Cobwebs

Cobwebs across the sky.  

It was a Hopi prophecy about the end times.

Throughout history many attempts had been made to correlate modern phenomena with this phrase to foreshadow our impending doom.  Some had even gone so far as to say it referred to the Internet, the Worldwide Web.  But visions of the future like this tend to be truly visions. Nostradamus was said to have looked into a cauldron to behold what he then wrote down for predictions about the future, for this seer did indeed see.

Now, looking up nearly every day he could see what seemed the more likely answer to the riddle: planes leaving behind ropes of white that stretched from one horizon to the other.  Not the type that dissipated a few lengths behind but that remained, blown by the winds, perhaps spreading until an oily haze covered the once clear sky.

When he first began to notice he saw many things that just didn't make any sense.  Once on the way back from lunch he looked up to see many ovals in a row, with the plane in the process of drawing more.  It was so early in his experience that he did not bother to take a picture or even tell anyone else that it was happening, and of course it never did again.  Still, he did see some other shenanigans, like arcs seemingly drawn around the sun, one earlier in the day and then another in the same spot hours later, many Xs in the sky that he feared were a target of some kind.  One instance of the "Eye of the Sun" even ended up as a picture on the front page of the local paper only to be explained away with frivolity.

There were many ideas as to what was going on up there, from the benign description of simple ice crystals to weather modification and radar accentuation, to more diabolical, life threatening ones.  His own pet theory which he did not take seriously was cribbed from some scifi movie or book, that we had all already been poisoned and that those planes were actually spraying the antidote.  If there were ever a true threat posed by the populace those in charge could simply stop the delivery of life and end us all.  Or perhaps on a whim they could experiment with the statistics of placement and volume and watch the numbers as we suffer and possibly die from our malady.

The reality was that it was just another of many attempts at controlling the minds of the people exposed, in this case an attempt to sow apathy all about to keep anyone from caring where the world was being taken.

This one was working, since no one really seemed to give a fuck.