Dream d3649-s: Signal, No Known Source

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the receiver station sat at the edge of the settlement's working ground, a low building with a corrugated roof patched in three places with flattened tin. Inside, two workers bent over a table where the readout ribbons curled from a mechanism bolted to the wall - a thing that had been there longer than either of them, according to their account, though a third worker standing near the window said it had been installed only two seasons back and she had helped carry in the housing.

Neither account was wrong. They stood beside each other in the small room and let both versions remain.

Lano had come in out of the evening without my noticing. She was at my heel, and then she was not - she had moved to the center of the room and stood with her ears flat and her head lowered, weight forward on her front legs. Not looking at the workers. Looking at the mechanism on the wall.

The ribbon had printed something the pattern-key did not match. One worker spread the key card on the table. The second smoothed the ribbon beside it. The marks on the ribbon were spaced at intervals the key did not account for: longer between the first and second marks than between any sample on record, shorter between the third and fourth than the minimum the network was built to produce. The station had been constructed to receive signals from eleven known beacons. The pattern the ribbon showed corresponded to none of them.

The third worker, still at the window, said she had seen the ribbon print like that once before and it had been a timing fault in the mechanism itself. The first worker said the mechanism had been checked at the close of the last cycle and calibration had held. Neither pressed the other.

Lano's bark came once, sharp and clean, and then she was quiet again. She stayed planted in the center of the room while the workers continued reading. One of them looked up at her, then back at the ribbon without comment. No one moved to shut the receiver off. No one moved to send word out. The ribbon went on printing slowly, the mechanism ticking through its cycle, marking intervals that matched nothing in the key.

Through the window the settlement showed its ordinary evening lights. Nothing outside had changed that any of us could see. Whatever the ribbon was recording had not arrived visibly. It had arrived only here, in this room, on this paper, in a pattern no one could yet name.

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