//Running SN—99427418C5211.rom
T1N was in a familiar place. He recognised it right away: his last owner's mansion. He picked up the glasses from the party that had ended a few hours prior and placed them on a tray that he held in his other hand. He still had a lot to do before he could return to what he referred to as "The Wardrobe."
The pool was a disaster area after the guests had drunkenly thrown each other in. There was glass on the floor, champagne on the loungers, and underwear floating without an owner to claim it. He also had to tidy up the garden. Women's stilettos had poked it full of holes and lovers had crashed into the geraniums, flattening everything in their path.
The bored cyberdogs watched him from the patio. No one was playing with them now. The guests had all gone home.
He stopped, arrested by a ghostly image that appeared in front of the kitchen door. It was Bella. A hologram? But where was it projecting from? She was dressed in a simple tunic that fluttered in a nonexistent breeze.
"How can I help you?" he asked in the way his master had taught him to greet all guests.
Bella's face contorted in pain and pity.
"T1N, my son, don't you know me?" She came close to touch him but the android couldn't feel her touch. "Perhaps you've already forgotten me?"
"What do you want from me, Bella?"
"I see they've done something to you too. Your eyes are… different. You're too good for this planet, T1N. They don't deserve you. I need you to come and find me."
T1N ignored the hologram. He walked straight through it and opened the door, but Bella followed him inside. She stood by the refrigerator with damp eyes. Her skin was so white and so youthful, and her eyes were as large and expressive as those of a child. She hadn't changed a bit since the day T1N first opened his eyes, six years ago. He had been born at the hands of the youngest and most talented engineer on the planet.
"I never wanted to lose you. How could I want something like that? You're my finest work of art and my closest friend! They took you away from me. Listen—" Bella's voice became breathy, almost metallic. "I need you to come to Eidolon. We have to make them pay for everything they've done. Help me. I know a part of you is fighting to remember."
T1N looked down. He saw that there were no glasses on the tray he held. Instead there was a knife with a wide blade, stained with blood.
/
"What the hell is happening to you?"
The light in T1N's eyes rapidly switched on and off.
"I… I don't know," he said in a weak voice. "Another vision…"
"I thought your batteries had run out and you'd left me alone in this shithole! You almost scared me to death."
Dotty realized she was grasping his shoulders and quickly withdrew her hands.
"Those images are stronger each time they come back. They even block my system commands."
"What's in those boxes?" asked Dotty, still shaking.
The third trapdoor that T1N had discovered was filled with black boxes piled one on top of another.
"Guns. Lots of guns."
T1N lifted one out and placed it with care at Dotty's feet. Dotty opened it in the same way she had opened the case for the exosuit. Inside, arranged on a small rack, were a handful of rifles and a couple of pistols.
"This one's mine," she said, grabbing a rifle made of dark metal with a long t-shaped barrel.
"You know how to use an arc rifle?"
"On Earth, me and my friend used to sneak into the toxic wasteland to kill mutant rats."
"Is that how kids have fun these days?"
T1N put on a vest made of the same material as Dotty's exosuit. From its straps he hung a pair of pistols and as much ammunition as it could carry.
"You'd never believe what we got up to. And I'm not gonna tell you either. I know it'd all be recorded in that chrome coconut of yours."
"That's fine with me." T1N smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Whatever you say. I'm just surprised you had a friend."
"You know what, Tin Can?" She fixed him with a stare. "You're a lot more human than you seem. I know plenty of flesh and blood people that would kill for your sense of humour."
T1N could only stare at her. She was the first person apart from Bella that had treated him as anything more than a tool.