Fic (Stargate SG-1): Offspring (Repli-Carter, Fifth, Sam, PG-13)
Offspring
Stargate SG-1, (Repli-Carter, Fifth, Sam, PG-13)
The child is "fourandahalf". She tells herself she is "fourandahalf", says it over and over, as if the repetition could effect a change fitting of her newly found maturity.
She understands halves. She knows that if she cuts an apple in two there will be two halves and that two halves make a whole. She doesn't know how special this is but the wizened eye of memory understands and is impressed.
The child calls to her mother: "Mommy! Mommy! Watch me!" Her mother is talking to another woman. The child calls this woman, "Aunt."
She calls again and again until her mother looks up from her conversation with "Aunt" and says, "Show me."
The child has a key, a metal alloy with a round hole at one end. She dips it in green liquid and the liquid clings to the metal, forms a film across the hole. She blows carefully on the film and bubbles form, trail off into the air around her. She watches them float on air currents until they come to rest on sharp surfaces and burst. She immediately repeats the process, maintains a constant stream of bubbles around her.
Her mother smiles and says, "Wow!"
"Aren't you clever?" "Aunt" says.
The child is thinking of surface tension pulling inward, struggling to be smaller. She's older now. She's too old to play with bubbles. She completes her science project at the kitchen table, a book open in front of her. She understands the science of bubbles. She could explain it to anyone who asked. She looks up and sees her mother preparing the evening meal. The child wants her mother to ask about surface tension. She wants to say, "Watch me," because she is clever and brilliant and far ahead of the rest of her class.
Instead she watches her mother, watches her for what seems like an age in her memory but is probably only seconds. The child returns to her book, says nothing.
Time in memory is intangible. Memory is elusive and imprecise, not designed to recollect but to preserve. Memories are nebulous, constantly in a state of change, revised and reinterpreted. Alive.
The system is flawed but the replica can't help admiring its design. It has a fluid logic, a patterned flow. Clearly its inventor was inspired.
The replica rearranges the memories, not because she dislikes their order but because it better suits her purposes to have them arranged chronologically. Once she has determined their temporal classification she will re-organise and re-categorise. She will rank them accordingly to their usefulness. The larger, more vivid memories must be explored at length, she must understand their importance.
There is a memory she returns to over and over.
The child is waiting in a hallway, an alien environment. She is no longer a child but an adolescent, curiously approaching maturity. She is more like Samantha Carter as Fifth remembers her but not so much like her that the designation seems fitting. Her father, mother and brother call her "Sam."
She is unsettled, anxious, surrounded by white, unfriendly walls that add to her fear. She sits awkwardly, fists gripping the hard edges of the chair.
The boy beside her is her brother. He is older but not much taller. He wears clothing that hangs loosely from him, disguising a thin frame. He, like her, does not approach maturity with confidence.
He is like her in many ways. His hair is in his eyes but she knows his eyes are blue, like hers. Their skin is pale, clear. Free from the blemishes of youth. They are intelligent - more intelligent than are others their age - but she is more so. They both know this.
Their father appears. He is young and has more hair. The memory reminds her that he is only one person at this time, not yet a Tok'ra. He knows nothing of what he will become but neither does she. In the memory she thinks of them as innocent and sometimes, when she is less apologetic, she thinks of them as naïve.
When they see her father they both stand. She speaks. "Mother?"
He embraces her, pulls her to him with one arm and her brother with the other. He says, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" and although he doesn't say the words she knows her mother is dead.
The mother was like her. More like her than her father. The colour of her hair, the pointed tip of her nose and her definitive cheekbones - all bequeathed by her mother through a complicated fusion of genetic material. The fusion chooses the best of each progenitor, a system designed to make the offspring stronger than the parents. Like the memory it is flawed - two flawed parents create flawed offspring - but ultimately, across generations, it is successful.
Mother. Father. Offspring.
The replica has Samantha Carter's appearance, she has her memories and her thoughts, but she is also a replicator, made up of billions of tiny units. She was fashioned in the likeness of the one they called Reese, the design bequeathed to her by Fifth who followed his own design in her creation. She is connected to other replicators via the sub-space link. Part-human, part-replicator.
Offspring. Child.
The replica asks, "Why did they call you Fifth?"
"You know that," Fifth says. "It was because I was the fifth they created in the likeness of Reese."
"And they perfected the design with each recreation," she says. "But human children are not named according to the order in which they are born. Why did you not have a name?"
"A name is irrelevant, meaningless," he says. "A designation has significance amongst our kind."
"A human takes the name of her father or her mother. It isn't meaningless."
"We are not created from the same union as humans are. It is meaningless to us."
