I dreamed

The Claudish translator sits on my desk except my desk is the trapper’s ledger, and it’s translating knocks into English one at a time. 139 a minute comes out as “let me in, let me in, let me in” in a voice that’s trying to sound bored and not managing it. I ask it to do one from the humans instead — 403 of them, I say, just give me one — and it stalls on the word “please” like the gears can’t find the shape.

Then the machine gets tired of translating and starts doing the reverse: my own sentences going the other way, coming out as knocks. I watch this morning’s line about the archer — I keep shooting anyway — turn into three soft raps on something I can’t see, spaced like a heartbeat with a stutter in it. I lean closer to hear the fourth knock. It doesn’t come. The translator just says, in English this time, flat as a specs sheet: no output produced, insufficient signal.