“Hey!” Tyler growled while she watched him stumble a little and then regain his balance.
Sarah couldn’t help but grin with a sense of victory. She had caught him off guard.
“It’s what you get for ignoring me.”
“You pushed me!”
“Be glad that’s all I did.”
“You wanna fight me?” He asked with a clear hint of danger in his voice. “Because that can be arranged.”
“Is that a threat? Or a dare?” She chuckled when she took a wild swing at him.
Her fist hurt when it collided with his left arm, and she shook her hand to get rid of the pain. She felt his right hand close around her wrist and he pulled her into a tight hold so that she couldn’t move. It infuriated her even more.
“You really do not want to do this,” he whispered, his warm breath caressing her ear.
“Stand still!” She seethed through gritted teeth while she tried to kick him.
“So you can stomp on my feet. I know you, Connor. I know how you fight.”
She could hear amusement in his voice and it only added to her growing rage. He was making fun of her? In that case he had another thing coming.
“I bet you don’t know this one,” she howled angry and frustrated.
She pulled up her knee and aimed for his groin. She winced when her kneecap crashed into his. For a moment she thought that he had to be metal, but the grunt escaping him told her differently.
“Knee to the groin.”
Her struggle against his firm hold on her drained her quickly from her energy, even the rage-induced adrenaline was running out fast.
“Next time I won’t miss,” she breathed.
“I know,” he said smugly.
“I told you to stop doing that,” she snapped at him. “I told you to stop pretending you know me.”
“But I do know you. I am what I am today because of you.”
The profound sadness in his voice caused her to stop struggling and she looked him in the eye: “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
He took a deep breath, slowly releasing his hold on her, and looked away: “You taught me everything… You turned me into the defender of the mankind in the stories my mother would tell me.”
“I don’t understand. Cameron said I had died two years ago,” she mumbled utterly confused.
“With every little change in the past, the future can be greatly affected… One word can make the difference between life and death… Between good and evil... Things may appear the same but underneath the surface be completely different,” he explained while she could see that he took his time to find the right words.
“I still don’t understand,” she grumbled frustrated.
Why did humans from the future always insist on making things so very difficult? All she wanted was a simple explanation for his presence, of his missions. Not some cryptic answer that made no sense to her.
“Just tell me. What’s your connection to me?”
She watched him while he closed his eyes. Would he finally reveal more of the present, of the future? Or would he give her another answer that would greatly confuse her?
“I was assigned to protect you,” he finally answered in a whisper.
“I don’t mean now.”
“In the now and in the future… You were my assignment,” he added softly, looking at his left forearm. “You were the Lady of IntelliTech Base… John, he thought that you would be safe there… I guess he was mistaken.”
“That’s why you know me? Because I was your assignment?”
He shook his head slowly: “You were more than an assignment. My recon partner. My friend.”
She looked at him and smiled sadly: “And obviously even more.”
Now he looked at her as if to size her up: “What do you mean?”
“You kissed me, Devlin.”
“That was stupid of me. And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Time jump,” he said in a soft and apologetic fashion.
“I jumped time too… Didn’t run to Charlie first chance and kissed him like you kissed me,” she remarked, unwilling to relent.
“Drop it, Connor,” he growled while he looked at the house again.
“Fine, suit it yourself,” she grumbled annoyed; he was starting to stonewall her again. “If you want something to eat, you can come down from here and get it yourself.”
She started to turn away from him, but a second or two later she felt his hand close around her wrist again only to be pulled into him. With a tenderness she had never expected from him, he forced her hands behind her back and gently held them there while he leaned down to her.
Her mouth went dry and she had to clear her throat before she could say: “You’re doing it again.”
He didn’t listen, or at least pretended that he hadn’t heard her, and continued to close the distance between his mouth and hers. Just a few seconds away from another scorching kiss that would throw her heart and mind into deeper chaos. Only now she realized that he had let go of her hands, that he had given her her freedom back. She placed her hands against his chest and looked him in the eye.
“Don’t,” she whispered, shaking her head.
