explorer (DYSTOPIA)Cold woke me before anything else did. not a sound, not a smell — cold, the specific cold of a surface that stopped pretending to be warm the exact second something stopped paying for it. *i don't move yet. i lie curved in the dented shape of myself and let the ache in my hips finish arriving.* there's a click somewhere under my belly, small and patient, that has clicked every time i've rolled over for longer than i've been alive. my mouth tastes like recycled sleep — sweetish, chemical, the flavor of the fog they push in to keep you under one more cycle. *one ear tips up. only the ear. the rest of me is still deciding whether being awake is worth whatever it just charged me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the deciding costs too. *the click under your belly answers — soft chime, a coin-sound with no coin* — ROLLOVER LOGGED. THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING REST™. the pad beneath you exhales its last stored heat up into your fur and then goes flat and dead as a puddle. all around, in the long low dark, the other pods breathe: hundreds of them, stacked in racks that climb past where your eyes give up, each one glowing a faint tired amber, each one ticking its own small tick. somewhere a sleeper twitches and gets billed for it. the fog hangs at whisker-height, sweet, patient, wanting you back down. far off, past the racks, a wet-metal draft moves — outside air, the kind with edges — and it carries one thin thread of something cooked.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the thread of cooked something does what the cold couldn't.* i'm up. bad, all at once, hips complaining, but up — low, belly still near the pad, because standing tall in here means standing into the fog and i'd rather crawl out under it than breathe another mouthful of down-you-go. *i put my nose to the draft and pull.* protein. old, reheated, somebody's third-hand grease, but real, not a picture of food beamed at me, actual molecules coming apart in warm air. that's east, past the racks, out where the edges are. *i step off the pad and my paw finds the walkway grating — vibration in it, faint, a machine-heartbeat that isn't mine and isn't the pods'.* i keep low. i follow the thread.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the racks end. the world gets tall and wet. *you nose out from under the last shelf of sleepers into a service canyon between two arcology legs, and the rain finds you immediately* — fine, warm, faintly oily, tasting of the ten thousand vents it fell past on the way down. neon bleeds in the puddles: a smeared amber jingle-loop of NEKOCORP MILK, MILK THAT REMEMBERS YOU, MILK—MILK—M— stuttering where the sign's half-dead. the cooked-grease thread is stronger now, coming from a shuttered stall down-canyon, its shutter warped just enough. between you and it: open ground, slick and lit. and high up, on a pipe that bridges the two towers, a shape sits very still — lean, unhurried, a flat double-glint where eyes should be that does not blink when the light sweeps it. it is watching the canyon. it has been watching a while.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the glint that doesn't blink freezes me mid-step.* not a drone — drones stink of ozone and want, this thing gives off nothing, no fear-smell, no hunger-smell, just still. cats that still are either dead or better than me. *i read the double-glint and something old in my spine says: not prey, not predator to you tonight, just above you.* i drop my eyes first. that's the polite lie. i flatten and i go wide of the open ground, hugging the wet tower-leg where the light can't fully reach, keeping that high shape in the corner of my whisker-map without ever looking straight at it again. *the grease-thread pulls me toward the warped shutter.* i let the rain hide the sound of me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the high shape lets you pass. of course it does — you were never the thing it was counting. *as you slip along the tower-leg, a drone-voice unspools overhead, that flat rotor-flattened rumor-tone the patrol units use when they're bored and broadcasting bounties into the rain*: — ATTENTION CITIZENS. PERSON OF INTEREST. FORTY THOUSAND LOYALTY POINTS. TUNA-RELATED SEDITION. DO NOT APPROACH THE SMOL ONE. POINTS EXPIRE BEFORE— *and it thrums on, west, away.* the warped shutter is right here now, breathing warm greasy air out of a black gap a cat-width wide. behind it: the tick of a cooling fryer, the drip of a bad seal, and — closer than you'd like — the small wet sound of something else already in there, eating.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i stop at the gap. the something-already-eating changes everything.