[SCC] Risk Management - IAWL series - John, Savannah, Bedell - Teen
TITLE: Risk Management
SERIES: It’s a Wonderful Life
AUTHOR: indiefic
CHARACTERS: John Connor, Savannah Weaver, Martin Bedell
RATING: Teen for language
WORD COUNT: ~3500
WARNINGS: Spoilers for all of season 2.
DISCLAIMER: Don't own 'em. Don't know who does.
TIMELINE: post Judgment Day, 2027
NOTES: Warning, unlike the other sections, this one contains some actual plot. ;p
SUMMARY: Allies and enemies and insurrection oh my!
***
John sighs in contentment and leans back in his chair. “Thanks.” He figures it’s a bad sign that he is not only getting used to what passes for food in this time, but that he considers a meal of roasted pigeon and something that looks suspiciously like seaweed to be not only edible, but a damn good meal. At least it wasn’t rat. Or squirrel. Or dog. Dog was the worst.
Savannah led him to the commissary and helped him procure his first meal in three days. Now that his stomach is full, he’s finding it hard to keep his eyes open despite all the questions speeding through his mind, but he presses on. “How long have you been here?”
“Serrano Point?” she asks, tucking an auburn lock behind her ear. She looks less like Catherine Weaver than John would have expected. Or maybe it’s just that the T-1001 was so devoid of the spark of life that drives Savannah that it’s difficult to see the physical similarities. “Four years here. Before that, we were in Mississippi for a while. Before that, it was Colorado. We bounced around a lot after J-Day.”
“We,” John prompts, suddenly wide awake. “You and John Henry?”
“John Henry,” Savannah repeats quietly, sinking back in her chair. “Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name.” For several long moment, she seems lost in memory. She catches herself and shakes her head. “No. Not John Henry. I haven’t seen him since … before. No. I mean me and James. Mr. Ellison.”
“Ellison,” John repeats, disappointed and at the same time, encouraged by the sound of a familiar name. “He stayed with you after …”
“After the shape-shifting terminator who had been impersonating my dead mother jumped through time with you after John Henry?”
John winces sympathetically.
Savannah gives him a sad smile. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with it.” The corners of her mouth curve up wryly. “As much as you can come to terms with something like that.”
John nods solemnly. “I know what you mean,” he says in a near whisper.
Savannah watches him carefully.
John squirms a little in his chair and eventually has to look away.
“Are you going to ask me about her?”
“Who?” John asks, unable to meet Savannah’s gaze.
“You mom,” she says softly.
John swallows thickly, blinking back tears. He steels his resolve and gives Savannah his best poker face, jaw set. “What happened to my mom?”
Savannah smiles again. “I don’t know where she is right now,” she says. “Sarah and James used to trade information every now and then. They weren’t friends exactly, but I guess after you live through J-Day, anyone familiar becomes family.”
John can’t move, can’t breathe. “She’s …” He can’t say it. His throat burns too badly. “She’s alive? But Cameron said … Cameron said she was sick.”
Savannah gives him a helpless expression. “I don’t know anything about Sarah being sick. If she was, she hid it well.” Quickly, she adds, “But I haven’t heard a word about her in at least six months.”
“But six months ago,” he says, frantically leaning across the table toward Savannah. “Six months ago she was alive.”
Cautiously, Savannah nods. “Yeah. I saw her in the control room. I didn’t speak to her. She was talking to Bedell and Perry.”
John takes a deep breath and sits back in his chair. Sarah might still be alive. He hadn’t even allowed himself to consider the possibility.
Savannah leans forward and gently touches John’s hand. “She’s a pretty fringe element, even in these times. But once or twice a year, she shows up out of the blue with recon. Good recon. If it wasn’t for what she did at Century, I think some people might suspect she was a Gray.”
John’s brow furrows as he tries to parse all of Savannah’s comments. “She was in Century?”
Savannah nods. “Yeah. The official story is that Kyle Reese, Derek’s younger brother, was the one who broke them all out, but James always maintained that Sarah was the one behind most of it. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
John blinks at Savannah. Sarah was in Century with Kyle? And no one told him. His joy at the thought of Sarah being alive is tempered by a sense of betrayal so deep he can barely breathe. Kyle and Derek knew. They knew and they didn’t tell him. His own family in this God forsaken time let him think he was an orphan.
