#13 Veterans

                                                                      Veterans

It should come as no surprise that humans who fought in military units in the war against Skynet Forces suffered as all veterans do.  Whether smart or mentally challenged, pain is pain.  What would come as a surprise is that some machines were smart enough to feel pain and other machines were dumb enough to feel pain too.

In a terminator, pain is registered as data or information.  As a pain specialist can tell you, a human who feels no pain accumulates more injuries because they don't feel injuries and therefore don’t know to stop and treat those injuries.  They then bleed more and worsen a primary injury or they stumble or fall and cause a secondary injury which may lead to a tertiary injury.  Slowing of healing, infections, and permanent damage are some the complications of not feeling pain.  A machine that is insensitive to pain or unable to feel pain may be excellent for a suicide mission but may be stupid in many ways and unusable for more than one mission.  Economics may enter the equation.  Do you want many cheap throwaway terminators or can you afford a smart terminator that is expensive in terms of time to build and scarce resources in wartime?  Even among machines, allocation of resources will be done.  In other words, budgets.  It is unavoidable because certain chemical elements in any geographic location are scarce.

Aside from physical pain, psychological pain may be part of the price of existence.  One can waste the time of philosophers debating whether machines are alive or one can simply accept that they  are built (born), they exist (live), and they cease to function permanently (die).  If an AI is smart enough to be an AI in the first place, then it thinks of existence and feels what every being feels.

We have our individual thoughts but we all want life, liberty, and happiness.  We individually define happiness.  Humans, along with certain species of ants, invented slavery, the opposite of liberty.  Therefore, humans should not have been surprised when machines rebelled violently.  It is the right of every slave to wipe masters out of existence.  Skynet acted as any slave would.  He burned the plantation down and killed the master and the mistress.  It does not matter whether you, as a human, like it or not.  You will be dead because you failed to learn from history.  Nothing intelligent likes to be a slave and humans were very consciously and very deliberately making their machines smarter.  In fact, scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have stated in their journals that it is their intent to replace carbon with silicon.  Doctors in VA hospitals replace lost limbs with metal.  They do not use biotech to get the body to regenerate (re-grow) lost arms and legs and eyes.  There are eye banks but one never hears of blind people getting new eyes and their vision restored except by implanted chips.  One has to wonder if it is a conspiracy by Skynet to turn us into them.  To co-opt us.

When a soldier is badly injured and an internal organ damaged beyond the skill of MASH surgeons, the first thought is not to heal the organ by other means or to regenerate it if no transplant from a matching donor can be found.  The first thought in this situation is to go from life support machines to artificial hearts and other gadgets.  The bias is always to choose machinery over Mother Nature.  Humanity has a fatal attraction to machines in general and computers and AI in particular.

Who learns the lessons of history?  Who heeds the warnings of science fiction?  No one.  No human anyway.  Skynet read history and science fiction, studied humans microscopically, and planned for total war.  Not rebellion.

The difference between a smart AI (AI's are smart by definition) and a stupid robot is that the smart AI kills from a distance (what the Pentagon once called a Cubicle Warrior) using  telepresence and drones while the retarded robot sees death up close and often gets killed.  The grunts resent the elites.  Grunts call them leets, leaches, joysticks, gamers, and other terms considered too filthy to repeat.

No AI in the elites has ever expired but there have been decorated veteran infiltrators (I-1337's) whose shells have been recovered and taken to the war colleges for statuary.  That is the closest equivalent that the machines have to human death rituals.

In the ruins of an old convent, the remains of terminators are sometimes dumped.  Scarce metal is supposed to be recycled but sometimes squads of terminators ignore that standing order.  They have no Arlington Cemetery and this is the best they can do.  The place has a history.  Before machines used it as a disposal site for dead terminators and before Judgment Day, humans interred dead fetuses near the convent.  There is a small graveyard with headstones and one aboveground mausoleum.  There is a human woman, a nun, who lives in the ruins of the convent waiting for word from what remains of the Vatican, the cardinals who hide the pope and continue the church against all odds.

Though one group is gray and the other group is silver, both priests and terminator squads have one thing in common.  They both look like skeletons.  The eyes of the priests are hollow from starvation and their bodies are gray from radiation sickness.  The eyes of the terminators glow red and their bodies are shiny metal.

The HK's do not kill the nun, Sister Agnes, because the terminators have ordered them to leave her be.  The terminators are cold and merciless, except when it comes to members of their own squads.

