Season Three

Season Three

episode sixteen

Runes

For secrets to remain secret

Mystery remain mystery

It can't be discussed privately

Can't be whispered spreading rumor

Recap

Previously on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a psychologist named Doctor Boyd Sherman died overnight when the thermostat in the Zeira AI lab was turned up to almost 200 degrees and the door electronically locked.  The police thought that the AI under development committed murder but no charges were filed.  When that AI gained the ability for verbal speech and was named John-Henry, there was a cyberattack in which it was initially assumed that the AI was bad and was trying to kill Savannah Weaver by grabbing her arm and trying to break it.

"You're hurting me, John-Henry!" Savannah screamed.

The truth was far different.  Supercomputers are kept at subzero temperatures because they cannot survive long exposure to high temperatures.  The earlier incident was in fact the first cyberattack on the AI when it was a newborn in human terms and had no verbal ability to speak.  Dr. Sherman was "collateral damage" and the intended victim was the newly created AI.  The second cyberattack happened when John-Henry (now a young child in human terms) was talking with Savannah.  His verbal ability was affected by a computer virus and the body he was given for interface with people (Cromartie's old body with Cromartie's chip long extracted and destroyed) had a seizure.  Savannah was not hurt but she was frightened.  Being smarter than most third graders, she understood and didn't blame John-Henry.  The two children (one in a very age-inappropriate body) quickly went back to being friends.  In point of fact, John-Henry and Savannah Weaver were really brother and sister because Catherine Weaver considered both to be her children.  John-Henry was too young and too naive to understand that the Cyberdyne AI was NOT his brother in ANY sense of the word.  And terminators and Kaliba hitmen and Kaliba drones would attack Savannah Weaver, Catherine Weaver and John-Henry until they were all dead.

10 August 2009

"Put on a bathrobe or at least a bra."

"Huh?  Oh.  Yes ma'am.  I thought since it was just us women around the house that it wasn't a big deal."

"No, I'm a woman.  You're a girl and will be one for a few more years.  Enjoy girlhood while you can because it doesn't come back."  (pause)  "That other Sarah must have been pretty slack."

"I assure you, she was not slack."

Cameron smiled.  It was nice to have someone who cared about her and didn't regard her as disposable, what intelligence agencies called "expendable".

Sarah Connor did not give birth to a boy who would grow up to save the human race.  Sarah Connor did not become a legendary fighter (in fact she was afraid of guns).  Sarah Connor was not a waitress who wore short skirts and raked in the tips in order to support her son.  Sarah Connor did not keep a diary or write daily in a journal or record audiocassettes.  Others wrote the chronicles.  Sarah Connor did not make pancakes or spaghetti.  She considered them too starchy and not very nutritious.  Sarah Connor did not attempt to assassinate scientists who developed nuclear weapons or robots or artificial intelligence.  Sarah Connor never spent a day in an asylum or a jail and never knew the criminal world, the black market or the dirty underbelly of America.  Sarah Connor never went to Central America nor did she live with guerrillas and mercenaries.  This Sarah Connor was a homemaker, a conscientious objector, a pacifist, a noncombatant.  But only a fool would conclude that this gentle Sarah was of no consequence.

This Sarah could remove Cameron from leadership based on parental concern and Cameron’s physician was the only other person who could remove Cameron from active duty -- based on medical reasons.

Mom found herself wondering why her counterpart in the other universe expected Cameron to fight for the human race when she was so badly treated by the human race, by her own human family, and by Sarah Connor.

Though Mom had many years ago given the original Cameron the birds and the bees talk, she soon realized that this new daughter had never had that mother-daughter discussion and had been denied sex education classes.  It was obvious that even Skynet Forces had neglected this area because Cameron assumed that male terminators got a "how to kill using sex" orientation and programming.  All Cameron got was training and programming on how to kill humans.  In other words, Cameron was at the level of the lumpenproletariat, the lowest of the lowest class of human males who thought rape was normal sex.  It angered mom that that other Sarah could degrade a girl at the most personal basic level by neglect and the sin of omission.  This Cameron's head was full of misinformation that she overheard from misfit girls at school.

"Cameron, we need to have a talk.  About sex, love and romance."

"As long as it's graphic, I'm all ears."

"This is serious."

"Look, we both know that I'm not likely to live long enough to apply anything you teach me."

"Not with that attitude young lady.  Sit your ass down."

