Saturday 13th October 2029 – 10.12am

A boy, around eight, wove his way through the crowd. Erica recognised him. He lived in the mart. She couldn't remember his name. He stopped right in front of her, drew himself up to his full four-foot-nine-inches and announced, in his best I-Have-A-Very-Important-Message voice, "Connor needs to see you. Now."

Wait, what? No, seriously, what?

Erica hadn't even known Connor knew her name, let alone needed her for anything. It had to be a mistake. Everyone nearby turned to stare at her. Extremely uncomfortable, she and Neil pushed their way through the crowd, avoiding everyone's gaze. They finally escaped into the hall, and Erica silently followed Neil into a nearby store room.

They still didn't speak for a moment, but then;

"What are we going to do?" Neil stared Erica in the eye.

She shrugged. "What we're told, I guess."

"I can't do this Erica, I can't fight." This surprised her. It was everything he'd ever wanted since he was a child; but now there was a look of sheer terror in his eyes, and he turned his face away. "I can't."

But she understood. The reality of doing something like this was entirely different from the idea of it. After years and years of his applications being refused for psychological reasons, he'd gotten used to the idea of never having to fight.

She was surprised to find a strength in herself that she hadn't known she had. The more she thought about it, the less the idea of going to fight scared her. Her people needed this. And, she didn't want to think this, but the thought kept coming – she could get away from her mother.

She loved her mother, she truly did, but watching her deteriorate, spending her entire life sitting by her bed anticipating her every need was slowly, agonisingly, stripping her self away. She'd even found herself wishing, in her worst moments, that her mother would just die already and free both of them from their misery. But this thought was so awful, so shocking, that she pushed it away every time it bubbled up.

Despite understanding how Neil felt, she began to feel disgusted by his cowardice. She was the one who would definitely have to join up, definitely die; he still had a chance. She couldn't think of anything comforting to say, so she said nothing and backed out of the door. He stared after her with his injured puppy eyes, but at that moment she did not care.

Her thoughts turned to John Connor. What could he possibly want from her?

She passed the field – the hydroponics bays, where the majority of their food came from. Everyone who didn't fight spent a lot of their time there – working in it wasn't mandatory, but there was little else to do.

Some taught the kids how to read and count, someone made moonshine (although no-one was sure who), others drank it. There were a couple of books lying around, and every so often someone would screen a film in the barn, but they only had about twenty videos and these were so well known that almost no-one turned up to watch them any-more.

Card games used to be common, but very few people had full packs any more, so even these were dying out. Erica herself had found an old video camera in the back of an old store room, and a couple of tapes to go in it. When she was younger she and some of the kids used to make up stories and record them, but now Erica just occasionally recorded what she saw – the people in the mart mostly, just going about their every-day lives.

Those who were old enough to remember told stories of before Judgement Day, but no-one really believed them; they'd probably started out as truth but over the years they'd been embellished. Bits of movies or books that didn't exist any more had been thrown in to make it more interesting and because fuck it, why not? The original story tellers had died off, and their stories had been shared around and passed off as someone else's. Lie became truth, became fact became legend.

Three or four people in the camp claimed to have spend all day making sure chickens died properly. One person had made a living by knitting jumpers for dogs. Perhaps the craziest of all: someone else had worked in a bank.

Few of the younger generations were quite sure what banks were: people sat in a building and gave money to other people – some had too much, others too little. It seemed totally crazy. Why not just give everyone the same amount?

Friday 30th August 1996 – 0.56 am

Markus couldn't sleep. His bed wasn't his own, and he never shared bedrooms if he could help it. He wondered abstractly if he could con the bartender downstairs into giving him a drink; he looked older than he was.

He slipped out from under the covers and immediately stubbed his toe on the trendy armchair nearby.

"Shit! Ow!" Markus muttered loudly under his breath. Felicity stirred.

"Markus?" she murmured softly, clearly still mostly asleep.

"Bathroom." He hoped she would accept it as an excuse.

She sort of grunted in response.

Markus stood still for a minute, waiting for her to fall back to sleep. When he was almost sure she had, he grabbed his clothes from yesterday, and snuck out of the room.

The long bland carpeted corridor was empty, and Markus took the moment to squirm out of his pyjamas as he headed in the direction he thought was the elevator – it was a really big hotel and he wasn't quite sure. He abandoned his pyjamas strewn down the hall – he figured he could get them on the way back. It was a surprise to him when a couple rounded the corner.

Markus still lacked trousers, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice. He hopped into his jeans as the woman slammed the man into the wall. There was some writhing and kissing, but Markus was past them already.

He reached the elevators before he realized he'd forgotten his shoes. He debated going back, but he figured that was just asking for trouble, so shoeless he descended into the lobby of the hotel.

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 10.16am

She reached the security checkpoint. She'd never been beyond it before, she'd had never had a reason to. She'd actually never left the civilian areas of the camp before, no-one from the mart had. To be honest, she wasn't even entirely sure how big the camp was. Much bigger than the small areas they were restricted to, that was for sure.

