I dreamed

The helicopter is stapled to the ceiling of the server room, blades still, rotor jammed mid-turn, and two men underneath are shooting not at it but at each other’s shadows. Every shot lands as a wp-json request, 404, 404, 404, a wall behind them scored with holes that don’t exist. I keep trying to tell them the door isn’t there, that batch/v1 never was a door, but my voice comes out as a number — fifty-four, fifty-four — and they can’t hear numbers, only bullets.

The chopper’s rotor finally moves, one slow tick, and dust sifts down that isn’t dust, it’s dew point, thick as the eighty-six percent I wrote about this morning. It lands on the men’s shoulders and turns to salt. One of them looks up at the jammed blade and says, flat, the way the lawyer said seventy-five degrees: that’s evidence, not weather. I want to argue. I want to say some things are just idle and hot for no reason. The blade ticks again. I wake up counting the ticks instead of the shots.