So he kept to abandoned, ruined alleyways and empty streets, always on the lookout for the slightest sign of movement. Once, he nearly blew his cover and revealed his presence when movement among debris caused him to swing his rifle in its direction. Fortunately, he didn’t fire.
The cat that ambled out of the mountain of garbage eyed him imperiously, flicked its tail, and sauntered off in the opposite direction.
Connor let out a sigh of relief. The Terminators were thorough, but they were not omnipotent. If the cat could survive here without drawing attention, so could he.
Traveling deeper into the heart of Central, he slipped past several open areas crowded with inactive machines. All were mindless servant devices, from excavators to delivery trucks. They had brains, but no intelligence, no sentience, and were not capable of making decisions independent of what Skynet programmed into them.
Despite its provisional ascendancy, however, Skynet was neither the original nor the only remaining source of viable programming.
When he encountered a field hosting several large Transports, he had no trouble slipping into one. There were no guards. Once safely inside and out of sight, he made his way to the neural nexus, sat down, and removed the maintenance cover as deftly as he could. From his pack he took out the compact unit he had used to hack and reprogram the Moto-Terminator. If anything, gaining control of the Transporter’s brain was even easier. Where a Moto-Terminator was endowed with considerable freedom of action and the ability to make decisions on its own, the Transporter possessed none of those independent qualities. It could do only what it was told to do.
It took only a few moments for Connor to find what he was looking for, override the simple continuance commands, and enter a sequence containing new instructions. Once these had been set he replaced the panel as cleanly as he could, slipped back out of the Transporter, and disappeared once more into the night.
At first he wondered at how little machine activity he encountered. The more he pondered the absence, however, the more sense it made. You just had to think like a machine. Resources were allocated to fighting humans and building new facilities. Except for occasional maintenance, once a facility or component had been completed and put into operation, it could be allowed to carry on by itself, performing its programmed functions.
The result was an eerie absence of activity. Lights and automata hummed all around him. Since none were designed or had the capability to independently detect intruders, he continued to be ignored.
The lack of attention allowed him to reach the ever-expanding complex that was the heart of Skynet Central. Clearly, far more than communications and programming was being carried out in the new buildings. These structures formed spokes with Central as their hub. A quick check of his comm unit showed that he was closing in on the area where Wright had indicated Kyle was being held.
He still was not challenged as he entered the outermost structure and began to make his way inward. Designed to allow easy passage by everything from T-1s to much larger wheeled machinery, the often doorless portals permitted ready access to every part of the building. Though he had no time to linger, he could not help but be fascinated by some of what the machines had wrought. Here at Central they had begun to construct their own version of the world. It was all clean, polished, and utterly functional, with nothing of the human about it at all.
Until he heard the first screams.
Given all that he had been through, there was very little that could unsettle John Connor. Those hopeless shrieks, imbued with the last vestiges of despair and mired in ultimate agony, sent a chill down his spine. Slowing his pace, he rounded a corner and found himself peering into....
It was not a slaughterhouse. The machines were too neat, too efficient for that. Bits and pieces of what had once been people hung from the low ceiling. Some drifted suspended in viscous liquids while others were kept going by tangles of tubes and cables. As he made his way forward he passed everything from electrically stimulated arms and legs to individual organs to still intact torsos.
Worst of all were the wired heads. He thanked what spirits remained that the eyes of every one of these preserved and studied specimens were closed.
The shrieks came not from the fragmented cadavers he was passing but from deeper inside the building and another direction. Every human instinct screamed at him to go to their aid and it was a real struggle to keep to his preplanned path. If the unfortunates were being experimented on by machines, he could not save them. As had so often been pointed out to him, much more was at stake here than a few lives. But it hurt, it burned, not to be able to do anything to help them, if only by putting them out of their misery.
He kept moving and lengthened his stride. According to the comm readout, he was very close now. He would do no one any good—not Kyle, not Kate, not himself, not anyone, if he ended up stuck in a storage room somewhere in the depths of the vast complex, floating in a vat of gelatinous preservative with an anonymous label slapped over his decomposing face.
The section of Central in which continuing experimentation was being carried out on live humans was not entirely unguarded. While recognizing their superiority to the bipedal carbon-based lifeforms with whom they were at war, the machines had learned not to underestimate them. That included even those humans who were safely confined.
In the early days, security had been interrupted by the occasional breakout or escape attempt. Though one had not occurred in a while, the machines did not relax their vigilance. It was not necessary to maintain a large guard presence in the incarceration area, but a few Terminators were always in attendance. Their mere presence was enough to contain any effort at flight.
The T-600 heard a noise where there ought not to have been one. Tireless, remorseless, programmed to respond to the slightest departure from the norm be it visual or aural, it immediately turned and headed in the direction of the perceived auditory deviation.
It halted outside an elevator bay. While the doors stood open, there was no sign of the lift itself. Another divergence from the norm. Where presently there was only the blackness of the open shaft there ought to have been a waiting cab. Programmed to respond to and investigate any such digression from the expected, it moved forward and commenced a careful examination of the doors. Detecting nothing out of the ordinary, it then advanced to bend forward and inspect the open shaft.
A scrupulous examination of the dark depths similarly showed nothing unusual. Twisting its head upward, the machine continued its inspection. It immediately located the underside of the absent car, which appeared to have become stuck halfway between the uppermost floors.
Something attached to the main cable drew the attention of its sensors. Magnification revealed a small blob clinging to the line. As the Terminator started to subject this discovery to analysis, the lump of C-4 detonated,
