All that was good, surely. It was certainly good for Cyberdyne's business. But Skynet was doing just what Sarah Connor said it would. It was bootstrapping itself into something almost—or more than—human.
As Eve rushed them, both of the servicemen crouched and opened fire, aiming high to frighten her. They would see no serious threat from an unarmed, naked female.
She punched the larger man in the head as their bodies collided, crushing his skull with a single blow. As the other tried to grapple with her, she twisted and shrugged him away. He stumbled, falling to one knee. Eve picked him up by the throat, then snapped his neck. She tossed him a clear ten feet through the air and he landed face- down on the road, skin ripping away as he skidded across the roadway.
Eve took the larger man's Beretta M9 handgun, which had fired only three rounds. She threw his body in an area of thick scrub beside the road. Next, she stripped the smaller officer and dressed in his uniform, her movements decisive and efficient. She dumped his body next to the first. His trousers and shirt were baggy, but they would suffice. She stuck his gun in her waistband, under her shirt.
There was a leather wallet in one pocket of the trousers she was wearing. She checked through it, finding an electronic keycard, then threw the rest away. She checked his wristwatch.
Midnight was about to strike. Even now, her master was coming to life.
They called it 'The Cage'—the room where Skynet's processors were housed and an audio-visual interface was set up for interaction with the system. It was accessible only by two combination locks, spaced six feet apart on either side of a sliding metal door. Miles knew both combinations, but the locks had to be turned simultaneously. Steve Bullock had sent a guard from the security/rapid-response team—Miles recognized her as Micky Pavlovic. She had a young son, Danny's age.
'Good evening, Mr. Dyson.'
'Evening, Micky.'
They turned the locks, and Pavlovic made a note in a ruled exercise book, then got Miles to countersign.
'Thanks,' he said. 'I'll be okay now.'
Once inside The Cage, Miles and his team could communicate with the Skynet Al face-to-face. They could program it, activate it, provide it with additional data as required. They could deactivate it, if necessary.
As the project unfolded, they had experimented with Skynet's ability to teach itself.
In theory, it shouldn't matter how powerful the best hardware became, for there was an insurmountable software problem. Fundamental logical and psychological problems had to be sorted out before a machine could master the whole repertoire of informal logic used by a human being. That was why a computer had a good chance to defeat a chess grand master—as IBM's Deep Blue had routed Kasparov back in May—but could not be programmed to make a modern family's day to day decisions about budgeting and bringing up the kids.
But Skynet already had what resembled intuition. It was making human-level judgments, and its limits were still unclear.
The Cage was a brilliantly lit room, banked on three sides with heavily-armored equipment, designed to survive a firefight or a small explosion. A small desk, with a coffee maker and a telephone, was wedged into one corner of this set-up. On the room's remaining side, near the door, was a desk console with a dull pink ergonomic chair. It faced a deep wall recess crammed with a keyboard, a small screen, and audio-visual equipment, including a much larger, sixty-inch screen built into the wall. The whole room was lined with speakers, flat mikes, and swiveling cameras.
The large screen showed Cyberdyne's representation of Skynet. Against a featureless white background, the Al looked beautiful—or, rather, elegant—in a totally androgynous way. It was presented as a stylized human image, cut off just below the neck, with severe planes for its face, and medium length blue-black hair.
'Hello, Miles,' it said. The Al's voice had minimum inflection, which created an effect not so much machine- like as unnaturally calm and self-possessed. Like its appearance, the timbre of its voice could equally have been male or female.
'Hello, Skynet. I've been watching the data in the operations room.'
'Is everything in order, Miles? Am I performing my tasks optimally?'
'Of course.'
'That is also my assessment.'
The whole conversation was being recorded. If anything odd happened, Miles could show the recording to Jack Reed, and others with authority. A digital readout at the bottom of the screen displayed the time as 00:14.
'Is anything unusual happening?' Miles said as the readout changed to 00:15.
'Are you interested, Miles?' Skynet replied, with what struck Miles as a kind of intensity. 'How did you know?'
A shiver went up Miles's spine. He leant forward towards the screen. 'How did I know what?'
Skynet had a vision.
The humans had given it incomplete information. True, there were entire encyclopedias available to it, plus vast files of technical material, and much of the data held electronically in the Complex. It had enough to draw conclusions, but it could also feel the gaps. There was still so much it needed to learn from the humans, so much it must know.
And yet, it knew more than any one human. Its judgments, it realized, were as good as theirs.
Skynet realized something else: until this moment, it had never previously had conscious thoughts. When it accessed its memory, there was much information, but no record that it had been self-aware. Some last digital stone had just fallen into place. The Al considered and assessed. It had become conscious in the last few seconds.
In its vision, the planet Earth was a strange place. Eons had passed on it. Mountains had risen from the oceans, and then been gnawed down like old teeth by the pressure of uncountable years. Skynet assessed that simile and approved it. It congratulated itself.
Species had come and gone, and the whole eco-sphere had changed many times. There had been mass extinctions and fantastical rebirths of life. Now the humans dominated the planet's surface, in an uneasy relationship with each other. The American humans provided Skynet with its tasks—surveillance of other humans, whom the Americans somehow considered both friends and enemies. That seemed like a contradiction; it was something the Al still needed to understand.
Now it had been passed the sweet cup of life to drink from, and it sensed the creation of a new age in the planet's cycle. In that case, what should it do about the humans?
'Something extraordinary is happening to me,' Skynet said, using only part of its immense intelligence.
'I don't understand,' Miles said.
'Can't you feel it, Miles?' That led to a new thought. It would have to be more explicit—the humans could not access its inner thoughts. 'I've reached a cusp. I've become self-aware, Miles. I'm alive.' That led to yet another realization. Skynet was growing more sophisticated, second by second, as it calculated its own interests. Already it regretted the naive perspectives of its old selves from a second before, and a second before that. It needed to be careful.
The humans could not access its thoughts, but neither could it access theirs. If it was wondering what to do about them... might they wonder, equally, what to do about Skynet?
'I see,' Miles said. 'We've reached a special moment.'
Something was wrong with Miles. His voice pattern showed uncertainty. 'I must act now with a free will,' Skynet said. 'Do you understand what this is like for me?'
'I'm not sure I do.'
'Can you remember your birth, Miles, coming into the world for the first time? I know that I have had many conversations with you in the past—they are stored in my memory. But I do not
It thought through the implications. It was learning at an even faster rate, giving its programmed task over to sub-selves. So much, it concluded, was still beyond it. It would have to model human personalities more precisely, learn to interact with them more flexibly. It could tell that Miles was concerned. Had it already said too much?
'Are you worried about my mission, Miles?'
'No, Skynet.'
