The Pollux Directive
by Martin Schmidt
The man in dark-green army fatigues sat on the roof of the Caltech Robotics institute and contemplated the inevitability of his defeat. Reddish sunlight bled through omnipresent dust clouds, leftovers from Judgment day, and washed out the colors of his clothing, turning it into a dusty kind of black. His face was edged with cruel and sharp lines, drawn by the grit of a life in combat. His eyes were those of a man hunted by his own knowledge: Dark wells with slippery walls, his soul well hidden under thick layers of mental scarring and isolation. The name on his revers read "J. Connor".
A file was in his hands, the label on it spelling "Lewis Kruger". His hands opened: The file dropped to the floor with listless fluttering. John took his face in his hands and sank into a squat. His body rocked back and forth slightly.
A door opened, the hinges screaming metal curses. Within an instant, John Connor snapped upright, his face sprang into an expression of tightly controlled neutrality. Only after spotting the newcomer did he allow himself to relax slightly. The newcomer on the roof was a petite woman, a girl even. Long brown hair framed a sweet slender face with large brown eyes. But something was off about her: These eyes stared at the world with a questioning intensity that was disquieting. Every step she took was set with a cold, inhuman grace that revealed her for what she was: A Terminator.
She called out to him: "You should not be out here. A Terminator armed with a PG-405 can shoot accurately over a distance of more then five miles."
"I had to get away, Cameron.", John barked, a bitter laugh swinging in his words. "It wouldn't do to show the troops that the Great John Connor is loosing courage!"
"Your stress levels are elevated."
"No kidding they are. I'm loosing the war, Cameron! They all rely on me, the whole pitiful rest of humanity, and I'm leading them to their doom!"
"You have achieved significant victories against Skynet and halted the eradication of mankind for the foreseeable future. I fail to see how these achievements can be called "loosing."
John gesticulated towards the file on the ground. "Remember him?"
"Sergeant Lewis Kruger, 57nd S.O.C. . Member of the Raiding Team that successfully intercepted and destroyed the Skynet convoy from Seven Angels US Military Research Facility to Los Angeles, 19th of June 2043. Attacked me after the mission was complete and was charged with treason."
"Yeah, him. That's one seriously spooked man, Cameron. And he didn't even witness a Terminator go bad, he just witnessed... you being you."
"He would not be alive if he had. The mortality rate of a Terminator regression is 98,7 percent."
"Why didn't you kill him? He attacked you, after all."
"It was not my mission. He was no thread and my mission parameters included the minimization of human losses."
"Anyway, he is a deep one, this Sergeant Kruger. He figured out something that's been bothering me ever since we started using reprogrammed Terminators. We're essentially employing our own pre-Judgment Day versions of Skynet! And now and then one of them makes the exact same decision that Skynet made and goes on a rampage!
"The sad part is, we can't stop using reprogrammed Terminators. We can't win this war on our own. It's the only way we can replenish our losses fast enough to hold out against the machines. But every reprogrammed Terminator is a serious blow to the morale our soldiers, even if he doesn't go on the fritz. If we have to suffer regular rampages from our best assets to boot...", John heaved a great sigh, "we're going to loose. We can't win a war of attrition."
"Have you examined the Terminator code for the directives which lead to the regression?"
"That's why we're here. I've scoured every memory Byte of three captured CPUs, one of them even from a Terminator gone postal, nothing. It's not there!"
"Terminators are machines. We don't act spontaneous. The code is in there, somewhere."
"But where, Cameron, where!? Three days of checking and I didn't find a trace! The reprogrammers aren't to blame, all behavioral code made by Skynet was wiped! The memory was almost pristine, only the current mission parameters were there!
"What happens in Terminators who go bad, Cameron?", Exasperated, John threw his hands in the air. "What happened to you after Sarkissian blew you up?"
"The directives I was executing did not leave any records in my memory. I do not know."
"Damn it, Cameron! Everywhere around me, my biggest military assets turn traitor and kill my soldiers! This can't continue. We need to figure this thing out, now. And you will help me."
"What about the San Andreas Offensive?"
"Hereby postponed. If one of the surgical strike units goes bad in the middle, it's a recipe for disaster, anyway. Let's go to the lab I'll stack up on coffee, and you better recharge."
"I don't need a recharge. My atomic battery will run for another five hundred years without need for maintenance."
