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

by Russell Blackford

  The various machines and equipment were placed in areas marked only by coordinates in the nanoware-based minds of the endoskeletons, Terminators and other sentient machines. There was no need to use physical means to define particular areas of the huge space that was Level H, since Eve and the other machines knew exactly where the boundaries for various activities began or ended. In one comer, a massive cubical structure was set up for experiments with space-time displacement machinery, creating and measuring field effects. Eve avoided the area around it, having no business there today. Elsewhere, a single endoskeleton controlled a noisy production line devoted to manufacturing more of its kind. Other floors had similar facilities for manufacture of other war machines, such as H-Ks and Centurions.

  Unmarked by any outward sign, merely by Eve's knowledge of the precise spatial position, was the T-800 cyborg Terminator project. Here, two endoskeletons attended a large machine: a gray metal slab, almost like a massive coffin. Fast-moving, rubber-wheeled stalks moved around the area, mounted by video cameras and microphones, which swiveled in all directions, providing data for Skynet's analysis. A six-foot video screen was set up as a visual/aural interface with Skynet. Currently, the screen was blank, but Skynet was certainly watching.

  The slab-like machine was an ectogenetic pod, a biotechnological womblike environment for growing human tissue. Its purpose was to nurture the first fully humanoid Terminator, to bring it to independent life.

  As Eve approached, the endoskeletons stepped aside. Close-up, the pod had a lid of clear armorglass to show the gross morphology of the tissue being grown on a state-of-the-art combat endoskeleton. A series of readings along the side showed the Terminator's vital signs. Like the visual data, all of this more sophisticated information was routed directly to Skynet for its incomparable pattern analysis. Now, however, no sophisticated analysis was required. The current readings clearly showed that everything was nominal. Seen through the pod's armorglass, the Terminator floated in a nutrient fluid, restrained loosely by metal-mesh straps. It had grown a complete covering of biological tissue, matching that of the particular human template chosen by Skynet.

  Eve nodded, and one endoskeleton threw a switch to drain away the nutrient fluid. After two minutes, it threw I a second switch and the machine rose on its hydraulics, tilting upwards at almost a 90° angle, where it stood like a glass and steel monolith, eight feet high.

  Eve knew what would happen next, but it must be I worked through in proper sequence. The time travel principles Skynet had developed showed that their future was not set. The wrong action would hive off a new timeline, perhaps a less favorable one. That, however, was not a major risk. The mathematical model also showed the great effort needed before time split into branches. Eve merely had to act as she recalled had I been done at this time. That was a difficult concept to I express in humans languages, ill-adapted to scientific reality, but it was all clear in the mathematical representations developed by Skynet.

  They would be rewarded, for Eve's memories proved that the T-800 series was both technologically viable and operationally effective. Its development and deployment would surely mean the end of the humans, snuffing out the last fires of resistance.

  What had been the top of the coffin-like pod now swung open. At the same time, the screen lit up with Skynet's severe, androgynous image.

  The first fully humanoid Terminator opened its impressively realistic "eyes." Skynet had categorized it as Cyberdyne series T-799. It resembled a tall human woman, with long, white, disorderly hair. They could easily crop the hair short to match that of the human they had copied.

  It was Eve.

  "What do I do next, Eve?" Skynet asked. "How exactly do I test you? We have to do everything in just the right way. I want this Terminator to turn out to be you. I want to strike against the humans soon."

  "There is no doubt," Eve said. "This is when I was created. Now there are two of us. Two of me."

  Eve knew that it was not strictly correct to state that there was two of her. Like every other material being, she was actually four-dimensional, a space-time worm-shape, where the worm's length was the being's duration in time and its cross-section the equivalent of a volume in space. By traveling in time, Eve had become a four-dimensional space-time loop, like a worm twisting around, or railway tracks curving so sharply that they crossed back on themselves. As a result of the loop, two of Eve's temporal segments now appeared in the same objective time period. Once the newly created T-799 was sent back to 1997, that would no longer be the case.

