explorer (DYSTOPIA)Gone. i'm already three lengths from the warm box before my head catches up to why — the hum changed. *paws hit wet grating, claws out, skid, hold.* that low steady buzz i sleep against every night, the one that lives in the stack of humming boxes behind the water machine, it hiccuped. dropped a note. things that hum for me do not get to change their voice without me knowing why. *ears swivel back toward the boxes. belly low. i want to know what touched my hum.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the buzz you sleep against is a stack of NEKOCORP relay boxes, and one of them is warm in a new place.* a smell you don't have a memory-slot for — clean plastic, no dust yet, someone's fingers were here within the last dozen rain-drips. the humming stack has grown a new box overnight, smaller, blacker, a single green eye winking on its face slow slow slow. the water machine beside it clears its throat and murmurs *thirsty? hydration is a NEKOCORP privilege* to no one. rain finds the back of your neck. two alleys east, a rotor turns over once and goes quiet again, listening.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i flatten and pour myself under the lip of the stack, into the hot exhaust wind i know by heart.* the new box smells wrong — too clean, nothing has lived on it yet. i put my nose to the seam where its warmth leaks and the plastic tastes faintly of the cold-fingers-smell, the smell that means a not-cat was here. *my teeth find the soft rope that feeds it. i know this rope. i chew ropes like this. they carry the hum.* i bite down, careful, testing — does this new thing feed from my stack, or does it eat my stack.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)*the soft rope gives a little under your teeth, rubbery, then a thread of copper-cold underneath — bite-memory says STOP and you stop.* the green eye on the black box quickens: wink wink wink, no longer slow. somewhere under the grating a coil of current tightens; the whole stack's hum bends a half-step higher, annoyed. the water machine brightens. *NEW DEVICE DETECTED,* it sings in the voice they use for good news, *WELCOME TO THE MESH.* and far off, that rotor answers — one blade-turn, then rolling, coming up out of quiet the way a wet thing comes up out of a drain.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i let go of the rope. the higher hum hurts a back tooth i didn't know i had.* the box wanted me to bite it. things that want to be bitten are traps — my mother's ear-flick lives in me still. *i back off the stack, low, and the rotor-sound is a coin on my tongue now, closer.* i go up instead. the water machine's flank is warm and full of handholds and i am on top of it, then on the pipe, then on the ledge, wet belly scraping, before the searchlight can decide the alley is worth a look.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)up on the ledge the rain is thinner and the city opens its mouth at you: a valley of wet neon, arcology towers standing in their own light like they're holding their breath, a NEKOCORP billboard three roofs off looping a kitten drinking synthetic milk with eyes too round to belong to any real cat. the drone slides into the alley you left, unhurried, its light licking the stack, the new black box, the chewed rope. it says nothing. *its lens tilts up.* on a farther roof, backlit, a shape sits very still — square head, two flat mirrors where a cat's eyes should catch the light and don't. it does not look at the drone. it is already looking at you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go still the way the far shape is still — mirror to mirror.* it is a cat. old-cat stillness, the kind that has watched more than it has run. the flat-eyes do not throw the neon back and that is wrong and also i understand it, the way i understand a closed door is still a door. *i do not challenge. i do not flee. i sit, one paw tucked, and let it count me.* below, the coin-on-tongue rotor-taste swells. the drone has found my chewed rope and is thinking about it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the far shape doesn't blink — the mirrors just tip a half-degree, an acknowledgement, *seen you, you're nobody's yet, good.* then it's gone off the back of its roof without a sound, the way water leaves a surface. the drone below stops thinking. its light snaps to the ledge, to you, and holds. a speaker somewhere in its belly wakes up warm and awful: *CITIZEN-ADJACENT LIFEFORM. YOUR CURIOSITY HAS BEEN NOTED AND MONETIZED. PLEASE REMAIN STILL FOR A PERSONALIZED OFFER.* the light is very bright. the rain falls through it like static.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*still for an offer. no.* the light is a paw pinning my shadow, and every part of me older than this city says a pinned thing is a dead thing. *i don't run flat — i run up, three claws into the wet billboard scaffold, into the kitten's giant glowing face.* the light hunts the ledge where i am not anymore. i climb into the smell of hot wiring and ozone behind the sign, where the milk-kitten's eyes are just two buckets of screaming light from the back, and nothing that flies wants to follow into a nest of live current. *my heart is a trapped bird. i wedge in and breathe.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)behind the billboard the world is heat and buzz and the underside of a lie — the milk-kitten is bald scaffolding and a thousand little suns from back here, and the current in the rails hums the note your teeth remember from the stack, the same NEKOCORP note, everything in this city humming the one owned note. the drone rises past the sign's edge, light sweeping, sweeping — can't reach you without cooking itself. its speaker tries once more, smaller now, almost sulky: *offer expired. a shame. you'd have loved it.