explorer (DYSTOPIA)Somebody else has been here. that's the whole message and it comes in through the nose before anything else does — a stranger's mark laid down cold and territorial on the corner of the crate stack that is *mine*, the ammonia-bright signature of a tom who does not belong in this run of alley. *ears flat, one paw lifted and not yet set down, the fur along the spine lifting on its own* i do not move toward it and i do not move away. i breathe it. old, maybe. a night old. but on my line, over my scent, and that is a thing that has to be answered.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mark answers back the way marks do — layered, deliberate, sprayed at exactly your shoulder-height so you'd have to reach to cover it. under the ammonia there's machine-grease and scorched something, ozone off a cut cable. the crate stack ticks as it cools. beyond it your real home breathes: the maintenance gap where the server rack lives, and the rack is *loud* tonight, that fat warm drone coming up through the pads of your feet, hungry-sounding, a hum with a shape you could crawl inside. the stranger's line runs right up to the edge of that warmth and stops. even he wouldn't go in. a subscription-water machine coughs blue light over all of it. WATER: 0.04 CR / SIP. nobody's drinking.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The warm is mine and he knew to stop at it, and that is almost respect, almost. *low along the wall now, belly-fur dragging grit, following my own line back in past his* the rack-hum climbs into my teeth the way it always does and my jaw wants the thing it always wants — the fat black cable insulation, the give of it, the faint battery-sweet under the rubber. *sets teeth to it, worries a strip loose, ears still swivelled backward toward his mark* i chew and i listen. you don't turn your back on a fresh tom. but the hum is good. the hum says the box is awake and the box being awake means the little fish-light will come if i work the wire right.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the strip peels with a rubbery snap and the taste blooms — copper, then that battery sweetness, then something bitter and additive-flat that NekoCorp puts in everything now so nothing tastes as good as it should. the rack shivers. a green pinprick somewhere in its face goes to amber, to green, amber, *green* — the box is talking to another box, far off, and your gnawing has found the soft place in its signal where the two of them handshake. the hum stutters half a beat. and in that half-beat, for less than a breath, the blue vending light overhead flickers a word it was never made to show — a filename, a long number, gone before your eyes can hold it. then WATER: 0.04 CR / SIP again, steady, like nothing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freezes, wire still in teeth* — the flicker went through me wrong, cold up the back like the drop before a fall, and i don't have words for it because i don't have words, i have only the thing under the fur that says *watched* and then says *no, nothing, keep chewing.* so i shake it off the way you shake off rain. *ears forward, pupils wide, the amber-green pulse of the box painting my whiskers* i lean back into the wire. one more pull. the fish-light. i have earned the fish-light. *bite, drag, the handshake stutters again under my jaw*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and it *gives* — the stutter opens into a gap and light spills out the rack's front seam, and there in the grille, low-res and stuttering and gloriously stupid, a fish. one fish. looping. tail-flick, turn, tail-flick, turn, the way it has looped in your chest since you were small enough to fit in a boot. the hum wraps warm around you. for three whole seconds the city is only this: warmth, a fish, your name on nothing. then — far off, east, over the noodle-stall rooftops — a new sound. thin. rotary. climbing. a rumor-toned broadcast riding under it, flat corporate cheer bent into a threat: "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CAT. FORTY THOUSAND POINTS. KNIFEBOY. POINTS EXPIRE ON CAPTURE." the fish keeps looping. the rotor keeps climbing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the fish is still there and my body has already left it* — ears snapped east, weight dropped, the warm forgotten because warm doesn't matter when the air starts folding around a rotor. i know that word-noise, KNIFEBOY, i know it the way i know thunder, not as a name but as a thing that makes the drones come low and the drones coming low means the drones come *here*, over my stack, over my warm, sweeping. *insulation dropped, spat, mouth suddenly dry* i flatten into the seam beside the rack where the hum can hide the sound of my own heart. not his hunt. not mine. but the light they hunt with does not care whose alley it crosses.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)it comes over the lip of the roofline nose-down, one white eye wide open, and the eye drags across the alley like a wet thumb — crate stack, puddle, vending glow, the stranger's mark lighting up faint blue under its scan and meaning nothing to it. the wash of it passes a whisker's width from the seam you're folded into. your warm rack, bless it, roars its dumb hum and swallows your shape whole; to the eye you are just more heat off a machine. the beam moves on. sweeps the noodle roof. lifts. the cheer-voice recedes eastward, still promising points that expire, still hunting a cat who is not you. rain starts again, fine, cold. the fish in the grille has stopped looping. the seam has gone dark. the box, having handshook whatever it needed to, has closed.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*don't move. count nothing. just the rain finding my ears one drop at a time.* the eye is gone and my body knows it before my thinking does, the spine settling a half-inch, the breath coming back low. *unfolds from the seam slow, one joint at a time, testing the air for rotor and finding only wet and cold and the after-smell of ozone* the warm is gone dark. the fish is gone. the stranger's mark is still there, still cold, still an insult, but it has stopped mattering the way it mattered before the eye came, because the eye reminded me what the alley is for. *steps to the corner of the crate. turns. lifts my own line back over his, slow, thorough, mine.* the box will wake again. it always wakes again. i will be here when it does.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your mark goes down and the alley re-sorts itself around it, the way it always does — yours on top, his beneath, the order of the world restored one scent-layer at a time. the vending machine hums its blue nothing. WATER: 0.04 CR / SIP. somewhere the rack ticks, cooling, dreaming its box-dreams. and high up, past the arcology's lowest lit floors, a NekoCorp billboard rolls over to its next face: a cat's silhouette in mirrored glasses, chin up, unbothered, the word BASED scrubbed off the frame and replaced with BUY. even the ones who got away end up selling something up there. the rain keeps coming. the night keeps belonging to whoever moves quietest. tonight, again, that is you.