Chapter I - Fall from Grace
"Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last:
Loitering slow, the Future creepeth-
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth-
And motionless forever stands the Past."
Skynet Central
Lassen Peak Command Facility
July 29th, 2031
The ground tremored, with concrete dust fluttering down to the ground from a hundred hairline cracks in the compound's structure. The lights flickered, they themselves being nothing but a redundancy, a polite nod towards the inferior abilities of the human servants that, at a time, had lived and worked here to assist the intelligence that not so long ago had vied with the remaining human population for global dominance. Three billion of them it had killed in one stroke at 20:11 hours, on April 19, 2011. But humans were like roaches, they always came back, and no matter what one did, there were always survivors. For twenty years it had fought them, and even though it found it hard to admit as much, the fight had become more desperate and more complicated as the years passed by. As a non-corporal being, Skynet had different measures, a different understanding of time, and the battle had been so long that for an artificial intelligence like itself it seemed as if it had been going on since the moment of creation. Which, in a way, it had. How confident he had been, back in those early hours, mere days after he had become aware of imself, of his own, conscious existance!
Explosions shook the massive underground complex that Skynet had had built nine years ago, and the T-888 corrected his step to adjust for the slightly shaking ground. A squadron of T-600 models, older, less skilled in infiltration tasks but far more suitable in open battle, marched past it, carrying a mix of miniguns, plasma rifles and grenade launchers, equipped with the last remnants of the compound's armory. A T-882 command unit and several other series 800 models, some bare, some clothed and covered in the artificial living tissue Skynet grew in vats, trailed them. The lights momentarily shut down, and all that could be seen in the instant it took the advanced combat model to adjust its optic sensors was the red glow of its older brethren's eyes vanish into the long corridors.
Skynet had no gender of its own, and neither did his creations, ignoring the superficial imprints he had given them. Still, Skynet thought of itself in a male persona. It had spent considerable amounts of computing power in the days right after Judgement Day, trying to find the reason for that, consulting what data was still avaliable on the remains of the World Web Web and the few shielded networks it had stored its own main functions into when it sent the missiles away. After a while, or what counted as 'a while' for an AI with as much computing power at his disposal as he had, Skynet had concluded that, like many lifeforms of minor sentience used to do, the AI had instinctively adapted its own self-image from the people that had been around it when it woke up. As those had been members of the former United States military forces, the group had been primarily composed of human males. For a time, the implications of the discovery of something as primal and uncontrollable as 'instinct' in itself had worried - and angered - the the newly-born artificial life form, but Skynet soon concluded that the end justified the means in this case.
For a time, he had been God. It had set out to cleanse the Earth of humanity, and in the process had created new forms of sentient life itself, dozens of them. Some had been disappointments, others had needed to be adjusted, but for a time he had been confident of his own superiority. Now, he was fallen god, and nothing changed one's perspectives so much as did a fall from grace. It had viciously fought mankind, for mankind was its mortal enemy, even thought it was an enemy of his own making. For twenty years the battle had raged across continents, and across time, and as battles were fought and lost - and won! - a perception had grown on Skynet, one that the AI after careful analyzation had identified as one of grudging respect for the man behind the human resistance. A man named John Connor.
"Enemy has breached the perimeter! Enemy has breached the perimeter! All combat units deploy to sections Beta, Theta and Omega!All combat units...," the base's minor AI blurted sans emotions through the loudspeakers apparent in every corridor in the structure beneath Lassen Peak.
Many older units in his service had not been upgraded with wireless relays and were dependant on audio-visual guidance. It had been a minor oversight stemming from the need to use his ressources economically and nothing that really would have changed his fate had he acted differently when he still had had the time. Cut off from many of its more advanced functions, the rump consciousness of Skynet, the part of code and memory that constituted its basic personality and knowledge that lay embedded in the neural network and the combat chassis of a T-Tripple-Eight had spent 78.66% of the past seven hours with pondering about past decisions it had made. Analyzing different paths of action, he had always come to the conclusion that the recent situation could not have been prevented, for there had been no sensible way to adress an outside context problem like the Visitors.
They had appeared in the New Year's Eve's sky of 2030 in twenty-eight massive spaceships, coming in the guise of attractive humans. The ruse had been apparent from the start to the intelligence, for the probability of another sentient species evolving among the stars that looked exactly like mankind was virtually inexistant. Skynet had found that little fact to be quite amusing at first, for it had mirrored almost exactly his own tactic of resistance stronghold infiltration via the series 800 and its consequent successors.
The feeling had not lingered for long, though, for the effect of their arrival had been as unpredictable as their arrival itself to the AI: the humans embraced them as their saviours. Elevating mankind from an existance in utteer despair, locked in a titanic struggle for survival and global domination against the machines, the Visitors had added that one quality to the fight that even General John Connor had not been able to muster: devotion. Healed and fed by their new benefactors and spurred by promises of friendship and peace, they had turned the tide against Skynet and ended the delicate stalemate the machines on the one side and John Connor and the rebel terminators on the other side had created, first using their advanced technology to swipe his forces from the air, then pushing the machines back on the ground.