“John,” Savannah says, squeezing his hand. “You okay?”
He shakes off the emotion, pushing it down, burying it like he’s buried so many others in his life. “Yeah. Fine.”
She looks unconvinced, but she lets it drop. “I’ll ask around, see if anybody has any idea how to get in contact with Sarah.”
“Maybe Ellison knows,” John offers.
Savannah’s lips purse together tightly and she swallows thickly. “James died earlier this year. Biological warfare. Took our two entire camps before we were able to manufacture a cure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Savannah says sadly. Slowly, she rises to her feet. “Come on. We’ll find you a bunk.”
***
John looks up as Savannah enters the lab. “I talked to Bedell,” she says. “He says he’ll do what he can, but he can’t make any promises about your mom.”
John nods. Bedell’s certainly not in a position to be wasting manpower trying to track down someone who obviously doesn’t want to be found. The fact that he’s willing to give it any priority at all is testament to Bedell’s sense of honor.
John looks back at the chip, adjusting the voltage and then tapping in another sequence, trying to access the menus again. Savannah’s lab is impressive, especially considering how scarce resources are in this time. There are two other techs, Radha Martin, a former electrical engineer in her early fifties and a thirty-something mechanic who goes by the name Ears. According to Savannah, the three of them have spent the last four years trying to decode enough of Skynet’s syntax to enable them to pull meaningful intel off the chips. So far, they haven’t had a whole lot of luck. They usually go straight for the visual memory since they don’t need the syntax to be able to understand the recordings. However, without any sort of primer, they’re often left without any way to understand how one clip might relate to another.
“The most basic pieces of the coding are in Assembly and LISP,” Radha says, looking over John’s shoulder. She taps on several of the keys, launches a command window and types in a few symbols that flood the window with line after line of decompiled code. “Here,” she says, pointing to several lines of code.
John winces. God, he hates LISP. But he slogs through a couple lines of code and gets enough to understand that it’s a procedure call for moving information from one section of physical memory to another.
“But it’s only the most low level functions,” Radha continues. “Any of the higher level functions and most of the raw data storage is in some Skynet specific language we haven’t been able to decipher yet.”
“Why do you want to decipher it?” John asks.
Savannah and Ears stop what they’re doing and join Radha in staring at him. John’s getting rather used to that. In only three days in the lab, he’s stopped them all in their tracks several times with his comments.
“I’m serious,” John presses. “I can drive a car, but I don’t really want to understand the intimate details of petroleum processing or how an internal combustion engine works.” He does, actually, understand the intimate details of both petroleum processing and the internal combustion engine, but that’s not the point of this discussion.
“Maddy thought the way you do,” Savannah says. “She played with them, poked around, experimented with some of the machines we had.”
“And?”
“And one of them killed her. And a two dozen other soldiers before someone finally took it out with an RPG that destroyed two years worth of research,” Savannah explains.
John purses his lips together and nods. This is dangerous. He understands that. But at the same time, they can’t afford to take the amount of time necessary to try and methodically slice away at Skynet. Humanity doesn’t have that kind of time, regardless of the risks.
***
“You’re giving that chip too much voltage,” Ears says, shooting John a warning look.
John glances up and then looks away, rolling his eyes. “I know what I’m doing.” John’s been a part of Savannah’s team for three weeks and he and Ears still haven’t found a way to really get along.
“Savannah’s not gonna like it,” Ears presses.
“I’ll handle Savannah,” John says, in what he hopes is a confident tone of voice. The whole reason he’s doing this while Savannah’s out of the lab is because he knows she won’t like it.
Ears snorts, but doesn’t say anything.
John turns his attention back to the chip again. The more he digs into it, the more convinced he is that Savannah’s methodology, while elegant, is flawed. Flawed because humanity can’t afford to wait. Savannah is too careful. She and her team are never going to make the kinds of advances they need to make in understanding Skynet’s architecture with the baby steps they’re taking. They need to be decisive. They need to take risks, or there’s never going to be any payoff.
“What the?” Ears curses.
Looking over his shoulder, John sees one of the mechanical arms that Ears was dissecting start to move. John immediately looks back at his chip and then at his monitor. It flickers black for a moment and then he’s looking at a live video feed of himself, washed in the red tones of Skynet’s heads up display. “Fuck.”
