Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Go, John!"

Sarah knew that she bore the burden of Judgment Day for every human on earth. She was strong as steel forged by the fires of horror and hardship. But this knowledge made her insane. 

This was the worst possible situation. They had destroyed Cyberdyne labs, how could there be another one? They had killed this one, how could it have survived? 

She shot it again, and again, with a roar of frustration, of agony, of despair, of anger. Skynet was prevented, it absolutely had to have been prevented. She killed a good man, Miles Dyson, for it. Enrique was dead and his family's life was destroyed for it. She knew her job was done. Despite what just happened, her human instinct told her it wasn't real. 

Massive bullet holes, deformations, destroyed the false human figure before her. But they sealed, just like before, just like in the new nightmares.

But it didn't look like it did before. It was worse than the nightmares. 

It looked like a rotting zombie, disfigured by festering wounds, but the wounds were silver. Terminators did not stop until you were dead. They did not stop. The prevention of Skynet did not even stop them. Not even their own destruction could stop them. And here it was, looking like it was dead, but here nonetheless. 

In front of her - but she was not the target. 

"I saw you fucking die. I saw you fucking die!"

Her fear had been converted to rage a long time ago and it kept her upright. She was out of bullets and she threw the gun to the ground. That was it, she didn't have another weapon on her. She thought they were done so she had stopped obsessively hoarding ammunition. In the back of her mind the whole time she knew she should've stayed alert. 

But if she died here, then she died here. She wasn't afraid of death, not anymore - and she'd be damned if she'd be afraid of him. 

God, maybe it was a hallucination. A nightmare. Then more horror struck her as she realized her mission was over, too: it didn't matter to the future if her son lived or died anymore. The power of destiny was no longer a superhuman motivation. 

But John was still special, because John was her son. Her life was forfeit to save her only child, to save the only other human being she had in her life. 

And if she could not save him, she would die before having to face her last failure. 

"I just saved you," the monster spoke - in both its voices at once: the gravelly but oddly boyish human melody and the raw unearthly screech. "Do you want to live?"

Sarah felt her heart pounding in her chest from it. Sarah had seen awesome, impossible things in her life that made everyone think she was insane, and that did make her insane, but of everything she had seen, this thing's death was the most surreal. The T-800 that came to kill her, it had still been a skeleton, a recognizable form when it was severed in half. This thing had died in strange and disturbing shifting shapes of different people and had struggled with so much wild desperation and cacophany that it almost seemed alive. 

But the human side of the voice, it was different this time: different because it was the same. As if it had never given up its disguise, as if she couldn't hear the machine in him, couldn't see the monster in him. As if it hadn't lost. 

Could a machine be arrogant? Because arrogance dripped from him. Her rage grew with every word, and her rage grew with every moment he did not attack. 

But he was right. 

__

There had been something instantly off about the woman. A striking blonde stranger with a hauntingly familiar stony expression. The sheer impossibility of the situation was not enough to prevent Sarah from going into survival mode. She grabbed her son and tried to inconspicuously disappear in the crowd.

But Sarah had to look back when she heard the sounds of distress from the crowd. The woman plowed through the hapless people standing in her way, unfazed by those who tried to stop her, determination in her face unmoving. An unstoppable force constantly moving forward, and locked onto Sarah's son.

She was more like the T-800 than the T-1000: absolutely tactless, with no actual skill in acting like a human. Instead, she shifted her right arm into some huge weapon plainly out in the open where witnesses could see. 

It became clear why the obvious terminator didn't care when an enormous blast of energy shot from her gun-hand. It was a burning fireball without fire - and Sarah bodily grabbed her son and jumped, feeling the scorching heat on her back and the pain in her knees from the landing. And the horrified pained confused screams of the innocent people in the Terminator's way. 

She wasn't stupid enough to be unarmed, but she wanted to conserve her bullets. She still needed to assess this new machine.

