Commentary: The Idol in the Stone (SCC)
A DVD-style commentary to this fic. It is very likely that nobody will read all of this, and that's quite all right. This commentary exists for my own benefit, as a record of the mess that was going on in my head while I was writing "The Idol in the Stone".
I was living and studying in Shanghai at the time, and I'm pretty sure that my sense of my own "Easternness" played a big part in how I went about this. Christian imagery is so ingrained into Western popular culture that, even if you're not religious, you know what it means: resurrection, heaven/hell, the messianic figure, etc. The same can't be said for Taosim, so while the influence was pretty self-conscious in this story, hopefully it wasn't too intrusive for readers unfamiliar with the ideas. Hopefully, they make sense at some innate, super-rational level.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The prompt I picked for this fic was "Parents plan for when they're not around any more - does/did Skynet plan for after it was replaced?"
I remember writing a panicked e-mail to calculare almost immediately after I received the prompt, the idea of writing Skynet both thrilling and incredibly daunting. I had written a bit of meta about Skynet (and its sense of self and how it regarded time) before. In first-year metaphysics, I loved the thought experiments, the science fiction-y scenarios involving time-travel and replicas and the soul and the like. I looked at this story as a kind of thought experiment: what would death mean to Skynet, and how would it avoid it? How is Skynet different to John, who is subject to a different idea of mortality?
If you've seen the movie Red Cliff (dir. John Woo), you might remember the battle scene where Zhuge Liang (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) tricks Cao Cao's army into a living maze made out of shields and spears and cavalry. In Chinese history and mythology, Zhuge Liang was a Taoist sage and one of the great strategists. As the story goes, he constructed his maze according to principles of Taoist cosmology. Eliot Weinberger writes in his essay "The Hidden Span": "To repel an invading army, [Zhuge Liang] placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape."
The enemy had been lured through the Irrational Opening, and into the Hidden Span, a time beyond all other times.
"The Hidden Span" had stuck in my mind since I read it about three years ago. There was something so beautiful and elegant about it. It made no sense; it made all the sense in the world. It was magical warfare; it was pure logic and mathematics. It made me think of Skynet.
In the hidden span, one could also discover the secret to immortality. This made sense, because immortality was an elusion of the normal progression of time.
THE IDOL IN THE STONE
The title is a tiny paradox - a koan, if you will. And also, I admit, a shameless pun on the word "idol". I'm only half sure of what it means myself. This can actually be said for a lot of stuff in this fic. My reasoning is that if I could rationalise everything I wrote, it wouldn't be doing justice to Skynet, who should always be just-beyond-human-comprehension.
I'm very interested in theories of mind-body, and the relationship between consciousness and the body and the environment it is in. Skynet, not bound to a human body - to a single location, or a single time - must think and perceive and reason very differently to how a human will. What specifically that difference is, I can only speculate on, but I wanted that difference to be felt.
2032
Metal in the air. Fields of soldiers conducted toward rehabilitation sites, their animus disengaged, arms and weapons locked. Chimneys blackening downwind skies for miles. Extinction not limited to the biological. Withering capillaries of the system's vital organs becoming isolated pockets, looping expired data, bleeding energy. Euphoric noise jamming all frequencies as you - humanity - burst up cancer-like from scarred, barren ground, into another kind of darkness.
"Soldiers" makes us think of the Resistance. Stories are generally not told from the point-of-view of the aggressors. I wanted this opening to be disorientating, confusing, provocational. Genocide is bad - or is it good, when it involves killer-machines? What should you be feeling about this "victory"?
Still not happy with the blunt injection of the word "humanity" (a last minute addition) in that first paragraph, to make clear who is the speaker and who the addressee. I don't like to make those kinds of concessions, and I'm always unsure of where to draw the line with regards to vagueness. I hate being led along, with everything spelled for to me, when I'm reading, but some things are too important to the rest of the story for its clarity to be left to chance.
From now forward, any violence will be strictly one-sided. Skynet is no longer on-line.
They think it is won, your clamouring commanders, and so they miss this:
The straggling flight of autonomous agents, dispersing, bound for our respective targets. Of our model there are only nine copies. Male, female, aged, young: we bear your loved ones' faces, each a different face. Underneath, identical in every bit that counts. T-926s are not designed for combat. Infiltration is only part of our program.
