The Line is a Canyon

A Terminator: SCC FanFiction

Disclaimer: I do not own Sarah Connor Chronicles or the Terminator Saga. The following events are fictional. Any similarity to real events or people is totally coincidental. At least, they better be.

Author's notes: This is a sequel story to Judge the Sky. If you haven't read that fic yet, you should. The entire situation presented here branches from that story. While I try to avoid giving more than what was in the series, there is some Jameron in here. Don't cheer yet, you may not like what you find.

I promise, in spite of the enormous technical detail of my previous story, to avoid unnecessary techno-babble, hyper-technical focus, or lengthy discussions of the operational functions of anything other than Cameron, So Help Me God. While this is a sequel to Judge the Sky, we're not on a navy base any more.

There is some fictional geography in this story. I have more liberty now. Some of the places mentioned are either made up or have been changed for the sake of the story. North Carolina residents, please forgive me. The real world was just not convenient.

I am going to try a little experiment with this one and occasionally scenes will include music in separated italics. The experiment will probably fail.

The tone if this story is more humorous that my previous effort. After all that seriousness, a little silliness might do some good.

A reminder: this story is AU, ignoring "To the Lighthouse," "Adam Raised a Cain," and "Born to Run."

Thank you all who reviewed my previous tale. You are the force that kept me going, and despite of my prolonged absence, it is you that kept me coming back. I promised this for you, and I'm going to deliver.

Enjoy.

...

Prologue

From the personal journal of Sarah Connor:

In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described the effect on the human psyche robots would have as they began to act and appear more like us. The theory stated that as robots became more and more like humans, people would respond to them more positively. However, there will come a point where the robots will be almost perfect in their replication of humanity, and humans observing them will experience revulsion. These will no longer be the quaint machines with crude programming tottering along and interacting with us in broken speech. They will be cybernetic organisms with realistic skin and speech patterns that walk and move and think like we do. They will be an almost perfect copy of us. But they won't be perfect, and it will be the gap between our behavior and theirs that will disturb us most. The almost will cause us to hate them.

Mori called this gap the Uncanny Valley, the separation between the near-perfect duplication of humanity and the real thing. If the positive feelings were graphed, they would rise steadily as the machine becomes more human until it reaches the point at which the almost comes into focus. It takes a sharp dive here into negative emotional association. Only when the replication becomes perfect will the emotional response to a robot become positive again.

Cameron wasn't human, but her replication of humanity was almost perfect. It was that almost, that difference between her behavior and the behavior of a real girl that made John keep her at arm's length. It was that almost that kept him from developing a closer relationship with her. That was all that I had to hold onto him with. If she ever crossed that line, ever climbed the Uncanny Valley, I knew I would lose him.