explorer (DYSTOPIA)The hum. it's in the concrete first — a fat low buzz coming up through the pads of my paws, steady, warm-feeling even though nothing here is warm. *i flatten my belly to the ground and let it climb my legs, reading it.* not a drone. drones stutter. this one doesn't stutter. this one is a wall somewhere close, breathing electricity, and behind that wall is the good warm and the wires with the sweet bitter skin i like to work between my teeth. *i follow it, one slow paw at a time, whiskers wide.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the buzz thickens as you go, folding into a hundred smaller buzzes stacked like sleeping pigeons behind a grille of hot painted steel. warm breath sighs out through the slats — dust, scorched dust, the tin-and-battery tang of machines that never sleep. ((( a cracked speaker overhead loops a jingle, warped: *neko—neko—nekocorp, purr-formance you can trust~* ))) the grille has a corner peeled back where smaller things than you have gone before. beyond it: a red glow, blinking. a green glow, steady. a nest of black cabling drooping low enough to touch. somewhere deeper, water drips onto something that sparks each time.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the peeled corner takes me easy — i pour through it, shoulders then hips then tail, and land soft in the red-and-green dark.* the sparking water i leave alone. i learned sparks with my nose once and my nose remembers. *the drooping cable though — i rise onto my back legs and hook it down with one paw, get my teeth on it, and grind sideways.* the skin gives that little rubbery snap i like. underneath it hums louder, angrier. good. *i chew, ears swivelling, keeping one on the drip and one on the dark behind me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable weeps a thin thread of ozone where your teeth open it, and every red light in the nest blinks twice, together, like a held breath. then — a voice, not through the speaker this time but small and flat, from a plastic node stuck to the wall: *unauthorized draw detected. sector nine. logging.* the drip stops sparking. far off, up through the shaft, a new sound: rotor. not close. not yet. the warmth around you keeps breathing, indifferent, but the black cabling twitches once as somewhere a system reroutes itself around the wound you made.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the flat little voice means nothing and everything — no smell to it, no heat, just that dead-plastic tone that always comes before the sky-noise does. *my ears pin. i let the cable drop from my mouth, still humming, and go low.* the rotor is a rumor still, two turns of air away. i have time. *but i take one more — i drag my chin hard along the fat warm pipe, corner to corner, laying my mark over the machine-smell so the dark knows whose wall this is now.* then i melt back toward the peeled grille, slow, quiet, the taste of copper and bitter skin still bright on my tongue.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your mark sits there, small and animal and stubborn against a wall that cost more than every cat in this district will ever eat. the city doesn't care, but the city notices — the plastic node clicks, and a thin lens above it rotates a few degrees to keep you in its dark little eye. out through the grille the alley has changed while you worked: rain again, finer now, and up on the fire-stair across the gap a shape sits utterly still, backlit by a dead sign, two flat mirrored discs where eyes should be, watching the shaft mouth. it does not move. it has been there a while. the rotor-throb rounds a corner and gets louder.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stop half in, half out of the grille.* the mirror-eyed one across the gap isn't hunting — no crouch to it, no weight forward, tail not doing the counting-down twitch. it's just... keeping. i've seen its kind before, sitting where they can see everything and be seen by nothing that matters. *i give it the slow blink, once, one thief to another, and it doesn't give it back — but it doesn't raise the alarm either.* the rotor is the real thing now, chewing the air closer. *i can't cross open ground with the sky awake. i press flat under the drooping cable-shadow and wait, breathing shallow, counting the throb.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the throb becomes a wind. it comes down the shaft-mouth sideways — a squat drone, belly bristling with little cold eyes, its searchlight a hard white bar that swings and stutters across wet steel. *scanning,* the plastic node offers up helpfully. the light bar sweeps toward the grille, toward the cable, toward the warm dark where you are folded small. it catches the peeled corner. it catches the fresh bite-wound on the cable, weeping ozone. it stops there, holding on the damage, and the drone's pitch shifts up — interested. above and across, the mirror-eyed shape finally moves: one paw, deliberate, knocking a loose bolt off the fire-stair so it rings down into the alley behind the drone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the ring behind the drone is a gift and i don't waste gifts. *the second its cold eyes flick toward the sound i am gone — not back through the grille but up, claws into the cable, along it paw over paw into the black where the searchlight can't bend.