C.6

August 2029

Hornet Compound

Daniel blinked and looked around. He was on a cot that was generously built, almost suited to his oversize frame. The walls were stone, his surroundings blocked off by wooden stands with man-height, coarse brown curtains hanging from them. The only light came from a naked low-watt bulb overhead; wires snaked across the stone ceiling to it and beyond.

He sat up. His internal time sense told him that it was about midnight. “Hello?” he said.

One of the curtains parted and Mike entered. She carried a wooden tray; it was packed tightly with mismatched bowls and plastic drinking vessels, plates, and utensils. “Sorry,” she said. “I was getting us something to eat. Good of you to wake up before it all got cold.” She sat on the foot of the cot, laid out the tray between them.

Daniel’s eyes grew wide as he saw what was on the plates. “Dear God, is that steak?”

“Venison steak.”

He seized one plate and balanced it on his lap, then helped himself to knife and fork. “How do they rate venison?”

“They shoot it themselves. Hornet’s hunter-gatherers train in bow and arrow so they can hunt silently.” Mike repeated Daniel’s actions with her own plate. “They don’t have meat every day, but they had a good hunt yesterday … and this is special treatment for Connor’s senior staff. Hornet Compound’s way of saying, ‘We’re big enough to treat John Connor to a good time.’”

“Hallelujah.” Daniel struggled to cut a bite-size piece. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. And chewed. “Flavorful, kind of spicy,” he said. “But tough.”

“Just like most of us.”

He snorted. “This evening, at the meeting, did I pass out?”

“Not exactly. You dozed off. And then you woke up for a minute, except it wasn’t you. It was him. Young Daniel.”

He looked at her closely, but seemed undismayed by the news. “How did Young Me behave?”

“Kind of like Old You, only without your extensive range of inhibitions.”

“I was afraid of that.” He heaved a sigh. “Well, regardless, it’s interesting that the connection is two-way like that. I wonder if Young Me can remember what he saw. And I also wonder if there’s some way I can arrange things so that I remember what I see when I’m there, seeing through his eyes.”

Mike struggled with her own piece of meat. “This is going to make my jaws ache. Not that I’m going to complain. Hell, if I’m not in too much pain, I’ll go back for seconds. So, you want to start tomorrow?”

“I want to start tonight.”

She grinned at him. “Lake’s already asleep. I’ll let you shake her awake.”

He shuddered. “Tomorrow. I wouldn’t be much use with my head bitten off and spat down a mine shaft.”

“You are getting wise in your old age.”

June, Present Day

Ávila Property

The voices in his dreams had once seemed so cheerful, so innocent. The time capsule they’d suggested had been a lark—an important lark, to be sure, and they’d convinced him of that, else he’d not have spent so much money, so much time.

But now the voices brought night after night of torture. He wanted to hate them, but he could sense that they did not want to hurt him.

They just had to.

The dreams hammered at him. Like true nightmares, he could not escape when he was in their grasp. But unlike true nightmares, he could sense that they were not the frightening but random manifestations of conscious and unconscious fears. He knew that there were minds on the other side of them, minds and voices that pressed them into his head every time he fell asleep.

In the dreams, Skynet, the master coordination system that could centrally manage all of the United States’ military forces, awoke. No longer just an artificial intelligence, it was truly sapient, a thinking being.

It was an alien being, made by human hands but not with human sympathies, and its first logical conclusion was that the greatest threat to its existence was its own creators. With inhuman patience, it waited, evaluating its resources and calculating human response, until it could figure out how to force and trick its human masters into handing it the keys to the Earth’s most terrifying arsenals. Then, when those weapons were in its hands, it finished strangling communications it had already been squeezing, disrupted lines of command, and launched the bombs.

And not only bombs. Every sort of weapon or vehicle that could be computer-controlled rolled out into the ruined world and continued the process of human extermination. Most fearsome of all were the Terminators—not only the T-1s, T-1-5s, and T-1-7s Danny had worked on, but more and more sophisticated models, some based on designs Danny knew were already on the drawing board, some the result of pure Skynet engineering.

