Tyler took a deep breath and look at the world as he had known it for the past twenty years for the last time. Slowly the doors of the fallout shelter slid closed. Next time that they would open again, this world would be gone. The sky exploded again. The world was on fire. He could not bear to watch it and yet he forced himself to see it.
Bright flashes of white light hurt his eyes. Blast waves caused the earth and air to tremble.
The moment the huge doors blocked out the last bit of this world, he hung his head in defeat and fought back the tears that were welling in his eyes. Unable to fight it off any longer, he fell to his knees and started sobbing. Someone placed a hand on his shoulder and he knew it was Sarah. He looked up and saw the look of horror and sadness on her face. As the doors had slid into their place, she too had watched the end of the world.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and rose to his feet again. She didn't need to see him cry over the world gone to hell. He needed to be strong. He needed to be Tyler Jess Devlin, if not for her then for himself.

"Hello, Father," the liquid metal figure said as Mark morphed into Catherine Weaver, the first person the T-1001 had encountered after it had arrived in this time.
Hello, Mother, Skynet greeted back with a smirk on its pale bluish face.
Catherine tilted her head and looked curiously at the wall screen: "John Connor?"
Corporal Catherine Ryan picked it out for me, it explained. Is she still alive?
"Yes," Catherine said mechanically. "I let her escape with a cut to her side."
Good, she will be most useful in the future.

A faint, sad smile formed on her lips when she felt the girl tug at her trademark leather jacket. She looked at the tall, silent figure in front of the closed door.
"What's wrong, Sarah?" The girl asked in a whisper. "And why is Tyler standing there like he is frozen?"
Sarah had stepped back and let him be when she noticed that he had to come to terms of what was now expected of him. He was to be the third in command, after John and her. He had to learn in four years what she had taught John during his entire life. Luckily Tyler had a hunger for learning, picking up on it very quickly. Still she had the idea that this Tyler was an improved version of the one John had sent back to save them. The knowledge of who and what he would be in the future had given him that extra drive to learn more things while in the meantime enjoy more things as well.
After the 'kidnapping' Tyler had yet to say one word to the girl. Sarah had introduced the three of them to the girl, and where she and her son had engaged in idle chitchat, Tyler had withdrawn from any form of conversation. He had needed to keep his attention to where they were going since he had decided to take a short cut through a missile field with missiles rising to the surface every few seconds.
Sarah took a deep breath and said: "He's just a little sad and he wants to be alone with his thoughts for a while, Robin."
Robin nodded and looked up at her again. Sarah looked at the girl's face and could see much of Tyler back in it. It was practically insane to realize that one day this 11-year-old girl would become the mother of the 20-year-old man who stood staring at the closed doors of the shelter. If she hadn't been in a similar situation, she would have never understood or believed it herself.
Only in her case John had sent back his father to protect her.

Catherine leaned one hand against the wall and tried to catch her breath. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and relived the massacre again. It all had happened so fast. Blades flashing the bright TL-light of Skynet's main room, cries of shock and horror followed by a creepy silence. Everybody was dead and that, that thing had been responsible. She had pulled her M-9 pistol and had fired a couple of rounds at it, but it had absorbed the bullets, unaffected nor damaged.
She still didn't know how she had survived, but fact was that she had. Her breathing had returned to normal and she touched her right side. A hiss escaped from deep within her lungs. She felt the warmth of her blood on her fingertips. Carefully she lifted her shirt and saw a shallow cut of a few inches long. It had sent its blade in her direction and acting on instinct she had turned away from it, grabbing the opportunity to flee.
Now she felt like a coward. Amelia, Private Tim Jenkins, General Henshaw, all in Skynet's main room had been brutally slaughtered by that thing. She was the only survivor and she wondered if she had been lucky or unlucky. Taking a moment to take in her surroundings, she noticed the door to a maintenance closet was open on a crack. Would she be safe from whatever that thing was if she could hide in there? After making sure that she was alone, she made a run for it.
Quickly she closed and locked the door behind her, only to trip over something big on the floor. She landed on her hands and knees, and looked back. The small stripe of light coming in from under the door revealed a pale face of a middle-aged woman, drawn up in a look of utter horror. The eyes were open but held no life light and from the corner of the woman's mouth blood had trickled onto the floor.
"I'm so sorry, ma'am," Catherine stammered while she shut General Bates' eyes forever.
There was no doubt in her mind that the thing had killed her as well. She considered and reconsidered her options: she could leave the maintenance closet and possibly run into it again or she could wait, stuck with a dead body, until the coast was clear. But how would she be able to tell when the coast was clear? If that thing could form blades with its limbs, who knew what else it could do. She decided to wait for a better moment to try and escape.

