Rise of the Machines t3-1

by David Hagberg

  Christ. On nights like these, even staying awake and moving, he could not block out the horrible nightmares he had since the T-1000 tried to kill him and his mother when he was thirteen. For the next decade or so, he dreaded the night, dreaded the visions of a world gone insane, dreaded the day on which Skynet powered up and took control of the world. Judgment Day. The day of atonement for all human sins, he'd been told by a crazy old preacher on the Sonoran Desert, maybe eight years ago.

  Connor was old for his age. By the time he was in his mid twenties, he had seen too much, had gone through too much trauma for him to have turned out so-called normal. At five feet eleven he was built like a soccer player, lean muscle mass, fine features, dark serious eyes beneath medium-cropped dark hair covered now by a black motorcycle helmet. In jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and old brown suede jacket, he was just an anonymous traveler in the middle of the night.

  Going nowhere since August 29, 1997, came and went without Judgment Day. Without the global thermonuclear war that Skynet should have waged on its own.

  A war after which John Connor would have emerged as the leader of the human resistance. The man who was supposed to save the world. The man on whom the hope for the survival of humans depended.

  But the war never came.

  John Connor did not become a hero. Instead he drifted. One town to another. One job after the other. Through the night, on his motorcycle, or in isolated campgrounds, alone with his endless nightmares. No friends. No purpose.

  He didn't have to close his eyes to see what the future would have been like. He could see himself, older, grizzled, battle-scarred, and weary. Bodies lying everywhere, many of them reduced to skeletons because of the heat; flesh and muscle and soft tissues completelyjburned away.

  It was night, like now, only bonfires burned all around him. His troops were gathered, tired, frightened, yet determined. They wore dirty, tattered uniforms, their eyes glistened with reflections from the flames.

  They'd brought down a flying war machine. Hunter-Killers, they were called. How he knew this he could not determine, but he knew it nonetheless.

  They were celebrating their meager victory. John strode through the troops, climbed up onto what remained of the H-K, and raised a fist. It was a war cry. A rally. Behind him some soldiers raised a horribly dirty, battered American flag.

  The soldiers rose.

  Connor turned to face his... wife.

  The hot sun beating on John Connor's back felt good, as did the heft of the eleven-pound sledgehammer he swung. After last night any physical labor was welcome. Labor meant life.

  Pergo Contractors were demolishing a two-square-block section of old buildings and what had once been a courthouse or a brick school at the edge of Watts. Dozens of day laborers, John included, were hired from the hall to be paid in cash every afternoon when they got off.

  It was mindless labor, hard physical work that blotted out his dreams—but only just. Still, when he stopped to take a drink of water, or to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he looked toward the city center to make sure that Los Angeles still survived. That the buildings still stood, that Judgment Day never happened.

  Which left him what, he wondered. The bombs didn't fall because the T-1000 had failed to kill him. Had failed to stop the death of Miles Bennet Dyson. Had failed to prevent the bankruptcy of Cyberdyne Systems. The computers didn't take control.

  And Connor had become—nothing. Driving into work this morning he had passed through sections of the city that seemed to be nothing more than endless boulevards of strip malls, car dealerships, fast-food joints, billboards. Then slums where transients lived under bridges, in cardboard boxes, their meals gathered from Dumpsters, their clothing discards; throw-aways, them and their meager possessions.

  There were others like him somewhere in the city. Probably around the world. People who were supposed to have survived Judgment Day; people who should have become freedom fighters: the resistance led by John Connor. So what were they doing now? Were they having the same nightmares? Having the same impossible time fitting in.

  A woman in a car beside him was talking on her cell phone propped under her chin while putting on makeup and driving. Safe, or so she thought, in her own little air-conditioned cocoon.

  The kids in their car, the bass speakers booming across the street

  The motorcycle cop who gave him the once-over before turning away and driving off with a total lack of interest John Connor was a cipher. A zero. A nonentity.

  None of them, not the woman, nor the kids, nor the cop, held any significance for him, though he knew that they should. Intellectually he knew that he could not continue his We as a drifter. He needed a purpose. And if it wasn't as leader of the resistance movement in some future world, then so be it

  His responsibility was to himself, here and now. He no longer had his mother to look after. He'd never known his biological father—the mystery man supposedly back from the future—who had come back to save Sarah Connor from death so that she could give birth to John. In fact, the only father he'd ever known, and that was only for a very brief time in his life, was a T-800. The Terminator who'd come back to save the young John Connor from another machine sent by Skynet.

  The criminal psychiatrists had thought that John's mother was crazy. He knew how they would classify him if he let himself be known. Like mother like son. Lock him away.

  That night Connor had a variation of the dream, which just lately was becoming so real that he was starting to have a hard time distinguishing what was imaginary and what wasn't

  He was sitting on a bridge, looking down at the swirling water, a beer in his hand. Jump or not The decision kept flickering in and out of focus for him.

  Lean forward. Just a little, until his center of gravity was not behind him, but forward, out over the void.

