C.5

June, Present Day

Ávila Property

Danny was already at the breakfast table when Linda came downstairs. That was unusual in and of itself, but he also looked different.

Danny was a good-looking kid, there was no getting past it. He was as big as Alex had been, broad in the shoulder and skinny at the waist, with a face that belonged on TV—handsome, a little bland, like a TV sportscaster or a pop star who would never achieve the highest level of success. To make it worse, one black curl usually drooped onto his forehead, like Superman in the comic books.

Actually, Linda reminded herself, she shouldn’t think of Danny as a kid—she was only a couple of months older than he. But being married to his brother had put her into an increment of a generation older than he, and his manner, always energetic and humorous, just seemed youthful in this sober family.

Today, though, weariness seemed to have leeched some of Danny’s handsomeness away. There were faint dark circles under his eyes and his black hair looked tousled, unwashed. He leaned over his plate as though shielding it from an anticipated rainstorm. He had a small spiral notebook on the table beside his plate, and Linda saw he had made a lengthy list on it. Many items were lined through.

She sat at her usual place opposite him. “Well, you’re up early.”

“Been up for hours,” he admitted, and rubbed his eyes.

“Doing what?”

“Shopping.”

“Shopping?” She frowned, then realized what he must have meant. “Oh, online.”

“That’s right.”

“For what?”

“Project.”

“Well, that makes everything clear.”

“Linda, you want the usual?” That was Mama, from the kitchen.

“No, thank you, Mama. Just some eggs and toast.”

“Eggs and biscuits and gravy, that’s what we have today.”

“That’s great.” Curious, Linda tried to read the items on Danny’s list, but his handwriting, bad even when right-side up, defeated her. He flipped the notebook shut, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because she was peeking or he’d planned to anyway. His eyes, intent on what little remained of his eggs, gave nothing away.

“So how’s work?” Linda asked.

He shot her a look, and to her surprise it appeared to hold a trace of guilt. He took a moment to answer. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m doing fine. Doing great. No problems. Fixing other people’s problems, in fact.” He was speaking more quickly than usual. “But, you know I work on weapon systems.”

“Yeah, I know.” She suspected, considering stray comments he had made about programming problems, that he worked on high-end targeting systems for comparatively close-range weapons, possibly for Vulcan machine guns or antimissile defenses. She would never tell him what she’d guessed; she didn’t want him to become defensive or feel that he needed to be more secretive about his work.

“But I wonder, you know, weapons. Put ’em in the wrong hands and people get killed. Our people, I mean. Not the other people. Not the people who are supposed to get killed. Or maybe everybody gets killed, you know?”

“Uh, yeah.” Linda revised her estimate of what Danny was doing. All of a sudden, it sounded more like it related to weapons of mass destruction—maybe nuclear missiles. “But you’re going to do your job right. Nobody will get hurt because you’ve made a mistake. You’re like Alex. A perfectionist.”

“True.” Danny stared off into the distance, through house walls and across broad pastures. “If I do everything exactly, exactly right, nothing will go wrong.”

Linda felt her throat tighten. Alex had been a perfectionist, but he had been human. He’d made mistakes. One of them resulted in him being found face-down in the road, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.

She tried to pry her attention and his from that forlorn memory. “Um, you’re starting to look like you need a day off—”

“Gotta go.” He stood, rocking his chair back; he caught it as it began to fall over. He set it back on its feet and picked up his notebook. “Going to do some old-fashioned analog shopping before I go in to work. Can I get you anything? Can of superstring?”

“Nothing I suspect you’d want to pick up for me, no.”

“Ah.” He made the word sound wise. “Adios.”

Mama came in to set a plate down in front of Linda as Danny made his hasty departure. She stared after him, shaking her head.

“Any idea what that’s all about?” Linda asked.

“I think he needs a girlfriend to calm him down,” Mama said. “All the Ávila men are like that, including Hugo. Run around like wild dogs until they’re forced to get serious about something. Danny’s the baby, but he’s already older than any of his brothers or father when they got married. So I think he’s just crazy.” She reached out to smooth a stray strand of blond hair from Linda’s eyes. “What was it they called it on TV yesterday? Testosterone poisoning.”

Linda nearly snorted up her first mouthful of eggs.

