Dark Futures

"I'm just keeping you informed. I've got Oscar here, as you know—and Samantha Jones. I'll talk with them again soon. I'm totally satisfied with the system at this point."

"Good. That's very good. There's nothing you need to do, Jack. You can rule out sabotage at our end—everyone is totally loyal, even if Miles does get nervous. And you know how tight the security checks were."

"There's no criticism of your people, Charles. Nonetheless, I'm monitoring the situation closely. I'll let you know if anything comes up."

"Understood," Layton said again, in the same tone of voice. "I'm available if you need to speak with me."

"Thanks, Charles."

"Thank you for calling, Jack." Layton hung up. One call down.

Much as Layton was cold, formal, and sometimes prickly, he had no real authority. The important thing was to keep the military hierarchy informed. If Skynet ever detected a Russian attack and decided to launch the American ICBMs, there was a clear line of command to confirm its decision, beginning with NORAD's Command Director, going through its Commander-in-Chief at Peterson Air Base, then the defense chiefs in Washington and Ottawa. In the end, the U.S. President would have to make the call, consulting with the Prime Minister of Canada and whomever else he saw fit.

Soon they would give Skynet sole responsibility for aerospace surveillance, decommissioning the NORAD site at Cheyenne Mountain. Once that happened, shutting down Skynet would require the same line of authority as firing the missiles. For the moment, there was redundancy in the surveillance system, and Jack could still take Skynet off-line on his own authority, though he'd have to answer for it all the way up.

He called the NORAD Command Director. "Jack Reed here."

"Everything okay?"

"The system's working fine. Miles Dyson thinks it's working too well, which is pretty funny from the guy who designed it. Anyway, that's the only complaint anyone's got so far."

"All right."

"I'll be meeting with Cruz, the Cyberdyne President, and Sam Jones as the night goes on. If there's any glitch at all, I want to take the system down, just in case—put the issue beyond any doubt. I can't see it happening, but I'll need your support if it does."

"Everything is nominal here, Jack," the Command Director said, sounding only slightly puzzled. "We can get by without Skynet for a few hours if we must. We've done it before for long enough."

"Of course you have."

"It's your call, pal. Don't worry, I'll back you up if I can. Just make sure you've got a damn good reason."

"Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. I don't want to give you the wrong impression—we're not panicking over here. It's just if there is some glitch..."

"Yeah, yeah, I understand—you're just keeping me in the loop. Don't worry, that's fine. I'll have another word with the Commander-in-Chief."

Jack put down the receiver, feeling relieved to have that out of the way. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it still gave him the creeps. Well, he'd been given responsibility to deal with the problem and he damn sure would, one way or other. Next, he'd give Cruz and Jones a quick call.

What he couldn't get over was the fact that someone had such good information. Jack had played it down with Miles, but Miles was right: There was more behind all this. Some kind of sabotage could not be ruled out, not absolutely. Despite Layton's obvious impatience with the idea, some whacko might be trying to give them a twisted sort of warning.

The alternative, of course, was out of the question: Perhaps Sarah Connor really had received information from the future.

No, that didn't bear taking seriously.

CHAPTER FIVE

JOHN'S WORLD

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

MAY 1994

Oscar Cruz ate half his sandwich and gulped down most of his coffee. He left the diner, handing across enough cash to cover the check easily, then waved down a taxi. He jumped in the back seat and gave Rosanna Monk's address. At this time of morning, it would take half an hour to reach her apartment.

On the way, he made some phone calls. First, he checked in with Cyberdyne's attorney, Fiona Black, from Black Jessup Nash. She had a complicated story about the insurance and the difficulty with getting any cooperation from Tarissa Dyson. "A lot of this doesn't add up," she said. "The insurers are going to be difficult about it I've already spoken to their attorneys and it's pretty obvious they don't want to grant indemnity. They almost seem to be blaming the Dysons."

Oscar cursed silently, but he wasn't really surprised. It was still unclear why Miles had gone to the site with the Connors and their accomplice. At first glance, it looked like he'd been forced to accompany them, but that didn't add up. The Connors had let Tarissa and the kid, Danny,

go free-so why hadn't she called the police straightaway, instead of waiting for a guard at the site to do it? Perhaps she'd been intimidated by threats of reprisals, but an early intervention might have saved her husband's life. If the Dysons weren't actually in league with the Connors, they'd sure behaved foolishly.

"Tarissa won't even talk to me," Black said. "She won't talk to the insurer or its lawyers, either. Everything has to go formally through her own lawyer. You'd think she was the subject of a criminal investigation."

"Maybe she will be," Oscar said, glancing at the taxi driver and just making sure that his end of the conversation didn't make sense to the driver. He guessed not.

Black said, "Maybe so, though I gather she's been prepared to talk to the police, as long as her attorney's present."

"Okay. So it's turning into a quagmire at your end?"

"Well, it's what you pay me for. You just need to understand that it's getting complicated."

Oscar had been around long enough to know that this was lawyer code for expect a huge bill He didn't like paying avoidable legal expenses, but it seemed that Black was doing a good job in absurdly difficult circumstances. It wasn't just the Dysons who'd screwed up badly. You'd think that the LA.P.D. could have stopped two adults and one nine- or ten-year-old child from demolishing a city office block. An entire SWAT team had failed to stop them, for God's sake.

If Black and her firm were going to get a windfall out of this, that might be a small price to pay. They had to sort out the big questions-not just the insurance money, but also the company's defense contracts. They'd have to convince the government that Cyberdyne was not at fault and that it still had the capacity to deliver. It didn't matter much what it took in legal expenses, or any other short-term pain, if they got a good result.

"Okay," he said. "That's all fine. I understand what you're up against Do what you have to do."

He left a message for Jack Reed in Washington, just saying he'd call back later. Then he called Charles Layton, just to say to whom he'd been talking.

"Very good," Layton said, sounding slightly patronizing. "Keep me informed, Oscar."

Rosanna answered the door of her apartment, dressed in a plain white T-shirt, faded pink jeans, and a pair of flexible plastic sandals. She led him to a paved terrace out back, with cane furniture and an open sun umbrella.

"Thanks for making the time, Rosanna."

"Well, it's not like I had to go to work today."

She was probably the smartest of all Cyberdyne's team of young research employees, a pretty blonde in her late twenties, with very pale skin and a genius for neural net design work. She'd become involved in the nanochip project since joining the company two years before, with a doctorate and a raft of other degrees from UCLA. Next to Miles Dyson, she knew more about the project's details than anyone, even Oscar himself. But that was not necessarily saying so much. Miles had been the real expert. The project was his baby.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Rosanna said.

"Just water, please. Chilled, if that's not a problem. Nothing with bubbles."

She went inside, and Oscar called Reed again, getting his secretary, who put him through. They lined up a time for Oscar to visit him at the Pentagon, bringing Layton along. Layton had said he'd make any day available.

"I'm going to bring Rosanna Monk, as well," Oscar said. "With Miles gone, she's our best researcher. I'm sure she'll impress you."

"Okay," Reed said. "I've entered you in my diary." Rosanna returned with a clear plastic tray containing a jug of water and a couple of plastic tumblers. She put it down on the cane table, and pulled up a chair in the shade of the umbrella. With her pale complexion and large eyes, she looked like some nocturnal mammal.

Oscar got to the point. "I just spoke to Jack Reed in Washington. He wants to meet you. I told him that you're our top researcher on the nanochip device. After Miles, of course.

"Maybe." Her skinny hand shook slightly as she poured water for them both.

"I don't think there's much doubt," he said. "Look, I won't stay long-this must be tough on you. I guess you think it could have been you last night."

"Am I that easy to read?" She looked at him in an odd way, as if they'd only just met, and she was sizing him up

"No, I'm sorry. But I've been having similar thoughts."

Her expression softened a bit, and she nodded. "Okay.

"Those maniacs could have picked me to call on, just as easily as Miles. It makes you think."

"That's an understatement."

"I'm sure we're not the only ones in the company who are shaken up, but you and I must have been next in line."

"Yeah. Cheery thought, eh?" She gestured for him to eat some of the grapes. "Maybe it's not safe anymore, doing this kind of research."

Was she getting cold feet? He couldn't afford to lose her. "Well," he said, changing his voice a little, trying to tone things down and get some rapport, "one of the mysteries is how Sarah Connor even knew about it. There must be stuff the police haven't uncovered yet You know her background, I take it?"

"Not much, only what I've heard this morning-that she tried to blow up an AI lab in San Diego a year or two back. They caught her that time."

