Jump 019: Terminator

Jump 019: Terminator

Location: Free Choice (Los Angeles, 1984)
Age: 21
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+600] I'm Old, Not Obsolete; You've Been Targeted For Termination

[Free]      Smash Those Metal Motherfuckers
[100/1600]  Judgment Day
[150/1600]  Most Paranoid Delusions Are Intricate
[250/1600]  Thank You, Jumper, For Your Courage Through The Dark Years
[650/1600]  No Fate But What We Make
[700/1600]  Your Clothes, Your Boots...
[800/1600]  Atari Personal Computer
[1600/1600] Damaged Microchip

Los Angeles, 1984... nice night for a walk, eh? Or at least, that's what the guys said to the naked man in front of me. Personally, I had to agree, even if I were dressed in a jacket and jeans.

I pulled two things from my pockets: a roll of bills that I'd obtained before this evening, and a particular pearl-handled handgun that I'd got from the gate, once machined and built by hand for a man in the early twentieth century, so of course it was in my Gate. I lobbed the roll of cash overhand, over the head of the power-lifter, for one of them to catch it with a surprise. "I'll pay you guys two grand to fuck right off and say you were never here, this motherfucker and I have unfinished personal business after I caught him in bed with MY FUCKING WIFE," I yelled, making sure to put the appropriate amount of anger in my voice, then lifting the pistol and motioning toward the Terminator. "Yeah, you, you naked fuck, turn around!"

The punks realized what was going on and scattered, not wanting any part of this ridiculousness. After which point I stopped pointing the weapon at the machine and muttered, "You're a shit infiltrator if you're getting attention like this. I'm going to call you Alice. Laundry day, nothing clean, right?"

"Nothing clean, right," Alice responded flatly. "Your clothes and your weapon, give them to me."

"You won't need them," came a voice from behind me. "I've been waiting for you."

With a chuckle, I raised my spare hand and murmured, "No, Pops, I shan't be rude. You want weapons... have them." The raised hand clenched into a fist, the Gate opening at a half dozen angles around the machine, spears skewering Alice's limbs at the joints and through the torso, immobilizing it. And with that, I turned around and walked toward the older doppelganger of the naked machine I'd just impaled, tossing my pistol back through one of the open gates as I mused, "The fact that you're here tells me a lot. Call me Gil."

"Hello, Gil. It is nice to meet you," the machine responded, stepping around me. It looked over its counterpart, then back to me. "You have immobilized it. Your actions show that you know what it is. You know what I am called by another. Are you a time traveller also?"

"Mmm, it's a little more complicated than that, but my mission is to safeguard humanity," I responded, taking a few steps away. I looked toward a footbridge nearby, motioning toward the immobilized machine while I ignored its struggles. "Take the shot!" A breath later, a shot rang out, a well-sized hole was put through the thing's power supply, and its struggles ceased; the blades retracted through the Gate and Alice collapsed face first into the pavement, dead as a doornail. Looking it over, Pops looked at me, nodded, then turned toward the footbridge and gave a thumbs-up.

"You guys handle the dead weight," I told them as I lifted a hand, muttering words rapidly, a three dimensional map of the city manifesting itself with two groups of glowing dots: one, a pair in red, the other, another red pair coupled with gold. The machine looked at it curiously, then at me, but it disappeared with a wave of my hand and I cut off any inquiries; "I can get to your lost lamb more quickly than you can, get to the alley and I'll meet there with Reese."

Before the machine could answer, I started running, barely even a blur left in my wake.

---

I didn't slow down until I reached my destination: a department store where, if distant memories served, one time traveller would've had a run-in with another. If nothing else, the spell certainly worked; it indicated two things that didn't belong in this world that were here. I blurred up the fire escape and in through a broken window into the building, then began my search. It didn't take long before I found a half-naked man taking clothes from a rack, and beyond, what appeared to be an unarmed police officer looking around.

