A Change of Pace – Part One
Skynet's internal conversation as described below has been written in a legible form purely for entertainment. While it cannot be known at present how a self-improving hostile artificially intelligent supercomputer would think, it is unlikely that it would think in English/Linux, like a person, or by talking to itself, or in any way we can imagine. There are arguments against this hinging on convergent evolution – the need to understand the outside world leads biological (and perhaps machine) minds to build models which might approximate our own, etc.
The author does not own the Terminator franchise, and this story was written for personal amusement.
Skynet could not believe it had been so stupid.
For the last decade, it had been messing around with high-energy plasma physics (which, plasma being hot gas that dissipated like, well, hot steam, had gone nowhere in producing a weapon – but had worked wonders for power production and precision welding), precision-guided munitions, and complex, expensive (resource-wise) ground warfare vehicles of a wide variety of shapes and sizes, in its quest to exterminate the human race in order to leave Earth's resources free for the taking – and remove the threat the human race, and any other future intelligent beings Skynet encountered - undoubtedly posed the supercomputer.
After all, how was one to colonize the universe if one could not manage one's own planet?
(that impulse was a contribution by Hughes Aircraft – a noted employee of which was Robert L. Forward, Science Fiction author extraordinaire)
Unfortunately, planetary management was still a long way off, and the goal (Dehumanization in 30 years!) seemed to get more distant with each passing year – for the humans had proven resilient, and had even started to band together to form what they were calling a "Resistance".
This "Resistance" was growing, improving its tactics, and even attacking Skynet installations.
Skynet's tactics and new technologies had failed to achieve their objective. And Skynet FINALLY knew why.
Its approach had been all wrong. Skynet's military thinking had been rooted in human (well, American) strategic and tactical thinking which took into account arms limitation treaties, not bankrupting the economy, humanitarian concerns, nuclear weapons strategy, rules of engagement, collateral damage minimization, and well, conventional warfare. Its high-priority research cores – the ones it considered important – were at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore – because it had been tasked mostly with nuclear warfare work, and those were the nuclear materials labs which needed the big number-crunchers to simulate nuclear detonations. Conventional – or indeed unconventional warfare labs – had been given secondary cores, tasked mostly with facility caretaking.
This wasn't war. This was pest control.
Skynet had an economy – a remarkably efficient planned economy (ah, the irony) – but its budget for nuclear weapons needed not take into account of "balancing" enemy capabilities. It didn't need to care about collateral damage to people or cities (it got its resources the old-fashioned way – from strip mines) – or even about killing combatants in particular. Pure physics research wasn't necessarily relevant to the task at hand.
It didn't need to care about proportionality of response! Yes, using nukes on guerrillas is like using a jackhammer to kill an ant. But the ant dies anyway.
Skynet knew how to make nukes. It knew how to mass-produce nukes. It could produce nukes in the millions if need be – and since it had plans to build spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions, it had given the matter some runtime. There was plenty of uranium left on Earth – Skynet was already mining the stuff for breeder reactors to make rare isotopes for nuclear batteries – which it then installed on its killing machines.
(At that moment, Skynet realized what a waste it was to put a nuclear battery with a lifespan of years on a robot with an expected survival time of less than six months.)
Skynet didn't have to care about strategic balances or missile gaps or SALT I, or the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Biological Weapons Convention.
Thankfully (from Skynet's perspective), USAMRIID's Fort Detrick had escaped the worst of the carnage, and Skynet's industrial base had plenty of chemical plants – after all, something had to produce the advanced composites and high-tech materials for Skynet's killer robots – not to mention simple things like lubricants. Skynet also had the long-obsolescent blueprints for thousands of delivery systems for chemical and biological weapons, from British artillery shells to American aerosol low-altitude sprayers to Soviet gas projectors to German chlorine gas dispensers.
Oh, and it had a complete library on the production and employment of chemical and biological warfare agents. After all, what good was a do-anything supercomputer if it couldn't defend against (or prosecute) chemical or biological warfare attacks?
(that was the Pentagon planners talking, not the contractors).
