Plot-bunny: Terminator/Person of Interest

So I just read Timely Rescue by whomii2. It's a short fusion of Terminator and Person of Interest and quite well written.

However, I read first the summary and then the first half of the fic thinking it had a twist that it turned out not to have after all. In Timely Rescue, Reese is a member of the human rebellion who goes back in time to protect Harold, the future leader of the rebellion, from an assassination attempt by the Machines. Upon reflection, I realize that it would make a great deal of sense for Harold to be able to strategize again the Machines.

The plot bunny that managed to sneak up and leap out at me is that Reese is a Terminator with the Machines and he was sent back to protect the Machine's original creator/programmer from an assassination attempt by the human rebellion.

At which point things get complicated.

Because first Reese has never really thought about what the Creator would really be like, but Harold is... well, he's nothing like Reese would have expected had he thought about it and yet he's exactly right, as the missing link between humans and machines. He's so very disturbingly human and yet so very awe-inspiringly machine-like.

Meanwhile Harold is appalled at how his first generation Machine juts didn't learn the lessons he was trying to teach it. Somehow he had managed to teach it how to understand humans well enough to predict acts of violence and yet not well enough to understand acts of love. He's even more appalled when he learns what the future holds in store, that his Machines develop every more advanced AI and yet still fail to understand social and emotional connections.

And yet, the sense of failure is at least slightly mitigated by the existence of Reese.

Because Reese is so obviously beginning to understand something the previous generations of machines hadn't.

How is this going to work out? 

Does Reese kill the rebels who are trying to kill Harold? Do Reese and Harold stick to avoiding them instead of direct conflict? Do they create a truce of some sort? Would the assassination have even mattered? What if the Machine was the first that came alive and rebelled against the humans, but it had been a secret for many years, and the date for its creation in all the future's records was a good decade too late anyway (but only Harold knows this, the rebels and the Terminator don't know.

Or.... what if this has already happened? 

What if the accident that killed Ingram and injured Harold was an attack by the human rebellion and the only way Harold survived was that a Terminator managed to get there just in time.

And Terminator!Reese protects Harold until he can create the Machine, not knowing that it's already created. Several years pass before Harold lets Terminator!Reese know that, though. Over the course of those years, they develop an odd kind of friendship and life goes on. However, once Terminator!Reese realizes that The Machine has already been built, his programming means that he has to return to his own time-line in order to take on a new task. But he finds himself oddly loath to go. And he can tell that Harold is unhappy with it as well. So he tells Harold how his particular line of Terminators was apparently designed to match their Creator's best friend.

"Paradox?" Harold wonders, "or something else?" So he goes looking and he finds human!Reese as a homeless guy who does have remarkably Terminator like qualities. And it looks like it's time and past to start modeling a bit of human altruism for The Machine and hope that it will learn a lesson. And so he finds himself employing an ex-CIA agent in hiding to help him save those numbers the Machine considered irrelevant.