OK Computer part 2
Those first few days they stayed together, within arm's length of each other. The three of them stayed close to Sheppard's body, keeping a vigil in Atlantis's morgue. Teyla and Ronon were like extensions of himself. They thought as a unit. They felt as a unit.
Incredibly, the SGC wanted to ship Sheppard's body back to Earth, despite his having listed no next of kin. "It's procedure, " they said. "No," Teyla said, and Ronon growled and Rodney looked up from behind them and thought of all the damage he could do, which was quite a lot, really. They wanted to have his funeral in the gateroom and then ship him back to Earth to be buried in Arlington. The team stared until they went away.
It was Ronon who said the obvious. "We can't put him in the ground."
"No," Rodney said, feeling sick at the prospect.
"No," Teyla agreed. "We will need a-"
"Yes," Ronon said.
"I can fly it," Rodney said, looking up.
Team Broccoli Test ♥
They'd orchestrated more complicated missions than this before breakfast; a diversionary tactic, a few overrides, and Sheppard's body had been whisked away to M7G-677, the planet of the children, where some of the kids had grown up, and all of them knew about grief. They spent the night in a hut that Keras had prepared for them, but nobody slept: outside, the torches had been lit, and they were visited in fits and starts by groups of children, who came bringing flowers and feathers and bits of decorated leather. A pile of flat brown stones began to build. Rodney didn't understand their significance until suddenly he did, remembering the sack of chocolate Sheppard had handed Keras, and then he had to go stand outside for a while.
The next morning, he and Teyla and Ronon carried the rough-hewn wooden coffin to the puddlejumper. Rodney resisted the urge to tug the lid off and take a last look at the man who'd been his team leader and best friend, and instead focused on how to position the coffin so that it would slide easily out of the weapons pod. Ronon had turned away, and Teyla was standing beside him, one hand on his back. Rodney blinked a few times and then hurried into the cockpit to program the flight path.
This was a mistake-the cockpit was Sheppard-haunted-but Rodney gritted his teeth and began the arduous task of convincing the navigational computer that, yes, he really did want to plot a burn-up trajectory. It wasn't that it was difficult; the needle that most pilots, that Sheppard, that most pilots had to thread was finding the entry corridor, not not-finding it. You had a 98 percent chance of not-finding it. The problem was getting the computer to believe you.
When he looked up again, Ronon was in the co-pilot's chair, slumped forward, hands dangling between his knees. "Are we ready yet?" Ronon asked, voice low and hoarse.
"Yes," Rodney said, as if it were a technical question, and then, it having struck him differently, "No. No." He sank back in his chair and closed his eyes.
"Come on," Teyla said softly, after a while, and they nodded and moved into position. Ronon dialed the gate, and Rodney guided them through and engaged the hyperdrive.
New Lantea looked like Earth from space, and Rodney wondered if Sheppard had picked it for that reason, if he had been flying Atlantis and recognized something that felt like home. Rodney checked their trajectory, double-checked the autopilot, and then felt a nauseating gut-clench of fear. This was it; it was time. He felt Ronon's hand on his shoulder. He was stumbling to his feet, they all were, clustering more tightly together. Ronon was hard up against his right side, and Teyla's arm was twined tightly around his, and they were standing there together looking out at the blue and white planet beyond.
"I can't do it," Rodney said tightly. "Somebody-somebody else-"
"Teyla?" Ronon muttered, and Teyla's hand tightened on his arm.
"I-yes," Teyla said, and then she took a deep breath and said, in a low, cracking voice, "John Sheppard, we loved you so much." New Lantea swam before his eyes, and a trail of glowing particles arced across the sky, John Sheppard become a shooting star.
"On Star Trek, he came back," Rodney said, and Ronon and Teyla were kind and didn't ask what the hell he was talking about, just put their arms around him and held on.
I'm thoughtful about the team's reaction to Sheppard's death. Some stories are "pull one thread and the whole thing unravels" stories, meant to valorize the crazy, unlikely, irreproducible synergy of that team, frail as an ecosystem. But no, that's not this story; Teyla and Ronon keep calm and carry on. They've both faced great loss before. For Rodney, grief is newer, less likely and more insurmountable. This is the opposite of Synecdochic's Rodney in Freedom, who ends the story perhaps more stable than he ever was before. But Syne's actually had a 5-year relationship; Speranza's is crazed by what-ifs.
"You are so lame. So, so lame, McKay," but Sheppard had tactfully put a hand on McKay 2.0's back and guided him to a chair when he had gone pale and faltered. Now McKay just sat there, sweaty and worn out and visibly trying to collect himself. Sheppard set his jaw and looked away, apparently trying not to look like a man who'd just had his own death narrated to him. Rodney himself had had to sit down, too, because he could see it happening all too vividly. One loose cannon. One lucky shot.
Finally, McKay took a deep breath. "That was the hard part," he said, almost to himself, "and the part we'll have to be most careful about changing. I can tell you the rest, because most of it never really happened. Well, not to you, anyway. It all happened to me."
There was a formal investigation into Sheppard's disappearance, but the paperwork kept getting mislaid; everything was in chaos. Atlantis's chain of command was in complete disarray, Carter having recently returned to Earth. Sheppard's death had taken out his entire team, and many of the scientists who might have stepped into the breach had been working round the clock on the superweapon they'd found in the clansmen's vault after they'd sacked the place.
We never even find out what Genghis' problem was. Speranza expends as little energy as possible on that stuff, because it's so not the point-or the POV. Rodney, at this point, wouldn't give a flying fuck. But it's relevant that it's a stupid death, out of the blue and mean and pointless, not some heroic saving of the world. It makes it harder to process and recover from.
Zelenka had stopped by his rooms soon after his return to tell him about it, and while he had hugged Rodney tightly and offered his sincerest condolences, he couldn't quite conceal his underlying excitement. "It is incredible, Rodney, the properties of it! Our first distillation was effective; our third has been perfection itself. Our tests have exceeded our greatest expectations: the Wraith react as if it is poison-why we have not before considered a solution along these lines," Zelenka said, actually smacking his forehead, "I do not know; certainly, the solution was evident in the literature, quite literally-"
Of course it was. If you don't pay attention to the texts, you're done for.
"Garlic?" Rodney said, turning the white root over and over in his hand.
Radek's smile was radiant. "Very like; it is a relative with very rare and special properties. Practically unknown in this galaxy, but now that we have a sample, we can propagate it easily. Isn't it wonderful?" and Rodney agreed that it was wonderful, and said he was happy for him, and for the botanists; happy for all of them, really.
Ronon gave him a little space, and then turned up at his door at the ungodly hour of five-thirty in the morning. "Put your trainers on," Ronon said.
Rodney leaned tiredly against the door frame. "You're out of your mind," he said.
"Come on, McKay. Now," and strangely, Rodney found himself relenting, fishing a pair of barely-used trainers from underneath his bed and putting them on. Ronon started off slowly, and Rodney followed him down the hall, down the stairs, and through a large, curving corridor, focused intently on Ronon's broad back. Ronon began to speed up, and Rodney found himself straining to keep up, arms pumping, lungs burning. It was surprisingly wonderful not to think, just to move, and he zoned out for a while, left, right, left, right, until all at once he couldn't run any more, and collapsed against a wall, fingers scrabbling at the cool metal. Ronon materialized beside him. "Bend over," Ronon said, hand pressed between his shoulder blades. "Head down. Breathe deep," and Rodney doubled over, hands braced on his thighs, and gasped for air until the world sharpened.
"What is this," Rodney asked, clutching his chest, "the John Sheppard memorial run?"
Ronon threw a towel at his face. "See you tomorrow, McKay."
Through the entire story, Ronon doesn't say much more than he ever does on the show, but Speranza's a master at letting his actions be his speech. Ronon's actions (run, stay, paint, ink) frequently carry heavy symbolic value for him; they signify. That goes back to his first episode on SGA.
Rodney muttered as he stumbled back to the room, grumbled through the hot shower that completely failed to ease his aching muscles, and mumbled as he fell onto his bed and into the first dreamless sleep he'd had since Sheppard died.
He was waiting for Ronon the next morning. "Come on. Let's go," Ronon said gruffly, and Rodney went without a word. They ran every morning after that, Rodney stumbling along panting and grateful for the routine of it. As time went on, it became the one, real thing in his world, the thing that kept him from losing touch entirely.
Because this was supposed to get easier, wasn't it? Ronon had gone back to work, drawn by the desire to deploy their new weapon against the Wraith. Rodney couldn't bring himself to be interested: biochemistry, Jesus, developing what was, not to put too fine a point on it, an insecticide. Oh, sure, there were things he could work on, not to mention a whole galaxy of things to discover now that he didn't have to devote himself entirely to defense, but what did it matter? New particle: big deal. Strange attractors, so what?
He was the only one who didn't seem to be able to get on with his life. Teyla had gone home to New Athos and the comfort of her people. She had taken up the mantle of leadership, taken another lover, had another child. But then Teyla had always been able to connect with people; God, she made it look so easy. But it wasn't easy, not for him, the whole 'connection' thing. Other people just didn't get him. Not usually anyway.
