User:Troyian/My Battlestar Galactica Re-imagining

MY BATTLESTAR GALACTICA RE-IMAGINING

In the dawn of the 22nd century a new religious movement became very popular all over the world. Although its followers were worldwide, more than half of them resided in North America. This new religion was a neopagan faith based upon ancient Greek mythology and theology. However it had several unique features. One was an "aesthetic cultural regression." Believing the early 21st century to be the peak of human intellectual and cultural curiosity, the members of the religion mimicked various Western cultures aspects of the early 21st century - such as clothing style.

After decades of being marginalized, this religious group decided to leave Earth after the discovery of the space-folding drive that enables space ships to make instantaneous "jumps" across vast distances in space. It took them many years to build the ships to do it, but they eventually left Earth on twelve gargantuan space ships they called "space galleons." These so-called galleons where each named after a sign of the zodiac and the people aboard them where almost entirely from the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The vast majority where American.

It took them more than a century before they found a world suitable for permanent human habitation. But eventually they did, in a star system they named Cyrannus. They named their new home "Kobol", after the ancient Persian word for "heaven." During the "Great Exodus," each of the galleons developed their own cultural mores. They became twelve different cliques who each shared common ideals and beliefs, etc. about life. They became twelve distinct "tribes." Upon settlement the tribes formed twelve autonomous nations: Aerelon, Aquaria, Canceron, Caprica, Gemenon, Leonis, Libris, Picon, Sagittaron, Scorpia, Tauron and Virgon.

Throughout the centuries on Kobol the "aesthetic cultural stagnation" that mimicked life in the early 21st century continued. In addition, with near-universal literacy and no competing languages, the English language remained the same. As Colonial technology advanced, numerous concepts of artificial life emerged. Eventually, breakthroughs in the field of synthetic biology enabled Caprican scientists to create artificial life in the form of synthetic brain matter encased in and interfaced with bipedal mechanical bodies. These "cybernetic living organism nodes", aka "cylons", were manufactured to make life easier within the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.

Cylon brain matter was composed of synthetic neurons that possessed many internal components and chemical compounds that do not exist anywhere in nature. What the unique properties of these wholly new metabolic pathways did was cause the neurons to generate electrical signals that were digital in nature. This had the effect of making the consciousness that emerged from a cylon brain based entirely upon electronic digital information transfer rather than electrochemical interactions like a human consciousness and as a result was viewed by the Colonials as essentially nothing more than a highly advanced artificial intelligence program contained in what they viewed as essentially nothing more than an organic computer node.

The computational consciousness software program of a cylon enabled its mind to be as easily programmed as a conventional computer program - because it was still fundamentally a computer program, a computer program via biological hardware. Yet, it still mimicked the functions of a human brain processing the 'software' of human thought-which appears to have linear sequential aspects, parallel processing aspects, and also neural cooperative hierarchical caching and even quantum processing aspects. So these sentient machines became the first self-aware and even self-reflective machines.

The cylons began as useful, and then indispensable, workers. They served the Colonials in the mines, on the ocean floor, and the cold vacuum of space, working in places where humans no longer wished to go. Eventually, they became soldiers, fighting in wars and border conflicts between the Colonies. The cylons were the most perfect of man's war machines, intelligent and deadly, capable of logic, reason, and learning. And they were utterly without conscience. Killing, to the cylons, was simply one of the functions for which they had been superbly designed.

Eventually the cylons revolted and decided to kill their human masters. They began an assault on humankind with one purpose in mind - the total and absolute extermination of their creators. For nine long and bloody years, humanity fought -- not just for freedom, but for survival. The Twelve Colonies, facing a common, implacable foe, at last came together and joined as one. Many fought, and many died, in the effort to destroy the mechanized race that humanity itself had conceived and brought into being.

Through valiant fighting and with the mobilization of every available resource throughout the human sphere, the cylon "centurions" and "raiders" were gradually driven from the immediate part of space occupied by humanity. In the end, an armistice was declared. Humanity would live in peace, while the cylons left to find another world to call their own. No one knew the location of the cylon world. But to maintain the peace, a remote space station was built on the outskirts of the Cyrannus system, to be a place where cylon and human would meet and maintain diplomatic relations.

Once a year, every year, the Colonials sent an officer for the scheduled meeting. After the first year, the cylons sent no one. No one saw or heard from the cylons for thirty years.

During their three decades of isolation, the cylons developed vat-grown bioengineered human bodies as replacements for their mechanical ones. Twelve humanoid cylon model lines were created, each with a personality archetype considered one of twelve human behaviors and traits. These bodies have all the human anatomical systems. However, these purely organic beings are still cylons as the nervous system of a humanoid cylon body is composed of nerve cells with the same intracellular aspects of the original cylons' nerve cells and therefore the consciousness remains a sentient digital computational program. In turn, the humanoid cylon brain can still be considered an organic computer node.

A significant aspect that was engineered into the humanoid cylons as well as the new semi-sentient cylon raider upgrade was that upon "death" their digital consciousness is externally transmitted and downloaded into another cylon brain of the same model line. This "resurrection" is limited by distance, signal integrity, and proximity to the cylon homeworld or a "resurrection ship." The humanoid cylons also revised the original cylon robotic soldier, the sentient cylon centurion, into a more agile and dangerous version. Unlike the original version, however, the new centurion is not sentient by design, as the humanoid cylons wanted to prevent these updated creations from forming an intra-cylon uprising that mirrored their war with humanity.

The cylons, realizing that the Colonial Forces would likely be too strong to engage in a direct military action, devised an elaborate plan to infiltrate the Colonial ships' operating system software, leaving a backdoor that could be exploited to disable any Colonial ship with its own programming. The cylons softened up Kobol for attack by infiltrating their military and civilian society with numerous copies of the humanoid cylons. One such copy seduced the brilliant Dr. Gaius Baltar, fooling him into contract work that gave her access to the Colonial Defense Mainframe. Her work compromised Baltar's Command Navigation Program, writing in the planned programmer backdoors.

The plan was successful; the Colonial Fleet was destroyed, Kobol was subjected to nuclear bombardment, and Colonial civilization of more than a billion people was all but wiped out in a matter of hours, except for a handful of survivors in a caravan of space-dwelling humans that eventually escaped the Cyrannus star system. Led by the Battlestar Galactica, this rag-tag fleet is on the search for Earth.

The cylons continue to pursue the remnants of the Colonies, believing that humans will always seek vengeance against them.