by Marc Everitt
When Eli got back to his apartment, he was pleased to be greeted by his robot cat and fussed the mechanical creature behind the metal ears, which made it purr loudly. “What have you been up to? Lazing about, I suppose,” Eli said as he unpacked in front of the attentive feline. The cat merely purred and was content to have its surrogate master back home again. At that moment, Eli’s com-unit beeped at him to tell him he had a communication waiting for him.
He walked to the wall unit, dialled up the message and read it. After reading it he sat on his bed and tried to comprehend the message Sara had sent him. It comforted him that she felt something for him, but it didn’t comfort him much. He did not feel happy about being loved by a murderous nun who was planning her trip to Graves’ World before Eli was born. That was just about the sort of luck he tended to have with women, he thought. This time he had really excelled himself.
The cat noted his actions and reactions and zoomed its eyes in on the message on the screen.
Eli, I am sorry that you had to find out what I am in that way. I didn’t want for us to get involved the way we did. I couldn’t let you distract me from what it about to happen. My brethren have waited for hundreds of years, as have I. Part of me wishes I was the quiet scientist who had fallen in love with you, but I am not. Please do not think of me too badly, it’s just that I have to do this. I am sorry I will never see you again, my love.
The cat understood none of it and decided its time would be better spent if it knocked something off the table and chased it across the floor as noisily as it could. Eli sat with his head in his hands and sighed. He supposed that if he didn’t want to be involved with strange people and situations he would just have to stop working with Taylor West. He lay back, tired and weary, and was asleep within seconds.
***
Taylor pushed the door to his house open and ploughed his way through more mail then he had imagined could exist. He threw his bags onto the couch and sat down heavily, throwing his favourite jacket onto the arm of the chair as he did so. He thought about going to bed, as he was tired, but decided to leaf through the post mountain. Plenty of bills, lots of junk and letters from people he didn’t know were all cast to the floor. The experience on Graves’ World had given him some clarity as regards some aspects of his past that had been obscured for him by his own mind for so long.
He could remember pieces of his childhood that he had long since blocked out. This caused him to feel old pain as if the wounds had opened up again, but at least gave him some sense of peace. This, however, was not enough to keep him from being very annoyed by the letter he opened demanding payment for the paperback copy of ‘Seven Androids for Seven Mutants’ that he had been sent despite never having requested it. He contemplated contacting the book club for the umpteenth time, but decided he had witnessed enough violence in the past few days and so started a new word puzzle instead.