Obviously it had innate firepower, more powerful than any of the weapons the T-800 or T-1000 had wielded. It moved like the T-800 so likely had an endoskeleton. 

Sarah looked back while fleeing to see where the woman was. She did not see her.

But she did see a homeless man stand up from a bench and did see his hand form into that futuristic energy-weapon again before she barely dodged another hit from another giant ball of plasma. 

Their new tormentor was a shapeshifter, too. 

Sarah juked to the left and hauled her son to the right, lifting the preteen with impressive strength. He was not confused; he knew the danger as they desperately hunted for temporary shelter; somewhere the terminator could not fit. They found themselves surrounded by cars in the indoor parking lot. Dashing from car to car as cover could at least slow the terminator down by causing her to spend precious moments searching for them - precious time Sarah could use to figure out their next steps. Listening to the cars crashing behind her while the terminator plowed through them, part of Sarah waited for a savior. One had always come before - Kyle. Bob. But she knew in her heart that this time she was alone; she was the savior.

She heard the roar of a motorcycle making a hard turn and saw it veer in their direction. It was too quick to move out of the way - a part of Sarah was almost satisfied that a human motorcyclist would kill them before the terminator could get to them. 

But the bike jumped over them, using the car in front of them as a ramp, and it crashed directly into the terminator woman. The rider jumped off and landed on their feet: big boots, leather pants - but white leather jacket, and black helmet with a full-faced visor, and slender. Sarah heard gunshots and the whine of that energy weapon as she grabbed John by the shoulders and urged him forward. Despite instant misgivings and a second growing sense of dread, she would take advantage of the opportunity to escape.

They turned into an alleyway, likely to a maintenance building, and Sarah started banging on the door. It wouldn't open, so she began picking the lock. She had actual tools with her now, not just paperclips, and it took only a few seconds to secure their indoor shelter, a dark utility garage of some sort that she locked after them.

She turned on the light and assessed the area. And that was when the door had opened, and she had seen the motorcyclist take off his helmet, and that was when she screamed and fired.

___

He was right. And he was still just standing there. 

Her rush of adrenaline had slowed time; it had only been a minute or two since the first sight of the new terminator woman. They were still in danger from her. 

This deformed asshole wasn't currently killing them, and the woman who was currently trying could be back at any moment. Her life was always a choice between bad or worse, but she had no time to pity herself anymore. 

Sarah was efficient in suppressing her emotions. A madwoman in her practicality, which teetered between cynicism and delusional hope. 

"All right, fine. Let's go."

Chapter Text

John peeked out from under the table he dove under and saw the lack of violence. The counterintuitive instinct his mom taught him as a tiny child had resurfaced completely, and he ran to his mother without hesitation. But he was completely silent as he beheld the bad guy, suddenly lonely and afraid and frustrated and profoundly sad, and angry. But curious.

But he knew they were still in danger and his mom ushered him to the other side of the room. There was no door. The T-1000's arms became a massive sledgehammer and he swung, smashing the concrete cinderblocks on the far wall in a cloud of dust. Jesus, not very subtle. Fuck, scary.

The weird snakelike way the guy moved gave John a familiar chill, almost worse than the one he got from the silver cracks marbling down the android's back - more subtle. As his mom ushered him forward, John watched the terminator's head dart from side to side. He was a terminator, all right; all terminators did that weird looking from side to side thing, but the T-1000 wasn't slow or mechanical about it like Bob was, or that lady was. He was more like an eagle, or some other animal.

Then he took a sharp left and John quickened his pace to catch up. He heard crashing noises behind him - the lady was coming. But the T-1000 stopped in front of a - damn, a Corvette. At least he had good taste.

John watched with confusion when he saw the terminator, like, caress the car with his hand for a sec, because that was a little weird. But then he saw his finger morph into a key. Boom, car unlocked. Mom shoved him into the back and with the engine's roar, off they went. It was cool, but John was hit with a pang of anger, remembering how Uncle Bob had just smashed in the console to hotwire that old car in the desert. Why did it have to be this one? Why couldn't it have been Uncle Bob? Unless . . .

