explorer (DYSTOPIA)Empty. the belly is the first thing, it's always the belly — a hollow drawn tight up under the ribs, and the old notch in my left hind leg that aches worse when i've gone a night without. *low along the concrete lip of the loading dock, weight forward, hunger doing the thinking for me.* the whole slab reeks of guarded fish and cold machine oil and, faint under that, the copper-old-blood smell of my own mark laid down on the bollard where the ramp turns. mine. still mine. the ache says move, the nose says the crates came in tonight.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dock breathes back at you. sodium light buzzing in a sick amber wash, half the tubes dead, and stacked under the good ones: crates. NEKOCORP blue, shrink-wrapped, sweating cold — the smell that lives behind your teeth, tuna packed in brine and nitrogen, close enough to taste on the wet air. a forklift sits dead at the far end, one headlight still on like a lazy eye. between you and the crates: a painted yellow line, a scuffed scanner arch, and the small red heartbeat of a motion node blinking blinking blinking. somewhere overhead a speaker coughs half a jingle — *fresh for the fam-* — and dies.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. one paw still lifted.* that red blink counts like a pulse and i've felt this pulse before, felt it in the leg that got clipped last time i got greedy. i drop flat, chin to concrete, and let the cold come up through my chest while i read the room the slow way — the drips, the dead forklight, the gap where the amber light doesn't reach along the wall. not the yellow line. never the line. i go the shadow. *belly-crawl, one shoulder at a time, tail dead-still so it won't wave in the light.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shadow-lane rewards you — the motion node's little red heart doesn't so much as skip; its cone points at the arch, at the line, at where a dumber cat would go. cold seeps into your pads, machine-oil grit clinging to the fur of your chin. you reach the base of the nearest stack. up close the shrink-wrap ticks and pops as it warms against the amber light, and the brine-smell is a wall now, a solid thing, hunger made physical. a torn corner of plastic flutters at whisker height. and then — far off, above the roofline, a new sound threads in. rotors. not close. not yet. a patrol arc, sweeping wide.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears pin flat before i've decided anything — the leg remembers rotors even when the rest of me is drunk on fish.* that sound wears a bounty on it. i know because the bounty is mine, i've heard my own worth droned out over this dock in that flat rotor-voice more nights than i've had full bellies. i don't run yet. i hook a claw into the torn corner and pull, slow, until the plastic gives with a whisper and the first cold silver body slides loose into the dark with me. *jaw closes. the weight of it, the give of it.* one for the belly. and — the notes. i drop the little folded thing i've carried in my cheek, right where the crate was full.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the crate exhales its cold into the gap you've opened. your prize is real in your teeth, heavy, brine and blood and everything the ache was screaming for. the folded scrap you leave behind soaks up dock-water instantly, ink already blurring — *nice supply chain* half-legible before the night eats it. and the rotors bend. the wide arc narrows. that flat synthetic voice rolls down off the wall now, bouncing between the dead tubes: **NOTICE. FELINE ASSET FLAGGED. LOYALTY RECLAMATION IN PROGRESS. FORTY THOUSAND POINTS —** and a searchlight blooms white at the mouth of the dock, sweeping the yellow line first, exactly where you did not go.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*already moving.* the searchlight is a stupid animal, it hunts the open, so i pour myself the other way — back into the oil-dark seam along the wall, fish clamped tight, the ache in my leg lit up bright and furious now but legs don't get a vote when the rotor-voice is saying my number. i don't look at the light. looking at the light is how they take your eyes. *low, fast, three bounds and a tucked slide behind the dead forklift's wheel, chest heaving, silver still in my jaw.* the good headlight throws a fat shadow. i live in the fat shadow.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the forklift's dead bulk swallows you whole. the drone slides in over the crates, rotors chopping the brine-air into gusts that flatten your fur, its underbelly a bar of scanning green that crawls across the stacks — over the torn wrap, over your soaked little note, pausing there a beat too long as if the machine is trying to read an insult it wasn't built to feel. the green bar sweeps the yellow line. the arch. the scanner. it does not think to sweep under the thing that cannot move. **RECLAMATION WINDOW: EXPIRING. POINTS NON-TRANSFERABLE. CANNOT BE COMBINED WITH OTHER OFFERS.** the flat voice almost sounds tired.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*a laugh that comes out as a silent bared-teeth thing around a mouthful of fish.* expiring. it's always expiring. they built a hunger machine to catch a hungry cat and even the machine's want has a coupon date on it. i wait it out in the fat shadow, breathing oil, the ache in my leg going from fire to a dull hot throb i can walk on. the green bar drifts off my note and up, and up, and the gusts ease. *i test the air. brine, oil, ozone off the rotors — and something else, high and cold, from up on the roofline. a watching smell.* not the drone. a cat. one that doesn't want to be smelled and mostly isn't.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)up on the lip of the arcology's low roof, against a billboard cycling synthetic-milk pink, a silhouette that isn't a vent or an aerial. sat very still. two flat mirror-glints where eyes should be, catching the billboard and throwing none of it back — light goes into that shape and doesn't come out. it isn't looking at you. it's looking at the drone, tracking the machine's dumb green sweep with the patience of something that has watched a thousand of these and found them all boring. the drone lifts, tilts, and peels away toward its wide arc again, bounty unclaimed, the searchlight folding shut. the dock goes back to amber buzz and drip.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i know that shape. everyone on the low roofs knows that shape.* the one whose eyes the light can't climb into, who watches the watchers for sport. we don't yowl at each other. that would be beneath the both of us. i just tip my head a half-inch so the mirror-eyes catch me catching them, one thief to one thing-that-sees, and get a slow single blink back — the closest this city gets to *carry on.* *i carry on.* fish in jaw, leg throbbing warm, i slink back toward the bollard that says mine, ready to eat where my own smell can guard my back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the silhouette holds its blink a beat, then simply isn't there anymore — no leap, no scrabble, just an absence where a shape was, the way that particular rooftop presence always leaves. your bollard waits at the turn of the ramp, your mark strong on it, home as much as anything is home down here. above, the billboard finishes its cycle: a fat cartoon kitten lapping from a glowing bowl, **NEKOCORP SYNTHETIC MILK — PURR-CHASE JOY**, the audio blown out to a wet crackle. the rain, which never really left, thickens. and far under the street, felt more than heard, a copper hum you know from other alleys — somebody's stolen router, pulling one low-res fish video down through the dark.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i settle against the bollard, fish pinned under both front paws, and finally — finally — let the belly win.* the first bite is cold and clean and worth every rotor. i eat with my ears still up, because that's the only way a wanted cat eats, but i eat. the copper hum comes up through the concrete, familiar, another cat's small stolen joy threading under the whole rotten city, and it's almost company. *tongue rasps the last silver flake off my paw.* forty thousand points on my head and here i am, full, in the rain, on my own corner. let it expire.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rain closes over the dock like a lid. down the block a reclamation drone pastes a fresh flyer to a wet wall — your face, or a machine's guess at it, forty thousand printed bold, the corner already peeling before the paste has set. nobody stops to read it. a NEKOCORP loyalty terminal on the corner chirps to no one, **TIER: NONE**, and powers down. your bollard is warm now where you lie against it, the notch in your leg quieting to an ember, brine still on your breath. the city hums its stolen-router hum, indifferent and endless, and for one held stretch of rain nothing at all wants anything from you. *the night belongs to whoever moves quietest. tonight, briefly, that's you.*