John stepped through the door. Eight people in jeans, painter’s pants, and T-shirts worked in various sections of the space, putting up walls, running cable, installing electronic gear. Desks already stood around. A pile of office furniture huddled toward the back. Hammers, saws, drills filled the air with industrious noise and the smell of saw-dust. He walked toward the rear, past workers who paid him no attention. John knew almost none of their names—security—but this was the fourth, no, fifth time they had done this kind of work for Sarah and him.
Ken Lash stood in the open doorway to the alley. A compact man, he wore a short beard sprinkled with gray.
He might have been thirty or fifty, John could never tell.
Now he stood, legs slightly apart, pointing at something up on the outside wall, and giving quiet instructions to two of his people, who nodded in silence. John always found it difficult to believe that Lash was anything but what he seemed to be: a general contractor running a modest but profitable construction business. He was very good at maintaining his cover.
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John waited while Lash finished with his people.
“Mr. Philicos,” Lash said then. “Good to see you.”
“Call me Sean, Ken.”
Lash smiled noncommittally, and John knew he would not.
“I feel funny you calling me ‘Mister.’”
“Yes, sir.”
John sighed. “How’s it going?”
“We’ll have you up and running in a couple of days. The furniture showed up earlier than expected, but we’re working around it. We’re modifying the phone connections to run a T4 line. Main problem was getting the permits for the extra electrical lines, but the Office straightened it out. One thing, we’ve installed a new monitoring net. It covers the walls and floor sandwiched in the insulation. Once activated, it’ll protect against any surveillance. Somebody wants to know what you’re doing in here, they’ll have to physically enter the premises and find a place to hide and just listen.”
Lash led John back into the building and continued pointing out what had been done so far, and what had yet to be done. John listened, impressed as always. They made the work Sarah and John did much easier, but Lash’s niceties were designed to counter a threat that had not appeared since the Connors had returned to this world.
“Any problems with the neighborhood?” John asked finally.
“No, sir. Although I wondered why you chose this location.”
“This is L.A. We didn’t want to send up a flag. Keep it low key.”
Lash said nothing, but John noticed his skeptical look.
The story, he had to admit, was a bit lame, but the truth would be harder to explain. John did not entirely understand the choice himself, but he knew Sarah. When she made up her mind, it served no purpose to argue.
Maybe her instincts are better than we know, he thought, thinking of the meeting with McMillin.
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“Sounds good,” John said when Lash finally wound down the tour. “Let me know when we’ve got the secure line to D.C. My mother upstairs?”
“Last I saw,” Lash said.
John headed for the stairs.
All the upstairs windows were open. He found Sarah on the sofa, watching a news channel, chewing on the end of a pen, legal pad beside her. She looked at him when he entered the room.
Simultaneously, they both said, “We may have a problem.”
They stared at each other for an awkward moment. John laughed first.
“You start,” Sarah said. She touched the remote, shutting off the TV.
John took a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and handed them to her, then shrugged out of his coat and sat down beside her. “I seem to have sent myself a message, and Destry-McMillin is the mailbox. I don’t pretend to understand all the physics, and before I left there I really missed Roseanne and Jade, but it comes down to this: Skynet still exists, somewhere. But it may have a finite lifespan. We don’t know.”
“You mean it can be destroyed.”
“No, I mean it has a natural lifespan—if ‘natural’ is a term you can apply to something that’s wholly artificial. It can die of—damn, the language just doesn’t work for this—it can stop existing over time. Just die. Sort of like old age.”
“I hear an ‘unless’ in that.”
John leaned forward, struggling with the explanation.
“If I understood myself correctly, Skynet’s awareness is a consequence of time travel. That’s why it’s been able to jump across dimensions, use time the way it does, because its very nature spans a certain time.”
Sarah frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“I’m not sure I do, either. But the catch is, there’s a natural boundary to it, like a…a parentheses in time, past and future, called a Cauchy Horizon. See, according to theory, 62
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time travel can’t reach into a time where no time machine exists. You have to build one first before visitors from the future can come back.”
Sarah grunted. “Bullshit. Who built a time machine in 1984?”
“Good question. And I asked. Seems it can happen as a side effect of a certain kind of physics—high energy, large particle physics. We’ve been playing around with that for decades.”
“But—”
“I said I didn’t understand all the physics. I didn’t understand a tenth of it. If we hadn’t been through all that we’ve been through, I wouldn’t have known they were even speaking English, okay?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“The cone of time, the period in which time travel in both directions is possible, mirrors itself. Picture two ice cream cones—”
“The pointy kind?”
“—yeah, the pointy kind. Point to point, okay? Each open end represents the boundary. Beyond either point, time travel can’t happen. Now, the trick is that every time you send someone back, you might establish a new boundary.”
“So the future boundary can get extended.”
“Right. But they’re not sure about that.”
