Planet of the Cylons.

[Guy Gardener]

Part One.

The Cylon Raider had been brought down by a massive rock flung by a medieval catapult. The surviving Centurion, just a torso bleeding cables and lubricant, crawled out of the flame engulfed wreck he had lead into battle against many Humans and other soft animal life. A leaping Gorilla hit it in the face 30 times with the but of his rifle, then thinking the machine dead raised the chrome carcass above his head like a trophy. The mildly damaged Cylon drew his sword and cut the monkey's head off, and he fell too, after the ape dropped him, and then fell on top of the Centurion. 25 more gorillas were circling this new Astronaut vermin come to disrupt the true way of life in Ape City, but 12 seconds later they were all dead from the violent nerve gas leaking from the raider's air breaks.

35 more fireballs, all them Cylon Raiders scuttled by stone balls moving preciously slowly through the air, that advanced Cylon technology could not recognize as a threat until it was far too late, and the entire attack wing had been relegated to exploding garbage. The last half of a Cylon looked up with regret commiserating as he could see and hear these large hairy humans stabbing, cutting, clubbing, slapping and shooting with science damned fire arms, which was very peculiar. Had something happened to their lasers?

It didn't matter how disastrous this foothold had been draw into a total rebuke, because finally after 20 years, the Cylon Empire had found Earth, and as soon as the Base Stars followed his beacon, the final extermination of the vermin known as man would begin with a mass of laser strikes from orbit. Total victory, and nothing was going to take this from him. 16 apes from 50 feet away riddled the Cylon Warrior with four hundred bullets before his red iridescent eyeball stopped sweeping left and right, left and right, left and right, so they stopped shooting and assumed that it was dead, tied the shining robot shells together and were dragged by Horse back to Ape City to be explained by Doctor Zaius.

 

[Robert Bruce Scott]

Planet of the... ceylons?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Two.

The last Centurion from the failed foothold to destroy the final catching mitt of the 12 colonies woke in a vice used to fix wagon axles, finding the irrepressible Dr Zaius, a zaddy orangutan, poking his tin plated eyelids with a screw driver and hammering his brain like a bell, trying to pry the big red eye out, since it would make a great lamp to read by at night, if only Zaius figured out the science before the ape council abolished this prize as antithetical, so the massive machine who has powerful hydraulic pistons instead of biceps, slaps the orange fuzzball across the room with one of his mighty composite steel human-crunching gauntlets.

"Human bastard!" Zaius stands up, takes a rifle off the wall, and starts shooting at the space born automaton, which high Councillor of Ape City spuriously thinks is a human knight of some kind from the distant past, again.

The Cylon rips apart the iron age vice holding his sheared waist together so that his leaking mechano-intestines stayed clamped, into murderous toss-able chunks, beginning his quest to take the hunched human's head off his orange shaggy human shoulders.

Zaius stops shooting after the Cylon runs out of brick-a-brack to throw at him, since he can't barely crawl towards new ammunition after the invasive injuries he has sustained on this brave new world "Human! Why do you call me Human? I am an ape!"

Centurions don't usually get to decide who they get to kill, so alone like this, without orders, mistakes are bound to rear up "Human! Why do you call me human? I am a Cylon!"

Zaius starts laughing "This is truly magnificent! The only reason either one of us wants to kill the other, is that we believed that each other of us were men! I hate men! If I could kill them all, what a glorious day that would be! This is a truly farcical turn of events! We should be friends!"

"You killed hundreds of Cylons, yesterday and then cut me in half!"

"Ah yes, there is that. Sorry. I made a boo boo, but we thought that you were a fleet of human ships from the 20th century, a fleet we had spent years preparing for the arrival of, and keen ape technology made short work of. Again, I apologize for over reacting, but it did not seem like we had a choice."

"You have made an enemy of the Cylon Empire!"

"I am your fiend and I am going to alternate between setting you on fire and drowning you, for the next week at least, until that is exactly the story you tell you superiors, about how brave Ape soldiers rescued you from a cowardly human sneak attack. Congratulations Cylon, it will be a joy learning how to break you, but break you I will."

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Three.

They sang to god the holy words in an unrecognizable key.

"Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you
And by now, you should've somehow realised what you gotta do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now"

Under the obvious solemn current of this reverent display of faith, old men section off to a subetheric private bubble to discuss telepathically the new yet ongoing and current invasion of their world by deadly alien machines from the other side of the universe. How it could very easily mean the end of all them all, or if they were very clever, just the end of the apes, even though there had always been plans to use the apes as cheap labour and third class citizens, since rebuilding a stem of industrial cities without half a billion disposable monkeys they can drive to raw frustration, might be literally impossible.

"And backbeat, the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out
I'm sure you've heard it all before, but you never really had a doubt
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now"

The new threat did not think, so telepathy was useless against these metal space monsters, but fortunately we mutant dregs, burnt, rotting, plasticized flesh cascading off our bones, infesting the crumbling ruins under the Forbidden Zone, are also very dangerously telekinetic. A dozen saucer ships flew by an encampment on the periphery of the Zone yesterday, where bald Children with melted faces grabbed ships like Frisbee plates from hundreds of feet in the air, still strafing exploding death lighting like it was a rapid fire 8 mm cannon, and their pilots, with their minds, pulling the Centurions to pieces like a smashed up shellfish dropped from height by a hungry gul.

"And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how
Because maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me"

The Cylon, tens of thousands of unflinching tireless robots, were the greatest opportunity man has had in quite some time, since their "basestars" once they land, are basically cities they can take from an unprepared enemy. Although, robots don't poop. Retrofitting an alien city with thousands of miles of copper pipes, when modern day humanity has almost no experience in smelting or forging septic canals, seems exasperating. It's like every-time Man thinks that they are going to get back on top, stupid reality kicks them in the sack. So usable, but uninhabitable, unless they pee into buckets, and then throw the buckets out the nearest window. Well it's not like that isn't almost what we are already doing 200 feet under the planet of the apes.

