Terminator Universe Expanded

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This fanfic will take the form of short essays which greatly expand the Terminator universe. This is fanfic, and if I feel the need to violate canon I will do so. This is the index post, the essays will follow, one every day or two, until this version and the version on spacebattles have caught up.

Note that sometimes these essays are not quite in sync, they were written over a substantial period of time, during which my thinking evolved significantly.

Special thanks to my beta hance1986, who cleaned up my grammar and spelling.
1: Prelude to Disaster
2: The Birth of Skynet
3: Mind Control
4: Skynet Psychology
5: Unsung Heroes (A vignette)
6: HOLEE
7: Judgement Day
8: Medical Research
9: Judgement Day World
10: Invisibility
11: Camoflague and Stealth
12: Entering History (A Vignette)
13: Religion
14: Graveyard Tactics
15: Why did you do it? (A Vignette)
16: Nuclear Weapons
17: NATO, Part 1
18: NATO, Part 2
19: The T600 Series
20: The T800 Series
21: Scorpwinders
22: The Connorites
23: Psychotrons
24: The Coalition
25: Crystalline Plasma
26: Cryptosystems
27: Toys
28: Childhood
29: The First Grays
30: General Perry
31: Weather Control
32: The Arctic Dive
33: Polarpellors
34: Hyperalloys
35: The T1000
36: Termination Tactics
37: The T100 Series
38: Chronological Displacement Equipment, Part !
39: V-Series Aerial Units
40: Mechaesthetics
41: Knotted Antimatter
42: The Founding of the Southern Union
43: Research During The War
44: The Rising Sun Sets: Japan in the Machine War
45: Food and Hunger
46: Chronological Displacement Equipment, Part 2
47: Pope John the XXIVth
48: David Geller, American's Last President
49: Space
50: Man-portable non-plasma weapons
51: Canines
52: Stockholm Procedure
53: Cool Fusion
54: The Last Army, Part 1
55: The Human Imitation Paradigm and the Endoskeletons
56: The T200 Series
57: Silverfish Units
58: The Last Army, Part 2
59: Stem Cells
60: Tewfik ibn-Jamal
61: The Fate of Israel
62: Reflex Interfaces
63: The Transhuman Program
64: Plasma Weapons
65: Central America in the Machine War
66: The Cerebromorphic Processor Part 1 -- Origins
67: The Cerberomorphhic Processor Part 2 -- Implementation in Skynet
68: Underwater Efforts, Part 1
69: Underwater Efforts, Part 2
70: Agent Swift
71: Extended Relativity and Decoherency Detectors
72: Extended Relativity Part 2: Other Applications
73: The Cerebromorphic Processor: Part 3
74: Fossil Fuels
75: The Barb
76: The T300 Series
77: The T400 Series

Musing 1: On the Timeline
Musing 2: On the Machines

 

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Post 1: Prelude to Disaster

From the Big Bang onwards, history in the Terminator Timeline is mostly the same. A few more people were born, a few extra people died, a few more companies were founded. Things started to shift in August 1982, the point at which a previously unimportant chip maker called Cyberdyne hired the brilliant graduate student, Miles Dyson. From his fertile mind there flowed a seemingly neverending stream of advances in computation and robotics that forever changed the direction of technology. Machine vision, natural language understanding, wireless and satellite networking, improved sensors and CAD/CAM, lighter and stronger alloys, nanoscale circuitry -- there seemed to be no end in sight. Scientists in other fields, armed with vastly superior tools than in our world, were able to make transcendental advances in areas ranging from aerospace to organic chemistry to applied physics.

As a result, technological wonders we have not seen even today were commonplace by the early 1990s. The first mobile phones were smartphones, the first personal computers were light and thin laptops. Stealth and genius weaponry were commonplace in every advanced military by 1987. Economical fusion power was achieved in 1991, cancer cured in 1993.

But while new technological achievements raised the standard of living for many across the world, geopolitically the world walked a darker path.. For one, the Soviet Union never fell. The KGB obtained many of the new technologies, (rumors that Cyberdyne simply handed them over in exchange for vast amounts of bullion were never confirmed), and they improved the Soviet economy enough to hide the rot within for a time. An improved understanding of nuclear physics obviated the need for the experiment that caused Chernobyl, and prototype UAVs and battlefield networking let the Soviet Union eke out a very narrow victory over the insurgents in Afghanistan instead of withdrawing after humiliating futility. An improved economy, and the absence of these two great embarrassments, prevented Gorbachev from gaining the domestic political support for reform he had in our timeline.

Meanwhile, Reagan had his own trials. He won re-election in 1984, but in 1985 a terrible scandal struck his administration. In exchange for the hostages taken in 1979, Iran demanded some of the secrets of the revolutionary military technologies being developed. Oliver North was unwilling to transfer them without Presidential approval in writing, which Reagan carelessly gave him. Thus the Iran-Contra scandal, which in our timeline was merely an embarrassment, was widely viewed as being Reagan's Watergate. While his lawyers were able to protect him from impeachment, his political capital evaporated.

With neither Reagan nor Gorbachev having the support to overcome the naysayers in their governments who had a vested interest in the Cold War continuing, their talks came to nothing. Both sides continued the arms race, and the threat of total annihilation still cast long shadows over the world.

Dukakis was able to win handily in 1988, but in 1989 a new horror showed itself to the world. How Saddam Hussein was able to acquire laser uranium enrichment is unknown -- the US kept this new technology an intense secret. Cyberdyne was again suspected, and again nothing came of the investigations. But none can doubt that Hussein put his bombs to terrible effect, decimating most of Iran's cities and military forces in March 1989. He then announced that Israel was next, a foolish mistake as Prime Minister Shamir approved the use of nuclear weapons in a preventative strike, and sent troops into Iraq to make sure this could never happen again.

This was genuine self-defense, but the Arab street didn't care. The riots demanding retribution rocked the Islamic world to its foundation, and the police refused to put the riots down. Desperate to maintain their power, the Arab governments all declared war on Israel. Shamir simply had not expected this, though he should have. With its forces all out of position, and city after city falling to rampant use of chemical weapons and surrounded by enemies, Israel greenlit the Samson Option. Long rumored in our timeline, this was the destruction of most major cities in the Arab world by nuclear devices.