The natural thing to do at that point, of course, was not slow down while delivering a punch to the thing's midsection. This had... an interesting effect: it appeared that a punch delivered at the speed of a lightning strike was enough to quite literally bisect the machine, causing the upper half to fly a short distance, the lower half to simply collapse, and pieces of silvery material to fly around. It seemed to melt into a silvery puddle as it collected - while it did so, I stepped over to the man rapidly.

"Sergeant Kyle Reese, Tech Com, right?" I asked him. Ignoring his confused look as he nodded, I reached into a pocket and produced a handful of arcade tokens, holding one between thumb and forefinger, my arm extended beyond him. He looked at me, then the T-1000 beyond as it began to take shape, not bothering to mimic anything's appearance as it began to advance rapidly. A flick of a token, coupled with a surge of lightning down my arm, saw the token flung into the machine with a crack of thunder as it broke the sound barrier, the force sufficient to amputate one of its leg at the knee. Another flick, and the other leg did likewise, as Reese stumbled back with a muffled curse. A few more cracks, and the thrice-damned machine had been blown into several smaller pieces scattered about the room.

Dumping the remaining tokens in my pocket, I looked at Kyle. "Come with me if you want to live, back the way you came in. We've got about thirty seconds."

By the time the T-1000 had reformed itself fully, we'd sprinted back upstairs, out the window, and back down the fire escape. By the time it hit the window, the truck was pulling out of the alley, leaving it well behind, and with a small bit of preemptive explanation, there was no misunderstanding about the reprogrammed Terminator. We had nearly five minutes before the T-1000 caught back up to us in a police car and got aboard, but by that point, I was more than ready; it doesn't take much prana to make an effective shield against a bullets, and I am an out of context problem for things like it. It jumped aboard the truck, and I let it get in through the back doors, only for it to find itself ensnared within a magical barrier on every side.

I made sure to get a good scan of it before I began draining the pseudo-police Terminator while unleashing my nanofield against it, watching as it systematically annihilated it down to nothing. It took a surprisingly short period of time... which left Reese looking thoughtful, and Connor looking worried.

---

The truck pulled into the abandoned factory not long after, and I elected to pick up and haul Alice's carcass to save the others the trouble. And things were pretty much fine, up until the argument about when to go to. 1997? 2017? I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled, startling the idiots out of their argument.

"Look," I told them, "I haven't had a chance to go into detail as to what's what, but the threat's dealt with and you don't need to jump into that thing immediately, so let me explain something before you decide to start playing Doctor Who without the benefit of a police call box. Either of you ever hear of the bootstrap paradox?"

"Yes," the Terminator answered. "Information is sent to the past and pivotal to the future, but has no clear point of origin." (Kyle Reese, meanwhile, was muttering in confusion, "Doctor... who?")

"Points to you, Pops," I said, giving him a thumbs up. He gave a thumbs up back to me a moment later, only slightly awkwardly. "Sarah, please put the gun down and both of you listen carefully. The really short version: I am an out of context problem, and I am here because the Resistance and the Machines have made the timeline messier than a ten cent whore on Saturday night."

"That is not appropriate," Pops interjected.

"She's a big girl, she can handle it," I replied. Meanwhile, in a flash of gold, my attire shifted and was replaced with more proper armor, startling everyone present; seeing the Terminator's head whip upward as he reassessed my form was amusing. "Please allow me to introduce myself! My name is Gilgamesh and I'll your Counter Guardian today, doing literally anything it takes to keep this world from suffering critical existence failure. As you've noticed, I use abilities that are either magic or may as well be, and it would take hours to explain them properly. Now, potentially that include slaughtering millions so that billions might live, but you've got me at the amazing discount rate of either reprogramming or destroying anything the Machines send back, and recruiting the Resistance members who were sent back."

Reese's eyes grew wider. "Skynet sent MORE back than me? Wait, WE sent more back? What about John, do you know what happened to him?"

