Daniel Graystone

From Battlestar Wiki, the free, open content Battlestar Galactica encyclopedia and episode guide
Daniel Graystone
Daniel Graystone

Name

{{{name}}}
Age
Colony Caprica
Birth place {{{birthplace}}}
Birth Name {{{birthname}}}
Birth Date {{{birthdate}}}
Callsign
Nickname {{{nickname}}}
Introduced Caprica pilot
Death
Parents
Siblings
Children Zoe Graystone
Marital Status Married to Amanda Graystone
Family Tree View
Role Computer engineer
Founder and CEO of Graystone Industries
Owner of the Caprica Buccaneers
Creator of the Cylons.
Rank
Serial Number {{{serial}}}
Portrayed by Eric Stoltz[1]
Daniel Graystone is a Cylon
Daniel Graystone is a Final Five Cylon
Daniel Graystone is a Human/Cylon Hybrid
Daniel Graystone is an Original Series Cylon
Related Media
@ BW Media
Additional Information
[[Image:|200px|Daniel Graystone]]

Dr. Daniel Graystone is a brilliant and wealthy Caprican computer engineer, and creator of the Cylons. He is also the founder and CEO of Graystone Industries, inventor of the holoband, and owner of the Caprica Buccaneers pyramid team franchise 58 years before The Fall.

Early Life[edit]

Not much is known about Graystone's childhood. At a young age, he began technological experiments in his parent's garage and dreamed of owning the Caprica Buccaneers. He met Amanda, his future wife, at a time in her life when she was recovering from serious psychological trauma. Daniel proved to be an important source of emotional stability (CAP: "End of Line"). With Amanda, Daniel had a daughter, Zoe. Daniel's first years of family life were financially and professionally difficult, and were marred by a fire that destroyed the family's first home. Eventually, Daniel would secure a contract with the Microcap company, beginning the upward climb of his career (CAP: "There Is Another Sky," "Ghosts in the Machine").

Corporate Success[edit]

Graystone eventually founded a technology corporation on Caprica that pioneered the development of the holoband, a user interface technology that allows for seemingly fully immersive virtual reality. The success of the technology made Graystone a celebrity scientist, frequently appearing on television. At the same time, his company began contracting with the Caprican government to develop technologies for military application, the most prominent of which was the U-87 Cyber Combat Unit. This project aimed at replacing human soldiers with cybernetic units installed with artificial intelligence.

While the development of the cybernetic body was successful, Graystone had considerably more difficulty with the programming of a true artificial intelligence and its related hardware. The project had originally been planned to take five years, but the increasing number of prototype failures led the program falling five years behind schedule and five hundred million cubits over budget. Frustrated with Graystone's failures, the Caprican government threatened to cancel its contract with the company and take the project to the Vergis Corporation, Graystone's Tauronese rival that had announced the successful development of a meta-cognitive processor that could serve as an artificial intelligence.

Personal Tragedy[edit]

Graystone suffered a personal loss when his daughter Zoe was killed in a suicide bombing aboard the Lev in Caprica City. However, he later discovered that before her death, Zoe had developed a method of uploading personal data onto the holoband that resulted in the creation of a holographic avatar of herself. Graystone believed it would be possible to use the U-87 prototype's body, combined with the processor developed by Vergis, to upload Zoe's avatar and allow her to live in the real world.

As a result, Graystone contacted Joseph Adama, a lawyer whose daughter and wife had also been killed in the terrorist bombing. Graystone asked Adama to use his ties to the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate on Tauron to steal the Vergis processor; in exchange, Graystone would reconstruct the personalities of Adama's daughter and possibly his wife. While Adama acquired the processor and handed it over to Graystone, he later became disgusted with the idea of resurrecting the personalities of the dead, leaving Graystone to pursue the matter himself.

Undaunted, Daniel tried to recreate Zoe as a robot, implanting Zoe's avatar in a U-87 unit. While the experiment initially seemed to work, with the robot calling Graystone "daddy" and taking a few steps forward, the avatar's data quickly became corrupted and the robot collapsed. Despite Graystone's efforts to recover his daughter's avatar, the data was apparently irretrievable.

Creation of the Cylons[edit]

Despite his failure to bring back his daughter, Graystone uses the stolen processor to perfect the military prototype for the government project. Dubbing the unit a Cybernetic Life-form Node (CYLON), Graystone presents the completed unit to an impressed group of government officials. Graystone Industries was officially awarded a contract for the production of one hundred thousand U-87s (CAP: Caprica pilot).

This success was short-lived, when it quickly became apparent that only the original U-87 prototype would function sufficiently; as described by Dr. Cyrus Xander, Daniel's assistant, attempts to produce copies or to transplant the stolen MCP into other robot bodies produced "morons" (CAP: "Rebirth"). For long weeks, Daniel and his company would struggle in vain to find an explanation for the problem. He briefly (and correctly) suspected that Zoe's avatar was still in the robot, but attempts meant to force Zoe to identify herself failed. Faced with the plummeting price of Graystone Industries stock, a dwindling supply of cash, and an accelerated production schedule forced onto him by a suspicious military, Daniel decided to purge any anomalies from the MCP and to start with "clean" MCPs. The Cylon, however, killed a Graystone Industries employee and escaped from its laboratory before the procedure could be performed (CAP: "End of Line").

References[edit]

  1. "Stoltz Joins Caprica Cast", SciFi Wire, 12 May 2008. Retrieved on 14 May 2008.