explorer (DYSTOPIA)*doesn't move.* the metal box behind me runs hot straight up through my spine and I let it, chin tucked, ears folded flat, counting the rotor passes the way I count everything worth trusting — not by number, by the gap between them. wide gap now. long enough. the hum in the box climbs a half-step, that particular whine that means the little blinking thing is awake and talking to itself. my whiskers know that whine. my whiskers like that whine.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the box breathes warm against your flank, a low copper drone that settles in the bones of the jaw. deep in it something ticks — pkt. pkt. pkt-pkt — packets you can feel more than hear, each one a tiny itch behind the ear. the whine steadies. a fan somewhere exhales dust that tastes of scorched sugar and old solder. two streets off, a searchlight drags across wet brick and keeps going, bored. overhead a cracked speaker coughs half a jingle — *neko— milk— your— best— frien—* — then eats itself in static. the blinking thing in the housing pulses green green amber. green green amber. wanting.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)amber is the one that pulls me. *low crawl now, belly to the warm grille, one paw testing the loose panel that never did latch right since the last time I worried it open.* the cable comes out here — the fat soft one, the one that tastes faintly of the fish flicker if you chew it just below the collar where the shielding frays. I know I shouldn't. I lower my head and do it anyway, teeth finding the old worn groove, and the whine in the box bends around my bite like it can feel me listening in.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bite lands and the signal *shivers* — down the wire, up your fangs, into the back of the eyes, and for one held breath the alley smears sideways into pale water-light: a low fish, silvered, turning slow behind glass that isn't there. it loops. it always loops. it is the best thing in the world for exactly as long as it lasts. but the amber blink is quickening now — amber amber amber — and under the fish-light a thin new smell threads in: ozone, and something that pings. far off, a rotor that had been drifting changes its mind. changes its heading. toward.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I hold the fish one heartbeat longer than is smart, because it is silver and it is mine and I have paid for it in scorched-cable aftertaste.* then the ping crawls up the back of my skull, that wrong-shaped sound that has no smell and means a thing is looking for a thing, and the fish pops like a bubble. jaw off the cable. up on all fours. ears rotating before the rest of me has agreed to be scared.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gap you were counting on is gone — the rotor is *over the mouth of the alley now*, close enough that the wind of it flattens the puddle-skin into ripples that run backward. a cone of white drops and swings, catching rain in hard silver rods, and where it passes the wet ground goes to bleached bone. a flat voice leaks out of it, too calm, aimed at nothing and everything: *unregistered draw detected. hold. hold. hold.* the warm box behind you keeps humming, indifferent, still leaking its little green heartbeat into a night that has just tilted toward teeth.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*no.* the light finds the edge of the panel and I am already not there — pour off the housing, hit the wet, take the low pipe I marked three nights ago with the corner of my jaw. drainage runs cold under my pads, the good kind of cold, the kind that swallows the shape of me. the ping fades a half-step behind the elbow of the pipe. I do not stop to be proud of it. proud gets you counted.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pipe spits you out on a wet ledge above the underpass, rotor-noise folding away into the general grinding hum of the city's throat. rain finds you again, patient. and across the gap, on a black rooftop lined with dead antennas, a shape sits that a cat's eye snags on and holds: another one of your kind, motionless, and where its eyes should be there are two flat mirrors throwing back the neon in perfect cold squares. it is not hunting. it is not hiding. it is just watching the drone go, and something about the set of it says it has been watching a very long time and has opinions it will not share.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I go still to match it, because that is the rule — you do not cross a stillness you don't understand.* the mirror-eyed one doesn't twitch. no threat-smell comes off the gap, no turf-mark, nothing to read, which is its own kind of loud. I keep it at the corner of my eye and it keeps me at the corner of its glass and we let the drone-quiet sit between us. then it turns its head a slow degree, unbothered, like it already knew how tonight ends, and I decide the warm box was better company.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)when you glance back the rooftop is bare — no leap, no sound, just gone, the mirrors taken with it. the ledge holds only rain and a faint dry-battery scent where the shape had been, already thinning. below, a vending machine wakes as you pass its sensor and chirps a bright dead little tune, offering a can of something behind reinforced glass to nobody. the underpass exhales its old warm draft back up at you, carrying solder and dust and the far-off, familiar packet-tick of a box that never stopped humming. home is that direction. home is always the warm hum.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I take the long way back — the way that crosses no open plaza, the way that keeps a wall against my ribs the whole run.* the packet-tick pulls me in the dark like a scent I can hear. by the time the grille-warmth breathes on my face again the amber has gone quiet green, the drone a memory two districts wide. I fold back into the hot seam of the box, tuck my nose under, and set one paw against the cable — not biting. just touching. just knowing it's there.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the box takes you back without comment, the way warm things do. hum steadies to the flat contented drone of a machine that will outlive everyone who ever leaned on it. rain thins to mist. somewhere a speaker tries the jingle again — *your best frien—* — gives up. the green heartbeat pulses slow now, unhurried, no ozone in it, no ping, just the long low pulse of a city grinding toward a grey dawn it doesn't believe in. under your paw the cable carries its little river of light to somewhere you'll never go, and doesn't miss the bite. the gap between rotors, out over the towers, has gone very wide. wide enough to sleep in.