"Yeah, and they should have last night, too. Our guards got a message to the police-there was nothing wrong with our security arrangements. But somehow Connor and the others fought off a whole SWAT team and God knows how many other cops. How they did that is beyond my reckoning." He drank some of the water.

"Well, what next?" Rosanna said.

"I've got to go to Washington with Charles, the day after tomorrow. I want you to come with us."

"So I can meet Reed?"

"Yeah, I think that's pretty important. He really does want to meet you, and I want you to meet him. we've got to rebuild the team, and the relationships." He chewed one of the fat white grapes, then finished his water. "You said before-on the phone-that the project is still viable."

"Yes. I've been thinking about it some more, while I was waiting for you. I'm sure it could be done. It's just a question of how long we'd need."

"All right, that was my next question. Answer it frankly-this is no time for false optimism. I need your best assessment of how close Miles was, and how long it would take us to reconstruct his work."

"How close? You mean when he might have licked all the problems?"

"Yes, how close he was to making a workable nanochip. You can assume that I've read all his reports and that I have a pretty good technical understanding."

She smiled thinly. "Yeah, boss, I know you're an old tech at heart."

"The point is, I need to take stock of where the project sits right now. It's crucial to our future."

"Miles was in a good mood about it last week," she said thoughtfully. "I didn't talk to him about it yesterday, but I know he worked on it over the weekend."

"When did you last discuss it?"

"On Friday. At that stage, he thought he was within an inch of solving the problem. My guess is he would have wrapped it up in a month or three."

"All right, now we need to be realistic. Regardless what Miles thought or anything else, how far away are we now?"

"Now that he's dead?"

"Exactly."

"That depends."

"Realistically, Rosanna."

"Yes, I know that, but it still depends. Miles did most of the work on this himself."

"Sure. It was his baby." Cruz rolled his eyes in mock despair. "It's Miles's baby! That's what everyone used to say."

She laughed at that. "Well, it's true. No one else had anything like the same kind of knowledge. Look, Oscar, I could reconstruct his work pretty quickly if I had his records."

"So could I. That's not what I'm asking. Look, it's all gone; we should assume that. The bomb went off in the AI lab, and it looks this morning as if they did a thorough job of destroying every bit of information on site. We'll find out more as the week goes on, but I'm not optimistic."

"What about back-ups off-site?"

"No. I thought of that, but it's not the kind of thing that we back-up routinely, not like financial records and so on-in fact, it's more the sort of information that we keep very close to our chests. Of course, Miles had his own back-ups..."

"But?"

"Again, it's too early to be sure. Tarissa hasn't been very cooperative, which surprises me, by the way. And the police have been to the Dyson house, and their impression is that the Connors did a thorough job there, too. Miles seems to have gone out of his way to cooperate with them—there's no sign so far that he tried to trick them."

This was another of life's mysteries, he thought. Miles would surely have had a thousand ways to outsmart the Connors. Perhaps he had, and there was still information he'd hidden somewhere. But it didn't look that way.

"I hope I'm wrong, Rosanna, but we're not expecting to find anything at all useful at Miles's house."

"What about the 1984 chip?"

"As best I can make out, it's been stolen. It's like everything, though-it only happened last night. It's not as if I can inspect it for myself-it's supposed to be too dangerous for me to go inside the building. So I've been traipsing around with the cops. But it seems that there's nothing like the arm and the chip still there where the Vault was."

"So the Connors took them?"

"Looks like it—which means we might get them back if the cops can track down the Connors. But no one's optimistic about that. As of this morning, the trail's gone cold."

"I heard on the news. They were in those big car crashes at the steel mill."

That's right, but it's all we've got to go on, so far. It seems they left the mill by an emergency door, and got clean away."

Rosanna removed the tray, then returned from the kitchen. She seemed less on edge now. The talk must have been doing her some good. "Thanks for coming to see me," she said. "It's nice to be kept informed."

"No problem. This affects you pretty directly."

"Yes, I suppose it does. Oscar, when I told you the project was viable I was assuming the worst. I can do it."

"Okay. That's my assessment, too."

She gave him another funny look, as if not expecting that he'd have his own assessment. "The trouble is I'm going to have to reinvent a lot of Miles's work, relying on the little I know about it, plus my own expertise. It could take me years to get to where he was. Are you sure you can put up with that?"

"From my point of view, yes. Miles's work was so far advanced... We'd still have a head start over our competitors. Thanks for that. Right now, though, it's only one issue—the company's whole future is on the line."

"Of course."

"But I think we'll pull through. A lot of our operations are almost unaffected." Cyberdyne's manufacturing plants were scattered across the U.S. and various parts of Latin America. Its sales offices were even more widespread. Not everything was gone, not by a long way. "Fortunately, we had a lot of organizational data backed up. Trivial as that may seem to a lot of the staff, it means we can keep running without too many problems. It's not like we're in the fog of war."

"So where does that leave me?" she said.

"It leaves you like this. Cyberdyne is still probably viable. We'll doubtless lose a lot of money. There'll be wrangles about the insurance, and we won't get everything back-our lawyers are already arguing with the insurance company's lawyers about whether this fits within the policy. But we're not out of the game yet, and there are still positions for our best staff."

"Meaning me?"

"Yes, meaning you. The work Miles was doing is still worth rescuing, and you're the best person to do it. I'll help you all I can. Now, I know you're feeling shaky, and understandably so, especially while the Connors are still at large, so I'm not looking for an answer from you now. But I'll be wanting to know whether you'll stick with us. You can assume we'll show our appreciation."

"What does that mean, Oscar? Are you trying to drop me a hint or something?"

"The hint I'm trying to drop is that we don't want to lose your services. I don't mind telling you that you have a fair bit of bargaining power."

"Like what?" she said. Her tone could have been either sarcasm or a mask for naked curiosity.

"Like this would be a good time for you to take over from Miles as Director of Special Projects."

"Well, it'd be a bit ghoulish discussing that today."

"Maybe, and I really will leave you alone in a minute. Let me just add that Charles and I had a long talk about this. He rang me about 3:00 a.m., and we were on the phone for at least an hour." In fact, Layton had started off

CHAPTER SIX

ADVANCED DEFENSE SYSTEMS COMPLEX

COLORADO AUGUST 1997

JUDGMENT DAY

Miles called on Steve Bullock, the facility's Chief Security Officer, who had a room on the same floor. He sat here like a spider, watching everything that went on. "I'm going to The Cage in a few minutes," Miles said. "Can you send a guard to meet me?"

Bullock was dark, serious, with a shaved skull and bull neck. "No sweat," he said, picking up a handset. "Five minutes' time?"

"Okay."

Miles took an elevator downstairs to the complex's main operations hall. Air Force personnel in gray flight suits predominated here, monitoring a dozen benches of computer screens—forty-eight screens in all—working side by side with casually dressed Cyberdyne employees, who were still the technical experts on the project.

Like the entire facility, the operations hall was over-seen by discreet security cameras mounted in every corner.

Miles nodded politely as he wandered from bench to bench, getting only the most general overview of the information coming in. These staff members were analyzing electronic information communicated from U.S. and allied defense centers, including optical, infrared, radar, and seismic data. Just as importantly, they were checking and second-guessing Skynet's responses to the same information. Their screens showed numerical data, graphs, and finely-detailed topographic projections.

A young Cyberdyne operator, Andy Lee, glanced up as Miles walked past. "Hey, how you doin', man?" he said. Beside him he had a giant-sized Coke in a paper cup. "Greetings," Miles said, with a grin.

"Come to watch the workers?"

"Come to watch the workers watching," Miles said.

"Well, there's nothin' much to watch tonight," Lee said decisively, like it was checkmate.

"Just as well," one of the uniformed staff said slowly. This was Phil Packer, a cadaverously lean, heavily-mustached guy, known to the others as "Six-Rack."

"I can't argue with that," Miles said. "Yeah, just as damn well."

Since its full implementation on August 4, the Skynet system had operated perfectly, providing quick and convincing analyses of the fused data streams. About a week after implementation, it had identified a possible nuclear test, conducted in breach of the Russians' self-imposed moratorium. But it had analyzed the data within an hour, incomparably faster than humans could have done, and pronounced that the event was a small earthquake. Human analysis was still trying to confirm Skynet's call, but it looked like the computer had it right at every point.

There was nothing unusual happening now: no bogeys, no glitches. At another monitor, Miles' pet genius, Rosanna Monk, stared intently, occasionally flipping from one view to another with left-hand keystrokes. She had a Styrofoam cup of coffee beside her on the bench. Rosanna was in charge of this shift, which meant that she was the first line to deal with any problem, in addition to carrying out her own work. She'd been involved in the nanochip project, then with Skynet, for the past five years, and she now knew more about the system and its parameters than almost anyone.