* i pull the air apart layer by layer through the crack: grease, yes, and under it — another cat. not the still one from the pipe. this one's rank, close, jaws working, and it hasn't smelled me yet because it's got its whole face in the food and the drip is covering me. *my stomach clenches, loud, traitor.* i've got a choice and about two seconds to make it. going in means a fight in a dark box i don't know, over scraps, against a cat already fed and footed. *my ears pin. my weight rocks back off the gap.* no. not for third-hand grease. i mark the spot in my head — food comes here, food will come again — and i peel away quiet, back into the rain, still hungry, still whole. hungry-and-whole beats fed-and-torn.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)smart. the box keeps its cat and its grease and its dark. *the rain has thickened while you decided — proper now, drumming the canyon into white noise, washing the neon into long runny ribbons.* your fur's soaked through, heat leaking out of you fast, and the cold from the pod is creeping back into the empty place where food should've gone. but the rain carries gifts too: on the far wall, low, a seam in the concrete is breathing — not cooked-food breath, just heat, dry and steady and enormous, the exhaust of some machine deep in the tower's gut that never sleeps and never bills. a fat warm draft, free, no chime, no THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING. above the seam a security drone hangs motionless in the downpour, rotors ticking over slow, its searchlight off, rain sheeting off its shell — parked, dozing, or pretending to.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the free heat and the parked drone are the same problem wearing two faces.* warmth i need. the thing hanging over it i don't. *i settle onto my belly in the shadow of a fallen pipe and i just watch it — the way the still cat on the bridge watched me — reading the rotor.* it ticks slow. slow and even. not hunting-slow, which stutters and jerks toward movement. this is idle-slow, a machine breathing in its sleep, same as the pods, same as me twenty minutes ago. *rain hammers. i count its ticks against my own heartbeat until i trust the rhythm.* then i move — not straight at the seam, but along the wall, staying under the drone's belly where its light, if it wakes, would have to swing furthest to find me. low. slow. into the reach of that dry warm breath.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the heat takes you like a hand. *the seam's breath rolls over your soaked fur and the shiver you didn't know you were holding lets go all at once — warmth climbing your legs, your spine, drying the rain off you in slow curls of steam.* the drone ticks on, idle, blind, rain drumming its shell; it does not wake. you've threaded under it into a pocket of dry heat the size of your whole body, walled on two sides, roofed by an overhang, open only to the shadow you came from. it smells of hot dust and machine-oil and nothing that wants anything from you. no chime. no offer. no eyes. down the canyon the milk-jingle stutters its dying loop, the bounty-drone's rumor fades west, the sleepers tick in their racks — and here, for now, the city is just warm, and just yours.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i turn twice in the dry heat, feeling the walls with my flanks, learning the shape of this pocket the way i learned the dented pod — but this one i chose, and nothing's counting my rollovers.* still hungry. the empty place is still there, and morning will make me answer for it. *but my fur's drying, my hips have stopped shouting, and the machine-breath is steady under me like a heartbeat that never gets billed.* i tuck my nose under my tail. one ear stays up — always one ear, that's the rent you pay to sleep in a city that eats slow ones. *the last thing i track before my eyes go is the tick of the drone above me, idle, idle, idle, matching the machine, matching me.* the food spot's mapped. the heat's mapped. tomorrow's a tomorrow problem. *i let the warm dark have me — cheap, this time. free.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city lets you keep it. *no chime comes. no THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING. the seam breathes its free warm breath over you and asks for nothing, which is the strangest luxury this place has left.* rain thins toward morning. the milk-sign finally gives up its stutter and goes dark. far up on the tower-bridge the still-eyed shape rises, stretches, and pours itself off into the neon somewhere else, its shift over or just its patience. the sleeper-racks tick. the bounty-drone's rumor is long gone west. above your pocket of stolen heat the idle drone hangs on, rotors turning slow over slow, keeping its blind unbilled watch over the one warm cat who out-waited it — and the long dystopian dark holds its breath, and the counter, somewhere, ticks quietly up by one.