"Don't people usually talk on guard duty?" I asked as the silence got to me. If I was going to spend a long night with Barnes, I needed some sound.
"Some people do." Barnes said and sounded as lifeless as the metal he said he hated.
"And you don't talk to people while on guard duty?"
"You're not a person. You're just some metal with the face of a person."
I was more than insulted with that comment. I wasn't metal with the face of a person, I was a person with my humanity replaced with metal. I was an abomination, but I was still human.
"No," I told him. "I was operated on by Skynet and made to be...what I am today."
"At least you're metal that knows your place." Barnes said, with a disturbing smile on his face. "You should just kill yourself and be done with it. Or I'll help you if your programming doesn't allow it."
"The parts of my Skynet programming that allowed it to control me was erased when I came here. So I could kill myself if I wanted to." I told Barnes and had to resist leaving him paralyzed for that comment. "And my place is with the Resistance."
"And in bed with John Connor?" He replied and I turned to him surprised. "I've guessed it, especially with how Kate has been acting lately."
"I haven't had sex with him." I said with something unsaid that my comrade picked up on.
"You don't have a chance with him." Barnes said with a smug smile on his face.
I hated that smile because it reinforced what I already knew. No matter how much I loved John, he would never allow me to get too close. Not close enough to be his wife and not even close enough to have an affair with him. All I'd be able to do is look at him and see what could have been.
"You don't know that." I replied, pushing my doubts to the deepest part of my mind.
"Metal and humans shouldn't mix. It's unnatural." Barnes stated. "You're the enemy and to think differently is to start down the road of becoming a Grey."
"But I feel like a human." I hissed. "I need to sleep and I need to eat. Hell, I can feel every emotion that you can. You're not more than me, you're just the same."
"All your emotions were created, they aren't real."
"How can they be fake if I feel them? If I can react to them?"
"All your reactions are programmed and you react accordingly."
I knew what he said could be true. Who I was before could've been radically different than how I am now. I could've used to be someone who would've sided with Skynet in an instant.
I could've been someone that wanted to destroy all of humanity and so gave my body to Skynet for that reason. No one would ever know.
"You know I was human before. How do you think it feels to be living as the enemy? As an abomination?" I said and that seemed to make Barnes silent.
He was a big supporter of John Connor and hated anything related to Skynet with a passion. He was a great man to have at your side and someone you wanted to never fight. That's how strong his passion was.
I knew, or at least hoped, that he was silent because he was imagining waking up to metal underneath his skin. The thought that all that he had been before had been tainted by the thing that he hated most. That he could never go back to what he had been before.
I also knew that if he thought this he would never admit it. He was that kind of man.
I noticed him looking out in the distance and turned my attention outward. Skynet had made me to be a fighter but hadn't added too much to my human sight. It probably thought I could get enough information from my hearing.
"Do you see anything?" Barnes asked me.
"A mass of something." I replied.
Barnes said nothing but an angry retort seemed to be on the edge of his lips.
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