Fanfic / The Last Connor

The Last Connor by Captain Tazer is a crossover between Alien and Terminator, specifically Aliens and Terminator Genisys.

Set shortly after the events of Aliens, the fic opens with Newt back on Earth but on her own after Hicks and Ripley apparently left her, but she soon finds herself with an unexpected new guardian in the form of "Pops", still alive after over two centuries, who reveals that Newt is actually the last living descendant of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese.

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The Last Connor contains examples of:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Skynet is the extreme example of this, but on one occasion its programming works for and against it when Pops realises that their opponent is his own past self, as neither Terminator can kill the other.
• Actor Allusion: Word of God explicitly confirms that Kyle Reese and Corporal Hicks being related is a reference to the fact that Michael Biehn played both characters.
• All Your Powers Combined: The heroes face a particularly terrifying example of this when Skynet creates three T-3000s in the form of the Xenomorphs; they might lack the ability to actually think, but in the form of a Xenomorph sentient thought isn't exactly important.
• Asshole Victim: While it may be a bit extreme to actually want a child dead, Newt’s school bully Bianca is so cruel to Newt that it’s hard to care much when the other girl is killed by a Terminator in Newt’s place, and Newt barely bothers to mourn her grandparents either after their continued attempts to control her and refusal to listen to her protests.
• Bad Habits: The T-1000 disguises itself as a priest to make contact with Newt’s grandparents and Ripley.
• Badass and Child Duo: Pops and Newt form this dynamic for most of the fic, although Newt still considers Ripley her first defender.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Pops serves as one when he steps in to protect Newt from potential attackers and then affirms his resolve to protect her.
  • In the final confrontation with the company in court, Ripley gets unexpected aid from Rodney McClaren, the husband of her lost daughter Amanda.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Probably the best description of Bishop, who has been rebuilt and reprogrammed to essentially serve as the 'representative' of Skynet in this new timeline.
• Broken Bird: The fic opens with Newt further traumatised after she was dumped with basically abusive grandparents and believing that Hicks and Ripley abandoned her, even before she has to deal with the appearance of a Terminator.
• Cast from Lifespan: Part of the reason Pops has remained in 'stand-by mode' for so long is that the 'upgrade' that gave him T-1000-esque shapeshifting abilities is also a drain on his power supply, so he remained offline to conserve power. As events unfold, Pops’ power supply continues to run down, forcing him to increasingly improvise or time his actions just right so that he expends the least amount of power possible to defeat the current threat.
• Closest Thing We Got: In the final confrontation, Ripley has to reprogram the younger Pops to fulfil his place in history as she’s the only one of the three LV-426 survivors with anything close to relevant computer experience.
• Crossover Relatives:
  • The central point of the series is that Rebecca ‘Newt’ Jordan is the last living descendant of the Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese who defeated Skynet in Genisys.
  • Later, Corporal Hicks is revealed to be a descendant of the Kyle Reese from the ‘new’ timeline Pops, Sarah and Kyle created, which Hicks and Newt note makes them technically related.
• The Determinator: In the tradition of all Terminators, Pops refuses to abandon his (in this case self-appointed) mission, starting with shooting two police officers in both knees each for trying to stop him for speeding and culminating in him sacrificing himself to destroy Skynet.
• Didn't Think This Through: After Newt learns that someone is trying to kill her, she runs away from school and her grandparents to the nearest mall, only realising after arriving that she doesn’t have money or food.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: As events unfold, Pops’ depleting power supply causes him to lose some of his less essential but useful capabilities, such as the sensors necessary for him to identify a disguised Terminator.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Skynet can’t understand why Pops would protect Newt when his original programming to protect Sarah Connor has become irrelevant, incapable of acknowledging that Pops’ concern for certain humans now goes beyond his programming.
• Face Death with Dignity: Newt nearly does this when a Terminator tries to kill her in the mall, before Pops shows up to save her.
• Faking the Dead: It is eventually revealed that Hicks was told that Ripley and Newt died back on LV-426, as he was in a coma from after Ripley left to rescue Newt until they returned to Earth; Newt was told that Ripley and Hicks left her and Ripley was just arrested and never told what happened to the others. Also, Pops helps his allies fake their deaths on more than one occasion to escape their immediate attackers.
• Groin Attack: Pops delivers a particularly brutal one when he finds a group of men preparing to rape Newt, as he literally castrates all of the would-be rapists.
• Happy Ending Override: Ripley manages to expose the company’s crimes, but this results in mass unemployment as Weyland-Yutani had such a major role in so many industries.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the final confrontation, Pops arranges for his own power core to be triggered so that his destruction sets off an EMP.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: As in Genisys, Pops is fighting other Terminators to protect his human allies.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: When Pops realises that he’s facing his own past self, neither version of him can kill the other due to their programming.
• I Hate Past Me: In a sense; since one of Skynet’s Terminators is the past version of Pops, the others must find some way to stop that Terminator without destroying it even as Skynet is still trying to kill them.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance:
  • Pops is unaware of some modern security systems, such as cars being secured with palm-readers, because he’s been in low-power mode for the last few decades.
  • Ripley is unaware of the history of Sevastopol II, whose predecessor was destroyed by her own daughter to stop another xenomorph outbreak (Alien: Isolation).
