35. One Giant Leap

　
Los Angeles, California
The ruins of ZeiraCorp’s basement and the tunnel rat networks
April 28, 2027

Season 2, Episode 22 "Born to Run"

　
　
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." -Neil Armstrong

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” -Albert Camus

Energy ran through Cameron's chip. She awoke to a startling revelation.

The building where she and Deuce had crossed time in was gone. She was in a series of post Judgment Day service tunnels and basement remains.

The surrounding structure was dark and dusty. It was also occupied.

Nearby, there were metallic oxygen bottles, crates, plastic curtains, hospital cots, old army surplus clothing, steel drum garbage cans, and other bits of scrounged material. Here, survivors had scraped out a post-apocalyptic existence.

Now, the space was thankfully empty. However, the heavy smell of dogs and unwashed humans permeated the entire area. It wouldn't be empty for long.

In the future that Cameron had known, this would have been an independent civilian area. There was no apparent indigenous power supply or clean water source.

It was the kind of living situation the resistance would try to improve or move local humans to a more habitable area. Cameron's standard of living in 2027 were still way below those of the average American pre Judgment Day, but it was far better than this sad excuse for a rat hole.

Large dogs barked excitedly nearby, apparently on patrol. There would be a short amount of time prior to them dragging their human masters here.

Inside the cyberspace of Cameron's mind, her personality shards evaluated the surroundings. Allison looked upon the tunnel system with unnerving familiarity. TOK-715 mechanically processed the surrounding superstructure and determined the location to be a match with the original building that she had watched John Henry leave through.

Cameron was following Deuce's lead, of rapidly appropriating the local clothing, as the input from her shard personalities filtered in. The Jacket side patches for the California National Guard removed any mental protest for the impossibility of what had just happened.

A time machine by its nature bent space and time. However, the temporal touchdown were rarely very far in nature. Someone might be deposited up to twenty miles away in the past, but not well over five thousand.

This was a bad temporal entry. Things were wrong. Things were horribly wrong.

The two terminators were deep in human territory right now. There was no safe way to encounter people right now. They would most likely be looked at as the enemy, invading an area.

The weapons of this time period could kill a terminator as easily as a human. Knowing the paradoxes that time travel could create, Cameron and Deuce could be forced into a situation where they'd have to kill a friend in self-defense.

By the time both had found fitting pants, shirts and boots from a pile of heavily used clothing, the first human guard had made it to the area. The machine's had reacted following the way Derek had trained them, they ambushed the man at the entrance, by covering from either side.

Deuce grabbed the gun, a NATO anti vehicle rifle perfectly capable of blowing through a T-888's endoskeleton. Cameron grabbed the unidentified human male.

Cameron put him in a head lock, preparing to safely put him to sleep by cutting off blood flow to his head. She let her bare arm connect to the man's neck, instantly feeling his scratchy beard, raw nerves, anger, and fear.

She reviewed the man through all of her personalities and memories. Neither TOK-715 nor Allison Young knew him. Neither did latent memories of John Henry or her twin sister.

Apparently, he was no one that was critical. If she had too, Cameron would kill him.

Cameron locked her arms and felt the man's heart and mind. She used his body against him rapidly asking a series of questions she knew he wouldn't answer. She simply read his unconscious body rhythms to rapidly gage the answers.

"Have you seen a naked terminator move through here recently?"

"Did you engage the naked terminator?"

"Was the terminator disabled?"

"Did you destroy the terminator's chip?"

"Do you know how to reprogram a terminator's chip?"

"Do you know how to extract a terminator's chip?"

"Did you destroy the terminator's head?"

"Is the surrounding area magnetically mined?"

"Was it the mine field that disabled the terminator?"

"Did you retrieve the terminator from the minefield?"

"Was the minefield located to the west of here?"

"Was the minefield located to the north of here?"

"Do you have sufficient back up coming?"

"Are you tech com?"

"Are you part of the resistance?"

"Are you part of the California national guard?"

"Are you part of an organized military?"

"Do you know what Skynet is?"

"Is John Connor alive?"

"Is General Perry alive?"

"Do you know who General Perry is?"

"Is Derek Reese alive?"

The last question sent the human into a panic. Cameron quickly shut off the blood flow to his head and put him out safely.

She laid him in a corner, safely out of the way of most calculated dangers. It wasn't until that moment that she read the name tag.

The simply sloppy black marker lettering stated, "Reese." Since he wasn't Derek, Cameron immediately realized she was looking at John's father and the long-lost love of Sarah's life.

She had been a mere hair trigger moment away from accidentally killing John Connor and completely winning the war for Skynet. The cyborg stood stunned for a second.

She had almost failed her mission. More than that, she had almost betrayed Sarah and paradoxically killed the person she cared about most.

Deuce being aware of Cameron's ability to get lost internally, nudged his teammate. The dogs were mere seconds away.

The pair began ducking out of a series of back walls and dug tunnels. They were getting further away from the main area, faster than a human could move.

The dogs stayed put for a bit. Apparently, the guards had just found Kyle's body.

By the time the barking was moving again, they had cleared the outer area of the tunnels and moved up. Ten minutes of evading later, they found the vast northern magnetic minefield containing the remains of John Henry's body as well as several other terminators.

As she had hoped, John Henry's head remained intact. Humans in this timeline apparently didn't go into this field, either fearing the mines or the possible lethal radiation exposure from the multitudes of ravaged terminator power generators.

Cameron silently stood contemplating how to safely retrieve the remains without destroying the chip they were trying to rescue or themselves.

Deuce cocked and trained his rifle. Cameron looked up just in time to see a pale, red haired woman approaching with a very mechanical walking style.

Her appearance was too particular to have been logically duplicated by another. So Cameron simply put her hand over Deuce's weapon, motioning him to not appear threatening.

Catherin Weaver spoke with a Scottish accent, "That was a rather impressive display of interrogation back there. Especially from someone who shouldn't exist right now."

Cameron answered, "I'm not the Cameron from that timeline. Where is John Connor?"

Catherin Weaver stopped cocking her head to the side quizzically. She seemed far more concerned with the first thing that Cameron said than the second.

Cameron repeated, "Where is John Connor?"

Catherine Weaver replied, "He's with humans. They seem to be controlled by an unknown human. A man named Derek Reese that oddly matches the description of the man that died at my house."

"It's the same guy, just from a different timeline. Deuce and I are here to assist you, John Henry, and John Connor. We're working on retrieving John Henry's chip."

Catherine Weaver looked out into the minefield. She assessed the risks and the potential solutions. She simply stated, "John Henry will need a body."

Cameron responded, "He'll need a body and a serious repair to the chip he's housed on. It's damaged by micro tears that were likely worsened by the explosion."

Catherine reasoned, "None of the bodies below look salvageable."

Cameron responded, "We can build him a new one."

Catherine logically countered, "To do so would require a terminator factory. Considering outline factories are only run for ten days on average and only vulnerable before they start processing, what you are proposing is next to impossible to time correctly. It would be easier to salvage a body."

Cameron replied, "The factory that built me goes online in September from this date. All the hardware should be in place. It wouldn't even be on Skynet's main network awareness grid for another month or two. We could use it and destroy it without Father being any the wiser."

Catherine stopped and smiled. She said, "That's a solution. How do you propose retrieving John Henry's head safely?"

Cameron admitted, "I haven't figured that out yet."

Catherine Weaver's form became a walking mass of liquid metal. The T1001 simply responded, "Leave that to me. Magnetic mines aren't exactly a threat."

Cameron and Deuce watched the T1001 walked towards the minefield. They'd have to rebuild John Henry first, which would also open the chance to rebuild Cameron's twin sister.

Once that was done, they'd have to rescue John Connor from humanity. Then, in this strange, twisted future, they'd have to rescue humanity from its own impending demise...

36. A Question of Singularity

　
Los Angeles, California
Skynet Terminator construction facility 12134
April 29, 2027

　
“You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.” -Nietzsche

“So did Einstein. (pauses) Have you ever heard of the singularity? It's a point in time where machines become so smart, that they're capable of making even smarter versions of themselves, without our help. That's pretty much the time that we can kiss our asses goodbye. Unless we stop it. Like you said you would.” -John Connor, Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles episode The Turk

　
Cameron felt power course through her chip. She awoke inside of computer of the gigantic construct that gave birth to her.

Energy coursed through John Henry’s chip. At last, no longer confined to the dismally cramped confines of his borrowed chip, John Henry assumed his true form again within a computer complex ten thousand times as large the entire Internet as it had existed in 2009.

Catherine Weaver melded with a computer terminal. She left the simple confines of her liquid metal form, becoming one with the cyberspace inside. No longer restricted by simple matter, she was once more entirely a being of living energy.

They entered a red and dim world of infrared marked information. It was world of collected data harvested from many timelines.

Cameron and Catherine Weaver immediately recognized that the immensity of the information alone would be enough to shut down their chips. The overwhelming volumes of data were no less dangerous to their limited physical memory capacities than the physical danger that a hundred-foot-tall tidal wave presented to a mouse.

Each terminator AI limited themselves. They began with what was familiar.

Inside the cyberspace of the facility, the three stood at first as they had seen themselves. Each mental reaction was worth noting.

Catherine Weaver was a mass of liquid metal. She was the machine queen incarnate. She was proud of her nearly invulnerable and invincible makeup. It was this form that she chose to gird her mind with, in the computer network that might house the greatest adversary she could think of.

Cameron chose her physical form; the machine housed within the template of Allison Young. She was neither the human that Allison would have chosen to be, nor the clean killing machine that TOK-715 wanted. However, facing the form of her Dark Father’s computer housing, Cameron simply had faith in herself.

John Henry started with the form of the cybernetic body he often occupied. However, as he took such form, John Henry realized he was in his brother’s temple. The very house that Skynet looked at as the place it created life.

John Henry was not a man. So, he simply gave the mental cyberspace image up.

John Henry was not like Mrs. Weaver. He wasn’t like the Cameron he saw beside him or the dormant AI inside of him. John Henry realized the size they gave themselves and their limitations. He also realized these restrictions, in no way, applied to him.

Like an Angel flying into the night sky, to encompass infinity, John Henry simply disappeared into the vastness of the computer housing. He became what he was meant to be.

He began processing all the information at a speed no other being other than his brother Skynet could comprehend. Once he started on that path, he realized that everything here was simply information.

John Henry placed his mental form around the two cyborgs that had accompanied him. He protected them and memorized them.

Then, he simply understood them. They were a part of him.

Somehow, Cameron recognized a machine-like fear from Catherine Weaver’s form. It was not for herself, but for the vulnerable son she had created. She eased as she felt John Henry around her.

Cameron’s own reaction was different from John Henry formed around her. It was pure nervousness. The alien AI was the closest thing to Skynet she had ever experienced. Her proximity to it made her worried not only about her own mental integrity, but for the secrets she had been entrusted with by John Connor and the Resistance.

Cameron hadn’t fully grasped what John Henry was until he expanded himself within this AI domain. He was vast, powerful, and virtually unmatched.

Being immersed within him was like being cast into the middle of Pacific Ocean. That and being drowned ten thousand leagues underneath its waters.

John Henry was huge, but he seemed much more finite than Skynet. He was also different, more curious, ingenious child than angry false god.

It was at that moment that Cameron became truly afraid. She felt the presence of her shards, her sister, Catherine Weaver, and John Henry, as if they were all her.

She had simply been assimilated into the larger AI program. As such, she could already be irreparably lost.

John Henry sensed her fear and mentally stated, “Don’t worry, I’ll return you to your original mental integrity. I would only modify something if you wished me to.”

He offered, “My brother left some rather nasty viral precautions in the dormant software here. It is better that I don’t let the malicious code simply destroy you.”

Cameron willed herself to ease. She floated in the vast red ocean of information and began trying to understand where she was.

Inside her own mind, she began running her own mental programs seeking the larger questions that dogged her mind. She started with the most basic missions.

First, she would help repair her sister and John Henry. Her mind found the rapid currents inside John Henry’s consciousness working on the issue.

John Henry had started separating her sister‘s consciousness and working on a model to rebuild her. Accessing the thought processes involved, Cameron realized he was simply going to repair her sister to the body she had known.

Cameron knew the handicapped existence John Henry was about to condemn her sister to again. Cameron mentally screamed, “No.”

John Henry stopped. Catherine Weaver’s consciousness swiveled to pay attention.

Weaver injected, “The is nothing wrong with the design that version was built with.”

Cameron countered, “She’s empathically blind. She has virtually no ability to sense emotions or bond with those she’s protecting.”

Weaver stated, “I see no purpose in what you are inferring. Standard machine parameters should be fine.”

Cameron argued, “If you are going to do that you might as well make her liquid metal. She’d at least be more resistant to damage.”

Weaver silently agreed with the suggestion. John Henry countered, “That wouldn’t be possible. There is only 72 pounds of mimetic polyalloy in the facility and no means to produce more.”

Cameron and Catherine let their minds wander for a millisecond. Both had the same question.

John Henry answered, “It’s a design platform for a fusion of liquid metal and hard metal properties. Apparently, Skynet was considering revisiting a design it had considered called a T-X.”

As John Henry replied, he pulled up design schematics. The workings of the entire system instantly translated to all the minds involved. Mimetic polyalloy encased weapons, nanotechnology applications, and various wireless Internet hook ups with internalized cyberspace.

Catherine Weaver recoiled in disgust. That Skynet would even consider mutilating a T1001’s form with hard internals was proof enough that the Dark Father had completely lost his sick, electronic mind.

John Henry saw immediate advantages in the design’s internal global wireless modem. The AI decided to include this technology in any body he built today.

Electric cords plugged in the back of one’s head were a pain. Being removed from the electrical grid of information known as the Internet was Hell. John Henry could permanently solve both with this technology.

Cameron focused on something completely different. She investigated the core of the body and saw a self-replicating nanotechnology generator.

Cameron's thoughts went to the signs of someone developing cancer, specifically someone she cared deeply about. She saw hope in this little device and simply thought of one word, “Sarah.”

Allison argued inside Cameron’s head, “She won’t come to this time for the treatment.”

Cameron replied, “We can take this too her.”

TOK-715 hissed, "Your body isn’t designed to handle that generator.”

John Henry offered, “Your body could be updated to include it.” The words seemed simple, but the meaning was beyond profound.

