Dream d1305-s: Camp Beside the Pulse

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we made camp at the base of relay beacon R-7, the one the Builder installed in what felt like another life but was only eighteen months ago. The tower hummed at a frequency Lano noticed before any of us - ears up, nose working, circling the anchor bolts twice before settling at my feet.

"Steel resonates at 47 hertz when ground current passes through the footing," the Builder said, pressing her palm flat against the tower leg. She pulled out her field notebook, wrote something, crossed it out, wrote it again. "This one's reading closer to 44."

The Weather Reader crouched over his instruments. "Atmospheric pressure's clean. That variance isn't coming from above."

"It's coming from below," the Listener said. Not an argument. Just the thing he heard.

The Philosopher had already unhitched his wagon and was seated on a crate, assembling some point in his head. "If a signal persists without a sender, does the concept of transmission still apply?"

"Yes," the Listener said, without looking up.

"That was too fast."

"The answer was already there."

The Dreamer had her sketchbook out, drawing the tower from the angle where the cable trench ran north toward the cave entrance - the same cave mouth where Lano and I had first gone underground, in the dark before we knew what we were looking for. The sketch caught something: the trench, the glyph-marked stone beside the entrance, the tower leg, all rhyming in line and direction.

The Student sat beside her. "What are you noticing?"

"That we laid our infrastructure right on top of theirs," she said. "We didn't plan to."

The Wireman was already at the cave mouth. He had not said anything since morning. He crouched at the entrance and ran two fingers along the carved channel in the stone - a conduit groove, we knew now, the same geometry as the ones the Builder had documented in the deep tunnels near d261. He stood, nodded once to nobody, and walked back to the fire.

We ate. The Philosopher argued that intentional signals required something capable of intention, and the Weather Reader said he didn't need it to have intent to measure it, and the Student asked whether the distinction mattered practically, and nobody resolved it.

He was looking north. His tail was not wagging. His ears were fully forward, reading something the instruments would confirm by morning.

Close. We were getting close.