The AVRO Arrow by David L Gordon

In the beginning, there was Cold War paranoia, and Canada—sweet, snowy, maple-syruped Canada—decided it wanted to play with the big boys. Not with nukes, mind you. That would be rude. Instead, they built a plane. A beautiful plane. A plane so fast it could outrun guilt. They called it the Avro Arrow, and it was shaped like a delta and dreamed like a poet.
The engineers were brilliant. They wore glasses thick as hockey pucks and spoke in equations. They built the Arrow to fly at Mach 2, which is twice the speed of regret. It soared. It roared. It made the Americans nervous. It made the Soviets blink. It made the Canadians proud.
And then came the politicians.
They looked at the Arrow and saw a price tag. They looked at the sky and saw missiles. They looked at the future and saw someone else’s problem. So they cancelled it. On a Friday. Because Fridays are for endings.
They didn’t just cancel it. They erased it. Burned the blueprints. Scrapped the prototypes. Told the workers to go home and learn to make snowmobiles or something. Thousands of minds, scattered like confetti at a funeral.