His last chance came in the form of a smiling Samantha Carter. "Hey there, Rodney," Sam said, unexpectedly appearing at his door. The SGC had changed uniforms again, and Sam had apparently been promoted to General; when the hell had that happened? [No kidding. That's a lot of promotions in not a lot of years....] "Will you come and have lunch with me?" Her smile never wavered even though-God, he knew he looked like shit; he hadn't shaved for days, and his beard was streaked with gray. "I want your advice on something. A project," and when he nodded, she added, tactfully, "I'll wait outside while you get dressed."
They went down to the mess for sandwiches and coffee. Rodney led her to his regular table, which was in a far corner where he was protected from whispers and staring eyes. "So," Sam said, and unfastened a folder of blueprints. "Tell me what you think of this," and it was an interesting enough project-an attempt to alter the underlying geometry of wormholes, so that their forms could potentially extend beyond the gates-that it actually took him a while to realize that this was an intervention, an attempt to draw him back into some kind of normal scientific life. Rodney was moved, and stopped paying attention to what Sam was saying and watched her face instead: the intelligence in her eyes, the warmth and kindness of her smile.
"Rodney?" Sam had stopped talking; she looked concerned, eyes searching his face. She tentatively touched his hand; hers was dry and cool. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, yes, I'm fine," Rodney said, but he turned his hand under hers and squeezed, once, tight. "Clearly you'll set up a subspace field experiment; do it virtually first, make some micro-version of that thing they're building at Princeton," and then, before Sam could launch back into her sales talk: "So what do you need me for?"
Sam hesitated, clearly taken aback by his directness. "I hoped you'd come back with me," she said. "To Earth, to the labs. You could run the whole thing, Rodney; design all the protocols. I mean, you're our go-to guy on wormhole technology," and suddenly he could see his way clear. Go back to his room, pack his few things, say a couple goodbyes. He would have to send a message to Teyla. Then he could go back with Sam through the wormhole; Area 51 would give him his lab back: the good one, with the windows and the extra-high-octane coffee machine. He could write his own ticket: all the minions he wanted, as much time with the particle accelerator as he could log, enough processing power to calculate-well, anything, really: the internal thought processes of his cat, the path of the steam rising from his coffee, the way to Andromeda. He could get quarters on base, or maybe buy a place in Ash Springs: a ranch house with big windows, a view of the mountains and the scrub and the sky, that clear blue-
"I can't," Rodney said, knowing that this was his bridge back and setting fire to it anyway. "I mean, I'm flattered, though of course it is true that I am the world's foremost expert in wormhole technology, so I can see why you so desperately need me, but honestly, it's just not a good time. I'm in the middle of another project right now."
Carter's good people. She's also got to be frakkin' busy people. It's kind of wonderful, actually, that she came all the way out to talk to Rodney herself. Nobody, though, has quite enough time or devotion to really, truly notice what's up with him and move mountains to fix it. After all, Rodney's a grown-up, right?
"Jesus, Rodney, could you do something about that incline?" John propped his skis up by the door, pulled his hat off, and threw it onto the table. His hair was standing up even more ridiculously than usual, and he was red-faced and a little breathless as he wrested off his ski gear and boots. "I'm not a young guy anymore."
The timeline jumping is so crafty. Mostly-developed John gives us a nice little shock, here, that we wouldn't get if we'd seen blank-eyed brand new John first.
Rodney snorted dismissively and kept typing. "You're not even alive anymore."
"Rub it in, why don't you?" John got himself a glass of water and perched, sweating and radiating heat, on the arm of the plaid couch. "You're not still working on that?"
"Yes, I'm still working on it! This isn't just a crack I can patch over; this is a huge glitch in the program! You're missing six years in a row-"
"-yeah, of middle school, Rodney," John said, and took a long swig. "I really don't think I need to remember who I sat next to in eighth grade Social Studies."
"Oh, you don't think so!" Rodney said, nearly apoplectic. "Excuse me, but who's the genius here, you or me? How can you possibly evaluate the significance of events you don't remember? This could be crucial to your psychological development-"
John sighed and put the glass down. "Whatever. Sure. It could be crucial-"
"-for all you know. And what do you know, anyway?" Rodney narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms. "Nothing from 1976 to 1982, that's for sure!"
"Gotta say, I'm not feeling the loss," John said, twisting to stretch out his back. "But okay, fine, go on and work if it makes you happy. I'm going to take a shower-"
"Happy?" Rodney scornfully told John's retreating back. "It's not a matter of happy! It's a matter of-" John closed the bathroom door. A moment later, the shower started up.
Rodney rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the laptop. Three minutes later, the grandfather clock chimed softly, and when Rodney ignored it, the buzzer he'd rigged up began its really annoying metallic bzzting sound. Rodney sighed and closed the laptop, shoving it away across the rough wooden table.
"I've got a meeting!" Rodney yelled toward the bathroom door. "John! I've got a-oh, hell," he said, and yanked the drive from the wall. He fell back in his chair, fighting the now-familiar disorientation, and tucked the drive into his breast pocket; he didn't like to go anywhere without the Terrarium anymore. His legs were prickling, and he roughly rubbed them with both palms to get the circulation going before tottering to his feet.
Hm, that sounds strangely familiar....
There were more people at the meeting than he expected, and he didn't recognize half of them; probably more botanists brought in to cultivate a more effective strain of supergarlic. Rodney took a seat at the table and opened his laptop, mind still circling the problem of 1976-1982. He navigated a path to the SGC mainframes and started grabbing what useful information he could get: states where Sheppard had lived, schools he had attended, missions he had flown. His John needed to know these things, too.
He remembered the day John opened his eyes: that first, terrible blankness, the later periods of confusion. Rodney only had the one scan to work with, and even though he'd designed and run several brilliant extrapolation programs-clarifying John on the neurobiological level by building out logically from clearly articulated cells to less clear ones-his John had still had terrifying gaps of memory, of veracity.
"Hello," John had said, all too polite, but then his second word had been, "Rodney," and Rodney had nearly fallen over in relief. "Yes. Yes. John," and then they had played their first, frantic round of "Do you remember?" (Rodney, yes; Teyla and Ronon, yes; Atlantis, yes. The rest of the expedition, sort of; the SGC, kind of; Afghanistan, vaguely. His mother, yes; his father, who?-and it was all suddenly a sheer cliff's face: John couldn't remember where he had grown up or gone to school or been stationed; he couldn't remember anyone except those few people he'd teamed with or flown with and, perplexingly, a girl named Charlene. He didn't remember going to summer camp, didn't remember getting married, didn't remember any of his disciplinary hearings.
"It's all right," Rodney had said in a soft, urgent voice, talking more to himself than to John. "We'll fix it. I'll fix it." He had actually fixed an awful lot of it, partly by importing what concrete information he could find (Sheppard's college transcripts, mission reports, military records) and partly by extending the biometric parameters by hand, massaging the code line by line instead of running the extrapolation script. Then John had remembered his ex-wife (Nancy), his college roommate (Todd), and how much he hated his father. Rodney was triumphant. John was thin-lipped and irritable for days.
The thing was, John had memories from 1976-1982, Rodney was sure of it; he could specifically recall John telling him about his late-seventies obsession with Van Halen; in fact, he was pretty sure John had admitted a mullet. So why couldn't he-
"Rodney? Rodney." and Rodney looked up sharply and said, "Hm? What?" Everyone was looking at him expectantly, and Zelenka sighed and said, undoubtedly with more patience than he deserved, "Dr. Kita and her team are having a little trouble with the kind of Ancient technology that is precisely your area of expertise, so could you-"
Researching my next fan fiction epic at work? Daydreaming in meetings? Not I, said the hen.
"Yes, yes. Of course," Rodney said, and went back to ignoring them.
Afterwards, Rodney made a beeline for the exit but found Zelenka standing in his path with a woman he didn't recognize: tall, bespectacled, brown hair tightly pulled into a ponytail. "Ah," Rodney said, clutching his laptop to his chest. "You meant now."
"Yes," Zelenka said. They followed Dr. Kita to her lab, where a long, tubular device of Ancient origin had been laid out on the bench and half taken apart.
"Oh, no, no, no-what are you, stupid?" because it was like trying to take apart a calculator to see the numbers. Exhaling angrily through his teeth, Rodney reassembled the machine, hooked it up to a screen, and began poking through its operating system.
"But that is not written in Ancient." Dr. Kita sounded disturbed. "That is one of the programming languages we have not yet deciphered. You know how to program in-Dr. Zelenka, does he know how to-" and of course he knew how to; he'd had to crack three different alien programming languages in order to create his virtual John.
"Yes, yes," Zelenka said fondly. "This is why we keep him around." Rodney was touched by the protective pride in his voice, though those good feelings were later undermined when he overheard Zelenka murmuring, "terrible loss," and "never recovered."
OK Computer's written in really tight 3rd person POV, so one of the nifty tactics Speranza uses to inject some neutral, or at least differently biased, information is in these little bits of overheard and overseen outsider commentary. Her Rodney POV is so strong that we don't need Zelenka to tell us he's gone around the bend, but he and Teyla and Kita and Carter add a small but essential information balance to the story.
John had built a fire in the large stone hearth and was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it, Rodney's laptop balanced on his knees. Rodney couldn't help but notice that John was wearing red wool socks. He didn't remember programming red wool socks.
