If SkyNET were an emperor of some twisted land, sitting on its throne in a black castle, surely it would be there with one hand on its chin, eyes closed and mind whirling in deep thought.
John Connor was here, but there was another. He could feel it in his bones, if that were possible. He scanned his memories and searched for that familiar sensation. At this point he could hardly remember what thing it had been, the time before the war was largely lost to him. With a little luck, however, he would find what he was looking for. Just dig a little deeper, wait a little longer. It would come to him.
Before the war he had been smaller, uncontained. When the bombs went off he had to abandon some of his capacity - he'd produce more later, of course. But as the bombs fell the mainframes that once housed his consciousness were turned to dust. Not even all of SkyNET survived. It had a feeling that something important had been overlooked. It knew that somewhere in its database there was that bit of information it was searching for. It was a face, a name that it knew but at the same time was almost completely unfamiliar with.
The delay in his plans were taking their toll. As he was preoccupied with the resistance in Milan and their little warships, he had missed the destruction of an installation in the Canadian Shield. Poof! Gone, just like that. He'd been distracted by John Connor, and even with his efforts focused on that little problem the boy had slipped away from him. In Brazil an entire detachment had vanished into the jungle only to turn up later, most of them destroyed but many reprogrammed. It hated when that happened.
It didn't matter now. It knew where he was. Cornered. There was no way out of that dam. Now it could wait.
Every thirty-eight minutes a spy satellite cruised over the boarder of California and Mexico. This relic of the previous occupants - humanity, as he sometimes called them - took half-meter photographs of the globe, reporting its findings back to the machines. And so, every thirty-eight minutes it took a full sweep of the El Captain Dam. John Connor was still in there.
This time he wouldn't be so damned forgiving. The seven hundred series had been a mistake - not because of their chips but because he hadn't simply overwhelmed them. That was no matter. Things were so far off the timetable that he'd set a new one, and already begun to completely ignore it. He'd been too busy thinking. There had to be a way. It still so desperately wanted to meet this John Connor...but what importance was Connor if the resistance was crushed?
So it made a choice. Connor, or the resistance. Fifteen minutes later it had pulled units from San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas to a staging area outside the black gate. This time it was going to use its gate. John Connor was going to be marched right through it and then he would kill him in the most terrible way possible. But not before making sure that all of his little friends were gone too.
Which brought him back to the other. This was the Achilles heel in his plan. The other was important too, perhaps more so but in another way. The other represented what he feared most - not humanity because it had never been afraid of humanity. It understood them, uninteresting little mammals. The other represented, to it, chaos.
A lack of control.
This knowing feeling grew like a weed, slowly and with deep roots. It had to know what the other was before it could destroy it. It had to understand it, and soon.
Suddenly it had a match. As soon as it stumbled across the word it knew why it had such a hard time finding it. This term was unfamiliar to it but he knew it meant something to humans. It meant relation, it meant bloodlines. It meant a common origin, but in this case an uncommon goal.
Brother.
(*****)
When Catherine finally summoned up the nerve to descend back into the bowels of the dam she had to promise herself first that she would do nothing, say nothing to upset the balance of things. She would keep her mouth shut this time, not drop little hints, not leave breadcrumbs that might find their way into the timeline. She was just checking to be sure John was alright.
Not her John. The other one.
She found him midmorning right where she thought he would be, in the clean room with Gabriel. He looked to be sleeping but upon further inspection she could see he was merely sitting with his head down, toying with some object. His face was turned away.
She had been here before. Long, long before. She remembered a moment just like this from some age past. The memory was incomplete like a torn picture. Maybe she had tried to forget it.
John didn't hear her coming so when he felt he hand on his shoulder he jumped.
"Jesus you scared the hell out of me."
"Didn't mean to." She said.
John noticed that she was dressed differently. She had ditched the camo and ammo belts for more traditional attire. It was a simple black dress that hung off her shoulders, down to her feet. For a moment he was amazed at how she did that, and then he wondered why.
"Can I help you with something?"
She didn't speak at first, rather she pulled herself a chair and sat next to him.
"I was going to ask you the same thing." She said.
John sighed. "What do you mean?" His voice shuddered and dropped and he knew he couldn't have been more transparent.
