Chapter 3 A Year Passes
Disclaimer: Terminator is owned by Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister, Dot). Tron is owned by Disney.
A/N: I'm gonna leave Jet out of the action, as I don't want to bother researching the game. I'll leave just the movie characters.
Alan and Lora Bradley had managed to drop their son off in a safe place in Argentina, and had now managed to teleport themselves to a bunker somewhere in Vermont.
"Damn it, Lora, Flynn was right!" Kevin Flynn had become a bit of a conspiracy theorist in his middle age, and had managed to hack into government computers enough to determine that the government was working on top-secret, automated war machines. "A 'droid army," he had called them. "A friggin' 'droid army out of Star Wars."
When the computer virus had started, Flynn launched the internal anti-viral programs that were so effective at keeping Project Orange clean. These programs were only able to work on a few special systems that he had personally designed (the design was too expensive to mass-market), and that were located in only a few places, so he was not able to clean up the entire internet from this plague, but he was able to make certain that he could use Project Orange to teleport himself somewhere.
And so they had, but Flynn had been separated from the rest while in the grid. So they didn't know where he was.
When the nuclear missiles first fired, one of Flynn's friends, who had one of the specially designed computers, managed to find out about it and inform them. Figuring that out-of-the-way places would be more likely to be targeted than Silicon Valley, he had them all zapped into the grid via Project Orange.
To the outside viewer, the effect was basically teleportation. The process took maybe thirty seconds. But to those being teleported, they seemed to spend several hours in the grid. This little flaw had never been ironed out, and fearing the applications it would be used for, Flynn never allowed it to be made public or to be sold to the government. That had apparently been a good thing, because it would have been disastrous if Skynet had controlled the project.
John and Kate were still trying to raise people on the old radio. So far, they managed to contact representatives from the Russian government and the British government, plus a few hard-core private militia members in Montana.
It appeared that Skynet had managed to disable most or all of the nuclear missiles of the other countries of the world through some strange means. Some were destroyed by Skynet's own ballistic missile strikes, other by an electromagnetic pulse, but others just ceased to work for no reason. Therefore, it would not be possible, in the short run, anyway, to retaliate by nuking areas where Skynet had strongholds. If they knew where they were, that is.
Skynet had already managed to take control of several automated factories, as a matter of fact, and was planning on using various forms of coercion to get people with the technical know-how to automate more factories for its use. In addition, it had taken control over a few pilotless aircraft that we in other areas than the base where Kate's father had been working. So even nuking the military installation in order to destroy the predecessors of the endoskeletons and the hunter-killers would not win the war.
The first order of business had been determining where they would find food and how to grow more food. Unfortunately, it all seemed pretty hopeless. John knew that he was supposed to lead the humans into victory, but he couldn't see how they could survive long enough to build a resistance, let alone a crack army capable of winning the war.
And he was right. Skynet was too powerful. The helicopter-like drones, ancestors of the soon-to-come aerial hunter-killers, were being sent out on a test run to round up some humans from a small town in Nevada. Factories in Michigan and Georgia would be producing more of the ground warriors within twenty-four hours, which would eventually evolve into endoskeletons and ground hunter-killers.
The concentration camps would spring up within a month, used to weed out the humans who served no purpose from those who could help Skynet. In more primitive cultures, there would be no camps. Humans would be shot on sight.
Plagues, some natural, some from a biological warfare program, would wipe out an additional billion humans over the next year. Another two hundred million starved.
In that time, John and Kate Connor (they decided to call themselves married without any ceremony, no time, no time at all) managed to create a network, to get a half dozen rudimentary plasma weapon prototypes for their resistance, and to start a series of small gardens to help to feed humanity.
But Skynet had already filled the United States with the first vaguely humanoid robots, and created a fleet of fifty thousand primitive aerial hunter-killers. The population of the US, at 150 million immediately following Judgment Day, was down to 25 million a year later. A nuclear explosion had destroyed the largest community of survivors, totaling half a million people.
And worst of all, almost all of the normal army gear, from helicopters to tanks, operated under the control of Skynet. Even things that were not initially part of the system had been assimilated. None of the few left who were in the military could explain it. Large portions of the military had explicitly been kept out of the Skynet system in the case of such an eventuality. And a lot of companies had small private defensive units, and the automated portions of these were controlled by Skynet. In fact, almost every military from every country that had any computer connections was affected. In fact, no computer systems that had been connected to the internet were safe to use, they all worked for Skynet. Bank cameras were its eyes. Speakers that were connected to a computer system became its ears. No one dared use any computer-related technology, because Skynet would find them instantly.
It was strange. Skynet had initially only used a virus capable of shutting down the internet. It could not have possibly had the ability to actually take control of the internet, at least not of parts of the internet that it had not been given control of by the military.
In point of fact, Skynet hadn't directly taken control.
Skynet's new best friend, the MCP, had.
And the MCP was going to win the war. It was going to wipe out the humans. The killing was accelerating. In another six months, there would be fewer than ten million humans on the entire planet. Nothing could stop it.
And then, one year after Judgment Day, one year to the day, John Connor received help. The only help that could possibly buy him the time he needed, get him the tech he needed, provide him with the victories he needed.
Help in the name of Kevin Flynn and Alan Bradley.