"I wish we could have done more."
Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head. "Of course, when the warheads fell, we knew what had happened. I wanted to go back and find Miles, but we had to make a choice. Skynet must have known what it was doing—it wouldn't have left anyone alive who could shut it down."
"There's a lot I still don't understand," John said. "Why would they give all the control to Skynet in the first place?" He looked at the Terminator. "Do you know anything about that?"
"No. I do not have detailed files."
Tarissa looked back and forth between them, the young man and his bodyguard. "You're the robot from the future?"
"I am a Terminator: Cyberdyne T-800 series, model 101. I am a cyborg construction: human biology on an endoskeletal combat chassis."
"This is for real, isn't it?" Danny said.
"Yes," John said. "It always was."
Tarissa nodded sadly, and poured herself more coffee. "I'm confused about one thing."
"Only one? Well, try me."
"Your messages said that all human decisions were being removed and given to Skynet. But it wasn't supposed to work that way. The final decision was still supposed to be with the President. Skynet shouldn't have been able to launch the missiles by itself."
"I suppose we'll never know," John said.
The T-800 was silent.
"No," Tarissa said. "I wish Miles was here to explain it all to us. I miss him..." She lost control for a moment, putting down her coffee cup, and weeping openly. But then she managed to speak through the tears. "When we heard about you and your mother, down here in Argentina, we knew we had to join you. Your reputation's growing."
"As long as Skynet doesn't hear about it," John said. "We're not ready yet."
"Do you know what happens next?"
"Skynet is preparing war machines," the T-800 said. "I don't have the details."
"Maybe I should have taken more time and programmed it into you, before I sent you back to '94," John said. "Still, you've done what you had to do. I might even be better off not knowing everything. It gives me room to make decisions."
"Correct"
"It's still weird," Danny said.
He seemed like a confident sort of guy, probably a genius like his father. "What's so weird?" John said.
"This whole time travel thing."
"What about it? Sounds pretty normal to me." He grinned, and glanced at the Terminator.
"Can't you see how it's full of paradoxes?"
"All right. I know that. Look, my mother and I have never tried to explain the whole story. It would only have hurt our credibility." John took them through it all. How he was destined to defeat Skynet. How Skynet had tried to change the past by killing him or his mother— before she could bear him. :
Infuriatingly, Danny shook his head. "It just can't work that way. Say Skynet sends back a Terminator to kill you. It can't change the past. Time has already taken it into account, can't you see that? And if you can, so would Skynet—it can't be stupid."
"Maybe it's got a few blind spots," John said.
"Maybe. Or maybe things happen differently. Say one of those Terminators had managed to kill you, right? It couldn't help Skynet anyway."
John hadn't thought of that. "What? Why not?"
"Because Skynet has grown up in a world where you exist. If there's a world where you don't exist, it's a different world See my point? It may also have a Skynet, but it's a different Skynet. Nothing it experiences is known to the Skynet who sent back the Terminator. All that happens is that time splits. One way or another, you can't use time travel as a weapon. At least not like that."
"But that's how it happened. You can't quarrel with reality, Danny."
Danny shook his head. "I don't think so."
"Unknown, right?" John said to the Terminator.
"Unknown."
"Great. Another mystery. Listen, Tarissa .. Danny... You and your people are welcome. Thanks for trusting us. Please come with us to the estancia"
Tarissa nodded. "Thank you."
John wondered how Sarah would respond to the Dysons. For years she'd lived with her hatred of Miles Dyson. Often she'd said that she wished they'd killed him back in 1994, before they left the U.S. They'd even argued about it, about what would have happened if they'd tried, whether the T-1000 would have been watching out for them to make that very move. Here they were, now, confronted by the human aspect of his life, the fact that he'd left behind a family.
An hour later, the Dysons and their people had packed up, and a whole convoy returned to the casco. Sarah and Gabriela came to meet them. John could imagine the tears when they met Tarissa Dyson. So be it. They were all in this together. Apart from the T-800, they were all human.
There would be many more tears ahead.
THE COMING OF THE MACHINES
Soon, their problems really began. The machines had searched out humans to the ends of the Earth. They found Buenos Aires and the other great South American cities untouched by Judgment Day's nuclear fires, but riddled with bullet holes, ruined by the warlords. Skynet's Hunter-Killer machines—the aerial and ground H-Ks—poured from the gray sky, and from the mountains and jungles of the north. They swept into the cities, accompanied by the first combat endoskeletons, like walking images of Death, or beings from a horror movie. They killed as many humans as possible, driving the others into extermination camps, to deal with them more efficiently.
When the war machines first came, the human Resistance struck back, including fragments of the once-proud U.S. military that had survived Judgment Day. They targeted Skynet's forces with the only weapons that were truly effective: tactical nuclear warheads. But no matter what was thrown at them, the machines returned. They never relented, never lost patience, were never beaten.
The Earth was damned already. Now it became a worse circle of Hell.
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
2012
The craters from tactical nuclear explosions stomped asymmetrically through the city and the countryside all round, like a giant's drunken footprints. Ruined buildings rose from a desert of broken concrete. Nothing green showed itself in the perpetual winter. Here and there, the twisted metal skeletons of old skyscrapers towered above lesser ruins. Some vehicles had been pushed together by the Resistance, and piled up into roadblocks. Bonfires made of rubber tires burnt in the street. Occasionally, a rat foraged for food, or a dull gray bird flew from one crumbling window ledge to another.
Humans and machines exchanged fire beneath the sunless sky. The sinister electronic noise of the phased-plasma mechanisms answered the noisy clatter of the Resistance guerrillas' assault rifles. Explosions boomed through the streets, leaving billows of dark, rising smoke. All round was the smell of gunpowder and harsher chemicals. Skynet's H-Ks swept through the city's streets. Occasionally, they stabbed at their human enemies with needles of shocking blue light from their phased-plasma laser cannons.
"We've got to withdraw, John," Sarah said through gritted teeth. "There's too many of them." Even as she approached her fifties, Sarah was as tough as any of them. Her hair was now a steel gray, when once it had been honey brown, but her body was still lithe and muscular.
John needed no encouragement. "Withdraw!" he shouted, in Spanish, then repeated it in English. "Fall back! Fall back!" The order echoed through the guerrillas' lines. They ran half-crouched, with zigzagging movements, seeking the next position of cover.
Dozens of the flying H-Ks circled like huge, flesh-eating dragonflies, looking out for prey. The super-intense light beams from their laser cannons incinerated whatever they hit, taking only a second to burn up a human body like a match head. Following in their wake was a column of ground H-K's, Skynet's huge, tank-like juggernauts. These were almost unstoppable as they crawled slowly on their caterpillar treads through the maze of streets. Keeping pace with them were dozens of smaller killers, the nimble Centurion gun-pods, mounted on four legs, and Skynet's most adaptable ground weapons of alclass="underline" the metal endoskeletons.