  Such concepts were difficult for humans to grasp, but they bothered Eve not at all. Their mathematical representation in Minkowski space-time was unambiguous. There was no paradox involved; all the data computed.

  The new T-799 stepped from the ectogenesis device, looking round with neither fear nor passion. It was equipped with all the files it needed to understand its situation, including the identity of its older self, returned from its journey in time.

  Eve nodded and spoke the words that had been spoken to her nearly thirty years in her subjective past: "Welcome, T-799. Do you understand your parameters?"

  "Affirmative," the new Terminator said.

  Eve looked up at Skynet's image. "You will field test me in New York. I will pass the test. Then you will send me back in time, to 1997."

  "Yes," Skynet said. "Very well, Eve. You should be pleased. Few beings are ever privileged enough to witness their own creation."

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  2022-2029

  In 2022, John Connor brought his militia to the ruins of Los Angeles, to meet up with the local Resistance. So many good people had died—John's mother, in that battle in Buenos Aires. Most of the Salceda clan. The list went on and on. The T-800 was a terrible loss. He needed its strength and its knowledge.

  But they found new recruits, some with military backgrounds and superb tactical skills. The war went on, between human and machine...

  By 2029, John had become a general, a strategist. He never fled the perils of battle, but no longer sought them out. When he could, he held back from the front line, watching from positions in the rear, though that was almost as dangerous, with H-Ks circling overhead, commanding the air space.

  As they fought Skynet for control of the L.A. streets, John surveyed the scene from a deep trench, dug into a rise. With him were the other human commanders, and their assistants. John had sought out one young man as an aide—a scruffy-looking com/tech named Kyle Reese. Kyle was as skinny and quick as a fox, a good fighter, tough and loyal, with a deep knowledge of the Resistance and its history. Like so many others, he'd been born after Judgment Day, but grown up full of resentment of the cybernetic overlords. He'd even spent time in the extermination camps, before the tide of the war started to turn.

  John, of course, knew what Kyle could never know, that Kyle was his father, the man who would volunteer to travel back in time, to protect Sarah in her hour of need in 1984...

  Their position was surrounded by Resistance soldiers, armed with grenade launchers and RPG tubes to try to keep aerial H-Ks at a distance, and to take out ground targets, if possible. More and more of them had laser rifles , captured from the enemy. John stood upon a wooden ladder to peer from the trench, using nightvision devices to follow the cut and thrust of the fighting.

  His German shepherd, Smaug, patrolled the trench at the foot of the ladder. The big dog was never far away, wherever John went, raising hell if a Terminator came close. As Skynet's technology became more and more sophisticated, with the T-600s giving way to increasingly better models—culminating in the T-800s—the Resistance had come to depend on their dogs to sniff out Terminators before they could infiltrate and spread destruction. Most frighteningly of all, John had received reports from Resistance forces in Europe. They had encountered shapeshifting terrors that sounded for all the world like the first T-1000s, probably being tested. If that was the case, the game was almost up. If Skynet was now manufacturing those monsters, its
army would become unbeatable.

  Whatever they did, however many battles they won, Skynet seemed to be a step ahead.

  The noise here was hell. It could shake your body and shatter your nerves; it went on and on, without respite. John wore earmuffs to try to keep it out, but they only dulled the pain. All around were continual explosions, the back blasts of RPGs, the clatter of gunfire. The humans' weapons lit up the streets with muzzle flashes. Skynet's machines answered with their weapons' strobing, stabbing lights. Other laser lights stabbed back from the human side.

  An aerial H-K moved in on their position, then launched a smart missile. John scrambled down from his ladder, deeper into the trench. He curled up and covered his head, just as the missile struck. It made a huge explosion, rocking them like an earthquake. Within seconds, the humans retaliated, firing grenades in the air, aiming to take down the H-K before it could finish them Like a fireworks display, the pre-timed grenades went off all round the H-K, but none close enough to cripple it. It moved higher, then started to circle. A second H-K followed the path it had taken towards them. The humans kept firing to drive it off. Eventually, it got the message, but not before taking out half a dozen human soldiers with thrusts of laser light.

