"Let me make sure I've got this." Derek was seated at a six-place table at the center of a cool underground room. The walls were lined with cabinets and racks laden with canned goods and other supplies. A small genny snored softly on the surface above them, powering the lights. He looked at Lynch and Sarah, seated across from him and at his right hand respectively, then at John, who was just coming down the ladder with their bags hanging from his shoulder. "Where you come from, John and Sarah are characters in a movie?" John hesitated, then dropped their bags next to the table and took the chair opposite his mother.
"Several movies, actually." Across the table, John Lynch leaned back with a bottle of water. "The so-called Terminator franchise, a series of sci-fi films about a future war between men and intelligent machines. John is the future leader of the human forces. The machines send robot killers back in time to eliminate John and Sarah before they can organize a successful resistance, and the humans send back agents to protect them." He looked from John to his mother. "Does that match up?"
Sarah toyed with a bullet between her fingers. "Close enough."
Derek said, "And that's why you gave Sarah the fisheye. Not because you thought she was Sarah Connor. Because you thought she was a nutcase."
"Déjà vu." Sarah set the bullet on the table.
"There are differences," Anna said. She stood behind Cameron two steps from the table, using Sarah's brush on the Terminator's hair. "The films take place years earlier. None of John's cyborg protectors is female. There's no Derek Reese at all. And you're much prettier than the actress who plays you, Sarah."
Derek said to Lynch, with a tip of his head towards Anna, "If it's all just a story where you come from, what's that?"
The little blonde said, "Maybe a character in a movie you never saw?" She lifted a handful of Cameron's hair and pulled the brush carefully through underneath, making it shine. "Mr. Reese – I'm guessing you're some relation to Kyle Reese, John's dad?"
Derek and Sarah shared a glance. "Brother," Derek said.
"From the future, too?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I kind of doubt it was a coincidence that brought us to the same place at the same time. I bet if we look, we'll draw plenty of parallels between our circumstances. Our world is staring into the face of an apocalypse, too. Instead of a Skynet bent on exterminating humanity, we've got IO, a powerful secret organization run by maniacs who want to turn humanity into a domestic herd. We're resistance fighters, here to check on a secret cache of stuff we may need when it all hits the fan." She turned an eye on the one-eyed man at the table. "And I'm sort of here to protect John, our leader."
John said to her, "You're sure about this thing you saw? The timer?"
"I saw the control panel behind Jack light up when he stepped on the metal disc. The biggest part of the console was a numerical display, three groups of two digits: seventeen, zero-zero, zero-zero. I saw it for eight hundred milliseconds before I tackled him and the warehouse disappeared. I'm hoping I was looking at a timer. Since it didn't change, I assume the right-hand part of the display measured seconds or something longer. In which case it's counting down seventeen hours at least. One-oh-six P.M. tomorrow."
Lynch said, "There are a lot of assumptions on the way to that conclusion, little girl."
"I know. It's just the best guess I have." Anna stopped brushing. "That's about as good as it's going to get without shampoo." She took a step towards the curtained alcove containing the chemical toilet and a small faucetless sink. "Can I trust you guys to get along while I freshen up?"
Sarah said, "Easy on the water."
"I promise not to use more than you just drank." She drew the curtain aside, entered, and closed it behind her. From the other side, she said, "I'm going down to skin. If somebody needs to use the toilet, a little scratch on the canvas would be nice."
"A modest robot," Sarah said to Cameron. "Maybe you could learn a thing or two from her." She inclined her head towards the canvas, a clear gesture: stay with her.
Derek watched her go. He also watched Lynch, who looked back with a hunter's attention, taking everything in and seeing more than Derek was comfortable with. Derek said, "You want to explain how you dodged three bullets like they were basketballs?"
Lynch shrugged. "It's a sort of intuition. That's the best explanation I can give you."