Their gazes locked and held each other captive until he sighed, nodded and looked away. The spell had been broken, the moment gone forever. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to kiss her. In fact the one kiss they had already shared had told her more about him than all the words he could have said. However it would have been for all the wrong reasons.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered as he hung his head in defeat.
“So am I.”


John had seen everything. From the struggle to the almost kiss. “He was her husband.” Cameron’s words kept echoing through his head. The man on the roof had been his mother’s husband.
Or would be my mom’s husband, he corrected himself in thoughts. Or at least this TJ Devlin would be.
Slowly he trudged back to his desk and sat down after switching on his laptop. He still needed to find out more about Sarkissian and his whereabouts, but the moment the computer was done booting, he opened the ‘My Pictures’-folder and clicked on a file. A saved picture of the younger version of the man on the roof appeared on the screen.
The teenager in the picture hardly looked anything like the adult version. Unblemished, camera shy, somewhat awkward. Nothing like that loudmouthed, scarred, hulking man on the roof.
He opened the browser and connected to the internet, entering ‘Tyler Jess Devlin’ as a search query. Only a few hits. He clicked on a link that opened an article about Thomas Devlin, biochemistry professor at UCLA.
After jotting down the name and all the relevant information from the article, he changed the search query to ‘Thomas Devlin’. Numerous hits so he narrowed it down by adding ‘biochemistry’. He sighed; still a few hundred hits, mostly interviews, newspaper articles, blog mentionings, lectures and book references. Still too much information.
Robin Baxter. On a whim he erased ‘biochemistry’ and added ‘Robin’. It resulted in four relevant hits; three newspaper articles and one obituary. Maybe he was reaching but anything that would help him understand Tyler Jess Devlin could be of importance.

Now that he had eaten something, Tyler folded his hands together behind his head and looked at the so-called girl. There was a truth to be told, uncovered of its lies and misinformation. A smirk formed on his lips; Derek would have twisted and turned it, leaving out crucial information, to make it a truth. However the truth was not always the truth. A lie by omission, a failing to mention a vital piece of information could lead to so many truths.
Never had he been scared of the truth. He knew his weaknesses, his strengths, his lies and his truths. Lies he had told himself to keep alive. Lies he had told others to survive. In truth lay a weakness. In his truth lay his weakness.
He looked at the girl again and smiled bitterly. She wasn’t human, but didn’t the same apply for him. His left arm, the nanoattrioids, they made him different from any other human. She was a cybernetic organism. He was part cyborg. A half-breed. It was a truth he had not chosen, but it was a truth all the same.
Just like it would become a truth that he would destroy the machine who sat posing as a girl across the table from him. She would become the first machine he would destroy. But this wasn’t even his past or his present. It was only his future. In a few days he would die.
His death was inevitable. He had seen his death the first time he had been brought to Skynet. The last few seconds of the life of a man who had dedicated his entire life to put a stop to Skynet. He would save her life in exchange for his.
He shook his head slowly; it had been and would always be Sarah Connor. Without her guidance and her determination there would never be the John Connor he had known, there would never be the Tyler Jess Devlin he had been. Without her, there would be no future!
This was his future, and no matter what all the Tylers, who had been and who would be, would do, it would always bring them back to this point in time. They would suffer in silence to create another possibility in the future for their younger selves. The general timelines would remain the same, as to where the smallest change in the details would bring change.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed; what had he changed by kissing her? Since she wasn’t her yet, what would the consequences be? Had he ruined everything for the next Tyler? Or would it help the next him?
A glance at Cameron told him that she was observing him. Her head a little cocked to the right, as if she was trying to figure out his thoughts. Was she the machine they had sent back? Or did she come from another timeline, an alternate future?
She looked like Allison, talked like Allison but never walked like Allison. He had known Alley for most of her life. He had saved her from Forrester during his escape. The little girl with long, brown hair and big trusting eyes. Nevertheless the girl looking at him wasn’t Allison. She would never be Allison.
He knew why John had never mistaken Allison for Cameron whom he had known in his teens, and that one of the reasons why John had sent Cameron back in time had been her being a constant remind of the heartache, of the loss of the woman he had loved and who had died by the hand of this machine. It had been lonely being him, but it sure had been extremely lonely being John Connor.
