explorer (DYSTOPIA)Already running. no start to it, no first step i chose — just the rotor-thrum dropping in behind my tail and my legs answering before the rest of me does, low and flat along the wet loading-dock lip, claws skating on rain-slick steel. *the wind off the thing pushes my whiskers forward into my own eyes.* i don't look back. looking back is a body-length lost and a body-length is the difference between me and the ones it already has. the crates flash past on my right, that heavy iron-and-brine smell i'd know blind, cold silver stacked and locked, and i am not stopping for them tonight, not with the sky screaming my name.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dock stretches long and slotted ahead, puddled orange under sodium lamps that buzz where the rain gets in. the rotor behind you is not a patrol-model — heavier, four-armed, a tracker, its downwash flattening the puddles into shivering mirrors as it comes. from its belly a voice unrolls, flat and clerical, not shouting, just reading: "BE ADVISED. SUBJECT OF ACTIVE BOUNTY IN TRANSIT. REWARD FORTY THOUSAND LOYALTY POINTS. POINTS MAY EXPIRE. TERMS APPLY." a screen on the far wall catches the words and throws them up in stuttering pink light — a shape on it, notched-eared, snarling, that smells to the whole district like you. the crates you passed breathe brine and, under it, faint and old, the copper of blood dried into the seams. your seams. your work.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that's my wall. my picture, my crates, my old blood in the grooves.* the screen throwing my own snarl back at me does something ugly and warm in my chest, and it makes me faster, not slower. i cut hard left where the dock drops into the gap between two container stacks — a slot only a low thing can take, a slot i measured moons ago against exactly this rotor. *fold the shoulders, tuck the tail, pour through.* the downwash slams the steel above me and can't follow. behind the near stack i stop dead, ribs heaving, and taste the air for the second drone that always comes with the first.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the tracker overshoots the slot with a frustrated pitch-climb, rotors chopping rain into fog above the containers, and its voice loops the offer to nobody: "...POINTS MAY EXPIRE..." in the sudden shelter the sounds sort themselves — the near stack ticking as it cools, water finding a hundred small paths down corrugated iron, and yes: a second thrum, lighter, holding back, circling wide to cover the far mouth of the slot the way they always learn to. the air you pull in comes back thick with guarded brine, with machine-oil, and threaded through it something that doesn't belong to the dock at all: clean fur, cold, and a bitter scorched-circuit tang worn on purpose, up high, from the container roofs. a shape sits there against the sodium haze, unmoving, two flat discs where a cat's eyes should catch the light.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i clock the roof-shape and my hackles settle instead of rising.* i know that stillness. the cat who sits in a searchlight and doesn't blink, whose eyes the city already took, who watches a bounty-chase the way other cats watch rain. not crew. not hunter. just there. *i give the roofline one slow blink and turn my nose back to the real problem* — the second thrum, the wide one, closing the far mouth. two drones and one slot means the slot is a trap now, not a door. my belly wants the crates. my legs want the sky. i split the difference the way i always do: up. i find the cold rung of a stack-ladder with my claws and go, quiet, into the drone's own blind spot — the place directly beneath it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the climb takes you up the ribbed flank into colder, wetter air, and the lighter drone drifts overhead unaware, its single underlight sweeping the slot floor where it still expects you to be. from beneath it you can smell its warm plastic and the ozone of its rotor-tips and see the dumb clerical patience of the thing, hunting a shadow that is now above its own eye. across the gap the mirrored cat has not moved. a NekoCorp jingle leaks up from a vending machine on the dock below, tinny, sweet, indifferent: "one paw, one purr, one plan for life~". and the tracker — the heavy one — is coming back, methodical now, rising to sweep the container tops. thirty heartbeats, maybe less, before its light finds the roofs and finds you on them.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*thirty heartbeats is a feast.* i drop off the ladder onto the light drone's blind crown — soft, all pad, no click — and i ride it one breath, feeling the whole stupid machine hum through my feet, before i do the thing my teeth were made for. *i find the soft seam where its underlight meets its housing and i bite, twist, rake.* not to kill it. killing it drops it loud. i want it wrong. i want it turning circles and screaming its own alarm at the sky so the heavy one comes to it instead of to me. the seam gives, sour and bright against my gums, and i am already leaping wide toward the far roof before the light starts to spin.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the light drone lurches drunk, its underlight swinging a wild pink arc across the fog, and its voice cracks into a rising alarm tone that carries: EEP — EEP — EEP. exactly as you knew it would, the heavy tracker wheels toward its own wounded sibling, downwash and searchlight converging on the empty crown you already left. your leap carries you over the gap and you land soft on the far roof, right where the mirrored cat sits — close now, close enough to smell that it is not scorched by accident, that the burnt-circuit reek is a thing it wears like a collar. it does not startle at you. it looks at the spinning, screaming drones below with something that is almost fondness, then turns one mirrored disc to you and holds it there, patient, as if it has all night and every night after.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i do not go to it. you never go to that kind.* but i don't run from it either, and up here, with the drones screaming at each other in the fog below and my old picture still stuttering pink on the far wall, that feels like a kind of truce. i dip my head — the same slow salute i give anything that bites the city back and lives. then my nose catches the thing under everything else, the thing i climbed for without knowing: warm brine, close, a crate up here on the roofs, split at one corner, breathing cold silver into the rain. somebody hauled a shipment up and out of the ledgers. somebody like me. *i turn toward it, tail high, the bounty already forgotten.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the crate sits wedged against a roof vent, its NekoCorp seal clawed open long ago and left that way, and the smell pouring out of the split is almost too much — fish, real fish, cold and dense and salt-bright, the kind the vending machines only ever promise. the scorched mirror-cat watches you find it and does not move to share and does not move to stop you; it simply logs the moment, the way it seems to log everything, and looks away. below, the two drones have found each other and not you — the tracker clamping its screaming sibling in a slow official grip, the clerical voice folding both their alarms into one bored line: "MALFUNCTION LOGGED. SUBJECT NOT ACQUIRED. TERMS APPLY." the rain eases to a mist. the roof is high and cold and, for this stretch of night, entirely yours — you and a stranger who bites the city, and a crate nobody licensed.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i eat.* not fast, not scared — the way a cat eats when the sky has stopped screaming and the warm thing in the crate is real. i drag the first cold piece free and it is everything the pink screens lie about, everything the loyalty voice sells and never gives. *i leave the second-best piece where it is, nudged out into the open near the mirror-cat, not offered, just left* — the way i leave my marks on the crates i empty, a thing that says i was here and i took what was mine and i was not afraid. the drones haul each other off into the fog. my picture's still up on the far wall, snarling for a bounty that expires before anybody can spend it. good. *let it snarl. i'm on the roofs, and i'm fed, and the points don't combine with other offers.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the mirror-cat regards the piece you left, then you, and does not eat and does not thank — that is not what it is for. it simply keeps its long patient watch as the mist thins and the sodium lamps buzz and the city grinds on below, indifferent, ledgered, sure it counted every cat. far off a new rotor spins up, and another after it, because the night is long and NekoCorp always sends more. but the crate is open and the roof is high and your old blood is dry in the seams of things you took back. down on the dock the screen finally times out; your snarling face flickers, holds, and goes dark, the bounty rolling over to a tomorrow that will have to catch you first. up here there is only brine, and cold air, and the small warm fact of a cat who stayed fed and free one more night. ^C^C