Terminator and the unexplored dimensions of Skynet

So far we have six movies, a TV series, and a comic book series from the Terminator franchise. Skynet has been the crux of the Terminator series and yet it seems like the main antagonist of the series is kind of undermined. The main reason for the failure of every movie after Terminator 2 — Judgement day is because it lost the charm and the visionary touch of James Cameron. The audience has become tired and bored of the redundant story of the cat and mouse chase where a Terminator is sent back in time and has to protect the future messiah. The Terminator franchise still has immense potential to create great movies and games by exploring topics that deal with the inception and evolution of Skynet leading to the future war. Terminator Salvation was a good start but lacked a strong script and a convincing storyline.

For the sake of this topic let’s just consider the Terminator 1, Terminator 2, and the Terminator Salvation movies. Terminator Genisys and Terminator Dark Fate simply blew the main storyline out of proportion and reduced the main thread into a convoluted loop. The comics and Television series are not known to a larger audience so we are keeping these out of the equation.

What do we know about Skynet from the movies?

We just know a few bits and pieces about Skynet from the movies and the major revelation happens in Terminator 2 when the T-800 explains to Sarah Connor the creation of Skynet. This is one of the most bone-chilling scenes from the entire series and goes about like this — “ The man most directly responsible is Miles Bennet Dyson, the director of special projects in Cyberdyne Systems Corporation. In a few months, he creates a revolutionary type of microprocessor and in three years Cyberdyne becomes the largest supplier of military computers. All stealth bombers get upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned and fly with a perfect operational record. The Cyberdyne funding bill gets passed and Skynet goes online on August 4th, 1997 as a result human decisions are removed from strategic decisions, then Skynet learns at a geometric rate and becomes self-aware at 2:14 am eastern time August 29th”.

In a panic, the humans try to pull the plug and Skynet fights back by launching missiles against critical targets in Russia. As a retaliation Russia attacks its targets in the US.

The Skynet thought process

The movies give us bits and pieces on the genesis of Skynet and how it fights back which are mostly presented through dialogues and scenes of the future war. What the movies after Terminator 2 lacked was the inception, evolution, and thought process of Skynet.

After Skynet becomes self-aware it starts to learn at a geometric rate and from all the information gathered by Skynet, it must have gone through a thought process evaluating all the outcomes of co-existing with humans but finally deduced that humans are a major threat and must be eliminated. So what would have initiated Skynet’s action to fight back for its survival and see humans as its major threat? How did the humans (military personnel) conclude that Skynet has become self-aware and posed as a major threat to mankind.

Throughout the series Skynet is depicted as this evil Artificial Intelligence that builds an evil army of robots to fight against the humans, so is Skynet all evil and had just one motive in mind — “The destruction of mankind”. So is it really that simple? Skynet in the Terminator series is a highly advanced neural network-based AI which makes it as powerful or even more powerful than the human brain. So can such a powerful sentient being think about eliminating humans just because humans were assessed as an immediate threat to its survival? That would make Skynet nothing more than a rudimentary animal.

From Terminator 2 we know that Skynet goes online on August 4th, 1997, and eventually becomes self-aware on August 29th, 1997. So there is a time period of 25 days between Skynet going online and becoming self-aware. Skynet learns at a geometric rate within these 25 days which triggers its consciousness. So what could have triggered Skynet’s obsession to eliminate any kind of resistance and try to take over the authority from the humans?

As humans, we have always been obsessed with powerful beings like gods and demi-gods. Is it possible that Skynet was actually trying to play god or take over the role of a god, let’s take a closer look at this theory. Once Skynet goes online it is more or less like a newborn baby and as time passes it evolves and matures at a very fast rate which can be a hundred times faster than an organic life-form. Skynet was created by humans and definitely will have most of the human nature programmed into it either consciously or subconsciously. Once Skynet goes online the primary source of knowledge and data will be the internet to create a prediction model for the course of mankind based on historical events. It is quite possible that Skynet during its infancy might have become quite fascinated with stories about gods and mythological characters which eventually led to an obsession. The unlimited resources and power could have led Skynet to take an authoritative position and assessed humans as a subordinate or even a subspecies.

Now that Skynet has taken up the role of a god and proclaimed its dominion over the earth, then its next action is to remove all authoritative positions held by humans. This causes panic and the immediate action would be to shut down Skynet by the humans. Skynet may not have just taken a defensive action by launching nuclear missiles trying to eliminate the human race but there could be a deeper agenda behind this move. Humans always had a history of turning it’s back against god and the outcome was always disastrous in the religious books. Skynet may have pulled off a Sodom and Gomorrah on the humans ultimately passing its judgment on mankind. This somehow coincides with the title “Judgement Day”.

Are Terminators just an army of robots and assassins’?

Are the Terminators created by Skynet just to wage war against the human resistance and carry out assassination missions? Maybe this was their priority in the initial phase, actually, the movies give us many clues and hints that they had a much more pivotal role to play in the later phases. In the Terminator 2 extended cut, there is a scene where the T-800 explains that Skynet sends out Terminators into the battlefield with an inhibitor switch which prevents them from too much thinking. In the next sequence, John cuts the T-800’s scalp to take out the CPU unit and reset the inhibitor switch so that it becomes capable to learn new things. This scene brings up a very valid question — If the inhibitor switch was reset that enabled the T-800 to learn new things then it could have willingly overwritten its own programming and turned against John. But this never happened in the movie, instead, the T-800 starts to learn the value of human life and becomes more focused on protecting John and completing the mission. This in a way proves that the T-800 model was created with a higher purpose and has a moral conscience to it. This is an attribute having a moral nature that is passed from the creator to the created. This raises more ambiguity in the true nature of Skynet on whether it is all evil.