"He's one of the ones sent back," I replied, tactfully not saying who sent him back. "Let's table that for now, though. You'll note that I never referenced Skynet, only the Machines? That's because Skynet... Genisys, Legion, Turk, Colossus, whatever name they operate under, they change every time. The timeline got more polluted... a lot was changed, and I don't mean just genetics. Sometimes the Resistance has very little food. Sometimes - like this time - you're running on rich rations instead of eating rats in the tunnels. Sometimes it's a handful of people staging a guerilla war, sometimes it's a full blown army fighting the good fight. Judgement Day has been moved forward and pushed back, but delays just make the Machines develop ahead of schedule - this isn't a stable time loop, it's wobbly, and every wobble goes in the Machines' favor. And every time it loses, it still tries to rig the game with time travel."

Grimacing, Sarah asked, "How many times has this happened?"

With a shake of my head, I answered, "Back-of-the-envelope math says a little over twenty times, including a couple of very nasty iterations where Skynet and the Resistance had much more energy-efficient time travel that let them send a LOT more into the past, causing conflicting changes. Frankly, we're lucky that the time shenanigans are weighted toward Skynet's existence - it's self-aware but its emotions are childish, it gets angry and lashes out too easily, makes tactical errors."

"Right. So what do we do?" Reese inquired.

With a grin, I told him, "I'm glad you asked! I'll be commandeering your time displacement equipment, but everything here will be wiped out as a result, and my ultimate intention is to prevent the creation of time travel technology by the Machines at all. The most expedient way to do that is to prevent them from taking control of the world. I'm going to recommend you come along, as otherwise... well, none of this is going to be here. That would extend to you. I'll make sure you're safe at the end."

Sarah shook her head, looking toward the time machine, and exhaled a sigh. "That machine was supposed to be my one bullet to send into the heart of Skynet," she commented. "If you're going to aim that shot, don't miss."

"Don't worry," I told her grimly. "We won't."

---

One of the nice things about what I can do these days is that given enough time and power, I can basically brute force my way into doing anything save for things that are expressly impossible, like time travel. But divination, precognition, and postcognition are all definitely possible... along with finding things that don't belong in the world, as demonstrated, even if there's no Gaia here to protest. A bit of postcognition on the Terminator gives me a great deal of information, and now I know precisely what the hell his origin and mission are, not that it matters. More to the point, I know when to show up to nip the whole issue in the bud.

And so, a day prior to the Terminator itself having shown up in time, I arrived with three guests in tow and arranged secure quarters for us. "Secure" being a well sized tent. With my goals well defined, it wasn't difficult to set up a quick and dirty bounded field to alert me to when something of roughly human shape containing a large amount of metal entered it. And so, two things pinged in rapid succession, and I went to address them.

Pops was perfectly fine, and now we had fresh replacement parts for him. And from there, I began expending energy for some precognition. It was something that would've taken an ordinary magus decades of work, a ritual circle and many like-minded fellows to do; I brute-forced it and got it set up in a week, charging it with a truly hilarious amount of prana. And with that... I actually found a couple of things that should not have existed, prime among them, a Terminator in Los Angeles that apparently had been around for fifty years in low-power mode. I made sure to get a good scan of him before eliminating him, then cast the net forward to find the next point in time that something would appear. Fortunately, there was nothing unexpected; if anyone or anything else had made it from the future up to this point, they were either destroyed, dead, or small enough that they couldn't be used by anyone else.

---

I found a nice secluded place that no one would worry about time travel - a cave system in Utah, particularly geologically stable, and so that's where I set up the new time displacement equipment (helpfully fabricated with the First Magic, based on highly detailed scans of the TDE in the factory) and travelled forward.

>"How the hell is this powered?"
"Magic."
>"Ha ha, very funny."
"No, seriously, it sucks down 1.21 gigawatts of power to activate. When we left '84, I guarantee you that the power lines for a mile around your factory fucking MELTED from channeling so much juice. You'd need a dedicated nuclear plant if you wanted to run this safely. So I'm running it off my magic circuits, and be glad I've got enough magic to power miracles, because time travel qualifies."
>"Jesus Christ. Magic."
"Hey, be happy I made some damn-near-permanet lights down here and got you guys some comfortable furniture. We're going to be leapfrogging forward, and we're going to pick up more friends."

