“That’s what you meant when you asked why you’re still here?”
“Again, there are two possibilities. Either I will disappear at some point, because there’s an entropic quality to the continuum and it just has to catch up. Or…”
“Or you’re not who you think you are.”
“Oh no. I am. But the timeline isn’t.”
“So what you’re remembering?”
“Could all be meaningless.”
“Does this ever get untangled?”
“We have to live through it. We have to survive to the other side of the Nexus. Time travel carries with it the pos-282
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sibility of failure. It’s only a temporary expedient. I should be the last to come back. When I left, the mechanism was to be destroyed. That act would set the boundary, establish a date in the future beyond which the continuum would resume its natural state.”
“What about the past? What about the machine Cyberdyne built in 2001?”
“The boundary in the past has already been established.
It cannot be extended.”
Sarah sighed. “I had some idea of using you to know how the future goes. It occurs to me now that maybe Skynet knew I’d think about that. Maybe you’re mixed up in the head in order to confuse me. Us. I don’t care.”
“How can we fight what we don’t know?”
“Oh, I know. I know Skynet. I know what it wants, how it wants to do it. The details change, but the goal is no different. Skynet hasn’t changed a bit. But I have. I’ve seen too much of what it wants to do. It’s chased me across time and other worlds, threatened my world, my family. When I came back here, I promised myself I wouldn’t run anymore.”
“I want to help.”
“You will. One way or the other. You will.”
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