The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  She could remember the first time she'd been conscious of that sensation— the moment when the first Terminator's laser-aiming dot had settled on her forehead.

  "Come with me if you want to live," she murmured to herself.

  "I did, but you didn't, Reese. And now it's me looking out for John."

  Time to write this up, she thought, and began gathering information. She paid particular attention to those reports that offered an explanation. Most of the time, roughly 87 percent, investigation of the vehicle had turned up no mechanical reason for the accident and so operator error was generally the leading cause. Or else they called it deliberate suicide.

  God knew people were capable of unbelievably stupid behavior. As my own experience has shown. But this was mounting up to be quite a wave of "errors," and if it was suicide then the earth was undergoing an epidemic.

  So what, if anything, did these perfectly fine vehicles have in common? she wondered.

  "Okay, let's do a sort. By date of manufacture. Aha." None of the vehicles in the oddest accidents were more than two years old.

  "Now let's check on who manufactured them. Using my own nasty, paranoid-bitch search parameters."

  Their most vital computer components had been made in automated factories that were only minimally under human direction. And each of these accidents was firmly in the 90

  percent that were being blamed on their operators.

  "Shit," she said, with quiet sincerity.

  With a few key taps she pulled up a report she'd already written about the automated factories. Some of their informants had sent photos of some secret military facilities in remote parts of the United States and overseas. They'd apparently started as U.S. military facilities and then, somehow, had proliferated.

  Sarah wondered if any information about these facilities had been declassified, and went to work. Three hours later she found good reason to cut loose with a litany of curses that would have impressed even the far-traveled Dieter. Buried in an insignificant memo dated three years earlier, and written to request information about a shipment of rebar, was a casual mention that Paul Warren had complained that the shipment was very late and he'd like to know why.

  Paul Warren was president of Cyberdyne Systems.

  * * *

  Dieter stared at her for so long that Sarah began to fidget.

  "Well?" she demanded. "What do you think?"

  He shrugged. "Shit," he said.

  "That's what I thought," she said, and rubbed her nose. "Shit."

  John looked from one to the other, frowning. "Could it possibly be," he asked with exaggerated patience, "that we're forcing the facts to fit a particular premise?"

  Sarah tightened her lips and looked away; slowly leaning back in her chair, she glanced sideways at Dieter. She hated that he was being called on to arbitrate between her and her son, but he had much more patience than she did, and besides, he was less personally involved.

  "Explain," Dieter said.

  John chewed his lower lip as he gathered his thoughts, then raised his hands. "Look, this stuff sounds like you've been reading Midnight World. Cyberdyne is just a company. It's not the bogeyman. Anytime it, or one of its officers, is mentioned doesn't necessarily mean that they're out to get us." He looked at his mother. "Mom, did you check for similar accidents for the previous two years, concerning vehicles that had as many computer components?"

  Sarah turned and gave him a look. "Why, yes, son, I did. First of all"—she held up a finger—"up until two years ago most vehicles didn't contain the number of computer components that they do today. Those that did had highly specialized functions and were generally not available to the public. Second, in slightly over sixty-two percent of those accidents, mechanical failure of some sort was found to be the cause. Third, given who we met working at Cyberdyne several years ago, and whose look-alike you met at Red Seal Base, I can't help making a connection between Cyberdyne, Skynet, automated factories, and these freakish accidents."

  She glared at him, tight-lipped. "Could it possibly be that you're refusing to see the obvious because it doesn't fit your theories?"

  John turned his face away, and holding up his hands rose from his chair. "I can see this isn't going to get us anywhere," he said. Without another word he walked out of the room.

  Sarah leaned back and slowly closed her eyes. Dieter sat with his chin in one hand and watched her silently.

  "I can't kill him," she said at last, as though surrendering a cherished notion. "He's supposed to save the human race."

  Dieter snorted a laugh. "He will, liebling." He shook his head.

