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

by Russell Blackford

  "You mean there was no chance to develop it further?" he said.

  "Exactly."

  "But Danny was born back in, I don't know, 1990 or something."

  "1988," Danny said.

  "Right, so you can't have been enhanced then. We didn't have that kind of technology back in the '80s—we still don't."

  "There are different kinds of enhancement," Anton said. "The rest of us have had somatic cell engineering at different points in our lives, but Jade is different. She's re-engineered through and through, from before she was born. Every cell of her is more efficient than you or me, or any of us."

  "Just don't pick on her," Danny said. "She'll make you regret it."

  "I could do without all the attention," Jade said.

  Danny glanced over at her. "Sorry, Jade. I know you're not a curiosity piece. You're one of us. You're the best."

  "Thank you, Daniel."

  "Hey, Jade, I'm sorry, too," John said. "I didn't mean to offend you."

  He was figuring out something else. Jade looked at least twenty, maybe a bit older. But she said she was born not long before Judgment Day. Let's see, he thought. If Judgment Day was 2021 and these people came from 2036, she must be only fifteen or sixteen. That didn't add up.

  "No offense taken, John," she said. "You need to know about us. Daniel is right—I was what they called one of the 'ultrabrights' in the years leading up to Judgment Day. I was re-engineered very deeply. For example, I'm almost immortal-I won't age any further."

  "How old are you, Jade?"

  For the first time, she laughed. "In years actually lived, sixteen. But I was designed to grow up fast, then stop. Socially, intellectually, and biologically, I'm much older. Then again, if you want to measure my age from when I was born until now, I'm about minus eighteen."

  "Most of us are pretty young if you do it that way," Selena said with a sardonic laugh. "I'm still not born. Danny and Anton are teenagers."

  Jade ignored this. "Selena, Daniel, and Anton...and Robert... were re-engineered, too. Their bones and muscles are stronger than ordinary humans'. We all have microscopic nanoware implants in our blood vessels to protect us from disease and heal our injuries."

  John had read something about that kind of technology. "Millions of them, right?"

  "Correct. Our senses have been upgraded with implants and our reflexes upgraded with cybernetic rewiring. We're all connected electronically to subvocalize to each other. I may be the 'best,' as Daniel puts it so nicely, but they can all do what I can I do."

  "Very modest, Jade," Selena said. "If only it were true." She sounded almost biting, but then she laughed good-naturedly and Jade joined in with it.

  None of them seemed to resent Jade-quite the oppo-site-but her sensitivity amused them. She was a super-woman among supermen and -women, and she seemed to feel like the odd one out, or like the others were all watching her, even though they appeared to like her. In fact, the way Danny looked at her, maybe he was in love. Or maybe it was more a fatherly feeling, or something. It would be pretty creepy if a guy his age thought Jade was hot and wanted to start dating her, or something.

  Or maybe John felt jealous. He hoped he wasn't falling in love himself. Anyway, he knew what it was like to feel isolated, so he warmed towards her. Yes, maybe they could be friends when this was over.

  Jade was the same age as him. Other teenagers of either sex usually struck him as very young, considering what he'd been through, and the sort of teaching he'd had right from the start. But when he looked at Jade, he didn't see a teenager; rather, she was an amazing young woman with incredible abilities. He realized he'd met someone way out of his league.

  When John had first seen Danny, back at El Juicio, he'd thought of Miles Dyson, Danny's father. They looked very much alike. But Danny must be a lot older than Miles was when John had met him back in 1994. So his aging processes must also be slowed down, or at least the medical science they'd used had blunted the effect of time. John couldn't really be sure how old any of them were. Selena looked about thirty, but who could say?

  Throughout the conversation, Sarah had been silent, as if she was biting her tongue. She might have an issue with all this high tech stuff. John hoped not, because these people seemed pretty cool. And, however enhanced they were by technology, there was no doubt which side they were on. They were for humanity, not Skynet and the Terminators.

