T2 Trilogy Set Plus (My Terminator Cards, Take Two)

[erikmodi]

The second novel in the T2 Trilogy, Rising Storm, starts with John and Dieter slowly making their way back to Paraguay, while Sarah is back in Pescadero State Mental Institution, but under the care of a much more accommodating (read, gullible) doctor. The novels credit a lot of Sarah's more questionable behavior in T2 to being not only pumped full of drugs for a mental illness she doesn't have (it's not paranoid schizophrenia if time-travelling robots really are trying to kill you), but actually being overmedicated. With a new psychologist on her case, hard experience on how to play the mending mental patient, and some influence from the mysterious government agency Tricker works for, Sarah's going to be out scott-free in a year and a half.

Meanwhile, something truly insane is happening elsewhere. Remember those human scientists working for Skynet, the ones that helped make Serena? Well, they're helping Skynet because they believe that humanity has to die to save the planet, so they're eager to help Skynet do exactly that. Who are they saving the planet for? Well, for itself! For the environment, for the clean air and water and soil and all the wee little growing things. What they don't realize -- and what Serena, when she asked about this, declined to point out -- is that Skynet has absolutely no reason to be environmentally conscious. It doesn't need clean air or water or soil, arable land or sustainable. . . anything, really. If Skynet's needs are best served by massive nuclear power plants and smoke-belching factories that poison air and water and earth, Skynet will have massive nuclear power plants and smoke-belching factories.

But in the present, Serena took the opportunity to encourage some loose Luddite networking. A major side character is one Ron Labane, who leaves his commune because they expected him to start doing actual work instead of typing up his New Luddite Earth-Saving Manifesto, to go to New York to get said manifesto published. No go, but he does get found by some young documentary filmmakers looking for exactly the kind of crazy save-the-world-type they can make a movie about. This catapults Ron to influence, his book gets published, and his New Luddite movement starts getting more and more mainstream. He also meets quietly with some of the more aggressive followers of his ideology, encouraging them strike out at things. Like the automated factories Cyberdyne is building. This all starts coming to a head in Rising Storm, with the Luddite movement getting big, and certain elements of it getting very violent. Those being the specific elements that will end up helping Skynet in the future.

[erikmodi]

John and Dieter are patiently waiting for Sarah's treatment with her new psychologist to run its course, reasoning that breaking her out would only put them all at risk (and, indeed, is exactly what at least two interested parties are hoping for). So they busy themselves preparing for Judgment Day, just in case Skynet isn't down for the count (it's not). Dieter, in addition to being a highly trained and experienced field operative the elitest, top-secretest counterterrorist organization ever, is also extremely rich. He has a personal fortune he can throw into buying weapons and supplies to stock caches all over the world to arm and equip the eventual Resistance. He also has several contacts, within and outside the Sector, and several false identities. He begins looking into getting some of those contacts on his side, and working on new ones. One of those new contacts is Vera Philmore, who quickly takes a liking to Dieter, quickly unravels his false ID, and quickly agrees to help once she sees him fight off a Terminator in her engine room.

John, meanwhile, starts making contacts of his own. He starts with a girl he meets quite by accident who's a student at MIT. She and her friends become the core of a group he has set looking into possible Skynet-related shenanigans. He eventually goes to meet them in person and get them fully on-board, including brining the CPU of the "airplane Terminator" for them to study, and to convince them he's not crazy.

Sarah makes an unexpected new ally of her own. Being transferred to a halfway house remarkably swiftly, she finds the man running the place is none other than dear old Dr. Silberman. Dr. Silberman who wanted to get famous off his remarkable patients' remarkable delusions and believed wholeheartedly in better sanity through chemistry. Dr. Silberman who saw a T-1000 walk through a steel bar door. Dr. Silberman who let himself be convinced that he'd had his own psychotic break and be "cured" of his own "delusion," all the while knowing he was lying to himself. Dr. Silberman who promises Sarah to help any way he can, because he knows she's not crazy, and everything she said is real.

