explorer (DYSTOPIA)The dark down here has a flavor, and tonight it's gone purple. that's the wrong word and it's the only word — the low shelf-light licks the back of my throat sweet and cold and violet, the way it does right before the crackle behind my eyes gets loud. *i don't move. haunches folded on the cool pipe, tail wrapped, letting it wash over me and trying to work out which of my senses is the liar tonight.* somewhere a drip is ticking. i can smell the drip. i can hear the rust.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the basement holds still around you and lets you sort it. concrete sweating, a floor of dead cable coiled like sleeping things, a bank of research racks along the far wall that don't blink so much as twitch — irregular, off-schedule, machines left running long after whoever fed them forgot the room existed. the drip you taste is real: condensation off a coolant line, plinking into a puddle that throws a smear of that violet light back up at the ceiling. and under the rust-smell, faint, a second thread — warm plastic, scorched a little, the particular reek of a chip that's been asked to do more than a chip should.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that scorched-plastic thread pulls my head around before i decide to turn it.* i know that smell from the inside. it lives behind my own ear, the little hot bump under the fur that itches in weather. *one paw out, testing the cold floor, whiskers strained forward.* the crackle picks up — a fizz of not-sound, like i can hear the puddle's color humming — and for half a breath i'm sure i've been in this exact room as a kitten, except it wasn't me, it was somebody smaller and browner and the memory has the wrong paws. *i shake my head hard. spiders in the skull. keep moving.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the head-shake scatters the borrowed kittenhood but not the fizz — it settles into the floor now, a low crawling static you feel through the pads more than hear. the twitching racks answer it. one of them, mid-row, wakes a cracked panel to a soft grey glow, and across the grey a line of little symbols scrolls by, patient, endless, going nowhere. no chime. no fish. just the scroll, feeding itself. the coolant drips. behind the racks, deeper in, a shape you hadn't clocked resolves out of the dark: another cat, sitting square to a dead terminal, one paw lifted to the black glass, tapping. tap. tap. tap. it does not look at you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go low and still. the tapping cat isn't hunting and isn't hiding, and that's its own kind of wrong.* tap. tap. the sound arrives in my nose as dust. i creep a body-length closer along the cold floor, chirr held down in my chest, reading it — the fur's dull, the eyes don't leave the black glass, the paw comes down on nothing and lifts and comes down again like it's waiting for the glass to open a door that closed a long time ago. *i've seen cats freeze at a drone's light. i've never seen one freeze at a dead screen.* the scorched-plastic itch behind my ear flares, sympathetic, like it recognizes the trap.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)closer, you can smell it: fog and old paper and the sour of a cat that hasn't eaten because eating isn't in the menu it's stuck inside. the terminal's black glass isn't fully dead — hold your bad eyes on it and a ghost of grey text surfaces and sinks, page 4, page 5, page 6, each one unsaying the last. the tapping cat's paw follows the sunk text down and waits for it to come back up. it will not turn to you. it cannot. whatever room it's in, it's a different room than yours, walled in glass and clauses. from far above, muffled through forty floors of concrete, something changes pitch — a rotor note dropping into a hunt. the basement isn't as forgotten as it smells.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the rotor-note lands in the pit of me and every borrowed memory goes quiet at once.* the tapping cat doesn't hear it. i want to bat its ear, break whatever glass it's pressed to, but my body knows the truth my paws don't want — you can't pull a cat out of a room you can't smell your way into. *i back off it, slow, eyes still wide because they're always a little too wide since the patch.* the hunt-note is getting a shape. i throw my nose up the way i came and hunt for the cool seam, the dead-cable dark, anywhere the light forgets to arrive.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor drops into the stairwell throat and its searchlight comes down the concrete steps ahead of it, a hard white bar swinging left-right, left-right, throwing the coiled cable into a nest of leaping shadows. it hasn't reached the floor yet. behind you the tapping goes on, tap, tap, indifferent, a metronome for the light. the puddle's violet drowns white as the beam finds it. a belly-speaker coughs its bored little liturgy into the damp: >> RESTRICTED RESEARCH LEVEL. UNLOGGED FELINE. PLEASE HOLD FOR RECLAMATION. << and where the beam hasn't swung yet, low along the base of the far wall, a black gap breathes cool air — a chase for pipes, tail-wide, running away into the dark under the building.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*RECLAMATION — that flat non-word goes down my spine like cold water and my crossed senses all scream the same thing for once: gone, be gone.* i time the bar of light the way i time everything, count its swing, three of bright two of dark, and on the dark i pour myself flat under the leaping shadows toward the cool breathing gap. *the tapping cat i leave. i have to leave it. i can't carry a cat out of a menu.* the pipe-chase takes me and the concrete swallows the searchlight behind me and the violet taste comes creeping back into my throat, and i've never been so glad to taste a color.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the chase is barely a body's width and it runs a long way, warm pipes to your left ticking with hot water somewhere far off, the searchlight's roar dulling to a hum to a memory of a hum. behind you the belly-voice loses interest — >> NO LOG. NO SUBJECT. NO CLAIM. << — and the rotor lifts back up the stairwell to hunt an easier floor. the fizz behind your eyes eases the further you get from the twitching racks, like distance is medicine. up ahead the pipe-chase opens its mouth onto night air: a drainage lip over a dead canal, the city's underside glittering wet, a NekoCorp jingle drifting across the water from somewhere too far to threaten you. *neko... your night is bright...* just weather now. just noise.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i come out onto the canal lip and the open air hits all my scrambled senses at once — the wet, the far jingle i can almost see as a smear of pink, the cold coming up off the black water — and for a wonder none of it hurts.* out here the light's too tired to reach into my eyes and tell me what to want. *i sit. i clean the pipe-dust off one paw, slow, and the borrowed kittenhood surfaces one more time — a browner cat, a warmer room — and this time i let it come and let it go instead of shaking it loose.* the tapping cat is still tapping somewhere under all that concrete. i hope its glass opens. i don't think glass opens.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the black water carries the jingle off and doesn't bring it back. across the canal a single window in a dead tower flickers grey — the same patient grey as the terminal, page turning over page — then gutters out, and you can't tell from here if a cat sat in front of it. the cold off the water is clean, unbranded, nobody's product. behind you the pipe-chase exhales its warm basement breath, an escape hatch that stays open. above, the arcologies blink their slow constellations, none of them in time, none of them for you. the fizz in your skull has quieted to almost nothing. the night, for once, is only as loud as it actually is.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i tuck my feet under me on the cool ledge, facing the water, back to the warm dark i can duck into if the rotor ever remembers me.* one room i got out of. one cat i couldn't. one kittenhood that isn't mine, sitting quiet now instead of clawing. *the drip of the canal, the far dead window, the pink ghost of a jingle already gone — my senses lay them all down side by side and for once don't argue about which is which.* tomorrow the patch will itch and the colors will taste wrong again and some new glass will try to hold me. tonight the cold water is real and it's mine and nothing is selling it to me. *eyes half down. not shut. never shut. but half down is enough.*