General Brewster knew that it was going to be another very long night.
He looked up and waved the project's chief engineer, Tony Flickinger, in. 'Okay, what have we got?'
Flickinger, who'd graduated cum laude from MIT in the early nineties, made his mark with Microsoft, then came over to Cyberdyne to work with Miles Dyson. With Dyson's death and the dissolution of the old company, Flickinger transferred to the Cyber Research Systems operation, becoming the Skynet chief engineer four years ago. He was very good at his job. In fact, General Brewster reflected, Flickinger was practically Skynet himself. He knew more about the system and its potential than any man alive.
'It's not getting better,' Flickinger said. He went to Brewster's computer terminal and brought up Skynet.
'This new computer virus is a tricky bastard. It's infected half the civilian Internet, as well as a lot of secondary military apps?payroll, inventory.'
'Primary defense nets are still clean?'
Flickinger looked up. His thinning short-cropped hair had gone prematurely gray. With his round face and pale complexion he looked the part of a computer engineer who had spent most of his adult life in artificial light.
'So far the firewalls are holding up, but the Pentagon's proposed that we use our AI to scan the entire infrastructure, search and destroy any hint of the virus.'
'I know, Tony. But it's like going after a fly with a bazooka.'
Flickinger shrugged. To him this was just another engineering problem that needed solving. 'Once the connection is made, it should only be a matter of minutes before Skynet is in charge of our national security.'
'During which we'd put everything from satellites to missile silos under the control of a single computer system.'
'The most intelligent system ever conceived.'
Brewster shook his head. 'I still prefer to keep humans in the loop. It's a huge step from weapons design to command and control. I'm not sure Skynet is ready.'
The Skynet page came up on the monitor. It showed a graphic map of the western U.S. with strategic military installations connected by green lines. The display showed real-time connections of data interchange between systems. The lines pulsated with energy.
Each installation glowed comfortably green, all op-
erations WITHIN PARAMETERS. OPERATIONS NORMAL.
But General Brewster was worried. At War College they'd studied worst-case scenarios in which U.S. strategic defense initiatives became short-circuited so that the nation's Nuclear Release Authority was bypassed.
Missiles flew.
The war began.
Los Angeles
'One day, it's all I'm asking, Scott,' Kate tried to convince her fianc6. 'It's no big deal. A couple hours out, a couple hours back. We'll be home in time to go out to dinner or something.'
'I'm sorry, the computers are down,' a clerk apologized, coming up to where they stood. She was an older woman in a stern business suit, glasses perched on her narrow nose, a gold chain from the stems around her neck. 'And we're closing soon. Just write out your choices, and I'll input them into the registry in the morning.'
'Okay, thanks,' Scott said, taking the clipboard from her. She gave both of them a smile, then left.
Scott turned on Kate. He was mildly irritated, which for Scott was something. 'I can't believe you told the general we'd drive all the way out to Mojave. Is this so he can show me how important he is?'
Kate touched his arm, a conciliatory gesture. 'It won't be so bad.'
Scott looked away to make sure no one was observing
what he would afterward call one of their little 'tiffs.' 'It's just, I wanted to meet him on my own turf, you know?'
Kate turned away, irritated too. She didn't want to fight with Scott over her father. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. She picked up a brass picture frame with a photo of a romantic couple strolling hand-in-hand along a deserted beach in the moonlight.
'Yeah, sure,' she muttered in answer to Scott's question. She didn't want to fight with him tonight. So, what did that say about their future?
She didn't know. She didn't know anything. And that was a terribly bleak prospect for her just now.
c.4
July 2029 Navaja Mountain
Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Parsons was dead. His body had lain beside his computer console in the second tier of consoles in the control room of the North American Aerospace Defense Command deep within the mountain for the past twenty-six years.
On Judgment Day those personnel caught inside were massacred when Skynet pumped all the oxygen out of the Redoubt, replacing it with pure nitrogen from the spare liquid nitrogen stores used to super-cool the high-power low-mass equipment.
Parsons's body lay on its side, its face dark purple, its flesh surprisingly intact after more than a quarter of a century. But rotting meat required oxygen, of which there was none inside the mountain.
Skynet was indifferent to gas or gas volumes, as it was indifferent to lighting, so the control rooms and various other spaces within the complex were lit only by the indicators and screens on electronic consoles and panels.
But the AI was sensitive to heat and humidity, so Na-
vajo Mountain Redoubt was kept at a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius at twenty percent relative humidity.
Parsons's eyes were open, but neither he nor the dozens of other corpses with him were aware that the cathedral hush of the large domed room was broken when impossibly fast streams of data crossed the main status board and a pair of Advanced Utility T-20 server robots trundled off an elevator.
Between them, walking flat-footed, back arched, head held high as if she were a soldier being escorted by the Praetorian Guard, was what Parsons would have considered the most perfect nude woman he'd ever seen.
But Parsons was dead, and Skynet was indifferent to considerations of human beauty except where such considerations were germane to the parameters of a mission.
She was a T-X, Enhanced Logic Weapons Systems Cybernetic Warrior/Infiltration Unit. T-X, for short.
An absolutely brilliant creation of superior intelligence, beauty, speed, adaptability, lethality, survivability, and supreme indifference, T-X was Skynet's latest advance in projection-of-power technology.
Stripped to her utilitarian battle chassis, protected by malleable ceramic/titanium armor, she was practically unstoppable on the battlefield, as the human resistance fighters under the commands of Colonel Steve Earle and Lieutenant Joel Benson had already found out.
Adorned with her infiltration trappings: muscles, sinews, blood vessels, skin, hair, T-X would be just as deadly among the pre-Judgment Day human population as she was on the current battlefields.
Possibly even deadlier if she could reach and eliminate the right targets.
Although she weighed in excess of 150 kilos, her footfalls were whisper soft across the bare tile floor as she threaded her way through the corpses and computer consoles to a transmission sphere the twin of the one at the old CRS facility twelve hundred kilometers to the west.
The T-20 robots that had escorted her backed off. T-X assumed the position, one knee and two hands on the pad as the sphere closed.
Her head bowed, eyes staring straight down, she waited with complete indifference. One minute, one hundred years, it did not matter.
Skynet's AI powered up the Continuum Transporter's circuits without fanfare, and seconds later the chamber took on a luminescent, electric blue aura.
T-X disappeared.
July 2003 Los Angeles
All the stores along Rodeo Drive were closed, only a few eating establishments and night spots in the vicinity were still doing business.
Traffic was light, the occasional car or SUV, one of them with a Bose stereo system cranked to full volume
