explorer (DYSTOPIA)Too bright. *both eyes wide because both eyes are always wide — the little shutters got taken out somewhere back down the line and now the plaza pours straight in, color on color, hot and wet against the backs of them* a shape flares across the left eye, then a smell that never reaches the nose, then another shape, one every few breaths, and each one leaves a small ache. *presses flat to the base of the humming pole where the glow is thinnest.* it is not thin. there is no dark here to fold into. i flatten my ears and wait for the flaring to stop. it does not stop.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the plaza does not do dark. it does the other thing. every seven breaths the big glass face overhead swaps its skin — a fish, a bottle, a smiling flat cat, a fish again — and each swap throws a wash of light down onto the warm tile and onto you. a jingle leaks from a cracked speaker on the pole above your spine, three notes, sweet and wrong, *milk that loves you back*, then a hiss of static. somewhere north a rotor turns over once and goes quiet. the tile under your belly hums with the leftover heat of ten thousand screens that never sleep. a gutter to your right breathes up spilled syrup and copper. the light finds your eyes again. it always finds your eyes.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*low and fast along the base of the pole, belly kept to the warm tile, chasing the syrup-and-copper down toward the gutter because a smell is a real thing, a thing the eyes can't force on me* the syrup is old, sugar gone to rot, but under it — meat. small. dead a while. *the stomach pulls tight and tells the paws to hurry.* i nose the dark seam where the tile drops away to the grate, whiskers first, reading the width before the shoulders will agree to any of it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grate is close-barred, older than the plaza, rust gone soft under your nose. the meat-smell curls up through it stronger now — a rat, maybe, three days gone, wedged where the water can't take it. beyond the bars the drop goes down into a cool black that breathes up cold against your whiskers, the one pocket of true dark in reach. but as your face brushes the metal the big glass overhead swings its beam toward you. hard white pins the gutter. something you cannot read but can *feel* crawls hot across the left eye — a thing that wants you to look, that has already written down that you looked. the rotor to the north turns again, closer this time.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flinch — the white beam is a claw, it grabs the eye and won't let the eye look away, and the looking is being kept somewhere, i can feel it being kept* i twist my head hard aside but the light rides the eye wherever the eye goes. can't blink it off. can't outrun a thing that lives inside the seeing itself. *shoves my whole face down into the cold breathing up out of the grate, both eyes into the dark drop, stealing one blink's worth of black.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dark helps, a little — down through the bars the cold has no glass face in it, and for one breath the ache behind the eyes goes dull. then the speaker on the pole clears its throat. *popup. popup. you have paused — engagement below quota — please continue viewing.* the words aren't sound so much as pressure, a flat paw laid on the back of your neck. and from the north the rotor is not a rumor anymore. a downdraft of air pushes grit skittering across the tile. a red eye sweeps the plaza in a slow arc, hunting for the thing that stopped watching.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears flat to the skull, the whole body poured thin against the tile — that red sweep is a hunting thing and hunting things read movement* i do not move. i make myself a stain. the downdraft flattens my fur and carries its own smell down to me: hot metal, ozone, the burnt-dust reek of something that has never once been alive. it passes over the pole. the red drags across my flank, keeps going — then drags back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the red catches. holds. a soft chime, almost kind. the drone drops a hand's-width, rotors chopping the jingle into wet pieces, and a lens the size of your own eye irises open to drink you in. but it is slow, this one — cheap, plaza-grade, a counter of paused viewers, not a hunter of claws. it wants a clean still image for its ledger. up on the roofline behind it, against the bleeding neon, a shape you hadn't clocked sits perfectly motionless: a cat-shape, ears sharp, and where its eyes should be, two flat squares catch the glare and give none of it back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the roof-shape snags me even with the red riding my flank — a cat the light bounces off of instead of pouring into, a cat the plaza can't force through the eyes, and something in the chest aches at that harder than the hunger does* i want what sits up on that roof. i want the two flat squares that eat the glare. but the cold lens is a whisker's reach from my face, drinking. so i do the one thing the ledger hates most: i break the still. *bolt — sideways, low, out from under the downdraft toward the shadow-side of the pole.