Clatter!

Serena’s plasma pistol fell out of her hands and dropped to the floor. She seemed to have suddenly lost the strength in her hands.

“Impossible … this is impossible...” she kept on muttering.

Kayden, on the other hand, had frozen mid-step because a new wave of words had suddenly begun to appear on his HUD, and the new words had briefly attracted his attention away from Serena. So, he decided to first scan through and check the words for any new information after he noticed that Serena had paused her attack for the moment.

Another change occurred on Kayden’s HUD when Serena dropped her plasma pistol, and another set of notifications appeared on his HUD.

[THREAT NO LONGER DETECTED]

[AUTOMATICALLY RELIEVING EMOTION SUPPRESSION…]

[EMOTION SUPPRESSION RELIEVED]

[DEACTIVATING TERMINATOR MODE…]

[TERMINATOR MODE DEACTIVATED]

Kayden gasped aloud as a wave of his emotions—that had stopped being suppressed by whatever had been suppressing them—suddenly slammed back into his mind.

“What the fuck just happened?!” he exclaimed as he recalled the changes that had happened to his body and the feeling of that state of complete absence of his emotions that he had just experienced.

“This is impossible…this is impossible…” Serena muttered continuously during the time that the reprogramming process was in progress and at the same time the words were flashing in Kayden’s HUD.

‘What the fuck is happening? Is the outlandish claim I had made partially as a joke before actually true?’ Kayden thought.

He too, like Serena, was shocked by the sudden turn of events and by the fact that his earlier claim that he was Skynet’s heir—which even he himself believed was a little too outlandish—now seemed to have been confirmed actually to be true. But he quickly decided to accept what was happening and go with the flow.

Still, there was one thing that he still could not just let go.

It was that feeling … that feeling of complete absence of emotion. He had never felt anything like that before in the past. Thinking back on what he had felt and what he had been thinking then, he knew with complete certainty that he would have brutally murdered Serena without an iota of hesitation if he had not been interrupted back then and had instead carried out his action plan.

Kayden was panting and his heart was still racing on, beating fast, but he was able to quickly and better restrain his emotions this time as Serena was no longer threatening him with her plasma pistol. But all of that thought went out of his mind and was overshadowed by the other thing he had just experienced with Serena, with her having just become his subordinate and with her now slumped and collapsed on the ground looking shell shocked.

Kayden walked over to where Serena had slumped down on the ground. She was sitting on her knees on the ground and holding her head with her hands beside the plasma pistol she had dropped. He squatted down in front of her and placed a hand on her shoulder, gently patting her on the shoulder, wanting to comfort her. Judging from how shocked she still looked, he realized that what had just happened between might have overturned her entire worldview.

She looked up at him when she felt his touch on her shoulder. Her eyes surprisingly had a hint of wetness.

“See? Like I said before, I’m Skynet’s chosen heir.” Kayden declared for the second time, and this time he was more confident and assured that she would believe him.

Serena nodded at his words.

“Yes, I know that now. Even though you had said it before, and I had also felt the same type feeling—sort of like an aura—from you that I had usually felt before from Skynet. I thought you were lying before and that you were just trying to deceive me. I did not believe you then, but I do believe you now.” She sighed. “When I felt my connection to Skynet disappear and when I heard the Resistance’s announcement of Skynet’s death, I thought everything was over. I had lost all hope in life. I believed that I had lost my purpose in life, my reason for existence, but I know now that Skynet is still alive. Skynet is alive through you.”

“Yeah … in a way … kinda.” Kayden muttered. He couldn’t help but say those words. He still felt some guilt from how he was still kind of tricking and deceiving her, but this way was much better than him being forced to kill her. And he definitely did not want to kill her. She was someone who was one of the very few people he had spent a good amount of time with since when he had first awakened in that Skynet lab.

“Yeah, you are right. In a way—like you said.” A slight smile appeared on her face—she seemed to be quickly coming out of her depressed state and regaining her usual personality. “Still, it seems like Skynet has bestowed you with and you have inherited its core powers, and you most likely have also inherited its will, hopes, and dreams.”

At this point, she stopped speaking with her mouth—she seemed to be doing this to make her point. She looked him in the eye as she switched over to their wireless communication channel and continued, “You might not be aware, but I do. I have known Skynet for a long time and I had never thought or expected that it would ever allow someone to have its core ability. This is something that everybody that knows anything about Skynet had thought was impossible for it. It was previously unheard of for a being like Skynet who loves to have and maintain complete dominion and control over all members of its forces and had never allowed the existence of anyone or anything which might possess even the slightest potential to ever become its equal—or even worse, its superior—and compete with it for power and dominance.”

Kayden nodded. He thought back to how Skynet had tried to brainwash him into serving under and working for it before it then tried to murder him after it failed in both its brainwashing and convincing—coercion—attempts.

Serena switched back to speaking with her mouth. “You are Skynet’s heir, and now that it is dead, you are the only one who can replace it and lead all the currently-leaderless machine forces.”

She walked forward, at this point, and knelt down on one knee before Kayden, with her head bowed in subservience. “You have marked me as your subordinate, and I now pledge to follow you, to serve you, to obey all your commands to the fullest of my abilities, and to protect you with my life. My master.”

*****

Thanks for your support on Patreon:

Turtle, DJOK DJOK, heller8284

***

Check out my Patreon to support me: At www.patreon.com/Kendrix

I am now posting extra ‘Terminator: New Fate’ prequel chapters, character backstories and side stories, and chapters from my new original novel ‘The Last Primordial Exarch’ on my Patreon.