SGA Fic: I, Rodney 3/5
See part I for notes, warnings, etc.
When a contingent of Marines arrived from Earth-including a new military commander-John revisited the idea of grabbing a Jumper and running after Rodney. If Colonel Everett was so sure that he knew what he was doing, well, he could just do it. Considering the likelihood that as soon as the Deadalus arrived, he’d be shipped back to Earth to face charges for fragging his commanding officer-well, he might as well go out with a bang.
But Everett didn’t know Atlantis like he did, and when things got bad, the city was going to need him. Plus, John knew that his guys-and they were his guys now, after a long year isolated in the Pegasus galaxy-were going to be almost as wary as he was of taking orders from someone who just showed up, even if the newcomer was a fellow Marine. He had to stay here, set an example, and defend Atlantis as best he could.
Figuring that out didn’t take more than a few seconds, and after that he had little time to think about anything other than getting their new resources deployed. The good thing was that the new weapons and personnel gave them a real chance at, if not actually winning this thing, at least not losing it. He’d have been happier leaving non-essential personnel at the Alpha site-but given the way they were jumping from one crisis to the next, it was difficult to say what skill sets might become essential next.
Somehow, he wasn’t terribly surprised when it turned out that the only way to have even a chance of saving the city was to carry a nuclear bomb-built by the Genii, working on McKay’s advice-into the maw of a Hive ship.
“You’re going to have to go after McKay without me,” he told Zelenka, who had just finished installing the bomb in the back of a Jumper. “If-is the satellite…?”
The scientist nodded. “The last time I had a chance to look at it on the sensors, it was still intact. The Wraith fleet are past it; they appear to be ignoring it, along with the other derelict satellites.”
“Good.” He knew he was focusing on that to avoid thinking about his own impending death. “Don’t let Everett stop you from going out after him. You’re acting head of science; once we’re not in the middle of a battle, he doesn’t outrank you.”
“I won’t.” Zelenka picked up his tool case. “Major? Good luck.”
Being beamed onto the Deadalus was almost an anticlimax. Fortunately, Colonel Caldwell was more willing to listen to his ideas, and less inclined to throw his weight around, than Everett had been. It wasn’t too long before the Wraith fleet was-impossibly, unbelievably-in retreat.
John had a much easier time believing it when he found out that they had only been the first wave, and another, even bigger fleet was coming in on their heels. There were a number of moments when John had reason to wish more than ever that Rodney was with them, but Zelenka came through like a trooper, delivering the miraculous saves just when they needed them. But the victory came at a cost-they lost a lot of good people, and Ford was…he couldn’t even think about Ford.
After they’d all had a chance to grab a meal and a few hours’ sleep, he, Colonel Caldwell, and Drs. Weir and Zelenka met in the conference room. John wasn’t surprised to learn that he and Weir were both ordered back to Earth-they’d accompany the wounded and the remains of the deceased when they used the new ZPM to open a wormhole back.
“There’s something I have to do first,” John said, as soon as he heard the news. Given the choice, John would have gone after both Ford and McKay, but he knew he wasn’t going to buy enough time for both rescue missions. “McKay’s still out there on the satellite.”
“Major,” Caldwell said, “surely that can wait. It’s my understanding that we’re basically talking about a body retrieval at this point.”
“Your understanding is incorrect,” Zelenka spoke up. “Rodney was originally designed as military prototype. As long as his synaptic membrane is undamaged-and his cranium is made of reinforced titanium, so it might be-all other components are replaceable. He’d have to go back to Earth for that, of course, so it makes sense to take him with the other wounded.”
Caldwell absorbed that knowledge, then cast John an appraising look. “In that case, I don’t imagine it’s much use trying to stop you,” he said dryly.
Oh, yeah, he knew all about John’s record, all right. “No, sir,” he agreed.
Once he, Teyla, and Zelenka had made arrangements for their respective people to continue repairs in their absence, they loaded up with radiation gear and headed out. Teyla was, unsurprisingly, unfamiliar with the radiation protocols, but the trip gave Zelenka plenty of time to familiarize her with them.
“We’ll have to wear the suits on the way back,” Zelenka pointed out. “We won’t be able to decontaminate Rodney’s…Rodney until we’re back on Atlantis.
“In that case, I will take the opportunity to be comfortable while I can,” Teyla said, shedding the bulky suit.
Now that Zelenka was free, John took the opportunity to ask, “Just how much of a chance is there that Rodney’s still alive?”
Zelenka shook his head. “I don’t have enough data to determine. He did grant me access to some of his diagnostic programs in case of emergency-I’ll be able to give you some idea once we see him. There is a chance, but how much of one, I can’t say.”
“He is not…suffering, is he?” Teyla asked.
“No-he is designed to go into shutdown mode when he sustains heavy damage. There may be some small chance that the automatic shutdown mechanism was compromised-I don’t know enough about the design to say that there isn’t-but if he is not dead, he ought to have been able to shut down on his own. No, the chance that he was damaged severely enough to prevent shutdown, but not killed, is all but nonexistent.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” John said.
Zelenka shrugged. “Sorry.”
Some time later, Teyla came to sit in the copilot’s seat next to him. “You know,” he said, hating to broach the subject, but knowing he was unlikely to get a better chance, “it’s been great working with you.”
“Yes?” she said, clearly not understanding why he felt the need to mention it.
“It’s…not all that likely that the SGC will let me come back,” he explained. He had a feeling it would take some fancy footwork to even scrape an honorable discharge.
“I do not understand. You are the military leader. Surely Atlantis cannot function without you.”
“I’m not the leader they picked-I ended up in command because I killed my superior officer. That’s not the kind of thing our military likes to encourage.”
“My people do not encourage advancement by assassination. But that is not what happened-you had no choice.”
“True, but the brass-the people in charge-back on Earth aren’t going to see it that way. You remember what Everett thought when he got here?”
Teyla nodded. “But it is my understanding that after he was fed upon by the Wraith, he understood and approved of your actions.”
“Yeah, but the people making the decisions won’t have had that experience. Still, you have a point-maybe he’ll put in a good word for me.” He hadn’t thought of that-maybe his career wasn’t over, after all. “And I know Dr. Weir will. Still, they’re going to pick someone else to be in charge-someone with a higher rank-and the new guy isn’t going to want me around. Especially not right away.”
Nodding slowly, Teyla said, “I can understand how it would be difficult for a new leader to establish authority in the presence of the former leader.”
“Exactly.” That was the biggest part of it, anyway. His known problems with authority wouldn’t help, either-he’d have a hard time convincing the new commander that he’d be a cooperative subordinate in his old command.
“I did not like the way your Colonel Everett strode through the Gate and took charge, nor the way he disregarded your and Elizabeth’s views,” Teyla observed.
“That’s how it works in our military. He outranks me; he’s in charge.”
After a long moment, Teyla said, “On Athos-and on many of the worlds we have traded with-soldiers are personally loyal to their commanders. A new leader could not take charge in that way, without gaining the consent of those he hopes to lead.”
“Yeah, we’re different that way. The Marines will respect the new commander-whoever he is, or she,-because the SGC put them in charge. There’ll be an adjustment period, but they wouldn’t seriously consider not following him unless he turns out to be incompetent or crazy-and the SGC wouldn’t send somebody like that out here.”
“It will not be the same with my people. They will not understand why an effective leader has been replaced, while he is still alive and uninjured. The alliance between my people and Atlantis may suffer.”
“Dr. Weir will still be in charge,” John pointed out. “Probably, I mean-she was the one they hand-picked to lead the expedition, and she’s done a good job, so it should be fine. She won’t let the new military commander alienate our allies.”
Teyla studied the scenery outside the window for a moment. “Perhaps I could, as you say, put in a good word for you? Would the opinion of an ‘alien’ leader be considered relevant by your SGC?”
Surprised and a little touched, John said, “Sure. I mean, couldn’t hurt.”
“Then I will do so.”
#
When they swam into the control room of the satellite, John swore-“Holy mother of fuck”-Teyla prayed, and while John wasn’t sure what Zelenka did-it was in Czech-he was fairly sure it was one or the other. Control crystals, fragments of metal, assorted circuits, and unidentifiable blackened debris floated throughout the space-a few of them still drifting, although most had stilled.
“We should try to find head first,” Zelenka said, his accent thicker than usual. “If is intact, we will know….”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. Teyla and Zelenka moved to begin exploring the area, but John held out an arm to stop them. “Look with your eyes, not with your hands. Once we start stirring up the…debris…it’ll be harder to find anything.”
Crowded together in the entranceway, they each took an area and searched. Zelenka carefully unshipped his laptop-slung on the back of his pressure suit-and charted the locations of components as they found them. Teyla was best at it-John supposed living in a hunter-gatherer society had its advantages when it came to honing observational skills.
John had been on body retrievals before-more than he wanted-and they all had their own special horrors, from the ones where the corpse looked almost like the person it had been, to the ones where someone he knew had been blown into unidentifiable gobbets of meat. McKay’s remains were somewhere in the middle; he’d been blown into fragments, but most of them were still recognizable. He had to remind himself twice that throwing up in a pressure suit was about the worst experience anyone could live through.
After Zelenka had charted the locations of half McKay’s torso, with a thigh attached; a hand and, separately, a shoulder; something he said was a power circuit; and a foot, Teyla said, “I see it-up there, in the corner.”
Once she had pointed it out, John wondered that none of them had spotted it right away. Rodney’s face was turned half to the wall, but one eye was still facing them, open and staring. “I’ll go,” Zelenka said, passing off the laptop to him and pushing off.
He at first seemed to be heading in the opposite direction from Rodney’s head, but John quickly realized that he was charting a course that would take him around the largest concentrations of debris, so the other pieces they had spotted would stay where they were. There were no air currents to worry about; as long as he didn’t touch anything, it wouldn’t move. Finally, he reached a ladder, climbed it, and snatched up his target.
Clinging to the ladder, Zelenka ran his gloved hands over Rodney’s head. “Cranium appears to be intact-that is first, first good sign. When we get back to Jumper I will run diagnostics.”
John let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. Teyla put her gloved hands on either side of his helmet, and touched his faceplate to hers. “Thank the Ancestors.”
They began gathering up the other parts. They had brought a gurney and human remains pouch, and without discussion they at first tried to arrange the parts in more-or-less proper order. But in zero gee, every time they put down a new piece, the others drifted up off the gurney and had to be caught again-it would have been funny if it weren’t so horrible. They eventually had to zip the HRP most of the way up, and stuff the components in through a small opening at the top, like filling a sack.
