C.3

June, Present Day

Ávila Property, East of Bakersfield, California

Danny Ávila watched the smoke cloud rise out of the ruined building. For just a moment, it assumed the aspect of a skull, but he didn’t know whether it was a human skull or the new-series Terminator cranial housing the engineers were developing. Then the smoke twisted, causing one eye socket to bulge. The skull’s mouth widened as though it were straining just before a ferocious bite to come, and—

Danny’s head banged down on something hard. He opened his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

He was face-down on the floorboards beside his bed. In his peripheral vision, he could see the shoe boxes, unsorted socks, and dust bunnies that occupied the space beneath his bed.

Someone tapped on his bedroom door. “Danielcito?”

He stood, still a little sleep-bleary. Morning light poured in through his east-facing window. Above his window and door, and above the bookcases that surrounded his bed, were the only places he could see the room’s walls. “Yes, Mama?”

“¿Estás bien?” Are you all right?

The clock on his headboard read 6:58. His dream had cost him two minutes of precious sleep. “Yes, Mama. I, uh, dropped a book on the floor.”

“Breakfast is ready.” Once upon a time, she never would have switched to English, nor would Danny have answered her in English. While Danny’s father Hugo was alive, his rule had been a simple and consistent one: Spanish in the house, English everywhere else. It was a sensible guideline; Hugo hadn’t wanted his family to become so Anglicized that they lost their mother tongue or so Spanish-oriented that they suffered in school or business. Danny thought that the rule would probably come back into force if ever there were children in the house again. But Danny and his brothers were grown, there were no children in the house, and Hugo was dead, victim of a heart attack years ago. So his family relaxed the rules a bit.

“I’ll be right down.” He grinned. Mama saying “Breakfast is ready” at this time of day was akin to saying, “The sun came up a while ago.” Unless atomic bombs rained down on Kern County, he’d never need to ask whether breakfast was ready in the Ávila house at seven A.M.

He turned to the laptop on his dresser. The first ritual of any morning was checking his e-mail.

Ten minutes later, dressed and up to date on e-mail, his laptop in the soft-sided briefcase he habitually carried, he reached the dining-room table downstairs.

Linda was already at the table, wearing her green-and-gold Kern County Sheriff’s Department uniform, her blond hair back in a ponytail, the uniform’s green jacket across the back of her chair. A book lay open beside her plate, and she was sufficiently wrapped up in reading it that she did not hear Danny’s arrival.

Danny leaned over her shoulder to look at it. “Superstrings, huh? That’s high-order math. Aren’t you too blond for that?”

She glanced up at him, her features set in a mock scowl that couldn’t quite mask a grin. She was not a beautiful woman, but had attractive features and intelligent, deep brown eyes. “I’m surprised you recognize the term,” she said. “I figured a code-geek like you would think superstrings came spraying out of a can.”

“You wound me, Deputy. And only breakfast can take away the sting.” He took his usual chair opposite her, facing the room’s front window with its view of the family’s pastures and the highway beyond. “No, really. Is this for class?” Linda took classes two nights a week, working her way, as quickly as her schedule would allow, toward a master’s degree in physics. Danny thought it was an unusual choice, figuring a sheriff’s deputy seeking higher education would gravitate to law or criminology, but Linda had always said that law enforcement was her job but not her career.

“Just some side reading. I have to figure out whether I’m going to invent time travel or faster-than-light travel first. This’ll help.”

“Danny?” Mama called from the kitchen. “You want the usual?”

“No, Mama. I want what I always have.” Here, “the usual” meant an Hugo Ávila breakfast—a plug of cholesterol arranged into scrambled eggs with cheese, fried sausage patties, French toast, and other tasty, heart-stopping choices. It was no use telling Mama that this diet had probably shortened Hugo’s life by decades; to her, this was what a breakfast should be.

Danny heard his mother’s sigh, and he mouthed the words as she spoke them: “Danny, you’re too skinny.”

“Got to stay skinny, Mama. Need to attract a woman someday, and you know it’s going to be with my looks, not my personality. You did say something about eventually wanting grandchildren, right?” He regretted the words as soon as he said them. Linda and his brother Alejandro, who went by Alex, had planned to have children someday, and he didn’t know whether Linda was sensitive about the subject. But she hadn’t reacted at all to his words; instead, she raised her hands over her head in a stretch to banish the last sleepiness of the morning.

