cyberdyne systems (12. 682)

Having gone through several temporal incarnations over the course of the franchise with an expanding backstory, presumably through multiple attempts from the future to change the past, the defence network computers, hooked into every—as described in the 1984 original—were commissioned for the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD, “trusted to run it all. They say it got smart—a new order of intelligence,” the singularity that recognised all humans as threats and “not just the ones on the other side,” referring to the Soviets and the Eastern bloc, deciding humanity’s fate pragmatically in a microsecond: extermination. Initiating a nuclear war and provoking counter strikes, most people are wiped out and Skynet enslaved the surviving population. Destroyed in by resistance fighters in 2029, cyborg Terminators were sent back in time to prevent the birth of the leader of the rebellion. In the first sequel, covert recovery and research efforts on the destroyed assassins in the sequels lead to the defence contractor’s break through in artificial intelligence through reverse engineering of a fragment of the crushed T-101. Having fully automated aerial warfare, congress embraces the project wholesale, sidelining human judgment, seen as a liability, in achieving offensive goals at the beginning of August 1997. After brought online and integrated with the full arsenal of American military, the exponential pace of its advance alarmed its handlers, causing them to try to disable it and shut it down. Skynet responds by bombing Russia, again eliciting a dead-hand response and another nuclear holocaust with a cast of representative survivors.