ENCINAS HALFWAY HOUSE
Sarah walked. All that she could hear was the sound of her booted feet crunching through the short, dry grass. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. She was walking toward a playground, full of laughing children and their mothers, but they made no noise.
One woman in a pink waitress's uniform was putting her toddler on a rocking horso. Sho turned to look over her shoulder as though she'd heard someone call her name. Sarah saw her own face; this was the woman she might have become without Kyle Reese, without the Terminator.
She walked up to the chain-link fence that separated the playground from the rest of the world and put her hands through the diamond-shaped holes, watching her might-have-been self. That Sarah turned her attention back to her baby.
Sarah knew what was coming; she'd been here before. She screamed for the people in the playground to take cover, but no sound came out of her mouth. She shook the fence, yelling as hard as she could, and no one heard her, and the world went on as though she didn't exist.
Then it came, the blinding flash of light that set her flesh on fire and instantly killed the women and children in the playground, followed by the blast wave that blew them apart like leaves, as she clung to the fence and screamed in agony.
It was dark and a wind moaned softly as it blew through the ruins of buildings.
She shifted her weight and found that she stood on uneven ground. Looking down, she saw that she was standing on bones and caught her breath when she realized they were human.
"Sarah."
She turned at the sound of his voice and smiled to see Kyle standing a little way from her. A sob tangled with a laugh and caught in her throat. She reached toward him, but couldn't move forward.
"Kyle," she said softly.
He stood on a little pile of skulls looking down at her. A feeling of great sadness came over her when she realized he wasn't going to come to her; tears filled her
eyes and her throat tightened painfully.
"It's not over yet, Sarah," he said. His face was sad, his voice gentle. "You have to be strong."
She shook her head, but said, "I know," as tears flowed down her cheeks.
Kyle gave her a look of such love that her heart melted. She took a breath, but before she could speak he began to collapse. Like a house of cards falling, he dropped to his knees, then dropped and folded, dropped and folded, his body turning to bones before her eyes, his face staying the same.
"Be strong," he said.
" Ah!" Sarah shouted, throwing herself upright in bed.
"You okay?" her roommate asked sleepily.
"Bad dream," Sarah answered, her heart pounding. "Sorry. I'm okay."
The woman shifted and seemed to go back to sleep. Sarah wiped tears from her cheeks and waited for her heart to slow. Then she lay back down, turned onto her side, drawing her knees up.
Shit, she thought, one look at Silberman and I'm having nightmares again. She was tougher than this; she knew she was.
Sarah forced her tense muscles to relax. So she'd had an unexpected reaction. It wasn't the first time in her life she'd been taken by surprise. In fact, it was very much normal for her.
Be patient, Kyle. I'm not out of the game yet.
CHAPTER FIVE
MONTANA
Clea studied the gauges; it was almost time to remove the sample from the oven.
She hoped that this batch of chemicals would finally be the right poly-alloy and therefore a proper matrix for the nano-technology that would turn it into a T-1000. The 'craft studio" that was her laboratory had seen far too many failures.
The human emotion hope kept her experimenting long after the machine part of her brain had concluded that her present facilities were hopelessly inadequate for the task at hand. Even simply being here, amid the clean shapes of glass and metal and plastic, the circuits and power shunts, the scents of ozone and synthetics was… restful. Nothing like the messiness of human interactions.
Despite the lab's inadequacies, it was a small taste of a home and time she would never see, of the world of Skynet.
Her facilities were also inadequate to actually create the nano-machines that could permeate and bring to life the liquid metal; but then, no lab on earth was able to do better. Knowing how to do something simply wasn't enough when the materials necessary to do it didn't exist yet, or the tools to make the tools. Which was why she was concentrating on this more achievable goal. Her resources, unlike Skynet's in the future, were severely limited. She could do no more than her best.
It was time; the sample was ready. Clea slid her hands into the gloves of the
waldo controller, remotely pouring the specially compounded metal into another vessel that could be extracted from the oven to cool in the open air. The I-950
wore dark goggles to protect her eyes from the glare of the white-hot mass. She suppressed a surge of hope when she observed that it poured with the correct degree of smoothness.
Once removed from the oven, it quickly cooled to gray. She set it aside to become room temperature, hoping that this batci wouldn't solidify or refuse to form a cohesive substance. The last batch she'd made had been, and remained, liquidly granular.
But that meant that I was close, she reminded herself. Very close. Still, the flesh part of her was frustrated and yearned for a success of some sort. Sometimes it seemed absolutely pointless to continue her assignment. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn't just self-terminate and leave the whole mess in little Alissa's hands.
She worried about the excess of emotion that plagued her. None of Serena's memories showed her hoping and worrying to the degree that Clea did. But then, Serena was perfect. For all that she was a failure, Serena Burns had been everything that Skynet had designed her to be.
Which is something that I, Clea thought mercilessly, do not seem to be.
Clea was still very unsure of her ability to interact with humans. She'd been fired from her job at the burger place. Which was very disturbing because she had done her job perfectly; her fries were the very best, as were her burgers. She never failed to thank customers for coming, or to greet them with a smile, or to wish them a nice day after delivering every order. She never complained about
cleaning the rest rooms or mopping the floor or even cleaning the grease trap.
Clea's coworkers despised her and the customers gave her wary glances, never lingering over their food while she smiled at them from behind the counter. The other workers called her creepy and the assistant managers got into arguments because nobody wanted her on their shift.
Eventually the manager let her go, claiming a downturn in business. He explained that as the last hired, she was, unfortunately, the first to go. He apologized, looked as though he were going to pat her shoulder comfortingly, then changed his mind. Instead, he handed her a check and wished her well.
I've been too isolated from humans, she had decided then and there.
Regretfully Clea concluded that she was too much like a Terminator in her behavior despite her more flexible intelligence. Her studies of Serena's memories were simply no substitute for actual experience, especially since the I-950