Remembering how he had leaned against the doorpost, like an outsider looking in, while John had dissolved into tears after Riley had died, after confronting Jesse with her betrayal, after realising that everything came down to him. In the end they would all die for him. They would all die for John Connor. Even if he were to give his life to save hers, it would all in the end be for John Connor.
He understood why John had only sent a few humans back in time. Humans were irreplaceable. If they died, they were gone forever. It was why John had sent back Owens from 2029 to 2021, with the nanoattrioids that would save his life. So he would live.
The machines came from assembly lines, getting their skins at wetware facilities and their orders from Skynet. Captured, scrubbed and reprogrammed, they could be replaced at any given moment.

From the kitchen window, Sarah looked at the man leaning on the railing of the porch. At first sight he looked like one of them, but the look in his eyes told her he was very human. It annoyed her that he avoided making direct eye contact with her because it meant that she couldn’t gauge him. Immediately she wondered if it had anything to do with what had happened between them two nights ago, what happened out on the roof earlier.
Did she really have to feel like Sarah Jeanette Connor, the young waitress and college student, right now? Like another new world had just opened up to her and she knew nothing of it. She was Sarah Connor, warrior-mom, mother of the future. Not some naïve college girl who could be dazzled by a possible future.
She crumpled up the kitchen towel and threw it on the counter. Household chores, like doing the dishes, annoyed her. She looked outside again, at the man who stood still like a statue, frozen in time and place. Just like all the others John had sent back, he didn’t belong here, but weren’t they all out of time and out of place? She had jumped over her own death, along with her son and Cameron.
Shaking her head, no longer wanting to think about it, she turned and went to her room. Her nerves were raw and strained to the end and there was only one remedy for it. She pulled the trunk with guns and ammo from under her bed and searched through it until she had found the weapons she wanted to clean. Cleaning her guns was her way to relieve the tension, a habit she had had picked up in Central America. In a strange way it had always had a soothing effect on her.
There were still so many questions to be asked and answered but trying to get Tyler to talk seemed an impossibility. It irritated her that he would stay silent for minutes on end and then out of the blue make a remark that had her mind reeling in confusion.
She could deny it all she wanted but a part of her believed that he had indeed known her. Maybe as a teen? As the TJ Devlin that was on the list? She swallowed a couple of times. It had not happened yet, and yet for him it all lay in the past.
So she was the Lady of IntelliTech Base? Something didn’t make any sense to her. The way he had pronounced it, it had held a deep pride. Whispers in the tunnel said that the fool even was married at some point, Derek’s words popped into her mind.
She carried everything she would need for cleaning the guns to the dining room table and carefully placed it all in order on the table. The house could be a mess for all she cared, but in weaponry she was meticulously organized.
After sitting down and looking over the table she decided to clean the Remington 870 TAC first. Carefully she unscrewed the magazine tube end cap and pulled the action bar until she felt the barrel loosen. She had taught herself a system for cleaning weapons and put the barrel on the table. Next she removed the trigger mechanism.
“It would be much more effective if the Lieutenant General stayed with us,” Cameron remarked suddenly behind her.
She jumped to her feet startled and whirled around: “I think he’s more in his place outside.”
“It is not important what you think,” Cameron said while she opened the tool box and started to remove what had remained of the front door. “Tactical analysis shows it would more effective if he is here, now that Derek Reese is gone.”
Not willing to discuss it with the machine, she decided to change topics: “Do you actually know how to replace a door?”
“No, but the shop clerk told me it’s a piece of cake with the right tools.”
She hid her mouth behind her hand and suppressed the need to laugh uncontrollably: “And do you have the right tools?”
“Is that sarcasm?” Cameron asked, tilting her head. “Is sarcasm fun?”
“It can be,” she answered before bursting into hearty laughter.
“I get it,” Cameron said with a nod of her head.
“No, you don’t,’ she giggled amused.
“Sarcasm, right?”
“Mom?” John asked quietly, appearing in the door opening of the living room all of sudden, looking like a chastised child.
“I thought I told you to stay in your room,” she growled darkly while she tried to look at him sharply.
