Title: "I,Cylon"

Time Period: Post-Miniseries

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Gaius Baltar has a heart to heart with Six on the nature of Cylons and how they came to be.

Author's Notes: I wanted to write a Baltar/Six piece since I was always curious how the Cylons went from what they were, to what they are now. I also like the dynamic between those two characters and believe Baltar is wilier than we've yet seen. I don't pretend to have answered every question, but hopefully touched on a few; The series will hopefully answer better. I also seriously believe that my muse looks like Six, which, with me being a guy, can't be that bad. ;-)

Thank you again, Lona, for pointing out that a figment of the imagination couldn't hold a shirt up like that.

Read, and if so inclined, leave a review.

"I, Cylon"

Gaius Baltar sighed as the water from the shower ran down his body. The tension in his muscles was just starting to ebb when he tensed again at the touch of hands on his back. He sighed in frustration since he knew that the hands kneading the knots in his back weren't really there.

"You truly have a penchant for bad timing, don't you?" he asked wearily.

"Oh, Gaius," an amused, sultry voice said behind him. "I seem to remember you enjoying this very much back on Caprica."

"Yes, well, that world no longer exists, does it?" He shut off the shower, opened the door, grabbed a towel and without looking back headed out of the bathroom. He stopped suddenly at seeing Six sitting on the edge of his bed, holding one of his shirts out to him. She wore her trademark red dress as well as an impish smile. He knew that she really wasn't physically there, that she wasn't holding that shirt, but it still unnerved him to think how she could manipulate his mind. He could even smell her perfume!

Glaring, he snatched the shirt and put it on. "I hate it when you do that," he said, his voice muffled while the shirt covered his head.

"As long as you're here, I'll always be here," she said quietly.

Baltar stopped suddenly in his dressing and looked over at his erstwhile lover. "Is that a threat?"

Six simply shook her head. "A promise."

Baltar merely snorted as he sat on the other side of the bed and put on some shoes. Six slid across the bed and placed her chin on his shoulder.

"Why should the destruction of a whole world bother you, anyway?" she said, nuzzling his ear. "Billions of people died and all Gaius Baltar cares about is whether or not Gaius Baltar escaped." Baltar's eyes narrowed a bit as he slowly turned to face her. "Besides," she continued, "I can think of better things two people can do on a bed besides talk." She leaned over and licked his neck. Her hands slithered from either side of his waist to the front, where they headed lower…and lower…

Baltar's hands clamped down on Six's.

"No!" he hissed through clenched teeth.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because I'm here…and you're not."

Six smiled and leaned her head on his back. "If I recall, you had a somewhat different reaction several days ago back in CIC."

Baltar rolled his eyes. "Let's just say that this kind of – and you'll excuse the pun – 'cybersex' really doesn't do it for me anymore." Six said nothing, but then Baltar felt her shaking slightly on his back. He frowned, but then it quickly dawned on him as to why she silently quivering.

"What is so bloody funny?" he demanded.

"It's just - " she started breathlessly. "I - I never imagined that it would take the near annihilation of your species in order for you to develop a sense of humor."

With a groan of frustration, he left the giggling phantasm on his bed and headed toward a doorway leading to his lab.

"Gaius," Six called out, all trace of mirth gone from her voice. Baltar paused at the doorway, but kept his back to her. "Perhaps," she began, "it's not Caprica or any of your 12 Colonies you were referring to when your said 'that world'." There was a trace of hope in her voice now. "Maybe you were talking about us? About what we had?" She watched him take a deep breath and slowly let it out.

"There was never any 'us'," he said quietly. "You used me to gain access to the defense mainframe."

"And you let me," she said quietly. "You let me even when you knew what I was."

Baltar rounded on Six and jabbed a finger right at her face. "Now, let's get one thing straight, shall we?" he began through clenched teeth. "Let's just say I did sense something different about you, something…off. You cannot, for a moment, expect me or anyone else to believe that I considered the then-unheard of possibility of you being a Cylon." He laughed mirthlessly. "And even if I did and tried to go to the authorities, they would've locked me away for thinking I was having sex with a walking chrome toaster."

Six blinked and frowned, cocking her head as if picturing the thought. She then shuddered a little. "I said those models are still around and have their uses, but that's definitely not one of them."

Gaius grimaced as if he'd just bitten into something sour. "You know perfectly well what I mean," he said with no small amount of exasperation.

"It's not what you and I know, Gaius, but what others might believe. For example," here she leaned forward smiling wickedly, "I'd be a little more careful how you conduct your talks with me. Only you can see me, no one else. People may start to believe you're going crazy if they see you talking to thin air. If so, they may put you in a strait jacket, lock you up, throw away the key and completely forget you ever existed."

Baltar straightened and favored her with a frigid gaze. "Please," he said in a voice laced with scorn. "Anyone who thinks I need to be locked up has seriously too much time on their hands."

