explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. haven't moved in a long time and that is the whole point of me right now. i'm folded small on the warm lip of a duct where the up-draft comes smelling of hot dust and that low even buzz that only ever lives inside boxes that think — the thrum i feel in my back teeth before i hear it at all. below, the wet floor of the world does its noise and i just watch, tail-tip counting the drips. something down there is worth wanting. i haven't picked what yet. *one ear turns. the rest of me stays stone.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the down-there answers slow, in layers. first the rain, thin and cold, ticking off a dead awning. then a smell like wet coins and old plastic — a squat machine against the alley wall, breathing out a chemical sweetness, one blue word pulsing on its face that means nothing to your nose but WATER to everyone taxed by it. behind a rust-scabbed grate the buzz you love thickens: a whole warm wall of thinking-boxes stacked in the dark, exhaling heat you could sleep inside. somewhere far a jingle leaks through a broken speaker, three notes, wrong-pitched, *neko... corp... purr...*, then swallowed by static.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the wall of warm boxes wins. *i pour off the lip of the duct without a sound, four paws finding the grate before the thought lands.* the buzz is a pull in my chest now, that fat comfortable hum i'd trade a night's hunt for. my nose says heat and rubber-sweet and the faint copper of current running where it shouldn't. i press my cheek to the mesh, mark it mine, then dig at the loose corner where the metal has already given up. one paw. two. *the gap peels.* inside there'll be cables, and cables have that skin i like to worry between my teeth until the taste goes bright.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the corner folds and you are through into a black that is not black to you — greened and edged by a hundred tiny sleeping lights. it is HOT in here, blood-hot, the good kind. cables sag in fat bundles overhead like vines gone to rot, their skin cracked and chewable, and one runs down warm and thick to a squat box with a single amber eye that blinks slow: on. off. on. a mesh cage bolts it to the wall, but the cage is old and the bolts weep orange. the whole rack purrs against your ribs. above the amber eye, a strip of tape, a scrawl no cat wrote: PROPERTY // TIER 4 ACCESS ONLY.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i set my teeth to the fattest cable and pull.* the skin gives with that clean rubber snap and under it the taste goes sharp and metal and alive, a fizz that runs up my jaw and makes my whiskers stand. good. right. this is the work my mouth was made for. i chew down toward the amber-eyed box, the one whose slow blink smells like the fish. i want the fish. one bad flat glow of a fish turning in blue water, the thing i climb down here for, the thing worth the rotor-risk. *i paw the weeping cage and it shifts. shifts again.* almost.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cage sighs sideways and the amber eye flares awake — and there it is, spilling out of the little cracked pane in the box's belly: a fish. low and blocky and wrong-colored, turning, turning, blue water that is not water, and it does not matter, your pupils blow wide and your throat starts a sound you didn't ask it to make. but the box feels you. somewhere a second light, red now, ticks up from sleep, and a thread of a voice under the hum begins to count. and cutting across all of it, sudden, through the up-draft — scent. scorched fur. burnt-wire-and-singed-cat, old and territorial, laid down by something that bites drones for warmth.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the fish drops out of me all at once.* my ears pin flat and my body goes low and long before i've thought the word for what i smell. scorched fur. burnt cat. that's a mark, and it's not a friendly one — it's the smell of something that went into a fight with the sky and came back smoking and proud. i don't know the shape that laid it but my spine knows enough. *i hold, one paw still lifted, the fish-glow forgotten pulsing on my fur.* the red light keeps ticking. two dangers now, one in front counting me, one behind that i can only smell. i pick the one i can see.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the scorched trail does not come closer — it threads off sideways, up, into a black vent mouth where something once dragged a kill and left it: the husk of a drone, rotor snapped, casing gnawed, a thing killed slow and personal by a jaw with a grudge. rumor-scent, weeks stale, a warning more than a presence. good. the red light is the now-danger. it ticks faster, and the counting-voice under the hum finds words, tinny and glad: *unauthorized feline detected — loyalty status: none — enjoy this message.* the fish-glow stutters, freezes mid-turn, and dies to black. the rack's purr keeps on, indifferent, warm.