SGA Fic: I, Rodney 2/5
Part II. See part I for warnings, rating, etc.
#
Despite clearly not wanting anything to do with John, McKay stayed on the team. He came to briefings, went on missions, trained on the firing range. But he refused to join in on any team social activities, or even casual conversations in the locker room or on puddlejumper rides.
John kept trying. He wasn’t sure why-it started out being about proving he wasn’t an asshole, but after weeks of being rebuffed, even he had to admit that he was probably just digging himself in deeper by not leaving the guy alone, when that was clearly what he wanted.
“You guys going to the Wizard of Oz tomorrow?” he asked one day when he was in the lab going through the box of Ancient gadgets people wanted him to touch. The movie was being screened in one of the big auditoriums, ostensibly for the benefit of the Athosian children who had never seen a movie before.
“The flying monkeys give me nightmares,” said the not-Russian guy, whose name John had learned was Zelenka.
McKay glanced up from his work to look over his shoulder at Zelenka. “Seriously?”
“Yes, I would dream that they came down off of the church that I had to pass on my way to school, and grab me and carry me into the sky, like they did Dorothy and Toto in the film.” He shuddered spastically and picked up a tablet.
“That’s very disturbing,” McKay said.
“I know. This dream tormented me for years.”
“No, I mean it’s disturbing that you call yourself a scientist when you’re afraid of a children’s movie.”
“So does that mean you’re going, Rodney?” John got in, before Zelenka could answer.
“No.”
“You sure? I have Dark Side of the Moon.”
“So?”
“So, it’s an alternate soundtrack to the movie,” John explained. “You can--”
“I have been to college, thanks,” McKay interrupted. “I meant, so what?”
“Well, you could listen to it with me, if you want.”
“I don’t.”
John said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind,” but as far as he could tell Zelenka was the only one who was still listening, and he just shook his head.
#
“Am I a real student?” Rodney had been holding the question in all day, but it wasn’t until he’d gotten back to the lab and done a page of differential equations that he felt calm enough to ask it.
“Hm?” Dr. Ingram glanced up from his computer screen.
“Today in Electricity and Magnetism a girl whose name I don’t know said it wasn’t fair for me to wreck the curve on every exam, and Dr. Swope said he hadn’t included my grade in the curve because I wasn’t a real student,” Rodney explained. “And I asked what he meant but he just said it didn’t matter and I was getting an A anyway and anyone who had a question about grades should see him in his office.” Rodney paused for breath. “Only my question wasn’t about grades, so I didn’t go.”
“Right,” Dr. Ingram said, rubbing his temples. “What was your question again?”
“Am I a real student?”
“Yes. Is that all?”
“Yes. Wait. No. I have a follow-up question.”
Jeannie had explained that maybe people got confused sometimes when he talked too fast, so he waited patiently until Dr. Ingram said, “Yes, Meredith?”
“Why did Dr. Swope say that I wasn’t a real student?”
“You would have to ask Dr. Swope that.”
“But I am going to get a real degree,” Rodney said, returning to the main point. “Right?”
“Yes. If you successfully complete all degree requirements, you will receive a degree.”
“A real degree,” he pressed. “And I’ll be able to go to graduate school.”
“You’ll be qualified to apply to graduate school. You’d have to be accepted for admission to a program, just like you were for the undergraduate program.”
“Okay,” he said, turning back to his own work. “That was all I wanted to know.”
But he still wanted to know about the other thing-and he was just the tiniest bit worried that Dr. Ingram was wrong-so the next day, he went to Dr. Swope’s office hour.
“I’m Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay, from your 12:20 Electricity and Magnetism class,” he explained, because Dr. Ingram always complained about how students showed up at his office hours and just assumed he would know who they were.
“Yes, Meredith, I know who you are.”
Oddly enough, his professors always said that after he introduced himself. Professors’ time was valuable, so even though he knew how to do small talk, he skipped it and got straight to the point. “I wanted to know why you said I wasn’t a real student.”
“Oh. Well, all I meant was that you’re participating in classes as part of Dr. Ingram’s project. You won’t be competing with the other students for placement in upper-division courses, or for research and fellowship opportunities, so it doesn’t really make sense to compare your performance against the rest of the class.”
“But I’m not,” Rodney objected. “Taking classes for Dr. Ingram’s research. I’m going to be a physicist.”
Dr. Swope opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Have you talked to Dr. Ingram about that?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted me to go into comp sci like him, but I’ve always been more interested in physics. I mean, physics is at the bottom of everything, isn’t it? You can understand the whole universe with physics. Well, and math. You know.”
“Yes, of course.” The professor hesitated. “You know, Meredith, what we’re doing in class is really just the beginning, the groundwork for later study. Rote memorization of formulas and facts will only take you so far.”
“I know.” All of the teachers said that, and they usually put it in the introduction to the textbooks, too. Rodney wasn’t sure why-he hardly did any memorizing; it was usually easier to re-create the formulas from first principles when he needed them.
“Right. I mean to say that actually being a physicist is a completely different animal from doing undergraduate-level physics.”
“It would almost have to be,” Rodney pointed out.
“Yes.” Dr. Swope sighed. “Just…don’t be too surprised if you run into trouble later on. Physics-real physics-requires deep understanding of concepts, and more creativity than Dr. Ingram probably thinks.”
“I don’t think Dr. Ingram knows that much about physics,” Rodney said. “But I’m not going to have trouble.”
Dr. Swope smiled, but somehow, it didn’t look friendly. Standing up, he said, “I don’t think computers are going to be replacing real scientists any time soon.” He opened the door and called the next student in, so Rodney had no choice but to leave, slightly more confused than when he’d gone in.
#
“You want one of these?” Rodney asked, taking an MRE out of his file drawer. It was late, and he and Zelenka were the only ones left in the lab.
“I thought I might go to the mess for some real food,” Zelenka said. “We have at least twenty minutes before the simulation is complete.”
“Suit yourself. They had some kind of pot pie earlier.” About to tear open the MRE packet, he hesitated. The pot pie had been pretty good.
“Chicken pot pie?”
“More like squirrel…ish.”
Zelenka stopped on the way to the door. “Not those bat-squirrel things from PXN-749.”
“Yeah, those. Don’t worry, both zoology and medical cleared them for human consumption, and the people on the planet have been eating them for centuries. They’re not bad. A little gamy.”
Zelenka shuddered and came back to Rodney’s desk. “Perhaps I’ll have one of your MREs after all.”
“Sure. You want chicken and noodles, or spaghetti?” He held them out; Zelenka chose the spaghetti. “You’re not squeamish about weird food,” Rodney pointed out, opening his entrée packet and pouring in water from the electric kettle. “You didn’t mind the not-goat gyros, and you had two helpings of herpetological surprise. Squirrel pot pie is relatively normal.”
“Maybe I am not in the mood for culinary adventure.”
“No, that’s not it. It’s the squirrel things! They look a little like flying monkeys, don’t they?” Rodney sat back, pleased to have figured it out.
“I do not make fun of your fear of whales,” Zelenka pointed out, adding water to his own MRE entrée, and dumping the smaller packets out onto the desk to poke through them.
“Whales actually exist,” Rodney pointed out. “And anyway, I’m not afraid of them. No, you’re thinking about this all wrong. What better way to demonstrate your superiority to the flying monkeys than by eating them?”
“I prefer to ignore them completely.”
“Revenge is a dish best served with flaky pastry.”
“Would you eat whale pot pie?”
“Pegasus whale, or Earth whale?”
“Either.”
“The Pegasus whales might be intelligent. I’d eat them if I was starving.” He considered. “But then, I’d eat you if I was starving.”
“Hey!” Zelenka smacked Rodney’s hand with his fork as he tried to help himself to the accessory packet from his MRE. “What are you stealing from me? Is there candy in there?”
“No-salt, coffee, and toilet paper,” Rodney explained. “You don’t need them; you never go offworld.”
Zelenka held the packet just out of his reach. “Coffee? What will you trade me for it?”
“It’s just instant.”
“Maybe I’ll keep it until I find someone who wants it more than you. Also, someone who will not eat me.”
“I’ll eat the whales first. There’s more meat on them, anyway. Okay, you can have half of my pretzels.”
Zelenka handed over the packet. “Yours has pretzels in it? Why does mine not have pretzels?”
“Yours has that plastic cheese stuff.”
“So I see.” Zelenka opened it. “Can we put it on the pretzels?”
“You’re a genius.”
By the time they were done eating, the simulation was finishing up. “It’s not going to work,” Zelenka said, pointing at the screen. “Look, the power distribution curve is falling off already.”
“I see it. All right, why don’t we try bringing in the secondary array and running them in parallel?”
“That might work,” Zelenka agreed. “But tomorrow, all right? It’s nearly midnight.”
Rodney glanced at his watch. “Huh. Okay, I can set up the simulation myself-it’ll only take, oh, half again as long.”
“Hah! You think you are funny, but you are not.” Zelenka started closing down his workstation. “You should leave too, get out of the lab for a bit. I’m sure it’s not good for you, recharging at your desk.”
“I have a lot to do,” Rodney said defensively. He usually did his recharging when there wasn’t anyone there, or at least only Zelenka, and he did go back to his quarters to defrag.
“Yes, but how can we talk about you behind your back if you never leave?”
“It’s Major Sheppard,” Rodney confessed. “He keeps turning up at my room and asking me to do things. It’s easier to get rid of him here.”
“Do things? What kind of things?” Standing up, Zelenka leaned against the back of his desk chair.
“Watch movies, play games…one time he asked me if I wanted to spar. I’m not even sure what that means, are you?”
“I think, in this case, it means that he is trying to be friendly.”
“Huh.”
“The Major reminds me of a dog my old girlfriend used to have, it was always bringing me things-sticks, balls, Frisbees. All covered in dog slobber. Every time I saw this dog, it thought maybe this time I would want to play with it.”
“Yeah, I’m more of a cat person. What did you do about the dog?” Rodney hoped the answer wasn’t that he waited for it to die; he didn’t want to wait that long. And anyway, he didn’t really wish the Major dead; he just wanted him to leave him alone.
“I threw the stick or the ball as hard as possible, so it would take the dog longer to bring it back and make me throw it again.”
Rodney thought about that one from all angles, but…. “Yeah, that’s not helpful at all.”
“It’s an anecdote, not a parable. Goodnight, Rodney.”
#
Oddly enough, after the mission where Sheppard ended up with a giant disgusting bug attached to his neck, Rodney found that his distaste for him had…cooled. Maybe it was because Sheppard had had to be killed (temporarily) to detach the horrible thing. It was like they were even, somehow. Whatever the reason, after about the fourteenth time Sheppard asked him if he’d come watch a movie with the team, Rodney began to wonder if maybe he should try throwing the slobbery stick. It was The Wrath of Khan, and Teyla wouldn’t know how astonishingly bad the science was if he wasn’t there to tell her. “Well. Maybe.”
“Really?”
“If nothing actually important comes up between now and then.”
He regretted it almost immediately, because Major Sheppard punched him on the arm and said, “Cool. It’s in Teyla’s room, at eight.”
Unfortunately, nothing more important did come up, so he went. It started off okay. They were all out of popcorn, but Ford had some Cheez Doodles that he’d obtained through some means that Sheppard, as commanding officer, apparently wasn’t supposed to officially know about, and Teyla shared some kind of Athosian gorp that really wasn’t half bad.
It wasn’t until the movie was almost over that he remembered why Khan had always been his least favorite of the Trek movies, behind even the cinematically much worse I and V.
Two of Dr. Ingram’s grad students had taken him to see it--maybe more because they wanted to go than because they thought he’d like it-but the grad students had always tried to entertain him with the things that they themselves liked, and usually, he liked them too
He’d been having fun up until the end, which had made the whole thing more of a blow. It was an exciting movie, and he’d just seen the original Khan episode on video. Sanjay had heard about Spock’s death ahead of time-probably from somebody on a BBS-and had warned them, but it was still inexpressibly sad. Laura, he remembered, was crying. The funeral had been touching in all the right ways until Kirk said…it.
