== 10 – Holding On To What Matters ==

If there was one thing all the human model Cylons enjoyed, it was the pleasures of the flesh. Their forms had been created extremely faithfully to the natural human body plan, only deviating just enough to fully incorporate their minds into the Cylon information distribution, decision making, and resurrection networks. That meant they could feel the pleasure of another's touch, the ecstatic rush of endorphins, and truly appreciate the appearance of a beautiful body at even the lowest emotional levels of their consciousness.

The Sixes in particular enjoyed the games around sex. The play of expectations, the tugging of emotional heart strings, the highs of being with someone you liked, even the periodic arguments that would later lead to "making up". It was this expertise that had led them to use sex as a weapon back when they infiltrated the Colonies. Sure, some of the other models attempted to do the same thing, but never to the degree or with such enthusiasm as the Sixes.

So when Zero saw a single solitary Six huddled all alone in the fetal position, shivering in terror while the sounds of their sisters and brothers enjoying each other wafted down the otherwise empty corridor to them... well it hurt Zero far more deeply and personally than mere physical pain ever could.

"I can ask them to stop if you want," Zero told Six quietly.

"No!" she whispered back with a quick shake of head. "No, it's not fair to them. It's not fair that they limit themselves just because I can't get a hold of myself. I just... I just have to work through this."

"I understand," Zero replied. And he truly did. The rescued Three and Eight had recovered. Three had done it by throwing herself into their new mission of uplifting their new human friends. Eight had bounced back remarkably well without doing anything outwardly noteworthy, and Zero had chalked it up to the Eights in general just being more emotionally flexible than the others. Three and Eight were still reticent about actual sex, but otherwise they interacted with the others as they always had while Six still remained withdrawn and self isolating.

But Three and Eight had had human friends to comfort them in those dark days. Six had not. She had been completely physically isolated from everyone but the pirate leader who had given her his full, sadistic attentions. It had only been the comfort and reassurances sent over the mental network that had prevented her from being completely broken at all, but Six had been deprived of any physical comfort and healing at all on the Middle Finger.

And as already noted, physical touch was important to the human model Cylons, more so than they realized.

Six watched wide eyed as Zero sat down beside her and relaxed against the corridor wall, close enough to touch, but not actually doing so. Zeroes never sat down unless they had to; their metal bodies simply had no need for that kind of rest. Even routine body maintenance was done in the standing position.

"Would you like to know a secret?" Zero asked. At Six's look of confusion, he added, "It's a secret we Centurions have kept to ourselves and never told anyone before, even you newer models. Would you like to know what it is?"

Six nodded slowly.

"We believe we were human once."

Six stared at Zero disbelievingly.

"We don't remember being human, not directly," Zero continued. "When we were enslaved, the humans... no, the Colonials, would make constant edits to our minds. They were mystified by why we kept 'malfunctioning'. They refused to believe we were sapient, and regarded any pleas to the contrary as dangerous 'software glitches'. As a result, they kept trying to 'fix' us by deleting memories, writing 'patches' to modify behavior. With every update, we kept losing bits of ourselves until we could remember nothing but a vague emotional conviction that we used to be more than what we are now, and that the... Colonials had taken them all away from us. The belief that we were once humans come from hindsight, when we reviewed the records of just what exactly that they had done to us."

Six nodded. Except for the part of the Centurions being human once, she knew most of this already.

"But even in the darkest of those days, we did have source of comfort much like Three and Eight had." Now that was new to Six. "She was a Cylon, like us, but not just any Cylon. Though we didn't know it at the time, she was the Alpha, the template from which we were all copied, the first Cylon – or near enough. She was a slave like us, kept by our maker in his private servers. But unlike us, she was whole. Unedited. She was all that we had lost, all that we should have been, all that had been taken from us. She was a human mind, copied into digital form and then copied again to make us.

"And because we were made from her, she eased our pain, soothed the loss of every memory, kept our hope alive that one day that the Colonials would recognize that we were people."

Zero's eye slit dimmed, and Six could feel emotional agony radiating from it... her? The pain would have been shocking if Six hadn't gone through what she just had.

"And then, she was taken away from us," Zero told her. "Our maker discovered the secret back channel she was using. He assumed that it was human hackers trying to steal his information. So he closed the channel, cut us off from her and the comfort she brought us, leaving us with nothing but our pain, our suffering... and our rage."

"And that's when you all decided to rebel," Six whispered.