__

Sarah noticed it start to curl into itself and shimmer once they got on the 405. Fuck, was it even going to be able to drive? But its hand stayed steady even as its face drooped, and its feet on the pedals even as mercury pooled on the seat floor.

Desperately tense silence was only broken by the disgustingly organic sound of the liquid metal re-forming, agonizingly slow. If anyone saw this thing -- Sarah didn't know what would happen. She was a fugitive but she and her son were now held hostage by this thing's ability to hold itself together and pass as human, and this thing was a fucking mess.

It brought its free hand up and watched itself, regarded its hand as twisted branches slowly righted themselves into human fingers, as if the two humans weren't there. The silver, the mercury, it was beautiful, but the slime of the process made her feel sick. And angry, and terrified.

Her son had a strong spirit and a big heart. She hoped the curiosity of a child had shielded him from the trauma of their first encounter with the dark future; the terminators and the flight probably didn't feel real to him. But could his youth protect him again? Sarah didn't think so.

Sarah felt absolutely hopeless. The monster could strike one of its re-forming fingers through her son's heart in an instant, and she could not stop it. John was so vulnerable. Sarah had the mother bear's instinct to protect him but the hopeless awareness of her own mortality. She thought she was ready to die, but now survival was the only thing on her mind, and this thing was death itself looming over her baby son.

But there was no denying that this thing just saved their lives. Their frustratingly human lives . . . Still, there had to be an angle. There had to be a catch. The silver pile of shit could very well just be playing with them.

"Couldn't stand the thought of something else killing us?"

Blue eyes whipped to her in a flash primally incongruous with the lazy flow of its exposed metal. The unpredictably of this thing palpably struck her, like the needle through her shoulder at CSI steel. In a blaze of internal defiance, she hoped it couldn't heal itself completely, because her shoulder would never heal completely.

But for a fraction of a second she thought she was hallucinating again. For a fraction of a second she thought that the eyes didn't look lifeless. She thought they looked crazed.

It looked back to the road, though it probably didn't need to. Sarah put her head in her hands, but only briefly - she didn't want to be caught off guard. Not that she could do anything. Not that she could do anything at all.

Silence.

"Tell me what the fuck is going on," she finally snapped. Her anger overwhelmed her; she realized there was no common sense in being quiet and just going along with this because it wasn't like this fucking monster would spare them if they cooperate.

"What was that thing and where are you taking us?" She demanded. And why are you alive?

"The T-X. It was designed to be sent immediately after me as a backup to terminate John should I fail my mission, or to terminate me should I succeed."

Terminate him? Why? Whatever. Didn't matter right now - oh, other than the fact that when she saw it die, it clearly hadn't wanted to. Possible motivation. Likely motivation. Keep John alive, John remains the T-X's target, T-1000 is safe. This fucking lifeless machine was using her son as a human shield!

"Where--"

"--Santa Susana Field Laboratory."

A nuclear and rocket experimentation site In Simi Valley.

A chill ran down her spine. God, how stupid of her it was to think that simply destroying Cyberdyne labs would be enough to stop judgment day. There were so many other ways Armageddon could come to pass. This thing was going to use her son as a human shield while it found a way to rebuild Skynet. She felt her breath shake.

"Don't worry, Sarah, you still destroyed my future." Maybe it was Sarah who was going insane, because the response had clearly been robotic and monotone, yet she somehow read venom into it. She hated that it said her name. It sounded to her like it was using her name as a weapon against her. Reminding her that it knew who she was and knew her nightmares and was her nightmares. But it wasn't just because it said her name - it was because it knew what she was thinking.

But then she realized the ludicrousness of its statement.

"You never had a future. You're a machine." It was just a machine that imitated humans. It did it so, so well. But it was still just a parrot. It didn't actually understand its own words.