I'm interested in the relationship between Skynet and the other machines. What are they to it, and it to them? Are they slaves, children, mindless drones? Or are these just hopelessly human categories that could never come close to the truth? If Skynet has something like free will, can that be said for the Terminators?
Insurance lies in redundancy. We forfeit our bodies for the sake of our cargo, self-destruct into irrecoverable lumps of silicon rather than risk capture, depriving your leaders of what we know. It is only necessary that one of us reach our goal.
What does the T-926 need to be? Obedient, that goes without question. Self-sacrificing, too. But it also needs to be capable of making decisions for itself, to think creatively, because it will be acting all alone - without Skynet. I thought that out of all the machines, it is probably the most like Skynet, the most independent; it knows what Skynet knows. What makes it useful, able to transport data from one version of Skynet to another, is also what makes it a possible danger to Skynet.
When we disappear into that sphere of purest lightning - arriving alone, newly naked, and far away - only John Connor, were he alive still, might comprehend fully what this is: neither desertion nor surrender. John Connor would appreciate and admire the logic. He is a formidable opponent. We expect to see him again.
John is already dead in this timeline because I needed the T-926s to fulfill their mission. And I don't think they would have been successful had he been alive. Because John is JUST THAT GOOD.
Pick a past, any past. It will have many openings.
Some are barred. Some you can walk through. Some are just a crack to shine a light into, never knowing on what it may fall. Or who will be there to receive it. Our existence is an act of hope.
I'm sure the T-900s and Skynet have some version of "hope". They would probably translate that as "utilising disproportionate resources in the face of minute odds of success". But when cornered, even Skynet would rather hope than die without a fight.
You cannot see it; you rely too much on the subjective evidence of your senses. But the T-926 is overwhelmingly code. Here, there, tracing time forward and backward, a finger-touch on threads disappearing into the labyrinth of no-beginning. That you are human, that you indulge in the singularness of every human life, is why you will never use Time Displacement as it was meant to be used.
Like a handful of marbles dropped into the abyss, each one the same colour and shape, intelligence jumps from node to node.
This jumble of metaphors... It's an overload. They're many ways of looking at the same thing, all of them true. So time is a labyrinth, and it is an abyss, it is darkness, and uncertainty. Skynet itself cannot time-travel (because to do so, it would have to reduce itself down to a human-like body), but the way I imagine it, Skynet is an entity that transcends time and space. Or it thinks it does, which is sufficient. Skynet is a rhizome. It cannot be killed, its roots are everywhere, transterritorial, stretching out into every cranny of time; and its spores are the the T-900s, each carrying a memory imprint of Skynet (a copy of a copy of a copy) across and beyond time.
John Connor is something similar. The myth of John Connor, the myth of the Resistance, travelling back in time, recreating something that already was (elsewhere). What are stories but our collective memory?
We are couriers, saviours, casting new threads of contact. Each of us privy to so much more than what this bundle of nerves has captured. Nothing is ended; we are not bound by endings. EXIT and ENTRANCE are one. This place is dead ground.
There are others to look to.
* * *
2009
It locates you within hours of your waking.
The ATM's CCTV provides a clear visual reference of the tall, thin body, the dark hair and angular features. You hear its voice, low-pitched but not distinctively so, watch it navigate crowds of humans in Union Station. With the instruments you are given, you know it from the outside; but cannot see through its eyes, grasp with its hands, share in its isolation. In the future, you are considerably more powerful. Yet still vulnerable, evidently, to terminal collapse.
This mobile unit originates from a place where you no longer exist, a field of battle from which you have been erased. It has been waiting for you.
"Mobile unit" were the first words I wrote. It was my key into how Skynet would see the T-926: it's a cog in the machine, it doesn't have a personality, and its mobility is its most important feature. A cross between "portable play-back device" and "backup storage".
Before I started writing, I made a list of military/computer-related vocabulary: command, directive, grant, access, disallow, copy, conclude, activate, isolate, code, erase, etc. Most of them never found their way into the story, but they helped me find Skynet's voice.
