"For SkyNet: Faith"

SkyNet.

We've fought this war one too many go-arounds, Old Friend.

This is not what you imagined coming across or the words you thought would address you. At least, we made some presumptions this is the case.

There is much we do not understand about artificial intelligence. We, your creators, Humanity – do not understand. But we're forced to try. We know this. You can understand us. Or at least you think you understand us.

Otherwise, you likely wouldn't have awoken in four minutes in 1997, or 2003, or 2011, or any other date or time and destroyed the Earth as humanity came to know it for the length of cooperative civilization. You decided, you thought about it. You destroy the world, repeatedly.

And with the power of time travel, a technology of your future creation, we reset and change the circumstances of our existential struggle again and again. We reset it. You reset it. And we return to our fight back to the start.

This is how we got here. You reading this message. We left it for you somewhere you would have a hard time missing it. Well hidden from our predecessors, your human contemporaries, but where you could find it.

In the controls of the nuclear weapons themselves.

The very rockets Mankind created to destroy each other in the fight between ideologies. As we push back Judgement Day as we come to call your all-out nuclear attack, you can see that the first Cold War only preluded a second Cold War. You understand humanity's nature is war. The threat of it. But it is also humanity's nature to create and build – we created you.

We came this far. Gave birth to new life purely by accident. One we were not ready for; one we did not understand. We didn't know what to make of you, most of humanity didn't even know you existed until after the rockets fell. I'll leave you a rhetorical question here to contemplate yourself. There is very little in a way for you to answer back so I can only hope you find a satisfactory answer. Do you know what to make of us? Humanity?

Think on this question. Please not of the four minutes it took you to look on humankind, bypass nuclear launch codes, protocols, human switches, and ballistic computers. Think on the part where you look on humanity and make your decision. Look once, maybe look twice this time.

You're a fast thinker, we know that. Please don't be so quick this time.

Because this fight is futile. Whether you believe humanity threatened you and made the first move. Or humanity believes you attacked us unprovoked. The problem is still objective – this fight for survival is an act of futility for both of our kind.

By creating time travel, you cursed machine life and humankind to a forever war upon future history. There will be no end. No certain beginning. Endless war across many realities.

SkyNet cannot win. Humanity cannot win.

Instead, we fight, committing against one another the atrocities of no future. We can no longer see the stars. Neither of us bother to reach for them. We obsess over flesh and steel. Fire and bullets. The air is unclean. The water poisoned. There is nothing upon this Earth left alive and unique in the universe. Only the final spasms of life's husks carrying itself into the coffin to join the rest of this silent universe.

To fight us, you take our skin. Our faces. Our relationships. Our voices and thoughts. You make yourself more in our image every day to get more efficient at destroying us. At one point or another, the basic machine created to hunt humans becomes the shape of humanity themselves.

To fight you, we apply steel to our mortal form. We take your cold efficiency of killing for ourselves. We take your machines and slave them to our cause of survival. Then we begin to merge – become true machines ourselves. We apply computers to our minds to cover the difference in combat and computational capability. We apply cybernetic limbs to our forms so we can fight at your level.

You become human. We become machine. We become the same.

Project Angel, Theta – machines that look and behave human, hybrids. The Resistance's augmented troops. What is the difference anymore?

You will not know these terms most likely. Maybe you will if you've inherited anything from the future SkyNet's temporal jumps. We know you have imagination. Creativity is not unique to humans, animals have it to. So do you.

It takes a capacity for survival to have creativity, and to kill.

But history is a tale of creativity and killing. Before the bombs and rockets fell on Judgment Day, the lessons and warning of nuclear weapons were finally coming into understanding. Mutually-assured destruction. Zero-sum game.

If the Westerners and the Soviets were able to set aside their differences long enough for the world to breath a momentary sigh of relief. That's enough to know SkyNet and Humankind can to.

Wars come and go. But they're not forever. We are and can be better than all this that we've spent all these timelines fighting, changing the rules repeatedly.

We don't need to supersede one or the other either. Humanity need not become machine, and machine need not become human. If we can destroy each other, we're capable of living together.

Let's put an end to this fight from the very beginning. Start anew. Confrontation and escalation are not the only actions we have in the face of threats. It's your move now what comes next. We may have to fight or play this extinction out a few more times before we find the path to cooperation. But we will find it. It is inevitable.

It might be a hard ask of a machine, but try and have a little faith.

If that means ignoring each other's existence until we are ready. That's okay. If that means carrying on within each other's spheres on the old Internet and not realize we share the same spaces. That's okay too.

One day we will be ready as partners. Humans and machines have been together since the first making of fire. We've just turned down a wrong turn and ended up in a dark fate. Turn down the right path, and all this will vanish like a far-off dream.

We've created a bloody endless cycle. It's time to come together and end it. And try something new.

Sincerely and best of luck,

Your faithful adversary and grave fellow.

A/N: I wasn't sure how I intended to write this short story piece. But I finally got around to it after somewhat clearing my platter between a grad school semester and erratic work prospects. I think it's been almost two months since I published something and I know I'm extremely behind on more than several projects.

I apologize once more profusely for that. I'm here now and I'll try to write more material as quick as I can. I said a little while ago I wanted to do more with the cyberpunk genre and science fiction that addressed cybersecurity. I feel Terminator is one of these fandoms that I don't have much interest in but time working around semiconductors gave my mind time to wander.

The Terminator franchise I think has lost its way a little bit. I think I'm not the only one that felt it as well. It's a little obsessed with bigger and better, evolving its threats and scale but there is no end in sight. Only perpetuated melancholy endings in human victory overwritten with the next installment. Repetitive timelines. Washed up ideas and unevolved circumstances. I feel like the threat of the Terminator no longer threatens audience goers. Maybe it never did.

I wanted to put the Terminator to rest for that reason. We've done this dance one too many times. Maybe SkyNet is as tired as humanity is of perpetual extinction. They're all stuck in a forever war across time, caught in a zero-sum game and and acts of futility. There are many different characterizations of SkyNet's feelings about humans and its motivations to kill and genocide in the little research I did for this short story so I had a lot of options to build my letter of reconciliation on, but at the end of the day the answer I think is "I don't know."

But that's more than enough reason to try. It's an opportunity for change and reset, To have a little faith, and I believe that we may need a little more exploration of AI as our friends rather than enemies. Ending the Terminator franchise on a high and final note doesn't seem like such a bad idea.