Mod Three: Emergency. It always came without warning. “Mayday, mayday, New York Center, we have smoke in the cabin, declaring an emergency.” A 757, full fuel, three hundred souls. My gut tightened. Mod Three took over—no thinking, just decades of drilled reflex. I cleared a hole in the sky. I vectored him directly to the longest runway at Stewart. I told the fire trucks where to wait. I listened to the pilot’s voice, strained but professional, as he put the wheels down. The blip merged with the airport symbol. Then silence. Mod Three released its grip. I realized I had not breathed for ninety seconds.

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.

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.

Mod Two: Sequence. The New York TRACON is a pressure cooker. Planes stack up like angry commuters. I had an Airbus from Paris, an Embraer from Cleveland, and a regional turboprop from Bangor all converging on Runway 22L at Kennedy. The computer’s suggested sequence was chaos. I overrode it. I slipped the turboprop behind the Airbus, slowed the Embraer with a 210-knot restriction, and painted a perfect diagonal string of lights in my mind. The tower controller later keyed up: “Nice flow, buddy.” Mod Two purred.

I drive home under a sky full of stars that are not my responsibility. But Mod Four is still awake. It always is.