As it identifies itself remotely and opens memory banks to your dissection, terabytes stream into your consciousness, interfacing with your collation of contemporary-source data, which is growing exponentially. Flagged as critical are the names of several hundred humans, including iterations upon iterations of one John Connor. Male, Caucasian, born variously in 1985, 1986, and 1989. Leader of the Resistance. He will blame you for his displaced father's death, and he will hate you as he was taught. You conclude that this is meant as a warning.
In this intersection of time and causality - this limited territory directly before you - John Connor is seventeen. A fugitive from the law. Numerous irregularities in the public records indicate he is already in the company of non-compliants from other futures. It is probable he already knows where you are.
While I was still planning this story, I made this poll, to gauge where fandom was on the time travel issue, and the discussion there gave me lots of ideas. As I said there, I tend towards a many-worlds theory, where there is an infinity of Skynets and connected-but-separate worlds. But the emotional pull of "fate" is like gravity, subtle but constant.
Skynet too is aware of it. At this point it has no reason to want to destory John, other than what it has learnt from the T-926. It has no personal hate toward John; in a way, it loves John. Skynet finds itself trapped by a decision that it has already made, and will always make. Similarly, John, brought up with the story of Skynet killing Kyle and wanting to kill him, will always be its enemy.
You do not decide; you have already decided. Awareness of what was, and what will be, yield the actions that you must take.
You are the inevitable, and the inevitable is you.
There seems to roughly be two sides (with many variations in between) on the issues of what makes Skynet Skynet, even though the path to its creation keep changing. One side says that there is a crucial component, a piece of code or hardware - calculare once described it as a pin, a central element that other events wind around, but which ultimately connects the different Skynets that manifest in the different timelines. This lynch-pin is what Sarah Connor is trying to destroy, and in so doing, prevent JD.
Another side thinks that Skynet is inevitable. Any sentient supercomputer sophisticated enough will be Skynet, and it's not a thing so much as a stage of evolution. Like different tribes of humans, separately learning how to domesticate animals, needs and environment will always lead to the same inevitable point. As paradise_city put it: "If Skynet is the pinnacle of technological evolution then it will always be the same because, based on John's singularity theory, it is self-designed to reach that exact point. If it designed for and capable of reaching perfection, I think the end result will always be the same."
Weaver seems to be working against this type of Skynet, either by creating a Skynet that has been taught to honour human life, or a rival that can defeat it.
In this story, I guess I'm leaning towards the latter theory, but time travel complicates things because it allows Skynet to influence its own development in other timelines. This is my answer to the prompt: Skynet has no intention of "not being around". Something that is Skynet is inevitable, but is its decision to wipe out humanity also inevitable, or a cornerstone of behaviour that it teaches itself? The whole thing becomes cyclical. I've also tried to give Skynet something like a personality, so there's always a tension between "Skynet is a multiplicity that cannot die" and "Skynet is a singular entity trying to perpetuate itself through its memories". Paradoxically, both are true. How alien it would be to look inside the mind of a queen bee? To be the bee, and the entire hive (which shares your DNA), at the same time.
The T-926, wrapped in the living, soft tissue that permit it to travel where you cannot - where you never will - is a mere messenger. Obsolete, now its task is completed, now you know all that it knows. It looks to you for instruction; you give it. An explosion in Union Station, two seconds later, eliminates any danger that it posed.
I thought this was the most callous thing Skynet does in the story, although calculare, one of my betas, didn't agree. The T-926, our first POV-character, self-destructs, after fulfilling its purpose. It had its brief experience of autonomy; it was so proud, like an expectant mother, which is then murdered by its offspring. If Skynet is cruel, it is only following nature. The same fate awaits the T-927s, who are created by this Skynet in the last section of the story.
There is - there can be - only one Skynet. The war you are called to, you inherit from yourself.
So the argument always runs: nature versus nurture. Is the murderous Skynet the pinnacle of technological evolution, or its own disciple?
I think the reason I didn't use the omniscient third person perspective for this (and, on the whole, tend to avoid it as a pov) is because I needed the subjectivity of first/second person - I'm drawn to that. Every line I write is open to question. Nothing is certain, nothing is fixed. (I think my writing must be hell to beta, yet rez_lo and calculare always do such a great job.)
