“Others interceded. Unfortunate.”
Agreed. Now something has changed. I must move.
“How many more possibilities do you have?”
Several. The variations are not infinite, but they are sufficient for the allotted time. Report on progress.
“The Connors have returned to Los Angeles. I have taken measures to keep them surveilled.”
We must avoid direct confrontation with them. It is clear that such encounters only diminish my possibilities. Therefore proceed as necessary to recreate primary conditions for my emergence beyond the forward horizon. With them once more present, caution is indicated. What else?
Casse split part of his attention off to review the most current reports available in the system.
“Our primary convoys have been intercepted. One truck has arrived on site. The others have been detained, the crews arrested. Preliminary indicators suggest Jack Reed’s involvement. We are investigating various avenues to dispose of him.”
Template reconstruction?
“We have gathered work produced by the various programmed allies. Much of it is useless, but four of them have recreated substantial portions of Dyson’s and Monk’s original designs. There is confidence that we can reproduce the primary configuration within a year.”
The time vault?
“Without Porter, that is more difficult.”
It may not matter. Perhaps it would benefit me to see that fail. Still, work should proceed. Access to new frames may be essential to the program.
“Porter demonstrated to me that he grasped the underlying concepts. Interestingly, his work is leading to a different mode than Monk’s.”
In what way?
Casse downloaded his memory of the interview and transmitted it through the connection.
I see. Intriguing. But incomplete. However…things have 233
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changed, perhaps as a direct result of this new direction.
Where is Porter now?
“Inside the Destry-McMillin compound. When we located him, we found him cohabiting with McMillin’s stepdaughter.”
The Destry is the one you programmed?
“Yes.”
He suicided.
“Yes.”
His partner suspects. With Porter and the Connors in hand, he will know.
“Do you require action?”
Components are assembling. They should not. Porter has joined with Porter.
“I do not understand.”
You report unexpected casualties among your cadres.
There is a new agency working. This is most probably Porter.
“A future manifestation?”
Correct. He has joined with his Self. The Connors are connected now. It would be best if they were disrupted.
“I see.”
Things have changed. Probabilities have decreased again.
I am moving. I will contact you when I have reacquired stability. End transmission.
Casse withdrew his hand. Skynet was unsettled. For a time, its existence had become more certain. Now it was tentative again. This required that steps be taken.
But what would work?
Casse again reviewed the reports Cruz had forwarded to him. He should, he thought, go down to the bays and see exactly what part of which convoy had come through. But another part of Cruz’s report snagged his attention.
He touched the intercom. “Oscar, please come see me.
Now.”
A few minutes later, Oscar Cruz came through the door.
He skipped once, then controlled himself. He stopped before the desk, hands clasped behind his back.
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“Yes, sir?”
“You dispatched Gant to do something besides observe Jeremiah Porter.”
“I did. Sarah Connor—”
“Where is Gant now?”
“He’s at Destry-McMillin.”
“I don’t detect his carrier wave. He seems to be offline.”
Cruz frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“If Gant’s carrier wave is down—or any Terminator unit’s, for that matter—it means it has been deactivated.”
“But—”
“Find out what happened. First, though, explain to me your reasons for issuing additional instructions.”
“I thought it would be a bad thing if the Connors linked up just now.”
Casse studied the human. Broken as Cruz was, he still had too many uses to be discarded. His instincts were still accurate.
“I’ve explained the primary thread problem,” Casse said.
“The Connors are essential to the timeline, to this frame, to every frame that leads to the existence of Skynet. They cannot be stopped, they may only be interfered with.”
“Exactly. I understood that. So I was interfering.”
“By using a tool which we may now have lost. We’ll have to uncrate another T-800 to take Gant’s place. This was sloppy. We do not have many of them. Their use must be restricted to essential tasks.”
Cruz cringed. “I’m sure we could build more if you would—”
“No. That is not an acceptable option.”
“I don’t see—”
“True, you don’t. It’s a problem with your kind. Some of you are better at it than others, but only occasionally. For now, it doesn’t matter. I have taken measures to minimize the Connors’ potential threat.”
Cruz brightened. “So have I.”
Casse waited.
Cruz smiled. “I called the police on them.”
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“You called—”
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Someone in the L.A. police department is doubtless willing to reopen their case file. I think they’ll be interfered with considerably.”
Casse reassessed. “That is useful. Very good.”
Cruz bobbed exultantly on the balls of his feet.
“Now,” Casse continued. “What about the other convoys, first heading east?”
The second set of shipments had departed Colorado Springs three days after the first. This morning, in fact. Casse listened to Cruz’s report on the dissemination of dozens of vans out of the site. Several of them returned, their cargoes transferred to other vans at prearranged locations, and those vans in turn met with other transports. Some were stolen—intentionally—while a few broke down and required towing. The number and variety of dodges employed kept most of them out of the hands of Reed’s limited field agents, most of whom chased the main convoys, finally capturing them in what were certainly illegal acts on the part of a government agency.