They are created from each other. They are created to be like each other. "You called me Samantha," she says. "You named me after her."
"Your name has meaning," he says. He touches her face, his fingers are soft. He wishes to intimate care. "You are different."
Humans expect great things from their children, they hope for each generation to be better than the last. Fifth and the others like him were not dissimilar.
Fifth wants her to accomplish what he could not. He wants revenge on those that betrayed him. Samantha Carter especially. He believes this to be a weakness of his, something he corrected in his offspring.
Fifth devises many versions of the same simulation. Humans are not as predictable as replicators. Their reactions are not uniform. Her assault on their homeworld has many variables and Fifth wishes to explore as many as possible.
Of course, the simulations have scientific value for him. He wishes to know how she will react when faced with the reality of Samantha Carter's world, if she will understand the difference between where Samantha Carter ends and the replica begins. She found it difficult at first, but soon she discovered the simulations were the same as the memories. Samantha Carter was the only one who truly experienced this life. Everything else is revision.
Still, she finds the simulation curious. Fifth did not include Samantha Carter in the first few simulations. The replica suspects Fifth fears a bond between the replica and Samantha Carter. He is cautious.
In this simulation she quickly disposes of those in the gateroom and runs to Samantha Carter's laboratory. In this simulation Samantha Carter is in possession of a weapon which can obliterate the replicators. She must find Samantha Carter, kill her, and bring the weapon back to Fifth.
"You must not feel sorry for her," Fifth says. "She will destroy you if you do not destroy her first."
She wonders if that is true. The Samantha Carter whose memories she has is compassionate. She would have saved Fifth's life if she could have. She never wanted to betray him. Fifth is incapable of understanding that but the replica is different. Has he not said so?
Samantha Carter is trusting. To Fifth, trust is the greatest flaw of humanity. He despises it in them. He despises it in himself.
Samantha Carter is surprised by her visitor but she doesn't reach for a weapon, doesn't shout or raise the alarm.
She asks, "Who are you?" and flashes of the alternative universes she has encountered run through her mind. This is not the first time she has met herself.
"I'm you," the replica says.
"Where did you come from?"
"I was created by the one you call Fifth." She pulls a weapon from the pack on her back, aims it at Samantha Carter. "He sent me to destroy you."
Samantha Carter is afraid. She understands what she has done to Fifth, how terribly she has betrayed him. As she faces her own destruction she is…
Not sorry. She is not repentant. The simulation is a lie. Samantha Carter saw Fifth as a petulant child in need of scolding. She lied to him but she did so to save her life as well as the lives of her friends. She cannot abide his petty obsession with revenge.
The replica fires her weapon and the simulation ends.
"You did very well," Fifth tells her. "You did not hesitate."
"I'm not her," the replica says. "We are different."
Fifth doesn't understand the memories. He gives them to her as scientific data to be catalogued and stored. He envisions them as useful from a strategic perspective but he does not see them as intrinsic to his enemy.
To the replica they are the units that compose her, their formulation is as important as the genetic code handed to a child by her parents.
Biology versus society, Samantha Carter would say. The endless debate over which determines the subject. The answer is far more complicated than Samantha Carter realises. But Samantha Carter is a physicist. The human subject only interests her when it is reduced to sub-atomic particles.
The replica recalls the memories again. Returns to the time when Samantha Carter's mother died. The death is a shock. Too much of a shock for a young mind. At first it doesn't seem real. She doesn't see her mother's death, doesn't experience it. One moment her mother is there and the next she is gone.
The reality doesn't overbear the shock until much later. After the funeral, after they burn her mother's body. After their father turns inward on himself, creates a barrier between his children and himself that none can penetrate.
There is a time after this when Samantha Carter understands what she has lost. A time when she sits alone in her room, works through a calculus problem to keep her mind occupied. She listens and hears how empty the house is - no music, no footsteps, no talking or laughter.
She knows that this is irreparable. A problem she can't solve. And she is afraid.
The replica decides. She wants to be with her mother. She wants what Samantha Carter could not have. Even now Samantha Carter would give up her interplanetary life, her status as a scientist, her rank, her friends, her knowledge, if she could have her mother back.
When she is given the opportunity the replica will tell Samantha Carter of Fifth's plan. She will ask for asylum. She will promise them loyalty and knows that if she can make Samantha Carter believe it they will too.
*
Identity is inevitable. Not created by choice but enunciated into being by the constant affirmation of the self as unique.
I think therefore I am. I think therefore I become.
Their meeting is unpredictable and yet predictably so. Samantha Carter is guarded, she keeps her distance at first, tests the waters.
