Chapter Two

The machine strode over to the cracked looking glass and stood in front of it, turning her back on the old man. He saw her red hair's misty reflection in the dirty mirror, before her body seemed to go out of focus, shimmering like the ripples on a lake.

He closed his eyes and briefly turned away, as if he were unsure if this was the right thing to do. Steeling himself, he forced his body to turn back towards the mirror and opened his eyes again.

Long, silky brown hair flowed over her shoulders as she slowly turned to face him.
She was wearing the attire he remembered so well; leather jacket, denim trousers and combat boots. She was looking at him with that sad, longing expression that had always taken his breath away. The one that had haunted his dreams for sixty years.
She was just like he had so vividly remembered her. Beautiful. Shining…

"John?"

His heart leapt into his throat. There was no mistaking that soft, angelic voice, conveying such devotion and yet such insecurity.

The old man rose to his feet with difficulty, not taking his eyes off of her. Unsteadily, he walked over to where she was standing and extended a trembling hand. He wanted to feel her hair gliding through his fingers.
Just this once

He could almost smell her.

A smell is like a memory. It brings back all those things you have locked away so long ago. It reminds you of things you have treasured. The salty smell of seaweed on childhood's beaches. The interesting, calming odour of your favourite rubber teething ring as an infant.
It reminds you of things you have loved … or lost. It can fill your heart with joy, with blissful recollections of life's wonderful moments, or with terrible sadness, with things you have let slip away, things you have regretted, their memory mocking your impotence at retaking the past. Reducing you to a slave of time.

Before his hand made contact, the old man hesitated. He let out a groan and clutched at his chest.
"No…"

He retraced his steps and collapsed back onto the chair, taking deep breaths.

The young girl's form instantly vanished into shimmering silver.

"Is there anything wrong?"
Catherine Weaver approached his side, wearing a concerned frown.

John raised his hand and waved her off, not wanting her to notice the tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

"I'm fine. It's just … I miss her so much" he croaked, pressing his eyes shut and letting his head sink onto his chest.

She studied him for a moment before making up her mind.
"Mr Connor, there is something else I have acquired…"

John looked up at her and watched her reach into one of the pockets of her business suit. She retracted her hand, delicately holding a shining flat object between her thumb and forefinger.

He knew immediately what it was. It was what had kept him going for sixty years, what had made him stay alive.
Slowly, almost dazedly, he got to his feet and extended his hand. Catherine carefully placed the chip on his upturned palm.

He gasped. It was as if a current had shot through his body. He had to consciously fight the notion to brake down and cry, caressing the small piece of circuitry as if it were the spawn, the sheer essence of life.

"How did you… and where…?" he spluttered, covering the chip with his hands, trying to shield it from the world.

Catherine strode over to his desk and sat down once more, crossing her legs and straightening her suit as if resuming the meeting after a coffee break.

"John Henry has been united with his brother" she simply said, tossing her hair back.
"There will be no reprogramming or returning the AI to its system."

"What do you mean?" John asked in bewilderment. "I thought he was like a son to you."

"Judas is no son of mine."

"Who?"

Catherine almost rolled her eyes.
"Evidently, home schooling has not achieved the goal it should have."

Their footsteps echoed along the seemingly endless corridor reaching deep into the mountain. Skynet's base was also an underground recess, and it uncannily reminded John of the place he had called home for over half a century.
Catherine's form briefly shimmered as she replaced the Commodore's combat gear with her usual greyish business outfit.

"That's better" she commented while she continued to stride purposefully ahead, her now high heeled shoes creating double the commotion her former combat boots had.

Just why she had chosen to reside in the Catherine Weaver form and the uncomfortable looking dress code to go with it, John never knew. He guessed even liquid metal had its preferences, extravagant as they may be.

After they had left base camp and had been cheered and saluted at by everyone they had passed, they had headed straight for their former enemy's lair. Catherine had driven them there in a beeline in John's private dune buggy, taking no detours, and making sure they were not followed by anyone.
She had told him during the drive how she had literally bumped into John Henry where she had least expected him: In Skynet's main level, connected by his cord bus to the ultimate weapon's mainframe itself.
John could literally imagine his creepy smile as Catherine recited, with about as much emotion as if she were briefing her former employees about their new expert groups, how he had greeted her as innocently as always and had asked her outright 'Will you join us?'.
After she had declined he had willingly answered all her questions, the machines' logic forever remaining a mystery to John. Any human would have put up a fight or at least refused to reveal any tactical secrets out of sheer spite. But John Henry had not only offered her the information on the whereabouts of the time displacement equipment, he had also generously advised her on how to defeat his now actually quite defenceless brother, to whom he was linked.

