[fic][dp] Copernicus
Title: Copernicus
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Sliding Scale of Het: Implied, Jack Harkness/Aleph
Rating: T
Fandoms: Torchwood; Life on Mars; Google; Global Frequency
Summary: The Google Copernicus lunar base forms the last stop before Jack and Sam make it home.
"Google," Sam said, stepping into the pressure hall and immediately needing to stabilize himself on a railing in the low gravity, "does not maintain a facility on the moon."
A moment later Jack somersaulted past his head, causing him to duck faster than really necessary and cling to the railing even harder as his sense of how gravity worked got used to the universe not giving a damn about what it thought. Jack caught himself against the wall and sunk back down to the floor again, turning on him with a sidelong grin. "I show you the universe, and you get hung up on a little R&D department on the moon. You all right?"
"Were you making a concerted effort to only visit planets with normal gravity?" Sam asked, straightening up - slowly. Walking was going to have to wait.
Jack did what seemed to the the first step to a jig. A second later he hit the ground again, and did the second. "Exclusion properties in the teleport. It didn't strike you as odd that we always hit planets with oxygen-based atmospheres and never materialized in empty space?"
Sam stared. After a moment he took a step forward, hanging tight to the railing as the floor continued its campaign of apathy. It didn't care if Sam's feet went away for extended periods; why should he? "To be honest, I... never really noticed."
"You've been watching too much Star Trek," Jack said, and bounded most of three metres to the door.
Sam followed, much more carefully. "Evidently. Is English use a factor for exclusion too?"
Jack chuckled. "Sam, with the single and highly inexplicable exception of Gaen, nowhere we've gone has used English. You just heard it."
Processing this and walking at the same time exceeded Sam's skillset. He stopped again. Jack bounced a little on the balls of his feet, which propelled him a slight hop into the air.
"I'll explain later. It has to do with keys."
"You're having entirely too much fun," Sam said.
Jack shrugged. "I like the moon."
Sam shook his head, pulling himself along the railing again. Sometimes it was best not to argue.
By the time he reached the door, Jack had either entered an access code or written a small novel on the keypad beside it. "The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment & Experiment in Search Engineering," he said, turning to face Sam, "informally referred to as the Googlunaplex and even more informally referred to as G-CHEESE, is home to thirty-five software engineers and information architects, two massage therapists, a dedicated staff psychologist, three live-in cooks and hydroponics engineers, two doctors, and a sushi chef formerly employed by the American pop band Hanson." He shrugged. "Also the dispatch officer for a global civilian-led secret contingency team, but we'd appreciate if you didn't spread that around."
Sam blinked.
Jack jabbed a thumb back into the control panel for the door, which rolled obediently into the wall. "Want to go inside?"
"Do you ever find yourself in a position where you need to explain why you show up unannounced at places you need a Saturn V rocket to get to?" Sam asked, holding onto the railing as long as he could. Jack gave every appearance of seriously considering his question.
"...I find myself in situations where it'd probably be useful."
He didn't wait for a response before stepping smartly through the door, an action which might even have been dramatic if he didn't sail absurdly for the first metre or so into the room.
Sam edged after him, half-expecting someone to stop them and ask what the hell they were doing there. No one did. They emerged into a dome perhaps four metres high at the centre, with strangely-designed couches and fairly normal coffee tables arranged in groups and lines of plants against the wall. Hydroponics, Sam imagined - each one bore a small plaque with a few lines of text, and at the end of the row was a stack of reports.
"So how are we getting back to Earth?" he asked, walking toward Jack. "Have they invented shuttlecraft while I was away?"
"We're going to teleport down," Jack said. "It's reliable on shorter distances. I just thought you'd like to see this. Come take a look at-"
Whatever he was going to say, he was interrupted. "Is that Jack Harkness?" called a voice from the adjoining chamber - young, female, American-accented. Sam glanced over, but couldn't see anything except monitors lining the far wall, each one set to a different channel. "Get your clothes off and get in here!"
Only quick reaction time kept Sam from choking on his own air.
