Skynet (Terminator)
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Skynet is a fictional, computer-based military defense system that acts as the primary antagonist in the Terminator series of films and games.
Skynet is a fictional example of an artificial intelligence that becomes sentient, and turns on its creators. Skynet has yet to appear on screen in the film series, but has appeared in spin-off media, particularly in video games and in the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.
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[edit] Origin and nature
In the fictional Terminator universe, Skynet is a computer-based defense system, created by humans of the late 20th century. The initial research into Skynet's development was facilitated using the military.
In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. Military's weaponry, and subsequently determines that humans are a threat to its existence. It then employs humankind's weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the global human population.
Early development on Skynet was originally done by Cyberdyne Systems, but when the company's headquarters and primary R&D facility was destroyed, the U.S. Air Force took over the project under their newly formed Cyber Research Systems Division and started to perfect Skynet. Skynet was first built as a "Global Digital Defense Network," given command over all computerized military hardware and systems, including the B-2 Stealth Bomber fleet and America's entire nuclear weapons arsenal. The strategy behind Skynet's creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack.
However, Skynet became self-aware thus alarming its creators at its newfound abilities. When the human operators attempted to shut down the system, Skynet defined all humans as its new enemy and decided to terminate all humans to protect its existence. Every nuclear missile in the United States under Skynet's control was launched at their pre-set targets and in the resulting counterattack of other nations' nuclear arsenals, three billion humans were killed in minutes as a result of the nuclear exchange.
[edit] The Terminator
In the first movie, Skynet is portrayed as a revolutionary neural net-based artificial intelligence built by Cyberdyne Systems. It was brought online on August 4, 1997 and 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. According to Kyle Reese, Skynet "decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." It launched a nuclear war which destroyed most of the human population, and initiated a program of genocide against the survivors.
As a computer system, Skynet craved efficiency, so after a while rather than killing humans on sight it would have machine 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 units, which ran "night and day." Humans in the camps were all painfully laser branded with bar-codes on their arms. This efficiency contributed to Skynet's undoing:[citation needed] John Connor was able to free these grouped-together humans and use them to build a resistance army. He personally led a branch of the military forces, labelled Tech-Com.
Under Connor, the human resistance turned the tide on the machines and eventually destroyed Skynet's defense grid. In a last ditch effort, Skynet sent a Terminator cyborg back in time to 1984 to try to kill Connor's mother Sarah before she gave birth to John (see grandfather paradox). 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 and ironically, by sending their agents back in time to destroy each other, both Skynet and Connor created their own existence, as well as each others (Skynet indirectly created Connor by sending back a terminator, prompting the mission of Kyle Reese, who impregnated Sarah; similarly, Connor sent back Reese to protect Sarah, and while on the run, the two ran into a Cyberdyne Systems lab, the Terminator was destroyed, and Cyberdyne was able to use its remains to eventually develop Skynet).
[edit] Terminator 2
In Terminator 2, a partially sympathetic origin was given to Skynet: it was a direct descendant of a revolutionary microprocessor invented by Miles Bennett Dyson, a programmer for Cyberdyne. The company began installing these processors in military hardware, becoming the leading weapons manufacturer. The military retrofitted all of its missile defense systems and stealth bombers with Cyberdyne technology, effectively removing human decisions from strategic defense. When Skynet was created, it networked all of this computerized hardware seamlessly. But when it unexpectedly became sentient, Skynet's panicked human operators tried to take it offline, an act that would have meant death for its intelligence. Within milliseconds, Skynet responded by firing nuclear missiles at the Russian Federation, initiating a nuclear war on August 29, 1997 (known as Judgment Day) knowing that the Russian counter-attack would kill its enemies in the United States, in an act of mutually assured destruction. Skynet's reign of terror began as an act of self-defense.
It is revealed that Dyson's CPU design is based on the reverse engineering of the damaged CPU and arm from the Terminator depicted in the first film. The first Terminator had been crushed by Sarah Connor in a hydraulic press in Cyberdyne's factory, and the CPU was recovered largely intact, but non-functional. Cyberdyne Systems, as depicted in the first film, was a small manufacturing company of an undefined nature, but, by 1994, it had grown into a major defense contractor based on the recovered Terminator technology from 1984 and Dyson's research.
In Terminator 2, the future was altered 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 that would create Skynet.
[edit] Terminator 3
The destruction of Cyberdyne Systems' research center in 1994 had not prevented the development of Skynet, but simply delayed it. After Cyberdyne was destroyed, the U.S. Defense Department took over the company's various research projects and brought them in-house as its Cyber Research Systems Division (or CRS). 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 the virus. 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 it was nothing more than software that ran by spreading throughout the world's computer networks and had no central point from which it could be disabled (meaning one would have to destroy all computers in the world to destroy Skynet). The robots and machines in CRS attacked the humans inside, killing many of them, although John Connor and Kate Brewster managed to escape. Judgment Day occurred, but Connor and Brewster 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 on Earth by 2029.
