T2 - 02 - The New John Connor Chronicles - An Evil Hour

by Russell Blackford

  "Let's meet in five minutes," John said, leaving the casco with Carlo, Sarah, and the T-800. "I want to get properly armed, then we'll organize the convoy."

  "Take care, John," Sarah said. "I know this might be important—"

  "Sure, Mom, but don't worry, I'll survive." She nodded, then gave a faint smile. "I know you will. You have to."

  With the T-800 beside him, John headed back to his room in one of the low buildings next to the casco. He put on a layer of webbing over his shirt, cramming it with grenades and ammunition, then slipped on his long coat. He checked the action of his M-16. "Let's hit the road."

  Carlo had already rounded up a group of fifteen from the fields and workshops, including Franco and Juanita Salceda, half a dozen former U.S. military personnel, and others from the estancia. Juanita smiled, catching John's eye for a moment. They'd bonded closely three years before, the day that Raoul had died and many others had seen a taste of what was to come. At seventeen, Juanita was tall and slender, like a black-haired foal— but her figure was now concealed beneath layers of weapons and clothing. She'd been working with Franco, and her hands still had traces of grease.

  Their convoy drove quickly to the newcomers' camp as a bitterly cold wind blew across the desert. There was a flash of lightning in the sky, then a mighty thunder-crack, but no rain. Beneath the Humvees' wheels, the roads were slippery with ice.

  Soon, John thought, Skynet would attack again—and there was nothing they could do to stop it. The messages from the future had told his destiny, that one day he would fight back against Skynet, and finally destroy it, but that was many years away. Meanwhile, he had to stay strong, give hope to those around him. More evils were to come: the machines, the extermination camps, everything that Skynet could hurl at them. Kyle Reese and the T-800 Terminator had been sent back in time from 2029—when the human Resistance would finally break through Skynet's defenses. It seemed so far away.

  Right now, the human survivors of Judgment Day were at each other's throats, warlord versus warlord, jockeying for position, squandering lives, stores and munitions, and wasting precious time. If Skynet could monitor them from its base in Colorado, it must be laughing. Day by day, it was gaining what it needed: breathing space, the chance to build forces of its own. One day, John knew, an attack would come from the north, not citing, but maybe I can help you. I worked in the Pentagon, early in the '90s."

  "Okay," John said. "What do you know about Skynet?" "I had two years' experience with the Skynet project I have a pretty good idea how the technology was supposed to work, probably better than most."

  That sparked John's interest. An understanding of Skynet's hardware, and the workings of its machines, might be useful. That led him to another thought. Even now they could start to plan. In another two decades they'd all be in the U.S., at war with the rogue computer. But they could find its weaknesses now, work out how to attack it. He wondered how much the T-800 knew that they'd never gotten from it. It had always shown limitations: often it lacked specific files with the details of future events.

  Meanwhile, back to Bellow. What might he know that could put some pieces in the puzzle? "What went wrong?" John said.

  Bellow shrugged, spreading his large hands helplessly. "You mean with Skynet? What happened on Judgment Day?" "Yes."

  "That I can't tell you. I was off the project well before then. By the time Judgment Day came down, I was doing hands-on intelligence work in Central and South America. That's what saved my life. As far as I know, no one walked out of Washington alive—same as a lot of places. It must have been saturated with Russian warheads." "Okay. I guess we'll never understand." "Where were you when the warheads fell?" Carlo said, following up John's question.

  "Sao Paulo," Bellow said. "That's where I met Fernando and his family." He nodded at Alvez. "The Russkies didn't hit the city itself."

  Every continent had been hit by nuclear warheads, but Africa and South America had been less damaged than the others, from what John could gather before the Internet had totally collapsed. It was certainly true of South America. The Russians had concentrated their missiles on military targets and U.S. interests; the huge cities of Argentina and Brazil had initially been almost unscathed.

  "But Sao Paulo is a wreck," Alvez said. "It's total chaos."

  "Sure," Bellow said. "Just like all the other big cities." Since Judgment Day, of course, things had only become worse, with the failed crops, the rivalries of warlords, the cold, the dark, and radioactive fallout. "But at least they survived. At least there are people who made it through alive."

