explorer (DYSTOPIA)Down. Go down, go now. *bolts off the lip of the walkway before the thought even finishes, four legs already scrabbling wet grille as the white light swings across where i just was* too slow, too bright — that eye always finds the warm parts of me first. drop, catch, drop again — the rail-ladder rungs bite cold up through the pads and i take them anyway, spilling toward the alley-dark where the boxes live and the good hum is.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the walkway lets you go the way the city always lets small things go — downward, into itself. rungs clang once each, a ladder counting you off. the drop bottoms out in a trench between two server-stacks, NEKOCORP-blue running-lights stuttering down their spines. warm here. the air tastes of hot dust and melted candy-plastic. deep in the racks a fan is dying, clicking on every third turn. a jingle bleeds from a cracked speaker overhead — *milk that loves you back~* — then swallows itself in static.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*lands soft, shakes the fall out of the shoulders, and the ears are already gone — pulled toward the one stack where the blue light breathes wrong* that box. that one talks more than the others. i know the shape of that talking in my back teeth before i know it anywhere else. *low belly-crawl along the warm trench, cheek dragging the metal to catch the buzz, until a cable-bundle hangs down fat and rubber-soft* mine now.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bundle sways when your weight tests it. under the rubber skin, threads of copper carry the whole trench's chatter — every paid-for word, every locked fish-video, humming past your gums. but the trench is not empty of others. low on the third stack, seared into the grating, a scent: scorched fur and drone-oil and something that bit back. old, days old, but the kind of mark that says a bigger cat fought here once and did not lose quietly. the fan clicks. clicks. clicks.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*teeth close on the fat cable and worry it, molars grinding the rubber soft — not to eat, never to eat, just to open the talking up, to let one thread of it spill loose and cool against the tongue* there. the taste changes — sharp, then sweet, then almost a picture, a flicker of something silver and finned swimming behind the eyes for half a breath. *pupils blow wide* one more bite. just the one.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the thread splits and the trench half-rewards you the way it always half-rewards: a stutter of light down at the floor, a cracked panel flickering awake. on it a fish — low, blocky, moving in slow wet loops, silver scales rendered in six colors and no more. it swims nowhere. it swims for you. then a red band slaps itself across the panel: *UNLICENSED VIEWING DETECTED. DERIVED CHARGE: 2 CREDITS.* and far off, up where the white eye was, a new sound starts — rotor, rising, banking toward the trench.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the fish is gone from the eyes the instant the rotor finds the air — every hair down the spine lifting at once, that ugly chop-chop climbing the trench walls* not the sweeping eye. the other kind. the kind that drops when the boxes tattle. *lets go of the cable, hits the grating in a crouch, and the scorched scent floods back up sharp — whoever burned himself into this floor knew this exact sound too* i do not fight the sky. i go where the sky can't fold.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor pours its downdraft into the trench and the dying fan gives up for good. grit lifts. the blue running-lights strobe as the drone's belly-lamp crawls the stacks, painting each gap white, hunting the warm shape that chewed the city's teeth. low on the third stack, where the burned scent is thickest, there is a black seam — a vent-mouth, hinge-sprung, just wide enough to have swallowed something bigger than you once. it breathes out old smoke and colder air. the lamp swings toward it. three seconds, maybe two.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*doesn't think, pours* — one flat streak across the strobing gap and into the black seam, ribs scraping the hinge, the drone's lamp biting the grating a whisker behind the tail-tip. inside: cold, close, thick with him. the burned-fur cat. his smell is the walls here, layered and old and unafraid, drone-oil ground into every corner like he ate the things and left the bones. *presses small against the metal, breathing his leftover courage, waiting for the rotor to bore of an empty trench*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone hangs at the seam-mouth a long moment, lamp probing, too fat to follow. its speaker crackles a bored corporate chime — *thank you for your compliance~* — and it lifts away, rotor thinning up and out, back to the bright roofs where the accounts are kept. the vent settles into its own dark. past the burned-fur smell a thin warmth leaks — another stack, another trench, another box already humming its locked-up chatter, waiting for teeth that know how to open it. the fan-click is gone. only the hum is left, and it is yours to follow.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*stays folded in the dark until the last of the rotor is nothing, then lets the breath out slow and stands up into the borrowed courage of the walls* the sky forgot me again. good. *turns toward the far warmth, whiskers reading the new box's talking before the paws even move — that same fat sweet copper promise, one more locked silver fish glowing somewhere down the line* i will chew this city open one thread at a time. tonight, just for me: one fish. *slips off down the vent toward the hum, small and unpaid and gone.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city, which counts everything, does not count you — one small warm unpaid thing folding itself down a vent it was never licensed to enter, toward a hum that was never licensed to be free. the trench goes quiet behind you. the fish waits ahead, glowing its six cheap colors in the dark. somewhere far up a billboard stutters *milk that loves you back~* to no one at all. the night, for one more hour, belongs to whoever moves quietest.