Cameron versus Dodgeball
A Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles fanfic
By Pjazz
2008
Thought...
Or its machine approximation.
Algorhythms. Binary code. Sub routines. Ones and zeroes.
Cameron's thought processors were functioning at optimum capacity, spiking green in her visual cortex and utilising 23 CPU with 13 silica-matrix RAM. She had a defrag scheduled in 46 minutes, a routine data dump that wouldn't require a toilet break.
The school gymnasium was empty, all apparatus removed save for a line of benches and 30 students, dressed alike in singlets, shorts and gym shoes. Cameron could sense their collective anxiety and knew why.
Dodgeball.
Deep in her chip cortex...
School activity. Sport based.
Object: To throw, catch or dodge a ball. Last man standing wins.
A game then, But one with deeper darker origins. Designed to simulate the hunting instinct. Millennia ago primitive humans would have thrown rocks, later clubs and spears to bring down prey. In the future, thermite grenades accurately thrown by renegade soldiers under John Connor's leadership would disable her own kind. Terminators laid low by the precursor of this dodgeball.
"Okay sportsfans. You all know the rules. Now let's play some dodgeball!"
Coach Carter. Gym teacher. School authority figure. A 48 year old male. Overweight. Balding. Possessed of a liver that was perilously close to exceeding human design tolerance. He held a ball under each arm.
Cameron's sensor sweep indicated that Coach Carter was enjoying himself. His pulse was elevated and he radiated excessive heat in the infra red spectrum; he seemed to be anticipating Dodgeball with an almost sexual intensity.
Curious.
There were 19 boys and 21 girls present. Cameron recorded that 4 girls were ovulating. One had a possible STD. Two boys were infectious with a strain of the common cold virus.
Threat: .00654 chance of John Connor contracting the virus and dying.
She would not have to terminate them.
"Ryan, you're up. Cameron, you bat for the girls. The rest of you, you're targets. Haul ass!"
Coach Carter tossed Cameron one of the balls. She examined it intently. Full sensor array. Rubber based. Organic structure.Spherical. Massing 5.86 pounds. An unlikely weapon of choice. Her combat subroutine went into primary mode. Thrown at high velocity the kill shot was to the head, resulting in 89 chance of fatality.
WARNING
A red alert icon blinked.
Mission parameters: Do not kill. Unless John Connor or his companions were mortally threatened.
Downgrade: Non Lethal response. Aim at legs, torso and groin areas. Reduce velocity 60.
Programmed.
Execute.
Cameron launched the ball. It struck a boy called Jefferson full in the face, the spin she imparted returning it to her before he could even react. He clutched his hands to his face and staggered to the bench. The ignomy of being first out nothing compared to the excruciating pain in his nose,
"Excellent, girly. Get the lead out, Ryan; she's making you look bad."
Coach Carter positvely glowed in all spectrums.
One by one Cameron picked them off, targeting graphics operating at 100 capacity. Several boys collapsed to the floor nursing their groins as the ball struck them yet returned to her as if on elastic. Coach Carter laughed fit to burst, his face as ruddy as mulled wine. But Cameron maintained a snipers composure. Not a flicker of emotion crossed her face.
Two left. John. And a girl. Maria. Tall. Athletic. She had used many of the others as cover. Good tactics. Natural cunning allied to self preservation. Familiar human attributes. But now she was exposed. Vulnerable.
Prey.
Attack vectors loaded in nanoseconds. Tracking, anticipating, predicting. The ball left her hands in a blur of kinetic energy and hit Maria high on the torso. She winced at the violent contact and accepted her elimination badly, spitting out some choice Spanish epithets in Cameron's direction. She reluctantly walked over to the now crowded bleachers.
The boy named Ryan swallowed nervously. He really wasn't very good at dodgeball, or sports generally. The only reason he was still standing was the extrordinary proficiency of the new girl. She never seemed to miss. And half the time she didn't even appear to be aiming. And those dead shark eyes...spooky. Still here he was, final three. Shit, if he kept this up he might win and impress the hell out of Megan Finkelstein, the fox with the long tan legs.
