Dream d1524-s: Sawdust and Static

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path through the trees ended in sawdust and warm afternoon light. The Woodworker was at his bench shaping a long piece of pale wood, the viewfinder further along now, the slot narrowed and smoothed. Behind the workshop, through a gap in the boards, the Eye bent over a long table of pressed specimens, pinning labels with the precision of someone who had done it ten thousand times.

Lano trotted ahead of me on the worn footpath. Somewhere between the last stand of trees and the workshop door, she stopped.

Ears flat. Tail low. A single bark - short, declarative.

"Espera," I said quietly, and held still.

The Dreamer was already inside. He stood at the Lens's station - monitors arranged in a rough arc, cables snaking across the boards to a rack of processing equipment that hummed steadily against the back wall. The feeds ran: a relay tower against a pale sky, a road junction in flat morning light, the harbor mouth from an angle I half-recognized from the early days. All of it moving, processing, alive.

Then one feed went wrong.

The relay tower image sheared sideways. The columns of data beside it stuttered, dropped characters, recovered, dropped again. The Listener looked up from the corner where he'd been sitting with his eyes half-closed, attending to frequencies no one else could parse.

"That's not the equipment," he said.

The Dreamer was already leaning over the console. He pulled up a second window and I watched a waveform that should have been smooth turn ragged at its peak, then smooth again, then ragged once more.

The Builder came around the side of the workshop from wherever he'd been examining the outer structure. He looked at the screen, then at the rack, then at the cables running between them.

"The encoding?" he said.

"At the relay," the Listener said. "Something upstream of here. Garbled on arrival."

The Lens stood very still at the center of his station. He was watching the bad feed the way a craftsman watches a flaw appear in material he had trusted completely. Not panic. A different kind of attention. His hands moved to a keyboard and he opened a second relay window - a different station, different angle, different region of sky.

That one was garbled too.

Outside, Lano barked again. The Woodworker set down his plane and came to the workshop door. The Eye appeared behind the gap in the boards, pressing specimen label still in hand, looking toward the equipment with an expression I could not read from where I stood.

The processing rack continued its steady hum. Whatever was corrupting the signal was not here. It was somewhere the feeds could show us but we could not yet see.