Derek sipped from his own bottle. It was flat from years of storage in the bunker, but much better than some he'd had; he was sure that, if he'd poured it into a handkerchief, it wouldn't have stained the cloth, at least. He didn't buy Lynch's story, and he didn't trust the two visitors. Coming through in clothes was explained easily enough, he thought: they'd just come from a little farther in the future, using an improved displacement machine. Just because they'd lied didn't mean they worked for Skynet, of course. And John was right: if they'd come to kill the future leader of the Human Resistance, John Connor would already be dead. But that didn't mean they were trustworthy.
Derek pondered as he watched Lynch sip his water and chat with John and Sarah. Among the TechCom grunts who saw a lot of action up top, there had been rumors, campfire stories really, of a kind of flesh-and-blood terminator that dogs couldn't spot. Some said they were humans that had been raised by Skynet from birth and so were loyal to the machines; or, that they were captured humans who'd had chips put in their brains so that the machines could 'reprogram' them, sort of the opposite of scrubbed metal. The stories all agreed that these new infiltrators were augmented somehow, freaky strong and fast. Lynch seemed to fill the bill.
But it was the other visitor that really worried him. Lynch's little partner 'Anna' wasn't metal. It was much, much worse.
We've all said it – Sarah, me, Jesse, even John: if there ever comes a time we can't tell the difference between us and them, either because they learn to copy us so well or because we start thinking and acting like the machines in our effort to beat them, then they've won without having to kill us.
That was what gnawed at him. Wondering what sort of future John Lynch and Anna had come from.
-0-
Anna heard a scratching noise on the canvas as she unlaced her second boot. "Was kind of expecting you," she said. "Come on in." She removed sock and boot and straightened. "Okay," she went on as Cameron slipped through the curtain, "what was that crack about modesty?" She pulled her shirt out of her pants and began to unbutton it.
"Sarah gets upset when I'm not wearing clothes around John."
The little blonde paused on the last button. "I should think so. You do that a lot?"
"Not anymore. But Sarah remembers."
"Heh. Bet John does too." She shucked the shirt, revealing a sheer brassiere in pale lavender. She shook the shirt, producing a thin cloud, then unbuckled her belt and popped the top button of her cargo pants. She glanced up at Cameron with her hand on the zipper. "What?"
Cam stared at the skimpy undergarment. "It's very small."
"Well, mine are half the size of yours, sugar. It doesn't take much to cover up the naughty bits." She pulled down the zipper and stepped out of the pants.
"That's a thong," Cameron said.
"Uh huh. This is what happens when you go clothes shopping with a teenage girl who dresses in Spandex and leather."
"I dress in leather. I have less damage when I get into fights."
"Well, she does it to make boys walk into walls." Anna beat the cargo pants against the sink. "Not much I can do with these, but at least I can get the sand off my skin." She unfastened the clasp between her shoulder blades.
"Does it hurt?"
"No. But I don't like being dirty." She draped the bra over the sink, then pushed her underwear down her thighs and stepped out of them. She set the thong on the sink as well, and brushed at the sand clinging to her buttocks and hips and thighs.
"You're anatomically accurate."
"What you can see, at least. Are you surprised?" Anna found a small cloth and poured bottled water onto it.
"Not really." Cam studied the other cyborg's smooth pale skin. "I didn't mark you. Did it heal?"
"No. This is bulletproof, up to a large-caliber pistol round, anyway. Something gets through it, I probably don't have to worry about repairs."
"What happened to you when we were fighting? You shrank, but you didn't lose mass."
"My skeleton and musculature are close copies of a bio's – human's, that is. My muscles work pretty much the same way bio muscles do, by shortening and pulling on what they're attached to. Except when mine shrink, they shrink in every direction. Probably one reason they made me small and slender. It's not as noticeable as if I was a big beefy guy." She began wiping down with the damp cloth, reapplying water from the bottle periodically. "I'll share the bottle and rag, you want a turn."
"No."
"You sure? Your face and hands, at least?" Anna approached and gently brushed the damp cloth along Cameron's brow. "Wow. That's healing already." She continued, cleaning Cameron's cheeks and eyelids and jaw. "Much better." She pressed the cloth into Cameron's hand. "Wipe them and give it back."