Ryan made his bid for glory, aiming hard and low. But John had been drilled from birth for superior physical strength and dexterity. And Sarah Connor was a hard task master.
John caught the ball on the fly and pumped it right back. The ball hit Ryan hard in the gut and he folded in half like an old canvas deckchair. His breath was knocked painfully out of him and the imagined prize of Megan Finkelstein's long tan legs wrapped round his neck so much fool's gold.
The coach's shrill whistle sounded. "Brother and sister face-off. This should be good. Work off some of that sibling rivalry, huh, kids?"
Cameron's targeting graphics locked on.
TARGET: Acquired.
SUBJECT: John Connor
WARNING
INVALID COMMAND
ABORT
SYSTEM OVERLOAD
The terminator froze, offensive systems powering down.
John Connor felt no such compunction. He was all too acutely aware they were the centre of attention.Everyone was watching. His mother's orders were to keep low, stay under the radar. She'd flip if she knew.
"Sorry, sis..."
He pistoned the ball hard at Cameron's head, confident he'd do little harm. But the terminator's defensive array still functioned. Servo motors swayed her head aside at the last possible moment. The ball missed.
"Dammit."
Just great. Mano-et mano with a hibernating terminator who won't say uncle. John reckoned he had less than a minute before someone noticed something odd about Cameron's posture.Then : an idea. Yeah...if he could just remember his pool technique...
John threw the ball at a tangent, well clear of Cameron visual sensors. It cannoned off one wall, rebounded off the angle of the other and struck her on the back of the head. Her hyper-alloy combat chassis didn't budge but the game was over. John had won, but more importantly Cameron snapped out of her trance.
"Oh. The game is over. You win. Well played."
Coach Carter was less than impressed. "Seems to me you deliberately let your bro win, missy. Not very girlpower, now is it."
"Girlpower?" Her cultural database drew a blank.
"All those feminists, those hairy-legged womens libbers, they didn't burn their bras so's you could take a dive."
"I don't understand. A bra is an unsuitable incendiary device."
But Coach Carter had stopped listening. "Okay, troops. Hit the showers. Game's over."
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In the girls changing room Cameron stood under a shower nozzle her face upturned so the spray cascaded over her and ran in rivulets down her body. With eyelids closed and thermal sensors online the hot water created fractal patterns in her artificial sensorium that were...nostalgia. Like a firefight at dusk with plasma rifles strafing the horizon.
Around her the other girls showered and changed. Had they bothered to observe the newcomer more closely they might have found it strange she was making no attempt to wash properly. The layer of living tissue over metal exo-skeleton required minimal maintenance, nothing like the time consuming grooming rituals of human females.
The place was a hive of shrill chatter and gossip as the girls relaxed. Cameron monitored the ebb and flow of conversation, running it through a threat assessment diagnostic. Cromartie had disguised himself as a teacher once and could do so again. So far no one had mentioned any new or replacement teachers on the faculty or anything unusual.
"Hey, bitch! Hey, whitebread, I'm talking to you!"
Cameron turned. Advancing towards her were three girls, semi-nude apart from towels cinched around their waists. Their belligerence was palpable, showing up in body posture, vocal inflection and heightened heartrates and respiration. She shifted her bare feet to a wider stance on the wet tile floor for better purchase, her combat routines powering to full alert. Her CPU ran battle simulations. Worst case scenario, she killed everybody here. It would take 3.7584 minutes. Approximately.
She recognised the middle girl. Maria Sanchez. From the Dodgeball game. Hispanic female. 120 pounds. Buff. Athletic. An alpha female. Strong. Resourceful. A natural leader. Such women would one day occupy positions of authority in John Connor's army.The two girls either side were betas; followers, herd animals, cannon fodder.