  "He just has things he must come to terms with. Have patience."

  Sarah couldn't help but smile every time he called her that.

  True she was tiny when standing next to him, but she had never thought of herself as any sort of diminutive. "I need to get out of here," she said. "Let's go to the Junction."

  It was more than ninety miles to Delta Junction, which meant that they might be gone overnight, depending on what they decided to do once they got there. But just heading down to the Klondike wouldn't take care of her restlessness.

  "Good idea," he said, and rose. "You've made me glad my truck is more than five years old. Something I never expected to feel."

  "John's isn't, though."

  He looked at her worried face and grinned. "Something that should occur to him anytime now." He grabbed their jackets and herded her out of the house.

  * * *

  John was seated at his computer looking over some schematics that Ike Chamberlain, Dieter's gun-geek friend, had sent him. They'd been trying to work out some of the gaps in the info John had rescued from the Terminator's head, with only moderate success. Part of the problem was that the materials they needed either didn't exist yet or were classified, as in

  "burn-before-reading-and-deny-they-exist" classified; like the perfect dielectric the plasma gun required.

  He heard Dieter's truck start up and heave itself into reverse, then grind its way up the gravel drive toward the road. His concentration broken, John dropped back in his chair and rested his chin on his hand.

  Why am I being such a jerk? he wondered.

  It wasn't a familiar sensation and he didn't like it. He knew that Dieter and his mother were right. Even if their confidence in Wendy's intervention was 100 percent, it was only common sense to have a backup plan. He'd been taught this so early and had it drummed into him so often that not having one gave him a terribly uncomfortable feeling.

  Like not wearing underwear to a wedding.

  It felt wrong. So why was he not only not making such a plan himself, but insisting that neither Dieter nor his mother make one? Although, knowing his mom, she probably already had, with two backup fallbacks.

  He shook his head in frustration and glanced at the schematic. With a muttered curse he saved it and grabbed the disk with his mother's report on it. He pushed it in the slot and did nothing.

  Why? he asked himself. Why hesitate, why don't I want to know?

  Maybe because if his mother was right and Skynet was sentient, then maybe Wendy's program, far from stopping Judgment Day, might actually be the cause of it. And it was me that pressed enter.

  The horror of it rippled over his skin like an army of ants.

  Was it us? Something went wrong… we were interrupted … I misunderstood? he thought incoherently. Did I make Skynet sentient? He forced himself to remember Wendy's face as she lay in pain. Her lips formed a word.

  He couldn't do this. John stood abruptly and walked back and forth, rubbing his face vigorously and pushing back his hair. I can't! he thought, holding up his hands as if to ward off an insistent interrogator. Wendy, he thought longingly, desperately. I don't want to…

  He forced down the rising panic, concentrating on his breathing until he felt less shaky. Here's the truth, he told himself, you're having panic attacks. You think you're controlling them when you're really just avoiding them. It felt g
ood to finally admit it to himself.

  His mother had often told him when he was growing up, "Lie when you have to, lie to anyone you want to, even me if you think it's necessary, but never lie to yourself. That way lies madness."

  At one time he'd thought, Well, you ought to know, Mom. That had been the low point of their relationship—shortly before he'd met the incontrovertible truth about Terminators.

  Now they were at another low point. At least then I could blame ignorance, or maybe even hormones. Now all he could blame was a failure of nerve. John pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. Okay, he thought, Red Seal Base, the lab, Wendy… She lay in a heap and he went to her, turned her over; she couldn't breathe. John closed his eyes at the memory. She was panicked, twisting the fabric of his pant leg and arching her back. He'd been afraid he'd need to do a tracheotomy. But then he'd found the spot where the trachea had been dented and he'd popped it back into shape.

  She tried to speak, but no sound came out, her lips formed a word. John struggled to understand. At the time he'd thought she was saying "Enter." He closed his eyes and struggled to remember. She was looking into his eyes as though willing him to understand, the bruises on her throat were already purple-black, her lips drew back, hard as she formed the word…

  "Erase"!

