Outside in the sunshine, Rosanna took Oscar's arm. "This is all pretty creepy," she said. Charles walked a few steps ahead of them, head bowed in thought. He was never one for small talk.
"Which bit?" Oscar said.
"Well, the arm apparatus in particular... and all of it in general."
"Yeah... It is strange. Is it bothering you?"
"Of course it's bothering me," she said, almost hissing the words.
"What do you want to do?" he said carefully.
"Put it this way, Oscar-just look after me. All right? I can do weird science for you, and I'll go to Colorado if you want. Just don't get me blown up in the line of duty."
Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it all was, that was what he wanted to hear. Rosanna was very capable, and a lot of their problems might be over if Jack and his people could pull off what he claimed. "You'll be fine," Oscar said. "You'll be a great Director of Special Projects. Congratulations."
But she gripped his arm harder, digging in with her nails. "Yeah, that's cool. Just make sure Mr. Reed keeps me alive." Then she released him and laughed. "You do that, and I'll promise to enjoy myself in Colorado. It's not like I have a lot of friends back in L.A. A happy Dr. Frankenstein is a productive one. Right? I just don't want to be a dead one, not like poor Miles. Is that a deal, Oscar?"
"Yeah, Rosanna. If that's all you want." He shrugged. "It's a deal. Word of honor."
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
AUGUST, 2001
"Hey, you still with us, partner?" Sarah said, wandering back to see what he was doing.
John realized he must have been drifting away. "What, Mom? Sorry..."
"I said, are you still with us? You looked lost in thought."
"I was thinking about Cyberdyne, and Judgment Day."
Sarah nodded at the computer terminal. "Was there anything new?" These days, she was always tense when she asked that.
"No, not tonight"
"Well, that's a pleasant change."
"I know. I wish we'd finished Cyberdyne off completely."
"You're not the only one, partner. Let's give up for the night. Tomorrow's another day."
The trouble was, he often did find stuff, and not just about Cyberdyne, though there was plenty of that He also kept up with more general developments in artificial ' intelligence, with what U.S. Defense was doing about research into new weaponry, with ideas about enhancing the NORAD system—anything that might be relevant. Not a day went by without some important development in the AI field, or someone reputable speculating about new kinds of computer hardware, or something else, completely out of left field, that just might be relevant to Judgment Day.
His main worry was still Cyberdyne. It was going from strength to strength, and lifting its public profile. When Bill Joy, the cyber guru, had expressed his fears about AI and nanotechnology in Wired magazine, Oscar Cruz, the President of Cyberdyne, had responded all over the Internet, reassuring everyone and getting as much free publicity as he could. That was over a year ago, now, but it still seemed like you couldn't avoid Cruz's name, not if you spent any time on the Net. It seemed to be spreading like wildfire. If you typed "Oscar Cruz" into the Google search engine, it came back with about a million hits. Some of Cruz's research scientists, like Rosanna Monk, were almost as famous.
When they'd left Raoul and Gabriela's estancia, they hadn't expected Cyberdyne to haunt them, and it hadn't at first, but now it was getting to them. Sarah had been growing more like her old, intense self. Maybe they needed to change something about their lives. The cyber cafe was a nice business, but the name and the decor ought to change. If Judgment Day might still be coming, the big Last Judgment painting overarching the room was out of place. It was like they'd crowed too soon. Skynet would have the last laugh.
"Let's tidy everything up for the night," John said, standing and stepping around the desk.
"I've finished most of that," Sarah said. "We can do a final scour of the place, if you like, then call it quits."
"Excellent."
They spent ten minutes getting the place spic-and-span: throwing out wrappers and drink cans that the customers had left behind; cleaning surfaces; washing dishes and cutlery in the kitchen out the back.
"I don't like the way things are heading, John. I'm starting to get nightmares again."
"I know. Me, too."
"Are you?" she said, looking at him with fear in her eyes.
"Uh-huh. Dreams about the missiles... and the explosions."
"Oh, God, I thought that was my cross to bear." Suddenly, she reached out and hugged him close to her. He was now taller than his mother, and she seemed somehow vulnerable when he embraced her, though they still trained each day and he knew how tough she was.
"Come on, Mom, maybe it'll all be okay."
"Sometimes I dream about the missiles," she said, as they let each other go. "Other times, we're back in L.A. and the T-1000 is still after us. We can't find a way to destroy it."
"It's all right. I have that dream, too. We were lucky, weren't we?"
"I wonder whether we should move," Sarah said, closing a drawer full of cutlery. "Leave Mexico City. It's so hard to know what to do."
"That's the sort of thing I was thinking about," John said. "You want to go back to the States?"
"Maybe. Maybe we should get back in touch with Raoul and Enrique, and the others. We might need them, after all."
"We could go to Colorado and check out Cyberdyne close-up. I bet there are ways we could suss out what's really going on."
She looked at him thoughtfully. "It's dangerous, though. We might be recognized."
"Hey, speak for yourself. No one would recognize me-I was just a kid when they last saw me. If you could lie low, we'd be okay. Then we could work out what to do." She must have understood what he meant, that they might have to attack Cyberdyne again. But could they do it by themselves, without the T-800 to back them up?
"I'll think about it, John. We'll have to be very careful, whatever we decide. Let's sit tight for a while and see what happens. Maybe the world will stay in one piece if we leave it alone." But she didn't sound like she believed any of this; it was more as if she wanted reassurance.
"It's nice that everything's okay now," John said. "We could be hanging out in a desert somewhere, in the middle of a nuclear winter, waiting for Skynet's machines."
"Yeah, but I'd be happier if Cyberdyne wasn't still in business, and making a tidy profit every year." "Exactly," he said.
Cruz and his people had started talking again about Cyberdyne's plans for nanoprocessing technology, but maybe they were just trying to get attention. After all, everyone else was talking nanotech, but no one had much that was concrete. Even if they did, maybe that was okay, as far as it went It might be cool if someone really did build some super-new computer hardware that could do amazing things with cyberspace, or even allow for some kind of artificial intelligence. There was no reason why it had to lead to Skynet and a new Judgment Day.
What worried him was that someone might be following Miles Dyson's work. That was what they'd tried so hard to prevent back in '94. Miles had taken it pretty hard, but he'd agreed to destroy everything when they explained about Judgment Day. The T-800 had convinced him, acting without hesitation to show him what it really was. John recalled how the Terminator had gone about that. It had made a deep cut in its left forearm, below the elbow, carving all round, then made another cut along the length of its forearm, and peeled away flesh in a single swift motion, exposing the metallic skeleton over which living tissue had been grafted. Miles had seen how the Terminator's wounds scarcely bled, and that its system of veins and arteries was not truly human.