Of course he had seen the movie since then-loads of times-but he usually made some excuse to be out of the room when that scene came. Now he was trapped on Teyla’s sofa between her and Ford, with no reasonable means of escape. So he gritted his teeth and balled his hands into fists in his pockets, and waited it out.
“Of all the souls I’ve met,” Kirk said on the screen. “His was the most--”
“Fuck you,” Rodney said, and maybe he hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or maybe he had.
Sheppard turned his head to glare at him before picking up the remote and rewinding pointedly.
So then they had to watch it again. “His was the most…human,” Kirk said. And Rodney liked Kirk, he really did, but he sort of wanted to kick his teeth in, and he couldn’t really imagine that Spock wouldn’t feel pretty much the same way. Spock wasn’t human. That was practically the whole point of him, and it had been obvious to Rodney even when he was five that being Vulcan was better. Only apparently that wasn’t obvious, even to Spock’s best friend.
Rodney had known all his life that he wasn’t human, but it wasn’t until that day that it occurred to him that anyone would think he ought to wish he was.
When the bagpipes started, signaling that the worst was over, Ford said suddenly, “Hey!”
“What?” Sheppard asked.
“I just realized,” Ford explained, looking over at Rodney, “that was mighty white of him, wasn’t it?”
Then Teyla asked what that expression meant, and Sheppard, for some reason, seemed to think he ought to be the one to try and explain. When he (inevitably) got bogged down in the history of race relations on Earth, Ford jumped in and straightened it out.
“I see,” Teyla said after a while. “So it is like when Private Conrad said that I could shoot like a man, in the apparently sincere belief that I would consider this a compliment.”
“Yeah,” Ford said, and Rodney nodded along.
“That’s not what he meant, though,” Sheppard said. “He didn’t mean human human, he meant that Spock was brave, and self-sacrificing, and a good friend.”
Ford, Teyla, and Rodney all shared a look. Rodney realized that Ford probably felt like he shouldn’t tell his CO that he had his head up his ass, so he was just about to do it for him when Teyla did instead. “And instead of saying those things, he decided to say that Mr. Spock was human. Which he is not.”
“Well, he’s half human,” Sheppard said.
“Ah,” said Teyla.
“Look, it’s supposed to be a compliment!”
“Yeah, I think we all know it was supposed to be,” Rodney answered. “That’s the problem.”
“Okay, whatever,” Sheppard said. “I think you’re reading too much into it.”
Still, Rodney left Teyla’s quarters feeling better about The Wrath of Khan than he ever had.
#
“So which graph is it for question one?” Carole asked, her pen poised over the lab notebook.
“You’re supposed to predict which one you think it’s going to be,” Rodney explained, not for the first time. His lab partner never seemed to understand that the point of labs wasn’t to fill in the answers as quickly as possible. Admittedly, he’d filled out his own lab diary the night before, but that was only because he’d already done this experiment when he was ten.
“Yeah, but I bet you already know.” She tilted her head to the side, the way girls did when they asked for things. He wondered why they did that.
“Yes, because I already understand Faraday’s Law. If you understood it, you’d know the answer, but you don’t, which is why you should do the experiment.”
“Faraday’s law is the one about electro-locomotive force, right?”
“Electromotive,” Rodney corrected.
“Right, that one!” She picked up the coil and magnet they were using for the experiment. “Which way does this go?”
Rodney watched her fumble around for as long as he could stand. “Okay, no.” He snapped his fingers a few times. “Move. Like this.”
As he ran through the lab procedure, occasionally saying, “Do you get that? Are you paying attention?” Carole stood to the side and said, “Uh-huh, yeah,” and copied down the results.
“Okay,” he said when he was finished. “We’ve still got half the lab period left, so there’s time for you to do it.”
But Carole had stopped paying attention, and was over at the next lab table showing her notebook to her friend-the one who had decided to be lab partners with the business major with no neck. “Uh-huh,” she was saying, “yeah, if you act stupid long enough, he’ll do it for you. Okay, so for question two it’s graph C, and then three was D.”
“Maybe we should put that one of our predictions was wrong, so it looks like we did it,” the business major with no neck suggested.
“Good idea-okay, let’s put…A, for number three.”
“A doesn’t even make sense,” Rodney pointed out. “Have you even been to class?”
None of them answered. He thought about telling the TA, but he’d tried that the first week, and he’d just told Rodney to focus on his own work. So instead he sat down and read through the next week’s lab.
“I know, but I’m totally getting an A,” Carole was saying, “so it’s kind of worth it. I’m going to ask him to be my lab partner for Waves and Vibrations, too. Ooh!” She raised her hand. “If we’re done, can we go?”
As it turned out, Carole flunked Electricity and Magnetism, so she wasn’t in Waves and Vibrations the next semester. And anyway, that time everyone wanted to be Rodney’s lab partner.
After eliminating anyone who wasn’t a physics major, and everyone who had gotten less than a B in Electricity and Magnetism, he picked Vinh Trang. He knew Vinh would be an all right lab partner-he at least made an effort to do the experiments properly, and had a basic grasp of the laws of physics.
“Do you want to go get lunch?” Rodney asked him after their first lab, which ended just before noon. He was still working on making friends; according to Jeannie, inviting people to do things was the way to do it.
Vinh paused in packing up his backpack. “I’m kind of busy. Maybe some other time.”
Taking him at his word, Rodney asked him again for each of the next six weeks, when it began to sink in that maybe Vinh was going to be busy every week.
The semester after that, he decided not to bother with picking a lab partner. There was a group of three in the section, but the TA never said anything about it.
#
John’s attention turned temporarily to the growing problem of the strained relations between expedition personnel and the Athosian refugees, and he dialed back his attempts to get Rodney to socialize with the team. Now that he’d come once, and seemed to have a decent time, John figured it was McKay’s own problem if he decided to isolate himself.
Not long after that decision, though, Rodney turned up in his office. “I need you to assign somebody to me for tomorrow,” he announced.
John blinked. “What for?”
“I want to explore some of the labs over on the south pier-that weird little round building. It’s my day off, but Elizabeth says I need a military escort.”
John pulled up the duty roster. “It’s not a good day-I’ve got two teams going offworld. Sorry, I don’t think I can spare anyone.”
“Oh, come on. Surely you can pull someone off…off…standing around looking menacing, or disturbingly masturbatory gun-polishing, or…or whatever it is your people do all day,” McKay sputtered.
“Well,” John said, having an idea. “It’s my day off, too.”
“So?”
“So I was going to spend it polishing my guns in a disturbingly masturbatory way, but I suppose I could go exploring with you instead.”
It was strangely satisfying to see McKay struggling with whether to accept his offer, knowing that if he refused, he’d be cutting off his nose to spite his face. Finally, the lure of exploration won out. “Well, all right,” he said, managing to sound like he was the one doing John a favor. “You should probably pack a lunch; I plan to be out there all day.”
They met up the next morning and took a transporter to a residential building on the south pier. It was a short hike from McKay’s little round building, but it was the closest transporter that had been cleared as safe.
“It really seems like there should be seagulls,” John said as they walked. It was a bright day, with a strong breeze coming in off the ocean; he could almost smell the ghost of sun screen and cotton candy.
“There aren’t any seagulls on this planet.”
“I know there aren’t, I was just saying, it seems like there should be.”
After a moment, McKay said. “Squirrels.”
“What?”
“There aren’t any squirrels, either.”
John thought about that for a moment. “No mice or cockroaches, either.” He thought that the city must have had them-or something like them-when the Ancients lived there, but they had to have died out, so long ago that there weren’t even any remains left.
“There are mice,” McKay corrected him. “We brought them. And I still maintain that having brought mice, we had a positive obligation to bring cats.”
“Then what would we have to bring to hunt the cats? Coyotes?”
“Neutered cats,” McKay answered. “Maybe just one. One neutered, vaccinated cat.”
John was starting to see where this was going. “Did you have a particular color in mind?”
McKay huffed and turned his attention to the access panel by the door to the small round building, which they had reached.
“So you had a cat?” John asked as McKay pried the cover off the access panel. “Was it, like, a….” He waited, hoping McKay would help him out. He didn’t. “Robot cat?”
“It was a regular cat. Made out of cat.”
Well, he supposed that if it was a robot cat, the SGC would have let him bring it.
“I always wanted a dog.”
“What a surprise.” The doors to the small, round building slid open. McKay gestured toward it. “Go ahead-do your thing.”
Lifting his P-90, John briefly considered making a jerking-off gesture on the barrel, but realized it would be immature. Then he did it anyway. McKay was still sputtering when he went into the building.
The building was dark and musty, but no sooner had he entered than the lights came up and the ventilation system whirred into life. He was in a sort of lobby, centered around a broad staircase flanked by dead plants. There were doorways on either side of the lobby. The walls and tiled floor were decorated in typical Ancient style, but in soft pastel colors.
John started for the doorway on the right, but before he got there, McKay barged in. “Since I haven’t heard any gunfire, I assume everything is fine.”
“You know what happens when you assume.”
“There isn’t going to be anything dangerous in here, anyway.” McKay started prying off the access panel by the door, but before he managed it, John waved his hand across the controls, and it opened. “Show-off,” McKay muttered.
They went in. The room was roughly semicircular, with consoles ranged along the curving outer wall, and a big table in the middle. There were cabinets built into the straight wall, and over them, a border displayed a series of symbols that were unlike those in any other room John had seen since arriving in Atlantis, but nevertheless familiar: the Ancient alphabet. Across the room, McKay was kneeling in front of one of the child-size consoles.
McKay, John figured, was in for a disappointment, but he thought it was cool. The Ancients had cleared away most of their belongings, so that even squatting in the middle of their city, it was hard to get much of an idea of what their daily lives had been like. They had the Ancient database and labs littered with abandoned experiments, but not their clothes and toothbrushes and drinking glasses.
Not really expecting to find anything, John opened one of the cabinets. But this building hadn’t been as completely emptied out as the residences. He found a bin full of plastic balls, wheels, and rods. Picking up a handful, he found that they were slightly self-adhesive. “Ancient Legos,” he said, making a pyramid.
McKay glanced over at him. “Haven’t you learned your lesson about touching things?”
“It’s a kindergarten classroom,” he pointed out. “There isn’t going to be anything deadly in here.”
McKay apparently didn’t have a comeback for that, because he just said, “Anyway, they’re more like Tinkertoys.”
John was opening another cabinet. “Oh, yeah. The Legos are in here.”
McKay abandoned his laptop to join him. Soon they were both sitting in child-sized chairs at the table, playing with Ancient building toys. John was making what he thought was a pretty good model of an F-1 fighter, and McKay was working on…something.
“What did you think this building was gonna be?” John asked after a while.
“A school.”
Oh. “Well, anthro and linguistics will be interested.”
“Everyone will be interested,” McKay corrected him. “One of the biggest problems we’re having with the Ancient database is that it assumes we know things that we don’t. It’s a big improvement over trying to figure out their technology from scratch, but it’s like, like--”
“Like if a caveman got his hands on copy of Popular Mechanics and a digital watch?” John suggested.
McKay took the expected amount of umbrage, and huffed, “More like if Sir Issac Newton were faced with a super-conducting supercollider and several peer-reviewed articles on the subject. As one of the most brilliant scientific minds in human history he’d be capable of understanding it, but he’d be leapfrogging over knowledge that took hundreds of years to develop-or thousands, in the case of the Ancients.”
John decided not to comment on McKay putting himself in the same category as Newton. “So what he’d really need before he could tackle the supercollider is--”
“A high-school physics textbook. Well, and a couple of undergraduate level ones, but the high school one would be a start, at least.” Rodney added two more rods to his…whatever it was. “I’m downloading the educational database onto my laptop, but still, tomorrow this place is going to be packed.”
