Mood Swings
Can you think of any better way to ruin SCC than turning it into another teen romance?
This is another installment of my battle against JohnxCameron. Different universe, probably, from Hiding In Time and much more pleasant. Might even be funny. Rated for one word.
Cameron had returned from another weapons acquisition. For reasons she was still assessing, arms dealers were more willing to sell to her than to Derek.
John's readings had drastically changed since her departure. Sarah and Derek exhibited only a few of the moods in her database. Derek's principal mood was easy to identify – angry. With months of observation and testing, she had categorized Sarah's main mood as grim, which had not been in her database originally but for which she had created a new classification.
John, on the other hand, had many moods and shifted quickly from one to the next. Her mission preparation had included this feature of humans in John's age group, including some information imparted by John himself, but the phenomenon nonetheless routinely absorbed a significant portion of her processing capacity. She now had much more complete entries for most of the moods identified to date. Still, the speed at which partly mature humans could change moods seemed to rival the speed at which she could perform numerical calculations.
At her departure, she had logged John's mood as playful. This slightly upgraded the likelihood of a successful mission, as it indicated John had a high level of adaptation to her. Upon returning, John's facial expression, body orientation, and immediate actions suggested sad, even grief-stricken, but this was irrational since she had returned unharmed. Now he was avoiding her – uncomfortable. With Sarah and Derek it was always best to make direct inquiries, but with John she had found that he solicited directness to a greater extent than he in fact preferred it. Even so, she needed to investigate what was now a slight decline in the expectation of mission success.
Derek was more likely to be helpful in this case. His desire to terminate her only affected his evaluation of her mission-critical behavior and she projected a very low probability that he would see this as critical. Sarah only infrequently wished to terminate her but regarded any attempt to influence John's emotional state as grounds to remove him from Cameron's presence for extended durations. She therefore approached Derek.
"John's mood has shifted radically though I have only been absent for a few hours. Can you explain?"
Derek smirked, as he invariably did when demonstrating knowledge or ability she lacked. These situations were also associated with much higher odds that he would be cooperative.
"He talked to his mother and the air went out of the balloon."
"His behavior has been altered because he acquired a balloon and it deflated." That was low on the list of interpretations of Derek's response but high on the list of reactions that would elicit more information from him.
Derek chuckled humorlessly, "He went from happy to unhappy in the course of a minute or two with his mom." He then left the room, as he most often did when it became apparent that she would be remaining.
Cameron considered informing him that the descriptions of happy and unhappy were inaccurate, but such corrections rarely appeared to improve human analytic ability. In addition, she needed to shift computational capacity to the immediate problem. The most likely event was a conflict between John and Sarah. In this case, utilizing Sarah was unlikely to be successful. However, approximately 50 of the time John's reactions to her were more welcoming when he was in conflict with his mother, several orders of magnitude better odds than the Sarah option. That left a more complex problem of how to approach John.
"Why don't you just ask me what happened?"
Cameron could not be startled. It was a matter for future investigation that she had not heard John's approach. Experienced human fighters were known to be able to deceive terminators in this fashion under certain conditions, but she had not observed John with this ability.
In a fashion, she could be surprised. His apparent preference for direct communication in this instance was not particularly unusual but his discernment of her intent on the basis of so little evidence was. The most likely explanation was that he merely randomly selected one of many low-probability interpretations – what humans called guessing. Another, though, was that he was developing greater understanding of her operating procedures. This required assessment in the near future, as it could have either a positive or negative impact on mission success probabilities.
"Why are you sad to see me?"
John shook his head, "You look like a hot girl, you're stronger and faster than anyone who's ever lived, and you talk like a child."
"On some dimensions, my database on human behavior is comparable to that of a pre-teen."
John laughed, typically a sign of a willingness to elaborate. Then his shoulders slumped and he turned sharply away from her – replicating the previously observed change in his moods. Cameron waited. It was impossible for her to feel impatience. If John left, she would follow; until then, she would wait.