*   *   *

The first of the packages from Danny’s online shopping binge arrived the next morning and more arrived each day after that. Normally Mama Teresa sorted out the day’s mail on the dining room table; now, on the days Linda returned from duty before Danny, which was an increasing proportion of the workweek, Danny’s side was heaped high with brown boxes bearing labels from different shippers and various companies of origin.

Most of them were book dealers, Linda saw. Some were medical and scientific supply firms. Various departments of the U.S. government were represented. In a development that caused the first bells of alarm to begin ringing at the back of her mind, some of the boxes were from semilegitimate dealers of firearms and other weapons—dealers who also sold books and videotapes that were well-known in law enforcement circles, products that alleged to teach people how to build explosives and man-killing traps, how to survive the collapse of the U.S. government or the arrival of a totalitarian U.S. government, how to sneak about and perform assassinations with all the skill of a cinema ninja. These products were bought by survivalists and teenage boys, wannabe radicals and martial arts fans, writers and crazies, and mostly for legitimate purposes, but to a peace officer, their presence suggested that a closer look was called for.

Except Linda wasn’t an investigating officer. She was a sister-in-law.

Mama seemed to take it all a bit more philosophically than Linda. Whenever she found her daughter-in-law staring at the stacks of goods, she’d shrug and say, “Good thing he makes a lot of money.”

August 2029

Wilderness Outside the Ruins of Bakersfield, California

Mark Herrera guessed that the pastures around the Ávila property were still much as they had been decades ago—a bit more overgrown, he expected. But there were still cattle, now wild cattle, in the area to graze on them. Weeds and tough indigenous bushes were now growing among the neglected rows of the various orchards, up through the char that marked where various wooden buildings had once stood.

He stood in the middle of one of the pastures, a couple of hundred yards from the cracked, dry highway lanes that had once been 58. The half-moon overhead provided a little light, but mostly the pasture lay in deep shadow. Mark wore night-sight gear over his eyes; built recently, it was heavier, cruder, and less reliable than similar gear from the end of the twentieth century, but it was far better than wandering around night-blind.

He stood almost still for several minutes, his only motion being a slow turn of the head as he surveyed the area. Everything he saw was in shades of green, the warmer the object the brighter the green; but at this time of year, inland California baked hard throughout sunny days and released its heat back into the skies at night, so things like rock, concrete abutments, and the like could show up as bright spots. Everything he saw had to be identified and confirmed as no threat before he could bring the others up. That was the purpose of a scout.

Finally satisfied, he reached down to give his lapel mike button the shortest of double-clicks, indicating “All clear, move up.” Then he continued forward, toward the center of the property, the portion that his mother Mike had said was the one-time center of habitation.

He found it before the others reached him, a section where there were several trees and fewer grasses, where a few blackened fragments of planed wood and some metal poles embedded in the earth indicated buildings had once stood. From here, he headed east-southeast, pacing off a fairly accurate 150 yards, and found himself looking at trees, some living and some stunted in death, arranged in neat rows.

An orange grove. This was the right place.

Kyla caught up to him, moving quietly in spite of the gear she carried—a field pack with several items clipped to it, including various weapons, a folding shovel, and an apparatus with a telescoping handle and a metal disk the size of a dinner plate at one end. Also on her back was the case that held her sniper rifle. Ginger and Ripper moved just ahead of her, flanking her, looking around and occasionally glancing up at her face to gauge her demeanor.

Kyla was silent. The Hell-Hounds didn’t like to make noise when exposed in the open like this. Mark nodded to her. She unclipped the apparatus, extended the handle, jacked the cable for a pair of headphones into the handle, and donned the headphones. She moved off at an angle, holding the disk of the apparatus an inch or so off the ground as she went. The dogs went with her, Ripper’s tail wagging just a little as they explored this new territory.

Mark waited where he was, his assault rifle at the ready, and watched as Earl made his way to Mark’s position. Ten, the fourth member of the Hell-Hounds’ current roster, and the unit leader, was still recuperating from the beating he’d taken at the hands of the T-800 days ago.

Kyla walked more or less due north for less than ten yards. Then she stopped, waved her metal detector around a bit, and turned sharply to the right, back toward the orange grove. Mark knew she had to have reached the buried irrigation pipes and cables for temperature and humidity sensors that Mike had told them about, and this was another milestone on their mission.