Even that wasn’t quite as bad, though, as how when John caught Rodney’s arm, the hand slipped into his, palm-to-palm, like it was shaking his hand. After stuffing it hurriedly into the body bag, he waved his arm vigorously, trying to shake off the feeling.
It wasn’t until they got down to the smallest parts that it became difficult to distinguish the fragments of Ancient devices from Rodney’s good old fashioned Earth circuitry. When they had been sorting through small fragments for a while, Zelenka said, “Is probably fine if we…stop. Most components will have to be replaced anyway.”
Teyla spoke up. “We are still missing the lower part of his right arm.”
Zelenka shook his head inside his helmet, then apparently realized Teyla, who was on the other side of the chamber, couldn’t see. “I believe arm was blown apart. He would have been near to console, here, standing like this.” Zelenka angled himself closer to the most damaged console, putting his right hand on it. “Right arm and right side of body took most of blast.”
He must have figured that out from the damaged to the body and the distribution of the remains, John realized. “All right,” he said. “Should we…look for a few more minutes?” Even if the parts they were finding now weren’t actually going to be used in the repairs-if repairs were even possible-it seemed wrong to just leave parts of Rodney drifting with the rest of the trash.
The others agreed. They found a few more fragments, and then strapped the body bag back to the gurney and went back to the Jumper. Teyla took second chair, Zelenka staying in the back with the gurney.
Once he’d disengaged from the satellite and set course back to Atlantis, John looked over his shoulder to see that Zelenka had the body bag open and was arranging the parts inside. Catching John’s eye, he said, “Rodney wouldn’t like the others to see him all out of order.”
His English fluency was back, John noted. Being in that charnel house of a satellite had to have been hard on him. “Good idea.”
Sometime later, Zelenka came up between the two front seats, clutching his laptop. “I have some limited diagnostics from the synaptic membrane. It hasn’t sustained any physical damage.”
“That’s good?” It sounded good, but Zelenka didn’t sound as elated as John was sure he would be if he was delivering the news they were waiting for.
“It is good,” Zelenka agreed. “But according to the documentation, a sudden shutdown could cause-for lack of a better word-software damage.”
“How can you find out?”
“I can’t,” Zelenka admitted. “But I am not an expert in this technology-back on Earth, they will be able to tell. I hope.”
After a long moment, Teyla said firmly, “We must be glad that our friend has a chance.”
#
They were barely back on Atlantis and through decontamination before John found himself in his dress blues, standing in the Gate room surrounded by flag-draped coffins-one of which Rodney had hastily been packed into. Dr. Weir had just finished delivering a moving-if a little generic-eulogy for all of the dead, and then it was his turn to add a few personal words about the deceased soldiers. He stumbled through them, overwhelmed by exhaustion, delayed grief, and barely-suppressed rage at being forced to leave Atlantis. Even though he had no choice, and they knew that, it still felt like he was abandoning his men.
Gratefully, he turned things over to Zelenka, who had spent part of the ride back composing his remarks about the scientists they’d lost. He was good at it-better than John had been-and even managed to make some of the scientists smile through their tears with reminders of science team hijinks.
But when he said, “And Dr. Rodney McKay, if he were here would remind us all,” the Czech scientist choked on a sob and was unable to continue.
John patted him on the shoulder and said, “Rodney would remind us all that he’s not dead yet.” Imagining how Rodney would react if he were there, John couldn’t stop himself from continuing, “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most…brilliant, arrogant, brave, obnoxious, and determined. He’ll be back on Atlantis before I am.”
A few more people spoke, then Weir gave the order to open the wormhole. Teyla touched her forehead to his, several soldiers and scientists shook his hand, and he hoisted one of the handles of Rodney’s coffin, and helped carry his friend home.
#
“…notify his next of kin.”
John raised his head, just barely managing not to blurt out, “Huh?” The SGC had tried to debrief him as soon as he stepped through the event horizon, but on the mandatory back-to-Earth physical, their doc had sent him to visitors’ quarters with orders to sleep for a solid eight hours. He was feeling better now, but still in no mood to listen to a recitation of his failings, and had been paying just enough attention to say, “Yes, sir,” at the right moments. “Sir?”
O’Neill said, clearly repeating himself, “We’d like you to go to Chicago and notify Dr. McKay’s next of kin. It’s a Jeannie Ingram-hopefully she’ll be able to help us get started on repairs. You can tell her that the repair project will be fully funded by the SGC.”
McKay had been built by a Dr. Ingram, but John was fairly sure that he had been a man. Was Jeannie Ingram his wife? Daughter? “Yes, sir.”
“We’ll have the Prometheus beam you there at 0600. We’ll talk about the rest of it when you get back-go get some sleep.”
John was on his way back to the visitors’ quarters before he thought to wonder what the “rest of it” might be.
#
John wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find at the address the SGC scraped up for Jeannie Ingram, but it wasn’t this. Maybe a lab or something, or an office on a university campus. Not an ordinary suburban house.
Shortly after he rang the bell, the door was opened by a tall man, about his own age-in other words, much too young to have built Rodney. “I’m Major John Sheppard,” he began. “I’m not sure I have the right address-I’m looking for Jeannie Ingram, she--”
“Miller,” the man interrupted.
“Huh?”
“Jeannie Miller. Ingram was her maiden name.”
“Sorry,” John said automatically. “Jeannie Miller, then. She was listed as the emergency contact for Rodney McKay.”
The man swore. Turning, he called up the stairs, “Jeannie? Honey, you’d better come down here.”
The stairs creaked a little, and a woman’s voice said, “What’s going on?”
“There’s a guy from the army on the porch, and he says it’s about your brother.”
“Air Force,” John corrected automatically. Brother?
The woman who joined the man in the doorway didn’t look much like a robot-but then, Rodney didn’t, either. Hadn’t. Whatever. “What’s going on?” she repeated, this time to him.
He backtracked and said again, “You were listed as the emergency contact for Rodney McKay.”
It was obvious that Jeannie-Mrs. Miller-knew where he was headed. “Oh my God.”
The man-her husband, apparently, somehow-held her and glared at him.
“As you may know, he’s been involved in a top-secret government project. I can’t give you any details, except to say that it’s a dangerous project, and recently he was…damaged.”
“Is he…is he dead?”
This was the part of the conversation where he had to go completely off-script. He’d done plenty of next-of-kin notifications, including some for MIAs, but never one where they had to ask the next of kin to tell them whether the person was dead or not. “We’re…not sure. One of the other scientists on the project believes that he might be…repairable, by someone with the necessary expertise.”
Jeannie pulled the collar of the bathrobe she was wearing closer to her neck. “Does the US government have anyone with the necessary expertise?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to help with that part,” John admitted.
After looking at him for a moment, Jeannie said, “You’d better come in.”
The man excused himself, saying something about getting “Madison,” whoever-or whatever-that was.
Jeannie led him back through the house to a cozy kitchen. Starting a pot of coffee, she said, “Dad passed away a few years back-he was probably-I’ll see who I can track down from his old work group. I’m still in touch with one of his former graduate students, and his secretary. They’ll know how to find everyone else.” She glanced at the clock. “I’d better wait--it’s early to call.”
“Dad” must be the Dr. Ingram John had heard Rodney mention once or twice, the scientist who had invented him. He wondered why Rodney didn’t use his last name, when Jeannie did. “And they’ll be able to help?”
“I hope so. Maybe. I was still in high school when-when the project ended. I don’t know how much the others knew. I have all of his old papers in the attic-project notes, schematics, all kind of unpublished stuff. He left it to-to Rodney, but Rodney never came to get it. I’ll bring it all down.” She poured a cup of coffee. She took it with lots of sugar, like Rodney did, and stirred so hard the spoon clanged against the cup like a badly-made bell. “Where is he?” she asked suddenly.
“Colorado,” John answered, once he’d worked out what she meant.
She nodded. “I’ll come. I mean, I know I can’t…and he’s not aware, but I should be there.”
“Okay.” It sounded like Jeannie wouldn’t be involved in the repair project herself, which seemed strange. John knew that Rodney did all of his own maintenance. But, he supposed, being a human didn’t make him a surgeon, so being a robot didn’t necessarily mean Jeannie would know how to fix one.
Jeannie started setting out cereal, bowls, and milk, a few moments before the man and a small girl came into the kitchen. The little girl stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide.
“Mommy, who’s that?” she stage-whispered.
Now that was weird. He knew Rodney had looked, physically, like a grown man from the day he was built. And anyway, if his sister knew enough about robotics to build herself a kid, she’d be spearheading the repair project, wouldn’t she?
Adopted, maybe, he decided. Or the guy was probably human-maybe she was his from a previous marriage.
“He’s a friend of your uncle Mer’s,” Jeannie said, giving the kid a hug.
“Major Sheppard,” he said, crouching down. “You can call me John.”
“I’m Madison.” She stuck her finger in her mouth. “Daddy says Uncle Mer’s sick real bad.”
She looked at him, then craned her neck to look up at her mom, then back at him.
“He is,” Jeannie said. “That’s why John came, to tell us.”
“Uncle Mer” had to be Rodney, then.
Madison continued, “he said he might be sick like the time Fluffy was sick and the doctor couldn’t make him better and he went to heaven. Or he might be sick like the time my friend Stacy’s dog got hit by a car and it was really scary and he had all his fur shaved off, but then he was okay.”
That pretty much covered all the bases. “Yeah,” John said. “Yeah, we don’t know yet.”
“Maddy,” Jeannie said. “Sit down and have your cereal, you’ll be late for school.”
John kept out of the way while Jeannie got Madison and the guy-Kaleb, it turned out-out the door. Then she sat down at the table with the cordless phone and an address book. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you want anything? Breakfast?”
“No, thanks. I ate on the plane.”
“Okay.” She looked up a number in the address book and dialed. “Leslie,” she said after a moment. “This is Jeannie, Dr. Ingram’s daughter. Please call me as soon as you get this….”
John wandered out of the room while Jeannie talked to the answering machine. The décor ran mostly to framed family pictures-mostly of the little girl, a few of the whole family, one of Jeannie and Kaleb’s wedding. The bride wore white and looked radiant.
Moving over to the fireplace, he took a framed picture down from the mantelpiece. The others were mostly posed, professional-looking shots, but this was a badly-composed snapshot. It showed a very awkward-looking Rodney dressed in a tunic and holding a plastic lightsaber, and a girl a little older than Madison with cinnamon-bun curls of hair over her ears, both holding plastic Halloween pumpkins. The girl resembled Madison a little, but couldn’t possibly be her, unless she was aging backwards. Rodney, obviously, was supposed to be Luke Skywalker. Not, John noted, C-3PO.
