Terminator Salvation

“The devil’s hands have been busy,” Connor finally murmured.

The prisoner had been allowed to retain his pants. He had been allowed to retain his boots and his hair. What he was presently missing was his shirt and much of the skin that had formerly covered the upper portion of his body. It had been cleanly peeled back like the plastic wrapping on an old toy. Beneath lay—beneath was....

In places it was impossible to tell where man ended and machine began. Or machine ended and man began; confusion as to precedent only serving to further emphasize the beauty and dreadfulness of what unknown talents had wrought. Titanium and other metal parts gleamed in the bright light. Veins and arteries became tubing with nary a break or weld visible. In places where primate verisimilitude had been sacrificed to save weight, light shone completely through the exposed body.

Connor stared.

You have to stare, he told himself. Because you’ve never seen anything like it before. To the best of his knowledge, no one had.

“What is it?” he murmured. “What the hell?”

Kate moved forward to stand beside him.

“More accurate to say, what hell?” She joined her husband in gazing at the disorientated prisoner. “The outer three epidermal layers reproduce their natural equivalent almost perfectly. I can’t tell if it has been engineered and grown, or if it’s real human skin that’s been modified. One characteristic that has already been noted is the remarkable healing properties it possesses.” She stepped forward and pointed with the large scalpel she was holding. “Look at that. I made the original incision there less than twelve hours ago. It’s already completely scarred over. Underneath is—well, see for yourself.”

Eyes widening, Wright gaped at the moving hand and the potentially lethal instrument it was holding.

“What are you doing to me?” Suspended in the heavy restraints, Wright stared at the people arrayed in front of him. “What have you done?”

Kate didn’t hesitate. A few quick, deft, practiced slashes with the blade opened the chest cavity wide. Stepping back, she studied the result as emotionlessly as if she had performed the opening on a cadaver. Except that a cadaver would have been far less unsettling.

“The heart is human, and very powerful. Given its powers of recuperation, that was to be expected. The brain is human too, and I think also original. But with some kind of chip interface. No one could have anticipated that. Even looking at it under the scanner, it’s hard to believe. But there’s no denying it.”

As she spoke she used the tip of the scalpel to indicate relevant parts of the prisoner, as if she was gesturing at an illustrative chart.

“There’s still quite a lot we haven’t analyzed. The pulmonary system is completely hydraulic and the heart muscle has been stabilized and enhanced accordingly to handle the increased flow and higher pressure. I can’t wait to get into the details of the nervous system and see how the hard wiring is integrated with the brain and the spinal cord. If it is a spinal cord and not just a braided cable.”

What were they talking about?

Wright had finally managed to come to grips with having awakened in a world gone mad. Now it seemed that he had been taken from that new world and dropped into a second one even more baffling and insane than its predecessor. The words of those who were coldly studying him, the detachment of their discussion, were as hurtful as they were incomprehensible. They couldn’t possibly be talking about him. He had inadvertently set off a landmine, sure, but it hardly meant that....

Dropping his head and lowering his gaze, he for the first time caught sight of himself, dangling above the high, deep drop. Despite a sudden desperate desire to do so, he found that he couldn’t scream. The shock of what he was seeing utterly overwhelmed the horror. And it had nothing to do with the height at which he found himself suspended.

He was looking at the inside of himself, and what he was seeing made no sense.

The woman they had called Kate was still talking. “...hybrid neural system for certain, but how it was accomplished is beyond me. Whoever did the work would have to have been part surgeon, part mechanical engineer, and all visionary. It’s as remarkable as it is disturbing. There appears to be a dual central cortex—one human, one machine.”

They were ignoring him, discussing him the way he had once discussed with his brother the best way to get more horsepower out of an old Ford big block. Did you remove this or that part, replace it, or have it remachined?

“What did you do to me? This isn’t me. What’s going on here?”

They paid no attention to his frantic questions. It was almost as if he wasn’t there.

Almost as if he wasn’t one of them.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You were right, John.” Kate’s attention shifted back and forth between her husband and the—creature. “Something has changed. This—thing—is unlike anything we’ve encountered previously. Aside from the technology that’s been incorporated into it, the surgical skill required to fabricate such a hybrid is beyond anything I could even begin to imagine.” She turned thoughtful. “Even back in the late twentieth century they were successfully implanting all kinds of artificial parts into people. First hip joints, then tendons and ligaments. Hearts, too. But it’s one thing to transplant a heart from one human into another. Linking it up with an entirely synthetic circulatory system—that’s new.

“As for linking it all to a half-machine brain and still having the original retain its full bank of memories without any apparent permanent loss or damage....” She shook her head. “It’s a miracle or a horror—take your pick.”

Connor studied the agonized figure that was hanging in suspension.

“We don’t know that the brain in question is retaining actual memories from the original cortex. The ‘memories’ the creature is experiencing could be implants designed to enhance its feeling of humanity and thereby augment its ability to deceive.” His tone was icy. “It’s all clever programming. To make the thing believe it actually is human.”