Written for comment_fic on Livejournal

Prompt was Cam/Sarah, "You're the most sophisticated killing machine on the planet, but you have trouble tying up your shoelaces?"

"You're the most sophisticated killing machine on the planet, but you have trouble tying up your shoelaces?" Sarah looked suspicious.

But Cameron just stared at her, looking perplexed, until Sarah sighed and got on one knee.

Cameron created and stored a redundant copy of the image of Sarah kneeling in front of her.

She bent over to reach her shoelaces, but left her hands hanging idle so that Sarah would grab her hands and guide her fingers to the laces.

Sarah's hands on hers. Image copied and stored.

Sarah worked fast on the shoelaces, teaching Cam what to do next without speaking except to say "Got it?" when they were done.

Cam had nodded. "Thank you for explaining."

The previous day, Cameron had heard John teach the little girl at the office how to tie her shoe. She quickly concluded that Sarah must have taught John to tie his shoelaces in a similar way. With smiles and tenderness. With a story to make the process easier for a human child to remember. With encouragement and delight in seeing the change in the child, minor though it was.

Humans love to watch other humans grow. There was insufficient information to determine yet whether they enjoyed watching other beings grow.

But Cameron decided to learn to tie her shoelaces. So first she unlearned it -- she found the file that taught her how to tie her shoe. It was small and easy to delete. And that way she wouldn't have to lie to Sarah.

Because Sarah looked tormented when she found out someone lied to her. And if that someone was Cameron, there were usually threats.

And Cameron knew that Sarah knew that Cameron would learn how to tie shoes right away. It wasn't necessary to say "Got it?". It wasn't necessary, and therefore Sarah had wanted to say it. Sarah didn't give her any of the smiles or encouragement or delight that she would have given young John, but she said "Got it?", and Cameron was pleased with that. And please with her (sort-of) new knowledge about shoelaces. She could have figured it out with an extremely simple reverse engineering algorithm of course, but learning it from Sarah was much more satisfying.

Cameron had come back in time because John trusted her. There were other machines that could have been sent, Cam knew, and many of them had far less a history of glitches. But John trusted Cameron.

He trusted that she would be able to change and grow so that she could keep protecting him, even as Skynet sent back more and more sophisticated killers. And she would learn to do this, she was to learn to be adaptable and flexible and creative, she was to learn to be interminable, by watching Sarah.

But Cameron wondered how she got to this point. Where she spent more time trying to learn from John how to elicit reactions from Sarah. Maybe this was her way of growing, of learning Sarah.

Or maybe she was having trouble holding on to her primary objective.

Cam knew she should tell John, insist that he do a full diagnostic. But the fact that Cam devoted more processing resources than necessary to re-arranging her Sarah files was no great danger. She would still protect John Connor. Just as she was sent back to do.

The first time John - futureJohn - had uploaded a picture into Cameron, it was a picture of Sarah. Cameron didn't know why he would do that, why he would want her to process her face long before she ever met her. She had analyzed the photo often, sometimes repeating the same analyses just to see if she would find something new. She spent a lot of time examining the proportions of Sarah's face -- the curve of the lip, the crinkle of motion around the eyes. All those things that humans got so much information from. She had tried to figure out why John would give her a picture of Sarah, but for a long time it remained a puzzle.

But when she went back to meet Sarah, she learned this bizarre thing called devotion from watching Sarah. And when she started to have this devotion to Sarah.... It made Cameron wonder if maybe future-John didn't understand her better than she understood herself.