He was still holding the picture when Jeannie came into the room with a cup of coffee in each hand. Handing him one, she said, “I thought you could use this.”
“Thanks.”
“Marion-Dad’s secretary-is making some calls,” she continued. “She’s going to have people call me here. So I guess all we can do now is wait.”
He started to put the picture back, but Jeannie intercepted it. “I don’t have many picture of Mer. Rodney,” she corrected herself. “This was taken on Halloween when I was, oh, seven or so. I was Princess Leia, and he was Luke Skywalker.”
Looking at both Jeannie and the picture at the same time, it was obvious that the little girl had been her. “Oh,” he said in surprise.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t want to confess that he had thought Jeannie was a robot, too.
“That was the only year he went out for trick-or-treat. A lot of people didn’t want to give him candy because they didn’t know he was a kid, and the next year he said he wouldn’t go. I think he dressed up and went around to the different labs in Dad’s building, but it wasn’t the same.” Still holding the picture, Jeannie sat down on the sofa. “I wish I’d been nicer to him, when we were kids.”
John wasn’t sure what to say to that. Rodney had never mentioned Jeannie, never mentioned that Dr. Ingram had a daughter who thought of him as a brother.
“We haven’t…we’ve sort of lost touch,” she explained. “This project he’s working on-I know you can’t tell me anything about it. But do you know if he’s happy?”
They should have had Zelenka do this. He knew Rodney better-or, at least, John hoped he did. Hoped somebody did. Still, there was only one right answer to Jeannie’s question, so he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I think he’s happy. I’m sure he is.”
#
John ended up staying at the Millers’ house all day, coordinating travel arrangements as people from Dr. Ingram’s old team called in. Over the next two days, they would be assembling in Colorado Springs, where Rodney had been moved to a University of Colorado lab to avoid the delay of obtaining security clearances for the whole team. Somehow, it was decided that John would travel down to Colorado with Jeannie the next day, which meant that he actually would have to fly commercial, rather than use the Prometheus transporters.
When Madison came home from kindergarten, she presented her mother with a folded piece of construction paper, decorated with butterflies and flowers under a smiling sun. “It’s a get-well card for Uncle Mer. D’you think he’ll like it?”
“I’m sure he’ll love it, honey,” Jeannie said.
The card made its way into one of the twelve banker’s boxes full of Dr. Ingram’s papers that they were taking with them.
“I’d better go find a motel, then,” John said as Jeannie started preparing dinner. “I’ll pick you up for the airport around nine.”
“Don’t be silly-we have a guest room.”
He accepted, but felt guilty-Jeannie obviously thought he and Rodney were friends, while he thought there was a good chance that Rodney still kind of hated him.
Still, if she ever found out, it would be because Rodney had recovered, so maybe that was all right.
#
Major Sheppard-John-had told her about Mer’s injuries, but it wasn’t enough to prepare Jeannie for the shock of seeing him laid out on a lab bench in pieces.
“My God,” she said, blinking tears out of her eyes. She knew Mer was sturdier than a human, had been built with backups and failsafes because, at one time, he’d been a military prototype. But seeing him like this, all she could think was no one could survive this.
The assembled scientists and engineers had never all worked together-the only time they’d all been in the same room before was Dad’s funeral-but they all arranged themselves around the lab without discussion, without jockeying for position. Greta Berger was holding the stump of Mer’s arm in one hand, typing into a laptop with the other, and Harry Chu, trying to connect a laptop to the port on his neck, said, “we’re going to have to bypass it,” to no one in particular, and started wiring the computer directly into Mer’s head.
The screen on Harry’s laptop went black for a second, then it beeped and displayed a schematic. All activity in the room stopped, while everyone looked expectantly at Harry. “He went into emergency shutdown before the explosion.”
There was a collective sigh of relief, and everyone got back to work.
“What?” John demanded. “What does that mean?”
Harry answered, “His synaptic membrane is designed to shut down to protect itself from catastrophic loss. Since the cranium itself is intact, we can be sure that the synaptic membrane hasn’t undergone any physical damage, either. If we can restore power, his primary processes should start up again.”
“It means he’s still in there,” Jeannie explained. Thank God, thank God, thank God. “If they can fix him, they can bring him back.”
John swallowed hard. “He’s not-Christ, he’s not aware, is he?”
“No-he’s completely shut down,” Harry assured him.
“So you think you can…?” John asked the question that Jeannie wanted to ask. But she had held back because she knew what the scientists would say, and sure enough Harry did.
“Too soon to tell. There’s a lot of damage-but there’s a chance. We’ll know more in a few hours.”
There was nothing for her to do in the lab, so after watching for a few more minutes, Jeannie left. At the end of the hallway, next to the stairs, there were a couple of vinyl couches, like you’d find in a student lounge, and some vending machines. Mechanically, she fed coins into the slot as she called Kaleb.
She got his voicemail. Checking her watch, she realized that he must still be teaching. “Hi, honey. The flight was fine; almost everyone’s here. We don’t know anything yet, but they say there’s reason to hope. I’ll call later. Tell Maddy I love her. You too.”
Ending the call, she opened her eyes and punched the buttons for peanut butter cups. She remembered getting them out of the machine near Dad’s lab. One for each of them. She wondered if they were still Mer’s favorite.
#
By midmorning of their second day in Colorado, John was going stir-crazy. Sticking his head in the lab and asking if there was anything he could do was, he knew, nothing more than an annoyance for the scientists. Yesterday, he’d made noises about going back to Cheyenne Mountain-the SGC could put him to use somehow, he was sure-but Jeannie had asked him to stay. And then when he’d called the SGC to fill them in on Rodney’s prognosis, some self-sacrificial impulse had made him pass along her request as well, and he’d gotten himself assigned to liaise between the repair team and the SGC for the duration.
The good news was that the team thought they could fix Rodney. They had a lot of work to do, but the further into the project they got, the more optimistic they became. From what John could gather, sourcing parts was the biggest obstacle-some of the technology that had been used to create Rodney was used for other applications, but some others would have to be re-created from the plans. The SGC had hopes of sending Rodney back to Atlantis on the Deadalus when it got back, if he wanted to go, so they had said to spare no expense in getting the project completed as quickly as possible, but they were still talking about custom work.
Shortly after John had asked Jeannie for the fifth time that morning if she wanted a cup of coffee from that place in the next building over, one of the scientists-an older woman in a jumper and big glasses, the one John thought looked more like a kindergarten teacher than the world-renowned robotics expert she apparently was-came out of the lab and started taking the lids off the banker’s boxes full of Dr. Ingram’s papers.
“Do you have any idea how these are organized?” she asked Jeannie.
“No, sorry,” Jeannie said, going over to her and taking a look in the boxes. “Probably some system that only made sense to Dad. He packed it all up before-you know, before he died.”
“I need power supply schematics, and Berger wants everything we can find about his skeletal structure, especially the hands,” the kindergarten teacher lady explained, pulling a file at random from the box and looking at it.
“I can look for it,” Jeannie said immediately. Maybe she was as desperate for something to do as he was, John thought. “Is there anything else I should look for?”
“I’ll poll everyone and make you a list.”
John helped Jeannie move the boxes from the hallway into an empty conference room across from the lab, and then stayed to help her with the sorting.
There was, as far as John could tell, no underlying logic whatsoever to how the files were arranged. Choosing a box at random to start with, he found a bound copy of one of Rodney’s doctoral theses, a grant application dated 1979, and printouts of email correspondence from the mid-nineties.
He’d made his way through two and a half boxes when Jeannie, sorting her own box on the other side of the table, made a small sound of dismay. He glanced over at her. “You okay?”
She nodded, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yeah. It’s just-Dad. And Mer.” Sniffling, she pushed a piece of paper across the table.
It was old-fashioned computer paper, the kind with holes down the side for the sprockets of the printer. Someone had drawn two stick figures, one with brown hair and one bald, with a paisley tie wider than its body. “I LOV U DR INGRAM” was written along the top in uneven block letters, and underneath the drawing were several addition problems.
“Rodney did this?” He shouldn’t be looking at it; Rodney would be mortified if he knew.
“He must’ve, yeah.” Jeannie took a deep breath and reached into the box for the next document. “He did really…I always thought he was Dad’s favorite, even after everything that happened. I know it broke Dad’s heart that they never made up.” Dropping a handful of papers back in the box, she took the drawing back and tucked it inside Rodney’s thesis. “I ought to show him, when he wakes up, that Dad kept all this stuff.” She scanned the tabletop and picked up a copy of Astronomy and Astrophysics that she’d found in an earlier box and put aside. “Dad was reading this the week before he died. He read everything Mer published.”
“He and your dad didn’t get along?” John asked awkwardly. There had to be something going on here that he didn’t quite understand.
“You don’t--” Jeannie wiped her eyes again. “Sorry, I forget, it must not have been as big a deal for everyone else as it was for us. It was all over the news, but maybe you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“When Mer-Rodney-was in his senior year of college, he started applying to graduate schools. I mean, obviously. He wanted to be a professor, like Dad.”
John tried, and failed, to imagine Rodney teaching college. “Okay.”
“He decided he was going to go to U.C. Berkeley. Their math department was ranked higher than ours, he said. Really, I think he just wanted to leave home. You know, like everyone does. And you know Mer. How he is. From the time he was ten or so, he was going to do what he was going to do. Dad couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to.”
“Sure.” Because Rodney wasn’t fictional, and he didn’t have Second Law.
“But Dad wanted him to stay and do his doctorates at MIT. I think-I swear, that’s all it really was-he didn’t want to lose Mer. But he couldn’t convince him to stay, so he went to the college and asked them to find some way to make him stay.”
“That couldn’t have gone over well.”
Jeannie shook her head. “Mer would have eventually forgiven him-right after Dad forgave him for leaving-but what the college decided to do was say that since Mer was developed in their lab, by their faculty, with their funding, he was the college’s intellectual property and he couldn’t leave.”
“Christ.” John had had his own troubles with his dad, but he couldn’t really imagine something like that. It had to have been like a punch to the gut.