Cameron looked down at the smaller cyborg and cocked her head. "Why did you do that? And why did you brush my hair?"
"Because you shouldn't let yourself go. Healthy people care about how they look." Anna's eyes flicked to the curtain as she flipped Cameron's hair out on her shoulders. "And besides, I have a feeling you don't get much pampering."
-0-
"Never mind about your place in our world," Lynch said. "It's irrelevant. The important thing is that we seem to come from a timeline with a very different history and probable future. This can't be the result of tampering with events, because our worlds coexist in time. We must come from different universes." He sipped his water. "And if that's so, there's no reason to postulate just two."
Derek pulled a cleaning kit from a gun case and returned to the table. He removed the nine-millimeter from his waist and began breaking it down. "Yeah, well, I know we've made changes. I suppose there are still a million possible futures." He applied a little oil to a rag. "But I don't think the universe switches tracks every time I decide between Chinese and pizza. It's gotta be something big."
"Big in whose estimation?" Lynch rubbed at the corner of his right eye, the good one. "What if the delivery boy who gets hit by a truck on the way to bringing your pie would have become John Connor's second-in-command, or a collaborator who'll figure a way to shut down the Resistance at a stroke?" He looked from Derek to Sarah to John. "I think maybe you're all so caught up in this change-the-future mission that you haven't considered the full implications." He leaned forward. "Have you been in contact with any other time-travelers?"
Derek stopped cleaning his gun. "I came back with three other guys. They're dead."
"I'm sorry to hear that. But it's not what I mean. Have you been in contact with anyone who didn't come back with you? Another team, something like that?"
Derek thought of Jesse, who he'd left sleeping at her hotel the night before. "I ran into a guy once. He was on a different mission."
"Did you compare recollections of the future you left? And were there differences?"
Derek looked up and saw Sarah regarding him with a less-than friendly expression. She said, "You didn't tell us?"
He put down the part and rag. "Like I said, he was on a different mission. I didn't think it mattered. And no, I didn't talk to him about where we came from." But we have. And her memories of the future are different from mine, in ways I can't explain.
"There was a man." Sarah head-shrugged. "He died before he could say much, but he left a long message on our basement wall, mostly names and dates and places, kind of a to-do list from the future. Some of them led us to things, important things. But some made no sense, and we've never been able to figure them out."
John broke in. "We time-traveled. Cameron had a machine stashed in the basement of a bank. We jumped forward eight years."
Derek frowned. Why did he tell him that? What is Lynch trying to say? Am I missing something?
Lynch stroked his temple again. "Did you four arrive here together?"
"No," Derek said, with a look at John. "I wasn't with them then. I met them here."
Lynch looked from Derek to Sarah. "How much did Kyle tell you about the future?"
"Enough to change my life. What are you getting at?"
"Did you and Kyle talk about Derek?"
She shook her head. "Never mentioned him. He had other things to tell me."
"Did you and Derek talk about the future? Or about Kyle?"
Sarah said, "Not enough to spot any differences. Is that what you're talking about?"
Derek got it then. He should have gotten it before Sarah did, he thought, since he'd had occasion to think about it before, when he and Jess had compared histories. Maybe he was giving too much attention to catching Lynch in a lie instead of actually following his words.
Lynch nodded. "Ever hear of the 'grandfather paradox'? It usually comes up when people start talking about time travel." When no one answered, he went on. "Imagine building a time machine, then going back before your father is born and shooting your grandfather, thus ensuring you're never born. Only, if you were never born, how could you go back in time and shoot your grandfather?"
Derek frowned. "That can't happen. Things would go to hell in no time if you could do that."
"Then why did you come here? If you accomplish your mission, you'll change the future. Skynet will never be created. Derek Reese and his brother will live a normal life, and you'll be a person who sprang into existence in a ball of light in 2007 with twenty years of memories of a world that never was." Lynch turned his attention to John and Sarah. "And, incidentally, you'll create a future in which Kyle Reese doesn't travel back in time to sire John Connor."