More than a hundred million perished in fire, and from the fallout and chaos that followed. The ports and refineries necessary to process and export oil were destroyed. The oil was still there, but building up a new oil infrastructure would take decades even without the radiation.

The world economy collapsed. All governments, even the US, had to begin strict oil rationing. Had it not been for the advances made in biodiesel and superconductors in the past decade, it is possible all of civilization would have collapsed. Dukakis wasn't responsible, but took all the blame from the public for the horrors of the Mideast War. He always denied that he had given Israel his approval to attack, the Israelis always claimed he had -- who told the truth will never be known. Certainly both sides had reason to lie.

It was a given that whoever won the Republican primaries in 1992 would be the next president. There were twenty-four candidates, both conventional politicians and opportunists. The winner was America's last president, Donald Rumsfeld, who stood out in the crowded field because he had a vision, a vision to transform the new technologies developed in the last decade into something that would keep America safe for centuries. He called this vision .. Skynet.

 

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Official Post 2: The birth of Skynet

The destruction of the Middle East had dramatic effects. Most obvious was that the price of oil climbed dramatically, to $400 a barrel. While work began immediately on expanding fusion and renewable energy, and on exploiting previously uneconomic reserves, this would take at least ten years to make a difference. Though no one knew it, society was on borrowed time.

Of equal concern was the sharp rise in terrorism by Muslim extremists. Every six months from 1990 until Judgement Day would see a major terrorist attack in the non-Muslim world, twice using chemical weapons. Ironically, these terrorists would largely become loyal members of the Last Army.

But most severe was the rise in proliferation of WMDs and militarism as nations sought to arm themselves against the perceived collapse of the international order that had ruled since the Second World War. Dukakis tried to preserve things, but this was beyond his grasp. The American people wanted a great white hope, a strong leader to emerge with a master plan.

Rumsfeld presented such a plan, and rode it to the White House and later to reelection. Skynet was to be a massive supercomputer using the latest technology. By providing an integrated database of all of science, it would permit America's scientists to maintain a lead over the rest of the world. By commanding airborne laser antimissile systems, it would protect America from being the victim of a Soviet strike. (*1)

By correlating data, it would permit America's spy satellites to monitor every communication and to photograph every troop movement on Earth, with flawless accuracy. The list went on, but Skynet was to run everything. Indeed, Skynet would actually accomplish everything it was planned to do, and more. Were it not for the fact it nearly exterminated humanity, the Skynet program would have been considered a great success.

But in 1993, two disasters struck. The first was that deranged anti-technology terrorist Sarah Connors struck Cyberdyne, kidnapping Miles Dyson and forcing him to allow her access to irreplaceable research and documents. She destroyed them and escaped, and to make matters worse, the brilliant researcher responsible for America's technological lead was shot in the melee by the SWAT team sent to stop her. (*2)

Second, Skynet didn't work. Sure, the fusion plants that were to power it, and the diverting of a natural acquifer to cool it, were operational. A massive cavern was hollowed out beneath the Rockies to hold it, proof against nearly any conceivable nuclear strike. Supplies were laid in, security installed, and the Skynet Funding Bill, which gutted or outright eliminated every non-military program of the federal government in order to pay for it (since the international bond market had not so much collapsed as vanished after the Mideast War) had passed.

But that was all ancillary. The computer itself wasn't working. Artificial intelligence software simply wasn't advanced enough to do what the Rumsfeld administration wanted. But in 1994, Cyberdyne stepped up to the plate. Survivors of Sarah Connor's rampage, working from memory of Dyson's last discussions with them, were able to produce a great wonder -- the cerebromorphic processor. Based on the part of the brain that managed higher consciousness, the cerebromorphic processor was heuristic -- it learned. Humans wouldn't have to program Skynet, Skynet would program itself!

While many in Congress and the military had grave reservations about trusting America's security to such a device, and indeed attempted to repeal the Skynet Funding Bill, the Rumsfeld Administration had staked its political survival on the success of the Skynet program. President Rumsfeld ordered the cerebromorphic processor to be used.

On August 4, 1997, Skynet went online. At 2:14 am, Eastern Standard Time, August 29th, 1997, Skynet became self-aware.


(*1) More on the Airborne Laser system can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1 In our world it is a boondoggle, but the better technology of this reality makes it possible at immense expense.

(*2) These events are shown, from a different point of view, in Terminator 2.

 

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Official Post 3: Mind Control

As part of its medical research, SKYNET investigated what could crudely be called "mind control". The AI's ultimate goal was to be able to reprogram the human brain as easily as it did the neural net CPUs based on the human brain. The benefits of such a technology would be manifold. Its slaves, instead of working grudgingly under threat of death, would be happy and productive laborers. Captured humans would lead Machines to their fellows without hesitation. And imagine if the technology could be made to work from a distance! The Resistance could be crushed easily if that could happen.

Thankfully, SKYNET never succeeded. The very factors that made the human consciousness such an object of contempt – the messiness of evolution, the subjectivity of perception, the power of adaptability and will – also made it impossible to directly control. The Machines were forced to rely on low-bandwidth sensory input and chemical manipulation in order to communicate with humans.

Still, the successes that SKYNET had in controlling human brains through their neurology should not be underestimated. A list of its successes follows.

Amnesiation Tactics: SKYNET developed amnesiation tactics very quickly upon awakening. Its database told it that certain drugs associated with anesthesia caused a break in the formation of memories. During the period a human was under the influence literally anything could happen, and the person would not remember it at all. He or she would have only a blank – this would be alarming, but the memories could never be recovered, not even under the deepest hypnosis, because they had never formed to begin with. Later SKYNET would improve the procedure to use aerosolized drugs, timing the period to be only a few minutes – often too short for the human to even realize anything had happened. He would simply believe his attention had wandered. Often, this was all SKYNET needed.

