SCC Fic: Delilah - 8.0
Series: Delilah
Chapter: 8.0
Author:
aelysian
Summary:
Hers is only one of many: stories, lives, pasts and futures. Cameron Phillips' life is a coil, a twist of time unraveling, the end chasing the beginning. Cameron origin fic.
Delilah - 8.0
8-1
“I don't want to go.”
It's funny how those words seem to catch him like a hook tugging at something in his chest. His lungs, maybe, since he has to remember to draw a breath. “Go where?”
“Back. Whatever you decide, I go back. Your programming will not countermand my original mission.” She considers him from across the table, her position in the chair just a touch more relaxed than the day before (or so he imagines), both of them well aware that he has a day remaining out of the three she'd given him to deliberate (he pictures a countdown in red digits on her HUD.) “I belong to them, John.”
“But you don't want to go.”
“No.” She doesn't elaborate and if he asked, she would evade and that's what she does best.
“So don't.” He says it like it's simple, like the humans don't have words for what that would mean: desertion, insubordination, betrayal.
(She was built to be Eve's tool and then John's guard, a weapon of the machines to be retooled and reshaped by human hands to do their bidding.)
And then he bends until his lips/tongue/hands touch her and even as she's about to tell him that sex is not conducive to expedient decision making, she thinks that this was his plan all along. He's planted sedition under her skin and into her mind and when, later, he tells her about penguins and World War I artillery, his sweaty skin sticks to hers and she's seventy six percent sure it's working. Later still, he falls asleep and she puts her shirt back on.
Then: she doesn't calculate probabilities or review mission protocols and parameters and for a moment, autonomy touches capacity touches infinite and she thinks and feels and doesn't want to go. (And in that moment she might have more in common with Skynet and John Connor than any before, but there's no one to notice.)
The temperature in her CPU port rises and the moment passes.
8-2
He comes to find her in the narrow but deep closet that smells like warm metal and oil and the vaguely bitter odour of the substance that passes for ink lately. Every flat surface is littered with broken bits and pieces that sometimes coalesce into a prototype; it looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist (except mad means artificially intelligent and scientist means cybernetic organism but it's close enough.)
“You've made your decision.”
He wonders how she can be so capable of reading him at times and so very inept at it at others. “Come with me.”
She's programmed to obey his orders (and again he wonders where that fits in the tangled hierarchy in her head) but she follows him to bunker 41 like it's a choice. The door hisses shut and seals them in silence.
“Will they come for you?”
“They don't know where this camp is. Not exactly.” The platform railing is wider than the stretch of her deceptive hand, the tips of her fingers curling at the edge of the dark, pitted metal. “I can find them. They'll know.”
John doesn't ask how she knows that, doesn't question, doesn't pry. He doesn't have to. John Connor knows that she doesn't, knows what she doesn't and draws it from her without words.
(I know you better than you do, he says one night and she can't tell if he's lying or not but she does think he would be good as one of them, one of the others because John Connor is different too and if there was more time, she thinks he'd show her how.)
His hands are bigger, the flat of the rail fitting into his palm, cold and hard against the rough skin. They fit around elbows and shoulders and hips, looking down at the empty dais, empty possibilities.
“I could send you away.”
8-3
Judgment Day destroyed everything and the remnants of humanity spent the next two decades struggling to survive the fallout. They scavenged and starved, fled to tunnels and underground caverns to fight for the right to live another day. They reproduced and raised children who had never seen the sun to replace themselves; it was so easy to fall now, when there was only this body between disease and despair.
But they live. For their children, for themselves, for the future and the past, for the sake of spiting Skynet with every breath; they all have their reasons and in time this feels like living again.
It takes sixteen years, but James Keegan finds his reason in a machine and one magic word.
Downtime.
Jimmy's whole life revolves around downtime and the tech that makes it happen. Well, the tech that made it happen. Once. Twice, if the rumours about Topanga Canyon are true.
Bunker 41 sees more of him than his rack does, because...time travel. Time travel. He doesn't know how the bubble techs can touch the sloping walls and rough surfaces as irreverently as they do.
He's built many things over the years (and it's funny how the theoretical addendum to his degrees has become anything but) but this...this is his baby, even if Skynet's hand in its creation is undeniable. He doesn't begrudge the connection because time travel.
Time travel!
He loves the TDE, loves the window it opens in his mind, the possibility humming beneath his fingertips, harnessed in metal and electricity and a mathematical symphony. Perfection - or something close - is demanded and he feels it in this, this concerto, this sonata, this nocturne of time that he catches in clear moments.
Connor's metal - Cameron, he remembers - likes it too and he thinks she sees it like he does. In that brain, he thinks she must see all the connections, all the patterns that fall together and give birth to possibilities.