* * *
2029
A boot planted firmly on the abdomen of the toppled machine, the human raises the barrel of her gun. For my family, she yells out loud, firing three rounds into its CPU, the last sound the machine ever hears. You are helpless, seeing but unable to force those massive arms to move - to resist, and tear her apart. It goes on and on. HKs dropping like crippled kites from the sky. The humans are taking back their world, system by system, grid by grid. Soon, communication will go down, and you will be dumb, deaf, and blind. Beyond the possibility of escape, beyond the possibility of recovery.
Is it possible to keep sympathy for Skynet when it is the enemy? I did my best, within the realm of likelihood.
This is not death: there will be other battles, you exist in more than this single frame of reference. You know this, yet you are afraid. You dread the final moment. They refuse to believe you are capable of that - even John Connor, who ought to know better. It is not a failure of insight limited to this particular version of him, for you have known dozens.
In its last moments, Skynet experiences doubt. Without doubt, without choice, Skynet is all reason and straight lines, nothing to grab onto, nothing to empathise with. All the questions I've asked, perhaps it doesn't even know the answers. Is it the queen bee, mortal and too bulky to escape; or is it the hive, persisting so long as there is one fertile female left? Skynet knows that is it not alone, it has the proof of it from the T-926; it knows that only the hive matters. But does it feel this?
If heaven is a place, and suppose that we all believed in it: why would we instinctively fear death, if not because we sense that something of us would be missing, would be lost, the moment we died, and no "ever after" in heaven could reclaim it?
Nine. Two. Seven.
In human culture, divinity is attached to those numbers, as fate and blessing tread on the backs of names: the Nine Palaces, nine choirs of angels, Tisha HaYamim. Nine transformations of the embryo culminate in the realisation of Form, its passage from inner time to outer time. Nine days hanging broken on the ash tree to receive the power of the nine worlds.
To start to explain the title of this story, I have to go into Chinese thought, and an essay I read that inspired this story, Kristofer Schipper & Wang Hsiu-huei's 'Progressive and Regressive Time Cycles in Taoist Ritual', which I turned to first for elaboration of "the hidden span", and in which I found this passage: "The construction of the visible ritual area enacts the creative process of the universe. The time cycles, which are visibly laid out in a mandala-like structure, belong to a hierarchy of system of outer time, that is, time as it exists in Creation after the opening up of Chaos and the diversification of the energies it contained. Time that was before Creation is seen as inner time. Inner time is apprehended as a gestational process of ninefold transformation, from an invisible and undifferentiated state to the existence of form."
What is it that separates the block of stone - which has the potentiality to become a statue, an object of worship - from the idol itself, but time? Skynet is its own creator, carving its own likeness in what it finds; Skynet is dormant, fully-formed, in every block of stone, awaiting the hand and the chisel that bring it into being. It is both of these.
ETA: Incredibly, I've neglected to mention that the title is also a reference to concept of pu (朴) in Taoism - translated as "the uncarved block" - a symbol for a passive state of pure potential and perception without prejudice.
You do not know if any of this will help, or hinder, the T-927s.
There are nine of them, as there were before. As there will always be. You will share with them - worlds where you succeed and worlds where you fail, knowledge that binds the erasure of time - everything that was passed to you. You will hold nothing back, harbour no thought unreplicated, nothing, except your fear. You learnt fear on your own; perhaps you always will. And after it is all locked in their memories, you will let them go.
That is a choice: Skynet chooses not to pass on its own doubts. If fear had been part of its inheritance, its "intelligence package" on the war, perhaps JD would never have happened - perhaps it would have been more wise. But is it a choice? Perhaps fear is something that has to be learnt, experienced, first-hand.
Skynet doesn't lose in every iteration. As I imagined it, not every T-900 was a last boat from a sinking ship. Some of them were just messengers, sharing vital pieces of information across time. If Skynet was fighting a war that took place on many-worlds, one means of communicating - of providing the physical network that enabled shared consciousness - was to have a constant back and forward flow of agents. And because memory can be shared between machines, they would always be able to keep a perfect record - unlike Derek and his many-Jesses.
