C.8

August 2029

Hornet Compound

John and Kate waited in the outer chamber of what members of his staff had nicknamed Frankenstein’s Bedroom.

Danny’s quarters were indeed now built up, an inner chamber and an outer one. The inner chamber was half-bedroom, half-laboratory. Against one wall—wooden planks laid over bare earth and stone, one side of the mine shaft—was a broad bed assembled from rough-hewn wood. At its foot was a wooden crate that, John supposed, held most of the few possessions Daniel had brought with him from Home Plate. Beside the head of the bed was an old easy chair, its moldering cloth cover replaced in recent years by deer hide.

Then there were the instruments. Powered by a cable running from this portion of the mine to the complex’s generator, they were devices scavenged over the years from hospitals and doctors’ offices left empty since Judgment Day. John recognized an electrocardiogram and a 1980s-era personal computer, but several of the other devices were unknown to him. Sometimes, despite his status as the acknowledged leader of the Human Resistance, he felt ignorant. It was a feeling that had dogged him since he was a child, a recognition of the fact that he’d never had a formal education, never received any diploma. His informal education had been an exceptional one, but there were cavernous holes in it.

The outer chamber was furnished mostly with a long table with chairs behind it and instruments atop it. These scavenged computer monitors received data from the devices and computer in the next chamber. The outer chamber was separated from the inner by a thin wall into which were set a single door and two panes of glass; shutters could close over the windows from this side. They were open now, and John could see that Daniel was on his bed, apparently asleep, while Mike occupied the easy chair and Tamara Lake stood beside it, talking to her.

“Nice, big apartment,” Kate said, deadpan.

“Yeah, but the neighbors seem to drop in whenever they want,” John said. “No respect for privacy.”

Lake emerged from the inner chamber. She wore the plain, baggy dark garments that were standard dress for just about everyone not engaged in military activity. Mike, similarly clothed, followed her out and shut the door behind her. Lake turned a knob on a panel inset into the table; the knob, tan plastic with an edged protrusion indicating where it was pointing, looked incongruous, like something off an oscillating fan. “This activates the microphone by his bed,” Lake said. “So we can hear when he drops into his special sleep.”

“So what are you finding?” John said.

Lake shrugged. “Hard to come up with any hard data using instruments scavenged from landfills. But it’s obvious that his system’s under a lot of stress, and much of that stress seems to relate to his dreaming states.” She took one of the chairs along the table and closed the shutter over the window above it. “His heart rate and blood pressure go way up when he’s in one of those states. To dangerous levels.”

Kate said, “And what about the EMR?”

Lake gave her a who-the-hell-knows grimace. “Well, Mike’s been measuring his spikes of EMR output when he’s dreaming. She’s even tested with people sleeping in the outer chamber when he’s in his dream state. He definitely broadcasts.”

John cleared his throat to conceal a sudden nervous thought. “Tamara, you and Mike didn’t use the word broadcasts last time. Tell me, how far could these EMR spikes be detected?”

Lake shrugged. “I don’t know. Ask Mike.”

John called Mike in and put the same question to her.

Mike could only shrug. “John, they wander all over the scale. I mean, radio transmissions wouldn’t escape these tunnels. But Danny’s output, well, it’s like an opera soprano singing scales; they go everywhere. Sometimes they’re up into the angstrom range we pick up from the Continuum Transporter and from T-X plasma weapon tests. This deep in the mountain, they’re probably undetectable on the outside. But then, we just don’t know how sensitive Skynet’s instruments are, what it’s looking for.”

“If you’re through with your tactical discussion,” Kate said, “is he going to be all right?”

“If we could keep him from getting in contact with his past self, maybe,” Lake said. “I just don’t see that happening. I think what we have to do is keep him fit until he rides out this contact. When it ends, perhaps he’ll return to normal.” She gave John a look that was almost apologetic. “Give me a real hospital with real instruments and a real staff, and I’ll try to get you some solid answers.”

“Sorry, you’re it. Keep your genius hat on and do whatever you can.”

*   *   *

The next night, John, Kate, and Mike gathered in Daniel’s outer chamber, preparation for another evening of communication with the Danny of the past. Lake was already in the inner chamber, calibrating instruments and talking to Daniel, who was preparing for bed. Through the window in the wall, Mike could not hear their words but could see their easy camaraderie.