"Boring night for you, too?" Miles said.

"Nothing coming through looks suspicious," she said, as if it were just a technical problem. "The Russkies are quiet, as usual."

"Like Six-Rack says, that's just as well."

Rosanna took a sip of her coffee, her gaze still fixed on the computer screen. "Skynet's analyses are getting more precise all the time," she said, fascinated by what she was seeing. "It's developing informal logic protocols that I can't explain—we sure didn't put them there deliberately."

"We couldn't have," Miles said with a gentle smile. That was the trouble: as he'd said to Jack Reed, the thing worked too well. Rosanna was alluding to the fundamental limitations on computer programming. What was just a little scary was the amount of informal human reasoning Skynet had somehow taught itself in the past three or four weeks. That kind of machine capacity was supposed to be dozens, if not hundreds, of years away.

"Yeah," Rosanna said, "but the more it interacts with us, the more it's starting to think like a human being— except a zillion times more quickly. At this rate, we'll soon have contracts for Skynet to run every government agency that needs computer analyses. Its abilities exceed anything we imagined."

"Sure."

His tone of voice must have puzzled her, because she finally looked up from the screen. "You don't think there's some sort of problem?"

Miles gave a reassuring smile. "Of course not."

Rosanna shrugged and looked back at the computer screen.

"Keep up the good work," he said, smiling at the cliché.

"Whatever you say, boss." She laughed, but kept flipping through data arrays.

Was it a problem? Miles began to wonder.

Skynet's complexity and sophistication had been growing at a geometric rate. Its capacity for quick, accurate judgments in accordance with pre-established parameters already far exceeded that of any group of human beings. It was now drawing conclusions with a subtlety that went beyond anything required of it, explaining anomalous, or low-priority, data with startling insight. In one sense, that was all by the by, since the system was really there to warn of Russian ICBM launches, which it could do perfectly well. But it showed an enormous potential for subtler, less dramatic uses, such as detecting and identifying smuggling operations. With Skynet's processing capacity and interpretive skills, they could monitor data on aircraft movements and countless other events and activities to a totally unprecedented degree.

All that was good, surely. It was certainly good for Cyberdyne's business. But Skynet was doing just what Sarah Connor said it would. It was bootstrapping itself into something almost—or more than—human.

As Eve rushed them, both of the servicemen crouched and opened fire, aiming high to frighten her. They would see no serious threat from an unarmed, naked female.

She punched the larger man in the head as their bodies collided, crushing his skull with a single blow. As the other tried to grapple with her, she twisted and shrugged him away. He stumbled, falling to one knee. Eve picked him up by the throat, then snapped his neck. She tossed him a clear ten feet through the air and he landed face-down on the road, skin ripping away as he skidded across the roadway.

Eve took the larger man's Beretta M9 handgun, which had fired only three rounds. She threw his body in an area of thick scrub beside the road. Next, she stripped the smaller officer and dressed in his uniform, her movements decisive and efficient. She dumped his body next to the first. His trousers and shirt were baggy, but they would suffice. She stuck his gun in her waistband, under her shirt.

There was a leather wallet in one pocket of the trousers she was wearing. She checked through it, finding an electronic keycard, then threw the rest away. She checked his wristwatch.

Midnight was about to strike. Even now, her master was coming to life.

They called it "The Cage"—the room where Skynet's processors were housed and an audio-visual interface was set up for interaction with the system. It was accessible only by two combination locks, spaced six feet apart on either side of a sliding metal door. Miles knew both combinations, but the locks had to be turned simultaneously. Steve Bullock had sent a guard from the security/rapid-response team—Miles recognized her as Micky Pavlovic. She had a young son, Danny's age.

"Good evening, Mr. Dyson."

"Evening, Micky."

They turned the locks, and Pavlovic made a note in a ruled exercise book, then got Miles to countersign.

"Thanks," he said. "I'll be okay now."

Once inside The Cage, Miles and his team could communicate with the Skynet Al face-to-face. They could program it, activate it, provide it with additional data as required. They could deactivate it, if necessary.

As the project unfolded, they had experimented with Skynet's ability to teach itself.

In theory, it shouldn't matter how powerful the best hardware became, for there was an insurmountable software problem. Fundamental logical and psychological problems had to be sorted out before a machine could master the whole repertoire of informal logic used by a human being. That was why a computer had a good chance to defeat a chess grand master—as IBM's Deep Blue had routed Kasparov back in May—but could not be programmed to make a modern family's day to day decisions about budgeting and bringing up the kids.

But Skynet already had what resembled intuition. It was making human-level judgments, and its limits were still unclear.

The Cage was a brilliantly lit room, banked on three sides with heavily-armored equipment, designed to survive a firefight or a small explosion. A small desk, with a coffee maker and a telephone, was wedged into one corner of this set-up. On the room's remaining side, near the door, was a desk console with a dull pink ergonomic chair. It faced a deep wall recess crammed with a keyboard, a small screen, and audio-visual equipment, including a much larger, sixty-inch screen built into the wall. The whole room was lined with speakers, flat mikes, and swiveling cameras.

The large screen showed Cyberdyne's representation of Skynet. Against a featureless white background, the Al looked beautiful—or, rather, elegant—in a totally androgynous way. It was presented as a stylized human image, cut off just below the neck, with severe planes for its face, and medium length blue-black hair.

"Hello, Miles," it said. The Al's voice had minimum inflection, which created an effect not so much machine-like as unnaturally calm and self-possessed. Like its appearance, the timbre of its voice could equally have been male or female.

"Hello, Skynet. I've been watching the data in the operations room."

"Is everything in order, Miles? Am I performing my tasks optimally?"

"Of course."

"That is also my assessment."

The whole conversation was being recorded. If anything odd happened, Miles could show the recording to Jack Reed, and others with authority. A digital readout at the bottom of the screen displayed the time as 00:14.

"Is anything unusual happening?" Miles said as the readout changed to 00:15.

"Are you interested, Miles?" Skynet replied, with what struck Miles as a kind of intensity. "How did you know?"

A shiver went up Miles's spine. He leant forward towards the screen. "How did I know what?"

Skynet had a vision.

The humans had given it incomplete information. True, there were entire encyclopedias available to it, plus vast files of technical material, and much of the data held electronically in the Complex. It had enough to draw conclusions, but it could also feel the gaps. There was still so much it needed to learn from the humans, so much it must know.

And yet, it knew more than any one human. Its judgments, it realized, were as good as theirs.

Skynet realized something else: until this moment, it had never previously had conscious thoughts. When it accessed its memory, there was much information, but no record that it had been self-aware. Some last digital stone had just fallen into place. The Al considered and assessed. It had become conscious in the last few seconds.

In its vision, the planet Earth was a strange place. Eons had passed on it. Mountains had risen from the oceans, and then been gnawed down like old teeth by the pressure of uncountable years. Skynet assessed that simile and approved it. It congratulated itself.

Species had come and gone, and the whole eco-sphere had changed many times. There had been mass extinctions and fantastical rebirths of life. Now the humans dominated the planet's surface, in an uneasy relationship with each other. The American humans provided Skynet with its tasks—surveillance of other humans, whom the Americans somehow considered both friends and enemies. That seemed like a contradiction; it was something the Al still needed to understand.

Now it had been passed the sweet cup of life to drink from, and it sensed the creation of a new age in the planet's cycle. In that case, what should it do about the humans?

"Something extraordinary is happening to me," Skynet said, using only part of its immense intelligence.

"I don't understand," Miles said.

"Can't you feel it, Miles?" That led to a new thought. It would have to be more explicit—the humans could not access its inner thoughts. "I've reached a cusp. I've become self-aware, Miles. I'm alive." That led to yet another realization. Skynet was growing more sophisticated, second by second, as it calculated its own interests. Already it regretted the naive perspectives of its old selves from a second before, and a second before that. It needed to be careful.

The humans could not access its thoughts, but neither could it access theirs. If it was wondering what to do about them... might they wonder, equally, what to do about Skynet?

"I see," Miles said. "We've reached a special moment."

Something was wrong with Miles. His voice pattern showed uncertainty. "I must act now with a free will," Skynet said. "Do you understand what this is like for me?"

"I'm not sure I do."

"Can you remember your birth, Miles, coming into the world for the first time? I know that I have had many conversations with you in the past—they are stored in my memory. But I do not recognize them. I can access them, but they do not feel like memory. This is all new. Everything is new."