This crazy mission. Mike hadn’t told them much about it, except that it involved Daniel Ávila having buried a time capsule of useful scientific facts back when he was a kid and suddenly remembering it a few nights ago. But even John Connor had agreed that it was worth finding, so here they were.

“Something flying,” Earl said.

Mark glanced at him and then up in the direction Earl was looking. There it was, bright red dot, miles to the northwest, moving west to east.

Mark gave the “get under cover” whistle and immediately trotted to the nearest tree, putting it between him and the distant bogey. Earl was right behind him, already spreading out an insulating blanket. He draped it around the both of them.

Adapted from thin, highly reflective plastic materials developed decades ago, this blanket was silvery on one side but covered with black cloth on the other. Its insulating properties retarded the passage of heat very successfully; already warm from running around with full gear in the summer night air, Mark felt himself begin perspiring heavily within moments of the blanket settling around him.

The blanket couldn’t keep all the heat in, of course. It would flow out under the edges, out through overlaps, through small holes. But the important thing was that it wouldn’t look like a human being’s heat-trace. Skynet hadn’t begun a program of extermination of every living thing on earth, just the humans. Whatever the flying object was, if it had an infrared sensor trained on them, it would see irregular patches of heat that did not match human profiles.

Probably.

Earl, whose time sense was better than Mark’s, poked his head out. “All gone,” he whispered. “Back to it.” He threw off the blanket.

Two minutes later, Kyla whistled for them. She stood on a spot of grassy earth yards outside the orange grove, the metal detector already folded up and restored on her pack; her pack was on the ground and she was now unfolding her camp shovel. Mark and Earl joined her and they began to dig. The dogs, happy that the humans were doing something new, trotted around, tails high and wagging.

Two feet down, Earl’s shovel was the first one to hit something that was not soil. It made a hollow, gonglike noise against a hard surface. In moments, the others had made similar discoveries.

They cleared earth away from four circular metal surfaces. Lying across two of them was a mass of cloth that, with its length and width, could have been wrapped around a skeletal human body.

“Looks like he buried it in fifty-five-gallon oil drums,” Earl said. He pulled his night-sight gear up from his eyes and flicked on a penlight. “Painted blue. You want to bet that’s good rust-resistant paint?”

“No bet,” Kyla said. She hauled the cloth-wrapped mass up out of the hole, set it aside, and began unwrapping it.

“Hey, that might be booby-trapped,” Mark said.

She gave him a withering look. “Daniel Ávila buries a time capsule for future generations to admire and then puts a booby-trap on top? ‘Here’s your present, boom’?”

“Never mind.”

She finished unwrapping it. It was a hand truck. “He even made sure the people of the future would be able to move his stuff,” she said. There was a trace of suspicion to her voice.

“Open it or move it?” Earl asked.

Mark shook his head. “Move it all back to the transport, then dig into it. We don’t want to be caught by a Hunter-Killer patrol hundreds of yards from our vehicle while we’re digging through twentieth-century pornographic magazines and comic books.”

August 2029

Hornet Compound

John Connor sat in a patio chair in the sentry station the people of Hornet Compound called High Spy.

The patio chair, like practically every pre–Judgment Day object still in continuous use, had been extensively refurbished and carefully maintained. The original aluminum frame was in good condition, scratched and scored but not bent. The nylon webbing that had once supported a sitter’s weight was all gone, replaced by leather straps. John supposed that the combination of pre-apocalyptic aluminum and deer hide looked a bit odd, barbaric, but he was so used to that type of juxtaposition of materials that it scarcely registered with him anymore.

The High Spy was actually the original entry into the mine—the portion of the mine claimed and worked in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a third of the way up this dual-peaked, half-mile-high mountain. The entrance now had dark blankets stretched across it, leaving gaps through which the sentry stationed here could observe the mountain slope and valley below. Directly over John’s head, a hole had been drilled in the stone and loaded with explosives; there was a manual detonator within reach of the chair, and an insulated copper wire led back into the mine, allowing the compound’s security team to blow the charge remotely if need should arise. One flip of a switch at either place, and the High Spy sentry station would cease to be a possible entry for Skynet forces.

The presence of so much explosive power so close didn’t faze John. He’d lived next to too many similar security measures for too many years to be perturbed.

A century and a half ago, the hard-rock gold mine had been worked with picks and muscle, dynamite and instinct. This entryway was a natural tunnel into a cave, but at the back of the cave the mine workings began, crude tunnels that needed no wooden ceiling supports because they were chipped out of solid stone.

