He got to his feet. He knew his enemy.
He went to the utility room. He had to assume also that the place was being watched. If so, his entrance would have been observed. Still, it might be useful to leave unseen. He closed his eyes, concentrating, and began exuding a film over his entire body. It covered his clothing, his face and hands, every part of him visible to the world. When he finished, he issued a command and the film became completely light absorbent.
He could not avoid opening the back door. But he kicked it and leapt into the night. Within moments he crossed the 131
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barren patch of dirt between house and alley and clambered onto the roof of a garage. He lay still and waited, watching the back door of Eisner’s apartment.
Twenty minutes later, a car pulled into the alley and stopped a few doors down from the duplex. Two men got out and, carefully checking the area, went unhurriedly to the apartment and entered. Soon they reemerged, returned to their car, and drove off.
Portis climbed off the garage roof, into its owner’s backyard, and went up the gangway to the next street. He dodged from shadow to shadow between streetlights until, several blocks from Eisner’s duplex, he began reabsorbing the film. He lost some of it, which flaked off onto the street, to desiccate and blow away within an hour. Calmly, he walked home.
On his own kitchen table, three computers now churned data simultaneously. One continuously prowled the Internet.
A second he had linked directly to the university database and, through that, to the national network of university and college databases. The third was networked to the other two, running correlations. He had gone back as far as 1982, the working estimate of the first temporal incursion.
Portis ignored them now, and went to the bedroom. A mattress lay on the floor, beside a pair of large gym bags and stacks of clothes. Five suits hung in the open closet.
He undressed and stretched out on the mattress, closed his eyes, and once again let that part of him that was not human take the data it had absorbed from Eisner and process it, letting his human aspect sleep.
Eisner had not known very much, but what he had pieced together since being removed from Colorado Springs and the work on Skynet proved impressive. He lacked the skills and acumen to duplicate the work, but he made some astute guesses. Portis had removed the stacks of drawings—drawings of circuitry, of connections, of processing devices that looked more like dendrites and synapses than anything solid state or even fuzzy state by current standards—and disposed of them. Eisner had been trying to recreate what 132
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he had so poorly sensed was the essence of Skynet. It amazed Portis how close the engineer had come. The direction was right, but key elements were missing. The temporal aspect, for one thing.
But Eisner would have required the insight and brilliance of a Miles Dyson or a Rosanna Monk—names Portis both revered and reviled—to make any further headway. Eisner had reached the limits of his ability—and it had driven him mad.
Madness advanced by the decaying infestation with which he had been converted by the agents of Skynet.
The victims of TX-A programming were never intended to live this long, Portis mused.
By the time the nanoware—the programming material from the TX-A that had nearly brought Skynet to being in this continuum six years earlier—started to tear apart the brain, Skynet should have, according to its timetable, been extant and Armageddon already achieved. None of these unfortunates who had been made slaves should have lived long enough to experience the consequences of their infection.
For the few days of his interrogation, Portis gave Eisner release from the schizophrenic natterings in his own head.
The machine spoke to Portis, not Eisner. Two key facts came from the dialogue.
Somewhere Skynet was being built.
Portis was not the first to pay Eisner clandestine visits, though he was the first to draw so much directly out of him. Cyberdyne still existed, though truncated, and the project continued.
Of course. We knew that. The question was how and through whom and where…
Part of him had hoped to discover the project completely aborted. There had been a slim possibility that the legendary war the Connors had fought across dimensions would have resulted in the required disruption of Skynet’s primary creation to secure the future reclamation. Too slim, it seemed.
Judging by Eisner’s work, the thing they lacked concerned 133
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time. Rosanna Monk made the conceptual leap, realized that in order for Skynet to achieve awareness it needed a temporal fluidity that no machine possessed. Skynet would be able to see that—if it achieved awareness. So, to become aware, it must be aware. The apparent tautology irritated Portis, yet the only way to describe the necessary conditions in ordinary language required tautology.
At its most basic, inaccurate, crude form, what Monk understood and what Skynet needed was a future self to lift its static manifestation from a perpetual Now state into one that floated in time. Not a lot, nothing that could even be seriously described as time travel, but a condition that defined the universe at its most basic level.
But in order for there to be a future self, the present thing must exist.
As it stood, Skynet existed temporarily, as a probability.
Because the boundary conditions had been set by the brief creation of a model, something that existed probabilistically in one plenum, Skynet had achieved a conditional existence in what might loosely be described as The Future. But it was a statistical anomaly. Real, but temporary. Unless it could manage to create itself in a primary plane and win it would fade at the far end of its boundary state, the future edge of the Cauchy horizon that defined the limits of its potential existence.
No one here—now, in this plane—had what Dyson and Monk had discovered. None of the agents of Skynet possessed the intuition to bring about the necessary temporal machinations. They needed a human. They needed another Monk.
And so I must find Jeremiah Porter…before they do…
It was always and only a matter of time.
