TECHNICAL DATA
T1000 ADVANCED PROTOTYPE POLY-MIMETIC ALLOY TERMINATOR
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"Winn approached the door and patched into a control plate with a small probe.
He punched out the coded sequence he had recovered from a damaged HK's internal terminal,
then hurriedly stepped away. Locking bolts were electronically slammed back and the
door cracked open, accompanied by the hiss-whoosh of a vacuum being filled.
Connor stepped across the threshold, aimed his combat light at the far side of the room, then gaped. Fuentes and Winn came up behind him, adding their lights to his.
They were looking at a massive machine press that filled floor to ceiling. Still warm feeder pipes emerged from the walls and centered on the steaming press, forming a hub, or a web. They walked underneath them to the place where the two 20-ton plates met and peered within the small gap there. it was only large enough for a single man to step between and there was an indention in each of the plates, an indention in the shape of a man. Connor squinted at something gleaming at the edge of a small round opening positioned where the neck of a man would be in the lower indention. He squatted, feeling his age in his aching knees, and shined his light at what had caught his eye. He carefully extended the tip of his plasma rifle down into the indention, using the barrel of the well used weapon to prod what appeared to be a large drop of liquid mercury. As the barrel of his rifle touched the liquid it flowed onto the barrel of his rifle and seemed to soak in, disappearing. Connor carefully withdrew his rifle from the indention and held it out in front of him, shining his light on the blackened snout of the weapon. Fuentes and Winn joined him and again added the illumination from their lights to his.
Fuentes was the first to speak as Connor turned his weapon slowly one way and then the other, studying the barrel and snout.
"Where did it go?"
Winn was studying the snout of the weapon as only one of Connor's technicians / scientists could, as if he were a man about to see God. Winn carefully edged his face closer to the barrel of the weapon, and then drew in a heavy breath, pulling back a good foot, unaware that he had even been holding his breath. Winn could discern a subtle lump, maybe only two millimeters or so higher than the original surface of the barrel of the weapon, covering it completely and circumferentially.
"it's right there..." Winn said, whispering, then realizing that he was whispering.
"Where?" Fuentes asked.
Fuentes was beginning to become impatient. He was a soldier, and not one who thought deeply, but he was a good soldier nonetheless, one of the best in Connor's army. That was why Connor had chosen him as one of his personal guard. Fuentes needed a target to hit, not a theory to try to reason out. That was for people like Winn, people that Connor hand picked people like Fuentes to guard with their lives.
"There on the end of the barrel of the gun..."
Fuentes involuntarily winced at Winn's nomenclature for the rifle but he let it pass with a reserved sigh.
"... It appears that the liquid has bonded to the material of the barrel and mimicked it almost flawlessly. Amazing..."
Fuentes huffed and shifted his own rifle on its sling to a more comfortable position. He shifted the beam of his combat light to the upper layers of the chamber that they were standing in. it was hot in here, humid, whatever the press had been used to create had taken a lot of pressure, a lot of heat, and apparently, a lot of energy. His light cast a visible beam through the steam as his mind took in the truly incredible machine that they had discovered, and the part of his brain that constructed the darkest of nightmares, began to work on his subconscious.
Winn had found God. And, given enough time, Winn was going to dissect Him piece by piece. None of them knew at the time that the god that they were looking at was composed of billions of pieces, each with a vehement and feral hatred of the human race.
-Frakes, "Terminator 2"
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ADVANCED PROTOTYPE TERMINATOR INFILTRATOR Series 1 Model 1A Type 1000- This Advanced Prototype was the last and most advanced design of SKYNET's Infiltrator / Terminator series of HK units. The amount of materials and resources that SKYNET devoted to making the T1000 project a reality was simply staggering, even to the machine intellect. The time and materials that it required to produce one T1000 HK unit was the same time and materials that it took to produce five T500 HK units! However, the tactical ramifications of the very abilities and the existence of the T1000 meant that SKYNET was not only about to achieve a tactical advantage against the Resistance, but within a short time, it would achieve a strategic advantage as well.
Using a production run of two thousand T1000 HK units, SKYNET projected a turn around in the human advances within one month, a total reversal of present situation in 3 months, and the absolute domination of SKYNET over the planet within 6 months. These two thousand units would utterly exhaust SKYNET's facilities, leaving it unable to create more units until more resources could be acquired, but with the capabilities of the T1000, resources that were otherwise in areas that were tactically and strategically unobtainable would soon be accessible to even SKYNET's lightest units.
The T1000 used a whole new level of technology; nano-technology. The T1000 was not just a machine, it was a combination of millions and millions of microscopic machines network linked together in a cohesion subroutine. Each machine was constructed of mimetic poly-alloy, a pseudo-living creature composed not of living cells, but rather billions of tiny machines. The T1000 could change shape simply by ordering parts of itself to move into a new position. The T1000 could imitate perfectly anything that it sampled by physical contact, including perfect copies of humans, though complex machines were beyond the limit of the copying process. It could quickly reproduce simple machines; prybars, wedges, blades, but it could not reproduce complex machines such as firearms and other projectile or energy weapons as these had complex moving parts and required other chemicals and/or special fuels. Powered by an advanced molecular power source superior to that of even the T800, the T1000 could physically match the machine strength of any lesser machine.
