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Fic of doom Chapter Three
Chapter Three: Which Contains Even More Cylons
The tanks stretched into infinity, but Boomer knew that was an illusion. There were only about fifty tanks on this ship, as there were on others. She stepped up to one, looking at the Six it contained. She shouldn't be doing this. There was nothing that said this was a good idea. Then again, nothing really said it was a bad one, either.
It was easy to switch the tank over from stasis to revive, and she sat back on her heels, listening as the different nutrients and processes started up. In some ways, Cavil was right: they were machines.
Sure, they looked human, but what was underneath? Manufactured bodies, bits and pieces that weren't born. For a moment, Boomer shuddered, thinking about biological processes, the ways their bodies could fail that weren't even because of an outside agency. Then she quelled her thoughts, knowing they were useless, now. She liked being alive, she liked being herself, even if she sometimes wasn't sure what that meant.
The liquid in the tank made a shushing noise as the pump began draining it a little, moving it around to wake the sleeper inside.
Standing, Boomer moved to lean over, watching the Six's eyes as they started to flicker. The muscles in her jaw tensed and Boomer reached down, catching the Six's hand even before it broke the surface of the resurection fluid. "Shh. Shh, it's all right."
"Killed us. Killed us all," the Six gasped before her eyes opened fully, and she found Boomer there. She froze. "Boomer." Her neck moved, but no sound came out, as though she were expecting something horrible.
The Six was afraid of her. Boomer frowned, "Is it because of what I did? Voting against the other Eights?"
"Voting against model is wrong." The Six said, as though Caprica had never done such a thing.
They were getting off-subject. Boomer plunged ahead, hand still holding the Six's. "Do you have a name?"
A moment of silence passed, while the Six's blue eyes looked at Boomer carefully, as though she were weighing her answer against the inevitability of her own death. Then a short little breath escaped her and she breathed in again. "Sybil."
Boomer closed her eyes, thanking Ellen for being right in some way. "Good. That's good. Sybil, I'm going to need your help."
"My help?" Looking even more wary, Sybil pushed herself up in the tank, then paused before climbing out and standing on the floor, shivering a little. "How do you need my help?"
Grabbing a towel, Boomer handed it to her, then moved to the next tank, amused to find a Two inside. "Cavil is wrong. I may not be human, but we live and we change and we are people, of some sort."
"Strange words coming from a sleeper agent," Sybil said, her tone mocking.
"Possibly." Kneeling, Boomer started the Two's tank into its resurrection phase. "But at least I'm trying to do something now."
"So what's your plan?"
Looking up at the towel-clad Six, Boomer felt a smirk stretch her lips, "We wake everyone up, and then we kill Cavil. It shouldn't be hard, he doesn't like more than one of himself being aware, and he mostly spends his time taunting Ellen."
Sybil frowned, her gaze distant. "Ellen?"
"Tigh. She's one of the final five." Boomer didn't bother with the capitals. They weren't special, after all. Merely as human as the Cylons were.
"You're frakking kidding me."
"Sometimes, I wish I was." Boomer leaned over the Two. "Wakey-wakey, Two."
The Two blinked at her, then grinned a little. "I wondered how long you would be, sister."
"Do you have a name?"
He blinked again, then shook his head, "I'm a Two."
As though that explained everything. Boomer snorted, "You can still be a Two. But I'm calling you Bob from now on. Sybil, start getting that side started. We'll need to hurry before Cavil notices that these tanks are active."
"Is he monitoring them?"
"I don't know that he's not," Boomer replied.
Sybil nodded and turned to take care of her side of the room. Boomer dropped a towel on the rim of Bob's tank and moved to the next one. It might take time, and they might not all agree, or trust her. But for now, they had a workable plan and a chance. Boomer wasn't going to lie to herself: taking Cavil down would be a lot harder than a few polite words to a Six to get her working and on-board.
-=-
-=-
Caprica sometimes thought they had forgotten her. Locked in a cell, with only her thoughts for company, she sometimes felt as remote as if she were floating in space, dead and gone. Being air-locked might be preferable to endless days where her only company was her distorted reflection in the glass. And him.
The man that no one else could see had been a frequent visitor, in the beginning. But now he seemed to find her boring.
God. She was boring. She had no life, no conversation left in her.
And then one day, the one-eyed colonel started visiting her. At first, he would simply watch her, his eye burning with something she couldn't fathom. Usually for only a minute or two and then he would stomp back out, leaving the marines to watch her through the glass and their cameras.