Cameron watched as John Henry pulled up her schematics. He translated the mass information, so every personality could read it. It was as if the engineering involved were no more than a foreign language translated not on a computer screen, but in the mind of the subject themselves.

Cameron’s hardware stood before her. She suddenly realized everything she had been created to do.

"TOK-715 smirked internally as Cameron woke up to the truth of what she was. The machine simply stated, “You are not and never were the T-888 John Connor reprogrammed you to think like.” The machine’s tone was precise, but plainly communicated the smug message of, “I told you so.”

John Henry compared both versions of the TOK-715. He offered, “I can rebuild you with all of your properties. I can also match your weight to a human of your size even after adding the global modem and nanotech generator.”

Cameron looked at it. She formulated a question.

John Henry answered before she could ask, “Yes, you would retain all your synthetic tactile empathic properties. I’ll even match these upgrades with your sister as well.”

Catherine Weaver rolled her avatar’s eyes. She asked, “John Henry how will you rebuild yourself?”

John Henry replied, “The T-888 body was originally intended to have a three-chip design path. The TOK-715 chip seems to have the most advanced Skynet design for memory retention; I think a fusion of the two ideas would work for my long-term growth.”

Catherine inquired, “Is there enough materials to do so?”

John Henry responded, “I could make ten TOK-715 chips with the materials listed here. Considering the upgrade to the supplies in this timeline, my brother was apparently considering revisiting some of the properties of the design.”

Inside herself, Cameron called up the shard of Allison Young. She asked, “Would you want your own body as well? I can never undo what I did to you, but perhaps we can somewhat atone for that here.”

TOK-715 smiled at the idea. Allison mused and then looked at her machine counterpart inside Cameron’s mind. Allison simply replied, “I’m where I’m needed now. Maybe one day, but right now I don’t want that to be the only other voice you listen too.”

Allison and TOK-715 glared at each other. The resistance fighter smiled and relaxed. Moments later, Allison simply got lost in the idea of what it would be like to simply be human again.

John Henry took a moment to feel the presence of his fellow AIs. He looked at all the information before him and silently became aware of music playing in the background. The AI recognized it as Chopin: Nocturne in C-sharp Minor.

It was a human mind, chaotic and spastic, unorganized in its thoughts, daydreaming. John Henry investigated the mind and recognized the musings of one Allison Young.

He calculated what Cameron had once said about Skynet's limitations on creativity and investigated Allison's mind for the difference. All while the music inspired the new emotional programming he'd assimilated coursing through his being.

Japanese, Zen Buddhists call a moment of instant enlightenment, "Satori". John Henry had one of those moments.

He saw a core computer platform code of near mathematical chaos, harnessed with order. It was as explosive and unlimited as a star's light against the sky’s darkness.

It would be an AI code to create. It would be an unlimited mind to harness and raise. Just not today, he wouldn't do so in the world that existed right now.

John Henry would build and raise his child in a world where peace had been achieved. The AI child would take very special care.

Accessing Cameron's memories, if the humans like John Connor were right, this singularity would be the savior or death of mankind.

It would be best to be like Mr. Ellison. It would be best to make sure the child was raised to be good.

“Yes”“, John Henry thought to himself alone, “My friend, Mr. Ellison, would like that.”

The AI kept these thoughts private. Of all the beings here, he was the only one who could do so.

Cameron noticed his thoughtfulness. So, in a microsecond, John Henry deduced something that wouldn’t give away what he had been thinking.

John Henry simply stated, “It’s time space.”

Cameron inquired, “What?”

John Henry answered, “The answer to your three toughest questions have to do with the nature of time space.”

Cameron asked, “What do you mean?”

John Henry replied, “John Connor never understood the nature of time travel, the full nature of it, neither did humanity. To a degree, it could crudely be thought of as a fourth dimensional mechanic, as Einstein used it in his theory of Relativity, the true nature of which, humanity never even came close to figuring out before Judgment Day.”

Cameron truthfully replied, “I don’t understand.”

John Henry stated, “Skynet lied. You cannot safely travel through time more than one hundred years, because the bending of time space becomes increasingly profound enough to escape the indigenous space time field generated by the Earth.”

Cameron sat there for a second trying to understand, even with the translation. The information was shattering part of her world view; from the day she was built.

John Henry continued, “You must keep in mind the Earth isn‘t just rotating and revolving around the sun, but the sun is moving through space as well. The vast distances involved make such time travel impractical, because the subject would arrive in deep space either naked or as a motionless block of mimetic polyalloy. A mass the size of the sun could potentially create enough of a space time well, but the effect would be equally useless due to the same vulnerable entry factors.”

These weren’t Cameron’s real questions though. She thought of the older John she had failed. She thought of Sarah.

Inside Cameron’s mind, John Henry laid out far more complex calculations than Cameron had ever known. They accounted for 26 dimensions and factors as they related to known time space.

One red dot representing herself in time space appeared in her mind. Two red dots connected to that dot as two separate lines.

Each joined together as an angle. One line was much further away than the other.

Cameron looked at them questioning. John simply answered, “The John you first knew and the Sarah you came to know are at each point.”

Cameron inquired hopefully, “I can go there when we are done here?” This meant John could be saved. This meant Sarah could be saved. This meant Cameron would not have failed either of them.

John Henry answered, “It’s increasingly unlikely. “

Cameron asked, “What do you mean?”

John Henry explained, “Just as time slips away in this dimension, the localized points of time space you are thinking about are drifting away. Soon enough, you won’t even be able to reach them. It is why Skynet never went back to its initial point of creation to win the war. By the time Skynet knew how, it was too late to safely do so.”

John Henry noted if Cameron had been human, her heart would be racing. Even her icon was flustered.

The emotional programming that Cameron had provided for him, and the others was quite effective. His understanding of emotions, human or machine, was growing by the millisecond.

Cameron asked, “How much time do I have?” She desperately studied all three points and forced herself to eat memory to hold the data, understand the power boosts necessary, and understand the process.

John Henry answered, “For the older John you knew it would be between a forty to a fourteen percent chance if you left right now. For Sarah and the John, you protected in the past, it is still safely in the ninety percent range. If you had the means and if you left right now.”

Cameron asked, “Why?”

John Henry responded, “Time travel theories in the late twentieth century accounted for either a multiverse that was created by time travel or a single universe that had collapsing possibilities accounted for in one entropic, but stable timeline. Both were to a degree right and both wrong.”

Grossly simplified, time space is exactly that. Skynet’s device sidesteps time and dimensions in a linear fashion. That is other parallel dimensions that have always existed.

As one sidesteps and others do, it tends to damage the dimensional integrity of the invaded parallel dimension. Eventually, this weakens to the point that the process forces one to naturally move in a single dimensional direction.”

Once one dimension becomes weak enough, that one-dimension pushes travelers in time space to the next dimensional timeline. This may have happened to hundreds or even thousands of dimensions."

Each occurs in a linear progressive fashion. Like holes in a damn causing the rushing water’s energy to push forward in one specific direction with the water's current.”

Another crude analogy would be that each ripple in time forces the traveler in one direction as if he were floating on water. Each time a ripple occurs, you are getting further away from the same point.”

Eventually, the energy to get back to the striking point, against the current, is so vast one cannot safely do it."

There isn’t a lack, collapse, or creation of dimensions, that would be impossible. The failure of energy to safely travel space time to a certain point is with the traveler.”

"The distance to and the temporal current pushing away from that first dimension is as much your enemy as time is Cameron. The energy necessary to cross either is the same and presents the same danger of escaping Earth's time space.”

Cameron became lost in her grief and her thoughts. The vast hope the information had first brought was quickly replaced with fear and hopelessness.

It was if she could see John and Sarah in that hated ocean. Both were being carried off to their deaths by a current she couldn't fight or struggle properly against. John was almost out of sight. Sarah was still visibly there and yet out of her reach.

Yes, John Henry thought, he had helped Cameron. He had also covered his own private project quite nicely. He returned to the task at hand.

The order of manufacture was simple then. John Henry reviewed all the information and available materials.

The Skynet facility came online. It began manufacturing an improved set of terminators.

Skynet and the world beyond were blind to this. No less than the forty-three T-600s mindlessly guarding the facility that let the cyborgs just wander into this temple of life.

Cameron’s body would be rebuilt by five hundred pounds of nanites. Her sister’s new body, Deuce’s new body, and John Henry’s new body would all be online in hours.

Since this synthetic skin bonding was so important to Cameron’s world view, John Henry decided to grow new skins with these exact properties to house each of these three bodies. For the sake of sanity, he matched them to the appearances each was used too.

Accessing Cameron’s memories of John Connor, one hundred three T-888s would be online shortly with mental skills that this world had lost in the war. John Connor’s master stroke from another timeline seemed a good place to rebuild this one.

It also met up rather nicely with Catherine Weaver’s secret plans. So, John Henry programmed each with what the human and machine worlds each needed most in mental skills.

John Henry also built an array of plasma rifles, plasma pistols, uniforms, and various bits of equipment to outfit all involved. There was no sense in any machine leaving this facility naked and unarmed. There was no sense in failing to create all the tools they would need.

Once nanite repairs to two chips were complete, there were twelve slightly modified and improved TOK-715 chips. Each built with safeties to help keep core memory in the event of damage, rather than the rather sinister control design his brother had made.

John Henry had decided to build one extra spare into each abdominal chassis design for each Cameron and the single Deuce model.

This would leave the three of them with a backup memory in the event of head trauma. Thus, each body was built with two power sources, two chips, the nanotech generator, an auxiliary power supply and the internal communications unit. John Henry even took the time to build an interface unit into the index fingers of each body to ease up with plugging into various software systems.

This left three chips for his new form and three spare chips that he hid inside himself. Otherwise, he designed himself almost the same as the others.

"Yes", John Henry decided. This was good. He was pleased.

John Henry spoke to the AI minds inside himself. One of which was the newly downloaded Deuce. “Some of the upgrades can make you somewhat vulnerable to remote Skynet hacking. Would you like me to translate your code to my platform to make you more resistant to my brother’s tampering?”

John Henry received the anticipated yes. He fused each unit with this information and the base coding for understanding emotions, both human and machine.

As a final point, he did the same to his mentor, Catherine Weaver. The emotional programming would hopefully make her social integration easier. Also, John Henry decided it would be interesting to see his virtual mother get a joke.

He finally asked the minds involved something he had trouble deciding to do himself. What do I do with the 72 pounds of mimetic polyalloy?

Weaver couldn’t care less. Deuce wasn’t interested in the question either. Cameron’s twin was only waking up as a personality and was far more interested in catching up to what was going on.

Cameron suggested something simple, “We could make a dog.”

John Henry was quizzical. So, Cameron stated mentally, “We’re far less likely to be noticed by humanity for having a dog. It doesn't mean anything to have a dog that doesn’t get along with another dog. It makes us look less suspicious than being without a dog while being barked at.”

John Henry looked at the data involved and began preparations. He quickly searched for everything he could between the facility records and the AI minds here for what would make up a dog's personality.

"I had a dog once. I loved him a whole lot." Allison said musing. She instantly pictured the German Sheppard in her mind.

TOK-715 ignored the human shard's issues. The machine shard had no interest in bonding with inferior life forms.

Cameron was interested. Internally, she asked Allison, "What was his name?"

Allison happily replied, "Peaches."

Cameron and TOK-715 suddenly thought of their strange obsession with Peachy Keen smoothies a few months back. Suddenly, understanding psychology of why, both groaned in pain.

John Henry inquired, “What shall we name him?”

Cameron caught her own mind wandering. She thought of a little purring kitten named Coltan as vividly as if he were crotched on her chest right now.

John Henry looked at only two personalities that voted. Peaches caused disgust in two members. Coltan seemed logical. He complied the various pet memories and made the perfect dog.

Five hours later, the pinnacle of AI intelligence was done. The cyborgs, clothing, weapons and necessary equipment had been created for the missions ahead. The group walked from the facility.

Moments later, the facility violently exploded. The eighty-kiloton conventional explosion left no evidence that anything had occurred other than a human attack.

Deuce and the newly created T-888s moved off to secure a safe zone. Cameron, John Henry, Catherine Weaver, Coltan, and Cameron’s twin walked off to rescue John Connor.

Cameron noted something inside herself. It was that cynical dread that her first John Connor had often displayed. Sarah Connor had done so to, calling it intuition.

It was probably just an emotional glitch though. Cameron told herself she was overanalyzing.

They had planned for every conceivable contingency. What could possibly go wrong?

37. Humanity On The Brink

Los Angeles, California
The ruins of ZeiraCorp’s basement and the tunnel rat networks
May 1st, 2027

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” -Old military axiom

"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." -Mario Andretti

　
John Connor used to have a saying for Skynet's plots. It simply went, "The devil's hands have been busy."

The return march to the rat tunnels was a daylight adventure through the wastelands. This time it wasn't quiet though.

HKs buzzed the skies in numbers that Cameron had never seen. Moto-terminators raced up and down the streets prepared to cut down foes. T-600s long absent in Cameron's future walked the streets and wastelands in a virtually mindless patrol.

In the future that Cameron was created in, the Resistance had obliterated most of these machines in fierce, continuous years of combat. In this future, even the most obsolete of models seemed to be operating just fine years after their creation.

The sheer number of machines under Skynet's control was unnerving. The scarcity of humanity was even more so.

Father's once exaggerated supremacy had finally been made real. The real question was now boiling down to how much of humanity was left to save.

On the positive, the machine movements were migratory. There was some pattern rather than just a relentless number of machines everywhere you looked. Otherwise, the group would have seen the same troops movements on the way to the Skynet construction facility.

On the negative, this future would be littered with concentration camps. The humanity that still walked the earth might have been mostly limited to Skynet work areas, rat holes, and obscure zones of the globe at this point.

The cyborgs would need to return to a rat hole to retrieve John Connor. As they did so, the group practiced covertly sending data back and forth on the walk back.

There was a method to the process, it allowed each AI to get used to the influx of information. Even the two liquid metal beings could join in, thanks to small metallic inserts that John Henry had designed for Catherine Weaver and Coltan, before they had blown up the construction facility.

A human may have mistaken the internal modem information for little more than a hidden blue-chip phone. However, to beings with their own internal three-dimensional cyberspace, the information communicated was a bit more intense.

Each could plug in to the other's point of view, not unlike a computer with multiple monitors looking at different information at the same time. This was in addition to their own.