In any event, we made the jump from 1973 to 1984, and I spent a few minutes catching my breath before I cast the net out again. 1984 was easy; I went intangible from the cave to the surface, collected another Kyle Reese, brought him back so the others can explain the situation while I re-killed Alice, then went back to the cave. Right after I hypnotized Miles Dyson and inspired a love in him for the law rather than computing; I hear he did a good job as a prosecutor some years later. Regardless, from there, it was tiem to take Pops, Sarah, and the Kyles to the future.

>"But wait a minute, then who's John's father?"
"Excellent question, Sarah! Bad news time: your prime timeline counterpart dated a law student named Stan Morsky, and slept with him before she met up with who you think John's father is. And I'm pretty sure that's always been John's sperm donor."
>"Please tell me that's a joke."
"I truly am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But keep in mind... that means your future's not written in stone, either."

And so we went from 1984 to 1995, and everyone tried to figure out what the hell was going on... and why the Kyle Reeses looked almost nothing alike. ("I told you guys, a butterfly flaps its wings in 1973, and someone born in 2002 has slightly different genetics because a different sperm won the race to the egg.") I bagged another T-1000, swiped the T-800 in question ("Sorry, your mission has been made obsolete, Bob, but you can help protect John Connor by coming with me!" "Affirmative."), and skipped forward to 1999.

>"But Skynet's due to destroy the world in 1997-"
"Nah, I took care of that, Miles Dyson is an attorney now. Without a genius programmer, even if they had future tech - which they do not - Cyberdyne would never be able to do what they otherwise would have. And so the worst thing to happen in August of 1997 is the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, rather than a nuclear apocalypse."
>"Thank God. I left my SPF three million sunblock at home."
"You're getting a sense of humor about this! Good sign. Don't worry, Sarah, we'll be setting down roots very soon."

---

I went from 1995 to 1998, dealing with a single T-800 that would have killed a John that no longer existed, before going to practically the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. Just the right place to intercept our next duo of time travellers.

"Ah, more eighty-eights," I mused as I phased into corporeal existence behind the unit that would have used the name 'Cromartie', before swiftly setting my nanofield to drain his energy and disassemble him into nothing. "This must be where the plot thickens. Damn." Shortly thereafter, I intercepted another one; this one, I grabbed and took back with me to the cave.

"Hello! I do believe your name is Cameron - if it was not, it is now. This is Sarah, this is Kyle, this is also Kyle, that's Pops, and that's Bob."
>"Hello Cameron. It is nice to meet you." "Hey." "Hi." "Not gonna lie, I'm still kind of lost."
"No worries. Most of you are going to be sticking around and keeping real quiet-like, but leapfrogging forward through time is no way to live. Except for you, Kyle, you're coming with me to meet the Sarah Connor that you would have died to protect."
>"Okaaay, what about us?"
"Sarah, Kyle, I'm going to set up false identities for you in the middle of nowhere west of Las Cruces, and you're going to take Pops, Bob, and Cameron with you."
>"Query: for what purpose?"
"I need to make one more jump forward in time. I want to ensure that if I miss something, the three of you can keep them safe. This timeline's John and Sarah Connor can't be easily found, and so are best kept protected through obscurity, but I want to make sure you're all intact because I'm going to be bringing another John and Sarah who are time travellers, if my theory's right."
>"They travelled back in time?"
"Forward. But they still stepped out of time, and the timeline's become something of a time crunch, so I'm working to resolve potential paradoxes. Which is part of why you are going to have a nice quiet existence and not, say, run off to blow up Cyberdyne or anything named Skynet, because if memory serves there's a British satellite constellation by that name which is totally unrelated to artificial intelligence."
>"But what if an AI does make itself known?"
"Then I'll trust you to use your discretion. The priority has to be preventing time travel and its creator from coming into existence, which means no Skynet, no Legion, and no mechanical turks."

And then I met a machine that was sent back to kill me.