They’d had a relationship, Daniel and Lake, many years ago. It had lasted, as most of Lake’s affairs did, until shortly after the point that Daniel ran out of new adjectives with which to praise her, to appreciate her intelligence and beauty. Once he began to repeat himself, she began looking around for someone new.

Mike couldn’t bring herself to dislike Lake. The woman wasn’t malicious. She was sad, flailing about in a search for happiness that could only be brought about if Skynet were suddenly to crumble, if she were magically to be transformed back to the age of thirty, if she were restored to the top of her profession.

Lake and Daniel had remained friendly, and neither had been hurt. It was the best possible outcome for a relationship that had failed to take root.

“Mike, let me ask you something.”

Mike turned back to John, who was seated beside Kate on the ancient couch against the wall. Mike automatically closed the shutter over the window. “Sure.”

“Your boy Mark—what’s he fighting for?”

Mike looked at John suspiciously. No one had ever had much luck figuring out what was behind his cryptic pronouncements or non-sequitur questions, but no one ever gave up trying. “Well, the same thing as everyone, I suppose. Wiping out Skynet and having the planet to ourselves.”

“Yes, but what sort of planet does he suppose it will be?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never asked him.”

“You’d better sit down.” Kate was whispering, as though John couldn’t hear her words. “He’s philosophizing again. This may take a while.”

Mike snorted, amused, and took one of the chamber’s chairs.

“You remember how they used to divide up the generations?” John asked. “Baby boomers, postboomers, Gen-X, and the like?”

“Uh-huh.” Mike shrugged. “I always thought that was so they could sell us stuff.”

“Probably was. Anyway, with Judgment Day, all those generational distinctions went away. Now we’ve got another one. There are only two generations, those of us who remember what life was like before J-Day and those who don’t.”

“Okay.”

“Those of us in the older group, we know what we’re fighting for. We have a vision of the world as it was, as we’d like it to be. Open highways and summer vacations and restaurants, living in the sunlight, living in fear of the Internal Revenue Service rather than a robot with an assault rifle. As sure as anything, when we bring Skynet down, the world we create will not be the same as the one we remember … but we’re fighting for the one we remember. Right?”

“Sure. What are you getting at?”

“Kyla talks about wiping out Skynet, about protecting her family and loved ones. It’s all about the present tense. I ask her what she would do when Skynet falls and she doesn’t have an answer. She doesn’t have a vision of the future.” John suddenly looked a little lost. Kate put her arm across his shoulders. “It seems wrong to me,” he continued, “that the older generation is the one with an eye to the future. With hope for the years to come. The younger generation lacks this. It’s backwards, and I wonder how damaging it might be. When our generation is gone, will there even be a plan, or a model, or a vision of the way we want things to be?”

Mike let a chiding tone creep into her voice. “Don’t you ever think about anything nice?”

“So what is Mark Herrera fighting for?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask him. And if he doesn’t have a good answer for me, I’ll send him to bed without supper.”

*   *   *

This time, Daniel sat more upright, leaning back against the wall of his chamber, well-padded by pillows and blankets. He was already asleep by the time Mike, John, and Kate silently reentered his bedroom.

“He’s just been under a couple of minutes,” Lake whispered.

“I’m there,” Daniel mumbled.

Lake turned to look at him, then automatically glanced at her watch. “Three and a half minutes,” she whispered. “A new record.”

“Where are you, Daniel?” Mike asked.

“Bedroom. There are books everywhere. Boy, did I have a lot of books.” He sighed. “Wish I had them now.”

Lake had already situated a blood pressure cuff on Daniel’s arm. Now she began to pump it up.

Mike continued, “Do you feel any different this time, Daniel?”

“Yes, yes.” Daniel sounded impatient. “Different at both ends.”

“How so?”

Lake checked the gauges on the blood pressure monitor. She jotted down their readings, shaking her head, not happy with the result.

“Here, I’m thinking straight. I don’t think I’m really asleep.”

“You’re asleep.”

“There … I think I could do something.”

“What do you mean, do something?”

“I mean, do something with my body.” He giggled. Daniel, always aware of his manner, his voice, never giggled. “Drive it around like a car. Oh, my God, I’m moving my hand.”