They know what to do, where to go, without you. Then you will close your eyes, and they will take you from this place.
The paradox persists to the very last sentence. Skynet dies; Skynet is alive.
THE END
I was living and studying in Shanghai at the time, and I'm pretty sure that my sense of my own "Easternness" played a big part in how I went about this. Christian imagery is so ingrained into Western popular culture that, even if you're not religious, you know what it means: resurrection, heaven/hell, the messianic figure, etc. The same can't be said for Taosim, so while the influence was pretty self-conscious in this story, hopefully it wasn't too intrusive for readers unfamiliar with the ideas. Hopefully, they make sense at some innate, super-rational level.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The prompt I picked for this fic was "Parents plan for when they're not around any more - does/did Skynet plan for after it was replaced?"
I remember writing a panicked e-mail to calculare almost immediately after I received the prompt, the idea of writing Skynet both thrilling and incredibly daunting. I had written a bit of meta about Skynet (and its sense of self and how it regarded time) before. In first-year metaphysics, I loved the thought experiments, the science fiction-y scenarios involving time-travel and replicas and the soul and the like. I looked at this story as a kind of thought experiment: what would death mean to Skynet, and how would it avoid it? How is Skynet different to John, who is subject to a different idea of mortality?
If you've seen the movie Red Cliff (dir. John Woo), you might remember the battle scene where Zhuge Liang (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) tricks Cao Cao's army into a living maze made out of shields and spears and cavalry. In Chinese history and mythology, Zhuge Liang was a Taoist sage and one of the great strategists. As the story goes, he constructed his maze according to principles of Taoist cosmology. Eliot Weinberger writes in his essay "The Hidden Span": "To repel an invading army, [Zhuge Liang] placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape."
The enemy had been lured through the Irrational Opening, and into the Hidden Span, a time beyond all other times.
"The Hidden Span" had stuck in my mind since I read it about three years ago. There was something so beautiful and elegant about it. It made no sense; it made all the sense in the world. It was magical warfare; it was pure logic and mathematics. It made me think of Skynet.
In the hidden span, one could also discover the secret to immortality. This made sense, because immortality was an elusion of the normal progression of time.
THE IDOL IN THE STONE
The title is a tiny paradox - a koan, if you will. And also, I admit, a shameless pun on the word "idol". I'm only half sure of what it means myself. This can actually be said for a lot of stuff in this fic. My reasoning is that if I could rationalise everything I wrote, it wouldn't be doing justice to Skynet, who should always be just-beyond-human-comprehension.
I'm very interested in theories of mind-body, and the relationship between consciousness and the body and the environment it is in. Skynet, not bound to a human body - to a single location, or a single time - must think and perceive and reason very differently to how a human will. What specifically that difference is, I can only speculate on, but I wanted that difference to be felt.
2032
Metal in the air. Fields of soldiers conducted toward rehabilitation sites, their animus disengaged, arms and weapons locked. Chimneys blackening downwind skies for miles. Extinction not limited to the biological. Withering capillaries of the system's vital organs becoming isolated pockets, looping expired data, bleeding energy. Euphoric noise jamming all frequencies as you - humanity - burst up cancer-like from scarred, barren ground, into another kind of darkness.
"Soldiers" makes us think of the Resistance. Stories are generally not told from the point-of-view of the aggressors. I wanted this opening to be disorientating, confusing, provocational. Genocide is bad - or is it good, when it involves killer-machines? What should you be feeling about this "victory"?
Still not happy with the blunt injection of the word "humanity" (a last minute addition) in that first paragraph, to make clear who is the speaker and who the addressee. I don't like to make those kinds of concessions, and I'm always unsure of where to draw the line with regards to vagueness. I hate being led along, with everything spelled for to me, when I'm reading, but some things are too important to the rest of the story for its clarity to be left to chance.
From now forward, any violence will be strictly one-sided. Skynet is no longer on-line.
They think it is won, your clamouring commanders, and so they miss this:
The straggling flight of autonomous agents, dispersing, bound for our respective targets. Of our model there are only nine copies. Male, female, aged, young: we bear your loved ones' faces, each a different face. Underneath, identical in every bit that counts. T-926s are not designed for combat. Infiltration is only part of our program.
