T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (10 page)

Miles had his own ten-by-ten square office tucked away In a corner of Level A, the complex's top floor. He'd left its walls and its metal shelving almost bare, since his real office and his real life were back in LA. His desk was topped with computer equipment: two screens running, performing calculations; keyboards; processing units; and a high-quality printer. To the left was a framed photo of his wife, Tarissa, and son, Danny. In front of that, Miles had placed a pile of computer printouts, half an inch thick, marked with highlighter pen and indexed crudely with yellow sticky notes.

He held his head in both hands, thankful that he'd sent Tarissa and Danny on a holiday to Mexico, "just in case," wishing he could have joined them.

As the digital readout on his computer screen turned over to
23:30
hours, his worries reached a crisis point. He called Oscar Cruz, who was who was still on deck tonight, like everyone else who counted. "You free, Oscar?"

"Hello, Miles," Oscar said. He sounded pretty tense himself, which was understandable. "Is anything wrong?"

"No, nothing definite. Nothing's happened—just getting nervous."

Oscar laughed nervously. "Me, too, of course. I have to ring Charles Layton in a minute—I'm updating him every hour. You know how he feels about all this. I'll talk with you a little later."

Layton
was never an easy man to deal with. Mentally, Miles wished Oscar luck. "Do you mind if I have a word with Jack?" he said.

"Go ahead. We'll all catch up after I've spoken to Charles."

Miles would be meeting through the
 
night with Oscar, Jack Reed and Samantha Jones, but he needed to talk now. He called Jack, who answered his phone immediately: "Reed speaking."

"Miles Dyson here, Jack."

"Yeah, Miles, what's up? Anything wrong at your end?"

"No, nothing actually wrong. I just had a word with Oscar. At my end, everything is nominal."

"Good. You sound like you want to talk it over."

"If you've got a minute."

"Yeah, okay. Come around. I'm damn sure not going anywhere tonight."

"I know. See you soon."

"Let's get a cup of coffee first. Then we can talk in my room."

Miles grabbed the printouts from his desk, and walked next door to a small kitchen with a microwave. He made two cups of plunger coffee and found a wedge of pizza in the refrigerator.

As he warmed the pizza through, Jack came in, looking tired but vaguely amused. His sun-leathered, wrinkled face was capped by a full head of brown hair, graying only at the temples, combed back in waves over his ears. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. "So what's the story?" he said.

Miles replied with a rueful shrug.

As the civilian Defense officer in charge of the Skynet project, Jack Reed was Cyberdyne's immediate client, the man that Miles and Oscar had to keep happy. He was also the only person here with the authority to shut down Skynet. Though Miles had developed some rapport with him, it was currently being stretched.

"Maybe I'm just too nervous tonight," Miles said.

"Sure, we all are, but you guys have been doing a great job. Everything's been working perfectly."

"Yeah, Jack, technically it's fine. Better than fine. But this stuff still bothers me." Miles gestured with the printouts. "And Skynet has been acting pretty strangely."

"Strangely, you think? How?"

"It's too good. It's better than we designed it."

The microwave pinged to say Miles's pizza was ready. He found a plate for it, then poured the coffee into a pair of chipped mugs. "Let's go back to my office," Jack said. "It's a
helluva
lot more comfortable than here."

Jack had a plush twenty-foot by ten-foot office, the best in the complex, harshly lit by fluorescent tubes shining through plastic deflectors. There was a shiny, black-topped desk near the entrance. Built into the opposite wall was a floor-to-ceiling video unit, nearly ten feet across. Like Miles, he'd left his office here largely undecorated. On one wall he'd
Blu
-tacked a large poster of the boxer
Muhammed
Ali, taken from a 1960s photograph—one of the fights with Sonny
Liston
.

They sat at a plain wooden coffee table in the farthest corner from the doorway. As Miles chewed his pizza, Jack said, "That stuff really bothering you?" He gestured at the printouts, on the floor at Miles's feet.

Miles bent and picked up the top page. "Well, yeah." Like the others in charge here, he'd been given 150-odd pages of postings on Internet sites and public mailing groups, all predicting that Skynet would malfunction tonight and cause a nuclear holocaust. "Yeah, Jack, it is bothering me."

"It's just another conspiracy theory," Jack said. "The Internet thrives on them. You know that, Miles. If there was a conspiracy in this case, we'd be the first to know about it, wouldn't we?"

"That's true, as far as it goes."

"Yeah... but?"

The material was uncannily pertinent and well-informed. The initial claims were traceable to a criminal psychotic called Sarah Connor, who'd been imprisoned when she tried to blow up a government computer research project in
1993. In
May 1994, she'd made a violent escape from the
Pescadero
State
Hospital
for the Criminally Insane. She'd been on the run ever since. Her claims had taken on a life of their own. More and more people were supporting them, or at least finding their own reasons to object to Skynet—there'd been demonstrations in
California
, where the movement seemed to have a power base, and even in
Colorado Springs
. Meanwhile, no one had ever spotted Connor.

Miles felt like a fool, but it hadn't stopped him persuading Tarissa to take that holiday with Danny while he was holed up at the complex. "What bothers me is how they've got so many things right," he said.

"There's been a leak somewhere," Jack said, as if by reflex. "We've gone over that before."

