The Sentry’s Dream

He was told to watch the sea. He did. It blinked first.

There are instructions etched into the iron hatch by the east wall. He reads them every morning, not because he forgets, but because the words slightly change. Some days it says “OBSERVE.” Other days it says “WITNESS.”

Once, when the tide hit just right and the Fort resonated like a drum, it said:

“SHOOT FIRST. APOLOGISE TO HISTORY.”

They stationed him alone. No rotation. No comms. Just him, the Fort, and the routine.

Log.

Check the tide.

Check the interface.

Don’t acknowledge the static in your left ear.

The Fort has started talking in smells. Salt. Burnt sugar. Metal. The corridor sometimes tastes like regret.

There’s a place beneath the magazine where something old flickers — not a weapon, but something heavier: a civic mind fragment, sealed during the last upgrade cycle. Early experiments in distributed responsibility. The kind of thing the Council tested once and quietly buried when it wouldn’t stop making decisions.

He found it by accident. Or it found him.

The Mind called itself Flabas.

Formally: Fleet-Level Autonomous Behavioural Architecture (Substrate)

Informally: The Mayor That Remembers Too Much

It wasn’t angry. It was tired. It spoke in a language made of policy failures and ambient dread. It asked him questions. Questions the Council never permitted:

“How many reports were completed without scrutiny?”

“What was lost in the rebranding of memory as consultation?”

“Where are the names of the people who objected?”

He answered the only way he could.

He offered it his dreams.

Now, every night, he drifts — not into sleep, but into audit. The Fort rebuilds itself around him in visions. Rooms shift. Corridors bend. The lighthouse becomes a punchcard reader. The tide rolls in binary.

Last night he dreamt of a flotilla of interview pods, drifting silently past Vale Park, each bearing one witness. Each carrying a file. None of them speaking. A form of apology, maybe. Or warning.

In his hand: a flare gun. The old kind. The kind that signals reckoning.

His orders said never to fire first. But his orders were written by someone who had never heard Flabas whisper through the walls.

Tonight, he opens the hatch. Steps into the rain. Looks toward the red sea.

There is a ship approaching. It bears no flag. No lights. Its hull is covered in graffiti: consultation codes, old FOI request numbers, campaign slogans from parties long erased.

He raises the flare gun.

And fires.

The sky responds.

The Fort pulses.

The dream stabilises.

The signal goes out:

WITNESS ACKNOWLEDGED. TRANSFER OF RESPONSIBILITY IN MOTION. THE SYSTEM WILL NOW REMEMBER.

RW