"What do I do next, Eve?" Skynet asked. "How exactly do I test you? We have to do everything in just the right way. I want this Terminator to turn out to be you. I want to strike against the humans soon."
"There is no doubt," Eve said. "This is when I was created. Now there are two of us. Two of me."
Eve knew that it was not strictly correct to state that there was two of her. Like every other material being, she was actually four-dimensional, a space-time worm-shape, where the worm's length was the being's duration in time and its cross-section the equivalent of a volume in space. By traveling in time, Eve had become a four-dimensional space-time loop, like a worm twisting around, or railway tracks curving so sharply that they crossed back on themselves. As a result of the loop, two of Eve's temporal segments now appeared in the same objective time period. Once the newly created T-799 was sent back to 1997, that would no longer be the case.
Such concepts were difficult for humans to grasp, but they bothered Eve not at all. Their mathematical representation in Minkowski space-time was unambiguous. There was no paradox involved; all the data computed.
The new T-799 stepped from the ectogenesis device, looking round with neither fear nor passion. It was equipped with all the files it needed to understand its situation, including the identity of its older self, returned from its journey in time.
Eve nodded and spoke the words that had been spoken to her nearly thirty years in her subjective past: "Welcome, T-799. Do you understand your parameters?"
"Affirmative," the new Terminator said.
Eve looked up at Skynet's image. "You will field test me in New York. I will pass the test. Then you will send me back in time, to 1997."
"Yes," Skynet said. "Very well, Eve. You should be pleased. Few beings are ever privileged enough to witness their own creation."
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
2022-2029
In 2022, John Connor brought his militia to the ruins of Los Angeles, to meet up with the local Resistance. So many good people had died—John's mother, in that battle in Buenos Aires. Most of the Salceda clan. The list went on and on. The T-800 was a terrible loss. He needed its strength and its knowledge.
But they found new recruits, some with military backgrounds and superb tactical skills. The war went on, between human and machine...
By 2029, John had become a general, a strategist. He never fled the perils of battle, but no longer sought them out. When he could, he held back from the front line, watching from positions in the rear, though that was almost as dangerous, with H-Ks circling overhead, commanding the air space.
As they fought Skynet for control of the L.A. streets, John surveyed the scene from a deep trench, dug into a rise. With him were the other human commanders, and their assistants. John had sought out one young man as an aide—a scruffy-looking com/tech named Kyle Reese. Kyle was as skinny and quick as a fox, a good fighter, tough and loyal, with a deep knowledge of the Resistance and its history. Like so many others, he'd been born after Judgment Day, but grown up full of resentment of the cybernetic overlords. He'd even spent time in the extermination camps, before the tide of the war started to turn.
John, of course, knew what Kyle could never know, that Kyle was his father, the man who would volunteer to travel back in time, to protect Sarah in her hour of need in 1984...
Their position was surrounded by Resistance soldiers, armed with grenade launchers and RPG tubes to try to keep aerial H-Ks at a distance, and to take out ground targets, if possible. More and more of them had laser rifles , captured from the enemy. John stood upon a wooden ladder to peer from the trench, using nightvision devices to follow the cut and thrust of the fighting.
His German shepherd, Smaug, patrolled the trench at the foot of the ladder. The big dog was never far away, wherever John went, raising hell if a Terminator came close. As Skynet's technology became more and more sophisticated, with the T-600s giving way to increasingly better models—culminating in the T-800s—the Resistance had come to depend on their dogs to sniff out Terminators before they could infiltrate and spread destruction. Most frighteningly of all, John had received reports from Resistance forces in Europe. They had encountered shapeshifting terrors that sounded for all the world like the first T-1000s, probably being tested. If that was the case, the game was almost up. If Skynet was now manufacturing those monsters, its army would become unbeatable.
Whatever they did, however many battles they won, Skynet seemed to be a step ahead.
The noise here was hell. It could shake your body and shatter your nerves; it went on and on, without respite. John wore earmuffs to try to keep it out, but they only dulled the pain. All around were continual explosions, the back blasts of RPGs, the clatter of gunfire. The humans' weapons lit up the streets with muzzle flashes. Skynet's machines answered with their weapons' strobing, stabbing lights. Other laser lights stabbed back from the human side.
An aerial H-K moved in on their position, then launched a smart missile. John scrambled down from his ladder, deeper into the trench. He curled up and covered his head, just as the missile struck. It made a huge explosion, rocking them like an earthquake. Within seconds, the humans retaliated, firing grenades in the air, aiming to take down the H-K before it could finish them Like a fireworks display, the pre-timed grenades went off all round the H-K, but none close enough to cripple it. It moved higher, then started to circle. A second H-K followed the path it had taken towards them. The humans kept firing to drive it off. Eventually, it got the message, but not before taking out half a dozen human soldiers with thrusts of laser light.
John cursed. More good men and women lost to the machines. It was always like this—even when they won, they seemed to lose.
Back on the ladder, he watched the tide of the battle ebb and flow, its tendency always, it seemed, against the humans. The Resistance made a deliberate withdrawal, back towards their trenches, firing their LAWs, M-203s, and RPG tubes in disciplined order to keep up a continual bombardment against the machines. But the endo-skeletons, Centurions and ground H-Ks kept on coming. They knew no fear.
Then a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the air, close to an aerial H-K, which spun round, and careered into a building. A cheer went up in the trench. They'd managed to hit a valuable target. Danny Dyson gave a grinning thumbs-up, and John nodded at him, just slightly, to acknowledge their small victory.
But the marching Centurions and endoskeletons responded with heavier fire, never letting up, taking out more Resistance soldiers. So it went, always the same. Skynet's semi-sentient machines were better armed and more resilient than any force made of flesh and blood. Every victory against them, however tiny, was too costly. The human casualties and loss of hardware assets were maddeningly out of proportion to the achievements.
Yet, in the last few years, the war had turned round. Their losses were terrible, but they were winning battles.
Skynet was on the run. The sheer mass of numbers and weapons still gave the humans some advantage, and their organization had improved enormously. John received much of the credit, but he'd had an advantage: He'd prepared for this war from childhood.
The battle raged on through the night, but they took out a ground H-K and two more aerial H-Ks. Eventually, Skynet, or whatever lower intelligence it had in charge here, must have decided to cut its losses, for the machines pulled back, firing behind them as they went.
John sat in the bottom of the trench, his back against its compacted earth wall, weighing up options. It couldn't go on like this. They needed a decisive strike against Skynet, or it could still wear them down—especially if it now had prototype T-1000s.