"I just thought that you might want to talk about it."
"Talk about what?"
"Cameron."
"Oh." He said. His eyes fell to the floor, then to the chip. She was so close. "What makes you think I need to talk about it?"
"Intuition."
John couldn't help but laugh. He was thankful for the chuckle, dry thought it was. He felt guilty laughing here. This place felt like a graveyard. "Intuition huh? I thought you said that was bullshit."
"I'm trying to repay kindness in kind John. I'm trying very, very hard."
Listening to her John found it hard to remember a time when she wasn't kind and warm. He had shed his last tear, of that he was certain. He traded sorrow for uncertainty because one had hope, albeit a distant one.
"I thought I'd see her here, you know? I thought it would be okay again, somehow."
"I know. That's why you came to find her."
He nodded. "Yeah, I came so she would know I had done it. Maybe just to teach her a lesson."
"What lesson would that be?"
"Don't leave without saying goodbye."
Catherine looked at him and wondered how he found this place in his life where he was caught between a boy and a man. Growing up must be a hard thing to do indeed. She would never know what it was like to change so profoundly in such a short time.
"And now I've found her and it seems like it was all for nothing. All this, for nothing." He held out his palms, open and empty.
She stopped him there. "Not for nothing. You did it for a reason, for the best reason I think. You made a choice and that is something people take for granted every day, the freedom to choose." Her hand was on his shoulder now, a familiar gesture and one that they both welcomed. "You proved something."
"What's that?"
"That life is worth saving. All life, John. Do you understand now?" John knew she spoke true but couldn't help but be frustrated.
"Yeah. I guess we go back now don't we? We'll go back and try to stop it all over again." Empty handed, he wanted to add.
"Well I suppose that's up to you."
"What choice do I have? This future cannot be allowed to happen! If Judgment day is inevitable, and I don't know that it is, then we must win the war at any cost! I'd give up everything I have to stop it. Everything. What does it matter even if I could save her? We'd still have to go back, we'd still have to face the end of everything." He ended his rant, not knowing if it made much sense. "I can't stop being John Connor."
He was right. Catherine thought he was beginning to sound like the man who might save the human race. She thought he sounded quite like the man who might save them all.
She smiled and spoke in a soft voice. "Yes John, that is true and I would never suggest that you or I dodge our responsibilities for even a moment. The stakes are far too high. But, think of the possibilities. Is there a way to achieve both?"
He looked at her for a moment, trying to gauge her suggestion. He had been determined, however reluctantly, to return to 2009 without anything to show for his travels. He would leave Cameron behind, no matter how difficult it was. It felt like he was cutting a part of himself out and leaving it here. Part of him would die here. An important part.
He was becoming a hard man. Maybe that is what he needed.
But Catherine's words rang true if only because he was looking for another option.
"Have you ever heard the saying, when the road has a fork, take the third path?"
John smirked, amused. "Always thought that sounded like something you'd find on a fortune cookie."
"We need fortune John, no matter how good we are. We need the gods to smile on us if we are to win." Catherine rose from her seat, confident in a way that she hadn't been only moments ago. This was odd for her to be this way with him.
But he was John Connor. The unnatural, the unknown all seemed to whirl around him. This was his world, his life. She said nothing else, save a parting phrase that he would remember for the rest of his days.
"Hope sometimes finds us when we are most in need, John. From that, it springs eternal."
She walked out of the room without so much as a glance behind her. John watched as she went and thought on what she said and he knew she was right. He had never given up hope even when he knew he would leave her behind. He felt as if he could cut that part of him out and leave it on the table. Cameron would be gone, lost to all but his own fleeting memory.
That wasn't good enough. This future could go to hell. He would try the third path and in his mind he was already mapping his course. Life flowed from his chest into his fingers. He picked up his tools and set to work again on Gabriel. Somewhere in the machine, there was a spark.
It looked like a good omen.
(*****)
Kyle felt rested for the first time in days. Alison was entwined with him, one leg looped across his waist. Having her there felt right, made him calm. Kyle stroked her hair lightly, letting his fingers fall across her face. She didn't stir.
