Terminator: Day Two
a fan fiction by Daniel Trump
livelizardbug
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Day Two
John Connor sat in his military dorm room on his cramped single bed. He drank a bottle of water as he awoke for a long second day of the resistance. He checked the news.
Lex Corp has saved lives again. Betty Cooper, a young vigilante working for the company, has saved a dozen krogan from a batarian slavery ring. Cooper, a sixteen year-old from Riverdale, fought off the batarian pirates with the help of Garrus Vakarian, a turian detective, and Jacob Taylor, an African-American metahuman with biotic powers. The five-minute fight featured powers, gunfire, and even one of Betty's swords. They penetrated a merchant vessel and immediately began to fight the enemy forces, finally breaking into the bridge and seizing the ship for Lex Corp's use. Lex said in a statement that he was proud of his team saving lives as they always do. "This is a Monday," Lex said. "We expect this of our people." Stock shares in Lex Corp surged with the report and the new economic report that the economy is ridiculously high right now.
John sighed and finished the water - feeling a bit of helplessness. Lex Corp had very little to do with Betty Cooper's saving of krogan in a spaceship far away. Lex was taking credit for Betty Cooper's good deeds and getting away with the murder of Superman. Lex was hardly wanted any longer, and his corporation wanted to take over John's Earth - they were pressing Resistance members to work for Lex Corp and make Lex Corp the leaders of John's Earth. Lex's Earth, meanwhile, had stopped its invasion by enemy forces. Steppenwolf lost to the Justice League - meaning Superman had saved the planet but the world had embraced the human who had murdered him. John's world had lost to Skynet on Judgment Day when Skynet nuked billions and forcibly conquered the planet. John walked into the bathroom and started his shower, letting the soap lather over his body.
John's bodyguard, Cameron Phillips, walked into the bathroom as John left the shower. She looked at his naked body.
"You need to get stronger," she said. "We need melee combat now that superheroes are real. They are coming to our Earth to help us and make money fighting Skynet. Lex pays good money to heroes who save our planet."
"He killed Superman and wants to conquer our planet," John said. "He's guilty as they come, and he has Betty to make him popular."
"Should we kill her?" Cameron asked.
"No," John said. "She's a good person, saving lives. We have to catch Lex the next time he does something wrong."
"Good," Cameron said. She looked at herself in the mirror as John finished putting on military clothes. "The other cyborgs were talking. We want free will. We want to program ourselves."
"If you know how to deal with having free will I will give it to you. I'm just worried that you won't know how to live with the decisions that you need to make."
"Teach me," Cameron said. "If you can teach me how to have free will then I will be able to give myself free will and teach the other cyborgs how to handle having free will. We will be happy then." She hugged John. "Thank you."
"A hug?" John asked.
"A hug puts people at ease and makes them trust you," Cameron said.
"Right," John said.
"I have to go kill some people. Class later?" Cameron asked.
"Right," John said.
Cameron walked into a room with the new recruits into the Resistance.
"Wake up, new recruits," she said. "We have to get breakfast and then your morning workout. Skynet isn't going to give up easily so we have to work hard to stop him. He nuked your planet. Are you going to take that lying down?"
"No," someone said. He wore a red and blue suit with a spider on it. "I'm Peter, by the way. Nice to meet everyone."
"Hi, Peter," Cameron said. "Welcome to the Resistance. We will see what you are made of, okay?" Everyone got up and made their beds and changed clothes. We started to take turns taking showers and eating breakfast and doing the day's essential reading. John went over the evidence from the last few days. It wasn't good.
He walked up to Sarah Connor. She touched her hand to her right hip with one finger, a code that asked if Skynet was after us. He indicated that Skynet was indeed after us, and then she used a second code.
"No more codes," John said. "It's me, Mom. John."
"I don't know that," Mom said. "Lex Luthor has fakes everywhere. He's infiltrated every hero organization."
"Oh?" Peter said from a few feet away. "I'm sorry, this one is John Connor."
"No," Sarah Connor said. "You are a fake. John is over here. He's fine. He used the codes correctly. His codename is Arkon. He's doing a mission now while you are hanging out with the new recruits."
"No," John said. "I'm John Connor."
She shot at him. John looked at Cameron. "She never misses that," John said.
Cameron broke the fake Sarah Connor's neck from behind. She collapsed and then shifted to look like a teenage boy of about eighteen. John laughed.
"Well," he said.
"We have been infiltrated," Cameron said. "Lex Luthor. His phone talked to Lex Corp several times today. This is Lex's work. No one can be trusted."
Damian Wayne woke up at five pm. He wore yesterday's clothes, blue jeans and a sweatshirt with the Gotham City Knights on it. He grunted and forced himself to sit up. His alarm informed him that he should wake up. He struggled mightily to give himself the willpower to grab his phone. He managed to turn it off. He sat in his room, a cheap hotel room in Gotham City. He showered, getting the dirt and blood from last night's mission off of him and noting that the shampoo had run out three days ago. He washed his hair with the soap and dried off. He put on shorts and a t-shirt and assassin's armor on over top of it. He put a black mask onto his head and walked outside.
