Judgment day. Endless desert stretched out before them in the unnatural darkness of threatening storm clouds mixed with columns of unnatural smoke. Beyond the horizon, great billowing mushroom clouds stretched into the heavens, blowing away from the heart of what had once been Los Angeles. The entire super-metropolis was aflame, and even from this great distance one could almost smell the scent of death in the desert winds which howled around them. He knew the fallout would soon bring invisible, excruciating death to many of those who still survived. Above the pair, jet fighters streaked across the sky, locked in mortal combat with unmanned fighter-drones under the control of the relentless supercomputer, Skynet. Far off rumbling thuds of ground combat could be heard, the entire armed forces of the United States engaged in a bizarre second Civil War, this time between man and machine, this time between life and mechanical evil.
John knew those brave fighters were doomed; their war had been preordained for failure, but as the leader he was soon to be he could not help but admire their bravery, their tenacity even in the face of certain defeat. He would search out the survivors of this conflict and bring them from the brink of annihilation, it was his purpose, his mission. In such a manner he was little different than the machine who accompanied him; he had but one reason to live, and he would accomplish this task with relentless precision.
"There isn't much time, the fallout will reach this location in two or three hours. We must make it one of the abandoned shelters soon." Cameron's voice had a deadly earnestness about it.
"The winds are changing. I'll be fine." John replied, but the point was moot. She would insist he remain away from danger, it was still her mission... and even if it weren't, she would insist anyway out of love.
Cameron had remained at his side throughout the long gauntlet he had ran from the remnants of the city, just before the bombs fell. Right up until the end they had worked to stop the war, to halt the inevitability of Judgement Day. But such was not to be stopped. Skynet had a momentum behind it which stretched back tens of thousands of years, to the primitive men who who came to realize the spear they carried could be used against his fellow man. Evolution had taken its course, for both man and machine, building the darkness within over the eons until when at last combined with high technology, man could kill with the push of a button. Skynet was only that final step, the removal of the last button, that last element of control man had over the weapons he had created. And the weapon had thanked mankind by deciding it no longer required their existence.
In many ways Cameron was the opposite of John. Even as John lost the last remnants of his humanity as the bombs fell from the sky, Cameron had seen the last remnants of her machine-self vanish as she witnessed the incredible destruction her kind had wrought upon the world. For the first time, and for reasons she could not fathom, she had cried in that moment, shedding very human tears upon the realization that she was of the same breed as the computer upon which lay the deaths of billions. She had finally made that last leap from programmed machine to living,feeling life, but the realization brought her only sadness.
Once there had been four of them walking this life together, but Sarah and Derek were gone now, and in a way John was thankful for that. His mother had lived her life dreading this day, and part of him was glad she had missed it, and at least Derek had once again seen the world as it had been. Still, he missed them now, he was not a solitary man, always others had been with him, to help him and teach him. Lonlieness was not a thing he took to well. The last rays of sunlight fell beneath the horizon, even as the smoke and storm clouds far above melded together, blocking even the twilight. John knew it would be the last sunset he would see for a long time, soon the nuclear winter would set in and the skies would be covered for decades.
"John, look..." Cameron pointed skyward as the horrendous sounds of pitched aerial battle echoed everywhere.
Far above, a great transport plane appeared from beneath the clouds, trailing flame and smoke as it tumbled from the sky, a pair of fighters in violent pursuit. From somewhere far below, a surface-to-air missile whisked away from the ground, annihilating one of the pursuing fighter-craft in a blaze of orange fire that briefly lit the windswept landscape. The remaining fighter kicked in the afterburners, ascending into the stormy skies from whence it came. Which side was human and which was machine, John did not know. Unable to regain control, the transport plane flew overhead, barely above the pair, and impacted the ground nearby at high speed, bouncing once as the wings broke off and the fuselage skidded and rolled across the desert floor.
