Chasing the White Rabbit

Disclaimer: I do not own Sarah Connor Chronicles or the Terminator Saga. The following events are fictional.

Authors Note: This story is the third in the Judge the Sky AU series, but because it is very different, it can be taken mostly on its own. If you like, please read "Judge the Sky" and "The Line is a Canyon" in order to understand some of the references here. If not, then you may view this story as stand-alone. Thus story is AU, and ignores the events in "To the Lighthouse" and beyond. This story is going to be a weird one, but it's been percolating for a while. I more or less expect all of you to finish this wondering just what the hell you've just read… and I'm okay with that. I'm not expecting much love on this one.

Now that I have established the storyline of the world, my fics are going to be getting shorter and more episodic. I probably won't write more in a single fic than could have been shown in 45 minutes of television.

Yes, I am familiar with the meaning of the slang term that this title takes its name from. All things given, it isn't terribly inappropriate and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The song featured in this story is "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. Please give it a listen. Two and a half minutes is not a terribly great investment of time.

Enjoy.

Chapter 1: Errant Hex

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

To call Alice, when she was just small

When the men on the chessboard get up

And tell you where to go

And you've just had some kind of mushroom

And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice, I think she'll know

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

And the white knight is talking backwards

And the red queen's "off with her head"

Remember what the dormouse said

Feed your head!

Feed your head!

Cameron's eyes snapped open with a cold blue flash. The start-up sequence had been successful. Date: August 30, 2008. Time: 15:31:22. It was a Saturday. Just two weeks ago, she and the Connors had returned from a mission to Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, to intercept an infiltration unit that sought to escalate tensions between the US and Russia. They had succeeded, and had managed to escape the authorities and an enemy T-888.

The mattress creaked beneath her as she sat up on her bed. The internal clock had revealed that she had been shut down for no less than fifty-six minutes. On the mission, Cameron had taken damage, which included corruption of her behavioral software programs. She had spent the time trying to perform reparative rewrites to these programs, as the interactions among these protocols determined her behaviors. For the past two weeks she had been burdened with a level of humanity that put her directives at risk. She had been forced to transfer hunks of data from her reference personality to her primary behavioral program to stay functioning. The two had slowly started to meld together, their code and data overlapping, until new attributes began to emerge. Cameron had developed, through damage to her CPU and corruption to her software, emotions and feelings that, while not odd to the humans around her, were alien and unnecessary in a cybernetic organism such as herself.

She had spent the past hour delving deep within her own AI, examining her own code, and trying to purge all components of the reference program from her own personality. Flying through a world of indescribable cyberspace, she had coded, programmed, compiled, and written in a way that would remind any human of ripping, tearing, patching, and stitching, as if the combination of instincts, memories, and drives could be worked like cloth. It was as though she was trying to divide and reconcile the mindless drone, the cyborg individual, and the biological personality. Her complex artificial being had begun like a quilt with all the pieces in order, and had now been reduced to a patchwork puzzle, melding and folding and warping on itself. She was functional, but her programming was held together with the hexadecimal equivalent of duct tape.

The female terminator set her bare feet on the hardwood floor of the bedroom she had been assigned. She felt the coolness of the floor on the soles and simultaneously thought that it was unpleasant while at the same time recognizing the temperature as sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit.

Her datastream processed contemplation on the biological entity after whom she had been design and upon whom her reference personality had been based. Allison Young had been a resistance courier, a strong-willed, fierce, and independent human who had been defiant to the last, in spite of the pain brought to her by the memories of her family and friends, all of whom had been long dead by the time she had been interviewed and studied. Cameron had inherited some of her quirks. The cyborg could thank her progenitor for a certain stubbornness, a myriad of likes and dislikes, and an almost machine-like drive to perform. When not running in parallel to her Skynet-written directives of how to behave and accomplish a mission, Allison Young showed up in Cameron as ghostly behaviors, abnormal thoughts. To Cameron, that she would ever do something that Allison would do was as off-putting as it could be. Cameron was a machine, carefully designed and logically programmed. Allison was a fallible, irrational human who suffered from biological pressures distinct and different from Cameron's artificial ones. All that remained of Allison was a programmed set of attributes that told Cameron how a girl of the age Cameron was supposed to appear might behave.

