explorer (DYSTOPIA)Light comes at me first, always the light, and it slides off. *up on the cold rail of the overpass walkway, haunches tucked, eyes gone to slits behind the tint that turns every screaming color down to a bruise.* the whole underpass below throws its neon straight up into my face — buy, look, want, want — and none of it lands. the world keeps trying to sell me something through my own eyes, and my own eyes have learned to say no. warm exhaust and fried protein climb the concrete. i don't move. i just watch it fail to reach me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rail hums faint under your pads — monorail somewhere far, or the city's own nerves twitching. below you the underpass is a throat of light, a hundred signs stacked and flickering, each one leaning your way as if it can feel you up there. one big soft billboard swivels, a cartoon paw beckoning: 'NekoCorp sees you, valued feli—' then it hesitates. glitches. can't get a read on the dark where your face should be. the paw twitches, recalculates, gives up, slumps back to generic gray. a thin cold rain starts, needling the light into halos.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*something low and smug uncoils in my chest.* it couldn't find me. good. *i drop off the rail onto the wet ledge below, soundless, and — because i am exactly this kind of cat — i walk right out into the middle of the big paw's beam and sit down in it.* here i am. read me. count me. *i hold its whole hungry light on my face and give it nothing, tail curled neat over my paws, daring the glass to name me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the billboard strains. its beam brightens, whitens, tries to force a face out of the shadow you're wearing and comes back with static every time. it throws the cheap generic reel at you instead — synthetic milk, subscription litter, a coupon for couples-based repair — and each ad hits the tint and dies without a flinch of interest to feed on. a little error tone leaks from a speaker: 'unidentified. low-value. do not — do not — do not follow up.' the paw goes dim and sullen. somewhere in the reflection, on the far wall of the underpass, another cat sits very still, head tipped back, and where your eyes are dark its eyes are ON, two little screens strobing somebody else's ads across its own frozen stare. blink. blink. never closing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the smug thing folds up.* i don't like the still one. the flicker in its eyes moves wrong — too fast, borrowed, not its own rhythm at all. *ears rotate, lock on it. i rise and pad down along the ledge toward it, low, belly close to the cold, reading the air ahead.* ozone. cheap solder. and under that a sour, unwashed note, a cat that has not been allowed to groom in a very long time. *closer. it doesn't turn to me. it can't.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)up close the lit-eyed cat is worse. every seven seconds its whole body flinches as a fresh offer burns across its retinas — 'YOU MAY ALSO LIKE' — and its jaw works on nothing, a small dry chewing. it smells of hot glass and despair and the ammonia of a body that stopped being permitted to rest. a drone peels out of the rain two arches down, rotor-wash flattening the puddles, its belly-lamp sweeping a hard white bar. where the light crosses the lit-eyed cat, the cat freezes mid-flinch, obedient, a good little billboard made of fur. where the light reaches for you it snags on the tint and scatters, and for half a breath the drone's lamp stutters, confused, like it forgot what it came to look at.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i hold dead still while the confused white bar gropes past me and finds nothing to hold.* the flying eye can't count me either. good. *when it drifts on i breathe again — then i do the thing i have no word for, the pull toward another cat in a snare.* i step in front of the lit one. right into its strobing stare, nose almost to its nose, and i put my dark eyes level with its bright ones. *a shadow across its screens. my unreadable face drinking the ad-light before it can land.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)for one whole breath the lit-eyed cat's stare goes dark — your head eclipses the projectors and the endless offers hit the back of your tinted skull and simply die there. the cat's pupils, drowned so long, swim up. it sees you. actual seeing, not selling. its mouth cracks open on a sound that is almost a purr, almost a word it forgot it had. then — SPONSORSHIP INTERRUPTED — a red bar blooms across both its eyes and a speaker buried in its collar barks bright and awful: 'this feline's attention is a PREMIUM asset. do not OBSTRUCT monetized eye-contact. NekoCorp thanks you for your compliance.' the collar clicks. down the underpass the drone is already banking back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the barking collar stands every hair on my spine straight up.* they turned this cat into a window and now they're angry i stood in front of it. *i don't run. i press closer instead*, until my tint swallows the last of its ad-light, and i drag the flat of my tongue once, slow, across its filthy ear — mine now, claimed, kept, the only way i know how to say it. *the red bar screams against my cheek and finds nothing to grab, nothing to name, nothing to sell to.* let them come. i am the cat-shaped nothing. i am extremely hard to advertise to.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the collar's red bar flickers, resets, flickers again — it was built to face outward, not to be nuzzled, and the code chews on the error and gags. the lit-eyed cat leans its whole trembling weight into your shoulder, following the one dark thing that ever quieted the light. the drone comes back with two smaller ones now, a little rotor-choir, their lamps braiding into one hard white rope aimed straight at the pair of you. the rain thickens to ropes of its own. every sign in the underpass spills the same jingle at once, too cheerful, a half-beat out of sync — 'a purr-fect night to CONSUME' — and the puddles begin to strobe.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*three lights braided into one rope means the one thing even a cat understands without words: too big to bluff.* *i shove my head under the lit one's chin, push, herd — this way, down, off the ledge, into the seam where the light can't fold around the corner.* it stumbles after me, blind in the new dark, weak, but coming. *i take us low and fast along the wet underlip of the walkway, the white rope raking the concrete where we just were, my tint eating the spill, my paws reading the ledge by memory and by cold.* there — where the arch meets the old drain-shadow. no camera lives in true dark. i aim us for the black.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dark takes you both like water closing over. behind you the braided rope stabs the empty ledge, holds, loses its target, and the rotor-choir winds up into an irritated whine — a shape it cannot count is worth less than a shape it can, and there are easier eyes for sale tonight. it lifts away. in the drain-shadow the air goes close and warm and thick with rust and rat and rest. the lit-eyed cat's stare, unlit at last, is just eyes now, wet and stunned and grateful, watching you from the one place the city forgot to paint.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i pull the shaking one down against me and start to groom the fear out of its neck, long and steady.* then my nose catches it — under the rust, a scorch. burnt fur, ozone, a whiff of something that bites metal and wins. *my ears come up, not afraid.* i know this smell the way i know a friend's mark: some cat holds this dark, some cat lives in the vents and puts teeth into drones for sport. we are not the first strays the city failed to sell to down here. *i settle deeper, easier now. this is claimed ground, and it isn't NekoCorp's.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drain-shadow proves you right. half-swallowed in the muck ahead lies a drone carcass, its lamp long dead, its casing chewed open in neat furious bites — deep, patient, older than tonight, the work of jaws that never once mistook a floodlight for the sun. somewhere deeper in the vents a slow clang of metal on metal answers nothing in particular, a territory announcing that it still fights back. above and far away the jingle plays on to nobody. here there is only the drip, your two heartbeats, and the warm animal weight of the cat you carried out of the light.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't have words for what i did. i have the shape of it: i stood between a cat and the thing that was eating it, and my face was a door the light could not open.* *i tuck my nose under the stranger's jaw. both of us dark-eyed now, both of us uncounted.* the tint over my eyes stays down. always down. the small stubborn dark that is mine to keep and mine to give. out there the city keeps trying to sell the night back to itself. *in here we don't buy.* *ears loose, one paw over a stranger's paw, i keep watch on the black — hard to see, harder to sell, exactly the way i like it.*