"You know, I really don't think you ought to hack on your own code," Rodney said uneasily, dropping onto the floor beside him with a grunt. "There's something unnatural about-"
"Oh yeah," John said, and rolled his eyes, "because that's where 'unnatural' starts in this scenario." He shoved the laptop at Rodney and said, "Anyway, I wasn't hacking it; I was just looking at it-and there, the information's there. I just can't access it."
Rodney grabbed for the computer. "What do you mean, it's there? Where?"
"It's there; it just got compacted and shoved into a subfolder," John explained. "The program's too big, so it just cut off the least accessed subroutine and boxed it away."
See, if I were trying to write this story, I'd be all, "Jeez, move along, get to the good parts." But when Speranza writes them, they are the good parts. I love these details. I cannot write novels. Yet. When I'm reading stuff like this, I'm learning how.
"Oh, right. Yes. Yes, I see." He was weak with relief; he hadn't really understood how much it bothered him to lose those six years. "I can fix that, no problem," he said, typing furiously; he'd already deleted a couple of scenarios to expand Samantha, and a bunch more to create John, but if John needed more space, he'd delete even more; hell, he'd wipe the whole drive, he'd-
"Or not." John propped himself against the sofa and stretched his red socked feet toward the fire. "Seriously, it's not bothering me. I only went looking because you seemed so-"
Rodney's fingers stumbled on the keyboard: he had to stay calm, had to, but it was so damn difficult these days. "Look, it's important, all right? It's nine to fifteen: it's when you started reading comic books, the first girl you ever kissed-all the stuff that made you, you! I can't download that, it's not like figuring out what textbook Stanford used for Combinatorial Math in 1985-"
"Oh my God." John looked shocked, and Rodney knew right then he was saying too much, but he couldn't seem to stop.
"-and just porting the information over! If I lose this, it's gone, and I can't get it back, it doesn't exist anymore, and I can't-I can't-" and John leaned toward him, face knotted with concern, and awkwardly patted his shoulder. It was exactly Sheppard's brand of non-touching touching, so familiar it made his lungs hurt. He pushed John away and brought his arm up to protect his face while he tried to squeeze the tears back. "Sorry," he mumbled into his elbow. "I just-I had kind of a rough day."
"Hey, don't worry about it," John mumbled, pulling away to give Rodney some space. Rodney heard him get to his feet and pad away into the kitchen. A clink of glass, bottles of beer probably. Rodney hastily scrubbed at his face and tried to rearrange his features into something like normal. John came back with a bottle of beer in each hand.
"The thing is," John began, obviously trying to be casual, "I don't think you're getting enough sleep." He offered Rodney a dripping bottle of lager, and Rodney deliberately put his laptop aside and took it. John nodded approvingly and let his long legs fold under him. Rodney tilted the bottle to his lips and drank: good, cold. "You work all the time-"
"I'm not working now," Rodney pointed out. "In fact, I'm in my room, relaxing; my body's in a comfortable, trance-like state-"
John pursed his lips into a little moue of disgust. "Yeah, but your brain is in here," he said, and poked the center of Rodney's forehead hard enough to hurt. "Working," he said. "Working, working- Did you ever hear of something called REM sleep?"
Oh, this is something that I, for one, by no means relate to: being attached to my creations. Sometimes so attached that I forget to go to bed. Nope. Totally alien concept.
Rodney snorted. "Oh, you are not going to lecture me on-"
"Oh, I just might," John said, and swigged his beer, "because, as I'm sure you know, I took not one, but two semesters of neuroscience," and fine, yes, John was mocking him, but just a little. "And this is not sleep, Rodney. This isn't like the virtual reality machine on the Aurora. You are not in stasis out there: you have to eat, and sleep, and move, and go to the bathroom-"
"Yes, well, thank you for your concern," Rodney said hastily, wanting to cut that line of thinking off now, "but I am, in fact, exercising daily and going to work and eating sandwiches and-" John tilted his head to the side, "-all right, yes, fine, possibly not sleeping as much as I ought to be. Just-" He fiddled with his beer bottle for a moment, and took another sip and plumped for honesty. "I'd rather be here."
John nodded understandingly. "So sleep here," he said, and Rodney frowned at him, because that had honestly never occurred to him.
"But you don't," Rodney began slowly, thinking it through. "You don't have to sleep."
"No, I don't," John agreed, "and I don't have to drink this beer either, but I'm doing it, because-" He blew out a sudden, irritated breath. "Well, I don't actually know why exactly: because my programming tells me to. Because Sheppard liked to. Because it's pleasant. Because-I don't fucking know, it's a goddamned existential nightmare every time I open my eyes. The beer tastes good, doesn't it?" and then he grinned a lopsided grin and said, portentously, "If the buzz is real, I must be real, right?"
"Oh, my God; it's the Tao of Grolsch," Rodney groaned.
Bwah! That works in no small part because "Grolsch" is such a funny-looking word.
"Hey, I'm making a serious point," John said. "Have you even tried sleeping here? I don't think it matters where you are so long as you let your consciousness rest for a couple of cycles, preferably with some rapid eye movement. I mean, this is your place, after all; stop fucking around with Sheppard's college transcripts and build yourself a waterbed."
He ended up crashing on the sofa with a pillow and a blanket and having the best sleep he'd had in years. He worried that John would stand over him all night, but after a few games of Forza Motorsport II, John just loped off to the bedroom he didn't actually need and shut the door. Rodney vaguely wondered if John's program would actually simulate sleep or if he would just lie down on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, his long, lean body perfectly still-and then Rodney was falling asleep himself, hard.
I like these plain, functional, but somehow terribly sexy descriptions of John. Heartbreaking how Rodney is more aware of John's body-not even his sexuality, necessarily, just the lines and angles of him-in the VR than he ever was in life.
He woke up with a start, disoriented, to the ringing of bells, the grandfather clock, and John standing over him wearing nothing but a pair of pink and white boxer shorts. "What?" Rodney asked, jerking up and nearly strangling in the blanket. "What?"
"I don't know!" John shrugged, and Rodney was momentarily distracted by the play of his shoulder muscle. "Clock went off. Are you supposed to be-"
Rodney sat up straight. "Oh, hell. Ronon," he said and yanked the drive out of the wall. He fell back in his chair, the white walls of Atlantis seeming sterile and cold after the warm wood and stone of the cabin. He heard the chiming of the doorbell, then the low, hard thumping that was Ronon pounding on his door. "Coming!" Rodney yelled, hurtling toward it. "Hang on, I overslept!"-and that much was true.
Ronon was on the other side, looking skeptical. "Get moving, McKay. You're not getting out of this," and Rodney opened his mouth to argue, except actually he felt great.
"Okay, hold on," Rodney said, and went to put on his tracksuit.
He chased Ronon through the hallways of Atlantis, then showered and shaved and ate a huge breakfast. He stopped by Dr. Kita's lab just to make sure they weren't doing anything unbearably stupid, and then headed back to his room and the Terrarium.
He found John sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine and wearing- "Okay, seriously," Rodney said, crossing his arms, "I know I didn't program that shirt." It was white, with pink and black swirls and a wide, pointed collar. John shrugged, but Rodney wouldn't let it go. "Or those pink boxers. And that parka wasn't red, and that red flannel shirt you were-oh, my God, you have been hacking on my code!"
"Actually," John said, letting the magazine drop to the table, "it's my code. And I'm just changing some colors, no big deal. I like reds. You got a problem with that?"
I love the big question looming at this point: Is John becoming more Johnish, revealing behaviours and preferences he had to conceal before, or is he actually diverging from his source, hacking his code to make himself other?
One of the ideas Coppa repurposes for fandom is Richard Schechner's, who defines characters as sets of behaviours, cut & paste-able like strips of film, which can be translated from stage to stage, story to story, while remaining true to the original. She writes, This decontextualizing of behavior echoes the appropriation and use of existing characters in most fan fiction; in fact, one could define fan fiction as a textual attempt to make certain characters "perform" according to different behavioral strips. Or perhaps the characters who populate fan fiction are themselves the behavioral strips, able to walk out of one story and into another, acting independently of the works of art that brought them into existence. The existence of fan fiction postulates that characters are able to "walk" not only from one artwork into another, but from one genre into another; fan fiction articulates that characters are neither constructed or owned, but have, to use Schechner's phrase, a life of their own not dependent on any original "through or "source." (p. 230)
Here, the behavioural strip that is John Sheppard exists as the t.v. character, the story's John and the VR John, like a set of nesting dolls, or, if you reject the notion that one's got more weight than the next, a set of quantum doubles.
Rodney is hunting for the ingredients that will produce the performance he's expecting. So far, he hasn't given much thought to the ways in which we're influenced (oppressed, liberated, outright altered) by our immediate surroundings.
John looked good in pink. Something about the color made his hair seem blacker and brought out the green in his eyes. "No, I suppose not. It's just, I just don't want you getting corrupted," and John slouched back in his chair and drawled, "Rodney, this concern for my innocence, it's very charming." Rodney fidgeted and cleared his throat and was about to suggest they hit the slopes or something-and then he caught sight of what John was reading, and his indignation caught fire again. He'd assumed it was a golf magazine, not-
But that's how we relate to everybody, really: through our own filters. We cobble constructs of them, and hope, desperately, that our perceptions are accurate and we're not in love with figments of our own imaginations.
