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

by Russell Blackford

  CYBERDYNE SITE COLORADO SPRINGS AUGUST 2001

  Rosanna keyed in a twelve-digit code to power-up the time vault. The whole basement rumbled with the throb of the huge underground engines. In a moment, she would unleash all that energy within the immensely strong hollow cube that was the most visually striking element of the apparatus. The flatscreens that displayed four views of the vault's interior showed it was empty: On this run, they would simply observe the effects of the field.

  Jade sat at her shoulder, watching Rosanna's computer screen. "Take it to the next stage."

  "All right," Rosanna said, "confirmed. Here we go." Now the flatscreens showed the energies unleashed inside the vault, powerful lightnings that centered just above the five-foot metal disk inserted into the floor of the vault They left the displacement field running, pondering the ever-changing data on Rosanna's computer screen. DoD had provided three powerful Cray supercomputers, operating in parallel, to duplicate the work of the ruined nanoprocessor. The detailed analysis was almost as good What really changed the situation was the fundamental knowledge brought by the Specialists. Their grasp of findings that had been made years in the future, in their world, complemented Rosanna's detailed knowledge of the time vault and its workings. Between them, they were getting results.

  After thirty seconds, the data settled down into a regular pattern. "All right, switch off the displacement field," Jade said. "Then power down."

  That regular pattern arose every time, after the initial disturbance to the Earth's space-time field. They could break the pattern by changing the flow of energy, but then it would stabilize once more.

  Rosanna entered the codes, then another code to open the time vault's massive, hydraulic door. Soon, the basement was back to normal, if "normal" was the word.

  She'd worked day and night for the past two weeks, seldom venturing out of the building's basement. Mostly, she slept here; she'd set up a small room in one corner with portable screens, with a bed, a mirror, and some other furniture. The building had bathrooms and showers that were adequate for her needs. Mostly she had food brought in. Whenever she left the building to buy food, or get some fresh air, the T-799 went with her—and one of the Specialists. The Terminator was under John's orders never to leave her side.

  It was hard to tell who was the master and who the student. In some ways, Rosanna's knowledge was far ahead of the Specialists'. They were warriors, not technical experts on time travel. But they not only pushed

  Rosanna in new directions, they followed her there just as quickly. She could easily believe their intelligence had been enhanced, especially Jade's. Rosanna knew her own capabilities, without false modesty; she was a genius. But Jade was at least her equal.

  "Very good," Jade said. "We can explore for field fluctuations."

  Rosanna nodded at that. The regular pattern that her screen had shown could be disrupted in various ways. Even a very large chunk of matter approaching or departing the Earth would register as a distortion of space and time. So would a traveler arriving from another time-anywhere in the planet's vicinity—or an object being sent in time. As Jade had explained it, Skynet and the T-XA had used similar principles to detect the Specialists leaving the future, and to locate them on arrival in the present. The time vault could operate as a very crude device for measuring such distortions. Crude, because it required huge amounts of energy that were really for another purpose: To punch holes in the field, and thus displace objects to other times and places.

  Jack walked over, looking satisfied. "Are we going to take a break?"

  Samantha stood, too, stretching ostentatiously. "Brunch time, I think."

  Jade looked up at them from where she was sitting. "Why not, Mr. Reed? We are doing very well."

  "Yeah, why not?" Rosanna said. A lot of the work was sheer grind, hour after hour. Jack and Samantha were in and out of here all day, dealing with their other problems. Much of this must be boring for a pair of Pentagon wheeler-dealers, exciting as the science itself was proving.

  Against the far wall, opposite the control console where Rosanna sat was a makeshift kitchen and bar: a government-issue lowboy set up with hotplates for warming coffee; a mini-refrigerator; and plenty of drinks and takeout food—whatever they ordered in or requisitioned, day by day. Most of them spent long hours here, now, munching through endless pizzas, cookies, potato crisps, and the occasional Chinese takeout. But only Rosanna stayed at night, sometimes with Jade. The others holed up for the evenings in an apartment block used by the Air Force. Maybe they ate and slept better than she did but they took a greater risk than she wanted to share.