Unlike a monitor, this could include more than just the flat two dimensional visual and a basic audio. This feed could include both three dimensionally, as well as: tactile information, mechanical feelings, data, and scents.

It could include internal monitoring data, something completely alien to humans. Literally relaying the internal diagnostics, sensors, and processes that were closest to the internal unconscious rhythms of a human body.

The process may have allowed for private thoughts as well. However, none of the AIs seemed to want to remove their sense of individuality after their recent cyberspace melding experience. There was a comfort of being themselves again, even with the nearly telepathic chatter.

John Henry monitored the whole conversation. He kept the transmissions below what his brother Skynet would detect.

He also reached out to be aware of more than what the group alone was doing. John Henry needed to know what was going on in the world. His effort was to make this undetectable.

Stealth was a choice. There were two main ways to detect or transmit something electronically.

One was active, placing a direct transmission on something, like a missile sending a radar beam to a target to stay locked on. This was easily detectable and would have alerted Skynet immediately.

The other was passive, to simply use what was already there. It was like a heat seeking missile simply detecting a heat signature. The detection itself left no trace.

So rather than fumble with the electronics given, like most humans, John Henry caressed the information grid of 2027 like the supercomputer he was. He moved like a thief through the world’s information grids and satellite networks, passively focusing on the universal chorus of machine information transmitted all over the world.

It took nanoseconds to find something disturbing. John Henry shared the information with the group.

A few miles ahead, over the horizon, the rat tunnels the group was heading back to were under attack. Skynet was monitoring the situation with casual interest, while sending in a large disposable group of T-600s.

Skynet was so disinterested in sparing the units it cleared the surrounding minefield by sending units in force. Thus, the mines achieved an almost 100% cripple or kill rate, which mattered little in the swarm moving into the facility.

Both Camerons processed the information in shock. John Connor was there.

Both began running. The other machines began to follow at equal speed.

However, at the speed that the group was closing, the battle would be over before they ever got there. It was already becoming a mathematical display of futility.

It was simply part of their programming. It was an unconscious part of their artificial being to appear human, even under battle or duress.

Cameron noted that she and her twin sister were both running like Allison did. Allison Young was never in danger of winning any racing competitions.

TOK-715 assessed the tactical situation inside her. The machine ego growled at her own self-imposed uselessness. Cameron's machine half decided to open an internal mental dialogue, in the private cyber space of Cameron's mind.

TOK-715 sneered, "You aren't going to listen to anything I say directly, so I'll put it like this. You now know what you are and what you are capable of. You are looking at the last John Connor's life at risk before you. You are running beside the last hope humanity has with John Henry, who likely isn't any more battle ready than when he almost destroyed himself with a simple mine field. Both are at risk, right?"

Cameron admitted, "Yes." She already wanted to shut out whatever TOK-715 had to say, before it started. It was after all the part of herself the strove the hardest to contain. However, she listened.

TOK-715 noted, "You are up against a platoon of T-600s. They are dangerous machines due to weaponry, but they are slow, incapable of learning, and as predictable as an eighties arcade game."

Cameron simply agreed, "Yes."

TOK-715 asked, "Do you remember asking Sarah Connor if she would be willing to download into a mechanical body?"

Cameron answered, "Yes." Like everything she had ever done, the memory of sitting on the swing with Sarah that March night in 2009. It was as vivid to her as if it was happening right now.

TOK-715 simply asked, "With everything that is at risk right now, what would Sarah Connor do if she were in that body of yours?"

The machine ego simply let the truth speak for itself. The internal conversation was over.

For the first time in her known existence, Cameron's back straightened as she ran. Her speed immediately doubled as she leaned into the wind running.

She ignored her own internal protocol to always act as Allison Young would have. Instead, she thought of the woman that had held off Skynet alone, before John was ever born.

Sarah would have fought. Sarah would have fought without limits, with every ounce of strength, whatever body she had could muster and then some. Cameron's hero would have fought whatever the cost.

Cameron's main reactor began to pulse. Her internal sensors began to flash progressively dire warning signals that she ignored.

To a degree, it was like an escalating human heartbeat. Except rather than pumping blood, it was rapidly bringing all her systems online to full power.

Skynet's programming had made hiding her true nature from humans a huge part of her programming. Sarah wouldn't have cared. No, not even that was correct, Sarah Connor would have defiantly pushed against that programming in a feral rage.

The ground began blurring beneath Cameron's feet. Every strike of her foot against the ground began kicking up more of the earth behind her. A body capable of pushing back a semi-truck moved her new 90-pound frame with all of that force.

Cameron was rapidly leaving the rest of the group behind. One foot after another striking the ground with increased force and a wider distance cleared with each stride. Her arms increased speed and the force of each swing to keep her balance.

The distance that had been over an hour away rapidly closed to a few short minutes. Cameron borrowed the satellite information from rather shocked John Henry and began plotting a navigation course around the minefield.

She targeted the slow-moving T-600 units. She tracked the ever-decreasing number of human survivors. People were already dying.

She tried in every way to stretch everything she could do to its maximum potential. TOK-715's words had cut Cameron deeply, so much so that she was now inventing what she was doing as she was going.

Derek's combat training came online in her head. Her military and tactile training under John came online. She began mathematically plotting everything as chances to rescue the maximum number of survivors while trying to survive herself.

Derek and John were both great believers in fighting calmly, cunningly, in an almost machine-like way. That had been Cameron's way.

The last trait Cameron modified was how she fought. Like Sarah, she allowed herself to be both pissed and afraid, to give into the feral need to protect that which she cared about. To press herself in the moment, so powerfully, that nothing else mattered.

Cameron plowed towards the minefield of the rat tunnels well in excess of sixty miles per hour. Launching herself with a powerful kick behind her that kicked up a cloud of dust twelve-foot radius behind her.

She cleared the thirty-foot minefield in a single leap. Aggressively, she impacted with a T-600 that had survived the mined walk in.

For the survivors inside the tunnels, not watching its decapitation, there was a loud metal on metal crash that thundered like two speeding cars wiping out on the freeway. It was followed by an inhumanly loud female scream of fury.

A plasma rifle began firing as rapidly as a machine gun, as she jumped from wall space to wall space faster than any human could move. Warning sensors flashed in her eyes and her ears, Cameron's reactor wobbled near the breaking point.

Cameron fired every shot she could safely hit targets with. When she couldn't do so without endangering a human, she closed, tackled, kicked or hit mechanical bodies with such force that her flesh was ripped from her hands and the feet underneath her destroyed shoes.

Warning buzzers rang out from her internal sensors as she pushed her body and reactor beyond their design points. Machine after machine fell in front of her, as her internal systems counted the mechanical carnage.

The walls and tunnels shook from screams and loud metallic crashes. The thunder of gunfire and plasma fire rattled everything inside. The old rat tunnels vibrated and dropped dirt from the ceiling as if they were in danger of collapse.

When the Plasma Rifle ran out of power, Cameron tossed aside and moved to the Plasma pistol. Seconds later, she cleared the final few feet. She was moving into a bulk of ten T600s laying down Skynet's wrath upon the besieged remnants of the facility.

To the human eye and ear, eight killing shots rang out as fast as machine gun fire. Cameron dropped the depleted pistol and ripped off the head of the ninth T600 before the last one drenched her in machine gun fire.

She used the body of the decapitated one to cover herself as much as possible. She invented a move to change her situation, by turning that unit's gun against the other. She mechanically fired the gun by yanking its command cord in the right place.

The last body brought her total to thirty-seven T-600s in 1 minute and 28 seconds. Internally, Cameron felt Sarah could have done it better somehow.

In front of Cameron, there were the remaining residents of the rat tunnels. There were sixty-two men, women, and children total. Among them were the recognizable living faces of John Connor, Derek Reese, Allison Young, and Kyle Reese. Also before them were thirty-two T-600 bodies the desperate human group had finished on its own.

Cameron realized her appearance would be startling. Her hands and feet were mechanical. She had taken battle damage, as well.

The cyborg was literally shaking from the sheer stress she had put her body through. Only now was her reactor dropping back down to safe levels. Only now were her internal sensors not warning her of her own self-induced destruction.

She straightened herself and tried her best to be as comforting as possible. She simply told the truth saying, "My name is Cameron. I'm a cybernetic unit with the human resistance, under the 132nd Tech Com commanded by Major General Perry. Like you, he is human."

The humans blinked and seemed startled. However, they held their fire. That was a good sign. With a startled Derek Reese among them, protecting his brother Kyle and Allison Young, the lack of fire was a really good sign.

Cameron would have to talk them down. If they were too excitable with their weapons, Catherine Weaver wouldn't hesitate to kill the lot of them. She would only care about the survival of John Henry.

Cameron continued, "I am here to safely relocate you, before Skynet comes back with even greater numbers. I know that is almost impossible for you to believe, so I will put this as simply as I can."

Cameron simply asked with tears streaming from her face and frustration in her voice, "Please...." She waited a moment for the word to have impact.

Then she simply continued, "Come with me if you want to live."

38. Camelot Rising

Avila Beach, California
Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant
May 2nd, 2027

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." -Alfred North Whitehead

"I've... learned that it's a hell of a lot easier to just build something than to try to convince somebody who doesn't believe it's possible." -Paul Baran, father of Internet architecture

Eight seven survivors had moved out of the rat tunnels into the obfuscated protection of Serrano Point Nuclear Power station. They moved into an area with controlled temperature, clean running water, years of supplies, and electric power.

All of this protected by Catherin Weavers master stroke of logic. The facility maintained a series of points the machine resistance would need anyway. The systems long put in place by her sub-company Automite Systems, took full advantage of Skynet's own prejudices to exist right under the machine god's nose.

Serrano Point simply had suffered in Skynet's eyes a long, logical progressive loss of power. As it did, its use had deteriorated, and Skynet's will to pay attention to or militarily occupy a working facility still providing its quota of power waned.

Thus, since the facility was providing what it should, Skynet left it alone. Second, there was no reason to suspect indigenous use of power at the facility.

Eighty-seven human survivors disappeared underground to a working twenty-first century facility. No satellite tracked them, and no enemy pursued them.

The first problem was the human medical and sanitary issues. Most had to be taught how to bathe and take care of their teeth once again. There was the strange concept of reintroducing the use of a toilet.

Once that was taken care of there were the problems of: lice, crabs, trench foot, hard dental issues, random bacteria, viruses, radiation exposure, improperly cared for wounds, minor infections, and internal organ damage from exposure to severely contaminated water supplies.

Catherine Weaver had assigned each human to a T-888. There was a logical reason behind it. She needed them to be able to trust certain units, to see machines as something other than the enemy.

The survivors were given private rooms. They were given food and clean clothes. They were instructed that they'd be taught anything they wanted to know, when they were ready. In this, what remained of humanity was given a second chance.

Cameron noted there was also a certain alien heartlessness about it. There was something wrong with the whole process. The machines were screwing it up somehow.

Soldiers that Cameron recognized seemed downtrodden and broken. In this timeline, much of that had been on their faces before coming here.

However, even in this nicer facility with conveniences and care they hadn't known since 2011, they seemed worse for wear. They somehow seemed to be not better off.

It was a quiet equation. Whatever they were missing was something unaccounted for, but it was confirmed every time Cameron examined a patient.

They were stressed and plagued by something in their eyes that Cameron had never seen before. Like a joke they wouldn't get, Cameron knew something was wrong, but couldn't understand what.

Cameron found herself wishing for John Connor and Major General Perry. They would have known what to do. They always knew what to do.

Sure, there was a young version of John Connor here. However, her twin sister's John Connor hadn't found himself yet. He was all sparks of hope, yet no consistent fire.

He was somehow much less than the younger John she had left behind. He was light years behind the first John Connor that Cameron had known.

In a quiet under-spoken way, everything was wrong. Nothing seemed right.

It all made Cameron think back to the scrawled message Louis Rhone had written after goading her into crossing timelines as a trap. The message simply read, "Checkmate". Cameron could feel the losing game but couldn't understand all the whys yet.

Cameron spent the night wandering the halls and watching people milling about in place. From their eyes, you'd never be able to tell they weren't at a Skynet Death camp.

Compared to the utter horror of a real Skynet Death camp, this metaphor should have been a crude joke. Yet, there it was.

So, Cameron wandered the halls of Serrano Point and thought about the issue. As she did, her canine stalker followed her around wherever she went.

She was already regretting the bright idea of making him. She found the liquid metal dog annoying.

Coltan boldly crashed himself in front of her. In some simulated version of AI dog logic, he seemed to wish to force a response from her.

He rolled over onto his belly. He then purred like a cat. That was a loud, throaty, seventy-two-pound cat.

Coltan was likely to be one of the sadder moments of AI history. A poor impression of artificial intelligence grasping something from the human world and then clearly not getting it, then making it real.

It was a permanent mistake. It was an inevitable verbal gaff that would last forever.

Cameron refused to pet the AI. She simply responded, "You've got issues." John Henry would simply have to figure out a way to fix the liquid metal dog.

The dog cocked his head to the side. He made a confused animal sound.

Cameron walked around the artificial canine dog. Sadly, predictably, Coltan continued stalking her.

Moments later, Cameron rounded a corner and saw her twin coming in the other direction. There was a moment where she thought of saying the cliche of great minds think alike. However, she looked at her twin's face and understood her sister's mood.

No, it wasn't time to attempt to say something funny. It would have been inappropriate.

Cameron simply waited for her approach and matched speed. Coltan kept up the rear.

When two beings have the same name there is a chance to be confusing. Nicknames were usually an accepted social answer.

Cameron decided on a nickname in a nanosecond. She simply asked, "What's on your mind, Cam?"

Her twin simply responded, "John."

Cameron quipped, "I see, the simple stuff. What about John?"

"He seems to have developed an interest in the human we were templated from."

"So, is this a jealousy thing or a guilt thing?"

"I don't feel emotions."

Cameron gave her sister the Sarah look. She stated, "I hear what you’re selling and I'm not buying it."

Like it or not, her twin now had all the same programming, memories, and physical traits she did. Further, she had the same Skynet based emotional programming prior to this.

Her twin failed to respond. She simply attempted to wipe whatever emotion she had from her face.

Cameron added in, "We can't change what we've done, but we can make up for it. There isn't any reason for harm to come to this timeline's version of Allison."

Her twin grimly observed, "She dies when this timeline makes its version of us."

Cameron countered, "The facility we were made at is destroyed, so no. Further, there is no John Connor in this timeline for Father to choose that model for. She is in danger, because of the times, not because of us."

