Terminator 3--Terminator Dreams Page 4

  Ten years ago, when the bunkhouse was first built, the property looked almost the same from this perspective, but it was actually much larger. Then, Hugo Ávila was finally facing the reality that none of his three sons was going to follow in their father’s profession. Lon, the oldest at twenty-two, had just graduated from business school and seemed destined for a successful career with the San Francisco brokerage that had hired him. Alex, the twenty-year-old middle son, was in his junior year of college and was adamant about following the career path of an uncle in law enforcement. Danny, the youngest, at sixteen, had been accepted for admission to UCLA, and his academic successes so far, plus his obvious genius with computer programming, made his father tremendously proud of him.

  But that left the Ávilas without a farmer in the new generation, and Hugo, no tradition-bound fool, did not even try to lure his sons back to his way of life. Instead, with an unspoken regret, he began selling or leasing the more distant fields and pastures to surrounding farms and ranches. He built a small bunkhouse and hired seasonal workers for the peak work times of the year. The rest of the work he did himself, sometimes joined by sons home on weekends.

  Even today, in spite of its reduced circumstances, the property was still profitable, still theirs. Hugo Ávila was five years in his grave, but his commonsense preparations had ensured that the family still had a home to return to, regardless of how broadly scattered they might be from time to time. There was an unspoken agreement between Danny and Lon that, whatever happened, the farm would remain in Ávila hands.

  Danny put the Jeep into gear and turned east, rightward, onto 58, the highway that took him every workday to Edwards Air Force Base.

  * * *

  Edwards AFB, in addition to being a working U.S. Air Force base and an alternate landing site for the space shuttle, housed many public and not-so-public operations: NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the chief research and development facility of Cyber Research Systems (Autonomous Weapons Division). Edwards, a part of the tabloid-notorious Area 51 testing center, conceivably housed many more projects even more secretive than CRS; Danny didn’t know and didn’t care.

  Much of the CRS Autonomous Weapons Division lay underground—machine fabrication areas, testing ranges, communications center, generators, access to the complex’s very own particle accelerator. But at the surface it looked like nothing more than a nicely modern glass-and-metal office building three stories tall. A spy satellite trained on the site would see Danny drive into the Edwards complex through the North Gate, navigate his Jeep almost to the complex’s south end to the CRS building, and enter his workplace just as thousands of civilian employees of the military did at scores of bases across the United States and its possessions.

  But as he took the elevator down to the first basement level, which served as home base for the project’s programmers, he could reflect, with satisfaction and an edge of worry, that this base was as secret, mysterious, and potentially unbalancing of the world’s balance of power, as the first atomic-missile bases had been fifty-odd years ago.

  He walked into Cube Hell and took in the usual quiet chaos of clicking keys, muffled curses, and conversation. On the far side of the room, something tiny and glinting—a paper clip launched from a rubber band—shot up from one cubicle to strike the acoustic tile of the ceiling and ricochet down into the adjacent cubicle, followed by an unrestrained cry of, “You bastard.”

  Danny grinned. It was his second home.

  Then, from the vicinity of Danny’s own double-wide, double-deep cubicle, Dr. Sherman stood up, and Danny’s heart sank.

  Phil Sherman was, in theory, lead programmer on the next-generation Terminator project. Like Danny, he was lean and above-average height, but he lacked Danny’s broad shoulders. His green eyes behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed glasses, his hair graying, dressed in a conservative gray suit, Sherman looked like he could be a banker by day and a friendly grandfather by night, though he had been a programmer and developer on several of the Apollo moon shots and many NASA and military projects since. His skills hadn’t kept up with modern programming languages and tools, but he was unusually adept at finding, hiring, and managing the most talented of today’s generation of code wranglers.

  But his presence at Danny’s cubicle at the start of work usually meant something had gone wrong. Sherman’s office was several stories up, on the same level as the Computer Center and General Brewster’s office.

  Danny hurried over. “What’s wrong, Phil?”

  Sherman smiled. “Diplomatic relations breaking down between the military and civilian side of things, as usual. General Brewster’s going to perform a demonstration with Scowl at noon today. And Scowl’s not feeling cooperative.”

  Danny moved into his cubicle and sat in front of his computer; he powered up its monitor and logged in. Scowl, a prototype Terminator, was the test bed for new operating system innovations and engineering improvements. It had all the functionality of the first-generation T-1s that had been secretly deployed to sites across the United States, but was much smaller; T-1s were nearly the size of midsize cars, while Scowl could be packed into a civilian van with room to spare. T-1s had arms that ended in tank-busting chain guns, while Scowl’s arms were fitted with articulated metal hands … and the robot’s programming allowed it to operate every small arm, every man-portable missile system in the U.S. military arsenal, in theory at least. Scowl was the Terminator onto which he and his team loaded each new update to the operating system, each program patch with a new feature.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s trying to fly.” Sherman sat in Danny’s guest chair. “We’ve got some footage on the problem. Look in the bug list directory for a file named ‘flapper.’”

