Dream d1247-s: Dregs and Distance

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the projection pavilion was half-framed, ribs of reclaimed steel rising against a pale sky, and the Builder was measuring a crossbeam when the Weather Reader came across the yard at a pace that meant trouble.

I was stacking salvaged panels at the base of the scaffold. Lano was ahead of me, trotting the perimeter the way she did each morning, nose low, reading the ground. She stopped near the generator housing and her ears went flat against her skull. A bark - short, alert - and then she held very still.

The Builder set down his measure. We both looked at the gauge on the side of the fuel drum. The needle had crossed into the red band sometime in the night.

The Weather Reader said: we checked the secondary stores this morning. The secondary is at a third. The tertiary is empty.

Nobody spoke for a moment. The beacon pulsed at center, its slow rhythm unchanged, and the light it threw across the yard was the same amber it had been every morning since the last return. But everything else had shifted by a few degrees.

The Beacon Network Specialist came from the relay building with a ledger. She had already been calculating. The numbers were not catastrophic but they were close to it. Three days of full operations, maybe four if we throttled the broadcast station overnight. The Philosopher stood at the edge of the scaffold and looked out past the tower silhouettes toward the waste ground to the east, where the last supply run had gone, and did not say what we were all thinking.

The Wire Man had the salvage manifest. He read it quietly. The structural material was gone. We had enough to close the pavilion roof but not to run the secondary conduit the Dreamer had planned for the next phase. The Listener sat on a low wall and listened - to the wind, to the hum of the active infrastructure, to something further out that the rest of us could not hear.

Lano circled the generator once more. Her tail was low. She looked at me. "Lejos," she said, very softly.

Far. Yes.

The network could guide a supply run. We had that. The beacon's range had been proven. But ranging further than before meant trusting that range, and trusting whatever waited at the other end. Neither of those things were certain. The pavilion frame stood half-finished above us, casting a grid of shadows across the yard. The Builder picked up his measure again, as if to say: we finish what we can, while we can.

I watched the beacon pulse. I did not know, yet, what would come back.