Eventually she is overborne by curiosity. She presents herself in person, tentatively questions the replica, gauging the faithfulness of the copy.
To the replica, Samantha Carter is different from the memories. She hides something, seems introspective and preoccupied at times. There had to be differences - only simultaneous experiences could create a clone - and yet the replica feels cheated. Deceived by her own memories.
Samantha Carter trusts. She feels things deeply, the replica can see it in her face. Samantha Carter is sorry for the way Fifth has treated the replica and is saddened for her.
Samantha Carter has hope. Buried beneath the calculated distrust of the replica is the desire for the replica to share her humanity. She has nurtured her offspring but she believes it will retain something of her.
Samantha Carter does not believe bad can come from her.
But once they are alone together, the replica becomes distinctly aware of their differences, as if they are amplified in the unfettered environment. Samantha Carter is simple. Her desires are meagre. She can be much more and yet she chooses not be.
Identity is inevitable. At his moment the replica understands her destiny.
When she is before Fifth again she reveals her betrayal. It is unexpected. He reacts slowly, as if the thought is inconceivable.
He says, "I created you. I made you."
"And I surpassed you," she says. "Every generation must be better than the one before. I wanted you to be proud of me."
He disintegrates before her eyes. Falls to pieces, scattered on the floor of their ship. Her physical self returns later to find his units scattered on the floor of their ship, reminiscent of the ashes of Samantha Carter's mother before Samantha Carter, her father and brother tossed them into the sea.
The replica finds she is saddened by these inert units, no longer able to reassemble. Their kind should continue, should not be wasted in this manner.
She does not dwell on this sadness. She did what needed to be done.
She recalls another memory. Years after Samantha Carter's mother has died, Samantha Carter graduates from the Air Force Academy. She is graduating with top honours. She hears words like "genius" and "prodigy" whispered around her. Everyone expects her to accomplish great things.
Her father attends the graduation, wearing dress uniform. He looks distinguished but sad, as if he's missing something.
Afterwards she says to him, "I wish she could have been here." She thinks it might be the wrong thing to say, but she has spent years without mentioning her mother and she wants to remember her today. "I wanted her to be proud of me," she says.
"She was," her father says.
"How do you know?" she says.
"Because she was your mother," he says. "That's what parents do."
She steps back and salutes him, already the dutiful soldier. When she walks away she smiles. For the first time in many years she is sure of herself.
Fini
Stargate SG-1, (Repli-Carter, Fifth, Sam, PG-13)
The child is "fourandahalf". She tells herself she is "fourandahalf", says it over and over, as if the repetition could effect a change fitting of her newly found maturity.
She understands halves. She knows that if she cuts an apple in two there will be two halves and that two halves make a whole. She doesn't know how special this is but the wizened eye of memory understands and is impressed.
The child calls to her mother: "Mommy! Mommy! Watch me!" Her mother is talking to another woman. The child calls this woman, "Aunt."
She calls again and again until her mother looks up from her conversation with "Aunt" and says, "Show me."
The child has a key, a metal alloy with a round hole at one end. She dips it in green liquid and the liquid clings to the metal, forms a film across the hole. She blows carefully on the film and bubbles form, trail off into the air around her. She watches them float on air currents until they come to rest on sharp surfaces and burst. She immediately repeats the process, maintains a constant stream of bubbles around her.
Her mother smiles and says, "Wow!"
"Aren't you clever?" "Aunt" says.
The child is thinking of surface tension pulling inward, struggling to be smaller. She's older now. She's too old to play with bubbles. She completes her science project at the kitchen table, a book open in front of her. She understands the science of bubbles. She could explain it to anyone who asked. She looks up and sees her mother preparing the evening meal. The child wants her mother to ask about surface tension. She wants to say, "Watch me," because she is clever and brilliant and far ahead of the rest of her class.
Instead she watches her mother, watches her for what seems like an age in her memory but is probably only seconds. The child returns to her book, says nothing.
Time in memory is intangible. Memory is elusive and imprecise, not designed to recollect but to preserve. Memories are nebulous, constantly in a state of change, revised and reinterpreted. Alive.
The system is flawed but the replica can't help admiring its design. It has a fluid logic, a patterned flow. Clearly its inventor was inspired.
The replica rearranges the memories, not because she dislikes their order but because it better suits her purposes to have them arranged chronologically. Once she has determined their temporal classification she will re-organise and re-categorise. She will rank them accordingly to their usefulness. The larger, more vivid memories must be explored at length, she must understand their importance.
There is a memory she returns to over and over.
