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Pillow Talk
Pillow Talk
Santa Clarita, California
Interstate Highway 5
July 3rd, 2027
"What truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me to the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. I have made the most important discovery of my career - the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found. I am only here tonight because of you [looking at and speaking to Alicia] You are the only reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you. [applause from audience]" - Professor John Nash’s acceptance speech for a Nobel prize to the crowd and his wife, Alicia, from the movie, A Beautiful Mind
"To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world." - Heather Cortez
The mission had been a failure. The random group of nomadic human survivors had been slaughtered minutes before she had got there. Then, there was the problem of why the humans were all dead.
Cameron desperately gunned the stolen fusion moto-terminator engine past 232 mph. Wind howled and whipped by her face and hair, at hurricane strength, while stinging her eyes.
The sound of the bike engine's roar beneath her was deafening. The vibration jarred her flesh, her metallic teeth, and her metal body frame.
Hellish firepower ripped up the wasteland's asphalt all around her. The pursuing moto-terminators followed her down the road.
She had mere microseconds to adjust to the changing road environment. She had to use the debris filled road to evade, the relentless assault by bullets. Anything beyond minor and exacting adjustments would send her and the bike both tumbling to their respective destruction.
Cameron hung low and into the machine she had lobotomized and borrowed. Her own form's added wind resistance would be the death of her, if she didn't.
She could feel herself achieving speeds that would have ripped a human right off the bike. Speeds high enough to fatally wound even her if she lost control.
She gunned the engine and kept going. There wasn’t any other choice.
She also had to alter coarse south. Heading home would have meant bringing this machine swarm with her. If her Father became aware of what was at Serrano Point, Skynet wouldn't even hesitate to nuke what it falsely believed to be its own property at the moment.
If she didn't know better she would have guessed the bike AIs had taken her hijacking of one of their own personally. It wasn't that.
The AI bikes were the living embodiment of machine rage on wheels. They'd kill any target they didn't consider friendly.
Thirty two machines followed at blinding speed. The angry swarm adjusting and attacking like a swarm of killer bees, killer bees with machine guns.
The group shared tactical information and synchronized fire like twentieth century fighter jets. They auto avoided the mess they made of the already dilapidated road and avoided any hazard they made to one another.
The roads of the world probably hadn’t seen a pursuit like this since the old human sport of NASCAR racing. The roads were safer and a lot better quality back then. They also didn’t include heavy weapons fire.
The streets roared. They literally shook from the furious pursuit.
With eyes glowing red, Cameron fully embraced her TOK-715 side. She plotted the road, noted the terrain down to every last pot hole, noted the obstacles from every abandoned car frame to every last rusty tin can, overlapped her actions, putting every ounce of strength and speed into survival.
If she stayed on the main road she was dead. Time was already running out.
She plotted a course off the highway, into an old neighborhood and off the road. It was an insane course of action. It would also include insane speed changes and hair trigger turns for evasion.
The first of the enemy AIs exploded behind her as she weaved past an old makeshift barricade of old cars. More when she tore through the open ruins of a house.
Most of the homes were roofless and door less. They’d been eroding in disrepair since Judgment day, sixteen years ago. Most had been looted and emptied long ago.
The bike hit the inside of another dead structure at 129 mph. The wheels almost slipped beneath her.
The swarm was already breaking up. The moto-terminators weren’t built for self termination, most slowed and re-evaluated the situation if they couldn’t keep an immediate lock.
She crashed through another collection of cheaply made plaster and wood walls as if they were paper. Which wasn’t far from the quality level they had originally been made at.
It took every ounce of her strength not to be knocked off the bike. Her flesh was being ravaged by her actions, so she took care to guard her eyes, while hugging as close to the bike as possible so the vehicle took the majority of the damage.
The stolen bike raced into the next home. The swarm was already falling behind, its firepower wilder and further off.
The bike almost slipped again. She slammed through more trash a plaster to further confuse their tracking and targeting, spreading the empty mass of the homes behind her like a fighter craft would use chaff or flare to confuse an enemy missile.
She wildly changed direction, took tight random turns, ever pressing forward, and gunned the engine. One home after another fell behind her.
She compensated for the weight, as the bike never could have on its own, by lifting its full weight prior to it hitting ground again. She barely avoided wiping out multiple times.
Twenty-six destroyed yards and smashed empty house frames later, she smashed through a old glass backdoor window after already slowing down to 83 mph, barely avoiding the empty grave of an old swimming pool. The bike took most of the glass damage.
Had Cameron been human, she would already been dead several times over. As a machine, she was moderately damaged externally and still lucky to be functional at all.
Six stealthy weaves later, the moto-terminator pack had completely fallen behind her. Cameron found a dry patch of old concrete and hid her tracks as she ran southwest evading for twenty minutes.