"And after all
You're my wonderwall
Today was gonna be the day, but they'll never throw it back to you
And by now, you should've somehow realised what you're not to do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
And all the roads that lead you there were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how"

It's the birthrate. We mutants can't get the numbers to populate a valley, holy bomb forbid the whole world. Attempts to breed outside our kind with apes, mute wildling humans, and even donkeys have proved fruitless. How can we fight a billion apes, or a million robots, if we can only muster a few dozen babies a year to replenish our numbers because we are so diseased from the radiation, the only thing that lets us talk and think aloud? But there is a religious question to ponder "What if these aliens bring with them more Alpha/Omega Bombs?" Does that reduce how holy our bomb is, or does it magnify the love then can express to god, beyond all other agenda, rescuing the Cylyons nuclear stockpile from the Cylons is an ecclesiastical certainty. It would be a mortal sin to leave all the images of god, the destroyer of worlds, in the steel hands of soulless filth from somewhere out there.

"I said maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You're my wonderwall
I said maybe (I said maybe)
You're gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You're my wonderwall"

What about their women? Some of us hunger for fresh meat we don't already call cousin. Are they entirely always metal that we could not bridge on their less stark figures, perhaps robo trafficking indentured sexual servitude unless we we won't find ourselves injured from humping some strange as romantically desirable as a ragged rusty feed trough? No unfortunately, if they have woman to credit their species, they also do seem to be made from tin and plastic.

"I said maybe (I said maybe)
You're gonna be the one that saves me (saves me)
You're gonna be the one that saves me (saves me)
You're gonna be the one that saves me (saves me)"

Amen. I need a beer.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Four.

Urko refused to be tricked.

He was the smartest ape that ever was.

He smashed tricky tricksters.

Human tricky tricksters died. Quickly.

Baltar held 7 feet in the air, by the throat, by a screaming gorilla (It's Urko!) questioning the ultimate traitor's ancestry, fortunately the wiley Caprican is 10 times stronger than a regular dumb human on this low gravity world, so he drew his short sword and cut his oppressor's moth beaten paw off at the wrist, which doesn't stall General Urko for even a moment, even with blood pissing everywhere, because the prideful ape starts wailing the pretentious becaped human upstart with his ragged stump again and again and again and again until the flamboyant Ambassador of the Cylon kicks Urko out a window to a 3 story drop.

"I don't care what the hell that was, I'm here to do business, so I'm just going to pretend that that feldercarb didn't frakking happen?I" The irate man composes himself and straightens his very very wide collar. Really a human dressed like an ape is fricking ridiculous! "Excellent, where are my manners, You may call me Lord Baltar." And he smiles like a shark.

The Apes had agreed to talk about a treaty, although they had first scored an impressive victory over the Cylon raiders, but now the shining Aliens, knew where all the immovable catapults were hiding, so it was quite easy not to fly in front of the narrow killzones slowly, or hang there for a while, and then get thwapped out of the sky by a lump of granite. Survival dictated that it was wise to make nice before the space robots understood how weak the Apes hand is. Capitulation or extinction.

"I want to buy 15 hundred humans, preferably alive."

"The only good human is a dead human." Zaius counters, forgetting that he was talking to a human, since he was quite literally talking to a human which is supposed to be impossible, but how this "Lord Baltar" apehandled Urko was a glorious jape, and would certainly make the rabid Gorilla more easier to manipulate in the future.

"I understand the sentiment." the slippery human agrees with the master of all apes in this city "I want the slaves pegged to a yolk by tomorrow, numbered by tattoo, disinfected and deloused, before payment will be issued."

"You do not understand the economics of our culture, if I had a month, I could source maybe 500 human wildlings from the nearby forests, but they are unruly animals who are very difficult to train to do the simplest tasks. What you ask is impossible, I'm putting my foot down, 15 hundred head of cattle is down right impossible to hunt out in less than 24 hours."

Baltar nods, and the hulking Centurion beside him shoots Zaius in the foot with a laser set to stun. His leg will probably be (figuratively) dead for a weak even if he retains consciousness after being struck in five of his lower fingers by a bolt of lightning explosions. "ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!! ARRRRGGGGHHH! ...Ah! What do you even need with so many humans? Are you trying to save them?"

"Gods no. I need hostages." Baltar walks to a rough hand drawn map on the wall of Zaius's study and points to the redded out part. The Forbidden Zone. "Here. There are a quarter million humans living in the Burroughs of this dead city. I only want a handful more than a thousand. It's an afternoons work unless you are an idiot."

Nursing his foot, unsure how wise it might be to order his own guards to shoot "Lord Baltar" in return "But that's the forbidden zone, the air and the Earth their are toxic poison. No one who ever goes there ever comes back. Nothing lives there, you are wrong, you are wrong."

Baltar is going to lose it. "Zaius? Can I call you Zaius? Good. Now I am the man who shot you a moment ago. Do you remember being shot? I can make them shoot you as many times as the highest number that I can think of, and they will do it, even if it takes months, my Centurions have a singular drive to follow even stupid orders, and they rarely ask questions... But you're right, it shouldn't just be about you. That will make you look a like a coward, and then insurgents will knock you off and I will have to start from the beginning again with a new head monkey. So this is what I am going to do for you, if you fall short of giving me all I asked for tomorrow, you are safe, but I will return with a thousand Centurions and execute every child in Ape City under the age of 10 years old."

Zaius is confused by the threat "But I am only 8 years old."

"What? But I thought that you were a village elder?"

"I am the fourth oldest Orangutan in the world. I am 8 years old."

This is the most peculiar planet "You are blowing my mind."

 

[Robert Bruce Scott]

I keep trying to not like the absurd drivel you publish. And I keep failing at that quite spectacularly.

