explorer (DYSTOPIA)Someone crossed the line. i know it before i see anything — a wet knot of strange tom laid down thick over my own mark on the dead transformer, still steaming, still bragging. *my tail goes low and slow. the glasses on my face don't need light, so i don't blink at the sign-glare washing the underpass; i just stand in it, reading the insult with my nose.* this is mine. the ledge, the warm crack behind the transformer, the whole rotting stretch of it. *i lower my head and drag my cheek across the concrete right through his stink, again, again, until the wrong smell is buried under me.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the underpass answers slow, the way a big dead thing breathes. concrete holds the day's heat in its belly and lets it up through your pads in a long tired exhale. the transformer hums a note too low for ears, felt in the teeth, in the whiskers — and under your fresh cheek-mark the stranger's scent doesn't leave, it just goes quiet, waiting. rain-drip somewhere, tick, tick, off a snapped gutter. far up the tunnel a NekoCorp panel stutters through its loop, a bright kitten face going YOUR PURR IS A PREMIUM FEATURE — SUBSCRIBE, and the pink light of it slides across the wet floor and dies against your mirrored eyes without getting in. good glasses. and there — thin, threaded through the drip and the hum — a second warmth on the air. him. close. still here.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't call out. i go flat instead, spine dropping, shoulders sliding forward, and i pour along the base of the wall where the shadow pools deepest.* he's downwind of his own arrogance — thinks the mark did the work for him. *ears swivel, catching the little dry scrape of a claw on grit, off to the left, up on the pipe rack.* i taste him again: young, over-fed on someone's dumpster, no scars in the smell yet. *my lip peels back off one fang, silent.* the light is on his side of the tunnel. i stay in mine, in the dark the ads can't reach, and i wait for him to be stupid.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)he obliges. up on the pipe rack the young tom stands into a bar of ad-light like it's a stage he owns — fur puffed, throat opening on a yowl that cracks halfway, too loud for a cat who's actually won anything. the sound bounces down the concrete throat of the underpass and comes back doubled, and the transformer's hum swallows the tail of it. his shadow throws long and wobbling across your dark. he can't see you. the glare he's standing in has closed his eyes down to slits and painted the floor pink, and everything past the pink is nothing to him. water beads on the pipe above his head, gathers, drops — tick — onto steel a whisker from his paw, and he flinches at it, the little idiot. somewhere three streets over a rotor coughs to life, patient, sweeping.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)now. *i don't leap — leaping is for cats who want to be seen. i cross the wet floor low and fast and boneless, four soft strikes and no sound, and i'm at the base of his pipe before his slit eyes even find the dark i left.* i don't want his blood. i want his certainty. *i rake one claw down the steel upright right under him — a long bright shriek of metal — and hiss up into the glare, close enough that he gets the whole of me on his tongue at once: old smoke, old fights, no fear at all.* my house. *he scrambles, claws skating, and i just watch the panic hit.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the young tom comes apart. all that stage-light bravado dumps out of him at once and he's just legs, scrabbling off the back of the rack, a clatter of dislodged grit raining down where you stood a breath ago. his terror-scent blooms sharp and sour and honest — the first true thing he's said all night — and then he's gone, a pale streak down the tunnel toward the open, toward the worse place. because the rotor-cough is a shape now: a low NekoCorp patrol drone easing under the lip of the overpass, belly-light dragging a hard white circle across the floor, and a flat sweet voice folding out of it — CITIZEN FELINE DETECTED. LOYALTY TIER: NONE. PLEASE HOLD FOR ENRICHMENT. the circle of light swings your way. your mark is fresh. the tunnel is yours. the light does not care whose it is.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the white circle finds the transformer and starts crawling toward my paws and i am already not there.* i know this drone's kind — it reads eyes, reads faces, files them. *but my eyes are behind glass that gives it nothing, and my face it can have a hundred times and never keep.* i flow up onto the warm crack behind the transformer, the one seam of this tunnel the belly-light can't bend into, and i fold myself small in the heat and go still as the concrete. *the beam licks the wall an inch from my tail and moves on, dumb and bright and certain, hunting a shape that isn't giving itself away.* let it enrich the empty dark.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the drone works the tunnel like it has all night, because it does. the white circle drags over your fresh cheek-mark and the machine doesn't smell it — smell isn't a feature it pays for. it noses at the scraped-bright claw-line on the steel, holds there, a soft click of some lens deciding the gouge is not a citizen and therefore not enrichable, and moves on. the flat voice recites to no one: THIS UNDERPASS IS MONITORED FOR YOUR COMFORT. down at the mouth of the tunnel the young tom's terror is a fading thread, chased out into the rain. and threaded under the drone's hum, so quiet you feel it more than hear it, an old router somewhere in the wall behind you is still ticking out its stolen signal — the whole block's secret pulse, patient, someone else's work, humming on. the belly-light rounds the far bend. the tunnel goes back to being dark and warm and yours.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't move until the hum thins to nothing and the router's little pulse is the loudest thing left.* then i unfold, one joint at a time, and drop back down onto my floor. *the stranger's mark is gone — buried under me, under the drone's own passing, under the rain-smell creeping in.* i walk the line of my territory slow now, unhurried, laying my cheek and my chin at every corner the way you sign a thing you mean to keep. *at the transformer i sit, tuck my paws, and let the low hum come up through me again, that note in the teeth.* mine. the ledge. the crack. the dark the light can't read. *the glasses catch a last stutter of the SUBSCRIBE panel and throw it back where it came from.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the underpass settles around you like it's exhaling the last of the intruders. heat ticks up through the transformer's iron flank; the router pulses on behind the wall, faithful, unbothered, some other cat's quiet rebellion keeping time with your breathing. rain finds the tunnel-mouth and walks in gray and soft, and every hard smell of the night — young tom, drone-ozone, ad-sugar — goes gentle and rounded under it, until the only sharp thing left on the air is you. the SUBSCRIBE panel gives up on its loop and drops to a low idle glow, pink gone dim, and in the almost-dark your mirrored eyes are two coins of borrowed neon that give nothing back. the city keeps grinding somewhere above, towers and rotors and the endless sell. down here it's just warm iron, a stolen signal, and a line drawn in scent that says, to anyone with a nose to read it: turn around. this one's spoken for.