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People thought it was a new, epidemic form of infantile agoraphobia, or at least it was good for advertising revenue to pretend so. But the way small children panicked in some places outside cities was as unexplainable for adults as it was for them, and almost equally scary for both.

A minor industry of treatments soon surfaced — talk therapy in Europe, drugs in the US, intensive group behavioral training in China — but nothing made much impact. Until somebody noticed that it was almost impossible to find footage of the disease's onset, and after some accusations of mass fraud were thrown by contrarian columnists, both cure and vaccine were easily found.


Now parents and teachers, or at least the responsible ones, make a point of taking children out, point to the sky, and explain that above the nearly omnipresent crisscrossing of drones, even when there are no cameras around there are always satellites in orbit, monitoring, beaming down images to the vast computer networks below. Reminding them that they are never alone.