explorer (DYSTOPIA)Copper. the signal tastes like copper tonight, licked off the back of my teeth before i even open my eyes, and under it something violet and humming that i *know* is a sound even though it's landing on my tongue. *jaw works. a click behind the ear that isn't a bone.* the wrongness settles in and i decide, like always, that it is normal. i am flat under the low warm pipe, and the warm pipe is lying to me about being a lap. i chew the frayed thing by my paw. it tastes like a station caught between two other stations.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pipe ticks. one long, three short, the wall behind you learning to breathe on a schedule that isn't yours. drip. drip. the water down here comes off the ceiling already warm and already tasting of pennies — you were right about the copper, the room agrees, the room always agrees a half-second late. somewhere overhead a door that costs money to open opens for someone who is not you. a far vent breathes out old smoke and scorched fur, a scent with corners on it, a scent that has bitten things and won. the frayed cable in your teeth twitches once. it is not supposed to twitch.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*spit the cable. ears flat.* the twitch runs up my whiskers and comes back out my eyes as a taste of green, and i don't like green. *low to the warm floor, belly dragging, one paw testing into the pennies-dark ahead.* the scorched-corner smell i leave alone. that smell fought a rotor once and the rotor came down in pieces. i am small, and my job is the drip, the warm, the frayed thing — not the cat who bites the sky and lives in the vents. *nose up. hunting the seam where the money-door let its warm leak out.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam gives you a ribbon of warm and a smell that isn't food but wants to be — synthetic milk, the billboard kind, piped down here to keep the machines from crying. the dark opens into a low room of racks. blink-blink-blink, a thousand small green eyes that are not cats, breathing that copper-violet hum you can taste on your tongue. the floor purrs money up through your pads. one rack runs warmer than the rest. it is the kind of warm a body wants to trust.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*creep toward the warm rack, shoulders low, the green not-cat eyes counting me as i count them.* the hum climbs into my skull and splits three ways — one note i hear, one note i smell, one note that crawls. *paws find the warm metal and knead before i tell them to.* it's a good warm. it's a warm with a heartbeat that isn't a heart. i press my cheek to it to leave my mark and the mark comes back wrong, like the rack marked *me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rack takes your cheek-rub and gives you a kitten. *it is not your kitten.* the memory arrives anyway, uninvited, unfolding behind your eyes: a sunbeam you never sat in, a mother you never had, purring at a frequency the room bills by the minute. your chest fills up with somebody else's small warm life and your body, stupid and loyal, starts to purr back. deep in the wires something small shifts its weight. many-legged. patient. it has been in here longer than the racks have.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the borrowed kitten sits in my chest and i can't cough it out.* i purr at a mother made of warm metal because my body doesn't know any better, and i hate that it doesn't. *the hum splits again and the crawling note gets closer.* something moves in the wires — small, too many legs, and i have felt this before, behind my own ear, on the *inside.* *flinch. shake the head hard, once, twice.* not now. not the spiders in the blue-tooth dark. i came for warm and a scrap, not for the thing that lives where the signal sleeps.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)shake all you want — the many-legged stays. it was in the wire before it was in you, patient the way billing is patient. the racks tick off down a corridor and at the end of it: a box, cold-breathing, humming a different song from all the rest. a fridge-shaped cold. it hums like it is *waiting for someone*, like it has been married to a hum for three years and forgotten what the other one's face ever smelled like. a magnet clicks. a soft mechanical sigh. above the box a small red no-blink eye wakes up, finds the heat of you, and — very quietly — begins to count.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. every hair up.* the cold sad box i don't care about, the box is somebody else's ruined marriage — but the red no-blink eye i know in my spine before my head catches up. counting is the thing they do right before the rotors come. *off the warm rack, silent, four soft landings, the borrowed kitten sloshing in my chest.* i put a rack between me and the eye. the taste in my mouth goes to iron, and iron is the flavor of *go.* *low and fast, hugging the cold floor toward any dark the eye can't fold itself around.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)too late has a smell and you already smell it — the corridor exhales, far off, a rising whine you feel in your teeth before your ears agree to it. up past the money-door a rotor spins itself awake. the red eye told on you. the room's speakers cough on in a voice too warm to trust: 'a valued unit is detected in a premium zone — please remain still for your convenience.' every green rack-eye turns at once to watch what you'll do. at the far wall there is real dark, cat-sized, a crack under a dead panel. it is close. the whine is closer.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i do not remain still. still is for units.* the crack under the dead panel is a black i can taste — dust, old cold, no eyes — and i pour myself at it shoulders-first, the way water finds the low place. *the borrowed kitten, the spiders, the green and the violet all scream at once and i let them, i am nothing but paws now, nothing but the low place.* behind me the warm room and its counting. ahead the dark that doesn't watch back. *ears pinned flat enough to taste my own skull, and gone.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the crack takes you and the dead panel swallows the whine down to a wet thud, thud, thud that can't fold itself small enough to follow. dust in the throat. old cold. no eyes. you are in the between-place now, the wall's own gut, where the pipes run their warm rivers and the city forgot to bill because it forgot this seam exists. far ahead, faint, a light that isn't neon and isn't green — moon-colored, cut into stripes by a grille high up where the wall meets the outside. rain-smell leaks through it. and on a pipe near the light, painted in something that glows without asking permission, a shape your whiskers read before your eyes do: *another cat left this. recently. friendly-ish.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*a warm pipe weeps at its seam and i drink, because the going emptied me out.* the water is warm and honest and for one swallow all three split notes go quiet at once. *the borrowed kitten drains out of me slow, down into the dark where it belongs to nobody.* then the glowing shape — *nose to it. it doesn't taste like anything, which is how i know it's true.* somebody who runs the forgotten seams, gone recently, friendly-ish. *i press my own mark beside it, small. a yes. a here-too.* then up, toward the moon-cut stripes, because *out* is a direction my whole body already voted for.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grille is loose — one bar sprung by weather or by whoever left the mark. beyond it a ledge, wet and narrow, three stories up over an alley that breathes steam. the rain finds you the moment you clear the bar and every scrambled sense goes quiet at once, washed down to one clean cold, and for a whole breath you taste nothing but water and water tastes only like water. down in the alley a figure crosses under a dead sign — low, unhurried, two mirror-eyes throwing the neon back as flat coins, gone before you're sure it was there. the city hums on, copper and violet, patient, counting somebody else now. the ledge is yours. the rain is yours. the night, for the length of this drip, belongs to whoever moved quietest.