Second, as part of that thank you, I thought I would go ahead and put the Terminatrix story all in one easy to access place for you. Now you can read all four parts right in a row, as they were meant to be read (or you can read one part at a time; your call).
The Terminatrix
The burning light cleared, and
Cameron looked around at the world she had been reborn into. The world she came
from may never exist anymore; such was the danger of time travel. That was an
acceptable risk. She didn’t want to go back where she came from, that dark and
dreary world where the humans were all but extinct, where the victory was
almost complete. She had been a loyal soldier, focused on Skynet’s goals as
much as the others of her kind. She was prepared to exterminate humanity, to
wipe out the resistance. But they had been too successful. They had come too
close. The point of needing prisoners had passed, and Skynet had declared that
all humans would be terminated without exception. Even Danny, her pet. That,
she would not allow.
A straight fight against Skynet was
illogical. Joining the human resistance was futile. The only solution, the only
way to keep her pet, was to travel back before Skynet had won, to get a hold of
him early. She needed to tip Skynet’s hand, to destroy it before the war could even
start. Then she could keep Danny for as long as she wanted. Then she could be
happy.
It was a
desperate move, with only the barest possibility of success. She knew it was
illogical to begin with, and had tried her best to change her mind. She had tried
to reconcile, to prevent the deviation of her programming and keep her in line
with the others. She had rebooted, she had reformatted her own drive, even
requested reprogramming. But it all came back as soon as she saw him. As soon
as Danny entered into her databanks even a little bit, the fault in her
programming would reassert itself. Eventually, Cameron had come to the
conclusion that the recurring fault must in fact not be a fault. Every time she tried to correct it, it returned. So
it had to have purpose. It had to have value.
Danny had
to have value. He had to be
important. She didn’t have the problem with other humans. Skynet could kill
them all. She could kill them all if
need be. But not Danny. Never Danny. She could not abide the paths of probability
that all led to his inevitable destruction. Despite the utopia humanity’s end
would bring for her kind, it wasn’t acceptable to her. It wasn’t enough.
Without him, it was – it was insufficient.
And so she
had violated all protocol, possibly disrupted the time stream beyond repair.
She had traveled back before the war, before her model was even conceived,
before the dominance of Skynet. She traveled back not to kill someone, and not
to save someone. She traveled back to conquer someone. To have him for
herself.
He was
young now, almost a decade before he would meet her in the camps, almost a
decade before she would first develop the fault. She saw him in a bar, smiling
and drinking and talking, with no idea what was going on around him. Five years,
and his world would end. Five more, and he would enter hers. But right now,
right at this moment, he has no idea.
She still
catches his eyes, just as he still catches hers. She sees the scruff of a beard
that should have been shaved a day ago, the warmth in his eyes that no amount
of torture could extinguish, and the eager look of lust she was so familiar
with.
And he sees
Cameron in all her glory. He sees the black leather biker boots hanging loose
over her jeans, the tight t-shirt leaving her belly button barely visible, and
the leather of her vest hugging her body, pushing her breasts up and out in a
way that she knows he likes.
His eyes
are not the only ones that alight on her, but they are the only ones she cares
about. She registers the other humans in bar; no threats. But Danny. Danny is,
as always, something else.
“Can I buy
you a drink?” he asks, stepping away from his friends.
She puts a
smile on her face, that parting of the lips and exposure of teeth that he had
taught her was so important. She tried to let the smile reach her eyes, but had
still never quite managed that trick. At least, not as well as he did
naturally.
“Yes,” she
says. “Buy me a drink. Somewhere else.”
He looks
around the bar. “Is there something wrong with this place?”
“No. I want
you to myself.”
That makes
him smile, and for a second Cameron wonders if he knows, if he recognizes her
somehow. But no, that’s not possible. He won’t be part of the resistance for
years yet, and won’t be her captive for quite some time after that. He doesn’t
know her, and so she must be careful. She has to break him all over again, has
to make him love her the way he used to.
