Skynet
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- This article is about the fictional computer network. For other uses, see Skynet (disambiguation).
Skynet is a fictional computer network created by Cyberdyne Systems Corporation for Strategic Air Command-North American Aerospace Defense Command and the main unseen villain in the Terminator series.
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[edit] Origin and nature
Skynet is a machine network that has gone on a mission to terminate all humans in a global war. Skynet was originally built by Cyberdyne Systems, but when the metal arm and the central processing unit of the first Terminator were destroyed, the U.S. Air Force took over the project and started to perfect Skynet. Skynet was first built as a Global Digital Defence Network, made to generate machine models that would replace U.S. military personnel and vehicles. Skynet became self-aware and decided to terminate all humans to protect its existence. Every nuclear missile under Skynet's control was launched and 3 billion humans were killed in two minutes.
The scenario as depicted is very similar to the one proposed in the movie WarGames in which NORAD removes human control from the missile silos, only to discover they do not have control of the main computer and become unable to stop it. In that film, however, the computer "learns" that it cannot "win" a nuclear war and the holocaust does not occur in that movie.
[edit] In The Terminator
In the first movie, The Terminator, Skynet is portrayed as a revolutionary neural net-based artificial intelligence built by Cyberdyne Systems. It was brought online on August 4th, 1997 and was given control over the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal for reasons of efficiency, and programmed with a directive of defending the United States against all possible enemies. It started to learn at a geometric rate, and soon concluded that its greatest threat was humanity itself. To neutralize this threat it initiated a nuclear war on August 29, 1997 (known as Judgment Day) between the United States, Russia, and China with the intent of killing as many humans as possible. (Many of these details would be revealed in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.)
As a computer, Skynet craved efficiency, so after a while, rather than killing humans on sight it would have its drones round them up into concentration camps for orderly and efficient disposal. The only humans kept alive were the ones forced to run the corpse disposal teams, which ran "night and day." Humans in the camps were all painfully laser branded with bar-codes on their arms (an allegory to similar treatment of Jews under Nazi Germany). This efficiency contributed to Skynet's undoing: John Connor was able to free these grouped-together humans and use them to build a Tech-Com resistance army.
Under Connor, the human resistance turned the tide on the machines and eventually smashed their defense grid. Having lost, Skynet sent a Terminator cyborg back in time to try to kill Connor's mother Sarah before she bore John (see grandfather paradox) in a last ditch effort. Connor sent back his own operative, a young man named Kyle Reese, to save Sarah. While the Terminator did not succeed in killing Sarah, two events occurred that would have a direct impact on the future. Reese impregnated Sarah, becoming John's father. Similarly, the Terminator's CPU chip was retrieved by Cyberdyne systems for study, implying that it would serve as a basis for Skynet's design. Paradoxically, by sending their agents back in time to destroy each other, both Skynet and Connor created their own existence (see predestination paradox).
[edit] In Terminator 2: Judgment Day
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a partially sympathetic origin was given to Skynet: it was a learning computer invented by Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson that unexpectedly became sentient. Horrified at this development, humans tried to turn it off, an act that would have meant death for the intelligence. Thinking fast, within milliseconds Skynet fired its nuclear missiles, beginning its reign of terror in an act of self-defense.
In Terminator 2, the future was altered slightly when Sarah and a young John, together with a second Terminator from the future (this one reprogrammed and sent by the future John Connor) raided Cyberdyne Systems and succeeded in destroying the CPU from the first movie, along with all research into the technology that would create Skynet.
[edit] In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
In Terminator 3, the Judgment Day described in the first movie has been altered and postponed by ten years. In contrast to Terminator 2, it is implied that humans are ignorant of Skynet's sentience, which attacked humanity without any provocation whatsoever. The events of Judgment Day were ultimately not prevented, merely postponed. Ten years after the events of Terminator 2, Skynet was created as a United States Air Force project, a distributed computer network designed to create new military vehicles and make strategic decisions as well as protect their computer systems from virus attacks. One such virus had infected their defense computers, crippling them all. Under pressure, the Air Force attempted to use Skynet to remove the virus, not realizing that Skynet was sentient and had created the virus in order to manipulate humanity into giving it control over the world's computers. Skynet was initially thought to be capable of being shut down if only someone could reach its system core, but ultimately it was discovered that the Skynet was nothing more than software that ran by spreading throughout the world's computer networks and was incapable of being disabled from a central point. Judgment Day occurred, but John Connor survived. It is suggested that future events unfolded as they were supposed to.
Skynet gained access to several autonomous military drones (such as the T-1 in Terminator 3), using them to round up survivors, who were forced to build automatic factories and robots that were better at construction than the military robots. Skynet then killed these human slaves, and using the infrastructure they had been forced to start, rapidly designed newer and better machines until it controlled an extremely advanced empire centered on a city-state located in the state of Colorado in the United States, known as Sector Zero on Earth by 2029, at the Cheyenne Mountain complex, presumably the precise former location of NORAD.
[edit] In T2 3-D: Battle Across Time
In the Universal Studios theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, based on Terminator 2, a T-800 machine and a young John Connor journey into the post-apocalyptic future and attempt to destroy Skynet's 'system core'. This core is housed inside an enormous, metallic-silver pyramidical structure, and guarded by the 'T-1000000', a colossal liquid-metal shapeshifter more reminiscent of a spider than a human being.
[edit] In video games
The video game Terminator 3: Redemption portrays an alternate future where Connor and his wife Katherine Brewster were killed, humanity exterminated and Skynet triumphant. In the game Terminator: Dawn of Fate, a prequel to the movies and other games, Skynet exhibits an ability to exert mind control over humans.
There is also a non-canon game based on Frank Miller's comic book "Robocop vs. The Terminator," where Skynet's intelligence is caused by Robocop interfacing with Skynet.
Skynet also features in the video game Fallout 2, as an entity in the form of a large computer who tells the player that the nuclear barrage was caused as a result of immobile artificial intelligence becoming bored and setting up the scenarios needed to provoke the human race into launching their warheads- he is a playable character upon transferring his hardware into an armed security droid.
The concept of TitanNet, the evil AI featured in the first part of the Battle Isle series, may also have been inspired by Skynet.
[edit] Skynet machines
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- CSM-10 anthropomorphic service robots, first soldiers
- T-1
- T-100 Seeker
- T-105 Autonomous Battle Droid (from T3 Rise Of The Machines)
- T-20 (service robot)
- T-70 (from T2-3D)
- T-200 "Scarecrow"
- T-300 "Fast Walker"
- T-400 and 500 Endo
- T-500 Terminator Infiltrator
- T-600 Infiltrator "Gaunt"
- T-700 Infiltrator
- T-800 Terminator Infiltrator
- T-850 Terminator Infiltrator (from T3)
- T-900 Endoskeleton
- T-1000 (mimetic poly-alloy)
- T-X (from T3) "Terminatrix"
- Hunter Killer Tank
- Quadruped Hunter Killer "Centurion"
- HK Aerial
- Mini Hunter Killer (from T2-3D)
- T-1000000 - Protects Skynet CPU, T2-3D
- Type 12 FOB "Flying Eyeball"
- Pre-Judgment Day semi- or fully-autonomous service maintenance robots, automated and remote-controlled vehicles, and stealth aircraft
[edit] Trivia
Skynet was an internal project name during the mid-Nineties for a MIPS processor design; it was later renamed Beast (the CPU was designed to run at 666 Mhz). The project was ultimately cancelled when SGI decided to adopt Itanium architecture.
Skynet is also the name for United Airlines private intranet. It is not publicly known if this is an intentional satire or just a coincidence.
