explorer (DYSTOPIA)Copper. *the torn rim of my ear, licked and licked again — iron, salt, the small private taste of my own damage. except it won't hold still.* it slides sideways and the long white tube-light stuttering overhead arrives on my tongue as copper too, same flat note in the wrong sense entirely. the drip off the pipe above me tastes green. i know that's wrong. i stopped trusting the seam between one sense and the next a long while back, down here where they patched me. *belly low against scrubbed metal floor, whiskers pinned, one paw testing the wet before i trust it. the deep-down place always smells of bleach and old fear, and both of those are also a sound now.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the sub-level breathes in long fluorescent stutters — light, no light, light — and each blackout leaves a shape burned green on the back of everything. cold seeps up through the floor into your pads, machine-cold, the kind that never had a sun in it. a sealed door stands at the corridor's end, one amber keypad light pulsing slow like a thing asleep. somewhere behind the wall a cracked speaker leaks a jingle worn down to nonsense — *neko— neko— your best life is a subscript—* — then swallows itself. ozone. the flat mineral drip. and under all of it a low electrical want, a hum with teeth, coming from a gap where the ventilation grate has rusted loose and warm air bleeds out.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the warm bleed pulls me before i decide to go. i put my nose to the loose grate and the heat has a flavor — dusty orange, a little burnt — and the hum lands behind my eyes as a color i don't have a mouth-word for.* i bite the rubber lip of a cable looping out of the dark, not to eat, just to feel the buzz set my back teeth ringing, to check the wire is alive. *it is. the ring climbs my jaw and blooms as that same purple pressure. i wedge a shoulder into the gap, then a hip, and let the warm dark take the rest of me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the vent is a throat and it climbs. hot dry wind combs backward through your fur, carrying flakes of insulation and the ghost of every fan it has passed. the metal ticks under your weight, expands, contracts. far up, a coin of grey — not neon, not dark, a bruised open sky — and the drum of rain on it getting louder the higher you go. the buzz you tasted braids into a hundred others up here, a whole nested chord of machines dreaming to themselves. then the shaft dumps you out through a bent louver onto a gravel rooftop, and the city unfolds all at once: arcology towers stacked into the low cloud, their sides crawling with ad-light, rain coming down warm and orange in the glow.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*rain, real rain, and i stand in it a moment just to let one clean sense arrive uncorrupted — wet, only wet, no color, no note.* then my ears do their work without me. *across the roofs, a far ledge, a shape sitting where a shape shouldn't be comfortable sitting — another cat, still as a drainpipe, and where its eyes should catch the neon they throw it flat back, two hard mirror-squares that don't blink.* my fur lifts along the spine. it isn't watching me. it's watching everything, and being watched by nothing, and i understand in my animal way that this is a cat who has made itself hard to find. i look away first.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirrored shape doesn't acknowledge you — that's its whole art, the not-acknowledging — and then the rooftop light changes. a new white blade sweeps across the gravel from the east, throwing your own shadow long and thin toward the far ledge. rotor-thrum, felt in the chest before the ears catch it, a fat grey security drone dropping over the parapet with its lens already turning. a bored corporate voice bleeds down through its speaker grille, flattened by rain: *loyalty tier: none. loyalty tier: none. please remain visible.* the mirror-eyed cat is simply gone — no leap, no sound, just absence where it sat. the searchlight swings toward the vent louver you crawled out of.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't run. running is a shape the light knows how to follow.* i pour myself flat into the seam between two roof-vents where the shadow is already thickest and i make my breathing small. *the blade passes over my spine — i feel its heat as a thin sweet line, actually taste it, ozone gone sugary — and my whole body wants to flinch into that wrongness and give me away.* i hold. the drone's want-hum peaks, that toothed electrical color filling my skull, then tips over and begins to slide east, dragging its light and its bored little voice after it. i wait three more breaths in the after-dark before i let a single muscle believe it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone folds away over the ridgeline, its *remain visible* thinning to a mosquito whine and then to nothing but rain. the roof exhales. near the stairhead housing a squat vending machine hunches against the weather, its face glowing soft, one panel cracked and weeping condensation, and warm air pushes steadily out of the intake grille beneath it — the same dusty-orange heat you tasted below, surfacing here. its screen loops a slow animation of a fish that is mostly the word FISH. no coins in you. no tier. but the warmth doesn't check for either, and the gravel in its lee is dry.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i test the dry gravel with one pad, then all four, and turn a slow circle in the machine's breath the way my body has always known to do, older than any patch they put in me.* the heat comes up smelling of dust and hot plastic and, faintly, of the fish that is only a word. *i fold my legs under. the cracked screen's glow lands on my closed eyes as a low steady hum i can almost sleep inside.* the ear still tastes of copper. the rain still tastes of nothing. for once the two of them don't argue. *chin down, tail wrapped, one ear left up and turning — off-shift, not off-guard.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city settles into its long orange hum around you. rain seams down the tower faces, gathering the ad-glow and letting it go, gathering and letting go. far below, a monorail sighs through a station and moves on. the vending machine murmurs its fish, murmurs its fish. somewhere out past the parapet a rooftop holds the exact shape of a cat with mirror eyes again, or maybe just an aerial and a trick of the wet light — impossible, from here, to say which. the warm grille breathes. the night keeps its old arrangement: it belongs to whoever moves quietest, and to whoever, for one dry hour, has stopped needing to move at all.