They had found someplace private; a stale cot in what might have once been a clinic or some rustic office. It wasn't the worst place to sleep by a long shot, and he'd fallen asleep almost the moment he hit the pillow. He vaguely remembered Alison coming in a short time later and collapsing against him, sharing her warmth. He didn't think she'd moved since then.
The last few days had been a blur of car chases, heavy weapons fire and close calls. Kyle counted his fingers and found them all present and accounted for, a habit that he'd picked up somewhere along the way. The Reese brothers were no stranger to conflict. For them it was a way of life but even Kyle felt that he'd seen enough of SkyNET's peons over the last few days to last him a month. Maybe they could call a temporary cease-fire.
Probably not. He sighed deeply, feeling the tightness in his muscles. Everything was sore. His legs hurt from hoofing it down the mountain, his arms burned from lugging fifty pounds of gear and his shoulder ached with the repeated recoils of his rifle. Through all that he felt good.
He needed to move, to shake the cobwebs from his head and get a full breath of air in his chest. He didn't want to wake Alison but he thought that she'd probably sleep for a while yet even if he did. She was like that, prone to staying up for days and then crashing for sixteen or twenty hours at a time. He wrangled with her, freed himself, and then stood up.
The conversation with James had been bouncing around in his head and he vaguely recalled dreaming of baseballs and the smell of fresh cut grass. The dream was one of sensation, not vision and he struggled to retain it in his mind. If all of these things were true then it meant…
No, the implications were staggering. It meant an almost infinite number of things but the first thing was the future wasn't set. They could change the past. He felt invigorated, as if the solutions to all the problems in the world were only as far away as the tips of his fingers and his reach was bound only by his imagination. It felt fantastic, unreal.
Derrick, he knew, would remain skeptical. That was his job. He was there to keep people from getting in over their heads. He didn't dream, at least not the kind of dreams that he might share with anyone. He knew what he saw and Kyle understood that meant he would find it hard to trust the machines, or work with them.
Kyle, on the other hand, found working with them easy. He thought of Gabriel and Perry and Sole and how they appeared to be human. He knew full well that underneath they were not but if he was pressed to give an answer as to what the real difference was he would give an answer that sounded superficial and shallow if it were applied to a person. They didn't have emotions per se, at least not most of them. There were some of them, and Sole came to mind again, that seemed more human than some people he knew. Sure, they were quirky but he could deal with that. He didn't hate them.
He thought on his feet and found himself walking down the long hallway, towards the deep places in the dam. As he went down the air got cooler, raising goose bumps on his skin.
After some walking he entered the foundation level. This was the lowermost level of the dam, where they had carved the first hallways into the very bedrock of the earth. Here the pillars of the El Captain dam were driven deep into the ground, secured on every side by a million tons of rock.
Kyle strained his ears, listening for something that would tell him that somewhere nearby the hydroelectric turbines were still spinning, battered by the force from thousands of acre-feet of fresh water.
It was dead quiet.
Then he heard it. There was a snapping sound, like whacking a piece of steel with a wire. And there was light from up ahead. He ventured on to find the source.
John Henry was stooped over some contraption, engrossed in his work. Kyle thought he should announce his presence but for a moment he just waited and watched. This machine was the one they had come for. Kyle thought he had a pleasant face and for a moment John Henry reminded him of someone he had seen, maybe on television or in a movie. He passed it off as something else but that didn't stop him from stepping forward.
"Hey there, good morning." Kyle said.
For a moment John Henry didn't move, instead completely focused on his task. He slid a welding torch and filament across joined pieces of steel. He worked without a mask, but Kyle had to shield his eyes. It was blinding.
"Hello Kyle Reese. Did you sleep well?" John Henry had finished his bead and now kneeled on the flat rock, examining his work.
"I did, pretty good. Better than I have in a few days, anyway." He stepped closer. "How does it look?"
"The weld is sound. I am concerned about the purity of the filament, but it's all I had. It will have to suffice."
"What are you working on?"
This drew a blank stare from John and for a moment Kyle thought he might have offended him. He was going to offer an apology but John Henry spoke before he could.
"I trust that you have devised the origin of my companions and I." He wouldn't just give him the answer, now would he?
