NOTES: This is the sequel to my previous story "Only Lonely". I'd recommended reading that one first. This story takes place during "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point".
SUMMARY: The truth of John and Cameron's relationship spreads to those willing to go to any lengths to undermine it.
DISCLAIMER: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.
"Fuzzy Dice"
Chapter 6
T.R. Samuels
Cold steal stung against frayed flesh as she twisted her wrists, motion rubbing salt into the wound where she had fought against the unyielding restraints. Harsh light flickered from a florescent bulb that dangled above her from a metal chain, reflecting in the chrome surface of the table she had been manacled to, its heavy legs bolted to the floor.
Hours had gone by in this room. Just her lone with her thoughts. Time had drawn out like a rusty blade, the torment ebbing it away to a fine razor that left her mesmerized in the deafening silence. A heavy steal door sat at the end of the concrete tomb, the only portal back to the world, a two-way mirror across one of the longer walls reflecting her in shimmering light.
Jesse had returned to Serrano Point the previous night, making her way through the unthinkable sight of soldiers lounging about in the open air, a babble of multi-lingual tongues dancing with one another around a towering bonfire as those with any modicum of musical talent played on homemade instruments. She had to fight away the advances of a drunken soldier who tried to sweep her into a dance, pulling her to his side as he swung her around, collapsing in an unconscious heap when his head continued to spin.
Inside the base had been a different matter. The moment upon entering the jaws of the main gate she had been taken down by a group of black-clad soldiers. Connor's trusted elite. Totally dependable. Fanatically loyal. Duplicates of the terminator model that looked like a lantern-jawed killing machine and spoke in some weird, indescribable accent.
That the hell had happened to the world?
The answer was simple. Skynet was gone. It was all over.
Finished. Destroyed. Terminated.
Connor had led the final attack personally, straight into the heart of Skynet's central core, deep beneath the fortress of Cheyenne Mountain. To hear the grandiose stories on the way to the Serrano Point it had been wall-to-wall with metal, the bowels of the facility an armoured maze of high-tech security and booby-traps, every foot of the way paid for in blood as the Resistance had gone head on with Skynet's elite, battling through them like knights of old as they fought their way to the monster's lair.
No Minotaur had lurked at the end of the labyrinth, but there had been a dragon. Skynet's final guardian.
Out of nowhere heavy mechanical locks clunked out of place, the armoured door to her cell swinging open with a metallic groan as Major General Perry marched into the room.
Inside Jesse rejoiced, relieved it was him and not someone lower on the chain. Someone she trusted and could talk to.
Someone with some god-damn authority.
"Stay at ease, lieutenant." His words forestalled her attempt to rise, muscles atrophied as she slumped back into her seat, watching as Perry slapped some narrow files onto the table and slid into the opposite chair. Her body curled upward as she anticipated his debriefing, her expression fervent as he began flicking through the contents of the files, studying the papers with indolence.
"Sir…?"
Perry cut her off with a wave of his hand, his gaze never leaving the documents. He flicked over the first page, making a meal of it.
"It's some butcher's bill you're gonna give me, Flores." His eyes rose from the papers and looked into hers, sliding sticky photographs across the table to her fingertips. The scene they painted was a cauldron of death, the aftermath of Bighorn Basin from the eye of a satellite.
"We were set up."
Her words hung in the air between them as Perry searched for sense, bright eyes never leaving her.
"What the hell are you talking about, lieutenant?"
"Someone told the metal we were coming. They were more than ready for us. Two divisions to guard some shit-hole outpost in the middle of nowhere? Gimme a break."
"That's a pretty strong accusation. Do you have someone in mind for it?"
Silence stretched out between them as she caught his gaze, firm and resolute, not a doubt in her mind, as sure as that her mother loved her. It was all the answer he needed.
"I'd advise you to take a cleansing breath lieutenant and rethink that unlikely hypothesis."
"Who else would have known enough? Who else had something to gain?"
"What you did in Bighorn was important. It was necessary to divide Skynet's forces so that we could strike at the heart." He tried to remain objective, empathy eating him up. "It's ugly and I know you won't like it, but there it is. It was a necessary sacrifice."
"Isn't that why we have reprogrammed metal? I thought that was Connor's whole fucking point! Aren't they the ones that make those kinds of sacrifices?"
The general quickly lost patience, hoping that some time alone would have calmed her down. Let her come to terms with what had needed to be done.
"You got the assignment because we needed all the metal we had to get into Cheyenne Mountain. Not to mention the fact that you wouldn't take them."