"The Physical Review?" Rodney spluttered, grabbing for it as John slunk out of his chair and went into the kitchen. "How did you get this? Why would you even want it?"
John groaned and slumped back against the counter. "Don't have a cow, Rodney, all right? Just, I want to know what's going on, so I got the program to suck in some external data feeds and render them as-" and Rodney looked around suddenly and saw the piles of newspapers, magazines, books and-
"Changing some colors, he says! No big deal, he says!"
John had the grace to look guilty, but was clearly going down swinging. "Oh, so you're the only one who gets to improve me? I don't get to improve me?"
"I'm not trying to improve you!" Rodney shouted. "I'm just trying to-" make you more like John Sheppard, except some deep instinct told him to bite his tongue. He took a breath and crossed his arms. "Hmph. And I was going to build you a racetrack."
John stayed still, but his hair perked with interest. "Racetrack?"
Hi, John's sentient hair! Hi, hi!
Also: cyborg!John yay! You guys, this is so cool. The same week I'm busy writing up my DVD commentary, Transformative Works and Cultures releases its first issue, which includes an essay by Madeline Ashby that's chock full of cyborg theory. Just ... grok this:The body is a discursive crossroads formed and coded by multiple authors and perspectives on both the real and figurative levels. Every child is a collaborative work whose (genetic) code was written by two individuals (and whose psychological programming is the product of an unknown number of contributors), and adults slowly take on the ability to "edit" speech, appearance, and mannerisms for various social contexts. The body and its associated values are similarly coded, interpreted, and otherwise made the subject and product of discourse. Cyberpunk fiction makes this reading of the body clear: The cyborgs that populate William Gibson's novels or Mamoru Oshii's films are able to rewrite their memories, modify their bodies, and treat themselves as works in progress. They are bodies of work that "are not slaves to master discourses but emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context" (Halberstam and Livingston 1996:2).
Here is John self-actualizing. Liberated from the constraints of the Air Force, among other things, John is free to become more himself. He can wear pink paisley! And red flannel and Rodney! He's like the cyborgs in Ashby's essay in that he's not only educating and cultivating the self who already exists, he's retroloading: dumping in the math and physics expertise that he didn't have before, and filling in memory gaps (or not) by guessing was important and formative and what wasn't.
Ashby continues,At these nodes are both the cyborgified characters of fan fiction and the cyborg authors who act as their puppet masters. If the body is a text that can be read, it can also be copied, interpreted, edited, and rewritten. This is the same for the fictional body, or the body that enacts fiction. The writing of the body and the self-discovery of the body through writing are phenomena that both Goldberg and Hobb (but especially Goldberg) criticize within fan fiction.
Rodney, John's "writer," is also a cyborg. Rodney discovers crucial things about himself through writing the John simulation-by which I mean the environment, not just the code for cyberJohn himself. The environment interacts with, changes and is for both of them. Eventually, Rodney uses it to literally rewrite his own life.
Rodney reminded himself, as he stood out in the whipping wind watching the red Formula 1 racecar take another hairpin curve, that John wasn't really alive, so he couldn't actually be killed. It was why he'd given John a ski slope, a half-pipe, a CH-47 Chinook: here, at least, he could let John indulge his stupidest, most daredevilish desires without worrying too much. In fact, he was more concerned about John's new hobby of hacking, which could result in real damage; anything else could probably be solved with a reboot.
The car eventually slid to a stop, and John emerged, in his unnecessary helmet and unnecessary goggles, grinning like a loon. His smile lasted the rest of the day and grew increasingly goofy. John was dazed, happy, over-exhausted and over-adrenalized, and so while, yes, Rodney was able to beat him at chess (several times), there wasn't a lot of satisfaction in it: John hardly seemed to mind. Later, Rodney saw, to his surprise, that John had fallen asleep on the sofa, face mashed against the cushions and still smiling.
Apparently the program did simulate sleep, and-well, it was very convincing. God, John was so beautiful, and Rodney wanted-Christ, to touch him, to smooth the pale red flannel across his shoulders, to cup his ass through the soft gray sweatpants he was wearing. But there was a line, even in something as crazy as this, and so Rodney took a deep breath and moved away. He almost went back to his room in Atlantis, except he really did sleep so much better here, so he went into John's bedroom instead.
It was familiarly neat, the Johnny Cash poster nailed to the cabin wall over the large bed, with its red (blue; Rodney could have sworn they'd been blue) flannel sheets and the heavy pile of red and green plaid blankets. John's guitar was in one corner, his surfboard (Rodney had not yet gotten around to building the ocean plug-in John had asked for) in the other. Rodney pulled a blanket off the bed and draped it over John, then got himself a blanket from the closet: he figured it was okay to crash out on a guy's bed, but less okay to actually pull back the covers and get in. He kicked off his shoes and pants, turned out the light, and stretched out, pulling the blanket tight around his shoulders, and...hm, something wasn't right about this.
The thing was, he'd spent a lot of time in Sheppard's tiny room on Atlantis, which had served as their team headquarters, rec room, infirmary and personal confessional. Rodney had sat on Sheppard's bed, sprawled out on it, played video games on it and...this wasn't, there was...it didn't smell right. It didn't smell like Sheppard, and Rodney hadn't until that very moment realized that Sheppard had a smell, but he did, and John didn't smell the same. It was probably some combination of personal hygiene products: hair gel and deodorant and aftershave, combined with darker, more medicinal smells. In the dark, it was easy to conjure them up: some sort of antiseptic, chlorhexidine, maybe, and something else more menthol-y camphor-y like Ben-gay, because Sheppard probably had pulled muscles throwing himself over balconies and out of windows and all that. Under that: fear, maybe. A little. He'd seen Sheppard afraid, knew that Sheppard was more afraid than he let on, hiding it behind lopsided smiles. There was a bitterness to Sheppard too, and Rodney remembered his dark moods, his almost paranoid eyes-and missed him all over again; God, missed him so, so, so much.
This is such a wonderful, crucial paragraph. Smell and memory are so deeply connected. He's foiled, dead-ended, by this one intensely physiological, realspace thing that all his coding genius just can't overcome.
"Sleep well?" John was standing at the window, looking out over the mountain, the fluffy white trees. He was bleary-eyed and stubbled, lazy, head low over a steaming mug.
"Yes; yes, I did." Rodney hid his embarrassment by pouring himself a cup of coffee with rather more fuss than was strictly necessary. "I took your bed, I hope you don't mind-"
John flapped an idle hand. "Nah. I was really wiped," and Rodney shot him a swift look, but he seemed sincere about it, as if he really had been tired, as if he really had slept. "I mean, that was great, driving, but it really knocked me out: the intense focus. I slept..." and Rodney's hand tightened on the mug hard enough to break it, like the dead his mind supplied; I slept like the-"...really well," John finished on a yawn.
Rodney couldn't keep the edge out of his voice, couldn't stop the sugar spoon clattering to the countertop. "You said you didn't have to sleep."
John didn't seem offended. "But I do it anyway," he said with a faint smile. "Some nights better than others. It's a good bed, though, huh? A lot bigger than we're used to," and before Rodney could even begin to formulate a reply to that, John added, "You know, you could always sleep at Sam's; whatever happened with you and Sam?"
Rodney just stared in dumb incomprehension: Sam? There was a familiar, teasing undertone to John's voice; was John talking about Carter? Then Rodney understood and grinned his relief. "You mean Samantha! Samantha, the simulation." He laughed and waved a hand. "Oh, I deleted her. God. Ages ago."
"Oh." John turned his head, but Rodney still saw some unrecognizable emotion momentarily take hold of his face. "Huh." Rodney cringed with guilt: was that in bad taste, to talk about deleting simulations, being that John was a simulation? Surely John had to know that he wasn't in the same league as the others, not even Samantha, who at her prime had only taken up maybe one tenth of the drive. Or was it that-
"Is it the lesbians?" Rodney blurted, because of course John had liked the lesbians. "Because-okay, yes, I deleted them, but I'm sure I can get them back. Or make you something as good." He realized with sudden dread that his perfect habitat had all the conveniences except female companionship; the Terrarium was seriously lacking in hot babes. His mind was already running through solutions: sexy neighbor? brothel down the road? sex bot?-oh, God, would it be too recursive to give John his own virtual reality scenario?-when John said, in a strange voice, "It's not the lesbians, Rodney."
"Right, no," Rodney said, more to himself than to John, "and besides, you like brunettes."
John slammed his coffee down. "Rodney," and wow, that was the voice Sheppard used when he wanted Rodney to shut the hell up and pay attention. "I wasn't asking for me; I was asking for you, because as your Designated Imaginary Friend, it's my job to tell you that you're wound pretty tight, and it might help you to get laid now and then." John crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows significantly: Capische? "As for me, I'm enjoying the time to myself, and if you want to get me hot-well, I wouldn't say no to that beach scenario. 80 degrees, and don't skimp on the waves."
The sexual tension at this point is a low, almost subsonic rumble. Speranza never resorts to a single one of the clichés that usually accompany its build-up. I can feel the change in air pressure, but I can scarcely pinpoint how she did it. It's in the questions John asks that are really fishing for answers to entirely different questions, and in his feinting swings from intense to off-handed.