Jack was chuckling and, when he noticed Sam staring at him, waved it off with an offhand "Aesthetics," which explained absolutely nothing.
Then he launched himself into a somersault which took him into the the room.
"Aleph!" he called, hopping back onto his feet in the glow of the monitors past the door. "Not staying long, unfortunately. What's the news on the Lunar front?"
Sam brought a hand up to rub at his temple. Travelling through time, he could accept. Teleporting wildly through the galaxy, he could accept. Standing in a Google-run research facility on Earth's own moon in his own time - or nearly - and watching Jack bound around like a human pinball? That was bloody mad.
He followed anyway.
The dome was more full of monitors than he'd thought. They covered every inch of available wall, from the floor to the top of the dome, a constant assault of light and low sound he had to blink back before he could see anything else. Jack was standing not far away, looking up at a circular desk with five or six more monitors ringing it. The desk had been mounted on a thick pillar at the center of the dome; a ladder led up to its chair, but precious few other concessions to its placement had been made. The woman sitting up there was rail-thin and looked in her early twenties if not her teens, with hair that caught the light from the monitors to look any color except a natural one. He couldn't identify whether it had been dyed green or blue or magenta, but it had definitely been dyed something. She looked like she might be of West Indies extraction, but after the months he'd been having, he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was a native up here.
Aleph, he suspected, if only because there was no one else in the room.
"The suits are in a board meeting, the cooks are in the kitchen, and all is right with the lunar world," Aleph said. "You came at a good time. And you brought a spaceship." She gave him a look over one of her monitors. "Who are your friends, and can we get them on the Frequency?"
"Not my friends yet," he said. "I'm supposed to meet them for the first time at some point in my future." He shrugs. "Once that's done I can ask them, but I have the feeling they're a bit independent."
"No such thing," Aleph said, toeing an entirely different monitor away. "Hey, new guy! How do you look naked?"
Sam's brain, though he'd been working on coming up with smalltalk this entire time on the offchance that he'd understand something in the conversation, offered no immediate response to that. Somehow, he suspected that Very well; how are you?, while perhaps not out of place among this company, would not be an answer whose response he wanted to deal with.
"...did I just shock one of your friends?" Aleph asked, looking back to Jack. "How do you shock one of your friends?"
"We're not here to be decorative, 'Leph," Jack said. "Just stopping by on our way through."
"Right, right." Aleph waved them on. "Hey, be sure to try out some of the lychees. Just had our first picking." She looked at Sam again. "You should have been here for the stink people kicked up about bringing invasive species to the moon. Like invasive species would be able to survive on the moon. I mean, we love our hydroponics, but it's not like we're gonna be terraforming the place."
His smalltalk engine was still stalled. "...I see," came out, eventually.
"All's been quiet up here," Aleph said in Jack's direction. "Three days since our last catastrophe, and that was just some asshole in Burundi spontaneous-human-combustion-ing his grandmother. Wouldn't have even made it up here except the president got involved and then someone's holdings in something they weren't supposed to have holdings in were threatened, and long story short, Lake Tanganyika now has about a half-kilometer more water area on its northern tip. It's been a light week."
"Want me to refer something up?"
"Hell, if it crosses your LIDAR." She leaned over the edge of her desk. "Nice seeing you. Drop by any time."
"You know I'm good for it." He raised a hand to wave, then pulled Sam out of the room. "See you around."
Sam shook his head, and then nearly stumbled again. Right. Low gravity. It seemed as though he could either balance or understand roughly what was going on, not both. "You wanted to show me something?"
"Yeah. Trust me; you'll like this one."
Jack hopped toward a hall. It was at least a minor blessing, Sam thought, that so far he hadn't started to moonwalk. He followed.
They made their way down a long, curving hall, to another door sans access panel. Jack knocked, paused for a moment, and then slid the door open, turning to grin in Sam's direction before pinballing backwards inside.
"I suppose I'm lucky we never went into zero-G," Sam said, and eased in after him.
And then didn't say anything at all.
