Dream d1542-s: Unmarked Frequency

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer walked ahead of us and no one spoke about it.

We had followed him for three dreams already - the silence between asking and arriving - and now the terrain was different. The path had narrowed to something deliberate. Conduit runs surfaced from the earth at regular intervals, capped in grey housing, running parallel to where we walked. The Builder crouched at one, pressed a palm against the casing, stood back up with the expression he gets when something impresses him despite himself.

"Bonded seams," he said. Not to anyone. Just said it.

Lano trotted close to the conduit line, nose tracing it, then diverted back to my heel. The sawdust came before the clearing did - a smell of cut wood and electronics both, the way a serious workroom carries its own weather.

The clearing opened around a bench and a structure that was not quite a building. Monitors in a weatherproof rack. Cable bundles dressed into clean runs along a low beam. A man at the bench with his back to us, planing a piece of wood that had nothing to do with the screens around him. The shavings curled and fell. He didn't stop when we arrived.

The Dreamer stopped walking. He stood at the edge of the clearing and waited.

The Listener was the one who heard it first.

She put her hand up - not a stop signal, something more involuntary, the way you reach for something falling. Her head tilted. Then her other hand went to the instrument at her hip.

"There's a signal," she said. "Coming through the receivers."

The Weather Reader already had hers open. "Not on any charted frequency. Not the beacon network."

The man at the bench set down his plane. He turned slowly. His face was not surprised. It was something closer to recognition - the expression of someone who has been expecting a problem to announce itself.

"That band has been quiet for years," he said.

Lano barked. Once, sharp - not at the man, at the air above the relay housing at the tree line. Her ears were flat, tail stiff. She backed two steps toward me and barked again.

"Lano," I said.

She didn't look at me.

The Philosopher had his notebook already open. After the second bark he wrote one word and held the page out briefly before closing it. Alerta. The Eye stood very still, watching the monitor screens, which showed the usual feeds - tree canopy, the path we had walked, a hillside - but one had gone to static. A clean rectangular absence where a feed had been.

The Dreamer had not moved from the edge of the clearing. He watched the static screen. His camera stayed at his side.