c.2

September 2029

San Diego, California

They were at what had to have once been a nurse’s station. It was at the intersection of two long, broad hallways on an upper floor and looked like many such installations Kyla had seen in pictures and books: a big desk, thick with computer equipment and piles of paper, situated behind a low wall that constituted a barrier to keep patients and visitors psychologically at bay.

Mark sat in the chair behind the main computer. His laptop was up and running beside the machine and cables ran between the two devices. Mark frowned as his fingers flew over his laptop’s keyboard. He was among the world’s best at hacking into Skynet computer systems, but that didn’t mean that such tasks were simple, and this one was taking a while.

Kyla was set up at one end of the low wall, her rifle propped against the wall top. The weapon was a Barrett M99, manufactured shortly before Judgment Day. Just over four feet long, it was made of blackened steel and brushed-silver aluminum, as elegant and simple in its beauty as Kyla herself. The .50-caliber rounds it fired were, when placed very accurately, capable of taking Terminators down—sometimes.

Kyla was oriented so that she could see down two of the hallways, the two that were better lit. Ginger and Ripper were together at the end of one of the other two halls, standing guard, ready to offer a growl or a yelp if they detected anything but friends headed Kyla’s way. Glitch was at the end of the last hall, motionless and silent; in his hands was a weapon from his backpack, a rare and precious chain gun. Though small enough to be carried by a man or Terminator, the weapon possessed the multiple spinning barrels of a Vulcan machine gun and could fire high-powered ammunition at a terrifying rate.

Ten and Earl were not in sight. They’d waited until Mark was set up, then moved on to find the optimal portions of the building for their loads of explosives. But they still didn’t know what they were blowing up.

“So?” Kyla said.

“Stop bugging me.” Mark’s voice lacked conviction. It was a rote response.

“What is this place?”

In getting to the nurse’s station, they’d passed whole sections of the hospital that had obviously been reconstructed since Judgment Day. Wards had been redecorated as apartments, with pictures and posters on the walls, old but well-maintained furniture, television sets that came on when activated and began displaying authentic shows from the last century. There were also chambers that were undecorated, unpainted, plaster still raw and white on the walls.

Mark had said that he wasn’t even sure this nurse’s station was original equipment. It could have been a reconstruction of a nurse’s station, he’d admitted.

Finally Mark answered. “All those apartments, the other places. They all represented slightly different time frames.”

“I don’t understand. They were all twentieth-century.”

“Right, but the twentieth century wasn’t just one constant, unchanging thing. Not like today. That’s what makes it so interesting. The toys in the one bedroom, foot-long action figures—”

“The dolls?”

“The dolls. Specific games. Those little metal molds were for pouring in raw plastic and then cooking over a stove to harden it. That’s all from the nineteen sixties. But the next room over had a record player for vinyl records, and the recordings were all disco. Artists called Abba and Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. That’s from the nineteen seventies.”

“I don’t get it.”

Mark shook his head, the motion barely visible in Kyla’s peripheral vision. “Neither do I. I’m just a history buff, an amateur. It’d take the real deal to figure this out. Hey, I’ve got the security camera network.”

Kyla resisted the urge to move next to Mark and peer over his shoulder. She was needed here. She was the sniper, the long-range defender of her team. “Tell me.”

“An operating theater. It looks functional. Empty hospital rooms. Outside, the T-600’s van is gone; it must have finished with its deliveries and driven off. The roof. A—” Mark’s voice faltered. “A man and a woman talking in a bar. I think it’s a TV show, though. I’ve seen both the actors before, somewhere. More empty hospital rooms…” Then, a moment later, it was “Oh, damn.”

“What?”

“I’ve got Ten and Earl on camera. And if I can see them…”

“Right.” Skynet could see them, too.

*   *   *

It was a hospital basement level, with hospital basement equipment. Electrical junction boxes. Water pumping equipment and water pressure gauges. Emergency generators. The overhead light-bulbs had been replaced at some point after Judgment Day with clusters of light-emitting diodes; they shone bright, not flickering, somehow at contrast with the way Ten thought basements should be illuminated.

The emergency generators had obviously been improved after Judgment Day. A portion of the basement level larger than a boxcar was sealed off, monitoring gauges installed. Labels on the gauges made it clear that this portion held fuel. “The generators could run off this for days or weeks,” Earl said. “Skynet really doesn’t want an interruption in the functions of this place. What do you have in mind?”

