arc-flash conduit
Title: Signs and Symptoms: the Common Cold
Author: 2ndary_author
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Rodney (slight Ronon, Zelenka)
Rating: PG
A/N: this is set against the backdrop of the signs ‘verse, although hopefully it will make sense without having read that since it doesn’t actually have much to do with Sheppard. For the "f**king freezing" challenge at sga_flashfic. Epigraph by Charles Harper Webb. Originally here.
Summary: { Signs & Signifiers}
"Homesickness. What are you thinking it meant?" Zelenka asks, because he and Ronon always commiserate about the randomness of English words.
Ronon shrugs. “I thought it meant…like the time Sheppard got stuck on the ice planet and the heating system went crazy.”
"...There is nothing noble about pain. Die
if you need to, the best way you can. (You define best)."
Enrico Fermi died of complications from cancer. So did Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein died of heart failure. Rodney’s capacious memory determines that Celsius, Doppler, and Fresnel were all tubercular. Marie Curie famously succumbed to aplastic anemia secondary to the effects of radiation. Evariste Galois, boy wonder, died at age twenty of wounds received in a duel. Kurt Godel died of malnutrition in a New Jersey hospital. (Trust Godel, Rodney thinks, to remain unpredictable to the last.) Good deaths, all of them, or at least, as good as death can be. Whereas he, Dr. Rodney McKay, genius nonpareil, is going to die because Major Freed broke his thumb playing foosball. And that’s just pathetic.
Of course, to give credit where it’s due, Major Freed’s idiocy would have hurt no one but himself if a certain Colonel had been content to scrub the mission to PG-134. But nooo, Sheppard had to step in, offer to fly Gate Team 4 out there himself, and then disappear somewhere between the drop site and the rendezvous point.
When Rodney had left the gate room, there had been some pretty discouraging talk about the likelihood of Sheppard crash landing on one of the numerous little ice moons that surrounded PG-134. No food, no liquid water, and near-constant sub-arctic blizzards. Jesus, between Godel, Galois, and John Sheppard, what is it with the mathematicians and their yen for bizarrely unpleasant deaths? (Not that Sheppard is in that category, Rodney reminds himself. Really, he’s just a flyboy with a knack for numbers.)
So, anyway, to take stock: Gate 4-abandoned. Sheppard-missing, possibly frozen. Rodney McKay, resident genius-facing imminent death. Because, for added excitement, the heating system has gone on the fritz. It’ll be the cold that kills him in the end. Or, no, to be strictly accurate, it will be the condensation. The temperature in the city has been dropping steadily for a day and a half. Now it hovers just below freezing; as soon as the sun hits, water vapor will start to form on the outside walls. The whole city will be like a giant glass of iced tea on a hot August day. Like a glass of iced tea the size of a bathtub. A bathtub into which someone drops a working hairdryer. Because that will be roughly the effect: there’s ungrounded solar energy running through the very walls in Atlantis. Beyond this point, Rodney’s deep in the realm of wacky metaphors since his computer simulation gave out-big, big red pop-up window: ‘ELECTRICAL FAILURE: ALL SYSTEMS’-at the condensation point. Personally, Rodney’s not sure whether there would be mass electrocutions, as every outside wall became an arc-flash conduit, or simply a holocaust of electrical fires. Cause of death: condensation is even worse than blaming everything on Major Freed, but it’s probably more accurate.
Moreover, just for the record-Jesus Christ, but it’s cold! Rodney’s shivering despite wearing his entire wardrobe cold weather gear from McMurdo (which is a considerable, especially when supplemented by his collection from Siberia and a sweatshirt he's pretty sure he's had since university in Toronto.). Not much point complaining when there's no one to appreciate it, of course. Rodney looks at the red letters blinking on his tablet, scrubs his hands across his face, and turns his attention to the jerry-rigged transducer. It’s sitting next to him, a Tupperware box on the floor of the tiny, glassed-in cupola at the pinnacle of Tower Four, sprouting a web of wires he’s patched to the window with the Athosian equivalent of duct tape. It will work-he built the damn thing, of course it will work-but he’s got to admit it doesn’t look promising. He rehearses the procedure, reducing everything to the most basic physical processes to clear his head.