John turns and sees the rest of the monitors in the lab flicker and then switch to the heads up display. Ears and John look at each other for a heartbeat, both of them seized with panic. Then, in unison, they both run for the router in the corner of the room. Ears reaches it a second before John and pulls the fiber optic cable connecting it to the rest of the complex network so hard that it strips the optics clean out of the chassis.
Ears is panting. Turning, he looks at John. “You think it got out?”
John opens his mouth to reply, but it’s cut short when claxons start blaring in the complex.
***
John stares at the toes of his boots. He’s slumped in a chair across from Bedell’s desk. John feels like shit. He’s been up for days, helping to restore files and reroute power and network lines. It took them thirty-six hours to completely flush the malicious worm out of the power plant’s production network. They avoided a meltdown, but a good number of the camp’s systems are still offline, namely water desalinization, the pump station for the plumbing to the head and power to the commissary. John’s surprised the camp hasn’t rioted yet. The fact that they haven’t is just testament to the number of hardships these people can endure. And that makes John feel like even more of a tool. Because these people had it bad enough to begin with and he went and fucked it up even worse.
“You blatantly disobeyed protocol,” Bedell says.
John nods.
“Why?”
John looks up at the weary general, trying to remember him as the boy he once knew. “Because we’re never going to win this war like this.”
Bedell looks at John. Bedell’s not angry. Not sad. Just tired. He sighs and leans forward, rubbing his eyes.
John’s comes to a very uncomfortable realization. Bedell knows. He knows they can’t win. He knows humanity is only delaying the inevitable. It’s a sobering, terrifying thought. But at the same time, John understands that there isn’t anything else Bedell can do except toe the line. Bedell has to try and maintain control or else the inevitable will just happen sooner.
Bedell sits back in his chair, pulls open one of his desk drawers and removes a plastic jug, setting it on the desk. He finds two cups, unscrews the jug’s lid and sloshes some of the clear liquid into the chipped glasses.
John takes the cup from Bedell and sniffs at it, wincing as the fumes burn his nose. This crap has to be at least a hundred and forty proof. He grimaces, swigging back the entire shot at once, hoping like hell it doesn’t kill him. Or blind him. John coughs violently as the alcohol burns its way down his throat. Between spasms, he watches as Bedell drinks his like water, sighing in contentment.
Bedell waits until John finishes choking and then holds up the jug in offering. John waves him off, but watches as Bedell pours himself another shot and downs it in one gulp.
“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” Bedell asks, contemplating his glass. “Not this you. Not John Connor the teenage boy.”
John doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t break eye contact.
“Just like Derek Reese never should have been at Presidio Alto. At least not the adult Derek Reese.” Bedell stares, unblinking, at John for several long moments. He smiles. “You know, the first time I saw him he was probably twenty. I thought I’d lost my mind. But then he introduced himself as Derek.” Bedell shakes his head. “Not Derek Baum, mind you. Or Derek Connor. But Derek Reese. And Derek Reese didn’t know anyone named John Connor.”
John looks at the floor, shaking his head. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“We were supposed to win,” Bedell says. It’s not a question.
Slowly, John looks up and meets his gaze. “Yes. We were supposed to win.”
Bedell nods, his expression tight. “And instead, we’re just treading water until they finish us off.”
John shakes his head. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says vehemently. “We can change it. We can find ways to fight them.”
Bedell laughs mirthlessly. “Any more of your experiments go awry and we won’t even have to wait for the metal to do us in, we’ll save them the trouble and off ourselves.”
John winces. He certainly has a point.
Bedell’s expression softens. “Things are never as simple as they seem.”
John’s brow furrows in question.
“You’re right,” Bedell says bluntly. “We’re never going to win this war like this. We have to take chances, even if it means risking our lives.” He sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “But there are so many fucking vultures just waiting and watching. The metal’s only part of the problem.”
John considers Bedell’s words carefully. “Taylor?”
Bedell nods. “Taylor. Fucking jackal. He likes to stir up trouble in the camps. Spreads dissention, chaos, anarchy.” He smiles mirthlessly. “As if we don’t already have enough of that.”
John looks pointedly at Bedell. “Can’t you just …”
“Off him?” Bedell asks. When John nods, he chuckles. “Wish it was that simple. And don’t think I haven’t seriously considered it. Taylor’s half crazy, but he’s not stupid. He has followers, zealous followers. If we got rid of him - if people found out it was us, it would tear apart what passes for human society. We’d all be totally fucked.”
