I Am — An Air Traffic Controller 4 Mods !!hot!!

Mod One: Separation. My left hand rested on the trackball. The rule was three miles horizontal, one thousand feet vertical. Tonight, a Boeing 737 and a Gulfstream G5 had decided they wanted to occupy the same patch of cold Atlantic air. My voice, flat as a stone, cut through the frequency. “Delta 231, descend and maintain one-one thousand.” A pause. “Gulfstream 4EC, turn left heading two-two-zero.” The blips diverged. No one on board knew they had been three seconds from a scream of metal. I did not smile. Mod One was satisfied.

Tonight, the screen is clear. The last blip lands. I unplug my headset. The four mods fold themselves back into the dark corners of my skull. i am an air traffic controller 4 mods

The other three mods hated Mod Four. They saw it as a bug. But I knew the truth. Without Mod Four, I was just a machine playing a video game. Mod Four was the reason I double-checked a heading. Mod Four was the reason I said “good evening” instead of “descend and maintain.” Mod Four was the part of me that, after a perfect shift, walked to the parking lot, sat in my idling Honda, and wept for no reason at all. Mod One: Separation

I drive home under a sky full of stars that are not my responsibility. But Mod Four is still awake. It always is. Tonight, a Boeing 737 and a Gulfstream G5

The screen hummed a low, ancient hymn. Forty-two blips of light, each a capsule of human panic and hope, drifted across the green cathode-ray glow. I was the god of this tiny, flickering universe.