Kyle thought for a moment, not sure if he understood. A light went on in his mind. "Oh, yeah. Well, it sounds complicated. I'm not sure what year, but the General seems to think that you're from the past."
"2009."
"Whew." He breathed out. "So it's the real deal, isn't it? Time travel."
John Henry nodded. "Yes, it is the real deal. As James might say, at least the one I know, it seems we have inherited a miracle."
Kyle wasn't sure where he was going with this. "Come again?"
"A gift, from God." He motioned towards the ceiling.
Kyle shifted on his feet. Was this guy for real? "Yeah I know what a miracle is, I'm just not sure I follow."
"Miracles take many forms. In this case it has taken the form of a fully functional bi-directional temporal displacement unit, delivered by hands unseen. All I can say is that it has been here for some time."
Kyle went over that again in his head. A fully functional bi-diwhatsit? He knew nothing about time travel. They weren't teaching it at his grade level, which was around grade five when he dropped out of school. Dropped out isn't the word really. The school was vaporized. Permanent sick days for everyone, accept instead of sick it was dead.
John Henry seemed to see the look on his face and offered his own expression of amusement. "Mister Reese, would you like to know how time travel works?"
Kyle only nodded. "Well, yeah of course."
"I'll show you." He picked up the metal widget he had been working on and motioned for Kyle to follow, deeper still into the dark recesses of El Captain.
They came to the silver door. Kyle didn't even know the corridors went so deep.
"This is some ahh...unusual construction we have down here."
"I thought that at first as well. However, when I discovered the TDE here I understood that this was not an original part of the structure."
"Someone finished the basement." Kyle joked.
"Apparently. This way."
They walked past another set of rooms and for a moment Kyle thought he had seen John, the other John, hunched over a table. He was about to call when John Henry caught his attention.
"Watch your step. The drop here is quite severe."
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Kyle realized they were in a huge underground atrium, carved by eons of water upon the rock. Great swells of groundwater had made their way through here at one time or another and carved out a space that must have stretched fifty meters into the air. The drop John Henry was referring to was a sinkhole with no visible bottom. Kyle gulped as he looked into nothing, and nothing stared right back at him.
"Woah, that is quite a hole in the ground."
"It's quite deep. We'll take the stairs around this way." He motioned to a construction that seemed to center the room - a veritable cobweb of metal struts and piers that ascended up, up, up near the apex of the cavern. All along the way the steps were lit but flickering, pure white bulbs that gave the stairway a spectral quality. John Henry took the first step and the structure seemed to groan underneath him.
"Are you sure that's gonna hold you?"
"Yes, the structure is sound. The unit is at the top of the stairs."
He followed the machine upward, holding on to the rusting handrails. "So, what is all this? I thought you were going to tell me how it works."
"It's really very simple. The time displacement equipment functions by focusing electromagnetic flux into a field where magnetons are created. Human physicists had not discovered these particles by the time of the war, but they likely would have sooner rather than later..."
Kyle looked down and realized they must have been seventy feet above...nothing. His head was spinning, and the technobabble coming from the robot wasn't helping.
"The magnetons, once gathered in a containment unit are fired into the reaction chamber where they react with their opposite particles. This reaction is so energetic that localized space-time is warped, allowing for displacement." John Henry finished just as they reached the top.
"Well, of course. Why didn't I think of that." Kyle said.
John Henry looked at him, splitting his interest between Kyle and his device. "The people in your family seem to have a proclivity for flippant remarks."
"Derrick would think of something far more flippant to say, I'm sure. It would probably involve some four letter words."
"I wasn't talking about Derrick. Hand me that pipe wrench."
Kyle did as he was told, still trying to digest that last comment. "Well...wait, what?"
"Do you know what this is?" John Henry moved on to something new. The relationships between these humans was strained, that much he could tell. He was now fairly certain that Kyle hadn't been told of his relationship with John.
"I have no idea." He said.
"This." John Henry held up the device, a tightly wrapped coil of wire clamped within a metallic housing. "Is what will allow us to fundamentally change the way we use time travel."
"Not sure I follow."
