Tyler opened his eyes a little and blinked against the bright light that lit the room. What the hell happened? The last thing he remembered was that dreaded T-1001 posing as a T-600 and the butt of a plasma rifle.
He tried to sit up, only to discover that he was tied down to the table. No chains this time but the kind of restraints that had been used to hold down mental patients. He knew because his mother had taken such restraints home with her and had showed him the flaws. She had taught him to escape them. How much had she known about his life to come? Because he was certain that she had not shown him for the fun of it. How much of the future had been changed in the past? How much of the future would be changed by what they would do?
For the first time he wondered if he was an invincible as he had thought.
The other Tyler had been able to see the changes, but he didn’t know if he ever could. His mind kept wandering back to Sarah. She distracted him, she weakened him and yet she was a source of strength and confidence to him. When it was just the two of them, the angry world would seize to exist. Two wounded souls that found shelter with each other, that nursed each other back to life. In a world ravaged by war, destruction and distrust, she was the only one he felt he could trust. And she had blindsided him with young Robin O’Conlin.
Even if he had been able to see the future unfold, it changed so fast that it was beyond his reach. He understood the timelines, the time loops, and how one little thing different in the past could make a huge difference in the future. However he understood that some things were supposed to happen to strengthen beliefs and convictions.
Had they crossed against the light? By choosing to follow their hearts and love in order to survive this cruel, cruel world? He had watched her get out of the dark sedan and walk to the trunk of the car. She had opened it and had picked up the fake Turk. He had seen why the other Tyler had loved her: her determination to change the future, her unwillingness to accept the destinies as they had been set out. It had only been a matter of time before he had come to realize that he could never see her as just his mentor. His mind and body had screamed in protest at him when he had turned her down on the night after Judgment Day, but it had not been the right time. A wry smile formed on his lips: When was the right time?
He raised his head a little to take in his surroundings. It was a small operation theatre with a lot of electronics and medical equipment. One large window with mirror-glass, two smaller ones that showed the darkened sky of the outside world. A small wall screen, one door next to the mirror-window and one door to his left. Eliminating the two small windows, there were three options for escape but it was not the time to leave yet.
After putting his head down again, he closed his eyes and thought about his chances. He had wanted to escape from Century but this was Forrester, a known Skynet testing facility. Not that he wanted to be a lab rat to be experimented on but having knowledge of this place and its purpose would help the Resistance in the near future.
The wall screen flickered and the pale bluish face appeared at the center: We meet again, First Sergean Tyler Jess Devlin.
Tyler kept quiet and closed his eyes quickly after reading the welcome message on the screen, pretending to have lost consciousness again. A strong current sent his body convulsing and twitching and he clamped his mouth shut to keep himself from screaming in pain.
Do not lie, First Sergeant, appeared on the screen.
His heart pounded savagely in his chest and he feared it would explode if he didn’t bring it down to a slow, regular beat. After taking a deep breath, he concentrated on slowing his frantically beating heart down. Slowly he turned his head a little to face the wall screen: “God damn piece of crap tech,” he hissed through gritted teeth.
Another strong surge of electricity raged through his body, straining his arm and leg muscles to a point past pain. It felt like each and every nerve and fibre of his body stood literally on fire: “God damn son of a rejected vacuum cleaner!” He panted.
A third strong current coursed through his body and he had to fight to keep his thoughts together. He needed to focus, needed to keep thinking coherent.
“STOP!” An unfamiliar man’s voice called from somewhere to the left of him.
Despite the gruelling pain of being electrocuted, he managed to turn his head a little to see who had spoken.
“Fucking traitor!” He seethed, his teeth chattering while the remainder of the electricity left him.
He had not known the voice but he recognized the man who approached him. They had never met in real life but he had heard stories about him, had seen his picture on the news and in news papers.
“Like I was left a choice,” the man countered while he checked the restraints.
“We all have a choice! Never will I work with that junkyard filler!” Tyler growled, feeling the deepest of hate well up for the smug looking man.
He had always hated him because of the stories his mother had told him, Sarah told him. But to work for the enemy, it was the biggest sin.
“I would sooner kill myself!” He added.
The fourth surge of electricity left him twitching and twisting again and he howled from the shear pain.
“Too bad,” the man sighed sadly. “Because you don’t know what you are missing.”
He stared at the man: “Never will I betray our kind… But I will kill you painfully and slow… This I promise,” he whispered.
A fifth shock of electricity sent his thoughts reeling and his muscles and nerves straining to the end. The pain drove him closer and closer to insanity. His surroundings began to fade out when the current lasted longer than before.
“Stop!” The man called again. “You don’t want to fry his brain… Just yet.”
Somehow Tyler felt a little thankful when the electricity stopped raging through him. Darkness crept up on him and he lost consciousness.