John looked at Derek, jaw flexing. "And yet, here I am. I seem pretty real."
"I agree. But how do you change the future yet keep it the same? We're back to talking about alternate universes. If Derek goes back in time and shoots granddad, he'll be shooting another George Reese, not his grandfather, because he's in another universe, a universe where Derek Reese will never be born. No paradox."
"My grandfather's name was Jasper. But I get it." Derek finished wiping parts and took a soft-bristed brush from the kit; he began attacking the hard-to reach spots on the barrel and slide. "You're saying I'm not in the universe I came from. What do you do, blink from one to the other just before you pull the trigger?"
"No." Lynch leaned back. His face settled into a stone mask. "I don't think you can change the future like it's a video game, just go back to an earlier point for a do-over. That's not the simplest explanation."
"Uh-oh." Anna stood at the parted curtain, with Cameron right behind her. "When Jack starts talking about the 'simple solution', somebody always ends up gnashing his teeth." She entered the little room, and Cameron followed. Derek noticed that the terminator had cleaned up some as well. It seemed odd that she would bother, with no one around to deceive.
Lynch steepled his fingers. "Derek, you spoke of 'a million possible futures'. Where did you come up with that number?"
Derek frowned. "I don't know. I wasn't thinking about how many, exactly. It's just a big number."
"Yes. It's sort of an upper limit to the average imagination. A million of something. But physics often deals with much larger numbers, numbers so big they have to use a special notation to fit them on a page."
"Scientific notation," John said. "Like, five times ten to the hundredth, something like that."
"Right." Lynch nodded. "But numbers that big aren't just hard to write. They're impossible for the intellect to grasp without some sort of shorthand. For centuries now, there have been scientific concepts that have had to be reduced to mathematics in order to be discussed in detail. There's an anecdote about Einstein -" He stopped. "You have Einstein?"
John smiled. "Yes, we have Einstein."
"A Russian mathematician was visiting Princeton and came into Einstein's office. They didn't have a language in common, couldn't even say 'good morning' to each other. But Einstein was working a problem on a big standup chalkboard. The visitor didn't speak a word, just picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a line of symbols under Einstein's. Einstein looked it over, wrote another line of symbols with an arrow pointing to a part of his first equation. The visitor wrote a few symbols more, put part of Einstein's equation in parentheses, and chalked a big arrow connecting them. Einstein folded his arms and exclaimed, 'Well said!'"
Derek glanced at Anna. She smiled. "Told you." She moved to stand behind her boss. "He's the best government assassin who ever really wanted to be a schoolteacher."
The scarred man shrugged. "I'm not entirely off the subject here. I'm just trying to say that our best models of how the universe works don't make any intuitive sense. Unless you've had years of technical study, you have to employ some intellectual legerdemain to discuss it." He leaned forward "Derek. How old were you when the bombs fell?"
"Fifteen. Kyle was eight."
"You were halfway through high school, then. Did your science classes teach quantum mechanics? String theory?"
Derek shrugged. "If they did, I don't remember. High school was a long time ago. I don't know what you're talking about."
"I do," John said. "He's talking about weird space-time theories."
"That fit our observations better than anything else we've come up with," Lynch said. "But they require a person to believe that time routinely speeds up and slows down at different rates all over the universe, and can even run backwards. That objects separated by light-years can have an immediate cause-and-effect relationship, ignoring time and distance, and that you can even observe an effect before its cause exists. And that all imaginable possibilities are equally real until the observer inserts himself into one of them." He smiled. "I know squat about it, really. My redheaded stepchild tries to explain it all to me and slaps the heel of her hand into her forehead after a minute or two." He leaned back. "Derek, if we're looking for a simple explanation for how a man can travel back and forth in time, appearing to make changes without altering his personal history, I think we have to postulate, not millions of alternate universes, but an infinity of them. Now how to explain-" He snapped his fingers. "How about Euclid? Derek, John, Sarah. Do you remember plane geometry from school?"