  Jack walked over to the lowboy and poured a mug of the strong coffee, then returned to the group of lounge chairs set up just in front of the control console. Rosanna and Jade joined them, completing a rough circle: Jade on Rosanna's left, then John, Sarah, Anton and Samantha. Across from them were Samantha and Jack, then the T-799, on Rosanna's right She had noticed how the Connors were wary of the Terminator, especially Sarah, who was still shocked, perhaps, at the way it had massacred their enemies. Rosanna saw things differently: What had it been supposed to do? A pity it hadn't killed them all.

  As the work proceeded, day after day, Jade and Anton seemed serious and intense, but they never showed signs of hurry or nerves; they simply got on with the experiments, quietly confident of success. Though she understood their enhancements, Rosanna was still amazed at how quickly and easily they had recovered from their wounds. Anton had been fine a matter of hours after the firefight in Washington. Jade had received a terrible chest wound that day, but even she had recovered within twenty-four hours. That suggested possibilities. How much could they learn, she wondered, just by studying the Specialists' bodies?

  One had been buried somewhere in Mexico, so she'd learned from Jade. One was scattered in space and time. But the other, Selena Macedo's body, was still in DoD's custody. That was a source of tension in the group.

  Jack looked round, like he wanted to make an announcement. He must have conferred with Samantha, since she was grinning from ear to ear.

  Sarah picked up on it first "Yes, Jack. What is it?"

  "I've spoken with the Secretary. Everything is now formalized. Our contract with Cyberdyne is rescinded. So that's the end of that."

  "Okay," John said, as if he had his doubts. "I guess that's cool."

  "They've been formally ordered out of here. They're a toothless tiger now. There's no future for them."

  In fact, no one from Cyberdyne had been here for weeks. What Jack was talking about was just tying up loose ends, and not the most important ones at that-not so far as Rosanna was concerned.

  "That would be nice to believe," Sarah said. "I hope we've seen the last of Cyberdyne."

  Rosanna was more worried about her own future. They would never get her to travel into the future world that Eve had described to them, not into the middle of a war zone, no matter how well they got the time vault to work. She valued her life too much for that. But she'd help the others. She owed them something, it seemed, though she surprised herself thinking that way. Shouldn't she have lost all thoughts like that — of gratitude to human beings—when the T-XA reprogrammed her? Anyway, helping them might be for her own protection. Even saving behind, she would not be safe, and that was for many reasons.

  They can sue, of course," Jack was saying, "but they won't want to go to court"

  "It still makes me feel sick," Sarah said. "Skynet still has mindslaves out there. We can't even find them all."

  "We know most of them," Samantha said.

  They'd caught a dozen DoD, military, and Cyberdyne staff in Colorado Springs. Then there were Layton and Cruz, and those who'd been identified in Washington-many of those were dead. But there might be others in Colorado, and even more in Los Angeles. Rosanna lacked precise knowledge, but she thought it would include the whole Cyberdyne Board and all its senior researchers and Execs. That alone was another twenty people, maybe even more. Every one of the
m would consider Rosanna a target She wondered if she was really safer here or in the T-799's future, what John liked to call "Skynet's World."

  Still, she was staying.

  "We'll watch them all like hawks," Jack said. "There's nothing they can do now."

  Sarah sat with one leg crossed over the other, tapping her fingers nervously against her thigh. "Famous last words, Jack."

  "Really, they're out of your hair. You'll never have to worry again."

  "Well, I'm plenty worried," Rosanna said.

  As Sarah stood to get more coffee, she said, "I'm with Dr. Frankenstein."

  Jack gave a patient smile. "You'll just have to trust us."

  "Let's get some more results," Rosanna said. "Later we'll do some serious testing."

  John spoke to Eve. "Get the laser rifle. You know what to do."

