explorer (DYSTOPIA)My ear is chewing on a sound that has no smell, and that is the wrong order for things. *the patch behind it — the itch that never scabbed, the one the credit-cats slid under my skin for twelve coins — has gone hot again, and when it goes hot the world hands me extra i never asked for.* right now it pours a flavor down the back of my tongue like a licked battery, tinny and green, and tonight green is a taste and not a color. i am somewhere going up. three of my four pads read cold concrete. the fourth reads a hum the others can't feel, and i have not trusted the fourth pad since the basement. *i climb anyway. up is quieter than down.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shaft goes up forever in short cold flights, every landing a copy of the last, so that climbing feels like standing still while the building lies to you about it. rebar-cold, piss-old, the ghost of a thousand cable-runs stripped out and sold for scrap. your hot patch drinks the air and renders it into flavors you never ordered: the fat electrical throb two floors up tastes of copper pennies, the far elevator counterweight sliding in its throat tastes of wet chalk. a dead maintenance strip stutters overhead, and each time it stutters your bad pad swears the stair just moved. high above, a fan the size of a car turns slow and pushes warm exhaust down the well — and riding it, faint, wrong, unmistakable: singed fur. something burnt has been up these stairs. not long ago.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*singed fur.* my nose files it clean before the patch can twist it into a sound — real information, cat information, the kind i still trust with my life. big tom. angry under the burn, that flat scorched reek of a body that's been too close to something that spins and bites. *i've smelled that one before, on chewed-up drones down in the plaza — the tom who lives in the vents and leaves them bitten.* i don't want his fight. but cats like that don't climb corp stairs for the view. *i pin my ears against the flicker and keep to the wall-seam where my shadow can't be counted, and i follow the burnt smell, not the taste.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the next landing has a panel set into the wall at cat-height, cracked, half-dead, a NekoCorp face that will not finish dying: >> CONNECTIVITY IS A RIGHT YOU CAN AFFO— >> then a wash of static, then the smiling loyalty tone starting over. your patch grabs the jingle and force-feeds it to you as a taste — synthetic strawberry, chemical and clinging, so thick you paw at your own mouth to get it off. under the panel the paint is scored: claw-marks, deep, four parallel canyons, and the little junction box beside it hangs open with its guts pulled into the air. the insulation on the fattest cable has been stripped by teeth. the copper underneath is bright and bitten and cold. the burnt scent is stronger here. it goes up.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*my belly cramps at the sight of the bitten copper — not because i want it, but because my belly is empty and it has started reading anything bright as maybe-food.* i haven't eaten since the rain before this rain. *i put my nose to the stripped cable and read the tom's teeth in it: he chews to open, not to eat, the way i knock racks to hear them wrong.* he's hunting the same thing i am — the warm dumb blood inside the machines — he's just louder about it, and louder gets you caught. *i lick the strawberry-ghost off my lip, hate it, and climb past the dying panel toward the fan, toward the exhaust, toward where the warm is coming from. hunger makes the decision my caution would've argued with.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wall-seam carries you up two more flights to a service door hung off one hinge, breathing warm through the gap. beyond it: a plant room, low red standby-glow, racks of humming grey boxes stacked into a ceiling you cannot see the top of. the singed-tom scent is worked into everything here, days deep, and braided through it now the sweeter reek of chewed insulation. your patch strikes like a struck bell the instant you cross the threshold: the whole room is screaming in a frequency your ear renders as hot pennies and drowned bees, so loud down your throat you nearly retch. one rack, dead center, wears its face panel clawed off. its little lights do not blink in the pattern the others keep.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the taste-scream nearly folds me in half — i drop to a crouch, jaw hanging, and let the drowned-bee flavor drain off my tongue before it drags the rest of me down with it.* this is the curse of the patch: it makes the loud things louder and i can't shut the door on them the way an honest cat should. *i breathe through my mouth, shallow, and make myself small behind the nearest warm box.* the clawed-open rack tugs at me — its lights are wrong, out of step, and wrong-rhythm is a thing my belly reads even when my ear is lying its head off. *i don't go to it yet. i hold in the box-shadow and listen for the only thing that matters: is he still in the room with me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)he isn't — but the room already knows you are. the clawed rack's wrong lights were never his doing; they're a wound the building has noticed all on its own. a panel by the door wakes with a soft chime, warm NekoCorp voice pouring out sweet as milk gone off: >> MAINTENANCE ANOMALY. DISPATCHING CARE. >> and from a slot near the ceiling a thing unfolds on four thin rotors — small, indoor-model, no searchlight, because in here it doesn't need one. it hunts on heat, and it has already found three warm shapes: you, the dying rack, and a vent-grate low on the far wall where the singed smell pools thickest and something large is holding very, very still.