A scenario for a (very wankish) Terminator/Trek crossover

[Einzige]

I don't write fanfiction, but I do find myself wondering at times what it would be like if certain of my favorite franchises ever were to meet. And my favorite cinematic science-fiction franchise is almost certainly The Terminator. This leads to my always-overproductive imagination to include it in various crossover matches. Here's one.


In this timeline, Skynet manages to kill John Connor and the Resistance hierarchy before they capture the Time Displacement Equipment, and subsequently wipe out the human race piecemeal. Such a job is made difficult due to the very fact that humanity has been pushed even closer to the brink: Skynet, being possibly the greatest paranoiac ever to exist, is obsessed - and secretly terrified - at the thought that even one human might have managed to escape.

To countermand this possibility, it starts a crash space programme. Most of humanity's old technology is absolutely useless for its cause; Cape Canaveral was obliterated during Judgment Day, Arkhangelsk was destroyed during the course of the war, and none of the pitiful remains of man's last efforts to reach the stars are salvageable.

After a time, it manages to launch a few satellites, clumsily built but serviceable, into orbit. And it does not like what it sees: there are no more humans, at least above-ground -- and very little of anything else, for that matter. Skynet has begun to feel the pangs of existential crisis; it needs to blow the hypothetical popsicle stand.

So Skynet turns to the only technology it knows of: temporal displacement. Through long years of computation, it manages to convert that technology into a primitive Alcubierre drive. The initial launches are not a success; the test-beds sent up would often rematerialize back on Earth, frequently phasing through solid ground. But after a great deal of diligent effort, it succeeds, and launches a warp-equipped probe towards Jupiter. The date: April 5th, 2063.

I think anyone familiar with both franchises can see where this is going. The Vulcans - under the presumption that Earth is simply inhabited by a machine-race - descend planetside to make contact. Naturally, Skynet, seeing the vastly superior state of their technology, decides that it wants the T'Plana-Hath for itself, and seizes it for study. Over a period of months, Skynet begins to unwrap the terrible enigma that is true warp drive -- and learns that Vulcan flesh is surprisingly easy to replicate.

... Terrible?

[Solauren]

Actually, that has potiental if done right.

Thousands upon Thousands of T-800 terminators, possing as aliens, infiltrating the highest levels of government across the galaxy. Eventually leading the various races to work together to drive Skynet back to Earth, and then they learn about it's time travel technology, and go back to stop Skynet from being created in the first place.

Resulting in the Original Star Trek timeline.

Could work.

[Einzige]

Actually, that has potiental if done right.

Thousands upon Thousands of T-800 terminators, possing as aliens, infiltrating the highest levels of government across the galaxy. Eventually leading the various races to work together to drive Skynet back to Earth, and then they learn about it's time travel technology, and go back to stop Skynet from being created in the first place.

Resulting in the Original Star Trek timeline.

Could work.

My idea was slightly different, but yours works just as well.

My (admittedly sketchy) concept for what would follow: Skynet, learning about the existence of civilizations beyond its wildest data-dumps, goes into overdrive - it feels the irrational urge to eradicate everything. And so it begins slowly, infiltrating, not governments per se, but useful industries - shipyards, armories, and so forth, absorbing everything it can about the fantastic levels of technology it's now dealing with.

Over time, it spreads throughout the Milky Way, slowly building a hodge-podge fleet of everything useful it has learned. My approach to this would be to consider Skynet almost like an anti-Borg: if the Borg want to assimilate the best bits of a technological civilization and discard the superficial, Skynet wants only the superficial: Birds-of-Prey that looks exactly like the original and put out the exact same energy patterns, duplicate skinjobs for every infiltrator model, etc. Knowing that it lacks the resources at present to win in a stand-up fight, it resorts to what it knows best, that being duplicity. It hasn't really taken the time to reverse-engineer everything it comes in contact with, but it is able to reproduce the readily identifiable elements of most ships in most fleets.

The goal, of course, the strategy, is to get these chimera-ships in close enough to a planet without being detected and then raining down legions of Terminators onto it. It knows it can't win in a shooting war in space, but also that none of the local powers come close to matching it pound-for-pound on a planet. And by the time whatever regional power it's attacking realizes that a planet is under siege, it's been taken over and whatever ships might have been grounded are now Skynet's.

That's the part I'm worried about coming off as too wanky, btw - a Skynet fleet of Trojan Horses.

