Dream d1568-s: Camp Among the Cables

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fire went up in a hollow full of cables, and we built it anyway.

The Builder cleared a flat space in the wired terrain - dead leaves swept back, a ring of stones set down between the conduits where they surfaced. Black lines ran across the ground on every side, thick as a wrist, ducking under and out of the soil, and we made our camp in the gaps between them. She struck the fire and fed it, and the light came up off dry kindling and threw the exposed conduits into relief: long shining ducts curving away into the dark, junction housings catching orange on their flat faces.

"Strange hearth," the Builder said, and crouched to feed it. "Stone and copper."

We ate in the wired hollow with the processing hum coming steady off the north. The Dreamer sat with his camera lowered in his lap and did not lift it. Lano curled against my leg, nose toward the fire.

The Philosopher came out of the dark and stood at the edge of the firelight, not sitting, the way he does when he is only passing through.

"All of this takes in," he said, looking down at the conduits running under our camp. "Feeds, frequencies, the road from above, the underside of clouds. Total intake. And I have walked it for an hour now and found nothing that gives out. No screen anyone reads. No voice answered. Intake without output is not watching. It is hoarding. It is a held breath that was never let go."

He let that sit in the firelight. Nobody filled the silence.

"Carry it north with you," he said, and stepped back over a cable, and went on into the dark the way he had come.

The fire burned down among the wires. We slept in the hollow with all of it humming around us, taking in, giving nothing back.