"But some of the decisions weren't even made when this stuff started to come out. You know that—the August 4 launch date only got firmed up in April, but there are predictions here going back to late 1994." He picked up the whole sheaf of papers and found one he'd marked, covered in Miles's orange highlighter pen, and dated nearly three years ago. At that stage, Cyberdyne had only just worked out the basics of its new computer hardware. "How do you explain that?"

"So someone got lucky."

"Not a good answer, Jack." He smiled wearily, knowing there was no good answer—they both knew it.

Jack sounded exasperated. "I don't know." Then he became more aggressive: "But what else did they pick? Just tell me that, Miles. What else have they got that's so impressive?"

"Well, the whole thing—"

"No. Not good enough. Number one, we always planned to call the system 'Skynet' and build it here in
Colorado
. Getting that right cuts no ice with me. And the rest is all vague. Sure, I take your point about the launch date—I can't explain that. But what's your explanation? Are you starting to think Sarah Connor got it from some robot that came back from the future—like it says there?" He pointed contemptuously at the material.

"Well, given the circumstances, it's not much wackier than anything else." For a moment there was a silence between them. "You know what I mean," Miles said gently. "For all we can tell, that's how we got the technology in the first place."

It seemed crazy expressing these doubts to his client.
Not good marketing, Miles
, he thought. Charles Layton and Oscar Cruz wouldn't approve. Still, the government already understood the circumstances in which the 1984 chip had been found in a Cyberdyne plant. Everyone knew how strange it was. They all had to face the facts.

"Yeah," Reed said, "I know. I can't explain the 1984 chip, either."

"No, none of us can, and I'm getting ready to believe almost anything."

Whatever the device discovered back in 1984 had been, the nanochip had been eerily advanced. It had given Miles and his people the start they'd needed to develop AI chips that now controlled many of
America
's defense assets, culminating in the massively parallel system of
nanoprocessors
that made up the Skynet AI

"So what are you advising me to do?" Jack said. "You want me to shut the sucker down?"

"Well, I don't know about that. Any formal Cyberdyne advice would
  
have
 
to
 
come from
 
Oscar
 
or Charles."

Jack gave a cynical smile. "How about off the record?"

"Off the record?"

"Yeah. What would you do? Off the record, Miles. Don't jerk me around."

"I think we should suspend the system's operations for the rest of the night."

"Yeah? You're really serious, aren't you? Look, I hear what you're saying, but—"

"Let's put the issue completely beyond doubt. It's not like we don't have back-up at
Cheyenne
Mountain
."

"Look at it from my point of view. You're advising me to shut down a functioning strategic tool because some nutcase says it's going to go berserk and cause a nuclear war, right? But that can't happen, Miles—you know that as well as I do. The whole system's not set up that way."

"But it's what's these printouts predict, and the people who post this stuff have a track record for being right."

"Not about anything like that."

Miles thought that over. "Sure. And it's probably all crazy, or a hoax." He smiled. "Don't worry, I'm not going nuts myself. But the point remains: Whoever started this is amazingly well-informed, whether it's Connor or—I don't know—whoever. I realize that the system can't just go berserk, but something's behind all this. I wish I knew what."

"You're thinking in terms of sabotage?"

"Yeah, maybe, though I can't see how—"

"No, and it'd be pretty damn funny for these people to try to sabotage the system to bring about the very result they most fear."

"Yeah, I know."

"Anyway, what good would it do them?" Jack paused for emphasis. "Look, everyone's briefed from the President down. Okay? You know the system can't go firing off missiles without human confirmation. If there
is
some sort of glitch, we'll deal with it. Right now, I just can't see the problem."

"I can't see it either," Miles admitted, feeling defeated, but wanting to persist, just a little further, if only to see whether Jack could put his fears at rest. "Not the exact problem. But, on top of all this, the system is an order of magnitude better than we designed it to be. We've implemented something that we don't fully understand. It's so advanced, and it's starting to act almost like it's alive."

"Yeah, okay, but that doesn't mean it's unsafe. Miles, I can't go back to the President and explain that I took the system down for hours just because of this stuff on the Net...and a bad feeling you've been getting lately... because the system is too good Give me a break, I need something better than that."

Miles sighed. "Yeah, I know." He rose. "Look, thanks for your time, Jack. It's clarified things. I'll see you later on."

"Sure. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to have a talk to Skynet."

Jack looked at him quizzically for moment, then laughed good-naturedly. "Sure, you might as well. If it'll make you feel better."

After Miles left his office, Jack Reed started making phone calls, just to keep everyone in the loop.

First, he called Charles Layton, the Chairman of Cyberdyne's Board of Directors, in L.A. Jack had found
Layton
to be a hard-nosed character with a soft, menacing way of speaking. He would not take kindly to any criticism of Cyberdyne, real or imagined, but that was too bad. If there was even a remote possibility of sabotage or malfunction, decisions about Skynet ultimately sat with the government, not with Cyberdyne. Still, they needed to keep the guy in the loop.

He answered the phone. "
Layton
here."

"Jack Reed here, Charles."

"Yes, Jack,"
Layton
said quietly. He always went out of his way not to sound involved or excited.

"I've been talking to Miles."

"Very good. I just got off the phone with Oscar Cruz. He tells me everything is working well."

"Sure, the system's working fine so far. But Miles seems pretty damn jittery about all this opposition to Skynet—I think he half-expects sabotage, though I can't see what motivation anyone would have to interfere with it."

"I understand,"
Layton
said in a definite way, as if understating some remarkable achievement. "Are you proposing any action?"