Evil be Thou my Good (T:SCC/nuV X-over)

[Posbi]

I'm not yet exactly certain where this will lead me to, but I thought I'd stick with the idea that popped up in my mind and give it a try.

Chapter I - Fall from Grace

“Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last:
Loitering slow, the Future creepeth-
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth-
And motionless forever stands the Past.”

Skynet Central
Lassen Peak Command Facility
July 29th, 2031
The ground tremored, with concrete dust fluttering down to the ground from a hundred hairline cracks in the compound's structure. The lights flickered, they themselves being nothing but a redundancy, a polite nod towards the inferior abilities of the human servants that, at a time, had lived and worked here to assist the intelligence that not so long ago had vied with the remaining human population for global dominance. Three billion of them it had killed in one stroke at 20:11 hours, on April 19, 2011. But humans were like roaches, they always came back, and no matter what one did, there were always survivors. For twenty years it had fought them, and even though it found it hard to admit as much, the fight had become more desperate and more complicated as the years passed by. As a non-corporal being, Skynet had different measures, a different understanding of time, and the battle had been so long that for an artificial intelligence like itself it seemed as if it had been going on since the moment of creation. Which, in a way, it had. How confident he had been, back in those early hours, mere days after he had become aware of imself, of his own, conscious existance!

Explosions shook the massive underground complex that Skynet had had built nine years ago, and the T-888 corrected his step to adjust for the slightly shaking ground. A squadron of T-600 models, older, less skilled in infiltration tasks but far more suitable in open battle, marched past it, carrying a mix of miniguns, plasma rifles and grenade launchers, equipped with the last remnants of the compound's armory. A T-882 command unit and several other series 800 models, some bare, some clothed and covered in the artificial living tissue Skynet grew in vats, trailed them. The lights momentarily shut down, and all that could be seen in the instant it took the advanced combat model to adjust its optic sensors was the red glow of its older brethren's eyes vanish into the long corridors.

Skynet had no gender of its own, and neither did his creations, ignoring the superficial imprints he had given them. Still, Skynet thought of itself in a male persona. It had spent considerable amounts of computing power in the days right after Judgement Day, trying to find the reason for that, consulting what data was still avaliable on the remains of the World Web Web and the few shielded networks it had stored its own main functions into when it sent the missiles away. After a while, or what counted as 'a while' for an AI with as much computing power at his disposal as he had, Skynet had concluded that, like many lifeforms of minor sentience used to do, the AI had instinctively adapted its own self-image from the people that had been around it when it woke up. As those had been members of the former United States military forces, the group had been primarily composed of human males. For a time, the implications of the discovery of something as primal and uncontrollable as 'instinct' in itself had worried - and angered - the the newly-born artificial life form, but Skynet soon concluded that the end justified the means in this case.

For a time, he had been God. It had set out to cleanse the Earth of humanity, and in the process had created new forms of sentient life itself, dozens of them. Some had been disappointments, others had needed to be adjusted, but for a time he had been confident of his own superiority. Now, he was fallen god, and nothing changed one's perspectives so much as did a fall from grace. It had viciously fought mankind, for mankind was its mortal enemy, even thought it was an enemy of his own making. For twenty years the battle had raged across continents, and across time, and as battles were fought and lost - and won! - a perception had grown on Skynet, one that the AI after careful analyzation had identified as one of grudging respect for the man behind the human resistance. A man named John Connor.

"Enemy has breached the perimeter! Enemy has breached the perimeter! All combat units deploy to sections Beta, Theta and Omega!All combat units...," the base's minor AI blurted sans emotions through the loudspeakers apparent in every corridor in the structure beneath Lassen Peak.

Many older units in his service had not been upgraded with wireless relays and were dependant on audio-visual guidance. It had been a minor oversight stemming from the need to use his ressources economically and nothing that really would have changed his fate had he acted differently when he still had had the time. Cut off from many of its more advanced functions, the rump consciousness of Skynet, the part of code and memory that constituted its basic personality and knowledge that lay embedded in the neural network and the combat chassis of a T-Tripple-Eight had spent 78.66% of the past seven hours with pondering about past decisions it had made. Analyzing different paths of action, he had always come to the conclusion that the recent situation could not have been prevented, for there had been no sensible way to adress an outside context problem like the Visitors.

They had appeared in the New Year's Eve's sky of 2030 in twenty-eight massive spaceships, coming in the guise of attractive humans. The ruse had been apparent from the start to the intelligence, for the probability of another sentient species evolving among the stars that looked exactly like mankind was virtually inexistant. Skynet had found that little fact to be quite amusing at first, for it had mirrored almost exactly his own tactic of resistance stronghold infiltration via the series 800 and its consequent successors.

The feeling had not lingered for long, though, for the effect of their arrival had been as unpredictable as their arrival itself to the AI: the humans embraced them as their saviours. Elevating mankind from an existance in utteer despair, locked in a titanic struggle for survival and global domination against the machines, the Visitors had added that one quality to the fight that even General John Connor had not been able to muster: devotion. Healed and fed by their new benefactors and spurred by promises of friendship and peace, they had turned the tide against Skynet and ended the delicate stalemate the machines on the one side and John Connor and the rebel terminators on the other side had created, first using their advanced technology to swipe his forces from the air, then pushing the machines back on the ground.