  • As it turns out, even Skynet was unware of Newt’s connection to Sarah Connor until after it had targeted her for termination, which attracted Pops’ attention.
• Little Miss Badass: Despite everything she’s gone through, Newt accepts her new family history and name after Pops explains his past to her.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Newt in particular serves as one for Ripley, Ripley holding on to a photo of Newt she recovered from LV-426 as a reminder of why she needs to be a model prisoner so that she can get her case reopened (Newt would likely reciprocate, but for most of the fic she was convinced that Ripley didn’t want her any more).
• Logical Weakness:
  • While Pops has been upgraded to possess the liquid metal of the T-1000 on his exterior, since he retains most of his original endoskeleton, not only does he still experience the occasional servo-glitches, he is only capable of assuming the appearance of individuals who are of a similar build to him where the T-1000 could vary its height or width to a certain degree. Also, his ‘upgrade’ has caused an increasingly-significant drain on his power supply compared to the lifespan he would have possessed if he’d remained an undamaged T-800; he’s managed to extend it by operating in standby mode for the last few decades, but tells Newt that he’ll only live for another year or so before his power runs down for good, and that’s without introducing the power drain he’ll experience if he has to fight suitably powerful foes or do anything particularly complicated with his poly-mimetic alloy, such as turning it into a boat to get Hicks and Newt to safety.
  • Later, the T-1000 is defeated during a fight with Pops on board a penal space cruiser when Ripley destroys the windows of the area where Pops and the T-1000 are fighting; while Pops is able to get a grip on something, the T-1000’s liquid metal state lacks the necessary solid mass to properly hold itself inside the ship against the vacuum.
• The Man Behind the Man: As it turns out, Skynet has spent centuries manipulating Weyland-Yutani by posing as a predictive computer program to help gather resources necessary for Skynet to achieve its full power.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • While living with her grandparents, Newt is forced to accept being called her birth name of Rebecca; after Pops rescues her, she swiftly insists on being called ‘Newt’ once more, although she adopts ‘Connor’ as a surname.
  • After the court case that led to Weyland-Yutani closing down, Ripley had to adopt a new name to protect herself from people angry at the subsequent mass unemployment, adopting the name ‘Ellen Connor’ in homage to Sarah Connor, with Newt retaining her new name of ‘Newt Connor’ and Hicks choosing the same surname once he joins them.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Newt’s school bully, Bianca Horsepower, steals Newt’s phone and answers it in a moment of petty spite, which causes a Terminator to kill her by mistake, thus tipping Newt off to the fact that someone’s after her and giving Pops time to find her.
  • Later on, certain Company agents try to track down Newt by announcing her disappearance, which gives Hicks the first sign that Newt isn’t dead and thus leads to his discovery that the Company lied to him.
  • On a wider note, Skynet targeted Newt with no knowledge of her relationship to Sarah Connor, which allows Pops to become involved in its attempt to target the LV-426 survivors and stop Skynet in its tracks.
• Nightmare Fuel: Skynet creates T-3000s in the form of the Xenomorphs; the only way that scenario could be scarier would be if the resulting ‘hybrids’ were sentient.
• Papa Wolf: Pops and Hicks act as this to Newt.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Even Skynet doesn’t want the xenomorphs to get to Earth, if only because it doesn’t have the resources to stop them if they destroy the human race before it can develop its resources to rebuild.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: A rare case where it’s perfectly justifiable for an adult to deliver one to a group of children, as Hicks criticises all of the kids who have bullied Newt since she came back to Earth.
• Reckless Gun Usage: A petty thug accidentally kills his friend because he wasn’t prepared for the recoil of his new weapon, causing him to be thrown back when he tried to fire a shot and pull the trigger on reflex to shoot his friend in the back.
• Saying Too Much: One of Hick’s new colleagues gives away that he was there to spy on Hicks when he mentions aliens when Hicks has never told anyone about the events on the mission to LV-426.
• The Scapegoat: It’s eventually revealed that Ripley was arrested and accused of the destruction of the colony on LV-426 after she returned to Earth.
• Shout-Out: When the new Terminators arrive in the present, one Terminator’s brief exchange with a human mimics Edgar’s death in Men in Black.
• Spit Take: Hicks gives one when he overhears a news broadcast revealing that Newt is still alive after he spent the last year thinking she and Ripley were dead.
• Spot the Impostor: When a T-1000 tries to trick Pops, Newt and Hicks by posing as Ripley, Hicks and Newt catch the T-1000 out when one of the Ripleys calls Newt ‘Rebecca’, Hicks and Newt are certain that Ripley wouldn’t call Newt that.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Skynet only has Terminators available in the present because it sent various signals into the future until a possible future version of Skynet sent aid to its past self. Later, the questions of Pops’ existence are explained when one of Skynet’s new Terminators is revealed to be Pops’ past self; Skynet avoids destroying it even after it learns Pops’ identity because the temporal consequences can’t be initially predicted. As a result, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Pops are able to capture that Terminator and reprogram it to go back in time to protect Sarah Connor, thus setting up the origin of this timeline.
• Trauma Conga Line: Ripley, Hicks, and Newt have all been through some unpleasant experiences after LV-426; Hicks was just told the other two were dead and returned to duty while Ripley was made the scapegoat for the colony’s destruction and sent to prison, but Newt is led to believe that Ripley doesn’t want anything more to do with her, was dumped with grandparents who never agreed with her mother’s choices, and is constantly bullied at school.
• Underestimating Badassery: In as much as a child can be ‘badass’, Newt evades the prison guards by making her way through the air vents to try and rescue Ripley, Hicks and Pops after they’re captured.
• Would Hurt a Child: The new Terminators naturally have no problem killing Newt, and one shoots one of Newt’s classmates because it mistakenly identified her as it’s target.