Tyler looked at the closed doors one last time and heaved a deeply sad sigh before turning away. He trudged to the car and open the tailgate. In the back of the station wagon were the last things they had taken with them. The last two weeks, Tyler and John had brought all things necessary here. They had put in dry sheet walls to divide it into rooms. The biggest one was the arms room and it was filled to the roof with all sorts of weapons. From thermate grenades to javelins, from a variety of handguns to M-240B machine guns, everything was there. Except for Tyler's favourite weapon, a bow made of coltan with arrows that had hollow tips filled with thermate.
He hoisted a particularly heavy duffel bag onto his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. John had complained about the weight of it after putting it into the back of the car this morning. A wry, crooked smile spread across his face for a short moment: it seemed like a happy moment now, even the glare John had sent him after he had called him a wimp again.
The smile disappeared as abruptly as it had appeared when he heard the girl's voice behind him say: "You are very strong, mister. Just like my stepdad."
He whirled around to see Robin stand a few feet away from him: "Don't you ever do that again, kid," he growled angrily. "Stunts like that might get you killed."
She looked stunned and he could see the tears starting to well in her eyes. He rolled his eyes and thought: Just what I need, a wailing kid. He couldn't feel sorry for saying that to her in the way he had done, even if she were to be his mother, especially if she were to be his mother.
"Will you kill me?" She asked tearfully, her voice dripping with reverend fear.
"No, I won't," he answered gruffly while he shook his head. "But maybe others will."
"But why?" She squeaked upset.
"Maybe they won't like it when people sneak up on them from behind?" He suggested.
She nodded in understanding, causing him to wonder if she really understood him or if she was just humoring him.
"Do you know what happened today?" He forced himself to ask in a friendly voice.
"The world declared war us?" She offered hopeful. "My stepdad said that that would happen after our defense systems went haywire and shot down planes and sunk ships. He said that the world was angry with us and would want revenge. It worried him and mom."
He took a deep breath, lifted the bag off of his shoulder and set it on the floor.
"Sit," he gestured to the floor.
She obeyed and sat down, looking up at him.
He folded his arms across his chest and thought for a moment: "If only the rest of the world had declared war on us, kiddo. At least then we would have had a chance."
"What happened then?" She asked with an expression of childish fear on her face.
"Some people call it the Apocalypse, others call it Eschatology, Armageddon, Judgment Day. The truth is that we, as humanity, put too much faith in technology and now it has turned on us."
She looked confused at him with big blue-gray eyes in which so much emotion was shown.
"You didn't understand a word from what I said, did you?"
"Nooo," she answered honestly with a hint of frustration in her voice.
He ran a hand through his hair and thought about how to simplify things for her. What would the other Tyler have said or done to explain this? Or had he not said or done anything at all? Was he now doing and saying the same things or was this different?
"Okay," he said while he knelt on one knee to be on eyelevel with her. "Do you like computers?"
"I do my homework on it. Sometimes my stepdad lets me play games on it or he lets me chat with my friends from school while he's in the room," she answered.
"Did it always do what you wanted it to do?" He asked slowly.
"Sometimes Internet Explorer would not react. Or the game would freeze, and my stepdad would have to restart the computer."
"That's what happened today," he said with a reassuring smile. "A big computer did no longer do what his owner wanted it to do."
He had to put it into simple words and examples for her to understand. Nevertheless the sooner she knew and understood, the better.

