Terminator: Day Three
a fanfiction by Daniel Trump
Hi. Damian Wayne here.
I took a cab to Wayne Manor to meet my dad. I needed to become my father and save the city from the sick criminality of the Gotham City mafia. I was twelve. I really, really wanted to meet him because he saved lives and impressed people. I didn't impress people - I annoyed them with my confidence and demeanor. I took a cab up to the huge gates. The gates opened to let me in. I entered through a door which seemed to be the gates to a huge mansion with an enormous, living garden around it. The house seemed to be the tree at the center. I loved it. I lived it. As I walked in Selina Kyle walked outside and hugged me. I found her very beautiful, and she was the lady of the manor.
An elderly white man in a nice suit walked up to me and shook my hand. He seemed older than anyone in existence. He could have created all of this - he certainly managed all of this. He ran everything in the garden, the center of my new world.
"I am Alfred, the butler," he said. "Welcome to our home, Master Wayne."
"Thanks," I said. I handed him my stuff. "Where will I be staying? How long will I be here? Have you talked to my mom?"
"Follow me," he said. He took me to a bedroom on the third floor. I had a huge room with a huge bed and bookcases filled with books - mostly history and culture, but some fiction too.
I sat in my room. Someone walked into the room. It was Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Betty had blonde hair and no makeup and a smart skirt and a blue sweater. Veronica had a black dress and makeup and dark hair. Betty and Veronica - I met the teen girls who fought bad guys. I made it in life.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Damian Wayne."
"No," Betty said. "You're the fake. You're not Damian Wayne. The other one is Damian Wayne."
"No," I said. "Check correctly. Check with Dr. Chase at the local hospital. I'm Damian Wayne."
"No," she said. "We're going on a retreat with the teen heroes. We're taking the other one. Goodbye."
I sat around, furious. I wanted to hit someone. How could he replace me again? In my special home? In my garden? That snake caused trouble for me. That snake stole the girls from me.
Someone hit me. I turned around to see
"Professor X will check at the end of the day," Alfred said. "In the meantime go to Arkham Asylum."
Nightwing punched me. I dodged back and punched him in the stomach. He threw a chair at me. I knocked it away but grunted in pain. Nightwing tried to grab my arm, and I punched him and then jumped away. He kicked me in the leg. I limped for a second and then kicked him in the head. He dodged back and knocked me down. I had trained my entire life to be a living weapon, the greatest assassin in the world, and I had just accomplished something: I had gotten my ass kicked.
He cuffed me and dragged me along the floor. I was put in the back of the Batmobile. We rode as the autodrive took us to Arkham Asylum.
"Let me submit evidence," I said.
"Tomorrow," Nightwing said. "Tomorrow Professor X checks the case. In the meantime get used to Arkham."
We made it to the front gates of Arkham Asylum. I tried to get out of my cuffs and failed.
Nightwing dragged me into a padded room. I sat there. I had a bathroom and a Bible and a huge space outside of my room. I stared at the guard.
"What time is it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Doesn't matter," he said. "Nighttime."
"Oh," I said. "I'm innocent. Can I talk to my lawyer?"
"Yeah," he said. "Your lawyer. Who is your lawyer?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know. Ask Talia al Ghul, my mom, to assign me a lawyer."
"I'm on it," the guard said.
Twenty minutes later a smiling guard came back. "She gave the other one a lawyer," the guard said. "She won't give you anything."
"And Dr. House?" I asked. "I need Dr. House."
"Oh," the guard said. "No, you get Dr. Quinzelle. That's the doctor who will help you."
I groaned. Harley was going to be my doctor? Ridiculous.
She walked into the area outside of my padded cell.
"Hiya, Robin," she said.
"Harley, someone replaced me. I'm Damain Wayne."
"I know," Harley said. "Which puts you in quite a problematic situation. What're ya gonna do about it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Can you get me out?"
"If you clear the Joker," she said. "Just admit, for the record, that the Joker was framed by Batman, and you can leave."
"No," I said. "I'll stay in my cell. Thanks."
"Okay, babe. Don't say I didn't offer you a deal. Bye."
Harley Quinn walked away from the cell.
Doing time is difficult. I lay in my cell all night long, struggling to sleep. I tried to read a little bit of the Bible. I woke up the following day.
The guard looked at me. "Professor X says that you are guilty. Tough break. Get used to Arkham."
I, John Connor, did drills with the new recruits. I ran five miles with them and then did weightlifting for another hour. We needed to get stronger and faster. We learned drills and practiced punching and kicking. I fought through the exhaustion of working out. We felt like gods; we could do anything. I turned to Cameron Phillips, the terminator cyborg, to ask what our goals were.