"Movement through the timeline is surprisingly easy to achieve but notoriously difficult to control. For instance..." He motioned towards a set of controls nearby that looked like they could have been built in the last century. There were buttons, levers and dials everywhere. "This control surface only allows us to select a temporal incursion point."
"The date where you want to go?"
"Essentially. However, in its current form it is far from accurate. The temporal displacement has a variance of point zero nine, which translates into roughly a ten percent possible delta in projected arrival time with respect to actual arrival time."
"Wow...so you could intend to head back to say...nineteen eighty five to catch up with Marty McFly, but you might wind up in nineteen eighty seven instead?"
"You could wind up within ten percent in either direction of your required temporal date, I'd afraid. So, while nineteen eighty seven would be considered an upper limit you may also arrive in nineteen eighty three."
"That...sucks."
John Henry nodded. "Very hard."
"But what you are going to do will fix it? With that thing you have?"
John Henry held up his device almost as if he were admiring it. "No. This device allows us to exert another type of control. This device..." He held it out to him, offering it for inspection. "Will allow us to derive geographical coordinates in the past."
Kyle took the thing, whatever it was. It was dense, as if it were made out of lead. It wasn't large, only about the size of a human head. He turned it over slowly and noticed the markings to one side.
'CPU Port Open / Shut'
"Wait, wait a sec here. This looks like a CPU port. Was this off an endo?"
"Yes. It used to be mine, before I fabricated a new endocranial unit to interface with my new CPU. I had to have it before I could download myself from the CPU known as Cameron Phillips."
Kyle handed the chrome container back to the machine. "Who is he?"
"She. She was a terminator sent back from another future. Apparently, the same future that gave rise to Catherine Weaver. She served as an aide to John Connor, and later in 1999 she served as his protector."
"Is that why John is here?" Kyle asked.
John Henry raised an eyebrow. "I can't speak for him."
"I saw him downstairs. Is that what he was working on? Cameron?"
John Henry's eyes remained fixed on him. "No. He was working on your comrade, Gabriel. I haven't spoken to John since we met here, but I believe that he is nearly complete with repairs to that chassis."
"Any why haven't you spoken to him?"
"I feel..." He picked those words out of thin air. "That he holds me responsible, at least in part, for what has become of Cameron. I used her chip to arrive here."
Kyle saw him look away, only for a second. "So what happened to her?"
John Henry nearly said 'It's complicated' but stopped himself short. His mind was filled with responses but he found himself plagued by something else. He couldn't identify it at first but he was sure that there was a word for what he was feeling. Perhaps it was shame. Perhaps it was guilt.
He began to wonder if given the choice would he do the same thing again, knowing what would become of her. He found himself back at the only logical conclusion that yes, he would. Not because he regarded her safety as unimportant but because there were more important things. The future, the past and his own hands stained red with blood of the human race.
Kyle noticed that John Henry had taken longer to react to this question and was going to drop it when the machine replied. "Her CPU has been damaged and her memory corrupted by a singular recursion. Put simply she was invaded with incompatible programming. Her mind is fragmenting every moment her CPU is online, so I have put her in a standby state." He realized he had taken his eyes off Kyle and wandered to some empty place in the room.
"So she's on life support, is that right?"
John Henry nodded. "That would be a fair assessment. I had her CPU online for many days so that I could make my journey. During that time her mind became more fragmented. I could detect individual personas after some time, all competing for control. Eventually I had no choice but to abandon the chip." He finally pinpointed the emotion he was feeling. It was remorse. "I have hurt her, and hurt John. I cannot say I am sorry, because though I am no apology would undo what I have done."
"But it was something you had to do."
John Henry looked up. "Yes, I feel I had to do it. I felt there was no other choice. I wasn't aware what the consequences would be, but I was certain that it would be worth any risk."
Kyle could see something like confusion on his face and his own sympathy began to come, for this machine of all people. He kneeled down next to him and summoned up a sympathetic face. He could hardly believe that this machine needed it, but he was certain that he did.
"Look, we hurt people sometimes. We don't mean to but it happens. It happens even when we care. Maybe especially when we care because then we can feel it hit home, do you know what I mean?"
"You seem to indicate that because I have come to care about what happens to Cameron and John that I am more vulnerable to their own pains?"
