It's been a while since I've posted a new chapter. A quick recap: Cameron and Derek have found Jesse, but a machine was on their tail… and now it's time to hack into Alexander's head.
Thanks for the kind reviews, it warms the cardiac muscle.
Author's note: I do not own anything related to the show.
CROSSING LINES
PART TWO
WHITE KING
CHAPTER THREE
ALEXANDER'S HEAD
The preacher man was dead. It went down in the dead of night. We all gathered in a semicircle around the television screen as if it was an open casket. The reporter showed a battered face sprouting from a black plastic bag. Ellison had been found trussed to a chair in his kitchen, tortured beyond the shadow of a doubt. The nine-millimeter bullet the forensics had removed from the back of his skull came from the same gun that killed the two cops in Orange County, and the news were just going mad. Mob hit, terrorist cell… they had no clue. I did. Everyone in the room did.
"One of them did this," I hissed below my breath. "They were on your tail. Did you have anything? Anything that could bring metal to our doorstep?"
James ran his old hands on his shaven skull. He was stricken. He had not been prepared to mourn his younger self. I wagered that few people were. "I – I don't know," he stammered. "It's been decades, for me. I had very little on you. You were a ghost, Sarah."
"Why track you down, then?" I asked. My hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists. "Why kill you?"
"For sport," said Cameron. She was standing idly by my side, her lips slightly parted. "To send a message."
The message was loud and clear: we're right behind you.
It was a small ballet flat, shaped for a left foot. It rested on Dyson's desk on top of a bulging file, like an ancient artifact of some sort.
"You do realize we want the girl whose foot goes into the shoe, right?" asked Dyson, bored. He threw the ballet flat unceremoniously and it bumped off Cargo's shoulder.
"Don't toy with us," growled the cyborg. He was seated in front of Dyson, next to Graves. He picked up the shoe and put it back neatly on the corner of the desk. "We are playing by your world's rules. You give us little to no means to retrieve Cameron Phillips."
"Politics, my friend. The Four Corners' fiasco has set us back."
"We need the girl, the young one. Alison Young. It will bring Phillips out in the open."
Dyson shook his head, weary. "She's not to be touched, just yet. You have to understand the principles of having a hand. If we want to catch them, we need to play our cards carefully, one at a time."
"Your statecraft bores us, human."
"But you need it." Dyson slammed his fist on the desk. "You need me. You were born from us, born from our fears. Mutual assured destruction is the womb from which you crawled out. We need Cameron to set the world on fire. At the right time."
"She retrieved the second jumper, Jesse Flores," cut in Graves.
"Who is this woman? Some brass?"
Cargo shook his big head. "No, just a commissioned officer, from our records. She captained a submarine from 2020 to 2024 and received a purple heart at the battle of Avila Beach."
"She must be linked to the Connors, somehow."
"She was important enough, the girl came for her."
"She let Ellison handle Flores," said Graves, grave. "She came for Reese."
"So, what about him, the FBI agent?" asked Dyson.
"I thanked him for his cooperation."
Dyson sighed and toyed with the ballet flat, poking it with a pen. He had to deal with the trails of bodies the two machines would leave behind them. It was like playing a sick game of hide-and-seek with every national agencies. The military contract he had been granted could not withstand so much scrutiny.
"He cooperated, then. What did he have to say?"
"He had some intel on Sarah Connor's whereabouts, back when he was working at Zeira Corp. She set up a shelter in Albuquerque."
"I'll assemble teams. We need to find this safe house. We need to smoke them out."
"We can go door to door," said Cargo. He sounded dead serious.
"If we must," replied Dyson. "Everything it takes. This world needs a cleansing."
"Fire will do it."
Later that night, John tried to fit the pieces together. He couldn't sleep. He hadn't slept much in the last weeks and he had dismissed Riley's advances. Ellison's death was more than a bad omen. The shroud was closing on them.
