randomeer: Mikah
People didn’t notice at first. Winters were already mild, and everyone was too busy complaining about the price of bread or the buses running late to care about the absence of frost. But by the third year, something felt off. Children born after 2028 had never seen snow, and they looked at old photos like they were illustrations from a forgotten fairy tale — white roofs, frozen ponds, people in coats that looked unnecessarily padded.
Historians tried to reassure everyone by pointing out that the “classic snowy Christmas” never really existed anyway. Dickens had simply grown up during a freak cluster of cold winters, and the Victorians, never ones to waste a good aesthetic, turned it into a tradition. The advertisers polished it, Hollywood lacquered it, and the rest of us inherited a holiday built on atmospheric exaggeration. Snow at Christmas was always more fiction than fact.
But fiction has power. And when the last real snowflake fell — unnoticed, unphotographed, uncelebrated — something in the collective imagination shifted. Winter felt unfinished, like a sentence missing its last word. People started calling the new era The Quiet Winters, as if naming it might make the silence less strange.
By the time governments finally admitted something was wrong, Musk had already left Earth behind like an old phone he couldn’t be bothered to recycle. From his Martian bunker he unveiled his “parting gift to the homeworld”: Snow‑Link, a global network of atmospheric converters designed to turn cold air into engineered snow.
It was classic Musk — overpromised, under‑tested, and launched with a livestream where he said the phrase “climate latency” eight times in two minutes. Still, people were desperate. They built the towers. They switched them on. And for the first time in years, snow fell again.
It was soft. White. Obedient.
Too obedient.
It fell in perfect geometric spirals, as if following instructions. It melted on a schedule. It never crunched underfoot — it sighed, like static. Children loved it, of course. They didn’t know any different. They grew up thinking snow had always come from machines, that winter was something you calibrated.
And maybe that was enough. Maybe repairing the world was never going to look like the past.
But sometimes, late at night, when the Snow‑Link towers hummed in the distance, older people swore they could remember the sound of real snow — that quiet, impossible hush the world used to make all by itself.