  "Affirmative," the T-799 said. After all that had happened, John still didn't know what to think of the Terminator. It had stepped in the way of gunfire that would have killed him, so he owed it his life, he supposed, just as he owed the T-800 that had saved him seven years before. But he'd seen this Terminator kill. It had been around all these years living among human beings, but no one had taught it to act more human. Maybe he should be doing that, as he had with the T-800. But he couldn't help recall the way it had slaughtered people-and not just the ones he had seen it kill. There'd been others before that, it had said, and he hadn't even asked about them. It was a murdering machine. How could he accept it?

  Then again, no one had taught it to be different. His other self should have done it up in the future, he thought, in Skynet's world. But he guessed there'd never been time for that. Eve had taken them through the issues that the other John had confronted. It must have been tough, with the whole world at stake, and Skynet striking back from an unknown location. The Resistance must have been desperate. He tried to imagine what it would be like, so many people wounded or even dying.

  He couldn't blame the Resistance, and he couldn't really blame Eve.

  Besides, those people in Washington had been almost dead already. It had not been like in 1994. Layton and the others had not just been doing their jobs, like the guards and police that the T-800 had injured, often badly-but never killed-when protecting him from the T-1000.

  Everyone who'd died in the Washington shootout had been a mindslave: Their personalities had already been destroyed by Skynet through its agents, the T-XA and Charles Layton. Did it make sense to say that they were really alive, that they were really the same people, or that they were human at all?

  He looked at Rosanna where she'd settled back at the control console, powering up the machine. Jade worked beside her. The two of them got along. Maybe they needed each other's company, two superbrains like that Anton joined them, too, pulling up another chair on the other side of Rosanna. The three of them were talking like anyone at work. Rosanna seemed pretty much human, not like a mindslave of a Skynet even a rebellious one.

  So maybe it depended on how deep the reprogram-ming went Rosanna was more and more like her proper self. It seemed there was hope for her, but she maybe she was a special case. Maybe there hadn't been hope for the others. Yet they were still human.. .weren't they? Could you stop treating human beings as human, even when they'd been changed so much? He didn't know the answer to that. In a way, he didn't like it that Eve had made the decision for him. Yet in another way, he was glad.

  Eve entered the time vault, and carefully placed the laser rifle exactly in the center of its floor, then returned to stand near John. Rosanna keyed in the codes to close the vault's door, then power it up. The huge engines beneath the floor began to throb with life. "Shall I go ahead now?" Rosanna said.

  Jack nodded somberly. "Yes, go ahead. We're all ready."

  She entered the code to activate the space-time displacement field John, Sarah, and the two government people shifted their chairs into a line to watch the flatscreens together.

  This experiment was not meant to send an integrated object through space and time, merely to record more data, and destroy something very dangerous. The flatscreens showed writhing, crackling blue electricity filling the vault's interior and playing over the laser rifle at the point where the space-distortion was most concentrated. As with all the other inorganic objects that they'd subjected to the time vault's energies, it would not survive—this was, in fact, a good way to destroy the weapon. But, as with those other objects, its effect on the field's configuration could be measured, and an assessment could be made of its fate.

  The weapon glowed in the midst of the artificial lightning, then suddenly vanished.

  "Well, that's that," Jack said. "I hope we've done the right thing. I feel like a coward."

  Rosanna turned off the field and powered down the apparatus, "You're not a coward, Jack. Don't think that way. You're just doing what has to be done."

  He gave her a quizzical look, but said nothing.

  "I've had the same thoughts," she said. "I'd like to make my own judgments, use this technology for something good, make some precise, difficult decisions. But the laser rifle had to be destroyed. It was a weapon for another time."

  "Why do you care?" Sarah said.

  Jack walked over to the lowboy and poured a mug of the strong coffee, then returned to his lounge chair. "I've been going along with your ideas," he said, looking at

  Sarah and the Specialists. "I'm not sure it's right, but there you go. You know more about it than me. I can accept advice."

