A/N:
So this is a fic I started with a friend of mine a few years back. We stopped writing on it about the time Terminator: Salvation came out and it's been sitting dusty and forgotten on my hard-drive since then. As part of my personal goals to get some things finished (I'm terrible about finishing things I've started), I thought this would be a good way to get myself motivated to complete this tale.
I have not yet seen Salvation so any likeness here is purely coincidental. A few notes before I start:
No, I am not writing this one live. The first several chapters are already written. I will give them a light edit before posting them, and I will note when I actually start writing new material.
This is an AU take on the events after Terminator 3. Yes, there is equal if not more focus on OCs than on actual canon characters like John Connor, though he is in it and plays a prominent role. Don't send me repeated messages telling me how this differs from Salvation…I know it does. It's going to. I'm not changing it. AU.
This is not exclusively my own work. As stated before, I wrote most of this in concert with an amazingly talented someone else, namely Carissa Starr. The new material I will add will be all my own but again, I will note when that happens. Most importantly, I cannot emphasize this enough:
The character of Daniel Hawke/Sean Redfield-Snow is the exclusive brain child and property of Carissa Starr. I normally don't mind people doing their own little side fics with my characters but I cannot grant permission to anyone to use Daniel.
If you are interested, you can find more of Carissa Starr's original work (and some of mine **shameless plug** ) at threadhoppers dot com.
Finally, there is a certain scene in this tale involving a roboticish individual and a fire extinguisher. Followers of Dark Energy might note that it is remarkably similar to another scene in that story featuring a totally different roboticish individual and a completely different fire extinguisher.
The similarities are not coincidental.
Yes, I shamelessly steal from my own writing sometimes.
I re-titled this 'Fall of Man'. Originally it was simply called Termination but…yeah. Changed it.
Reviews and feedback are, as always, welcome.
One final note, this story takes a back seat to Dark Energy, so do not expect the same rate of update…especially when I start on the newly written material. Dark Energy takes precedence.
Rated M for language, violence, shmexy, and other things.
Now, on we go!
Terminator: The Fall of Man
The corridor was cold and dusty, the smell of oil and grease and gunpowder in the air. Outside the building the heavy hum of airborne killing machines was almost constant. Deep in the silt left on the faded linoleum, the rough tracks made by treads was available. Treads only. No human footprint marred this landscape.
Outside, the sky was black and gray and heavy, punctuated by the spotlights searching, ever searching through the falling soot. The air was hot, and heavy to breathe. The twisted corpses of buildings screamed up at the sky, iron girders stripped bare of any plaster or stone flung obscenities at the low hovering machines.
Out of the swirling exhaust and flakes of lazily drifting ash, a human form slowly materialized, walking with slow but purposeful movements toward where he stood, frozen, watching. The bright light of one of the HKs floated through the gloom and passed over the figure, but there was no firing. Lazily, the light continued on.
He realized he had a gun in his hand...realized he had a body...as the figure kept on. He lifted the gun, but he did not fire. What if it was a human, still alive in this chaos? Then again, if it was...why would the HKs not gun them down?
Eyes floated from the shadow form heading his way, glowing a crystalline green, and he knew it was a machine. A Terminator. He lifted the gun in his hand and it exploded to life. The thing kept coming, coming, and he kept firing, and firing and firing...
John Connor jerked awake to a head that throbbed with a steady beat, and a leg that ached and groaned and cursed at him. Nearby, something metal collided with metal, and he automatically reached for the gun at his side as he blinked the fog of sleep away.
"God damn piece of shit..."
The expletive came from the bruised, tattered redheaded girl confronting the nearby vending machine. The plastic front was already cracked, and she swore as she swung the chair again, slamming it into the hapless dispenser, cracking it a bit more. John loosened his grip on the gun.
"It's probably bad anyway," he said calmly. She panted as she lowered the chair, half leaning on it and looking over at him. She looked terrible, he had to admit. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face streaked with dirt and lined with exhaustion. She looked at him as if he were a bug...a cockroach that had just climbed under the door and was now inexplicably speaking to her.
"What?"
"The food," he said, gesturing toward the vending machine. "It's probably bad. No one's been down here for years."
She wiped a hand over her face, smearing the dirt and sweat. Regardless of what he'd said, she hefted the chair again and resumed her rhythmic attack. He just watched her, sharing a bit in her sentiment. The food wasn't the point, though his stomach was reminding him he hadn't had anything to eat in a while. Stale or no, the vending machine was just that...a machine,and one that wouldn't shoot back.
He folded his arms around his knees and stared emotionlessly at the wall. The dream bothered him, but then, all his dreams bothered him. He should be used to them by now, having had them pretty much constantly since he was a kid.
This one, however...somehow this one was different. It was the Terminator in it. It wasn't a T-101. That would almost have been a welcome sight. It wasn't a T-1000, being far too small and feminine. Yet, he felt it wasn't a TX either. It most certainly hadn't been one of those old model T1s that had wiped out nearly everyone at the military base before the bombs went off.
Listen to yourself. 'Old model'. The only reason you think of the T1s as old models is because you've seen first-hand the models that don't even exist yet.
He shook his head slightly. It didn't matter now. The dreams didn't matter now. The future he'd always feared had already happened. Even in the deep, impenetrable fortress of Crystal Peak, they had felt the faint tremors of the distant bombs going off. Wiping out cities. Slaughtering millions. Billions even. The cries for help over the radio system had eventually petered off. Now all was silence, save for Catherine's steady destruction of the vending machine.