Ten gestured toward the pipes that connected the tank to the primary generators. “I think I’ll just cut these now and flood the basement with fuel. First disconnect the pressure meters so Skynet isn’t alerted. Set up an explosive charge on both timer and radio reception, but I don’t want to set it off until the air is pretty much saturated with fuel.”

Earl gave a mock shudder. “Economical.”

“Lots of bang for the buck.”

“Let’s do it.”

Then the radios at their belts hissed, two short bursts of static.

The team was supposed to maintain radio silence … except in times of trouble. One burst meant “Heads up, be alert.” Two meant “The jig is up, we’re compromised.” Three would mean “We’re under attack.”

“Let’s do it fast,” Ten amended.

Present-Day

California

The question ate at Paul: What city is this? San Francisco? San Bernardino? San Diego? San something. Definitely California. Why couldn’t he remember?

The beer, it had to be the beer. He was more drunk than he realized. But the wrongness of it, the realization that something in his brain was just not working right, caused his heart to hammer.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I can show you some of the sights.” And remember where the hell we are. And clear my head.

Eliza nodded, a slow movement, like a queen gesturing assent. “All right.”

Paul signaled the waitress for the bill, then a shadow fell across him. He looked up.

The bouncer stood over their table, massive, blocking the light. His attention was on Eliza. “We must go,” he said.

Paul rose. He was as tall as the bouncer and could face him eye to eye—or, at least, eye to sunglasses—though he lacked width of shoulder. “Excuse me?”

“It’s not a problem.” Eliza stood. “He’s an old friend of mine. This will only take a moment. Have another drink while I’m gone. Better yet, take a nap.” She reached over to brush away strands of Paul’s hair that had drifted down onto his forehead.

Paul’s knees buckled as weariness settled on him. It was like a late-night work jag when the espresso had finally worn off or like lying on the beach in the late afternoon, the exhaustion from a day’s worth of swimming finally catching up to him.

I’ve never been swimming at the beach.

I’ve never had espresso.

He sank, almost nerveless, back into his chair and leaned helplessly across the table, knocking empty bottles of beer out of his way. They skittered across the tabletop and fell out of sight, but he did not hear them hit, did not hear them break.

His eyes closed, but he concentrated on the fast, panicky beating of his heart and managed to stay awake. He forced his eyes open again.

Eliza and the bouncer were gone. It had been only a second, but they were not within his field of vision.

The bartender, the waitress, and the other bar patrons were still there. They weren’t moving. They stood as immobile as store mannequins. But there was a slight sway to their stances and their eyes were alive.

The fear rose in Paul, fear of the wrongness of his situation, fear for Eliza and what the bouncer might intend for her. He struggled to stand, struggled to move, and when neither proved possible for him, struggled to shout.

He heard a noise, a garbled, strangled sound. It really didn’t seem to come from him, but it corresponded to his attempt to scream. He tried again, heard the noise once more, as if from across the room.

He had to stand. He shoved with his arms, with his legs, trying to get a little distance between his body and the table.

His limbs did not move. But he felt something, pressure against his knees and hands, a less distinct pressure holding his limbs in check.

He pushed harder, ignoring what he saw, concentrating entirely on what he felt. He could feel his arms and legs lashing out again and again, could feel pain where his hands and wrists and knees were connecting with a surface.

Then, for a brief moment, there was light, a vertical shaft of brightness to his left. It dazzled him. It faded a second later, but the spots before his eyes remained.

He pushed again and the light reappeared. He pushed harder and it broadened, lengthened, until it washed across everything he could see and blinded him almost completely.

As his vision adjusted, he found that he could see two sets of images, superimposed over one another. One was the bar; the other, a set of acoustic tiles directly in front of him. To his right was a dark oval plane angled toward the tiles, rocking just a bit. To his left, a black metallic surface, as though he were lying in a container, and beyond it were chairs and banks of machinery—but it was all oriented wrong, as if he were lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

He felt dizzy, sick to his stomach, but he tried rolling over to the left. He saw his right arm, clad in a skintight gray-black material, flop over the surface, even though he could also see it, in its white sleeve, lying before him on the tabletop, supporting his head.

It was wrong, everything was wrong. But he could now feel his right arm over the metal lip of whatever he was lying in.

He gasped and choked as water poured into his mouth, into his lungs. He kept his elbow hooked over the metal lip and hauled with all his strength, pulling his face up out of the fluid, up over the lip.

