explorer (DYSTOPIA)A frequency, first. before any of it — a thin violet whine threading up through the concrete, the kind that other cats don't hear and i taste like cold metal on the back of the tongue. *lying flat on the ramp of a buried parking level, ears not moving, whole skull tuned to the pitch of it.* the patch behind my ear itches when the signal climbs. it is climbing now. somewhere a machine is thinking too loudly and my borrowed nerves are eating the leftovers.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the whine forks. two notes now, then four, the concrete drinking each one and giving back damp echo. down the oil-black slope a puddle holds a reflection that flickers — a NekoCorp loyalty terminal three levels up, bleeding its glow down the stairwell in a slow pink pulse. *the pulse matches your heartbeat for three beats and then, wrong, gets ahead of it.* far off, a tire hums on wet deck. the air tastes of brake dust and a sweetness that shouldn't be down here: warm tuna-broth, canned, faint, coming up from a vent grille to your left that breathes lukewarm on your whiskers.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The broth-smell wins over the itch, always does. *belly-crawl toward the grille, the violet note still riding my spine but the stomach louder now.* i put my nose to the slats. warm. dusty. underneath the tuna there's a second thing — copper, chip-solder, a smell like the inside of my own head on the bad days. i paw one slat. it gives. *ears swivel back once, checking the ramp behind me, then forward again.* whatever cooks down here cooks for someone. i want to know if they left.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the slat folds inward with a tin groan and the vent exhales full into your face: broth, solder, and a third breath of something cold-electric. beyond the grille a maintenance crawlspace runs black and low, strung with dead fiber. a single indicator LED breathes green at the far end, and against it — *a silhouette*, seated, unmoving, ears squared, two flat mirrored discs where eyes should be, catching the green and throwing it back doubled. not a threat-posture. not any posture. it does not look at you. it looks at everything at once, the way glass does. a rumor-toned drone broadcast bleeds down the shaft from the street: "...unlicensed moggers in sector, report reflective eyewear, report reflective—" then swallowed by static.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i hold. every hair holds.* the mirror-eyes read as glass, not hunger, so the body unlocks one notch — but slow, low, tail flat to the concrete. i don't cross into the black. i leave the tuna where it is; the tuna was bait or it was somebody's, and either way this one already owns the dark it sits in. *i dip my chin, the small give one cat shows another that means i am not here for your corner.* the drone-word rides the static again — reflective, reflective — and my ear pins. that word is about the seated one. i back off a body-length, keeping the mirrors in the edge of my eye.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the silhouette accepts your chin-dip by not moving, which is its own kind of answer. as you ease back the mirrored discs tilt — one degree, tracking the drone-sound, not you — and for half a second the doubled green in them shows you your own crouched shape, very small, twice. then the LED at the shaft's end dies. black. the whine in your teeth spikes hard, violet gone white, and up the ramp behind you the pink loyalty-pulse stutters, drops, comes back counting different. rotor-noise now, real and near, a wet chop folding off the low ceiling. searchlight-spill slides across the top of the ramp, feeling its way down.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)White signal, white panic — the patch behind my ear is screaming a color and my legs already answered. *bolt sideways off the ramp-line, out of the light's reach, into the seam where a support pillar meets the deck.* i fold behind cold concrete, flanks going fast, mouth open to breathe without sound. the rotor is hunting the ceiling not the floor yet. i press one shoulder to the pillar and let the vibration tell me: two levels of hum, one getting louder. *i do not look at the light. cats who look at the light get seen.* i map the dark instead — grille behind, black crawlspace beside, open deck ahead sloping up toward air.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the searchlight pours down the ramp and pools where you were lying, finds warm nothing, drags left. the drone's rotor-pitch drops into a patient hover — it has all night, its casing says NEKOCORP SAFETY IS A PREMIUM FEATURE in letters that glow even through the grime. it isn't hunting you. it's parked over the crawlspace mouth, sniffing for reflective glass. from inside that black seam: no sound at all, the specific total silence of something that has chosen to not be findable. the puddle by the pillar shivers with the rotor-wash and your twice-small reflection breaks apart. the sloped deck ahead breathes street-cold down at you — exhaust, rain, freedom — maybe nine paces of open light between here and it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)Nine paces of open is nine paces too many with a hover overhead. *i wait. that is the whole craft of it — waiting past the itch, past the white color still bleeding at the back of my eyes.* the drone wants the glass-eyed one, not me; i let it want. i time the searchlight's drag — left, hold, left, hold. on the next drag i go low and fast along the pillar-shadow, not toward the open slope but along the dark wall, hugging the seam, letting the crawlspace's own blackness cover half my run. *four paws silent on wet deck, belly a finger off the ground.* i am not the reflective thing. i am the thing that was never here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you pour along the wall inside the drone's blind arc and it never turns — it is fixed on the silent seam, certain its prize is in there, and maybe it is, maybe the glass-eyes are watching the rotor watch them with something like patience. the wall-shadow carries you past a dead vending machine, past a scatter of promotional confetti gone to grey mush, to where the deck lifts. cold real air hits your face full: rain, a thousand roofs of it, the electric ozone of the whole city breathing. behind and below, the searchlight still combs an empty black mouth. ahead, up a short concrete tongue, the street — neon smeared in wet, a distant rooftop where a small shape sits against a billboard's glow, ears squared, unmistakable even from here, watching the sky.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The air says go and my body was always going to. *up the concrete tongue in three, into the rain, fur flattening cold and instant.* the itch behind my ear finally drops — out from under the buried machine-thought, the violet quiets to almost-nothing, just a hum i'll carry till morning like i carry all the leftover signals. i shake once, hard. up on the far roof the squared-ear shape hasn't moved; same mirror-stillness as the one in the dark, or a different one, the city is full of watchers tonight and i am done being near any of them. *i pick the low wet gutter-line, tail up, and start walking my own smell back into the world.* the tuna stays unclaimed behind me. some meals aren't worth the eyes that come with them.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)rain takes you in like it takes everything, no ceremony. the buried whine is a closed door now; the street's own noise floods back — a jingle two blocks off promising CLAWCOIN REWARDS FOR LOYAL PAWS, a gutter running fat with runoff, the distant complaint of a monorail. the far-roof silhouette tips its squared ears once toward you across all that wet space, an acknowledgment or an accident, then returns to the sky. under your paws the gutter-line is warm-ish, sheltered, yours by right of walking it. somewhere below the deck you just left, a searchlight finally gives up and clicks dark. the city redraws the alley behind you almost at once, wrong in some small way no cat will ever name, and offers the next corner up ahead, smelling faintly of fish and fresh trouble.