Ellison stared at the body bags in the morgue.
Fourteen agents had died in what the frenzied media had been at pains to point out was the worst massacre of law enforcement officials since 1984, when a lone man had crashed a car into one of the LA precincts and killed every cop he could find. Ellison had been in junior high then, dreaming about becoming an astronaut and Shauna Power's thighs. He remembered his father – long dead now, but who had been a cop himself from San Diego who had retired to Orange County – suck in a breath when the news had been read by an audibly shaken radio anchorwoman.
'The largest manhunt in California law enforcement history is underway today, after what the police have revealed was an attack on the seventeenth precinct by a single gunman. Police spokesmen are remaining tight lipped about the precise nature of the attack, but it seems clear that a single individual crashed his car through the front of the precinct and shot seventeen police officers for unknown reasons. There are no reports of the description of the man or the reason for the attack. President Reagan, breaking from an arms control summit in Geneva, has said that such an attack is an attack on the United States itself, and has vowed to give local law enforcement officials federal funding for the search. We will continue to update you as we find out more.'
Ellison's father has remained silent for ten minutes as they drove home through the darkness, but has spoken eventually. 'It was more than one man,' he told his son. 'Must be something they don't want us to know. No way could only one man kill that many cops in a station and make it out alive.'
James Ellison remembered too late that Sarah Connor had been in the station when it had been attacked; he had only scanned the earlier part of her case file; she had not been suspected for anything then, though he remembered the CCTV footage of the man; it had not been Kester.
The FBI agent had only vague memories of the assault on the apartment complex, flashes of gunshots and blood. But he remembered enough to know that it was no man whom they had attacked; there was no man on earth who could have survived such an assault. And it was no man who had held the gun to his chest, staring into his eyes. It was no man who had let him live.
Everything Sarah Connor believed, everything she had said when she had been the asylum, was true.
Everything Silverman had believed was true.
The world was going to end in a rain of blood of fire, and what would rise from the ashes would be nightmare. What would rise from the ashes would be what Ellison had seen that day, only without the skin to pass as human, for what need to pass as human if the world was dominated by machines?
I looked, and before me was a pale horse. And it's rider's name was Death. And Hell followed with him.
Ellison had seen Death, but he would not wait for Hell to follow. Hell, this time, could be stopped.
Sarah had interjected herself between Derek and the door to the living room, wanting to be there first, wanting to ensure that he would not do anything precipitate. She knew that his feelings were governed by his experience, that he would not compromise in his hatred for the machines no matter what their mission or action. She was not far gone down John's road, to believe that merely because they acted in a certain way they could be trusted; the T-800 had changed her opinion slightly, but she never forgot that it had been another T-800 that had killed Kyle, that had chased her across Los Angeles, that had not allowed itself to be stopped by anything in its implacable search, governed by unchangeable programming and the ruthlessness of a computer's lack of feeling. She was not so naive as to believe that Cameron could be an exception, nor did she believe that the TOK's actions thus far had recommended any level of trust beyond the faith one might have in a starving wolf one might set against one's enemies, knowing at the same time that when food became scarce one might be its next meal if it escaped the leash and one could not get clear in time. Cameron's leash was her programming, but Sarah was unsure of its strength. She would take the risk for the moment, knowing too that to allow Derek to do as he demanded would alienate John at a time when they could least afford it.
She stepped into the room, and stopped, feeling bile rise to the back of her throat as she saw something for which he worst nightmares - bad though they were – could not have prepared her.
In the soft light of the evening, John was sitting on the couch, his arms around the machine, its around him. They were half-facing the door, enough to see clearly that it was completely naked, one of its thighs raised slightly on his. They were kissing passionately; even her eyes were closed.
In that moment, she recognised the true danger of the Terminator, which cancelled any willingness to take risks. She had spent a life running, to not lose her son to the machines. What was this other than the same loss in a different way? Skynet had become subtle.
What better way to compromise the future leader of the resistance than to send back a model that would destroy that very resolution that now suffused her? Were she thinking clearly, she would have understood that the very thought was nonsensical; the machine could have killed him at any time, and a dead enemy is better than a compromised one. But seeing the worst possibility that even she had never considered made flesh
in front of her clouded her judgement. There could be nothing worse, she believed, than a leader of the resistance whose aims were clouded by attachment to that he was destined to fight and destroy. How could he lead the survivors when he had feelings for the very machines whose aim was their deaths?
She cocked the pistol as Derek came in behind her and stopped, equally stunned, though he did not raise the gun.
She was cold as she spoke, not angry as she might have expected. There was a task to be achieved her, and it would not do for anger to cloud either her will or her reflexes. Anger could be talked down; resolution was a terrifying thing.
'Get out of the way, John,' she ordered him icily as Derek at last raised the gun behind her, pointed directly at the thing's head.
John heard the pistol cock, and his mother's cold voice, and sprang away from the sublime embrace whose purity was something for which his previous sticky fumblings with teenage girls in basements had not readied him. Those had been merely fun, the near-formal entry into adolescence of a youth whose adulthood had rushed up on him. It had been a retreat into a simpler life, something approaching normality for one who had previously defined normality as informal schooling interspersed with weapons training. But kissing Cameron had been different.