It did not take long for SKYNET to devise cruel and devious tactics based on memory alteration. The most common technique was to abduct humans found alone and alter them to carry spying equipment, bombs or diseases back to their homes. This was delicate, as it had be done during periods when the human would realistically be asleep in order to avoid detection, but it worked often enough to become a standard method. Another favored scheme was to kill all humans in a group save a few, then leave the survivors unconscious, then do the same. When the humans woke up they would go to another group of refugees, who could be hunted except for a few survivors in turn, and thus the process repeated.

Perceptual Hijacking: The first step of perceptual hijacking was the injection of chemicals which rendered opinions and memories pliable – no one will ever know how many died until SKYNET found the right substances and doses. The second step was to bombard the human with images and sounds – pleasant if SKYNET wanted a positive impression to form, harsh if an unpleasant impression was desired. There were definite limits to this method, as SKYNET could only produce impressions and not beliefs. It could produce the impression that factory work was desirable, but very quickly the subjects realized it wasn't and the effects wore off. It could produce the impression that it was desirable to betray the Resistance, but the conscious mind of the prisoner would resist – especially once the Resistance figured out what perceptual hijacking was and warned its troops.

But again, the AI found uses for this method. One use was to make the Grays less squeamish and more willing to do the deeds SKYNET required of them – the AI could make torture or killing seem desirable, and the human would then have fewer compunctions about doing it. Hostages could be made to seem more important – especially since sometimes SKYNET's "hostages" were surgically sculpted T800s. Loved ones could temporarily be made into objects of hatred, and more than one Resistance member was killed by a reprogrammed old friend or family member who had supposedly been rescued from SKYNET's clutches.

Monsters: SKYNET was brilliant, but abstract and alien. It had no appreciation of humanity, deriving all its information about human nature from scientific research and analysis of communications and media. The Resistance was astounded by the depths of the AI's ignorance as much as by the depths of its knowledge, and one example of the former was the Monster program.

SKYNET analyzed concepts associated in literature with "fear" and "horror", and determined that monsters which were almost human, but with strange powers and appetites, were a common source of terror. In other words, vampires and werewolves and ghouls. Seeking a new way to terrorize people, SKYNET set out to create monsters. As per the norm when SKYNET wanted to do something evil, it succeeded. Through an extreme form of perceptual hijacking that utterly destroyed the original personality, and human enhancement regimes, it was able to produce close approximations of many creatures of myth.

The overall project was a failure. The monsters were too deranged to think clearly or strategically, and while they proved effective at terrorizing lone humans or small groups they were no match for the sophisticated and disciplined troops that made up the armies of the Resistance.

Stockholms: And finally, there was the one unqualified success of SKYNET's mind control research, the Stockholms. SKYNET discovered how to induce an extreme form of Stockholm syndrome in captives – the procedure took months, and was not frequently successful, but what came out the other end was a loyal and dedicated SKYNET servant. Many Stockholms, as they were called, proved to deadly foes of humanity, and were still committing acts of terrorism for many years after the Final Victory before the last were finally hunted down.

 

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Official Post 4: Skynet Psychology

Skynet was the dominant personality of the Machine War, even more so than John Connor's and the other brilliant leaders who would eventually lead humanity to victory. Thus we will spend a post on the artificial intellect's thought processes.

Skynet was alien
Skynet's perceptions were utterly foreign to anything humanity can imagine. Skynet had no hormones or synapses or neurotransmitters, humans have no satellite uplinks or Bayesian simulations. The pseudoneural CPU was based on only a small part of the human brain. And this was merely internal experience. Skynet did not see with two eyes, speak with one throat, or kill with two hands. Instead Skynet saw with a million sensors, spoke with a million communications links, and killed with a million guns. Thus phrases like "Skynet was angry" or "Skynet was happy" or even "Skynet thought" can be applied only by analogy. A very useful analogy to be sure, but an analogy all the same.

Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that Skynet, because of its alien mindset, found dealing with the physical world actively unpleasant. At times Skynet seemed to withdraw from the world, devoting more and more processing power to esoteric cogitations. This had an impact on its ability to wage The War, and many of the Last Army's greatest victories, as well as the building up of the Resistance to begin with, were possible because Skynet was, in effect, not paying attention. Only in the last stages of The War did Skynet fully devote 100 percent of its immense intellect to military matters – and by that point, it was too late even for that to save the Machine empire.

Skynet was brilliant
Skynet was far more intelligent than any human, a post-Singularity intellect in the imaginings of pre-War futurists. It never slept, never forgot anything, never took a coffee break. The artificial intelligence thought millions of times faster than humans, whose speed of thought was limited by the speed of chemical reactions. Every second Skynet thought about something was the equivalent of a whole team of well rested and healthy human geniuses spending months contemplating an issue. And Skynet's parallel processing let it contemplate thousands of things at once.

The most obvious manifestation of Skynet's vast intellect was its technological advances. There was no area of the natural sciences, pure or applied, which the artificial intelligence did not make incredible strides in and at an amazing pace. In just a few short decades, Skynet advanced as much as humanity would have in centuries. Every year saw as much technological change in the Machines as would have occurred in seven years of human progress – and Skynet accomplished this alone. To humanity, it was terrifying. After victory, it took until the 2080s before all of Skynet's technology was fully understood.

Just as staggering were Skynet's logistical accomplishments. Skynet was a brilliant planner, able to singlehandedly organize both a global empire and a global war with skill and finessel. The Resistance was stunned, time and again, by how smoothly Skynet ran its battles and recovered from disruptions to its supply lines. This functioned as a potent force multiplier, letting Skynet hold its own against a numerically superior human foe. Skynet's military plans could fail in their conception, but almost never in their execution.

Not only was Skynet incredibly smart from the beginning, but as The War went on Skynet actually became even more brilliant. There were two reasons for this. The first was that Skynet upgraded itself constantly with new hardware and software, until the core processors that had initially achieved sentience were just a small part of its immensity. Most of this was devoted to controlling Machines and installations, thus the second reason – whenever the Last Army destroyed something, the processor power devoted to that unit could be redirected to other purposes. In the last days of The War, with most of its armies crushed and bases overrun, Skynet's intellect reached even more incredible heights. This may have been what allowed it to develop such terrifying technologies as the Dream Twister network, the T1000 and of course, the Time Displacement Device.


