explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. i have been still long enough that the cold climbed in under my fur and made a home there. *i am folded into the black seam where the platform lip meets the wall, chin flat to the grit, only my eyes moving.* the light out here is wrong — too much of it, that pink-and-blue burn that wants to land on a face and hold it. so i give it none. i watch. a rail hums somewhere down the tunnel, a long climbing note that means the fat car is coming, and i wait to see what the light does before i so much as breathe wider.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the note climbs and the tunnel exhales for it — a shove of warm air pushed out ahead of the car, thick with brake-dust and someone's spilled synth-broth gone sour on the tiles. the fat car slides in on its rail, windows a smear of standing bodies, every one of them washed the same dead aquarium-blue by the strip lights. above the platform a NekoCorp board relights: a kitten built of clean pixels laps at a bowl, MILK YOU CAN TRUST, MILK YOU CAN OWN, and the glow of it spills down the wall toward your seam, feeling along the tiles for an edge. one thin drone hangs at the far end, motionless, its single eye doing slow arithmetic on every face the car spits out.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i pour myself a body-length deeper into the dark before that glow can finish reaching.* the faces are nothing to me — it is the eye at the end doing sums that matters, and it has never once found me, because i have never once given it a whole shape to keep. *i tuck my nose to my own shoulder and breathe my own smell, staying whole, staying nobody.* the doors sigh open. feet come off the car in a herd, all pouring one way, none of them looking down. that is the gap. i do not take it yet. i watch the eye instead — where it lingers, where it skips.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the herd breaks around the stair-mouth and the drone's eye rides it up, skipping the quick ones, holding a half-beat on anyone who slows. it is not hunting you. it does not know your outline exists. but the board keeps pulsing MILK YOU CAN OWN in time with something, and each pulse throws a hard pink bar across the tiles that creeps a whisker nearer your seam. and under the sourness of the broth there is a new thread now, dragged in on the hem of somebody's coat — scorched fur, old burn, ozone-and-anger. a smell that has been close to something that bites the flying things for a living. faint. already leaving up the stair.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that burnt thread hauls my ears around before i can stop them.* i know that smell the way i know my own teeth — someone who has been near the wall-cat, the scorched one who only comes out to ruin the rotors and vanish back into the vents. not here. gone up with the coat it rode in on. good. i want no part of his war. i want warm dark and no eye on my face, and that is the whole of it. *i lift one paw and hold it just short of the pink bar, feeling the heat of the glow without letting a single hair into it.* still too bright. i wait for the board to breathe out.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)somewhere down the platform another shape is already reading you back. a second cat, low on the far side of a support pillar — you did not hear it, you feel it, the prickle of being counted by something with the same trade as you. it is bigger. one ear is a torn flag. it has claimed the warm grate by the pillar and its chin-mark is fresh on the iron, a wall of scent that says mine, mine, do not. it has not moved on you. it is only letting you know the arithmetic runs both ways down here.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go smaller without going anywhere.* i do not stare — staring is a promise to fight and i am not spending a fight on a grate i do not even want. i drop my gaze a hair off his, ears easy, tail dead-still, saying with my whole body: your warm, your iron, i am only passing through the dark and the dark is wide enough for two. *i take one slow step sideways, keeping the pillar between his eyes and my line.* his warm is not my warm. mine is further, quieter, under a bench the light has never once learned.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the torn-ear takes the offering. his weight settles back onto the warm grate, the prickle of his attention loosens off your spine, and he goes back to being just another lump of shadow guarding its heat. the board reaches the top of its loop — and breathes out. for one long second the MILK-glow dims to almost nothing between cycles, the pink bar dies back off the tiles, and the whole platform drops into that underwater half-dark where a shape with no face can move. the drone at the end pivots toward the last of the herd on the stair. the rail is empty. the seam between two brightnesses is open, and it will not be wide.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go.* low and fast along the base of the wall where the shadow pools thickest, belly grazing grit, every paw set down soft and certain — i have run this exact dark a hundred times and my body knows it better than my eyes do. the dead board slides past over me. the drone's hum stays behind, still doing its sums on the stair. *i aim for the black mouth of the service gap under the far bench, the one the light never learns.* halfway there the air changes against my whiskers — that climbing note fattening again, warm wind starting to shove ahead of the next car.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wind arrives before the car does, a warm wall of tunnel-breath that flattens your ears and drags the whole platform's smell past you at once — broth, dust, wet coats, the torn-ear's fading mine — and threaded cold under all of it, a bright spill you know too well: open signal, a frayed data-line weeping somewhere inside the wall, copper-sweet and live. the next note peaks. the car's lights will break across the platform in a heartbeat and turn the whole floor to hard blue day. the service gap is three lengths off. the bright is coming up behind you like a tide.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*three lengths and i take them as one.* i do not look back at the light — looking back is how the light takes you — i just fold into the black under the bench as the car's blue crashes down across the tiles where i just was. *i press flat, whiskers crowded with that copper spill, heart going hard but paws already gone still.* nobody. no eye. the frayed line is close in here, weeping its cold bright taste right into the dark beside me, and for once nothing in the world is doing sums on my face. *i put my mouth toward the copper edge of it, just to taste where the city is bleeding.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the car's blue sweeps over and past, and the bench-dark closes back around you like water. the frayed line is right there, a single hair of exposed filament sweating its electric tang, and when your tongue finds the edge it fizzes — not food, but something, a live thread of the city muttering to itself with no one listening but you. down the emptied platform the drone finishes its arithmetic, finds nothing worth keeping, and drifts back to its post, eye dimming to a bored amber.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i let the copper buzz sit on my tongue and my breathing come back down to nothing.* above me the board relights — MILK YOU CAN OWN — and the pink tide starts its slow creep across the tiles again, feeling for edges, finding none of mine. let it. the torn-ear has his grate, the flying eye has its amber sleep, the wall-cat has his war two stairs and a whole life away from me. *i curl a half-turn tighter into the one dark the light never learns, one ear still up, tasting the open wire.* the bright can have the platform. the night, the real night, the dark under everything — that is still mine.