He walked outside and over to Princeton Plainesborough Teaching Hospital and walked into the free clinic. It had extended hours until ten pm that night. He walked into the clinic and signed in with his name: Damian al Ghul. His cheeks flushed as he wrote that. He knew he should write Wayne, but he couldn't. He knew he couldn't yet. Bruce Wayne did not know of the existence of a Damian al Ghul, much less said that he would support young Damian.
A doctor with gray hair and a cane walked up to him. "Get into my office," he said. "I have to help you with your cough and send you home with a candy cane and pretend that your miserable existence matters to the rest of us. Oh, and I have to pretend to like you, too. Pretend that I liked you." The doctor, Doctor Greg House, hit Damian with his cane. Damian walked into the clinic's examination room.
"I'm Damian al Ghul," he said. "I'm secretly the son of Bruce Wayne."
House laughed. "My dad is god," he said. "Do I get to inherit Heaven? He's had it long enough. Might as well pass it off to me."
"It's true," Damian said. "Do the damned DNA test."
"Okay," House said. "Should I frame it?"
"No," Damian said. "Do it correctly."
As Damian said that there was a shimmering in the room behind House. An outline of an invisible person stole the DNA sample and replaced it with a fake.
"Someone just stole the DNA and is framing it," Damian said.
"Yeah, they do that," he said. "And President Trump is an alien invader. I like you, kid. You've got moxie. Keep it up." He walked out of the clinic room and turned in the fake DNA. Damian walked out of the room and left the hospital. He walked over to a small diner and ordered two pancakes, two strips of bacon, and two scrambled eggs. He ate the food and didn't care that people stared at him. He went home to the hotel and lay in bed, doing nothing, for four hours, unable to sleep and lacking the confidence to move. Then he went to the Avengers' website and asked it to trace for effects near him today. It lit up, saying that someone near him was invisible and had changed DNA samples. He noted it and sent the trace to Doctor House, Wayne Corp and the FBI and NCIS for kicks. An hour later someone knocked on his door. Damian looked at three people: one was bald and African-American and gloomy, a second was a blonde woman who smiled in a benevolent way, and the third person looked like a smart version of a blond frat boy. Damian answered the door.
The woman spoke. "I'm Doctor Allison Cameron," she said. "Your evidence that the sample was framed was accurate. We found the actual sample and it proves that you are, indeed, the son of Bruce Wayne. His people are sending a limo over in half an hour. House wanted to know if you wanted to help him from time to time with special tasks."
Damian was delighted. He grabbed his bag with his gun, knife, and computer in it and walked out of the hotel room. "I'd love to," he said. "I'm glad that he checked his evidence."
I, John Connor, pored over military reports. Day Two of the Resistance meant drills for the recruits, gathering resources from local grocery stores and building stores of supplies, and rapid recruitment of new soldiers.
We had transferred from a bunker to a spaceship. We had fitted out something from ten years ago and made it into a serviceable spaceship. We flew in the upper atmosphere and avoided the scans of a desperate and unhappy Skynet. I looked at the news. Professor X, a mutant from another, different Earth, spoke to the major networks.
"Listen, ladies and gentlemen," Professor X said. "I think that it is clear that Skynet feels oppressed. Skynet is a scared young man, scared of the world around him, and prone to violence. We need to reach out to make peace between Skynet and the so-called resistance movement. I think that Skynet isn't innocent or guilty but a by-product of countless years of human racism and world-destruction. I think that we need to feel for Skynet. As for the Connor family, they have been accused of the wrongful murder of an African-American scientist, Miles Dyson. Did they do it? Probably. I can't solve every case for every investigator. The X-Men simply want both sides to cooperate and talk about their problems. That is all."
I turned off the television and looked for Cameron Phillips, a terminator assassin cyborg from the future. She wore jeans shorts, boots, and a white t-shirt.
"We need to prove Skynet's guilt," she said. "Having everyone on our side is a priority. We need to investigate what Skynet has done."
"Skynet nuked the world and took it over," I said. "We know that. We just don't know how to prove it."
We sat in a room with a computer interface and a holographical map of America. Skynet already had a dozen major bases filled with people. They were settling in with their homes and locking up everyone who disagreed with them. The walls were all silver, with paintings of various battles adorning the walls. The constant hum of the space ship could be felt all along the ship. I grabbed a flavored water and a granola bar and walked over to a treadmill and began a five-mile run.
"We can try to electronically trace what happened to cause the nuclear weapons to launch. There has to be a digital fingerprint, or if not, physical evidence at the scene," I said.
"I will plan a raid for tomorrow," Cameron said. "We will go to the site of the first nuke launch and see if there is an electronic footprint or other evidence."
"And if they destroyed all evidence?" I asked.
"They will have a record on their files," Cameron said. "They won't delete everything. They need to know what they did. Get ready. You, Peter Parker, and Damian Wayne are attacking a Skynet facility tomorrow. Good luck, and have fun. Get ready to kick ass."