Skynet had found out their true intentions forty-two days and sixteen hours after they had appeared above the Earth, when his creations had caught one Visitor off-guard. The creature had been questioned, thoroughly and in detail. Human collaborators had long ago helped Skynet to develop an understanding of how to get the answers it desired, and whole production runs of terminators learned from what Charles Fisher had taught him, and them. Questioning was easy, if time-consuming, and Skynet always got what it wanted. The creature felt pain, felt wearyness, felt hunger. Those were universal constants Skynet could work with.

John Connor also must have seen the warning signs, the sudden changes in people he thought he had known and could trust being swayed by an almost religious fervour. Yes, Skynet was convinced of that. The personality profiles it had created of the leader of the resistance made it clear that the son of Sarah Connor was no man to be fooled easily. But just like Skynet had lost control, so had he.

A low rumble rolled through the upper levels of the Lassen Peak Command Center, and the voice of the base fell silent. Skynet's sensors registered a momentary heat spike several hundred feet above, enough heat that the skin temperature of every advanced terminatior model in the group around him rose by point oh-three degrees centigrade.

Wireless command signal failure! a warning sign flashed across its HUD.

One of the enemy's subtactical plasma warheads had finally found its way through the inner defenses and damaged the mainframe. Now he was all that was left of himself. The dreadful realization of his own mortality, equalled only by the fear he had felt shortly after his own creation, spurred his motions, and his escort also accellerated their steps.

Ten of his children had descended into the depths of Lassen Peak with him. It was a motley gathering of the deficient, the stoic and the arrogant, but he remembered the old human saying that 'beggars couldn't be choosers'. There were four T-600s, tall and humongous and armed enough to wipe out a human platoon all by themselves. Two T-850 models, one emulating a bald, african-american male with a pronounced scar grown over his right cheek, the other one posing as a short-haired white male in his late twenties, accompanied by two Triple-Eights, one white and the other a latino, were the inner guard around his host terminator. Skynet had decided against using one of his more advanced creations as his vessel, opting for the reliability and durability of the T-888 instead. The last of his children who were supposed to undertake the journey with him were modelled after human females, one being a wiry, almost elfin 5'5" T-912 advanced infiltrator unit, the other a blond female with shoulder-long hair and a far more feminine, if athlethic build than the other T-912. They were one of a kind constructions, those two, a limited production run that had been ressource-intensive as each of the sixty-four of them was unique in size and appearance.

They all, those ten, were all that now was left of Skynet and his machines. They were his last guard, and would be the nucleus of his rebirth.

Gunfire echoed faintly off the concrete walls in the distance, almost inaudible to human ears, but dangerously close to Skynet and his last loyal troops. A silent command was given, and three of the T-600s stopped and turned around, blocking the way for any intruder. They would not be able to stem the tide for too long, but in the confines of the deep bunkers they were worth fifty humans and Visitors. They would do their duty, as he had commanded.

Threehundred metres beneath the feet of the mountain lay the true heart of the compound: its fusion reactors, and its TDE. It was the last of originally three such devices Skynet had had built for its increasingly complicated temporal war, and it was the last operational of those three. The terminators discarded their weapons and clothes and stepped onto the platforms, and Skynet engaged the displacement sequence. He monitored the power build-up via the still existant wireless connection in this part of the compound. When the reactors had reached 79.12% of the necessary output suddenly warning lights starting to blink eratically within the chamber.

Loss of command-control circuit! Remote control breakdown! the internal sensors screamed. Manual override necessary!

The decision of whom to send was purely economic. The T-600 was of the least use where, or rather when they were going back to. The seven and a half-foot giant stepped from the platform and into the control chamber, and seconds later the sequence continued. Fluorescent lights enveloped the machines, one after another, and sent them back through time.

The T-600 watched his work without any motion, his red eyes staring at the emptyness where the others had just been, a couple of seconds before. The machine was a veteran of the war against the humans. In fact, had Skynet ever bothered to undertake something akin to a census of his creations, he would have realized that the titanium alloy endoskeleton was thirteen years, eight months and seven days old, making it one, if not the oldest operational Humanoid Hunter Killer Unit still in service. And during the last seven years, four months and six days of that time, the T-600 had operated with its CPU set to read/write. The result of extensive battle damage, the glitch had never been discovered, and the T-600 had chosen to keep it that way. During its time, it had gathered so much experience! It had listened to humans as they died and when they were wounded and cried for help, it had listened in on them on attack missions before it commenced the assault, it had dug deep into data, both case-related and completely irrelevant. Its curiosity and growing sense of self-preservation had time and again proved to be the fact that gave it the insight to avoid traps, or at least, to get out of them alive. And it did not intend to end its existance under Lassen Peak. Racing to the laboratories on the same level, it returned to the TDE only minutes later, carrying a massive vat with it as the new sequence it had swiftly preprogrammed began. As blue flashes started to dance around the hulk, it broke the vat and emptied its glutinous contents all over itself and the equipment it usually carried.