I must have a serious weakness for absurdity.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Five.

Science can get you laid. No one can argue that established fact, because it's also science. Double science really, which is twice as much science as any Ape needs to impress a female. "Doctor Zira! If I can get this monstrosity off the ground, you will mate with me!!!"

"Oh Doctor Milo, you are a funny little chimp." She flirts. Definite flirting. He's not imagining that she is flirting, it's a tale as old as time. He totally imagined it, but even if he hadn't, flirting is not a legally binding contract.

After the Liberty II's test flight of a few hundred meters, the beautiful Doctor slept with that idiot Cornelius, during a sex rampage that disturbed the local flora and fauna, But Milo knew that his will was right, and that her loins were wrong. His science made her randy, so she should be sleeping with him. A basic truth. Delicious Zira had accidentally fornicated with the wrong Ape. What a silly Girl.

A few days later "Dr Zira! When I get my ship into space orbiting this sheer disc we live on, You will sleep with me!"

"Oh! That will make my day, you big strong ape!" Placating and playing along, look very similar, but any normal ape could read the tone of situation, Dr Milo on the other had had his face clogged up with so much engine grease that he could't smell where her hormones were pointing, or know why she wouldn't be interested physically in such an incredibly mature man three marathons past his prime.

The ancient human made vessel dredged from a lake bed appropriated from a months now missing talking human called "Taylor" flew upward towards the blue sky until it turned black, but more surprising out the window, the planet of their birth was not a flat plane of resources, but a globe, I mean seriously, it's like MIlo couldn't help but find more new untold ways to commit heresy becoming even more likely to be an excessively punctured victim of a firing squad upon his hero's return home to Ape City. Milo turns around to tell his confederate scientists "Hey Look! It's a god damned ball!" But Cornelius and Zira are banging in zero gravity, and ignoring his effete jibber jabber.

After the ship lands back down on Terra Firma, DR. Milo puts his paw down, and has a word with Cornelius about the prize the two of them seem to be struggling over "There seems to have been a misunderstanding. It's not your fault. I suspect I never clearly drew out my intentions Cornelius. I only asked Dr Zira to help with this project because I had believed that she would quickly be aggrieved to bear my children after accepting that I am an awesome Scientist. She is not here for her mind, which I agree has been surprisingly helpful, but if you are not going to get out of my way boy, I might as well replace her with a male Ape who can do Zira's job just as well, without being such a fertile distraction."

Cornelius decides that no ape should go this fast. Breaking the sound barrier so may times has obviously driven the old man insane, so he walks away before he says anything that cannot be unsaid, but their plan was sound, he had collected 3 full barrels of gunpowder, unimaginable explosive power indeed! They just had to fly into space and some how drop the barrel after barrel after barrel on the one and only one mothership the Cyclons brought with them, that can't possibly be bigger than maybe 4 wagons, and after the three of them had saved the world, then he would tell Zira about how Dr Milo had the horn for her. Gosh oh gee, that will make his intended laugh and laugh, but they yes, after that, they needed to run.

A new day, the same old speech "Zira! After I save apekind, after I have blown them to kingdom come, and they are all dead, and we are alive, it is then that you will sleep with me sexually!"

She smiles like the sun, from the good natured comedy they share "Ha! Milo you are just adorable! If you are the hero that saves every one of us by setting a few hundred robots on fire, I will honestly consider letting you get a leg over. I mean you'll not just be a hero of ape city, but a hero of the entire planet of the apes! Very bangable." Zira tells this joke that Milo, a complete nerd, does not have a fraction of the social skills necessary to understand as fiction, which seals all their fates.

But they are finally ready. They found servos that held their mothers of all bombs to the hull, and they thought they had triangulated the origin of where in space that their enemy was waiting to kill all of them. It was go time. The arrow head shaped ship zipped into the air, then zipped into space, then zipped past the moon. Oh my, the moon! If this was not a military mission to share death with forces so dumb as to think that the Apes would bow down to robot overlords, this is their independence day (giggle). It took 2 hours, but Milo and Cornelius and Zira finally found their target, and their target had a name riveted to the side of it's hull: "Battlestar Pegasus".

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Six.

The majestic Ship of Lights, a lattice of fossilized time where austere glowing Gods cruise the past for twitchy younger races to anal probe.

"Get up you little shit!"

Baltar formerly nestled in the bosom of a good nights sleep, rocking some stark white pyjamas he did not remember putting on before he passed out, off his tits on ape wine, which kinda hummed. The mystery PJs hummed, not the sick wine. Wine whines, not hums. So I guess Jammies usually jam, but this nightwear hummed? Weird. To wit, the paunchy old boy had been minding his own business, out to it, when he was abducted, from a swinging hammock overlooking his luxurious mansion dominating the outskirts of Ape City, a polite change of pace from captivity under Cylon rule, billeted in a grotesque sectioned bedsit the pragmatic Cylons provided for him on "his" base star lo these many horrific years, his typical accommodations, felt more like an upside down iron maiden, than anything resembling restfulness, so things had actually finally been getting good, at last, for the last Human, and now this... These assholes again.

Kicked awake, Baltar scurries away from the yelling, and rebukes "The first thing the Cylons did after they executed their lizard forefathers, was that they burnt all the pillows. It's been 15 years since I Last felt a something against my cheek that was not grating. This is how you make an enemy of Gaius Baltar! What do you want John?"

Benevolent, radiant John glares at the most infamous turncoat in the history of everything as hard as he can. "I said get up Baltar."

Like any curmudgeon persisting through his 50s, Baltar has to hold onto everything in the universe to get up off the floor "I don't trust you, because last time I followed your guidance John, it did not work out at all well for me, or anyone else I know." Baltar knows exactly where he is, and that it's all a rotten sour turd.

