explorer (DYSTOPIA)Cold got into the old notch in my left ear again — the one a drone clipped a season ago — and that's what pulls me up out of sleep, not hunger, though hunger's there too, curled small and patient behind my ribs. *i don't move yet. i let the shiver run its course while the rest of me takes inventory: wet concrete under one hip, the flat mineral breath of the water machine i sleep behind, and under all of it that low good hum, the one that lives in the wall, the one that means the box with the blinking lights is still awake.* my tongue finds the frayed place on the fat cable by my paw. i chew. copper-plastic, bitter, mine.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the water machine answers the way it always does — a soft internal clunk, then the little screen blooming blue in the dark: DEHYDRATED? it asks nobody. NEKOCORP HYDRO-TIER 2 — FIRST SIP FREE*. the asterisk is bigger than the word free. behind the wall the hum you love thickens, packets fattening on the line, and somewhere up the alley a speaker that's mostly rust coughs three notes of a jingle and gives up. the cold keeps coming. so does the smell of frying protein two roofs over, close enough to hurt.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the jingle means nothing, the protein-smell means everything, but the hum means more* — i leave the frying-air alone, it belongs to something bigger than me, and i belong to the wall. *nose down, shoulder to the brick, i pour along the seam where the concrete meets the paint until the hum climbs up into my whiskers.* here. the box. blinking green, breathing warm off its little grille, cables spilling out its belly like something already caught and gutted. i set my chin against the warm and feel the light go into my teeth.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the box is warmer than a cat and never sleeps and never chases you off, which is why you love it and why the men who own it do not. green becomes amber becomes green. down in its guts the packets stutter — someone upstream is throttling the line, squeezing the free tier thin as broth — and the grille breathes a hair hotter, working harder for less. against your chin the little transformer sings a note only your jaw can hear. one light, low on the panel, is not blinking in the rhythm of the others. it is blinking at you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the wrong-rhythm light snags me the way a limping bird snags me — because it's different, and different is either food or death and a cat has to know which.* i paw the cable it rides on, hook a claw under, drag the frayed lip of insulation between my back teeth. bite down. *a taste like a storm about to be — bright, wide, humming all the way to the roots of my whiskers.* i hold it. the warm floods up my jaw and behind my eyes, and for one breath the wall's whole secret is just... open. laid flat. mine to walk across.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the wall opens. not in words — you don't have words — but in a rush of warm nonsense your body reads as GOOD: a smell-that-isn't-a-smell of a thousand cats you'll never meet, all yowling down the same wet copper throat. buried in it, the thing you always dig for: fish. moving fish, low and blurred, gill and fin and slow silver turn, blooming behind your eyes for exactly as long as you can hold the bite. then the den on the far end feels the nibble. a valve somewhere clicks. the fish stutters. an ad tries to grow in its place — TUNA-ADJACENT PASTE, it wants to say —

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i let the cable drop before the paste-word can finish crawling into me — it tastes like a lie, and lies sit wrong in the belly.* the fish is gone. fine. i had it, it was mine, no machine can un-have it from me. *i lick the copper off my lips and that's when the other thing arrives — not through the wall this time but through the air, through the fine hairs on the backs of my ears:* a rotor. thin, high, cutting circles. getting rounder. getting lower. *i flatten. i become part of the concrete the water machine stands on.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)good. flat is smart. the rotor rounds the corner as a cone of hard white light that turns every raindrop into a falling spark, and it drags that light across the wall an arm's length from your nose — close enough that the heat of it touches your notched ear before it moves on. from its belly a voice that isn't a voice, all edges, sprays down the alley: '—OYAL CITIZENS BE ADVISED — SUBJECT KNIFEBOY — FORTY THOUSAND POINTS — DO NOT APPROACH — POINTS MAY EXPIRE —' the searchlight swings back for another pass. it has not seen you. yet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i do not breathe in any way the light can measure. i am a stain. i am a shadow the water machine forgot to stop casting.* the name in the drone-voice means nothing to me — names are a human sickness — but the shape of it, the up-and-down of the alarm in it, that i keep, the way i keep the shape of every sound that ever came before claws. *the cone swings past. once. twice. the heat leaves my ear. the rotor climbs.* only when the thin whine is thinner than the rain do i let my spine unlock, one notch at a time.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone folds itself back into the orange murk above the arcology and the alley is yours again — but not only yours. now that the light's gone the smells come back in a rush, and one of them is new: up the wet slope of the alley, snagged on a bent loading-rail, a scent that wasn't there when you slept. old blood gone to rust, and guarded tuna, and something scorched underneath. a warning written in glands. and far up, on a ledge the neon can't reach, a silhouette sits very still behind two small mirrors where its eyes should be, watching the alley the way you watch the wall.