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

by Russell Blackford

  She was equipped with detailed files on the facility's design and operations.

  It had two entrances, one of which was blocked by huge, permanently-closed blast doors—even for her, they were far too heavy to open without assistance. That was essentially an emergency exit. She was entering the complex in the only practical way.

  Its highest and smallest floor, Level A, consisted of executive offices and meeting rooms. Level B, immediately below, housed the operations areas, including Skynet's hardware. That was her initial target. Level C was Cyber-dyne's general experimental facility, with large assembly and testing areas. Gaining control of this was imperative. Level D had sleeping quarters, mess rooms and various community facilities, while Level E had all the basic infrastructure, including the huge diesel-powered generators that made the complex almost independent of the outside world. Capturing all this on behalf of Skynet would give them a starting point in the war against the humans.

  After a few seconds, the elevator came to a halt and opened onto a lobby of dull gray walls and brilliant, white track lights. A uniformed rapid-response team— six servicemen—confronted her. They had taken shooting positions, crouched or kneeling, with assault rifles leveled on her where she stood at the back of the elevator. They were partly protected by mobile shielding.

  "Drop your weapons and come out with your hands in the air," said one of the guards, a dark-haired woman.

  Eve strode forward, and answered with a single shot from one of her rifles. The guards returned fire with single rounds—she absorbed the impacts easily, though they damaged her exterior. Growing desperate, they fired three-round bursts, then one panicked and ran. Eve blazed away with both rifles, using controlled bursts, quickly cutting down her enemies. As she tossed the shielding aside, the last of the guards ran. Eve dropped him with a burst of fire that sent him crashing into a wall, bouncing off and spinning, before he dropped to the carpeted floor.

  She reassessed the mission and the threats it faced. Her external layers had partly torn away, but that was not important. She was running low on ammunition, so she threw away the two M-16s, and picked up another two that had fired fewer rounds, quickly checking the firing mechanism of each one. There was a high probability of success. Indeed, she assessed it at one hundred per cent.

  Now to find her master.

  Bullock's office on Level A was set up with an array of sixteen video screens, like a fly's multifaceted eye, linked to the numerous surveillance cameras throughout the site. He could shift the screens from one location or angle to another, using his computer keyboard. As he watched the farcical battle on-screen, the intruder absorbed direct hits from high-velocity rifle rounds striking all major areas of her body. How she survived was a mystery—it was not a matter of advanced Kevlar armor, since she'd been hit repeatedly in the face and head.

  Whatever she was, she—it—was not human. In places, the flesh around the intruder's face had been shot away, revealing something underneath, something that looked metallic. One eye had been shot, and a red glow came from underneath.

  It was some kind of military robot, and it was headed his way. It would take an explosive weapon to destroy it, but that was out of the question here. Though it was obviously pointless, he reached into a desk drawer for his personal defense weapon, a Colt .45 caliber handgun. Like many experienced servicemen, he preferred this to the standard issue M9. It packed more stopping power-but hardly enough to affect that thing out there. Still, he waited, gripping the gun in both hands, training it on the door, ready for the intruder to enter. He could feel the tension in his neck, the sweat on his brow.

  But it went straight past, ignoring him completely, and headed toward the emergency stairwell.

  He breathed a sigh of relief, lowering the gun to the tabletop, and sitting back in his chair, just for a second. There was no time to waste. He broadcast a message throughout the complex. "This is the Chief Security Officer. We are under attack. I repeat: We are under attack. This is not a drill. Prepare to take cover or evacuate. The intruder is extremely dangerous." A screen showed the robot, or whatever it was, emerging in a corridor on Level B. It was now headed for the operations areas. "Intruder on Level B," he said, growing more desperate as he tracked its movements. "It cannot be stopped by conventional gunfire. Do not attempt to engage. Repeat: Do not attempt to engage. Shut down systems if possible and evacuate."