Cameron had survived and the bike was still serviceable. The cyborg took a minute to seal her wounds, picking: glass, wood, nails, and plaster out of her synthetic skin.
Cameron plotted a course home. Then, she traveled off road, to avoid attracting any more attention.
Something bothered her deeply about all of what had just happened. It was how little the damage to her soft tissue had hurt…
After returning to Serrano Point, Cameron had showered herself. Scared of John’s potential reaction to her exposed metal, Cameron wasted some of her internal store of nanites healing her external body.
It was the first thing she did. That is without a logical reason to do so.
After dressing, she wandered the halls. A machine lost in her thoughts.
One hundred thousand things she done wrong crossed her mind. Ten thousand things she could do wrong invaded her thoughts. Three billion lives lost also haunted her.
It was one of the chores of being an AI. Humans thought they had the lockdown on overanalyzing things, of being lost in self doubt, or indecision.
Being an AI of her level meant analyzing things on a level most humans would never grasp, even briefly. The fear of doing something wrong could be crippling to a machine, right now, looking at the entirety of what had happened over her lifetime in the Resistance, Cameron was feeling like a failure on several levels.
Still, she found herself at John’s door like he had asked. Like so many nights before, she stood there.
She repeated an old habit. Her hand went to a necklace, that this John had given her, lost long ago in another timeline. It had been two years ago, in the jump that sent her to the younger John and Sarah.
Being a machine, lost for a moment in the exacting detail of a memory, she could still feel its weight on her skin. Two years had not dulled the object’s touch or its loss.
In truth though, the old habit had lost its meaning. The necklace was gone.
That was Cameron’s central paradox. It was so long ago and yet she would remember it forever as if it was right now.
With everything that had gone wrong, should she even be here? With everything that had gone wrong, could there be anything still there like there once was?
She knocked. John opened the door and invited her in.
Supreme Commander John Connor was working on something. He’d been sitting on a couch, working on a laptop, moving stuff around with John Henry‘s station link help.
Cameron sat next to the man who had first freed her for an hour. John talked about a presentation he was going to give.
It was like one of the weekly staff briefings John used to share with the inner circle. He was going to try to get people to see the big picture and what had to be done.
He was being professional. He was also preparing himself for a speech.
His leg was cold. At first Cameron had thought it was him, that he was mad at her somehow.
Slowly, to her horror, she realized it was her. She wasn’t feeling him, not the way she should be.
She was cold. She felt pressure, temperature, sensation, but there was no connection.
She ran a diagnostic, but nothing was wrong. She felt broken without knowing why.
John stopped his presentation when a tear ran down her face. He looked at her, smiled, and attempted a joke saying, “My speech is that bad, huh?”
Cameron looked at John, she attempted to hide her features like she used to, but she remembered her promise to Sarah. So, she processed her machine feelings in a way that a human could understand her distress.
Her lip quivered. She stated as her eyes watered, “I did everything you told me too. I followed all of your orders John.”
Supreme Commander John Connor looked her in the eyes. There was a wrinkle where he considered telling her to stop faking, then seemed to stop himself.
Cameron answered what she thought he was thinking, “Sarah taught me to do this. I don’t feel like you do John and I don’t have feelings the way you understand them, but Sarah wanted me to be able to express what I felt in a way people could understand.”
“Why would mom do that?”
“Because she said it was necessary for trust. So I could understand and they could. So you could.”
John face was perplexing. Cameron didn’t know what to think of it.
She asked, “What are you feeling? I can’t tell right now.”
“Why don’t you just read my Poetry?” It was John’s strange term of Cameron normal ability to read a person’s emotions through tactile contact.
“Because right now I can‘t. I don‘t know why.”
John’s brow creased. He took her hand but felt it was cold. She didn’t adapt to his temperature. She didn’t react to his feelings. She didn’t chameleon to his thoughts. Her hand was as cold as if it belonged to a T-800, rather than her.
He blurted out, “I don’t understand.”
“Well, that makes two of us.” She said, wiping a tear from her eye.
“Did I do something to piss you off?”
“Other than you dying and not telling me I’m a Skynet chip, no.”
“Perry?”
“Perry.”
“Having a legacy chip in your head doesn’t make you Skynet, Cameron.”
“Well, it sure as Hell doesn’t make me Uncle Bob, John.” The word Hell opened up another can of worms. She had promised this John she’d seek out faith, she had something to report.
She added, “You should also know that John Henry was a faithful convert to Christianity. He had a death experience, when Skynet attacked him in 2008, and I have something to share on behalf of the AIs.”
“What would that be.”
“We’re screwed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might have a heaven, John, but apparently, my kind doesn’t qualify.”