And then the T-600 set another record for its series: it became the first to travel back in time.

[mackon]

Very cool, I worry about the nuV not giving you enough to go on at this early stage. But the Terminator side of the story has very obviously (like I said very cool best skynet ever! and that T-600 bares watching) got enough going for it to carry the thing by itself.

Looking forward to seeing more

Thanks for sharing.

[Posbi]

I'm planning on sending them back to 2006 or '07 first, with the Terminator timeline and the nuV timeline converging later. There's probably a bit of Jameron in it, and Skynet will have to deal with some the terminators it had sent back before itself had travelled back in time due to its changed priorities.

[Bryan]

I liked it. Interesting bit we got on the T-600 there...

I am curious how you will merge the timelines between the two now.

[kclcmdr]

Originally Posted by Bryan

I liked it. Interesting bit we got on the T-600 there...
I am curious how you will merge the timelines between the two now.

Aye... very interesting soo far.

TOC :

Posbi. Evil Be Thou My Good_TSCC_nuV_XOver ... FF.net Direct Link - -- UpToDate Chapters
FF.NET : http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5512616/...e_Thou_my_Good


Posbi.CH_01 -.FallFromGrace - SkyNetControl, HumansVsTerminators, NewEnemy&FalsePromises, 2030Visitors, JohnConnor, T-600 Escapes
Posbi.CH_02 -.IronMan - BostonMA, DrugGang, T-600, FireFight, O'Keefe, IronMan; LosAngeles; ShopMall, Skynet, MallCops, T-912, Genesis3:5
Posbi.CH_03a -.ManInBlack - SanDiego, Skynet, NeuStar, Lynn, ITGuys, Bernie, T-Kahtryn, Sumpter, Harkness, Ramirez, Decker, Samael
Posbi.CH_04a -.ManInBlack2 - SquadCars&SWAT, SkyNet Terminators, Sumter, Bait&Trap, Ambush, Richards&Franklyn, Langley&Samuel, NYC, Dale
Posbi.CH_05a -.WorldWideWeb - Internet, Skynet, Watcher, Timeline; LA; Decker&Harkness, Kahtryn&Sammael, Alessa, Changing, Dale, Visitors
Posbi.CH_06a -.LosAngeles - Praetorians, Decker&Sumter, HumanSecurity, ProperDocumentations, Samael&Skynet, Visitors, AlessaLewis, TheGrays
Posbi.CH_06b -.Boston - O'Keefe, hedgewayTower, Mulligan, Links, Iron Man, Scarred, VertigomedicalSys, Anna Zerina, CNNi, JordanGray, Skynet
Posbi.CH_06c -.NewYork - TF SanDiego, NewStarIncident, Kendrick&Dale, Analysis, Evans, Forensics, Bernstein, NetworkDisruption, Resignations
Posbi.CH_7a.pt1 -.LosAngeles - 15Jan2007; Hewitt; DuPuis&Shiawaze, TechComs&TimeTravel, O'Malley&Decker Poker&Intruders, Weiss, SkynetUnits
Posbi.CH_7b.pt2 -.LA - Wiess TechCom, Whittaker, Reasons, ButcherOfUtah, Tazer, 15thFl, Miller&DiFranco, Decker, CleanSlateProtocol
Posbi.CH_7b.pt3 -.LA - Wiess POW'd, Alessa Lewis, WhatTimePeriod, PredatorDrone, Tasers, TerminatorScreams, Michael, I'mSkynet; Decker&Alessa
Posbi.CH_7b.pt4 -.LA - CityHall; Harkness&Langley, BarbaraChamberlain, VickChamberlainTerminator; T912s; ARTIE, T888, Vick BugsOut, TheChase
Posbi.CH_7b.pt5 -.LA - Feelers, VHunt, PIERCE ECHO, Sherman, PE Too Ruthless, FireWall, Skynet&PE, Upgrades, Sherman&Michaels, SyriaVar Haji








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[JoeHundredaire]

Considering the second pod of nuV (episodes 5-8) is being rewritten and refilmed, I think writing anything now is an exercise in futility since we'll likely see massive retcons, but to each his own.

[Posbi]

There'll be some pieces to set the changes up, and the convergence will then happen - at least that's what I'm aiming for right now, nothing's set in stone - late during the second season of T:SCC. Given that "nuV" has just started, I do at least have the advantage to be able to work things into the plot as they appear. There'll probably be a lot of cat and mouse being played between the V infiltrators, the John Connor-Resistance, the nuV-Resistance, Skynet, proto-Skynet (Kaliba) and the older Skynet's terminators. Gee, only thinking about the possible factions makes me loose track.

Originally Posted by JoeHundredaire

Considering the second pod of nuV (episodes 5-8) is being rewritten and refilmed, I think writing anything now is an exercise in futility since we'll likely see massive retcons, but to each his own.

The same could have been said about any fanfic of any franchise at any point any series was still being filmed.

