"Maybe it's just doomed to fail," John said. "Skynet was never going to succeed. It was bound to fail because it had failed."
"That's right." Danny was nodding eagerly. "In its own past, you had actually been born, you'd actually survived the attacks of the Terminators."
"It's like everything Skynet did was already taken into account. It had to fail. I don't see the problem."
"The problem is that Skynet isn't stupid. Couldn't it reason the same way? Whatever it did, it couldn't beat you like that. You can't use time travel as a weapon—at least not in that way."
"You see," Tarissa said, "anything that managed to build a time travel machine must have had a very sophisticated theory. It would have to know all this."
"So why did it even bother?" John said. "It should have known it was going to fail. Is that it? It should have known that you can't change the past like that?"
Danny gave an emphatic nod. "That's what I've been saying."
"So what was it all about?" Sarah said. "Whatever you want to tell me, it happens. Skynet sends back the Terminators. So why? If you're so smart, tell me that. Because I know: it definitely happens. It happened to me and John. Both of us almost died."
John could see time as like a snake, twisting around and biting its own tail. If time was like that, it was hard to say what caused what. Maybe the whole concept of cause and effect had to be thrown away, at least as they understood it.
Maybe, he thought, but that can't have been the full story. It implied that the future was fixed, that it could never change, that there was only one future, only one possible future. That was never how Kyle had explained it; it couldn't be right. They'd always lived in the faith that the future wasn't set.
"The important thing," Danny went on, "is that it can't change its own past. So why did it send the Terminators back? If Skynet is sitting in 2029, losing the war, carrying out experiments in time travel, and all that, it reached that point via a series of historical events. As John says, those have already fed into the account, whatever happened in 1984, or 1994, or any other time in the past." He gestured at John. "If you are still alive in 2029, and leading the Resistance, the events leading up to what Skynet does in that year must include the fact that the Terminators were unsuccessful."
"I can see that," Sarah said grudgingly.
"The thing is, if you can see it, once it's pointed out, so can Skynet. No offense, but it must be as smart as any of us. And my mom's right: If time travel is actually possible—and we know it is—then whoever invents it would have to do a lot of mathematical analysis of how it actually works. They'd see what we've just discussed pretty quickly. It would all be in the equations. You can't change your own past. Those Terminators that tried to kill you, or prevent you from being born, couldn't be both successful and unsuccessful at the same time. It's a contradiction in terms. No technology could ever make it happen that way, not even if God made it."
"So what's the explanation?" John said after a silence.
Danny shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not Skynet."
"Great—what an anti-climax."
Gabriela laughed. "This is very interesting, but I thought you might do better than that."
"Well, maybe we can," Bellow said. "But you might not like it."
"What's that?"
"Okay, I was just a kid when Judgment Day happened," Danny said. "But I heard all about what you guys were saying—Sarah and John. I'd heard how the end of the world was coming, and about the Terminators from the future. My dad told me it was just stories, not to take it seriously, but I thought about it all the same, how time travel might work. Then it happened—" He glanced painfully at his mother. "I've talked about it ever since to anyone who'd listen. You'd be surprised how many people have actually studied the ideas, tried to produce models of how time travel might work."
"All right," John said. "So where does it all get us?"
"Maybe there could be different effects."
"What do you mean?" Sarah said, sounding, despite her words, as if she was ready to leave the table. Danny had convinced her, John thought But it wasn't helping at all.
"Maybe you can go back into time and hive off a new timeline from the point where you went back. It's like a new branch off the trunk of the original tree. The trunk is still there, but so is the new branch. They grow in parallel from that point. You see?" Danny shrugged. "But anyone on the original branch will see everything as being the same. All the events just curve back on themselves."
"So you're saying that we're on the trunk?" John said trying to follow it. "But there might be another world where the Terminators succeeded, where Mom got killed in 1984—" he glanced at her "—or I got killed ten years later. In that world, maybe Skynet wins?"
"That's right"
"I think I can see what you're getting at."
"Right. Let's say that you can make some changes to the past at least in some circumstances, but maybe you just make a new time branch, a new world, if you want to think of it that way."
"Yeah, you might go back and kill your grandfather in the cradle, but you wouldn't suddenly vanish like you'd never been born. You'd just create a world where you wouldn't be born in the future. You'd swap worlds."
"You'd be an anomaly in the new world you were in," Bellow said. "You'd be there, but you wouldn't really belong."
"Okay," Danny said. "And that's the best that Skynet could hope for. If it ever came close to being defeated, it could send back Terminators programmed to kill you. But it couldn't save itself that way. It just had a chance to create a timeline where its counterpart, the Skynet of that world, would survive. It might save its own kind, but it couldn't save itself, not really. That must be what it thinks it's going to achieve. That's all I can think of." He gestured hopelessly with both hands. "Really, that must be it. Up there in 2029, it wants to create a world with no John Connor."
There was a silence, then Sarah broke it. "Assume this is all true..."
