That Which Is Always Present (3/4)
First exercise for the reader: Suggest a title. Because this is the penultimate part and I'm singularly failing at nominalism.
Part One: Elizabeth
Part Two: John
"You think you're going to be done soon, Doctor McKay?"
Rodney looked up from where the laptop was streaming the last fifty addresses dialed by the DHD, matching them up to those that had entries in the Ancient database. They didn't have the database accessible -- just the index of planetary entries took up most of the laptop's hard drive -- but it might be useful later on, when frustration led them to crazy, nonsensical decisions and whim-following in the hopes of finding the needle in the haystack.
"Don't rush genius, Lieutenant," he said when Patchok looked ready to hover.
Patchok didn't roll his eyes, but he clearly wanted to. Next to him, Ford (¬Ford in Rodney's mental dialogue, a negation of logic embodied and clad in camouflage) grinned and Rodney had to look away, back to the symbols on his screen.
He didn't know how the others were handling it with so little fuss. Elizabeth could play gracious host because she was a diplomat and presumably had training in the art of not getting unsettled. But what was Sheppard's excuse? Or Teyla's? Both of them were rolling with the waves, accepting the arrival of these visitors from another reality with the sort of aplomb with which they greeted every new experience. It was the sort of optimism that got them allies and friends as often as it had them walking into trap after trap and while Rodney didn't think that Sumner's team meant them any harm... how could they stand it?
Being around this Aiden Ford, even if he wasn't their Ford, made him almost physically ill. The air around ¬Ford almost stank of doom, of an inevitable fall, and Rodney didn't know how the others weren't choking on it like he was.
"You don't need genius to know that we're not going to get anything from this DHD," Zelenka called over from where he was perched on one of the empty equipment cases. Hunched and peering over his glasses, Radek looked like a confused owl.
"Yes, well, I'd rather get our full amount of nothing now instead of needing to come back later just to verify its uselessness," Rodney retorted, turning back to his screen. A few of the gate addresses were familiar to him -- planets they'd been to, mostly -- and he knew that Radek was right, but he also knew that he wasn't quite ready to sit in his lab in Atlantis and stare at the screen there yet.
They'd been on M24-G41 for a few hours, long enough for the marines to get a little restless after finishing up the scans Rodney had set them to doing when they'd first arrived. There were two marines with the ATA gene, which meant that they could use PDAs to sweep the area for any power sources or energy readings; the other marines were given Geiger counters to check for radiation. The radioactivity required to destabilize a wormhole at its origin point was massive, so whatever had happened on the other M24-G41 wasn't happening here, but if there were enough ambient particles, then maybe they'd get an idea. It wouldn't be the first time a gate team had had an explosion follow them through a wormhole.
"We're going to have to check in soon, sir," Patchok said. "I'd like to be able to give them a return time."
It was framed politely and agreeably; Patchok had been playing nicely all afternoon -- amenable to the point that Rodney was suspecting that Sheppard had said something to him -- but the slight tone of warning was clear. Pick a time or I will.
Rodney looked at his watch. "Another hour, Lieutenant," he said.
Patchok nodded and turned to walk away, ¬Ford tagging along behind. The two had spent the afternoon chatting amiably, comparing careers and commanding officers and what they thought about Atlantis until Rodney had barked at them to let him work in peace, unable to concentrate any more on his own tasks when ¬Ford was burbling happily about his time in South Carolina before he'd gotten the assignment to Antarctica. They'd moved away, but not far enough for Rodney's straining ears to hear tales of another Atlantis's mission. If Patchok was disturbed -- Rodney was sure that all of the marines knew about Ford, their Ford, even if they'd never met him -- he certainly didn't show it.
"I don't know what you hope to accomplish here, McKay," Radek said from his perch. Radek, too, seemed unfazed, if not necessarily unaffected. "Whatever happened to tear a hole in the curtain between our realities, I don't think it happened on M24-G41. Theirs or ours."
Rodney sighed and rolled his neck. "I don't think so, either," he admitted. "But it's the best we can do in terms of retracing their steps."
As his neck popped loudly -- you'd think Medical would have imported a chiropractor by now -- he looked up. It was late afternoon on this world and the moon was already visible, faint in the blue sky. And then he realized. Snapping his fingers, he stood up quickly, the motion of putting the laptop aside automatic by now.