“Taylor would do that?” John asks, dumbfounded that anyone’s ego could be that big. “He’d risk what remains of humanity to suit his own agenda?”
“In a heartbeat,” Bedell confirms darkly. “Taylor uses metal to further his own ends. He uses them as the bad guys in his own personal mythology. The boogymen.” He smiles mirthlessly. “The evil from which Taylor will deliver humanity.”
A chill traces down John’s spine. Taylor’s rhetoric is no doubt powerful with the straggling remains of the human race.
“It’s all a bunch of bullshit,” Bedell sneers. “I don’t even think Taylor believes half the shit he says. But it doesn’t matter. He’s learned it’s power. It gets him followers, people willing to do anything for him in the name of humanity. Thirty years ago the guy would have had some infomercial empire. Now he’s a bigger threat to the survival of humanity than Skynet.”
John shakes his head. “It’s all the more reason to act now. We can’t wait. Between the machines and Taylor’s insurrection, if we don’t do something soon, the human race is truly going to be lost.”
Bedell pours another shot of alcohol into his glass and swirls it around, watching the liquid. He shakes his head. “I’m barely holding this camp together as it is. A few years ago we found an old nuclear sub. One of Savannah’s techs, Maddy, had some metal she swore she reprogrammed enough to be able to captain the damn thing. We were going to try and use it for supply runs, to reach out to potential human allies.” He swallows the alcohol in one mouthful and then takes a deep breath. “Taylor stirred up a hornet’s nest of trouble over the damn thing. Convinced people that the captain couldn’t be trusted, that we were conspiring with the enemy. A few of his crazier followers got on board and scuttled the sub. Cost me four of my best soldiers. Taylor spread rumors that the metal had flipped on us, that it was responsible for it all. That we brought it down on ourselves.”
“Jesus,” John curses.
Bedell nods sadly.
“Then we are completely screwed,” John says.
Bedell nods again. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
John sighs in frustration and reaches across the desk, pouring himself another shot and choking it down. He and Bedell sit in silence for several moments, both of them lost in misery and memories.
“So tell me,” Bedell finally says. “How the hell are you here?”
“It’s a long story.”
Bedell leans back in his chair and props his feet up on his desk. “I’ve got time.”
John contemplates his empty glass. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Or maybe he’s just sick of lying to people. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“Try me.”
John looks at Bedell for a long moment and then lets out a harsh breath. It comes out in a jumble. All of it. Sarah. Kyle. How an adult Derek ended up at Presidio Alto. How a teenage John Connor ended up in 2027. And why the world was so fucked.
Bedell listened to it all in silence and when John finally finished, he simply nodded. “I know that the metal if fucking with things it doesn’t have any business fucking with. Goes against nature.”
“You know about Skynet’s time travel research?”
Bedell nods. “Topanga Canyon. Lot of freaky shit going down there.”
John leans forward, looking at Bedell with a pleading expression. “We have to get into that facility. Trust me when I tell you that if we do, we can stop all of this from happening.”
Bedell laughs. “Shit. I can’t mount an offensive of that scale.”
“You have to,” John says firmly.
Bedell’s lips press into a thin, hard line and he looks at John. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “But if I were you I’d get used to this time.”
John nods. Bedell will do what he can and that’s all John can ask for. But Bedell is wrong. John can fix this. He will fix this.
***
Hours later, John is patrolling the old service tunnels underneath Serrano Point. It makes him feel useful and puts him somewhere that he doesn’t have to endure the dirty looks from all the people he pissed off with his chip experimentation.
“It’s not safe for you to be down here alone.”
John spins around, heart pounding. How the hell did someone sneak up on him? Fuck. He has to get his head in the game before it gets blown off.
He sees the man, standing mostly in shadow a couple of dozen yards down the tunnel. He keeps his weapon trained on him. “What the fuck do you want?”
The man steps forward and John raises the rifle higher. The lighting sucks and John’s eyes burn from lack of sleep and Bedell’s moonshine.
“You shouldn’t be here, John. You shouldn’t have come.”
John blinks and then watches as the man steps closer and closer. Even in the dim light, John can make out the features that used to belong to Cromartie. He swallows thickly. “John Henry?”
The cyborg tilts its head to the side and looks at him quizzically.