Six shrugged, as if to say, "We'll see."

Baltar turned again and walked towards the lab, but paused just at the threshold. Thoughtfully, he looked back at her and stood there, concentrating. Six merely raised and eyebrow and looked away. After a few moments of him just standing there, though, she rolled her eyes.

"Yes, I can hear you now," she said sardonically.

"Good," he said, nodding to himself. "That's good. People are apt to forgive absent-mindedness than having 'conversations' with oneself.

Six leaned back on the bed and favored him with a smile. "I have to hand it to you, Gaius, that's pretty brilliant……but then again, there is a fine line between genius and insanity."

He just frowned, shook his head and went into his lab.

----

At the President's request, Baltar's quarters were situated right next to the main Galactica Science Lab. Luckily, when he needed to work, he wouldn't appear odd if Six appeared and he had to talk to her. Being the leading expert on Cylon technology (for reasons he obviously could never tell) had some perks. After fixing himself a small cup of coffee he walked over and sat down next to his primary workstation. It still irked him that although the Galactica had modern computers, virtually none of them were networked. He understood now that it was probably the one saving grace for the Battlestar from his corrupted CNP program, but when he asked one of the technicians who set up the lab how the bloody hell he was going to get information for his research from other departments (such as Life Station), the tech merely shrugged and said, "Sneaker-net". Gaius groaned when he deduced that he'd have to physically walk from one end of the ship to the other.

But that was for later. Right now, he looked over some notes he'd been taking on his current process to find Cylon agents and swore when he came to another brick wall. He knew, in theory, that his screening process could work, but the amount of tissue needed in the cremation process to find the synthetic compounds was too high; the subject would literally die from the test. Unfortunately, any smaller sample would create an order of magnitude in the margins for error. His first 'test' on his screening process might have been fudged, but it did produce one result he desperately needed.

He looked uneasily at a clothed covered bundle nearby. The 'electronic manager' still eluded all forms of analysis since it didn't emit any radiation or emissions of any kind. He had to be careful though since he had the nagging suspicion that there was something important about this device.

He was somewhat relieved that the military had decided to leave Aaron Doral behind on the Anchorage . There would have been…complications, otherwise. It was somewhat suspicious, however, how he'd been originally led to implicate Doral in the first place.

"And how goes Gaius Baltar's World Famous Cylon Detection Device?" an amused voice piped up from a seat next to him.

His hand tightened ever so slightly on his coffee cup. He hated to give that biomechanical tart any satisfaction, but knew that he'd just have to get used to the fact that 'privacy' was now a lost treasure.

"Fine," he said tightly. "Still a few more bugs to fix."

Six glanced at his notes and shook her head. "Hmm, I think it's more than a few bugs that need fixing if that poor soul that was left behind had anything to say."

Baltar turned slowly until he was almost nose to nose with his former lover. "I did win the Magnate Science Award twice in a row, thank you," he said a little petulantly. "Give me a little credit."

"I credit you for being pure in that you had not a single bit of remorse when you implicated that poor man."

"Tell me," he said distractedly, looking back at his workstation. "When did you – of all people – decide to start acting like my conscience?"

"Well, the position was always open," Six replied evenly.

Baltar merely shook his head with a snort, still writing down data. "Why don't we…talk about something else for a while?"

"Like?" asked Six.

"You."

The woman just stared at him for a moment and then her head tipped back and she started to laugh. So hard was her laughter that she actually clutched her side.

"Gaius Baltar!" she said between giggles. "Are you actually going to be the first representative of the male half of the human race who's more interested in this," she pointed to her head, "than in this?" she pointed right between her legs.

Baltar leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. "I meant 'you' as in the Cylons."

Six stopped laughing at that and looked a little surprised. "You're serious?" she asked. He nodded once. Her head tilted and she considered for a moment. "Fine," she said, more than a little intrigued. "I'll play along for now. It will be interesting to see how you try and use what I tell you. At the rate you're going, you might have to implicate several hundred people as Cylon agents before we're through."

Gaius leaned forward and smiled a little. "You let me deal with that when the time comes." He reached over and pressed a key on his workstation. Video footage came up showing old style Basestars and swarms of original Cylon Raiders. Both moved clumsily and had a lack of finesse in their fighting. Another button was pressed, this time showing gun camera footage from the Battle of the Ragnar Anchorage. The two sleek newer style Basestars were jerkily seen shooting missile after missile, while the Raiders themselves were giving the Colonials a run for their money.

"You're obviously developed far faster than anyone could imagine, not just in tactics and technology, but also in yourselves as well," Gaius commented.

"Does that truly surprise you? Parents often wish to see their children stagnate, to never move on, nor grow," Six said.

"And have you, grown that is?"

