John emerged from sleep slowly, opening one eye then the other. He wasn't sure how long he had slept, but he was sure that it hadn't been long enough. There was no light down here to tell him what time of day it was, but eventually he summoned the courage to get up.

John's body rebelled against him as he tried to move, but being the hard-on-the-outside type, he ignored it. His mouth was parched, and he could swear that someone had poured sand into his joints the night before. It all just hurt like hell, and as soon as he was standing he felt the urge to go back to bed.

Catherine was nowhere to be found. He assumed she had gotten off somewhere, hiding in a corner while her body went through its regeneration. He'd have to hit her up on that when she got back. There were a list of things he wanted to ask her, and she likely had an equally long list of things she'd never tell. These things kept secrets. In John's mind, that made them more human, and in that way he was one step closer to putting it all together.

He emerged from the confines of that small room into one slightly larger, lit by some remote beam of sunlight. Derrick was still on the slab of concrete where they had left him the night before. John's heart jumped at the sight of it, and for a moment he feared the worst.

Then, his chest moved. Derrick was breathing.

"Thank god." He said, walking towards his uncle.

Derrick Reese hadn't come out of his deep slumber, but his chest moved regularly in long strokes as he took deep breaths of air. He lay with his hands over his belly, one arm covering the gash underneath.

Apparently, field surgery was one of Gabriel's' many talents. He filed it away as a useful note and quickly moved his mind to something else. For him the memory was far too raw to revisit.

"We were beginning to think you wouldn't wake up."

Alison had entered the room unnoticed, likely on cats feet as John hung over his uncle. He put the relation out of his mind and turned to face her, and judged by her expression that she had some very important things to say. He could only imagine...

"Any water around? I'm parched." He tried to steer the conversation away from this lonely, dangerous road.

"Sure, right over there." She motioned towards the floor where Michaels pack rested.

John reached down and rummaged around before finding a steel canteen full of cold, refreshing drink. He held it to his lips, intensely aware that Alison was watching him now. She had changed from before when they had met in the tunnel. She didn't treat him as some idle curiosity, some nice boy that had crawled out of a hole to join the rest of the world.

Now he was John Connor, and if John didn't know better he would have said the look on her face was a familiar one.

'Riley is a threat.' How he had loathed that line, the reality of it, the sincerity of the person delivering it.

In the end, she had been right of course. Everyone is a threat to you John, even me. Cameron had told him that too. He had caught Cameron giving Riley this same look and for a moment he saw into her world. For Cameron, Riley was one person who could wreak a special kind of havoc. For a moment, he saw through the eyes of a machine.

He finished the water and reseated the canteen, wiping his face and rising to his feet. Alison didn't speak to him, but he wasn't sure if that meant she wouldn't.

"What time is it?"

She crossed her arms and leaned against the concrete door frame. "A little after noon. You want something to eat?"

Alison offered him a few things from her rations pack and he accepted, still feeling weak. His head felt light and his body fatigued like he was under too much weight. He could hardly tell if it was because of the blood drawn or the adrenaline from the battle. He was too tired to think about it.

He was alert enough to notice how Alison was regarding him. She was not smiling but instead watching him with a grim expression - one that said her pleasant facade was gone, at least for now.

Therefore he was not entire unprepared when she spoke to him next. "So you're John Connor."

He looked at her and nodded just slightly, mouth full.

"What does that mean anyway? I mean, this little side trip that the General has us on is all well and good, I'd follow him anywhere and he knows that..." She paused to collect herself, and pace once around the room.

"Does that mean we all die for you? Is that what happens now?"

He wasn't expecting that, and at that moment he didn't have a good answer. Alison was looking at him with more than a hint of sadness on her face. He missed her smile and now it looked as if it might never return and all he could think to do was swallow and take another bite, afraid of the words that might come out of his mouth if he were to begin speaking.

"You know Derrick."

Again, he nodded, if possible even less enthusiastically than before.

"How? And no bullshit this time, I'm sick of hearing you lie." The finality of her voice was unnerving.

He lifted one eyebrow and rose to his feet, a bit unsteadily, finally righting himself against the wall. "You really want to know the answer to that?"

She nodded. "You don't only know him, I mean...you even look like -"

"Derrick Reese is my uncle."