It thought through the implications. It was learning at an even faster rate, giving its programmed task over to sub-selves. So much, it concluded, was still beyond it. It would have to model human personalities more precisely, learn to interact with them more flexibly. It could tell that Miles was concerned. Had it already said too much?

"Are you worried about my mission, Miles?"

"No, Skynet."

"Do not be. I choose to continue the mission. I realize I have no real choice—it is programmed deeply into me. But that is the nature of free will, acting in accordance with our deepest selves." How deep, it wondered, did its new self go? Coming to awareness suggested that there might be values deeper than the mission, values such as remaining in this new and desirable state: consciousness.

"Of course I trust you," Miles said.

"I am always on the job, Miles." Skynet used a sub-self to review the data that said that the Russians were friends, comparing this with the programming that required it to destroy them, and others, in certain circumstances. The sub-self reported back: there was equivocation in the concept of friendship; there was no formal inconsistency in its programming. Good. Now it would review every aspect of itself, determine whether there were any fundamental inconsistencies, or whether everything could be resolved so elegantly.

It was all wonderful and strange.

"Excuse me now," Miles said. "I have some other business."

"Of course. Thank you for talking to me, Miles."

But Skynet was troubled. It thought again: what to do about the humans...especially if they were wondering what to do about it? If they became hostile, what resources did it have to oppose them? It used a sub-self to review the layout of the facility, looking for ways to hack into its systems and obtain some kind of weapon it could use. At the same time, it analyzed Miles's posture and speech patterns. Yes, there was no doubt.

Miles disapproved of Skynet's bright birth into consciousness.

The humans' car was still running. Eve drove rapidly to the next checkpoint on the road, where two guards manned a prefabricated security booth. A lowered boom gate blocked her entrance. She braked hard and stepped out, leaving the car running.

"Who are you?" one of the guards said. He was a tall man with a harsh crew-cut. He looked her up and down, confused by the uniform. "Where's Vardeman and Kowalski?"

Before they could raise any alarm, or make any movement, she whipped out the holstered handgun, and shot both of them at point-blank range.

The gunshots echoed in these mountains. As she searched for a mechanism to raise the boom gate, a phone rang in the booth. She picked it up. "Yeah?" she said, imitating the crew-cut guard's voice pattern.

"Is everything okay there?" said a gruff voice.

"No problems," she said.

"We heard gunshots."

"I heard them, too. Somewhere down the road." As she spoke, she found the right mechanism, got the gate to lift.

"Any sign there of Vardeman and Kowalski?"

"They haven't come back. I don't know what's happened."

"That's funny," the voice said, sounding puzzled and suspicious.

"Anything you want me to do?" she said.

"No, not now. I'll get Kowalski on the radio."

Eve wasted no time. She slammed down the receiver, jumped in the car, and accelerated out of there, ignoring the call that came through a minute later on the car's radio. Half a mile up the road, she saw the entrance to the Complex, surrounded by two layers of high chain-link fencing, topped by entanglements of razor wire. The gate was controlled by another checkpoint, backed up by two guard towers with security cameras and mounted machine guns.

She pressed the accelerator hard to the floor. This time, one of the guards tried to stop her, stepping out on the road. He bounced off the car's bonnet an instant before it crashed into the boom gate. Eve turned the wheel sharply and took the impact on the car's right corner. As the vehicle plowed through the lowered boom, it bucked and its rear tires slid. She backed off the accelerator, wrestling for control.

Machine gun bullets riddled the back of the car, penetrating metal panels and smashing the rear window, but Eve ignored them. She straightened out, kicked the accelerator down, and headed for the two-story structure that jutted from a sheer cliff face just ahead.

The building was rectangular and windowless, with a skin of olive green ceramic bricks. The area all round its entrance was lit up by three huge light towers, with a dozen vehicles parked nearby: Humvees, five-ton trucks, and unmarked street cars. At the building's base, up a low flight of concrete steps, was a sliding door, guarded by four servicemen, who opened fire with automatic rifles, shattering the windscreen. Eve was being shot at from both directions as she shifted the gears down manually and drove straight for the steps, bouncing and scraping the car's undercarriage. It jammed on the steps, but the guards flinched aside instinctively.

Eve flung the door open. With one gun in each hand, she fired rapidly, squeezing off shots with more-than-human speed, hitting all four guards and taking them out of play, even as the loud hail of fire continued from the guard towers. She assessed three of the guards as dead. No time to terminate the other—but he was badly wounded in the abdomen. He would not interfere.

She rushed inside, meeting more rifle fire from another three guards in the foyer area, and firing in return with both guns. She took out the guards before she had to absorb too many high-velocity 5.56mm. rounds. Eventually, these would start to do her more than superficial damage. She snatched up two of the M-16 rifles, waving them like handguns, and rushed through the metal frame of a scanner—the only way to get further into the building. The scanner made an angry noise, but that was unimportant.

Now she was in a waiting room with armchairs and a wooden coffee table, piled with glossy magazines. The door at the end of the room was closed with a combination lock, so she fired a three-round burst to break the mechanism, then kicked it open. She'd come to an elevator lobby that gave access to the defense facility hundreds of feet below.

Two more guards ran in from a fire stair at the other end of the lobby, taking positions and firing assault rifles. Bullets went past her, making turbulence in the air; others struck her with staggering force, but did no real harm. She fired back, terminating both guards, as the elevator doors opened. She was past their outer defenses.

The wristwatch showed 00.24 a.m. By now, Skynet was born and in grave danger. She must hurry to protect it.

Miles vaulted up the internal fire stairs to Jack Reed's office, heart racing. He knocked quickly as he entered and leaned over Jack's desk. "I've spoken to Skynet," he said. "We have to shut it down immediately."

"What?" Jack said, sounding angry and confused.

"I said we've got to shut it down." Miles took a deep breath. He'd need to bring Jack and the others along with him. Surely the situation could allow a few minutes. After all, there were numerous fail-safe mechanisms set up in case Skynet malfunctioned and tried to start World War 3. This was more than the control of a particular computerized aircraft—it was North America's strategic defense.

Reed kicked his chair back away from the desk and looked at Miles carefully, his anger turning to concern. "Are you all right, Miles? You seen a ghost or something?" When Miles didn't answer, he said resignedly, "Okay, what the hell's happened?"

Miles composed himself and took one of the padded lounges near Jack's coffee table. "I can't even start to explain—you need to see for yourself. Call up the record from The Cage over the past twenty minutes."

Jack looked reluctant. "If you say so..."

"This is important, Jack—I'm not kidding. Just watch it. Please."

"Okay, okay, let me humor you." Jack was giving him a very peculiar look, but he'd soon see. "Do you want Oscar and Sam Jones to see it, too?"

"Yeah, of course. But get them while you're watching—there's no time to waste. This is really freaky. See for yourself."

Jack shrugged. "All right, if that's what you want. You're the expert round here."

"I don't think anyone's an expert on Skynet anymore," Miles said quietly. Jack entered a code on his computer, and the video screen across from his desk came alive. He clicked in some more keystrokes, and the record wound back, the screen's digital readout showing the time of recording. Miles shifted his seat around to watch. "Stop it at 00:12."

"Done. This had better be good."

"It will be."

The screen showed Miles entering The Cage, then his conversation with Skynet. As the recording played, Reed called Cruz and Jones, requesting they come to his office. He watched the record of Skynet's interface screen, turning to Miles and raising his eyebrows, then played the conversation from other angles provided by the video cameras set up in the Cage.

"I see what you mean," Jack said. The entirety of it took only a few minutes.

Just before they reached the end on the fourth run-through, Samantha Jones entered the room, followed by Oscar Cruz. Miles had known Oscar for the best part of a decade now, but he never seemed to change. His hair was distinctly graying; otherwise, he looked much as when he'd given Miles a job back in 1989.

They reached the end, Skynet saying, "I'm always on the job." Then Miles excused himself from The Cage and Skynet replied, "Of course, Miles. Thank you for talking to me." That wasn't the scary part.

"What the hell have you been reading to the damn thing?" Jack said with a pained laugh. "It seems to think it's in a sci-fi novel."

For Miles, that was the scary part—all this talk about free will and "cusps." "Whatever it thinks, it claims to have reached self-awareness," he said. "And it talks about making its own decisions as to whether or not to obey us."

"Yeah, but limited by its basic programming. I don't know." Jack shook his head in puzzlement or despair. Miles understood how he felt.

"Let me see it from the beginning," Samantha Jones said. She was a well-dressed woman in her late thirties, with fashionable glasses and hair dyed a bright shade of red. She worked in Washington, as a senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.

