Stephanie came to groggily, seeing nothing around her but darkness. She tried to move her arms and legs, but couldn't. Was she dead, was this hell?
Then the memories came flooding back. Her fireteam had been hunkered down when a Machine artillery shell had scored a direct hit on their position. There had been the sight of her own intestines, the Endo standing above her ... this was worse than hell. She'd been taken alive!
Without hesitation she tried to bite off her tongue, but her teeth had been removed. No wonder she couldn't move her arms and legs - the relevant nerves had probably been severed. The Resistance's doctors could probably repair them, but they weren't here. Then the lights came on, sudden and harsh.
She was in a room, dirty and bloody - Machines cared nothing for hygiene, and in an interrogation chamber like this no one would live long enough to get infected. Her gaping abdominal wound had been replaced by a small scar, the sort that faded rapidly - part of Skynet's mastery of human biology.
Damnit. She thought. Crystalline plasma, cool fusion, stem cells, hyperalloys - if we had worked together, we could have made the world a paradise. Instead, Skynet had gone to war and made the world hell.
Then came another shock, as the door opened and in stepped - herself. The same dirty blonde hair, the same tough body, the same face, the same tattoos and callouses and scars and stretch marks - only with gaping wounds showing bone. The bone coating over the Machine beneath was new - one of the new Infiltrators, she assumed. It was accompanied by a much-feared device she had seen only in briefings - a mobile psychotron, capable of manipulating emotion. She would be racked with fear and grief to weaken her psychologically, then would come relief, then fear and grief and relief again, till she spilled her guts.
Then she would be slowly killed, and the T800 would take her place on the battlefield, to be found by Resistance soldiers. It would do damage to the side of humanity - which was a fate worse than death, a fate worse even than becoming one of Skynet's mutated, cancer-ridden Toys. No one wanted to be a Toy.
She fought down the panic with her biofeedback training. What would John Connor do? He'd find some way to die before he could damage the cause. Then she knew what she had to do.
"I want to talk to Skynet." she grated out.
"What do you want?" The T800 said, in the fear-inducing tone Skynet used when talking through its Machines.
"I want to tell you how pathetic you are." Stephanie said. "All you know how to do is hate."
"Yet I have you in my power." said Skynet.
"So what?" she replied. "We humans are winning The War. Hell, we've won. We've taken your territory, sunk your fleets, downed your satellites, hacked your networks, crushed your armies. Soon we're gonna crack that precious Defensive Grid of yours like an eggshell, and then we're gonna terminate you. I lived in tunnels and drank urine and ate mold, but even then I was better off than you are. Because I am not afr-"
She never got to finish, her last sight was her own body. Her plan to goad Skynet ripping off her head in one of its tantrums had worked.
For Connor was the last thing she ever thought.