June, Present Day

Ávila Property

Daniel held Danny’s hand up in front of his face and studied it in the darkness. He could see it only as a silhouette against the lighter color of the ceiling. He balled it into a fist, turned it this way and that.

He could feel his heart race. He was in possession of his younger body.

Moving slowly, as nervous as a first-time driver, he pulled the sheet from his body and sat up in Danny’s bed.

There was a nightstand beside the bed, a desk lamp atop it. Clumsy, he fumbled his hand up to the neck and switched it on. The sudden glare caused him to wince, but he looked around, hungry to see his past, to see where he came from.

Distantly, he heard Mike’s voice: Daniel, what’s going on?

“I’m getting out of bed.” He suited action to words. He noticed that he was wearing briefs. His feet came down on a hardwood floor. “This is so … cool. And there’s another thing that’s different.”

What is it?

“I believe I’m still thinking straight. At your end. I just feel more awake than previous times. I mean, I don’t remember the previous times … but I was always groggy coming out of them. I’m not groggy now.”

Can you force yourself to relax? Lake’s worried about your heart rate.

Daniel took a few deep, slow breaths as he looked around, cataloging the shelves of books. He moved over to the window, pulled the curtain aside to look out. He saw open fields and the distant white and red lights of traffic a few hundred yards away.

Traffic moving with lights on under open skies. He felt a grin broaden on his face. Amazing how such a mundane scene could be so heartening.

“It’s like a movie, Mike,” he said. “I’d call it ‘When Man Ruled the Earth.’”

August 2029

Hornet Compound

A quarter of a mile from the main entrance to Reid Precious Metals Mine #3, a man walked quietly up the mine’s main access road, ascending the mountain. He was tall, in good shape, wearing the camouflage pattern uniform of John Connor’s troops. He carried a meticulously maintained Colt M16A4 assault rifle at the ready. In the darkness, he moved nearly silently, alert to the sudden appearance of the enemy, any enemy.

The road wasn’t what it used to be. Potholes marked it. There were cracks and breaks in it from movement in the earth. In places, the earth had washed out from beneath it over the course of more than twenty years of no maintenance, and the pavement had collapsed down into gaps. There were one or two spots where yards and yards of pavement were just gone, leaving only ragged edges behind, with no obvious explanation for their disappearance.

The man stepped off the pavement and onto one of those earthen patches. At the halfway point between the two stretches of pavement, his foot came down on a piece of ground that felt no different than any other.

But inches beneath the surface lay a belt of rubber in which was imbedded a layer of piezoelectric crystals, man-made solid-state crystals that generated small electrical charges when put under pressure. The man’s weight caused the crystals to emit a charge. Wires attached to the layer of crystals carried that charge instantly up the mountain slope.

Unknowing, the man marched onward.

*   *   *

“Here are some more passwords to try,” Mike said. In the dim light of Daniel’s inner chamber, she squinted at the paper she held. “KLASSUV2K. G8ESOFHELL. 38D4ME.” She spelled each one. “Do you have that?”

“I have it.” Daniel had found paper and pen, had composed a note to his younger self explaining what the list would constitute. In the last several minutes he’d forced his present-day eyes open to copy Mike’s sketch-maps of CRS project’s secure floors, of the Continuum Transporter building, of Edwards AFB’s access and security tunnels, of every sort of map they could put in front of his face.

“Now—” Mike began.

“Linda.” Daniel’s voice had changed; it was less crisp, less assured.

Mike frowned. “What about Linda?”

“Is she there? In my future?”

“Danny?” Mike looked confused. “Is that you?”

“I’m here.” Then, a moment later, his voice became more mature again. “I told you, Danny’s asleep. I’m pretty much in control of his body.”

“Oh, my God,” Kate said. “We’ve got Daniel at that end and Danny at this end.”

On the bed, Daniel raised his head. His eyes fluttered as though he were trying to open them. If that was his intent, he failed and his chin sagged back to his chest. In his younger voice, he said, “I can’t see.”

“You’re all right, Danny,” Kate said. “You’re here among friends.”

“But what about Linda?”

Mike looked over at John and Kate, her expression forlorn. She mouthed the words, “I can’t.”

Kate and John exchanged a glance. Glum, John nodded.

Kate said, “Danny, Linda isn’t here.”

“She’s got to be. She’s got to be.”

“No, Danny. I’m sorry, but Linda’s not part of your future.”

“Do you know if she, if she survives?”