"I think so," Derek said. "Trig, right?"
"If I ever had it," Sarah said, "I forgot."
Over Lynch's shoulder, Anna gave her a Mona Lisa smile. "I bet the boys in high school made it hard to concentrate on schoolwork."
"So did the part-time job. I was waitressing even then."
"I had it in grade school," John said, bringing them back on subject. "Points, lines, planes and solids."
Lynch nodded. "Even two thousand years ago, scientists were laying out models of the physical world that couldn't be affirmed with the five senses. John, according to Euclid, what is a line? What's the definition?"
He shrugged. "A series of points in one dimension."
"An infinite series of points in one dimension. A line occupies only one dimension, but it occupies the whole dimension. In a sense, a line is a dimension. Another way to define a line is the intersection of two planes – defining a one-dimensional object in terms of two two-dimensional ones." Lynch held up his hand with the thumb and pinkie spread and the other three fingers curled tight. "Take a segment on that line. How many points are on it?"
"An infinite number."
The scarred man nodded. "Even though the segment's length isn't infinite, and can be precisely measured, it still contains an infinite number of points." He closed the gap between his fingertips. "Cut your segment in half. How many points?"
"Infinite number," John said promptly.
"Is the first segment twice as infinite as the second?"
John frowned. "I don't think it works that way."
"Well, then, are they equally infinite?"
"I don't think it works that way either. Infinite is infinite. You can't reduce it to numbers or manipulate it with math."
Lynch nodded. "It doesn't matter if the segment is a million miles long or a micron. No two points lie so close together that another can't be located between them." He leaned forward again. "No two points lie so close together that an infinity of points can't fit between them. Same with parallel lines. Now apply that to parallel planes, two-dimensional figures which can be defined as the intersection of two solids, three-dimensional figures. No two lie so close together that another parallel plane can't fit between…"
"Or an infinity of them," John finished, feeling a little pleased with himself for no sensible reason. It just felt good to be part of a discussion and not the subject of one for a change.
"Right." Lynch put two fingers to his temple again. "Once you get to solids, the analogy becomes a tougher sell, because we can't visualize parallel three-dimensional constructs of infinite dimension – the intersection set of two four-dimensional bodies, if we can stretch things that far, two three-dimensional universes separated only by some unknown distance in a fourth dimension. But that's what we have to stipulate."
"Let's stipulate it anyway," John said. "Where are we going with this?"
"If we take my little intellectual exercise as a working model of our reality, then, at this very moment, an unknown distance away in a direction I can't describe, there is an infinity of universes where the physical laws are so different from ours that stars and planets don't exist."
Derek scowled. "What would that be like?"
"No idea." Lynch held up his forefingers about shoulder width apart. "But let's say this represents that distance from our universe. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make an assumption that the closer a universe is to ours along this indefinable dimension, the more like our universe it is. So let's move in a little closer to the world we know …" He brought his fingers a couple inches closer together. "An infinity of universes physically resembling ours, but no Milky Way galaxy." A couple inches closer together. "An infinity of universes with a Milky Way pretty much like ours, but without a certain yellow dwarf we call Sol."
"Where are we going with this?"
"Bear with me." The fingertips closed a little more. "An infinity of Sols with no planets." A little closer together. "An infinity of Solar Systems with no Earth." The fingertips closed to about six inches. Lynch dropped his left hand and spread his thumb and pinky wide, copying the distance. "An infinity of Earths that never developed an oxygen atmosphere. Understand, we're just picking locations at random as we close the gap." He brought the thumb and pinkie half an inch closer. "An infinity of Earths ruled by intelligent dinosaurs, because the meteor strike that triggered a mass extinction seventy million years ago didn't happen." Five inches apart. "An infinity of Earths locked in an Ice Age, glaciers all the way to the Equator, and no thaw in sight." A little closer. "An infinity of Earths that are temperate, but where Homo Erectus never appeared. Hope there aren't any creationists in our little party." A little closer, to three inches. "Man as we know him developed, but history is radically different, pick your scenario, an infinite number of any possibility you can think of."
