Epic (Ancient History challenge)
Title: Epic
Author: 2ndary_author
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Rodney, John, Miko, assorted OC linguists
Rating: Pg-15
A/N: no disrespect meant to Greeks or linguists; epigraph by Nikos Kazantzakis (who is Greek although not, I think, a linguist).
Summary: Epic: from the Greek--story, tale, song
"Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels"
There is a reason why Radek is usually the one dealing with the linguists. Several reasons, actually: one being that Rodney’s time is far, far too valuable to be spent coddling soft scientists (and he means that adjective in both sense of the word). Others have to do with the petition sent by the linguistics division to Elizabeth Weir protesting Dr. McKay’s demeaning and unprofessional comments regarding their discipline. Rodney would admit to some rather, uh, well-sharpened sarcasm….but unprofessional? Absolutely not! For one thing, anyone who called linguistics a profession was clearly unfamiliar with the true meaning of the term. Pursuant to that discussion, Rodney may have suggested that the linguists invest in some good dictionaries-but as he’d explained to Elizabeth, it’s not demeaning if it’s true.
Nevertheless, the Linguistics Department has now crashed its entire computer system for the third time in as many days, and Radek is otherwise occupied with a conduit on the East Pier that is shooting sparks and scaring the Marines. Rodney would be content to let the linguists work away with quills and parchment or whatever outdated, unscientific methods they usually indulge in, but the tall scary one tracked him down in the lab this morning and threatened another memo to Elizabeth.
“Fine, fine,” Rodney concedes and heads over to the Linguistics division Tower three. He brings a ham sandwich and Miko, because he’s skipping lunch for this, thank you very much, and ‘cause he wants a witness in case Tall & Scary decides to get physical. Instead, Miko and Tall, whose name is really Dr. Getlin, chats away in Japanese and Rodney doesn’t really pay attention until Miko suddenly says, “Oh! Major Sheppard!”
"Miko-san!" Sheppard, lounging against one of the lab tables in scrubs, produces a stream of syllables that even Rodney can tell isn’t really Japanese.
Miko giggles behind one tiny hand.
“I didn’t know you spoke Japanese,” Rodney says icily…Miko, Sheppard, Zelenka-Linguistics is poaching his staff loyalties!
Sheppard shrugs. “I don’t. But I watched a lot of kung-fu movies as a kid.”
“Kung-fu is Chinese,” Rodney grumbles, settling down in front of a computer console and plugging in his tablet.
“Miko! All this time-you never told me!” Sheppard looks comically hurt.
The tiny scientist giggles again.
Rodney scowls at the screen. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“MRI.”
Rodney stops typing. “You’re joking.”
“Uhm. No?”
Disgusted, Rodney shakes his head. “We have an optical bioscanner that creates 3D fullcolor holograms-holograms!-of unsurpassed clarity and resolution, and you want to use a 1.5 Tesla MRI. I still can’t believe Elizabeth let you haul that thing through the ‘gate. Who wrote this code?”
“The MRI shows us what we seek: neural connectivity for phrase-structure grammar,” Dr. Getlin intones serenely. “And, Mike, Dr. McKay here is about to call you a moron.”
“Figured,” some guy saunters over from another computer console to look over Rodney’s shoulder.
Rodney’s a little put out. He hates to be predictable. Also, he’s pretty sure Getlin made up all that mumbojumbo about phrase-whatever. “If you wrote this sad excuse for code, then you are a moron. What is it even supposed to do?”
“We’re trying to build a concordance of proper names that appear in both the Ancient database and the epic poems of ancient Greece.”
“Oh.” Rodney mentally downgrades Mike from ‘moron’ to ‘idiot,’ because now that he can see what the linguist was trying to do…well, the code’s still not elegant, but it might pass as functional. The problem is more likely due to trying to interface two huge systems. He reworks an SQL call and pulls up the merge lists.
“You need to break these down; putting everything into two lists is slowing your search to a crawl…or, more accurately, a crash. It’s looping back on itself and-”
“Break them down how?” Mike asks suspiciously, like Rodney’s going to hurt his precious code. Which he is, but…well, call it tough love.
“Anything smaller than ‘Greek language’ and ‘Ancient language’ would be a start. You can’t just dump everything into two files…I mean: Pericles, Callicratidas, Zeus, Prometheus, Artaxias, Telemachus, Homer, Pallas Athena,” Rodney scans a random page. “The Greek file alone is nearly enough to crash your server. And who the hell is Callicratidas anyway?”