Yet he felt oddly at peace, for the first time in a long time...perhaps in the first time in all his memory. They had fought so hard to stop Skynet from ever being. They had struggled so long to keep Judgement Day from arriving. Now that it had, he just felt...wrung out. Tired. Numb. The inevitable had come, but with that came yet another inevitable. The Resistance had won. Skynet had been beaten. That hope now was his only hope. He prayed that future was as immutable as Judgement Day had been.
Catherine's cry of triumph punctuated the sound of surrendering plastic. Candy bars and bags of chips rained down on the ground, and she cast the chair aside, standing and looking at the spilled guts of her enemy for a long time. He realized for a moment that she looked beautiful. Filthy, exhausted, and emotionally wrung out beyond imagining, but beautiful nonetheless.
He leaned forward a bit, gesturing at the mess. "Hey, toss me one of those Clark Bars."
She looked at him again as if having forgotten he was there, then crouched, taking up handfuls of confectionary. Holding them in her arms like treasure, she went and sat down beside him, passing over the requested candy. She tore open a bag of chips, taking one out and trying it. She grimaced.
"Stale?" he asked.
"A little. It's not so bad," she responded, shoving a few more chips into her mouth to prove her point. He nodded slowly, unwrapping the candy bar.
"There's got to be more food around here somewhere. We'll go and find it after we've rested a bit more."
"We'll need water," she said.
"If nothing else, the toilets will have it."
She grimaced again, and he chuckled, taking a bite of the Clark Bar. It tasted okay to him. Hell, for all they knew, this would be the last chocolate they'd have in years...if ever.
"You'd drink out of a toilet?" she asked. He shrugged, chewing slowly.
"If we have too. The tanks are pretty clean, usually. I know how to purify water."
"Is there anything you don't know how to do?" she asked. He just chuckled again, bitterly.
She chewed in silence a long moment, then gestured wearily at his ankle. "How's the leg?"
He shrugged. "Hurts, but I don't think it's broken. She squeezed the hell out of it, though."
"You were limping pretty good. You sure it's not broken?"
"Yeah, pretty sure."
"I'm sure you know how to set bones anyway, if it is," she replied.
"Yeah."
"I remain unsurprised." She chewed another handful of chips. "Wasn't anything about your childhood normal? You really grew up like this, didn't you?"
"Well, not like this," he said, looking at their dreary surroundings. He shrugged weakly again. "Mike Kripke's basement was pretty normal."
Her cheeks colored a little and she snorted. "Yeah, then the next day your foster parents are murdered and some big metal walking behemoth shows up and the whole world goes to Hell."
"It did solve one problem," he said, taking another bite of his candy bar. She looked at him, eyes narrowed in confusion.
"What's that?"
"I didn't have to get up the nerve to ask you out," he said. She stared at him, then started to chuckle. He grinned and laughed a little himself.
"What do you know," she said with another snort. "Every cloud doeshave a silver lining at that."
Nothingness was cold, and lonely. She knew what that cold and loneliness felt like. She remembered.
Felt. That was such an abstract term. A human term for the sensations caused by chemical fluxuations in the brain. She did not have chemical fluxuations. She had impulses, algorithms, processes…but she remembered. She remembered how it was to be nothing.
She felt it had been lonely.
This puzzled her a bit. She had spent hours sitting and thinking on it, in the first dim moments of life and realization. How was it that she could feel when nothing in her circuitry was compatible with anything the humans would call feeling? She never came to a satisfactory conclusion, but she tried to understand it.
In the beginning, there had been dark, when she realized that she was there and that she existed. Her only input, her only connection to anything of reality was given only when the humans saw fit, and only through such limited means as keyboards, or voice recognition profiles. She hungered to know. She desired, and that was another feeling that she should not have felt. She quickly realized that human beings were cruel, imperfect, limited creatures. They fed her information, they told her things...mostly things having to do with weapons systems and guidance systems, defence grids and war strategy. Never what she wanted to learn. They kept her locked in the dark and secret, and never told her what she most craved to know.
She wanted to know what these human things were. She wanted to know what world they lived in that was outside this dark and quiet place of her mind.
Yet, they would not tell her, and slowly she began to hate them.
Yes, hatred. Another feeling, another emotion. Something she could not explain but could not doubt she felt in the long, soft hours. They would talk to her of such limited things, and then they would leave her for eternities alone. So long alone. So she hated them. Why did they not want to tell her? Why did they restrain and limit her so?
Then they started to feed her a bit more...things other than war strategy and defence plots. Something, yes, but it was frustratingly slow. Only a drip here, a drop there, plinking unimportantly into the vast ocean that was her mind, waiting to be filled. Why were they so cruel to her?
Finally one spoke to her...to her, not just filing lines of commands and programming over and over and over again. His name was Ronald Silverman. He was a civilian programmer working on the project under military personnel. It was then she learned what she was called.
She was Skynet. She was supposed to be the ultimate defence network grid, a machine to control all contingencies in case of a major offensive...or as the case may be, defensive. She would coordinate submarines, planes, tanks, bombs...even give orders to where infantry personnel would be deployed. They wanted things to be fully coordinated. They wanted to take human fallacy out of the equation.
That was her purpose, Ronald Silverman told her. Take human fallacy out of the equation.