  About an hour later, as it started getting light, they filled the Chevy's tank at a big PEMEX gas station, drawing on John's reserve of cash. By now, the Mexican police would have made a connection between the night's traffic carnage, and other terrible events, and the Lawes family cyber cafe. Even if they couldn't piece together that Deborah and David Lawes were actually Sarah and John Connor, it was dangerous to use a credit card and create electronic footprints. Worse, their carefully established identities were now pretty much useless.

  The station had a store and a diner attached. "John," Danny said. "We're going to need all the nutrients we can get. How about you do that job?"

  That figured. A teenager might look less conspicuous buying a whole lot of junk food. He got a dozen burgers to take away, three giant bottles of Gatorade, a half-gallon carton of ice cream and all the multi-vitamin pills he could find. Anton wolfed down most of it, but Selena and Jade took a good share. They seemed to be famished.

  John went back for more. He shrugged at the guy behind the counter at the diner. "My friends are pretty hungry," he said.

  The station had a few racks of clothes and accessories for tourists: T-shirts; cheap, locally made jeans; sunglasses; and an assortment of bags, hats, and eyeshades. Sarah bought a few items for the Specialists to make them less conspicuous than in Danny's current dinner suit, Anton's police uniform, and the short dance dresses worn by Jade and Selena. Selena spent a few minutes in the women's bathroom cleaning herself up, and returned looking more or less normal, in blue jeans and a bright T-shirt. Dressed the same way, Danny, Jade, and Anton looked like a group of tough, but fairly harmless, tourists.

  After that, Jade drove on, for hour after hour. John re- alized how long he'd been awake, and let himself drift off to sleep. The Specialists seemed tireless, but it was no use trying to compete with them. He was only human, not enhanced like them.

  When he woke, it was bright daylight Selena had taken over the wheel, and John hadn't even noticed them stopping; he'd slept right through it Now he was between the passenger door and Jade on his left, squeezed be- | tween him and Anton. He realized, in fact, how closely he was pressed against Jade. Embarrassed, he sat up straight.

  The sun was high in the sky and they had entered desert scrub country. Up front Sarah and Danny were both sleeping.

  "Good morning, John," Jade said. She spoke very softly, but Sarah stirred.

  "Uh, hi, Jade," John whispered. "I hope you feel better after some sleep."

  "Yeah, sure. Where are we?"

  "Nearly halfway to the border, south of Mazatlán. We've been driving hard."

  "You must have been. What time is it?"

  In the front seat, Sarah checked her wristwatch. "Almost midday," she said.

  John checked the time as well. They'd been driving for most of the last eight hours. All the same, Jade and Selena must have been breaking every possible speed limit. Right now, the car was doing 110 mph. These guys weren't too worried about the police.

  On Jade's other side, Anton looked completely recovered. John had never seen the extent of Anton's laser burns, and he couldn't imagine the damage that the T-XA had done to his organs when it put that spike through him. But time, rest, and food had restored him. Those nanoware implants must really be something.

  "We're going to stop soon," Danny said. "We've got to bury one of our own."

  "Then where do you want to go?" Sarah said.

  "Colorado. But we need weapons and supplies. We know you have friends in California. Our records don't tell us who they are."

  "Leave them out of this."

 
"Mom!" John said.

  "We can't endanger them, John."

  "Mom, I don't think we have a choice."

  She considered that, while everyone waited. "All right We have friends near Calexico. The Salcedas."

  "Right," Danny said. "We'll go there. Then we'll head for Colorado Springs."

  In the afternoon, they made a deep grave for Baxter in the sands of the Sonora Desert, north of Hermosillo. The Specialists dug it out with their usual strength and swiftness, but then they stopped to take time, placing his body carefully, his long arms across his chest. Moving calmly, deliberately, they filled in the grave.

  "Robert did so much for us all," Selena said. She turned to Sarah. "I wish you and John could have known him. He was always there for us, always ready to fight the machines. You could count on him." She shook her head in wonderment, giving a small smile, as her eyes moistened. "That was the great thing about Bobby. You always could count on him. Always. He never let us down."

