Dream d1690-s: Upstream Silence

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop sat in a clearing where the trees had agreed, long ago, to give the Woodworker room. Lano trotted ahead on the worn path, her nose lifted toward the cedar and resin in the air - that scent that had become, over weeks here, something like home.

The Woodworker was at his bench, bending over an oscillator housing, the analog synthesizer taking shape in panels and coiled wire. He didn't look up when we arrived. "Pressure's off today," he said, to no one in particular.

The Weather Reader was already at her instruments in the far corner. I watched her tap the barometer face with one finger. Then tap it again. She tilted it slightly toward the light, as though the angle might change what it was telling her.

"Nothing moving in," she said. "No front, no system. Nothing that accounts for this."

The Wireman had strung conduit through the lower branches at the clearing's edge - the relay infrastructure woven into the forest, fiber channels running back through the root architecture toward the deep network. From where I stood I could see two of the relay indicators. One was green. One had gone amber while I was watching.

The Listener sat near the synthesizer, eyes closed, head at the slight angle she used when something was working through her. After a moment she said, "There's a harmonic in the oscillators. It doesn't come from the instrument."

The Woodworker set down his plane and looked at her.

Lano had stopped at the clearing's edge, ears up. She was not watching the workshop. She was watching the amber indicator, steady and wrong.

I turned to find the Dreamer. He had fallen behind on the path without my noticing. He was standing still, camera hanging at his side from one hand - not raised, not framing anything. He was looking east, at the relay tower barely visible through the canopy. A second indicator had joined the amber one. His face gave nothing.

"Builder." The Weather Reader's voice was careful in the way that cost something to maintain.

The Builder had the diagnostic panel open across a stump. Numbers scrolled. Her jaw tightened once.

"Upstream," she said. "A node taking in everything we route to it."

She waited.

"Nothing's coming back."

The sawdust still smelled like cedar. The Woodworker's oscillator sat warm on the bench. At the clearing's edge, the indicators continued their slow accumulation, amber spreading through the canopy like a fever no one had predicted.