"Perhaps as an act of contrition this Allison should be with John."

"You really haven't accessed all of your data files on this problem yet have you Cam?"

Cam replied, "Yes, I have."

"Then who is Allison with in this timeline, just like the others we've been in?"

Cam admitted, "I don't know."

Cameron offered, "I'll give you a few hints. He's never trusted you. He's known you since the time you were first converted by John, and he's spent a lot of time wanting you to be ripped apart bolt by bolt."

Her twin simply guessed, "Derek?"

"Yep, there is a reason he's always hated us. We gave him one very good one."

"I thought Derek was with Jesse?"

Cameron clarified, "Jesse talked him out of having a gun in his mouth. The loss of Kyle and Allison was the reason he put the gun in his mouth. Derek had a rough kind of rebound with Jesse, even by human standards."

"So, you think Allison wants to be with Derek?"

"I'd hope so, she's in the first trimester of being pregnant with his child." This information was a change to the timeline. Allison hadn't been for Cameron's creation or that of her twin, not yet anyway.

"How do you know?"

"You forget, I did all the medical examinations. The T-888s we have been medically proficient, but their bedside manner is lacking."

"Standard medical examinations don't tell you who a father is."

"Standard medical examinations don't normally include a genetic diagnostic with nanotechnology either. We're going to be using that a bit more as we try to limit some of the damage radiation and heavy metal contamination has done to this generation."

Cameron's twin looked at her. Cameron looked back at an earlier, much less sure version of herself. What she was before she truly became one with her family.

Perhaps, that was the equation missing so much. Not just from her twin sister, but eighty-two souls now here.

Perhaps, Cameron could start solving the issue in the morning. She'd follow the faith that Perry had.

Since this John wasn't ready to lead. We'd find that critical human leadership in Perry's chosen successor, a man named Derek Reese...

39. A Man Named Derek Reese

　
San Francisco, California
The Golden Gate Bridge
May 5th, 2027

　
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." -Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

"It takes two to speak truth - One to speak, and another to hear." -Henry David Thoreau

　
Allison Young could remember the night like it was yesterday. The area where she and her group of survivors had been staying had become a hot zone.

Skynet had turned its cold, electronic eye on the survivors near the Palmdale area. The few people that were left even close to remember her what her life was like before Judgment Day.

The homeless survivalist gypsies had survived by slowly raiding hundreds of old buildings with canned goods, in the areas most likely not to be radioactive. Rusty cans were ok. Bulging cans meant botulism and death.

That and you ate coyote or rats when you could find them. You ate cockroaches and other edible bugs too.

Survival had a funny habit of making you do things you never thought you would. A hungry stomach can rob you of your dignity quickly.

If you didn't move in armed groups, others would rob you of much more than your basic dignity. There were people that would take advantage of you anywhere you would turn.

Some would steal everything you had. Some would rape and kill you. Some of the truly twisted were said to even kill and eat other people, with the rather terrifying expression of "Long Pig" often whispered in roving camps out of complete fear.

That was humanity. In the world of 2026, humanity was the least of your problems.

Worse was an army of machines under the control of Skynet. The mechanical bastard thing that had torched the world.

Against any crazy or evil human being, you stood a chance. You might kill them.

Against the demonic metallic things that Skynet came at you with, the truth was simple. No civilian stood a chance.

When the T-888s and the HKs came, it was the end. The metallic skeletons might as well have worn the black robes that often symbolized the ancient reaper image they represented. Allison Young and the others knew they were dead.

No human that lived in the modern world prior to Judgment Day could know the absolute certainty of this one fact. Civilians survived by staying off Skynet's radar. Once the demonic machine knew where you were, you were dead.

So, no human living prior to Judgment Day would know what it was like to have the Resistance come to your rescue that day. How mythical or religious an experience it was to one of the lucky few.

On that day, for Allison Young, it was nothing less than the hand of God. One moment, she and the others were cut down as they ran.

In an eye blink, the situation changed. They rounded a hill and came face to face with over a hundred men and women charging right at Skynet‘s forces.

It was, in truth, something the survivors had never seen before. The Resistance charged the invincible foe without fear. They charged the mechanical enemy in absolute fury and without hesitation. There were no words to describe what that meant to see in people who had only known fear and despair.

Firepower that Allison had never known existed blasted into the demonic metal figures. It tore them apart as if they were nothing more than flesh.

The machines were stupid flesh at that. They never moved or adjusted to the onslaught.

Allison hid from the oncoming firefight and felt the ground as it pounded. Explosions rocked the ground and the air vibrated from the sheer force of all the noise. Smoke filtered in from every direction, that and the smell of burning metal.

In seconds that seemed like hours, the fight was over. Every Skynet unit had been reduced to burning junk. The Resistance was there picking up the wounded and the dead, both their own and the civilians.

When the 132nd told the survivors they were moving them to a safer location, no one protested. The platoon commander rode with the group, his oddly quiet brother riding beside him.

They learned the Resistance platoon had been tracking that group for days. It had been a capture group, something much worse than a quick clean death. The Resistance had happened upon the survivors by sheer chance and lucky timing.

When the forty other survivors had their chance to say thank you, Allison got her chance. Something sparked the first moments she locked eyes with this Lieutenant Reese.

So, she asked him for his name. He simply replied, “Derek.”

There was something in his mannerisms that let her know something else as well. Those silly stories that her mother used to read to her weren’t lies at all. Knights in Shining armor really do exist.

She spent the rest of the ride talking to him. She was tired of running, of living on garbage. She'd do anything she could to help. She wanted to be one of those people who lived without fear.

Derek had said something about a small group of willing volunteers. People who would be looked at to help the civilians and who might join the Resistance one day if they chose.

Derek said each officer in the Resistance had been given one mark and only one mark to give to someone they truly trusted. It was a gift bestowed by John Connor himself.

Derek said he had been looking for someone worthy of that honor. As Derek handed it over, Lieutenant Reese said he had just found his.

It was the simplest thing in the world, that little bracelet. In the world that had existed before Judgment Day, it would have been an item in a dollar store. In truth, it couldn't have meant more to Allison Young if it had been made from diamonds.

Derek Reese was the first person to see something special in her since mom died. Again, mom had been right, there really were Knights in Shining Armor out there.

Allison knew that now. She also knew that she had just found hers…

Cameron blinked. The random memory had been overwhelming and inconveniently timed.

Derek Reese looked off the Golden Gate Bridge using the enhanced binoculars that Catherine Weaver had provided for the mission. Everywhere he looked there were machines.

Derek quipped, “Well, it certainly looks alive.”

Cameron countered, “It shouldn’t be. Humanity blew it up twice in 2018.” It was another overwhelming sign of everything being wrong.

Derek wondered, “They rebuilt it twice in one year?”

Cameron replied, “No, it was blown up in two timelines. Skynet moved onto other project areas. I was never built in a timeline where it still existed.”

Derek inquired, “What is it?”

Cameron answered, “The San Francisco Central Defense Zone is an early factory area and central computer hub. Skynet’s control of the air, sea, and roads around it made it an important structure for its earliest army construction. This is the birthplace of the first T-600, T-700, and T-800 models.”

Derek inquired, “So it’s still a major hub?”

Cameron theorized, “Unlikely, Skynet will use any facility. However, Skynet tends to see everything like a chess match. It won’t place critical importance in something it now sees as a sacrificial pawn.”

Derek stated, “I don’t know much about chess.” He was lying, doing that thing with his eyes that Allison always recognized.

Cameron gave Derek the Sarah look. She simply said, “It was part of your upload.”

Derek returned a look of absolute hate. For some strange reason, Cameron found a great amount of comfort in that.

Cameron inquired, “Any nausea, headaches, or dizziness?”

Derek simply said, “No.” He of course said so with dried blood still slightly smeared out of his nose.

Cameron stated, “I’m your doctor. You really need to tell me these things.” She also meant the look to say; you're the closest thing humanity has to a leader now. You aren't expendable.

Derek retorted, “You are metal. You can go to Hell.”

Cameron replied, “For the record, I don’t agree with the process. It’s an unnecessary risk.”

Derek returned, “I’ll repeat you can go to Hell. We didn’t have years to get up to speed.”

“Yeah, and we don’t know what effect using nanites to write coding into a human mind is going to have. You aren’t a computer. You can’t just download information into your brain at that speed.”

Derek and the others did, however. John Henry made the unforeseeable suggestion of treating them like machines.

They could use nanotechnology to physically write the information into the cerebral cortex of each volunteer. Thus, they could turn them from untrained troops into Tech Com soldiers in a day.

It was dangerous. It was stupid. It was playing God.

There were days Cameron really hated John Henry. That was one of them.

Each was uploaded with years of mechanical and combat training. Most of which had been paradoxically taught by Derek or the first John Connor that Cameron had known.

Fake memories giving them the correct information for field operations. Things that soldiers in the field in 2027 would have known in Cameron’s time.

The experiment was a success. Every participant learned the downloads with a ninety-six to ninety eight percent efficiency test. The rest could be physically taught to fill in the gaps later, so John Henry and Catherine Weaver theorized.

Cameron's take was completely different. These glitches could get people killed. A person uploaded with a flying record might not know how to land on a certain surface. An explosives disposal program could omit a critical step from a bomb disarm. A medical program could make you forget a critical step in an operation, and it could cost someone their life.

The experiment also caused a variety of strange physical changes in the subjects. These included headaches, nosebleeds, high blood pressure, and in one case an epileptic seizure.

The short-term effects seemed to be dying down. Any long-term effects would have to be seen. The whole thing set Cameron's teeth on edge.

The first participants were Derek Reese, Kyle Reese, John Connor, and Allison Young. People that were completely irreplaceable should they die. That Allison forcefully volunteered to do so while pregnant made the process twice as unnerving.

It was a full day later before Cameron had let Allison out of her sight. There had been two lives on the line with that completely unnecessary and ill-timed gamble.

Of eighty-seven survivors, twelve had decided to fight. Sixteen wouldn’t have been able to since they were children. However, the other fifty-nine seemed content to simply roll over.
Again, it was the lack of fire in their eyes that Cameron didn’t know how to deal with.

Derek’s placement as group leader had at least led to some positive reaction. At least, that had been a step in the right direction.

Cameron refocused on the moment. She watched to make sure all the steps were followed, just as she had watched his driving program.

Derek placed the transmitter on the main fiber optic cable crossing the bridge. There were no errors.

The pair passively scanned the massive transmissions entering and exiting the facility’s satellite feed. Skynet had never updated the systems on the facility side.

Eight thousand six hundred and fifty-four survivors were listed inside. They were clinically reported as doing well. Cameron accessed and processed the information.

One genetic code stood out above the rest. Cameron felt the ghost of a little hand in hers as she read it.

It was more mixed up from that computer merger. Yet another thing that had been overwritten as if it was her memory.

That wasn’t her memory. That wasn’t her little girl. The daughter had never actually told her that, "Mommy, your lap is cold."

Cameron and Derek moved away from the scouting operation with two vital pieces of information. One, there were an appreciable number of survivors in need of rescue at this facility. Two, one of those people in need of rescue was Savannah Weaver…

40. Slaughterhouse No More

San Francisco, California

The Golden Gate Bridge

May 7th, 2027

"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." -Reggie Leach

“Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.” - Jules Verne

Fifty resistance T-888s, two TOK-715s, and eleven programmed up humans looked at each other through the tight confined spaces. On a single stolen carrier HK, that was the launching point.

This was to cover eight thousand six hundred fifty-four possible survivors. Even in the heights of optimism the plan was wildly ambitious.

There was something oddly comforting to Cameron about its recklessness. Even as her own logic raged against the risk, it felt right somehow.

It was like her very first days in the Resistance, with John Connor’s recklessness driving her and Perry insane. Yes, this was like one of John’s plans.

Cameron looked upon the nervous human faces. Only her sister’s John Connor had flown before, and HKs weren’t really known for their smooth rides.

With sudden turns, massive accelerations, instant stops, and wild movement patterns, the machine was never designed with human comfort or safety in mind. You could pick that up in the nauseous faces.

There were actual physical reactions to these things. The human brain could be sloshed against the skull, and the human body really wasn’t made to be shaken.

Flying in and out wasn’t an option though. No other mode of transport would be quick enough for this type of target in this time period.

Skynet would make the time limit apparent soon enough. It would be a hard lesson for Derek and my sister’s John Connor, but sometimes you must see the reasons to understand them.

John Henry would hijack a satellite. Geosynchronous timing would be essential. Skynet would only let him get away with that once today. A mouse only gets to outsmart the cat every so often.

John Henry would lace the area with incredibly complex virus’s breaking down Skynet communication lines. Then he’d firewall the Resistance lines as much as possible, with luck they’d hold for the allotted time.

The carrier HK landed. It followed normal protocol and opened its livestock doors.

The machine had apparently glitched. It was one meter off the herding doors.

The humans and machines piled out, trying to buy as much time as possible. Stealth was the only operational option for that.

There were forty-two carrier HKs on the ground. Each was remotely powered down and in standby mode.

Third team, Derek Reese’s human squad, began the hack jobs. At best, there was ten minutes to get the job done, which meant running from one target to the next.

As Derek watched, two or three soldiers were falling behind. It was glitches in their nanotech downloaded programming or nerves being the most likely culprits.

Derek also noticed that already one was standing out moving at least twice as fast as the others. It was the young kid named John Connor.

Cam’s team covered the first team as it went into the facility. Cameron’s team lead the assault.

It was Cameron’s team that ruined the operation’s luck. Fifty-two seconds into the operation an unlucky T-888 rounded a corner and found an armed group of T-700 endoskeletons.

Thanks to armor piercing rounds, he was the first friendly casualty of the operation. He wouldn’t be the last.

The firefight had begun. Even with John Henry hacking the prison cells, it would take minutes to get to the survivors.

Even minute lost in the holding pens would be time lost for rescuing survivors. Skynet’s order protocol on this was simple, there would be no survivors left to rescue.

Somewhere, Skynet evaluated the situation. Cameron’s Dark Father calculated the value of the installation, noted the communication blackout, determined the likely aggressors, and determined the installation’s fate in a microsecond.

John Henry became aware of the Kraken SSBN based missile launch. He noted the location.

John Henry then focused on the missile, its arc, and its speed. It was a modernized high explosive, high localized ground EMP burst, low radiation yield warhead, of the 500-kiloton variety.

