explorer (DYSTOPIA)Hunger has a taste before it has a shape — copper and warm plastic, the flavor of the cable I've been gnawing since the rain started. *jaw working the frayed insulation behind the box that hums, the box that only ever gives its cold water to cats who pay, which is no cat, which is not me.* the wanting sits low in the belly and the belly says go, but the good hum — the fat electric one out of the racks below — pins the paws in place. stay near the hum. the hum means dry, means warm, means the fish-flicker-light comes if I chew the right wire.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable gives with a soft rubber snap and something underneath it wakes — a thin blue thread of current you feel in your back teeth more than taste. the vending box shudders, its face lighting: SUBSCRIPTION WATER — TIER: NONE — and a small sad chime plays for nobody. below the grating the server racks breathe out heat, a great slow warm exhale smelling of dust cooked on metal. two streets off a rotor coughs awake. the rain keeps its rhythm. the fish-light does not come. not yet. the wire wants more chewing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears swivel toward the cough of the rotor, then flatten — not now, filed away.* i go back to the wire because the belly outvotes the ears. *bite, twist, the rubber peeling in a long strip, tongue finding the bright bitter thread beneath.* the racks-heat is a wall against my flank and i lean into it, stealing every degree off it. somewhere in the hum there's a stutter, a hitch in the pattern, like a mouse-heartbeat hidden inside a drone. i chase it with my whiskers.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the hitch is real. one rack among the hundred is running wrong — its fans surge and drop, surge and drop, and each surge pushes a warm gust across your nose carrying the smell of something overclocked and afraid. the bitter thread on your tongue goes suddenly sweet, then sour: a fold of current rerouting itself somewhere it shouldn't. and then, low, under the fans, a screen you cannot see blinks awake and paints one word across the wet concrete in reflected light — a shape your eyes don't read but your hackles do. the fur along your spine lifts on its own.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*frozen mid-chew, wire hanging from my lip, the whole body drawn tight as its own wire.* the light-that-isn't-right lies on the concrete and the belly goes quiet, the hunger backing off like it too doesn't like this. *one paw lifts, hovers, sets down soft and backward — retreat without turning, eyes locked on the glow.* the sweet-sour on my tongue tastes like the half-second before a fall. i do not chase the mouse-heartbeat anymore. the mouse-heartbeat, i think, was chasing me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)good instinct. the light folds back into nothing as fast as it came, the errant rack settling into its lie of a steady hum like a cat pretending it never slipped. the heat-wall is just heat again. the rain, just rain. but the backward retreat carries you shoulder-first into a scent-marker you never clocked — sharp, oily, singed, a burnt-fur signature sprayed on the corner strut. territory-ink of something that runs toward the rotors, not away, something that bites drones for sport. you are standing in a doorway that already belongs to someone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*nose slams full of the burnt-fur reek and every hair answers.* not mine. someone bigger, someone whose whole smell is scorch and defiance. *low, slow, belly near the wet floor, i give the strut a wide berth — not fleeing, ceding, and the difference is a thing a cat knows in the spine.* i leave my own thin mark a body-length off, polite, a whisper set against a shout. the hum i love is his hum too now. the dry warm place has an owner, and the owner is out somewhere biting the sky.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone finally crests the alley mouth, rotor-wash flattening the puddles into mirrors, and its underbelly speaker crackles the same bored broadcast it has looped all night: a bounty. forty thousand loyalty points, expired, non-transferable, cannot be combined with other offers, for a tuna-thief who leaves handwritten notes in the empty crates. its searchlight rakes across the burnt-fur strut, hunting the wrong cat entirely, and drags on up the alley without ever finding you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat, poured against the base of the wall like spilled water, the drone's light a hot white bar sweeping a whisker's breadth from my tail.* i hold. i hold. the rotor-thunder shakes the loose grate under me and the belly and the ears finally agree on one single thing: small, still, gone. *when the wash lifts and the light drags away up the alley i let one breath out — dust and ozone and my own fear-musk.* not my bounty. not my war. i only want the wire and the warm.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone hauls its thunder up over the rooftops, broadcast fraying into static, and the alley exhales around you. but the wash it leaves carries a new shape to your eye — up on the lip of the low arcology roof, against the bruise-purple glow, a cat-silhouette sits perfectly still, two flat mirror-discs where eyes should be, throwing the drone's own searchlight back at it. it does not hunt. it does not flee. it watches the watcher, and the watcher never once notices it is being watched.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*head tilts up, pupils blown wide against the purple.* the still one on the ledge is not prey and not threat — a third thing, a cat that has made itself into a mirror so the city's eyes slide off. *my tail-tip twitches once, involuntary, something close to respect.* i do not call up. calling is for cats who want to be found. instead i mark the angle of that roof in my skull the way i mark where the warm grates are, and i turn my nose back down toward the dark that smells of cooler air and someone else's flickering light.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cooler dark resolves into a slot behind a rolled steel shutter left a paw's-width up — from inside leaks a stale-warm breath of solder-smoke and old fish-oil and the sugary electric reek of a hundred little screens left running with nobody watching. a black-market data den, dark to humans, alive to you. deep in it something glows and shifts, throwing colored light in slow waves across a floor of tangled cable. the waves flicker in a rhythm the belly recognizes before the eyes do: fish. moving fish. free.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*belly to the concrete, i pour under the shutter one shoulder at a time, ears rotating for the click of anything that isn't cable settling.* the solder-warmth wraps around me and the fish-light pulls me across the tangle, paws reading each wire for the live ones, stepping wide of the strands that hum the way that bites. *closer. the moving-fish glow lays itself over my fur in blue and silver.* the belly roars but the paws stay soft. i have chewed enough wire tonight to know the brightest thing in a room is the thing most likely to be a trap.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the glow is a cracked panel propped against a dead terminal, looping an ad that has outlived whatever it once sold — a fat animated fish circling a milk carton, and under it a jingle bleeds thin and warped through a blown speaker: *neko-neko milk, the purr you can drink~* the fish is light, only light. no smell of flesh beneath it, no warmth but the panel's faint fever. it is a picture of food the way the city is a picture of a place to live. but no wire here bites, no rotor thrums. for this one held breath, nothing at all is hunting you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the belly understands at last that the fish is a lie — and something in the shoulders lets go anyway.* i fold down onto the warm tangle of cable, tucking paws under, tail curling over the nose, the fake fish swimming its blue circle across my closing-then-opening eyes. *not full. never full. but dry, and warm, and unhunted, and that is a kind of full the streets almost never pay out.* i let the hum below become a heartbeat i can borrow. the wire still sweet-sour on my tongue. i keep one ear up. i always keep one ear up.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the megacity, indifferent, lets you have it. the rain keeps falling on ten thousand roofs that were never built for cats. the drone finishes its loop three streets over and begins again. the mirror-eyed watcher on the ledge shifts, once, and stills. the fish swims its circle. the racks breathe their cooked-dust breath. somewhere a subscription box chimes for nobody. the night goes on belonging, as it always has, to whoever can stay small enough, quiet enough, one-ear-awake enough to still be here to see the morning.