“In that case, maybe we should check out the rest of the rooms before the rush.”
The other ground-floor room was similar to the first, except that the wall was decorated with what John eventually decided was the Ancient periodic table, rather than the alphabet. The cabinets were mostly empty, except for a few handheld devices that John couldn’t manage to initialize, and one that displayed a slowly rotating hologram of the planet, complete with tiny weather systems.
McKay said that this room’s consoles held the same database as the other room, but poking around a little, John found some kind of math game. He couldn’t read much Ancient, but he was pretty familiar with their numbers-since the Jumper displays used them, he had to be.
The consoles made a pleasant chiming sound when a correct answer was entered, and a low thunk when they got a wrong answer. At the next console, McKay was getting a lot of thunks-but as it turned out, when John checked out his screen, his was showing a different game. Geography, it looked like-the screen was displaying different solar systems.
“What are you supposed to do, identify them?” John asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Okay, I know this one-it’s the Athosian system! But what’s that in Ancient?”
John shrugged. “You got me.”
The console thunked and the screen changed, showing a solar system and a block of text. “Okay, now it thinks I’m backward,” McKay said. “It went back to the beginning and it’s giving me the answers.” He read, “The…something or other…system has two gas giants, two rocky planets, and an asteroid belt. It is…something something, experimental station, something, defense station? Habitable planet has mountains and…something, home to the giant…okay, that’s either ‘lizard’ or ‘squid.’”
“Go back to the part about the defense station,” John suggested.
“That’s all it says about it.” He pulled out a PDA and quickly copied something from the screen. “We can check it out in the grown-up database later.”
They tried out several more games, including one where McKay spent quite a bit of time building molecules, and a spelling game that wouldn’t let John quit until it came up with words easy enough for him to spell. Then, after popping back into the kindergarten room to check the progress of the database download, they ventured upstairs.
The layout was different on the second floor. Instead of two large classrooms, the area around the staircase was ringed with smaller rooms, each with a workstation, a cabinet, and a bench or table. “Downstairs was the elementary school,” McKay speculated, activating the console in one room. “Then when they were older, they got their own labs up here.”
“You think each kid just worked on their own?”
McKay looked around the small room. “Their reproductive rate was very low, you know. They wouldn’t have had more than a couple of kids the same age at any time. The younger kids probably worked on their own too, at the consoles-they probably just put them in the same room so the teacher could keep an eye on a bunch of them at once.” He messed with the console for a moment, and it displayed a lot of text and a schematic of a Stargate. “Okay. Good. This is a slightly more advanced database-we’ll have to download this one, when the first one’s done.”
While they were waiting, they explored the rest of the little labs. In one, John found a partially-assembled model of a Puddlejumper, with the components neatly labeled, and the remaining components neatly placed in a box next to the model.
“Major Sheppard?” McKay called from another lab.
“In here.”
“What, did you find something cool? Oh.” When he saw what John was looking at, he lowered his voice to the sort of hushed, reverent tone that they’d all used when they first arrived, awed and painfully conscious of the weight of history. “He must have been working on it when they had to evacuate,” McKay said softly.
John nodded. “They probably didn’t-didn’t have room for it, or something.” He knew all about having to leave things behind in a move. “Or maybe since they weren’t taking the jumpers, his folks made him leave it.”
McKay nodded.
“Say.” John cleared his throat. “Do you think anyone would care if I took this back and finished it? I mean, we already understand the Puddlejumpers pretty well.”
McKay muttered, “What do you mean, we?” but said, “Yeah-yeah, we’re not going to learn anything new from it. Have it.”
“Cool.”
#
Jeannie threw her overstuffed backpack into the corner of the lab.
“Hi, honey,” Dr. Ingram said. “How was--”
“Mer, do you want to go get a soda?” she interrupted.
Rodney was in the middle of a quantum mechanics problem set, but he recognized that Jeannie wanted to be out of the lab. It was strange-he knew that a year or two ago, he wouldn’t have realized that. So he said, “just a second,” and quickly finished up the step he was on, and went with her.
As they walked around campus, Jeannie sighed and kicked angrily at stones. “What’s wrong?” Rodney asked after a while.
“Dad didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Tell me what?”
“He moved out. He and mom are getting a divorce.”
“Oh.” He didn’t really know Mrs. Ingram-and he knew she didn’t like him. “No, he didn’t say. So where is he living now?” Not at the lab-he still left at night, like always.
“Some apartment, I don’t know. I have to stay over there tonight.”
“That’s weird.” He knew why he hadn’t been back to the Ingrams’ house in a couple of years-Mrs. Ingram didn’t want him there. But now that Dr. Ingram had his own apartment, he could have had Rodney over.
“I know. I mean, half the kids in my class have divorced parents, but it’s weird when it’s yours.”
That hadn’t been what Rodney meant, but he didn’t correct her. He could see, sort of, how it would be upsetting. It was always weird when one of Dr. Ingram’s grad students left, and he had to get used to new ones. “Do you want some ice cream?” he suggested, not sure what else might help Jeannie feel better. He usually did math when he was upset, but he didn’t think Jeannie cared about math.
“It’s like forty degrees out,” she pointed out.
“We could eat it inside.”
“Thanks anyway, Mer.”
#
“I have an emergency agenda item,” Rodney announced as he took his seat at the next staff meeting.
Sheppard, Teyla, and Elizabeth all looked unimpressed. “New business is at the end of the meeting,” Dr. Weir reminded him.
“What if my news is that we’re all dying?” he asked. “Does that have to wait until we’re done discussing the mess hall menus?”
“We’re not all dying,” Sheppard said. “If we were, you’d have led with that.”
He sort of had a point, but Rodney didn’t say so. “Someone thought it would be funny to put vermin in my quarters.”
That made Dr. Weir sit up and take notice. “What kind of vermin?”
“Is it not more likely that the vermin made it to your quarters on their own?” Teyla asked.
“Mice,” Rodney said. “And I know someone put them there, because they’re in a tank!”
Elizabeth sat back, shaking her head slightly, while Teyla just looked puzzled. Sheppard, on the other hand, said, “Oops.”
Rodney stared at him. “‘Oops’? What does that mean?”
“I did that,” Sheppard admitted.
“Oh, that’s real mature! Why the hell are you putting mice in my room?” And to think, he had thought just the other day that now that Sheppard wasn’t too annoying, now that he wasn’t trying so hard.
“I thought you’d like them,” Sheppard explained. “You were talking about how you missed your cat, and then someone was giving away mice, so I thought, hey.”
“‘Hey’? ‘Hey’ is not a thought process. And even if I do miss my cat, what does that have to do with mice? What would I get if I said I missed Café Du Monde coffee? Chicken noodle soup?”
“French onion,” Sheppard answered. “Anyway, they’re pets! You miss your pet, I got you a pet. You could say thank you,” he added.
“Mice aren’t pets. Anyway, where did they come from? The genetics lab? They could have bubonic plague, or glow in the dark, or…God only knows.”
“Glow-in-the-dark mice would be cool,” Sheppard said. “But they aren’t. Private Windon got a pair from one of the biologists, and they keep having babies. Half the marines on the base have pet mice now.”
“Which biologist?” Rodney demanded. Giving away lab specimens was just unacceptable. Especially when they ended up in his room.
“I had to promise I wouldn’t say.”
The life sciences people did have a whole breeding colony that they used to produce healthy, normal mice for experiments. Considering that the offspring were all over the base, they had better hope that the original pair had been from those. “How careful are your marines being? It’s only a matter of time until some of them get out, and we have an infestation.”
“Maybe when we do, the SGC will let you bring your cat,” Sheppard said. “Until then, you have some mice.”
“I don’t want mice.”
“Private Windon said no givebacks.”
“You’re Private Windon’s CO,” Rodney pointed out. “You can make him take his mice back.”
“I also had to promise I wouldn’t do that. He’s really having a hard time finding homes for this last batch of mice.”
“Does he know how baby mice are made? Because there’s something he can do about that.”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Weir said.
Sheppard looked over at her, but Rodney was getting out of his seat, having just had a horrible thought.
“Do you mind if we start the meeting?” she continued
“I have to go separate the mice,” Rodney said. “They could be fornicating in my quarters right now.”
“Private Windon said they were both males,” Sheppard said helpfully.
“If Private Windon knew how to sex mice, he wouldn’t have them to give away!”
“Dr. McKay,” Weir said. “You can deal with the mice after the meeting.”
“I’m pretty sure mouse sex takes less time than a senior staff meeting,” Rodney said, but something about Dr. Weir’s expression made him slip back into his chair. “If I end up with baby mice, I’m giving them to you.”
Dr. Weir didn’t acknowledge that, but Rodney decided that since she hadn’t refused them, he could totally hold her to it.
When they left the staff meeting, Sheppard loped along beside him. “Do you really mind the mice? I guess I could try to find another home for them. I thought you’d like them.”
Now that he knew the mice were supposed to be a present, and not some kind of extremely obscure prank, he was warming to them slightly. “I don’t know.”
Rodney sort of thought that when he got to his quarters Sheppard would go somewhere else, but instead he followed him inside. The mice were in a tank on Rodney’s desk. When he took off the cover, one mouse poked its nose out of a pile of shredded paper, whiskers twitching.
“They like these seed things from the mainland,” Sheppard said, picking up a little plastic bag that was next to the tank. “Windon gave me some when I picked up the mice. Here, give him one.”
Rodney took one of the large, flat seeds and offered it to the mouse. The mouse sniffed at it for a moment before taking the seed in its mouth and scurrying off to the corner of the cage. As soon as it had done so, a second mouse nose emerged from the paper nest.
By the time the second mouse had started on its seed, the first one was finished, so Rodney picked it up by the base of its tail and examined the underside. “Okay, that one’s a male. Here.” He handed Sheppard the mouse and picked up the other one, which proved to also be male.
“See?” Sheppard said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“No baby mice to worry about, anyway. They could have knocked up their sisters, but that’s not my problem.” He put the mice back in their tank and gave each one another seed before replacing the lid.
When he turned around, Sheppard was sprawled indolently across his bed, holding the framed picture from his nightstand. “This your cat?”
“No, I keep a picture of someone else’s cat on my bedside table.”
“It’s a nice cat,” Sheppard said.
“I’ve had him since grad school. He’ll probably be dead before we get back to Earth,” Rodney added gloomily.
“If he ends up coming to Atlantis, he can watch the mice. Like cat TV.” Sheppard put the photo back where he’d found it and rolled to his feet. “Coming to lunch?”
“I have to get back to the lab,” Rodney said, but he ended up going to the mess anyway, where he wrapped bits of vegetable from his salad and a corner of bread from his sandwich in a napkin and stuffed it in his pocket, for the mice. An all-seed diet couldn’t be healthy for them.
#
Getting his cat was one of the first things Rodney did after he arrived in California-at least, after the strictly necessary stuff like renting an apartment and figuring out where the grocery stores were.
He got there a month before the term-quarter, they called it here-started, and was shocked to learn that the University wouldn’t let him in to his assigned lab space early. Term times had never meant anything to him before. When he did finally get in, seeing the kind of lab facilities provided for graduate students was another shock-the lab he’d grown up in had been of the kind granted to senior faculty working on government-funded projects. He’d had his own work area in it for years, and anything he wanted for his projects had just sort of…turned up.
If he had stayed at MIT, it would probably still be like that.
But now he was on his own two feet, and it was better that way. Certainly no one was saying anymore that his career was all part of Dr. Ingram’s research.
He’d expected to feel-he told himself that he did feel-a heady sense of freedom from picking out his own apartment (a studio in a converted house), his own furniture (a secondhand sofa, small table and chair, bookshelves), and his own course in life (the physics degree first, then the one in mathematics, with maybe a Masters in engineering thrown in there). What he really felt was lonely.