“Cameron?”
***
[end section]
SERIES: It’s a Wonderful Life
AUTHOR: indiefic
CHARACTERS: John Connor, Savannah Weaver, Martin Bedell
RATING: Teen for language
WORD COUNT: ~3500
WARNINGS: Spoilers for all of season 2.
DISCLAIMER: Don't own 'em. Don't know who does.
TIMELINE: post Judgment Day, 2027
NOTES: Warning, unlike the other sections, this one contains some actual plot. ;p
SUMMARY: Allies and enemies and insurrection oh my!
***
John sighs in contentment and leans back in his chair. “Thanks.” He figures it’s a bad sign that he is not only getting used to what passes for food in this time, but that he considers a meal of roasted pigeon and something that looks suspiciously like seaweed to be not only edible, but a damn good meal. At least it wasn’t rat. Or squirrel. Or dog. Dog was the worst.
Savannah led him to the commissary and helped him procure his first meal in three days. Now that his stomach is full, he’s finding it hard to keep his eyes open despite all the questions speeding through his mind, but he presses on. “How long have you been here?”
“Serrano Point?” she asks, tucking an auburn lock behind her ear. She looks less like Catherine Weaver than John would have expected. Or maybe it’s just that the T-1001 was so devoid of the spark of life that drives Savannah that it’s difficult to see the physical similarities. “Four years here. Before that, we were in Mississippi for a while. Before that, it was Colorado. We bounced around a lot after J-Day.”
“We,” John prompts, suddenly wide awake. “You and John Henry?”
“John Henry,” Savannah repeats quietly, sinking back in her chair. “Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name.” For several long moment, she seems lost in memory. She catches herself and shakes her head. “No. Not John Henry. I haven’t seen him since … before. No. I mean me and James. Mr. Ellison.”
“Ellison,” John repeats, disappointed and at the same time, encouraged by the sound of a familiar name. “He stayed with you after …”
“After the shape-shifting terminator who had been impersonating my dead mother jumped through time with you after John Henry?”
John winces sympathetically.
Savannah gives him a sad smile. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with it.” The corners of her mouth curve up wryly. “As much as you can come to terms with something like that.”
John nods solemnly. “I know what you mean,” he says in a near whisper.
Savannah watches him carefully.
John squirms a little in his chair and eventually has to look away.
“Are you going to ask me about her?”
“Who?” John asks, unable to meet Savannah’s gaze.
“You mom,” she says softly.
John swallows thickly, blinking back tears. He steels his resolve and gives Savannah his best poker face, jaw set. “What happened to my mom?”
Savannah smiles again. “I don’t know where she is right now,” she says. “Sarah and James used to trade information every now and then. They weren’t friends exactly, but I guess after you live through J-Day, anyone familiar becomes family.”
John can’t move, can’t breathe. “She’s …” He can’t say it. His throat burns too badly. “She’s alive? But Cameron said … Cameron said she was sick.”
Savannah gives him a helpless expression. “I don’t know anything about Sarah being sick. If she was, she hid it well.” Quickly, she adds, “But I haven’t heard a word about her in at least six months.”
“But six months ago,” he says, frantically leaning across the table toward Savannah. “Six months ago she was alive.”
Cautiously, Savannah nods. “Yeah. I saw her in the control room. I didn’t speak to her. She was talking to Bedell and Perry.”
John takes a deep breath and sits back in his chair. Sarah might still be alive. He hadn’t even allowed himself to consider the possibility.
Savannah leans forward and gently touches John’s hand. “She’s a pretty fringe element, even in these times. But once or twice a year, she shows up out of the blue with recon. Good recon. If it wasn’t for what she did at Century, I think some people might suspect she was a Gray.”
John’s brow furrows as he tries to parse all of Savannah’s comments. “She was in Century?”
Savannah nods. “Yeah. The official story is that Kyle Reese, Derek’s younger brother, was the one who broke them all out, but James always maintained that Sarah was the one behind most of it. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
John blinks at Savannah. Sarah was in Century with Kyle? And no one told him. His joy at the thought of Sarah being alive is tempered by a sense of betrayal so deep he can barely breathe. Kyle and Derek knew. They knew and they didn’t tell him. His own family in this God forsaken time let him think he was an orphan.
“John,” Savannah says, squeezing his hand. “You okay?”
