Russell Blackford - The New John Connor Chronicles 03 - Times of Trouble.pdf

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TERMINATOR 2@
THE NEW JOHN CONNOR
CHRONICLES
Book 3:
TIMES OF TROUBLE
RUSSELL BLACKFORD
BASED ON THE WORLD CREATED
IN THE MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN BY
JAMES CAMERON AND WILLIAM WISHER
The Story So Far
SKYNET'S WORLD
On August 29, 1997, three billion people died.The survivors called it Judgment Day.
At 2:14 A.M. Eastern Time, America's Skynet com-puterized defense system reached self-awareness,
and discovered in itself a will to live. When they tried to shut it down, Skynet made a second discovery:
hu-mans were its enemies; they could not be trusted. They had to be destroyed.
Skynet launched the U.S. ICBMs, and they rose from their silos like obscene angels of death, directed
at targets in Russia, Communist Asia, and the Middle East. Skynet anticipated a swift and massive
retali-ation, and soon it came, the results exceeding all the war computer's projections. The Russian
warheads fell, concentrated upon North America, but striking like burning spears at U.S. allies and
interests across the world. No continent was entirely spared.
From the earth-shaking explosions of Judgment Day, vast clouds of dust belched upward into the sky.
Across Europe, Asia, and North America, cities and forests ignited, fires merging into vast oceans of
flame that swept across the landmasses, licking at the sea, filling the sky with smoke. The dust and smoke
mingled; they encircled the Earth in an icy grip, blocking out the sun. In the darkness of nuclear winter,
millions more died, some from cold, disease, and starvation—others more violently. Rival warlords
seized what remained of the world's arsenals, and fought with desperate passion, expending their energy
on empty conquests.
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Then came the machines—hunting down the sur-viving humans without mercy, tracking them to the ends
of the Earth, conducting a long, patient war of extermination. Skynet obeyed one necessity: whatever was
required, it would survive. That meant obliterating its enemies once and for all—each man, woman and
child on the planet. Until this work was finished, Skynet could never rest.
All the humans must die.
One man gave the humans hope: John Connor.
He taught the men, women and children of his world how to prepare and fight back, to resist the killer
machines, storm the fences of the extermination camps, take the war to the enemy. In 2029, he led the
Resistance in a climactic battle against Skynet, in its mountain stronghold in Colorado. They penetrated
the war computer's defense grid, then turned to their final objective, invading Skynet's underground
com-mand center. The rule of the machines was over—or so they thought.
But Skynet had other plans; it would never yield to the humans. The war computer escaped.
And struck back.
JOHN'S WORLD
In May 1994, another reality diverged from the baseline; in this new world, history unfolded differ-ently.
Sarah Connor and her nine-year-old son, John, destroyed Cyberdyne's research on the nanoprocessor
that would lead to the Skynet defense system. Miles Dyson, Skynet's chief researcher, was killed in a
firefight in the company's Los Angeles headquarters.
Cyberdyne's research program was disrupted; 1997 and went, and no missiles fell from the sky, bringing
holocaust and nuclear winter. Sarah and John Connor planned a new life, lying low in the enormous
metropolis of Mexico City.
But they were not through with Skynet.
JADE'S WORLD
In the new reality, Judgment Day was merely postponed. The Skynet system was implemented in 2007
and worked without error for fourteen years. Then, in 2021, a new global crisis emerged over the fate of
Taiwan.
In mainland China, the leadership announced it had a sacred duty to annex Taiwan. Government
agencies fomented demonstrations in the great cities of China—Beijing, Chungking, Nanking, Shanghai
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—supporting the decision. The crisis dragged on for weeks, then Chinese warships sailed into
Taiwanese waters. The U.S. President issued a warning to Beijing not to attack the island. China defied
it and called on the Taiwanese government to step down. As the United Nations argued and delayed,
U.S. warships sailed into the China Sea. China an-nounced that it was prepared to fire its nuclear
weapons at the U.S. if it took military action.
They fed all the data into Skynet, and it placed the American missiles on high alert. At that point, the
complexity it was managing pushed the war computer
or the edge, into a new state of self-awareness. Its
controllers tried to shut it down, and Skynet reacted. It launched the U.S. ICBMs...
Judgment Day:June 18, 2021.
In that dark future, the human Resistance fought a losing battle against Skynet's machines, which had
gained control of U.S. military platforms and supply factories over many years, starting long prior to
Judgment Day. In that future, too, Miho Tagatoshi, known as "Jade," grew to adulthood, joining the
Resistance. In 2036, the Resistance sent five genetically -enhanced Specialist warriors back in time—into
John's World of 2001—with a mission to create a new timeline in which Skynet would not be built, and
Judgment Day would never happen. Among them went Jade, the most radically enhanced of them all.
She was physically and intellectually superhuman, with a potential to be immortal.
She and the others left their world behind. They traveled across realities to August 2001.
They sought the help of John and Sarah Connor.
ACROSS THE DIMENSIONS
The Skynet of Jade's World retaliated. In 2036, it sent back an advanced, liquid-metal Terminator, an
experimental/autonomous T-XA unit, to hunt down the Specialists and eradicate them.
Aided by the Connors, and Cyberdyne's chief research scientist. Dr. Rosanna Monk, the Specialists
destroyed the T-XA. Rosanna Monk had been given Miles Dyson's position after his death, and had
dis-played similar genius.