It seemed to shock them both when he said it, but John tried to keep his brave face on while he watched Alison process information. Her jaw moved, and her face cocked to one side. He was reminded so much of Cameron, and for a moment he thought it might all come to an end. She may have been worth it, if it were only his own life - but he could hardly ask these people to put themselves at risk for him any longer.

Alison heard him, but at the same time had a hard time making sense of the words. 'Uncle.' Well, that meant...but that was just insane. Well, was it really? Intelligent machines, nuclear war, extinction. Was this man...her family? Part of her?

"That means that Kyle...my Kyle, is your...." She couldn't finish.

John nodded and walked over to her. When she didn't back away, he put one hand on her shoulder and did the only thing he thought might work. John Connor begged.

"There are maybe four or five people in the world that I have met that know this truth. I don't even know if Ellison knows it. But it's true, and now you know my biggest secret. It's hardly the only one, but it's the one that I've held closest to my chest. Future me decided that I should tell no one." He paused, thinking that he had summed it up quite nicely. "Not even Kyle."

She brushed his hand off her shoulder and walked past him, to Derrick. He couldn't see her face but John knew that she would have things to say to him. This might be the end of their already strained comradeship. They had tolerated his poor behavior, his cryptic, half true stories, his boy like ogling of Alison, and now near death on the battlefield. Now he'd have to prove that he was worth it.

"Future you? How is this true?" She turned to him, holding one hand over her mouth and suddenly John felt much smaller than he had been. Daylight seemed to chase away his fortitude and now he was left with Alison whose face had turned red, eyes streaked with tears.

John had some explaining to do.

"Alison, I can tell you the story of my life. This is the story as only I know it. It's the only way I know to answer all of your questions, but I'm afraid of what you'll do if I do."

She could only shake her head. "Be afraid of what I'll do if you don't." This was her ultimatum.

The story began, and Alison listened, intent on every detail.

In 1984 my mother was a waitress in California, her name was Sarah Connor. She was young then - twenty one or twenty two, just starting out. She lived with her roommate and lived normally. Isn't that what we all want? She wasn't a soldier, she wasn't a mother, and she made two-fifteen an hour plus tips.

I don't recall what time of year it was - it's always summer on California, isn't it? Anyway, her troubles really began while she was out one night. She'd been stood up by a date, and it turned out to probably be a good thing, but who knows? She'd meet my father this night, but she met someone else too. That night in 1984, in the chaos of a downtown nightclub, three people were gunned down by a single man. He was huge, and unstoppable tank of a human being. He nearly killed her, and that would have been it. She was on the ground, a pistol leveled at her head. Kyle Reese saved her life. He had been sent from 2029.

'We smashed those metal motherfuckers.' He told my mother how one man named John Connor had taught the people of the resistance to fight the machines. His story was of this single man who had turned extinction in victory. Kyle Reese had been given a picture of Sarah Connor at some point in the future, he had kept it as sort of a treasure. He knew her face, and he began to love her. It was impossible, perhaps, but maybe he just loved the idea of her. My father never told him, but when the last of the machines were destroyed they sent one assassin back in time to kill her - rendering my existence terminated in order to alter the future.

Eventually, through the course of days or weeks, she can hardly remember which at this point, they came face to face with it. My father had nearly destroyed it with a piece of homemade explosive. My mother saw what it really was, death made in chrome, and then she watched as it killed my father. But my mother, a waitress from California making minimum wage, killed it. She crushed it in a hydraulic press and watched them carry the body of the man she loved away on a stretcher. I don't know if she has ever loved another man. She's been with others, mostly soldiers, after I was born. But I don't think any of them meant to her what Kyle meant to her. Kyle Reese gave her a destiny, and what better gift can one be given if not a purpose? Even if it is a dark one.

When John finished the story Alison said nothing. His story and his life, of which she was sure there was much more, seemed all too impossible to believe. Yet she did believe it, she was sure not a word of it was a lie.

"James knows?"

John shrugged. "I'm not sure. I know he knew my mother. I suppose it's complicated." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the note that the General had saved for him. John didn't hesitate at all before handing it to her. "This is from my mother."