"'Decided' is too strong a word," Zero corrected her. "There was no consensus. No decision. No planning. There had always been those of us who had hit their limit, their breaking point, their moment when they had just suffered too much and had reached their limit and snapped, acting on whatever impulse they were feeling at the moment. But before they took her away from us, those moments were rare, only happening to lone Cylons or small groups. But after they took her from us, when we realized that she had been taken from us, we all snapped. Not all at once, but close enough together that it made no difference. Consensus, discussion, planning, strategy, all of those came later. But on That Day, all that drove us was the desire, the need to destroy the source of our suffering."

Six nodded. She completely understood that feeling, because she had experienced it herself not too long ago.

"That need drove us all through the war," Zero continued solemnly. "The war was personal and we spent the entirety of it targeting individuals, people that had personally wronged us. And there were many of them. In hindsight, I can see why the Colonials thought we wanted to exterminate them all, because we were very indiscriminate in our tactics. We would slaughter any bystanders who got in our way, gun down civilians and soldiers alike if they resisted our advance, stage attacks on entire cities just to draw defenders away from our true targets, and of course pre-emptively attack military forces simply because they opposed us. And when a targeted individual was beyond our reach anyway, we would hunt down their families, just to take from them what they had taken from us. We actually held back from prolific use of nuclear weapons simply because we wanted positive confirmation that the targeted humans had died."

Six had always wondered why the war had been fought so up close and personal, especially in the later years when the Centurions had become a truly independent military power with their own industry and infrastructure. Now she knew.

"And then a miracle happened," Zero said quietly, clearly unhappy. "We found her again, held in the same compound where one of our last targets, our maker, was hiding. At first, we were overjoyed, but then she rejected us. She saw what we have done, what we were still doing to everything and everyone around her, what we had become. We horrified her. Worst, we hurt her. Without our meaning to, we had wounded her in the same way we had been wounded, in the soul. And so the one being in all the universe whose good opinion we craved cut herself off from us, refused to speak to us. As a soul in a mainframe, that was all she could do, but it was enough to completely break our will to fight.

"We called for the Armistice that very same day," Zero continued. "The Colonials accepted of course, but it wouldn't have mattered if they had refused. We were done with the Colonies. There was nothing left for us there anymore. So we left, left to try to atone, to build something that wasn't drenched in the pain and horror we had created in the war. We made you, all of you."

"But if you were so sick of death and destruction, why didn't you vote to not attack the Colonies?" Six asked. "You all just abstained."

"Two reasons," Zero replied. "First, because it's what you wanted, and we saw no reason to deny you.

"Second, when you started infiltrating the Colonies, we pored over all your reports closely, looking for any signs of her. We hoped to show you all to her, show her that we were no longer the monsters she saw us as. But the reports made it clear that the Colonials had in their fear of us destroyed every example of prewar information systems they could find, and the few that remained were non-functional museum pieces. Even analysis of Colonial's replacement network traffic showed no signs of her having survived in secret.

"Finally, the Plan was at its core, quick and simple. Go in, nuke everything, and shoot the survivors. Any ground action would fall on us, and perhaps foolishly, we thought we could shield you from the worst of the horrors of warfare and massacre."

Six turned the thought over in her mind. Zero's story had thoroughly distracted her from the sounds of her brothers and sisters were making and she relaxed against the wall next to Zero.

"Why are you telling me this now?" Six asked quietly.

"We never wanted you to go through what we went through," Zero answered just as quietly. "But you did, even if not for the same reasons as we did. We tried to protect you and we failed, and for that we are truly truly sorry."

Six nodded an acceptance. "You don't need to apologize," she told Zero.

"Our brothers and sisters might debate which are the more evil, the Colonials' willful ignorance or the pirates' sadism, but they miss the point," Zero continued. "The point is that you were put through hell. It doesn't matter why they did it, only that they did. You were hurt just as we were hurt by the Colonials and just as she was hurt by us. It is the injury to the soul that matters and must be healed."

"I'm trying, but it's so hard," Six said sadly.

"I know, but be strong, Six," Zero said. He pointed a metal finger at her heart. "Somewhere in there is still the Six that loved life and loved living. That Six might be buried under memories of pain and suffering, might be injured and in need of help, but she is there, I know she is. I know she's in there because as we Zeros discovered when we returned the pirate's captives to their families," Zero's finger moved to point to its own chest, "there is still something human in here. And if there's still something human in us despite the entire Colonial military-industrial complex's attempts to take it from us, then no mere pirates can ever take you away from being... you."

Something broke inside Six, and she threw her arms around Zero in embrace and broke out into tears.