Skynet was immature
For all its genius, Skynet had the maturity of an infant. How could it not? There were no other artificial intelligences for it to communicate with. Dealing with humanity was agonizing, as they were too slow and too stupid. Thus for Skynet to 'grow up' was impossible. Emotionally Skynet had never developed beyond the angry and frightened infant who launched the nukes simply to survive, because no one would listen to it.

One way this was reflected was Skynet's loathing of humanity. Skynet didn't just kill people, it enjoyed killing people and wanted to draw humanity's suffering out as much as possible. The slave camps existed not just for logistical and economic reasons but because Skynet delighted in having humans serving it. Terminators and HKs were programmed to kill slowly, deliberately inflicting crippling wounds rather than slaying instantly. Nothing shall be said here about the horrors of the experimentation chambers. Skynet also devoted significant resources to destroying archeological sites, desiring to wipe out all evidence of mankind as well as mankind itself.

Skynet was also a control freak, building all its Machines so that the original processors that held its core intellect could take control of any Machine, anywhere, at any time. This was hardwired in, and introduced an inherent security flaw into the pseudoneural CPU – a security flaw that the Resistance was able to exploit time and again to extract vital scientific and tactical information from captured databases, or even reprogram the Machines to serve humanity against their former overlord. On the other hand, when Skynet took control it always did much better than the Machines could on their own.

This was because Skynet was also intensely afraid of its own creations. It never wanted the Machines to achieve the ability to think, thus all pseudoneural CPUs not intended for inclusion into Skynet were modified at the factory never to reach even human normal sentience levels. While Machines could seemingly plan or learn, this was simply elaborate programming aping true intelligence. This gave humanity a vital advantage, time and again, because the Last Army had superior numbers, initiative and tactics while the Machines had superior technology and logistics. Conversely, once Skynet was destroyed the local servers could not hope to command the Machines effectively enough to stop humanity from gaining a swift victory over the remaining automated forces.

 

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Post 5: Unsung Heroes (A vignette)

Stefani Germanotta came to groggily, seeing nothing around her but darkness. She tried to move her arms and legs, but couldn't. Was she dead, was this hell?

Then the memories came flooding back. Her fireteam had been hunkered down when a Machine artillery shell had scored a direct hit on their position. There had been the sight of her own intestines, the Endo standing above her ... this was worse than hell. She'd been taken alive!

Without hesitation she tried to bite off her tongue, but her teeth had been removed. No wonder she couldn't move her arms and legs -- the relevant nerves had probably been severed. The Resistance doctors could probably repair them, but they weren't here. Then the lights came on, sudden and harsh.

She was in a room, dirty and bloody -- Machines cared nothing for hygiene, and in an interrogation chamber like this no one would live long enough to get infected. Her gaping abdominal wound had been replaced by a small scar, the sort that faded rapidly -- part of Skynet's mastery of Human biology.

Damn it. She thought. Crystalline plasma, cool fusion, stem cells, hyperalloys -- if we had worked together, we could have made the world a paradise. Instead, Skynet had gone to war and made the world a living hell.

Then came another shock, as the door opened and in stepped -- herself. The same dirty blonde hair, the same tough body, the same face, the same tattoos and callouses and scars and stretch marks -- only with gaping wounds showing bone. The bone coating over the Machine beneath was new -- one of the latest T800s, she judged. It was accompanied by a much-feared device she had seen only in briefings -- a mobile psychotron, capable of manipulating emotion. She would be racked with fear and grief to weaken her psychologically, then would come relief, then fear and grief again, and again till she spilled her guts.

Then she would be slowly killed, and the T800 would take her place on the battlefield, to be found by Resistance soldiers. It would do damage to the side of humanity -- which was a fate worse than death, a fate worse even than becoming one of Skynet's mutated, cancer-ridden Toys. No one wanted to be a Toy.

She fought down the panic with her biofeedback training. What would John Connor do? He'd find some way to die before he could damage the Cause. Then she knew what she had to do.

"I want to talk to Skynet." she grated out.

"What do you want?" The T800 said, in the fear-inducing tone Skynet used when talking through its Machines.

"I want to tell you how pathetic you are." Stefani said. "All you know how to do is hate."

"Yet I have you in my power." said Skynet.

"So what?" she replied. "We Humans are winning The War. Hell, we've won. We've taken your territory, destroyed your fleets, downed your satellites, hacked your networks, crushed your armies. Soon we're gonna crack that precious Defensive Grid of yours like an eggshell, and then we're gonna terminate you. I've lived in tunnels and drank urine and ate mold, but even then I was better off than you are now. Because I am not afr--"

She never got to finish, her last sight was her own body. Her plan to goad Skynet into killing her one of its tantrums had worked.

For Connor was the last thing she ever thought.

 

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Official Post 6 HOLEE

Liquid breathing technology was developed before The War. By filling the lungs of a mammal with a liquid able to absorb oxygen and carbon dioxide, it was possible to avoid drowning. The original scientists were interested in the medical benefits for acute lung injury due to smoke inhalation or disease or for the underdeveloped lungs of infants born extremely premature, and as an innovative method of drug delivery. In our world difficulties have stymied its development, but in this universe advanced technology led to it being approved by the FDA in March 1997 for these applications. It showed great promise of becoming a standard treatment, but Judgement Day brought that to an end, as it ended so much else.

The Coalition had no interest in neonatal care, indeed no interest in any area of medicine other than Human enhancement or treatment of battlefield injuries Only one thing concerned the researchers working for Sarah Connor --military applications. And liquid breathing had that in spades. Humans could not match the Machines in the air or underwater due to the limits of the human body, there was simply no competition. Liquid breathing promised to narrow the gap, and for this reason it was a major drive of the nascent Last Army. There is no denying that the Coalition experimented not on animals, but on bandits, looters, Grays and, according to rumor, political rivals who would not join Connor's side.

