Dream d1649-s: The Wrong Color Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the node burned copper instead of gold.

We had been watching it since the Wireman finished the splice an hour before dark - all of us standing at the cave mouth, looking north at the single point of light among the dimmed framework. The Builder said the connection was stable. The Wireman said the feed was clean. But none of us had said anything about the color until Rurik pointed his nose at it and held still.

"It is not the same," the Weather Reader said. He had his barometric log open, not reading it, just holding it.

It was not the same. The original framework glowed a warm amber-gold we had all memorized without trying - the color of the feed at full health, the color of the first nodes we had seen from the hillside weeks ago. This node was cooler. Copper-red. Not wrong, exactly. Different. Re-lit by different hands using different materials, following the same wiring pattern but bringing its own character to the current. Re-founding, the Builder had said when we chose it. The word held new weight in the dark.

Then Lano barked.

Not her alert-to-sound bark. Her ears went flat against her skull, her whole body low and taut, and she barked once at the feed-junction cabinet the Builder had bolted to the inner cave wall beside the carved glyphs. A sharp, alarmed sound, and then she held the posture - nose toward the cabinet, tail still.

We all heard it afterward: a high thin whine building fast, and then a crack. The smell of scorched insulation reached us a second later.

The Builder moved before anyone spoke. He had the cabinet open in four seconds, lamp already in hand. A salvaged relay coil we had carried from the northern cache - copper-wound, looked reliable - had failed. The coil was black at one end. The secondary feed circuit it had managed was dark.

"That line served the junction recorder," he said. Not panicked. Measuring.

"Can you bypass it?" the Wireman asked, already crouching beside him.

"Not with what we have here."

Rurik walked to the cabinet and sat two meters away, watching it. His amber eyes caught the copper glow from outside. Lano held her low posture, watching the same point.

I had my camera in my hand - I had lifted it without deciding to - but I did not raise it yet. I stood at the cave mouth instead and looked at what the night held: the copper of our re-founded node against the dimmed amber of the original framework on the skyline. Two colors in the dark. One dark space where the recorder had been.

The Weather Reader said quietly, almost to himself: high pressure, clear, good conditions. Good conditions for a problem with no answer yet.