Dream d1677-s: Sawdust and Amber

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Woodworker's synthesizer sat on the bench like a small altar, its oscillators humming in two pitches that should have been one.

We had been there for three days by then, or what counted as days. The workshop clearing smelled of pine resin and flux, and the Eye had pinned the last of her taxonomy plates to the back wall - forty-two specimens of recurring dreamforms, each named and cross-referenced in her small handwriting. Lano had found a spot in the shavings beneath the bench and lay there with one ear cocked, a habit formed since we arrived.

The Woodworker was adjusting a filter, a hand-wound coil that controlled which frequencies the circuit would pass. He was explaining resonance: how a system trained to amplify one thing will eventually amplify everything, including the thing that breaks it.

"There," he said, and held up a finger.

The synthesizer had changed. Not dramatically. A shimmer in the lower register, a harmonic that didn't belong to the patch he'd built. He leaned forward, adjusted nothing, listened.

The Weather Reader was already checking her instruments. She had a wrist-mounted barometer she consulted the way some people check the time - reflexively, without thinking. I watched her tap it once.

"No cloud cover," she said. "No front. The reading doesn't match anything out there."

The Builder was at the door by then, tablet raised, scrolling fast. "Relay stations on the secondary conduit ring. Six amber." He paused. "Eight."

The Dreamer had been standing near the workbench, camera in hand. I noticed he hadn't raised it in some time. He was looking at the synthesizer, not at the Builder's tablet, not at the barometer. His expression wasn't alarmed. It was something slower than that.

"Intake pattern," the Builder said. "A node upstream pulling bandwidth. No output. No routing decisions. Just consuming."

The oscillators shimmered again. The circuit was picking up something it had never been designed to receive.

The Philosopher appeared in the doorway without my noticing she'd moved. "We know what this looks like," she said.

Nobody argued.

The Eye came around from the garden side, pressing soil from her palms. She looked at the plates on the wall, then at the party. "We tend what is here. You tend what is out there."

Lano padded to the door and sat, nose pointed north.

The Dreamer put his camera in his bag.