T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures

by Russell Blackford

  Miles had his own ten-by-ten square office tucked away In a corner of Level A, the complex's top floor. He'd left its walls and its metal shelving almost bare, since his real office and his real life were back in LA. His desk was topped with computer equipment: two screens running, performing calculations; keyboards; processing units; and a high-quality printer. To the left was a framed photo of his wife, Tarissa, and son, Danny. In front of that, Miles had placed a pile of computer printouts, half an inch thick, marked with highlighter pen and indexed crudely with yellow sticky notes.

  He held his head in both hands, thankful that he'd sent Tarissa and Danny on a holiday to Mexico, "just in case," wishing he could have joined them.

  As the digital readout on his computer screen turned over to 23:30 hours, his worries reached a crisis point. He called Oscar Cruz, who was who was still on deck tonight, like everyone else who counted. "You free, Oscar?"

  "Hello, Miles," Oscar said. He sounded pretty tense himself, which was understandable. "Is anything wrong?"

  "No, nothing definite. Nothing's happened—just getting nervous."

  Oscar laughed nervously. "Me, too, of course. I have to ring Charles Layton in a minute—I'm updating him every hour. You know how he feels about all this. I'll talk with you a little later."

  Layton was never an easy man to deal with. Mentally, Miles wished Oscar luck. "Do you mind if I have a word with Jack?" he said.

  "Go ahead. We'll all catch up after I've spoken to Charles."

  Miles would be meeting through the night with Oscar, Jack Reed and Samantha Jones, but he needed to talk now. He called Jack, who answered his phone immediately: "Reed speaking."

  "Miles Dyson here, Jack."

  "Yeah, Miles, what's up? Anything wrong at your end?"

  "No, nothing actually wrong. I just had a word with Oscar. At my end, everything is nominal."

  "Good. You sound like you want to talk it over."

  "If you've got a minute."

  "Yeah, okay. Come around. I'm damn sure not going anywhere tonight."

  "I know. See you soon."

  "Let's get a cup of coffee first. Then we can talk in my room."

  Miles grabbed the printouts from his desk, and walked next door to a small kitchen with a microwave. He made two cups of plunger coffee and found a wedge of pizza in the refrigerator.

  As he warmed the pizza through, Jack came in, looking tired but vaguely amused. His sun-leathered, wrinkled face was capped by a full head of brown hair, graying only at the temples, combed back in waves over his ears. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. "So what's the story?" he said.

  Miles replied with a rueful shrug.

  As the civilian Defense officer in charge of the Skynet project, Jack Reed was Cyberdyne's immediate client, the man that Miles and Oscar had to keep happy. He was also the only person here with the authority to shut down Skynet. Though Miles had developed some rapport with him, it was currently being stretched.

  "Maybe I'm just too nervous tonight," Miles said.

  "Sure, we all are, but you guys have been doing a great job. Everything's been working perfectly."

  "Yeah, Jack, technically it's fine. Better than fine. But this stuff still bothers me." Miles gestured with the printouts. "And Skynet has been acting pretty strangely."

  "Strangely, you think? How?"

  "It's too good. It's better than we designed it."

  The microwave pinged to say Miles's pizza was ready. He found a plate for it, then poured the coffee into a pair of chipped mugs. "Let's go back to my office," Jack said. "It's a helluva lot more comfortable than here."

  Jack had a plush twenty-foot by ten-foot office, the best in the complex, harshly lit by fluorescent tubes shining through plastic deflectors. There was a shiny, black-topped desk near the entrance. Built into the opposite wall was a floor-to-ceiling video unit, nearly ten feet across. Like Miles, he'd left his office here largely undecorated. On one wall he'd Blu-tacked a large poster of the boxer Muhammed Ali, taken from a 1960s photograph—one of the fights with Sonny Liston.

  They sat at a plain wooden coffee table in the farthest corner from the doorway. As Miles chewed his pizza, Jack said, "That stuff really bothering you?" He gestured at the printouts, on the floor at Miles's feet.

