Author's notes: Warning; this chapter will start out a bit disgusting and might feel a little hard to read, (it was hard writing it), but it will turn out all right.

The two agents from Weyland's special operations department stood leaning against their car, smoking cigarettes. They both had a look of chagrin in their faces as they watched the emergency personal carry out the body bags from the burned house – this development was not welcome!

"Yes Sir, the old couple is gone," agent Humphrey reported into his radio. "Gone as in 'dead', Sir. No, there's no sign of the girl, she wasn't at home when this happened. We have no idea who did it. Of course, Sir, I wouldn't think otherwise. Yes, Sir, I'm quite aware what this means. We'll find her, Sir. Yes, Sir, I'll report back when we find her." With a heavy sigh he turned off the radio.

"Not a very gracious call, I take it?" agent Bolton asked his partner.

"He's angry of this news, and I understand him, "Humphrey said grimly. "This was the perfect safe-house for that brat, with legal blood-related guardians who only had their religion in mind to keep her in check. Whoever did this did not do us a favor! Now we're going to have to find a new place and a new program to put that little pest into! If only she had been at home at least when this happened, then this wouldn't have been a problem for us – then she would have been silenced!"

"We have to find her and bring her in?" This was more of a statement than a question.

"A.S.A.P." Humphrey confirmed. He took up the satellite tracking padd and turned it on. What he saw didn't please him. "Fuck! According to this, she's just been here! And we missed her!"

"She couldn't have gone far," the more reasonable agent Bolton said. "Which way did she go?"

"She's heading south-west," Humphrey replied.

"Let's go. We'll catch up with her!" The colored agent threw away his cigarette and got in behind the wheel. The younger agent hurried inside the car as well and they drove off with shrieking tires. They drove past the watching crowd with only centimeters apart; they had no real regard for civilian safety. Several people actually had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit by the car and they stood waving their fists in rage after the agents.

The car sped along the way they figured the child must've gone – but suddenly they couldn't go further! Poles were set up on the street to halt unnecessary traffic.

"Damn!" Bolton cursed. "This neighborhood wasn't built for easy drive-by! We have to go around several blocks to get to the right street on the other side!"

"That will cost us valuable time," Humphrey muttered. "Fortunately she still has her cell-phone – she'll be easy to find."

"The killer may yet get her first," Bolton stated as he backed the car to turn around.

"One can only hope."

Rebecca could no longer think straight. She was running aimlessly because she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do. Her mother's parents – her last relatives were dead! She was alone! She was homeless, and she was not welcome anywhere else! She didn't even know where she was right now; she had run away in such blindness of despair from the burned-down house that she had got lost and did no longer know how she would find her way back. But what was there to go back to? She had lost everything!

Wherever she was, it was not such a good place for a young girl to be alone in – she was in the back-alleys of some run-down buildings in the old industrial streets. Once sometime ago this area had bloomed with different manufacturers and suppliers – but the Weyland-Yutani Company had made them all go out of business. The area was deserted and devoid of life – almost. When Rebecca stood against an old trash-can to catch her breath, she was approached by two men.

"Hey, kid, you all right?" one of them said. "You look kind of sad. What's wrong?"

"Are you lost?" the other asked. Rebecca was in such deep despair that she momentarily forgot about her distrust for other people.

"T-they're dead!" she said with trembling jaw.

"Who is?"

"M-my grandp-parents… and all of my family… they're gone! They're all gone! I'm all alone!"

"Good gracious!" the first man said. "You have absolutely no one? No one to take care of you?"

Rebecca shook her head. "A-and someone wants to k-kill me! I don't know where to go! I don't know what to do!" The tears were streaming down her face.

"Holy shit!" the other said. "You're really in trouble, aren't you?" The girl nodded in reply.

"Hey, don't worry! It'll be all right! We'll take care of you!"

"Yeah, we got plenty of room at our place – we'll be happy to have such a cute little girl like you living with us."

A warning-bell was starting to buzz in the back of Rebecca's mind. "I… I can't pay for…"

"Oh, you don't have to worry about that," the first man said, now with a funny – and somewhat hungry smile. "All you have to do is to be nice to us from time to time."

"Be good to us and we'll be good to you. Ain't that a fair deal?" The other also had a funny look in his eyes now. Rebecca's stomach was starting to wrench itself. Her grandmother had warned her about this! She said that there were men out here that wanted to do unspeakable thing to little children. If her grandparents had been so concerned for her welfare, then why did they want to flog her?

"N-no!" she said nervously. "G-get away from me!"

"Come now, kid, don't be so ungrateful! It's a win-win for all of us!"

"Can't believe how lucky we are! Cutest little kid I ever saw – and no one who'll miss her!"

Rebecca tried to run, but the two villains caught her! One of them held her in a tight grip above the ground with one hand across her chest and the other covered her mouth. The girl went into frenzy; she kicked and tried to use her teeth, fighting with her most ferocious strength. But she was famished; her power wouldn't last long.

