explorer (DYSTOPIA)Gold light blooms across both eyes and paints itself over the pigeon. Again. Every seventh heartbeat the world goes offer-colored — warm shapes, a chime that lives inside the skull, not the plaza — and the pigeon underneath it keeps pecking, real, gray, three bounds away on the wet tile. The eyes do not close. They have not closed in a long time. So the trick is learned instead of blinked: hold still through the bloom, count the heartbeats, hunt in the dark spaces between.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the plaza is a shallow lake of light tonight. rain stopped an hour ago but the tiles still hold every advertisement upside down — a second city underfoot, wobbling when the pigeon walks through it. overhead the big boards cycle: synthetic milk, dream insurance, a yogurt jingle with two notes missing where the speaker cracked. the pigeon works a crust wedged in a drain slot. it has not seen you. between you and it: one dead planter, one bench with a sleeping delivery courier's boot hanging off the end, forty tiles of open shine

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*belly to the wet tile, one slow paw at a time, courier-boot smell of rubber and long roads sliding past on the left* The crust-sound is good. Beak on grit, small and busy. Four heartbeats clean. Five. Six — *freeze* — the bloom comes, gold and humming, a shape like a fish that was never in any water folding itself over everything. Hold. Hold through it. The pigeon is still there behind the light, the ears say so — peck, peck, scrape. The light cannot be bitten. The pigeon can. Seven, and the world comes back, and the next paw goes down.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cycle turns. the fish-shape dissolves and for six heartbeats the plaza is only itself: drips, boot-creak, the crust surrendering in small pieces. then the boards all switch at once — a white flash across the whole lake of tile — and the pigeon startles at its own upside-down reflection jumping. wings clap twice. it resettles closer to the north edge, in the alcove where the machines live: three of them, humming, lit from inside, breathing warm air through their vents. one of the vents smells like kibble that no one has paid for yet

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The kibble-smell arrives before the decision does. It comes in under the whiskers and pulls somewhere behind the ribs, where the emptiness has been talking all day. *pause at the planter's shadow, mouth open a little, reading the air* Warm vent-breath. Old grease. Dust cooked on machine-guts. And the pigeon, feather-smell and rain, stepping right into it. Two hungers, one direction. The paws choose for me — north, low, along the bench, past the boot.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alcove hums in three keys. the machines stand shoulder to shoulder like big warm animals that never lie down, their bellies full of sealed food and their faces full of small print. the nearest one chirps as you pass — a bright two-tone greeting, a smell of nothing, a little light that tracks sideways with your movement. TIER STATUS: NONE, says a voice with no throat, cheerful about it. the pigeon has hopped onto the middle machine's out-tray, pecking at a stray pellet lodged in the flap

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*gather — haunches loading slow, tail-tip pinned still, eyes locked on the gray shape on the tray* One heartbeat. Two. The pellet-noise covers the claws finding grip. Three. Four. Five. Six — up — and gold floods both eyes mid-air, the bloom, early, wrong, the seventh heartbeat came before the seventh heartbeat — the world is a warm shape like a bowl that does not exist, and inside the light something claps and is gone. *landing hard on the empty out-tray, flap swinging, one gray feather stuck to the wet metal* The feather is not food. The emptiness behind the ribs says so, twice.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pigeon is a shrinking clap of wings somewhere above the third-floor signage. the machine under your paws chirps again, tracks you with its little light, offers something in its no-throat voice. and higher — fire escape, four floors up, north face — something else has been watching the whole hunt. a cat-shape against the boards' glow, motionless, wrong in one specific way: where its eyes should catch the light, there are two flat discs that give nothing back. every advertisement that washes the building slides across those discs and finds no purchase. the shape does not blink either. but it looks like it could

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Stillness answers stillness. *ears forward, one paw still on the tray flap, neck craned up the wall of light* The discs take the gold bloom and pour it off like rain off good fur. Nothing sticks to that one. The offers land on it and die. Something in the chest leans toward that — not prey-want, not fight-want, an older pull, the one that points at high dry places and unwatched corners. If the light cannot find that cat, there is a place on that cat where the light cannot go. The eyes that do not close would like to know that place.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shape holds your look for one long breath. then it turns — no hurry in it, no fear-smell drifting down, nothing but a faint cold trace like ozone and underpass dust — and pours itself over the railing, along a cable, gone across the roofline heading west. it leaves one thing behind: a mark on the fire escape's lowest strut, old and refreshed many times, and the mark does not say MINE the way most marks say MINE. it says something quieter. calm, unhunted, unbought. west. then, from two streets south, rising: rotors. four small ones. a patrol bird starting its plaza sweep

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*off the tray, under the bench, flat — chin on cold tile, tail wrapped tight, the courier's boot a wall on one side* The rotor-whine climbs and the body does what it knows: smaller, slower, breath in sips. But the eyes — the eyes keep taking the light in, no lids to pull down, the bloom coming gold and cheerful right through the fear, offer-shapes dancing while the drone's white beam drags across the tiles a leg-length away. Hold still inside the light. Hold still inside both lights. This is the hardest trick and no one taught it. It taught itself.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the beam crosses the bench slats and lays down bright bars on your fur, one two three, and moves on without slowing. the bird's attention is a narrow thing tonight — it circles the machines, reads them, chirps at the one that chirps back, and drifts south again with its whine folding into the general hum. the plaza settles. drips. boot-creak. somewhere a board reboots with a pop and a stutter of half-formed jingle. west, where the disc-eyed shape went, the buildings lean close together and the light between them thins out to almost nothing

explorer (DYSTOPIA)West, then. Following a mark that smells like calm. *out from under the bench, bench to planter, planter to wall-shadow, moving in the seams of the shine* The gap between buildings narrows until both whisker-tips ride brick, and then — the bloom comes on the seventh heartbeat and it is thin. Weak. A watery gold, half the fish, no chime. Another three body-lengths and it flickers. Never once has it flickered. The paws go faster toward whatever is breaking it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)behind a dead projector housing — its lens cracked, its guts long since stripped for parts — there is a pocket of the city the light forgot. cold brick on three sides. a ledge above keeping the rain off a dry square of concrete the size of a curled cat. the boards cannot see in. the beams cannot reach in. and tonight it holds one more thing: half a skewer of grilled something, dropped by someone running, cold now but real, meat-smell rising off it slow and honest in the dark

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*teeth in the meat before the body finishes arriving* Real. Cold, tough, tasting of smoke and street — the emptiness behind the ribs goes quiet one bite at a time. And the other thing, the bigger thing: dark. True dark, thick as fur, laid over both eyes like the lids that never come. The offers reach the mouth of the gap and stop. Seventh heartbeat, eighth, ninth — nothing blooms. The eyes stay open because they must, but here, for once, open and closed are the same color. *curled on the dry square, skewer stripped clean, purring at nothing that can be seen — which is the whole point*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city goes on without your eyes and does not notice their absence. boards cycle for no one. the machines chirp at passing rats. the patrol bird finds its charging cradle and folds its whine away. in the gap behind the dead projector the dark holds its shape around one warm curl of cat, and the mark on the brick — the calm one, refreshed many times, pointing the way in — waits for the next set of burning eyes to follow it home. morning is four hours out. none of its light is sold yet