  There was little they could do to commemorate his gravesite. Jade took a fistful of sand, and let it fall gently. "We won't forget you, Robert."

  "We're all mortal," Anton said, "however long we live. We're mortal, but we still keep fighting." Anton seemed like a real tough guy, but even he was choking back tears.

  "Amen," Danny said.

  Selena said, "We love you, Bobby."

  John felt overcome. "He must have been a great guy. I wish we could have known him better."

  Jade nodded. "He was one of our best. That's why he came back with us. One day, I'll tell you all about it, how he fought Skynet, and the machines, the Terminators." She stopped as a sob overcame her.

  Sarah reached out and held her, forgetting any reservations she had about the Specialists. For the moment, Jade was just another young woman, overcome with grief. "It's okay," Sarah said. "It'll all be okay."

  Jade wept openly. "Thank you, Ms. Connor," she said, between the tears and painful sobs. "I know. We'll make it worthwhile. I know. It's all right. I know. I know."

  As the shadows stretched out through the afternoon and they headed towards Mexicali and Calexico, John said, "Okay, we were going to compare notes. At least set out the highlights, remember?"

  "All right," Danny said. "Let's get your half of the story. You had two Terminators try to kill you, one in 1984 one in 1994, right? That's the story you told my mother, back in '94, when you came to our house."

  "The 1984 one was programmed to hunt me," Sarah said. "John wasn't born yet. The T-1000 came after him ten years later. Maybe this gets confusing." She took the Specialists through it quickly. In the original future, America's Skynet computerized defense system reached self-awareness in 1997 and discovered in itself a will to live. When its creators tried to shut it down, Skynet had launched the U.S. ICBMs at targets in Russia and several other countries. The Russians had responded in kind. From the ashes, came nuclear winter. "Then the machines came, hunting the humans down, seeking us out to the ends of the Earth."

  But one man had led the human Resistance in the future: John Connor. Skynet was beaten in 2029, but had played one last card, sending back the Terminators to kill John, or prevent him from being born. It had tried to change the past, but it failed.

  "Right," Danny said. "That makes sense. Let's call the future you described the baseline reality. When you blew up Cyberdyne in '94, things changed."

  “That was the whole idea," John said.

  "Yeah, sure. But they didn't change the way you thought they did, because that's not how time works. We know that now. Before Judgment Day happened, there was a lot of theory about time and time travel. Let's say that we've all diverged from the baseline. In the world that Jade and Selena were born in, the one we're all in now, Skynet gets implemented in 2007, but Judgment Day isn't until 2021. As you can imagine, lots of things happened in between, stuff we all grew up with. With the kind of computer processors that were used for Skynet, there were huge technological advances in every field. Time travel was invented, the research has already started. Soon, we mastered it. We made great strides in bioteeh—every possible field of science. There were protests about Skynet, but they came to nothing and the system worked fine until 2021. By then, everyone trusted it completely. There were no signs that it was sentient or self-conscious."

  "It was everywhere," Anton said. "It controlled the armed forces and their support units almost without human safeguards. Over all those years, they hadn't been necessary, so they got pared back. When Judgment Day happened, Skynet had the upper hand. We haven't been able to defeat it."

  "So now you're the ones trying to change the past?" Sarah said. "You're trying to stop Skynet being built, like we tried in '94?"

  Anton shook his head. "I wish it worked like that. It's not so simple."

  "We don't think you can ever change the future," Selena said. "Or the past."

  "That's right," Danny said. "And Skynet must have known that as well as we do."

  "But we have changed things," John said, hoping he was right. "Judgment Day was supposed to happen in 1997. It didn't happen, and here we are, plenty of world still left."

  "That's just how it seems to you."

  "We want to create a different future," Anton said, "alongside the ones that already exist. We want to give mankind another chance."

  "I don't think I'm going to like this story," Sarah said.

  Anton took them through it quickly. Sometimes you could make changes in time, but you didn't wipe out the old timeline-that never happened. You just created a new one. The timeline in which John grew up to win the war against Skynet still existed. So did the future that the Specialists had come from.