“Spartan admiral,” Sheppard remarks around a bite of…Rodney recognizes his sandwich and glares. He’s busy berating the linguists right now, but he makes a mental note to exact retribution later: both on Sheppard for swiping the sandwich, and on Miko, for ignoring her unspoken job of protecting it. “My dad was big into military history,” Sheppard shrugs, deliberately misinterpreting the glare.
“Oh, look, it’s linguistics,” Rodney snaps. “It’s not important! You could do it alphabetically, if you wanted. Although…no, Ancient has so many letters you’d be here all day. Christ, how about ‘fictional’ and ‘non-fiction’?”
The room gets very quiet, and Rodney looks up to find everyone staring at him. Oh, God, if they’ve gone and gotten insulted because he implied that linguistics doesn’t matter…but then, Dr. Getlin snickers. Mike snorts. Two women who have been poring over some kind of a scroll start to giggle. Three people stationed at various computers are smiling to themselves.
“What?” Rodney demands, which only makes them laugh harder. “What are they laughing at?” He’s about to have a full-blown flashback to his first day of high school, and Sheppard must notice, because he manages to corral his smirk. Rodney’s still not forgiving him for the sandwich.
“They’re all fictional, McKay,” he explains.
“Are you a moron?” Rodney gestures at the section up on his screen. “Homer, Pericles, the guy you said was an admiral. They’re all mixed in with Athena and Zeus and that one with all the consonants.”
Sheppard shrugs. “I could say Captain Hook was a pirate. He's still fictional.”
“You’re telling me that Homer wasn’t real? I think my grade ten English teacher would beg to differ.”
Sheppard waves his half-eaten sandwich at Getlin. “You tell him; thinking about it still gives me a headache.”
“Thinking about what?”
“The Greeks…the ancient Greeks, as we know them-well, suffice to say, the adjective is doubly appropriate.” Getlin seems to think this is sufficient explanation.
Rodney crosses his arm and raises an eyebrow. “You’re telling me the Ancients populated classical Greece? The Ancients were still here, in Atlantis, fighting the Wraith when the Greeks were busy creating democracy and whatnot. No Ancients on Earth until, oh, 1 BC or so. Right in time to give the Roman Empire a boost. Facts may not matter in the social sciences, but we in the real sciences like to think-”
Getlin interrupts.“The Ancients invented classical Greece, Dr. McKay,” he says shortly. “The wars, the myths, Mount Olympus, Athenian democracy, the whole society-they made it up, sort of Ancient role-playing game.”
“Like Dungeons and Dragons,” Sheppard supplies helpfully. “Or Risk, maybe.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Rodney sniffed. He looks around, waiting for someone to back him up on this, but no one will meet his eye. “For one thing, the Ancients were brilliant scientists. The Greeks, though, the Greeks-” he realizes that he’s flailing as though he can physically grasp an example of just how backwards classical physicists were. “Aristotle thought heavy things fell faster than light ones! He thought there were five elements!”
“McKay, it was a game, an elaborate game” Mike says, like that should explain it all. Rodney’s getting really tired of Mike. “The physics, the religion- none of it had to make sense. IProbably more fun if it didn't: like little kids pretending that the floor is boiling lava so they have an excuse to climb all over the furniture.”
“It added a level of complexity,” one of the female linguists said reprovingly, as though she doesn’t approve of comparing the Ancients with children.
“Like…choosing a character class or an alignment,” Sheppard puts in, and Rodney’s too surprised by other events to wonder where Sheppard learned anything about D&D.
In fact, Rodney’s beginning to feel like he needs to sit down. “What about the ruins? What about the poems?”
“McKay,” Getlin says gently, “you said it yourself: the ancient Greeks didn’t know about gravity. They didn’t understand what we now consider to be basic properties of matter. Do you really think they could have built the Parthenon, much less build it to last for centuries? The earliest "Greek" buildings?” He puts Greek in air quotes. “They date back to, what, 5 BC? Even the archaeologists admit there’s a margin of error there. The Ancients built them to look old, built them out of old limestone and terracotta, and after a few thousand years, who can tell? We’ve always thought the Romans were copying Greek art and architecture but there’s enough in the database to prove that it was really just more of the same. As for the Odyssey…well, the Ancients were truly astonishing poets.”
“Tolkien made up his language, too,” Sheppard adds, and Rodney wishes the man would just shut up for a minute so he could get his head around this.
Rodney has never cared the slightest bit about history, or linguistics, or the Greeks. He’s quite comfortable with flexible ideas: time is relative, light is a wave-a particle-a wave. So why does he suddenly feel like these soft science eggheads have just proven that 2 + 2 = -27.4?
“How do you know?” he asks quietly.
