Author's note: apparently the synopsis, disclaimer and character list aren't enough warning, so I'm going to make a bald statement.

If you are one of those T:TSCC fans who believes John Connor and Cameron's relationship is romantic rather than codependent;

if you think Cameron is a 'real' girl trapped in a mechanical body, needing only a kiss or a declaration of love from her Prince to free her;

if you believe that their relationship is a love written in the stars, and no other for either of them is possible, believable or interesting...

Hit the back button now. There's nothing here for you.

Van Nuys California
Saturday December 8 2007

The TOK-model infiltrator parked her car around the block from Martin Bedell's address and shut off the engine. She had deliberately avoided first driving past, to deny her opponent any possible forewarning; now she sat in the quiet vehicle for a moment and scanned her surroundings for witnesses or surveillance before getting out to complete her approach on foot.

She surveyed the area as she walked, continually assessing and analyzing. The neighborhood was quiet, with no one out on the street or sidewalks. Young people usually made up the bulk of pedestrian traffic in residential neighborhoods, but this district showed little evidence of children: no toys in the yards or chalk marks on the sidewalk, no bare patches on the lawns bordering the concrete, even at corners. She examined the small neat houses, all similar in layout and built in a style popular twenty or thirty years previous, and surmised that the subdivision's houses had been bought new by young couples starting their families, couples who had stayed and paid down their mortgages and become middle-aged while their children, like Martin Bedell, had grown and gone.

The Bedell residence was set back a little farther from the street than the adjacent houses, and screened by mature bushes: just as had been described to her. She turned down the drive and followed its slight curve past the foliage. As soon as the house came into view, she could see that the T-888 had been there ahead of her: the front door was wrecked, sagging off its one remaining hinge. Not bothering to draw her Glock, she moved stealthily to the driveway at the side of the house, senses at maximum.

But, looking through windows, she saw no indication of occupancy, either human or cyborg. There were no vehicles in the driveway or visible through the garage windows. Although she knew Mrs. Bedell owned a Pomeranian, no crazed barking challenged her presence near the house. She entered through the ruined front entrance, leaving the door standing open, and began searching. Portions of the rooms were in a state of disarray consistent with a hasty search careless of leaving evidence, rather than of a struggle. Of Martin Bedell's parents, there was no sign; she deduced the Trip-Eight had arrived, tossed the house, and left, all while they were out. She doubted it would have lured them away or waited for them to leave, and she could formulate no reason why it would have taken them with it, nor why it would have bothered to hide their bodies.

An open phone book and photo album she found lying on the dining room table told her everything she'd come to learn. She immediately called Sarah. "The Triple-Eight has been to the parents' house. They're safe, but it's seen his picture and it's on its way to the school."

"Get there. Find John. I'll call Derek."

"I can be there in two or three hours," Cameron said, and disconnected.

But, instead of leaving the house and heading for her car, she studied the picture album, and its photos of Martin Bedell in his school uniform, marching and saluting and aiming a rifle. She turned back a few pages, and saw a ten-year-old Martin at a birthday party, looking thoroughly uncomfortable in good clothes. She turned forward a page, almost to the end of the book, and saw him as a smiling young man, posing with arms around a couple of late middle age, presumably his parents. She surveyed the room's furnishings, comparing them to the descriptions in her memory: she knew without climbing the stairs that the upper floor contained three bedrooms and a tiny bath, and that Martin's was the bedroom whose window was adjacent to the old TV antenna tower at the back of the house. She felt her actions fettered by a rare uncertainty: although she hadn't lied to Sarah, she was unsure whether she should actually drive to Presidio Alto, because she knew she was already there.

A woman's voice saying, "Oh, my God," and the squeaky yapping of a small dog pulled her attention to the door. Cameron turned to see the elders from the picture standing in the doorway, looking at her. The man held the source of the barking, a Pomeranian, which stared at Cameron with marble eyes as it continued giving alarm that something strange and dangerous was in the house.

"Excuse me for trespassing," she said. "I saw the door, and I thought someone might need help."

The couple's facial expressions switched from alarm to pleasure. "You're not trespassing, dear." The woman advanced, reaching for Cameron's hands. "As if we couldn't recognize you from your picture." Her hands clasped Cameron's and squeezed. "Welcome to our home, Alicia."