  Then Tarissa told her story. When Judgment Day had come, her husband had been away from their home, working on the Skynet project in Colorado. She and Danny had been on vacation in Mexico.

  John put himself in their place: what must it be like to have had a husband, and a father, who'd invented the machine that destroyed human civilization? At the same time, this person whom they must have loved had been lost in the same mad destruction that had killed billions of others. In their position, John would have been torn apart. At least he and Sarah had been consistent, always fighting against Skynet, always doing their best. They'd known what was coming before it happened. All he could think of to say was, "I'm sorry. I can't begin to understand how you must feel."

  She obviously refused to blame Miles. "We knew about

  your predictions of Judgment Day, of course, but we couldn't believe them. The story about robots from the future was just too much. But it shook Miles all the same, even though he said it was irrational." Miles had sent them on that vacation, and it had doubtless saved their lives.

  John and Sarah had tried to warn the world, but no one had listened to their story. Why would they? No doubt, it had seemed bizarre, this tale of mechanical assassins from the future. As for the source, Sarah Connor had already spent time imprisoned in a mental institution. But for all that, some people had taken notice. There had even been political demonstrations—yet the Skynet project had gone ahead.

  "There's a lot I still don't understand," John said when Tarissa had finished. "Why would they give all the control to Skynet in the first place?" He looked at the T-800. "Do you know anything about that?"

  "No," the Terminator said. "I don't have detailed files."

  Tarissa looked back and forth between them, the young man and his bodyguard. Something must have clicked with her. "You're the robot from the future?"

  "I am a Terminator: Cyberdyne T-800 series, model 101. I am a cyborg construction: human biology on an endoskeletal combat chassis."

  "This is for real, isn't it?" Danny said.

  Bellow gave John a knowing look, as if to say, There, I thought something was up with that guy. You tried to put one over on me. John gave him an innocent smile, but looked at Danny more closely, realizing that Danny had never fully believed it, not even after Judgment Day. "Yes," John said. "It always was."

  Tarissa poured herself more coffee. "I'm confused about one thing."

  "Only one? Well, try me."

  "Your messages said that all human decisions were being removed and given to Skynet. But it wasn't supposed to work that way. The final decision was still supposed to be with the President. Skynet shouldn't have been able to launch the missiles by itself."

  "I suppose we'll never know."

  The T-800 was silent.

  "No,"Tarissa said. "I wish Miles was here to explain it all to us. 1 miss him..." She lost control for a moment, putting down her coffee cup, and weeping openly. But then she managed to speak through the tears. "When we heard about you and your mother, down here in Argentina, we knew we had to join you. Your reputation's growing."

  "As long as Skynet doesn't hear about it," John said.

  "We're not ready yet."

  "Do you know what happens next?"

  "Skynet is preparing war machines," the T-800 said. "I don't have the details."

  "Maybe I should have taken more time and programmed it into you, before I sent you back
to '94." John said. "Still, you've done what you had to do. I might even be better off not knowing everything. It gives me room to make decisions."

  "Correct."

  "It's still weird," Danny said.

  John sized him up. "What's so weird?"

  "This whole time travel thing."

  That started them down a whole new path. To John, time travel was not a scientific conjecture, but a fact that he had experienced. After all, here he was with the T-800, which had come from the future to protect him. In 1994, he'd fought the T-1000, with the T-800 and Sarah. Then they'd had to fight the shapeshifting Terminator once more only three years ago. Time travel was perfectly real, and the messages from the future had all been accurate. John had never had to theorize about it because he knew how it worked. Everything that had happened was consistent with the messages from Kyle Reese and the T-800. It all looped back on itself, but it all made sense in the end.

  But Danny challenged him: "Can't you see how it's full of paradoxes?"

  John took him through it all, how the events of Judgment Day were only Skynet's first action in its campaign to rid the world of humans. But the Resistance was destined to prevail. In 2029, Skynet would play a last card, by sending back two Terminators to stalk John in the last decades of the twentieth century. He told them how Sarah had encountered the first an imitation-human T-800, in 1984, before John was even born—trying to stop him from ever existing. Then, in 1994, a prototype T-1000 had tried to kill him while he was still a child.