“It’s all in the database.” One of the women who was looking at the scroll has come over to stand next to Mike. “Details that make sense of a lot of the archaeological findings on Earth, drawings, drafts of poems, lists of characters. And more: Ancient has personal articles, like the personal a in Spanish?”
Rodney looks at her blankly. “I wouldn’t know. I took French.”
“In Spanish,” the woman continues, “there’s an extra a placed before personal names-so listeners know the speaker is talking about a human being. Well, in Ancient, there’s something we’ve started to call the fictive article: it’s a little two-letter symbol that appears in front of the names of fictional characters. And Pericles, Callicratidas, Aristotle…in the Ancient database, they all carry the fictive article.”
“You knew about this?” Rodney asks Sheppard, feeling unaccountable betrayed.
Sheppard squirms. “Yeah, kind of. Beth explained it all while I was getting scanned one day.”
“Oh.” Rodney thinks he should be making more of an argument. The idea that Hellenic Greece was a giant hoax is preposterous. It’s outrageous. It’s nonsense, and he opens his mouth to say as much, but what comes out is a question instead: “Why?”
“Why what?” Mike asks.
“Why did they-the Ancients-why did they pretend it was real? I mean, was it all just an elaborate trick to play on the Earthlings? Some kind of an in-joke?”
“Who knows? May have been a cover story,” Mike suggests. “The Ancients were fleeing the Wraith out here in Pegasus; there was no way they could pass themselves off as Roman…”
Dr. Getlin finishes the thought. “And it would have been pretty dangerous to start spouting off about rocket ships and stargates to people who’d just figured out how to refine bronze. Good way to get yourself sacrificed to the nearest god.”
“They were refugees,” says the woman, and Rodney wonders if she’s Beth. “Maybe they just wanted to keep a bit of home with them, so they made their elaborate make-believe world come true.”
Rodney turns to Sheppard and Miko. “What do you think?”
Miko doesn’t answer; she looks as stunned as Rodney feels.
Sheppard finishes off the ham sandwich. “I still think it’s a great story.”
Rodney and Miko walk back to the astrophysics lab in silence. Sheppard had to stay and get his brain scanned (‘sort of a this is your brain, this is your brain on Ancient kind of thing,’ he’d explained).
At dinner, Rodney finds himself tipping bits of blue jello off his spoon into his bowl. It falls in accordance with the law of gravity: nine point eight meters per second per second. Well, nine point three, here on Atlantis, but the principle holds true and that makes him feel a little better. Afterwards, he goes back to his lab and spends a few hours deriving all of the laws of wave mechanics, just to calm his mind. About three-quarters of the way through, something occurs to him.
For once, Rodney actually knocks on Sheppard’s door-it is a little late for social calls-but the Major answers wearing a scowl that says Rodney’s concession to civility didn’t win him any brownie points. He’s squinting under the hall lights, his hair smooshed and his face marked from the pillow.
“McKay,” he says flatly.
Rodney become keenly aware of the fact that it’s 3:27 AM. He decides to get right to the point. “They were joking, right? About the whole…you know, the Greeks and the Romans. That was some sort of twisted social science humor.”
“Don’t fuck with the linguists, Rodney,” John says tiredly. “They’ll fuck you right back.”
Author: 2ndary_author
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Rodney, John, Miko, assorted OC linguists
Rating: Pg-15
A/N: no disrespect meant to Greeks or linguists; epigraph by Nikos Kazantzakis (who is Greek although not, I think, a linguist).
Summary: Epic: from the Greek--story, tale, song
"Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels"
There is a reason why Radek is usually the one dealing with the linguists. Several reasons, actually: one being that Rodney’s time is far, far too valuable to be spent coddling soft scientists (and he means that adjective in both sense of the word). Others have to do with the petition sent by the linguistics division to Elizabeth Weir protesting Dr. McKay’s demeaning and unprofessional comments regarding their discipline. Rodney would admit to some rather, uh, well-sharpened sarcasm….but unprofessional? Absolutely not! For one thing, anyone who called linguistics a profession was clearly unfamiliar with the true meaning of the term. Pursuant to that discussion, Rodney may have suggested that the linguists invest in some good dictionaries-but as he’d explained to Elizabeth, it’s not demeaning if it’s true.
Nevertheless, the Linguistics Department has now crashed its entire computer system for the third time in as many days, and Radek is otherwise occupied with a conduit on the East Pier that is shooting sparks and scaring the Marines. Rodney would be content to let the linguists work away with quills and parchment or whatever outdated, unscientific methods they usually indulge in, but the tall scary one tracked him down in the lab this morning and threatened another memo to Elizabeth.