The room - once he started paying attention to the room and not Jack's antics - stood at the edge of the facility, nearly-seamless windows opening onto a vista of the lunar surface, silent and severe. Off in the distance stood the American flag, posed and still above the plaque where the Eagle had landed. The rest of the landscape was unbroken: what Aldrin had called magnificent desolation, rendered in shades of grey beneath the unfiltered sunlight.
Sam took two steps forward and Jack fell in behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Look up."
He looked up. And tilted his head back, up and up, to where the Earth hung suspended in the star-studded sky.
His mouth slacked into a wordless o.
From here, the Earth was gibbous; vibrant white-blue-green cupped by a crescent of night, cloud formations roaming across its surface, edged in gold from the light of the sun. The stars - and he didn't know if they were the same stars he could see from the planet after Lusuosa, or from Gaen, or from any stop along the way, but they were familiar here, showing the same constellations to the moon as the Earth - hung behind it, miniscule by comparison and impossibly distant.
"Oh, my god," Sam breathed, and Jack's arms settled around him.
"Home." Jack's voice was quiet, ghosting behind his ear. "Home like you never get to see it. Unified, peaceful, serene. It'll be another sixty years before you can see war from up here."
A shiver wound its way down Sam's back. "Only sixty?"
Jack exhaled, pressing his lips into Sam's hair. "Earth survives," he says. "Despite everything. The planet is there until the sun explodes. I had a friend go to see that, once. I'm told that humanity lasts, too, but forget I said anything. No; here we are, on the surface of the moon, looking up at the Earth as it hurtles through space in orbit of the sun, the sun hurtling through space around the galactic core, the galaxy hurtling out from the center of the universe... and after that, well, it gets a bit messy. But it all looks so peaceful from here."
He smiled, and Sam could feel that smile against the crown of his head.
"Wish I could have given you a flyby," Jack said. "Gone on a wide lap, shown you the night and day. You know, the first time I came to Earth, I had a ship that could make a wide Earth orbit in three minutes keeping its viewports to the blue. Better class of time-travel, too. I could've taken you to see the pan-Earth aurora of 2161 from the high atmosphere..."
"I used to have NASA's image of the day emailed to me," Sam said, his own arms settling over Jack's. "Never thought I'd get to see this in person. Any of it. I always regretted not being old enough to remember the moon landing...."
Jack chuckled. "Maybe we can go back and see it some day. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon,'" he quoted. "'We came in peace, for all mankind.' Are you impressed yet?"
Sam chuckled. "I'm not going to answer that."
"Spoilsport." Jack exhaled. "'If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.' That'd be Gallileo, in the sixteen-thirties. Have to wonder how he knew."
"Hm," Sam said, but nothing else.
They stood like that for a while, watching the Earth and the stars without glimmer.
After that while Jack released him, stepping and floating back at he brought up his wrist device. He flipped the cover open and started tapping in commands, executing a graceful half-turn as he drifted down toward the ground again. "I haven't used this thing since Gaen," he said. "It'll take me a second to calibrate, but I should be able to put us within three streets of where we need to end up. That's actually pretty good, if you've been keeping score."
"I haven't, but I'll take your word for it," Sam said, and the wrist device whittered unhappily. Sam pulled his gaze away from the heavens, and looked to Jack. "Is something wrong?"
Jack shook his head. "Nah, just interference. I could calibrate this for a scan, but it'd take forever. My guess? Rift weather."
"Sorry?"
Jack glanced up. "Cardiff sits on a rift in time and space," he said. "It acts up sometimes."
"Cardiff," Sam said, and it was hard to tell whether his voice was more or less incredulous on that than it was on "...is on a rift in space and time. You know what?" he decided. "I'm not going to ask. I'd thought that coming back to Earth would be at least one normal part of this adventure. Clearly, I was wrong."
"In these years, early 21C, Earth starts opening its eyes," Jack said, and waved a hand at the luminous Earth above. "Aliens, paradoxes, parallel universes - there's no such thing as 'normal' from here on out. It is," and he looked up with a fabulous smile, "the most brilliant time of the century. And it's waiting for us."
He finished the calibration, and looked up. Sam followed his gaze to the curve of the Earth, gleaming in the darkness.
