David Hagberg: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

This time the battle was fought along a coastline somewhere. In the distance John could see the burned and burning hulks of oceangoing freighters.

Nothing was safe.

The entire world was on fire.

Connor suddenly awoke in a cold sweat and sat up. He raised his hands and watched how they shook.

He was falling apart Disintegrating. The waiting was driving him crazy. Something was about to happen. Something important.

After he'd collected his pay, he'd stopped for some beer and a few groceries and then had set up camp in a trash-filled vacant lot a few blocks from work. He'd started a campfire and after he'd eaten, had fallen into a deep sleep in which he had been transported to the future and the past and the present all in a jumbled mess.

He got out of his sleeping bag, walked a few feet away, and urinated on a pile of trash, an angry animal marking its territory.

For a long time he stood stock still, listening to the sounds of the city: a siren somewhere in the distance, a car alarm in the next block, a single gunshot that he was able to identify as a 9mm semiautomatic pistol.

He turned and stared at his campsite and his motorcycle. He could not stay here. Something, some inner voice, urged him to leave. Right now! Go, go, go, run!

It was the same as always, Connor thought, hastily packing his things and strapping them aboard the bike. There would never be an end to his meaningless existence.

He peeled off into the night, bumping over the curb and savagely hammering the throttle. The bike wanted to climb out away from him, but Connor leaned forward, feathering the gas while still peeling rubber, the throaty exhaust blast echoing satisfyingly off the buildings.

Labor was life. Movement was life. Noise was life.

Somehow he was on the Hollywood Freeway, U.S. 101, heading north in the sparse 1:00 a.m. traffic. The Topanga Canyon exit came up and he took it, leaning into the curve and following the road up into the hills. Twisting, climbing road. Sometimes country, sometimes neighborhood.

Maybe there was no escape for him. Maybe there'd never been a possibility of escape.

He leaned hard into the sharp curves, sparks flying from where the foot peg scraped the road surface.

He could only keep moving. Try to keep the demons from taking over his head.

The speedometer flickered past one hundred, the green instrument lights the only points of sanity for him now. The only things in his life that were solid, that were real, that were rooted in fact The physical laws of the universe. Hammer the throttle and the bike accelerated. Cause and effect. Lean into the curves in order to live.

The small doe that bounded into the middle of the road and stopped, mesmerized by the bike's single headlight, was another sudden immutable fact of reality.

Connor backed off on the throttle, pumped the brakes, and oversteered left to miss the deer, the tires doing a crazy jig on the asphalt

Then there was nothing. Weightlessness, his stomach lurching as the front wheel hit the gravel at the side of the road, sending the bike pivoting sharply on its stem and flipping end over end.

Connor hit the pavement with his knee and left shoulder, then rolled onto his back, sliding on the gravel as if he were an ice cube skittering across a hot griddle.

It was all in slow motion at first. He could feel no pain, but he could clearly see his bike flipping in midair, his packs coming loose. He could see the gravel and dust flying. He could even smell the odors of burnt oil and hot exhaust.

Then, like a gigantic Pacific comber, breaking slowly and accelerating onto the beach, Connor's consciousness switched to real time as he came to a breathless stop.

He looked up at a cloudless sky, brilliant with stars for a change, in time to see a meteorite streaking east to west.

Some luck, he thought.

John Connor stood up in the open Humvee, raised the powerful binoculars to his eyes, and scoped what was left of the old Edwards Air Force Base and Cyber Research Systems facility on the desert east of L.A.

From the last rise a mile out, one hundred meters east of the impassable Interstate 14, the base looked as if it had been shattered. The south field control tower was down in a heap, as were most of the aircraft hangars, administrative offices, barracks, and research facilities.

It was a carefully maintained camouflage. Anyplace that appeared as if it supported human activity was a certain Skynet target Occupy an aboveground shelter for more than a day, show lights at night, even for one night, or do something as fundamentally mundane as sowing a vegetable garden and an attack was certain to follow.

Humans had learned the hard way to become creatures of the night; burrowers into the earth; underground animals who when cornered fought back viciously.

Nothing moved in the deepening twilight except for a dust devil that scattered debris as it trossed the tarmac and dissipated in the middle of the heavily cratered east-west runway. The silvered mesh dish of the power reception antenna was disguised as debris in the middle of the CRS main research center and control annex.

Connor and the others breathed sighs of relief. It did not appear as if Skynet had moved against this place yet. Though they all figured it was only a matter of when, not if. Each time they came out here and powered up the place, Skynet detected it. Sooner or later the attack would come.

Connor sat down. "It's dear," he said to his driver. They headed down from the rise and raced across the desert in a convoy of three Humvees, carrying the technicians and the soldiers to protect them.

As they came onto the base and approached the shelter of the one standing hangar they kept watching the sky for an approaching line of H-Ks. But they were in the clear so far.

"People, the mission clock starts now," Connor spoke into his lapel mike. "You know the drill. We're at T-minus twenty minutes. Let's get it done."

Cloaked in darkness, the Humvees pulled up inside the hangar. Four soldiers with portable radar and infrared scanners, along with handheld ground-to-air launch-and-leave missiles, hurriedly set up their surveillance positions to cover all four quadrants while Connor and the techs descended into the old CRS underground control center.

As the emergency generator kicked in and the control center's lights came on, Connor approached the T-850 cyborg battle robot recumbent inside the Lexan holding chamber.

The machine was fitted as a human infiltration submodel with a form and face that Connor knew very well. This was a machine-done of the unit that had saved his life and the life of his mother. The same machine that had cared for him with even more loyalty and dedication than any human father could have.

"It's just a machine," John's wife suggested softly at his shoulder.

Connor nodded, but he didn't turn. "I know." A kaleidoscopic collage of images passed across his mind's eye with the speed of light; on the desert, in dark hallways and factories, on motorcyles, explosions, gunshots, fires. Everywhere T-800, nameless except for its model number, protecting him, saving his life.

Machines had no emotions. But looking at T-850 °Connor knew better.

The six mainframe techs they'd brought with them set about powering up the transporter head and receptor circuits.

Lieutenant Tom Carter, their machine programs and ops expert gently shouldered Connor aside, slid the clear cover off the holding chamber, and opened his tool kit on the T-850's broad chest. He was an older man, in his middle sixties. He had grown up and got his education at Cal Tech before Judgment Day. Like many men of his era he had less respect for the machines than the younger people had. They were just machines, after all. Well designed, operationally nearly perfect, but just metal and electronic circuitry, nothing more.