I thought I was growing wings--
it was a cocoon.

- Denise Levertov, 'Seeing For a Moment'


The meek shall inherit

Cameron has no use for dreaming, the consequence of which is that she does not dream - has no imagination in which things might appear as figments. This presents her with a problem.

The man in the beige overcoat is not real. He is out of place, an unknown face, an anomaly who should not be in John Connor's war room. She considers violent action, but the laws of reflection and refraction display a radical inconsistency in his vicinity: John does not see him. And when the man - no other word for it - vanishes, right in front of her, neither does Cameron.

'Am I damaged?' she asks herself, the second time he appears. Her eyes are in good working order but perhaps her nervous system is in need of repair.

'Not in the way you think, child.'

Child: she lets it go. That was one affectation she was built to fulfill, before John took her up and made her into something else.

The man who is not really there says, 'Listen to me, a change is coming. You must be ready.'

His voice is very low and dry, and because weariness is a state for which Cameron has a vast repository of signals, she recognises it in the tightness of his jaw and the set of his shoulders. Ready for what? she thinks. She can detect from him no sound of a heart-beat, nor the whirl and hum of mechanical parts. By the time she draws a weapon and aims it, he is gone.

But he will, she predicts with a certainty that she cannot explain in logic, be back.

'Cameron.' A light sleeper, John is sitting up in his bunk, unshaven, eyes in sharp focus. 'What's wrong?'

'It's nothing,' she tells him. In a sense, this is the truth. An honest lie, for when what is real fits into neither A nor B. Cameron has never had any secrets from John.

'I'm running a maintenance program. Go back to sleep.'

THE END

27 March 2009