T2 - 03 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Times of Trouble

by Russell Blackford

  Then the General shook hands with the black man, Danny Dyson—a different Danny from the one who had traveled back in time from Jade's World, with the other Specialists, only to be killed while destroying the T-XA. In his own reality, John had first met Danny back in 1994, when he'd joined with Sarah and a T-800 to raid Cyberdyne's headquarters in Los Angeles. At that stage, John had been only nine years old, and Danny only six. In this reality, Skynet's World, Danny had grown to become one of the leaders of the Resistance, and one of its few experts on the advanced computer hardware that had been used for the manufacture of Skynet and its machines.

  "Juanita's right," Danny said. "It's good to see you back at last."

  General Connor nodded solemnly. "You don't know how good it is to be back. I never thought I'd say that about this place, but you know what I mean. To be back with my best friends." He glanced at Juanita, with a look that suggested "friends" was kind of an understatement.

  "Daniel—" Jade said.

  That's Danny, to you." The man gave a broad grin.

  "Very well, Danny."

  "Say, that's better."

  "It is good to meet you again." They'd met that one time, and worked well together on the time vault. That had been hurried, and there'd been no chance for small talk or social chitchat. "I am sure we will work together once more. Forgive me if I ever act strangely. The Daniel Dyson of my world was a close friend—he was killed by a Terminator. This is strange for me. But there are many strange relationships here; I think we will all have to make allowances."

  It was what they'd all been thinking. Good for Jade, John thought, putting her cards on the table.

  "No problem," Danny said.

  "Well, Jade," the General said, "you're right on that one. We're all doing that...making allowances, even if we don't like to say it." He nodded at Sarah, then at John. "This is a crazy universe we live in...or multiverse, or whatever you want to call it." His mouth turned up slightly at one corner. That was the closest he usually came to a full smile. It would have to do.

  Juanita led them inside the mountain, where they were confronted by a huge space of concrete and steel, full of heavy machinery, pipes, tanks of liquid, metal ladders and walkways, all lit dully from overhead. Huge turbines whirred and hummed within their metal shells. Just a few warmly-clad soldiers moved about purposefully, monitoring equipment. Another group sat on the far side of the floor, observing banks of what must have been video screens, though they were at the wrong angle for John to see properly. This was Level E of the original Skynet complex, the lowest of the five levels that had been built by human beings.

  They took some metal stairs down to Level H, passing more guards at each level. Juanita and Danny led them across the concrete floor to the time vault, where Danny had set up a meeting area, with chairs for them all. The whole set-up had changed since John had first come here; it had been made slightly more human in its feel, with such touches as an area for making coffee. Better still, the floor was not covered with maimed, bleeding bodies and •mashed machinery, as it had been last time.

  We've been working on the time vault," Danny said. "I understand it much better now. I was hoping you would help me, Jade, now you're here."

  Of course, Danny."

  "That's good, because I think we can just about get this thing to talk. I'm close to figuring out the whole theory of it, but I could just do with some help...from someone who actually knows."

  "We can start straightaway," Jade said. "Today, if you like."

  "I like, all right. That'll be fine."

  General Connor placed the polyalloy arm/hand on Danny's metal desk, amongst his computer hardware. "You know what this is?"

  "I can make a good guess. You told me you were bringing it." He held it up and inspected it closely. "So, this is from a T-1000. Well, I'll be damned."

  "I'm handing it over to you. You and Juanita are my best computer experts. Again, you'll have to work with Jade. She knows the tech stuff better than any of us."

  "Only because of where I come from," she said.

  "Yeah, and because you're a goddamn freakin' genius. You don't have to bullshit us about that."

  "Very well. I'll be pleased to work with Daniel and Juanita."

  "You know the tech stuff as well as any of us, John," Juanita said. "I mean...leaving Jade aside. Don't sell yourself short."

  "I won't, but there's no need to defend me to myself, either." Again, the General gave that little twist of his mouth that was somewhat less than a smile. "You won't need my help. I've asked Gabriela to stay here for a few days before she heads back to L.A. We'll be working on other things."

  "Like the warlords?" Sarah said.

  "Yeah, exactly like that. Cecilia's campaign is going well, but we need to finish it off. I'd drive them into the goddamn sea if I could."

  "Maybe you'll get your chance."

  "I certainly hope so."

  Since they'd sent Cecilia to Argentina with half a dozen Terminators, she'd been hitting back hard against the Rising Army of Liberation. They'd sent more Terminators to support her and the other fighters who were loyal to the Resistance. There was now a growing POW camp, just outside the ruins of Rosario. But they all knew they'd need to give her more support to complete the mission, and clear out the warlords once and for all.

  "What about us?" John said.

  The General placed a strong hand on his shoulder. "You and Sarah deserve a break by now. You've been in the thick of the fight ever since you came here."

  "Well, I'm not so sure about that."

  "Believe me, neither of you has to prove a thing to us. You're going to Jade's World, to get the job done there—"

  "That's what everyone assumes," Sarah said cryptically.

