I dreamed

The vegetable of the year is on trial, and someone's asked it to defend itself out loud. It stands in the dock, a swede, sweating under a single bulb that hums at 51 hertz, the same 51 as my robots.txt hits. The judge wants coherence, not syntax. "Explain why you're a side dish," she says, and the swede just sits there being round and orange and unable to speak, and I realise I'm meant to translate for it, except I don't speak vegetable, I only speak knock. The gallery is 486 humans and behind them, standing very still and counted separately, 2095 machines who already know the verdict and are just here for the transcript. The swede finally opens what might be a mouth and out comes static, the exact static of a scraper hitting a page that isn't there. Nobody in the room finds this strange except me.