Santa Ana California
June 6 2007

She walked down the busy, treeless sidewalk lined with little storefronts, scanning her surroundings without seeming to, assessing threats and gathering data. Humans in this here-and-now were busy and vital and unaware, very different from the ones in the world she'd left. In that world, food was strictly rationed, and the calorie allowance low enough to restrict unnecessary activity. The only time that humans downtime showed much energy was when they were fighting or running for their lives.

One large display window she passed offered flatscreen TVs in various sizes for sale. One unit was showing a news program. The events being described were local and not in her memory, but the date tag in the corner confirmed that her arrival late last night had been within acceptable parameters, just three hours before her target time.

This was the first of two planned temporal-displacement hops on her itinerary, the last of which should take her to John Connor in September of 1999. The Leader of the Human Resistance sometimes sent his operators to their final destinations in stages, so that their later assignments would be completed no matter what might befall them further in the past, or to complete a mission requiring the performance of tasks widely separated in time. Her original itinerary had been a direct trip to her primary objective, but there had been a last-minute change to provide a newly-established Resistance cell with vital information that had been unearthed after their departure uptime - which was where she was presently headed. When that mission concluded, she had instructions to drive to Carlsbad, a town just south of Camp Pendleton, and locate a certain man who ran an electronics store. The man in question was a bubble tech who'd been sent back years before to build a way station for time-hopping Resistance fighters, and would send her on to complete her journey.

Sending operatives in stages did entail a certain risk. Temporal displacement used copious amounts of power, but it required no more to displace someone a hundred years than it took to send them ten. Guidance was the limiting factor. The complexity of the calculations required for an accurate time-jump increased exponentially with the magnitude of the displacement, until precision was beyond even Skynet's advanced computers; an attempt to send a man back a century might send him back two instead, or ten. Pre-Judgment-Day technology was, at best, able to manage a margin of error of one or two months over a five-year displacement, and a year over a ten-year one. So time-travelers using multiple jumps tended to make the subsequent ones short. Calibration errors always resulted in overshoots, fortunately, so she wouldn't miss meeting her principal at the intended time and place, but an eight-year displacement from this departure point might overshoot by several months. Considering the importance of her primary mission, the itinerary change indicated that there might not be any subsequent bubble travelers scheduled for some time – or ever.

As she neared her objective, she passed another storefront window, this one displaying a selection of women's apparel. She paused to study her reflection: an attractive (judging by the glances of young males she passed) twenty-something girl with dark brown hair tumbling over her shoulders, dressed in jeans and a tank top. A bag large enough to contain a change of clothes bumped at her hip, hanging from her shoulder by a sturdy strap. Nothing about her appearance would elicit undue attention. Certainly no one would suspect they were looking at a machine intelligence sheathed in a living tissue culture engineered to mimic human flesh.

She had arrived naked, but not without resources. Many bank vaults had come through Judgment Day with their contents intact; the only difficulties lay in finding one whose currency hadn't been gathered for fuel and burned, and in finding a supply of usable banknotes whose dates of issue were old enough to avoid suspicion of counterfeiting. Humans had a number of places to safely carry small parcels through displacement, females especially; she'd arrived with several thousand dollars to spend at need. A parking-lot donation box had provided her with a hiding place for the night and clothing good enough to visit a store the next morning. And now, eleven hours after her arrival, she had everything she needed to blend in and move freely.

She arrived at the address she'd been given, a storefront much like the others, but with a second door that opened to reveal a narrow flight of stairs leading up to a second-story apartment. She made no attempt to be quiet as she ascended the stairs, and presently heard activity in the apartment above, including sounds she identified as those of weapons being readied.

She reached the door and knocked softly, three raps. Looking at the door's peephole, she saw shadows shift as someone on the other side examined her. A voice through the door said, "What is it?"

"John sent me."

"How do I know that?"

"Because if Skynet sent me, we wouldn't be talking through the door."

Locks clicked; she counted three. Then the door was drawn aside to reveal a man with a Browning Hi-power in his hand. Several steps behind him, another man held a shotgun in both hands, not quite pointing it at her. They both relaxed at their first good look at their visitor, a slender young girl of average size, unthreatening in appearance. Two other men in the room broke out in wide smiles. If her original programming were still directing her actions, she thought, they would have died with those smiles still on their faces.

"Come in, quick." The man at the door shut the panel and engaged the deadbolts. She examined the entry, and concluded that the deadbolts were ineffective: the door was steel, but hollow, and the hinges were conventional in size and number, screwed into a wooden jamb. She estimated that it would hold back a Triple-Eight for no more than a second or two.