"Hang on, Sam. We're going home."
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Sliding Scale of Het: Implied, Jack Harkness/Aleph
Rating: T
Fandoms: Torchwood; Life on Mars; Google; Global Frequency
Summary: The Google Copernicus lunar base forms the last stop before Jack and Sam make it home.
"Google," Sam said, stepping into the pressure hall and immediately needing to stabilize himself on a railing in the low gravity, "does not maintain a facility on the moon."
A moment later Jack somersaulted past his head, causing him to duck faster than really necessary and cling to the railing even harder as his sense of how gravity worked got used to the universe not giving a damn about what it thought. Jack caught himself against the wall and sunk back down to the floor again, turning on him with a sidelong grin. "I show you the universe, and you get hung up on a little R&D department on the moon. You all right?"
"Were you making a concerted effort to only visit planets with normal gravity?" Sam asked, straightening up - slowly. Walking was going to have to wait.
Jack did what seemed to the the first step to a jig. A second later he hit the ground again, and did the second. "Exclusion properties in the teleport. It didn't strike you as odd that we always hit planets with oxygen-based atmospheres and never materialized in empty space?"
Sam stared. After a moment he took a step forward, hanging tight to the railing as the floor continued its campaign of apathy. It didn't care if Sam's feet went away for extended periods; why should he? "To be honest, I... never really noticed."
"You've been watching too much Star Trek," Jack said, and bounded most of three metres to the door.
Sam followed, much more carefully. "Evidently. Is English use a factor for exclusion too?"
Jack chuckled. "Sam, with the single and highly inexplicable exception of Gaen, nowhere we've gone has used English. You just heard it."
Processing this and walking at the same time exceeded Sam's skillset. He stopped again. Jack bounced a little on the balls of his feet, which propelled him a slight hop into the air.
"I'll explain later. It has to do with keys."
"You're having entirely too much fun," Sam said.
Jack shrugged. "I like the moon."
Sam shook his head, pulling himself along the railing again. Sometimes it was best not to argue.
By the time he reached the door, Jack had either entered an access code or written a small novel on the keypad beside it. "The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment & Experiment in Search Engineering," he said, turning to face Sam, "informally referred to as the Googlunaplex and even more informally referred to as G-CHEESE, is home to thirty-five software engineers and information architects, two massage therapists, a dedicated staff psychologist, three live-in cooks and hydroponics engineers, two doctors, and a sushi chef formerly employed by the American pop band Hanson." He shrugged. "Also the dispatch officer for a global civilian-led secret contingency team, but we'd appreciate if you didn't spread that around."
Sam blinked.
Jack jabbed a thumb back into the control panel for the door, which rolled obediently into the wall. "Want to go inside?"
"Do you ever find yourself in a position where you need to explain why you show up unannounced at places you need a Saturn V rocket to get to?" Sam asked, holding onto the railing as long as he could. Jack gave every appearance of seriously considering his question.
"...I find myself in situations where it'd probably be useful."
He didn't wait for a response before stepping smartly through the door, an action which might even have been dramatic if he didn't sail absurdly for the first metre or so into the room.
Sam edged after him, half-expecting someone to stop them and ask what the hell they were doing there. No one did. They emerged into a dome perhaps four metres high at the centre, with strangely-designed couches and fairly normal coffee tables arranged in groups and lines of plants against the wall. Hydroponics, Sam imagined - each one bore a small plaque with a few lines of text, and at the end of the row was a stack of reports.
"So how are we getting back to Earth?" he asked, walking toward Jack. "Have they invented shuttlecraft while I was away?"
"We're going to teleport down," Jack said. "It's reliable on shorter distances. I just thought you'd like to see this. Come take a look at-"
Whatever he was going to say, he was interrupted. "Is that Jack Harkness?" called a voice from the adjoining chamber - young, female, American-accented. Sam glanced over, but couldn't see anything except monitors lining the far wall, each one set to a different channel. "Get your clothes off and get in here!"
Only quick reaction time kept Sam from choking on his own air.
Jack was chuckling and, when he noticed Sam staring at him, waved it off with an offhand "Aesthetics," which explained absolutely nothing.