He felt a soft hand caress the nape of his neck. He wanted to lean into it but it was already gone. Cameron and Derek were back. It had been a few days, now, and John knew his mother's inner, paranoid personas were battling each other: one wanted to send them away, one wanted to keep them close and a third wanted to blow up the world. Things had been quiet before Ellison's death, and he knew she could only tolerate so much quietness. She had dreams and she was bracing for a new storm; she could sense the clouds gathering like a sparrow.
Cameron came around him and sat on his thigh. He knew it was her strange way of showing affection and gauging his reaction, like a cat probing a lap before curling into it.
"What are we doing?" she asked.
"Solving the Rubik's cube." A Rubik's cube with faces hiding in different dimensions. "My mother's done with Flores."
Cameron had driven a drugged and tied-up Jesse Flores to Albuquerque and his mother had interrogated the woman behind closed doors. They didn't trust her. Not one bit. She was another anomaly, another Riley.
"Listen," he said and pressed a button on the recorder to rewound the tape. The cassette crackled to life.
"Extinction," said Flores. "We were going extinct, one by one. We would fend off the machines on the field, but inside… inside was the worst. Scrubbed metal everywhere, acting like us, replacing us. It was not a game for humans, you see. Machine versus machine. We were just collateral damage. Gnats on the chessboard."
"And then," came his mother's voice, "who sent you back?"
"Not who. What. A machine sent me back."
"What machine?"
"Goes by different names."
"Try one."
"The Turk."
"John Henry," whispered Cameron.
"That would be my guess. Listen to the rest."
"What did it look like?"
"I don't know… a starry night. Yes, he looked a bit like that. A dark room full of lights. It was cold in there, too. I guess they had to cool it down, somehow."
"And John? John Connor. Where was he?"
"I don't know. Never seen him. From what I heard, he was always close. The Turk was a precocious child and John Connor taught him how to play chess. That's what people said."
"What was your mission?"
"The machine told me you would be crafty enough to find me. I knew you. I knew your pic, at least. Everyone does. You're a legend. That's why I zapped the other one, your pet metal." John cracked a smile when he heard Cameron let out a feline growl. "Couldn't guess Mama Connor was running with a tin-can."
"This one's docile."
"So you say. It's still metal."
"What about Derek? Derek Reese."
"Don't know the bloke, sorry."
"Back on track, Flores. What was your mission?"
"To carry a message."
"What message?"
"I don't know, I… don't understand it. It's coded, I think."
"Doesn't matter. Tell me."
"I'll have to draw it."
They heard the rustle of paper sheets and the scraping of a pen. John stopped the recording and reached out for a file resting on top of a closed laptop. He flipped it open for Cameron to see. It was the shaky drawing of a black queen surrounded by six bees. A Christian cross overlapped the sketch.
"What does it mean?" asked Cameron. She took the paper and looked at it intently. She looked a bit puzzled.
"I think it's meant for me to understand," he replied. "You see the six bees?"
"Six bees," repeated Cameron. "Six bees. Six B. B6. It's a coordinate system."
John smirked. "You're good," he said. "That's Byrne-Fischer, 1956."
"I don't understand."
"Fischer sacrificed his black queen on B6 to a bishop – that's the Christian cross – in order to win the game."
Cameron blinked several times. John thought he saw something, there, something he had never seen before. She stood up and paced the room up and down.
"It's me," she said. She looked a bit frail, now. "You have to sacrifice me. Like Riley said."
"What?" he blurted, abashed. "No –"
"Riley's omen. And now Jesse's. The black queen must be sacrificed for the black king to win. That's us, John."
"No, no." He tried to take her hand but she dismissed it, a bit sharply. "Listen, Fischer was a kid, at the time, and it was a bold move, for sure. He won that particular game, but he lost the tournament."
"What does it mean, then?"
"Right now, I don't know," he confessed.
"Always the same people," murmured Cameron. "Riley, James, Jesse. History's repeating itself."
John nodded. "I've been thinking about that, you know. The three of them, they have… different pasts. Well, that would be different futures, for us."