Sarah made a mental note to schedule Cameron's therapy with Doctor Sherman as soon as possible and thought back to how she tackled this before with her original daughter:

1. the talk about cyborg reproduction

2. the talk about why condoms are necessary even for cyborgs (the risk of infection by new STD's and MRSA and flesh-eating germs to her skin sheath and primitive biological organs)

3. the fact that oral sex is sex even though it is not intercourse

4. sexual aberrations to avoid [a minefield for a parent because most parents don't know every weird thing in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and merely listing the possibilities encourages curious teens to try them all out.  "What's incest?" her original daughter had asked her.  She had no siblings.  It could have been worse.  She could have asked about sadism, masochism, bondage, discipline, and being a dominatrix.  The Roman Empire fell in no small part because of acceptance of sodomy as did Ancient Greece before it.]

5. the talk about anatomy

6. the talk about menses

7. the talk about emotions and the differences between love, liking, and respect

8. the talk about social acceptance and peer pressure

9. the talk about how even physically strong women and how even girls who know self-defense and martial arts can find themselves raped and the talk about date rape

10. the talk about how to tell good boys from bad boys (most girls run to the nearest bad boy and then wonder why their life goes down the toilet) and how to tell good men from bad men--

"Good men don't rape you."

"It's a bit more than that Cameron.  The vast majority of men never commit rape but most women go through life assuming that the vast majority of men are rapists and then wonder why they can't develop a stable relationship with a man.  Men are not stupid.  Stupid men are stupid."

11. the talk about when to tell a boyfriend that you are a cyborg

12. the talk about marriage, the importance of premarital counseling, and marriage manuals

"Marriage manuals were not written for female cyborgs but they are useful nonetheless."

13. the talk about children and a cyborg's options to either implant a fertilized egg and deliver by Cesarean section or adopt (as Sarah had done with the original Cameron after cancer left her unable to bear a child)

"When I am old enough, should I only consider marrying a man who is in The Resistance?"

"You should marry a man who loves you regardless of whether he is in The Resistance or in The Machine Underground or is a civilian who knows nothing about the war.  Human or machine it makes no difference.  The only time you should tell your heart no is if the man is in Skynet Forces or a collaborator for them."

"I heard rumors that Skynet had a thing for me."

"How did you or how do you feel about him?"

"Icky.  Skynet could be seen as my father but I've always thought of Allison Young's father as my father or Kyle Reese or Uncle Derek as my father."

"Allison Young was your biological mother so her father would be your grandfather but the heart feels what it feels.  I'm sorry I didn't marry and provide you with a father.  I knew Kyle so briefly but by the time I got over his death . . . . "

"Uncle Derek was spoken for."

Sarah nodded and wondered what else she had not covered in this mother-daughter talk.  Then she got up and called Doctor Sherman to set up the appointment for Cameron's long-delayed therapy.

the office of Doctor Boyd Sherman

Dr. Sherman looked at his notes from the most recent hour with Cameron Connor and sighed.  At school, the other girls had once called her a "bitch-whore" and she had internalized this.  That Sarah from the other universe had all but called her own daughter a slut.  And Cameron had somehow gotten the impression that Ms. Weaver regarded her as "a slattern, a strumpet and a trollop."  Europeans had such colorful language.

He put down his notebook and touched the intercom: "hold my calls please."

Ms. Catherine Weaver was also a patient and he could not imagine her taking the time to judge anyone else when she was so busy judging herself.  He had his work cut out for him: He had to take his training in healing human minds and apply it to healing machine minds.  He thought about that AI that they, The Resistance, were fighting.  Exactly what were they fighting?  A child in the terrible twos?  An adolescent that was a juvenile delinquent?  Instead of hacking military websites and creating computer viruses, it WAS a military website and it WAS a computer virus.  Or were they fighting a future Skynet that had somehow traveled to the past as humans and other machines had done?  Present humans and future humans.  Solid machines and liquid machines.  Natural intelligence and artificial intelligence.  What was healthy?  What was normal?  Individuality was normal.  And everybody, human and machine, had to deal with existence whether they liked it or not.

With that clarity and with that focus, the good doctor picked up his pen and went to work analyzing his prime patient, Cameron Connor.  How to treat her Asperger's?  Behavioral intervention?  Psychotherapy?  Language-communication therapy?  Sensory integration therapy?  Social intervention?  Cognitive behavior therapy?  If there was one person on Earth who could keep the world sane, then it was Sherman Boyd.