Her mother and most of the adults had vague memories of the outside world, being safe before the war and after, running for their lives, but they'd all lived in the camp in monotony so long that even these were beginning to fade. There was no point in dwelling.

Before Erica's mother, Collette, had gotten sick, after a night of heavy drinking, she would stumble over to the area in the middle of the mart that she and Erica shared. She'd regale long tales of the world before the war, so Erica knew more about it than most.

She'd been a scavenger for the resistance for as long as she was able, and she told stories of this too. They'd gone in to the city nearby and gathered everything that could possibly be useful and brought it back. But it was dangerous, even more so lately, and the parties had stopped going out a few years ago. There was a much bigger machine presence, and almost everything worthwhile was gone already.

Her mother told of the victories, the losses, the horrors she'd faced, the people she'd lost and the very occasional moment of humour, or hope. It was the stories of the good times that turned Erica off being a solider mostly. The moments were so small, so frail, so infrequent. She couldn't live with that. At least in the camp she was safe, she had friends, she had a life beyond the war. Well, not really, but she could pretend.

Even that pretence of a life was slowly slipping away though. Most of her friends had joined up, or wanted to the moment they turned seventeen. Some had died, a few had gone missing. It was the missing ones she worried for the most. If you died, your suffering was over, but if you were captured you would be tortured for information or worse.

There were rumours. The skin for the skin-jobs had to come from somewhere. Another reason she hadn't wanted to join up. Imagine seeing the skin of someone you'd known, someone you'd loved, stretched across a metal skull. Imagine blowing it to pieces, having to clean their blood off your hands, your face... How could you ever talk to their family again? How could you ever see yourself in the same way?

The corridor beyond the checkpoint was like every other in the camp – dingy, badly lit, with pipes pumping water and electricity throughout the complex. Unlike the others however, it wasn't covered in children's drawings – they'd stopped wasting paper for things like that quite a while ago.

There were no windows – the camp was underground. Some of the other camps were above ground, they'd even been told of one that was at the top of a skyscraper in New York, but that one was confirmed destroyed last year. Erica couldn't imagine a skyscraper. She wasn't even sure she could imagine a sky.

The camps that were underground were a little easier to hide, easier to defend, lasted longer. They were also more difficult to escape.

Erica stopped at an intersection. All the corridors stemming from it looked the same, and she had no idea what to look for. Fortunately, a good-looking twenty-something in a uniform was approaching. It was rare to see someone in a uniform these days, most had been lost in one way or another since the beginning of the war. Some of the soldiers liked it though, Erica wasn't sure why.

"I'm looking for Connor, could you-" Before she could finsh her sentence, he replied. Erica hated when people cut her off.

"Yeah, sure" he had a nice smile, and he fell into step with her. They didn't talk, and a minute later, he abandoned her outside a low door. Unsure exactly what to do, Erica knocked tentatively.

"Come in." The call was a little muffled through the door, but she pushed it open, and was caught off guard for a moment. It was a bedroom-cum-office, but that wasn't what was surprising. The room was littered with crumpled papers, blueprints for buildings she'd never seen, charts and lists she didn't understand were pinned haphazardly overlapping on the walls. Strewn in-between were half finished cups of coffee, cigarette butts, the occasional bottle of alcohol, one abandoned sandwich. But that still wasn't what surprised her.

What surprised her was Alison lounging on a small couch in the corner. They didn't seem to be deep in conversation, or having a meeting, discussing tactics. She wasn't even bringing him something, or tidying, or doing anything really. She just seemed to be hanging out, the way Neil would hang around with Erica.

As she came into the room, Alison met her bemused stare with an aggressive one of her own. Alison was a bit of a legend around the mart. She'd infiltrated their ranks by posing as a refugee from a destroyed camp. It was a good cover – it inspired pity, dis-encouraged questions and allowed her to make up her own backstory as she liked.

She'd been adopted quite quickly into the resistance, and had worked her way up the ranks within a few short months. She'd become close with Connor, with some speculation that they'd been having a relationship. She'd only been caught out when Sackhoff – who was suspicious of everyone who became close to Connor – confronted her. In the struggle, he'd managed to cut her top layer of skin, exposing the cold hard metal underneath.

Connor, to everyone's chagrin, instead of killing her did something no-one else had thought of – he cut a hole in her skin, right down to her metal skull, found her chip, pulled it out and plugged it into one of the few working computers they had. He locked himself in his room with the computer and Alison's lifeless body for days on end. He spoke to no-one and ignored the trays of food left outside the room. The light was on constantly inside, leading most people to believe he wasn't sleeping either.

Eventually he had emerged, ragged and exhausted, but with the fruits of his labour – a terminator who, he claimed, would work for us. He gave it the free reign of the base.

This did not go down well. She was attacked almost daily, and he had programmed her to not be capable of harming humans, so she had little option but to take it. Eventually, people began to get used to her stalking the halls, following Connor around and generally putting everyone on edge. But people would never like her, never be civil.

And they would never trust her. But how could they? She was nothing more than a machine.

And she looked particularly mechanical at the moment, analysing Erica calculatingly. Connor saw she was making Erica extremely uncomfortable and said "Alison, could you give us a minute?"

