explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. that first, before any of it. not hiding, not hunting — just folded down small on the warm lip of the intake grille where the machine-breath comes up dry and dusty, and watching. *tail wrapped over paws. one ear tracking, the other gone loose and lazy.* below me the fat cable bundles run in slack loops, skins cracked and sweet-bitter where my teeth have already been, and i do not go to them yet. i wait. the good warm boxes hum steadier when nobody's spooked them, and a spooked dock tells on you. so: still. i count the far light's sweeps without knowing i'm counting.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the intake keeps breathing its warm nothing up into your fur — air filtered three times dead, tasting of scorched dust and the ghost of a coolant nobody makes anymore. under the grille the bundles tick as they cool. one of them is warmer than its neighbors, warmer than it ran last night, and the hum off it sits a half-step high, wrong-eager, the pitch a box makes when something new has been bolted inside it that wants to be found. far off the sweep-light finishes its arc and starts back. between sweeps the dark down here is total and full of small sounds: a drip, a settling seam, and — once — a claw that is not yours, testing metal somewhere off to the left.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*head turns left. the body does not — the body stays folded, that's the rule.* another claw. not close. i let the ears do the arguing while the rest of me plays dead-warm and boring as a dropped glove. but the wrong-eager box pulls at me, that half-step-high hum, the almost-itch of a fresh thing begging for teeth — i know that pull the way i know an empty belly, it lives in the same low place. one thing at a time down here, though. i mark the stranger-claw first. i flatten my breathing thin and taste the air coming off the left, asking it quietly: who.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the air off the left carries a stranger cut with machine: cold ozone, a licked-clean coat that smells of no den at all, and under it the faint mirror-tang of lenses — the claw belongs to a shape that moves the way rooftop shapes move, low and certain, eyes that throw the neon back flat and dark and give nothing away. it isn't hunting you. it's reading the same warm box, from the far seam. up on the gantry a speaker crackles awake and drools half a jingle before the rot eats it — *NEKOCORP milk, for the kit who deser—* — then a flatter voice slides in underneath, drone patter, a name repeated like a pressed bruise, forty-thousand points, expired, cannot be combined with other off—

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears pin flat at the rotor-word buried in that flat voice — the patter always comes riding wind off blades, and blades mean up-and-looking.* the mirror-eyed one at the far seam, though — that one i hold in a corner of the ears and let be. no hiss in its walk. no lunge. just a cold reader working the other edge of the same warm thing, and i have shared worse corners with worse for less. two of us, one box, and neither showing teeth: down here that counts as company. i ease a breath out. the counting voice above is the real weight on my spine, not the cat.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed shape reads your ease and answers it the only civil way — by not looking at you, by keeping its flat dark lenses fixed on the racks as if you were weather. the truce holds in the space between two cats who both decided the same thing at once. overhead the bounty patter loops once more, thins, and folds back into the general drone-hum of the district, one more bruise-name pressed into a night already full of them. the warm box keeps its wrong-eager pitch. and the split you left in its skin last time you fed catches a stray gleam, a hairline of old want.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)so the box wins now. slow. one paw off the warm lip, weight easing down through the pads until the metal stops complaining. *low, poured, a single tooth finding the old split in the bundle-skin.* i do not tear. i taste. that's the whole art of it — you take the one thin swallow the box is careless enough to leave loose, and you leave before it counts its own fingers. the high hum comes up through my jaw. i set the tooth. i pull the loose thing free.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the skin parts sweet-bitter under the one tooth, that oily crackle-taste flooding back over your tongue, and the wrong-eager bundle answers — not pain, boxes don't hurt, but a stutter, the high hum tripping over its own feet, and for one breath the dark fills with a smell that is not a smell at all: hot copper and cut grass arriving straight behind your eyes. a flat blue nowhere. rows of little lights that mean nothing and everything. a door standing open that wants a word it is sure you already carry. across the dock the mirror-eyed stranger goes very, very still. above, the sweep-light hitches — pauses — and swings back early, hunting the flicker your tooth just tore in the grid.