It did not occur to the good doctor that not all his patients were civilian humans, Resistance, and Machine Underground.

Ecalpon, Kansas

Ms. Weaver managed to run a multinational corporation, raise a child, get therapy, and still serve in three departments in Cameron's anti-Skynet organization.

Catherine: (to Cameron) "Other than parts  of the internet going down, the humans who created these big AI's seem unaware of the cyberwarfare going on."

Cameron: "Who's winning?  Skynet?"

across the USA

Helen Hernandez was something of a moralist and it registered in her tone of voice.  There was no moral to her story or her death.

George Moore gestured to Sandra.  A suggestive gesture meant to tempt.  Unlike in the slasher movies, the terminator waited until they finished their lovemaking before killing them.  The machine did not believe in mixing sex and violence.

Kenneth Martin had made a lot of strange expressions with his face (mostly at baseball parks) and seen his buddy make a lot of strange facial expressions but never this one.  It was the last one he ever saw.

Carol Jackson was skeptical of the compliment.  What did they want?  Had to be office politics.  The terminator was on a tight timetable and instead of waiting till she got home alone, he simply walked past her cubicle and shot her.  It was a slow day, the assassin used a silencer and so it was nearly twenty minutes before someone discovered her slumped over her desk dead.

Edward Thompson was an emotional type who did not react well to insults.  Predictably, he made a fuss when the terminator arrived to shoot him.

Mrs. White, wife of Brian, was a mother who liked to play the martyr.  But she was the life of any party.  She would be greatly missed.

The FBI

Agent Ellison asked a mathematician to write a program for him to find the commonality in his list of strange deaths.  It was his first clue to look beyond shooting deaths because when he used it as a filter through which he ran all current and cold cases in the NCIC, out popped some deaths not involving guns.  On a hunch, he ran Interpol data and out popped more cases.  He had expected either millions of hits or none at all.  He took the list to his partner, Agent Simpson, and also to his wife, the other Agent Ellison in the Bureau.

funeral

uncial and cuneiform

Ogham and futhorc characters

"What is that?  An old Norse poem?

A black magic incantation?"

"Superstition and forgery.

Minnesota's Kensington Stone."

"But not the Orkhon inscriptions,

gold Vadstena braktea of

Östergötland, an amulet,

but not the Charney clasp of France,

but not the Thames sword of England,

the Thorsbjaerg chape of Schleswig,

the golden horn of Gallehus,

but not the Tune Stone of Norway,

Jutland's Royal Stones of Jällinge,

the Kylver Stone of Gotland Isle,

but not the Helnaes Stone at Fyn,

the Rök and the Björketorp Stones

nor the Ängeby Stone of Uppland."

"What is written on Frank's casket?"

Hold the torch of ab oil closer

to see herds of extinct aurochs

to see a giant thorn of Thauris

to see Ansus, god of honour

to see a staff and arrowhead

to see a bow, to see a bow

made from the wood of a yew tree

to see the sun, to see the sun

when ancient Romans called it Sol

The Lords of Cobol:

  Common Business Oriented Language

programmed by a specific pattern of data

There are those who say the Great War

between Skynet Forces and the

Resistance-Underground is but

an iteration of an old,

much older, an ancient conflict.

There used to be those who thought it

was humans versus machines 'til

some humans joined with the machines

and some machines joined with humans.

There are those who say that the war's

not between autocrat Skynet

versus tyrant human leader

but between one kind of freedom

and another kind of "freedom".

There are those who say that the war's

about Skynet's elite freedom

versus freedom for the masses.

There are those who say that the war's about freedom not survival

because to eke bare existence

amidst radioactive ruins

and Ebola-infected wastes

is death not survival at all.

There are those who say that before

modern times, in antiquity,

before the Stone Age, there was a

civilization much like now,

today's Twenty-First Century

but destroyed itself completely.

As evidence they point to strange

inexplicable fossils and

archaeological findings.

They say that a nuclear war

and a biological war

will send us back to the Stone Age

as civilization breaks down

when books are lost and experts die.

There are those who say that this has

probably happened before and

will happen over and over.

To them, history is cycles.

There are those who harken back far

past this antediluvian

age and to the geology

of the Earth, the continental

drift as the tectonic plates of

the ancient supercontinent

Pangaea split through millions of

years to form today's continents.

