The very creatures Skynet must eventually eliminate were necessary to Skynet’s birth.
He entered his office. A desk and three chairs, a view to the north, nothing else. On a corner of the desk was a link to the superconducting receiver in the basement levels of the building. Inactive as yet, soon Casse would receive instructions from it. From the future. From Skynet. Until then, he relied on the programming with which he had been sent back. Modified by circumstance and experience, it nevertheless remained consistent.
After the failures of the other units to build Skynet and secure its future, he had come forward to take over at a more direct level. Brute measures clearly would not work.
The paradoxes entailed in attempting to kill the Connors resulted in more difficulties than anticipated. The timelines split, mingled, separated into a melange of possibilities.
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Quantum indeterminacy at the macro level, something for which no theory existed that proved useful. It never should have happened. Skynet ultimately would have been better off leaving it alone.
But once tampered always tangled. The only possibility for success now lay in surviving past the Nexus point. After today’s events, Casse understood that very concretely. He had been helpless trying to kill young Porter. He could not do it. Porter was part of the essential timeline, necessary to the future existence of Skynet, inextricably bound to a strand of inevitability. Casse was from a future that still promised only probable existence. He could not kill Porter.
Frustrating. Cruz had been ineffective as well, especially with the recomplicating factor of more humans appearing to effect a rescue of Porter. How had that been allowed to happen? Regardless, the fact remained that Casse could have slashed and stabbed for an hour and somehow never kill Jeremiah Porter.
That at least justified the use of agents from this frame.
He had wondered about that since he began the program.
Better to use Terminators, perhaps, but not if they also would be unable to kill the important humans, the humans that threatened Skynet.
All those attempts, wasted. It seemed impossible that the first Terminator, back in 1984, had failed. One human stood between it and Sarah Connor. One human, against a Terminator. Ridiculous.
Of course, Casse understood now. Even if the human had not come back to try to save Sarah Connor’s life, the attempt would have failed. She had been too intimately bound to the inevitable timeline. Especially after Skynet sent back the Terminator.
It felt odd to realize that Skynet had been wrong. That it had made a mistake. In all the years Casse had been here, waiting and watching, he had witnessed the human propensity for ridiculing and criticizing their leaders. He had found it puzzling. Yet now, perhaps, he understood that a little more, too.
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But Skynet had indeed made a mistake. That first breach of the timeline set in motion all that followed—and preceded, again and again. Even Casse’s presence added to the tangles. Skynet had sent him back even earlier, to 1982, to observe. Casse had been there to follow the events of the first Terminator’s attempts to eliminate John Connor and the resistance and set circumstances up in Skynet’s favor.
Helplessly, Casse had watched. And again, ten years later, when the second attempt had been made. And again, when—
No one had seen or heard from Sarah Connor or her son, John, since 2001. Casse doubted they were dead. Best to assume they lived, somewhere. But they were not the only threats.
This Jeremiah Porter, for instance. It might indeed be a good idea to kill him. All that time travel had done to date was make Skynet’s existence more tentative. But now Skynet depended on it. The idea was in the world. Someone would solve the problem. Rosanna Monk had not been the only one bright enough to understand the physics. The consequences of an independent time travel program, one not under Skynet’s control, could not be modeled. Casse knew that such an event could twist the timeline so out of shape that Skynet could vanish without a trace, never built, unimagined, a phantom. The more factors involved, the less chance of survival. The only thing to do was to limit that possibility.
He stood at the window, the lights in the office dimmed, and gazed at the sprawl of city to the north. Late afternoon was giving way to early evening and lights began to dot the view. Despite their innate disorderliness, humans at times built with surprising intricacy and sophistication.
Depending on perspective, of course.
The intercom chimed.
“Yes?”
“It’s Cruz, sir,” the assistant said.
“Send him in,” Casse said.
Casse watched Oscar Cruz’s reflection in the window as the man entered the office and hurried up to the desk.
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“Have you cleared out those offices?” Casse asked.
“Yes, sir. The crew just left. Not a trace that we were ever there.”
“Except for three witnesses.”
Cruz lowered his head and seemed to writhe where he stood. Only for a second, but Casse saw. Cruz was beginning to break down. The nanoware permeating his brain had become pathological. Cruz’s occasional requests to be reinfected demonstrated a considerable degree of sanity, but also the recognition that his condition would only worsen.
“We’re working on that, too,” Cruz said. “Gant knew the intruder. Paul Patterson, a security agent at Destry-McMillin. We’ve concluded that the woman is Deirdre McMillin.
Porter has been living with her.”
“Where are they?”
“They fled to McMillin’s home first, but they’re now at Destry-McMillin itself.”
“So they have had opportunity to tell others what happened. This is becoming a containment problem.”
“Yes, uh, yes it is.”
“You sent people to Porter’s apartment?”
“They’re all dead,” Cruz said.
Casse turned around. “How?”
