[BSG] Killer Robots and Clones :: PG :: Gen :: 1/1
Title: Killer Robots and Clones
Author: chaletian
Fandom: BSG
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Daybreak II - well, pretty much everything, really
Summary: Sequel to Spaceships and Cave Paintings - archaeologists try to figure out the mystery of Mitochondrial Eve.
They live peacefully. It’s not what they were expecting, and it’s a far cry from life on Galactica, so much so that it’s disorienting to begin with, and Helo and Sharon both wake with the sound of boots ringing on metal in their ears. They live in the wild, but they don’t live alone, because as much as some people are wary of Hera and Sharon, and even Helo, they know they can’t isolate Hera like that. So they live in a village, and it’s hard work and it’s tiring, but they sleep well.
Cath Crawford is pretty sure it’s all down to the Stargate DVDs she bought, but she has two Pleistocene-era bodies (she thinks) and cave paintings with spaceships and what look suspiciously like killer robots and also maybe clones, not to mention something that looks freakishly similar to the angel her six year old niece drew on last year’s Christmas card, and she’s seriously contemplating the idea that they’re not a hoax.
They give Hera charcoal from a cold fire, and she draws on cave walls - stick figures of her mother and father, and pictures of the Cylon ships that Sharon washes off, rubbing at the rock till her fingers are raw. But Helo takes to drawing as well, and he sits with Hera in his lap, and they draw their village and the people in it.
“Please tell me you never plan to publish this theory until you actual find a bloody time capsule with video of aliens standing next to dinosaurs saying, ‘Hi, yeah, we crash-landed our spaceships into the middle of Africa, hope you don’t mind - oh, and by the way, watch out for those killer robots,’” says Rob, her grad student, and she just rolls her eyes.
“Jesus, Rob, please tell me you don’t actually think dinosaurs were still around 150,000 years ago, because I may need to speak to the examinations board about rescinding your degree.”
Helo wonders one day, as they sit in their little wattle house, whether their history will live on. Sharon says no. We don’t have the social or technological infrastructure to move forward from this point, she says. The generations after us will regress, breed with the indigenous people. We will be forgotten. Neither of them is much upset by this. After prophecy and destiny and fate, it’s nice to know that what they do doesn’t matter.
They’re sitting in a tent a hundred yards from the supposedly-hoaxed cave paintings. Cath’s on vacation: no-one’s going to fund a trip to this place.
“Whatever,” says Rob. “Aliens.”
Cath looks off to the distance, sees the harsh landscape and the beauty in its simple lines, and imagines people living their: a village. A reconstruction of Mitochondrial Eve suggested a combination of caucasian and asian genetics; Adam was caucasian. The DNA available was too limited for any definitive results, but it looked like they may at least have been related. But they definitely didn’t originate from the African continent, which is one more giant tick for the hoax column.
They have no more children, but Hera grows up happy and healthy. They teach her what she needs to know to survive, and she learns much of it by herself. There are other children in their village, and she has friends. She still draws on the cave wall, religiously. It’s not that they make a conscious decision, but they don’t teach her to write. They don’t teach her about the Thirteen Colonies, or Kobol or Galactica, though they think she probably picks at least some of it up from the others. One day she draws Kara Thrace, blonde hair haloed out around her, and Helo says, Someone must have told her about Starbuck and Apollo.
“I just don’t know how they did it,” she says. “How did anyone pull this hoax off? We have the best equipment in the world, and everything we have says they’re genuine. The bodies, the paintings…”
“And if it is a hoax,” says Rob, “why fuck it up with the spaceship thing? I mean, it’s pretty huge flashing sign saying NONE OF THIS IS REAL, right? Why go to all the bother, all the enormous faff it must have been, if you’re just going take the piss out of it.”
“Unless it’s real,” says Cath quietly, and they sit in the twilight.
“It can’t be real,” says Rob eventually. “I mean - it can’t.”
They live in the valley till the end of their days, and they’re happy. Hera finds a match, and has children of her own, and they live in the village. When Helo dies, they bury him, and Sharon rests a hand against his cheek before they cover him in earth.
“Right,” says Cath. “Because they’re human. Adam and Eve. They’re definitely human. So maybe they’re the real thing and the paintings are fake.”
“Adam had titanium staples in his leg,” says Rob. “Either they’re the real thing and they weren’t your average Flintstones, or they’re a fake.”
Cath stands up. She looks towards the cave, and to the site where they excavated Adam and Eve.
“They’re real,” she says. “There is no-one who has the technology to make a body recent enough to have titanium in him test as being 150,000 years old. It’s just not possible.”
“Well then, as old Sherlock put it, once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left…” he trails off, and Cath nods.
In time, Sharon dies too, and Hera, and Hera’s children. The climate of the valley changes, and the village moves on. Sand silts up the entrance to the cave where Hera drew pictures with her father, until it’s little more than a hole. Underground, the bones of Hera and her family and her friends bond with earth and stone and become part of the land, one tiny piece in the jigsaw of its history. Nameless, faceless, storyless.
“But it’s unpublishable,” she says. “It’s academic suicide. Unless we find a spaceship that’s 150,000 years old.” She’s joking (mostly).
Across the continent, hundreds of miles away (but only an hour or two in a Raptor), an old man dies alone, next to a cairn he built. The years slip by and the land and the cairn and the bodies slide into the sea, inch by inch, till there’s nothing left. The Raptor goes too, a relic at the bottom of the ocean, rusting, prehistoric. But still there.
THE END
A/N - I initially (lazily) called the male skeleton Mitochondrial Adam (even though, as a couple of people have pointed out, there is no such thing). Mitochondrial Eve, just FYI, is the theoretical most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans (there is also Y-chomosomal Adam, from whom all men inherited their Y chromosome; they are assumed to have lived tens of thousands of years apart).