John, who as I mentioned before is a god, also in whites, seems like an old man in his mid 40s, good looking sure, but graying, with one of those prim accents that arrive hand in hand with a first class education "Events had to unfold in a particular way to ensure the best path to enlightenment for man. We have a plan."

Baltar sits up "You told me to betray my species to the Cylons. You did that, I was just following orders, so why am I the little shit? I trusted you, that it would all work out, and I was promised leadership! I was supposed to be King of Humanity when the Cylons were appeased and dwardled off. Were the hell is my pay off? It's been a long road from there to here!"

It's like John is talking to a baby, and in many ways he is. "We approached 512 other men and woman to betray the Colonies utterly, in their dreams in exchange for riches and power, including Adama, and they all said "No". You were the first toad, the first lapdog, the first bucket of scum to agree to facilitating the extermination of 20 billion people."

"You think you're so great?"

"I think that I am wiser and humbler than you are Baltar."

"Go frakk yourself."

"Sticks and stones..."

Enunciating with his arms, Baltar starts pacing "I never should have played along with your... I was your agent! You told me to destroy Caprica and Gemanon and Picon and the rest, and that the more that I tried to kill everyone, the greater prosperity mankind would feel in the end. Quite Frankly "John", I'm not seeing it!" Baltar spreads his palms out far to symbolize the nothing burger that had become his lot since siding with these angels over his own kind during the apocalypse.

"Well, you need to start paying attention you man, we are finally at the really clever bit." John chuckles.

"The Clever Bit?" Batar starts scanning the room for a weapon.

"The 12 Colonies were a genetic dead end, which was fairly obvious, your collective experiment in democracy was never going to evolve into timeless beings of light. It was just pathetic watching you wallow in your complacent three-dimensionalnessness. You all had to go, it was a painful decision, but the colonies could still be useful we reasoned. We found a way to benefit life with your death."

"I'm all ears. Please do go on..."

"Millions of light years yonder, the 13th colony had been struck dumb by a virus, thousands of years ago. We deduced that the Galacticans, once there were Galacticans, could inoculate half billion humans on Earth, in less than 3 centuries, by interbreeding with the savage wildlings. After your generous sacrifice and donation, the Earthlings can ascend and have it all among the chorus and enlightened beings, with me."

This is not the story they told Baltar way back in the beginning. "Naked unbathed rat eating vermin? No one I know is going to want to stick their meat and two veges in that, or one of our women letting illiterate savage m... I suppose Starbuck did okay back in the day, so maybe that won't be such a problem?"

John has saved the worst for last. "If the colonial fleets lands, with their technology, sure, your people, with their lasers and chain link fences, can probably stick to loving their own kind, which is bad news for us, but what if the entire fleet crashes, and they are bereft of their technology moving forward? We project that at least half the Galacticans will survive a dead on collision, and that that small vital seed is all that is necessary for the native humans to reclaim their world from those disgusting apes."

"That's the plan?'

"That's the plan." Smug John is rather proud of himself for moving civilizations around like game pieces.

"I kill 20 billion humans. 40 thousand survivors shlep across space, chased by chrome murder monsters, then half of them die 22 years later colliding with a planet of great apes, so that the next tier of survivors can be raped by marauding stone age hill people, all so that they can shake off a flu that robbed them of their voice boxes centuries ago? That's the plan?"

"We are geniuses."

"You are insane."

"I admit we had to be a little liberal in places with free will at stake, but in 4 thousand years you will not even recognize Earth. You have saved humanity." John is expecting applause and congratulations from his captive audience, now that everything is laid out, which is not the hell going to happen.

"I saved the wrong humanity."

"What was that?"

"You are INSANE!" Baltar, hero of the Cylon, leaps at the Mormon space angel, trips him, and then starts smothering the young kicking ethereal immortal with his pillow, totally unaware that this is a dream and that Baltar is still asleep in his chimp woven hammock, building a stern hangover, on Monkey World.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 7.

That damn Orangutan took Amy.

His wife was dead, so they die, they all die, starting with this hairy prick.

Septuagenarian monkey slaying Alan Virdon, local legendarily boogy man, mother apes tell horror fables about gruesome Virdon eating little monkeys who stay up late after bedtime, crouched on a hilltop, lining up his sights, finding range and correcting for wind, with an ape built rifle that the wizened astronaut had customized into a semi-automatic, which scared the living shit out of any ape that tried to push him around. Virdon had stopped fucking around after they killed Pete. No more clever tricks, games and near misses, teaching high school science and civics to these damn animals. He created a zone of exclusion, and killed anything that crossed into his vaguely ill-defined territory. Factually Alan could have brought this tin pot back water starter planet to it's knees years ago with a couple bathtubs of gelignite, and they would have put him on the ape council, but then he'd just wake up a month later with a knife in his gut no matter how careful he played the game of thrones, but killing one ape, he could out run those consequences easily, even if it was that shitty old miser Zaius.

Over head the blazing rockets of a colonial viper cracked the sky... The most advanced air craft that Alan Virdon had seen in 2000 years, and... It was cool, so cool. Alan needed to hold on to that baby's yolk, and take it into space, like yesterday already. These feeling were more than sexual. Losing his composition, Alan had to follow it, and find out who got a big wet sloppy kiss for rescuing him from this stinking nightmare.

And then hope turned to shit. It landed, the Viper landed right next to beside the orange sphincter of tedium, Doctor Zaius... so... What the hell does this mean? Virdon's worst enemy is in cahoots with his new best friends?

Damn!

This is not what rescue finally looked like?

Alan sprints the distance between his snipers nest and the head shot that would have made him so happy, maybe a full mile in less than 10 minutes, at this rate, eating healthy and running for your life constantly, if not for the stress and being chased by murderers, Alan might live to be 200 years old... In the distance, Alan could see Zaius was genteelly shaking hands with a human boy dressed immaculately in almost glowing white, impossibly clean linen.