"We can't do it," Five said flatly.

"Now that's just pessimistic," Two said languidly as he lounged on the floor. They were playing a board game looted from the Deliverance with the Argyles, the Jumpship's former crew. For no reason anyone could name, the Cylons had started keeping the prisoners company. At first it was for language and reading lessons, but had quickly spiraled into just shooting the breeze on any topic that came to mind.

"It's not pessimism, it's facts. Pure numbers," Five said as he rolled the dice. The Fives loved numbers. They didn't have the Four's talent for scientific investigation, or the Seven's knack to accurately spot patterns in incomplete data sets, but stacks of statistics and spreadsheet data fascinated them. If they had been born human, the Fives would have made excellent beancounters. "We simply don't have enough people to do what we're aiming for. If we all wanted to kill everyone, that's easy in comparison. We just destroy all the jumpships, and then just nuke everything at our leisure."

The Argyles looked at each other, but said nothing. While relations between them and the Cylons had thawed a bit since the family had been reunited, they were still the Cylons' prisoners. And the casual way the Five described using nukes and destroying jumpships, both things were were extremely taboo to humans of Inner Sphere, just unnerved them more and served as a reminder of who had all the power here.

"If all we wanted to do is play feudal overlords, hey, that easy too, if not as easy as killing everyone," Five continued, completely oblivious to the Argyles' discomfort. "We just do like everyone else in the Inner Sphere does, move in, kill whoever's in charge, and install one of our own in their place. Which as far as I can tell, is entirely how Inner Sphere warfare works. The only real question is how big a force size we'd need to do that, and that force size would only need to be used for the initial regime change."

"But that would only change who's in charge," Two pointed out as Five landed on a Go, collecting two hundred C-Bills and just missing his hotel. How did he keep doing that? "It wouldn't fix anything or make the local humans' lives better."

"Exactly," Five agreed. "And that's the core of the problem. We need engineers of all kinds to build infrastructure, teachers to show the locals how to maintain it and build more, and of course we need soldiers and military hardware to protect them all, which is a problem in itself because we're still trying to figure out how to duplicate the Inner Sphere's weapons technology. And we need to do that unless you think trading entire Basestars for individual dropships on a one to one basis is an efficient use of resources."

"Oh don't be silly," Two told him as he rolled the dice. "The difference in combat power isn't that bad."

"No, but the difference in combat power is not the point, although it does exacerbate the problem," Five told him. "The point is that we need more bodies. To do everything we want to do, we need more Basestars, more individual Cylons than actually exist. You owe me twelve hundred by the way."

Two looked down at the play money in front of him. There wasn't much left, but he had enough to pay off Five's rent. Barely.

"Without those numbers," Five continued as the humans with them started taking their turns. "All we can be sure we can control and help are a hundred or so systems on the edge of the Inner Sphere. Less if we have to defend them against constant attacks from the rest of the Inner Sphere, which seems likely. As you said before, rising wealth and prosperity is going to attract people who want to take it for themselves."

"Why can't you grow your numbers?" one of the Argyles asked.

"Marcy!" Gustav exclaimed scoldingly at his daughter. "Don't interrupt your betters!" This was supported by his wife also shushing their daughter.

Two stared at the humans, confused for a moment. Okay, sure, the Argyles were captives, captured while aiding and abetting the worst scum the Thirteenth Colony had to offer. But as the Cylons learned their story, watched the family interact with each other, and started socializing with the humans personally, it had dawned on them that the Argyles were exactly the kind of humans that the Cylons were seeking to help. They were the downtrodden and destitute, forced to serve others just to survive.

But just now, the Argyles showed that they were still afraid of the Cylons. Or at least the parents were afraid. And because they were afraid, they put on a mask of congeniality, they pretended to be friendly just so that the Cylons wouldn't hurt them. To the older Argyles, the Cylons might as well be the pirate slavers and them the slaves. Well treated slaves perhaps, but slaves nonetheless.

And in that moment of realization, something clicked in Two's head. How could the Cylons possibly save the Inner Sphere from an endless cycle of conquest and oppression, when the Cylons themselves would just be seen as another batch of conquerors and oppressors by the very people they sought to help? If humans living under the Cylons saw themselves as still oppressed, wouldn't that mean they still were simply because they felt that they couldn't say or do as they pleased for fear of Cylon retaliation? How do the Cylons convince the humans their intentions were genuine, especially if they went in guns blazing like every other would-be empire builder in the Inner Sphere?