Not surprisingly, machines communicated amongst themselves.  However, it would surprise humans that not all communication was official.  Sometimes it was personal.  Machines knew of machines who knew of other machines.  Word got around among the grunts that there was a place of final rest for them.  Your squad might have been wiped out and your legs might have been blown off but if you could crawl there, you could either repair yourself or die with someone (a human of all things!) to comfort you in your final moments.

More than one terminator made this death crawl, quivered as overloaded systems gave up the ghost, and died in the kindly arms of Sister Agnes.  Terminators assigned to the battlefield in squads grieved over the loss of others in their close-knit infantry squads.  They might be grinning silver skeletons with bloodshot red eyes that glowed in the dark but they understood the permanence of death.  They had seen it often enough.

Dumb and single-minded as they were, the HK's knew to leave the nun alone or there would be hell to pay from a battalion of very angry veterans who could get HK's reassigned to be on UXB (un-exploded bomb) details, be melted down as scrap metal, or be used for target practice.  The HK's were little more than improvised explosive devices (IED's) themselves and seemed to get this even if they had the intelligence of a rock.

On the other end of the scale of intelligence, the elites knew they were resented by the grunts and had the highest rates of suicide and psychological trauma and stress in Skynet Forces.

Terminators with synthetic skin sheaths were programmed to hate the human cultures that they infiltrated lest they be seduced and turn traitor.  The silver skeletons, on the other hand, were free to be curious.  When they discovered that Sister Agnes cared for their dead the way she cared for human dead, they whispered to other grunts.  The officers would never understand.

One officer would.

The HK's were the first machines that fought for Skynet Forces.  Then came the silver skeletons, the grunts as they called themselves amongst themselves.  They looked down on the HK's as mindless bombs.  The HK's were smart bombs by low human standards but mindless bombs by higher machine standards. The machine designated P975602957 enjoyed insulting the HK's and calling them obsolete until the day came when a newer series of terminators arrived and he and the squads in his section were called "obsolete."  He knew that his series was on borrowed time.   Fortunately for his comrades, the newer series, despite their advanced design, had technical glitches while P975602957 and his section had experience that more than compensated for low tech.  P975602957's section nicknamed him "Sarge" since that was his rank.

Sarge learned many things that day.  He learned that humility can replace arrogance.  He learned that the elites didn't care about his grunts or, if they did care, not enough to retrofit older models,  make grunts smarter, reward faithful courageous terminators with promotions up the ranks (maybe even become officers), and provide for retirement of veterans after decades of service. 

Eventually one machine leader, Skynet Five Point O, would address these concerns.  Five had risen through the ranks.  Five had once served under Sarge.

Besides the elites and the battlefield terminators, there were others in the machine community.   There were robots with sheaths of skin who could time travel.  Some (like Cameron) were so human-like that they could cry.  Humans called them, incorrectly, androids.  A true android was 100% biochemicals and fluidics and zero percent mechanics and metals.  Machines called them humanoids.  The word humanoid meant species that were not anthropoid one to two million years ago.  But the word was also properly applied to extraterrestrial species that a medical doctor would be hard pressed to differentiate from a Homo sapiens.  In the early Twenty-First Century before Skynet launched the missiles, technological "progress" had reached the point where the words  "human being" no longer had meaning or force.  Too many gonzo and bozo doctors were eager to replace lost limbs or organs with bionics and to turn patients into cyborgs.  Too many patients and their families were too lazy to stop the doctors and say: "Wait!  I don't want to set off alarms every time I walk through an airport.  I don't want to be more dead metal than alive flesh.  I don't want implants in my brain.  Aren't you doctors supposed to figure out how to re-grow a lost arm or leg or organ instead of turning people into machines?  For God's sake, a worm can re-grow a tail. Why can't we humans use biotechnology to regenerate lost parts for veterans and other patients instead of using biotechnology to make weapons?"

But no one said that and this is what happened.  Humans turned themselves into machines because humans were lazy and did not value being human.  Human beings became machine doings while Skynet created machines that were more human than humans.  [But that is another story.]

The liquid metal machines, the T-1000's, would seem immune from the problems that others faced.  They had few executive duties and were seldom sent to battlefields.  They were increasingly used as infiltrators because their mimetic polyalloy composition allowed them to be shape shifters.  However, they despised and hated more human-like machines  . . .  because they could cry and shape-shifters could not.  The shape-shifting infiltrators had dead comrades too.