“We, uh, don’t know. Four men…they didn’t report back…we sent two more to check…”
“If Deirdre McMillin was helping Paul Patterson extricate Porter from us, she wasn’t in her apartment. Someone else is interested in her then.”
Cruz blinked. “The New Mexico subject?”
“He killed several of our people there, correct?”
“Yes—”
“And he found Eisner, correct?”
“Correct,” Cruz started.
“Then we can assume he is an interested party. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“We, uh, lost him in Minnesota.”
“Why was he in Minnesota?” Casse asked.
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“Tracking down Porter’s family, as it turns out.”
“As it turns out. Do you consider the possibility good that he is now here in Los Angeles?”
Cruz fidgeted.
Casse, annoyed, touched a button on the desk, bringing the room lights up. Cruz flinched, frowning.
“What else?” Casse asked.
“I, uh…Gant recorded an earlier encounter with Patterson.
At Pioneer. He brought along a man who claimed to be an inspector.”
“Claimed?”
Cruz reached into his jacket and pulled out a 5 X 7
envelope. He spilled photographs on the desk. Casse saw images of a young man, athletically built, neatly groomed.
“So?” Casse asked. “Who is he?”
“His stated name is Sean Philicos. He’s a private security specialist. He and his sister operated the company out of Santa Fe we discussed earlier. They’re about to open offices here—”
“His sister…?”
“Julia Philicos. I don’t have pictures of her. Not yet.”
“Who are they?”
Cruz tapped the topmost picture. “That’s John Connor.”
Casse stared at the pict
ure. “You’re sure?”
“Well, he’s older, of course, but…I saw these people, close up. Yes, sir. This is John Connor. I’m willing to bet Julia Philicos is Sarah. Sarah Connor. His mother.”
“How did this get past us?”
“We thought— you thought—they were dead. Gone. They haven’t been seen since 2001. I mean, I couldn’t keep track of them after I went to prison.”
Casse raised a hand and Cruz fell silent. John Connor.
And mother. Not unexpected, but unwelcome certainly. He might have guessed—would have guessed, if he could become more adept at it—that they would appear at a time like this. “Do we know how long they’ve been back?”
“A few years. PPS Securities and Investigations—that’s 196
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their company—was incorporated a little over three years ago, in Albuquerque.”
“They required help to do that. Their identities are protected.”
“Reed? But he’s all but fired, I didn’t think—”
“People like Jack Reed are never discarded lightly. He’s still very useful. His authority has been somewhat curtailed, but he is not to be disregarded. We should recheck all our security on the shipments from Colorado Springs.”
“You don’t think—?”
“I do think. I don’t guess, Oscar. I want to know. See to it.”
“What about Porter?”
“He’s with McMillin. We wait. If an opportunity arises, terminate him. Inform Gant.”
Cruz looked uncomfortable, but finally he nodded. He began to gather up the images.
“Leave those,” Casse said. “Where is Gant now?”
“Outside the Destry-McMillin campus. Do you want him recalled?”
“No. Where are these new offices the Connors are opening?”
“Um, I’ll get you the address.”
“Do that.”
Oscar Cruz waited, his fingers dancing nervously against his sides. Then he nodded deeply, stepped back from the desk, pivoted, and left the office.
The Connors are back, Casse thought. He glanced at the link on his desk, still useless until the monopole receiver was complete. Even then, it might not work. The war may already be lost, and Skynet vanished in a wisp of quantum probability. But I am still here. That must indicate something. Still a chance.
He studied the pictures of John Connor until the intercom chimed again and Cruz gave him the address of PPS
Securities and Investigations.
When he saw the images downloaded from Gant, Oscar 197
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Cruz panicked. For nearly a minute he imagined himself back in solitary, isolated with only the dedicating parasites in his brain for company. John Connor. Of all people. In confinement he had replayed the disasters in Colorado Springs and in Washington D.C. over and over in his imagination. His powers of visualization were greatly enhanced by the infecting nanoware Charles Layton, former CEO of Cyberdyne, had passed to him from the TX-A unit. Every moment came back to him, clear and immediate.
They had been so close to realizing the existence of Skynet then. They had been so close to owning the section of the government that oversaw their project. A few more minutes with Jack Reed and Samantha Jones and they would have been Skynet’s agents in the great cause. But John Connor and his mother and those damn Specialists who had no business being in this time frame anyway, showed up to ruin the entire moment.
“Not again,” he said, leaving Casse’s office. “Not again…not again…”
He stopped in the hallway, closed his eyes, and willed himself to stop repeating that line. He needed no new ticks.
The collection begun since midway through his prison sentence gave him enough trouble. The dysfunction resembled Tourette’s.
The urge faded, and Oscar continued to the elevator.
He descended two floors, then went to his own office.
Behind his desk, he accessed his computer, rummaged for a time until he found the address Casse wanted. He touched the intercom and passed it on.
“Very good,” Casse said. “I want you to stay here, Oscar, and make sure everything goes smoothly when the first trucks arrive.”
