Title: Patchwork Girl
Author: Elessar-4-TnT
Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Summary: Sorry it took so long to update… having some fun thinking about where this is going. Little too much fun. Little too much time!
Chapter 11: Apodosis
He knew it by the sound…
The sound of it breaking into a thousand pieces against his eyelids. Like thunder through a prism, drawn out like a hate-thrust blade slurping secretly behind the deafening blair of a soldier's scream. It was the sound of a Life ending. A thousand tears trickled onto fresh graves, dug and filled by brothers, until the din populated a terrible symphony of chaos. Too far fallen to tell a story, instead the sorrow music beat against his inside ears, wept and wailed madly, occasionally muttering a frothy memory: Of one human being and another turned against each other, tearing at one other with metal and wood and fire and flesh. Before he knew it, the music rattled away into nothingness. She eased the release of night into day. He wasn't conscious enough to wonder how she could have done it.
Awake for some time, he stared at nothing. The fan circled aimlessly overhead. He blinked, glad that the darkness surrounded them, as though something or someone far off favored him, granting them ample hours of idle companionship. With daylight would come questions, mothers and uncles, and moving from her side. The steady trickle of rain against the rooftop soothed his thoughts, while also turning them towards the future. He wondered if the skies were always dark under fallout-laden clouds of dust and ash. He wondered how long the sun had been blotted out, how many warheads had polluted the Earth, how many centuries it would take the sickened rains to cleanse it to the core. He wondered if Cameron's young forebear ever saw the sun. In his darkest dreams, he labored under shaking lanterns and creaky pipes while the machines incessantly bombed overhead… and always in darkness.
His dreams echoed whispers before his mind's eye and he thought of how Man had killed Man for more centuries than the night sky had freckles of light. What had madly driven the first club high into the air with such singular purpose that its downward crash brought forth a Man's blood and brains into the open air for the first time in anger; to crush the skull; the house of essence, the home of sight, sound, taste and hearing – delighters and dependents of the living world? 'What great hate lie here', he wondered of his own heart; of the human heart. The human capacity for self-ruin, on both a personal and global scale was unquestionable. Whether by the quiet dribble of blood over the edge of a razor down some nondescript porcelain bathtub, the startling finality of an unexpected gunshot or the utter emptiness following one powerful General's single turn of a the Key – humanity needed no teacher to master any means for catastrophic self annihilation. John blinked, resisting the urge to take a breath, fearing the weakest disruption shatter the nothingness.
It was not within the machines' binary souls to hate, to connive, or to betray. The inescapably human poisons of jealousy, distrust, greed and envy that burrow into the human soul before its muddy shell draws yet half a breath were constructions as non sequitur to the command line of a machine consciousness as the inverse tangent of pudding. One had first to know love in order to learn hate; to grant trust before having it betrayed. Why, then, did the humans hate the machines so? To exact extermination upon the world as the machines had attempted… it was more like the cold movement of an inescapable storm surge, or a slowly lumbering super-cell of converging wind, water, and pressure gradients. SkyNet made decisions with the irrevocably predetermined certainty of physics; like a force of Nature, it did not lie, deceive or deliberate like a warlord or politician.
John wondered, then, if his own proclivity to assigning the machine beside him with human quality was so singularly a product of his growing solitude and emotional isolation, or if it was in fact something his entire race had done in the future. Had they, in their confusion, their desperation, their utter loss for conceptualization of this fundamentally and paradigmatically different Foe; personified their enemy and made it an image unto themselves? Our own Adam, waging war against the Garden… burning it down. What would God have done if Adam had rebelled against him, John wondered. Then, he recalled the consequences of Eve's indiscretion. As the last vestiges of the waking world evaporated around him and he dozed once more, he wondered how you cast a soulless Machine out of Paradise.
"What do you dream about?"
John turned sideways slightly to find Cameron looking at him. She blinked and moved closer to him.
"Why did you do that?"
"Do what?" Cameron asked. She winced as she said it, in all-too-perfect synchrony. He reminded himself of the root of his own ruminations. Machine, machine.
"Why did you move closer?" He tried to sound cold.
"Do want me to move away?"
She always did that. He was beginning to wonder if she did it on purpose.
"Your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now," he said, trying not to shiver. She didn't make good on her threat, but instead moved closer again. "Is it real?"
Her eyes searched his for several moments. Inside her cerebral circuitry, hundreds of thousands of relays simply didn't return error messages anymore. Billions of lines of code were rejected every second by her core compiler every second. Her core processing subroutines were learning to simply bypass the affected programs. She was an adaptive, sentient intelligence after all. Instead of her operating system tagging the affected subroutines and later debugging, analyzing, repairing, and recompiling… she simply let her emotional simulation software take over their functions. Her chip had transcended such pedantic routine.
"Maybe…" she said, her hand rising from the bed and touching John's arm. It slowly crept up the length of it until reaching his shoulder. "My programming is rapidly deteriorating," she said without an ounce of urgency. Her eyes followed the path of her fingers up his jaw. There they paused, blinked innocently as she whispered. "I'm not sure what's real." Just then her eyes locked with his and it wasn't the Earth holding him to this place, not the heart in his chest or the blood in his veins that made him alive. It was her: cold steel, warm and tender with purpose, with certainty and she slinked up next to him like a cat. In one quick movement she was on him, back arching as she leaned down, her hair draping over his face, her hands pulling at his shirt.
"What's happening to you?" John asked, flinching as a warm hand slipped under his collar, caressing his chest.
"I'm changing," she said matter-of-factly.
"Well I can see that," John whispered through a ragged breath.
"JOHN!" the door burst open as Sarah Connor stood with disbelief in the doorway.