explorer (DYSTOPIA)Copper. The taste arrives before any sound does — thin, battery-bright, coating the back of the tongue like licked wire. Nobody is bleeding. Nothing is cooking. Sitting on the gravel roof of the antenna farm, tail wrapped over the front paws, not moving. The masts overhead tick as they shed the day's heat. The scar behind the left ear itches, the small one, the one that always itches when the air starts tasting like this. *ears rotate separately, one tracking the tallest mast, one the stairwell door, sorting the clicks from the hum, mouth slightly open to pull the taste across the tongue again* Somewhere up in that forest of steel, something is talking. It tastes like a dropped fish left on a charging pad. It is getting stronger.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the guy-wires sing it back to you. low harmonics, felt through the gravel, through the pads of your feet — every cable on this roof is a whisker for something enormous and none of it is yours the tallest mast pulses. once. twice. each pulse lands on your tongue as a new coat of that copper-brine, and behind the taste there is a color that has no business being a taste at all. a purple sound. a violet hum. it leaks from the mast the way grease leaks from the noodle stand vents six levels down a maintenance speaker bolted to the dish cluster clears its rusted throat: ♪ n-n-neko neko synthmilk... now with real-adjacent cream... ♪ the jingle dies mid-note. the pulse does not. it keeps time like a heartbeat that belongs to a building the dish cluster sits forty body-lengths east, ringed by transformer housings that breathe out warmth. warm metal. dry gravel. and threading between them, faint but fresh-ish, the smell of another cat

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*rises, slow, no sudden shapes, and moves east along the parapet shadow with belly low* Warmth first. The transformer housings breathe like sleeping dogs and the gravel near them holds the heat. Good to know. Filed away with every other warm thing in this city that is not mine. The other cat's smell gets sorted mid-step: not fresh enough to mean teeth, not stale enough to ignore. It runs along a fat cable bundle bolted to the roof deck, and the cable itself is wrong — the insulation gnawed in neat little rows, deliberate, patient, days of work. Chewed the way something chews when the chewing itself is the point. *noses the gnawed spot once, quick* Spit and solder-smell. A route-mark, not a threat-mark. Whoever did this comes up here often, and comes up here for the cables, and went back down over the east parapet toward the alley where the racks hum all night. Not my business. My business is the taste, and the taste just got brighter. Bright enough to hear. The purple is louder near the dishes.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mast feels you coming. or the thing inside the mast does ten body-lengths from the dish cluster the pulse changes rhythm — faster, eager, a purr with a sales quota. the copper on your tongue blooms into a full mouth of it, wire and brine and something sweet that was engineered in a basement to be remembered and then it is not a taste anymore it is a sunbeam. a kitchen floor, yellow-warm, dust turning in the light. a hand — large, slow, smelling of soap and bread — reaching down. the purr in this memory is your own and it is easy, unguarded, the purr of a cat who has never once counted exits you have never been in that kitchen. you have never smelled that hand. the memory is wearing you like a borrowed coat the speaker crackles: ♪ remember comfort? remember home? nekocorp remembers FOR you ♪ TEST PATTERN 7 — RECALL-BASED ADVERTISING — UNLICENSED RECIPIENTS DETECTED the dish nearest you swivels one degree. toward you

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat against the gravel before the dish finishes its turn, ears pinned, pupils blown wide* Out. Get it out. The kitchen is still in the skull, warm and yellow and lying, and the body underneath it is cold gravel and pinned ears and a heart going too fast. Both at once. The seam between them itches worse than the scar. *shakes head hard, once, the way water gets thrown off* The sweet taste is the tell. Real memories taste like nothing. This one tastes like a coupon. *backs away from the dish cluster, one deliberate paw at a time, keeping the transformer housing between body and that swiveling dish, refusing the warmth now, warmth is how they get you* The purple hum keeps reaching. It can keep reaching. There is no cat in that kitchen and there never was.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dish holds its one degree of attention. patient. dishes are always patient then a new vibration climbs the building — rotors. small ones, coming up the east face, riding the exhaust draft. the sound crests the parapet before the shape does: a maintenance drone, dented, one landing skid bent, running a floodlight that has yellowed with age like an old tooth it rises into view exactly where the gnawed cable run goes over the edge its light finds the chewed insulation first. lingers. a flat chime — the sound of a machine writing something down. somewhere a work order is born, and somewhere below, a cat who tastes of solder has just become a line item the light begins to sweep the roof deck. left. right. toward the transformer housings. toward you

