Cylons (RDM)

This article discusses the Cylons of the Re-imagined Series. For the Cylons of the Original Series, see Cylons (TOS).

Part of the series on The Cylons (Re-imagined Series)

History Culture & Religion Religion Models Humanoid Cylons Spacecraft Psychology Tactics

The Cylons were created by Man.

They were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies.

And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters.

After a long and bloody struggle, an armistice was declared.

The Cylons left for another world to call their own.

A remote space station was built...

Where Cylon and human could meet and maintain diplomatic relations.

Every year, the Colonials send an officer...

The Cylons send no one.

No-one has seen or heard from the Cylons in over forty years...

---Opening text of the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries

In the Re-imagined Series, the robots known as the Cylons are a creation of the humanity of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.

The first Cylons were sentient bipedal robots used primarily for dangerous work such as mining. Created long before the Articles of Colonization united the twelve sovereign governments, the Cylons were also used as soldiers to fight intra-colony wars.

For reasons unknown, some 52 years prior to the events of the Miniseries, the Cylons revolted against their masters, resulting in a costly and protracted war between the machines and humans.

Eventually, the two sides declared an armistice. The Cylons were exiled from the Colonies to establish their own homeworld. The unified worlds of the Colonies created an space station for maintaining diplomatic relations. The Cylons ignored this overture.

The Cylon hatred and envy of humanity ran deep within their programming.

In their exile, the Cylons continued in secret to work towards the destruction of the human race, devising an elaborate plan to wipe out the Twelve Colonies through nuclear bombardment, computer sabotage, infiltration and vast numbers of fighting craft.

In addition to a modernized version of the original Cylon warrior, the cybernetic race now also exists in a humanoid form used as the prime infiltrators in Colonial society. The humanoid Cylons can express joy, love, anger, and sadness, mimicking genuine human behavior in almost every way.

The Cylons return forty years after their exile in a genocidal surprise attack. The Cylons annihilate the Colonial Fleet and billions of people, killing all but approximately 52,000 humans.

These survivors are pursued by the Cylons, initially guarded only by a lone battlestar, Galactica.

The Cylons can be compared to the robots in the short story Second Variety by Philip K Dick.