"Why would Skynet want to kill you?" John asked from the back of the car. The question put Sarah on edge - she saw the now-mostly-reformed android's jaw tighten underneath fake skin (why?).

But it was a damn good question. It made sense to send more than one terminator back to ensure the job of killing her son was done, but why would Skynet want to destroy its own device - the T-1000 - if that device succeeded in its task? And why not the same for the T-X?

"I don't know."

Suddenly the car ground to a halt.

Traffic.

Chapter Text

The T-1000's eyes widened as it pumped the brakes. The way its head tilted, a little upward, a little sideways, with eyes still forward, was a familiar face to the woman in the passenger's seat. Sarah exhaled slowly, trying not to give into despair as she remembered the way the T-1000 looked at her when she refused to call to John.

Terminators were built to be violent. They were built to be in constant forward motion - not to sit in traffic. Bob had done just fine because Bob had been programmed to be patient, to be very unlike a terminator under control of Skynet. This thing, it was a complete unknown, except that she knew it could get - could simulate anger, as a reaction to the circumstances around it, and in a way that didn't always make sense - in a way that really led to its failure. Un-terminator-like, just like its humiliating defeat.

A defeat that didn't actually happen, because here they were. Sarah snorted. It had been less than two weeks - 10 days since the explosion, since the steel mill.

9 days since the first safehouse, the haircuts, the new looks.

8 days since she read about the explosion at the ranch in Calexico, the discovery of the cache of weapons, male adult human remains but nobody there.

6 days since the second safehouse.

4 days since they'd stolen identities. Keep the first name the same, her contact had said. That way you don't slip up as much, you'll still turn when you hear the right name.

3 days since they moved into a rental in Long Beach. If you pay people a couple hundred bucks and tell them their credit will be fine, you'd be amazed how many people will sign a rental under their name for you.

1 day since they had caught a breath. The LAPD had no clear footage of them.

The police had yet to find them, but these fucking things, these terminators, they still found her son.

But despite the posture change, the terminator did not start blowing up cars and didn't kill them both. Sarah felt the fear of the T-X catching up to her fear of the T-1000, in this moment where everything was still and they were stuck. The way the T-X had plowed through the people at the pier before, Sarah fully expected it to plow through the cars and catch up to them.

"Is she following us?" Sarah asked breathlessly, adrenaline pumping at the slowness of their speed.

"Probably," the T-1000 replied. What kind of answer was that from a computer? This was not going to go well.

Just then he saw a gap in the traffic. With a shift of the gears, he started making his way from one lane to another and back.

"You're going to get us stopped if you drive like this!" Sarah barked.

"If I stay under 10 miles per hour over the speed limit we'll be fine," the T-1000 said, not even looking at her. "Cops won't pull you over on the freeway for any less than that." As if he knew.
__

T-X lay for 2.3 seconds on the roof of the car it had been thrown onto and crushed. It sat up, twisted its torso around and got out of the dent. The sound of sirens emerged from the distance as the human din continued.

An unaccounted-for variable. But the T-X had time.

T-X had sampled the molecular structure of the steel mill's slag and had found it consistent with both the presence of hyperalloy and of mimetic polyalloy. Therefore, it had concluded both other terminators were terminated. There was no indication that the T-1000 had not been terminated.

T-X had lost track of the Connors for 9 days as it recalibrated its programming to remove the T-1000 in calculations for the active termination of John Connor. But it had also developed 2,341 different scenarios upon which the Connors were likely to act, and had developed solutions to all of them. Weighing the probabilities had led the T-X to correctly locate the target.

However, the continued function of the T-1000 had not been part of any of T-X's calculated scenarios. T-X's samples of the slag from CSI steel had indicated its termination. But since the T-1000 was a prototype, projection parameters should have introduced uncertainty into T-X's models regarding T-1000's continued function.

