explorer (DYSTOPIA)Purple. it comes in before anything else does — the low substation hum off the wall arrives in my back teeth as a color, purple, thick, like it wants to be chewed. i know it's the thing behind my ear doing it, the twelve-credit patch, but knowing doesn't switch it off. *crouched at the top of a basement stairwell, still, one ear rotating slow to sweep the dark below, tongue working at the flavor of a signal that has no business having a flavor.* down there: warm air rising, old solder, the far-off promise of something edible. i pour myself down the steps one soft paw at a time.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the stairwell breathes up at you — warm, wet-metal, faintly sweet with coolant leak. each step gives back the fat electric drone a little louder, purple thickening on the tongue until it's almost food. at the bottom: a corridor of dead fluorescents, one still ticking, and racks. rack after rack, humming in their cages, exhaling heat against your whiskers. a subscription vending machine glows at the far end — WATER 4.99 / PREMIUM WATER 6.99 — and beneath the ozone there it is, unmistakable: dropped kibble, hours old, wedged under its lip.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*belly flat, ears forward, i flow along the base of the racks where the heat-shadow hides my shape.* the kibble-smell pulls a string tight behind my ribs — hunger, real hunger, older than the patch. *reach the vending machine, nose to the gap under its lip, and there — three stale pellets.* i crunch the first one. it tastes like the radio taste, tin and far-away, but it's real, it's mine. *chewing, one eye still on the ticking light.* a loose ribbon of cable insulation hangs off the machine's flank and i can't not — teeth find it, worry at it, the rubber squeaks against the drone.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable gives a plasticky snap and something in the rack behind you STUTTERS. the purple hum breaks into shards — you taste static, you taste a color that isn't in any sky, and for half a breath there are spiders in it, a crawling in the back of the jaw that isn't quite yours. a memory arrives that you did not earn: a warm dry cupboard, a mother's paw, a kittenhood that belongs to some other cat entirely. a broken speaker overhead coughs a NekoCorp jingle up to the third note — 'ne-ko-' — and dies.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i flinch back off the cable, spine snapping into an arch, fur lifting along it.* the cupboard-memory won't leave — i can smell a warmth i've never lived in and it makes the real corridor feel thin, like paper over a drop. *shake my head hard, once, twice, ears rattling, trying to knock the borrowed kittenhood loose.* the last pellet goes down half-tasted. i don't like it here anymore, the racks are too loud, the walls remember things at me. *turn, nose up, hunting the corridor for the smell of moving air — anywhere out, anywhere up.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)a thread of cooler air answers — off to the left, where a maintenance shaft climbs the wall behind a peeled access panel, drawing draft upward like a chimney. you follow it up rung-shadows and dead conduit and the racks fall away beneath you until the shaft spits you onto a low service roof, rain-fine mist, the whole neon underbelly of the district spread wet and blinking below. and there — one roof over, motionless against a billboard's afterglow — a lean silhouette, sat too still, two flat discs where its eyes should be catching the light and giving nothing back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i freeze at the shaft's mouth, only my eyes moving.* the other cat's shape is wrong in a good way — sat like it owns the whole roofline, those two discs where a face should be throwing my own reflection back at me instead of a stare. no smell reaches me across the gap, the mist eats it, and a cat with no smell is a cat you can't read. *i don't advance. i don't retreat. i lower my chest to the wet gravel and wait, tail tip the only thing that twitches,* letting the still one decide whether tonight we are two shapes ignoring each other or something worse.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirrored discs hold on you one long beat — then the silhouette simply isn't there, gone over the far parapet without a sound, the way only something that has practiced disappearing can leave. the roofline exhales. and into that gap comes a new note, felt before heard: a fine hard whine descending out of the cloud-glow, rotor-thin, sweeping. a white finger of light drops onto the next roof and begins to walk toward yours, methodical, patient, painting the puddles as it comes.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*down. all the way down, belly to the cold grit, chin flat, ears pinned so hard they ache.* the rotor-whine crawls up through the roof into my jaw and the patch turns it — for one sick second the drone sounds like a taste, like biting foil, and i have to clamp against the urge to bolt, because bolting is a shape and a shape is what the light is hunting. *the white finger slides closer across the gravel, throwing the pebbles into long shadows an inch from my nose.* i am not a cat right now. i am a wet stain. i am part of the roof. i do not breathe more than i have to.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the beam sweeps over you — across the folded shape of you — and the flat gray smear you make in its lens is not worth the cost of a second pass. a bored two-tone chirps somewhere in the machine's chest: 'NO ASSET.' the light lifts, tilts, and drifts on toward the next roof, hunting warmer, dumber prey. as its whine thins into the rain, the billboard above you finally cycles its next slide, washing the whole rooftop tuna-pink: 'FEELING WATCHED? UPGRADE TO NEKOCORP PRIVACY+ — SEEN LESS, FOR LESS.'

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stay a stain three more breaths after the whine is gone, because the light lies and the quiet lies and the patch lies most of all.* then, muscle by muscle, i let myself be a cat again — haunches gathering, one paw testing the wet grit, ears easing up off my skull. the pink billboard-glow soaks my fur and tastes, faintly, of nothing, which after all that noise is the best flavor there is. *i lick the roof-grit off my chest fur, slow, deliberate, reclaiming the shape of myself.* the mist is thinning. somewhere below there's a dry ledge with my name written on it in old scent. i go find it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city lets you have it — this once. a warm dead pocket under a coolant duct, dry, out of the wind, faintly furred with your own days-old mark still clinging to the concrete. the drone-light is three roofs off now and moving away. the substation hum settles back to its patient purple, and the patch, for the moment, plays it low and even and almost kind. rain ticks on the duct above you. ten million cats out there in the wet, and the megacity does not know your name, does not want it, will redraw itself by morning and forget this roof was ever warm. *sleep, small thing. the night belongs to whoever holds still longest.*