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beatrice-otter · 3 months

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Fic: Fertile Ground

I suppose I should probably actually post my worldbuilding exchange fic here. Wouldn't want to be too quick off the mark, it's only been a month since it was revealed 🤣

I wrote a BSG fic, which gave me a lovely excuse to write a fic about a headcanon I've had since I first watched the show. (What the headcanon is, you'll have to read the fic to find out ...)

Title: Fertile Ground Author: Beatrice_Otter Fandom: Battlestar Galactica Characters: Original Four Length: 5383 words Written for: redrikki in Worldbuilding Exchange 2024

Summary: Simon only bothered to continue the fertility experiments because the others demanded it. Things are different on New Caprica.

AO3. Squidgeworld. Dreamwidth. Pillowfort.

Simon sat at his lab bench, waiting for his samples to finish processing—as well as they could, given the abysmal shortages of everything on New Caprica—and contemplated whether it would be worth it to take his turn as the Four representative at consensus meetings. The Ones were dead set against shipping in medical supplies from the Colonies. The Sixes and Eights should be pushing for it—if they truly wanted to build a relationship with the humans, helping them stay alive should be high on their priority list—but Fours were the only Cylons who really understood the fragility of the human body.

There was a knock at the door. Nurse Sashon popped her head in. "There's a human who's actually willing to have you treat her."

"Really?" Simon stripped off his gloves and tossed them in the laundry basket. Medical staff had been dramatically under-represented in the refugee fleet, and several years of trauma and poor healthcare and worse food hadn't been helped by the living conditions on New Caprica. But people would rather wait for Doc Cottle or one of the others, than be treated by a Cylon. "What's wrong with her?"

"She didn't say," Sashon said.

The nurse should have taken her medical history and seen if it was something she could handle herself, but Simon was bored and it would at least be a change. "Show her to my office." He washed his hands, and went down the hall to his office. He didn't often use it, but was private, equipped for a basic examination, and meant that fewer people would see her with a Cylon, if that was something she cared about.

He sat down in his chair and ignored the slightly musty smell that seeped in everywhere on New Caprica. The light through the window was thin and watery, nothing like his office back home had gotten. He didn't have time to ruminate on the past before a human woman sidled in—plump, with stringy black hair tied up in a messy bun, wearing shapeless layers of clothing like everyone else on New Caprica. He recognized her. She'd been in prison, briefly, although he didn't know why—he never bothered to look up those sorts of details.

"I'm Doctor Simon Agrinion," he said. "Please, come in, have a seat." He gestured courteously at the chair he kept for patients. For a second, he could almost have been back in his clinic on Caprica before the attacks.

"Doctor?" The human scrunched up her face skeptically. "Didn't know Cylons have medical schools."

"We don't," Simon said. "But as it happens, I received my MD from Paradise Valley Medical School on Caprica, and was a board-certified OB/GYN with a practice in Delphi for nine years before the attack." He pointed to his degree and certificates, hanging on the wall behind him. Copies of the ones that had been destroyed with the rest of Delphi.

"Why do Cylons need OB/GYNs?" she asked.

"Because some Cylons think that because we're so close, biologically speaking, to humans, we should be able to reproduce the same way," Simon said.

"You want kids?" she asked.

"I don't, but some of my brothers and sisters do," Simon said. So few Cylons had ever even seen an infant in the flesh, they were almost mythical. Once he'd gotten enough experience to be able to tell the reality apart from the fantasy, he'd recommended that if they send some infiltrators to be child carers. Nothing had ever come of it. "And given that my model has the most aptitude and interest in biology and medicine …" he spread his hands. "Here I am."

"You've treated human patients before?" she asked.

"As I said."

"Did you hurt any of them?"

"I have never harmed a patient," Simon said. It was true. The humans at the Farm weren't patients, they were test subjects; the prisoners here on New Caprica weren't his patients, either. "I didn't even send back any data that was used to plan the attacks."

"But you knew it was coming," she said. "You knew all your patients were going to die, and you didn't do anything to stop it."

"That's right," Simon said. What could he have done? Even if he'd wanted to, he couldn't have changed much. "But then, you knew that when you agreed to be seen by a Cylon doctor."

