c.8

While Paul Keeley lay sleeping, the implant within his skull stirred.

Ports no wider than the diameter of human hairs slid open in the implant’s hypoallergenic surface. Before blood could seep into them, they extruded fibrous threads, actually chains of microscopic robotic devices—examples of the nanotechnology that drove high-end Skynet devices such as the T-1000 and T-X Terminator series.

The nanotech threads effortlessly punched through brain tissue, interrupting a synaptic chain here, erasing the connection between two sets of memories there. This casual, undirected surgery did not do damage from which Paul could never recover, but damage it did do. Still, Paul felt nothing; the brain, even damaged, feels no pain.

The nanotech threads pooled up against the inside of Paul’s skull, spreading out in all directions from both temples to the coronal suture, where the frontal bone of the forehead fused with the parietal bones farther back and to the sides. Had someone been watching with a sophisticated enough magnetic resonance imaging device or similar diagnostic apparatus, the threads would have seemed to go still at that moment, but they were not inactive; having reached their interim destinations, they began attaching themselves to one another at nodes on their microscopic bodies, reinforcing the tensile strength of each thread.

Then they began to exert pressure.

Finally Paul reacted. His left shoulder twitched, moving his entire arm, and then the twitch became chronic. Its arrhythmic jerking awoke him and he turned to look, bleary-eyed, at the offending limb.

Then his eyes widened. He clamped his hands over his ears and temples, exerting pressure, as if to contain within something that wanted out.

Within his braincase, the implant pulled in one direction and pushed in another, driving its mass through fragile tissue, churning brain matter into an organic sludge—

*   *   *

It should have been a scream, but it came out as a muffled, strangled noise, and Paul sat up, clutching his head. His blanket dropped away from him.

He ran his fingers across his temples, through his hair, but there was no agonizing pressure coming from within. There was no sensation of deliberate, fatal movement within his skull.

It had been a dream.

He’d had it before. But each time it came to him, it was new—and he lived it as though for the first time.

He wondered if it would ever come true—or go away forever.

He looked up into the eyes of the Terminator.

Above him loomed the hulk of the T-1 they’d found that afternoon. Someone, out of a sense of history or humor, had attached a lightbulb to the ceiling above and before it and the light shone down on the ancient robot.

The T-1 did not move, and no lights shone from the diodes in its crude face. Paul did not feel menaced by it and had set up his blanket between its treads, well away from the humans he accompanied.

In the distance, in the darkness, there was an odd click-click-click noise. The clicks were irregular, like pieces of plastic or pencil tips dropping onto the concrete, and were getting louder, closer.

Paul just stared. He had only a knife with which to defend himself, and he didn’t care to run.

The oncoming being moved into the light. It was Ginger, Kyla’s canine, her toenails clicking on the floor, her tail wagging slightly with curiosity. Behind came Ripper, and finally coming into the light was Kyla herself, her sniper rifle cradled in her arms. She was barefoot.

“Was that you?” she asked. Her voice was pitched low. Up the ramp, guards were on duty; down the ramp, at the next level area below, people were sleeping. She obviously didn’t want to disturb either group.

“Yeah,” he said. “Bad dream.”

She looked up at the unmoving figure looming above him. “Maybe it’s the company.”

“Hey, I’m Sleeps-With-Toasters, remember? I’m just living up to my name.”

She almost smiled. “That’s not funny. You’re going to give people the creeps until they put a round into you.”

“They’ll put a round into me whether or not I give them any more creeps. It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

He gave her an admonishing look. “Never mind.”

“You really think you’re facing some sort of death sentence? For fraternizing with the enemy?”

“Well, for that, and for having a chunk of the enemy installed in my skull. And for not having anyone who can say, with any sort of conviction, ‘He’s not a witch. Don’t burn him.’”

She sat down before him, cross-legged, and laid her rifle across her lap. Ginger immediately flopped down to lie against one of her legs. “Come on, you’re not dumb. If everyone thought you were a menace, you’d never have been allowed on a mission where you could get at my parents.”

“You’ll note that I haven’t been given any weapons.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know that. But it’s not true in any case. Tell me the truth. You haven’t had any opportunity to pick up a monkey wrench and brain one of them?” She frowned. “I wonder if saying that out loud is dereliction of duty for me.”

Paul thought about it. “Maybe you’re right. But there’s no way for me to find out whether I’m waiting out some sort of sentence or not. I don’t have any sort of connection with any human being.” He patted the T-1’s tread. “Boris here is my only friend.”

Kyla made an exasperated noise. “Oh, great, you’re Pinocchio.”

Paul fingered his nose. “You saying I’m lying?”

“I’m saying you’re a little wooden thing who wants to be turned into a real boy. But you can’t be.”

“Even assuming you’re right … why not?”