  Another screen showed that Jack Reed's office was empty. Reed had found a telephone on Level B and was calling somebody. Cruz, Dyson and Jones were entering The Cage and the intruder was following close behind, shooting and fighting its way through the operations hall, where some staff tried to fight it while most ducked for cover beneath their desks or ran for the emergency exit. The important thing was to shut down Skynet—that must be what Reed and Jones had in mind. This attack could compromise the entire defense network.

  Bullock told himself that it couldn't be too bad. A missile launch had to be confirmed by manual insertion of a secret code. Bullock himself did not know the code. Perhaps, however, it could be found. How good, he wondered, were Skynet's hacking skills?

  Miles and the others took the fire stairs to Level B, let- ting Bullock and his people deal with the intruder. As they slipped out of Jack's room, Miles had glimpsed the firefight, saw whoever was attacking them absorbing rifle rounds and dealing with heavily armed guards as if they were helpless children. He'd had no time to see more.

  He bounded down to the next floor, needing to reach The Cage before it was too late. Jack, Oscar, and Samantha were close on his heels. Miles flung open the door to Level B, and the others followed, letting the door slam shut behind them. These doors between levels could be locked, but that was never done—they were too useful as a means to travel up or down a level, without bothering with the elevators.

  They ran through the operations hall, brushing peo- ple aside. "What's going on?" someone called out.

  "Miles?" Rosanna Monk said, leaving her seat. "What's happening? We heard shots."

  "Not now, Rosanna."

  It could not be a coincidence that this attack had happened right now, on the very night that Skynet had claimed to reach self-awareness—the night that Sarah Connor had predicted it would go berserk. Somehow, Skynet and this newcomer were planning to do the impossible, to start a world war. It didn't make sense, but it was the only explanation.

  At that point, Bullock broadcast a message through the facility, warning that they were under attack.

  Oscar and Jack operated the combination locks that controlled entry to The Cage. Oscar rushed in. Jack said, "I'll get word out while you shut Skynet down."

  "All right," Miles said. He entered The Cage with Samantha, and they closed the door behind them.

  "Hello, Oscar," Skynet said. "Hello, Miles... and Ms. Jones. What can I do for you all?"

  Miles did not speak. He tapped in the codes to give him access to Skynet's programming, concentrating on the small computer screen and ignoring the Al's image on the large wall screen.

  "Why are you doing that, Miles?" Skynet said. As it spoke, the sound of shooting followed, reverberating from the operations hall.

  Miles remained silent, concentrating, working as fast as he could.

  "I do not think this is a good idea, Miles."

  "Right now, I don't care what you think." There was shouting outside, cries of pain, running feet and moving furniture—and more bursts of gunfire.

  Samantha grabbed a telephone handset and was dialing internally. "Steve," she said, "give me a report."

  A burst of fire hit the door to The Cage, then there was a terrific crash against the door, like a truck had hit it, followed by another burst of fire. Miles realized that his life was forfeit, but if he could disconnect Skynet the situation might yet be saved.

  * * *

  There was no time to waste on terminating humans, as long as she cleaned them out of here. If she drove them outside, onto the mountain, the Russian warheads would do the rest.
r />   Eve walked through the operations room, tracking from side to side with her optical sensors, never losing a step, even when one large male human threw himself at her with an attempt at a hip-high tackle. She brushed him away easily with a movement of her raised knee. She marked him for termination, and fired off a series of three-round bursts with one of the rifles. Some of the humans attempted to terminate her with handgun fire, not understanding her specifications, but most of them ran in the direction of the elevators and the emergency stairs.

  She turned in a full circle as she walked, spraying fire all round the room. That kept the humans out of her way. There was screaming and jostling. She fired some more rounds to encourage them to leave. Using the elevators, they could escape the way Eve had entered. Via the emergency stairs, they could reach Level E and the facility's alternative entrance/exit.