“Fine, fine,” Rodney concedes and heads over to the Linguistics division Tower three. He brings a ham sandwich and Miko, because he’s skipping lunch for this, thank you very much, and ‘cause he wants a witness in case Tall & Scary decides to get physical. Instead, Miko and Tall, whose name is really Dr. Getlin, chats away in Japanese and Rodney doesn’t really pay attention until Miko suddenly says, “Oh! Major Sheppard!”
"Miko-san!" Sheppard, lounging against one of the lab tables in scrubs, produces a stream of syllables that even Rodney can tell isn’t really Japanese.
Miko giggles behind one tiny hand.
“I didn’t know you spoke Japanese,” Rodney says icily…Miko, Sheppard, Zelenka-Linguistics is poaching his staff loyalties!
Sheppard shrugs. “I don’t. But I watched a lot of kung-fu movies as a kid.”
“Kung-fu is Chinese,” Rodney grumbles, settling down in front of a computer console and plugging in his tablet.
“Miko! All this time-you never told me!” Sheppard looks comically hurt.
The tiny scientist giggles again.
Rodney scowls at the screen. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“MRI.”
Rodney stops typing. “You’re joking.”
“Uhm. No?”
Disgusted, Rodney shakes his head. “We have an optical bioscanner that creates 3D fullcolor holograms-holograms!-of unsurpassed clarity and resolution, and you want to use a 1.5 Tesla MRI. I still can’t believe Elizabeth let you haul that thing through the ‘gate. Who wrote this code?”
“The MRI shows us what we seek: neural connectivity for phrase-structure grammar,” Dr. Getlin intones serenely. “And, Mike, Dr. McKay here is about to call you a moron.”
“Figured,” some guy saunters over from another computer console to look over Rodney’s shoulder.
Rodney’s a little put out. He hates to be predictable. Also, he’s pretty sure Getlin made up all that mumbojumbo about phrase-whatever. “If you wrote this sad excuse for code, then you are a moron. What is it even supposed to do?”
“We’re trying to build a concordance of proper names that appear in both the Ancient database and the epic poems of ancient Greece.”
“Oh.” Rodney mentally downgrades Mike from ‘moron’ to ‘idiot,’ because now that he can see what the linguist was trying to do…well, the code’s still not elegant, but it might pass as functional. The problem is more likely due to trying to interface two huge systems. He reworks an SQL call and pulls up the merge lists.
“You need to break these down; putting everything into two lists is slowing your search to a crawl…or, more accurately, a crash. It’s looping back on itself and-”
“Break them down how?” Mike asks suspiciously, like Rodney’s going to hurt his precious code. Which he is, but…well, call it tough love.
“Anything smaller than ‘Greek language’ and ‘Ancient language’ would be a start. You can’t just dump everything into two files…I mean: Pericles, Callicratidas, Zeus, Prometheus, Artaxias, Telemachus, Homer, Pallas Athena,” Rodney scans a random page. “The Greek file alone is nearly enough to crash your server. And who the hell is Callicratidas anyway?”
“Spartan admiral,” Sheppard remarks around a bite of…Rodney recognizes his sandwich and glares. He’s busy berating the linguists right now, but he makes a mental note to exact retribution later: both on Sheppard for swiping the sandwich, and on Miko, for ignoring her unspoken job of protecting it. “My dad was big into military history,” Sheppard shrugs, deliberately misinterpreting the glare.
“Oh, look, it’s linguistics,” Rodney snaps. “It’s not important! You could do it alphabetically, if you wanted. Although…no, Ancient has so many letters you’d be here all day. Christ, how about ‘fictional’ and ‘non-fiction’?”
The room gets very quiet, and Rodney looks up to find everyone staring at him. Oh, God, if they’ve gone and gotten insulted because he implied that linguistics doesn’t matter…but then, Dr. Getlin snickers. Mike snorts. Two women who have been poring over some kind of a scroll start to giggle. Three people stationed at various computers are smiling to themselves.
“What?” Rodney demands, which only makes them laugh harder. “What are they laughing at?” He’s about to have a full-blown flashback to his first day of high school, and Sheppard must notice, because he manages to corral his smirk. Rodney’s still not forgiving him for the sandwich.
“They’re all fictional, McKay,” he explains.
“Are you a moron?” Rodney gestures at the section up on his screen. “Homer, Pericles, the guy you said was an admiral. They’re all mixed in with Athena and Zeus and that one with all the consonants.”
Sheppard shrugs. “I could say Captain Hook was a pirate. He's still fictional.”
“You’re telling me that Homer wasn’t real? I think my grade ten English teacher would beg to differ.”
Sheppard waves his half-eaten sandwich at Getlin. “You tell him; thinking about it still gives me a headache.”
“Thinking about what?”