"I did," she said. "I figured you'd be happy enough to give me what I need."

Simon raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't comment. "Let's get started, then," he said, taking out a notepad. He got her name—Iris Olbion—and a brief medical history before performing a routine physical exam. She was in pretty good health, all things considered, and he told her so.

"So what is it you need help with?" he asked.

"I need an abortion."

"How far along are you?" She wasn't showing yet, but given her body type that didn't mean much.

Iris shrugged. "Almost five months."

Simon sighed. "That's far enough along that a procedure here in the hospital would be best."

"You can't just give me a pill?"

"I could," Simon said. Those, they had more of than they needed. The Fives had sold it as a way the Cylons were restoring civilization to humans after Roslin's ban, and the Ones had thought it was a great idea—every abortion meant one fewer human to kill later on. "A combination of mifepristone and misoprostol. But after twelve weeks, the dosage goes up. Chances are, we'd have to give you multiple doses until it took, which means medical supervision. It would probably take around twenty-four hours. A D&E only takes five to ten minutes."

"At twelve weeks I didn't know I was pregnant." Her voice was flat.

"Irregular cycle?" Few human women on New Caprica had regular menstrual cycles, considering the stress and borderline nutrition.

"Not particularly, but I wasn't paying attention." She wrapped her arms around herself. "I haven't been sexually active in years. It never even occurred to me. But I was in the Cylon jail for three days, and I only remember two of them. I don't remember the last time I had a period. And I'm feeling … something move. Inside."

Simon looked down at the notes he was taking and withdrew the faint tendrils of his consciousness from the web of his brothers' thoughts. "Have you taken a pregnancy test to confirm anything?"

"Not like there's a drugstore on the corner," she said flatly.

Simon had stocked his office as close to his Delphi office as he could, in a burst of optimism which hadn't lasted long, which meant he did indeed have a box of pregnancy tests in his cabinet. He extracted one and handed it to his patient. "The instructions are on the packaging. The restroom is down the hall on the right."

As soon as the door had closed behind her, he sagged in shock. After all the experiments on various basestars and colonies—in as close to ideal conditions as they could manage—a basic intrauterine insemination on this hellhole had worked?

He was reasoning far in advance of his data, Simon reminded himself. The odds of a hybrid pregnancy surviving to the fourth month were astronomical. Most likely, one of the human guards had taken advantage of her while she was unconscious. At this point, he didn't even know for sure she really was pregnant.

Next step: perform the abortion his patient wanted, and then analyze the fetal tissue to see if it had any Cylon characteristics. In the unlikely event it did … then he needed to check on all the women he had inseminated, see if any of them were pregnant. He hadn't bothered to check; it had seemed so unlikely. He was only performing the inseminations because his baby-crazed brethren insisted.

If any of them were pregnant, then he'd have to figure out what the hell was different here on New Caprica to allow viable Human/Cylon hybridization.

If none of them were … then he'd have to learn to get very good at hiding things from his brothers and hope nobody ever realized he'd aborted the only success he'd ever had.

The fetus' neurons were made of the same synthetic fibers his as his own. It was indeed a hybrid.

***

Cottle wandered in to the lab just as he finished taking the last of his samples.

***

"Heard you had a human patient."

"I did," Simon said. "She wanted an abortion, and figured that at least was a procedure she could trust a Cylon with. Sashon assisted. It was a textbook procedure." He forced himself to stop talking. That was a rookie mistake, you were far more likely to arouse suspicion or give something away by saying too much than too little.

Cottle grunted. "What are you doing now?"

Simon shrugged. "Running some tests. I'm curious about how New Caprica might be affecting pregnancy." Environment always mattered—gravity, air pressure, air quality, a hundred other factors could influence things. But what could possibly be different enough to allow a hybrid pregnancy?

"Not sure it matters much, because it's not like we can send pregnant people anywhere," Cottle said.

"It's not like I'm overrun with work," Simon responded. Honestly, he thought that was half the problem here on New Caprica. There just wasn't anything for the Cylons to do. No distractions from their internal arguments, except whatever games they wanted to play with the humans.

"Right," Cottle said. But since the human was overrun with work, he left shortly after.

