9/11 Calls

Scene: Inside the dusty garage hideout, night.
The neon from a half-broken โ€œOPENโ€ sign flickers through the window. John Connor leans over a pile of salvaged techโ€”old CB radios, voice boxes, and busted cell phonesโ€”while the T-800 calmly reloads a shotgun with mechanical precision.


JOHN CONNOR:
Hey, uhโ€ฆ Iโ€™ve been meaning to ask you something.

T-800:
Affirmative.

JOHN:
Back there, when you called my foster parents? You sounded exactly like my mom. Likeโ€ฆ freakishly real. How do you even do that?

T-800:
Mimetic polyalloy units possess molecular-level sound replication. I do not. My model uses mechanical approximation and computational waveform analysis.

JOHN (squints):
Soโ€ฆ like autotune on steroids?

T-800 (deadpan):
Incorrect analogy. I record a minimum two seconds of vocal input, extract harmonic frequencies, and construct a digital phoneme map. Then I synthesize the signal through my vocal processor.

JOHN:
So you basicallyโ€ฆ remix their voice in real time?

T-800:
Affirmative. The imitation is exact to within 0.0003 percent deviation in waveform fidelity. Human auditory systems cannot detect the difference.

JOHN (impressed):
Man, thatโ€™s insane. Can you, like, do me?

T-800 (turns slightly, perfectly mimicking Johnโ€™s voice):
โ€œHey dudes, this is John Connor, future leader of the Resistance. Donโ€™t mess with my dirt bike.โ€

JOHN (laughing):
Okay, thatโ€™s creepy as hell.

T-800 (flatly):
It is an effective infiltration technique.

JOHN:
Yeahโ€ฆ remind me never to let you borrow my phone.