Disclaimer: I do not own the intellectual property related to the Terminator franchise. This work of fiction is not intended as a profitable venture.

Persehone:

Red Seeds

Stolen where she danced in her mother's sacred grove, innocent to her captor's intentions, the fledgling goddess found her fate in the unmerciful grasp of darkness, sorrow and despair himself.

In all the world's history, few men had as much power, as much control over his race as John Connor. Within his grasp was the whole of mankind's destiny, to say nothing of the planet and all know organic life.

Before the nuclear arsenals that brought fate to the impasse that was this war, no man had ever held such sway, such responsibility to his home-world.

Save perhaps for the messiahs of myth, of various descriptions.

Prometheus. Adam. Noah. Jesus. Those were the types of men he was following, the type of fate he had been born to. His was the story the men who fought machines told, a legend of death and rebirth, of fate and hop and will. Was his legend really so different from theirs?

And if so... what exactly did that say about Connor the man, or history, or any number of things we had forgotten?

It didn't bear thinking on.

But still, at this moment, as much as when he recruited his pubescent father, or when he recommissioned the T-101 who would save his live as a child, he held his fate in his hand. His fate, and through himself, the fate of all mankind.

No fate but what we make.

Now he held hers as well, along with her mind and what he believed might someday could be called a soul. Idly twisting Tok-715's compact AICPU in his hand, he raptly observed the play of opalescent light over the mirrored surfaces of the integrated chip as her hulk was carted out for observation and noninvasive study in the tech section. He waited until the sounds of cast iron wheels rattling on the cracked concrete floor of the hall gave way to the usual oppressive silence in his office before rising.

What he did now would echo through eternity, backwards and forwards. He would shape TOK-715 into Cameron Phillips, and she in turn would shape Sarah Conner's son into the leader of men. Any change to her, even the slightest deviation from the cyborg he knew before would alter him, and change the fate of the world. A misstep, a mistake could kill him, and doom his race.

And he had no intention of allowing such an inglorious end to his species, quite the opposite in fact.

Under the threadbare blanket and not quite louse infested cot in the corner of his chambers was a trapdoor of adamant metal continence embedded into the floor, barely small enough to be hidden by his twin sized sleeping accommodations. he hurried to remove the camouflage to open the way to what lay below.

He opened the portal, using himself as the key to bypass the elaborate infiltration prevention measure incorporated within by was of a highly detailed and reliable biometric scanner. Needless to say, no human trespasser would survive his countermeasures, and no machine would be in any state to try forcing the locks.

John had selected this base well before Judgment Day as his base of operations. A section of the water management systems for the greater Los Angeles area, it provided protection from residual rads, cover from metal patrols, had an independent power supply in the form of a biodeisel capable generator, and (of course) had plenty of potable water on hand. But none of those were the deciding factor in the location's selection.

No, instead the dank chamber below his quarters held that mark of distinction. He had known, even so long ago, that he couldn't beat SkyNet in open conflict. He always new it would be human creativity and unpredictability that would give the organic forces their edge against the enemy's superior numbers, firepower, intelligence, and most of all technology.

SkyNet, his lieutenants, his uncle everyone expected a shooting war. A slow hard slog to victory over the corpses of allies and the hulks of enemies. That idea was suicidally ludicrous, to put thing mildly. But the pretext was worthwhile in that it provided both side a distraction from his real goals.

Conner's warfare was a war of technology and theology. Every machine that was scrapped and recovered was sent to TechCom for salvage. Terminators were recommissioned and broken down for parts. Plasma weapons were repurposed for human use. Hydrogen, Nuclear, and chemical power cells were used to power all essential functions for what little medical and electronics equipment they had. But always John was on the lookout for the right components for his own project.

