Dream d3072-s: Hum Without Pattern

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the three antennas rose out of the fog before I could see their bases, needle-thin black iron scored with old corrosion, the uppermost tips lost somewhere above the cloud ceiling. The Tally-Reader stood with a ledger open, reading the count aloud in a voice low enough not to disturb the frequency, and I wrote it down: one hundred and twenty-seven placed, an unknown remainder beyond the sheet's edge.

The antennas were humming. That was normal. Ospreyhush had been built around the hum, the Warden of the Deep Stratum had told us, the hum preceded the settlement by at least three foundation layers. What was not normal was the rhythm breaking.

I heard it first as a stutter, a brief gap in the continuous tone, then a second gap at a different interval. Lano had stopped moving. She stood at my heel with her ears flat against her skull, tail low, nose working the damp air. The Anomaly-Hand crouched near the base of the nearest antenna and placed a palm against the cold iron. She did not speak. She turned her head slowly, as if listening with the side of her face.

The relay box on the east post had a small amber indicator light. It had been solid since we arrived. Now it was flickering in a pattern I could not parse, short and long pulses, nothing matching any schema the Horizon-Surveyor carried in her reference pages. She was already comparing them, running her finger down the columns. Nothing matched.

Rurik had gone up. He was perched on the junction housing twelve feet above us, amber eyes fixed on the indicator light, tail wrapped tight around his forepaws.

The Relic-Watcher said, quietly: the relay at the north post is dark. I looked. The light there was out entirely.

Lano barked once, sharp and short, then went silent again, pressed against the back of my knee.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum came around from the instrument shed with a hand-wound tape spool and a clipboard. His expression was careful and unreadable. He said the morning check had come back garbled on two of the five relay stations, not absent, garbled. The signal reaching the downstream receivers was arriving as something other than what was sent. The encoding was not holding.

He did not offer a cause.

The Bedrock-Reader had been down at the foundation trench since before we gathered. She called up from it now, not urgently, but with a flatness in her voice that drew everyone to the edge. She pointed at a seam in the stone below the concrete collar, a pale cyan line, thin as wire, running horizontally across the face of the cut. The Anomaly-Hand came and crouched at the edge and looked at it for a long time.

The hum continued, broken at intervals, wrong.

I wrote down the time and the position of the seam and the state of the relay lights, because that was what the Tally-Reader had taught us to do at the edge of the surveyed sheet: record the condition, not the explanation. The condition was this. The antennas were standing. The signal was not arriving as sent. The pale seam ran through bedrock older than any foundation we had measured. Lano sat with her nose pointed at the antenna base and did not relax.

The Warden said we would take another reading in the morning.

---