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.”

“Nothing is missing, Marcus. You are whole, complete, entire. More so than any who have gone before you. Look at yourself. Flawless.”

He glanced down at his body. Every scratch, every injury, every wound had healed and was gone. There was no sign of the terrible charring he had received from the napalm while escaping the Resistance base. His palms were as pure and clean as if steel bolts had never been driven through them. It was as if he had never been damaged. Raising his gaze to his beaming resuscitator, he saw that her image was equally perfect and flawless.

He swallowed.

“What am I? Human? Machine?”

She shook her head.

“You are something new, Marcus. As I said, unprecedented. Entirely and precisely where one begins and the other ends.” A soft laugh escaped her unblemished throat. “You are the chicken and the egg.”

It doesn’t make sense, he thought. The time he had spent wandering since his initial resurrection had taught him much. Even more than his, her existence here in this sanctuary of machine intelligence stood in stark contradiction to everything he had learned.

“Everything you think you feel,” she told him, her voice tinged with compassion, “every choice you’ve made. Skynet. ”

Around him, the screens showed machines at work. A hybrid heart being installed in an alloy chasis chest. A chip being emplaced at the base of a skull. Machines working on–him.

“We resurrected you,” the voice explained. “Advanced Cyberdyne’s work. Altered it.”

He stared fixedly at the face that had reappeared on the monitors.

“You died. ”

At this, the face on the screens morphed, changed–into that of John Connor. And then into that of Kyle Reese, and back to Connor, the visage speaking Kogan’s words from Connor’s lips.

“Calculations confirm that Serena Kogan’s face is the easiest for you to process. We can be others if you wish.”

The face of Kyle spoke with the cyberneticist’s voice.

“Marcus, what else could you be...”

Back to Connor’s face again.

“...if not machine?”

Lowering his gaze, the bewildered but somehow certain Wright stared at his restored hands, at his newly perfect self, and whispered a reply.

“Human.”

As the images on the multiplicity of monitors shifted and changed, one repeated the installation of the chip in the back of his head. Noting the location, he let one hand drift upward to it.

“Accept what you already know,” the restored vision of Kogan advised. “You were made to serve a purpose, to achieve what no machine had achieved before.”

A new image, taken from an Aerostat.

“To infiltrate,” the voice continued. “To find a target.”

Still another view, this time on a riverbank. Of John Connor gazing at someone, aiming a gun in that someone’s face. Marcus Wright’s face.

The recording was of his own point of view.

“And bring that target back home,” Kogan’s voice concluded, “to us. ”

The recording spooled on. Connor speaking.

“You show me where I can find Kyle Reese.”

His own voice, replying. “I will.” His own voice, recorded.

By Skynet.

He had been broadcasting, all along. Back to Skynet. Everything.

“In times of desperation,” Kogan’s voice was saying, “people will believe what they want to believe. And so we gave them what they wanted to believe. A false hope–a signal the Resistance thought would end this war. And they were right. The signal will end this war. Except it is the Resistance that will be terminated–not Skynet.”

Once more the image on the multiple screens changed. At the sight of John Connor moving cautiously before a row of cells, Wright started. He wanted to scream, to shout out a warning–but there was nothing he could do. Nothing except watch.

“You can’t save John Connor anymore than he can save Kyle Reese. With Connor dead, with Command destroyed, the Resistance will perish. There will be nothing left–and you were the key to it all, Marcus.”

For the second time, he howled at the dispassionate screens. “You used me!”

Intended to be soothing, her voice was only infuriating.

“Our best machines failed time and again to complete their mission. We had to think–radically. And so we made–you. The moment a neural processing chip was fused to your brain, we created the perfect infiltration device. You gave us the access we needed to destroy the last remnants of humanity. You, Marcus, did what Skynet failed to do for forty‑four years: you killed John Connor.

“Don’t underestimate yourself, Marcus. Don’t fight it. Take a good, hard look at what you are now and compare it to what you were formerly. In the world before you were considered to be a cancer on society. Something to be shunned, punished, locked away. In this world you’re a hero. Your name will live for ten thousand years. The heart that beats within you will last for hundreds of years. You will join a new evolutionary order. One deserving of domination over this mistreated world. Machines that will colonize the stars. Exist forever. And you, there, leading the future....”

It was impossible to tell whether the glint in her eyes was caused by the light in the room or a source internal.