"Are you sure there are no traps in here?" John asked her, feeling all the more unsure the further they ventured into the mountain.
"No bombs, self destruct mechanisms or a hoard of Triple Eights waiting around the corner?"

It had all been going far too easy for his liking.

"Positive" she said, as they finally reached the remains of a reinforced steel door which was set at the end of the corridor and bore deep lacerations around the lock and the security panel.
"The AI was so sure of itself it rendered the necessity for defences within its fortress' outer limits quite inconceivable."

"I guess you're right" John murmured, gazing at the stainless steel walls of the hall beyond the door and missing any of the usual telltale signs of surveillance such as cameras or motion detectors.

There was nothing to prevent them from continuing their journey into the bowls of the enemy. Skynet had had no monsters up its sleeve, not even a laser screen or the guillotine doors John had expected to be present ever since he had played a certain computer game back in the early nineties as a kid.

An array of computer equipment was set up at the far end of the hall. Crude and unsophisticated, it reminded him of the first time he had seen the John Henry AI system back at Zeira Corp's basement, with the Turk amidst of it.
All the computer screens were blank apart from the blinking of a cursor. John didn't bother to check. He knew what that meant. Skynet had been formatted, to put it bluntly. And so had John Henry. Cromartie's body was sitting on a swivel chair, motionless like a puppet, his creepy smile locked forever on his face. If it hadn't have been for the open port in his head and the thin laceration visible on his shirt just above his power source, he may merely have been in standby.

With a frown, John turned to the liquid metal machine standing behind him, which was patiently waiting for him to finish relishing over at last being able to experience what he had been striving to behold with his own eyes for over seventy years. The demise of Skynet.

"Catherine" he began uneasily, fumbling in his pocket for the chip he had carefully wrapped in the worn and crumpled antistatic bag he'd had on him for over half a century.
"If you deleted John Henry from the chip, what about—?"

"Mr Connor" she interrupted him impatiently. "Please do not imply that I do not know what I am doing. I of course transferred the John Henry AI from the host chip to the Skynet mainframe before I deleted them both. The chip's original programming has remained unaltered."

John let out a sigh of relief and nodded.
"Fine. Let's blow the place. Bur first help me with him."

He indicated towards the disabled machine in the chair and walked up to it, gripping one of its arms and pulling.
"I'm afraid I'm not as strong as I used to be."

Catherine raised an eyebrow.
"You intend to salvage the Triple Eight's body? For what purpose?"

John rolled his eyes.
"I already told you. You're taking him back with you together with the chip."
These machines, honestly

Without another word, she stalked over to the lifeless terminator and effortlessly slung it over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, almost knocking John over in the process.

"Watch it!" he complained, just about managing to steady himself on the back of the chair.
"Breaking a leg is all I need."

They left the Machine-God's sanctuary and strode once more through the endless corridor. As soon as they had reached daylight, Catherine handed John a tiny black box with a single red button.

John nodded and took it, turning to look once more down the corridor of doom.
"This is for you, Mom. Take that, you son's of bitches."

The charges Catherine had placed amongst the computer array went off and the muffled sound of a far away explosion echoed through the corridor. John threw the now useless detonator into the gaping opening and deliberately turned his back on a matter dealt with, just like his mother would have done with a content smile on her face.

"Right" he said, as they headed for the vehicle parked at the foot of the mountain.
"Where did you say the TDE was situated?"

Catherine glanced over the body slumped over her shoulder and cocked an eyebrow.
"I cannot recall having informed you of its location as yet."

I'll get used to that some day. And if it takes me another sixty years
John sighed and gazed skywards.
"Yeah. Okay. So where is it, then?"

"It is situated in a warehouse in the McGuire Gunnery Range" she told him as they approached the buggy.
"That is not very far from here."

She dumped Cromartie's body in the back of the car and climbed into the driver's seat. John got in beside her and stared out of the windscreen, deep in thought.

Depot 37 is a military ware house, a part of the McGuire Gunnery Range.
That
's where I was built

"I've heard that name before" John said absent-mindedly, while Catherine drove towards the remains of what had once been a city's industrial precinct.
"And I've been there. Depot 37. I wonder if it's still in there."

