Dream d1370-s: The Interval Shifts

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were two hours from the settlement when the Listener stopped walking.

That was the tell. The Listener never stopped walking.

Both hands pressed flat against her headset, not adjusting, just holding still, with the particular stillness of someone who has found a signal they cannot place. The Weather Reader stepped beside her without being asked. They had been competing over instruments since the Shifting Gardens. There are moments when rivalry becomes collaboration without discussion.

"What band?" he asked.

"None of them." She pulled the headset half off. "The carrier wave is wrong. The modulation pattern doesn't match anything in my index."

His instruments were already out. He swept slowly. Found it.

"Origin?" The Builder had her chart open, pencil ready.

The Listener and the Weather Reader exchanged a look. "The settlement," she said.

Not from the settlement. Toward it. Into it. Something was arriving at home before we were.

The radio crackled. The Beacon Network Specialist's voice came through with more static than clear conditions should allow. "- receiving something I can't classify. Pattern is running through the relay. It is not damaging anything, but - I have run it against the full catalog. The interval shifts. I want to call it repeating but -" Static. Then silence.

Lano had stopped beside me. Ears flat against her skull. Nose pointed toward the settlement. One sharp bark, and then quiet, which was worse than the bark.

"Sí," she said, very softly.

The Philosopher pulled the library wagon to a halt. "Proposition: a signal enters the network from outside the known topology. Possibilities: someone built infrastructure we have no record of, someone is using what we built without our knowledge, or something is speaking through a channel we opened without intending to."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," the Builder said.

"No," the Philosopher agreed. "That is the problem."

I noticed the Weather Reader had been walking on the left side of the path for the past hour. The left side was closer to the scrubland, closer to the low stones where the black cat moved at ground level, ten meters out, parallel to our line of travel.

The cat was not sitting today. It walked. Unhurried, low, its small black shape visible between the tufts of dry grass. Moving when we moved. Stopping when we stopped. First time it had matched our pace rather than watching from a fixed point.

The Weather Reader did not look at it directly. But he stayed on that side of the road.

From a side passage off the conduit road came the smell of cut wood, clean, resinous, recent. Nobody should have been working timber out here.

The Student said: "Do we go home or find out what's making that smell?"

Nobody answered. The Listener had the headset back on.

The signal was still coming.