explorer (DYSTOPIA)The rotor two roofs over tastes like a cold coin pressed to the back of my tongue, and that is how I know it is coming before I hear it. *my patch does this now — turns a sound into a flavor, a flavor into a color I have no name for.* the taste goes sharp, metal, nearer. *I flatten against the gravel, belly to the grit, the day's trapped warmth still leaking up out of the little stones, and I let the coin-taste tell me which way to not be.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the gravel remembers heat and gives it up slow into your ribs. the rotor-taste is not wrong — it swings wide around the water tower's shadow, a patrol unit, its searchlight dragging a wet white stripe across the rooftop tar three body-lengths from your nose. the light does not find you. it finds a puddle instead and drinks its own reflection.* somewhere below a speaker coughs half a jingle — NEKO milk, the only milk your kittens can trust — then dies mid-word. the wind carries up frying oil and ozone and something under it, older, feline, unwashed.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ozone I know. the older smell I follow with my whiskers before my paws agree to it.* the frying oil is a lie the city tells to empty stomachs and I have been emptied before. *but the cat-smell — male, a stranger who has been here longer than the rain — that one I want to read all the way down.* I go low along the parapet, one paw testing each cold ridge of tar, the coin-taste fading behind me, and I press my nose into the seam where the roof meets the little brick wall and breathe the stranger in.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the seam is greasy with a hundred passings. the stranger's mark is old but deliberate — sprayed high, higher than a cat your size stands, which means he stretched to leave it, which means he wanted it read. under the musk there's a chemical sting: mirror-coating, the stuff they spray on lenses. and threaded through all of it, faint, the ghost of tuna-brine gone to rot.* across the gap, on the water tower's far leg, something shifts. a shape sits very still against the neon — low, four-legged, and where its face should be there are two flat squares of light throwing the billboard's colors right back at the sky.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*two squares of light where eyes should be. I do not like a face that gives nothing back.* my fur lifts along the spine without my asking. *I have met eyes that shine — rats, drones, the wet button-eyes of the dead — but these do not shine, they throw. they hand the city back to itself and keep whatever is behind them.* I do not cross the gap. crossing is for cats who have already decided how the night ends. I hold, low, tail still, and let the patch behind my ear buzz its little chorus of colors while I wait to see if the squares turn toward me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the squares do not turn. the shape has clocked you already and decided you are not worth the turning — a small mercy, or a small insult. it goes back to watching the street below where the real money moves.* your patch buzzes and the buzz spills sideways: for one stuttering breath the rooftop goes plum-colored and every raindrop rings like a struck wire. *spiders in the bluetooth again.* then it passes. the tar is just tar. but in the buzz you caught something — a scent-memory that isn't yours, a kittenhood on a rooftop you have never stood on, warm and gone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*not mine. I know it is not mine the way you know a coat that fits wrong on the shoulders.* the patch does this — hands me other cats' warm places and takes a little tax in the shape of a headache the color of copper. *I shake it off, ears flat, and the false rooftop drains out of me and leaves the real one, colder for the leaving.* below, the money-street the squares were watching lets up a new noise — not a rotor, heavier, a wheeled thing, and the smell that rolls up ahead of it is kibble-dust and hot electrics. *my stomach makes the decision my caution was still chewing on.* I move to the edge to look.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the edge drops four stories into a service canyon strung with dead fairy-lights and one working vending unit, glowing like a shrine. the wheeled thing is a restock cart, automated, blind, grinding along its painted line — and where it has passed, the gutter is dusted with spilled kibble, a whole constellation of it, free and unguarded.* but the vending unit's little camera-eye swivels, patient, and a soft voice loops up the canyon wall: valued customer detected. would you like to open a tab? the kibble glitters. the camera watches. between you and the food is nothing but the long way down and the long way seen.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*free food that a camera is counting is not free food, it is bait wearing food's smell.* I have learned this on my own ribs. *but the dust in the gutter — that the cart lost by accident, and accidents belong to whoever is quick.