The future war, p.9
The Future War, page 9
She was a terrorist who liked to blow up computer companies. She’d been diagnosed insane because she claimed that an evil computer was going to try to kill the human race.
Crazy! he thought. Only it’s like they said. A paranoid can have real enemies. Too bad they’re everyone’s enemies, this time.
Chapter 7
SARAH’S JOURNAL
It was a long two weeks in the shelter as freakishly heavy winds carried the fallout from Russia, Asia, and probably our own West Coast up to Alaska. We listened to the radio stations going off, one by one; then the bombs came, and for a while there was nothing, and we might have been the last alive in a world as empty of humanity as Skynet’s soul. We wondered if anyone had heard our broadcast, and if so, had they believed us?
Knowing what was happening around the world was very hard to take. John blames himself, I blame myself, Dieter blames himself; although at least we don’t blame one another. The weight of depression on all of us was almost physical. We failed.
Now it’s up to us to make it up to humanity for that failure.
Alaska
Bemused, Sarah watched John teaching the children about self-defense; they were grouped around the base of a big Sitka spruce, a circle of dirty faces and slightly ragged clothes on the resilient pine-needle surface of the ground. The strong spicy scent of the tree’s sap came to her on the wind—which was fortunate, because soap and hot water were already scarce.
John had turned out to have an unexpected talent for dealing with children. He was patient, he gave them slack, but he wouldn’t let them run roughshod over him. They were learning self-discipline in these classes, and self-reliance. After accepting an exuberant greeting from the munchkins, he sat them down to listen to his lecture.
“Okay,” John said. “Now sometimes you’re going to find yourself facing a larger or better-armed opponent. What do you do?”
The kids said nothing, glancing at one another to see if anyone else had any ideas.
“Nobody? You run, or you hide, whichever is better. Why is that?”
A little girl held up a skinny arm and John nodded at her. “’Cause if you don’t you’ll get hurt.”
“That’s right. You could get hurt, or worse, killed. Yes, killed.”
“But what if you can’t get away?” a boy asked.
“I’m going to show you how to break away if someone grabs you. And I’m going to show you a few ways to hurt an attacker so that he, or she, will think twice about trying to get you. But everything I’m teaching you is so that you can run away. That’s why we finish every lesson with a run. You want to be able to run a long, long time as fast as you can. Okay?”
There was a ragged chorus: Yessir, yes Mr. Connor…
“Okay, now who’d like to help me demonstrate? Sharon and Jamie?”
Everyone laughed and the two chosen came forward reluctantly, their faces red.
Grinning, Sarah turned away. She had a meeting with the parents; four couples, all of them close in age, and like most Alaskans pretty savvy about the basics of surviving in the wild. Of course none of them had expected being in the wild to become a lifelong thing, and they were starting to panic as they began to suspect that rescue wasn’t coming.
The children, bless them, were adapting just fine. It was the parents who were going to be a handful.
While the three of them had been in the fallout shelter they’d discussed how to approach people on the subject of Skynet and its intention to wipe out the human race. Dieter had argued that they’d have to take it slow. “They’ll never believe us,” he’d insisted. “They’ll think the blast unhinged our minds.”
Sarah had looked at him. “My heart wants to say, ‘Of course they’d believe me,’” she’d said. “But…”
“But as someone who spent a lot of time locked up in the booby hatch, you think he’s right,” John had put in.
“Tactful.”
“No, just true. He’s your boyfriend; he has to be tactful. I’m your son, the Great Military Leader, and I can tell it like it is.”
These four couples were the first group of people they’d brought together and led to one of their supply caches. They’d also built a large communal dwelling on the site; it was half-underground, with a turf roof. The group had been a bit dubious at first, but accepted the Connors’ explanation that the building conserved resources. They seemed to be settling in all right.
And it was snug inside; outside the sky was overcast, with a gray chill that had been around since the bombs fell. Inside the poles and turf had a sort of archaic coziness, lit red by the flicker of the fire in the central hearth.
Sarah joined the circle around the blaze where the adults were nursing cups of coffee. The beverage was so irreplaceable that everyone treated it like a ceremonial occasion when it was brewed up. Cups were held with both hands and no one spoke for the first few mouthfuls. But everyone was beginning to notice that caffeine went further when you didn’t get it very often.
Sarah accepted a cup and sipped contemplatively for a while.
“The kids all love your son,” one of the women said eventually. “They live for these lessons.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, though,” one of the men said. He had a long, sensitive face and glasses; his name was Paul. “I’m afraid it will encourage them to be violent.”
Sarah blinked. Even before Judgment Day, she’d found the assumption that you could keep your children safe from violence by not telling them about it inexplicable. Now it seemed demented.
“After what’s happened, things have changed,” she said patiently. “Food supplies are going to be running out, and then people are going to go looking for more. Some of those people will be willing to do anything to feed their own children. And some will be criminals who have always felt entitled to take what they want by force. We may find ourselves in a position of having to choose our children over theirs.”