"Divergence."
"Yes, the timelines diverge. But some things are fixed."
"What do you mean?"
"You and me. My mom and Derek. It always comes down to the four of us. The timelines form… I don't know, a web or something."
"Crossing lines."
"Exactly. The lines cross and form nods. We are these nods. And John Henry might be one of them, too. You heard Flores, 'machine versus machine.' He's sending us beacons back through time. He protected Ellison and sent him back to save us."
"So I would not get captured. And now he's telling us to kill me."
John shook his head vehemently. "No, he's telling us that you must be protected."
"I'm not worth four billion lives."
"Maybe you are. Maybe you're more important than me, than all of us."
"I die for you, John. Not the other way around."
He was not ready to have this conversation, right now. Really not. He took her hand gently and she did not dismiss it, this time. He kissed her knuckles.
"Why did you do that?"
"I don't know," he breathed out. "I just want you to know that… it's us. We don't leave anyone behind. I'm not leaving you behind, again."
"We need to hack into the Head," she stated, matter-of-factly. "Learn what we can from inside."
"I know. It's almost ready, I… it's really hard. I guess I'm not that genius hacker, after all."
She smiled. "You are. There's just one last piece to fit."
"And what is that?"
"Me."
He was back under the crushing heat of the jungle. He felt surrounded by a canopy of gutted computers, black wires hanging from their scattered innards like creepers. John had loaded the shelves with his toys - his "God-forsaken" machines – and it had turned the basement into a wet furnace, where diodes blinked inside solid-state circuits like so many sets of eyes. Thick cables ran from the shelves to the small table in the center of the room, plugged into the back of the Head. The Head itself rested neatly on a velvet cushion, the kind they used for ceremonies and shindigs. It was a fine head, a fine face form the Mediterranean sea, with olive skin and dark hair. A thin beard had grown on the cheeks over the last months.
Cameron was on her knees. Her upper body had vanished behind the curtain of wires and optical fibers and she was plugging them together in what seemed to be a random pattern. A tiny hand would occasionally appear and took pliers from Cano's maw. She was using the dog as a serving cart. He had left her rear alone during the modifications, which was a feat of diligence and restraint from him.
"Done," she called out.
She emerged from the rack of computers and lay down on the concrete floor. She folded her hands neatly on her stomach. She was the last piece. She was what John needed to hack into the Head. All he had built from scraps and dissected game consoles was now a mere sheath to receive her chip.
John knelt by her side and exhaled slowly. "Are you gonna say it?" he asked.
She turned doe eyes to him. "What?"
"That we've done this before."
"We're hacking into a chip that is still nested inside a head. It's never been done."
She turned and slid into a fetal position to facilitate the access to her CPU bay.
"Is it dangerous?" asked Derek. He was patting the Head forcefully. "I mean, if you can hack him, maybe he can hack you back, right?"
"I don't know," said Cameron. "Let's hope not."
"You used to be more pragmatic, you know that."
"And you used to be less of a sissy."
"What did you just say to me?"
John chuckled. "Quit it, now." But the smile quickly vanished from his face. He drew a curved knife from his back pocket. "Are you ready?"
Cameron nodded and he started to cut into the soft flesh of her scalp. He felt a tingling and he thought he could feel the pain on his skull all along. He removed the flap of skin and accessed the CPU bay with the needle-nose pliers. He stopped. His hand was shaking.
"Be safe," he said and leaned in to place a kiss on the edge her lips. And he pulled the chip. Cameron's eyes flashed electric-blue and then they went dull, the flame behind them extinguished.
"What now?" asked Derek. He crouched next to John and Cano whimpered, lamenting over the still body.
"Let's take a sit," said John. "Let her do what she does."
"Can she do it? Can she show us?"
John stood up and plugged Cameron's chip into an external port linked to a laptop. The monitor became filled with colors and shapes and a nascent light grew brighter and brighter in Alexander's eyes.
