SCC Fic: Delilah - 10.0
Series: Delilah
Chapter: 10.0
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 - 10.0
10-1
Sarah takes exception to three days but temporal displacement is stressful on human physiology; should they encounter conflict, Sarah Connor would have been insufficiently effective prior to today. She says nothing.
The safe house is where John said it would be, though the building stands a few stories taller than it will in the future. Sarah asks questions but doesn't press for answers; ambiguity is a sufficient diversion for now. (They've seen me before, she says. It's not a lie because she's precise if nothing else.)
She leads Sarah up, up, and knows something's wrong the moment the door gives under the slightest touch of her fingers. The room is silent and the air is still and the bodies are laid out for anyone to find. She checks them, one by one, because Sarah doesn't think to do so and because everything about this room is wrong.
The triple eight is superior in size and weight and when she sees the tell-tale shift in the reflection of his irises, she knows exactly what he does not see and what he does not know about her. Knowing is power, John says - said - and she knows her stride will not match his even as the pistons in her legs strain to compensate.
She fails to pre-emptively detect the oncoming vehicle, but aluminum and steel crumple against her and glass shatters with ease; she doesn't quite grasp inconspicuous yet.
You died, she says, when Sarah confronts her outside the house. She's emulating Jane Hubard, physician, who is twenty-four years old and will lose the smallest finger on her left hand on Judgment Day.
Not everything, she says, and understands that Sarah doesn't know how to speak to her kind; she asks too many questions and is satisfied with too few answers.
Cancer, she says, because Sarah needs to know that much. The disease is not uncommon in the future; radiation from the fallout will continue to cripple the surviving humans long after the bombs fall and Cameron heard the diagnosis delivered seventy-three times before going downtime. The data consolidates and simplifies and she presents with precision.
10-2
Humans are complicated. She decides her linguistic centres require development because the humans she encounters at the side of Sarah Connor are causing unprecedented delays in her processing (2.1 seconds on the average. This falls on the lower bound of the acceptable range and she documents every instance, allowing for the possibility that the acquaintances of Sarah Connor are social outliers.)
The man called Enrique speaks at length and it takes a few moments to discern that he means little more than what he says in between redundancy and tangental anecdote. She doesn't understand.
The girl without a name; she understands her better. There's a language there, precision in the silence because the body does all the talking. In this, she excels, because humans lie better with words and meanings than they do with their bodies and this secret dialect is more than heartbeats and chemistry. It's the little things, and the girl isn't the first to teach her that.
Details.
The police officer wants details and Sarah wants none, but Cameron thinks that she might understand the difference between the boy John Connor and the dead man in a dead future. (Officer Rogers lives and never finds out why.)
The boy doesn't know how to mask his secrets; his body speaks loudly enough for even Sarah to hear. He's young, she thinks, young and new, but she hears and feels his inhalation when her fingers leave his skin (just there) and is...satisfied. Satisfied is the word and she doesn't bother to question the where and why it came from.
There's time yet, anyway, and Sarah has questions.
10-3
Secrets are kept in walls and under floors, at the tip of pliable human tongues, deep inside hearts and minds. She finds the poster of a cat not yet a lion. Non-congruous, but she lets John draw the conclusions. A current hums against her own electromagnetic field a nanosecond before she makes contact; something trips and fades and everything drains away.
They keep their secrets in safes, in careless collections of paper and ink for anyone to find, in coarse velvet sachets filled with tiny bits of carbon. Too paltry for bodies and too crude for minds, she sees no value in the gleam of diamonds unfit to cut a chassis from unformed metal. John says otherwise and smiles as he does (his saline levels are still high and she trades him a glass of water for the gem he offers her) and when she mimics the expression, it's at once both less and more than the smile of the human girl Cameron Phillips that day just outside second period Chemistry.
She asks Sarah and contemplates peroxide in a dark room lit by the projection of Marilyn Monroe against the television glass, a diamond resting inside the inefficiently tiny fifth pocket of her jeans.
Tomorrow, they'll have new names, new bits of plastic and laminate that will do their lying for them. Tomorrow, she'll take her first human life because Sarah won't and someone has to know that sometimes death is necessary. (Tomorrow, there'll be a surge of energy in an abandoned derelict garage that leaves a crater in the concrete but no one's there to notice.)
She switches channels and wonders if the T-888 has found Derek Reese yet.
10-4
New clothes, because humans perspire and variety is nice because wearing the same thing everyday is boring. John smiles as he explains and again when Sarah's actions to minimize the length of their shopping trip only serve to increase the attention from the store attendant.
She buys a jacket and tells John that there's no dye for purple in the future when he asks.
Sarah doesn't ask anything when she selects her mandated quantity of underwear in every available colour, but she decides her choices are the result of the effects of temporal displacement equipment on her more sensitive systems.
A woman picks up on the third ring.
“Is Samantha Albert there?”