Then he launched himself into a somersault which took him into the the room.
"Aleph!" he called, hopping back onto his feet in the glow of the monitors past the door. "Not staying long, unfortunately. What's the news on the Lunar front?"
Sam brought a hand up to rub at his temple. Travelling through time, he could accept. Teleporting wildly through the galaxy, he could accept. Standing in a Google-run research facility on Earth's own moon in his own time - or nearly - and watching Jack bound around like a human pinball? That was bloody mad.
He followed anyway.
The dome was more full of monitors than he'd thought. They covered every inch of available wall, from the floor to the top of the dome, a constant assault of light and low sound he had to blink back before he could see anything else. Jack was standing not far away, looking up at a circular desk with five or six more monitors ringing it. The desk had been mounted on a thick pillar at the center of the dome; a ladder led up to its chair, but precious few other concessions to its placement had been made. The woman sitting up there was rail-thin and looked in her early twenties if not her teens, with hair that caught the light from the monitors to look any color except a natural one. He couldn't identify whether it had been dyed green or blue or magenta, but it had definitely been dyed something. She looked like she might be of West Indies extraction, but after the months he'd been having, he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was a native up here.
Aleph, he suspected, if only because there was no one else in the room.
"The suits are in a board meeting, the cooks are in the kitchen, and all is right with the lunar world," Aleph said. "You came at a good time. And you brought a spaceship." She gave him a look over one of her monitors. "Who are your friends, and can we get them on the Frequency?"
"Not my friends yet," he said. "I'm supposed to meet them for the first time at some point in my future." He shrugs. "Once that's done I can ask them, but I have the feeling they're a bit independent."
"No such thing," Aleph said, toeing an entirely different monitor away. "Hey, new guy! How do you look naked?"
Sam's brain, though he'd been working on coming up with smalltalk this entire time on the offchance that he'd understand something in the conversation, offered no immediate response to that. Somehow, he suspected that Very well; how are you?, while perhaps not out of place among this company, would not be an answer whose response he wanted to deal with.
"...did I just shock one of your friends?" Aleph asked, looking back to Jack. "How do you shock one of your friends?"
"We're not here to be decorative, 'Leph," Jack said. "Just stopping by on our way through."
"Right, right." Aleph waved them on. "Hey, be sure to try out some of the lychees. Just had our first picking." She looked at Sam again. "You should have been here for the stink people kicked up about bringing invasive species to the moon. Like invasive species would be able to survive on the moon. I mean, we love our hydroponics, but it's not like we're gonna be terraforming the place."
His smalltalk engine was still stalled. "...I see," came out, eventually.
"All's been quiet up here," Aleph said in Jack's direction. "Three days since our last catastrophe, and that was just some asshole in Burundi spontaneous-human-combustion-ing his grandmother. Wouldn't have even made it up here except the president got involved and then someone's holdings in something they weren't supposed to have holdings in were threatened, and long story short, Lake Tanganyika now has about a half-kilometer more water area on its northern tip. It's been a light week."
"Want me to refer something up?"
"Hell, if it crosses your LIDAR." She leaned over the edge of her desk. "Nice seeing you. Drop by any time."
"You know I'm good for it." He raised a hand to wave, then pulled Sam out of the room. "See you around."
Sam shook his head, and then nearly stumbled again. Right. Low gravity. It seemed as though he could either balance or understand roughly what was going on, not both. "You wanted to show me something?"
"Yeah. Trust me; you'll like this one."
Jack hopped toward a hall. It was at least a minor blessing, Sam thought, that so far he hadn't started to moonwalk. He followed.
They made their way down a long, curving hall, to another door sans access panel. Jack knocked, paused for a moment, and then slid the door open, turning to grin in Sam's direction before pinballing backwards inside.
"I suppose I'm lucky we never went into zero-G," Sam said, and eased in after him.
And then didn't say anything at all.