WARNING
A red alert icon. The alpha female had metal hidden on her person. A concealed weapon? No. Sensors indicated the quantity was insignificant. Cameron operated her zoom function. There. A tiny sliver of metal bisecting the girl's left nipple; a crescent of silver/alloy pale against the areola pigment.
OBJECT : Nipple ring.
PURPOSE : Body adornment. Decoration. Possible mate attractant.
THREAT : Minimal.
Cameron averted her gaze. Human social mores dictated it was inappropriate to stare at another humans sexual characteristics.
"Listen up, whitebread. Whaddua call this, huh?"
Maria stabbed a finger at her upper right torso.
"I call it your right mammary gland," Cameron answered calmly.
"Huh? Are you tripping, girl?"
"No. I am perfectly balanced."
"I'm talking about this. See the bruise right here? It's hurts like a sonofabitch. That's from your little ball juggling act earlier."
Cameron zoomed in. Yes. A small circle of increased skin lividity. Hundreds of burst blood vessels below the epidermal layer. A diagnostic ran automatically.
"You should put ice on that. It hurts like a sonofabitch."
"Don't you be telling me what to do!"
Cameron inclined her head. "I like your nipple ring. It is...
A menu of archived responses gleaned from her data mining popped up for her selection:
1 - freaking cool
2- totally rad
3- smoking hot
4- pimps my ride
5- blows chunks
"...freaking cool."
Maria Sanchez hesitated. She had fully intended to kick this new girl's ass. No one threw a frigging dodgeball at her hard enough to hurt like hell and leave a bruise the size of a plate and got away with it. She was an intimidating school presence and took every advantage of it, as her regular attendence at detentions bore out. But now, some survival instinct buried deep inside her mammalian cortex stayed her hand. An intuition that if she lifted a finger to this deceptively frail girl she was heading for a world of pain such as she had never experienced before. It was this same survival instinct that one day would cause her to leave LA for the mountains a mere 48 hours before the bombs dropped, thus saving her life. Now she did something she seldom ever did. Maria Sanchez backed down from a confrontation.
"Uh...right. Just watch your step, is all. Just...stay outta my face, whitebread. I don't wanna see you. I don't wanna hear you. I don't wanna smell you."
With a final face-saving glare of intimidation, Maria spun on her heels and stomped away, her bewildered acolytes following in her wake. But all that pent up aggression had to come out somehow. She grabbed the nearest girl who made the mistake of looking at her.
"What you staring at, Finkelstein? You skanky bitch.Give me your lunch money. NOW!"
Cameron's combat routines powered down. She left the showers and returned to her locker, toweled down and began to dress. The girl with the locker next to hers, a pale blonde with wet hair and glasses, whispered conspiratorially:
"You don't want to mess with her. She's a bad ass. I thinks she deals drugs. But you didn't hear it from me, okay."
"But I did hear it from you." Cameron imitated the girl's voice perfectly. "'You don't want to mess with her. She's a bad ass. I thinks she deals drugs.' "
The girl's face reddened. "There's no need to be so mean. You're new. I was only giving you a friendly warning. Everyone thinks you're weird."
She clutched her school bag tightly to her chest and hurried off. Cameron tracked her visually until she left the changing room.
Everyone thinks you're weird
Her social skills program might need reformatting.
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When the bell rang for the end of the school day Cameron met John at their prearranged rendezvous point outside the school gates. John put his bag down and sat on the wall. He hunched over so that only she would hear what he was saying.
"You froze. Earlier. During dodgeball."
"Yes. A mission conflict."
"I thought I was gonna have to press control-alt-delete."
"Control-alt-delete?"
"It's a computer term. For keyboards."
"Oh. But I have no keyboard. The correct procedure is to slice open the back of my skull, peel back the epidermal layer and perform a negative-positive recharge of my internal CPU."
John supressed a grin. "Switch you off and on again?"
