Disclaimer: Thanks to James Cameron, Andrew Vanja, Johnathan Mostow, Schwarzenegger, Hamiltorm, and all others who have made the Terminator Saga such a wonderful playground for the mind. Especially for letting us play with all the wonderful toys. And Even more so, for not fileing any lawsuits. Right James? Right Andrew? Right Summer?

A/N --Dreams AU runs parallel to Crusader AU. And dreams being what they are in Terminator stories, sometimes they happen out of sequence with reality. Sometimes.

The Monday after the barbecue seemed to drag by for John, at least until lunch.

He woke early to take his running club through their workouts. The UCLA Resistance had its work cut out for it, competing against USC and UC-Berkley that next coming weekend. They were NCAA Division One schools. And John's club? They were just a scrappy band of runners.

John made it to his 8:00 am class, Theory of Artificial Intelligence Design on time. Then at 9:00 he covered a sophomore level computer programming lecture for Miles, or Dr. Dyson, as John called him on campus. Miles' duties at Cyberdyne occasionally prevented him from making his lower division classes. But it was routine for full Professors to have their graduate students cover their lower division classes from time to time. Teaching that class was the easiest part of his day. John could teach that programming class in his sleep.

John had one more class that day and then he headed over to the Advanced AI and Robotics Laboratory or the Android Shop as he called it. Miles, Andy Goode, himself and a few other hand picked Post Docs and Ph.D. candidates were developing a human emulation AI, an android. Miles ran the whole project. Andy and John were working on the code and the processor design. The others were mainly robotics and biomechanics geeks who designed the hardware. Eventually the team would have to bring in some medical people to design the skin and the organic components, but that was a ways off.

Although, whenever he took the time check up on the breakthroughs in battlefield reconstructive medicine brought on by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he reflected that they'd probably have workable synthetic skin available before they cracked the AI part. The team was trying to combine learning abilities, physical control and personality emulator into a single processor cluster. John wasn't sure they could do that. He thought the android would probably need two processor clusters.

John walked into the Android Shop with Philly Cheesesteaks from Johnny Rockets. Theirs were better than Subway but not as good as Texadelphia. If Andy didn't want his, John would eat it for dinner.

Andy looked up from his terminal, "You're in early, John."

John set the Cheesesteaks down on the table next to his work station. "Yeah, brah, I wanted to make sure you and I were okay. I know we left things a little awkward after the cookout at Miles and Cicely's place." He grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge, extending one toward Andy who nodded. John lobbed it gently across the lab. Both them felt acutely awaret that a stray bottle of water could shatter the experimental processors. But each was completely confident in the other. Of course they would never, ever toss the water if Dr. Dyson or the other team members were present. At least if anyone was looking

Andy caught his water and walked over to John's table, "How's that?"

John offered Andy the Cheesesteak with sauteed mushrooms but no sauteed green peppers and onions. "Well with your girl, Dude." He kept the one with sauteed mushrooms, onions and peppers for himself. Green peppers and onions didn't sit well with Andy

Andy had a look of careful consideration like he was weighing his response carefully, so John just pressed on, "She and I were best friends in high school, but I haven't seen her since my Junior year."

Andy chewed his bite of sandwich, "I didn't bring a girl to the cookout."

John set his food down. "You're kidding, right? You were half done with cooking the burgers; you took a call on your cell phone; then you went inside yelled for me. I came in and she ran over and planted one on my cheek."

Andy sipped his water and then chewed another bite thoughtfully. "You're Dreaming again; aren't you?" He actually pronounced the capital 'D.'

John considered for a moment. "Yeah, man, I guess so." He ate some more. Drank some more.

Andy commented, "This hasn't happened since you were an undergrad, has it?"

John replied, "No. And I could usually keep it separate from reality, because there always an Android with me. The recurring Nightmares in middle school had that big, brown-haired guy with shotguns and an Austrian accent. The whole series of dreams from High School always had me paired up with that gorgeous, raven haired babe, who was way better looking than any girl who would hang out with me back then."

