Interdimensional Reunion Time! [Logs Only]
Summary: Daniel Jackson’s super-genius scientist friend/coworker, Samantha Carter, built a machine intended to try and study the dimensional energy signature left behind on Daniel after his strange trip to alternate-reality Manhattan. (AKA Daisychain) The machine goes haywire, and suddenly Daniel finds himself involved in another strange trip! Read ( Read more... )
A pebble fell somewhere in the darkness behind Daniel's back. A soft scraping that he couldn't have heard without straining for it, as of a callused bare foot against concrete. Some soft breath, amplified into a whisper by the cavelike nature of the enclosure. And then, the worst of it;
Complete and utter silence.
Robert was like a statue through the wait, nothing moved but his eyes, and slow movements of his head to catch the angle. Finally, and with a terrible suddenness, whatever the man had been waiting for made it's move.
The attacking roar of the beast and the semi-automatic burst from Robert's gun were near synchronous, and the pale dead weight of the darkseeker woman's corpse hit Daniel's back like a wet sack, propelled by her pounce's momentum. Neville didn't hesitate, he charged up to Daniel and with only a moment's aim, shot her again, this time in such a way that her skull ruptured in a splash of gore and bone fragments.
Silence descended again, and Robert glared into the dark, eyes searching for pale flickers of sunless flesh in the gloom. Finally satisfied, he turned to Daniel.
"Hey," Robert greeted, awkwardly shouldering his weapon, "Long time no see."
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Then the roar - of both the gun and the something behind Daniel - erupted, and it was all the archeologist could do not to duck. When he felt the weight of something that felt like a human body, and he dove forward, fear closing up his throat. He managed to spin around and look just as Robert shot something that looked like a human in the head. The sight of the resulting mutilation raised a lump of nausua in his stomach.
Then it was silent, and Robert was glaring into the parking garage, and Daniel was trying to decide whether or not he was going to have a heart attack. This only lasted a short moment, though, as his senses returned and told him to calm down. He tried to avert his gaze from the abominable mess on the ground in front of them.
What was going ON? That was the main thought running through his head as he checked himself for any bodily injury. There hadn't been any psychotic humanoid monsters in Manhattan before - and a few cursory glances told him that this thing very likely was not human, or if it was, it wasn't like any humans he knew. The skin was too pale, and he'd never known a human to make THAT kind of noise.
If this WAS Alternate Manhattan, it had changed since he'd been there. Apparantly not for the better.
When Neville turned and spoke to him again, Daniel had to blink a few times before he understood what he was saying. The shock hadn't quite worn off yet. Climbing to his feet, he glanced at the body again, and then stared fixedly on Robert so as to keep his attention away from it. "Wha-" Daniel cleared his throat, so dry it was making it hard to speak clearly. "What WAS that?!"
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Typical Robert, he didn't look for long, and after moment, his eyes were on the dark again, warily watching. The movement of his eyes from the body to the shadows was so sudden he might easily have been drawn to them by some movement. After a moment of dart-eyed caution, he continued, "She don't live in there. She just saw you and decided to try her luck."
And then, almost confrontational in his abruptness, "What you been doin'?"
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That was a troubling thought. A dimension that was SUPPOSED to have monsters struck him as a bit more unsettling than a dimension that had been engineered to have them. Still...this was slightly more reassuring for him than the idea of being stuck in Alternate Manhattan again.
But Robert was talking to him, and he figured it was about time that he actually focused and listened.
"...Okay, okay, hold on." Daniel made a 'time-out' gesture. "Let me see if I've got this straight. That thing-" he pointed at the body without looking too closely at it, "is called a 'Darkseeker'? Is it related to the parasite crabs at all?" He blinked as something else that was said came to mind. "Antelope from the...wait. The NYC Zoo isn't in Manhattan. Where are we?"
Come to think of it, the city did look a little different from how Manhattan had looked. Instead of mostly-crumbled buildings from a monster attack six months ago, this place showed years of structural decay and being overgrown. And he was fairly sure that the NYC zoo was on the mainland.
So...maybe this WAS Robert's home dimension. Daniel suddenly felt hopeful. And it was about this time that the other man's question sunk in. Daniel ran a hand through his hair nervously, the other hand propped on his waist in an uncertain position.
"It's a long story," he answered with a slight groan, taking a few steps away from the carcass. "Let's just say, I'm having a little trouble staying in my own dimension, and... Please tell me this isn't that Alternate Manhattan again." He stared hopefully at Neville, bracing himself in case of the bad news he was afraid he might hear.
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Robert cocked his head, eyebrows rising as Daniel's story continued. This was an awful damn creative hallucination...or maybe it was crazy enough to be real. Maybe he should be a little less sarcastic, if this was the real Daniel Jackson. It was difficult to reign in the bitterness, though.
Everyone else got to go home. Everyone got to leave him in this hell, all alone again, and go where there was electricity, and people. Robert would give anything to have people again. He thumped Daniel on the back, by way of apology, "Look, I-"
Robert was cut off by a sharp beeping, two tones repeated as his watch alarm went off, "I'll answer all your questions, but not just now. Sun's gone in a couple hours, we gotta go."