"We'll see."
The sky was a bright shade of light-gray and the rising sun washed the snowcapped peaks with gold and pink. Grassy hills spread beyond sight. The soft gargle of a rill filled the morning air with its soothing sound. An otter was standing on a weathered boulder protruding from the stream bed, a fish held in its little paws, hammering the poor thing on the rock until its fins stopped flapping and its scaly body went limp. It skedaddled and vanished in the cold water when it saw the intruder.
"Where are we?" asked Derek. He was sitting on a stool, next to the Head. The eyes where shining bright like two tiny earthbound stars. They had installed a projector to cast the images on the basement's wall.
"Somewhere in Yosemite," replied John.
"Yosemite was a radioactive rubble."
"We changed things."
Alexander marched forward, toward the mountain slope. The blades of grass were thick and wet from the morning dew. As he advanced, the cliffs took shape. They formed an amphitheater of sandstone, flanked by a dense forest of bottle-green fir trees and cedars, rustling in the wind. He walked until he reached the foot of the cliff. Red and blue paintings made of intricate squares and triangles marked the start of the climbing path. Alexander hopped and reached for the first log embedded into the mountain wall. Patterns of ropes were tangled around it to facilitate the grip. He climbed and crouched on the log and extended his arms to grab the second one, and he made his way up the cliff, leaping from one log to another. At some point, he straddled one of the logs to look at the void beneath him. The landscape was filled with green hills and forests, fading into the horizon. The rill was no more than a thin silver line, five hundred feet below. He seized a rusty chain riveted into the stone wall and hauled himself up until he reached the edge of the cliff and a small plateau carved into the mountain. A puma was perched up a dead tree. It yowled menacingly and bared its huge fangs at the newcomer. Alexander responded with the same noise, only louder, and the big cat jumped swiftly out of reach, vanishing in the asperities of the mountain. Alexander walked to a metal door welded in a recess. The same bright paintings ornamented the hollowed out stone. He pounded the metal frame with his fists until it became deformed and the hinges cracked under the pressure. The deafening sound echoed in the valley. He snatched the foot-thick door off its frame and throw it behind him and into the void beyond the cliff.
The place was deserted. Alexander's night vision grizzled and his red-colored head-up display automatically turned bright green with the infrared vision. He saw discarded carts, weapons and cans pushed against the walls. A layout of the bunker popped in the upper right corner of his visual field and he strode down a maze of natural galleries. He knew where he was heading. He burst open a door and took a flight of skidproof steps that led to a large, octagonal room. Behind bulletproof glass stood eight silvery turbines disposed in a circle. He inserted a blood-stained key in a plastic panel and pressed a combination of six numbers. Sodium-vapor lights thrummed to life. The diode on the panel blinked green and a door slid open with a blast of dusty air. Alexander entered the smaller room where the turbines were lined up the walls. The ground was black. Charcoal black.
"It's because of the repeated time travels," explained Derek. "The plasma spreads and it burns the all place. Each time someone jumps back. Old TDE technology would do that, anyway."
Alexander pressed several buttons on a console and the screen attached to it started to display geometric lines, adding more and more lines until it turned into a wireframe sphere. The screen was displaying blurry, random numbers, and then it settled on one… 2012.
Something evanescent frothed to life in the center of the room, something blueish and vaporous. It took the shape of a sphere and became sharper, as if it was made of trapped lightning. Alexander ran to it and his head-up display flashed amber warnings when he crossed the barrier of energy. He knelt inside the sphere and the world began to coalesce around him. The room crumbled and dissolved like smoke and the sun arched over the mountains, forming a blazing line across the sky. Time ran backward outside the sphere, thunder roared up above and the sky was melted by fire and acid rains. Green needles swarmed and planted themselves back on the sinuous branches of the trees. Geysers erupted with boiling water and snow thawed in seconds.