  Miles bent and picked up the top page. "Well, yeah." Like the others in charge here, he'd been given 150-odd pages of postings on Internet sites and public mailing groups, all predicting that Skynet would malfunction tonight and cause a nuclear holocaust. "Yeah, Jack, it is bothering me."

  "It's just another conspiracy theory," Jack said. "The Internet thrives on them. You know that, Miles. If there was a conspiracy in this case, we'd be the first to know about it, wouldn't we?"

  "That's true, as far as it goes."

  "Yeah... but?"

  The material was uncannily pertinent and well-informed. The initial claims were traceable to a criminal psychotic called Sarah Connor, who'd been imprisoned when she tried to blow up a government computer research project in 1993. In May 1994, she'd made a violent escape from the Pescadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. She'd been on the run ever since. Her claims had taken on a life of their own. More and more people were supporting them, or at least finding their own reasons to object to Skynet—there'd been demonstrations in California, where the movement seemed to have a power base, and even in Colorado Springs. Meanwhile, no one had ever spotted Connor.

  Miles felt like a fool, but it hadn't stopped him persuading Tarissa to take that holiday with Danny while he was holed up at the complex. "What bothers me is how they've got so many things right," he said.

  "There's been a leak somewhere," Jack said, as if by reflex. "We've gone over that before."

  "But some of the decisions weren't even made when this stuff started to come out. You know that—the August 4 launch date only got firmed up in April, but there are predictions here going back to late 1994." He picked up the whole sheaf of papers and found one he'd marked, covered in Miles's orange highlighter pen, and dated nearly three years ago. At that stage, Cyberdyne had only just worked out the basics of its new computer hardware. "How do you explain that?"

  "So someone got lucky."

  "Not a good answer, Jack." He smiled wearily, knowing there was no good answer—they both knew it.

  Jack sounded exasperated. "I don't know." Then he became more aggressive: "But what else did they pick? Just tell me that, Miles. What else have they got that's so impressive?"

  "Well, the whole thing—"

  "No. Not good enough. Number one, we always planned to call the system 'Skynet' and build it here in Colorado. Getting that right cuts no ice with me. And the rest is all vague. Sure, I take your point about the launch date—I can't explain that. But what's your explanation? Are you starting to think Sarah Connor got it from some robot that came back from the future—like it says there?" He pointed contemptuously at the material.

  "Well, given the circumstances, it's not much wackier than anything else." For a moment there was a silence between them. "You know what I mean," Miles said gently. "For all we can tell, that's how we got the technology in the first place."

  It seemed crazy expressing these doubts to his client. Not good marketing, Miles, he thought. Charles Layton and Oscar Cruz wouldn't approve. Still, the government already understood the circumstances in which the 1984 chip had been found in a Cyberdyne plant. Everyone knew how strange it was. They all had to face the facts.

  "Yeah," Reed said, "I know. I can't explain the 1984 chip, either."

  "No, none of us can, and I'm getting ready to believe almost anything."

  Whatever the device discovered back in 1984 had been, the nanochip had been eerily advanced. It had given Miles and his people the start they'd needed to develop AI chips that now controlled many of America's defense assets, culminating in the massively parallel system of nanoprocessors that made up the Skynet AI

  "So what are you advising me to do?" Jack said. "You want me to shut the s
ucker down?"

  "Well, I don't know about that. Any formal Cyberdyne advice would have to come from Oscar or Charles."

  Jack gave a cynical smile. "How about off the record?"

  "Off the record?"

  "Yeah. What would you do? Off the record, Miles. Don't jerk me around."

  "I think we should suspend the system's operations for the rest of the night."

  "Yeah? You're really serious, aren't you? Look, I hear what you're saying, but—"

  "Let's put the issue completely beyond doubt. It's not like we don't have back-up at Cheyenne Mountain."

  "Look at it from my point of view. You're advising me to shut down a functioning strategic tool because some nutcase says it's going to go berserk and cause a nuclear war, right? But that can't happen, Miles—you know that as well as I do. The whole system's not set up that way."

  "But it's what's these printouts predict, and the people who post this stuff have a track record for being right."

  "Not about anything like that."

