SCC Fic: Lies My Terminator Told Me
Title: Lies My Terminator Told Me
Author: aelysian
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ongoing
Summary: Cameron's a liar. We love it. Here's how.
This is a semi-ongoing/request fic. Have a line you think was one of Cameron's (many) lies? Comment and I will attempt to fic it (also feel free to write comment response fic yourself.)
Lies My Terminator Told Me
“My dad sells tractors. My mom stays home.”
She doesn’t have a dad or a mom. The parents she describes are those of a girl named Lindsay. Lindsay was tall and blonde and Cameron’s new best friend. She teaches her how to put on eyeliner and paint her nails. Cameron helps her with her homework. And then the school secretary notices the blank address on Cameron’s records and she needs a house, a story.
Lindsay and her parents go away and she tells the school that they won the lottery. Winning the lottery is a good thing.
She paints her nails every night and practices what she will say to John Connor.
“It’ll be our secret.”
It isn’t really a secret because in the future, everyone knows who Sarah Connor is.
Cameron has her own secrets but this John doesn’t know about them so they can’t be ‘our’ secrets.
She identifies the substitute teacher as a Triple Eight almost immediately, so when Cromartie raises the semi-automatic she’s already on her feet and the first bullets find her instead of John. She pretends to be dead and John escapes through the window.
He scrambles into the truck and her foot is already on the gas pedal and her secret is not a secret anymore but it’s okay because she has others.
They speed away from the school and she smiles a little.
“I was sent here to protect John.”
It isn’t exactly untrue, because she was sent here and she will protect John. But it isn’t the why and how because Cameron is different from any terminator sent back before. (And if he’d wanted to send a terminator just to protect him, he would have chosen a larger, more resilient model.) She has no mission, no directives blinking and blinking away.
Do what you think is best. A simple instruction, but one that consumes her. She was not designed for this, for the constant contemplation of what is ‘best’, what she thinks, what to do without explicit commands.
Jump into the future and save Sarah Connor, save John’s mother. Let Jordan Cowan die, keep John safe. Use Morris to deflect Cromartie’s attention, keep John safe.
Somewhere along the way, all the cogitation and computation distilled into that single mandate: keep John safe.
Her mission is her choice and she wonders if this is what he was trying to teach her.
“I don’t sleep.”
She cannot enter any stage of the human sleep cycle, but sometimes when it’s late at night, she shuts down her higher processes one by one. She runs on automatic, making slow circuits around the house, her scanners prepared to re-activate her in an emergency. And then, when everything is quiet and still, she turns off the functions that run scenario after scenario, calculate probabilities, analyze and re-analyze, until there is nothing left but her consciousness. Nothing left but her.
She doesn’t know how to explain those times, but neither John nor Sarah asks so she doesn’t tell.
“I love you! I love you, John and you love me.”
John is everything to Cameron Phillips, but that isn’t who Sarah pins between two trucks. It isn’t her that pleads with him. TOK-715 doesn’t want to go and neither does Cameron so it pulls words from her mouth and tells him what he wants to hear.
(And I isn’t me so much as it’s she, and you isn’t you so much as it’s him.)
She wakes up herself and John looks at her with expectation in his eyes, but that wasn’t her and she isn’t what he wants. He did the wrong thing, bringing her back because his purpose is far greater than any of theirs (and without John, your life has no purpose) and she cannot allow that to be compromised for anything, least of all a machine.
“I feel heat.”
This is incorrect. She does not feel heat the way John does. When sunlight touches her skin, when an explosion consumes her in a wave of fire, she is aware of the change in surface temperature, though it does nothing to her heat-resistant frame. She knows heat.
What she feels is the absence of heat. When the wind is cool against her organic components, contrasting with the power that animates her, when the chill of the freezer slows the functions of her fingers imperceptibly (but her systems note and archive the difference.)
She feels it when she is alone. When John pulls away and the loss of his body heat leaves her cold.
But John will not understand, so she simply says that she feels and lets him think what he wants. For now.
“You and I talk about it a lot.”
It would be more accurate to say that he talks and she listens. Sometimes when it’s quiet and still and sometimes when the earth shakes with falling fire and death. Always when he wakes up leaking tears from his eyes and always when too many people die. (He tells her even one is too many but she knows that he knows better than that.)
Later she understands that "you" is not "him", that the John she left is not the John she has here, but the damage is done. She wonders if she'll ever see Future John in him but doesn't calculate the probability; she rolls down the window and tells Derek to apply more pressure to the accelerator.
