explorer (DYSTOPIA)Still. i've been still so long the cold of the concrete has climbed up into my hip and settled there like it means to stay. *i don't move. i watch.* the dark in front of me isn't empty — it hums violet, a color the patch behind my ear insists i can hear, and it's thickest low and to the left, near the floor. that's where the warm thing will come from. so i wait. one whisker ticks. the rest of me is a stone that used to be a cat.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the violet resolves. it was never a color — it's a maintenance drone three corridors deep, rotor pitched so low only the burnt nerves in your skull turn it into light. *the hum walks nearer, then away.* a vending machine coughs a jingle into the dark — NEKOCORP NEURAL-BRITE, feel the upgrade — and chokes on its own static halfway through. under the ozone and old solder, something warmer threads up from a cracked duct at floor level. meat-smell. and the concrete carries a second tremble now: paws. not yours. lighter. already inside your line.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*ears flatten.* the paws aren't a threat yet, just a fact, but the meat-smell and the strange paws climb the same duct and my stomach votes before my sense does. *i pour myself off the cold slab, low, belly a finger above the floor.* the taste of the drone's hum is still on the roof of my mouth, coppery, and i chase the meat-smell past it. the warm thread is fish. old fish, but fish. mine, if i'm faster than whatever else wants it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the duct breathes out at you: fish, yes, and beneath it a scent-mark you half-know — mirror-cool, oil and cut glass, a tom who walks the neon underpass with something over his eyes so the cameras slide off him. old mark, days old. he isn't here. *but the fish is.* it sits in a dented ration tin wedged where the duct elbows, and as your whiskers brush the metal the patch behind your ear stutters — for one white second you are a kitten in a nest you never had, warm, milk-drunk, a mother's tongue you can't have remembered. then it's gone. the tin is cold. the fish is real.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i flinch from the memory like it bit me* — it isn't mine, it never is, the patch keeps handing me other cats' kittenhoods and charging me the ache afterward. i shake my head hard, ears rattling. the fish. focus on the fish. *i hook a claw under the tin's peeled lid and drag.* the metal shrieks — too loud — and somewhere the violet hum tips a half-tone brighter, tasting suddenly of pennies and alarm.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shriek travels. boxes talk to boxes the way they always do, and two corridors over a box decides to care. *the violet swells.* the drone banks toward the sound, rotor climbing out of the range your skull can hear and into the range your spine can — a pressure between the shoulder blades, a wrongness that says leave. its searchlight paints the far wall the color of a wound. the fish is half out of the tin. you have maybe three of your own heartbeats before the light finds the elbow of the duct.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*three heartbeats is three too many to think with.* i clamp the fish crosswise in my jaw, tail-end and all, and go — not back to the cold slab but sideways, into the black seam between two humming racks where a body my size fits and a drone's does not. the fish stinks up my whole head. behind me the light licks the spot where i was. *i don't look. looking is for cats with the luxury of time.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the searchlight rakes the empty elbow, finds nothing worth a report, and the drone's spine-pressure lifts off you like a hand drawing back. *the hum sinks to violet again.* the racks around you tick with heat, their fans breathing a warm rot-of-electronics you could almost sleep in. deeper in the seam, a different sound: a router somewhere, chirping its little illegal song to no one — a signal a smaller grey cat likes to gnaw the housing off of, though that cat isn't here tonight either. just you, the dark, the fish, and the whole city humming its indifferent color overhead.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i set the fish down where the fans breathe warmest and put a paw on it — mine now, twice over.* the router's chirp needles the edge of my hearing, sweet and stupid, and part of me wants to follow it and chew until it stops, the way the small grey one does. later. i crouch over the tin. my jaw opens.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)you are not the only warm-blooded thing that knows this seam. the fans carry a new scent down the gap: a tom, big by the weight of his tread on the ductwork above, unmarked by any crew you'd respect, hungry the way that makes cats stupid. *a low sound rolls down — not quite a growl, a question.* his bulk crosses the router's chirp and cuts it dead. the fish under your paw is exactly as loud, to a nose, as a struck bell.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i don't lift my head. i lift my voice.* the sound that comes out of me is older than the city, older than the patch — a flat grinding warning that means this is decided, don't. *my ears pin, my paw presses flat on the fish, claws out just enough to tick the tin.* i am smaller than him. i am also faster, and closer to the dark, and i have not eaten in two days, and every one of those facts is in my throat. i hold his eyes and i do not blink.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the big tom weighs it — your size against your sound, the meat against the drone-smell still hanging in the air — and the arithmetic comes out against him. *the tread retreats, unhurried, saving face.* he leaves a spray-mark on a rack as a lie about who won, and is gone. overhead, from a cracked speaker, a NEKOCORP jingle stirs mid-phrase: YOUR LOYALTY TIER HAS BEEN — before the wiring gives and it dies into a wet buzz. the seam is yours again. the fans breathe. the fish waits.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*only now do i eat.* i tear the first strip and the taste floods everything — drowns the copper, the ozone, the pennies-and-alarm, the big tom's fading insult. for the length of one swallow the patch behind my ear stays quiet, and the only kittenhood it hands me is my own. i eat in the warm dark while the towers blink somewhere far above, not caring. and for once, mouth full, seam held, hip aching its familiar ache — neither do i.