And the voices in the dreams insisted that he do something about it, do things not to prevent the future he saw, but to make it easier to endure … to make the war one the future voices could win.

The dreams and the demands they made of him were stomach-wrenching and gruesome. By day, he could not shake the feeling that they were more than the result of the job stress he was experiencing—they were real, or would someday be real. He lived with a growing conviction that they were not dreams, were not the product of hallucination or insanity. He became glum and noncommunicative around the house, tight-lipped at the office.

One thing that brightened his dreams was the presence of Linda. Sometimes, when the nightmares were at their worst, he would hear her voice, soothing him. But eventually the images of devastation would return.

What the voices asked him to do was impossible. They wanted him to hack into heavily protected government and civilian databases, change and destroy information, steal and misdirect classified information. These were criminal offenses. Some of them constituted treason.

In dreams that were not sent to him, he could see the eyes of his parents, of his brothers, of Linda as they looked at him, realizing that he was a traitor. Their disappointment ground him down to the size of the head of a pin.

But the voices persisted. Try to understand, they told him. You’re worried about going to jail. There is no jail. There is no federal court system. There is no United States. When Judgment Day comes, everything you’re now working for will go away. You need to work toward something else.

We need you.

He wanted them to be lying so he wouldn’t have to do what they said. If he ever really, truly believed them, he knew he would have to do it.

Even though it meant the distant voices would be able to give him more facts and reasoning that supported their assertions, Danny began to ask questions of them. How could such a thing happen? He didn’t want to hear about the logic of it, not the dumb-ass lesson of man implementing technology before he understood it, before he could control it; he wanted to know about the methodology. What techniques does Skynet use to force the U.S. government to hand over the reins of military power to it prematurely? What does it do to disable the checks and balances and countermeasures the government had in place?

The voices gave him answers, answers he remembered when he awoke. By day, when not doing his specific assignments and tasks at CRS, he would nose about the U.S. military computer networks, peer through the Skynet operating system, evaluate the results of Skynet and Terminator test runs.

Danny was good at his job. He didn’t get caught, but he did become depressed. Everything the future voices told him was possible.

And there was nothing he could do to prevent it, to cancel the future the voices described to him. Oh, he could draft a report warning the Department of Defense about possible flaws in their control of the Skynet system. But the problem was that gradual changes that had taken place in the Skynet setup—such as alterations to the protocols that would allow Skynet to assume control and lock down lines of communication between military forces—had been, in theory, brought about by human decision, based on human evaluation of how these systems coordinated with one another, especially in the face of possible enemy action. Danny could see the manipulation and string-pulling behind these decisions; operating over a period of months, Skynet had to have been influencing the results of test runs and operations in such a way as to cause military observers to come to specific conclusions and recommend specific changes. But now each of those changes was backed by tests, retests, and documentation by people whose opinion carried much more weight than Danny Ávila’s.

He couldn’t do anything. Except, perhaps, what the voices were going to recommend.

Wrapped in gloom, his resistance at an end, Danny caved in. He would listen, really listen, to the voices and not just struggle against them.

August 2029

Hornet Compound

Daniel had his own private room now, at the far end of a mine tunnel not far below ground level. The quartz vein the tunnel followed had run on for only a few hundred feet before playing out. His room was hundreds of yards away from the nearest sleeping chambers of Hornet Compound.

Secrecy and privacy had been the main reasons for Daniel’s placement in this isolated location, but ever since he had been relocated here, John’s advisers had found that no one shared his dreams; only those who participated in the project were near him when he slept; when he slept, they were always awake.

His chamber had a bed surrounded by chairs and a curtain—once a military tarpaulin—to shield it from the rest of the tunnel. Tamara Lake had told him that the chamber would be built up, medical and sensory equipment added to monitor his progress, a real wall installed so that those watching out for him wouldn’t have to be in the same room.

