David Hagberg: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

He touched a release point just under the skin on the right side of T-850's neck, and the unit's head lolled slackly onto its right cheek. Next, he found the seams that followed the unit's hairline from the base of its neck behind its ears to its temples. The skin parted easily and peeled back to reveal a metal skull with a tiny access port.

Carter worked like a surgeon. His moves were very quick and very precise. He attached a portable power source to a pair of input points on T-850's skull allowing the dormant motherboard to power out from the port, which he replaced with a reprogrammed CPU from his tool kit.

T-850's eyes came alive momentarily, until Carter disconnected the power source.

Carter looked up. "It'll take me three minutes to install the hydrogen fuel cells in its chest So I want a time check." He glanced at Connor's wife. "I don't want to give this thing time to sit up and start singing Dixie before we send it back."

"We'll give you four. Three to get him powered up, and one to get him into the chamber," Connor said.

Carter glanced at Connor's wife who shrugged, but neither of them saw fit to correct Connor's use of the pronoun him instead of it.

The Continuum Transporter, as the device was officially designated, had begun as a series of Special Action Projects (SAPs) carried out at the Air Force's high-security research and test base in the New Mexican desert, known in the popular press of the time as Area 51.

The super black project, funded by the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and National Security Agency, was designed to create an artificial wormhole. Einstein had first suggested such a phenomenon, and the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had done some work on the possibility. But the problem was power. By most calculations the wattage needed to create an infinitesimally tiny wormhole, in other words a passageway through space-time, would take almost all the energy ever produced in the universe since the moment of the big bang.

But a grad student at Oxford had developed a mathematics model to meld Einstein's relativity with Heisen-berg's quantum mechanics, creating a ten-dimensional wormhole at the superstring level. It would be a passageway that would automatically expand exponentially like a virus gone wild. But only so long as power was applied to what was thought of as an artificial singularity.

In the mid nineties, under the guise of the launchings of dozens of military and NSA technical means satellites, a solar sail made of extremely thin Mylar, two hundred kilometers on a side, was positioned in an extremely rare geosynchronous orbit that kept it stationary over the north pole. When it was spotted it was thought to be nothing more than an aurora borealis.

The sail focused sunlight, beaming it to the reception antenna and singularity equipment at the CRS facility. Capable of transmitting several hundred terawatts of energy over time periods of less than one nanosecond, the wormhole was opened.

Through that brief passageway, objects could be sent backward in time, and theoretically, though it had never been tried before, forward in time.

The twin of this machine was buried deep inside Navajo Mountain. One under human control and the other under Skynet control.

Without the balance the war would be over within twenty-four hours. Why Skynet had never tried to destroy this place was anyone's guess.

But it would happen someday, Connor thought as he watched the main console's indicators shift from red to green.

Alice Skerrit, their chief tech, flipped a series of switches on one of the equipment racks, then turned and gave Connor the nod.

"Your four minutes start now, Tom," Connor told the programs and ops man, who immediately took one of the hydrogen cells from its cushioned container and gingerly carried it over to the T-850 unit.

Each cell, about the size of a book, was encased in a shiny titanium-carbon fiber alloy nearly featureless except for its power points.

Inside the warrior robot's chest, the cells were fairly benign, but if they were mishandled they could blow with a respectable bang. People would get killed. Even Connor instinctively stepped back a pace.

He keyed his lapel mike. "Watchdog, how's it looking?"

"Clear, so far, boss," Sergeant Doogie "Watchdog" Harris came back from topside. "How much longer before we can boogie?"

"About five minutes. Keep frosty up there."

"Will do."

Connor's wife was stationed at the main control console. When the device was fully powered in standby mode, and T-850 was in position inside the transmission chamber, she would uncage the firing switch and flip the toggle. From that moment the main computers would take control of the last four seconds of the operation.

Carter finished installing the second power cell, and he quickly buttoned up T-850's chest, even as the cyborg's units started to boot up.

Even to the technicians, some of them standing or string at consoles ten meters away, it was obvious that T-850 had transformed from an inanimate object to something that was as alive as any machine could possibly be. It made them all nervous. They had been fighting these things for years.

The machine's eyes opened and scanned Carter's face and its immediate surroundings, as the holding chamber worktable lined up with the spherical transmission chamber.

"Position, please," Carter told the machine.

T-850 sat up effortlessly and gracefully moved into the transmission chamber, one bare knee and two hands on the pad.

"Ten seconds," Connor's wife called out.

The transmission chamber's clear bubble door closed.

"Eight seconds… seven… six… five…"

T-850 faced forward, its eyes downcast as it waited for its processors to fully boot up, the parameters of its mission coming clear to him as if he were a human being who had suddenly come out of a deep amnesia and was starting to remember his past and his hopes and plans for the immediate future.

"Four seconds… three… two… one," Connor's wife completed the countdown. She uncaged the switch and flipped it to the transmit position.

John watched T-850 as the chamber began to take on an eerie blue cast. He was waiting for… what?

T-850 looked up at the last second, his eyes boring in on John's.

T-850 nodded, the movement of his head barely perceptible as he disappeared.

The large diamondback rattlesnake stopped a few yards from a lone Joshua tree and raised its wedge-shaped head. It felt something that it could not understand. There was nothing detectable by the sensitive receptors in its flickering tongue, nor could it sense an animal heat source anywhere close. But something was coming, and it began to rattle its warning.

A thick mist formed around the base of the tree, and heat came with such sudden intensity that the rattler had trouble backing off from what it now considered a life-threatening danger. It bared its fangs, a drop of poison glistening golden at each tip.

A blue, luminescent sphere materialized out of nothing, lightning bolts crackling with raw energy all around it. The tree split in two and began to burn. The sand around it became molten, glowing first red and then white-hot.

When the smoke dissipated, T-850—Terminator — crouched in a small bowl-shaped depression, one knee and both hands on the ground, his head bowed as if he were a man who had come a long way and was weary.

Slowly he raised his head to catalog his surroundings, his onboard sensors giving him instant head-up displays overlaid with real-world vision through his eyes.

He stood and walked away, his bare feet crunching on the half-solidified sand that broke into needle-sharp shards of glass.