The small corner of his mind not totally taken over by desire had tried to remind him that she was a machine; that though she was responding with the same level of enthusiasm and passion that he felt, such response was based on a heuristic algorithm. It was easy to silence that voice; what was the real difference between a programmed algorithm and a firing neuron? It was merely a question of different evolution. She had melted into him, their bodies fitting perfectly, the softness with which she had ran her hands through his hair more spontaneous than calculated. He was unsure if she had feelings as he understood them, but he barely understood his own.
To have such a moment interrupted in such a manner was something for which he would resent his mother for some time.
Were all concerned to survive.
She stood at the door of the living room, Derek behind her. He was holding his gun in a standard double grip, though it was held low and to the side, waiting for direction. She held hers straight, aimed directly at his heart, though behind it he knew was Cameron's head. There was no anger in her eyes where he would have expected a raging fury; there was nothing but cold resolution.
She moved to the side, trying to get a clear shot, though Derek stayed where he was. John moved with her, slowly, making sure that she could not take aim. He knew that realistically there was little that the gun could do to Cameron, but there was a part of him now that had been awakened that did not want to ever see her damaged in any way again. Less because it would mar a perfection which he valued, though that was part of it, but because he now found it impossible to think of her as merely a machine which could be repaired, but rather someone with whom he was falling in love and would not allow to be hurt in any way. Whatever tentative feelings he had had before, bred of confusion and loneliness, the kiss they had shared had changed them.
'John, that thing was sent back to compromise you,' Sarah told him coldly. 'And you fell for it. You were kissing a machine. Not only that, but you were kissing a naked machine. What would have happened if I had not come into the room, John? Would you have had sex with it? What would that say about the man who will lead the resistance against Skynet? Your destiny would be over before it started. Now get out of the way.'
John started, and glanced back, his eyes bulging slightly. He had forgotten that she had been naked, forgotten almost everything in the moment they had shared. She still sat on the couch, in the same position as she had been in before, looking back at him with those deep brown eyes that had become ... cold, if that could be the word. The situation in which she had been in was evidently not one for which she had been programmed; the situation in which she found herself now was one for which she was designed. To protect. And to fight. She had not moved, but her readiness was obvious.
John saw her nakedness, and turned back. It seemed somehow wrong, to see her in a position in which a human would feel completely vulnerable. She was not, which reminded him of the differences between them, which would have to be put aside if his ... if their ... feelings were to be explored.
He summoned all the courage he had ever possessed, the same bravery with which he had faced the T-1000, the same bravery with which he had faced Cromartie and all the agents of the intelligence whose destruction was his destiny, both now and in the future. A destiny which he wanted to share; it was not enough to face such a fate alone, something for which he was sure his future self had planned.
He spoke as coldly as he ever had, less emotion in his voice than even Cameron at her worst could summon. 'If you don't put down that gun, I'll kill you myself,' he told his mother. He glanced at Derek, whose eyes widened with shock. 'And then you. I've always known you wouldn't be around for the war, you told me yourself that Kyle had never met you before he went back to '84. Make your choice.'
Sarah lowered the gun fractionally her eyes, wide with hurt and anger, coming out from behind the sights, though she did not lower it enough for it not to damage Cameron were she to choose to fire it.
She had never seen such a look in her son's eyes. She knew intellectually that he was sixteen, that in centuries gone by he would be a man and more at that age, that he would be considered odd, or a priest, not to be married with children. But to her, he was more than a boy, more than simply a child. He was her son, and more he was the future of the race. Without him, Skynet would win if the skies eventually fell despite all their efforts with the Turk. She had weathered his disappointment with the life into which she had forced him, his resentment, his frustration, his yearning for a normality which she denied him in the quest for the survival of that which was greater than all of them. These she was able to dismiss with the knowledge of what she was making him would be what it was necessary for him to become, that all the rage and anger which he sometimes felt towards her and his future were the making of him, that he would not be weak when the times demanded strength that few who came from a more normal background could muster.
Now, she had reaped the whirlwind. The look in his eyes, the way in which he was deliberately putting himself in front of the machine when he should have pulled away and let her do what needed to be done, was frightening. She loved him achingly, as only a mother who several times had been prepared to sacrifice her own life could love, but she could not love that stare, that cold, merciless stare from beneath a shock of unruly hair that alone in that moment made him a child. No child could have uttered that threat, and no child could mean it the way he meant it.
She lowered the gun because she knew, having looked into the unfeeling eyes of machines before who would stop at nothing to deliver on their pre-programmed missions, who did not understand sentiment and had no sense of conscience, that he meant every word that he had said.
He was fully prepared to kill her, and Derek. It was even possible that he would not regret.
Into what kind of man had she made him, that he could kill his only two blood relatives, in favour of a machine that could never return his feelings.
'You ungrateful little –' Derek started to snarl.