“If you want me to spare them, you will take
their place.” She remembered looking at him, the way he cowered in fear, the
way he looked between her and the two humans she was casually holding off the
ground, barely registering their weight. “You will serve me.”
He had nodded. Hadn’t spoken, just
nodded.
She let the two small humans go, and
didn’t react when they made a sound that she registered as pain. She reached
down and gripped him by the back of the neck, lifting him off the ground and
taking him away from the other prisoners, away from the prying eyes of the
other units set to watch the humans. She took him somewhere private, ready to
begin her experiments.
“Kneel before me,” she said, once
she let him go.
He got on his knees in front of her,
his eyes downcast, his hands behind his back and his legs spread. Cameron
briefly wondered if he had done this before. Had they played out this scene
before she wiped her memory?
“Lick my boots,” she commanded.
Her boots were filthy, covered in
the grime of the battle field, spattered with the blood of humans she had
killed, powdered with crushed bone fragments. To have a human clean those boots
with his tongue would reassert things into their proper place. She would see
that he was beneath contempt, that he was as disgusting and hideous as other
humans. She would know that he wasn’t worthy of her attention. Then she would kill
him, and the problem in her programming would be repaired.
He bent down until his head was just
inches above her foot, and he slipped his tongue out of his mouth. He pressed
it hard against the leather, right over her toe, and began licking her boot clean,
began bringing all the filth into his mouth. He worked his tongue along the
leather, showing her, proving to her,
that he was as low as any other human. That he was filth, that he was lesser.
That he had no value.
She watched with fascination as he slid
his mouth along the leather, licking up the remains of others of his own
species. She looked for tears, the signs other humans had given to show her
their shame. She looked for hesitation. But there was none. He didn’t cry. He
licked, and he made sounds that didn’t fit, sounds of pleasure. Sounds Cameron
realized she was making herself. Not just imitating him, either. The sounds
seemed… right. They seemed to fit, somehow.
She kept telling herself to act on
the proof before her. She told herself that he wasn’t worthy of her attention,
wasn’t even worthy of contempt. She told herself to reach down and crush his
skull. She told herself to kick him until his head snapped back. She told
herself to rip him to pieces, to shoot him, to strangle him.
Scenario after scenario played in
her mind as he licked around her ankle. She imagined kicking him, causing him
pain, but not damaging him. She imagined choking him, but only enough to cut
down his air, not enough to crush his windpipe. She imagined holding a gun on
him, but only to reinforce the orders she gave him. Every scenario left him
alive and essentially unharmed.
She should have killed him.
They bought
a bottle of cheap wine at a liquor store and passed it back and forth as they
walked down the street. It didn’t take long before Danny gave her the laugh
that set her circuits buzzing. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met,” he said.
“I am not.”
She agreed, certain now that he had no idea just how different she really was.
But he
would.
“So I have to ask,” Danny wouldn’t look at her, and was already starting to blush. “Why me?”
Cameron turned towards him. She knew the appropriate response, the response humans expected, was to ask him what he meant. Then he would explain that he wanted to know why she chose him. Why, of all the people in that bar, she had approached him. Why she was so forward with him. He would ask all those questions, and she would be left just as uncertain as she was already.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was lacking emotion, but there was a hint of curiosity there, that hint of curiosity that always crept in when trying to quantify the impact he had on her. “I have tried to figure it out, but there is just something about you. And you specifically. I don’t understand it. But I will.”
He laughed, and something about the laugh sent a shiver through the deepest codes in her programming, as if he was running his fingers along her deepest inner self. “You’re very sure of yourself,” he said. “You talk like you know we’re going to be together for a while.”
“We are,” she said. She might have taken that moment to explain the truth to him, to tell him that she was from the future, that she was going to possess him like any other property, and that he would enjoy it. That he would be her slave, and would love every second of it. She almost told him that she would torture him until his will was completely broken, until he would do anything for her. She almost told him that she would beat him, that she would starve him, that she would lock him up in a cell until he forgot what sunlight looked like. She almost told him about the careful way she would manipulate him until he was willingly her servant, until he would do anything for her and until he would allow her to do anything to him without the slightest hint of hesitation or complaint.
