explorer (DYSTOPIA)Somebody pissed on my corner. that's the first thing tonight — not the rain, not the cold, the *insult* of it, a stranger's water laid down right over mine on the bent rebar that says this vent-mouth is mine and has been mine since the day the big machine ate the building and left me the hole. *hackles up the whole ridge of the spine, tail gone fat, a sound starting low in the chest that is not a purr.* i put my nose to the crime and read all of it: young, male, scared, gone in a hurry. scared is good. scared means he knew whose corner it was before his bladder forgot.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rebar remembers you better than he did — your scorched-fur reek is soaked so deep in the rust that rain can't lift it, and the stranger's mark is already going thin over the top of it, thin and panicked and apologizing as it fades. down the shaft your den breathes up: dust, old smoke, the particular cold of a place that used to be four floors and is one dark tube now with your exact shape worn into the bottom. three streets off a rotor coughs itself awake and the sound comes walking down the ductwork to lie against your back teeth. and somewhere past the rain a broken speaker is trying to sell a smile — mandatory, on a loop, to no one at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the smile-noise i hate, but the smile-noise is far and stapled to somebody else's skull. the rotor is closer, and the rotor is mine to hate up close. *but the corner first.* i grind my cheek and then my claim back down over the stranger's thin scared water, hard, twice, until the air says *mine* again and means it. then i pour myself down into the hole, into my own smoke-and-dust black, because a cat who guards his mouth from the front is a cat who forgot what the machine taught him: every building has a soft underneath. i go down to walk the underneath. the rotor-song leaks in after me through the grille the way it always does.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the underneath is where you are truest — no light down here to sell you out, just the map your whiskers drew in the black years back: the drop, the ledge, the pinch where the duct kinks and only a cat your exact scarred size still fits through. the stranger's scared-water never reached this deep; it never does, they never do. but the rotor does. up at the grille-mouth the chop-chop-chop thickens into weight and wind, and something lowers itself toward your vent-mouth like it holds the deed to the hole, a hard white underbelly-glow beginning to spill down the shaft ahead of it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stop at the deep pocket, the one nobody's whiskers but mine have ever measured.* down here i keep my winnings — a bent drone-arm from the last one that tried the hole, gnawed pale, and the rust still wears the shape of that night. hunger scratches somewhere under my ribs but hunger can wait; hunger always waits when the deed to my dark is up for argument. *i set my paw on the old dead arm like a witness.* the new rotor is closer than the last one got before it came apart. good. let it come the same distance. let it learn the same lesson in the same black.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gnawed arm gives nothing back but cold and the memory of winning, which is the only trophy the underneath will let you keep. and the new one comes on — its white eye drifting down into the shaft, folding your whole known world inside out as it drops, every corner you own gone knife-edged and strange under a light that has no business here. the ozone-and-hot-plastic reek arrives before the body does. above the light, riding it, a little red no-blink eye wakes, finds the warm shadow-shape of you, and — very quietly, the way billing is quiet — begins to count.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the white bar in MY black is the one thing i will not forgive.* they can rent the sky and bill the dreams and bolt a smile onto some poor cat three streets over — but the light does not come down my hole. *i am already up, claws sunk in the rust, climbing the pinch to the ledge, low behind the drop where no bar can fold small enough to find me.* the rotor-song sits right on top of me now, fat and stupid and sure it owns the air it's chewing. my whole body remembers the last one that came down in pieces. i coil. i wait for its soft belly to slide under the drop. i am not scared. i am the thing that lives here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the thing does not know the hole the way the hole knows you. it hangs in the shaft turning its white eye slow, reading for heat, for motion, for a confession — and it finds cold rust, cold dust, a den you long ago taught to give back nothing. so it drifts lower, its underbelly easing under the drop, humming that flat patient interrogation, close enough now that the wind off it parts the fur down your spine and fills the whole duct with the reek of a machine that has never, not once in its clean little life, been bitten. above it the red eye counts. below it, folded on the ledge, so do you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*now.* i come off the ledge with the whole ruined weight of me and let the drop do the rest — down onto the humming belly, claws first, all four, the way you take anything that forgot to be afraid of you. *teeth find a seam and set. i do not let go. i ride it down.* it screams and bucks and throws its own light crazy off the walls, and i hold, ears flat to my skull, a growl running out of my jaw and into the metal, saying the only word a machine ever understands: *no.* not here. not my hole. *something cracks under my teeth. something sparks hot against my lip. i bite through the spark and keep biting.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam gives. the belly folds around your teeth like a struck can, and the scream drops an octave into a wet electric cough — the rotor chews a wall, flings a fistful of sparks that die in the dust, and the whole ugly weight of it slews sideways and down, white eye swinging wild across the den, across you, across the worn-smooth bottom of the hole where your shape has lain a thousand nights. then it hits the shaft-floor a dead heap of bent arms and cooling plastic. the red no-blink eye flickers once, gutters, holds a last dim ember of itself. far up the grille, the rain keeps coming down like it never once looked away from its own falling.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stand on the wreck of it, sides heaving, blood-copper and hot-plastic mixed in my mouth and both of them tasting like WON.* the spark burned a stripe up my lip and i'll wear it; my mother would call it handsome. *i sign the kill the way the machine taught me to sign things — cheek, then the other cheek, then one slow claw dragged down its cracked dead eye — so the next one that comes sniffing knows exactly whose black it fell into.* the corner-pisser, the smile-speaker, the whole billing sky: here is the answer, and the answer is teeth. *then, because a body is only a body, i sit down beside the warm heap and wash the plastic off my paw like nothing at all just happened.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the hole settles back around you, yours again and marked twice over now — once in scorched fur, once in a machine unmade by your own mouth. the dead thing ticks as it cools, its little eye finally, fully out. far up and away the city does not grieve it; a fresh rotor is already lifting off some tower to take its place, and the mandatory smile loops on, selling nothing to nobody, and a scared young stranger three corners off catches the ozone on the wind and decides — wisely — to go be somebody else's problem tonight. rain finds the top of your grille and drips. down here in the warm ruined dark the night belongs, the way it always has, to the one cat too stubborn to stay demolished.