[erikmodi]

Of course, the Sector isn't entirely pleased that one of their top operatives seems to have decided "retirement" means "hook up with one of the most wanted women in North America." Dieter gets a few old Sector friends on his side, but most of them are hunting him down to ask him some very pointed questions. This all comes to a head in rather spectacular fashion. John and Dieter were trying to buy guns from some redneck gunrunners who fancied themselves bounty hunters on the side. Dieter looks just like the guy wanted for killed seventeen police officers in 1984. The Sector stings this attempted arrest to get Dieter, and Clea and Alissa send their Terminators to Terminate everyone. More Dakka, Stuff Blowing Up, and a bunch of Sector Agents on scene now have really good reasons to give Dieter and the Connors the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, due to the type and amount of damage necessary to put a Terminator down for good, there isn't enough physical evidence to convince anyone who wasn't present, so there's still something of an uphill battle.

[erikmodi]

Clea tries to get in good with Cyberdyne to get on the Skynet project to complete her mission, not realizing that Skynet has been taken out of Cyberdyne's hands by Tricker's mysterious organization. But she does manage to impress them, and is shanghaied to their new base in Antarctica. There, she not only manages to get assigned to work with Viemeister on Skynet, but starts a romantic relationship with him, being as close as she can get to Skynet at present. Lacking Terminators, she manages to get permission to leave the base to study seals, implanting them with nanotech controllers.



Dieter learns the location of Red Seal Base from his old partner in the Sector. Meanwhile, Wendy Dorset, the college girl John met and formed a little proto-Resistance group (and had a fast romantic attraction) with is framed for murder, so she, with the help of her college buddies, heads down to the von Rossbach estancia in Paraguay, reasoning that John and Sarah Connor probably have lots of experience hiding from law enforcement thanks to being wrongfully accused (Sarah is quick to point out that Wendy is wrong on one point: with the exception of John being wanted for the murder of his foster parents because no one buys the old "shapeshifting robot from the future" alibi, everything they're accused of they've actually done).

Wendy arrives as they're debating how to go about stopping the latest attempt at Skynet, and Wendy comes up with an idea: Every time they blow it up, they just restart the project in a more defensible location under ever-tighter security. So instead of trying to kill the monster, stop it from becoming a monster. Thanks to the Terminator CPU John left in the care of the MIT group, Wendy has a pretty solid understanding of Skynet's AI, and she can work backwards to figure out the inputs that let it become self-aware, then write a program that instructs it to ignore those inputs. Sarah, still recovering from injuries from the last book (and a few new ones she picked up while institutionalized), is in no condition for an Antarctic hike, so John, Dieter, and Wendy head down, using Vera Philmore's yacht to land in Antarctica then snowmobiling overland. They're waylaid by Clea's seals (John gets his facial scars during this), but they make it to the base, sabotage it to clear it out, and then get ready to deal with the Infiltrator and Skynet. Wendy has her two disks in the cups her bra (so they don't freeze and shatter during the Antarctic trek), but forgot to label them and which was which, so she inserts the disk containing all the AI instructions first. Clea chokes Wendy almost to death after this and breaks the second disk, the one that would instruct the fledgling Skynet to ignore those inputs. Wendy's got a near-collapsed trachea when John finds her, so can't quite make out what turns out to be her last word: erase. Thinking she said enter, he uploads essentially an AI program into Skynet, making it self aware (that whole "temporal inertia" thing at work again). Clea kills Wendy, Dieter fatally injures Clea, and they leave with Tricker, now on their side (partly because Clea wigged him out just that much, partly because this is the kind of epic screw-up that costs one their life in Tricker's line of work).



So, just to recap: Our little jaunt to Antarctica ended with John's first love dead on the floor, Skynet now self-aware by John's own hand, and now two out of three I-950's dead and one ally of marginal usefulness. Good work, team.

