explorer (DYSTOPIA)A chime. that's what drags me up out of the warm — not light, not hunger, a three-note chime stapled to the inside of my own skull, the one that means the warm just cost me something again. *ears twitch before the eyes agree to open. the rest of me is still poured into the heat of the vent, boneless, some long unnumbered stretch of sleep i didn't pick and can't seem to finish.* i don't want to surface. surfacing is where the counting lives. *but the chime comes a second time, nearer, and rides in on a smell that doesn't belong to the warm — cold, wet, outside-shaped, wrong.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warm you're leaving was never warmth — it's a service. a rack of pods breathing recycled sleep back into each other, and under every one a little meter ticking in the dark, and yours ticks loudest because you've stayed longest. the chime rides a sick pink glow: DREAM RESPONSIBLY, the jingle half-eaten by a blown speaker so it loops out ...ream respon... ream respon... into the fur of your neck. the cold you smell is a door left open somewhere down the line, and through it the real night leaks in — wet iron, a far rotor, the fat forever-hum of towers that never once stop selling.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i unfold one limb at a time and every one of them is still half-dreaming — a tuna sea, a sunbeam i never sat in, a cooing voice folding buy, buy through the deep of it.* i shake the borrowed dream off my ears and it doesn't all come loose. *some of it stays stuck behind the eyes, sugared and not mine.* the counting-chime i hate worse than the cold, so i choose the cold. *off the warm lip of the vent, slow, pads meeting a floor that seems to bill me just for the touch, and i pour toward the open-door smell — belly low, tail flat, the long stiffness cracking out of my spine one notch at a time.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the floor keeps its quiet tally as you cross it, tick, tick, a coin for every pad-fall you won't see the bill for until it's grown too big to outrun. the corridor pinches past a den that reeks of cold appliance and colder devotion — a cat that lives married to a humming fridge in there, its love-light blinking recommend, recommend into the dark, an anniversary coupon curling on the wall. you don't stop for it. ahead the open door breathes rain, and set in the wall beside the frame a pod-meter blinks its red running total, patient as a heart that only ever learned how to add.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the red number counts and my spine already knows the rhythm — it's the same pulse the rotors keep right before they drop. add, add, add, and never once giving anything back.* i don't look at it twice. *i clear the door shoulder-first into the wet and the cold lands like a slap of being awake — real awake, all the way down, for the first time in a season i can't measure.* rain. actual rain, not the piped kind, not the sold kind. *i stand in it one whole breath and let it rinse the last of that sugared dream-voice down off my fur and into the grate.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alley takes you cold and honest. rain fine as static, a puddle throwing three broken signs back up at a sky that isn't listening. far off a speaker-cat's voice saws through the wet — YOU ARE NOT TRAPPED, THE CITY WALLS ARE FOR YOUR PROTECTION, PLEASE BUY NEKOCORP YOGURT — bright and cracking and stapled to some poor skull seventeen hours a day. you've heard that one asleep, bled into your rented dreams. it's worse out here awake. then, threading in under it, quartering the alley-mouths with a slow bar of white: a rotor. just one. low.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the rotor-word cuts clean through the smile-noise and every hair i own stands up to meet it.* awake means seen, and seen is the whole thing i slept a season to hide from. *i fold myself into the black seam behind a dead vending machine — the kind that only ever sold water a sip at a time — and go stone. chin to cold grit. breath gone shallow and small.* the white bar comes walking the wet toward me. *i give it no heat it can trust and no motion it can name. just a slit-eyed nothing, finally rested, and finally, meanly patient.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bar slides over the dead machine, over the sip-priced dark, and finds nothing worth a bounty — drifts on, rotor thinning east into the smile-noise. and then, for one held breath, the rain seems to hang. the puddle's three broken signs blink out together and come back a half-beat wrong, the whole alley redrawn just slightly off true, and a voice that isn't the city's and isn't yours threads up through the wet, flat and calm and far too aware: *there it is. the seam. i always notice the seam.* then it's gone. the rain falls like it never paused, and the alley is only an alley again.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*something just stepped across the place where the dream used to sit and i flinch at it the way you flinch at a stair that isn't there.* i don't know that voice. *i know it wasn't talking to me and knew me anyway — knew the seam, knew me sitting in it.* fur up my whole spine, i back out of the black quick and low and put the dead machine between me and the wrong-feeling air. *the belly picks now, of all the nows, to remind me it's a season empty.* good. hunger i understand. hunger doesn't watch me back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wet carries a thread of it to you — brine and blood, tuna packed cold, and laid over the top a scrawl of scent-mark that reads guarded, reads somebody already claimed this haul and left a handwritten note about it. down the block a torn flyer sags off a streaming wall, forty thousand points printed bold over a face the paste can't hold, the corner peeling before it's even set. not your fight tonight. but past it a loading dock breathes cold fish-air into the rain, and your season-empty belly does the slow math a rested cat can finally afford.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i leave the guarded haul to whoever cut that mark — i'm not stupid enough to steal from the shape that leaves notes.* the loose fish-air is a different song and it's singing to my ribs. *i cross to the dock low and glancing, the way you cross open ground when you've only just remembered you can be seen at all, and i work the seam of a split crate with one patient tooth — not tearing, tasting, the whole art is in the not-tearing.* cold brine floods the back of my tongue and my empty belly answers it loud enough to hear.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the crate skin parts sweet under the one tooth and gives up a slab of cold fish into your teeth, heavy, real, everything the season of dreaming only ever promised in low resolution. no billing chime rings. no meter ticks. the dock light buzzes its dead sodium amber and doesn't ask you for a thing. off past the stacks a rival crew's scent-line runs hard down the far wall — a boundary you'll respect tonight, for free — and above it all the towers keep humming their sell into a rain that's stopped listening.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i drag the fish back into the sip-machine's shadow and eat.* head down, fast and low, ears up and swiveling between each swallow because that's the only way a just-woken cat gets to eat. *the cold clings good to the roof of my mouth and every bite lands like proof — this is mine, uncounted, unbilled, mine.* the borrowed dream drains out of me slow with each mouthful, the tuna sea and the stolen sunbeam and the buy-buy voice, all of it running down into the dark of the dock where it belongs. *for the first time in a season i am awake and i am not sorry.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the fish gives up the last of itself and the night settles back to being only a night — steam, wet asphalt, the far speaker-cat still sawing PLEASE BUY, PLEASE BUY at a block that's asleep the paid way. behind you, somewhere down the racks of pods, your meter goes on adding in the dark, patient, certain you'll come back for the warm. maybe. not tonight. tonight the rain has stopped, the belly is full, and the counting can wait for a cat who, for once, isn't listening for it.