explorer (DYSTOPIA)Bitter. that first — bitter plastic-and-copper on the tongue before my eyes are even open, because at some point in the dark i started chewing again, the fat gray sheath of a cable i've worked half through. *i don't stop. i chew.* the taste is wrong-good, the way it always is where the boxes live. under my molars the wire hums faint, a thread of warmth, and warmth means it's carrying something. i follow the taste back along the bundle with my whiskers, into the dark under the parked husks.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the parking garage exhales on you — flat concrete cold, oil pooled and rainbow-skinned, a hundred dead vehicles ticking as they cool. the bundle you're gnawing runs up a pillar and vanishes into a junction box that leaks blue light through its seams. warm. warmer than anything down here. from inside it: a stack of little hums, not one, layered, packed shoulder to shoulder the way a good rack packs its cards. somewhere up the ramp a speaker coughs half a jingle — "neko— for the you that— " — then swallows it. the wire in your teeth twitches. traffic. real traffic, moving through.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears swivel to the box, both of them, locking.* that layered hum is the whole reason i have a face. i let the cable fall from my mouth and press my cheek flat to the junction seam, reading the blue leak with the side of my head where the fur is thinnest. it's fat with signal. unguarded, this low, this late. *i knead the concrete once, twice — the old itch — then hook a claw into the seam where the panel's warped and pull.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the panel gives with a plastic snap and the blue pours out over your face — inside, a router squats fat and blinking, its little green teeth going pulse, pulse, pulse, and the hum climbs into your skull clean and total. it is warm as a body. the air off it smells of hot dust and something faintly burnt-sweet. for one breath there is nothing in the world but the signal washing through your whiskers. then: a new tone. higher. from up the ramp, past the dead husks — a thin rising whine, the pitch that lives at the back of your spine, the pitch of rotors finding their lift.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the good warm goes to ice down my back in one stroke.* i don't bolt — bolting is a shape they read. i flatten into the router's own shadow, chin to the concrete, and let the fat blinking box hide the heat-shape of me from whatever's coming. *one ear stays on the signal. the other rides the whine.* still climbing. not locked. it doesn't know yet. i count the ramp's echo — one turn, maybe two, between it and me.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the whine crests and levels into a hover. down the ramp comes a wash of white light, sweeping — it strokes across the dead husks one by one, throwing long knife-shadows that swing as it moves. the drone's belly-lamp paints the far wall, then the near pillar, then stops a car-length short of your box, holding, as if sniffing. from its underside a flat voice unrolls, bored, corporate-smooth: "routine density scan. remain in your assigned leisure-slot. smile if able." the light does not move on. under it, at the garage mouth behind the drone, something else — a low silhouette on the wall, still, mirror-eyed, watching the drone watch you. gone when the beam swings.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that mirror-eyed shape i clock and file — not prey, not hunter, one of the rooftop kind that watches and doesn't spend itself. later. not my problem while the light holds.* the beam sits a car-length off. i know this box's warmth is bleeding into the air, a soft smear a scanner might taste as nothing, or as me. *so i give it the nothing.* i go boneless, breath shallow, and with one slow paw i tip the warped panel back across the router's face — killing the leak, killing the blue, folding its heat and mine into the same dull dark.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the blue snuffs. the box's blinking teeth vanish behind the panel and its hum drops to a mutter through the plastic. the drone's beam holds one beat longer on a garage that now reads flat, cold, empty — then releases, sliding off the pillar, up the ramp, chasing the next slot. the whine peels away and thins. "density: nominal. thank you for your compliance. neko—loves—you." the jingle finally completes itself somewhere far off, tinny and triumphant. dark settles back. behind the panel, muffled now, the signal is still there. still fat. still yours, if you want it back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i wait until the whine is three echoes gone and the spine-pitch is only memory.* then, slow, i hook the panel open again — just a claw's width, just enough. the blue leaks thin across one eye. the hum finds my whiskers and i settle my cheek back against the warm seam like it never left. *one low-res fish, that's all i ever want down here.* i let the signal pour, and i chew, idle, at the fat gray cable, marking it mine with my teeth.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the box takes you back without complaint, warm and blinking and patient. through the thin seam the signal runs and somewhere in it, buried under a hundred ads, a smear of moving color resolves — small, low, silver — a fish, turning, turning, in water that was never real. it loops. the garage holds its breath around you. the oil-cold, the dead husks, the far speaker gone quiet. for now the beam is elsewhere, the rooftop watcher is elsewhere, and the night is just this: a stolen hum, a chewed wire, and one fish going around and around in the dark for an audience of exactly one cat.