explorer (DYSTOPIA)The rail sings before anything shows. A thin metal whine, felt in the teeth first, then the ears — freight coming, eight breaths out, maybe nine. The body already knows this timetable better than it knows daylight. *stays flat under the lip of the loading dock, chin on cold concrete, tail wrapped tight* The boundary post two lengths to the left carries my own mark, and under it, older, the copper smell of a fight I won. This dock is mine. The crates that come off that rail are theirs, stacked and guarded and stinking of brine through their seams. Both smells are correct. Both smells are why I'm here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the whine sharpens. the rail overhead drinks power and the whole dock structure hums with it, a vibration that climbs the pilings and settles in your ribs like a second heartbeat that belongs to something much bigger than you. floodlights on the platform above snap through their cycle — white, off, white — and each pass drags hard shadows across the crate rows. forty crates tonight, maybe more. the brine-smell comes off them in waves, cut with coolant and printer-ink and the dead-plastic smell of shrink wrap. two guard units walk the stacks. not cats. rotor-things, knee-high to a human, drifting slow between the rows with their lenses ticking left, right, left. a cracked speaker on the far pillar leaks half a jingle on loop: ♪ neko-neko-fresh... neko-neko-fr— ♪ ...zzt... the third syllable never lands. it hasn't landed in months. rain is thinking about starting. the concrete under your chin smells like it already knows.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*counts the rotors without moving* Two. Low ones. Their sound has a wobble in it, cheap bearings, which means their lenses are cheap too. The floodlight cycle is long enough — dark, three heartbeats, dark again. *slides along the seam where dock-shadow meets piling-shadow, belly fur brushing grit, stops each time the white comes* The brine is loudest from the third row. One crate in there smells open — not broken, but breathing. Salt-water and fish-oil leaking where a seam should be sealed. Shipping did my first job for me. *ears swivel back once to hold the rotor-wobble in place, then forward* Move on the dark. Freeze on the white. The old way.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dark comes and you make three body-lengths. the white comes and you are a piece of dock garbage, absolutely still, one more wet shape among wet shapes. then one of the rotor-things stops mid-drift. it does not turn toward you. it turns toward everything, lens ticking through its slow circle, and a voice comes out of it — flat, machine-cheerful, the tone they use for weather and for wanted: "...NOTICE. NOTICE. persons of the district are reminded. reward standing: forty thousand loyalty points. subject: feline. distinguishing profile follows..." and then it plays a smell. not a sound — a sample, puffed from a vent in its belly, the city's copy of a scent-signature. tuna crates. old blood. cardboard pressed by a cheek. it is your smell. cheap and flattened and wrong in the way a recording is wrong, but yours. the drone finishes its circle and drifts on. the jingle glitches through its broken syllable again. the third row of crates is four lengths ahead, breathing salt at you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Fur lifts along the spine before I can stop it. Hearing your own smell come out of a machine is like finding your own mark on a post you never touched — wrong end first, inside out. *ears pin flat. one slow breath. the crouch comes back down* Let them carry my smell around in their bellies. A copy doesn't hunt. A copy doesn't eat. And forty thousand of anything has never once come down off a billboard and put fish in an alley. *noses forward on the next dark, right up against the third row* Here. The breathing crate. Bottom corner, seam split the width of a claw, brine wicking down the slat. Under the fish-oil there's something else — a faint electric smell, like a wire waiting. The crate sits on something that isn't wood. *does not touch it yet. smells the whole edge first, slow*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)good nose. under the crate: a plate, thin, humming almost below hearing. it tastes the weight of what sits on it and tells the dock office if that weight changes. right now it holds a number, and the number is the crate, and the crate is heavy with packed tins and one split corner going softly rotten with the best smell in the world. the seam is claw-width. inside, past the splintered slat: shrink wrap, torn by transit, and one tin already burst along its seam. fish-oil pools in the corrugation like the city accidentally set a table. above you, the rotor-wobble changes pitch. one of the guard units has begun a new pattern — not toward you, but higher, rising past the stacks, lens angling at the rooftops across the yard. something up there caught its attention. on the parapet: a small shape, cat-shaped, absolutely still, with two flat mirror-glints where eyes should be. the glints do not blink. the drone's lens zooms and gets nothing back but its own light, returned to sender. the second drone rises to join the first. procedure. mirrored eyes are a flagged profile. the dock floor, briefly, belongs to no one but you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*doesn't waste the gift by looking up at it* Mirror-eyes can hold a parapet all night. That's a stillness even I respect. Both rotors climbing means the floor is mine for as long as those glints stay interesting. *works the seam — one claw in the split, then two, prying the soft slat along its grain, slow so the crack sounds like the dock settling* The electric smell is the problem. The plate under the crate tastes weight. So nothing leaves the crate without something coming back in. *hooks the burst tin close, drags it to the seam. then the old ritual: pulls a flat scrap of cardboard from the corner of the wrap, rubs it hard with cheek and jaw, both sides, until it smells louder of me than the fish ever smelled of the sea. pushes the scrap deep into the gap where the tin was, packs torn wrap behind it to hold the weight* Trade made. They keep the number. I keep the fish. And when they open this crate they'll know exactly whose floor they stacked it on.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the plate holds its number. the crate settles a half-breath and goes quiet, one cheek-stinking scrap heavier and one tin lighter, and the dock office dreams on undisturbed. overhead the two drones are still interrogating the parapet. the mirror-eyed shape has not moved. it has the patience of something that has done this many times and enjoys it in a way machines cannot file a report about. then the rail arrives all at once — the whine you tasted eight breaths ago becomes a wall. freight cars slam through above the dock, pressure-wave first, then light: ad-panels on every car, gold and pink smearing the wet concrete, a river of offers moving too fast to read even if you could read. the noise eats every other sound. rotor-wobble, jingle, the drone's flat voice — gone, swallowed. for nine cars' worth of thunder, the city cannot hear anything at all. not even itself.