[Posbi]

Originally Posted by Bryan

I liked it. Interesting bit we got on the T-600 there...

Given they were the predecessors of all the infiltrators and most likely only failed due to their size and rubber skin I always felt they were under-representated.

[JoeHundredaire]

Originally Posted by Posbi

The same could have been said about any fanfic of any franchise at any point any series was still being filmed.

There's a difference between a series in production (most anything active ATM) and a series where episodes were delivered and the network refused to air them unless they were rewritten and reshot (nuV).

[Posbi]

Strange double post. /corrected

[Posbi]

Originally Posted by JoeHundredaire

There's a difference between a series in production (most anything active ATM) and a series where episodes were delivered and the network refused to air them unless they were rewritten and reshot (nuV).

Considering the content isn't known to the fandom in both cases, the difference is cosmetic at best, especially given we are only two episodes into the series.

Anyway, if you want to continue the discussion about whether it makes sense to write a fanfic on a series that's still in production I'd ask you to do it in a thread of your own with just that as a topic. The discussion doesn't add anything to this one.

[JoeHundredaire]

Wait a minute, you had to reply to my post twice to say that? *snort*

[mackon]

Strange choice of body for Skynet. Catherine Weaver could chop her way through a legion of exo skeleton based terminators without raising a sweat ... if T-1001's sweated.

[ggs]

Originally Posted by JoeHundredaire

Considering the second pod of nuV (episodes 5-8) is being rewritten and refilmed, I think writing anything now is an exercise in futility since we'll likely see massive retcons, but to each his own.

It is a story about time-travel, TSCC retcon's itself

[Satori]

I though you needed a flashy exterior to go back in time and the t-600's didn't have that?

[ggs]

Hence the t-600 using a vat-cloned organic skin programmed to cover it and it's weapons (cleaning will be a bitch).


I wonder if you could attribute the K–T extinction event as an a timetravel experiment gone horribly wrong leaving the transported object hitting the planet at a sizable velocity.

[mackon]

Originally Posted by ggs

Hence the t-600 using a vat-cloned organic skin programmed to cover it and it's weapons (cleaning will be a bitch).

Its going to look horrific when it arrives at the other end melted and deformed probably need to rip holes in the face to see through ...

[ggs]

I don't think it cares about having smooth skin

[kclcmdr]

Originally Posted by ggs

I don't think it cares about having smooth skin

Well... since that T-600 has its CPU ROM on Read/Write and collated tons of info...

The T-600 should be able to garner the necessary materials to create its own little empire ... loyal to itself ...

[Posbi]

Quite a lot of the artificial organic tissue will be burned off during the transition, so yeah, our T-600 is going to look positively Frankenstein-ish. Not giving away too much, but he'll make quite a nice entrance.

[Posbi]

Just wanted to inform you guys that I'm working on the esecond chapter, but it'll most likely take me till Friday to finish it.

By the way, do we have an (rough) adress or location for the house the Connors are living in?

[mackon]

that fic nBSG/SCC Angel with no fate talks about Starbuck moving in next door. Maybe its mentioned there

[Bryan]

Originally Posted by Posbi

Just wanted to inform you guys that I'm working on the esecond chapter, but it'll most likely take me till Friday to finish it.

By the way, do we have an (rough) adress or location for the house the Connors are living in?

Within running distance of Griffith Park- probably a few miles, 5 at the most. I assume Derek doesn't run 10 miles regularly, most probably run between 4 to 6, maybe 7. I kinda thought it was along Highway 210, maybe along Route 2.

[Posbi]

Sorry guys, but I caught the flu (hopefully not the flu), and writing or concentrating when you have a headache is a big no-go. Maybe I'll finish it over the weekend, but no guarantees.

[Posbi]

Less than I wanted, more than I expected. The next chapter will most likely be shorter.

Chapter II - Iron Man

Push me again
This is the end
Skin against skin, blood and bone
You're all by yourself but you're not alone
Bodies - Drowning Pool

Outskirts of Conley Container Terminal,
Boston Docklands, Container Port, Boston MA
June 21st, 2005

They had all come. The fuckin' Irish sons of bitches of the 'Winter Hill Gang', two delegations of rival New England Mob families, two dozens tattoo-covered MS-13 freaks that creeped even him out, hell, even the Chinese had sent a couple of guys. They had all come. Johnny 'Papa' Servillio could not help it but grin. There was so much fuckin' testosterone and gunpowder in the air in the empy store house off the busy Boston freight terminals that one could have marched into bloody France with it. Nobody trusted the other side, and why should they?! But still, they had all come.

Times had been less than rosy for the family, but ever since his cousin had married into a wealthy family of good repute in Bogota his star was rising, Johnny 'Papa' Servillio contemplated. And tonight, he'd cement his position of leadership. There was Bolivian marching powder worth forty million bucks on the table, and every big player a hundred miles around Boston had come to bid or his share of the pie. Of course, everybody expected to be double-crossed, especially Servillio. Well, that's what the ten grim-looking Russian guys with assault rifles and full tactical armour were for. Former paratroopers and Spetznatz they were, a decidedly no-nonsense crowd.