Jesse scoffed, her anger coming to boil, stoked by incredulous flames. She had known Perry was a strong supporter of Connor and of the metal. She never knew quite how strong until now.
"The only reason the metal didn't get the assignment is because they have a better union than us." Her tone was a sardonic monotone, implication clear and it gave Perry a bad taste in his mouth. "If we'd had…"
"Had what, lieutenant?" He slapped the file closed, looking her dead centre, tired of this same old crap. "Which is it, because I'm confused. Do you want the metal to fight with you or not?"
He was met with more stonewalling, her heels dug in and jaw set, a trait of all the soldiers too bitter to change.
"There's no racism in foxholes, is there lieutenant?"
"It's not racism! They're not people! They're things!" The bile exploded out of her, the walls around her shrinking as her last line of salvation turned away before her eyes. "WE were people! WE mattered!"
"Yes you did. The diversion you provided drew a significant force far enough from Cheyenne for us to mount our attack. You were the ones who wouldn't accept back-up."
"WHY US?!"
Perry regarded her for a long time, the seconds ticking away as he tapped his thumbs against the files, mulling over whether of not to tell her, to go all the way. Connor had authorised him to do so if it meant bringing her back into the fold.
They needed everyone they could get.
He moved the documents aside and knitted his fingers together on the table. "Okay. If you really want to know, then here's the truth."
Jesse shifted forward in her seat, ready for anything he was about to tell her.
"But I'm warning you… this is top secret. Only a handful of people know the true scope of it all. Failure to keep this information secret carries a penalty that is quite severe."
There was no need for anymore; Jesse knew how Connor handled traitors. It was the one thing she liked about him.
Perrys' fingers fished in his breast pocket, retrieving a tiny silver key and slid it across the table.
"Your division bucked authority and you couldn't follow orders. You were the only ones that couldn't work with the machines… you're not part of the solution. It made you the logical choice for a feint attack."
Deep down a part of her already knew this as she slipped the key into her cuffs. When you send troops out to die, preferably you don't send your best.
None of that made her feel the slightest bit better.
"So what?! He just decided to get rid of us?! Because we were in the way? Like we were garbage?!" Without warning she suddenly burst out of her chair, shoving the table against Perry's chest and ran to the mirror.
"Hey you! I know you're watching, Connor!"
She smashed her fist against the glass before feeling the general's iron grip take her biceps from behind.
"That's enough! Belay that soldier!" He commanded, feeling her strength falter as he manhandled her back into the chair. "He isn't here. He's in Topanga Canyon."
"What the hell's in Topanga Canyon?!"
Perry retook his seat, drawing together the scattered files. "Nothing that would interest you."
She closed her eyes against the strain. It was like talking to a machine. Worse yet, a bureaucrat.
"Why did Connor need to nuke an entire valley just to keep the secret that Skynet was experimenting on humans? That's not news. Everybody knows what they did to us in the camps."
"Connor made a choice. He always knew the war was coming to an end and that afterward the real fight would begin."
"What fight?"
He tried to suppress a laugh, a sick desperation in it. "Have you looked around lately, lieutenant? The world's a wasteland. Once we got hooked back into the satellites Connor had the techs take pictures of the whole planet so the scientists could figure out how bad things were."
Pretty bad, she'd imagined.
"They were worse than anyone thought. There's just nothing left. The ecosystem is shot to hell, it'll be over a hundred years before all the dust settles and there are very few us left. Maybe not enough to start over. That's our biggest problem now."
Amongst the information was a sad kernel of truth that Jesse had long since discovered.
The most difficult thing was having children. The bleakness of there existence making that truer than ever before. Soldiers could simply not be out of action for months on end to have babies. Babies needed warmth, food, water, clean cloths, medicine and safety. None of which were in abundance.
Many people that did manage to conceive wished they hadn't. The radiation from Judgement day still lingered across the planet, contaminating most food and water supplies. Deformities and miscarriages were common tragedies, the precious few born healthy still ripe for a hundred other fates.
At least it was one thing she never had to worry about. She remembered clearly how the one doctor she had ever seen had told her she could never have children. Too much radiation. Too many battles. The foolish plans she had dreamt for her and Derek shattered in an instant.
"You have to understand; it was either compromise or oblivion. Connor made the choice and I respect him for that. He's the only one that ever could. He pulled us back from the brink and gave us a future. Now we all have to see it through."
Jesse shook her head. "What future?" She laid her palms flat out, begging for the answer that would make sense of it all, give the soldiers of Bighorn Basin the reason and meaning they deserved.