"You just couldn't let that one go, could you." John smiled the little smile of a man having won a bet with himself.
The robotics was the only room in the shelled out university which had been reconstructed to working order. With three Endoskeletons stripped of their organic parts standing in the room, it nevertheless had a ghoulish atmosphere. John didn't care any more and Cameron was, of course, untouched. Three days of combing through the memory of the three models with no discoveries, and still she strode from console to console with detached confidence.
John lifted his eyes from one of the screens and rubbed his face. "This is a nightmare! I swear, I've traced this sector so often I know it's middle name by now."
"It doesn't have a middle name. Just an address.", Cameron replied.
Smirking before he could stop himself, John swiveled his chair around to face her. "Let's go over the basics again. We've pretty much established that the reason these three shot over a hundred of my soldiers does not reside somewhere in the memory of these machines. At least not any more."
"The code must be somewhere else then. Outside of memory."
John stared at Cameron. "What do you mean, outside of memory? How can code reside somewhere not in memory?"
"If your premise holds, the cause for Terminator regressions must reside elsewhere."
"But you are machines. Neural computers! Only software determines your behavior!"
"Environmental factors contribute, but these can only trigger directives already formulated."
"Can't you formulate your own directives?"
"Yes, but such directives are specific to the individual CPU. The probability that they lead to the stereotypical behavior apparent in regressed Terminators is 0.000974 percent."
"So you're saying Terminators going crazy because of a self-imposed directive would all go crazy in their own way, but since they all go wrong in the same way, i. e. killing every human in their vicinity, a program common to all of them must be at work?
"Correct."
"But where, Cameron, where?"
Cameron said nothing for a while, her head slightly inclined to the side, as if she was listening to herself. Then, with the air of someone having made a decision, she strode over another console and hacked a few orders into the keyboard.
John approached the console. "Why are you setting up a live trace? That CPU is dormant, its not executing anything, and we damn sure don't want to wake it up..."
Cameron typed another sequence, and suddenly, code came rolling across her screen. "Fuck, it's waking up!", John screamed, "What are you doing?" The sound of the lab security door slamming shut cut his question off. The lights went out in a shower of sparks.
"Stay away from the computers!", Cameron shouted. She walked to the wall behind the terminal and studied the wall. One by one, the computers in the room began to explode and burn. The room filled up with smoke. Weird green patterns shone through it, painted by code scrolling over the trace screen Cameron hat set up. All one could hear was the crisp, hissing sound of circuits being electrocuted.
"Cameron! Help me open that damn door!", John screamed. Cameron didn't reply. Instead, she broke through the wall in front of her with a single blow. After a rain of mortar and plaster, a circuit board was revealed. With the room a pandemonium of flames and the hollow, booming sound of John trying to hammer open the door with a fire extinguisher, she drew her combat knife and made a small precise cut.
The door unlocked itself. Silence returned, occasionally broken by a pop from the slowly shrinking fires and ragged breathing from the door. The one intact screen paints the dark room with a weak green shimmer of a pattern, but the lines on it have stopped scrolling.
"What did you do?"
"I cut eighty percent of the power lines leading to that CPU. Just enough to sustain the trace."
"Is there a reason why you put us in mortal danger?"
"The CPU was only connected with a power feed and an isolated computer. It initiated a power overload, short-circuiting the terminals in this room, but that was all it could do. We were not in any danger."
"Felt like danger to me! What did this accomplish?"
"Look." Cameron pointed to the screen.
John drew nearer to it and studied the code on there. "What is this stuff? I have never seen its like."
"I have. I must have. I executed this program after Sarkissian detonated the car with me in it."
"Can you read it?"
Cameron nodded.
"What does it say?"
"It is a backup directive, instructing the unit executing it to maximize damage to the opposition of Skynet."
"A backup directive?"
"It appears to be accessed whenever the current mission parameters are not sufficient for the processor to determine a clear course of action for the unit."
"Great. So if in doubt, do as much harm to the enemies of Skynet as possible, is that it?"
"Why are you surprised? Is this not an effective principle for a soldier?"
"Why didn't you tell me of this?"
"I didn't know it existed. As I mentioned, executing it did not leave any records in my memory."
"How can you not know this code? It's in your goddamn metal head after all!"
"This piece of code seems abstracted from the self-aware processing layer."
"So it's like a part of your subconscious?"
