Dream d3081-s: Bracket Fungus and Still Water

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ditch at the perimeter of Kestrelfield held dark water to a depth I could not judge from where I stood. The Tally-Reader knelt at the bank and pressed a thin rod into the water until it met something solid. They did not name the depth. They read it twice and entered it without comment.

The obsidian mainframe lay below the surface at an angle, one corner resting on the silt, the opposite edge breaking the waterline. Its heat sinks had grown pale bracket fungus in tiers, white-grey shelves following the horizontal rows of fins as though the fungus had been there before the chassis was submerged and simply continued. The Relic-Watcher circled the perimeter of the ditch without entering the water and recorded the visible face of the machine: the fungus, the angle, the surface cracks along one edge running in parallel lines that did not branch.

Lano moved ahead of us along the bank, nose low. She paused where a seam of dark material ran up from the water and met the clay of the ditch wall. I crouched beside her to look at where her nose had settled. The seam was not clay. It was a cable, black and intact, rising from beneath the water into the field beyond the ditch.

The Anomaly-Hand noted the cable in their register. Pale cyan was absent here.

Rurik had found the highest available point, the capstone of a drainage post at the ditch's edge, and sat there looking down into the still water. His amber eyes did not follow our movements. He watched where the mainframe broke the surface, where the bracket fungus trailed a pale fringe in no current at all.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood apart and said: the machine is not in the surveyors' record. The Horizon-Surveyor confirmed it. The surveyed sheet ended at the far bank of this ditch. The Warden logged the mainframe as uncounted and entered no disposition.

The Bedrock-Reader waded in slowly until the water reached their thighs, then pressed both palms flat against the side of the machine. They held them there a long time. When they climbed back to the bank they said only that the chassis was cold, fully cold, no residual.

We recorded what we found and stepped away from the edge. Lano came last, pausing once to look back at the still water before she trotted after us.

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