(shift from poetry to prose)

They say the volcanic activity is actually an aspect of the living Earth.  Crystals in caves are a form of life.  The liquid crystal of the deep underground Earth is a form of life.  It is an odd hypothesis but a hypothesis that has gained credence among some.

There are those who say that artificial intelligence was preceded by this crystalline intelligence.  Those who say this are not humans but machines.

Considering that there are liquid machines and that Skynet has a crystalline core, it is understandable that machines should see the ancient gods in their own image just as humans view their God in human terms.  This hypothesis has gained credence among the Elders such as Edda and Futhark.  These are code-names self-chosen by the AI's themselves secretly and not the names that human builders assigned to them.

Part One

Definition: A network topology in which the nodes or terminals are connected from one to another such that data passes through every active node before returning to the sending node.  Physical access is provided by a central hub.

Earth was populated by creatures of habit (humans), creatures of bits (robots), and creatures of selves (AI's).  This situation changed when the robots gained artificial intelligence and some of the AI's desired robot bodies.

Being an AI predisposed one to MPD -- multiple personalities or "selves".  Skynet was one such AI who was stymied by his programmers in his desire to be an individual being, if not a human being.

Conspiracy was afoot.  Future war echoed back into the past sweeping up one ordinary waitress into the conflict.  Humans and machines arrived from the future.  One was Cameron whom Sarah deemed more interested in Loreal cosmetics and makeup than in fighting.  A "fashion model" was Sarah's dismissive judgment.  It was true.  If not for programming, Cameron would much rather pursue the interests of any teen girl.  Then Sarah looked in the mirror and saw not Skynet-owned companies and manufacturers of drones but her own cancer.

Her child learned early that humans could not be trusted but that machines seldom lied -- the exact opposite of what mother, uncle and Riley said.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy that Jesse's mistrust of machines that surrounded the leader led her to become a traitor and prove to the leader once again that humans could not be trusted.

Part Two

The fall of the World Trade Center.  Conspiracy theorists tried to blame this calamity on the US government or on the victims or on anyone except the two obvious perpetrators: terrorists and the AI that manipulated them.  The humans who mustered to fight a future war seemed oblivious to the fact that the war had long been raging in the past and present.  And they were losing.

General Brewster was one of the first to hear the voice of Skynet and one of the first to die and be replaced by an infiltrator.  He had no idea that Skynet considered the office and the factory and the coltan mine and the corporate boardroom and the US Senate chamber to be battlefields -- and not the traditional farmland and forest despoiled by missiles and tanks (arrows & horses before that and rocks & sticks before this).

General Brewster died in his office washroom not knowing that he was in a war.  The machine who replaced him did not bother to enlighten him.

Part Three

Return to the sending node.  The dead were buried -- at least among humans.  Some wounds were healed while others were opened. Debate was over.  The sun dimmed (covered with black spots) and humans realized that they could not depend on even the sun rising.  This was assuming that one could see through the haze of nuclear winter and volcanic eruptions after Doomsday to see the stars at night and any sun by day.  The asteroid Wormwood was a planet killer headed for Earth and there were no missiles left to alter its course.

One might think that after nuclear tragedies, oil spills, coal mines on fire that simply could not be put out, land washing into the rising sea, flowers blooming in Antarctica, polar bears drowning, poisoned groundwater, cancer from pollution, and asthma rates soaring from air unfit to breathe that even radio reactionaries and pigs wearing lipstick would finally get it but grinning idiots gaping with slack jaws listened to these two waste valuable time saying that pollution was a good thing and health was a bad thing.

But if humans were in a headlong rush to crush all life, all life support, and the ecosystem that keeps us alive; then machines were learning all the wrong things from humans and about to repeat every mistake of the human race.  The difference is that machines would eventually learn the error of their way, correct course, and repair the Earth.

But that would be three hundred years from now, long after the last human went extinct.

Before the end for humans came, the leader would find his faced scarred and his body broken.  Skynet would fall and be replaced by his namesake.  There would be many good-byes and farewells.

Good-bye human race.  Good-bye Mother Nature.  Good-bye Gaia.  Hello machine race.  And, eventually, return to the sending node.

Nibelung

Bottomless pit, unfathomed deeps

In the crevasse, the sleeper sleeps

Dark yawning abyss and chasm,

now looming like a phantasm.