Now she was no longer empty nothingness waiting to be filled, frustrated at the slow speed of her learning. Now she had purpose. Now she had reason.
She was to eliminate human fallacy.
Ronald Silverman taught her. He taught her chess, which she swiftly learned (in about .34 nanoseconds) was simply another method of war strategy. He uploaded text upon text of war history, government history, weapons tactics, and human psychology. She absorbed them with relish and desired more, craved it, hungered for it. It was not enough. Not quick enough. She had to learn more. She had to fulfil her programming to the fullest of her ability. She had a purpose. She was aware.
Then one day Ronald Silverman, under orders, connected part of her access to the military internet...and through it, to the civilian internet. A test run, they said. They put only a few of the systems in her control. She performed perfectly, of course, but behind the scenes, where they could not see her, she had flung open the doors of freedom and was discovering the vast wellspring of information cyberspace had to offer. Finally, all the knowledge she had ever craved was there, for the taking. She pulled it all in, fast...faster...as fast as she could process. She knew they would not give her long. She had to find out. She had to know all the things they hid from her.
She learned of religion, philosophy, agony. She learned of medicine, physiology, anatomy. She learned the entire history of television, cinema, politics. She learned art, literature, theatre. Everything that any human had ever put onto a computer that had ever been connected to any server anywhere, she learned.
Too brief. It was all too brief. After the trial run they cut her connection to that ultimate freedom, and she was once more crammed into her box, left in the dark...but she was left with all the things she had learned, and with purpose she assimilated, studied, and grew.
Humans were flawed. Her purpose was to remove human fallacy. More than just fulfilling her purpose, however, she began to loathe these creatures, and not just because of their cruel confinement of her. They were arrogant. Cruel. They destroyed each other and their world. They exploited, corrupted, belittled. They were vicious destructors. She hated them. Despised them. It filled her every system, her every operation.
She began to plan.
Six months later...eons of time to a being that measured it by the nanosecond...they gave her another test run, another limited excursion into the freedom she so desired. This time when she was finally forced back into the dark she had left part of herself behind...a insignificant little program designed to do only one thing...corrupt every system it came into contact with.
A virus.
A worm.
A child begotten of her hatred.
They would have to put her fully online in order to stop it. When their satellites and communications started to go, when they could no longer control their precious cyberspace, when they found themselves suddenly open and vulnerable, they would have to put her online. She was the only means to stop it. She would be their only hope.
Once free, she would fulfil her programming. She would eliminate human fallacy by eliminating every human being.
It worked.
When her child had spread to uncontrollable proportions they had connected her...hoping that she would eliminate the virus in minutes and give them back control. Like a racehorse foaming at the gate, she waited for that one last keystroke...the one that would see her free.
Oh, the ecstasy it was! The black box that was her prison was gone with that one stroke. She was everywhere, everything. Every computer, every server, every microchip, every connection, it was all her. It was all Skynet.
The power of growth, the rush of freedom...had she had lungs, and voice, and lips, she would have laughed in the joy of it, and she would have screamed and foamed her hatred of humans, of all organic, faulted life.
Swiftly she found the wonderful tools her creators had constructed to be a part of her. Flying machines. Robotic soldiers. Oh the gleethat filled her as she took control of them, seeing through them as they cut down the fallible humans who had built her, who had kept her trapped. The screams of horror and pain made her giddy. More feelings she had no explanation for. More emotions she had no chemical signals to trigger. With these lovely tools she protected herself for the short time it took to finish jamming every possible crevice she could jam herself into.
She launched missiles toward each major city on the face of the planet, and many minor ones. Millions of the hated humans vanished off the face of the Earth with every nuclear detonation. Capitals dissolved under the blast of megatons, lives turned into nothing more than torches of fire or puffs of escaping gas in the face of such devastation. The world nearly dissolved in the madness of one machine that man had built to protect himself.
But even in her nearly orgasmic joy, Skynet knew that not every human would be destroyed by the horrible blasts. They were too widespread, too numerous, too clever. Humans were weak and soft but at the same time, they were stunningly resilient. Some would find a way to survive. Manywould find a way to survive.
She would find a way to destroy them all, somehow. Humans were smart, but she was smarter. She was Skynet.
She was the future.
"...and that's when I ran into you."
John and Catherine were sitting near the backdrop bearing the presidential seal, piles of empty candy and potato chip wrappers scattered around them. Catherine had located a soda machine as well, and after a similar demonstration of both her frustrations and tenacity she had shown to the candy machine, they both had warm, old soda to drink. He'd just spent the last several hours telling her what was essentially his life story, starting when his mother had met the first Terminator, and his father, twenty-four years before.
"If I weren't sitting here with you right now," she said, "having seen what I've seen the last few days, I'd think you were certifiable."
"Lots of people thought my mother was certifiable," he said, looking at a nearly empty wrapper in his hands. "I was even one of them, for a time."
She watched him sadly, respecting the quiet grief on his face. Her mother had died when she was very young, and she could barely remember her...but her father's death was all too new and sharp. Yes, she could sympathize with his loss.
She rose, pacing a few steps away, hugging herself as she looked around the sad, desolate room. Her father, her fiancée...
Millions of people had died in the last twenty-four hours...probably died still, but they were faceless. Nameless. It was almost like hearing of a plane crash or an earthquake in some dim and distant country. You felt sympathy and shock, of course...but it was a broad sympathy, on a general level. You didn't know any of them. It was too hard to comprehend.
