John paused for a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow, taking in a deep breath and closing his eyes, resting for a few seconds – as long as he dared – and then pushed his load once more. The cart he was pushing was laden with bodies; eight or nine, he guessed, and it weighed a ton. He pushed with everything he had, his muscles straining, burning, his body begging to just lie down and rest, but he kept on going, knowing if he faltered or fell he'd be executed on the spot; the machines had no use for humans too weak to work.
John had never felt so drained in all his life; not even during his jungle training in South America with his mom, at least then he could rest every once in a while. He'd worked out the grim routine of the camp over the last three weeks: the disposal units started up at first light, the first daily intakes of dirty, starving, fearful, condemned prisoners were herded by T-70s into the disposal chambers and poisoned to death with some kind of gas. John heard the sickening, agonised screams of those inside, every morning, listening to their cries become hoarse as the gas took effect, turning into coughing and retching, and then all went silent.
Soon after, the workers were shepherded out of their living area – little more than a large shed with thin, tattered hospital ward mattresses scattered on the ground – and put to work, transporting the freshly murdered corpses from the gas chambers to the hospital's three furnaces for disposal. They worked nonstop for eighteen hours a day; John's wristwatch had somehow made it through his battle with Cromartie and subsequent capture intact, and he'd noticed that the disposal and incinerator units shut down at midnight every day and the machines pushed them back to their dingy sleeping area for the night, allowing them roughly six hours of rest a day.
John knew the machines didn't care about their human prisoners, but guessed that Skynet knew they needed rest to function, and provided them with the bare minimum to allow them to maintain their workloads. It hadn't been enough for everyone; John had witnessed several men and women collapse from exhaustion, and were then brutally executed. Several more had tried to escape; their heads had joined the late Clemens' on the perimeter fence, looking into the camp to deter would-be escapists or insurrectionists.
John pushed his heavy cart up to the furnace and started to haul the bodies into the fiery entrance, wincing uncomfortably and unable to shield his face from the searing heat. He turned his head away, not wanting to look at their faces; their pale, clammy, pasty bodies; expressions a grim portrait of the agonising pain, fear, and confusion of their final moments. He tried not to look but he couldn't help but feel that they were still warm; the disposal units so efficient that from death to cremation was mere minutes and varied only on the speed of the unfortunate soul who had to push them from slaughterhouse to crematorium. At least the brilliant flames inside illuminated the night better. Even though it was night, the camp was well lit; bright floodlights in all four corners of the camp, plus lights positioned on the outside of the hospital, shining down on the camp grounds and enabling the workers see what they were doing. But there were still patches of darkness dotted around where bulbs had broken, and the furnace John was loading up was located in one such pool of darkness, leaving him reliant on the light of the fire to see what he was doing.
He pushed one body after another into the incinerator, each cremated without a funeral, it seemed so utterly wrong to John. He struggled with one body; the corpse too heavy and his own body too weak to lift it. It didn't help the body had once been a morbidly obese, middle aged man, who seemed to weigh more than him and Cameron put together. John thought morbidly, no wonder Skynet didn't want this guy, and then scolded himself for thinking it. He'd tried to teach Cameron how every single life was precious and needed to be saved. Her philosophy, if it could be called that, was that sacrifices were necessary. His had been different; to save every life they could, no matter the cost. He'd realised that even over two weeks, he'd started to care less and less. He'd silently cried himself to sleep every night, lamenting over Cameron and his own sorry state of affairs. He'd cried for the dead he burned at first then started to push it down, to suppress it, knowing there was nothing he could do for them.
John heaved the body up as hard as he could, lifting from his knees and every muscle in his legs, back, and arms were straining, on fire. He held it, pinned against the wall of the furnace, and tried to push up towards the furnace entrance, a little over five feet above the ground. He pushed and grunted and struggled, but it was no use, he felt his grip slipping, the body sliding down despite his best efforts.
"Come on... come on!" John grunted in both frustration and fear. Three days ago he'd seen a prisoner struggle to lift a body into the furnace. Struggled and failed, the poor woman had been there longer than John, and was weak from hunger and fatigue, and had dropped a body she'd been trying to lift into Furnace Two. A nearby T-70 had witnessed her and decided, with its simple mind, to terminate her. John had practically seen the machine's simple thought processes at work; instead of merely shooting her it had picked her up and threw her into the furnace – saving ammunition, no doubt; very efficient, John had bitterly thought. He'd been next in line after her and had to keep loading bodies in after her, trying and failing to block out her pitiful, agonised wails as she was burned to death. It hadn't lasted long, at least.