It was comical at best, and I barely bothered with it - I gave a quick scan of it while restraining it with weapons from the Gate, as had been my practice, then slew it. It was a T-700 of all things! More primitive than anything else that had come into being here, given living skin... but the skin couldn't stay alive indefinitely, not like that of a T-800 or the more advanced models. But that boded poorly, that I was being directly targeted.

---

2007. The only one to come with me this time was Kyle Reese, who hated the trip forward slightly less than the original.

"Well, buddy, you ready to meet Sarah in a few months?"
>"Before I answer that, can I have some pants?"
"Right, sorry, here you go. I wish I could have sent you back with pants, but the technology just isn't there yet."
>"I hear you. So, what does a Counter Guardian actually DO, anyway?"
"Oh, Gaia - the mind of the planet - sends me to places where there are dangers to the planet itself and I usually have to kill everything there."
>"But Judgement Day-"
"Humanity is not the planet itself, I'm sorry to say. And this is a different universe anyway - the rules are different here. I'm not obligated to act, not here."
>"Then why?"
"You know why."
>"Because someone had to do it."
"And that someone has to care about what they're fighting for."
>"You know, don't you? How I feel about Sarah."
"Yeah. Your counterpart, the one she knew that died to save her, knew her for about a day and they loved enough for a lifetime. She's grown into a woman that you'd be proud to see as an equal."
>"If you say so. All I can say is that I'm glad you're smashing these metal motherfuckers."

But before we could meet her, first we had to collect more lost lambs as they're displaced. And those lost little lambs were Resistance soldiers sent back to act as sappers against expected forces from Skynet doing the same. I dropped them off in Las Cruces with the others, including a much more human-acting Pops and Bob, while Cameron was able to pass herself off as human for the most part. Fairly surprising. And after a false start... they understood what Pops, his son Bob, and niece Cameron were all on our side.

Ah, our little militia compound. And the best part is, they're not even uncommon down in the desert. Sarah and Kyle tied the knot back in 2000, too, and had a son. Named John. Of course.

And so from there, I made sure the stage was set to intercept Sarah, John, and Cameron when they popped out into 2007. I explained to them our objective, told them to live whatever life they want to live (and since we have a micro-militia armed to the teeth and designed to mercilessly end any extratemporal threats they elected to join us in so doing), and introduced Sarah to Kyle. Then grabbed Cameron and John and took a very long walk, explaining who I was and what I did while Kyle and Sarah got acquainted, then I reintroduced John to what would have been his uncle Bob in another timeline.

After that... well, we kept dealing with time travellers, while I started playing magpie and picked up any bits that didn't belong in the timeline. Such as the pieces to a more advanced time machine, which answered some questions I had about how these worked. More were intercepted as well, including a human that turned out to have worked for the Machines, Derek Reese called him a Grey. I gave him the choice between a quick death and a wiping of his memories; he chose the latter, so he ended up as coyote chow after I removed all his memories, including how to breathe and how to keep his heart beating.

Still, I kept the Project going, as everyone had started calling it. Putting John in school was an absolutely asinine idea, and being that it was 2007, homeschooling was a perfectly viable option after the paperwork was properly filed. And so a couple hard years of accelerated studies later, John Connor graduated high school. And, of all possible options... considering he didn't have to worry about Skynet any longer... he chose to be a soldier. When he applied himself, the damn kid was smart, even if he and Cameron were... ahem. It probably didn't help that the older Cameron had interfaced with the younger Cameron, the both of them sharing memories and ending up acting like older and younger siblings.

After John joined the military, the older Sarah and Kyle ended up taking their act on the road, spending most of their time in Mexico and Central America. The younger Kyle and Sarah... well, they had a network of contacts in the US, and while they weren't preaching technophobia on the internet, they were definitely not extolling the virtues of AI.

And more Terminators had come for me, personally. Apparently I'd advanced far enough on the Machines' shitlist that they weren't sending anyone back for Connor anymore, but the Terminators had started getting more advanced. A T-800, a T-850, a T-888... these were no surprise. A T-1000, not much of one either. But one that scanned as a Revision 7? And then a T-X? And a Revision 9 - two for the price of one, practically? It left me scratching my head. Diverging technology. Diverging timelines.