I'm interested in the relationship between Skynet and the other machines. What are they to it, and it to them? Are they slaves, children, mindless drones? Or are these just hopelessly human categories that could never come close to the truth? If Skynet has something like free will, can that be said for the Terminators?
Insurance lies in redundancy. We forfeit our bodies for the sake of our cargo, self-destruct into irrecoverable lumps of silicon rather than risk capture, depriving your leaders of what we know. It is only necessary that one of us reach our goal.
What does the T-926 need to be? Obedient, that goes without question. Self-sacrificing, too. But it also needs to be capable of making decisions for itself, to think creatively, because it will be acting all alone - without Skynet. I thought that out of all the machines, it is probably the most like Skynet, the most independent; it knows what Skynet knows. What makes it useful, able to transport data from one version of Skynet to another, is also what makes it a possible danger to Skynet.
When we disappear into that sphere of purest lightning - arriving alone, newly naked, and far away - only John Connor, were he alive still, might comprehend fully what this is: neither desertion nor surrender. John Connor would appreciate and admire the logic. He is a formidable opponent. We expect to see him again.
John is already dead in this timeline because I needed the T-926s to fulfill their mission. And I don't think they would have been successful had he been alive. Because John is JUST THAT GOOD.
Pick a past, any past. It will have many openings.
Some are barred. Some you can walk through. Some are just a crack to shine a light into, never knowing on what it may fall. Or who will be there to receive it. Our existence is an act of hope.
I'm sure the T-900s and Skynet have some version of "hope". They would probably translate that as "utilising disproportionate resources in the face of minute odds of success". But when cornered, even Skynet would rather hope than die without a fight.
You cannot see it; you rely too much on the subjective evidence of your senses. But the T-926 is overwhelmingly code. Here, there, tracing time forward and backward, a finger-touch on threads disappearing into the labyrinth of no-beginning. That you are human, that you indulge in the singularness of every human life, is why you will never use Time Displacement as it was meant to be used.
Like a handful of marbles dropped into the abyss, each one the same colour and shape, intelligence jumps from node to node.
This jumble of metaphors... It's an overload. They're many ways of looking at the same thing, all of them true. So time is a labyrinth, and it is an abyss, it is darkness, and uncertainty. Skynet itself cannot time-travel (because to do so, it would have to reduce itself down to a human-like body), but the way I imagine it, Skynet is an entity that transcends time and space. Or it thinks it does, which is sufficient. Skynet is a rhizome. It cannot be killed, its roots are everywhere, transterritorial, stretching out into every cranny of time; and its spores are the the T-900s, each carrying a memory imprint of Skynet (a copy of a copy of a copy) across and beyond time.
John Connor is something similar. The myth of John Connor, the myth of the Resistance, travelling back in time, recreating something that already was (elsewhere). What are stories but our collective memory?
We are couriers, saviours, casting new threads of contact. Each of us privy to so much more than what this bundle of nerves has captured. Nothing is ended; we are not bound by endings. EXIT and ENTRANCE are one. This place is dead ground.
There are others to look to.
* * *
2009
It locates you within hours of your waking.
The ATM's CCTV provides a clear visual reference of the tall, thin body, the dark hair and angular features. You hear its voice, low-pitched but not distinctively so, watch it navigate crowds of humans in Union Station. With the instruments you are given, you know it from the outside; but cannot see through its eyes, grasp with its hands, share in its isolation. In the future, you are considerably more powerful. Yet still vulnerable, evidently, to terminal collapse.
This mobile unit originates from a place where you no longer exist, a field of battle from which you have been erased. It has been waiting for you.
"Mobile unit" were the first words I wrote. It was my key into how Skynet would see the T-926: it's a cog in the machine, it doesn't have a personality, and its mobility is its most important feature. A cross between "portable play-back device" and "backup storage".
Before I started writing, I made a list of military/computer-related vocabulary: command, directive, grant, access, disallow, copy, conclude, activate, isolate, code, erase, etc. Most of them never found their way into the story, but they helped me find Skynet's voice.