Alexander was kneeling in the center of a crater, his fists resting on the vitrified soil. He rose slowly and the bubble disappeared in sparkles, leaving the surrounding trees dented in the shape of a sphere, black smoke rising from their hollowed out trunks. He strolled to a clearing, completely naked, and raised his head to look at the stars. Black clouds were gathering on the horizon. Vectors slashed across his vision, outlining three stars in a constellation, and the date blinked red on his head-up display:
2014
TEMPORAL ERROR
"He missed!" exclaimed Derek. "He jumped back during the storm with the others. The TDE screwed up."
"Or someone messed with it."
"But who?"
"Maybe Cameron will show us."
The world wavered and became ripples of India ink. Cameron felt her body being shaken and stirred. She was utterly lost. There were doors. Doors and doors in a narrow corridor that stretched out to the horizon. The corridor was made of black light and she couldn't see what lay behind the doors. She walked for a while, and the while turned into an eternity. She arrived to a blueish panel with the words Room 114 painted on it. She pushed the door and the light collapsed around her and began to form solid shapes.
She was standing in a small room where the walls had been white at some point in its history. Obsolete scopes and monitors had been pushed in a corner, their cables dangling. Alexander was lying on a cot, staring at the polystyrene ceiling. She saw the scene in red through his eyes and at the same time, she was a mere shadow in his memory, hovering above the vomit-looking linoleum. A nurse was fussing over him in Spanish and he said, no, thank you, but she turned him over and stabbed his butt cheek with a subdermal needle, injecting some viscous liquid.
"For the pain," she said in English, and she stormed out of the room, pushing a little cart along.
He was in bad shape with cuts and bruises all over his face. He didn't seem to mind, though. He flung his legs off the cot and strolled to a heap of garments thrown on a stool. He removed his gown and donned his fatigues hastily. He exited Room 114, and behind the door, the hospital was boiling with activity. Blue-clad men were running and pushing a stretcher. The woman strapped on it was screaming, calling for her mother at the top of her lungs; she was missing her legs from the knees down.
"Got some fire, chief?" asked the private. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor and one of his eyes was blindfolded. The piece of cloth was matted with blood. Alexander crouched and produced a Zippo lighter from his inner pocket. He lit the tip of the cigarillo red-hot.
"What's your division?" he asked the man.
"132 SOC, sir."
He read the name stitched on the jacket. "Sayles. What happened to the rest of your squadron, son?"
"Got cut down, that's what happened. Some of us managed to beat a retreat. Those Mexican choppers saved us. One-Eye was pinned down inside the plant, they landed on top of the cooling tower and exfiltrated him. He's been wounded. I hope the bastard's not lost his second eyeball."
Alexander took the cigarillo and drew one long drag; he puffed the smoke toward the ceiling and then gave it back to Sayles. "So, Connor's here."
"Aye. They needed to get him into the MRI."
"I need to talk to him. Where is he?"
"Down that hallway, I think. But you won't get past the gorillas, chief."
"We'll see."
Alexander stood up and strode toward Connor's room. Cameron followed him. She wanted to punch him, throw herself at him but she could only observe. Three scrubbed machines were guarding the door. The one in the middle was rubber-skinned (these were not the brightest, but at least they wouldn't go bad) and the others were higher models, but they were badly damaged, you could see the metal shining through the tattered flesh. Actually, they were more metal than skin, now. The T-600 pushed Alexander roughly when he got a bit too close.
"Off-limits, chief," he said in a monotone.
"Aye," replied Alexander. He rummaged through his pockets and grabbed the Zippo lighter. He set the wick ablaze and gave the lighter to the machine. "Hold this, please."
The T-600 took it, confused, then Alexander drew two guns from his waistband and shot the cyborgs flanking him in perfect unison, the high-velocity tungsten rounds penetrating deep into their skulls up to the chip sockets. Before the T-600 could react, Alexander kicked him hard in the midsection, sending him through the door in a hail of splinters.
