Chapter 1: Tech-Com

Summary: Three billion died in the nuclear exchange. Hundreds of thousands perished in the nuclear winter. Millions more were killed by the machines. For the life of him, Derek Reese can't work out why John trusts Cameron.

Word Count: 2004

Rating: PG-13 for language.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything from Terminator. If I did, McG wouldn't have directed that terrible fourth film.

TECH-COM

"Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you" - Nietzche

Sometimes, Derek can't figure out for the life of him why John trusts Cameron. To him, a hardened Tech-Com soldier, it's an abomination. Sometimes he doesn't see John Connor, the kid, but the general that he'll one day become. The future leader of the free world spends his free time talking, laughing and socialising with a terminator. The enemy. What was it they called it in the past? Fraternising with the enemy?

Letting his guard down, at the very least. That was the very thing, terminators are insidious. It's a design feature. Let your guard down for one second and bang! The General had told Kyle that, had explained some Japanese guy's theory called 'the uncanny valley'. It basically stated that as robots become more human-like, people begin to view them as more and more human, up to a point. If they reach that point, suddenly that little proto-human robot is fuck-off creepy. No other words for it really, everyone gets that reaction. Derek had seen it at that tech fair; nobody who'd looked at those cutting-edge mannequins had managed to completely suppress a small shiver. Anyway, the theory continued that (hypothetically of course) one day someone would make a machine that was so close to human that people, even knowing what it was, would react to it as though it were human. Skynet had done just that.

The General had explained all this to Kyle, in greater detail. Know your enemy, he had said. Derek had agreed when his kid brother had explained it to him. He understood it all too well; he remembered all too well the moments where he'd had a terminator in his sights and his gut had clenched in the millisecond after he squeezed the trigger. A millisecond where he feared, he worried and finally prayed that it was a terminator and not a human. That it wasn't a person. And that was the coup de grace. Even a Resistance fighter with a decade's experience could feel one brilliant moment of hesitation and doubt when faced with a skinjob. Even knowing it was merely an infiltration sheath didn't help; there was still that microscopic moment of doubt. Course, they trained them for that. The instructors showed them video-capture of the consequences of hesitation. A hoary veteran had shown the fresh fighters the malformed bones of his hand, crushed in the unbreakable grip of a T-600. Derek had stood in the doorway at the back of the classroom, watching.

The soldiers of the 132nd had needed retraining too, when it came down to it. They, the all-important first attack wave - the commandos, had needed retraining and re-orientation to survive contact with an enemy that looked and moved as it were human, but wasn't. The same principles applied, of course. Never hesitate, shoot for the head or torso. If their power cells or their precious chip blew, a terminator is so much scrap metal. And if in doubt, shoot anyway. PsyOps had drummed that into them all.

Collateral damage, they said. A single dead human versus a whole dead Tech-Com insertion team? It wasn't a difficult scale to balance. It was a lesson that Derek had taken to heart, as no one else did. His squad mates mocked him for being a hard ass sonuvabitch, willing to shoot civilians on the mere suspicion that they were metal. They didn't understand the new war and what it meant for humanity. To beat the machines, they had to copy them. The Resistance needed to be as hard, as uncompromising and as drop-dead ruthless as the killing machines they were trained to retire.

The average soldier's life expectancy averaged out at about three or four years, give or take. Derek had fought for three years under the command of Major Perry, the man struggling to hold together the remains of Ashdown's resistance, before John Connor had broken the fences of Century Work Camp and brought in his new Resistance regime. He had survived through five years now of Tech-Com high-risk ops. He'd done his share of mortal sins, of war crimes (if the Geneva Convention still existed, that is). He'd shot down thirteen men who he'd been pretty sure had been terminator infiltrators in his long career. Two hadn't.

If he had too, Derek would do it again. He would probably burn in hell, and he accepted it. He wasn't a believer any more anyway. In fact, Hell had nothing on 2027's Los Angeles. When you've seen the world awash in nuclear flame, hell suddenly doesn't seem like such a bad proposition. No, Derek wasn't frightened by damnation or death. Post Judgement-Day America can pretty close to the former – and the latter was the only escape from the former.

What Derek was afraid of, the thing that kept him awake at night, was the path John was taking. The kid would have to become the man, the general. It was that or let the world go to shit. Ashdown's ridiculous open war with Skynet had ended with the machines scrapping almost all of the US military's remaining assets and with the Resistance leaderless and scattered. The Russian Resistance leader, Anton Kitsenko, was a ruthless bastard who thought nothing of throwing his fighters into a meaningless war of attrition in mainland Europe. No, it had to be John Connor. The man who had broken out of Century and rekindled hope in the jaded and tired race of man. A man who fought a successful guerilla war against Skynet, denying it vital resources and distracting it's attention from the bigger picture. Death by a thousand cuts. No, there was no one to replace General John Connor, leader of the North American Advanced Technology Command.