Part 3
Incredibly, the SGC wanted to ship Sheppard's body back to Earth, despite his having listed no next of kin. "It's procedure, " they said. "No," Teyla said, and Ronon growled and Rodney looked up from behind them and thought of all the damage he could do, which was quite a lot, really. They wanted to have his funeral in the gateroom and then ship him back to Earth to be buried in Arlington. The team stared until they went away.
It was Ronon who said the obvious. "We can't put him in the ground."
"No," Rodney said, feeling sick at the prospect.
"No," Teyla agreed. "We will need a-"
"Yes," Ronon said.
"I can fly it," Rodney said, looking up.
Team Broccoli Test ♥
They'd orchestrated more complicated missions than this before breakfast; a diversionary tactic, a few overrides, and Sheppard's body had been whisked away to M7G-677, the planet of the children, where some of the kids had grown up, and all of them knew about grief. They spent the night in a hut that Keras had prepared for them, but nobody slept: outside, the torches had been lit, and they were visited in fits and starts by groups of children, who came bringing flowers and feathers and bits of decorated leather. A pile of flat brown stones began to build. Rodney didn't understand their significance until suddenly he did, remembering the sack of chocolate Sheppard had handed Keras, and then he had to go stand outside for a while.
The next morning, he and Teyla and Ronon carried the rough-hewn wooden coffin to the puddlejumper. Rodney resisted the urge to tug the lid off and take a last look at the man who'd been his team leader and best friend, and instead focused on how to position the coffin so that it would slide easily out of the weapons pod. Ronon had turned away, and Teyla was standing beside him, one hand on his back. Rodney blinked a few times and then hurried into the cockpit to program the flight path.
This was a mistake-the cockpit was Sheppard-haunted-but Rodney gritted his teeth and began the arduous task of convincing the navigational computer that, yes, he really did want to plot a burn-up trajectory. It wasn't that it was difficult; the needle that most pilots, that Sheppard, that most pilots had to thread was finding the entry corridor, not not-finding it. You had a 98 percent chance of not-finding it. The problem was getting the computer to believe you.
When he looked up again, Ronon was in the co-pilot's chair, slumped forward, hands dangling between his knees. "Are we ready yet?" Ronon asked, voice low and hoarse.
"Yes," Rodney said, as if it were a technical question, and then, it having struck him differently, "No. No." He sank back in his chair and closed his eyes.
"Come on," Teyla said softly, after a while, and they nodded and moved into position. Ronon dialed the gate, and Rodney guided them through and engaged the hyperdrive.
New Lantea looked like Earth from space, and Rodney wondered if Sheppard had picked it for that reason, if he had been flying Atlantis and recognized something that felt like home. Rodney checked their trajectory, double-checked the autopilot, and then felt a nauseating gut-clench of fear. This was it; it was time. He felt Ronon's hand on his shoulder. He was stumbling to his feet, they all were, clustering more tightly together. Ronon was hard up against his right side, and Teyla's arm was twined tightly around his, and they were standing there together looking out at the blue and white planet beyond.
"I can't do it," Rodney said tightly. "Somebody-somebody else-"
"Teyla?" Ronon muttered, and Teyla's hand tightened on his arm.
"I-yes," Teyla said, and then she took a deep breath and said, in a low, cracking voice, "John Sheppard, we loved you so much." New Lantea swam before his eyes, and a trail of glowing particles arced across the sky, John Sheppard become a shooting star.
"On Star Trek, he came back," Rodney said, and Ronon and Teyla were kind and didn't ask what the hell he was talking about, just put their arms around him and held on.
I'm thoughtful about the team's reaction to Sheppard's death. Some stories are "pull one thread and the whole thing unravels" stories, meant to valorize the crazy, unlikely, irreproducible synergy of that team, frail as an ecosystem. But no, that's not this story; Teyla and Ronon keep calm and carry on. They've both faced great loss before. For Rodney, grief is newer, less likely and more insurmountable. This is the opposite of Synecdochic's Rodney in Freedom, who ends the story perhaps more stable than he ever was before. But Syne's actually had a 5-year relationship; Speranza's is crazed by what-ifs.
"You are so lame. So, so lame, McKay," but Sheppard had tactfully put a hand on McKay 2.0's back and guided him to a chair when he had gone pale and faltered. Now McKay just sat there, sweaty and worn out and visibly trying to collect himself. Sheppard set his jaw and looked away, apparently trying not to look like a man who'd just had his own death narrated to him. Rodney himself had had to sit down, too, because he could see it happening all too vividly. One loose cannon. One lucky shot.
Finally, McKay took a deep breath. "That was the hard part," he said, almost to himself, "and the part we'll have to be most careful about changing. I can tell you the rest, because most of it never really happened. Well, not to you, anyway. It all happened to me."
There was a formal investigation into Sheppard's disappearance, but the paperwork kept getting mislaid; everything was in chaos. Atlantis's chain of command was in complete disarray, Carter having recently returned to Earth. Sheppard's death had taken out his entire team, and many of the scientists who might have stepped into the breach had been working round the clock on the superweapon they'd found in the clansmen's vault after they'd sacked the place.
We never even find out what Genghis' problem was. Speranza expends as little energy as possible on that stuff, because it's so not the point-or the POV. Rodney, at this point, wouldn't give a flying fuck. But it's relevant that it's a stupid death, out of the blue and mean and pointless, not some heroic saving of the world. It makes it harder to process and recover from.
Zelenka had stopped by his rooms soon after his return to tell him about it, and while he had hugged Rodney tightly and offered his sincerest condolences, he couldn't quite conceal his underlying excitement. "It is incredible, Rodney, the properties of it! Our first distillation was effective; our third has been perfection itself. Our tests have exceeded our greatest expectations: the Wraith react as if it is poison-why we have not before considered a solution along these lines," Zelenka said, actually smacking his forehead, "I do not know; certainly, the solution was evident in the literature, quite literally-"
Of course it was. If you don't pay attention to the texts, you're done for.
"Garlic?" Rodney said, turning the white root over and over in his hand.
Radek's smile was radiant. "Very like; it is a relative with very rare and special properties. Practically unknown in this galaxy, but now that we have a sample, we can propagate it easily. Isn't it wonderful?" and Rodney agreed that it was wonderful, and said he was happy for him, and for the botanists; happy for all of them, really.
Ronon gave him a little space, and then turned up at his door at the ungodly hour of five-thirty in the morning. "Put your trainers on," Ronon said.
Rodney leaned tiredly against the door frame. "You're out of your mind," he said.
"Come on, McKay. Now," and strangely, Rodney found himself relenting, fishing a pair of barely-used trainers from underneath his bed and putting them on. Ronon started off slowly, and Rodney followed him down the hall, down the stairs, and through a large, curving corridor, focused intently on Ronon's broad back. Ronon began to speed up, and Rodney found himself straining to keep up, arms pumping, lungs burning. It was surprisingly wonderful not to think, just to move, and he zoned out for a while, left, right, left, right, until all at once he couldn't run any more, and collapsed against a wall, fingers scrabbling at the cool metal. Ronon materialized beside him. "Bend over," Ronon said, hand pressed between his shoulder blades. "Head down. Breathe deep," and Rodney doubled over, hands braced on his thighs, and gasped for air until the world sharpened.
"What is this," Rodney asked, clutching his chest, "the John Sheppard memorial run?"
Ronon threw a towel at his face. "See you tomorrow, McKay."
Through the entire story, Ronon doesn't say much more than he ever does on the show, but Speranza's a master at letting his actions be his speech. Ronon's actions (run, stay, paint, ink) frequently carry heavy symbolic value for him; they signify. That goes back to his first episode on SGA.
Rodney muttered as he stumbled back to the room, grumbled through the hot shower that completely failed to ease his aching muscles, and mumbled as he fell onto his bed and into the first dreamless sleep he'd had since Sheppard died.
He was waiting for Ronon the next morning. "Come on. Let's go," Ronon said gruffly, and Rodney went without a word. They ran every morning after that, Rodney stumbling along panting and grateful for the routine of it. As time went on, it became the one, real thing in his world, the thing that kept him from losing touch entirely.
Because this was supposed to get easier, wasn't it? Ronon had gone back to work, drawn by the desire to deploy their new weapon against the Wraith. Rodney couldn't bring himself to be interested: biochemistry, Jesus, developing what was, not to put too fine a point on it, an insecticide. Oh, sure, there were things he could work on, not to mention a whole galaxy of things to discover now that he didn't have to devote himself entirely to defense, but what did it matter? New particle: big deal. Strange attractors, so what?
He was the only one who didn't seem to be able to get on with his life. Teyla had gone home to New Athos and the comfort of her people. She had taken up the mantle of leadership, taken another lover, had another child. But then Teyla had always been able to connect with people; God, she made it look so easy. But it wasn't easy, not for him, the whole 'connection' thing. Other people just didn't get him. Not usually anyway.