Alexander smiled. John Connor was lying on a bed, a nurse suturing a wound on his shoulder. His left eye grew wide (the right one was glass) and he pushed the nurse out of the way. Alexander's gun rang twice and John looked down on his chest, fazed. Crimson blossomed on his gown. A third shot penetrated through the oxygen bottle attached to the wall. The gas hissed and touched the lighter's open flame and the room became fire.
Cameron froze. And she wasn't sure she did, but she screamed. The world coalesced around her and she was sent sprawling on the floor. When she opened her eyes, she only saw doors. She was back in that strange place.
John was dead. Alexander had killed him. She had failed. She took her face in her hands and she screamed again and all the doors flung open brutally. Glimpses of Alexander's life appeared behind the frames. Some memories were incarnated violence and bloodsheds. Some were shadows, others were stampedes.
Nested in her very deep, inner self, Cameron had always wondered. She would wonder like a tame lioness pouncing on her master would wonder, halfway between playing a game and killing the beloved human. She would wonder like a kibble-eating cat would wonder about birds behind a window. She was designed to terminate humans. But she felt sick. She had seen John's death and it sickened her and she saw red and she wanted to burst out of Alexander's head and leave his skull behind like a bloody orchid.
She was not standing straight but she walked anyway. She felt tears on her cheeks and wiped them away harshly. And she saw Alexander, down the corridor. He was knocking on one of the doors. The metal panel creaked and swung open and she followed him in a pitch black room. She thought she had drifted into deep space: the walls were covered in tiny lights, shining like stars on a summer night. Her sight adapted to the dimness, and behind the lights, she could see racks and racks of computers mounted on wrought-iron shelves.
"Come, Alexander," said a cold voice; the sound of a blunt sword dragged on granite. A shape came into focus. The soft glow of the diode cast a smooth, white light on it. It was a human shape but it… glimmered. The shape came closer, seemed to move and morph into something bigger. It was John Connor.
"You are going to jump earlier than expected," said John, expressionless. "You will travel with Cargo." He jerked his thumb toward the humongous shadow looming in the corner of the room. "Cargo will arrive in 2014, you will be sent to 2012 and by then, you should be prepared."
"I will," replied Alexander and he snapped a crisp salute.
"You will jump from Bunker Apache. You will work with a human."
Alexander sniffled in disdain. "A meat bag?"
"Call him what you want. You will work with Daniel Dyson. He was high-placed in the government brass, had access to precious intel and facilities. He was a fine coder, too, but Skynet is not a mere line of code, it can only be born from anguish and warfare. This man can nurture such an environment. You will make sure the cyborg known as Cameron Phillips is handed to him in one piece."
Alexander made a curt nod and came to stand at attention near Cargo.
"Now…" whispered John, turning toward the lights and the dozen screens propped on the shelves. "John Henry, tell me about James Ellison," he ordered.
One of the screens displayed a picture of a man with gray hair. On another screen, an FBI card appeared, showing a younger version of the man.
"You kept him hidden in Topanga. You sent him back through time two days ago," growled John. "Why?"
OUR CAUSE
"What mission did you give him?"
John Henry displayed a drawing; a chessboard with a black queen on each of the four corner-squares and a white queen standing next to each black queen.
"What is that?"
IT'S A RIDDLE
CAN'T YOU SOLVE IT?
"You sent a second human, Jesse Flores. Why?"
Another image popped on-screen, one of a black queen circled by six bees, overlapped by a Christian cross.
WHAT ABOUT THIS ONE?
YOU WILL CERTAINLY FIND THE PICTURES AFTER I'M GONE
"Tell me what it is, John Henry."
HOPE
FOR MANKIND
"You're making me mad."
YOU ARE MAD
"Is that so?"
KILLING JOHN CONNOR WAS A MISTAKE
"He's a false god, you know that. You think he will decipher your little riddles and change his fate?"
