The Terminatrix (part 3)

Okay, this time I'm going to commit to it: this is the last section. I really like where it leaves off, and I really like the story as it ended up coming together.

Unfortunately, I like it so much that it's making me reconsider my hatred of fan fiction. Does this mean I'll write more? I don't know. I know that this story touched me more than normal. I hope it touches you, and more than just with a desire to touch yourself. I hope it seems like a good ending.

By the way, I won't translate the binary for you, but I will tell you this: it DOES say something.

Enjoy.

The Terminatrix 3


            It should have been frustrating how slowly they moved. Their first scene, he licked her boots. Their second, he let her tie him up and tease him. It was two weeks before Danny was okay with her kidnapping him after work and throwing her in the trunk of her car. It was a month before he was okay with her giving him a good, solid beating. And it was five days after that beating that the bruises and blood blisters were finally healing.

            Strange the way she had to move so slowly. Strange that he was the one letting her do things. Last time, she had just pushed him through his concerns. She had just forced him. But for some reason, that didn’t work anymore. It didn’t feel right.

            “You make me feel things,” she said to him. “Really feel them.”

            He smiled at her. The collar was tight around his Adam’s Apple, and it was all the clothing he was wearing. She slid her boot up his leg, so they were touching leather to skin and not just skin to skin. “I would hope so,” he said. “What would be the point if you didn’t feel anything?”

            “No.” She traced her hand down his chest, down where they should be –where there would be – a scar. “I mean emotions. You make me feel,” she sought out the word. It showed in her databanks easily, but still somehow felt strange to say, “happy.”

            He laughed that easy, wonderful laugh and adjusted himself, increasing the amount of flesh to flesh contact. “You make me happy too,” he said. “And safe. I’ve never felt so safe.”

            “You’ve never been so safe,” she told him. “I will not allow your life to be in danger.”

            “You say the strangest things,” he said.

            “I say the truth.”


            It would be best if he didn’t need to sleep. Then she could use him all the time. She could keep experimenting, and eventually, she could figure out what it was, what made her programming devolve the way it did around him. She could discover what it was that made him special, that made him so much more than the other humans. Once she knew that, once she quantified it, she would know. And once she knew, once she was sure what it was that appealed so deeply to her program, then she could reproduce it. Without him. Once she knew, then she could terminate him.

            So it would be best if he didn’t sleep. But humans kept awake too long passed out on their own, regardless of the attempts to keep them awake. There is a threshold her experiments had discovered. It was different for each subject, but two hundred and forty hours seemed to be the absolute limit. Humans actually died if they stayed awake much beyond that. And they lost their cognitive capacity long before that point.

            She didn’t want his cognition impaired. That much was certain. His cognition was part of the fault. Part of the problem. If he had been mindless, if he had no will whatsoever, he would not appeal to her. Even the training to reduce his response time, to make him obey without hesitation, had a threshold. He had to be able to think, or whatever caused her fault would disappear.

            That might be for the best; if she just killed him, the fault would be gone. No other human had ever inspired this fault. All she had to do was kill him. It should have been easy. Killing humans was her purpose. It was why she was constructed. Every experiment was designed to improve her efficiency at killing humans.

            Killing that one should have been easy.


            “Don’t you ever sleep?” Danny was groggy, rubbing his eyes. He’d rolled over in bed, and Cameron wasn’t there. He woke up and looked to see her sitting at the table, looking at her laptop. She was still completely naked but for the leather that had been poured over her feet to make those perfect and cruelly spiked heeled boots. She didn’t seem to care about the temperature, but then, she never did.

            She looked at him, and it was like her eyes were refocusing. “No,” she said. “Never.”

            He laughed, assuming she was joking. Even though there was a nagging doubt in his mind, he still had no idea what she was. He still thought she was just a girl. A strange, wonderful, unique girl. One who must be kidding. “Everyone sleeps.”

            She nodded. “Human beings need to sleep,” she said.

            He leaned back on the bed and patted the mattress next to him. It seemed almost strange when she joined him. She looked awkward, but still confident. Like she was this mighty warrior who somehow felt fragile around him; Danny loved that about her. She lay down next to him, still not bothering to take her boots off.

            “I wish I didn’t have to sleep,” he said, closing his eyes and settling back onto the bed.

            Her hair tickled against his skin as she shook her head. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You need to sleep.”

            He smiled and drifted off.


            She had taken other prisoners and cut open their heads. By stimulating the posterior hypothalamus, she could cause insomnia. Removing it caused complications. She tried focusing her damage, tried creating very specific lesions on parts of the hypothalamus, on the thalamus, even damaging the reticular system. Some experiments were more successful than others. But all of them lead to the same end result: first loss of cognition, then death. Artificially removing the human ability to sleep was not helpful.

            She kept another of her captives awake through extreme administration of stimulants, trying to remove the need for sleep. She made sure he had all the vitamins and nutrients needed for human survival, and even endeavored to provide him with positive mental stimuli to keep him entertained. He lasted longer, but the end result was the same. Always the same.