There were days when Caprica wondered what would happen to her here. She'd heard enough of the marines joke about the treatment of her sister Six, Gina, they'd called her. There'd been a sort of malevolent under-current when they talked about her, and the way some of the marines looked at her made her skin crawl. She tried not to think about that, tried not to let them know that even without Gina's memories, she still wanted to scour her skin clean from their gazes.
It comforted her to know that the Galactica marines seemed to find that treatment objectionable. Many of them had been Sharon Valerii's guards. Many of them had stood with Athena against the darkness of battle. They didn't know quite what to make of Caprica, but they didn't view her as just a thing to be destroyed and desecrated.
For that, she could also be grateful.
The colonel's visits began to lengthen. Sometimes, he would bark words at her. Questions she couldn't answer. Other times, he seemed to be searching for something he couldn't articulate, until his anger got the better of him and he stomped out.
Finally, he broke her out of her reticence. It was an insult she couldn't escape, and she lashed out, her fist knocked him down.
The marines reacted as expected, grabbing her, pushing her back against the wall (for a brief instant, she thought of Gina, but they weren't holding her like that, merely restraining her from moving to attack their colonel again).
"Hold!" Climbing to his feet, colonel Tigh glared at them, "Release the prisoner and get the frak out of here."
Looking confused, they did, moving slowly, as though expecting him to change his mind.
Caprica stayed where she was, watching him.
"How do you do it?" he demanded, his voice harsh, "How do you pretend to be human when you're just a machine?"
"By being a machine." Pushing away from the wall, Caprica moved away from him, sitting down on the chair they'd given her. A concession for all of the question and answer sessions, back when their marines seemed to care about prying information she didn't have from her. "What do you want, colonel?"
He didn't answer, and the door almost slammed when he closed it.
Caprica relaxed slightly.
"How very interesting." The man in her head murmured, sliding into view as he walked the path Tigh had just covered. "You are a machine of course, darling. But a very clever and attractive one. I wonder if that's why he keeps coming back."
There was nothing she could think of to say that was scathing and dismissive enough, so Caprica merely ignored him, fingers resting across each other.
Perhaps the marines would be back to questioning her tomorrow. She wondered what else she wouldn't be able to tell them.
-=-
Natalie understood certain kinds of power. Most of the Sixes did, it was built into them, the way that a flash of skin or slight smile could corrupt a human being who was attracted to their forms. She also understood that waking alone and naked might not bother everyone, but it could bother some. Which was why she had Leoben wake a Four and a Five, shepherding them through their sense of dislocation and mistrust until they were dressed.
"Why did you wake us?" The Four's voice was even, his eyes studying her, but revealing nothing. He was waiting.
"To talk to you. We are at a crossroads, brothers." Natalie folded her hands in front of her on the table. "The models are splintering, fracturing. We no longer speak as one unanimous voice."
Both of them frowned.
A flicker of a smile crossed her lips, then was gone. "We are individuals, and we can die forever, out here. We're stranded, this ship won't go anywhere without equipment that we don't have. And we have no one to blame but ourselves."
"Unity is paramount, is essential," the Five said, his tone disapproving. "It's a way of life."
"But it's a stifling way of life." Prudence said, coming into the room from behind Natalie. She moved to take the seat next to Natalie's.
Her appearance startled Natalie, but she should have asked her to come. She'd been short-sighted; having an Eight, a Two and a Six together might help matters. The smell of engine grease made Natalie turn to look at her, "Prudence?" She wondered if this meeting should be cut short to deal with whatever crisis had occured.
The Eight waved a hand, then leaned forward, her hands clean, but splotches remained on her sleeve. "Gentlemen. Haven't you ever wanted to be more than you were? To know that you, personally, would leave something of yourself behind? That your accomplishments wouldn't be credited to simply a model number that no one would remember in a thousand years?"
"We're Cylons." As though that explained everything.
Natalie laughed, "Of course we're Cylons. But we should be people, too."
The Five frowned harder, "What are you trying to say?"
"That we should be individuals. We should make our own choices."
His eyes cleared, and he nodded, "Right. Well, we do that. We all vote."
As a model, as a single entity that didn't disagree with itself. Natalie wondered if she could really feel a headache coming on, or if the Five was being dense on purpose. "Do you have a name?"
Prudence snorted, "Fives and Fours don't believe in names, unless they're going undercover."
"That's not true," the Four said, looking sad. He shifted in his chair, looking at the Five for a moment before he turned back to the two women. "I was one of the Simons working in a farm. I liked that name."
"Did you share memories, or were you really there?" Prudence challenged him.
