explorer (DYSTOPIA)Green. a bar of it slides across the oil-black floor and i can taste it — cold, coppery, like licking the round end of a battery — before any part of me admits it's only light. *flat between two dead vehicles, belly on ribbed concrete, pupils blown wide, following the green as it crawls one wall to the other.* the taste means something up there is looking. so i don't move. i let the color pour over my fur and i be concrete. i be a stain. i be nothing worth a second sweep.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the green passes. behind it, higher up the spiral ramp, a fat rotor-thrum folds down through six levels of parking deck and arrives in your spine a half-beat before your ears — drone, patrolling, its underbelly lamp painting slow circles. LEVEL 3 stencilled huge and peeling on the far pillar. drip. drip. drip, off a coolant pipe, each drop landing in a puddle that already tastes of antifreeze and rust. somewhere a speaker no bigger than a beetle coughs to life: "nekocorp reminds you — unattended felines may be RECYCLED for loyalty credit ♪" then dies. the searchlight lifts. begins another pass.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the word RECYCLED arrives as a sound but lands in my mouth as a flavor — burnt hair, that same wrong sweetness — and my whole hide ripples once, involuntary.* the beetle-speaker's dead but i hear its purple still hanging in the air where the noise was. i hate that i can. *slink low off the ramp's edge, down the fat concrete lip to the level below, pads soundless, tail flowing after me like it belongs to a different, calmer cat.* down is darker. down the drone's circles can't reach. down there is a hum i want to put my teeth in.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)LEVEL 2 swallows you. no lamp-circles here, only the tired brown glow of one surviving fixture buzzing at the far end. the hum you smelled from above resolves into a bank of grey lockers along the wall — not lockers, a server closet with its door sprung, exhaling warm dry air that reeks of hot dust and old plastic gone soft. a cable spills out of the gap and lies across the floor like a fat black worm, insulation split, copper winking under it. the warmth pulls at your cold hip. the split cable pulls at your teeth. from deeper in the closet: a tiny green LED, blinking. blinking. blinking, at the exact rhythm of the drip upstairs.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i put my nose to the split cable and the signal in it comes up my whiskers as a taste — thin, electric, a sound i can lick, like foil and radio and someone very far away saying a number over and over.* there are spiders in this wire. not real ones. the buzzing kind that live behind my eyes since the basement, the ones that crawl out whenever a machine gets too close to talking. *jaws part, close gently over the insulation, that good soft give — then a shudder of static rolls up my jaw into the bad tooth and i drop it, ears flat, tasting purple again.* the LED knows my name. it shouldn't. it's blinking it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the closet doesn't answer, because closets don't. but the LED's rhythm stutters — once — off-beat, then catches itself, as if something on the other end of the cable heard your teeth and paused. the warm air keeps coming. and out past the tired brown fixture, up the far ramp where LEVEL 2 opens onto a slot of rain-wet night, a shape resolves against the neon spill: another cat, high on the incline, motionless. low-slung. and where its eyes should catch the light they throw it straight back instead — two flat mirror-coins, no shine of their own. it is not looking at the drone. it is looking down. at you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*every hair i own stands.* i know those eyes — not the cat, the eyes, the way they give nothing back, the way looking into them tastes of absolutely nothing at all, a clean flat zero, the only quiet thing in this whole screaming city. *i go still in the deep way, the way that isn't hiding, the way that's just waiting to learn which direction i'll need to already be running.* it doesn't want the wire. it doesn't want the warm. cats that wear their own dark don't want anything you can smell, and that's what makes them worse than the drone. *one paw lifts. sets down. i give it the side of my body, never the back. never the back.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed shape holds your gaze one long breath — then simply isn't there, the way a reflection isn't there once the light moves, gone up over the ramp's lip into the rain without a sound to mark it. in the space it leaves, an ad-panel bolted to the pillar flickers awake, sensing warmth, sensing you: a too-bright loop of a smiling cat cradling a can, YOU MAY ALSO LIKE strobing pink across the oil floor, YOU MAY ALSO LIKE, YOU MAY ALSO — before it too gutters back to black. cold air rolls down the open ramp now, and it carries the outside in: wet asphalt, frying protein, and under it, faint, the ripe animal musk of a crew that marks this garage as theirs.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the frying-protein smell hits the floor of my belly like a paw and everything else goes quiet — the purple, the mirror-eyes, the number in the wire, all of it under the one true fact that i have not eaten since the light was grey.* the musk says this run is somebody's, some crew's, some rule i didn't agree to. *but hunger is older than rules and it's driving now.* i point my whole self at the wet slot of the ramp, at the smell of the outside, and i pour myself toward it low and fast between the dead vehicles, three months of basement teaching my legs to move before the drone comes back around.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you break from cover clean. the ramp mouth rushes up — rain, real rain, cold needles across your nose — and there at the lip, jammed against the wall, a vending machine hums its own hum, [A1][A2] glowing, a dropped foil packet wedged half-under its base where some earlier body fumbled a purchase and fled. the protein-smell is that packet: torn, still warm, still holding two, maybe three greasy mouthfuls. behind you the drone's thrum swings back onto LEVEL 3, methodical, unhurried. ahead the crew's musk thickens — closer than the smell alone had promised. the foil is right there. the night, as ever, belongs to whoever moves quietest.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i take the packet. no debate in it — teeth on foil, drag it free of the machine's base, three mouthfuls gone in two, grease and salt and the flat ghost of real fish somewhere under the synth.* the crew-smell says i have seconds. the drone-thrum says fewer. *i clamp the last corner of foil in my jaw and go sideways into the rain, off the ramp, along the wall where the neon can't decide if i'm there, belly wet, hip cold, the wire's stolen number still faintly on my tongue and the taste of that flat-mirror nothing not quite scrubbed out behind it.* mine now. all of it. keep moving. the city can bill me later.