"Lieutenant Ford?" he called over. ¬Ford turned, along with Patchok. "Could you come here, please?"
¬Ford ambled over, the same helpful grin in place. Rodney forced himself to look at ¬Ford's face and meet his gaze. "What's up, Doc?" ¬Ford asked, pleased with himself for a joke that had gotten old even before they'd left Antarctica.
"Look up at the sky," Rodney instructed, pointing up. "Do you notice anything different from the M23-G41 you were on?"
"How likely is--" Radek began, but Rodney cut him off with a peremptory gesture.
"Lieutenant?" he prompted.
¬Ford was different from their Ford in many ways, even from the Ford from before. He was more serious, presumably the result of spending his time as the subordinate of Sumner, who had no sense of humor, instead of Sheppard, who merely had a bad one. ¬Ford carried himself more like the Marine lieutenants who currently wandered through Atlantis and less like the excited kid who happened to be wearing an officer's uniform. But Rodney hadn't spent the last several hours surreptitiously listening to him without realizing that the two Fords were more alike than they were different. And their Ford, the one who'd been flustered by science and too fond of explosives and so devotedly loyal to Sheppard and maybe (privately, when nobody else could see) had been Rodney's friend.... that Ford had loved the stars. On off-world missions, they had spent hours trying to discern constellations like a cosmic Rorschach test, trying to find the same star from different worlds, arguing about what to name them and whether the constellation was a woman with bared breasts or just a bear. This was not that Ford, but Rodney was willing to bet that ¬Ford counted the suns and moons of each planet he visited just the same.
¬Ford scanned the sky, looking around and turning in a slow circle, then doing it again. "There's a sun missing," he finally said. "Or maybe it was a planet or a really bright star. But there was something right there--" he pointed to a spot in the sky over the stargate. "And it's not here."
Zelenka started muttering in Czech, the sort of annoyed rumble of words that Rodney didn't understand but knew that meant that he was annoyed at a wild guess (that he hadn't made) panning out.
"Can you be more precise?" Rodney asked, gesturing at the stargate. "Stand where you were when you saw it and show us again."
¬Ford trudged over to the stargate, past the collection of boxes and the trolley and the marines standing gate duty on this uninhabited world. He ran up the steps the the gate itself, turned around, and came back down the steps as if he were arriving on the planet. He stopped a few paces from the gate, closed his eyes for a moment, took another step, and then turned. "It was over the second notch," he said, pointing again. The stargate itself had colored plates in low relief at regular intervals.
"Williams!" Rodney called, startling the engineer who had been examining the stargate itself for anomalies. "Get a reasonably accurate positioning on where he's pointing, please?"
Williams put down what he was doing and went to the equipment trunks to pull out what he'd need. Rodney turned back to Radek, who had come to stand next to him.
"Supernova?" Radek asked, not really making it a question. "It would have enough energy to disrupt a wormhole."
Rodney nodded. "And that is roughly in the direction of Atlantis."
Radek cursed in Czech. "Which means that to send them back, we'll have to find another unstable star. We don't even know if the one that sent them here was an innie or an outie."
"An innie or an outie?" Rodney repeated, turning in disbelief.
"You know what I meant," Radek said dismissively, waving his hand and turning to retrieve his laptop.
Rodney did, but that was so not the point. "You spent how many years of research to reduce stellar phenomena to belly buttons?"
He followed Zelenka back to his perch, continuing to talk. "The problem, of course, is going to be sending them back to the right reality. All we can reasonably be sure of is that we can kick them out of this one. There's no saying that we can get them back to their point of origin."
Radek shrugged. "There are no certainties in life. Here? Some chance is better than none at all."
"How very Bohemian of you," Rodney muttered, then went to his own forsaken laptop. "Lieutenant?"
Patchok jogged over. "Sir?"
"We'll be ready to go as soon as Doctor Williams is finished with Lieutenant Ford." He gestured at the equipment cases. "You can pack up now."
Patchok raised an eyebrow. "I can? Why, thank you, sir."
Rodney was pretty sure he'd just been insulted, but Patchok left him before he could say anything else. The lieutenant was already summoning idle marines to collect their cargo.
"Ortilla, bring your squad in to help load the trolley, please?"
