{ fic: tin girl or, the untold story of cameron phillips. (sarah connor chronicles) }

"My dad sells tractors," she says, "what about yours?"

The construction of the TOK715's alter-ego is fragile, much like the human it has been programmed to portray. Cameron. What is this name? What is this she?

"My mom stays at home."

Cameron Phillips is your everyday girl-next-door. She likes literature, she's steady in math and science, and she's good at track. She's probably flunking French. And, yes, her father sells tractors, the boring kind. The TOK715 is a reprogrammed cybernetic organism sent back in time from the year 2027. Its primary objective is the protection of Sarah and John Connor. Its secondary objective is integration and camouflage. The TOK715 says, "Thank you for explaining," and Cameron Phillips adds, "it'll be our secret," with a smile. (Trust, its internal systems codify John's behaviour, acceptance.)

John Connor is shy, and wary; Cameron has to talk and talk and talk, has to push his buttons just to get him to look at her. She is attractive, this she knows. Another John Connor told her so. It was the first thing he ever told her. At least, it's the first thing she remembers after he wiped her systems. "No secrets," he said, showing her what she had done, and what he had done to her. "No regrets."

("Regret," she had quoted, "noun. Sorrow or disappointment due to some external circumstance or event." Her cybernetic processors clicked over the definition; her head tilted to one side, a new component of her programming, intended to indicate contemplation. Regret is not something that she understands. The TOK715 has no need for it.)

Cameron Phillips smiles at the boy in the classroom because he is new, and because he seems lost. She sits next to him in class, and she's hurt when he shuns her friendly advances. Cameron Phillips feels sympathy when he tells her about his dead father and his over-attentive mother; she feels glad that her parents are not the same. She tries to cover his embarrassment at his open confession, to reassure him.

Cameron Phillips dies in that classroom.

The TOK715 detects a familiar unfamiliar presence when the substitute teacher enters the room. The T-888 model is not adept at camouflage; it does not care enough to try harder. Its only objective is to kill.

When Cromartie begins to fire across the classroom, her secondary programming shuts down, and her primary protocol initiates - she blocks John from the gunfire, takes a direct hit, and her system has to reboot. One hundred and twenty seconds. When she comes to, there are two girls from the class looking down at her and glass strewn across the floor. She jumps to her feet, assessing the relative success rate of a thousand exit routes. She takes the easiest one: climbs onto the window ledge and throws herself out onto the ground. Her optical scanner shows Cromartie tossing a school bus onto its side. She looks around for a weapon, something big. My dad sells tractors. The SUV slams into the T-888 and she throws open the door. "Come with me if you want to live." Specific words, words coded into her virtual memory by a man who is and is not, the boy in front of her; words that tie the past to the future by way of the present. Neither Cameron nor the TOK715 worry about temporal confusion. There is only the objective. There is only now.

(In the future, John Connor tries to teach her compassion. His face is worn and rugged, marked by age and the battle against Skynet. He is old. He tries to explain to her the significance of life, of memory and nostalgia - the importance of time to humans, to bodies that decay and cannot regenerate. He forgets, sometimes, that beneath the illusion of her flesh is an endoskeleton as powerful and as capable of destruction as the Hunter-Killers that scour the topside. He forgets that Cameron Phillips is a figure of his own making, and that she is only as real as he believes her to be. He talks about before and after as though his life is linear when it is a paradox, reconstructed, broken down and remade time and time and time again. He talks about memory and forgets that he took hers from her. But the TOK715 does not have a concept of irony.)

Sarah Connor is a woman who defies codification. Her combative strategies are mostly sound, but she seems prone to erroneous judgements based on human sentimentality.

"You should have changed your alias."

"Go to hell," Sarah spits, low and dangerous, and the TOK715 knows that the facts as presented in 2027 are true: the mother of John Connor is as formidable as a Terminator, violent and calculating. Cameron Phillips would have shuddered in the face of such hatred and contempt; the TOK715 has shed its more sophisticated integration protocols, and resorts to logic. "They'd have found you anyway. They always do." They not we. It took the TOK715 seventy-three days to find the Connors. It belongs with them now, not Skynet.

(When he sends her back - when John Connor, saviour of mankind, leads her to the brink of time and leaves her there - his face seems pained. He deliberates over his final words, but says only, "You know what to do," then takes a step back.

"Yes," she says, "I do," then throws herself into the displacement field.)

"You should wear a sign," John says after they've made the jump to 2007, "help needed." His brow is creased, his palms are sweating. His heart rate is significantly altered.

"You’re angry," she states, and he rolls his eyes. He turns his back to her like she’s a stranger. Her head tilts to the side, and she fails to choose an adequate reaction. The TOK715 knows no regrets, doesn’t know sympathy. There is only the objective, and the objective is to protect John and Sarah Connor. There is no Cameron Phillips – there never was.