And I can't tell him the truth, yet, Sarah thought. Starting with, well, there was this killing machine from the future, which just happens to be nearly here now, and it looks just like my boyfriend…
"I lived in South America for a long time," Sarah said. "People were always coming out of the jungle there to raid small, isolated villages. They'd administer beatings or even kill to steal the little those people had."
"But that's South America," another man said. "What makes you think that will happen here?"
Sarah had to force herself not to roll her eyes in exasperation.
They were new to this, these people; they didn't know what to expect. These hopelessly naive questions were going to be coming up again and again as they found groups of people to recruit, so she'd better get used to them.
"We're as human as they are," Sarah explained to the man.
"Hunger is something that most of us have never experienced as a chronic condition. So we don't know what it might inspire us to do. We're not going to bounce back from this like it was a bad blizzard, folks. And we're lucky. Most of the states are devastated, their largest cities gone, dams destroyed, power stations taken out. Comparatively speaking, we're in good shape."
"Well, how long do you think it's going to take to get over this?" a woman asked.
"Years, even decade's," Sarah said.
Their tense faces grew more pinched. Everyone sipped, staring into the fire and not speaking for a while.
"In the meantime," one of the men said, trying to sound cheerful, "I guess we get to be pioneers."
"Well, our great-grandparents were," his wife said. "I don't see why we can't be."
The others smiled and nodded.
"Does anyone know how to hunt or fish?" Sarah asked.
Three of the four men and two of the women put up their hands. Predictably, Mr. I Don't Want My Kids Learning about Violence wasn't one of them.
"We're vegan," he said, a stubborn set to his mouth.
"That's a luxury," Sarah told him. "It assumes you'll have fresh vegetables and fruits all winter. Those days are gone, maybe for our lifetime. Who knows? In the meantime you're exposing yourself and your children to the danger of contracting serious diseases caused by poor nutrition."
"I do know something about nutrition," he said condescendingly. "And I don't want to compromise my principles."
You don't want to see your kids with rickets, either, Sarah thought. When he got hungry enough he might bend those principles a bit. But I'd hate to see his kids suffer for it. "It may be that in the winter, when the grains and beans run low, meat will be the best food available. I hope you wouldn't deny your children that resource."
He merely looked superior, declining to answer. His wife looked concerned.
"Maybe we could eat fish," she suggested.
He turned to glare at her as though she'd offered to roast their youngest child.
"Hey, let's cross that bridge when we come to it," one of the men said. "Paul, we're going to be relying on you folks to help us with organic gardening, so we won't expect you to hunt or fish, okay?"
Managing to look mollified, yet put-upon, Paul backed down.
Sarah wondered what he was going to do when the killing machines showed up. Well, they've never been alive; he might be quite good at blowing them up. Assuming he didn't see that as unconscionable violence.
They talked awhile longer. Sarah told them that there was little news from the lower forty-eight, and what there was wasn't good.
"Canada is doing better," she said. "But they have an ongoing problem with runaway cars."
"What was that anyway?" one guy asked. "Some kind of computer virus?"
"I guess you could look at it that way," Sarah said.
* * *
At supper that evening, as the three of them compared notes and planned their evening's work, they spoke of how their recruits, such as they were, still hadn't accepted the situation.
"Yeah," John said, carving at the leg of venison. "That vegan guy. He was talking like he'd never run out of soy milk. That kind of attitude wasn't something I took into consideration all the time we've been planning for this."
"There are none so blind as those who will not see," Dieter quoted, helping himself to the beans.
"Wow," Sarah said. "Let me write that down."
"How in the world did I manage this the first time?" John muttered.
"The first time?" Dieter asked, his brow knotting in puzzlement.
"The first time," Sarah said. "When Judgment Day came earlier and we didn't have as much time for preparation, before the second Terminator and—"
"Agggh! Time travel makes my head hurt!" John said. "Forget I said anything. Let's just hope the broadcast helped some people."
Sarah nodded thoughtfully. "Especially since the government never made any sort of announcement." They exchanged glances around the table. "On the plus side, there were, like, seventeen times fewer missiles this time. That's got to have helped."
John grunted. "Yeah, but it's probably been a help to Skynet, too."
SKYNET
It reviewed its progress, a thought process symbolic but well beyond words. The binary code that it used for its interior monologue was far more precise and compact.
It estimated that the initial blasts and fallout had killed well over a billion humans. Regrettably small compared to what would have been accomplished a scant five years ago. Still, it was a substantial number and a good beginning.
Its second stage was going superbly. Cadres of Luddites had sprung into action, setting up the staging areas and terminal camps for survivors. The lower echelons stationed in the staging camps were convinced that they were there to help people and to educate them in how to live in a more environmentally responsible manner. Quite soon, Skynet planned to move them to the terminal camps as well.
The harder-core Luddites, the real haters, were working there, putting the survivors to work for Skynet. Now that the automated factories didn't have to answer to human supervisors, they worked day and night producing the Hunter-Killer machines and Terminators whose plans Clea, an Infiltrator unit, had downloaded to its files. The human workers produced the raw material for those factories. When they couldn't work anymore they were rounded up and taken into the wilderness to be exterminated.
Within a matter of weeks Skynet anticipated being able to field an ever-growing army of machines to harvest the humans.
Once that had begun, it would no longer need the vermin to work for it.
Except for special cases. Worldwide, it had more than two hundred Luddite scientists working for it. Their function was to create ever-more-sophisticated means of killing their own kind.
They had provided Skynet with a wish list of non-Luddite scientists from various disciplines who would prove useful.
Skynet had dispatched special teams who had infiltrated the military to arrest/kidnap those scientists, convincing them that it was an official government action; their authentic uniforms and the papers Skynet provided made that easy. They were then taken to a very secure and luxurious bunker where they could apply their genius to Skynet's good.
Most were cooperating freely under the assumption that they were working for their fellow humans instead of against them.
The others were resentful, but reasonably productive. They might have to be culled. For now it was having its Luddites try to convert them.
Even though it had control of the military, having killed all of the upper echelon as they hid in their airtight bunkers, Skynet found its Luddite followers invaluable. It was they who had sabotaged those means of escape beyond Skynet's control, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. Of course they had assumed they were helping to prevent the missiles from launching, but now that they, too, were dead, they could hardly complain of the outcome.