Humanoid Cylons

Humanoid Cylons: There were thirteen different models in this class, divided into two groups: the Final Five (who should really be called the First Five) and the Significant 009

Seven. For the rest of this book we’ll be referring to the known twelve humanoid models as just Cylons,^k unless we need to specify one or the other.

Gaius Baltar with Cyclons Tory Foster and Six.

Final Five Cyclons Ellen and Saul Tigh

Eight and Six with four of the Final Five: Galen Tyrol, Tory Foster, Saul Tigh, and Sam Anders.

Cylons are sentient synthetic biological creatures, possessing all the attributes of life except evolution by natural selection. They have been designed to be so biochemically similar to the people of the Twelve Colonies that they can pass pretty stringent standardized medical tests without being detected. They have—or they have been programmed to behave as if they have—all the emotions, intelligence, and weaknesses of the people they were based on (something that pisses off the Cylon known as Brother John Cavil to no end).

The Final Five Cylons, the ones we know as Tory Foster, Ellen Tigh, Colonel Saul Tigh, Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol, and Ensign Samuel Anders, are the only survivors of the first generation of humanoid Cylons created by the inhabitants of the planet Kobol more than four thousand years before the destruction of the Twelve Colonies. These humanoid Cylons were able to breed, and eventually formed themselves into a thirteenth tribe called, appropriately enough, Cylon. This tribe of Cylons was on moderately good terms with their creators, but at some point in their history they found it advantageous to leave Kobol and seek their own planet, which they called Earth. They were destroyed two thousand years later in an all-out nuclear attack by the sentient Centurion-type robots they themselves had created. The Final Five, forewarned of the upcoming cataclysm by the same “angels” who later appeared to Dr. Gaius Baltar, Caprica Six, Captain Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, and perhaps others,^l managed to survive the attack and used a relativistic spacecraft to find their way to the Twelve Colonies, though this revelation comes from a rambling Sam Anders with a bullet in his brain, and could be considered of questionable veracity.

There, they found a situation similar to the one that had befallen their home planet: mechanical Cylon Centurions in the Twelve Colonies had turned on their creators and started a war against them. More importantly, these Centurions had begun to experiment with creating their own synthetic biological creatures. According to Ellen Tigh, she and the other Four agreed to help the Centurions to make humanoid Cylons if they would end the war against the Colonies. The result was the group of Cylons we call the Significant Seven.

All humanoid Cylons look, feel, sound, smell, and taste the same way we do, as evidenced by the number of Colonials who have had sex with Cylons^m without even realizing it. At least one model of Cylon, the one we know as Saul Tigh, can age. And probably most important for the overall arc of the show, Cylons can breed with Colonials.

And oh, how the Cylons are obsessed with sex! Sex infuses almost all of their interpersonal relationships, and Cylons spend their days as horny as a roomful of science fiction fans at a Galactica convention. The Cylons (at least the female ones) display some form of luminescence along their spine at the moment of orgasm, which must have made Baltar’s threesomes with D’Anna and Six look like a laser light show.

Significant Seven Cylons seem to have problems reproducing biologically with each other. Number Six explained to Baltar their belief that this apparent infertility is due to the inability to feel real human love between the partners. We have evidence that at least one model of Cylon, Number Eight, can be fertilized by Colonial males, and another model, Number Six, can be fertilized by Saul Tigh, a member of the Final Five. Tigh was using his own Cylon projection system to imagine that he was making love with his beloved wife Ellen instead of Six, so maybe there was real love in the act.

Not to be too cynical, but with most species lack of love is usually not enough to prevent conception. Why do Cylons have such trouble impregnating other Cylons? It may be that the Cylon gene pool is so small, and Cylons are so genetically alike, that fetuses spontaneously abort. Maybe Cylon eggs and sperm are too fragile to survive with each other. Think of Cylon gametes as if they were half-dead batteries, and Colonial gametes as fresh batteries. If you power a gadget with one half-dead battery and one fresh battery, the gadget will most likely work. If you use two half-dead batteries, the gadget will most likely not work. Maybe Ellen and the others just fraked up the reproductive system of the Significants, whether deliberately or accidentally.

And it’s probably a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor from Ronald D. Moore that the show’s opening crawl says that Cylons “evolved,” when they are actually great creatures created by intelligent design. Much like the “evolution” of piston engines from the Model A Ford to the Maserati.