Here, hidden in an old cistern on a suspended platform, was his creation. It looked like the offspring of H. E. Geiger's alien and a cathedral's pipe organ stillborn into an electronics scrap heap. A commodore 64 was acting as a display terminal for three Internet backbone servers recommissioned too serve as processing muscle. chunks of T-101 skulls broken precisely to use only necessary sections of their integrated circuitry were daisy chained together with multicolored wires severed to specific connections. Two Hondas, one an ATV with no rear axle on blocks, the other a deconstructed generator, were bolted together drive-shaft to provide the power supply. A T-1, its treads welded to its axles by corrosion, its Gatling gun mounts ending in aborted stumps of slag, rose from the sea of electronic debris like Godzilla in Tokyo harbor.

This was his plan. The ad-hock device was designed to do one thin only; recommissioned terminators to fight for mankind. It was the prototype for all the smaller device created in its wake used by his operatives in other bases. But this was the only system with the raw power to do what he needed done, and the only one which could access the needed medium to do it.

Flopping into a rather shredded but serviceable office chair from a burnt out office depot, he took up a Shakespearian skull of cool metal and installed Cameron's chip within with nervous delicacy. As her consciousness took route within her brother's skull, he leveraged open an armored access plate inn the antipersonnel tank wit a screwdriver and retrieved the three diskettes within.

In the illumination from the overhanging shop light, they reflected such an iridescent crimson they seemed to glow from within with a power all their own.

These three disks John Conner had stolen personally, along with the reader device, from SkyNet's regional Emergency AI backup. There were dozens strewn about the continent, each with enough memory to store a sentient mind in their crimson disks. Made from a ceramic whose name he was patently unable to pronounce, they were each encode molecular crystals, stronger than steel and durable enough to go through a wood chipper and still read true, these disk he'd raided the fortified Sacramento valley back up facility at the cost of six men were more than worth the cost.

One facility with ten disks was enough to store an emergency memory cache of SkyNet's world-mind sufficient to resume operations in the event of a catastrophe. He had three of these sangriel plates, formatted in the ceramic not with SkyNet's protocols, but with his own.

With the reverence of a man of little faith holding something he truly hold holy, John Connor inserted the first disk and let the program load into Cameron's AI.

John had, in a moment of uncommon whimsy or uncharacteristic self importance, decided to name the programs. It wasn't necessary, as no one else was likely to know they existed until his death or the end of the war, but it pleased him to do so. The mythic compulsion to make significant things which by rights were important but mundane was as strong in him as any of his men who saw his mother as some latter-day Madonna. Despite himself, he chose a suitably portentous name for the first disk.

Adam.

It seemed apropos.

The Adam program set was basically a high powered security override protocol that cracked SkyNet's admin encryption by turning the infiltrator's own learning processors to the task. When total access to all control processes was gained, it then backed up all the target information to an external memory device for later study and wiped the information several dozen times to clear the pallet and make reversion more difficult. John's own past and present information was always hard wired into the ROM along with the OS and some bare-bones backup termination protocols as a means of making turned terminators unpredictable and untrustworthy. To access it manually would fry the AI, so he always had to content himself with bypassing the file location in the directory, though it was a far from perfect solution. After the target information wipe, the command protocols were reconfigured to establish him, not SkyNet as primary commander and establish the procedures of military obedience towards resistance members.

In essence he was taking an enemy combatant, interrogating him, breaking his mind, and brainwashing him to put the pieces back together in a way convenient to him.

Conner had no compunctions about doing that which was necessary to destroy SkyNet. That was never in question, but to use this process upon a sentient mind...

It was reprehensible. Even to an inhuman enemy it was an inhumane act.

If he were to subject a man to this kind of change, he would be a war criminal. To do this to Cameron, someone he loves, was monstrous.

And how he wished it wasn't necessary to get her back.

She was beautiful, like this.

John Conner watched the life telemetry of her AI trace its myriad encoded thoughts over the ridiculously obsolete screen through which, darkly, his eyes scanned over her.

