John kneeled on the floor of the helicopter next to Allison. He found her hand and gently squeezed it.
"I'm so sorry, Allison," he said through gritted teeth. "Hang in there, baby. You're gonna make it."
Allison, still unconscious, made no response. One of the orderlies tended to her, while the medic and the other orderly were busy with Tomlinson.
With no one to talk to, John took the opportunity to silently admonish himself. He felt horribly guilty for allowing her to come on this mission. Three out of eight were killed. What if she had been one of the three? Or Kyle?
John was impassively staring at the floor, when the medic tapped his shoulder.
"Don't worry, Connor," he said, "She's in good hands. He's another story, though. Lost a lot of blood."
John nodded somberly. Not another.
He traded his glance at the medic for the view outside. John had been shocked when he first saw the ruins of Los Angeles the previous day, but seen from an elevated position, the catastrophe was overwhelming enough to take his breath away.
The great city, once home to more than 25 million souls, was now a blackish-gray wasteland, stretching to the horizon. Downtown, Anaheim, Santa Anna—wherever he looked—nothing escaped the devastation.
Unable to resist the urge, John switched sides on the chopper, taking in the westerly angle. It was just as horrific—the San Fernando Valley, Burbank, Hollywood—all gone.
However, in stark contrast to the desolation, a gleaming patch of white buidlings stood out in the vicinity of LAX. John felt a lump in his throat—that could only be one thing.
Skynet.
At least I know where it is now.
He turned back to Allison, gently holding her hand once again. John somberly stroked her hair with his free hand.
I still have one slice of heaven. And I almost lost you!
His mind raced back to the sight of the ivory anomaly amidst the ruins.
"The white buildings—that's them, right?" he asked the medic, gesturing with his head toward the west. "Skynet?"
The medic nodded an affirmative. "Yep, one of their advanced bases. They're slowly expanding over time," he said.
"Where are we headed?" John inquired. "Which base?"
"Serrano Point, of course," the medic replied. "Where else would we go?"
"I don't know," John replied defensively. "I've never been to any base."
Serrano Point was a nuclear reactor built and on-line during the Connors' brief stay in 2008-09. Located near Long Beach and both the SEAL Beach Naval Weapons Station and the Los Alimitos Joint Forces Training Center, it was an ideal locale for a military base.
John thought it was odd for it to be spared, being such an obvious target. On the other hand, older Derek had told the Connors of Serrano's importance during the war.
John again gazed out the window, straining his eyes to the horizon to see if he could spot the facility. But they weren't in range yet.
He could not get the devastation out of his head. So many have died already. So many more have yet to die. Can we really win this war? What cost is too high?
Suddenly, John felt Allison's hand squeezing his own, bringing him out of his haze. He quickly looked and saw her weakly smiling at him.
"John!" she said, although her voice was badly muffled by the oxygen mask. "What happened?"
"Hey!" John exclaimed, smiling and moving right up next to her. "Shhh, don't worry. Doc says you had a collapsed lung and maybe a concussion. We don't know about your leg, yet. But you're gonna be okay!"
"Where are we going?" she asked, grimacing through the pain.
"Medical base at Serrano Point," John assured her, gently stroking her hair. "Just a few more minutes."
Allison smiled and closed her eyes, trying to block out the agony. It was obvious she was in great discomfort.
"Did we win?" she asked, looking John straight in the eyes. "Did we stop them?"
"Oh, yeah," John said, grinning, adoring the fire in her expression. "Stopped 'em cold. No metal survived."
Allison smiled faintly and closed her eyes again, hoping sleep would relieve the pain a little.
John leaned forward and kissed her tenderly on her forehead.
As the chopper arrived at Serrano Point, John once again took in the view, trying to get accustomed to the surroundings. The twin cooling towers of the reactor were the most dominant features, but he was also able to count no less than 10 distinct buildings and what looked to be a fully intact airstrip.