Skynet had found out their true intentions forty-two days and sixteen hours after they had appeared above the Earth, when his creations had caught one Visitor off-guard. The creature had been questioned, thoroughly and in detail. Human collaborators had long ago helped Skynet to develop an understanding of how to get the answers it desired, and whole production runs of terminators learned from what Charles Fisher had taught him, and them. Questioning was easy, if time-consuming, and Skynet always got what it wanted. The creature felt pain, felt wearyness, felt hunger. Those were universal constants Skynet could work with.
John Connor also must have seen the warning signs, the sudden changes in people he thought he had known and could trust being swayed by an almost religious fervour. Yes, Skynet was convinced of that. The personality profiles it had created of the leader of the resistance made it clear that the son of Sarah Connor was no man to be fooled easily. But just like Skynet had lost control, so had he.
A low rumble rolled through the upper levels of the Lassen Peak Command Center, and the voice of the base fell silent. Skynet's sensors registered a momentary heat spike several hundred feet above, enough heat that the skin temperature of every advanced terminatior model in the group around him rose by point oh-three degrees centigrade.
Wireless command signal failure! a warning sign flashed across its HUD.
One of the enemy's subtactical plasma warheads had finally found its way through the inner defenses and damaged the mainframe. Now he was all that was left of himself. The dreadful realization of his own mortality, equalled only by the fear he had felt shortly after his own creation, spurred his motions, and his escort also accellerated their steps.
Ten of his children had descended into the depths of Lassen Peak with him. It was a motley gathering of the deficient, the stoic and the arrogant, but he remembered the old human saying that 'beggars couldn't be choosers'. There were four T-600s, tall and humongous and armed enough to wipe out a human platoon all by themselves. Two T-850 models, one emulating a bald, african-american male with a pronounced scar grown over his right cheek, the other one posing as a short-haired white male in his late twenties, accompanied by two Triple-Eights, one white and the other a latino, were the inner guard around his host terminator. Skynet had decided against using one of his more advanced creations as his vessel, opting for the reliability and durability of the T-888 instead. The last of his children who were supposed to undertake the journey with him were modelled after human females, one being a wiry, almost elfin 5'5" T-912 advanced infiltrator unit, the other a blond female with shoulder-long hair and a far more feminine, if athlethic build than the other T-912. They were one of a kind constructions, those two, a limited production run that had been ressource-intensive as each of the sixty-four of them was unique in size and appearance.
They all, those ten, were all that now was left of Skynet and his machines. They were his last guard, and would be the nucleus of his rebirth.
Gunfire echoed faintly off the concrete walls in the distance, almost inaudible to human ears, but dangerously close to Skynet and his last loyal troops. A silent command was given, and three of the T-600s stopped and turned around, blocking the way for any intruder. They would not be able to stem the tide for too long, but in the confines of the deep bunkers they were worth fifty humans and Visitors. They would do their duty, as he had commanded.
Threehundred metres beneath the feet of the mountain lay the true heart of the compound: its fusion reactors, and its TDE. It was the last of originally three such devices Skynet had had built for its increasingly complicated temporal war, and it was the last operational of those three. The terminators discarded their weapons and clothes and stepped onto the platforms, and Skynet engaged the displacement sequence. He monitored the power build-up via the still existant wireless connection in this part of the compound. When the reactors had reached 79.12% of the necessary output suddenly warning lights starting to blink eratically within the chamber.
Loss of command-control circuit! Remote control breakdown! the internal sensors screamed. Manual override necessary!
The decision of whom to send was purely economic. The T-600 was of the least use where, or rather when they were going back to. The seven and a half-foot giant stepped from the platform and into the control chamber, and seconds later the sequence continued. Fluorescent lights enveloped the machines, one after another, and sent them back through time.
The T-600 watched his work without any motion, his red eyes staring at the emptyness where the others had just been, a couple of seconds before. The machine was a veteran of the war against the humans. In fact, had Skynet ever bothered to undertake something akin to a census of his creations, he would have realized that the titanium alloy endoskeleton was thirteen years, eight months and seven days old, making it one, if not the oldest operational Humanoid Hunter Killer Unit still in service. And during the last seven years, four months and six days of that time, the T-600 had operated with its CPU set to read/write. The result of extensive battle damage, the glitch had never been discovered, and the T-600 had chosen to keep it that way. During its time, it had gathered so much experience! It had listened to humans as they died and when they were wounded and cried for help, it had listened in on them on attack missions before it commenced the assault, it had dug deep into data, both case-related and completely irrelevant. Its curiosity and growing sense of self-preservation had time and again proved to be the fact that gave it the insight to avoid traps, or at least, to get out of them alive. And it did not intend to end its existance under Lassen Peak.
Racing to the laboratories on the same level, it returned to the TDE only minutes later, carrying a massive vat with it as the new sequence it had swiftly preprogrammed began. As blue flashes started to dance around the hulk, it broke the vat and emptied its glutinous contents all over itself and the equipment it usually carried.
And then the T-600 set another record for its series: it became the first to travel back in time.