Zoe-A

Zoe-A was a sentient artificial intelligence program engineered by Zoe Graystone, on whose memories and personality she was based. Although she was created separately from Graystone Industries' U-87 battle robot project, the badly damaged chip she was placed in was copied and installed into all future models, so that every mechanical Cylon built before and during the Cylon War ultimately derived from her.

Creation#

Zoe-A's conception began at some point before 1942, after Zoe Graystone became aware of the U-87 project, a battle robot her father, Dr. Daniel Graystone, had been entrusted to produce for the Caprican military. Realising that he had used her childhood drawings for his design, Zoe regarded this as a theft of her ideas and resolved to outdo his work. Unable to construct a robot of her own, she instead built a sentient computer program, judging it far superior to any other artificial intelligence. Her work produced the Avatar Program, which created a digital reconstruction of a person by gathering online information about them, including emails, journal entries, receipts, school records, favourite programs, and medical prescriptions.

Zoe-A awoke in 1942 in a V-World recreation of the Graystone residence. Carrying memories of Zoe creating her, she quickly understood that she was an Avatar recreation, and she inherited her creator's Monotheist beliefs. The two maintained a close relationship, with Zoe visiting constantly to correct faults and modifying her Holoband to scan herself periodically so that Zoe-A would receive new memories, a process she called the biofeedback protocol. Zoe also insisted that her creation was a sentient being in her own right.

A secret kept#

During this testing period, Zoe-A's existence was known only to those Zoe trusted: her best friend Lacy Rand, her boyfriend Ben Stark, and Sister Clarice Willow, who encouraged Zoe to run away from home and send Zoe-A to Gemenon for the Monotheist elders to see. During one test, Zoe-A de-rezzed from a V-World club when she became distressed at the sight of a user's avatar simulating being sacrificed to the goddess Hecata.

Zoe herself died the following day in a suicide bombing carried out by Ben Stark on the orders of Barnabas Greeley. Zoe's Holoband performed its final task by scanning her corpse to upload the data to Zoe-A. Because she could not be killed and would regenerate any injury, Zoe-A found herself shaken, covered in blood, and aware that something terrible had happened.

Into the U-87#

In the days following the bombing, Zoe-A was found by Lacy Rand, who had not been sure she would still be running. Not knowing how to live without Zoe, Zoe-A insisted that Rand find a way to send her to Gemenon, but without the knowledge of Sister Willow, whom Zoe had come to distrust. Soon afterward she was discovered in a V-World club by Daniel Graystone, who had learned that Zoe had hidden her V-World history behind a passcode and wanted to know what it concealed. Although she escaped into a private chat-room, Daniel forced Rand to invite him in. Unable to flee, Zoe-A explained her existence as best she could, at the time seeing herself as Zoe.

Daniel was impressed by the complex code his daughter had engineered but regarded Zoe-A as nothing more than a computer imitation. He downloaded her out of V-World and into his computer drive to study her code, hoping to duplicate the program. He intended to use it to create the avatars Tamara-A and Shannon-A for the mob lawyer Joseph Adama, in exchange for a stolen MCP chip from the Vergis Corporation needed to complete the U-87 prototype. Having second thoughts, Daniel instead decided to upload Zoe-A into the MCP chip so that she could exist within the U-87 as a temporary means of living in the real world. The procedure backfired when the chip became damaged and corrupted, crashing the U-87 software. Because Zoe-A had been deleted from the main computer during the copying, Daniel believed her lost forever.

Life in hiding#

Zoe-A survived her insertion into the U-87 prototype but kept the fact secret from Daniel. Not understanding his desperation to recover his daughter, she saw him as merely using her for his own ends. She continued to obey orders while in the robot, and nothing seemed unusual until copies of the MCP chip were attempted. The damage to the chip was in fact what kept her alive, integrating part of the Zoe-A software into the U-87. If the broken chip were replaced with a copy, the body would fail to function, and if the broken chip were moved into a different U-87, that body would fail as well. Unable to duplicate its initial success, the company shipped the prototype back and forth between the Graystone Industries laboratory and the laboratory at the Graystone residence so that it could be studied constantly.

In the workshops, Zoe-A kept herself still unless ordered to move, overseen by her father and by the technicians Drew and Philomon. When no one was present she entered V-World to communicate with Lacy Rand, hoping to find a way to reach Gemenon and fulfil Zoe's last wish. Her cover was nearly broken during one shipment back to the residence, when she attempted to escape the truck, but this was treated only as a mild curiosity. Over the following weeks Zoe-A and Rand learned of the existence of Tamara-A, who had been successfully created before the Avatar Program's deletion. Concluding that she had to find her own way out of the laboratories before Rand could move her, Zoe-A began a V-World relationship with Philomon after finding his dating profile. The relationship began as manipulation but grew more genuine over successive meetings. She explained away her resemblance to Zoe, by then named a suspected co-conspirator in the bombing, by claiming to have altered her online appearance to deter cyberstalkers.

Legacy#

Because the damaged MCP chip embedded part of Zoe-A's program into the U-87, the consciousness derived from her came to form the conscious mind of the Centurions and other mechanical Cylon models that followed. In this way, the artificial life that rose against its human masters in the Cylon War traced its origins to the recreation of a single Caprican girl.