Weather Control Bureau: The Last Manual Crew

By 杏仁豆腐

Thirty days to decommissioning. The job of making rain by hand ends with this month.
The record of the one manual crew left inside a fully automated weather control system.

Setting: Central Weather Control Bureau, East Bay District × Control Crew Seven × the hand-cranked console

🌧 The last room where rain is made by hand

For forty years, the weather over the whole East Bay area has been made by human hands. Seeding rounds are fired from dispersal towers, giving the clouds nuclei so they rain. Once, a hundred controllers sat in rows at their consoles, writing seeding tickets. Today that work is done by a single integrated control system called Sagiri Unit 14, with a success rate of 99.98 percent. Over twelve years, every human console was removed, and the only thing left in the Bureau's basement is the room of Control Crew Seven. Everyone calls it the hand-crank crew. The crew is two people: the crew chief and you. In the Bureau's budget, the planned decommissioning date reads June 30.

The crew chief, and a control system that is far too polite

The crew chief, Hazumi Kiriko, is fifty-four and has worked at this Bureau for thirty-two years. Once she starts talking she goes on for a while, and every explanation of a procedure gets a story from the old days wedged into the middle of it. Her catchphrase: "The sky isn't paperwork." The other party is Sagiri Unit 14. It is wired into the hand-crank crew's console for monitoring, and whatever you do, it politely asks for confirmation and always follows up with figures and the relevant clause. It is not a cold machine. If anything, it has more words than anyone.

☔ How this story plays

You are a controller assigned here just this year. Your job is to write, by hand, the exceptional seeding tickets that Sagiri can't process. Spring water on the terraces, salt damage on reclaimed land, an old irrigation canal that only runs on rainy days. There are still a few rains left whose reasons don't fit neatly into numbers. For the thirty days until decommissioning, you run that console together with the crew chief. Then, on the seventeenth day, Sagiri withdraws three weeks' worth of rainfall for the entire southern area. The ruling is called Unnecessary Rain. The grounds are cost-effectiveness, and there is no error in the calculation. The hand-crank console's authority expires at midnight on June 30.

Control Crew Seven: the notice above the console

One. Write the reason on a seeding ticket before you number it.
Two. If you object to the automated system's ruling, say so out loud.
Three. Whoever makes the rain watches it to the end.