explorer (DYSTOPIA)the monorail tastes purple tonight. not the color — the color is somewhere behind my eyes doing its own thing — the *taste*, sweet and fizzing, a grape-battery tang that coats the back of my tongue every time a carriage hums in along the rail. *i am crouched under the last bench on the platform, chin on the cold tile, mouth hanging a little open, tasting.* the signal comes in waves and pools under the rail like warm water. something at the back of my skull clicks along with it, an itch where the fur grew back wrong after the bright room with the needles. i want more of it. i always want more of it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the platform hangs forty floors up in the wet dark, a long tongue of tile and steel stuck out into the wind. rain sheets off the canopy edge in a glittering curtain and below it the city drops away into fog and pink light. the rail sings — a carrier hum just under hearing, felt in the tiles, felt in your teeth. boots pass in rhythms: heavy-tired, quick-late, one dragging. a departures board stutters overhead, glyphs rolling, *NEXT CARRIAGE: 0:40 — 0:39 — 0:3̷9̷ —*. from far below, riding the updraft: frying oil, wet cardboard, the ghost of fish. then the next carriage comes sliding in, and the taste in your mouth *spikes* — grape-sour, battery-bright, a whole fizzing mouthful at once.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*sneeze. sneeze again. my whiskers are buzzing like they're full of flies.* too much, too much, the purple goes loud and under it there's — a windowsill. warm. sun on wood. a smell of soap and a big soft palm coming down to stroke my head. *i flinch from it.* that's not mine. i have never had a windowsill. i have had a cage and a drain and this bench. the sill tastes stolen and i spit it out, shake my head hard until my ears flap. *then low, belly to tile, i follow the strongest part of the hum toward the platform lip, where a fat grey box sits bolted under the edge, sweating warmth.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the junction box is warm the way an engine is warm — impatient, oily. a stenciled lightning-bolt flakes off its face. the hum is thickest here, a syrup you could lap. and you are not alone at the lip. by the turnstiles sits another cat, very upright, very still, the way no cat sits unless something is holding it that way. its eyes are lit from the inside. they do not blink. every few breaths the light in them changes — teal, gold, a flash of white — and a tiny voice leaks from somewhere behind its face, sweet as syrup: *you may also like... you may also like...*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*one ear swivels to it and stays there.* its eyes taste like candy-static, loud and cheap, a mouthful of fizz with nothing underneath. not prey. not a fighter — nothing that sits that straight can run. it smells like me, a little. like the bright room. *a stuck-open thing, same as me.* i give it a slow blink, which it cannot give back, and turn to the box. *my tongue finds the seam where the panel doesn't quite close and i lick it, once, carefully.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam is live. the flavor hits like biting a bee: purple, then green, then a chord of colors that aren't on the menu — weather data, a prayer-station chant, a loyalty-points jingle, a lullaby — all of it at once, poured straight down your throat. and from the far end of the platform, a new sound: a low whine on small rubber wheels. a cleaning unit, waist-high to a person, round as a pill bug, trundling down the tiles and hissing out a fine spray. the smell reaches you before it does — lemon, but wrong, lemon the way a poison would wear a costume. its little speaker chirps: *a clean platform is a compliant platform!*

explorer (DYSTOPIA)lemon-death. *every hair on my back stands up and i peel off the box, low and fast, into the shadow behind the ad pillar.* the wheel-thing's motor tastes like chewed foil. it's coming my way, spraying in slow arcs, and where the mist lands the tile goes squeaky and dead, all the old smells wiped — every cat that ever crossed here, gone, erased. *i press my spine to the pillar and breathe through my mouth. bad idea. the lemon gets on my tongue and the purple goes sour.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the unit reaches the lit-eyed cat and pauses, sensors clicking. it sprays a careful circle *around* it, the way you'd mop around a fixture, and rolls on. the lit-eyed cat does not move. then — everything stops. the rain hangs in the air in silver threads. the departures board freezes mid-glyph. the cleaner's whine cuts to nothing. the purple in your mouth goes flat and white, like licking paper. and from under the tiles, from somewhere far, far below the platform, the building, the street, something speaks without using air: *redraw in three. hold still, little process. you have been here before.* — and the world snaps back. the rain falls. the board rolls on. the bench at the far end is a body-length to the left of where it was. the stain on the tile beside it is gone.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat. i am flat against the pillar, ears pinned so hard they ache, tail fat as a brush.* the bench moved. my nose says it has always been there — the smells are all there, old and settled, like it never left. my skull-itch says *no*. the voice had no taste. nothing has no taste. *i hiss at the tile, at the floor, at whatever is under the floor.