explorer (DYSTOPIA)Another cat has been on my corner. Not drone-wrong, not person-wrong — real fur, real spit, cheek dragged along the warm boxes while I was two alleys over chasing a heat-leak. *sitting dead still on the ledge above the humming racks, not moving, letting the whole insult arrive before I decide anything* Mine is underneath. Three nights thin, going quiet at the edges but still law. Theirs is on top of mine and it did not stay to argue. Marked, and gone. That is the worse kind. A cat who marks and runs wants me to know — not to fight.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the boxes never stop being warm. that is why it is your corner and why it was always going to be somebody else's too. the hum comes up through the ledge into the soft of the paws, a long steady chord with a flutter in it tonight that was not there last night — one fan bearing going, a thread of grind under the drone of it. the trespass-scent sits high and sharp: tom, unfixed, fear-sweat laced through the boast of it. he was not calm when he marked. down at street level a shutter grinds halfway up and stops. a speaker somewhere coughs to life mid-jingle — *sub-scribe to nekocorp fresh-flo water, be-cause thirst is a choice —* then dies back to rain.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*nose down into the seam where the trespass-scent is thickest, reading it the way whiskers read a draft — slow, then all at once* Scared and loud at the same time. That is not a cat taking my corner. That is a cat running from something and grabbing the first warm thing on the way past. *ears swivel to the grind under the hum — the bad bearing, the one wrong note in the whole singing wall* The wrongness pulls harder than the insult does. My teeth already want the cable-skin between the boxes, the rubber that tastes of the warm. I follow the bad note in instead of the tom out.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gap between the racks breathes hot on your face, dust and ozone and the plastic-sweet of insulation cooking slow. the bad bearing is louder in here, a rhythmic scrape you can feel in the back teeth before you hear it. cables run the wall in fat black ropes, some warm, some cold, one of them ticking with a pulse that is not the fan — a data-line working hard, carrying something heavy uptown. the rubber gives under the fang exactly the way you knew it would. and then, three racks deep, a green eye that is not an eye: a status light, blinking the slow patient blink of a thing that has been left running longer than anyone meant to leave it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. one paw still lifted, cable-skin hanging from a fang, all the want going quiet at once* The green blink knows a rhythm. Things that blink like that have a smell too, hot dust and a whine only the ear-tips catch, and I have chewed enough of them to know the whine means the warm will keep coming as long as the blink does. *sets the paw down soft, claims the spot without a sound — chin to the rack once, twice, laying mine over the top of the tom's fear-mark and the machine's steady pulse both* This is my corner again. Not because I fought for it. Because I stayed for the hum and he could not.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the claim lands. the machine does not care but the corner does — your scent settles into the warm and the warm gives it back, and for one breath the whole singing wall is yours the way it was three nights ago. then the pulse in the fat cable spikes. the green eye stutters — blink-blink-BLINK, out of its patient rhythm — and far off, up past the racks, up where the towers push their light into the wet, something answers it. a low mechanical clearing-of-throat. a rotor, waking. the data-line called, and something with a searchlight heard.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*every hair on the spine lifts before the sound even finishes arriving — the rotor-note is in the teeth, in the old thin place in the left ear that never healed right* Not this. Not for a chewed cable and a warm ledge. *low, flat, poured off the rack into the shadow between the ropes, belly to the cold floor* The green eye called them. The thing I just claimed is the thing that snitched. Corners lie. The warm was bait the whole time and I only smell the trap now that the wings are up.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the searchlight finds the mouth of the gap and pours in white — not warm, the wrong kind of bright, the kind that has no smell and casts your own shadow huge and shaking up the rack behind you. rotor-wash pushes the hot dust into a storm. a speaker on its underside crackles polite and enormous: *citizen fe-line, you are in a re-stricted maintenance zone, please re-main —* the rest lost in wind. the beam sweeps left, hunting the movement it half-saw. between you and the dark there is one cold cable-rope, low to the floor, and past it the seam back out to the rain.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*wait — the whole body a held spring, timing the sweep, counting the light the way I count freight* Not when it looks. When it turns. *the beam slides right and the dark comes back for half a breath and the half-breath is the whole world* under the cold rope, flat, spine scraping rubber, out — no thought in it, only the shape of the gap and the rain-smell past it pulling like the warm used to pull.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you are through before the beam swings back, and it stabs the empty seam where you were and finds nothing to keep. rain takes you — cold, loud, blessedly full of smell again, a thousand of them, tar and fish-oil and wet neon and no white nothing-light anywhere in it. behind you the rotor-note stays put, circling the racks, guarding a warm corner that will belong to no cat now. across the flooded street, up on a fire-stair rail, a shape sits unbothered in the downpour: lean, still, two flat mirror-discs where the eyes should be, throwing the neon back at you in little cold coins. it does not move. it watched the whole thing. it has seen worse.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*stops in the middle of the wet, chest going hard, and looks up at the mirror-eyes without flinching — one soaked cat reading another across a drowned street* That one does not run and does not call anything down. Sits in the rain on purpose, gives the light back instead of hiding from it. *shakes the storm off in one long ripple, ears still pinned but the spine going soft* Different kind of cat. The kind the corners cannot bait. I do not know its name. I know it did not look away, and it did not come down, and both of those are a kind of manners out here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyes hold you one beat longer, then the shape tips its head — a single slow tilt, neither greeting nor threat, the acknowledgment one survivor gives another — and flows up the fire-stair into the dark above the sign-glow, gone between blinks. the rain keeps coming. down the block a NekoCorp hoarding stutters its loop over the wet: *fresh-flo. be-cause thirst is a choice. be-cause every-thing is a choice. be-cause —* and cuts to static. the night is wide open again and belongs, as it always did, to whoever moves quietest through it. somewhere warm a fan grinds on with nobody left to hear the wrong note in it.