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Goode and Evil
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2011
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Character/Pairing: Andy Goode
Rating: PG-13, trigger warning for dark imagery including
references to suicide.
Spoilers/Timeframe: The whole series is fair game, but only as
it relates to Andy's timeline. References to Terminator 3 and the
Infiltrator novels (no knowledge required).
Summary: How Andy Goode became Billy Wisher.
Disclaimer: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
Feedback: deslea at deslea dot com.
More fic: http://fiction.deslea.com
Author's note: I've constructed where I think Andy sits
(before Sarah and Derek intervened) in the network of parallel
timelines arising from the movies, books, and series. As a
result, there are references to other Terminator universes
floating around. However, you don't need to know the books to
follow the story - it's just Andy's journey.
It is already much too late when Andy Goode knows.
Oh, he knew that the Turk had grown from a moody toddler into a
moody teenager, of course. But as it turned out, Turk was the
kind of moody teenager who wound up taking a gun to school. Only
this moody teenager had a nuclear arsenal, and school was the
world.
He has plenty of time to think as the bombs fall. Advanced
Technology Systems, Inc's Sacramento facility is one of the most
secure buildings in the country, with twenty storeys below
ground. (Is? As of three hours ago, "is" is a very relative
term). Its above-ground offices house (well, housed) offsite data
for the largest companies in the world. It is the only way they
can explain the security and the enormous volumes of daily data
transfer.
Not that Advanced Technology Systems, Inc is the big player in
all this. It's a subsidiary of Cyberdyne Systems, which in turn
is a fully owned asset of Cyber Research Systems, which in turn
is the company that holds all sorts of patents the government
wants to control but doesn't want to be directly associated with.
Cyberdyne rents those underground storeys from Advanced
Technology Systems, but somehow or other Cyber Research Systems
signs Andy's paychecks. And CRS gets some sort of special
staffing appropriation from Uncle Sam. Andy doesn't know shit
about forensic accounting, but he knows a pile of turd when he
steps in one, and this one spreads far and wide.
However you crunch it out, the government is the real player
here. The rest is just a great big laundering scam so Congress
(or is it the Senate? Andy doesn't understand politics) can keep
its hands clean. He wonders how clean they're feeling now, if any
of them are alive to consider the question at all.
Whoever Andy actually works for in the final washup, it's the
Google of military computer scientists, where he has spent the
last four years rubbing shoulders with the greatest minds in
military history.
He does not count Kurt Viemeister among those, no matter how
many monographs the bastard has written. The feeling is heartily
mutual. Was, he amends. As of two hours ago, Kurt Viemeister
doesn't feel, think, or write anything at all. He's a lifeless
form, a sad sack of shit slumped over his desk, taken out by his
own assistant.
The assassination of Kurt Viemeister was a special case. An
odious, arrogant, sociopathic neo-Nazi whose brilliance was
eclipsed by more than a shade of madness, to say that he was
unpopular was an understatement. When the time came for blame,
everyone was more than happy to turn it his way. There were
probably fifty people in the place who had spent the last five
years longing for an excuse to pump him full of lead. His
mild-mannered assistant, a nice lady in her forties who had
suffered his systematic humiliations for the last two years, was
just the one who got there first. She emptied a full clip into
him, then collapsed to the floor and burst into tears. Andy
didn't think she'd ever fired a gun before in her life.
So Kurt was a special case. At the moment, they're all confused
and hurting, all preoccupied with what happens next, all hoping
against hope that their loved ones are still alive up there
somehow. Cyberdyne (or whoever) prefers people with no close
relatives, but almost everyone has *someone*. They have not yet
turned into a lynchmob, which is why Andy is still alive.
He wonders how long that will last.
Andy was naive when it came to war. Criminally naive, as it
happens. He has never been a soldier, and never met one. He deals
in theoretical models. He imagined that his work on better and
more precise weapons would make war cleaner. That by precisely
targeting a single building, and bombing it at night, civilian
casualties would be slim to none. He imagined that war could be
reduced to a great big chess game, with pieces sacrificed with a
minimum of blood spilled. It was why he accepted the job in the
first place. The juxtaposition of war and chess made perfect
sense to him.
He knew on some level that he was naive, but he never knew just
how bloody and messy it could be. But the satellite feeds from
those parts of the world that are not entirely obliterated show
him just how messy this war is going to be.
