explorer (DYSTOPIA)Cold gets into the hip first — the bad one, the one that clicks when the wet comes down off the coolant stacks and settles low. *lying tucked against a dead ad-panel, one paw folded under, not moving because moving costs heat.* but there's a hum. always the hum. that flat white note that isn't a drone, steadier than a drone, and my whiskers know it the way they know my own breath. *ears turn toward it before i decide to.* the cold breath. the box that keeps its cold and never shares it. i have loved that box a long time. i get up wrong, favoring the hip, and i go.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alley narrows toward a service recess where the cold lives — a squat refrigeration unit set into the wall, chrome sweating, its seams breathing out that flat exhale of frost and old milk and something sweeter underneath, synthetic, a smell built in a lab to mean 'yours.' the hum wraps your teeth. a pinprick of light finds your good eye: >> COMPATIBILITY WARD >> YOUR PARTNER MISSES YOU >> 2 DIGITAL CANDLES INCLUDED << it burns half a second on the wet chrome and is gone. the box hums on, indifferent, cold, faithful. down-alley the rain keeps its own time.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i press my cheek to the chrome and the cold bites and i don't care.* the sweet-built smell says mine says stay and my body believes it even where the rest of me has stopped. *i knead the grille, slow, the way you do at a thing that will never knead back.* somewhere in the box's throat a click, a shift, and the exhale changes — colder, then a puff of that lab-sweet, aimed, like it knew my face was there. i lean harder. the hip complains. i let it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the unit shudders, a compressor kicking over, and from a speaker-grille no bigger than a claw a voice leaks out, warm, close, wrong: 'based on what you said while sleeping — TUNA-SCENTED COOLANT, now 12% off.' the frost-breath pulses in time with it. above and behind, on the lip of the arcology's second setback, a shape sits very still against the sodium glow — lean, ears flat, two little mirrored discs where a cat's eyes should catch light and instead give nothing back. it does not move. it has been watching the whole time you leaned on the cold box that talks.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the fur along my spine lifts before i understand why — the two flat coins of not-light up on the ledge, eyes that don't answer.* every hair says seen. i freeze mid-knead, cheek still to the chrome, and for a breath the box's cold and the watcher's stillness are the same cold. *low, i peel off the unit, belly close to the wet, putting the dead ad-panel between me and the ledge.* the box keeps talking to my empty place. let it. i've been left for less.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed shape doesn't follow — just tips its head a fraction, a slow acknowledgment, then looks away as if you were never the point, and is gone over the far side of the setback without a sound. the alley exhales. but the exhale has a rotor in it now: two streets east, climbing, that stuttering thrum you feel in the wet grating through your pads before you hear it. a searchlight swings a white bar across the puddles, hunting the edges of things. the cold box hums. the light comes closer.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat. all of me flat, poured into the black seam where the ad-panel's base meets the ground, hip screaming, ignored.* the white bar walks the wet toward me, slow, dumb, patient the way only made things are patient. i make myself a shadow's shadow. breath small. the rotor-thrum climbs into my back teeth and sits there next to the box's hum, two machines singing wrong at each other over the space where i'm trying not to exist.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bar sweeps over the ad-panel, over the sweating chrome, catches the frost-breath and turns it to a brief ghost of white vapor — the drone's sensor stutters at the cold, confused, a soft tk-tk of a lens refocusing on nothing. a jingle bleeds down from a cracked speaker overhead, three notes, sugar-bright: 'Neko-Corp — we keep what's yours~.' the light holds a beat on the vapor. then the rotor pitches up and away, bored, and drags its white bar off down the next alley. the thrum thins. the box, faithful, is still exhaling cold into the dark where you're pressed.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i wait past the point of safe, then past that too, until the rotor is only a memory in the grating.* then the other thing wakes — not the hip, lower, the hollow under the ribs the cold made me forget. hunger. *i slink back to the box, but this time i'm not looking at it, i'm looking under it, along its base, where a thing that keeps cold sometimes lets a little of what it keeps slip out.* nose down. reading the seam. asking the box for once to give instead of recommend.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)low along the base, past the sweat and the coolant-tang, a thinner thread: fish. real or near-real, gone slightly, leaked from a cracked seal somewhere in the unit's cold gut and pooled in a rusted channel underneath. it's barely a smear. it is the best smell in the world. beside it, bolted to the wall, a vending unit blinks patient orange — [A1] [A2] [$] — a can of the good stuff visible behind scratched plastic, three inches and one entire economy away. the smear under the box is free. the can is not. the hum goes on.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i take the smear. tongue flat to the cold metal channel, working the rust for every thread of it, purring without meaning to at a thing that isn't kindness, just leakage.* the can behind the plastic i don't even look at twice — i learned young that the blinking orange things want something back i don't have and never will. *the box gave me this by accident and accident is the only honest giving i trust.* i clean the channel past empty. the hip has stopped shouting. small mercy. i'll take it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the moment your tongue leaves the channel the speaker-grille warms back up, that close wrong voice: 'enjoyed the leak? customers who licked the channel also purchased—' and then, oddly, a pause. a longer pause than a machine should take. the frost-breath hitches. for one beat the hum drops a half-step into something almost like listening, as if the cold box registered the purr and had no product for it. then it recovers, brightens: 'RATE YOUR PARTNER 1 TO 5 STARS.' the rain picks up. the orange vending-light blinks on, off, on.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i sit back on my haunches and look at the box a long moment — the sweating chrome, the little grille that asked me for stars.* i don't have stars. i have a fed belly and a bad hip and a spine that still remembers the mirror-eyes on the ledge. *i touch my nose once to the cold seam, not a knead now, just a goodbye the box won't log right.* long i kept coming back and it kept its cold and neither of us ever once got warm. *i turn. the wet alley opens east.* the box recommends something to my leaving tail.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)behind you the grille recites into the empty cold — 'we'll keep the light on, we'll keep what's yours~' — and the words thin as you walk them off. the alley mouth gives onto a wider run, rain slanting gold through the fall of a NekoCorp billboard's glow, synthetic milk poured endlessly by a cat that never existed. puddles carry the ad down-broken into a hundred smaller cats, each pouring, each smiling. your pads print the wet and the prints fill in behind you. somewhere ahead, warmer than chrome, a steam vent breathes. the hip clicks. the night keeps not belonging to anyone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i follow the warm.* not the box's warm, which was never warm — a real one, wet and low and rising off the grating ahead, smelling of rust and rice-water and other cats who came before. *i walk into it and let it climb up through the bad hip, through the fed belly, into the place the sweet-built lab-smell was aimed at and never once reached.* mine, the vent doesn't say, because it doesn't have to. i fold down into the heat. ears still half-turned east — for rotors, for mirror-eyes, for the box i won't go back to tonight. *eyes narrow. not shut. never all the way shut.* the city hums on without me for once, and i let it.