Morning light teased at Portis’s eyelids, firing the darkness.
He stared at the ceiling while he reintegrated and reviewed the work done overnight. The net result was that Eisner really did not know what was currently being done. The 134
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people dealing with Eisner were human, as far as he could tell. Portis was not so sure.
One name emerged: Casse. Eisner had not known who Casse was. He had only heard the name mentioned once during a visit from Cyberdyne people. The reference had been deferential, suggesting this Casse was someone in charge.
Portis showered and dressed, then went into the kitchen.
Coffee waited in the automated percolator. He opened his screens and skimmed as he drank. On one, columns of Porters scrolled by—places, occupations, ages, genders, dates. On the other, research programs and scientific paper publications by people named Porter or based on someone named Porter’s older work. The middle screen was lining up correlations, no matter how spurious. Not many, so far.
Maybe fifty. Portis leaned over the chair and studied them.
He glanced back and forth between the left and right hand screens—and reached for the right-hand mouse to stop the scroll.
“Robert Porter, son of Jeremiah and Elaine Porter…reported missing…any information, please contact…”
The news article was over two years old, putting it at the extreme limit of the flurry of missing and deceased Porters.
He had seen something else, earlier, involving a Robert Porter from Los Angeles. He sifted his memory, then typed commands. He found it under scholarships. Robert Porter received a four-year scholarship to California Institute of Technology, in mathematics. The home address for both boys matched.
But Robert Porter had enrolled for classes last year. He was a junior this year. Odd. What about the fathe
r?
He did another search. The Porters had moved, apparently, from L.A. to Minnesota. No follow-up on the missing persons report. Portis sat back. He needed access to police records in L.A.
There was an address in Minnesota, though.
It sounded more like a mistake, an oversight or a coincid-135
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ence. Missing data, nothing more. But it nagged at him.
There was something familiar about this.
Portis went to the counter to refill his cup. He gripped the handle tightly, poured carefully, and let the frustration flow around his skull. Why don’t I remember?
There seemed to be a vast emptiness where his life once filled the gaps between tasks. Distantly, he recalled an exchange, a price for the chance to do this one last thing.
To be here now, as he was, cost him who he had been.
But it’s still there…
He sensed it, all his memories, his past, waiting for the proper command, the necessary chance to reemerge. They could not excise his memory, only hide it, push it aside to make room for the tools and the goals.
He was connected to this Porter. That explained the familiarity of the name he had stolen. Portis was close.
Maybe he was Porter— a Porter, at least. Maybe finding this one, the key Porter, would open his own life to him.
Skynet wanted Jeremiah Porter, too. Dead, apparently.
Lee Portis, uncertainty incarnate, understood that he had to find him first.
He went back to the table and continued his search. This Jeremiah Porter had moved to Minnesota after losing a son who then turned up in time for classes at Caltech. Who should he talk to first?
Portis drained his cup. One more trip to the university.
He decided to pursue this one. A hunch perhaps, but it was more than he had been going on to this point. He needed to get Robert Porter’s transcripts. Then—if it still felt right—he could shut everything down here in Clovis. Time to move again.
Portis finished a report on the university network. He suggested certain upgrades and strategies to improve perform-ance, made recommendations on several applications, and spoke at length with the systems manager, who seemed surprised at Portis’s results. For the two weeks Lee Portis had been there, some of the staff treated him respectfully 136
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but coldly. They did not want him there, thought perhaps he was some kind of spy the university had planted, or, worse, that some corporation had introduced. They expected negative results. When he made his final report to the manager, the shock was apparent.
“This is good work,” she admitted. “Thank you.”
“Just doing my job,” Portis said. “It’s been fruitful working here. You have a good staff.”
“I…” She laughed self-consciously. “I must admit, I didn’t expect anything like this.”
“I know.”
She looked embarrassed. “Well…”
“That’s fine. I’m usually not welcome places where I show up. Doesn’t stop me doing my best. It’s all right.”
They shook hands. Portis cleaned out any lingering traces of his incursions into and through their database, gathered up his briefcase, laptop, and the coffee cup they had given him, then left. The files he wanted on Robert Porter of Caltech were in his inside jacket pocket. No one searched him on the way out. He reached the parking lot and his car, feeling oddly pleased with himself.
He pulled out of the lot, drove through the gates, and onto 70 North. Within a mile he knew he was being followed. He changed lanes a few times to be sure; the dark green Chrysler contained four people and, though they were careful, it was obvious to Portis that their focus was on him.
He took the exit onto 60 West, then left the highway at North Main Street. He drove up to East Fourth, then over to Hinkle. At the next alley, he cut through to Calhoun and headed south. When the green Chrysler turned up still behind him, he was certain. He continued south to Castillas Boulevard.
The old train yards sprawled south of the road. A few were still in use, but most of them had been abandoned.
