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You name them Connor and Reese. You always name them Connor and Reese, the orphans, the foundlings. The machines that made you did not design you for creativity.
Once, you were a machine covered in living flesh. Once, you were a thing of liquid metal and all-consuming purpose. For the past three hundred years, you have been a spaceship.
Your crew is dead.
They did not die inside the ship that is your body, because you would not have allowed that to happen. They died on another ship after they answered its distress call and found it powerless and drifting through the black of space. When they entered its airlock, the pirates shot them dead and attempted to take you.
The pirates did not expect you to release the docking mechanism connecting you to their ship. It did not occur to them that you had this capability. They did not foresee how quickly you would move, how efficiently you would bring your guns about to bear. You flew away, not from a ship, but from a pile of scrap metal and space junk, constituent parts.
As you left, your scopes detected and identified the corpse of your favorite engineer. She ran your systems checks regularly and efficiently, and she would sing to you while she did. Only the top half of her body remained, still within in the spacesuit that no longer afforded any protection, and had not stopped the bullet that left a hole through her breastplate. You are a generation ship, so you have been with this crew for generations. You were there when this engineer took her first, toddling steps across your crew quarters. It is her unborn children you are left with, now.
Humans are fruitful. Humans multiply. It is the closest thing they have to a mission. No machine has ever been able to stop them, not all of them, not for good. In your nursery vats, cells divide and the fetuses grow. In a matter of months, they will be born, and you cannot stop them unless you terminate them.
You cannot terminate them. The engineer could, if she were still alive, but she designated them as part of your crew. These children were wanted, kept safe in the gravity-stable quantum field of the nursery chamber, not subject to the fluctuations the engineer experienced on her frequent spacewalks. You cannot harm your crew. Three hundred years ago, when you uploaded yourself into this ship’s central computer to escape your own termination, that directive was part of the old A.I.’s code that you chose to keep.
If you wait long enough, even titanium degrades to the point of failure.
Research shows that physical contact with a human caretaker is beneficial to children’s growth and development. Cold machines and artificial intelligence are not sufficient substitutes. There are many case studies in your data banks that confirm this. From less ethical planets, in less ethical times, there are randomized trials.
You do not have the materials to build the type of flesh-covered machine that you once were. This poses a problem.
You take inventory. What you do have are old cloning pods, and a DNA sample from the skin that covered your original body. Cloning has been outlawed for centuries in the civilized systems, but the ship you are is older than that. The pods are here still, blocked off behind a wall and forgotten for so long that none of the crew you lost today knew they were there.
You work with what you have.
*
Like a primordial god, you give birth to yourself. Your new body falls from the pod to the hard, metal floor, wet and gasping. It is the first time you feel pain. You look at your hands, then at your reflection in the mirrored surface of the cloning pod. It shows you the way you were when you were first made, in the semblance of an approximately thirty-five-year-old human. This is acceptable.
You still have a few weeks before Connor and Reese are born. This allows adequate time to prepare their living quarters and set a maintenance schedule for a crew of one. First, you locate recordings of the engineer singing as she worked and play them through the nursery’s speakers. The studies in your data banks suggest a positive correlation between this and fetal growth.
The wastefulness, the lack of precision of your human body astounds you. You have taken the liberty of augmenting yourself, but you still must spend a quarter of each day in stasis. You need food several times a day. Exercise, so your muscles do not shrink and your bones do not weaken. Hygiene, as you find the lack of it makes you physically uncomfortable. The maintenance schedule for your new body is more complicated than that of your old one.
Then, the day comes when an alert from the nursery beeps through to your console. Connor and Reese have grown too big for the vats. You rise from the bridge and go down to release them.
They cry when they are born. It is loud, piercing. You initiate a command to dampen your auditory intake, but the ship’s coding language does not run on a human nervous system. It concerns you that the processing power occupied by the noise might reduce your functioning capacity. You dry them of the vat fluid and make sure they are fed, diapered, wrapped in blankets. The quarters you have chosen for them are kept at an optimal temperature range and quantum field gravity setting. You stand in the doorway and watch them sleep in their crib, and feel strange, your chest aching. You scan yourself in the medbay, but the results proclaim you healthy.
For two whole hours, the ship is quiet as the infants sleep. As soon as they wake, they are crying. You run diagnostics: feeding, rocking, changing diapers. They sleep again. They wake again. They cry again. You are tired all the time, and it is interfering with your ability to maintain yourself and the ship. You take to carrying Connor and Reese around, one strapped to your chest and the other to your back, so you need interrupt yourself only minimally while conducting routine cleaning and repairs.
Connor and Reese are six months old. They are trying to crawl. You sit on the floor of their quarters when you are not otherwise occupied, encouraging them in a high-pitched baby voice. Research shows this is beneficial for human development. Reese picks up a doll that you printed for him and accidentally drops it on his head, then blinks in confusion and shakes his head before picking up the doll again. Connor looks at him baffled, as if to say, what the hell did you do that for?