A half-hour later, they were back in Atlantis. Rodney left Zelenka and Williams to oversee the safe return of their equipment to the proper labs and went up to Elizabeth's office. After having completely forgotten about the dissonance in the excitement of the supernova, Rodney nearly stumbled as it slammed back into him with the force of a body blow. Sumner and Sheppard were in there with her.
"Good news, I hope?" Elizabeth said, looking up expectantly.
"Well, yes, maybe," Rodney replied, feeling oddly embarrassed before his audience. He didn't know why -- it's not like he'd ever cared what their Sumner had thought of him. "We may have figured out how our visitors got here."
"And?" Sheppard drawled. Next to him, Sumner leaned forward.
"We won't know for certain until we plot out the coordinates and render a model," Rodney began, "but we think Colonel Sumner's team may have opened a wormhole either close to or through a star going supernova. It's established fact that wormholes are affected by planetary gravitation -- for sufficiently large masses -- and large values of stellar energy. What is produced by the blast wave of a supernova would more than account for how they -- you -- ended up here."
"That's wonderful, Rodney," Elizabeth enthused. "This should put us on the road to being able to return Colonel Sumner and his team back home."
Rodney made a face at her optimism.
"You don't think so," Sumner said flatly. Elizabeth's brilliant smile dimmed a bit.
"There's no way to determine what kind of supernova -- and we're taking a leap by assuming that that's what it was -- occurred," Rodney replied, looking at the space between Sheppard and Sumner. "If it was a white dwarf drawing material from another star or simply a massive star imploding under the weight of its own gravity."
"Will that matter?" Sheppard asked. He was sitting more upright than usual, Rodney idly noted. "A star exploding is a star exploding. Right?"
Rodney rolled his eyes and sighed with irritation. "You really did get your aeronautical engineering degrees out of a Cracker Jack box, didn't you?"
"Cut them out of a box of Count Chocula," Sheppard replied. "I'll take that as a 'no.'"
"Take it as a 'we don't know,'" Rodney admitted reluctantly, narrowing his eyes at Sheppard's smug grin. "If we understood precisely how sudden energy fluxes affected wormholes, then we might have a better answer. And no, before you ask, we can't experiment. We don't happen to have a handy list of stars that could pose as likely candidates for going supernova."
"Is there any way we can find one?" Elizabeth asked.
"Or make one?" Sheppard added, looking surprised when everyone turned to him. "What?"
Rodney thanked whatever impulse kept Sheppard from pointing out that Rodney had already obliterated most of a solar system.
"We can try to recalibrate some of our long-range sensors," Rodney said before Sheppard's inner muse could strike again. "Our first area of exploration should be the span between here and M24-G41, which, before you ask, we cannot traverse in a puddle jumper. It would take light years."
"Is this something the Daedalus can help us with?" Elizabeth tapped a key on her keyboard. "It should be back within a month."
Sumner looked uneasy with the prospect of waiting that long, but said nothing.
"I'm sure we can put it to good use," Rodney agreed. "But there's no reason to wait so long to start the search. It's not impossible that the same star that went supernova in Colonel Sumner's reality could yet be intact in ours. If it isn't, we'll keep looking."
Elizabeth nodded. Rodney looked at his watch. "I'll let you get back to work," she said and Rodney nodded, accepting the get-out-of-flail-free card for what it was. He took the back stairs to the transporter, thereby avoiding ¬Ford, and made it down to his lab unmolested.
Williams was already synchronizing his laptop to their mainframe and Zelenka was jabbering away in rapid-fire Czech to Novetny, their resident modeling genius. And, sitting on a stool out of the way, was ¬Ford.
"Doctor Williams and Doctor Zelenka said that I could come down and watch you guys," ¬Ford explained when he noticed Rodney staring. "Is that okay?"
"That's fine," Rodney answered a little too quickly. "Why wouldn't it be fine?"
"Uh, because I seem to weird you out more than I do everyone else around here?" ¬Ford asked by way of reply.
"You don't--" Rodney caught himself in the lie and stopped. "You do. Very much, to be honest. But that's no reason for me to be rude. Please stay. Just, you know, keep out of the way."
"Aye aye, sir!" ¬Ford answered happily.