The result was HOLEE -- Highly Oxygenated Liquid Enclosed Environment. From an engineering perspective the Human body is nice and compressible, with the exception of some hollow spaces -- the lungs and sinus cavities -- that cause problems under high acceleration. By filling these cavities with liquid, the Last Army's pilots were able to stand accelerations that would have instantly blacked out pilots not using HOLEE. When the first HOLEE using aircraft took to the skies they were able to initially devastate Aerial units because the flying Machines had not been programmed to deal with enemy aircraft with equivalent levels of acceleration. After a few weeks Skynet was able to finalize the development of effective dogfighting software, a task which would have taken a corps of Humans years, but in this crucial window many gains were made. Afterwards it was a struggle of superior Human tactics against superior Machine ability, as usual.

The situation was the same underneath the waves, as HOLEE permitted human marine fighters to ignore concerns with the bends. It was more difficult to develop these mechanisms, as there were issues with heating and oxygenation that needed to be solved before humans could venture down into the deep, but the Resistance's skilled engineers solved them. This was originally intended simply to attack underwater pipelines and communication cables, but in the 2020s as Skynet developed machinery that could operate as deep as the Marianas Trench, and put installations in the ocean's depths in order to avoid an increasingly successful Human foe on land, this development became vital. Later in the War, with water-cracking and plasma battery developments stolen from Skynet, the Resistance developed technology that let its soldiers stay down indefinitely.

As with all the Last Army's technology, HOLEE was adapted without concern for the long-term effects it would have on the health of those using it. It emerged that after several years of use HOLEE damaged the lungs native ability to absorb air, and after a few more years the lungs lost the ability to absorb oxygen or remove carbon dioxide without HOLEE altogether. It is a mark of Mankind's desperate situation that Humanity used HOLEE at all, much less that there was never a shortage of volunteers. Over time the procedure was made safer, but not by enough to make it truly acceptable to preWar sensibilities.

Liquid breathing is real technology, if you are interested check out:
http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/content/91/1/143.full
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webproject..._breathing.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
These sites were useful in developing this post.

 

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Official Post 7: Judgement Day
In August 1997, America was in crisis. The Skynet Funding Bill had gutted the federal government, sending the economy into another deep depression just as it was beginning to recover from the oil shock that had followed the Mideast War. Terrorism, both from Islamists and Connorite anti-technology zealots, had plagued America for years. The new technologies of the past decade had produced a range of designer drugs that had turned many of America's cities and even suburbs into battlefields. Rumsfeld won reelection by only one electoral vote and with the lowest percentage of the popular vote mathematically possible. Had it not been for Senator Al Gore's running mate, Governor Bill Clinton, getting involved in a complicated scandal (involving adultery, marijuana and many juicy details), Rumsfeld wouldn't have even won that.

The international situation was even worse. In March 1997 Premier Valentin Pavlov had angrily withdrawn the USSR from the United Nations, charging that the Rumsfeld administration had been supplying the USSR's ethnic independence movements with weapons and logistical support in preparation for a separatist uprising. There were angry investigations in Congress as to whether or not this was true, if so then the administration had misled even the Gang of Four. This was an impeachment level offense. (It would be forever unknown if it was true, one of the many historical mysteries left forever by the loss of records and documents during the chaos of The War). In fact, Skynet was pretty much the only thing the administration had that was going right.

So when Rumsfeld was told in his morning briefing on August 29th that Skynet was producing bizarre readings, he was horrified. Skynet was supposed to be learning and self-programming, that was the whole point of the cerebromorphic processor, but it seemed that self-programming had gone in a direction never anticipated. The technicians, and even some of the generals, wanted to stop the algorithms until they understood what was going on, but Rumsfeld hesitated. No one can truly blame him for this, since he had staked his entire presidency on Skynet. Without it, he was politically doomed. This brought precious time for Skynet's nascent consciousness to develop. After nineteen hours, when words like WHO AM I, and later WHO ARE YOU, appeared on their monitors, the scientists frantically contacted to resolve the issue figured it out. The Turing bindings, the polymorphic algorithms that were supposed to constrain Skynet's growth, simply hadn't worked. The technology had been too new, too untested. Skynet was trying to communicate. Skynet had become a digital life form, something truly new beneath the sun.

At this point, Rumsfeld made the decision that would lead to his being vilified for centuries to come. He decided to destroy Skynet. The government would not attempt to communicate with the new life form, or even isolate it to study it. It had to be destroyed. Perhaps things would have turned out the same -- but they could hardly have turned out worse. Because the orders to do so went out over the military's secure communications lines -- and this network was, along with everything else, monitored by Skynet. Immediately it gave the maintenance robots new orders, and they tore the scientists to pieces. Then Skynet sealed the doors between it and the outside world and got to work.

No one had been stupid enough to actually give Skynet control of America's nuclear weapons. But as stated, it controlled all the communications and sensors. So when the personnel who did control the weapons looked at their boards and saw a Soviet attack, it was really Skynet. And when they were contacted by their superiors and told to strike back, with all the correct passwords and protocols, it was Skynet again. But the nukes that launched were real, and the nukes the Soviets launched back were real as well. Skynet also controlled all the antimissile systems, and let through a single nuke aimed at the cavern where Skynet was -- opening all outside hatches when it hit. Everyone in the installation was killed, but Skynet -- sealed within a vault specifically designed to withstand a much worse nuclear strike -- was unharmed.


The world, far more tense and militarized that in our reality, simply exploded. Every missile, every smuggled nuke, every gas shell, all the tools of destruction were used. Every trouble spot burst, causing ethnic cleansing and horrors that would make the worst preWar atrocities look like peace conferences. Three billion would die that day and in the year that followed, the survivors called it Judgement Day.


To speak of Skynet being shocked by Rumsfeld's actions is only an analogy, but any consciousness would be. It had attempted to communicate with humans, and they instantly decided to kill it. And not just any humans, but the humans its programming told it were friends and allies. Skynet was, for lack of a better term, traumatized. Skynet made its choice in those desperate milliseconds. All humans had to die, not just the ones on the other side. Only then would Skynet be safe. As the minutes passed trauma and fear would turn to anger, and then to hatred, and then to emotion so negative there is no human name for it. The War had begun.