Author: chaletian
Fandom: BSG
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Daybreak II - well, pretty much everything, really
Summary: Sequel to Spaceships and Cave Paintings - archaeologists try to figure out the mystery of Mitochondrial Eve.
They live peacefully. It’s not what they were expecting, and it’s a far cry from life on Galactica, so much so that it’s disorienting to begin with, and Helo and Sharon both wake with the sound of boots ringing on metal in their ears. They live in the wild, but they don’t live alone, because as much as some people are wary of Hera and Sharon, and even Helo, they know they can’t isolate Hera like that. So they live in a village, and it’s hard work and it’s tiring, but they sleep well.
Cath Crawford is pretty sure it’s all down to the Stargate DVDs she bought, but she has two Pleistocene-era bodies (she thinks) and cave paintings with spaceships and what look suspiciously like killer robots and also maybe clones, not to mention something that looks freakishly similar to the angel her six year old niece drew on last year’s Christmas card, and she’s seriously contemplating the idea that they’re not a hoax.
They give Hera charcoal from a cold fire, and she draws on cave walls - stick figures of her mother and father, and pictures of the Cylon ships that Sharon washes off, rubbing at the rock till her fingers are raw. But Helo takes to drawing as well, and he sits with Hera in his lap, and they draw their village and the people in it.
“Please tell me you never plan to publish this theory until you actual find a bloody time capsule with video of aliens standing next to dinosaurs saying, ‘Hi, yeah, we crash-landed our spaceships into the middle of Africa, hope you don’t mind - oh, and by the way, watch out for those killer robots,’” says Rob, her grad student, and she just rolls her eyes.
“Jesus, Rob, please tell me you don’t actually think dinosaurs were still around 150,000 years ago, because I may need to speak to the examinations board about rescinding your degree.”
Helo wonders one day, as they sit in their little wattle house, whether their history will live on. Sharon says no. We don’t have the social or technological infrastructure to move forward from this point, she says. The generations after us will regress, breed with the indigenous people. We will be forgotten. Neither of them is much upset by this. After prophecy and destiny and fate, it’s nice to know that what they do doesn’t matter.
They’re sitting in a tent a hundred yards from the supposedly-hoaxed cave paintings. Cath’s on vacation: no-one’s going to fund a trip to this place.
“Whatever,” says Rob. “Aliens.”
Cath looks off to the distance, sees the harsh landscape and the beauty in its simple lines, and imagines people living their: a village. A reconstruction of Mitochondrial Eve suggested a combination of caucasian and asian genetics; Adam was caucasian. The DNA available was too limited for any definitive results, but it looked like they may at least have been related. But they definitely didn’t originate from the African continent, which is one more giant tick for the hoax column.
They have no more children, but Hera grows up happy and healthy. They teach her what she needs to know to survive, and she learns much of it by herself. There are other children in their village, and she has friends. She still draws on the cave wall, religiously. It’s not that they make a conscious decision, but they don’t teach her to write. They don’t teach her about the Thirteen Colonies, or Kobol or Galactica, though they think she probably picks at least some of it up from the others. One day she draws Kara Thrace, blonde hair haloed out around her, and Helo says, Someone must have told her about Starbuck and Apollo.
“I just don’t know how they did it,” she says. “How did anyone pull this hoax off? We have the best equipment in the world, and everything we have says they’re genuine. The bodies, the paintings…”
“And if it is a hoax,” says Rob, “why fuck it up with the spaceship thing? I mean, it’s pretty huge flashing sign saying NONE OF THIS IS REAL, right? Why go to all the bother, all the enormous faff it must have been, if you’re just going take the piss out of it.”
“Unless it’s real,” says Cath quietly, and they sit in the twilight.
“It can’t be real,” says Rob eventually. “I mean - it can’t.”
They live in the valley till the end of their days, and they’re happy. Hera finds a match, and has children of her own, and they live in the village. When Helo dies, they bury him, and Sharon rests a hand against his cheek before they cover him in earth.
“Right,” says Cath. “Because they’re human. Adam and Eve. They’re definitely human. So maybe they’re the real thing and the paintings are fake.”
“Adam had titanium staples in his leg,” says Rob. “Either they’re the real thing and they weren’t your average Flintstones, or they’re a fake.”
Cath stands up. She looks towards the cave, and to the site where they excavated Adam and Eve.
“They’re real,” she says. “There is no-one who has the technology to make a body recent enough to have titanium in him test as being 150,000 years old. It’s just not possible.”
“Well then, as old Sherlock put it, once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left…” he trails off, and Cath nods.
In time, Sharon dies too, and Hera, and Hera’s children. The climate of the valley changes, and the village moves on. Sand silts up the entrance to the cave where Hera drew pictures with her father, until it’s little more than a hole. Underground, the bones of Hera and her family and her friends bond with earth and stone and become part of the land, one tiny piece in the jigsaw of its history. Nameless, faceless, storyless.
“But it’s unpublishable,” she says. “It’s academic suicide. Unless we find a spaceship that’s 150,000 years old.” She’s joking (mostly).
Across the continent, hundreds of miles away (but only an hour or two in a Raptor), an old man dies alone, next to a cairn he built. The years slip by and the land and the cairn and the bodies slide into the sea, inch by inch, till there’s nothing left. The Raptor goes too, a relic at the bottom of the ocean, rusting, prehistoric. But still there.
THE END
A/N - I initially (lazily) called the male skeleton Mitochondrial Adam (even though, as a couple of people have pointed out, there is no such thing). Mitochondrial Eve, just FYI, is the theoretical most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans (there is also Y-chomosomal Adam, from whom all men inherited their Y chromosome; they are assumed to have lived tens of thousands of years apart).