The condensation will begin here, in the solar generation station in the highest tower in the city, closest to the rising sun. If he flips the transducer switch at the first sign of vapor, the electricity will feed through the wires into the box. It will hold for about twenty seconds, give or take, before overloading and forcing the electricity back out. Out is better than down: the pressure wave will blow the top off the tower, but once this station is taken out, there won’t be enough consistent current to cause much more damage. It would be an almost elegant solution, if only there were some way to remotely activate the transducer. There isn’t…nothing he can be sure will work once the sunlight starts to cook the freezing air. So really, flipping the switch is what will kill him: flip the switch to channel the energy to vaporize the metallic components to create the light radiation and, hey, radiation: he’s practically an honorary Curie.
It's a depressing thought, so he unlayers two sweatshirt hoods and an Athosian goat-thing-wool cap to tap his radio. “Hey, Radek, how’s it going?” he asks, fighting for casual. He’s not hoping, really, but just maybe, maybe, possibly, the Czech has figured out what’s up with the heating system.
“Not as fast as it would be going if you were not asking me for updates every ten minutes,” Zelenka replies, sounding irritated even through a hail of static, and it’s the uncharacteristic testiness more than anything that tells Rodney there won’t be an easy solution. Not that he really thought there would be or anything.
“Oh. Well, then. Fine,” Rodney says. And too bad for Radek. He’s going to feel terrible when Rodney’s dead and those were their last words. Of course, part of the reason he’s down in the deepest boiler room is because he’s the scientist most likely to figure out exactly how dire the situation is. If he can’t come up with a solution-and Rodney can’t come up with a solution, so the likelihood of Radek…well, there’s an earth expression about a snowball in hell that could be applied to that likelihood. But, yes, well, Zelenka might eventually come to the same explosive conclusion that Rodney's already reached, and when he does, he'll have to make his way up twenty-seven flights of stairs to interfere. That's the rest of the reason Zelenka's in the boiler room: if he reaches Rodney in time to argue with him...Rodney's afraid he just might listen.
They're not totally out of luck: Teyla just happens to be visiting her people on the mainland. Rodney’s pretty sure she’ll be okay, even if his rerouting doesn’t work. He’d tried to get Ronon out of harm's way, too, on the pretense of needing mainland supplies to fix the heating system. Hell, he’d evacuate everybody, if he could, but Elizabeth already thinks he’s cried wolf once too often and, besides, there has to be something for Sheppard and his rescuers to come home to. Or through: save the city, save the gate. Still, Ronon-well, Rodney wasn’t one to play favorites, but it seemed like if anybody gets to sit this one out, other than the resident genius, Ronon would be the man. All those years on the run from the Wraith; the Satedan might have nine lives, but that’s no reason to take unnecessary risks.
Ronon had ruined the plan, of course. He’d sent one of the geologists to the mainland in his stead and…well, it wasn’t a huge deal, because Rodney’s plan would certainly, certainly, almost positively save the city. But still, there was the principle of the thing. If someone goes out of his busy way to save your life, the least you can do is have the decency to be saved!
“Do you live to thwart me?” Rodney had hissed, when Ronon had casually explained the bait-and-switch. Perhaps a tad melodramatic, but understandable under the circumstances.
Ronon had just shrugged. “It’s how I roll.” Which made Rodney consider adding a last-minute codicil to his will, something to prohibit Ronon from ever hanging out with the Marines again-surely they wouldn’t ignore a man’s dying wish, but…
Oh, God, dying wish. Rodney feels sick; he’s freezing, but his hands are leaving sweaty palm prints on the little box that’s going to incinerate him in…well, soon. Too soon, and the idea of excavating his layered clothing to read his watch is suddenly exhausting. It all comes down to time. He could fix this, if only he had more time. Time is relative, but temperature is absolute, one of his college professors had repeated. The man was a chemist and a moron (the two went together more often than you’d think, in Rodney’s experience), but gallingly correct, for all intents and purposes.
Working in the Pegasus Galaxy, Rodney’s learned the calculus of collateral damage the hard way. You’re inevitably going to lose people; the best you can do is try not to lose the people who are essential to everyone else’s survival. He is a genius, and therefore a particularly valuable member of the expedition. In fact, though he’s learned not to say it out loud, objectively speaking, his life is probably worth several non-genius lives. But compared to the lives of everyone in Atlantis-plus Sheppard, Gate Team 4, and the rescue mission, who would all be stranded without the ‘gate…plus a good number of the Athosians, who would be sitting ducks without that ‘gate… No single person is worth all those lives; that’s another Pegasus Galaxy lesson.