“It was right around graduation week that all this was happening-I mean, they had been fighting about it all spring term, but it was graduation week that the college delivered the-injunction, or whatever it was called. Something like that. I remember we tried to go out to dinner to celebrate Mer’s graduation-they were still speaking then, barely. Dad was trying to convince him that he had no idea what the college was going to do, but Mer wouldn’t listen, and eventually he just stormed out of the restaurant. I think that was the last time they talked. Mer moved out of the lab, he actually disappeared for a few days-Dad was frantic-when he resurfaced, he had a civil rights lawyer who was going to stop the injunction, and that was when the whole thing hit the papers.
“By that time, Dad was trying to convince the college to stop the whole thing, but they wouldn’t listen, either. The rumor was that the Supreme Court was going to reach down and take the case-Dad had some federal DOD funding early in the project, was the excuse-people were picketing the building where the lab was, Dad was getting death threats, it was awful. And the thing I remember the most is Dad on the phone, frantically trying to find someone who had seen Mer recently and would talk to him, so he could find out if he was okay.”
“What happened?”
“Before the case could go to court, for some reason Canada offered Mer political asylum and citizenship. I remember their Prime Minister made some kind of speech about the how Canada, unlike the U.S., had never had slavery, and how they were a beacon of freedom for the oppressed-it was just weird. I mean, Dad loved Mer, he really did, and all of the sudden people who didn’t even know him were trying to make him out to be some kind of monster. But Mer decided to be Canadian-I don’t think he’s ever even lived there, but he’s officially Canadian-and the college withdrew the injunction, and the whole thing just went away. Except that Mer never spoke to Dad again. Every now and then Dad would try to get in touch, but Mer would just send his letters back unopened.”
That explained a lot about Rodney. John had to wonder how it was that his file included the LIFE magazine article from when he was a kid, even that 20-20 clip, but none of what must have been extensive coverage of the MIT debacle. Rodney had arranged it that way, definitely.
“He stayed in touch with me, sort of,” Jeannie added. “Christmas cards, and he sends Madison presents. If I call him-when he has a phone number I’m allowed to know-he’ll talk, as long as I don’t mention Dad. It was hard, you know, being in the middle, but he’s my brother.”
“Sure,” John nodded. Not that his own brother had tried to be in the middle-he was firmly on their father’s side. But he could understand in the abstract, at least.
“Anyway, that’s why they didn’t get along. He even changed his name when he left-his real name used to be Meredith. I don’t know if it’s like a Malcom X thing, or what…it was Dad’s middle name. I have to remember to call him Rodney, when he wakes up,” she added, wiping her eyes and briskly picking up a folder. “I’m going to take this in to Greta-I think it’s the one she was looking for.”
#
A few days later, a pile of boxes arrived that had the scientists all a-twitter. Experience with Rodney suggested that anything that scientists found that exciting had to be at least mildly cool, he waited long enough for them to have opened the boxes, then went into the lab.
What he found stopped him short. “What the hell is that?” On a bench next to the one where Rodney was, they were laying out a set of human-shaped parts-torso, legs, arms, head. The surface was matte black plastic, battered and scuffed in places; one leg looked like it had melted. The really disturbing thing, though, was that the molded-plastic face looked sort of like Rodney’s.
“Ah. Major Sheppard, meet Joe,” Harry Chu said with a grin. “Meredith’s twin brother, as it were. Basically identical to Meredith, except for the cosmetic features and, of course, the synaptic membrane.”
“And the hands,” Dr. Berger put in, sounding peeved. John noticed that the thing’s arms ended in pincers, rather than hands.
“Good old Joe,” one of the other scientists-his name was Smith, or something like that--said, coming up and giving the plastic thing a pat. “I spent the better part of a year trying to blow him up. Stress tests,” he explained, catching John’s nonplussed look. “We couldn’t run them on Meredith after he was initialized, obviously, but the DOD kept asking for more, so we knocked this one together. Don’t worry; he’s not intelligent-your cell phone probably has more processing power.”
That was a relief, but still, ‘Joe’ was uncanny in every way Rodney wasn’t.
“We made sure Meredith never knew about it, either,” said Dr. Walker, the one John had thought looked like a kindergarten teacher. “The stress lab was on a different floor and everything. It would have been disturbing, when he was little.”
“We were also supposed to see how quickly and cheaply one could be built,” Smith added, “once we had invented all of the technology. The DOD had the idea they could mass produce them for military applications.”
“Army of invincible robot soldiers,” one of the others glossed, just in case John couldn’t figure that out.
And wasn’t that a disturbing thought? He’d encountered enough brass who had trouble remembering that grunts were human; how much worse would it be if they were all identical matte-black mannequins?
“Completely idiotic, of course,” Smith continued, “training the synaptic membrane is the time-consuming and expensive part, and there’s no getting around that. But as long as they were willing to keep throwing money at us, we certainly weren’t going to tell them so.”
“Those were the days,” Chu agreed. “All the money for research into strong AI dried up after Meredith did his disappearing act, of course. There’s no point putting millions of dollars into building robots if you can’t use them for anything they don’t want to do.”
“And Harry has to put a dollar in the swear jar again,” Berger said. “‘AI’ was a dirty word in Dr. Ingram’s lab,” she explained. “He felt that qualifying ‘intelligence’ with ‘artificial’ was pejorative. ‘Machine-based intelligence,’ if it’s necessary to make the distinction.”
“Although, he is working for the military now,” Smith pointed out. “So maybe they got their money’s worth, after all.”
“It’s an international project, actually,” John said. “And Dr. McKay’s in charge of his division, so he doesn’t often have to do anything he doesn’t want to.” Apart from get blown up on a satellite, trying to protect his city from space vampires. And see one of his friends and co-workers have the life sucked out of him by a space vampire. And…well, he’d better just stop there.
“We’re very proud of him,” Dr. Walker said. John wasn’t sure if her tone was just the slightest bit patronizing, or if he was imagining it.
“And we should be able to use some of these parts to get him up and running again soon,” Chu added.
John took it as the dismissal it was, and went back across the hall to the conference room.
#
Another two days later, the scientists called him and Jeannie into the lab. Rodney was on the bench where he’d been all week, but now with a sheet drawn up to his chin, rather than with his guts spread out all over the room. There was a faint scar down the side of his face where he must have had an artificial-skin graft, but otherwise, he looked more or less like he had when they’d brought him back from that one mission, shut down.
“We’ve done as much as we can,” said Dr. Chu. “Everything’s fixed except for his right arm.”
“A prosthetics manufacturer is working on the arm,” Dr. Berger explained. “They’re going to need another two weeks. But we can wake him up without it.”
Jeannie nodded. “Will it hurt him?”
Her question started a debate among the scientists. Finally Berger said firmly, “The sensors in his upper arm will alert him to a problem. If it’s aversive, we can disable them.”
“Okay,” Jeannie said. “Okay, I guess, do it.”
John wasn’t entirely sure that they had planned on waiting for her approval, but since they had it, he supposed there was no reason to make an issue of it.
“Once we reactivate him, he’ll go into a maintenance cycle,” Walker explained. “He’ll wake up once it’s complete.”
“How long?” Jeannie asked.
“About twelve hours,” John said. “Right? That’s what it was last time.”
Jeannie looked at him sharply. “He was hurt before?”
“Ran out of power,” he explained. “Long story. He was fine, though.”
“That’s right,” Walker continued, “twelve hours, more or less.”
“I’ll do the honors,” Dr. Chu said. Pulling back the sheet enough to expose McKay’s neck, he plugged a cable into the USB port there.
Rodney spasmed, his eyes suddenly opening wide. “Where’s doctoringram?” he said, sounding scared and, somehow, young. “He said he’d be here when I woke u--”
Before he could finish the word, he suddenly went slack.
“What was that?” Jeannie asked, looking around at them. “Is there something wrong?”
“He’s probably just disoriented,” Walker said, smoothing the sheet over him.
“After an emergency shutdown, he needs the maintenance cycle to be able to appropriately access memories,” Chu added. “But his memories are still there. Something he saw or heard caused him to spontaneously access a memory that caused the utterance.”
“We shut him down for upgrades once when he was about four,” Walker suggested. “I remember, Dr. Ingram did promise him he’d be right there when he woke up. It was probably that.”
Jeannie didn’t look like she was much reassured, so John added, “The other time, he jerked like that, and he said something weird, too. Sounded like, ‘not the penguin cake.’ Then he conked out, and twelve hours later he was fine.”
“Okay.” She still didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I forgot all about that penguin cake.”
“There really was a penguin cake?” John had figured Rodney was actually saying something else.
“Yeah, it was…I guess his fifth birthday? Or maybe his fourth. He was pretty young, anyway. Dad ordered this cake with a penguin on it, but when he was carrying it into the lab he tripped, the cake went flying…the candles were already lit, and there was so much paper in the lab, it was a miracle nothing caught on fire. Mer was upset about the cake at the time, but then by that afternoon he thought it was funny to pretend to drop things and say, ‘Oh no, not the penguin cake!’”
This was great stuff-John wondered how hard it would be to get the mess to make a penguin cake for Rodney’s next birthday.
“It must have been when he was four,” Dr. Walker said. “I’m sure the Star Wars cake was when he was five.”
“I think you’re right. It was the year I had ponies at mine, and that was when I was seven,” Jeannie agreed.
“Right, when the woman who owned the ponies wouldn’t let him ride,” Walker agreed with a nod.
“Well, his feet would have touched the ground,” Jeannie pointed out. “Mom should have ordered a bigger pony.”
After some discussion over whether anyone really needed to stay with Rodney for the next twelve hours-Chu and Smith arguing against; John and Jeannie for, and the rest of the scientists agreeing that while Chu and Smith were right, nothing was going to happen, it didn’t seem right to just walk away-they agreed that everyone except Chu and Smith would take turns sitting with him. A woman whose name John still hadn’t caught took the first shift, and the rest of them went out to lunch.
He sat with Jeannie and Walker, who spent most of the meal trading Rodney stories. It turned out that Dr. Walker had been a research assistant on the project when Rodney was first initialized. “Dr. Ingram thought Mer-Rodney-should have a female caregiver,” she explained. “Probably sexist, but it was the only one of the really top-notch labs actively recruiting women. Once we established that I wasn’t automatically in charge of all potty incidents, it was fine.”
John pointed out that he really didn’t need to know about his teammate’s toilet training, at which point Walker and Jeannie cheerfully turned the conversation to memorable vomit incidents, including a who-can-eat-the-most-ice-cream showdown that had ended with 6-year-old Jeannie going home wearing an MIT t-shirt as a dress, and her original clothing consigned to the building incinerator. “Funny how Mom was never all that enthusiastic about me going in to work with Dad, after that.”