His last chance came in the form of a smiling Samantha Carter. "Hey there, Rodney," Sam said, unexpectedly appearing at his door. The SGC had changed uniforms again, and Sam had apparently been promoted to General; when the hell had that happened? [No kidding. That's a lot of promotions in not a lot of years....] "Will you come and have lunch with me?" Her smile never wavered even though-God, he knew he looked like shit; he hadn't shaved for days, and his beard was streaked with gray. "I want your advice on something. A project," and when he nodded, she added, tactfully, "I'll wait outside while you get dressed."
They went down to the mess for sandwiches and coffee. Rodney led her to his regular table, which was in a far corner where he was protected from whispers and staring eyes. "So," Sam said, and unfastened a folder of blueprints. "Tell me what you think of this," and it was an interesting enough project-an attempt to alter the underlying geometry of wormholes, so that their forms could potentially extend beyond the gates-that it actually took him a while to realize that this was an intervention, an attempt to draw him back into some kind of normal scientific life. Rodney was moved, and stopped paying attention to what Sam was saying and watched her face instead: the intelligence in her eyes, the warmth and kindness of her smile.
"Rodney?" Sam had stopped talking; she looked concerned, eyes searching his face. She tentatively touched his hand; hers was dry and cool. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, yes, I'm fine," Rodney said, but he turned his hand under hers and squeezed, once, tight. "Clearly you'll set up a subspace field experiment; do it virtually first, make some micro-version of that thing they're building at Princeton," and then, before Sam could launch back into her sales talk: "So what do you need me for?"
Sam hesitated, clearly taken aback by his directness. "I hoped you'd come back with me," she said. "To Earth, to the labs. You could run the whole thing, Rodney; design all the protocols. I mean, you're our go-to guy on wormhole technology," and suddenly he could see his way clear. Go back to his room, pack his few things, say a couple goodbyes. He would have to send a message to Teyla. Then he could go back with Sam through the wormhole; Area 51 would give him his lab back: the good one, with the windows and the extra-high-octane coffee machine. He could write his own ticket: all the minions he wanted, as much time with the particle accelerator as he could log, enough processing power to calculate-well, anything, really: the internal thought processes of his cat, the path of the steam rising from his coffee, the way to Andromeda. He could get quarters on base, or maybe buy a place in Ash Springs: a ranch house with big windows, a view of the mountains and the scrub and the sky, that clear blue-
"I can't," Rodney said, knowing that this was his bridge back and setting fire to it anyway. "I mean, I'm flattered, though of course it is true that I am the world's foremost expert in wormhole technology, so I can see why you so desperately need me, but honestly, it's just not a good time. I'm in the middle of another project right now."
Carter's good people. She's also got to be frakkin' busy people. It's kind of wonderful, actually, that she came all the way out to talk to Rodney herself. Nobody, though, has quite enough time or devotion to really, truly notice what's up with him and move mountains to fix it. After all, Rodney's a grown-up, right?
"Jesus, Rodney, could you do something about that incline?" John propped his skis up by the door, pulled his hat off, and threw it onto the table. His hair was standing up even more ridiculously than usual, and he was red-faced and a little breathless as he wrested off his ski gear and boots. "I'm not a young guy anymore."
The timeline jumping is so crafty. Mostly-developed John gives us a nice little shock, here, that we wouldn't get if we'd seen blank-eyed brand new John first.
Rodney snorted dismissively and kept typing. "You're not even alive anymore."
"Rub it in, why don't you?" John got himself a glass of water and perched, sweating and radiating heat, on the arm of the plaid couch. "You're not still working on that?"
"Yes, I'm still working on it! This isn't just a crack I can patch over; this is a huge glitch in the program! You're missing six years in a row-"
"-yeah, of middle school, Rodney," John said, and took a long swig. "I really don't think I need to remember who I sat next to in eighth grade Social Studies."
"Oh, you don't think so!" Rodney said, nearly apoplectic. "Excuse me, but who's the genius here, you or me? How can you possibly evaluate the significance of events you don't remember? This could be crucial to your psychological development-"
John sighed and put the glass down. "Whatever. Sure. It could be crucial-"
"-for all you know. And what do you know, anyway?" Rodney narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms. "Nothing from 1976 to 1982, that's for sure!"
"Gotta say, I'm not feeling the loss," John said, twisting to stretch out his back. "But okay, fine, go on and work if it makes you happy. I'm going to take a shower-"
"Happy?" Rodney scornfully told John's retreating back. "It's not a matter of happy! It's a matter of-" John closed the bathroom door. A moment later, the shower started up.
Rodney rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the laptop. Three minutes later, the grandfather clock chimed softly, and when Rodney ignored it, the buzzer he'd rigged up began its really annoying metallic bzzting sound. Rodney sighed and closed the laptop, shoving it away across the rough wooden table.
"I've got a meeting!" Rodney yelled toward the bathroom door. "John! I've got a-oh, hell," he said, and yanked the drive from the wall. He fell back in his chair, fighting the now-familiar disorientation, and tucked the drive into his breast pocket; he didn't like to go anywhere without the Terrarium anymore. His legs were prickling, and he roughly rubbed them with both palms to get the circulation going before tottering to his feet.
Hm, that sounds strangely familiar....
There were more people at the meeting than he expected, and he didn't recognize half of them; probably more botanists brought in to cultivate a more effective strain of supergarlic. Rodney took a seat at the table and opened his laptop, mind still circling the problem of 1976-1982. He navigated a path to the SGC mainframes and started grabbing what useful information he could get: states where Sheppard had lived, schools he had attended, missions he had flown. His John needed to know these things, too.
He remembered the day John opened his eyes: that first, terrible blankness, the later periods of confusion. Rodney only had the one scan to work with, and even though he'd designed and run several brilliant extrapolation programs-clarifying John on the neurobiological level by building out logically from clearly articulated cells to less clear ones-his John had still had terrifying gaps of memory, of veracity.
"Hello," John had said, all too polite, but then his second word had been, "Rodney," and Rodney had nearly fallen over in relief. "Yes. Yes. John," and then they had played their first, frantic round of "Do you remember?" (Rodney, yes; Teyla and Ronon, yes; Atlantis, yes. The rest of the expedition, sort of; the SGC, kind of; Afghanistan, vaguely. His mother, yes; his father, who?-and it was all suddenly a sheer cliff's face: John couldn't remember where he had grown up or gone to school or been stationed; he couldn't remember anyone except those few people he'd teamed with or flown with and, perplexingly, a girl named Charlene. He didn't remember going to summer camp, didn't remember getting married, didn't remember any of his disciplinary hearings.
"It's all right," Rodney had said in a soft, urgent voice, talking more to himself than to John. "We'll fix it. I'll fix it." He had actually fixed an awful lot of it, partly by importing what concrete information he could find (Sheppard's college transcripts, mission reports, military records) and partly by extending the biometric parameters by hand, massaging the code line by line instead of running the extrapolation script. Then John had remembered his ex-wife (Nancy), his college roommate (Todd), and how much he hated his father. Rodney was triumphant. John was thin-lipped and irritable for days.
The thing was, John had memories from 1976-1982, Rodney was sure of it; he could specifically recall John telling him about his late-seventies obsession with Van Halen; in fact, he was pretty sure John had admitted a mullet. So why couldn't he-
"Rodney? Rodney." and Rodney looked up sharply and said, "Hm? What?" Everyone was looking at him expectantly, and Zelenka sighed and said, undoubtedly with more patience than he deserved, "Dr. Kita and her team are having a little trouble with the kind of Ancient technology that is precisely your area of expertise, so could you-"
Researching my next fan fiction epic at work? Daydreaming in meetings? Not I, said the hen.
"Yes, yes. Of course," Rodney said, and went back to ignoring them.
Afterwards, Rodney made a beeline for the exit but found Zelenka standing in his path with a woman he didn't recognize: tall, bespectacled, brown hair tightly pulled into a ponytail. "Ah," Rodney said, clutching his laptop to his chest. "You meant now."
"Yes," Zelenka said. They followed Dr. Kita to her lab, where a long, tubular device of Ancient origin had been laid out on the bench and half taken apart.
"Oh, no, no, no-what are you, stupid?" because it was like trying to take apart a calculator to see the numbers. Exhaling angrily through his teeth, Rodney reassembled the machine, hooked it up to a screen, and began poking through its operating system.
"But that is not written in Ancient." Dr. Kita sounded disturbed. "That is one of the programming languages we have not yet deciphered. You know how to program in-Dr. Zelenka, does he know how to-" and of course he knew how to; he'd had to crack three different alien programming languages in order to create his virtual John.
"Yes, yes," Zelenka said fondly. "This is why we keep him around." Rodney was touched by the protective pride in his voice, though those good feelings were later undermined when he overheard Zelenka murmuring, "terrible loss," and "never recovered."
OK Computer's written in really tight 3rd person POV, so one of the nifty tactics Speranza uses to inject some neutral, or at least differently biased, information is in these little bits of overheard and overseen outsider commentary. Her Rodney POV is so strong that we don't need Zelenka to tell us he's gone around the bend, but he and Teyla and Kita and Carter add a small but essential information balance to the story.
John had built a fire in the large stone hearth and was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it, Rodney's laptop balanced on his knees. Rodney couldn't help but notice that John was wearing red wool socks. He didn't remember programming red wool socks.
