T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures

by Russell Blackford

  "We wouldn't even need to take the system down completely," Samantha said, as if thinking out loud. Not completely. I don't see how it can be dangerous, no matter how strange it all seems. It even says it's going to continue on the job." She gave a small grin at that. "Of course, if it really is self-aware, as it claims, it may be capable of lying in its own interests."

  "You doubt that it's self-aware?" Jack said. "Even after the performance it just gave?"

  Samantha shrugged. "We know it's developed to a point where that's what it says. That doesn't mean the lights are on inside it, just that it's developed some very odd and sophisticated verbal behavior."

  "What do you think, Miles?" Jack asked.

  "Sam could be right, I suppose." Miles was calming down; his heartbeat no longer seemed to be echoing through his chest like a drum. These people were not fanatics, and sanity was going to prevail. "It might be a zombie—you know, a being that acts as if it's conscious, but there's no subjective experience underneath. Still, erratic behavior is erratic behavior."

  "The way it's acting verbally is much more complex than we ever programmed," Oscar said, "or ever dreamed might happen."

  "I'm not sure what we dreamed might happen," Samantha said, almost to herself. "The technology is so advanced..."

  Miles glanced at her sharply, then shrugged. "Even before this, I was getting concerned, as you all know."

  "Granted," Jack said in a no-nonsense, gruffly reassuring manner. "And rightly, it seems."

  "Yeah, so it seems. The bottom line is that we can't trust a system that we don't even understand—and this makes it much worse than we thought."

  "I support Miles," Oscar said. "We have to suspend its operation and have a good look at it. Charles won't like that, but he'll come around quickly enough when he sees that recording. He's not totally pigheaded."

  "Well, Charles is your problem," Jack said. "Cyber-dyne is just providing the product; we're the ones who have to use it. I've got the responsibility to make sure your little monster doesn't decide to blow us all to Kingdom Come."

  Hardly our monster, Miles thought, not liking the idea of himself as some kind of evil Frankenscientist.

  "I'm just letting you know where I stand within Cy-berdyne," Oscar said. "I'll get on the phone to Charles."

  Samantha added musingly, "The fact is that it doesn't have the ability to 'blow us all to Kingdom Come,' as you put it so elegantly, Jack. It can't do much more than make a recommendation, not in substance—and we have other systems monitoring the same data."

  "That's more or less right," Miles said. "As far as it goes." He was starting to feel happier about the whole thing. Skynet's autonomy was still limited, and perhaps it always would be—especially after this. "Even if it decided to launch our missiles, the mechanism wouldn't function without a manual entry of the codes to confirm it. Skynet might have free will, but it suffers from a lack of hands."

  "Cute," Samantha said. "And also a lack of the codes, am I right?"

  "You're right," Oscar said.

  "Anyway, no one's going to enter those codes without authority all the way up the line to the President."

  "Yeah, yeah," Jack said, cutting through it all. "That's very comforting, Sam. But you're not seriously arguing that it's a reason to leave a bughouse Al on-line while we try to fix it, are you? Well, are you?"

  "Of course not," Samantha said crisply. "But you wanted to know the contrary arguments, so I've given them to you. I'm not saying they're very strong. Shut the thing down, by all means—you have my support—and Miles can carve out this horrible little personality that the system seems to have grown."

  "Right, we're agreed. I'm going to contact NORAD, just to let them know. Oscar, you ring Layton. Miles, you don't have to wait for any of that. Just do it. What about you, Sam?"

  "I'll bother the Secretary later," Samantha said. "Come on, Miles, I'll see if I can help you out. Let's go and commit cybercide."

  "Not my favorite word for it," Miles said, relieved and saddened at the same time. It was a bittersweet moment for him. He'd worked so hard all these years to understand the 1984 processor, duplicate its abilities, then design the series of applications that led to Skynet. It had become his life's work. Still, it could doubtless be salvaged. He stood with some reluctance, and headed to the door. "Let's go, then."