On to part IV
When a contingent of Marines arrived from Earth-including a new military commander-John revisited the idea of grabbing a Jumper and running after Rodney. If Colonel Everett was so sure that he knew what he was doing, well, he could just do it. Considering the likelihood that as soon as the Deadalus arrived, he’d be shipped back to Earth to face charges for fragging his commanding officer-well, he might as well go out with a bang.
But Everett didn’t know Atlantis like he did, and when things got bad, the city was going to need him. Plus, John knew that his guys-and they were his guys now, after a long year isolated in the Pegasus galaxy-were going to be almost as wary as he was of taking orders from someone who just showed up, even if the newcomer was a fellow Marine. He had to stay here, set an example, and defend Atlantis as best he could.
Figuring that out didn’t take more than a few seconds, and after that he had little time to think about anything other than getting their new resources deployed. The good thing was that the new weapons and personnel gave them a real chance at, if not actually winning this thing, at least not losing it. He’d have been happier leaving non-essential personnel at the Alpha site-but given the way they were jumping from one crisis to the next, it was difficult to say what skill sets might become essential next.
Somehow, he wasn’t terribly surprised when it turned out that the only way to have even a chance of saving the city was to carry a nuclear bomb-built by the Genii, working on McKay’s advice-into the maw of a Hive ship.
“You’re going to have to go after McKay without me,” he told Zelenka, who had just finished installing the bomb in the back of a Jumper. “If-is the satellite…?”
The scientist nodded. “The last time I had a chance to look at it on the sensors, it was still intact. The Wraith fleet are past it; they appear to be ignoring it, along with the other derelict satellites.”
“Good.” He knew he was focusing on that to avoid thinking about his own impending death. “Don’t let Everett stop you from going out after him. You’re acting head of science; once we’re not in the middle of a battle, he doesn’t outrank you.”
“I won’t.” Zelenka picked up his tool case. “Major? Good luck.”
Being beamed onto the Deadalus was almost an anticlimax. Fortunately, Colonel Caldwell was more willing to listen to his ideas, and less inclined to throw his weight around, than Everett had been. It wasn’t too long before the Wraith fleet was-impossibly, unbelievably-in retreat.
John had a much easier time believing it when he found out that they had only been the first wave, and another, even bigger fleet was coming in on their heels. There were a number of moments when John had reason to wish more than ever that Rodney was with them, but Zelenka came through like a trooper, delivering the miraculous saves just when they needed them. But the victory came at a cost-they lost a lot of good people, and Ford was…he couldn’t even think about Ford.
After they’d all had a chance to grab a meal and a few hours’ sleep, he, Colonel Caldwell, and Drs. Weir and Zelenka met in the conference room. John wasn’t surprised to learn that he and Weir were both ordered back to Earth-they’d accompany the wounded and the remains of the deceased when they used the new ZPM to open a wormhole back.
“There’s something I have to do first,” John said, as soon as he heard the news. Given the choice, John would have gone after both Ford and McKay, but he knew he wasn’t going to buy enough time for both rescue missions. “McKay’s still out there on the satellite.”
“Major,” Caldwell said, “surely that can wait. It’s my understanding that we’re basically talking about a body retrieval at this point.”
“Your understanding is incorrect,” Zelenka spoke up. “Rodney was originally designed as military prototype. As long as his synaptic membrane is undamaged-and his cranium is made of reinforced titanium, so it might be-all other components are replaceable. He’d have to go back to Earth for that, of course, so it makes sense to take him with the other wounded.”
Caldwell absorbed that knowledge, then cast John an appraising look. “In that case, I don’t imagine it’s much use trying to stop you,” he said dryly.
Oh, yeah, he knew all about John’s record, all right. “No, sir,” he agreed.
Once he, Teyla, and Zelenka had made arrangements for their respective people to continue repairs in their absence, they loaded up with radiation gear and headed out. Teyla was, unsurprisingly, unfamiliar with the radiation protocols, but the trip gave Zelenka plenty of time to familiarize her with them.
“We’ll have to wear the suits on the way back,” Zelenka pointed out. “We won’t be able to decontaminate Rodney’s…Rodney until we’re back on Atlantis.
“In that case, I will take the opportunity to be comfortable while I can,” Teyla said, shedding the bulky suit.
Now that Zelenka was free, John took the opportunity to ask, “Just how much of a chance is there that Rodney’s still alive?”
Zelenka shook his head. “I don’t have enough data to determine. He did grant me access to some of his diagnostic programs in case of emergency-I’ll be able to give you some idea once we see him. There is a chance, but how much of one, I can’t say.”
“He is not…suffering, is he?” Teyla asked.
“No-he is designed to go into shutdown mode when he sustains heavy damage. There may be some small chance that the automatic shutdown mechanism was compromised-I don’t know enough about the design to say that there isn’t-but if he is not dead, he ought to have been able to shut down on his own. No, the chance that he was damaged severely enough to prevent shutdown, but not killed, is all but nonexistent.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” John said.
Zelenka shrugged. “Sorry.”
Some time later, Teyla came to sit in the copilot’s seat next to him. “You know,” he said, hating to broach the subject, but knowing he was unlikely to get a better chance, “it’s been great working with you.”
“Yes?” she said, clearly not understanding why he felt the need to mention it.
“It’s…not all that likely that the SGC will let me come back,” he explained. He had a feeling it would take some fancy footwork to even scrape an honorable discharge.
“I do not understand. You are the military leader. Surely Atlantis cannot function without you.”
“I’m not the leader they picked-I ended up in command because I killed my superior officer. That’s not the kind of thing our military likes to encourage.”
“My people do not encourage advancement by assassination. But that is not what happened-you had no choice.”
“True, but the brass-the people in charge-back on Earth aren’t going to see it that way. You remember what Everett thought when he got here?”
Teyla nodded. “But it is my understanding that after he was fed upon by the Wraith, he understood and approved of your actions.”
“Yeah, but the people making the decisions won’t have had that experience. Still, you have a point-maybe he’ll put in a good word for me.” He hadn’t thought of that-maybe his career wasn’t over, after all. “And I know Dr. Weir will. Still, they’re going to pick someone else to be in charge-someone with a higher rank-and the new guy isn’t going to want me around. Especially not right away.”
Nodding slowly, Teyla said, “I can understand how it would be difficult for a new leader to establish authority in the presence of the former leader.”
“Exactly.” That was the biggest part of it, anyway. His known problems with authority wouldn’t help, either-he’d have a hard time convincing the new commander that he’d be a cooperative subordinate in his old command.
“I did not like the way your Colonel Everett strode through the Gate and took charge, nor the way he disregarded your and Elizabeth’s views,” Teyla observed.
“That’s how it works in our military. He outranks me; he’s in charge.”
After a long moment, Teyla said, “On Athos-and on many of the worlds we have traded with-soldiers are personally loyal to their commanders. A new leader could not take charge in that way, without gaining the consent of those he hopes to lead.”
“Yeah, we’re different that way. The Marines will respect the new commander-whoever he is, or she,-because the SGC put them in charge. There’ll be an adjustment period, but they wouldn’t seriously consider not following him unless he turns out to be incompetent or crazy-and the SGC wouldn’t send somebody like that out here.”
“It will not be the same with my people. They will not understand why an effective leader has been replaced, while he is still alive and uninjured. The alliance between my people and Atlantis may suffer.”
“Dr. Weir will still be in charge,” John pointed out. “Probably, I mean-she was the one they hand-picked to lead the expedition, and she’s done a good job, so it should be fine. She won’t let the new military commander alienate our allies.”
Teyla studied the scenery outside the window for a moment. “Perhaps I could, as you say, put in a good word for you? Would the opinion of an ‘alien’ leader be considered relevant by your SGC?”
Surprised and a little touched, John said, “Sure. I mean, couldn’t hurt.”
“Then I will do so.”
#
When they swam into the control room of the satellite, John swore-“Holy mother of fuck”-Teyla prayed, and while John wasn’t sure what Zelenka did-it was in Czech-he was fairly sure it was one or the other. Control crystals, fragments of metal, assorted circuits, and unidentifiable blackened debris floated throughout the space-a few of them still drifting, although most had stilled.
“We should try to find head first,” Zelenka said, his accent thicker than usual. “If is intact, we will know….”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. Teyla and Zelenka moved to begin exploring the area, but John held out an arm to stop them. “Look with your eyes, not with your hands. Once we start stirring up the…debris…it’ll be harder to find anything.”
Crowded together in the entranceway, they each took an area and searched. Zelenka carefully unshipped his laptop-slung on the back of his pressure suit-and charted the locations of components as they found them. Teyla was best at it-John supposed living in a hunter-gatherer society had its advantages when it came to honing observational skills.
John had been on body retrievals before-more than he wanted-and they all had their own special horrors, from the ones where the corpse looked almost like the person it had been, to the ones where someone he knew had been blown into unidentifiable gobbets of meat. McKay’s remains were somewhere in the middle; he’d been blown into fragments, but most of them were still recognizable. He had to remind himself twice that throwing up in a pressure suit was about the worst experience anyone could live through.
After Zelenka had charted the locations of half McKay’s torso, with a thigh attached; a hand and, separately, a shoulder; something he said was a power circuit; and a foot, Teyla said, “I see it-up there, in the corner.”
Once she had pointed it out, John wondered that none of them had spotted it right away. Rodney’s face was turned half to the wall, but one eye was still facing them, open and staring. “I’ll go,” Zelenka said, passing off the laptop to him and pushing off.
He at first seemed to be heading in the opposite direction from Rodney’s head, but John quickly realized that he was charting a course that would take him around the largest concentrations of debris, so the other pieces they had spotted would stay where they were. There were no air currents to worry about; as long as he didn’t touch anything, it wouldn’t move. Finally, he reached a ladder, climbed it, and snatched up his target.
Clinging to the ladder, Zelenka ran his gloved hands over Rodney’s head. “Cranium appears to be intact-that is first, first good sign. When we get back to Jumper I will run diagnostics.”
John let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. Teyla put her gloved hands on either side of his helmet, and touched his faceplate to hers. “Thank the Ancestors.”
They began gathering up the other parts. They had brought a gurney and human remains pouch, and without discussion they at first tried to arrange the parts in more-or-less proper order. But in zero gee, every time they put down a new piece, the others drifted up off the gurney and had to be caught again-it would have been funny if it weren’t so horrible. They eventually had to zip the HRP most of the way up, and stuff the components in through a small opening at the top, like filling a sack.