"You know, I really don't think you ought to hack on your own code," Rodney said uneasily, dropping onto the floor beside him with a grunt. "There's something unnatural about-"
"Oh yeah," John said, and rolled his eyes, "because that's where 'unnatural' starts in this scenario." He shoved the laptop at Rodney and said, "Anyway, I wasn't hacking it; I was just looking at it-and there, the information's there. I just can't access it."
Rodney grabbed for the computer. "What do you mean, it's there? Where?"
"It's there; it just got compacted and shoved into a subfolder," John explained. "The program's too big, so it just cut off the least accessed subroutine and boxed it away."
See, if I were trying to write this story, I'd be all, "Jeez, move along, get to the good parts." But when Speranza writes them, they are the good parts. I love these details. I cannot write novels. Yet. When I'm reading stuff like this, I'm learning how.
"Oh, right. Yes. Yes, I see." He was weak with relief; he hadn't really understood how much it bothered him to lose those six years. "I can fix that, no problem," he said, typing furiously; he'd already deleted a couple of scenarios to expand Samantha, and a bunch more to create John, but if John needed more space, he'd delete even more; hell, he'd wipe the whole drive, he'd-
"Or not." John propped himself against the sofa and stretched his red socked feet toward the fire. "Seriously, it's not bothering me. I only went looking because you seemed so-"
Rodney's fingers stumbled on the keyboard: he had to stay calm, had to, but it was so damn difficult these days. "Look, it's important, all right? It's nine to fifteen: it's when you started reading comic books, the first girl you ever kissed-all the stuff that made you, you! I can't download that, it's not like figuring out what textbook Stanford used for Combinatorial Math in 1985-"
"Oh my God." John looked shocked, and Rodney knew right then he was saying too much, but he couldn't seem to stop.
"-and just porting the information over! If I lose this, it's gone, and I can't get it back, it doesn't exist anymore, and I can't-I can't-" and John leaned toward him, face knotted with concern, and awkwardly patted his shoulder. It was exactly Sheppard's brand of non-touching touching, so familiar it made his lungs hurt. He pushed John away and brought his arm up to protect his face while he tried to squeeze the tears back. "Sorry," he mumbled into his elbow. "I just-I had kind of a rough day."
"Hey, don't worry about it," John mumbled, pulling away to give Rodney some space. Rodney heard him get to his feet and pad away into the kitchen. A clink of glass, bottles of beer probably. Rodney hastily scrubbed at his face and tried to rearrange his features into something like normal. John came back with a bottle of beer in each hand.
"The thing is," John began, obviously trying to be casual, "I don't think you're getting enough sleep." He offered Rodney a dripping bottle of lager, and Rodney deliberately put his laptop aside and took it. John nodded approvingly and let his long legs fold under him. Rodney tilted the bottle to his lips and drank: good, cold. "You work all the time-"
"I'm not working now," Rodney pointed out. "In fact, I'm in my room, relaxing; my body's in a comfortable, trance-like state-"
John pursed his lips into a little moue of disgust. "Yeah, but your brain is in here," he said, and poked the center of Rodney's forehead hard enough to hurt. "Working," he said. "Working, working- Did you ever hear of something called REM sleep?"
Oh, this is something that I, for one, by no means relate to: being attached to my creations. Sometimes so attached that I forget to go to bed. Nope. Totally alien concept.
Rodney snorted. "Oh, you are not going to lecture me on-"
"Oh, I just might," John said, and swigged his beer, "because, as I'm sure you know, I took not one, but two semesters of neuroscience," and fine, yes, John was mocking him, but just a little. "And this is not sleep, Rodney. This isn't like the virtual reality machine on the Aurora. You are not in stasis out there: you have to eat, and sleep, and move, and go to the bathroom-"
"Yes, well, thank you for your concern," Rodney said hastily, wanting to cut that line of thinking off now, "but I am, in fact, exercising daily and going to work and eating sandwiches and-" John tilted his head to the side, "-all right, yes, fine, possibly not sleeping as much as I ought to be. Just-" He fiddled with his beer bottle for a moment, and took another sip and plumped for honesty. "I'd rather be here."
John nodded understandingly. "So sleep here," he said, and Rodney frowned at him, because that had honestly never occurred to him.
"But you don't," Rodney began slowly, thinking it through. "You don't have to sleep."
"No, I don't," John agreed, "and I don't have to drink this beer either, but I'm doing it, because-" He blew out a sudden, irritated breath. "Well, I don't actually know why exactly: because my programming tells me to. Because Sheppard liked to. Because it's pleasant. Because-I don't fucking know, it's a goddamned existential nightmare every time I open my eyes. The beer tastes good, doesn't it?" and then he grinned a lopsided grin and said, portentously, "If the buzz is real, I must be real, right?"
"Oh, my God; it's the Tao of Grolsch," Rodney groaned.
Bwah! That works in no small part because "Grolsch" is such a funny-looking word.
"Hey, I'm making a serious point," John said. "Have you even tried sleeping here? I don't think it matters where you are so long as you let your consciousness rest for a couple of cycles, preferably with some rapid eye movement. I mean, this is your place, after all; stop fucking around with Sheppard's college transcripts and build yourself a waterbed."
He ended up crashing on the sofa with a pillow and a blanket and having the best sleep he'd had in years. He worried that John would stand over him all night, but after a few games of Forza Motorsport II, John just loped off to the bedroom he didn't actually need and shut the door. Rodney vaguely wondered if John's program would actually simulate sleep or if he would just lie down on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, his long, lean body perfectly still-and then Rodney was falling asleep himself, hard.
I like these plain, functional, but somehow terribly sexy descriptions of John. Heartbreaking how Rodney is more aware of John's body-not even his sexuality, necessarily, just the lines and angles of him-in the VR than he ever was in life.
He woke up with a start, disoriented, to the ringing of bells, the grandfather clock, and John standing over him wearing nothing but a pair of pink and white boxer shorts. "What?" Rodney asked, jerking up and nearly strangling in the blanket. "What?"
"I don't know!" John shrugged, and Rodney was momentarily distracted by the play of his shoulder muscle. "Clock went off. Are you supposed to be-"
Rodney sat up straight. "Oh, hell. Ronon," he said and yanked the drive out of the wall. He fell back in his chair, the white walls of Atlantis seeming sterile and cold after the warm wood and stone of the cabin. He heard the chiming of the doorbell, then the low, hard thumping that was Ronon pounding on his door. "Coming!" Rodney yelled, hurtling toward it. "Hang on, I overslept!"-and that much was true.
Ronon was on the other side, looking skeptical. "Get moving, McKay. You're not getting out of this," and Rodney opened his mouth to argue, except actually he felt great.
"Okay, hold on," Rodney said, and went to put on his tracksuit.
He chased Ronon through the hallways of Atlantis, then showered and shaved and ate a huge breakfast. He stopped by Dr. Kita's lab just to make sure they weren't doing anything unbearably stupid, and then headed back to his room and the Terrarium.
He found John sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine and wearing- "Okay, seriously," Rodney said, crossing his arms, "I know I didn't program that shirt." It was white, with pink and black swirls and a wide, pointed collar. John shrugged, but Rodney wouldn't let it go. "Or those pink boxers. And that parka wasn't red, and that red flannel shirt you were-oh, my God, you have been hacking on my code!"
"Actually," John said, letting the magazine drop to the table, "it's my code. And I'm just changing some colors, no big deal. I like reds. You got a problem with that?"
I love the big question looming at this point: Is John becoming more Johnish, revealing behaviours and preferences he had to conceal before, or is he actually diverging from his source, hacking his code to make himself other?
One of the ideas Coppa repurposes for fandom is Richard Schechner's, who defines characters as sets of behaviours, cut & paste-able like strips of film, which can be translated from stage to stage, story to story, while remaining true to the original. She writes, This decontextualizing of behavior echoes the appropriation and use of existing characters in most fan fiction; in fact, one could define fan fiction as a textual attempt to make certain characters "perform" according to different behavioral strips. Or perhaps the characters who populate fan fiction are themselves the behavioral strips, able to walk out of one story and into another, acting independently of the works of art that brought them into existence. The existence of fan fiction postulates that characters are able to "walk" not only from one artwork into another, but from one genre into another; fan fiction articulates that characters are neither constructed or owned, but have, to use Schechner's phrase, a life of their own not dependent on any original "through or "source." (p. 230)
Here, the behavioural strip that is John Sheppard exists as the t.v. character, the story's John and the VR John, like a set of nesting dolls, or, if you reject the notion that one's got more weight than the next, a set of quantum doubles.
Rodney is hunting for the ingredients that will produce the performance he's expecting. So far, he hasn't given much thought to the ways in which we're influenced (oppressed, liberated, outright altered) by our immediate surroundings.
John looked good in pink. Something about the color made his hair seem blacker and brought out the green in his eyes. "No, I suppose not. It's just, I just don't want you getting corrupted," and John slouched back in his chair and drawled, "Rodney, this concern for my innocence, it's very charming." Rodney fidgeted and cleared his throat and was about to suggest they hit the slopes or something-and then he caught sight of what John was reading, and his indignation caught fire again. He'd assumed it was a golf magazine, not-
But that's how we relate to everybody, really: through our own filters. We cobble constructs of them, and hope, desperately, that our perceptions are accurate and we're not in love with figments of our own imaginations.
