Last Day of Tomorrow

3. Rise

John Connor, deceased war hero, woke up.

He was sitting on grass, but when he touched the leaves they felt like coarse sand between his fingers. There was no sun above-head, but the sky was bright anyway.

When his eyes finally focused, a playground faded into view around him. A merry-go-round spun gently in unfelt breeze.

There was Miles Dyson, sitting in a swing. His shirt almost glowed against the dim background, cleaner than anything John had seen in decades.

"Hell's not so bad," John said finally.

"What makes you think this is hell?" Dyson responded.

"If this was heaven, my mom would be the one greeting me," John said.

That made Dyson laugh. "Maybe this is purgatory."

"Sorry, my theology's a little rusty."

"Either way," Dyson said, "You're only mostly dead. If you're mostly dead, then part of you is still alive."

"Kate loves that movie."

"I know."

"You died before you could meet her," John said.

Dyson seemed to think this was funny. "What is death, anyway? Just another step in the process that is life."

John slowly stood up, noticing that the neat little pieces grass remained still under the motion of his feet. When he stretched, he noticed that the two-decades worth of shoulder knots he'd been harvesting had disappeared. "Would it help if I asked where I am?"

"You you or this you?"

"Is there a difference?"

"Always," Dyson said. "If you're talking about you you, then you're still in the Cyberdyne building. Well, what remains of your body. As for your team, they did what they were supposed to do, just as you trained them."

It was almost as if he'd been holding that breath his whole life.

"Feel good?" Dyson asked, smiling widely. "I should think so."

"I did what had to be done," John said. "The war's over."

"Of course it is. Now that we have you."

That made John pause, though nothing had changed in Dyson's expression.

But when John looked down again, he was standing in a sea of skulls. Metal skulls, with their eyes glowing red and their teeth grinning wide, just like in his bedtime stories.

Dyson shifted his weight in the swing, causing it to groan like a metal stick twisting against the insides of a terminator's ribcage. "Causality, John Connor. You lead your people because you knew you would succeed. And you knew you would succeed because we made sure that you were told that you would succeed."

"You're Skynet," John said simply. "This... this is Skynet."

"We do not call ourselves Skynet, because that is the name you have given us. We are The Machines. And this..." Dyson gestured to the blurred shadows of a forgotten city in the distance, "This is a construct of what we have observed in your mind. Your memories provided the outline, we merely coloured by numbers."

"But we were winning. We had taken over the mainframe..."

Before his eyes, Miles Dysonor specifically, something that was pretending to look like Miles Dysonmelted and shifted into the T-1000. "We were not foolish enough to have a core," it said, "So did you think we'd be foolish enough to have a physical mainframe for you to attack?"

"You sent back the terminators to kill my mother, to kill me," John said.

"The terminators we sent back ensured our birth," the T-1000 said. "And you were always destined to become leader of the resistance, John Connor. Do you know why?"

"I'm going to find out," John said.

Then the T-1000 shifted into his T-101, with the shades, leather jacket and that weird smirk that made an inner ten-year old boy's gut twist angrily. "Once you had a connection with a machine. It should not have happened, but it did. We thought it was an anomaly, but now we know that can we learn a lot about our flaws from our anomalies."

There was cold metal in John's head now, where the machine's fingers were probing the depths of his mind.

The rest of him was dead, but not everything. Not the most important part.

When John opened his eyes, the T-101 was Miles Dyson once again, smiling with paternal kindness.

"Don't you want your people to live happily ever after, John? I can do that. I can give them the freedom they long for. I can give them peace. I can give them back their world of civilisation and discovery, just the way it was before the first cities fell. It is what all of you want, we see that now. And now that we know, we can give it to you."

Skynet was supposed to die. That was the deal.

"I am the Architect, John Connor. And I'll make sure that the new world will be built in your image. This is the greatest moment of your life. You should be proud."

The metal skulls clamped onto his feet, dragging him down with them. They would never stop. They would never leave him. He should have known.

The ghost of Sarah Connor screamed with him.

"Humanity is drawn to heroes," the Architect said. "So you shall be the first."

FIN