It might be better when the term started, when he met his fellow students. But that wasn’t likely-he’d never fit in among his classmates, and that was unlikely to change. Dr. Ingram’s lab had been the only place where-
Well. He hadn’t exactly fit in there, either, now had he? He’d been the center of attention because he was the project. He didn’t miss that. Really. He didn’t.
There was a coffee shop down the street from his house, and in the coffee shop was a bulletin board where people put up signs for things like used cars for sale, new bands seeking singers, psychic palm readings. He got his couch from the bulletin board, and a few days after his arrival, he was looking at it again, hoping to find someone selling a television.
Instead he found a Xeroxed flyer that said, “Free to a good home!”
It had been there when he bought his sofa, too, but since then, someone had written over it in red magic marker, “Desperate! Moving Friday, Can’t Take!”
Seeing it filled him with a white-hot surge of anger. He asked the barista to borrow the phone.
“Do you still have the cat?” he demanded of the girl who answered.
Yes, she said, and explained breathlessly how he was a lifesaver, because she’d gotten the cat last spring, when her friend had been giving away kittens, only now she was graduating and she had a job in Chicago, so of course she couldn’t take him with her.
“Didn’t you realize when you got the cat that you were eventually going to graduate?” he interrupted. “What did you think it was going to do-evaporate? It’s alive, you know, it’s not a toy you can just throw away when you’re tired of it.” He was almost yelling, because really, who did she think she was?
“Look,” the girl said. “Do you want the cat, or not?”
He told her to bring it to the coffee shop, if she could be bothered, and was mildly surprised when she showed up. She glared at him during the handover, a boyfriend hovering wordlessly behind her.
He could tell that she recognized him. Now, since his graduation and everything that had come with it, everyone who saw him knew-not who, but what-he was. But she just handed him the cat carrier, litter box, a bag of cat accessories. “His name’s Keebler,” she said grudgingly.
Keebler, Rodney thought, was the stupidest name ever given to a cat. “Kepler,” he said as he let the cat out of the carrier into his new apartment. “Here, Kepler.” The cat tentatively sniffed his outstretched fingers, then allowed its ears to be scratched, a low purr rumbling from its chest.
After that apartment in Berkeley, Rodney moved 17 times. Kepler went with him everywhere, except Atlantis.
#
McKay didn’t go so far as to actually thank him for the mice, but he stopped complaining about them, so John figured he must have decided he liked them. Then one day when he was ranting at one of the scientists, John heard him say, “You know what? Fig and Coil would be better at your job than you! And they don’t even have thumbs! Move!”
The scientists found something to do on the other side of the room they were exploring. “Fig and Coil?”
“The mice,” Rodney answered. “Fig Newton and--”
“Tesla Coil,” John nodded. “You know, the Marines tend to name theirs things like ‘Ripper’ and ‘Fang.’”
“How nice for them. Come on,” Rodney said to the control panel he was working on. “Initialize, why don’t you?”
“Let me try,” John said, and laid his hand on it.
The panel obligingly lit up.
“Floozy,” Rodney said to it, edging John aside.
As John drew back his hand, he realized that McKay had given him the perfect opening to ask about something he’d always wondered, but had a feeling Rodney would mock him mercilessly for even considering. “It’s not, uh, alive, is it?”
Rodney took a moment from his work to cast a disparaging glance over his shoulder. “The city? No.” He hooked up his laptop to the panel and spent several moments tapping at the keys before he added, “Well.”
“Hm?”
“It has some self-repairing components, so it would be possible to define ‘alive’ in some way that would include the city. But not in the way you meant-it would be alive like a tree is alive.” He kept working as he talked. “Actually, a forest would be a better analogy-it’s made up of numerous systems, some of which could tenuously be described as alive, all ultimately connected and interdependent to varying degrees. But it’s not aware; it doesn’t make choices.”
“It does things we didn’t tell it to,” John pointed out. “Like the quarantine lockdown.”
Evidently it wasn’t a stupid question-Rodney’s glance at him this time was almost approving. “It reacts, but only in programmed ways. The reactions are complex enough that they can almost look like choices, but they aren’t.”
That was pretty much what he’d expected McKay to say, but it was still a little bit of a disappointment-when they had arrived, and now when they explored new parts of the city, it felt like the city was welcoming him. He’d wanted it to be true.
“The difference is that a person can generate infinite novel responses, while something like Atlantis can only perform a finite number of programmed responses, in potentially novel combinations. Which is also like a forest,” McKay was saying. “There’s a reason humans all over tend to independently invent the idea of nature spirits, after all. A sufficiently complex system can behave almost as though it were aware.”
“Don’t let the soft sciences people hear you,” John said. “They’ll think you’re converting.”
“Yes, well,” Rodney said peevishly. “I did grow up in an artificial intelligence lab. I heard as many conversations about what constitutes consciousness as you probably did about, about football and scratching yourself.”
“Scratching ourselves isn’t really something we talk about,” John answered. “I wonder why they didn’t make it aware-the Ancients, I mean. It can’t be that they didn’t have the technology.”
“They could have. I know why they didn’t.”
McKay didn’t elaborate. After several minutes, John said, “Why didn’t they?”
“Because if it were able to make choices, at some point it would make ones they didn’t like. Aha!” He called over to the other side of the room, “Try hooking it up now!” Returning his attention to the laptop in front of him, he continued, “A self-aware city would have to end up as the functional equivalent of either an absolute monarch or a slave.”
John was about to ask McKay which one of those he thought he was, but wisely stopped himself just in time. McKay wasn’t the city; he was its chief of science-he had agreed to the expedition and its goals just like everyone else; if he hadn’t, the SGC would have found someone else to do his job. They wouldn’t have had to either accede to his demands or somehow force him to cooperate.
“Hah!” McKay added, as more consoles lit up around them. “I’m a genius.”
#
Not long after, they learned that a Wraith armada was heading their way, and every waking moment had to be spent preparing for the attack. Or, as McKay frequently reminded them, “Preparing to die.” John did notice, though, that McKay had no trouble periodically descending into panic without for even a moment stopping his frantic work.
John didn’t like splitting up the team, but when McKay proposed going out to an abandoned weapons platform in a last-ditch effort to bring it back on-line, he knew he couldn’t take the rest of his team from the other preparations for a 15-hour jumper ride. Reluctantly, he assigned another pilot to take Rodney and another scientist there, while he, Teyla, and Ford kept working on finding an Alpha site and preparing Atlantis for a siege.
#
It was a testament to how far Rodney’s life had come that putting on a spacesuit and exploring an abandoned orbital weapons platform wasn’t even close to being the coolest thing he’d ever done. Hell, it barely qualified as the coolest thing he’d done that week.
Of course, it was also insanely dangerous, and they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t the last stand against a horde of space vampires bent on invading the Earth. But he still took a moment to appreciate the coolness of it.
Once he got life support going, Grodin and Miller joined him in the satellite. They quickly determined that the naquadah generator they had hooked up was producing plenty of power, and it was compatible with the satellite’s systems. Finding out why the weapon still wouldn’t work was more difficult.
When they determined that the problem was with the conduit leading from the satellite’s buffer to the weapon, and that in order to reroute it, someone was going to have to go outside-well, Rodney’s desire to do an actual spacewalk warred with his fear of drifting through space forever. When Grodin drew the short straw, he still wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.
From inside the satellite, Rodney directed Grodin in how to make the repairs. They took longer than Rodney had hoped, but not as long as he had feared-the Wraith battle group was still a few minutes out when Grodin finished. “We have power to the weapon!” Rodney said when he’d tested it. “Come get me, and let’s get the hell out of here!”
He waited impatiently. After a few minutes, Grodin’s voice came over the radio. “Oh dear,” he said.
“That’s not good,” Rodney pointed out. “What’s going on?”
“We’re having trouble connecting to the airlock.”
Quickly, Rodney hooked his laptop back up to the satellite. “You routed power away from the airlock controls, genius,” he said, the words tripping out of his mouth while the full implications of the error were still settling on him.
“Oh. Dear,” Grodin said again. “I’ll go back and fix it--”
“Yeah, and you can wave to the Wraith while they fly right past you!” This was bad. Really, really bad.
“Wait.” Miller’s voice came through the radio. “We can open the hatch manually. It’ll be depressurized, but can’t you, I don’t know--”
“Hold my breath? No.” He wasn’t designed to work in vacuum-conceivably, he could have been, and it might be interesting, at some point, to figure out what modifications he’d need, but it wasn’t something he could do in the-he checked his watch-three minutes they had. “I’d have to go into shutdown mode-and if I shut down before I open the hatch on this side, I won’t be able to go through it, but if I open the hatch into the depressurized airlock while I’m still running, I’ll blow out every circuit I have.” He swallowed hard. “Look, you’re going to have to go without me. Retreat to a safe distance, cloak the jumper, and come back for me. I’ll, uh, I’ll stay here and make sure the weapon works right.”
There was silence on the radio for a moment. “Understood,” Miller said. “We’ll be back for you in a few minutes, Dr. McKay.”
With nothing else to do, McKay switched his displays to watch the Wraith fleet arrive. “Two minutes out,” he said into the radio. “I’m arming the weapon. Ready to fire in sixty seconds.” Through Grodin’s radio, he heard Miller relaying that message back to Atlantis.
“Oh, shit,” he said a moment later, watching the readouts on the weapons displays. “The power isn’t making it to the weapon-it’s building up in the buffer.” Grodin was saying something in his ear, but Rodney didn’t register what he was saying as he scrambled for the tools he had recently packed away. “It’s at 115%.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I’m trying!” Getting the weapon to fire was probably a lost cause, but he had to send the power somewhere. He scrambled to engage auxiliary systems that could absorb some of the excess power, but the power in the buffer kept building. “120%. Shit, shit, shit!”
“The Wraith ships are almost out of range,” Miller said urgently.
“Give me a second!” An alarm started beeping urgently. “It’s going to-fuck, the buffer’s going to overload.” Fingers flying over the consoles, still trying to find some way to release the power, Rodney said, “Get back to Atlantis, help with the evacuation--”
“Dr. McKay!”
“I’m-sorry.” Sparks started flying from the power conduits that led up to the buffer.
Everything went black.
#
In the control room, Zelenka reported, “The weapon isn’t firing.”
“Why not?” John demanded, leaning over his shoulder.
“If I knew, I would say. The Wraith ships are passing out of its range.”
“We have a transmission from the Puddlejumper,” the Gate tech added.
Miller’s voice overlapped with Zelenka’s as Miller reported an unsuccessful mission, and Zelenka said, “I’m reading a significant explosion inside the satellite.”
Then Zelenka stopped talking, and Miller continued, “Dr. McKay was on board.”
Zelenka swore in Czech, and John felt his stomach go cold. Dr. Weir held up her hand. “Jumper one, what’s Dr. McKay’s status?”
There was a moment of radio silence, then, “Atlantis, we have no reason to believe that he survived the explosion.”
Dr. Grodin’s voice overlapped Miller’s. “The satellite looks structurally intact, although sensor readings suggest considerable internal damage and significant radiation. There may be something to recover, but we can’t get in there without radiation gear.”
“No reason to believe he survived” didn’t mean that McKay was dead. His technical specs suggested that he could take a lot of damage. If he wasn’t answering the radio, that could just mean he was shut down.
“Understood, Jumper One,” Dr. Weir was saying. “Come home.”
John opened his mouth to protest, but there was nothing he could say-he couldn’t demand that Miller and Grodin subject themselves to dangerous levels of radiation. Every instinct he had screamed at him to get in a Jumper and go bring back his teammate, but the Wraith would be on their doorstep before John had time to reach the satellite, much less make it back. He couldn’t leave Atlantis to face a major battle without its military commander-and nor could he ask anyone else to desert their own teammates to rescue his.
“Right,” he said around a sizeable lump in his throat. “We’ll go get him once we’ve defeated the Wraith.”
Zelenka, his eyes round behind his glasses, nodded sharply. “Yes,” he said firmly. Then, more quietly, “as soon as we figure out how to do that.”