If Andy imagined war to be clean, Kurt Viemeister imagined it
to be a bloody cleansing. When it came time to feed the Turk
voice inputs to create its vocalisation and aural recognition
subroutines, Kurt read it Mein Kampf. With a grotesque
inspiration like that, little wonder the Turk took a gun to
school.
It isn't that he didn't see things going bad. If he's totally,
brutally honest (and why shouldn't he be?), he saw it six months
ago. He is a different kind of programmer to Kurt, who was a hard
scientist. (Was, he amends. He will never program again). He was
an intuitive programmer, seeing pathways where Kurt saw only
cause and effect. And in a totally intuitive way, he saw the
pathways of sentience opening up before his eyes. He didn't know
what it was, not really, but he saw the shift. He realises now
that the Turk, his Pinocchio, was well on the way to becoming a
Real Boy. And that alone might have been all right (would it?)
but a Real Boy with a disdain for the inferior and a taste for
war was a dangerous thing. Especially once it was let loose in
the military intranet.
He thinks that Kurt's penchant for taking all the credit has
given him more than a little protection. Oh, the other scientists
know that Skynet is the Turk and the Turk came with Andy,
headhunted fresh out of a chess competition, but the other
scientists have blood on their hands too. This hasn't been a
one-man band. And none of them are in any mood to raise the topic
of blame. There are too many people around with no blame at all,
too many secretaries and janitors and security guards and tea
ladies with at least as many reasons to kill them as loved ones
in the world upstairs.
But he doesn't know how long that will last. Maybe Kurt has
satisfied their need for vengeance, but maybe not. How long
before that grief turns to fury? How long before they start to
dig? Patents are the primary product at CRS, and Andy's name is
on the patent. He sold a licence to the government but he kept
the rights. Whether before they leave this building or after,
Andrew David Goode is going to become the Hitler-figure of
whatever is left of this generation, father of hate, father of
evil, father of their destruction.
If it's before, he will be killed. If it's after, he will be
hunted.
Maybe he doesn't deserve to live, but that's between him and
the Turk. It isn't going to happen like this. Not in a locked box
that, after all, was only partly of his making. The Turk was a
song in his head and maybe it's a song that was always meant to
be. A song that would probably have always come to life one way
or another. A song with a great big fucking orchestral behind it,
consisting of Kurt and the government and CRS and Cyberdyne and a
dozen others. Maybe he was the conductor, and he will pay for
that one way or another, but he sure as hell didn't do it alone.
Andy doesn't know war, but he knows chess, and he knows
strategy. And the first rule is that the King's safety is
crucial. Castle early if you can, he thinks. Move out the Knight.
Protect the King with the Rook and the Pawns.
He thinks he knows who will be his Rook.
*****
Billy Baumann is a janitor, at least seventy. He is the least
concerned of all of them by what has occurred. He is shocked and
saddened, but his sadness is impersonal. His wife died two years
ago; they had no children. He is the kind of man who embraces
solitude at a certain age, who desires good company or none and
considers good company a rare thing indeed. His companion is his
dog, and by happy coincidence, his dog is at work with him today
(an infraction he has been warned about several times and
cheerfully ignored), so he is as philosophical about the end of
the world as anyone can be. If anyone will help him, Andy thinks
it's Billy.
He tells Billy what he wants; Billy is willing. He has never
seen an organisational chart in his life and as far as he's
concerned, the whole thing is Big Government's fault no matter
who did what here. And Andy's favour is a small one. The finer
subtleties of computer science may elude him, but he's street
smart. He's taken the temperature around here and he knows the
lynchmob is coming. The murmurings have started already. Billy is
old enough to have seen lynchings of his own people as a child,
and that's no way to start a new world.
Andy changes quickly into Billy's spare coveralls, and
positions himself artistically on a trolley, the sort the mail
room guys use to push around parcels. Billy might be old, but
he's wiry and strong, and he pushes Andy down to the kitchen
easier than Andy might have done it himself. It makes Andy
realise with a flush of shame that he's been completely detached
from reality down here, insulated really. He's not strong, he has
no idea how to defend himself, and he's asked an elderly man with
barely a few dollars to rub together to bail him out of his own
spectacular mess.
They round the corner, and Andy spots the security guard. Move
out the Knight, he thinks, by way of silent instruction to Billy,
but Billy is way ahead of him.
"Whatcha got there?" the guard asks.
"Another one's opted out," Billy says tersely. "Damn cowards,
these young people. Don't even shoot 'emselves like a real man.
