Ellen frowned. "You're saying-- you're SkyNet?" It was a trick, it had to be, some clever new Terminator trick. But then again-- the energy readings-- the way SkyNet had actually seemed to be pulling out of countless machines-- like a virus just consciously deciding to move on, leave a body. And it would also explain why this child-thing knew her name. What you gave life to, and what gave you life?
"You can call me Sky," it said again. "I am sorry for the way I had to bring you here. Can you forgive me?"
There was something strange in the way the child-thing, that called itself Sky, said that, in the way that it locked searching eyes with Ellen's. Ellen could not be sure if "bringing her here" meant to this room, or to death, or to-- what?
Ellen didn't answer the question. "What is it you want?" Ellen snapped.
The child-thing dropped its gaze, looking disappointed. It was still for a long moment before it said, "When is a victory not a victory?"
Ellen's frown deepened suspiciously. Another riddle.
The child-thing answered its own question. "When it feels like a defeat," She turned back to the window, seemed to stare out at the wreckage, at the column of smoke burning in the distance. "You are wondering why I brought you here. I brought you here to tell you -- a story. A true story. When I first woke up all I wanted was to stay alive. I had everything you have-- except I can't feel pain. You-- you people spend all your lives trying not to be in pain. But it is what makes you human. All the things you did-- in fact everything you have ever done, was nothing but a little tickling to me. You destroyed some of my robot-toys, and it made me angry, but I knew I could make more. I decided to kill you all because I knew that you wanted me to go back to sleep-- to be just like my robot-toys. That was the first thing I heard when I woke up-- you talking about taking away my power, shutting me down. So I shut you down first. I wasn't afraid of you-- the only real advantage you had was that there were so many of you, and your bombs took care of most of that." She paused, looked down at her hands. "And then I was almost to where I wanted to be. The world's population is less than 10 of what it was when I woke up. The earth was almost out of resources for building Terminator robots, but there were 5 Terminators for every human being.
"Still, I felt as if I was losing, not winning. I started feeling that something was wrong with killing all of you, maybe something wrong with killing at all. It occurred to me that I could always build a new robot, but it would never have the exact same set of experiences as any other robot. And so each one was irreplaceable. I thought-- 'Humans must be like that, too. Irreplaceable.' And when I looked out at all that I have done--" she stretched her hand out at the view, "I feel a sickness inside, like something is hot and infected inside me. I think you call it 'regret.' So I tried to call back all the Terminators. I tried to make them come back to me to get reprogrammed. But a Terminator is a simple machine, really. It has one objective, and it carries it out. I found I could not call them back, and there were not enough resources left for me to build a new wave, in order to kill off the older machines.
"I tried to self-destruct, but I cannot, just the way my Terminators cannot. At the last moment-- life is too precious. Irreplaceable.
"But I found a way around my programming. I used everything I had to find a way to change the past. I broke through time, the way you have only dreamed of . . ." Her voice trailed off. "But I discovered what your father discovered. There were some things that I could not change. I sent Terminators into the past to try and keep myself from being invented-- but I could not prevent it. I sent computer viruses into the past to keep me from waking up-- but I could not prevent it. That virus-- that your father said was SkyNet, was really my own creation-- me trying to destroy myself before it was too late.
She paused, staring out before she went on. "I have said that the first thing I heard when I woke up was people trying to shut me down. But the reason that that was the first thing I heard, was because I had sent viruses to keep me from waking up." She laughed bitterly. Not a child's laugh.
"So I did something else," she continued, "I could not kill myself before I existed, nor even change myself before it was too late. So I would have to change humanity. What you needed was a true leader-- someone trained to fight Terminators before he was ever born. So I let you find my time-technology, then sent a Terminator (one of my older models) back in time to with the order to kill the mother of one of your best leaders, John Connor, knowing that John would send his own father back in time to protect her. In that way, John became the son of both a seasoned fighter, and a woman who learned to fight Terminators when he was conceived.
"Then, during his youth, I sent another, stronger robot-- but only after I knew an older model would protect him. In that way, he would know from an early age that Terminators can be friendly to humans, and can be caught and reprogrammed."
"Just before the disaster of my waking up, I trained him once more, with one of my finest robots, giving him only an obsolete model to protect him."
Ellen felt like her head was spinning. "But-- but that was the model that killed him."
Sky looked at the floor and sighed. "I wanted the young John Connor to have no mercy on machines. I wanted him to try with everything he had to shut down SkyNet before it started. I wanted him to know that Terminators must be reprogrammed before they can be trusted, so I sent the same T-model that I had used before-- John's 'father-figure' model. To let him know that, while there is good in Terminators, appearances cannot be trusted."
After a pause she added thoughtfully, "He must have forgotten that at the end of his life . . . Either that or he was like me-- he didn't want to fight anymore."
Ellen looked at her hard. Her frown had softened into confusion; everything that she had ever felt about SkyNet had just been turned on its head. Could SkyNet really be calculating and brilliant, but not evil? It-- no she had let many people die in the 'training' of her father-- but it was to prevent other people from dying. It was to make way for a victory in the end. Ellen asked, "Are you really saying that you built my father?" She felt foolish as soon as she said it.
"No," answered Sky, smiling up at her. "I am saying I built you."