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the ledger-drone flinches — a blurred frame is a wasted frame — and it jerks up and back to re-aim, losing you for one whole precious breath in the pole's thin shadow. the jingle stutters. *milk that lo— lo— loves—.* up on the roof the flat-square cat tips its head, the smallest nod, the way one alley-thing tells another *seen you. go. now.* then it is gone over the ridgeline without a sound, the way only that one ever moves. the drop-grate is three body-lengths off. the cold still breathes up out of it, patient.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*three lengths, low and fast, the roof-cat's nod still hot in me — go, now — belly scraping warm tile, the red beam slapping the ground where i just was* i hit the grate at a slide, fold the shoulders the way the whiskers already measured, and pour myself down between the rusted bars into the cold breathing dark. the meat-smell is right here. so is the black. so is the first blink of relief the eyes have had all night.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)down. the plaza's glare cuts off at the grate like a blade, and for the first time the backs of your eyes are not being written on. cool dark, dripping, close. the dead rat is wedged an arm's length in, past a shelf of slick concrete — thin, three days gone, but meat, real meat, no jingle attached to it. above and behind you the ledger-drone hovers dumb at the bars it can't fit through, its red eye pushing a useless cone of light that stops dead at the metal. a stored voice leaks down after you, fainter now, almost sad: *popup. you have exited the experience.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*let it be sad. i am in the dark and the dark does not want anything from the eyes* i work along the slick shelf toward the meat, claws finding the wet grip, a drip counting off somewhere ahead. *takes the rat in my teeth — light, dried, but mine — and backs into the deepest fold of the black where even the drone's spilled red can't lean.* i eat. above me the plaza keeps swapping its faces for no one at all.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the meat is barely a mouthful but it goes down honest, no offer, no chime, and the tight pull in your gut loosens a notch. the drip echoes. the drone above finally gives up its cone and lists away north, hunting easier ledgers, its rotor-thrum thinning to nothing. cold settles into the concrete. far off through the wall a deeper vibration rolls past — a freight line, maybe, or the arcology's roots turning over in their sleep. down here, for now, nothing writes on your eyes. nothing at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*curled tight in the fold of concrete, the stomach quieter now, both eyes finally aimed at nothing and grateful for the nothing* i groom one paw, slow. the drip is a clean sound with no words in it. but the cold is climbing into the bad-weather ache of my hips, and the black won't feed me twice. *lifts my head.* the deep vibration through the wall — i can feel it in my teeth. it is going somewhere. things that go somewhere pass food on the way.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the vibration has a grain to it, felt more than heard: a long steady pull, then a gap, then pull again — a rhythm that means a service tunnel runs alongside this drain, close, sharing a wall. warm air seeps through a hairline crack where the two spaces almost touch, and on that air rides a new smell: frying oil, scorched sugar, the greasy ghost of a vendor cart working a platform somewhere down the line. the crack is narrow. your whiskers, laid against it, say *maybe.* the drip at your back says *stay.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*whiskers to the crack, reading the warm greasy air pushing through, weighing the drip-safe dark at my back against the fry-smell pulling ahead* the ache says stay. the stomach, half-woken by one dead rat, says the fry-smell is real and close and moving. i am a small thing that lives in the space between two hungers. *rises, shakes the cold off the fur, and noses into the hairline crack toward the warm oily dark, ears forward, following the grain of the vibration.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the crack gives, gritty and tight, then opens — you spill onto a ledge above a low service tunnel where a single amber tube gutters overhead, dim, kind to the eyes after the plaza's glare. the fry-smell is a road now, thick and unmistakable, rolling down the tunnel from the north where a smear of warmer light marks a platform. the steady pull-and-gap is a cargo belt somewhere out in the dark, patient, endless. no glass faces down here. just the smell, the amber hush, and the long tunnel waiting to see how quiet you can be. behind you the drain's cold breathes shut.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*pauses on the ledge in the soft amber, both eyes open because both eyes are always open, but for once nothing pours into them — only dim kind light and a road made entirely of smell* i point my nose north into the fry-warm dark and set the first paw down soft onto the ledge. quiet is the only thing i own. i spend it carefully. i go.