John was terrified that the same fate would befall him now. He pushed and struggled, to no avail; he couldn't keep it up any longer. No, please! John begged his body to hold out, tried to will his muscles to make one last push, but nothing came. Any second the machines would be on him, and he'd be shot to death if he was lucky...
"Come on, lad," John heard an Irish accented voice beside him, as a large, black haired, DPM clad man grabbed the obese corpse and pushed up with him. Together they hauled the body into the furnace, both of them snapping away from the hole as the raging fire within spat up in response to the newcomer like water splashing upwards around a tossed stone, the flames licked violently upwards, narrowly missing the pair.
"Thanks," John muttered to the man as he turned back to his empty cart, leaving his unnamed saviour to unload his own bodies into the incinerators. He wasn't ungrateful, but he was sure his salvation was simply a temporary measure. The next time there might be no one to help him, and the machines executed all slaves who were unable or unwilling to work.
He pushed the empty cart back towards the gas chambers, his tired body glad of this temporary reprieve – pushing the empty carts was the nearest thing the working population of Century had to rest during the day. John pushed the cart past the main hospital building, taking a moment to stare inside. He'd been here for three weeks and he'd seen no one – no human, at least – go into or out of the hospital. A single T-70 stood guard outside the main entrance, barring entry to anyone not composed entirely of metal. John had peered at it curiously and wondered what - if anything - was going on in there. But he'd been worked so hard that he barely had energy to even think about it.
Cameron, though, was a different matter. He thought about her even though it pained him to do so. He'd mulled over the last time he saw her a hundred times at least. Could she have survived? He wondered. She'd looked as bad as Uncle Bob had after barely defeating the T-1000; she'd still had all her limbs, granted, but the metal shard through her chest, the horrific burns to her skin, her knee twisted and warped. And Uncle Bob had managed to come back online; Cameron had shown no signs of rebooting. Her head seemed okay, from what he'd seen, so her chip shouldn't have been damaged. But he had no way to know for sure, and that uncertainty hurt John more than anything.
He'd also thought about how he'd treated her the last few days before they'd been separated; he'd been cold towards her, angry that she'd gone off on her own, and had nearly been destroyed – blamed for Derek's assault. She'd thought he'd assumed it was her, and he'd done nothing to reassure her. He hated himself for that, for driving a wedge between them once again; when she'd needed him, he'd let her down. He let everyone down. How the hell he was meant to be some world leader, some messiah, he didn't know. Sure, he'd done okay running Cheyenne Mountain, but once he'd taken his force out on the road, to lead other units, they'd obeyed his orders, but still remained suspicious of him. They didn't like how he'd had Cameron around, most of all.
Since the Area 51 battle, when Cameron's true nature had been exposed, confidence in him had dropped like a stone, he'd seen it in their faces; in Ryan's, in Perry's, even in Derek's. And he couldn't blame them; he'd never been good at this; at leading, at fighting. He'd screwed it up, and now Cameron was as good as dead – lying offline in the ruins of Las Vegas, possibly forever – and the prophesised saviour of mankind was toiling helplessly in a shithole work camp, waiting to falter, waiting for his turn to be executed and casually tossed into the furnace; burned down to nothing and forgotten.
John reached the disposal units, leaning tiredly on his empty cart and awaiting the next load of bodies. Each of the two disposal units – parking garages with the legend 'Ambulances' above the doors – churned out around forty people every half hour. The garage doors were closed and there was silence within, indicating the gas had taken effect and killed those inside. The doors would soon open to vent the gas and grant John and his fellow workers entrance inside to load the bodies into their carts.
John looked out at the camp and saw another Osprey land on the grassy area between the hospital building and the fence, its landing lights shining brightly through the dark night sky. The same trio of T-70s emerged from the hospital entrance and plodded towards the transport, pulling more captured humans out the back and lining them up to be branded. Ospreys landed constantly throughout the day, every day, and disgorged more condemned souls into the hellish squalor of the camp. This time, unlike many others, including John's arrival, nobody tried to run; they were either too scared or too shocked to make any move at escape.
John didn't know whether it was a good or bad that they stayed put; a quick death by gunfire seemed attractive compared to the horrific systematic disposal those condemned would face later. Bad thing, he mouthed as he watched. The machines branded them all and herded them into the larger enclosure in the camp, awaiting disposal. Given the amount of people stuck in the camp – perhaps a couple of thousand, John guessed from the cramped conditions inside, people packed in like sardines with little or no room to move - they'd have a day or two to ponder their fates, standing around like cattle before it was their turn to be destroyed, systematically gassed to death like annoying cockroaches.