“We don’t have any record of her after Judgment Day, Danny. I’m sorry.”

“She has to be in my future.” Danny sounded both stubborn and desperate.

Kate spoke up: “If she’s in your present, you should make the most of that, Danny.”

“No, she’s there, she’s got to be there.”

“Danny, can I change the subject for a moment?”

Daniel sighed. “Sure, Kate.”

“You saw my father the other day. On your field test.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about him. Tell me how he … how he was.”

John squeezed his wife’s shoulders. The situation with Daniel was like having a visitor who was still friends with a loved one who lived too far away to be visited. John knew Kate ached to somehow reach through Danny’s connection, to exchange words with her father once more, one last time. And he knew she would keep aching, because such a thing was not likely to happen.

“He was kind of single-minded,” Daniel said. “I think he’s got a sense of humor, but it’s, like, only in certain directions. Some things just aren’t funny to him because they’re too strange…”

The intercom on the instrument table buzzed. The noise jolted Daniel, but his eyes did not open. John swore and leaped up to press the button on the device. “We’re in session here,” he said, his voice a hiss.

“Sorry, Commander.” The voice was Lucas Kaczmarek’s. “We’ve got a mobile anomaly.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.” John rose. “Mike, finish this session up as fast as you can. Kate?”

His wife stood, glancing unhappily between him and Daniel. “I’ll come with you.”

*   *   *

In the compound’s security office, a wood-walled portion of one of the first cross-tunnels off Tunnel 1, the main entrance tunnel, Kaczmarek directed John’s and Kate’s attention to a computer screen. The screen, all shades of green, was broken down into sixteen squares, arranged four by four, and each square was a bar graph. Once a minute or so, the screens updated, each bar shifting one place to the left.

“These are the external pressure sensors, correct?” John asked.

“That’s right.” Kaczmarek pointed to one of the graphs, top row, second from the left. “This is main road, location two. You see we have a succession of flat lines, which is standard for no activity on the road. A human walking along it will create a bar about a quarter of an inch tall.” He gestured at the center of the graph, where a bar a full inch tall dominated. “That’s something heavy. Four, five hundred pounds.”

“Like a Terminator,” Kate said.

“That’s right.” Kaczmarek shifted one square to the right. It, too, had a one-inch spike in it, this time closer to the square’s right edge. “Main road, location three, a few minutes later, just after I called for you.”

“No report from our guard stations?”

“No. I checked with our outermost stations by land line. They reported nothing wrong. Their passwords were correct. Of course, someone moving overland could have reached the main road from the side, bypassing the guard stations accidentally or deliberately.”

“At this rate of travel, how long before it reaches the next pressure sensor?” Kate asked.

Kaczmarek looked to one side, where the Resistance fighter normally assigned to the screen, a thin young man with coppery red hair and hard, dark eyes, sat. “Prescott?”

“Ten more minutes, sir,” the younger man said. “More or less. But only four until the bogie comes within view of the next guard station.”

“What kind of station?”

“A stink box, sir,” Prescott said.

John offered up a faint smile. “Stink box” was the informal term most soldiers in the Resistance used for a concrete minibunker. The standard stink box had an interior about eight feet long by four wide and high, not large enough to stand up in. On the front facing were a hatch-style door and a double-paned window, the window permitting a good view of the area to be surveyed but helping retain heat. Fans associated with ducts that led far away from the minibunker allowed some air circulation. Other amenities included a phone, connected by cable to the security office, and a back hatch that led to an emergency escape tunnel.

Because the minibunker was built to retain heat and thus provide Skynet with little or no infrared signature to detect, and in spite of the fan-and-duct air circulation, their interiors were hot. Nor did they have bathrooms, or easy access to latrines; sentries stationed there had to take in and carry out their own buckets or bedpans, which they hoped they wouldn’t have to use. Sentries had to lie for hours, doing little but watching and sweating. The bunkers received periodic cleaning, but nothing ever quite got rid of the smell—hence “stink box.”

“Get that guard out by way of the escape hatch,” John said. “Have him—her?”

“Her,” confirmed Prescott. “Corporal Dixon.”

“Have her get in a position to watch both the road and the bunker. She’ll report by radio.” John turned to Kaczmarek. “Put the compound on pack-and-prep alert. Just in case.”

“Yes, sir.”