"Just tell me what the hell's going on…"
####
Sometime later Jesse staggered out from the depths of Serrano Point, up through the dark tunnels and colour coded security to the throng of celebrators that still danced into the night, every last one of them oblivious to the bombshell Perry had released, leaving her a walking corpse just waiting for a stiff breeze to blow her over.
She had collaged the pieces of the puzzle to their unthinkable conclusion, the final revelation a mirror image of herself; a monstrous, red-eyed terminator looming up behind her, ready to tear her head off. It still spun around in her mind, making her dizzy and she had to sit down, finding the broken chassis of HK and flopped down on the ground next to it, her back propped by its sturdy frame.
Before her was the victory celebration, its participants casting long shadows from the central bonfire as Serrano Point glimmered in the distance, their greatest drunkards swaggering about the fire like voodoo shamans in the flickering light.
As she watched everyone, going from face to face, the reality began to dawn, seeing things in a light she had been blind to before, Perry's revelation a lightning bolt to her brain that rerouted her synapses. She found herself studying each person in turn; their gait, their posture, how they carried themselves, searching for the ones that did not belong.
Soon she found them, sitting amidst the regular people in perfect camouflage, watching the human spectacle in quiet fascination and confusion, the scene becoming kinetic and abstract in her mind as time slowed down and her heart sank.
The young chopper-jock that flirted with the blonde woman, her figure too perfectly proportioned; the dippy computer tech that flushed red beneath the bemused gaze of the muscle bound Adonis. Some were teaching them how to dance, others playing catch, the more inebriated explaining the mind expanding properties of distillated spirits.
It was already happening. Had already happened. The world had moved on while she'd been left in the dust. An obsolete model from a bygone era that had no place in the future. Certainly not Connor's.
A tear slid down her cheek, weeping for the past, for a time that made sense and she knew how to fight the enemy.
"Hey there." A young guy said to her as he passed. "Cheer up soldier, it might never happen." He pressed the bottle he had been holding into her hand. Jesse felt the weight of the glass container, warm brown liquid rolling inside. She hadn't seen anything like it in ages, all booze nowadays clinically distilled from an industrial ethanol that tasted like battery acid.
"Don't ask me how but one of them showed us how to make it. Took us ages to get it right."
She smiled and unscrewed the top, beginning to feel better as she lifted the bottle to her mouth and her motion froze, mind spinning back to nominal speed and the haze lifted.
"One of them?"
"Yeah, one of the metal. Doug I think."
The tone was so flippant, casually thrown away and it made her shake, rage boiling as the sweet smell of the drink turned sickly, tantamount to poison. She shoved the cap on and thrust it back to him, eyes dark and unyielding.
"I'll stick with our stuff thanks."
He gave her a sad look, not eager for a fight, the soldier in him retired since this morning. "Hey, don't be like that. War's over. The last thing we need is another one."
She did not respond. Nothing he said would interest her and he eventually stomped away, back to his party and his new friends.
No matter what happened she would never become like him. The resolve setting in her mind as a plan began to formulate.
She needed to find out what happened to Derek. Find out what was happening in Topanga. Come up with a way to resist. Come up with a mission.
She needed it. Craved it. That reason to exist and keep fighting.
She bolted up from her seat, her new assignment a vital injection that threw coal on the fire, reaching the guy and grabbing his elbow.
"Hey, I'm sorry." She smiled at him, seeing the hope in his eyes. "It's just… it's been so long, y'know. Fighting the machines. It's the type of thing that doesn't vanish over night."
He returned her smile, forgiveness instantaneous as he unscrewed the cap and offered her the bottle. Without missing a beat Jesse took it and downed the ruby gold in a lingering swig, its flavour sweet as honey going down.
What was a little poison for the sake of the mission?
"So… Specialist J. Cullie." She read from his shirt, handing him back the bottle. "What do you do here in the future?"
He had a little laugh to himself. "My name's Jim, only my brother goes by Cullie. I'm a tech over at Topanga." He took a swig, feeling the burn and the dizziness. "But I can't tell you what I do. It's all very 'hush-hush'." He laughed, sometimes not believing what he did himself.
Jesse beamed him her most winning smile, holding his gaze as she took her turn with the rum.
"Really…?"
####
Derek Reese sat stupefied in the oversized chair, trying to make sense of everything now it was out in the open. What she had just told him was like a slap in the face to everything he knew, the contrast with his own truth an insoluble mountain. Half of him wanted to run, hasten back to base and bury his head in the sand, the architecture of the future made all the more dark by the lights of perverted Skynet science.