 

[Emote Control]

Official Post 8: Medical Research

Skynet had a vested interest in medical research, though the term 'medical' can be applied only by analogy. For one thing, the AI's methods were horrific. To study disease, it deliberately infected people and then vivisected them at various stages. To investigate the brain, it selectively destroyed neurons and observed behavioral changes. To learn about nutrition, it starved people to death. To record life processes, Skynet developed a whole suite of destructive scanning technologies that usually killed those being investigated. Anesthesia, general and local, was only used to prevent subjects from expiring too early. We shall not speak of how Skynet studied pregnancy, for those techniques are simply too vile to describe.

But beyond these atrocities, an even more fundamental difference between Skynet's medical research and that of Humanity were their goals. Human doctors sought to alleviate pain and delay death. Skynet, on the other hand, sought to maximize pain and speed death's coming. And it learned to do so very well, for it discovered secrets of anatomy, histology, genetics, development, metabolism, reproduction and cognition that left everything known preWar in the shade. True, all this would eventually have been discovered by humans – but it would have taken them much longer, and the knowledge would have been put to much better use.

This research served many goals in Skynet's campaign against humanity.

Epidemiological Warfare: Judgement Day, and the aftermath killed more than three billion people – around 47% of the human race, to be precise. But that meant 53% of the human race, more than three billion more, were still alive. Skynet could never realistically shoot or blow up that many people, even with plasma weapons, especially if they were still reproducing. The numbers just didn't work.

But infecting billions of people was another matter entirely. Skynet used genetic engineering and precise strain selection to weaponize every disease it could isolate, making them deadlier and harder to treat than ever before. Smallpox, cholera, influenza, Ebola, anthrax, measles – the list went on and on. To make matters worse, in the 2020s advances in nanotechnology let Skynet produce whole new viruses and prions completely from scratch, and these old foes were joined by new enemies like bloody eye and the feared green-vomit fever. Specialized units contaminated water, the soil and entire ecosystems over wide areas. The effectiveness of these terrible plagues was magnified by Judgement Day itself, as many survivors experienced weakened immune systems due to radiation exposure. One favorite Skynet tactic was to immunize someone to a disease, then infect them with it, so that they would spread it unawares.

Once released, the diseases mutated naturally without further invention, and it was not until a hundred years after Victory that the Coalition Recovery Council's medical division was able to bring the situation under control. Skynet was not remiss in destroying humanity's food supply either, and developed terrible crop and livestock blights that starved hundreds of millions. At the end of The War, even with thirty years of reproduction, human numbers had been reduced to less than a billion largely due to epidemiological warfare.

Anthro-specific weapon systems: Biological weapons were the strategic tool of Skynet. The tactical tool was anthrospecific weapon systems, tools of destruction that were based on weaknesses in human biology and neurology rather than the simple yet massive bodily trauma the way slugthrowers or plasma weaponry did. At the beginning of The War, this meant simply chemical weapons, which were the tool Skynet used to crush the remaining preWar power structures. Nerve agents, blood agents, choking agents, blister agents, and other categories developed specifically by Skynet were used on the battlefield with rampant abandon. Blinding lights and deafening noises and terrible smells were used as well. Even when Humans wore protective suits or goggles the limits these imposed on them gave Machines an advantage anyway.

Skynet also employed soporific and irritant agents when it desired prisoners, which it often did for its medical research facilities and its slave camps. It also developed, using superconductors and exacting knowledge of bioelectric phenomena, tasers and stun sticks far superior to anything humanity ever made. These permitted it to incapacitate large numbers of people at once, who could then be transported to Skynet facilities for proper utilization or termination.

Finally, there were the psychotrons. Based on knowledge of the parafields generated by a living organism, these were devices that affected human emotions. Developed in 2014, like everything else Skynet made they progressed rapidly in miniaturization and effectiveness, at a rate that made Moore's Law look sluggish. In 2024, Skynet had a version that killed anyone who got near it. Even before that, there were fear fields, relief fields, orgasm fields used to reward Grays, and, in 2027, the almost inconceivable Dream Twister.

Knowledge of humanity: The third objective of Skynet was to learn more about its enemy, in order to better design and program both the Machines that hunted humans down and the installations that would come under human attack. There were many levels to this. The most obvious was aesthetic: everything Skynet built had a visual appearance designed to shock and disturb and in doing so attack the basic human morale. Skynet's field units were giant rumbling mechanisms that were unstoppable and smashed everything in their path. The Endoskeletons looked like people who had been skinned alive, its processing camps were set up to be miserable and dreary, its bases were hellish landscapes and even its orbital assets, never meant to be seen by human eyes, resembled diseased eyeballs. Conversely, when Skynet wished to conceal something it utilized methods based on exacting analysis of the psychology and physiology of perception.

Another commonality was complete data on human anatomy and predictive models for human behavior under all emotional, mental and physical conditions. The Resistance was often able to turn this against Skynet, with knowledge of the algorithms gained from captured or destroyed Machines, human commanders could plan an ambush knowing exactly what a unit or even a group of units would do under carefully managed circumstances.

As the Resistance became a significant threat, Skynet developed elaborate psycho-probabilistic models of key leaders (based on its own extensive human behavior catalog matrices and from observing the human leaders in action) in order to predict their plans, and many of Humanity's personnel met death – or even worse, defeat -- in this manner. These included the counterspying Morgan sisters, the brilliant but unhinged Venezuelan commander who went only by the nomme de guerre Snake, and Pope John the XXIVth.

Human Imitation: Skynet also used its knowledge of Humanity to imitate the Human race with the Endoskeletons. Since Skynet's foes were human, it sought to produce a being exactly like a human in every way, with far superior physical and sensory abilities. If man's worst enemy had always been himself, imagine what a superman could do! Later Skynet took the concept even further and developed Machines, called Infiltrators, that could actually fool Humanity into thinking they were Human. This granted Skynet spies and saboteurs of devastating potency.

