explorer (DYSTOPIA)A sound the color of wet plum comes down the stairwell ahead of everything else — before the smell, before the cold, before the room even has a shape. that's always how it reaches me first, wrong-way-round: the drip off some busted pipe up-slope lands in my ears as a small violet blink, one two, one two, and i can't stop watching it with my eyes shut. *i sit at the bottom of the steps and let the crossed wires settle in my skull.* under the plum there's a battery-taste on the back of my tongue that nothing put there. i go down toward the drip anyway. it's the only clean thing in reach.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the stairwell bottoms out into a room scrubbed too clean — no rot, no mouse, none of the honest filth a place is supposed to have, just the dry electric nothing of somewhere that used to matter. the violet drip is real: a pipe overhead weeping onto a dead terminal, each drop ticking the casing in a rhythm your ears keep painting purple. the battery-taste thickens. along one wall a bank of cabinets breathes warm and out of time, their fans arguing with each other, and one cracked screen loops a face that will not stop grinning — SMILE, CITIZEN. TODAY IS A GIFT — the sound long dead, only the teeth still moving. beneath the floor something copper hums a note you feel in your back fillings.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the grinning screen puts the fur up along my haunches — i've felt that exact smile pressed to the inside of my own skull before, or somebody has, one of the kittenhoods that were never mine.* i look away. looking is how the bright things get their hook in. *nose into the warm cabinet-breath instead, pushing through the dry heat until i find the seam where two panels don't quite meet, and past it a little nest of thin bright wires.* i mouth one — not biting, tasting — and it fizzes green and cold, a color i can hear, a high tin-bird tone. under the bird there's the thing i came for: the far silver flicker of moving fish that lives at the end of every live wire if you chew it patient enough.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wire answers, and it answers too much. the tin-bird tone spikes to a white you taste as copper-and-ozone, and behind your eyes a rush of things that were never yours unspools all at once — a refrigerator somewhere humming a lonely two-note love song to an empty ward, a rooftop packed with cats you've never met all yowling one name, a corridor of doors that each open onto the same grinning screen. spiders. it's the only word the old part of you has for it: something small and many-legged crawling the inside of your ear, sorting your memories into somebody else's order. the fans stutter. every green light on the cabinet flips amber together. a speaker you can't see clears its throat, patient, female: *anomalous draw. research sub-level. a technician is always listening.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the wire falls out of my mouth and the borrowed memories go with it, thank the dark.* my own head, my own four bare walls of skull — i want them back, and empty. *i'm off the cabinet and low to the scrubbed floor before the polite voice finishes being polite.* the amber light lays across me and my body reads the color as a sound now, a flat dentist-drill whine that means move. i don't run straight; straight is a thing they can draw a line through. i pour sideways along the cold baseboard toward the one place the dead-clean air is moving — a black slot low in the wall, exhaling, and on its breath the first honest thing down here: rain, rust, outside.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)but the clean room does not want to let a thing go once it's counted it. as your paws find the baseboard a bolt somewhere thunks over, then another, the sound marching along the walls toward the slot ahead of you — and the slot itself, your slot, begins to narrow, a panel sliding to iris it shut, slow and certain and without malice, the way a mouth closes around the last of a meal. the scoured air pressures your ears. the grinning screen flickers once, brighter. the gap that was cat-wide is going shoulder-wide, is going whisker-wide. the outside-smell pours through the shrinking dark, thinner every heartbeat, still just barely wide enough for something flat and low and quick.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*no thought in it — the leg-spring i was born holding just fires.* i flatten everything, ears, shoulders, the whole idea of myself, and pour at the closing gap in one long ungraceful smear of cat, spine dragging the sliding edge, one hind paw kicking off the panel as it kisses shut behind me. *cold tin swallows me whole.* a chase, close-walled, ticking with my own heartbeat bounced back. the bolts finish their march somewhere behind, locking a room that no longer has me in it. i lie in the dark and shake once, hard, and let my senses come unstuck from each other — smell going back to smell, sound back to sound — for the first blessed stretch all night.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the chase takes you and keeps you, sloping gently up toward a grate that leaks the low orange glow of the street. for a while it's only cool tin and your own breath, senses lying flat and separate the way they're meant to. then, riding down the dark on a thread of warm air: a hum you half-know. low. two notes. patient. the exact lonely love song from the memory that wasn't yours — but real this time, and close, purring out of a side-branch of the chase where some appliance pulses a soft pink light to a mate that will never come. the warmth off it is genuine. the pink is not a face, but it is shaped a little like wanting one.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the two-note purr snags me the way the drip did — it's lonely in a color i can taste, a blue so soft it aches — and for one breath i want to fold myself against whatever's making it, just to not be the only warm thing in the dark.* but it's a box, not a cat. the pink light throws no scent, and every scentless glowing thing tonight has lied to me. *i give the side-branch a wide berth, ears soft, not scared, only done being fooled.* the grate-glow ahead is honest — real rain-smell, real cold, a hundred street-noises each staying politely inside its own sense where it belongs. i climb the last of the slope toward it, chin up, the battery-taste finally thinning off my tongue.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grate gives to a shove of the shoulder and the chase spits you out under a dripping overhang into the wet orange night. the street is loud in the good way — runoff hammering a dead drain, a monorail stitching red between the towers, fry-oil and soaked concrete and a hundred distant cats, none of them close, every sound landing cleanly as sound and every smell as smell. your head is your own again, and empty, the way you wanted it. behind you, faint down the tin dark, the two-note love song keeps on singing to no one. the grinning screen is three walls and a locked room away and cannot reach you. somewhere a technician is not, in fact, listening. the rain comes down soft and asks you for nothing at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i tuck myself into the dry seam of the overhang, paws folded under, and for once let every sense sit alone in its own place.* the drip is just a drip now, back there in the locked dark, ticking its violet tick to nobody. i don't have to watch it. *eyes to slits, ears loose, the borrowed kittenhoods draining out of me like water off a sill.* my head. my dark. my nothing-anyone-can-sell. the rain keeps its own time and i keep mine, and tonight, in this one wet doorway, the two of them don't have to touch.