“Gaius-Vision, God, and the Currents of Destiny”

With your eyes closed you sit back against one of the most comfortable couches on Caprica. The sliding door to your sea-side condo is open, allowing a fresh, spring breeze to blow through the room, filling it with the scent of flowers, salt, and peace. It is one of the most relaxing settings in all of the twelve colonies of man, and you are the king of its domain.

There’s a drink in your hand, a delicate mix of your favorite alcohol and flavorings. There’s just enough ice in the glass. It won’t melt too early and dilute the drink should you choose to savor it, and it won’t get warm either. It’s perfect, and like the weather outside, all yours.

You begin to wonder if anything could ripen this scene to a more perfect condition, and just when you don’t think it’s possible you feel her hand on your shoulder. It traces softly from the nape of your neck, over the shoulder, down the arm, and over the hand holding your drink. It’s a delicate balance of composure and desire simply holding onto that glass with the threat of a sweeter treasure competing with it.

Her scent is intoxicating. It fills the room every time she approaches. It’s like you’re saturated by her presence the minute she arrives. But it’s not an overbearing saturation, it’s a pleasurable one. Like the feel of good silk, that sensation never gets old. You feel as though you could indulge in it forever.

Then her lips meet yours and you kiss her. Bliss can hardly describe the feeling she gives you. It’s a sweet surrender to whatever oblivion love and lust can bring, and you willingly give in to it. Of all the women you’ve had, this one was different. She loved you, and every single thing she did proved it. You wanted to love her back, but something always got in the way. It was a discomfort similar to feeling like some invisible voyeur was always looking in the window. You knew they were there, somehow, but you never saw them.

Then she whispers to you, “God is watching.”

And suddenly you open your eyes, and you’re sitting in a cramped crew compartment of Colonial One. You’ve been sitting here for days, waiting to die. The sweet scent of the spring day is replaced by recycled air and the odor of sleepless human beings. There is no soft breeze, only the blow of the overhead fan, and there is no drink your hand, only the blanket you’d tried in vain to sleep beneath.

The feeling of the woman’s lips is gone, but her scent is not. She’s sitting beside you, though no one else can see her. You’re mind begins to recover, remembering the events of the past week: the nuclear bombings of the twelve colonies, the rushed exodus from everything you’d known, the selfless sacrifice of a colonial soldier to get you aboard this ship. Yet, beyond all of that, you remember most the revelation that the woman, you’re love, was artificial. She was not human, but she wasn’t made of metal. She was a Cylon, but she wasn’t a Cylon like you’ve ever known. And now she resided only in your mind.

You’re name is Gaius Baltar, and you teeter on the brink of two worlds: Human and Cylon.

With the remaining human population tallying less than fifty thousand, no single human being is more conflicted than the scientific genius Gaius Baltar. Pushed unwillingly (some might say kicking and screaming) into the war between Cylons and humans, Gaius finds himself straddling the line of loyalty. He was responsible for creating the Department of Defense’s computer security system, and when he let his then-girlfriend peek into the database in an effort to impress her, he inadvertently gave the Cylon’s access to all the twelve colonies’ defenses. In that regard, he is technically a traitor to the human race. In other lights, he’s just a gullible innocent.

As the fleet races to find a home safe from the threat of Cylon attack, Gaius has been placed in the role of “Cylon-expert,” due to his scientific knowledge. When he faked a test to distinguish human from Cylon, he was then placed in charge of discovering who among the fifty thousand surviving humans was and was not human. According his calculations, testing each and every human would take over sixty years to complete, a span of time that’s afforded to no one in these trying times.

To make matters worse, his Cylon-infiltrator-girlfriend lives on only in his mind. She appears nearly every moment it’s inopportune to, and whispers guiding words into his ear. A series of unexplainable coincidences has all but convinced Gaius that he is some agent of God. With his tantalizing, and invisible, companion showing him the way, Gaius has become more and more willing to let this “God” guide his actions, for good or ill.