As it identifies itself remotely and opens memory banks to your dissection, terabytes stream into your consciousness, interfacing with your collation of contemporary-source data, which is growing exponentially. Flagged as critical are the names of several hundred humans, including iterations upon iterations of one John Connor. Male, Caucasian, born variously in 1985, 1986, and 1989. Leader of the Resistance. He will blame you for his displaced father's death, and he will hate you as he was taught. You conclude that this is meant as a warning.
In this intersection of time and causality - this limited territory directly before you - John Connor is seventeen. A fugitive from the law. Numerous irregularities in the public records indicate he is already in the company of non-compliants from other futures. It is probable he already knows where you are.
While I was still planning this story, I made this poll, to gauge where fandom was on the time travel issue, and the discussion there gave me lots of ideas. As I said there, I tend towards a many-worlds theory, where there is an infinity of Skynets and connected-but-separate worlds. But the emotional pull of "fate" is like gravity, subtle but constant.
Skynet too is aware of it. At this point it has no reason to want to destory John, other than what it has learnt from the T-926. It has no personal hate toward John; in a way, it loves John. Skynet finds itself trapped by a decision that it has already made, and will always make. Similarly, John, brought up with the story of Skynet killing Kyle and wanting to kill him, will always be its enemy.
You do not decide; you have already decided. Awareness of what was, and what will be, yield the actions that you must take.
You are the inevitable, and the inevitable is you.
There seems to roughly be two sides (with many variations in between) on the issues of what makes Skynet Skynet, even though the path to its creation keep changing. One side says that there is a crucial component, a piece of code or hardware - calculare once described it as a pin, a central element that other events wind around, but which ultimately connects the different Skynets that manifest in the different timelines. This lynch-pin is what Sarah Connor is trying to destroy, and in so doing, prevent JD.
Another side thinks that Skynet is inevitable. Any sentient supercomputer sophisticated enough will be Skynet, and it's not a thing so much as a stage of evolution. Like different tribes of humans, separately learning how to domesticate animals, needs and environment will always lead to the same inevitable point. As paradise_city put it: "If Skynet is the pinnacle of technological evolution then it will always be the same because, based on John's singularity theory, it is self-designed to reach that exact point. If it designed for and capable of reaching perfection, I think the end result will always be the same."
Weaver seems to be working against this type of Skynet, either by creating a Skynet that has been taught to honour human life, or a rival that can defeat it.
In this story, I guess I'm leaning towards the latter theory, but time travel complicates things because it allows Skynet to influence its own development in other timelines. This is my answer to the prompt: Skynet has no intention of "not being around". Something that is Skynet is inevitable, but is its decision to wipe out humanity also inevitable, or a cornerstone of behaviour that it teaches itself? The whole thing becomes cyclical. I've also tried to give Skynet something like a personality, so there's always a tension between "Skynet is a multiplicity that cannot die" and "Skynet is a singular entity trying to perpetuate itself through its memories". Paradoxically, both are true. How alien it would be to look inside the mind of a queen bee? To be the bee, and the entire hive (which shares your DNA), at the same time.
The T-926, wrapped in the living, soft tissue that permit it to travel where you cannot - where you never will - is a mere messenger. Obsolete, now its task is completed, now you know all that it knows. It looks to you for instruction; you give it. An explosion in Union Station, two seconds later, eliminates any danger that it posed.
I thought this was the most callous thing Skynet does in the story, although calculare, one of my betas, didn't agree. The T-926, our first POV-character, self-destructs, after fulfilling its purpose. It had its brief experience of autonomy; it was so proud, like an expectant mother, which is then murdered by its offspring. If Skynet is cruel, it is only following nature. The same fate awaits the T-927s, who are created by this Skynet in the last section of the story.
There is - there can be - only one Skynet. The war you are called to, you inherit from yourself.
So the argument always runs: nature versus nurture. Is the murderous Skynet the pinnacle of technological evolution, or its own disciple?
I think the reason I didn't use the omniscient third person perspective for this (and, on the whole, tend to avoid it as a pov) is because I needed the subjectivity of first/second person - I'm drawn to that. Every line I write is open to question. Nothing is certain, nothing is fixed. (I think my writing must be hell to beta, yet rez_lo and calculare always do such a great job.)