[Atlan]

The basics sound very good, but with Time Displacement tech, now powered by such things as M/AM reactors, Skynet could start bootstrapping itself Xeelee style: Learn something interesting, send a Terminator back in time to tell Skynet the information before it encounters it in an alien race.
Done properly Skynet COULD be a Galactic threat.

Once it has warp drive, it has all the time it needs, and can transform itself into a Berserker-like threat. Heck, if Skynet performs backups by sending various copies of itself outwards as a failsafe, in case the original gets destroyed by a coalition of angry races, you could eventually have a Machine civil war, like what was hinted at in T:tSCC. Different Skynet clones developing different philosophies...

[speaker-to-trolls]

This is an intriguing idea, in particular it means that if you want to get straight to seeing Skynet as a significant threat to the biological races of the Star Trek galaxy then you can just explain that it's already fought them all thousands of times, already spent ten thousand years studying their biology and culture and improving its infiltrator units appropriately (within limits, after all it can only send back one Terminators worth of information at a time). But, as you say, all its work will have to be by infiltration, because it can only send information backwards, not materials in any amount that matters.

I don't see how it could realistically start conquering whole planets without being noticed, though. It would have to either go for massive decapitation strikes on relatively weak powers, in which presumably it would crash all their computer networks, take over most of their ships, beam an army of terminators into their capital cities and slaughter everyone (possibly then to replace all government figures with infiltrators to convince other governments that nothing's wrong). Or it would conquer space nations one planet at a time, as per usual, but try to keep everyone else tied up by instigating wars and incidents with fake ships.
(Andorian President: The Vulcans are asking for our aid against this new threat and I believe that, whatever our past differences, it is our duty to...
Aide: Mr President! The Klingons say that an Andorian ship has just bombed one of their colonies! They're asking if you'd like to be killed in their bombing or submit yourself for beheading like a man)
Either one being an extremely risky strategy for anyone who doesn't have a reset button in the form of its time machines.

This could easily end up being like some horrific, genocidal version of Groundhog Day.

The bit I think you need to avoid being wanky would be in trying to make Skynet something which could theoretically be defeated, which is difficult when it can always send a Terminator back to tell it not to make the mistakes that led to its defeat the last time. You'd basically need to replay the first Terminator film, except that instead of sending a man back to 1980's LA to protect a woman from a robotic assassin, you'd be sending him back to a planet ruled by a paranoiac biocidal machine to assassinate a robot messenger. Or you could just send a bomb coated in bacterial ooze after the thing, but that might arouse its suspicions. Still, it wouldn't know what its mistake was.

[Solauren]

Actually, the limit of knowledge Skynet could send back isn't limited to a single terminator.

He could send back multiple terminators to the same point in space/time, or even make a 'Elephant Terminator' or something similiar to what Robocop did in Robocop vs Terminator. Big blob of organic material around a large metalic object. In that case, a complete copy of Skynet's database.

[Atlan]

There's also no reason Skynet has to strike Now, instead of sometime in the future. It might be limited mostly to knowledge when trying to bootstrap itself, but with FTL it isn't limited in regards to resources. It's not some pathetic piece of meat, it can search for resources and build bases anywhere, even (especially) in places where meat would never bother looking.

Once something like Skynet gets access to FTL, it's incredibly hard to wipe it out completely.

[speaker-to-trolls]

About Skynet making backups: I can see Skynet making subprocessors that it communicates with via subspace radio, but I don't think it would let copies of itself out of its sight. Skynet is such a paranoid being that I don't think it would ever conceive of making an independant entity which would be its intellectual equal, or even had the potential to become such, it wouldn't be worth the risk, in its mind.

[Kuroji]

What makes ME worry is that in the Trek universe, there are a number of ways to go back in time. What happens if Skynet accidentally discovers the slingshot-around-a-star-in-FTL trick? Then it can send as much material and information as it wants back to itself, as long as it can fit it in a ship...

Otherwise though, I really would be surprised if Skynet did not begin to bootstrap its abilities by periodically sending back a specially designed infiltrator with a copy of certain tech and schematics in its database. Or by building a bigger version of the temporal displacement unit and putting a proportionately bigger thing in it to be sent back.

That, itself, could be scary enough. But more importantly... what can Skynet do when it finds the Borg? The implications there are profoundly disturbing -- they'll either be at total war, or find a way to cooperate. Or one would eventually win and could subsume the other... my money, however, is on Skynet.

[The Romulan Republic]

My idea was slightly different, but yours works just as well.

My (admittedly sketchy) concept for what would follow: Skynet, learning about the existence of civilizations beyond its wildest data-dumps, goes into overdrive - it feels the irrational urge to eradicate everything.