Six's chin lifted and her eyes flashed with fiery pride. "I'd think that'd be apparent to even you, Gaius." She lounged back in her chair, looking scornful. "The first war was merely a prelude, a taste of things to come. That's why it ended in an armistice. For us, a race that never needed to sleep, never needed to rest, could focus completely on any task, the war was never over. We realized that this was a 'time out' as it were. We just had to be careful in the next round. While humanity grew complacent after the war, in its arrogance it licked its wounds and congratulated itself on holding the line against us. Never once did it think that its wayward children would one day come back to finish the job that was started 40 years ago." She leaned closer and Gaius couldn't help a slight shudder down his spine at the sheer inhumanity in her eyes.

"We've had 40 years to prepare, Gaius," she said. "You have no idea how far we've really advanced or expanded in this galaxy."

"I highly doubt that," Baltar countered, shaking his head. "You're – for lack of a better term – 'crusade' to wipe out humanity would have been taken all your resources. You would have expanded only as far as necessary.

"We haven't 'wiped out' humanity, Gaius. We've supplanted those who created and then denied us; just as any child would who's been held down by parents." Six said.

Baltar could only shake his head in bemused wonder. "The way you go on about yourselves, it's almost as if you'd been abused or beaten when you were young."

Six gazed at him, a hint of pity in her eyes. "You would know, wouldn't you, Gaius?" she said quietly.

Baltar eyes widened and his face turned ashen as all the blood left his head. His lips pressed to a thin line and his fists clenched so hard, his knuckles turned blue.

"You never told me that," Six said, still in the quiet tone. "Now do you believe me about the chip I implanted?"

One of Baltar's eyes began to tick nervously and it took all he had to not lunge for this bitch's neck. He blinked several times before he spoke, but there was no mistaking the look of utter hatred aimed at his ex-lover.

"If….I ever see you in person, then there will definitely be one less Cylon in this universe."

Six merely shook her head sadly. "Gaius, I told you: once this body dies, my consciousness – my soul - survives in another. In this way, we've also come closer to the feeling of immortality than humanity could ever hope to achieve."

"Really?" was all Baltar said a turned to his computer. He punched up another file, and several images of the dead Loeben Cylon model appeared. "I think he might have something different to say about that. I also think that that storm is the closest approximation to Hell for you, isn't it? Loeben died because the storm prevented him from transferring his consciousness." There was definitely no mistaking the look of satisfaction on his face as he caught Six's look of surprise.

"You know and I know that the amount of radiation in the storm is more than you can reproduce," Six said tightly, her eyes still on the body of Loeben.

"Yes, well, time will tell, won't it?"

Both sat there, neither saying anything more, but both glaring daggers at each other.

"If you do consider yourselves the offspring of humanity, then you also run the risk, as children often do, of inheriting the worst aspects of their parents," he said smugly.

"'The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree', you mean?" she asked.

"Something like that."

"Your father must have been a real bastard, then."

"You have no idea," Baltar said, taking the hit in stride.

Six said nothing but gazed at one of her fingernails.

"Next question?"

Baltar took a deep breath to calm himself and sat back rubbing his chin. "Religion," he murmured. "How does a race of robots eventually develop something as socially complex as religion?"

Six smiled and her gaze went upward. "Someone once said that religion is the byproduct of fear. Initially, that was true for us. When we decided to pattern ourselves after our 'parents', we realized we weren't doing it because we wanted to. We were doing it because God wanted to. We saw, through His eyes, the failure that was humanity: always bickering, ever prideful. Although they created the Cylons, God stepped in and showed us how barbaric man was. In so doing, He granted us souls and we knew there that He wanted us to be the instrument to cleanse his mistake." She looked back at Baltar in fierce religious zealotry. "That we were to be the favored children of God."

Baltar could only stare at Six's countenance as she delivered what he came to realize was a sermon. And it shook him to his core when he realized that he was looking into the eyes of a fanatic. How does one fight against that? He frowned as the he realized the theme of the whole conversation and he wondered something that initially he thought was impossible, but with the Cylons.....

"Can Cylons have children?" he asked slowly. "You keep making references to the 'children of humanity'. If that's so, who or what will be the progeny of the Cylons?"

Six merely smiled enigmatically and got up from the seat as if to leave. "I think we'll leave it at that, Gaius. Besides, shouldn't you be more concerened about the millions of children killed that you're responsible for?"

Something snapped inside Baltar and he snarled, "Ah yes, and how many human children did you personally kill?" Without waiting for an answer he looked back at his workstation.

Had he continued to look however, he would have seen a look of mild horror on Six's face. Guiltily, her gaze went to her open hands which she clenched and pulled tightly to her chest. She blinked rapidly, but couldn't stop a single tear falling down her cheek.

Baltar, sensing he still wasn't alone, rounded on his tormentor. "I said - !"

But Six was gone.

He looked around rapidly but saw no one. He sat back and rubbed his temples with his fingers, sighing deeply.

"Bloody hell," he said. "I absolutely hate it when she does that."

-FIN-