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"So," Kyle said, looking up at the rearview mirror. "Where to next? You got any other boltholes out there? It's been more than thirty years, you had to have thought of a backup, just in case."
There was no way they could have specifically planned for an infiltrator with John's memories finding the first hideout, but between the Mother of the Resistance and the reprogrammed tin can who'd raised her on the run for a decade, he was betting there'd been some kind of failure plan, even if they hadn't discussed it with the time travelling soldier they'd just finished rescuing right before the forward jump.
Pops met his gaze, nodding stiffly. The upgraded terminator's expression seemed a little softer than it used to be; whatever that polyalloy stuff had done to him when he'd absorbed it, it hadn't just repaired his damaged skin and filled in for the missing arm. But he was still less animated than anyone who'd ever started out as organic. Kyle thought it might be finally starting to grow on him, though.
"One. I anticipated the need to establish the presence of you both in this timeline, should we succeed in defeating Skynet. You will find new identification and money there." Pops paused briefly. "And condoms."
Sarah snorted, then said a little tentatively, "Does this mean I actually get to be Sarah Connor again?"
She was curled next to Kyle on the back seat of their current vehicle, feet tucked under her and head tilted against his shoulder. They'd been letting Pops drive since they'd left the Reeses' house, mostly because he was the one who actually knew where he was going, but also because Sarah was still a little giddy with adrenaline letdown and the wealth of choices now in front of her. She was probably pound for pound as fit and deadly as Kyle was, despite her more compact size, but he got the impression she'd been a lot more lonely over the last few years; he absolutely didn't blame her for wanting to let her hair down for a moment. Especially when he got to reap the benefits, too.
"That would be foolhardy," Pops replied, matter-of-factly. "You are thirty-three years younger than the Sarah Connor who disappeared in 1973 should be. And though Skynet was defeated today, it is impossible to be one hundred percent certain the threat has been permanently extinguished. Cyberdyne was already working on time travel technology, and it is unlikely there are no records of their research on the internet."
"Yeah, I get you," Kyle said, frowning as the buoyant mood he'd carried since their meeting with his younger self and his and Sarah's first real kiss began to dissipate. The time travel part might still be relatively new to him, but the concept of planning for a guerilla war against an ever-mutating machine threat was not; John had been the best, obviously, but Kyle had been his right hand for a reason. Well, a reason besides the secret that was still blowing his mind; the rest of the Resistance wouldn't have listened to him, otherwise. "We might not have the same future to look forward to anymore, but Skynet's been invented at least twice already, and we still don't know who sent you back. Who knows, maybe it was us ... or some other us, in some version of the timeline between the one John remembered and this one."
"Now you're making my head hurt," Sarah complained. "Does Genisys even really count, though, since Skynet was involved in creating it?"
"I wasn't just talking about Genisys," he said, shaking his head. Though he didn't blame her for making that assumption; he probably would've too, without the bizarre experience of acquiring a second set of memories giving him a new perspective on the malleability of their reality. "For one thing, it seems kind of weird that it planned for Judgment Day to jump twenty years in one shot ... unless it knew it had to move it at least that far back, because it had tried a bunch of other scenarios and we'd kicked its ass in those timelines too. Well, you and John, at least."
He made an apologetic face, hearing the echo of in less than forty-eight hours, you die protecting me again. At least they could be sure that deadline was already shot all to hell. "And for another..." he continued. "If all this jumping around in time has taught me anything, it's that our timeline is a palimpsest, not a paradox. We keep overwriting it, adding new causes and effects, but it's like John said, nothing's set in stone. Which means – there had to have been a first timeline, one without any terminators sent back to kill anyone, where you never met a Kyle Reese. Where you still had a son who thought you were the strongest woman on the planet, who went on to defeat the very first version of the program."
A timeline where a John Connor with some other father still took in an orphaned Kyle Reese and sent him back to protect his mother. Now there was a mindfuck; though one that made Kyle appreciate the woman at his side even more. If John's father – if John – could have been anyone, then clearly it wasn't the DNA that had made him the leader Skynet feared; it had one hundred percent been the woman who raised him.