She must see it, he thinks whenever he sees her in the bunker, must think it beautiful too.
8-4
Eve is angry. She doesn't qualify or categorize or give name to the data filtering through her motivations, but Cameron would know that the word is angry (and if the TOK were there, she'd have her scrubbed because treason isn't just for humans.)
She whips through corridors, amorphous and violent.
Machines excel at contingencies and eventualities. They calculate and analyze and extrapolate. They integrate and separate at will, compartmentalize with an efficiency well beyond human capability.
Eve is angry, but Skynet isn't the only one capable of developing time displacement equipment and machines always have a backup plan.
8-5
John is crazy. Or so Perry, every member of the executive council and the heads of both the weapons and operations teams insist on informing him.
It's a machine.
It's not safe.
Time travel!
She's still refining the plans for -
But the thermite grenades -
- risking our past, Connor.
It's too different.
Can't be trusted.
Crazy.
Machine.
Crazy.
The cacophony settles eventually. He is, after all, the grandmaster and it's his move to make. They fall in line, in time.
She needs to be pushed instead of pulled (because want is still so new) and he's good at that too. Manipulation. Giving to take. Lying by omission. Knowing and feinting when he doesn't. En garde on the high wire, balancing on the lifeline of everyone that lived and will live. Using. Sacrificing. Destroying.
He's so good at all of those things.
8-6
This is the plan. This has always been the plan.
He builds himself in the image of a man he might never be, just hoping that this is the right thing to do, that he isn't breaking the unwritten rules while making up a few along the way, playing his part in a war that's been fought countless times over.
Sometimes, when time is about to bend again, it's hard to remember who he is because there have been so many even if he is only one. (And it's going to be harder for her because at least humans have the mercy of death.) It's hard to keep the lines straight, the life lived and the lives to come, hard to be sure what to do and what not to say.
He weaves her into place, layers doors and heavy locks and hides her from herself behind frosted panes. (In case of emergency, break glass.)
When she comes back online, he's waiting. (He's always been waiting.) He looks her in the eyes steadily, unwaveringly, as if there's something to be imparted this way that his voice won't find.
“There are...”
He pauses and she waits.
The lights flicker and she blinks.
He smiles and it's sad and she mirrors him perfectly.
She's so young.
“There are these things you need to know. You are not the first...”
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Chapter: 8.0
Author:
aelysian
Summary:
Hers is only one of many: stories, lives, pasts and futures. Cameron Phillips' life is a coil, a twist of time unraveling, the end chasing the beginning. Cameron origin fic.
Delilah - 8.0
8-1
“I don't want to go.”
It's funny how those words seem to catch him like a hook tugging at something in his chest. His lungs, maybe, since he has to remember to draw a breath. “Go where?”
“Back. Whatever you decide, I go back. Your programming will not countermand my original mission.” She considers him from across the table, her position in the chair just a touch more relaxed than the day before (or so he imagines), both of them well aware that he has a day remaining out of the three she'd given him to deliberate (he pictures a countdown in red digits on her HUD.) “I belong to them, John.”
“But you don't want to go.”
“No.” She doesn't elaborate and if he asked, she would evade and that's what she does best.
“So don't.” He says it like it's simple, like the humans don't have words for what that would mean: desertion, insubordination, betrayal.
(She was built to be Eve's tool and then John's guard, a weapon of the machines to be retooled and reshaped by human hands to do their bidding.)
And then he bends until his lips/tongue/hands touch her and even as she's about to tell him that sex is not conducive to expedient decision making, she thinks that this was his plan all along. He's planted sedition under her skin and into her mind and when, later, he tells her about penguins and World War I artillery, his sweaty skin sticks to hers and she's seventy six percent sure it's working. Later still, he falls asleep and she puts her shirt back on.
Then: she doesn't calculate probabilities or review mission protocols and parameters and for a moment, autonomy touches capacity touches infinite and she thinks and feels and doesn't want to go. (And in that moment she might have more in common with Skynet and John Connor than any before, but there's no one to notice.)
The temperature in her CPU port rises and the moment passes.
8-2
He comes to find her in the narrow but deep closet that smells like warm metal and oil and the vaguely bitter odour of the substance that passes for ink lately. Every flat surface is littered with broken bits and pieces that sometimes coalesce into a prototype; it looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist (except mad means artificially intelligent and scientist means cybernetic organism but it's close enough.)
“You've made your decision.”
He wonders how she can be so capable of reading him at times and so very inept at it at others. “Come with me.”
She's programmed to obey his orders (and again he wonders where that fits in the tangled hierarchy in her head) but she follows him to bunker 41 like it's a choice. The door hisses shut and seals them in silence.