The sunlight is creeping closer to his tower. Nearly showtime. And it will be a spectacular light show, if Rodney’s calculations are correct (which, of course, they are). Maybe it’s the height that’s doing funny things to his stomach; Rodney doesn’t think he’s ever been this high up. You can see everything from here, the gleam and spark of new sunlight on a thousand fragile towers. He’d been offered a job at Oxford once, a professorship in ‘the city of dreaming spires’. Turned it down, gone to work for the US military instead. Better toys and, after all, he had his pride-it was the Cavendish Lab or nothing. Too bad; Oxford was probably a nice place. Peter Grodin had an excellent first from Oxford, Rodney remembers randomly. He doublechecks the wires on his box, puts his thumb on the switch. Peter Grodin and Marie Curie: if you have to go, he decides, you could choose worse company.
“-dney?” Zelenka’s voice cuts in suddenly.
“What?” Rodney nearly drops the trigger box. Hounded to his very death, he is!
“No need to…tone…very unprofess-”
“Busy, here, Zelenka. Any time you’d care to reach the point…”
“Heat’s working,” Zelenka says shortly.
“What heat?”
“The heat. I-” snap, crackle, pop of static, “…adjustments to the solar couplers, and the combustion chamber seems to be back online. Also, Elizabeth-”
There’s more static, but Zelenka must be transporting closer to the surface, since when he cuts in again, the transmission is much clearer.
“-so it seems they will be returning presently.”
“Wait…what? I missed that middle section.” Rodney’s gripping his trigger box so hard that the Tupperware lid pops off.
“I was saying that Elizabeth tells me Gate Team 4 has been in contact. Together with the SAR group, they have found Major Sheppard on the ice moon…”
Zelenka is still talking, but Rodney’s not listening. At some point, the damaged trigger box fell from his cold fingers. He doesn’t realize it until he puts his hands up to the bubble of glass and realizes they’re empty. His hands, shaking with something that isn’t cold anymore, frame Atlantis’s Western quadrant and the rising sun that is just now touching his tower. No one has to die today, and when Rodney lets his forehead drop against the window, the glass is blissfully cool.
Author: 2ndary_author
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Rodney (slight Ronon, Zelenka)
Rating: PG
A/N: this is set against the backdrop of the signs ‘verse, although hopefully it will make sense without having read that since it doesn’t actually have much to do with Sheppard. For the "f**king freezing" challenge at sga_flashfic. Epigraph by Charles Harper Webb. Originally here.
Summary: { Signs & Signifiers}
"Homesickness. What are you thinking it meant?" Zelenka asks, because he and Ronon always commiserate about the randomness of English words.
Ronon shrugs. “I thought it meant…like the time Sheppard got stuck on the ice planet and the heating system went crazy.”
"...There is nothing noble about pain. Die
if you need to, the best way you can. (You define best)."
Enrico Fermi died of complications from cancer. So did Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein died of heart failure. Rodney’s capacious memory determines that Celsius, Doppler, and Fresnel were all tubercular. Marie Curie famously succumbed to aplastic anemia secondary to the effects of radiation. Evariste Galois, boy wonder, died at age twenty of wounds received in a duel. Kurt Godel died of malnutrition in a New Jersey hospital. (Trust Godel, Rodney thinks, to remain unpredictable to the last.) Good deaths, all of them, or at least, as good as death can be. Whereas he, Dr. Rodney McKay, genius nonpareil, is going to die because Major Freed broke his thumb playing foosball. And that’s just pathetic.
Of course, to give credit where it’s due, Major Freed’s idiocy would have hurt no one but himself if a certain Colonel had been content to scrub the mission to PG-134. But nooo, Sheppard had to step in, offer to fly Gate Team 4 out there himself, and then disappear somewhere between the drop site and the rendezvous point.
When Rodney had left the gate room, there had been some pretty discouraging talk about the likelihood of Sheppard crash landing on one of the numerous little ice moons that surrounded PG-134. No food, no liquid water, and near-constant sub-arctic blizzards. Jesus, between Godel, Galois, and John Sheppard, what is it with the mathematicians and their yen for bizarrely unpleasant deaths? (Not that Sheppard is in that category, Rodney reminds himself. Really, he’s just a flyboy with a knack for numbers.)