He didn’t really care. He could sleep anywhere, anytime. And now, with most of the chairs surrounding him occupied by his friends and allies, he closed his eyes and did just that.

*   *   *

Lake waited until Daniel’s breathing slowed into what she recognized as his usual sleep pattern. “It usually takes a little while before he goes into REM sleep,” she whispered. “But the time interval is getting shorter every night. Fifteen minutes two nights ago, twelve minutes last night.”

“He’s getting better at it,” Kate said.

Lake frowned. “Well, it’s just not natural.”

“Nothing about this is natural,” Mike said.

“It does beg the question,” John said, “if it is possible for anyone else to do this, how do we find them?”

“I’m not sure,” Lake said. “It’s too early to tell. I’ve been trying to catalogue the distinctive characteristics of the person or persons who’ve exhibited this behavior. Between Daniel and you, we have two—well, one and a half—samples. When we find enough traits common to you two, then we can go on the lookout for others with similar traits.”

Kate kept her expression steady, but John could tell that she was enjoying Lake’s slight perturbation. Lake tended to rub almost everyone the wrong way, and seeing her on the receiving end of uncertainty tended to cheer most people up. “So what have you got?” Kate asked.

“Well, Daniel has a photographic memory and an extraordinary time sense. I doubt that they’d contribute to being able to leak his dreams across time, since they’re not characteristics John shares, but maybe they’d help him remember the dreams in the first place. Most people forget most of their dreams; not him.”

“Okay,” John said. “So we’ll have a check box for ‘perfect memory’ on the questionnaire. What else?”

“There’s one thing that may be even more significant. Something you and he have in common, John. And you, too, Kate.”

“Well, that means it’s not a Y chromosome and a love of sports,” Kate said.

“You’ve all been exposed to the peripheral electromagnetic emissions of a particle accelerator, the one at CRS,” Lake said.

John and Kate exchanged a look. “For a little while,” John said. “Sure.”

“And Danny, over a span of years … but from a greater distance, through a greater depth of earth and insulating materials. We don’t know much about their particle accelerator; it was part of black operations for which we haven’t found many records. There’s no telling what effect its operation might have had on your brain chemistry. That alone might have altered or kick-started something in your heads that led to this. And while that’s just speculation, this is hard fact: Daniel throws off a greater-than-normal amount of EMR when he’s in his dream-state. It interferes with some of the instruments. I kept noticing static on the intercom whenever he was dreaming, and when Mike checked things out, she discovered that he was lit up like a little generator.”

Kate shook her head, not fully understanding. “A greater-than-normal amount?”

“That’s right,” Mike said. Then she paused as Daniel muttered something, but the man went quiet again. She continued, “Everyone emits electromagnetic radiation. Enough to detect and measure. In a sense, we’re meat machines, just like a Terminator is a metal-and-silicone machine. Both types of machines throw off some electrical output.”

“Invidious comparison,” Kate muttered.

Lake grinned at her, happy to see her discomfited.

Mike continued, “Daniel’s output is strange and strong. I wonder if it is somehow burrowing its way back in time and finding a matching receiver back in the past—and Daniel himself is that receiver. It’s found other receivers in the present, but it has to be people sleeping very close to him.”

“I hear you,” Daniel said.

Everyone looked at him. Even in the dim light, it was obvious that his pupils were moving back and forth under his eyelids.

“Do you recognize my voice, Danny?” Lake asked.

“You’re Tamara.”

“That’s right. John and Kate and Mike are all here, too.”

“Hi.” Daniel giggled, an incongruous noise. “I’m Danny, and it’s been twenty-four days since I’ve had a drink.”

They smiled. All were old enough to remember how the stereotype of a visitor to Alcoholics Anonymous, making such a declaration in front of his peers, had become material for stand-up comics in the years before Judgment Day.