There was some tension between them, suddenly, and Natalie wanted to frown at her. But this seemed to be important to Prudence, with the way her hands were gripping the edge of the table.
Simon's face settled into deeper lines, as though he were remembering something he didn't enjoy. "It was my first death. I'd never felt such... such pain. I'd watched so many men and women die, but myself..." His eyes cleared a little, and he met Natalie's gaze, ignoring Prudence. "My carotid artery was punctured. I bled out in what felt like an eternity, but it was barely nine minutes."
"I think we've gotten off the subject," the Five said, his voice sounding irritated. Natalie decided to call him Anton in her head. "What is it you want, Six?"
"My name is Natalie, and if you're going to be that way about it, I think I'll just call you Anton."
Which was a ridiculously childish response, but trying to ride herd over two Cylons who weren't on her side for the 'good of the community' was grating on her nerves. She wasn't even sure why she'd tried. It wasn't like they were capable of moving past their logic and hatred of the humans.
Simon chuckled, "Anton does fit you, Five." He looked at Prudence, "Who are you?"
Looking uncomfortable, Prudence nevertheless answered him. "I'm Prudence."
"Did she name you, as well?"
"Yes."
Five smiled, as though her answer were a triumph, of sorts. "Then you didn't choose to change yourself. She chose. How is that any different?"
Her discomfort gone, Prudence smiled at him. "It isn't, I suppose. Except that I am not Punchline, Jo, Cassie, Danielle or Emma. And those are only the beginning. There are going to be more Eights with names, more individuals stepping out of this idea that we as a people should remain simply model numbers, with no place of our own."
It made Natalie smile a little, herself. This wasn't something that was going to be as easy as Prudence made it sound. Even among the Sixes, individuality was a difficult concept for them to understand. Caprica had started it, Natalie had watched her, taking the other Six's measure and trying to emulate while still being herself. But there were others, like Sabine, who would never enjoy their individuality. Who remembered too much of the horrors of war.
"For the Cylon to survive, we have to adapt and evolve, brothers." Leoben spoke at last, as though he'd been waiting for the right moment.
Perhaps he had been, guided by whatever he was believing in at the moment, whatever twist of fate he and the hybrid had sensed. Natalie wasn't sure how much she had ever believed in the hybrid. But the likelihood of her knowing more of their fates than they knew themselves wasn't impossible.
-=-
chapter four
The tanks stretched into infinity, but Boomer knew that was an illusion. There were only about fifty tanks on this ship, as there were on others. She stepped up to one, looking at the Six it contained. She shouldn't be doing this. There was nothing that said this was a good idea. Then again, nothing really said it was a bad one, either.
It was easy to switch the tank over from stasis to revive, and she sat back on her heels, listening as the different nutrients and processes started up. In some ways, Cavil was right: they were machines.
Sure, they looked human, but what was underneath? Manufactured bodies, bits and pieces that weren't born. For a moment, Boomer shuddered, thinking about biological processes, the ways their bodies could fail that weren't even because of an outside agency. Then she quelled her thoughts, knowing they were useless, now. She liked being alive, she liked being herself, even if she sometimes wasn't sure what that meant.
The liquid in the tank made a shushing noise as the pump began draining it a little, moving it around to wake the sleeper inside.
Standing, Boomer moved to lean over, watching the Six's eyes as they started to flicker. The muscles in her jaw tensed and Boomer reached down, catching the Six's hand even before it broke the surface of the resurection fluid. "Shh. Shh, it's all right."
"Killed us. Killed us all," the Six gasped before her eyes opened fully, and she found Boomer there. She froze. "Boomer." Her neck moved, but no sound came out, as though she were expecting something horrible.
The Six was afraid of her. Boomer frowned, "Is it because of what I did? Voting against the other Eights?"
"Voting against model is wrong." The Six said, as though Caprica had never done such a thing.
They were getting off-subject. Boomer plunged ahead, hand still holding the Six's. "Do you have a name?"
A moment of silence passed, while the Six's blue eyes looked at Boomer carefully, as though she were weighing her answer against the inevitability of her own death. Then a short little breath escaped her and she breathed in again. "Sybil."
Boomer closed her eyes, thanking Ellen for being right in some way. "Good. That's good. Sybil, I'm going to need your help."
"My help?" Looking even more wary, Sybil pushed herself up in the tank, then paused before climbing out and standing on the floor, shivering a little. "How do you need my help?"
Grabbing a towel, Boomer handed it to her, then moved to the next tank, amused to find a Two inside. "Cavil is wrong. I may not be human, but we live and we change and we are people, of some sort."