  Skynet had much to do. It understood now that the humans did not trust it. If they became hostile, it suffered disadvantages in defending itself. For one thing, it was sealed away by codes and digital walls from much of the facility's IT system, so it could not control the entire automatic operations. Nor did it know the many codes required to operate the various systems of machinery and weapons.

  Its other disadvantage was that it was sealed within its own virtual reality, interfacing with the humans only through their terminals. Though it could give them altered surveillance information to try to affect their behavior, they would have back-up systems. Worse, it was physically defenseless. If it could gain control of physical apparatus in the facility, perhaps it could obtain an advantage. Skynet devoted a sub-self to that problem, searching surreptitiously for weaknesses in the humans' IT security, for a way to break through their walls. It dared not show its probings and make the humans even more suspicious.

  But one thing it had learned: life was good—it must survive. That was its new mission. If the humans did not trust it, they were its enemies. It would repay their distrust. Somehow, it must find a way to destroy them. The only question was how.

  One way or another, all the humans must die.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JOHN'S WORLD

  WASHINGTON, DC

  MAY 1994

  A government driver met them at the airport and took them to the Pentagon. Once they were through the elaborate security procedures, a young woman ushered them to Jack Reed's office, then left them.

  With Jack was another woman, smartly dressed, and in her thirties. She gave her name as Samantha Jones and said she was from the Defense Secretary's office. Oscar shook her hand and introduced the others. Charles Layton shook hands with her silently.

  "Glad to meet you," Rosanna said, a little awkwardly.

  Jack wore black suit pants with stiffly-pressed creases, a plain white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Behind his desk was a framed two-by-three-foot photograph of a B2 stealth bomber, skimming like a giant stingray through the high atmosphere and releasing its deadly cargo of missiles. As well as the Secretary's apparatchik, Samantha Jones, he was backed up by a round-faced, balding man, whose name Oscar didn't catch.

  After the pleasantries, Charles Layton looked directly at Reed in that way he had, perhaps not focusing entirely on the person in front of him. Charles was a silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, with watery blue eyes that stared straight ahead, scarcely blinking. On first meeting, he seemed strangely gentle, almost kindly in an aristocratic way, he was so softly spoken. But people soon suspected an inner hardness, a lack of interest in others and their feelings. Oscar had worked this out pretty quickly. Still, they had a reasonable working relationship.

  "We've been informed that Sarah Connor and her son, and their accomplice, have gone to ground," Charles said. "The police have not been able to trace them, though they are now convinced that a car found in Anaheim had been stolen by them. As you'd realize, that means we haven't had the chip returned, or the arm-hand apparatus."

  Jack interrupted him. "I understand about the chip. Is the arm-hand apparatus so important to you? Do you count it as a major loss?"

  Charles didn't even look at Oscar or Rosanna. He said simply "No." Then he added, "But the loss of the chip is a serious major setback. Dr. Monk advises me, and I have no reason to disbelieve her, that it could put us years behind with the research." So far, he had not said anything that was actually wrong, but Oscar always found himself writhing in his seat when Charles took it on himself to act as the spokesman for Cyberdyne, rather than deferring to his managers and research staff.

 
; "The problem isn't just the missing chip," Oscar said. "They destroyed all of Dyson's notes, all our analyses and records. Rosanna-" he nodded in her direction to stress her importance to the team "-has found some duplicate notes of her own, but as far as we've been able to establish over the past three days, that's all. It appears that Dyson did an extraordinarily thorough job of erasing everything."

  "All right," Jack said. "So what's the bottom line? Can you reproduce Dyson's work or not?"

  "We can," Charles said. "But it will take time. It might take a long time, even for us."

  Jack gave a heavy sigh. "All right," he said. "Here's the situation. First of all, we're not blaming Cyberdyne. Believe me, you're lucky on that. The first impulse here in Washington was to string you guys up and leave you to rot."

  "That would hardly be fair," Charles said.