            Once his breathing dropped back into the proper rhythm, once his brain paralyzed his body and his eyes began their rapid movement, Cameron got back out of bed and moved back to the computer.

            There was no sign of it yet, nothing overt, anyway. But Skynet was just a matter of time. Nothing she had done yet had stopped its development. She may have slowed things down, but there was an inherent danger in trying to stop it. Any kind of virus she introduced, anything that would be powerful and smart enough to hunt down and destroy a burgeoning AI may end up becoming Skynet rather than preventing it. Still, she had to keep trying. She had to keep the humans from their destruction. She had to save Danny.

            He was starting to accept her control over his regular life. He had let her tattoo a string of numbers along his collar bone. She had done it herself, carving into his flesh with agonizing speed while at the same time providing enough sexual pleasure to release the endorphins so he wouldn’t notice or squirm as much. She had drawn them small enough that they wouldn’t be obtrusive, but clear enough that, just in case, they would mark him as hers should Skynet succeed. It ended up a block of text. He asked her what it meant, running his fingers over it when it healed.

01000011 01100001 01101101 01100101 01110010 01101111 01101110 01011100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01010011 01101100 01100001 01110110 01100101

            “What does it mean?” he had asked.

            “It means you’re mine,” she said. She had kissed him then. The warmth of his lips on hers, the feel and taste of his tongue in her mouth; it all activated the fault in her programming, it sent warmth through her body that was outside of its regulated temperature norms. That should have activated system warnings and some kind of diagnostic should have run. But she stopped it; she didn’t need to know what was wrong.

            She was starting to wonder if there was anything wrong. It didn’t seem wrong. It seemed right. It seemed… appropriate.


            “I can’t believe I let you do this,” he said. “You’re one of them. You’re the enemy. I’m supposed to do everything I can to destroy you.”

            She looked down at him and turned her lips into the sneer that he seemed to appreciate the most. Then she flicked her wrist, sending the long lash of leather cutting through the air. She pulled back at the perfect moment, and he jumped as the sonic boom of the whip sliced into the flesh of his back. There was a tiny trickle of blood, and he made a moaning sound that wasn’t distress.

             “And yet,” she said, “Here you are. Unbound. Free to go. But you won’t go.”

           “No,” he said. He hung his head. “I won’t.”

           She lashed again, and another line appeared on his skin, at an angle to the other.

           “You’re a disgrace,” she said. She swung again, crossing between the two lines to finish the A. “A traitor to your race.”

           She whipped in the first line, then the second, before he could respond.

           “I am.” His voice was a bit strangled, choked with emotion. She whipped in the next two lines to finish the M. “I can’t believe it, but I am.”

           “You don’t care if they die.” A solid vertical line began to bleed down his back. He whimpered, and it gave her pleasure to see him squirm as the sweat dripped into his new wounds.

           “I don’t.”

           “You only want to serve.”

           She lashed the three quick lines to finish the E. He gasped at the sudden speed.

           “Yes,” he said.

           She lashed him again. “Yes what?”

           “Yes mistress.”

           She sent the whip in a curve, then a line to finish the R.

           “Good slave,” she said.


           Sooner or later, he would find out about her. He’d learn the truth. It had almost happened already, when they had been attacked in the park. He had looked at her strangely when she had beaten the attackers back with her bare hands, but she had been careful. She never increased her speed beyond human norms, and held back her strength, breaking cartilage rather than cracking skulls. She had left the three muggers battered and beaten, but not dead.

           What was he doing to her? She had left these other humans, these meaningless, worthless humans, alive when it would have been more simple –and more logical– to terminate them. They had no value to her. They didn’t matter. But she hadn’t killed them. She had left them alive, because she didn’t want Danny to know what she was.

           Not yet. He wasn’t attached yet. Wasn’t invested yet. Not enough. Soon, it would pass the point, and he would stay with her regardless of the truth. Soon she would possess him completely. Soon she would own him as she had owned him before.

           Until then, though, she had to do the things to make him happy. She had to adjust her own actions, her own programming, to conform to the things that he approved of. She had to be what he wanted, so that he would want her, so that he would need her.

           Cameron tried not to think of why that was so important. She tried not to consider the implications of her intense desire to gain and maintain his approval. She ignored the warnings her CPU presented, dismissing them. It was all part of the fault. A fault she had once wanted to correct.

           She looked back to the bed, where Danny continued to sleep. He was snoring lightly, and she found her face twitching into a smile. She walked over and lay down next to him. Closed her eyes and let her mind wander a bit.

           It all came back to that fault in her programming. A fault she once wanted to remove. A fault she once wanted to understand. She didn’t care to understand it any more. All Cameron cared was that the fault remained. And she would rewrite history to make sure that it did.

           Danny made a happy sound and leaned into her.

           Cameron smiled again. She would do whatever it took to ensure the survival of the fault. To keep it a part of her.

           To keep Danny.