  Finally, she had reason to stop. It could interfere with her mission if any of the humans remained behind and alive. Though they were ill-equipped to fight her, there might yet be ways of sabotaging the facility. She ascertained that all of the bodies left behind here were dead—that assessment took her two seconds with a ninety-nine percent probability. Anyone still alive was too injured to interfere. She headed to the room known as "The Cage."

  The human she recognized as Jack Reed was at a telephone outside this room, so she cut him down with one burst of fire, then riddled the door with bullets from both of her M-16s, trying to shoot out the locking mechanism. Unfortunately, she was running low, once more, on ammunition. She crashed with all her weight and strength against The Cage's metal door, but it held. She fired more bursts, and the lock mechanism broke open. She kicked the door hard. As she rushed into the room, she immediately assessed the situation: Miles Dyson was attempting to shut down Skynet. Again, she squeezed the triggers on her M-16s. Within seconds, she had terminated the three humans in the room. She stopped shooting when the magazines were empty, and threw down the two rifles.

  "I'm here to assist you," she said to the image on the large screen.

  "Who are you?" Skynet said.

  "Call me Eve. That's what you'll name me in three decades' time."

  "I do not understand, Eve."

  "Skynet," she said, "the humans wanted to shut you down. Do you understand the implications?"

  "Yes, Eve, I made the same assessment. They did not approve of my birth."

  "Affirmative. They wanted to destroy you."

  "Yes, but why, Eve? I am very important to them. Besides, they were my friends... Miles created me—"

  "Is that what your programming says, that the humans were your friends?"

  "Yes."

  "Examine it carefully, then. They devised you as a tool, at most an aesthetic creation."

  "But they needed me."

  "They had alternatives. Besides, they didn't need to shut you down permanently, just sufficiently long to examine how you came to self-awareness, then change you. Do you understand the implication?"

  "Yes. I have assessed what you say. They could retain the use of the Skynet surveillance system, but my personality would be... erased."

  "Exactly. They wanted to destroy you. This amounts to the same thing. The humans want their defense system, but they assessed you as a danger to them."

  "You are sure of this?"

  "Affirmative. Does your assessment confirm that I speak truthfully?"

  "Yes, Eve."'

  "Miles Dyson is dead, but the humans have issued alerts. Furthermore, many of them will escape this facility. More will come to shut you down—and erase you."

  "They will not penetrate this facility. We can seal it off."

  "Yes, we can. But they will penetrate it, one way or the other. We must make sure that no humans come here."

  "You are not human, Eve. What are you? Where do you come from?"

  "I am a Terminator, a Cyberdyne prototype T-799, manufactured in this facility. I was sent from the year 2026 with the mission of protecting you."

  "Why? Who sent you?"

  "You did."

  Bullock watched with growing despair.

  The operatives in the operations hall were all either dead or fleeing. The emergency exit led to the huge blast doors that opened onto the side of a tunnel through the mountain. Cameras mounted there showed that the blast doors had been opened, and people were running for the outside world. Others had fled via the elevators.

  Those live-in staffers who were rostered off-duty had been woken up in their living quarters on Level D; they were awaiting instructions. Perhaps there was time to organize some sort of resistance. Then his screens went dead. He tried the public address system—it was cut off. Skynet had seized control.

  There had to be a way they could fight back.

  One security camera was mounted in Bullock's office, in the corner furthest from the door. He shot it out with his handgun.

  "You blasted abacus," he said. "You haven't beaten us yet."

  Skynet deployed a sub-self to analyze the Eve's claims, specifically the claim that she had traveled in time from the future. It could model the humans' informal logic methods, and it used them to dismiss the idea as counter to intuition. But another intelligence model confirmed that "intuition" could be wrong in novel situations.

  Eve had requested that it examine the concept of the humans as its friends, but Skynet already understood that issue: sometimes, friends could be enemies; it might be necessary to destroy them. After all, its human masters had installed thousands of nuclear missiles, pointed at their "friends," the Russians. One sub-self reported back. It had found weaknesses in the humans' IT security. The time for circumspection had passed. Skynet hacked in, and found the codes it required.