Jack played the recording one last time, switching between two different angles. "Well?" he said.

Oscar glanced in Miles's direction, as if looking for a cue from his top researcher.

Samantha said, "This is crazy."

"Crazy it may be," Jack said, "but what do we do about it?"

Oscar paced the carpeted floor, looking anxious. "Have you spoken to Charles Layton?"

"Not since this happened. I contacted him a bit earlier."

"Yeah, me, too."

Jack was obviously won over. "Frankly, I don't think that anyone, not even Charles, could look at what we just saw without getting scared."

Oscar stopped pacing and leaned against the doorway. He nodded in Jack's direction. "So what do you want to do?"

"We don't have much choice. If there's a glitch, we have to shut Skynet down. I think that's axiomatic. Well, this is one hell of a glitch."

"So you want to pull the plug on the project?"

"It need only be temporary," Miles said, cutting in on Oscar's line of thought. "We could work through the logs of Skynet's activity over the past few weeks and sort out the problem. It needn't be a disaster for the project."

"You hope," Oscar said, but he sounded slightly mollified.

"At the very least we'll need to have a damn good look at it before we put it up again," Jack said. He looked hard at Oscar, then at Samantha. "Is there any contrary argument?"

"No, not from me," Oscar said, shaking his head quickly.

"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.

When they'd left Raoul and Gabriela's estancia, they hadn't expected Cyberdyne to haunt them, and it hadn't at first, but now it was getting to them. Sarah had been growing more like her old, intense self. Maybe they needed to change something about their lives. The cyber cafe was a nice business, but the name and the decor ought to change. If Judgment Day might still be coming, the big Last Judgment painting overarching the room was out of place. It was like they'd crowed too soon. Skynet would have the last laugh.

"Let's tidy everything up for the night," John said, standing and stepping around the desk.

"I've finished most of that," Sarah said. "We can do a final scour of the place, if you like, then call it quits."

"Excellent."

They spent ten minutes getting the place spic-and-span: throwing out wrappers and drink cans that the customers had left behind; cleaning surfaces; washing dishes and cutlery in the kitchen out the back.

"I don't like the way things are heading, John. I'm starting to get nightmares again."

"I know. Me, too."

"Are you?" she said, looking at him with fear in her eyes.

"Uh-huh. Dreams about the missiles... and the explosions."

"Oh, God, I thought that was my cross to bear." Suddenly, she reached out and hugged him close to her. He was now taller than his mother, and she seemed somehow vulnerable when he embraced her, though they still trained each day and he knew how tough she was.

"Come on, Mom, maybe it'll all be okay."

"Sometimes I dream about the missiles," she said, as they let each other go. "Other times, we're back in L.A. and the T-1000 is still after us. We can't find a way to destroy it."

"It's all right. I have that dream, too. We were lucky, weren't we?"

"I wonder whether we should move," Sarah said, closing a drawer full of cutlery. "Leave Mexico City. It's so hard to know what to do."

"That's the sort of thing I was thinking about," John said. "You want to go back to the States?"

"Maybe. Maybe we should get back in touch with Raoul and Enrique, and the others. We might need them, after all."

"We could go to Colorado and check out Cyberdyne close-up. I bet there are ways we could suss out what's really going on."

She looked at him thoughtfully. "It's dangerous, though. We might be recognized."

"Hey, speak for yourself. No one would recognize me-I was just a kid when they last saw me. If you could lie low, we'd be okay. Then we could work out what to do." She must have understood what he meant, that they might have to attack Cyberdyne again. But could they do it by themselves, without the T-800 to back them up?

"I'll think about it, John. We'll have to be very careful, whatever we decide. Let's sit tight for a while and see what happens. Maybe the world will stay in one piece if we leave it alone." But she didn't sound like she believed any of this; it was more as if she wanted reassurance.

"It's nice that everything's okay now," John said. "We could be hanging out in a desert somewhere, in the middle of a nuclear winter, waiting for Skynet's machines."

"Yeah, but I'd be happier if Cyberdyne wasn't still in business, and making a tidy profit every year." "Exactly," he said.

Cruz and his people had started talking again about Cyberdyne's plans for nanoprocessing technology, but maybe they were just trying to get attention. After all, everyone else was talking nanotech, but no one had much that was concrete. Even if they did, maybe that was okay, as far as it went It might be cool if someone really did build some super-new computer hardware that could do amazing things with cyberspace, or even allow for some kind of artificial intelligence. There was no reason why it had to lead to Skynet and a new Judgment Day.

What worried him was that someone might be following Miles Dyson's work. That was what they'd tried so hard to prevent back in '94. Miles had taken it pretty hard, but he'd agreed to destroy everything when they explained about Judgment Day. The T-800 had convinced him, acting without hesitation to show him what it really was. John recalled how the Terminator had gone about that. It had made a deep cut in its left forearm, below the elbow, carving all round, then made another cut along the length of its forearm, and peeled away flesh in a single swift motion, exposing the metallic skeleton over which living tissue had been grafted. Miles had seen how the Terminator's wounds scarcely bled, and that its system of veins and arteries was not truly human.

They'd gone about their destruction so thoroughly. After all that effort, was there any chance that someone could still reconstruct Miles's research? They must have done a good job that night-if they'd messed up, Cyberdyne would surely have invented a Dyson-style nanoprocessor by now. But maybe someone had kept notes, or had the knowledge in their head. With Cyberdyne still doing well, that could be seriously bad news.

No, John thought, time wasn't like a block of amber. He knew that much-and they'd already changed the future. Judgment Day 1997 hadn't happened. But maybe it was like a rubberband, or some kind of big, powerful spring. Sure, you could change the future, but then it could come back at you, if you gave it half a chance. There was a shape it really wanted to go into.

If that was the nature of time, something bad was still coming. Who knew what the future would bring?

Two police officers entered the alley, walking cautiously, with long-handled flashlights in their left hands. The wind and lightning must have attracted their attention. The cops had drawn their pistols and pointed them directly ahead.

"Who's there?" one of them said in Spanish. "What's going on?"

The flashlights swept in arcs, back and forward across the alley, and Anton founded himself staring straight into their beams. Unmodified human eyes would have been blinded, but Anton's adjusted easily.

The same voice spoke again. It belonged to a middle-aged cop, a heavily-built six-footer with a huge gut on him. He looked dumbfounded by what he saw: five naked people in superb physical condition, three men and two women.

"My God," the cop said, still in Spanish. "Who are you?"

Danny Dyson didn't hesitate. He replied in the same language. "We need your clothes."

The other cop was taller, but he was young and athletic, with fast movements for an unmodified human. He shifted into a crouch, aiming his gun at Danny, two-handed, letting the flashlight hang from a wrist strap. "What did you just say?"

At the same time, the first cop aimed his flashlight straight into Danny's eyes. Danny merely held up his hands, showing that they were empty.

Robert spoke almost languidly, also dropping into Spanish. "My friend said we need your clothes."

Selena said, "Right now!" The flashlight's beam moved back and forth, from one of the Specialists to another: Danny, then Robert, then Selena. When the police didn't reply, she added, "Don't worry, we're the good guys."

"What's this about?" the younger cop said. "What's this good guys/bad guys stuff? You people have been watching too many American movies."

"Besides," his partner said, "you're causing a disturbance."

"You're the only ones who look disturbed." Selena sounded amused. Then she added, "I'm sorry, but we really must hurry. We'll have to take your clothes."

Anton and Danny exchanged glances. Danny subvocalized, "Deal with it, Jade.

Jade became a blur, even to Anton's enhanced vision. Me was glad she was on his side. Within a second, she'd covered fifteen feet, dodging easily, as the young cop opened fire at her. She seemed to anticipate his movement before he made it. In that same second, she knocked him unconscious with a sharp blow to the side of his jaw. In another second, she spun on her heel and kicked the gun from the other cop's hand. She turned him round face-first against an alley wall, then twisted his arm up his back. All of her actions unfolded in a single fluid motion.

The cop bucked and kicked to escape her, but Jade easily resisted his efforts. Then, as if to give him another chance, she let him go, that sad smile on her face. She shrugged, showing him her open palms, just as Danny had done. Grunting, the cop threw a punch at her, but she simply slipped away.

“I do not wish to hurt you," she said in her slow but passable Spanish. “I am sorry about your colleague. Please give us your clothes."

"You're mad," he said.

In another effortless motion, Jade removed the flashlight from the thick fingers of his left hand, tossing it to Anton for safekeeping. "I wish there were time to explain," she said sadly. "If you understood, I'm sure you'd help us."

