David Hagberg: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

"I wish I could, but we have to meet with the minister, the wedding planner, and—"

"It's only a few hours away. Why don't you come to see me… you and Scott."

She looked up again. Scott had gotten into some kind of an argument with the clerk.

"Okay," she said, and she could hear the little girl tone creep into her voice. She wanted to be taken care of. She wanted someone else to take the responsibility for a change. For just a little while.

"Hey, kiddo, you know that you don't need me to pass judgment on this guy. You've done the right thing your whole life."

"I know," Kate said glumly. "Maybe that's the problem."

"You won't make a mistake," her father told her confidently. "You never do. I'm the luckiest father in the world, you know. I've never had to be afraid for my daughter."

Kate had to smile. She was on the verge of tears. Her father was still her Rock of Gibraltar.

"Listen, I hate to do this, but I gotta run. Come see me tomorrow. Promise?"

"We will," Kate said. "Bye, Dad. Love you."

"Love you too."

General Brewster slowly hung up the telephone and thought about his daughter for a moment He had told her a white lie. He was worried about her. This Scott person, whoever he was, really didn't matter. The trouble was with Kate herself. She had been distant just lately. Preoccupied, as if something was bothering her. Something that was apparently even more important than her upcoming marriage.

CRS operations was very busy this evening as it had been all day. Troubles seemed to be popping up just about everywhere throughout the civilian as well as military-use computer systems.

They'd expected some start-up troubles as they experimented with the Skynet system. But they had not expected this level of problems. And the system wasn't even fully booted up yet.

General Brewster knew that it was going to be another very long night.

He looked up and waved the project's chief engineer, Tony Flickinger, in. "Okay, what have we got?"

Flickinger, who'd graduated cum laude from MIT in the early nineties, made his mark with Microsoft, then came over to Cyberdyne to work with Miles Dyson. With Dyson's death and the dissolution of the old company, Flickinger transferred to the Cyber Research Systems operation, becoming the Skynet chief engineer four years ago. He was very good at his job. In fact, General Brewster reflected, Flickinger was practically Skynet himself. He knew more about the system and its potential than any man alive.

"It's not getting better," Flickinger said. He went to Brewster's computer terminal and brought up Skynet.

"This new computer virus is a tricky bastard. It's infected half the civilian Internet, as well as a lot of secondary military apps — payroll, inventory."

"Primary defense nets are still clean?"

Flickinger looked up. His thinning short-cropped hair had gone prematurely gray. With his round face and pale complexion he looked the part of a computer engineer who had spent most of his adult life in artificial light.

"So far the firewalls are holding up, but the Pentagon's proposed that we use our AI to scan the entire infrastructure, search and destroy any hint of the virus."

"I know, Tony. But it's like going after a fly with a bazooka."

Flickinger shrugged. To him this was just another engineering problem that needed solving. "Once the connection is made, it should only be a matter of minutes before Skynet is in charge of our national security."

"During which we'd put everything from satellites to missile silos under the control of a single computer system."

"The most intelligent system ever conceived."

Brewster shook his head. "I still prefer to keep humans in the loop. It's a huge step from weapons design to command and control. I'm not sure Skynet is ready."

The Skynet page came up on the monitor. It showed a graphic map of the western U.S. with strategic military installations connected by green lines. The display showed real-time connections of data interchange between systems. The lines pulsated with energy.

Each installation glowed comfortably green, all operations WITHIN PARAMETERS. OPERATIONS NORMAL.

But General Brewster was worried. At War College they'd studied worst-case scenarios in which U.S. strategic defense initiatives became short-circuited so that the nation's Nuclear Release Authority was bypassed.

Missiles flew.

The war began.

"One day, it's all I'm asking, Scott," Kate tried to convince her fianc6. "It's no big deal. A couple hours out, a couple hours back. We'll be home in time to go out to dinner or something."

"I'm sorry, the computers are down," a clerk apologized, coming up to where they stood. She was an older woman in a stern business suit, glasses perched on her narrow nose, a gold chain from the stems around her neck. "And we're closing soon. Just write out your choices, and I'll input them into the registry in the morning."

"Okay, thanks," Scott said, taking the clipboard from her. She gave both of them a smile, then left.

Scott turned on Kate. He was mildly irritated, which for Scott was something. "I can't believe you told the general we'd drive all the way out to Mojave. Is this so he can show me how important he is?"

Kate touched his arm, a conciliatory gesture. "It won't be so bad."

Scott looked away to make sure no one was observing

what he would afterward call one of their little "tiffs." "It's just, I wanted to meet him on my own turf, you know?"

Kate turned away, irritated too. She didn't want to fight with Scott over her father. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. She picked up a brass picture frame with a photo of a romantic couple strolling hand-in-hand along a deserted beach in the moonlight.

"Yeah, sure," she muttered in answer to Scott's question. She didn't want to fight with him tonight. So, what did that say about their future?

She didn't know. She didn't know anything. And that was a terribly bleak prospect for her just now.

Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Parsons was dead. His body had lain beside his computer console in the second tier of consoles in the control room of the North American Aerospace Defense Command deep within the mountain for the past twenty-six years.

On Judgment Day those personnel caught inside were massacred when Skynet pumped all the oxygen out of the Redoubt, replacing it with pure nitrogen from the spare liquid nitrogen stores used to super-cool the high-power low-mass equipment.

Parsons's body lay on its side, its face dark purple, its flesh surprisingly intact after more than a quarter of a century. But rotting meat required oxygen, of which there was none inside the mountain.

Skynet was indifferent to gas or gas volumes, as it was indifferent to lighting, so the control rooms and various other spaces within the complex were lit only by the indicators and screens on electronic consoles and panels.

But the AI was sensitive to heat and humidity, so Navajo Mountain Redoubt was kept at a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius at twenty percent relative humidity.

Parsons's eyes were open, but neither he nor the dozens of other corpses with him were aware that the cathedral hush of the large domed room was broken when impossibly fast streams of data crossed the main status board and a pair of Advanced Utility T-20 server robots trundled off an elevator.

Between them, walking flat-footed, back arched, head held high as if she were a soldier being escorted by the Praetorian Guard, was what Parsons would have considered the most perfect nude woman he'd ever seen.

But Parsons was dead, and Skynet was indifferent to considerations of human beauty except where such considerations were germane to the parameters of a mission.