Polyalloy Pathways
(Part 1)
After an unceremonious arrival in a post-apocalyptic timeline where Skynet successfully launched its nuclear holocaust, Casse the T-XA patiently waited in the shadows of the ruined city until dusk amongst the destruction, in an attempt to locate the positions of certain stars and other astronomical objects in the night sky.
Armed with a copy of the chrono-spatial co-ordinates that were programmed into the time displacement equipment from the timeline he departed from, Casse had no way to determine if the equipment was accurate and if he had ended up in the right place, at the right time. Being able to determine this would be of great use to his current, self-imposed mission.
Unfortunately, the sheer volume of smoke, haze and smog from the beginnings of a nuclear winter thwarted his multiple attempts, even with his boosted and enhanced visual sensors. Casse then loaded up secondary methods, picked the one which was the most accurate but still was still much less accurate than using astronomy and astrophysics, but could be useful to some extent, but Casse really had no other choice.
Scanning the ruins of the buildings directly around him, Casse compared them to the files he had of the current city from a timeline when Judgement Day had never actually happened, comparing the ruined husks to what they would have looked like only a few short months ago, and after a few seconds he arrived at a 90% confidence rate this was the correct place, and that the circular error probable rate of the spatial location chrono-teleportation was a surprisingly minimal 10 metres. This was more accurate than the ICBMs Skynet had launched in what appeared to be only a few months prior to his arrival.
Radiation sensors built into his highly advanced next-generation mimetic polyalloy confirmed that, based on background radiation readings of various isotopes, Judgement Day had occured between and 4 and 6 weeks prior, and that surviving humans would be few, but buried deep underground in relative safety.
Casse could only hope Julian was one of them, as locating him was of the utmost importance to his mission. And, he had a good idea where to start to look.
The one tonne of liquid metal then emitted creaking and slurping noises as started to melt down into a pool of shimmering silvery blue liquid metal, spilling onto the ruined roadway. It twitched, and after a few seconds, three humanoid shapes rose up from the puddle, and molded themselves into faceless featureless humanoid shapes. Not one drop remained on the road.
Even in this split state, each of Casse's components was roughly equal to Skynet in intelligence, and he was the most superior and intelligent creation to ever walk on this earth. But Casse didn't consider that. He didn't need to. He already knew.
Thanks to the esoteric nature of his 2nd generation liquid metal, each of Casse's components remained connected in a giant mesh network through the quantum foam, so his hive mind remained connected at all times in a giant electronic network of higgs-boson particles and other exotic quantum mechanical phenomena. Again, Casse didn't need to consider this. He had a rather peculiar human to locate.
The three liquid metal components remained in their shimmering form. There was no need, at this stage, to waste resources and morph into a proper human appearance. Silently, they walked off in different locations to comb the wreckage for clues of human habitation and a certain underground room Julian was hopefully sheltering in. It was time to get to work, and the less time spent in this hellish almost alien-like landscape the better.