Danny managed not to stare. He did love the sight of a woman in uniform.

No, it was more than that. He knew his heart raced every time he came in close contact with Linda. But it wasn’t all that good an idea to go lusting after the widow of his own brother.

He’d always worried, just a little, that some members of his family didn’t fully accept her. A transplanted Texan who had come to California to attend USC, she had an Anglo mother and a Latino father, and there was no language barrier for her in the bilingual household. But she never went to church or allowed herself to be drawn into discussions of faith, and she hadn’t become pregnant in the year she’d been married to Alex. More conservative members of the extended family and their friends wondered if she even considered herself a Christian.

Mama came out and set a plate in front of Danny—scrambled eggs, no cheese, salsa on top, ordinary toast, a peeled orange. She looked at it disapprovingly.

Mama Teresa Ávila was the polar opposite of her late husband. She was a small woman—tiny, really—whose metabolism and relentless activity level burned through calories at a rate that would make Hollywood starlets sick with envy. Despite her efforts to fatten up everyone remotely related to her, she was lean. At fifty, she had yet to get her first gray hair. Her strongest facial feature was a proud and prominent Aztec nose, which Danny, when teasing her, would refer to as her can-opener. “This is not enough to keep a hamster alive,” she said.

“It’s fine, Mama.” Danny plunged a fork into the eggs, indicating that he was content with such sorry fare. “Besides, you know programmers can live on diets that would kill lesser men. At work I sustain myself eating lead paint chips, scorpions, and very small rocks.”

She offered him a long-suffering sigh and returned to the kitchen.

Linda snickered. “One of these days, she’s going to brain you with a ladle.”

“Papa always said you have to deal with a strong-willed woman by being so much trouble that you break her morale.”

“Alex used to tell me that. When he was being troublesome, of course.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “I wonder if Mama’s getting a little deaf. I don’t think she can tell the difference between a book and a body hitting the floor.”

Danny shrugged, swallowing his first mouthful of eggs. “I fell out of bed. Bad dream.”

“You were back in high school, naked, on test day…”

He grinned. “I haven’t had that dream in days. No, one of the weapon systems I’m working on went haywire, tried to kill a bunch of people, and blew up.” His family knew that he programmed weapon systems for the Air Force, but not what sort of systems. No one outside of work knew that he was a lead programmer at CRS, working on next-generation Terminator operating systems and Terminator-Skynet interface routines. He was on the cutting edge of technology that would someday render the modern infantryman, tank, and helicopter obsolete.

But in his dream, an extremely advanced Terminator, a variety that was just now on the drawing boards at CRS, walking on two legs instead of grinding along on tracks, hadn’t been serving the interests of human masters, hadn’t been targeting enemy troops or matériel. It had been trying to exterminate Americans in the ruins of an American city. The dream had been unsettling.

Linda finished the last of her breakfast and stood. “I’ve gotta go.” She picked up her plate.

From the kitchen, Mama called, “Just leave that, dear. I’ll get it.”

Danny shot Linda an accusing look. “She’s not going deaf,” he whispered.

Linda grinned. “Don’t you just love a peace officer who lies to you?”

*   *   *

The gravel driveway leading off the Ávila property was one lane wide, and the gravel hadn’t recently been replenished; the track was now two shallow earthen ruts with gravel between them and to either side. Danny stopped his car, a late-model Jeep Grand Cherokee in sunlight-reflecting white, just before the driveway reached Highway 58 and looked back across the property.

In the foreground were acres and acres of pasturage, slightly rolling land with patches of hardy grasses and scrub bushes throughout. Spotted cattle not yet enervated by early summer sun slowly moved from patch to patch. In the middle distance rose the family home, a wide, two-story wooden farmhouse built in the 1930s and carefully maintained in the decades since; it gleamed yellow, with white trim, in the morning sunlight. To the left of it was a low single-story bunkhouse built much more recently, and nearby were the barn, pump house, and other auxiliary buildings of a working farm. Farther out were groves of oranges and pistachios.

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 check. 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.