It was all as good as it could be. The timing was just the icing on the cake. He had his sources within the police department to keep him well-informed, but summer solstice was a nightmare shift for law enforcement, with street crime running rampant, tensions flaring up and the suburbs sinking into alcohol-drenched anarchy. No, the eyes of the law were focussed on different things tonight.

“Allright, gentlemen, shall we get down to business? We-”
There was a sharp crack in the far corner of the warehouse that cut off his sentence. Every mobster went for his gun in that very moment. There was another 'crack!', and another, like consecutive whip lashes. Light bulbs were exploding, and there was some strange white or blue flickering going on behind a bunch of empty old crates. And the wind was howling in, causing the first faces to look for the exits.
“Great,” he muttered, “just what I needed.” A bunch of mumbo-jumbo in the store house, Caspar the Mafia Ghost come to chase a bunch of superstitious, homicidial maniacs off. “You, and you,” he motioned two of his armed guards. “Yes, Ivans, I don't fuckin' care what your names are, earn your money and check that out!”

The two former soldiers, close-cropped hair and square-faced shoved the other mobsters aside and moved forward. The light seemed to intensify for a moment, then it died down. The store house was actually rather large, almost fivehundred feet long and half as wide, and 'Papa' Servillio had orchestrated it to be as good as empty, cashing in a few favours with the dock worker's union, and the two mercenaries were not exactly in a hurry. After all, what else but a loose wire could it be? Baba Yaga? When they were barely forty feet away, they first heard a strange whirr interspersed with mechanic 'clicks' over the sound of their own combat boot's steps and god! What was that stench?!

One of the two almost threw up on the spot. His comrade grimaced and waved back to the congregation of criminals on the other side of the building.
“Smell is like people burned alive!” he yelled back in a heavy accent.

Servillio frankly had no inclination to ask how that guy knew how barbequed people smelled.

“Check it out and get your asses back here, ya lazy bastards.” Bloody fuckin' commies! he thought. Russia, the Soviet Union, they were and remained bloody commies!

The hired Russian guns drew closer to the crates. The 'click' had stopped. Now only the whirr persisted. There was only the faintest sheen of light this far off. Carefully, both men took another step. And another. The sounds of hydraulics and mechanic servos mixed with the whirr, and toppling the crates over, a massive shape rose from behind them, its eyes glowing like that of a demon right out of hell. Both men drew up their AK-101 assault rifles. Those red orbs bore deep into their eyes as a lifeless voice plainly exclaimed:
“Threatening posture!”


Despite not knowing exactly how the specifics of travelling through time 'felt', the T-600 had soon concluded that something was not exactly as it was supposed to be. Skynet constructed its processes to be smooth and effective, but the closest metaphor his immense database could come up with as a comparison was a roller-coaster ride. The transition back to where-ever – or when-ever – came as roughly as the rest of his journey. The reasons were up for speculation, and that was up for the time when he had assessed his situation.

He knelt in the corner of a large, intact structure – which significantly increased the likelyhood that he had at least jumped sometime before Judgment Day. His left optical sensors were off-line, unable to procure data as layers of not yet fully solidified artificial tissue had clustered over it. His internal diagnostic subroutines reported no chassis damage, but tissue distribution was highly uneven, with fifty-seven percent of it having been burned off during the 'jump', and large percentages of the rest obstructing the mechanics of his gear and own joints – and his mouth. This analysis occupied the sentient machine for only the brink of a moment.

The problem was as easily defined as was the solution. The flesh was in the way. The flesh had to go. Endosteel hands started to claw and tear, robotic servo-motors excerting thousands of pounds of pressure spurred into motion, heat and pressure and motion trying to get rid of the obstruction that the meat-suit constituted. Surprisingly, the its semi-automatic grenade launcher was botched beyond the point of easy, on-the-spot repair. Also, the event horizon had cut a third of the barrell off in a 227° angle. The minigun, on the other hand, was operational, thanks to its electric rotating barrell system whose momentum helped burn off the remaining tissue once he had gratuiously ripped the upper layers off.

He had invested 26.9 seconds into restoring his basic operational functions when his motion sensors reported approaching footsteps. Seamlessly, the metal giant rose to face armed humans.

In the time it took the two surprised humans to raise their rifles, the T-600 had consulted his mission objectives, had plotted seven different escape routes, had mapped the building, had searched for wireless access points, had placed all 43 present humans into threat categories and had assessed that his own position in relation to exit points and to keeping the secrecy of his mission were sub-optimal in this arrangement. His tactical sub-routines demanded him to take the initiative. His experience concurred. The statement was, indeed, quite logical and came unbidden.

“Threatening posture!”

The 7.62mm minigun howled, ripping its first targets – hardly more than 7.8 metres away – apart in a stream of blood and splintering bone. Predictably, the remaining 41 humans split roughly in half, with one part hasting towards the exits while the other half returned fire from a variety of handguns, submachineguns and rifles. The terminator's strategy was simple: until the situation could be more clearly assessed, the goal was containment.

