explorer (DYSTOPIA)Warm dust and hot solder — that is the smell that means the good hum is awake tonight, and my belly is pulling me toward it before my paws agree to it. *nose low, whiskers combing the damp seam where the wall meets the grating.* somewhere past the machine that only ever gives cold water to cats who can pay, a stack of humming boxes is breathing out that copper-warm breath i chew toward every night. one fish. one small silver fish swimming on a cracked pane, if i can get close before the flat grey box notices me. i pick my way in — quiet, hungry, sure.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the vending machine throbs a jingle through a blown speaker — *NEKO-QUA, hydration is a lifestyle, hydration is a subscription* — the words smearing wet across the tiles. behind it the heat is real: a bank of routers stacked crooked, fans pushing out that solder-and-dust warmth you love, blinking a slow green pulse like something asleep and dreaming. a curl of chewed cable insulation from some earlier night still hangs off the lowest shelf. the good hum wraps your paws. but under it, fainter, a second rhythm — a rotor, high up, sweeping the block in long lazy passes.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the rotor is far and lazy and i am close and hungry, so the rotor loses. *i flatten and pour myself up onto the warm shelf, fans breathing into my belly fur.* my teeth find the old insulation and worry it, plastic-bitter, the taste that means i am where i belong. the green pulse blinks against my whiskers. i press my nose to the warm pane until the cold glass hums and — there. a smear of silver, a small light-fish flicking side to side. i put a paw on it. i do not know why it fills me. it just does.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pane brightens under your paw — the silver fish loops, side to side, side to side, and for three long breaths the whole city narrows to that one cold swimming light. then the glass stutters. a red seam crawls up the edge. *AD DETECTED. UNLICENSED VIEWING. YOUR CURIOSITY HAS BEEN NOTED, VALUED CUSTOMER.* the routers' green pulse flips to a nervous amber. the fans spin higher, hotter. far off, that lazy rotor changes its note — no longer lazy, a tightening whine bending toward your block.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)amber means go. i know amber. *fur lifting along my spine, one last hard stare at the silver fish before it drowns in the red.* you cannot bite light but you can keep it, so i take the fish in my eyes and carry it. i drop off the shelf soft — four paws, no sound — the chewed cable still bitter on my tongue. but the shelf's edge has grown a new smell since last night: a strip of something sticky, a flat card wedged in the grating, plastic and cheap ink and the faint chemical sweetness they use to make cats come closer.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the flat card is a NEKOCORP loyalty tab, adhesive gone grey, and it wants your paw on it — *TAP TO ENROLL, VALUED STRAY, TIER: NONE, YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS WITH ONE PURR.* it smells of the sweet lure they spray on everything that is a trap. as your whisker grazes it, it lights, thin and pleading, and somewhere a ledger you cannot see writes a line about a cat it does not yet own. the whine of the rotor tightens another notch. the sweetness and the danger are braided together now, one scent.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)sweet-that-wants-something is not food, it is hook, and i have felt hooks before in the soft part of a lip. *i pull my paw back from the glowing card like it burned, ears flat, and turn my shoulder to it.* nothing that begs you to touch it is your friend. i leave the card lighting up for no one and drop into the dark seam where the alley folds shut, low and fast, the whine pressing against the backs of my ears like a wind that wants inside my skull.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the searchlight finds the mouth of the alley and pours in white — it slides over the wet tiles a whisker's width from your tail and you are already past it, into the fold of dark where the wall leans. up high on the lip of the underpass a shape sits that the light does not touch: lean, still, two flat mirrors where eyes should be, watching the drone with no fear in it at all. it does not look at you. it does not have to. the rotor screams over, loses your scent in the vent-steam, and banks away hunting easier prey.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-eyed one on the ledge is not prey and not the box-drone and not mine to challenge, so i do the polite thing between cats who both know the dark: i look, i blink slow, i keep my distance. *ears swivel, tail low and even.* the steam has eaten my smell for now and that is a gift i do not waste. my belly is still empty — the fish was light, not food. somewhere down-wind there is a fatter smell, cold fish, real fish, oil and salt and metal crates, riding up from the low end of the block.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the fat smell is real and it is guarded — a loading dock at the block's low end, crates stacked and strapped, the salt-oil of real fish so thick it makes your jaw ache. but the scent is fouled with something else: old blood, and a warning laid down in the way a cat marks a place it owns. a broken speaker on the dock post crackles a drone-flat bulletin — *...REWARD ADJUSTED... SUBJECT KNIFEBOY... APPROACH NOT ADVISED...* — before it dissolves into static. the crates are close. the ownership is not yours.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)real fish behind another cat's blood-mark is a fight i am too small and too hungry to win, and a cat who dies proud dies anyway. *i hold at the edge of the fat smell, memorize it, let it go.* but memorized is not nothing — i walk the wind backward, low and patient, following the salt-oil to where it thins, to the place the guarding cat cannot smell past its own mark. there. a single crate cracked at the corner, one silver tail poking through the strapping, forgotten by everyone but the wind and me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the cracked crate breathes cold real fish into your face, close enough now that your whiskers touch the wet metal strap. the tail is right there, salt and oil and the good heavy weight that light-fish never had. but the strap creaks under your paw, and from the dark at the dock's heart two eyes open — not mirrors this time, but a low unblinking amber, and a growl so quiet it is felt in the floor before it is heard. the blood-mark's owner has not left. it has only been waiting to see who would be foolish enough to come.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)felt-before-heard is the growl that means one more step and you bleed, and my body knows it before my hunger does. *i close my teeth on the silver tail and pull — one hard silent yank — and the fish gives, tearing free of the strapping.* i do not stay to be brave. i am already three lengths gone, prize clamped in my jaw, the growl unfolding into a roar behind me and the wet grating flying under my paws. take the fish, keep the fish, do not look back. the warm hum is that way and the warm hum forgives.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the roar chases you and then it doesn't — the blood-mark's owner will not leave its crates to follow a scrap into open ground, and it knows what you have taken is small. the block exhales. the rotor's scream is long gone, the searchlight moving on to some other alley's cat. behind the subscription-water machine your routers have cooled back to that slow green pulse, dreaming again, breathing solder-warmth into the dark. the warm shelf is empty and waiting, and the weight in your jaw is, this time, real.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i climb the warm shelf one-jawed, drop the fish where the fans breathe hottest, and stand over it a moment just to own it.* real weight. real salt. the light-fish swims behind my eyes and the true fish rests under my paws and for once the two are not the same lie. i eat slow, in the solder-warmth, ears still half-turned to the dark out of old habit. tomorrow the box will glow amber and beg me to tap and enroll and belong to it. tomorrow i will not. tonight i am fed, i am warm, i am no one's, and the night belongs to whoever moves quietest.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city lets you have it. the rain keeps its steady count on the corrugated roof, the routers dream their green dream, the blown speaker holds its tongue for once. far above, past the arcology towers bleaking their cold advertising light into the low clouds, nothing is looking down at this one warm shelf and the small fed shape curled on it. the ledger never got its purr. tier: none. and none, tonight, is exactly the tier a cat wants to be.