He shakes off the emotion, pushing it down, burying it like he’s buried so many others in his life. “Yeah. Fine.”
She looks unconvinced, but she lets it drop. “I’ll ask around, see if anybody has any idea how to get in contact with Sarah.”
“Maybe Ellison knows,” John offers.
Savannah’s lips purse together tightly and she swallows thickly. “James died earlier this year. Biological warfare. Took our two entire camps before we were able to manufacture a cure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Savannah says sadly. Slowly, she rises to her feet. “Come on. We’ll find you a bunk.”
***
John looks up as Savannah enters the lab. “I talked to Bedell,” she says. “He says he’ll do what he can, but he can’t make any promises about your mom.”
John nods. Bedell’s certainly not in a position to be wasting manpower trying to track down someone who obviously doesn’t want to be found. The fact that he’s willing to give it any priority at all is testament to Bedell’s sense of honor.
John looks back at the chip, adjusting the voltage and then tapping in another sequence, trying to access the menus again. Savannah’s lab is impressive, especially considering how scarce resources are in this time. There are two other techs, Radha Martin, a former electrical engineer in her early fifties and a thirty-something mechanic who goes by the name Ears. According to Savannah, the three of them have spent the last four years trying to decode enough of Skynet’s syntax to enable them to pull meaningful intel off the chips. So far, they haven’t had a whole lot of luck. They usually go straight for the visual memory since they don’t need the syntax to be able to understand the recordings. However, without any sort of primer, they’re often left without any way to understand how one clip might relate to another.
“The most basic pieces of the coding are in Assembly and LISP,” Radha says, looking over John’s shoulder. She taps on several of the keys, launches a command window and types in a few symbols that flood the window with line after line of decompiled code. “Here,” she says, pointing to several lines of code.
John winces. God, he hates LISP. But he slogs through a couple lines of code and gets enough to understand that it’s a procedure call for moving information from one section of physical memory to another.
“But it’s only the most low level functions,” Radha continues. “Any of the higher level functions and most of the raw data storage is in some Skynet specific language we haven’t been able to decipher yet.”
“Why do you want to decipher it?” John asks.
Savannah and Ears stop what they’re doing and join Radha in staring at him. John’s getting rather used to that. In only three days in the lab, he’s stopped them all in their tracks several times with his comments.
“I’m serious,” John presses. “I can drive a car, but I don’t really want to understand the intimate details of petroleum processing or how an internal combustion engine works.” He does, actually, understand the intimate details of both petroleum processing and the internal combustion engine, but that’s not the point of this discussion.
“Maddy thought the way you do,” Savannah says. “She played with them, poked around, experimented with some of the machines we had.”
“And?”
“And one of them killed her. And a two dozen other soldiers before someone finally took it out with an RPG that destroyed two years worth of research,” Savannah explains.
John purses his lips together and nods. This is dangerous. He understands that. But at the same time, they can’t afford to take the amount of time necessary to try and methodically slice away at Skynet. Humanity doesn’t have that kind of time, regardless of the risks.
***
“You’re giving that chip too much voltage,” Ears says, shooting John a warning look.
John glances up and then looks away, rolling his eyes. “I know what I’m doing.” John’s been a part of Savannah’s team for three weeks and he and Ears still haven’t found a way to really get along.
“Savannah’s not gonna like it,” Ears presses.
“I’ll handle Savannah,” John says, in what he hopes is a confident tone of voice. The whole reason he’s doing this while Savannah’s out of the lab is because he knows she won’t like it.
Ears snorts, but doesn’t say anything.
John turns his attention back to the chip again. The more he digs into it, the more convinced he is that Savannah’s methodology, while elegant, is flawed. Flawed because humanity can’t afford to wait. Savannah is too careful. She and her team are never going to make the kinds of advances they need to make in understanding Skynet’s architecture with the baby steps they’re taking. They need to be decisive. They need to take risks, or there’s never going to be any payoff.
“What the?” Ears curses.
Looking over his shoulder, John sees one of the mechanical arms that Ears was dissecting start to move. John immediately looks back at his chip and then at his monitor. It flickers black for a moment and then he’s looking at a live video feed of himself, washed in the red tones of Skynet’s heads up display. “Fuck.”