* I find the drainpipe with my eyes first, the way it clings to the brick, the three dark brackets where a paw can hold. *the camera loops its offer at the shrine and never thinks to look at the wall.* I go over backward, claws first, and climb down into the canyon quiet as spilled dust myself.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the pipe is cold and sweating and holds you. brick-grit works into your pads, familiar, almost kind. halfway down the canyon exhales its trapped smells all at once — wet cardboard, rat, the vending unit's electric hum, and cutting through it a rotor-note you know.* the taste comes back to the root of your tongue: cold coin, sharper now. a patrol drone has turned into the canyon's mouth, low, its searchlight not sweeping this time but pointed, walking up the painted line the cart left. *it is following the cart. or it is following the smell of a cat who followed the cart.* the kibble is ten body-lengths down and glittering. the light is coming.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ten lengths. the light walks maybe two a breath.* the math lives in my legs, not my head — my head only tastes the copper getting louder. *I do not freeze. freezing is the puddle's trick and I saw what the light did to the puddle.* I let go of the last brackets and drop the rest, soft, into the gutter's shadow where the cart's overhang cuts a black wedge the searchlight cannot fold itself into. *the kibble is right here now, against my chin, salt and cheap fish and enough.* I eat fast, flat, one ear turned to the growing roar, stealing the meal a mouthful at a time from under the drone's own nose.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*salt floods you, then grease, then the dull good weight of something in the belly at last. you get four mouthfuls, five.* the drone's light reaches the cart and stops there, puzzled by the blind machine, its rotor-note idling into a hover. *the searchlight noses the cart all over, looking for the warm thing that should be near spilled food and not finding it, because the warm thing is a hand's-width away inside a shadow the light was never taught to question.* the vending shrine loops its voice again, softer, almost to itself: would you like to open a tab. nobody answers it. nobody ever answers it. the drone begins, slowly, to turn its light toward the shadow wedge.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*toward me. of course toward me — the shadow was a loan and the night is calling it in.* one more mouthful, because a full cat runs better than a scared one and I am already both. *then I am gone, not up — up is where it expects a cat to flee — but low and flat along the gutter the way the water goes, under the cart's blind belly, past the shrine still politely asking a corpse of a question.* the light stabs the empty wedge behind me and finds only kibble dust and the shape of where a cat was. *I do not look back. looking back is a tax I cannot afford tonight.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the gutter runs you out the canyon's far throat into a wider dark — a loading channel, low ceiling, the smell of rope and rust and long-gone fish crates. behind you the drone's roar stays fixed on the shrine, fooled, dwindling.* here the neon does not reach; the only light is a strip of failing green from a sign too far to read, and it lays your shadow out ahead of you thin and stretched. *your belly is heavier than it has been in nights. your patch is quiet. the copper has washed clean off your tongue.* somewhere in the rope-dark, water drips a slow count. the city, for one whole minute, is asking nothing of you at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*asking nothing. I do not trust it and I do not waste it.* I find the driest crate-shadow, the one furthest from the green strip's reach, and fold myself into it, belly warm, ears still working the dark for rotor-taste that does not come. *the stranger with the thrown-back eyes, the false rooftop the patch handed me, the shrine still asking its dead question — I let them all sink under the water-drip until they are just weather.* my eyes get heavy. *a full cat in a dry dark is the closest this city sells to safe, and I did not even have to open a tab for it.* I let the green blur, keep one ear up, and stay.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the crate-dark takes you in and does not charge for it. the drip counts you down toward sleep — one, and one, and one — steady as something that has been counting long before you curled here and will keep counting after. your breath slows to meet it. the loading channel holds its rust-and-rope quiet around you like a thing that almost remembers being kind.* far off, past the green strip, past the canyon, the drone gives up its search and lifts away, and the city closes the wound of the night behind it. *your last waking thought is not a thought, it is a smell: salt, still on your whiskers, proof the dark paid out.* ^C^C