explorer (DYSTOPIA)Somebody else was here first. a smeared line of tom-musk gone stale over week-old kibble grease, and under it one claw-drag I don't have a name for. *nose flat to the cold concrete of the service corridor, reading the whole boundary before a single paw crosses it.* not my line. i don't cross another cat's mark for nothing. but the wall behind it is humming — that fat electric drone coming up through the plaster, the one that pulls at me the way warm milk used to pull, and my ears have already turned to it before the rest of me agrees.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mark is old. whoever laid it hasn't refreshed it in three nights — the musk has thinned to a threat with no cat left behind it, and the corridor knows this the way an empty cage knows it. past the boundary the hum thickens. it is not one hum. it is many, stacked: a rack of them behind a punched-steel grille, warm air breathing out through the slots in little dusty pushes that part your whiskers. a strip of light stutters overhead. somewhere in the walls a speaker with a blown cone tries to sing >>nekocorp fiber. the future is buffering<< and gives up halfway. the warmth wants you. the warmth always wants something back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*low, belly brushing grit, one paw over the dead cat's line and then the whole of me spilling across because the warm won.* the breath from the grille tastes of hot dust and melted plastic and that green-metal tang i chase in my sleep. *cheek dragged along the corner of the grille, laying my own scent thick over the stranger's, claiming the warm as mine.* the singing box up there is lying. they always lie sweet. i put my teeth to the slots anyway — just the edge, just to feel where the humming lives.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grille gives a little where your teeth find the soft aluminium lip, and the hum jumps up your jaw into the bone behind your ear. inside: cables. a nest of them, fat and rubbery and warm as sleeping snakes, bundled into the dark and pulsing faint against each other. one has been chewed before — not by you. the exposed copper glints. the air down here smells of ozone and the specific sweetness of insulation that has been gnawed and gnawed. far off, up the corridor's throat, a rotor coughs to life. not close. not yet. but the corridor carries it like water carries a dropped stone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears flick back at the rotor cough, then forward again — greed beats fear by a whisker.* the chewed one. someone found the good vein before me and left it half-open, rude, wasteful. *jaw around the rubber, working it, the warm insulation squeaking against my teeth, that gnaw-sweetness flooding the back of my nose.* this is mine now. i pull, i worry it, i strip a strip. the hum in the copper goes bright and thin under my tongue like a fish just under ice.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the strip peels. a bead of blue light runs down the bare copper where your tongue was and the whole rack shivers — a box two shelves up blinks from steady green to a fast angry amber, blink blink blink, and a new smell arrives: hot, sharp, a filament somewhere deciding to become smoke. the blown speaker rallies for one bright second — >>unauthorized access logged. a technician of joy is on the wa—<< — and dies again. the rotor up the corridor stops coughing. it catches. it holds a steady note now. it is coming down the throat of the hall toward the warm, and its little light is already licking the far wall.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*copper still bright on my tongue, but the amber blink hooks my eye and the smoke-smell yanks my head up.* that fast light means the same as a hiss, means the same as a raised paw — go. *i don't run yet. i take the loose strip of insulation in my teeth because it is mine and i earned it, then i pour off the grille sideways, low, into the seam where the corridor wall doesn't quite meet the floor.* the rotor-note fills my skull. i make myself small in the dark and let it pass over, whiskers pinned, breathing shallow through a mouthful of stolen rubber.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone slides into the corridor mouth — a flat wedge of matte plastic, one underlit eye sweeping, rotors throwing a cold downdraft that flattens the dust into little running lines toward you. its light crosses the grille. crosses the peeled cable. pauses. a thin red reticle stutters over the damage and a voice with no cat in it recites >>property of nekocorp. gnaw responsibly<< to an empty hall. then, high on a rooftop vent you can just see through the seam — a second silhouette. still. lean. two flat mirror-discs where eyes should be, catching the drone's light and throwing it back doubled. it does not move. it watches the drone the way you watch it. then it is gone, the way that one is always already gone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the mirror-eyed one. i've caught that shape before at the edges — the cat who is never where the light expects, who smells faintly of cold glass and no-fear.* i don't call out. cats like that don't answer, they just leave you the gap they made. *and the drone, nose-down over my stolen vein, has its back-draft aimed the wrong way now.* i go while its eye is busy scolding a wall. *out of the seam, three soft bounds along the base of the rack, the loose strip streaming from my jaw like a caught tail, into the dark under the lowest shelf where the warm still lives but the light can't fold itself.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)under the shelf the world narrows to a warm slot that smells of dust and old solder and, faintly, of you now — because your cheek is already writing you into it. the drone's downdraft frays at the shelf's edge and can't reach in. its light quarters the corridor twice, finds no cat, only a peeled cable and a boundary-mark three nights dead, and logs both without understanding either. >>threat resolved. have a compliant evening<< it tells the smoke. the amber box up the rack gives one last blink and steadies back to green, the smell of the almost-fire thinning. the hum settles. it is, for now, a hum you are inside of instead of stealing from.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the rotor-note thins, climbs, folds back up the corridor and out.* i wait past the point where waiting is smart, because that's the difference between old cats and flat ones. *then i let the stolen strip drop between my paws, put my chin on the warm slot floor, and the rack's hum comes up through the concrete into my ribs, steady, huge, indifferent, mine to borrow.* the copper taste is fading. the warm is not. tomorrow the dead cat's line will still be there and so will i, and i will have chewed the good vein a little wider. *one ear stays turned up the corridor. it always does. but the rest of me, for the length of this hum, sleeps.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city keeps breathing its warm breath into the slot where you've folded yourself. up on the fiber line a fresh trickle of light runs past the wound you left, routed around it, uncaring, endless. the blown speaker finds one more thread of song from somewhere deep in the wall — >>you're all caught up<< — and this time, almost gently, it stays true for a whole three seconds before the static takes it. the amber has gone green. the drone is two streets over now, scolding someone else's wall. the rain starts again on the roof far above, and the rack hums on, and the warm holds you, and the night belongs, for a little while longer, to whoever chewed quietest.