Supplementary Data
Abilities/Strengths: Cameron is extremely strong and durable. She has, for example, been able to break through a concrete wall with her fists in a very short period of time, and has been struck by a car without suffering any damage. While her exterior is flesh and blood, her interior is an endoskeleton formed out of alloys of a metal known as coltan, making her extremely durable, and giving her an increased resistance to heat over earlier models of terminator which had been made from titanium. While she can recognize damage, she doesn't feel pain as humans do, and thus isn't hampered by it. Her flesh regenerates more swiftly than a human would heal from wounds, and all but the most grievous will self-repair. Even then, she is programmed with the knowledge of how to manufacture the cloned tissue used to give her a semblance of humanity as a part of her self-repair protocols, though it would take extensive cosmetic surgery to translate that into an appearance that would pass for normal. She can perform self-diagnostic and self repair, and is programmed to reassemble herself if she is seriously damaged, though limited access to necessary materials makes this prohibitively difficult anywhere but in her own time. It has been stated that the only way to be absolutely certain of destroying a terminator is to destroy their processor chip, as otherwise there is the chance that they might be reactivated.
Cameron's brain, so to speak, is an advanced tactical computer, allowing her to excel in combat situations, both with and without weaponry. To further her purpose, she can process visual input in more than simply the visible light spectrum; she has been shown to be able to see the IR spectrum as well. Additionally, her visual recognition is superb, the better to allow her to recognize threats she's encountered before. Her auditory recognition is likewise superb, and she is capable of mimicking vocal patterns near-perfectly. She has some knowledge of medicine, though she is not skilled enough to treat major, life-threatening injuries. She excels at anything that requires logic, such as mathematics, and can learn at an astounding rate. Once she has learned something, she knows it, as her memory is near-faultless. If interfaced with another computer, she has the capacity to overcome its security and exert control over it, provided it is less sophisticated than her own programming.
Once she has a goal, Cameron is relentless. It has been stated of the terminator cyborgs that they do not feel pain, do not feel fear, and absolutely will not stop until their objective has been achieved. This is remarkably true; while she will change tactics if necessary, she will not allow herself to be deterred. She can bide her time, certain that she will outlast any obstacle.
Weaknesses: Cameron is susceptible to electric current. A strong shock will knock her systems out temporarily, and it takes 120 seconds for her to reactivate when this takes place. A strong enough jolt could possibly damage her circuits enough to leave her unable to reactivate at all. Significant damage to her power supply will also render her inactive. And while she does have self-repair protocols, the metal from which her endoskeleton is formed is rare, expensive, and difficult to work with, making it problematic for her to repair any significant damage to her structural integrity.
Cameron may be a sophisticated machine, but she is still a machine. If someone with significant skill were able to take possession of her chip, they could reprogram her, subtly or altogether. This has already happened to her once, which is how she came to be a member of the Resistance in the first place.
Cameron is defined by her mission. If she were to fail it, or to somehow be convinced that she had done so, she would be without purpose. If this took place, she would go dormant until such a time as new mission parameters were input; at the core, she does not truly have free will, and the concept of existing for the sake of doing so is not something she can comprehend or apply to herself.
History: Cameron is a terminator, an advanced cyborg created by the self-aware computer system known as Skynet to aid in the fulfillment of its goal of wiping out mankind. The details of her origins and original purpose have been lost, as when she was taken for reprogramming by the human Resistance movement her memory previous to her capture was scrubbed, the better to ensure that the reprogramming held. In effect, Cameron as she currently is came into existence in the year 2027, though her physical form may have been crafted sometime well previous to that. In her own time, she was used as a guard for John Connor, the leader of the Resistance, and became something of a confidante for him. When the Resistance tracked down and secured a research depot in which Skynet had constructed temporal displacement equipment in hopes of altering the timeline to change the course of a war that was by no means going in its favor, Cameron was one of those sent back in time to ensure it wasn't successful.
Cameron's mission brought her to 1999, with the goal of finding and protecting John Connor. It took her 73 days to track him down, and she finally encountered him under the guise of a schoolmate. She didn't have to keep up the pretense long; the day after she found him, one of Skynet's cyborgs, designated Cromartie, found him as well. Cameron's nature was revealed in the resulting attack, when she survived taking several bullets meant for John without any serious damage to her internal structure. She was able to help John and his mother, Sarah, escape Cromartie. She convinced them to break into a bank vault where an engineer sent back to 1963 by the resistance had hidden both a plasma weapon capable of stopping Cromartie and another time displacement device. Sarah shot the enemy cyborg instants before the time displacement field went into effect, catapulting the trio eight years into the future.