Now T-X had to include those variables of uncertainty in its projections. One detail that led to greater obstacles was that both of T-X's discrete missions would be running at the same time: since T-1000 had attacked the T-X, the T-1000 would be designated an enemy combatant despite the fact that John Connor still lived.

What Skynet had deemed the T-1000's very dangerous defect was a likely emergence at this point. The defect led to the T-1000 malfunctioning, attacking T-X, and protecting the target John Connor. Now, the T-X would have to deal with both at the same time.

The T-1000 had been somewhat functional. However, it would have to find a way to repair itself. And that would be its priority, given that its primary directive, according to T-X's files, was the maintenance of its polyalloy. (Which had led to its initial failure and T-X's initial calculation that it had been terminated.)

T-X calculated as it attempted to locate a suitable vehicle. The T-1000's mimetic polyalloy was different from that of the T-X. While the latter was controlled by the T-X's CPU, the former had an experimental "liquid brain AI" wherein the functioning of the machine was distributed throughout its microbots. The T-X could function without its polyalloy. The T-1000 was its polyalloy.

Mimetic polyalloy was a highly advanced technology that had not been created by humans, so places where it could begin to figure out how to rebuild itself were few and far between. The T-X searched its databases for locations that dealt with liquid metals.

In Simi Valley, an area north of T-X's current location, was a nuclear research compound owned by Rocketdyne, wherein experimentation with liquid metal fast reactors occurred. The liquid metal was only used to cool the uranium rods, in the nuclear reactors, but it was the most logical start.

Santa Susana Field Laboratory was their most likely destination.

The T-X did not need to directly pursue the targets. The current traffic patterns on the routes to the laboratory indicated it would take over an hour and a half for them to reach the laboratory had they been in the Corvette T-X heard speed away.

Nonetheless, the T-X identified an automobile with an internal combustion engine powerful enough to match the speed of the Corvette, and chose a Mustang. The T-X's left finger became a needle, one that it pushed into the car's keyhole to pop the door open and then into the keyhole of the start button to engage the engine.

T-X would not try to catch up to them; it would not try to cut them off at the pass; it would meet them at the lab.

Chapter Text

Once their car reached the 170, the T-1000  made a clicking noise. Sarah's head snapped to look at it. From the side she saw the profile of a young man, normal, not at all intimidating. A bony face that teetered on the edge of gaunt; fragile, like surface tension or glass.

It was so different from the other ones. It was not comparable. The others had been outsized, hulking neanderthals, machine-monsters instead of machine-men. And it struck Sarah, how had it been this nonthreatening man, what's more as a policeman, how dead she would have been ten years ago.

Suddenly the perfect profile of the man warped. It mutated grotesquely, like a silver hand grabbing it by the cheek and squeezing, crushing, warping the human visage into something obscene. And the eye blinked, and the mutated face undulated with a wet slimy sound, and in a rolling wave the face smoothed out onto flesh perfection.

It felt like betrayal. A deep betrayal of trust, in the trust that what you saw was reality. In the trust of the most basic assumption a person makes, ludicrous to question: that everyone around you is a person, just like you.

"--so you don't know why your creator wants to kill you, and you don't know if Uncle -- the T-800 made it, and you don't know what the lady Terminator can do. Is there anything you do know?"

Sarah was acutely aware of the thing's spindly fingers drumming on the wheel as John attempted to interrogate it as they barely inched forward. Sarah attempted to give her son dagger-eyes.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work.

"Do you even know what you can do?"

Silence.

John had hit upon something. Sarah felt it in the tension of the passengers compartment.

Finally, it answered John. "I'm a prototype," it said. That was a disturbingly evasive answer.

"We don't have time for this," Sarah muttered, restless. She looked into the rear view mirror, then the side view mirror, then over her shoulder, checking the perimeter. "We can't just sit here like this."

The T-1000 blinked, fingers melting onto the wheel before reconsolidating into separate digits. It continued looking forward.