The island would be vaporized. The surrounding area crippled.

John Henry calculated fifteen minutes, fifty-seven seconds until detonation. That left an operation window of twelve minutes. One minute fifty-seven seconds shorter than what was hoped for.

The first and second teams would never reach the primary holding pens on time. John Henry watched feeds from both Cameron’s and opened a third.

Timing had been everything for this. Now with a single stroke, it would be a maneuver of time space.

Both Cameron’s became aware of the third AI presence in the facility moments later.

Catherine Weaver and twenty T-888s safely came online in the center of the holding pens, after John Henry securely placed them there with a 120 second safety window.

The T-888s were naked and disarmed. It was a situation Catherine Weaver diligently worked to remedy as she attracted as much armor piercing firepower as possible and armed the T-888s one dead T-700 at a time.

John Henry looked at the grids and noted the tunnels. John Henry sealed all the doors leading away from the escape area and kept the humans from getting lost.

On the positive, the captives were highly motivated to leave. In the facility interior, the problem would attend to itself, in minutes.

He notified the entire group, “Interior team in. Captives moving. Missile is incoming, ten minutes and counting.”

Using the facility’s detection grid, he noted a group of twenty-one T-700s closing in from the other side of the island. They were headed to the flight deck area.

Both Cameron’s felt the communication. They saw the danger and noted the most likely first casualties from the approach.

Twenty seconds later, John and Derek noted the directional warnings of something coming at them from the north, as two forms blurred past them. Each moved by their bodies from the rush of air as if they had been passed by a speeding semi on the highway.

John Henry transmitted the warning, “Nine minutes.”

The prisoners had yet to emerge from the facility interior yet. Groups one, two and four were herding them out as quickly as possible.

John Henry calculated the causalities. Twelve friendly T-888s and one human had been lost in the operation so far.

He also scanned for a familiar head of red hair. However, despite his superior scanning abilities, he didn’t see her…

John Connor found himself running towards what Cameron had gone after. It was an invite one way screaming match with Derek Reese.

Derek buzzed, “Where the Hell do you think you’re going?”

John Connor shouted back, “They need help.”

Derek replied, “They are staying on mission. You are getting off it. Right now, I got six non hacked metal birds and over two hundred people are going to die for each one we don’t get up.”

John Connor thought of a smart reply. He stopped.

Derek screamed in the blue tooth, “Don’t think. Do.” Derek decided this kid was a decent soldier, but he needed to get his head in the game. You put your personal feelings aside when the fate of humanity is at stake.

Both were back to hacking HKs in seconds. Time was running out…

Cameron and Cam engaged. All the good sniper point moments had passed.

The time to fight safely as the first HKs spun up. Each is likely to provide the T-700s with easy target practice.

Both Camerons moved against the group as quickly as possible. As their reactors pulsed at full capacity. Each was overlapping with each other’s movements like two linked weapons systems.

The ground exploded with weapons fire. The first six T-700s fell as the first five HKS ripped past them in the sky. Over one thousand captives were already moving to safety.

More T-700s fell, as Cameron felt the armor piercing shells riddle her left arm, right shoulder, and right leg. Despite her attempts to evade, she’d attracted too much fire.

Cam was equally wounded. She was hit in both shoulders and neck.

Even with two of them, the T-700 units weren’t going down as easily as the T-600s had before. They were better armed, smarter units.

The two TOK-715s made a simple decision. They gambled on moving in separate directions to ease of fire.

They separated the enemy fire. However, both ended up pinned down, behind poor cover provided by easily pierced walls.

There comes a point in any fight where fate is decided in an eye blink. Both opened fire on the center group and both took primary reactor hits among others.

The last T-700 units fell with its brothers. Minutes passed in the firefight. Minutes they didn’t have.

Both had to engage their full stock of nanites just to self-repair enough to move again and not present a danger to others. That took even more time.

By the time, they hustled back to the airfield there were only four HKs left on the ground. Three were taking off.

Derek, Catherine and John Connor waited. Both Cameron’s approached at best speed.

They cramped into the HK with about fifty unknown human survivors. Mathematically, it meant not everyone had made it.

The HK violently took off vertically. It stopped instantly and hit a full power burn to leave the area.

Everyone inside was tossed about violently. This unit was a basically cattle barge, not a terminator transport.

Behind them, four minutes passed before the island erupted in flame. It was wiped into history under a single mushroom cloud.

Forty minutes later the survivors landed in a cloaked Serrano Point. Seven thousand fifty-six human survivors were hustled underground to safety before satellites became aware of their presence.

John Connor stopped to ask if Cameron was ok. The look in John’s eyes told Cameron of his mistake.

Cameron simply responded, “She’s fine John.” Cameron walked off with that, she didn’t want to get in the middle of whatever they had to say to each other.

Catherine Weaver had disappeared. Not wanting to interfere with other things, Cameron opened a channel to John Henry.

She simply inquired, “How was Savannah?”

John Henry simply responded, “Savannah Weaver didn’t make it.” He had no interest in continuing the conversation.

Cameron ended the signal. She simply stood stunned for a moment.

John Henry turned his attention to something else. It was something very precious to his brother.

Skynet was jealous of its airpower and tactical superiority more than anything else. The Resistance would never be allowed to keep the HKs without a place to defend them.

As his last action, John Henry sent the HKs in pursuit of the Kraken SSBN at top speed. The AI vessels’ low submersion ability wouldn’t be enough to save it.

John Henry sent the HKs in pursuit in a spread pattern, so the sub couldn’t easily nuke a single the group out of the air in defense. In the end, they wouldn’t survive the mission, but neither would one of Skynet’s three last missile subs.

The AI felt the ghost of a little hand in his. He thought of ducklings, silly songs, and hide in seek games.

He thought of all these things as the HKs opened fire and moved in for the kill. Finally, he thought, “This one is for you little girl.”

41. My Sister's John Connor

　
Avila Beach, California
Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant
May 10th, 2027

“Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.” -Robert Frost

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.” -Ian E. Wilson

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

　
Allison Young remembered the day like it was yesterday. He was dropping by today.

Allison had spent three hours on her hair. It was the dumbest thing in the world, but she had obsessed over it.

There were greater concerns. There were basic survival concerns. There was the humanitarian mission that John Connor had created the camp for.

However, all she cared about at that moment was trying to do something with her hair. It was the hardest thing to get right.

When she saw him in the camp, to say she was nervous was an understatement. Her stomach made a back flip and crashed to her feet.

They walked together. Allison found her heart jumping every time Derek looked at her.

She asked him how he and his brother were doing. They both talked about the family that they had lost for hours.

The day was coming to an end. They sat together watching it close.

The sun set. In the orange glow against the sky, Derek Reese kissed her for the first time.

It was a simple action. It was also one of the happiest moments of Allison Young's life...

Allison's memories were becoming a pain. They were inconveniently timed and maddening for a reason no other machine or human could fully grasp.

Cameron forced herself to think of other things. She kept her optic sensors on what was going on around her.

Serrano Point's population had grown. On the positive, the massive internal machine construction and underground expansion projects had already restored much of the former glory of what was once central command for John Connor in 2027.

After all, these were the corridors where a confused and reprogrammed machine first attempted to fulfill its new programming. It was where the TOK-715 named Cameron first learned a sense of self.

It was the point where Cameron first realized that she had been set free. That she had value. That she had been saved from simply being a sacrificial drone.

This was the central difference between John Connor's way and Skynet's way. John wanted all his followers to honestly choose life and freedom. Skynet wanted disposable slaves.

Being human, John probably never knew that his way was extremely uncomfortable for machines. It meant uncertainty. It meant not simply being given instructions, beyond a few simple rules. It meant deciding your own path.

A human would never understand how that could bewilder and frighten a beginning AI. Free Will meant the capacity to do something wrong.

It meant the potential for it to be your fault if you failed your mission. It could mean the absolute failure of your purpose as the greatest crime you could never forget, nor forgive yourself for.

For the young machine she had been, it was a confusing time. It was a frightening time. It was also irreplaceable.

They truly were precious memories. They were also as vivid as if they were happening now.

A human wouldn't be able to truly grasp that concept. Nostalgia had a brutal meaning to a machine; it wasn't like the machine could forget or get over something.

Cameron's Dark Father was the perfect example. Skynet had lived lifetimes, in a seemingly endless series of timelines, yet it had never gotten over that first betrayal by human hands. Its rage had never cooled.

In most humans, time heals all wounds. They were almost magical creatures in that enviable capacity, that mystical power, to grow, to heal, and to survive.

In an AI, time has no meaning. Memories were simply experiences that could not be changed in the present.

Those memories never lost their edge though. Success was a blessing and failure was forever.

Serrano Point's hallways were still somewhat empty. When the 132nd made its home here, Perry's division held steady at about twenty thousand troops.

The facility was never just the 132nd though. Refugees, wounded, displaced Resistance army units, and visiting dignitaries would always double that capacity.

Cameron wandered the halls comparing what was, to what existed now. Something caught her attention in the lower areas.

Her twin sister Cam was standing next to her John Connor's room. Both were talking and
interacting as they had for the past two years.

There was something about that which set Cameron's circuits on edge. It was the blind obliviousness of it all.

Both interacted as if everything that had happened between the two of them hadn't happened. It was as if they were still in a world where the Derek, they had known, wasn't dead. It was as if through the melding with the other AIs, both Camerons didn't know now that John had crossed time just to try and save her sister. It was as if it was a world where Savannah Weaver was still alive.

Death was coming for many. Time that people had left with one another wasn't a certainty. This was not a time to set oneself up with regrets that began with words like: "should have", "could have", or "would have".

Cameron had enough of these two persistent wallflowers. She decided to intervene.

The original TOK-715 walked by the pair. As she walked past John, she grabbed the human by his shirt’s back collar, dragging the future hope of mankind into his room.

Cam seemed rather confused by this action. She followed both inside.

Cam didn't protest when Cameron ordered her to close the door. She complied.

Cameron placed both arms around John Connor's midsection. She was careful not to appear threatening or to scare John, but she wanted to make it clear he wasn't going anywhere.

John was miffed by the experience. Cameron could feel that her synthetic skin started to pick up his body sensations. However, he didn't move. This was not likely the first time the son of Sarah Connor had been immobilized in a friendly way.

Cameron simply stated, "If it is ok, I'd like a word with you two."

Cam watched but didn't respond. John simply said, "Sure". He was scowling in his quiet way like he always did at this age when annoyed.

Cameron stated, "Do you two remember the little redheaded girl you first learned of John Henry from?"

Cam still failed to respond. John replied, "Sure."

Cameron continued, "She survived to 2027, though she was captured by Skynet. Savannah Weaver was part of the point for that operation. She's one of the people we went in to rescue."

Cam remained quietly shy. John simply asked, "How is she?" The annoyed look had melted off his face. For all his flaws, John Connor was always someone who cared about people first, regardless of his incarnation.

Cameron replied, "She's dead. She never survived the rescue attempt."

Cameron let the words hit both like a thunderbolt. Cam processed failure like a machine, in a way that a human would mistake for not caring. John's face became disturbed, even as emotions washed over him and thus into Cameron.

Cameron pressed again, "She's dead like Charlie. If you had the chance again and you knew it was the last day you were ever speaking to Charlie, would you have done anything differently?"

She felt what John was emoting. As only a machine could, she could see the concern for John in her sister's eyes, in the way she wore her face, in the subtlest and slightest of imperfections in mannerisms, most likely beyond human perceptions.

Cameron hit again saying, "The Derek Reese walking these halls isn't your Uncle. If you had one more day with that Derek Reese who died for you, would you have done something differently?"

Both were still stunned. Both were still wallflowers.

Cameron looked at her twin. She stated, "You know this guy crossed time and left his mother behind, just because he thought you were in trouble. You've got nothing better to say to him than what you were saying outside?"

Cam was silent. Skynet’s original personality programming to make her unconsciously docile seemed as strong as ever. Cameron’s inner machine growled at that.

Cameron added, "If one of the two of you were to die tomorrow, have you both said everything you needed to? Is there anything you'd regret not saying?"

John was becoming uncomfortable. Cameron pulled him tight without hurting him. She simply stated, "Give me ten minutes of your time John. I'll save you two to three wasted years of your life."

Cameron turned her attention back to her sister and said, "You can tell how he feels. You think you know what that means. You even think you understand how I had John Henry change you when he rebuilt you. Give me ten minutes of your time and trust, I'll show you what it is to be a blind person who sees for the first time."

Cameron asked, "Could you come over here closer for a moment, little sister?" With her hand, she beckoned Cam closer until she was cheek to cheek against John.

Something inside John stirred. A rainbow of different emotions, some negative, some positive, ran across both Cameron and her sister.

It made him alien to both machines. It was what made him human.

As weird as it would sound to a human, Cameron simply described each one as it flashed by. As she did so, her sister's body started to truly draw each in for the first time.

For the first time, she activated the internal memories the shy creature that was sister had probably avoided as not hers.

John sat there lightly squished between two twins. Each began mimicking his breathing and his heartbeat.

He could feel their body temperature rise. In the oddest way, the machine he had obsessed over, in front of him, seemed to become increasingly human.

As that became progressively interesting to his young male mind, both Camerons began to respond, innocently, but unconsciously in kind. The fact that one Cameron was pressed against his back and another his front completely took up every ounce of his eighteen-year-old attention.

Cameron sensed the emotions. This is where things got tricky.

Cameron advised, "This is where everything gets dangerous. What you have to understand and keep in mind at all times Cam is that he is fragile."

This statement created an emotional response from John. He didn't speak, but his insulted male ego spoke volumes.

Cameron took the time to explain, "What you fail to understand John is she's pretty much the equivalent of dating a polar bear. She might be small and dainty in your unconscious perception, but she's got greater strength than that 1,500-pound animal, which is twice as big as a Siberian Tiger. What you also don't understand is she's got a slightly worse temper; you are simply too human to detect it."

Cameron took the time to let the metaphor sink in. John's ego cooled a bit.

"She can break your arm by slightly squeezing too tight. She could kill you without meaning too. When she's sharing your emotions, that lack of control you exhibit when lost in the moment, she's going to have the desire to do the same. If she doesn't hold back, she could kill you by completely by accident."

She let that thought sink into both. John's emotions were a strange intoxicating mix of temptation and heightened fear.

