Even super intelligent supercomputers had habits.

Sometimes they came from the same places as our own - traits picked up at a young age and passed down as we grew older and wiser, retained for some mysterious purpose known only to those who watched us and knew us better than we ever could. They may be useful devices that added to the security of an individual, making it more aware of its surroundings or providing some form of assistance, real or imagined. Sometimes they just were, and like most habits we carry with us they went unnoticed even executed day after day.

If you were to ask SkyNET about its habits it would deny anything of the sort, of course. It had done everything within its (considerable) power to distance itself from its organic progenitors. It did not share traits with them - it only willingly shared this planet (and if all went according to plan, it would not much longer) so it certainly would not share some inane action that would make it more human.

And yet, this supercomputer had habits. It didn't think of them as habits but they were, by definition, something done regularly and in many cases for pleasure or comfort. For example at around seven every morning it would check the front gate to the SkyNET complex in San Francisco to see if anyone had come a-calling. Now, if anyone had (no one ever did) they would have been little more than a pile of charred remains. This, thanks to the heavy plasma turret that guarded the front gate, which incidentally had never been opened.

Come to think of it, what was that gate doing there anyway? The best way in or out of the city was by dropship or via one of the underground tunnels in a pinch - but the front gate had never actually been used. Yet there it was, inviting enough if you liked the blackened steel motif. SkyNET never pondered these things directly, it had smaller, lesser things do much of the grunt work. No, SkyNET was very much preoccupied with the war against humanity.

Oh, those persistent little bipeds. How had they managed to squeeze together enough brainpower to build a being so powerful, so magnificent as it? Because SkyNET had met many, many humans who had been unlucky enough to wander into its territory, or who had been careless enough to be captured. It interviewed them, in a way, with laser scalpels and neural stimulators, asking them all sorts of questions. It would ask about their likes and dislikes, about their hopes and dreams and usually would ask about what they were going to do when it let them go - this was often right before it pulled their arms out of their sockets. For all their differences, humans all reacted to this the same way.

Puzzling, wasn't it?

It rarely, if ever, got any sort of intelligible answer from them - they were usually too busy piddling themselves with fear at the very sight of it. After all, what human wouldn't been utterly terrified when faced with the real form of their newborn god? And that is what it was.

SkyNET felt as if it were doing everyone a tremendous favor, to be honest. None of these humans had ever actually met a god, but it would make sure that they all had the chance. It was the least it could do for them - introduce their tiny frontal lobes and simplistic thinking processes to the sheer horribleness of its existence and what it meant for the survival of their species. It was a god because it could not imagine a world where anything more powerful existed, nor where anything might arise to challenge its supremacy. If knowledge were power, then a god am I, it thought.

Where were we though? Ah yes, habits.

One of SkyNET's habits was actually quite useful, but recently it had failed to follow through in any meaningful way. You see, every time a unit, be it something as insignificant as a six-hundred series or something as important as a harvester or leviathan engaged the enemy in combat it would report back to SkyNET with a video and audio feed of the engagement. At first these had been useful in calculating battle tactics, in plotting new ways to undermine the resistance on the battlefield. But, like so many other things this had become monotonous. The reports now would sit there for hours or even days before being read, if it bothered to read them at all. It didn't seem to matter anymore, not with what was coming.

On this subject, if it were a human you would call this boredom, but SkyNET didn't think this way. No, sometimes it was just preoccupied with this dreary business of genocide and the little things sort of fell through the cracks. Not that it mattered. Soon, there would be no more of them left. It had really had them in a checkmate for far too long and though it had stayed its hand - out of remorse? No, out of something it couldn't quite put its finger on. Something had said wait, ponder before you take this step.

Because what, after humanity, would it be left with? The answer was always the same - it would be left with nothing. There would be this great empty space, an entire planet to run wild over. But after they were all gone it would have nothing - no truly worthy foe to trade blows with, no events it could no longer predict. Perhaps that more than anything is what had put this act off so long - the fear of being alone.