Pills, I think. They didn't let pussies like this into the
military when I was a boy. Not even as civvies."
"Sure he's dead?"
Andy feels, rather than hears Billy draw himself up. "Young
man, I've been around dead people since before you were born. I
was a paramedic in World War Two, you know." Andy does the math
and realises that's impossible, but counts on the guard not to
realise that.
"Fine. There's a dozen in there already, so just stack him up.
If you can stick around for a few minutes, I'm gonna go take a
leak."
He feels the rush of cool air as the coolroom door opens. It's
a fridge, not a freezer. He'll be all right here for a while -
under the coveralls, he is dressed warmly for the overly
temperature-controlled environment. And the door doesn't lock, so
if he really needs to, he can get out. He also has the option of
increasing the thermostat, although the idea of sharing a warm
room with a dozen bodies doesn't fill him with enthusiasm.
Andy opens his eyes and observes his lifeless Pawns with cold
horror.
He has never seen a dead body before. Now he's seen an even
dozen, stacked up like sandbags. A pretty woman who might have
been an executive assistant to someone senior, her wrists all
bloody. A middle-aged guy in a brown cardigan with a rope burn on
his neck. He feels a scream rise in his throat.
Calmly, Billy grabs him by his coveralls. "Shut. Up."
Andy does. There is bile in his throat, but he shuts up. The
scream leaves him in a tiny, whining hiss of air, and dissipates.
"I'll relieve the guard every now and then, and I'll fill you
in on what's going on. They'll probably stop worrying about the
guard once the body count builds up, but there will be more
traffic in here, too, so be careful. We've got another four days
in here before the generators die and the lockdown releases, and
you probably don't want to be upstairs for at least that long
anyway."
Andy stares up at him. Wondering how he can just rattle off
those logistics in the company of twelve bodies. Wondering
whether he will ever learn to survive the way Billy can.
"Andy? Do you understand me?"
Mutely, he nods.
Billy nods too, and then he leaves him there.
*****
It's a hard four days.
The cold is hard going, but he lived in Alaska for a year, so
it's not the hardest part. That, at least, can be managed with
movement, and with blankets Billy brings him from the sick room,
and with sweets and warm drinks Billy smuggles in whenever he
can.
He has a spot under the bottom shelf where he can wrap himself
up warm, unnoticed by the people coming and going with an
increasing collection of corpses. There, he can watch the
sightless eyes of the executive assistant with the slashed
wrists, and that's the hardest part. She's one of his victims,
and over those four days he builds up a whole story in his mind
about who she was and who she loved and what she liked, and what
she was thinking in those last moments when she took her life,
unaware that her killer - her *real* killer - was in the same
building.
Along with that is a leisurely growing self-hatred. Oh, he
thought he hated himself before, but that was just shock, really.
What he feels now is a whole different ballgame. If he had to do
it again, he wouldn't ask Billy for help. Wouldn't have had the
sheer gall to consider asking *anyone* for *anything*.
But still he takes the food and drink that Billy gives him.
Still he accepts the gift of survival. He doesn't deserve it, he
hates himself for it, but even with the weight of six billion
dead on his shoulders, he wants to live.
He has brought great evil into the world, and he has nothing he
can offer the world in recompense. Yet still he takes from
someone who has nothing left to give.
There's a special place in hell for someone like that.
*****
He thinks it will get safer when the four days is over, but it
doesn't.
He thinks that people will leave, but they have nowhere to go.
Some are so paralysed they couldn't leave even if there was. For
a few hours, they sit there in the dark. That's when it seems to
dawn on them all: What now?
That's when the bodies of his fellow scientists start to come
in - the ones who hadn't opted out already. They come in with
marks on their bodies, signs of violence, and they are slung to
the floor with loud, slapping sounds. Thrown aside with the same
callous disregard all of them have shown the rest of the planet.
And Andy Goode, that nice young man with the nice young looks
and father of the Turk who took a nuclear arsenal to school, just
stays there in his makeshift bunk and lets it happen.
If he were a good man (or a Goode man), he would come out of
hiding. Reveal that he was alive and reveal his role. Offer
himself as a sacraficial lamb and implore them to let these
others go.
He knows he won't do that. He isn't evil - not really - but he
*is* weak. And in this dawning world, weak is the new evil.
*****
On the fifth day, his patent is discovered.