  He dropped the beer bottle instead, and as he watched it fall toward the water he was transported to the future, to the dream within a dream. A landscape of bodies and skeletons; of Hunter-Killer machines in the air, of tens of hundreds, tens of thousands of robot warriors, their metal bodies gleaming in the light from hundreds of fires, as they sought out human beings, killing them with laser cannons. Burning, searing flesh.

  This time the battle was fought along a coastline somewhere. In the distance John could see the burned and burning hulks of oceangoing freighters.

  Nothing was safe.

  The entire world was on fire.

  Connor suddenly awoke in a cold sweat and sat up. He raised his hands and watched how they shook.

  He was falling apart Disintegrating. The waiting was

  driving him crazy. Something was about to happen. Something important

  After he'd collected his pay, he'd stopped for some beer and a few groceries and then had set up camp in a trash-filled vacant lot a few blocks from work. He'd started a campfire and after he'd eaten, had fallen into a deep sleep in which he had been transported to the future and the past and the present all in a jumbled mess.

  He got out of his sleeping bag, walked a few feet away, and urinated on a pile of trash, an angry animal marking its territory.

  For a long time he stood stock still, listening to the sounds of the city: a siren somewhere in the distance, a car alarm in the next block, a single gunshot that he was able to identify as a 9mm semiautomatic pistoL

  He turned and stared at his campsite and his motorcycle. He could not stay here. Something, some inner voice, urged him to leave. Right now! Go, go, go, run!

  It was the same as always, Connor thought, hastily packing his things and strapping them aboard the bike. There would never be an end to his meaningless existence.

  He peeled off into the night, bumping over the curb and savagely hammering the throttle. The bike wanted to climb out away from him, but Connor leaned forward, feathering the gas while still peeling rubber, the throaty exhaust blast echoing satisfyingly off the buildings.

  Labor was life. Movement was life. Noise was life.

 
; Somehow he was on the Hollywood Freeway, U.S. 101, heading north in the sparse 1:00 a.m. traffic. The Topanga Canyon exit came up and he took it, leaning into the curve and following the road up into the hills. Twisting, climbing road. Sometimes country, sometimes neighborhood.

  Maybe there was no escape for him. Maybe there'd never been a possibility of escape.

  He leaned hard into the sharp curves, sparks flying from where the foot peg scraped the road surface.

  He could only keep moving. Try to keep the demons from taking over his head.

  The speedometer flickered past one hundred, the green instrument lights the only points of sanity for him now. The only things in his life that were solid, that were real, that were rooted in fact The physical laws of the universe. Hammer the throttle and the bike accelerated. Cause and effect. Lean into the curves in order to live.

  The small doe that bounded into the middle of the road and stopped, mesmerized by the bike's single headlight, was another sudden immutable fact of reality.

  Connor backed off on the throttle, pumped the brakes, and oversteered left to miss the deer, the tires doing a crazy jig on the asphalt

  Then there was nothing. Weightlessness, his stomach lurching as the front wheel hit the gravel at the side of the road, sending the bike pivoting sharply on its stem and flipping end over end.

  Connor hit the pavement with his knee and left shoulder, then rolled onto his back, sliding on the gravel as if he were an ice cube skittering across a hot griddle.

  It was all in slow motion at first. He could feel no pain, but he could clearly see his bike flipping in midair, his packs coming loose. He could see the gravel and dust flying. He could even smell the odors of burnt oil and hot exhaust

  Then, like a gigantic Pacific comber, breaking slowly and accelerating onto the beach, Connor's consciousness switched to real time as he came to a breathless stop.

  He looked up at a cloudless sky, brilliant with stars for a change, in time to see a meteorite streaking east to west.

  Some luck, he thought.

  c.2

  July 2030

  Edwards Air Force Base

  John Connor stood up in the open Humvee, raised the powerful binoculars to his eyes, and scoped what was left of the old Edwards Air Force Base and Cyber Research Systems facility on the desert east of L.A.

  From the last rise a mile out, one hundred meters east of the impassable Interstate 14, the base looked as if it had been shattered. The south field control tower was down in a heap, as were most of the aircraft hangars, administrative offices, barracks, and research facilities.

  It was a carefully maintained camouflage. Anyplace that appeared as if it supported human activity was a certain Skynet target Occupy an aboveground shelter for more than a day, show lights at night, even for one night, or do something as fundamentally mundane as sowing a vegetable garden and an attack was certain to follow.

  Humans had learned the hard way to become creatures of the night; burrowers into the earth; underground animals who when cornered fought back viciously.

  Nothing moved in the deepening twilight except for a dust devil that scattered debris as it trossed the tarmac and dissipated in the middle of the heavily cratered east-west runway. The silvered mesh dish of the power reception antenna was disguised as debris in the middle of the CRS main research center and control annex.

  Connor and the others breathed sighs of relief. It did not appear as if Skynet had moved against this place yet. Though they all figured it was only a matter of when, not if. Each time they came out here and powered up the place, Skynet detected it. Sooner or later the attack would come.

