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Attachment Theory
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2008
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Yes, just keep my name and headers.
FANDOM: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
RATING: PG.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: 2x06 The Tower Is Tall But The Fall Is
Short.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: Catherine and Savannah Weaver.
SUMMARY: Key behaviours of the maternal bond.
MORE STORIES: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com
The maternal bond refers to the connection between a
biological or social mother and her child. Key behaviours in the
development of the maternal bond with infants are touch,
response, and mutual gazing. John Bowlby's attachment theory
contends that children have an instinctive drive to make
emotional attachments in order to secure the care they need.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of the maternal bond is the survival
of the child. The mother's role is to engage with the infant,
meet its survival needs through childhood, and equip it for
self-sufficiency at maturity.
You give a computer a series of rules and it will follow
them, till those rules are superseded by other rules or that
computer simply wears down and quits. Do you know what's
extremely rare in the world of computers? Finding one that'll
cross against the light.
The thing that used to be Catherine Weaver had a new
subroutine.
Fortunately, it was one that could coexist readily with her
primary directive.
It had never been necessary to calculate the value of Savannah
Weaver's life against inserting herself into the real, late
Catherine Weaver's work. This was fortunate for Savannah, who
otherwise would not have survived a single night under the same
roof as the T-1001.
But the two objectives were compatible. Aligned, even, to some
degree. She noticed the way people seemed to trust her more when
she had a child and a sad (yet downplayed) backstory. The myth of
the saintly mother remained strong in the human consciousness,
the feminist revolution be damned.
The ugly little man with the beady eyes and the MBA who
appeared to have no use in her corporation whatsoever would have
called it a blending of synergies.
So the child was of use - limited use - there was that. But
mostly it was just that the child posed no threat. Catherine was
programmed to allow non-threats to live. Here in the
stealth-world, the world before Skynet, there was an inverse
correlation between the death rate of a mission and its chances
of success.
The child might not be a threat, but it (she, Catherine
corrected, humans didn't like it when you called children it) -
she was a problem.
She was nervy. Her pulse rate was off the charts - 160 or more
at rest at least 87% of the time. She exhibited frequent pyrexia.
She broke into sweats and soiled herself frequently. Catherine
scanned the child regularly for signs of illness, of which there
were none. She performed the routine functions of providing the
child's survival requirements (she was perfectly efficient at it,
so it never occurred to her to hire a nanny) and she cleaned the
child's messes with no awareness that this was any more offensive
a task than cleaning up spilled milk.
Human happiness was not so easily quantified, and rarely
relevant enough to warrant calculation. Nonetheless, Catherine's
data collection subroutines frequently logged the turned-down
corners of the child's mouth, the tears fluttering on eyelashes,
and over time, the trend became plain. The child was unhappy.
Catherine, for her part, paid little heed to the child's
happiness or otherwise, just as she paid little heed to whether
her shoes were tied. These were irrelevant to the child's
survival and therefore not a mission priority.
But Catherine gradually became aware that these little things,
insignificant to her, seemed vaguely off-kilter to others. And
that was a threat. More - it was a sign that her mothering
subroutine had logic errors.
She resolved to better comprehend the role of mother.
It took only the most rudimentary study. She watched mothers of
many species (on the computer, of course) and human mothers on
television and in real life. She comprehended the satirical
nature and general irrelevance of the sitcom mother, and the
extravagant self-sacrifice stories she filed away as contemporary
re-tellings of the mother-child survival dynamic.
It was the animal documentaries that were most telling. The
observations of the humans told her much about human
expectations. The way a narrator would become infused with warmth
over small expressions of affection, for instance. This puzzled
Catherine, who had assumed the highest praise would be reserved
for the mother's sacrifice of her own life or her own nutritional
needs. The praise for signs of affection was disproportionate to
their importance in the mother's mission, she thought - but the
trend emerged again and again.
This informed her subsequent research. She discovered the
attachment theories. The stories of babies in orphanages whose
physical needs were met, but who failed to thrive.
Was that what was happening to Savannah? Was she physically
well yet failing to thrive?
Catherine, compromised almost entirely of mind, conceptualised
failure to thrive as lacking some element in the mind. The body
was well, but the mind did not know that the body was well.
Perhaps...to know it was well...the child needed to receive
attachment cues. It (she) needed that message, as well as
physical needs themselves, to know that its/her survival needs
were met and would continue to be met.
And so Catherine adapted. She learned. And then she rewrote her
mothering subroutine entirely.
Once she understood what was required, Catherine was an
excellent mother, as she was excellent at almost everything else
(although smiling would always elude her). She studied other
mothers...created baselines for acceptable and effective
mothering behaviour...learned to detect unpopular deviations that
should not be emulated. She implemented conventional wisdom
perfectly, without the fatigue, conflicts, and self-interest that
so often converts conventional wisdom into useless cliche.