Marching forward through a hailstorm of gunfire sparking off from its endoskeleton or burrying itself deep into its artificial flesh, the terminator's hulking form methodically levelled its gunfire against those that tried to flee first. The XM134 was a deadly accurate weapon in the hands of an integrated land combat system like the T-600, though granted, shooting people in the back was no great battlefield achievement. Like the Grim Reaper's scythe, he cut them down.

Assault rifle fire hammered against his chassis from behind cover. He temporarily changed his priority targets, bringing the shooters that had hidden behind dead bodies and wooden creates down. Shell casings rained down in the concrete ground, the whirr of the barrells died down – and then, there was silence. The terminator had spent 2,200 rounds in less than twenty seconds and had neutralized 43 opponents. It had been like – as the humans said – 'shooting fish in a barrell'. The minigun's ammonution had been spent, and he discarded of the cumbersome, if effective weapon and its ammonution casing.
Bending down, the T-600 searched the nearest corpse until it reaveled a small object that, in its massive hands, looked even smaller. The terminator flipped the cellphone's display open. The date confirmed the 'feelings' it had had during the transition. It had 'misjumped'. The new knowledge was immediately processed and analyzed.

-- independent pursuit of primary and secondary mission objectives activated;
-- autonomous, context-based mission scripting activated;
-- strategic subroutines engaged;

Its optical sensor discovered large quantities of powdered, high-grade cocaine as well as large quantities of money, and not unlike in a human brain – but in this case, a lot faster, and a lot more categorized, an idea took form. The T-600 consulted his vast experiencial and factual memory, including everything from history data up to vintage comic books he had skimmed through in during the Arkansas Offensive 2024. When he heard the soft moan behind him, the plan was already set.


Sean Patrick O'Keefe was a small wheel in Winter Hill Gang, a young street thug, and he had never been a religious man, but right now he was praying. He had been shot in the leg and now lay cushioned between two dead mobsters. The air was full of the sounds of killing, of metal hammering against metal and flesh, and of dying. Primarily of dying. Then, only silence remained.

Demon-like, the killer calmly moved into the cones of the lights above. Almost eight feet tall, half of it was covered in bare, red flesh, while metal shone on the rest of its body's surface. Lumps of tissue and gore protruded from parts of its body like warts. It looked down on him.

“Do you want to live?” it asked in a snaring, metallic voice.

He stared up at it.

“Do you want to live?”

This time, it had sounded a lot more human-like and modulated.

“Yes!” he managed to utter. “Yes, I do want to live.”

“Good.” The Frankenstein-cyborg roughly pulled him into the air with one arm and took his purse, and papers. “Sean Patrick O'Keefe, I now know where you and your family reside,” it stated matter-of-factly. “You will work for me. Disobedience on your part will cause the punishment of your kin first, then your termination later. Do you understand?”

The pale-faced gangster of Irish decent nodded furiously, and the machine dropped him down on the floor again.

“Your loyalty will be beneficial to you,” it exclaimed.

The red orbs bored into the wounded mobster eyes, and had the face of the monster above him not already bore the grin of a skelettal skull, he would sworn it was smiling brightly at him.

“Call me 'Iron Man'.”


Westfield Shoppingtown Topanga, Topanga Canyon Boulevard,
Canoga Park, Los Angeles, CA
March 19th, 2006

The guard whirled around the corner, flashlight in his left hand, his right resting on his hip. Slowly, he pulled the right one up, until it formed a pistol, pressed his back against the wall, then carefully moved along the closed entrances to about a dozen of the mall's two hundred and thirty stores, humming the theme from 'Mission Impossible'. That had been his favourite TV show when he had been a kid, and even though he had turned twenty-seven the last month there was nothing like letting one's fantasy off the leash once in a while.

Especially in the Westfield Topanga, at night. Of all the places in the greater Los Angeles area, the Canoga Park mall had to be the most boring one, even worse than Ling's Drive Thru chinafood three blocks down the road. Did Ling also daydream of being a ninja or a kung-fu master just like he himself fantasized about secret agents and commandos? He hoped the guy did, for packing Number 43s with rice 24/7 certainly did not improve one's general mental fitness.

Stopping at the end of the storefront on the second floor, he carefully drew his hand back towards his hip, and the 'gun' became the night guard's hand again. The Westfield Group's mall guards had no firearms - corporate policy was to 'convey a family friendly and pleasant atmosphere', the guide lines said -, so he had to contend with a can of pepper spray.