The room - once he started paying attention to the room and not Jack's antics - stood at the edge of the facility, nearly-seamless windows opening onto a vista of the lunar surface, silent and severe. Off in the distance stood the American flag, posed and still above the plaque where the Eagle had landed. The rest of the landscape was unbroken: what Aldrin had called magnificent desolation, rendered in shades of grey beneath the unfiltered sunlight.
Sam took two steps forward and Jack fell in behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Look up."
He looked up. And tilted his head back, up and up, to where the Earth hung suspended in the star-studded sky.
His mouth slacked into a wordless o.
From here, the Earth was gibbous; vibrant white-blue-green cupped by a crescent of night, cloud formations roaming across its surface, edged in gold from the light of the sun. The stars - and he didn't know if they were the same stars he could see from the planet after Lusuosa, or from Gaen, or from any stop along the way, but they were familiar here, showing the same constellations to the moon as the Earth - hung behind it, miniscule by comparison and impossibly distant.
"Oh, my god," Sam breathed, and Jack's arms settled around him.
"Home." Jack's voice was quiet, ghosting behind his ear. "Home like you never get to see it. Unified, peaceful, serene. It'll be another sixty years before you can see war from up here."
A shiver wound its way down Sam's back. "Only sixty?"
Jack exhaled, pressing his lips into Sam's hair. "Earth survives," he says. "Despite everything. The planet is there until the sun explodes. I had a friend go to see that, once. I'm told that humanity lasts, too, but forget I said anything. No; here we are, on the surface of the moon, looking up at the Earth as it hurtles through space in orbit of the sun, the sun hurtling through space around the galactic core, the galaxy hurtling out from the center of the universe... and after that, well, it gets a bit messy. But it all looks so peaceful from here."
He smiled, and Sam could feel that smile against the crown of his head.
"Wish I could have given you a flyby," Jack said. "Gone on a wide lap, shown you the night and day. You know, the first time I came to Earth, I had a ship that could make a wide Earth orbit in three minutes keeping its viewports to the blue. Better class of time-travel, too. I could've taken you to see the pan-Earth aurora of 2161 from the high atmosphere..."
"I used to have NASA's image of the day emailed to me," Sam said, his own arms settling over Jack's. "Never thought I'd get to see this in person. Any of it. I always regretted not being old enough to remember the moon landing...."
Jack chuckled. "Maybe we can go back and see it some day. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon,'" he quoted. "'We came in peace, for all mankind.' Are you impressed yet?"
Sam chuckled. "I'm not going to answer that."
"Spoilsport." Jack exhaled. "'If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.' That'd be Gallileo, in the sixteen-thirties. Have to wonder how he knew."
"Hm," Sam said, but nothing else.
They stood like that for a while, watching the Earth and the stars without glimmer.
After that while Jack released him, stepping and floating back at he brought up his wrist device. He flipped the cover open and started tapping in commands, executing a graceful half-turn as he drifted down toward the ground again. "I haven't used this thing since Gaen," he said. "It'll take me a second to calibrate, but I should be able to put us within three streets of where we need to end up. That's actually pretty good, if you've been keeping score."
"I haven't, but I'll take your word for it," Sam said, and the wrist device whittered unhappily. Sam pulled his gaze away from the heavens, and looked to Jack. "Is something wrong?"
Jack shook his head. "Nah, just interference. I could calibrate this for a scan, but it'd take forever. My guess? Rift weather."
"Sorry?"
Jack glanced up. "Cardiff sits on a rift in time and space," he said. "It acts up sometimes."
"Cardiff," Sam said, and it was hard to tell whether his voice was more or less incredulous on that than it was on "...is on a rift in space and time. You know what?" he decided. "I'm not going to ask. I'd thought that coming back to Earth would be at least one normal part of this adventure. Clearly, I was wrong."
"In these years, early 21C, Earth starts opening its eyes," Jack said, and waved a hand at the luminous Earth above. "Aliens, paradoxes, parallel universes - there's no such thing as 'normal' from here on out. It is," and he looked up with a fabulous smile, "the most brilliant time of the century. And it's waiting for us."
He finished the calibration, and looked up. Sam followed his gaze to the curve of the Earth, gleaming in the darkness.
"Hang on, Sam. We're going home."