Raider Cylons

Raider Cylons (to be known in these pages as “Raiders” or “Heavy Raiders”) are meat machines. They are near-perfect examples of a cybernetic organism—living tissue, including a brain, interfaced with electromechanical devices.

The machine part of a Raider takes the form of a vehicle able to fly through space as well as through most planetary atmospheres. They are equipped with missiles (either conventional or nuclear) and kinetic energy weapons (a.k.a. bullets) and are employed by the Cylons to attack ships in the Colonial Fleet. They seem to have similar propulsion units as Vipers, with slightly superior maneuverability, though Raiders are also equipped with faster-than-light (FTL) drives for long-distance jumping.

The living part of a Raider is housed inside the metal exoskeleton. The ship’s viscera look very much like muscle and sinew, and use oxygen as part of their metabolism. Its brain has limited sentience and thinking ability, so Raiders are about as bright as a well-trained dog. They can resurrect just like humanoid Cylons—the consciousness of their past incarnations are placed in a new Raider body, and their memories are reborn with them. This gives them the ability to learn from past mistakes, as well as the capacity to develop and hold one hell of a grudge (as seen in the stand-alone second season episode “Scar.”). Still, while Raiders are relentless in their motivation, they’re not overly bright. Their threat to the Colonial Fleet lies more in their sheer numbers rather than any brilliant tactical skills.

A Raider in flight.

The fourth season episode “He That Believeth in Me” showed an interesting side of Raider cognition. During an attack on the Colonial Fleet, a Raider made some form of visual contact with Samuel Anders’s eyeball and recognized his true Cylon nature. That Raider must have immediately broadcast the word to the rest of the Raiders that they were attacking a fellow Cylon, because all the Raiders stopped the attack and returned to their basestar. This “rebellion” of the Raiders caused Cavil to advocate their reprogramming—a position that so revolted some other Cylons that it led to a civil war.

Centurions

Finally, there are the Centurions. Centurions are the soldier-workers of the robot world. They combine tactical knowledge with extreme firepower, making an almost unbeatable combination. We don’t know if their tactical knowledge is innate or directed, but it is not too much of a stretch to guess that Centurions are given their overall mission from their controller and are left to their own devices to carry out that mission. They have an outer skin of armor that is impervious to ordinary bullets (though they can be brought down by explosive rounds), and their arms are multiple tools, housing hands, edged weapons, and three-barreled Gatling-type guns.

They have the capacity for sentience, but had been prevented from attaining self-knowledge by the humanoid Cylons, who are appropriately terrified of their own creations rising up and rebelling against them. The Cylons have installed a kludgeⁿ called a “telencephalic inhibitor”^o that keeps the Centurions dumb and happy. After Cavil’s decision to lobotomize the Raiders, rebel Cylons removed the inhibitor from some of their Centurions, giving the Centurions the capacity to turn against Cavil’s faction.

A Cylon Centurion.

Also, as seen in Razor, somewhere in the galaxy there still remained a few “classic” Centurions—the original type, probably designed by Graystone Industries around 58BF. They are just as metallic as new Centurions, but they tend to be gold rather than silvery and are much more classically Egyptian in their design. One main difference between classic and modern Centurions is that the classic ones do not have integral weapons. Another is that they can speak.^p Of the remaining original Centurions, those that weren’t destroyed when their basestar blew up at the end of Razor were probably destroyed along with the Colony.

CHAPTER 3

Are We Creating Our Own Cylons?

Until fairly recently the story of Frankenstein was only a metaphor: the label of “crazed scientist who created a monster he couldn’t control” could be—and was—applied to any researcher working on nuclear weapons, cybernetics, industrial chemicals, and, starting in the 1960s, genetics. The stakes are even higher now. In the early twenty-first century, scientists are on the threshold of truly creating life by the manipulation of laboratory chemicals. The goal is to synthetically replicate the genome of a living creature, or to design a new, viable genome. Some researchers are even trying to physically build the structure of single-celled organisms. This raises the deep, unspoken question that pervades every episode of Battlestar Galactica: Exactly what debt, if any, do we owe to the creatures we create?

Genetic research is no longer in the realm of brilliant Ph.D.s holed up in a high-tech laboratory. You can go to your friendly neighborhood toy store and buy a science kit that teaches you how to extract and isolate DNA from nearly any cell. You can go to any Web site specializing in science equipment for high school teachers, and you can buy all the necessary gear to allow you to modify bacteria genetically to give them resistance to ampicillin (many germs are ampicillin-resistant already, so you’re not likely to be solely responsible for breeding the next killer plague). Even better, if you’re a college student, you can enter MIT’s iGEM competition.