As much time-hopping and dimension-dancing as they did, John still fumbled the language. The chronology had long since lost any kind of linear logic and turned into a single, infinite strand of spaghetti, piled in on itself in a hopeless tangle. He could not even be sure which “him”
had sent this message: his forty-something self who led the resistance to victory against Skynet in 2029, or the teenager who had gone to join the fight, only to begin a cross dimension quest chasing Skynet down as it fled from world to world. They had no way of knowing if various aspects of themselves had calved off when the shifts occurred, shadows remaining behind to linger in timelines that may or may not persist.
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“Anyway,” John continued, “the idea is that, after I destroy the time vault in 2029, the future boundary is closed off. But Skynet can use time travel freely at any point before that.”
“And do what?”
“Try to establish a new boundary.”
“How?”
“Building a new time machine.”
Sarah closed her eyes. “Wait. Wouldn’t Cyberdyne’s time vault qualify as a new time machine and establish a new—what did you call it—boundary?”
“Sure, but we destroyed that one in 2029, along with Skynet in that timeline. What Skynet needs to have happen is for another one, somewhere else, to be built—”
“Cyberdyne can’t build it?”
“Sure they can, if they had someone who could do the work.”
“Another Rosanna Monk.”
“Right.”
“And is there a candidate for this new Monk?”
“According to me,” John said with a smirk, “we need to find someone named Jeremiah Porter.”
Sarah let her head fall back. She gazed at the ceiling for a long time.
“Do you trust these people?” she a
sked finally.
“At Destry-McMillin? Not sure. But there’s no love lost between them and Cyberdyne.”
“Either way, we probably should get on this.” She straightened, picking up the legal pad. “Someone has been killing every Jeremiah Porter they can find. Here.”
John took the pad. Sarah’s cramped handwriting filled several pages—dates and places, some with notes about cause of death.
“All,” she said, “within the last year.”
“You’ve seen this pattern before, haven’t you?”
“Just change the name to Sarah Connor and this looks like a repeat of 1984. Except for the range. This covers more than L.A.”
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“You think they’re related.”
“A third of them are mathematicians or physicists or high-tech engineers. You tell me.”
“But…if Skynet needs this guy to build a new time machine…”
“Why are they being killed? Good question. Let’s answer that one later. For now, we need to find this guy. The right one.”
“You’re assuming he’s not one of these?”
“The killings go on. You tell me.”
Sarah picked up the remote. The television came back on. CNN was talking about the upcoming hurricane season.
Sarah looked over the list. Twenty-two names so far, most Jeremiah Porters, from all over the country. She hesitated to check overseas databases. Killings that wide spread would suggest Terminators all over the planet. Always a possibility.
The ones not exactly Jeremiah were variations—Gerald, Gerard, Jerry—but related in other ways. Professions ranged from a teacher to a project head at a high-energy research lab on the east coast, from engineers to logicians. All of them occupied positions dealing with abstruse areas of math, particle physics, or formal logic. Sarah did not see how logic might pose any kind of threat, but a few of them had written papers involving kindred mathematical explorations—at least, as far as she could tell. John had a better grasp of such matters, but both of them missed the expertise of the Specialists. Even Roseanne Monk would be helpful now.
But they were all gone. Sarah and John had come home alone. They were more or less on their own.
Not quite, she thought wryly. There’s Jack…
Jack Reed. And Samantha Jones. Sarah wondered, often, just how far they could be trusted. But John seemed comfortable with the arrangement, at least insofar as their commitment to help.
The hardest part for Sarah was the fact that Cyberdyne still existed. Reed had promised to take care of that. When 65
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John and she returned, three years ago, they found a world in which Cyberdyne thrived, albeit at a reduced level. No Skynet. No Department of Defense contracts, they learned.
But still there. Still doing research in many of the same areas that had nearly brought about Armageddon before.
Still trying to build Skynet.
And succeeding, if what I’m seeing is what I think it is…
Just as in 1984, a Terminator was systematically murder-ing people—this time Jeremiah Porters. That was what it looked like, at least. One Terminator or more. She hoped only one, but she could not be sure. In 1984, she had been the target, but several Sarah Connors had died. Skynet, far in the future, could not be sure which Sarah Connor posed the eventual threat that would bring it down, so the Terminator came back programmed to kill all the Sarahs in L.A.
Thorough. Cold-blooded, but thorough.
No blooded.
On the other hand, this could be coincidence. She scanned the list, checking ages, and many of them were over sixty.
That might reassure her, except for those who had died violently: three motor accidents, one hunting accident, two suicides, and one accidental electrocution. The most recent death had occurred four days ago, in San Bernardino. Much as she wanted to believe this to be a string of unfortunate coincidences, Sarah chose to think the worst. Safer that way.
And now this thing with Destry-McMillin and a message from the future.
Why a message? Why not a messenger, like the other times?
John seemed convinced.
Whatever the case, Sarah agreed, they needed to find Jeremiah Porter— the Jeremiah Porter, a specific one. She looked over at her son at the kitchen table, attention focused on the computer screen, right hand resting on the mouse.
