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

by Russell Blackford

  If Black and her firm were going to get a windfall out of this, that might be a small price to pay. They had to sort out the big questions-not just the insurance money, but also the company's defense contracts. They'd have to convince the government that Cyberdyne was not at fault and that it still had the capacity to deliver. It didn't matter much what it took in legal expenses, or any other short-term pain, if they got a good result.

  "Okay," he said. "That's all fine. I understand what you're up against Do what you have to do."

  He left a message for Jack Reed in Washington, just saying he'd call back later. Then he called Charles Layton, just to say to whom he'd been talking.

  "Very good," Layton said, sounding slightly patronizing. "Keep me informed, Oscar."

  Rosanna answered the door of her apartment, dressed in a plain white T-shirt, faded pink jeans, and a pair of flexible plastic sandals. She led him to a paved terrace out back, with cane furniture and an open sun umbrella.

  "Thanks for making the time, Rosanna."

  "Well, it's not like I had to go to work today."

  She was probably the smartest of all Cyberdyne's team of young research employees, a pretty blonde in her late twenties, with very pale skin and a genius for neural net design work. She'd become involved in the nanochip project since joining the company two years before, with a doctorate and a raft of other degrees from UCLA. Next to Miles Dyson, she knew more about the project's details than anyone, even Oscar himself. But that was not necessarily saying so much. Miles had been the real expert. The project was his baby.

  "Can I get you something to drink?" Rosanna said.

  "Just water, please. Chilled, if that's not a problem. Nothing with bubbles."

  She went inside, and Oscar called Reed again, getting his secretary, who put him through. They lined up a time for Oscar to visit him at the Pentagon, bringing Layton along. Layton had said he'd make any day available.

  "I'm going to bring Rosanna Monk, as well," Oscar said. "With Miles gone, she's our best researcher. I'm sure she'll impress you."

  "Okay," Reed said. "I've entered you in my diary." Rosanna returned with a clear plastic tray containing a jug of water and a couple of plastic tumblers. She put it down on the cane table, and pulled up a chair in the shade of the umbrella. With her pale complexion and large eyes, she looked like some nocturnal mammal.

  Oscar got to the point. "I just spoke to Jack Reed in Washington. He wants to meet you. I told him that you're our top researcher on the nanochip device. After Miles, of course.

  "Maybe." Her skinny hand shook slightly as she poured water for them both.

  "I don't think there's much doubt," he said. "Look, I won't stay long-this must be tough on you. I guess you think it could have been you last night."

  "Am I that easy to read?" She looked at him in an odd way, as if they'd only just met, and she was sizing him up

  "No, I'm sorry. But I've been having similar thoughts."

  Her expression softened a bit, and she nodded. "Okay.

  "Those maniacs could have picked me to call on, just as easily as Miles. It makes you think."

  "That's an understatement."

  "I'm sure we're not the only ones in the company who are shaken up, but you and I must have been next in line."

  "Yeah. Cheery thought, eh?" She gestured for him to eat some of the grapes. "Maybe it's not safe anymore, doing this kind of research."

  Was she getting cold feet? He couldn't afford to lose her. "Well," he said, changing his voice a little, trying to tone things down and get some rapport, "one of the mysteries is how Sarah Connor even knew about it. There must be stuff the police haven't uncovered yet You know her background, I take it?"

  "Not much, only what I've heard this morning-that she tried to blow up an AI lab in San Diego a year or two back. They caught her that time."

  "Yeah, and they should have last night, too. Our guards got a message to the police-there was nothing wrong with our security arrangements. But somehow Connor and the others fought off a whole SWAT team and God knows how many other cops. How they did that is beyond my reckoning." He drank some of the water.

  "Well, what next?" Rosanna said.

  "I've got to go to Washington with Charles, the day after tomorrow. I want you to come with us."

  "So I can meet Reed?"