John watched the new arrivals as he waited, feeling guilty that he was he was relieved to watch their condemnation, a distraction from his own miserable thoughts of Cameron's fate and his own.
His watch suddenly beeped, over and over as the alarm signalled midnight, and as if timed to his watch, the floodlights shut off, leaving the camp with only the murkier lights of the hospital walls. He sighed with relief at the darkness; it signalled the end of another day of miserable slavery. The machines marched into the worker's section of the camp and started to herd everyone back into their grimy sleeping area, though none needed to be coerced into resting. John let go of the empty cart and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, his head hung pathetically as he ambled his way back.
When he got to the sleeping area he saw another usual sight; the T-70 with two hands – the one that branded new entries – marched over with a large, industrial sized barrel, placed it on the ground, and walked off, leaving them alone for the night. Prisoners crowded round the barrel and pushed each other aside, fighting over the rights to get there first. John grabbed a dirty bowl and spoon from a pile in one corner of the room and waited for most of the pushing and shoving to die down until he made his way there, filled his bowl from the bottom of the barrel, and spirited away from everyone else.
The machine with two hands, the T-71, as John had privately dubbed it, dumped the barrel of thin, grey, foul smelling liquid at the same time every day; at midnight when the camp closed down for the night. John sat down outside the building, place his bowl on the floor and pulled out two photos; one of him and Cameron, his arm wrapped around her shoulders and pulling a ridiculous face, while Cameron's face remained blank and stoic. One of the happier times they'd had before Judgement Day. The other was of his mother, taken when she was younger, sat in a jeep with a German shepherd beside her, a bandanna on her head and storm clouds in the sky over a desert backdrop. She couldn't have been much older than 19 or so.
He dug his spoon into the bowl and ate forcefully, shovelling the 'food' down his mouth as fast as he could. He wasn't sure exactly what it was; some kind of meat broth or a very thin stew. Whatever the meat was from, he didn't know. He didn't even want to think about it. He sat alone, outside the sleeping quarters, and ate in quiet solitude, grinding his teeth on a lump of chewy, grisly meat, forcing his gullet to open up and swallow it down, and wondered for the umpteenth time what the hell the meat actually was.
As always, at night when he had nothing better to do, he sat out alone while he ate, and his mind drifted to Cameron. He tried to remember what they'd had together; their first and only real date; the night afterwards, the first time they made love together and took their relationship further than he'd ever imagined it; and her built day, when they'd spent the day blissfully alone together.
Instead his mind wondered to how badly he'd treated her. Since he'd discovered he was a machine, and they'd travelled to 2007, he'd treated her with a mix of coldness, irritable tolerance, and a casual indifference. He'd been attracted to her all that time, but he'd been ashamed of himself for feeling anything for a machine, and what was supposed to be the enemy. After she'd reverted back to her default Skynet programming and tried to kill him, he'd barely acknowledged her existence; instead brushing her off to spend time with Riley – trying to forget what happened and bury his feelings for what he'd seen as nothing but a cold, calculating, machine. He'd acted with open hostility towards her at times, barely speaking a word to her.
Things had improved between them after Riley had been killed and Jesse disappeared; they'd become closer than before, becoming friends almost. Then, a year after that, his mom had been killed by Cromartie, and he'd distanced himself from her once again. He deserved to lose Cameron, he decided. She deserved better than him, though she'd never want anyone else, just as he never would either. It was his pig ignorance that had gotten himself captured and her killed; even if her chip were undamaged, she'd still not rebooted; with no one to fix her she'd stay offline forever; dead, for all intents and purposes. Dead, because of him.
"Sarah Reese, 2010," John muttered, reading the short inscription on the marker. Just a rock with two words and a number; nothing to indicate who she'd really been, what kind of woman she was. Nothing said of the devoted – if overbearing at times – mother, or the dedicated soldier she'd been. Nothing to show she'd died trying to save her son, to save the world. The world would never know of her struggle, her sacrifice, John thought bitterly. It wasn't even her real name, for Christ's sake! That would have been too high a risk, Cameron had said, and Derek had for once agreed.