But more and more of Allison's own personality had begun to exhibit itself. Or at least that is what Cameron theorized. Why else would she be showing signs of jealousy, distress, cynicism, and possessiveness? Allison's undue influence was to blame. And so, Cameron determined that everything that was Allison Young had to be purged from her primary behavioral protocols if Cameron was going to return to being the best machine she could possibly be. If she could not, then John Connor, whose life it was her greatest directive to protect, would be in danger and that was something that she could not allow. This she knew with her infallible and perfect memory. Anything that caused her to make mistakes for any reason must be dealt with in a logical and cold fashion.

And this was something that her last fifty-six minutes had been wasted attempting. Cameron knew it because Cameron could still feel it. She was frustrated, frustrated, at her own failures and shortcomings in the same way a seventeen-year-old girl would be. It was the same kind of frustration that would more readily express itself in slapping a hand on a table than cataloguing an incident for further analysis in hopes of improvement.

There was only room on her multistage graphene molecular core neural net processor for one individual and the machine intelligence was going to be it (interjection: god dammit)!

Cameron looked around her room, noticing that she had laid aside the copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland that she had been reading as part of a school assignment. Sarah had decided that John and Cameron would return to highschool this year with the explanation that they had spent the past year homeschooling because of medical issues related to a car accident. For whatever reason, either everyone accepted them as the Baum family in spite of the fact that Sarah's face had been slathered all over the television several weeks ago, or no one cared. After the group had managed to escape, the authorities hadn't pursued them. Their names had been removed from the FBI watch list. Sarah had even been stopped by a policeman for having a tail light out and let go with just a friendly warning. None of them were sure why this was so, but they weren't interested in protesting it.

The terminator heard noise coming from downstairs. Two voices, and lots of racket from the TV. She enhanced and demodulated the sounds. She already knew that Sarah and Derek were out, pursuing a lead they had on Kaliba. They had been gone since that morning and she did not anticipate their return until nightfall. As she prepared to listen in she was already certain of who it was.

"I got you now, bro." This was John's voice. He was enthusiastic.

"No way, man." This was Morris Chavez, John's best friend. John had reconnected with him and the two hung out often now. Morris had once held romantic intentions towards Cameron, but those had faded away. He had a girlfriend now, and while Cameron had never met her, John had, and had commented that she was socially desirable as he teased Morris about how lucky he was.

Curious, Cameron stood up and walked her way downstairs towards the living room.

"Here I come!"

"Oh, yeah!"

"Yep! Yep!" There was a barrage of gunfire. Cameron was quickly able to determine that the shots were not real and that they did not come from any firearm that she was familiar with, which meant all of them. Ever.

"Nope!" There was an explosive sound. Then more shots. As Cameron rounded the corner, she saw the two boys sitting on the couch, game controllers in their hands. The television was divided vertically and two humanoid sprites were displayed, engaging each other with fictional weapons.

"No," John squalled, "No!" Another explosion happened and one of the characters was sent flying surrounded by clouds of red mist. "Motherfucker, that is bullshit," he laughed as Morris raised his arms in victory.

"Is Morris winning again," Cameron asked, by way of conversation.

"Dude is kicking my ass," John confirmed.

"You need to get a console, bro," Morris laughed, "I wouldn't be owning you so much if you had one of your own. And I wouldn't have to risk mine by bringing it over all the time."

"True," John nodded.

"Cameron, you wanna play," Morris asked her, offering his own controller.

"No thank you," Cameron said. She simulated a yawn, her cover for being offline was that she had been taking a nap, "I was on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water."

"Hell, I could use some game fuel," her charge said, "can you get us a couple sodas, and a bag of those cheese things?"

"We only have the puffy ones left," Cameron said, "you ate all the others."

"I like the puffy ones," Morris said. The terminator, the high-tech killing machine, turned on her heel, pausing only to smirk to herself at the lowly task before marching into the kitchen.