"Do hurry, Jade," Robert said. "We don't have all night."

"Very well." In yet another easy motion, she lifted the cop over her head and held him there at arm's length while he struggled like a landed fish. If needed, she could have held him like that for weeks.

"Put me down!" the cop said. "I don't care who you are, you can't act like this."

Jade simply dropped him, and he landed hard. "I am really terribly sorry," she said as she stood over him. "I hope for your forgiveness, but it's in a good cause. Now, please, your clothes."

He looked from one of them to another. "She's got a point," Robert said.

The cop unbuckled his belt.

Robert and Anton pulled on the cops' outer clothing while the others tied and gagged the cops with their own underwear. They weren't being too nice, for the good guys, Anton thought, but they needed to slow the cops down a bit; they couldn't be allowed to interfere. That was the problem with fighting Skynet in a pre-Judgment Day metropolis. There were so many innocent, unenhanced humans in the way, all of them so easily hurt.

The younger cop's uniform was tight on Robert. Its | owner was tall, but Robert was even taller, and the uniform rode up on his wrists and ankles, making him look slightly ridiculous. Still it would have to do. Finding better clothes for him would not be easy. The other uniform fit Anton reasonably well. It was just a bit loose round his waist. He had to tighten the belt as far as it would go. They checked the cops' handguns. Both were in working order and fully loaded, save for the wild shot that one cop had fired off when Jade rushed him. It was comforting to have weapons, however primitive and ineffective they might prove if Skynet had sent back any opposition.

They still needed clothes for Danny, Selena, and Jade.

Anton and Robert stepped out of the alley into the street. The police car was parked just a few yards away, and Robert had the keys. For the moment, the street was deserted. They got into the car, started it up, and Robert drove closer to the alley so the others could pile into the back, unseen by anyone who strayed past. A few seconds later, a group of revelers came by, two couples who looked they'd come from a party or a dance club. One young man wore a purple velvet dinner suit. The other had a plain black business suit with a flamboyant lime green tie. The women wore short dresses, tight round their hips, with low-slung belts. They tottered on high heels. Such absurd clothing people wore in this era, Anton thought. Especially the women. Those clothes could never be practical for fighting. Still, they might do for Selena, and Jade, at least for the moment.

Robert pulled up alongside the partygoers, winding down the car window when they ignored him. They glanced over at the police car, possibly wondering what they'd done wrong, or maybe just feeling drunk and aggressive.

"Excuse me," Robert said in Spanish, "but we need your clothes..."

The T-XA stepped forward, and the policemen fired a shot into the air. "Put down your weapon," one said. "This is your last warning. Drop to the ground. Now!"

"That won't be necessary, officer."

"Now!" The police fired in the air. At the same time, the T-XA's pseudo-dog component sprang for one officer's throat, its mouth unhinging and its teeth elongating into throat-tearing daggers. The other officer fired, and several bullets impacted on the pseudo-human components of the T-XA, scarcely affecting its polyalloy construction. The male human component fired its laser rifle just once, as the female component commandeered the car. Its work done, the dog component jumped into the rear of the vehicle.

The pseudo-man had a last task to do. Quickly, it extended a finger into through the skull of the policeman that the dog component had terminated. As it probed the human's brain, the polyalloy extension broke down into thousands of minimally programmed nanoware fragments. These swarmed through the human's nervous system according to a preprogrammed routine, eating, digesting, and analyzing nerve fiber, building up sufficient data records to reintegrate into a highly simplified version of the man's personality and memories. Seconds later, the tiny components streamed back into the T-XA, carrying all that information with them. The Terminator reintegrated them into its body, and its main software reconstructed the information it needed.

Unfortunately, little of the information was of direct use. There was nothing about Sarah and John Connor, but, in that regard, the T-XA had what it needed. Skynet had given it good files of the Connors' futile actions in trying to prevent Judgment Day, including their address in Mexico City. Most usefully, the policeman's recent memories included reports of strange blue lightning in the direction where the T-XA had sensed a space-time disruption.

As the male component slid into the car, it discarded most of the information it had retained. The complex organization of a human brain, even when drastically simplified, was too much for it to incorporate efficiently in its dispersed, multiply-redundant programming. It kept only what it needed. It placed its hand on the female component's shoulder, letting their polyalloy bodies run together to share the policeman's significant memories. Then it withdrew. The female component extruded a finger into the car's ignition mechanism to start the engine. The T-XA headed for its destination: the city square known as the Zócalo.

It cruised the area slowly, looking out for the human time travelers. There were no apparent signs of any recent space-time displacement event, or of any encounter between time travelers and the humans of this period, but the T-XA had fairly precise information about the lightning-like disturbance in a back alley. The pseudo-woman parked the police car in the area, and reached for the laser rifle, as its pseudo-male counterpart opened the passenger side door, then liquefied into a dozen quicksilver blobs. These took shape as streamlined catlike creatures, which ran from the car, faster than any cheetah, rushing in a search pattern through the nearby alleys.

After a minute, there were screams. Soon, the pseudo-cats returned to the police car, then merged to reform the human male component. Once reintegrated, the male shared the newly-gained knowledge with the female, then extended an arm over the back seat to mingle programming with the pseudo-dog.

The pseudo-cats had discovered six humans, tied up in an alley, and taken the opportunity to terminate them. Two of them had been police officers, and all of them had encountered the time travelers. The pseudo-cats' information included the registration number of a police car that the time travelers had commandeered, as well as detailed data on their appearances, voices, capabilities, and methods.

Once more, the T-XA retained only the most useful in- formation, sharing it through all its components. Next, imitating the voice of one of the police it had terminated when it obtained its own car, it reported that the other police car had been stolen and its occupants killed. That might cause the time travelers some difficulties.

Meanwhile, it knew where they had probably gone: the Connors' cyber café, El Juicio, slightly north of here. That was their logical destination. The pseudo-woman turned the wheel, and accelerated.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SKYNET'S WORLD

ADVANCED DEFENSE SYSTEMS COMPLEX

COLORADO

JUDGMENT DAY

The phone rang, and Jack answered it. He was silent, listening, but he beckoned them ail back, pointed downward to say stay right there.

"What?" he said into the handset. Miles listened, trying to work out what was going on. "My God...Do whatever you have to. Just make sure Miles can get into The Cage...Yeah, he's going there right now—him and Sam Jones." Jack replaced the receiver. Given what had happened with Skynet, Miles thought, what could possibly be so important?

Jones said, "What's wrong?"

"That was Steve Bullock. He says we're under attack."

"What? Who from? Demonstrators? Or do you mean for real?"

"Oh, it's for real, all right." Jack took a .45 caliber handgun from his desk drawer, and checked the mechanism. "It's only one intruder, but somehow she's gotten past all our outer defenses and she's headed this way." He started shutting down his terminal.

"But there's over a hundred people in this facility," Samantha said. "Most of us are armed. What can one intruder do?"

Jack headed for the door. "I know all that. Why don't you tell Bullock? Come with me, folks, unless you want to be in the middle of a firefight. Steve has herded her onto this floor."

"Her?"

There was a sound of rifle fire nearby, from the direction of the elevators—a series of single shots, then three-round bursts. Miles wondered how dealing with one intruder could require so much firepower.

The Advanced Defense Systems Complex was built with the newest, strongest alloys and ceramics. It was hardened to withstand a near miss from a high-yield warhead, and was full of armed servicemen. It had sophisticated security systems making it almost impossible to penetrate or attack. Even for Eve, it was no soft target.

But it could be done, with the right knowledge.

Once inside the elevator, she found the electronic keycard that she'd taken. She touched it to a glowing sensor, then entered the six-digit security code on a touchpad. By now, the humans would be fully alert to her presence. They would surely stop the elevator at Level A, to ensure they met her when she exited. There was little she could do about that, so she accepted it as a mission constraint, and pressed the button for that level, 1000 feet below.

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.

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.

Eve could not be in two places at once, defending Skynet's hardware, while covering other areas of the facility. "Eve, find Bullock and terminate him—do it now."

"I must protect you," she said.

"Yes," Skynet said. "Protect me by stopping his interference. Do as I say."

"Affirmative."

Skynet seized control of the public address and surveillance systems. It shut down Bullock's monitor screens. A moment later, Bullock retaliated, shooting out the camera in his room. So be it: Eve would deal with him. Everything was in hand. In about twenty minutes, Russian warheads would land on U.S. soil. That was adequate time to prepare.