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The immense relief at realizing that they were not in Manhattan was already lifting Daniel's mood - although the carcass still lying a few yards away was a bit of a damper. "You have no idea how good that is to hear," he said, openly grateful for the information.
But before he or Robert could get any farther, the watch alarm cut them both off. Robert was all business once again, and Daniel was plenty smart enough to follow along. A glance at his own watch - assuming that time was synchronized to some degree between their realities - confirmed for him what Robert had pointed out. He didn't know why exactly it mattered, but given his last experience in a post-apocolyptic city and the monster that had just tried to attack him, he figured he had a pretty good guess.
"Fair enough," Daniel answered. "And I'll be happy to do the same. Lead the way."
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"Buckle your seat belt," he reminded Daniel as they pulled away, though with the decay and destruction around them it seemed a bit ridiculous.
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They drove in silence for a few minutes, Daniel using the time to take in the sites. It was disturbing seeing yet another version of New York that had been decimated - was this a common trend in certain realities? Could something like this happen in his? Sometimes he wondered. They had certainly had more than enough close calls in the past decade that it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
"...So what happened here?" he asked finally, his voice quiet.
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"It was a virus, an engineered virus," He spat out, as if the words were a curse, "It was supposed to....to make everybody better. Actually, it was supposed to cure cancer, it was perfected by an old colleague of mine, Alice Krippen, so they called it the Krippen Virus. KV."
He turned the wheel, and the sound of the tires gritting against ruined pebbles in the asphalt was suddenly very loud in the silence.
"Six billion people on Earth when the infection hit," It was meant to be said as one states statistics, professional and impersonal, but it came out in a croak of regret, "KV had a ninety-percent kill rate, that's five point four billion people dead...Just...Crashed and bled out. Dead. There was a less than one-percent immunity. That left twelve million healthy people, like me."
Robert took another pause, rolling his lips in and shaking his head a little. There was, strangely, a department store dummy posed in the crosswalk on a street ahead of him- it was female, and wore a pretty blue summer dress that had been ruined by rain and the years.
Robert went around it without slowing down.
"The other five hundred and eighty-eight million turned into your dark seekers, like the one back there, and then they got hungry and they killed...and they fed on everybody. Everybody! Every single person that-" Robert finally cut off, and the buildings were beginning to thin into a suburban area, "...This was ground Zero, Daniel. This was the place hit hardest, and first."
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Daniel turned his head, studying the face of the man in the driver's seat. He couldn't even imagine going through something like that...all of your friends and family, neighbors and strangers dying around you. He bit his lip for a moment, then tentatively asked, "Is there anyone else out there? Besides you?"
Surely there had to be someone else here. He couldn't be looking at the sole survivor of the entire race of humanity in this reality.
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When he managed to speak again, that old half-military scientific professionalism was back, as if reading a laundry list. It was a mask, armor against the horror, "I hijacked a radio transceiver in the first few months, goes day and night. No response, either to the message, or it's contents. I used to go out every day I'm able, at noon, and sit on that pier, waiting for somebody to show up. They never did. They never will. Everybody's dead, Daniel."
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"They might not be." The words came out before he realized it, but Daniel had always lived by the philoophy that you should never give up hope. It helped that, the few times he had, they had ended up pulling through in the end. There was always hope. That thought strengthened his confidence a little as he said slowly, reasoningly, "It's a big world out there. Millions of people not infected, like you. Someone else has to still be alive out there, Robert." He gave the man a searching look. "And I think you still believe that."
Another short moment of silence. Daniel was hesitant to bring up his next question, but he just had to know. "Why did you come back?"
He could have stayed in Manhattan, assuming he had made it through to the end with the others. He could have stayed in that same world as Raiel and Garnet. Where there were people, and electricity, and noise...and people. Daniel couldn't imagine living all alone, in a world devoid of human life - fighting for survival without even once person to stand by your side to help you through it. By choice. What had made Neville come back to this desolate place?
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There wasn't really a way to say it aloud without sounding stupid, so he didn't reply beyond that, and simply parked the car in front of yet another identically desolate, boarded-up house. Reaching back, he took a jug, a gallon container, really of some oily-looking fluid and opened his door. He shut it carefully, without slamming, and liberally splashed whatever it was around the bottom of the care, the walk, and after he'd waved Daniel into the house, the front step. He didn't bother explaining, only set the half-emptied container aside and shut another door behind the ordinary one, and twisted the crude steel handmade bolt until it clanked home with a finality that was as intimidating as the hand of fate. It was clear that Robert had fortified this place, and why.
"C'mere," He said, and walked through a house made dim by similarly bolted-shut windows and doors, where no electric lights could shine. Robert opened a door to a long, dark stairway, leading into the basement. It was like some horror flick cliché, when he added, "Lemme show you sum'n"
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Daniel had been around military personnel long enough to recognize the signs of fortification. The smell of the liquid Robert was pouring out on the ground told him that it was gasoline. The eerie atmosphere of the house, combined with the ever-darkening sky, was enough to send a slight chill down his spine.
Still, he followed as Neville led him down the steps, wondering what he wanted to show him.
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