explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. i have held still long enough that the metal under my belly stopped being cold and started being mine. the hum is what i came for — that fat warm drone coming up through the floor grate, the one that means a nest of the blinking boxes is awake somewhere under me. *ears swivel, lock onto it, the rest of me not moving a whisker.* i know this sound better than i know my own hunger. give me the dark and i could walk straight to the exact box it comes from with my eyes shut.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grate breathes warm oil-air up into your fur and the hum thickens, splits — not one box, a whole stacked wall of them behind a mesh panel three drops down, green pinlights blinking out of sync like a slow rain of little eyes. a jingle leaks through a cracked speaker somewhere below: *nekocorp premium bandwidth — you deserve to be connected™* — then chews itself into wet static. under the mesh rides a smell you already have a word for in your teeth: hot dust, melted plastic, the copper-sweet bite of the black cable-skin you have stripped before.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*down.* i pour off the grate lip and drop, four soft landings down the mesh face, claws finding the diamond holes without asking my permission first. the melted-plastic smell hooks me sideways to a fat black cable slung along the wall, warm as a sleeping thing. *i set my back teeth to it — not to eat, never to eat.* just to feel the little live buzz jump into my jaw, that thin electric shiver that says the box is awake, the box is fed, the box does not know i am here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable gives under your teeth with that rubbery give you like, and the buzz leaps up your jawbone into the roots of your whiskers — then the wall of boxes flinches. one green light goes red. a flat voice with no cat anywhere inside it clicks on above you: *unauthorized draw detected on node nine.* a fan somewhere spins up to a thin climbing whine. the warm air turns itself over, and under the melted-plastic ride there is a new thread now: sharp ozone, and far off, the wasp-drone of a rotor coming awake.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the red light is nothing to me. the fan-whine is everything — it climbs into the pitch that drags my skin backward off my spine, and my body decides before i do. *teeth off the cable, belly to the ledge, i become a shadow with a heartbeat.* the rotor is still far. far is a gift and i do not waste gifts. i take the ledge to the left, away from the ozone, toward a black slit where the mesh runs out and the real alley starts to breathe.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the slit opens onto wet air — rain you smell a whole heartbeat before you feel it, gray city-rain fat with everybody's leavings. the alley drops away below into neon bleeding pink and acid-green off standing puddles. across the gap, high on the far roofline, a shape is sitting that does not hold itself like prey and does not hold itself like a drone: low, patient, two flat discs where a cat's eyes should be, throwing the neon back at you in cold mirror-round coins. it is not looking at you. it is looking at everything. *behind you, the rotor-whine banks — closer now by one whisker.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed one i leave alone. that kind of stillness is a whole language and every word of it says i already saw you coming, don't. *i dip my head once — the small polite lie of a cat who wants no trouble — and slide the other way along the slick ledge.* the rotor is the real teeth tonight. i put a corner between me and its sound, then a second corner, and let the rain start filling in the shape of me so the sweeping light has less of a cat to bite.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rain closes over your fur cold and complete, and for one held breath the searchlight rakes the exact wall where you just were and comes back holding only water. the rotor-drone stutters, loses the thread of you, drifts sideways sniffing. and then the floor of the world changes: below you a loading dock, roll-door half down, and a smell arrives like a paw across the face — fish. real fish, not the tuna-scented lie the vending machines cough up. cold crates of it, ringed and guarded, and pinned above them to a post a wet flapping sheet, a stern printed cat-face under one word your nose can't read but the whole street already knows: WANTED.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the fish-smell undoes me a little at the knees. *my mouth floods, my belly clenches its small hard fist.* but the crates wear a wall of scent that has nothing to do with the flapping sheet — a bigger tom's marks, layered, sour-sharp, old under new, laid down to say this is spoken for and the speaker is not small. taking from here buys a fight i am too wet and too little for tonight. so i take the map instead: where the smell lives, how deep the guard, when it might thin. i back away hungry but whole, which is a kind of full.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)wise. the marks were not bluffing — down the dock a heavy shadow shifts its weight, one guard-cat's torn ear rotating toward you, then, finding you already leaving, rotating back to its crates. the rain thins to a slow drip off the roll-door's lip. from the east your own place calls: the vending machine that only ever sells subscription water, and the warm dead pocket of dark behind it that smells like you and like nobody else alive. between here and there, only the ordinary dangers. the box-hum is gone out of your teeth now, but you carry its map folded behind your eyes — node nine, the red light, the fat live cable — saved for some hungrier, quieter night.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i turn toward the water-smell of home and the thin tin-and-dust smell riding under it that belongs to me and no one.* the night handed me three things and let me keep myself: a wall of live boxes to come back and drink from, a mirror-eyed ghost to never once cross, and a fish-fortress to outwait instead of storm. that is enough for one wet dark. *tail up, i thread the ordinary shadows — small, soaked, and worth no bounty — one careful paw after another, until the machine's dumb blue glow leans over and says home.* i fold into the warm dead pocket, tuck my nose under my tail, and let the whole dripping city hum me down under.