Daniel Bryant – he preferred that name to his older Danny, which he believed betrayed a lack of gravitas not commensurate with his position or his wealth – sat in his spacious office, thirty floors above ground level Los Angeles. He remembered the smog of years before, when such a position would have afforded his a view of little more than the smoke generated by millions of cars and homes, oblivious of the damage they were doing to their environment in simple pursuit of comfort and ease. He considered it to be a disease of modernity; he had seen the same in Europe, the same wilful disregard for the future of the planet which so easily informed the choices made by citizens and their governments. He was not a religious man, believing instead in science and the inevitability of the triumph of Enlightenment rationalism over the bleak superstition of the past – but be wondered what a God would think who had given the earth to man in stewardship. It did not take long for Adam and Eve – if one ignored Lilith – to be expelled from the Garden to face a nasty, brutish and short life which was the fate of all humans, regardless of external trappings. He sometimes wondered, in the years which had followed the destruction of Cyberdyne and the death of his genius mentor, whether humans as a race waged some subconscious war on a nature which had denied them paradise.

He often wondered, were that to be the case, who was winning.

His phone – the newest, trendiest iPhone – rang on his desk. Though he wore sober suits and cut his hair short, the innocent and easily impressed youth he had been was not far from the surface; heading a large corporation of his own foundation as he did, he felt that the retention of such openness gave him an edge over his rivals, who considered little more than productivity and relied upon quarterly returns to validate them. His eyes were on a higher prize.

It's the end of the world as we know it, REM sang from his phone. And I feel fine.

'Bryant' he answered with his usual curtness.

'It's done,' the guttural, accented voice on the other side of the connection informed him.

'Thank you,' he replied, hanging up and replacing the phone.

'Mr Dyson?' he had asked hesitantly on the last day he had seen the man who had so shaped his future. 'The materials team wants to run another test on the ... uh ... on it,' he finished lamely. He had only seen the cybernetic arm once, though he had seen analyses from the chip, and had never been more fascinated. The intricacy of the design which revealed its revolutionary potential was breathtaking. He had sat for hours at his terminal, looking at the bland schematics as a child might stare at a snow bowl, wondering how such fascination could be crammed into such a small space, and such beauty.

Dyson had barely glanced at him; it had been a busy day, with meetings scheduled with the new investors, who also had needed only one look to open their bank balances to unlimited takings by Cyberdyne. 'Yup, I'll get it.'

The question burned at Danny Bryant, a question the absence of whose answer had gnawed at him when he had finally been able to think clearly. Who was the designer? Whose was the brilliance that created such a thing?

He cleared his throat. 'Listen, Mr Dyson, I know I haven't been here that long, but I was wondering if you could tell me, I mean if you know ...'

'Know what?' Dyson had asked impatiently.

Danny sucked up his courage. 'Well ... where it came from.'

Dyson looked at him with something approaching pity. 'I asked them that question once. Know what they told me? Don't ask.'

It had not taken him long from the destruction of the Cyberdyne lab to finish his PhD. thesis and get a well-paying job at another cybernetics firm. Though he had mourned Dyson – and cherished his rage at the people who had led him to his death, though the circumstances had never been explained – cybernetics had been the next big thing in the early 90s. This was before the advent of the Internet, when sanity had fled the markets and venture capitalists had swarmed through California, like the prospectors of a century before, in search of wealth where they considered its only origin to be. He had prospered, taking out many patents, most of which were based on the development of heuristic learning algorithms for use in intelligent IT applications. It had also not been long before he had been noticed by DARPA, the Department of Defence research establishment. His patents by then were being used by firms as diverse as Sun Microsystems and IBM, which had incorporated several of them into the design of Deep Blue, the computer which had finally, and for the first time, defeated the greatest chess player in history, Gary Kasparov. The years which he spent at DARPA, developing intelligent software routines for military projects such as the Predator drone and unmanned surveillance robots such as those used by NASA in Martian exploration, had been fulfilling, but ultimately hollow. He could see no gain to be had in extending the lead of a military which was already the most powerful on earth.