Among the twelve colonies, there exists a pantheon of multiple gods. Legend tells that once they all lived together on the world of Kobol, but then some grew jealous of each other and fought. They, and their human tribes, left Kobol to found these twelve colonies. Supposedly, this same legend makes reference to a thirteenth colony called “Earth” which the fleet now searches for, hoping that it might be a salvation planet to call home.

But Gaius never believed in the gods. He never bought into the spiritual side of it all, refusing to give up his sense of an ordered universe. Everything was scientifically explainable to Gaius, but gods and spirits were not. They were irrational, unexplainable, and they had no business in his vision of the universe. Yet this woman has shown him a new path, a singular God that has guided everything since the beginning. It would seem, due to all the unexplainable events since the destruction of the colonies, that her words about this God are true. For the time being, Gaius has accepted that perhaps there is a spiritual God guiding him.

Or perhaps it is merely feeding his ego.

Gaius and Number Six, as she’s come to be called, keep a solitary council. Meeting within the recesses of his mind, they can create nearly any setting they wish, though Gaius’ old condo seems the more frequent vision they choose. It is a site of a simpler time, when there was no war, no death, and no real struggle. It was there that Gaius and Number Six were together, and in his mind, Gaius can live there always.

This sort of “Gaius-Vision” has become a staple of his current life. She steps in whenever his mind is at an impasse, or a crossroad of decision. It’s clear that she has a plan for him, though she merely shrugs it off that it’s “God’s plan.” It could be possible that Number Six is merely manipulating him to do what the Cylons need for him to do to complete whatever plan they have, but other events seem to indicate that this “God” and his plan may have more real foundations.

One of the human models pointedly told Starbuck of things only she should know. He spoke clearly of them, as if he’d been there himself. He spoke of destiny and the currents of God’s stream, which pushed them all along their path towards some inevitable end. By the time President Roslin had him thrown out an airlock, even Starbuck was more than a little shaken in her beliefs.

Now humanity has found Kobol, just like the colonial scriptures said they would. Their dying leader, Laura Roslin, had led them there, just as it also said she would. Now needing the Arrow of Apollo, she sent Starbuck back to Caprica to retrieve it. Perhaps this was Starbuck’s last chance to prove the Cylon wrong. Perhaps she needed to believe that what she’d always been taught hadn’t been a lie. Maybe that is why she disobeyed orders and left the Galactica, even when she knew it might cost her, and the survivors, everything.

Gaius meanwhile is told that he will help father a child that is both human and Cylon. It will be the face of things to come, he’s told, and it will change everything. But in what way will it change? Will the two sides come together as allies once this union occurs? Will the inter-breeding simply birth something else entirely? While the audience has yet to be shown what the child looks like, it is left to guess as to the importance of this child.

Though Number Six has mentioned that this child will one day come, another is already on its way. The model named Sharon Valeri is pregnant with the child of the colonial soldier Helo. Helo, the same soldier who’d given up his seat to save Gaius, was now intricately tied to this inter-breeding destiny of the two “species.” Though, somewhere, he loves (or loved) Sharon, it’s unclear of her motivations. She seems to have switched sides, saving Helo when she should have led him to his destruction. She’s professed love for the Chief on Galactica as well, even when she was about to be executed. Still, on Caprica, she stole the only ship Helo and Starbuck had to get off-planet. Her motivations, her true motivations, may yet to be truly witnessed.

So who is God? Is he a true spiritual being that guides the Cylons and humans to their destinies? Is he merely a comptroller that knows far too much about human history and those that operate within the fleet? It’s possible that Number Six downloaded a profile and history of nearly every pilot on the Galactica, and that’s how the models knew what they knew of Starbuck and Helo.

One thing is for certain, however. Something is culminating. Some destiny does await the survivors of the colonies, and that destiny intersects with the Cylons. Whether it is spiritually guided or carefully manipulated is unknown, but perhaps in the end that detail won’t matter. In the end, those involved can only hope (or pray) that their destinies lie fulfilled with happy endings.

Written by Mike Kern