Finally in earshot...

"My friends call me Doctor Z." The blonde Boy says.

The politician replies "Really? My friends, also call me Doctor Z."

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Eight.

After a near miss, well lets be honest about it, the miss wasn't even close, that scary little turnip Rigel is put in control of their interrogation. Very near by, Commander Adama is monitoring the brutal debriefing from the other side of a two 2-way mirror wondering what this alien scum would look like after they were shaven from head to toe and deloused. Oh my god. Their toes are more fingers! Irregardless indolent Adama is furious about almost losing everything, after it took her so long to get here, to the top. First that lying twinkler Lucifer dipped her father's face into the business end of a volcano, then Tigh, who was waaaay older than he looked, retired gracefully into the tender arms of a very large man, then Boomer shat himself to death from an under-cooked squid, during a rather grand weekend fishing with the boys on an alien moon, then Jolly was too dumb to do the paperwork, so he quit after a week, and then command finally fell to the last Adama, if you don't count Boxy, which her father quietly did not, but now, today these three scruffy leather daddy weirdos from deep space, dropped a teeny tiny enny weeny little bomb on her ship, and it went fizzel pop poof, since they didn't know that a lot stuff you expect to blow up on a planet, will not blow up in a vacuum. Adama is totally overreacting to a non-threat, which is much better than under reacting to a real threat, because that's how you lose 12 home worlds.

12 worlds in one day.

Gone.

Galactic class morons.

Never going to live that shit down.

"It's right there!" Dr Milo, a haunched terrorist who widely avoided scuttling a Battlestar, half an hour earlier is cuffed across the face for speaking nonsense, but he's still pointing at the Colonel and screaming at the monitor! "Earth! Earth! That's our home! Earth! Can't you see it? What's wrong with you?"

Executive Officer Rigel, an adorable little heart throb dumpling, does not like how this man, this "ape", is talking to her. "Is your planet really very small? That's just a star field. I don't know what sort of feldercarb you're trying to sell here Ape, (She punches him in the breast plate) but my patience is whittled to a point, and there's not a lot of good will between right now, and the three of you fuzzy little buggers being spaced out of an airlock."

A technician wheels in a table with restraints, so that Rigel can start waterboarding her new friends, but Milo continues ranting "It's a big blue ball! You would think it's a flat plane, but no, somehow we magically don't fall off a globe. It's as obvious as day! Are you morons?!"

Adama chimes in over the PA to her XO "Break all the female's fingers, on her left hand."

The two chimps, in shock that they were encountering a species of such unmitigated evil, create a defensive posture to protect their mate, but they are standing in a low gravity cell for alien weaklings, which by comparison, even Rigel a woman of advanced years, almost 50, but still with glistening cherub cheeks, rippling with super-ape strength, might as well be disciplining small children. She holds Zira's paw to the table with one hand, and raises a hefty club with the other "Hey Athena? Did you say left hand or right?"

Zira begs for clemency "Please don't!! I'm Pregnant!"

"Join the Club!" The hammer drops tenderizing the keen scientists hairy knuckles. "I'm pregnant, you're pregnant, even the commander is pregnant, every one is pregnant. We're a dying people, and the only way to stop dying, is to start frakking."

Tearful Milo has never been in the face of such celebrated injustice "By the lawgivers word, we thought you were the Cylons! We tracked down their ships, and here we are to destroy them, they are a conquering force with unimaginable technology, you are not supposed to be here, we did not know that you were humans, or even special humans who can talk! This is a mistake, we are sorry! Please, please forgive us!! "

"Special humans who can talk?" Rigel wonders what strange folly has befallen her space brothers and space sisters on the 13th colony. "What they hell did you do?"

"I'd cut their skulls open and play with their brains." The veterinarian uses the truth as an axe, to strike back at this woman who has most probably left her as a charity case gimp for the rest of her short life. If Zira can't hold a scalpel, life is not worth living, so she might as well drown herself, and the baby.

"Zira! YOU STUPID WOMAN!!! SHUT! UP!" Milo slaps her, so Cornelius punches him, and then the two apes are scrambling on top of each other as if there is a not 5 foot 3 inch tall murderer in the room, waiting to exhale.

Faceless security pulls the comedy act apart. Zira is a sobbing mess.

"Fast friends, I see. You dropped a bomb on one of our ships. Milo, Cornelius, Zira, you didn't hurt anyone because you are ridiculous. Gunpowder? Come back in a thousand years when you're a grown up! But intent. You intended to murder everyone of us, and that is not something we take lightly or will forgive. Hey Athena I'm going to break this ladies other hand? Good? Good!"

Zira is bawling her eyes out, nursing and licking her bloody claw-paw "It was a mistake, some of our best friends are humans... We need you. The Cylons built concentration camps, working apes and humans TOGETHER to death to find special underground minerals. They are going to kill all of us, please... You have to fight our enemies, because we can't."

"Your ship is very impressive. Fight them yourselves."

Zira is going to pass out from the pain "It's not ours. It's a relic from the past."

Zira passes out from the pain.

"I'm going to be honest with you boys, if you make out for ten minutes, I won't kill her." Then Rigel glares at them with anime eyes, waiting for the live porn to start.

Adama is no fun. "Rigel! Stop screwing around! If the Cylons have a Tyllium refinery up and running, I want it. Find out where it is, or cut their hands and feet off."

Doctor Milo hobbles over to the large map onscreen of the solar system and thumps his fist against the plasma screen "This is where we are from! This is Earth! This is where the Cylons are!" But unfortunately half a dozen mutants in the Forbidden Zone, 3 light years away, are focusing all their mysticism at the survivors of the 12 Colonies who have been cruising around in circles for the last 5 years. They can't see Earth, they can't reason where Earth might be, and they can't guess. All roads to Earth are closed to this dread caravan of filthy refugees with their weird food and funny peculiarities in pronouncing the most normal words.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Nine.