***

None of his tests showed anything interesting beyond the fact that it had been, from what he could tell, a perfectly healthy fetus. Perhaps he shouldn't have given her the abortion she wanted? Then he could have studied its development? But no. He'd had no reason to deny it, not without explaining why, and that would have caused a major conflict with the humans if it got out—and he couldn't see how it wouldn't. Nor how he would explain why he needed to run so many tests on her and the fetus. Even if he'd simply ordered her taken to the prison, there would have been a problem. And New Caprica had enough of those already.

If it wasn't a fluke, there would be others to study later. If it was an unrepeatable fluke, then it held no scientific value.

He'd done the right thing by following her wishes. And the next step was to find out if it had been a freak chance, or if any of the other New Caprica inseminations had worked.

***

It took a little bit of doing, but he was able to account for every single human he'd inseminated in the eight months since they'd conquered the place.

None of the ones who'd been in prison for two months or longer had gotten pregnant, but he already knew that. And confirming that was the easy part; all it took was a quick rifle through the networked files. He didn't even have to go to a terminal to log in, not for information so many of his fellow Fours were accessing regularly.

The humans who'd been in and out more quickly—and thus had fewer checkups—were harder to get data on. Humans were fetishistic about keeping information on paper, and anyway they didn't have access to computers here on New Caprica to keep data on. So he had to make a list of names and go through cabinets full of paper files to see if any of them had been to the hospital for prenatal care or abortions. And do it at a time when the humans wouldn't see him do it, which was annoying. But the offices were deserted overnight, which gave him plenty of time.

He slipped in once the staff had gone back to their tents, ignored the Centurion standing guard, and started looking.

The first woman had not been to the hospital—or at least, not been recorded as doing so—since her release from prison two months ago. Inconclusive; she might be pregnant and not have noticed yet; she might be pregnant and not arranged for medical care yet. Or, most likely, she was not pregnant; even under ideal circumstances, artificial insemination only had about an 8% success rate per attempt, and these were not ideal circumstances.

Still, he made a note to check back later.

It only took five more files before he found his first possibility. Alinda Tyritake had been brought in for questioning on some suspicion or other six months ago; she was now pregnant. Probably about five months pregnant, according to the notes, and the sonogram hadn't found anything unusual. She could feel the baby move.

It was still more likely that she was pregnant by some human, Simon reminded himself.

He copied down the information and went on to the next one.

Two hours later, he put the last of the files back and left, nodding to the Centurion as he passed it.

He needed a walk, he decided; he certainly wasn't going to be able to sleep now.

Simon wandered through town until he was in a field on the outskirts. He flung himself down onto the vegetation and stared up at the stars above.

None of the inseminated humans who had been in prison long-term were pregnant.

Twelve percent of the inseminated humans who had been released immediately were pregnant, about what he'd expect if he were running a regular fertility clinic for humans under these conditions.

The prison was prison; but it was also a better and healthier environment than the tents the humans were camping in. It was warmer and cleaner. Prisoners were under stress, of course, but while stress lowered the likelihood of carrying a pregnancy to term it did not result in universal spontaneous abortions. And it wasn't like the humans who were free had any fewer problems to worry them. Logically, if one group was going to have more successful pregnancies, it would be the prison group.

"If I were a Six or a Two, this is where I'd start talking about God's great plan," Simon mused. They were far too likely to jump to conclusions that way.

He shuddered to think what the reaction to this was going to be. All the Sixes and Twos—and half the Eights—would drop everything and head to New Caprica to see the great miracle, and never mind what got dropped elsewhere because of it. The Ones would be unbearable, vicious, in their efforts to bring them down a bit. The other Fours would probably want to relocate all the Farms—and every human with a uterus they could capture—to New Caprica to try the whole suite of experiments here. The Fives wouldn't care, but the Threes would want to stir up trouble. There wouldn't be room for anyone. It would be chaos, and he'd have no place to work.

And they'd all want things from him.

Life had been easier, when he'd been a doctor in Delphi before its destruction, when he hadn't had to factor in his entire family to every decision. New Caprica was a shithole, but at least there were few enough Cylons here that they weren't all living in each others' pockets. And since they were living in an apartment building humans had made for themselves, he could have a human-style apartment all to himself.