Andy chewed some more. This was a good cheesesteak. But not as good as Texadelphia. "Yeah, I remember reading your stories before Dr. Dyson found us both and brought us into this project. The way you wrote her, she was like Aeon Flux, Wonder Woman or Xena the Warrior Princess."

"Yup." John smiled wanly and looked of into the distance. "She was quit the fighter, but she was more like my personal Trinity, you know, from The Matrix movies?"

Andy asked, "Was this most recent Dream just as real, just as lucid as the ones from before?"

John took another bite and thought through the dream and his memories of the cookout. "Yeah, it was just like the cook out, right down to Danny crashing his remote control airplane and the volleyball match between Mom and Dad and they Dysons."

Andy looked critically at John over his cheesesteak. "Except for the girl that I didn't bring."

John answered with his mouth full, "Right. Except for her."

Andy returned to the thought about the stories John had written before, "You were always cagy on the details about your high school dream girl, but I get the impression that she's somehow the guiding inspiration behind this whole project."

In for a penny, in for a pound, John pressed on and began to open up to his friend. "Yeah, I don't talk about that much. I'm not sure what to think of it myself. But it's brought us this far." John gestured to the lab, the whole project, "We're going to change the world Andy. You, me, Miles, the team. We're going to revolutionize life on planet earth. Mankind will never be alone again. We'll always have our Android friends, allies, protectors."

Andy looked like he might have had a tear in his eye. Or pepper. There wasn't any dust in here. "You sound like an Isaac Asimov story when you talk like that."

John continued, "A guy can dream; can't he?"

Andy figured he should make a serious suggestion here. The project was at another critical phase. We couldn't have John going off the rails. No one else had his finesse with the code. "Yeah, but maybe you should start keeping a daily written journal of what really happens, so you can review it every morning and sort the facts from the Dreams." Andy finished his sandwich, threw away the wrapper and washed his hands.

"No kidding;" John's voice had a touch of sarcasm. "That is a very good idea."

Andy returned to his workbench."I'm serious; you don't want to end up in Atascadero State Hospital, like your mom."

"That wasn't real." John said around his last bite of cheesesteak. "That was in the Junior High Nightmares." Then he two threw away his trash and washed his hands and face.

Andy replied crossing back from the sink, "I know, just testing."

They were quite for a while, each working his own separate projects. Andy looked like he was writing code. John was working on processor design modifications Miles had asked for. Then Andy looked up at John and posed a question. "All those stories, you wrote back in the day, the ones about the boy detective and his android girl-partner, those weren't just inspired by Isaac Asimov's Bailey and Olivaw novels were they?"

John

"Which stories are you talking about?"

Andy

"Oh, come on, John, you know the ones: Time Jump, New Identities, The Case of the Falling Girl, Heavy Metal, The Case of the Three-Eyed Man, Dungeons and Dragons, The Demon Hand, the Beginning and Ending ones that are named for obscure songs by the Smashing Pumpkins, and all the rest of them."

John

"Yeah, they were my dream therapy. I wrote all those stories to keep track of what was in Dreams and what was real, because even then there was overlap."

Andy

"That cheerleader did jump at your school, didn't she. What was her name?"

John

"Dana Griffith. I'll never forget her."

Andy

"Did you really get that teacher fired?"

John

"Maybe. All I know is that the Griffiths and a lot of other families got justice when he was put away."

Other members of the team were entering the lab, so Andy walked over to John's area, "I always thought The Case of the Three-Eyed Man was a little too close for comfort to what really happened when Greek 2.0 got stolen from the Chess Championship. When I read the part about Alvin Green lying on the floor with Turk 2.0 stolen and a bullet in his head and later thought about how I had been lying on the floor, out cold with a lump on my head in reality, I felt like I was walking over my own grave. "

John nodded knowingly. How many times had he felt like he was dreaming the life he could have lived if things had somehow been different? They worked on through the rest of the afternoon, comparing notes and conferring with each other and other members of the team, but neither spoke of the Dreams again.