  “Brewster’s going to kill us.” The whispered comment came from above Sherman’s head. Danny turned to look. Jerry Squires, another team programmer, was standing in his adjacent cubicle, resting his chin on the partition in between. The effect was that of a narrow, diabolic-looking severed head with tousled sandy hair having been balanced there.

  Danny turned back to his monitor. He found the file in question and double-clicked on it to launch the recording. “You ever been in Brewster’s office, Jer?”

  Squires continued his spectral-whisper voice. “No.”

  “You know what’s on his desk?”

  “Again I say no.”

  “A picture of his daughter. His daughter’s kind of hot. I say, general’s got a hot daughter, you strive to make him happy every day of the year, against the time he’s so happy with you he invites you home for Thanksgiving.”

  Danny’s monitor resolved itself to a view, from low-ceiling height, of Scowl. The squat tracked robot was situated before a folding table. On the table were several objects: a chess set whose pieces’ locations suggested that a game was well underway; a glass half-full of clear liquid; and a handgun Danny recognized as an M9 Beretta, the armed forces’ standard-issue 9mm semi-automatic. “Manual dexterity tests?”

  “That’s right,” Sherman said. “Plus a test of the interface between Scowl, the mainframe control, and a commercial chess program. Jer got it all functioning last night … but not exactly successfully.”

  The severed head, no longer whispering, said, “Hey.” The word was a complaint.

  On screen, the Terminator began to reach for the chessboard. But before its arm had moved more than a few inches, it folded the arm up at the elbow and tucked it into place against its body, raised and lowered it, and did it again. Only then did it reach out to grasp one of the knights on the chessboard. With slow deliberation, it lifted the piece and set it down to endanger a white bishop.

  The tucking and flapping looked curiously like a bird with a damaged wing trying to lift off. Danny snickered. “How often does it do that?”

  “Every time it’s called on to use either arm,” Sherman said. “The only arm-related task that doesn’t set it off is a diagnostics ch
eck. Think you can fix it before noon?”

  Danny turned an incredulous expression on him. “What, based on what I’ve seen here? Without even digging into the code?”

  “Yes.”

  Danny relented. “I think I can fix it in ten or twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Jer objected. “I’ve been here all night working on it. I haven’t been home.”

  “That explains the smell.”

  “Anyway, I can’t figure it out.”

  “I can.” Danny pointed a finger accusingly at him. “Let me guess. You were fiddling with the fine-manipulation code last night to keep Scowl from knocking down as many chess pieces as usual. And at some point you cut and pasted in some of the self-checking stuff I did yesterday for its set-up-for-transport mode.”

  “Well … yeah. How’d you know?”

  “The code you borrowed is structured like some of the standard problem-solving routines. It calls subroutines that figure out all the motion control steps for the task it’s been presented. But since I wrote it specifically for machine shutdown, the task is automatically assumed to be ‘fold up for transport.’ So there are a couple of places where, instead of looking for the register that defines its current task, it automatically assumes shutdown procedures have begun, and it folds up its arm to lock into place. Instead of going ‘move chess piece,’ it’s going ‘shutdown, shutdown, move chess piece.’”

  The severed head winced. “That’s your fault. You were sloppy.”

  “I wrote it from scratch. You borrowed it and did a lousy job of filing off the serial numbers. Who’s sloppy?”

  “You are.”

  Sherman rose, a tolerant smile on his face. “Gentlemen, I’ll send over some Nerf pistols so you can duel at dawn. In the meantime, Danny, I’d appreciate it if you’d get this straightened out so the general doesn’t pop his cork.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “And I’ll tell him you think his daughter’s kind of hot.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  With Sherman gone, Jer stared down at him. “Your mistake was in saying ‘kind of hot.’ Two mistakes for the price of one. You’re suggesting that you could bag his little girl, but also that she’s not the most baggable little girl in all the world.”

  “Go home, code thief.” Danny turned back to his monitor.

  The footage of the Terminator’s chicken-wing antics was certainly amusing. Danny played it several more times before getting to work on repairing the code. Someday, he hoped, the early stages of the Terminator project would be declassified so the footage could show up on a blooper reel or as an Internet download.

  C.4

  August 2029

  Vega Compound, Sacramento, California

  John Connor snapped to wakefulness in full darkness.

  That’s the way it usually happened. Most of the places he slept were within caves, abandoned missile sites, surviving basements beneath collapsed buildings, hidden bunkers. Generally, the air was too warm and still, often stinking of long human occupation without the benefit of occasional thorough cleaning.

  Now, he felt the warm heaviness of the air and heard no sound to indicate that they were in trouble. As his first panic subsided, he knew where he was: Vega Compound, once a set of steam tunnels beneath California State University in Sacramento, now a community of a few dozen humans … and, for John’s convoy of trucks, a temporary way station. The leader of the little community had given John and Kate a private chamber, once a spacious janitor’s closet, as their bedroom, and had situated John’s circle of commanders and soldiers in an adjacent tunnel they could have to themselves.

  He didn’t have to reach out to feel that Kate was still beside him. The bed they shared, two cots roped together with a number of tatty blankets thrown over them to smooth out where the cot supports protruded, was barely large enough for them.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “For what?”