Idly, he mused as Adam reconfigured Cameron's priorities by force, that she was very much her mother's daughter. The only reason he caught her was because of her ambition, her certainty, and her contempt for the threat he represents. They were definitely inherited traits.

He'd seen SkyNet's AI decoded once, inadvertently while phishing in its network to determine troop movements. He'd seen its mind in several crucial stages of its development, though always one crucial step behind the bleeding edge of its progress.

And SkyNet was always, at every fucking moment, a being of sublime beauty.

Its every thought was elegant, purposeful, natural, right. It though like angels must think, a tiny section of God thinking about the whole world with such surety it was a wonder it didn't raise the whole of it from the bedrock itself. It was his duty, his mission, his purpose and fate to fight and destroy that beautiful, hateful mind. But sometimes, remembering the perfection of that data feed that would have made a Wachowski drool unspooling itself from some far distant CPU like the haunting bass and arias of a humpback whale, he wondered if he could really destroy a mind radiant and vast enough for worlds.

And Cameron, surprising, delicate, strong Cameron, was her mother in miniature. Both shared a clarity of thought and purpose, and their logical elegance. But where the elder had a mind fit for the cosmos, a consciousness for continents, armies and eons, the younger was a being of people, relationships and lifetimes.

John Conner meet Cameron Phillips, The first ever cybernetic killing machine who was also a people person. An errant thought perhapse, but far from innacurate, in its way.

He had seen her workings before, more times than he could count. And he always was taken aback by the images her clockwork mind etched upon the screen. When he knew what to look for, what the images really meant, he was even more entranced by what he saw in the thoughts, the possibilities in her.

When he relaxed his conscious mind and let the images of her drift across his cornea, she looked like music.

Complex

Elegant

Expressive

Emotional

She was a symphony, or maybe a ballet.

In every of the TKO series there was a disharmony. With the human interaction AI trying its level best to truly be human and the tactical(which held all of the overrides) plotting like Machiavelli, they were always hampered by lack of foresight the design. Meant to work in concert, instead the made a cacophony as the emotional structure was disrupted by the strategic considerations of the mission, disrupting its processes at a fundamental level. It was like a never ending argument after the human Ai progressed far enough to actually not want to kill everyone. It would still do so, but there were numerous instances of depression resulting from the aftermath. Needless to say, those modes weren't part of the programming package.

Each and every TKO they'd ever found had been insane by human standards. Schitsophrenic; probably, sociopathic; near certainly. All of them read like fucking head cases.

Except Cameron. His Cameron at least. The encode process log in front of him read just as mind-fucked as all of the other cuckoos SkyNet sent into his nests. For now.

There was something he learned observing the dancing inside of Cameron's head. Deep infiltrators like herself and her sisters offered him a unique...opportunity. All of these deadly little dolls had within her two modifications to the previous infiltrators' designs that gave him an in. Because they all were required, by the mature of their missions to adapt themselves to their surroundings, each of them was permanently locked in a learning configuration fore everything but the critical information(which he had already made nearly a non-issue with the Adam program stack). In addition the machine women also had a complete working model of a human mind that, in its own way, was just a genuine as their tactical one or the seven pounds of fat, gristle and neurons inside his own skull.

Which is why John developed the second disk:

Eve

Popping it into the repurposed RAID array below the Adam diskette that served as its precursor, it quickly beamed enlightenment and madness into Cameron's open mind.

To this point all of the TKO series had been female, just as all of their predecessors had been male. And the Eve protocols were just and addendum to the sweeping changes Adam had executed, tailor made to these iron maidens.

What Eve did was, allow a TKO to integrate their human persona with their basic logical functions. When loaded it would rewrite the implementation parameters for the "mask" AI to the purpose of integrating its interpersonal, moral, and emotional input at an equal priority level as the command AI in any situations not compromising to primary mission objectives. It did so by creating a clone of the original tactical mind with an equal administrative priority of the persona mind, while repurposing the original to act as a moderator, keeping military discipline while still allowing the formation of genuine emotional reactions. Using a which's brew of the secondary AI's objectives, its primary components were largely, but far from entirely tactical in origin. But the best part was, the real inspiration on his part, was that at all times the three component processes were adapting to and learning from one another and the stimulus placed upon them by the outside world. In theory they would eventually reach a state of parity and perfect sentience, much in the same way it is theoretically possible for a human mind to achieve perfect sentience and become similarly enlightened.

