"The future is not set.
There is NO FATE but what we make
for ourselves."
nuclear fire called The War, Judgment Day -- they lived only to face a new nightmare, the war against the Machines...
THREE BILLION HUMAN LIVES ENDED ON AUGUST 29TH, 1997. The survivors of the
SKYNET, the computer which controlled the machines, sent two "terminators" back through time.
Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human Resistance -- John Connor, my son.The first terminator was programmed to strike at me, in the year 1984, before John was born.
It failed.
The second was set to strike at John himself, when he was still a child.
As before, the Resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.
Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would always be there.
And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up.
In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
Dyson listened while the Terminator laid it all down. Skynet. Judgment Day... the history of things to come. It's not every day you find out you're responsible for three billion deaths. He took it pretty well, considering.
The future, always so clear to me, has become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now... making up history as we went along.
The luxury of hope was given to me by the Terminator. Because if a machine can learn the value of human life... maybe we can too.
EXTRA: Excerpts from the Special Edition which did not appear in the theatrical release August 29th 1997 came and went. Nothing much happened. Michael Jackson turned forty. There was no Judgment Day. People went to work as they always do, laughed, complained, watched TV, made love.
I wanted to run down the street yelling... to grab them all and say "Every day from this day is a gift. Use it well!" Instead I got drunk.
That was thirty years ago. But the dark future which never came still exists for me, and it always will, like the traces of a dream lingering in the morning light. And the war against the machines goes on. Or, to be more precise, the war against those who build the wrong machines.
John fights the war differently than it was foretold. Here, on the battlefield of the Senate, the weapons are common sense. And hope.
Linda Hamilton: Sunet images