John turns and sees the rest of the monitors in the lab flicker and then switch to the heads up display. Ears and John look at each other for a heartbeat, both of them seized with panic. Then, in unison, they both run for the router in the corner of the room. Ears reaches it a second before John and pulls the fiber optic cable connecting it to the rest of the complex network so hard that it strips the optics clean out of the chassis.
Ears is panting. Turning, he looks at John. “You think it got out?”
John opens his mouth to reply, but it’s cut short when claxons start blaring in the complex.
***
John stares at the toes of his boots. He’s slumped in a chair across from Bedell’s desk. John feels like shit. He’s been up for days, helping to restore files and reroute power and network lines. It took them thirty-six hours to completely flush the malicious worm out of the power plant’s production network. They avoided a meltdown, but a good number of the camp’s systems are still offline, namely water desalinization, the pump station for the plumbing to the head and power to the commissary. John’s surprised the camp hasn’t rioted yet. The fact that they haven’t is just testament to the number of hardships these people can endure. And that makes John feel like even more of a tool. Because these people had it bad enough to begin with and he went and fucked it up even worse.
“You blatantly disobeyed protocol,” Bedell says.
John nods.
“Why?”
John looks up at the weary general, trying to remember him as the boy he once knew. “Because we’re never going to win this war like this.”
Bedell looks at John. Bedell’s not angry. Not sad. Just tired. He sighs and leans forward, rubbing his eyes.
John’s comes to a very uncomfortable realization. Bedell knows. He knows they can’t win. He knows humanity is only delaying the inevitable. It’s a sobering, terrifying thought. But at the same time, John understands that there isn’t anything else Bedell can do except toe the line. Bedell has to try and maintain control or else the inevitable will just happen sooner.
Bedell sits back in his chair, pulls open one of his desk drawers and removes a plastic jug, setting it on the desk. He finds two cups, unscrews the jug’s lid and sloshes some of the clear liquid into the chipped glasses.
John takes the cup from Bedell and sniffs at it, wincing as the fumes burn his nose. This crap has to be at least a hundred and forty proof. He grimaces, swigging back the entire shot at once, hoping like hell it doesn’t kill him. Or blind him. John coughs violently as the alcohol burns its way down his throat. Between spasms, he watches as Bedell drinks his like water, sighing in contentment.
Bedell waits until John finishes choking and then holds up the jug in offering. John waves him off, but watches as Bedell pours himself another shot and downs it in one gulp.
“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” Bedell asks, contemplating his glass. “Not this you. Not John Connor the teenage boy.”
John doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t break eye contact.
“Just like Derek Reese never should have been at Presidio Alto. At least not the adult Derek Reese.” Bedell stares, unblinking, at John for several long moments. He smiles. “You know, the first time I saw him he was probably twenty. I thought I’d lost my mind. But then he introduced himself as Derek.” Bedell shakes his head. “Not Derek Baum, mind you. Or Derek Connor. But Derek Reese. And Derek Reese didn’t know anyone named John Connor.”
John looks at the floor, shaking his head. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“We were supposed to win,” Bedell says. It’s not a question.
Slowly, John looks up and meets his gaze. “Yes. We were supposed to win.”
Bedell nods, his expression tight. “And instead, we’re just treading water until they finish us off.”
John shakes his head. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says vehemently. “We can change it. We can find ways to fight them.”
Bedell laughs mirthlessly. “Any more of your experiments go awry and we won’t even have to wait for the metal to do us in, we’ll save them the trouble and off ourselves.”
John winces. He certainly has a point.
Bedell’s expression softens. “Things are never as simple as they seem.”
John’s brow furrows in question.
“You’re right,” Bedell says bluntly. “We’re never going to win this war like this. We have to take chances, even if it means risking our lives.” He sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “But there are so many fucking vultures just waiting and watching. The metal’s only part of the problem.”
John considers Bedell’s words carefully. “Taylor?”
Bedell nods. “Taylor. Fucking jackal. He likes to stir up trouble in the camps. Spreads dissention, chaos, anarchy.” He smiles mirthlessly. “As if we don’t already have enough of that.”
John looks pointedly at Bedell. “Can’t you just …”
“Off him?” Bedell asks. When John nods, he chuckles. “Wish it was that simple. And don’t think I haven’t seriously considered it. Taylor’s half crazy, but he’s not stupid. He has followers, zealous followers. If we got rid of him - if people found out it was us, it would tear apart what passes for human society. We’d all be totally fucked.”