"Strange words coming from a sleeper agent," Sybil said, her tone mocking.
"Possibly." Kneeling, Boomer started the Two's tank into its resurrection phase. "But at least I'm trying to do something now."
"So what's your plan?"
Looking up at the towel-clad Six, Boomer felt a smirk stretch her lips, "We wake everyone up, and then we kill Cavil. It shouldn't be hard, he doesn't like more than one of himself being aware, and he mostly spends his time taunting Ellen."
Sybil frowned, her gaze distant. "Ellen?"
"Tigh. She's one of the final five." Boomer didn't bother with the capitals. They weren't special, after all. Merely as human as the Cylons were.
"You're frakking kidding me."
"Sometimes, I wish I was." Boomer leaned over the Two. "Wakey-wakey, Two."
The Two blinked at her, then grinned a little. "I wondered how long you would be, sister."
"Do you have a name?"
He blinked again, then shook his head, "I'm a Two."
As though that explained everything. Boomer snorted, "You can still be a Two. But I'm calling you Bob from now on. Sybil, start getting that side started. We'll need to hurry before Cavil notices that these tanks are active."
"Is he monitoring them?"
"I don't know that he's not," Boomer replied.
Sybil nodded and turned to take care of her side of the room. Boomer dropped a towel on the rim of Bob's tank and moved to the next one. It might take time, and they might not all agree, or trust her. But for now, they had a workable plan and a chance. Boomer wasn't going to lie to herself: taking Cavil down would be a lot harder than a few polite words to a Six to get her working and on-board.
-=-
-=-
Caprica sometimes thought they had forgotten her. Locked in a cell, with only her thoughts for company, she sometimes felt as remote as if she were floating in space, dead and gone. Being air-locked might be preferable to endless days where her only company was her distorted reflection in the glass. And him.
The man that no one else could see had been a frequent visitor, in the beginning. But now he seemed to find her boring.
God. She was boring. She had no life, no conversation left in her.
And then one day, the one-eyed colonel started visiting her. At first, he would simply watch her, his eye burning with something she couldn't fathom. Usually for only a minute or two and then he would stomp back out, leaving the marines to watch her through the glass and their cameras.
There were days when Caprica wondered what would happen to her here. She'd heard enough of the marines joke about the treatment of her sister Six, Gina, they'd called her. There'd been a sort of malevolent under-current when they talked about her, and the way some of the marines looked at her made her skin crawl. She tried not to think about that, tried not to let them know that even without Gina's memories, she still wanted to scour her skin clean from their gazes.
It comforted her to know that the Galactica marines seemed to find that treatment objectionable. Many of them had been Sharon Valerii's guards. Many of them had stood with Athena against the darkness of battle. They didn't know quite what to make of Caprica, but they didn't view her as just a thing to be destroyed and desecrated.
For that, she could also be grateful.
The colonel's visits began to lengthen. Sometimes, he would bark words at her. Questions she couldn't answer. Other times, he seemed to be searching for something he couldn't articulate, until his anger got the better of him and he stomped out.
Finally, he broke her out of her reticence. It was an insult she couldn't escape, and she lashed out, her fist knocked him down.
The marines reacted as expected, grabbing her, pushing her back against the wall (for a brief instant, she thought of Gina, but they weren't holding her like that, merely restraining her from moving to attack their colonel again).
"Hold!" Climbing to his feet, colonel Tigh glared at them, "Release the prisoner and get the frak out of here."
Looking confused, they did, moving slowly, as though expecting him to change his mind.
Caprica stayed where she was, watching him.
"How do you do it?" he demanded, his voice harsh, "How do you pretend to be human when you're just a machine?"
"By being a machine." Pushing away from the wall, Caprica moved away from him, sitting down on the chair they'd given her. A concession for all of the question and answer sessions, back when their marines seemed to care about prying information she didn't have from her. "What do you want, colonel?"
He didn't answer, and the door almost slammed when he closed it.
Caprica relaxed slightly.
"How very interesting." The man in her head murmured, sliding into view as he walked the path Tigh had just covered. "You are a machine of course, darling. But a very clever and attractive one. I wonder if that's why he keeps coming back."
There was nothing she could think of to say that was scathing and dismissive enough, so Caprica merely ignored him, fingers resting across each other.
Perhaps the marines would be back to questioning her tomorrow. She wondered what else she wouldn't be able to tell them.
-=-
Natalie understood certain kinds of power. Most of the Sixes did, it was built into them, the way that a flash of skin or slight smile could corrupt a human being who was attracted to their forms. She also understood that waking alone and naked might not bother everyone, but it could bother some. Which was why she had Leoben wake a Four and a Five, shepherding them through their sense of dislocation and mistrust until they were dressed.