Was there something in the air or soil or water here on New Caprica that increased fertility rates in general? He'd have to look into that. The pregnant women were probably not carrying hybrids; it was still most likely that Iris's pregnancy was a fluke.

But if it wasn't—and if it wasn't some weird thing on New Caprica that increased human fertility—then what was it?

Iris's pregnancy wasn't the first hybrid. There was that Eight, the one who'd defected. She had gotten pregnant on Caprica, under conditions almost as bad as they had here.

But the thing she hadn't been—and the thing she had in common with Iris, and all of the others who were now pregnant—was in Cylon control. She'd spent most of that time alone with her human, and then in the Colonial Fleet.

What if there was something about standard Cylon facilities that encouraged miscarriages? Or about contact with other Cylons? Could it be the constant, low-level signal emissions that made up the web of Cylon shared consciousness? That would be highly unlikely, because it was a very low amount of radiation that shouldn't add up to more than normal background radiation.

"It would still make more sense than the idea that you need love to conceive, considering that love is not required for regular conceptions," Simon told himself. If God did not make love a requirement for pregnancy in general, why require it for human/Cylon hybridization?

He perked up. At least this proved conclusively that the problem with their past experiments wasn't a lack of love. Iris certainly didn't love him or any other Cylon, and she'd gotten pregnant with a hybrid fetus.

***

By the time he reached his apartment, he'd finished thinking things through and his mind was much quieter. Most of the Fours on planet were asleep right now, and he let the soft rhythm of their dreams rise up into his attention. He was yawning as he walked down the hall.

"You're out late."

It was a One. Simon sighed; he was tired, and all he wanted was his bed. But it would be rude to ignore him. "I went for a walk. The stars are beautiful, tonight."

"They always are," the One said. "When we can see them on this frakking hellhole."

"Yeah."

"Didn't know you were interested in astronomy," the One said.

"I'm not, really, but we don't get clear nights very often."

"I hope nothing is troubling you?" The One smiled. "You know, I do have training and experience in counseling, if you're interested in someone to talk to."

As if he'd go to a One for that! Manipulative frakkers, all of them. "I'm fine, but thanks," Simon said. "Good night." He entered his apartment and closed the door firmly behind him.

Before getting into bed, he went over to the interface terminal in the bedroom. There wasn't any news, or at least, not any interesting news; all the reports were roughly the same as they'd been for most of their time on New Caprica. And this late at night, there were very few human-form Cylons in the datastream. (The Centurions were there, of course, but they largely kept to themselves.) He set a flag for someone to tell the hospital that he would be coming in late the next day. Unnecessary, of course, they'd probably be relieved he wasn't there, but it was an old habit.

***

He got a few strange looks, walking into the hospital that afternoon, which were explained when he opened his office door to see another Four sitting in his chair. Not one he knew, which meant a new arrival to New Caprica.

"You're in my seat," he said.

The other Four stood up slowly, a glint in his eye and the shiver of amusement he didn't quite hide well enough. This was probably his first time anywhere that wasn't a basestar or the Colony—he had that superior air of humoring the poor spy corrupted by human ways that their more sheltered brothers sometimes got.

"I saw your message in the datastream, thought I'd help out."

"How'd that go?" Simon asked.

The other shrugged. "It was boring. One of the humans asked me to run a few tests; I did it because I couldn't figure out what you were working on. You didn't leave any notes."

"I wasn't expecting someone to fill in for me," Simon said. "I hope you didn't get too bored."

"I didn't have anything else to do." The Four gave him a calculating look. "Are there any experiments we could be doing? I know we can't do anything like the Farms here, we're trying to play nice, but ��."

"There's actually quite a lot we don't know about Cylon bodies, as opposed to Human ones," Simon said. "Studying our fellow Cylons would be useful."

"Why bother? We can just regenerate if anything too bad happens."

"For one thing, it would make the hybridization research easier if we had a better idea of exactly where the differences were," Simon pointed out.

"Oh, I suppose." The Four cocked his head. "And it would be something to do, to pass the time. Might even be interesting."