There's no response for a moment and if she couldn't hear the poorly transmitted background noise, she might have assumed a faulty connection.
“She...she died. Four years ago.”
It's not unexpected. Time travel means racing forwards and backwards over the lives of everyone else and somewhere, she's six years old and alive.
Maybe there's something about her silence that gives her away or maybe it's that thing John called intuition. “...Cameron? Is that you?”
She hangs up.
Three days later, John tells his mother about a future he hasn't yet lived and she can hear her John in him.
The day after that, she learns a new word and makes a new friend who jumps from the school roof before she can ask if she knows any card games. She thinks that this John doesn't yet understand that everyone dies. She thinks Sarah Connor does.
She's only half right.
10-5
He watches. Waits.
The others are dead, but the part of him still capable of grieving is numbed by knowing that they were always dead men walking. It was a one-way mission and he tells himself that there wasn't enough room in the world for two of Sayles anyway. (And there are no Reese boys when it's just him.) Besides, there's a trip eight on his ass and he'd be lying if he said that there wasn't a sense of exhilaration and wretched familiarity about it, like the moonshine buzz from Timms's piece of shit still, like the recklessness that runs fast and hot in your blood when you aren't sure you're going to live to see the next day cycle.
But no one's asking.
He waits in the darkness cast by the trees and nightfall, watches as the fire grows, consuming from the inside out. It's merciful destruction at the hands of someone who doesn't understand that the danger isn't in the machine, but in the mind of the man who builds it.
Derek has seen the future, but Andy Goode's devastation is raw and real and reminds him of the haunted gaze of Billy Wisher. Wisher who laughed at his own jokes that nobody else ever got, who habitually picked at the hem of his sleeve until the left arm was a good inch shorter than the right, who kept him company - wanted or not - in the mess after Jesse left again and Kyle -
He leaves when the sirens draw closer. Billy Wisher lives another day and the part of Derek that's still aching for Kyle, or Jesse, or Sumner or anyone, hopes that Andy Goode never touches a computer again. But Derek's not an optimist and he can't afford mercy.
10-6
The helicopter crashes perfectly.
The man is killed on impact; the pilot follows shortly. The radio is intact and when rescue comes three hours and sixteen minutes later, they carry away the miraculously unscathed sole survivor and wrap her in a thick blanket. (Shock, someone says. Does anything hurt? Look into this light. Hey, you're going to be okay.)
In time, they clear the wreckage and wrap the dead to be buried by their bereaved families.
Catherine Weaver's body is never found. But then, no one's looking.
Previous | Next
Chapter: 10.0
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 - 10.0
10-1
Sarah takes exception to three days but temporal displacement is stressful on human physiology; should they encounter conflict, Sarah Connor would have been insufficiently effective prior to today. She says nothing.
The safe house is where John said it would be, though the building stands a few stories taller than it will in the future. Sarah asks questions but doesn't press for answers; ambiguity is a sufficient diversion for now. (They've seen me before, she says. It's not a lie because she's precise if nothing else.)
She leads Sarah up, up, and knows something's wrong the moment the door gives under the slightest touch of her fingers. The room is silent and the air is still and the bodies are laid out for anyone to find. She checks them, one by one, because Sarah doesn't think to do so and because everything about this room is wrong.
The triple eight is superior in size and weight and when she sees the tell-tale shift in the reflection of his irises, she knows exactly what he does not see and what he does not know about her. Knowing is power, John says - said - and she knows her stride will not match his even as the pistons in her legs strain to compensate.
She fails to pre-emptively detect the oncoming vehicle, but aluminum and steel crumple against her and glass shatters with ease; she doesn't quite grasp inconspicuous yet.
You died, she says, when Sarah confronts her outside the house. She's emulating Jane Hubard, physician, who is twenty-four years old and will lose the smallest finger on her left hand on Judgment Day.
Not everything, she says, and understands that Sarah doesn't know how to speak to her kind; she asks too many questions and is satisfied with too few answers.
Cancer, she says, because Sarah needs to know that much. The disease is not uncommon in the future; radiation from the fallout will continue to cripple the surviving humans long after the bombs fall and Cameron heard the diagnosis delivered seventy-three times before going downtime. The data consolidates and simplifies and she presents with precision.
10-2
Humans are complicated. She decides her linguistic centres require development because the humans she encounters at the side of Sarah Connor are causing unprecedented delays in her processing (2.1 seconds on the average. This falls on the lower bound of the acceptable range and she documents every instance, allowing for the possibility that the acquaintances of Sarah Connor are social outliers.)
The man called Enrique speaks at length and it takes a few moments to discern that he means little more than what he says in between redundancy and tangental anecdote. She doesn't understand.
The girl without a name; she understands her better. There's a language there, precision in the silence because the body does all the talking. In this, she excels, because humans lie better with words and meanings than they do with their bodies and this secret dialect is more than heartbeats and chemistry. It's the little things, and the girl isn't the first to teach her that.
Details.