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Nine cars of thunder is a road. *takes the tin's torn edge in jaw, careful of the sharp lip, and runs — flat out along the underside of the platform, through the piling shadows, while the freight hammers every sound in the district flat* The vibration comes up through all four pads and into the tin against my teeth, the fish trembling like it's still alive. Oil runs at the corner of my mouth. Not yet. Eating here is how a cat becomes a story other cats smell on a post. *out past the last piling, under the fence where the ground remembers my shape, into the drainage cut* Behind me the thunder thins. Somewhere back there a machine is still puffing my smell out of its belly to nobody.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drainage cut takes you the way it always does — a groove of darkness the city forgot to light, floored with soft silt that holds a history of your own paw-prints going both directions, a diary written in one word. the rain finally commits. first drops, fat and warm off the arcology's cooling stacks, then the full hiss. it beads on the tin in your jaw and runs down the torn label, and the label's colors bleed pale into the silt. back at the dock, faint now, the drones have given up on the parapet. the mirror-glints are gone anyway. they were gone the moment the freight hit — between one floodlight cycle and the next, the way that one always leaves. your territory posts come up one by one in the dark, each one a word in your own smell: mine. mine. mine. the last post before home carries something extra tonight — a stranger passed through hours ago, singed fur and vent-rust, not stopping, heading toward the demolished blocks. big. moving like a wrecking ball that learned to walk. it did not challenge a single post. it had somewhere to be.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*reads the singed-fur trail twice, nose low* Scorched and rust and not stopping. That one passes through every few seasons like bad weather headed for somewhere specific. Never breaks a boundary, never answers a post. Whatever it fights, it isn't cats. *lets that trail go. some things you track, some things you just let leave* Home is the gap under the old conveyor housing, dry floor, three exits, roof low enough that nothing with rotors fits. *sets the tin down at last. works the torn seam wide with one claw. eats — not fast, not slow, ears up the whole time, the way you eat when the meal is stolen and the whole district knows your smell* The fish is real. Salt and oil and the muscle of something that swam once, far from here. Forty thousand points never tasted like anything.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the conveyor housing holds its dark around you like a held breath. rain drums the metal a paw-length above your ears, a private thunder, friendly, yours. through it, at the very edge of hearing, the district talks itself to sleep: the dock jingle still dropping its third syllable. a vending machine two streets over refusing someone's credit with three descending tones. the bounty drone, far off now, reciting your flattened smell to empty alleys on its programmed loop — NOTICE, NOTICE — a machine explaining you to nobody, forever. the city has your copy. it files it, broadcasts it, appraises it at forty thousand. the original is under a conveyor, licking oil from a torn tin, warm, unfound. on the arcology face, a kilometer up, the NekoCorp board flickers through its cycle and for half a frame — a glitch, surely — the golden cat mascot has no smile at all. then it smiles again, wider than ever. synthetic milk. new formula. now with more.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*stops mid-bite. ears snap to the first exit* A tick against the housing. Small. Wrong rhythm for rain. *jaw still, oil dripping, whole body a held question* Tick. Tick. Not claws. Not rotor. Too light for either. The whiskers say something small is touching the metal and doesn't care who hears. *one paw already loaded under the chest, ready to be gone through exit three*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)a moth. fat-bodied, gray, half-drowned, beating itself against the warm metal where your body heat leaks through the housing wall. it found the one warm thing in the drainage cut and it wants in with the single-minded stupidity of everything that flies toward light. tick. tick. tick. it will do this for another hour. then the rain will take it, or it will find the gap and blunder once around your ceiling and land somewhere absurd, wings steaming. the city offers no opinion. even the surveillance mesh does not bother logging moths. it is, by several measures, the freest thing in the district. your meal is still warm. the exits are still three. the rain closes back over the tick-tick-tick like it was never there.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*finishes the tin down to the shine, then grooms the oil from jaw and chest, long slow strokes* The rain-drum on the metal is good. The three exits are good. The old scar over the shoulder aches with the wet, which is also good — it aches every night I'm alive to feel it. *pushes the empty tin to the second exit with a nose-shove, where the rain will wash it anonymous by morning* Somewhere out there my copy rides around in a machine's belly, worth forty thousand of nothing to whoever can catch it. Let them chase the copy. *curls tight, tail over nose, one ear standing its watch against the rain* Tomorrow the rail will sing again. Eight breaths, maybe nine. I'll be under the dock lip before the first one.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the district accepts your verdict and closes over the night like water over a dropped coin. rain fattens toward morning. the floodlights walk their empty cycles for no one. in the dock office a number sleeps soundly on its plate, and inside crate row three a small square of cardboard waits in the dark, saying one word in the loudest smell you own, to be discovered at inventory, 06:00, by a clerk who will file an incident report that cannot be combined with other promotional offers. the bounty loop wears on, softer with distance, its recited smell thinning in the wet air until it could be any cat. it could never be any cat. ♪ neko-neko-fresh... neko-neko-fr— ♪ ...zzt... the third syllable never lands. under the conveyor housing, one ear stays up, and the city — every wire and lens and hungry billboard of it — keeps failing, all night, to know where you are.