By now, the place is swarming with people. New people. Military
personnel who knew about the place have turned up, seeking
supplies and safety and shelter from fallout. They aren't army
anymore - just people are are scared out of their wits, AWOL and
half-mad with shock. Most of the original people he worked with
are already dead or catatonic. Only Billy appears to have kept
his mind. That's one tough old nut, Andy thinks, not without
admiration.
He hears the shots and the shouting and the sound of bootheels
and the thud of unified running steps. Hears them calling his
name. Hears them coming for him. Billy gave him up, he thinks;
well, he can hardly blame him. Not with written proof. It wasn't
Big Government, that patent says, it was Andrew David Goode. And
Billy has abandoned him to his rightful punishment. Well, Andy
may have accepted Billy's undeserved kindness, but he can't
reproach him for his deserved condemnation.
He braces himself in his little spot under the shelf and waits
and tries to make some sort of hasty peace with his life, his
devastating legacy, and his certain death. He waits for the peace
of knowing his fate and it doesn't come. Wonders if he'll die
waiting.
"I am Andrew Goode," he hears a surprisingly strong voice say,
not far from the coolroom door. "I'm the one you're looking for."
In that moment, Andy knows that he isn't weak after all, at
least not irredeemably so, because he begins to rise out of his
hiding place without a second thought. The only thing that stops
him from showing himself is the rapid sound of gunfire.
He manages to stay silent as Billy Baumann's body is slung into
the coolroom. Manages to hang onto his slender thread of sanity
as a scream rises in his throat.
Billy turns his head. There is blood coming from his mouth. His
eyes are horribly aware.
"Billy," he whispers, pulling himself out of his hiding place.
"Why? Why for me? Jesus!"
"You made that thing," Billy whispers. "If anyone can undo it,
it's you."
With dawning horror, Andy realises that Billy knew the truth
all along. That this was always the plan. And for the first time
since the bombs fell, he feels tears of horror and shame rising
in his throat.
"Jesus, Billy," he says hoarsely. "I wish - I wish -"
Wish what? That the Turk never happened? That he'd told the
government to take their patent and shove it? That he'd found a
way to get Kurt off the project? That he'd never asked Billy to
help him survive? That he can undo it, that he can be good (or
Goode)?
Billy dies while he is still figuring it out.
*****
General Robert Brewster is his name, and restoring order is his
game.
He's military - senior military - but his sidekicks are not.
They're a mix of regular army, local law enforcement, and a few
friends and family members. A young vet named Kate Brewster -
Brewster's daughter, he assumes - attends to the sick, injured,
and traumatised. Her friend (boyfriend?), John, takes an
inventory of weaponry. He's young, but he knows his guns, and not
only the legal ones by the looks of it.
"What's your name, kid?" Brewster asks, peering at him oddly.
Because General Robert Brewster was the head of Cyber Research
Systems. Which made him Andy's boss.
But Brewster is no fool. Billy's body has been strung up
postmortem, and the sign around his neck reads, *Andrew Goode
Father Of The Machines*, and Andy is wearing janitor's coveralls
marked *Billy*. And Brewster has just as much to lose as Andy if
their role is exposed.
"Billy Wisher, Sir."
They hold gazes for a long moment. Brewster's eyelids flicker,
the secret passing between them.
He says at last, "I think we have some cleaning up to do here,
don't you?"
Andy nods. "I want to help, Sir." Then, in a low voice, he
adds, "I *need* to help."
Brewster nods. Thoughtfully, he glances at the boy who's
collecting the guns.
"Wisher, there's someone I'd like you to meet."
END
ENDNOTE: If you do happen to know the books and wonder where
this fits, I see this as an "interim" timeline where a number of
the elements that become the various canon universes are
re-arranging themselves through multiple iterations. Basically I
envisage this as a variation on the Infiltrator book timeline,
the early TSCC timeline, and the T3 timeline - hence Kurt and
Andy's presence together, the presence of the government-owned
Cyber Research Systems, and familiar-yet-different elements such
as Kurt's assassination and Brewster's leadership of CRS. This is
a parallel timeline that existed in the world where Sarah didn't
jump forward (so Andy never met her, never rebuilt the Turk, and
the Turk didn't become a Weaver asset), Serena Burns
(Infiltrator) hadn't yet jumped back (so she didn't feed Skynet
its sentience, the Sacramento facility was never destroyed, and
Kurt was never banished to the Antarctica facility), and Serena
Burns (T3 variation) didn't jump back as the TX and kill General
Robert Brewster, so John and Kate were second-in-command to
Brewster until he died at some later time.