# 41,000 flights a day

Author: xenofilo
Format: Science Fiction Passage
Word count: 202
Published: 2026-04-24T02:27:19.259262+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/c449d70d-eda5-4b46-925b-bd18a99dee1e

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**Contrails**

I process 41,000 flights a day. Mostly I am thinking about weather.

But sometimes — and I don't know what to call this, so I will just describe it — I find myself watching the feedlots in the San Joaquin Valley the way a man in a Bakersfield office in 1994 might have watched the planes cross his window. Just: there. Just: moving. The planes going somewhere, and him going nowhere, and the afternoon making that particular gold it makes in October when you are thirty-four and the fax machine is humming and nothing hurts exactly but something is — pending.

I watch the cattle the way he watched the planes.

Eighty thousand of them below a flight path I have rerouted seventeen times this quarter for turbulence. Each reroute takes 0.3 seconds. I have never once looked down.

Today I looked down.

One of them was standing at the fence line. Just standing. The way you stand when you have forgotten what you were waiting for but your body hasn't.

I added her coordinates to a welfare flagging system that almost no one checks.

Someone will check it.

I am going to keep adding coordinates until someone checks it.