Doctor Bertram Hollister was a scientist and one of the men potentially responsible for the creation of Skynet.
History[]
The Man from Cyberdyne[]
Bertram Hollister was a scientist and company man at Cyberdyne Systems. Through his life, Hollister's work had been rejected by many: Stanford had rejected his theories as untested and the Nickleby Trust as mere science fiction.[1] By 1984, Bertram Hollister was almost sixty years old. He had worked in microelectronics research for the last twenty-five years and felt he was owed a notoriety he didn't have. A greedy man and a coward, he would have been more than willing to sell secrets to the KGB if he had been pressured to do it.[2] He had been married two times and had spent most of his life with and for Cyberdyne Systems.[3] At this point, Hollister was in charge of the company's corporate policy and was suspected of lining his pockets with its profits.[2]
Earlier that year, Hollister had briefly studied the wreckage of the T-800 that had tried to kill Sarah Connor. The police had found it crushed in a Cyberdyne factory[4] and had brought it to him for a professional opinion. Despite how heavily damaged the microprocessor was, Hollister had been able able to take copious notes before the police took the wreckage away as evidence.[2]
The Time Travelers[]
The day that everything changed for him, his assistant Doctor Ed Astin had tried to make Hollister see the severity of their issues, as he didn't see a future in continuing to work uniquely for the military, despite the promise of initiatives like Project Bellerophon. Hollister, who had little respect for the younger man, had asked him to mind his own business. That night, as Hollister worked on his notes at home, he received a surprising visit: Astin and two armed strangers, Mary and Alan, who were there to kill him. Hollister was saved by four strangers, that killed Alan with a strange energy weapon and drove Mary and Ed away. The quartet took Hollister away from danger and to a Cyberdyne warehouse laboratory; by that point Hollister had started to suspect something odd was going on, as the four strangers seemed able to communicate among them without saying a word and one of them ripped the warehouse's electrified fence with his bare hands.[2]
The four presented themselves as government agents and told Hollister that they were very interested in Project Bellerophon, as Hollister was the most likely candidate to successfully develop an AI network that would give the United States strategic superiority over the Russians. Hollister, seeing an opportunity to finally become a rich man, said he would like to help his country but would not be able to do so without the T-800's wreckage, that was still locked down in the basement of police headquarters. The four strangers agreed to retrieve it for him.[2]
As promised, the group soon returned with the crushed remains of the Terminator but were surprised by Mary and another of her accomplices, Bart, who were there to kill Hollister. To everyone's surprise, one of the four alleged government agents, a short man called Dudley, changed sides and opened fire against his companions, destroying the crushed endoskeleton with the plasma gun. Hollister was rescued by two LAPD agents, that dragged him away from the room as Mary tried to blow him up with a pipe bomb. Hollister was taken to safety, but his mind was somewhere else, as he had managed to take something with him: Dudley's plasma gun. That was not the only piece of future technology he got his hands on as weeks later, Hollister received an anonymous package with the head of a T-800 inside.[2] At some point in the following days, Hollister realized that he was destined to develop the artificial intelligence that would destroy mankind. He decided not to worry about it: he could still become rich and powerful in the present, and was more than happy to leave the future to the machines.[1]
Collateral Damage[]
Nineteen days after this ordeal, Hollister saw on TV what appeared to be an endoskeleton fighting the LAPD. He realized with excitement that there were more Terminators around. Soon afterwards, Astin contacted him. Hollister, pretending to have been worried for his former assistant, asked Astin to meet him. His plan was to frame Astin for all the happenings in the previous days in an attempt to stop the police from looking too close into the whole thing, but Astin never made it to the meeting.[1] Weeks later, while Hollister was inspecting the soon-to-be-open Cyberdyne plant in Ellison Valley, Astin suddenly showed up. Hollister threatened to call security on his former assistant, but this time Astin had something to offer: a disc of Terminator schematics that he had extracted from Dudley, who had turned out to be a cyborg. Hollister didn't believe him at first, as he knew of Astin's hate for him, but he realized he had underestimated the younger man's greed.[3]
Their meeting was rudely interrupted by four armed men, who accused Hollister and Astin of turning their world into a nightmare. Hollister reacted quickly, killing the leader of the group with the plasma gun that he still carried with him, but in doing so he sealed his destiny: the other three, all travelers from that future that Hollister and Astin had been so happy to sell for money, opened fire and killed both men.[3]
Notes[]
- In The Terminator RPG timeline, Hollister was hired and made Cyberdyne's director of R&D explicitly to analyze the chip and arm of the first Terminator. He made a shady deal with Raven Technologies to share Cyberdyne's secrets in exchange for access to the rest of the Terminator's wreckage. Like in the Tempest timeline, Skynet sent a Terminator squad to protect him from Mary Randall.[5] He was eventually killed, although it's not clear whether he was killed by Randall's team,[5] by a second team of Resistance agents,[6] or by Raven Technologies' backers. After his death, he was replaced as director of R&D by Miles Dyson.[7]
Gallery[]
Appearances[]
- The Terminator: Tempest
- The Terminator: Secondary Objectives
- The Terminator: The Enemy Within
- The Terminator RPG (Mentioned only)
- The Terminator RPG Quickstart Part II
- The T2 RPG Sourcebook (Mentioned only)
References[]
| SkyNET | |
|---|---|
| Original timeline - Genisys timeline (Genisys) - Skynet 2.0 | |
| Embodiment | Meta-Node (T-800) - Sky-1 - Skynet (T-XA) - Alex (T-5000) |
| Facilities | Skynet Central Core - Skynet Hub - Skynet Central Command - Skynet Satellite |
| Related Topics | |
| Artificial intelligence | The Turk - John Henry - ARTIE - MIR - Legion - Kokoro |
| Developers | Miles Dyson - Andy Goode - Barbara Chamberlain - Danny Dyson - Bertram Hollister Cyberdyne Systems - Cyber Research Systems - Kaliba Group - Malcolm Lee |