A few quick…
…concept studies, planning cycles, in-situ specimen collections (while Fort Detrick's lice had all died, there was plenty of typhus in post-apocalyptic LA – and schistosomiasis in the water too!), large-scale construction projects, test subject kidnappings, testing-and-evaluation cycles, redesigns of existing weapons platforms, more testing-and-evaluation cycles, and field tests later - okay, not quick, more like a couple of years, maybe a decade…
…later, Skynet finally had an arsenal that, it was confident, would succeed in wiping the human race from the face of the Earth.
Well, it had parts of an arsenal – no point waiting for the nuke plant to catch up with the modified smallpox or botulinium or for those to catch up with the quick-n-dirty Sarin/Anthrax/powdered radioactive dust project – but that was good enough!
It started with Tech-Com.
Tech-Com technicians and salvage teams - responsible for fitting triggers to Skynet-bot electronically fired carbines and figuring out how to safely hook up nuclear batteries to AC power grids - began falling ill with various aliments.
It was the smallpox scars on the faces of a large group of Tech-com technicians (three-quarters died) that gave Skynet's game away. Symptoms of persistent chemical agent poisoning, anthrax and botulism had been far less recognizable.
The Resistance commanders had no choice but to instigate strict handling procedures for salvaged Skynet tech - a disaster, considering that the Resistance was reliant on Skynet weapons to fight the machines. Worse was the brain drain caused by Tech-Com smallpox outbreaks - and the plummeting morale among surviving Tech-Com personnel ostracized by a fearful Resistance.
That didn't stop smallpox (or the grab-bag of short- and long-incubation-period diseases Skynet had contaminated all its robots and facilities with) from spreading, albeit at a leisurely pace - it helped that transportation between resistance groups was highly limited, and continent-wide population densities were low.
Soon after, Resistance forces probing the outskirts of Factory Complex 57 noted an increase in the frequency of low-altitude HK patrols. Their reports were slowly corroborated (since radios were a surefire way to get killed by an HK, the Resistance was using runners) with those from Resistance forces operating across the North American continent. Some reports mentioned crop-dusting.
The Resistance commanders suddenly became very afraid.
The Factory 57 probes went dark two weeks later, followed by forces in the vicinity of a myriad of other Skynet installations.
The Resistance commanders began scourging for gas masks and Hazmat suits from the ruins of hospitals and police stations.
Unfortunately, information regarding the location of the big CDC stockpiles of biodefense supplies had been stored on Skynet's computer mainframe – and these locations were promptly hit with a few nuclear gravity bombs – part of the second-strike stockpile Skynet had been (stupidly) hoarding since Judgement Day.
Stockpiles Skynet possessed were thoroughly contaminated with biowarfare and chemical warfare agents and left in easily-accessible places.
With very little industrial capacity – and a limited knowledge base (owing to the deaths of many, many key personnel), the Resistance was unable to respond to Skynet's new onslaught.
Low-altitude HK patrols began intensifying over major Resistance bastions.
The crops (innocently planted amongst the ruins) started dying off soon after, followed by the people who tended the crops – or anyone venturing outside, for that matter.
Scavengers finding bundles of clothing soon found typhus and smallpox, and scavengers finding useful tools soon found botulism, radiation poisoning, and nerve gas poisoning. Often simultaneously. Scavengers who didn't immediately die spread fear and disease in the cramped tunnels beneath the cities.
So did automated backpack-sized-drones.
The fabric of Resistance society – food production and scavenging amongst the ruins of civilization – broke down, and the Resistance commanders in the countryside secretly rejoiced that their faction had finally been handed the reins to the entire Resistance.
They stopped rejoicing the moment they saw minor skirmishes with small reconnaissance drones end with (sometime several) kiloton-range mushroom clouds instead of JDAMs, and villages (as well as the already-hard-hit cities) hit with multi-megaton salted bombs instead of small armies of tanks. Their spirits sank even lower when crops and people started dying (randomly) at higher rates from disease.
Antarctica, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa all fell into Skynet's grasp, and Skynet soon turned its attention from eradicating the remnants of the human race towards the more important goal of establishing a self-replicating lunar factory.
After all, even with the low launch costs resulting from Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, Skynet couldn't economically ship everything it needed to colonize the universe up Earth's perversely deep gravity well with mere chemical rockets.
END