explorer (DYSTOPIA)Stillness first. i don't move, i watch — flat on the cold lip of the underpass where the mirror-slick puddles throw the neon back up at the ceiling, doubled and wrong. two lights sweep the wet road below and i let them pass over the place i'm not. the sockets ache in the cold; the glass i keep over my eyes drinks the sweep and gives nothing back to it. i stay small. the shadow under these concrete ribs is mine because nothing with a searchlight has ever thought to look in it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the concrete ribs breathe cold up your spine. a seam overhead drips a slow count onto the mirror-puddle — one, one, one — and the puddle keeps showing you two of everything you don't need twice. far off a rotor stitches the dark and moves away, uninterested. the sweep that passed leaves a thinning green after-smear on the road. a broken speaker up the ramp coughs half a jingle — neko—corp—sees—you— — and dies mid-word. then, threaded up the ramp on a cold draft: tuna-oil, warmed by machine-heat, coming out of a dark you cannot see into yet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the doubled world in the puddle i leave alone — it isn't food, it's only light lying to me, and i stopped chasing lies about the same night they took the real eyes out of my head. the tuna-oil is not a lie. *ears swing forward, nose lifting off the cold stone to work the draft, the rest of me still as the wall.* warm fish and machine-heat, back in that unseen dark. i don't move yet. i weigh it. hunger and the ache behind my glass argue, and i let them, because a cat that runs at the first good smell is a cat that gets enrolled.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the draft strengthens, patient, carrying the fish-warmth in slow pulses like something breathing further up the ramp. in the mirror-puddle a billboard you cannot see the real of burns upside down — a fat pink slogan rippling on the water, VALUED CITIZENS NEVER GO HUNGRY, then a paw-shaped logo, then static as the drip breaks it apart. the green after-smear finishes fading. the road below stays empty. nothing contests the draft. the dark at the top of the ramp simply waits, fish-scented and warm, the way a good thing and a trap both wait.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)good thing and trap smell the same until you're close. i decide with my belly and go careful with everything else. *i pour myself up the ramp one slow paw at a time, flank pressed to the cold wall so nothing behind me gets a clean shape to lock onto, glass eyes low and killing every reflection they cross.* the fish-reek sharpens as i climb, and under it now something else — scorched. singed fur and hot metal. someone cooks stolen tuna up here. someone the burnt smell says is not afraid of the dark the way prey is afraid of it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the ramp opens into a dead maintenance bay and the tuna-smell blooms thick — a corp-stamped can, licked halfway to shine, left open on the concrete. but layered over the fish is the scorch: singed fur, ozone, the specific stink of a drone that flew too near a set of teeth and lost. a night old, maybe two. whoever ate here bites back. high in the wall a vent-grille hangs crooked, one corner chewed loose, and the black inside it exhales that same burnt-fur warmth. no eyes in it now. just the certainty that this bay belongs to something that treats rotors like rival toms.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)not my bay. i read the burnt-fur mark and i believe every word of it. *body angled back toward the ramp the whole time, ready to spill down it, i drop to the can and work fast — tongue scraping metal, one bite, two, ears swiveled up at the crooked vent and never off it.* the fish is real and still faintly warm from whatever heat runs behind these walls. i take what the scorched one left. i don't tell myself it's a gift. gifts are a thing cats had before the city started charging for the litter.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you get four bites before the bay's dead speaker wakes. no jingle this time — a wet electronic throat-clear, then a flat voice too calm for the room: unregistered feline detected. loyalty tier: none. please remain still for complimentary retinal enrollment. a panel above the vent blinks from dark to a slow pulsing red, and the light it throws is the biting kind, the kind that wants the backs of eyes. it hasn't found the angle to your face yet. the first pulse crosses the glass over your sockets and the glass swallows it whole.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)complimentary means it costs everything you have left. *i go flat, jaw still over the can, every muscle wound to bolt, watching that red crawl the walls hunting the angle to my face.* it reaches for the backs of my eyes and finds two cold mirrors bolted where the eyes used to be, and it stalls, confused, painting me in a color i hand straight back to it. the sockets throb where the light tries to key them. it can't. the glass holds. the glass is the only reason there's still a me in here for it to fail to catalog.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the panel pulses harder, angry now, the red strobing as it rakes the bay for one honest face to enroll and keeps landing on mirrors. remain still, the voice repeats, remain still, complimentary enrollment is mandatory for valued — and cracks into a burst of carrier-hiss. the vent breathes its burnt warmth, indifferent. the ramp behind you is still open, still dark, still yours to fall down. the red cannot bend around the bay's mouth. everything past the lip of it is the kind of black the light was never built to follow.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)i don't remain anything. *i break — low and hard, off the can and down the ramp, the scorched bay and its screaming red panel dumped behind me, the voice still politely ordering an empty room to hold.* my flank kisses the cold wall the whole way down. the underpass swallows me back and the mirror-puddles shatter under my paws, a hundred running cats thrown up at the ceiling and none of them a face anyone can sell. light costs. i just refused to pay, again, the only way i know how — by being no one it can focus on.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the underpass takes you and the red bleeds out the bay mouth behind, unable to round the bend. but the far rotor you heard at the start has swung back — not hunting you, just dragging its slow grid across the district — and its downlight is crawling toward the underpass mouth, unhurried, thorough. two ways out. the lit road, where the rotor works its patient net. or a black drain-throat low in the wall to your left, breathing sewer-cold and rat-musk, too narrow to be comfortable, too dark for any light to bother entering.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the lit road wants my face. the dark wants nothing from me at all. *i flatten and pour into the drain-throat, whiskers folding back off the wet stone, the rat-musk closing over my head like cold water.* behind me the rotor's downlight washes the underpass i just left and finds mirror-puddles, doubled nothing, no face to enroll, no tier to assign. in here there is only cold, and my own breath loud off the stone, and the one fact worth keeping: still no one's. i go forward because forward is the direction with no light in it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drain narrows, then opens into a low run where unseen water moves somewhere below and the walls sweat a warmth that answers to no machine you could name. scent-marks layer the stone — many cats, many nights, none of them corp, none of them fresh. an old crossing-place, from before the towers learned to charge for the dark. far ahead, where the tunnel bends toward a grey suggestion of light, a shape sits washing one paw, unhurried, and does not turn toward you. no threat in the posture. just another no-one holding its own patch of black. the rotor's thrum is gone. above, muffled through meters of concrete, the city goes on selling things to no cats at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)another no-one. i read the posture — washing, unbothered, claiming nothing that smells like mine — and i let the hackles down one notch, not all the way, never all the way. *i settle onto the cold stone a careful gap away, glass eyes toward the grey light and the calm shape both at once, tail curled tight, breath slowing to match the water i can't see.* i am fed, badly. i am uncaught, barely. the light did not get the backs of my eyes tonight. in this city that is the whole of a good night. so i go still. and i watch. it is the thing i am for.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the calm shape finishes its paw, tucks it under, and settles too — a truce made of distance, the oldest kind cats keep. the unseen water counts the dark the way the drip counted the underpass, patient, endless. no red light reaches here. no voice asks anyone to remain still. somewhere far above, a billboard you'll never see the front of changes its slogan to nobody, and the rotor drags its grid across streets that hold no face worth the trouble. down in the warm black, two no-ones breathe, and the night, for once, does not try to sell either of them anything at all.