“Because you’d have to do the job yourself, and you’re too full of something—maybe stubbornness, maybe self-pity—to do it.”

“Oh. Well, is there a course in this? Maybe one of your father’s lecture series?”

The look she gave him suggested that she was not at all impressed by his sarcasm. “Actually, that’s one he could teach. Because he’s had to do that. To become what he is today.”

“Yeah, right. If there’s any one term that’s consistently used to describe John Connor, it’s ‘natural leader.’”

“But it’s wrong. I mean, he is a leader. He’s a great leader. But it didn’t come naturally.”

“How did it happen, then?”

“He spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the world needed him to be. He studied leaders and leadership, from books, from people he met—especially after J-Day. The way he puts it, he intellectualized a process that comes naturally to other people. And then he took the next step, which was to act as what he needed to become.”

“You’re saying your father is just pretending to be what he is.”

She shook her head. “I’m saying that he became what he wasn’t originally. And that’s what you ought to do. You want people to respect you or like you? Stop acting like a reject. Stop scuttling around in the shadows. Act like someone they’ll respond to better. And when they do, maybe you’ll start becoming that person.”

“Yeah? Well, one of these confident, battle-hardened Resistance guys you’re talking about, looking at you here, would say, ‘Hey, how about crawling into this blanket with me?’”

She gave him an exasperated look. “Well, that’s a start. An awkward, half-assed one, but a start.” She heaved herself to her feet. “But for right now, you’re still a wooden thing, and I like real boys.”

“So you’re worried about splinters.”

She laughed, then turned away and walked off into the darkness. “Night.”

“Good night.”

Ripper was last to leave. The dog gave Paul a sympathetic look that all but said, Dude, you struck out.

*   *   *

The next day Paul disassembled and began a decades-overdue maintenance of one of the Humvee Avenger engines. The thing was in surprisingly good shape, despite its many years of downtime; corrosion was at a minimum and most of the mil-spec belts and hoses might hold together.

He was on his back beneath the engine compartment when he became aware that booted feet had come to a stop nearby; their wearer had to be peering into the driver’s seat. “Hey,” he said. “Is there an extender for the socket wrench out there? I need it.”

The boots moved to the nearby tool kit and there were small clinks and clanks as their wearer dug through the tools; this noise only added to the repair-shop sounds echoing off the walls, as all along the complex men and women worked to restore its treasure of vehicles. Then, silently, a large male hand extended the extender within Paul’s reach.

Paul took it. “Thanks.”

The hand withdrew. There was no reply.

“The correct response is: ‘You’re welcome.’”

“You’re welcome.”

Paul jerked, avoiding by a fraction of an inch banging his head on the engine components above. Only one member of this expedition had those deep tones and that accent. “Oh, it’s Glitch.”

“Yes.”

“You know what my last job was, Glitch?”

“Analyzing and evaluating twentieth-century artifacts, principally mechanical apparati, for their usefulness in supporting the cause of the human Resistance.”

“No, after that. I spent several months or a year teaching a Terminator how to have conversations. Which is something you obviously need.” Paul attached the extender to the socket wrench and got to work tightening the last nut of his current task.

“I am capable of conversation.”

“You know how to talk. Not the same thing. What is the purpose of conversation?”

“Oral exchange of information.”

“Sometimes, yeah. What about the rest of the time?”

Glitch was silent for a moment. Either the answer was eluding the T-850 or he was actually hesitating—or programmed to do an effective simulation of hesitation. “Oral exchange of information.”

Paul shoved his way out from under the Humvee and sat up. Glitch remained in place beside the vehicle, staring at him incuriously. “There you’re wrong.” Paul disassembled the socket wrench into its components, dropping each into the correct slot in the thirty-year-old black plastic socket wrench case within the tool kit. “Doesn’t your programming have anything about human psychology, human needs?”

“A minimal amount necessary for interpretation of human behavior. Since I will not be called upon to pass for human in human society, a more extensive behavioral package was considered unnecessary.”

“See, it’s always more complicated than ‘oral exchange of information.’ Consider all my conversations with the T-X.” Paul felt a sudden pang of loss. The woman he had thought Eliza to be was a machine, one that has as its ultimate goal the extinction of the human race. But whenever Paul thought about her, that realization was transformed into something else, the loss of someone he cared about: the emotion of caring reinforced by dozens—perhaps hundreds—of encounters he couldn’t even remember. A woman I cared about has died. Or been transformed into something awful. It was the same thing. “The information I was giving to her, all about me, my history, and my interests, was not the information she was accumulating, which was how human beings act and react in a bunch of circumstances. And the information she was giving to me, all about her history and interests, was completely fictitious, while the real information she was giving me, which was all about how I should chase after her like a hormonal adolescent, was all subliminal. Get it?”