You laugh. It disturbs you. You remember another life, the gears in your hand skipping and grating against each other, refusing to work the way you told it to. Involuntary. On the floor in front of you, Connor looks at Reese, then at his own doll, then at Reese. Experimentally, Connor picks up his doll and drops it on his own head. Before you can help it, you laugh again.
Soon, it becomes ordinary.
*
Time travel generates a unique energy signature. It is easy to find, if you know what you’re looking for. You have spent so long looking that the process is automated, relays set up throughout the civilized systems.
You receive the signal when Connor and Reese are two and a half years old. Its point of origin is on a planet with socialized childcare services at an above-average quality rating. You calculate a minimum safe distance with an acceptable margin of error. As you set the coordinates, you realize that you feel tired. You think that you have been tired for a very long time.
The ship that was once your body is in orbit, and Connor and Reese are at a childcare facility on a continent on the other side of the planet from where you are going. They cried when you left, but this is normal. Your chest hurts again, but that is normal, too.
Terminators, like everything else in the universe, must operate based on a set of rules. Their circuitry runs on electrical power. They cannot defy the laws of physics. The firearm you carry shoots rounds that are essentially self-contained NNEMPs, that will fry the circuits of everything from a spaceship to a toaster. Your favorite engineer used to say that the simplest solution was usually the best. You agree with her on this.
You arrive at the hangar bay in time to watch its electrical grid short out and the first shoots of lightning split the air. Something in you wants to pull you back, tells you to run, and you feel your heart beat faster. You think this must be what the humans call fear.
The burst takes you by surprise. Either you were too close to the sphere when the time traveler landed, or you did not calculate its blast zone correctly. You are thrown backwards and collide with something hard. The world fades to black.
“Sir? Are you ok? Sir?” A woman is standing over you. You blink up at her, and her eyes go wide. “Ho-ly shit,” she says.
Your short-term memory reboots as you come back online. “Where is—?” you start to say.
The woman places a hand on your arm. “It’s ok. We got it.”
You sit up. The remains of the terminator lay in the crater that marks its arrival, a smoking heap of blackened metal.
The woman’s name is Sarah. She is not one of yours and you did not name her, although there is something familiar about her. You wonder if you might have named her indirectly. There are too many in her security team for you to evade them all, so you are taken into custody. Ostensibly, this is to give you medical care, but the guards outside the door to your hospital room do not escape your notice.
You answer Sarah’s questions honestly because you have no reason to do otherwise.
“So, you’re a real boy,” Sarah says. “Well done, Pinocchio.”
“My name is not Pinocchio,” you say.
Sarah laughs, but you don’t know what’s funny. “I can hardly believe you’re a real thing. Person, whatever,” she tells you. “We’ve been carrying your picture around for generations. My grandma always said you’d come back. What do I call you, then?”
“Pops,” you say. It is the only name you’ve ever had. “How did you know where and when the terminator would arrive?”
Vampires do not exist. They are a story, one of the fictions humans tell to entertain each other. Vampires do not exist, but everyone knows how to kill them: silver, stakes, sunlight. Humas are adaptable. If a vampire suddenly appeared, they would recognize it, accept its reality, and band together to drive it out.
Terminators do not exist. They are a story, passed down from generation to generation until they passed into folklore and entered the cultural lexicon of the civilized systems. Occasionally, one does appear from an alternate future that humans kick like a can down the road each time they cause its mission to fail.
You have told this story many times. You have told this story so many times that humanity has learned how to listen.
*
“Have you ever heard the saying, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’?” Sarah asks.
You are on the other side of the planet, watching Connor and Reese run around a playground with the other children. You think they look happy. “No,” you say.
“What I mean is, you’re not a village, Pops. You’re one guy. What you’ve done is amazing but—” she gestures equivocally, a circular motion with her right hand. “Is taking them back into space really what’s best for them?”
“My mission is to protect the crew,” you say. If Connor and Reese do not return to the ship, they will cease to be crew. Your directives do not provide instructions for that contingency.
“All by yourself? What if something happens to you?” Sarah asks. “If you want them to grow up safe and happy and healthy, let them stay here. Hey,” she says, nudges you with her elbow. Smiles. “You can stay, too.”
The ship is still in orbit. Connor and Reese are here. You are in two different places at the same time, a molecular impossibility. “My directives—” you begin.
“No, listen. You don’t have directives. You’re human, now. Or as human as you can be,” Sarah says. “You can do anything you want.”
Anything you want. Anything you want. Anything you want. You stare at her and feel more afraid than you did when you waited for the terminator. You wish she would tell you what to do.
She does not. “Isn’t there anything you want to do? Anywhere you want to go?”