Even that wasn’t quite as bad, though, as how when John caught Rodney’s arm, the hand slipped into his, palm-to-palm, like it was shaking his hand. After stuffing it hurriedly into the body bag, he waved his arm vigorously, trying to shake off the feeling.
It wasn’t until they got down to the smallest parts that it became difficult to distinguish the fragments of Ancient devices from Rodney’s good old fashioned Earth circuitry. When they had been sorting through small fragments for a while, Zelenka said, “Is probably fine if we…stop. Most components will have to be replaced anyway.”
Teyla spoke up. “We are still missing the lower part of his right arm.”
Zelenka shook his head inside his helmet, then apparently realized Teyla, who was on the other side of the chamber, couldn’t see. “I believe arm was blown apart. He would have been near to console, here, standing like this.” Zelenka angled himself closer to the most damaged console, putting his right hand on it. “Right arm and right side of body took most of blast.”
He must have figured that out from the damaged to the body and the distribution of the remains, John realized. “All right,” he said. “Should we…look for a few more minutes?” Even if the parts they were finding now weren’t actually going to be used in the repairs-if repairs were even possible-it seemed wrong to just leave parts of Rodney drifting with the rest of the trash.
The others agreed. They found a few more fragments, and then strapped the body bag back to the gurney and went back to the Jumper. Teyla took second chair, Zelenka staying in the back with the gurney.
Once he’d disengaged from the satellite and set course back to Atlantis, John looked over his shoulder to see that Zelenka had the body bag open and was arranging the parts inside. Catching John’s eye, he said, “Rodney wouldn’t like the others to see him all out of order.”
His English fluency was back, John noted. Being in that charnel house of a satellite had to have been hard on him. “Good idea.”
Sometime later, Zelenka came up between the two front seats, clutching his laptop. “I have some limited diagnostics from the synaptic membrane. It hasn’t sustained any physical damage.”
“That’s good?” It sounded good, but Zelenka didn’t sound as elated as John was sure he would be if he was delivering the news they were waiting for.
“It is good,” Zelenka agreed. “But according to the documentation, a sudden shutdown could cause-for lack of a better word-software damage.”
“How can you find out?”
“I can’t,” Zelenka admitted. “But I am not an expert in this technology-back on Earth, they will be able to tell. I hope.”
After a long moment, Teyla said firmly, “We must be glad that our friend has a chance.”
#
They were barely back on Atlantis and through decontamination before John found himself in his dress blues, standing in the Gate room surrounded by flag-draped coffins-one of which Rodney had hastily been packed into. Dr. Weir had just finished delivering a moving-if a little generic-eulogy for all of the dead, and then it was his turn to add a few personal words about the deceased soldiers. He stumbled through them, overwhelmed by exhaustion, delayed grief, and barely-suppressed rage at being forced to leave Atlantis. Even though he had no choice, and they knew that, it still felt like he was abandoning his men.
Gratefully, he turned things over to Zelenka, who had spent part of the ride back composing his remarks about the scientists they’d lost. He was good at it-better than John had been-and even managed to make some of the scientists smile through their tears with reminders of science team hijinks.
But when he said, “And Dr. Rodney McKay, if he were here would remind us all,” the Czech scientist choked on a sob and was unable to continue.
John patted him on the shoulder and said, “Rodney would remind us all that he’s not dead yet.” Imagining how Rodney would react if he were there, John couldn’t stop himself from continuing, “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most…brilliant, arrogant, brave, obnoxious, and determined. He’ll be back on Atlantis before I am.”
A few more people spoke, then Weir gave the order to open the wormhole. Teyla touched her forehead to his, several soldiers and scientists shook his hand, and he hoisted one of the handles of Rodney’s coffin, and helped carry his friend home.
#
“…notify his next of kin.”
John raised his head, just barely managing not to blurt out, “Huh?” The SGC had tried to debrief him as soon as he stepped through the event horizon, but on the mandatory back-to-Earth physical, their doc had sent him to visitors’ quarters with orders to sleep for a solid eight hours. He was feeling better now, but still in no mood to listen to a recitation of his failings, and had been paying just enough attention to say, “Yes, sir,” at the right moments. “Sir?”
O’Neill said, clearly repeating himself, “We’d like you to go to Chicago and notify Dr. McKay’s next of kin. It’s a Jeannie Ingram-hopefully she’ll be able to help us get started on repairs. You can tell her that the repair project will be fully funded by the SGC.”
McKay had been built by a Dr. Ingram, but John was fairly sure that he had been a man. Was Jeannie Ingram his wife? Daughter? “Yes, sir.”
“We’ll have the Prometheus beam you there at 0600. We’ll talk about the rest of it when you get back-go get some sleep.”
John was on his way back to the visitors’ quarters before he thought to wonder what the “rest of it” might be.
#
John wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find at the address the SGC scraped up for Jeannie Ingram, but it wasn’t this. Maybe a lab or something, or an office on a university campus. Not an ordinary suburban house.
Shortly after he rang the bell, the door was opened by a tall man, about his own age-in other words, much too young to have built Rodney. “I’m Major John Sheppard,” he began. “I’m not sure I have the right address-I’m looking for Jeannie Ingram, she--”
“Miller,” the man interrupted.
“Huh?”
“Jeannie Miller. Ingram was her maiden name.”
“Sorry,” John said automatically. “Jeannie Miller, then. She was listed as the emergency contact for Rodney McKay.”
The man swore. Turning, he called up the stairs, “Jeannie? Honey, you’d better come down here.”
The stairs creaked a little, and a woman’s voice said, “What’s going on?”
“There’s a guy from the army on the porch, and he says it’s about your brother.”
“Air Force,” John corrected automatically. Brother?
The woman who joined the man in the doorway didn’t look much like a robot-but then, Rodney didn’t, either. Hadn’t. Whatever. “What’s going on?” she repeated, this time to him.
He backtracked and said again, “You were listed as the emergency contact for Rodney McKay.”
It was obvious that Jeannie-Mrs. Miller-knew where he was headed. “Oh my God.”
The man-her husband, apparently, somehow-held her and glared at him.
“As you may know, he’s been involved in a top-secret government project. I can’t give you any details, except to say that it’s a dangerous project, and recently he was…damaged.”
“Is he…is he dead?”
This was the part of the conversation where he had to go completely off-script. He’d done plenty of next-of-kin notifications, including some for MIAs, but never one where they had to ask the next of kin to tell them whether the person was dead or not. “We’re…not sure. One of the other scientists on the project believes that he might be…repairable, by someone with the necessary expertise.”
Jeannie pulled the collar of the bathrobe she was wearing closer to her neck. “Does the US government have anyone with the necessary expertise?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to help with that part,” John admitted.
After looking at him for a moment, Jeannie said, “You’d better come in.”
The man excused himself, saying something about getting “Madison,” whoever-or whatever-that was.
Jeannie led him back through the house to a cozy kitchen. Starting a pot of coffee, she said, “Dad passed away a few years back-he was probably-I’ll see who I can track down from his old work group. I’m still in touch with one of his former graduate students, and his secretary. They’ll know how to find everyone else.” She glanced at the clock. “I’d better wait--it’s early to call.”
“Dad” must be the Dr. Ingram John had heard Rodney mention once or twice, the scientist who had invented him. He wondered why Rodney didn’t use his last name, when Jeannie did. “And they’ll be able to help?”
“I hope so. Maybe. I was still in high school when-when the project ended. I don’t know how much the others knew. I have all of his old papers in the attic-project notes, schematics, all kind of unpublished stuff. He left it to-to Rodney, but Rodney never came to get it. I’ll bring it all down.” She poured a cup of coffee. She took it with lots of sugar, like Rodney did, and stirred so hard the spoon clanged against the cup like a badly-made bell. “Where is he?” she asked suddenly.
“Colorado,” John answered, once he’d worked out what she meant.
She nodded. “I’ll come. I mean, I know I can’t…and he’s not aware, but I should be there.”
“Okay.” It sounded like Jeannie wouldn’t be involved in the repair project herself, which seemed strange. John knew that Rodney did all of his own maintenance. But, he supposed, being a human didn’t make him a surgeon, so being a robot didn’t necessarily mean Jeannie would know how to fix one.
Jeannie started setting out cereal, bowls, and milk, a few moments before the man and a small girl came into the kitchen. The little girl stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide.
“Mommy, who’s that?” she stage-whispered.
Now that was weird. He knew Rodney had looked, physically, like a grown man from the day he was built. And anyway, if his sister knew enough about robotics to build herself a kid, she’d be spearheading the repair project, wouldn’t she?
Adopted, maybe, he decided. Or the guy was probably human-maybe she was his from a previous marriage.
“He’s a friend of your uncle Mer’s,” Jeannie said, giving the kid a hug.
“Major Sheppard,” he said, crouching down. “You can call me John.”
“I’m Madison.” She stuck her finger in her mouth. “Daddy says Uncle Mer’s sick real bad.”
She looked at him, then craned her neck to look up at her mom, then back at him.
“He is,” Jeannie said. “That’s why John came, to tell us.”
“Uncle Mer” had to be Rodney, then.
Madison continued, “he said he might be sick like the time Fluffy was sick and the doctor couldn’t make him better and he went to heaven. Or he might be sick like the time my friend Stacy’s dog got hit by a car and it was really scary and he had all his fur shaved off, but then he was okay.”
That pretty much covered all the bases. “Yeah,” John said. “Yeah, we don’t know yet.”
“Maddy,” Jeannie said. “Sit down and have your cereal, you’ll be late for school.”
John kept out of the way while Jeannie got Madison and the guy-Kaleb, it turned out-out the door. Then she sat down at the table with the cordless phone and an address book. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you want anything? Breakfast?”
“No, thanks. I ate on the plane.”
“Okay.” She looked up a number in the address book and dialed. “Leslie,” she said after a moment. “This is Jeannie, Dr. Ingram’s daughter. Please call me as soon as you get this….”
John wandered out of the room while Jeannie talked to the answering machine. The décor ran mostly to framed family pictures-mostly of the little girl, a few of the whole family, one of Jeannie and Kaleb’s wedding. The bride wore white and looked radiant.
Moving over to the fireplace, he took a framed picture down from the mantelpiece. The others were mostly posed, professional-looking shots, but this was a badly-composed snapshot. It showed a very awkward-looking Rodney dressed in a tunic and holding a plastic lightsaber, and a girl a little older than Madison with cinnamon-bun curls of hair over her ears, both holding plastic Halloween pumpkins. The girl resembled Madison a little, but couldn’t possibly be her, unless she was aging backwards. Rodney, obviously, was supposed to be Luke Skywalker. Not, John noted, C-3PO.