  "Yeah, I think that's pretty important. He really does want to meet you, and I want you to meet him. we've got to rebuild the team, and the relationships." He chewed one of the fat white grapes, then finished his water. "You said before-on the phone-that the project is still viable."

  "Yes. I've been thinking about it some more, while I was waiting for you. I'm sure it could be done. It's just a question of how long we'd need."

  "All right, that was my next question. Answer it frankly-this is no time for false optimism. I need your best assessment of how close Miles was, and how long it would take us to reconstruct his work."

  "How close? You mean when he might have licked all the problems?"

  "Yes, how close he was to making a workable nanochip. You can assume that I've read all his reports and that I have a pretty good technical understanding."

  She smiled thinly. "Yeah, boss, I know you're an old tech at heart."

  "The point is, I need to take stock of where the project sits right now. It's crucial to our future."

  "Miles was in a good mood about it last week," she said thoughtfully. "I didn't talk to him about it yesterday, but I know he worked on it over the weekend."

  "When did you last discuss it?"

  "On Friday. At that stage, he thought he was within an inch of solving the problem. My guess is he would have wrapped it up in a month or three."

  "All right, now we need to be realistic. Regardless what Miles thought or anything else, how far away are we now?"

  "Now that he's dead?"

  "Exactly."

  "That depends."

  "Realistically, Rosanna."

  "Yes, I know that, but it still depends. Miles did most of the work on this himself."

  "Sure. It was his baby." Cruz rolled his eyes in mock despair. "It's Miles's baby! That's what everyone used to say."

  She laughed at that. "Well, it's true. No one else had anything like the same kind of knowledge. Look, Oscar, I could reconstruct his work pretty quickly if I had his records."

  "So could I. That's not what I'm asking. Look, it's all gone; we should assume that. The bomb went off in the AI lab, and it looks this morning as if they did a thorough job of destroying every bit of information on site. We'll find out more as the week goes on, but I'm not optimistic."

  "What about back-ups off-site?"

  "No. I thought of that, but it's not the kind of thing that we back-up routinely, not like financial records and so on-in fact, it's more the sort of information that we keep very close to our chests. Of course, Miles had his own back-ups..."

  "But?"

  "Again, it's too early to be sure. Tarissa hasn't been very cooperative, which surprises me, by the way. And the police have been to the Dyson house, and their impression is that the Connors did a thorough job there, too. Miles seems to have gone out of his way to cooperate with them—there's no sign so far that he tried to trick them."

  This was another of life's mysteries, he thought. Miles would surely have had a thousand ways to outsmart the Connors. Perhaps he had, and there was still information he'd hidden somewhere. But it didn't look that way.

  "I hope I'm wrong, Rosanna, but we're not expecting to find anything at all useful at Miles's house."

  "What about the 1984 chip?"

  "As best I can make out, it's been stolen. It's like everything, though-it only happened last night. It's not as if I can inspect it for myself-it's supposed to be too dangerous for me to go inside the building. So I've been traipsing around with the cops. But it seems that there's nothing like the arm and the chip still there where the Vault was."

  "So the Connors took them?"

  "Looks like i
t—which means we might get them back if the cops can track down the Connors. But no one's optimistic about that. As of this morning, the trail's gone cold."

  "I heard on the news. They were in those big car crashes at the steel mill."

  That's right, but it's all we've got to go on, so far. It seems they left the mill by an emergency door, and got clean away."

  Rosanna removed the tray, then returned from the kitchen. She seemed less on edge now. The talk must have been doing her some good. "Thanks for coming to see me," she said. "It's nice to be kept informed."

  "No problem. This affects you pretty directly."

  "Yes, I suppose it does. Oscar, when I told you the project was viable I was assuming the worst. I can do it."

  "Okay. That's my assessment, too."

  She gave him another funny look, as if not expecting that he'd have his own assessment. "The trouble is I'm going to have to reinvent a lot of Miles's work, relying on the little I know about it, plus my own expertise. It could take me years to get to where he was. Are you sure you can put up with that?"