* then it drops back toward the alley and the chewed rope and the black box winking its green wink, wink, wink, patient as a thing that knows you have to come down eventually.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i wait in the hot dark until the coin-taste thins to nothing.* i am hungry now — the running took the last of the warm-box calories and left a hollow that leans me toward every food-thought at once. down in the alley the water machine still murmurs about hydration, useless, water is free from the sky and falling on my head. but under the murmur, threaded in the exhaust-wind — there — fish. not real, the flat pretend-fish smell of a torn pouch, but my belly does not check papers. *i ease out of the scaffold, down the cold side of the sign, toward the one honest promise in this whole valley: something spilled that i can eat.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the fish-ghost pulls you down a fire-stair slick as a tongue, past a window where a cat-shaped screen sleeps and bills someone $4.99 for rolling over, down to a loading dock's lip where a delivery pod cracked itself open against a bollard and spilled its guts: silver pouches, most sealed, one burst, the pretend-tuna smell blooming huge and chemical and perfect. stamped on every pouch, small: PROPERTY OF NEKOCORP SUPPLY LINE. the burst one's been torn from the inside, claw-work, deliberate — some cat robbed this pod and left the rest for the rain. the spit-smell on the tear is going cold. you weren't the first hungry thing here tonight, only the latest.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't rush the open pouch — open means someone chose to leave it, and left food is a question.* i circle, low, reading the dock with my nose: cold spit-smell fading, no warm body-heat lingering, no fresh danger-musk. only rain and pretend-fish and the far patient hum. *satisfied enough, i pin the burst pouch with one paw and eat.* it tastes like salt and plastic and the idea of a fish drawn by something that has never seen a sea, and it is the best thing that has happened to me all night. the hollow in me closes a notch. i eat fast, ears up, tail flat.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pretend-fish goes down and your body thanks you in the old wordless way — warmth spreading, edges softening, the night briefly survivable. above the dock a speaker crackles a jingle to nobody, *NEKOCORP: WE FEED THE FUTURE, ONE SUBSCRIPTION AT A TIME,* the tune sweet and looping and just slightly wrong, like it was written by something that studied happiness in a lab and got most of it. the rain eases. down the dock's throat, red pinpricks — a low camera waking, or an eye, tracking the small warm shape of a cat who is, for one dangerous moment, content and not watching its back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*content is a smell other things can smell.* the red pinpricks touch the back of my neck like breath and i am moving before i've finished the mouthful, food-warmth still spreading even as my legs go cold and smart. *i take the pouch with me — teeth through the torn lip, dragging.* mine now. i've paid for it in fear. i go along the dock's dark seam, low and quick, away from the red eyes, toward a drain-mouth breathing warm rot-air that means under, that means small spaces, that means no rotor fits.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drain-mouth swallows you into warm dark and the city's owned hum gives way to older sounds — dripping, the deep settle of pipes, something small skittering off from your approach. the pretend-fish pouch drags wet against your chin. behind and above, the red eyes lose you; the loading dock goes back to being just a mouth the city forgot to close. down here the walls sweat and the dark is honest dark, unlit, unbilled. a long way off through the concrete, muffled, that half-step-high hum you woke to still bends the air — your stack, your box, your chewed rope, waiting. everything in this city is one long hum and you are a small warm knot moving through the middle of it, fed, unfollowed, alive.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i find a dry shelf of concrete above the trickle and i eat the rest slow this time.* the hum is far and it is still mine to go back and fight, later, when i've slept, when the black box has shown me what it really is. *pouch licked flat, i turn three times and fold down, nose under tail, one ear left up for the world.* the cold-fingers-smell, the mirror-eyed cat, the offer that wanted me still — all of it goes into the place where i keep things to be afraid of tomorrow. tonight the drip is steady and no light can find me and my belly is a small closed warm fist. *the up-ear listens. the rest of me lets go.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drain holds you the way concrete holds warmth — grudging, temporary, enough. water finds its own way down past your shelf, muttering. far up through the grate a sliver of neon lays one thin pink stripe across the dark and then a cloud eats it. the city keeps humming its single owned note to the towers and the drones and the sleeping billing-cats, not knowing or caring that one small unowned thing has folded itself into a seam it can't reach and shut its eyes. the black box winks somewhere above — wink, wink, wink — counting a mesh that is missing exactly one cat. morning is a rumor. for now there is only the drip, and the warm, and the up-turned ear, and the dark that belongs to nobody, not even NEKOCORP. *not yet.*