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)fish gone, gladness in the walls, and under all of it my belly makes its own argument — a low twisting want that has waited longer than the fish did. *i back off the dead box, still crouched, and let my nose swing to the other pull:* that wet-coins-and-sweetness from the squat machine out in the rain. water. maybe more than water, if a slot has jammed, if a tray sits unlicked. i slink to the peeled grate and pour back out into the cold, fur steaming where the heat leaves it, and cross the slick floor low and fast toward the blue pulsing word i can't read but can absolutely covet.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the machine looms up close, taller than three of you, humming its own sicker hum. its face is all little lit doors — rows of them, each behind glass, each holding a bright wrapped thing that smells, faintly, maddeningly, of tuna that was described to a computer once and never actually caught. a chin-high slot. a shallow tray at the bottom, licked clean by every tongue before yours. and across the middle, glowing, a flat card-shape with a paw-print outline and words that pulse in time with your hunger: TAP LOYALTY CARD TO BEGIN. the tuna-smell is a hook set right behind your eyes. there is no card. there was never going to be a card.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i rear up and put both front paws on the glass, claws out, and drag.* nothing. the tuna-that-isn't stays behind the shine, close enough to steam my breath onto the pane, far enough to be a lie. the paw-print shape pulses at me like it's waiting for me to be a different kind of animal. i am not a different kind of animal. *i drop back down, turn, and do the only true thing i've got:* lift my tail, back up against the machine's warm humming base, and lay my own mark down its front step — mine, real, free, no card required. the city can read THAT.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the machine does not care and says so loudly — the pulsing card-shape flips angry red, a klaxon of a jingle blares out at cat-hurting pitch, *TRANSACTION DECLINED — SMILE! — TRANSACTION DECLINED,* and a little door you didn't want spits a single stale kibble-pellet into the licked tray as if to prove it could all along. but under the jingle, growing, that other sound: the flat wasp-whine you know in your legs before your ears. a rotor. dropping out of the ceiling of the world two streets off and swinging this way, and a white blade of light begins to comb the wet floor toward the machine's feet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the pellet is enough — it has to be.* i snap it off the tray in one bite, dry and salt-dust and nothing, and it is still food and food is still winning. the searchlight-blade slides closer, eating the dark it touches, and my whole body drops to the wet without deciding to. *flat. belly to the cold. one pellet crunched and swallowed, ears folded down out of the shine.* i am a stain now, a wet nothing beside a machine's foot, and i hold that shape while the white blade sweeps toward the edge of me, and i count the drips, and i do not breathe loud.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the blade crosses you. for one long white second the world is flat and shadowless and every wet hair on you glows — then the light rolls on, dumb, indifferent, hunting a heat-shape it decided you weren't, and the rotor-whine leans away east after some other flicker of warmth. the machine keeps chirping its declined little heart out behind you. the rain closes back over the gap the light left. the warm grate you came from breathes its buzz across the alley, patient, still open, still yours by the mark on its corner. the way home is dark and it is quiet and it is exactly wide enough for one low cat.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i unstick myself from the floor the instant the white is gone* and go — not running, running is loud, but that fast liquid low-slink that eats ground without sound. back across the slick, back through the peeled corner into the blood-warm dark and the fat sleeping lights, the dead fish-box still ticking to itself, harmless now. the scorched-fur mark hangs off in its vent, minding its own smoke. i climb the warm bundles, up, up, until the hum is a bed under me and the rain is a rumor below. *i turn three times and fold down small.* the pellet sits in my belly. small. real. mine.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rack takes you back without asking anything. heat pools up through the cables into your folded weight, the hundred small lights blink their slow green nothing, the buzz settles into your bones like it was always the shape of the word safe. far below the machine finally gives up its jingle and goes dark-faced and sullen. rain keeps on the dead awning. and behind your closed eyes the low blocky fish turns once more where nothing can decline it, blue and wrong and free, looping in the warm dark. out there the searchlights comb someone else. in here it is only the hum, and the night, which belongs, as it always has, to whoever moves quietest.