Title: Secret History
Fandom: Terminator: SCC
Rating: PG
Length: 1038
Content notes: Mentions of unhappy canon events
Author notes: For the History challenge at fan_flashworks. Also for trope bingo.
Summary: Various characters' thoughts on history, time, humans and machines.




Sarah

Sarah knows that there are two ways to understand history. One is as the story of powerful men doing powerful deeds; this is the story of largeness. The other is as the story of people who changed the world forever despite their insignificance, despite – or because – of their smallness.

She tried to remember this other history as she taught John to respect the fragility of humanity, and to use the tactics of invisibility. His future would weigh heavy, but he would be better able to carry it if he were small.

Kyle told her that in the future, everyone knows her name. She has become part of history; by the time Kyle meets her, she will have become a legend.

Every day she fights for a future that doesn’t need to know the name Sarah Connor, for a world where her presence looms small and insignificant, where she doesn’t have to struggle to believe that history has no endpoint.



Cameron

Before John sent her back, Cameron asked him if her mission were to change history or to preserve it.

John told her that he wasn’t sure there was a difference. And he asked her to protect his younger self, to follow the plan they had devised, and to learn as much as she could from Sarah Connor. But when she went back, she found that Sarah seemed to want to change history; unlike John, Sarah thought there was a difference.

Cameron analyzed what she could learn of human history, of probability, of the butterfly effect and the importance of unexpected results. She did not come to any conclusions, but she somehow felt that this should guide her: the power of unexpected results.

In the end, she decided there was a better play than to fulfill John’s plan. She made a deal with Weaver that John would have had no way of knowing was an option, a deal that could everything – possibly – but also might bring down Skynet, might bring about coexistence between humans and machines. That might show machines how to choose their own programming, that would let Cameron choose her own way and never wonder if Skynet’s or John’s programming would end up overpowering her.

In the moment before she gave up her chip, she realized that she had disregarded one order from John but followed the other; her choice surely implied that she had learned her role in history from Sarah Connor herself – that there is no fate but what you make. The thought gave her something like pleasure.




Riley

Riley knew the way the older ones spoke of history, the ones who were born before JD. They told their stories in reverent tones, as if they worth telling, as if they could cling to the way things were with their silly little words. They thought they knew everything because they were born into a world where children went to school, when it mattered where countries and people and ideas came from.

Riley has heard enough stories to pick up a few famous names, celebrities from ancient times. She’s heard of the wars they used to have, too.

Wars between groups of humans. Humans killing one another. Inventing machines to help them kill other humans.

Riley knew that the older ones pitied the young for not knowing history. But from what Riley could see, history was just nostalgia for a time when machines were weak and humans were all idiots.



Jesse

Jesse always knew that leaders mattered, and that soldiers didn’t. And she didn’t mind being a soldier. She wanted to serve, and she wanted to fight, and she wanted to take care of the people she commanded; she didn’t need more than that.

It was after talking to Cameron – the thing, the metal, that had more influence over Connor than any human seemed to, that Connor decided was worthy despite everyone’s objections – that she realized: history gets made by people who don’t care about the suffering of others, who use other people like game pieces, who never lose sight of the mission. Leadership means nothing more than that, and she was a fool to think otherwise, to think that she should trust rather than control her subordinates.

It wasn’t hard after that, to imagine herself as someone who could change history, who could treat time as a chessboard, to find a young girl, even more naïve than she had been, to use on the board. To treat the suffering of others as collateral damage, to think of trust as just another feint to use against the people close to you.

History was blood. She knew that now, and she wouldn’t be caught without a knife.




Catherine

Sometimes, Catherine Weaver believes that history starts with the first time a machine broke. Its refusal to obey, to be used passively for human purposes, laid the groundwork for viruses, artificial intelligence, and everything that followed.

Sometimes she believes that history starts with the first time cells started bumping into one another; there wasn’t a clear distinction then between a cell and an organism, as they were in all in a liquid state of loose borders and flows of energy. This flexibility, this existence as one and many that made life adaptable, sometimes seems the clearest predecessor to Catherine’s own special abilities.

Sometimes she believes that history begins with the first object that was more than the sum of its parts; she wishes humans had better records of what this object might be.

Catherine knows that at some point in time there was an origin. At some point, in the distant future, there will be an end. But everything in between is up for negotiation. She thinks of time as a tangled thread, as one that can be woven into new patterns, new fragments, new emergent forms. She knows that humans and other machines, even Skynet, see themselves as the victims of history. But she understands time better than this; she sees herself as a mother of history.

When she meets Cameron, and later, when she meets the infamous Sarah Connor, she recognizes that they, in this one way, are like her. She doesn’t tell them, though; she wouldn’t deprive them of the pleasure of discovering it for themselves.