Rodney cocked an eyebrow because he'd so rarely heard their Ford actually use that phrase. Maybe Sheppard had told him to lay off or something. And then Williams finished syncing the laptop and Novetny nearly tripped over himself leaving the room so that he could start his work, Zelenka trailing behind and still giving instruction.
Rodney sat down at the bench and opened up his own laptop, immediately connecting to the in-house network. He skimmed the subjects of the emails that filled his inbox -- routine bureaucrap, mostly -- and was setting his IM to "Don't Bother Me Unless Something's Exploding -- No, Really, Don't" when ¬Ford spoke again.
"Did the me of this reality just die or something?" ¬Ford asked. "I mean, we kind of noticed that you all look at us like we're ghosts, but... I get different looks, you know?"
Rodney didn't reply, didn't stop typing. He didn't know what to say. Nobody had told him "Don't tell this Ford about our Ford," or anything similar. ¬Ford belonged to another timeline, so there wasn't any chance of the Grandfather Paradox kicking in -- hell, they had a greater chance of cascading entropic failure (a side effect of reality-hopping that he'd intentionally kept quiet about; it wouldn't matter for Sumner or Markham, but if their Ford was alive somewhere, it could affect ¬Ford).
"And, well, this is just going to come out wrong," ¬Ford went on, "but... you -- my you, the one in my reality -- he and I don't really, you know, talk. I'm not sure he'd miss me if I were dead. And I'm guessing it was a little different here or maybe you watched me die or something or.... And I'm sorry if I'm bringing up something you really don't want to talk about. If you want me to go away, I will. "
"It was different here," Rodney finally said, unable to keep pretending that ¬Ford wasn't talking. He didn't turn around, didn't think he could bear the earnest look on ¬Ford's unmarred face. "You -- he -- and I were on Sheppard's off-world team together, along with Teyla. We spent a lot of time together. Not all of it quality time, but enough of it was. I... I don't have a lot of friends -- I'm sure that's true of your Rodney McKay -- and, well, he was one of them. In a mostly-annoying, little-yappy-dog kind of way."
"Oh," ¬Ford said quietly.
"We don't know if our Aiden Ford is dead," Rodney went on, suddenly unable to stop. The pressure had been building and now the words had to escape. "He probably is -- I think Sheppard's the only one who really believes that he isn't. And I'm not sure if I'm hoping Sheppard's right or wishing that he's wrong."
"He did something," ¬Ford realized aloud. "And you can't forgive him."
"I don't know if I can," Rodney admitted. He'd said these things to Heightmeyer and they hadn't made him feel better. They didn't now, either. "I'm not sure how much of it is his fault and how much of it was beyond his control. He wasn't himself the last few times we saw him. He'd changed and if the initial change was an accident, then I'm not sure the rest of it was."
The withdrawal from the Wraith enzyme had nearly killed him. He couldn't have -- wouldn't have -- done it on his own, not without so much help. And that experience had only complicated his own feelings toward Ford, making him both pity his erstwhile teammate and hate him for not being strong enough. Because he knew from Sheppard that Ford had been forced to detox in the Wraith cell and had still gone right back for more as soon as he was able to. Rodney wouldn't deny that he occasionally wished for a return to the Mentat-like state he'd been in while on the enzyme, but he'd always understood that the cost wasn't worth the advantage. Ford... had never seen. Didn't want to see. Didn't care to see. In the junkie that Ford had become, Rodney had always seen the shadow of the good person, the good marine that he'd been. And that left him wondering how much of the scary, psychotic Ford had been lurking in the man he'd called his friend.
"I shouldn't have brought it up," ¬Ford said. "I'm sorry."
"No, no," Rodney said, waving him off even though he was still sitting with his back to ¬Ford. "It must be horrible for you. You show up in a place where everything is the same, except that it isn't, and then on top of that, you find out that your counterpart--"
"Turned out to be the evil twin?" ¬Ford supplied. "Yeah, that kind of sucks."
Rodney turned around, finally, to look at ¬Ford. He looked distressed and Rodney didn't know what to say or to do to make things better. Because whatever Ford had done, it shouldn't be on this young man's head.
"Is there a chance that whatever he did, I'll end up doing?" ¬Ford asked.
"I don't know," Rodney admitted."The places where our timelines aren't the same, that's where this falls. And it really did start with an accident."
¬Ford gave him a wry grin, one that would have looked too old on their Ford. "Doesn't it always?"