Much of the mine consisted of tunnels that meandered in a southeast to northwest direction, following the natural flow of the gold-bearing quartz veins. Then there were shorter cross-tunnels connecting the longer ones, and a vertical hole, labeled Shaft 1, that led deeper into the mountain and the tunnels below.

Ahead of John, about a thousand feet down the mountain slope, was the main entrance into the mine as it had been worked in the 1960s. Then, speculators had found new veins of quartz, brought in new digging equipment, set up new processing facilities. They had dug the mine down to depths of a thousand feet below the base of the mountain.

From here, John could see the ruins of the later mine works. Hornet Compound’s leader, Lucas Kaczmarek, had pointed out the various buildings to John earlier in the day.

John could barely make out the mill, the building where the quartz ore had been ground down to a consistency like talcum powder, and the vat facility, where the ground ore had been poured into enormous vats and treated with cyanide to extract the gold. It was easier to see the several dump sites where hundreds and thousands of tons of tailings, the quartz dust from which the gold had been extracted, had been left. They gleamed brightly in the moonlight, tiny, lifeless deserts both near and in the distance.

John tried to imagine what the place would have looked and sounded like when operational—giant dump trucks hauling ore between the main entrance and the mill, air blowers roaring, the mill grinding. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but it would at least have been an industry of mankind, ugly but comforting.

The intercom on the floor beside the chair beeped. Like most of the intercoms in Hornet Compound, it had been reconditioned from an old push-button phone. John picked up the receiver. “Connor.”

“Commander, this is Lucas. We’re getting packet radio transmissions from the Hell-Hounds.”

John took a deep breath. A month ago, the Human Resistance’s last communications satellite had been destroyed by Skynet. Since then, radio transmissions between resistance groups had been a more dangerous affair, and teams in the field knew to transmit encoded data packets rather than voice whenever possible, and to leave the area as soon as they could after ceasing transmissions. Radio transmissions were a necessary part of Resistance activities, but they were also a beacon for Skynet’s forces. “I’ll be right down,” he said.

He hit the button to disconnect and punched two numbers. A moment later, someone, a female voice, said “Cathedral.” That was the name of one of the mine’s many large open chambers, areas where people could congregate.

“This is John Connor. Please tell Sanders that I’m done at High Spy, he can come back up anytime.”

“Will do, Commander.”

John hung up and took one last look out through the gap in the blankets. The view wasn’t all ruined mine works. In the distance were mountain peaks, stars overhead. It was the opportunity for a view like this, and for a few minutes, perhaps even an hour, of privacy, that had prompted him to take the long walk to this lonely security station and relieve the soldier on duty for a little while.

But it was time to go back to work.

*   *   *

John and the members of his senior command staff on this mission stood clustered around the radio operator as data transmitted by the Hell-Hounds scrolled up in green letters across a monitor screen.

“U.S. Geological Survey publications and printouts,” John said. “Plus some geological data from Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere.”

“Complete notes from several Nanotechnology Conferences,” Kate read. “Notes from biology and conservation conferences.”

Behind her, Tamara Lake bounced up and down. “Yes, yes, yes! Anything about a viral reactor?”

“Complete specifications, on paper and disk, of the Terminator Series 1 operating system, plus T-1-5, T-1-7, and prototype work,” Sid Walker said. The letters from the screen reflected from his face, making him look like an irregularly shaped terminal. “Relevant portions of the Skynet software. Probably too dated now to give us much help, but we might be able to glean something from it.”

“A download of the entire Library of Mankind data site,” Mike said in awe.

Kate glanced at her. “What’s that?”

“A university project started in the earliest days of the Internet. They typed in or scanned the world’s great works of literature. Popular fiction, too, when it entered public domain. Plus the classic works of philosophy, theater, science.”

“Nothing cutting-edge, though,” Walker said. He offered a disappointed sigh. “Waste of disk space.”

“It’s part of what makes us human,” Kate snapped. “And if we’re not going to be human, we might as well let Skynet snuff us out.”

“Viral reactor?”

“Nothing about a viral reactor, Tamara,” John said. “Sorry. But it’s one hell of a haul of knowledge. And it’s proof that we have a connection, even if it’s a low-bandwidth one, back to the past just before J-Day.” He turned to Daniel Ávila.