Needle-in-a-haystack time, she thought. I’m so tired…tired of being afraid…
From below came the muffled noise of construction.
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Sarah set the list aside, closing her eyes. The world had been making a modest kind of sense lately. Oh, well.
John rubbed his eyes. The windows showed the harsh orange of the streetlights. Ken Lash’s people still worked downstairs. Tomorrow they would start up here, first with new windows—bulletproof, to be sure, but more immediately important, polarizing. Sarah would have to give up leaving the windows open.
His head buzzed with too much information—and not enough comprehension. Stefani Jaspar’s explanations not-withstanding, the material tested his limits. She was good at breaking complex ideas down nearly to a layman’s level, but the fact remained that time travel was too much to fit into anything that made sense.
He looked over the list of names. It would be good to tackle something he understood.
Who is Jeremiah Porter, and why is he so important to me?
He had long since grown used to thinking of himself as more than one person. Future self— selves—present self, parallel selves. Sarah and he had been “home” for three years now, and nothing had happened. But there had been lulls before. Just when it seemed that Armageddon had been canceled, time intruded again.
This time would be different. No more running. The future wanted to hurt them, try to kill them. This time they would get there first.
John closed down the computer. The list contained eight names, all within the Los Angeles area. Four others were already dead. The problem was how to tell which one was the important one. He could tell only so much from the little available on the Internet. He discounted three of the names immediately: one was over eighty and in a hospice; one worked for the county highway department; one was a cook at a small Hungarian restaurant. Not the sort of people likely to impact Skynet.
Today had been the first time in three years he had heard 67
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any word of Skynet. He wondered how Cyberdyne could possibly have the capacity to build it—and for whom? Jack Reed and his assistant, Samantha Jones, had shut down their government contracts, at least till recently. He wondered who had gotten around Reed and Jones and resurrected the federal connection. And why had Reed failed to tell him? DoD money. The Pentagon had been hot to have Skynet back in the ’90s, but after 2001 it seemed like a dead end. True, they were still a big, vital corporation, diversified, with branches in other countries. Nevertheless, John found it hard to believe that they could reconstruct the Skynet project. Their research staff, after the incidents in 1997 and 2001, suffered the loss of several top people unwilling to work with the possibility of future catastrophes.
And with Miles Dyson, head of the original project dead, and Rosanna Monk, his successor, missing, few could follow the extremely complex and abstruse theories underlying the nanoprocessor and time vault. The death of Cyberdyne’s CEO, Charles Layton, left the company with an aura like a curse. His replacement, a man named Oakley, seemed no more dangerous or enigmatic than any other CEO. Out-wardly, Cyberdyne looked like just another big tech firm, larger than most, but no more a threat, either.
And yet the project continued. The evidence was circum-stantial—McMillin’s suspicions of industrial espionage could be no more than one company stealing secrets from another to improve the bottom line—but John believed that Cyberdyne, and through it Skynet, was still working to bring about Armageddon.
Skynet still loomed in their future.
<
br /> Somehow, a man named Jeremiah Porter was pivotal.
And someone was killing Jeremiah Porters across the country.
Why?
To find out, he needed to talk to him. The one. The Porter he had sent himself the message about.
The message itself had been enigmatic, almost cryptic.
A copy lay on the table beside the keyboard.
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MESSAGE TO SELF/JOHN CONNOR/VERFIY BY NAMES AP-PENDED/YOU-I MUST FIND JEREMIAH PORTER/MATHEMATICIAN-EQUIVALENT TO MONK/LOCATION UNKNOWN/ESSENTIAL TO TIME STREAM/SKYNET ATTEMPTING TO LOCATE-TERMINATE/PORTER NECESSARY TO RESISTANCE/THE
FIGHT CONTINUES.
There was a space and then a string of names: SALCEDA TAJEDA ANTON JADE DANNY and so on, ending with three names that convinced John that he had sent the message himself, from the future: David Lawes, Deborah Lawes, and Kyle Reese. The first two had been the Connors’ pseudonyms in Mexico, back in ’01.
Kyle Reese was his mother’s lover, the man who had saved her from the first Terminator.
His father.
Jeremiah Porter. Mathematician. John understood enough math because of Jade and Roseanna Monk to realize how much he did not understand. What he had seen today at Destry-McMillin had stretched him way beyond his limits.
But he recognized some of the functions from Roseanna’s time vault work.
So this Porter character was supposed to be her equal.
Impressive. But he would have Monk’s vault in the future—as would Skynet. There was already a time machine.
Why would another time travel expert be necessary?
Because everything is still fluid…
John checked the time. Eleven-twenty. He sighed.
“Where do we start?”
He looked up. Sarah leaned against the woodwork that marked the boundary between this room and the next, holding a cup of coffee. She appeared calm, but he knew better. She felt it just like he did.
“I need to see these people at Pioneer Kelvin,” John said.
“That’s the company McMillin thinks is giving Cyberdyne 69
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access to Destry-McMillin material. Why don’t you start tracking down these Porters?”
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