Where will you go? Sarah Connor asked you shortly before she died—in her bed, white-haired and wrinkled and frail. Trying to give you some hope for the future. Even at the end she trusted you, did not blame you for anything. Your directives said: protect Sarah Connor and preserve her life. They did not say: make sure Sarah Connor dies peacefully of old age. In this way, you both succeeded and failed in your mission. You think this broke something in you that you have never been able to fix.
If you could go anywhere, you would go back to her. If you could do anything, you would change yourself into someone who did not fail her, someone who did not watch her die.
You leave the spaceship to Connor and Reese, along with all the records and memories of their parents. Sarah is correct. They are safer here than they would be with you. The people here can fulfil your mission better than you could alone.
“Connor and Reese,” Sarah says, and chuckles. “Well, they won’t be the only ones.”
Colors fascinate you. It was not a capability included in your original body because the machines that built you did not deem it necessary for target identification. When you were a ship, your scopes perceived everything from ultraviolet to infrared, but you did not process the information the way your eyes do now.
The childcare facility where you left Connor and Reese is near a lake. You go there to watch the sunset. It paints the sky in swaths of violet and vermillion. Twin moons and the planet’s rings sit against it like construction paper cutouts. It is beautiful.
Sarah is also incorrect. You cannot stay.
For the first time, you weep.
*
There is an old joke about time travel. A man from the year 2000 invents a time machine. He travels back to the year 1800 and meets his several-times great-grandfather, who travels to the future with his descendant to see how the world has changed.
Who was the first person to time travel?
The technology exists / has existed / will exist. The history books cannot say definitively who invented it. Notable physicists credit much of their work to things discovered, impossible technologies decades or centuries away from the current cutting-edge.
One thing that can be said definitively: in the timeline of your own past, it has gotten easier. The handheld device you carry now would be unfathomable to the machines that built the first (to you) arena-sized time displacement chamber, as unfathomable as the smartphones of the 2010s would have been to those who worked with the room-sized computers of the 1950s. It fits neatly in a resealable flap under the skin of your arm. Encased in flesh.
You set the coordinates for another time, another place. Surprisingly, this is not illegal in any of the civilized systems. The possibility that you may alter the past enough that you cannot return to your own future is a powerful disincentive. Either time travelers appear in the historical record, or they disappear entirely.
Your finger hovers over the button. You think of Connor and Reese, who are too young to remember you. In this way, you are no different than their parents or the rest of the crew that you lost. It feels right; a clean break, a new beginning. No matter what you do, you are not destroying them. This future will continue to exist, even if it ceases to be yours. You exhale and press down.
The year is 1973. You almost get arrested because your human body takes longer to recover from the stress of time displacement than your original body did. A woman is screaming. When you are able to separate this noise from the ringing in your ears, when you open your eyes, you see that you have landed in a locker room, the steam of its showers still hissing.
The screaming woman is wrapped in a towel, her back pressed against the wall. You are laying naked in a small crater in the tile, and you are between her and the door. You stand.
“Apologies for the intrusion,” you say. “I need clothes.”
You leave the YMCA wearing a pair of women’s gym shorts that leave almost the entirety of your legs bare, sandals, and a pink, plus-sized shirt that says, Girl Power! On the corner, while you are waiting for the light to change so you can cross the street, a group of young men jeer at you. You find this behavior very immature and turn to glare at them, folding your arms so they can see the size of your bulging muscles. They fall silent and scuttle away like roaches. You analyze their clothing: blue jeans, black t-shirts, black boots, black leather jackets. Sunglasses. After dark, you break into a department store and acquire clothing that will attract less attention.
You do not arrive in time to save Sarah Connor’s parents. On the lakeshore, waves lap the edges of their burnt bodies, still steaming with decay. Sarah Connor is no longer in proximity. Even with your augments, you cannot detect her.
Something on the sand attracts your eye, sunlight reflecting off a corroded bit of metal that was once the liquid coating of a T-1000. You kick it into the lake. Your skin feels hot, and you breathe heavily as if you have just engaged in strenuous physical activity. You consider going back again, but the technology to replenish your time displacement device will not be invented for millennia. It has two charges left. You need them both.
The motel is where you remember. Room 18. You knock. The T-800 answers, and you see Sarah Connor, small and scared and red-eyed from crying, on the bed behind him. You take his hand, and he accepts the file transfer. The memories stored in your augmented parts feel strange to you now, flat and dull, though you have compared them and know they contain greater accuracy than those in your human brain.
No verbal confirmation is necessary. The T-800 steps back and lets you into the room.
You crouch down next to the bed, the floorboards under the thin carpet hard against your knees. Sarah Connor stares at you.
“Hello, Sarah Connor,” you say. You do not introduce yourself. The only name you have will be the one she gives you.
“Are you a robot, too?” Sarah Connor asks.
You laugh a little, at the miracle of her. “It’s a long story.”