“Yes. But that is still an oral exchange of information.”

Paul stood up, not deterred by the robot’s implacable insistence on one answer. “And then there’s the question of affirmation of emotion. People talking in order to reassure each other and themselves. To form or reinforce bonds with one another.”

“Still an oral exchange of information. The information is: ‘I am good, you are good.’ It is simply expressed in a cumbersome and inefficient fashion.”

Paul stared into Glitch’s eyes and adopted a patronizing tone. “So you’re so smart—are you capable of performing this second sort of conversation?”

“Probably not. But it is not required of my role within the Resistance.”

“Now, think about that. You’re supposed to protect people from Skynet and its units, to save them when they’re in danger, to facilitate their plans in order to improve the whole species’ chances of survival. Does it interfere with your objective at all when people are too fearful and suspicious of you to cooperate fully with you?”

This time Glitch did not hesitate. “The odds are high that this does result in some interference.”

“Therefore your conversational helplessness limits your effectiveness.” Paul frowned. He didn’t normally use a phrase like ‘conversational helplessness.’ All his months of interaction with the T-X had made him a better speaker, had broadened his vocabulary.

“Yes, that follows,” Glitch said.

“Well, I tell you what. Anytime, at least up until I’m executed, you want to improve your conversational skills, come to me and we’ll talk. And I’ll give you a starter lesson right now. Allowing people to talk about their favorite subject makes it easier for them to relax and makes them feel better about you … and just about everyone on Earth has the same favorite subject.”

“What is their favorite subject?”

Paul grinned, victorious. He’d actually engaged a Terminator’s curiosity—or, rather, some imperative in the programming that made it a learning mechanism. “There are a couple of hints to the answer in the conversation we just had.” He closed his tool kit and picked it up. He wanted to give the Kawasakis a look-see.

Glitch stood in place for a moment, then, recognizing that the main body of the conversation was at an end, turned away. He took three steps, then stopped and turned to look back at Paul. “Themselves,” he said.

“Very good. You’ve just learned something.”

Clover Compound, Colorado

They lay in darkness hundreds of feet within the stony earth. This was one of the deepest tunnels of the old mine that had been incorporated into Clover Compound. No lights were strung here, no intercoms, no sign that anyone had visited in a hundred years or more—no sign other than a bundle of blankets and two moving forms beneath it.

J. L. held Lana to him, a tight embrace for which she seemed anxious, even desperate. They were cheek to cheek, and whenever she spoke, he could feel her lips moving against the corner of his mouth.

“How long before you have to go?” she asked. Though it was unlikely anyone else would have heard had she shouted at the top of her lungs, she still whispered. This distant, empty place seemed to encourage whispering.

“Oh, I can pretty much take the afternoon off.”

She giggled. J. L. liked that. Most of the women he knew didn’t giggle. They tended to laugh outright. Then she said, “No, I mean, before you have to leave Clover.”

“Oh. I’m not sure. A couple of days, a week maybe.” With the tip of his nose, he traced the letter J across her cheek and felt her shiver. “If I’m lucky.”

“If I’m lucky.”

“So, do you give this kind of reception to everyone who visits Clover Compound?”

“No … just the ones I like. And only ones Raymond can’t punish for it.”

“Wow. And does Mears ever punish you for it?” J. L. kept his tone light, but the thought of the old man visiting pain on Lana, superficial as she might be, stirred him to anger.

“No. Well … not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“When he finds out, he just looks at me like he’s so hurt. Like I’m some sort of brute who beats a frail old man with a stick. God, I wish I could quit my job.” A tear trickled down her cheek, and J. L. felt it roll down his as well.

“What is your job?”

“I’m his mistress.”

“Oh. I meant, your job in Clover Compound.”

“I told you. I’m his mistress.”

“That’s your official job?” J. L. drew back as if to look at her, though there was not one glimmer of light to reveal her features.

“Officially, it’s ‘attendant.’ But there’s only one attendant in Clover Compound, and everyone knows what it means. Before me, there was another one, and after me, there’ll be another one.”

“Why can’t you quit?”

“Because Raymond has to approve all position transfers. You apply for a post and he approves it … or he doesn’t. So I applied for the post. But it’s been years and he won’t let me leave.”

“You applied knowing what the job was?”

“Yes.” She shrugged. “I used to live in a—well, it wasn’t even a compound. It was just my family. A cabin deep in the woods. My father and brothers hunted. My mother and sisters and I cooked, kept the cabin up, gathered fruits and vegetables. It was, I guess, very traditional. My father was kind of weird about duties and roles. I knew about Clover Compound because my mother kept mentioning it. Since I was the oldest, she wanted me to be living somewhere else by the time I was an adult, and Pa wouldn’t hear of it … there was a lot of arguing about that. But it was all settled when the assault robot came.” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “I was the only one to get away alive; and I found my way here, and Raymond made me an offer; and the idea of not having to work, after all those years of it, and still to have somewhere to live and enough to eat, was so amazing…”

“But now you’d prefer to work.”