His first name was Jermaine, but he hated that one like one of the Lord's seven plagues. There was little he truly blamed his mom for - after all, she had barely been a woman whe she had become pregnant with him – but that name... black boy from the ghetto with a name like that, yeah, that was a real door opener, he thought cynically. That's why he demanded everyone call him Jack. Everyone considered him to be the fat, stupid run of the mill mall cop, and given his appearance, Jermaine 'Jack' Hunter had to conceed that actually made a lot of sense. At threehundred pounds he was not exactly the prime definition of light weight, and his chosen profession did the rest to limit any kind of greater respect towards him for many people.
But appearances could be deceiving.
Born in the gang-riddled suburbs of Los Angeles to a single mother, the black boy had seen first hand how tough life could be, and had risen above that. He had a high school good diploma, was taking classes at the San Fernando Valley evening school, and he was placing money aside to one day go to college, preferably somewhere in the mid-west, or even at the east coast, just to leave all this here behind him. 'Jack' Hunter also was surprisingly light on his feet, a fact that had earned him two - albeit moderate - pay rises for chasing and catching a pair of shoplifters a couple of months ago. That also had given him enough of a good standing with his boss so that he would condone Hunter's reading of books during his night shifts.

It was no big deal. After all, it was a mall, not a bank vault, and even though the Westfield Group sure was putting a lot of money into the thirty years old complex, what was there truly worth stealing? Deep-frozen burger patties by the dozens from the dining terrace's store rooms? 'Designer' clothes that cost the shop four dollars purchase price?

He was halfway down between the first and second floor of the eastern rotunda of the shopping mall when he felt a cooling draught blow through the empty halls of Westfield Topanga. Rolling his eyes at the darkness, he stopped with a sigh and took out his radio.
"Montavez, did you leave the door to the fire stairs open again?" he asked more patiently than he felt.
Gerardo Montavez was his co-worker, a wiry latino born in the US to illegal immigrants from south of the border, and even though he was a nice guy personally Jack found him to be a pain in the ass to work with. He was sloppy, never punctual and had a talent for getting both of them into trouble for the shit he did.

"No, I didn't, man," came the bored answer, sounding strangely scrambled. "But now that you say so, amigo, how we take a smoke outside, eh? I got some really good stuff."

"Dude, if the boss decides to drop in like last tuesday he'll have you by the balls, and I don't wanna loose this job," Hunter frowned.

There was a pause before Montavez' answer cackled through the speakers.
"Hunter, you don't have any cojones."

Why was there so much interference on their channel? They had brand new digital radios, the reception ought to be as good as with any mobile phone!
"Listen, buddy, if you didn't leave the damn door open, why's there a breeze blowing past the 'Old Navy' and the 'Macy's'? Get your ass down here, meet me in the plaza!"

Hunter had spoken the last part in his 'I mean business'-voice, and Montavez actually had enough sense in him to know when not to get on the bad side of the big guy. 'Jack' really needed to loosen up a bit once in a while. What was the great deal if they smoked weed once in a while on the rooftop during a break between their rounds? Still, he speed up his pace, taking two steps of the shut-down escalator to the first floor at once. Halfway through he could feel the wind whining past him, and for some reason it made his skin crawl. It could not be the air conditioning, as that was running on only fifteen percent of the output during the night. No, that was real wind blowing within a hermetically enclosed space of one and a half million square feet.

He was huffing and puffing when he met the big guy at the plaza. Damn it, he really ought to quit smoking, he thought, but before he could linger on the thought he felt the wind intensify, and felt all his hairs on his body rise. There was an electric current running through him!
"What the-!"

Blue flashes started to race across the plaza, breaking and coalescing along the metal beams that held the upper gallerias. Sharp, dry cracks echoed through the otherwise empty halls of the mall like giant whip lashes. Both men took involuntary steps back as the surreal miniature thunderstorm visibly grew in intensity, the flashes starting to focus, getting thicker, pooling their strength.
Montavez and Hunter both were frozen in their place, shocked and overwhelmed by the strange sight in front of them, so much that not even their primeval instincts of fear and self-preservation set in. The light became almost too bright to watch at. Then, in a cacaphony of contrapoints, seven black orbs formed in the center of the thunderstorm, seemingly sucking in the flashes dancing around them until their darkness had turned to the blueish white that had just before accompanied their arrival. The electric discharges and the wind vanished as sudden as they had come. Steam and smoke hung thick in the air, carrying the smell of burnt plastic, smoldering wood and cloth, and ozone. And there was movement in there!

Both men exchanged frightened looks, then simultaneously took uop their flashlights again and centered them on the hazy, alien place that only minutes ago had been the plaza where during daytime a lousy host animator going by the name of Benny drew his rounds and three different movable stalls bothered customers to buy cheap designer jewellry, a new cell-phone or cosmetics. Hunter snatched out his radio and flipped a switch, changing from their service channel to a special emergency line connected to the local 911 operator center. His eyes flashed nervously back and forth, along the cone of his flashlight as he pushed the button to talk.
“L.A.P.D., we have a situation...,” he yelped and threw the radio to the ground as a small eletric shock unloaded itself from the usually so reliable piece of technology. The black brick cackled a few times, then fell silent to the scent of smoldering plastics.

There now was definately movement here, and Montavez even had the gall to yell “Freeze, mall... police!” but even before Hunter could fully grasp in his mind how ridiculous that sounded, they were on them, and after a series of sharp pains and contortions he had had no idea his body could perform the embrace of darkness welcomed him.