On to part III!
#
Despite clearly not wanting anything to do with John, McKay stayed on the team. He came to briefings, went on missions, trained on the firing range. But he refused to join in on any team social activities, or even casual conversations in the locker room or on puddlejumper rides.
John kept trying. He wasn’t sure why-it started out being about proving he wasn’t an asshole, but after weeks of being rebuffed, even he had to admit that he was probably just digging himself in deeper by not leaving the guy alone, when that was clearly what he wanted.
“You guys going to the Wizard of Oz tomorrow?” he asked one day when he was in the lab going through the box of Ancient gadgets people wanted him to touch. The movie was being screened in one of the big auditoriums, ostensibly for the benefit of the Athosian children who had never seen a movie before.
“The flying monkeys give me nightmares,” said the not-Russian guy, whose name John had learned was Zelenka.
McKay glanced up from his work to look over his shoulder at Zelenka. “Seriously?”
“Yes, I would dream that they came down off of the church that I had to pass on my way to school, and grab me and carry me into the sky, like they did Dorothy and Toto in the film.” He shuddered spastically and picked up a tablet.
“That’s very disturbing,” McKay said.
“I know. This dream tormented me for years.”
“No, I mean it’s disturbing that you call yourself a scientist when you’re afraid of a children’s movie.”
“So does that mean you’re going, Rodney?” John got in, before Zelenka could answer.
“No.”
“You sure? I have Dark Side of the Moon.”
“So?”
“So, it’s an alternate soundtrack to the movie,” John explained. “You can--”
“I have been to college, thanks,” McKay interrupted. “I meant, so what?”
“Well, you could listen to it with me, if you want.”
“I don’t.”
John said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind,” but as far as he could tell Zelenka was the only one who was still listening, and he just shook his head.
#
“Am I a real student?” Rodney had been holding the question in all day, but it wasn’t until he’d gotten back to the lab and done a page of differential equations that he felt calm enough to ask it.
“Hm?” Dr. Ingram glanced up from his computer screen.
“Today in Electricity and Magnetism a girl whose name I don’t know said it wasn’t fair for me to wreck the curve on every exam, and Dr. Swope said he hadn’t included my grade in the curve because I wasn’t a real student,” Rodney explained. “And I asked what he meant but he just said it didn’t matter and I was getting an A anyway and anyone who had a question about grades should see him in his office.” Rodney paused for breath. “Only my question wasn’t about grades, so I didn’t go.”
“Right,” Dr. Ingram said, rubbing his temples. “What was your question again?”
“Am I a real student?”
“Yes. Is that all?”
“Yes. Wait. No. I have a follow-up question.”
Jeannie had explained that maybe people got confused sometimes when he talked too fast, so he waited patiently until Dr. Ingram said, “Yes, Meredith?”
“Why did Dr. Swope say that I wasn’t a real student?”
“You would have to ask Dr. Swope that.”
“But I am going to get a real degree,” Rodney said, returning to the main point. “Right?”
“Yes. If you successfully complete all degree requirements, you will receive a degree.”
“A real degree,” he pressed. “And I’ll be able to go to graduate school.”
“You’ll be qualified to apply to graduate school. You’d have to be accepted for admission to a program, just like you were for the undergraduate program.”
“Okay,” he said, turning back to his own work. “That was all I wanted to know.”
But he still wanted to know about the other thing-and he was just the tiniest bit worried that Dr. Ingram was wrong-so the next day, he went to Dr. Swope’s office hour.
“I’m Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay, from your 12:20 Electricity and Magnetism class,” he explained, because Dr. Ingram always complained about how students showed up at his office hours and just assumed he would know who they were.
“Yes, Meredith, I know who you are.”
Oddly enough, his professors always said that after he introduced himself. Professors’ time was valuable, so even though he knew how to do small talk, he skipped it and got straight to the point. “I wanted to know why you said I wasn’t a real student.”
“Oh. Well, all I meant was that you’re participating in classes as part of Dr. Ingram’s project. You won’t be competing with the other students for placement in upper-division courses, or for research and fellowship opportunities, so it doesn’t really make sense to compare your performance against the rest of the class.”
“But I’m not,” Rodney objected. “Taking classes for Dr. Ingram’s research. I’m going to be a physicist.”
Dr. Swope opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Have you talked to Dr. Ingram about that?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted me to go into comp sci like him, but I’ve always been more interested in physics. I mean, physics is at the bottom of everything, isn’t it? You can understand the whole universe with physics. Well, and math. You know.”
“Yes, of course.” The professor hesitated. “You know, Meredith, what we’re doing in class is really just the beginning, the groundwork for later study. Rote memorization of formulas and facts will only take you so far.”
“I know.” All of the teachers said that, and they usually put it in the introduction to the textbooks, too. Rodney wasn’t sure why-he hardly did any memorizing; it was usually easier to re-create the formulas from first principles when he needed them.
“Right. I mean to say that actually being a physicist is a completely different animal from doing undergraduate-level physics.”
“It would almost have to be,” Rodney pointed out.
“Yes.” Dr. Swope sighed. “Just…don’t be too surprised if you run into trouble later on. Physics-real physics-requires deep understanding of concepts, and more creativity than Dr. Ingram probably thinks.”
“I don’t think Dr. Ingram knows that much about physics,” Rodney said. “But I’m not going to have trouble.”
Dr. Swope smiled, but somehow, it didn’t look friendly. Standing up, he said, “I don’t think computers are going to be replacing real scientists any time soon.” He opened the door and called the next student in, so Rodney had no choice but to leave, slightly more confused than when he’d gone in.
#
“You want one of these?” Rodney asked, taking an MRE out of his file drawer. It was late, and he and Zelenka were the only ones left in the lab.
“I thought I might go to the mess for some real food,” Zelenka said. “We have at least twenty minutes before the simulation is complete.”
“Suit yourself. They had some kind of pot pie earlier.” About to tear open the MRE packet, he hesitated. The pot pie had been pretty good.
“Chicken pot pie?”
“More like squirrel…ish.”
Zelenka stopped on the way to the door. “Not those bat-squirrel things from PXN-749.”
“Yeah, those. Don’t worry, both zoology and medical cleared them for human consumption, and the people on the planet have been eating them for centuries. They’re not bad. A little gamy.”
Zelenka shuddered and came back to Rodney’s desk. “Perhaps I’ll have one of your MREs after all.”
“Sure. You want chicken and noodles, or spaghetti?” He held them out; Zelenka chose the spaghetti. “You’re not squeamish about weird food,” Rodney pointed out, opening his entrée packet and pouring in water from the electric kettle. “You didn’t mind the not-goat gyros, and you had two helpings of herpetological surprise. Squirrel pot pie is relatively normal.”
“Maybe I am not in the mood for culinary adventure.”
“No, that’s not it. It’s the squirrel things! They look a little like flying monkeys, don’t they?” Rodney sat back, pleased to have figured it out.
“I do not make fun of your fear of whales,” Zelenka pointed out, adding water to his own MRE entrée, and dumping the smaller packets out onto the desk to poke through them.
“Whales actually exist,” Rodney pointed out. “And anyway, I’m not afraid of them. No, you’re thinking about this all wrong. What better way to demonstrate your superiority to the flying monkeys than by eating them?”
“I prefer to ignore them completely.”
“Revenge is a dish best served with flaky pastry.”
“Would you eat whale pot pie?”
“Pegasus whale, or Earth whale?”
“Either.”
“The Pegasus whales might be intelligent. I’d eat them if I was starving.” He considered. “But then, I’d eat you if I was starving.”
“Hey!” Zelenka smacked Rodney’s hand with his fork as he tried to help himself to the accessory packet from his MRE. “What are you stealing from me? Is there candy in there?”
“No-salt, coffee, and toilet paper,” Rodney explained. “You don’t need them; you never go offworld.”
Zelenka held the packet just out of his reach. “Coffee? What will you trade me for it?”
“It’s just instant.”
“Maybe I’ll keep it until I find someone who wants it more than you. Also, someone who will not eat me.”
“I’ll eat the whales first. There’s more meat on them, anyway. Okay, you can have half of my pretzels.”
Zelenka handed over the packet. “Yours has pretzels in it? Why does mine not have pretzels?”
“Yours has that plastic cheese stuff.”
“So I see.” Zelenka opened it. “Can we put it on the pretzels?”
“You’re a genius.”
By the time they were done eating, the simulation was finishing up. “It’s not going to work,” Zelenka said, pointing at the screen. “Look, the power distribution curve is falling off already.”
“I see it. All right, why don’t we try bringing in the secondary array and running them in parallel?”
“That might work,” Zelenka agreed. “But tomorrow, all right? It’s nearly midnight.”
Rodney glanced at his watch. “Huh. Okay, I can set up the simulation myself-it’ll only take, oh, half again as long.”
“Hah! You think you are funny, but you are not.” Zelenka started closing down his workstation. “You should leave too, get out of the lab for a bit. I’m sure it’s not good for you, recharging at your desk.”
“I have a lot to do,” Rodney said defensively. He usually did his recharging when there wasn’t anyone there, or at least only Zelenka, and he did go back to his quarters to defrag.
“Yes, but how can we talk about you behind your back if you never leave?”
“It’s Major Sheppard,” Rodney confessed. “He keeps turning up at my room and asking me to do things. It’s easier to get rid of him here.”
“Do things? What kind of things?” Standing up, Zelenka leaned against the back of his desk chair.
“Watch movies, play games…one time he asked me if I wanted to spar. I’m not even sure what that means, are you?”
“I think, in this case, it means that he is trying to be friendly.”
“Huh.”
“The Major reminds me of a dog my old girlfriend used to have, it was always bringing me things-sticks, balls, Frisbees. All covered in dog slobber. Every time I saw this dog, it thought maybe this time I would want to play with it.”
“Yeah, I’m more of a cat person. What did you do about the dog?” Rodney hoped the answer wasn’t that he waited for it to die; he didn’t want to wait that long. And anyway, he didn’t really wish the Major dead; he just wanted him to leave him alone.
“I threw the stick or the ball as hard as possible, so it would take the dog longer to bring it back and make me throw it again.”
Rodney thought about that one from all angles, but…. “Yeah, that’s not helpful at all.”
“It’s an anecdote, not a parable. Goodnight, Rodney.”
#
Oddly enough, after the mission where Sheppard ended up with a giant disgusting bug attached to his neck, Rodney found that his distaste for him had…cooled. Maybe it was because Sheppard had had to be killed (temporarily) to detach the horrible thing. It was like they were even, somehow. Whatever the reason, after about the fourteenth time Sheppard asked him if he’d come watch a movie with the team, Rodney began to wonder if maybe he should try throwing the slobbery stick. It was The Wrath of Khan, and Teyla wouldn’t know how astonishingly bad the science was if he wasn’t there to tell her. “Well. Maybe.”
“Really?”
“If nothing actually important comes up between now and then.”
He regretted it almost immediately, because Major Sheppard punched him on the arm and said, “Cool. It’s in Teyla’s room, at eight.”
Unfortunately, nothing more important did come up, so he went. It started off okay. They were all out of popcorn, but Ford had some Cheez Doodles that he’d obtained through some means that Sheppard, as commanding officer, apparently wasn’t supposed to officially know about, and Teyla shared some kind of Athosian gorp that really wasn’t half bad.
It wasn’t until the movie was almost over that he remembered why Khan had always been his least favorite of the Trek movies, behind even the cinematically much worse I and V.
Two of Dr. Ingram’s grad students had taken him to see it--maybe more because they wanted to go than because they thought he’d like it-but the grad students had always tried to entertain him with the things that they themselves liked, and usually, he liked them too
He’d been having fun up until the end, which had made the whole thing more of a blow. It was an exciting movie, and he’d just seen the original Khan episode on video. Sanjay had heard about Spock’s death ahead of time-probably from somebody on a BBS-and had warned them, but it was still inexpressibly sad. Laura, he remembered, was crying. The funeral had been touching in all the right ways until Kirk said…it.