"The Physical Review?" Rodney spluttered, grabbing for it as John slunk out of his chair and went into the kitchen. "How did you get this? Why would you even want it?"
John groaned and slumped back against the counter. "Don't have a cow, Rodney, all right? Just, I want to know what's going on, so I got the program to suck in some external data feeds and render them as-" and Rodney looked around suddenly and saw the piles of newspapers, magazines, books and-
"Changing some colors, he says! No big deal, he says!"
John had the grace to look guilty, but was clearly going down swinging. "Oh, so you're the only one who gets to improve me? I don't get to improve me?"
"I'm not trying to improve you!" Rodney shouted. "I'm just trying to-" make you more like John Sheppard, except some deep instinct told him to bite his tongue. He took a breath and crossed his arms. "Hmph. And I was going to build you a racetrack."
John stayed still, but his hair perked with interest. "Racetrack?"
Hi, John's sentient hair! Hi, hi!
Also: cyborg!John yay! You guys, this is so cool. The same week I'm busy writing up my DVD commentary, Transformative Works and Cultures releases its first issue, which includes an essay by Madeline Ashby that's chock full of cyborg theory. Just ... grok this:The body is a discursive crossroads formed and coded by multiple authors and perspectives on both the real and figurative levels. Every child is a collaborative work whose (genetic) code was written by two individuals (and whose psychological programming is the product of an unknown number of contributors), and adults slowly take on the ability to "edit" speech, appearance, and mannerisms for various social contexts. The body and its associated values are similarly coded, interpreted, and otherwise made the subject and product of discourse. Cyberpunk fiction makes this reading of the body clear: The cyborgs that populate William Gibson's novels or Mamoru Oshii's films are able to rewrite their memories, modify their bodies, and treat themselves as works in progress. They are bodies of work that "are not slaves to master discourses but emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context" (Halberstam and Livingston 1996:2).
Here is John self-actualizing. Liberated from the constraints of the Air Force, among other things, John is free to become more himself. He can wear pink paisley! And red flannel and Rodney! He's like the cyborgs in Ashby's essay in that he's not only educating and cultivating the self who already exists, he's retroloading: dumping in the math and physics expertise that he didn't have before, and filling in memory gaps (or not) by guessing was important and formative and what wasn't.
Ashby continues,At these nodes are both the cyborgified characters of fan fiction and the cyborg authors who act as their puppet masters. If the body is a text that can be read, it can also be copied, interpreted, edited, and rewritten. This is the same for the fictional body, or the body that enacts fiction. The writing of the body and the self-discovery of the body through writing are phenomena that both Goldberg and Hobb (but especially Goldberg) criticize within fan fiction.
Rodney, John's "writer," is also a cyborg. Rodney discovers crucial things about himself through writing the John simulation-by which I mean the environment, not just the code for cyberJohn himself. The environment interacts with, changes and is for both of them. Eventually, Rodney uses it to literally rewrite his own life.
Rodney reminded himself, as he stood out in the whipping wind watching the red Formula 1 racecar take another hairpin curve, that John wasn't really alive, so he couldn't actually be killed. It was why he'd given John a ski slope, a half-pipe, a CH-47 Chinook: here, at least, he could let John indulge his stupidest, most daredevilish desires without worrying too much. In fact, he was more concerned about John's new hobby of hacking, which could result in real damage; anything else could probably be solved with a reboot.
The car eventually slid to a stop, and John emerged, in his unnecessary helmet and unnecessary goggles, grinning like a loon. His smile lasted the rest of the day and grew increasingly goofy. John was dazed, happy, over-exhausted and over-adrenalized, and so while, yes, Rodney was able to beat him at chess (several times), there wasn't a lot of satisfaction in it: John hardly seemed to mind. Later, Rodney saw, to his surprise, that John had fallen asleep on the sofa, face mashed against the cushions and still smiling.
Apparently the program did simulate sleep, and-well, it was very convincing. God, John was so beautiful, and Rodney wanted-Christ, to touch him, to smooth the pale red flannel across his shoulders, to cup his ass through the soft gray sweatpants he was wearing. But there was a line, even in something as crazy as this, and so Rodney took a deep breath and moved away. He almost went back to his room in Atlantis, except he really did sleep so much better here, so he went into John's bedroom instead.
It was familiarly neat, the Johnny Cash poster nailed to the cabin wall over the large bed, with its red (blue; Rodney could have sworn they'd been blue) flannel sheets and the heavy pile of red and green plaid blankets. John's guitar was in one corner, his surfboard (Rodney had not yet gotten around to building the ocean plug-in John had asked for) in the other. Rodney pulled a blanket off the bed and draped it over John, then got himself a blanket from the closet: he figured it was okay to crash out on a guy's bed, but less okay to actually pull back the covers and get in. He kicked off his shoes and pants, turned out the light, and stretched out, pulling the blanket tight around his shoulders, and...hm, something wasn't right about this.
The thing was, he'd spent a lot of time in Sheppard's tiny room on Atlantis, which had served as their team headquarters, rec room, infirmary and personal confessional. Rodney had sat on Sheppard's bed, sprawled out on it, played video games on it and...this wasn't, there was...it didn't smell right. It didn't smell like Sheppard, and Rodney hadn't until that very moment realized that Sheppard had a smell, but he did, and John didn't smell the same. It was probably some combination of personal hygiene products: hair gel and deodorant and aftershave, combined with darker, more medicinal smells. In the dark, it was easy to conjure them up: some sort of antiseptic, chlorhexidine, maybe, and something else more menthol-y camphor-y like Ben-gay, because Sheppard probably had pulled muscles throwing himself over balconies and out of windows and all that. Under that: fear, maybe. A little. He'd seen Sheppard afraid, knew that Sheppard was more afraid than he let on, hiding it behind lopsided smiles. There was a bitterness to Sheppard too, and Rodney remembered his dark moods, his almost paranoid eyes-and missed him all over again; God, missed him so, so, so much.
This is such a wonderful, crucial paragraph. Smell and memory are so deeply connected. He's foiled, dead-ended, by this one intensely physiological, realspace thing that all his coding genius just can't overcome.
"Sleep well?" John was standing at the window, looking out over the mountain, the fluffy white trees. He was bleary-eyed and stubbled, lazy, head low over a steaming mug.
"Yes; yes, I did." Rodney hid his embarrassment by pouring himself a cup of coffee with rather more fuss than was strictly necessary. "I took your bed, I hope you don't mind-"
John flapped an idle hand. "Nah. I was really wiped," and Rodney shot him a swift look, but he seemed sincere about it, as if he really had been tired, as if he really had slept. "I mean, that was great, driving, but it really knocked me out: the intense focus. I slept..." and Rodney's hand tightened on the mug hard enough to break it, like the dead his mind supplied; I slept like the-"...really well," John finished on a yawn.
Rodney couldn't keep the edge out of his voice, couldn't stop the sugar spoon clattering to the countertop. "You said you didn't have to sleep."
John didn't seem offended. "But I do it anyway," he said with a faint smile. "Some nights better than others. It's a good bed, though, huh? A lot bigger than we're used to," and before Rodney could even begin to formulate a reply to that, John added, "You know, you could always sleep at Sam's; whatever happened with you and Sam?"
Rodney just stared in dumb incomprehension: Sam? There was a familiar, teasing undertone to John's voice; was John talking about Carter? Then Rodney understood and grinned his relief. "You mean Samantha! Samantha, the simulation." He laughed and waved a hand. "Oh, I deleted her. God. Ages ago."
"Oh." John turned his head, but Rodney still saw some unrecognizable emotion momentarily take hold of his face. "Huh." Rodney cringed with guilt: was that in bad taste, to talk about deleting simulations, being that John was a simulation? Surely John had to know that he wasn't in the same league as the others, not even Samantha, who at her prime had only taken up maybe one tenth of the drive. Or was it that-
"Is it the lesbians?" Rodney blurted, because of course John had liked the lesbians. "Because-okay, yes, I deleted them, but I'm sure I can get them back. Or make you something as good." He realized with sudden dread that his perfect habitat had all the conveniences except female companionship; the Terrarium was seriously lacking in hot babes. His mind was already running through solutions: sexy neighbor? brothel down the road? sex bot?-oh, God, would it be too recursive to give John his own virtual reality scenario?-when John said, in a strange voice, "It's not the lesbians, Rodney."
"Right, no," Rodney said, more to himself than to John, "and besides, you like brunettes."
John slammed his coffee down. "Rodney," and wow, that was the voice Sheppard used when he wanted Rodney to shut the hell up and pay attention. "I wasn't asking for me; I was asking for you, because as your Designated Imaginary Friend, it's my job to tell you that you're wound pretty tight, and it might help you to get laid now and then." John crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows significantly: Capische? "As for me, I'm enjoying the time to myself, and if you want to get me hot-well, I wouldn't say no to that beach scenario. 80 degrees, and don't skimp on the waves."
The sexual tension at this point is a low, almost subsonic rumble. Speranza never resorts to a single one of the clichés that usually accompany its build-up. I can feel the change in air pressure, but I can scarcely pinpoint how she did it. It's in the questions John asks that are really fishing for answers to entirely different questions, and in his feinting swings from intense to off-handed.
Part 3