This surprised him. The buildings were hardly as pristine as Skynet's and some had blown out windows, tattered edifices and other battle scars. But they were more-or-less intact and alive with activity—a stark contrast to the devastation nearly everywhere else in the city.
Sharing some of credit for their condition, John surmised, was the presence of several anti-aircraft batteries at the base's perimeter. He was also astonished to see fighter jets—either F-15s or F-18s, he couldn't tell at the speed they were moving—flying regular combat air patrols.
His shock quickly turned to anger. My team's risking our necks when we have a fully operational base like this one.
But then his gaze fell upon the most unexpected sight of all—neatly moored to the dock nearest to the power plant was a large naval vessel. John shook his head, not believing what he saw, but the image remained. Jet black. Conning tower. Shape of a long, thin pipe.
"Is that a submarine?" John exclaimed.
"Yep," the medic replied, briefly looking up at him. "USS Jimmy Carter, fast attack sub. One of a few that survived. They think Skynet got most of the boomers, though."
John had no reply, but he was remotely aware of his jaw hitting the floor of the helicopter.
The chopper finally landed on the medical helipad. John took the back end of Allison's stretcher while one of the orderlies led them inside. The medic and the other orderly handled the detail with Tomlinson's gurney.
Once inside, Allison was gently transferred off the stretcher to an examining table. There were nurses and doctors vying for position to treat her while the orderly read the bullet for them.
John was only distantly aware of what they were saying as he backed off, confident she was in good hands. He did stroke Allison's hair one more time, though. He remained against the wall in the triage unit, contemplating all that had happened in just his second day in 2021.
"Are you okay, son?" a nurse asked him. "Were you injured?"
John blinked at her twice before coming out of his stupor. "No, I'm fine," he said.
"Why don't you relax in the waiting room, then?" she insisted. "It's gonna be a while until we have her all patched up."
"Yeah, okay, thanks," John said.
"We'll be sure to get you as soon as we move her to a room," the nurse added, smiling.
John smiled back and nodded his appreciation as he walked through the doors to the waiting area.
He sat down and breathed a heavy sigh. Glancing around, he noted that the inside of the hospital was no less impressive than the outside. It had electricity, actual running water, hallways and rooms that were relatively clean, and people milling about in clothing that did not reek of decades-old sewage.
Again, the polar opposite of life in the Reese's bunker. Someone has a lot of explaining to do.
John found himself slowly nodding off as he sat in the waiting area. His mind drifted back to the image of the Skynet complex.
Skynet Central was a complex of buildings actually located in Sunnyvale, California. Meticulously built and maintained by machines, the immaculately white 1-story structures stood as a severe antithesis to the death and destruction that had become the balance of San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland megalopolis.
The compound was separated from this desolation by 50 meters of open ground and a 20-meter high perimeter fence topped with barbed wire. Guard towers, placed every 100 meters, surmounted the fence by another 10 meters. Sentries and tanks patrolled the grounds endlessly.
In the center building, the lone window of the edifice was momentarily occupied by a solitary humanoid presence. It appeared to be silently monitoring the machine activity outside. It was also relatively unique, in fact, one of only a few non-machine entities in the complex. The name its badge read: Daniel Dyson.
Daniel was the son of Miles and Tarissa Dyson, the first born of their two children. Miles was the lead programmer at Cyberdyne Systems, a young, promising computer and robotics firm in Los Angeles that had ascended to prominence mostly through the mysterious, but fruitful, acquistion of two prized items—a highly advanced microchip and the most sophisticated robotic arm ever seen.
The items were, of course, the remanants of the first terminator sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Miles, albeit unknowingly, was creating the machines and the programming to destroy the world. It was, perhaps, a cruel bit of cosmic irony that Skynet would actually help create itself by sending this first infiltrator back, but Sarah wasn't interested in irony—she just wanted to assassinate Miles and destroy his work.
And she nearly fulfilled this mission, until John arrived in the nick of time to prevent her from finishing the job. Then John and the second terminator explained it all to Miles, causing him to recant all his hard work and destroy any and all manifestations of his efforts.