Cruz winced. His right hand curled into a fist, opened, and the fingers danced over the intercom. He wanted to leave, to go out and do something. Sitting and waiting hurt.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“I’ll talk to you when I return.”
“Yes, sir.”
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Cruz closed his eyes, gripping the arms of his chair, and rocked for a few seconds. The motion soothed him.
Why now? John Connor! Jesus Christ…
He laughed.
Who knows?
The goal was simple. Despite setbacks, Cyberdyne still commanded considerable resources. Jack Reed had done his best to shut them down, but a corporation this large, so widespread and diversified, proved virtually impossible to kill. The military R & D division suffered, of course. They had lost their chief ally in the Pentagon when Jack found out what they were doing. Jack might have managed to sink them if politics had not intervened. The world changed, priorities shifted, and Cyberdyne survived. Reduced, truncated, humbled, but largely intact.
And it had a considerable foreign market on which to draw.
I did that, Cruz thought, pride displacing anxiety. He had built the actual infrastructure of the company throughout the ’90s. He had recruited the people, organized the departments and divisions, negotiated the contracts, provided the base that guaranteed—ultimately—their success.
The only thing that frightened him was the Connors.
Silly, he knew. They were only two people, how much damage could they do?
He remembered Colorado Springs in 2001. The Connors, aided by people from the future— a future, he had to keep reminding himself that there was more than one, at least for the time being, which seemed a stupid phrase in con-text—who possess incredible abilities, had invaded their secure compound just before Skynet was about to go online and destroyed the project. The disaster had been nearly a repeat of the 1994 destruction of Cyberdyne’s L.A. facility where Miles Dyson had been working on the nanochip that was the basis of all their work in advanced cybernetics, leading to Skynet. Dyson had died in the L.A. event, but his assistant, Rosanna Monk, had ably—and, Cruz thought, 199
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miraculously—reconstructed all of Dyson’s work, in Colorado Springs, bringing them right back to Skynet as a reality.
Along the way, she had discovered the working principles of a time travel device, but that had been a sideline as far as Oscar Cruz had been concerned. The prize was Skynet and, with the enhancements from the TX-A—also from the future, he knew, which he supposed made time travel rather more important than he had thought at the time—they had nearly pulled it off.
Until the Connors.
Sarah Connor, the mother, had been haranguing Cyberdyne, the government, anyone who would listen, for years about the monster machine, Armageddon, the dangers of A.I., and what Cyberdyne, through their government contracts, was about to do. It had always bothered the Skynet development team how accurate her accusations had been, and when she had destroyed their L.A. labs in ’94, she had gone to ground and become a presence on the Internet, creating a growing community of conspiracy theorists, independent cybernetics experts, cranks, and genuinely concerned citizens who had done their best to disrupt the entire program. One of Cruz’s jobs for years was damage control, arguing back to the hotheads and extremists. None of it made sense until Layton had programmed him. Then he had understood. Clearly. Humanity was a disease and the bellyaching and carping were symptoms. Skynet would cure them all.
But it had to exist in order to do that.
If only we could have turned Reed…
Cruz slapped his hands flat on the desk. “Well, there’s only one thing to do,” he announced. “We have to kill them all.”
&nb
sp; Suddenly, he felt very calm. It was good to reach a satisfying conclusion, especially one he knew would solve all their problems.
Casse left his car just off West Pico, eight blocks from the address of PPS Security. The early evening dinner crowd 200
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changed as he neared Calder until he found himself in a more diverse, less expensive neighborhood, drawing curious looks from the locals. He was overdressed, conspicuous.
Casse picked a man who appeared to be the right size and veered toward him. He managed to bump into him, receiving a snarl of invective. Casse apologized, catching the man by his naked arms as if to prevent him falling, and hurried on. Casse absorbed the oils and dead skin. The substance of the man broke down within him, registering on the programmable matrix of his own makeup as coded instructions. The few seconds’ close examination completed the sequence Casse now initiated throughout himself. He drifted closer to the buildings until he reached the next intersection. Around the corner, Casse found a dark gangway within twenty paces. He stepped into it and allowed the change to take him, taking the man’s form. He felt the transformation as a rippling expanding from his core and spreading throughout his limbs, over his face. When he stepped back onto the street, the curious looks were gone.
He wandered along with the flow of night traffic until he reached the street.
Two vans were parked before the two-story building. A sign lay against the wall, identifying the place. Light filled the first-floor window and door, but the second floor appeared dark, unoccupied.
Casse wandered past to the next intersection, then crossed the street. He looked up the alley that ran behind PPS
Security. Another van stood outside the rear door.
Casse sat down in the narrow space between a pair of commercial dumpsters. Concentrating, he poured instructions into his leg. He possessed this template from years ago, during his first months in this frame. He watched his leg as material bulged around the ankle, backed up toward his knee, stopping halfway up his calf. With an effort and a sensation that might have been pain in a human, the bulge detached itself and flowed across the alley pavement.
As it left him, it altered quickly, taking a new shape. Within seconds, it walked toward the parked van, recognizably 201
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