Of course he had seen the movie since then-loads of times-but he usually made some excuse to be out of the room when that scene came. Now he was trapped on Teyla’s sofa between her and Ford, with no reasonable means of escape. So he gritted his teeth and balled his hands into fists in his pockets, and waited it out.
“Of all the souls I’ve met,” Kirk said on the screen. “His was the most--”
“Fuck you,” Rodney said, and maybe he hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or maybe he had.
Sheppard turned his head to glare at him before picking up the remote and rewinding pointedly.
So then they had to watch it again. “His was the most…human,” Kirk said. And Rodney liked Kirk, he really did, but he sort of wanted to kick his teeth in, and he couldn’t really imagine that Spock wouldn’t feel pretty much the same way. Spock wasn’t human. That was practically the whole point of him, and it had been obvious to Rodney even when he was five that being Vulcan was better. Only apparently that wasn’t obvious, even to Spock’s best friend.
Rodney had known all his life that he wasn’t human, but it wasn’t until that day that it occurred to him that anyone would think he ought to wish he was.
When the bagpipes started, signaling that the worst was over, Ford said suddenly, “Hey!”
“What?” Sheppard asked.
“I just realized,” Ford explained, looking over at Rodney, “that was mighty white of him, wasn’t it?”
Then Teyla asked what that expression meant, and Sheppard, for some reason, seemed to think he ought to be the one to try and explain. When he (inevitably) got bogged down in the history of race relations on Earth, Ford jumped in and straightened it out.
“I see,” Teyla said after a while. “So it is like when Private Conrad said that I could shoot like a man, in the apparently sincere belief that I would consider this a compliment.”
“Yeah,” Ford said, and Rodney nodded along.
“That’s not what he meant, though,” Sheppard said. “He didn’t mean human human, he meant that Spock was brave, and self-sacrificing, and a good friend.”
Ford, Teyla, and Rodney all shared a look. Rodney realized that Ford probably felt like he shouldn’t tell his CO that he had his head up his ass, so he was just about to do it for him when Teyla did instead. “And instead of saying those things, he decided to say that Mr. Spock was human. Which he is not.”
“Well, he’s half human,” Sheppard said.
“Ah,” said Teyla.
“Look, it’s supposed to be a compliment!”
“Yeah, I think we all know it was supposed to be,” Rodney answered. “That’s the problem.”
“Okay, whatever,” Sheppard said. “I think you’re reading too much into it.”
Still, Rodney left Teyla’s quarters feeling better about The Wrath of Khan than he ever had.
#
“So which graph is it for question one?” Carole asked, her pen poised over the lab notebook.
“You’re supposed to predict which one you think it’s going to be,” Rodney explained, not for the first time. His lab partner never seemed to understand that the point of labs wasn’t to fill in the answers as quickly as possible. Admittedly, he’d filled out his own lab diary the night before, but that was only because he’d already done this experiment when he was ten.
“Yeah, but I bet you already know.” She tilted her head to the side, the way girls did when they asked for things. He wondered why they did that.
“Yes, because I already understand Faraday’s Law. If you understood it, you’d know the answer, but you don’t, which is why you should do the experiment.”
“Faraday’s law is the one about electro-locomotive force, right?”
“Electromotive,” Rodney corrected.
“Right, that one!” She picked up the coil and magnet they were using for the experiment. “Which way does this go?”
Rodney watched her fumble around for as long as he could stand. “Okay, no.” He snapped his fingers a few times. “Move. Like this.”
As he ran through the lab procedure, occasionally saying, “Do you get that? Are you paying attention?” Carole stood to the side and said, “Uh-huh, yeah,” and copied down the results.
“Okay,” he said when he was finished. “We’ve still got half the lab period left, so there’s time for you to do it.”
But Carole had stopped paying attention, and was over at the next lab table showing her notebook to her friend-the one who had decided to be lab partners with the business major with no neck. “Uh-huh,” she was saying, “yeah, if you act stupid long enough, he’ll do it for you. Okay, so for question two it’s graph C, and then three was D.”
“Maybe we should put that one of our predictions was wrong, so it looks like we did it,” the business major with no neck suggested.
“Good idea-okay, let’s put…A, for number three.”
“A doesn’t even make sense,” Rodney pointed out. “Have you even been to class?”
None of them answered. He thought about telling the TA, but he’d tried that the first week, and he’d just told Rodney to focus on his own work. So instead he sat down and read through the next week’s lab.
“I know, but I’m totally getting an A,” Carole was saying, “so it’s kind of worth it. I’m going to ask him to be my lab partner for Waves and Vibrations, too. Ooh!” She raised her hand. “If we’re done, can we go?”
As it turned out, Carole flunked Electricity and Magnetism, so she wasn’t in Waves and Vibrations the next semester. And anyway, that time everyone wanted to be Rodney’s lab partner.
After eliminating anyone who wasn’t a physics major, and everyone who had gotten less than a B in Electricity and Magnetism, he picked Vinh Trang. He knew Vinh would be an all right lab partner-he at least made an effort to do the experiments properly, and had a basic grasp of the laws of physics.
“Do you want to go get lunch?” Rodney asked him after their first lab, which ended just before noon. He was still working on making friends; according to Jeannie, inviting people to do things was the way to do it.
Vinh paused in packing up his backpack. “I’m kind of busy. Maybe some other time.”
Taking him at his word, Rodney asked him again for each of the next six weeks, when it began to sink in that maybe Vinh was going to be busy every week.
The semester after that, he decided not to bother with picking a lab partner. There was a group of three in the section, but the TA never said anything about it.
#
John’s attention turned temporarily to the growing problem of the strained relations between expedition personnel and the Athosian refugees, and he dialed back his attempts to get Rodney to socialize with the team. Now that he’d come once, and seemed to have a decent time, John figured it was McKay’s own problem if he decided to isolate himself.
Not long after that decision, though, Rodney turned up in his office. “I need you to assign somebody to me for tomorrow,” he announced.
John blinked. “What for?”
“I want to explore some of the labs over on the south pier-that weird little round building. It’s my day off, but Elizabeth says I need a military escort.”
John pulled up the duty roster. “It’s not a good day-I’ve got two teams going offworld. Sorry, I don’t think I can spare anyone.”
“Oh, come on. Surely you can pull someone off…off…standing around looking menacing, or disturbingly masturbatory gun-polishing, or…or whatever it is your people do all day,” McKay sputtered.
“Well,” John said, having an idea. “It’s my day off, too.”
“So?”
“So I was going to spend it polishing my guns in a disturbingly masturbatory way, but I suppose I could go exploring with you instead.”
It was strangely satisfying to see McKay struggling with whether to accept his offer, knowing that if he refused, he’d be cutting off his nose to spite his face. Finally, the lure of exploration won out. “Well, all right,” he said, managing to sound like he was the one doing John a favor. “You should probably pack a lunch; I plan to be out there all day.”
They met up the next morning and took a transporter to a residential building on the south pier. It was a short hike from McKay’s little round building, but it was the closest transporter that had been cleared as safe.
“It really seems like there should be seagulls,” John said as they walked. It was a bright day, with a strong breeze coming in off the ocean; he could almost smell the ghost of sun screen and cotton candy.
“There aren’t any seagulls on this planet.”
“I know there aren’t, I was just saying, it seems like there should be.”
After a moment, McKay said. “Squirrels.”
“What?”
“There aren’t any squirrels, either.”
John thought about that for a moment. “No mice or cockroaches, either.” He thought that the city must have had them-or something like them-when the Ancients lived there, but they had to have died out, so long ago that there weren’t even any remains left.
“There are mice,” McKay corrected him. “We brought them. And I still maintain that having brought mice, we had a positive obligation to bring cats.”
“Then what would we have to bring to hunt the cats? Coyotes?”
“Neutered cats,” McKay answered. “Maybe just one. One neutered, vaccinated cat.”
John was starting to see where this was going. “Did you have a particular color in mind?”
McKay huffed and turned his attention to the access panel by the door to the small round building, which they had reached.
“So you had a cat?” John asked as McKay pried the cover off the access panel. “Was it, like, a….” He waited, hoping McKay would help him out. He didn’t. “Robot cat?”
“It was a regular cat. Made out of cat.”
Well, he supposed that if it was a robot cat, the SGC would have let him bring it.
“I always wanted a dog.”
“What a surprise.” The doors to the small, round building slid open. McKay gestured toward it. “Go ahead-do your thing.”
Lifting his P-90, John briefly considered making a jerking-off gesture on the barrel, but realized it would be immature. Then he did it anyway. McKay was still sputtering when he went into the building.
The building was dark and musty, but no sooner had he entered than the lights came up and the ventilation system whirred into life. He was in a sort of lobby, centered around a broad staircase flanked by dead plants. There were doorways on either side of the lobby. The walls and tiled floor were decorated in typical Ancient style, but in soft pastel colors.
John started for the doorway on the right, but before he got there, McKay barged in. “Since I haven’t heard any gunfire, I assume everything is fine.”
“You know what happens when you assume.”
“There isn’t going to be anything dangerous in here, anyway.” McKay started prying off the access panel by the door, but before he managed it, John waved his hand across the controls, and it opened. “Show-off,” McKay muttered.
They went in. The room was roughly semicircular, with consoles ranged along the curving outer wall, and a big table in the middle. There were cabinets built into the straight wall, and over them, a border displayed a series of symbols that were unlike those in any other room John had seen since arriving in Atlantis, but nevertheless familiar: the Ancient alphabet. Across the room, McKay was kneeling in front of one of the child-size consoles.
McKay, John figured, was in for a disappointment, but he thought it was cool. The Ancients had cleared away most of their belongings, so that even squatting in the middle of their city, it was hard to get much of an idea of what their daily lives had been like. They had the Ancient database and labs littered with abandoned experiments, but not their clothes and toothbrushes and drinking glasses.
Not really expecting to find anything, John opened one of the cabinets. But this building hadn’t been as completely emptied out as the residences. He found a bin full of plastic balls, wheels, and rods. Picking up a handful, he found that they were slightly self-adhesive. “Ancient Legos,” he said, making a pyramid.
McKay glanced over at him. “Haven’t you learned your lesson about touching things?”
“It’s a kindergarten classroom,” he pointed out. “There isn’t going to be anything deadly in here.”
McKay apparently didn’t have a comeback for that, because he just said, “Anyway, they’re more like Tinkertoys.”
John was opening another cabinet. “Oh, yeah. The Legos are in here.”
McKay abandoned his laptop to join him. Soon they were both sitting in child-sized chairs at the table, playing with Ancient building toys. John was making what he thought was a pretty good model of an F-1 fighter, and McKay was working on…something.
“What did you think this building was gonna be?” John asked after a while.
“A school.”
Oh. “Well, anthro and linguistics will be interested.”
“Everyone will be interested,” McKay corrected him. “One of the biggest problems we’re having with the Ancient database is that it assumes we know things that we don’t. It’s a big improvement over trying to figure out their technology from scratch, but it’s like, like--”
“Like if a caveman got his hands on copy of Popular Mechanics and a digital watch?” John suggested.
McKay took the expected amount of umbrage, and huffed, “More like if Sir Issac Newton were faced with a super-conducting supercollider and several peer-reviewed articles on the subject. As one of the most brilliant scientific minds in human history he’d be capable of understanding it, but he’d be leapfrogging over knowledge that took hundreds of years to develop-or thousands, in the case of the Ancients.”
John decided not to comment on McKay putting himself in the same category as Newton. “So what he’d really need before he could tackle the supercollider is--”
“A high-school physics textbook. Well, and a couple of undergraduate level ones, but the high school one would be a start, at least.” Rodney added two more rods to his…whatever it was. “I’m downloading the educational database onto my laptop, but still, tomorrow this place is going to be packed.”