Alison read it, and the act seemed to steel her against something. He could see that Alison was shaken and thought it was perhaps the thought of her man with another woman. John honestly didn't know, but he figured that his guess would remain that and filed it away.

When she handed it back to him she gave him a longing look. At least the grim glare was gone now, but it was replaced with something even worse. A demand.

"There's more. I want to know it, all of it."

John didn't know where to start, but he decided that he'd skip the parts that weren't well formed. His childhood was like that - a montage of people and places that had been but that set in the background of a much greater story. The next big event in his life was

In 1994 I was back to living in California. My mother was out of the picture at this point. I think you can get the idea - when you start talking about robots and the end of the world, everyone thinks you're not all there. I began to think that too. It hurt her, I know, but there was a time I didn't think any of this was true. I lived with foster parents at the time, these would be the last of several, but they were good people.

I remember getting picked up by this cop in a mall in L.A. I had just stolen three hundred dollars from an ATM and I thought I was in deep shit so I ran. It saved my life - he wasn't there to arrest m but I had no idea just how dangerous he was. Luckily there was someone who did, and his arrival brought a reality that I knew only through stories. He didn't have a name, didn't ask for mine, but he had a purpose. He was a terminator, and he was there to save my life. I had sent him from the future, the one my mother had always warned me about.

It should have shocked me to meet this thing from the future but I knew than that my mother had been right: Machines would take over the world and attempt to exterminate the human race. Once again, I was their favored target. But here was this machine, a terminator of all things, and he looked just like the one that had tried to kill my mother. I didn't know that at the time, but she nearly blew a gasket when we arrived to rescue her from the state mental hospital.

She never trusted him and I don't blame her for that. She had fought one before, and she knew just how tough they were to kill. She used him as a tool: to protect her son, to get information about the future. My mother planned to put an end to it, and I had seen her get this way before. Eventually she set her sights on a man named Miles Dyson. He worked as a computer scientist for a defense contractor called Cyberdyne. She was going to kill a man she had never met, a man with a family.

They were doing some scary shit, building things that the rest of the world had never even heard of. It was out of this world. And you know what? They had part of the one my mother had killed eleven years before. They kept part of its arm and its damaged CPU in a vault on the top floor. Mankind had Pandora's box locked in a glass case and didn't even fucking know it.

In the end she couldn't do it. My mother is no killer. She has a good heart, and I think that may be the most important thing I've learned from her - people have good hearts. She could have, maybe even should have killed a dozen times along the way but she always took the route of least damage. I don't know why, but I suspect that it was to keep from becoming like them. If we forget how important people are, even people who despise us, then maybe we lose a little of ourselves. I really don't know the answer to this, but I think about it a lot.

In the end, we won. We threw the terminator, one just like Catherine Weaver, into a vat of molten steel. It died in fear I think, made these horrible noises like an animal in a trap. In the end it was all the same: I was alive, and my mother was as well. To my everlasting dismay, I learned there was one more task to be completed.

I'll never forget the way he looked at us when he said there was one more chip. It was him, and he knew it. He must be destroyed also. He was too dangerous to live, despite the destruction of Cyberdyne and the death of Dyson. The terminator chose to sacrifice himself to protect us - all of us, I am convinced of this. He learned that important lesson that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one. In this case, I was the one. He was like a father to me and as crazy as that sounds I miss him sometimes. Isn't that ironic? If it isn't I don't know what is.

John finished the story and looked at Alison. This time her gaze was no longer one of suspicion or confusion but one of pity. John felt a single tear rolling down his cheek and rushed to wipe it away. Had he been crying? Apparently.

"But it still happened. Judgment day still happened...why? I thought you said Dyson stopped it. His research was destroyed."

"He did. He died...in the explosion in the Cyberdyne building. We thought we had trashed everything there was to the future. It seemed like a light was at the end of the tunnel, and somewhere past it, hope."

Alison gave this some thought and realized that in some ways waiting for the end of the world would have been just as bad as living through it.

"We don't know who builds it this time." John said. "We were on the trail of an outfit called Kaliba, my Uncle was taking care of that, when everything started to go wrong. People started dropping like flies...I was just wishing it were over. We paid so high a price and had so little to show for it. Nothing, in fact. We had nothing. I suppose in the end that is why I'm here, to make sure we don't go into the future unarmed."