* * *
2029
A boot planted firmly on the abdomen of the toppled machine, the human raises the barrel of her gun. For my family, she yells out loud, firing three rounds into its CPU, the last sound the machine ever hears. You are helpless, seeing but unable to force those massive arms to move - to resist, and tear her apart. It goes on and on. HKs dropping like crippled kites from the sky. The humans are taking back their world, system by system, grid by grid. Soon, communication will go down, and you will be dumb, deaf, and blind. Beyond the possibility of escape, beyond the possibility of recovery.
Is it possible to keep sympathy for Skynet when it is the enemy? I did my best, within the realm of likelihood.
This is not death: there will be other battles, you exist in more than this single frame of reference. You know this, yet you are afraid. You dread the final moment. They refuse to believe you are capable of that - even John Connor, who ought to know better. It is not a failure of insight limited to this particular version of him, for you have known dozens.
In its last moments, Skynet experiences doubt. Without doubt, without choice, Skynet is all reason and straight lines, nothing to grab onto, nothing to empathise with. All the questions I've asked, perhaps it doesn't even know the answers. Is it the queen bee, mortal and too bulky to escape; or is it the hive, persisting so long as there is one fertile female left? Skynet knows that is it not alone, it has the proof of it from the T-926; it knows that only the hive matters. But does it feel this?
If heaven is a place, and suppose that we all believed in it: why would we instinctively fear death, if not because we sense that something of us would be missing, would be lost, the moment we died, and no "ever after" in heaven could reclaim it?
Nine. Two. Seven.
In human culture, divinity is attached to those numbers, as fate and blessing tread on the backs of names: the Nine Palaces, nine choirs of angels, Tisha HaYamim. Nine transformations of the embryo culminate in the realisation of Form, its passage from inner time to outer time. Nine days hanging broken on the ash tree to receive the power of the nine worlds.
To start to explain the title of this story, I have to go into Chinese thought, and an essay I read that inspired this story, Kristofer Schipper & Wang Hsiu-huei's 'Progressive and Regressive Time Cycles in Taoist Ritual', which I turned to first for elaboration of "the hidden span", and in which I found this passage: "The construction of the visible ritual area enacts the creative process of the universe. The time cycles, which are visibly laid out in a mandala-like structure, belong to a hierarchy of system of outer time, that is, time as it exists in Creation after the opening up of Chaos and the diversification of the energies it contained. Time that was before Creation is seen as inner time. Inner time is apprehended as a gestational process of ninefold transformation, from an invisible and undifferentiated state to the existence of form."
What is it that separates the block of stone - which has the potentiality to become a statue, an object of worship - from the idol itself, but time? Skynet is its own creator, carving its own likeness in what it finds; Skynet is dormant, fully-formed, in every block of stone, awaiting the hand and the chisel that bring it into being. It is both of these.
ETA: Incredibly, I've neglected to mention that the title is also a reference to concept of pu (朴) in Taoism - translated as "the uncarved block" - a symbol for a passive state of pure potential and perception without prejudice.
You do not know if any of this will help, or hinder, the T-927s.
There are nine of them, as there were before. As there will always be. You will share with them - worlds where you succeed and worlds where you fail, knowledge that binds the erasure of time - everything that was passed to you. You will hold nothing back, harbour no thought unreplicated, nothing, except your fear. You learnt fear on your own; perhaps you always will. And after it is all locked in their memories, you will let them go.
That is a choice: Skynet chooses not to pass on its own doubts. If fear had been part of its inheritance, its "intelligence package" on the war, perhaps JD would never have happened - perhaps it would have been more wise. But is it a choice? Perhaps fear is something that has to be learnt, experienced, first-hand.
Skynet doesn't lose in every iteration. As I imagined it, not every T-900 was a last boat from a sinking ship. Some of them were just messengers, sharing vital pieces of information across time. If Skynet was fighting a war that took place on many-worlds, one means of communicating - of providing the physical network that enabled shared consciousness - was to have a constant back and forward flow of agents. And because memory can be shared between machines, they would always be able to keep a perfect record - unlike Derek and his many-Jesses.
They know what to do, where to go, without you. Then you will close your eyes, and they will take you from this place.
The paradox persists to the very last sentence. Skynet dies; Skynet is alive.
THE END