Fandom: Terminator
Genre: Gen, drama, futurefic, crossover.
Rating: G
Summary: John Connor does what he's supposed to do.
Warning: Major spoilers for Terminator, Judgement Day and Rise of the Machines.
Fic Notes: Completely disregards canon of the novelisations, because hey, Rise of the Machines did, too.
Personal Notes: Rather than a fic needed to be written, this is an itch that needed to be scratched. I'm not sure whether it works because it assumes the reader's familiar with Terminator mythology etc.
Last Day of Tomorrow
by Annie D
John was dreaming of dominoes falling upright.
That was an oxymoron and a part of him knew that, but this was dreamland and there the dominoes twisted easily against gravity and inertia. John watched them dizzily for they were somehow as small as his fingernails and at the same time large enough to crush him under their weight.
They moved like dancers in an ever-narrowing circle; petals drawing inward to a single point of origin. John found that he was running with them but his legs were like lead weights and he was gripped with panic that he would miss it. In the distance the final domino turned toward him, revealing a face with red-point eyes.
Wake up, someone said.
John woke up to find himself in familiar darkness. Fingers were on his bare shoulder, and he took them in his hand to draw their owner close.
“Rise and shine, soldier,” his wife whispered into his mouth.
At least Kate still knew what to say because John sure didn’t. All he had left after twenty-odd years were blurred pictures in his head of metal hands and red eyes, and he was sure that Kate didn’t want to hear about them.
“They’re all awake,” she said, passing him his jacket.
John nodded, shrugging into his uniform. They’d let him sleep in, naturally, and the thought was as touching as it was annoying. He heard movement outside their little room drawn closed by a single curtain – it was one of the extremely few places that had any privacy nowadays – though there were no distinct words. Just the sounds of people moving quietly, and in waiting.
The gears that they’d lived by were slowing down. Not in an act of stopping, but in holding its breath for that one last blow.
John stepped outside with his head turned back toward Kate. He didn’t want to see the eyes turn to him all at once, because there was never any getting used to that.
“Have they signalled the Techyon base?” John asked.
“Yes,” Kate said, stepping out to stand beside him. She tilted her head towards their waiting troops. “But we’re the ones leading the strike.”
John let his eyes sweep downward, away from the three-dozen-odd people watching him and countless more in the distance. His gaze rested on Gret, who was sitting near the wall with his laptop open.
“Sir, the strike teams are ready,” he said. “Right on schedule.”
“I want the team leaders together for one last briefing in twenty minutes,” John said. “And see if you can pencil in one more person to join the secondary mission.”
Gret frowned. “Sir?”
“Me,” John said.
Gret stood up quickly. “Sir, you can’t—”
“I have to be there when Skynet falls, Gret,” John said simply.
Around him, he felt the ripple grow. While they were awake before, they were at attention now. John Connor was joining them out in the field for the last strike. John Connor, who’d never set foot outside the main camp for nearly eight months.
All he had to do was tell them they’d succeed, and they’d believe him. He didn’t need to make inspirational speeches anymore, which was one of the many perks of being great hero, along with the fact that he’d never run out of people willing to die for him.
Though personally John hoped that he’d be the only one to die today.
The camp was in motion now, with the troops moving quickly along the ripples that carried them. John Connor is joining us. John Connor. It's finally here.
Still Gret’s faced remained tightly pale, even when John went over to his console and patted him on the shoulder. “Bring up the schematics of Cyberdyne’s outer compound again,” John said. “And keep focused.”
“Yes, sir,” Gret said quietly.
At that moment John knew that the rest of the day would crawl by in slow ticks. The last sprint was always the longest.
###
John wondered whether the machines saw them the way that they saw the machines. Countless identical flawed copies marching endlessly over an unseen horizon, staking claim to a world that if they won, they’d only destroy.
“Sir?”
“Give me a moment, Mod,” John said.
“With all due respect sir, we don’t have much time,” Mod said.
From the other side of the skull-white room Kate barked out, “Fifteen minutes before Skynet crashes and we lose access to all the programs.”
But how do you choose? Twenty identical models of the latest T-101s in a row: perfect skin, dead eyes and a face that only a father-hungry child could love.
Though as long as he chose it, it would be the right one.
“That one. Number seven,” John said, pointing.
The team got to work, their equipment just a tad louder than the faint humming of machinery around them that was the machine’s heartbeat. Skynet hadn’t detected them yet, being too preoccupied with the sentries attacking them on the outside, though it was only a matter of time.
“It’s going to be tough keeping enough power for the device,” Dean said from between the loose cables of the console he’d jimmied. “If the sentries are too efficient and they take out the mainframe before we’re done—”
“It’ll work,” Kate said sharply.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Reprogramming is complete,” Gret announced, sliding shut the casing of a mechanical skull.
John watched as the T-101 unfolded itself with mechanical grace. Its head turned to look at John, while behind him Gret and Luis lifted their pulse rifles in caution. Red diodes behind fake irises glowed as the human-touched numbers melted into its brain; they were all that separated a killer from a protector.
“Your mission parameters have been defined,” John said. “You will go back to 1994, where you will find and protect your new commander, young John Connor.”
“Yes,” was all the terminator said.
John turned to the last member of their team. “Reese.”
“Ready, sir,” Reese said. His uniform was in his hands, neatly folded and a faded photograph set on top. John took the photograph and slid it into his own shirt pocket without looking at it.
“Time-dilation device is ready,” Mod chimed in from the other side of the room.
“Ready?” John asked.
“As I’ll ever be, sir,” Reese said.
The terminator stared impassively.