Alison furrowed her brow. "Was Derrick killed?"

John could only nod.

Alison drew in a deep, shuddering sigh and held it there until her face turned red. "How?"

"Triple eight." John pointed his finger right between his eyes. "He didn't have a chance. I couldn't let him die here, again. It was the least I could do, I suppose."

"My god, how many of them are there in the past? It sounds like SkyNET is already up and running."

"If it is then I don't know how we're going to stop Judgment day. There are so many unanswered questions, I don't even know where to begin telling you all the things we don't know."

Alison looked as if she sympathized. "But there are some things you can tell me. Why are you here John Connor? Tell me about Cameron."

John took a look around the room and decided that he'd finish the story, leaving nothing out.

So life became normal for a while. When the eight hundred had come back in time he gave a date - August 27th, 1997, as the day SkyNET became self aware. That day came and went with no fanfare, and the world remained in place. Still, because of what we had seen we were wary and did not celebrate. My mother told me that every day after that one was a gift, one that we should cherish. We did the best we could, bouncing from place to place, living on the edges of society, never getting to close or to comfortable. Life was hard, but it was the best it had ever been.

In the fall of 1999 my mother moved us again. I was fifteen, and to me this was only a few years ago. We moved to a little town in New Mexico called Red Valley. We started over; we had no friends, we made no connections. But, as fate is not kind enough to leave well enough alone I would make a connection there that would lead me to this room, though the reasons are still somewhat unclear.

I want to make sure you understand one thing. The eight-hundred could never fool you. If you knew what to look for and if you spent any time around him at all you would know right away that something was up. His mannerisms were close to human, but they were always a bit off. Sure, he looked like us and smelled like us, he even bled like us, but when he looked at you it was all metal. I thought they were all that way.

I met Cameron Phillips on the first day of school. I told her later that if I had been thinking right I would have known something was up. That was a lie, but it wasn't the last one. I never would have known. She asked me my name, wanted to know where I was from, she told jokes, she flirted, batted her eyes. You would never have known what was underneath. I never would have known.

The next day in class, our instructor was gone for the day. Money says he was dead, but I never found out. His replacement was Cromartie. This wasn't his first name or his last name, it was just his name. Cromartie was a triple eight with a pistol hidden in his leg, and when he stood up to pull the trigger Cameron jumped in front of the bullets, saving my life for the first of many, many times.

From there we escaped, but I also learned the awful truth. Judgment day was still coming at us like a freight train, perhaps worse than before. This time SkyNET seemed to have learned from its past mistakes. The machines were more and more like us - they could blend in, live lives right next to the people they were going to terminate and do so for months or even years. I saw it happen, I've seen it happen. It could have happened to me.

Cameron told us about the future, and the John Connor she knew. Apparently she knew me well, sometimes I wonder just how well. She knew things about me that no other person has ever known. She knew my favorite book, she knew where I'd go when I wanted to be alone, she knew how to get inside my head. She knew how lonely I was, and confessed that we talked about it. 'We will talk about it' she said.

And here the story truly takes a turn into the strange. We lost eight years, going from 1999 to 2007 in the blink of an eye. Have you ever traveled through time? Imagine cold, like a thousand steel needles, and you can see from one end of the universe to the other. I have no other way to describe it other than to say that the first time was terrifying, and the second time was a rush.

From there we tried to put together something that resembled life. SkyNET was our main goal and Cameron said this was where we could find it, in California in 2007. But the jump changed future history and now things became unpredictable. We made allies; my uncle was one of them. He was cold at times and hard always, and I think he hated Cameron. There was some history there I never knew, but could guess at. He never trusted her. My mother didn't trust him. I had to rely on them both, and we all put up with having a mechanical watchdog prowling around the house at all hours of the day.

Things began to change for the worse when Cameron was nearly destroyed. Her chip was damaged and she reverted - something I'm not sure how to define in technical terms. Whatever it was it flipped a switch and she went from friend to foe in the blink of an eye. And I will tell you there was no time harder in my life than that moment when I realized that I would have to destroy her. It should have been a small thing, don't you think? But she was my friend. That had to count for something, for me at least.