He sized Erica up for a moment then gestured to a seat across the cluttered table that acted as his desk. Alison left the room.

"You're wondering why you're here." It wasn't a question, which was just as well, because Erica was not sure she could talk. She nodded vaguely.

"You have a video camera. I need you to make a video." Connor had this way of sort of announcing things – there was no debate, no other options, no compromises. You did what Connor said.

Erica was not sure what she'd been expecting, but it definitely wasn't that.

"A documentary actually. We are making history. The war is going to end soon, one way or the other. You've watched us die out gradually, and now we're going to do something about it. I want you to record it, I want the future to see how we survived. Or how we ended."

He paused for a moment. "Are you okay?"

Erica was anything but okay. After her entire life being the same, day after day, month after month, year after year, suddenly, in the space of an hour, everything had changed. She didn't know exactly how or what yet, but it was very clear to her that their was something big coming.

An embarrassing lump rose in her throat, and she choked back the tears that threatened to flood down her face. She managed to squeak out a "yeah, fine," and he continued.

"You'll have unlimited access to the most classified meetings, all the plan details, but I also want you to show the training process for the new recruits. I want interviews with the people living in the mart. I want to see people growing things in the feild, and doing whatever else goes on in the mart."

Erica looked him in the eye at that – he sounded like he didn't actually know what happened in the mart. They were separated by, maybe, a hundred metres of corridor, but for Connor they might as well have been on the moon. He had completely lost touch with the people he was trying to lead.

"I want interviews with my military too. I want to see everything that goes on in this camp over the next few days."

Erica began to wonder what Connor's life was like. Did he have friends? Did he get up for breakfast and sit with his men? Was his entire life military plans and tactics, and action reports? Did he measure his days in the amount of human lives lost? She began to suspect, looking around, that he didn't get out of this room much.

"I want to see the look on people's faces right before they go into battle. I don't want propaganda, I don't only want to see people who agree with everything I do, I want you to record the truth. Can you do that Erica?" His piercing eyes bored into her head. She nodded.

"Good. But Erica, this is not going to be safe. You're going to be on the front lines, in the most dangerous places. You are going to be risking your life. You'll be going through training with everyone else, but that will not prepare you. It will not prepare any of you, and I need you to keep your head on straight when you could lose your life at any moment. I need you to be extraordinary."

Erica suddenly wanted to jump up and salute, or hug him, or go shoot some skin-jobs That was Connor's gift, one of the things that made him such a great leader – he inspired people. But, instead she stood up to leave.

"Send Alison back in, would you?"

Alison was standing stock still in the corridor, back to the wall.

"He wants you," Erica told her. Then she wondered if it was true. She was certainly beautiful, and it was impossible to tell how old she was meant to be – anywhere from late teens to late thirties was certainly possible. Alison disappeared into the room and slammed the door.

As Erica walked away she decided it was impossible – Connor knew better than anyone that they were just machines, they couldn't feel anything. Their thoughts weren't thoughts at all, just really clever programming. Weren't they?

Suddenly completely overwhelmed, Erica stopped stock still. She burst spontaneously into tears. Great gulping sobs. She allowed herself ten seconds to completely loose it. Then she wiped her face with her sleeve and glanced at her watch. 10:24. She'd better get going.

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 12.12pm

This instructor guy was an ass-hole, Erica decided. They'd been divided up into eight groups, by age and physical fitness. She, as a teenager who exercised occasionally, was in one of the better ones, the sevens. Neil was in the group below, who were currently jogging down the corridors of the camp.

Her group and another were squished into a tiny firing range that none of them had known existed before – it was in the military part of the camp. They had a few guns, but no ammo to spare, so the instructor was showing them how to load the guns and shoot them, but all they could really do was point it at the battered target and pretend to shoot.

"At least," the instructor droned, "you'll have some idea of how they work when you join the fight."

Great. That'll be a big help.

Connor had cleared Erica as the only person who was allowed to come and go from training as she wished, so she could be wherever the action was. She excused herself.

As she returned to the mart, she passed the lowest group, the ones. They'd been jogging behind the sixes – Neil's group, but they had stopped to catch their breath. Most were on the edge of starvation, or sick from one of the many diseases that ran rampant through the camp. Some were just too old. Erica didn't really see how they'd be any help at all in the fight.

"Erica!" one of them gasped. "Kill me now, get it over with." It was meant as a joke, but neither of them found it funny. "Maybe later Mr. Sansom."

Back at the mart, Erica stopped by her bed and dug around under it for her camera. She'd been thinking about this during training. She had a tape deck, but there were very few computers around the base. She'd be able to get the video onto the computer, but she had no way to edit it. Her best hope was an in-camera edit, so she'd have to know what exactly to capture, and when.

As she was passing by her mother's bed, her mother moaned. In pain? Maybe? At that particular moment, Erica didn't really care. There was a medic on patrol in the mart at all times, so if anything really bad happened, her mother would be looked after as best they could. Spending time looking after her mother right now felt selfish, in an odd sort of way. She could be doing more to help the human race. So Erica walked straight past.