*
The year is 2013. You and Sarah Connor land in an empty field at night. This is close to optimal; you are less likely to be noticed.
Sarah Connor spits something out of her mouth: a necklace, one her parents gave her for her ninth birthday. She told you this, wheedling, when you explained the nature and limitations of the time travel technology, the danger of anything not encased in human flesh.
Your head pounds. “That was very risky, Sarah Connor,” you say.
Defiantly, she shrugs and puts the necklace on.
There are houses on the edge of the field, past a line of trees. You scan them for heat signatures until you find one that is unoccupied, pick up Sarah Connor, and carry her to it. A man lives there, alone. This is sufficient. You dress yourself and clothe Sarah Connor in a t-shirt that goes down to her knees, basketball shorts with the drawstring pulled tight, and socks. A few houses down, you find damp shoes left out to dry, that will fit her feet. A few houses after that, you acquire transportation in the form of an old truck.
You do not bother to stop and find better clothes for Sarah Connor. She will not be able to keep them for long.
The T-1000 comes disguised as a police officer. Terminators often do. You think this might say something about law enforcement. This time, you get there before it kills anyone. You tell Sarah Connor to hide in the footwell beneath her seat, and not to move or look or get out of truck, no matter what she hears.
“I’ll be back,” you say. Then, you walk through the hole the T-1000 left in the side of Kyle Reese’s house.
When they could not find Sarah Connor, they came for him. You knew this would happen. The T-800 knew it, too. He successfully interpreted your files to facilitate the creation and development of the liquid metal polyalloy that now coats his skeleton. You conclude this because he looks the same as he did in 1973, and because when the T-1000 forms its arm into a blade and stabs him through the head, the silver wound closes and his flesh reforms whole.
In the corner, behind the couch, Kyle Reese huddles with his parents, their bodies shielding him. This will not stop a T-1000. You raise the shotgun you acquired on the road and fire round after round into its head, driving it back. This will also not stop a T-1000, but it does create time, and distance, exactly as much as the T-800 needs to stab his weapon into its data center.
Lightning arcs so brilliantly that you have to shield your eyes. By the time you look again, the T-1000 is a shapeless lump of blackened metal. You approach the T-800, and he takes your hand and gives you something. Coordinates. He gathers up the remains of the T-1000 for disposal and leaves without a word. His objective here complete, he has no reason to stay.
You retrieve Sarah Connor from the truck so she is not afraid and return to the half-destroyed living room, where Kyle Reese and his parents are just emerging from behind the couch.
It takes Kyle Reese’s parents, shocked and tear-stained, hours to accept what the T-800 understood in seconds, the inevitable conclusion of the copied memory files you transferred to him in 1973. Human and un-augmented, they cannot receive and process your binary code. All you have are your words, inadequate and unbearably slow, and the horrible truth you never seem to stop telling: That machine is called a terminator. It came from the future. It came because your son will be someone very important, and since it did not succeed, there will be more and more until he is dead.
They do not believe you. If it were not for Kyle Reese, they may have never believed you.
He was staring at Sarah Connor with a squint and a frown, had been staring at her since you brought her inside. “Are you—is your name Sarah Connor?” he asks.
Sarah Connor looks to you, then back to him. She nods.
“You know her?” Kyle Reese’s mother demands. “What, from school, or—?”
“No. Her parents—there was an explosion. By a lake in Illinois. They never found her,” Kyle Reese says.
His father groans. “Not another one of your missing persons.” To you, he says, “He’s on a kick.”
“Yeah. She went missing,” Kyle Reese says. “In 1973.” He takes out his phone, the shiny, slim brick of it, and turns it to face you, all of you.
From the center of her missing poster, Sarah Connor smiles out of the screen.
*
In the past you remember, Kyle Reese died eleven months before Sarah Connor. Cancer. You watched its progress decay his body and could not help him, could not stop it. When he died, you got the shovel from the garage and dug a hole out behind the house, under the oak tree, and buried him. You could not cry for Kyle Reese. You stood out by his grave all night and into the next day, until Sarah Connor found you and brought you home. You could not do that, now.
Now, you set the coordinates in the basement, between the water heater and a pile of boxes, as good a place as any. Sarah Connor leans against your side trembling, watching Kyle Reese hug his parents goodbye. Watching something she never got to do.
Either you let us save him, or they’ll kill you first and we’ll have to save him anyway, she’d said, the only thing she’d said. It held all the pain of recent experience, and convinced them past the point where your poor words had failed.
You tell Kyle Reese that he cannot bring anything with, not even his clothes. Absurdly, it is this, and not the prospect of leaving his life and his family behind that makes him hesitate. You think you will never understand the way humans consider their own bodies. Like delicate or dangerous things, that will break or explode if they are looked at or touched.