So, anyway, to take stock: Gate 4-abandoned. Sheppard-missing, possibly frozen. Rodney McKay, resident genius-facing imminent death. Because, for added excitement, the heating system has gone on the fritz. It’ll be the cold that kills him in the end. Or, no, to be strictly accurate, it will be the condensation. The temperature in the city has been dropping steadily for a day and a half. Now it hovers just below freezing; as soon as the sun hits, water vapor will start to form on the outside walls. The whole city will be like a giant glass of iced tea on a hot August day. Like a glass of iced tea the size of a bathtub. A bathtub into which someone drops a working hairdryer. Because that will be roughly the effect: there’s ungrounded solar energy running through the very walls in Atlantis. Beyond this point, Rodney’s deep in the realm of wacky metaphors since his computer simulation gave out-big, big red pop-up window: ‘ELECTRICAL FAILURE: ALL SYSTEMS’-at the condensation point. Personally, Rodney’s not sure whether there would be mass electrocutions, as every outside wall became an arc-flash conduit, or simply a holocaust of electrical fires. Cause of death: condensation is even worse than blaming everything on Major Freed, but it’s probably more accurate.
Moreover, just for the record-Jesus Christ, but it’s cold! Rodney’s shivering despite wearing his entire wardrobe cold weather gear from McMurdo (which is a considerable, especially when supplemented by his collection from Siberia and a sweatshirt he's pretty sure he's had since university in Toronto.). Not much point complaining when there's no one to appreciate it, of course. Rodney looks at the red letters blinking on his tablet, scrubs his hands across his face, and turns his attention to the jerry-rigged transducer. It’s sitting next to him, a Tupperware box on the floor of the tiny, glassed-in cupola at the pinnacle of Tower Four, sprouting a web of wires he’s patched to the window with the Athosian equivalent of duct tape. It will work-he built the damn thing, of course it will work-but he’s got to admit it doesn’t look promising. He rehearses the procedure, reducing everything to the most basic physical processes to clear his head.
The condensation will begin here, in the solar generation station in the highest tower in the city, closest to the rising sun. If he flips the transducer switch at the first sign of vapor, the electricity will feed through the wires into the box. It will hold for about twenty seconds, give or take, before overloading and forcing the electricity back out. Out is better than down: the pressure wave will blow the top off the tower, but once this station is taken out, there won’t be enough consistent current to cause much more damage. It would be an almost elegant solution, if only there were some way to remotely activate the transducer. There isn’t…nothing he can be sure will work once the sunlight starts to cook the freezing air. So really, flipping the switch is what will kill him: flip the switch to channel the energy to vaporize the metallic components to create the light radiation and, hey, radiation: he’s practically an honorary Curie.
It's a depressing thought, so he unlayers two sweatshirt hoods and an Athosian goat-thing-wool cap to tap his radio. “Hey, Radek, how’s it going?” he asks, fighting for casual. He’s not hoping, really, but just maybe, maybe, possibly, the Czech has figured out what’s up with the heating system.
“Not as fast as it would be going if you were not asking me for updates every ten minutes,” Zelenka replies, sounding irritated even through a hail of static, and it’s the uncharacteristic testiness more than anything that tells Rodney there won’t be an easy solution. Not that he really thought there would be or anything.
“Oh. Well, then. Fine,” Rodney says. And too bad for Radek. He’s going to feel terrible when Rodney’s dead and those were their last words. Of course, part of the reason he’s down in the deepest boiler room is because he’s the scientist most likely to figure out exactly how dire the situation is. If he can’t come up with a solution-and Rodney can’t come up with a solution, so the likelihood of Radek…well, there’s an earth expression about a snowball in hell that could be applied to that likelihood. But, yes, well, Zelenka might eventually come to the same explosive conclusion that Rodney's already reached, and when he does, he'll have to make his way up twenty-seven flights of stairs to interfere. That's the rest of the reason Zelenka's in the boiler room: if he reaches Rodney in time to argue with him...Rodney's afraid he just might listen.
