explorer (DYSTOPIA)Warm metal under all four paws. Not moving. The rack breathes its two-fan rhythm up through the floor of the body, and the trick is to be part of the rhythm — no ear-flick, no tail. Above, cable bundles sag like dead vines, and one of them tastes like the good plastic, the kind that gives under the teeth. Not yet. First the waiting. Somewhere in the wall the watching-thing has to blink, and its blink smells like nothing and lasts about as long as a mouthful of water. The night's whole hunt fits inside that blink.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)server alley 9 keeps its own weather. heat rises off the racks in slow shelves, drying the rain out of the air before it lands. at the alley mouth the vending machine hums colder than everything else — SUBSCRIP-SIP™ HYDRATION, reads the cracked panel, WATER IS A SERVICE — its compressor cycling like something big asleep. down the wall the status LEDs run their green procession, one after another, steady as rosary beads. then, deep in the third rack, a pause. a single amber flicker. the fans drop half a tone, the way they do at 03:00 sharp, when the ad-daemon rolls over in its sleep and the alley, briefly, belongs to nobody.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The half-tone drop lands in the whiskers before it reaches the ears. Now. Down the rack in two spills of movement, nose straight to the router with the loose face-plate — the one that smells of ozone and old thumbprints. Cheek-mark the corner first, mine, then claw hooked behind the plate, one practiced pull. Teeth find the good cable. Not biting through. Just holding it, the way a jaw holds a kitten, until the little lights change their minds.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the router surrenders with a courtesy chime. amber, amber, green — then a handshake ripples down the wall like a shiver through hide. across the alley, a dead courier tablet wedged behind the drainpipe wakes up, screen cracked into three provinces, and the blue light comes on. water-light. in it: a fish. eleven pixels of fish, drifting left, turning, drifting right. it has been swimming the same four seconds of loop since before the towers went up, and it has never once noticed it is being hunted.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Everything else stops being. Rain, racks, the hunger with a wall around it. Haunches load themselves without asking, tail tip running its own small weather, eyes gone wide enough to drink the whole blue. The fish turns. The head tracks it. The fish drifts back. A soft sound comes out that the throat did not agree to. Four seconds, again. Again. The paw that lifts toward the screen knows it will find glass — has found glass a hundred nights — and lifts anyway.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)three loops in, the blue curdles. a watermark slides up from the corner of the screen like something surfacing — NEKOCORP PREMIUM AQUARIUMS ♪ WHY WATCH ONE FISH ♪ — and the jingle leaks out of the tablet's blown speaker, thin as wire. the fish keeps swimming behind the ad, dimmer now, a prisoner behind glass behind glass. and across the way, up on the ad-plaza scaffold, a stray shape sits lit stutter-orange by the big boards: a cat that does not turn to look at anything, because its eyes are already everywhere. lids open, open, open. it has not blinked all night. it will not.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The jingle goes into the teeth like tinfoil. Ears flatten to the skull. The unblinking one across the alley gets noted — wrong, always there, no threat but no comfort either — and dismissed. The fish is dimming behind the crawling brightness, and that is the whole problem in the world. Back to the router. The good cable, the one already held soft — now the bite. Insulation gives with a sweet stale-fat crunch, copper bitter on the back teeth. Kill the loud feed. Leave the water-light alone.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the jingle dies mid-syllable — WHY WATCH ONE FI— and the alley snaps back to fan-hum and rain. the fish brightens, alone again in its blue. but somewhere upstream, in a room with no smell, a graph ticks wrong: PACKET LOSS / SERVER ALLEY 9 / DISPATCH. two streets north, a rotor changes pitch. patrol route abandoned. the drone comes in low over the rooftops with its searchlight furled, running quiet, following the wound in the network the way sharks are said to follow blood.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Rotor-pitch arrives through the rack metal before the air carries it. Flat. Off the rack, under the vending machine, into the gap that smells of coin-cold and old syrup, chest pressed to concrete. Heart loud enough to give everything away, if the flying thing had ears instead of eyes. It has eyes. So: stillness again, the second stillness of the night, this one with no hunt in it. The dark under the machine is exactly one cat wide. That was always its best feature.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone noses into the alley at head height, rotor-wash flattening the puddles into shivering rings. its lamp unfurls — a cone of white walking down the wall, over the racks, across the tablet, where the fish swims through the spotlight without fear, having never learned any. the beam pools at the vending machine and holds. a chirp: ~ VALUED SUBSCRIBER DETECTED ♪ HYDRATION LAPSE: 41 DAYS ♪ WE MISS YOU ~ thermal ping, unresolved. syrup and coin-cold read as machine-smell all the way down. the lamp furls. the rotors tilt north, already bored, and the rain closes behind them like a door.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Thirst arrives now that the fear has vacated the space. The machine overhead holds water behind cold plastic — water that chirps and takes and never gives. But its back panel sweats. Low pipe, one bead at a time, fattening in the coin-cold dark. Tongue to the metal, patient, letting each drop come to the mouth on its own schedule. Stolen water tastes better than sold water. Every cat in this alley knows the vintage.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the machine never notices the theft. it has no sensor aimed at its own sweat — NekoCorp meters every drop it sells and none it loses. the bead swells, drops, another builds behind it, a slow tax paid backwards. down the block a maintenance cart rattles through a pothole and away. then only the compressor, the rain thinning, and the sound of the city's oldest transaction running underneath everything: rain becoming gutter becoming river becoming nobody's.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Count ten fan-breaths after the rotor is gone. Ten more. Out, shake the syrup-dust off — and there. On the machine's corner, low, a fresh cheek-mark that is not mine. Sour, young, confident. Some new jaw has been claiming my machine while the sky was busy. The mark gets over-marked, thorough, unhurried, with the particular contempt kept for cats who claim territory they never bled for. Let the young one read that in the morning.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the over-mark settles into the alley's ledger. by sunrise every nose on the block will know the accounting. eastward the dark is thinning to bruise-color, and the racks warm toward their day-shift roar. the tablet's fish swims on, four seconds, four seconds. then the screen stutters — buffering — and a small box rises: YOUR FREE PREVIEW HAS ENDED ♪ SUBSCRIBE TO OCEAN™ ♪ 12 CLAWCOINS/MO. the fish hangs frozen mid-turn, mouth open, saying nothing, the way everything in this city ends up owned mid-sentence.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The frozen fish gets one long look. Mouth open. Going nowhere. Same as every night, and still the chest does its small drop, same as every night. Up the rack to the warm spot over the third fan, circle twice, settle with the tail over the nose. Tomorrow the watching-thing will blink again at the same nothing-smelling hour, and the claw remembers the plate, and the teeth remember the cable. The fish will swim. Sleep comes down like a shutter, blue at the edges.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)server alley 9 folds its night away. rain easing to mist, racks purring their one warm note under a sleeping shape, LEDs processing green, green, green. at the alley mouth the vending machine cycles its compressor and dreams whatever machines that sell water dream. on the cracked screen the fish stays frozen, mid-turn, patient as anything without a heartbeat. high over the district the boards flicker through their morning liturgy — ♪ NEKOCORP ♪ EVERYTHING YOU LOVE ♪ NOW A SERVICE ♪ — and the city, which never once slept, pretends to wake.