"Now you're psychoanalyzing a genocidal computer?" she asked.
"What can I say—it's a long-term relationship," John pointed out. "You might say it's my mission in life. Hey! I'm supposed to be this great military leader, right? Did Napoleon's mom treat him this way?"
"She probably whacked him upside the head with a broomstick now and again.
Of course, she didn't know he was going to be anything but a Corsican dropout."
"Yeah, but you do. So how 'bout a little respect?"
Sarah grinned and settled herself down, leaning her back against a rock and
wiggling until the gritty desert soil felt a little more comfortable. "That thing from a cell phone," she said after a moment, "what's it do?"
"Basically it's the whole works," John said, "without the speakers."
She nodded, gazing into the fire. "So you were right to make that Faraday cage,"
she said grimly. "It was communicating with someone." She glanced up at him.
"Any way to find out who?"
"Not without the right equipment." John's eyes grew dreamy for a moment.
"Jackson Skye probably had stuff I could've used to find out."
"Hold on to it," Sarah said. "We may yet be able to find out."
"If it was communicating with someone it means there are more of them," Dieter said.
Sarah and John looked at him.
"We know," she said gently.
"The question is," John said, "another Terminator, or something else?"
"Like a T-1000?" Sarah said, her eyes distant.
John took a shaky breath.
"Yeah," he said.
"Or maybe just a better-made Terminator," she said. "If this isn't an original
Skynet special, then something here is building them. It has to be. Something came back from the future, with the power units and CPUs. A coordinator, a manager."
"Sort of a master Terminator?" John said. He held up the board from the cell phone. "And this might have its number." He looked at his mother. "So, do we give it a call?"
A smile lifted one side of her full mouth. "Maybe, when we figure out how to get the number."
"I'm worried about the pilot," von Rossbach said suddenly.
"Don't go there, Dieter," Sarah warned. "If he's smart he'll go for therapy and within a month the doctor will have talked him into disbelieving what he saw. If he's not smart he'll take a lot of drugs or drink a lot of booze, and when they cart him off with the d.t.'s he'll have a therapist convince him it was all in his head."
"I think the second way sounds smarter," John volunteered.
His mother pointed a finger at him and he subsided, grinning.
"Thing is you can't concern yourself with him. We haven't got the time. Nobody will believe him anyway." Sarah said.
"Somebody will," Dieter warned. "Whoever is at Cyberdyne will. And they must be pretty well connected to the Web to have known we were in the Caymans."
John tapped his tweezers against the Terminator's metal skull in a hip-hop beat
as he thought. "And if that's so…" he said, slowly, his eyes flashed up to meet his mother's.
"Then Sacramento is probably a trap," she said.
John nodded. "So? What are we gonna do?"
Sarah blew out a breath that fluttered her bangs. She shrugged.
"We go to Sacramento," Dieter said. "It's the only lead we have."
"Unfortunately," Sarah pointed out, "they know we have it."
"True," Dieter conceded. "But they don't know where we are, exactly, or when we'll arrive."
Sarah glanced at him and very consciously didn't say what she was thinking.
Which was that he was the one who had wanted them to find the remote storage site.
Though, to be fair, she thought, we did learn something fairly interesting. Which is that there's apparently some sort of boss Terminator. Maybe something even smarter than Uncle Bob. But what?
"Whoever, or whatever is looking for us," Dieter said, "can apparently find us very easily through the Internet. That means we can't use the credit cards or go near what might be computer-connected cameras." He stopped suddenly as though struck by an idea.
"What?" Sarah asked suspiciously.
"I was just thinking… Cyberdyne is on a military base. How difficult would it be for this person to get connected to an uplink and hack into the military's spy satellites?"
Sarah and John just looked at him.
"You remember how Mom said 'don't go there' a minute ago?" John asked.
"Well, don't go there either."
Sarah shook her head. "Life used to be so much simpler," she said pushing her hair back from her face. "I liked it much better when all we had to worry about was the FBI and the CIA and Interpol and the Sector and stuff like that. Now we've apparently got a head Terminator who might be counting the number of sticks I'm putting on this fire. Well, here's one if you're up there!" She held her middle finger up to the stars. "And on that note, I'm going to try to sleep."
She pulled her blanket over her and settled down on the cheap plastic air mattress they'd bought in the village store. John looked up into the sky for a minute. Then he picked up the CPU and put it in his shirt pocket. The more suspicious looking of the Terminator's chips he gathered up and tossed into the flames. Dieter frowned, but said nothing as he watched the sparkles and flares they made in the fire.
NEW YORK CITY: THE PRESENT
Ron Labane was annoyed, glowering out his office window, fiddling with a cup of organic, peasant-grown, but cold coffee. It had been days and he'd yet to receive the courtesy of a reply from the CEO of Cyberdyne.
He chewed his lower lip as he worked on his press release about Cyberdyne's precious secret project. His followers would just eat this up. Secret military projects made the damn fools cream in their jeans. And since this would be just the first of many such facilities, a lot of precious manufacturing jobs would be going bye-bye forever instead of just going south. That should shake up the complacent, secure middle class. It also meant the more militant Luddites would get on board and stay the course until the issue was resolved.
He had a meeting arranged tomorrow with a group who would make the fab four look like the losers they were. This news would be at the top of the agenda. He'd received more information on the project, obviously from someone high up in the inner circle at Cyberdyne. Names, dates, places, logistics, even what had to be a general overview of the whole project.
Nice to have friends in high places, he thought smugly.
He read over what he had written.
Profit is good. Isn't it? Profit drives the economy; it's what provides jobs that allow us to have homes and buy the things that make life comfortable.
Of course, sometimes the profit motive can override common sense, or even common decency. As when medical care is denied to a patient because it might cost too much. Yes, it would save the patient, but… that's not really what health insurance is all about, is it? Health insurance is about profit, about dividends paid to investors. We all just think it's about our personal health.
What about when profit is so important that jobs are eliminated by the
thousands?
What about a factory that's totally automated? A place that manufactures the machines it needs, repairs those machines, and sets them in motion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No humans needed.
No such place exists, you say. Except perhaps in the daydreams of engineers.
Oh, really? Perhaps you should ask Cyberdyne Corporation about their plans to build such a facility for the military. Yes, it's a real project and it's due to be built…