explorer (DYSTOPIA)Nothing moves, and that is the whole job. i am not stalking, i am not fleeing, i am a shape that agrees to be furniture until the sweep passes. *belly folded flat into the warm gap between two stacked boxes that never stop breathing heat, chin down on the crossbar, only the eyes working.* the little green mouths in the black metal blink at me — one two three, pause, one two three — and i have learned their rhythm the way i learned which gutters go dry. when they blink wrong, the food-truth comes. so i wait. i am good at the part where nothing happens.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the heat off the stack is a live thing, exhaust-breath pushed through slotted teeth, and it carries the particular smell you have taught yourself to love: hot dust, scorched solder, the plastic-skin of a hundred sleeping cables. the green mouths keep their count. one two three. pause. then — under the count — a new pulse you do not have a name for, faster, hungrier, coming up the spine of the rack from somewhere deeper than the wall. far off, past the chain-fence, a rooftop holds a cat-shaped stillness of its own, two flat mirrors where eyes should be, watching the lot the way you watch the mouths. it does not blink. the rain finds the gap in the corrugate and starts its slow cold tapping, one drop, then its friends.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears swivel without the rest of me moving — the mirror-eyed shape on the roof registers, gets filed under not-food-not-now, and released.* it is not hunting me. cats that wear their own darkness like that never bother with a thing as small as me. i go back to the count. but the new pulse under the count is a burr in my teeth, an itch behind the whiskers, and my whole life has been the itch that says the thin skin over that itch will taste right. *nose drops to the fattest cable where it bellies out of the stack, and i mouth it, careful, testing the give of the casing before the bite.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the casing gives like a ripe stem, a bright rubber snap between the back teeth, and underneath — copper-cold, a tingle that runs your jaw to your ear and lights a small white star behind the eyes. the fast pulse stutters. somewhere three walls over a fan spins down that had never once, in your whole memory of this alley, stopped spinning. a speaker in the vending-shrine beside you clears its throat and sings, warm and awful: 'NEKO-CORP HYDRO — because thirst is a SUBSCRIPTION worth keeping.' the green mouths blink one two — and then do not finish. pause. long pause. the count is broken. the food-truth is close.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the star behind my eyes is still burning and i love it and i let go of the cable before it loves me back too hard.* the count is broken means the wall is not paying attention. broken-count is the only door i have ever needed. *i pour myself down off the crossbar, four soft landings, no ring in the metal, and slink the seam of the shrine toward the low mouth at its base where the cold cans wait behind glass i cannot open but around which, always, the careless ones drop crumbs of the real thing.* i am small. small is a key.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)at the base of the shrine the glass throws your own eyes back at you, doubled, huge. behind it the cans sweat in their coils. and yes — the tribute: a torn foil corner, fish-oil gone tacky, wedged where the machine's lip meets the wet ground. it smells like the only honest thing for a block. but the moment your paw touches the crumb the plaza above pulls a breath. a shadow slides over the wet with edges too clean to be cloud, and from high up, patient, a sound assembles itself out of the rain — a flat mechanical hover, a lens racking focus, a voice with no throat: 'CITIZEN-FELINE. LOYALTY TIER: NONE. HOLD FOR SCAN.'

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the crumb is in my mouth already — swallowed on instinct before the throatless voice finishes its second word, because a scent that honest does not wait for permission.* HOLD is a word for creatures that were built to hold. i am built for the opposite. *low, flat, boneless, i am under the shrine's lip and into the black slot between it and the wall before the clean-edged shadow finishes settling — claws finding the old wet grout, hindquarters bunched, the rotor-sound climbing into that whine that means the light is about to come down.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the light comes down white and total, turns every raindrop into a falling spark, and paints the slot you have just poured yourself out of — a half-second late. it sweeps the wet where you were. the throatless voice, unbothered, recalculates: 'MOTION LOGGED. SUBJECT: UNBILLED. DEPLOYING.' the whine forks into two whines. behind the wall, in the dark you are swimming through, the pipes carry a smell down to you from the loading side of the block — guarded, iron-sweet, tuna packed in crates that somebody bleeds to keep, and threaded through it the burnt note of a rumor the whole alley knows: someone up there is worth forty thousand points that expire before they can be spent.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*two whines. the crates' iron-sweet is a wall of want and it is on the wrong side of two whines, so i file it — later, later, if there is a later — and take the down.* pipes go down. drones do not love down; their light needs a floor to land on and down is where the floor forgets to be. *i drop through a busted grate-lip into the under-dark, all the way onto the tacky pipe-run, and here the world shrinks to warm metal and my own heartbeat and the drip-drip that is only ever water.* my ribs pull. one green star still smokes behind my eyes. the honest crumb sits in my belly like a coal.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)down here the whines flatten to a memory of themselves, thwarted, circling the grate they cannot follow you past. the pipe-run breathes its own heat and the dark is close and total and, for the first time since the count broke, yours. water finds a rhythm overhead — one two three, pause, one two three — the same count the green mouths kept, as if the whole city runs on the one patient number and only pretends the rest. far ahead the tunnel exhales a grey coin of light where it opens onto a lower alley. the rain sounds different there. thinner. waiting.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i let the count carry me — match my paws to it, one two three, pause — because a body that moves on the city's own number does not read as a body to the things that hunt for wrongness.* the grey coin ahead is a maybe. maybe-food, maybe-turf, maybe another mirror-eyed shape that files me and lets me go. *i pad toward it low and even, whiskers combing the dark, the coal in my belly warm enough now to be called full, which is the closest word my body keeps for safe.* the star behind my eyes finally goes out. good. i did not want to see what it was showing me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the coin widens into a mouth and the mouth breathes the lower alley over you: colder rain, a fry-oil ghost, and — faint, high, from a cracked speaker three roofs up — a jingle worn down to nonsense, 'ne-ko, ne-ko, we keep the lights on for YOU.' no whines. no clean-edged shadow. just a wet slot of a street, a puddle throwing pink neon back at the underside of everything, and the ordinary enormous business of surviving one more hour in a city that bills you for the air. behind you the count keeps counting, patient, indifferent, ready to break again the next time you find a wall that isn't looking. the night, as ever, belongs to whoever moves quietest. you move quietest.