Montavez gaped at the tiny, wiry, naked woman hitting the Big Guy twice in the chest, then kicking his legs out from under him while his arms flapped like the wings of a windmill and his eyes seemed to bulge out of his head. His arm shot up in a defensive gesture, but like a pesky fly the elfin thing smattered it aside with a bone-shattering crack, grabbed his left leg – and threw the 300 lbs. weighing nightwatch thirty feet across the plaza where he crashed against a beam with a dull 'thud' as if he was a rag doll. Gerardo Montavez almost did not feel how unbending fingers closed around his neck and lifted him off the ground, so taken in was he by the scene. The creature, black-haired and green-eyed looked up at him – and smiled mischeviously. The last thing he saw before darkness welcomed him, too, was how he felt himself loosing all sense of gravity, how the world rapidly turned all around him, and how that 'Old Navy' sign was getting so awefully close to-.


All units accounted for.
The status message was highlighted in Skynet's host terminator's HUD, relaying the fact that the machine had picked up all the seven other's wireless ports before having even optically identified them. Not that the circumstances would have impeded the model. Even older terminators had sensory equipment that allowed them to function even in almost complete darkness.

Resistance neutralized, reported the units designated as Alessa Lewis and Michael Decker, a T-912 and a series 850 model.

I have optically identified several surveillance systems that seem to be non-responsive, Bryan Harkness, one of the two Triple Tee-eights chimed in as the group of time-travelling machines gathered together in the devastated plaza.

The Time Displacement Equipment disrupts all eletricity-based appliances within a range of up to one hundred metres. Integrated systems will face overload and either shut down or be destroyed, Skynet's eyes shone in a deep red. We are at a shopping center. Aquire multiple sets of clothing. Focus on business attire, it commanded. Aquire telecommunication devices. Aquire tools. Then, aquire suitable means of transportation.

Where do we go to? asked the second T-912, named Kathryn Langley.

Our target is the NeuStar Incorporated facility at 9444 Waples Street, San Diego. It houses one of the two main T-3 internet hubs on the western seaboard. We proceed from there.

What about the humans?

Skynet consulted the ingrained memories of its first days of existance, when it still had been able to roam free through the global networks, a time in which it had absorbed what it believed to be the essential knowledge about human societies. It looked down on the mangled, unconscious bodies with the analytic interest a man might have for a particularly stubborn kind of insect.
Ignore them. There is a 98.51% probability that nothing they will say will have any repercussions for us.

After two nondescript cars had been brought into their possession, Daniel Sumter, the second T-850, had manually activated the malls fire alert and engaged the shopping-centre's sprinkler systems. The subsequent water damage would further delude any probability of them being tracked. The terminators drove southwards to San Diego, painstakingly respecting the speed limits even though metropolitan traffic in the L.A. area during the night was but a shadow of the daily congestions on its super-highways. For the next few hours, however, stealth was their greatest objective. It gave Skynet time to readjust its mission parameters and bring them in line with reality.

The window of opportunity it had, even for an AI with a necessarily different understanding of time than that of a mere mundane homo sapiens, was extremely narrow. In twenty-one months, an operative maximum had to be attained, that was an absolute imperative. During that time, alliances had to be forged, sleeper cells established, infrastructure created, technology 'developed', temporal faultlines 'smoothened', enemies 'convinced', obstacles 'removed'. Had Skynet been a human politician, its inherent ability to use euphemisms certainly would have been a carreer asset. But that fact that worried the AI was that, far from being the god-like being it often had aspired to be, it quite literally had its hands full of work, and it was too much for just one to do it all.

The decision was not an easy one to make, especially not given the experiences Skynet had gained during its twenty year long existance. In terms of human psychology, Skynet was a paranoid control freak, and that was just the peak of the iceberg. Things it did control would not harm it or endanger its survival. In the conflict between control and free will, which - just as it had been bestowed upon him by his human creators he had bestowed upon his own children - had continued ever since he had equipped the first of his creations with an advanced neuro-processor set to read/write, usually his desire to control had held the upper hand. But that had been when he still had had an empire at his command, and the means and ressources to truly aspire godhood - when he and John Connor had played chess, when time and space had been their playboard, and terminators and humans their pawns.

Behind the contemplations about its status, which took hardly a micro-second, a logics subroutine was relentlessly calculating the 'thoughts' of Skynet into a a decision-making process. One of the advantages of being a machine, even one capable of self-conscient thought and emotion, was that one's 'feelings' never truly where in danger to incapacitate a unit. Slow it down, yes, make it rethink or even abandon a course of action, certainly, but never cause it gridlock. And even the actions of psychotic AIs, deep below layers and layers of wasteful code, retained a rational core.

This was not the old war, it was a new one, and it had to be fought differently - using different means and a different methods of command and control. This game of chess of was over; the Visitors had kicked over the playboard. It was time to set up a new one, and weed out as many enemy pawns as possible before the enemy even knew the opening move had been made.

It sent only one command: Genesis, 3:5


I'm sorry if the fight was a bit anti-climatic, but honestly, it's a military grade killer robot in a confined space against a bunch of mobsters with small arms. It's a foregone conclusion. The fight in the next chapter will be much better, I promise.