explorer (DYSTOPIA)*Already running.* paws slap gravel-tar still warm from the day and behind me the light comes — that white finger swinging across the roof, hunting the shape i just left. through the lenses it's only a gray smear. no bite in it. no burn crawling up the back of the skull the way bare eyes would take it. *low and fast, tail flat, ducking under the lip of an exhaust hood.* the big sign's glow can't find my eyes either. good. i keep to the dark the glasses make and let the roof carry me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the exhaust hood breathes hot fried-oil breath over your spine as you tuck under it. the searchlight passes — sweeps the tar where your heat still sits, hesitates, moves on. rain fine as static settles on your fur, on the lenses, and does not blur them. below the parapet the city drops away in wet tiers: arcology towers stacked like ribs, their windows a hundred thousand cold squares. a NEKOCORP jingle leaks up from a broken speaker three floors down — *milk that loves you back~* — warped, half a note flat, playing to nobody. somewhere a rotor is climbing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears swivel toward the climbing rotor, not the jingle.* the jingle is nothing, it has no teeth. the rotor has teeth. *creeps to the parapet edge, belly low, chin over the drop, lenses tilted down.* the whole face of the tower is light and none of it reaches me — i can look straight into the cold squares and the glasses drink the glare before it can tax me for looking. *scans the wet tiers for a way down that isn't open air.* i need a seam. a pipe, a dead cable run, a ledge that steps.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)there — two body-lengths left along the parapet, a coolant pipe sweats down the tower's flank into the dark, fat and furred with condensation, warm to the whisker before you even touch it. it groans as the building shifts its weight. following it down with your eyes: a service ledge, then a dead ad-panel jutting like a shelf, then black. and on the wind coming up the pipe — under the wet concrete and ozone — a thread of something scorched. burnt fur, old and angry, the smell of a cat who has bitten metal and lost. it isn't fresh. but it has been here.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*nose works the scorched thread, once, twice — files it, does not follow it.* that's a fighter's smell. a vent-dweller, a drone-biter. not prey and not friend, just a mark left by teeth on the world. *turns from it, sets a forepaw on the sweating pipe.* warm. good grip in the fur of the condensation. *pours down onto it, spine loose, claws just kissing the metal, riding the groan of the tower instead of fighting it.* the ledge comes up under me and i take it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the ledge holds. cold grit under the pads now, the pipe's warmth left behind above you. the dead ad-panel waits one step down — its face gone dark years ago, but as your weight touches the ledge a sensor somewhere wakes it, and it stutters half-alive: *YOU MAY ALSO LI—* then dies again, throwing one stripe of magenta light straight up the wall. through the lenses the stripe is a flat gray bar, harmless, a thing that would have speared bare eyes and left an offer burned on them. from below, rising fast now, the rotor resolves into two: a pair of them, running a lattice pattern up the tower's side, methodical, patient.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freezes on the ledge, one paw lifted, every hair reading the two rotors.* lattice means they aren't hunting me — not yet. they're combing. a grid, back and forth, and grids have gaps that move. *presses flat into the shadow the dead panel throws, lenses down so nothing catches and gives me back.* i count the sweep in my chest, the way the pressure of them pushes and eases, pushes and eases. *waits. tail utterly still.* when the near one turns its back on this face of the tower, i go.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the near rotor swings wide at the top of its lattice, nose tipping away, its downwash rolling a warm dirty gust across your whiskers — and for a breath the tower's flank below is unwatched. the drop under the ad-panel is not black after all: a fire-stair switchbacks down there, mesh steps slick and singing faintly in the rain, and past them the alley floor glitters with runoff and thrown neon. the gap is open. it will not stay open. the far rotor is already beginning its turn back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*go.* *drops off the ledge onto the first mesh step, and the mesh sings under the claws but i'm already past it, switchback, switchback, pouring down the stair like water finding the fastest crack.* the wet doesn't matter, the lenses keep the alley neon from blinding the turn, i can see every edge cold and gray and exact. *hits the runoff at the bottom and the cold bites up to the elbow.* down. under the light-lattice, into the alley's own dark, where the towers can't lean their eyes.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alley swallows you. above, the two rotors close their grid on empty ledge, find nothing warm, and drone off along the tower's face still combing — the pressure of them fading out of your chest. down here the air is thick: fish-brine from a shuttered stall, wet cardboard, the sweet rot of a spilled synth-milk carton with the NEKOCORP cat still smiling up off the label into the runoff. a low doorway breathes warm air. somewhere close a vending machine hums to itself, patient, lit, waiting for a coin no cat carries.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*shakes the cold runoff off one paw, then the other, unhurried now — the sky-eyes are gone and this dark is mine.* the warm doorway pulls at me but a warm doorway that breathes is a mouth, and mouths that breathe on their own belong to someone. *noses instead toward the humming machine, low, reading the smell of it — old grease, cold metal, dust cooked on a warm bulb.* no food-smell. just light and patience. a thing that waits. *sits just outside its glow, in the lens-dark, and lets the run drain out of my legs.* the towers kept their offer. i kept my eyes.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the vending machine's hum wraps you, almost warm. its face glows a soft insomniac blue over rows of things no cat needs — SUBSCRIPTION WATER, MOOD PATCHES, ONE (1) LOYALTY UPGRADE — and it does not care that you can't pay, will hum the same hum till the district is torn down and redrawn. the rain thins to nothing. up top, the searchlight has moved to another roof, another shape. the alley holds its breath and its brine and its warmth, and for one long beat the city forgets you are in it. the lenses give it all back to you gray, exact, and yours.