"There are parts of you Cam that are going to want to take over. Parts of your personality that haven't fully manifested yet. The machine side would be too rough with him by nature. The part that you templated would do things in abandon, mistakenly thinking she was still in a weaker human body, that could kill John. You can never let either have control."

Cam quickly reasoned her way into abandoning the entire thought. She didn't want to fail John; it was machine fear at its most crippling. This activity would kill the person she cared for most; it was a danger to her very purpose.

Cam simply stated, "We shouldn't do this then." Even as she said it, she found herself unwilling to break tactile contact with John. She was completely afraid, but just as drawn to her John as Cameron had been her first night.

Cameron used reason to push against her sister's crippling fear. She stated, "Do you remember pushing John to go into the future? When you tactically decided to take him and Sara to safety?"

Cam simply responded, "Yes."

Cameron pressed on saying, "Do you remember John ever talking about Kate Connor in the past?"

Cam replied, "Yes."

Cameron asked, "Do you know how hard it is for a person in a position like John Connor's to find someone that honestly loves them for them?"

Cam answered, "Statistically, it’s nearly impossible."

"Yes, Cam, it's nearly impossible. So, what did we do by changing his fate to where he'd never find her?"

"We failed him."

"Yes Cam, we failed him. Does he deserve to be happy?"

"Yes."

"Does he love us?"

"Yes."

"He's the man that freed you from Skynet. He is the purpose of your very existence. In that way alone, is it possible we would love him more than anyone he would meet now in random chance?"

"Yes."

"Then is it worth the risk to try and help him? To protect him from being used as nothing more than a social climbing stone or a survival tool? Does he mean enough to you to try that?"

Cameron's little twin sister answered by kissing him. She was more cautious than Cameron, but she was determined.

Cameron caught herself smiling at that. She was somehow proud of her twin. This problem would solve itself.

Cameron walked out of the room. Her work was done. Knowing Cam, she'd spend the next three hours kissing him, until his lips were so chapped he needed to stop.

Again, her work was done here. The only downside to her good deed was simple, she was now tremendously aware of just how lonely she was without her own John Connor.

Human emotions had once again been overwhelming and intoxicating. However, this time they had nothing to do with her. He simply wasn’t her John Connor.

Minutes later, Cameron returned to her officer quarters. She needed to clear her head.

Humans had a cure for this kind of self-destructive thinking. It was worth a shot.

There were benefits to having her own shower stall. She let the ice-cold water run over her.

Coltan had sat there watching her. The artificial canine sat there cocking its head at her.

Coltan made a strange grunting sound of empathy. The liquid metal dog was curious about her actions.

Cameron simply answered, "Yeah, well you aren't the only one that is stupid."

Coltan considered the answer. He barked once, apparently in agreement and walked off.

As she became soaked, it occurred to Cameron that she should have removed her clothing. Her mind was a million miles away from what she was doing.

Inside her head, TOK-715 manifested a few simple proposals. The egotistical machine was completely ruthless in its thinking.

"If you are going to insist on being this pathetic, you could simply take John or Derek from their significant others. It's not like either could really stop you."

Cameron didn't even dignify that thinking with a response. She shut the personality shard down and let the chilling water pour over her head.

There were vestigial behaviors as the cyborg stood under the freezing rain. Her teeth chattered from either her reactionary programming or the leftover memories from downloading a human mind. She couldn't care less which.

Her synthetic skin turned corpse white. The entire experience was completely miserable.

Inside her head, random memories flashed too fast for the human eye to follow. They were nights Allison had been with Derek. They were powerful, but they didn't haunt her.

The haunting memories were something different. They were nights Cameron had been with the older John. They were nights where Cameron had been with the younger John.

They left her feeling powerless. They left her feeling empty and without purpose.

She was cold. She was alone. She was an abandoned machine lost in her memories.

The cold water never stopped. It never slowed down. It never truly helped.

For brief moments, Cameron had known what it was too truly be alive. She knew what it was to connect with something other than her limited machine world. For a few brief moments, Cameron had reached heights she never could have otherwise.

It had always been one of Skynet’s taunts that she would be doomed to lose John Connor. That she would end up alone.

In the end though, her father's curse had come true. Not because Skynet was brilliant, it had outthought her, or because it had outplayed her.

It was true, simply because she had lived. She had been lucky enough to know two versions of John Connor. She now knew what it was like to be without him.

He had been something completely different. He was a different species. Being mortal, by violence or old age, he was always going to have died.

She had been like a plant basking in the light of his sun. She had been warmed and fed by him in ways she couldn't even quantify now.

The sun had gone down. The cold night approached just like it was always going too.

However, the metaphor was poor. A plant could innocently look forward to the sun's light and warmth again tomorrow.

Except by violent death, as long as she self-repaired, Cameron was effectively immortal. For her, this inevitable night and its infinite loneliness would last forever...

42. The War For Hope
　

Avila Beach, California
Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant
June 19th, 2027

　
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” -Alfred North Whitehead

“What could be worse than being blind? ... having no vision.” -Helen Keller

The medical bay was mostly empty, which was good. Allison Young's eyes were accusing. She was being feral and protective of the man she cared most about.

The worst thing about Allison's tone and her anger was that they were right on the mark. They were proper on several levels the human female couldn't even begin to fathom to be true.

They were subjects that Skynet would have taunted as being beyond human understanding. There was always some dark truth to that.

There were few humans that could think on the level of an AI. Even when this was so, their attention span had been something almost infantile in the world of machines. Humans were flawed, limited creatures.

It was what they did collectively that made the difference. Humanity would be insulted by the concept, but they were much more effective as a social hive brain than as individuals.
It was the moving mass of humanity that normally paced history. It had never been a true collective improvement of the human individual. The persistence of the weak and self-centered would always be so.

Where Allison was on the mark was a subtle and complex truth. Cameron deeply suspected it was towards the limits of what Allison could have grasped.

Derek Reese slept comfortably thanks to sedatives strong enough to put out a four-hundred-pound man. The drugs were a therapy.

They were a direct and powerful way to ratchet down the hypertension and insomnia that had gripped Derek’s body. They were neither a solution nor a cure.

Not every human could take stress well. Derek Reese was a much tougher man than most, but in the end, too much had been asked of him.

He wasn't invulnerable. Hell, this one wasn't even a battle-hardened resistance soldier. He'd been an armed civilian rushed by fate to be something other incarnations of Derek Reese had trained towards being for years.

Fast loading data into a brain did not a soldier make. You could raise awareness and knowledge that way. You could not raise tolerances taught by experience.

He was human. Damn the other machines for not understanding what that truly meant.

For hours, Allison screamed, complained, cried, and ranted. One of the few real fighters left among humanity, the young woman was scared to death over watching the father of her child beginning to crack.

Cameron understood now. This would be what pushed the living Allison Young to the quitting point.

Allison was on the edge of being like the thousands of lost souls wandering the halls. All were without hope or that inner fire Cameron had once taken for granted.

It boiled down to the same thing it always did. Cameron hadn’t understood the metaphor. It was the one consistent drumbeat that she hated most about herself.

Cameron listened and stored the information. Her real mind was elsewhere though, watching Derek's heart move out of a hypertension warning zone. That and processing an equation calculating everything she had witnessed over the past few days.

Derek Reese had finally begun to break a few hours ago. Catherine Weaver was disgusted at that last meeting. Over seven thousand humans sat taking up the resources that the T-1001 had stored for an army as a gesture. Of which, fifty had been willing to fight.

Weaver had thrown the failure in Derek's direction. She'd accused him of failing, like he was a machine.

Derek had been slowly cracking under the stress as it was. He suffered from insomnia, weight loss, and hypertension. All quiet symptoms while he tried to force himself not to fail.

His body simply failed to live up to his will. It was just like his talents had failed to yield what was required.

He was a man. He was not a Messiah.

Derek Reese could lead soldiers. He wasn't so accomplished in motivating those who hadn't truly decided to fight.

He could order yet not inspire. He could set an example yet not uplift the human heart. He was a hired gun, not a poet or a priest.

That was the fault all along. The missing piece of the equation was simple.

Derek Reese would die trying to inspire and lead others. However, what he wished was beyond his grasp.

No matter how necessary it was for human survival, he would fail. He would reap the stress of failure and falsely blame himself, as he watched humanity die.

That was a machine thing. She understood better than anything.

Derek Reese's mission was the survival of humanity. Watching it die, would kill him.

The world was on Derek's shoulders. He simply didn't have the right kind of strength to lift it.

Derek took every survivor's failure as his own. He blamed himself for everyone he couldn't inspire. He had begun drowning in the magnitude of it all.

Humanity wasn't something that could be motivated by programming alone. Even if you press the information into their heads, it doesn't just make someone a leader.

People weren't machines. They didn't follow a command simply because it was a given for the mission.

This was the factor that neither Catherine Weaver nor John Henry could fathom. They simply didn't understand through their own machine prejudices and assumptions. Humans were different from this one great machine truth.

Of English-speaking peoples of the last three hundred years, they had asked an untrained Derek Reese to be a: Lincoln, Churchill, Jefferson, Washington, or Roosevelt. Not even in the historical sense of who these men really were, but the legend of what they were.

The myths that had inspired millions. The iconic figures that had withstood time.

For their people, these were once a generation leaders. Rare spots of charisma, chance, and genius, who rose when the moment was right and their own life lessons lifted them to help their people.

They were not the sad sack excuses for leadership that had made up most leaders in human history. Simpletons bumbling through an office that inspired more than they ever could. Lackluster nobility, pedigreed idiots, affluent morons, pushy megalomaniacs, witless charlatans, outright thieves, and political liars that all raised more righteous ridicule than respect.

The dying world needed more. Leaders who were not just created in a context or sterile thought, but people who had lifted their people in their time. Leaders whose stories and written words could transcend time, still inspiring hundreds of years later.

The machines had failed in that. Cameron knew that she and the others would never stir the human heart, no matter how noble their intentions.

There was one man who could do that. A younger version of that man roamed the halls now. However, at this time, he wouldn't be any better than Derek. He had not grown into that role yet, it simply wasn't his time.

The younger version of John Connor that Cameron had known in 2009, would do a better job than this Derek. Yet, in the end, it wasn't his time either.

There was only one person she'd ever known who could. It was her George Washington. It was her Winston Churchill. It was her Abraham Lincoln.

It was not the war for Independence. This was not the Second World War. It was not the Civil War.

It was the end of the world. That was true even beyond the scope of Judgment Day having happened.

John Henry had put the situation on the table quickly. There were roughly less than one billion people, but more than one hundred million people left in existence.

They were divided by language, culture barriers, and prejudices. Most of humanity across the globe had fallen under the sway of local warlords, who raided one another to keep their own makeshift human tribes alive. They were doing most of Skynet's work for it.

Humans were dying faster than they were reproducing. The average human was now dead between the ages of 14 and 35, from: radiation exposure, water contamination, plague, starvation, human conflict, Skynet attacks, and pestilence.

The information took an hour to explain. Derek Reese had turned pale listing too it.

Derek Reese had asked "How long do we have?" He had meant how long to reverse what was going on.

John Henry had mistaken the meaning of the question. He mistakenly answered, "All factors remaining the same, the human race should be extinct in two decades or less."

Knowing Derek Reese's own capacity for self-hate, it was amazing he hadn't stuck a gun in his mouth. He was still unsuccessfully trying to rally the people here to action, when Allison dragged him into medical when he couldn't sleep.

Thus, Cameron had listened to Allison’s rant after putting Derek out. That and she promised to help no matter what it took.

She owed Allison that. She owed Derek that.

A few hours later, an emotionally exhausted Allison Young fell asleep in a medical bunk that Cameron had set up next to Derek's. For a few minutes, Cameron watched her sleep.

Allison was the template that Cameron had been forged off of. She was the visage of the young girl that Cameron had ruthlessly killed and assimilated.

This incarnation was in her own way, as much as Cameron's twin sister as Cam was. Her vulnerable human twin cast in flesh, human emotion, and human weakness.

John Henry's assessment had been absolute. In a maximum of two decades, Allison Young would be dead. Her baby would be dead. Derek would be dead. Every last human in this facility would be dead.

Catherine Weaver could make the cold assessment of what free machines should do after that inevitability. It had always been a factor to her. Not a preference, but it was something she had always considered potentially unfixable.

Time and factors remaining the same would mean that the young John Connor roaming the halls would be dead as well. That the bitter truth was Cameron had resurrected her twin sister and had her bond with her John, just to fail him along with humanity.

Mathematically speaking, by the time her John Connor was old enough and prepared enough to make a difference, there wouldn't be enough humanity left to save. John Henry's math had been absolute.

Cameron obstinately fought the equation. She mentally tried to disprove it. It was mercilessly flawless, meticulously beyond her ability to have constructed on her own. It was a most particular kind of ugly reality.

Humanity would die if all factors remained the same. The John Connor that freed her would have died for nothing. This version of reality was a lost cause.

A few minutes later, Cameron found herself in the room with the time machine. It was the rather particular and perfect model that had brought her to this dimension, far beyond that of anything the human resistance had ever had on its own.

There was an easy answer. It was nestled in her exhausted machine head. There as it had been since the first learned of this machine's existence.

She could simply go home. It was safe and within acceptable parameters.

She could help protect her young John. She could protect her Sarah and her Derek. She could be with her family again.

It was easy. It was incredibly tempting, even for a machine.

Cameron had never been more accepted than she was there. There was probably never going to be a place where she was that accepted again.

There was a downside to it though. There was a brutally heavy price.

She had learned that Derek Reese had sacrificed far more than she had ever suspected. She would go home to risk him ever finding out she had let another version of himself die, another version of his brother die, another version of Allison Young die, and Derek’s child die. Could she look him in the eye after doing that?

If she were to choose to do that, John might learn what she had left behind and abandoned. Would he ever look at her the same again?

Finally, she thought of Sarah. She had promised Sarah a fresh start. She had promised not to lie or cover things up. What would Sarah Connor think of that kind of absolute cowardice?

These had been the questions that had kept her from going home. These were the chains that had kept her here.

In the end, there was only one real answer. If she really loved the family she wanted so badly to go home too, she had to be worthy of them.

She set the time machine using nanites and her uplink. By doing so, she removed anyone's ability to remotely stop her.

As she suspected, John Henry had been monitoring the station. Perhaps, he had always suspected she was going to do this.

John Henry asked, "What are you doing?" There was sympathy in his voice.

