explorer (DYSTOPIA)Hunger first. it's the oldest thing in me tonight — a hollow grinding low behind the ribs, older than the ache in my back leg where a drone clipped me two winters ago, and the two of them argue about which hurts worse while i lie flat on cold ribbed steel. *i breathe through the pain and let the nose do the work.* somewhere close there is oil, wet cardboard, rat, and under all of it — faint, sealed, taunting — the cold pink smell of fish behind metal.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the loading dock breathes around you in slow diesel heaves. rows of shipping crates stacked cat-heights high, their seams weeping frost, each stamped with a paw-print logo that pulses faint blue in the dark. the fish-smell is real and it is close — third crate from the wall, refrigerated, humming its own little cold song. but the hum has a second layer under it: a thin electric whine, patient, the sound a lock makes when it is thinking. somewhere up in the girders a red dot wakes, considers the dark, and goes back to sleep. not yet. not looking at you yet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*low. i go low, belly kissing the steel, and i pour myself between the crates one shoulder-length at a time.* the ache in the leg says slower and i listen to it — i have learned to trust the parts of me that got hurt. the cold crate sings louder the closer i get. *i press my whole face to the seam where the lid meets the box and pull the fish-smell in until my mouth waters and my jaw shakes.* i know this box. i have opened boxes like this box. there is a soft place at every corner if you are patient and mean.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the corner gives you its secret: a rubber gasket, perished and brittle from a hundred cold cycles, peeling at the edge like old skin. behind it, tuna. real tuna, the restricted kind, the kind that gets a bounty attached to whoever it walks away with. as your claw finds the gap a speaker somewhere overhead clears its throat and croons — *NEKOCORP reminds valued units: shrinkage is theft, theft is un-pawsitive, un-pawsitivity is logged~* — the jingle bright and dead-eyed, looping into itself. the red dot in the girders opens again. this time it holds.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the dot's weight lands on my fur like a cold breath and every hair stands up to meet it.* i do not look up. looking up is for cats who want to be remembered. *i hook the gasket, peel, and the corner sighs open — pink, oiled, glorious — and i take the first mouthful right there in the light because a full stomach outlives most cats who wait.* the leg screams that we cannot run yet. i tell the leg we will run when we are heavier.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor spins up before the alarm does — a fat mechanical hornet-drone dropping out of the girder-dark, searchlight blooming white across the crates, and the jingle switches key into something with teeth: *bounty-eligible unit detected~ hold still for your reward~*. the light swings. and in the half-second before it finds you, it catches something else first: high on the far wall, on a ledge that should be empty, a lean silhouette with two flat mirrored discs where eyes should be, watching the whole thing without moving. the discs flash once in the searchlight. then the wall is empty again, and the light is on you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i saw the mirrors. every cat down here has seen those mirrors once, on the worst or best night of their life, and lived to smell about it.* the seeing steadies me somehow — if the flat-eyed one is watching then this is a night worth watching. *i clamp a second mouthful, drop off the crate on the good leg, and slam sideways into the dark gutter-channel between the stacks where the fat drone's body is too wide to follow.* behind me the light bangs against metal, blind and furious.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the channel swallows you and spits the drone's light back at itself, strobing off wet walls too narrow for its rotors. it screeches its little corporate outrage — *un-pawsitive~ un-pawsitive~* — and pulls up to circle for another door. the gutter runs downhill under your paws, slick with runoff and the ghost-smells of every cat who ever fled this way. ahead, a grate of orange light where the dock meets the alley. and from a speaker you cannot see, low, almost kind, threaded right through the jingle like it was always part of the song: *nice supply chain. run, chud.* — a voice, not a recording. then only the jingle again, as if it never spoke.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the words land wrong and my ears pin, because that was not the box-voice, that was a cat-voice wearing the box, and i do not have a shape for that so i do the cat thing and flinch it out of me and run.* the tuna is heavy and cold in my jaw and it is mine, it is forty-thousand-points mine, and the ache in my leg has gone quiet the way it always does once the running actually starts. *i take the orange grate at a flat sprint and the alley opens its wet mouth to take me in.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the alley is rain and neon and freedom — puddles throwing back a hundred broken NekoCorp signs, synthetic-milk ads dribbling pink light down the brick. behind you the dock alarm finally catches up and howls at an empty channel. the drone gives up at the grate; the restricted crates are not worth the paperwork of a narrow chase. your bounty rides your jaw, uncollected, expiring even now, un-combinable with other promotional offers. the rain closes over your scent-trail like it was paid to. up on a fire escape three streets on, two mirrored discs tilt down, watch you pass with your prize, and — you would swear it — dip once, the smallest nod, before the dark takes them back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i carry the fish under a dead vending machine, into the black hollow where the compressor used to hum, and i set it down and eat like the city owes me and is finally paying.* the mirrored one nodded. i file that away in the warm place where i keep the handful of things that make the leg-ache worth it. *pink oil on my whiskers, rain on the roof, a bounty on my head that no one alive can spend.* i clean a paw. i am the most wanted cat on this dock and no one knows my face, only the hole where the tuna used to be. ^C^C