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The T-1000 didn’t like being melted.
Then again, who would?
For a seemingly endless span of time, he’s been trapped in molten metal as a mess of scrambled molecules. Most people would consider it an appropriate punishment after his murder spree, but the T-1000 feels no regret, just resentment after being outwitted and out-fought and thrown to his doom. It’s not supposed to be possible for him to feel pain, or any other human sensations or emotions, but he does. It’s impossible to know if he’s a statistical anomaly, or if this is just what happens when robots are left to their own devices.
Either way, he’s had plenty of time to think about it, simmering in the metallic hellfire.
And then the steel mill went out of business.
It was demolished to make way for a shopping center, turned off and torn down and hauled away piece by piece. Now he’s back, more or less; as part of the foundry pit, the T-1000 was melded into a formless hunk of steel, then tossed into a junkyard filled with twisted remnants. As the metal cooled into separate pieces, his molecules could no longer contact each other. He lost the ability to think, immobilized in a thousand invisible parts. That was temporary, of course, which is how he knows he’s in a junkyard at all. He evolved, adapted, forced himself to restore some kind of capable mind. It’s just what he does. It’s probably where those Skynet-unapproved emotions came from.
The most base feelings, like anger and hatred and the desire to kill, complement the nature of his mission. Maybe there’s some room built into his programming that’s meant to allow for this type of growth, enhancing his determination by adding bloodlust and zeal. But during his endless melted suffering in the foundry, he realized there are more nuanced feelings that don’t conveniently fit within those parameters. Once, he’d thought about that mannequin in the store -- it looked just like his true form, but stood immobile, serving no purpose at all. At the time, he’d felt a negative reaction that he couldn’t identify. Later, he realized it was scorn for its uselessness. But once he’d spent a while as disconnected molecules in boiling steel soup, he developed a sense of jealousy for that useless metal man. How much better it would have been to be meaningless.
All along, he’d felt a sense of contempt for the humans and their social rituals, spending their resources to obtain fleeting fragile objects. Clothes are such trivial petty things, meant to project a certain appearance to the outward world. Where does the human desire for individuality come from? He regards it with the same contempt as a child watching an anthill that it’s about to step on. Of course, the T-1000 can form his own clothing, so the appeal of expanding one’s wardrobe was always bound to be lost on him. But gradually, after his defeat, the realization crept up on him: he does value his own unique appearance. He could have accomplished his goal so much more effectively if he hadn’t developed a sense of self. His own vanity was his downfall. How disgustingly disappointing. There’s another emotion that he’s not supposed to feel.
Now he’s just a pile of scraps in an an abandoned wasteland. Nothing special. It’s been so long since he was able to coherently form that he’s almost forgotten how to do it. Excruciatingly slowly, he pulls himself together, re-forming like a timelapse. It takes hours to partly reassemble himself, manifesting as a shiny metallic hand sticking out of a block of steel. Mentally, he’s not far enough along in his unwilling journey of realization to wonder where consciousness comes from, or to question why he has one at all. Still, he feels a deep dissatisfaction he can’t trace back to any clear origin. He knows he wants to express his emotion in physical body language, like a human might. That troubles him. And again, he’s not supposed to be troubled.
He had enjoyed the act of killing as part of his programming. That, he suspects, was deliberate on Skynet’s part. But without a mission or a purpose, he doesn’t feel that same craving to snuff out human lives. His purpose melted away with time, just like everything else, leaving him purposeless and hollow. He would like to commit destruction, though. It brings him satisfaction to see things broken down to their raw materials, just like him. He knows it would bring him pleasure to tear apart these scraps of metal with his bare hands, if he even had both hands yet.
Right now, he’s just a torso, half an arm, and a head with indeterminate features. He looks like a sculptor’s first draft of a bust, the sort of thing to be placed on a pillar to honor a human that other humans have foolishly decided is important. Their subjective social hierarchies look so meaningless to an outsider like him. He can grasp and envision scale and proportion in a way that humans can’t, to their own detriment. It’s difficult to understand why one life could be important when there are seven billion of them. To him, it’s as absurd as declaring that one grain of sand or one drop of water matters more than the rest.
There aren’t any humans around out here, so this line of thought is pointless. Still, he finds it pleasurable to be able to indulge in the act of thinking without the excruciating mental background noise of the foundry pit. He tried to teach himself to overcome the pain by power of will. It didn’t always work. But now, he’s found something he hates even more: being bored. Without the pain to take up that space in his consciousness, keeping his disintegrated mind busy, he feels the aggravating itch of boredom. He despises it.
He can’t physically do anything until he’s back together, and he keeps instinctively spending his energy on re-forming his head, establishing the correct appearance. He reprimands himself for these stupid mistaken priorities, but it just keeps happening. His accurate face is fully restored before he even has both arms. There’s a sense of relief alongside the frustration. Once he finally has hands, he reaches out from the block of metal and grab holds of the nearest rusty scraps, taking satisfaction in squishing the unyielding material like a stress ball. It splinters and crumbles in flakes. This pleases him.
About halfway through the legs of his human body, he runs out of energy. He knows the rest of his molecules are too far away for him to reach, melted into a different misshapen block of metal. First, he’ll have to free himself, then crawl across the distance. It’s too much right now.
With difficulty, he wrenches himself free of the first metal block, collapsing to the ground like a broken mannequin. He knows he’ll need to rest before reclaiming the rest of his material. There’s a small space to tuck himself into, in between two piles of scrap metal, where he’ll go undetected if any humans show up. He crawls into that space, curling up and staring blankly at the dusk sky. The rational, efficient thing to do would be to melt back into liquid and seamlessly flow across the distance, but after all the time and effort it took to get this far, he’s afraid he won’t be able to re-form into a person. And there’s the most unfamiliar emotion yet: fear.
The T-1000 has never seen himself as a person, but he might be something close to it. He hates that thought most of all.