Clarice Willow

Sister Clarice Willow was a Monotheist and a member of a Soldiers of the One terror cell on Caprica. Her birth name is unknown; her surname was taken from her wife, Desiree Willow. As the planetary commander of the Soldiers of the One, she pursued a scheme she called Apotheosis: the use of a stolen avatar program to grant a form of digital afterlife, to be inaugurated through the mass murder of civilians.

Monotheist origins#

Willow was raised in a Monotheist environment in the Gramadas mountain range of Gemenon. During the 1920s the Church was threatened with extinction, and the Soldiers of the One, a militant Monotheist organization, turned part of the Gramadas into a fortress before beginning a terrorist campaign across the other Twelve Worlds around 1932.

The avatar program and Barnabas Greeley#

As Soldiers of the One planetary commander, Willow turned her attention to a spate of bombings that continued after the death of Zoe Graystone. Through contact with the STO leadership, she learned that the organization was gearing up for another war and that cell leader Barnabas Greeley was behind the bombings, having begun an unauthorized campaign quietly approved by the leadership. These two concerns converged when she paid a house call to the Graystone residence hoping to download the family's computer server data, realizing that without the avatar program she would have no leverage against Greeley. The download succeeded, but the program was found to have been deleted from the server during a recent transfer.

When Olaf discovered a poster covertly arranging a multi-cell gathering, he, Willow, and Nestor realized Greeley posed a severe threat and might even have them assassinated to seize control of the entire planet. Willow halted Greeley's smuggling operations to pressure him, then confronted him in person at his warehouse base. The following night she departed for Gemenon and narrowly survived a bomb planted in her car.

Apotheosis and the Church#

On Gemenon, Willow entered negotiations with the Church leadership to sanction Apotheosis, her proposal to use the avatar program for religious purposes. The Elders were uninterested in her method, the mass murder of thousands of civilians at a Pyramid game in Caprica City's Atlas Arena to spawn avatars of the suicide bombers. They deemed the killings detrimental to their cause, and it was later questioned whether killing was needed at all, since avatars could be created without killing the original person. Disgusted at the Church's position, Willow began plotting an overthrow with equally disaffected leaders such as Diego. One of the Elders, Obal Ferras, was executed by his peers after his own plot to assassinate Willow was uncovered.

Betrayal and the murder of Mar-beth#

During the final days of preparation before the Atlas Arena attack, Willow continued to see Amanda Graystone, who had left her husband Daniel and was housed at a cabin outside the city. As Willow weighed how to obtain Zoe's pendant, then in the hands of the Global Defense Department after Zoe was incorrectly blamed for an earlier bombing, she drew the attention of GDD agent Jordan Duram. While Director Singh found excuses not to sanction an investigation, given Willow's many connections among the STO and Monotheists, Duram recruited Amanda as an off-the-record confidential informant. To protect Amanda, Singh was given documents suggesting that Mar-beth Willow, another member of the group marriage, was the informant. Warned immediately by Singh posing as a third party, Willow believed Mar-beth was an informant, followed her to a nearby park, and stabbed her in the throat, with Olaf and Nestor disposing of the body in the river.

The Atlas Arena plot#

Singh tracked down the two remaining Willows and assured them he was using all his power to implicate the Graystones as terrorists and open a window for the bombing. On the day of the attack, all the suicide bombers except Clarice had been digitized, and because Nestor died before creating the template for a Clarice Willow avatar, she gave herself an excuse not to attend, remaining instead with the family's computer servers. The servers were programmed to generate the avatars and upload them online only once the bombers' holobands determined them to be dead.

Exploring the Heaven programmed in V-World for the new avatars to load into, Willow was met by Zoe-A, the original avatar created by Zoe Graystone. Having met her creator's parents and been in control of the U-87 during the STO raid, Zoe-A demanded to know the reason for Willow's actions and was let in on the plan. Outraged, Zoe-A destroyed the Heaven program while, in the real world, the terrorists were gunned down by U-87 Cylons, foiling the bombing. Zoe-A's carnage bled into reality and caused the computer server to explode before the avatars finished generating, killing everyone involved except Willow herself.