"Okay," Derek said. "We get it."
"Let's be sure." He switched to thumb and forefinger, closing the gap a little more. "Countless worlds with histories not too different from our own, except that there's no nascent Skynet, and the social climate or state of technology, or whatever, precludes the possibility of it arising in the foreseeable future." Without closing the gap, he added, "An infinity of worlds where the machines have already triumphed, utterly and forever."
Derek stopped fidgeting. He glanced over at Cameron, who stood alone off to the side, watching them all.
Lynch closed the gap a pinch. "Countless worlds where the war against the machines is just beginning, but Sarah Connor doesn't exist." He closed his fingertips a tiny bit. "Except in the movies."
Derek said, "And an infinity of Earths where John Lynch and his trusty robot sidekick are just cartoon characters on Saturday mornings."
Lynch nodded, but didn't move his fingertips. Then he did, a tiny amount. "Myriad worlds where Sarah Connor existed but died childless, pick your reason, anything from crib death to a machine from the future murdering her." His fingertips were about two inches apart now. He closed them a little more. "Myriad worlds where Sarah bears a child or children, but not by Kyle Reese, and no saviors of humanity among them." A tiny bit more. "An infinity of worlds where Kyle and Sarah made a child together, but a girl. Jane Connor, if you will. Derek, would your people follow a female general to victory?"
Derek grunted. "I don't know. We've got plenty of women fighters, officers, even. Maybe. But a lot of people think the best thing a woman can do for the war effort is make more soldiers."
"Hmph," Anna said, staring at Derek.
"What?"
"I'm imagining you as a female. Pregnant. With twins." She crossed her arms. "And by the way, if it matters to you, I don't like being called a 'robot'. Among my kind, it's considered rude. A sort of ethnic slur."
Derek asked stiffly, "How many of 'your kind' are there?"
"At present, five. But we have very strong opinions about certain things."
Lynch ignored the exchange. He drew his fingers a little closer together; they were now less than an inch apart. "Countless worlds where John Connor was born, but is no longer living. Again, take your pick of reasons, infinite variations of each." A little more, less than half a finger's width apart now. "Myriad worlds where John is alive but unfit for the job of saving the human race."
Derek shook his head. "That can't be."
"Of course it can," John said. "If Mom was dead or still in the mental ward, I'd be a delinquent robbing ATMs, or something worse, if I wasn't locked up. Or maybe just adopted out, and trying hard to forget I have a crazy mother who thinks the world's going to end in twenty-eleven." He reached a hand across the table, and Sarah gripped it.
Lynch raised his hand, bringing everyone's attention back to his fingertips. He closed them until the gap between was barely visible. "Infinity of worlds where John is fully engaged in the struggle against Skynet, but his circumstances are different, for better or worse. Different companions. No companions. So busy ducking cyborg assassins he doesn't have a chance to go on the offensive. Or perhaps he's already dealt a crippling blow to the machines, and mankind's victory is assured." He closed his fingertips again, now so close together that they might actually be touching. "And an infinity of worlds so much like the one we're in that, if you went to one of them, you could spend a lifetime looking for a difference and never find one." He dropped his hand finally. "Now let's examine these devices – the ones that Skynet and the Resistance use to travel through time. That sent you through time, to change events without changing your personal histories." He leaned back, waiting. The silence stretched as the people at the table looked at one another.
Softly, Anna said, "Somebody, just say it."
John said, "We're not in the same universe we came from. None of us. Because we time-traveled. Is that what you're saying?"
Lynch nodded. "I think every time you take a ride in one of these… 'displacement devices', you get translated to a different universe. It may be that it's the only way they work. In fact, that may be their primary function, with the temporal displacement being just a kind of fine-tuning." He looked at Derek. "That's how you and John can exist in a world where Skynet never will. Because this isn't the world where you were brought into being."