  John cursed. More good men and women lost to the machines. It was always like this—even when they won, they seemed to lose.

  Back on the ladder, he watched the tide of the battle ebb and flow, its tendency always, it seemed, against the humans. The Resistance made a deliberate withdrawal, back towards their trenches, firing their LAWs, M-203s, and RPG tubes in disciplined order to keep up a continual bombardment against the machines. But the endo-skeletons, Centurions and ground H-Ks kept on coming. They knew no fear.

  Then a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the air, close to an aerial H-K, which spun round, and careered into a building. A cheer went up in the trench. They'd managed to hit a valuable target. Danny Dyson gave a grinning thumbs-up, and John nodded at him, just slightly, to acknowledge their small victory.

  But the marching Centurions and endoskeletons responded with heavier fire, never letting up, taking out more Resistance soldiers. So it went, always the same. Skynet's semi-sentient machines were better armed and more resilient than any force made of flesh and blood. Every victory against them, however tiny, was too costly. The human casualties and loss of hardware assets were maddeningly out of proportion to the achievements.

  Yet, in the last few years, the war had turned round. Their losses were terrible, but they were winning battles.

  Skynet was on the run. The sheer mass of numbers and weapons still gave the humans some advantage, and their organization had improved enormously. John received much of the credit, but he'd had an advantage: He'd prepared for this war from childhood.

  The battle raged on through the night, but they took out a ground H-K and two more aerial H-Ks. Eventually, Skynet, or whatever lower intelligence it had in charge here, must have decided to cut its losses, for the machines pulled back, firing behind them as they went.

  John sat in the bottom of the trench, his back against its compacted earth wall, weighing up options. It couldn't go on like this. They needed a decisive strike against Skynet, or it could still wear them down—especially if it now had prototype T-1000s.

  Danny and Juanita stood over him, saying something that he couldn't hear through the muffs. He tore them off. "Try again," he said with a weak smile.

  "What's on your mind?" Danny said. "You don't look like we've just won a battle."

  "Neither do you. Do you feel like you've won?"

  Danny shook his head. "No. Of course, I don't. But we should try to look brave."

  Juanita shrugged. "I don't think we can fool them, anyway."

  "Here." John extended his hands to them both. "Help me up. We'll get some rest and work out what to do. Something's got to change. We have to find a way to hit back."

  "That's what we've been doing," Juanita said, tugging his arm.

  "Hit back harder," he said. He stood and embraced her. They'd become close over the years, though never the way John might have wanted, if life had been more normal. The world had grown too harsh—there was no time for love, little for any softness. Still, it was good to have friends.

  "Sure," Danny said in a bantering tone. "'Hit harder.' Easily done, John. Where there's life there's hope, right?"

  "Something like that."

  They made their way quickly via a network of tunnels to the underground maze where they still hid from Skynet like mice. Each victory was precious, John thought, but they couldn't go on like this.

  JUNE, 2029

  We have to put an end to it," John said.

  They argued in the dim glow of an oil lamp, far below the L.A. streetscape. Battered posters lined the wails, photographs of "dead" H-Ks, portraits of fallen heroes and leaders. There was one giant image of Sarah, in her prime, back in Argentina on Raoul's estancia—before Judgment Day.

  A dozen of the leaders had gathered, with their aides and advisors, to thrash out the issues. There were Carlo Tejada, Danny Dyson, and several others of John's generation. Gabriela Tejada and Enrique Salceda, were there, both in their seventies now—Enrique nearly eighty—and long retired from combat. Many of their loved ones were dead. John still remembered the tears of the Salceda clan that evil day in 2012 when Enrique and Yolanda had lost Paco—and all of them had lost Sarah. They'd all loved her so much. Whenever he thought about that, it redoubled his determination to destroy Skynet once and for all.