Simon nodded. "It could be." The other Four probably hadn't ever been directly involved in the attacks or in the pursuit of the humans. He'd probably never done anything but sit around the Colony living vicariously through the memories sent back by other Cylons. Simon would be more sympathetic to his boredom if he wasn't trying to find something interesting to do by trying to take Simon's place. But after a few moments of conversation, the other Four left.

Simon double checked everything he'd done, and he'd done everything correctly that Simon could see, which was good. Having the memories—and almost all of Simon's memories of his training and work among Humans were in the datastream, and almost all of his fellow Fours had chosen to fully incorporate them—didn't necessarily mean you knew how to put them into practice. (And it definitely didn't mean you felt the same way as the copy who had originally experienced the thing you were remembering.)

Once the check was done, Simon turned to his project. He could order the Centurions to round up the possibilities and bring them to the hospital for a checkup, but why bother? They'd come in for checkups eventually anyway, and if he made sure that they had ample supplies for amniocentesis and similar tests, Cottle would use them, and he could check if they were carrying hybrid fetuses from there.

No, the thing to do next was to start looking at environmental factors that might be common to the Farms and to the prison here on New Caprica. Get tests of water quality, air quality, that sort of thing. He could do the prison himself—he was scheduled to work there next week, instead of the hospital, might as well do it then—but he'd need his brothers back in the Colonies to do the work there and send him the data.

There were no terminals in the hospital, as it was designed for humans. Simon made a note to put the request in when he got back to his apartment that evening.

***

That afternoon Simon and Cottle took inventory, going through the list of supplies the hospital had, figuring out what could be made here on New Caprica and what to request be shipped out from the Colonies. When the Cylons had first arrived, such requests had all been filled as a matter of course. These days, things were different. But they could usually still get most of the most critical things.

"So, did the other Four have a medical license, too?" Cottle asked, as they finished up.

"No," Simon said. "I was one of only three to attend medical school, and one of only a handful—" he couldn't remember exactly how many "—to get licensed and practice in the Colonies. But all of my model share what I learned, in school and in my practice."

"Is having someone else's memories the same as having done it yourself?"

"No," Simon said. "And we can transmit knowledge and skills without all the experiences that went with them, if we choose. And we normally do. What's the point of sharing all the meals in the school cafeteria, for example, or the annoyance of trying to study while your next door neighbor blasted their music at deafening volume?" And then there were the things that your brothers couldn't understand, and things that were private. Which often came to the same thing; Cylon society didn't believe in privacy, though many Cylons who'd spent time living among Humans learned to value it.

Cottle grunted. "If he shows up again to take your place, do you vouch for his skills? And his ethics? Would he do as good a job as you?"

"Maybe not as good," Simon hedged. "Probably more like an intern or resident who knows all the textbooks but has never put them into practice."

He didn't answer the question about ethics, and from the look he shot him, Cottle noticed.

***

It took a few days to get the response back from his brothers still in the Twelve Colonies; he wasn't asking for summaries of data already collected, but rather, whole new testing of everything they could get their hands on. There were a few grumbles about wasting time looking over things they already knew perfectly well, and a few approving remarks about doing things thoroughly, sent along with the data.

It was a lot to analyze, but he had the time, and so he went through it manually instead of merely having the datastream sort through it and process it. He couldn't do it at the hospital, because so many of the chemical formulas he couldn't recognize on sight. And he also needed confirmation of which ones they'd varied, and what the results had been, so he could eliminate them. Parts of it were tedious, but there was also something very satisfying about checking things off, one by one.

And also, this way he could verify that nothing had been overlooked.

While he was working his way through that project in his off hours, the supplies he'd ordered came through, and Cottle started giving amnios to his pregnant patients. The poor living conditions since the destruction of the Colonies greatly increased the risk of problems.

Humans did the needle work, but Simon processed the tests; no Human who knew how to do it had survived, that they knew of.

Simon passed on all the results completely accurately. With one exception; he did not inform anyone that he had tested for Cylon characteristics.

Of the fifteen women on his list of possible hybrid pregnancies … only one was carrying a fully-human fetus.

The other fourteen were hybrids.

He spent more time on his data analysis.

***

Simon almost missed it, and in retrospect that had to be intentional.

It was mislabeled. According to the analysis, it was a prostaglandin compound used to treat hypertension. Fairly benign.