“In that case, maybe we should check out the rest of the rooms before the rush.”
The other ground-floor room was similar to the first, except that the wall was decorated with what John eventually decided was the Ancient periodic table, rather than the alphabet. The cabinets were mostly empty, except for a few handheld devices that John couldn’t manage to initialize, and one that displayed a slowly rotating hologram of the planet, complete with tiny weather systems.
McKay said that this room’s consoles held the same database as the other room, but poking around a little, John found some kind of math game. He couldn’t read much Ancient, but he was pretty familiar with their numbers-since the Jumper displays used them, he had to be.
The consoles made a pleasant chiming sound when a correct answer was entered, and a low thunk when they got a wrong answer. At the next console, McKay was getting a lot of thunks-but as it turned out, when John checked out his screen, his was showing a different game. Geography, it looked like-the screen was displaying different solar systems.
“What are you supposed to do, identify them?” John asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Okay, I know this one-it’s the Athosian system! But what’s that in Ancient?”
John shrugged. “You got me.”
The console thunked and the screen changed, showing a solar system and a block of text. “Okay, now it thinks I’m backward,” McKay said. “It went back to the beginning and it’s giving me the answers.” He read, “The…something or other…system has two gas giants, two rocky planets, and an asteroid belt. It is…something something, experimental station, something, defense station? Habitable planet has mountains and…something, home to the giant…okay, that’s either ‘lizard’ or ‘squid.’”
“Go back to the part about the defense station,” John suggested.
“That’s all it says about it.” He pulled out a PDA and quickly copied something from the screen. “We can check it out in the grown-up database later.”
They tried out several more games, including one where McKay spent quite a bit of time building molecules, and a spelling game that wouldn’t let John quit until it came up with words easy enough for him to spell. Then, after popping back into the kindergarten room to check the progress of the database download, they ventured upstairs.
The layout was different on the second floor. Instead of two large classrooms, the area around the staircase was ringed with smaller rooms, each with a workstation, a cabinet, and a bench or table. “Downstairs was the elementary school,” McKay speculated, activating the console in one room. “Then when they were older, they got their own labs up here.”
“You think each kid just worked on their own?”
McKay looked around the small room. “Their reproductive rate was very low, you know. They wouldn’t have had more than a couple of kids the same age at any time. The younger kids probably worked on their own too, at the consoles-they probably just put them in the same room so the teacher could keep an eye on a bunch of them at once.” He messed with the console for a moment, and it displayed a lot of text and a schematic of a Stargate. “Okay. Good. This is a slightly more advanced database-we’ll have to download this one, when the first one’s done.”
While they were waiting, they explored the rest of the little labs. In one, John found a partially-assembled model of a Puddlejumper, with the components neatly labeled, and the remaining components neatly placed in a box next to the model.
“Major Sheppard?” McKay called from another lab.
“In here.”
“What, did you find something cool? Oh.” When he saw what John was looking at, he lowered his voice to the sort of hushed, reverent tone that they’d all used when they first arrived, awed and painfully conscious of the weight of history. “He must have been working on it when they had to evacuate,” McKay said softly.
John nodded. “They probably didn’t-didn’t have room for it, or something.” He knew all about having to leave things behind in a move. “Or maybe since they weren’t taking the jumpers, his folks made him leave it.”
McKay nodded.
“Say.” John cleared his throat. “Do you think anyone would care if I took this back and finished it? I mean, we already understand the Puddlejumpers pretty well.”
McKay muttered, “What do you mean, we?” but said, “Yeah-yeah, we’re not going to learn anything new from it. Have it.”
“Cool.”
#
Jeannie threw her overstuffed backpack into the corner of the lab.
“Hi, honey,” Dr. Ingram said. “How was--”
“Mer, do you want to go get a soda?” she interrupted.
Rodney was in the middle of a quantum mechanics problem set, but he recognized that Jeannie wanted to be out of the lab. It was strange-he knew that a year or two ago, he wouldn’t have realized that. So he said, “just a second,” and quickly finished up the step he was on, and went with her.
As they walked around campus, Jeannie sighed and kicked angrily at stones. “What’s wrong?” Rodney asked after a while.
“Dad didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Tell me what?”
“He moved out. He and mom are getting a divorce.”
“Oh.” He didn’t really know Mrs. Ingram-and he knew she didn’t like him. “No, he didn’t say. So where is he living now?” Not at the lab-he still left at night, like always.
“Some apartment, I don’t know. I have to stay over there tonight.”
“That’s weird.” He knew why he hadn’t been back to the Ingrams’ house in a couple of years-Mrs. Ingram didn’t want him there. But now that Dr. Ingram had his own apartment, he could have had Rodney over.
“I know. I mean, half the kids in my class have divorced parents, but it’s weird when it’s yours.”
That hadn’t been what Rodney meant, but he didn’t correct her. He could see, sort of, how it would be upsetting. It was always weird when one of Dr. Ingram’s grad students left, and he had to get used to new ones. “Do you want some ice cream?” he suggested, not sure what else might help Jeannie feel better. He usually did math when he was upset, but he didn’t think Jeannie cared about math.
“It’s like forty degrees out,” she pointed out.
“We could eat it inside.”
“Thanks anyway, Mer.”
#
“I have an emergency agenda item,” Rodney announced as he took his seat at the next staff meeting.
Sheppard, Teyla, and Elizabeth all looked unimpressed. “New business is at the end of the meeting,” Dr. Weir reminded him.
“What if my news is that we’re all dying?” he asked. “Does that have to wait until we’re done discussing the mess hall menus?”
“We’re not all dying,” Sheppard said. “If we were, you’d have led with that.”
He sort of had a point, but Rodney didn’t say so. “Someone thought it would be funny to put vermin in my quarters.”
That made Dr. Weir sit up and take notice. “What kind of vermin?”
“Is it not more likely that the vermin made it to your quarters on their own?” Teyla asked.
“Mice,” Rodney said. “And I know someone put them there, because they’re in a tank!”
Elizabeth sat back, shaking her head slightly, while Teyla just looked puzzled. Sheppard, on the other hand, said, “Oops.”
Rodney stared at him. “‘Oops’? What does that mean?”
“I did that,” Sheppard admitted.
“Oh, that’s real mature! Why the hell are you putting mice in my room?” And to think, he had thought just the other day that now that Sheppard wasn’t too annoying, now that he wasn’t trying so hard.
“I thought you’d like them,” Sheppard explained. “You were talking about how you missed your cat, and then someone was giving away mice, so I thought, hey.”
“‘Hey’? ‘Hey’ is not a thought process. And even if I do miss my cat, what does that have to do with mice? What would I get if I said I missed Café Du Monde coffee? Chicken noodle soup?”
“French onion,” Sheppard answered. “Anyway, they’re pets! You miss your pet, I got you a pet. You could say thank you,” he added.
“Mice aren’t pets. Anyway, where did they come from? The genetics lab? They could have bubonic plague, or glow in the dark, or…God only knows.”
“Glow-in-the-dark mice would be cool,” Sheppard said. “But they aren’t. Private Windon got a pair from one of the biologists, and they keep having babies. Half the marines on the base have pet mice now.”
“Which biologist?” Rodney demanded. Giving away lab specimens was just unacceptable. Especially when they ended up in his room.
“I had to promise I wouldn’t say.”
The life sciences people did have a whole breeding colony that they used to produce healthy, normal mice for experiments. Considering that the offspring were all over the base, they had better hope that the original pair had been from those. “How careful are your marines being? It’s only a matter of time until some of them get out, and we have an infestation.”
“Maybe when we do, the SGC will let you bring your cat,” Sheppard said. “Until then, you have some mice.”
“I don’t want mice.”
“Private Windon said no givebacks.”
“You’re Private Windon’s CO,” Rodney pointed out. “You can make him take his mice back.”
“I also had to promise I wouldn’t do that. He’s really having a hard time finding homes for this last batch of mice.”
“Does he know how baby mice are made? Because there’s something he can do about that.”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Weir said.
Sheppard looked over at her, but Rodney was getting out of his seat, having just had a horrible thought.
“Do you mind if we start the meeting?” she continued
“I have to go separate the mice,” Rodney said. “They could be fornicating in my quarters right now.”
“Private Windon said they were both males,” Sheppard said helpfully.
“If Private Windon knew how to sex mice, he wouldn’t have them to give away!”
“Dr. McKay,” Weir said. “You can deal with the mice after the meeting.”
“I’m pretty sure mouse sex takes less time than a senior staff meeting,” Rodney said, but something about Dr. Weir’s expression made him slip back into his chair. “If I end up with baby mice, I’m giving them to you.”
Dr. Weir didn’t acknowledge that, but Rodney decided that since she hadn’t refused them, he could totally hold her to it.
When they left the staff meeting, Sheppard loped along beside him. “Do you really mind the mice? I guess I could try to find another home for them. I thought you’d like them.”
Now that he knew the mice were supposed to be a present, and not some kind of extremely obscure prank, he was warming to them slightly. “I don’t know.”
Rodney sort of thought that when he got to his quarters Sheppard would go somewhere else, but instead he followed him inside. The mice were in a tank on Rodney’s desk. When he took off the cover, one mouse poked its nose out of a pile of shredded paper, whiskers twitching.
“They like these seed things from the mainland,” Sheppard said, picking up a little plastic bag that was next to the tank. “Windon gave me some when I picked up the mice. Here, give him one.”
Rodney took one of the large, flat seeds and offered it to the mouse. The mouse sniffed at it for a moment before taking the seed in its mouth and scurrying off to the corner of the cage. As soon as it had done so, a second mouse nose emerged from the paper nest.
By the time the second mouse had started on its seed, the first one was finished, so Rodney picked it up by the base of its tail and examined the underside. “Okay, that one’s a male. Here.” He handed Sheppard the mouse and picked up the other one, which proved to also be male.
“See?” Sheppard said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“No baby mice to worry about, anyway. They could have knocked up their sisters, but that’s not my problem.” He put the mice back in their tank and gave each one another seed before replacing the lid.
When he turned around, Sheppard was sprawled indolently across his bed, holding the framed picture from his nightstand. “This your cat?”
“No, I keep a picture of someone else’s cat on my bedside table.”
“It’s a nice cat,” Sheppard said.
“I’ve had him since grad school. He’ll probably be dead before we get back to Earth,” Rodney added gloomily.
“If he ends up coming to Atlantis, he can watch the mice. Like cat TV.” Sheppard put the photo back where he’d found it and rolled to his feet. “Coming to lunch?”
“I have to get back to the lab,” Rodney said, but he ended up going to the mess anyway, where he wrapped bits of vegetable from his salad and a corner of bread from his sandwich in a napkin and stuffed it in his pocket, for the mice. An all-seed diet couldn’t be healthy for them.
#
Getting his cat was one of the first things Rodney did after he arrived in California-at least, after the strictly necessary stuff like renting an apartment and figuring out where the grocery stores were.
He got there a month before the term-quarter, they called it here-started, and was shocked to learn that the University wouldn’t let him in to his assigned lab space early. Term times had never meant anything to him before. When he did finally get in, seeing the kind of lab facilities provided for graduate students was another shock-the lab he’d grown up in had been of the kind granted to senior faculty working on government-funded projects. He’d had his own work area in it for years, and anything he wanted for his projects had just sort of…turned up.
If he had stayed at MIT, it would probably still be like that.
But now he was on his own two feet, and it was better that way. Certainly no one was saying anymore that his career was all part of Dr. Ingram’s research.
He’d expected to feel-he told himself that he did feel-a heady sense of freedom from picking out his own apartment (a studio in a converted house), his own furniture (a secondhand sofa, small table and chair, bookshelves), and his own course in life (the physics degree first, then the one in mathematics, with maybe a Masters in engineering thrown in there). What he really felt was lonely.