He was still holding the picture when Jeannie came into the room with a cup of coffee in each hand. Handing him one, she said, “I thought you could use this.”
“Thanks.”
“Marion-Dad’s secretary-is making some calls,” she continued. “She’s going to have people call me here. So I guess all we can do now is wait.”
He started to put the picture back, but Jeannie intercepted it. “I don’t have many picture of Mer. Rodney,” she corrected herself. “This was taken on Halloween when I was, oh, seven or so. I was Princess Leia, and he was Luke Skywalker.”
Looking at both Jeannie and the picture at the same time, it was obvious that the little girl had been her. “Oh,” he said in surprise.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t want to confess that he had thought Jeannie was a robot, too.
“That was the only year he went out for trick-or-treat. A lot of people didn’t want to give him candy because they didn’t know he was a kid, and the next year he said he wouldn’t go. I think he dressed up and went around to the different labs in Dad’s building, but it wasn’t the same.” Still holding the picture, Jeannie sat down on the sofa. “I wish I’d been nicer to him, when we were kids.”
John wasn’t sure what to say to that. Rodney had never mentioned Jeannie, never mentioned that Dr. Ingram had a daughter who thought of him as a brother.
“We haven’t…we’ve sort of lost touch,” she explained. “This project he’s working on-I know you can’t tell me anything about it. But do you know if he’s happy?”
They should have had Zelenka do this. He knew Rodney better-or, at least, John hoped he did. Hoped somebody did. Still, there was only one right answer to Jeannie’s question, so he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I think he’s happy. I’m sure he is.”
#
John ended up staying at the Millers’ house all day, coordinating travel arrangements as people from Dr. Ingram’s old team called in. Over the next two days, they would be assembling in Colorado Springs, where Rodney had been moved to a University of Colorado lab to avoid the delay of obtaining security clearances for the whole team. Somehow, it was decided that John would travel down to Colorado with Jeannie the next day, which meant that he actually would have to fly commercial, rather than use the Prometheus transporters.
When Madison came home from kindergarten, she presented her mother with a folded piece of construction paper, decorated with butterflies and flowers under a smiling sun. “It’s a get-well card for Uncle Mer. D’you think he’ll like it?”
“I’m sure he’ll love it, honey,” Jeannie said.
The card made its way into one of the twelve banker’s boxes full of Dr. Ingram’s papers that they were taking with them.
“I’d better go find a motel, then,” John said as Jeannie started preparing dinner. “I’ll pick you up for the airport around nine.”
“Don’t be silly-we have a guest room.”
He accepted, but felt guilty-Jeannie obviously thought he and Rodney were friends, while he thought there was a good chance that Rodney still kind of hated him.
Still, if she ever found out, it would be because Rodney had recovered, so maybe that was all right.
#
Major Sheppard-John-had told her about Mer’s injuries, but it wasn’t enough to prepare Jeannie for the shock of seeing him laid out on a lab bench in pieces.
“My God,” she said, blinking tears out of her eyes. She knew Mer was sturdier than a human, had been built with backups and failsafes because, at one time, he’d been a military prototype. But seeing him like this, all she could think was no one could survive this.
The assembled scientists and engineers had never all worked together-the only time they’d all been in the same room before was Dad’s funeral-but they all arranged themselves around the lab without discussion, without jockeying for position. Greta Berger was holding the stump of Mer’s arm in one hand, typing into a laptop with the other, and Harry Chu, trying to connect a laptop to the port on his neck, said, “we’re going to have to bypass it,” to no one in particular, and started wiring the computer directly into Mer’s head.
The screen on Harry’s laptop went black for a second, then it beeped and displayed a schematic. All activity in the room stopped, while everyone looked expectantly at Harry. “He went into emergency shutdown before the explosion.”
There was a collective sigh of relief, and everyone got back to work.
“What?” John demanded. “What does that mean?”
Harry answered, “His synaptic membrane is designed to shut down to protect itself from catastrophic loss. Since the cranium itself is intact, we can be sure that the synaptic membrane hasn’t undergone any physical damage, either. If we can restore power, his primary processes should start up again.”
“It means he’s still in there,” Jeannie explained. Thank God, thank God, thank God. “If they can fix him, they can bring him back.”
John swallowed hard. “He’s not-Christ, he’s not aware, is he?”
“No-he’s completely shut down,” Harry assured him.
“So you think you can…?” John asked the question that Jeannie wanted to ask. But she had held back because she knew what the scientists would say, and sure enough Harry did.
“Too soon to tell. There’s a lot of damage-but there’s a chance. We’ll know more in a few hours.”
There was nothing for her to do in the lab, so after watching for a few more minutes, Jeannie left. At the end of the hallway, next to the stairs, there were a couple of vinyl couches, like you’d find in a student lounge, and some vending machines. Mechanically, she fed coins into the slot as she called Kaleb.
She got his voicemail. Checking her watch, she realized that he must still be teaching. “Hi, honey. The flight was fine; almost everyone’s here. We don’t know anything yet, but they say there’s reason to hope. I’ll call later. Tell Maddy I love her. You too.”
Ending the call, she opened her eyes and punched the buttons for peanut butter cups. She remembered getting them out of the machine near Dad’s lab. One for each of them. She wondered if they were still Mer’s favorite.
#
By midmorning of their second day in Colorado, John was going stir-crazy. Sticking his head in the lab and asking if there was anything he could do was, he knew, nothing more than an annoyance for the scientists. Yesterday, he’d made noises about going back to Cheyenne Mountain-the SGC could put him to use somehow, he was sure-but Jeannie had asked him to stay. And then when he’d called the SGC to fill them in on Rodney’s prognosis, some self-sacrificial impulse had made him pass along her request as well, and he’d gotten himself assigned to liaise between the repair team and the SGC for the duration.
The good news was that the team thought they could fix Rodney. They had a lot of work to do, but the further into the project they got, the more optimistic they became. From what John could gather, sourcing parts was the biggest obstacle-some of the technology that had been used to create Rodney was used for other applications, but some others would have to be re-created from the plans. The SGC had hopes of sending Rodney back to Atlantis on the Deadalus when it got back, if he wanted to go, so they had said to spare no expense in getting the project completed as quickly as possible, but they were still talking about custom work.
Shortly after John had asked Jeannie for the fifth time that morning if she wanted a cup of coffee from that place in the next building over, one of the scientists-an older woman in a jumper and big glasses, the one John thought looked more like a kindergarten teacher than the world-renowned robotics expert she apparently was-came out of the lab and started taking the lids off the banker’s boxes full of Dr. Ingram’s papers.
“Do you have any idea how these are organized?” she asked Jeannie.
“No, sorry,” Jeannie said, going over to her and taking a look in the boxes. “Probably some system that only made sense to Dad. He packed it all up before-you know, before he died.”
“I need power supply schematics, and Berger wants everything we can find about his skeletal structure, especially the hands,” the kindergarten teacher lady explained, pulling a file at random from the box and looking at it.
“I can look for it,” Jeannie said immediately. Maybe she was as desperate for something to do as he was, John thought. “Is there anything else I should look for?”
“I’ll poll everyone and make you a list.”
John helped Jeannie move the boxes from the hallway into an empty conference room across from the lab, and then stayed to help her with the sorting.
There was, as far as John could tell, no underlying logic whatsoever to how the files were arranged. Choosing a box at random to start with, he found a bound copy of one of Rodney’s doctoral theses, a grant application dated 1979, and printouts of email correspondence from the mid-nineties.
He’d made his way through two and a half boxes when Jeannie, sorting her own box on the other side of the table, made a small sound of dismay. He glanced over at her. “You okay?”
She nodded, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yeah. It’s just-Dad. And Mer.” Sniffling, she pushed a piece of paper across the table.
It was old-fashioned computer paper, the kind with holes down the side for the sprockets of the printer. Someone had drawn two stick figures, one with brown hair and one bald, with a paisley tie wider than its body. “I LOV U DR INGRAM” was written along the top in uneven block letters, and underneath the drawing were several addition problems.
“Rodney did this?” He shouldn’t be looking at it; Rodney would be mortified if he knew.
“He must’ve, yeah.” Jeannie took a deep breath and reached into the box for the next document. “He did really…I always thought he was Dad’s favorite, even after everything that happened. I know it broke Dad’s heart that they never made up.” Dropping a handful of papers back in the box, she took the drawing back and tucked it inside Rodney’s thesis. “I ought to show him, when he wakes up, that Dad kept all this stuff.” She scanned the tabletop and picked up a copy of Astronomy and Astrophysics that she’d found in an earlier box and put aside. “Dad was reading this the week before he died. He read everything Mer published.”
“He and your dad didn’t get along?” John asked awkwardly. There had to be something going on here that he didn’t quite understand.
“You don’t--” Jeannie wiped her eyes again. “Sorry, I forget, it must not have been as big a deal for everyone else as it was for us. It was all over the news, but maybe you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“When Mer-Rodney-was in his senior year of college, he started applying to graduate schools. I mean, obviously. He wanted to be a professor, like Dad.”
John tried, and failed, to imagine Rodney teaching college. “Okay.”
“He decided he was going to go to U.C. Berkeley. Their math department was ranked higher than ours, he said. Really, I think he just wanted to leave home. You know, like everyone does. And you know Mer. How he is. From the time he was ten or so, he was going to do what he was going to do. Dad couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to.”
“Sure.” Because Rodney wasn’t fictional, and he didn’t have Second Law.
“But Dad wanted him to stay and do his doctorates at MIT. I think-I swear, that’s all it really was-he didn’t want to lose Mer. But he couldn’t convince him to stay, so he went to the college and asked them to find some way to make him stay.”
“That couldn’t have gone over well.”
Jeannie shook her head. “Mer would have eventually forgiven him-right after Dad forgave him for leaving-but what the college decided to do was say that since Mer was developed in their lab, by their faculty, with their funding, he was the college’s intellectual property and he couldn’t leave.”
“Christ.” John had had his own troubles with his dad, but he couldn’t really imagine something like that. It had to have been like a punch to the gut.