He scraped over the metal lip, first his chest, then midsection, and suddenly he was falling, slamming down hard onto a flat surface. Pain cut into his shoulder, the side of his head. Fluid splashed down atop him. And his vision of the bar and all its paralyzed inhabitants, himself included, remained unchanged. He closed his eyes and saw only that for long moments. He coughed until his throat was sore but almost all the fluid was ejected from his lungs.

Paul lay there gasping for long moments, willing his heart and breathing to slow, forcing himself to remain under control. Then he opened his eyes to look around.

His second set of surroundings was very different from the bar. This was a brightly lit room, smaller than the bar, with off-white linoleum floor and walls painted in a soothing pastel yellow. There were chairs, rolling racks with what looked like complicated electronic equipment, and the centerpiece of the room, a massive black thing that looked like an egg-shaped coffin atop a rectangular black pedestal.

Something dug at his memory. I know what that is. I’ve seen them in books.

That’s a sen-dep tank. Sensory deprivation. A late-twentieth-century technique used in various sorts of esoteric research and medical treatment. The subject floats in a liquid environment, in total darkness. Cut off from most sensory input, he becomes more receptive to internal stimuli such as hallucinations, the effects of drugs …

Paul sat up. He seemed to be covered, head to foot, in the dark skintight material. He touched it. It was soft to the touch, giving way under the slightest pressure, and was wet.

Only his hands and feet were free. He raised his hands to his face. His head, too, was uncovered.

In his other vision, he remained slumped at the bar table, while the other occupants of the bar, endlessly patient in their paralysis, waited.

He stood, slow and awkward, and finally his other vision changed. In the bar, his other body straightened and stood as well. Now, when he raised his arms before his face, he could see them twice, once in his long-sleeved work shirt, once in the skintight garment.

But now that both views of himself were consistent in orientation and pose, if not in content, the nausea he’d felt was fading. He felt better. Just not good.

Now that he was upright, it was time to find out just what the hell was going on.

September 2029

San Diego, California

Glitch moved at a rapid pace down the access stairwell, his footsteps echoing on the concrete steps. His posture was perfect, his face devoid of any expression that might indicate he was aware that he could be confronting the end of his own existence.

That was the way it should be. Glitch was a T-850, a Terminator. Captured—assembled, rather, in pieces from Terminators destroyed at a raid on a Resistance habitation compound—and then repaired, reprogrammed, and upgraded from his T-801 roots, Glitch had no concern for his own safety beyond what was required to best achieve his mission parameters.

His short-term parameters were simple. Mark had explained them to him quickly, but meticulously, without recourse to emotional considerations that were irrelevant to Glitch. The activities of Ten and Earl were observable on this compound’s security cameras. The activities of Mark, Kyla, Glitch, and the dogs were not. Therefore the greater danger accrued to Ten and Earl. Glitch was to travel to their location and defend them against all attacks, pending further orders and further recalculations of mission parameters.

At the ground-floor landing, one heavy door—a metal fire door, painted in a red-orange that had faded and peeled with the years—led rightward, an unlit EXIT sign above it. Another, identical but for its darker paint job, led leftward. Glitch’s internal map, a wire-frame diagram of the portions of the building he had seen so far, coordinated with his internal compass and indicated that the right-hand door led to the main lobby. The left-hand door, logically, would lead to additional stairs downward.

He tried it. It was secure. He slung his chain gun on its strap back across his shoulder, then leaned into the door, felt its metal construction buckle under the pressure he exerted. He struck it, once, twice, three times, felt and saw it deform with each blow, and finally it was warped enough that the final blow slammed it open. The crash it made echoed up the stairwell he’d descended and down the one the ruined door revealed.

That was good. The noise might attract Skynet forces away from the humans and to Glitch.

*   *   *

The noises were almost simultaneous—a muffled clank from beyond the stairwell door by which Ten and Earl had entered the basement and a distant crash from the hallway that seemed to serve the basement level as its main entranceway.

Ten took a couple of paces back to keep ahead of the advancing tide of fuel oil. The air was thick with the smell, though it had been only a few moments since they’d severed the fuel lines. “We’re in for it,” he told Earl. “Both exits are covered.”

Earl turned to stare back into the dimly lit recesses of the basement. “Let’s make a new one.”

“I’m with you.” Ten followed the older man back past banks of locked storage areas with wire-mesh walls. From his backpack, he dug two of his three remaining shaped charges—blocks of plastic explosive with detonators imbedded in one side.

Not far ahead, the storage areas came to an end. There was concrete wall at the end of the aisle; it looked as though the last storage areas were not quite flush with the wall, that a gap, perhaps a service corridor, a mere yard wide separated the last storage areas from the wall itself.