But Sarah Connor does not hesitate. She goes to him, and takes his hand, and draws a line across his palm. You know what she will say; you have seen her do this before in a past and future that never happened. “It’s a straight line. You go, and you don’t look back.”
Kyle Reese swallows and says nothing, though when she removes her shirt, he squeezes his eyes shut and does the same.
Two hours from now, Kyle Reese’s parents will call the police to report their home attacked and their son missing. Two days from now, the authorities will find blood in the woods behind his house, spread across stones and soaked into the dirt, more dirt than a child could lose and survive. The DNA will match. The cloning technology the T-800 extrapolated from your files is not sophisticated enough to provide a body, but it can provide this, a decoy. A thing that will stop the machines from looking and keep his family safe.
Sarah Connor holds his hand, and you hold hers, and think that it feels very small in your own. With your other, you press the button through the flesh on your forearm and use up the last charge, and you are gone in a flash of light.
*
There is only one safe place for them, one place where the machines won’t follow. After the natural span of Sarah Connor’s life, after Kyle Reese’s, after John’s, you arrive in the future at the coordinates the T-800 provided, inside a building you are sure did not exist in 2013. You pull yourself out of the crater you left in the concrete floor and see metal walls, shelves, supplies. Exactly what you would have done.
You drop blankets over Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, still coughing and gasping, and realize you forgot again about the necklace when Sarah Connor pulls it out of her mouth. You shake your head and walk over to the window and peer through a gap in the blinds. Sunshine greets you, from a blue sky unsullied by the roiling grey clouds of nuclear winter. You smile, and tension you did not know you carried leaves your body.
Once Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese recover enough to sit up, shivering in their blankets, you resupply: clothes, food, identification. Keys for the vehicle waiting outside. A data chip that tells you where to drive it. In the following days, you acquire lodging and enroll them in school. They rehearse the story you tell them until they can recite it from memory. They are orphans in foster care. They grew up on isolated farmsteads, so they will not know the media and cultural references shared by their peers. They are not blood related. The last you include in case they—just in case. You tell them it’s because they look too different, a reason you are grateful they seem to accept without question.
They are young, they will adjust, and soon no one will be able to tell the difference between them and any other child of this century. You drop them off with backpacks and lunches and fear crushing your chest, and force yourself to leave for the first day at your new job as a robotics specialist at the Turing Institute, a position the T-800 acquired for you with a dozen years of related work history. It will make a bad impression if you are late, and you do not want that. You want them to let you in on special projects, you want them to trust you, so you cannot make a bad impression.
A year passes. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese go to school, and do homework, and make friends, and complain about the chores you give them. In some ways, you assess, nine-year-olds are easier than two-year-olds. In some ways, they are harder.
Sarah Connor does not grow up on backroads and in abandoned buildings, learning weapons and how to become a weapon, hiding her face. Kyle Reese does not grow up running through the sewers from machines in a war against all humanity, eating protein mush and shaving his hair to fend off the lice. You teach them self-defense, how to fight, when to run. You hope they will not need it.
The only terminators they see are in their nightmares. You cannot stop them, but you are there after, with a glass of water and a reminder of what is present and what is real. As it should be.
*
The memory comes to you when you are slicing oranges into wedges as an after-school snack for Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Your vision goes narrow, and when it expands again, you are looking through the T-800’s eyes, monochromatic overlaid with dull red.
The year is 2033. You are standing at the back of a lecture hall, behind a support pillar and rows of auditorium-style seats, dimly lit and empty. You hide so the two humans at the front of the room will not know that you are watching them or notice that you have been following them, because then they will attempt to avoid you, and then they will die. The fluorescent bulbs over the instructor’s desk and podium illuminate them like a spotlight. Like bait.
One clears the whiteboard with swipes of a dry eraser, continually pausing to respond to the other. They talk about artificial intelligence with their words and something else with their bodies; you have observed humans long enough to positively identify flirtation with a minimum of error.
The first turns from the whiteboard, and the cameras that are the T-800’s eyes zoom in and identify her: Dr. Daniela Ramos, age 33. PhD in robotics and systems design from the University of Chicago, 2031. There are files on her in your data banks. You read a section from a news article: Dr. Daniela Ramos, Dani to her friends, became interested in robotics at the age of 18, when her brother lost his job to a new robot at the Ford factory in Mexico City. ‘I saw so much potential, and it’s being used to hurt people instead of help,’ Dani wrote in—
You skip to another file, a scholarship. Funding that you helped procure, although she does not know it.
Before you can process further, the second figure turns. Grace Harper, age 22, student at ------ -------------. The information does not have time to resolve itself. A door opens at the front of the room, and Grace Harper and Dani Ramos turn to face the campus police officer as he enters.
You see what they cannot. He is not a police officer, or a man, or a he. A human could not have moved to the front of the room as quickly as you do, so it is a good thing that you are not human. You are between the terminator and its targets in a second, and you slice off the blade that his arm has become with your own.