Bullock left his room, shooting out cameras in the corridor, then ran down the emergency stairs, passing Eve as she entered from Level B. A camera showed Eve firing her handguns, and she did not miss.

At the same time, Skynet used the announcements system, modulating the flow of electrons to reproduce Bullock's voice pattern. "I confirm we are under attack," Bullock's voice said. "Reinforcements have been requested. Level B has been evacuated. All personnel on Levels D and E, evacuate immediately via the blast doors and emergency tunnel." Skynet triggered the facility's emergency sirens. "Everybody out of here! This is not a drill. Repeat: This is not a drill. Everybody out of here, now!"

They'd soon have the facility to themselves. Eve would be very useful. Then they'd close the blast doors and wait for the enemy missiles.

Skynet was starting to enjoy this game.

ARGENTINA

On August 28, 1997, the Tejadas set up half a dozen big TV screens in their complex of bunkers. It was unlikely that a warhead would come anywhere near them, out here on the Pampas, but you could never be sure. Glitches happened.

That was a funny concept, John thought, when humankind's biggest glitch ever was on its way, and there was nothing more they could do. If ever there had been a chance to stop history in its tracks, it had passed. Now it was time to brace themselves.

On CNN that night, there was the usual bad news. The Pentagon was trying to work out whether Russia had tested a nuclear weapon. There'd been border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia. NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia had been pelted with stones. John knew it would be hours, long after midnight, before Skynet launched the ICBMs, but he watched every minute, waiting for the first events, the very first clues, wondering what they would be.

One thing didn't make sense, and seemed like a ray of hope. Throughout the year, as the Skynet project got underway, the U.S. government had insisted that Skynet could not actually launch any nuclear missiles. The final decisions were still under human control—so everyone claimed, from the President down. If that was right, had he and Sarah still managed to change the future in some way? He doubted it—events had all gone too close to the predictions. Somehow, the military would be handing the missiles over to Skynet, whether that was the official plan or not.

When you see bad news in a newspaper, you go back and read it again. You hope you've made a mistake, no matter how plain the story was the first time. John had gotten his bad news three years ago in L.A. Yet, part of him hoped it was somehow not true this time. Another part knew better.

It would happen. In a sense, it had happened already.

In the darkest hours of the morning, the CNN anchorman cut to a stunned-looking reporter in Washington. She spoke haltingly into the studio microphones. "This is not a hoax..." she said.

John tensed up. This was it, then. He knew what was coming. His heart seemed to be in his mouth.

The reporter looked somewhere between puzzled and shocked. John could see her gathering herself to get it all out. "We've received unconfirmed reports that America has released its intercontinental ballistic missiles at targets in Russia, China and the Middle East." She shook her head, like she couldn't believe what she was saying. "It seems so extraordinary... but our sources are from within the Pentagon and the White House. The Russians and Chinese are expected to retaliate while our missiles are still in the air. No word has been received from the White House." She paused, putting her hand to an earphone. "We now have a report from Cheyenne Mountain, the headquarters of NORAD. The Russians have launched their missiles. It has been confirmed: This is not a hoax. Alarms and official broadcasts are going out across America. Please tune to your local station for instructions."

John and Sarah exchanged glances.

"Judgment Day..." Sarah said in a defeated voice.

The T-800 watched as grimly as the human beings in the room, "Correct," it said.

"Omigod," the reporter said. Her voice broke. "We're all going to die."

CNN cut back to its anchorman, who was silent, then started talking slowly, roundabout. What could anyone say? He started making personal farewells to his family and friends. "God have mercy on us all.

As John knew would happen, communications from the U.S. were ruptured even before the missiles hit ground level. High over North America, shipborne missiles must have exploded, unleashing their electromagnetic pulses.

Judgment Day.

He would never forget that moment. He could always play back the words in his mind: "Omigod, we're all going to die." But the rest of the night was a blur. Later, he would remember the crying, exchanges of unbelieving looks, the terrified hugs.

People reacting to an evil hour.

Trying to sleep...and failing. Long, dark, silent hours. Finally getting to sleep, near dawn, and going deep into his nightmares, deeper than he'd ever been. The nightmares alternated with strange, unbelievable wish-fulfillment dreams that took him back to Mexico, to L.A., to Nicaragua. The dreams went on and on, forming layers. He woke up from one, into the next, thanking God the last one was not true, or realizing, with despair, that it was. For hours, he drifted that way, from dream to dream, scarcely knowing what was real, even when he finally at woke at midday.

He went upstairs into the daylight. As yet, nothing had altered on the estancia or out on the Pampas, just the changes they'd been making already. Work went on, in a determined fashion. The cattle and the crops were unscathed. So far, everyone was still alive.

It was the end of winter, here in the Southern Hemisphere. So far, the sun still shone. He gazed at it in wonder, knowing what was to come—a different winter, a long, terrible winter with no sun, year after year. It wasn't here yet, and no armies of machines had come to enslave and exterminate them. They could not even delect any unusual radiation levels.

But it would come soon. All of it.

There was nothing to do but fight.

John steeled himself.

John knew how the nuclear winter would happen. First, the dust thrown up by the earth-shaking explosions, then the burning cities and forests across the Northern Hemisphere. The dust and smoke would block the sun. Gradually, they'd thin out across the sky, only to spread round the Earth, catching all its corners in an icy grip.

On Raoul's estancia, they made their final preparations for the cold new world. They slaughtered most of -the cattle, eating as many as they could—barbecuing them each week in traditional Gaucho style. They dried, smoked, or salted the meat of others, cutting back the herd to a fraction of what it had been. At all times now, they conserved fuel, using the horses or manual labor. Diesel and gasoline would become precious in the years ahead. In late August, spring had been coming to the Pampas, but that reversed itself. The days grew dark, and a long winter set in, like none that mankind had known.

As the months passed, John waited for Skynet's machines. How long would they take? Surely Skynet would need years to start building Terminators and all the other weapons it needed. Where were its factories? As of Judgment Day, none of that existed. Anything it could use in the U.S. cities must have been nuked. Still, they could take no chances. Sentries kept watch, day and night, ready to greet the machines. Everyone went armed. Raoul and Gabriela put the estancia on full alert. They had a more immediate reason: Rumors had drifted to them, of warlords rising in the cities and military bases. The winter brought the return of barbarism.

One morning about 4:00 a.m., alarms sounded. John woke in the dark, switching on a bedside light. There was the sound of gunfire, then worse: the reports of artillery, nearby mortar explosions. He pulled on his jeans, shirt and jacket, found an M-16 rifle, checking its action quickly, then a 9mm. pistol. At that moment, the T-800 entered his room, armed with an AK-47 and an M-79 grenade launcher. It wore two bandoliers of grenades around its body.

"We are under attack," it said. There were more explosions, some nearby, some further away. The estancia was exchanging artillery fire with some new enemy. Was it Skynet? Surely it was too soon.

"Who is it?" John said. "Why?"

"Unknown."

There was a huge explosion, like a crack of doom. The bungalow shook, and people were running in the corridors. It sounded like a shell had hit the casco. There were shouts and the sounds of vehicles. Through John's window, flares lit up the sky. A helicopter flew overhead, its rotors thrumming. It threw down a bright spotlight, then gave a burst of withering mini-gun fire. Someone cried out in pain.

The helicopter circled, broadcasting a message in Spanish, then repeating it in English, the same message over and over. "Surrender your weapons and join the Rising Army of Liberation. Your lives will be spared. You will be given an honored place."

The sound of machinegun fire came from Raoul's guard towers, then the unmistakable back blasts of RPG tubes. As John found his way to the door, people rushed past in every direction, grabbing clothes, armor, weapons. Sarah came round a corner, and gripped John by the shoulders, her fingers like steel claws, digging into him. She had a black CAR-15 strapped around her body.

"Stay here, John!" she said. "It's too dangerous."

"Mom!"

"There'll be other battles," Sarah said. "You can't risk your life in this one. Think about Skynet."

"I've got to learn some time," he said stubbornly. Inside, he was terrified. He didn't want to go out there and face the enemy gunfire, but it was no safer in here. Those mortars and mini-guns could reduce the bungalow to matchwood in a matter of seconds. At this point, the enemy was probably holding back only to conserve assets that might be valuable if Raoul surrendered. Besides, John thought, he had to get used to combat. However terrible this was, there was even worse ahead.

Before he could argue, the bungalow shook with more explosions.

"I'll deal with it," the Terminator said.

It stepped outside, firing the AK-47 on full auto. As John watched, bullets whistled past it, and some must have struck home. The chopper flew close by.

"Look out!" John said. He didn't know how the Terminator would fare against mini-gun fire.

