Snow in July

In the summer of 2071, the Halvorsen Weather Company had three employees, one leased cloud-seeding drone and a waiting list that stretched into the following spring. Most of its work was dull: a little rain for a farmer in Nebraska and a clear sky for a county fair. Priya Raman, the company's only meteorologist, could have done those jobs in her sleep.

So when a man called on a Tuesday afternoon and asked for snow, she assumed she had misheard him.

"Snow," he repeated. "On Saturday. Just over my backyard, if that's possible." His name was Walter Duncan, he was eighty-one, and he lived in Millbrook, Ohio, where the forecast for Saturday was ninety-four degrees and sunny.

Priya explained, as patiently as she could, that summer snow was technically possible but absurdly expensive. "Most people who ask for it want it for a wedding photo," she said. "Then they hear the price and settle for a fog machine."

"It's not for a photo," Walter said. "It's for my granddaughter, June. She's seven, she's lived in Arizona her whole life, and she's never seen snow. She's coming to stay with me this weekend, and I promised her a winter." He paused. "I've been saving up for a while."

The amount he named was nowhere near the company's usual fee for a full day of work, but it was clearly everything he had saved. Priya glanced at the waiting list and sighed. "I can't promise anything," she said at last. "But I'll come and take a look at your sky."

Millbrook turned out to be a small town of maple trees, wide porches and one diner that closed at three. Walter's house sat at the end of a quiet street, with a backyard just big enough for a swing set and a vegetable garden. Priya spent Thursday running models on her tablet and Friday testing the drone, which she called Gus. By Friday night, she had worked out a plan: Gus would rise at dawn, chill a narrow column of air above the yard, release light snow from ten o'clock sharp to a quarter past, and then shut itself down.

At 9:58 on Saturday morning, June was sitting on the swing in a borrowed winter coat that was three sizes too big for her, looking deeply suspicious. "Grandpa, it's hot," she complained. "Why do I have to wear this?" "Just wait," said Walter, who was sweating through his own scarf.

At ten o'clock exactly, the first flakes drifted down. June stopped swinging. Within a minute, the air above the yard was full of fat, slow snowflakes that sparkled in the sunlight and melted the instant they touched the warm grass. June stuck out her tongue to catch one, then shrieked with laughter and began running in circles. Walter stood very still, and Priya noticed that he had to wipe his eyes.

Then, at a quarter past ten, when Gus was supposed to shut down, the snow didn't stop. It got heavier. Red warnings began to flash on Priya's tablet. Somewhere in the cooling cycle, Gus had picked up a faulty sensor reading and concluded, with the total confidence of a machine, that the job was nowhere near finished. Instead of shutting down, it was pulling more and more moisture out of the air and turning it into snow.

By half past ten, the snow was sticking, and the yard was white. By eleven, so was half the street. Neighbors came out of their houses in shorts and flip-flops, staring up in disbelief. Meanwhile, Priya was typing commands as fast as she could, and Gus was ignoring every single one of them.

"If I'd checked that sensor last night," she muttered, "none of this would have happened." There was only one command the drone couldn't ignore: a manual shutdown, which had to be sent from less than ten feet away. Gus, however, was hovering about forty feet above the yard. Priya climbed onto the roof of Walter's garage and held the remote up as high as she could, but she was still more than twenty feet too low.

June, who had been watching from under a tree, suddenly ran into the house and came back with the kite her grandfather had bought her for the weekend. It was bright orange and shaped like a fish. "It's windy now," she shouted. "Send the remote up on the kite!"

She was right. The cold air pouring down from the drone had stirred up a strong, steady wind. Priya set the remote to repeat the shutdown signal every second, and Walter taped it to the kite. June let out the line, and the orange fish climbed into the falling snow until it was swinging just below the drone, well within ten feet.

Gus stopped humming. Its lights went out one by one, and it glided down in a slow spiral and landed softly in a snowbank next to the vegetable garden.

For the rest of the day, Millbrook had winter. Kids built snowmen in their swimsuits, the diner stayed open late to sell hot chocolate, and by sunset, everything had melted into puddles.

Walter, who had never seen the town so happy, tried to pay double. Priya refused to take more than half of the original price. "The second half of the show wasn't in the contract," she said.

Back at the office the following Monday, she added a new line to the company's price list: "Snow, one backyard, fifteen minutes." Underneath, in smaller letters, she typed: "Kite not included."