“ We gave your existence meaning, Marcus. And it is your new life as a machine, not as a man, that will continue. Remember what you are.”

He considered. He pondered his options. Only then did he reply.

“I know...”

Digits driven by more than muscle reached up and back. Probing, then digging. Tearing into living flesh, heedless of the neural shouts of alarm the action triggered in his brain.

“...what...”

Blood and flesh gave way to gleaming metal, an object that was far too large and should not even have been where it was. He grimaced.

“... I am....”

Eyes bulging, nerves trembling, and muscles straining, he closed the fingers of his reluctant hand around the chip and pulled. His enhanced body was already fighting to repair the damage to the back of his head as he ripped the chip from its mounting–and from his skull.

Resting in his palm it did not look like much. Millions of connections lay within. They made a most satisfactory crunching sound when he clenched his fingers into a fist. Opening his hand, he let the glistening, bloodstained shards fall like bits of silver to the floor.

The voice that filled the room was cold and disappointed.

“You will not get a second chance. You have foresworn immortality. And you cannot save John Connor.”

Still bleeding from the back of his head, Marcus Wright let his eyes rest on each monitor, one at a time, until he reached the last one.

“ Watch me. ”

Picking up a chair, he hurled it at the nearest screen, shattering it. Throughout the control room, the image of Dr. Serena Kogan winked out.

The controls on the door leading off the hallway were straightforward and familiar: standard Skynet design. Slapping the compact disruptor over the cover plate, Connor pressed a pair of buttons in sequence and stepped back. A brief flash was followed by a puff of smoke as the door shorted out and popped open. Advancing, he gave it a push and followed its slow swing into darkness.

***

The prisoners huddled in their cells, awaiting what would come next. When it did, however, it was like nothing they could have anticipated.

Without warning, the cell doors opened. They pulled away, waiting for death to enter.

Nothing. There was no movement whatsoever.

After a few moments, they began to stir. First one, then another approached the portal.

Then they began to move faster, piling out of the cells, the adrenaline of escape pushing new energy into their wasted limbs.

A man shouted as they streamed past.

“Let’s go! Everyone out! Now! Kyle! Kyle Reese! Is Kyle Reese in there? Head to the Transports!”

No one paused. They all just kept running.

Continuing to call Kyle’s name as he desperately pushed through the sea of fleeing human bodies, Connor noticed one cell door that was still closed. He approached, nudged it open and peered inside. In the dim light, the outlines of the room were indistinct. Except for a single hunched figure the holding cell was empty. Connor took a hesitant step inward.

“Kyle?”

Unfolding its limbs as it did so, the figure rose. Red eyes opened, flickered briefly, steadied as they locked on the intruder. It was the same relentless, invincible, unfeeling killing machine responsible for so many deaths and near‑deaths in past, present, and future.

It took a step toward Connor.

He didn’t hesitate. In the heartless, brutal world of the present there was no time for indecision. Not for those who wanted to live. There was no time for Connor to wonder why he was in a room with the machine that had tried to kill his mother or to speculate on Kyle’s current whereabouts. There was only time to react.

He turned and fled, with the Terminator accelerating in pursuit. As it had been designed to do.

Out in the hallway, Connor whirled and lit up the machine with the compact flame thrower he was carrying. It melted away the Terminator’s face but barely slowed it down. Snatching the weapon out of the human’s grasp, it snapped it in half. Trying to duck, Connor caught a weighty metallic punch that sent him flying backward to slam into the far wall.

Bruised, he scrambled to his feet, whirled, and stumbled down the hall. The machine followed, in no particular hurry to dispatch this particular prey.

As he tried to run faster, a ferocity of thoughts churned in Connor’s mind. What had gone wrong? It made no sense, no sense at all. Employing force and skill, knowledge and stealth, Wright had fought his way into the heart of Skynet Central. To what purpose? To lure Connor to his doom? If Wright’s aim all along had been Connor’s death, he’d had ample opportunity to kill him on the outside. The hybrid could have slain him easily when they faced one another beside the river. Why this elaborate subterfuge to draw him to Skynet itself?

Unless....

With all that had happened, with all the changes to past and future, it might be that Skynet would not trust reports of Connor’s death without assurance. Without incontrovertible proof. And what more convincing proof than to have Connor die on site, where his body could be incontestably identified down to the last strand of intractable DNA?

Or was there another reason? One that was unknown to the fleeing Connor–and perhaps even to Wright himself?