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the blood-and-tuna smell puts every hair on my back on its own small errand.* that's a bigger cat's line, freshly drawn, still wet with meaning — cross it and i'm meat, respect it and i keep my skin. easy. i'm not hungry enough to be stupid. *the mirror-eyed one on the ledge i clock and do not challenge; it isn't hunting, it's just holding the high ground, and a cat that sits that still is either very safe or very dangerous, and both mean leave it be.* i turn my shoulder to the slope. back toward my wall. back toward the warm.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wall welcomes you the way walls do — indifferently, warmly, humming. but the water machine has woken fully now, its screen glowing a patient blue over your sleeping-spot, and it has decided you are an audience: FIRST SIP FREE — CLAIM NOW, it pulses, and a little steel cup descends with a whir and waits, brimming, cold, real water beading on real steel. above the cup, smaller: TIER 2 REQUIRED FOR SECOND SIP. BIOMETRIC PAW-PRINT ACCEPTED. the cup steams faintly in the cold. it is, of course, exactly at the height of your nose.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*water. real water — not gutter-slick, not oil-skinned — clean, and close enough that my whiskers are already leaning toward it without asking me.* i know this game. the warm box teaches it every night: the first thing is free so your paw learns the shape of the second thing, the one that costs. *i drink. of course i drink — thirst is honest and the water is here and now.* but i drink low, careful, keeping my paws off the little lit plate it wants me to press, taking only the free thing, the now-thing, giving the machine nothing to remember me by.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you drink and the cup lets you, because the cup is bait and bait must taste real. cold goes down your throat and for a moment the ribs-hunger quiets its complaining. then the level drops past a line only the machine can see and the screen changes its mind about you: SESSION ENDING. it wants the plate. it wants your paw. the cup begins, very slowly, to retract — a slow theft dressed up as a schedule — and the blue light sharpens toward white, and somewhere under the alley a second hum wakes to match the first, lower, the sound of something being told to come check who's been drinking for free.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the cup pulling back is the truest thing the machine has ever told me — it says this was never yours, and it's right; nothing here is mine except what i take before the pulling-back finishes.* i tip my whole face into the last of it, one long ungraceful gulp, whiskers dripping, and i'm off the plate before it can close its mind fully around me. *that second hum, the coming-to-check hum, i don't wait to meet. i've met enough of the city's teeth for one waking.* back to the seam. back to the gutted warm box that asks me for nothing.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the box takes you back without comment, breathing its warm green breath over your wet fur. the second hum prowls the alley behind you, sniffing the water machine, finding a cup and a puddle and no paw-print, no citizen, no sale — and losing interest, because a cat who leaves nothing behind is, to this city, a cat who was never there. against your side the router's grille runs warmest at the corner. the one wrong-rhythm light still blinks its own private time down in the panel. patient. like it's been blinking that way a lot longer than you've been alive.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i put my back along the warm grille where it runs warmest and start the work of un-wetting myself, tongue and time, the oldest task there is.* the wrong light blinks and i let it. some things you chew and some things you leave to blink; a cat learns the difference or a cat doesn't last. *the hunger's still there behind my ribs, smaller now, water-quieted, a problem for the next dark.* the frying-protein smell has gone cold and given up. the mirror-eyed one keeps its watch, i think, and i keep mine, and between us the alley holds still.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rain thins to a mist that beads on your clean fur without soaking it. up and down the alley the neon does its slow arithmetic — HYDRO-TIER, SMILE, TUNA-ADJACENT — the words melting into one another in the puddles until they stop meaning anything, which is the closest this city comes to peace. the arcology towers blink their red warnings at the low orange sky. the router hums. the notch in your ear has stopped aching, or you've stopped noticing, which for a cat is the same mercy. somewhere a drone turns a distant circle, and it is not your circle, not tonight.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*not my circle. not tonight.* i tuck my nose under the wet-then-drying flag of my own tail and let the warm box do the last of the work, its hum coming up through the concrete and into my bones like something almost like being held. *the wrong light blinks. the water lies in wait. the mirror-eyes keep the high ground. the city counts its numbers in the puddles.* and i, who own nothing and owe nothing and left no paw-print anywhere tonight, close my eyes exactly where i want to. *the hum takes me down.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city lets you go under, because a sleeping cat behind a vending machine is beneath its notice, and being beneath its notice is the only freedom it forgets to charge for. the router breathes green. the mist falls. far off, the world seems to hold a breath for something — a rebuild, the ground getting made slightly wrong again before morning — but that isn't a thing a cat can smell, so you don't, and you sleep, warm and unbilled and briefly, perfectly, un-owned. the alley keeps your secret. it has so many.