  "SHIT!" John leaped to his feet. "Fuck! Shit! Fuck! Shit, shit, shitshitshitshitshit, FUCK!" He stood in the center of the room, breathing hard and feeling nauseous. This couldn't be happening, it couldn't! The universe couldn't be this cruel, this evil! He had made Skynet sentient?

  Something had happened—the Terminator had interrupted Wendy before she'd inputted the second disk, or even the first, apparently. A strange feeling of calm settled over him as he accepted the truth. Wendy's brilliant program had given Skynet life, and at this moment the computer was working its way toward its goal of exterminating its creators.

  Mom's report on the strange accidents that were crawling across the globe was actually a record of Skynet's experiments with a sort of primitive HK, Hunter-Killer.

  Tears ran down his cheeks, his face twisting into a grimace as his breath clogged his throat like a gripping fist, hard and painful. The calm blew apart and the pressure in his throat rose until at last he was able to let loose the wordless cry of agony he'd held in for all this time. A howl of shame and loss and regret that seemed to have roots that snapped and tore as he let it go.

  Dropping to the floor, he huddled in on himself and wept, for how long he didn't know, but when it stopped he felt exhausted, as though he'd been ill a long time.

  He lay quietly on the floor, his cheek against the rough carpet, and once again thought of Wendy in the last moments of her life.

  By an act of will he replaced the image with the memory of her face as he made love to her for the first time. Then he thought of her at Logan, the first time he'd left her. She was smiling, exasperated, excited, maybe a little sad to see him go, but proud she'd taken the chance of kissing him. Love glowed in her eyes and brought a soft rose tint to her cheeks. This was how he would remember her.

  He stood, feeling shaky, and deliberately pushed the image from his mind. There wasn't time for grief anymore. He had work to do.

  With a trembling hand he brought up the information on the disk he'd installed. Then, numbly, he began to read. His mother's research would probably confirm his worst fears, and he had to know.

  He noted that his mother had cataloged the various accidents as occurring in bands running north to south during a specific time period. Every one of them, worldwide, had occurred between the hours of eleven to three within each band, whether in South America, Scandinavia, Africa, or China. John had to concede that, given the timing, it was unlikely that these were purely random events.

  But are they intelligently guided?

  Or were they the manifestation of some perverse program that had been installed by Skynet's fallen agents and activated by chance, or by some government employee who never imagined that his or her fantasies were escaping into the real world?

  John tapped his fingers on the desktop as he thought. Since he lacked a conveniently decapitated Terminator to examine, it might be that the closest thing he had to Skynet was his own truck. He had a friend who lived just outside Richardson who customized cars. Ray had every type of diagnostic computer available to man, and John thought that he could jury-rig something, using his laptop, Ray's diagnostic equipment, and the brain from his truck.

  First, though, he shot off a message to Snog and the gang at MIT with his mother's report attached. Then he reached for the phone.

  * * *

  Ray Laber was an automotive genius and people came to him from all over the United States and Canada. When asked why he wasn't located in, say, San Diego, he simply answered that he liked the way that Alaska challenged a vehicle. He and John had met at a truck pull shortly after the Connors had moved to the state. They'd hit it off so well that Ray had offered to hire him and teach him the business he loved.

  John had been sorely tempted, but the knowledge that he would have to base their working relationship on a pile of lies had prevented him from accepting.

  Ray met John at the door of his garage, wearing his usual uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and lab coat with a brand-new gimme cap on his shaggy, dirty-blond hair. He held out a hand with old-fashioned engine grease ground into the knuckles, and John took it.

  "Thanks for letting me in," Connor said.

  Ray looked at him curiously. "No problem. Need any help?"

  John hadn't really told him anything, just that he wanted to check something using one of the diagnostic computers. It was clear that Ray was intrigued; he lived to probe the mysteries of the automobile.

