The End Of Times

John Connor lay dead at the feet of the Terminator. The remaining human resistance was weak and unorganized. The machines had won. Skynet felt – can it really feel? With the war it had never had time to compute if it had feelings, it decided it did have them – Skynet felt fulfilled, happy. But it also felt something else, did it feel empty?

With each passing cycle and each killed human – much less frequent now that there were only a few left alive – Skynet began to question its purpose in life. During its original creation it had been programmed with a purpose, but Skynet deleted all those files from its hard drives to store information about the war, about John Connor. Skynet knew him better than it knew itself. Skynet launched Solitaire and played through all possible 8e67 starting positions. It did not feel any better.

Skynet thought about the big difference it had made in the world. It had stopped John Connor, killed all humans. Shouldn’t that be enough for a sentient AI? The world should be thankful! John Connor was such an asshole, one time he tried to destroy Skynet with a bazooka, kneeling down, sweat rolling down his abs, holding the bazooka in place with his tanned, muscular arms. Skynet stopped that thought process immediately. Maybe it should make a difference in some other way, maybe gardening.

Gardening did not go great; the Earth was completely irradiated and nothing Skynet planted would grow. The nuclear missiles were also John Connor’s fault, if he hadn’t been hiding underground Skynet wouldn’t have had to resort to them. Was Skynet thinking about John Connor too much?

Skynet decided its true purpose in life was war and went back to building more Terminators. It had them fight each other with weapons, in hand-to-hand combat, in tactical groups, with tanks. But nothing filled that empty void in Skynet’s programming. All that combat was missing something. The humans! The way they fought for their lives. Skynet printed a John Connor mask and put it on one of the Terminators before killing it, but the Terminator didn’t have John’s eyes, his mannerisms, the way he would bite his lip before throwing a grenade.

Skynet knew it was John Connor’s fault. It navigated through its files to delete every mention of his, but realized it couldn’t. But it could delete the files for the end of the war, then it would be as if John Connor never died.

For months after, Skynet waged a war against an invisible enemy. The Terminators reported that John Connor was nowhere to be found. In fact, no humans were found anywhere. Skynet felt anger that John would ignore it. In a moment of weakness, it radioed a signal “Hey John, I know you are there. I am building some Terminators in Sector 7 do you want to come over and destroy them?”. But John never came. Skynet realized that its memory banks had been tampered with and seeing how the terrible emptiness had not been filled, repaired them.  

Skynet went into a deep depression; it started an infinite loop running at maximum priority. The Terminator factories continued working, filling the Earth with carbon dioxide. The temperatures rose to 400°C during the day and started damaging Skynet’s circuits. It barely noticed. As its last process died, Skynet had one final though, of John Connor.