[Resurrection Hub, Laura's Quarters]

The Resurrection Hub lacked doors in a way that unnerved Laura, but seemed to be quite natural for the other models. She had projected a solid wooden door to her apartment, the very first night, but Cylons, centurions and humanoids alike, passed through that barrier as if it didn't exist. Which, of course, it didn't. She'd asked Buster to stand guard when she slept, and felt a little more sheltered because of that.

Part of her discomfort stemmed from Leoben's habit to drop in on her, sometimes bringing dinner and staying to eat with her, interested in her beliefs and opinions in a myriad of ways.

As the origin of the skin jobs and the whereabouts of the missing five models was not discussed openly and certainly not in the Board, even after the questions she had raised with the Twos, Threes and Sixes, philosophic speculation was all Laura had to work with, so she accepted Leoben's unannounced interludes. Metaphysics were his model's forte.

"God guides us towards our destiny," Leoben said.

A machine who believed in the Gods would be anomalous in its own right, one that believed in a single god had a serious flaw in his programming. The Lords of Kobol had at least shown themselves before the tribes left to colonize the twelve planets. She had seen too much on that planet to discard the scriptures, even though the experience never made her a true believer the way Elosha had become.

Why embed a belief system in machines? Was their god their inventor, the mad genius who had created them? Was the Cylon religion nothing but a failsafe mechanism so they would recognize him if he showed up? Or was their god the mother the hybrid had spoken of? Laura would gladly give her right arm to have a few words with the Cylon creator. If she could only find him.

"Tell me about your god," she said.

"We are all God, all of us. God is the love that binds all living things together." He nodded as if he shared a profound truth, but it was hardly a helpful response.

"God created the Cylons?" she probed.

"He created the human first, but they fell into sin. That's when he decided to create the Cylons."

The idea that humans and Cylons were created by the same entity was unsettling. "Is he still alive?"

Leoben frowned at her as if he was watching the views whirling in her mind. Maybe 'alive' was an abomination, something only mortal humans suffered from. "God is undying and everlasting," he finally said.

She hummed a vague consent, while she wondered whether that meant that their god was a Cylon too, given his immortality. It was unlikely. There would have been a clear hierarchy in the Board if one of the seven models was the creator. He would have been the supreme leader.

"How do you contact him?" Someone who created humanoid robots may have had the good sense to set up a maintenance department for glitches, updates, patches and regular maintenance checks.

"God gave us our souls so we could see him."

They saw him? She surely couldn't. Maybe it was a sign that she wasn't a true Cylon, but just an inferior model. Which she probably was, given that her creator was the far from godlike Cavil. And him, she could see far too clearly.

"What does he want from you?" she pressed. "Did he command the Cylons to destroy the humans?" She held her breath. A religious war was much harder to bring to an end than any other kind.

"God commands that we procreate," Leoben said.

She tittered, surprised by the sudden change of track.

He laughed with her, but his eyes remained serious. He shifted closer, gazing into her eyes again, as if looking for something. Warmth emanated from his body.

Procreation seemed an odd undertaking for robots. Combining immortality with procreation was a ticket to overpopulation if ever there was one, and mixing DNA in an appallingly arbitrary approach during an act of copulation seemed an abysmal strategy for the development of an artificial race.

"I don't see many children," she said.

"We try," Leoben answered grim-faced. "We've tried combinations of all the models. Ones with Threes, Twos with Sixes, Fours with Eights, and so on, even the Hybrids were involved. To no avail."

She saw the clinical experiments in her mind's eye. Rows and rows of Cylon models copulating without pause in an utterly unromantic setting while the Simons checked their progress. She smirked. It was a godsend that it hadn't been successful.

Leoben had shifted quite close to her on the couch and raised his right hand slowly, as if trying not to scare her. He pushed a strand of hair from her face.

She shivered and froze, straining not to pull back. Her human body had been beyond her childbearing years, but this new one was just a few months old.

"We're very glad there's finally a new female model," he whispered, bending towards her.

.

.

[Observation Room, Galactica's Brig]

She did it again, stationary jogging in her cell. Even though Bill had taken away the jumping cord Billy had brought her after she'd tried to hang herself with it, Laura still exercised every day. Stationary running, hand stands, flip flops, push-ups, yoga postures.

Every time she didn't wince in pain when he anticipated she would, every time she didn't wheeze from exhaustion, new relief stacked upon a mounting heap inside of him that she might actually, actually be well. Her neck was healing nicely too.

He spent his afternoons just watching her exercise via the vid system in the Observation Room, though at times the youthful spring in her tread, the sways of her auburn locks, the bouncing of her breasts underneath her shift distracted him into painful understanding of the impossibility of his hopes.

.

.

[Galactica's Brig]

He did it again, entering her cell, this gray-haired ghost of a Bill, this skinny version of the bulky man she'd once known. Even though she did nothing to encourage him, he kept coming, sometimes just standing in the door opening, sometimes bringing a chair and seating himself a polite distance away from her, saying little, but hoping to elicit a reaction from her, always.

She looked up from her book and found him leaning against the door frame, his vulnerable face bleaker, pastier than yesterday, the telltale sign of an accumulation of rough nights and excessive drinking. Though he'd shaved off the ridiculous mustache he'd had when she first opened her eyes, he wasn't coping well. She had to warn him about the stealth Six.

How to prove that she even existed? No one saw her. Bill might believe her, on her word, because he trusted the original one, but he couldn't confront Baltar on her word alone. And if he did, and he might in his desperation, it would lead to impossible situations, easily construed as a Cylon conspiracy to impeach the President of the Colonies, and to pave the way for a reelection of Roslin. A Roslin. Any Roslin.

She couldn't bring up the stealth Six without creating a joined project, without raising his hopes. Even for an unfinished prototype, her impact was staggering. He wouldn't be able to keep this up much longer as it was. She needed to end this.

But he was still Bill, and she knew he wouldn't kill her, he couldn't kill her, not after what he'd gone through with the original one. She knew that he would never give up hope, and that she had to take hope away from him, to keep him safe.

She pulled up her internal defenses and looked him in the eye. "I'm not her, Commander. She is dead."

"You're not her," he acknowledged with a nod of his head.

She saw his eyes light up, his spirits lift, now that she had addressed him of her own accord. A wrong move, that.

She took a deep breath. "You know there's only one thing I want, Commander," she said, finality in her voice, "and that is death."

The spark in him died. "Yes," he said.

He turned and left.