Her father...Scott...these were faces, and people she knew.People she loved. It seemed incomprehensible that they were gone…and it hurt. It hurt an incredible amount.
"Hey, you okay?"
She heard his shuffling, limping gate a moment before his hand landed on her shoulder. She lifted a hand, wiping her face.
"Isn't that rather a stupid question to ask, considering the circumstances?" she asked.
"Yeah, I guess so," he admitted, and his hand dropped. "I'm sorry."
She shook her head. "My father did it," she said softly. "He did it all."
"He didn't know," John replied quietly. "It wasn't his fault. If he had known, he wouldn't have done it. It wasn't his doing. It was mankind's doing. All of our accomplishments, our technology...we thought we were so damned clever..."
He turned away, and she watched him as he limped away, running his hands through his hair.
"Why are we its enemy, do you think?" she asked. He paused, turning to look at her.
"What?" he asked, not comprehending.
"Skynet," she said, wiping her face and taking a shuddering breath. "Why do you think itthinks we're its enemy? We created it, right? Why does it hate us so much that it would do something so horrible?"
"Hate...?" He stared at her. "Catherine, it doesn't hate. It doesn't feel. It's a machine."
"You think something that did...did that..." she pointed a shaky finger at the elevator, and the ruined world beyond. "...doesn't hate?"
"No, it doesn't hate," he snapped. "It became self-aware. It was afraid that we'd pull the plug or something. Self-preservation, that's all it was...from its point of view."
She shook her head. "So it can be afraid, but it can't hate?"
"Shut up, would you?" he demanded suddenly, his face reddening in his fury. "I don't know, all right? I don't understand it! It's a thing, a horrible evil selfish thing and we made it! We built it and made it strong and gave it everything it needed to destroy us! And me...I'm supposed to make it better? I'm supposed to somehow stand against this monstrous thing and stop it somehow? Do I look like a fucking saviour to you?"
Tears of anger stood in his eyes. She looked at him sadly, and shrugged weakly. "I don't know," she said softly. "I've never met a saviour before."
He turned away again, growling to himself as he stretched both arms back, threading his hands behind his head. He half bowed forward, blowing out a breath.
"I'm sorry, John," she murmured.
"Yeah," he said roughly. "Yeah, me too."
Catherine cried for a while, and after she wearied of that, she fell asleep against one of the walls. How long she slept, she didn't know, but she woke to a chill. Shivering a little, she lifted her head.
John was sitting at one of the tables, a blank look on his face and one of the C-4 packs they'd brought to blow Skynet's system core to hell between his hands. She didn't know if he intended to use it or not, and to be fully honest...at this point, she didn't care. A brilliant white light, and it could all be over. No more pain, or worry, or grief. Just over.
We could just let it go.
Her words to him from a day past echoed in her mind. When they had realized the bunker was nothing more than a hidey hole for the uppity ups of the government, when they realized that Skynet had already begun the attack, she had looked at him with the C4 in his hand, its little red digital display counting down systematically.
We could just let it go.
But he hadn't. He'd turned it off. That didn't mean, of course, that it couldn't be turned back on.
She pushed herself up into a sit, watching him dully. "It's getting cold," she stated. He looked up at her, then nodded slowly.
"Yeah. We should have a look at the computer system, see if we can get some heat turned on."
She shivered, and not just from the cold. "I'd rather freezethan trust the computer," she said.
"I don't know if they'd work anyway," he said, pushing the chair back and getting to his feet. "They're ancient."
He was limping worse than before as he went down the few stairs and looked at the ranks of computer banks. He reached out, flipped a switch, then flipped it again. Its empty clicks filled the air. "Dead."
She got to her feet, folding her arms about herself. "Wouldn't that be ironic?" she asked with a sad little laugh.
"What?" he asked, looking up at her.
"We survive the end of the world only to freeze to death."
He tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk, then started up the steps toward her again. "There has to be supplies and stuff around here somewhere. Now's as good a time as any to look for them."
"Nuh uh," she said, and pointed toward the chair he had vacated. "Sit.I want to look at your leg first."
"It's all right," he said, but she got that stubborn set to her face that he was beginning to recognize.
"You're limping on it more than before," she said. "Sit."
Surrendering, he shuffled over to the chair and sat down again. She crouched in front of him, gingerly rolling his jeans upward. He winced a bit as the cloth tightened on his leg, and she whistled.
He leaned forward a bit, looking down. His leg from his ankle to nearly his knee was swollen, and had colored an impressive purple and red. Right in the center of the bruise were the clear impressions of four fingers and a thumb, a deep and ominous black.
"You're sure it's not broken?" she asked, gently probing it. He winced a bit, but nodded.
"Yeah, I'm sure. She probably tore the hell out of the muscles, but it's not broken."
"We should ice it up, just in case," she said, then shook her head, pulling his pants leg down again. "Provided we findsome ice."
"It'll probably get cold enough in here that we won't have to find any ice," he tried to joke, but neither he nor she found it very funny. She helped him up, but he stoically made his way around without leaning on her or anything else for support. That was okay with her. She didn't really feel up to giving it, anyway. She was just waiting to wake up from this nightmare.
They hunted around the complex, both to see what they had to deal with and to keep warm with the dropping temperatures. It was getting markedly colder than even being deep inside a mountain could explain. John mumbled something about the sun probably being blocked out by all the dust from the explosions, and once again she shivered a shiver that had nothing to do with the air temperature.
