By ChaosEternus
Thanks to LONA of the BSGWS for Beta'ing this fic for me.
thanks to the reviewers, the comments are appreciated
Im working on chapter lenghts but so far only Mailman has managed to get some long chapters in... the last few have been four/five page monsters.
please check it out, its a little underreviewed at the moment ;-)
It came as no real surprise to me that a cure wasn't exactly easy to find. Quite frankly, I would have done more than raise my eyebrows if Britannica had an article entitled 'How to Cure Cylons' in its directories.
I imagine it would have made Geata look a bit funny too, considering he had been posted as an assistant to this project. Course, as far as I knew Adama and Roslin still thought this was a Cylon Detector come Cylon Interrogator project.
Gaeta on the other hand appeared to be fully in support of my little side project and seemed to be spinning it to Command. I say seemed because I can just see Adama as the type to send a quiet off the record nod to this kind of project.
Especially when we had come up trumps on our first day of research with a likely Cylon detector that would be reusable and was in common usage on Earth in fact, though not for this use.
"What do you mean you have found a Cylon detector?" It was Baltar that voiced the question, apparently prompted by his invisible friend but nobody seemed inclined to do anything else until it was answered, which was fine by me.
"Have you heard of Scanning Electron Microscopes?"
Blank looks all around greeted that question, but I wasn't surprised, most likely they called it something else.
"Right, well it's a microscope only unlike the light based microscopes used for most things, these use a beam of electrons controlled and manipulated by electromagnets"
Lights went on in Baltar and Roslins eyes.
"Yes" Baltar interrupted, "gives them far higher resolution than the theoretical limit for light based scopes but I don't see what this has to do with Cylon detectors"
I shrugged, "Whoever said the sample had to be 'dead' or even cut from the source?"
Baltars jaw dropped slightly, but it was Roslin who said it aloud, "a beam of electrons would not harm the human body..."
"Exactly" I grinned, "and you could get cross-sections of the mind and everything at high enough resolutions that any artificial constructs would stick out like a sore thumb"
Adama raised an eyebrow, "Like a sore thumb?"
"Just an expression, just an expression" Okay, I was in a good mood. That was one major problem down for these refugees and it felt good.
As did dropping the folders I had brought into the meeting in front of everyone, "That's everything I could find on MRI scanners"
I winced at their puzzled looks; whoops forgot to mention that, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanners are what the scanners designed for use on humans are called.
Anyways, its basic operating principles, basic design specs but I found no full schematics, none of the advanced details"
I smiled apologetically, "So you'll still have to do a bit of work on it but..."
Everyone except Baltar was smiling at me thankfully, Baltar seemed distracted and I would almost say malevolent. Not you just upstaged the genius with a slight ego problem type malevolent, but threatening, you've just acted against me and I will have vengeance type malevolence.
I decided to watch my back around him and tell the others to as well.
I didn't trust Baltar, and I couldn't quite pin down why.
That had been two weeks ago, two weeks in which we had been found and attacked just once.
Two weeks in which I had found no indications of a cure.
Two weeks in which the few sources I had access to all told me what the Cylons had done should be impossible at even their level of technology.
Two weeks in which I got more and more frustrated, I was certain I had heard of it being managed on Earth and yet I could find no real reference to it or any reasonable suggestion of how it might be done.
I was beginning to think I might be asking the wrong questions.
It was Gaeta who found the first thread when he stumbled across a reference to hypnotism in the Brittanica.
He was shocked, it sounded like a practise listed in the Books Of Kobol as a black art, with a name I could translate and frankly couldn't even pronounce.
The limitations listed were obvious, you couldn't be told to do anything you didn't want to but the wording even to me seemed a little off, like the author was carefully censoring.
On our third look through we spotted something odd, the limitations were phrased to suggest they applied to all hypnotism but taken into context, the sentence on limitations could only apply to light trances. The article referred only to light trances in fact, not to anything deeper and I was pretty certain I had heard tell of deeper trances.
We both knew what that meant, censorship.
We both had the question in our eyes but we didn't air it aloud, if a light hypnotic trance could make you do as you were ordered within limitations, even allow a post hypnotic suggestion to be placed what could a deeper trance by a skilled hypnotist? One who didn't care about their subjects?
It was only one thread; we didn't have the tapestry yet.
But we knew it was a start.