Catherine spoke in a matter-of-factly tone without looking at him.
"Depot 37 was acquired by Zeira Corp shortly before we left. In the future we shared once before, the TDE facility was a huge asset to General Connor, after the resistance had managed to take control of it. Skynet suffered great losses because of this. I had wanted to be one step ahead this time and I presumed I had been. It seems I was mistaken."

She stopped the car outside an intact building which seemed to consist solely of reinforced concrete.
"And how would you come to know of this facility, Mr Connor?"

He had a faraway look in his eyes, as if reliving events he had long forgotten.
"She disabled a terminator and locked him inside the fallout shelter. He had been keeping a stash of coltan. She … gave me the key…"

He trailed off and lowered his gaze to the floor as his eyes started to sting. Remembering where he had placed the key so many years before, he automatically reached into his pocket. The touch of the safely wrapped-up chip inside brought him back to the present.

Catherine turned to him, almost surprised.
"That explains the presence of a Triple Eight's remains, then. It sent Mr Murch into hysterics. He was able to learn so much from it after I had … acquired it. We removed the coltan to another company facility and installed the regeneration unit we used on the Triple Eight Mr Ellison procured for me."

"Cromartie?" John exclaimed breathlessly. "You repaired Cromartie in there?"

"Why, yes, Mr Connor" she replied calmly. "The body was in a close to irreparable state. You had done an excellent job of disabling him. And so it was thanks to your cyborg and yourself we had the necessary spare parts at our disposal."

"But why didn't you use the Triple Eight from the warehouse?" he asked in disbelief. "Why go to all the trouble of digging up Cromartie?"

Catherine actually seemed a little embarrassed.
"That would be because I did an even better job of … disabling it after I had entered the building" she admitted bashfully. "Nobody is perfect."

John let out a snort of laughter and Catherine got out of the car in an obvious huff, treating him to her best disdainful look.

"There is one thing I don't understand, though" she declared as they crossed the debris-strewn plain, which had probably once been the building's parking lot.
"Before I transferred John Henry to the Skynet AI system he informed me Mr Connor will find what he is seeking in Depot 37. The TDE unit is, however, not located inside the depot, but inside this building."

John Henry's voice having suddenly briefly sounded from Catherine's mouth unnerved John. Even though he had seen the red haired woman change into many different people, including himself, over the years and speak in various voices, the mellow, creepy voice of the cyborg who had stolen his protector's chip sent a shiver down his spine.

"I couldn't say, either" he admitted rather baffled, slipping his hand inside his pocket and relishing in the feeling of the object he had been searching for for so long.
"He had it in his head what I was looking for."

As far as John could see, the TDE unit seemed to be fully functional. Not that he had a clue on how to operate it, though. The first time he had jumped, he had been instructed on how to connect the strangest pieces of equipment he had ever seen which had been harboured in a bank's vault for years. The second time he had stepped into the bubble at the last possible moment, somehow knowing he would never see his mother again.

I'll stop it

John thought of his mother and how she had always tried to keep her promises.
I wonder if she managed

He watched the liquid metal machine twiddle various dials and depress some coloured buttons underneath a small screen.
Reminds me of a Kaoss Pad

"Catherine" he exclaimed after a sudden thought struck him.
"Whatever happened to the machine in the bank?"

She looked up from programming the TDE unit and stared at him blankly.
"I cannot recall committing with a terminator in a bank."

"Not a terminator" John explained breathlessly.
"The TDE unit. The one I jumped to 2007 with. It was in a bank's vault. How come nobody ever found it? I mean, we just left it there, somebody must have noticed bits of machinery standing around that by rights should have made no sense."

Catherine bared her teeth as if she were about to bite him, but John knew this expression to be her attempt at actually smiling.
She'll get it right one of these days

"Zeira Corp acquired the building in question the same day you left" she informed him conversationally.
"Again without knowing it, you greatly aided me in achieving my goal. And with the preparation and construction of my own TDE unit. The instruments you said you left behind were, although crude and partly disrupted by the explosion of an isotope weapon, still operational."

John's jaw dropped.
"Zeira Corp had its hands into everything, didn't it?"

"Why yes, Mr Connor" Catherine admitted with an unmistakable trace of pride.
"It has proved to be a veritable and most valuable asset. I must say I chose well."