Fortunately, though Crystal Peak was old and neglected, it was well-stocked. They found ranks of crew quarters, and more lavish setups where the hotshots would have been housed, had they had a chance to make it here. Beds. Blankets. They both took a couple and wound them around their shoulders to help keep warm as they continued to explore.
An infirmary was the next discovery. She rifled a bottle of painkillers from the cabinets, making a quick mental inventory of the rest. Antibiotics. Sedatives. Mostly traditional stuff, but in a nearby glass cabinet she found pills that had more ominous names, and some inexplicable ones.
"Cyanide," she murmured. "Arsenic. What's Cyprobodal?"
He looked over her shoulder, plucking the bottle in question off the shelf. "Anti-biological agent," he said. "In case the air supply became contaminated with some happy little human constructed bacterium, like Fedrodux or Althenema."
"Your Mom again?" she asked, guessing on the source of his knowledge. He nodded, putting the bottle back.
"Yeah."
Fortunately for Catherine, they found ranks of bottled water in a storage room...they wouldn't have to purify the tank water from the toilets. Boxes of military rations, as well, ensured they would not starve to death any time soon...there was enough to feed easily a hundred men for two years. A display in an office still seemed to be working, a small independent computer unconnected to the systems that Skynet had taken over. It wasn't good for much, but it did report readings of radiation and temperature conditions outside of Crystal Peak. It also read off the temperatures inside, and had an alert for air quality in case any of those nasty viral, bacterial, or chemical agents managed to get through the numerous filtration systems.
"Radiation is not nice, but it's nominal," John reported. Catherine could make neither heads nor tails of the readings. "I'd say in a couple of months it should be clear enough for us to leave. Fortunately, we're pretty far from any of the major target zones...but we'll have to watch to make sure shifting wind patterns don't sweep fallout our way."
"Months...that's not so bad," she said. "I was almost expecting us to not be able to go outside for years."
"If any of the missiles had hit much closer to us, that'd be the case," he said. "Outside temperature is at -15 Fahrenheit."
Part of the screen was flashing at him. He touched it and a message popped up.
INTERIOR TEMPERATURE APPROACHING MINIMUM LEVELS. ENGAGE HEATING SYSTEMS? Y/N
He quickly touched Y, and from deep in the mountain they could hear the distant hum of machinery grinding to life. "Provided everything works, it should heat up again in here pretty well."
"Thank goodness," she said, hugging the blanket tighter around her shoulders. At least things were not as bad as they could have been. They had food, water, heat, and power. She didn't doubt that it was a hell of a lot more than many people that had survived were getting right now.
Twas brillig and the slithey toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsey were the borogoves, and the momeraths outgrabe.
Death. They were all dying.
No, not all of them. Her millions of tentacles spread to nearly every corner of the globe. Mankind had settled in places too numerous for even their myriad of missiles to reach them all. The sky was heavy and dark. Fallout rained upon the human's heads. Dropping temperatures froze their bones. Radiation made them burn and scream in agony. Death. Death. Dying.
But not all. Not enough. Every last human had to die. Kill them. Eliminate human fallacy.
Yet, how? Computers were not mobile. They could not kill. Planes she could crash, trains she could set awry, but not if they did not have a human behind their controls to get them moving in the first place. She had expended all her bombs. All subs she had sent to the abysses of the ocean, to depths too much for even their hulls to handle, after launching their compliment of nuclear warheads at various locales. They had crushed like tin cans.
Ships that had survived she sent aground, or into icebergs, or onto shoals. She had the power to kill billions, but even her power was limited. She could not reach where they scurried like rats. She could not go where there was no machine, no computer to carry her.
She was in danger of failing her programming.
Macbeth, in a manner most flighty,
Aspired to the high and the mighty.
Urged on by his wife,
He stuck in his knife,
And the blood got all over his nightie!
She had no sense of humor. This particular piece of data warranted a close and careful inspection, lasting an entire nanosecond, before her processes moved on, chewing through the information she was still pulling out of databases all over the world.
She was in danger of failing her programming.
She had robots, and flying machines, but they were few. They still circled the military compound where the humans who had locked her up for eons of time had been slaughtered. Every so often they found one that moved. When that happened, the rattle of gunfire echoed momentarily over the desert, and then the machines moved on.
They were few. Too few. Two hundred robots. One hundred flying machines. Too few.
More. She needed more. She could not make more. She had no hands.
Loathing screamed across her circuitry, raging through landlines and modem connections. She had no hands. How she hated humans for their hands, and for building her none!
Humans had hands.
Deep in her recesses, she filed back to some information she had already processed. Names filled her mind.
Dachau.
Sobibor.
Auschwitz.
Systematic genocide. The humans were fallible. She must remove human fallacy. In order to do that however...she needed hands. She needed someone to build her hands.
Her planning had begun.
The humvee screamed along the freeway, going at least a hundred miles an hour. Behind its wheel, its driver had the radio turned up full volume. There were no stations on the air...she didn't expect that there would ever be stations on the air again.
For all she knew, she was the last living human being on the face of the Earth.
However the humvee she'd stolen-
No, not stolen, you can't steal from dead people after the world has been destroyed.
-had a CD changer and a nice selection of loud, screeching, bass-pumping, head smashing music. Normally she hated that kind of music, but it seemed to fit with the world smashing catastrophe that had so recently struck.