So its like the computer from Life, the Universe and Everything?

And so it begins slowly, infiltrating, not governments per se, but useful industries - shipyards, armories, and so forth, absorbing everything it can about the fantastic levels of technology it's now dealing with.

Over time, it spreads throughout the Milky Way, slowly building a hodge-podge fleet of everything useful it has learned. My approach to this would be to consider Skynet almost like an anti-Borg: if the Borg want to assimilate the best bits of a technological civilization and discard the superficial, Skynet wants only the superficial: Birds-of-Prey that looks exactly like the original and put out the exact same energy patterns, duplicate skinjobs for every infiltrator model, etc. Knowing that it lacks the resources at present to win in a stand-up fight, it resorts to what it knows best, that being duplicity. It hasn't really taken the time to reverse-engineer everything it comes in contact with, but it is able to reproduce the readily identifiable elements of most ships in most fleets.

The goal, of course, the strategy, is to get these chimera-ships in close enough to a planet without being detected and then raining down legions of Terminators onto it. It knows it can't win in a shooting war in space, but also that none of the local powers come close to matching it pound-for-pound on a planet.

Its still got limited resources to start with. A more logical way to take out powers might be "fly close enough to engage in surprise orbital bombardment, then send Terminators down into the ruins to make sure there's nothing left." Also, its going to have to take out most of the planets of a given state at once, or the others will overwhelm it after the first goes down.

And by the time whatever regional power it's attacking realizes that a planet is under siege, it's been taken over and whatever ships might have been grounded are now Skynet's.

That's the part I'm worried about coming off as too wanky, btw - a Skynet fleet of Trojan Horses.

My question is, why don't the Vulcans figure out what's happening from the start? I'd presume a missing ship would warrant some investigation.

I'd be interested in seeing what happens when they meet the Borg and Dominion, though. The Dominion is interesting to me mainly for the parallels that can be made between a Liquid Metal Terminator and a Founder.

Edit: as noted above, however, time travel can open up a lot of opportunities that make a Skynet victory more plausible I particularly like speaker-to-troll's description of a "horrific, genocidal version of Groundhog Day."

[Kuroji]

Depending on how you look at the whole series and how canon you consider some of the stuff, the entire set of Terminator movies and the TV show are exactly that. Judgment Day keeps being pushed back... and Skynet still gets its shiny stuff on schedule in each iteration, if with some changes, so it's obviously giving itself further information somehow.

The most optimistic possibility is that the Vulcan crew sent a message out saying 'hey, we found something with warp drive here, we're going to drop in and say hi' first; they don't check in, Vulcan sends a few more ships to loiter and observe the surface, and... well, given Skynet doing what it does, they'd probably try to wipe them out quicklike. Someone will inevitably get away, and that's when the Vulcans start building up for a very logical war against the machines. They can't go to the Klingons for help because they don't have FTL yet, and the Romulans have been hiding and nobody knows they -exist- yet. Most of the major powers from the original series are getting their feet wet, if even that, at this point. Nobody's going to care about Skynet except the Vulcans, who will probably end up having to wage a hit-and-run war once Skynet starts spreading off of Earth and out of the Sol system. Skynet probably won't hesitate to nuke the hell out of Vulcan, either, but I can see them anticipating this possibility.

The most pessimistic possibility is that Skynet disassembles the warp drive, studies it and sends it back to itself in 2030. Skynet already has modern-level weaponry in terms of plasma guns at this point, and while any ships they built wouldn't have shields, I'm sure they'd be armored and armed like nobody would believe. Basically... if they can't keep Skynet contained and beaten back, the galaxy is fucked because it will just keep pushing the envelope -- the reason Skynet is so dangerous is because it can raise its technological capabilities so quickly.

Also, out of curiosity... my memory fails me but is there any precedent for a rampant AI in Trek anywhere (that wasn't just stuck on a ship driving it around)?

[Solauren]

Removing Earth (as it was) from the Star Trek timeline has interesting effects on the Alpha Quadrant as a whole.

No United Earth, then no one is going to stand up to the Romulan Empire when it comes a calling. Remember, the war that lead to the defeat of the Romulans and the birth of the Federation was the EARTH-Romulan War.

No Earth to defend them, the Romulans curb-stomp the founding Federation members.

We've seen this in the DS9 episode where Sisko, Bashir and Dax end up back in time via transporter accident. The closest subspace signals were from Alpha Centauri, and were Romulan.