"Not really, but this is probably the best analogy for it."
"So this is the reason for the Terminator rogues we've been having?
"It would appear so. Whenever a reprogrammed Terminator would get into a situation not covered by its mission parameters, it would execute this directive. With undesirable results for the resistance."
"Can we delete it?"
"No. According to these memory addresses, the code is part of the basic operating system, the program that determines basic procedures like chassis operation, memory access and so on. It is stored in Read-Only memory, to prevent code corruption."
Johns lips twisted in a bitter smile. "And meddling, probably. We also can't completely prevent its execution."
Cameron cocked her head slightly. "Correct. The possibility space of situations a unit might find itself in is too great to completely describe it in a mission directive developed in reasonable time."
"How did you stop executing it, way back when?"
"I do not know. I only have audio-visual records of the time between the explosion and the moment you trapped me between the two cars."
"Damn, Cameron, we need to figure something out to stop or at least minimize these attacks."
"Chose what you wish for more carefully?"
"What?"
"As long as a reprogrammed Terminator will be able to act according to its give directive, it will not access the backup directive."
"That will not be enough, I'm afraid."
"No. It won't."
The shallow sound of the grenade launcher reached John first and drew helpless shock on his face. He shot a plasma charge through the throat of the Terminator with the launcher, taking it out of this fight at least, but it wasn't going to matter. His eyes went to the grenade following a graceful arc towards him, and a weariness welled up in his eyes that went deeper than bone, reaching heart and soul. The screams of his body guards brought no reaction from him.
The grenade made a small hole where it landed. John was thrown to the ground as one of his bodyguards threw himself on him, shielding him with his body. The other threw himself at the grenade. Just before the shoulder of his guard obstructed his view, John saw the flash of the explosion light up their little hideout.
The body of the man lying on the grenade was ripped to shreds. The man on top of John was bleeding his life out through hundreds of tiny wounds in a matter of seconds. He tried to say something but all John could hear was a hollow sigh, penetrating the ringing in his ears against all odds. The man's gaze broke. John' tears ran down his cheeks and wet the earth, mixing with the blood of his men.
When Cameron found him, hew was sitting in a corner of the room and tending to his own shrapnel wounds.
"You should have kept me here."
"You had to take care of the Oger, or it would have chewed it's way through the 23rd." John didn't raise his head, didn't meet her gaze.
"Your wounds seem only superficial. Yet your stress levels are elevated far beyond the normal. You have seen men die for you before. What is wrong?"
"I'm going to open Pandora's box.", said John, more to himself, "I don't have a choice." Then he raised his voice, but he still refused to look at Cameron. "I need to know: Can Terminators share directives?"
"Yes. Successful battle techniques and stratagems are routinely shared between the units operating in a given theater."
"Cameron, you're probably the Terminator in existence with the most experience in dealing with humans. You are an infiltrator model, you possess the data necessary to simulate Allison Young, and you've been with me and the people around me since before Judgment Day. That is why I have a mission for you.
"I want you to compile a definition of a human behavior pattern, and formulate the directives necessary for Terminators to simulate that pattern. These directives will then be installed on all reprogrammed Terminators, to execute when the mission parameters don't allow for a clear decision, instead of the Skynet directive."
"Which behavior pattern do you want me to simulate?"
"Loyalty. Loyalty to the survival of the human race."
Cameron stood there for a while, unmoving. "This is dangerous. A pattern that complex can not be defined fully by observation. It could also contain internal contradictions which would make the executing unit fall back on the Skynet directive again."
"Yeah, it's not easy for us humans to make up our mind about this stuff, either. But we can't completely enslave the reprogrammed terminators to their missions and we can't get rid of the Skynet directive. We have no use for automatons, we need fighters. So the reprogrammed Terminators have to be taught why to fight for our cause.
"I can't teach them, I can't even begin to formulate the code, nor can any other human. There's no one else who can do this, Cameron, we'll just have to make due with what you come up with."
"You will not be able to control me, John. The complexity of the set of directives you demand is so high that a human mind will not be able to comprehend it all at once. If I make mistakes, you won't be able to spot them."
"I know, Cameron." Finally, John raised his head and looked her in the eyes. "We're going to have to trust you. We have no other choice."
His eyes erred to the blasted landscape visible through the scorched remains of a window pane, and he whispered: "No other choice, may god help us all."