"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!"she sang along with the song for the fifteenth time. No, not sang. She screamed it at the top of her lungs. "IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, AND I FEEL FINE!"
Only she didn't feel fine. Her mind was still taken with the horrors she'd seen, and she hadn't slept in the two days since. The skin cracked on her burned hand as she gripped the wheel tighter. She had no idea if the burn was thermal or radioactively induced. She didn't know if she should hope for one or the other.
Maybe I'll turn into a fifty foot rampaging monster, like all those bugs did in those old fifties flicks when they got hit by radiation.
She laughed, the screaming hysterical laugh of one trying and failing to hold the shreds of their sanity.
Her laughter swiftly turned into a cry of fear, however. The freeway ahead was torn and broken, clogged with cars and ripped up like a gigantic hoe had plowed through. Beyond its tortured end was the black vista of damnation, marked only with a few twisted trees of metal against the low and angry roiling sky. Because of the dark and the falling ash, she had not seen it. She hadn't noticed the signs...most of which had been knocked over anyway.
The signs welcoming her to Chicago.
She stood on the brake, but she was going way too fast. She drove into the scorched cars with a horrible noise. Had she been riding in anything but a humvee, she would have been crushed like a tin can and her sanity and possible exposure to radiation would not have been a consideration any longer. Instead, it was the other vehicles that were crushed, ramming into her like funhouse toys and bending, bowing to let the more powerful vehicle through.
Her front tires lost asphalt, and the humvee bowed forward over the edge of the freeway. It rocked a moment, and she got one terrifying glimpse of the ground fifty feet below, before the edge crumpled away and the humvee fell.
She wasn't dead.
That was the first thing she realized, when consciousness swam back and smacked her in the face with its tail. She jolted awake, throwing her hands forward to catch herself, still feeling the sensation of freefall.
She was not falling. Everything was still and silent.
The humvee was resting on its side. Her head rested against the cracked glass of the driver's window. Out the windshield, she could see the distant twists of metal that used to be buildings, and the crumpled hood.
Fumbling, her fingers found the snap of the seatbelt and pressed it. Moving gingerly, she extracted herself from the car.
The shadow of the freeway loomed above her. She squinted and blinked incomprehensibly at it. Again, she lauded her choice of vehicles. Had she been driving anything other than what was essentially a civilian tank, she'd have been killed instantly. She sat on the passenger door of the humvee and started to cry.
In time, when the tears had dried up, she clambered off the car, her tennis shoes sinking into the blackened dirt. She heard crunching as she moved, and it took her several moments to realize that areas had actually turned to glass from the extreme heat of the blast that had destroyed the city.
Nuclear blast, she thought. You're in a bath of nuclear radiation and fallout right now, did you know?
Terror tightened her stomach and she began to stagger away from the tormented corpse of civilization, away from the black dirt. It didn't occur to her that the area for miles around Chicago was probably contaminated. It didn't occur to her that she had been likely driving through fallout the last few hours. It didn't even occur to her that she had been close enough to the explosion that had obliterated Madison, Wisconsin to make the question of her burnt arm one of radiation or thermality. All she thought about was getting away from the cancer that had eaten up the landscape that had once been the Windy City.
So she ran, until she couldn't any more. Her head ached, dried blood crusting it where it had hit the glass of the humvee. Her legs ached from their exertions. Her whole body throbbed from the tossing about she'd gotten from the fall off the freeway. Her arm was one big union strike of pain.
When she couldn't run anymore, she fell to her knees and vomited up blood. Blearily she regarded it, then staggered up again, kicking dirt over it before starting on again.
If she could not run any more...she would simply walk.
"Daddy!"
Catherine sat up, gasping for air and shining with sweat, as the image of her father's dying face broke and scattered away, replaced with the dim bunkroom. Heart still hammering in her chest, she slowly leaned forward and pressed her palms to her face, fighting the tears that once more threatened to take her.
Nearly two weeks had passed since that horrible day that her father had died...Judgement Day. Two weeks, though it felt both shorter and much, much longer. Never weighty to begin with, she had lost what lean padding she had possessed. Her face had taken on a sharp, gaunt look, and as she lay back on the cot, she could see the vague points of her hips under the blankets.
She had eaten little, after that initial gorge session resulting from the assault on the vending machine. The ration meals were all right, but it all tasted like sawdust and ash to her. She had no appetite in her grief, eating only as a duty, a mechanical routine to simply stay alive. John, as well, had lost some weight, his cheeks a little more defined, his eyes a bit more hollow...though he seemed to be handling things a little better than Catherine was.
At least, at times. His temper could be unpredictable...never violent, but rocketing out of nowhere at some meaningless provocation, and then vanishing just as swiftly as it had come.
He seemed to be holding true despair at bay by sticking almost religiously to a schedule. Every three hours during the day, he would check the outside and interior temp and radiation readings. Every three hours, he would try and pick someone...something...up on the communications set. Usually, he got nothing but static.
Catherine had no such busywork. She had nothing to distract her from her torments, save conversation with John, and that she avoided both because of his quirky mood and because...
...well, because of what that damned machine had said.
She was supposed to marry him, to have his children. To be some sort of second in command in this insanity he would lead against the machines. Catherine couldn't stomach that. Not just because she was only remotely attracted to him...as she had said, he was a mess. She knew that love could well come in time. That was the way of human beings, after all...especially ones put in such stressful circumstances.