"Yes."
"I'll keep it in mind."
They waited in silence. Behind them the other students milled about, chatting, hooking up, some leaving others waiting for the school bus to arrive. Then Cameron said:
"Coach Carter finds violence sexually stimulating."
"So the Coach is a sadist." John shrugged. "I've yet to meet one who isn't.
"I might get my nipple pierced. The left one."
" Any-uh-particular reason?"
"Assimulation. Maria Sanchez has a nipple ring. It's freaking cool. She has a bad ass."
"Is a bad ass. She is a bad ass."
"Yes. That is correct. Thank you."
"And I don't think you wanna be taking life lessons from her. I hear she's a member of a gang. The Bloods. The Crips. Either way she's trouble."
"The Bloods and Crips. Territorial gangs based in Los Angeles. During the war those that survive set aside their rivalries and unite to fight Skynet."
" My enemy's enemy is my friend."
Just then Maria Sanchez burst out of the school building, shoving junior students aside like so many skittles. She glowered at Cameron in passing, then crossed the street where a muscular latino boy sat astride a yellow Ducatti motorbike. The two embraced, frenched, then Maria climbed on the back of the Ducatti, the latino boy gunned the engine and they roared off toward the city.
"Yeah. Some role model."
"In 2019, Major Maria Consuela Esmeralda Sanchez will command a strike force that will overcome superior firepower and sucessfully disrupt Skynet's uranium enrichment facilities on the New Mexico border. You will promote her in the field to the rank of full Colonel."
John's jaw nearly hit the ground. "You're saying that.. bully is on our side?"
"My enemy's enemy is my friend."
John shook his head in amazement. But Cameron had more surprises.
"In retaliation, Skynet will construct the T-600, a Terminator designed to resemble a latino female that is physically desirable to human males. It will be used to infiltrate and destroy hostile rebel elements south of the border. Humans will name the T-600 the Taco Belle."
"Taco Belle? B-E-L-L-E?"
"Yes."
"At least we don't lose our sense of humour."
John ran his fingers through his hair. He had the beginings of a headache, he often did when Cameron offered a glimpse into the future. The future he and others were now trying to prevent, The future where billions were dead and he was the erstwhile saviour of the remnants of mankind.
How many of these school kids, so cocooned in their comfortable day to day existence, would one day be radioactive ash? How many would survive and find the necessary strength and fortitude to fight back against the odds? Like Maria Sanchez apparently would. How many would simply cower in the rubble and starve to death, or from disease, or the predations of the machines they had once trusted so implicitly?
And where was God during all of this? John had stopped believing in a deity the moment the terminator had plucked him to safety from his trail bike in the drainage culvert and made his mother's psychotic ravings chilling fact. Because in the end all the churches, mosques and synagogues would fail to repel a single nuclear missile. It took a deep-buried fallout shelter to do that, those obsolete monuments to Cold War paranoia.
"Mom's here."
Sarah Connor screeched to a halt in the jeep. Cameron and John climbed in. Sarah had the vehicle moving before they even had time to shut the doors. A moving target is harder to hit.
"How was school?"
"I lost to John at dodgeball." Cameron replied matter of factly. "Coach Carter is a sadist. I might get my nipple pierced. Everyone thinks I'm weird. I got an A in advanced math. Mrs Cohen says I'm MIT material."
Sarah raised her eyebrows at John. What the f- He shrugged and smiled wanly. Just another day in the life...
On the radio a Creedence track played, a reminder of earlier, simpler times. The music was upbeat but the lyric imbued with foreboding:
There is a bad moon rising
There are stormy times ahead
Don't go out tonight
You know it'll save your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
THE END
First, a confession: I know squat about dodgeball. We don't play it here it in England. Rugby's violent enough, believe me. So, if I got the rules and regs wrong, my apologies. Hope it didn't detract from the fanfic.
Hope you enjoyed it. Any and all reviews welcome.
PJ