I was born a miner, of a long line of miners that had plumbed the depths of Caprica since the log forgotten years of Landing but though I followed the family tradition and joined my fellows in those dark, damp and warm warrens beneath the ground I never truly understood the ground in which I worked.
I mined, I dug, I learned, and with the weight of my family's name behind me I swiftly progressed from simple digger, to mine engineer, then manage then finally architect, but I was never more then a studious amateur, the ground did not speak to me of its traps, its bounties like it did my father. He could walk the length and breadth of a mine just once and know exactly where to dig, where to avoid, where to prop and where to pump. I too could tell you all those things but I would need my tools, my measurements and my computers and I wouldn't always be right.
No, I knew how to mine, I knew how to dig, I knew how to tear the precious resources from the ground but the ground did not care for me, and it did not speak to me.
Not even at the end.
It's ironic really, at the time of the Fall I was at the opening of a new mine, five years of surveying, measuring, politicking and only recently had we achieved the final green, the go ahead to pull the Lords gifts out of the ground, the gift in this case being of hematite, iron ore, almost all of which would end up as steels for construction and for tools.
Two years to the day since that opening and I am founding a new mine once more, this too is for hematite, most of which will again end up as steel but this mine is not on Caprica, its not home, its on the surface of a distant world, the new home for the shattered fragments of our humanity that managed to escape the clutches of the heretical cylons. This time I am mine foreman, this mine is mine to control, and to nourish. I thought I could not handle such a task, not given the few people available who have experience in such matters but its easy, I know now where to mine and where to prop, where to pump and where to avoid, the ground itself speaks to me as the soil of Caprica never did.
I try hard not to see any implications in that, but as I toss and turn at night, desperate to find sleep I can not help but wonder, why is it the ground of this alien world that speaks to me when the ground of Caprica never did? Why is it that I can understand and know this place far better then my own?
Was it that I always knew that I would be called to mine this place, the pull the precious resources out of this distant ground?
The thoughts disturb me often, and I do not know how to answer them.
They call me the Angel of the Celestia, the ship that brought me and so many others to the relative safety of this far star, they call me saviour and look up to me with trusting thankful eyes as I give what comfort I can, and try, as best I might, to cure their ills with the trickle of expensive alien medicines the Earthers send me, medicines I don't understand and do not entirely trust.
How can they call me saviour, do they not know who I am?
No, they know, they just do not seem to understand, they can not place me as being the same face that graced a thousand newspapers and a million screens, they cannot see me as the Butcher of Heracles Gate.
I was incompetent, I was a drunkard and I killed near fifty people in that town before the authorities found me out, stripped me of my degree and tossed me into prison. I have no right to be an Angel, no right to pretend to heal, to be pretend to know what I am doing.
Do they not understand what I am?
I am a killer, the blood that stains these hands will never wash off, and yet despite me telling them of who I am, reminding them of what I did, its to me they come, its me they want as their Doctor, its me they want healing their children, their loves, their mothers.
I do not understand them, I do not understand why its me many choose to come to, but when they come, when they gaze at me with their trusting eyes, when thye place their precious, abused faith in me I find it truly hard to say no, to turn them away to somebody who might actually know what they are doing.
I am no Doctor, not any more; I lost that right many years ago, but Lords, what have I became? And what please is this path I walk now?
I wonder often at the irony of life as I walk the scattered, hastily built streets and ways of Freedom, my truncheon at my side, my stride slow, but purposeful, steady, accepting the nods and greetings of the citizenry as I past, most seeing not me but the uniform I wear.
Only two police officers survived the fall, neither of whom was me, but they needed more and I could walk the walk, I could talk the talk, my record was clean and I had more then a rudimentary understanding of law, so I was asked to join and I accepted.
Now, I patrol these streets, I try to keep the order in these hard and difficult times, always aware that stress levels were always high and that not all had survived the fall with their sanity exactly intact, and I try to be just and fair and all the while I contemplate irony.
Irony is the senior most beat officer on the planet learned the ways and means of the Police not to become one of them but to avoid being caught by them. Irony is the best known but least seen cat burglar of Gemon City, whose successes are supposed to have netted fifteen million worth of goods in just ten years now seeking out the thieves, the charlatans and worse. Irony is a man whose head was once worth a ten thousand bounty now determining the bounty on others heads.
So, as I walk the walk and as I talk the talk and do my best to keep the peace in these harsh times, I always find my thoughts returning to that one simple word and what it truly means to me now.