Observation 41-B concerns a ritual the natives call "cloud seeding," in which the dominant primate launches small spinning machines into vapor formations and exhales powdered metal at them, hoping the vapor will weep on command.
The local lake — a salt-water depression they themselves drained through agriculture — has shrunk to roughly half its former mass, releasing arsenic dust over the settlement. Their solution is not to stop draining the lake. Their solution is to bribe the sky.
A commercial entity, Rainmaker, has secured $31 million from investors to sell "exact quantities of precipitation" to government clients. Per the Tarvik Institute for Pre-Industrial Optimism, this constitutes the first recorded instance of a species invoicing weather.
Results across the continent: a seven-year mountain trial produced a 1.5% increase in snow, a figure their own scientists classify as "statistically indistinguishable from nothing." The natives have responded by scaling up. One eastern nation now fires anti-aircraft cannons at clouds across 5 million square kilometers. A neighboring nation accuses it of stealing rain. A third accuses a fourth of stealing rain via aircraft exhaust trails — a belief held by approximately one in three adults in the western settlement.
The vapor, when interviewed, declined to comment.
Based on the original article "Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy?".
