(Originally a Facebook post from December 2012)

I was watching Terminator 2 on AMC when I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with my dad after seeing it for the first time. I must’ve been around eight years old.

We spent a lot of time in our yards when I was a kid. Mom was always planting flowers, and my dad and I were usually off doing “manly things” (roar roar roar).

We’d just seen the movie a few weeks earlier. And being an eight-year-old boy, the heroic and violent story stuck with me. As my dad passed me a dustpan to go sweep the driveway, I asked him:

“Could Terminators really take over the world?”

“No,” he said. “God wouldn’t allow it.”

“Why not?”

“Because God loves us, and would never let something so evil happen.”

I returned to the yard, unsatisfied with the answer. Someone had dreamed up the idea, written the movie, and even built a semi-functioning endoskeleton for the future war scenes. The only thing missing was the thinking computer chip welded into its head.

And then it hit me.

People didn’t need self-aware machines to kill humans on a massive scale. We’d been doing that ourselves since the dawn of time. All it would take to make the Terminator real was a person to imagine it, a person to build it, and someone willing to use it.

That day in the front yard, I came to a conclusion that’s never really left me: If the world were to end, it wouldn’t be by God’s will—but by man’s. There was evil in the machine… but the greater evil was in us.

That thought haunted me for days. It gave me nightmares. Eventually, I tried to balance it out—if there was that kind of evil in the world, then there must be an equal capacity for good. But what kind of good could stand against something like that?

It wasn’t until Chris and I started writing stories that I finally found an answer.

I guess I was more imaginative than Mr. James Cameron—because one of our heroes had a jetpack and a space fighter…