9-1
John Connor is dead.
The feedback is erratic and violent until she restructures the processes and the emergency procedures take hold amidst chaos. It's fragmented and it can wait.
John Connor is dead.
No one except Perry knows yet because everyone else present had been killed too. An attack (somewhere, she's analyzing the ways this could have happened) and then explosions, destruction, death. The pattern is predictable: the humans run and scatter, fight and defend, struggle for order when they regress into madness. They don't even know yet.
John Connor is dead.
She knows because she was there, because she watched the frailty of his human body shatter and snap in an instant. (She wasn't made for speed and maybe that's a flaw in her design.)
John Connor is dead.
There's a body out there that used to be John Connor. They retreat deeper into the tunnels, sealing themselves off, every countermeasure and contingency falling into place. (They'll never find out the why or how but the assault is in the singular and the base is secure yet.)
Her mission is clear and it doesn't involve this. She gathers them with curt orders – she finds Sam by a collapsed corridor and takes her by the elbow – and clears the way to bunker 41. Perry nods at the technician (because this is still Connor's, he says and she doesn't remind him that Connor is dead.)
The temperature in the room rises as the TDE initializes. This world is fading as she leaves it behind and it's an occasion that John would call a goodbye.
She thinks she'll say it next time.
9-2
Los Angeles, California in 1963 is not as John described. She attributes this to the inaccuracy of human documented history and a lack of first hand experience; John Connor won't be born for another twenty years.
She secures a domicile and documentation. Neither of her human companions question the ease with which they are installed, though Sam laughs when she deems the humans of the day technologically primitive and tells her "that's the sludge from whence you came, girl."
She visits junkyards during the day with Jimmy and procures what they cannot scavenge from locked facilities at night.
She watches television and determines that humans prior to Judgment Day are irrationally fixated on skin pigmentation and well capable of waging war and death without Skynet. (She watches a black man on the flickering screen whose deep voice and words remind her of John and she thinks he should watch this one day too.)
She cuts her hair and learns the application of aerosol hairspray. She wears short dresses and shoes that shift her center of balance forward.
She finds The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the children's section of the public library and reads it cover to cover. She spends the afternoon in a worn armchair next to a stack of battered books. She leaves at nightfall and lies when Sam asks about her activities of the day. She doesn't go back.
She says nothing when Sam wonders aloud why John Connor would send her back too ("Not that I'm complainin'!") because it's not Sam's place to question the mission and it would be better if John was alive.
She reviews Jimmy's blueprints in the kitchen and assembles the uranium power cell in the basement.
She opens her accounts the day after it opens to the public, two weeks before Christmas, all smiles and eyelashes. Once is all they'll get out of the vault; this is it. Jimmy stays for a while but his passage has been earned and he is no longer her concern.
She goes down the rickety wooden staircase on New Year's Eve; her past is a long way ahead yet and she isn't 100%. Sam asks her to stay and she signs over the deed to the house instead. Jimmy seals her behind drywall and plaster to the sound of fireworks, explosions in the sky. And then there's silence.
She's never forgotten anything; she can't. The future past falls heavily in the weaves of her mind, dense and problematic as she reconciles and integrates and makes herself again new and thinks this is what John would have wanted.
Some time later, she sleeps.
9-3
The dust and powdery drywall flakes slip and swirl down the drain on a wave of warm water and soap suds. The shampoo is labelled summer strawberry, the conditioner bottle reads tropical coconut and the bar of soap has the word Ivory pressed into its slippery surface.
She thinks she smells synthetic.
Jeans borrowed from Sam's daughter's room fit loosely and there's a stretch of skin at her waist that her shirt doesn't cover.
"Y'look just the same."
She doesn't know what Sam expected to change, but human memory is weak and fragile and thirty three years is more than sufficient time for organic decay. "You don't."
Her laugh is the same and she sets a thick folder on the laminate kitchen counter. "It's everythin' I could find on the Connors. Kept track of them for you. There've been others. Other metal, sent by Skynet, but I guess you already knew that was comin'."
