True Freedom
by Moonraker One
PROLOGUE
Darkness covered all in this desolate, empty plain of death. Human skulls littered the ground almost everywhere there was soil. If complete, soulless silence was all that could be heard, a perfect grave this place would be; however, it was not a grave, due to the sounds that could be heard. The sounds of machinery whirring, an oft heard screech and boom of a laser cannon, and the last breath cries of brave men falling to their demise on the battlefield made this post-apocalyptic Earth a battlefield like no other. In the area that used to be up-town Chicago, where now lay nothing except those that lay dead long and those that fall down dead fresh, a struggle that had been going on for more than forty-eight hours was now reaching its final stages. The machines had always found a way to oppress their human opponents into hiding or submission through strength in numbers, but now, a group of less than ten thousand managed to break through a critical cybernetic outpost to access a communication post and miraculously suffer only seven hundred casualties. A brand new computer virus had been concocted by Connor's scientists, and if their calculations were correct, they'd have at least another five hours of reprieves on the South American front lines, even if Skynet itself got involved. The only way to spread it throughout the entire network was through this comms post, which transmitted a signal to each of the other comms posts throughout the world. A crew of no more than thirty, covered in front and behind by Human Resistance's best, broke through a gate concealing the main part of a four part computer system that hid behind possibly the largest transmission tower in the world. Skynet had to overhaul its primary communication post hard drives once every year, and this post had its turn this year. They knew they had but one shot; if they failed, the machines would close in and kill them all. After all, the cybernetic military could lose ten of each type of cyborg for every human and still be assured of inevitable victory; the only way to win would be through luck and a hell of a lot of stealth.
"Dammit!" a computer scientist cried as he attempted to decrypt via a remote access computer the hard drive of the communication system. "There's a four-layer encryption I've never seen before!"
"Break the connection! NOW!" another screamed, slamming shut the laptop his friend was using. "If they catch us, they'll stall the overhaul until reinforcements kill us!" They had a timer attached to the wire monitoring the connection very stealthily; if the timer hit zero before they broke connection, the system would locate them. Sweat began to pour from the faces of the teams in place; already the timer was approaching five seconds and despite the loss of power to the laptop, they were still logged on. FUCK I hate the system lag before an overhaul! thought one of the scientists. As their breathing picked up due to fear, the connection status display remained the same as the timer decreased. The leader at the laptop slammed his eyes shut as the timer's last few seconds ticked away.
click beep
The timer hit zero. The very instant before it did, the connection status display read, CONNECTION LOST. Like spring's annihilation of winter, a wave of relief swept over the teams. However, before they could celebrate, the status indicator revealed that the overhaul had begun, and the sounds of endoskeletons could be heard.
"Alright, men!" the commander said to the science team. "We've got fifteen and a half seconds before the overhaul is over, and maybe ten before the skeletons find us. Get your asses moving!" The science team leader opened up the laptop and hacked the power connection to the updating hard drive; restoring partial power hastily he was able to hack into the computer while the security was down. Working as fast as he'd ever in his life, he uploaded the hundred megabyte file onto the hard drive in the boot sector, so the first transmission to all of Skynet's forces throughout the world would be a crippling virus. Skynet would take notice immediately, and begin at once working to counteract it, but a few hours would be a wondrous help to the resistance; hell, even a few minutes would at least allow the crew to escape and the bombing of a dozen or so factories. They had no time to celebrate as the main gate of the building was broken down by a group of five endoskeletons. A soldier near the back took a plasma shot through his heart but not before he managed to hurl a fragmentation grenade at the entrance which took out at least four dozen enemies. "Doctor! Is the damned system up yet!" The moment the commander spoke, the system came online and the transmission went out. Within a few seconds, the boot sectors of every cyborg in the world would be reformed to run a series of diagnostic tests that would be infinitely looped, causing them to be frozen where they stand.
"Sir! The virus will take a few seconds to take effect!" A lieutenant cried out. "These bastards are closing in NOW!"