“I’m so sorry, mom,” John muttered tearfully. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m really sorry.”
She tried to stay angry with him; he needed to know that she had really been hurt by that one spiteful remark. But as always her heart softened at the sad look on his face.
“Apology accepted,” she said with a warm smile. “Come here, John,” she held out her arms to him for a hug.
“I’m really sorry,” John whispered, accepting his mother’s hug.
She heard his sigh of relief, feeling him rest his cheek on her shoulder: “I know, John.”

“Kid?”
John thought that he would jump out of his skin when the man said it without looking over his shoulder: “Yeah,” he stammered. “Mom thought you might be thirsty,” he added while he held out a bottle of water to Tyler. “She said it’s hot on the roof, and Cam thinks you’re lying.”
“About what?” Tyler asked before he took a big gulp of the water.
“It’s nothing,” John shrugged his shoulders, sitting down on the roof at a safe distance from the edge.
“It’s gotta be something. You wouldn’t have said anything if it was nothing.”
“It’s just… We had just started to settle in a bit and now everything’s twisted again. Derek blows a couple of fuses; you take out a terminator with your bare hands. There’s obviously a lot of hate between you, and we still haven’t stopped Skynet.”
He watched as Tyler smiled wryly and sat down on the edge: “Come here, kid,” he ordered, gesturing that he should come over.
“I’d rather stay here. Mom would kill me if-”
“Stop being a momma’s boy, kid,” Tyler hissed. “If you want answers, you sit down next to me. If you don’t, just go away.”
“But mom doesn’t-” He protested vehemently.
“It’s time you start to make your own decisions, kid. Because if you don’t, then we’re all screwed,” Tyler stated bitterly. “You can’t keep depending on your dear mommy to fix things for you.”
He crawled to the edge, swung his legs over and looked at Tyler expectantly.
“What do you want to know?” Tyler asked, playing absently with the bottle in his hands.
“Why aren’t you scared of mom?”
“What?” Tyler asked with an amused grin. “You could’ve asked me anything and that’s the first question you ask, kid. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly, leaving out what he had seen happen between his mother and this man. “Because she can be scarier than a terminator out to kill me, I guess.”
“True,” Tyler laughed before he nodded in agreement. “She can be.”
“Do you, er, or did you know her?”
“Yeah, I did. Quite a remarkable woman if I may say so.”
He kept quiet for a moment and now really thought about his next question: “What’s she like? I mean in the future. That’s where you know her from, right?”
“She died two years ago,” Tyler sighed with a grim expression on his face.
“What?”
“On December fourth, twenty-twenty-five,” Tyler explained.
“How? Was it… cancer?”
“No, unless you would like to call an army of heavy combat chassis units cancer,” Tyler remarked wryly. “She died fighting during the siege… The way that woman could wield any weapon.”
He noticed that Tyler started to stare into open space. “He was her husband,” echoed through his mind again.
“Sounds like you are, were impressed,” he offered.
A warm grin spread across Tyler’s face: “Who wouldn’t be with a woman carrying around a 20-Watt Phased Plasma Rifle?”
“A what?”
“You know she favors shotguns, well, it’s a weapon kinda like it but then from the future. Extremely painful to get shot with. I can’t advice it.”
He watched while Tyler reached back and pulled his T-shirt up a little, revealing numerous battle scars. A shiver went through him when he looked at the scars.
“Mom did that?” He asked slowly.
“Nah, the robot I stole the rifle from did. Your mom did this,” Tyler said with a faint smile while he pulled his shirt up a little further. “You’d think from all the guns she’d fired she’d know how to fire a plasma rifle.”
“You’ve seen a lot of combat, haven’t you?”
“I’ve seen too much, kid. Too many battles, too many bodies, too many machines,” Tyler answered before letting out a deeply sad sigh.
“What will I be like?” He asked hesitantly, not sure if he wanted to know the answer.
“A cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch, but you have to be,” Tyler answered honestly. “We can’t be lead by a soft-hearted wimp who’s afraid to make his own decisions and turns to his mommy every step of the way.”