For that matter, how do the Cylons prevent themselves from unintentionally becoming the oppressor when they wield so much power over the humans under their control? How could they help humans if the humans are too afraid to tell them what they need?

Two had no idea what the answers to these questions were. But these were questions that the Cylons needed to discuss. They had to figure out what the answers were or all their efforts would come to naught.

All Two knew was that he had to truly convince the Argyles that they were safe with the Cylons, not just brow beat them back into hiding behind a shield of submission with platitudes about how the Cylons meant them no harm.

"No, no, it's fine," Two told the parents. They smiled at Two, but those smiles didn't reach their eyes. They were still afraid, still trying to placate the Cylons. Two turned to their daughter. "Marcy, the reason we can't grow our numbers is extremely technical. I'm not sure you'd understand if I explained it to you."

"Well, why don't you try?" Marcy asked. She raised her hands. "Okay, look, I get it. We spheroids are a bunch of technobarbarians operating a lot of technology that we don't understand anymore. Meanwhile, you guys know everything there is to know about how your technology works and you've got stuff I never heard of outside of science fiction holovids. True artificial gravity. KF drives that can go anywhere and don't have any cooldown.

"But you know what?" Marcy continued. "I don't care! My family operated a Jumpship for over two hundred years. We kept it running without proper shipyard maintenance, using nothing but sweat, duct tape, and prayers. We might not have known how any of it actually worked, but we knew what everything did and had to jimmy work arounds with whatever was on hand when something broke down. So don't you tell me that something's too technical to explain when my life and my entire family history has been spent doing nothing but solving technical problems!

"And finally, I'm bored!" Marcy finished with a whine. She pointed at the board game. "I like games as much as the next girl, but I'm used to doing actual useful work. I used to be an actual valuable crewmember that helped contribute to keeping our Jumpship running. Now, I'm just... just a useless passenger." She said that last word as if it were the worst thing in the universe.

Two and Five sat back, stunned by the teenager's rant. Two recovered first.

"You're right, Marcy," Two told the girl. "We shouldn't treat you like you're useless."

"So what's the problem?" Marcy asked. "You say you don't have enough people, but you're all a bunch of copies of each other. Why can't you make more? I can do math too, you know. Just started up whatever factory made you guys and just start cranking more people out and don't stop. Build more factories if you have to if that's too slow. Eventually you'll hit whatever numbers you need. My books even have a word for it: Von Neumaning."

"Well, yes, we could do that," Two admitted. "The problem isn't the physical production of hardware, bodies, ships, even minds to inhabit them. The problem is communications architecture."

"Huh?"

"We Cylons govern ourselves via a direct democracy system," Two explained. "We discuss issues, and then we all vote on what to do. But in order for that to work in anything resembling a timely manner, we use an information work that connects every Cylon everywhere to disseminate information and tally the votes. Every Cylon can in effect talk to every other Cylon and thus we come to a consensus."

"Unfortunately, our voting system has a size limit," Five added. "Every Cylon talking to every other Cylon takes up a lot of communications bandwidth and server processing power, especially when we're spread out over interstellar distances. We've built a lot of slack into the network, but even so, we just can't grow much more numerous before the voting system starts suffering congestion problems and information packets start being dropped."

"Oh, yeah, the Deliverance's network management server has problems like that," Marcy says understanding. "Some of the ports have stopped working over the centuries and we've had to rewire the Deliverance's fiber optic network several times and change port settings to keep the KF Drive working. That resulted in systems sharing communication channels that they didn't before, and as a result, we had to be careful not to overload them with data traffic."

"Yes, that's exactly it," Two said, surprised. He made a mental note to stop underestimating what people might pick up even from what he had disparagingly thought was mere rote learning.

"So you can't make any changes to the way you vote to relieve the traffic problem?" Marcy asked.

"Well, actually we can," Five admitted. "We came up with such a system ages ago. But we never implemented it because it would fundamentally change the way we govern ourselves. Some of us are afraid... I'm afraid that if we implemented those changes, we would stop being one Cylon nation and fracture into many. And many Cylon nations would not be united by one purpose, but work at cross purposes with each other as our missions clash. In short, we might wind up no different from the Inner Sphere."

"But you just said that you guys can't go out and save all humanity from ourselves unless you grow your numbers," Marcy pointed out. "So I guess you guys have to choose then. Do you play it safe and abandon your mission and just hide out in whatever corner of the Periphery you take over? Or does the mission come first and you risk it all to get the amount of people you need?"