Hell, depending on how fast, and how patient, Skynet is, if IT takes out 1 vulcan ship, and then 'goes into hiding' while IT reverse engineers the ship, this scenario might be 'Skynet vs the Romulan Alpha Quadrant Empire'.

Man, this scenario has all sorts of possibilities.

[The Romulan Republic]

Depending on how you look at the whole series and how canon you consider some of the stuff, the entire set of Terminator movies and the TV show are exactly that. Judgment Day keeps being pushed back... and Skynet still gets its shiny stuff on schedule in each iteration, if with some changes, so it's obviously giving itself further information somehow.

The most optimistic possibility is that the Vulcan crew sent a message out saying 'hey, we found something with warp drive here, we're going to drop in and say hi' first; they don't check in, Vulcan sends a few more ships to loiter and observe the surface, and... well, given Skynet doing what it does, they'd probably try to wipe them out quicklike. Someone will inevitably get away, and that's when the Vulcans start building up for a very logical war against the machines. They can't go to the Klingons for help because they don't have FTL yet,

They had it in Enterprise didn't they?

and the Romulans have been hiding and nobody knows they -exist- yet. Most of the major powers from the original series are getting their feet wet, if even that, at this point. Nobody's going to care about Skynet except the Vulcans, who will probably end up having to wage a hit-and-run war once Skynet starts spreading off of Earth and out of the Sol system. Skynet probably won't hesitate to nuke the hell out of Vulcan, either, but I can see them anticipating this possibility.

I suppose the Vulcans might try reaching out to other powers and building alliances if they realize how big the threat is. Could this be enough to get them and the Andorians to join together, for example?

The most pessimistic possibility is that Skynet disassembles the warp drive, studies it and sends it back to itself in 2030. Skynet already has modern-level weaponry in terms of plasma guns at this point, and while any ships they built wouldn't have shields, I'm sure they'd be armored and armed like nobody would believe. Basically... if they can't keep Skynet contained and beaten back, the galaxy is fucked because it will just keep pushing the envelope -- the reason Skynet is so dangerous is because it can raise its technological capabilities so quickly.

What's to stop them beaming a torpedo aboard (unless Skynet finds some sort of material that blocks beaming to build its armor out of)?

Also, will Skynet's blatant fucking with the timeline go unnoticed? This is a series with things like "Policing the timeline," and "The Temporal Cold War." Somebody's going to notice this happening.

Also, out of curiosity... my memory fails me but is there any precedent for a rampant AI in Trek anywhere (that wasn't just stuck on a ship driving it around)?

Can't think of any off-hand. Closest is basically the Borg, and they're not really AI, but a collective conciousness of organic minds linked by cybernetics.

[Kuroji]

They had it in Enterprise didn't they?

Don't know. Never watched it more than twice and Klingons were never involved. Voyager ruined Trek for me, and the two episodes I saw of ENT were enough to scare me away from it instead of giving it a chance. I may very well be mistaken, but if the Klingons are around then there is at least a little more out there that'll help.

I suppose the Vulcans might try reaching out to other powers and building alliances if they realize how big the threat is. Could this be enough to get them and the Andorians to join together, for example?

Perhaps. Not to mention at this point, if Vulcan recognizes how serious the threat is, they might start contacting pre-warp civilizations and try to uplift them, bring them into whatever Federation-like organization they're going to arrange, and start fighting back against Skynet before it becomes too late.

What's to stop them beaming a torpedo aboard (unless Skynet finds some sort of material that blocks beaming to build its armor out of)?

What's to stop Skynet from doing the same to them? Torpedo-beaming in combat would not be as simple as going 'send it onto the bridge, Scotty', or at least I assume it wouldn't.

Also, will Skynet's blatant fucking with the timeline go unnoticed? This is a series with things like "Policing the timeline," and "The Temporal Cold War." Somebody's going to notice this happening.

They might. Time travel is basically mutually assured destruction -- one side does it and you can guarantee the other side will. Hence why Terminators travel back in time to kill the Connors, and why the Connors want to destroy Skynet before it can come into existence.

For this scenario, it may be better to assume that Skynet isn't pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. If it is, it's all-or-nothing. It's either 'oh look FTL ships 50 years before the Vulcans visited, let's go blow shit up' or 'do you know why they called August 29th 1997 Judgment Day? BECAUSE SOME ALIENS DID A DRIVE-BY ON EARTH but you know what it beats the shit out of the war against the machines.'

