Dream d1266-s: Even Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Scale Gardens had become one size.

I remembered standing here in Phase 10 - standing and suddenly shrinking, or the ferns around me suddenly towering, the geometry of the space rearranging itself without warning. You never knew if you would feel like an insect or a giant stepping between grasses. The Gardens had made scale itself a question worth asking.

Now everything was the same height as everything else. The dead flora stretched grey across the field in uniform rows of failure, each stem reaching to the same elevation as its neighbor, as though whatever force had made them variable had simply given up and averaged them.

The Builder crouched at the edge of a dead root cluster, fingers tracing lines in the grey soil. "Conduit network," he said. Not a discovery - a confirmation. He had a notation system I did not fully understand, small marks in a leather-covered log, each representing something that used to carry something. "They ran parallel here. Then branched. Then -" He stopped at a break in the line. Just stopped, finger resting on the gap.

"Severed," the Wireman said from ten meters off. He was on his knees beside a different cluster, working with a short tool I couldn't name, probing where the white fungal threads had pulled apart from each other like frayed rope. "This wasn't decay. Something cut these. The ends are clean."

Lano moved between the root systems with his nose close to the ground, tracking something beneath the smell of old growth. He paused at one of the severed threads, sat back, and said: "Silencio."

That was all.

I told the Builder: "This field used to shift. You would feel yourself change size without moving. Things would grow or shrink around you. It was disorienting and I hated it and I would give a great deal to feel it now."

He looked up at me. "The conduits drove that?"

"I don't know what drove it. I only know it happened here."

He wrote something in the log. The Wireman looked across the field with his jaw set, calculating distances between the severed ends, measuring what reconnection would require.

Somewhere behind us the Convergence Quest signal persisted, its pull bending northeast through the still air, patient and indifferent. We were not moving northeast. We were kneeling in a dead field where perspective used to live, mapping what it would take to bring it back.

The Builder pressed his finger back to the gap in the conduit line and held it there, as though checking for a pulse.