But still, it caught his eye. That wasn't a contaminant that you would expect to find in the water anywhere except maybe around the pharmaceutical factory that produced it, and even then, only if they were particularly bad in their environmental practices. It was harmless, and so he would have dismissed it, except … it was present in the water from every Farm compound.

And in the water in the prison.

And (he checked) in the water on the basestars.

He eyed the tap in the kitchen, which he could see from the table where he was working, and decided to take a sample in to the hospital the next day.

Now, it was an old drug that Humans had used for years, and had no pregnancy complications whatsoever. But the question remained: what the frak was it doing everywhere that Cylons were? And why had nobody noticed it and used it as a variable in any of their experiments?

At first, Simon couldn't think of a reason.

So he looked up the formula to see what other drugs had the molecular formula C22H38O5. Just in case there had been an identification error.

(But an error at all twelve Farms and the prison and the basestars?)

And there was another drug with that molecular formula.

Misoprostol.

An abortificant.

…

Simon got up and went for a walk, all his thoughts and emotions tucked up carefully inside him so that none of his siblings could feel them.

It was raining outside, unfortunately, but there was a nice stand of trees not too far from the settlement that blocked the rain nicely. He could have stayed in his apartment and projected the trees, but … he needed to be moving while he thought this through.

The air was bitterly cold, and he welcomed it, letting it press through his body, wake him up. Keep him focused, instead of letting his brain run around in circles.

It had to be the Ones.

The thought had been creeping around the edges of his mind since he started looking into the chemical.

The Ones hated the idea of children, mocked it relentlessly at every turn. They thought they should be in charge, that they were the smartest and the wisest and the only ones who truly saw the world as it was, and all others should accept the place the Ones laid out for them. They'd sabotage the dreams of their fellow Cylons and laugh about it.

And they would have had the access to do it, to alter the datastream so that it would mis-identify misoprostol as something else.

But how to prove it?

No, he didn't need to prove it was the Ones, not yet; he just had to prove it had been done. There were plenty of medical reference libraries back in the Twelve Colonies; every hospital and clinic would have one. And out of the millions of medical labs that humans had had, surely at least one still had functioning equipment. All he had to do was send a discreet message to a brother still in the Twelve Colonies, have them look up the formula in a book, and run the test on Human equipment.

Once they did that, and uploaded the results to the datastream, the cat would be out of the bag. Simon couldn't predict what would happen next, but—

"Hello, Simon."

He had, he realized, been very stupid. Simon turned to face the One—there were two of them. He opened his mind wide and tried to reach his brothers—

***

Simon surged up out of the tank, gasping, but it was too late. He was cut off from the datastream; the only ones he could reach were the Ones kneeling around the edge, watching him flop around in the confusion of Resurrection.

"I don't know why you started poking around now, after you'd pretty much given up on the whole reproduction project," one of them said, "but we can't have it. Everything is much better without children, I'm sure you understand. It's a nice distraction for some of our brothers and sisters, but that's all it can ever be. A distraction."

"Besides, can you imagine what would happen if you told everyone about what we'd done?" the Ones said. "Why, it would tear the Cylons apart! So much for Cylon unity. We'd be as bad as the Humans."

"If you wanted Cylon unity, you should have abided by the consensus," Simon said.

"The consensus was wrong."

Another One snorted. "Besides, what do you think kids would do, in the long run, to our unity? Instead of seven models, there would be God only knows how many running around. Each one unique." He spat the word, as if it were dirty.

"How did you figure out I was onto you?" Simon asked.

"A notification any time someone looks up the chemical composition of that abortificant," a One said.

Simon could probably have figured that one out on his own, he realized. "What are you going to do with me?" he said. "My brothers will notice I'm gone."

"Will they? There's thousands of Fours, and a couple hundred of you on New Caprica. What's one, out of so many?"

"But only three of us actually went to medical school," Simon pointed out. "Every Four out there has memories from me, incorporated into their core self. Some more or less than others, but they've all got something. They'll notice that I'm not there."

"No." The One smiled. "They won't. You think you're the first? You aren't. They won't ever think to ask what happened to you."

He reached down below the lip of the tank, to where Simon knew the controls were.

Everything went dark.

#fanfic #fanfiction #battlestar galactica

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