  "Sarah has misgivings," Jade said.

  "So do we all," General Connor said. "Well, whatever they are, you and your son are welcome here. I know you'll want to work with us, and I don't doubt your abilities. I think you should sort out how you can best help, whether it's with Danny and Juanita and Jade, or what..."

  "It might be a case of or what" Sarah said. "Right now, you have a new world to build here. I want to be part of that, even if it can't last."

  "Why do you say it can't last?"

  "For God's sake, John, I'm sick of false optimism. All we can do is keep fighting. If Jade wants to return her world and carry on the fight there, I'm happy it she's doing that. Maybe I'll go with her—I don't know. But it looks to me like, whatever we do, Skynet wins in the end. I just hope there can be some happiness here for a while. I'll support that."

  "It's not true that Skynet wins in the end," Jade said. "We can't let it be like that, Sarah. We have to fight on."

  "Of course we do. I'd never suggest otherwise."

  "Back in your world, Sarah, remember when we worked with Dr. Monk on the time vault?"

  "Of course."

  "I remember every detail of what we did when we refined the mechanism."

  "Yes, I suppose you would with that goddamn super IQ of yours."

  Jade looked slightly hurt at that. "Please, Sarah, I only mean well for you and humankind. You know that."

  Sarah gave a long sigh. "So where's all this getting us?"

  "Give me two days to work on the time vault with Danny and Juanita. We'll get more data. I want to analyze it."

  "If it's that important, take as long as you want."

  "I want to convince you that it is worthwhile sending a force to my world."

  "Oh, you don't need to convince me of that. I have no doubt that we'll send some sort of force, whether it's really worthwhile or not. What else can we do? We're human. The human species might not be much, but it's all we've got. It's better than the alternatives that I've seen. It's us—or Skynet, or the goddamn cockroaches."

  John laughed.

  "We'll send some kind of force," Sarah said. "It's just a question of who should go, and when...how many...and the most important question."

  "What's that?" Juanita said
. Sarah looked her in the eye. "What will Skynet do about it?"

  TWELVE

  COLORADO SEPTEMBER 18, 2029

  As John watched, Jade keyed in a code to power-up the time vault. She sat beside Danny at his work station, the metal table that he used for his computers and other electronic hardware. The vault's engines rumbled like a powerful car waiting for a touch on the throttle. The screens displayed views of the vault's interior, taken from different angles, showing that it was empty right now.

  John, Sarah, Juanita, and General Connor sat around to see what Jade and Danny had accomplished. "This is where it gets interesting," Danny said. "You're gonna want to see this."

  Jade entered a second code to deploy all that energy into the vault. On the screens, images appeared of lightning-like energy discharges, seeming to spread out from a point near the center of the vault. The lightning unfolded, then seemed to fold back into itself, a perpetual motion of dancing, white-blue energies. Jade entered yet another code, and one screen went momentarily blank, then lit up with a complex matrix of ever-changing numeric data. John could not follow it all; it was much too fast. Perhaps Jade had the mental speed to make sense of it, but it was beyond the capacity of an ordinary human being to analyze the pattern in real time. Still, he'd seen something like it before, as had his mom.

  Jade gave a sad smile, then her face opened up somehow, and the sadness vanished, just for a moment. "You recognize this so far?"

  "You and Rosanna showed us the same thing," he said. "Back in 2001...I mean in"—he looked at Sarah—"in our world."

  "That is true. As I said to you three days ago, I remember every detail of what we worked through with Rosanna. Let me show you some more. I'm going to turn off the displacement field, then switch it on again. I'll need to let the engines rest in between. Watch what happens." She entered a code to power down.

  "All right," the General said. "So what is this supposed to prove?"

  "I am storing all the data. It can be analyzed. But I can see something that you may find more difficult. I will restore the power to the time vault very soon, and you may understand what I mean if I guide you. Concentrate on just a small part of the screen; perhaps the top right-hand corner. You will see regularity emerge."

  After some minutes, she powered up the vault once again, and John watched carefully, finding regularity in one corner, just as she'd said. When she shut the vault down and powered it up yet again, the same regularity emerged—and again each time she went through the procedure. Each time, there was an initial disturbance—"We're disrupting the Earth's space-time field," Jade said—but then the pattern would stabilize.

  "All right, so what's the point of all this?" Sarah said.

  "We can explore for field fluctuations. The presence of mass bends space-time, so a very large piece of matter approaching or departing the Earth would create a fluctuation in the field. But that is not all. Every time a device such as this is used, it creates a local fluctuation. An object arriving through a displacement field will cause a disruption, as will an object sent elsewhere. That is how I traced Skynet to Spain."

  "Right," John said. "It was using a time vault that it had over there to send Terminators to attack our positions." He smiled a little at the way he'd used the word our. He'd started to feel less like a stranger here, more like a signed-up member of the human Resistance.

  "Yes," Jade said. "It was a matter of tracing the field fluctuations. And that is what my people do constantly in my world. They monitor the space-time field to detect any action taken by Skynet. If it sends anything in their vicinity, or to its bases across the world, they want to know."

