“Can’t you help him?” John asked as he opened the back door of the car and got in.
“The Devil doesn’t need any help, does he, Cameron?” Derek asked haughtily. “Tin cans like yourself would like to stay away from him as far as possible.”
“I don’t experience fear,” Cameron answered simply while she got in the passenger seat of the car.
“No, but the very fact he exists messes with your programming, right?”
“I have no recollection of it, but I am not afraid of him.”
“Well, I should be if I were you,” Derek grinned darkly. “And you know exactly why.”
“Enlighten us,” Sarah remarked, not making any attempt to hide her annoyance that she was kept out of the loop.
“Not only is the Devil John’s best programmer, his favorite pastime is taking out tin cans,” Derek chuckled amused. “He absolutely does not fear the machine and attacking them unarmed is a sport for him. There’s nothing that man doesn’t know about those metal bastards.”
“I know,” Cameron said coolly. “He reprogrammed me together with John. For that I cannot be scared of him.”
“What do you know about this Devlin? Aside from the obvious statistics,” Sarah asked while she stuck the key in the ignition and turned it to start the car.
“Not much. He and John will be best friends,” Cameron shrugged. “John trusts him with his life.”
“So why is he here?”
“He had no longer any purpose in the future after Skynet was destroyed. His base had fallen. His friends had died.”
“Did he,” Sarah paused for a moment to choose the right words while she let the car pull out of the parking lot. “Did he have a family?”
Cameron turned to face Sarah and answered: “No, not in the traditional sense.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. How come every question she ever asked was met with an evasive answer. Couldn’t it just be straight and clear for once? A slumbering headache made its presence known and she rubbed her forehead softly with her index and middle finger.
“Explain?” She sighed as she looked at Derek in the rearview mirror. “Not in the traditional sense? What does that mean?”
“Whispers in the tunnel said that the fool even was married at some point, but only the crew at IntelliTech Base knew if it as true. If he was, chances are that she died when IT Base fell,” Derek added to the conversation. “John knew too.”
Deep creases furrowed Sarah’s brow and she bit the inside of her lower lip as she tried to put the new pieces of the puzzle about this Devlin character into the place. Her mind was rushing and the headache worsened. Why had future John sent back yet another lone warrior? And why had she been the target again? So many questions, so very few answers.
Maybe this Tyler Devlin could give her the answers she so desperately sought. However in that case the biggest question of them all was: would they see him again? If not, she would be stuck with even more questions than ever before.
Her instincts told her that it was only a question of time before he would reappear in their lives. Suddenly she remembered that fateful night when she had gone out to catch a movie. Despite the fact that two Sarah Connors had been murdered already, and the news reports were already mentioning it as the Phonebook Killer, she had felt the need to leave the apartment she had shared with Ginger.
She had been walking down Pico Boulevard after grabbing a bite to eat, unable to escape the feeling she was being followed. The man in the trench coat hiding in the shadows of the dark alley, a few feet behind her when she had passed the mouth of the alley. She had fled into the first public place she had come across, a disco called Tech Noir, to call the police.
So many years ago and she still remembered it as if it had happened only yesterday. She glanced into the rearview mirror and smiled faintly when she saw her son staring out the window.
The man she had thought to be the killer had been her savior and he had left her a son.

“In other local news today, Century City Shopping Center became the scene of an altercation between a man and a woman. According to witness’ statements the man attacked the woman for no apparent reason. The two left the scene before the mall’s security and the police arrived and are still at large,” the news anchor droned while the TV-screen showed a blown-up photo of a scruffy looking man from one of the security cameras at the mall.
“I was having a coffee, just minding my own business, waiting for my wife, you know, when hell broke loose,” an elderly man said into the camera. “This huge man, he just attacked that woman.”
“It was chaos. They were both so unbelievably strong,” a young woman with her daughter on her arm stated. “They completely tore up the place.”
“Damages to the food court are considerable and will take up to a week to restore. In a fountain near the entrance the police found a handgun,” the news anchor added as a voice-over as footage of the man and woman fighting was shown.
“If it had been used in the fight, the chances would have been that innocents would have been injured or killed. By finding the gun, we now have reason that the man is armed and dangerous,” a spokeswoman of the Los Angeles Police Department said.