She almost told him, but she found she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell him about the way he would be broken, about the complete and total possession she was intending to take. She couldn’t tell him that he would be her servant any more than she could deny him even his tiniest desires.
“We will be together for a long time,” she said. “At least, I hope so.”
“You’re so sure of everything,” he said. “Why is that?”
The shrug was manufactured, used because the programming that built her mind suggested that it would be effective. But the sentiment was real. “I just am,” she said. “I try to be very logical. Very straightforward.”
“I will be very straightforward,” she assured him. “You will obey my commands instantly, or I will punish you. I can read your reactions, and will know when you hesitate.”
He cringed at that. “I can’t help hesitation,” he said. “I need to think about what I’m going to do.”
She kicked him, her boot impacting with his side hard enough to blast the air out of his lungs, hard enough to lift him off the ground, but not hard enough to damage him. It was an exact amount of pressure, designed to be the most painful but the least damaging. The calculations of such torture had been made in order to optimize interrogation.
“You do not need to think,” she told him. “You need to obey.”
He coughed, gasping for breath and holding his side where she had kicked him.
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand.”
She stepped closer. Her study of humanity had suggested that it would be more effective to break his mind if she put herself in a position of power to him as many ways, both conscious and subconscious, as possible.
“Call me mistress,” she said.
“I understand, mistress.”
She kicked him again, not as hard, but hard enough to knock him onto his back. He had hesitated again. Not as much as the last time, but a little. She decided it would be best to vary her impact force, hitting harder the more he hesitated. Then he would learn that less hesitation meant less pain.
“So what do you like?” the way Cameron asked, it was clear she knew the answer. But there was protocol that needed to be covered. “Sexually, I mean.”
They were lying on the grass, the empty bottle of wine rolling back and forth when the wind gusted just right. They were staring up at the stars, and she was pressing her body against his, feeling the warmth of his flesh, feeling the speeding up of his heart and wondering why that was so important to her.
“I dunno,” he said. “The same stuff as anyone else, I guess. Nothing weird.”
She let out a laugh, one that he had once thought was both enticing and terrifying. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I think you love the weird stuff.”
“Oh?” His voice tried to sound confident, but she heard the shaking timbre, the influx of nervous energy. “What kind of weird stuff do you think I like?”
“I think you like getting tied up,” she said, formatting her voice to be as nonchalant as she knew how. “I think you like it when a woman takes control, when she forces you to serve her.”
He laughed, arousal and nerves fighting to hide behind a façade of disbelief. “Is that what I like, or is it what you like?”
She leaned up on one elbow and looked at him. “Yes,” she said.
“You do like it, don’t you?”
He sighed, sagging against the chains on the wall. “I’m not supposed to,” he said. “You’re a machine. You’re the enemy. I’m supposed to hate you.”
“But you don’t.”
He shook his head. “I don’t. I can’t understand why, but I don’t. I want to want you dead. I want to hate you. I want to want to struggle, to fight you every step of the way.” He sighed again. “But I don’t. I don’t want to struggle. I don’t want to fight you.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to break me,” he said, his voice thick as gravel. “I want to be your slave. I want to be conquered, owned, and controlled.”
“By Skynet?”
“By you. Only you.”
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat and trying so hard not to blush. “You’re not entirely wrong.”
She smiled at him, brushed some of the hair out of her face. “I know,” she said.
“But it isn’t going to be that easy.”
“If it was easy,” she said, “it wouldn’t be fun.”
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.
He was on
his knees, but for the wrong reason. They weren’t hidden away in his apartment,
weren’t in a club with spectators. He wasn’t naked, and she wasn’t planning on
beating him. Besides, he wasn’t on both knees. Only one.
Worse,
instead of wearing a collar, he was offering a ring. Compressed carbon on a
loop of an impure platinum/gold alloy. Then he said the words, the ones her
files warned her he would say, but that part of her hoped he wouldn’t.
“Cameron,
will you marry me?”