  Connor sat down. "It's dear," he said to his driver. They headed down from the rise and raced across the desert in a convoy of three Humvees, carrying the technicians and the soldiers to protect them.

  As they came onto the base and approached the shelter of the one standing hangar they kept watching the sky for an approaching line of H-Ks. But they were in the clear so far.

  "People, the mission clock starts now," Connor spoke into his lapel mike. "You know the drill. We're at T-minus twenty minutes. Let's get it done."

  Cloaked in darkness, the Humvees pulled up inside the hangar. Four soldiers with portable radar and infrared scanners, along with handheld ground-to-air launch-and-leave missiles, hurriedly set up their surveillance positions to cover all four quadrants while Connor and the techs descended into the old CRS underground control center.

  As the emergency generator kicked in and the control center's lights came on, Connor approached the T-850 cyborg battle robot recumbent inside the Lexan holding chamber.

  The machine was fitted as a human infiltration submodel with a form and face that Connor knew very well. This was a machine-done of the unit that had saved his life and the life of his mother. The same machine that had cared for him with even more loyalty and dedication than any human father could have.

  "It's just a machine," John's wife suggested softly at his shoulder.

  Connor nodded, but he didn't turn. "I know." A kaleidoscopic collage of images passed across his mind's eye with the speed of light; on the desert, in dark hallways and factories, on motorcyles, explosions, gunshots, fires. Everywhere T-800, nameless except for its model number, protecting him, saving his life.

  Machines had no emotions. But looking at T-850 Connor knew better.

  The six mainframe techs they'd brought with them set about powering up the transporter head and receptor circuits.

  Lieutenant Tom Carter, their machine programs and ops expert gently shouldered Connor aside, slid the clear cover off the holding chamber, and opened his tool kit on the T-850's broad chest. He was an older man, in his middle sixties. He had grown up and got his education at Cal Tech before Judgment Day. Like many men of his era

  he had less respect for the machines than the younger people had. They were just machines, after all. Well designed, operationally nearly perfect, but just metal and electronic circuitry, nothing more.

  He touched a release point just under the skin on the right side of T-850's neck, and the unit's head lolled slackly onto its right cheek. Next, he found the seams that followed the unit's hairline from the base of its neck behind its ears to its temples. The skin parted easily and peeled back to reveal a metal skull with a tiny access port.

  Carter worked like a surgeon. His moves were very quick and very precise. He attached a portable power source to a pair of input points on T-850's skull allowing the dormant motherboard to power out from the port, which he replaced with a reprogrammed CPU from his tool kit

  T-850's eyes came alive momentarily, until Carter disconnected the power source.

  Carter looked up. "It'll take me three minutes to install the hydrogen fuel cells in its chest So I want a time check." He glanced at Connor's wife. "I don't want to give this thing time to sit up and start singing Dixie before we send it back."

  "We'll give you four. Three to get him powered up, and one to get him into the chamber," Connor said.

  Carter glanced at Connor's wife who shrugged, but neither of them saw fit to correct Connor's use of the pronoun him instead of it.

  The Continuum Transporter, as the device was officially designated, had begun as a series of Special Action Projects (SAPs) carried out at the Air Force's high-security research and test base in the New Mexican desert, known in the popular press of the time as Area 51.

  The super black project, funded by the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and National Security Agency, was designed to create an artificial wormhole. Einstein had first suggested such a phenomenon, and the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had done some work on the possibility. But the problem was power. By most calculations the wattage needed to create an infinitesimally tiny wormhole, in other words a passageway through space-time, would take almost all the energy ever produced in the universe since the moment of the big bang.

  But a grad student at Oxford h
ad developed a mathematics model to meld Einstein's relativity with Heisen-berg's quantum mechanics, creating a ten-dimensional wormhole at the superstring level. It would be a passageway that would automatically expand exponentially like a virus gone wild. But only so long as power was applied to what was thought of as an artificial singularity.

  In the mid nineties, under the guise of the launchings of dozens of military and NSA technical means satellites, a solar sail made of extremely thin Mylar, two hundred kilometers on a side, was positioned in an extremely rare geosynchronous orbit that kept it stationary over the north pole. When it was spotted it was thought to be nothing more than an aurora borealis.

  The sail focused sunlight, beaming it to the reception antenna and singularity equipment at the CRS facility. Capable of transmitting several hundred terawatts of energy over time periods of less than one nanosecond, the wormhole was opened.

  Through that brief passageway, objects could be sent backward in time, and theoretically, though it had never been tried before, forward in time.

  The twin of this machine was buried deep inside Navajo Mountain. One under human control and the other under Skynet control.

  Without the balance the war would be over within twenty-four hours. Why Skynet had never tried to destroy this place was anyone's guess.

  But it would happen someday, Connor thought as he watched the main console's indicators shift from red to green.

  Alice Skerrit, their chief tech, flipped a series of switches on one of the equipment racks, then turned and gave Connor the nod.

  "Your four minutes start now, Tom," Connor told the programs and ops man, who immediately took one of the hydrogen cells from its cushioned container and gingerly carried it over to the T-850 unit.