Part Four: Teyla
Part One: Elizabeth
Part Two: John
"You think you're going to be done soon, Doctor McKay?"
Rodney looked up from where the laptop was streaming the last fifty addresses dialed by the DHD, matching them up to those that had entries in the Ancient database. They didn't have the database accessible -- just the index of planetary entries took up most of the laptop's hard drive -- but it might be useful later on, when frustration led them to crazy, nonsensical decisions and whim-following in the hopes of finding the needle in the haystack.
"Don't rush genius, Lieutenant," he said when Patchok looked ready to hover.
Patchok didn't roll his eyes, but he clearly wanted to. Next to him, Ford (¬Ford in Rodney's mental dialogue, a negation of logic embodied and clad in camouflage) grinned and Rodney had to look away, back to the symbols on his screen.
He didn't know how the others were handling it with so little fuss. Elizabeth could play gracious host because she was a diplomat and presumably had training in the art of not getting unsettled. But what was Sheppard's excuse? Or Teyla's? Both of them were rolling with the waves, accepting the arrival of these visitors from another reality with the sort of aplomb with which they greeted every new experience. It was the sort of optimism that got them allies and friends as often as it had them walking into trap after trap and while Rodney didn't think that Sumner's team meant them any harm... how could they stand it?
Being around this Aiden Ford, even if he wasn't their Ford, made him almost physically ill. The air around ¬Ford almost stank of doom, of an inevitable fall, and Rodney didn't know how the others weren't choking on it like he was.
"You don't need genius to know that we're not going to get anything from this DHD," Zelenka called over from where he was perched on one of the empty equipment cases. Hunched and peering over his glasses, Radek looked like a confused owl.
"Yes, well, I'd rather get our full amount of nothing now instead of needing to come back later just to verify its uselessness," Rodney retorted, turning back to his screen. A few of the gate addresses were familiar to him -- planets they'd been to, mostly -- and he knew that Radek was right, but he also knew that he wasn't quite ready to sit in his lab in Atlantis and stare at the screen there yet.
They'd been on M24-G41 for a few hours, long enough for the marines to get a little restless after finishing up the scans Rodney had set them to doing when they'd first arrived. There were two marines with the ATA gene, which meant that they could use PDAs to sweep the area for any power sources or energy readings; the other marines were given Geiger counters to check for radiation. The radioactivity required to destabilize a wormhole at its origin point was massive, so whatever had happened on the other M24-G41 wasn't happening here, but if there were enough ambient particles, then maybe they'd get an idea. It wouldn't be the first time a gate team had had an explosion follow them through a wormhole.
"We're going to have to check in soon, sir," Patchok said. "I'd like to be able to give them a return time."
It was framed politely and agreeably; Patchok had been playing nicely all afternoon -- amenable to the point that Rodney was suspecting that Sheppard had said something to him -- but the slight tone of warning was clear. Pick a time or I will.
Rodney looked at his watch. "Another hour, Lieutenant," he said.
Patchok nodded and turned to walk away, ¬Ford tagging along behind. The two had spent the afternoon chatting amiably, comparing careers and commanding officers and what they thought about Atlantis until Rodney had barked at them to let him work in peace, unable to concentrate any more on his own tasks when ¬Ford was burbling happily about his time in South Carolina before he'd gotten the assignment to Antarctica. They'd moved away, but not far enough for Rodney's straining ears to hear tales of another Atlantis's mission. If Patchok was disturbed -- Rodney was sure that all of the marines knew about Ford, their Ford, even if they'd never met him -- he certainly didn't show it.
"I don't know what you hope to accomplish here, McKay," Radek said from his perch. Radek, too, seemed unfazed, if not necessarily unaffected. "Whatever happened to tear a hole in the curtain between our realities, I don't think it happened on M24-G41. Theirs or ours."
Rodney sighed and rolled his neck. "I don't think so, either," he admitted. "But it's the best we can do in terms of retracing their steps."
As his neck popped loudly -- you'd think Medical would have imported a chiropractor by now -- he looked up. It was late afternoon on this world and the moon was already visible, faint in the blue sky. And then he realized. Snapping his fingers, he stood up quickly, the motion of putting the laptop aside automatic by now.