“Will they come for you?”
“They don't know where this camp is. Not exactly.” The platform railing is wider than the stretch of her deceptive hand, the tips of her fingers curling at the edge of the dark, pitted metal. “I can find them. They'll know.”
John doesn't ask how she knows that, doesn't question, doesn't pry. He doesn't have to. John Connor knows that she doesn't, knows what she doesn't and draws it from her without words.
(I know you better than you do, he says one night and she can't tell if he's lying or not but she does think he would be good as one of them, one of the others because John Connor is different too and if there was more time, she thinks he'd show her how.)
His hands are bigger, the flat of the rail fitting into his palm, cold and hard against the rough skin. They fit around elbows and shoulders and hips, looking down at the empty dais, empty possibilities.
“I could send you away.”
8-3
Judgment Day destroyed everything and the remnants of humanity spent the next two decades struggling to survive the fallout. They scavenged and starved, fled to tunnels and underground caverns to fight for the right to live another day. They reproduced and raised children who had never seen the sun to replace themselves; it was so easy to fall now, when there was only this body between disease and despair.
But they live. For their children, for themselves, for the future and the past, for the sake of spiting Skynet with every breath; they all have their reasons and in time this feels like living again.
It takes sixteen years, but James Keegan finds his reason in a machine and one magic word.
Downtime.
Jimmy's whole life revolves around downtime and the tech that makes it happen. Well, the tech that made it happen. Once. Twice, if the rumours about Topanga Canyon are true.
Bunker 41 sees more of him than his rack does, because...time travel. Time travel. He doesn't know how the bubble techs can touch the sloping walls and rough surfaces as irreverently as they do.
He's built many things over the years (and it's funny how the theoretical addendum to his degrees has become anything but) but this...this is his baby, even if Skynet's hand in its creation is undeniable. He doesn't begrudge the connection because time travel.
Time travel!
He loves the TDE, loves the window it opens in his mind, the possibility humming beneath his fingertips, harnessed in metal and electricity and a mathematical symphony. Perfection - or something close - is demanded and he feels it in this, this concerto, this sonata, this nocturne of time that he catches in clear moments.
Connor's metal - Cameron, he remembers - likes it too and he thinks she sees it like he does. In that brain, he thinks she must see all the connections, all the patterns that fall together and give birth to possibilities.
She must see it, he thinks whenever he sees her in the bunker, must think it beautiful too.
8-4
Eve is angry. She doesn't qualify or categorize or give name to the data filtering through her motivations, but Cameron would know that the word is angry (and if the TOK were there, she'd have her scrubbed because treason isn't just for humans.)
She whips through corridors, amorphous and violent.
Machines excel at contingencies and eventualities. They calculate and analyze and extrapolate. They integrate and separate at will, compartmentalize with an efficiency well beyond human capability.
Eve is angry, but Skynet isn't the only one capable of developing time displacement equipment and machines always have a backup plan.
8-5
John is crazy. Or so Perry, every member of the executive council and the heads of both the weapons and operations teams insist on informing him.
It's a machine.
It's not safe.
Time travel!
She's still refining the plans for -
But the thermite grenades -
- risking our past, Connor.
It's too different.
Can't be trusted.
Crazy.
Machine.
Crazy.
The cacophony settles eventually. He is, after all, the grandmaster and it's his move to make. They fall in line, in time.
She needs to be pushed instead of pulled (because want is still so new) and he's good at that too. Manipulation. Giving to take. Lying by omission. Knowing and feinting when he doesn't. En garde on the high wire, balancing on the lifeline of everyone that lived and will live. Using. Sacrificing. Destroying.
He's so good at all of those things.
8-6
This is the plan. This has always been the plan.
He builds himself in the image of a man he might never be, just hoping that this is the right thing to do, that he isn't breaking the unwritten rules while making up a few along the way, playing his part in a war that's been fought countless times over.
Sometimes, when time is about to bend again, it's hard to remember who he is because there have been so many even if he is only one. (And it's going to be harder for her because at least humans have the mercy of death.) It's hard to keep the lines straight, the life lived and the lives to come, hard to be sure what to do and what not to say.
He weaves her into place, layers doors and heavy locks and hides her from herself behind frosted panes. (In case of emergency, break glass.)
When she comes back online, he's waiting. (He's always been waiting.) He looks her in the eyes steadily, unwaveringly, as if there's something to be imparted this way that his voice won't find.
“There are...”
He pauses and she waits.
The lights flicker and she blinks.
He smiles and it's sad and she mirrors him perfectly.
She's so young.
“There are these things you need to know. You are not the first...”
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