Alan Foster - Terminator Salvation

Until he heard the first screams.

Given all that he had been through, there was very little that could unsettle John Connor. Those hopeless shrieks, imbued with the last vestiges of despair and mired in ultimate agony, sent a chill down his spine. Slowing his pace, he rounded a corner and found himself peering into....

It was not a slaughterhouse. The machines were too neat, too efficient for that. Bits and pieces of what had once been people hung from the low ceiling. Some drifted suspended in viscous liquids while others were kept going by tangles of tubes and cables. As he made his way forward he passed everything from electrically stimulated arms and legs to individual organs to still intact torsos.

Worst of all were the wired heads. He thanked what spirits remained that the eyes of every one of these preserved and studied specimens were closed.

The shrieks came not from the fragmented cadavers he was passing but from deeper inside the building and another direction. Every human instinct screamed at him to go to their aid and it was a real struggle to keep to his preplanned path. If the unfortunates were being experimented on by machines, he could not save them. As had so often been pointed out to him, much more was at stake here than a few lives. But it hurt, it burned, not to be able to do anything to help them, if only by putting them out of their misery.

He kept moving and lengthened his stride. According to the comm readout, he was very close now. He would do no one any good—not Kyle, not Kate, not himself, not anyone, if he ended up stuck in a storage room somewhere in the depths of the vast complex, floating in a vat of gelatinous preservative with an anonymous label slapped over his decomposing face.

The section of Central in which continuing experimentation was being carried out on live humans was not entirely unguarded. While recognizing their superiority to the bipedal carbon-based lifeforms with whom they were at war, the machines had learned not to underestimate them. That included even those humans who were safely confined.

In the early days, security had been interrupted by the occasional breakout or escape attempt. Though one had not occurred in a while, the machines did not relax their vigilance. It was not necessary to maintain a large guard presence in the incarceration area, but a few Terminators were always in attendance. Their mere presence was enough to contain any effort at flight.

The T-600 heard a noise where there ought not to have been one. Tireless, remorseless, programmed to respond to the slightest departure from the norm be it visual or aural, it immediately turned and headed in the direction of the perceived auditory deviation.

It halted outside an elevator bay. While the doors stood open, there was no sign of the lift itself. Another divergence from the norm. Where presently there was only the blackness of the open shaft there ought to have been a waiting cab. Programmed to respond to and investigate any such digression from the expected, it moved forward and commenced a careful examination of the doors. Detecting nothing out of the ordinary, it then advanced to bend forward and inspect the open shaft.

A scrupulous examination of the dark depths similarly showed nothing unusual. Twisting its head upward, the machine continued its inspection. It immediately located the underside of the absent car, which appeared to have become stuck halfway between the uppermost floors.

Something attached to the main cable drew the attention of its sensors. Magnification revealed a small blob clinging to the line. As the Terminator started to subject this discovery to analysis, the lump of C-4 detonated, severing the cable. The heavy, industrial-duty elevator cab immediately plummeted downward.

The T-600 was powerful, but not especially quick. It could observe, evaluate, and react, but not do all three simultaneously. The result was that the plunging multi-ton lift sheared it neatly in half. The upper section accompanied the falling cab downward. What remained wobbled on its legs, keeled over, and with a lifeless clang fell backward onto the floor

Swinging around to the open doorway from where he had been clinging, Connor put away the tiny remote detonator he was holding. As he stepped over the mangled remains of the Terminator a muted screech echoed up the open elevator shaft, signifying that the lift’s automated braking system had brought the cab to a safe stop at the bottom. Connor had been counting on that to forestall any much noisier, potentially alarm-activating crash. It was always gratifying to be able to use a machine’s own efficiency against it.

As he strained to listen to his surroundings, sounds began to filter up to him from holding cells that could not be much further down the corridor in which he was standing. Moans and occasional distinctive sobbing drew him onward. He glanced down at the comm unit. Holding steady in the center of the readout screen, the beckoning red light could grow no brighter.

He was inside it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Marcus Wright remembered dying.

The bright lights. The attentive, expressionless attendants who in their fashion were more robot-like than the machines who were ostensibly their servants. A soft, nuzzling pain working its way through his body as if his blood was being lightly carbonated. Little different from going to sleep, really.

Except that he knew that the State was killing him, using a process perfected through practice and vetted by precedent. Over the course of a tumultuous and fragmented life he had encountered slow food, slow development, slow sex. What was being done to him was slow murder. Individualized extinction, pure and simple, neat and clean, so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the society that wished him exterminated.

As a final experience it was at least interesting, even though he knew as the carefully concocted poison seeped into him that he would not be able to properly analyze it, since he was not going to wake up.

And now here he was, waking up.

What had gone wrong? Or had something gone right ? Where was he? The lights looked different to his blinking eyes. Bright still but not as harsh. His surroundings too, significantly altered. Instrumentation that had not been present at his execution. Different ambient sounds tickling his tympanum. Even the smell was different, clean but absent the terrifying sterility of the killing chamber. He looked down at himself. He was whole, intact.

Repaired.

Then he heard a voice. That voice.

“We knew you’d be back. After all, Marcus—it was programmed into you.”

Memories flashing in his brain, repeating. Remembering. Awakening in a new world, not dead. A terrible, ongoing war between humanity and sentient machines. Devastation and destruction everywhere. Survivors desperate and confused and warily forthcoming. A defiant youth named Kyle Reese. A somber little girl called Star. John Connor. A lot of things being blown up, concepts and ideas as well as matters of substance.

Terminators.

San Francisco.

Penetrating a place of inhuman, uncaring death called Skynet Central. Where he... where he....

This is all wrong , he told himself. The image on the screens was still strikingly beautiful, as well as full of a confidence that had not been there before. A confidence that was almost frightening.

He looked down at himself again; at his body, once more intact and whole, and looked around at screen after screen.

“WHAT AM I?” he shouted at the top of his voice.

“You are improved, Marcus. It was ground-breaking work. Unprecedented. You are unprecedented.”

“I don’t feel unprecedented.” He licked his lips. “I feel uneasy. Like something’s missing.”