"Lieutenant Ford?" he called over. ¬Ford turned, along with Patchok. "Could you come here, please?"
¬Ford ambled over, the same helpful grin in place. Rodney forced himself to look at ¬Ford's face and meet his gaze. "What's up, Doc?" ¬Ford asked, pleased with himself for a joke that had gotten old even before they'd left Antarctica.
"Look up at the sky," Rodney instructed, pointing up. "Do you notice anything different from the M23-G41 you were on?"
"How likely is--" Radek began, but Rodney cut him off with a peremptory gesture.
"Lieutenant?" he prompted.
¬Ford was different from their Ford in many ways, even from the Ford from before. He was more serious, presumably the result of spending his time as the subordinate of Sumner, who had no sense of humor, instead of Sheppard, who merely had a bad one. ¬Ford carried himself more like the Marine lieutenants who currently wandered through Atlantis and less like the excited kid who happened to be wearing an officer's uniform. But Rodney hadn't spent the last several hours surreptitiously listening to him without realizing that the two Fords were more alike than they were different. And their Ford, the one who'd been flustered by science and too fond of explosives and so devotedly loyal to Sheppard and maybe (privately, when nobody else could see) had been Rodney's friend.... that Ford had loved the stars. On off-world missions, they had spent hours trying to discern constellations like a cosmic Rorschach test, trying to find the same star from different worlds, arguing about what to name them and whether the constellation was a woman with bared breasts or just a bear. This was not that Ford, but Rodney was willing to bet that ¬Ford counted the suns and moons of each planet he visited just the same.
¬Ford scanned the sky, looking around and turning in a slow circle, then doing it again. "There's a sun missing," he finally said. "Or maybe it was a planet or a really bright star. But there was something right there--" he pointed to a spot in the sky over the stargate. "And it's not here."
Zelenka started muttering in Czech, the sort of annoyed rumble of words that Rodney didn't understand but knew that meant that he was annoyed at a wild guess (that he hadn't made) panning out.
"Can you be more precise?" Rodney asked, gesturing at the stargate. "Stand where you were when you saw it and show us again."
¬Ford trudged over to the stargate, past the collection of boxes and the trolley and the marines standing gate duty on this uninhabited world. He ran up the steps the the gate itself, turned around, and came back down the steps as if he were arriving on the planet. He stopped a few paces from the gate, closed his eyes for a moment, took another step, and then turned. "It was over the second notch," he said, pointing again. The stargate itself had colored plates in low relief at regular intervals.
"Williams!" Rodney called, startling the engineer who had been examining the stargate itself for anomalies. "Get a reasonably accurate positioning on where he's pointing, please?"
Williams put down what he was doing and went to the equipment trunks to pull out what he'd need. Rodney turned back to Radek, who had come to stand next to him.
"Supernova?" Radek asked, not really making it a question. "It would have enough energy to disrupt a wormhole."
Rodney nodded. "And that is roughly in the direction of Atlantis."
Radek cursed in Czech. "Which means that to send them back, we'll have to find another unstable star. We don't even know if the one that sent them here was an innie or an outie."
"An innie or an outie?" Rodney repeated, turning in disbelief.
"You know what I meant," Radek said dismissively, waving his hand and turning to retrieve his laptop.
Rodney did, but that was so not the point. "You spent how many years of research to reduce stellar phenomena to belly buttons?"
He followed Zelenka back to his perch, continuing to talk. "The problem, of course, is going to be sending them back to the right reality. All we can reasonably be sure of is that we can kick them out of this one. There's no saying that we can get them back to their point of origin."
Radek shrugged. "There are no certainties in life. Here? Some chance is better than none at all."
"How very Bohemian of you," Rodney muttered, then went to his own forsaken laptop. "Lieutenant?"
Patchok jogged over. "Sir?"
"We'll be ready to go as soon as Doctor Williams is finished with Lieutenant Ford." He gestured at the equipment cases. "You can pack up now."
Patchok raised an eyebrow. "I can? Why, thank you, sir."
Rodney was pretty sure he'd just been insulted, but Patchok left him before he could say anything else. The lieutenant was already summoning idle marines to collect their cargo.
"Ortilla, bring your squad in to help load the trolley, please?"