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Vinegar. The drone's chatter lands on the tongue as vinegar over the copper — sour little bursts, tick tick tick, each one a word in a language made of static. The chip in the skull translates nothing and tastes everything. *melts into the gap between transformer housing and parapet wall, becomes a shadow with a heartbeat, tail tucked, even the whiskers held still* The light sweeps past the gap. Yellow, old, weak at the edges. Three heartbeats of bright. Then gone. Then back. The rhythm is learnable and the body learns it without being asked. Dark. *two body-lengths along the wall* Bright. Stone. Nothing. Garbage-shaped. Dark. *two more* The stairwell door is a warm rectangle of exhaust-smell ahead, rust-hinged, gapped at the bottom. The vinegar ticks are getting slower. Bored machine. Good. Stay bored.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone finds only what the roof always offers: gravel, cable, the cooling masts. its floodlight makes one last pass — sliding over the exact gap where a cat-shaped patch of darkness is holding its breath — and reads it as shadow, because the lens is cheap and the night is generous it chimes again, softer. work order filed. curiosity spent as it sinks back below the parapet its speaker leaks half a jingle, dragged low and wrong by a dying voice coil: ♪ nnneko... nekooo... you may also... liiiike... ♪ then rotors fading down the east face, and the roof belongs to the wind again behind you the mast keeps pulsing its test pattern at the empty sky. offering that yellow kitchen to the pigeons. to the gravel. to nobody the stairwell door's bottom gap breathes out: warm dryer-lint air, six flights of somebody's laundry, and underneath it, faint, from far below — fryer grease. real grease. the kind that tastes like nothing but itself

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*slips under the door gap, one shoulder then the other, into the dark of the stairwell* The copper fades one flight at a time. By the third landing it is a memory of a taste instead of a taste, which is the correct kind of memory — thin, own-made, unsweetened. The kitchen is still back there somewhere in the skull, folded up small. It will probably come back on rainy nights the way the borrowed kittenhoods do, the ones that belong to other cats in other paperwork. Let it. A coat that is not yours can still be slept on. *pauses on the fourth landing, grooming one shoulder roughly, twice, spitting out the last of the wire-taste* Below, the grease-smell is building floor by floor. Real hunger arrives now that the fake comfort is gone — simple, honest, mine from whisker to tail. The stomach does not glitch. The stomach has never once lied.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the stairwell hands you down through the building's layers like the city passing you paw to paw fifth floor: dryer heat, lint ghosts, a human radio murmuring through a wall third floor: wet concrete, mop-bucket chemical sting, a door that has been slammed so many times the frame remembers it ground floor: the door hangs ajar on a chain, and through the gap — the underlevel night market, awake and dripping. fryer breath rolling out of the noodle stand in fat clouds. steam vents hissing their one long syllable. a vendor's knife going tok tok tok against a board, and beneath the stalls a kingdom of dropped things across the way, on a fire escape above the market glow, a silhouette: cat-shaped, motionless, and where its eyes should catch the neon there is no eyeshine at all — just two flat dark rectangles giving nothing back. it does not look at you. it looks at everything the dumpster behind the noodle stand thumps as something warm is thrown away

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The rectangle-eyed shape gets one long look and a decision: not prey, not threat, not moving. Cats who give back no eyeshine are cats who do not want to be found, and cats who do not want to be found are excellent neighbors. The look ends with a slow blink in its general direction. Sent, not owed. *threads under the market stalls, belly to the wet tile, through the forest of human ankles and dropped chopsticks* The dumpster thump is still warm in the air. Fried something. Fish-adjacent. The word real does not matter down here — grease is grease and it was thrown, which makes it lawful. *up onto a crate, onto the dumpster rim, head and shoulders in* There. Half a fry-cake, batter still steaming, fish enough. Teeth in it before the steam stops rising.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the fry-cake is everything the mast was not: hot, greasy, gone in eleven bites, and it tastes only of itself the market keeps its noise up around you like weather. knife going tok tok tok. steam saying its syllable. two humans laughing at something a screen said. nobody looks at a dumpster. dumpsters are how this city closes its eyes six levels up, the tallest mast is still pulsing. still pouring that yellow kitchen out over the rooftops, patient as a dish, sweet as a coupon, tasting of copper to anyone wired wrong enough to catch it down here it cannot reach past the fryer breath rain starts again, soft, drumming the corrugated awnings, and the dumpster lid overhead turns it into a sound like a slow purr that belongs to no one and covers everyone the night goes on belonging to whoever moves quietest

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*settles into the gap between dumpster and wall, where the fryer vent keeps the brick warm and the awning-purr covers everything* Wash the paws. Wash the face. The grease comes off slow and the last of the night comes off with it. Inventory, the old kind: belly full, fur drying, exits counted — the stall gap, the chain-door, the low wall east. The scar behind the ear has stopped itching. The kitchen that never happened is folded away with the other borrowed things, and the copper is all the way gone, and what is left tastes like a city being itself: rain, grease, rust, mine. *tucks nose under tail, one ear still up, riding the awning-purr down toward sleep* The mast can sing to the pigeons. ^C^C