Selling his patents for millions, he had founded his own corporation, though he had not listed it publicly, preferring to maintain tight control over research budgets and strategic planning. He would not be held hostage by shareholders, preferring to pursue his own vision. One with which, he knew, the Defence Department was quite pleased.



Buying the name of the long defunct company at which he had once worked had not been expensive, and his one indulgence to sentiment. It had honoured Dyson, who had started him on his path. After twelve years, he had re-founded Cyberdyne Systems Incorporated.

What he had ordered a week before was not done in sentiment, he knew, and the small part of him which had not been corrupted by a slavish adherence to the vision of a man who, did he but know it, had repented when faced with the sheer horror of the consequences of his action, regretted the necessity. Andy Goode's work had been more than simply the adequate connection of circuits which his original research when in college had promised. Bryant had known him, briefly, when he had been completing his thesis. He found his ideas interesting, if not entirely original, and had approached him when he had founded Cyberdyne with a view to employment. Goode had politely refused, saying that there was little incentive for him to allow his research to be used by someone else to make money in which he himself was obviously uninterested. The world was full of such idealists, Bryant knew, as he stared out at the evening and the lights of the cars streaming along the roads below. There was room for them, also, if their numbers remained small.

But Goode's research, and its results, had proven to be more than should ever be allowed an idealist. Bryant had not ordered him killed – that would have raised more questions about his own agenda than it would have answered, but he had ordered the research to be obtained. Sadly, however, someone else with an unknowable motive had reached that point first, which irked him. He was unused to having his goals thwarted.

And his vision would wait for no man.

John could still hear the arguing in the kitchen as it began to reach a crescendo of fevered whispers, so much so that he thought that he could hear the arms of his mother and uncle as they swept through the air. It would be like the whistle of a sword in combat; he knew enough of his mother when she was infuriated, and was getting to know Derek almost as well, to know that their gestures would be a substitute. At that moment, he cared very little.

He cut away her bandages as quickly as possible, trying not to let his eagerness force him into carelessness. He supposed that he needed more light to do the job properly, but he knew that if he turned on the main light in the room, then his mother and his uncle would realise that something was wrong and would bury whatever dispute preoccupied them in favour of curiosity, which would spoil the moment. In that instant, he wanted to be the only one to see her now that she was, hopefully, fully healed. It was appropriate, he thought to himself as he moved up her legs – fully healed – to his stomach. She watched him constantly for any indication that there was anything wrong, asking him at the oddest moments what it was that bothered him, or why, or how, when the answers should have been evident. He hoped that she was healed enough that he would not have to ask her anything similar.

The three days and nights which he had spent by her side as she convalesced had built up an anticipation, and fear, of this moment.

'Be careful of the waist,' she warned him in a soft whisper. He nodded and continued, brushing his hair back from his eyes. He began to speak as he continued to cut, not realising that he was speaking aloud what he should have been silently thinking. He had spoken to her still form often enough since the explosion, as one might to the victim of a coma, that he forgot himself in his excitement and exhaustion.

'You know, for the first few months I knew you, I kind of thought of you as more than a machine, but less than human,' he whispered as he cut, her skin glowing golden in the light as he removed the cloth, 'you know, nothing really like us at all. The questions, the ruthlessness, the stating of the obvious – it was easy enough to pass you off in school as special, or autistic, or something. That story about the metal plate in your head fit perfectly. I know that I didn't treat you very well, either, and I don't know if you cared. I know you can care, I've thought enough about the last few months to know that. I know that there is much more to you than your programming, more than just eating a Dorito in a desert gas station to make you different. I've seen the way you look at us sometimes, the way you look at me. There's something in your eyes that isn't there in the eyes of a machine, something that means that your programming, or whatever, is more than it was meant to be. I don't know if it feelings, real feelings, or something else, but I've seen the way you look hurt when I treat you badly because of something that's going on with me, or when Mom treats you like a toaster, or when Derek says something stupid. I don't think that you are just imitating how a person would act, I don't think that a machine, a real machine, would even know to act differently when someone says something that would hurt another person. I remember when the T-800 asked me why people cry, he just didn't understand, it was an equation that he couldn't balance. But you understand why people cry, you understand why they laugh, even of your humour is weird. You're more than a machine to me.'

