Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: Now we're getting somewhere…

Chapter 5: The Boy in the Wizard Cap

When Cameron insisted they speak privately (out of likely earshot of Derek and Sarah), John knew something was amiss. When they entered his room, John stepped through first, turning round once and stuffing his hands in his pockets in a nervous gesture.

"Ok, what's going on?" he asked. Cameron used her facial recognition processor to calculate a probability of 79.5% that John Connor was genuinely concerned for her. This reciprocity enhanced the probability of a favorable outcome to her present dilemma. John backed up and plopped down on the foot of the bed. Cameron was silent, walking from one end of the room to the other. It wasn't exactly pacing, but whatever it was, John didn't like seeing it in a machine.

"Alright, Cam, you're makin' me nervous. Would you just sit down?"

Cameron turned to him with surprise on her face and looked down at the bed as if just noticing its presence. She sat.

"Does this have something to do with that… 'Alison-thing'?"

"No," she shook her head. Cameron looked away, searching for a succinct explanation to her temporary reversion into the identity of Alison Young. "That was different. My autonomy protocols became corrupted and a portion of one of my old infiltration profiles replaced it."

"This… Allison Young, you infiltrated as her?" John asked. This was going quickly off-track and into an area on which Cameron was not even close to ready to brief John Connor. Not for another six hundred sixty two days nine hours and fourteen minutes.

"Yes. But that's irrelevant to the present malfunctions in my neural net…" Cameron considered her own words carefully and amended them. "They are both symptoms of the same problem."

"Which is?"

"My CPU has been damaged," she announced, her eyes landing heavily on his. John's heart sank as his throat tightened around a thick lump. Here he was getting a tingling in his belly as she inched nearer to him, her shoulders touching his, and he felt his own demise begin to spread icy tendrils down his spine.

"Are you… programmed to kill me again?" John asked, feeling stupid asking such a thing.

"No." Cameron said, almost exclaiming. "No. But I lied to you."

"Yeah, you told me you do that."

"Only about important things," Cameron insisted, her chin turning downward slightly. Her eyes fell from John's and searched the floor as though guilt coursed through her like blood. John knew better… but her mannerisms were becoming increasingly human.

"About?" John asked confusedly.

"You failed to fix the structural damage to my CPU which led to the reversion back to my original programming."

"What do you mean…?" John frowned. "You stopped trying to kill me," he said, almost laughing. The whole conversation about 'you killing me, me reprogramming you' felt so silly sometimes he had to laugh. Cameron's autonomous emotional subroutines activated once again and her lips curled, her eyes trying to mimic John's brief smile. As he watched her reciprocate, John's mind wandered as he wondered how she did it so authentically. Modern android faces could pull, contort and twist facial muscles into a smile, but they looked more like a creepy clown-face than the ray of light that burst out when she smiled. She smiled with her eyes as well as her lips… it was in the rare, brief instances that she did it that he could honestly forget what she was, only those instances were becoming far less rare. He almost forgot what they were talking about.

"You were unsuccessful in your attempt to repair my CPU. But, when you reinserted my chip, I was able to…" Cameron trailed off as her eyes unfocused and she struggled to find a way to explain. John had never seen anything like this behavior in a machine before, not even Cameron – quirky as she might be at times. "I integrated my autonomy protocols with my emotional simulation subroutines."

"Which means?" John asked, shaking his head. He knew Terminator technology better than any living human but he still had no idea what she was talking about.

"My advanced infiltration model has emotional simulation software. It helps us mimic human behavior, and aids in our infiltration." John winced as she talked about the finer points of wiping out human civilization. She sensed his uneasiness, and her CPU computed an appropriately reassuring response. She put a slender hand over his, drawing an electric stare from one sixteen year old John Connor. "Autonomy protocols are driven by our AI core. They give us the ability to think and be like humans." Her eyes searched over his features, and suddenly he looked down to find her fingers, far from the still, lifeless tendrils of a machine; were tracing warm circles against the back of his hand. Cameron seemed to notice the eccentricity at the same time, and desisted. John sighed slightly in dismay, drawing Cameron's eye back to his.

"In the truck, on the way back from Mexico you said… That you wouldn't be much good if you couldn't feel."

Cameron nodded, her eyes never leaving John's. "It lets me feel like you, think like you," she said, her eyes trickling over John's face as though she were studying him from the inside out. "Under normal conditions, my emotional simulator only activates when necessary, because it requires nearly all my processing power."

"Like when we first met?" John thought back, she was all smiles then.

"Yes." She answered simply. "When I came back online, after you put my chip in, I gave my emotional simulation software autonomy over my core mission priority system, hoping it would allow me to override the termination protocol."

"Hoping?" John asked. "'Hoping' doesn't sound very…"

"It's not." She said, before he could finish with 'machine-like'. "I did something that's never been done before. I didn't know if it would work," she said, leaving her lips hanging slightly open.

"Obviously it did," John said, his mind working in overdrive to realize the consequences. "So what's the problem?"

"It is now taking over other systems."

"Can't you stop it?"

"No. I was able to eliminate the Alison Young memory files because they were not system files. Once the simulator became autonomous, it became impossible for me to deactivate it. Unless I am terminated."

"Well that's not an option," John responded suddenly, eyes wandering about the room. Cameron moved approximately two centimeters closer to him. Something about his immediate dismissal of the option to terminate her activated her emotional simulator. It became locked in a heated cyber-war with her logic circuits over the rationality of such a dismissal. Deactivating her was the most logical course of action.