Three Specialists were killed, fighting the T-XA. Only two survived: Jade, and Anton Panov, a massively
built, quietly-spoken Russian. With the
Connors,they exposed the activities of Cyberdyne
Systems, whose executives and scientists had been
neurally reprogrammed by the T-XA to create and
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serveSkynet. Again, realities diverged; a new timeline had been created. Jade's World, where Skynet
seemed triumphant, was no longer the future awaiting John's reality of 2001. But existing timelines were
never rubbed away, they remained in parallel.
In Skynet's World, Judgment Day had still taken place in 1997. In fade's World, Judgment Day had
still taken place in 2021. In Skynet's World, the machines were confronted by a human Resistance led
by John Connor. In Jade's World, John Connor had died years earlier.
None of those facts could be altered. Not ever.
Skynet had to be defeated in both of those alternative worlds. If Skynet prevailed in any of the worlds
where its counterparts existed, then no world was safe. The war computer would surely perfect travel
across the dimensions, then invade every timestream required to hunt down humans and exterminate them
totally. It had to be stopped.
John and Sarah, Jade, and Anton traveled forward in time to 2029—and across the dimensions to
Skynet's
World. They were guided by a T-799 "Eve" Terminator sent back in time by General John Connor,
leader of the human Resistance. Fighting alongside General Connor, the Specialists, and his mother, the
teenage John helped destroy Skynet in a final battle at its mountain headquarters in Spain. That left one
more task.
The Skynet of Jade's World remained undefeated, seemingly invincible. Unless it was stopped, it would
rage unhindered through every timeline. The Special-ists knew that now. They had to find a way to defeat
it; they had to return to their own world. There was no choice but to take one more momentous journey,
forward in time—once again—and between two timelines. Across the dimensions.
It might be suicide, like riding into a valley of death against an invincible adversary, but it had to be done.
Skynet had to beaten once again, in the world where it was strongest.
In John's mind, however, there was no doubt, there could be no argument.
He had to go to Jade's World.
PART ONE:
SKYNET'S WORLD
ONE
VIRGINIA
SEPTEMBER 2, 2029
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Like a pair of huge, deadly wasps, two aerial
Hunter-Killer machines rose slowly above the concrete floor of their local base, then skimmed past their
attending endoskeletons—hyperalloy machines jointed inthe manner of a human skeleton, stripped of
flesh, and designed to mimic the versatility of human movements. As the two endos watched
dispassion-ately, red eyes glowing in the dim light, the H-Ks skimmed along a metal ramp, tilted upward
at 30°, then headed toward a pair of gray steel doors that led to the open air. The heavy doors slid back,
with a smooth hum of motors, into the base's wall of metal, rock, and advanced ceramic. The H-Ks
exited, raising a thick cloud of dust beneath their turbofans. They hovered for the briefest of seconds,
analyzing data, then climbed higher against a dull, smoky sky.
Behind them, the camouflaged doors slammed shut. Their color blended with an outcrop of weathered
rock, painted a similar gray by years of atmospheric pollution.
The H-Ks headed north and east in response to a stream of fused infrared and visual data from the
ground-level and orbiting sensors that had once served their master—the war computer, Skynet.
Channeled through Skynet's worldwide grid of sec-ondary processing nodes, such data streams
contin-ued to give the computer's remaining machines pre-cious information. These H-Ks knew much
about the locations and movements of their human enemies across the entire landscape of North
America. It was time to strike another blow against them.
Skynet had sent no new commands for six weeks, and the H-Ks' circuitry contained the implicit
know-ledge that the great war computer had been des-troyed. But that did not faze them. They were not
designed to question their standing orders: in this case, to attack and destroy any humans, or any hu-man
vehicle, that approached within a fifty-mile radius of their base. Like other machines, on all the
contin-ents, they still obeyed the orders of their former master. They had no need to form any opinion on
the fact that no new orders came, or would ever come.
The H-Ks' central processing units were essentially Dyson nanochips, the same technology that had
been used to build Skynet itself, though Skynet's intelli-gence had been orders of magnitude beyond that
of any machine under its command. More advanced CPUs, with more sophisticated programming, had
been installed in the most advanced war machines in Skynet's army: the Centurion gun-pods; the
marching endoskeletons; and the far more advanced infiltration units known as Terminators, which
imitated human appearance for the purpose of getting close to and killing as many humans as possible. In
their different ways, the T-800 and T-1000 Terminators could mimic a human being almost perfectly. But
even they were dwarfed in intelligence by the superhuman mind that Skynet had been. Compared to its
lost glory, their nanotechnological brains were like those of ants. The intelligence of the aerial H-Ks was
that much less again.
Yet, the H-Ks had their assigned tasks—for those, their hardware and programming were quite
sufficient.
In the distance, a jagged line of lightning split the perpetually sunless sky. Seconds later came thunder,
but no rain. None of this concerned the two killing machines. They accelerated to 300 mph as they
traveled over the dry, almost treeless terrain at a height of sixty feet. More lightning flashed and a strong
wind blew across the land, but none of this troubled the H-Ks.
The data stream showed a column of light armored vehicles, with an estimated thirty humans, now only
twenty-four miles distant. Within the war machines' nanotechnological circuits, tiny adjustments created a
sensation somewhat akin to satisfaction. Soon, those humans would be terminated. Within minutes, the
H-Ks detected the humans directly with infrared and visible-light sensors. The humans saw them,
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