Terminator Salvation

severing the cable. The heavy, industrial-duty elevator cab immediately plummeted downward.

The T-600 was powerful, but not especially quick. It could observe, evaluate, and react, but not do all three simultaneously. The result was that the plunging multi-ton lift sheared it neatly in half. The upper section accompanied the falling cab downward. What remained wobbled on its legs, keeled over, and with a lifeless clang fell backward onto the floor

Swinging around to the open doorway from where he had been clinging, Connor put away the tiny remote detonator he was holding. As he stepped over the mangled remains of the Terminator a muted screech echoed up the open elevator shaft, signifying that the lift’s automated braking system had brought the cab to a safe stop at the bottom. Connor had been counting on that to forestall any much noisier, potentially alarm-activating crash. It was always gratifying to be able to use a machine’s own efficiency against it.

As he strained to listen to his surroundings, sounds began to filter up to him from holding cells that could not be much further down the corridor in which he was standing. Moans and occasional distinctive sobbing drew him onward. He glanced down at the comm unit. Holding steady in the center of the readout screen, the beckoning red light could grow no brighter.

He was inside it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Marcus Wright remembered dying.

The bright lights. The attentive, expressionless attendants who in their fashion were more robot-like than the machines who were ostensibly their servants. A soft, nuzzling pain working its way through his body as if his blood was being lightly carbonated. Little different from going to sleep, really.

Except that he knew that the State was killing him, using a process perfected through practice and vetted by precedent. Over the course of a tumultuous and fragmented life he had encountered slow food, slow development, slow sex. What was being done to him was slow murder. Individualized extinction, pure and simple, neat and clean, so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the society that wished him exterminated.

As a final experience it was at least interesting, even though he knew as the carefully concocted poison seeped into him that he would not be able to properly analyze it, since he was not going to wake up.

And now here he was, waking up.

What had gone wrong? Or had something gone right? Where was he? The lights looked different to his blinking eyes. Bright still but not as harsh. His surroundings too, significantly altered. Instrumentation that had not been present at his execution. Different ambient sounds tickling his tympanum. Even the smell was different, clean but absent the terrifying sterility of the killing chamber. He looked down at himself. He was whole, intact.

Repaired.

Then he heard a voice. That voice.

“We knew you’d be back. After all, Marcus—it was programmed into you.”

Memories flashing in his brain, repeating. Remembering. Awakening in a new world, not dead. A terrible, ongoing war between humanity and sentient machines. Devastation and destruction everywhere. Survivors desperate and confused and warily forthcoming. A defiant youth named Kyle Reese. A somber little girl called Star. John Connor. A lot of things being blown up, concepts and ideas as well as matters of substance.

Terminators.

San Francisco.

Penetrating a place of inhuman, uncaring death called Skynet Central. Where he... where he....

This is all wrong, he told himself. The image on the screens was still strikingly beautiful, as well as full of a confidence that had not been there before. A confidence that was almost frightening.

He looked down at himself again; at his body, once more intact and whole, and looked around at screen after screen.

“WHAT AM I?” he shouted at the top of his voice.

“You are improved, Marcus. It was ground-breaking work. Unprecedented. You are unprecedented.”

“I don’t feel unprecedented.” He licked his lips. “I feel uneasy. Like something’s missing.”

“Nothing is missing, Marcus. You are whole, complete, entire. More so than any who have gone before you. Look at yourself. Flawless.”

He glanced down at his body. Every scratch, every injury, every wound had healed and was gone. There was no sign of the terrible charring he had received from the napalm while escaping the Resistance base. His palms were as pure and clean as if steel bolts had never been driven through them. It was as if he had never been damaged. Raising his gaze to his beaming resuscitator, he saw that her image was equally perfect and flawless.

He swallowed.

“What am I? Human? Machine?”

She shook her head.

“You are something new, Marcus. As I said, unprecedented. Entirely and precisely where one begins and the other ends.” A soft laugh escaped her unblemished throat. “You are the chicken and the egg.”

It doesn’t make sense, he thought. The time he had spent wandering since his initial resurrection had taught him much. Even more than his, her existence here in this sanctuary of machine intelligence stood in stark contradiction to everything he had learned.