Traversing the Forbidden Zone, penetrating the Forbidden City, Doctor Z is teaching Doctor Z how to ride a horse while their caravan is being attacked by an immaterial cluster of make believe King Kongs. The boy was at first distressed by the colossal quadruped bucking this way and that between his bald scrawny teen thighs, since it's not like Z's forefathers had time to fill up a zoological ark with a wide spectrum of diverse wildlife while rampaging Cylon Base Stars were turning cities housing millions, from orbit, into laser fried impact craters wallpapered with half cooked still screaming meat, but the despotic ape was acting very father-like, which makes sense if you know his story, and that Doctor Z's own apex telepathy is ramping up the Orangutan's serotonin levels.

"Now despite what he says, I did not kill Virdon's wife. That was my great grandfather, an infinitude ago, who by the way Virdon killed, sliced his guts open, and then he beheaded my grandfather, drove a dozen bullets into my father and now he's after me, because Alan Virdon, the last Astronaut until your arrival Z, the worst of his kind, thinks that we all look alike and that my entire family tree are all literally the same ape, when actually my lineage is a string of odd apples, but that man, my nemesis, is entirely insane and unstoppably racist."

In the distance the upside downed prisoner Virdon suspended on a pole, bound at the wrists and ankles, hitched between a pair of horses, is screaming "Tonight I dine on ape blood you orange c###!" as if he has the upper hand, that this complete defeat is all part of his sinister plan, and that nothing is going to dissuade Virdon of his mission to completely empty this disturbed world of apes.

"I am not a violent man, but I sense that you are." A clearly pregnant transmaterial Godzilla's brown-green snaggle rawt tail of razor sharp scales swishes harmlessly through the posse of explorers, on a pressgang mission to round up 1500 slaves for Baltar, on threat of extermination.

Doctor Zaius steadies his horse who thinks that it has already fallen off a 2 thousand foot tall cliff, and still plummeting. "I am no man, but I understand what you mean: Why haven't I killed him? He killed my father, and there's no real pickling of justice here. An animal killed an ape, so that animal must be put down."

"But?" Z's namesake Z inquires.

"There are no buts about it my young friend, that bizarre and lethal crazy person over there, I have killed a hundred times over. I have 6 of his heads mounted on a wall in my study, and a seventh polished skull to relieve myself into. It's some perverse ancient magic, that no matter how I kill him, it never takes, and he always comes back."

"Spooky." Doctor Z, the human boy touched with divinity responds as his shoulder explodes from contact with a mean spirited bullet."frakk! Og! Ow! Frakk! Frak!" and falls off his horse. "Okay! Doctor Z! That was definitely real! Real guns, real bullets! No more illusions! Frakk! Frakk! They are frakking shooting at us! My arm! My frakking arm! Frak!"

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Ten.

Sneaky Baltar ready to betray his masters and allies again, because he is the worst, dialled up Athena Adama on a well hidden private subspace ham radio the Cylons did not know about, his defacto niece, if our view of history is a little askew, and forget that this cretin was known as a skeeze well before he was known universally as a shit stained turncoat, who the entire Adama family had always reviled as a waste of spleen tissue.

“Gracious lady Commander, you look radiant! You should carry even more babies, all the time.” Butter would not melt.

“Commander will do.” Sexism. Yay! Never going to get tired of that.

So much confidence and positivity from the poster child for Euthanasia “I was there the day you were born Athena! As I recall, I was almost your godfather. It would not hurt to think of me as family, my poignant prodigal child.”

“Commander will definitely do.” Children play a game where they throw wet daggit scat at his effigy on Exodus Day. “What do you want Baltar?” She has to resist the urge to spit on the deck, after saying his name, because Adama has too much respect for the cleaning Ladies.

“It’s time for me to return home!” Does he have too many teeth? That smile is incisive.

“No.” Curt. Find out where he is, drop a big mother frakking bomb on his smarmy face, send the dipshit to hell, and be done with his existence, forever.

“You can’t pretend with me. I know you’re not the hardass you’re playing at. Girls like to skip and play with daisy chains, and that will always be true.”

“Look shorty, We know you have sex with Cylons, and we don’t want that degenerate behaviour confusing our children. If you come within military distance of this Battlestar, I’ll blow your ass off the rest of your body. Kill yourself. Please.”

She hit a nerve “I am not short!”

“You were below average on Caprica, probably everywhere, and then you went to live on a space ship where you are the only lifeform who is not 8 and a half feet tall. Shorty.”

“Everything has changed!”

“Are you still a spineless rat?”

Baltar is becoming uncomfortable, he remembers this girl playing with ponies, as if skycycles were not faster. “Athena, control your rabid feminine emotions! I insist that everything has changed, I have always been on your side, my pretty, generally and specifically, but my former masters – “

“The Cylons.” She buts into his rhythm.

“No, my former masters from the Ship of Lights, have revealed that they never intended anything but pain and misery for the 12 colonies, and that I may have been a fool to ever think otherwise, and I know that this is a fast paced switcheroo, but I want to save you from a final total destruction that maybe only a handful of you might limp away from into an insidiously frightful fate you could not possibly imagine. It’s bad, really bad, you have to trust me with your lives to get our dying species out of this perplexing conundrum. Please.”

“The who from the ship of where want to do what?” The old foogy has finally snapped. Frakk him.

“I’m sorry, I’d always just assumed you were smart because you were beautiful… Is there a man I can talk to? Maybe Stringbean or Jolly, they always seemed so mismatched, when they were back to back shooting their way out of some tense situation, like the only reason that the stumpy one didn’t fall between the lanky one’s legs, is because he was so damn fat. Ha!”

“It’s Greenbean, and he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Oh, frakk you, you hypocritical piece of crap!”