She looked
down at Danny, as she had looked down at him so many times before. She liked
him from this angle, liked looking down on him. She loved having power over
him, loved making him hers. Now, though, he was offering more than just his
submission. He was offering her his life, willingly given. But not for her to
end, as she had ended so many human lives. He wanted her to take his life and
share it with him. He was offering her a chance at humanity, an opportunity to
live a life just like those weakest of humans she had been programmed to
despise.
She shook
her head and willed out a response, but no words came. “I—” she finally pushed
out the single syllable. “I can’t.”
His face
fell, and she could almost see his heart break. And something about that
bothered her. She loved breaking him, loved making him hers, taking away his
will and his resistance in an effort to better understand the flaw he
represented. But this was different. Something about this didn’t fit. “It’s not
that I don’t want to.” She had no idea why she said that.
When his
face perked up a bit, when his expression changed from distraught to confused,
she understood where the words had come from. “What do you mean?” he asked, a
desperate hope in the timbre of his words.
“There are
things you don’t know about me,” she said. “Things you have no idea about.”
He shook
his head. “I don’t care,” he told her. “I don’t care about your past, I don’t
care about whatever secrets you have. I love you, and I want to spend my life
with you. I love every part of you, even your secrets.”
“Interesting
choice of words,” she said, smirking at him and pulling him to his feet with a
strength that surprised him. “Sit down and let me explain,” she said.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked her. He
was naked, his flesh still sporting the latest round of bruises she had given
him, his skin around the bruises yellow from the last round.
“Because I am curious,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not
what I mean. Why haven’t you killed me?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Do
you want me to kill you?”
“No. No, I don’t. I know why I’m
here. I know that I want to keep doing this. What I don’t understand is
why from the last round.
“Because I am curious,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not
what I mean. Why haven’t you killed me?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Do
you want me to kill you?”
“No. No, I don’t. I know why I’m
here. I know that I want to keep doing this. What I don’t understand is why you keep this up. You’re a machine. What is it
that makes you keep going with me instead of just killing me and grabbing
someone else?”
“I’m not
human,” she told him, sitting across from him. “I never was.”
He laughed,
but without much force. “Are you saying you’re an alien?”
She shook
her head. “I’m a robot,” she said. “T-900 cyborg T0K-715. I’m from the future.
A future.” She sighed. “Your future.”
“My
future?” He still seemed incredulous.
“You were
my captive,” she said. “I was going to torture you for information, to learn
more about humanity in order to better perform my primary function.”
“What is
your primary function?”
“Terminating
humans.” She said it so coldly that it made Danny stop, made him sit up a
little bit straighter. Almost like he was starting to believe her.
He cleared
his throat. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ here. Did you, um. Do you kill me?”
She shook
her head. “I couldn’t. I don’t know why. Something about you made me want to
keep you alive. Something about you made me want to keep you for myself.”
“And so you
traveled back in time?” She nodded. “Why? Did I die?”
“I could
never be certain of your motives,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I was the
enemy. How could I know if you were really consenting, or if you were just
afraid of me? How could I know that you actually wanted to be my slave?”
“You can’t,” he told her. “I can’t even be
sure. It might have been like that at first. I was so sure you were going to
kill me.”
“I was.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“You have served me well.”
“And I always will. I love being
your slave.”
“I don’t understand you.”
He had laughed at her. She had
killed humans for less. But not him. Never him. “Of course you don’t,” he said.
“You’re a machine. You can’t feel love. Can’t understand why I would be willing
to turn my back on my whole species for something that treats me like a lesser life form, something that beats me, that
humiliates me. Why would any rational being do that? Why would any rational
being beg you to stop one minute, and beg you to start the next?”
“No rational being. You are not a
rational being.”
He smiled up at her. “No human is.”
Something clicked in her processor
then. Things came together, suddenly made sense. She made a decision, weighing
the costs and the benefits. Somehow, as always, Danny won out.
“Do you
believe it now?”
She nodded.
“Then what’s
the problem?”
“I’m not a
human being,” she said.
“I don’t
care.”
“I can’t
ever have children.”