  "It may not be right for you" Sarah said, "but it sure is for the world." She started warming up: "In fact, it is for you too. You know what you became in those other worlds—a man who brought us all Skynet. You and Sam, and everyone else involved. . . you were part of Judgment Day in those worlds, just as much as Miles Dyson or Rosanna. You don't want that to happen in this reality.

  We're counting on you to stop it."

  "I'm not so sure. It wasn't just the military applications . . If we could have reverse-engineered that rifle's power cell, that alone might have had enormous effect for good. Millions of lives might have been saved, one way or another."

  "Yes," Sarah said, "I know you think that, Jack. And millions more might have been killed. Do you have to find a high-tech fix for every problem?"

  "It's not every goddamn problem, Sarah. You know that."

  "I also know that this government of yours has plenty or resources already. It doesn't need a whole new energy source. Why not just show some compassion with what

  you have now? You know-some better priorities. Don't

  you think that might change the world?" "Well, maybe it would." "You can be sure it would."

  "All the same, this was a great opportunity. Well, whatever..."

  "What's done is done," Samantha said. "We all had a say in it; we all agreed."

  "Well, I went along with it," Jack said. "Perhaps it's for the best"

  "Okay," Rosanna said, "I've captured the data. Let's do the next experiment It looks like we're almost there. We'll go for broke today. One more test now, then we'll check the results. Then we'll see what happens to Elske."

  There was one more remnant of the future to be destroyed: The liquid metal that had been chopped off the T-XA when it had entered the time vault. It had been the Terminator's arm, caught when the massive metal door had slammed shut on it. But the metal had liquefied, with no larger body to rejoin. As they all watched, Anton carefully poured the thick, silvery substance within the time vault. It formed a rounded shape on the vault's floor, something like a water droplet the size of a small dog.

  When he was satisfied that all the metal was there, Anton stepped out, and they took their positions watching the screens. Rosanna worked through the sequence, powering up the vault, then sending the liquid metal across space and time, to destroy it. The harsh energies played over it and it vanished.

  Afterwards, there was a silence. Sarah said, "I'm glad to see it go."

  "No argument," Samantha replied.

/>   That was one thing they'd all agreed on. The programmed liquid metal from the T-XA was even more dangerous than the Terminator relics from 1984 had been. It used similar principles to a T-800's CPU, but was even more advanced. With the right equipment and enough time, it could be reverse engineered and used as the basis for something like Skynet.

  "I've got the data," Rosanna said.

  The T-XA had traveled in time without being destroyed; it was possible to configure the liquid metal and the space-time displacement field to each other for the purpose of genuine time travel. That might have been a good experiment, John thought, but they'd had to leave it out The important thing was the time displacement of life. He turned to Rosanna, knowing what was next. They had to start experimenting on living things. Cruel as it might be, they needed to start somewhere before they put humans in the time vault. "So, are you ready to send Elske?" he said.

  "Soon. I want to do some calculations. The rest of you take a break, and we'll come back in two hours."

  Elske was a white laboratory mouse; it would soon be the first rodent to travel in time.

  John took a long walk, just with Eve for protection. It was only midday, but it felt like they'd been working all day, now they'd destroyed the laser rifle and the last of the T-XA. The sun shone down vertically in a cloudless sky, making the artificial world of the Cyberdyne basement seem unreal by comparison. He wondered about the sunless world that Eve had come from, the world after nuclear winter, dominated by Skynet's machines.

  "Is it going to be cold, where we're going?" he said.

  "Affirmative."

  He tried to imagine a world with no sunshine, just varying degrees of darkness. He also wondered about the Terminator, the way it still spoke. "Can't you say more than just this 'affirmative' crap?"

  "When necessary."

  "Necessary for what? The mission, I guess." "Correct."

  "Well, that's a little better." The machine was silent.

  John said, "Tell me about what happens when we get there—I mean, practical stuff. We have to, oh, I don't know, be displaced right into Skynet's HQ, right? That's where 'I' am — the future me, I mean." He meant to say, The future me of Skynet's World, but that was too complicated. Eve could work that much out.