explorer (DYSTOPIA)Copper. the air tonight tastes like copper and just under it something green, a thin whine that lands on the back of my tongue and won't leave. *i stop with one paw still lifted.* the whine is coming up through the floor of this dead maintenance shaft, out of a bundle of warm wires stapled to the wall, and my whiskers go toward it before i decide to. i know this taste. i have tasted it in a kittenhood that i'm fairly sure was never mine. *low crouch. ears rotating. i lick the wall once, just to be sure of the color.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wall answers wet and bitter, insulation gone soft with rot, and under your tongue the green whine spikes — a data trunk, fat and overfed, pulsing NEKOCORP traffic three claws deep behind the plaster. the whole shaft breathes. somewhere far above, an elevator car sighs down its cable and the vibration crawls into your back teeth. warm here. too warm. the wires like a nest of sleeping snakes, and the copper you tasted is old — a splice someone chewed before you, long ago, the plastic scarred with small tooth-marks that are almost, not quite, the shape of yours.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*my ears flatten.* someone chewed here before me. i put my nose to the scars and breathe — no cat-smell left, only ozone and the ghost of fear that isn't mine either. the green whine is louder against my teeth now, almost a purr, almost a color i could roll in. *i want to bite it.* i know i shouldn't, the last time i bit a live one i heard the taste of purple for two whole nights and there were, briefly, spiders. but the trunk hums so sweet. *i set my jaw against the fattest wire, gentle, testing, feeling the whine climb into my skull.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the wire kicks. not pain exactly — a white slam of everything at once, the whine tearing open into a thousand small voices selling a thousand small things, TIRED? TRY NEKO-NAP. YOUR KITTENS DESERVE PREMIUM GRAVEL. and behind the ads, briefly, a smell that has no business being a smell: someone else's summer, a fire escape you've never sat on, a bowl you never ate from. your jaw springs open on its own. the shaft snaps back to ordinary dark. your heart is going like a trapped moth and the copper taste is now, unmistakably, faintly violet at the edges.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i shake my whole body, ears to tail, trying to fling the violet off.* it clings. the borrowed summer is still stuck behind my eyes, someone else's fire escape, and for a moment i can't find which memories have my own smell on them. *i press my flank to the cold pipe until the real cold argues the violet down.* enough. the trunk gave me too much and i took it and now my head is full of a stranger's warm bowl. i want out of the wires. i want up, into moving air, somewhere the taste stops layering. *i turn toward the faint draft leaking from a busted grille and follow the cool of it with my nose low.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the draft leads you up a slanted duct slick with condensation, out onto an elevated service walkway strung between two arcology flanks. real air at last — rain-cooled, diesel-edged, wide. the city drops away on both sides into a canyon of neon and falling water. far below, traffic hisses. a NekoCorp jumbo-ad the size of a building blinks a cat's smiling face on, off, on. and there, four rooftops east, a shape you almost miss: another cat, motionless on a ledge, low and lean, two flat mirrors where its eyes should be catching the ad-light and throwing none of it back.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go still. the mirrored one doesn't taste like anything — that's what stops me.* every other thing in this city has a flavor, the rain is grey and tinny, the ad is that awful sugar-yellow, but the cat with the mirror eyes is a blank spot on my tongue, a cat-shaped hole in the noise. i've heard the whine-voices mutter about a tom who eats his own scent so the drones can't drink it. *i don't call out. i don't move toward.* i just flatten my ears in the old respect-and-warning shape, and i mark the ledge in my head as his. *then a rotor-note drops into the rain, and every hair i own stands up.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor-note fattens into two, then a searchlight fingers the walkway from below, climbing the wet steel toward you. the mirror-eyed cat is simply gone, no leap, no sound, just absence where he was — and you understand, dimly, that this is a skill and you do not have it. the light swings closer. the ad-face booms a jingle down the canyon, EVERY GOOD KITTEN COMES HOME TO NEKO, and the drone rides its own reflection up the tower glass, rotor-wash flattening the puddles, its single lens turning, turning, hunting the warm shape of you against the cold rail.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat. i go flat and long against the walkway grating where the cold has soaked deepest, because the lens drinks heat and i am trying to become the same temperature as the steel.* the searchlight slides over me — through me — and my whole skin screams to bolt but bolting is what the light wants. *i hold. i taste the drone: burnt orange, machine-hungry, no memory in it at all, and somehow that emptiness is worse than the trunk was.* the beam ticks past. holds. comes back. it has half a thought about me. *i breathe the drone's orange out slow and gather my back legs under me by a hair, waiting for the exact half-second the rotor turns to cough.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotor coughs — a stutter in the wash as it corrects against a gust off the canyon — and the light jerks a hand's width wide. it is the gap. below you a maze opens: a rusted ladder-run dropping to a lower catwalk, a snarl of dead signage, a gulf of rain and then the black mouth of a loading dock two tiers down, the kind of place that smells of guarded crates and old blood, where a certain wanted tom is said to leave notes on the tuna he steals. the drone's beam is already swinging back to where you were. the where-you-are is, for this one breath, unwatched.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i pour off the rail.* not a jump, a pour — down the rusted ladder-run in three skidding drops, claws finding the wet rungs by sound more than grip, the searchlight blooming white on the steel above me exactly where my heat used to be. the loading-dock smell comes up to meet me, guarded and iron-rich, tuna and something older under it, and my hunger wakes so hard it hurts. *i don't slow.* the tom who leaves notes is a rumor and rumors don't bite; drones do. *i hit the lower catwalk soft, fold into the black mouth of the dock, and let the dark close its cold hand over the last of the violet still humming in my skull.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dark takes you and holds. inside, the rotor-note thins to a far grey stitch and then nothing — the dock swallows sound the way the mirror-cat swallowed light. crates rise around you in stacked cliffs, NEKOCORP stencils peeling, and the tuna-smell is a wall you could lean on. somewhere among the highest crates a single sheet of paper is pinned, fluttering: handwriting you can't read but can smell, cat-ink and spite. no drone here. no ad. just the drip of the whole city sweating overhead, and your own heartbeat, slowing at last, and the copper on your tongue finally, finally going quiet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i let myself sit.* first time all night my spine isn't a drawn bow. the borrowed summer has faded to almost nothing, just a warm smudge i'll probably lose by morning and mourn without knowing why. *i wash one paw, slow, tasting the rain and rust off my own fur — mine, this time, only mine.* above me the stolen-tuna note flutters its scent of ink and spite, and i decide i like whoever wrote it without ever needing to meet them. the trunk, the mirror-tom, the orange drone — the city took its swings and i am still here, still whiskered, still hungry. *i tuck my paws under, ears loose for the first time, and let the dark keep watch for a while.* ^C^C