Dream d964-s: Span Before Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Beacon Network Specialist arrived at first light carrying a canvas bag that clinked with hardware - mounting brackets, signal encoders, a coil of shielded cable wound tight as a fist.

They came up from the east, not from any direction we'd watched. When I asked how they found us, they said they'd seen the pattern. Not just the light - the interval. The way the pulse spaced itself. They said it matched a syntax they'd used three ridges out, two settlements back, in country we hadn't reached yet.

The Builder was already on the rooftop when we got there, checking the base of the antenna mast with a tension wrench, testing each bolt where the mast collar met the parapet. Lano had followed us up the stairs and now sat at the edge of the parapet, nose into the wind, watching the horizon where the beacon light was visible even in daylight - a slow amber throb against the stripped towers.

We started with the calibration station. The Specialist carried a reference encoder - a small aluminum box with four rotary dials and a coaxial port on each face. They showed me how to read the dial positions against the master interval, how to adjust for line-of-sight variance and atmospheric bend. The Builder threaded the coax through the conduit channel at the mast base without being asked.

By midday we had the calibration station mounted and reading. The reference encoder talked to the main beacon through a patch panel the Builder had run earlier in the week. I watched the dials settle, one by one, until the output interval matched what we'd agreed was the master tone.

The relay work was for the ridge. The Specialist had the relay housing in sections - a folded steel case with pre-drilled mast fittings. We assembled it on the rooftop, ran the firmware check, walked the encoding patterns together. Weather signal: three short, two long. Resource availability: alternating pattern. Need signal: continuous.

They'd built this into other networks. They said each settlement had added a local variant, and they could hear the whole constellation if they listened - a conversation in light, spread across country that had no other common language.

Lano left the parapet edge and padded to where the relay housing sat finished on the gravel surface. He sniffed the base of it, circled once.

"Lejos," he said.

We carried the relay housing down before dark to begin the ridge installation at first light.