John now had his head resting against a wall and was staring into space. After 51 seconds in this position, he spoke, "My mom finally got around to telling me about the factory where you were made."
"Yes." Humans expected some sort of response, even when they intended to continue speaking.
"I started thinking about your creation and your, uh, life after that."
"Yes."
"You're going to die, aren't you?" Before Cameron could point out that 'terminate' was a superior rendering, John began rambling, considerably raising the probability that he was soon to relay the cause of his mood shift.
"You were built in that factory."
"Ye-"
"And you told me that I then reprogrammed you and sent you back."
"After I demonstrated the stability of my new programming, yes."
John paused and looked at her for a moment, then proceeded, "But if you survive, I'd have no reason to reprogram the new you, the one just built. Because I'd have the old you . . . you." John looked as if he wasn't sure she would understand.
"That assumes there is only one timeline in this scenario, which cannot be disproved but is contraindicated by the following"
"Fine, fine, fine!" John was suddenly shouting, so Cameron stopped. "But if there is only one timeline or timelines are, I don't know, stubborn in some way, then the simplest, consistent chain of events is that you're built, I reprogram you, I send you back, you die, then I find you to start the process over again."
"Yes." This no longer seemed to be an appropriate time to object to the use of the word 'die.'
"So you're very likely going to die! Doesn't that bother you?"
"The odds of my termination during this mission were high from the moment I confirmed your identity. 89.1 was my estimate at the time; it has declined since with our success to this point to 82.4."
"This was a suicide mission."
"My programming prevents suicide."
"I meant that you have expected to die all along."
"Yes."
John's current mood was a frequent one in the Connor family -- exasperated. "You think you could have told me that!"
"It is not relevant to my mission."
"It's relevant to mine!"
As seemed to be the norm, the moment at which she might learn something valuable about John was the same moment at which his mother made her presence known. John's eyes widened when he saw Sarah, he mumbled something, and essentially ran out of the room. If Cameron could have moods, hers would be irritated.
"Let me guess, you have no idea why he acted that way." Sarah's tone and body language suggested sarcasm, but this had always been a difficult concept for Cameron to identify empirically.
"He feels an emotional attachment to me." At Sarah's prompting gesture, Cameron continued, "The prospect of that attachment being altered by my termination is confusing, as it generates a choice between attempting to break the attachment now while it is weaker or being forced to break it at my termination when the attachment is stronger.
"Very good, tin man. Now what's the Optimal Solution?" The last two words were pronounced in such fashion as to leave no uncertainty with regard to sarcasm.
"That is impossible to say without further evaluation of John's emotional state, plus commitment to a long-term plan of action from which to extrapolate probabilities for my date of termination."
"Wrong."
Cameron cocked her head.
"Either you get killed soon and it doesn't matter that much by the time the shit hits the fan or you get killed late in the ballgame and it completely screws things up. Think about the effect on your mission, on John, if you get blown to pieces right as the war starts."
John already had skills that would be invaluable to the human resistance, specifically with computers. But he still couldn't see things the way Sarah could. Cameron had previously identified this risk but her nature meant she could not fully appreciate its extent. John's reaction to the abstract thought of her termination and Sarah's apparent concurrence now weighed more heavily in her formulations than the need to ensure John would accept her presence as long as necessary. She would have to attempt to limit his attachment, a project in which Sarah and Derek would almost surely be willing to assist.
Her programming on this was limited but there was one readily available option. An apparent problem with the target's family could be resolved as necessary; it was even possible that grief at the death of her father would cause her to seek comfort with John. She would ask Derek's opinion of this potential strategy, as Sarah inevitably objected to nearly all terminations. She dialed a number scanned from the school directory, pushed John's door open to find him unsurprisingly pretending to be absorbed in his computer monitor, handed him the phone, and said, "You should call your friend Cheri from school. She's tight."
END