Thanks for all of the kind words for the premiere post-isode. I try to keep these short like flash fiction.
Cylon dreams are very realistic, much like the projections we use when walking around in monotonous corridors. So I truly believed with all my heart that Erf was in fact a paradise and not a burnt out ember. I was back on the Basestar telling the hybrid about how beautiful and lush it was and how well all the landing party settlements were going. She looked at me with tears of joy and I began crying with her, holding her hand tightly. Suddenly she sat up and yelled right in my face “THEY WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!”
The jolt woke me up and I found myself in a soft bed in the middle of a very large warehouse sized room. I vaguely remembered being carried uncomfortably in the arms of the Erf Centurion for an undeterminable amount of time. I felt much better than yesterday but I was still a bit dizzy from the radiation sickness. As I slowly gained consciousness I came to realize that the huge room I was in was filled with thousands and thousands of objects. There were unusual paintings, wooden statues with demonic wings, large metal abstract sculptures, as well as various computer hard drives of all colors, shapes and I’m sure varying storage capacities. There was so much to take in and it was all so haphazardly arranged that I was having trouble focusing my eyes on any one thing. The floor was a mess of wood shavings and paint and the only piece of furniture in the room as far as I could tell was the very bed that I had awoken in.
There were no windows but several of the sculptures as well as some of the paintings emitted enough light to dimly illuminate the place. I noticed a faint rustling noise and I decided to head toward it, slowly making my way through the maze of bizarre doodads. Most of the paintings were intricate, abstract and fractal in nature, but a few of them were as realistic as photographs. I began to notice that the photo-like ones were all of the same strange theme, they all depicted large and small Centurions engaged in various mundane activities such as washing a car or playing Pyramid Ball. The wooden statues were almost all humans, very angelic looking humans I might add, but each one had the most hideous satanic wings that I had ever seen sprouting right out of their shoulders, tearing through their clothes.
The noise was getting louder as I got closer and I recognized it as the noise of a Centurion moving around, stopping for a short time, then moving around again. I figured it must be the one who had brought me here so I quickened my pace a bit. A bright light was coming from the same direction as the noises which made maneuvering easier as I progressed.
I was about 20 feet away when I saw a painting in the pile that startled me. It was of a Centurion standing upright with a smaller Centurion on its shoulders, just like a Dad would carry his kid around. It suddenly hit me with a lurch that all of the other paintings were of Centurion families going about their daily life.
I turned a corner and there was my Erf Centurion with his guitar still strapped to his back. I yelled at him and waved my arms frantically but he paid me no attention. He was thoroughly absorbed in what he was doing, something which I couldn’t comprehend for the life of me. There were several little statues on the floor, some in the shape of Centurions and some shaped like the humans of the demonic wing variety although much smaller. He would move them all a little bit then step back and stand still for a moment then move each one of the statues again then step back again which he repeated over and over. I tried to get his attention again by standing right in front of him and making a guitar motion with my arms but he didn’t respond to me in any way, let alone break into song. I had so much to ask him, there was so much I could learn from him, but I couldn’t even get him to acknowledge me.
Frustrated, I sat down on a stack of old hard drives, and I began swearing at the methodical machine. Watching him toil away uselessly was hypnotic and my mind began to drift off trying to think of what I should do next. I was getting hungry and thirsty but if I were to eat or drink anything I would certainly get radiation poisoning all over again.
All of sudden it hit me what the Centurion was doing. The statues he was moving weren’t wooden, they were pliable like clay and he would move the arms and legs and wings of the things separately from the bodies. The damn thing was making an animated movie! When it stepped back it was taking some kind of internal digital photo and in his head he could play them all back and see motion.
These Erf Centurions apparently have a bit more artificial intelligence than our version of them or maybe not, maybe this is what an intelligence would become when left alone and not being told what to do all the time by either humans or other superior Centurions. This one had been using his intellect to create objects of art for centuries. He was a true artist, one who created for himself alone, not in the least caring what others thought of his work, toiling away truly creating art for art’s sake. From my experience on Caprica I knew that plenty of artists made that claim but I was standing before the only known artist who ever actually lived it.
The hard drives I was sitting on must certainly contain thousands of animated movies, probably even novels and songs. The memory of a Centurion is quite large but he had created so much for so long that he had had to gather up all of these hard drives to store his work in. I realized then that there was no way he could answer any of my questions about what had happened here on Erf or even what my ancestors had been like because like the digital music device I had found a few days ago, no data from 2,000 years ago would survive on a hard drive. Maybe at some point he had realized this and that was why he had turned to making physical objects like the paintings and sculptures, creations that would be permanent and not be lost.
The Erf Centurion’s body of work, although interesting, wasn’t really of much help to me now however. Although I admired him on some level I hated him for not helping me to survive. Sure he had helped me once but now it seemed that he couldn’t care less about me. Then I thought about how it was that he must have helped me. When I had taken the radiation medicine from the hospital it hadn’t worked because it was too old. Yet he must have given me medicine that worked and therefore must have been relatively fresh. Somehow he must have gotten a hold of a viable supply, and yet he didn’t seem like an entity who would have created it himself, he was way more interested in his stupid animation (which by the way I got to see a lot of later and lets just say he’s lucky he didn’t have to make his living at it).
Somewhere somehow something must have given him a supply of fresh radiation medicine and right then and there I decided I was going to find out who else was alive on this burnt out shell of a planet. I had made the decision to live no matter what.
TO BE CONTINUED