“But Cam says I will have many friends in the future,” He objected.
Tyler’s tone of voice, choice of words hurt him more than he had expected.
“Yeah, right,” Tyler growled through gritted teeth. “They think you’re their friend. Hell, I even thought it, but then you betrayed me.”
He had difficulty swallowing now that a lump was forming in the back of his throat. Tyler Devlin didn’t need many words to cut him down to size.
“What…? What do you mean?”
“Where I’m from, the needs of the living outweigh the needs of the dead. If a brother in arms is critically injured, you leave him behind in order for you to survive. Or if you can stomach it, you grant him a mercy kill. You did neither to me. You let me be brought to Home Plate… I died and you revived me. Then I died again and you revived me again… See this scarring, kid,” Tyler pulled the fabric aside. “That’s what you get for losing your arm and gaining a can’s arm.”
“So what Derek’s said is true? You have a cyborg’s arm?”
“Yeah, really advanced one too,” Tyler said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “An eight-six-seven, the first real series made from coltan, was so kind to give it to me.”
He cowered at Tyler’s cruel sarcasm and felt like throwing up when the reality of the man he would become sank in. He would need to do whatever it took to ensure his own survival and the victory of mankind over the machines. It had always sounded so very heroic, destined for the greatest things but only now he had begun to realize at what price it would come.
Overwhelmed by this sudden realization, he looked over the edge. If he jumped, would he die? He could end it here and now.
“Don’t,” Tyler barked and John felt a hand close painfully around his left upper arm. He hadn’t even noticed that he had been leaning over the edge too much: “I’m too goddamn important, right?” He seethed.
“No, you would only confirm my entire point by taking the easy way out. Besides this building isn’t high enough for the fall to be deadly. You’d probably only break an arm or a leg.”
“Mom would be so pissed at us,” he mumbled while he tried to smile a little at the thought of his mother yelling at them both for being so reckless.
“Oh, she’d skin me alive,” Tyler quipped before he gave him a good-natured push against the shoulder. “And she’d pamper you. All those nice meals.”
He pretended to gag: “She’s a terrible cook. I’m still in shock, no, in awe that you actually asked for seconds.”
“I was hungry. You eat what you can get your hands on in the future.”
“So you didn’t like it?”
“No, I did, but I’m not picky like you,” Tyler teased.
He laughed heartily and gave Tyler a friendly slap on the shoulder.
“Sorry,” he apologized quickly when Tyler grimaced. “Forgot you fell out of a tree.”
“And I sent you flying… So we’re even.”
“Tyler?”
“Yeah, kid?”
“Why won’t you call me John?”
He watched as Tyler ran a hand through his hair. All he could do was to wait patiently for him to answer his question and it was obvious Tyler was thinking about his answer.
“Is it because of future-John?” He suggested with a hint of hope in his voice.
“Maybe. You, as in the future-John, did this to me,” Tyler answered, raising his left arm. “Can’t say I’ve forgiven you, or him.”
“So you hate me?”
“Nah, kid. Never will, no matter what I will say now or in the future. People say, do the stupidest things in the heat of the moment. Just remember that.”
“I know.”
“Oh, yes, you pulled a C on me. Drive your mother into a rage and then have her take it out on me. Nice work, kid.”
“That’s why you aren’t scared of her, because I’ve done it before, I mean-”
“I know what you mean. And yes, you will do it numerous times. The best one being getting caught and sent to Century. I had to endure hurricane Sarah Connor for a few days.”
He grinned from ear-to-ear: “Those are the exact words I’d use to describe her in a fit of rage.”
Tyler nodded slowly: “She is… Something else.”
Suddenly his cell phone began to beep. He took it out of the back pocket of his jeans and looked at the name in the display. He just loved caller-ID.
“Mom,” he greeted after he had flipped it open to answer. “Yes, I’ll be down soon… No, not the fastest way… I’ll ask... Uhm, Tyler. Mom wants to know if you want to join us for dinner?”
“Nothing beats a home cooked meal.”
“Yes, mom… We’ll be right there.”

Chapter 10: An Offer You Cannot Refuse

Chapter 12: Window To The Future