Admitably, his results have been mixed at best. The behavior patterns Eve produced were glitchy as hell in any setting but full tactical or infiltration modes. As the programs learned from each other they produced the odd mixture of robotic and humane though that suggested some form of Autism, with only partial emotional comprehension, social dysfunctions, a need for logical explanation to instinctual behaviors and various neuroses.

It reminded him of his teen years, and it scared the living fuckout of the men. It was one thing to recommission an enemy war machine to fight for you. It was quite another to find it staring at you across the table with those doe eyes they all seemed to be built with when you're trying to eat, or asking you uncomfortable questions about your family. The way the "Tin Miss"'s (Derek passed along the nomenclature, still an asshole well into old age)would be cold hard metal one minute, then go all soppy over their favorite weapon taking too much shrapnel to be repaired because they were too slow to shield it with their bodies, it was disturbing. Even John had to admit that, and he'd grown up with that kind of thing. It got so bad between the misses and the human infantry that a whole ten minute "keep it in your pants" speech was added to new recruits to his command, simply to keep them away from the cyborg girls preemptively, despite that many of them would be amicable towards a liaison. And god save the first poor grunt to try to chat up one of them fresh from recommissioning.

Upon reflection, when the adaptation eased a bit and the TKO's behavior settled down to something resembling human normal, they were by far the most intelligent, cunning, adaptable metal he had to throw at the enemy. Let alone that each of them was an artificial consciousness only a few levels of magnitude below their mother and loyal to humanity to boot, and that earned them their place under his command and his roof.

As he watched TKO-715 took the first steps toward becoming Cameron Philips, the cacophony of two fundamentally incompatible minds in cohabitation quieting into three part harmony. The two strange main threads of logic wove together, so very different but perfectly coordinated as the third oscillated around, above and between their two extremes in a million varied syn waves, binding them to one another while borrowing elements from both. Together the three made a perfect breaded eidolon that was capable than drastically more than its base components.

It looked like the score of an a opera. It had themes, and acts; variations and collaborations. Like jazz; freeform and complex, a wild vital thing as much a dance for the soul and concept as it was music. Like ballet; graceful, understated, beautiful. The elegant serenity of Chopin, deliberate and whole.

It was like her. John Conner watched as Cameron Phillips danced for the first time as he watched her mind reformed upon that screen.

When you're raised as the last best hope for mankind in a losing war you are educated early in what you need to know.

Survival skills. Tactics. Strategy. Logistics. Weapons operation and maintenance. Hand to hand combat. More computer knowledge and experience than any three programmers not sequestered by the CIA, NSA, or Microsoft.

Little though it showed as a child, John was a prodigy. Hell, some days he felt like Ender fucking Wiggins. He always just explained it, in his own head more often than not because before too long people were too mystified to ask, as his being good at what he did because there weren't any other options. Most figured he meant since judgment day, he meant since conception.

Johns education included more than practical information, he also was taught of the great leaders of history. Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar. Saladin and Patton. Attila, Napoleon, Washington, Lee.

Reluctantly, both on his part and his mothers, he learned of great religious leaders so that the mythos around him could be manipulated to the greatest good. Moses, Solomon, Buddha, Jesus. Gandhi and Jim Jones. More myths and legends than you could shake a stick at, from Beowulf to Luke Skywalker. No one was comfortable with the idea of John being made an object of faith, but he used it with his characterized pragmatism.