The police officer wants details and Sarah wants none, but Cameron thinks that she might understand the difference between the boy John Connor and the dead man in a dead future. (Officer Rogers lives and never finds out why.)
The boy doesn't know how to mask his secrets; his body speaks loudly enough for even Sarah to hear. He's young, she thinks, young and new, but she hears and feels his inhalation when her fingers leave his skin (just there) and is...satisfied. Satisfied is the word and she doesn't bother to question the where and why it came from.
There's time yet, anyway, and Sarah has questions.
10-3
Secrets are kept in walls and under floors, at the tip of pliable human tongues, deep inside hearts and minds. She finds the poster of a cat not yet a lion. Non-congruous, but she lets John draw the conclusions. A current hums against her own electromagnetic field a nanosecond before she makes contact; something trips and fades and everything drains away.
They keep their secrets in safes, in careless collections of paper and ink for anyone to find, in coarse velvet sachets filled with tiny bits of carbon. Too paltry for bodies and too crude for minds, she sees no value in the gleam of diamonds unfit to cut a chassis from unformed metal. John says otherwise and smiles as he does (his saline levels are still high and she trades him a glass of water for the gem he offers her) and when she mimics the expression, it's at once both less and more than the smile of the human girl Cameron Phillips that day just outside second period Chemistry.
She asks Sarah and contemplates peroxide in a dark room lit by the projection of Marilyn Monroe against the television glass, a diamond resting inside the inefficiently tiny fifth pocket of her jeans.
Tomorrow, they'll have new names, new bits of plastic and laminate that will do their lying for them. Tomorrow, she'll take her first human life because Sarah won't and someone has to know that sometimes death is necessary. (Tomorrow, there'll be a surge of energy in an abandoned derelict garage that leaves a crater in the concrete but no one's there to notice.)
She switches channels and wonders if the T-888 has found Derek Reese yet.
10-4
New clothes, because humans perspire and variety is nice because wearing the same thing everyday is boring. John smiles as he explains and again when Sarah's actions to minimize the length of their shopping trip only serve to increase the attention from the store attendant.
She buys a jacket and tells John that there's no dye for purple in the future when he asks.
Sarah doesn't ask anything when she selects her mandated quantity of underwear in every available colour, but she decides her choices are the result of the effects of temporal displacement equipment on her more sensitive systems.
A woman picks up on the third ring.
“Is Samantha Albert there?”
There's no response for a moment and if she couldn't hear the poorly transmitted background noise, she might have assumed a faulty connection.
“She...she died. Four years ago.”
It's not unexpected. Time travel means racing forwards and backwards over the lives of everyone else and somewhere, she's six years old and alive.
Maybe there's something about her silence that gives her away or maybe it's that thing John called intuition. “...Cameron? Is that you?”
She hangs up.
Three days later, John tells his mother about a future he hasn't yet lived and she can hear her John in him.
The day after that, she learns a new word and makes a new friend who jumps from the school roof before she can ask if she knows any card games. She thinks that this John doesn't yet understand that everyone dies. She thinks Sarah Connor does.
She's only half right.
10-5
He watches. Waits.
The others are dead, but the part of him still capable of grieving is numbed by knowing that they were always dead men walking. It was a one-way mission and he tells himself that there wasn't enough room in the world for two of Sayles anyway. (And there are no Reese boys when it's just him.) Besides, there's a trip eight on his ass and he'd be lying if he said that there wasn't a sense of exhilaration and wretched familiarity about it, like the moonshine buzz from Timms's piece of shit still, like the recklessness that runs fast and hot in your blood when you aren't sure you're going to live to see the next day cycle.
But no one's asking.
He waits in the darkness cast by the trees and nightfall, watches as the fire grows, consuming from the inside out. It's merciful destruction at the hands of someone who doesn't understand that the danger isn't in the machine, but in the mind of the man who builds it.
Derek has seen the future, but Andy Goode's devastation is raw and real and reminds him of the haunted gaze of Billy Wisher. Wisher who laughed at his own jokes that nobody else ever got, who habitually picked at the hem of his sleeve until the left arm was a good inch shorter than the right, who kept him company - wanted or not - in the mess after Jesse left again and Kyle -
He leaves when the sirens draw closer. Billy Wisher lives another day and the part of Derek that's still aching for Kyle, or Jesse, or Sumner or anyone, hopes that Andy Goode never touches a computer again. But Derek's not an optimist and he can't afford mercy.
10-6
The helicopter crashes perfectly.
The man is killed on impact; the pilot follows shortly. The radio is intact and when rescue comes three hours and sixteen minutes later, they carry away the miraculously unscathed sole survivor and wrap her in a thick blanket. (Shock, someone says. Does anything hurt? Look into this light. Hey, you're going to be okay.)
In time, they clear the wreckage and wrap the dead to be buried by their bereaved families.
Catherine Weaver's body is never found. But then, no one's looking.
Previous | Next