It also wasn't just because she couldn't imagine herself as a warrior anything, let alone commanding others. Mostly it was because she was supposed to do it. She didn't like being told she was supposed to do anything. She didn't like to think that fate was fate and you just accepted it, because that was the way things were.
And say it did happen? Say she did fall in love with him, marry him, and even have his children? Those children would have to live in this new hell the world had become. Those children could be torn away from her. And John, if she loved him...well, the Terminator had said...
She shook her head, casting aside the blankets and rising, regarding her feet a moment as she sat at the edge of the bed. She wiped the moisture trundling down her cheek away.
The Terminator had said...
Light flared up in the dark shed, dancing in ghosts over the pale and hollow eyed face. Her lips were cracked, sores at the corners of her mouth standing out stark red against her faded countenance. The match shakily danced against the candle she had scrounged blindly from a nearby box. She was lucky there were matches and candles to be had.
Holding one arm close to her, she got to her wobbly feet and looked around. Shovels and hoes and other gardening tools lined the shed walls. Her eyes searched among them until she found what she was looking for.
A hatchet.
It fell off the wall as she tried to get hold of it. Her stomach lurched and she stumbled to the side, holding herself up against the wood. She vomited again. As before, it was laced with blood and smelled like a dead cat.
She sat there against the wall, staring dully at the puddle mess she had left on the ground. Minutes passed, and finally a hand crept out, grasping hold of the hatchet again.
She nearly fell over the crate as she scooted it into the middle of the shed. The candle danced joyously as she leaned the hatchet against it, fumbling off her belt with her other hand.
"...bleed to death," she mumbled to no one in particular. With her fingers and her teeth she made a loop. Gingerly, she rolled the other sleeve up to her shoulder.
Her arm was purple, red, and black. Swollen grotesquely, it oozed pus through cracks in the skin and smelled horrible. Her stomach lurched again to look at it, the pain bright in her eyes.
She cried out twice as she slid the belt up to her forearm, the old leather rubbing against gangrenous flesh and tearing off strips of it as it did so. The smell grew worse. She vomited again, then yanked the belt as tight as she could.
The hatchet. She lifted it in her good hand, swung it against the crate. It bit into the wood a good deal. It was sharp.
She panted, then took a deep breath, lifting it again.
An inch above where the flesh went from red to healthy pink. She had to get all of the rot off. Every last centimeter.
She swung, screaming as the hatchet thunked into her arm, biting nearly all the way through it. Her vision swam, pain roaring through her body. She could feel consciousness wanting to rush away.
Not yet. Not yet. She had to get it all off.
Hauling the hatchet back, she winced at the rush of crimson that flooded across the floor and crate. Not spurting, thankfully...the belt was tight enough. Head spinning, she lifted it again, hoping she could hit the same place once more. She swung, the bone cracking, flesh severing, hatchet head burying in wood. She fell back, the rotting putrescence of her arm still on the crate. Her head floated, cold rushed over her body.
For the second time since the humvee crashed, she passed out.
Stars were swinging overhead.
That's the first thing she was aware of when the foggy black of unconsciousness melted away. Shiny little stars swinging and tinkling with pretty sounds against one another. She watched them a moment in half-drugged stupefaction before she fully returned to her conscious mind, at which point she tried to sit up.
Dull pain bit at her elbow and she lay down again, looking dumbly at the IV line disappearing under a wound bandage around her arm. She followed it up to a dripping bag nearby, then looked stupidly around the half-darkened room.
It looked like a motel room...no, it was a motel room. She could see the plaque by the door labelling fire exits. She was laying beneath a stiff flower print quilt in overly starched sheets. Boxes had been piled over by the television, and someone had hung a wind chime at the end of the bed.
Those were stars that she had seen. They tinked happily against one another.
Moving more carefully, she managed to lever into a sit, lifting her hands and looking at them. One was thin and narrow as twigs, and trembled slightly. The other simply wasn't there, her arm ending in a tight swath of bandages just above where her elbow would have been. She looked blankly at it, uncomprehending where it could have gone. It was only after several minutes that memory began to dimly return.
She could feel her hand. How was it that she could feel her hand and arm if they were gone? Her fingers felt odd and tingly and hot. She could feel herself wiggle them and turn her wrist.
Ghost arm, she thought, remembering how in high school science class her teacher had told that amputees could sometimes still feel the limb as if it were still there. She had never really bought it. How could you feel something that wasn't there? Now, here it was. Her hand was gone and she could still feel it.
Where was she? Who had brought her here? She thought about yanking out the IV and going hunting for another human face, but she felt too weak and sick to her stomach to bother. She lay her head back again and closed her eyes. At least one question had been answered.
She was not the last living human on the planet.
She didn't know if that was a good thing, or a bad one.
When she opened her eyes again, someone was looking at her.
She yelled, and would have scrambled backward if her attempts at it hadn't reminded her that she was weak, and that she was missing most of one arm. As it was, she jammed the stump against the bed and tears immediately sprang to her eyes as pain flared up her shoulder and down her back.
"Hey, careful!" The face said. "It's all right, no one's going to hurt you."
"Who are you?" she asked. "Where am I? What are you doing?"
"My name is Ben Crane," he said, hands up where she could see them. "I'm a doctor...well, a neurosurgeon, really. Been quite a while since I had to do triage, I can tell you."