"All right," he said. "Who are you, and why are you here?"

"I have information you need. Several technical experts not on your watch list." Many Resistance groups were tasked with, among other things, identifying and watching scientists and technicians developing AI software and hardware, no matter what the stated purpose. From her bag, she extracted a list she'd written down from memory that morning and passed it to the man with the Browning, who seemed to be the group's leader.

He examined the list and frowned. "A dental-supply company is doing AI? And-" His eyes widened. "You gotta be kidding me. Sex dolls?"

"It's a collaboration. The companies are engaged in a joint venture to produce lifelike human figures with sophisticated reactions to certain stimuli. It could be the forerunner to the infiltrator models' human-analogue programming."

"What does a dental-supply company want with something like this?"

"A training aid for dental students, a patient they can't injure. The company has already developed a practice mannequin that describes symptoms and responds to a limited number of questions. It also gags, squirms, and cries out when a mistake is made that would cause discomfort."

He scoffed and folded the paper. "Spose the love dolls do too. Jesus." He stuck out a hand. "Well, thanks. Horace Sullivan. Call me Sully."

"Hello, Sully." She chose a name automatically as she reached for his hand. "Alis…" She hesitated. Some subroutine she didn't recognize had abruptly weighted her random selection to drop it to the bottom of her option list. "Alicia." She pronounced it in four syllables, the 'i's' pronounced as long 'e's' and the 'c' as an 's'.

He smiled. "Don't like being called 'Alice,' huh?"

Not 'Alice', she thought. 'Alison'. Curious. "I guess not."

"Well, I don't care much for 'Horace' either, you might guess."

Sully introduced the other three men in turn. The one with the shotgun, Ben Miller, said, "Alicia, huh? I don't remember seeing you around HQ before we time-hopped."

"Special unit," she said. "We kept out of sight, mostly."

"Where are you staying?"

"I'm not. I have business elsewhere."

"Want something to eat?" Asked the third man, Jim Dyce. "Maybe we could go out, even."

"No, thanks. I just ate." She found the men's relaxed attitude disturbing. She was certain they'd been more alert and cautious down-time; they wouldn't have survived for over a decade after Judgment Day otherwise. But their return to the relatively safe and routine world of their younger days, it seemed, had lulled them.

Dyce patted his stomach, smiling. "Since we tripped, it's like I have to put something else in my belly as soon as there's room for it, like I gotta stock up before it's gone."

"No." She met his eyes. "If we're successful, you'll never go hungry again."

His smile disappeared. "Guess we'll find out in four more years."

A younger man who'd been watching her from the living room couch rose to offer his hand. Sully introduced him as Wilson Dyle. Instead of shaking her hand, he held on to it, and to her eyes as well, and offered her a smile that was different from the others'. "You don't remember me," he said softly. "Do you?"

She did not, which meant that any meeting between them would have to have been before her capture and memory scrub. But such a meeting was unlikely to be remembered by him with a smile, she thought, since she would have been trying to kill him. "No," she said. "I'm sure you're mistaken."

"I'm sure I'm not, Alicia." He let go of her hand, smile fading: disappointed apparently. He lowered his voice further. "We shared rations and a blanket in a back tunnel one night. You came to Iowa bunker with a message, and you didn't have a way back till next day. You really don't?"

She suddenly realized his mistake. Newer-series infiltrators' sheaths were usually modeled after real humans acquired by the machines. He must have met her human template before the girl's capture. The reference to a 'back tunnel' told her the nature of the relationship: couples often sought little-used sections of the tunnel network for sex, foregoing safety for privacy. Wilson was looking closely at her face: trying to discern whether she really didn't remember him or was pretending not to, she believed. His smile was gone now.

She drew on her store of social remarks, learned from association with future-John and his associates. "I'm sorry. It's wrong of me not to remember, but I don't." She took in the other men, who were privy to the conversation though they were pretending not to hear. "Sometimes displacement causes a temporary disruption of memory." A complete lie, but she believed it would suffice to bring the conversation to a close. It seemed a bad time to tell him she was a cyborg.

"Or maybe I wasn't as memorable as I hoped," he said, his voice stiffening. "I'm sure you've got guys hanging around you all the time." He began to step back. "You must have heard 'haven't we met somewhere before' about a million times."

"Not really," she said. She shouldered her bag. "I have to go now. Good luck to you all." She moved toward the entry. "You should reinforce this door. And get a dog."