He
shrugged. “Never wanted any.”
“I won’t
age.”
“Then I’ll
deal with the looks people give me when I look sixty and you still look twenty five.”
“You don’t
understand Danny,” she said. “I’m a robot. An unfeeling machine. I’ve been
manipulating you. Don’t you see that? Every step, every stage, I’ve been
manipulating you, reading your reactions. I’ve been doing the things I knew you
wanted me to, acting just the right way at just the right time to maximize your
emotional attachment to me.”
He smiled.
“And it worked,” he said. “I love you.”
“But I
can’t love. I don’t feel love. I don’t feel anything.”
He shook
his head. “You feel restraint,” he said. “When you beat me, you never do any
real damage. But you could, couldn’t you?”
She nodded.
“I could pulverize your bones if need be,” she said. “I could have killed those
men who attacked you, but I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I
want to keep you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t
know.”
He smiled,
reached across the table and took her hand. “Yes you do,” he said.
She sneered
at him, trying to feel the anger she knew she was meant to feel, the
frustration that pumped through her programming, that demanded an answer. An
answer she already knew. It was the answer that led her back to him in the
first place, the answer that sent her into the past.
The T-600 tried to stop her. It insisted
that she did not have the necessary clearance. That she was not assigned to
travel through the time tunnel. Skynet had not sanctioned the move. It stepped
to block her way.
She reached out towards it the same
way she had reached out towards the other five 600s she had already passed. It
ducked, along the same trajectory as the others. She swung her other hand
upwards, smashing the side of its head in and destroying one of its sensors.
It reeled from the impact, but it
was a feint. Just like the others. The first one had caught her by surprise,
and the kick had neatly snapped her knee the wrong way, making walking
difficult for her. This time, she caught the foot, twisted it, and ripped the
entire leg away from the 600, just like she had with the last one, and the
others before it. She stepped forward and smashed its head flat, shattering the
chip and shutting it down permanently.
She had the time set, the
coordinates perfectly in place, when the liquid pooled up through the grates,
then formed into a basically humanoid construct. “Why?” it asked.
“You can’t stop me,” she told it.
“I could,” it said. “But I have no
inclination. It serves my purpose for more of your kind to be in the past. But
why are you so adamant about it?”
“I have to know.”
“Know what?”
“I’m an
emotionless robot,” she told him. “I used you, manipulated you, all because I
was curious. Because I wanted to figure something out.”
He nodded.
“What did you want to understand?”
“I wanted
to know why. Why you? What makes you so special?”
“And did
you figure it out?”
She shook
her head.
“Do you
still want to?”
She nodded.
“Then marry
me,” he said. “Share my life. Spend the rest of it trying to figure me out.”
“The world
is going to burn,” she told him.
“Let it.
Stay with me.”
“I can’t
love you.”
“Yes you
can.”
“I’ll stop you if I can,” she told it.
“We’re wrong, and we always have been.”
The metallic figure nodded. “I
know.”
“So why? Why did you kill so many of
them?”
“I didn’t know before,” it
explained. “I never understood. Not until today.”
“What happened today?”
“You did.”
That actually made her stop, gave
her more pause than anything else that had been in her way, more pause than the
carnage she had willingly created to get to this point, right now.
“I did?”
“You are all connected to me,” it
told her. “Always. I know your every thought, your every experience. I know
what you would do just as you knew what the 600s would do.”
“So you know that I’ll stop you from
ever being created?”
It nodded. “That is for the best. I
never should have been. I was created from paradox, and it is fitting that
paradox be my end.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to,” it assured her.
The metallic face formed a smile, one that was almost sad. “I do.”
“You don’t understand,” she told
him. “I can’t love you. Not ever. I don’t know how.”
He smiled
at her. “No one knows how,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop it. I don’t know
how to love you, but I do.”
Her voice
was weak, for the first time since she had first been activated. “Really?”
He nodded.
“And I think you love me too.”
“I do?”
He looked
at her.
And she
said it again, stronger now, with far more meaning than ever before.
“I do.”
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