Dream d1222-s: Drift from the Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ridge caught it first.

The settlement spread below in the flat gray of afternoon, the beacon at center pulsing its slow warm interval, each flash syncing something in my chest I'd stopped noticing as remarkable. I was walking the perimeter path with Lano when the change arrived - not heard, not seen, just felt as a shift in the hum beneath the infrastructure, the way pressure changes before weather.

Lano stopped. Ears flat against his small white head. His nose worked the air in quick precise passes. He did not bark. He watched the signal room.

Inside, the Wire Man had his headset pressed tight and his hand raised for quiet before I'd crossed the doorframe. The Listener was already at the secondary receiver, fingers hovering. The readout paper fed from the machine in its slow continuous scroll, and the marks it printed matched nothing in the log books lining the far wall.

The Beacon Network Specialist arrived from the ridge relay station with a strip of fresh print in hand - she had caught the signal forty seconds ahead of us, the ridge having line of sight in directions the settlement floor did not. Her expression was composed, careful.

"Not any known station," she said.

The Builder ducked the low beam coming down from the forecasting tower, stood reading over the Wire Man's shoulder without reaching for the paper. The Philosopher stayed at the doorway, watching the beacon pulse through the window, as if counting against something. The Weather Reader checked the atmospheric logs: clean. Clear sky, clean signal bands. Whatever this was, it traveled at ground level through the network, not from above.

The Dreamer said nothing, standing at the edge of the group with her arms crossed, watching the machine print.

The pattern had no origin tag. No call sign. No interval matching any index we held.

Lano barked. Once, short, aimed at the window facing north.

We all looked north. The beacon pulsed. The paper kept feeding.

The Wire Man pulled off his headset. "We've been on this frequency three hours. The pattern hasn't changed once. Whatever is transmitting this started before we were listening."

"Fuego," said Lano, barely a sound.

He sat on the concrete floor, pressed against my leg, and held his watch on the northern window.

The Beacon Network Specialist smoothed the print flat on the table under the lamp. The question sat in the room without anyone speaking it - investigate or close the channel and log it as unknown. The beacon pulsed its familiar light on the glass, and for the first time since we built this place, that light felt like an answer to nothing.