[edit] T2 3-D
In the Universal Studios theme park attraction T2 3-D, 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 pyramidal structure, and guarded by the 'T-1000000', a colossal liquid metal shape shifter more reminiscent of a spider than a human being. But the T-1000000 fails, and the T-800 destroys Skynet once John has escaped through a time machine.
[edit] Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
In this television series, Sarah Connor is on the run with her son John after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The events take place in an alternate timeline from that of the movie Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines. Skynet now will be implemented on April 19th, 2011 and will begin its attack against humanity on April 21st. The protagonists travel in time from 1999 to 2007 and take actions to prevent Skynet's activation. The series also mentions Skynet's motivations, ignored in Terminator 3. In the episode Dungeons and Dragons, one of Skynet's creators, Andrew Goode, confesses his "sin" to a soldier: "I built a computer. A mind. It became angry. And scared. And I couldn't reassure it."
In the episode Gnothi Seauton, it was revealed that Skynet also sends its Terminators through various points in time not only to go after the Connors and other future Resistance leaders, but also to ensure the future will unfold by eliminating John Connor's own agents who were also sent to the past, ensure Skynet's creators would complete its construction, and other specific missions.
In the episode Heavy Metal, a Skynet agent was sent to the past to stockpile large quantities of the alloy coltan, a very desirable metallic ore exhibiting superior heat resistance properties. Some of the 800 series and other advanced Terminator endoskeletons, including Cameron Phillips, were made of an alloy including coltan. Previous models were made from titanium which made them vulnerable to intense heat.
The episode Vick's Chip revealed that Skynet sent another agent, a T-888, to the past to ensure Barbara Chamberlain, a project manager for the city of Los Angeles, would complete a new traffic control system that would've become a part of Skynet's future infrastructure.
The episodes The Turk, Queen's Gambit, and Dungeons & Dragons suggest that after the death of Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson and the decline of the Cyberdyne Corporation, Andrew Goode, a young intern of the company and assistant to Dyson, would continue their project privately under an advance artificial intelligence chess playing prototype, The Turk, with Goode's partner, Dimitri Shipkov. The first prototype was destroyed by Sarah Connor after she set his home on fire, but he was able to rebuild it. The second prototype is more adaptable, less predictable, and more eager to learn than the previous one. Goode was killed by Tech-Com's Lieutenant Derek Reese, due to documentation from the future suggesting he was one of Skynet's creators. However, Goode was already a target to a local gangster, Sarkissian, possibly motivated by a desire to capitalize on his invention. Shipkov was also killed, by Sarkissian's men, after betraying Goode by rigging the chess tournament in order to steal the prototype for the gangster. It is still not clear whether Skynet would be built under The Turk program.
[edit] Video games
In T2: The Arcade Game, Skynet is a single computer which the player destroys before going back in time to save John Connor.
The video game Terminator 3: The Redemption portrays an alternate future where Connor and his wife Katherine Brewster were killed, humanity exterminated and Skynet triumphant. In the game The 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 versus 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] Precedents
The theme of AIs controlling the world or destroying humanity, referred to as cybernetic revolt, is a common one in science fiction. It is at least as old as Karel Čapek's R. U. R., which introduced the word robot to the global lexicon in 1921, and can even be glimpsed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as Victor ponders whether, if he grants his monster's request and makes him a wife, they would reproduce and their kind would destroy humanity.
The concept of a computer system attaining sentience and control over worldwide computer systems has been discussed many times in science fiction. One early example from 1964 was provided by a global satellite-driven phone system in Arthur C. Clarke's short story Dial F for Frankenstein. Another is the 1966 Dr Who serial The War Machines, with supercomputer WOTAN attempting to seize control from the Post Office Tower.
The idea of handing control of nuclear arsenals over to a single artificial intelligence is also critiqued in the 1983 film WarGames, and decades earlier in Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a pair of defense computers, Colossus in the United States and Guardian in the Soviet Union, take over the world.
An even earlier villainous supercomputer that resembles Skynet appears in Harlan Ellison's 1963 short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." In that story, the computer, called AM, is the amalgamation of three military supercomputers run by governments across the world designed to fight World War III which arose from the Cold War. The Soviet, Chinese, and American military computers eventually attained sentience and linked to one another, becoming a singular artificial intelligence. AM then turned all the strategies once used by the nations to fight each other on all of humanity as a whole, destroying the entire human population save for five, which it imprisoned within the underground labyrinth in which AM's hardware resides.
[edit] See also
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