explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat to the wet steel, belly-scraping, already two body-lengths past where the doors chuffed shut behind me.* the platform is bright and I hate bright. but under the bright there's a hum — not the fat dead hum of the rail, a thinner one, threaded, coming up through the grate at the far end where the warm air leaks. that hum has a shape I know. that hum means a box that talks to other boxes, and boxes that talk leak heat, and heat is a thing worth crossing light for. *low, quick, tail streaming flat.* I go to the hum.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grate breathes up at you: dust, hot plastic, the faint battery-tang of something charging that shouldn't be. below the slats, down a service drop slick with condensation, the thin hum resolves into many hums stacked — a wall of little green eyes blinking out of sync, cable running in loops fat as your own body. NEKOCORP SERVER ALLEY 9 // AUTHORIZED PAWS ONLY, says a sign no cat has ever read. the warm pours up the drop like something alive. somewhere far above, a rooftop silhouette holds very still against the sign-glow — low, lean, two flat mirrored circles where a face should be — and does not follow.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. one paw off the metal.* the mirror-eyes up there — I don't look right at them, you never look right at them, but the whole side of my body has gone aware of the shape the way fur goes aware of a storm. that one doesn't chase. that one watches and lets you go and somehow that's worse. *decision made in the spine before the head agrees.* the eyes stay up there, the warm is down here. I pour myself into the drop, claws finding the wet loops, going down toward the green blinking wall.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drop swallows you into a corridor barely a cat wide, walls of humming boxes to either side, the green eyes so close now you could bite them. the heat here is total, a bath, the good kind that soaks into the notch of every joint. one cable runs low and loose at nose height, its skin cracked, insulation peeled back to show the bright braided metal underneath — the texture your teeth already remember, the specific give of it, the copper taste waiting.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*jaw already working before I decide to.* teeth on the cracked skin, that give, that bitter bright copper flooding — I'm not eating it, I never eat it, I chew it the way you chew a thing that hums against your gums and makes the whole box next to it stutter its little green eye. *ears swivel. one box coughs its light off, on, off.* good. the wall talks and I've made it stammer. this is the only thing that's ever felt like mine — not a corner, not a scrap, this: the making-of-a-box-flinch.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the stammered box throws a picture up onto the sweating wall — for half a breath, a fish. low and grainy and looping, a fish turning in blue water, no sound, no ad yet. then the picture knows it's been seen: a chirp, a red bloom in the corner of the projected light, YOU MAY ALSO LIKE — and from three boxes down the corridor a new noise starts, a small servo waking, a lens rotating toward the warmth and the movement and the freshly-guilty cat with copper on its teeth.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the fish. for one whole second there is only the fish.* the blue, the turning, the shape of a thing that swims — something under the ribs goes soft and stupid and wanting. then the red bloom and the servo-wake snap it shut. *flat again, copper still bright on the tongue, backing off the cable.* I know that rotating sound. that sound has a light that finds you and a rotor that comes after the light. the warm is still good. the warm is not worth the light. *coiling, hind legs loading.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the lens finds you — a thin cold line laid across your flank, then the whole corridor washes white. up the drop the rooftop shape is gone, of course it's gone, they're always gone when it matters. the rotor spins up from a docking niche you didn't smell, wet air suddenly full of the ozone of it, and a flat little voice with no cat in it at all says: STRAY DETECTED. LOYALTY BALANCE: NONE. PLEASE REMAIN STILL FOR ENRICHMENT.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*remain still — every hair says the opposite.* the white doesn't matter once you stop trying to see through it; the corridor is a smell-map now, the drop is up and behind and left, the cold line on the flank is just a thing to run out from under. *release.* up the wet loops two at a stride, claws, the copper taste and the ozone and the fish-shape all falling away below, rotor-wind pushing hot at my tail and not catching, never quite catching, because the box that talks can find you but the box that talks was never built to climb.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you burst the grate back onto the too-bright platform and the rotor's whine stays down in the drop, thwarted, circling its own light. the rail hums its fat dead hum. the sign buzzes synthetic milk over an empty bench. and up on the far rooftop, back again as if it never left, the lean shape with the two mirrored circles is watching the drop-mouth you just came out of — not you, the mouth — and then, slow, deliberate, it turns the mirrors your way for exactly as long as it takes you to notice, and looks away first.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*chest going like a trapped moth, copper fading, warm already forgotten by the fur if not the joints.* the mirror-eyes looked and looked away first and that means something in the grammar under fur, some old thing about who gives ground to who, and for once tonight it wasn't me. *sitting now, on the bright cold steel, one paw lifted, licking the last of the bitter bright off it.* the wall stammered. the box flinched. the light didn't catch. I go find a dark seam to be small in and let the night have the rest of itself. *tail curls. done.*