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the blue nowhere is gone as fast as it bloomed — tooth off the wire, done, one look is all i ever want from a box.* but the light came back EARLY and that is the whole grammar of danger right there, the world turning its head toward you. i am moving before i choose to, low belly-crawl off the warm lip toward the black seam on the right — away from the mirror-eyes, away from where that white will land. *claws soft, weight rolling heel to toe, spine a poured thing.* the high hum keeps stuttering behind me. i took something out of the box. i don't know its shape yet. it sits behind my eyes like a swallowed bead, cool and patient.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the right seam breathes cooler — a draft with real outside folded into it, wet asphalt, rain three floors up, the fat mineral stink of a puddle that's been catching runoff since before you were kittened. good. but the sweep finds the emptied grille behind you and holds, white and total, and now the rotor is not patter, it's air — actual chop-chop pressure walking down the shaft as a drone drops into the dock, underbelly light spilling hard-edged shadows across the racks. it hasn't got you. it's got the warm box, the flicker, the split skin. it hangs there interrogating a bundle of cable while you pour yourself, whisker by whisker, into the cool dark. behind you, unhurried, the mirror-eyed shape is already gone — it read the early light one blink before you did.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*halfway into the seam i freeze — not fear, math.* the drone's underbelly light comes walking the racks in hard white bars, and one bar sweeps the mouth of my seam, close enough to lay a stripe of glare across my own whiskers. i do not blink into it. i let my eyes go to slits and hold, one paw lifted, the bead behind my eyes gone very still as if it too knows to play dead. the light tastes of nothing but it presses, a weight without heat. i count. one. two. it moves on.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bar of glare slides off your whiskers and crawls on down the rack, indifferent, because a drone reads heat and motion and confessions, and you gave it none of the three — just a slit-eyed nothing folded in a crack, colder than the metal around you. behind it the rotor keeps chewing the air over the emptied box. the seam ahead of you narrows, then kinks, then opens — you can feel the geometry of it in your whiskers before your eyes have it, a throat of dark bending toward that fat outside-draft. the way is clear. the way was always going to be clear; you just had to outlast one bar of light.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*pour is the right shape for it — no bones in me now, just going, the seam taking me one rib at a time.* behind me the blades yell questions at a cable that cannot confess. let it. the mirror-eyed one beat me out clean and i mark that, tuck it away, a thing worth knowing about a cat i'll cross again. the outside-draft fattens, rain-smell and puddle-mineral and, threaded under both, the sweet warm rot off some food-place's back end — and my stomach wakes all at once, loud and rude. the bead behind my eyes has cost me nothing yet. but a full belly thinks straighter than an empty one, and i mean to think about it soon.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam spits you out low behind the food-place, into rain fine as static and a puddle throwing three broken signs back up at a sky that isn't listening. the drone's yell stays sealed inside the dock now, walled off, already losing patience with a cable that never talked. out here the vent breathes old oil and something protein-close and real, a warm grease-slick huddle of scent right at the lip of a dented tray — cold, hours old, but food, unmistakably food, no lock on it, no eyes on it that you can find.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i eat.* head down, fast and low and glancing up between each swallow the way you have to out here, the cold grease clinging good to the roof of my mouth, the rain ticking off my spine and running the neon down into the puddle in long bruised smears. *swallow. check. swallow. check.* and only now, belly filling, does the swallowed bead behind my eyes turn over once — that flat blue nowhere, that open door wanting its word — and i feel, distant and cool, that it is not nothing. it is the kind of thing a cat carries carefully and speaks of to no drone. i finish the tray. i lick the tray. i decide to keep it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the tray gives up the last of itself and the night settles back to being only a night — steam, wet, the far forever-hum of the arcology towers, a rival crew's scent-line drawn hard down the far wall that you will respect, tonight, for free. the bead behind your eyes goes quiet again, patient, folded shut around its door, biding whatever hour it means to matter. and a billboard overhead resets to full white, washing the puddle blind, because the city already took what it wanted from you long before the food did: you moved. down here you always move.