T2 RF

	 Behind the T-1000 was an enormous I-beam, hanging
from two chains, used to lift ingots into the smelters,
running on linear tracks. The polymorph grabbed the
I-beam and sent it rolling down the track. Straight at
Terminator. The two-ton girder smashed into his chest,
crushing it.
	 The T-1000 pulled the I-beam back and then heaved it
forward again. Terminator wrenched himself sideways
to take the second blow on the shoulder. Metal crunched
and pieces broke loose inside the savaged cyborg. He
sagged, turning to grip the wall....
	 The visual array was collapsing inward and ballooning
out rapidly, and the man/machine’s sense of balance
was gone. It tottered as the third blow bashed into his
back, smashing his spine and pelvis. Servos ratcheted,
freezing up in buckled mounts, failing with a pro-
test of clattering steel. Terminator dropped to his knees,
crucified against a wall of machinery.
	 The T-1000’s fourth blow was centered between the
cyborg’s shoulder blades. His skull was partially caved
in. Terminator slid to the floor.
	 Prime core disruptions fired through the wafer
circuit brain. Memories spun loose from their electrical
moorings. Terminator had no real life to see flash before
his eyes, but there was data. And other people’s lives.
The chaotic pattern of human emotions spun out inside
its head like a tangling audiocassette as it saw glimpses
of the past few days. Sarah and John, kneeling, holding
one another as they wept. John trying to hide his tears.
Sarah facing the T-1000 with an inappropriate weapon.
The T-1000 itself, emotionlessly reacting to changing
operational environments. And for a microsecond,
a weird fusing caused a gestalt grasp of its entire
existence, the meaning of human interaction, and from
this mushrooming explosion of cross-reffing came one
single entity that the cyborg had not been programmed
to experience.
	 Feeling.
	 Terminator fell back on the concrete, energy firing
like misdirected rockets through his synthetic mind. As
the cyborg convulsed in machine-death, he learned his
most profound lesson about organic life.
	 Too bad he didn’t have time to analyze it.
	 Terminator was a pathetic shape on the floor, a lump
of scrap-heap. But the tattered strands of a ripped
apart consciousness sought alternate energy traps
inside the fractured CPU. Skynet had designed the
terminators to withstand enormous damage and survive
with enough consciousness to repair the damage
enough to complete the mission. And now, the man/
	 machine’s brain found back-up circuits in the onion
peel layers of the wafer-circuit, and despite the total
trauma to the outer and inner chassis, it searched for
alternate strands of cabling to carry the command to
move
	 move
	 MOVE ...
	 A spark here. There. And then, a leg joint bent
convulsively.
MOVE!
The leg bent.
	 No mere man could have come back from the brink
like this. But no man had such compelling commands
programmed into every molecule of its artificial
intelligence.
	 Besides, Terminator had seen the revelation,
and now it was going to move. Frozen servos
notwithstanding.
The cyborg began to feebly crawl, dragging his
malfunctioning legs behind the crushed spine. His
arm stump screeched on the tile floor as he inched
himself forward. But his exposed machine-eye burned
red with determination.