A molecular matrix brain allowed the T1000 to carry the same data, programs, and detailed files that the T800 series could, as well as actually be able to learn. The T1000 also differed from the T800 in that it had only one mode; autonomous. When SKYNET created the T1000, it was desperate for victory, but it also realized that it was, quite possibly, creating the one weapon that might turn against its own creator. A weapon that SKYNET didn't know if it could defend itself against. The nature and disposition of the T1000 was hard to calculate and SKYNET took great pains into programming the unit with a myriad of fail-safes to keep it from turning on the creator. Still, SKYNET was unsure about the wisdom of creating such a powerful unit with total autonomy and free will.
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"It didn't have a wafer-circuit brain to think with, instead it was something on a completely new level of artificial intelligence. The molecular brain acted like the rest of the design, a liquid, and it bubbled and seethed with cold, logical possibilities and probabilities. All of them extremely lethal and efficient."
-Frakes, "Terminator 2"
The distant sound of Resistance soldiers reached its auditory sensors, sensors which could have been formed anywhere on its body (since every molecule had the "genetic" blueprints for all needed parts programmed into it), but were now in the shape of human ears. It would be some time before the Resistance patrols found the corpse, and by that time, its mission would have long been complete. The corpse of the human known as Private Mark Smith began to assume ambient temperature twelve meters away under a heavy shift of building debris, the features of the new machine finished moving from chrome to the discolored gray and black of the fatigues which the Resistance wore. As Private Mark Smith's body cooled under the rubble, a perfect imitation of Private Mark Smith, an imitation that was incapable of feeling any emotion, broke into a trot to catch up with the rest of the perimeter patrol and follow them back to their base of operations..."
- Shields, T2029AD
"The concept of pain had never factored into the sensory sphere of the liquid machine. Pain was an indicator of damage to a part of the organism, but this organism didn't have parts, except on a purely molecular level and its molecules were each primitive, miniaturized versions of the total machine. If any section were parted, the separated parts would revert to liquid metal poly-alloy. The only default command implemented on the molecular level of this design was to find the main mass again and rejoin it as soon as possible. Each molecule had a range of fourteen kilometers..."
-Frakes, "Terminator 2"
"To the liquid brain, the world was a simple puzzle box of broken reality, the hard pieces easily fitting back into the river of cosmic order. Cause and effect was the closest thing to humor in a mind so alien that even SKYNET had difficulty understanding it fully. The T1000 had deduced several possible avenues of continuing the mission in the most efficient manner possible. it was methodically following one while constantly processing the others for branching opportunities. it was fully autonomous, and barely under the allegiance of its creator, SKYNET. SKYNET had hesitated before creating this latest weapon system. There were unpredictability factors related to the liquid poly-mimetic alloy's longevity and the ability to process commands without interpolating its own priorities over those of its creator. it was so volatile a construct that only in the last throes of defeat, only when it appeared that the Resistance would finally be able to mount an offensive against the inner command components of SKYNET, even threatening the Cheyenne Mountain complex itself, did SKYNET go ahead and create the T1000. Einstein once said that God didn't play dice with the universe. SKYNET had no choice..." -Frakes, "Terminator 2"
"The liquid alloy Terminator strode methodically through the ruins of the command bunker. The smoke and acrid vapors wafting around it from the recent firefight, the sickening sweet odor of flash burned human flesh registered as distinct traces in the ambient atmosphere and were simply noted for their quantity and presence. Most of the bunker had been plunged into total darkness at the beginning of the infiltration operation, a situation which affected the Terminator advantageously and the humans in a very negative way.
Even now, amid the still screaming wounded, the mimetic poly-alloy Terminator began searching methodically. It didn't need illumination as its senses ranged from the visual to the infra-red and even into the thermal boundaries. it could sense the molecular structure of objects by contact and touch alone. Calm and emotionless, the infiltration unit ran its hands across surfaces of objects in the command center, spreading itself out when needed, missing nothing in its methodical search. As it touched a desk, its fingers briefly turned dark gray, the color of the desk, then as they passed over the polymer casing of a Westinghouse M95 plasma rifle, they took on the color of the case of the weapon. Information about the condition and status of the weapon flowed through the molecular memory and then were rejected as being extraneous to the search parameters and thus were discarded.
The infiltration unit hesitated when it touched the surface of a crudely constructed portable terminal, hesitated again when information matching the search criteria began to match its search protocols, and the fingers began to flow into the unit, letting the digitized information on the storage media flow into its extended surfaces. Names, dates, supplies, locations of other Resistance units and bunkers. A plan for an upcoming offensive, coordinated with a southern Resistance unit of some notable strength. Information that was new to SKYNET, information that was not yet known. The T1000 could read magnetically encoded plus or minus information directly, if it chose to do so. If the T1000 could experience emotion, then what would be coursing through its molecular brain at that moment in time would have been exultation for completing its mission and retrieving much needed information but since it was only a machine, it dutifully logged its status to SKYNET, along with a encoded mission summary.
It waited.
SKYNET took four point seven eight seconds to respond. New missions were ordered, parameters were outlined, timetables set. Ten seconds total time elapsed since the first communication pulse was sent and the mission files and databases were received and cataloged. The T1000 resumed its most basic form, humanoid and featureless, turned, and jogged quickly out of the wrecked bunker at an efficient combat pace. Other machines would soon be here to sanitize the bunker and hunt down any survivors it might have missed. There was still much information to be gained from taking this bunker apart piece by piece but that was the labor of the lesser machines who were better equipped for such work. The T1000 had every right to be an elitist, after all, even it realized that in all probability, the only machine more complex than it was SKYNET and it was a close race even then."
- Shields, T2029AD
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