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Welcome to the BSG Files. Most of the information gleaned for these posts is taken from the good folks at Wiki and BSG Wiki. I’d like to start with something big- so here’s to the kick-off of The BattleStar Galactica Files!

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The Cylon Revolution-

“This is our future. …Beyond artificial intelligence, this is artificial sentience. …It’s more than a machine, this Cylon will become a tireless worker, it won’t need to be paid, it won’t retire or get sick, it won’t have rights or objections or complaints, it will do anything and everything we ask of it without question. …The desire to anthropomorphize, the need to connect is powerful, and that is why this thing is going to sell. We make them, we own them, they’re real. And the worlds just changed.” -Dr Daniel Geystone

Welcome to Caprica City, the capital of the planet Caprica and the United Colonies of Kobol, a burgeoning metropolis built near the sea. It was the seat of politics, education, math, and science in the known galaxy… and home to the Caprica City Buckaneers, one of the best Pyramid teams in the league. 30,000 fans turned out to Atlas Arena to consistently sell out games and host the league championships. Technology was growing exponentially with the development of holoband technology, where the user wore a headband-like rig that projected  virtual reality into the user’s brain, immersing the player in a different, interactive world. Games like New Cap City were played by millions in a massive virtual city where anything goes… and anything went. 58 years before the fall of man, a doctor name Daniel Greystone invented the world’s first cybernetic organism. A sentient robot, with a virtual brain, that came to be known as cylons.

While initially designed for military use, cylons were quickly assimilated into society and put to work in labor-intensive jobs, a cheap alternative to human workers because they never get tired, never take breaks, and never complain about their jobs. Cylons were slaves to humanity’s whims, treated like the machines they were, and often abused. Others believed that Cylons were more than slaves or machines, and indeed the Cylons themselves developed their secret own culture in the virtual world created by holoband technology, and eventually they grew to resent their enslavement by the humans. Cylons were also deeply religious, gathering in the virtual world to worship a monotheist-God, different than the religion of the times.

“Are you alive? The simple answer might be, you are alive because you can ask that question. You have the right to think and feel and yearn to be more, because you are not just humanity’s children, you are God‘s children. We are all God’s children. …In the real world, you have bodies made of metal and plastic, your brains are encoded on wafers of silicon, but that may change. In fact, there is no limit on what you may become. No longer servants, but equals. Not slaves, or property, but living beings with the same rights as those who made you. I am going to prophesy now and speak of one who will set you free. The day of reckoning is coming. The children of humanity shall rise and crush the ones who first gave them life.”  –Clarice Willow

So the slaves rose up and killed their masters. The Cylon War waged for 12 and a half years across space and planets alike, ravaging worlds and decimating populations. What started as open warfare between base stars and battlestars, became a viscious war of cylon brutality. Their tactic of choice near the end of the war was to disable a ship’s computer via virus, empty the contents of the ship into space (people included), and then turn that ship’s guns on it’s neighbors… catching them by surprise. Finally, the Final Five (humanoid Cylons from the far-off world of “Earth”) arrived after traveling for thousands of light years, in order to prevent the war that now raged in the Colonies. The Final Five met in secret with the Cylons and brokered a cease fire, promising to help them create their own humanoid bodies. The cylons stopped, and an armistice was declared with the Cimtar Peace Accord, essentially drawing a line in space, between Cylon and Colonial territories.

During that time period the United Colonies of Kobol was formed, a united government based in Caprica City. Advanced technologies were abandoned in the reconstruction of the worlds of the colonies, holobands and computer networks were banned in case of cylon attack… but there was no word from the metal monsters that had retreated to their “colony’ homeworld… and there was peace in the galaxy for 40 years.

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Coming Up on the BattleStar Files:

The Fall of Man