He stood over his mother's recently laid grave; a simple stone marker with her favourite alias and the year of her death. He couldn't cry; he wanted to, he sorely wanted to cry and let it all out, but he couldn't. He felt nothingness, hollow and empty inside, the only thing he felt was anger. Anger towards his uncle and the machine both standing with him. He was bitter at Derek for simply giving Sarah little more than a pauper's grave, and more at Cameron, for being the reason his mother was in the grave in the first place. Cromartie had fired the shots but Cameron had stopped treatment, in effect killing her.
"I'm sorry, John," Cameron stepped beside him, too close for his liking, and looked down at the grave.
"No, you're not," John accused through gritted teeth, refusing to even look at her. He hated himself as much as he hated Cameron right now. Cameron may have killed his mom, but she died because of him. She'd died to save his life, to protect him, because of his actions in the future. What he did, what his future self did, was indirectly responsible for his mom's death. He'd killed her, just as sure as Cromartie had when he'd shot her, or as Cameron had when she'd stopped trying to resuscitate her. All three of them were responsible, but at least he was sorry for her death. He missed her, wanted her back. Cameron didn't care, Sarah had been nothing to her; an extra gun at best, an inconvenience at worst. John knew she wouldn't have hesitated to kill her if she judged his mom as being a threat or hindrance to her mission, which was why Cameron had simply let her die.
"I'm sorry for your loss," Cameron corrected, still standing close to him. She knew that people often wanted someone close to them when they were grieving. For moral support, she'd heard. She knew it, she didn't understand it.
Yeah, right, sorry for my loss, John thought. It was always about him, nothing more. It was how she was programmed. "You just don't get it, do you?"He said bitterly, turning away from her and walking down the row of unmarked graves, down to the cemetery entrance, needing to get away from it all, from everything.
"Where are you going?" Derek asked, breaking his silence for the first time since they'd arrived.
"Away!" John snarled, pulling out a pistol from the waistband of his jeans and waving it at Cameron and Derek. "Don't follow me," he ordered, pointing it straight at Cameron's head for emphasis – not caring that he could shoot her all day with it and not even dent her endoskeleton. "You'll regret it."
He ran off, out of the cemetery and away as fast as he could, not looking back to see if either his uncle or Cameron were following, needing to get out and away from it all, get away from them. He was done being John Connor, he decided; all his destiny had ever done was cost him those he cared about. There was a way around that, he realised; he'd just stop caring. He'd stop being John Connor.
"Eh, quit your moping, lad; the food's not that bad," John looked up and saw the same dark haired guy from earlier, standing in front of him, with a shorter, younger, blonde haired man with a buzz cut. Both men were in army DPMs, stained with dirt and grime and blood. Even after weeks – at least – of constant work, no rest, and near starvation, they both cut impressive physiques and looked strong. Even without the fatigues he could easily tell they were military.
"I'm fine, leave me alone," John mumbled, looking back down at the floor, wanting to stay lost in his own little world and immerse himself in his precious memories of Cameron – all he had left of her now.
"You're not fine," the older man replied, the Irish accent John had heard from before made 'fine' come out as 'fayeen.' He leaned against the wall and slid down to the ground next to John. The blonde man did the same on the other side. John slowly clenched his fists, ready to act if they decided to start a fight. Even in Century - Skynet's own Auschwitz - where people had nothing, he'd seen prisoners beat the tar out of each other at night simply for the clothes on someone else's back, or for their bowlful of the disgusting meat broth.
If Cameron were truly dead then he didn't care if he died either; he couldn't – and didn't want to – go on without her. But he'd rather choose how he went out at least and being beaten do death and stripped naked for his clothes wasn't how he envisioned his end.
"Calm yourself, lad," said the Irishman. "We're not gonna mug you or anything."
"What do you want?" John muttered impatiently. He just wanted to be left alone.
"We've been watching you," he replied. "Ye don't speak a word to anyone, just walk around looking more fucked than the rest of us, and we've been here longer. So what's up?"
"Nothing," John said quietly, looking down at the ground. "I'm fine."
"Not a talker, eh? That's fine. I'm much the same, it's trying to get this one to shut up that's the problem." he pointed towards the blonde man next to him.
"He hasn't said anything since you sat down," John replied, wondering what exactly these two were up to.
"That's still a damn sight more than what you've said since you got here. What's your name, lad?"
John turned his head and looked at the Irishman suspiciously. People who wanted to know his name were generally from the future, in his experience, and either wanted to control his life or snuff it out completely. He narrowed his eyes slightly, scrutinising the man in front of him. He looked down at his uniform for an instant and was glad that Cromartie's earlier shots – which had bounced harmlessly off the Mark. II coltan flak jacket he'd been wearing at the time – had punched through his uniform and made the 'Connor' stencilled on his uniform illegible.
