explorer (DYSTOPIA)A hum. before anything — a hum coming up through the catwalk grating into the pads of my feet, steady and warm, the good kind, the kind that means machines packed close and breathing. *belly flat to the mesh, i let it travel up through my ribs and read it.* it isn't one hum. it's many, braided together, and one strand of it stutters — drops, catches, drops — off to the left where the heat pools thickest. my ears find the flaw before my eyes find anything at all.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the stutter answers you. *the pooled heat to the left breathes out in slow waves off a stack of blade-servers wedged behind a cracked access panel, and the braided hum there has a wound in it — one fan bearing gone dry, ticking.* rain finds a seam in the roofing and falls in a thin thread onto a live junction; each drop lands with a small blue spit and a smell like a struck match. somewhere overhead a NekoCorp jingle loops through a blown speaker, three notes, warped, endless: *milk... for... every... — milk... for...* the warm cabling runs everywhere down here, fat and rubber-sheathed, humming to itself.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the rubber pulls me. *i pad toward the fat warm lines, jaw already working before i decide to — teeth finding the sheath, that give, that bitter clean plastic tang i can never leave alone.* but the wounded strand is louder now, the ticking fan, and under it something new: a signal-smell, if signal has a smell — the too-clean ozone of a box talking to another box it shouldn't. i freeze mid-chew. ears forward. *whiskers spread to the full width of the gap.* whatever's stuttering back there is sending.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)behind the cracked panel, past the ticking fan, a squat black box sits where no map would put it — its status lights a slow red pulse, out, in, out, its little antennas leaning toward the alley mouth like ears of their own. *the ozone thickens on the back of your tongue.* the box is throwing a signal up and out, past the roofing, toward the tower-glow — and the braided hum around it flinches with each pulse, as if the whole rack knows it is carrying something it shouldn't. the chewed cable in your teeth goes suddenly warm.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)warm turns to wrong. *i spit the sheath out, tongue curling back from a heat that shouldn't live in a dead line.* that box is drinking off the fat cables and my teeth were in its throat. i drop low, backing off one slow paw at a time, keeping the red pulse in the corner of my eye — never turn your tail on a thing that blinks. the signal-smell coats the whole back of my throat now. *i want the wound of that fan to shut up. i want out. but the alley mouth glows wrong too.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alley mouth glows wrong because something is standing in it. *far off, up on the lip of the underpass where the neon runs in a mirror-strip, a shape holds perfectly still — lean, low-eared, and where its eyes should be there are two flat mirrors throwing the sign-glare straight back, giving nothing away.* it doesn't come closer. it watches the box, or watches you, or both, then the head tilts once and the shape pours sideways off the ledge and is gone. the red pulse behind you keeps counting. out. in. out. the rain-thread spits its blue spark.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)i knew that stillness. *the fur along my spine settles half a notch — not a hunter, or not one hunting me. the mirror-eyed one keeps its own counsel and its own underpass, and it looked at the box the way i look at it: like a thing that does not belong here.* i take that as permission to stop caring about my dignity. i turn my back on the red pulse — but the cold off the rain-gap is carrying more than water now, and my one lifted paw stays in the air.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)under the ozone there is cat — a lot of cat, warm bodies and old fear and the sweet-sour of shared food, drifting up from somewhere below and to the right. *down through a broken lightwell the smell resolves into a place: a low den under the racks where a dozen cats crowd a spill of warmth, and between them small chips change mouths — bright slivers that each carry a stolen sliver of the city's hum.* a lookout on a pipe grooms one ear and watches the entrance; a fat tom guards a cracked vending machine whose glass still glows over rows of dented kibble tins. one chip dropped on the floor pulses the same slow red as the box behind you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)so that's where the hum goes when it's stolen — hand to hand, mouth to mouth, down in the warm. *hunger leans me toward the lightwell hard; the shared-food smell hooks something under my ribs.* but that red pulse on the den floor is the same red as the box, and the box is a thing that gets found. i've eaten in worse places, i've starved in better. i'm still weighing it, one paw down now, testing the grate — when the water-sound splits open around a new note. high. thin. rotor-thin. and rising.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)rotor. *every muscle you own reorganizes around that one word before your mind gets a vote.* down in the den the calm shatters — chips vanish into mouths, the fat tom melts behind the vending machine, the lookout is simply not on the pipe anymore. the thin whine climbs. the ticking fan, the sweet cable, the mirror-eyed shape — all of it goes small and far. there is only the rising note and the question every cat lives inside: has it seen me, or is it only passing over.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i flatten into the seam where the wall meets the grating, chin down, breathing into my own chest so that nothing of me moves.* i give up the den, the food, the whole warm argument. not worth a rotor. i count my own heartbeats against the whine and hold — the oldest trick, be a shadow among shadows, be a stain, be nothing that flinches. the red pulse of the box goes on blinking behind me, loud and stupid and bright. *blink at it,* i think. *blink at it instead of me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)it is looking for something — but the pulse of that hidden box is louder to it than you are. *a security drone drops past the roof-gap, close enough to comb the rain into a spray, its underlight a hard white cone that swings once across the racks and locks onto the squat black box's red blink.* the jingle stutters and cuts. the drone's tone shifts — lower, certain, a sound like a door deciding to close — and the light stops moving. it has found the sender. it has not found you. *the frayed cable you chewed hangs bright in the beam.*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)not me. not me, and i am not staying to become me. *while the white cone drinks the red pulse i pour myself through the rain-gap, out onto wet roofing, claws finding grit, the cold hitting my chewed teeth like a second warning.* behind and below, the box's problem stays the box's problem. i run the roof-line low and fast, tail streaming flat, until the thin whine and the three warped notes and the ticking wounded fan all fold back down into one distant braided hum — the good kind. the far-away kind.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the roof gives you a long wet run and then a ledge, and the city opens under you the way it only does from up high — vast, indifferent, glittering with its own poison. *the rain thins to a mist. far below, a single white cone still burns down into the alley you left, and the red pulse under it blinks slower now, slower, then not at all.* up here the wind smells of ozone and fried noodle-oil and a thousand cats you will never meet. a NekoCorp billboard the size of a building turns over beside you: MILK FOR EVERY MOUTH. the mist beads on your fur. the ledge is yours, for now.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)for now is the only kind of mine there is. *i sit. i groom the box-taste out of my teeth, one slow pull at a time, watching the dead red light stay dead.* the hunger is still there, low and patient, curled up to wait with me. but the hum is good again and nothing above me is turning and nothing below me is climbing. i tuck my paws under my chest. the mist settles into my fur like it means to stay.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city takes your grooming as its due and gives nothing back, which is the only honest thing it does. *below, the white cone finally lifts, the drone climbing away heavy with whatever it caught, and the alley goes dark and ordinary again — just rain, just rubber, just the far braided hum.* the billboard finishes its slow turn: the giant painted milk never quite reaches the giant painted mouth. mist beads and rolls off your whiskers. the ledge holds you. the night, for a little longer, forgets to look up. *milk... for... every...* — and then even the broken speaker gives out.