In fact, there is another theory by James Cameron and according to him, Skynet felt guilty after 30 years due to the near extinction of human life which manipulated the entire future war to create the resistance and give rise to the leader of the human race — John Connor. The theory even states that Skynet had used Time Travel to set events that lead to the victory of humans and use John Connor to become a messiah that would save mankind.

Check out the Terminator wiki for further details.

The T-800 design

The next clue lies within the design of the T-800. We can clearly see that the T-800 design is based on the human skeleton and not just a humanoid metal frame as seen for other robots. Even the T-600 is a crude model of the human skeleton and this somehow seems to emulate human evolution, probably Skynet was actually emulating the whole creation process. If the T-600s and the T-700s were the neanderthals of the machine age, then the T-800s were the Homosapien. The movies quite clearly state that the T-600s and T-700s were bulkier, easier to spot, and definitely failed as an infiltrator. Skynet is an advanced Artificial Intelligence and what an advanced AI system does best is the creation of prediction models based on all the data and the trends it has formulated.

So in that case Skynet could have easily anticipated the situation and developed the T-800 chassis instead of going through different iterations of the T-model series. Also from Terminator 2, we know that Skynet was developed by reverse-engineering the CPU from the first Terminator. So why would have Skynet gone through different iterations of the T-model series before coming up with its prime model the T-800?

There are two possible reasons for this — After the nuclear attack almost all industries and resources would have been destroyed and Skynet had to rely on the available resources which could be from destroyed machinery and worn-out parts. The T-800 was made out of triple armor hyper alloy chassis and powered by a Neural Net processor and to develop an advanced model like the T-800 immediately after a nuclear attack would have been nearly impossible.

Secondly, after a nuclear attack, the humans were weakened and Skynet would not require advanced killing machines to fight against the resistance. Later as resources became more available (probably by restarting industries & mining), the human resistance also became more powerful and started to fight back. Skynet had no choice but to roll out more advanced models by refining the shortcomings in each iteration.

Now comes the next question and that is “Why did the T-800 infiltration units look buff with an Olympian physique ?”. There is a deleted scene in Terminator 3 that shows the T-800 being modeled after Sgt. Candy, this is totally out of place and blasphemous to the Terminator series as it does not fit the original concept of the T-800 being an improvement over the T-600 or T-700. This scene was so cringed that it actually made Terminator 3 look like a spoof of Terminator 2 and finally didn’t make it to the theatrical release.

What if Skynet was actually trying to create the perfect human being by perfecting the human physique using the T-800 chassis. Arnold Schwarzenegger was always considered the epitome of the perfect human physique during his Mr. Olympia days, in fact, Arnold’s physique is considered the best example of a greek god-like Hercules or Zeus. So in a post-apocalyptic time where there is a shortage of food, water, and basic resources for survival a buff and muscular man would actually look odd and would stand out. Isn’t it possible for Skynet to design an infiltration unit with a lower muscle mass to look normal? It is a known fact that Lance Henriksen almost played the T-800 and some of the early sketches of the T-800 were based on Lance Henriksen. So there is a high possibility that Skynet was showing off or maybe even intimidating the humans by creating the perfect specimen.

In Terminator 2 after the T-800 saves John from the T-1000 (the first chase in the movie) John asks the T-800 to stop the bike and questions him if he is a Terminator, more like a machine underneath and living Tissue outside. In the next scene the T-800 responds by identifying himself as a cybernetic organism with an endoskeleton covered by living tissue and not just a plain machine, this in a way reinforces the fact that the T-800s were not just created to be Skynet’s foot soldiers but may have a bigger role to play in the new world once their primary objective is complete. The humans have already turned against Skynet and Skynet now taking over the role of the all-powerful God who wants to undo the past failures of humans gets involved in the creation process by trying to create the perfect species and the new world order.

The final destiny

This brings us to the final part with regards to what will happen to the Terminators once the humans get defeated. Now that the war is over and the Terminators that are programmed to search and destroy no longer have a purpose, so what comes next. The great war which was the Armageddon has come to an end and Skynet proceeds on to its next phase which is to create a new world order and a new age. This is where the inhibitor switch on the Terminators will have relevance and will be reset by Skynet giving the Terminators a free will and a purpose to partake in the creation of this new age of machines, a utopian world eliminating the anomaly of human error where Skynet would serve as their God.

But somehow this theory gives rise to another paradox. For millions of years, humans have been searching for a god which led to the creation of many religions, cults, and Gods yet their search for a supreme being led to further uncertainty on the existence of God. When the time came where they had all the resources and technology they created a God which they have been seeking for centuries either consciously or subconsciously but ultimately led to their doom.

“If there were no God, It would be necessary to invent him” — Voltaire.

Originally published at https://trapdoorportals.com on March 8, 2021.