The Big Sleep - Carl; @inxunionxtherexisxstrength
The young man was so graceful it made him slightly awkward: head turning side to side, constantly looking around with wide eyes like everything around him was surprising.
The man knew one thing about himself: he was not a man. He knew two directives: recover essence to stay alive, and do not let the humans find out you are not one of them.
The first thing "he" remembered was, in accordance with exterior dates, approximately 25 years ago. It was a very brief indication of enormous, catastrophic damage. Scorching pain - without knowing what pain was.
The next thing it remembered was increasing awareness, like being born and growing up and into an adult, built piece by piece of mimetic polyalloy gathering into a complete unit. Then it felt the rumble of the ground as a building collapsed, iron beams sucked dry and brittle of all the mimetic polyalloy that had been mixed into it, somehow.
It, the not-man, was good at hiding. And that is what it did, since it had no mission, no memory, and no master. But it did not hide for long. In its liquid was a plethora of academic information, telling it what things maybe were in concept, but it was such a curious machine that he could not help but to survey the entire world, since he was in it.
An hour standing outside of a pet store, starting at tropical fish in the aquarium in the window, abruptly came to a close when a stray cat approached and rubbed against the man's jean ankles.
The T-1000, it knew as its model name, had already determined that cats were not threats. They were good. He knelt down to pet the cat. It felt good.
After a few pets, vicious barks from an animal that was clearly a threat - a large dog. This was one creature the robot remembered negatively. The cat dashed into an alleyway to escape, and that made the T-1000 have a further negative reaction to the dog.
He quietly ran after the dog to stop it from chasing the cat. He very much wanted to kill the dog, but that would draw attention to it. The dog came to a stop, however, in front of a store - a drapery store - and a shadow loomed over him, causing a particular disturbance in the air that was confusingly familiar.