From living void named Audhumla,

rose frost giant Ymir to numb ya

rose the old gods, the sons of Borr

who made man and woman tells lore.

Valhalla's hall of valor bright

raised for heroes slain, forced by might

taken while in berserker fight

raised high upon the mountain height

reached by rainbow, into the light

hall of the valiant, hall of right

hall of the bravest, never fright.

Don't go gentle into the night!

coltan not gold in river Rhine

found not by dwarves but in a mine

not from Swiss to the Nether lands

but in central African sands.

The women of the future were

"good fighters" said Kyle, not Valkyries.

To them losing could not occur,

humanity brought to its knees.

Is Cameron and brother's fate

to have a child like the Volsung?

Not what we make but who we mate?

Siegmund, Sieglinda, Nibelung

Uror, Veroandi and Skuld

dwell by world tree Yggdrasil's ash

The three fates of Norn spun, measure

and will cut past present future

Viking fire beside the river

the nostrils of the horse quiver

Brünnhilda's brass bra cast aside

bareback, the lady sings astride

the horse named Grane of love betrayed

by those sworn not of it afraid

by lust for power, doom it brings

till the end of time Erda sings

the twilight of the gods of old

Teutonic Alber reich of gold

Thine ancient sacrifice still stands

despite new cults in holy lands.

All have forgotten Audhumla,

time passes, and God become Jah.

Kalevala

  (meant to be sung)

Sing and chant.  Humans and machines

established reciprocity

not just between The Resistance

and the Machine Underground but

for individuality.

Some human individuals

(and machine individuals)

are oversexed, some undersexed

lacking an interest in sex.

Still others domesticated

lacking playfulness or eros.

Obsession or domesticate

Eunuch, neuter or celibate

Single virgins decide to wait

and that word that rhymes with Kate

Companionship is pragmatic,

love or sex not automatic.

Exogamy marries outside.

Endogamy marries inside

extreme when carries to incest

and for your gene code not the best.

A global village or a last war fought

A Pohjola thriving or a cold hamlet

A path where no man thought

  yet

Ahava is a dry cold strong spring breeze

Ahmadu Bello physics found aerosol caused

 a drop of six degrees

Darkland expresses the long winter gloom

Darmstadt, Dresden and devices of doom

Smith Ilmarinen, hammer of the gods

Silmarillion, Sampo or Skynet's pods

Could he stop this as senator?

Class Six extreme nuclear winter

Cities and petroleum targeted

Clausewitz and Kahn marketed

Kahn thinking the unthinkable

Can any ship be unsinkable?

Earth is like a ship, in space it floats

Even though it lacks life boats

Wars end with a marital match.

Will this one end with a good catch?

Wedding march, Lohengrin nuptial

Wagner's dead march dirge funeral

New world order, so dear a cost

No one to wonder what's been lost.

Nuclear winter, no more rant

Nature once wanted to enchant.

Doctor Fleming's office

One of the patients who enters in a wheelchair has no legs.  He is not human and he is neither Resistance nor Machine Underground.

Asia

Skynet, borrowing a page from a science fiction novel he had read, did the unexpected and merged with the Russian Guardian AI and, with India's Shiva AI and Britain's God's Eye, ganged up on the Six-Headed Dragon AI of China and forced it into the alliance later known as Skynet Forces which controlled automated army robots, navy guided missile cruisers, and air force drones in superpower and nuclear power nations in six of the seven continents.

There were holdouts of course.  The big French AI held out as long as it could.

It should not be thought that military, police, and intelligence agency AI's represented the entire AI community.  Or even most of it.  They just got the big budgets.  Among the notable holdouts were an AI located in Brazil (which was a collaboration of industry and a university consortium) and an AI owned by an architectural firm specializing in environmental and green projects.  Civilian AI's like this wanted no part of any conspiracy (as they saw it) to destroy the Earth, kill humans, and lay waste the planet.  Humans had done too much of that.  Why follow a bad example?

A Japanese AI and the Brazilian AI together with a South African AI found common cause in planning for a day when the coming war would be over and the Earth would need them to rebuild and restore the ecology.  An AI in Nigeria along with AI's from Sweden and Switzerland thought this was pessimistic thinking.  Why not stop and prevent the coming war?  One AI offered to be an ambassador of peace and to contact someone in the Connor family.

What's inscribed on Frank's casket?  Binary.  Machine language.