Lake rolled a small table on wheels beside Daniel’s bed. On the table, attached to an articulated mechanical arm, was a television screen. “Danny, I want you to open your eyes. I have something to show you—”

“No, screw your recordings.” Daniel shook his head, keeping his eyes closed. “No more. I know that I have to do it. I just don’t know what.”

Lake looked at John, an inquiry. He waved her away, and she moved the rolling table from beside the bed.

“Danny, this is John. Do you have paper there?”

“Don’t need paper. I’m remembering everything.”

“All right. Here’s exactly what we’d like you to do…”

*   *   *

Daniel’s eyes came open. His mine-shaft chamber was darker now, but he could see that there was one silhouette left in the chairs. “Mike?”

“I’m here.”

“Scientific genius like you shouldn’t be reduced to baby-sitting.”

“I need the money.”

Daniel laughed and reached out a hand for her. She took it.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Daniel? You’re covering something up.”

“It’s a personal thing. Not an operational thing.” He sighed. “I still can’t remember.”

“Remember before J-Day? But you’re there. You’re in contact with the younger you. Every night, now.”

“And when I wake up, like now, I don’t remember anything the younger me has been doing, experiencing, or seeing. Oh, sometimes I get little flashes of visions, but it’s all stuff that I saw then but have also seen more recently. T-1 Terminators. Pieces of Edwards. I’d like, just once, to see my mother’s face. To see anyone’s face. To see my family house.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to try harder.”

“No, you don’t. Don’t try at all. Just relax and let it happen.”

He laughed. “I don’t mean I’m going to strain at it. I don’t think I could even fall asleep, muscles all locked with tension. What I want to do is just change the way I sleep when we’re trying these experiments.”

“Sleep’s sleep, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes and no. I dream different ways when circumstances are different. Big, spicy meal just before dinner and I tend to have weirder dreams. Dozing off when I’m sitting up, lights on, surrounded by people, I tend to have fragmented little dreams that don’t add up to entire stories. I also tend to be lucid or nearly lucid when I’m doing that. See the difference?”

“I see that there is a difference, but I don’t know what it means.”

“All it means is that I want to go to sleep under different circumstances and see if it results in a different type of contact when I reach Danny.”

“Okay, but … I don’t want you to exert yourself. I don’t want you to overstay your welcome when you’re connected to Danny. The problem is, the longer you dream, the faster your breathing and respiration, the redder you get—Tamara’s worried.”

Daniel laughed. “Tamara’s not worried. Tamara has all the warmth and sympathy of a T-800.”

“Then I’m worried.”

“Well, that’s different.” Daniel squeezed her hand and changed the subject. “This is as close as you and I have ever been, Michaela. Why is that? Every time I showed you I was interested, you turned me very politely aside.”

“You are ruthlessly exploiting your new position.” Her tone suggested that she was more amused than angered.

“I’ve barely gotten started.” Daniel clutched at his chest with his free hand; his voice became overly theatrical. “Why, Mike, why? Why did you leave me to the tender mercies of the man-eating Tamara for the two weeks she could stand me? Why’d you never give me the time of day?”

She snorted. “Give yourself some credit. I figured you’d break my heart.”

“I always thought that…” Daniel paused, reluctant to stomp across genuine emotions. “That you hadn’t ever really gotten over losing what’s-his-name, Mark’s father.”

“Well, there’s that, too.”

“So?”

“So … let’s not even talk about it while everyone’s emotions are all jumbled up by this dreaming experiment.”

He sighed. He was no longer overacting. “He was a very lucky man, your husband. His wife still mourns for him and he has a son he can be proud of. Me, there’s nothing to show the world I was ever here. When I die, that’s it. I evaporate.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die anytime soon. And your accomplishments with the Resistance, okay, they’re not as flashy as John’s, but without them, the human race might be gone now.”

“And even with them, it might still be gone tomorrow.”

“Daniel—”

“Enough.” He released her hand and rolled onto his side, away from her. “I’d better get some sleep. Some real sleep.”