Dream d1489-s: Grain and Feed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath came out of the trees into a clearing that smelled of pine resin and warm electronics. Sawdust drifted in shafts of late light. Someone had built here - not recently, but not long ago. The bench was worn smooth by use. The conduit entering the clearing from three directions was bolted cleanly to treated wood risers, each junction labeled in small handwriting. Underneath everything, a hum. Not intrusive. Steady, the way a well-set bearing sounds when you put your hand near it.

The Woodworker was already at the bench. I don't know how he arrives before us - he often does. He was running his hand along the edge of a housing: aluminum, milled, precisely joined. Not wood. He said nothing but his hand kept moving, reading the material the only way he reads anything.

Behind the workshop, the Eye was crouched over a low table of pressed specimens. Flat afternoon light, no shadows behind the building. She lifted one specimen and held it sideways toward the sun. A leaf, something with compound structure, dried perfect and flat.

"Filtered," she said, to no one specifically. "Not selected."

Lano trotted ahead of me onto the cleared ground and stopped in the center, nose working. He turned a slow circle. "Quieto," the Wireman said - barely audible, which is how he speaks. Lano sat.

The Dreamer stood at the clearing's edge where the first monitor was mounted, facing out from the treeline. The screen was running. The feed showed another clearing from a different angle - further east - empty except for the relay housing we had passed an hour ago. The Dreamer looked at the screen the way he looks at a photograph before deciding whether it deserves to exist.

The Builder came up beside him and read the conduit routing with her eyes, the way she reads load-bearing walls. "Whoever ran these lines did it in sequence," she said. "Each run accounts for the next." She wasn't complimenting. She was noting craftsmanship the way you note a joint that will outlast the building.

The Dreamer nodded once. His camera stayed at his side.

I stood between them and watched the feed. Another angle switched in. The bench appeared on screen, from above, from a camera I hadn't seen. All of us in the clearing. The Eye still holding her specimen to the light. Lano in the center.

The machine had already been watching when we arrived.