John heard them in the corner and recognised the voices. He shut the door the last inch over with a click when he wanted to slam it.

Skynet. Camps. Holocaust. Genocide. Over ninety percent of the human race gone.

It should have been the most dramatic events in history- he was living on the contours of history, living right in the flux. To everyone else, that's exactly what it was. For him, somehow it felt like a rerun. He supposed that in some lifetime, some parallel universe, it had been new and fragile and must have seemed entirely random. Before he'd decided to become his own prophet.

“I'm wasting my time.”

“Yes.”

He let out a quick breath and a crooked smile. Not so much his own prophet; his own architect. Precisely drawing out his future like a chess master moving pawns across a board one square at a time.

“You do that.”

He looked up at her, raising an eyebrow and tilting his head. He tried not to think of how mechanical the movement was as she mirrored it. Pop quiz time.

“Explain.”

She repeated the act, the motion more fluid. Next, he'd teach her to blink. The words took a beat to come from her lips but did not stumble.

“You have a propensity towards the inefficient allocation of-”

“I waste my time.”

“Yes.” Her head righted itself. “You waste your time.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I stare at walls.”

“Incomplete,” she replied, tilting her head again. “You also stare at doors.”

John let the silence fall as he sat at the wooden desk. It was an odd, old thing, with swirls carved into the legs (only one of them charred), but he liked it. His real business- patrol runs, finding the latest factory aside – was time. He liked to have a bit of the past beside him, real enough to touch.

He struggled to think of her as anything but Cameron, even though she wasn't there yet. Barely reprogrammed, in fact. She was a jolt, a blast and a blink- like the first time he met Derek, dragged along by Kyle to some social function or another. Kyle, his father, should have been the jolt and he should have been able to think of him as something other than Kyle, but he couldn't. That teenaged life with his mother had been easy. Some layer of the past ten or twelve alterations back and his own life post-apocalypse had been easy, he was willing to bet. But becoming who he had to be, walking through the cornfield of possible futures and deciding which to brush his closed fist against and which grains to carry on, he was beginning to lose control.

Cameron, Derek, Kyle. The model who'd protected him the first time. He knew what had to be done and where to find it, who to send back and when, almost as if it were burnt into his skin like the work camp barcode.

Cameron, Derek, Kyle; his mother. He knew who to manipulate and how. What to teach and what to order. What items to give, what clues - feelings – to plant. Trial and error, computations, making bets on the past to gain the future and never existing in either.

“Cameron,” he turned around in the chair and sat forward, hands clasped between his knees and elbows on top of them. “Tilt your head.”

She did.

“And back,” John mirrored the motion and then righted his head. She copied him. “Now blink,” he ordered. She remained still before blinking, holding her eyelids closed the barest fraction too long.

He pursed his lips, eyes on the floor, and stood. Walking to within a few feet of Cameron, he stopped. “Watch me.” He locked his eyes onto hers and blinked a number of times. Cameron nodded, a motion she'd learned the day before, and mimicked him. This time the pause, the time her eyes were closed, was perfect.

John felt something in his throat burn like the acid in the air up top, looking at her as she looked at him. He stayed just there and staring for a heartbeat too long and sat down at the desk again.

He knew what his past-self, in this latest alteration, was planning. A future without Skynet, without the war. He'd turned hard, knew what his father and his mother and his uncle would have made of his decisions – decisions as big as the last campaign and as small as staying where he was when he heard Derek's voice outside.

Once, he'd let Kyle pull him into all the socials and all the makeshift bars they made. It was important, he'd told him. Could call it infrastructure or sociology, but it was what made them human. They could fight and run until the end of time, his father before he'd fathered him had said, but it didn't mean a damn if they ended up like the machines.

The things he didn't tell them- any of them – kept him awake at night. He was a stitch in time, but that didn't make him happy. He couldn't tell his mother, father and uncle that they'd bequeathed him a life of misery for the greater good. He couldn't be a part of those socials and he couldn't be their friend because he had to play God above them.

He would send Cameron back after Derek. The two of them, together, would make the final alteration to the timeline.

Later, he watched Cameron practice in the mirror opposite his bed – she didn't sleep, even though he'd taught her how to pretend. She tilted her head, blinked and pulled her eyebrows together to form a frown.

John knew, like he'd always known, that nothing he did to the timeline would make Cameron human or born of a mother. That didn't mean he cared less, invested less in her; it meant the opposite. Cameron was a bomb and catalyst thrown into his own past, her every fibre from long hair to tone of voice calculated to get a precise reaction and loyalty from his own self. She was calculated to devastate him.

She would end it, one way or another. She knew - would know, because he would teach her how to learn and she would – that of all the reasons why Skynet couldn't be allowed to exist, they were paramount. They were each in their way a perfect synthesis of human and machine. John was numb, was inhuman and capable of inhumanity. He was the ultimate product of Skynet, going slightly mad but with enough left to realise it. With him in charge, with his being negotiating between futures and acting with inhuman knowledge, Skynet wouldn't need to end the human race. Of all the things Cameron would prevent, she would prevent him.

Cameron had to be ready, and he couldn't speed the process by releasing her amongst the troops to pick up human mannerisms and speech patterns. He would, eventually, when he could trust them not to attempt to kill her. He would, in the end, when he'd taught her how to lie.

THE END

All comment appreciated.