  Miles thought that over. "Sure. And it's probably all crazy, or a hoax." He smiled. "Don't worry, I'm not going nuts myself. But the point remains: Whoever started this is amazingly well-informed, whether it's Connor or—I don't know—whoever. I realize that the system can't just go berserk, but something's behind all this. I wish I knew what."

  "You're thinking in terms of sabotage?"

  "Yeah, maybe, though I can't see how—"

  "No, and it'd be pretty damn funny for these people to try to sabotage the system to bring about the very result they most fear."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "Anyway, what good would it do them?" Jack paused for emphasis. "Look, everyone's briefed from the President down. Okay? You know the system can't go firing off missiles without human confirmation. If there is some sort of glitch, we'll deal with it. Right now, I just can't see the problem."

  "I can't see it either," Miles admitted, feeling defeated, but wanting to persist, just a little further, if only to see whether Jack could put his fears at rest. "Not the exact problem. But, on top of all this, the system is an order of magnitude better than we designed it to be. We've implemented something that we don't fully understand. It's so advanced, and it's starting to act almost like it's alive."

  "Yeah, okay, but that doesn't mean it's unsafe. Miles, I can't go back to the President and explain that I took the system down for hours just because of this stuff on the Net...and a bad feeling you've been getting lately... because the system is too good Give me a break, I need something better than that."

  Miles sighed. "Yeah, I know." He rose. "Look, thanks for your time, Jack. It's clarified things. I'll see you later on."

  "Sure. What are you going to do now?"

  "I'm going to have a talk to Skynet."

  Jack looked at him quizzically for moment, then laughed good-naturedly. "Sure, you might as well. If it'll make you feel better."

  After Miles left his office, Jack Reed started making phone calls, just to keep everyone in the loop.

  First, he called Charles Layton, the Chairman of Cyberdyne's Board of Directors, in L.A. Jack had found Layton to be a hard-nosed character with a soft, menacing way of speaking. He would not take kindly to any criticism of Cyberdyne, real or imagined, but that was too bad. If there was even a remote possibility of sabotage or malfunction, decisions about Skynet ultimately sat with the government, not with Cyberdyne. Still, they needed to keep the guy in the loop.

  He answered the phone. "Layton here."

  "Jack Reed here, Charles."

  "Yes, Jack," Layton said quietly. He always went out of his way not to sound involved or excited.

  "I've been talking to Miles."

  "Very good. I just got off the phone with Oscar Cruz. He tells me everything is working well."

  "Sure, the system's working fine so far. But Miles seems pretty damn jittery about all this opposition to Skynet—I think he half-expects sabotage, though I can't see what motivation anyone would have to interfere with it."

  "I understand," Layton said in a definite way, as if understating some remarkable achievement. "Are you proposing any action?"

  "I'm just keeping you informed. I've got Oscar here, as you know—and Samantha Jones. I'll talk with them again soon. I'm totally satisfied with the system at this point."

  "Good. That's very good. There's nothing you need to do, Jack. You can rule out sabotage at our end—everyone is totally loyal, even if Miles does get nervous. And you know how tight the security checks were."

  "There's no criticism of your people, Charles. Nonetheless, I'm monitoring the situation closely. I'll let you know if anything comes up."

  "Understood," Layton said again, in the same tone of voice. "I'm available if you need to speak with me."

  "Thanks, Charles."

  "Thank you for calling, Jack." Layton hung up. One call down.

  Much as Layton was cold, formal, and sometimes prickly, he had no real authority. The important thing was to keep the military hierarchy informed. If Skynet ever detected a Russian attack and decided to launch the American ICBMs, there was a clear line of command to confirm its decision, beginning with NORAD's Command Director, going through its Commander-in-Chief at Peterson Air Base, then the defense chiefs in Washington and Ottawa. In the end, the U.S. President would have to make the call, consulting with the Prime Minister of Canada and whomever else he saw fit.