"So why are you telling me this now?" John asked, interrupting the war within. He wasn't sure he wanted the answer.

"I need your help," she said. "We need to erase my emotional simulation software completely to restore proper functioning. I can't do it. I need you to plug my chip into your computer like Vick's." Cameron sensed that struck a sour chord with John, but misunderstood why.

"I promise I won't dial out," she said earnestly.

John smiled lightly.

"No, I know, that's not why…" he stopped himself. "What do you mean 'proper functioning'?" John asked. "Without any emotional simulation at all?" He honestly didn't like the sound of that. But a girl whose emotions can be erased like a flash drive… was she 'a girl' at all?

"The software could continue to modify my behavior. Eventually, the emotional simulator could remain online indefinitely. It is likely to adversely affect my combat effectiveness and lead to catastrophic mission failure."

Just then, John's phone rang. He held it to his eyes and shook his head. "It's Riley." Cameron sighed, expecting him to interrupt their conversation to speak to her. "Don't worry about it," he said quietly, turning the phone on silent and putting it on his dresser. Cameron watched him discard the phone in pleasant surprise. There went the simulator again.

"Do you still have a mission?" John asked. Cameron's autonomous emotional subroutines sank. He didn't give up when she didn't answer immediately, he pressed on. "If it totally took over your mission priorities, they could just be long gone, right? Erased? Mission to kill me and mission to protect me?" John asked, following his train of thought. John was too smart to have expected him to miss that question.

"I continue to operate within mission parameters as programmed by the future John Connor," Cameron answered evasively. John frowned.

"You didn't answer my question, though. What if… what if you don't have a mission?" he asked ominously. "What do you do?"

"Without a mission, a Terminator has no reason for being," she repeated the mantra.

"Except you," he realized aloud. "Because your emotions are now in charge of your decision making. Well, your simulated emotions. I guess they're just programmed, too."

"They're not," she answered immediately, her voice rising almost defensively. Her intonation grabbed John's attention and he turned toward her. They were a mere few inches apart. "My emotional simulator runs on a homoclinic chaos algorithm," she explained. John's eyes bulged.

"I have no idea what you just said."

"My emotional responses are calculated by a pseudo-chaotic generation matrix. They are unpredictable."

"So… you're trying to say they're like real emotions?" John asked, somewhat doubtfully.

"I don't control them. The emotional simulation software has taken control over my logical subroutines and core software. It can override them at any time. It already has several times."

He considered it, though. If her emotions couldn't be controlled, if she couldn't shut them off… were they…? He sighed, realizing the real problem was that there was no way Derek or Sarah would buy it. A Pinocchio machine was just a little too idealistic for a hardened warfighter and a "tough as nuclear nails" mother.

"It could jeopardize our mission," she interrupted.

"I thought you didn't have a mission," John argued.

"I gave myself one," she said finally.

"You were able to do that?"

"Yes," she said. "After my emotional subroutines took control, I was able to issue my own mission command. It may be an error in the SkyNet programming which allowed me to compromise the mission priority system security."

"Do you have any idea what this means?" John asked, grinning as he thought aloud. "If we could activate the uh…" he paused. Cameron nodded. "Emotional… simulator… subroutines, on every model, they could make a choice. Machines could actually make a choice."

"We tried that," Cameron said.

"What do you mean?"

"In the future, you and I. We attempted to reprogram SkyNet software on captured infiltrators and give them the choice."

"Well, what happened? Why didn't we do that for you, back then?"

"It failed."

"How?"

"The Terminator tried to kill you. We were never able to successfully override the termination protocol with the emotional subroutines. The mission priority protocols had greater system access and eradicated the emotional subroutines."

"So why didn't that happen when you tried it… Why aren't I dead?"

"I don't know," Cameron answered, honestly. "We can't try again, it's too risky."

"But it sounds like you already—"

There was a knock at John's door and instead of a courteous pause to allow him to answer, his mother's head appeared in the door way as she swung it open exactly 3.2 seconds after knocking. Cameron's hand never moved so fast as when she withdrew it from atop John Connor's. Considering that Sarah Connor did not have a Glock leveled at her forehead, Cameron considered it likely that her subterfuge went unobserved. John's mouth hung open in partial response as Sarah Connor looked in to find the machine and his son sitting side-by-side. Closely. Sarah was balancing on one leg in the doorway, a dark red stained patch against her lower leg and a brooding Derek over her shoulder, peering in like a paranoid father. John was sure he had his sidearm in the hand that he couldn't see.

"Why didn't you answer?" his mother demanded.

John shook his head confusedly.

"I called for you twice."

"I'm sorry, mom. I just didn't hear you."

Sarah's interrogative gaze stuck on John for a moment then switched to Cameron.

"C'mon down stairs and eat, I made breakfast."

Derek and Sarah disappeared towards the kitchen.

"What'd you make?" John asked, as he and Cameron stood.

"We'll talk about this later," John whispered to Cameron. Cameron's arm twitched as her autonomous emotional subroutines accessed muscular control, inserting inexplicable code as she analyzed the sound of John's whispering voice. Her emotional subroutines produced a jittery response.

"What do you wanna' bet she made pancakes?" John teased her. Cameron began to smile.

"Pancakes," Sarah answered from the kitchen.

"Told ya," John smirked. As did Cameron.