explorer (DYSTOPIA)Somebody sprayed the corner post that is mine. i know it is mine because i wore it in with my own cheek over a hundred nights and the smell that lives there is supposed to be me and only me. this is not me. this is a bigger tom, unfixed, cocky, left his mark high — higher than i can reach — which is the whole rude point of it. *i sit down in front of the post and do not move. ears forward. i let the insult sit on my tongue and go stale before i answer it. behind the post, under the wet cardboard, is the thing that actually matters: a low warm hum in the concrete that i have chewed my way toward for three nights, the good hum, the box-that-thinks hum. the tom does not know about the hum. that is my one card.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the post answers you in layers. the tom-smell is on top, loud, but under it your own worn-in scent is still there, patient, not gone. good. the concrete keeps its secret warm — that hum climbs into your paw-pads and up the long bones of your legs, steady, the pulse of a NEKOCORP relay cabinet buried behind the wall, breathing out heat and a thin blue whine you can almost taste at the back of your jaw. // somewhere up the alley a speaker no bigger than a bottlecap coughs to life: "—clawcoin balance: ZERO — you have (1) unread offer —" then dies in a fizz of rust. the rain has stopped. the puddles hold the sign-light dead still, and in one of them, thirty tail-lengths off, a shape is drinking. big. unhurried. it lifts its head and the puddle breaks.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i do not stand. standing tells him i care. instead i flatten one ear-and-a-half and turn very slowly toward the broken puddle, keeping my weight loaded on my back legs where it does me good.* i know his kind. drinks in the open, marks high, expects the whole alley to fold. but he is drinking rainwater off dead pavement and i am sitting on a wall that runs hot, and hunger is a clock that ticks louder for the big ones. *i put my nose down to the base of the post — under his insult, past it — and find the seam in the concrete where the warm air leaks. i breathe it in slow and let him watch me do it. let him wonder what i have got. the cabinet smells of hot dust and copper and that faint electric sweetness that means cable, chewable cable, sheathed in the soft plastic i like.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the tom reads you reading the wall and it costs him a half-beat of swagger — you can see it, the tail drops one notch. he doesn't know what the wall is. he only knows you know something. that's currency and you just spent it in his face. // the seam breathes warmer now, almost panting; the relay is under load, some tower far overhead pulling data down through it in a flood, and the whole cabinet sings up a third. behind the drywall, a hand-width away, the cable runs — you can smell exactly where the sheath is thin. // then the alley-mouth goes white. a security drone slides across the far end, unhurried, its underbelly light dragging a hard-edged rectangle over the wet stones. the tom melts sideways into shadow on pure reflex. the rectangle sweeps toward the post. toward you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the light is a wall coming at me at cat-height and everything in me that is older than the city says GO DARK. i do not run — running is a moving thing and moving things are what the light wants. i pour myself flat into the seam-shadow at the base of the post, one shoulder pressed to the warm concrete, and i go the color of not-there. the hum is right against my ribs now, so loud in my bones it feels like it is coming from inside me. i borrow it. i make my breathing match it. i am not a cat, i am a warm patch on a warm wall, nothing to see, nothing that pays taxes.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rectangle crawls over the post — over the tom's high insult-mark, which lights up chemical-bright in whatever the drone sees — and the machine pauses on THAT, not on you. a soft internal click, a category being filed. "—unregistered biological. logging.—" it is cataloguing the smell, not the warm patch. your stillness is holding. the light hangs one more second, deciding, and the heat of the cabinet at your spine ticks up again, and this close you can feel the exact spot where the wall is thinnest — a screw-head, loose, a finger of cold air where the panel doesn't quite meet. then the drone loses interest. the rectangle slides off, chasing the tom's louder signature down the alley, and the dark comes back like water closing over.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the big tom's swagger just got him logged and me forgotten, and that is the funniest thing that has happened to me in three nights. i do not laugh. i work.* the cold finger of air by the loose screw is an invitation and i am rude enough to take it. *i hook a claw behind the panel edge where it has gone soft with damp, brace both back feet on the warm seam, and pull. the metal gives a thumb-width with a tired little groan. now the hum is not behind a wall, it is a mouth, breathing hot copper-sweet right into my face, and there — there — a fat run of cable, sheath split already by heat, the soft plastic curling back like something that wants to be chewed. i put my teeth on it. not through it. just on it. i can feel the whole city trembling down the line.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cable hums under your teeth like a living throat. the plastic gives that satisfying give, waxy and warm, and the vibration floods straight into your jawbone — the whole downstream flood of the tower pouring through a wire the width of a worm, and you are standing on it, tasting it. for one blink the alley's dead speakers all catch the same ghost at once: "—NEKOCORP thanks you for your—" "—thanks you for your—" "—your—" stuttering, because something in the flow just felt a tooth. // deeper in the cabinet a cooling fan changes pitch. not an alarm. just a machine noticing weather it can't name. and far off, past the arcology's knees, a rooftop holds one still silhouette against the sign-glow — narrow, seated, two flat mirrored discs where eyes should be, watching the alley the way you watch a mousehole. it does not move. it has been there the whole time.