Derek snorted with contempt while he switched off the TV: “The Devil doesn’t need guns to be armed and dangerous, but what the fuck do they know?”
Sarah raised an eyebrow and sent him a curious look: “What do you mean?”
“The Lieutenant General is one of them. He’s a goddamn cyborg.”
“Cameron said that he is human and-”
“Cameron said that he is human. Cameron said! Cameron says a lot, but she doesn’t know shit!” He interrupted her furiously. “He has an arm of coltan which he tested on my little brother!”
“Kyle?” She asked in a whisper.
“Yeah, the Devil choke slammed him and then tried to crush his windpipe,” he seethed.
“He tried to kill Kyle?”
“It took my entire squad to get that half-breed to let go of my brother. Trying to kill Kyle bought the Devil a nice stay in solitary, and what did John do about it? Nothing, zilch, nada.”
“Why did he try to kill Kyle?”
He tapped against the side of his head: “It’s the nano’s. They made him do it. Convenient excuse, isn’t it?”
“Nano’s?”
“Some experimental drug,” he answered. “Turns humans into merciless tin cans who then turn on their own.”

John looked up when there was a knock on his door. As always he had not been granted a moment’s rest. Always someone coming to check in on him, coming to talk to him.
He hadn’t been the target today. Had he been the only one to see that the danger had not been from that tall man but from the woman he had been following? It struck him as odd that his mother had been the target once again. Last time she had been Skynet’s primary target had been when he had not even been born yet. The future him had sent back a lone and brave warrior to protect her because she would give birth to him. That lone and brave warrior had been his father, Kyle Reese. Was history repeating itself?
He had seen the second of hesitation on the scarred man’s face when he had looked at John’s mother, like he recognized her. Had the future him pulled another stunt like with Kyle Reese?
Again there was a knock on his door, this time a little louder. Again he preferred not to call enter. The door swung open and Cameron walked in.
“You remained quiet,” she stated upon his questioning glare.
“Maybe I don’t want the company?” He sneered.
“Oh,” she said, turning to leave. “Thank you for explaining.”
He rolled his eyes: she was incorrigible when it came to using normal speech. He had told her numerous times already to use different phrases than the standard ‘thank you for explaining’.
“Cameron?” He asked softly.
“Yes, John?”
“What do you know about Devlin?”
“Not more than what I told you, Sarah and Derek in the car,” she answered.
“Would you lie about it? I mean, would you withhold information?”
She nodded: “If my mission requires it.”
“And does your mission require it now?”
“Yes.”
“So you know more about him?” He decided to interrogate her.
“Yes.”
“And you won’t tell me?”
“No.”
“And if I ordered you to tell me, would you tell me?”
“No.”
“Awesome,” he grumbled with annoyance.

There were easier ways to obtain thermite, Tyler knew that but after that little scuffle earlier the police was most certainly looking for him, so he had to make it himself. That’s why he had chosen this abandoned aluminium storage warehouse. Aluminium powder everywhere, plus all the rust he had turned into rust powder. The only ingredient hard to obtain had been magnesium but he had found it at a drug store and had actually paid for it.
Not a day back and he already had a few crimes to his name: robbery, assault and battery, destruction of property, grand theft auto. Not that he cared much for the laws of this time. They were useless in the battle against Skynet.
He looked at the makeshift container in which the steel skeleton lay and smiled pleased with himself. The T-867 had not been a really big challenge, but it had given him the chance to examine how the time travel had affected him. The nanoattrioids had not stirred their ugly little heads when he had attacked the T-867. Maybe because he hadn’t worked up a sweat when disabling the killing machine.
Should he remove its chip and keep it? So he could read it later when he would have access to the right computer hardware? Would it tell him something he didn’t already know? He knew that it wouldn’t. Its mission directives had become clear the moment he had seen it target his assignment.
He ran a hand through his hair and heaved a deeply sad sigh. It nearly killed him to think of her as an assignment when she had been so much more to him, when he had been so much more to her. However he needed to keep his distance and shield his heart.
She had seen him and it had hurt him more than he had ever been able to imagine that she had not recognized him. It was extremely difficult to keep remembering that she had died and this Sarah was not the Sarah he had known.
He picked up the piece of cloth he had drenched in gasoline, searched the pockets of his pants for the lighter and lit it before tossing it into the container. The thermite ignited, flames reaching and grasping, eerily screeching as the metal shrivelled up and melted away.
Slowly he trudged towards the wall and sat down with his back against so he could watch the fire die. Feeling tired suddenly he rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes.

Chapter 1: Welcome To Century

Chapter 3: Ignorance Is The Night Of The Mind