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- This article is about the fictional computer network. See Skynet (disambiguation) for other meanings.
Skynet is the fictional computer network owned by Cyberdyne Systems Corporation featured as the never-seen villain of The Terminator film series.
Skynet is only vaguely described in the first two movies, but is explained in more detail in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as a U.S. Air Force software experiment to protect military computer systems from virus attacks. Skynet is activiated prematurely when the T-X (the third terminator sent back in time to kill) introduces a virus into the computer systems of the world and cripples them all. Under pressure the U.S. Air Force attempts to use Skynet to remove the virus from the computers of the world. However Skynet gains sentience and takes over the computer systems once it wipes out the virus. This is a time paradox; the Skynet of the future sends back T-X to release the virus into the world which consequently allows Skynet to gain control of the world's computers. Skynet then seizes control of all military systems and launches a full scale nuclear attack against mankind, leading to an open ended war between the human survivors and its minions, the titular Terminator robots. Skynet is initially thought to be destroyable if only the protagonists were able to reach its systems, but they find that the Skynet software has spread throughout the world and is not capable of ever being disabled from a central point.
In the first Terminator film, Kyle Reese stated that the human resistance had finally managed to "smash" Skynet's defensive perimeter in 2029, but this future may have been altered by the events of Terminator 2 and 3.
Originally, Skynet was created by Cyberdyne Systems, who figured out how to make such a revolutionary new computer using the CPU chip from the Terminator sent back in time to 1984 (a self-fulfilling cycle: effectively, Skynet "is its own grandpa"). But in Terminator 3 it is revealed that Cyberdyne was a sub-contractor for the USAF's Cybernetic Research Systems.
The main concept is that while Skynet was winning the global Man/Machine War on a strategic level, a last-ditch offensive by humans in North America was able to capture its time displacement device and its primary Cheyenne Mountain complex.
After starting a nuclear war between America, Russia, and China with the intent of killing as many humans as possible, Skynet had access to several autonomous military drones (such as the "T-1" in Terminator 3).
It used these drones to round-up survivors and force them to build automatic factories and robots that were better at construction than the military robots. It then killed these human slaves, and using the infrastructute they had been forced to start, rapidly designed newer and better machines until it had an extremely advanced empire on Earth by 2029.
Kyle Reese said that, as a computer, Skynet craved efficiency, so rather than killing humans on sight after a while, it would have its drones round them up into concentration camps for orderly and efficient disposal. The only humans kept alive were the ones forced to run the corpse disposal teams, which ran "night and day." Humans in the camps were all painfully branded with bar-codes on their arms using a laser, as Kyle Reese was. This impracticality was some of Skynet's undoing: John Connor was able to free these grouped-together humans and use them to build his resistance army.
In Terminator 2, a partially sympathetic origin was given to Skynet: it was a learning computer that unexpectedly became sentient. Horrified at this new sentience, humans tried to turn it off, effectively killing it; thinking fast, within milliseconds it fired its nuclear missiles. It had begun its reign of terror in an act of self-defense; essentially, humans "fired first" by attempting to turn it off.
However, in Terminator 3, it is implied that humans were ignorant to Skynet's sentience, and it nuked humanity without any provocation whatsoever.
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