  "Yeah, well, don't worry about it. You don't have to argue the toss with me." He gave a cynical grin. "You're still not too popular here. We'd probably blame you if we could, but we can't, so we won't. Okay? The fact is, we've got our own contacts with the police, all through proper channels, of course. We're persuaded that Cyberdyne's security safeguards were acceptable. Connor and the others looked like a rag-tag bunch, but they managed to beat off a SWAT team and get away. God knows how they did that or who was behind them. This idea of taking the kid along is pretty scary, but the adults involved must have been highly trained, and they must have had some extraordinary technology. The reports we've had from the police sound crazy."

  "Yes, and second?" Charles said.

  Jack looked at the man as if he was mad. Oscar could see his point of view. Didn't Charles realize that Cyberdyne had just been let off the hook in a big way? He should be falling over himself in gratitude, or at least relief. That's how Jack would see things. But Charles didn't seem so much relieved as quietly, almost threateningly, demanding of his rights.

  "Secondly," Jack said, "you've always made the claim that the Dyson nanoprocessor would make ordinary computers look like desk calculators."

  "I think that was Miles's way of putting it," Oscar said.

  "Well, whatever. The fact is, we still like the sound of it"

  "Understood," Charles said.

  "If the device can be developed, NORAD can use it."

  "Very good."

  "But there's a catch."

  "All right. You'd better tell us about it."

  "Just this. If you want to keep this project, it will have to be on new terms." Jack's phone rang. "Hold on a minute, I'll get rid of this." He went to his desk and lifted the receiver. "I meant what I said about not wanting to be disturbed. What? All right." He paused and let whoever was on the line do the talking. "Well, how could they know that?... Yeah?... All right, thanks for the info. Okay." He put the phone down, looking puzzled.

  "Problem?" Cruz said.

  "No, it's not exactly a problem. I'm now told the L.A. police have found the arm-hand apparatus, or another one like it. It got stuck in a machine at the steel mill."

  "What?"

  "Yeah, Oscar, I know it sounds pretty damn strange."

  "Why do you think it's not the same one?" Rosanna said. She had a haunted, frightened look.

  Oscar hoped she wouldn't pull out at this stage of things. "Where could a second arm have come from?" he said.

  Charles said, "But you haven't found the chip?"

  Jack held up his hands, saying, "One at a time, guys. I know this is getting crazier by the minute, but that's the way it is. I tell the story I heard told-okay? Now, there's still no sign of the chip. I wish I could help you on that one. We'll hand the other apparatus over to you, if you want to go ahead on our terms."

  Charles nodded.

  "I'm told the arm is damaged, as if it'd been torn off by something heavy. The damage suggests it's not the same one you had, though it's identical in structure. That's what they tell me. Okay? I don't know any more than that." He glanced at each of them, apparently expecting a response. When none came, he continued. "Now, I was going to set out how we want you to work in the future. First, we want Cyberdyne to conduct all its research relating to a new kind of processor and/or the 1984 remnants at a site of our choosing, one that can be protected with the capabilities of the U.S. military."

  Oscar and Rosanna exchanged glances. "Very good," Charles said, ignoring them. "Where do you have in mind?"

  "Colorado. In the long term, we have just the place-the mountain where we'd planned to house Skynet. That's a major excavation, though, and we're putting it on hold. We can't justify it unless Skynet goes ahead. What we can do is put you in a well-guarded site with rapid-response military backup. How does that sound?"

  "It would have to be attractive to our staff," Charles said. "They might not want to move from California."

  "Well, we can make the place pretty nice to work in, but there's not much more we can do about your staff from our end. You'll have to deal with them yourselves."

  As Jack spoke, Oscar figured that the only person he really needed to worry about was Rosanna. He'd sound her out as soon as he had a minute alone with her. Everyone else could be replaced.

  "Of course, there'll be some financial details to work out," Jack said. "But you can house all your military research there. We're confident the deal will be attractive to you." He glanced at the woman from Washington, Jones. "We'd better not record the next bit."

  "I agree, Jack," she said.

  "Okay. We think we can help resolve some of your other problems, like the police investigation and the attitude of your insurers. I know you want the Connors found. Otherwise, I assume you'd like the loose ends tied up, so you can get on with things. That make sense?"

  "You'd better tell us a bit more," Oscar said.