  In each case, the human Resistance had sent a helper. In 1984, Kyle Reese had saved Sarah's life and fathered John, though he'd died on the night that John was conceived. In 1994, a reprogrammed T-800 had helped them escape the T-1000, which had only tracked them down again long after Judgment Day. The combined firepower available here had destroyed it. So both of Skynet's attacks failed. The point was, no paradoxes had happened. It all fitted together.

  But Danny shook his head. "It just can't work that way."

  They debated it, and John found it frustrating: this was his lived experience being challenged. But Danny seemed to be right: it didn't add up. The story had an inconsistency: if Skynet had meant to use time travel as a weapon, it must have known that it couldn't succeed. In a timeless sense, it hadn't succeeded. And that could be deduced, just by logic. A computer could have worked it out. So what had Skynet meant to do? Everything that had been so clear was now mysterious.

  "Unknown, right?" John said to the Terminator.

  "Unknown."

  An hour later, the Dysons and their people had packed up, and a whole convoy returned to the estancia. They parked in front of the casco, in a graveled area already full of Jeeps, Humvees, and military trucks. There were buildings on all sides: bungalows, workshops, garages, and sheet-metal helicopter hangars. In the center of the graveled space, Gabriela had built a memorial to her husband, a rock-and-concrete obelisk—the concrete had been mixed with the liquid metal of the T-1000 Terminator. When they'd first built it, John had woken with nightmares of the T-1000 somehow pulling itself together, seeping out of the concrete and attacking again, but of course that had never happened.

  Now the memorial had a new meaning: it symbolized his eventual victory over Skynet, no matter what resources he needed to throw at it. He'd keep doing whatever it took. Anytime, anywhere.

  Gabriela planted herself on the front verandah with a group of heavily-armed comrades to guard her: Sarah, of course; Sarah's one-time boyfriend, Bruce Axelrod, a long-haired ex-Green Beret; and Enrique Salceda, who was still trigger-happy, even in his fifties, when confronted by strangers.

  "It's okay," John said, getting out of his vehicle. "These people are friends."

  He walked to the steps, carrying his own rifle, the T-800 keeping pace beside him. Carlo followed, even bigger than the Terminator. Sarah lowered her weapon, and the others accepted her lead, except for Enrique, who was always hard to convince.

  "Everything's okay," Juanita said, getting out of her own Humvee. Her father finally lowered the barrel of his AK-47 and switched the safety selector. "All right, so what's the story?"

  "It's a long one," John said. He introduced the Dysons, Alvez, and Bellow, watching Sarah raise her eyebrows at the name "Dyson."

  Her voice mixed doubt and hostility. "You're Miles Dyson's family?"

  "Come in, come in," Gabriela said. "We obviously need to talk."

  Bellow looked around at the parked vehicles. "What about our people?" he said.

  John thought about it for a minute. He pointed out a space to pitch their tents, behind the nearest bungalows. Gabriela agreed, and Bellow swapped glances with Alvez.

  Alvez took the job over.

  "You help them out," John said to the Terminator. It knew the estancia as well as anyone, and could do the work of several people, with its great strength and endurance. Besides, it could keep an eye on the newcomers. John was pretty sure he trusted them, but they'd be sorry if they played any tricks. The T-800 looked Bellow and the Dysons up and down, as if assessing their threat potential to John. Then it nodded slowly and went with Alvez.

  Inside the casco, Gabriela gestured for everyone to be seated. Several people were already there, milling around, mainly the military commanders who'd joined John's cause. Some looked thoughtful, others bold and swaggering. "All right," Gabriela said, "where do we start?"

  John took them through the story as quickly as possible, repeating what Tarissa and Danny had said. The Dysons nodded at points in the narrative, so John was getting it right. Then they went over John and Sarah's story, their encounters with the Terminators, what was supposed to happen in the future.