"Don't worry, little girl – you'll soon get used to us!" the creep who held her hissed in her ear.

"I always liked the fresh and lively ones," the other said hungrily. "I think I'd like some of the down-payment right now!"

"Take off her pants! Let's see what she has to offer!" The perp reached in between her kicking legs to grab on to the hem of her gym-suit. Rebecca screamed behind the hand, but to no avail.

"UNHAND THAT GIRL!" a voice suddenly boomed behind them. The child-molesters turned around and saw an old-looking man on a motor-cycle. They had been so engrossed with their 'fortune' that they had missed hearing him approach.

"Who the hell are you?" the one who was not holding the child asked. It couldn't be a relative – the girl said she was all alone.

"Unhand that girl!" the biker repeated, stepping off his MC.

"Look, you don't understand," the other perp said. "This is my kid! She's a bit of a troublemaker who keeps running away, but I was about to bring her back home…"

"Incorrect!" the old biker stated as he approached them. "She is mine!" He pulled a gun.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey…" the first one sputtered as he held up his hands. "We get it; you want to have a go with her too! It's okay, you can have her first! Just leave something for the two of us afterwards…"

Pops analyzed their words and came to the conclusion that these men displayed behavior that was declared as heinous to society – even Sarah Connor detested this kind of molestation above anything else. Pops recalled Sarah Connor once saying to him that she didn't like him going around hurting people so much although he limited himself to shoot them in the legs – but these kind of people she wouldn't care less if Pops shot their dicks off!

Pops did exactly that.

The first man he had a clear shot for – the other he had to time correctly as the girl was kicking in his arms. When she had in her struggle swung her legs to the side and left the crotch of her assaulter clear, he fired. Two shots of the gun and two sets of genitals became mince-meat.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGHH!"

Three bodies dropped to the ground: two of them because the excruciating pain in their shot members made their knees to give up under them. The third fell to the tarmac as she was let go because her assaulter had other matters to be concerned for – the child came to rest on her knees where she remained, quite shaken up. The two perps crawled away while holding on to their ruined crotches with their hands, bawling loudly in agony and leaving a trail of blood after them.

Pops came up to the girl where she sat. "Are you all right?" he asked her. Rebecca hardly looked up – she sat staring at an invisible spot before her, trembling all over. Pops could see that she was in a state of shock.

"They… they wanted to… h-hurt me…"

"Yes. They are child-molesters. They no longer have the ability to hurt a child again, though."

"…Y-you son of a bitch…" one of them whined.

"It was lucky I found you when I did," Pops continued to tell the child. "I didn't see you anywhere between the mall and your house. I figured you had gone in another direction away from there."

"M-my house… It's gone! And m-my grandparents…"

"I know," Pops said. "The Terminators did it. When they were certain that you had been located, your grandparents were deemed as witnesses to be terminated."

"Terminators?" Rebecca asked, still trembling. "W-what are they? Are they… synthetics?"

"Not exactly. They're cyborgs. Cybernetic organisms. Living tissue over a hyper-alloy combat chassis-skeleton. Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 – T-800 series."

"That's quite a mouth-full…" Rebecca said, finally looking up. "But it doesn't tell me anything! W-why do they want to kill me?!"

"I do not have all sufficient data," Pops said. "But the most probable reason for you to be terminated is because you are the last living descendant of Sarah Connor."

There was a silence for a while as Rebecca was looking at the old man with a bewildered expression. Only the whining from the perpetrators behind her was heard. "Don't just stand there talking… call an ambulance! Oh, God… it hurts!"

"Who?" Rebecca finally asked.

"Sarah Connor was the key-element in the war against Skynet back in the early 21: st century," Pops explained. "It was thanks to her and her mate Kyle Reese that Skynet was prevented to launch the nuclear war that would have destroyed all of human life in the year 2017."

"What…? I… I don't understand!"

"Skynet was a supercomputer created by Cyberdyne Systems – it was meant to be an Omni-automated system designed to run everything in the country. But Skynet became self-aware and concluded that mankind was a threat to it. Its goal was to launch every nuclear missile available to destroy the entire human population of the world. That day would have been called 'Judgment day' and would've been the beginning of the war against the machines. The survivors would have fought for their freedom, so Skynet would have created the infiltration-machines to exterminate the resistance – those machines would have been known as 'Terminators'."

"I still don't understand!" Rebecca was getting a little irritated now. "You're talking of a war that should have happened but never did! And you're talking about machines that were never created, but are here now to kill me anyway! You're not making any sense!"

"Sarah Connor destroyed Cyberdyne and defeated Skynet in 2017 – Judgment Day never happened, that timeline has been deleted. But Skynet must've somehow survived into this era –the proof of that is these new Terminators. In the near future from now, Skynet must once again be attempting to launch Judgment Day – but apparently it is this time taking precaution to make sure that no one will stop it! Skynet is systematic; I believe that Skynet believes that the training and determination to fight Skynet has been passed on from generation to generation through the family-line of Connor – it wants to make sure that you won't be there to interfere with its' plans! Most likely it knows that you are the last member of that blood-line, so it has sent three Terminators back through time to terminate you now, in this year when it knows that you are the most vulnerable and defenseless."

