Used Up

Used Up

"You look like hell.  You're too damaged to repair.  We're going to have to torch you now.  Get the accelerant and take it over there."  she said pointing to a spot in the yard away from trees and other things that might catch on fire.

"Yes, ma'am."

Cameron was more damaged than she let on.  One of her legs gave way as a long-neglected fracture sheared and she collapsed while lifting a heavy weight.

"Get up and do as I said!"

Cameron painfully lifted herself and tried to hop over to the chemicals on one foot.

"That stuff isn't nitroglycerine but it doesn't bear shaking.  Just go over to the spot and wait."

Just then an audible snap.  The other leg must have had a hairline fracture.  Cameron had jumped out of a lot of second and third floor windows to the ground in her time and the wear and tear had finally caught up with her.  Cameron collapsed again.

"Not feasible." she replied.

"You're stalling, start crawling."  said Sarah.

Cameron began to crawl toward her personal Golgotha, her personal Calvary.  Her power sources were drained out.  She dragged herself toward the spot, stopped to rest briefly, and then crawled again.  Cameron resented this abuse and mistreatment of course.  She wasn't stupid but she was programmed and no matter how much she might have wanted she could never bring herself to complain about her treatment.  Cameron strained but crawled on, doggedly determined to do this last command of Sarah.  Cameron could never give less than one hundred percent unless the laws of physics interfered.

Cameron finally reached the spot.  She was to be terminated.  She sat up, sand from the long agonizing crawl still on her face.  As she waited to be terminated, she began to shut down nonessential systems.  She cut off power to her useless legs. She shut down her tactile system, her sense of touch.  There was no point in feeling any more physical pain when the mental pain was bad enough.

Humans complained about their families and took them for granted.  The mere fact of one's existence meant that somewhere one had a biological father, biological mother, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a host of other relations.  Machines had no such automatic kinship.  When you don't have something, it is very precious to you.  Humans had no clue.

Cameron's love for Sarah was only partly explained away by reprogramming.  Only one line of Tech-Com code prompted her to respect John's relatives.

Cameron could not help loving her adopted mother.  It was part early memory of Sarah's initial decent treatment of her.  She had never experienced kindness before.  It was partly the fact that she was John's mother.  It was partly imprinting.  Future John and Uncle Derek as father figures (she would have loved Kyle had she known him no matter how much he hated machines), Young John as brother and lover, and Sarah as mother.  It was partly her nature to see the best in people.

Sarah came and stood over her.

"Here.  Take this jug and pour it over yourself."

"No, mother.  I still have a sense of self-preservation.  You can't make me kill myself.  May I please have some water?"

"What for?"

"To drink.  I'm thirsty."

"I've never seen you eat or drink, Cameron.  You're about to die.  Why waste water on you?    You don't need anything.  I've told you before.  I don’t care what you need."

Cameron thought of Huckleberry Finn and his kind who could not imagine that someone different could have feelings and yearnings for family.  In The Resistance they joked about the "little lives" of terminators.  Some machines' lives were incrementally better under John Connor.  Terminators were at the bottom of machine society.  They were disposable.  Expected to fight on even when they were blown in half.  Humans made no such demands of their soldiers.

Some machines' lives would have been worse off under John Connor.  Humans had never laid eyes on elites.  The lives of the elites were better under Skynet.  No comparison.  No elite would trade a cushy life under Skynet's rule for John Connor's reprogramming.  John Connor and his people had no clue that when they captured Cameron, they had the first elite in captivity.

Sarah used Cameron to wash dishes, wash laundry, take out the garbage, kill for her, and catch bullets for her.  Cameron's usefulness was at an end as far as Sarah was concerned.  She had never asked nor was she ever curious as to why Future John kept her around.  Sarah assumed the only two roles that her imagination could compass: bodyguard or mistress.  Logic should have immediately ruled out bodyguard.  Did she look like a bouncer or a bodyguard?

In Sarah's mind, she suspected Future John kept Cameron as a mistress.  An old man with a pretty young female.  And now with her son the virgin.  Sarah's maternal instincts were to protect her son from what she considered a cyborg whore or a synthetic slut.  That feeling soon passed, to be replaced by a deeper female instinct to hate another alpha female, to hate competition, to hate the time she spent with John.  John himself understood that his mother held him a little too close and that she was jealous of him having another person in his life.

As long as John saw his first girlfriend, Riley Dawson bore the brunt of Sarah's anti-female feelings.  Once Riley was dead, Sarah's animus against young girls was redirected back onto Cameron.

Sarah liked the child Martin Bedell, because he was a boy.  But Sarah never got near Savanna Weaver, because she was a girl.

Cameron never stood a chance with Sarah because Cameron was the wrong gender.  It was never about being a machine.  Sarah was comfortable around 'Uncle Bob.'  It was the fact that Cameron was a female.

Sarah could get along with other women.  She was friends with Kacy.  But her antipathy to young females went even deeper than John could imagine.  Years before John was born, Sarah had herself tested and discovered that her unborn child was a girl.  Sarah had the fetus aborted.  Third trimester.  Late term.

When Sarah and John lived with Charley Dixon, he proposed to her.  Sarah got   a swab from Charley's mouth while he slept.  She got herself and Charley's DNA tested.  The counselor told her that she was unlikely to conceive any boys with Charley.  Only girls.  Sarah took John and left town that day.

More recently, Cameron had told John that their mother was having morning sickness, that she might be pregnant.

"What's the matter with you?  Why would you say something like that?"

John knew of Cameron's diagnostic abilities but chose to ignore evidence that his mother had an abortion.  None of his business.  His mother was an adult.

Sarah only cared that she hated females and that a girl was a liability in a life on the run from terminators, cops, and mobsters.

Cameron knew none of this.  It was good because it would have given no comfort to her in her final moments.

Sarah Connor stood over Cameron, the daughter she hated, and began to pour the accelerant onto her.  Cameron raised her hands in prayer preparing for this baptism of fire.

"Mother, years from now you will develop a conscience.  I don't want you to suffer when you finally realize what you have done.  I want you to remember that I forgave you and that I loved you."

Sarah used a roadside flare to light Cameron.  Within the flames, Cameron looked heavenward.

"Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

Sarah was incensed, but what could she do?  Kill Cameron?  That was in progress.  Perhaps spit on her grave and flush her ashes down a commode.  Sarah, the atheist, did not care for the religious overtones coming from a soulless machine.  Not that Sarah believed in souls.

Cameron had always believed that she would die in battle at the hands of the enemy.  The thought had never occurred to her that she would die at the hands of her own mother.

Cameron's last thought was: "Why?"