John blinked. “This the same John Henry I was typing to?”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps he didn’t die.” There were human beings that had near death experiences that didn’t see a white light, John was going to bring up it wasn’t an actual death, until he saw her expression.
Cameron glared at him. She remembered John Henry’s slow agonizing death as if it was her own, in her mind, John Connor didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about.
She changed the subject again. Cameron asked, “Why did you send me away?”
“There was seething issue in our ranks and you were a target.”
“It was my purpose to protect you.”
“You were a political focal point for the entire insurgency. You were the tool the Grays were using to turn the troops on themselves. I saw an opportunity to save you and the people being manipulated.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, she responded, “You died. Skynet gloated by showing me your corpse John. I lost you and I failed you.”
John gently stroked her hand stating, “You didn’t fail anyone. I’m sitting right here, because of you.”
Cameron let the words sink in. She calmed the machine inside her.
John added, “The insurgency was a psychological warfare act that Skynet had been using for a while. What happened between us may have sped things up, but it was always going to happen, because of the hay wiring chips.”
He looked into Cameron’s eyes. He stated, “You understand that without your kind, my kind couldn’t win the war. Almost every heavy combat piece in the air, on the sea, or on land was an AI or AI driven. Satellites were as well.”
John continued saying, “We had to use the malfunctioning AIs or we would have yielded the entire war. What happened was going to happen, whether you and I had been together or not. It just might have happened a month or two sooner.”
“You might have won.”
“I doubt we would have routed Skynet out of every last one of its rat holes by then. The truth is that we lost the war for two reasons. One was Skynet setting the chips to Haywire. Two was failing to bond with the machine resistance that would have made that irrelevant. Neither of those factors was your fault or mine.”
“You decided that?”
“Perry did and I agree. Feel free to argue with him if you wish.” John smiled.
Cameron looked at him seriously. She asked, “Was I just a tool to you John? Was I just a way for you to study Skynet?”
John took her hand and squeezed it. He looked her in the eye and said, “Do you remember the necklace I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve only known of two other owners to that necklace. Do you know who they were?”
“No.”
“One was my mother. The other was the mother to my two children. You know how I felt about them, so how do you think I felt about you?”
Cameron calmed. She centered herself out of whatever lock had held her AI mind hostage.
Slowly, her synthetic skin came alive. Simply by holding his hand, Cameron moved through the nerves of John’s body, as if he were nothing more than an extension of herself.
She could feel his heartbeat and its ghost began to beat in her chest. She could feel him breathing and her body began mimicking the same.
She felt the warmth of his skin against her. As she moved closer, the scratchiness of his beard tickled her face.
She kissed him and took an hour slowly undressing him. Knowing he was mortal and fragile, she took every moment she could to appreciate him.
John Connor was no machine. He would be flawed and imperfect. However, he loved her and needed her as strongly as a human could.
Hours went by in slow soft intimate moments. Cameron felt drunk from the power of the human emotions and living sensations that rolled off his body.
They were magical moments. However, being human, John could only go on for so long.
He felt like talking afterwards. This slightly annoyed her because it contradicted endless hours of Cameron’s research with woman’s magazines.
John said, “So, mom wanted you to be able to express yourself.”
“Yes and she also read your silly book to me.” She smiled at him, while laying naked on his chest.
John smiled, “She call you the Tin Man?” He was trying to tease.
Cameron mood changed. She confessed, “No, by the time she read the book to me she called me Dorothy.” This lead to her tearing up on his chest.
“That sounds like a good thing. Why do you seem upset?”
Cameron confessed, “Don’t be all human and take this the wrong way, because I do want to be here with you. But just like Dorothy, a big part of me just wants to go home.”
She ran her fingers against his chest. For a few moments, he was silent.
In the end, John did what he always did when uncomfortable. He talked and he joked to raise his mood and that of others.
He talked a bit, saying amusing and endearing things. However, he really needed to sleep.
Cameron stole something from Sarah. She just rubbed his hair a certain way, until he dozed off, despite himself.
She watched him rest. She stayed and laid on top of him, feeling his heartbeat, his breath, and every little twitch as he dreamed.
Right now, eternity could jump off a bridge. For tonight, he was hers. Right now this is where she wanted to be.
Whatever price fate would have her pay, she didn’t care. Whatever her flaws or limitations, Cameron truly loved John Connor, in a manner no human would ever truly understand…
Mike70056 |
Latest page update: made by Mike70056
, Nov 1 2009, 4:16 PM EST
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Keyword tags:
2027
AI
Cameron
John
John Connor
John Henry
moto-terminator
Perry
Sarah
Skynet
T888
The Machine Resistance
The Resistance
The Wizard of Oz
Tin Man
TOK-715
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