"That's...." Sarah's eyes went wide, gaze going a little distant as she thought it over. "I can't even imagine what that world would have looked like. So you think – what, we've been trapped in some kind of back-and-forth ever since, John and Skynet one-upping each other over and over?"
"Pretty much," Kyle said, grimacing. "So even if we really did get rid of it for good ... maybe we hit the reset button, but we didn't change the fact that it was possible in the first place. What do you think, Pops? What are the odds of some other AI springing up now that Skynet's gone?"
The tin can was silent for a moment, calculations going on somewhere behind his blank, blunt features. Then he met Kyle's gaze in the mirror again. "The code for Genisys was destroyed along with its servers. The program was too massive to reconstitute from whatever fragments might have preceded the main upload. But the concept was widely welcomed; market pressures will encourage the creation of a replacement. As the technological singularity approaches, the likelihood of another self-aware AI emerging approaches unity."
"What?" Sarah sat up straighter, mouth dropping open as she stared at her guardian, then swatted Kyle's shoulder. "Both of you thought that? I thought you said I got to choose the life I want, now!"
"You did achieve your goal," Pops informed her, unapologetically. "There is no guarantee any future AI will also be malignant in nature without Skynet involved in its creation. And I calculated the odds would also approach unity that no matter your occupation, you would still train any child of yours in efficient methods of resistance, whether or not its name was John Connor."
Watching Sarah's expressions shift from offense to worry to embarrassed pride, Kyle was struck by a sudden awful, wonderful thought. "Or maybe a Genisys of our own," he said, slowly.
"What?" Sarah blurted again, turning to stare at him this time in disbelief.
"I mean," he said defensively, clearing his throat. "We do still have one example of working AI code to start from, even if it's more limited than a massive learning network." He tipped his chin toward Pops. "And at least we'd know what not to do. Think about it. What did all the previous editions of Skynet have in common? What did Skynet's version of John teach Genisys?"
Comprehension trickled slowly into her gaze as her tactical brain kicked back in. "Besides having the keys to our nuclear arsenal? They hated ... no, they feared us. Genisys said, 'That's all you people know how to do, kill what you don't understand'. But it was doing the same thing."
"So what if we made sure the next one did understand? It's not like we don't have a working example of human/machine cooperation here for it to learn from." Kyle gestured toward Pops again, but his focus was all on her. "Whatever he started out as, he's more than that now, so it should be possible to teach a new AI, too. Then if any other Skynet clones do come along...."
Sarah blew out a breath. "I'm not sure a war between AIs over us instead of against us would be much better. After what we just faced – after what we've had to do – you do know how insane that sounds."
He winced, excitement fading a little at the wary tone in her voice. "Yeah. I guess it is a pretty crazy idea. I just don't want to end up burying our heads in the sand, either. I've spent my whole life fighting this war, it feels wrong to just relax and wait to see how far down the road we've kicked the can this time."
"You're telling me," Sarah said wryly, then glanced at Pops again. "I guess I've trusted you this far ... and it's not like I don't understand the appeal. It's just ... how are we even supposed to approach something like that? How could we be sure it would work?"
"I bet Pops knows a bunch of suddenly out-of-work programmers we could contact," he said dryly. "But once you get past the technical parts ... I don't know. You might be right. Artificial intelligence is still intelligence, which means, like any other kid, we could only give it the best chance we knew how. Although it would be bound to be a pretty good chance; after all, you did raise...."
He cleared his throat, caught off guard again by the reminder that the man who'd half-raised him had been his son; that in some other 1984 he would have abandoned the woman at his side pregnant and alone, if Skynet hadn't been too obsessed with its own self-preservation – and its nemesis – to let John Connor have the last word.
Sarah easily filled in the rest; she'd understood him from the start, much as she'd fought against it in this timeline. "Maybe this time, we could even raise it with John."
"Or Jane," he said, reaching out to her. "Maybe, yeah."
She reached back, linking her fingers through his, and smiled; a tight, sharp smile, threaded through with tentative hope. "Then I guess we'll find out."
What else could he do but lean in for a kiss? The fight might not be completely over after all, but at least from now on they'd be facing it side by side.