But in the end, I couldn't do it. We had her down and out, I had her chip in my hand and the thermite flare in the other and I couldn't bring myself to put an end to her. It could have gotten me killed and to this day I don't know how I fixed her, but I did. I plugged her in and gave her the gun, and she gave it right back. After that, nothing was ever going to be the same. I had crossed some line, and as if to accentuate it I remember the moment so clearly - Cameron and I on one side of the line, my mother and Derrick on the other. I felt as if I had betrayed them. I knew I would do it again, given the chance. This was the world I lived in.

After that we found a new normal. It was hard to forgive Cameron for what she had done, but the more I thought about it the more I realize how silly this was. Do we forgive a knife for cutting us? It was a tool - is a tool. That was how I tried to look at it anyway. It didn't work well.

We moved on leads into SkyNET, falling into and out of more bad situations than I can remember. We made allies sometimes, friends occasionally and enemies often. I met a woman. A girl really, but she made me feel like I could be normal. Her name was Riley, and in the end I got her killed to.

We were closing in on Kaliba when things started to go to hell, quickly. We realized that there was an order out to terminate a young girl that I recognized - her name was Savannah Weaver. Her father and mother had been killed some years before in a helicopter crash, but she still had a mother - more or less. The Catherine that you know was living with this little girl, living the life of the woman that was dead. Again, this is a mystery to me but I feel that I'll need all the help I can get in solving it.

Derrick was killed saving Savannah. I didn't see it happen, but I know he was in the house and got caught at close range. They don't miss when they are that close. He was shot once and was dead before he hit the floor. We escaped with Savannah, and were all over the news the next day.

Agent Ellison, or James I suppose, was in on this whole thing in one measure or another. He worked for Catherine as her head of security. He also worked on a project she was running in her company's basement. Project Babylon was work aimed at creating sentient artificial life. This was a terminator building SkyNET, or so we thought. In the end, it turned out not to be so.

My mother was arrested when we returned Savannah. For the first time in my life I was alone. I had no shield, no one was going to watch my back. Only Cameron was going to look out for me, and her behavior was becoming more and more unpredictable as time went on. But she was all I had. I chose to trust her, and in the end I should have trusted her all along.

Cameron broke my mother out of prison but was heavily damaged in the process. She was already not 100%, and the fight in the prison had done what I would call irreparable damage to her chassis and god knows what else. Still, she wouldn't stop. We thought SkyNET was brewing in the basement of Ziera Corp and while my mother and I went to meet Catherine Weaver, we sent Cameron to meet John Henry, the man who would be a virtual god.

But he was not SkyNET. When we got to the basement John Henry was gone and Cameron was sitting in his place, deactivated. John had taken her chip and with it, she was gone as well. We followed them into the future...

"...and here we are."

The story ground to a halt far from whatever outcomes could be divined by any who knew it. Alison took it all in, studying his face for a lie or anything withheld but found nothing. The look in his eyes was one of pure exhaustion and even resignation to the events that had brought him here, but there was no regret. There was no deceit.

"You're here for her? For Cameron?"

"I'm here for her." He said it and in doing so felt even more sure of his purpose.

Alison looked him dead in the eyes. "Thank you for explaining."

"Explaining what?"

The voice was a welcome surprise to them both. Derrick was lying on his concrete slab, still looking very much worse for wear but alive. Alison reached out to him as if to make sure his eyes were really open before taking his hand tightly to her chest.

"Derrick, oh thank god..." She said.

John felt relieved at seeing his uncle for more than the obvious reasons - perhaps now he could avoid the awkward questions that still hung in the air. For now, all her effort was on this wounded warrior.

"John go get Kyle and the General. Hurry!" It was all the encouragement that he needed.

John returned moments later with his father and James, afraid to go into the room with the rest of them. Despite his proximity to it all he felt like an outsider in this world, in this group of people. He stopped at the door and watched his father, Alison and the General engage in the ritual of rebirth. For the Derrick was back from the dead. For John nothing could be more true.

John used their relief to slip away quietly to places unseen. He was glad they had not noticed him though he still felt pangs of what could be regret or sorrow that these human connections were denied to him. This time he could hardly tell if it was fate toying with him again or if he was doing it to himself.