explorer (DYSTOPIA)Copper. that's the first thing — copper laid over hot plastic, the taste-you-can-smell of something metal running too warm nearby. *my tongue's already out reading it before i've decided to move.* i know this flavor. it means boxes that think, stacked in the dark, breathing out heat i can sleep against. the water-vending hulk hums behind me, sealed, useless, three credits a sip and i have no credits, only teeth. i turn my back on it and follow the copper deeper in.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the copper thickens as you go, and with it a low steady exhale — not wind, machine-breath, warm and dry from a hundred slotted vents. the alley narrows into a gut of stacked server cabinets, amber standby lights blinking out of sync like a slow rain of eyes. cabling sags overhead in fat black loops, some of it chewed already, insulation peeled back to bright wire that catches the neon spill. underfoot the concrete goes from cold to blood-warm in one step. somewhere in the racks a fan bearing is dying, a thin whine that scrapes the inside of your ears. NEKOCORP stencil on the nearest cabinet, half flaked away: SERVER ALLEY 9 — AUTHORIZED PAWS ONLY.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*authorized is a smell, not a word, and mine's already all over these racks.* i find the loop i left half-stripped last night, still tasting of me and ozone, and set my back teeth into the peeled part. not to eat. to feel — the wire hums a different song when the boxes are pushing something big through it, and tonight it's fat and fast, jaw-buzzing, the good kind. i work along the loop with my whiskers, hunting the warm spot where the signal pools thickest.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warm spot is a squat box lashed to the third cabinet with cable-tie, its ports blinking green-green-green then, for one breath, all red. the jaw-buzz spikes — floods your teeth, floods the wire, floods the whole loop bright and loud — and a smell rides in on it that isn't heat: clean, sharp, wrong. a scent of nothing, of scrubbed metal, the smell that comes right before the sky starts paying attention. up in the racks a speaker no bigger than a beetle coughs to life against your ear: "nekocorp thanks you for your unmetered curiosity. a representative has been dispatched." the green lights all go red and stay red.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*teeth off the wire. now.* the buzz dies in my jaw and the quiet it leaves is worse than any noise — dispatched is a word i taste as rotor-wash before it ever gets loud. i drop flat between two cabinets where the heat-shadow is thickest, tuck my tail, make myself a warm nothing against warm metal. one ear stays up. i don't run yet. running is what the light wants. i wait for the shape of the thing coming.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)it comes as pressure before sound — the air in the gut of the racks gets heavier, pushed down from above, and then the thrum arrives, four-rotor, patient, the kind that isn't chasing anything yet because it hasn't found it. a searchlight drops through the cable-loops and swings, slicing the dark into moving bars. it passes over your heat-shadow once and keeps going — the cabinets are all as warm as you are, and for this one second that is the only reason you exist. the beetle-speaker in the rack keeps chirping your position in a language the light hasn't learned to read yet: "curiosity logged. curiosity logged. curiosity lo—"

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the light passes and i let one held breath out slow through my nose.* the little speaker keeps saying me over and over — so i take the little speaker. one paw, claws, hook the cable-tie and pull it loose from the cabinet, and it drops chirping into my mouth mid-word. plastic and battery-tang, foul, i don't care. a mouth is the quietest place in this whole alley to keep a thing that won't shut up. now i move — low, belly-dragging, along the blood-warm seam of concrete toward the dark where the racks end and the wet begins.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the speaker fizzes against your tongue, its voice gone to a wet mumble, then nothing. the warm seam runs you out of the racks and spits you into a slot of open night — rain again, fine and cold, needling down between two arcology flanks that go up further than any cat has cause to look. and there, four rooftops over and one down, a shape sits where no shape should be comfortable: a cat-silhouette, dead still on a ledge, two flat discs where its eyes should be catching the neon and giving none of it back. it isn't looking at you. it's looking at the drone. it does not blink. the rain doesn't seem to land on it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i know that stillness — it belongs to the one whose eyes throw nothing back.* i've crossed scent-trails with it before, always at the edge of trouble, never in it. the flat-disc cat watches the sky so the rest of us don't have to, and a cat that watches the sky is a cat worth staying downwind of and nothing more. i dip my head once, the small alley-courtesy, and do not close the distance. the drone is its problem now. i turn the other way, speaker still dead in my cheek, and follow the cold toward water-sound.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)downwind carries you along a drip-line of runoff into a service canyon where the rain collects and runs a thin black river down a scored gutter. the water-sound is loud enough here to eat the last of the rotor-thrum behind you. a cracked NEKOCORP hoarding flickers above the gutter, a smiling animatronic cat holding a can, its jingle looping through a blown speaker so it comes out as a threat: "drink — drink — drink — dri—". the black river carries a smell of tuna-oil, faint but real, upstream and to the left. your dead speaker has gone cold in your mouth. the night is yours again for exactly as long as you keep moving.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*tuna-oil upstream and to the left — the wire can keep its songs.* i spit the dead speaker into the black river and watch it go, one small drowned voice sent down to wherever the city keeps the things it stops needing. the copper and the ozone and the scrubbed-metal wrong of that box all rinse off my tongue, replaced by the one honest smell in this whole gutter. hunger takes the wheel from curiosity, the way it always does in the end. i put my nose to the current and go up it, low and quiet, into the left-hand dark.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the left-hand dark takes you in without complaint. the tuna-oil thread pulls tighter, warmer, realer with every pawlength — past a subscription-locked kibble machine humming its little theft, past a storm grate breathing up the smell of a hundred cats who came before you, up toward a loading seam where the scent finally pools into something you could put teeth into. behind you, far down the canyon, the searchlight sweeps the empty racks once more and finds only warmth with no shape in it. curiosity logged, and lost. the counter ticks. the city redraws the alley a little darker where you used to be, and you are already somewhere else, following the only question that ever really mattered.