Election for Governor: Intendra Campaign Transmission

‘My advisors wanted me to begin this speech with ‘Faithful of the Fleet’, but I address this to all sentience. The time for division is over. On our stony road there has been pain and there has been death and there must be no more. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that the wheel is broken or not: our current situation is intolerable and needs to change. Autocrats, dictators, governors and tyrants have all failed to raise us out of the mire of our Myriad troubles. At great moments in our history, when the night has seemed darkest and the dawn furthest from the horizon, our kind has turned to the scrolls, to their wisdom, to their teachings, to their truth. I believe that the scrolls should be at the heart of our philosophy, but they should not be our philosophy.

‘The scrolls were written by the wisest of our forebearers; they contain the greatest of our wisdom. It is through them that we sought to create other life, cylon life and human life, and it is through them that I now wish to lead this fleet. Like the High Priests and Priestesses of old, long since destroyed, the wisdom remains – and what is wisdom? It is the ability to temper revenge with justice, to temper anger with forgiveness, to put aside personal slights and injuries and lead with a strong heart. We are men and women, marine and machine: we die together and we can live together. The Cylons are people too – they should be treated like people as our friends and tried and executed like people as our enemies. In the fleet that will survive, they will be given our respect. No! They will earn it, I firmly believe this, my friends.

‘As High Priestess, I would set up a council of learned advisors, drawing with equal measure on those who believe and those who do not. I believe that we should reintroduce our day of rest, for what is life without it? I have spoken to the people of this fleet. I have spoken to people who have not had one day’s rest since the holocaust. I spoken to people too weak to work, whose life has become their work. Is it not time to give these people what even the lowest criminal had in colonial society? There are some nay-sayers who will tell you that we cannot afford the drop in productivity, that we cannot rest, even for a day. But there are jobs that can be done by our new cylon citizens. If they are to join the fleet, then they should know work as we have known it, they should live as we have lived, for in that, might we not find equality?

‘I had a dream, and in that dream I was standing on a shore, wracked by waves on both sides, when through those waves, a water-snake came swimming against the current. When he came onto the land, he turned into a man and he greeted me and said, ‘I am Daniel’. He was the wise judge of the old scriptures and he told me that only through the bringing together of all our brothers, sisters and children, can we restore our place on the path and set right what we have lost. I say this to you not to quote scripture, but to tell you that even in this dark hour there is a glimmer of hope. Hope in the scriptures for those who believe, but hope in the wisdom they contain for all, for the scriptures were written by men and women as we are men and women. Men and women of the fleet, it is in finding our greater self that we will become whole. We must find our brothers and sisters on the Galactica and – as High Priestess – my first order will be to begin that search. If we can unite with the greater half of our people, perhaps our past can become a memory, and the unity of our future secured.’