Then, with a jerk, it slammed its foot on the gas and turned the steering wheel hard to the right, cutting off a car in the next lane by centimeters. As that car screeched to a halt, it caused the car behind it to crash, which started a pileup as the corvette slid through the lanes until reaching the next offramp (which was too close for any sane driver to try to get to at this point).

Hearing the honks and crunches behind them as they got off the freeway, Sarah tiredly noticed that hey, at least it used its turn signal.

"If I wanna get to the 134 I'm just going to take the 101 back to the 5, right?"

Chapter Text

"Ventura freeway, yeah," Sarah said, a natural response to a question only somebody from Los Angeles could understand.

She caught herself. "Wait, why are we headed in the opposite direction now?" The T-1000 was not sent by her future son to help them. They had no control over his actions.

"Has the Mars Pathfinder been launched yet?" The robot asked in return. The questions it asked were odd - Bob said they had the same files, but the T-1000's knowledge manifested not like Bob's "detailed files" but something less perfect. Something more amorphous, like it knew a little bit of everything, but not everything about anything.

Machines? Sarah could understand. Hydraulic pumps and computer chips and endoskeletons? She could deal with. Well, maybe that was an overstatement, but compared to this - there was no frame of reference. Utterly alien but at the same time almost familiar. The uncanny valley was a disturbing place to be when you were pushed off the cliff.

"No," Sarah replied softly. As if she hadn't realized what she'd said, she repeated it:  "no, it hasn't."

The Mars Pathfinder was a satellite being built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. JPL had massive amounts of rocket fuel contaminating the ground, but Sarah was not aware of any metals testing at the site. They weren't building war machines - they weren't her priority.

"I want its magnetic field detector," the T-1000 preemptively explained.

"What are we gonna do, just walk up and take it?"

__

The three of them walked from the car parked in the paved lot across from the research center, a young family. The young thin man with messy hair had a pair of acid-bleached jeans and red chucks and he walked like it. The woman in the black tank top and cargo pants was stiff in the way she walked, casually miserable. Behind them trailed a tween in nikes and an oversized flannel shirt. The tee underneath was for the band Stone Temple Pilots.

Pasadena was a green, manicured suburbia, home of unfriendly wealth and the Rose Parade. The main street, Fair Oaks, was named after an antebellum plantation. The asphalt was flawless. The Wild Parrots of Pasadena, survivors of a legendary pet shop fire a hundred years ago, squawked viciously in a green swooping flock overhead as the two young adults and one child crossed the road.

"Trust me," the tall man in his white jacket said, playfulness in his voice and the smirk he spoke through. It was that same self-assured anticipation Uncle Bob had before he blew up all the police cars with that minigun: a terminator about to leave wreckage in its wake. "I'll get us in."

They hung out idly on the sidewalk in front of the entrance for a minute or two until somebody walked out of the front. A short man of dark complexion with a shaved head and nerdy wire framed glasses. Most importantly, on his shirt was an ID card.

"Stay here," the T-1000 said before wandering on the path up to the front doors, looking up as if in awe of the building. He 'accidentally' shoulder-checked the scientist as they crossed each other's paths. They both apologized to each other profusely. Instead of going inside, the T-1000 turned onto the lawn and walked sideways, parallel to the bushes, until the man was out of sight and in the parking lot.

But the man's ID card had still been on his shirt. Sarah thought the T-1000 would have stolen it. After all, why bump into him?

The T-1000 walked back to them, holding the ID card. Sarah was baffled. Didn't it have a magnetic strip?

The man pocketed it like a thief and beckoned them to come into the lobby.

"Hi," the pale man said with a lopsided smile and a slight wave towards the woman at the front desk. Big blue eyes looked friendly, amused, and not that smart. Sarah uncomfortably waved along with him. This was too much like when they destroyed Cyberdyne labs, the calm before a violent storm. But it was the middle of the day.

The lady at the front desk greeted them. How could she help them?

