Well, Clea thought, back to the vat for you. Any contamination it had picked up would mostly be rubbed away by its travels. *Return to base. Discreetly,*
* Acknowledged.* It looked around itself. Off in the distance it saw a house, undamaged by the blast. Humans had come outside to gawk at the fire. Where there were humans there would be transportation. It headed for them.
OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA
Ron offered the last few energy-saving tips and said good night when Tony came tearing onstage. For a split second he thought he'd made an error in his timing
and had left them with a ridiculous amount of dead air. The audience began to rustle and murmur.
Then Tony slipped him a news report and said, "It's an accident. Maybe. Some asshole in a propane truck rammed into a nuclear-waste carrier right in the middle of a small town in New Mexico. There's a news blackout. Apparently the whole state is out."
Ron turned to the audience and clapped his hands. When they'd quieted down he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have some terrible news."
He read them the report in his hand, just the bare, unadorned facts. "I'm told there's a news blackout on this incident, which means that this is all we may know for some time. I'd like you all to bow your heads with me and pray for the people of New Mexico." After a moment's silence he lifted his head and looked at them solemnly.
"Now let's all just remain calm," he said. "We'll know more by and by. But when you get home I'd like you to write your congressman or -woman and tell them we don't want any more accidents like this one."
People applauded enthusiastically, rising to their feet and clapping with an energy that spoke of their anger and their horror. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, they stopped and began filing out, murmuring to one another.
Ron watched them go, a little seed of anger burning in his breast. This could have happened at the beginning of the show, and ruined everything.
On the other hand, since they had finished the show, this little incident beautifully underscored what he'd been talking about. He'd have to get to his
publicist on this. He'd work up a statement emphasizing that his show had been talking about the dangers of nuclear power just before the news broke.
Ron smirked; there was nothing quite like being able to say "I told you so!"
ENCINAS HALFWAY HOUSE
The show ended, and it hadn't been all that bad for blatant propaganda. As the credits began to roll someone came running in from offstage. Sarah got up, not really thinking anything about it except that the New Luddites didn't have top-quality people running their programs. The nurse switched to another channel, where a news anchor was announcing that a fuel truck had crashed into an eighteen-wheeler carrying nuclear waste.
My God! She thought.
The anchor went on to say that background radiation as far away as Albuquerque had jumped by over 700 percent…
I don't think that's even supposed to be possible! Sarah thought. Those containers are supposed to be specially designed to withstand just about anything up to a direct hit with a bomb. Which an exploding propane tank would very closely resemble. Maybe it's just my nasty mind talking, but this sounds deliberate.
The news anchor was saying that possible terrorist activity was being looked into.
Nice to know it isn't just me for a change, Sarah thought. Paranoids had real enemies, too.
MONTANA
Clea smiled. Her timing had been exquisite. She'd found a weakness, exploited it and voila! Panic in the streets. Or there would be after her message on the Net was discovered.
They'd be blathering about it for weeks, maybe months, and spending untold amounts of money studying and correcting the problem. Little knowing that despite their best and most earnest efforts, she'd just do it again.
Actually, next time she thought she'd cause an oil spill. Clea had been exploring the possibilities of hacking into a ship's closed system by satellite. If it proved feasible she was going to try to time the incident so that some enormously popular place was soiled in the most appallingly photogenic manner possible.
Preferably somewhere with otters. Dying otters just drove humans wild.
For a while she'd toyed with the idea of having a Terminator do the job for her, but it would be better to do it by remote if possible. It would be much, much more difficult for the oil companies to explain if they didn't have a convenient scapegoat, such as a mysteriously missing crewman.
Heads will roll, she thought. What a charming image. She began to see why Serena had found such joy in her work.
Clea was busy with her preparations to leave Montana for New York. She had stepped up her production of T-101s using the last few chips that Serena had left her and working overtime manufacturing a close facsimile of her own.
Fortunately she found microlithography a relaxing hobby. It would take years of experimentation before she would have the proper materials to make the true
chip, but what she'd been able to cobble together had 97.3 percent of the efficiency of the real ones, so for the interim they should perform adequately.
Her plan was to place the Terminator that had been established as her relative and guardian in shutdown mode and claim that her "uncle" was dead. Then, once he was buried, she would travel to New York to meet with Cyberdyne's CEO
and obtain a job that would bring her in contact with Skynet at last. Anyone checking into her background would find an empty cabin and an only relative buried in the nearest town's nondenominational cemetery.
Shortly before the funeral and Clea's departure, Alissa and the Terminators would move to a new location in Utah. Her buried "uncle" would switch back to active mode after a set time and join them there; traveling by night since its flesh casing would probably die when it was buried and have to be replaced at the new facility.
With her tracks satisfactorily covered and her equipment and replacement safely hidden in a new location, she would be free to perform her function while Alissa grew up at a more normal, and undoubtedly safer, rate than Clea herself had been allowed. At the same time her little "sister" could obtain a human incubator. There just wasn't time for her to do it herself.
She thought everything was going extremely well when Alissa came to her in the lab. "Where is Sarah Connor?" the unnaturally solemn little girl asked her.
"Where is her son, John, and their ally, von Rossbach?"
Clea looked up from her workstation, stunned. The computer part of her brain had been sending her increasingly testy reminders about this subject, but she'd been shunting them aside, barely paying attention to them. True, she had been
busy, equally true her projects were important and Serena's own mission statement had put Sarah Connor last on the list of priorities, but to ignore something just because it was unpleasant… that was… human. The I-950 felt such a wave of self-disgust that her computer flooded her system with mood elevators.
"I don't know," she said. Clea could feel the blood rising in her face, a human-style signal of shame, one her computer part had apparently decided not to suppress.
Sarah Connor had been in custody in a mental hospital the last time she'd checked. John Connor and his friend had disappeared. She had no idea of the current whereabouts of any of them.
"Do you know?" Clea asked.
"Yes," Alissa said. "And no."
"That is nonsense," Clea said. "Either you know or you don't. If you know, tell me; if you don't know, find out. Either way, stop wasting my time, I have a great deal to do." Her little sister could be very annoying when she wanted to be.