Author: aelysian
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ongoing
Summary: Cameron's a liar. We love it. Here's how.
This is a semi-ongoing/request fic. Have a line you think was one of Cameron's (many) lies? Comment and I will attempt to fic it (also feel free to write comment response fic yourself.)
Lies My Terminator Told Me
“My dad sells tractors. My mom stays home.”
She doesn’t have a dad or a mom. The parents she describes are those of a girl named Lindsay. Lindsay was tall and blonde and Cameron’s new best friend. She teaches her how to put on eyeliner and paint her nails. Cameron helps her with her homework. And then the school secretary notices the blank address on Cameron’s records and she needs a house, a story.
Lindsay and her parents go away and she tells the school that they won the lottery. Winning the lottery is a good thing.
She paints her nails every night and practices what she will say to John Connor.
“It’ll be our secret.”
It isn’t really a secret because in the future, everyone knows who Sarah Connor is.
Cameron has her own secrets but this John doesn’t know about them so they can’t be ‘our’ secrets.
She identifies the substitute teacher as a Triple Eight almost immediately, so when Cromartie raises the semi-automatic she’s already on her feet and the first bullets find her instead of John. She pretends to be dead and John escapes through the window.
He scrambles into the truck and her foot is already on the gas pedal and her secret is not a secret anymore but it’s okay because she has others.
They speed away from the school and she smiles a little.
“I was sent here to protect John.”
It isn’t exactly untrue, because she was sent here and she will protect John. But it isn’t the why and how because Cameron is different from any terminator sent back before. (And if he’d wanted to send a terminator just to protect him, he would have chosen a larger, more resilient model.) She has no mission, no directives blinking and blinking away.
Do what you think is best. A simple instruction, but one that consumes her. She was not designed for this, for the constant contemplation of what is ‘best’, what she thinks, what to do without explicit commands.
Jump into the future and save Sarah Connor, save John’s mother. Let Jordan Cowan die, keep John safe. Use Morris to deflect Cromartie’s attention, keep John safe.
Somewhere along the way, all the cogitation and computation distilled into that single mandate: keep John safe.
Her mission is her choice and she wonders if this is what he was trying to teach her.
“I don’t sleep.”
She cannot enter any stage of the human sleep cycle, but sometimes when it’s late at night, she shuts down her higher processes one by one. She runs on automatic, making slow circuits around the house, her scanners prepared to re-activate her in an emergency. And then, when everything is quiet and still, she turns off the functions that run scenario after scenario, calculate probabilities, analyze and re-analyze, until there is nothing left but her consciousness. Nothing left but her.
She doesn’t know how to explain those times, but neither John nor Sarah asks so she doesn’t tell.
“I love you! I love you, John and you love me.”
John is everything to Cameron Phillips, but that isn’t who Sarah pins between two trucks. It isn’t her that pleads with him. TOK-715 doesn’t want to go and neither does Cameron so it pulls words from her mouth and tells him what he wants to hear.
(And I isn’t me so much as it’s she, and you isn’t you so much as it’s him.)
She wakes up herself and John looks at her with expectation in his eyes, but that wasn’t her and she isn’t what he wants. He did the wrong thing, bringing her back because his purpose is far greater than any of theirs (and without John, your life has no purpose) and she cannot allow that to be compromised for anything, least of all a machine.
“I feel heat.”
This is incorrect. She does not feel heat the way John does. When sunlight touches her skin, when an explosion consumes her in a wave of fire, she is aware of the change in surface temperature, though it does nothing to her heat-resistant frame. She knows heat.
What she feels is the absence of heat. When the wind is cool against her organic components, contrasting with the power that animates her, when the chill of the freezer slows the functions of her fingers imperceptibly (but her systems note and archive the difference.)
She feels it when she is alone. When John pulls away and the loss of his body heat leaves her cold.
But John will not understand, so she simply says that she feels and lets him think what he wants. For now.
“You and I talk about it a lot.”
It would be more accurate to say that he talks and she listens. Sometimes when it’s quiet and still and sometimes when the earth shakes with falling fire and death. Always when he wakes up leaking tears from his eyes and always when too many people die. (He tells her even one is too many but she knows that he knows better than that.)
Later she understands that "you" is not "him", that the John she left is not the John she has here, but the damage is done. She wonders if she'll ever see Future John in him but doesn't calculate the probability; she rolls down the window and tells Derek to apply more pressure to the accelerator.