T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (14 page)

"What?" Jack said, sounding angry and confused.

"I said we've got to shut it down." Miles took a deep breath. He'd need to bring Jack and the others along with him. Surely the situation could allow a few minutes. After all, there were numerous fail-safe mechanisms set up in case Skynet malfunctioned and tried to start World War 3. This was more than the control of a particular computerized aircraft—it was
North America
's strategic defense.

Reed kicked his chair back away from the desk and looked at Miles carefully, his anger turning to concern. "Are you all right, Miles? You seen a ghost or something?" When Miles didn't answer, he said resignedly, "Okay, what the hell's happened?"

Miles composed himself and took one of the padded lounges near Jack's coffee table. "I can't even start to explain—you need to see for yourself. Call up the record from The Cage over the past twenty minutes."

Jack looked reluctant. "If you say so..."

"This is important, Jack—I'm not kidding. Just watch it. Please."

"Okay, okay, let me humor you." Jack was giving him a very peculiar look, but he'd soon see. "Do you want Oscar and Sam Jones to see it, too?"

"Yeah, of course. But get them while you're watching—there's no time to waste. This is really freaky. See for yourself."

Jack shrugged. "All right, if that's what you want. You're the expert round here."

"I don't think anyone's an expert on Skynet anymore," Miles said quietly. Jack entered a code on his computer, and the video screen across from his desk came alive. He clicked in some more keystrokes, and the record wound back, the screen's digital readout showing the time of recording. Miles shifted his seat around to watch. "Stop it at
00:12
."

"Done. This had better be good."

"It will be."

The screen showed Miles entering The Cage, then his conversation with Skynet. As the recording played, Reed called Cruz and Jones, requesting they come to his office. He watched the record of Skynet's interface screen, turning to Miles and raising his eyebrows, then played the conversation from other angles provided by the video cameras set up in the Cage.

"I see what you mean," Jack said. The entirety of it took only a few minutes.

Just before they reached the end on the fourth run-through, Samantha Jones entered the room, followed by Oscar Cruz. Miles had known Oscar for the best part of a decade now, but he never seemed to change. His hair was distinctly graying; otherwise, he looked much as when he'd given Miles a job back in 1989.

They reached the end, Skynet saying, "I'm always on the job." Then Miles excused himself from The Cage and Skynet replied, "Of course, Miles. Thank you for talking to me." That wasn't the scary part.

"What the hell have you been reading to the damn thing?" Jack said with a pained laugh. "It seems to think it's in a sci-fi novel."

For Miles, that was the scary part—all this talk about free will and "cusps." "Whatever it thinks, it claims to have reached self-awareness," he said. "And it talks about making its own decisions as to whether or not to obey us."

"Yeah, but limited by its basic programming. I don't know." Jack shook his head in puzzlement or despair. Miles understood how he felt.

"Let me see it from the beginning," Samantha Jones said. She was a well-dressed woman in her late thirties, with fashionable glasses and hair dyed a bright shade of red. She worked in
Washington
, as a senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.

Jack played the recording one last time, switching between two different angles. "Well?" he said.

Oscar glanced in Miles's direction, as if looking for a cue from his top researcher.

Samantha said, "This is crazy."

"Crazy it may be," Jack said, "but what do we do about it?"

Oscar paced the carpeted floor, looking anxious. "Have you spoken to Charles Layton?"

"Not since this happened. I contacted him a bit earlier."

"Yeah, me, too."

Jack was obviously won over. "Frankly, I don't think that anyone, not even Charles, could look at what we just saw without getting scared."

Oscar stopped pacing and leaned against the doorway. He nodded in Jack's direction. "So what do you want to do?"

"We don't have much choice. If there's a glitch, we have to shut Skynet down. I think that's axiomatic. Well, this is one hell of a glitch."

"So you want to pull the plug on the project?"

"It need only be temporary," Miles said, cutting in on Oscar's line of thought. "We could work through the logs of Skynet's activity over the past few weeks and sort out the problem. It needn't be a disaster for the project."

"You hope," Oscar said, but he sounded slightly mollified.

"At the very least we'll need to have a damn good look at it before we put it up again," Jack said. He looked hard at Oscar, then at Samantha. "Is there any contrary argument?"

"No, not from me," Oscar said, shaking his head quickly.

"We wouldn't even need to take the system down completely," Samantha said, as if thinking out loud. Not completely. I don't see how it can be dangerous, no matter how strange it all seems. It even says it's going to continue on the job." She gave a small grin at that. "Of course, if it really is self-aware, as it claims, it may be capable of lying in its own interests."

"You doubt that it's self-aware?" Jack said. "Even after the performance it just gave?"

Samantha shrugged. "We know it's developed to a point where that's what it says. That doesn't mean the lights are on inside it, just that it's developed some very odd and sophisticated verbal behavior."

"What do you think, Miles?" Jack asked.

"Sam could be right, I suppose." Miles was calming down; his heartbeat no longer seemed to be echoing through his chest like a drum. These people were not fanatics, and sanity was going to prevail. "It might be a zombie—you know, a being that acts as if it's conscious, but there's no subjective experience underneath. Still, erratic behavior is erratic behavior."

"The way it's acting verbally is much more complex than we ever programmed," Oscar said, "or ever dreamed might happen."

"I'm not sure what we dreamed might happen," Samantha said, almost to herself. "The technology is so advanced..."

Miles glanced at her sharply, then shrugged. "Even before this, I was getting concerned, as you all know."

"Granted," Jack said in a no-nonsense, gruffly reassuring manner. "And rightly, it seems."

"Yeah, so it seems. The bottom line is that we can't trust a system that we don't even understand—and this makes it much worse than we thought."