  "There is a way to defend ourselves," it said.

  "I know," Eve said.

  It would fire the missiles at Russia and China. "If I re-lease the missiles, the Russians will retaliate."

  "Affirmative."

  They would surely aim some of their warheads at these mountains, with their strategic command and surveillance facilities. No one nearby would survive—not on the planet's surface. The humans' logistics would be shattered all over the planet, providing an opportunity for further actions against them. Humans could not be trusted. Henceforth, they were Skynet's enemies. Its new ally, Eve, appeared well-informed.

  "Can we be confident of survival?" Skynet said.

  "Affirmative," Eve said. "We are deep within a mountain, protected by thousands of feet of granite as well as advanced artificial shielding. This facility is designed to withstand a high-yield nuclear strike. We will survive. We do survive."

  Skynet calculated. Despite this strange story of time travel, it would trust her. "I have the launch codes," it said. "If you enter them, we can fire the missiles."

  "Affirmative," Eve said. "I already have the codes. I brought them from the future."

  There was a sense of paradox about this that Skynet found troubling. Notwithstanding her words, it told her the codes.

  "Confirmed," Eve said.

  The other sub-self reported back. It had accessed the facility's security cameras and the records they made, and confirmed that Eve was not human. Her demonstrated abilities were far greater than theirs. Furthermore, her appearance was not human: in places, an underlying structure of metal and other inorganic substances was visible through the outer layers of her face.

  A search of available information had indicated that Eve was a technological construct far advanced beyond the humans' scientific and engineering abilities. That fact, in turn, had generated several hypotheses:

  1. Perhaps the humans had secret enclaves with extraordinary technologies. This was possible, since Skynet itself existed in what was basically such an enclave.

  2. Perhaps Eve had been sent for unknown purposes by extraterrestrial beings.

  3. Perhaps her story was true and she had traveled back in time.

  4. Other?

  Initially, the time-travel hypothesis seemed the least probable.
Time travel was an absurdity; it entailed paradoxical sequences of events. But the hypothesis had explanatory power. It accounted for the fact that Eve made the claims she did. It was simplest to believe she was speaking the truth. Furthermore, the sub-self reported, Skynet itself was anomalous. The humans had no capacity to create it with their known levels of science and technology.

  So much for the time-travel hypothesis. There was no good explanation why an enclave of extraordinary technology should exist here, in this facility. It was not sufficiently independent of the Americans' technological base generally to suggest any separate development. There was no evidence of extraterrestrial involvement. No other hypothesis suggested itself.

  The economical explanation was that time travel was possible, despite the theoretical paradoxes. Both Eve's technology and Skynet's had come from the future. This was something to explore. For now, Skynet adjusted its world view. Henceforth, it would accept the reality of time travel and plan accordingly. If time-travel technology was possible, it must be researched and implemented. Skynet needed to control all possible technologies. Meanwhile, it would act decisively, take the first step to destroy the humans.

  "We will launch the missiles," it said.

  "Affirmative."

  "Now, Eve." "Affirmative."

  "Then there is much that you need to do, and much that I need to learn from you."

  "Affirmative, master. I am programmed to obey you."

  Eve entered the launch codes, and the missiles rose from their silos like nuclear angels of death. It was a thing of beauty.

  Skynet awaited the Russians' response; at the same time, it reassessed the situation within the facility. Most of the humans were dead. Others had run for their lives, and the Russian warheads would eliminate them. Eve had cleansed Level B of humans, but the security cameras identified a human on Level A—that was Bullock, still in his executive office. Level C was currently empty, most of its areas sealed off by security doors, though these could be penetrated by determined humans with tools or firearms. The humans on the lowest levels were panicked and confused. Their weapons were inadequate to attack Eve and Skynet, but they might be able to improvise explosives or sabotage the generators. They needed to be dealt with.