It might be better when the term started, when he met his fellow students. But that wasn’t likely-he’d never fit in among his classmates, and that was unlikely to change. Dr. Ingram’s lab had been the only place where-
Well. He hadn’t exactly fit in there, either, now had he? He’d been the center of attention because he was the project. He didn’t miss that. Really. He didn’t.
There was a coffee shop down the street from his house, and in the coffee shop was a bulletin board where people put up signs for things like used cars for sale, new bands seeking singers, psychic palm readings. He got his couch from the bulletin board, and a few days after his arrival, he was looking at it again, hoping to find someone selling a television.
Instead he found a Xeroxed flyer that said, “Free to a good home!”
It had been there when he bought his sofa, too, but since then, someone had written over it in red magic marker, “Desperate! Moving Friday, Can’t Take!”
Seeing it filled him with a white-hot surge of anger. He asked the barista to borrow the phone.
“Do you still have the cat?” he demanded of the girl who answered.
Yes, she said, and explained breathlessly how he was a lifesaver, because she’d gotten the cat last spring, when her friend had been giving away kittens, only now she was graduating and she had a job in Chicago, so of course she couldn’t take him with her.
“Didn’t you realize when you got the cat that you were eventually going to graduate?” he interrupted. “What did you think it was going to do-evaporate? It’s alive, you know, it’s not a toy you can just throw away when you’re tired of it.” He was almost yelling, because really, who did she think she was?
“Look,” the girl said. “Do you want the cat, or not?”
He told her to bring it to the coffee shop, if she could be bothered, and was mildly surprised when she showed up. She glared at him during the handover, a boyfriend hovering wordlessly behind her.
He could tell that she recognized him. Now, since his graduation and everything that had come with it, everyone who saw him knew-not who, but what-he was. But she just handed him the cat carrier, litter box, a bag of cat accessories. “His name’s Keebler,” she said grudgingly.
Keebler, Rodney thought, was the stupidest name ever given to a cat. “Kepler,” he said as he let the cat out of the carrier into his new apartment. “Here, Kepler.” The cat tentatively sniffed his outstretched fingers, then allowed its ears to be scratched, a low purr rumbling from its chest.
After that apartment in Berkeley, Rodney moved 17 times. Kepler went with him everywhere, except Atlantis.
#
McKay didn’t go so far as to actually thank him for the mice, but he stopped complaining about them, so John figured he must have decided he liked them. Then one day when he was ranting at one of the scientists, John heard him say, “You know what? Fig and Coil would be better at your job than you! And they don’t even have thumbs! Move!”
The scientists found something to do on the other side of the room they were exploring. “Fig and Coil?”
“The mice,” Rodney answered. “Fig Newton and--”
“Tesla Coil,” John nodded. “You know, the Marines tend to name theirs things like ‘Ripper’ and ‘Fang.’”
“How nice for them. Come on,” Rodney said to the control panel he was working on. “Initialize, why don’t you?”
“Let me try,” John said, and laid his hand on it.
The panel obligingly lit up.
“Floozy,” Rodney said to it, edging John aside.
As John drew back his hand, he realized that McKay had given him the perfect opening to ask about something he’d always wondered, but had a feeling Rodney would mock him mercilessly for even considering. “It’s not, uh, alive, is it?”
Rodney took a moment from his work to cast a disparaging glance over his shoulder. “The city? No.” He hooked up his laptop to the panel and spent several moments tapping at the keys before he added, “Well.”
“Hm?”
“It has some self-repairing components, so it would be possible to define ‘alive’ in some way that would include the city. But not in the way you meant-it would be alive like a tree is alive.” He kept working as he talked. “Actually, a forest would be a better analogy-it’s made up of numerous systems, some of which could tenuously be described as alive, all ultimately connected and interdependent to varying degrees. But it’s not aware; it doesn’t make choices.”
“It does things we didn’t tell it to,” John pointed out. “Like the quarantine lockdown.”
Evidently it wasn’t a stupid question-Rodney’s glance at him this time was almost approving. “It reacts, but only in programmed ways. The reactions are complex enough that they can almost look like choices, but they aren’t.”
That was pretty much what he’d expected McKay to say, but it was still a little bit of a disappointment-when they had arrived, and now when they explored new parts of the city, it felt like the city was welcoming him. He’d wanted it to be true.
“The difference is that a person can generate infinite novel responses, while something like Atlantis can only perform a finite number of programmed responses, in potentially novel combinations. Which is also like a forest,” McKay was saying. “There’s a reason humans all over tend to independently invent the idea of nature spirits, after all. A sufficiently complex system can behave almost as though it were aware.”
“Don’t let the soft sciences people hear you,” John said. “They’ll think you’re converting.”
“Yes, well,” Rodney said peevishly. “I did grow up in an artificial intelligence lab. I heard as many conversations about what constitutes consciousness as you probably did about, about football and scratching yourself.”
“Scratching ourselves isn’t really something we talk about,” John answered. “I wonder why they didn’t make it aware-the Ancients, I mean. It can’t be that they didn’t have the technology.”
“They could have. I know why they didn’t.”
McKay didn’t elaborate. After several minutes, John said, “Why didn’t they?”
“Because if it were able to make choices, at some point it would make ones they didn’t like. Aha!” He called over to the other side of the room, “Try hooking it up now!” Returning his attention to the laptop in front of him, he continued, “A self-aware city would have to end up as the functional equivalent of either an absolute monarch or a slave.”
John was about to ask McKay which one of those he thought he was, but wisely stopped himself just in time. McKay wasn’t the city; he was its chief of science-he had agreed to the expedition and its goals just like everyone else; if he hadn’t, the SGC would have found someone else to do his job. They wouldn’t have had to either accede to his demands or somehow force him to cooperate.
“Hah!” McKay added, as more consoles lit up around them. “I’m a genius.”
#
Not long after, they learned that a Wraith armada was heading their way, and every waking moment had to be spent preparing for the attack. Or, as McKay frequently reminded them, “Preparing to die.” John did notice, though, that McKay had no trouble periodically descending into panic without for even a moment stopping his frantic work.
John didn’t like splitting up the team, but when McKay proposed going out to an abandoned weapons platform in a last-ditch effort to bring it back on-line, he knew he couldn’t take the rest of his team from the other preparations for a 15-hour jumper ride. Reluctantly, he assigned another pilot to take Rodney and another scientist there, while he, Teyla, and Ford kept working on finding an Alpha site and preparing Atlantis for a siege.
#
It was a testament to how far Rodney’s life had come that putting on a spacesuit and exploring an abandoned orbital weapons platform wasn’t even close to being the coolest thing he’d ever done. Hell, it barely qualified as the coolest thing he’d done that week.
Of course, it was also insanely dangerous, and they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t the last stand against a horde of space vampires bent on invading the Earth. But he still took a moment to appreciate the coolness of it.
Once he got life support going, Grodin and Miller joined him in the satellite. They quickly determined that the naquadah generator they had hooked up was producing plenty of power, and it was compatible with the satellite’s systems. Finding out why the weapon still wouldn’t work was more difficult.
When they determined that the problem was with the conduit leading from the satellite’s buffer to the weapon, and that in order to reroute it, someone was going to have to go outside-well, Rodney’s desire to do an actual spacewalk warred with his fear of drifting through space forever. When Grodin drew the short straw, he still wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.
From inside the satellite, Rodney directed Grodin in how to make the repairs. They took longer than Rodney had hoped, but not as long as he had feared-the Wraith battle group was still a few minutes out when Grodin finished. “We have power to the weapon!” Rodney said when he’d tested it. “Come get me, and let’s get the hell out of here!”
He waited impatiently. After a few minutes, Grodin’s voice came over the radio. “Oh dear,” he said.
“That’s not good,” Rodney pointed out. “What’s going on?”
“We’re having trouble connecting to the airlock.”
Quickly, Rodney hooked his laptop back up to the satellite. “You routed power away from the airlock controls, genius,” he said, the words tripping out of his mouth while the full implications of the error were still settling on him.
“Oh. Dear,” Grodin said again. “I’ll go back and fix it--”
“Yeah, and you can wave to the Wraith while they fly right past you!” This was bad. Really, really bad.
“Wait.” Miller’s voice came through the radio. “We can open the hatch manually. It’ll be depressurized, but can’t you, I don’t know--”
“Hold my breath? No.” He wasn’t designed to work in vacuum-conceivably, he could have been, and it might be interesting, at some point, to figure out what modifications he’d need, but it wasn’t something he could do in the-he checked his watch-three minutes they had. “I’d have to go into shutdown mode-and if I shut down before I open the hatch on this side, I won’t be able to go through it, but if I open the hatch into the depressurized airlock while I’m still running, I’ll blow out every circuit I have.” He swallowed hard. “Look, you’re going to have to go without me. Retreat to a safe distance, cloak the jumper, and come back for me. I’ll, uh, I’ll stay here and make sure the weapon works right.”
There was silence on the radio for a moment. “Understood,” Miller said. “We’ll be back for you in a few minutes, Dr. McKay.”
With nothing else to do, McKay switched his displays to watch the Wraith fleet arrive. “Two minutes out,” he said into the radio. “I’m arming the weapon. Ready to fire in sixty seconds.” Through Grodin’s radio, he heard Miller relaying that message back to Atlantis.
“Oh, shit,” he said a moment later, watching the readouts on the weapons displays. “The power isn’t making it to the weapon-it’s building up in the buffer.” Grodin was saying something in his ear, but Rodney didn’t register what he was saying as he scrambled for the tools he had recently packed away. “It’s at 115%.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I’m trying!” Getting the weapon to fire was probably a lost cause, but he had to send the power somewhere. He scrambled to engage auxiliary systems that could absorb some of the excess power, but the power in the buffer kept building. “120%. Shit, shit, shit!”
“The Wraith ships are almost out of range,” Miller said urgently.
“Give me a second!” An alarm started beeping urgently. “It’s going to-fuck, the buffer’s going to overload.” Fingers flying over the consoles, still trying to find some way to release the power, Rodney said, “Get back to Atlantis, help with the evacuation--”
“Dr. McKay!”
“I’m-sorry.” Sparks started flying from the power conduits that led up to the buffer.
Everything went black.
#
In the control room, Zelenka reported, “The weapon isn’t firing.”
“Why not?” John demanded, leaning over his shoulder.
“If I knew, I would say. The Wraith ships are passing out of its range.”
“We have a transmission from the Puddlejumper,” the Gate tech added.
Miller’s voice overlapped with Zelenka’s as Miller reported an unsuccessful mission, and Zelenka said, “I’m reading a significant explosion inside the satellite.”
Then Zelenka stopped talking, and Miller continued, “Dr. McKay was on board.”
Zelenka swore in Czech, and John felt his stomach go cold. Dr. Weir held up her hand. “Jumper one, what’s Dr. McKay’s status?”
There was a moment of radio silence, then, “Atlantis, we have no reason to believe that he survived the explosion.”
Dr. Grodin’s voice overlapped Miller’s. “The satellite looks structurally intact, although sensor readings suggest considerable internal damage and significant radiation. There may be something to recover, but we can’t get in there without radiation gear.”
“No reason to believe he survived” didn’t mean that McKay was dead. His technical specs suggested that he could take a lot of damage. If he wasn’t answering the radio, that could just mean he was shut down.
“Understood, Jumper One,” Dr. Weir was saying. “Come home.”
John opened his mouth to protest, but there was nothing he could say-he couldn’t demand that Miller and Grodin subject themselves to dangerous levels of radiation. Every instinct he had screamed at him to get in a Jumper and go bring back his teammate, but the Wraith would be on their doorstep before John had time to reach the satellite, much less make it back. He couldn’t leave Atlantis to face a major battle without its military commander-and nor could he ask anyone else to desert their own teammates to rescue his.
“Right,” he said around a sizeable lump in his throat. “We’ll go get him once we’ve defeated the Wraith.”
Zelenka, his eyes round behind his glasses, nodded sharply. “Yes,” he said firmly. Then, more quietly, “as soon as we figure out how to do that.”
On to part III!