A young Cyberdyne operator, Andy Lee, glanced up as Miles walked past. "Hey, how you doin', man?" he said. Beside him he had a giant-sized Coke in a paper cup. "Greetings," Miles said, with a grin.
"Come to watch the workers?"
"Come to watch the workers watching," Miles said.
"Well, there's nothin' much to watch tonight," Lee said decisively, like it was checkmate.
"Just as well," one of the uniformed staff said slowly. This was Phil Packer, a cadaverously lean, heavily-mustached guy, known to the others as "Six-Rack."
"I can't argue with that," Miles said. "Yeah, just as damn well."
Since its full implementation on August 4, the Skynet system had operated perfectly, providing quick and convincing analyses of the fused data streams. About a week after implementation, it had identified a possible nuclear test, conducted in breach of the Russians' self-imposed moratorium. But it had analyzed the data within an hour, incomparably faster than humans could have done, and pronounced that the event was a small earthquake. Human analysis was still trying to confirm Skynet's call, but it looked like the computer had it right at every point.
There was nothing unusual happening now: no bogeys, no glitches. At another monitor, Miles' pet genius, Rosanna Monk, stared intently, occasionally flipping from one view to another with left-hand keystrokes. She had a Styrofoam cup of coffee beside her on the bench. Rosanna was in charge of this shift, which meant that she was the first line to deal with any problem, in addition to carrying out her own work. She'd been involved in the nanochip project, then with Skynet, for the past five years, and she now knew more about the system and its parameters than almost anyone.
"Boring night for you, too?" Miles said.
"Nothing coming through looks suspicious," she said, as if it were just a technical problem. "The Russkies are quiet, as usual."
"Like Six-Rack says, that's just as well."
Rosanna took a sip of her coffee, her gaze still fixed on the computer screen. "Skynet's analyses are getting more precise all the time," she said, fascinated by what she was seeing. "It's developing informal logic protocols that I can't explain—we sure didn't put them there deliberately."
"We couldn't have," Miles said with a gentle smile. That was the trouble: as he'd said to Jack Reed, the thing worked too well. Rosanna was alluding to the fundamental limitations on computer programming. What was just a little scary was the amount of informal human reasoning Skynet had somehow taught itself in the past three or four weeks. That kind of machine capacity was supposed to be dozens, if not hundreds, of years away.
"Yeah," Rosanna said, "but the more it interacts with us, the more it's starting to think like a human being— except a zillion times more quickly. At this rate, we'll soon have contracts for Skynet to run every government agency that needs computer analyses. Its abilities exceed anything we imagined."
"Sure."
His tone of voice must have puzzled her, because she finally looked up from the screen. "You don't think there's some sort of problem?"
Miles gave a reassuring smile. "Of course not."
Rosanna shrugged and looked back at the computer screen.
"Keep up the good work," he said, smiling at the cliché.
"Whatever you say, boss." She laughed, but kept flipping through data arrays.
Was it a problem? Miles began to wonder.
Skynet's complexity and sophistication had been growing at a geometric rate. Its capacity for quick, accurate judgments in accordance with pre-established parameters already far exceeded that of any group of human beings. It was now drawing conclusions with a subtlety that went beyond anything required of it, explaining anomalous, or low-priority, data with startling insight. In one sense, that was all by the by, since the system was really there to warn of Russian ICBM launches, which it could do perfectly well. But it showed an enormous potential for subtler, less dramatic uses, such as detecting and identifying smuggling operations. With Skynet's processing capacity and interpretive skills, they could monitor data on aircraft movements and countless other events and activities to a totally unprecedented degree.
All that was good, surely. It was certainly good for Cyberdyne's business. But Skynet was doing just what Sarah Connor said it would. It was bootstrapping itself into something almost—or more than—human.
As Eve rushed them, both of the servicemen crouched and opened fire, aiming high to frighten her. They would see no serious threat from an unarmed, naked female.
She punched the larger man in the head as their bodies collided, crushing his skull with a single blow. As the other tried to grapple with her, she twisted and shrugged him away. He stumbled, falling to one knee. Eve picked him up by the throat, then snapped his neck. She tossed him a clear ten feet through the air and he landed face-down on the road, skin ripping away as he skidded across the roadway.
Eve took the larger man's Beretta M9 handgun, which had fired only three rounds. She threw his body in an area of thick scrub beside the road. Next, she stripped the smaller officer and dressed in his uniform, her movements decisive and efficient. She dumped his body next to the first. His trousers and shirt were baggy, but they would suffice. She stuck his gun in her waistband, under her shirt.
There was a leather wallet in one pocket of the trousers she was wearing. She checked through it, finding an electronic keycard, then threw the rest away. She checked his wristwatch.
Midnight was about to strike. Even now, her master was coming to life.
They called it "The Cage"—the room where Skynet's processors were housed and an audio-visual interface was set up for interaction with the system. It was accessible only by two combination locks, spaced six feet apart on either side of a sliding metal door. Miles knew both combinations, but the locks had to be turned simultaneously. Steve Bullock had sent a guard from the security/rapid-response team—Miles recognized her as Micky Pavlovic. She had a young son, Danny's age.
"Good evening, Mr. Dyson."
"Evening, Micky."
They turned the locks, and Pavlovic made a note in a ruled exercise book, then got Miles to countersign.
"Thanks," he said. "I'll be okay now."
Once inside The Cage, Miles and his team could communicate with the Skynet Al face-to-face. They could program it, activate it, provide it with additional data as required. They could deactivate it, if necessary.
As the project unfolded, they had experimented with Skynet's ability to teach itself.
In theory, it shouldn't matter how powerful the best hardware became, for there was an insurmountable software problem. Fundamental logical and psychological problems had to be sorted out before a machine could master the whole repertoire of informal logic used by a human being. That was why a computer had a good chance to defeat a chess grand master—as IBM's Deep Blue had routed Kasparov back in May—but could not be programmed to make a modern family's day to day decisions about budgeting and bringing up the kids.
But Skynet already had what resembled intuition. It was making human-level judgments, and its limits were still unclear.
The Cage was a brilliantly lit room, banked on three sides with heavily-armored equipment, designed to survive a firefight or a small explosion. A small desk, with a coffee maker and a telephone, was wedged into one corner of this set-up. On the room's remaining side, near the door, was a desk console with a dull pink ergonomic chair. It faced a deep wall recess crammed with a keyboard, a small screen, and audio-visual equipment, including a much larger, sixty-inch screen built into the wall. The whole room was lined with speakers, flat mikes, and swiveling cameras.