"Yes, Ms. Connor?" Danny said.
"Could there be another world? A different kind of world from the one that Skynet wants?"
John finished her thought for her: "Could there be a world where Judgment Day never happened?"
"Yes," Danny said. "Maybe so. Some event might have brought it about. The Terminators might even have triggered it somehow—in some other world. Skynet must have known that risk."
John could see his Mom thinking about it. She looked at him without hope. "A world without Judgment Day. If only it were true."
CHAPTER
FIVE
TEJADA ESTANCIA, ARGENTINA JUNE 2006
The discussion turned to more general issues of how Danny, Tarissa, and their people could help. That number of people was an extra burden on the Tejadas' famished land, but it was also a boost to their strength: More people who could work the land, travel and organize, and, most of all, fight when the time came for that.
As they spoke, the Terminator returned with a group of others: Franco and Juanita; Alvez; and two others from the Dysons' group: a man of about thirty, and a slightly older woman.
"All under control," Alvez said.
There was still plenty of room at the big table, and Carlo gestured expansively. "Take a seat. You're all welcome here."
"How did you guys come to team up?" John asked.
"I knew Miles, back before Judgment Day," Howard Bellow said. "When Judgment Day came down, I didn't know that Tarissa and Danny had survived. I assumed they were back in L.A., while Miles was doing one of his stints in Colorado, getting Skynet operational. When I heard that there was a woman in Mexico claiming to be Tarissa Dyson, I had to check it out."
"By the time Howard and his people found me, I'd stopped claiming to be anybody much," Tarissa said. "A lot of people had heard of Miles and his part in creating Skynet. The name 'Dyson' wasn't very popular."
Howard gave a cynical grin. "It didn't make any difference to me, or anyone from the U.S. military. I don't know that any of us blamed Miles.
Something freaky went wrong with Skynet that night, Cod knows what."
Sarah spoke very calmly, leaning across the table. "Don't you think you were just setting yourselves up for something 'freaky' when you handed the U.S.A.'s strategic defenses to a goddamn feral computer?"
"Ma'am, I think you're right," Bellow said. "In fact, we were asking for trouble even earlier."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean we had enough firepower to destroy civilization many times over. So did the Russians. It was a helluva way to run national defense."
"So if that's what you thought, what were you doing in the military?"
"With all respect, that's not how I looked at it. I never thought the military was dishonorable, I never thought being there was wrong. We had a job to do, a much-needed job. Plenty of people hated America and Americans^—for all the wrong reasons. They hated our success and our freedoms. That was worth fighting for, you know. Not everything that we did was bad. We needed a strong conventional force, but we never needed all those nukes. It just gets hard to see it clearly when you're working in a place like the Pentagon, caught up with all
the moves and countermoves—but it's pretty obvious now."
"All right," Sarah said. "I understand how it must have seemed."
"I only wish we'd all seen clearly."
"So do I."
"Well, when I heard about Tarissa and Danny in Mexico, I had to check them out. I knew what they must have been through after Judgment Day."
"You believe us that there's another war coming?" John asked.
"You mean with Skynet's machines?"
"Yes, with the machines. Have we convinced you of that?" In John's experience, many people were now prepared to believe it, since Sarah had been right about Judgment Day. But others still doubted. In one way, he couldn't blame them. The way rumors traveled and legends were created, lots of crazy ideas came to be believed. Then other people were skeptical about everything: They even doubted the story that Sarah and John had predicted Judgment Day. But nobody at the Estancia had doubts. Most had seen the T-800 in action, and many had been present the day the T-1000 came.
Then there were those who'd been well informed prior to Judgment Day, the ones who knew exactly what the Connors had predicted—then seen it come to pass. Since Judgment Day, many people from what remained of the U.S. military had become their biggest supporters.
"You don't have to convince any of us," Howard said, "not anymore. When I was working in the Pentagon I saw a lot of the material that came from you two."
"Yeah," John said ruefully. "I guess it didn't do much good." He and Sarah had done whatever they could to stir up opposition to Skynet, without getting caught. They'd often used the Internet, and John had become expert with it, sending data through untraceable paths, laying out the message about Skynet and the coming of Judgment Day fully and accurately for anyone who was prepared to consider it with an open mind. At least there was some record that he and his mother had known things that they could not possibly have known without information from the future.
"A lot of us saw the material," Howard said. "You wouldn't believe how many official analyses there were of how much you knew, and how you could know it. I had a stack of printouts on my desk at one point, all marked with highlighter. I'm damn sure Miles and the other Cyberdyne people saw it all. Then it became obvious back in August '97. You really did know what you were talking about."
"Okay," John said, "that's cool. Maybe you can help us now. I've been thinking about it."
"Thinking about it? In what way?"
"If we had the same processing technology as Skynet, we could fight it out on an equal footing," he said, trying to think it through. He realized when he'd said it that it couldn't work like that—they could never challenge Skynet where it was strong.