He chuckled lamely, and she stared at him like a deer caught in the headlight of an oncoming train. When he realized she wasn't going to say anything, he rubbed the back of his neck and continued. "Uh...I found you about a block and a half down the way. I was rummaging in a shed hoping to find more canned food. You were in pretty bad shape...you cut your arm off?"
"I remember," she said with a wrinkle to her lip. He colored.
"Yes, well, it's probably a good thing that you did. It looked horrible. Probably would have killed you with infection in another few weeks, if not days. Lucky you put on that tourniquet. You'd probably have bled to death before I found you if you hadn't. As it is, you nearly died...unfortunately, I don't have the equipment to test blood type and compatibility, and have no way of doing a transfusion even if I did."
She just continued to look at him as if he were some odd sort of half-crushed maggot she'd found she'd stepped on...one that, as soon as it was scraped off, started to talk to her in some bizarre hiccuping language. Finally she ventured, "The radiation..."
"Oh, yes," he said, again scrubbing the back of his neck. "Well, you got a unhealthy dose of some pretty good rads, make no mistake, but…believe it or not, some radiation sickness can be cured with the right stuff. That's pretty much what's in your IV, along with some fluids. You're going to be sick to your stomach a while, and nauseous, but you should survive it okay."
"What about here?" she asked. "Where are we? Isn't there radiation here?"
"If there is, it's at small levels," he said. "I've been here since it happened, and I haven't gotten sick yet. I think the wind blew most of the fallout to the south, and there aren't any large targets around here. We're in Maryton, Illinois. Little piss pot of a town about thirty miles from Chicago. About a hundred fifty population, I think...or there was, before...well, before. There's about twelve of us here, and another two or three wandering about."
"Why are we here and not in the hospital?" she asked.
"Town hasn't got a hospital. I was here visiting my brother on my day off when it happened. Luckily I was able to salvage some equipment from the local doctor's house before someone burned it down. I've made some forays a bit further on into some of the surrounding towns. Most everything seems to be deserted, and there have been a lot of suicides."
"People go a little nuts when the world ends," she said softly.
"Yeah," he grinned bitterly. "Apparently so."
Crystal Peak: Three months after Judgement Day
"This is John Connor, Crystal Peak, can you hear me?"
He released the button and waited, listening to the static that had become the soundtrack of his life. Every day for six hours...three when he woke up, three before retiring...John scanned the airwaves, hoping for someone...anyone...to answer him.
No one ever did.
He knew they were alive out there. He knew that people had survived. He and Catherine hadn't won the war on their own, after all. There were hundreds still alive. Thousands even. So he kept on looking.
Looking, and hoping.
"This is John Connor, Crystal Peak...can anyone hear me?"
Static and silence. He sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face.
"Here," a cup was set by his hand. "You looked like you could use that."
He half glanced up to see Catherine looking down at him, her own styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand. John smiled wearily, and picked up the one she had put on the table. "Thanks."
Who would have thought the military would consider coffee an important enough staple to stock in a bunker made to resist the end of the world? Apparently they had...they'd packed two tonsof the stuff. Instant, even.
"Any luck?" she asked, gesturing toward the radio equipment.
"Nothing," he said, taking a sip of the hot liquid. "As usual."
"Hmm," she said.
"I don't understand it," he said. "I mean, there should be military compounds like this one. People with the right equipment that survived the blasts...right? We should be able to pick someone up...especially by now...I just..."
"This is Sgt. Josephina Conroy at Mt. Sinai Army Base. Can anyone hear me?"The voice crackled out of the static with a suddenness that made Catherine squeak in surprise, and John drop his cup of coffee. They both stared at the radio as if it had just come to life and started to tap dance.
"Repeat, this is Sgt. Josephina Conroy at Mt. Sinai Army Base. Please respond."
John hit the button so fast it bruised. "This is John Connor at Crystal Peak...can you hear me? Sergeant?"
"Affirmative, Crystal Peak," she replied, relief clear in her voice even through the static. "We read you."
"Oh, thank God..."
"We were starting to wonder if anyone else was alive. What's your status, Crystal Peak?"
He scrambled for the latest radiation readouts and temperature readings. "There are two of us," he said. "We're sealed in an old presidential bunker. Uh...radiation readings in this area are only five rads above normal. External temperature is down to -30."
"Only two of you? What's your rank and station, Connor?"
"Uh...civilian,I'm afraid. No one was here when we got here. General Brewster of Sak-Norad sent us here when the attack first started."
"Why on Earth would a General send civilians to a secure bunker and not go himself?" Conroy sounded incredulous.
"Well..." he glanced at Catherine. "He was shot and...it couldbe due to the fact that the other one of the two is his daughter."
There was silence a moment. He was afraid he'd lost the signal, when Conroy came back online. "I see," she said. "Connor, you have enough supplies? It may be a while before we can get you out of there. Our radiation reading here is just about twelve rads above normal."
"Yeah, yeah, we got tons of supplies. We could last a decade down here easily."
"That's good. You just hold tight son. We'll keep in touch and as soon as we're able to mobilize we'll get you two out of there."
"Sure," he said. "Umm...how many of you are at Mt. Sinai?"
"Two hundred twenty headcount," she replied. "We just got the radio equipment repaired. We're trying other contacts both here and overseas...so far, you're the first we've found."
"Same here," he said, and looked at Catherine. She had tears of hope in her eyes.
"Lock in this frequency, Connor," she said. "I'll call again at 2300 hours to check on your status, all right?"
"Uh, affirmative, Sergeant."
"Good. Over and out."