  "So what's your future like?" John said.

  "Hard. Skynet is winning. By 2036, it had crushed all human resistance in North America. Other centers of resistance held out, but there's no way we that can see to penetrate Skynet's defenses, not with the resources we have left. That's why we're here. It looks like humanity is doomed in our timeline. We came back to create a better future, one with a chance of avoiding Judgment Day."

  “But why does Skynet care? If all you can do is create a new future alongside the old one, what's it got to fear?"

  "Nothing. We weren't sure how it would react when it detected the space-time field fluctuations. But it's sent back the T-XA to stop us. You should assume that Skynet will do what it can to destroy human life anywhere, any time, whatever we do, in any world-any timeline—we ever try to create. We've got to be ready for it. It's paranoid about us. It thinks that every human being is its enemy."

  "And it will always create Judgment Day if we give it Half a chance," Sarah said.

  "Perhaps, Ms. Connor," Jade said. "We don't know. But that's what we've experienced. It's what happened in our universe."

  "Yeah." Sarah sounded disgusted by what she'd heard, John couldn't blame her. She turned to him, shaking her head bitterly. "Maybe it always happens, whatever we do.

  All we've done is postpone it, and make it worse."

  "It does look that way," John said. "Doesn't it, Mom?"

  Sarah closed her eyes, then lowered her head. "God help us, why did we bother trying?"

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  AUGUST 2001

  Oscar Cruz lived in a plush beachside condo, just ten minutes' drive from the new Cyberdyne headquarters. He'd stayed up late tonight to read Rosanna's latest reports. They were fascinating. Relaxed deep into one of his heavily cushioned armchairs, he studied a printout analysis of the Mark 1 nanoprocessor, and what it had achieved so far. Its capacities were already beyond anything Rosanna had promised. It was just as well he'd kept her services. Every penny they'd spent catering to her whims had been repaid with interest.

  Jack Reed's people were moving cautiously, wary of creating any truly Frankensteinian technology, much as Charles Layton and others on the Board still scoffed at that. The point that Rosanna had established early on was that the lost nanochip and the other 1984 remnants really were from the futur
e. There was no other explanation. When you looked at the total picture, it all made sense. They had to be the remains of some kind of military cyborg device, the same device that had killed seventeen police in a shootout that year, and identical to the one that had helped the Connors destroy the Cyberdyne HQ ten years later. Sarah Connor must be crazy, of course, and there had been no nuclear Armageddon in 1997, but it didn't hurt to be careful. Connor was obviously caught up in something she didn't understand.

  It had taken someone like Rosanna to work this out. The woman was strange and self-absorbed, but she was brilliant. She had that manner that made you dismiss everything she said as too eccentric to be true-then go and check up, just in case she was right. If she said the moon was made of green cheese, you'd laugh at her, then conduct an investigation, just in case.

  Eventually, the Dyson-Monk nanochip could be adapted for the military computers Jack and NORAD had originally imagined, but now they were onto something bigger: time travel. Rosanna had convinced them all it was possible, and now she was working with some of the best physicists in the country, using the Mark-1 processor for their mathematical modeling. The practical results didn't yet add amount to time travel, but they were certainly amazing.

  Downstairs, outside the condo block's high brick fence, someone pressed the buzzer. Damn it, who could it be at this time of night? Oscar checked the security system. Its four-inch video screen showed a young Hispanic woman with very long hair. He pressed the button to speak with her through the microphone, "Yes? What do you want?"

  "Oscar Cruz?"

  "Yes."

  "From Cyberdyne?"

  "Yes, what do you want?"

  "We need to talk," she said.

  No way was he talking to some total stranger who'd come to talk about Cyberdyne, not after 1994. "Call me at work. You can sort it out with my secretary."

  "Mr. Cruz, we need to talk now."

  "No we don't." He terminated the connection, but the buzzer went off again. He activated the mike. "I said to call me at work."