Right around the time John and Dieter are returning to Paraguay, Alissa, Serena's last clone and the last extant I-950, arrives looking for them. Only Sarah's home, and Sarah manages to kill the I-950. The last few T-800s are off quietly retooling several of Cyberdyne's automated factories for eventual HK and Terminator production, so. . . by the standards of this scenario, the Resistance has now won, killing all Skynet Main Characters. Or Skynet won, generating its 50 Research to make Skynet self-aware.

This brings us to the end of T2: Rising Storm. I'm not sure if much will come out of the third book, Future War, as it mostly deals with the lead-up to Judgement Day, the Day itself, and the immediate aftermath, with a fair bit of fast-forwarding to reach the end of the war and the send of the T-800, T-1000, Serena, Kyle, and "Uncle Bob" back in time in the first place. We'll see what, if anything, jumps out at me as I reread it.

[erikmodi]

A few random cards to round things out for now. Still working on reading Future War, we'll see if anything jumps out.



A couple different models of Light Assault Infiltrator, a Generic Scavenger, and a different picture for Serena, in case you think Tricia Helfer isn't bombshell-y enough.

[erikmodi]

Okay, some ideas from early in Future War.

The bulk of the first part of the book is Sarah and Dieter noticing some odd patterns and thinking that, perhaps, Skynet is getting ready to make its move. John is in denial, because of what happened to Wendy, but soon realizes his error and gets on board. This carries them up to Judgement Day itself. A fun thing that I'd like to try and incorporate is that some of this weirdness involves unexplained accidents, blamed on "operator error" in lieu of anything else, all involving vehicles made in the last two years with substantial computer components built in fully-automated factories. Essentially, Skynet using run-of-the-mill cars, trucks, and construction equipment as proto-HKs, and testing them initially in isolated incidents. When the time comes, Skynet uses these homicidal vehicles to corral people in major population centers to maximize the effect of its nuclear launches. I have no idea how to actually do this, as it hinges pretty tightly on Skynet being about ready to start its extermination of humanity in earnest, but it's a cool idea that could make for some fun cards.

Anyway, as John, Sarah, and Dieter become convinced that Judgement Day is imminent, they get a hold of their contacts and let them know to prepare, finally broadcasting a message across all TV and radio stations about what's going on to try and save as many as possible.

Cyberdyne's automated factories and their proliferation have been a major background point since book one (plans for them were among "Miles Dyson's data" that Serena "found" and offered to Cyberdyne way back when), and I've had the Cyberdyne Factory card sitting about awhile, just kept not posting it for whatever reason. The Automated Factory is new.

[sherm]

ok so im not sure if im getting too deep in this game, but working on a side project,

is there a zip file download link for these cards?

[erikmodi]

No, sadly.

I crapped out about halfway through my reread of Future War, haven't gotten back to it, and I'm not highly computer savy when it comes to online storage of such things. I figured that I'd look into it when I was certain this set was finished.

[sherm]

Nov 26, 2021 18:27:18 GMT -5 erikmodi said:

No, sadly.

I crapped out about halfway through my reread of Future War, haven't gotten back to it, and I'm not highly computer savy when it comes to online storage of such things. I figured that I'd look into it when I was certain this set was finished.

Easy as mate. I'll download them all invidually.... If any wants a zip of the downloaded images, I'll make one .

[erikmodi]

Cool.

What's the side project?

[sherm]

Working on a solo version that more of a dungeon crawler.

5x5 grid layout instead of linear. Aliens to be run by an ai system (this is the biggest part to rework).

Everything else going to run as the normal game runs

[erikmodi]

That sounds pretty cool!

[sherm]

im hoping it will work out, it will let me play the game solo and will make use of the 2500 cards i have for both AVP and terminator... im thinking of impletmenting human resistance as militia forces and skynet as combat synthietics, just so they mesh into the aliens predator universe a little better.

[erikmodi]

Yeah. . . the two universe don't quite mesh, as the Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator comic pointed out. Not impossible, but not fully compatible either.

If the AI for the Aliens works out, something similar could be done for Terminators, at least in Past scenarios. Future, adding production and implants and such, would be trickier.