The World of The Gunny

Thanks to Christopher Shields

FORCED LABOR and DEATH CAMPS


For all of their trouble, SKYNET found many uses for human beings; none of them pleasant. The initial stages of the War saw the rogue AI working feverishly to reduce the human population as much as it could, but SKYNET soon discovered that logistics were becoming a real problem. Production of combat units competed with production of construction and maintenance units. SKYNET soon discovered that it was hard to both fight a war on a global scale and try to rebuild the world in its own image at the same time. Labor units were a secondary priority until SKYNET could get the human population problem with its illogical, arrogant resistance to its domination under control and well on its way to orderly extinction. In a fit of brilliance, SKYNET ascertained that it could do both and still fulfill its labor quotas and projections by using captured humans as slave labor. it would work them until they dropped dead, dispose of the bodies, and capture new ones to replace those that attrition claimed. This much the AI had learned from its study of human history, slavery being a time honored practice dating back to before the first instance of recorded human history. For the most part, slavery had been a failure leading to all kinds of problems. However, SKYNET was immune to most of those problems and approached slavery not as a political subject, but rather as an expedient method to acquire cheap, disposable labor. Work or die became the labor ethic of the masses it collected and SKYNET kept it as simple as that, reinforcing its absolute authority at the slightest infringement of its rule.

While humans were in no way as efficient or capable as dedicated, precision made, manufactory produced labor units, they were free for the use and made up for what they lacked in strength with sheer numbers. The joy of hunting humans among the ruins doubled in pleasure for SKYNET when it began to introduce entirely new series of machines that not only hunted humans, but captured them as well. SKYNET learned many hard lessons about slave labor and its camps were evolutionary processes, constantly changing and adapting into armed and armored installations ruled by simple programming that allowed for no divergence of operational protocols. SKYNET soon discovered that it was fighting a war on two fronts, one on the outside of its slave labor camps, and one on the inside. SKYNET eventually learned that not every human that it captured went so unwillingly, that some humans allowed themselves to be captured so that they could get closer to SKYNET, to observe its operations and to, when circumstances allowed, communicate this information back to clandestine human units still operating in the ruins.

it was with great consternation that SKYNET realized that some of the early slave camp revolts had been instigated from within, by powerful, charismatic humans who would later form the core of the Resistance command structure. Shortly after the raid on Camp 30, which resulted in more than 200 humans being freed, seventy-three machines destroyed, twelve hundred tons of equipment scrapped and five thousand tons of processed materials ruined, SKYNET began a policy of laser branding all humans captured and put to work in the labor camps. This information was kept in a central data base and included all physical data as well as DNA samples, medical information such as known injuries and any information that could be acquired while the subject was assigned to detention in the labor camp. Targets which were terminated in SKYNET raids were always checked by the Machines to see if the human remains had a laser brand present on the corpse. If the brand was present, it would indicate an escaped labor unit and the termination would be logged in the database. Laser branding went far in making orderly disposal more efficient. DNA of terminated humans was also checked against a database, especially for humans which formed the core of the Resistance.

Life in the slave labor camps was hard, only the strong survived for long.


Many of the humans who form the core of the resistance began life in the camps. Such noteable heroes of the Resistance such as Sergeant Kyle Reese.