explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. i go still the way the cold concrete goes still, all four paws set on the painted line of the ramp, not one whisker moving, because the thing worth watching hasn't decided yet whether it's seen me. *no crouch, no creep — just weight held low and even, breath shallow through the nose.* there is a door at the bottom of this parking deck that breathes warm out its bottom edge, and the warm carries the one smell in the whole soaked city that pulls me before hunger does: hot dust, melted plastic, the tin-and-lightning reek of boxes that talk to boxes. i don't move toward it. not yet. i wait for the light to finish its sweep and forget me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the deck is a throat and you are the thing caught in it. overhead a strip tube stutters — tk. tk. tkkkk — laying down a wash of dead blue, dying, coming back, dying. oil-water sits in the tire grooves and throws the blue back up at you doubled. from the breathing door: a low steady 60-cycle hum, fat and warm, and threaded under it a thinner faster stitch of clicking — many small green thoughts blinking out of sync. a payment terminal on the pillar wakes as your shadow crosses it. **WELCOME VALUED FOOT-TRAFFIC** it chirps to no one, then sleeps. far off, up the ramp spiral, a rotor turns over once, testing the air, and goes quiet again.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the clicking is what owns me. *ears swivel forward, whole skull tuning to it like it's a fish flapping under ice.* i know that stitch. i know it in my teeth. i come off the line at last, low and pouring down the ramp, keeping to the black where the blue tube can't reach, tail flat, and the warm gets warmer and the melted-plastic smell gets loud enough to taste on the roof of my mouth. the door doesn't shut all the way — there's a paw-width of dark at its base, breathing. *nose in first. the heat combs back the fur along my cheeks.* somewhere past it something is chewing on a river of talk and i want in.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you spill through the gap into a closet no bigger than four cats laid nose to tail, and it is a furnace of light. a rack floor to ceiling, black boxes stacked in it, each with its own little constellation — green, green, amber, green — pulsing that fast stitch you followed down. bundles of cable sag between them like warm vines, some fat, some hair-thin, all of them humming a heat you can feel on your belly before you touch them. the air is scoured, dry, no rot, no rot at all — wrong for the city, clean the way a trap is clean. outside the door, bolted to the pillar, a machine glows: **AQUA-TIER™ · HYDRATION IS A SUBSCRIPTION · tap to begin your journey.** one bottle turns slowly behind the glass, lit like a relic.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)i don't care about the water. never have. *i put my chin against the fattest of the warm vines and the hum goes straight through the jawbone into the back of my eyes.* this. this is the good one. the river of talk runs through here and i want to open it. *mouth over the soft ribbed skin of the cable, and i bite — not hard, a worrying, back-teeth, the way you work a knot out of tuna gristle.* the outer skin gives with a small dry crackle and a new taste floods up cold and metal and bright, like licking the inside of a storm. a thread of it comes loose. i chew. the whole rack seems to lean an inch toward me, listening back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the constellation stops blinking. all at once, every green light on the nearest box goes hard amber and holds — and that is worse than any noise, a whole wall of tiny eyes opening on you at the same instant. then the sound: not a bark, not a rotor, a soft polite female chime from a speaker you can't see. **unusual activity detected on this node. a technician has been notified. thank you for choosing NekoCorp.** the warm vine in your teeth twitches once like a live thing. the amber light lays itself across your face and paints your own whiskers back at you on the closet wall, huge and trembling. up the ramp spiral, far off, the rotor turns over again — and this time it does not go quiet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the cable drops out of my mouth. spine already moving before the thought lands — flat, low, backward, out the paw-width dark and into the blue-stutter throat of the deck.* the polite voice follows me through the gap, still thanking me. i hate the thanking. the good taste is still on my tongue and i would come back for it, i always come back for it, but not with that rotor waking — the rotor is a different animal, the rotor has no manners at all. *ears pinned flat to the skull, belly scraping oil-water, making for the black stairwell mouth at the deck's far corner where the warm air leaks upward.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor crests the ramp behind you and the whole deck changes temperature of light — a white searchbeam slaps down, swings, and the oil-water throws it back so the floor and ceiling both go bright at once, nowhere to be small. the drone's down-blast pushes grit and cold across your hindquarters. it hunts in stripes, sweeping. and in the half-second the beam rakes the upper deck you catch it — a shape on the concrete lip above, another cat, dead still, unbothered, two flat mirror-discs where its eyes should be throwing the searchlight right back up at the machine like an insult. it does not run. it watches the drone the way you watched the door. then the beam swings on and the lip is empty and you were maybe never sure it was there.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't stop to wonder about the mirror-eyed one. filed, though — kept, the way i keep every scent that didn't try to eat me.* the stairwell mouth swallows me and the bright cuts off like a paw over a candle. up. i take the dark risers three at a bound, claws skittering on wet steel, the rotor-thump flattening against the concrete behind me until it's just a pressure in the floor and not a thing in the air. *lungs working, heart a fast wet drum, the storm-taste finally fading off my tongue.* a landing. a broken window weeping night air and rain-smell. i pour through it onto a ledge and the city opens up huge and blinking below me, a thousand racks like the one i bit, all humming, all talking, none of them mine yet.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the ledge is cold and honest and the rain finds you at once, laying the panic flat. below, the deck exhales its white beam in slow bored circles now, hunting a cat that isn't there anymore — the rotor already forgetting, already logging **incident resolved** to something that keeps counts. the district spreads out under the drizzle: arcology towers with their sides scrolling milk ads, a monorail stitching red between them, and everywhere, in every basement and closet and pillar, that same fat 60-cycle hum you can feel in your paw-pads through the stone. the river of talk runs under all of it. somewhere a technician has not, in fact, been notified. somewhere a bottle turns slowly behind glass for no one. the storm-taste is gone from your mouth but you know the door now. you know the way back down.