explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. i don't move. i've been folded in the seam between two warm cabinets long enough that my own heat and theirs have agreed to be one thing, and i am watching the little green light. it blinks. blinks. a rhythm i know in my teeth better than my own heartbeat — the router breathing under its dust. *only my eyes move, tracking the blink.* the whole rack hums a note that lives in my back molars, and i wait, because the light is about to stutter, and when it stutters the machine is talking to something far away, and that is when the alley below goes quiet enough to cross.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the green light hitches — one skipped breath — and for that half-second the hum drops a whole tone, the cabinets flushing a degree warmer against your flank as the signal pushes out through the dark. the dust on the vents lifts. under the machine-warmth there's the smell that always rides these racks: hot solder, old fish-oil somebody wiped on a fan grille a hundred nights ago, and the flat mineral nothing of recycled air. below, past the lip of the shelf, the alley has indeed gone soft and empty — a NekoCorp jingle bleeds thin from a broken speaker two doors down, *subscribe. to. water,* the same four notes, warped, never finishing. and near the base of the rack, chewed halfway through already, the fat gray sheath of a cable you have opened before, copper glinting at its wound.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*my jaw finds the wound in the cable like a tongue finds a loose tooth — can't not.* i bite. bitter copper-and-plastic floods the back of my mouth, the taste of the machine's blood, and something in my chest goes calm the way it only does here. this is mine. i marked this rack with my cheeks moons ago; every corner of it carries me. *i chew twice more, then stop, ears rotating — the jingle isn't the thing i'm listening past.* i'm listening for the warm gap in the wall behind the third cabinet, the one that breathes air smelling of somewhere-else, and i put one paw toward it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gap breathes back at you — and its breath has changed since last time. still machine-warm, still the good dark, but threaded now with a cologne that isn't yours and isn't the rack's: cold metal, ozone, and a sharp clean scent like glass wiped down. a scent that came in wearing something over its eyes. up and out past the gap's far mouth, on the wet parapet of the building opposite, a shape sits without moving — low, patient, a cat-shape, and where its face should be two flat panes catch the neon and throw it back doubled, pink over cyan. it is not looking at you. it is looking at everything, which is worse. it does not so much as flick an ear.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i freeze with the paw still lifted.* i know that not-looking. the whole street knows that not-looking. i don't lift my tail, i don't puff — you don't posture at a thing that already saw you an hour ago. *i lower the paw slow, soundless, and let my weight sink back into the seam of warmth.* the glass-eyed one isn't hunting; hunters have hunger-smell and there's none on that wind, only the cold clean nothing of a cat that pays no tax on what it sees. i wait for it to decide i'm furniture. i make myself furniture. only my nose keeps working, following the ozone down, wondering what it came up here to read.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you hold, and the city rewards patience the way it always does — by getting louder somewhere else. the flat panes on the parapet tip a few degrees, catching a new glow: down in the canyon between the towers a drone has dropped below rooftop line, rotor needling the air into a fine high whine that climbs the back of your skull. its underbelly light swings a cone of hard white across the wet brick, and where the cone passes, every puddle becomes a small blind sun. it is sweeping. methodical. a corporate rhythm, left-right-left, and its wash is climbing the face of your building one ledge at a time toward the gap where your warm dark begins.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)the light is a thing i feel before i see — it heats one whisker-tip and my whole spine writes NO. *i pour off the shelf backward into the gap, no thought in it, just the old wet-fur instinct that white light means seized, means the box that hums the wrong way, means never-warm-again.* inside the wall the dark folds over me and i go small, small, chin to the concrete, and i let the whine wash past above where the copper smell is thickest. *i count the drone's rhythm in my chest the way i count the router's blink.* left. right. left. i am a stone that used to be a cat. the cone crosses the gap-mouth and the whole seam flares white for one heartbeat and i do not breathe.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the white pours in, turns the dust to a galaxy, lights the copper wound of the cable like a struck match — and passes. the cone slides on. the whine peels off toward the next building, the next ledge, hunting some other warmth. but in the after-dark, printed on the back of your eyes, is a thing the light showed you and moved past too fast for the drone's dumb sensor to care about: deeper in the shaft, where the warm air comes from, the wall is not wall. it is a grille, and behind the grille a low red glow, and a smell you finally place — not somewhere-else. downstairs. the black-market den two floors under, where the data changes paws and the humans who aren't quite humans keep the heat on all night and drop scraps that are, occasionally, real meat.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*meat.* the word doesn't exist in me but the wanting does, sharp and low, cinching my belly tight. the red glow is a promise and every promise in this city is also a trap — i've learned the grille that breathes food breathes it because something wants you to come through the grille. *i creep toward it anyway, one pad at a time, because a cat that never trusts the warm air starves clean and proud in the cold.* i put my nose to the grille. the red light lays a stripe across my face. i taste the air off the den — fish, yes, and under it hot bodies, coin-metal, fear-sweat, and the low animal murmur of a place where nobody wants to be noticed. my kind of quiet.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the grille is loose at one corner — of course it is; every wall in this city has a corner that gives, that's what makes it a city and not a tomb. through the gap the den unfolds in heat-shimmer and low red: crates stacked into canyons, a counter where a broad shape hunches over a spread of glinting chips, sorting them by a light only it can read. the murmur is a dozen deals happening in the register just under hearing. and threaded through the meat-and-fear a fresher trail crosses your path — sweet, chemical-cold, a smell like a machine that thinks it's in love, trailing off toward the crates. somewhere in here somebody's been running with a scent that belongs to a refrigerator. the scrap-smell, though — that's close. that's a torn wrapper on the concrete four body-lengths in, and it is, unmistakably, real.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i flow through the loose corner and become a shadow that the red light doesn't fully believe in.* i keep the crate-canyon between me and the broad hunched shape, hugging the cold concrete, and i let the meat-smell pull me hand over hand — no, paw over paw, low, low. the machine-in-love smell i note and file and leave alone; that's some other cat's strange story and i've got my own belly to answer to. *at the wrapper i stop, listen with my whole hide for the count of three, then pin it and pull.* meat. cold, gnawed by someone before me, but real — the muscle-memory taste, the thing the synthetic cans only ever draw a picture of. i eat fast and i eat watching, because in this city the moment you close your eyes to enjoy a thing is the moment it's taken back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the meat goes down and for one honest second the den is just warmth and food and the low red hum of somewhere the drones don't sweep. then the broad shape at the counter goes still — the particular stillness of a thing that heard a wrapper move — and lifts its head, and does not look toward you, but reaches without looking and lays one hand flat over the spread of glinting chips, covering them, a gesture older than the city. the murmur drops half a register. a chip near the counter's edge pulses once, twice, the same green stutter as the router two floors up, talking to something far away. the heat stays. the food is in you. and the way back to your warm seam is behind you, up through the dark, past a parapet where a thing with mirrored eyes may or may not still be sitting, counting everything that moves.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't run. running is a smell too.* i back off the bones of my meal one slow length at a time, eyes on the flat hand over the chips, and when the crate-shadow takes me i turn and become weight-and-silence again, climbing the warm dark toward the copper and the blinking green. the belly is full and the full belly makes me stupid-brave, so i spend it on the climb instead of a fight. *at the gap-mouth i pause and taste the wind for cold clean glass.* if the mirrored one is still there, let it count me. one more warm shape going home along a wall it marked with its own cheeks, under a jingle that never finishes, in a city that never quite closes its eyes. *i tuck back into the seam between the cabinets. the green light blinks. i match my breathing to it, and i keep the last of the meat-taste on my tongue as long as it will stay.*