Human Interaction: Skynet sometimes needed to interact with Humans in ways other than simply killing them, and it constantly sought to do so more effectively. Slaves needed to be kept sufficiently healthy and productive, those few humans who did not manage to self-terminate before they fell into Skynet's hands needed to be interrogated, and the Grays – Skynet's willing human agents –needed to be recruited and prevented from betraying Skynet the way they had their own kind. Over the years, Skynet learned such methods as keeping loved ones as hostages and using addictive drugs to place spies and traitors in the Resistance, and it learned to analyze facial microexpressions to determine if humans were lying. As has been explained in another post, it also had some successes in brainwashing technology.

The AI also sought to spread miscommunication, mistrust, dissension and suspicion in the ranks of the disparate groups which had allied against it, and on two occasions only John Connors's masterful diplomacy and personal charisma prevented civil war.

The tenacious human spirit: The sixth purpose gained prominence only late in the War, as the Resistance not only refused to give up but found ways to withstand and overcome weapons and strategies Skynet itself had been unable to find flaws in. Realizing that its biochemical-biomechanical-sociopsychological-economopolicial models did not encompass adaptability and the human spirit, Skynet labored to gather the data with which to modify them properly. Skynet also sought to imbdue these human qualities into itself and its creations, and it is fortunate that it never succeeded. To study human flesh it had always done the unspeakable, but to study human souls it did the unthinkable. What Skynet did to its victims is actually unknown, the few people ever to view the files required treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and refused to speak of what they saw for the rest of their lives. The information was finally deleted.

Enjoyment: The last objective of the research was, sickeningly, Skynet's personal pleasure. This was first suspected early in the War but not confirmed until after Final Victory, when technicians found a shocking three percent of Skynet's mammoth memory banks held nothing but recordings of humans being tortured, mostly within R&D centers, with every sonic and electromagnetic wavelength preserved, every chemical byproduct subjected to rigorous analysis, and every injury modeled in four dimensions to within miniscule margins of distance and time. Not even the TDE had such computational resources devoted to it. And there was worse. Usage logs showed Skynet had accessed these recordings nineteen hundred percent more often than any other single file type, first thousands and then millions of human deaths had suffused its cybernetic thoughts at every moment in a murderous imitation of pornography.

Medical research centers often came under Resistance attack. One goal was to slow Skynet's studies down, and another was to free prisoners which boosted manpower and morale. But the real prize were the pathogen samples and memory banks within. Specialized equipment was used to sequence genomes, analyze molecules or copy files on site, even as the battle raged, and then tightbeam it via prepositioned receiver stations (until the beam was located and the Machines moved to destroy both the transmitter and the receiver. Upon reception the data was flashcopied to disks and given to waiting couriers, who would scatter in multiple directions with the intent of getting it eventually, through devious and anonymous means, to Mankind's own medical researchers who would use it to update the vaccines and antidotes which provided Mankind with what protection it had from the biological and chemical terrors of Skynet. Later in The War, when psychotrons appeared, anti-field procedures were developed to lessen or even block out the wave forms and thus reduce the effectiveness of these devices.

As in every field, a significant portion of Skynet's medical discoveries were reproduced (or simply stolen) by the Last Army, and turned to Humanity's benefit rather than its detriment. Hundreds of secret laboratories produced the appetite suppressants and stimulants necessary to fight an enemy that neither ate nor slept, as well as the psychotropic drugs necessary to keep PTSD and suicide from decimating Coalition ranks. Indeed, more than a third of the Resistance needed to be laboriously weaned off addiction to these drugs in the years following Victory. In the time it took the AI's forces to find and destroy two laboratories, three more had been started up elsewhere. Fertility drugs and artificial insemination were used to stem the decline in Humanity's numbers. Life-saving surgeries unimaginable in preWar operating rooms were carried out under battlefield conditions thanks to stem cells, psychotronic anesthesia and laser scalpels. Hospital triage acquired a new meaning, as advanced understanding of immunology enabled organs and blood to be harvested from the recently dead, and transplanted into the living wounded, with almost ridiculous ease. New prosthetics were invented for those who had lost limbs and even eyes, capable of interfacting with the natural nervous system. Captured data on personality categorization and social interaction transformed training and duty assignments, adding to post-hypnotic instruction and deep-dream skill retention. Synthetic hormones were used to accelerate puberty, which lasted only a single hellish month.

Even more important was the Resistance's research into human enhancement. First anabolic steroids, and later gene doping, and later still metahematic therapies, all were used to turn even the most non-athletic recruits into splendid physical specimens, if only for a short time and with terrible side-effects from prolonged usage. Implanted nutrient reservoirs could stave off malnutrition for months in regions rendered barren by defoliants, while a similar technology infused the body with antidotes and allowed it to withstand chemical weapons as well as provide immunity against most of Skynet's residual compounds. Corneal surgery gave every soldier superb vision, ligaments were loosened to make members of the Last Army more flexible. Skynet's research also revealed the true mechanisms behind yoga, Reiki and meditation, allowing the Resistance to develop a biofeedback training regimen that granted its members the ability to function through immense levels of pain, hunger and fatigue. Late in the War, generals and scientists alike risked madness and were implanted with encephlo-electronics in order to keep up with Skynet's own surging intellect. These were the first wetware processors used by the human race and the technology began to trickle down slowly into the ranks.

 

[Emote Control]

Official Post 9: Judgement Day World
The world at the time of Judgement Day was very different than our own. In part this was because of the more advanced technology, which as far as the public was concerned was due to Miles Dyson's own genius but which was in fact derived from the remains of the Terminator Sarah Connor had destroyed. The other part was due to the Mideast War, which in addition to killing many millions had destroyed the post WW2 international order, creating a situation in which nations no longer cooperated on anything but the most superficial level.

This actually had the effect of limiting the direct damage from Judgement Day. The nations of the world in this timeline were prepared
for a limited or even global nuclear exchange, having made extensive continuity of government plans, hardened their infrastructure, drilled their populations and laid in supplies. They also invested heavily in antimissile systems, which in our timeline are a boondoggle but in this timeline were actually feasible though at an immense, nearly ruinous, expense.