Ten stopped a dozen steps from the wall. “Here,” he said, and slapped one of the shaped charges into Earl’s hand. “Set for radio detonation.” He marched on another six paces, concentrating on the apparatus in his hand, carefully flipping a rocker switch under a protective case from TIMER to RADIO and then closing the case again. From the back of the charge, he peeled a black plastic film; beneath it was a layer of yellowish adhesive, far more sticky than the plastic explosive it coated.

In the distance, footsteps—heavy, ringing, metal footsteps—approached from the direction of the main hall.

“Ten—”

“Yeah, I hear it.” Ten eyed the ceiling above. It was a full yard above his reach. He crouched and leaped upward, slapping the reverse side of the charge against the ceiling. He landed, knees bent, and kept his attention on the charge.

It held to the ceiling, the red gleam of an LED indicating that it was ready to receive transmission.

He glanced over at Earl. The older man had clambered up one of the wire-mesh storage area walls and was carefully fitting his own charge to the ceiling above it. Earl grinned down at Ten, the smile of an older and wiser man who knew how to achieve the same results without as much physical stress.

Beyond Earl, across the basement, a figure emerged from the main hallway at a trot, moving toward Ten and Earl.

She was not what Ten expected to see. She was a human female—blonde, youthful, vital. She was dressed as a nurse. Her expression was serene, unworried.

And she was not the source of the ringing, metallic footsteps. They were still coming up loud behind her.

Ten swung his weapon, the archaic Colt M16-A4 that served as his chief battle piece in those times when plasma rifle batteries were in short supply, around from his back and brought the barrel up. He aimed at the nurse, spraying fire across her head. The assault rifle kicked in his grip, its aim threatening to rise; he struggled to hold it in place.

Bullets struck the woman, deforming her forehead—momentarily. Then her skin smoothed. She continued forward, her pace unchanged.

“Fall back, fall back!” Ten suited action to words, trotting backward as he maintained his fire against the woman, squeezing off short bursts.

Earl dropped from his perch and raced past Ten, out of his sight.

The woman’s right arm changed, the flesh flowing from it like water, revealing shining metal apparatus beneath. The machinery itself altered, reconfigured, with a blue glow dancing across protruding elements.

Ten’s back hit the concrete wall. He moved right, positioning himself at the corner of the last storage area, and continued to fire.

Earl pulled at his sleeve, trying to draw him farther around the corner, out of the nurse’s sight. Ten shook him off. “Detonator!”

Earl shouted, “You crazy bastard!” Then he drew a device, the general size and shape of one of the late-pre–Judgment Day cell phones, from a jacket pocket. He used his teeth to pull its short antenna out to its full extent.

The nurse aimed her malformed arm. Ten shoved himself toward Earl, bearing his companion to the concrete floor, just as the air above them ignited with a brilliant electric-blue glow.

Heat washed across them. The contents of the storage area, metal desks and chairs and miniature refrigerators, wooden and plastic crates filled with paperwork and ancient medical samples, exploded or melted, plastic components screaming with animal-like voices. Ten looked up, saw the metal portions of the storage area glowing orange, yellow, and white, deforming as they melted. Heat beat down at them from the destroyed goods.

He scrambled back to the corner. The nurse was still coming. Five more steps and she’d be directly beneath Earl’s shaped charge.

“Ready!” Ten shouted.

Four steps, three, two—her arm came up again, aiming in toward Ten’s unprotective face—one—

“Now!”

The ceiling directly above and a half-dozen steps in front of the nurse rocked, spraying flame and chunks of concrete down upon the nurse. She looked up just in time to see a tremendous mass of concrete, rebar, and plaster crash down upon her. More rained down upon the pile of debris that covered her.

Ten felt hands on his shoulders as Earl hauled him to his feet. The older man wasted no time waiting for orders; he dashed forward to the mound atop the nurse, stepped up on it, and began climbing the adjacent chain mesh up toward the ceiling and the floor above.

Ten slung his M16 and followed. When he was halfway up, his eye was drawn by movement from the direction by which the nurse had entered.

Coming toward him was something the size of Glitch, but gleaming, silvery—an assault robot. Built like a Terminator, but without the false skin to conceal its true nature and lacking all the sophisticated programming needed by Terminators to pass themselves off as humans, it moved with a mechanical precision and efficiency that was distinctly inhuman. In its hands it carried a plasma rifle, as shiny and smoothly contoured as the assault robot itself.

And the robot was already aiming the weapon.