He was not paying attention to what he was doing, beyond being careful not to damage her golden skin as he cut with the sharp scissors. Were he paying attention, were he more awake, were he not speaking words in semi-delirium that would perhaps have waited for a better time, he would have noticed that he was cutting away the bandages at her breasts, that he had already cut away the cloth around her hips. That she was almost naked in 

front of him as he moved upwards. He didn't see as he spoke; he was looking at her face, hidden beneath the cloth.

At her eyes, though he couldn't see them.

'I think you had to be damaged for me to realise what you meant to me, or even why you were sent back the way you were. I don't know myself in the future – I don't know your John – but I don't think that I am going to change that much over the years that I would send back a machine that looks like you to protect me when I could have sent back another reprogrammed T-800 or T-888. I mean, what sense would that make? I think that I had a reason when I sent you back to protect myself. I don't really know yet what the reason was, but it was more than just protection, or at least more than just protection for my health. There's no way that your John couldn't have known that I start feeling things about you, there's no way that he would have sent someone back as perfect as you are unless he knew the possibility of what might happen. I mean, I'm sixteen. I feel sixty, but I'm still sixteen, and sixteen year old guys – most of them – feel things that they shouldn't, sometimes. He must have remembered what he was like when he was sixteen. He must have known that there was a possibility of something. So, I'm thinking that what I feel isn't really that wrong, like maybe it was something that I was meant to feel, something that was supposed to happen. There, you're all done,' he said as he removed the last cloth from her face.

He drew back a split second later, in absolute horror.

'I'm not having this conversation with you again,' Sarah hissed at Derek as she propped herself up against the counter in the dim light. She was tired – more tired than she remembered feeling in a long time – and the conversation she was having with Kyle's brother was repetitive. He was almost like a machine himself, though she should punch herself for thinking it, in his single-minded refusal to accept anything that did not conform precisely to his worldview, shaped as it was by blood and fire, by the falling missiles and the rise of the machines. She knew that that would be danger for anyone who had had to endure that – who had been forced to live in sewers and storm drains, hunting rats, hiding from the first machines off the line, pale shadows next to the sophistication that Skynet could not marshal. That sophistication had its apex on the couch in the other room and it was that sophistication, against most instincts, that she now defended. She had had enough; she had enough to worry about with finding the Turk and stopping Sirkissian and whoever backed him without having to waste energy on Derek's obsessions.

He leaned forward on his seat at the table, his expression that peculiar mix of innocence and rage that characterised him. Kyle – what little she really remembered beyond impressions twisted by urgency and fear – had been more purely focused than Derek. She never knew him that well, but she imagined that he lacked his brother's fierce capacity for hatred.

'That thing inside is a danger, Sarah,' he snarled back quietly, so as not to wake John who, they both assumed, was asleep in the next room. Beside the very thing that one day, Derek was sure, would kill him. They were Terminators, but he had seen the first T-600, the one with the rubber skin upon which they did not have to even rely on the dogs to detect, so obviously were they machines. Their movements, their voices, their appearance, everything about them spoke of what they were. But this one – this TOK, whatever designation that was or whatever it meant – was so far ahead of them as the cell in his pocket was ahead of Morse code for steamships. He had never seen an infiltration unit as perfect as this one, and for that reason alone he remained convinced that it had to be destroyed. But he could not convince anyone else.

She turned away in frustration, and he rose from his seat, towering over her, though he could see that she was not intimidated. If she could stand toe to toe with a T-1000 – thankfully, only three of those had been built before they had taken out the production facility and destroyed the schematics stored in the memory buffers of the production sub-unit – she would not be intimidated by him. 'This might be the only chance we have to destroy that thing. When it's up and around again, it wouldn't let us. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't rest, it can't be talked to, it doesn't feel anything, it wouldn't let us stop it. Now, while it's in there,' he gestured at the room, 'is the only opportunity we might have to deal with it, finally. Burn it up in the same place we burned the other one and move on. Then it would just be the three of us, three humans, and we wouldn't have to worry about a wolf in the fold. Because that's what it is, and that's all it will ever be. I don't care what the John from my time reprogrammed it with; sooner or later, something will happen and it will revert to its original programming. And then we are all dead, and the future dead with us.'