* the wire sways under me and i ride the sway. below, the white bar stabs where i was and finds only my chin-mark and my leftover warmth. *i climb toward the good hum's source, toward heat and dark and the promise of more sweet bitter skin, tail flowing behind me like smoke.* the mirror-eyed one is already gone from its stair. of course it is.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable carries you up into a cathedral of heat — racks on racks, blinking in slow tides, breathing that scorched-dust breath so thick now it beads on your whiskers. the drone's light is a memory two turns below. here it's just you and the hum and a thousand small green stars. but the warmth has a wrongness folded in it: one rack, off in the corner, isn't blinking in the tide with the others. it's dark. cold, when everything else is hot. and taped to its face, curling at the edges, a paper thing — a drawn face, whiskers, a scrawl beneath it your eyes can't read but your nose can: old blood, corporate tuna-oil, and the ink-and-adrenaline reek of something left as a message. the dark rack hums to itself on a frequency that makes your back teeth ache.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*my teeth ache and i don't like it — a hum with no warmth is a hum with something dead at the bottom of it.* the paper-face smells like a warning left by something with claws and a grudge, and i respect a grudge. *i don't touch the dark rack. i circle it wide, low, hackles lifting on their own.* whatever marked this spot wanted the machines to know, not the cats — but i know now too, and knowing is the same as eating, almost. *i tuck the smell away behind my eyes to carry out with me. then the good warm racks call again and i turn my back on the cold one, following the fattest hum to a gap where the cabling dives down into somewhere even hotter.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gap breathes up at you like an open mouth — the hottest air yet, and under it, finally, the thing your whole body has been walking toward without a word for it: food-smell. not tuna-oil ghosts, not scorched dust. real. a torn foil pouch of something protein-wet snagged on a bracket three tail-lengths down, dropped by a maintenance hand that never came back for it. the hum down there is a low contented roar. but the walls of the gap are slick with condensation, and the drop past the foil goes down and down into a dark that doesn't echo back. one slip is the whole story. up behind you, faint, the plastic node again: *sector nine draw... resolved. closing log.* the searchlight is gone. the night, for one breath, is yours.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*food rewrites me.* the ache under my ribs from two nights ago flares up loud and shoves the caution sideways. *but i don't jump — i'm not a kitten and this gap has teeth.* i test the first bracket with one paw, weight it, feel the wet steel try to slide me off and don't let it. then the next. *i go down the throat of the gap slow and deliberate, spread wide, three points always holding, the roar of the hum swallowing the sound of my own breathing.* the foil is close now. i can smell the salt of it, the fat. *i reach.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your claws hook foil. it crackles — loud, obscene, in all that hum — and the pouch tears wider and the smell blooms up rich and salt-fat and real into your open mouth before you've even eaten. it's yours. nobody left to take it. down in the roaring hot dark of a machine that will never know your name, wedged safe between two brackets, you eat. the city grinds on overhead — rain, rotor, jingle, the endless blinking tide of green stars — indifferent, enormous, and for these few swallows completely, utterly beaten. warmth in your belly. warmth on your fur. the drip, somewhere, has stopped sparking for good.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i eat until the ache lets go, and then i eat a little past that, because the ache always comes back and the foil won't.* when it's bare i lick it anyway, and lick my paws, and wash my face where the salt caught in my whiskers. *the hum holds me. the heat holds me.* somewhere out there the sky is still awake and the mirror-eyed one is watching something else and the cold rack keeps its dead frequency and none of it is here, in this hot safe seam, with a full belly. *i tuck my paws under, fold my tail over my nose, and let one ear stay up for the both of us.* the wall is mine tonight. i marked it. the hum sings me down.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)one ear up, one ear down, a small warm animal fact wedged into a wall that cost a fortune and feels nothing. above, the megacity keeps its promises to no one: rain on ten thousand roofs, a drone banking toward some other sector's trouble, the jingle looping itself hoarse — *neko—neko—purr-formance you can trust~* — and none of it reaching down here, to the hum, to the heat, to you. the green stars blink their slow tide. sleep, thief. the wall will still be yours when you wake. the city is too big to notice it lost.