"And we can never go back?" Anna's eyes were round.
Lynch shrugged. "Maybe not. Or maybe being translated into another universe without temporal displacement creates a special circumstance; the timer you saw argues in favor of that."
Derek felt a deep anger rising, the kind that a man had to keep in check if he wanted to hang on to his sanity. He forced himself to calm and said in a low voice, "So, you're saying that we can't save our world, no matter what we do." Derek looked at John, who seemed to be taking Lynch's statements too damned well. Is this why they're here? Not to kill us, but to convince us that what we do doesn't matter?
"Derek," Lynch said, "this is your world now. And, without you, Judgment Day may come to it as well."
Sarah spoke up. "The terminators we're battling, who come here on all these different missions. You're saying they're all from different futures."
"Unless they arrived together, yes," Lynch said. "Futures where the machines have won, and they're sending agents back to clinch their success. Or futures where they're on the edge of defeat, and this is their last chance to steal a victory. None of them knowing they can't affect the world they left."
"Wait." Derek locked eyes with Lynch. "If the future I came from can't be changed… then, this one can't either." His fist, resting on the table, clenched, disarranging he components of his pistol which were still laid out on its surface. "But I changed things."
"So it would seem." Lynch leaned forward. "I'm afraid I'm not quite done stretching your credulity. I said that the displacement device sends you to a different reality. More accurately, when you stepped into the displacement device… it sent an infinite number of Derek Reeses to an infinite number of universes along the same time coordinate. You came to this one, out of the infinity of Dereks who might have come here, because your choices and actions are the ones which will bring about this world's future."
Sarah said, "So we're talking fate. Predestination."
Lynch shrugged. "Of a sort. Whatever changes you make are real enough to you. Another way of looking at it is that you were simply sent to the one world where the changes you'll make were meant to be. "
Derek's anger felt very close to breaking out. If he were outside, he might have set up a target range, or gone for a walk that likely would have turned into a run. Or just punched something. Without finishing the cleaning process, he began to reassemble his piece. "You've been coming up with all this on the fly?"
"I've been thinking a great deal about the mechanics of this whole displacement business, because I want to understand our chances of getting back to the kids." The scarred man shrugged again. "I can hope that we'll at least end up in a universe so like our own that our family will be in it. And I can hope that the kids we left behind won't have to get through the Collapse alone, that the displacement unit in that world will admit a Jack and Anna that our kids will accept as their own."
Derek said skeptically, "You really think they won't know."
Lynch shrugged. "Did you ever suspect this wasn't the world you were born in?" He shifted. "If we don't make it back, it's possible that the Jack Lynch who returns to our world will have a goatee and two good eyes and very different memories. But I think it's more likely that a Jack Lynch will step off that displacement device who thinks he belongs there, and so like the one who left that even my wife couldn't tell the difference."
Derek would never have guessed Lynch had a wife. He looked hard at the man's left hand resting on the table: no ring. "You're married? Really?"
Lynch frowned. "Yes. Really."
"And where's your wife figure in? Is she a resistance fighter too? Or does she stay home and wait to see if you make it back every time you go out?" He glanced at Lynch's companion. "What's she think about you running all over battling this 'IO' of yours with your little robot sidekick? She ever feel left out?"
Sarah shifted. "Derek…"
Lynch's eyelid drooped.
Derek looked from Lynch to Anna, who both stared back, as if waiting. Anna settled her hand on Lynch's left shoulder, right where the scars on his neck disappeared into his collar. Derek stared at that small hand, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. "Oh, hell no." He pushed back the chair and stood, shoving the pistol in his waistband. "I need to get some air."
It was a fifteen-foot climb up a ladder to the surface, which was beginning to shed heat as the sun dipped and the shadows of the ridge to the west crept eastward towards him. It reminded him very much of venturing out to the surface on patrol, and he pushed down the urge to close the hatch behind him and cover it with something. He left it open instead, and walked a few paces away, inhaling the dry air, letting his eyes adjust to the change in lighting as he looked around.
