Dream d1574-s: The Hum That Did Not Resolve

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sawdust was still in my clothes when the ground changed.

We had left the Woodworker's bench an hour before - or what passed for an hour in that country - and the path had been good: packed earth, pine needles, the smell of resin fading slowly behind us. The Woodworker walked last, as she usually did, checking the path she'd come from. The Philosopher pushed the wagon. Rurik moved along the margin of the tree line, amber eyes catching nothing in particular.

Then the conduit.

It came up from the ground at the clearing edge, thick as a forearm, wrapped in weathered orange housing, running parallel to the path before diving back underground twenty meters ahead. The Builder stopped. Crouched. Ran a hand along it the way he checked load-bearing joints.

"Buried with intent," he said. Not a complaint. An assessment.

The Dreamer, ahead of us all, did not stop. He had not raised his camera once since we left the workshop. It hung on the strap at his side, swinging slightly with his stride. I had grown so accustomed to the small sounds of shutter and winding mechanism that the silence of it felt like a missing instrument in an ensemble. We all felt it. Nobody said so.

"He is just walking," the Student said, quietly, beside me.

"Yes," said the Eye. "Notice that."

Lano trotted ahead along the conduit line, nose working the housing the way she worked soil after rain. She paused at a junction box half-buried in moss, looked back at me with ears up, and said - flat, one syllable - "aqui." Then she was moving again.

The relay housing appeared at the first gap in the trees: a gray box on a galvanized post, door sealed, no markings. The Builder glanced at the Woodworker. She was studying how the post had been set into the ground.

"Poured concrete footing," she said. "Whoever did this planned for permanence."

Above, in the canopy, I found the first camera housing - a weathered dome on a bracket, cables descending the trunk in neat conduit runs, aimed at the clearing we had just crossed. Not scanning. Fixed. Recording something or nothing, with equal patience.

The Listener had gone quiet twenty steps back. Now he spoke.

"The hum has been there for ten minutes. I kept waiting for it to resolve into something familiar."

It did not resolve. It sat at the edge of perception, steady and purposeless, a machine running its cycle in a station no one had come back to check.

The Dreamer kept walking.