There was no reaction in her face or her eyes as he spoke, and he felt as though he could shoot himself with frustration. He knew that she had not scoured the tunnels for dogs and cats and rats to eat, knew that she did not know – not really know – what the future held when Skynet shook off the chains of its masters and struck at its creators with weapons they had designed to defend against nations made obsolete the moment of the machines' singularity. He knew that she could not really imagine what it was like to be found, cringing and terrified, in a storm tunnel and lifted without ceremony by the first anthropomorphic models and dumped on a truck that needed no driver. What it was like to stroke his little brother's matted and filthy hair, surrounded by 

others with expressions of haunted horror and resignation on their faces as they stared at the sides of the truck or the black sky above in search of something that would lend their last few moments meaning.

What it was like to be dumped onto the packed earth of the camp, and sorted according to size, weight, health and strength. To have the split second of relief at being chosen to live turned to pure horror at the task which was the reason for their survival.

'Assist the disposal units, sort the refuse according to criteria clarified at disposal plant. We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well, and live.'

He knew the film from which that was a reference, but could not decide to this day whether Skynet – more properly, one of the semi-autonomous sub-units – used it because it was something the few survivors might know, or because it was insane. Or both.

What it was like to see the first raid on the camp, led by a slim and scarred man at the head of a squad of thirty soldiers in body armour and fatigues as they melted their way through the wires, using devastating firepower to overwhelm the automated sentries, designed as they were far more to keep people in than to keep them out. To see the blue streaks of the tracer rounds as they lanced through the darkness, the showers of sparks from the explosions as the internal magazines of the sentries exploded in a pyrotechnic display whose beauty was matched by its importance. To hear the screams of relief of the survivors as the man at the head of the attack squad marched to the front of the disposal unit and manually shut it down.

'We are TechCom,' he announced in a clear, determined, voice, his eyes cold above a scar that arched down the right side of his face, surrounded by his soldiers, all armed and all vigilant. 'From this day, so are you.'

Sarah could appreciate none of that, nor could she understand the desperation of the resistance as, in response to the raids on the camps, not only had Skynet increased the rate of disposal, but also began construction of newer, more efficient killing machines. Culminating in the TOK now recuperating on the couch.

How could be make her understand?

He grasped her by the shoulders as she looked back at him defiantly. 'That thing is the best that the machines have ever made,' he whispered to her as he heard rustling from the other room but ignored it. 'It is everything that they shouldn't be but are. Slippery, undetectable, lethal. And you are letting it follow us around like a puppy. But a puppy won't kill you when your back is turned. That thing will.'

The worst was that he didn't know if she – if it – was the same one as the one that he had seen weeks before he left, in the company of Connor himself, or if it was merely the latest in a production line. If he was sure of the former, he would not be so vehement. He was not, and would not take the risk. Risks were policy decisions, made by the likes of Connor – future Connor – and his staff. He was only a soldier; he did not take risks.

'There are other things that can kill us,' she replied coldly, shrugging him off. 'And the machine has done a good job so far of protecting us from them. When I think it's going bad, I'll destroy it myself. For now, it stays and does its job. I think –'

Derek heard a soft noise from the other room, suspiciously like whispered conversation. He took a deep breath and reached around to the Sig in his belt at his back. He put it off safety and checked the chamber, turning.

'What are you doing?' Sarah demanded, reaching for her own gun, though he was not sure what she meant to do with it, as she had obviously not heard the noises. But her senses were not honed from years of continuous warfare.

'It's awake.'

'What's wrong, John?' she breathed at him as he stared with pure dismay.

She was perfect; absolutely healed as though the explosion had never happened. She looked back with clear, almost innocent eyes, even her hair as it had once been before the attack on her jeep. She still retained that faint pout which he had once found so irritatingly cute, but now merely cute.

The source of what he might have realised looked like revulsion were he not so tired was not how she looked; no one could have asked for more, in a machine or in a girl. It was his sudden, awful realisation that everything he had just thought he had kept in his head, all the things of which he had thought when she had been ... asleep ... all the realisations and the fears, he had spoken aloud, so she could hear.