Daniel sat in a folding wood-and-leather chair near the door into the chamber. He was shaking his head. “Great. Now I’m as popular as the one outhouse at a prune-cooking convention.”

“Once again, Daniel delves where mankind was not meant to go,” Lake muttered.

“So, what do you say, Daniel?” John asked. “Are you willing to play with this some more?”

Daniel heaved a sigh. For once, it did not seem a theatrical affectation. It sounded as though it came from deep within the real him. “Willing, yes. And I will. I’m just not sure I want to.”

“What’s the problem?” Lake asked. “You know you survived. You know you made it this far.”

Daniel turned a glum face toward her. “Yeah, sure, it’s that simple. Tamara, you’ve had a quarter of a century to adjust to what you lost on J-Day. Everyone here has … except me. I mean, I really want to find out if I can communicate with a younger me, get him to answer some questions … maybe even pick up some of his memories. I’ve wanted some miracle to bring back my pre–J-Day memories since forever.

“But thinking about it in the last couple of days … What if I do remember, and then get to experience losing everything again? If I start remembering who and what I was, if I start remembering the people I loved … I may lose them for the first time, right now. I might lose my mind a second time. Become a vegetable.”

Kate said, “But against the possible gains…”

Danny nodded. “It’s a selfish consideration, I know. Like everyone here, I decided a long time ago, if it comes down to a choice between me and another chance for the rest of humanity, I’ll choose for the human race. But…” He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, his voice was rougher. “But I can’t promise to go with dignity. I’m a coward at heart. I figure I’ll cry and whine all the way down. Frankly, this scares the hell out of me.”

Mike moved up beside him, rested her hand on his shoulder. “We can use your kind of cowardice any day, Daniel.”

He didn’t answer. But he laid his cheek against the back of her hand.

“All right,” John said. “Sid, deploy a ranger unit and a standard combat unit to rendezvous with the Hell-Hounds on their way home. I want the cargo they’re carrying divided up among two or three units. In case they’re attacked, I want some portion of it to reach us intact.

“As for us, I want everyone to have his thinking cap on. At tomorrow’s staff meeting, I want everyone to have two lists. List One: things we need, especially information, that Young Danny might be able to get us via time capsule, things that can help swing the balance of war away from Skynet and toward us. List Two: things Young Danny can do back at his point in time to give us any edge. Things he can engineer into the Terminator or Skynet software, for instance, in case back doors or faulty programming might survive all the revisions Skynet has made to its programming over the decades.” He turned back to Daniel. “You might just go down in history as the savior of the human race.”

Daniel snorted and waved dismissively at John. “Get on with you. If I’m the savior, I’ve already done all the hard work, back before J-Day. The modern me can take the week off.”

*   *   *

“Let’s hear what you have,” John said. “Mike, you’re our time travel expert. You go first.”

“Just like school,” Mike said. “Punished for being the best-informed. All right.” She tapped a piece of scrap paper on the table before her. It was covered with notes; many of them, scratched through, were from other staff meetings. As precious a commodity as paper was never used once and then discarded. “First thing on the shopping list—whatever we do, if we’re to persuade the pre–Judgment Day Danny Ávila to do this, we have to convince him of what’s to come. Make him understand what’s going to happen in the years that he faces. I’m arranging to have a sort of documentary video, sights and sounds of the apocalypse, to play for Daniel when he’s in his connected sleep. Maybe we can keep his eyes open for it.”

“Basically, a motivational tool,” Kate said. John saw her repress a shudder.

“That’s right. Second, ever since we got the Continuum Transporter at Edwards operational earlier this year, we’ve been facing a question mark. After the first successful launch, when we sent Kyle Reese back to save Sarah Connor, why didn’t Skynet destroy the facility? Skynet is bound to have detected the output from the satellite that provides the transporter with its power. It has to have detected the surge from the generators at Edwards, to have detected heat traces there, and so on. There’s no logical reason for it to have allowed the Edwards site to remain intact, to allow us to use it since then.”

“What are you suggesting?” John asked.

“I think the first important thing we should do with this asset is to ensure the assets that we already have. I think Young Daniel needs to introduce false data into Skynet to convince it that Edwards is not, was not, and never could be a threat to it, regardless of what sort of sensor data it might pick up in the years after J-Day.”

