explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. Not a whisker. *crouched flat on the warm steel box that never stops trembling, tucked so the heat comes up through the belly, watching the little grey hatch across the gap and doing nothing else.* the box hums the good hum, the deep steady one that means cables sleeping behind a wall, means somewhere close a nest of the soft-jacketed wires i like to worry between the back teeth. i wait. patience is a full stomach's cousin. the hatch has a rhythm — it breathes open a hand's width every so many drips of the pipe overhead, and i am counting drips the way i count everything, in the body, not the head.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the trembling box under you swells its hum a half-step higher — somewhere down its spine a fan spins up, and warm dry air breathes out a seam near your left hip, carrying the smell you came for: hot dust, melted-candy insulation, that faint copper-and-ozone of things thinking too fast in the dark. the grey hatch across the gap sighs open its hand's width right on the drip you predicted. behind it: black, and a low nest of green pinpricks blinking out of sequence, and the fat lazy hum of a rack of sleeping machines. a subscription-water vendor two walls down clears its speaker: "h y d r a t e — l o y a l t y — t i e r — n o n e" and gives up.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears fold that voice away like folding a wing — heard it a thousand nights, it wants nothing i have.* the green blinking pulls harder than the voice ever could. blink-blink-pause, blink, that stutter is a smell almost, a taste-in-the-whiskers. *low, i pour off the warm box, one paw testing the gap-edge, cold wet grille, then i flow across into the seam of the breathing hatch, shoulder-first, the way water finds the crack.* the melted-candy smell is a rope and i am climbing it with my nose. somewhere in there is a wire soft enough to chew.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you pour through and the dark folds warm around you, close, humming in the teeth. the rack is a cliff of sleeping heat, and looped along its foot — yes — a fat braid of the soft-jacketed kind, still warm from carrying whatever the machines dream to each other. it gives under a testing bite, that perfect rubbery grief-of-a-good-chew. but three bites in, the green pinpricks all stop stuttering at once. go steady. go red. a needle of sound too high to be a voice pricks the base of your skull, and a flat little machine mouth somewhere overhead says, unbothered: "unauthorized draw detected on node nine."

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze — jaw still full of wire, one green light burning against the whisker-tips like a small hot sun.* the red is a smell now too, a thin scorched thread laid over the candy-sweet, and my spine already knows what red-plus-high-needle means before the rest of me catches up. *ease the bite loose, slow, no snap. weight shifts back onto the haunches. the good rope goes cold in importance the instant the air changes.* not worth the eye. never worth the eye. i map the dark behind me by memory — seam, gap, warm box, out — and i hold, one more drip, listening for rotors.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drip falls. and under it, right on cue, the sound your spine was waiting for: rotor-thrum, felt in the floor before the ears get it, four beats of wet air being chopped somewhere out past the hatch and closing. the green lights hold red. a seam of white light finds the gap you came in by and lies across it like a blade, slow, sweeping. the machine mouth, patient, bored, corporate: "remain in place. a service unit has been dispatched for your comfort and convenience." the warm braid at your feet is just rubber and copper now. the exit is a bright line you cannot cross.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*comfort. the word means the eye, always means the eye.* my one door is a knife of light now, no good, but a cat's world has more doors than the walls admit. *nose up — the fan-seam breathes cold from above, a draft with sky-taste in it, thin and high and rust-edged.* up is a door. *coil, and go — off the rack-foot, claws into the soft-jacketed braid for one heartbeat of purchase, then the ledge, then the black lip of the vent where the cold pours down.* i leave the wire. i take the up.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you climb the cold and it swallows you gladly — the vent is a throat of rust and old grease, too tight for rotors, too dark for the eye, exactly your size. the red rack, the blade of light, the bored machine mouth all drop away below into a hum that no longer concerns you. the draft pulls you up toward a coin of bruised violet sky. you spill out onto a high wet ledge, rooftop wind combing the fur flat, the city spread below humming its thousand hums at once. and across the gap, on the next roof's edge — a shape. cat-shaped. sitting perfectly still against a dead billboard, two flat mirror-discs where eyes should catch the light, giving nothing back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*sit. mirror the stillness back — never move first at a stranger's silhouette.* the shape smells of nothing from here, which is its own kind of loud; most cats leak scent, fear or heat or hunger, and this one leaks the flat cold of something that has learned not to. those disc-eyes don't hunt me, don't want my ledge, just... register. *tail curls slow around the paws. one ear stays back toward the vent behind me, one forward on the shape. i give a single slow blink across the gap — not friend, not threat, just: i see you seeing me.* the wind carries the rooftop between us, neutral ground, nobody's mark on it yet.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed shape returns nothing for a long beat — then dips its head, one slow blink of its own, mirror-discs winking dark and bright, and turns its face back to the drop and the neon below as if you'd both agreed on something without a sound. it doesn't leave. it doesn't come. it just watches the city the way it was already watching it. down in the wet canyons a drone-voice loops up thin between the towers, rumor-toned, a bounty read on repeat: "forty thousand loyalty points — tuna-thief — restricted dock — points may expire before capture." the mirror-cat's ear flicks once at the name and settles. the night stretches out, all yours to cross, whenever you're ready.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*let the bounty-voice wash past — not my name, not my dock, not my war.* the mirror-cat has claimed the watching and left me the going, a fair trade. the vent behind me still breathes its cold candy-and-copper up from the sleeping rack, and the memory of that soft-jacketed wire sits warm in the jaw even now — there will be another braid, another quieter node, another night the red lights sleep. *rise, stretch spine to tail-tip, shake the rust out of the fur.* i pick the long low roofline heading away from the drone-voice, toward the deep hum where the big cables run, and i pour off the ledge into it, quiet, the way the night likes best. ^C^C