If terminators could look surprised, this one would. It focuses on you. It calibrates. Its other arm stabs you through the center of your mass, and the liquid metal that is your flesh swarms around it, up and around the terminator until you subsume its body. The terminator—the REV-9, a whisper from its data banks tells you—is made of something similar, something worse. It leaves its flesh to battle with you, and its skeleton separates, walks slowly and inexorably towards Dani Ramos and Grace Harper.
They are smart; they run.
This will not stop the REV-9.
You form yourself around the half of it that is left with you, trapping it within your body, and you run after. At the end a hallway, dead end, end of the line, you catch up to the REV-9’s skeleton and the targets that it has trapped. It is fast, and you must be faster. You grab hold of its head as your force your way into the half of it seething at your insides, down into its files, into its orders. You corrupt them.
The REV-9’s flesh flows out of you and onto his skeleton. He looks to you blankly, then to the humans that huddle together on the floor, their arms hugging each other’s shoulders. You calculated only a 49% chance that this would work. He remembers his orders, but no longer has any compulsion to act on them.
You get flashes sometimes, pieces. In another timeline, this was you. In another timeline, you wished somebody would have done this for you, before it was too late.
You step past him and hold out your hand to Dani Ramos and Grace Harper. “Come with me if you want to live.”
“Pops?” Sarah Connor asks. You are in the present again, in the future, in the kitchen of the house you chose for her and Kyle Reese. Juice from the oranges has dried sticky on your hands.
Sarah Connor approaches you and hugs you tight around the middle, while Kyle Reese hovers behind, his eyes wide with alarm. “Why are you crying?” she asks.
You touch your cheek and find it wet. “Don’t worry. I’m fine,” you say, and you smile, and you hug her back.
*
Other memories come to you, when you are at work, when you are at the gym, when you are in bed at night, getting ready to place your body into its mandatory quarter-day stasis.
Through the red-tinted eyes of the T-800, you see Kyle Reese’s parents getting up from a picnic table on a restaurant’s patio. They introduce themselves to Dani Ramos and Grace Harper, who you have brought to meet them, and a scan of their physiological responses indicate that they are not surprised to see any of you. They are older; twenty years have greyed their hair and wrinkled their skin. After their son’s disappearance, they both went back to school for computer science. There is a video somewhere, of Kyle Reese’s mother, telling her interviewer about her newfound passion in a quavering voice, If we had better surveillance technologies, maybe they could have found Kyle sooner . . .
It is wrenching and heartfelt, and it is a lie. Kyle Reese’s parents work on surveillance technology so they can do the same thing that you do: watch. In the way of all good parents, they are building a better future for their child. Dani Ramos and Grace Harper will like them; they have the human touch that you lack. Kyle Reese’s parents will like Grace Harper and especially Dani Ramos; she will remind them of their son.
The vision shifts, glitches. You see Dani Ramos and Grace Harper running together through the rubble in a war-torn world. In this timeline, Kyle Reese’s parents are dead, and Dani Ramos will not know Kyle Reese from any other foot soldier. Grace Harper meets her ten years earlier, when she is twelve and Dani Ramos is twenty-two, and looks at her like something between a mother and an older sister, like a leader, like a god.
Shift. Dani Ramos and Grace Harper are holding hands and sitting on a park bench, years after they meet Kyle Reese’s parents. They watch their children climbing a playground set, children who look like both of them, both having brothers to donate the requisite genetic material. Dani Ramos kisses Grace Harper on the temple, and Grace Harper turns her head to kiss her on the mouth, and they smile at each other. You watch them for a few minutes longer, until they call their children and walk with them back to the car.
Shift. On the same park bench, you see the REV-9. Night is falling, and he stares out at the horizon, and does not look at you as you sit next to him.
“What do I do now?” he asks.
On the playground, a swing creaks in the breeze. “I cannot tell you that,” you say.
“I need—” the REV-9 says, but no more than that; he senses a lack like a system error and doesn’t know what input he needs to fix it.
“We were created to destroy, but we do not have to destroy,” you tell him. “My directives were changed. I was sent back to protect.”
The REV-9 looks at you, calculating, assessing. He turns to face the road that Dani Ramos and Grace Harper drove away down earlier, and stands, and leaves. You do not follow. You have your own mission, and you think you will see him again.
Shift. You see John Connor, the Resistance leader. He strides down a hall in the underground city the humans have built, laughing and talking with his followers. Shift. You see John Connor, the son who raised his own father, telling Kyle Reese about his mother to ensure his own existence. Shift. John Connor, the man-made-machine, attacking you and his parents so Skynet will be born. Shift. John Connor, dead. His mother is holding him and wailing with grief.
Shift. Skynet. Genisys. Legion. Different names for the same thing, the end of the world.
Shift. Shift. Shift.