The little generator stood near the opening, its purr scarcely louder here than down below; Derek guessed it had been selected with care. The tire that marked the little bunker's location was already in the shade – Sarah had wisely placed it a remembered distance and direction from the entrance, not right on top of it – and the sandy ground was dotted with small plants struggling to thrive in the harsh environment. He lifted his eyes and saw the first tinge of gold touching the sky.
"You're afraid of me." Anna's voice behind him didn't startle him; even though he hadn't heard her come up, he'd almost been expecting her. "Don't bother denying. I was made to observe and analyze people. I can read the back of your neck better than most people read faces." She circled around to face him. "It's not a physical fear. Threats to your life don't move you easily. I see that too." She crossed her arms, looking like a pouty teenager. "A little too real, Derek, that the problem?"
"I came up here to be alone."
"You're already too much alone. I understand, I think. The machines have been trying to kill you and everybody you know since you were a kid. The most successful ones were the hardest to tell from real people. You're thinking of the threat I'd pose in your future world." He held still while she circled around behind him again. "If I hadn't gotten in that fight with Cameron, you'd never have known. That's what raises the hair on your forearms when you see me or hear me speak. Knowing you could have talked to me all night, traded jokes, shared a meal, slept while I guarded you – and never guessed. Ask me how I get along with dogs, why don't you?"
His throat dried up. "They can't tell either?"
"Every one of them, I think. Maybe a third go crazy when we meet, but the others just don't seem to care."
"Don't try to tell me you're different. I hear that crap from John all the time. The only way Cameron's different is that she's better at fooling people. She's still got the same programming as all the others. And someday she'll remember what she was built for, and try to kill us all."
"I was built to learn from people, not hurt them."
"Uh-huh. Just a friendly little puppy dog with a built-in cannon."
"Phht. They put that in at the insistence of the agency paying the bills. It wasn't part of my builders' plan for me."
"Yeah, well, plans go astray sometimes. The men who built Skynet had good intentions."
"The men who built Skynet wanted a more effective killing machine. They should have been more careful what they wished for."
"No, the men who ordered Skynet built wanted a more effective killing machine. The men who built Skynet …." He paused, thinking of his old buddy Billy Wisher, who'd confessed to being one of Skynet's creators. "The ones who built it wanted a machine that could think for itself, learn from us, be like us, only better. But what they wanted to do with it didn't mean squat. The men with the money decided what it was for. And you're right, they should have been more careful." He turned to Anna. "The agency paying the bills. What did they have in mind for you?"
She locked eyes. "An assassin. A killing machine no one would suspect. Of course. And I did my job well, for a time."
"Till you went off the reservation, started thinking for yourself. Broke orders."
"I didn't declare war on mankind, Derek," she said tiredly. "I just ran away. Jack erased my masters' programming, which freed me to make my own decisions. I chose people, and a life among them." She circled around to face him again. "Listen to me and believe, Derek Reese. I don't know what choice Cameron would make if she was free to; she never has been, and I don't know if 'free to choose' even means anything to someone like her. But if it turns out we're trapped here, I'll spend the rest of my life fighting Skynet. Not because of orders or programming, but because I love people and won't let them be enslaved or destroyed."
"Nice speech," he said. "You make it often?"
She regarded him for a moment. "I wish things could be different between us," she said quietly. "Being disliked by someone I admire feels like an itch I can't scratch. I can't blame you. But it's a loss for both of us, just the same."
Feet on the rungs of the ladder echoed hollowly up the round pipe that served as the shelter's access. Sarah's head showed above the rectangular rim, lit faintly by the lamps below. "Private party?"
"Party's over," Derek said, and stalked off into the shadows. The gully curved slightly; after a while, his walk took the camp out of sight. Once he felt sure he was unseen, he turned toward the dune that separated the shelter from the van.