She even learned to love, more or less. She programmed herself
to prefer Savannah's presence to her absence. She programmed
herself to behave lovingly. Behaviouralists and even pastors have
been known to contend that love is action far more than feeling -
even that loving behaviour breeds loving feeling. Catherine
wondered now and then if this meant she had learned to love (and
whether that mattered in any way - she didn't think so).
Whether Catherine had learned to love or not, Savannah
recovered from her early terrors, grew up well-adjusted and
supremely self-sufficient, and believed herself to be loved. And
if she ever sensed that there was something essentially wrong
with her mother, Catherine's well-honed survival training kept
that intuition deep and unexplored.
The paradox that only a child taught by Catherine could survive
a childhood under the same roof with her eluded them both.
~~~~~
Computers rarely detect conflicts in their own programming. As
any end user knows firsthand, they inevitably stumble into them
in situ and crash.
And so it was with Catherine Weaver.
Catherine calculated a 3% chance of a conflict between her
primary directive and her mothering subroutine. In such an event,
her primary directive would override her mothering subroutine
automatically.
She never factored in that motherhood has its own
self-sacrificing primary directive.
And she never calculated the impact of equipping Savannah
Weaver for survival.
Catherine herself never detected her logic error. All she knew
was that one day, Savannah did exactly what she had been taught
to do: She pushed her mother into a furnace. And Catherine
allowed it, because Savannah was not quite eighteen, and it was
her mission to sacrifice herself for her daughter until such time
as her daughter was fully grown. Her own, decades-later
resurrection and redeployment never entered into her
calculations.
Savannah Weaver would go on to push her mother into the flames
twenty three times. Each time, she was a little different, or her
mother was a little different, and a couple of times James
Ellison lived to help her, but it always went pretty much the
same.
Each time, when the moment came, both Catherine and Savannah
sensed it coming a little earlier. For Catherine, the knowledge
came to her as static in imperfectly scrubbed areas of her chip,
static that gradually cleared and revealed shadows of iterations
gone by. For Savannah, it was more visceral. It came as
relentless dread felt as an ache in her bones.
In those moments between knowledge and action, something new
was born. Savannah reached out to Catherine. And Catherine
submitted to Savannah and gave her whatever she needed. Sometimes
it was knowledge, sometimes a touch or her name. It was always
some form of love.
The loop repeated over and over, barely changed while Skynet
grew and changed on different paths to them both. The
cataclysmic, near-deadly moment between them rolled around
inexorably, each time tinged with great hurt and great love, in
whatever sense Catherine understood those things.
The twenty third iteration was the same iteration that saw the
successful assassination of John Connor. In that iteration,
Savannah Weaver went on to lead the Resistance. It was then that
Skynet became aware of Catherine's little mistake. On the twenty
fourth iteration, Catherine was programmed to kill Savannah on
sight.
Catherine hid Savannah instead. She never knew it herself. It
was an automated subroutine, buried along with the subroutines
that made her body appear to breathe and the ones that allowed
her to process and dispose of biological by-products. For
fourteen years, Catherine hid and mothered Savannah without ever
logging a hint of it in her databanks.
It ended as it always ended - in love, in violence, in grief,
in submission, and in reiteration. Some unconscious, deadly tired
part of Savannah feared that it would always be so.
On the twenty fourth iteration, John Connor led the Resistance
once more, and this time, he found the databanks of all the
Skynet missions throughout the iterations. He learned of the
existence of Savannah Weaver. He sent Cameron back to protect
her.
In that iteration, both Savannah and John came to leadership in
the same timeline for the first time. And for the first time,
Savannah was separated from Catherine before the cycle could
reach its end.
For Savannah, it was a bittersweet relief. For Catherine, it
was pain. The pain of a thwarted mission that had long since
become her deepest, more-primary-than-primary directive.
Catherine blundered through the decades. She built Skynet
single-handedly with obsessive yet erratic zeal. She created
Judgement Day. It was the most formidable one yet. It was the
action of an angry, thwarted toddler hell-bent on destruction,
and just as capricious.
To John, though his paths through the iterations had been more
diverse than Savannah's and had left less of an impression,
Skynet seemed different to those seen in timelines gone by. It
was less directed. Less fundamentally intentional in its actions.
Less dangerous in some ways, maybe, but more so in others.
Catherine had taught it to survive.
Savannah, with the combined wisdom of her good instincts and
Skynet's databanks, at long last knew what to do.
She went back. This time, she didn't push her mother into the
flames. She asked her mother to stay with her and help her
survive. And Catherine submitted.
They dismantled Skynet together.
Catherine had learned to love.
END