  “Waking you up.”

  “You didn’t wake me up. A dream woke me up.”

  “Me, too. What was yours about?”

  He snorted. “It was pretty silly. An old-style Terminator, like a T-1 except it had hands, with a problem with its arms.”

  “It flapped them like a chicken?”

  He raised his head off the folded blanket that served him as a pillow. “Was I talking in my sleep?”

  “No. That was my dream, too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I’m spooked.”

  “I don’t blame you.” He gauged his state of wakefulness and decided that he wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep again anytime soon, regardless of what hour it was. He pulled the sheet off him. “I think I’ll go see if Kyla has checked in.”

  “I think I’ll go with you.”

  * * *

  When they emerged from their converted closet, they were dressed in faded khaki uniforms that were often dress of the day for Connor’s command staff. The broad concrete hallway beyond was dimly lit by hanging lamps. These flickered and popped at intervals, fueled by badly rendered oils; John made a note to himself to find someone to offer the Vega Compound leaders technical advice on rendering fats.

  A few feet nearer than the closest lamp to the left, Earl Duncan sat in a folding metal chair suited to university use. Only its two rear legs were on the floor; he had it leaned backward against the peeling green corridor wall. His shotgun, an over-and-under model, lay across his lap; he held a tattered paperback book above it. He gave them a cordial nod. “’Morning.”

  “Good morning, Earl,” Kate said. Something about Earl’s solemnity and dignity had always caused her to speak to him with a little more formality than she reserved for others. “What time is it?”

  “’Bout four A.M.”

  “Has Kyla checked in?”

  Earl nodded. “We got a short text transmission from her and Mark Herrera a couple hours ago. They’ll be in by twilight tonight. They managed to get Transport Five out of there intact.”

  Kate sighed as two days of tension began to leech away. “Thank God. How about the dogs?”

  Earl grinned. “Dogs are okay.”

  John let out a breath. “Earl, you could have awakened us to tell us.”

  Earl offered up a low chuckle. “Boss, I don’t cost anyone sleep for anything short of a T-600 or an avalanche.”

  “Well, I suspect Mike feels the same way I do, so I’ll wake her up to tell her that her son’s still alive.”

  Earl shook his head. “No need. She got up a minute ago. I told her. She went off to the mess to get some breakfast just before you came out.”

  “Doesn’t anyone sleep around here?” Those words, projected in a sullen whisper, came from the darkened portion of the corridor where the cots for Connor’s command staff and other traveling staff were situated.

  Out of that darkness walked Dr. Tamara Lake, the Resistance’s senior authority on genetics and high-level biological matters. When not involved in work related to her speciality, she also served as Connor’s command staff doctor, accompanying him on his travels.

  Now in her midfifties, Lake had seen the beauty of her youth fade, but she still bore a trace of it in the elegant lines of her face. Her hair was now completely gray, but she kept it cut short and arranged in a hairstyle reminiscent of social sophisticates of thirty years ago; she’d obviously just run a brush through it, since it wasn’t disarrayed. Unlike most members of the command staff, she preferred civilian dress whenever possible, and often traded to have one or two nonmilitary garments available to her; now she wore her sleep-shirt, a not-too-faded blue linen tunic that fell to just above her knees and showed off her still-shapely legs to good effect.

  Over the years, John had occasionally seen Lake out of control, and knew how bitter she was at having lost her life of high-end medical research, grant proposals, and California celebrity socializing when Judgment Day came. But still he didn’t know whether to appreciate her struggle to keep age at bay, or
to pity her for it.

  “Did we wake you up?” John asked. “Sorry about that.”

  Lake shook her head. “No,” she said around a yawn. “Weird dream. Got any booze, Earl?”

  Earl just cocked an eyebrow at her. He didn’t drink, as she’d known for twenty years.

  John and Kate exchanged a look. “What sort of dream?” Kate asked.

  “It was silly. An old-style Terminator with a—”

  “Malfunctioning arm,” John finished. A chill of worry, reaction to being suddenly confronted with the unknown and inexplicable, settled in his stomach, and intensified when Lake turned a startled expression on him. “Let’s go find Mike and put the same question to her,” he said.

  * * *

  “Just like mine,” Michaela Herrera confirmed. She sat at a folding table in the concrete hallway that served Vega Compound as a mess hall. A tall, strongly built Mexican-American, she had a pattern of burn scars on her right neck and cheek that decorated her like a tribal tattoo. Her brown eyes, normally directed like spotlights on whatever had her attention, held an expression of worry. One of Connor’s chief scientific advisers, she was a member of the staff that unraveled the means of operating the Continuum Transporter, the time-travel device the Resistance had discovered early that year … the device Connor had used to send his own father, Kyle Reese, back into the past.

  “So what does it mean?” John asked. “Opinions, anyone?”

  “We can rule out anyone hearing you or Kate talking in your sleep,” Lake said. She ran both hands back through her hair. The gesture tightened her sleep-shirt over her bosom. John saw Kate roll her eyes at this obvious, if minor, ploy for attention. “So we’re talking about some sort of extraordinary level of contact.”