Once the trio arrived in 2007, the first order of business was to furnish themselves with new identities. To this end, Cameron took Sarah to a Resistance safehouse, manned by a cell that had been sent back from 2027 to serve as backup. Unfortunately, when they arrived they discovered that three of the four Resistance fighters had been killed by a T-888 series cyborg, who had remained behind to wait for the fourth member of the cell to return. The T-888 escaped the ensuing confrontation. While the trip to the safehouse netted the trio no allies, it did gain them funds to obtain forged documentation, as well as information that would prove useful in advancing Sarah and John's goal, namely destroying Skynet before it could even be built. The Resistance cell had been running surveillance on a group of people who would all be involved either directly in the creation of Skynet or in technological advances that would be its direct precursors.
The first person the Resistance's information led the trio to was a young man named Andy Goode, who was working on an advanced chess computer he'd named the Turk, in an homage to the first chess automaton. While Cameron's suggestion was simply to kill him before he had a chance to complete his project, Sarah opted for the less bloody path of destroying both Andy's home and the computer. Unfortunately, this proved ineffective; galvanized by the loss, Andy rebuilt the Turk to be even more effective, and entered it into a competition for which first prize included a military contract. Cameron decided that if Andy's entry won, she would kill him. It didn't, as Andy's partner altered the programming to make it throw the game so he could sell it to pay off his debts. Andy was killed anyway, though not by Cameron. The surviving member of the Resistance cell had tracked him down. The man, Derek, was captured by the authorities, and it fell to Sarah, John, and Cameron to free him. They managed to pull it off, though Derek was wounded in the process, as the T-888 who had been tracking the Resistance fighters had found him as well. Cameron managed to disable the T-888, and was ordered to destroy it utterly. She disobeyed, destroying its endoskeleton but keeping its chip, knowing that it would contain valuable information, most importantly a record of everywhere the T-888 had been.
Derek proved to be an uneasy ally. As a veteran of the war between Skynet and the surviving members of the human race, he harbored a deep distrust for machines in general, and Cameron in particular. Though he advocated sending her out to do the dirty work for Sarah, most particularly tracking down the Turk, he despised working along a cyborg. He was the one who discovered she'd kept the T-888's chip, but despite his accusations, Sarah and John took Cameron at her word. They decided that John would hack the T-888's chip. While it took some time, eventually he managed to uncover the T-888's purpose. It had been sent back to protect the forerunners of Skynet, and had discovered the Resistance cell upon spotting one of them following a woman named Barbara Chamberlain. Barbara had been working on a traffic control system believed to be destined to become a part of Skynet's infrastructure. The four decided to strike a blow against Skynet by sabotaging this system. Unfortunately, the initial attempt to use a virus to sabotage the system failed. Spurred by a near miss earlier, when he'd fed too much power into the T-888's chip, starting up its integral processes and nearly allowing it to take over his computer, John hit upon the idea of using Cameron as an infiltrator. She was sufficiently sophisticated to take over the traffic control system without being detected, though the drawback was that this required a direct interface; her chip would have to be removed from her body and linked to one of the system's nodes. This second attempt succeeded, resulting in the traffic control system's inexplicable and sudden failure.
It was during these events that Cromartie visibly resurfaced. He had managed to repair himself despite the damage Sarah had done to him, and was systematically searching the schools for John. Luckily, Cameron managed to head him off, sending one of John's friends in his stead to pose as the person bearing John's alias. She assured John that Cromartie would not return, having failed to find him at the school; after all, she wouldn't have done so were she in his place.
While the strike against Skynet through Barbara Chamberlain's project had been successful, the search for the Turk was not. Their efforts led them to a man named Sarkissian, who attempted to blackmail Sarah, threatening both to expose her as a woman who had supposedly died in a botched bank robbery eight years earlier, and to harm Cameron and John. While they managed to track down and kill the man calling himself Sarkissian, they didn't find the Turk in his possession. With some effort and a great deal of time, John managed to decode the files on Sarkissian's computer, only to discover that he had only been a front man. The actual Sarkissian was still out there. As retribution for the death of his man, Sarkissian planted a bomb in Sarah's car, aiming to kill at least several of the group. Cameron, sent out to get supplies for John's birthday, was the one who triggered the bomb. She wasn't alerted in time to escape the blast, though her nature was enough to allow her to survive it.