"I'm here to stop her. I'm here to save him." Jesse finished her tale, watching Derek as he raised his glass to his mouth, hands shaking as his nostrils flaring at the smell of the whiskey before he placed it down on the table.
There were some minutes of silence as the cogs ticked over in his mind, trying the jigsaw every which way, piecing it together like a shattered mirror that cut his fingers every time.
He shook his head, the facts refusing to stick.
"I don't get it, Jess. So we keep the metal around; it's not perfect but maybe Connor has a point. Maybe it's not that bad an idea." He was reaching and he knew it, but his faith in John Connor wasn't about to be thrown out the window.
"It's not just that Derek. It's what Skynet was trying to do; re-sequence our DNA and giving it to the machines. Make something so insidious that we'd never know."
She was always better at the tech stuff than him and it was already hurting his head. It wasn't like he ever finished high school. He just liked to smash metal.
"It was trying to find a way for the terminators to reproduce. With people. With each other."
"How? Why?"
"Skynet wanted a weapon that was impossible to detect, one that we wouldn't notice until it was too late. It knew we were having problems reproducing, so it would send as many of these things as it could to infiltrate us, never turn on us or make waves, just be good little soldiers. They'd have or give us children without anyone ever noticing what was happening. Ones that looked and seemed healthy, encourage us to continue, but they'd all be engineered by Skynet."
"To do what?"
"So it can wipe us out from inside! Like ethnic cleansing. Even if Skynet was defeated it would still win that way. People wouldn't be people anymore. They'd be artificial, part of the machine. It could have put any type of anomaly in our makeup; reduced lifespan, lowered intelligence, any type of mutagenic. Take your pick."
It felt like something out of a Frankenstein nightmare, attacking human sanctity at its core. Derek knew well enough that Skynet's science knew no bounds. Its twisted imagination risen to a height beyond humanities, its morality plunged far below.
"That's hard to believe, Jess. How does Cameron fit into all this?"
Jesse huffed, the mention of its name distasteful. "She was for him."
"Connor?"
"Skynet based her on some little tech he'd come to like. Made her identical so he'd drop his guard." She smiled at his frown. "What? You thought Skynet sent a terminator that looked like that just to kill him?! One thing I'll give Connor is that he's only human."
Derek's mind rocketed like a freight train, the mystery of Cameron Phillips suddenly making more sense than he knew how to handle. Without a word he rose from his chair, pacing the bedroom as he tried to think, his fingers running across his brow and chin as he tried to slow his breathing.
Somewhere through the daze and confusion, clarity was beginning to shape, for the first time ever feeling like he was on the inside looking out.
Metal bitch! He knew it from day one she was trouble. Why the hell didn't Sarah listen?
"It never stops, Derek." Jesse's voice has reduced to a croaky trill, hoarse and tired from laying it all down. "It never stops trying to find one more way to kill us."
In a rush the implications crashed into him. "John… him and that thing… oh shit!"
Jesse nodded her head, her face graver than a cemetery. "We have to kill it Derek. Her as well. Leave nothing left."
He was surprised when the cold dread went through him. "But John…"
"Will hate you forever… but it has to be done. We have to stop it right now or Skynet will win."
Somewhere inside him the last bastion of humanity held out hope, resisting the greater forces of pragmatism and necessity that bore down upon it, a microcosm of the War of the Future playing out within, its soldiers and terminators his pious homunculi.
Surrendering to the inevitable battle felt like death and rebirth, casting the path ahead that he knew must be taken no matter the cost, Jesses' revelations making it all so abundantly clear.
He turned to her a changed man, willing and able, tinged with regret, the certainty in his eyes her assurance.
"Lets get to work."
####
Golden sunlight cast through the open window of John Connor's bedroom, its curtains fluttering in the morning breeze to breathe life into the room. Within the narrow bed its occupants lay in an idle slumber, neither making haste to leave as the clock on the nightstand clicked over into quadruple digits, its temporal concepts of little interest to either of them.
Cameron Phillips turned her head and gazed upon the sleeping form of her lover, his hair ruffled, breathing slow and even as his angular cheek rested against the pillow next to hers. Beneath the covers she was aware he was naked, what he had told her was his 'birthday suit', a variant of which she also possessed and had come to use during all his nocturnal phases. It made things far more agreeable.