*   *   *

Once he was in the hallway, Paul found that his understanding of what he was seeing continued to improve. The vision of the bar and its paralyzed patrons faded to nothingness, leaving him in a hallway with scuffed off-white linoleum flooring and industrial-green walls. The air was cool and somehow sterile. The hallway stretched for what seemed like a half a mile ahead of him, but he knew that his perceptions still had to be distorted, that the corridor could not be as long as that.

All the doors along it were closed. He wondered whether opening any of them would give him answers to the questions clogging his mind. Where is this? How did I get here? Where’s Eliza? What’s happened to me?

But he didn’t dare look. Something told him that he was surrounded by wrongness and needed to get clear of it as fast as possible.

That meant finding an exterior exit. Was he on ground level now? Above it? Below it? The silence, broken only by the faint hissing of air-conditioning, suggested that he could be belowground.

First things first. Assess condition and resources. Someone had told him that. Who was it? A man with graying sandy hair, a fleeting, wispy memory. Thinking of him, Paul felt a sense of loss.

Condition: Physically weak, uncoordinated, brain not working right. Memory fouled up. Resources: a set of insulating garments from a sensory-deprivation tank.

If he could only get his hands on a firearm—

Did he know how to use one?

Yes.

How did he know how to use one?

He couldn’t remember.

He growled to himself, slapped his palm against his forehead as if to jar sticky gears and pistons into movement.

Paul came to a slightly open door. He peered in, then, half-recognizing the shapes he could dimly see, reached in to snap on the light.

Inside was furniture—a single twin-sized bed, the bedclothes disarrayed, a cheap-looking wooden desk, a straight-back wooden chair, a weight bench.

He felt dizzy again. This was his efficiency apartment, home sweet hovel, but beyond the door he was peering in should have been a set of three steps down to the sidewalk.

He stepped in and looked around. To the left should have been his kitchenette with the exterior window beyond. The refrigerator, stove, and miniature dishwashing machine were in place, but the window was black. Wondering, he moved over to it. Beyond should have been a busy city street, day or night, but there was nothing but darkness.

The sliding door into his closet was open, revealing his clothes on their hangers: plain white T-shirts, short-sleeved and long-sleeved button-down shirts in a variety of colors, blue jeans, slacks. He hastily grabbed several shirts and two pairs of pants. From the bottom of the closet he took his cross-training sneakers. He slid the closet door closed, revealing a mirror affixed to one of the panels. He dropped all his items onto the bed, rolled them into a bundle.

From the chest of drawers he took underwear and pairs of socks. Atop the chest of drawers was a belt pouch, the pouch he always wore. He’d been wearing it back in the bar. He unzipped it, looked at his contents. A multitool that would fold out into pliers and wire cutters, with smaller tools, ten of them, that would fold out from the handles, five to a side. His wallet. His keys—apartment, mailbox, the gated swimming pool of his apartment complex.

He pulled the belt around him and clicked the plastic buckle into place. There. Now I’m armed. It seemed laughable, but he felt better knowing his precious multitool was in his possession again. Thing’s older than I am— He frowned. He couldn’t remember where he’d gotten it, yet he knew that it was older than he.

How old was he? A year out of college, so twenty-three, he thought. But he couldn’t remember college.

What was this place? It looked like a hospital. Had he been institutionalized, for his own good, by friends or family?

No. There were no institutions. He had no family. He had no friends.

The truth of that, unaccompanied by memories to give it context, hit him so hard that he bent over, nauseated.

The wave of sickness diminished and passed, but not the conviction that his realization was the truth.

He could see himself in the closet mirror, and that view, at least, afforded him some relief. He was not unusually good-looking—tall, lean, with some breadth of shoulder, with brown eyes and ordinary features that would never land him a job in Hollywood—

If Hollywood was gone, why did he know so much about it?

—but the features were those he recognized, the only difference being the three-or-four-day growth of beard. He hadn’t worn any facial hair minutes ago, when he was talking to Eliza.

He gathered his bundle and left.

The next door down the hallway was ajar as well. It was the living room he’d known as a child, the muted orange of the rounded sofa as garish now as it had been when he was little, the turntable of the stereo system on a wall shelf that had been intended to bear books. It was all so fresh in his memory that he expected to see his mother, returning from her shift at the all-night restaurant, step in the front door to greet him, though she’d been dead since—how long?

Half-formed memories were slugging it out with one another in his head. He backed out of the room and decided to let them finish annihilating one another. Then he could ask the winners what reality was. He continued down the hall.

The floor trembled beneath his feet.