'It looks wet and disgusting,' Serena remarked.
Skynet showed her a magnetic resonance image of a human's brain as it engaged in sex.
'Astonishing,' she said as she watched the colors swirl. It obviously felt better than it looked.
'Don't they know we're watching?' the girl asked.
'Creatures of habit.'
And thus a challenge. Serena enjoyed challenges.
Her eyes were open as if she'd never been asleep. Serena sat up in her cot, straining to hear.
She rose and entered the bright corridor barefoot and wearing the simple shift she slept in. Mystified, she noticed that none of her sisters or brothers had been wakened.
'Where are they?' she asked.
In answer, Skynet flashed a map of the corridors showing the location of the invader with a flashing dot. There were probably others, but this one was her assignment.
As she trotted down the hallway Serena wondered how the humans had found this facility. It was small, and discreetly underground. Its only product was biological and therefore hard to trace, unlike the giant factories that produced the war machines and the soldier robots, the mines and foundries and chemical plants.
True, it held a node of Skynet, making it a worthwhile target, but even the destruction of that node was bearable. Skynet's main location was well out of their reach. All other systems were multiply redundant. The destruction of this node would mean only that a new laboratory would be created elsewhere. The only significant loss would be Serena and her siblings and the scientists who had created them.
'How did they find us?' she asked at last, unable to suppress her curiosity.
This confession of fallibility on the part of Skynet shook the girl to her foundations, but she pushed the information aside as irrelevant. She would consider it later.
Observing her reaction, Skynet recorded another success in her training and attitude.
Montez crouched at the branching end of a sterile white corridor, alert for any incursions of Skynet's battle robots. He listened to the infrequent communications of the other teams and waited for his signal to proceed. He checked his watch and looked around; all silent, all clear.
Serena watched him. A brief scan in the ultraviolet range showed his fear, any overt sign of which was hidden by the gas mask he wore.
'Kill or capture?' she asked.
She peeked around the corner again and considered how she'd do it.
Some instinct warned Montez he was being watched and he spun round, weapon at the ready. Training held his fire and he stared at the child who gasped and jumped in fear.
The girl was a pretty little thing, with enormous, up tilted hyacinth blue eyes and a shining cap of pale blond hair. Barefoot and dressed in her nightgown, she looked incredibly vulnerable. She bit her lip and then ghosted toward him on tiptoe.
'Help me!' she whispered. 'Please, please take me with you.'
He didn't answer for a minute. The lieutenant would have his ass for bringing a kid along. But what could he do? With a grimace she couldn't see, he lifted a finger to the area of his mouth in a shushing gesture. Then he signaled that she should grasp his belt.
With a grateful little noise the kid did so and they waited together. Finally the signal came and he started to rise.
Serena couldn't believe it had been this easy. The human hadn't even felt it when she took his knife out of its sheath. As he started to rise she plunged it up to the hilt into his spine at the base of his neck.
She stood back as the body spasmed and voided. There was very little blood.
Warmed by the praise, Serena turned and padded back to her cot, convinced that the escaped human had been planned by Skynet to provide this training opportunity.
She lay back down, pulled up her covers, and was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
INFILTRATOR CRECHE: 2028
After her last growth acceleration Serena awoke to all appearances a young woman of twenty; her hair had darkened to the color of burnished bronze, and she moved with the animal grace that only an inhuman perfection of nutrition and training could have produced. She had received enhancements to her neural-net-computer implant and could now freely access Skynet's data systems—or any other system that Skynet had ever interfaced with or recorded, and given a little time, virtually any system complex enough to have an operating code. To power the mechanical subsystems she had an improved biological fuel cell running off of her bloodstream that would never need to be replaced as long as
she herself was viable. Most intriguing of all she now had the ability not merely to communicate with Skynet but to actually
She was given her mission at last: Her function would be to gain the confidence of humans in order to discover their plans and, if possible, assassinate their officers. Her particular mission was to find and destroy John Connor, the human leader.
LONGMONT, COLORADO: 2028
Crouched behind rubble, Serena peered at the humans through the rib cage of a skeleton. Their ingenious destruction of the satellite transmission tower had left Skynet temporarily blind in this area, allowing them to move freely in daylight.
She was to join this team and follow them back to their base.
Her cover story was that she was the lone survivor of a scouting party. She bore artistic and deliberately, though not seriously, infected wounds as proof of her ordeal. She also bore dispatches, genuine ones, from one of Connor's lieutenants to the commander of this particular group.
Skynet had determined that passing on the documents would have a negligible effect on the war and would support her story nicely. It was believed that the humans had no means of verifying personnel records, and she had passed for human more than once in the lab's interrogation chambers. Skynet had also gone to considerable trouble to determine that there were in fact no survivors of that scouting party.
Serena followed her targets at a distance, watching their movements and imitating them with perfect mimicry. She noted their hand signals and found a file on them, making the full set available to herself.
The 1-950 stalked the humans all day, taking note of where they holed up for the night in a huddle of ruins whose charred walls stood above the surrounding sea of rubble, scrub, and tough dry weeds. She watched them eat their cold supper and sip from their canteens as she settled herself to wait for morning.
Approaching them at night would surely get her shot. They hadn't survived this long by being stupid.
They'd been heading north out of the ruins of a megalopolis, and because of the terrain, they would continue to do so for some miles. Farther on, the landscape flattened out, natural cover increased, and the number of routes they could take would expand.
She'd place herself in their path a few miles farther ahead and let them discover her. It would be best for them to stumble onto her trail by themselves, much less suspicious. After a moment's consideration Serena decided to begin by laying a trail several kilometers back, in case their commander was of a cautious nature, leading to the place where they would 'find' her. Five ought to be enough. She started off at a lope.
This might be more elaborate than was strictly necessary. In all probability the humans wouldn't be too alarmed by her. She was, after all, wearing their uniform, bearing dispatches and wounds, and clearly wasn't a Terminator.
