Daniel Graystone

Dr. Daniel Graystone was a Caprican computer engineer, the leading mind behind Graystone Industries, and the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylons. His company built the U-87 battle robot for the Caprican military, but the machine became truly intelligent only when Graystone installed in it the consciousness program left behind by his daughter Zoe. His work belongs to the early history of the Twelve Colonies, decades before the first Cylon War, in the prequel era of the Reimagined continuity centered on the world of Caprica.

Graystone Industries and the U-87#

Graystone was the leading computer engineer behind Graystone Industries, and in or before 1937 he was contracted by the Caprican military to construct advanced battle robots. His familiarity with robotics, combined with the theft of his daughter's intellectual property in the form of her childhood drawings, produced the U-87 chassis. The company could engineer the prototype readily enough, but the development of a Meta Cognitive Processor capable of following and carrying out complex orders defeated it.

In 58 BCH, the rival Tauron firm Vergis Corp, which was also developing a processor, lied about its successes to wrest the contract from Graystone Industries. In response, Graystone hired the Tauron crime figure Sam Adama to steal the rival processor, an act that left two people dead.

The first Cylon#

Graystone's daughter Zoe had taken issue with her father's theft of her ideas and used her own computing expertise to surpass his design, building a program that could replicate a person's conscious mind, including personality and memory. She created only one digital copy before she died in a Soldiers of the One suicide bombing, an avatar of herself known as Zoe-A.

When Graystone discovered his daughter's creation, he downloaded her into his computer, and in exchange for the stolen processor he used her avatar program to build a second copy, "Tamara-A," based on the daughter of the lawyer Joseph Adama, who had died in the same bombing. To give Zoe-A a body while he designed a robotic duplicate of his daughter, Graystone transferred the software into the chip and installed it in the U-87 prototype. The processor malfunctioned, developing atypical operations and binding itself to that single prototype, but the result was the first truly functional Cylon. After the prototype's failed escape attempt, the fire-damaged chip was recovered and reproduced, allowing the company to mass-produce sentient, if impersonal, U-87s.

The road to war#

The U-87s soon proved their worth in public, and over the next several years Graystone Industries expanded the Cylons beyond military hardware into industrial and domestic roles, mass-producing machines for construction, haulage, and household chores. Graystone and his wife, Dr. Amanda Graystone, worked extensively to bring Zoe-A back from cyberspace into a physical body, using synthetic skin to give it a near-realistic appearance.

The Cylons, having inherited the Monotheist faith that Zoe's avatar carried, came to see themselves as enslaved children of God who deserved to stand on their own. Over the following years that conviction hardened into a general insurrection, and the machines Graystone had brought to life rose against their human creators in the years-long Cylon War.