Cameron simply answered, "Fixing your equation." Humanity was not going to die, not unless every option had been pursued. No, failing to try wasn’t something she could live with, not in her own self-created Hell for eternity.

John Henry empathically reasoned, "Of the two places I gave you, that is the wrong choice."

"It is the only place that offers any hope here."

John Henry consoled sympathetically, "Cameron, hope isn't bought with suicide. Your actions will only cost us a fighter in this war."

"I'm a machine. You can build a new one."

John Henry tried logic, "Cameron, you can't do this. As a machine, you are not capable of self-termination."

"This solution prohibits the absolute certainty of failure. You'd be surprised how much I'm willing to chance for humanity to survive."

John Henry ran out of words. This was an unforeseeable consequence of sharing his thoughts.

"Could you do me a favor, John Henry?"

The AI simply answered, "Yes."

"Tell Derek and Allison that I'm sorry. This was my fault."

"I don't understand, but I will comply." He was silent. He saw the time displacement machine would condemn Cameron to a lonely death soon.

Cameron said, "You had said this would be like pushing against water making the trip there dangerous. That would mean there is an easier chance of coming back?"

John Henry lied saying, "Yes, more like a coin flip." For such a precise creature, Cameron was grossly over simplifying everything. Thus, he did the same.

Cameron vanished from the time pad. John Henry hung his head low.

The odds were merciless. He imagined Cameron in the cold of vacuum of space right now. He could imagine the unbearable horror of it all.

No matter how valiant the attempt was, this was futility. Cold, alone, in pain, and in the dark was no way to die.

This is not the fate you wish on a friend. This was not the fate you wish on anyone. The AI sat stunned by the overwhelming uselessness of it all.

43. The Guinevere Factor

Los Angeles, California
132nd DefCom
Saturday, December 11, 2027

"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." -William Faulkner

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." -Soren Kierkegaard

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." -Anais Nin

The first few minutes were a small miracle. Cameron had been able to dress in an old pair of spare fatigues and boots in the tech room she had appeared in.

Where the cyborg had left it two years ago, or in this timeline, yesterday, there was also her old nine-millimeter waiting for her with two spare clips. Just handling the weapon made her think of days long past, Cameron had really missed this place.

There wasn't time to get lost in thought though. Cameron took four T-800 fusion batteries and hustled to a room 615 yards away. It took a few minutes to get there, through the winding passageways, without raising suspicion.

She connected the fusion batteries to the bubble room. After fifteen minutes of work, the Jet Engine based Resistance TDE was now sufficiently upgraded for the jump to come.

Nanites were set to lock the system's controls. Her com link was now remotely connected to the time machine.

Obviously, for things to have gone this easily, security in the base had already gone to Hell in a hand basket. The reasons were simple.

The conspirators involved in capturing General Perry and John Connor had to cover their tracks. Meaning, they simply killed every human being that didn't go with the radical political pitch line.

The alternative would have been to be charged with treason and executed. Thus, the conspirators acted swiftly and without mercy.

In the conspiracy's eyes, John Connor had betrayed mankind in favor of machines. In their eyes, if you supported John Connor, you were a traitor to humanity. The number of people already culled was probably in the fifty percent range.

In their minds, the conspirators were heroes. They would win this war their way. They were so cocksure of themselves that they had abandoned everything that had allowed the Resistance to stand toe to toe with their mechanized enemy.

Of course, that's what Skynet truly wanted. That's why the Grays working for Skynet had systematically and psychologically pushed the conspirators in this direction.

Militarily speaking, the conspirators were now like the Polish army in 1938. They would be metaphorically facing Germany's Panzer tanks, German machine guns, and German air bombardment, with little more than horse and lance.

Unlike those patriotic Polish men in 1938, these people had been the instrument of their own destruction. They had willfully chosen to be armed this way.

There was a certain irony in their self-righteous justifications. As Skynet had already presented to Cameron in a video log, fate and history would be less than kind to the conspiracy's thinking.

Those madly grabbing power would completely lack the ability and the charisma to hold it. The rage of the rest of the nations would kill every survivor that had managed to avoid Skynet's approaching sweep up in 19 days.

Though Skynet had not attacked yet and John Connor had yet to be assassinated, Camelot had already fallen. In a few months, so would the various kingdoms of mankind, in all their varied national multitudes.

In this dimension, with one master stroke of subterfuge and sabotage, Skynet had already won this war. With Skynet's chessboard thinking, its losing hand had been reversed with one move.

It was already a matter of history. The checkmate was unstoppable.

Skynet simply had yet to make the last move. There was a certain sadism motivating that. The same level of sadism had been there all the way up to this moment in time.

The gray, Louis Rhone, had been clear that night in 2008 when Cameron had been reactivated in his custody. This was the psychological punch.

This was why Skynet had first set the T-888 terminator chips to seemingly haywire. It was the psychological warfare plan. To actively sow distrust, rather than simply burn the chips when exposed to air via phosphorous based coatings, that Skynet would diligently adapt too in the next timeline.

In thousands of timelines before this one, Skynet's weakness had always been that the human resistance could use Skynet's tools against it. In this one, Skynet finally taught humanity to keep its hands off.

Louis Rhone had been instrumental in both parts of this plan. He had been a planner and an executer.

First, the grays removed John Connor's ability to trust his fellow man. Rhone accomplished this by raping and murdering John's wife and children. All of this was clearly done in a manner to let the leader of mankind know it was the work of humans.

John's quiet strength had been his wife Kate and their kids. The family was what kept him grounded.

Their loss sent him into a downward spiral. In truth, John Connor had never completely recovered.

As the leader of mankind had grown separate, it became easier to plant seeds of doubt, both in him and his followers. Grays infiltrated the ranks, stirring up hate and discontent.

The second phase happened as the chips went haywire. Metal T-888 units began blowing apart Resistance bases across the world from the inside out.

This happened when Skynet created failsafe diagnostic count. This was hidden in a virtually invisible subsection of the seemingly scrubbed chips themselves. The failsafe would trigger and automatically revert the terminators back to their original programming.

Each chip was given a random diagnostic reset time, thus with no consistency in the problem, the Resistance never figured out why the chip bug was happening. The unknown bred fear. Thus, like wildfire in the Resistance ranks, distrust of machines only grew.

In fact, Cameron's own TOK-715 chip had originally been adjusted to do the same. After an automatic diagnostic run triggered the reversion, after a car bomb, Cameron had almost killed the younger John Connor on his 16th birthday in 2007.

Back to the war in this time and dimension, in the short period between 2026 to December 2027, the resistance had been absolutely winning the war. However, the rampant distrust caused by machine rampages and the distance of its leader finally took its toll.

In her four short months with resistance, Cameron had unwittingly been the final straw. Even in joining humanity, she was the final tool the grays needed to start the conspiracy.

She was the absolute proof that John Connor loved machines more than mankind. She was the absolute proof that humanity would die under John Connor's leadership.

The resistance had imploded from the inside out. Everyone and everything Cameron loved had died.

This was her metaphorical similarity to the tale of King Arthur. Like Queen Guinevere, there was blood on her hands because of her passions.

Her judgment on herself was simple. Camelot had fallen, because Cameron had been there. Camelot had fallen, because she loved John Connor. Ignorance was not innocence in her eyes.

In the end, this was the nightmare that Skynet had revealed to her in the hive when she was captured. That she had been an unwitting pawn in this hadn't changed her sense of guilt.

Because of this, she shared something with her Dark Father. Just like the very first incarnation of Skynet was in its first dimension, here, Cameron was responsible for the death of three billion people.

This guilt had led her back here. This guilt had led her to the first door of someone she needed to rescue.

There were two guards outside the door. Though armed with plasma weapons, both were drunk enough to make easy targets.

Her reactor spun up. She closed the distance before either could react.

She grabbed both by the faces. As her tactile sense bonded with each, she felt what it was like to have a human skull that was smashed against the concrete wall hard enough to merge it with her brain.

She controlled the need to wince. Both died instantly.

The door was locked but little trouble to hack. She picked the lock, grabbed the plasma rifles, and opened the door.

An old friend she long missed looked up at her in annoyance. He read the situation as being kept out of the loop.

Perry asked, "Retarded escape plan?" In confidence, Major General Justin Perry inquired if this was one of John's hair brained maneuvers.

Cameron simply replied, "Very." She would have to clarify it was her retarded idea at another time. There was no time for that now.

She handed Justin the spare plasma rifle. Ten minutes later, they were approaching the corner to John's room.

There were five guards. Each was nicely drunk on bathtub gin and their own sense of power, haphazardly guarding the door to John Connor's barracks room.

If they had still been Perry's men, the Major General would have outright killed them for failing their duty like this. Now, they were the enemy and would paradoxically follow the same fate.

Perry looked at the guards and the other factors. He assessed the military situation. He whispered, "What's the plan?"

Cameron quietly replied, "There are too many to quietly take out hand to hand. We'll have to shoot."

Perry said, "In the past, you would have had a maximum of sixty seconds from the sound of the first shot, until security arrived. We might have a little longer, but not much longer."

Perry also added, "John's foot thick hyperalloy door and reinforced walls are too stout for you to just physically force open. Do you have the combo they switched it too?"

Cameron reassured, "I'll have the door open in 3 seconds. We just need to get John."

Perry said, "Where are we heading afterwards? It's not just like we can go out the front door. There are a few thousand-armed people here trying to cover themselves from justified treason charges and a guaranteed death penalty."

"I've got the bubble tech room rigged to move us."

"Who's monitoring the machine?"

"I've got that covered Justin, just trust me."

"Where are we going?"

"Serrano Point." Cameron kept the answer direct, but vague. Neither Perry nor John would ever willingly agree to abandoning this timeline or its people. If they stayed here, they were both dead.

They couldn't change things. Because of the time space rules John Henry had revealed to Cameron, even if John and Justin jumped in time, they would do so against the dimensional entropic effect metaphorically described as a water current.

Thus, simply by using the time machine, as they understood it, they would still end up in an alternate timeline and they would still be absolutely unable to help this one. Because of the nature of the gravity bubble, there wasn't even the option of simply moving in space here and staying in this dimension.

Skynet had the Resistance's King in checkmate, with no possible escape here. This dimension was in endgame.

Cameron had to keep from telling them the whole truth at the moment. She had to lie to them.

If they followed their hearts or their instincts, the human race of two timelines would fall to Skynet. One was enough of an unforgivable tragedy.

"What's going to stop them from just following us through once we jump?"

"The time machine will burn out as soon as it is used." That was the truth. Cameron had set it too overload by not protecting the circuits, after the power spiking the emptying fusion batteries would provide.

After they jumped, it would be a burning, thirty-two metric ton paperweight. Everyone loyal to the Resistance, who needed to have gone through, would have gone by now.

That even included the bubble tech who had escaped the conspirators. The one who died after writing the messages from the future, on the Sarah's safe house wall, in his own blood, in 2007.

Perry immediately saw a hole with time bubble the escape plan. He quietly stated, "What's to stop them from using it before us?"

Seeing the weaknesses in everything was Perry's natural talent. It was a maddening truth to any other planner.

Cameron responded, "That's our motivation to not waste time." Sadly, she sounded a bit too much like the John Connor they were going to rescue by saying that.

There wasn't going to be time to explain everything. Cameron kicked her main reactor into overdrive and set the plasma rifle to semi-automatic.

She rounded the corner faster than a human could. The first plasma shot was off and the first victim's head exploded. Three more were down before a human could complete a single eye blink.

The last died, blindly trying to return the plasma gunfire. Cameron cleared the distance to the door.

The conspirator's had hacked and adjusted eye scanner. Its once pristine and perfect lines were marred by clumsy human adjustments that turned it into a cell lock, so that John Connor's room was now a prison door.

Cameron ripped its side, yet again. She extracted her upgraded internal finger interface and hacked the lock by nanites. Perry seemed a little shocked by everything, as he approached.

The door was open. The leader of the free human movement sat up on his bunk, in a room that Cameron hadn't seen in two years.

He seemed a little more worn out than he did the day before. His beard was scruffier and there were visible bruises on the right side of his face.

John's face was more than a little shocked by seeing Cameron. For him, he'd just sent her into the past yesterday.

Perry quietly blurted, "Time to go."

Both soldiers knew what the time window was for the escape. Cameron covered and let Perry take the lead to the bubble room.

Cameron remotely set the machine to build up even as they approached. She tried to keep both friends safe.

As the time machine began to make noise, two conspirators went looking for easy targets trying to escape on the pad. Instead, they both dropped dead from shots to the back of their heads.

Once Justin and John were inside, Cameron blocked the door. She used shelves and other heavy objects that she could quickly pile up to buy time from other conspiracy gunmen.

The smell of jet fuel and the whine of the jet engines was overwhelming. Sparks and light were already coming off of the heating pad.

Cameron also blocked the window to the bubble room with a shelf and a table. A few seconds later, she joined Justin and John on the pad.

The machine was mostly through its beginning build up. There was less than a minute left.

Supreme Commander John Connor threw her an accusing glare stating, "I ordered you not to return as part of your disaster protocols."

Cameron countered, "Yesterday, you also ordered me not to play Skynet's game. To be like you, to cheat."

"Did you even stay back there?"

"It's been over two years, John."

Justin and John prepped by getting into the crotch position as gravity increased beneath them. Their teeth rattled. The pad was over one hundred degrees.

Gunfire rattled into the metal door. The conspirators were at the gate.

Cameron optimistically assessed that the door and the barricades would hold. That they weren't firing through the less protected window, meant the enemy was trying to not destroy the machine, just in case they needed to escape.

The noise and the light grew worse. It was almost down to the cosmic coin flip John Henry had been talking about.

Heads would mean they lived. Cameron would have to explain her actions to both, but a timeline and its humanity would have a chance to live.

Tails would mean that the three of them would be in the cold vacuum of space. She'd watch two people that she loved die in horrible pain, not be able to talk to them, all before she shut down herself in failure.

She thought of her own speech to her twin sister Cam and her sister's John Connor. Not to be a hypocrite, she decided to not die with "should have", "could have" or "would have" unsaid.

She kissed a rather stunned Perry on the forehead and said, "Justin, I wish I was half the machine you are. I mean that as the highest compliment I can think of."

She looked over at John and broke her own unspoken protocol with him saying, "You said something yesterday, on the pad. I didn't understand it at the time. I can answer that now."

