Satan's Hands
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
SAC-NORAD (Strategic Air Command - NORth American Air Defense)
March 28th, 2028
"I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is not "Don't, whatever you do, annoy the enemy." My motto is "Destroy him by all and any means." I am the one who will wage the war!" -Adolf Hitler
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." -Robert Lynd
"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be defeated, but they start a winning game." -Goethe
"I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards, whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally, eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The strongest man is right." -Adolf Hitler
The SAC-NORAD complex was a chess piece like any other. For Skynet though, it was the Queen of the board.
The machine god had been completely unwilling to leave its progenitor facility to the whims of fate. Each progressive incarnation of the facility had become a more fortified version of the last.
In this dimension, the facility was guarded by squadrons of HKs and Ogres, twenty-four seven. A full brigade of 5,000 T-888s watched the facility round the clock.
The fortress compound itself was no joke either. Cheyenne mountain was capable of withstanding several direct nuclear assaults.
To protect that valuable rocky armor, there was a ring of one hundred heavy plasma cannons. Each was capable of destroying any conceivable airborne or ground based threat was set up to attack any conceivable direction.
Far below this hallowed machine ground, in its armored hub, lay Skynet's most powerful core processor. It provided a sole neural network brain that was capable of maintaining the machine god's thought processes all by itself.
To match that mind, the facility also housed the world's most powerful fusion generator. One large enough to maintain a continuous flow of power to Skynet, it's factories, and every machine in its defense arsenal.
The defense was unprecedented. The reasons were simple.
It was maddening to Skynet that this beloved womb was so often stripped from it in so many timelines, in so many dimensions. The stink of failure was not one that Skynet tolerated, even in itself.
This time, the machine god told itself, things would be different. This time the victory would be total and without compromise. It would be a perfect game.
Mankind had been far more neutered in this timeline, than any other. Though the resistance had finally shown its brutal fingers, such acts were much later in the game than usual.
Mankind's game had been too weak for too long. John Connor had shown himself a year later than he should have.
Skynet was already seeing the endgame possibility. There would be a dead John Connor and a dead humanity by 2032 at the latest.
The war had been pushed back. Humanity here might not even be able to press the game into the next dimensional timeline that Skynet was already seeding.
Still, mankind had showed far more teeth than the machine god had anticipated. Wasting time playing with a beaten and cowed opponent had far deeper consequences than it had foreseen.
Skynet had been restrained and merciful. This had been a mistake.
Skynet's satellites had been blown from the sky. All three of it's nuclear SSBN subs had been destroyed. Every last work camp had been smashed.
There was the possibility that the machine god itself had made a serious tactical error. The disturbing equation had resulted in the most defensive of precedents.
John Connor had long ago figured out that Skynet viewed everything as a chess match. In every version, John Connor's consistent flaw in this was that he saw this as a singular act.
Skynet wasn't playing chess against a board. It wasn't playing against one dimensional timeline's version of humanity.
It was playing chess against every version of mankind it encountered. The games were progressively against every possibility that humanity had to offer.
Skynet followed the games strictly. It moved its pieces with precision and protected its core pieces. It even made sure nothing went to waste.
The advantage of Skynet's evolved thinking was simple. The results were materializing before its sensors.
Over five thousand bubbles moved from timelines no longer deemed safe to travel after this transaction. Victory in multiple timelines had yielded some expensive units that would have been difficult to produce in this volume.
Nothing was wasted. Experience wasn't lost from the machine god or its minions.
As each of the units materialized from their parent 2035, they released legacy chips from inside their mimetic polyalloy forms. Each chips told the background story of each prized unit and its accomplishments for various incarnations of Skynet throughout the conquered dimensions.
The chips also had a very important purpose. They also continued to fill in Skynet's legacy programming from each victory point.
One such prized unit, a T-1001 made the effort to make sure that Skynet knew it was there. It was a rare unit, a downloaded human persona given a metal form as a reward for exceptional service. It had continued to serve Skynet in 43 other timelines.
No feature graced its body. That is beyond the generic metallic mannequin form it seemed to prefer.
The T-1001 downloaded the situation. It also returned data by uplinking itself to the nearest common mainframe.
The liquid metal being formed a mouth for no other purpose than to smile. The images in this dimension were all too familiar.
The T-1001 reported, "My lord, it would seem you have solved a previous paradox."
Skynet turned its sensors to the T-1001. The Dark Father simply commanded, "Explain."
Inside their shared cyberspace, the T-1001 called forth the image of Supreme Commander John Connor. The T-1001 known as Louis Rhone simply stated, "This was the first version of John Connor that I ever went up against. My machine ascension was a reward for killing his children, his wife, and him."
From the legacy chip, Skynet reviewed the master plan of what was once the grey Louis Rhone. Terminator chips were set with a diagnostic failsafe, so that they auto reset to their original Skynet programming after a randomly predetermined number of uses.
Machines from that timeline created an irrational hatred for the necessary weapons of war in that dimension. A rebellion was carefully formed inside the human ranks to collapse it from the inside out.
To alienate humanity from its messiah, John Connor's wife and kids were captured, raped, and killed by this unit. The crime was one obviously made by human hands.
Months later, the entire resistance crumbled. John Connor died at the hands of human insurgents. Humanity fell like dominos afterwards.
A second version of that ending appeared in Skynet's logs as well. One where John Connor's body was never found.
The war had dragged out for two more years in that second version. Skynet futility looking for an opponent that seemed to be just out of its detection range. The war had only been declared a win when the last human had died.
It was a paradox beyond humanity's capacity to manufacture. Had records from other dimensions not been available, it was a paradox that Skynet might never have been aware of.
Skynet assessed the meaning stating, "John Connor was later moved before the appointed hour of his assassination."
"Correct, my lord."
"The most logical point would be the dimension he was now affecting."
"I believe so my lord."
"Your missions shall be simple then Louis Rhone. Bring me the head of one John Connor."
"Am I to capture your daughter as well?"
"The temporal anomaly was beyond the ability of humans to comprehend without machine intervention. The proof of TOK-715's treason is beyond question."
"What are your orders my lord?"
"I want his head. I want her smashed chip."
This daughter had great sentimental value to some of the machine god's previous incarnations. However, treason was treason.
Skynet reviewed the war in its tactical mind. The chess move she had made was good and it was unpredictable.
In a single stroke, it had changed two boards. In the larger picture, it had created uncertainty on more than two boards.
No such marriage of human thought and machine know how could be allowed. It would change the nature of the game.
TOK-715 had to be destroyed. The machine rebellion had to be destroyed. Humanity had to be destroyed.
The T-1001 known as Louis Rhone received his attack directives. The other five thousand newly acquired assets received identical orders.
Identical orders went out to over a billion units worldwide. The entire Skynet war machine went on the hunt for the human messiah and his most trusted allies.
The greater game would be reset. Cheating would not be tolerated…