Admiral William Adama.

Admiral Adama, flanked by Lee Adama and Tom Zarek.

iGEM stands for international Genetically Engineered Machine.^q The competition is open to teams of college undergraduates from all over the world. The goal is to take public-domain standardized DNA sequences known as BioBricks—for example, the DNA sequence that codes for a specific biological function such as making luminous protein, or for detecting concentrations of various elements—and insert them into bacteria to make useful biological machines that are not evolved, but intelligently designed to perform certain tasks. The comparison with a brick is deliberate—BioBricks are designed to be as easy to use and as interchangeable as LEGO bricks. The process is very much like taking a handful of electronic components—resistors, capacitors, diodes, logic gates—and putting them together in just the right way to build a robot. Of course, life being what it is, there is never any guarantee that the interaction of all the different BioBricks will have the result you expected them to have.

The iGEM program represents a gigantic shift in the way biology is taught. It used to be that the goal of biology was to learn as much as possible about how various life processes work. Now the cool (and scary) thing about synthetic biology is that the goal is to learn how to use those biological process as black boxes: you give these processes an input, and they give you an output. There’s no need for a synthetic biologist to understand exactly how a certain gene sequence codes for a specific protein—all they need to know is that it does.

In past years, teams of undergraduate college students from around the globe have taken freely available predefined bits of DNA and created:

1. Bacteria that eat industrial pollutants

2. A biosensor that detects high levels of UV radiation

3. Immunobricks to defeat the bacterium that causes ulcers

4. A bacterium that treats lactose intolerance

5. RNA molecules that encode nearly all of the IF . . . THEN Boolean logic of computers

6. Intestinal bacteria that produce fart gas that smells like wintergreen.

The resulting biological machines may be our first baby steps toward creating Cylons, but so far the iGEM students are still taking BioBricks and inserting them into already living bacteria. They haven’t tried to build an entire living organism from catalogue parts. They’re leaving that to the big guys like J. Craig Venter.

Venter, the bad-boy genius of the modern genetics industry, was the maverick who wowed the genetics world in the 1990s by boasting that his company would sequence the entire human genome before the federally funded Human Genome Project finished. Ever since then he has been at the forefront in many different types of genetics-related breakthroughs: his latest task was to grow a bacterium from a completely synthesized genome made from parts available in the laboratory. The announcement in May 2010 of his success was hailed as the first creation of totally synthetic life that we know of on Earth.

It’s possible that this same type of work—discover the genetic code of an already existing creature, synthesize that code, then grow it in a lab—is what the young pilot Bill Adama stumbled upon just before the end of the first Cylon War. The hybrid on the Cylon ice planet clearly was involved in some form of experimentation: it collected Colonial civilians and probably used sections of their DNA to grow the biological parts that surrounded the hybrid’s tank. Perhaps, with the help of the Final Five, those parts became the biological components of Raiders and Centurions. They almost certainly served as the biological components that became the humanoid Cylons themselves.

Frankenstein’s creature condemned his creator for building him without a reason. Our biological machines are not in a position to demand accountability from anyone—yet. But research clearly isn’t going to stop there, and there may come a time when our creations start to experiment on their creators. At that moment, whether we want to admit it or not, we’ll be starting down the same path as the Colonials. When our creations ask “Who am I?” we’ll be able to give our Cylons only one answer: “You’re us.”

CHAPTER 4

Cylon Intelligence and the Society of Mind

What type of brain does a Cylon have? Since Cylons are intelligent organic creatures, virtually indistinguishable from Colonials, their brains must be at least superficially similar to Colonial brains. If you assume that the Colonial brain is similar or identical to a human brain of the twenty-first century, the Cylon brain should meet the following minimum requirements:

• Elements: 100 billion neurons

• Connections: 100 trillion

• Storage: 100 million megabytes

• Image Processing: 210 million images per year

• Processing Speed: 0.001 Megahertz

• Power Requirement: 20 watts

Though it’s never specifically stated, a lot of evidence points to the idea that Cylons are considerably smarter than their Colonial counterparts.

Cyclon model Two, also known as Leoben Conoy

Leoben and Starbuck look down at the child she beleives is hers.

Six in a projection of a forest.