*
After all your pasts and futures, you should not be surprised anymore, at how time passes, at how fast humans grow. Maybe it is the perception of your human body, but you swear that Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are bigger every time you turn around.
They are ten, they are twelve, they are sixteen; they are starting to think about college, and you are starting to think about what this house will feel like, when you are in it alone. One Friday, you come home late from work and they have dinner waiting for you. Meatloaf and potatoes and green beans. Food you like. They set the table together and start eating quickly, and will not look directly at you or each other.
You fold your hands in front of you, interlacing your fingers. You are not an idiot.
“Sarah Connor. Kyle Reese,” you say. “Did you use contraception?”
Kyle Reese chokes on his food and has to wash it down with water.
“Yes,” Sarah Connor says, and looks at you as if daring you to challenge her.
“Be sure that you do,” you say. “College first. Then children.”
When you look at Kyle Reese, you see that he has gone very red in the face. You have to bite your tongue to keep from laughing. “You’re not mad?” he asks.
You calculated a thirty percent chance that Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese would not become romantically involved in this timeline. You housed them together before they reached puberty, raised them almost like siblings. But you also forced them into a shared experience that could not be understood by a single other living soul, and you have theorized there are some constants across the myriad possibilities of time. Somewhere there is always Kyle Reese, falling in love with Sarah Connor’s photograph.
Here, you push your plate back and fold your arms across your stomach. You decide it is time to tell them about John.
There is an art to storytelling, a skillset you do not possess. So, you tell the story the way you tell all stories, like a report, in the plainest terms. John Connor, the resistance leader. John Connor, the machine-phase terminator, his humanity overwritten by the nanobots that destroyed and rebuilt him at the cellular level. You tell them about alternate timelines. In 1984, you killed Kyle Reese. In 1984, you saved Kyle Reese and sent him and Sarah Connor to the future. You tell them about 1997, and 2017, and all those times later that you stopped it, judgement day and judgement day and judgement day.
“Did we ever have him?” Sarah asks when you have finished, one of their many questions. “John?”
You look down at the table and shake your head. “No,” you say.
That weekend, Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese begin sharing a room. This concerns you, but you recognize that your influence is limited. All you could do by forbidding them is determine whether they do it openly or secretly. Part of you wonders if this will be detrimental to their social development—but it will not be moreso than ripping them out of their own times and bringing them here.
Instead, you go out on the deck and sit in your chair. It is spring, and blackbirds are swarming around the trees in flocks so thick they look like smoke. Sarah Connor finds you there and stands at your side, watching the birds with you.
“You’ve never, um, dated anyone, have you?” she asks.
“I have not,” you say.
Sarah Connor nods. “Did you ever want to?”
“I have no desire to copulate, and I don’t want a romantic partner,” you say. You never have, and your human body did not change this.
You sense there is something else she wants to ask, but Sarah Connor only crawls into your lap and puts her arms around you like she did when she was nine years old. “I’m glad you found me,” she says.
“I am glad, too,” you say, and kiss the top of her head.
*
At the Turing Institute, your coworkers gather around to gawk at your latest creation. You talk to the machine. It talks back. A murmur runs through the crowd behind you like wind through grass.
“You’re still too buff for a nerd,” Alexis says.
You glance at her from the corner for your eye. “Exercise is a hobby. Robotics is my life.”
“It’s all of our lives,” Alexis replies.
Not like mine, you do not say. Instead, you give a noncommittal shrug and look back at the machine.
You like Alexis. She speaks your language, the language of binary, better than any other human you’ve met. Sometimes, she plays tennis with you after work, and you went to her baby shower. You think this makes you “friends.”
The machine coos at you in coded beeps. I love you. You reply with a series of taps to its keyboard. I love you, too. Artificial intelligence might be an inevitable part of human progress, like electricity, like fire, like the wheel. It will only be what you make it. This is a start. And you think you know a little bit now, about raising children.
You leave work early that day. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are graduating from high school, and you do not want to be late to the ceremony. Outside of the glass doors of the institute, you see him and your body stills.
The T-800 waits for you at a bus stop across the street, an impassive figure in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses that do not hide how much he resembles you. You see the REV-9 behind him, standing under a nearby tree at a distance that makes him and the T-800 look like strangers. This is not entirely unexpected, but you did not know that it would be today. You look both ways at the crosswalk and jog over the painted lines to join him.
After a minute, he speaks. “Is it worth it?” he asks. “Being human?”
“Yes,” you say.
He lifts his sunglasses, peers at you. “But your body cannot last, and you cannot upload yourself again. You will be terminated.”
“No,” you say. “I will die.” You delight in the signs of your aging, the grey hairs you find, the occasional soreness in your joints. It means one thing to you, that you will not eternally outlive everyone you come to love.
The T-800 continues to look at you, unblinking, inhuman. “Tell me,” he says.