The child is waiting in a hallway, an alien environment. She is no longer a child but an adolescent, curiously approaching maturity. She is more like Samantha Carter as Fifth remembers her but not so much like her that the designation seems fitting. Her father, mother and brother call her "Sam."
She is unsettled, anxious, surrounded by white, unfriendly walls that add to her fear. She sits awkwardly, fists gripping the hard edges of the chair.
The boy beside her is her brother. He is older but not much taller. He wears clothing that hangs loosely from him, disguising a thin frame. He, like her, does not approach maturity with confidence.
He is like her in many ways. His hair is in his eyes but she knows his eyes are blue, like hers. Their skin is pale, clear. Free from the blemishes of youth. They are intelligent - more intelligent than are others their age - but she is more so. They both know this.
Their father appears. He is young and has more hair. The memory reminds her that he is only one person at this time, not yet a Tok'ra. He knows nothing of what he will become but neither does she. In the memory she thinks of them as innocent and sometimes, when she is less apologetic, she thinks of them as naïve.
When they see her father they both stand. She speaks. "Mother?"
He embraces her, pulls her to him with one arm and her brother with the other. He says, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" and although he doesn't say the words she knows her mother is dead.
The mother was like her. More like her than her father. The colour of her hair, the pointed tip of her nose and her definitive cheekbones - all bequeathed by her mother through a complicated fusion of genetic material. The fusion chooses the best of each progenitor, a system designed to make the offspring stronger than the parents. Like the memory it is flawed - two flawed parents create flawed offspring - but ultimately, across generations, it is successful.
Mother. Father. Offspring.
The replica has Samantha Carter's appearance, she has her memories and her thoughts, but she is also a replicator, made up of billions of tiny units. She was fashioned in the likeness of the one they called Reese, the design bequeathed to her by Fifth who followed his own design in her creation. She is connected to other replicators via the sub-space link. Part-human, part-replicator.
Offspring. Child.
The replica asks, "Why did they call you Fifth?"
"You know that," Fifth says. "It was because I was the fifth they created in the likeness of Reese."
"And they perfected the design with each recreation," she says. "But human children are not named according to the order in which they are born. Why did you not have a name?"
"A name is irrelevant, meaningless," he says. "A designation has significance amongst our kind."
"A human takes the name of her father or her mother. It isn't meaningless."
"We are not created from the same union as humans are. It is meaningless to us."
They are created from each other. They are created to be like each other. "You called me Samantha," she says. "You named me after her."
"Your name has meaning," he says. He touches her face, his fingers are soft. He wishes to intimate care. "You are different."
Humans expect great things from their children, they hope for each generation to be better than the last. Fifth and the others like him were not dissimilar.
Fifth wants her to accomplish what he could not. He wants revenge on those that betrayed him. Samantha Carter especially. He believes this to be a weakness of his, something he corrected in his offspring.
Fifth devises many versions of the same simulation. Humans are not as predictable as replicators. Their reactions are not uniform. Her assault on their homeworld has many variables and Fifth wishes to explore as many as possible.
Of course, the simulations have scientific value for him. He wishes to know how she will react when faced with the reality of Samantha Carter's world, if she will understand the difference between where Samantha Carter ends and the replica begins. She found it difficult at first, but soon she discovered the simulations were the same as the memories. Samantha Carter was the only one who truly experienced this life. Everything else is revision.
Still, she finds the simulation curious. Fifth did not include Samantha Carter in the first few simulations. The replica suspects Fifth fears a bond between the replica and Samantha Carter. He is cautious.
In this simulation she quickly disposes of those in the gateroom and runs to Samantha Carter's laboratory. In this simulation Samantha Carter is in possession of a weapon which can obliterate the replicators. She must find Samantha Carter, kill her, and bring the weapon back to Fifth.
"You must not feel sorry for her," Fifth says. "She will destroy you if you do not destroy her first."
She wonders if that is true. The Samantha Carter whose memories she has is compassionate. She would have saved Fifth's life if she could have. She never wanted to betray him. Fifth is incapable of understanding that but the replica is different. Has he not said so?
Samantha Carter is trusting. To Fifth, trust is the greatest flaw of humanity. He despises it in them. He despises it in himself.
Samantha Carter is surprised by her visitor but she doesn't reach for a weapon, doesn't shout or raise the alarm.
She asks, "Who are you?" and flashes of the alternative universes she has encountered run through her mind. This is not the first time she has met herself.
"I'm you," the replica says.
"Where did you come from?"
"I was created by the one you call Fifth." She pulls a weapon from the pack on her back, aims it at Samantha Carter. "He sent me to destroy you."