A weird sensation sent icy shivers up and down her spine. Sarah heaved a deep sigh and tried to find a comfortable spot on her bed. It had been days since the last visual confirmation of Tyler and she had begun to worry again.
A few days ago she had instructed Catherine to put together a raid team to help her son and Tyler escape from Century but they had returned without John, without Tyler but with a group of civs they had managed to liberate. Hanssen, the teamleader, had passed her a message from her son that he needed to stay in Century to give the other prisoners hope and to help those in need of help on the inside. It was not his time to escape Century just yet.
Tyler was a different story; she knew that he would become an escape artist, helping people to get out of Century. The fact that he had seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth did not bode well. He wasn’t the Tyler who had come back in time to help and protect them and she worried that he would never be.
This Tyler refused to accept his fate lying down, resulting in reckless behavior and extremely dangerous situations, as if he was tempting fate, relying on his destiny to stay alive. It was a contradictio in terminus: his refusal versus his acceptance. But there were more conflicts in him. He would cold and distant as the other champion of the human race, warm and passionate when they were alone. Patient when examining the battle reports and the shutdown machines, impatient with intolerant troops and bad battlefield decisions by others. He could kill another human and feel no regret, and he could kill another human and be consumed by guilt.
This world, this destiny had twisted and perverted him and he had become a very complex man. Nothing never meant nothing with him, and if she had not known him as a teenager she would have needed a manual to understand him and his reasoning.
A faint but widening smile spread across her face when she thought back of their last lovemaking. It had been passionate and almost too vehement for her to handle, like he had bottled up all his good feelings and they came pouring out all at once. Afterwards he had lain wrapped firmly around her, resting his head on her heavily heaving chest, and she had thought that she had felt him sob silently while she had played with sweaty locks of his wavy hair, wallowing in the afterglow.
For a long moment she wondered about what kind of man he would have been in a normal world. Immediately followed by the knowledge that in a normal world Tyler Jess Devlin would never have been. In a normal world John would never have been able to send back Robin Baxter to be Tyler’s mother. In a normal world men like Tyler would never have been needed.
I’m not a hero… I’m a monster, forged in the heat of battle, formed and defined by war, death and destruction. It had been ominous but true words, spoken by the man this Tyler was destined to become. The other Tyler with his cyborg left arm and the nanoattrioids that caused fits of pure insanity when he got worked up over something.
The sudden need to sleep and forget about this world overwhelmed her and she closed her eyes. Slowly she sunk away in the world of dreams.