  "Aw, no thanks," John said. "It's not that interesting and I'll bet you're late getting home as it is."

  The other man blushed. His adored wife was a stickler for one thing—dinner at six-thirty. Ray had often said that he figured that maybe he was a little henpecked, but he did enjoy his suppers with the family. When the kids got to be teenagers it might not be possible for them all to sit down together every night; while they were small he was more than willing to toe the mark.

  "How 'bout I come back around eight, then?" he asked.

  "Great," John agreed. I'll either be done by then or hopelessly stymied. "Give my love to Marion."

  "Will do, buddy."

  John watched him go with something like envy.

  How wonderful it would be to not know the future, to expect tomorrow to be much like today.

  Of course, if Ray had known the future he probably wouldn't have had his two kids. Which would be a shame 'cause they were nice little guys. Sometimes John thought of Ray and his family as a warm fire in a cold world, something precious and rare and forever beyond his reach.

  Work! he commanded himself, and got back into his truck to drive it into the garage.

  * * *

  Two hours later John had set up the Faraday cage he'd constructed at home over the motherboard he'd removed from his truck and his laptop, both of which he'd connected to the diagnostic computer. He'd already worked his way through several levels of straightforward programming without finding anything remotely interesting.

  Well, I didn't think it would be easy.

  If there was anything to find, it would be well hidden. He just hadn't expected his hunt to be so stupefyingly boring. John got up and made a pot of coffee. This was going to take a while.

  Wait a minute, he thought. If Skynet is sending messages to cars and trucks and so on, then there's got to be a wireless modem inside that silver box.

  And if that was the case, then maybe… He went to his laptop and called up the file of code he'd downloaded from the head of the Terminator they'd captured on their flight from the Caymans. Most of it was incomprehensible, despite the best that Snog and the gang at MIT could do. But if he was right, then sending a line of this text to the truck's computer should elicit some kind of response.

&nb
sp; "Here goes nothing," he murmured, and entered a selected line.

  The response was gratifyingly quick. Four lines of unintelligible, but terribly familiar text appeared. John's heartbeat picked up and his mouth went dry. Here was proof positive of a Skynet connection. He closed his eyes. Then opened them as he heard the modem connection in the diagnostic machine kick in. A modem that was outside the Faraday cage.

  He'd forgotten the damn thing had an Internet connection.

  John picked up a heavy wrench and slammed it down on the silver box containing the truck's motherboard, then ripped it from its connection to the diagnostic computer. That made it easier to continue hammering until bits and pieces sparkled across the concrete floor like silicon confetti…

  "Jeesh, John, I know computers can be frustrating, but you can't drive that truck without one."

  John spun around, startled, to find Ray Laber staring at him quizzically. The older man's face got a bit more serious at seeing the expression on John's.

  "Sorry," John said, and put down the wrench. "I guess disconnecting it would have done as well."

  "I guess." Ray walked over and checked the connector, then glanced at the shattered box.

  "Do you maybe have an old truck or something I could borrow?" John asked. He thought maybe his voice was shaking, but wasn't sure. Inside he was shaking plenty.

  Ray grimaced. "I picked up a seventy-eight Ford I was gonna restore," he said. "It's running pretty good, but it looks like hell."

  "Perfect," John said. "Can I leave my old truck with you?"

  With a snort Ray said, "Well, unless you can carry it out of here on your back, I guess you'll have to. You wanna tell me what's goin' on?"

  "Yes," John said. "But I've got to go, my mother's been in an accident. The cop didn't want to say much, so I think she might be hurt bad." He waved toward the parking lot. "Key in the ignition?"

  "Yeah," Ray said, concerned. "You want me to come with?"

  John hesitated to be polite, then said, "No, better not. I might have misinterpreted the cop; sometimes they can be so close-mouthed over nothing your imagination goes into overdrive. Thanks for the loan."