Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.2

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 had 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.

Each cell, about the size of a book, was encased in a shiny titanium-carbon fiber alloy nearly featureless except for its power points.

Inside the warrior robot's chest, the cells were fairly benign, but if they were mishandled they could blow with a respectable bang. People would get killed. Even Connor instinctively stepped back a pace.

He keyed his lapel mike. "Watchdog, how's it looking?"

"Clear, so far, boss," Sergeant Doogie "Watchdog" Harris came back from topside. "How much longer before we can boogie?"

"About five minutes. Keep frosty up there."

"Will do."

Connor's wife was stationed at the main control console. When the device was fully powered in standby mode, and T-850 was in position inside the transmission chamber, she would uncage the firing switch and flip the toggle. From that moment the main computers would take control of the last four seconds of the operation.

Carter finished installing the second power cell, and he quickly buttoned up T-850's chest, even as the cyborg's units started to boot up.

Even to the technicians, some of them standing or string at consoles ten meters away, it was obvious that T-850 had transformed from an inanimate object to something that was as alive as any machine could possibly be. It made them all nervous. They had been fighting these things for years.

The machine's eyes opened and scanned Carter's face and its immediate surroundings, as the holding chamber worktable lined up with the spherical transmission chamber.

"Position, please," Carter told the machine.

T-850 sat up effortlessly and gracefully moved into the transmission chamber, one bare knee and two hands on the pad.

"Ten seconds," Connor's wife called out.

The transmission chamber's clear bubble door closed.

"Eight seconds… seven… six… five…"

T-850 faced forward, its eyes downcast as it waited for its processors to fully boot up, the parameters of its mission coming clear to him as if he were a human being who had suddenly come out of a deep amnesia and was starting to remember his past and his hopes and plans for the immediate future.

"Four seconds… three… two… one," Connor's wife completed the countdown. She uncaged the switch and flipped it to the transmit position.

John watched T-850 as the chamber began to take on an eerie blue cast. He was waiting for… what?

T-850 looked up at the last second, his eyes boring in on John's.

T-850 nodded, the movement of his head barely perceptible as he disappeared.

The large diamondback rattlesnake stopped a few yards from a lone Joshua tree and raised its wedge-shaped head. It felt something that it could not understand. There was nothing detectable by the sensitive receptors in its flickering tongue, nor could it sense an animal heat source anywhere close. But something was coming, and it began to rattle its warning.

A thick mist formed around the base of the tree, and heat came with such sudden intensity that the rattler had trouble backing off from what it now considered a life-threatening danger. It bared its fangs, a drop of poison glistening golden at each tip.

A blue, luminescent sphere materialized out of nothing, lightning bolts crackling with raw energy all around it. The tree split in two and began to burn. The sand around it became molten, glowing first red and then white-hot.

When the smoke dissipated, T-850—Terminator — crouched in a small bowl-shaped depression, one knee and both hands on the ground, his head bowed as if he were a man who had come a long way and was weary.

Slowly he raised his head to catalog his surroundings, his onboard sensors giving him instant head-up displays overlaid with real-world vision through his eyes.

He stood and walked away, his bare feet crunching on the half-solidified sand that broke into needle-sharp shards of glass.

The diamondback reared back and struck, sinking its two-inch fangs into the man-thing's left calf, its reflexive muscle action pumping several ccs of deadly venom through the hollow killing teeth.

Terminator's sensors were aware of the creature, and his memory banks correctly identified the reptile as Cro-talus adamantous, dangerous to man and most mammals.

He reached down and picked up the snake, holding it gently just behind its head before it could strike again.

For several moments cyborg and reptile remained eye to eye, each regarding the other with a resigned curiosity. For Terminator the snake was a fact of biological life on earth. For the snake the man-creature was just that, an object that was not food, but that presented an extreme danger.

Terminator opened his mouth and emitted a sound from the back of his voice processing unit that perfectly mimicked the snake's warning rattle, then tossed the animal over his shoulder, turned, and strode away from the still burning Joshua tree, his onboard sensors perfectly attuned to his environment, his processors fully up to speed with the parameters of the mission.

If Terminator could have any emotion at all, it would have been a certain satisfaction that he was back.