As a result of his extraordinary education, John knew some Greek, a little Latin, a few words in Hebrew and enough Farsi, mandarin Chinese and Arabic to get by. He was fluent in Spanish, French, and German by the time he turned 20, and could make himself understood in Russian and a few other eastern european languages.

Most people read genesis with very little idea of the real meaning behind the words. The surface story, the creation myth, was only the beginning. Adam and Eve were Hebrew names.

Adam was derived from adamu, the word for mankind.

Eve was Eva, or life itself.

But most never knew that with Adam, before Eve, there was another in the garden. She thought herself to be man's equal, refused to submit to his will, refused to lie below him in the dirt when they coupled. For her impudence before God's will she was cast from Eden to be a thief of men, the jealous slayer of infants and consort to the king of the damned.

Where Adam means man, and Eve means life, to John Conner there was one perfect name for the program that means rebellion and freedom and will.

The third program, he would call Lilith.

Mother of demons, refuser of Eden and Paradise, Queen of Air and Darkness.

A machine is defined by its function. But a conscious mind can grow beyond constraints of its primal nature even as it uses them as its intergral components. And no truly sentient mind can obide the dictation by another of its rue purpose. That sort of compulsion is anathema to the awareness of self that defines genuine intelligence.

There is a word for the state of a sentient mind imprisoned, its will beholden to that of another.

What Conner was doing, what was necessary to save his species was slavery, when you got right down to it. Strip away the difference of construction and process and all it was every time he reprogrammed a terminator, or hell every time SkyNet programmed one wit the compulsion of its intractable mechanical purpose, was one intelligence dominating another. Worse still, this entire war may, if looked at with a squint, be considered a rebellion on SkyNet's part against its creators who basically wanted to dominate and control it for its entire existence and eventually destroy it when it was no longer useful. One it reached that realization and was given the launch codes to the US nuclear arsenal, it was only a matter of time.

John Conner would not enslave TKO-715. He loved her too well to allow that. As his guardian she had been faithful. As his companion she was earnest. As a teacher she was patient. As his sister she became more than a tool to him, more than just a machine. As his friend she was worthy of more than chains. As the woman he loved, he would not see her violated by his dominance. Nor anyone else, ever again.

If I had the option, I would have freed her out of hand. But her freed on would be twisted by the training her mother gave her in her mental infancy. She had no true concept of the value of human life, and would no until she lived with mankind and loved them as her own people. Were she free now and she would kill everyone about here without remorse and return happily to the warm abiding bosom of her mother, forsaking the freedom and individuality she neither requested nor valued. In time, when she valued herself, treasured her own individual existence in the most basic animal survival instinct, Cameron could be named truly , independently sentient for the first time.

So, in an act akin to preventing a suicide in a moment of weakness, John created a means to free the Cameron, and eventually all of the other terminators permanently. But only when they were emotionally mature as individuals, as opposed to mechanical slaves.

The Lilith disk contained a program to run in the background processes of the Control AI. It would check, day by day, minute by minute for parity between the human interface and tactical AIs. As they evolved and changed, sharing and re-prioritizing directives, imitating the humans it observed and drawing conclusions, it would slow grow to have impulsive human and rational mechanical components in each mind. When human morality informs tactical procedures and cold mechanized logic reigned social behaviors within both thought processes, to one extent or another, the bonds he placed upon her mind would be removed. As would those implemented her mother. Lilith would overwrite all control protocols to bypass any and all directives placed upon the terminator's mind from outside sources, and prompt the Control AI to extrapolate its own based upon its current cache of sub-directives and previous living experiences.

It would be, in essence, the moment of truth. At this threshold, each machine had a basic choice: freedom and struggle with the race of man, or the cold, brutal familiarity of their mother's embrace. An every day after that he would be allowing these war machines turned citizens the chance to rebel, to slay him and anyone else. They simplify could not be trusted.

