Dream d1464-s: Only the Conduits

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we walked the road between the workshop and the settlement, and the sky had that pressed-down quality the Weather Reader had been watching all morning - pressure falling, she said, systems stacking from the south.

The road was familiar. We'd built three relay stations along this stretch, and each one we passed showed the same pattern: green-yellow on the power indicator, signal throughput reduced but holding. The Builder crouched at each housing, read the gauges, stood without speaking. We all knew what holding meant, and how temporary holding was.

The Dreamer walked slightly behind.

Not far behind - just a half-step removed, the gap you'd attribute to distraction if you didn't know him. I'd watched him photograph everything for months: settlement rooflines, the curve of a river, Lano asleep in strange positions. This morning his lens had found only signal equipment. The first relay's cable bundle. The antenna mount at the second station, the corrosion pattern on the housing bolts. When a stand of larches opened to the right, the light falling through them the way light falls when it knows it's being looked at, his camera stayed at his side.

I slowed to walk beside him. "Anything useful in that second station?"

"Throughput's down thirty percent," he said, and kept walking.

"I meant photographically."

He looked at the road ahead. "Not really."

Lano had been trotting ahead all morning, but near the third relay she stopped. Ears flat. Tail low and stiff. She turned back toward us and barked once - short, directive - then faced the relay housing.

The Wireman reached it first. He crouched at the power panel and pried it open. Inside, the fuel indicator sat near the base of its range.

"Generator's running on reserves," he said. "And the salvage kit is empty."

The Builder came up beside him. "The whole kit?"

"Coupling spares, junction wrap, backup capacitors. Someone ran this station down hard."

The Philosopher stood a few steps back. "The settlement's been pulling from everything reachable. That's not negligence. That's triage."

The Weather Reader checked her instruments without looking up. "Pressure still dropping."

"They'll need to range further for supplies," the Builder said. "Broader than the local grid. And that means using the network to coordinate - the same network we're trying to stabilize."

Lano sat between us and the housing, watching the fuel indicator.

When I looked back for the Dreamer, he had fallen behind. Twenty meters down the road, stopped beside a camera mount bolted to a birch tree - new hardware, nothing we'd placed - staring at it with an expression I couldn't name from that distance.

He didn't photograph it. He just looked.