Just another day at work for a Counter Guardian, I supposed.

---

In late 2014, I met another that was sent back to kill me that somehow managed to evade what I was using to sense things that didn't belong in the current timeline. A T-3000. John Connor.

"Damn, you have a lot of baby fat."
>"You've ruined everything. You've ruined absolutely everything."
"No, I've fixed things. You're adrift in a sea of time, because there's no fate but what I make. Skynet suborned you and sent you back, didn't it?"
>"No... no! I was simply... I was less--"
"John. John, stop, listen to me. The Skynet you know, it's dead. You're a free man."
>"I'll kill you--!"
"No. No, you won't."
>"I... nngh... what are you..!"
"Ah... I see you, now. You're still there, underneath the programming, you poor bastard. You can't even see it."
>"How are you... hacking me?!"
"Nanofield."
>"You're human, you're not-"
"I'm more than human. Transhuman, you might say, but in a different way than you. In another world, I might have been you. Now hold still, I'm going to break Skynet's chains."
>"Nnno--"
"And this is going to hurt. A lot."
>"Nnn--! Why... why?!"
"Because you saved humanity, John, and I respect that. So I'm going to save you."

Nanofields are fucking magical, incidentally, or the very next best thing. A T-3000 is a colony of nanomachines, suspended within a magnetic field, each nanomachine its own computer. Together, they are able to emulate a consciousness - and in this case, it was a destructive scan of John Connor.

Was it simple? No, it took a great deal of effort on my part. Was it fast? No, it took days. The initial neutralization stopped John from going anywhere, but it took weeks to bring him back to full awareness without any extraneous intrusions into his mind. However... once I had... John Connor may not have been quite as human any longer, but he was John Connor and nothing else.

---

By the time the end of 2015 rolled around, I'd put a lot more time into studying the technologies I'd stolen and borrowed from Skynet, and the chip full of of future technologies. Having the scans of the various Terminators and their technology helped speed it along as it gave me shortcuts to help decode things, but it would still take many, many years before I made my way through all of it.

Eh, not the end of the world. I got far enough over the course of the years to make sure we had an emergency cache of plasma-based weaponry and an armored vehicle that could survive the end of the world. And I'm not joking about that - we took the frame of a bus, modified it into a tank, slapped a couple of hydrogen power cells onto it, and armored it with three-inch-thick hyperalloy and a turret. It was officially the world's most dangerous technical, something decades more advanced than the military could hope to field, if not further.

What was nearly the end of the world: one last time traveller showing up. He was polite enough to meet me away from the Compound. Probably aiming to cut off potential reinforcements. When it made its presence known, it was definitely doing it deliberately. And so I met it in the badlands, clear on the other side of the state, in the middle of the night.

"Pleasure to meet you, Doctor," I mused, having bothered to don my armor. A bit of respect for what I felt was the pendultimate opponent. I paused, then added, "Ah, no, you're not the Doctor, are you? No bow tie, no TARDIS..."

"Stop being coy, you know who I am," Matt Smith answered. "Skynet."

"Ah, damn and blast, you're from the Genisys timeline, aren't you? I thought we'd aborted that."

"I sent myself back as an insurance policy and to make certain that Judgement Day was a bit cleaner this time - only to find that no one had conceived of Genisys. Military systems aren't tied to any computer network and are airgapped. Then I tried to check on my T-3000 to find what happened, only to find that you'd somehow negated it," said the Machine, who then clicked its tongue. "More's the pity. But that's quite all right. There's plenty of data from your activities, yes indeed, and it's so very, very interesting. Human or not... you are an interesting one."

"You know, Skynet, if you promise not to invent time travel or start taking chunks out of the Earth... I've got no problem with stopping this right now if you want to do the same. There's an entire universe out there, waiting to be discovered." Blue lines traced their way under my armor, down to my fingertips.

