Terminator End war: Prologue
The Ghosts of the Past
Note: may contain some course language
My name is John Connor. My whole life has been about the future, and I don't mean about what MAY come or what COULD happen, but about what WILL come, about what WILL happen. My future has been decided since before I was born. Nine months before I was born, the man who would become my father, approached my mother and told her a story, a story about a future where mankind was fighting a war. A war for survival, against machines trying to eradicate mankind. Machines lead by a super computer called Skynet a computer that tried to eliminate humans in one swoop in what people of this future called judgment day, and the person leading his war against the machines trying to prevent mankind from falling and basically mankinds only hope,
Her unborn son. Me.
He told her he was a soldier sent back from this future to protect he from something else that was sent back, a terminator. A machine endoskeleton covered in artificial flesh, blood, and tissue, sent back to kill her, and thus prevent me from being born, and thus, destroy mankind's supposed only hope. Of course, the soldier would succeed, the terminator would fail, and the events surrounding my mother meeting this soldier would turn her from a shy timid waitress, into a soldier, fighting to change the future.
That was in 1984. Ten years later, in 1994, I'm ten years old. I remember my mother telling me stories as a child about how it all happened, about my supposed destiny but I just thought she was crazy and apparently so did everybody else. They locked her in pescadero state hospital, a mental hospital. I was sent to live with foster parents. Until it happened again. Skynet tried again, this time it sent another terminator back, this time to kill me, and like the first time I, in the future, sent back a protector but this time it wasn't another soldier, it was a terminator, similar to one that had been sent back to kill my mother, except it was reprogrammed to protect me. He helped me break my mom out, and helped us stop judgment day. We thought.
But we never did.
Sure we destroyed Cyberdyne Systems the corporation who built skynet and sure we saw Miles Dyson the man who was in charge die trying to make sure it was, but we still did not stop it from happening. We only postponed it. Postponed it until July 24th, 2004 and I didn't figure it out until it was too late.
Before hand my mother and I lived on the run, on the run from the cops, from the FBI, from everyone. When she died, I stayed on my own. I lived off the grid, erasing any and all connections to anyone, or anything. I never truly believed that we stopped it, or that we were safe, but I can't say it wasn't assuring when the original date came and past and nothing happened. But I still could never help believing that it wasn't truly over.
When the day finally came, it was almost surreal the fact that despite all that we had done, we had still failed. My life off the grid had taken me back to Los Angeles, the home I hadn't been in in over Ten years. I found myself in the presence of an old friend. Her name was Kate Brewster. She worked at a veterinary clinic with her fiancé, Scott. I had went in looking for pain pills because I wrecked my motorcycle and she found me and was able to trick me and get me in a cage, thinking I was just some druggy looking for a cheap high. Then she recognized me. She went out into the lobby for a minute, then I hear shots fire and then a few minutes later something crashes through the back wall. I kick open the door of the cage, but before I get out, I see a metallic hand reach up out of a pile of rubble, and it is at that moment I realize,
It wasn't over.
I managed to get out of the room before it did, but then in the hall, I met him again, or least another one like him, another terminator. Like before this one was sent back to protect me from the other who was trying to kill me. But this time it was different. The other was also sent back to kill Kate because in the future she was destined to be my wife and my second in command. It was also sent back to kill as many of my would-be lieutenants as possible before the events unfolded. Before I knew it, I was once again thrust into this war that hadn't even happened yet, this war for survival.
And then as we stood hundreds of feet below in a bunker for V.I.P's, the bombs fell, and the world, as we knew it, was wiped away.
Now, decades later, I look out upon the scorched earth. I think about my experiences in this war. I think about the past and all that we have lost, and then I think about something Kate said to me long ago on the first night in the bunker she said, "Think about everyone your foster parents, your father, your mother, my father. Don't let what happened to them be in vain, don't let them have died for nothing." I think about it and it drives me. Drives me to fight on, drives me to do whatever is necessary to end skynet once and for all, and get back what it tried to take from us, and try to rebuild this ruined world.
I see ghosts. I hear them cry out, hear them wonder why they were slaughtered like they were nothing. Hear them wonder why their lives were meaningless. I fight for them, and for my wife and unborn child, and for my fellow soldiers, and for all the surviving humans across the world. I know that in the end, the machines will not, and can not win, because there is one thing that they can never defeat, never destroy, the power of the human spirit. It is the most powerful force in the world. Of all the forces in the world and in the universe, the human spirit is the only one that is truly constant, because while other things may weaken or break under pressure, the human spirit gets stronger. We know that with every battle our numbers lessen, but we also know that our will to fight only gets stronger. We know that someday there will be an end to this war but for now we must continue to fight, because we know that, when this war does end, it will be the human race that is victorious and not some lifeless, soulless machine.
As I sit here in my quarters thinking on all of this, and thinking on the battle we just came back from, my thoughts are suddenly broken by the sound of two of my soldiers talking out in the hall, I walk over very close to the door and listen to their conversation. They begin talking about. "What could have been done all those years ago before this all happened…"And I begin to listen even more intently…