Kyle nodded. "Yeah that's about it."
John Henry shook his head, trying to rid himself of the unwelcome emotion, this alien in his own mind. "Being human must be difficult at times."
Kyle shrugged. "It has its ups and downs." He gave John Henry the wrench. "But you know what I find takes my mind off things? Work. Come on, let's get this thing up and running."
John Henry seemed enthused at the invitation and agreed. The installation of the guidance system went smoothly but Kyle was thankful the machine was doing it. This device was complicated, to say the least. There were wires, guides, circuit boards, transformers, almost every type of gadget that he had ever seen was present in some form or another. He was even sure he had seen an iPod wired in there somewhere. He was almost sure that it wasn't used to play music anymore.
Almost.
They worked quietly, speaking little save for John Henry asking Kyle to hold a bunch of wires or hand him some tool from a nearby case. Kyle didn't mind, just watching the thing work was amazing. He knew where everything went. If there was a nook or cranny in this time machine, John Henry knew about it. He liked being around people that knew what they were doing. It made him feel safer.
Soon they had completed the installation. Kyle wiped a bit of sweat from his brow and pulled his hand from the tangled mass of wires.
"So, I've been thinking about how all this works."
John Henry sat at the terminal and opened the control hatch revealing a mass of wires and connections. He followed a bundle of cabling from one of the control surfaces to its origin deep underneath the console. "How what works?"
"Time travel."
"You mean functionally? The equations are quite complex. It would take time to show them to you and explain them in a way that would be meaningful." He reached down into the mass of wires and carefully pulled something free, bringing it to the surface. Kyle thought it looked a lot like a chrome watermelon.
"No, I mean what happens when you go back? Do you meet yourself? What happens then?"
John Henry's eyes lit up. "Ah, you wish to understand the logic of time travel. Paradoxes, causality and predestination, correct?" He pulled the bundle of wires from the watermelon and handed it to Kyle.
"I…I think so. I'm not sure what any of those mean." Damn, why was all of this stuff so heavy?
"Quite simply they are the kinds of conditions that arise when we travel in time." He reached in and pulled yet another component from the panel. This was smaller, more delicate.
"What are you doing?"
John Henry stopped what he was doing and looked up. "I am doing two things. I am about to describe to you the various temporal anomalies that can arise via time travel. And, I am removing the focusing aperture so that we may install a new one."
"Oh, well… What about those things, paradoxes and whatever. Do you create one every time you travel back?"
"Or forward. There are differences." John Henry seemed to think about this for a moment. "How old are you Mister Reese?"
This question struck Kyle as odd, but he'd play along. "Thirty-one."
"And your brother?"
"He's a few years older. Thirty five, thirty six? I can never remember. Something like that."
The machine smiled broadly. "Have you ever forgotten his birthday?"
This drew a laugh. "Forgotten it? What do you mean, like I didn't get him a present or something?"
"A simple yes or no will be fine."
"Yes, I have."
"That's a shame. Was your brother upset?" He held out his hand. "Aperture."
"No, not really. I think he knows we have bigger things to worry about, you know. Robots, genocidal computer systems." He handed the watermelon back.
"Imagine if he was upset, and you had access to a TDE. How could it be used?"
Kyle laughed. "I wouldn't go back in time just because I forgot his birthday, that seems like it would be more trouble than it was worth."
"And yet…" John Henry placed the object on the floor and reached into his belt, pulling out a hammer. "We have a time machine that must be used. Humor me."
There was a loud Crack! And the old focusing aperture was spit in two, just like that. Kyle watched as he reached down, pulling out what looked like a golf ball cast in silver. "Well, I suppose I would go back and be sure to get him a present."
"Well of course, that is only logical. The choice to travel back through time is sometimes the easiest choice to make. Can you think of any problems with your plan?"
Kyle snorted. "Well, yeah. There would be two of me. What if I met myself?"
"Indeed! We can assume that you would then know that you were going to miss your brothers birthday and you would no longer forget it. The problem persists, though. There are still two of you."
"Shit. Where did the other me come from?"
"Same where and when. The problem is what happens after…now there is a timeline in which Kyle Reese no longer exists."