  "From my point of view, yes. Miles's work was so far advanced... We'd still have a head start over our competitors. Thanks for that. Right now, though, it's only one issue—the company's whole future is on the line."

  "Of course."

  "But I think we'll pull through. A lot of our operations are almost unaffected." Cyberdyne's manufacturing plants were scattered across the U.S. and various parts of Latin America. Its sales offices were even more widespread. Not everything was gone, not by a long way. "Fortunately, we had a lot of organizational data backed up. Trivial as that may seem to a lot of the staff, it means we can keep running without too many problems. It's not like we're in the fog of war."

  "So where does that leave me?" she said.

  "It leaves you like this. Cyberdyne is still probably viable. We'll doubtless lose a lot of money. There'll be wrangles about the insurance, and we won't get everything back-our lawyers are already arguing with the insurance company's lawyers about whether this fits within the policy. But we're not out of the game yet, and there are still positions for our best staff."

  "Meaning me?"

  "Yes, meaning you. The work Miles was doing is still worth rescuing, and you're the best person to do it. I'll help you all I can. Now, I know you're feeling shaky, and understandably so, especially while the Connors are still at large, so I'm not looking for an answer from you now. But I'll be wanting to know whether you'll stick with us. You can assume we'll show our appreciation."

  "What does that mean, Oscar? Are you trying to drop me a hint or something?"

  "The hint I'm trying to drop is that we don't want to lose your services. I don't mind telling you that you have a fair bit of bargaining power."

  "Like what?" she said. Her tone could have been either sarcasm or a mask for naked curiosity.

  "Like this would be a good time for you to take over from Miles as Director of Special Projects."

  "Well, it'd be a bit ghoulish discussing that today."

  "Maybe, and I really will leave you alone in a minute. Let me just add that Charles and I had a long talk about this. He rang me about 3:00 a.m., and we were on the phone for at least an hour." In fact, Layton had started off

  CHAPTER SIX

  ADVANCED DEFENSE SYSTEMS COMPLEX

  COLORADO AUGUST 1997

  JUDGMENT DAY

  Miles called on Steve Bullock, the facility's Chief Security Officer, who had a room on the same floor. He sat here like a spider, watching everything that went on. "I'm going to The Cage in a few minutes," Miles said. "Can you send a guard to meet me?"

  Bullock was dark, serious, with a shaved skull and bull neck. "No sweat," he said, picking up a handset. "Five minutes' time?"

  "Okay."

  Miles took an elevator downstairs to the complex's main operations hall. Air Force personnel in gray flight suits predominated here, monitoring a dozen benches of computer screens—forty-eight screens in all—working side by side with casually dressed Cyberdyne employees, who were still the technical experts on the project.

  Like the entire facility, the operations hall was over-seen by discreet security cameras mounted in every corner.

  Miles nodded politely as he wandered from bench to bench, getting only the most general overview of the information coming in. These staff members were analyzing electronic information communicated from U.S. and allied defense centers, including optical, infrared, radar, and seismic data. Just as importantly, they were checking and second-guessing Skynet's responses to the same information. Their screens showed numerical data, graphs, and finely-detailed topographic projections.

  A young Cyberdyne operator, Andy Lee, glanced up as Miles walked past. "Hey, how you doin', man?" he said. Beside him he had a giant-sized Coke in a paper cup. "Greetings," Miles said, with a grin.

  "Come to watch the workers?"

  "Come to watch the workers watching," Miles said.

  "Well, there's nothin' much to watch tonight," Lee said decisively, like it was checkmate.

  "Just as well," one of the uniformed staff said slowly. This was Phil Packer, a cadaverously lean, heavily-mustached guy, known to the others as "Six-Rack."

  "I can't argue with that," Miles said. "Yeah, just as damn well."

  Since its full implementation on August 4, the Skynet system had operated perfectly, providing quick and convincing analyses of the fused data streams. About a week after implementation, it had identified a possible nuclear test, conducted in breach of the Russians' self-imposed moratorium. But it had analyzed the data within an hour, incomparably faster than humans could have done, and pronounced that the event was a small earthquake. Human analysis was still trying to confirm Skynet's call, but it looked like the computer had it right at every point.