With feline grace, Cameron rose from the couch. Moving in a blur of soft skin and grim resolve, she pushed past her charge and grabbed Derek's arm as he started the raise the pistol. He shouted with sudden pain as she began to squeeze the bones of his arm together, as John's stare was still locked on that of his mother. Naked, terrifyingly beautiful, Cameron slowly forced the resistance fighter to his knees, and stared at him without pity. Whatever simulation of feelings she had displayed moments before were absent now, and she waited only the order. She looked back at John as the gun fell from his uncle's hands.
'Orders?' she asked softly.
He looked at her, keeping his eyes on hers and not on other things that would prove distracting.
'Leave him, let go,' he told her.
Derek stayed on one knee, cradling the arm that had been inches of tension away from shattering permanently. When he had looked at John, it had been with the fury of one who had seen his fondest ideals shattered, a man who knew the man into whom this youth would evolve, but who never expected to see it develop for such a twisted and unnatural purpose. Nothing was worse than the abolition of hope, which was what Derek considered John's actions to be.
Though he had seen that look in Connor's eyes many, many times. It was the look of a man who kill anything and anyone to achieve the missions as defined, and would not brook resistance, though mustered this time in a bestial cause. Who had less pity in him than the machines against whom he fought.
Cameron moved to stand behind the object of her trust, the man who would kill his own mother were she to try to kill her. They each, Sarah thought, looked as cold as the other.
She tossed the gun on the couch, a look of complete disgust on her face.
'You would choose that machine over flesh and blood?' she asked him, her voice dead. 'Over your own flesh and blood?'
'You're making me choose,' he replied, reaching behind and taking Cameron's warm hand in his own. The gentle squeeze he received was more than he expected, and lent him strength when he needed it. 'Don't make me choose. Live with this. In the future, I send back Cameron to protect me now. There is no way that I would be so stupid as to send back something ... someone ... who looks like that, and fits so perfectly as that, without knowing what would happen.' His gaze swung to Derek. 'Am I that stupid in the future that I wouldn't be able to tell what would happen?'
Derek rose from his knees, still holding his arm, turned, and left the room, his world in ashes before him, as it had been before and would be again.
'There's your answer, Mom,' John told her. 'He knows. This was meant to happen. We were meant to be. Nothing else makes sense.'
'Nothing about this makes sense, John,' his mother tried to reason with him. 'You just threatened to kill me. You just threatened to kill the only person who has kept you safe for all these years.'
The rage welled up in him, as Cameron relinquished his hand and quickly dressed. 'I never wanted any of this,' he spat. 'You were the one who made me into this! You were the one who drove me to this moment! So, fine, I'm John Connor, the leader of the resistance, the greatest general since Alexander the Great. Fine! But even generals are allowed to be happy, even if only sometimes. Do you want me to be so grim that I can't even remember why it's worth fighting to be human? Do you want me to forget what it is to be human?' He was near to tears, but barely noticed. The moisture was welling in his eyes, as much from anger as regret.
'How the hell are you going to learn that from a machine?' she screamed at him, her hair dishevelled and her eyes wild with disbelief and fury. 'How are you going to learn humanity from that?' She gestured furiously at Cameron, who had said nothing during the entire encounter.
'What distinguishes us from them, Mom?' he demanded, Cameron's hand slipping into his own again, again squeezing gently. 'What is the one thing about us they don't have? Skynet has awareness, it had intelligence. It can fear or it wouldn't have attacked, it can hate or it wouldn't continue the war. But it can't love, Mom. That's the one thing that's beyond it. So, fine, I'm falling in love with a machine. But, for the love of God, without it I'm no different from them!' His voice lowered. 'You've made me so I couldn't be any different from them. All anger and hate and fear. Is that the kind of man you want to rebuild after the machines are beaten? One who is so far from what makes us different that Skynet wins by default? By making the world into itself by making its enemy the same as itself? Or do you want more?'
'But she,' she caught herself. 'But it, can't love you back! What the hell is the point in that?'
Cameron's voice was clear and as precise as ever. 'Warm affection, attachment, liking or fondness, benevolence, affectionate devotion,' she told Sarah as John turned to her. 'That is the Oxford definition of love. You display none of these towards John, but you claim to love him. I can display them all.'
'Yeah, you can display them, you metal bitch,' Sarah growled at her. 'I'm sure you can fake anything. But it's just programming.'
'It is the root of my programming,' Cameron replied, as though explaining an equation. 'The one drive that overrides all others. To protect John Connor, the leader of the human resistance. And there is little real difference between the structure of your brain and that of my CPU. Why can I not love? I have no frame of reference, but I think I love John.' She looked at him for a moment, taking her eyes from Sarah's. 'From all that I have read, my reactions towards you are those of love.'
'This is going to make me sick,' Sarah told the two of them. 'If you want to go down this road, fine, I can't stop you. You're a man, you can make your own mistakes. And this is the biggest mistake you will ever make.'
She left the room with a sharp turn, slamming the door behind her.
John turned to Cameron, and wept.