Dream d1306-s: The Ground Reports

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood on the ridge in a long clear line, all of us, looking back at what we had made.

Below, the landscape ran in orderly channels: relay beacons every three hundred meters, cable trenches following the contour of the hillside, junction boxes marked with the Builder's color-code. The Dreamer was documenting it. The Student was counting the beacons aloud and losing track.

"Nineteen," the Student said.

"Twenty-two," said the Builder, without looking up from her map.

"I counted the ones behind the limestone shelf."

"Those are the ones that matter."

The Weather Reader had his instruments angled east, where the signal was thickening in the atmosphere. Clear conditions, but the air had texture to it, a grain he kept describing in terms the rest of us translated badly. "High coherence," he said. "Like the pressure before a broadcast."

"That's not a meteorological term," said the Philosopher.

"It is now."

Lano was out ahead on the ridge path, nose working the gravel, tail low but moving. Then he stopped. Ears went flat against his skull. A single bark, sharp and pointed back the way we came.

The radio on the Wireman's pack crackled. The Wireman unclipped it and held it out without a word.

The Beacon Network Specialist's voice came through with interference I hadn't heard in months. "Party, check in. We have a situation at the settlement. The old district, east quadrant, the reclaimed warehouse block. The conduit underneath has given way. That's the original infrastructure, the pre-network layer. I'm looking at a tilt in the building. Cables are severed on lines seven and nine. Signal is holding on alternates but I don't know for how long."

No one spoke for a moment.

The Builder put her pencil down flat on the map. "Which conduit. The clay tile run or the poured concrete?"

"Concrete. The long one."

She closed her eyes briefly. "That's load-bearing for three junction boxes."

The Philosopher said, carefully: "The proposition being that we built our network on top of a failing foundation."

"Not a proposition," said the Builder. "A measurement."

The Weather Reader turned his instruments toward the settlement. The atmosphere read clean. No storm, no pressure event. Whatever was failing was failing from the inside, weight and time and the particular dishonesty of old infrastructure that looked solid until it wasn't.

The Student looked at the Listener. The Listener had one hand raised, palm out, attending to something without instruments.

"Lines seven and nine," the Listener said quietly. "I can hear the gap."

Lano sat down on the path, facing back toward home, and said: "Peso."

We stood on the ridge between the signal ahead and the trouble behind, and the clear air held both without preference.