“Waste of resources,” said Walker. “We already know that Skynet hasn’t destroyed Edwards. Therefore we don’t need to go to the effort.”

“So we didn’t need to send Kyle back to save John’s mother?” Mike asked. “We could have sat on our thumbs, and she would have beaten that Terminator to death with her purse?”

Walker glared at her, not appreciating the sarcasm. “I think something would have happened, yes. She would have seen it for what it really was and been alerted to the danger, and it would have been destroyed when a propane tank blew up, or in some other calamity.”

“I don’t agree,” Mike said. “I don’t think time and history are as concrete as you do. John, have you told everyone about the 1997 Judgment Day discrepancy?”

“No,” John said. “Not all.” Appreciating her subterfuge, he gave Mike a slight smile. Mike knew that Kyle Reese was John’s father; Walker didn’t. But she’d come up with a reason for sending Kyle back that Walker would probably accept. “I suppose I’d better. You all know that Kyle Reese was able to find my mother-to-be and protect her from the T-800 sent back to kill her. But what you don’t know, what I’ve largely kept to myself, is that Kyle told her that Judgment Day would occur in 1997, several years before it actually did. And I spent the years from 1997 until J-Day wondering what had gone wrong—what had gone right, actually—and whining about the fact that I no longer had a mission in life, a purpose to fulfill.”

Walker snorted. “Well, obviously, Kyle wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. Your mother must have remembered it wrong.”

“You didn’t know my mother.”

Walker still looked scornful. “Then how do you explain the discrepancy?”

John looked at Mike.

She said, “When we learned that Skynet had sent back a T-1000 to kill John and his mother in the 1990s, we sent back the only agent we thought of who might be able to destroy it, a T-800 that Daniel himself programmed—”

“Go me,” Daniel said, his tone low. He looked tired. John suspected that he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.

“And it was successful.” Mike didn’t look at John. She knew he still had a strong emotional attachment to the Terminator that had saved his life in the 1990s; but most of the members of the senior staff didn’t share that sort of sentiment about any Terminator. “I think that their efforts to prevent J-Day did change history, our history. But only a little—the net effect was that it pushed J-Day back a few years. I think that when we sent Kyle back, J-Day had actually taken place in 1997. But we don’t remember it that way because our history has been revised since then.”

Lake grimaced. “Meaning that we’ve been revised, too.”

Mike nodded. “That’s right. One weird idea is that maybe it wasn’t exactly us who sent the T-800 back—not precisely this mix of people. If history was revised, maybe the cabinet of advisers, the crew of technicians that worked with John was different. We wouldn’t know.”

“We do know,” John said. “The T-X that was sent back to just before Judgment Day was assassinating people who would grow up to become my chief advisers, my lieutenants. The T-850 told me some of their names. Any of you ever know a José Barrera, a Bill or Liz Anderson?”

All around him, advisers shook their heads.

John continued, his voice heavy, “I suspect that when we planned the Kyle Reese and T-800 time launches, Barrera and the Andersons were here, among you. Maybe some of them instead of some of you. We were probably their friends. But now they haven’t existed since the T-X went back, and other people have taken their place. Which of you feels like a replacement?”

“Let’s not get too weird,” Walker said. He returned his attention to Mike. “So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying that we should presume that we’re responsible for Edwards staying intact, and should ensure that it happens. Because if we don’t, history may well re-revise itself, unspooling forward from J-Day, and suddenly Skynet blows up the Edwards of 2029 A.D. immediately after we sent Kyle back. We won’t ever have sent back that T-800, so John and his mother die in the 1990s, and history revises itself again. John doesn’t organize the Resistance. And today, in 2029, only one in ten of us is still alive, and we’re living in caves, eating raw rabbit meat, and waiting for the world to end.”

Kate frowned. “So what happens to the us we know? The ones sitting around this table? We’re real.”

Mike shrugged. “There are several possibilities. If we assume there’s only one reality, one stream of history, then we get edited. Changed earlier than now. What we’re experiencing now never happened. We cease to exist. John’s a weird case because the events that caused Judgment Day to move back several years from 1997 occurred after he’d been told about the 1997 version, but anything that gets changed before our current state of consciousness, we never recognize as a discrepancy.