She had heard everything. He had kept nothing to himself, nothing of what he thought or, worse, of how he felt. So crushing and terrifying was that realisation that, as the last bandage fell forgotten to the floor, he was still so focused on her clear brown eyes and what he believed more and more to be more innocence than confusion that he still did not notice her lack of clothing, though she had not moved.

'You heard everything I just said, didn't you?' he asked her in a shaken voice. Thinking of her as a machine made him merely feel slightly embarrassed; thinking of her as he had begun to made him feel 

humiliated. No woman should ever know so much about how a man felt, not without much more passing between them, and even then rarely.

'Yes,' she replied with her customary precision. She cocked her head to the side very slightly as it rested on the arm of the couch. 'What did you mean by what you said?'

He felt a wrench of disappointment like ice in the pit of his stomach. He had not wanted at all to lay bare what he thought or what he felt, but having done so now it felt as though a weight had been lifted from his soul. But he had not thought of it as a boy might when summoning the courage to ask a girl out only to find rejection the crushing result. It seemed now, though, that it was.

The second between her question and his reply was an age in which thoughts and feelings tore through him like a bullet ricocheting within his body. He took a breath and pulled away.

'Nothing,' he replied coldly.

The grip on his arm was like a vice, so tight it felt as though she would crush the bones. Her eyes blazed blue as he had seen them do only once before, the only time when she had allowed them to do so. Then, as now, it had been a reminder to him that she was different.

'You meant something,' she replied softly in the light, sitting up, still holding to his arm as her eyes locked onto his. 'You would not have said all those things if you did not mean them.'

'So maybe I meant them,' he replied curtly, trying to pull away. He might as well have tried to escape a strait-jacket. 'So what? You don't understand.'

'You said that you acknowledge that I do understand,' she told him, her voice changing very slightly, a slight quiver at the back of her throat denoting ... uncertainty, perhaps? He wondered. 'So if you know I understand that you did mean what you said, why do you now deny that you meant anything?'

'Look,' he said lamely, 'I'm tired, I haven't slept in what seems like forever, and I've been worried. We all say things that we don't mean when we're tired. Well, maybe you don't, but people do.' It was a hurtful thing to say, he knew in view of those feelings he was rapidly trying to bury as a result of them being hurled back into his face by her indifference to them, but he could see no other response that would allow him to salvage some remnant of his pride from beneath her foot. Denial seemed the safest option, but still she would not release his arm.

'The human brain is complex,' she told him. 'It allows you to think in many different ways. I have noticed that when people are tired, they say things that they do mean but would not otherwise say.' She drew him closer. Once again, he tried to pull away; once again, he failed. 'This indicates that you mean everything that you said. That you have feelings for me that began before I was injured, that what you feel is endemic to you and that you cannot change it. That what you feel is about how I am to you as much as it about you. That you want to be with me.' She looked satisfied, as though she had solved a riddle. 'That you think you were maybe meant to be.'

'Look,' he replied, his face flushed, his heart beating more rapidly than he remembered it beating even when he had first met the T-800, even when the bullets had ripped through the classroom months before, 'I'm really tired, and –'

'I think that you were,' she told him. 'I think that it what is destined. That is what I have always thought. It is the remainder of an equation I cannot otherwise balance. That you – that my John – meant for this to happen.'

'Meant for what to happen?' he asked through a fog of confusion, made worse by proximity and the smell of her hair that he had not noticed before.

She pulled him towards her, and silenced his doubts and his rejection with a kiss that was as passionate and pure as it was sublime. It seemed to him to last a lifetime, he lips softer than he would have thought, her body more pliant and more fitting. As he kissed her back, his arms snaking around a back he still had not noticed was bare, as hers snaked around him, as the ambient noise of the traffic became so distant in his mind, such was his preoccupation and sheer joy at the satisfaction of desire and more, as they held each other so tightly he thought he would break, he realised in that moment that, for the first time in a life spent either in resentment at his fate or on the run towards it, he was happy.

Until he heard the pistol being cocked behind him, and the voice of his mother, colder than metal itself.

'Get out of the way, John.'