"Definitely family," John stated monotonically when he came to stand next to her.
Sarah was keeping a close eye on Tyler as he explained all that had happened this day to Robin. If this Tyler was anything like the Tyler sent back, tactfulness wasn't high on his list.
"Please, John, don't do that," she muttered with a shaky voice.
Her nerves were strained to the point of breaking and her son sneaking up on her could perhaps prove to be fatal. First their madman's drive to the shelter through the missile field, now the knowledge the world as they had known it had come to an end. She felt responsible for what had happened today. She could have said more, done more to prevent this day from happening. She could have warned more people but the majority of the ones she had warned had looked at her with an expression that had told her that they thought she was completely insane. They should have stopped Skynet but as Tyler had pointed out a few days after the death of the Tyler who had been sent back, Skynet would always exist, only growing stronger and smarter with each postponing of Judgment Day.
The Turk had been a fake, a bait to get to them and future Tyler had sacrificed himself to keep them alive. A few days later, Catherine Weaver, CEO of ZeiraCorp, had announced during a press conference that nothing had been stolen. Tyler, still TJ back then, had called it the inevitability of the future. So she had shifted her focus from stopping the future to preparing for it.
Five point five billion people had died today. An overwhelming feeling of powerlessness welled up from deep within the pits of her stick and she put her hand to her mouth to keep from throwing up. She knew that she could never have saved them all, but she could have saved a few more if only she had insisted on making them believe her. Her stay at the Pescadero State Hospital had worked against her as always.
She took a big swig of tequila and felt the liquid burn in her throat. She was Sarah Connor, mother of the future, mother of John Connor the warrior prophet. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes but at least now she could blame it on the strong alcoholic drink instead of on the deep sadness that was slowly consuming her heart and soul.

Catherine jerked awake, banging her head against the wall. She had no idea where she was or how long she had slept. Where she was became clear the moment she looked at the corpse of General Bates again, but what the time or the day was remained a mystery.
A strange rattling noise had awoken her from her shock induced sleep. Her right side protested by stinging violently when she crawled over to the door, unlocked it and carefully opened it on a crack without making a sound. The strange noise came from the tracks of a T1, the successor of S.W.O.R.D.S.. It drove past her while scanning the hallways. She had to pull back into the darkness of the maintenance closet to remain undetected. It stopped suddenly. Had it seen her? Or worse did it see her now? Was this an old model? Or was it the newer version, equipped with infrared scan?
She held her breath and watched as the T1's head slowly turned 360 degrees, only to let it out when it continued its way down the hall. It had not seen her.
She shut the door and locked it again. Leaning back against the wall, she tried to grasp what was happening. The machines, operating under Skynet's supervision, had taken over. She felt like she was about to faint when she realized that Skynet had been uplinked to each and every military defense system, including those of the U.S. bases abroad.
Somehow until now she had thought that Skynet had only seized control of this base. But what if what she now feared was the cold, harsh reality? If Skynet had taken over all the bases, it had ushered in the end of the times. Skynet would only need half of its arsenal to wipe out the entire world population.
The room started to spin uncontrollably, just like her mind at the thought of how much death and destruction Skynet could have inflicted upon the world. Was there even a world left? She wondered while her mind slipped into a peaceful darkness.

Sarah placed a hand against the wall to keep herself from falling flat on her face. Her thoughts were drowning in a sea of tequila. It hadn't been her intention to get dead drunk but with each swig of tequila the pain and the helplessness had become less and less intrusive in her mind. She wanted to forget all about today. The alcohol had not blocked out the intense feeling of emptiness and she felt dead on the inside.
"Are you okay?" Tyler asked concerned as he looked up at her.
She snorted and watched him for a long moment while he continued to assemble his coltan bow. It was his own design, just like the arrows. The room began to spin again, then swayed from side to side, and she closed her eyes quickly: "How can I ever be okay again?" Her counter was slurred.
She could hear that he got up and walked up to her. She could feel him gently place his hands on her shoulders.
"Com'on, Connor. Look at me," he said in a soft voice.
She opened her eyes again and gratefully focused on his face. At least the room wasn't spinning and swaying so much. Her eyes were drawn to his and she noticed once again how kind his eyes actually were, despite his distant and calculating nature. He was nothing like the shy and lanky boy they had taken in four years ago. He was tall, broad and muscular, and a man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind, even if it wasn't appreciated.
"One day you will be okay again," he said firmly. "We all will be okay again."
"How can you be so sure?" She asked, her voice slurring a little.
"I'm not, but I need to believe it in order to preserve my sanity," he answered.
"What the point of staying sane and alive if we are dead already?"
"We are not dead," he growled. "We're still very much alive."
"It sure feels like I'm dead," she mumbled, staggering when the room began to spin and sway again.
"We all do, Connor, we all do," he sighed sadly. "But I have to believe that one day I will feel alive again. I just have to."
"I want to feel alive, Ty," she said with a sob in her voice. "Can you make me feel alive again?"
She grabbed his face and pulled him down to her so she could kiss him: "Please?"

Chapter 3: No Human Thing Is Of Serious Importance

Chapter 5: A New Reign