“That’s horrible!” one of the other women said. Her eyes had a wild look that made Sarah think she was going to crack one of these days. “It’s uncivilized!” she went on. “As long as we can share, we should.”
“What we have in storage here will get you about halfway through the summer,” Sarah explained. “By then the seeds you’ve planted should be bearing fruit. And there are wild plants that you can harvest as well. But Alaska has always had a short growing season.”
She glanced up, and everyone followed suit, even though they were looking at the rough pine trunks of the rafters; it seemed to her that the weather was already colder than it had been.
“This year I expect it will be shorter than usual. So your crops will be smaller. Food is going to become a big issue from now on. And yes, there will be people who’ll steal it whenever they can, even if they have to kill you.”
“What makes you think like that?” asked Paul. There was an edge in his voice that indicated unspoken questions about her stability.
And I can’t tell him the truth, yet, Sarah thought. Starting with, well, there was this killing machine from the future, which just happens to be nearly here now, and it looks just like my boyfriend…
“I lived in South America for a long time,” Sarah said. “People were always coming out of the jungle there to raid small, isolated villages. They’d administer beatings or even kill to steal the little those people had.”
“But that’s South America,” another man said. “What makes you think that will happen here?”
Sarah had to force herself not to roll her eyes in exasperation.
They were new to this, these people; they didn’t know what to expect. These hopelessly naive questions were going to be coming up again and again as they found groups of people to recruit, so she’d better get used to them.
“We’re as human as they are,” Sarah explained to the man. “Hunger is something that most of us have never experienced as a chronic condition. So we don’t know what it might inspire us to do. We’re not going to bounce back from this like it was a bad blizzard, folks. And we’re lucky. Most of the states are devastated, their largest cities gone, dams destroyed, power stations taken out. Comparatively speaking, we’re in good shape.”
“Well, how long do you think it’s going to take to get over this?” a woman asked.
“Years, even decades,” Sarah said.
Their tense faces grew more pinched. Everyone sipped, staring into the fire and not speaking for a while.
“In the meantime,” one of the men said, trying to sound cheerful, “I guess we get to be pioneers.”
“Well, our great-grandparents were,” his wife said. “I don’t see why we can’t be.”
The others smiled and nodded.
“Does anyone know how to hunt or fish?” Sarah asked.
Three of the four men and two of the women put up their hands. Predictably, Mr. I Don’t Want My Kids Learning about Violence wasn’t one of them.
“We’re vegan,” he said, a stubborn set to his mouth.
“That’s a luxury,” Sarah told him. “It assumes you’ll have fresh vegetables and fruits all winter. Those days are gone, maybe for our lifetime. Who knows? In the meantime you’re exposing yourself and your children to the danger of contracting serious diseases caused by poor nutrition.”
“I do know something about nutrition,” he said condescendingly. “And I don’t want to compromise my principles.”
You don’t want to see your kids with rickets, either, Sarah thought. When he got hungry enough he might bend those principles a bit. But I’d hate to see his kids suffer for it. “It may be that in the winter, when the grains and beans run low, meat will be the best food available. I hope you wouldn’t deny your children that resource.”
He merely looked superior, declining to answer. His wife looked concerned.
“Maybe we could eat fish,” she suggested.
He turned to glare at her as though she’d offered to roast their youngest child.
“Hey, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” one of the men said. “Paul, we’re going to be relying on you folks to help us with organic gardening, so we won’t expect you to hunt or fish, okay?”
Managing to look mollified, yet put-upon, Paul backed down.
Sarah wondered what he was going to do when the killing machines showed up. Well, they’ve never been alive; he might be quite good at blowing them up. Assuming he didn’t see that as unconscionable violence.
They talked awhile longer. Sarah told them that there was little news from the lower forty-eight, and what there was wasn’t good.
“Canada is doing better,” she said. “But they have an ongoing problem with runaway cars.”
“What was that anyway?” one guy asked. “Some kind of computer virus?”
“I guess you could look at it that way,” Sarah said.
At supper that evening, as the three of them compared notes and planned their evening’s work, they spoke of how their recruits, such as they were, still hadn’t accepted the situation.
“Yeah,” John said, carving at the leg of venison. “That vegan guy. He was talking like he’d never run out of soy milk. That kind of attitude wasn’t something I took into consideration all the time we’ve been planning for this.”
“There are none so blind as those who will not see,” Dieter quoted, helping himself to the beans.
“Wow,” Sarah said. “Let me write that down.”
“How in the world did I manage this the first time?” John muttered.
“The first time?” Dieter asked, his brow knotting in puzzlement.
“The first time,” Sarah said. “When Judgment Day came earlier and we didn’t have as much time for preparation, before the second Terminator and—”
“Agggh! Time travel makes my head hurt!” John said. “Forget I said anything. Let’s just hope the broadcast helped some people.”