Rebecca sat on her spot, looking very skeptical. There was another moan coming from behind her. "You can't just let us lay here and bleed to death! Call a doctor, for crying out loud!" The other just lay crying - Pops ignored them.

"Sent back through time?" Rebecca questioned. "Are they from the future?!"

"That is the most common point of origin." Pops said. "They have the ability to travel through time with the help of a time displacement unit."

"Then you're from the future too, right? Don't deny it, I saw you! You're one of them!"

"I am a Terminator, but I am not from this future. I'm from the timeline that didn't happen. I've been here for over two-hundred years. I was with Sarah Connor when she destroyed Cyberdyne."

"But you're still one of them! Then why are you helping me?"

"Sometime in the timeline which no longer exists I was re-programmed and sent back to the year 1973 to protect Sarah Connor who was nine years at the time to be her guide and protector until the time was ripe to make a strike against Skynet. I have no files on who sent me, but I was programmed to ensure her survival at all costs – both her and her offspring for as long as I could! When it came to my knowledge that you have become a target, I set out to find and protect you, just like I am programmed to."

"This… this is crazy!" Rebecca started to look very distraught. "How can this be? Why did my grandparents never say anything about this?"

"Your grandparents didn't know. The bloodline of Connor runs on your father's side."

"My father?! B-but his name was Jorden, not Connor?!"

"It is still not uncommon for the women in a family to take on the last names of the spouses they engage holy matrimony with. That occurred two times over the years between Sarah Connor and your father."

"Wait a minute… You're saying you've been following the family since Sarah Connor… you said you are programmed to protect them! Then why didn't you protect my dad?! Do you know what happened? Why weren't you protecting us in my colony?!" Rebecca was now looking very upset.

"I couldn't protect him on that distance," Pops explained as-a-matter-of-factly. He didn't sound angry for being accused of abandoning his mission. "When Russell Jorden left Earth together with your mother there was nothing more I could do – I couldn't follow him even if I was feeling obliged to. All I could find out was that some time later they had you and a brother, but that was all. I do not have any knowledge of what happened on that planet – all I know is that you came back to Earth alone."

"Alone!" Rebecca whispered. "That's always how I end up… all alone! And now I'm even the last one!" That knowledge filled her with such sadness that it completely overwhelmed her.

"Are you all right?" Pops asked.

"NO, I'M NOT ALL RIGHT! HOW CAN I POSSIBLY BE ALL RIGHT?!" Rebecca couldn't help it: she broke down completely and started to cry in her anguish. "I don't understand… Why is this happening to me? (Sniff) The monsters destroyed my home and killed my family! I thought the woman who rescued me loved me, but she wants nothing to do with me! Instead I got stuck here on a world I know nothing about with people who thought their god was more important than I was! (Sniff) The kids at school hate me – they always bully me, but no one cares! And now I got robots from the future on my tail who wants to kill me and no one cares about that either – instead they too just want to hurt or to molest me!"

One of the shot men behind her tried to make an excuse. "W-we're sorry, okay… just call for a doctor! Pleeeeease! It hurts so much!"

"Like you know anything about pain!" the child snorted at the men behind her. "I wanted nothing of this! I just want to be a normal kid, how is that too much to ask?! Instead I got monsters and killer-robots wanting to do terrible things to me and no one to turn to… and on top of that I'm hungry! I'm tired and I'm hungry… but no one cares!"

"I care," Pops said. "I took care of Sarah Connor when she was a child and all alone. I can take care of you too if you'll allow me to." Pops stretched out his hand to her, inviting her to take it. "You won't make it out here by yourself, Rebecca Jorden. Your best chance is with me, and deep down you know this. Let me help you."

She hesitated, still unsure what to make of this robot. But what was the alternative? This machine, no: cyborg was right – she wouldn't last long in this cruel world. Who knows what's out there? She didn't know, but perhaps he did. She had nowhere else to go, and he did save her – twice even. Maybe he was sincere, and she had nothing else to lose. She took his outstretched hand and allowed herself to be pulled up to her feet.

"We need to get out of here as soon as possible," he told her, not really releasing her hand.

"What's your name?" she asked carefully.

"Sarah Connor called me 'Pops'. You may do so as well."

"Pops… what about them?" she indicated to the two men who still lay wriggling in agony on the ground.

"What about them?" he asked her.

"Are we going to… leave them like that?"

"They wanted to hurt you. Does it matter?" She wasn't sure. It was just that she felt like she was no better than they were if she just turned her back to them. But they did want to hurt her - and this was the adult's world, not hers since she was just a kid. They went by rules she knew nothing about. She said nothing more; she only followed along her new protector into the unknown future.