A half-hour later, they were back in Atlantis. Rodney left Zelenka and Williams to oversee the safe return of their equipment to the proper labs and went up to Elizabeth's office. After having completely forgotten about the dissonance in the excitement of the supernova, Rodney nearly stumbled as it slammed back into him with the force of a body blow. Sumner and Sheppard were in there with her.
"Good news, I hope?" Elizabeth said, looking up expectantly.
"Well, yes, maybe," Rodney replied, feeling oddly embarrassed before his audience. He didn't know why -- it's not like he'd ever cared what their Sumner had thought of him. "We may have figured out how our visitors got here."
"And?" Sheppard drawled. Next to him, Sumner leaned forward.
"We won't know for certain until we plot out the coordinates and render a model," Rodney began, "but we think Colonel Sumner's team may have opened a wormhole either close to or through a star going supernova. It's established fact that wormholes are affected by planetary gravitation -- for sufficiently large masses -- and large values of stellar energy. What is produced by the blast wave of a supernova would more than account for how they -- you -- ended up here."
"That's wonderful, Rodney," Elizabeth enthused. "This should put us on the road to being able to return Colonel Sumner and his team back home."
Rodney made a face at her optimism.
"You don't think so," Sumner said flatly. Elizabeth's brilliant smile dimmed a bit.
"There's no way to determine what kind of supernova -- and we're taking a leap by assuming that that's what it was -- occurred," Rodney replied, looking at the space between Sheppard and Sumner. "If it was a white dwarf drawing material from another star or simply a massive star imploding under the weight of its own gravity."
"Will that matter?" Sheppard asked. He was sitting more upright than usual, Rodney idly noted. "A star exploding is a star exploding. Right?"
Rodney rolled his eyes and sighed with irritation. "You really did get your aeronautical engineering degrees out of a Cracker Jack box, didn't you?"
"Cut them out of a box of Count Chocula," Sheppard replied. "I'll take that as a 'no.'"
"Take it as a 'we don't know,'" Rodney admitted reluctantly, narrowing his eyes at Sheppard's smug grin. "If we understood precisely how sudden energy fluxes affected wormholes, then we might have a better answer. And no, before you ask, we can't experiment. We don't happen to have a handy list of stars that could pose as likely candidates for going supernova."
"Is there any way we can find one?" Elizabeth asked.
"Or make one?" Sheppard added, looking surprised when everyone turned to him. "What?"
Rodney thanked whatever impulse kept Sheppard from pointing out that Rodney had already obliterated most of a solar system.
"We can try to recalibrate some of our long-range sensors," Rodney said before Sheppard's inner muse could strike again. "Our first area of exploration should be the span between here and M24-G41, which, before you ask, we cannot traverse in a puddle jumper. It would take light years."
"Is this something the Daedalus can help us with?" Elizabeth tapped a key on her keyboard. "It should be back within a month."
Sumner looked uneasy with the prospect of waiting that long, but said nothing.
"I'm sure we can put it to good use," Rodney agreed. "But there's no reason to wait so long to start the search. It's not impossible that the same star that went supernova in Colonel Sumner's reality could yet be intact in ours. If it isn't, we'll keep looking."
Elizabeth nodded. Rodney looked at his watch. "I'll let you get back to work," she said and Rodney nodded, accepting the get-out-of-flail-free card for what it was. He took the back stairs to the transporter, thereby avoiding ¬Ford, and made it down to his lab unmolested.
Williams was already synchronizing his laptop to their mainframe and Zelenka was jabbering away in rapid-fire Czech to Novetny, their resident modeling genius. And, sitting on a stool out of the way, was ¬Ford.
"Doctor Williams and Doctor Zelenka said that I could come down and watch you guys," ¬Ford explained when he noticed Rodney staring. "Is that okay?"
"That's fine," Rodney answered a little too quickly. "Why wouldn't it be fine?"
"Uh, because I seem to weird you out more than I do everyone else around here?" ¬Ford asked by way of reply.
"You don't--" Rodney caught himself in the lie and stopped. "You do. Very much, to be honest. But that's no reason for me to be rude. Please stay. Just, you know, keep out of the way."
"Aye aye, sir!" ¬Ford answered happily.
Rodney cocked an eyebrow because he'd so rarely heard their Ford actually use that phrase. Maybe Sheppard had told him to lay off or something. And then Williams finished syncing the laptop and Novetny nearly tripped over himself leaving the room so that he could start his work, Zelenka trailing behind and still giving instruction.
