TTSCC – The Importance of John Henry in Season 3

The mud-puddle that sucking at my shoe is this question: What, exactly, is so important about Weaver’s John that Sarah’s John can’t win the war without em[[daggerto]]?

Obviously it has to be more than Cameron’s chip, because if that were the case they could have just waited for her to heal and then let her jump forward with JC and CW.

It can’t be because JH downloaded into Cameron’s chip. Why? Here’s something I wrote in the official blog site:

From a purely technical point of view there is even less to suggest that JH transferred himself into the chip. I almost want to quote Cameron’s, “I don’t think you understand how we work,” but given that none of us really understands how these fictional beings work a lot of left for grabs. We are reliant, then, on what our technology is able to do and what we’ve seen in the past.

While a terminator might have several chips, only one is considered to be the “brain”. This wonder is not only a processing device, but a storage device (as we learned in “Vick’s Chip”). The essence of a terminator resides in this chip. As Cameron pointed out, the essence of a terminator is both in its software and it hardware (something Mr. Murch was also describing to Catherine). While it might be possible to download the contents of a “chip” to an identical chip, it’s extremely unlikely that you could download contents for an alien construct (e.g. the John Henry server farm) and have it function correctly into a chip that isn’t due to be manufactured for another 16 years or so. It would be like trying to get a program written to run under CP/M-80 to run under Windows (any flavor) even though the core of a Windows machine, its BIOS is still based on CP/M 80. Not an easy thing to do at all, and it never ever quite works right even if you do get it to run.

Also, there is the data transfer vs time factor. For JH to wipe and inhabit Cameron’s chip would require a massive download of data in just a few minutes. Let’s see…if we figure that a terminator chip is a one-half equivalent to a human brain (and that’s doing a great disservice to terminators), then that gives us a starting neural count about about 35 billion. Multiply this by the size an average neuron needs for storage, processing, addressing/connections, etc… we’ll be very conservative and add in four orders of magnitude (the usual brain is has about 4 orders of magnitude more connections than it does neurons) so that brings us to 350 trillion. But that’s just connections. We still need to add in the storage and processing. Even if it’s simple, it’s going to take room…figure another order of magnitude to 3.5 quadrillion. Converting this to 64-bit words (i.e. multiplying by 8 we have a final estimate of 28 pebibytes (PiB).

If we then allow 10 minutes for the time of the Connors’ visit to Weaver and the journey to the basement, that gives us just 600 seconds to overwrite Cameron’s alien computer architecture with John Henry’s. That gives us a necessary throughput of 500 trillion bits per second…and that’s assuming no time taken for chip removal, programming the chronoportation device, etc.

All I can say is that if JH has that sort of throughput, I want the name of ZeiraCorp’s ISP, because I get nothing close to that (my broadband is about 50 million times slower).

So…factoring all of that in, it seems unlikely that JH had the resources necessary to do anything more than to put Cameron’s brain into Cromartie’s chronoportable (i.e. undamaged) body.

From the “Will you join us” question exchange both here and “Today is the Day, Part 2″, it’s not difficult to assume that Cam and Cat are from essentially the same timeline and are aware of the same deal. Cameron’s chip traveling back to the future, as does CW, is a logical continuation of a renewal of that once-failed alliance.

From what we’ve seen, terminators seem more concerned with the brain than the body. Or do they? Will CW be as unsettled by JH acting like Cameron as JC will be by Cameron looking like Cromartie?

From my perspective at least, I don’t think Cameron went to the future be of any shipper issues. I think she’s in the future mostly because of scientific reliance on Occam’s Razor.

Looking up… the fasted Internet connection currently is 40 GiB/s (or 400 Gib/s) — or about 1,000 times slower than would be necessary to download JH.

Of course this is ZeiraCorp, where a time machine is apparently just an add-in peripheral, so who knows what CW cooked up?

Here’s the thing: Murch pointed out that changing a fan wire “tweaked” JH. Can you imagine what moving his whole personality to an alien chip would do?

So…we are left with the question (one that JC will likely ask, so we need to know the answer before he does): What does JH bring to the table that Cameron doesn’t? Is it just the key  “crossing against the light ” aspect? One little thing that makes Cameron (now Camenry) “more”? It really seemed like Cameron had that “crossing against the light” thing covered. Perhaps it’s not just having the ability, but being able to propagate it?

Still, CW seemed rather surprised by the solution Cameron and JH used. She had to reason it out, so clearly it wasn’t part of the plan.

But again, what is it about JH that is so important? Is JH even more potentially advanced than Cameron? At this moment, I think the only answer is that he imbued Cameron’s chip with the unambiguous ability to “cross against the light”. He did not, however have enough time to transfer his own complete matrix into the chip. So, when JC and CW meet up with Camenry, it’s not likely either one will recognize their cybernetic “relatives” whole and complete.

What would that mean? The Cameron personality would likely prevail, but not be as robotic or perhaps as blindly loyal to John as before. The JH part might be wanting to get to know eir “brother” better. It’s possible that this independent Camenry’s desire to have a meeting of the minds with Skynet could pose serious problems for JC and CW…one that was never foreseen by either.