"We still need to prove that Skynet nuked the planet and took over," she said. "It's essential to our lives to catch Skynet. We need to go to that nuke site and see who launched the nuke."
"Fine," I said. "Let's get suited up in armor, grab some assault rifles, and head out there. I got us a new Jeep."
"Great," Cameron said. "Let's go."
We dropped out of our spaceship and onto the highway near the nuke site in Nevada. We drove about twenty minutes while listening to the radio. I couldn't believe that rock had been squashed by pop music. The only rock on the radio was from thirty years ago. Nuclear weapons had ravaged the planet. I felt nothing about this. I didn't let myself care or acknowledge the truth. If I felt it I would feel the pain of six billion dead people.
We drove through a desert area with sand, gorgeous mountains, and no people. We scoped out the location. Two Skynet robots stood in front of the gates. Cameron turned to me.
"We should kill them without alerting everyone else," she said. "I can cut out communications away from here with a burst from my phone." She grabbed her phone and typed in something very long and way too complicated. She pressed the button.
"There," I said. I shot at the nearest robot. He crumpled as the assault rifle wrecked his face and body. The other one turned and shot at me. Cameron shot him straight in the head with a sniper rifle she had brought. Both robots collapsed.
Cameron and I ran up to the gate. Cameron hacked the gate and opened it. We walked into the facility. The main control center was downstairs two floors, so we went down and found it. We saw a Skynet robot in there. It shot Cameron in the chest. I shot it repeatedly, and both sides ducked for cover. Cameron didn't move for a minute. I shot at the robot over and over, trying to pin it down. Cameron blinked. She turned to me. "I can't move my arms or legs," she said. "I am in trouble. I regret. I regret everything."
I shot at the robot. It shot back, and suddenly I felt pain in my shoulder. Blood started to gush out of my shoulder. I couldn't stand. Blood poured out of my body. I took off my belt and shirt and tried to close the wound as best I could. The robot looked at us. It shot Cameron in the head and then dragged me up two floors to the ground floor. It moved me into the back of a large truck and cuffed me there. Another robot cleaned and closed up my wound. I collapsed and lost consciousness then.
I woke up in a cell. I was cuffed to the ground. Three other people sat in the room with me. One of them smiled and patted me on the good shoulder.
"I'm Kyle Reese," he said. He looked no more than fifteen. "It's nice to meet you. This place isn't much, but they feed us and let us live, so it could be worse. We work for the machines. We work all day or we sit in solitary all day. Those are our choices."
"Shouldn't it be different?" I asked. "Shouldn't we fight back? Shouldn't we do something about our life situation? I'm going to teach you something, a memorization exercise. Memorize every guard and where they go and what they do, all day long, while we work. Can you do that?"
"Will we get in trouble?" Kyle asked.
"I hope so," I said. "But not yet. No, they won't care if you don't mention it until we are back here for the evening."
"Great," Kyle said.
They wanted us to move boxes from one set of trucks to another set of trucks. The trucks came from the factories to us, and we sent them via truck to the Skynet bases. We also sorted them and sent differing amounts of each to differing bases.
We unloaded a truck which seemed to contain metal parts. I made sure to "accidentally" open a couple of boxes. No weapons, of course, but parts which could make something. We started to steal a couple of everything in a shed which usually was just a bathroom, in the cupboard with the extra toilet paper and so on. We filled it with cool stuff. Every meal we ate bread and mixed vegetables. Every hour we had bathroom breaks. Occasionally people went to the basement. They came back with no memory of their time down there.
We ate dinner desperately, consuming the food that Skynet gave us. After dinner we worked four more hours, putting boxes onto assembly lines. We were asked to move a box every ten seconds, and it crushed some of the people who weighed too much or were too old to handle it. Skynet AI's sent them to their rooms early when they complained. We hid five boxes into the bathroom's storage area. Kyle and I looked at the stuff we had stolen.
In the first box we found cleaning materials. We ignored that. In the second box we found a part which helped make an arm for a Skynet AI. We modified it into a weapon. In the third box we found devices which could become phones or devices like that. I began to see what I could scavenge for parts. Then Skynet called us to go to our room. We went back to our room around ten pm. I lay there next to Kyle.
"Good day?" I asked.
"Tolerable," Kyle said. "We do this every day."
"We don't have to," I said. "We can fight back. We can beat them."
"I don't know how," Kyle said. "I don't know how to fight."
"Let's teach you," I said. I began to teach finding cover and movement and using guns and explosives. We worked for an hour and then went to bed exhausted. We sat in a prison which seemed like all of reality to us. Reality became a prison. The Skynet facility encompassed all of our reality. We needed to escape and get somewhere else.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow we will fight back.
