Setting: Just after the events in "Flesh and Bone".
Spoilers: Up through episode 1.08.

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Day 26

Another human-looking Cylon turned up in the fleet yesterday. Like the "Aaron Doral" type, this model has been encountered before. He was the Cylon who gave Dad a close call back on the Ragnar Anchorage. He called himself "Leoben Conoy." At Ragnar, he tried to pass himself off as just an arms dealer, but when he was isolated alone with Dad, he turned on the mind games. After Dad revealed the existence of human-looking Cylons to his senior staff a few weeks ago, I read Dad's report on his first encounter with Conoy. Clever bastard, this particular Cylon. A first-class mind-frakker.

It was clear to me in Dad's report that he'd been pretty rattled by Conoy. That was partly due to the shock of first discovering that our mortal enemy now has a human face, but I think it goes a lot deeper than just appearances. Cylons have always been just machines to us: progrmmed hunks of metal with tinny, monotone voices. They weren't true life-forms. There was no moral ambiguity about destroying them. Now they speak with emotion. They sweat. They bleed. And in Conoy's case, they spout philosophy and debate matters of the eternal soul. Long ago, we welded and snapped together their metallic frames and downloaded software into their brain chips that included a low-level of artificial intelligence. But we never gave them religion. We never taught them how to pray. We certainly never gave them souls. Yet somehow our subservient drones have evolved into a creature with all the trademarks of what we would have to consider as sentient life. It's a disturbing thought, but I can't deny the fact any longer that the Cylons are indeed alive.

Living or otherwise, however, the Cylons remain our enemy. Perhaps it would be best to view them now as a hostile tribe; they're an insurgent band of humans who are intent upon destroying civilization as we know it. Humanity does have a very long history of tribal warfare. It's the reason we created Cylons in the first place. This is just the latest round. As far as I'm concerned then, these Cylon moles among us are no different than terrorists, and they should be expected to employ all of the time-honored tricks of war. Suicide bombings. Sabotage. Spying. Misinformation. Why wouldn't they engage in these things? Everything they know about war, they learned by watching us.

The first copy of Conoy told Dad that he was an "observer of human nature." I think that's a euphemism for saying that his job is to gather intelligence about people and then profile them. Then if it suits his mission, he uses what he's gleaned about a person to try to manipulate them. That appears to be the case with all copies of this "Conoy" model. The latest version, discovered hiding on the Geminon Traveler, was definitely cut from the same mold.

Unfortunately, it wasn't Dad who faced off with Conoy #2 yesterday. It was Kara. Dad chose her to handle the interrogation. What was he thinking? He said he needed someone who could stay focused on the job and not get confused by all of Conoy's mind games. If that was really what Dad wanted, Kara should have been the first to be disqualified for the job. Unfortunately he didn't ask for my input. I didn't even know about it until after she was already in place on the Geminon Traveler. I didn't have the chance to object until it was too late.

Kara is a tough lady, but she has a long history of allowing her emotions to cloud her judgment. She tries to appear stoic, but she's actually quite vulnerable and it doesn't take much effort at all to push her buttons and set her off. That's why she's been to the brig so many times. That's why she passed Zak through flight school. That's why she tried to prematurely bounce the nuggets out of training only 10 days ago. She's a bundle of emotion barely contained under a cool exterior. And frak it, she's been laid up in sickbay with a shattered knee and fighting borderline depression for several days. Colonel Tigh and I had to manipulate her to get her out of bed. And only one day later, Dad sends her off to face a manipulating, mind-twisting Cylon? I ask again, what was Dad thinking? Is he really so utterly blind to her weaknesses? I understand that he'd want to help her regain her confidence and show her that she's valuable to us whether she can fly a viper or not, but sending her to deal with Conoy was a mistake.

As soon as Kara came back to Galactica she proved me right. She didn't get any information out of him, but he did a number on her. She was quiet and very evasive for a long time. She finally opened up to me (at least a little bit) late in the evening and basically confirmed what I'd feared. This is the woman who was going to snipe Tom Zarek in the head without any hesitation, but she was disturbed about seeing a Cylon blown out of an airlock. Apparently Conoy succeeded in convincing her that Cylons have souls and she was truly bothered by the prospect that Conoy's soul might not find its way to his God. I can't say whether Cylons have souls or not, but the fact is I don't care. If he had a soul and it vanished into oblivion... so much the better. If there was a human traitor who contributed to the Holocaust, I'd blow his head off personally and wouldn't give a frak for the disposition of his soul either.

Conoy also succeeded in half-convincing Kara that he was clairvoyant. He guessed who she was. He knew things about her. Personal things. She wouldn't tell me what exactly he knew about her... but it really rattled her. I tried to convince her that all of it could be explained by the mere fact that he was a spy. It was his job to know things about us. He's been gathering information about key personnel all along – her included. He didn't have to guess her name. He knew her on sight. He just played it up to make it appear otherwise, like a mystical mind-reading trick, and she bought it. Worse, once he succeeded in bending her to buy into his mind-reading act, he started playing fortune teller. She told me he gave her a clue about our future. Yes, this came from a creature who doesn't want us to have a future.

I tried addressing the whole situation with her from a completely logical and scientific viewpoint, but I think I only made minimal headway. She got a little peeved with me at one point and countered back by telling me that not everything about the universe can be learned from a textbook. I just told her that a textbook is a more reliable source than a manipulative Cylon. If her leg wasn't still bound up in a full-length brace, I think she would have tried to smack me. As it was, she had to settle for tossing a cherry tomato at me, but she caught Hot Dog on the back of the head instead. At least that got a smile out of her. She finally headed off for her rack in a better mood than before we'd talked, but she's still obviously very confused.

Oh Kara. Dad really fraked up when he sent you into that spider's web and you got tangled up in there good. At least this particular spider got squashed. Now how do we flush out the others that are still lurking around?