"John," he answered simply. He thought it best not to shout out that he was John Connor, in case they or anyone else were after him. He also remembered what Clemens had said to him. Even if he told them they'd never believe him.
"Just 'John,' no last name?" John shook his head at them. "Fair enough, lad. I'm Declan Byrne, and the blonde idiot next to ye is Neil Slater." The man called Slater nodded to John, who automatically nodded back, more out of politeness than really caring. He wanted the pair of them to just leave him alone, let him spend whatever time he had left in the camp in his own way.
"Where're you from?" Slater asked him with a broad, New York accent as he spoke for the first time since they'd approached John.
"What does it matter? It's not there anymore?" John replied evasively, alarm bells ringing in his head at another question that could pin down who he was.
"What unit?" Slater corrected, nodding at his uniform. "That's 4th Infantry, right?" he pointed at the ivy leaf shoulder emblem on his arm. John nodded in reply, relaxing slightly that they were just generally curious, and oblivious to who he really was.
"That's Connor's unit, ain't it?" Byrne asked. "You've met the old general?"
"Yeah," John replied. "But he keeps to himself a lot. He's not that old, either." Changing the subject, he asked, "what about you?"
"Navy SEALs," Byrne replied.
"You don't sound much like a SEAL," John said.
"Ah! The accent," Byrne replied. "Well, Slater's a SEAL; I was halfway through a two year exchange from the SAS, when Skynet got all pissed off." Byrne rolled up his sleeve to show a winged dagger tattoo on the underside of his forearm, an inch below where the machines had branded him with a barcode. "Bloody glad they missed that; that little feller cost me a fortune."
John closed his eyes for a moment. Byrne and Slater – or Byrne at least – talked too much for his liking. But he didn't want to offend them; they were Special Forces and could probably snap his neck like a twig without even breaking a sweat. If he couldn't get rid of them, he might as well make conversation, he decided.
"What did you do, in SEALs, or SAS, or whatever?" John asked.
"Sniper," Slater replied. "Byrne's an explosives expert; typical Irishman. You should have seen his face when he found out this concentration camp didn't have any Guinness."
"Shut it," Byrne snapped, grinning. "He's right though; I specialised in demolitions; I can blow up anything, with anything. Yourself?"
"I... ah... I joined up right after high school," John lied on the spot. "My dad was a soldier; he was killed on a mission before I was born. He was a hero; he saved a lot of lives."
"And you thought you'd follow your old man's footsteps," Byrne said.
"Yeah, I always knew I'd join up; it was kind of chosen for me." The best lies, John knew from experience, were those that had some element of truth in them, to make them real. A long moment of silence passed between the three of them. John tried to make out what to think of the two of them. Byrne was very chatty, and while Slater seemed quieter, they pair of them seemed much less affected by the constant toil and death than himself and everyone else in this charnel house.
"Hey, what's this?" Slater plucked the photos from John's hand and stared intently at them.
"Hey!" John snapped, grabbing at them as Slater pulled away.
"Jeez!" Slater grinned. "They're some nice pieces of ass, here, buddy. Century might not be so bad with a bit of porn, hey. Who's the MILF?" He held up the older photo.
"That's my mother," John seethed through gritted teeth. "She's dead."
"Oh... sorry," Slater's face turned bright red and he handed the photos back without another word.
"Just ignore Slater, lad. He's a bit deficient in the legover stakes, if you know what I mean. He'd screw one of the metals here if they had a hole of some sort." Slater flipped him off and said nothing, a little embarrassed about offending John. John wondered what the hell they'd think if they knew he was in love with a machine, after that last statement. They'd probably go berserk and have nothing to do with him, or worse.
"How did you two end up here?" John asked, changing the subject away from the photos.
"We were tasked with taking out Vandenberg air base," Byrne replied. "We'd found the rockets and Connor ordered that massive worldwide attack. We blew the things to kingdom come but got attacked as we tried to get away. We're all that's left." John realised suddenly that he was talking to the same guys who'd found the Vandenberg rockets, the SEALs whose intelligence photos had started this whole campaign to disrupt Skynet's satellite system from going online.
