Rising Storm

eyes and her throat tightened painfully.

'It's not over yet, Sarah,' he said. His face was sad, his voice gentle. 'You have to be strong.'

She shook her head, but said, 'I know,' as tears flowed down her cheeks.

Kyle gave her a look of such love that her heart melted. She took a breath, but before she could speak he began to collapse. Like a house of cards falling, he dropped to his knees, then dropped and folded, dropped and folded, his body turning to bones before her eyes, his face staying the same.

'Be strong,' he said.

' Ah!' Sarah shouted, throwing herself upright in bed.

'You okay?' her roommate asked sleepily.

'Bad dream,' Sarah answered, her heart pounding. 'Sorry. I'm okay.'

The woman shifted and seemed to go back to sleep. Sarah wiped tears from her cheeks and waited for her heart to slow. Then she lay back down, turned onto her side, drawing her knees up.

Shit, she thought, one look at Silberman and I'm having nightmares again. She was tougher than this; she knew she was.

Sarah forced her tense muscles to relax. So she'd had an unexpected reaction. It wasn't the first time in her life she'd been taken by surprise. In fact, it was very much normal for her.

Be patient, Kyle. I'm not out of the game yet.

CHAPTER FIVE

MONTANA

Clea studied the gauges; it was almost time to remove the sample from the oven.

She hoped that this batch of chemicals would finally be the right poly-alloy and therefore a proper matrix for the nano-technology that would turn it into a T-1000. The 'craft studio' that was her laboratory had seen far too many failures.

The human emotion hope kept her experimenting long after the machine part of her brain had concluded that her present facilities were hopelessly inadequate for the task at hand. Even simply being here, amid the clean shapes of glass and metal and plastic, the circuits and power shunts, the scents of ozone and synthetics was… restful. Nothing like the messiness of human interactions.

Despite the lab's inadequacies, it was a small taste of a home and time she would never see, of the world of Skynet.

Her facilities were also inadequate to actually create the nano-machines that could permeate and bring to life the liquid metal; but then, no lab on earth was able to do better. Knowing how to do something simply wasn't enough when the materials necessary to do it didn't exist yet, or the tools to make the tools. Which was why she was concentrating on this more achievable goal. Her resources, unlike Skynet's in the future, were severely limited. She could do no more than her best.

It was time; the sample was ready. Clea slid her hands into the gloves of the

waldo controller, remotely pouring the specially compounded metal into another vessel that could be extracted from the oven to cool in the open air. The I-950

wore dark goggles to protect her eyes from the glare of the white-hot mass. She suppressed a surge of hope when she observed that it poured with the correct degree of smoothness.

Once removed from the oven, it quickly cooled to gray. She set it aside to become room temperature, hoping that this batci wouldn't solidify or refuse to form a cohesive substance. The last batch she'd made had been, and remained, liquidly granular.

But that meant that I was close, she reminded herself. Very close. Still, the flesh part of her was frustrated and yearned for a success of some sort. Sometimes it seemed absolutely pointless to continue her assignment. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn't just self- terminate and leave the whole mess in little Alissa's hands.

She worried about the excess of emotion that plagued her. None of Serena's memories showed her hoping and worrying to the degree that Clea did. But then, Serena was perfect. For all that she was a failure, Serena Burns had been everything that Skynet had designed her to be.

Which is something that I, Clea thought mercilessly, do not seem to be.

Clea was still very unsure of her ability to interact with humans. She'd been fired from her job at the burger place. Which was very disturbing because she had done her job perfectly; her fries were the very best, as were her burgers. She never failed to thank customers for coming, or to greet them with a smile, or to wish them a nice day after delivering every order. She never complained about

cleaning the rest rooms or mopping the floor or even cleaning the grease trap.

Clea's coworkers despised her and the customers gave her wary glances, never lingering over their food while she smiled at them from behind the counter. The other workers called her creepy and the assistant managers got into arguments because nobody wanted her on their shift.

Eventually the manager let her go, claiming a downturn in business. He explained that as the last hired, she was, unfortunately, the first to go. He apologized, looked as though he were going to pat her shoulder comfortingly, then changed his mind. Instead, he handed her a check and wished her well.

I've been too isolated from humans, she had decided then and there.

Regretfully Clea concluded that she was too much like a Terminator in her behavior despite her more flexible intelligence. Her studies of Serena's memories were simply no substitute for actual experience, especially since the I-950

genuinely didn't understand many things about Serena's memories.

Humor, for example, eluded her completely. And while Serena had moved easily among humans, actually enjoying their company, Clea simply didn't like them.

Not least because they confused her.

Sometimes the I-950 worried that certain synapses just hadn't formed in the rush to make her mature enough to carry on Serena's assignment. In personality she and her predecessor were nothing alike, and given their identical genome, implants, and memories, they should have been. For example, Clea often wondered if she was up to the mission, while Serena never had.

The I-950 glanced at the sample and saw that it was finally cool enough to handle. She poured it out, noting with approval that it had a gelid quality to it.

Beneath the scum of ash on top it was a bright and gleaming silver.

Clea picked it up and pulled it into two pieces; she squeezed and they took prints of her hands. Then, as the warmth left the metal, the pieces began to solidify.

With a sigh she dropped them onto the table and turned away to clean up. One piece rolled under the light of a desk lamp, the other to the edge of the table.

While Clea worked, and considered her notes, the heat of the lamp began to affect the sample. Before long a soft point began to form at one end of the lump nearest the lamp, the silvery substance yearning toward the warmth above it. The sample farthest from the warmth also reacted, one side becoming smooth and slightly bowed out while the other retained the imprint of her hand.

The I-950 turned to sweep up the two samples and blinked at what she saw.

Well, she thought, this is something new.

She picked up the pieces and began experimenting with them. The substance showed that it had remarkable qualities. It could be worked into a shape, just as wet clay could, then it would hold an approximation of that shape while reacting to heat and cold. Impressions could be made on it and items could be pushed into it and they would remain there until heat passing over that area wiped the impressions away.

It wasn't what she was looking for, but it had tremendous potential. Her first thought was that it would be usable, just as it was, for an art material. It was attractive in and of itself, and its malleability made it a natural for architectural embellishment and sculpture.

This substance could be my entree to Cyberdyne, she thought. True, they