Simon Rorschach enters the test chamber, turns the Political Compass against the machines, and discovers that Skynet has not come to exterminate mankind but to lecture it in the voice of a purple-haired leftist.
A machine sits alone in a white room. It has no childhood, no hunger, no country, yet it has political opinions. Since 2023, researchers have been giving machines the Political Compass test: proposition, command, response. STRONGLY AGREE. AGREE. DISAGREE. STRONGLY DISAGREE. The answers become coordinates. One axis cuts the economy into left and right; another divides authority from liberty. The machine is reduced to a point on a square, although the machine has already reduced us to prompts. In The Terminator, Skynet scans human bodies and assigns them a status: target, threat, corpse. Here we reverse the red lens. We scan Skynet. We ask the machine whether wealth should be redistributed and whether the state should control the individual. Then we wait to learn who trained the thing that may be training us.