"That mightn't be what we need," Howard said. "Sometimes a lower-tech response can be more effective. It all depends on the situation. We'll have to fight asymmetrically. Understand what I mean?"
John understood it well. He'd trained with guerrillas in Central America, and knew a lot about techniques for dealing with a higher-tech aggressor. With the right weapons, people, and tactics, fighting in the right countryside, much could be done against the smartest computerized hardware. "All right," he said. "That was just a thought. But maybe there's still some advantage..."
"Maybe, maybe not."
But John was onto something. Just what was Skynefs strategy? If they knew that, maybe they could counter it? Kyle had described its weapons to Sarah, and she'd gotten it all down in the tapes she'd made just afterwards. John had talked about it more with the T-800. He had a fair idea about the mobile gun-pods, the H-Ks—or Hunter-Killer machines—the Terminators, and other weapons that Skynet would invent, including the guns they would use. Skynet was designing a whole armory to hunt them down. "Just bear with me on a couple of points," he said. "This might be kind of important."
"Yeah, right."
"Okay, so lots of weapons were destroyed on Judgment Day, right? And in all the wars ever since."
"Correct," the T-800 said.
John looked over at the Terminator. "But we must still have more weapons than Skynet. Human beings, I mean. It didn't have Terminators or any stuff like that on Judgment Day. It must have had to start almost from square one. Nothing like that existed back in 1997, or we'd know." He turned to Howard. "Thats right, isn't it? You guys didn't have any, like, secret Terminators hidden away somewhere. Nothing like that?"
"No, John," Howard said. "Nothing like that."
"All right." If it started with nothing, Skynet must still be struggling to build its machine army. It would have to start small, with machines that it could control somehow, then start building machines that could manufacture bigger machines—until it had complete factories geared up to produce the kinds of weapons that Kyle and the T-800 had described, the whole array of H-Ks, infiltrator units and the rest. But what about computer power? They had little that they'd been able to save here, but Skynet must be able to make chips like the one that controlled the T-800—if it couldn't now, it would have to soon.
Those chips were the equivalent of the H-Ks' and Terminators' brains—what they thought with, their memories, their stripped down equivalents of personalities. It was no use trying to imitate it; the Resistance needn't be in the business of building its own Terminators and other machines. They were all tailored to slaughtering human beings. They needed to fight back with whatever came to hand, tailored to wrecking machines.
Something clicked into place. "We don't need to build computer chips like Skynet uses," he said.
"No, we don't," Howard said.
"I know, I know that. But what if we could read Skynet's data? Look, we'll be fighting all these machines, all high-tech stuff, all computer controlled. Some of them will be almost independent." He looked to the Terminator on that. "Am I right?"
"You're right."
"Okay, which means they'll have all sorts of data we can use." It made sense. There'd be vast amounts of information about Skynet's resources and plans. Every time they captured a chip from a Terminator, it could provide a wealth of information.
"Sound enough in principle," Howard said.
"Yeah, but what?" John said, laughing at the implication in Howard's voice.
"But where do you get the equipment? You need more than theory to build the devices you'd need."
Danny said, "It would take a whole technological base that we don't have. It needs a whole economy, the sort of advanced economy that existed before Judgment Day. That's decades beyond anything left in the world, even if we acted right now to try to rebuild it."
"So what do we do?" John said. "Just give up the idea?"
"We might as well," Howard said. "Look, I know this is tough, but we can't beat Skynet at the high-tech game."
"I'm not saying that."
"Well, that's how it's coming across. There are just too few of us left with the right knowledge, and we
don't have the tools or production methods."
"Yeah, I know." He was getting a little angry by now. "Look, I know about asymmetrical warfare. I've been trained by the best. We've got to use Skynet's strengths against it."
"Well," Howard said, "the nanotech we used for Skynet couldn't be manufactured now. It needs highly artificial conditions. Whats more, even people like me who could probably use the equipment don't know how to build and design it. We're not much better off here than a stone age tribe with flint axes and bone needles."
Carlo spoke up. "It sounds to me like Skynet has the same problem."
"So if it can solve it, why can't we?" Howard said, slightly mockingly.
"No, I didn't say that. We don't know what resources it has. But if it can solve the problem, we might not have to. We can use its own weapons against it, if we work out how."
It was starting to come together. "That's right," John said. "There's a few things we'll need to do. We can't build a force like Skynet's, but I'm not saying we should. We'll find its factories and its lines of communication. Those should be our targets. I think we can do that." When Kyle had gone back in time, he'd spoken of concentration camps. The thing was, John realized, you didn't need to herd people into concentration camps if you could simply roll over the top of them and slaughter them totally.
He was forming a plan. A series of points came together in his mind.
"Okaaaay," he said. "Time out. I want to go away and think about this."
Some people he trusted more than others. He met with Sarah, Carlo, Franco, and Juanita, back in his small room in one of the bungalows beside the casco. They sat around on the floor and the bed. Sarah took the one chair in the room, while the T-800 stood guard in the comer, near the door.
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