John had to become that man. Some days, Derek could almost see it in him, the way he moved, the way he stood. It left him hope. And fear. Fear that John might be turned from the path he was supposed to tread, the path that lead to a human victory over the machines. Without him, the War of the Future (as Sarah had dubbed it) was doomed to defeat. Derek was now responsible for the young man who amounted to humanity's messiah.

That was why Derek was frightened of Cameron. He just doesn't know where she stands. Where it stands, even. It is insidious; if you stop reminding yourself of what it is even for a few minutes, you'll view it as human. A fatal error. An error John could make so easily. It appeared human, but so did the others. This one, it was different. The General had told him that this one was special. Derek hadn't understood, had almost sneered at the word, but that was what it was. It was different from the others.

And that was Bad. With a capital 'B'.

Derek can try to rationalise it away to himself, but that's no good. He can see it happening, and that has disturbing consequences. John Connor, the leader of the Resistance, feels empathy - sympathy? Love? For a terminator, no less - It's horrifying; sympathy for the devil. Derek did not care for Skynet sympathisers, the so called "Grays" who worked for God-knows-what ultimate reward from the enemy of mankind. He hated seeing that emotional reaction in John, the attachment to the terminator. He could see it already, oh yes! He could see that the kid was attached to it. It was his friend, a robot companion he could order around, could hang out with, could trust completely with his life. Who wouldn't? It does his homework for him, it guards him 24/7, it follows his orders, jokes and chats with him. Maybe it even fucks him, Reese.

Derek already had a pretty good idea that the uncanny valley which had most of an effect on young John Connor was right between Cameron's perfect tits.

No. It didn't bear thinking about. Because a terminator is a terminator. Surely even John had to understand that. But did this John truly comprehend? From what Derek had discerned, the first time this John had met a terminator, it had protected him from one of those tricky liquid-metal bastards. Was that how he viewed them? As a shield between him and harm?

For certain, this John hasn't seen what the older Connor must have seen; the horror. The horror of the future. He has never watched crowds of refugees freezing to death in a nuclear winter. He has never sat by the bedside of a comrade dying of sickness that could have been trivially cured in days at a twenty-first century hospital. This John has never closed the eyes of the slaughtered inhabitants of a raided bunker and said a prayer for their souls. He has never sat waiting for the machines with nothing but a jimmy-rigged gun and a flak jacket and fought them in close quarters battle. Not yet.

That had to be it. Derek could easily believe that the kid didn't understand and comprehend the enemy, not the way that the General had. Sarah was better that way, to be honest; she would never trust a terminator further than she could push one. She'd had the hard truth drummed into her by the T-800 and his kid brother. Still, she was a disappointment too, in her way. The great Sarah Connor, revered soldier and the greatest Resistance fighter. She was soft and forgiving, too merciful to Skynet's human lackeys and too innocent.

Too humane, God damn the word. He's not sure if he admires her as a better person than he could be, or damns her as a naive fool. She couldn't be what he was, what he'd been. She would never be one of the soldiers who carried scratched-up Westinghouse plasma rifles, one notch for every tin can they'd scrapped. Derek never notched his rifle either, but that was just on general principle. Derek held no illusions; he wasn't that good now. Maybe never again. The months he had spent in Los Angeles had taken it's toll on his combat fitness, as had the bullet he'd taken. His speed of hand was sluggish, his reaction time had increased and he was still sick. He held no illusions, no self flattery; if it came to sudden combat, Cameron could kill him with no more effort than swatting a fly. That galled him.

Derek Reese was interrupted from his morning reverie by the entry of the cyborg in question into the room. Although visibly at ease, a body language specialist (or a terminator) could read his automatic glances towards the door and windows as the actions of a professional soldier checking the exits. The terminator probably also noticed Derek's unconscious and habitual movement of his hand towards a gun that wasn't holstered at his side.

Their eyes met. Derek Reese has no need to speak to Cameron. He knows it. He knows what the machine is, the machine with the eyes and nose and mouth and hair and body of Allison Young. She had been a young Resistance fighter, a runner in the often-fatal business of delivering messages between bunkers. The word on the grapevine was that she had been ... involved with the general. Derek had seen her once on a visit to Connor's headquarters at Kansas, and she had seemed relaxed and happy in his presence - content. It repulsed him that this doppelgänger was wearing the face of Allison Young. But it was almost reassuring, this reminder of his old life. Once, he'd thought he would have loved to go back to the days of his youth. Now he had and the shock of seeing the complacency of the human civilisation was disorientating. In all this, the presence of the terminator was a stable anchor he could relate to, and hate. Because at the end of the day, in the final analysis, it was a terminator. And Derek knew all about terminators.

"I know you."

"I know you too," it replied.

The metal bitch.

Author's Notes: The "Japanese guy" that Derek mentions is Masahiro Mori. His uncanny valley hypothesis is explained very roughly and more than a little incorrectly than Derek. Derek is someone from the new world, someone who holds the old world's values close to his heart while acting against them; like advocating the murder of witnesses or so on.

Thanks to my beta-readers, T.R. Samuels and Thescarredman.