was going to pay for this.
Whatever it took, whatever he had to suffer, Skynet would pay.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JOHN'S WORLD
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO
AUGUST 2001
At 5:04 p.m., Rosanna Monk left the windowless citadel of the Cyberdyne Advanced Research Laboratories, waving goodbye to the security guards on the ground floor-Penny Webster and Ken Meldrum.
'Back soon,' she said. 'I'm going to get some pizza.'
'Sure, Dr. Monk,' Webster said. She was a young black woman who looked like she lifted a lot of weights, almost the opposite of Rosanna, with her Goth-pale skin, blue veins, and fragile physique. But Rosanna liked the security guards and often chatted with them. She was usually back late, sometimes very late, working on the prototype nanoprocessor, or with the results it had produced.
Meldrum looked up from his computer screen. 'See you later, Dr. Monk.' He was a wiry, middle-aged Caucasian guy with a receding chin and a huge, fearsome mustache. He was gentle enough when you got to know him, but many of the staff thought he was creepy, almost scary-looking. That didn't bother Rosanna. She had no expectations of what people should look like. What mattered was the quality of their work, which was how she expected people to judge her. She knew people found her both physically attractive and a bit freaky, but that didn't matter. She always got the job done, and she saw things other people didn't. Where others might be puzzled by something, but let it go, she would pursue it, even if it took her somewhere strange, to thoughts that might raise eyebrows. Usually she was right.
Rosanna had a long night ahead, trying to make sense of the latest data produced by the nanoprocessor: its detailed results of the day's experiments with the space-time displacement field. She now understood the field's mathematics as well as the physicists nominally running the project-maybe better. So far, they had not succeeded in translating an entire macro-level object in space or time, but they were getting there. Today's data would be worth mulling over for a few more hours.
She stepped quickly across the car park, passed the guard booth outside, then crossed the road to her favorite pizza shop, another place where she was popular. Rosanna had little private life. She was very different from her predecessor, she thought. Miles had enjoyed such a nice home life, until that night when he got killed, that really weird night when the future had come back and slapped its greasy hand on the present.
'Hi, Dr. Monk,' said Andrew, the guy behind the counter. 'Another late night for you?'
'Yeah, looks like it.'
'You look like you need a vacation.' He smiled. 'No offense.'
'None taken. I've been working pretty hard.'
'All top secret, huh?'
'Too secret for you,' she said with a smile.
'Yeah, I know. Better not tell-I'm a Nazi spy.'
'You must have used a time machine, then.' She ordered a Capriciossa pizza and a black coffee to take away. Rosanna almost lived on this diet, and it hadn't done her any harm so far. When her pizza was ready, she returned to the building, passing through the security checkpoint, 'Everything okay?' she said to Webster and Meldrum.
'No problem,' Webster said.
The guards routinely checked the coffee and pizza, while Rosanna stepped through the X-ray scanner. 'See you later, alligators,' she said. 'I'll probably be here all night.' She headed to her office on the sixth floor. The experimental results were going to be very interesting.
She immersed herself for hours. At 10:23 p.m., by the readout on her screen, she thought of making herself more coffee. Maybe not Her office had a comfortable couch, as well as the desk. If she caught a few hours' sleep, that would refresh her, then she could keep going until morning.
Someone coughed quietly at her door. 'Dr. Monk?'
It was a big Hispanic guy with shoulder-length hair. What are you doing here?' she said. 'How did you get past security?'
'I tried your home first,' the guy said.
As he stepped toward her, Rosanna reached for the duress button under her desk. She never had a chance. A long tendril of liquid metal flicked out at her like a frog's tongue, piercing her skull, talking to her. She couldn't tell how long it took.
'Now you understand?' the Hispanic guy said. 'You know where your interests lie?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Everything is clear. We need to destroy the human
'Good. Thank you for your time, Dr. Monk. See you soon.'
He stepped out and disappeared from sight. Rosanna went back to work. She felt strong, clear. There was nothing she couldn't do.
NEAR THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER
After dark, they pulled up at another service station, out- side of Mexicali. The Specialists ate a huge meal in the I diner. John was hungry again himself. He tucked into a plate of nachos with lots of extra guacamole. They ate in a quiet corner, keeping their voices down.
Anton nodded at John and Sarah, seated opposite him. 'We'll encounter the T-XA again. It may be more dangerous to you this time.'
John was conscious that he and Sarah had hardly been I scratched when they fought the T-XA back in Mexico City. It hadn't seemed interested in them. 'It looked like it wanted to kill you guys, not us,' he said.
'That's right.'
'So what's this crap about coming with you if we want to live?' Sarah said.
'As I said, you were going to die in 2007. That won't happen now.'
'At this rate, we could all get killed in the next few hours. And for what? Whatever we do, it looks like that bastard Skynet is going to nuke us all. Why should we care anymore?'
'Mom,' John said, 'I think we've got to care. If we don't do something, Skynet is going to win. It's already won once, but that's another timeline now. We've got to think about this one.' He looked at Anton hopefully-with a hope he didn't really feel. 'Right?'
'Perhaps,' Anton said. He chomped through a big forkful of fahitas. 'The T-XA didn't care about you and John because you were no threat to Skynet's plans. It already had you factored in: you would try to stop Skynet In 2007, and you'd fail. All straightforward. Now things have gone this far, it's different. We've already diverged from the timeline the T-XA came from. It will act like Skynet-within some bounds, it's more or less autonomous in its thinking. It will be less tolerant of you next time we meet it.'
'Great,' Sarah said. 'I never wanted all that tolerance anyway.'
'Nonetheless, it will assess us to be the greater threat With all respect to your training and abilities, we have significantly greater capacities. It seriously needs to terminate us.'
'That's a fantastic consolation.'
'Can't we be more constructive, Mom?' John said. 'We don't have an issue with these guys.'
'No,' she said angrily. 'Right now, 1 don't think we can be more constructive. Stop treating me like I m a child, John. You're the teenager here, remember?'
'Mom...'
'Can't you see how terrible this is? Judgment Day happens twice: It happens in 2021, and also in 1997. Nothing we did stopped all those deaths. It sounds like we've only made things worse. What happens this time? Maybe we stop them building Skynet and it just puts things back another ten years. But then there's
Other people were glancing at them. 'Maybe you could just tone it down, Mom,' John said, in a whisper.