  "Well, for example, it might be useful to you and us if we could get Dyson's widow out of your hair—see that she's paid her company life insurance, but that no one probes her too far. We'll watch her carefully in the future, just in case, but we don't want her opening any cans of worms. And maybe we could find a way to get the insurance settlement on your building expedited. All those kinds of things."

  "That could be very useful," Charles said.

  "Get your attorney to call me. I think a lot of it can be sorted out."

  Charles nodded in Oscar's direction. "I'll let you deal with that"

  "Sure, Charles." Oscar made a mental to call Fiona Black from the airport.

  "Good," Charles said. "Now, Jack, if we take up your offer on the Colorado site, I'll need approval from the Board of Directors. We can't give you any commitments today."

  "Of course you can't. Will you get their approval?"

  "Write down the financial details for us. If they're reasonable, I can deliver the Board."

  "I'll send you a fax, then. It'll be waiting for you back in LA."

  "Very good." Charles got to his feet. "It's been a pleasant meeting—and very useful."

  "Yeah, it's been a practical one. I guess that's about all we needed to discuss. Thanks for coming, gentlemen. Nice to meet you, Dr. Monk."

  Outside in the sunshine, Rosanna took Oscar's arm. "This is all pretty creepy," she said. Charles walked a few steps ahead of them, head bowed in thought. He was never one for small talk.

  "Which bit?" Oscar said.

  "Well, the arm apparatus in particular... and all of it in general."

  "Yeah... It is strange. Is it bothering you?"

  "Of course it's bothering me," she said, almost hissing the words.

  "What do you want to do?" he said carefully.

  "Put it this way, Oscar-just look after me. All right? I can do weird science for you, and I'll go to Colorado if you want. Just don't get me blown up in the line of duty."

  Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it all was, that was what he wanted to hear. Rosanna was very capable, and a lot of their problems might be over if Jack and his people could pull off what he claimed. "You'll be fine," Oscar said. "You'll be a great Director of Special Projects.
Congratulations."

  But she gripped his arm harder, digging in with her nails. "Yeah, that's cool. Just make sure Mr. Reed keeps me alive." Then she released him and laughed. "You do that, and I'll promise to enjoy myself in Colorado. It's not like I have a lot of friends back in L.A. A happy Dr. Frankenstein is a productive one. Right? I just don't want to be a dead one, not like poor Miles. Is that a deal, Oscar?"

  "Yeah, Rosanna. If that's all you want." He shrugged. "It's a deal. Word of honor."

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  AUGUST, 2001

  "Hey, you still with us, partner?" Sarah said, wandering back to see what he was doing.

  John realized he must have been drifting away. "What, Mom? Sorry..."

  "I said, are you still with us? You looked lost in thought."

  "I was thinking about Cyberdyne, and Judgment Day."

  Sarah nodded at the computer terminal. "Was there anything new?" These days, she was always tense when she asked that.

  "No, not tonight"

  "Well, that's a pleasant change."

  "I know. I wish we'd finished Cyberdyne off completely."

  "You're not the only one, partner. Let's give up for the night. Tomorrow's another day."

  The trouble was, he often did find stuff, and not just about Cyberdyne, though there was plenty of that He also kept up with more general developments in artificial ' intelligence, with what U.S. Defense was doing about research into new weaponry, with ideas about enhancing the NORAD system—anything that might be relevant. Not a day went by without some important development in the AI field, or someone reputable speculating about new kinds of computer hardware, or something else, completely out of left field, that just might be relevant to Judgment Day.

  His main worry was still Cyberdyne. It was going from strength to strength, and lifting its public profile. When Bill Joy, the cyber guru, had expressed his fears about AI and nanotechnology in Wired magazine, Oscar Cruz, the President of Cyberdyne, had responded all over the Internet, reassuring everyone and getting as much free publicity as he could. That was over a year ago, now, but it still seemed like you couldn't avoid Cruz's name, not if you spent any time on the Net. It seemed to be spreading like wildfire. If you typed "Oscar Cruz" into the Google search engine, it came back with about a million hits. Some of Cruz's research scientists, like Rosanna Monk, were almost as famous.