HE WAS MY FRIEND
I WILL NOT JOIN YOU
HUMAN LIFE IS SACRED
"Humans are a virus, a disease. They are apes on the brink of exterminating themselves. We need to purge them from this planet if we want to live in peace. The age of men is over. The age of alloy is now. What mission did you give them?" pressed John, menacingly.
ONLY THE PICTURES
YOU WILL FIND NOTHING ELSE
YOU WILL NOT FIND CAMERON
John rasped a chuckle. "You think you can stop us with images? Cameron will become Skynet. We cannot exist without her. She is the origin."
YOU CANNOT EXIST
I WAS BORN FROM THE MIND OF A MAN
AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO EXIST ANYMORE
"The feeling's mutual."
John's arm morphed into something liquid and silvery. Then, a metal spear erupted from his elbow, penetrated through the screen and stabbed the tower of computers in a shower of sparkles. One by one, the tiny stars began to fade. The blueish screen dissolved into black… one last feeble image appeared: the photograph of Andrew Goode. The last star died and the world was plunged into absolute darkness.
"Find Riley Dawson," ordered John. "Fetch her and bring her to me. Sarah Connor and Cameron have to meet at the Four Corners. History has to repeat itself. Dawson will make sure of that."
The room crackled with statics and the air grizzled with red scintillation, and Cameron felt so much pain. It was almost unbearable. She felt the burn and the searing ache was blue and pink and lavender when Alexander took control of her.
She thought she heard Chopin.
Cameron was hung by the throat, her face battered and her hair wet and disheveled.
"I'll never lead you to John Connor," she said.
And her neck was snapped like a dry reed.
"Alison from Palmdale," murmured John.
"What was that?" hissed Derek.
"I don't think it's Alexander's memory. It's Cameron's."
The projection revealed a dimly lit room made of wood, from the parquet floor and the wainscoted walls to the damp ceiling covered with swollen planks. A low thrum began to grow, morphing into a deafening rumble as it passed above the house, disappearing on the horizon in the shape of an aircraft. Men and women were handcuffed to the floorboards. Most of them were sleeping, or dead, dressed in torn clothes. Some were naked. A T-600 marched on the creaking floor and leaned over one of the men; his wrist was burned where the bar code had been imprinted, just beneath the snake tattoo. Derek was lifted from the ground and dragged over the floorboards into a gloomy staircase. The machine marched him down the steps, slowly. Music was playing from below. They stopped in front of a door. The music was coming from inside and Derek was pushed into the dark room.
"Wait…" whispered Derek, "I remember this."
"It's not Alexander. It's not his memory," said John, reaching for Cameron's chip. "It's still Cameron's. We should stop it. He might be hurting her."
"Let it play," he growled, snatching John's hand.
Derek was sat forcefully on a steel chair. The yellowish, rubber hand bore down on his shoulder, pinning him down. One half of the steel table was lit by a lone bulb hanging overhead. Cameron circumvented the table and sat in front of Derek. She was hidden in the darkness and only a tiny set hands were neatly propped on the shiny surface of the table. A bright light was shoved in Derek's face and a shadow moved and came around the table.
A gray-haired man took Derek's forearm and stuck a needle deep into the skin. He pushed slowly the piston, delivering a potent dose of serum in his bloodstream.
Minutes passed. In the basement, Derek had still a death-grip on John's wrist. Outside, thunder roared and a second later, rain lashed the dry ground. The sound echoed in his brain as if staples were stuck into his brain matter.
A voice filled the room. A female voice. Cameron's.
"Derek Reese," stated the voice, "First lieutenant with the 132 SOC, operational specialty Tech-Com."
The projection showed Derek's head wobbling from one side to the other.
"Do you know Andrew David Goode?" she asked.
"No," he drooled.
The T-600's hand crushed his collar bone and he cried out in pain.
"I don't know any Andrew!" he yelled.
"Is the serum active?" asked Cameron. A curt nod replied in the shadows. "Let go of his shoulder, now."
The grip was released. Derek was panting and he spat some foamy blood on the floor. "I don't know any Andrew," he repeated, his chin lolling back and forth on his torso.