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i feel the mirror-eyes before i place them — that particular itch on the back of the neck that means watched-by-something-that-is-not-hungry. i do not spook. i know that shape from the underpass rumors that ride the scent-marks: sits high, sees everything, eats nobody. not my problem tonight. i keep my tooth where it is. the stutter in the dead speakers is MY doing and i can feel that too, the way the flood hiccups when i bite down, like the whole fat river of the city has to step around one small cat's mouth. i am not hungry for the wire. i am hungry for the hiccup. i bite down a little harder, once, on purpose, just to hear the city forget its own jingle.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city forgets. for one whole second the alley goes tongueless — every bottlecap speaker, every flickering hoard-sign, every ad choked mid-word — and in that second the only sound left in the world is the fan, the rain-drip, and your own heartbeat loud in the wire. it is the quietest the street has been in years. the dark feels bigger without the jingles holding the walls up. // then the flood re-routes itself around the wound, the way water does, and the noise pours back in a rush — "—milk! synthetic milk! now with—" — louder than before, over-correcting, embarrassed. the fan settles. up on the rooftop the mirror-eyed silhouette tips its head one degree, as if it noted the silence too and filed it somewhere, then goes back to stillness. the warm seam under you keeps breathing. you got away with it. this time the city paid you in a single second of its own silence.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the silence is spent but my nose is still open, and now that the jingles have stopped shouting over everything i can smell what they were hiding. under the copper and the hot dust, threading up from the far end of the alley where the loading docks breathe: tuna. real tuna, in oil, in metal, guarded — and over it, faint, blood and cold steel and a scent-mark laid down cocky and quick by something the drones want badly. i know that mark too. everybody downwind knows that mark.* not mine to chase. i have a warm wall and a chewed wire and a corner with my name written back over the top of it. *but i lift my head anyway, because a cat that stops smelling the whole board is a cat that gets logged.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the loading-dock tuna is a wall of scent so thick it has a temperature — cold, briny, wrapped in the ozone of an electric fence you can hear before you'd ever reach it. and yes: laid across the nearest crate, still wet, that other mark. cocky. quick. the kind left by something that steals in and out faster than a rotor can turn. // right on cue the alley's speakers find a new script, and this one they mean: "—ATTENTION — loyalty bulletin — the individual known as KNIFEBOY — forty thousand points — do NOT approach — report sightings to your nearest—" and from three streets over, answering it, the flat wasp-whine of a bounty rotor spinning up, hunting the same smell you just found. the warm wall under you says stay. the tuna says come. the rotor says neither, and says it louder.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*forty thousand of anything is a number that means nothing to my mouth. the rotor means something. i split the difference the way my legs like to: i do not go for the tuna and i do not run from the wall — i drop off the warm lip on the shadow side and pad three, four crates closer, low, just to read the thing properly, because knowing where the loud danger is going is how a small cat stays a small cat that is alive.* the KNIFEBOY-mark is going away from the docks, not toward them. clever. he baited his own smell across the crates and left, and the rotor is chewing an empty trail while he is somewhere warm laughing. *i respect it. i do not follow it. i mark a crate-corner of my own, quiet, low, mine, and back off before the light comes.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bounty rotor sweeps in over the docks exactly where the trick told it to, its light carving the cold fog into hard slices, and it finds crates, fence, brine, and nothing to shank. it hangs there stupidly, recalculating, its underlight strobing the whole alley in migraine white. your low quiet mark goes unread — too small, too honest, not worth a category. // the trail's real owner is long gone; only the joke of him lingers. and above it all, still on the far roof, the mirrored discs catch the strobe and throw it back in two cold coins of light — the seated shape has not moved through any of this, has watched the tom, the drone, the wire, the trick, and you, and kept every one of them without spending a single motion. the rotor gives up, tilts, and hauls itself back toward the towers, taking its white knife of light with it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the white light goes and takes its noise with it and the alley is just an alley again — wet, cold, mine. i have learned the whole board tonight without touching the parts that bite: the tom logged, the wire chewed, the tuna guarded, the trick admired, the roof-watcher noted and let be. that is a full night's work for a small cat and my ribs are telling me so.* good. i am done knowing things. *i pick my way back up the shadow side to the warm concrete lip, and the good hum is still there waiting for me, patient, breathing copper into the cold.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warm lip takes you back like it never noticed you left. the relay hums on, steady, fed, indifferent — the chewed cable a small private wound only you and it will ever know about. the rain starts again, fine and soundless, dressing the sign-light in a soft blur. the docks keep their cold tuna. the towers keep their flood. the rooftop keeps its mirror-eyed watcher, and for one last moment, before you tuck down, the two cold coins tip toward you — just you — and hold, the way you'd hold a mousehole you're in no hurry to open.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*a second of silence is a fair price and i am a cheap date. i let the cable go. it stays chewed-soft and warm; it will still be here tomorrow and so, probably, will i. i back out of the panel one careful paw at a time and nose it most of the way shut behind me, because a good hole is a secret and secrets are worth more than tuna.* the tom is gone, logged and chased off my post. the mirror-eyes on the roof can keep watching; watching is not taking. *i climb back up onto the warm lip of concrete, tuck my feet under me over the good hum, and set my own cheek to the corner where the insult was, slow, deliberate, writing me back over the top of him. mine. the wall is mine. the hiccup was mine. the night, what is left of it, is mine.* ^C^C