'Well'—Pool rose—'keep thinking about it, gentlemen. If you have any ideas please feel free to contact me.' He placed a plain business card on the CEO's desk. Like Tricker's, it bore only an E-mail address. Pool glanced from one man to the other, nodded once, and left without another word.
The two men were silent for forty-five seconds; then Warren spoke.
'We are fucked,' he said quietly.
Alissa frowned. Some part of her had expected Tricker; had hoped for Tricker might be more accurate. Apparently this Pool was Tricker's replacement. He certainly seemed to be the same sort of human. It also seemed that the government's interest in Cyberdyne was limited to projects other than Skynet.
Both she and Clea had estimated a high probability that Intellimetal would prove a strong lure to Cyberdyne, which more or less ensured government interest. Her sister's casual mention of a Skynet-like entity was intended to prove irresistible to whoever had taken over the project, a doubly baited hook.
What they hadn't expected was that Clea would disappear so suddenly and so thoroughly. When she had vanished after her interview with Colvin and Warren, the little I-950 had naturally assumed that the government had intervened. But she had no idea of exactly where or from whom that intervention had come. The mysterious Tricker, she'd supposed. But he proved impossible to locate.
Now, with this Pool, Alissa hoped she finally had a lead.
She'd had some of her bugs hack into Cyberdyne's security system and through the company's cameras she watched the agent's progress through the building and out into the parking lot.
As he drove off she took note of the car's license-plate number and started a search. The address that came up wasn't very informative, a U.S. government motor pool, but it was a place to start.
She'd assign one of the T-101s. They were good at worming their way through bureaucratic baffle gab.
Swinging her legs and putting a finger to her chin, Alissa considered her sister's possible fate. It seemed unlikely she'd been murdered. Unless they'd completely destroyed her head, the computer part of her would have made contact. Unless they'd buried her in the equivalent of a Faraday cage, which was astronomically unlikely, it should have been possible to locate her.
No, a living Clea was somewhere shielded, or somewhere she feared that any attempt to communicate would reveal her true nature. This silence was more likely an act of will than a sign of misfortune.
In other words, things were probably going as planned. Except for the uncertainty and the Connors still being alive and on the loose. Alissa's lips thinned in displeasure. She needed to enter her next phase so that she'd be in a position to take care of them.
There would be no better time than the present.
Clea was enjoying her new lab; it had all the equipment she could ever use, and any materials she wanted, however exotic, toxic, or illegal, were provided within forty-eight hours. She'd tested this and didn't even try to hide her glee when she was presented with some obscure and costly element.
Tricker had cautioned her that she couldn't continue to make such requests without producing tangible results. Clea had countered by giving him an
extremely long and involved lecture on the advantages of pure science. He'd come as close to running away as she'd ever seen him.
The lab itself was small, but its efficient design made up for the lack of space. Its white walls and gleaming metal surfaces somehow gave it the illusion of size, though its dimensions were more those of a large walk-in closet. The overhead lights were the kind that mimicked natural light, making it more comfortable still. It suited her.
Meanwhile, her research into the T-1000 matrix was going very well and she was able to keep most of the work she was doing secret from the humans while seeming to produce a lot of new data. Their expectations, naturally, were based on what they thought a human could accomplish, so that, all in all, they were thrilled with her.
All of the scientists were watched all of the time. So the first thing she'd done was to spend long periods just sitting and thinking, or staring into a microscope.
Once she knew they had a fair-sized archive of such activity, she became more active.
Her first real effort was to create some bugs, fiddling with the components so that no one thing seemed connected to another, then put them together as she walked from her lab to the cafeteria, or to her room; looking for all the world as though she was picking at her fingernails. When they were complete she set them loose in the ventilation system. One of her bugs was programmed to lurk in the tape banks and at her signal to run archival footage of her doing nothing at all.
They'd already collected some fascinating information for her, both about the
other scientists and the base staff, as well as confirming her suspicions about being under observation. The entertainment value of spying on everyone else didn't make up for the lack of communication with the outside world, but she was working on that.
As part of her plan to keep the humans off balance regarding her real work…
She had a dozen projects going forward more or less simultaneously. She destroyed a great deal of what she accomplished without storing the information on their computers. She had her own, after all.
But she had to be careful. They sorted trash here with obsessive-compulsive thoroughness. Therefore they knew to the ounce what materials had been used and how. So she used only minute bits of things, working at speeds no human could duplicate on things the human eye could barely see. So far they suspected nothing.
One of her side projects was the creation of what she hoped would one day be a nano-machine. Right now it was huge, easily visible with the naked eye if you knew where to look. And, unfortunately, its range of functioning was extremely simple, requiring several to actually accomplish a task of any significance.
About a dozen together were not much smaller than the bugs she and Alissa had created for surveillance. But they were much more complex and with time she was certain she'd find ways to diminish their size without losing utility.
Clea was gearing them toward affecting biological processes because she had a plan. But the one thing that was difficult to get here were animal test subjects.
When she'd submitted that request Tricker showed up to suggest that she
concentrate on Intellimetal.
Clea had carefully explained about how carcinogenic the stuff was and how, though she was trying hard to make it less dangerous, there was only so much a computer simulation could do. He'd stared at her for a long time, then said he'd see what he could do.
She could see why Serena had liked Tricker. The I-950 found it amusing to manipulate him, and moving him to sarcastic exasperation was actually pleasurable. In this she knew she was definitely becoming more like Serena; she found that reassuring
Checking a gauge, she made a note, solely to satisfy the watchers.
The I-950 had to admit that though she liked her lab she was feeling slightly claustrophobic. It wasn't being underground so much as it was the lack of information. The base was completely cut off from the rest of the world; no TV
or radio, no telephone calls, and no Internet. This despite the very reasonable argument that cutting them off from observing the progress in their individual fields might slow their work, or even render it useless.
She'd been told that those who complained to Tricker had been given his
Everyone treated the agent as though he was a power in the community, but the I-950 knew that the agent was in no way involved in decisions regarding the fate of the imprisoned scientists.
Though she had no evidence of that. But otherwise he had only a little more freedom than they did.