“Yeah. You think I’m disgusting, don’t you?”

“I think you did what you needed to in order to survive. Maybe it was the right choice, maybe it was the wrong one, I don’t know. But it’s not ‘disgusting.’ Disgusting is turning your back on a brother-in-arms. Did you ever do that?”

“No.”

“Then you’re okay.” He settled back in place beside her. “You want to quit, I can get you out of here.” He didn’t know that for sure, but he was certain that Lt. Sato would act on this woman’s behalf.

“No, you can’t.”

“The lieutenant can. Remember, he can talk to John Connor and Kate Brewster anytime he wants.”

“They’re not as powerful as Raymond here in Clover Compound.”

J. L. suppressed a sigh. Perhaps it was because Lana hadn’t grown up with the names Connor and Brewster in her ear since she was a child—or perhaps she’d been indoctrinated too thoroughly in the cult of Raymond Mears the Patriarch—but it was obvious she had no faith in anyone to extricate her from this situation.

He decided to change the subject … for the moment. “Is there any chance he’ll come down here and find us?”

“No, he never comes down here. I know it’s the access to Satan’s Hole and all, but he doesn’t visit.”

“So this isn’t where you and he go for privacy.”

“Oh, no.”

“Where do you go?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“He’d punish you?”

“I just can’t.”

There it was again, the tinge of irrationality that accompanied every one of the dictates of Mears, at least as Lana understood them. J. L. wondered if the woman even understood how deeply enmeshed she was in the old man’s illogic.

Well, it was time to find out. He spent a moment rehearsing the words Sato had given him and mixing them in with arguments he’d developed while talking with Lana.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Is just being alive still the most important thing to you?”

Sato had insisted that he used the word “still.” “Say ‘still’ and it means she has to reevaluate what you’re asking her about.” J. L. had expanded on that. “Just being alive” was different from “being alive,” because the words would remind her that she understood how far from admirable she considered her life to be.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Let me put it to you this way. The worst Raymond Mears could possibly do to you—and that’s if none of the Scalpers were in the way—is kill you. My question is this: Is that the worst thing that could happen to you? Is that the worst thing of all?”

“I guess maybe not.”

“Well, listen. Something’s going on out here. People operating out of or through Clover Compound are getting killed. We don’t know why, but we’re pretty sure that it has something to do with the place where you go for privacy.” That was a wild leap of supposition, it was true, but Sato had said that the only person in the compound who had access to high-level information that could doom missions and had demonstrated a willingness to gossip about it with noninvolved people was Raymond Mears. So Mears was Suspect #1, and any secrets he was preserving had to be uncovered. “We need to find out where that is and look it over—or else more people will die. Just like your brothers and sisters and parents did. You might be able to put an end to it. Just by telling us where. So you have to decide whether it’s worse for this to keep happening, which it definitely will, or if it’s worse for him to try to do his worst to you, which we can probably keep from happening.”

She was silent for a long time. He lay there, listened to her breathe, and felt his stomach do flip-flops. All the fighting he’d done over the years, all the bullets he’d dodged, hadn’t distressed him nearly as much as trying to back this woman into a corner and oblige her to do the right thing.

Finally she said, “I’ll show you. Meet me in the high airflow chamber in an hour.”

“Thank you.”

She sat up. By touch, she located her garments and pulled them on one by one. “If I die, you’ll tell people why, won’t you? I don’t want to be remembered just as his mistress. Please.”

“I’ll tell people. And if you do what the lieutenant and I say, I don’t think you’ll die. Maybe nobody will die. Everyone just has to be smart.”

This time it was no giggle—she laughed and there was a touch of bitterness to it. “Now you’re asking too much. I’ve never been smart.” She stood. “You might want to wait a few minutes before you follow me out. You remember the way?”

“I remember.”

She moved off into the darkness, sure-footed, familiar with her surroundings.

He waited until she’d been gone a minute. Then he pulled his pants on and carefully, keeping his hands before him to make sure he didn’t take a sudden fall, moved on hands and knees the fifteen yards or so to Satan’s Hole.

Maybe, as Lana had asserted, it wasn’t half-filled with the rotting corpses of Mears’s rivals and enemies. There was certainly no smell of decay floating up from its depths.

He leaned over the lip and threw up.

He sat back, wiping his mouth. He felt shaky and finally suspected, despite glorious childhood dreams of being a leader of men, that he probably wasn’t destined for that role.

Sometimes leading people meant manipulating them. And manipulating them made him sick.

J. L. decided that he might have to stick to killing the machines instead.