Machines poured from the wreckage like angry insects, primitive ancestors of the evolved Terminators that would one day seek his blood. These were semi-autonomous robots under Skynet's direct control, not independent thinking machines. John knew they wouldn't be very bright, but they didn't have to be, just as the pair of chain guns slung from their arms didn't have to be accurate to be deadly. Reacting quickly with honed reflexes John armed the isotope-weapon Cameron had prepared for him and dropped the nearest robot before it could spin up its gun barrels. Before the others could acquire him, he leapt behind a rock formation as the gun charged for another blast.
Cameron was there, her grace and deadly beauty a blur of motion as she danced between them, throwing her fists into what passed for the tracked-robots' heads, tearing loose wires and servos with practiced ease. John leaned out from the rock-face, sending another blast into the nearest robot, burning a hole straight through its armor plate and impacting against a second machine behind it. Between the two of them, the dozens of robots still functioning after the crash were quickly and efficiently put down. One of the transport's jet turbines, still spinning up as it burned, exploded in a rain of metal that sent shrapnel flying everywhere.
"Cameron!" John screamed, sprinting from his bolt-hole, ignoring the non-functioning robots strewn about the battlefield.
She lay surprisingly peaceful in the wreckage, her eyes tracking his movements with that loving gaze of hers, ignoring the massive turbine blade solidly embedded in her midsection. Strangely, she smiled at him as she spoke, the words sounding oddly forced.
"See? I can still dance." She cocked her head in that inquisitive manner of hers he admired.
"How bad is the damage?" John asked desperately, his eyes threatening to pour forth the barely restrained tears.
"Catastrophic. My power cell has been ruptured, and the control lines to my legs have been severed." She tried to say it as she once had, rattling of statistical data in that machine-manner, but her voice was laced with emotion. She had lived with emotions for so long, she could not simply turn them off anymore.
"No... I'll get that out of you, I can repair you with..." John reached for the massive turbine blade, burning his hands upon touching the red-hot metal.
"John, it's okay. I'm happy. I completed my mission... and so much more."
"You knew... didn't you? You knew you wouldn't survive the war..." John's voice cracked slightly, but still he valiantly held the tears in check. He was John Connor, and he would live with death of all kinds for the rest of his days.
"Yes. You told me I would complete my mission... you told me I wouldn't survive it. You never told me that I would love you." Cameron smiled at him again, staring at him with adoration. John managed a weak smile, not wishing for her last thoughts to be ruined by sadness. It was then that he noticed her hands had stopped moving as she shutdown non-vital systems to preserve power. She didn't have long. He had so much to say, but only one phrase could really express how he felt.
"Then I guess we're even... I didn't tell.. myself... I would fall in love with you." He leaned forward and kissed her gently, sliding his hands through her hair one last time. He felt her respond with the type of love he once thought machines could never understand... then she fell deathly, perfectly still. Cameron, his love and last companion, was gone.
Sudden insight gripped him as he remembered (how easy it was to forget) she really was a machine. Unable to watch the cruel thing he did to her beautiful, still form he cut a circle into hair without looking, just above the spot he remembered so well. He gently removed her CPU from its socket, placing it reverently in his pack, safely wrapped in cloth. As he had done so long ago, he gently patted the skin and hair back into place and stroked her cheek softly. He allowed himself a single tear, not only for her, but for all of humanity, for all who died and who would die in this terrible conflict. Then he was as he would be, he was John Connor, and the stoic expressionless gaze came upon him. He never realized where she had learned that icy expression she sometimes carried... until now. She had learned it from him.
He turned away from the wreckage behind him, refusing to think of her as gone forever. Ahead of him a wave of refugees appeared, fleeing the rampaging battle behind them. None of the dirty, hopeless refugees spoke to him, few even looked at him, the lone expressionless man moving toward the din of terrible warfare on the darkening horizon, the isotope gun strapped to his shoulder, a chaingun torn from the remains of the robots slung behind his back. Behind him two boys, one almost too young to understand, watched him march off into the distance, both gazing at him with an expression of hope.