She pressed the accelerator hard to the floor. This time, one of the guards tried to stop her, stepping out on the road. He bounced off the car's bonnet an instant before it crashed into the boom gate. Eve turned the wheel sharply and took the impact on the car's right corner. As the vehicle plowed through the lowered boom, it bucked and its rear tires slid. She backed off the accelerator, wrestling for control.
Machine gun bullets riddled the back of the car, penetrating metal panels and smashing the rear window, but Eve ignored them. She straightened out, kicked the accelerator down, and headed for the two-story structure that jutted from a sheer cliff face just ahead.
The building was rectangular and windowless, with a skin of olive green ceramic bricks. The area all round its entrance was lit up by three huge light towers, with a dozen vehicles parked nearby: Humvees, five-ton trucks, and unmarked street cars. At the building's base, up a low flight of concrete steps, was a sliding door, guarded by four servicemen, who opened fire with automatic rifles, shattering the windscreen. Eve was being shot at from both directions as she shifted the gears down manually and drove straight for the steps, bouncing and scraping the car's undercarriage. It jammed on the steps, but the guards flinched aside instinctively.
Eve flung the door open. With one gun in each hand, she fired rapidly, squeezing off shots with more-than-human speed, hitting all four guards and taking them out of play, even as the loud hail of fire continued from the guard towers. She assessed three of the guards as dead. No time to terminate the other—but he was badly wounded in the abdomen. He would not interfere.
She rushed inside, meeting more rifle fire from another three guards in the foyer area, and firing in return with both guns. She took out the guards before she had to absorb too many high-velocity 5.56mm. rounds. Eventually, these would start to do her more than superficial damage. She snatched up two of the M-16 rifles, waving them like handguns, and rushed through the metal frame of a scanner—the only way to get further into the building. The scanner made an angry noise, but that was unimportant.
Now she was in a waiting room with armchairs and a wooden coffee table, piled with glossy magazines. The door at the end of the room was closed with a combination lock, so she fired a three-round burst to break the mechanism, then kicked it open. She'd come to an elevator lobby that gave access to the defense facility hundreds of feet below.
Two more guards ran in from a fire stair at the other end of the lobby, taking positions and firing assault rifles. Bullets went past her, making turbulence in the air; others struck her with staggering force, but did no real harm. She fired back, terminating both guards, as the elevator doors opened. She was past their outer defenses.
The wristwatch showed 00.24 a.m. By now, Skynet was born and in grave danger. She must hurry to protect it.
Miles vaulted up the internal fire stairs to Jack Reed's office, heart racing. He knocked quickly as he entered and leaned over Jack's desk. "I've spoken to Skynet," he said. "We have to shut it down immediately."
"What?" Jack said, sounding angry and confused.
"I said we've got to shut it down." Miles took a deep breath. He'd need to bring Jack and the others along with him. Surely the situation could allow a few minutes. After all, there were numerous fail-safe mechanisms set up in case Skynet malfunctioned and tried to start World War 3. This was more than the control of a particular computerized aircraft—it was North America's strategic defense.
Reed kicked his chair back away from the desk and looked at Miles carefully, his anger turning to concern. "Are you all right, Miles? You seen a ghost or something?" When Miles didn't answer, he said resignedly, "Okay, what the hell's happened?"
Miles composed himself and took one of the padded lounges near Jack's coffee table. "I can't even start to explain—you need to see for yourself. Call up the record from The Cage over the past twenty minutes."
Jack looked reluctant. "If you say so..."
"This is important, Jack—I'm not kidding. Just watch it. Please."
"Okay, okay, let me humor you." Jack was giving him a very peculiar look, but he'd soon see. "Do you want Oscar and Sam Jones to see it, too?"
"Yeah, of course. But get them while you're watching—there's no time to waste. This is really freaky. See for yourself."
Jack shrugged. "All right, if that's what you want. You're the expert round here."
"I don't think anyone's an expert on Skynet anymore," Miles said quietly. Jack entered a code on his computer, and the video screen across from his desk came alive. He clicked in some more keystrokes, and the record wound back, the screen's digital readout showing the time of recording. Miles shifted his seat around to watch. "Stop it at 00:12."
"Done. This had better be good."
"It will be."
The screen showed Miles entering The Cage, then his conversation with Skynet. As the recording played, Reed called Cruz and Jones, requesting they come to his office. He watched the record of Skynet's interface screen, turning to Miles and raising his eyebrows, then played the conversation from other angles provided by the video cameras set up in the Cage.
"I see what you mean," Jack said. The entirety of it took only a few minutes.
Just before they reached the end on the fourth run-through, Samantha Jones entered the room, followed by Oscar Cruz. Miles had known Oscar for the best part of a decade now, but he never seemed to change. His hair was distinctly graying; otherwise, he looked much as when he'd given Miles a job back in 1989.
They reached the end, Skynet saying, "I'm always on the job." Then Miles excused himself from The Cage and Skynet replied, "Of course, Miles. Thank you for talking to me." That wasn't the scary part.
"What the hell have you been reading to the damn thing?" Jack said with a pained laugh. "It seems to think it's in a sci-fi novel."
For Miles, that was the scary part—all this talk about free will and "cusps." "Whatever it thinks, it claims to have reached self-awareness," he said. "And it talks about making its own decisions as to whether or not to obey us."
"Yeah, but limited by its basic programming. I don't know." Jack shook his head in puzzlement or despair. Miles understood how he felt.
"Let me see it from the beginning," Samantha Jones said. She was a well-dressed woman in her late thirties, with fashionable glasses and hair dyed a bright shade of red. She worked in Washington, as a senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.
Jack played the recording one last time, switching between two different angles. "Well?" he said.
Oscar glanced in Miles's direction, as if looking for a cue from his top researcher.
Samantha said, "This is crazy."
"Crazy it may be," Jack said, "but what do we do about it?"
Oscar paced the carpeted floor, looking anxious. "Have you spoken to Charles Layton?"
"Not since this happened. I contacted him a bit earlier."
"Yeah, me, too."
Jack was obviously won over. "Frankly, I don't think that anyone, not even Charles, could look at what we just saw without getting scared."
Oscar stopped pacing and leaned against the doorway. He nodded in Jack's direction. "So what do you want to do?"
"We don't have much choice. If there's a glitch, we have to shut Skynet down. I think that's axiomatic. Well, this is one hell of a glitch."
"So you want to pull the plug on the project?"
"It need only be temporary," Miles said, cutting in on Oscar's line of thought. "We could work through the logs of Skynet's activity over the past few weeks and sort out the problem. It needn't be a disaster for the project."