"Why did you wake us?" The Four's voice was even, his eyes studying her, but revealing nothing. He was waiting.
"To talk to you. We are at a crossroads, brothers." Natalie folded her hands in front of her on the table. "The models are splintering, fracturing. We no longer speak as one unanimous voice."
Both of them frowned.
A flicker of a smile crossed her lips, then was gone. "We are individuals, and we can die forever, out here. We're stranded, this ship won't go anywhere without equipment that we don't have. And we have no one to blame but ourselves."
"Unity is paramount, is essential," the Five said, his tone disapproving. "It's a way of life."
"But it's a stifling way of life." Prudence said, coming into the room from behind Natalie. She moved to take the seat next to Natalie's.
Her appearance startled Natalie, but she should have asked her to come. She'd been short-sighted; having an Eight, a Two and a Six together might help matters. The smell of engine grease made Natalie turn to look at her, "Prudence?" She wondered if this meeting should be cut short to deal with whatever crisis had occured.
The Eight waved a hand, then leaned forward, her hands clean, but splotches remained on her sleeve. "Gentlemen. Haven't you ever wanted to be more than you were? To know that you, personally, would leave something of yourself behind? That your accomplishments wouldn't be credited to simply a model number that no one would remember in a thousand years?"
"We're Cylons." As though that explained everything.
Natalie laughed, "Of course we're Cylons. But we should be people, too."
The Five frowned harder, "What are you trying to say?"
"That we should be individuals. We should make our own choices."
His eyes cleared, and he nodded, "Right. Well, we do that. We all vote."
As a model, as a single entity that didn't disagree with itself. Natalie wondered if she could really feel a headache coming on, or if the Five was being dense on purpose. "Do you have a name?"
Prudence snorted, "Fives and Fours don't believe in names, unless they're going undercover."
"That's not true," the Four said, looking sad. He shifted in his chair, looking at the Five for a moment before he turned back to the two women. "I was one of the Simons working in a farm. I liked that name."
"Did you share memories, or were you really there?" Prudence challenged him.
There was some tension between them, suddenly, and Natalie wanted to frown at her. But this seemed to be important to Prudence, with the way her hands were gripping the edge of the table.
Simon's face settled into deeper lines, as though he were remembering something he didn't enjoy. "It was my first death. I'd never felt such... such pain. I'd watched so many men and women die, but myself..." His eyes cleared a little, and he met Natalie's gaze, ignoring Prudence. "My carotid artery was punctured. I bled out in what felt like an eternity, but it was barely nine minutes."
"I think we've gotten off the subject," the Five said, his voice sounding irritated. Natalie decided to call him Anton in her head. "What is it you want, Six?"
"My name is Natalie, and if you're going to be that way about it, I think I'll just call you Anton."
Which was a ridiculously childish response, but trying to ride herd over two Cylons who weren't on her side for the 'good of the community' was grating on her nerves. She wasn't even sure why she'd tried. It wasn't like they were capable of moving past their logic and hatred of the humans.
Simon chuckled, "Anton does fit you, Five." He looked at Prudence, "Who are you?"
Looking uncomfortable, Prudence nevertheless answered him. "I'm Prudence."
"Did she name you, as well?"
"Yes."
Five smiled, as though her answer were a triumph, of sorts. "Then you didn't choose to change yourself. She chose. How is that any different?"
Her discomfort gone, Prudence smiled at him. "It isn't, I suppose. Except that I am not Punchline, Jo, Cassie, Danielle or Emma. And those are only the beginning. There are going to be more Eights with names, more individuals stepping out of this idea that we as a people should remain simply model numbers, with no place of our own."
It made Natalie smile a little, herself. This wasn't something that was going to be as easy as Prudence made it sound. Even among the Sixes, individuality was a difficult concept for them to understand. Caprica had started it, Natalie had watched her, taking the other Six's measure and trying to emulate while still being herself. But there were others, like Sabine, who would never enjoy their individuality. Who remembered too much of the horrors of war.
"For the Cylon to survive, we have to adapt and evolve, brothers." Leoben spoke at last, as though he'd been waiting for the right moment.
Perhaps he had been, guided by whatever he was believing in at the moment, whatever twist of fate he and the hybrid had sensed. Natalie wasn't sure how much she had ever believed in the hybrid. But the likelihood of her knowing more of their fates than they knew themselves wasn't impossible.
-=-
chapter four