“It was right around graduation week that all this was happening-I mean, they had been fighting about it all spring term, but it was graduation week that the college delivered the-injunction, or whatever it was called. Something like that. I remember we tried to go out to dinner to celebrate Mer’s graduation-they were still speaking then, barely. Dad was trying to convince him that he had no idea what the college was going to do, but Mer wouldn’t listen, and eventually he just stormed out of the restaurant. I think that was the last time they talked. Mer moved out of the lab, he actually disappeared for a few days-Dad was frantic-when he resurfaced, he had a civil rights lawyer who was going to stop the injunction, and that was when the whole thing hit the papers.
“By that time, Dad was trying to convince the college to stop the whole thing, but they wouldn’t listen, either. The rumor was that the Supreme Court was going to reach down and take the case-Dad had some federal DOD funding early in the project, was the excuse-people were picketing the building where the lab was, Dad was getting death threats, it was awful. And the thing I remember the most is Dad on the phone, frantically trying to find someone who had seen Mer recently and would talk to him, so he could find out if he was okay.”
“What happened?”
“Before the case could go to court, for some reason Canada offered Mer political asylum and citizenship. I remember their Prime Minister made some kind of speech about the how Canada, unlike the U.S., had never had slavery, and how they were a beacon of freedom for the oppressed-it was just weird. I mean, Dad loved Mer, he really did, and all of the sudden people who didn’t even know him were trying to make him out to be some kind of monster. But Mer decided to be Canadian-I don’t think he’s ever even lived there, but he’s officially Canadian-and the college withdrew the injunction, and the whole thing just went away. Except that Mer never spoke to Dad again. Every now and then Dad would try to get in touch, but Mer would just send his letters back unopened.”
That explained a lot about Rodney. John had to wonder how it was that his file included the LIFE magazine article from when he was a kid, even that 20-20 clip, but none of what must have been extensive coverage of the MIT debacle. Rodney had arranged it that way, definitely.
“He stayed in touch with me, sort of,” Jeannie added. “Christmas cards, and he sends Madison presents. If I call him-when he has a phone number I’m allowed to know-he’ll talk, as long as I don’t mention Dad. It was hard, you know, being in the middle, but he’s my brother.”
“Sure,” John nodded. Not that his own brother had tried to be in the middle-he was firmly on their father’s side. But he could understand in the abstract, at least.
“Anyway, that’s why they didn’t get along. He even changed his name when he left-his real name used to be Meredith. I don’t know if it’s like a Malcom X thing, or what…it was Dad’s middle name. I have to remember to call him Rodney, when he wakes up,” she added, wiping her eyes and briskly picking up a folder. “I’m going to take this in to Greta-I think it’s the one she was looking for.”
#
A few days later, a pile of boxes arrived that had the scientists all a-twitter. Experience with Rodney suggested that anything that scientists found that exciting had to be at least mildly cool, he waited long enough for them to have opened the boxes, then went into the lab.
What he found stopped him short. “What the hell is that?” On a bench next to the one where Rodney was, they were laying out a set of human-shaped parts-torso, legs, arms, head. The surface was matte black plastic, battered and scuffed in places; one leg looked like it had melted. The really disturbing thing, though, was that the molded-plastic face looked sort of like Rodney’s.
“Ah. Major Sheppard, meet Joe,” Harry Chu said with a grin. “Meredith’s twin brother, as it were. Basically identical to Meredith, except for the cosmetic features and, of course, the synaptic membrane.”
“And the hands,” Dr. Berger put in, sounding peeved. John noticed that the thing’s arms ended in pincers, rather than hands.
“Good old Joe,” one of the other scientists-his name was Smith, or something like that--said, coming up and giving the plastic thing a pat. “I spent the better part of a year trying to blow him up. Stress tests,” he explained, catching John’s nonplussed look. “We couldn’t run them on Meredith after he was initialized, obviously, but the DOD kept asking for more, so we knocked this one together. Don’t worry; he’s not intelligent-your cell phone probably has more processing power.”
That was a relief, but still, ‘Joe’ was uncanny in every way Rodney wasn’t.
“We made sure Meredith never knew about it, either,” said Dr. Walker, the one John had thought looked like a kindergarten teacher. “The stress lab was on a different floor and everything. It would have been disturbing, when he was little.”
“We were also supposed to see how quickly and cheaply one could be built,” Smith added, “once we had invented all of the technology. The DOD had the idea they could mass produce them for military applications.”
“Army of invincible robot soldiers,” one of the others glossed, just in case John couldn’t figure that out.
And wasn’t that a disturbing thought? He’d encountered enough brass who had trouble remembering that grunts were human; how much worse would it be if they were all identical matte-black mannequins?
“Completely idiotic, of course,” Smith continued, “training the synaptic membrane is the time-consuming and expensive part, and there’s no getting around that. But as long as they were willing to keep throwing money at us, we certainly weren’t going to tell them so.”
“Those were the days,” Chu agreed. “All the money for research into strong AI dried up after Meredith did his disappearing act, of course. There’s no point putting millions of dollars into building robots if you can’t use them for anything they don’t want to do.”
“And Harry has to put a dollar in the swear jar again,” Berger said. “‘AI’ was a dirty word in Dr. Ingram’s lab,” she explained. “He felt that qualifying ‘intelligence’ with ‘artificial’ was pejorative. ‘Machine-based intelligence,’ if it’s necessary to make the distinction.”
“Although, he is working for the military now,” Smith pointed out. “So maybe they got their money’s worth, after all.”
“It’s an international project, actually,” John said. “And Dr. McKay’s in charge of his division, so he doesn’t often have to do anything he doesn’t want to.” Apart from get blown up on a satellite, trying to protect his city from space vampires. And see one of his friends and co-workers have the life sucked out of him by a space vampire. And…well, he’d better just stop there.
“We’re very proud of him,” Dr. Walker said. John wasn’t sure if her tone was just the slightest bit patronizing, or if he was imagining it.
“And we should be able to use some of these parts to get him up and running again soon,” Chu added.
John took it as the dismissal it was, and went back across the hall to the conference room.
#
Another two days later, the scientists called him and Jeannie into the lab. Rodney was on the bench where he’d been all week, but now with a sheet drawn up to his chin, rather than with his guts spread out all over the room. There was a faint scar down the side of his face where he must have had an artificial-skin graft, but otherwise, he looked more or less like he had when they’d brought him back from that one mission, shut down.
“We’ve done as much as we can,” said Dr. Chu. “Everything’s fixed except for his right arm.”
“A prosthetics manufacturer is working on the arm,” Dr. Berger explained. “They’re going to need another two weeks. But we can wake him up without it.”
Jeannie nodded. “Will it hurt him?”
Her question started a debate among the scientists. Finally Berger said firmly, “The sensors in his upper arm will alert him to a problem. If it’s aversive, we can disable them.”
“Okay,” Jeannie said. “Okay, I guess, do it.”
John wasn’t entirely sure that they had planned on waiting for her approval, but since they had it, he supposed there was no reason to make an issue of it.
“Once we reactivate him, he’ll go into a maintenance cycle,” Walker explained. “He’ll wake up once it’s complete.”
“How long?” Jeannie asked.
“About twelve hours,” John said. “Right? That’s what it was last time.”
Jeannie looked at him sharply. “He was hurt before?”
“Ran out of power,” he explained. “Long story. He was fine, though.”
“That’s right,” Walker continued, “twelve hours, more or less.”
“I’ll do the honors,” Dr. Chu said. Pulling back the sheet enough to expose McKay’s neck, he plugged a cable into the USB port there.
Rodney spasmed, his eyes suddenly opening wide. “Where’s doctoringram?” he said, sounding scared and, somehow, young. “He said he’d be here when I woke u--”
Before he could finish the word, he suddenly went slack.
“What was that?” Jeannie asked, looking around at them. “Is there something wrong?”
“He’s probably just disoriented,” Walker said, smoothing the sheet over him.
“After an emergency shutdown, he needs the maintenance cycle to be able to appropriately access memories,” Chu added. “But his memories are still there. Something he saw or heard caused him to spontaneously access a memory that caused the utterance.”
“We shut him down for upgrades once when he was about four,” Walker suggested. “I remember, Dr. Ingram did promise him he’d be right there when he woke up. It was probably that.”
Jeannie didn’t look like she was much reassured, so John added, “The other time, he jerked like that, and he said something weird, too. Sounded like, ‘not the penguin cake.’ Then he conked out, and twelve hours later he was fine.”
“Okay.” She still didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I forgot all about that penguin cake.”
“There really was a penguin cake?” John had figured Rodney was actually saying something else.
“Yeah, it was…I guess his fifth birthday? Or maybe his fourth. He was pretty young, anyway. Dad ordered this cake with a penguin on it, but when he was carrying it into the lab he tripped, the cake went flying…the candles were already lit, and there was so much paper in the lab, it was a miracle nothing caught on fire. Mer was upset about the cake at the time, but then by that afternoon he thought it was funny to pretend to drop things and say, ‘Oh no, not the penguin cake!’”
This was great stuff-John wondered how hard it would be to get the mess to make a penguin cake for Rodney’s next birthday.
“It must have been when he was four,” Dr. Walker said. “I’m sure the Star Wars cake was when he was five.”
“I think you’re right. It was the year I had ponies at mine, and that was when I was seven,” Jeannie agreed.
“Right, when the woman who owned the ponies wouldn’t let him ride,” Walker agreed with a nod.
“Well, his feet would have touched the ground,” Jeannie pointed out. “Mom should have ordered a bigger pony.”
After some discussion over whether anyone really needed to stay with Rodney for the next twelve hours-Chu and Smith arguing against; John and Jeannie for, and the rest of the scientists agreeing that while Chu and Smith were right, nothing was going to happen, it didn’t seem right to just walk away-they agreed that everyone except Chu and Smith would take turns sitting with him. A woman whose name John still hadn’t caught took the first shift, and the rest of them went out to lunch.
He sat with Jeannie and Walker, who spent most of the meal trading Rodney stories. It turned out that Dr. Walker had been a research assistant on the project when Rodney was first initialized. “Dr. Ingram thought Mer-Rodney-should have a female caregiver,” she explained. “Probably sexist, but it was the only one of the really top-notch labs actively recruiting women. Once we established that I wasn’t automatically in charge of all potty incidents, it was fine.”
John pointed out that he really didn’t need to know about his teammate’s toilet training, at which point Walker and Jeannie cheerfully turned the conversation to memorable vomit incidents, including a who-can-eat-the-most-ice-cream showdown that had ended with 6-year-old Jeannie going home wearing an MIT t-shirt as a dress, and her original clothing consigned to the building incinerator. “Funny how Mom was never all that enthusiastic about me going in to work with Dad, after that.”
On to part IV