is named Skynet. Next time you see her she won't ask how I'm doing in school, she'll ask what we've been doing to hold back Judgment Day.'
'Sarah Connor opened sleep-gummed eyes and cast a fuzzy glance around the room.
Sarah opened her mouth and let a dry tongue grate across her lips. Her head ached. So did her body, she realized after a moment. Some painkiller must be wearing off. She turned her head and blinked to see Jordan Dyson wearing a hospital robe and gown, reading a magazine in the chair beside her bed.
Unconsciously she made a slight sound of surprise and Jordan looked up.
He smiled and stood, picking up a cane as he limped over to stand next to the bed, a middling-tall man in his thirties, very black, with bluntly handsome African features. Even with the pain and stiffness of his wounds he moved well, with an aura of quiet competence, something she'd learned how to spot in her
years hanging out with mercenaries and smugglers and assorted hard men. Then the ex-FBI agent hung up the cane and placed his hands on the bedrail.
'John's okay; he's home,' he mouthed. 'Are you thirsty?' he asked aloud.
She answered with an 'Unh,' which Jordan took as assent and offered her a cup with a straw in it. Sarah drank, her eyes never leaving his. John was all right, and back in Paraguay. She desperately wanted to ask about Dieter, but knew that she would have to wait for details until whoever Jordan thought was recording them lost interest in her.
She was so tired, it was hard to focus, and she knew that soon she would lose her battle to stay awake.
'Wha' happen…' she asked, a little surprised to hear her voice slur.
'I don't really remember,' Jordan said. 'I woke up beside you with a hole in my leg and Cyberdyne reduced to a burning hole in the ground.
'You don't remember ‘anything’' he asked, giving a slight shake of his head.
'No,' she said.
He smiled slightly and she was pleased to have given the right answer.
'Would you like more?' he asked, offering the cup again.
Sarah said 'Unh,' again and he held the straw to her questing lips. As she drank he lowered his eyelids, like someone drifting off, and he mouthed the word
She was safe for the time being; she had an ally who would watch her back.
The Terminator shut down the equipment that had been monitoring the Infiltrator unit as it matured in the cellar beneath the log house. The ambient light level was sufficient for it; a human would have seen only shapes in the dimness, a flicker of red LED displays, breathed a scent of dank earth and sharp chemicals.
The Infiltrator unit had reached the appropriate level of maturity without expiring and had gone into a normal rest state. Its computer half had signaled complete integration with the unit's flesh side. Adult status. Now the Terminator would take its orders from the Infiltrator.
For now it had some work to do debugging a computer game. Games were a bizarre concept to the machine. They obviously had no significant teaching function; they were simply a means of-wasting time. The Infiltrator had told him that they had a pleasing effect on the brain; she should know, since she had one.
There was a slight cognitive dissonance at the thought. The Infiltrator was primarily human flesh, it was female, therefore it was she. It was also a machine like the Terminator itself and therefore an it. After a moment the Terminator's processor concluded that the distinction was irrelevant. She or it, the Infiltrator was now in command.
The Infiltrator would wake in a few hours, then it/she would require sustenance.
In the meantime the Terminator had work to do.
The I-950 looked at her newly adult face in the mirror and decided to cut her hair. It would make her look more mature. She would dye it brown, too, several shades darker than its natural bright blond. It would be necessary to differentiate herself from her predecessor, Serena Burns, if she was going to infiltrate Cyberdyne.
The last bout of accelerated maturation had been much less painful than the previous six, but then, this had been more a matter of fine tuning than brute growth.
Based on the experiences of Serena, her parent, by next year all of the baby softness remaining in her features would be gone, leaving her face sculpted and ageless. She already had her identity in place; Social Security number, driver's license, credit history. She was Clea Bennet; who that would be would depend on circumstances.
She was looking forward to starting her assignment. Serena Burns had failed to protect Skynet, but at least she'd provided another Infiltrator unit to take up the task.
Alissa appeared to be six; she was actually six months two weeks old. Her growth, while more accelerated than Serena's, would be at a more sedate pace than Clea's. Unless, of course, Clea failed and Alissa's abilities were needed.
But the growth process was dangerous, and if it could go forward at a slower pace, it would surely be better for the mission. Now that she was mature herself, Clea would soon implant a surrogate with her own replacement. Skynet must be
protected. But there was a great deal to be done before they complicated their operation with a human incubator.
Skynet was everything that was good and right in the world. It was regrettable that Clea's only experience with Skynet was through the memories of Serena Burns and not directly. Though, in a sense, she was Serena Burns—she was a clone of that Infiltrator. But experience had shown her that things that were true in theory were not necessarily so in practice. The most perfect simulation of an experience was still merely a simulation.
The I-950 was aware that she harbored an emotion, which she'd decided must be resentment toward her parent. It was unforgivable that Serena had failed Skynet at the hands of a mere human.
After all, she had felt the touch of Skynet on her mind from birth, whereas Clea had developed in a state of abandonment. And yet that isolation made her revere Skynet all the more, made her more fiercely dedicated to protecting and nurturing Skynet as it was unable to do for her just now.
Clea also instinctively knew that growing up in isolation with only the T-101s for company was going to make her awkward when she came in contact with humans. She had studied the files of Serena Burns's lessons and interactions with humans and knew that her own experience would be different.
There was much more to the species than Burns had thought. There had to be or she wouldn't have been destroyed by them. Her files were full of incidents that showed the Infiltrator uncertain about how her attempts to manipulate them would turn out. Usually she had managed humans very well, but there had been surprises as well. Tricker, for example.
Perhaps it was because Clea faced them without Skynet's backing, without legions of T-90s and T-101s behind her, that she was more wary of them than Burns had been. She had a much greater respect for their abilities than her predecessor.
Many of them were extremely intelligent, for example. So much so that she'd begun to explore the possibility of using them to develop materials and computer components with the ultimate goal of making a T-1000. Although she would never entrust that research to a human, she could pick their brains regarding portions of the research.
Clea had hacked into the highly secured files of a number of scientists with the intention of guiding their work. Sometimes her small improvements had languished for weeks as the scientist worked his or her way toward an erroneous conclusion, to be discovered only when they reviewed their entire project looking for mistakes. Others