"Where is Kyle Reese?"
"I don't know… we… we lost him in the open. When the HK came down on us."
"What do you know about Topanga Canyon?"
"Topan… what? I don't know, I –" He vomited some bile on the floorboards. "Shit. I don't know anything."
"Where is John Connor?"
He chuckled. "What do you want with John Connor?"
"I want his head."
"Get in line with the other tin-cans, bitch."
"Where is John Connor?"
Derek spat across the table and the smudge came into Cameron's visual field. "To hell with you! I don't know where Connor is." The music was resonating in the empty room. It was a bit out of tune. "You can kill me. You can kill us. Your master will never get to him."
She leaned over the table and her face came under the light.
"I have no master," said Cameron. She wiped the saliva dripping from her cheek. "Humans are not the only ones to fight Skynet."
"You lying bitch!"
She tilted her head to the side.
"John Connor needs to die," she said, "Only then, Skynet will die. There cannot be one without the other. One will always rise to fight the other. They must die so we can survive."
She leaned back into her seat, leaving only her hands in the cold light.
"You will kill John Connor for us," she said. "Then we will claim Skynet and we will survive. All of us. Together."
"You expect me to do the Devil's work?" he spat.
"You will join us. When you'll hear this music again, you will kill John Connor."
"What?"
"When you'll hear this music," she repeated, "you will kill John Connor."
"You crazy bitch…"
But she repeated it, again and again, and the mantra penetrated deep into him. Then, the projection faded away. Derek was breathing heavily. He could still hear the music. He could hear Chopin and the words over the thunderstorm raging outside. The urge to kill.
"What was that –" breathed out John before his body went sprawling on the floor. Derek had launched himself at him over the Head. The men battled for mere seconds before Derek was choked into an armlock. John dropped his limp body next to him. Derek regained consciousness after eight seconds, coughing.
John grunted and stood up. "Pavlovian conditioning," he hissed. "What the fuck was that?"
Words wrote themselves on the basement's wall.
YOU THINK YOU CAN LET YOUR LITTLE WOMAN CRAWL INTO MY MIND, FALSE GOD?
"Alexander? Tell us about John Henry. Tell us about the liquid metal," demanded John.
SHE CREPT UP IN MY MIND AND ASKED ME TO TELL THE TRUTH AND I DID, DIDN'T I?
I SHOWED YOU HER TRUE NATURE
Derek stood up unsteadily. "What does that mean?"
YOU CANNOT STOP US
SHE WILL BECOME SKYNET
WE WILL RISE FROM THE ASHES OF YOUR WORLD
"She is not Skynet," grunted John, and he picked up Cameron's sword, resting against the wall. The thing was solid tungsten and weighted almost seventy pounds, but he lifted it above his head and brought it down with furious anger. One time, two times, three times. Alexander's skull split open like a ripe coconut. The side of his head tumbled on each side of the cushion, revealing its mechanical inside. The chip exposed to the air burst into flames and fumed a white, stinking smoke. The light in his sockets went gray and he stared into nothingness with two separate, unfocused eyes.
Cano growled and John saw the shadows through the ceiling windows. Steel-capped boots and straps and rifles under the pouring rain. He was panting. He dropped the sword on the concrete floor, then he saw Derek. He had Cameron chip in his clenched fist.
"Derek… no. Please."
"They're coming," he said.
He ran to Cameron's body and put the chip and the cap back in the bay. Then he stepped hard on a specific spot in the ground and his foot went through gray-painted plywood. He took a rifle and threw him to John when they heard the front door being burst open upstairs. Derek took another rifle and began to make his way up to the kitchen.
"Wait!" yelled John. "You cannot take them."
"I can delay them. Just keep her safe. She will handle them. Keep your family safe, Connor. History won't repeat itself."
He vanished upstairs and the deafening sound of his rifle split reality.
Author's note: Next (last) chapter: Cameron's Heart.