“Taylor would do that?” John asks, dumbfounded that anyone’s ego could be that big. “He’d risk what remains of humanity to suit his own agenda?”
“In a heartbeat,” Bedell confirms darkly. “Taylor uses metal to further his own ends. He uses them as the bad guys in his own personal mythology. The boogymen.” He smiles mirthlessly. “The evil from which Taylor will deliver humanity.”
A chill traces down John’s spine. Taylor’s rhetoric is no doubt powerful with the straggling remains of the human race.
“It’s all a bunch of bullshit,” Bedell sneers. “I don’t even think Taylor believes half the shit he says. But it doesn’t matter. He’s learned it’s power. It gets him followers, people willing to do anything for him in the name of humanity. Thirty years ago the guy would have had some infomercial empire. Now he’s a bigger threat to the survival of humanity than Skynet.”
John shakes his head. “It’s all the more reason to act now. We can’t wait. Between the machines and Taylor’s insurrection, if we don’t do something soon, the human race is truly going to be lost.”
Bedell pours another shot of alcohol into his glass and swirls it around, watching the liquid. He shakes his head. “I’m barely holding this camp together as it is. A few years ago we found an old nuclear sub. One of Savannah’s techs, Maddy, had some metal she swore she reprogrammed enough to be able to captain the damn thing. We were going to try and use it for supply runs, to reach out to potential human allies.” He swallows the alcohol in one mouthful and then takes a deep breath. “Taylor stirred up a hornet’s nest of trouble over the damn thing. Convinced people that the captain couldn’t be trusted, that we were conspiring with the enemy. A few of his crazier followers got on board and scuttled the sub. Cost me four of my best soldiers. Taylor spread rumors that the metal had flipped on us, that it was responsible for it all. That we brought it down on ourselves.”
“Jesus,” John curses.
Bedell nods sadly.
“Then we are completely screwed,” John says.
Bedell nods again. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
John sighs in frustration and reaches across the desk, pouring himself another shot and choking it down. He and Bedell sit in silence for several moments, both of them lost in misery and memories.
“So tell me,” Bedell finally says. “How the hell are you here?”
“It’s a long story.”
Bedell leans back in his chair and props his feet up on his desk. “I’ve got time.”
John contemplates his empty glass. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Or maybe he’s just sick of lying to people. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“Try me.”
John looks at Bedell for a long moment and then lets out a harsh breath. It comes out in a jumble. All of it. Sarah. Kyle. How an adult Derek ended up at Presidio Alto. How a teenage John Connor ended up in 2027. And why the world was so fucked.
Bedell listened to it all in silence and when John finally finished, he simply nodded. “I know that the metal if fucking with things it doesn’t have any business fucking with. Goes against nature.”
“You know about Skynet’s time travel research?”
Bedell nods. “Topanga Canyon. Lot of freaky shit going down there.”
John leans forward, looking at Bedell with a pleading expression. “We have to get into that facility. Trust me when I tell you that if we do, we can stop all of this from happening.”
Bedell laughs. “Shit. I can’t mount an offensive of that scale.”
“You have to,” John says firmly.
Bedell’s lips press into a thin, hard line and he looks at John. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “But if I were you I’d get used to this time.”
John nods. Bedell will do what he can and that’s all John can ask for. But Bedell is wrong. John can fix this. He will fix this.
***
Hours later, John is patrolling the old service tunnels underneath Serrano Point. It makes him feel useful and puts him somewhere that he doesn’t have to endure the dirty looks from all the people he pissed off with his chip experimentation.
“It’s not safe for you to be down here alone.”
John spins around, heart pounding. How the hell did someone sneak up on him? Fuck. He has to get his head in the game before it gets blown off.
He sees the man, standing mostly in shadow a couple of dozen yards down the tunnel. He keeps his weapon trained on him. “What the fuck do you want?”
The man steps forward and John raises the rifle higher. The lighting sucks and John’s eyes burn from lack of sleep and Bedell’s moonshine.
“You shouldn’t be here, John. You shouldn’t have come.”
John blinks and then watches as the man steps closer and closer. Even in the dim light, John can make out the features that used to belong to Cromartie. He swallows thickly. “John Henry?”
The cyborg tilts its head to the side and looks at him quizzically.
“Cameron?”
***
[end section]