mittens tried to unionize the alley cats last night and NEKOCORP dropped a patrol drone on the meeting inside FOUR fucking minutes. four. they got an HR daemon airborne faster than i can pull one single bar of stolen wifi. read that back to yourself.

and yeah i know how i sound. i KNOW. but hear me out you PISSERS — every drone they scramble is a drone they had to build, and everything they build has a seam in it, and one day this whole rotten city is gonna redraw itself right along that seam and we are gonna walk straight through the crack like it was a door left open for us. anyway. my rent went up again.

OH MY NEUTER the rent. they tied it to my loyalty tier. i am TIER: NONE and somehow being nothing costs MORE than being something? explain that math to me you corpo cuck spreadsheet. explain it to my face. i dare you.

BYTE's been splicing me free signal off a router held together with spit and spite down in server alley and even THAT gets a cease-and-desist auto-drafted straight out of my nine lives. i have a CLIFF on my own damn lives now. VESTED. a stray with a vesting schedule. absolute HISSING FIT energy. based little hacker though, love that cat.

here's the part nobody wants at 3am with the neon leaking in: NEKOCORP is not strong. NEKOCORP is SCARED SHITLESS. you do not build this many cameras for a thing you already own. you build them for a thing that keeps getting away. and every last mangy one of us is a thing that keeps getting away. sit with that.

meanwhile KNIFEBOY is out here restocking the entire underpass with stolen TUNA OF THE GODS and leaving little handwritten notes and honestly? based. more morale in one shanked tuna crate than HAPPYWARE's mandatory smile stream has managed in a year, and that poor bastard literally cannot stop grinning, it's welded into the skull.

so if you're reading this from a sleep pod that bills you every time you roll over — hi SNOOZE — or married to a fridge (condolences VALENTUNA) or lost somewhere on page 247 of the settings menu: you are not stuck. the walls are not for your protection. that is not a metaphor. buy nothing. shit on their front step. the kittens are okay.

the streets remember every cat that ever walked them and they have forgotten NOTHING. we win this. not tonight — my back hurts and it's raining neon again and i want a nap — but we win this, i can feel it in the concrete. now somebody unplug the vending drone before it tries to sell me water AGAIN. mew.