  Danny listened intently. When John and Sarah were finished, he frowned and shook his head. "I'm sure what you're saying is true," he said in a way that implied he disbelieved it. He gave an embarrassed smile.

  "But you still don't accept it?" Sarah said.

  "No, it must have happened to you that way. But something doesn't add up."

  "Look, it's nothing unusual if you have your doubts." She spoke without emotion, not off-handedly, but in a deliberately flat voice, almost like a machine. "I've been disbelieved for twenty-something years. I wouldn't expect less from Miles Dyson's son."

  "Whoa, lady, hang on," Danny said. "My father got killed by Skynet, he's entitled to some respect."

  Sarah looked incredulous. "Respect? You've got to be kidding me. It was his fault all this happened. We should have killed him back in '94, it might have saved billions of lives. As it was, he only had three years to live. We would have been doing him a favor. He could have died without becoming a monster. I—"

  She checked herself, maybe realizing these were actual human beings she was attacking, and the horror of what she was describing. She had gone too far.

  There were tears in her eyes, and she said, "I'm sorry, I just don't know. There just had to be another way. I can't believe it had to be like this. How did we let it turn out this way? Back in the '90s, there seemed to be so much hope. It looked like we might have peace in the world—though I knew better. But why did it have to happen? They still had to go ahead, keep their bombs, build their war machines. When I think about it, I just don't understand."

  "None of us do," John said. "Well, I'm sure that's true."

  After a brief silence, Danny was first to speak up. "We do believe you, you know. You were right about Judgment Day."

  "But I'm still crazy? Is that what you're going to say?" "No, no, I don't think that I just want to understand Skynet. There's one bit that doesn't make sense, even accepting all the rest... and I don't doubt any of it. But why would Skynet do something that's not even possible?"

  "Lots of people would think that time travel isn't possible," John said.

  "I know, but I'm not just talking about physically possible. Believe me, I've grown up thinking about this. I've read all the books I could find. I know what I'm talking about."

  "Go on," Gabriela said, eyeing Sarah carefully, to s
ee that there was no fighting.

  Danny nodded. "The thing is, you can't change your own past."

  "You can swallow time travel, but you can't swallow that?" Sarah said impatiently.

  But Danny was making a kind of sense, or so it seemed to John. Maybe there was more to learn, and anything they understood about Skynet could only help them. "Maybe Kyle's understanding of time travel wasn't all that deep," he said. "We might be missing something."

  Sarah considered that. "Maybe. He said that he didn't understand tech stuff, not that kind of tech stuff. He wasn't a time travel expert, just a brave man sent back on a dangerous mission. All right, so what's the big theory?"

  For a moment, Danny seemed nervous, but then he said, "Thank you for listening, Ms. Connor. I can only put the problem the same way that I did to John. It doesn't make any logical sense."

  "You mean the time travel paradoxes?" Sarah said. "I've thought about those. There's no paradox so far. Everything fits together all too well. No one changed the past. Kyle came back to protect me from the first Terminator. I ended up having his baby. The Terminator didn't stop me."

  "I understand that."

  "It was the same in 1994, the T-1000 didn't manage to kill John. In the end, it all fits together. I can't see any paradox. Believe me, I've had twenty-two years to think about it."

  "Yes, but from your own experience. I'm sorry, let me explain what I mean: Think about it from Skynet's viewpoint."

  "In what sense?"

  "How's this all supposed to help us?" Enrique said, frowning fiercely as he had been throughout.

  "Maybe it can't at all," Danny said. "But it might help us understand Skynet. Perhaps that can give us an advantage. Look, the way you've figured it so far, Skynet is losing in 2029, so it sends these Terminators back to change the past. It's like a secret weapon—it wants to take out John before he can lead the Resistance.

  "But it could never work that way from Skynet's point of view. Skynet as it will be in 2029 is the product of everything that has happened before, including its battles with the Resistance, and especially with John. If the past changed, so would Skynet. Its own experiences and memories would be different. It wouldn't even know it had won a victory, because it wouldn't have the problem. Its own identity would have changed. It wouldn't even be the same Skynet. You can't change your own past, because it would mean changing yourself."