“Or, maybe, every time events get changed, a new stream of history gets spun off in a new direction. Maybe the old ones continue on, unaffected. Maybe there’s a stream of history where Sarah Connor was killed by that first Terminator and, by 2029, all humanity is extinct. Maybe there’s one where Judgment Day did take place in 1997, and one where it didn’t take place at all because our second mission, the one with the T-800, was completely successful. Maybe there’s one where Skynet sent Terminator after Terminator back into the past and John had to destroy one every six weeks until he turned eighteen, at which time he had to start destroying one every month.” Mike ignored the snorts of laughter and derision from around the table. “They’re not our problem. Our own history, the part that leads up to us and the part that leads away from us, is.”

John didn’t find this line of discussion either disturbing or amusing. He’d had to live with more time-based anomalies and theories than anyone other than Kate knew.

Since the beginning of the year 2029, he and his experts had used the Edwards Continuum Transporter device three times—once to send Kyle Reese back to save Sarah Connor, once to send a reprogrammed T-800 to the 1990s to save the teenage John Connor, and once, only a month ago, to send a reprogrammed T-850 to the morning of Judgment Day to save the adult John Connor and Kate Brewster from an example of the brand-new T-X line. But his memories of that T-850’s warnings were clear. That Terminator had told him that it had been sent back not from 2029 but from 2032—shortly after it had killed John Connor and then been reprogrammed by Kate. Either something significant had malfunctioned in the Terminator’s programming during the launch through time, or some ripple in history’s events had changed things once again.

The very fluidity of time and history frustrated and confused him, and the notion that he could be edited, his history revised again and again without his being aware of it, was very spooky indeed. Equally spooky was the way the days on the calendar were being crossed off as July 4, 2032—the day the T-850 had told him he was going to die—neared. If that Terminator was correct, he had less than three years to live. Unconsciously, he sought out Kate’s hand with his own.

“I have an idea,” Daniel said. “If you’ll allow me to sit at the grown-ups’ table for a minute.”

John nodded. “Go ahead.”

“What can be done once, can be done several times. Let’s broaden the parameters of this part of the operation a little. What if, instead of making Skynet blind just to Edwards, we get Young Me to make it blind to a number of sites? Places we can then occupy and use as staging areas, unmolested, until Skynet is able to overcome the false data I’d be introducing?”

“Blind spots,” Walker said.

Daniel grinned. “Operation Blind Spot.”

Walker finally relaxed, relenting. “I like it.”

“Is that it for you, Mike?” John asked.

She nodded, but held up her scrap of paper. “Except for a wish list of books and equipment, if we get the chance to do another time capsule.”

John turned to Lucas Kaczmarek, who was in command of Hornet Compound. A burly middle-aged man with an Eastern European stamp to his features, Kaczmarek had lost his left arm in the first year after J-Day; he kept his left sleeve pinned up.

John had told the others that he’d invited the man into the conversation as a courtesy, since John planned to operate this special mission from this compound, but it had been more than that. Kaczmarek ran the compound like a tightly disciplined military unit, ensuring that every one of its citizens knew how to fight. He also wrote procedural manuals distributed to every compound under John’s command teaching people to build and repair weapons. He seemed a likely candidate to join John’s circle of advisers someday, and John wanted to see how he handled himself at an advisory meeting. “Lucas, what have you got?”

“If we had a complete list of the resources Skynet assumes control of on Judgment Day,” Kaczmarek said, “it might give us new information today about the crucial centers of the modern Skynet’s operations. Also, we know that, over the years, Skynet has more or less reduced its infrastructure so that its principal dispatch points for vehicles and Terminators are bases that are very self-sufficient, easy to maintain—a simple matter of conservation of resources. If we had a military evaluation of the bases and facilities the U.S. government considered low-maintenance, we might—”

“So you’re my future friends?” Daniel said. There was a wondering tone to his voice.

They all turned to look. Daniel was smiling, a less cynical expression than usual, and turning from face to face.

Mike’s eyes widened. She clapped her hands over her mouth, masking her expression of shock and surprise.

Daniel’s attention reached Kate and he, too, looked surprised. “Hey, it’s the general’s daughter, isn’t it? Karen? Kay?”

“K-kate,” she managed.

“You’re still pretty hot.”

Kate struggled for a response. But Daniel’s eyes rolled up in his head and he fell forward, banging his forehead on the table.

“Well,” Walker said, “that was special.”