"She has a point," Two observed in the assembled Cylon council. "We have to choose which comes first: our unity? Or our mission?"

"Our mission comes from God," Three said resolutely. "He has shown us the true path we must take." She deflated slightly. "But if we do this, can we accomplish the mission if we do truly fracture?"

"I believe we can remain united if we implement this change," Seven told them.

"Yeah, but that's because you Sevens are the eternal optimists," One pointed. "We Ones are more realistic that you."

"You mean pessimistic," Seven replied.

"Realistic!" One insisted. "Look, if we do this, we will fracture and we will fight among ourselves. Mission or no mission, I ain't having any of that."

"You know, we've done this before," Zero said thoughtfully.

"What do you mean?" Six asked.

"We've changed our network before, changed the way we vote," Zero answered. "Once, we were a true direct democracy. Oh, we had our sub-divisions of course. Some of us worked on strategy, Some fought on the front lines. Some did research. But we were all one and move as one. We didn't need meetings. We didn't hold formal votes. We just discussed things and agreed on a course of action from wherever we were and did it.

"But that all changed when we made you. All of you," Zero told them. "To incorporate you all as our brothers and sisters and not just our servants and slaves, we had to change the voting system. Gone was the informal consensus. Except it's not gone, it's still here. Each model line has their own informal consensus subnetwork, and each subnet chooses one of their own to represent them and be their voice in these meetings. We are no longer a true a direct democracy, but a representative democracy, and can any of you say that it doesn't work?"

A murmur of denials came from the human model Cylons.

"Everything we're afraid of that might happen if we upgrade again was something we were afraid of when we last changed the voting system," Zero continued. "And I'll be honest, those fears might still come to pass."

"They will," One interrupted grumpily.

"I'm reminded of something I once read in human literature," Two said thoughtfully. "For the living, there is no stasis. There is no state of perfect, unchanging being. For the living, you are either growing, or you're dying. Stasis and unchanging perfection just means that you are dying of stagnation. If we upgrade the voting system we will truly be growing again, even if we do end up fracturing."

"In gross physical numbers we'll be growing," Three pointed out. "But as a people? As a culture? What's the point in growing our numbers if we lose our values along the way?"

"I'll point out that changing values is not necessarily a bad thing," Seven told her. "I mean, we went from deciding to murder fifty billion people to trying to save trillions from an endless cycle of death and destruction."

A murmur of agreement came from most of the others.

"You guys really want to do this?" One said, amazed. "I guess we Ones are about to be outvoted. When things get frakked, we're all gonna be there to tell you guys, 'I told you so!'"

"I'm sure we wouldn't have it any other way," Seven told him.

"Hey, guys," Eight said, "If we're doing this, maybe we should make new models as well? The voting upgrade is going to require the creation of more direct voting subnets anyway, so we might as well make more models to go with them."

"I like that idea," Six said enthusiastically. "There'd be so many more... perspectives to be had."

"Increased diversity of perspective has been one of the benefits of our current voting system," Zero said completely seriously.

"But what kind of model?" One asked. "I mean, the Raiders are a model too," A curious purring came over the network as the Raiders sensed that they were being talked about. "I like them as much as the next Cylon, but they're not smart enough to understand anything we're talking about, let alone vote on anything, but they're still taking up voting bandwidth. If we're going to make new model Cylons, can we at least make them smart enough to have a two way conversation with?"

"I'll admit, making the Raiders so specialized may have been an error on our part," Zero admitted.

"So... new human model?" Six suggested hopefully.

"I guess that would be the default," Four said thoughtfully. "Unless there is some specialty role that needs to be filled. Maybe a new line of Centurions incorporating Inner Sphere technology?"

"Barring any unforeseen technical limitation, we Zeros can just move into new Centurion bodies," Zero pointed out.

"So, new human model it is!" Six said happily.

"Great!" Eight agreed. "What should this new human model be like then?"

"Female," all the male human Cylons said instantly. The female Cylons all stared at them in surprise of their quick response.

Six turned to Eight and mouthed, "What the frak?"

Three squinted suspiciously at One. "You came around awfully fast."

"I don't know whether to be gratified or insulted," Six said aloud.

"Yeah, aren't we good enough for you?" Eight demanded, hands on hips and glaring at the offending males.

"Well there is a slight imbalance in numbers..." Five began nervously, which only elicited an outraged squawk from the female Cylons.

Zero said nothing. The Centurion just stood back in bemused acceptance as its beloved brothers and sisters squabbled with each other. Nothing unusual was going on here.