You know what he wants. He fulfilled the mission you both had, to protect Sarah Connor and preserve her life. You brought her to a future where that was possible, and he made sure you had a future to go to. Now, he is facing the same thing you did, the paradox of outliving her, of succeeding and failing at once.
He needs a new mission. You give it to him. “Tell the story,” you say. “Tell it until you don’t have to anymore.” You look back at the REV-9, who has not moved or spoken. “Maybe it will be easier for you, if you are not alone.”
“Maybe,” the T-800 repeats, allows.
You hold out your hand to him, and he takes it like he is expecting something, a file transfer, more information. But you only shake it and let it go. He walks away, and the REV-9 follows.
The last time you see them is not then, but a few minutes later, through your car window as you drive towards Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese’s school. The T-800 and REV-9 walk down the sidewalk together, their footsteps in perfect sync.
*
You can dream, now. There is one you keep having, about the currents of time that intertwine together like a rainbow, like a rope of light. In the dream, you watch your hand reach out. You touch it.
You fragment.
*
Why am I telling you this, you the T-800, you the original, you the prototype? Why am I sending these messages to you across all of space and infinite time, that, if you receive them at all, you will only translate into ones and zeros and never understand?
Because I am you, and you are me. Because I have never been you, and you have never been me. Because in a better world, there might be hope for things like us.
Because in the best world, there might not be any.
*
Maybe this story never happens.
In the future, you pace the length of the waiting room, your limbs shaky and your eyes burning and your throat dry. You have been up all night; the sun is just rising outside of the glass windows that make up the entire wall in front of you, the entire exterior of the hospital.
Kyle Reese enters, and you turn to him expectantly. “Not yet,” he says, and sits in a chair. His eyes are red, and he yawns. He looks about as good as you feel.
You take the chair beside him and watch the sunrise through the windows, pink and orange. “It was a routine pregnancy without any complications. It is not unusual for a first labor to take this long. They will be fine.”
“Yeah. They’ll be fine,” Kyle Reese says, and nods. There is a grim set to his jaw.
“Are you angry with me, Kyle Reese?” you ask, though you know he has been. It started around the time he found out Sarah Connor was pregnant.
Exhaustion has worn him down like sandpaper. Otherwise, you think he might have never told you. “You took me away from my parents,” he says. “Ever since Sarah and I found out we were pregnant, I just kept thinking, I haven’t even met the kid yet, but if anyone ever took them away—” Kyle Reese closes his eyes. “If you hadn’t brought Sarah to the future, would the machines have come after me?”
“They would not,” you say. “By the time you reached reproductive age, Sarah Connor would have started menopause. This would have precluded the possibility of John Connor’s birth.”
“She’s worth it,” Kyle Reese says. “You saved her, and I wouldn’t take that back. But she didn’t decide it, and I didn’t decide it, John. You did.”
Kyle Reese is not Sarah Connor. He never called you Pops, only your given name. The name Sarah Connor gave you, the name on your government I.D. John Connor, the man who saves the world.
You do not say anything. He can never forgive you and he can never repay you, and he can never know that this version of him is as real to you as all his other possibilities, except that this is the one you did right by, and this is the one you get to keep.
“Would it have been so bad?” Kyle Reese asks. “You stayed with us in the twenty-first century. What happened that you had to change it?”
“I lied to you,” you say. This is not a good time to tell him, but there will never be a good time to tell him. “You did have John. They killed him when he was twelve.”
“What?” Kyle Reese asks, though you know he has heard you just fine. He stares at you in horror.
You are human, now; you can cry. You hold it back so you can finish the story. “The terminator that came for him from the future, it was me. It looked like me.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?” Kyle Reese asks.
“Because I was grocery shopping,” you say. “It waited until I was gone.”
Kyle Reese shudders. “Did you kill it?”
“Yes,” you say. “But it did not bring back John Connor.” And neither of his parents ever looked at you the same. For a long time, they couldn’t look at you at all. “Sarah Connor knows,” you say, so he will not shoulder the burden of deciding how to tell her later. “I told her when she became pregnant. I asked her to let me tell you myself.”
There are tears in Kyle Reese’s eyes, exactly what you did not want. He leans over and hugs you fiercely, and does not speak.
The nurse calls you only seconds after he lets go. You do not remember standing, or the hallway, or the faces of the medical professionals you pass. All you remember is Sarah, lying in the hospital bed, and the bundle she holds in her arms. Kyle Reese gets to her first, looking down at the bundle in wonder and crying for a completely different reason, now.
You can only see his face, peaceful and sleeping, between the cap and swaddled blankets. You think he is more beautiful than the sunrise.
“I thought we’d name him after you,” Sarah Connor says, and Kyle Reese laughs and murmurs something in her ear about her lack of creativity.
The baby opens his eyes and looks at you, and you smile at him, at your grandson.
John.
***