John held such a peaceful expression in sleep, his arm making an involuntary movement to pull her closer, mumbling softly as his grip tightened. Her heart tightened with it.
"Ugh... bring the bottle."
She had observed this behaviour before. Sometimes he would speak in his sleep, his arms and legs wander about, hands getting everywhere. At first she had been amused by his night-time activities, only discovering recently that these mannerisms were a valuable insight to her partner's psychology.
Cameron had made the successful growth of their relationship a top priority, studying several schools of thought on the subject of inter-human relations and practices. She had mastered the basic principles quickly, finding John remarkably more cooperative than the popular magazines had suggested 'her man' would be.
Quite the contrary, he seemed to be an atypical specimen of what was described to her as the average male.
John had not always insisted driving, drank from the carton, nor had he made the 'annoying habit' of leaving the toilet seat up. She found it curious why such activity should annoy anyone. Far more curious as to why Jane from Portland had left her partner of two years over one such a trivial incident, for a time frightening her at the apparent fragility of human bonding.
Her musings ceased as she detected the tell-tale signs that John was waking up, manoeuvring herself closer to him as his breathing became irregular and his eyes fluttered open, falling on her immediately and rewarding her with his smile.
"Umm… morning, Cam." He kissed her mouth, his hand moving to her stomach, rubbing it in a circle. "How is she?"
She knew to what he was referring, catching the subtle probe, his cunning never ceasing to amaze her.
She ran a brief scan. "The baby is fine."
"Good."
He settled back down in the bed, much closer to her now, his face buried in her shoulder as he began his habitual morning ceremony of slowly waking up.
"John."
"Uh-huh…"
"I have been analysing the situation."
"That's nice."
"It may become necessary to terminate Derek Reese."
A bolt of neurons fired in his brain, weaving his resolving consciousness. He raised his head from her shoulder and looked into her eyes, her seriousness evident. "Huh… what?!"
"He has shown a willingness and capability to inflict harm upon you. That's unacceptable."
John thought quickly to head this off, the women in his life famous for their tangents. "I thought you weren't built for revenge."
"It's not about revenge, John. It is a logical tactical manoeuvre to eliminate threats when they arise."
"Cam, just because something is logical doesn't mean that it's the right course."
Her brow furrowed together, mouth becoming small. "Explain."
"Okay…" His mind blazed, clawing for logical opposition. "It… just isn't Cam. You can't go around terminating people because they don't agree with what you're doing."
"Why?"
"You just can't, alright!"
Cameron seemed to consider this, head and eyes moving in the unique way she had when contemplating. Soon veracity drifted to the surface, fear in her expression. "He could be a threat to our child, John. It's obvious that he doesn't approve."
To her surprise his mouth widened into its most reassuring smile, the mark of the eternal optimist. "It'll be alright. Nothing and no one is going to stop us having our baby. I promise. Derek can think and feel whatever the hell he likes."
A strange feeling welled inside her, one that was warm and made her feelings for him deepen. She was being illogical. Mere words making the worry go away, a weakness for him that had always been there. Everyday John became a little more like the John of the future; more certain and confident, at ease with himself, though still he held true to this idealism and boyish optimism.
But a boy that had seen and done so much, possessing an old and wearied soul well beyond his years.
"John…" Her tone was cautious and uncertain, the wisdom of her next words feeling dubious. "Aren't you going to ask me how?"
"How what?"
She swallowed hard and fearfully. "How we… could make a child in the first place?"
John regarded her for several seconds, his face setting as he spoke with total conviction. "No. I trust you."
The feeling returned, her heart falling for him all over again. He was nothing like the John in the future.
"I don't remember anything from before I was reprogrammed. John always erases our memories of working for Skynet."
He grinned to himself as the truth to her question began to be revealed, a mystery he suspected more to herself than to him, her heart wielding no deception. He always thought it unlikely that she would know, her surprise during the first days of her pregnancy answering that.
Sometimes Cameron could be very complicated.
"Are you certain you don't want to know?"
He nodded his head, sleep pulling him back. "It doesn't matter, Cam." He kissed her gently, not wanting her to worry as he spoke through a yawn. "It's not like we can ask future-me anyway."
She mulled over the last possibility in her mind, its promise of answers a shiny lure. John may be content not to know, but her intolerance of mystery spurred her forward. "No… we can't," The sentence seemed final and he lowered his head to her shoulder, diving for what sleep there was still to salvage.
"But we can ask the Engineer…"
John's eyes snapped open. Now he was awake.
Hope you like it. This one was difficult to write.
Please read and review.