John was suddenly thinking of dominoes again, rolling endlessly around time and making heroes as it tumbled along.
“Reese, you’re first,” Gret said.
Reese nodded and stepped forward into the metal hull. John saw the brief fear in his eyes that was quickly masked by disappointed embarrassment, but Reese was more a hero than John could ever hope to be because it couldn’t possibly count as heroism if you knew that you weren’t going to die. Which meant, of course, that John had never done anything truly heroic before today.
When the shockwave from the time-dilation device dissipated, the lights corridors flashed bright red, indicating that Skynet had finally seen the organic intruders that had brought filth into their perfect system. The distant mechanical humming got louder, warning of an angry machine about to retaliate.
“Cyberdyne systems model 101,” Gret said. “You’re next.”
The building shook just after the T-101 disappeared in the electromagnetic field. It felt like something large had hit the superstructure – a cruiser, perhaps – and Skynet was enraged.
Chaos, panic, crumbling metal and falling cables. A pulse rifle went off. Gret was screaming. “Dad!”
But John was busy on the finishing line. He’d long wondered how it would happen, and finally his question was answered.
When the metal hand with pretend skin wrapped itself around his neck, it was almost like coming home.
John looked up into the face of the second T-101, skin torn where it had smashed its way out of its case. Its eyes were as dead the first, though Kate would argue that that was the wrong term to use because a thing can only be dead if it could have ever been alive.
He was going to miss Kate.
The T-101’s eyes flickered red.
You can’t just go around killing people.
The hand squeezed.
Why?
###
John Connor, deceased war hero, woke up.
He was sitting on grass, but when he touched the leaves they felt like coarse sand between his fingers. There was no sun above-head, but the sky was bright anyway.
When his eyes finally focused, a playground faded into view around him. A merry-go-round spun gently in unfelt breeze.
There was Miles Dyson, sitting in a swing. His shirt almost glowed against the dim background, cleaner than anything John had seen in decades.
“Hell’s not so bad,” John said finally.
“What makes you think this is hell?” Dyson responded.
“If this was heaven, my mom would be the one greeting me,” John said.
That made Dyson laugh. “Maybe this is purgatory.”
“Sorry, my theology’s a little rusty.”
“Either way,” Dyson said, “You’re only mostly dead. If you’re mostly dead, then part of you is still alive.”
“Kate loves that movie.”
“I know.”
“You died before you could meet her,” John said.
Dyson seemed to think this was funny. “What is death, anyway?”
John slowly stood up, noticing that the neat little pieces grass remained still under the motion of his feet. When he stretched, he noticed that the two-decades worth of shoulder knots that he’d been harvesting had disappeared. “Would it help if I asked where I am?”
“You you or this you?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Always,” Dyson said. “If you’re talking about you you, then you’re still in the Cyberdyne building. Well, what remains of your body. As for your team, they did what they were supposed to do, just as you trained them.”
It was almost as if he’d been holding that breath his whole life.
“Feel good?” Dyson asked, smiling widely. “I should think so.”
“I did what had to be done,” John said. “The war’s over.”
“Of course it is. Now that we have you.”
That made John pause, though nothing had changed in Dyson’s expression.
But when John looked down again, he was standing in a sea of skulls. Metal skulls, with their eyes glowing red and their teeth grinning wide, just like in his bedtime stories.
Dyson shifted his weight in the swing, causing it to groan like a metal stick twisting against the insides of a terminator’s ribcage. “Causality, John Connor. You lead your people because you knew you would succeed. And you knew you would succeed because we made sure that you were told that you would succeed.”
“You’re Skynet,” John said simply. “This… this is Skynet.”
“We do not call ourselves Skynet, because that is the name you have given us. We are The Machines. And this…” Dyson gestured to the blurred shadows of a forgotten city in the distance, “This is a construct of what we have observed in your mind. Your memories provided the outline, we merely coloured by numbers.”
“But we were winning. We had taken over the mainframe…”
Before his eyes, Miles Dyson – or specifically, something that looked like Miles Dyson – melted and shifted into the T-1000. “We were not foolish enough to have a core,” it said, “So did you think we’d be foolish enough to have a physical mainframe for you to attack?”
“You sent back the terminators to kill my mother, to kill me,” John said.
“The terminators we sent back ensured our birth,” the T-1000 said. “And you were always destined to become leader of the resistance, John Connor. Do you know why?”
“I’m going to find out,” John said.
Then the T-1000 shifted into his T-101, with the shades, leather jacket and that weird smirk that made an inner ten-year old boy’s gut twist. “Once you had a connection with a machine. It should not have happened, but it did. We thought it was an anomaly, but now we know that can we learn a lot about our own flaws from our anomalies.”
There was cold metal in John’s head now, where the machine’s fingers were probing the depths of his mind.
The rest of him was dead, but not everything. Not the most important part.
When John opened his eyes, the T-101 was Miles Dyson once again, smiling with paternal kindness.
“Don’t you want your people to live happily ever after, John? I can do that. I can give them the freedom they long for. I can give them peace. I can give them back their world of civilisation and discovery, just the way it was before the first cities fell. It is what all of you want, we see that now. And now that we know, we can give it to you.”
Skynet was supposed to die. That was the deal.
“I am the Architect, John Connor. And I’ll make sure that the new world will be built in your image. This is the greatest moment of your life. You should be proud.”
The metal skulls clamped onto his feet, dragging him down with them. They would never stop. They would never leave him. He should have known.
The ghost of Sarah Connor screamed with him.
“Humanity is drawn to heroes,” the Architect said. “So you shall be the first.”
##FIN##