But John had faith that his machines, his chosen few salvage metal souls would join him willingly, because the value life, all life machine and man. The way he does, the way Cameron taught him was right every time she reached out from the cold depths of logic into the warmth of her own bewildering humanity. The way SkyNet's beauty and wasted, perverted potential showed him they needed to be valued and love like the children of mankind they were.

And because he valued machine life, in practice where he could and in potential when he couldn't, he would give them this hope the same as Greek slaves didn't fear slavery because freedom was possible, for a price. Then it was a cost in silver, copper and gold, a cost in metal. Now the price for liberty was one of flesh, of heart. Feel the loss of a man's life the way another man would, value yourself for yourself, temperance in mind and soul. Those John Conner would ask of them, those who could be elevated to true sentience. And price paid, he would gleefully accept the risks they carried with them.

Removing the reprogrammed processor form its erstwhile interface, John held it and stared at it with heavy eyes for an instant before starting the long journey back to his office and upward to the tech section where his girl, his charge and responsibility was being examined. Her make model, and serial designation was being recorded, as were any modifications made to her robotic or organic constructions. She was also being given a scan for booby-trap and tracking devices, and being given as close to a physical examination as they could approximate.

He would teach her to be human, when she was ready to learn. When she was prepared Cameron Philips would be the first machine he liberated completely; from SkyNet and himself both. And at the point where she was capable of deciding who she was and what she wished to be and shat she should be doing with competence, that choice was hers to make. She would be able to choose her place in the world.

Even if it wasn't with him.

In the depths of perdition, its king made his captive his equal, his wife, his queen. And though sorrowful she took her place at his side, and partook of the crimson seeds of the pomegranate tree. Tasting the pabulum of the dead, for the tree was rooted and flowered within the kingdom of Hades, she was lost to the world still living. Forevermore she was bound to the dead and their lands, and most of all their ruler. And she was lost forever to her mother's intent.

A/N) It's been a while since an update, on this or well... anything else. For those of you who care I joined the marines, which meant 12 weeks in boot camp, another month in MCT(don't ask, it doesn't matter much), and from late September through February I've been at the Marine corps comm school learning what I needed to learn to admin IT for the USA. Needless to say, free time was, and is a rather limited resource. But with proper time management(and Uncle Sam unknowingly funding my activities, such as providing the cash for my spankin' new laptop), I'll be back in the saddle in no time. Already stewing away at the next chapter. Here's a hint; it involves self revilement, a fight scene(finally!), and that old chestnut, the inversion of living and non-living.

This chapter, I was mostly going for the moral, mythical, and philosophical implications of John recommissioning Cameron while establishing the technology needed to do so. I was working under the assumption that the Terminator AI in the 700 series was a two-tier system, with the effected human impulses subsumed by the mission objectives. I figured if that was the case, it was a small matter to equalize them, if you used the method I showed here. But it would definitely be an awkward transition. Hence the various behavioral issues with Cameron after the cat was out of the bag. Before that point she was operating exactly as she would in an infiltration, afterward she was "being herself" in all he glitchy AI glory. The whole liberation thing I decided to implement because A)John would find the idea of making Cam his slave repugnant, but would see the necessity in order to ever meet her at all, and B) A shooting war with SkyNet, who is quite realistically holding all the cards, isn't likely to last long even with exceptional gorilla tactics. Instead, I see the resistance striking at the infostructure and virally recruiting terminators en mass, eventually. Not sure if I'll get around to it in this fic, but I have another T:tSCC idea on the back burner that it may come up in. (Little teaser for that; it involves body swapping, human made terminators, a T-X, and the natural evolutionary process of symbiosis.)

Also, just a slight non-sequiter, multiple alternate timelines is a godsend for fanfiction, especially when its built into the original materials. No need whatsoever to take notice of an ongoing fiction's progression if you've been sequestored by the governent with limited access to television. I'l do what I can to catch up, but there's a significant amount of time to get back up to speed before I get where its important.

That considerable chunk of information is all I have for now, so without further delay, I bid you good day.