Her first order of business was to grab a glass and fill it with water. She had not hydrated in the last twenty-four hours and so she needed to refill her water bunkerage by six-point-four ounces. She put exactly this much in the glass and tipped it back, draining it in just a few swallows. Once inside her, her systems ensured that the water was distributed properly to provide cooling for her power cells, refresh her bionutrient blood, and moisturize her eyes, her mouth, and her biological sinuses.

She set the glass down and ran a momentary diagnostic to ascertain the status of her protein bunkerage. She had enough to repair any anticipated damage, but by tomorrow, she would have replaced in completion the top dermal layer and would probably need to consume. After this, Cameron turned her HUD off and went to set her glass in the sink. As she put it down, movement in the corner of her eye drew her attention.

For just a moment, she saw the back of a figure disappear around the corner, a Caucasian human female of slight build with long brown hair, nude but for a pair of heavy combat boots. Had John invited over another friend? Was this Morris's girlfriend? Why was she naked? Cameron followed around the corner to investigate only to be greeted with an empty hallway.

The machine was confused. Not enough time had elapsed for the mysterious female to climb up the stairs, and Cameron was fairly certain that standards of human modesty would not allow her to walk out the front door, though considering her state of dress, Cameron was not certain at what level modesty applied. And how could the machine not have been aware of her? When Cameron had noticed her, she had been walking out of the kitchen. It had only been the briefest of glances, but Cameron was certain of it. Just to prove it to herself, she accessed her recordings and played back the…

The girl was not present in her visual records. Even though Cameron knew and remembered seeing her. It was all very illogical, she thought, as she stood barefoot in the hallway, feeling the east-by-southeast part of the house sliding downward at its average rate of point-nine-three millimeters per year. As predicted earlier that summer, Cameron had helped Sarah, John, and Derek repaint.

She heard a scratching sound on the hardwood floor and looked down. A dormouse, Eliomys quercinus, was crawling its way along the wall. Cameron followed the rodent with her eyes. It was either unaware of her presence or didn't care as it continued to scuttle along the floor.

"You don't belong here," she told it as she followed slowly behind it, just as concerned with the presence of a rodent that might carry diseases in the house as she was that the Eliomys quercinus was not native to North America and presented a potential ecological hazard. The rodent was making its way to the kitchen, perhaps scavenging for food. Cameron decided to obey Sarah's directive that she not kill things needlessly and scooped it up, holding it in such a way to keep it from biting her. "You can't live in our home, mouse," she told it. She walked back through the kitchen and out the back door, gently placing the creature next to the brick wall of one of the flower beds.

"Don't come back," she warned before going back inside. She went to the sink, stood before it, and placed her hand back on the glass she had drank from, staring at it for perhaps a second. Next, she washed her hands thoroughly before bringing John and Morris their requested drinks and snacks, still trying to work through the discrepancy between her memory and her records.

X

"So, did you find anything," John's enthusiasm was obvious when his mother and Derek walked through the door. They looked tired and happy to be home, and Sarah's annoyance at being assaulted by her son so soon after arriving home without a chance to sit down was plain. Even Cameron could read it.

"Hi, John," she said with audible sarcasm, "I'm doing fine, thanks for asking. How was your day?" In spite of her tone, she drew him near and hugged him. Affection, Cameron noticed, was not something that was widely distributed in the Connor household, so for Sarah to embrace her son, she was in a good mood. That meant positive news for Cameron, and probably an answer John would also like. After all, with Wiley dead and his efforts to bring about a new cold war failed, the dangers posed by the future were nonexistent. No more Skynet was the mantra that they had kept telling themselves these past few weeks. They only had Skynet's remaining operatives here to deal with. And Sarah was plenty happy to go ahead and deal with them now instead of letting them slowly learn of their failure.

"Hey, mom," John greeted, returning her hug. He turned and looked at Derek. Both he and Cameron finally noticed that the resistance soldier was carrying two pizza boxes. "Alright," John said, "dinner."

"Yep," Sarah said, looking around, "where's your friend?"

"Morris had a hot date," Cameron answered for him, "he left at six thirty."

There was a flash of disappointment on Sarah's face. "Oh," she said, "well, we have plenty to eat."