Nevertheless, Miles' epiphany and subsequent attempts to reverse what he had created were in vain. He died in the destruction of the Cyberdyne building and Judgment Day, as it turned out, was not averted, just delayed.
All Daniel could remember from the whole incident was two things. The first was indelibly seared in his mind—his own efforts to spare his father's life when he sprawled across his father's prone body at their home while a deranged and homicidal Sarah Connor leveled a gun at him, as if he could magically deflect the bullets.
The second was that Miles died in the incident, anyway. And, just as the authorities had done, he pinned the blame solely on the Connors.
In response, Daniel had turned his father's ambition into his own. For the love he felt for his father, for the hatred he felt toward the Connors, he was going to get revenge.
And if he had to destroy the rest of the world to accomplish this, so be it.
There was only one problem: the Connors had disappeared after his near perfect attack on Zeira. He was almost certain his kamikaze drone had killed them and his rival, Catherine Weaver, but no remains were ever found to prove this conclusively.
His own hyper-ambitious boss, Dick Maussner, never shied away from brutal tactics like extortion, rape, torture—even murder—to achieve corporate goals, and Daniel never had a problem with them either. But for some reason, he didn't feel the satisfaction he had expected when the Connors were purportedly eliminated.
Nevertheless, work progressed on Caliba's artificial intelligence and robotics projects without delay and Daniel found himself fully immersed in the effort. The military was greedily purchasing whatever they invented and money was flooding in. Life was good.
Until one day, when Maussner's bullet-ridden corpse was discovered in a ditch on company property. No one knew who did it, but it became a moot point when the apocalypse arrived just two days later.
Now, Daniel found himself working for new masters—oddly enough—that which he had help create. He credited his continued existence with a few lines of code he had secretly embedded into the AI's base programming, but he wasn't certain it would hold up forever.
In any event, he hoped to prove his loyalty by continuing his work in the R & D laboratory. It wasn't like he had much choice on the matter—the machines would not permit his departure from the Caliba campus.
So he worked on and on, helping develop better, faster versions of his drones, larger, more intimidating models of tanks, and so forth. The machines provided everything for him—food, water, living quarters, medical care, a workout facility and even a small theatre.
Everything, that is, except a reason to go on living. He often considered trying to escape, until the day his colleague, Abdul Rahman, was ruthlessly gunned down by tanks and sentries just outside the main gate. Fear became his new motivation.
A new project his masters had tasked him with was the infiltrator design—terminators—as he called them. Their sentries, disguised to look as human as possible, would infiltrate and kill the human leadership.
The most diffcult part of the design, at least aesthetically, was imitating human skin. The earliest designs, with a rubber skin, were used on the 600 series of warriors with comically bad results. Humans had picked them out so easily that the concept was abandoned on the 600s altogether.
But they didn't give up entirely. Daniel insisted that the key was for the skin to actually be alive, not merely a cover. Thus, the automatons he envisioned would be true cyborgs—living tissue over fully armored endoskeletons. The ultimate assassins.
So R & D plodded forward, often capturing humans for the sole purpose of experimenting with real tissue and blood. The partial infiltration of Zeira's John Henry AI all those years ago had given them some insight on artifical tissue generation, but the missing pieces of the puzzle were proving to be very elusive.
Daniel had always envisioned the infiltrator to be of the large, male variety, capable of pummeling a man, or several men, with its bare hands. Therefore, the chasis prototypes for the 800 series, as he called it, were in full production, merely awaiting their skin covering.
But then one day, an image came to his computer screen that altered his view entirely. It was video of a young woman—Allison, as fate would have it—attempting to escape from the Century City work camp. He was impressed by her athletic ability and amazed at how close she actually came to freedom.
Several camera angles had captured her likeness from different sentries, guard towers and other locations in the camp. Looking at the various pictures, a thought began to coalesce in Daniel's mind, causing him to get up and walk to that lonely window.
"Hold everything," he suddnely announced. "I think it's time to consider another option for our infiltrators."