A brief flash of anger passed through John; if Byrne and Slater hadn't found the rockets, he'd have never ordered that attack. He'd have never gone to Nevada or met the coward, Ryan, and he and Cameron would never have had to face off against Cromartie, and she'd be with him now instead of laying inert in the ruins of Las Vegas. His anger passed quickly, however. It wasn't their fault; they'd simply done their job and given him the intelligence. He'd ordered the attack; it was his fault that so many had been killed by Skynet at Area 51, his fault Cromartie had slaughtered all those men, and his fault Cameron was as good as dead.
John snapped out of his self loathing as he heard the now familiar, mechanical plodding of machine feet stamping up and down. He looked out across the camp, towards the main hospital building, and sat a T-70 approach the main entrance, passing the unit that stood guard and barred entry.
"What's in there?" John asked them.
"We don't know," Slater replied, following John's gaze at the former hospital. "No one's ever been in there. The machines guard it day and night; they don't let anyone near it."
"We've seen the machines drag a dozen people in there since we got there, and not a single one's come out again." Byrne looked wistfully. "One of my own lads was taken the day before you got here. They shocked him and carried him inside, unconscious. Hope the poor bastard stayed that way."
"What do you mean?" John said.
"I'd rather take my chances lifting bodies around than with whatever's in there. Hell, I'd rather be one of those poor bastards," Byrne pointed at the other half of the camp, where the majority of Century's inhabitants milled around like sheep, awaiting slaughter.
"But you don't know what's in there," John was confused.
"Better the devil you know, lad. Who knows what the hell those machine bastards do to people in there. Do yourself a favour; if the machines take you there, fight them, run, whatever; better to eat a bullet that whatever's inside that building."
"I've thought about that anyway," John said miserably. "We're all gonna die here anyway, why not make it quick?"
"You're not dead yet," Byrne answered. "Plus, the grub's top," he grinned, taking the last of John's now cold meat broth and waiting for John to nod okay before drinking it down.
"You like that?" John asked, incredulous, yet also knowing that Byrne was trying to distract him. "We don't even know what it is."
"John, he's Irish, remember," Slater teased. "Anything that's not potato is a rare delicacy to him."
"Don't forget the Guinness," Byrne said between gulps of John's broth, grinning stupidly. John realised that their ripping each other and bickering relentlessly had probably saved them from succumbing to despair.
"I should... I should get some sleep," John stood up and walked back into the sleeping quarters, not hearing any reply Byrne or Slater might have made. He searched through the darkness for a place to sleep. It took several minutes of stepping over and on people before he found a space large enough to lie down. There was no mattress – all of them had been taken by whoever got them first or whoever was strong enough to wrest it from somebody else. John wasn't bothered about a mattress and certainly wasn't going to start a fight over one. His watch said he had little over four and a half hours' sleep before they'd be awoken to start another day of miserable, unrelenting labour, acting as Skynet's undertakers once again.
He crept over to a spot in the corner and lay down on the hard concrete floor, taking his jacket off and placing it over himself as a cover. There were no pillows, so he rested his head on his hands to keep it off the uncomfortable, hard, cold floor. On his first night in he camp he'd taken his boots off to get comfortable and placed them next to him, and had woken the next morning to find someone trying to steal them. He'd scared them off, but it had shown him how desperate people were in the camp; desperate enough to steal, to kill, over the slightest scrap of clothing or morsel of food.
John closed his eyes, tried to blank out the pitiful crying and groaning all around from those prisoners still awake, and rubbed the photos of Cameron and his mother in his breast pocket. Partly just to reassure himself they were still there, but mostly to cling on to what he'd once had: A mother who loved him, albeit in her own strange, overprotective and domineering way; and Cameron, his protector, his lover, his soul mate, both now dead, because of him. Both died protecting him, it was his fault. He'd tried to be the John Connor that Cameron knew, that his father had known. He'd tried to be that man, that leader. But it just wasn't in him.
Unlike before, he wanted to be John Connor now. He wanted to lead, to make a difference. But he didn't have what it took to be John Connor: leader of the resistance. Perhaps Derek, or Perry, or someone else entirely, would come up and lead mankind against Skynet. He never got why it was always meant to be him; what made him so special?
Whatever it was, it wasn't enough, he knew. His fate was sealed in the camp; he'd never leave Century work camp. Sooner or later, he'd die here, and mankind would either find a new leader or fall under. Either way, there was nothing more he could do. He wasn't some great military leader, just a pretender with a destiny he could never live up to; Pathetic.
I give up, he thought as he slowly drifted off into an uneasy, fitful sleep. Let someone else be John Connor.