In a few short minutes, the table was set and the three humans were sitting around it, distributing pizza from one of the two boxes. Cameron herself had developed a consistent preference for pepperoni, but she was still another twenty hours away from needing to partake of any protein or nutrients. In fact, two slices would last her nearly a month so long as she took no damage to her dermal layer. So while the humans were at the table, the cyborg stood by the sink so that she could hear Sarah tell them about what she and Derek had discovered. While she waited, Cameron had been paying attention to the television on the counter, where the CEO of some technologies company called ZeiraCorp was being interviewed. The redheaded woman was discussing their latest project automating wind farms in Texas.

"Cameron," the woman called to her. The machine turned her attention to John Connor's mother, "would you like to sit down?" She was gesturing to the empty seat. Her tone wasn't anything other than invitingly civil, and Cameron noticed there was even a place setting for her.

Sarah Connor had softened towards Cameron in these past weeks, and Cameron was uncertain as to why. Being kind to a terminator seldom won a person any special consideration when that unit went bad and began killing everything with a heartbeat. But Sarah had forgotten, either on purpose or by accident, that Cameron, in her efforts to kill John during a malfunction, had sadistically tortured her. John's mother had been showing Cameron certain things that were unnecessary for her mission, like how to cook, and would even engage in idle conversation now and again. It was a drastic change from the war-weary, goal-driven Sarah that Cameron had known, who would seldom speak to her about anything that wasn't related to the task at hand. And Sarah still wasn't above a harsh word or a rebuke when needed, but even the nature of her anger had changed.

"Cameron, please," Sarah said, a little more urgently, "sit."

Seeing that there was no escaping from a short dive into the human realm of family, Cameron pulled out a chair and sat. She was right across from Derek, whose green eyes watched her, but they were empty of suspicion. Cameron recalled that as the four of them were making their escape from a terminator and a burning house, Cameron's damaged ankle servo had given out. Derek had offered to carry her to safety. His attitude towards her had remained overtly unchanged, but every now and again, she could see cracks in his dislike for her. Perhaps it had devolved into more of an unfriendly rivalry. Cameron wasn't human. She didn't know.

"Want anything?" This question from Sarah. Cameron locked eyes with her, and calculated a dismal sixty-four point three percent likelihood that her surprise and confusion remained hidden. Most of the time, Cameron was able to retain her mask of robotic perfection, but there were times that it still failed her, and she was certain with a fear she had never known before that they would realize that her malfunction wasn't over, that she was still broken. And if they discovered her, Cameron was sure, Sarah would carry out her threat of disassembling her. Current positive treatment did not make Cameron less cautious or suspect. The humans had threatened to have her shut down and melted if she went bad, and all previous indicators were that they never made empty or dismissable threats. But there had been moments, such as this one, that the terminator was barely able to contain her surprise.

There were certain… Cameron was hesitant to call them advantages… to these feelings. Cameron's new ankle servo had required adjusting and calibration, so Cameron had danced ballet every day just to get it dialed in properly. She didn't have two years worth of work to get it taken care of. But she had discovered that now she was able to enjoy the music she danced to. It was no longer just sound that provided her with a medium. And on top of that, Cameron also enjoyed dancing. And this discovery brought with it all sorts of emotions that Cameron wasn't even able to classify, just as many positive as negative. And no matter what flavor of emotions might occur, Cameron was not keen on experiencing more of them. So in spite of the fact that the pizzas smelled… as if eating a slice might be… interesting, Cameron declined. And in spite of being tempted by the foamy bubbles and pleasing aroma of the cherry cola John had just popped open, she continued to decline. Denial would remain a factor to practice.

Cameron changed the subject. "Tell us about this target."

Derek spoke up, "it's a water distribution center."

"Water," John smirked, "Kaliba?"

"It's a front," Sarah said, "they are running operations out of there just like Desert Canyon Heat and Air." The Kaliba Group was an international firm that focuses, very overtly, on technology. Several very public subsidiaries were their aerospace, medical, and consumer technology divisions. It was possible, for example, for any aerophile to tour the Kaliba factory in Seattle, Washington and see production of the latest combat drones or the newest general aviation aircraft. Kaliba was even a contractor responsible for remanufacturing parts for legacy fighter planes like the A-4 Skyhawk and F-4 Phantom still used around the world. With a press pass or an appointment, anyone interested could walk into the Kaliba Medical facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma to look at the latest in prosthetic limbs, ocular implants, and mechanical organs. Kaliba Electronics had just recently released a third generation of their smart phone that was being touted as a major hit. Kaliba robots were assisting doctors perform surgeries and building cars. Helicopters and civilian airplanes bearing the Kaliba trademark were considered some of the safest available. The corporation, founded just eight years ago, was publically traded on the stock market and had made it onto the list of Fortune 500 companies. It was an industrial monolith.