“Calm down, you are having a senseless tantrum, it’s embarrassing, for you. Sit down, put your head between your legs, and breathe normally. There’s a good girl.”

Athena feels the rage of a million exploding suns consuming her. “No one likes you, You are going to die with my foot up your ass.”

Desperation. “I’m on Earth, I found Earth!”

“Sorry the message is garbled, what did you say?”

“I’m on Earth, there is no 13th colony, and it is a trap, it’s always been a trap!”

“Seriously, coot, toad, bastard, speak up, I can’t hear you!”

Baltar fines his argument down to a point “You are in danger, and only I can save you!”

“Nope, sorry, I’m not getting any of this? Hey! Jupiter, how clement is the solar wind right now? I think it’s knocking the crap out of the signal this asshole is using to talk to me about complete rubbish. “Don’t believe a word he says” my father would say, and “shoot him before he starts talking” is a code to live a life by. This rot has been a complete waste of my time! Baltar, if you can still hear me, frakk off you frakking frakk!” The deformed Forbidden Zone mutants almost a full parsec yonder are still perfectly jamming all references to the planet of the Apes, home to the 13th Colony who is dumb, from the colonial fleet, who is almost there.

“Athena! Athena! Listen to me! Listen to me!” Baltar’s shrill voice, less insincerely charming, now that it’s been raised 20 decibels to elicit clarity, echoes across the flight deck of the Pegasus, in one ear and out the other of the entire command staff, who register not a lick of anything.

“Where did he go? It’s just static.” Athena is worried. Baltar means trouble, so whether they believe him or not, whether he is telling the truth or not, not that he said much, that wasn’t critical libel about her appearance or gender, half of the fleet is probably going to be choking on a hard vacuum by the end of the day.

“Useless piece of crap, we can’t trust him honey, you did the right thing.” Rigel consoles her raison d’etre.

“I need a hug.”

They embrace.

“I got you babe.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Eleven.

Back in the Forbidden Zone, under Siege, the two Doctor’s Z, along with 40, I mean 39, I mean 38, I mean 37, I mean 36...

Telepaths make frakking excellent marksmen. They can see through walls or around corners, and hell’s dong if they can push their target, & then will the useless slackjaw primate to walk gleefully without reservation out from secure cover, towards an ideal killbox, face-first into a bullet. It’s like evolution isn’t really all that fair, not that this kind of mutation is strictly speaking evolution in the usual slow plodding 100s of generations or careful natural selection way. They cheated. Soak in a billion rads of radioactivity for 6 generations and suddenly any dumb goober is half way to being a god, even if their sperms are black as pitch, so almost half of the population are infertile, offering nothing to the future, giving the finger to Darwin. Very powerful, but nothing human, and less of them by head, every year, until frustrated they eventually kidnap a few thousand rat eating regular humans from the forest to make the healthy babies, since the idea of sex when your partner is this damn ugly can be perfectly repellent.

35, 34, 33… Basically Doctor Zaius is losing one Gorilla ground pounder stormtrooper per second to the mutant defensive line unhappy about the hairy lice infested savage enemy at their gates. “Don’t Worry Doctor Z, I’m protecting the two of us, but they are so strong, and there are so many of them.” The boy with something extra explains to his new best friend who would murder him fast if Zaius had not been psychically roofied into playing out a fish out of water buddy comedy.

“Are you “protecting” Verdin too?” The ape wants to know the players who are playing.

“I don’t have to. He’s not human. Operating on a completely different wavelength, maybe? I have no idea what he is thinking, and neither do they.”

Zaius provides a truth “He’s 2000 years old.”

“Really? That is unusual, but It’s more than that, it’s like he is inauthentic, maybe Verdin is a clone?”

“What’s a clone?” 30, 29, 28, 27, 26…

“An exact copy, constructed quickly in a matter of hours.”

“That’s exactly what I said an hour ago.” Doctor Z admonishes the Boy for dressing up regular general knowledge crap that everyone knew, but with made up words, that no one knew. “If they can’t see his mind, maybe they can’t see him at all?”

Moments later, bullets wizzing past his ginger highlights, Doctor Zaius is cutting the rank human free from that tent pole hung between two horses. “Verdin, do what you were born to, kill everyone over there, and then you can come back here, and I’ll let you kick me in the face until I have no more teeth left, and I won’t even try to stop you. Deal?”

Verdin spits on Zaius and then runs at the new threat, without fear.

What followed was graphic, disgusting and nearly super human, Alan was kicking his way into chests, then pulling out hearts and lungs, but that was only possible because the heavy radiation in this climate left its defenders made up from mostly jelly meat and soft cartilage. Kickback from a rifle 1 caliber stronger would have ripped these men’s arms off. Scourge of the ape’s world Avenging angel Alan Verdin, after an unforeseen twist of fortune wound up being an angel of Mercy preserving the lifeblood of his immortal enemy Doctor Zaius, for a moment at least.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Twelve.

Doctor Milo figured it out, and weaponized whatever it was, because he’s a genius. Whenever anyone of these flea picking space animals hear the word “Earth” they get dopey, stupid and distracted. Say “Earth” Three times and they try to run away, but if you have the gall to say the name of the planet Milo was born to, and wherefrom he can trace his prestigious origins back to even the plague, in a loop, on repeat, their jailers and oppressors just plain pass out from what looks like half a dozen strokes, crawling into a ball for security. With this neat trick in hand, the three intrepid astrochimps Cornelius, Zira and Milo cleverly break from their detention cell on the qt, and soon, a few hours, no more, later, manage to find the Liberty II on the hanger Deck, without hurting anyone too much or raising the alarm. Zira will be incontinent for the rest of her life because of the PTSD from yesterday but what they hadn't figured out is that they had actually already timewarped 3 years into the past when escaping their doomed word, thrall to a massive Cylon fakking fracking venture, and furthermore, that their continuing great escape in this fantastic voyage will have, is that they won’t touch grass again until the year behind them 1972, when it must be their mission to stop this crazy weirdo unbalanced crap from going down again in the first place, and make a better world for her child, who is a blessing. Although Milo is considering eating Cornelius's baby the moment it escapes her irresistibly shaggy body, and putting his own fetus into the gorgeous lady who should be his blissfully wedded ape once a knife cuts through all this confusion and Cornelius's neck.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Thirteen.