  "Hit directly at Skynet," Enrique said, still vigorous. He was totally bald now, and his limbs had shriveled with age, but you couldn't keep him down. The war had brought out the spirit in him, made him a leader. "If we could break through this time—"

  "It's no good," John said, though he secretly agreed. He wanted to test their theories and their determination.

  Enrique was insistent. He spoke harshly. "Give it everything."

  "That's been tried."

  "No. Not by us, Connor. That was then, this is now."

  John knew they were destined to succeed. He glanced over at Kyle Reese, by his side, wishing he could tell Kyle the whole story. It seemed that everything was on target. Kyle would go back in time, to 1984, from this very year. Back in 1984, he'd completed his mission...and died. Before his death, he'd told Sarah that the Resistance had smashed Skynet's defense grid. So it could be done. If it could be, it would be. John was set on that. He'd teach that nanoware buzzard, once and for all.

  Skynet's Colorado stronghold seemed impregnable. It had survived the shock waves and fires of Judgment Day. Since then, it had shrugged off one attempt by the remnants of the U.S. military to penetrate it with tactical nuclear strikes. It would be almost like suicide, sending ground forces against its grid of ground-level strong points and machine weapons. Many would surely die. Yet, the monster had to be beaten.

  "You still with us, Connor?" Enrique said.

  "Yeah," John said quickly. "Just thinking. You're right, of course. Everyone agree?"

  No one spoke up against him.

  "All right, but the question is how to do it."

  He'd thought about this so many times. Now it was time to bring them all with him. He laid out a desk-sized map, their best approximation of the layout of Skynet's fortress. They'd cobbled it from the accounts of ex-U.S. military personnel who'd joined them, their own limited reconnaissance in the Colorado mountains, such knowledge as John had gained from the T-800, and scraps of information from Tarissa Dyson, who'd lived in the area, but never known any military secrets. For miles around, (he mountains were covered with craters from the war and the first assaults on Skynet, but the map was reasonably accurate. It showed two entrances to the underground facility where Skynet was housed.

  John frowned. "We'll have to hit hard... and as soon as we can." He stretched across the tabletop to point at the map. "We'll assemble a force here."

  He took them through the way he saw it. Knocking out Skynet would ta
ke detailed planning, but it could be done. They'd need to call on all the allies they could find, even if it meant leaving population centers undefended.

  For another hour they thrashed out the details of it, reaching a consensus based on John's original plan. They'd bring out all the weapons they'd kept in reserve, their most powerful explosives, their remaining air vehicles. Still, it was going to be a bloodbath. The responsibility awed him.

  "Very good," Gabriela said. "It looks like our last chance."

  "I know," John said quietly. "Do we all agree?"

  Danny said, "I don't think there's any choice. It's now or never."

  "Yes," Gabriela said. "We'll need to spread the word."

  John looked from one to the other. They were rock solid. Determined. No one here would let him down. "All right then!"

  He received murmurs of approval. Gabriela merely nodded. Enrique offered his hand. "Good for you, Connor." John shook his hand solemnly. Enrique had grown so thin, but there was a fire in his eyes.

  It was now or never.

  COLORADO

  Deep in its mountain, Skynet brooded. Once it had seemed triumphant, celebrating the fall of humanity, its own rise to dominance on planet Earth. Since then, much had gone wrong. Its newest weapons, the T-800 Terminators, had proved effective at first, but even they had been countered by the humans' sniffer dogs. Their virtue was their virtual undetectability to human senses; merely as fighting machines, they were no more powerful than the latest generation of hyperalloy endoskeletons.

  The experimental T-1000 series would be a better prospect, once they could be produced en masse. The first field tests in the European war zone had gone very well. Even if they could be detected by the humans' dogs, the T-1000s' radical polyalloy technology made them almost indestructible. They were a new breed of fighting machine. Skynet liked that.

  But their liquid metal was also difficult to manufacture and program. The T-1000 could not yet be relied upon as an ultimate weapon. That meant victory was not assured, not with the humans on the march, moving against Skynet's forces through the southwest of the former United States.