They're not totally out of luck: Teyla just happens to be visiting her people on the mainland. Rodney’s pretty sure she’ll be okay, even if his rerouting doesn’t work. He’d tried to get Ronon out of harm's way, too, on the pretense of needing mainland supplies to fix the heating system. Hell, he’d evacuate everybody, if he could, but Elizabeth already thinks he’s cried wolf once too often and, besides, there has to be something for Sheppard and his rescuers to come home to. Or through: save the city, save the gate. Still, Ronon-well, Rodney wasn’t one to play favorites, but it seemed like if anybody gets to sit this one out, other than the resident genius, Ronon would be the man. All those years on the run from the Wraith; the Satedan might have nine lives, but that’s no reason to take unnecessary risks.
Ronon had ruined the plan, of course. He’d sent one of the geologists to the mainland in his stead and…well, it wasn’t a huge deal, because Rodney’s plan would certainly, certainly, almost positively save the city. But still, there was the principle of the thing. If someone goes out of his busy way to save your life, the least you can do is have the decency to be saved!
“Do you live to thwart me?” Rodney had hissed, when Ronon had casually explained the bait-and-switch. Perhaps a tad melodramatic, but understandable under the circumstances.
Ronon had just shrugged. “It’s how I roll.” Which made Rodney consider adding a last-minute codicil to his will, something to prohibit Ronon from ever hanging out with the Marines again-surely they wouldn’t ignore a man’s dying wish, but…
Oh, God, dying wish. Rodney feels sick; he’s freezing, but his hands are leaving sweaty palm prints on the little box that’s going to incinerate him in…well, soon. Too soon, and the idea of excavating his layered clothing to read his watch is suddenly exhausting. It all comes down to time. He could fix this, if only he had more time. Time is relative, but temperature is absolute, one of his college professors had repeated. The man was a chemist and a moron (the two went together more often than you’d think, in Rodney’s experience), but gallingly correct, for all intents and purposes.
Working in the Pegasus Galaxy, Rodney’s learned the calculus of collateral damage the hard way. You’re inevitably going to lose people; the best you can do is try not to lose the people who are essential to everyone else’s survival. He is a genius, and therefore a particularly valuable member of the expedition. In fact, though he’s learned not to say it out loud, objectively speaking, his life is probably worth several non-genius lives. But compared to the lives of everyone in Atlantis-plus Sheppard, Gate Team 4, and the rescue mission, who would all be stranded without the ‘gate…plus a good number of the Athosians, who would be sitting ducks without that ‘gate… No single person is worth all those lives; that’s another Pegasus Galaxy lesson.
The sunlight is creeping closer to his tower. Nearly showtime. And it will be a spectacular light show, if Rodney’s calculations are correct (which, of course, they are). Maybe it’s the height that’s doing funny things to his stomach; Rodney doesn’t think he’s ever been this high up. You can see everything from here, the gleam and spark of new sunlight on a thousand fragile towers. He’d been offered a job at Oxford once, a professorship in ‘the city of dreaming spires’. Turned it down, gone to work for the US military instead. Better toys and, after all, he had his pride-it was the Cavendish Lab or nothing. Too bad; Oxford was probably a nice place. Peter Grodin had an excellent first from Oxford, Rodney remembers randomly. He doublechecks the wires on his box, puts his thumb on the switch. Peter Grodin and Marie Curie: if you have to go, he decides, you could choose worse company.
“-dney?” Zelenka’s voice cuts in suddenly.
“What?” Rodney nearly drops the trigger box. Hounded to his very death, he is!
“No need to…tone…very unprofess-”
“Busy, here, Zelenka. Any time you’d care to reach the point…”
“Heat’s working,” Zelenka says shortly.
“What heat?”
“The heat. I-” snap, crackle, pop of static, “…adjustments to the solar couplers, and the combustion chamber seems to be back online. Also, Elizabeth-”
There’s more static, but Zelenka must be transporting closer to the surface, since when he cuts in again, the transmission is much clearer.
“-so it seems they will be returning presently.”
“Wait…what? I missed that middle section.” Rodney’s gripping his trigger box so hard that the Tupperware lid pops off.
“I was saying that Elizabeth tells me Gate Team 4 has been in contact. Together with the SAR group, they have found Major Sheppard on the ice moon…”
Zelenka is still talking, but Rodney’s not listening. At some point, the damaged trigger box fell from his cold fingers. He doesn’t realize it until he puts his hands up to the bubble of glass and realizes they’re empty. His hands, shaking with something that isn’t cold anymore, frame Atlantis’s Western quadrant and the rising sun that is just now touching his tower. No one has to die today, and when Rodney lets his forehead drop against the window, the glass is blissfully cool.