Sarah reached out and held her, forgetting any reservations she had about the Specialists. For the moment, Jade was just another young woman, overcome with grief. "It's okay," Sarah said. "It'll all be okay."
Jade wept openly. "Thank you, Ms. Connor," she said, between the tears and painful sobs. "I know. We'll make it worthwhile. I know. It's all right. I know. I know."
As the shadows stretched out through the afternoon and they headed towards Mexicali and Calexico, John said, "Okay, we were going to compare notes. At least set out the highlights, remember?"
"All right," Danny said. "Let's get your half of the story. You had two Terminators try to kill you, one in 1984 one in 1994, right? That's the story you told my mother, back in '94, when you came to our house."
"The 1984 one was programmed to hunt me," Sarah said. "John wasn't born yet. The T-1000 came after him ten years later. Maybe this gets confusing." She took the Specialists through it quickly. In the original future, America's Skynet computerized defense system reached self-awareness in 1997 and discovered in itself a will to live. When its creators tried to shut it down, Skynet had launched the U.S. ICBMs at targets in Russia and several other countries. The Russians had responded in kind. From the ashes, came nuclear winter. "Then the machines came, hunting the humans down, seeking us out to the ends of the Earth."
But one man had led the human Resistance in the future: John Connor. Skynet was beaten in 2029, but had played one last card, sending back the Terminators to kill John, or prevent him from being born. It had tried to change the past, but it failed.
"Right," Danny said. "That makes sense. Let's call the future you described the baseline reality. When you blew up Cyberdyne in '94, things changed."
“That was the whole idea," John said.
"Yeah, sure. But they didn't change the way you thought they did, because that's not how time works. We know that now. Before Judgment Day happened, there was a lot of theory about time and time travel. Let's say that we've all diverged from the baseline. In the world that Jade and Selena were born in, the one we're all in now, Skynet gets implemented in 2007, but Judgment Day isn't until 2021. As you can imagine, lots of things happened in between, stuff we all grew up with. With the kind of computer processors that were used for Skynet, there were huge technological advances in every field. Time travel was invented, the research has already started. Soon, we mastered it. We made great strides in bioteeh—every possible field of science. There were protests about Skynet, but they came to nothing and the system worked fine until 2021. By then, everyone trusted it completely. There were no signs that it was sentient or self-conscious."
"It was everywhere," Anton said. "It controlled the armed forces and their support units almost without human safeguards. Over all those years, they hadn't been necessary, so they got pared back. When Judgment Day happened, Skynet had the upper hand. We haven't been able to defeat it."
"So now you're the ones trying to change the past?" Sarah said. "You're trying to stop Skynet being built, like we tried in '94?"
Anton shook his head. "I wish it worked like that. It's not so simple."
"We don't think you can ever change the future," Selena said. "Or the past."
"That's right," Danny said. "And Skynet must have known that as well as we do."
"But we have changed things," John said, hoping he was right. "Judgment Day was supposed to happen in 1997. It didn't happen, and here we are, plenty of world still left."
"That's just how it seems to you."
"We want to create a different future," Anton said, "alongside the ones that already exist. We want to give mankind another chance."
"I don't think I'm going to like this story," Sarah said.
Anton took them through it quickly. Sometimes you could make changes in time, but you didn't wipe out the old timeline-that never happened. You just created a new one. The timeline in which John grew up to win the war against Skynet still existed. So did the future that the Specialists had come from.
"So what's your future like?" John said.
"Hard. Skynet is winning. By 2036, it had crushed all human resistance in North America. Other centers of resistance held out, but there's no way we that can see to penetrate Skynet's defenses, not with the resources we have left. That's why we're here. It looks like humanity is doomed in our timeline. We came back to create a better future, one with a chance of avoiding Judgment Day."
“But why does Skynet care? If all you can do is create a new future alongside the old one, what's it got to fear?"
"Nothing. We weren't sure how it would react when it detected the space-time field fluctuations. But it's sent back the T-XA to stop us. You should assume that Skynet will do what it can to destroy human life anywhere, any time, whatever we do, in any world-any timeline—we ever try to create. We've got to be ready for it. It's paranoid about us. It thinks that every human being is its enemy."
"And it will always create Judgment Day if we give it Half a chance," Sarah said.
"Perhaps, Ms. Connor," Jade said. "We don't know. But that's what we've experienced. It's what happened in our universe."
"Yeah." Sarah sounded disgusted by what she'd heard, John couldn't blame her. She turned to him, shaking her head bitterly. "Maybe it always happens, whatever we do.
All we've done is postpone it, and make it worse."
"It does look that way," John said. "Doesn't it, Mom?"
Sarah closed her eyes, then lowered her head. "God help us, why did we bother trying?"
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
AUGUST 2001
Oscar Cruz lived in a plush beachside condo, just ten minutes' drive from the new Cyberdyne headquarters. He'd stayed up late tonight to read Rosanna's latest reports. They were fascinating. Relaxed deep into one of his heavily cushioned armchairs, he studied a printout analysis of the Mark 1 nanoprocessor, and what it had achieved so far. Its capacities were already beyond anything Rosanna had promised. It was just as well he'd kept her services. Every penny they'd spent catering to her whims had been repaid with interest.
Jack Reed's people were moving cautiously, wary of creating any truly Frankensteinian technology, much as Charles Layton and others on the Board still scoffed at that. The point that Rosanna had established early on was that the lost nanochip and the other 1984 remnants really were from the future. There was no other explanation. When you looked at the total picture, it all made sense. They had to be the remains of some kind of military cyborg device, the same device that had killed seventeen police in a shootout that year, and identical to the one that had helped the Connors destroy the Cyberdyne HQ ten years later. Sarah Connor must be crazy, of course, and there had been no nuclear Armageddon in 1997, but it didn't hurt to be careful. Connor was obviously caught up in something she didn't understand.
It had taken someone like Rosanna to work this out. The woman was strange and self-absorbed, but she was brilliant. She had that manner that made you dismiss everything she said as too eccentric to be true-then go and check up, just in case she was right. If she said the moon was made of green cheese, you'd laugh at her, then conduct an investigation, just in case.
Eventually, the Dyson-Monk nanochip could be adapted for the military computers Jack and NORAD had originally imagined, but now they were onto something bigger: time travel. Rosanna had convinced them all it was possible, and now she was working with some of the best physicists in the country, using the Mark-1 processor for their mathematical modeling. The practical results didn't yet add amount to time travel, but they were certainly amazing.