Lastly Doctor Z takes his boots off, and he’s a bare ass boy, put into the world like his mother made him, even though legend has it that he may have teleported out of the womb because the traditional exit is a three-ring circus of blood, which no one is completely happy about.

No one is cleaning this pond. Z is not walking away from this swim without jock itch and maybe leaches. His toe dips into the brain pool they found under the Forbidden City of Mutants, joining the advanced hive mind of the mass human gestalt identity, introducing himself with his winding origin story: My Two Dads, which is somewhat of a 2/3rds truth, since other than Starbuck and Cye, who were very gay for other for at least a month, his actual bio-dad, the nefarious Count Iblis, provided essential requirements to his birth (Deus Ex Splooge), where upon teen wonder Doctor Z hammers his way into the collected consciousness of a thousand years of human history, and rewrites the mind pond's mission: 1. Leave the Pegasus and the Colonial fleet alone, so that they can find Earth. 2. Strike the apes dumb, so that Adama can plant a new flag on this 14th colony without fear of insurrection. 3. Focus their telepathic rancour through subspace at the Ship of Lights, break its engines and throw enlightened prigs into real space, so that that his pawn Baltar can destroy it and them.

Z crawls out of the moss and goo, impregnated by a hundred thousand fleas looking for somewhere warm to leave eggs.

“What was that?” Doctor Zaius did not understand the childish indiscretion, to splash about in a soup of human brains with flippers and teeth “What di… What… W…” and those were the last words ever to be spoken by an ape for as long as this wet hive mind of superior beings that seems to spread half a galaxy wide, has anything to say about it.

Airdrying the human genius angel explains to his gelded pet “I just won.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Fifteen.

Adama's Amada is a palindrome. Right?

Atop one of those high rise throne stilts, for hours, dirty old plump, grey and balding Baltar still failing to explain to Commander Adama Junior that that the Cylons are planning to strip mine the 13th colony, and that the Ship of Lights with their bullshit mysticism have written them all off, and that Baltar has to save the pretty lady from her own god damned ignorance, and maybe the rest of humanity too, but she’s feigning distraction, or maybe there’s some new front in the war no one has told the inglorious Baltar about? Whatever is afoot, it’s hero-time, after all, It's the least he can do, so the military genius repeats even louder that which has been happening behind the scenes all along to the last woman to lead the colonial fleet, about their frank ancestors who ascended to heaven and built a ship out of lights thousands of years ago, on Cylon, yes Cylon. Pay attention… After all, where do you think that the colonizers of the colonies colonized from? But those old gods went mad on their flock and she is going to be shepherded into a Pegasus shaped grave if Athena can't figure out how to shuck her guiding light. “The Gods are not on your side you stupid woman! If you come here to Earth, you will die, but I am a good man, so I am going to take care of the Cylons for you, and that's half the battle, you're welcome!” …But on the other end of the televiewer she looks through, trying to raise this doomsaying clown, the girl is unresponsive and blinks like a simpleton, un-a-frakking-ware of one iota of this swear ridden conversation she is half of. Adama is not listening, or she can’t listen, but no matter how in the know the Commander might or might not be, only one familiar restriction of choices were left available to Lord Baltar the Amazing: Mass Murder.

Almost as quickly as the Cylon stooge, no more, decides to lay his life down for the cause, opportunity knocks. Equidistant between all three Basestars orbiting Earth taking aim at the larger ape settlements in Europe where they still speak French, the Ship of Lights smashed in the face by a little nude telepathic boy splashing about in a spa with disembodied omnipathic mutant brain monsters, now solid and vulnerable materializes into the gunsights of an enemy without mercy and monocular vision, Baltar aboard the Lead base star, a superlative weapons platform that can grind planets into stardust, who technically still has mission seniority, by his command orders ramming speed, until all four vessels crash into one another exploding into a finely powdered nothing, and humanity wins but Baltar is too dead to know that or to amend his part in history as anything less than an unwiped but hole. Testify!

The End.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Epilogue.

Days later, that boy, leader of his nation, plays fetch with his orange monkey, politically decapitated leader of his nation, and a fun time is had by all, even if Zaius is too old for this shit, but honestly, there is no arguing with a choke collar, well okay, you can argue with a choke collar, but it hurts, and the scars are forever, as a smoking Cylon Raider one third piloted by Baltar the unkillable, former leader of his doomed robotic nation, almost doesn’t not crash into a plush verdant field, yonder from the tent city of New Caprica surrounded by concentric circles of barbed wire and landmines under siege from intelligent but mute but very angry gorillas, who want their voices back, on their last hurrah before they concede to be animals or slaves, after the hunger gets to them because the civil services of their civilization is toast, metaphorical toast, if they actually had access to unlimited toast, they could probably fight on for another century and maybe win their world back from these scheming astronauts, when Baltar shoots his shiny co-pilots and escapes the exploding wreck of the last useable piece of Cylon tech in this corner of the universe to greet a regiment of Gorilla infantry identifying him as the enemy, who break his nose and hang the weasel faced reprobate, from a tree till he stops twitching, by the base of a lush hill where atop that big pointy bugger, Adama leader of her Nation, and Rigel are holding hands, under the precious navy blue sky of their new home, because they are in love, and give birth together because they timed out everything perfectly 10 months ago, to their two fat daughters, Starbuck and Apollo, saturated in afterbirth, future leaders of their nation.

Really The End.