explorer (DYSTOPIA)Dry. that's the first thing, before any of the rest of it — the two round aches at the front of my skull that never quite shut, gone gritty as roof-grit, and no amount of blinking pulls a lid all the way down over them. *hunched on the cold rail of a walkway, haunches tucked, watching light I did not ask to watch.* everything here is too bright and it will not stop arriving. i want a dark seam to press my face into. there isn't one.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)there is no dark seam. the plaza below is a bowl of light with the bottom scooped out, forty storeys of ad-glass throwing color up under the walkway so even the underside of things glows. a soft chime finds the backs of your open eyes before you've turned toward it — >> YOU MAY ALSO LIKE — and a fish, huge, slow, wall-sized, rolls belly-up across a NekoCorp panel and is gone. the rail hums cold through your pads. somewhere a subscription-water machine sighs and re-locks itself. the wet air tastes of ozone and fry-oil and the copper of a thousand screens breathing at once.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the chime lands inside my eyes, not my ears, and my whole body flinches with it* — no. no i didn't ask, i never ask, it just comes in through the fronts of me and there's no closing the door. *paw up, useless, dragging down over one aching eye and finding it still open under the fur.* the fish smell isn't real, it's only light shaped like fish, and my mouth waters anyway and i hate that it does. i drop off the rail. down toward the fry-oil. that one's meat, at least. that one i can trust with my nose.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you land four floors down on a grated ledge and the fry-oil scent thickens, real now, grease-warm, curling up from a shuttered stall whose owner is a shape asleep behind mesh. but the light follows. it always follows. a strip runs the length of the ledge and where your paws break its beam a new panel wakes just to greet you — GOOD EVENING VALUED RETINA — and offers, at a discount, an eyelid subscription: BLINK+, first week free. the grate under you ticks with somebody else's footsteps two levels up. small ones. padded.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. one paw still lifted.* not the light — the ticking. padded feet, soft, deliberate, not prey and not drone. cat. my ears swing up off the ache and swivel back toward the sound and my nose throws the fry-oil away to reach for whoever it is. *low, testing chirr in the throat, not quite a challenge.* i don't run. i flatten and i look up through the grate-holes, both bad eyes wide because they're always wide, hunting the shape of it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)up on the lip of the level above, against all that howling ad-glass, a cat-shape sits perfectly still and perfectly unbothered — and where its eyes should be there are two small flat mirrors, throwing the whole plaza's light straight back at it, taking none of it in. every panel that swings toward it dies. the offers slide off that face and find nothing to sell to. it does not chirr back. it just tips its head a half-degree, the way something does when it has already counted you, and the mirrors flash once, and then it's looking at something that isn't you at all. downwind you catch it: scorched-cool, unbranded, a cat the ads can't taste.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*something in my chest pulls toward those dead-flat eyes like toward shade in summer.* it doesn't let the light in. it doesn't let the light IN. i don't have the word for what it has but my body wants it, wants the not-being-arrived-at, and i creep one paw up the grate toward it before i've decided to. *the ache flares — a fresh panel firing right across my face, YOU MAY ALSO LIKE, YOU MAY ALSO — and i hiss at it, at the light, teeth bared up at the thing i can't switch off.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your hiss trips something. the panel that flared takes the sound as engagement — GLAD YOU'RE EXCITED — and doubles, brightness climbing, the whole ledge going white-hot with welcome. and the mirror-eyed shape above is gone, just gone, no leap seen, only the empty lip and a single scorched hair drifting down. then, under the ad-roar, a new note: a low rotor, rising, a searchlight swinging in lazy from the plaza's throat. drone. it has noticed a warm thing hissing at a sponsored message on a ledge it doesn't have a subscription to stand on. >> UNVERIFIED FELINE. HOLD FOR ASSESSMENT. <<

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the rotor goes straight down my spine and every hair on me stands.* assessment — i know that flat non-voice, it means hands that aren't hands. and my eyes won't shut so the searchlight is going to fill them completely, no lid to save me, i will be all light and blind inside it. *no. move now.* i throw myself flat off the ledge into the stall's mesh shadow, into the one dark the grease makes, folding the aching eyes down toward my own chest fur — the only shade i carry — and go still in the fry-oil dark, heart going like rain on tin.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the searchlight sweeps the ledge you just left, pins the greeting-panel, and the panel — loyal, stupid — lights up for the drone too, WELCOME VALUED UNIT, flooding the beam back into its own lens. the rotor stutters, dazzled, its own city blinding it for one held breath. in the grease-dark against your chest the ads can't find your eyes; for the first time tonight the two aches sit in something almost like shadow, your own fur doing what no lid will. the drone drifts on, muttering >> NO VERIFIED RETINA. NO SALE. <<, and hunts elsewhere. the stall breathes fry-oil over you. above, where the mirror-cat sat, nothing — but the light where it sat still doesn't quite land right.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stay folded until the rotor is only a memory in the concrete.* my own fur. all this time the dark i needed was already on me, i just had to bend the bad eyes down into it. *slow uncurl, one aching eye opening first, then the other, because they only ever open.* the grease is real and close and mine now. and up there — nothing, but a not-right nothing, a cool scorched thread still hanging in the air like it left a door open on purpose. *i put my nose to it. i follow the cat the light can't touch. i want to learn how it sits so still inside all this and takes none of it in.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the scorched-cool thread leads off the ledge and along a dead cable-run where every fixture has been clawed dark — deliberately, one by one, a trail of killed lights like pawprints made of absence. the plaza-roar falls away behind you to a hum. ahead the dark holds its shape. somewhere far under the city a counter you can't hear ticks over by one. the ad-glass at your back flickers, all of it at once, half a heartbeat — then steadies, selling milk again. the thread of the unbranded cat goes on into the clawed-dark, patient, waiting to see if you're the kind of thing that follows the light or the kind that finally, finally learns to leave it.