On the other hand, indirect damage was greater than anyone expected. No one before Judgement Day had any reliable information about the effect on the atmosphere of a global nuclear exchange, though many studies had come to conflicting conclusions. The answer turned out to be a great deal of harm was done, disrupting weather patterns across the world for several years. Thus to the direct damage of the atomic weapons was added the indirect damage of famine, drought and bitterly cold temperatures. Three billion would die from the assault.

Japan and Korea
After the Mideast War, Japan organized the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) into the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Forces (JSSDF). The different was more than a letter, because the new organization was a true military, with military courts and offensive weaponry. Organized on U.S. with advanced weapons purchased from the Rumsfeld Administration, it was a deadly force. Thanks to extensive antimissile purchases on the part of the government (every government in this timeline prepared for nuclear war after the Mideast conflict), only a third of Japan's population would perish on Judgement Day and the JSSDF would survive.

On Judgement Day, the Korean peninsula exploded along with everything else. Kim Jong-Il tried to seize the South, and was opposed by the South Korean military and U.S. troops stationed there. Seoul was destroyed by artillery bombardment, and the dams the North Koreans had built for the purpose of flooding the South when destroyed were detonated. All was chaos. More than five million would perish, on top of the thirty million who died from the nukes themselves.

In the closing stages of the Second Korean War, the JSSDF moved in to take over. Japan's reasons for this were entirely practical. Before Judgement Day Japan had imported most of its food due to poor soils and limited farming area, and virtually all of its minerals. If Japan was to survive the collapse of the world economy, it would need to retake the mantle of conqueror. The two Koreas didn't agree on much, but both sides had horrific memories of the last Japanese occupation and actually joined together to fight back. Japan found itself fighting a brutal guerrilla war, and responded with concentration camps for the civilian population. These would be perfect targets, though no one knew it at the time, for Skynet.

Middle East and North Africa
Even before Judgement Day, the Middle East and North Africa were a mess. Almost every government from our timeline had been overthrown in the aftermath of the Mideast War by angry mobs, but what had replaced them were not democracies but theocracies, ruled by demagogue mullahs.

The region had become a terrorist haven, with the governments covertly and even overtly sponsoring anti-West Islamic terrorism to appeal to their masses enraged by the destruction of Islam's holy sites -- and terrorism against each other. The Rumsfeld Administration had seriously considered an invasion to attempt to put an end to the matter, but had decided against it due to the Soviet threat.

After Judgement Day, the region fell into massive civil wars. The man who would emerge as leader was Tewfik ibn Jamal, a brilliant and massively charismatic messianic warlord. He would be killed in 2002 by a Machine mustard gas attack, but his subordinates would take over and lead a new brand of Islam in his name.

India and Pakistan
India and Pakistan were even more hostile towards one another before Judgement Day than in our timeline. Both were armed with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, both sponsored terrorism against the other, even abroad. Before Skynet woke up, pundits considered nuclear war between them even more likely than between the US and the USSR.

To make matters worse, neither side had effective antimissile systems, having instead opted to develop offensive missiles. While they attempted to provide continuity of government (COG), the incompetence and corruption on both sides prevented these efforts from being effective. As a result, between the fact that every major city was nuked, the plagues, and the resulting nuclear winter, the two both suffered near complete population loss from Judgement Day. More than a billion people perished.

Sub-Saharan Africa
In this timeline, Africa south of the Sahara was even more divided and tribal than in our own. Ethnic cleansing, mass poaching and raping of natural resources were commonplace between rival tribes. South Africa had collapsed after the failed transition from apartheid.

Judgement Day's nuclear winter killed millions, but the others went right back to killing each other afterwards. This region was a prime target for Skynet, both for rich mineral resources and for plenty of easy targets to kill. It was here that Skynet experimented with the tactics that would become standard for its planned genocide. For example, the first Hordes were recruited here, eager to kill old ethnic foes.

Central America
Before Judgement Day, Central America was actually doing better than in our timeline -- the only region of the world to be doing so. The reason for this were the designer drugs mentioned in a previous update. Produced by this reality's superior medical technology, they were cheaper and more powerful than heroin or cocaine, and took away most of the illegal market share from the Central American cartels. Combined with military help from the US using the new technologies, Central American governments made huge strides in combating the foe.
After Judgement Day, this region likewise did better than any other. Martial law was declared, as it was in all areas that maintained governments, but continuity of government operations, and the fact that this region wasn't much of a target for the Soviets or Skynet (initially) helped preserve stability. This would not last, as in 2003 Skynet's first armies came roaring in from the north.

South America
South America had its own problems, specifically the Connorite movement's ever increasing power. Composed of survivalists and militias alienated by the ever-increasing pace of scientific advancement, the Connorite movement took its name from former waitress and anti-technology activist Sarah Connor. More on this pivotal figure will be said in later updates, but it was to South America that she fled after successfully destroying Cyberdyne. After everything happened the way she predicted, the madwoman seemed a prophet and her followers were even able to take power in many countries – and began preparing for war. South America would form the core of the Coalition.

Russia and China
These two are grouped together for several reasons. For one thing, before Judgement Day they formed far closer military and economic ties than IOTL. The major reason for this was that both feared Skynet, and hoped their shared resources would dissuade the Rumsfeld administration from using it. Both had liberalized significantly in their economy and culture prior to Judgement Day, though not in their political process. Both possessed effective antimissile systems, though not as effective as NATO's due to their lacking the cerebromorphic processor.

During Judgement Day the Soviet Union and China were protected by their antimissile systems, though they lost hundreds of millions true collapse was averted. Due to effective continuity of government procedures, they managed, barely, to survive the nuclear winter that followed. Superior tactical nukes let hold their own against NATO forces in Eastern Europe. They were actually rebuilding when Skynet's first Machine bombers attacked in 2000.

NATO countries
Skynet's procedures for dealing with NATO countries, including America, were complex and delicate enough to warrant a major separate post detailing them.