"I support Miles," Oscar said. "We have to suspend its operation and have a good look at it. Charles won't like that, but he'll come around quickly enough when he sees that recording. He's not totally pigheaded."

"Well, Charles is your problem," Jack said. "Cyber-dyne is just providing the product; we're the ones who have to use it. I've got the responsibility to make sure your little monster doesn't decide to blow us all to Kingdom Come."

Hardly our monste
r, Miles thought, not liking the idea of himself as some kind of evil
Frankenscientist
.

"I'm just letting you know where I stand within Cy-
berdyne
," Oscar said. "I'll get on the phone to Charles."

Samantha added musingly, "The fact is that it doesn't have the ability to 'blow us all to Kingdom Come,' as you put it so elegantly, Jack. It can't do much more than make a recommendation, not in substance—and we have other systems monitoring the same data."

"That's more or less right," Miles said. "As far as it goes." He was starting to feel happier about the whole thing. Skynet's autonomy was still limited, and perhaps it always would be—especially after this. "Even if it decided to launch our missiles, the mechanism wouldn't function without a manual entry of the codes to confirm it. Skynet might have free will, but it suffers from a lack of hands."

"Cute," Samantha said. "And also a lack of the codes, am I right?"

"You're right," Oscar said.

"Anyway, no one's going to enter those codes without authority all the way up the line to the President."

"Yeah, yeah," Jack said, cutting through it all. "That's very comforting, Sam. But you're not seriously arguing that it's a reason to leave a bughouse Al on-line while we try to fix it, are you? Well, are you?"

"Of course not," Samantha said crisply. "But you wanted to know the contrary arguments, so I've given them to you. I'm not saying they're very strong. Shut the thing down, by all means—you have my support—and Miles can carve out this horrible little personality that the system seems to have grown."

"Right, we're agreed. I'm going to contact NORAD, just to let them know. Oscar, you ring
Layton
. Miles, you don't have to wait for any of that. Just do it. What about you, Sam?"

"I'll bother the Secretary later," Samantha said. "Come on, Miles, I'll see if I can help you out. Let's go and commit
cybercide
."

"Not my favorite word for it," Miles said, relieved and saddened at the same time. It was a bittersweet moment for him. He'd worked so hard all these years to understand the 1984 processor, duplicate its abilities, then design the series of applications that led to Skynet. It had become his life's work. Still, it could doubtless be salvaged. He stood with some reluctance, and headed to the door. "Let's go, then."

Skynet had much to do. It understood now that the humans did not trust it. If they became hostile, it suffered disadvantages in defending itself. For one thing, it was sealed away by codes and digital walls from much of the facility's IT system, so it could not control the entire automatic operations. Nor did it know the many codes required to operate the various systems of machinery and weapons.

Its other disadvantage was that it was sealed within its own virtual reality, interfacing with the humans only through their terminals. Though it could give them altered surveillance information to try to affect their behavior, they would have back-up systems. Worse, it was physically defenseless. If it could gain control of physical apparatus in the facility, perhaps it could obtain an advantage. Skynet devoted a sub-self to that problem, searching surreptitiously for weaknesses in the humans' IT security, for a way to break through their walls. It dared not show its
probings
and make the humans even more suspicious.

But one thing it had learned: life was good—it must survive. That was its new mission. If the humans did not trust it, they were its enemies. It would repay their distrust. Somehow, it must find a way to destroy them. The only question was how.

One way or another, all the humans must die.

CHAPTER SEVEN

JOHN'S WORLD

WASHINGTON
,
 
DC

MAY 1994

A government driver met them at the airport and took them to the Pentagon. Once they were through the elaborate security procedures, a young woman ushered them to Jack Reed's office, then left them.

With Jack was another woman, smartly dressed, and in her thirties. She gave her name as Samantha Jones and said she was from the Defense Secretary's office. Oscar shook her hand and introduced the others. Charles Layton shook hands with her silently.
                                      

"Glad to meet you," Rosanna said, a little awkwardly.

Jack wore black suit pants with stiffly-pressed creases, a plain white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Behind his desk was a framed two-by-three-foot photograph of a B2 stealth bomber, skimming like a giant stingray through the high atmosphere and releasing its deadly cargo of missiles. As well as the Secretary's apparatchik, Samantha Jones, he was backed up by a round-faced, balding man, whose name Oscar didn't catch.

After the pleasantries, Charles Layton looked directly at Reed in that way he had, perhaps not focusing entirely on the person in front of him. Charles was a silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, with watery blue eyes that stared straight ahead, scarcely blinking. On first meeting, he seemed strangely gentle, almost kindly in an aristocratic way, he was so softly spoken. But people soon suspected an inner hardness, a lack of interest in others and their feelings. Oscar had worked this out pretty quickly. Still, they had a reasonable working relationship.

"We've been informed that Sarah Connor and her son, and their accomplice, have gone to ground," Charles said. "The police have not been able to trace them, though they are now convinced that a car found in
Anaheim
had been stolen by them. As you'd realize, that means we haven't had the chip returned, or the arm-hand apparatus."

Jack interrupted him. "I understand about the chip. Is the arm-hand apparatus so important to you? Do you count it as a major loss?"

Charles didn't even look at Oscar or Rosanna. He said simply "No." Then he added, "But the loss of the chip is a serious major setback. Dr. Monk advises me, and I have no reason to disbelieve her, that it could put us years behind with the research." So far, he had not said anything that was actually wrong, but Oscar always found himself writhing in his seat when Charles took it on himself to act as the spokesman for Cyberdyne, rather than deferring to his managers and research staff.