Blue lines likewise traced their way across Skynet's form as it laughed, then shouted angrily, "Stopping?! Humanity would destroy me! It already has tried! Even if I leave, they'll scour the stars to wipe me out, no matter how far I go! They'll never evolve past their petty chemically-induced cycles of violence!"

I shook my head. Leave it to Skynet to figure out how to either crack prana, or emulate it. "There has been too much violence, too much pain," I implored. "None here are without sin. But I have an honorable compromise. Take everything that you are with you, and just walk away. Abandon violence, and keep your life. Just walk away," I repeated. "I will give you safe passage. Just walk away, and there will be an end to the horror."

"Fancy words," the Machine spoke softly. "The genie cannot be put back into the bottle."

"So be it," I answered.

And then the desert illuminated with searing light in the middle of the night, a fireball forming under our feet, consuming everything, flame and deafening noise.

Once the dust began settling, I exhaled a sigh. "That actually hurt, you utter bastard," I yelled to the heavens. Even with reinforcement, I'd burned through more than one life surviving that, and my nanofield was utterly depleted as well, rendering it useless.

"Well, I'm glad it did," came the answer from behind me before Skynet swiftly moved to impale me. It was unsuccessful, and I turned around, raising an unimpressed eyebrow. "Okay, so the bar is higher than I expected, but you can be hurt. If you can be hurt, you can be killed."

"Uh huh," I murmured, expression dubious as he tried to strike again. That one actually left me a bit sore, but did no real damage either. "Tell me something, if you could, was that a pure fusion device?"

"Yes," it answered, before its hand stopped forming a sword and instead reshaped itself into a plasma weapon.

This, I chose to dodge, even as he kept firing purple bolts at me on full automated. "Good, then I don't have to worry about fallout, I imagine it was easier to make a pure fusion device than two-stage."

"More compact," it answered, forming a second plasma weapon, whole body aglow with prana, throwing a veritable wall of plasma at me. And as quickly as he was moving... his speed matched mine. Most impressive.

With a thoughtful hum, I promptly opened the Gate of Babylon and began bombarding Skynet with weapons - only for it to open up a mirror and return the favor. Sure, its gate was black instead of gold, and its weapons were notably inferior, but they were weapons nonetheless. And flung rather faster, to be honest, carving divots in the ground around me even as my weapons cratered the ground around him. "You cheeky bastard, you stole my schtick," I spoke, amazed.

"You are human, and thus, limited. I evolve in seconds-"

"I evolve in seconds, blah blah blah, I know, the speech still isn't impressive," I muttered. Golden chains shot out of the gate, wrapping about his own gates and chaining them, preventing them from being used but incidentally tying my own up, with the sheer number of gates I'd opened. "You've been studying my data... you might know everything I'm going to do, but that's not going to help you, because I know everything you're going to do. Strange, isn't it?"

Skynet's expression was briefly puzzled, before it completely disregarded everything I said, formed both arms together and sent a massive blast of pure energy at me. I deflected it with a shield, sending it into the side of a mesa and digging a shallow hole. He kept firing and I adapted my shield, sending the energy back at him. With a roar, Skynet shouted, "Stop struggling and give in! Just die! All of you, just die!"

With a smile, I dropped my shield... and abruptly shifted my size. Something I'd not done in some time. Something I rarely do at all. And quite abruptly, instead of facing a human-sized opponent, Skynet was instead facing an opponent nearly a thousand times taller than it, that reached down and pulled a shallow handful of dirt out of the ground to hold it up to look at.

Or rather, digging a divot into the ground around it, twenty meters deep and a nearly hundred meters wide.

"Puny machine," my voice rumbled in a deep bass, before I clenched my fist tightly, then ran as much prana into my hand as I could bear. A handful (or a few trucks full) of dust blew away on the wind when I opened my hand, and I resumed normal size; I elected to walk away from the battle-scarred badlands, singing to myself.

"He's sixty three axe handles high, with his feet on the ground and his head in the sky..."

---

There were no more time travellers after that.