  There was nothing unusual happening now: no bogeys, no glitches. At another monitor, Miles' pet genius, Rosanna Monk, stared intently, occasionally flipping from one view to another with left-hand keystrokes. She had a Styrofoam cup of coffee beside her on the bench. Rosanna was in charge of this shift, which meant that she was the first line to deal with any problem, in addition to carrying out her own work. She'd been involved in the nanochip project, then with Skynet, for the past five years, and she now knew more about the system and its parameters than almost anyone.

  "Boring night for you, too?" Miles said.

  "Nothing coming through looks suspicious," she said, as if it were just a technical problem. "The Russkies are quiet, as usual."

  "Like Six-Rack says, that's just as well."

  Rosanna took a sip of her coffee, her gaze still fixed on the computer screen. "Skynet's analyses are getting more precise all the time," she said, fascinated by what she was seeing. "It's developing informal logic protocols that I can't explain—we sure didn't put them there deliberately."

  "We couldn't have," Miles said with a gentle smile. That was the trouble: as he'd said to Jack Reed, the thing worked too well. Rosanna was alluding to the fundamental limitations on computer programming. What was just a little scary was the amount of informal human reasoning Skynet had somehow taught itself in the past three or four weeks. That kind of machine capacity was supposed to be dozens, if not hundreds, of years away.

  "Yeah," Rosanna said, "but the more it interacts with us, the more it's starting to think like a human being— except a zillion times more quickly. At this rate, we'll soon have contracts for Skynet to run every government agency that needs computer analyses. Its abilities exceed anything we imagined."

  "Sure."

  His tone of voice must have puzzled her, because she finally looked up from the screen. "You don't think there's some sort of problem?"

  Miles gave a reassuring smile. "Of course not."

  Rosanna shrugged and looked back at the computer screen.

  "Keep up the good work," he said, smiling at the cliché.

  "Whatever you say, boss." She laughed, but kept flipping through data arrays.

&nbs
p; Was it a problem? Miles began to wonder.

  Skynet's complexity and sophistication had been growing at a geometric rate. Its capacity for quick, accurate judgments in accordance with pre-established parameters already far exceeded that of any group of human beings. It was now drawing conclusions with a subtlety that went beyond anything required of it, explaining anomalous, or low-priority, data with startling insight. In one sense, that was all by the by, since the system was really there to warn of Russian ICBM launches, which it could do perfectly well. But it showed an enormous potential for subtler, less dramatic uses, such as detecting and identifying smuggling operations. With Skynet's processing capacity and interpretive skills, they could monitor data on aircraft movements and countless other events and activities to a totally unprecedented degree.

  All that was good, surely. It was certainly good for Cyberdyne's business. But Skynet was doing just what Sarah Connor said it would. It was bootstrapping itself into something almost—or more than—human.

  As Eve rushed them, both of the servicemen crouched and opened fire, aiming high to frighten her. They would see no serious threat from an unarmed, naked female.

  She punched the larger man in the head as their bodies collided, crushing his skull with a single blow. As the other tried to grapple with her, she twisted and shrugged him away. He stumbled, falling to one knee. Eve picked him up by the throat, then snapped his neck. She tossed him a clear ten feet through the air and he landed face-down on the road, skin ripping away as he skidded across the roadway.

  Eve took the larger man's Beretta M9 handgun, which had fired only three rounds. She threw his body in an area of thick scrub beside the road. Next, she stripped the smaller officer and dressed in his uniform, her movements decisive and efficient. She dumped his body next to the first. His trousers and shirt were baggy, but they would suffice. She stuck his gun in her waistband, under her shirt.

  There was a leather wallet in one pocket of the trousers she was wearing. She checked through it, finding an electronic keycard, then threw the rest away. She checked his wristwatch.