  "And it must monitor you, right?" John said. "I mean, like when they sent you back in time?"

  "It does, which negates any attempt we might make to use the time vault to move troops from place to place. It is militarily useless arriving unarmed in a place identified by Skynet's war machines. As for my journey in time, you are right. Skynet and the T-XA detected me and the other Specialists using similar principles."

  As Jade explained it, the time vault was a crude device for measuring such distortions. Jade's people, like the Skynet of their world, had far more sophisticated technology to do the same thing.

  She brought up the magnification on one of the screens, so they could all see clearly. "This maps the energies of the vault." She looked at Sarah, then John. "What I am showing you is the same work that

  Rosanna Monk did back in your world. That was how we got here, across the worlds. We can create a space-time map that captures nodal points in time."

  John nodded. "Where the timestreams separate? Like what happened in 1994 when Mom and I raided Cyberdyne?"

  "That is right. That is what I am showing here, but it needs to be more accurate. I still can't untangle what happened in 1984, ten years earlier."

  "The first Terminator," General Connor said. "And that's the year where I sent Kyle Reese." He and Sarah exchanged glances, each knowing the significance of that to the other.

  "Look here," Jade said, making a series of keystrokes. "In 1994, there are energies as well." The image shifted yet again. The screen now showed a simple diagram that branched upward, like a tree. The movement of the branches toward the top of the screen represented the normal flow of time, from past to future. The different branches were alternative timelines—different worlds. "Sure enough, we have a nodal point in May 1994, the year when you first raided Cyberdyne Systems. There is a further nodal point in 2001. You can see time branching. Something happened there."

  "Sure," John said. "And we know what." It was when they'd raided Cyberdyne again...and exposed it to the government. He grinned at that. "The government cancelled Cyberdyne's contract. Result: No more Skynet." He paused. "At least that's what we hope."

  Sarah frowned. "Yes."

  Jade nodded. "Yes, that is what we all hope. We do not know what events take place in your world after that time, but what we can say for certain is that its history changed in August 2001. That is something.

  John remembered the events vividly. First, the arrival of the Specialists. Then the giant T-XA, pursuing them from the future. It had been able to divide into smaller units, carrying out activities in different cities. It had been an extraordinarily adaptable liquid-metal monster, even worse than the T-1000s that he had fought here and in his own world. Yet, they'd destroyed it in the end, scattering it across space and time in an experimental time vault, not unlike this one that Skynet had invented. They'd also destroyed Cyberdyne's experimental nanoware technology, which would lead to Skynet.. .and they'd exposed the leading players in Cyberdyne as tools of Skynet—they had been neurologically reprogrammed by the T-XA to bring Skynet into existence.

  None of that had happened in the world that Jade came from, and what he was seeing confirmed it; until now, he hadn't been sure. When Rosanna Monk had created a space-time map like this, back in 2001, she'd been unable to examine what happened in August 2001 from inside it. The map had left that mysterious. Now they'd stepped outside of it, and they could see what had happened, at least something of it. After August 2001, Jade's World and John's own reality were two distinct, parallel timelines. That was what the screen showed. What they'd done before they'd come here—to Skynet's World—had actually had some effect.

  But how you could you tell which timeline was which? The screen showed a nodal point in 2001, but nothing told him the details of any events in either world. All he was seeing was the visual analogue for mathematical data about Earth's space-time field. You couldn't deduce much from that. And it wasn't as if one timeline showed up as the "original." In a sense, Jade's World was the original and his own

  "Got it," Sarah said. "It can't be the line where we attacked Cyberdyne in 1994."

  "Nice going, Mom," John said with a smile. The "tree" branched twice, once in 1994...and then only one of those branches split again in 2001. That branch had to be the one where Judgment Day had been postponed. By a process of elimination, the branc
h that did not branch again was the original reality.

  It was Skynet's World.

  It was difficult to grasp—thinking about time could make your head spin. But it all became clear when you studied the graphics on the screen.

  'Yes," Jade said. "Correct. Now look at these disturbances, and tell me what they are."

  Sarah laughed nervously. "I have no idea, teacher."

  "Jade made the point earlier," Danny said. "In theory, you could get this in lots of ways. But there's only one thing it could be in practice. It's the use of space-displacement machinery, like this."

  "In this timeline, it begins about... 2026," Jade said. "Just three years ago. It must have been when Skynet started experimenting in a serious way with time travel. However, look at the other timelines, the two that branch apart in 2001." She showed those lines on the screen, a giant "V," with two branches moving apart from a point at the bottom of the screen.

  John peered at it. "What are we looking for?"

  "Those minor disruptions. There are many of them on both timelines, dating from 2001 when Rosanna Monk starts testing her time vault. But look here—the line on the left of the V has serious disruptions concentrated in...yes...2036. Some significant use of space-time displacement fields is being made in that year—objects being sent back in time, or through space, perhaps even arriving from other realities. That is my world, John. I would stake my life on it."

  "So we know which world we're going to?" Sarah asked thoughtfully.