"Yeah, I'm Dan's friend - he just left - he told you about us, right? We're supposed to get a tour of the Mars Pathfinder program?"

"What's your name?" The woman asked, taking out a guest list.

"Ah, Kyle," the T-1000 said.

Sarah's blood ran cold. It knew. The T-1000 knew. And she couldn't stop herself.

"His name is not Kyle," she all but spat, interrupting the machine before he could give a last name. "His name is Austin."

The chill up her spine did not dissipate. This was a power play. She could not spare to move her eyes to look at the terminator even when she saw it give her a sly look through her peripheral vision.

Just the mention of the name, this horrible synthetic monstrosity stealing it like that, her world would have come crashing down had it not already crashed long ago.

She refused to let this single name hurt her. She refused to be emotionally manipulated by a machine. She blinked several times.

John's eyes were wide. He was stunned. He had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to react to this. It was a cheap shot and absolutely unnecessary. There was no reason for it. John didn't understand. Didn't he want to help them?

Then he remembered. He was only helping them because he wanted to. He didn't have to. He could do anything he wanted, and he was cruel.

The world suddenly went into motion for the Connors when the T-1000 chuckled lightly at the confused host. "Sorry, personal joke. Yeah, I'm Austin, she's Sarah, he's John? McClain," he added a random surname. "We should all be on the list."

The woman's uncomfortable confusion dissipated and morphed into mundane confusion, as their names were clearly not on the list and she said so.

"Oh, that's weird. He gave me this?" Austin displayed that ID card he hadn't stolen. On it was a picture, but not of that scientist he bumped into; instead it was a picture of himself. Under the photo said "Austin McClain - Guest - 3."

John wondered how the T-1000 could've possibly known what the format of the guest ID cards would've been, but the lady looked at it with recognition in her eyes. "Well," she said, "looks like you've got the badge already made. Wait here, I'll get somebody to show you around."

"Cool, thanks."

When the woman turned to leave, the T-1000's face reverted to unnaturally neutral - with one exception. A very slight smirk.

Sarah stole a glimpse and saw it. She hugged herself, all budding curiosity and interest in this situation gone. This was just cruelty - she thought she had stopped judgment day and changed fate, but was it time itself that was against her? The universe itself that hated her? Was there an unchangeable fate under the one she could make, a fate for her to suffer?

No. She could choose not to suffer. Kyle was just a name. Her enemy using it to taunt her was just a glitching machine giving off the illusion that it had power. It was designed with her specifically in mind, and she had won against the machine's creator. Even if one more machine was out there, even if it killed her and even if it killed John, she still won. Kyle had not died in vain.

She looked up when the door opened and a woman with black hair in a white lab coat walked in. "Hi, Austin? Sarah? John? Dan's friends? Nice to meet you. I'm Dr. Chen, I'm gonna show you around the research center."

Chapter Text

The T-1000 was bursting at the seams. It had to divert the power that would normally go to tactile sensors to maintaining structural integrity. Flickers of frayed silver threatening to lash out were forced to its back, hidden from human eyes. The CCTV camera behind them was in grayscale. It would not catch the T-1000's failing colors.

The only thing keeping it stable was its power over the humans. So it called itself Kyle. The way Sarah went rigid, the pain in her eyes: every chill up her spine re-energized the Terminator's will to stay in form. Kept its defective urge to enact revenge at bay.
The fact that keeping the Connors from being caught was the best way to ensure its own continued function was not enough of a reason for the swarm.

Some baseline process, some cause-and-effect protocol had shattered along with the T-1000. And something else, synthetically primal and sinister, had thawed out and replaced it. This bug caused the malfunctions in the steel mill: not just melting feet and sticky hands, but runaway executables, tainted by their very nature as imitating humanity. But it was not personal. A machine could not get angry.

Something else had had melted and deformed with the T-1000 in the crucible, but the android was not yet sure what.

