3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

As a result of temporal interference by Sarah Connor, her son John, Miles Dyson, and the T-800 destroying Cyberdyne headquarters and all backups of the research in 1995, the date for Judgment Day is moved to two days after activation on April 21, 2011.