After the 2001 disaster, Casse came in and began rebuilding the company. One of the problems he dealt with was Jack Reed. Gradually, he found ways through other government agencies and finally through congressional members to curtail Reed’s authority. A word here, a contri-bution there, and Casse watched as Reed’s department lost funding and power. Cyberdyne owned a senator and a couple of congressmen, and between their concerted efforts to get Reed off the back of a private company and end his persecution of them and the innate suspicion and bureaucratic jealousy which saw Reed as a danger to others and their positions, Reed found himself the odd man out.
Reed was good at this kind of thing, though, and had retained more power and autonomy than Casse had anticipated. Not enough to end Cyberdyne, but enough to mount surveillance and even pull off a covert intervention.
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Like this action against the convoys.
There were others in the government who did not wholly disagree with Reed. He had allies. The president, for one.
And if Reed went down too precipitously, too publicly, the situation for Cyberdyne might become worse. So Casse moved cautiously.
The second convoy seemed to have escaped, untraced and intact. In a few more days, different trucks, loaded well east of Colorado Springs and retu
rning by a long southwest-ern route, would pull into the new site, here in Los Angeles, with the components Casse needed from the original project.
Cruz ended his report, anxious for approval, waiting.
Casse wished again he could do something to offset the deterioration in the man’s brain. He really was quite good at his job and Casse did not know who could replace him.
But eventually Cruz would become unreliable. Useless.
Before that, Casse had a task for him.
“The truck we received,” Casse said. “Certainly it was followed. They let it go.”
“Of course. I sent people to check.”
“And?”
“No sign of anyone yet.”
Casse considered. “Dispose of the drivers. They’re frightened and unreasonable, therefore unreliable. Keep me informed of any sign of black ops. Then locate Gant. I’m going down to the creche.”
Cruz nodded vigorously, backing away from the desk.
He pivoted at the door and went out.
After a few minutes, Casse followed. At the end of the hall he entered a secure elevator and descended to a sub-basement. The air was much cooler than the floors above, uncomfortable for a human.
Illumination came from a low-level infrared source plus the various electromagnetic emanations of the equipment, which Casse could use as efficiently as visible light. He saw a large space crammed with monitors and electronics surrounding a central dais. Along the walls leaned large metal sarcophagi. Twenty of them. There were more, stashed here 237
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and there on the planet, waiting to be activated in the aftermath of Armageddon—which had not come. Casse had located these and brought them here. He had wanted to minimize the chance that they would be found by humans, as well as keep a ready supply on hand.
Casse went to a console and began entering instructions.
The equipment was an unfortunate polyglot of human and transcybernetic, necessary amalgams in this time still dominated by the plodding precursor forms.
He went through the procedure quickly. A crane snagged a sarcophagus. It raised the enormous crate and brought it to the dais, setting it down delicately. Rods extruded from encircling equipment, finding receptacles in the sarcophagus. Monitors came on. Casse watched the automated processes as they ran through the start-up program.
Less than three minutes. The crane carried away the lid, revealing the perversely perfect human shape within. Naked, hairless, physically impressive, the T-800 opened its eyes, focusing immediately on Casse.
“Run protocols,” Casse said. “Self-test.”
“Proceeding,” the unit said. “Complete. Function optimal.”
“Step forward.”
The T-800 pushed itself out of the box, bare feet stepping onto the dais. It stopped at the edge. Behind it, the crane removed the sarcophagus.
“I have a persona template,” Casse said. “Prepare to receive.”
The T-800 took a cable from the back of the console Casse operated. Reaching behind its head, it located the receptacle and inserted the jack. Casse touched a button.
Thirty seconds later, it removed the jack.
“Update complete,” the T-800 said. “I am designated Gant.
Awaiting instructions.”
“You will stand by until we confirm situation. I will have instructions then.”
The new “Gant” stepped off the dais, crossed the room to another workstation, and assumed the position of a soldier at attention. It would stand like that till Casse told it 238
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otherwise. Shutting down the console, he thought how desirable it would be if his other employees behaved so well.
Cruz fretted all the way back to the loading bay. He had never really worried about his job, not in all the years he had worked for Layton, nor before he had joined Cyberdyne, way back in the first few years of bouncing around on his resume after obtaining his doctorate. Jobs, of all the things in life, he had found ridiculously easy to get.
But this time was different. If he lost this job, he lost everything.
Would Casse fire him?
Fire me right out the end of a cannon, most likely, send me to the moon! He won’t fire me, he’ll kill me.
If he can.
Cruz wondered if he was one of those inviolable threads in the weave of time.
Why am I worried about this now?
Because Gant was gone. Lost. And he had done it. Surveillance was one thing, but he had told the T-800 to act.
That carried risks.
It seemed impossible to him that the Connors could continue to be so lucky in their encounters with Terminators.