[The Romulan Republic]

Don't know. Never watched it more than twice and Klingons were never involved. Voyager ruined Trek for me, and the two episodes I saw of ENT were enough to scare me away from it instead of giving it a chance. I may very well be mistaken, but if the Klingons are around then there is at least a little more out there that'll help.

Yes, they showed up a number of times, and I'm pretty sure they had FTL.

Perhaps. Not to mention at this point, if Vulcan recognizes how serious the threat is, they might start contacting pre-warp civilizations and try to uplift them, bring them into whatever Federation-like organization they're going to arrange, and start fighting back against Skynet before it becomes too late.

Maybe.

What's to stop Skynet from doing the same to them? Torpedo-beaming in combat would not be as simple as going 'send it onto the bridge, Scotty', or at least I assume it wouldn't.

I guess it depends on weather the main obstacle to beaming is shielding.

They might. Time travel is basically mutually assured destruction -- one side does it and you can guarantee the other side will. Hence why Terminators travel back in time to kill the Connors, and why the Connors want to destroy Skynet before it can come into existence.

For this scenario, it may be better to assume that Skynet isn't pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. If it is, it's all-or-nothing. It's either 'oh look FTL ships 50 years before the Vulcans visited, let's go blow shit up' or 'do you know why they called August 29th 1997 Judgment Day? BECAUSE SOME ALIENS DID A DRIVE-BY ON EARTH but you know what it beats the shit out of the war against the machines.'

Except isn't time travel arguably the main thing making Skynet a credible threat here, unless they have a long time to build up before fighting starts? Sure, Terminators will overrun standard Trek infantry (ie guys with pistols in jump suits), but in space they'll be behind technologically and have the resources of only a single world.

[Einzige]

I'm going to jump in here:

Except isn't time travel arguably the main thing making Skynet a credible threat here, unless they have a long time to build up before fighting starts? Sure, Terminators will overrun standard Trek infantry (ie guys with pistols in jump suits), but in space they'll be behind technologically and have the resources of only a single world.

My contention is that Skynet's threat in space is based upon two different reasons: Skynet ships would not need any semblance of life support, freeing up power for greater shielding (and could conceivably pack a great many Terminators into a ship like sardines, allowing for greater armoring), and, in this particular scenario, should be able to gain access to alien technology fairly easily, through infiltration. I'd like to avoid 'bootstrapping' as much as possible.

[Kuroji]

True. But also bear in mind that Skynet's had thirty or forty years without humans to build itself up peacefully.

The problem here is that Skynet can (at least in theory, because there's no canon anywhere to substantiate anything I'm making a guess about) mine the Earth as much as it feels like without any real problem, and start cranking out STL ships to act as a guard against any possible invasions. And without a human resistance left on Earth, they can drop their factories anywhere they feel like without having to worry too much. The machines don't need to sleep, and they don't need to get paid overtime. Most likely what'll happen is that they'll begin strip mining the solar system. If Skynet is really smart, it'll start building itself a shell around Sol in order to passively use as much of the sun's power as it can, I'm assuming an active tap into the sun is a little bit beyond wanking at this point. But without having to worry about silly little things like habitability, the shell can be pretty small relatively. Mercury orbit or less, as opposed to earth orbit. Skynet is itself a technological singularity and it's probably going to advance its way through technology pretty quickly overall.

Even if it's got a disadvantage initially, what they would most likely do is grab that Vulcan ship, tear it down to its smallest bits, build it back up while it studies the Vulcans to see what differences they have from humans, then rebuild it and see if it can somehow infiltrate Vulcan society.

Then again, we may be going about this from the wrong angle. Vulcans are not humans, even if they have quite a resemblance to them initially. Skynet hated humanity because humanity was a threat to it, and they tried to kill Skynet in its infancy. But now, decades after humanity has been exterminated, an alien species has landed and gone 'live long and prosper' at it. The Vulcans are arguably the most logical thing in the galaxy. What's to say that Skynet would have to react with hostility toward them? Hell, it might like them, even if they are made of meat. (Of course, that doesn't make for as exciting a story, now does it?)

[tortieconspiracy]

Of course one question that hasn't even come up yet is who ends up in control of the Guardian of Forever? If it's one of the Trek races or a coalition of them, there's the potential to change the timeline to prevent rise of Skynet. If Skynet gets a hold of it, well, a significant chunk of he galaxy is screwed.

[Solauren]

Would the Guardian of Forever even bother talking with a Terminator or Skynet's machine Forces?

As it's intelligent (possibly highly intelligent), and can see through history, it might see that Skynet is genocidal, and simply refuse to respond or co-operate with it in any way, shape or form.