Sarah nodded thoughtfully. “Especially since the government never made any sort of announcement.” They exchanged glances around the table. “On the plus side, there were, like, seventeen times fewer missiles this time. That’s got to have helped.”
John grunted. “Yeah, but it’s probably been a help to Skynet, too.”
Skynet
It reviewed its progress, a thought process symbolic but well beyond words. The binary code that it used for its interior monologue was far more precise and compact.
It estimated that the initial blasts and fallout had killed well over a billion humans. Regrettably small compared to what would have been accomplished a scant five years ago. Still, it was a substantial number and a good beginning.
Its second stage was going superbly. Cadres of Luddites had sprung into action, setting up the staging areas and terminal camps for survivors. The lower echelons stationed in the staging camps were convinced that they were there to help people and to educate them in how to live in a more environmentally responsible manner. Quite soon, Skynet planned to move them to the terminal camps as well.
The harder-core Luddites, the real haters, were working there, putting the survivors to work for Skynet. Now that the automated factories didn’t have to answer to human supervisors, they worked day and night producing the Hunter-Killer machines and Terminators whose plans Clea, an Infiltrator unit, had downloaded to its files. The human workers produced the raw material for those factories. When they couldn’t work anymore they were rounded up and taken into the wilderness to be exterminated.
Within a matter of weeks Skynet anticipated being able to field an ever-growing army of machines to harvest the humans. Once that had begun, it would no longer need the vermin to work for it.
Except for special cases. Worldwide, it had more than two hundred Luddite scientists working for it. Their function was to create ever-more-sophisticated means of killing their own kind. They had provided Skynet with a wish list of non-Luddite scientists from various disciplines who would prove useful.
Skynet had dispatched special teams who had infiltrated the military to arrest/kidnap those scientists, convincing them that it was an official government action; their authentic uniforms and the papers Skynet provided made that easy. They were then taken to a very secure and luxurious bunker where they could apply their genius to Skynet’s good.
Most were cooperating freely under the assumption that they were working for their fellow humans instead of against them. The others were resentful, but reasonably productive. They might have to be culled. For now it was having its Luddites try to convert them.
Even though it had control of the military, having killed all of the upper echelon as they hid in their airtight bunkers, Skynet found its Luddite followers invaluable. It was they who had sabotaged those means of escape beyond Skynet’s control, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. Of course they had assumed they were helping to prevent the missiles from launching, but now that they, too, were dead, they could hardly complain of the outcome.
Skynet could issue orders with all the proper code words and voice and fingerprints, but as its demands became more extreme, it was proving very helpful to have one of its pet fanatics on hand to stiffen flagging resolve. Rounding up civilians and putting them in concentration camps, for example, had set off a wave of protests, until the protesters were talked out of their doubts by Luddites in uniform.
Everything was going according to plan, but Skynet looked forward to having more reliable units in the field. Units made of steel.
On Route 2, Alaska
Dog Soldier propped his boots on the dashboard of the truck, crossed his arms behind his head, and grinned as the cold wet wilderness passed by on either side. The heater was running, and the smell of wet leather and unwashed feet was strong in the cab.
“This is like shooting fish in a barrel,” he said. “They’re all so eager to come with us. Jeez, you have to threaten to shoot ’em, they want to get on the trucks so bad.” He chuckled. “It don’t get no better than this.”
Balewitch, sitting in the driver’s seat, her arms folded over her ample bosom, stared straight ahead. The truck downshifted and she glanced at the stick. “Yeah,” she said. “And that’s the problem. Most towns are around the highways. But there’s thousands of people out there in the wilderness, and they’re just the type to give us trouble.”
Dog shifted in his seat to a more upright position. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But a lot of ’em are Luddites.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Balewitch said scornfully. “They’ve still got to go.”
He nodded. “Maybe the boss has a plan.”
“Maybe he does. But until we know about it, we’ve got to make our own plans. We need a way to lure them in so that we can keep trucking the bastards to oblivion.”
“Oblivion!” Dog grinned. “That’s in Canada, isn’t it?”
She sighed in exasperation. “You’re such a child sometimes.”
His mouth twisted and he turned to look out the window. After a minute he looked over at her. “Do you have any ideas, O solemn one?”
“Maybe we can drop leaflets telling people to gather at certain locations to be—”
“Trucked to relocation and reconstruction camps! That’s brilliant, Bale!” He sat back, smiling. “Do you think the boss has any kind of aircraft we could borrow?”
“We’ll have to ask him, won’t we?” She thought for a moment. “Or maybe we should consult the lieutenant.”
For two weeks they’d been running a pair of buses to the staging camp run by Orc in the wilds of British Columbia. Then this morning an earnest young soldier had approached them in the town of Tok, where they were taking on passengers.
“Ma’am,” he’d said, actually saluting.
She’d looked him over, not taking off her sunglasses, which seemed to increase his nervousness.
“Are you Susan Gaynor?”
“I am,” she said, using her real voice, an almost masculine foghorn growl. She found it enjoyable to intimidate people and he was a deliciously easy target.