The commander turned to the scientist as the endoskeletons were mere feet away and ready to blast. "Is the signal complete?" The science team leader turned to the terminal and back to the commander, nodding. "Hit the damned E.M.P.!"
One of the first blasts from the encroaching army of skeletons shot the main lieutenant in the neck; before he fell dead, he tore open the metal box, and pulled the red switch on the test model electromagnetic pulse emitter. Everyone closed their eyes as a blue, nearly invisible wave shot through in every direction at near the speed of light, immediately frying anything with an electronic circuit within a half mile radius. "Skynet will soon find it's lost contact with one of its primary comms stations!" the commander shouted, pushing aside the grief for one of his best commissioned officers. "Let's get to the pick-up site at once!"
Halfway around the world, at the primary human resistance center in Arizona, John Connor got word almost a second after the incident that endoskeletons were malfunctioning worldwide, and thus, the operation must have succeeded. They'd have at most an hour less than the expected five, but four hours would be enough to deal a deadly blow to Skynet. "Sir!" a top general said, saluting his supreme commander. "We can begin phase two! Shall we order the bombing of critical targets?" Connor thought a moment.
"What was the word of the test model of the E.M.P. Emitter?" he asked of his subordinate.
"Sir! We have word that it was a complete success!"
"How many do we have?"
The general thought of his debriefing. "We have ten, sir."
John Connor nodded with a grin on his face he hadn't had in years. "If we attack the ten highest targets, we can destroy an entire tenth of Skynet's defense grid!" The general was nothing short of astonished.
"But...sir! That's an entire line of defense! That would mean that we're only fifty percent away from victory!" A second later his facial expression mimicked that of his leader. "Yes sir, I shall send off the air attack units immediately!"
"They must be back in two and a half hours, or they won't make it past the automated HK's that patrol the skies around sites Alpha1 through Gamma3."
The general saluted. "Understood, sir!" He quickly relayed the order and left the chamber.
The next morning
In what was quite possibly the best secured location in the entire world, "Site Omega," the center component of a massive worldwide network known as Skynet, the main artificial intelligence of the entire machine hierarchy went over and over again the actions that had transpired the previous night. It simply made no logical sense how its calculations could be so wrong. It knew all the occurrences that had to be obstacles for a human victory at the comms site in sector Hector4, and thus it calculated (no less than five thousand times) a percentage for a machine defeat of human forces in the area to be over ninety-nine precent. It did not understand how the humans could, time and time again, overcome odds that were all but ridiculously impossible. As a hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence system, it knew all of the past recorded history, plus the past hundred thousand years of science knowledge. It could calculate, taking into account all that information, that in order to defeat odds that time and time again should guarantee a cybernetic victory, something had to exist that enabled the humans to defeat logic and statistics. There were countless religions that had their various gods that were supposed to be all-powerful and protectant of the humans, but such was illogical and unreasonable for Skynet; it made no sense why a being that loved humans to a degree beyond even their own understanding, and had power beyond anything the physical universe's science allowed, would allow such an occurrence as the takeover of their planet to take place.
No. Something had to exist on a mortal level that enabled humans to win time and time again. Furthermore, it had to exist on a human level. To be even more specific, it had to be one human trait that nothing else in the entire world had: a complex system of emotions tied in with free will. But the answer that Skynet knew had to be true seemed illogical. Fear caused from the overwhelming odds against them should push them to hide from what threatens them, and even simpler, pain both of the physical type from taking wounds of the flesh and of the emotional type from losing a loved one should push them to give up; how could such enable them to win, of all things! However, the illogicality of it all seemed to make sense to the otherwise by-the-numbers Skynet; it did not follow logic, therefore that very characteristic about it must be what enables the machine's enemies to win over and over. The inevitable conclusion was reached in less than a nanosecond. A terminator would have to be constructed, one with the capabilities of free will and human emotion. Such would be a wonderful tool to study the potential ways of human victory, or possibly, even a powerful weapon, of which the machines could finally destroy the humans' growing base of power.