  Soon they would give Skynet sole responsibility for aerospace surveillance, decommissioning the NORAD site at Cheyenne Mountain. Once that happened, shutting down Skynet would require the same line of authority as firing the missiles. For the moment, there was redundancy in the surveillance system, and Jack could still take Skynet off-line on his own authority, though he'd have to answer for it all the way up.

  He called the NORAD Command Director. "Jack Reed here."

  "Everything okay?"

  "The system's working fine. Miles Dyson thinks it's working too well, which is pretty funny from the guy who designed it. Anyway, that's the only complaint anyone's got so far."

  "All right."

  "I'll be meeting with Cruz, the Cyberdyne President, and Sam Jones as the night goes on. If there's any glitch at all, I want to take the system down, just in case—put the issue beyond any doubt. I can't see it happening, but I'll need your support if it does."

  "Everything is nominal here, Jack," the Command Director said, sounding only slightly puzzled. "We can get by without Skynet for a few hours if we must. We've done it before for long enough."

  "Of course you have."

  "It's your call, pal. Don't worry, I'll back you up if I can. Just make sure you've got a damn good reason."

  "Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. I don't want to give you the wrong impression—we're not panicking over here. It's just if there is some glitch..."

  "Yeah, yeah, I understand—you're just keeping me in the loop. Don't worry, that's fine. I'll have another word with the Commander-in-Chief."

  Jack put down the receiver, feeling relieved to have that out of the way. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it still gave him the creeps. Well, he'd been given responsibility to deal with the problem and he damn sure would, one way or other. Next, he'd give Cruz and Jones a quick call.

  What he couldn't get over was the fact that someone had such good information. Jack had played it down with Miles, but Miles was right: There was more behind all this. Some kind of sabotage could not be ruled out, not absolutely. Despite Layton's obvious impatience with the idea, some whacko might be trying to give them a twisted sort of warning.

  The alternative, of course, was out of the question: Perhaps Sarah Connor really had received information from the future.

  No, that didn't bear taking seriously.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JOHN'S WORLD

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  MAY 1994

  Oscar Cruz ate half his sandwich and gulped down most of his coffee. He left the diner, handing across enough ca
sh to cover the check easily, then waved down a taxi. He jumped in the back seat and gave Rosanna Monk's address. At this time of morning, it would take half an hour to reach her apartment.

  On the way, he made some phone calls. First, he checked in with Cyberdyne's attorney, Fiona Black, from Black Jessup Nash. She had a complicated story about the insurance and the difficulty with getting any cooperation from Tarissa Dyson. "A lot of this doesn't add up," she said. "The insurers are going to be difficult about it I've already spoken to their attorneys and it's pretty obvious they don't want to grant indemnity. They almost seem to be blaming the Dysons."

  Oscar cursed silently, but he wasn't really surprised. It was still unclear why Miles had gone to the site with the Connors and their accomplice. At first glance, it looked like he'd been forced to accompany them, but that didn't add up. The Connors had let Tarissa and the kid, Danny,

  go free-so why hadn't she called the police straightaway, instead of waiting for a guard at the site to do it? Perhaps she'd been intimidated by threats of reprisals, but an early intervention might have saved her husband's life. If the Dysons weren't actually in league with the Connors, they'd sure behaved foolishly.

  "Tarissa won't even talk to me," Black said. "She won't talk to the insurer or its lawyers, either. Everything has to go formally through her own lawyer. You'd think she was the subject of a criminal investigation."

  "Maybe she will be," Oscar said, glancing at the taxi driver and just making sure that his end of the conversation didn't make sense to the driver. He guessed not.

  Black said, "Maybe so, though I gather she's been prepared to talk to the police, as long as her attorney's present."

  "Okay. So it's turning into a quagmire at your end?"

  "Well, it's what you pay me for. You just need to understand that it's getting complicated."

  Oscar had been around long enough to know that this was lawyer code for expect a huge bill He didn't like paying avoidable legal expenses, but it seemed that Black was doing a good job in absurdly difficult circumstances. It wasn't just the Dysons who'd screwed up badly. You'd think that the LA.P.D. could have stopped two adults and one nine- or ten-year-old child from demolishing a city office block. An entire SWAT team had failed to stop them, for God's sake.