"All right, that was my next question. Answer it frankly-this is no time for false optimism. I need your best assessment of how close Miles was, and how long it would take us to reconstruct his work."
"How close? You mean when he might have licked all the problems?"
"Yes, how close he was to making a workable nanochip. You can assume that I've read all his reports and that I have a pretty good technical understanding."
She smiled thinly. "Yeah, boss, I know you're an old tech at heart."
"The point is, I need to take stock of where the project sits right now. It's crucial to our future."
"Miles was in a good mood about it last week," she said thoughtfully. "I didn't talk to him about it yesterday, but I know he worked on it over the weekend."
"When did you last discuss it?"
"On Friday. At that stage, he thought he was within an inch of solving the problem. My guess is he would have wrapped it up in a month or three."
"All right, now we need to be realistic. Regardless what Miles thought or anything else, how far away are we now?"
"Now that he's dead?"
"Exactly."
"That depends."
"Realistically, Rosanna."
"Yes, I know that, but it still depends. Miles did most of the work on this himself."
"Sure. It was his baby." Cruz rolled his eyes in mock despair. "It's Miles's baby! That's what everyone used to say."
She laughed at that. "Well, it's true. No one else had anything like the same kind of knowledge. Look, Oscar, I could reconstruct his work pretty quickly if I had his records."
"So could I. That's not what I'm asking. Look, it's all gone; we should assume that. The bomb went off in the AI lab, and it looks this morning as if they did a thorough job of destroying every bit of information on site. We'll find out more as the week goes on, but I'm not optimistic."
"What about back-ups off-site?"
"No. I thought of that, but it's not the kind of thing that we back-up routinely, not like financial records and so on-in fact, it's more the sort of information that we keep very close to our chests. Of course, Miles had his own back-ups..."
"But?"
"Again, it's too early to be sure. Tarissa hasn't been very cooperative, which surprises me, by the way. And the police have been to the Dyson house, and their impression is that the Connors did a thorough job there, too. Miles seems to have gone out of his way to cooperate with them—there's no sign so far that he tried to trick them."
This was another of life's mysteries, he thought. Miles would surely have had a thousand ways to outsmart the Connors. Perhaps he had, and there was still information he'd hidden somewhere. But it didn't look that way.
"I hope I'm wrong, Rosanna, but we're not expecting to find anything at all useful at Miles's house."
"What about the 1984 chip?"
"As best I can make out, it's been stolen. It's like everything, though-it only happened last night. It's not as if I can inspect it for myself-it's supposed to be too dangerous for me to go inside the building. So I've been traipsing around with the cops. But it seems that there's nothing like the arm and the chip still there where the Vault was."
"So the Connors took them?"
"Looks like it—which means we might get them back if the cops can track down the Connors. But no one's optimistic about that. As of this morning, the trail's gone cold."
"I heard on the news. They were in those big car crashes at the steel mill."
That's right, but it's all we've got to go on, so far. It seems they left the mill by an emergency door, and got clean away."
Rosanna removed the tray, then returned from the kitchen. She seemed less on edge now. The talk must have been doing her some good. "Thanks for coming to see me," she said. "It's nice to be kept informed."
"No problem. This affects you pretty directly."
"Yes, I suppose it does. Oscar, when I told you the project was viable I was assuming the worst. I can do it."
"Okay. That's my assessment, too."
She gave him another funny look, as if not expecting that he'd have his own assessment. "The trouble is I'm going to have to reinvent a lot of Miles's work, relying on the little I know about it, plus my own expertise. It could take me years to get to where he was. Are you sure you can put up with that?"
"From my point of view, yes. Miles's work was so far advanced... We'd still have a head start over our competitors. Thanks for that. Right now, though, it's only one issue—the company's whole future is on the line."
"Of course."
"But I think we'll pull through. A lot of our operations are almost unaffected." Cyberdyne's manufacturing plants were scattered across the U.S. and various parts of Latin America. Its sales offices were even more widespread. Not everything was gone, not by a long way. "Fortunately, we had a lot of organizational data backed up. Trivial as that may seem to a lot of the staff, it means we can keep running without too many problems. It's not like we're in the fog of war."
"So where does that leave me?" she said.
"It leaves you like this. Cyberdyne is still probably viable. We'll doubtless lose a lot of money. There'll be wrangles about the insurance, and we won't get everything back-our lawyers are already arguing with the insurance company's lawyers about whether this fits within the policy. But we're not out of the game yet, and there are still positions for our best staff."
"Meaning me?"
"Yes, meaning you. The work Miles was doing is still worth rescuing, and you're the best person to do it. I'll help you all I can. Now, I know you're feeling shaky, and understandably so, especially while the Connors are still at large, so I'm not looking for an answer from you now. But I'll be wanting to know whether you'll stick with us. You can assume we'll show our appreciation."
"What does that mean, Oscar? Are you trying to drop me a hint or something?"
"The hint I'm trying to drop is that we don't want to lose your services. I don't mind telling you that you have a fair bit of bargaining power."
"Like what?" she said. Her tone could have been either sarcasm or a mask for naked curiosity.
"Like this would be a good time for you to take over from Miles as Director of Special Projects."
"Well, it'd be a bit ghoulish discussing that today."
"Maybe, and I really will leave you alone in a minute. Let me just add that Charles and I had a long talk about this. He rang me about 3:00 a.m., and we were on the phone for at least an hour." In fact, Layton had started off
CHAPTER SIX
ADVANCED DEFENSE SYSTEMS COMPLEX
COLORADO AUGUST 1997
JUDGMENT DAY
Miles called on Steve Bullock, the facility's Chief Security Officer, who had a room on the same floor. He sat here like a spider, watching everything that went on. "I'm going to The Cage in a few minutes," Miles said. "Can you send a guard to meet me?"
Bullock was dark, serious, with a shaved skull and bull neck. "No sweat," he said, picking up a handset. "Five minutes' time?"
"Okay."
Miles took an elevator downstairs to the complex's main operations hall. Air Force personnel in gray flight suits predominated here, monitoring a dozen benches of computer screens—forty-eight screens in all—working side by side with casually dressed Cyberdyne employees, who were still the technical experts on the project.
Like the entire facility, the operations hall was over-seen by discreet security cameras mounted in every corner.
Miles nodded politely as he wandered from bench to bench, getting only the most general overview of the information coming in. These staff members were analyzing electronic information communicated from U.S. and allied defense centers, including optical, infrared, radar, and seismic data. Just as importantly, they were checking and second-guessing Skynet's responses to the same information. Their screens showed numerical data, graphs, and finely-detailed topographic projections.