She turned back to the instrument panel and powered the machine up. A faint humming sound filled the air as she keyed in coordinates, times and dates.

"Five dimensions?" John asked, trying to make sense of the multi-dimensional display and giving up immediately because his head started to spin.
"How on earth do you get five dimensions?"

Catherine gave him a kind, almost sympathetic look as if she had been asked why the sky is blue by her daughter.
"In addition to the three dimensions you might be familiar with, we also have to take the dimension of time into consideration."

"That's four" John exclaimed with a frown. "The display seems to have a fifth setting."

With something akin to an impatient sigh Catherine spoke in a slow and clear voice as if explaining something to someone not quite the ticket.
"That is because time is a constant, Mr Connor. Just as you are able to move about in your three spatial dimensions, you are also able to move about in time."

"But time flows, Catherine" he pointed out. "It doesn't stay still, just look at me. I'm the best example."

"You have grown older through time" she clarified, gazing at his wrinkles and deciding she would have to alter her appearance to compensate for the human aging process if she really were to continue to act as Ms Weaver back in 2008.
"Just because you move through space doesn't alter it. The dimensions remain as they were and the same goes for time. You flow, Mr Connor, time does not. And to find a point—"

"Fine. But that's still four dimensions" he interrupted her. "Where do we get a fifth one from?"

"Patience is a virtue which I need to teach you, Mr Connor" she said dangerously, folding her arms over her chest and scowling at him.
"I was just about to elaborate."

John practically shrank back under her disapproving stare.
"Sorry" he muttered, awkwardly shuffling his feet, feeling sixteen again and as if he were being reprimanded by his mother.

"As I was saying, to find a point in time we are required to obtain a fifth coordinate. Timestate, or, as your physicists call it, spacetime" she went on mechanically, like a school teacher resuming the lesson after an interruption.
"In our five-dimensional system we are now able to create a triangle between our current location in three dimensional space and time as humans measure it as well as the point in time we strive to arrive at. The five-point vector offers us our destination."

"Eh?"

Catherine simply ignored him and finished making the final adjustments to the TDE unit.
Sometimes I really don't know why I bother explaining

For the third time in his life, John saw the brilliant bluish-white time bubble materialize itself. He thought this unit must be more sophisticated than the others had been because the bubble remained perfectly stable without the usual spitting or hissing.
Just like a gateway
Also, Catherine did not seem like she were in a hurry. He supposed you just stepped into this bubble and pressed go whenever you felt like it.
Brill

Catherine stepped away from the panels and turned to face him.
"Are you sure about this, Mr Connor?"

John nodded. "Yes, I'm sure. Give my regards to Savannah and Ellison … and tell Mom I love her."
I wonder if she stopped it. I wonder if she took care of her body—…

"I will."
She inclined her head and strode across the room towards the entrance.
"I shall collect John Henry's body and—"

"No."

Catherine stopped in her tracks and slowly turned around, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.
"I beg your pardon?"

"No. I'm sorry, Catherine, you can't take him with you right now" John exclaimed breathlessly. "I still need to do something. I'll send him along later. Is that possible?"

She nodded, even though she still seemed a little surprised, if not confused.
"I have programmed the unit with the appropriate coordinates. They will remain set for you to return the body together with the chip at a later time. What is it you wish to do?"

"I'm not sure, I just have a hunch, that's all" he told her pensively. "I know you're not too comfortable with having hunches."

Catherine bared her teeth. "I have got used to your hunches over the years and I must say they have sometimes served you quite well. To use a rather dated expression: A man's godda do what a man's godda do."

John burst out laughing at the sudden deep Yankee voice she spoke in, reminding him of some terrible Western he had once seen as a boy.

She stepped up to the time bubble and glanced back over her shoulder once more.

"Wait" John exclaimed, rushing over to her, a concerned look on his face.

Now they had finally reached the parting of the ways he realised with a sudden stab of regret that his only friend was about to leave forever. He had never thought of her as a friend, not for sixty years, not until today.

"Take care, Catherine" he said, embracing the liquid metal machine and giving her a brief peck on the cheek.

He took a step back and watched her press a button on the panel before she entered the glistening globe of light. She turned around and stood still, her head held high, just how he would always remember her.

"Be careful out there, Mr Connor" she said, her first genuine smile on her lips.

And then she was gone.