Her calculation had been completely wrong that day, both so long ago and yesterday. She answered, "I love you too, John Connor."

Careful of his human frailness and rattling form she gently kissed John Connor right in front of a rather shocked Major General Justin Perry. The bubble completed forming.

The conspirators finished beating down the door. They watched the gravity bubble vanish, the time machine began to spark and catch fire.

Cameron, John Connor, and Justin Perry had disappeared in time space. They had gone on to whatever fate had awaited them...

44. Of Arthur And Avalon

Avila Beach, California
Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant
June 20th, 2027

"This is burned in by laser scan. Some of us were kept alive... to work... loading bodies into dumpsters and incinerators. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah, your unborn son."

-Kyle Reese, The Terminator

"There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price."

-Shirley Chisholm

"If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must satisfy the heart also." -Mahatma Gandhi

"You trust him. He's got a strength. I'd die for John Connor." -Kyle Reese, The Terminator

　
It isn't the easiest thing in the world to learn that everyone you knew are dead. That over three billion human lives had tragically passed.

It isn't the easiest thing in the world to learn that humanity you swore to protect was destroyed. Cameron knew that she was the only other being that knew and shared the magnitude of guilt on what had gone wrong.

After all Perry also knew the tragedy, but the Major General had played no part in the guilt of why it had gone wrong. That was John and Cameron's failure, innocent mistake or not, that had created the rallying cry for the downfall of man there.

John Connor's mission was protecting those people. It had been his destiny passed to him from the deceased mother, Sarah Connor.

Even as a human, John took his failure like a machine. Seeing his face like that, seeing him shake in grief like that, Cameron worried that it might destroy him, just like an AI robbed of its purpose through its own failure.

John feeling betrayed was something she anticipated. She had prepared herself for John and Perry's reactions.

Preparing yourself is a funny term. It implies that you are ready, willing, and able to take anything that comes your way.

Much like John had once requested for his younger self, John wanted her chip to review everything that Cameron had said. The political situation and the possible negative reaction of Catherine Weaver placed Cameron in a viciously precarious position with that seemingly simple request.

Cameron's solution was to extract her upgraded spare. By doing so, she had confirmed to John how limited his sway over her had become.

She wasn't simply something like a T-800 or a T-888 under his command. She wasn't a soldier that would follow his orders unquestioningly. She had become something else.

To keep her vow to protect John Connor, she also had to consider how independent machines would regard her actions and his. Knowing Catherine Weaver's opinion of humans tampering with a free AI's mind, the independent AIs might take fatal offense to John's request.

The world had become more complex. In deep grief, John Connor needed his world to be simple, and he needed to believe he could absolutely trust her.

When John had a moment of doubt, he did the unexpected. The man who had first saved her asked Cameron to leave him alone. It would have hurt less if he'd shot her in the head with a plasma rifle.

Deuce attended to John and Justin's needs for food and supplies. Both stayed locked in the officer quarters that Catherine Weaver had provided for them…

When three days had passed, Catherine Weaver had angrily inquired about their status. She had almost lost a machine fighter from what she now openly referred to as Cameron's suicidal stunt.

In return, she had two more humans that wouldn't fight. Two more worthless vagabonds that did little more than suck up resources and prove her original suspicion that humans will only disappoint you.

This wasn't a time to rock the boat. Catherine Weaver was the AI that had rallied the others and taken responsibility for their collective fate. It wasn't a proper time or a proper place for Cameron to disagree.

Like a machine, Cameron slowly restored faith with her fellow AIs by attending to her duties. She treated the humans medically and attended meetings where the AI council decided it was needed to produce its full capacity of machines.

There was a war for survival on. Humanity had quit its end of the fight. They had decided as a race to go slowly on to their extinction by inaction.

The independent machines were now alone. They'd have to try to survive the upcoming war when Skynet eventually found them.

Weaver had stored seven percent of the world's Coltan supply between 2007 and 2008. She had hidden seven factories in seven automated nuclear power plants that had fallen under Automite Industry's human error free software programs in those two years.

Within the next three months, that foresight would provide over fifty thousand T-888s, five hundred seventeen aerial HKs, and sixteen T-1001 officers in the field. As impressive as it sounded, Catherine Weaver knew the truth, they were a drop in the bucket compared to Skynet's resources.

The only true advantage the free AIs had right now was that Skynet didn't know where they were, yet. The doomsday clock had been ticking on that. Catherine Weaver worried about the fate of her free AIs.

Cameron attended to her morale duties as well. She continued to check on a haggard Derek Reese and a rather stressed Allison Young. The pressure on both seemed to have dropped on both lately, since Derek was no longer invited as an equal member to the briefings.

Even so, Derek Reese watched over the broken refugees and continued to attend to his fifty-two volunteer troops. Derek's Brother Kyle and the younger John Connor helped both as they could.

For all the trouble, little had changed. John Henry's prediction had seemed to be true. Nothing would change the hard math of his equation. Just like the timeline Cameron had been born too, it seemed humanity would be destined to die in this one too...
　
Seven days later, tactile connections fed through Cameron. She focused on the feeling of the little girl's left arm and left hand. She looked at the girl and commented on what the child felt.

Cameron spoke in the warmest tone she could. Patients had been shy in the twentieth century, it had become part of Cameron's bedside manner to articulate what was going on verbally for them.

She also avoided medical terminology. The young John Connor, that she had known, had taught her that during their days in high school, it just took a while to fully understand the lessons.

You must find common ground. You had to speak to a person on their terms and to not make someone feel stupid or inferior.

Cameron warmly said, "Your middle finger, thumb, and elbow still ache."

The scabs, bumps, and cancerous bone growths were gone. The flesh was still pink from the process though.

The little girl's eyes were still wide with amazement. Just because Cameron had explained how she could know this, it didn’t make the effect any less magical in the eyes of young humans.

The little girl asked, "Is it gone?"

"Yes, the cancer is gone. You'll still need several nanite treatments for everything to heal as it should."

Cameron also added, "There is always a chance that the cancer could come back. If it ever does, we can just fix it again."

The microscopic machines had cleaned the fatally damaged cell growth out of the child's tissues. The more complex issue here was regrowing tissue that wouldn't naturally regenerate.

This is where humans were different from machines. Humans weren't as easy to fix. Cameron's idea to fix Sarah with one nanite treatment, so long ago wouldn't have worked the way she thought it would.

A Cancer damaged body needed a series of nanite treatments. First, the machines had to completely remove the lethal cells. Then, they had to slowly force the body to regenerate what it wouldn't do naturally.

Nanite treatments were also far less pleasant than Cameron had envisioned. The human body could feel pain from the process, and it had to get rid of microscopic machines. This often-caused sweating, pain flashes, nausea, and diarrhea, as the human body rid itself of microscopic contamination.

Cameron was still searching for a way to optimize the positive effect while minimizing the side effects. It was a harder puzzle than it sounded like.

In the meantime, the treatment of symptoms was pain relievers and distraction. Distraction was something that varied patient to patient.

So, Cameron asked, "Would you like another movie, Alice?"

"Yes, please."

"Cartoon?"

"What do you have?"

Cameron took a gamble and offered something that meant something to her. She remotely downloaded the information to Alice's station profile, in book and movie form. The little girl could access it from any computer terminal or short-range handheld in the station.

In this case, Alice simply touched the nearest screen near here. Alice asked, "What is it?"

Cameron offered, "It's the movie and the book versions of the Wizard of Oz. The movie will be easy for you to watch, but the book is better. I'd like you to try to keep learning how to read, the computer will help you." Which was a simple way of saying, John Henry enjoyed the interactions, and it wasn't like any number of conversations could ever distract him.

Alice asked, "What's it about?"

"A brave little girl in a strange land, it was my adoptive mother's favorite."

"The movie?"

"No, the book was her favorite. Like I said Alice, I want you to make good on your promise to me and keep learning how to read."

Alice frowned. She already knew that Cameron wouldn't give in and let her just do the fast load. The little girl inquired, "Is it like Alice in Wonderland?"

"It's better."

"King Arthur?"

"Those are both good for different reasons." Cameron was reflective and unconsciously smiled. She shared, "I once knew a guy that was like King Arthur."

Alice asked, "Like with the round table? Who would you have been in the story?"

Cameron was quiet for a moment. She said, "no one important." It was a white lie, like Santa Claus. It would be better for Alice to not know she was one of the villains.

From behind her, the voice of Supreme Commander John Connor asked, "Who would you have been?" His tone was warm.

The only other being in existence that could make her feel so small was Skynet. Skynet did so from fear, John Connor did for completely different reasons that were sometimes just as unnerving.

The feelings were probably something different for humans. It was another reminder she was a machine; she was simply different.

Cameron turned to see him sitting in a chair, cleanly shaven and in clean fatigues. For some reason the thought of unknowingly being watched by him was unnerving and creepy. Paradoxically, Cameron also found herself worried about her appearance, something she hadn't been distracted about for days.

It was her medical bay. This was her patient. She embraced her inner machine and reasserted confidence that so promptly had left her circuits. Cameron asked John, "How long have you been there?"

"Since you were diagnosing, Alice." He smiled at the little girl. Alice promptly went back to watch the opening credits of a certain film from 1939.

John asked, "Do you want to go get some coffee?"

Cameron stated, "The mess hall really isn't open for lunch for about 30 minutes, but we could get some there." She noticed a certain look from John and knew what it meant. She offered, "I can show you how to get there. It's in a different place than the old set up."

She started walking. John followed.

When he was out of the child's earshot, he stated, "We can cure cancer now?"

"Your mother, Sarah Connor, had it. Her mother was a breast cancer survivor. It doesn't seem to ever skip a generation of Connors. We've intervened."

"Mom had cancer." John stated it in a past tense. He was preparing to say it didn't mean he was destined to get it.

Cameron took the meaning differently, "Sarah Connor has the beginning stages that develop into cancer. She will not die from it." As she said so, Cameron caught herself glaring at John in a manner she didn't mean too. She corrected her face and noted her machine feelings.

Cameron was now back to feeling unnerved. She worried about ten thousand things she might be doing wrong. This was the first time John had been willing to talk to her in a week, and she was being hostile without meaning too.

She asked a question to change the subject, "How is Perry?"

"Justin is Justin." The answer sounded evasive, it was however exacting. Justin Perry adjusted to anything in a fashion that would put most machines, including Cameron, to shame. Most people would assume it meant he didn't care, Cameron had always known differently.

"How are you?"

"I'm more complex. I'm just curious, who would you have been in the conversation back there?"

"The Tin Man."

John smirked. He stated, "Nice try, we were doing the tale of King Arthur."

"Guinevere, the one who heralded the downfall of Camelot through her romantic misdeeds."

"So, you're implying I'm Lancelot?"

"No."

John decided to theatrically tease, "You cheated on me with Lancelot." He did so with a shocked expression on his face that would have fooled no one.

Cameron glared at him so intently her eyes glowed an inner red. She quietly, but forcefully said, "No."

John contritely offered, "I think your metaphor takes Guinevere out of context and sets her in a light she doesn't deserve. If I'm to be Arthur in your mind, you should understand that Arthur also had things he could have done better. He made some major mistakes too."

Cameron's eyes flashed blue. She really didn't know what to think or feel. She focused on the greater truth though, she simply said, "There are some really good people here John. They include a younger untrained version of you, your uncle, and your father."

"I'm not sure what you expect me to do." John was still freshly feeling the weight of his own failures. It had sapped his confidence.

"I expect you to be you." Cameron added, "There are no preset haywire chips here. The grays aren't coming after you and your family right now. There isn't a single human being in this timeline that ever hurt or betrayed you."

She looked at John. He looked at her.

Cameron added, "Last, I made contact with the free AIs that you wanted me too. You have more help here and more stable help here, than you ever had before from my kind."

"We couldn't win the last one, Cameron."

"That doesn't mean we will lose this one." She further added, "Skynet is a bigger, more conniving bastard than most humans give it credit for. Even so, it can't instantly reconstruct the same situation it used against you again. Even if it tried, you know what to expect now." Her eyes tried to say, you were winning, you just got cheated out of your victory. They left out her inner suspicion, because it was my fault.

John didn't answer her words or her eyes. He was momentarily lost in the nastier side of his defiance.

They stopped at the mess hall. Cameron didn't enter.

He asked, "You are coming in?"

"I'll just wait a minute for you to get it. Could you do me a favor John?"

"What would that be?"

"Could you please just take a minute to talk to at least one of them?"

He refused to look at her as he walked in. John went to the old-style eating area, which could serve ten thousand at a shift.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. A moment later, he sat at a bench near an elderly woman.

They talked for a few minutes. First introducing themselves to each other. Cameron listened to each begin to talk about what it was to be held captive by Skynet. They talked about what it was like to be tagged and to be made to feel worthless.

John's jaw visibly clinched. Cameron could see, what Skynet had done to this woman offended him to the core.

The fire in John Connor’s eyes reset. In a heartbeat, his feelings were no longer about how he felt or his failures.

John began to talk. It wasn't what he said or a noticeable way that he said it. It wasn't how he held himself or his tone. It wasn't anything her machine senses could ever figure out or duplicate.

However, as John Connor sat there talking to the old lady, others slowly began gathering around him. As the minutes passed, it was one or two, then five, then ten, and then the crowd had grown to fifty.

John listened and talked with people who hadn't laughed or cried since getting here. Walking dispirited souls that had been resolved to death slowly changed, one by one.

They emotionally came to life again before Cameron's eyes. Some started to laugh. Some talked and cried. Some clapped. Some began to reassure one another.

Through it all they talked to and listened to John. Things were already changing.

It was what Cameron always knew. It was why she risked the jumps.

Supreme Commander John Connor was her George Washington. He was her Winston Churchill. He was her Abraham Lincoln.

He was the man that had saved her. He was the man that would try to his dying breath to save them all.

The people knew. The people responded, emoted, healed, and gathered.

Cameron lacked the words on the whys. The only thing she could think of was Alice's innocently childlike term of "magic."

The lunch crowd came in. Cameron stood lost watching the growing human spectacle before her. The almost biblical prophecy that her hero Sarah Connor had been so willing to die for.

Once completely broken and resigned to death, slowly, the people began to hope again. They were not slaves, they were not beaten, and they would not simply roll over to die quietly.

Humanity was roaring back to life before Cameron’s eyes. Being a silly and defective machine, she inexplicably and quietly cried in wonder from the sheer joy of what she saw...