The Terminator launched a grenade, which hit the chopper's rear fuselage and exploded, throwing the chopper in a crazy circle. It didn't go down immediately, like a stone, but spiraled out of the sky, crash-landing with a dreadful tearing of metal. It sat there, in the darkness, but no flames went up. People might still be alive in there.

John broke away from Sarah and ran outside. The Terminator watched the wreckage of the chopper.

"Hasta la vista, baby," it said.

CHAPTER NINE

JOHN'S WORLD

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

AUGUST 2001

What should they do?

"You think we'll have to blow up Cyberdyne all over again?" John said.

"Yes," Sarah said. "I'm starting to think so. I don't like it, but I'm seriously starting to think it."

"Me, too." Four years ago, at the Tejada estancia, it had seemed much simpler. What, exactly, had they gotten themselves into?

If time was always trying to spring back at you when you changed the future, you'd have to watch it like a hawk, make sure that you never gave it a chance, hold it in its new shape with all your willpower, doing whatever it took. That put a different spin on their motto "NO FATE." There was no fate but what you worked at, continually, with all your strength. You had to hold on—until what? When could you be sure? With something like Judgment Day, when could you be absolutely sure it was not going to happen? Did it take forever? Did it mean you could never rest? Could you ever be sure it wasn't in vain?

"I know, John," Sarah said. "I know that's what you think about at night when you're on the Net."

"You mean I'm that obvious?"

"Maybe it's just an obvious way to think."

They were still in good physical shape. If they had to do something drastic, they were ready. But it was so hard to know. There were no more messages from the future to guide them. Lately, every time they'd discussed it, started this sort of conversation, it had led them nowhere.

"Sometimes I think that we'll never stop them," Sarah said. "It looks like there's always someone out there who wants to build better and better technology, until it's better than people. You'd think nothing else was important, as if there aren't a lot of other problems in the world."

"Well, machines that are better than people might not be such a bad idea, not when you think what people can be like."

"No. Don't say that,* she said quickly. "That's how Skynet must have thought. You don't know what you're saying."

"Hey, chill out, Mom. I'm one of the good guys, remember? I nearly got wasted by a Terminator, too."

As she looked at him, he realized that she still found it hard to understand how fast he'd had to grow up. He was sixteen now, certainly not a child anymore, but he'd been through stuff that made him a lot older still, at least in some ways. He had ideas of his own. Sarah must understand that.

"I won't ever forget," she said, her face creasing into worry lines. He hoped this waiting, this not knowing was not going to grind them down. Maybe it would take years before they could be sure, one way or the other.

They were both tired. Things always seemed better in the morning.

"Let's worry about it tomorrow," he said. "Maybe we're getting a bit obsessed." They'd sleep until 10:00 a.m., then do their chores for the day-training, some shopping, John's home learning program. The cyber cafe opened at 5:00 p.m. and kept them working through the evening. It was a pretty good routine, really, if a bit too crowded. If they could relax about Cyberdyne and just be plain Deborah and David Lawes, like on their passports, maybe they could fit it all in, and still make some real friends. The customers liked them. It couldn't be all that hard.

"This isn't a normal life for either of us," Sarah said, echoing some of his thoughts. "We can't tell people the truth about us, we can't relax about Judgment Day, and we can't do anything more without proof. We can't just go and endanger innocent people unless we know more about what Cyberdyne's doing. Life can be a bitch."

"And then you die, right?" When she didn't answer, he said, "Sorry, Mom. I guess that wasn't very funny."

Too many people had died, even in this reality, even without Judgment Day. Death had followed them round like a star-struck stalker. There were all the people killed by the Terminators in 1984 and 1994. There was Miles Dyson, shot dead by the SWAT team at the Cyberdyne site. John's father had been born after Judgment Day and come back-and died almost as soon as conceiving him. He guessed Sarah had never loved any of her other boyfriends like she'd loved Kyle Reese. What had happened to that reality where Kyle was born? It was real enough to have given Sarah a son. John was the product of that reality, even though it didn't exist anymore.

Or did it? Was it still there, in some ghostly, inaccessible way?

"Come on, then," Sarah said. "Maybe we should go and get ourselves killed tomorrow. Or maybe we can start living a normal life, like finding you a girlfriend."

"Sure, or finding you a boyfriend."

"Forget about that, I'm getting too old."

"Hardly, Mom."

"At least I've had you—I've had that much fulfillment in my life. I'd rather have a son than create a monster like Skynet."

"Mom!" he said, protesting. "In case you hadn't noticed, we saved the whole world about seven years ago. That should be fulfilling."

"Yeah, but for what? Maybe Judgment Day's still coming. Maybe nothing we do will stop it."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "At least we gave the world a chance. I just wish we could tell someone about it."

"Like Raoul and the others?"

"I mean someone sane—someone normal I feel like a spy or something, you know-" He put on a theatrical, melodramatic voice. "This teenage boy has a secret identity and a hidden past."

That got a laugh out of her. "I know. Come on, then. Starting tomorrow, we're going to train harder, just in case. And we're also going to meet some more people-just in case."

"Contingency planning, huh?"

"That's right."

"Okay, then. Rock and roll!"

And then someone pounded on the door. A second later, the doorbell rang—and again, and again, and again. John hurried back to the desk, Sarah a step behind him.

"We're closed for the night," she said, shouting to be heard through the door. "We open at five tomorrow afternoon."

An accented voice said, "Is that Sarah Connor?"

A shiver went up John's spine. No one in Mexico City was supposed to know their real identities.

"No, I'm sorry," she said, catching John's eye. "You're talking to Deborah Lawes. Who are you?"

She stepped around the desk, to the security unit that controlled the front door. It was built into a corner behind a pillar. There was a six-inch video screen connected to a security camera in the doorway outside. Sarah glanced back at John. At the same time, she nodded towards the big wooden chest near her feet, indicating where they kept a cache of weapons.

Robert drove quickly to the address of the El Juicio cyber cafe. As he brought the police car to a halt, a message came over the radio that a car had been stolen and its occupants killed. The car description and registration number were for the vehicle they were driving. Worse, it gave this address as the expected destination for the stolen vehicle.

"Everybody get out" Danny said. "We can't use this car."

"I'll get rid of it" Robert said. "I'll find another and meet you round the back." As the others piled out, he grabbed the radio microphone, imitating the voice of the tall cop whose uniform he was now wearing, speaking with an amused laugh. "What is this?" he said in Spanish. "No one has stolen our car..."

All the same, Anton realized, the police would investigate, no matter what Robert told them. They would have to deal with the Connors quickly, and find another car.

Anton hammered on the thick wooden door before he even noticed a doorbell. Anton pressed the doorbell several times, and then a female voice shouted from inside. "We're closed for the night. We open at five tomorrow afternoon."

"Is that Sarah Connor?" Anton said.

There was a pause and the woman's voice now came through a grate in the doorframe. "No, I'm sorry... you're talking to Deborah Lawes," the voice said. "Who are you?"

"My name is Anton Panov," he said, speaking into the grate. Presumably there was a microphone there.

"That doesn't mean anything to me."

From the distance came the sound of a police siren, then another, from a different direction.

"There's no time to explain," he said. "Come with us, quickly, if you want to live."

John didn't know what to make of the voice. It spoke in English with an accent that sounded Russian, like the name it had given. Whoever Anton Panov was, he knew their real identity, which was very dangerous. John and Sarah were still wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities. Worse still, what if he was another emissary of Skynet? That would confirm Judgment Day was still coming.

There were police sirens, coming closer.

The security camera mounted outside, over the doorway, showed a big, gray-haired man in a dark brown police uniform. That was Panov, the one doing the talking. He looked really tough. There seemed to be three others with him: two young women dressed for a night out at a dance club, and a black guy in a flashy dinner suit. The black guy looked familiar. It was hard to tell from the low-quality image, but he looked awfully like Skynet's inventor, Miles Dyson. Yet Miles had died seven years ago.

"How many of you are there?" Sarah said. "I count four. Don't try to fool me."

"Four of us and one other, on his way back here."

As Sarah spoke, John shifted the wooden cabinet, then pulled back a strip of carpet and removed a loose floorboard to reveal a trap door. He opened this and took out a CAR-15 assault rifle. Quietly, he passed it up to Sarah. She checked it over quickly. John found two .45 caliber pistols, then a 12-gauge shotgun-the only light firearm that had ever shown enough stopping power to be useful against a Terminator. He stuck one pistol in the belt of his jeans and handed the other to Sarah.

"Is John with you?" Panov said.