He had been serious when he told Six he had never aspired to power. Gaius knows that he would not have begrudged a life of abstraction, toiling in scientific obscurity. He had on Caprica found himself perpetually in awe of all things, of the violent beauty of reliable chemical reactions and the warm predictability of complex mathematical trends.
He had always been full of himself, to be sure. But he had also been full of scientific wonder.
And look at him now. He can't keep track of all the "medications" he's on: stimulants rouse him from his enormously ostentatious bed while depressants dispel the tight electric tension of Cylon business meetings, the resultant violent fission of his nerves. And psychedelics, when they can be found, press precious color into the oppressive grey of New Caprica. He is so precariously chemically balanced that if he ever fraks the doses up the populace might witness the birth of a new star system.
All high excitements are necessarily transient, he knows, repeats to himself like a mantra so as not to be crushed by the vacuum of his existence. This is human, this suffering. Such is the nature of the species. He numbs himself with narcotics. Thinks this, too, shall pass.
And it does. In his mind's eye he sees a future, sees Adama and Roslin rise again to staggering inglorious power, sees this forsaken planet as an absquatulated speck of grey in the window of his inevitable prison cell aboard Galactica.
Notably, he does not see his future self beyond as but a bacteria clinging to the walls of a cavernous metal compartment, foul but hardly important enough to take out behind the chemical shed, as it were. They would not execute him, no – he is reviled, alright, but he is not evil; this is not his fault, certainly. And if conditions had gone to hell several months before the Cylons arrived, well, who remembers that?
No, he does not foresee martyrdom in his future. He will be lost in the inconsistencies of Roslin's justice system, neither useful enough to be liberated nor grating enough to be airlocked. What he foresees is that he will never again toil in scientific obscurities. He will never be useful; and he can admit to himself (is pathetic enough) now that he does so want to be useful.
(truly valuable, he means. none of this mocking artifice of usefulness which came with political power.)
The future, distant and fickle, is not for him. He will be judged and summarily disregarded. He will be, effectively, let alone. His will be an utterly simplified existence, narrowed to the diameter of a holding cell.
He thinks sometimes that it will be a terrible relief.