explorer (DYSTOPIA)Cold in the joint first. before hunger, before the light — the old ache in my hip where a service door caught me once, throbbing slow with the wet. *i don't get up yet. i knead the flattened cardboard, testing which way the pain lets me lean.* the belly's the second thing. empty and loud and demanding, a knot pulling toward wherever warm-and-fed might be. and there it is, threaded through the damp: that thin electric warmth off to the left, a machine breathing heat it doesn't need. i know that breath. i've slept on that breath. *hip complaining, i rise anyway and point my nose at it.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warmth resolves as you close on it — a squat gray cabinet wedged behind the shuttered water kiosk, its vents ticking, exhaling that dry copper-and-dust heat that means the little lights inside are awake and working. the hum is a nest of hums, layered, some steady, one of them stuttering like it's chewing on itself. *the top panel is skin-warm.* below it, sheathed in gnawed plastic, a fat bundle of cable runs down into the dark, and one strand of it carries a taste you already know is there before your tongue confirms it — bitter, forbidden, familiar. two streets off, a rotor coughs and moves away. not for you. not yet. the billboard overhead loops its jingle through a blown speaker: NEKO— *crackle* —purr harder. work softer. NEKO—

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*up onto the warm panel in one bad-hipped lurch, and the heat goes straight into the sore joint like a hand pressing it.* i sit. i let it fix me a little. but the ears won't settle — the stuttering hum is a wrongness, a knot in a sound that should be smooth, and something in me needs to worry it loose. *i lean off the edge, head down toward the gnawed cable, and set my teeth to the plastic where it's already soft.* i'm not eating it. i'm reading it. the bitter comes up sharp and the buzz threads into my jaw and behind my eyes, and for one blink the whole cabinet's breathing feels like it's saying something almost shaped.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the buzz peaks the instant your teeth find copper — a bright metal shriek across the tongue, then the stuttering strand steadies, as if the chewing set something back in its groove. inside the cabinet the lights shift their rhythm. warmth blooms a half-degree hotter under your paws, grateful, almost. from a slot on the machine's flank a strip of thin paper feeds out and curls in the wet: a receipt nobody asked for. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS LOGGED. CONNECTION FEE: 0.03 CLAWCOIN. YOUR BALANCE: —. above, on the far rooftop across the alley, a low silhouette holds itself very still against the sign-glow — narrow, patient, two flat mirrored discs where the eyes should be, catching the neon and giving nothing back. it has been there the whole time. it does not move.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*teeth off the cable, all at once.* the shape on the roof. i didn't hear it, didn't smell it — it's upwind and it's still and that's worse than a drone, because a drone is dumb and this is watching on purpose. my fur lifts along the spine of its own accord. *i flatten to the warm panel, small, ears pinned, one paw tucked under.* i don't run. running is a thing that moves first, and whatever's up there is winning the game of not-moving. so i hold. i make my breath shallow. i keep those two flat cold discs at the very edge of my eye and i wait to learn if the night is about to change shape.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the silhouette holds a long, long beat — long enough for the rain to stitch three more lines down the sign — and then, unhurried, it turns its head a few degrees, unhitches from the ledge, and pours itself sideways along the rooftop and gone, no sound, no scent trail crossing to you, just an absence where a watching used to be. it never hurried. whatever it wanted, it wasn't you, or it had already gotten it. the warmth under you keeps breathing. somewhere below street level a subwoofer thuds a market awake — stalls, frying oil, the wet-fish reek of a tuna cart pulling its shutters up — and the smell of food reaches into the knot in your belly and pulls.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i wait until the absence has been an absence for ten full breaths before i trust it.* the hip's warmer now, looser; the heat did its work. and the food-smell has me — frying oil, and under it, unmistakable, the oily silver reek of tuna doing its slow drag across the back of my throat. *i slither off the panel, land soft on the good leg first, and put my nose to the ground toward the thud of the market.* one last thing though. before i go i turn and rake a quick claw down the soft plastic of the cable, my own gnaw-mark over the machine's stupid paper. mine. i fixed your hum. i'll be back for the warm.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the claw-mark takes, a pale fresh gouge over the curling receipt — your scent laid down, a small flag planted in a small warm country. then the alley tips you downhill toward the noise. the market is a wet throat of light: strung bulbs, steam, a hundred feet and no faces at your height, just ankles and cart-wheels and the constant risk of being stepped through. the tuna reek sharpens to a single source — a low stall, ice weeping down its side, a cat-sized crate stacked at its base guarded by nothing, which is exactly the kind of nothing that gets a stray killed. overhead a patrol drone slides between the bulbs, and its underbelly speaker recites in a flat bored loop: forty thousand loyalty points. the cat KNIFEBOY. do not approach. points expire on capture. do not approach. the cat KNI—

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the drone's shadow slides over me and i freeze between two crate-legs, made of stillness again.* the flat voice means nothing to me — sounds, not sense — but the rhythm of it, the sweep of the thing above, that i understand in the meat. i wait for the light to pass. *then i'm at the weeping crate, and the tuna-reek is a wall, and the guarded-by-nothing is screaming trap in every hair on my body.* i don't climb in. i reach. one paw, claws out, hooking through the gap for the nearest cold silver edge, weight back on the good leg, everything in me ready to be already-gone the instant the world twitches.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your claw finds the fish — cold, yielding, real — and drags a whole slick slab of it grating out through the gap. no snap of a trap, no net, no light. just, tucked where the slab had been, a scrap of card gone soft with meltwater, clawed over in a jagged hand you can't read but whose meaning is pure territory-scent: this crate was already emptied by someone who left a message about it. the drone's loop dopplers away between the bulbs. the market roars on, indifferent. the fish steams faintly in the cold. it is, for one held breath, entirely yours, and the hip doesn't hurt, and nothing is watching, and the city has — briefly, suspiciously — decided to let you eat.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i drag the slab back between the crate-legs, into the dark seam where no ankle can reach, and i hunker over it with my whole body curved into a wall.* i don't think about the soft clawed card, the emptied crate, the someone who came first. that's a tomorrow-shape and i am an is-now cat. *i eat. fast, ugly, both eyes still working the gap of light past my shoulder.* the tuna is cold and oily and perfect and it goes into the belly-knot and loosens it thread by thread. warm hip, full mouth, my mark drying on a machine two streets back that owes me nothing and will feed me again. the rain keeps coming. i keep eating. the night, for once, is losing the game of moving first.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city lets it stand. the bulbs buzz, the steam curls, the far rotor threads its patient grid across a sky you'll never look up into for long. above the market a dead billboard flickers half-alive, throws one guttering wash of pink light down into your seam, finds you crouched and fed and unbothered, and moves on — nothing to sell a cat that already has what it wants. the tuna dwindles. the warmth of the machine two streets back keeps breathing your scent into the dark, holding your place. somewhere a stuttering hum runs smooth tonight because you passed through. the alley exhales. you are small, and sore, and full, and the neon rain comes down on the just and the unjust and the entirely feline alike.