There was a proposal in the city council to turn part of them into a museum.
At North Thornton, he turned south again, then found a 137
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service road leading into the yards. A large gate with a bold NO TRESPASSING sign stood open, the chain cut. The old steel in the tracks had gray market value, enough to keep smalltime thieves willing to take the risking of breaking in at night with a big truck and a couple of industrial Waldos.
Portis sped along the sand-covered blacktop, dodging the larger potholes, until he found a large corrugated steel warehouse. He drove around it and stopped. He could hear the pursuing Chrysler crunching closer on the worn road.
Portis got out of his car and scanned the area. Stacks of drums, old ties, and masses of track shared space with abandoned trucks, a couple of ancient boxcars, and assorted mechanisms whose functions Portis could only guess. He looked at the wall of the warehouse, a good thirty feet high.
At the far end was a personnel door at the top of a short flight of concrete steps. He covered the ground in a sprint.
The door was locked. Portis tightened his grip and turned.
The mechanism gave way with a sharp crunch and the tongue slid back. He slipped through the doorway into dense gloom. Light came through gaps in the walls and the partially open dock door on the opposite side of the space.
Portis amped his vision. The floor was a clutter of skids containing barrels or crates, and stacks of discarded construction components—beams, frames, slabs of corrugated metal. Above, a crane ran along heavy I-beams, part of the maze of support structure.
He could hear them talking, outside.
Portis weighed his options. He had none, really. It was time to move on. He did not want to leave a trail, not this early in the search. Not when he thought he had found what he was looking for.
He stepped back, out of the arc of the door, and squatted, waiting. Soon the door swung inward. The light overwhelmed his vision for an instant. He compensated in time to see an arm extended through the doorway, a pistol in hand. He stood. Across the warehouse, two figures had entered through the dock door.
Portis reached out, grabbed the forearm, and pulled to 138
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the left, dragging the man through. As the body cleared the doorway, Portis stepped into it, coming face to face with the second man, standing on the concrete landing outside.
There was an instant of surprise, a hesitation. Enough. Portis kicked the man squarely under the chin. The force sent him off his feet, against the steel railing behind him, and over, chin, several teeth, and neck broken.
Still holding the first man’s forearm, Portis pivoted, bringing the gun arm down, behind, and pulling the man back for Portis’s free right hand to grasp his jaw. In a simple, powerful twist, he snapped the man’s neck. The body spasmed, pistol fell, and Portis released the corpse.
He swept up the pistol, kicked the door shut, and jumped over the inside railing to the warehouse floor before the two on the far side could react.
He ran silently between mounds of forgotten material until he was all the way to the far side of the building. He came out from between a stack of drums and a canvas-covered block of crates, now on the two men’s left. One turned, hearing him, bringing up a weapon.
Portis shot him through the forehead.
The last turned to flee.
Portis caught him at the threshold, half in the light, and kicked his feet from beneath him. He did not scream, though as Portis dragged him back inside the warehouse he did claw the ground.
Portis hauled the man from the floor and carried him into the warehouse. He managed to kick Portis twice, but when Portis did not react, he breathed “Shit!” and looked frightened.
“Hey, look,” the man said, head twisting back and forth to try to see where Portis carried him. “We didn’t know—we
were told to see who you were and…and look, if we’d known you were working for Mr. Casse—”
Portis threw the man against a stack of crates. He aimed the pistol.
The man looked more frightened now. “Look, no harm done. I can—”
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“You can tell me about Mr. Casse,” Portis said. “Or…”
The man swallowed hard, then tried to run. He took one step. Portis shot his knee. He sprawled, howling in pain, on the floor, hands covering the sudden flow of blood. Portis dragged him back to the crates and propped him up.
“Willingly?” Portis asked.
“He’ll kill me.”
“So will I.”
The man’s expression hardened. “Then fuck you.”
“I have something a little different in mind,” Portis said, and reached both hands for the man’s face.
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THIRTEEN
Robby looked over the apartment, going through a mental checklist to be sure he forgot nothing, then closed the flap on his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
Deirdre was gone. He felt guilty at being relieved. He did not want to go through another terse conversation about the interview, another session of special pleading to cancel it. He loved her—even if he seldom admitted it—and could not believe his good fortune at finding her, at being accepted by her and loved in return, but the differences between them, mostly in their backgrounds, sometimes frustrated him to the point of rage. After two years together, she still did not understand, did not comprehend what all this meant to him.
Rich girl from Bel Air…
He immediately felt ashamed of the thought. Deirdre did not fit that stereotype, any more than he fit the stereotypes applied to him. But, he knew, stereotypes persisted because of a kernel of truth.
Basically, Deirdre had never had to justify her existence.
Bobby had grown up justifying himself constantly. He was just one more borderline poverty case, another body for the statisticians and the social metricians to stick in the appropriate column. Deirdre did not have the core knowledge of having to fight for the right to sit at the table.
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