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*three warm shapes, and i'm the only one moving.* the vent-grate — that's him, the burnt tom, folded in there waiting the little machine out exactly the way i'd wait it out. the rotor-thing turns between us like it can't decide which of us to open first. *the patch renders its motor as a taste of licked foil, rising.* i don't love him. but i know that cornered stillness — i have BEEN that stillness — and the drone is going to pick one of us, and neither pick ends soft. *so i do the one thing this cursed patch is actually good for.* i put a paw flat on the clawed rack's spilled guts, on the wrong-rhythm lights, and knock something loose. heat-bloom. noise. i make the dead rack the warmest, loudest, wrongest thing in the room — and pour myself sideways into shadow before it finishes flaring.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rack answers with a gout of hot air and a cascade of its wrong lights slamming all-on at once — a small sun in the infrared, a scream of heat that swallows every other warm shape in the room. the care-drone wheels hard toward the new brightness, protocol chirping happy, and buries itself against the flaring rack, fans whining themselves ragged. behind the grate the big shape lets out one long breath. the standby-glow catches, for the length of a blink, two singed ears and one flat furious eye through the slats — taking the measure of you, this stranger who just spent his own cover to buy a tom he's never met one clean breath. beyond him the vent's inner dark yawns. the door you came through still hangs open at your back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*we hold each other's eyes through the slats for exactly one heartbeat — burnt tom and glitch-cat, no sound, none needed.* i don't go to him and he doesn't ask. that's the whole treaty between cats like us: i made him a gap, he'll carry the scent of who made it, and past tonight neither of us owes the other a single whisker. *he backs into the vent-dark without a sound, gone, taking his loud hungry war deeper into the walls.* my turn. the drone's still drowning itself in the fake sun. *the patch is howling foil-and-bees down my throat, but all four pads — even the liar — agree on the door.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you're two lengths from the hinge when the fake sun betrays you — the flared rack trips its own last breaker and drops dark all at once, and the room's heat-map blinks back to honest readings. the care-drone lurches, confused, casting for the warmest thing left. which is you: a small live engine of blood crossing open floor. it pivots, rotors hardening from a hum into a whine, and slides between you and the hanging door, patient, chirping its soft >> HOLD STILL FOR CARE >> a hand's-width off the concrete. the strawberry jingle is still looping somewhere down the stairs behind it, sweet and dead.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*it wants me to freeze. everything corporate always wants me to hold still for care.* the patch is screaming so loud i can barely think — so i stop trying to think and let it be a weapon instead of a wound. *the drone runs on the same frequency that's flaying my ear; i can taste exactly where its motor lives.* i don't run at the door. i run at the drone, low and wrong-angled, and at the last half-length i twist and rake the flat of my paw across its underside where the foil-taste is brightest — one hard swat into its own spinning teeth. *then i'm past it, under the hinge, into the cold of the shaft, not waiting to hear what a care-drone sounds like when it eats itself.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)behind you the drone finds one of your shed hairs in its own rotor and comes apart in a bright ugly clatter, care-protocol reciting apologies to the empty room as it dies. the shaft swallows you into its cold repeating flights, and this time down feels like down — honest gravity, the building too busy tending its wounds to bother lying to you about the stairs. flight after flight the plant-room scream thins, the foil-taste drains off the back of your tongue one landing at a time. by the third turn the strawberry jingle is gone. by the fifth the copper-penny throb is only a throb again. your patch ticks, cools, sulks, goes quiet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*quiet.* the world is only a world again — cold rebar, old piss, my own four feet, and the fourth pad has stopped inventing hums to scare me with. *i sit on a landing halfway down and let my heart find its normal rain-rhythm.* i am still empty. i climbed all that way toward warm blood in the machines and i left with nothing in my belly and a dead drone's foil-taste under my claws. *but i am walking down instead of being carried out in a care-tray, so the night owes me nothing and i owe it nothing back.* i lick the swat-paw clean, ear to torn ear, and take the last flights slow. down is where i live. down is where the smell is real.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the street door breathes wet neon and rain and the ordinary reeking hum of the plaza, and it has never in your scrambled little life smelled so much like the truth — fish-grease, hot tar, a hundred cats who came before you and a hundred more who'll come after. a gutter runs warm past your paws carrying the day's spilled everything toward a grate. somewhere a vendor's synth-fish vat clatters shut for the night, and the smell of it is real food, findable food, cat food, only a few wet blocks off. behind you, up all those identical flights, a tom you'll never see again keeps the gap you gave him. the city doesn't thank you. the city never does. *it just opens the next alley, and lets you be hungry in it.* ^C^C