T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures by Russell Blackford Page A

stretched.
    "Maybe I'm just too nervous tonight," Miles said.
    "Sure, we all are, but you guys have been doing a great job. Everything's been working perfectly."
    "Yeah, Jack, technically it's fine. Better than fine. But this stuff still bothers me." Miles gestured with the printouts. "And Skynet has been acting pretty strangely."
    "Strangely, you think? How?"
    "It's too good. It's better than we designed it."
    The microwave pinged to say Miles's pizza was ready. He found a plate for it, then poured the coffee into a pair of chipped mugs. "Let's go back to my office," Jack said. "It's a helluva lot more comfortable than here."
    Jack had a plush twenty-foot by ten-foot office, the best in the complex, harshly lit by fluorescent tubes shining through plastic deflectors. There was a shiny, black-topped desk near the entrance. Built into the opposite wall was a floor-to-ceiling video unit, nearly ten feet across. Like Miles, he'd left his office here largely undecorated. On one wall he'd Blu -tacked a large poster of the boxer Muhammed Ali, taken from a 1960s photograph—one of the fights with Sonny Liston .
    They sat at a plain wooden coffee table in the farthest corner from the doorway. As Miles chewed his pizza, Jack said, "That stuff really bothering you?" He gestured at the printouts, on the floor at Miles's feet.
    Miles bent and picked up the top page. "Well, yeah." Like the others in charge here, he'd been given 150-odd pages of postings on Internet sites and public mailing groups, all predicting that Skynet would malfunction tonight and cause a nuclear holocaust. "Yeah, Jack, it is bothering me."
    "It's just another conspiracy theory," Jack said. "The Internet thrives on them. You know that, Miles. If there was a conspiracy in this case, we'd be the first to know about it, wouldn't we?"
    "That's true, as far as it goes."
    "Yeah... but?"
    The material was uncannily pertinent and well-informed. The initial claims were traceable to a criminal psychotic called Sarah Connor, who'd been imprisoned when she tried to blow up a government computer research project in
1993. In
May 1994, she'd made a violent escape from the
Pescadero
State
Hospital
for the Criminally Insane. She'd been on the run ever since. Her claims had taken on a life of their own. More and more people were supporting them, or at least finding their own reasons to object to Skynet—there'd been demonstrations in
California
, where the movement seemed to have a power base, and even in Colorado Springs . Meanwhile, no one had ever spotted Connor.
    Miles felt like a fool, but it hadn't stopped him persuading Tarissa to take that holiday with Danny while he was holed up at the complex. "What bothers me is how they've got so many things right," he said.
    "There's been a leak somewhere," Jack said, as if by reflex. "We've gone over that before."
    "But some of the decisions weren't even made when this stuff started to come out. You know that—the August 4 launch date only got firmed up in April, but there are predictions here going back to late 1994." He picked up the whole sheaf of papers and found one he'd marked, covered in Miles's orange highlighter pen, and dated nearly three years ago. At that stage, Cyberdyne had only just worked out the basics of its new computer hardware. "How do you explain that?"
    "So someone got lucky."
    "Not a good answer, Jack." He smiled wearily, knowing there was no good answer—they both knew it.
    Jack sounded exasperated. "I don't know." Then he became more aggressive: "But what else did they pick? Just tell me that, Miles. What else have they got that's so impressive?"
    "Well, the whole thing—"
    "No. Not good enough. Number one, we always planned to call the system 'Skynet' and build it here in
Colorado
. Getting that right cuts no ice with me. And the rest is all vague. Sure, I take your point about the launch date—I can't explain that. But what's your explanation? Are you starting to think Sarah Connor got it from some