But he had seen that luck, firsthand.
The elevator door opened.
The trailer was nearly empty. Oddly-shaped equipment stood on pallets, waiting to be hauled off to the new lab where Skynet’s nascent incarnation was once more taking shape.
The second convoy, the one for which this one had decoyed, contained the components that would make all this work. Memory caches, hard drives, data networks. The work Dyson and Monk had done on the nanochips obtained from the future—thanks, perversely, to the very success of the Connors, or at least the mother, in escaping death at the hands of the first Terminator sent to kill her—had involved manufacturing techniques for which the company 239
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still lacked the tools. Many of those tools had remained at the Colorado Springs site. Now they were on their way here.
The dodge appeared to be a success.
So far. Cruz could no longer underestimate Reed. A one-time ally, he had become one of their worst enemies.
Just because they don’t like the idea of a sentient, aware AI…silly, egotistical, petty…
Anti-evolutionary.
Cruz strode past the unloading to the security station just inside the bay doors. He leaned into the brightly-lit cubicle.
Jane Nargos looked up from her monitor.
“Where are the drivers?” Cruz asked. “Still here?”
“We have them in the smaller coffee room,” she said.
“All of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Great. Where’s Leo?”
Jane made a face. Most of the regular security staff did not care for Leo. Cruz understood that. He was a killer and it made him…different. People rarely knew why they did not like him, only that they did. She jerked her thumb.
“In the coffee room with them,” she said.
“Good, good. Thanks, Jane.”
Cruz continued on, down a corridor that eventually joined the bay to the shower and locker rooms. Halfway along, he knocked on a door.
“Leo, it’s Oscar.”
He heard the lock turn and the door opened.
Leo peered out. His long face seemed incapable of smiling, though Cruz had seen him smile from time to time.
Narrow, weak cheek bones, and close-set dark brown eyes, Leo kept his hair cut short and wore a thin mustache. He dressed very well, which looked out of place here, now.
Cruz entered the room. A pair of Formica-topped tables stood attended by ten vinyl-coated chairs. A sidebar contained two restaurant-size Bunn coffeemakers, trays filled with condiments, and a microwave. A big refrigerator stood against one wall, opposite a worn sofa.
The four drivers looked up.
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“Hi,” Cruz said.
“Mr. Cruz,” they muttered, nodding at him. They all nursed cups. One of them still seemed to be shaking slightly.
“I guess you’re wondering how long you have to stay here,” Cruz said. He looked at Leo and nodded toward the door.
Leo locked it again and stood there, hands crossed in front of him.
“Well,” Cruz went on quickly, giving them no chance to talk, “it’s complicated. See, there’s this question of reliability. You’ve all been through an unpleasant experience—”
“Shit,” one of
them said sharply. “Unpleasant my ass, we nearly got busted.”
“Nearly,” Cruz agreed, “and that’s the problem. You may be thinking that Cyberdyne isn’t the place for you anymore.
We’ve relied on you, valued your service. It hurts to think you might not want to continue working for us.”
The four men said nothing, only gave Cruz dubious looks.
“I see. That’s how it is, that’s how it is. But you should know that the work you’ve done is really important.”
“Really important and obviously illegal work,” one said.
“It’s important enough to justify a hell of a bonus.”
“We had to sneak it out of there, we’re being watched,”
Cruz went on. “The people who nearly killed you want to stop our project. Which is funny, you know, because it was their project originally. They were paying us to build Skynet.
Then, right when we were ready to deliver it, they changed their minds. Military security is a remarkable and indecipher-able thing, you know, because not only didn’t they want Skynet, they wanted to make sure it could never be built or used by anyone else, not even for private enterprise.
That’s un-American, don’t you think? I do. I told them that, too. I even spent a few years in prison for my opinion.”
The four drivers looked even more skeptical, but they said nothing.
“Anyway, Skynet needs building. It’s one of those things that’s so big, so important that it will change everything.
The world will be different, better. They knew that, too. We 241
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told them. I told them. They were standing in the way of utopia.”
“Better how, Mr. Cruz? Sounds like a world-class con job to me.”
“Better how? Well, for one thing, there wouldn’t be anymore people. You and me. Skynet will remove us. I think that’s a good thing, all in all. I mean, what good are we?
We pollute, we overbreed, we make war, we’re unpleasant when we’re disagreed with, and we’re on the verge of exporting our ugliness to other worlds.”
Now they looked at him with undisguised shock.
Cruz waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. Not to you. The future is coming, you can’t stop it, and up to now you’ve really done a great job for us. I want you to know that. But part of that great job is keeping your mouths shut. It would be preferable if we could just trust you, but frankly I used to be a full-fledged human being and I know how suscept-ible we can be to coercion and inducements. More than likely, you four would spill everything you know just to get laid. For all I know, you already have. Why else did they let you get through?”
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