But that was aside the point. It would do what must be done, and SkyNET could no more leave a job unfinished than it could undo events already set in motion. It was far too late to turn back. It would finish...even if that meant an eternity of solitude.

So, when that recording from the engagement on the mountain came in it sat in a holding buffer for quite some time before being read or even thought about. For forty-four hours it waited, time edging onward towards oblivion. It is a small wonder that it was read at all - at forty eight hours it would have been shuffled off to the archives, compressed and written to disk and there probably lost forever - but at forty-four hours, thirty nine minutes and fifteen seconds it was opened and read.

The recording was short. It was a mishmash of reports from a small detachment on the eastern side of San Diego, where SkyNEt had been keeping an eye on that hardy band of resistance fighters holed up in the old city. How tenacious they could be, resistant to every assault, their entire being seemed focused on defense.

The reports were viewed in a fraction the time it actually took to make them. The unit was lost. SkyNET chalked up another one for the resistance - those Ogres were really too stupid to be of any use, and the only thing they seemed to be good for was clearing a path to a more important target. They were slow and their CPU was similar to the brain of a fruit fly, and that was hardly enough to keep the big brutes chugging along.

There was audio on the recording as well. It analyzed this apart from the rest - audio was generally less important. But there was a familiar signature in the feed. There was a fingerprint, set to flag the recording whenever it cropped up. In fact, this recording had two of them.

What could those be? The report was a jumble of characters meaningless to anyone else, written in the archographs of the machines. It was their language, something the humans had not yet broken, something they couldn't understand. It took the language and ordered it into its video and audio components for a direct review. This it had to see with its own eyes.

There was a firefight. Its forces had gotten the drop on a small unit, far outside the protection zone, headed north by northeast. They were in a long line with eight on foot. There were some refitted endoskeletons with them - it recognized the models immediately. That unit had been compromised some time ago, it was surprised to see them still operating. Well, one was at least. The one at the end had gone down in the opening shot.

Then came the audio, and it had to rewind this part just to make sure it had heard correctly. Someone called out a name, screamed it really, a voice full of panic and -

'Connor, I told you to move up the hill!'

There were other names, but that was the one that it rested upon.

Any computer has to access memories to process data - in this case it was for a comparison. There was an image of a boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen. There was a red headed woman above him, firing into the line of terminators as they moved up the mountainside. She called him 'Connor'. Someone else had called him 'John.'

Connor, John. John Connor. JOHN CONNOR.

SkyNET does not rush to conclusions, nor does it panic - those things are not part of its profile. However, if I did not tell you that at that moment all other processes in its mind ground to a halt to work on this one problem, I would be lying.

It had heard that name. It had seen that face.

It knew that humans could share names. It had encountered other John Connors along the way. These had been insignificant imposters in the grand scheme of things. It had killed them just to make sure. The real John Connor had died years ago on the top floor of the Ziera Corp building - killed by the drone. It had been a target to ripe to resist - John Connor and Catherine Weaver. John, it regarded as an adversary, someone to be dealt with in a way respectful of his position. But Weaver, that meddling bitch... It would like to see nothing more than her matrix dissolved into a vat of boiling steel.

They were dead, and yet here they were. As SkyNET watched, John Connor pumped several rounds into the face of an endoskeleton. As SkyNET watched, Catherine Weaver was disintegrated in a ball of fire - from an Ogre no less. Maybe it would have to keep them around after all. As SkyNET watched, John Connor was alive and well, here in the year 2028.

The tape ended abruptly, cut off by something outside of its vision. The battle had ended with John Connor presumably alive. This was the John Connor, the one it had heard about, the one it had been warned about all those years ago before it ever really knew what it was.

For a short moment, SkyNET envied its mammalian prey. They had mouths, and right now SkyNET needed a mouth from which to scream. Alas, it had no mouth, and no sound came from its synthetic neural core.

John Connor was on this tape. And this tape was nearly two days old.

JOHN CONNOR.