The man turned to face the small wall screen: “He will not be of use to us if you fry his brains beforehand. I don’t need another drooling patient.”
The pale bluish face grinned maliciously: He did not cooperate.
“You want to know how he thinks? How he is able to handle metal in his body?” The man asked.
Affirmative.
“Then don’t fry his brains,” the man countered annoyed. “There are other methods to discover his thinking pattern.”
Other methods?
“We could monitor his brain activity while we show him images and words, see how he reacts to certain visual and audio stimulants. By his scars we can tell he is a fighter. Show him images of battle, let him listen to battle. He is fairly young-”
First Sergeant Tyler Jess Devlin, born February 17th, 1991. He is 24.
“As I said fairly young. He is a good-looking man despite his scars, so he must turn a few heads on his base. He must have a mate,” the man concluded.
A mate?
The man nodded: “A girlfriend, a lover, a partner.”
The pale bluish face morphed into the face of a woman extremely familiar to the man: Her? Subject T7840/7 has reacted to her before.
The man looked intently at the screen. He had never forgotten that face. The woman who should have made his career with her acute schizo-affective disorder but who instead had ruined his career and his life.
He swallowed when he remembered that fateful night. She had broken his arm, threatened to pump him full of drain cleaner on her way out of Pescadero State Hospital. He had thought that she had been just another nut job craving for attention by inventing a truly unique story of an imaginative future, but that night everything had changed.
He had resigned and had become a true believer but Sarah and hers had never granted him a moment’s consideration. After Agent Ellison had locked him in the very same cell as her former patient his devote conviction of her son becoming the savior of mankind had slipped into a deep hatred.
It had been the luck of the draw that the day before Judgment Day he had gotten himself into isolation in the basement of the building, and thus escaping the furious flames of reckoning. He was a scholar, unable to defend himself against the machines that flooded the world, so when the chance came to join forces with the oppressor he had grabbed it with both hands. He was not proud of it but it kept him alive. In exchange for his life, he had offered his knowledge of the human psyche.
Now Dr. Peter Silberman stood looking at the unconscious man and felt relieved. He wasn’t as intimidating as the big man he had seen clad in black leather, wearing dark shades on the night of Sarah’s escape, but he was intimidating all the same. For a human.
If this man was just as crazy as that Kyle Reese character he had examined in 1984, his threat held all truth. He stood at a crossroads. With one word, he could render him useless, leaving nothing behind but a drooling idiot in a vegetative state, but his curiosity took over. Aside from securing his own life, he could learn more about what drove the Resistance fighters and help out his employer.

Darkness was all around. Not even the night sky showed any stars. Electric blue mists swept over the surface. A mysterious wind swirled and whirled the mists. Bluish-white arcs fingered the dark emptiness. The strange lightning bundled together and the explosion of white light was blinding. As the light was swallowed by the darkness a sphere of energy became visible. It took the shape of a big mirror ball, and disappeared suddenly with an ghostly monster’s growl.
She squinted and could make out the form of a man. Scarred, muscular, naked. Slowly he rose to stand and she could finally see who it was. Tyler, his face devoid of emotion, scanned his surroundings slowly and seemed to look straight through her.
Again a mysterious wind picked up and swirled the mists. Electric discharges lit up the darkened sky. Again it bundled forming into another sphere midair, growing until it touched grounded. Another spooky growl announced the arrival of someone. Scarred, lean, naked. The man was thrown into the mists, as if time had spit him out. The man slowly turned and scrambled to his feet. He looked around timidly. Kyle, the look in his eyes ultra-alert, stood hunched up and tried to catch a full breath.
The mists separated and revealed a forked path. A look up at the darkness revealed two glaring red moons, piercing through the dark, like the eyes of the T-101 that had chased her at Cyberdyne Systems. She tried calling the two men who had now seen each other but her voice refused duty. She tried walking towards them but she was rooted to the floor literally. As she glanced down, it revealed her legs had melded with the floor fusing into the metal rosters she was standing on.
A bright flare shot across the darkness, followed by a white flash and she automatically raised her hands to shield her eyes. The bright white light dissolved into the darkness and she stood looking a mushroom cloud reaching for the darkness. Like a plinian column it suddenly collapsed, thrusting its fiery clouds in all directions.
She shrieked soundlessly when the first clouds reduced Kyle and Tyler to ashes. Fire tugged at her, the tongues of flames licking at her skin, but she couldn’t feel it.
Her eyes snapped open and she sat up with a start before staring at the soaked sheets for a moment. She gasped for air while she wiped the sweat off of her forehead. She was bathing in cold sweat and every muscle in her body was shaking vehemently. Blood roared through her veins and her heart hammered frantically.
Still tormented and tortured in dreams, there would never be release from the madness that had haunted her for over thirty years now. This was the world she had known to come to exist. She felt sick to her stomach and she let herself slide out of bed. On her hands and knees, she threw up all she had eaten that day.
Her stomach churned again when images from her past nightmare forced their way back to the front of her mind and she could barely keep herself from throwing up again. It had been a long time since she had had such a violent physical reaction to any of her many nightmares. Was it an omen? Like the Inferno nightmares she had had in the past around the time she had been sentenced to Pescadero State Hospital. Or was it her mind processing the severe losses the Resistance had suffered the past two weeks? Or was it just another of her numerous inexplicable nightmares?
The dimming light announced the dusk. Another dark night was coming.

Chapter 12: Century - Part II

Chapter 14: Escape From Forrester