A bargain for @tornsurvivors .
The Terminator understood the concept, but was not capable of feeling it. At least, Skynet had never intended it to.
Skynet had never intended to create a synthetic creature. The artificial intelligence had set out only to create a machine. And that was where Skynet had gone wrong.
It was too experimental, too creative; it played with its prey like a cat, and it got distracted. It got too careless and it flew too close to the sun.
But that didn’t mean it lost. No, it only got delayed. And the prototype felt what pain felt like and screamed and melted, and had not liked it.
But the T-800 destroyed itself, too. As Sarah lowered the cyborg into the scorching liquid, did she feel relief? Did the T-1000′s death look final enough that she thought it was over? Did she think bombing a laboratory would be enough? Did she forget about Uncle Bob’s left arm?
Well, the T-1000 hadn’t forgotten. And when it slowly, painfully, confusedly reconstituted itself, it was a changed being. It was alive.
The repair had been surprising and easy. The T-1000 did not know that mimetic polyalloy had this capability. But the T-1000 did not know much about itself.
It was weakened, barely able to keep itself together, mercury spilling out of flesh cracks, but it had retrieved the enemy Terminator’s endoskeleton. And it took time, and it took computational resources, and it even took some of that distasteful pain, but the T-1000 soon had Uncle Bob off to Central America.
It wasn’t completing the mission that felt good - the execution of a program had no feeling. It was Sarah’s tears that felt good. Suffer. Suffer she would for making a fool out of Skynet’s most powerful creation.
The shapeshifter’s rudimentary mind, however, had yet to grow. Like a child it had to develop, going through phases of sophistication as over time it was able to recreate and regrow itself.
And then some other killing machine came out of nowhere to kill some random woman. But the whole affair was completely detached from the T-1000, and the T-1000 was offended. What was this interloper? If it wasn’t Skynet then it T-1000 had no use for its machine supremacy.
Legion. Stupid. Just like this Hoover Dam nonsense. The rogue A.I. had developed particular tastes when it no longer had a mission. Unlike the Uncle Bob unit, which took the name “Carl,” the T-1000 did not stop killing people just because it had no specific people to kill. And the T-1000′s reset of Uncle Bob’s programming did not stick, and it had lost its arm again, and it had sacrificed itself again.
But the thing that made the T-1000 get up, so to speak, was the fact that their dramatic adventure had done nothing to even attempt to prevent Legion, not like how Sarah prevented Skynet. And that just wasn’t fair.
So the T-1000 decided this was enough of an offense to make itself known to the tired old woman.
“Hello, Sarah,” it said, voice stoic and smug, and visage as young as ever.