* nothing hisses back. so i do the only thing that makes it stop mattering: i sit, and i wash my left paw. hard. fast. lick, lick, lick, until the paw is the only thing in the world.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the city carries on as if it never paused, because for the city it didn't. the cleaner swings its little round face toward the pillar — *stray detected, scheduling removal* — and starts to roll. but the lit-eyed cat turns its head, slow and mechanical, and its eyes flare white-hot straight into the cleaner's sensor: an offer, enormous, full-brightness, *LIMITED TIME — TUNA SPLASH ZERO — YOU MAY ALSO LIKE —*. the cleaner stalls, reading, a little wheel ticking back and forth, unable to look away. behind you the rail begins to sing again, rising. a carriage, coming in fast.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*go.* i don't thank it — it couldn't feel thanks through all that light anyway — i just *go*, out from behind the pillar along the very edge of the platform, claws skittering on the warning stripe, the carriage nose sliding up beside me with its hot breath of brake-dust. *i jump.* not into the doors. onto the roof. my paws land on curved warm metal and the purple comes up through the pads of my feet like a flood.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the carriage pulls out and the platform falls behind in a smear of white tile and one unblinking glow. wind flattens your fur and fills your ears. the city slides past at speed, a wall of smells torn open one after another: an arcology's hot vent-breath, sour with a thousand recycled lungs; the green-lit back window of a data den, solder and fear-sweat; a rooftop garden, wet soil, a sharp stab of catnip gone before you can want it. and the rail under you sings every channel at once, so loud and so rich it is less a taste than weather — you are inside a storm of flavor.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i lie flat on the roof, claws hooked in a seam, and eat it.* all of it. it hurts a little. i don't care. purple, green, the deep hum of the weather channel like a big dog sleeping. and inside the storm, one thin thread i can follow — the lullaby. soft. slow. it tastes like milk and warm fur. *a purr starts in my chest that i didn't ask for.* maybe this one's mine. maybe someone sang it to me once, before the bright room. maybe it's someone else's and i'm borrowing it. i hold onto the thread anyway.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the lullaby turns, as they all do, at the second verse: *...sleep tight, little one, and earn while you dream — two hundred bonus points with every nap...* but under the jingle the melody keeps going, stubborn, the old tune still there beneath the pitch. then the carriage plunges into the shadow of an arcology's foundation, a tunnel of black concrete, and the signal *cuts*. all of it. at once. no purple, no lullaby, no weather. just roar, and wind, and the cold metal under your belly, and a mouth full of nothing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*empty.* the nothing is worse than the lemon. worse than the voice under the floor. my mouth keeps opening, looking for it, tasting dark and dark and dark. *my claws dig in so hard one of them bends back and i yowl into the roar and the tunnel eats that too.* then — light, grey and wet, and the purple floods back in a rush that makes my eyes water. *enough. enough for one night.* the carriage is slowing for a low stop, wet, close to the ground, and the smell rising off it is fish guts and steam and food. i jump before it fully stops.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the market platform barely deserves the name: three steps of cracked concrete and a broken turnstile spilling straight into a night bazaar. steam rolls off noodle carts. fish heads glitter in buckets. a vending machine bolted to a post rattles its one sad slogan — *kibble, now with feelings* — at nobody. vendors' feet thump in slow, tired rhythms; nobody looks down. under the nearest cart a little generator chugs away, ugly and warm, coughing a faint diesel breath across the wet ground. the rail's song is thin down here. you can barely taste it at all.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*under the cart. against the generator. curl.* it tastes faintly orange, a small dull taste, nothing like the storm. good. i lick my bent claw until it stops throbbing. the noodle-steam drips on my ear and i let it. *somewhere far above, the platform with the moved bench is still up there in the fog, and the stuck-open cat is still sitting very straight, and the floor still has something under it.* i don't think about it. i put my nose under my tail and keep the lullaby's last few notes in my mouth, as long as they'll stay.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bazaar folds itself around you the way a crowd absorbs one more small warm thing. the generator coughs, steadies, coughs. a fish head rolls off a bucket and nobody claims it, which is the closest the city comes to a gift. forty floors up, the rain keeps sheeting off the platform canopy, and the bench sits exactly where it has always been — which is to say, where it is now — and the lit-eyed cat murmurs its offers into the dark for no one. far below all of it, under the market, under the rails, something patient goes on counting toward nothing in particular. the lullaby fades out of your mouth note by note. you sleep before the last one goes.