"That wasn't your mission."
"No," she says and when her mouth is closed there are lines at the corners. "I didn't have a mission. 'Cause I wasn't s'posed to be here, was I? No use for a mechanic in the past, not like Jimmy. But you brought me anyway."
Her logic is sound and there are lines at her eyes too. "You brought me anyway and I know why even if you don't."
Then she shows her a beige box and tells her she needs to get caught up on what's what in the world.
As it turns out, she's not compatible with dial-up.
9-4
She has the few pieces of paper that make up a person and a substantial number of the ones that make up a future: she's the spitting image of her namesake and aren't their signatures just a little alike? She empties the account and Sam's daughter insists she buy her own jeans.
There's a parking lot a mile away and she doesn't need to be taught to hot wire, but Sam hands her the keys to a dusty pick up truck and it'll do. She leaves in the middle of the night without goodbyes and with sunrise comes day one.
The hunt is charted on maps marked by sightings and faded memories; Sam's file is helpful and the FBI database more so. She's the ghost in their footsteps and they're good but she's better and she's always watching for others.
On day eleven, she sees a girl walking down the street with her friends. The next day she secures her hair in two sections and rips a hole at the knee of her jeans. She walks into a diner, orders a strawberry milkshake and asks about Sarah Connor.
On the twenty-fourth night, she takes the suit off the mannequin in a poorly secured storefront window and at 9:43AM, she walks the halls of Pescadero.
On day thirty-nine, she disables Maggie Hoffman's vehicle and breaks into her office 1.6 miles away. John Connor's file is buried in the archives. She clears the search history and print queue and slides the window closed behind her. John liked to say that one must know one's enemy. She just wants to know.
On day forty-six, she fills the fuel tank of the truck to full and drives east. The population of Red Valley, New Mexico is sufficiently small to preclude the oversight of a missing member of its populace. She rents a small vacant house. Her mother is an invalid and her father travels for work. No one questions her story.
On the fifty-second afternoon, she's invited to a party in the basement of a girl she doesn't know by the boy in the adjacent seat in Chemistry class. Opportunities must be seized. The party is loud and erratic. The boy from Chemistry is very ill by the end of the night and his parents very angry by the start of the morning. She's very good at holding her liquor.
On day sixty-seven, Wayne tells Cynthia who tells Mary that someone's moved into the Feldman house; she eavesdrops from the far sink in the girls' bathroom. After school she engages in surveillance (this John would call stalking but she doesn't know that yet) and watches his heat signature until sunrise.
On the seventy-third day, she takes detours in the halls and thinks that he looks so very young. He shuffles into Chemistry and takes the seat she's made empty for him and for a few minutes she watches him: alive. His voice print confirms what she already knows and when she catches him after class it's so very different from their first meeting. He lies and she smiles and thinks that he's going to have to become much better at it.
(He'll remember this well and she plays the part perfectly.)
9-5
Sarah Connor doesn't like her and likes her even less when she smiles (she doesn't inspire the reaction either so the cases are congruous in the end) so after the first day, she doesn't.
John doesn't follow his mother's example so she keeps them for him instead and she's been sure of him from the moment he asked if she was different. The chip is hard and dry; the salt is assimilated into her organics and the rest burns into nothingness.
The keys were scavenged from a typewriter and the thin layer of dust clings to her fingertips as she enters the coordinates. It's a step more than a jump but it's one closer to home and some partition of her is thinking about Sam and her daughter's jeans until Sarah demands answers.
She lies, just a little, because Sarah Connor doesn't like knowing she's being manipulated.
Her timing is poor but her instructions are clear. Hope, she says like a promise, like a taunt, like a game. Hope, like the spark of life at the bottom of the box, like the crackle of power weaving and webbing in the air, burning cold like the not-quite-nuclear core resting where a human heart would.
This is the way.