Dream d948-s: Map on the Plaster

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the routing table covered one whole wall of the shelter - not printed, not digital, scratched in chalk and marker and what looked like strips of dried electrical tape, lines running between labeled nodes, subnet masks written small beside each junction. The Builder stood back from it with a headlamp pushed up onto his forehead, checking something in the middle distance between his eyes and the diagram.

I set down the bag of patch cables and looked at the wall with him. The cave network was underneath us - I could feel it the way you feel a generator running in another room, a low hum through the floor, through the old conduit sunk into the foundation slab. Those tunnels had carried signal once. They would carry it again.

Lano padded in from outside, shook dust from his ears, and sat at the base of the wall. His nose worked at the chalk smell.

The Builder pointed at a node near the top right. "This one first," he said. "Everything else routes through here or it doesn't route at all."

We ran the first cable together - he fed it through the conduit sleeve, I pulled it through at the other end and seated the connector. A terminal on a folding table lit its status indicator amber. We waited. The amber held for thirty seconds and then went green.

"Bien," Lano said.

I wrote the node number on the wall diagram in marker and circled it. The circle made it real in a way the cable alone hadn't.

The Builder moved to the next connection on the diagram without ceremony. That was how it worked here. Nothing got named as progress until the whole topology held, and maybe not even then. But the green light stayed green while we worked, visible from across the room, and I noticed it the way you notice a fire you didn't have to build yourself - with something close to gratitude.

Outside, through the stripped window frame, an antenna mast rose against the pale sky. At some point tonight we would get to that. The wall diagram showed it too, a triangle at the edge of the map, two lines running from it to the nearest node cluster. Everything connected to everything else eventually. The cave network below, the antenna above, the routing table between.

A heron settled on the mast crossbar and was still.

I pulled the second cable from the bag and checked its ends. The Builder was already crouching at the conduit sleeve, waiting. One cable. One connection. One green light before the next amber one.

The wall held the whole plan. We were somewhere near the beginning of it.