• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Kate eyed the pilot compassionately. Plainly, Blair Williams was caught between an empathetic rock and an irrefutable hard place. Connor’s wife was sympathetic—but only to a point.

“Okay, I accept that it saved you—but only to gain access to the base. Which it did, because you brought it here.” She raised a hand to forestall the other woman’s budding objection. “Relax. No one’s blaming you. Until I got into it I thought it was human myself. It fooled everyone else who came in contact with it, too. We just got lucky that the landmine it triggered did more damage to it than was probably anticipated.

“It saved one human—you—so it could kill other, more important humans, John being the most prominent among us. That’s what they do. A gun is a dangerous thing. A gun with a mind of its own is a thousand times more dangerous. That’s what Skynet is—a very big gun with a dangerously big brain. And this ‘Marcus Wright’ is just one more bullet aimed at the heart of humanity.

“It acted like a friend, but it isn’t. It saved your life because that fit in with its programming. It gives itself a name, but it’s a machine. Its pleading, the language it uses, its false implanted memories—they’re all part of cold, logical, inhuman programming. A bomb with emotions is still a bomb, whether it’s put together by a human being or Skynet. It gained your trust, and used it. But it doesn’t deserve it.”

Under Kate Connor’s withering logic Williams was reduced to mumbling a protest.

“I’m just saying, just asking, do a little more research first. Try to find out more about him before you rip him apart like some kind of sick science project.”

“There’s nothing ‘sick’ about doing what you must to ensure your survival, Blair. You want us to wait, to study him as a—personality. We don’t have the luxury of time in this fight. There are no gray areas in this war. You know that as well as any of us. There is no in-between, no partly-human or nearly-machine. It’s us or them. And you saw for yourself—it’s not one of us.”

Kate left Williams standing by herself in the hall, dejected and confused. The pilot would have to sort out her feelings by herself. In advance of the major assault, everyone was needed. There was no time to coddle the indecisive.

As far as Kate Connor was concerned, or her husband, or anyone else who had come in contact with or had heard about the intruder, there was no need for further discussion because there was nothing to discuss. The advanced hybrid was a machine. A new class of Terminator, but definitely inhuman. All that remained for Williams was to accept the obvious.

Yet how could she reconcile that with the fact that, whatever his personal agenda, Marcus Wright had risked himself to save her from the three murderous vagrants when he could just as easily have walked away and continued with his....

Programming?

Tormented and bewildered, she turned and headed back down the hallway.

Apples were a rarity at the base. Though the surviving humans whose task it was to keep the Resistance supplied with food, clothing, medical supplies, and other necessities did their best, mechanized transportation could not be risked to provide something as luxurious as fresh fruit. The apple in Barnes’s hand had come from a nearby orchard. Though half wild and overgrown, its trees still supplied fruit in season, which was carefully picked by small groups of civilians.

So Barnes savored the red fruit in his hand. The prisoner hanging in suspension before him had glanced once or twice in its direction, evincing a passable imitation of hunger as it had done so. You had to hand it to Skynet, Barnes thought as he took another bite. When it decided to manufacture this particular example of faux human, it had gone all out to render the motivational programming in as much depth as possible.

Rising from the chair where he had been sitting and studying the prisoner, Barnes continued to munch on the apple as he paced a slow circle around the dangling figure. It was a powerful body, but as Terminators went nothing especially remarkable. Easier to blend