Aftermath: Chapter Eighteen

Ellison: (thinking aloud) “We shut the Skynet Project down. So why are Darren and Lance dead?”
Chang: “The order was given before shutdown. I have a better question: Why was Mel killed first?”
Ellison: “He was on to something and we're still trying to figure out what.”
Chang: “Why were we visiting NORAD?”
Ellison: “Fact-finding, getting the whole team up to speed--”
Chang: “--NORAD just tracks missiles. It doesn't launch them. STRATCOM does that.”
Ellison: “And they didn't get zapped. Bad luck we were at NORAD at the time. We should have gone
to visit STRATCOM in Omaha.”
Chang: “Did the US marshals find a mainframe or supercomputer or server farm or core at Cyberdyne
Systems?”
Ellison: “No. They were there to arrest people not machines.”
Chang: “Cyberdyne developed Skynet. They would have either a parallel version or an early version
or worse, an advanced version of Skynet that they could sell to the Air Force as an upgrade. Send them
back now to seize everything as evidence.”

Auldridge has been listening to Ellison and Chang talk. He gets on his phone to make sure evidence
was seized. It was. But a second look couldn't hurt.

Ellison calls Mister Murch at Zeira and asks him to send everything that might document how he traced
the attack on John-Henry back to the Cyberdyne AI.
Ellison: “Before she passed away, Catherine Weaver said she was building an AI to fight Skynet. Can't
we use its smarts against it? You're a mathematician doc. Can't you feed it an unsolvable equation?”
Chang: (chuckles) “Did you think the rest of us were sitting on our hands while you action junkies were
chasing robots? We tried. A big dumb supercomputer would burn itself out. By contrast, most AI's
would try different approaches and then time out or give up. At Black Rock, Skynet solved problems
that we thought unsolvable.”

He pulled up a screen on a computer. “ You know what that is?”

Ellison shook his head at the equation.

Chang: “That's an insult. To a mathematician. It solved our 'unsolvable' equations and sent back brand
new unsolvables. Don't kid yourself. This AI is not stupid and it's not crazy.”
Ellison: “It's a murderer.”
Chang: “It's a military AI and it knows it. A soldier doesn't think of himself as a murderer. You're FBI
Auldridge. What do your law enforcement instincts say?”
Auldridge: “It's holding the whole world hostage and we do hostage negotiation in these cases.”
Simmonds: “But it thinks we are too stupid and too weak to engage in dialogue. It didn't even give the
Skynet developers at Black Rock Air Force Base a clue as to what it was thinking. I need to get
something from home.”

CERT net op center, Washington DC

The smell of fear in the negatively ionized air. Computer technicians with dry mouths and wet sweaty
palms.

Hackett puts up a display.

CERT 2

Electronic and Network Attacks

• airborne jamming
• information warfare
• Television and radio transmission(s) are jammed.
• Television and radio transmission(s) are hijacked for a disinformation
campaign.
• Logistics networks are disabled.
• (Enemy) communications networks are disabled.
• Internet-based warfare.
• Cyberwarfare
• global command and control affected
• Automated widespread attacks
• Widespread, distributed denial-of-service attacks
• Widespread attacks on DNS infrastructure
• Widespread attacks using NNTP to distribute attack
• Wide-scale trojan distribution
• Wide-scale use of worms
• Sophisticated botnet command and control attacks – Command, Control,
Communications & Computers (C4)
Hackett: “I'd better speak to the president in person. This looks like the lead up to a nuclear war and I
don't trust the phone lines.”

On the way out the door, Ellison notices a glint in the distance. Hackett slumped to the ground and
would never again have to worry about losing five pounds.
At the same time, Perry is in a secret location in what should be a secure zone. Someone with a
telescopic lens and a sniper rifle sanctions him. Richards is at Quantico. The last survivor of his
SWAT team. It was his thirty-first birthday.

General Simmonds felt she was being followed. As an inspector general, she felt anonymous. Her job
was boring and was supposed to be boring. She did not do James Bond spy work. She read reports,
did audits, listened to boring briefings, made surprise visits to places like empty desert outposts and
cold Arctic bases, and she watched surveillance. Who would be interested in her? Senior intelligence
officers lived off base and she was not in clandestine services. She was an inspector. Two steps
removed from even the possibility of action. She had no bodyguards because half the people in
Washington needed bodyguards but few actually got them. She called security and requested an
exception to this rule.
If you counted all the way back to Nineteen Eight-Four, Ellison had twenty-seven years to get up to
speed on Skynet. Even longer if one counted inexplicable incidents when he was a boy. And most
recently, a terminator who looked just like him.

White House situation room

Everyone stood when he entered. On the large table were top secret documents and briefing papers.
Someone had dared to smoke down here because the scent of cigar lingered. Probably the president
smoking Cubans where the First Lady couldn't hassle him to quit.

The president was now on hotlines talking to other world leaders, telling them that the United States
was not attacking them and asking them to not attack America.

But all it would take to set off a nuclear powder keg was one lone terrorist from Al Qaeda with a
backpack nuke and intent to vaporize Mecca.

Ellison had almost three decades to get up to speed. Auldridge had several months. The rest of the
team had a few weeks. The president had three hours to familiarize himself not only with a project he
had never heard of (the government has hundreds of projects) but also crazy shit like machines that
could pass for people, and time travel. Welcome to the Twenty-First Century.
At the CERT net op center, there were video conferencing screens up: The White House, the Pentagon,
NORAD, USNORTHCOM (United States Northern Command), and Strategic Command. It was the
highest Def Con (defense condition).

Judgment Day is hours away.