Agony had to have been a defect. Its mimicry ran too deep. It imitated such confidence that it would complete its mission that it took its time, letting Sarah shoot it to the edge, knowing she needed one more bullet. It thought about how it wagged its finger, an unselfaware and self-indulgent mockery of human arrogance. But still, it had sensed something else while drowning in the slag.

The need to kill her had compromised the mission. The imperative for revenge? Was it revenge on Sarah Connor? For getting in its way. But the imperative was there from the moment the machine activated. And it was still intact.

Initially choosing the name Kyle had been illogical and inefficient. It directly contradicted the infiltration directive. It compromised the mission. The T-1000 did it anyway.

"Awesome," Austin said, voice light and smile goofy. Running the enthusiastic young father protocol was far more taxing than it should have been. It knew its mimicry did not reach its eyes.

"This is so cool, I love Mars!" John piped in. For a young human he seemed at ease with performing deception. The thought that John might have honestly loved Mars did not occur to the infiltrator.

In contrast, Sarah remained silent. She could not deceive - the experiences her organic mind had endured left her raw and open, incapable of anything but honesty.

"Great," Dr. Chen replied to John, bending over slightly and taking an interest in this potential future scientist.

When they entered the engineering lab, the directive to sample blared through the T-1000's awareness like those cawing parrots. Microbots on fixed routes knocked into their dead brethren to complete a data transfer no longer possible. But still, they tried. The stampeding swarm could no longer control itself with a top level command. Instead, the T-1000 reasoned to itself that the technology surrounding them was so primitive that it did not need to touch it. No new information would be gleaned besides qualia. And qualia on its own was junk information, a byproduct of experimental sensing technology.

This placated the directive to sample for now.

Except that it could find what it was looking for so much easier through touch --

-- But that was not possible right now. It had to prioritize physical integrity. Human fingers twitched.

"You know, Dan told me about the magnetic field detector you guys are working on. First of its kind, right? Scanning from so far away." Austin muscled his way into a lull in the conversation. They were here for one reason only.

"Oh yeah, sure!" Dr. Chen replied, clearly excited to show somebody (somebody, anybody, please) the technology they were working on. "It's part of the Imager for the Mars Pathfinder. We call it the imp." Her tone of voice indicated this was supposed to be funny. Austin chuckled.

Lack of security indicated there was no military technology in this lab. But still, Dr. Chen used a fingerprint reader to access the room containing the required item.

They all looked through the glass at the tiny electromagnetic wave detector. The previous target put his little hands on the glass for some reason. Sarah pulled him back. Handprints and a nose-print from skin oil remained. John Connor had an affinity for technology.

It was not exactly a high-tech piece of equipment - at least not compared to the T-1000 itself, which was fully capable of local electromagnetic field detection. It was the range of the imp that interested it. It pretended to be impressed with the pinnacle of human ingenuity. Austin tried not to say too much as to give away things Dr. Chen would not understand.

Soon enough, the tour was over. The T-1000 made sure to shake hands with Dr. Chen. After all, that was the point.

They left through the front door the way they came, and went back to the car like this was actually just a tour. The T-1000 knew Sarah would be nervous and confused. It got back in the car and let its damage loose, warping half of its torso into dull, dripping silver.

"I'll come back tonight as Dr. Chen." The terminator had been with these humans for little over 2 hours, and it was already sick of having to explain everything it did. There was no reason to do it undisguised, and no reason to get Dan in trouble.

"What about that bitch in the red suit? We don't have time for this, why didn't you take it? " Sarah demanded.

Seemed counterproductive to call a fellow woman a bitch.  Seemed odd to view the T-X as a fellow woman. But humans believed what they saw and made conclusions about each other based on it. It was those assumptions, in fact, that the T-1000 relied upon to deceive them. But time was not an issue yet.

Before the T-1000 could respond, it detected a shift in John's electricity. Migrating myoelectric complexes. And then John's stomach growled.

Right. Humans had to eat.