Cylon Memories?

[saffron]

I've been rewatching the series recently and I am unsure about something regarding the way memories work for humanoid-cylons. When a humanoid-cylon dies, it's consciousness is downloaded into a new body. But I thought that the humanoid-cylons are not "networked" in a live way, so to speak. Meaning, they do not all know what's going on with each other as it happens. (In Season 2 Sharon is accused of having current, "live" knowledge of cylon activities and she said it didn't work that way.)

If that is true, then a cylon would only know what he/she experiences, and they would only have the memories that his/her consciousness experienced in their current and past bodies. (Of course they would also have any memories the cylon's created/inserted as part of their human/sleeper agent persona, but I'm not talking about those here.)

So...how is it that Sharon Agathon/Athena remembers things from Galactica, like her love of the Chief, experienced by the Sharon "Boomer" version?? These couldn't have been implanted memories, as they happened after Boomer was already inserted as a sleeper agent. And since the humanoid-cylons don't seem to be networked, these memories couldn't have been passed that way. I think Sharon Agathon remembers these things prior to the death of Boomer, so it couldn't be some kind of inter-model memory download sent out to other versions upon death/reincarnation.

Am missing something related to the way cylons work? Is there some kind of "update" that gets sent out to the same version of each model so that they know what each other knows??

Any insight or help is appreciated!

[Steelviper]

Even freakier was the insight Athena seemed to have on what Adama said to Boomer's corpse...

[Joe Beaudoin Jr.]

The writers have deliberately not answered any of these questions and avoided discussing the science of Cylon resurrection, so I don't think we'll ever actually know what happens.

However, this doesn't preclude the fact that I have a few theories of my own.

One is that the Cylons regularly back themselves up, then send the difference between the last backup and their point of death. That helps to explain how they're able to back up so much data in so little time, other than data compression, etc.

It also helps to explain how Athena has Boomer's memories. They're merely stored somewhere, like a server farm for memories, and then the Cylons pull what they need. In Athena's case, they need to convince Helo that she's Boomer, so they pull her memories.

I don't think they actually "share" memories amongst themselves, since there's been nothing to support that. They're goal is to be human as possible, and having a "hive mind" isn't what they view as human, so I don't think there's an active collective that has the sum of all Cylon experience.

[Serenity]

They don't share everything. The Cylons aren't a collective. But some selective memories are clearly shared. That's also been acknowledged by the writers, so it's not simply an oversight.
In fact it's been acknowledged by the show itself, but not explained.

But it's been implied that there can be a transfer of data when needed. The models just aren't part of a constant network.


Steelviper:
That corpse thing is only suggested by the cut to the morgue scene. I think this is more of an error in editing than anything. Without it, Sharon could also refer to the "Why?" from the Miniseries, which is again referenced in "Resurrection Ship, Part II".

[alpha5099]

My theory has always been what Joe was taking about, back-ups. At some point, they backed-up Boomer's memories, and inserted it into a new body. (I hadn't thought of it as a regular practice, more as something they did especially for their experiment with Helo, but it definitely would make sense that they would do regular back-ups to expedite the downloading process.)

[JDS]

I think Athena was created, or at least "activated", immediately before we first see her on Caprica. So whatever information was available at that time, i.e. Sharon loving the Chief, was implanted. Now if Boomer had been killed already, then it would have been really simple - her memories could have been "cached" upon download, and available for other copies to use. But she hadn't been killed and downloaded yet, so...I'm not sure how they actually got the memories themselves.