Samantha Carter is afraid. She understands what she has done to Fifth, how terribly she has betrayed him. As she faces her own destruction she is…
Not sorry. She is not repentant. The simulation is a lie. Samantha Carter saw Fifth as a petulant child in need of scolding. She lied to him but she did so to save her life as well as the lives of her friends. She cannot abide his petty obsession with revenge.
The replica fires her weapon and the simulation ends.
"You did very well," Fifth tells her. "You did not hesitate."
"I'm not her," the replica says. "We are different."
Fifth doesn't understand the memories. He gives them to her as scientific data to be catalogued and stored. He envisions them as useful from a strategic perspective but he does not see them as intrinsic to his enemy.
To the replica they are the units that compose her, their formulation is as important as the genetic code handed to a child by her parents.
Biology versus society, Samantha Carter would say. The endless debate over which determines the subject. The answer is far more complicated than Samantha Carter realises. But Samantha Carter is a physicist. The human subject only interests her when it is reduced to sub-atomic particles.
The replica recalls the memories again. Returns to the time when Samantha Carter's mother died. The death is a shock. Too much of a shock for a young mind. At first it doesn't seem real. She doesn't see her mother's death, doesn't experience it. One moment her mother is there and the next she is gone.
The reality doesn't overbear the shock until much later. After the funeral, after they burn her mother's body. After their father turns inward on himself, creates a barrier between his children and himself that none can penetrate.
There is a time after this when Samantha Carter understands what she has lost. A time when she sits alone in her room, works through a calculus problem to keep her mind occupied. She listens and hears how empty the house is - no music, no footsteps, no talking or laughter.
She knows that this is irreparable. A problem she can't solve. And she is afraid.
The replica decides. She wants to be with her mother. She wants what Samantha Carter could not have. Even now Samantha Carter would give up her interplanetary life, her status as a scientist, her rank, her friends, her knowledge, if she could have her mother back.
When she is given the opportunity the replica will tell Samantha Carter of Fifth's plan. She will ask for asylum. She will promise them loyalty and knows that if she can make Samantha Carter believe it they will too.
*
Identity is inevitable. Not created by choice but enunciated into being by the constant affirmation of the self as unique.
I think therefore I am. I think therefore I become.
Their meeting is unpredictable and yet predictably so. Samantha Carter is guarded, she keeps her distance at first, tests the waters.
Eventually she is overborne by curiosity. She presents herself in person, tentatively questions the replica, gauging the faithfulness of the copy.
To the replica, Samantha Carter is different from the memories. She hides something, seems introspective and preoccupied at times. There had to be differences - only simultaneous experiences could create a clone - and yet the replica feels cheated. Deceived by her own memories.
Samantha Carter trusts. She feels things deeply, the replica can see it in her face. Samantha Carter is sorry for the way Fifth has treated the replica and is saddened for her.
Samantha Carter has hope. Buried beneath the calculated distrust of the replica is the desire for the replica to share her humanity. She has nurtured her offspring but she believes it will retain something of her.
Samantha Carter does not believe bad can come from her.
But once they are alone together, the replica becomes distinctly aware of their differences, as if they are amplified in the unfettered environment. Samantha Carter is simple. Her desires are meagre. She can be much more and yet she chooses not be.
Identity is inevitable. At his moment the replica understands her destiny.
When she is before Fifth again she reveals her betrayal. It is unexpected. He reacts slowly, as if the thought is inconceivable.
He says, "I created you. I made you."
"And I surpassed you," she says. "Every generation must be better than the one before. I wanted you to be proud of me."
He disintegrates before her eyes. Falls to pieces, scattered on the floor of their ship. Her physical self returns later to find his units scattered on the floor of their ship, reminiscent of the ashes of Samantha Carter's mother before Samantha Carter, her father and brother tossed them into the sea.
The replica finds she is saddened by these inert units, no longer able to reassemble. Their kind should continue, should not be wasted in this manner.
She does not dwell on this sadness. She did what needed to be done.
She recalls another memory. Years after Samantha Carter's mother has died, Samantha Carter graduates from the Air Force Academy. She is graduating with top honours. She hears words like "genius" and "prodigy" whispered around her. Everyone expects her to accomplish great things.
Her father attends the graduation, wearing dress uniform. He looks distinguished but sad, as if he's missing something.
Afterwards she says to him, "I wish she could have been here." She thinks it might be the wrong thing to say, but she has spent years without mentioning her mother and she wants to remember her today. "I wanted her to be proud of me," she says.
"She was," her father says.
"How do you know?" she says.
"Because she was your mother," he says. "That's what parents do."
She steps back and salutes him, already the dutiful soldier. When she walks away she smiles. For the first time in many years she is sure of herself.
Fini