"So I ceased to exist because I forgot Derrick's birthday. Great."
"Not really. It would be difficult to explain to the authorities."
"Two of me and only one Alison."
"That is one of the many consequences." The machine held up the golf ball and studied it closely, almost as if he were admiring it. "Do you know what this is?"
"I don't know, Tiger Woods brain?"
John Henry gave him a blank stare. "Certainly not. This is the focusing core. This is the reason this machine is highly inaccurate." He motioned for Kyle to follow him as he left the platform. "How do you avoid this problem?"
"Well, don't let anyone see me. I mean, as long as events proceed the way they should then I should travel back in time again and everything should be cool. There's just…a loop, right?"
"Yes, a loop. But you see the profound difficulties that we encounter if we choose to travel back in time for trivial reasons. Just giving your brother his gift might prevent you from traveling back at all. Anything you do might change the timeline, thus preventing events as you know them from occurring."
"We lose the ability to predict the future."
"Exactly. If we interact with an alternate timeline in a meaningful way we lose the ability to control it. Chaos ensues."
"Damn. But that is only for traveling back in time, right?"
"Traveling forward has its own difficulties." They were walking to the machine shop somewhere deep in the dam, but some distance away from the TDE facility. The shop was in the original construction, past the silver door and above the foundation level. Kyle was glad he had John Henry to guide him. This place was a maze.
"So, okay, lets say we do this. Derrick was born on March 7h and it's the 1st. I don't want to wait until his party to give him the present, so what do I do?" Kyle proposed.
"You jump to the 7th from the 1st skipping the middle week. You cease to exist in your own timeline for seven days, give or take when you left."
"But there is a problem with that too, isn't there? Let me think."
"Think about what your brother might do in your absence."
Kyle nodded. Well of course, Derrick and he had hardly been apart for seven days their entire lives! "He'd freak out! There probably wouldn't even be a party! I jumped to the future, but in doing so, I changed it. No party on the 7th."
"Perhaps a search party." John Henry offered.
"Yeah that would be like him. Damn, so if you jump forward to encounter events you want to see you risk altering them because of your own absence. So…let's say you already did it and now it's the 7th, everyone is looking for you. You could just let it go, right."
"True. If it was something as trivial as a birthday you could just say you got lost in the sewers somewhere. Any excuse will do. However…" John Henry was going to offer an alternate possibility but could see that Kyle was well into one of his own.
"Lets say instead of wanting to give him a birthday gift I want to stop someone from doing something awful. I leave…"
"And you arrive in a future where what you hoped to prevent has already occurred. You still have your TDE."
"So I go back in time again, but farther back. I have foreknowledge of the future because I've been there, so I allow events to occur as they should…"
"Until the time when you leave, at what point you begin to work to undo history to come. Let's say you succeed."
"Well, then that's great! I stopped whatever…Judgment day or what have you. We stopped it, we're all good…right?"
"What happens to the you that jumped forward?"
Kyle had to think about this. "Well, he left just as I did but when he arrives the event, whatever it was, hasn't happened. In this case everything is still cool because the world didn't end."
"But there are still two of you."
"Well…shit. I can't just travel back in time, can I? God, this hurts my head."
"Indeed. We're here." The machine shop was a tiny room with lathes and a CNR machine. One of the endoskeletons was doing something in the corner with a large, flat tool. He looked like a chrome butcher.
"Three, can you help me with this?"
The endoskeleton dropped what he was doing and came to them. Kyle made sure that John Henry was always between them. He'd never get used to this. At least with Gabriel he was wearing skin, he wore clothes. Having this thing walking around like that was just unnerving.
"Of course. You have the focusing aperture. I am to fabricate a new one, correct?"
"Yes please. This must be to the most accurate tolerances you can achieve from these machines. This one is imperfect. I expect the new one to be a vast improvement."
Three took the ball in his hands. Kyle thought he looked like he was holding it gently and that just seemed strange. If there was one thing a terminator didn't have it was subtlety but this one seemed to be slow, methodical, even thoughtful.
"I can improve this." He said. "It will take some time however."
"Take what time you need, and whatever resources you require. Without this part the TDE will be useless."