Rodney sat down at the bench and opened up his own laptop, immediately connecting to the in-house network. He skimmed the subjects of the emails that filled his inbox -- routine bureaucrap, mostly -- and was setting his IM to "Don't Bother Me Unless Something's Exploding -- No, Really, Don't" when ¬Ford spoke again.
"Did the me of this reality just die or something?" ¬Ford asked. "I mean, we kind of noticed that you all look at us like we're ghosts, but... I get different looks, you know?"
Rodney didn't reply, didn't stop typing. He didn't know what to say. Nobody had told him "Don't tell this Ford about our Ford," or anything similar. ¬Ford belonged to another timeline, so there wasn't any chance of the Grandfather Paradox kicking in -- hell, they had a greater chance of cascading entropic failure (a side effect of reality-hopping that he'd intentionally kept quiet about; it wouldn't matter for Sumner or Markham, but if their Ford was alive somewhere, it could affect ¬Ford).
"And, well, this is just going to come out wrong," ¬Ford went on, "but... you -- my you, the one in my reality -- he and I don't really, you know, talk. I'm not sure he'd miss me if I were dead. And I'm guessing it was a little different here or maybe you watched me die or something or.... And I'm sorry if I'm bringing up something you really don't want to talk about. If you want me to go away, I will. "
"It was different here," Rodney finally said, unable to keep pretending that ¬Ford wasn't talking. He didn't turn around, didn't think he could bear the earnest look on ¬Ford's unmarred face. "You -- he -- and I were on Sheppard's off-world team together, along with Teyla. We spent a lot of time together. Not all of it quality time, but enough of it was. I... I don't have a lot of friends -- I'm sure that's true of your Rodney McKay -- and, well, he was one of them. In a mostly-annoying, little-yappy-dog kind of way."
"Oh," ¬Ford said quietly.
"We don't know if our Aiden Ford is dead," Rodney went on, suddenly unable to stop. The pressure had been building and now the words had to escape. "He probably is -- I think Sheppard's the only one who really believes that he isn't. And I'm not sure if I'm hoping Sheppard's right or wishing that he's wrong."
"He did something," ¬Ford realized aloud. "And you can't forgive him."
"I don't know if I can," Rodney admitted. He'd said these things to Heightmeyer and they hadn't made him feel better. They didn't now, either. "I'm not sure how much of it is his fault and how much of it was beyond his control. He wasn't himself the last few times we saw him. He'd changed and if the initial change was an accident, then I'm not sure the rest of it was."
The withdrawal from the Wraith enzyme had nearly killed him. He couldn't have -- wouldn't have -- done it on his own, not without so much help. And that experience had only complicated his own feelings toward Ford, making him both pity his erstwhile teammate and hate him for not being strong enough. Because he knew from Sheppard that Ford had been forced to detox in the Wraith cell and had still gone right back for more as soon as he was able to. Rodney wouldn't deny that he occasionally wished for a return to the Mentat-like state he'd been in while on the enzyme, but he'd always understood that the cost wasn't worth the advantage. Ford... had never seen. Didn't want to see. Didn't care to see. In the junkie that Ford had become, Rodney had always seen the shadow of the good person, the good marine that he'd been. And that left him wondering how much of the scary, psychotic Ford had been lurking in the man he'd called his friend.
"I shouldn't have brought it up," ¬Ford said. "I'm sorry."
"No, no," Rodney said, waving him off even though he was still sitting with his back to ¬Ford. "It must be horrible for you. You show up in a place where everything is the same, except that it isn't, and then on top of that, you find out that your counterpart--"
"Turned out to be the evil twin?" ¬Ford supplied. "Yeah, that kind of sucks."
Rodney turned around, finally, to look at ¬Ford. He looked distressed and Rodney didn't know what to say or to do to make things better. Because whatever Ford had done, it shouldn't be on this young man's head.
"Is there a chance that whatever he did, I'll end up doing?" ¬Ford asked.
"I don't know," Rodney admitted."The places where our timelines aren't the same, that's where this falls. And it really did start with an accident."
¬Ford gave him a wry grin, one that would have looked too old on their Ford. "Doesn't it always?"
Part Four: Teyla