The most obvious example comes from the episode “Torn,” in which Six tells Baltar that Cylons can use their brains to project whatever imagery around them they wish. She gives the example of a corridor in a Cylon basestar: to Baltar it’s just a bare metallic hallway, but Six can use the powers of projection within the Cylon mind to make walking down the corridor like taking a stroll through a beautiful sun-dappled forest.

At the very least, Cylons use what brains they have differently. One of the most common misconceptions about cognition is that humans use only 10 percent of their brain power. Anyone who has ever seen a PET scan of their own brain activity knows this isn’t true—most scans show sporadic activity happening throughout the entire brain. While it is true that not all parts of the brain are active at the same time—when you’re sitting quietly listening to instrumental music, you’re probably not using the verbal or the motor control portions of your brain—over time, you can rest assured that you use 100 percent of your brain. Cylon mental superiority might just be a result of them using more of their brain at any given time.

If Cylon brains are more powerful than ours, they might have considerably more neurons and synapses, and possibly faster neuronal processing speeds, though that bumps up against the Cylon Indistinguishability Conjecture.^r A much more reasonable way that Cylon brains might be different from Colonial brains is in the “software,” the ability to perform at a much higher level than Colonials while still maintaining the same hardware.^s

A synapse is a small gap between brain neurons, on the order of approximately tens of nanometers, which serves as a junction to bring neurons together. The complex web of connections between neurons is similar to the complex web of connections between transistors in a computer’s CPU, with one main difference. Thanks to synapses, neurons are not connected one-to-one; they are connected many-to-many. A synapse allows many neurons to connect to many other neurons by not really connecting at all.

When a stimulus to a neuron reaches a certain threshold strength (called the neuron’s action potential), the neuron opens several vesicles within itself and releases a chemical known as a neurotransmitter, the purpose of which is to tell the other neurons, “Hey, this neuron has fired!” The neurotransmitter flows into the synapses between neurons and spreads among them, with the closest neuron obviously getting the strongest dose of neurotransmitter. More distant surrounding neurons get considerably smaller doses. Whatever message the firing neuron was trying to send, the neurotransmitter gets the message across. If the amount of neurotransmitter absorbed by any of the surrounding neurons is sufficient to reach their action potential, those neurons will then fire, reinforcing the original stimulus that caused the first neuron to signal.

Neuroscientists understand that learning takes place when one neuron stimulates another neuron repeatedly and/or continuously for a few seconds or even minutes. When this happens, the “teacher” neuron releases an additional protein that helps the surrounding “student” neurons to grow. When these student neurons grow, they strengthen the connection between themselves and the teacher. Whenever the “teacher” fires off a signal, the “students” will over time become more receptive to receiving it. One stimulus will become tightly associated with a specific response, and the brain will have learned something new.^t

One thing brain scientists don’t yet fully understand is how a functioning brain—one like ours that can think and reason and create (or at least appreciate) music and art—can be made out of repeated units of a relatively simple object like a neuron. In this way neuroscientists have a lot in common with artificial intelligence researchers who are trying to solve essentially the same problem from the other direction—how to turn a box of computer chips into a functioning brain.

The MIT professor Marvin Minsky is rightly described as one of the fathers of AI. Minsky built the first random neural net computer (the predecessor to Cylons) in 1951 and patented the first head-mounted computer display twelve years later. In the 1970s, Minsky and Seymour Papert started to develop their “Society of Mind” theory. They said that the complex construction we call the “mind”—the realm of language, memory, learning, consciousness, the sense of self, and of free will—is actually built brick-by-brick of much smaller subunits, which he calls agents. These agents are themselves mindless; it is through their interaction that they produce the mind.

As Minsky said in his 1988 book Society of Mind: “What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.” In other words, to employ another Minskyism, “Minds are what brains do.”

As we mentioned, an important clue that Cylon brains work the same (or in a similar) way came in the episode “Six of One,” when we learned about the Centurions’ telencephalic inhibitor. The humanoid Cylons wouldn’t need that kludge if Centurion brains were a bunch of transistors running Python. Such a gadget would only be necessary if Cylon brains worked as a Society of Mind—if “mind” just naturally emerged as a consequence of connecting together a threshold quantity of smaller brain subunits. If that’s the case, then twenty-first-century AI researchers here on Earth have only one question: What is that threshold quantity?

Sentience is another word for consciousness, or the ability to be aware of oneself. For example, you know that you are a human.^u