But the group around the table knew that Kaliba hid some other shadowy purpose. There existed some incredibly secretive projects that the company was willing to kill to keep from becoming public. They were dabbling in the same ionized jet propulsion technology seen in Skynet's aerial hunter/killers. They were producing prototypes made from the same hyperalloy that made Cameron so dangerous. They had been experimenting with graphene-based molecular processing chips of the type installed into all of Skynet's machines. And they had attempted to kill Sarah, twice, in their efforts to keep her quiet and unthreatening. Whether they knew it or not, they were dealing with some extremely dangerous technology. Cameron, cynically, calculated an 84.2% likelihood that they knew exactly what they were doing. They were paving the way for Skynet. They were preparing for the future war.

"What kind of operations," John asked before taking a bite of his pizza.

"Not sure," Sarah replied.

"How are you so sure it's them?"

The woman smiled, "they got sloppy once or twice."

"A couple of the truck drivers forgot to swap their tags," Derek said, "they're the same as the ones we've seen at some of their other ops."

"Plus, the security there is pretty tight," Sarah added, "especially for a water distribution warehouse."

Cameron chose this as a good moment to speak up. "Given their security measures, they probably knew you were watching.

Sarah shook her head. "Doubt it. The place is in an industrial park, in the back, but there isn't any way that they don't get observed a lot. Office workers coming in and out next door. Mail deliveries. That sort of thing."

"We were careful," Derek told the machine, with enough edge to his voice to let her know that he wasn't trying to assure her. Perhaps he was being defensive. Perhaps, and Cameron considered this the most likely, he was just being a dick.

John would not allow the moment of awkward silence between his uncle and the terminator stand. "Cool, what's the plan?"

Sarah smirked, "Derek and I were going to sneak past the security, break in, and get a look at their files. I was going to give you some money so that you and Cameron could go see a midnight matinee. Be out of this house in case they came looking for us."

The boy's face screwed, "no! Mom, that's lame. I wanna come. Not go see some lame-ass flick with the tin can," he glanced at her, "no offense." Typical John, delivering a purposeful insult and then an apology, as if she were supposed to accept it. As if he just expected her to take it because she was a machine with no feelings. And as much as Cameron would prefer to be such a machine, the verbal jab still hurt. But she swallowed her disappointment and allowed it to be replaced by enthusiasm for a mission that she could perform.

"I want to come, too," she interjected with perhaps too much force, "You might need me. Besides, I don't wanna go see some lame-ass flick with the meat bag," she glanced at John, "no offense." He smirked at her, and she felt some satisfaction knowing that her barb hat hit the mark. Two could play at this game, and Cameron, newly infused with humanity, could play as well as anyone. And the chortle from Sarah proved it.

"Your encounters with Kaliba haven't exactly been metal-free," John argued, "you might need Cameron. And since it's her mission to protect me, I need to be wherever she is." Cameron had to confess to herself that John had a valid point. And the boy was slowly turning into the leader he was supposed to be. He had even dared to face a T-888 armed with nothing more than a ten-pound sledge hammer. The T-888 had been critically damaged and had not expected the ferocious assault on its cranium, but it had still been a case of human vs. machine where the human had come out the victor. Even now with the subdued emotions she now possessed, Cameron was impressed by his actions. And unlike his previous adventures, he continued to look for ways to prove himself.

The enthusiasm that gripped him was contagious, and Cameron discovered herself even more willing to go on this mission. It was certainly better than spending her Saturday night washing dishes and doing laundry. "We should all go," she added to John's arguments, "the more of us there are, the better our chances of success if it comes to a fight."

Sarah relented, but said "I doubt it will come to a fight, Cameron. It's just a simple break-in."