O roteiro original do O Exterminador do Futuro sugere que eles eram campos da morte. A implicação é que o objetivo era dispor dos humanos com a maior eficiência possível:
Kyle: Most of us were rounded up, put in camps...for orderly disposal...Some of us were kept alive...to work. Loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever...
Na novela para Terminator: Salvation , descobrimos que a Skynet também tentou extrair informações de alguns prisioneiros ...
So they kept moving, continued to follow wordless directives, and speculated on the manner of their impending demise. Options ranged from the abrupt to the fanciful. A few fatalists even pointed out that their deaths were likely to be less painful than the destruction humans had inflicted on other humans down through history. Where people had all too often proven themselves sadistic, willing to inflict pain for pain’s sake, the machines were only efficient. Except in isolated instances where there was a specific desire to extract information from the otherwise reluctant prisoner, no machine would kill by torture. Not because they regarded the use of torture as immoral, but because they considered it an inefficient allocation of resources.
E parece também que vinha realizando pesquisa médica em seus prisioneiros humanos, presumivelmente na esperança de criar uma unidade de infiltração Terminator mais crível.
Everything except the blood that was draining off a metal table in the room’s center. Its smell contrasted sharply with that of the otherwise all-pervasive disinfectant. The latter was of course unnecessary for the protection of the machines. They made use of such chemicals because they did not want their specimens to become contaminated.