“The Greeks…the ancient Greeks, as we know them-well, suffice to say, the adjective is doubly appropriate.” Getlin seems to think this is sufficient explanation.
Rodney crosses his arm and raises an eyebrow. “You’re telling me the Ancients populated classical Greece? The Ancients were still here, in Atlantis, fighting the Wraith when the Greeks were busy creating democracy and whatnot. No Ancients on Earth until, oh, 1 BC or so. Right in time to give the Roman Empire a boost. Facts may not matter in the social sciences, but we in the real sciences like to think-”
Getlin interrupts.“The Ancients invented classical Greece, Dr. McKay,” he says shortly. “The wars, the myths, Mount Olympus, Athenian democracy, the whole society-they made it up, sort of Ancient role-playing game.”
“Like Dungeons and Dragons,” Sheppard supplies helpfully. “Or Risk, maybe.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Rodney sniffed. He looks around, waiting for someone to back him up on this, but no one will meet his eye. “For one thing, the Ancients were brilliant scientists. The Greeks, though, the Greeks-” he realizes that he’s flailing as though he can physically grasp an example of just how backwards classical physicists were. “Aristotle thought heavy things fell faster than light ones! He thought there were five elements!”
“McKay, it was a game, an elaborate game” Mike says, like that should explain it all. Rodney’s getting really tired of Mike. “The physics, the religion- none of it had to make sense. IProbably more fun if it didn't: like little kids pretending that the floor is boiling lava so they have an excuse to climb all over the furniture.”
“It added a level of complexity,” one of the female linguists said reprovingly, as though she doesn’t approve of comparing the Ancients with children.
“Like…choosing a character class or an alignment,” Sheppard puts in, and Rodney’s too surprised by other events to wonder where Sheppard learned anything about D&D.
In fact, Rodney’s beginning to feel like he needs to sit down. “What about the ruins? What about the poems?”
“McKay,” Getlin says gently, “you said it yourself: the ancient Greeks didn’t know about gravity. They didn’t understand what we now consider to be basic properties of matter. Do you really think they could have built the Parthenon, much less build it to last for centuries? The earliest "Greek" buildings?” He puts Greek in air quotes. “They date back to, what, 5 BC? Even the archaeologists admit there’s a margin of error there. The Ancients built them to look old, built them out of old limestone and terracotta, and after a few thousand years, who can tell? We’ve always thought the Romans were copying Greek art and architecture but there’s enough in the database to prove that it was really just more of the same. As for the Odyssey…well, the Ancients were truly astonishing poets.”
“Tolkien made up his language, too,” Sheppard adds, and Rodney wishes the man would just shut up for a minute so he could get his head around this.
Rodney has never cared the slightest bit about history, or linguistics, or the Greeks. He’s quite comfortable with flexible ideas: time is relative, light is a wave-a particle-a wave. So why does he suddenly feel like these soft science eggheads have just proven that 2 + 2 = -27.4?
“How do you know?” he asks quietly.
“It’s all in the database.” One of the women who was looking at the scroll has come over to stand next to Mike. “Details that make sense of a lot of the archaeological findings on Earth, drawings, drafts of poems, lists of characters. And more: Ancient has personal articles, like the personal a in Spanish?”
Rodney looks at her blankly. “I wouldn’t know. I took French.”
“In Spanish,” the woman continues, “there’s an extra a placed before personal names-so listeners know the speaker is talking about a human being. Well, in Ancient, there’s something we’ve started to call the fictive article: it’s a little two-letter symbol that appears in front of the names of fictional characters. And Pericles, Callicratidas, Aristotle…in the Ancient database, they all carry the fictive article.”
“You knew about this?” Rodney asks Sheppard, feeling unaccountable betrayed.
Sheppard squirms. “Yeah, kind of. Beth explained it all while I was getting scanned one day.”
“Oh.” Rodney thinks he should be making more of an argument. The idea that Hellenic Greece was a giant hoax is preposterous. It’s outrageous. It’s nonsense, and he opens his mouth to say as much, but what comes out is a question instead: “Why?”
“Why what?” Mike asks.
“Why did they-the Ancients-why did they pretend it was real? I mean, was it all just an elaborate trick to play on the Earthlings? Some kind of an in-joke?”
“Who knows? May have been a cover story,” Mike suggests. “The Ancients were fleeing the Wraith out here in Pegasus; there was no way they could pass themselves off as Roman…”
Dr. Getlin finishes the thought. “And it would have been pretty dangerous to start spouting off about rocket ships and stargates to people who’d just figured out how to refine bronze. Good way to get yourself sacrificed to the nearest god.”
“They were refugees,” says the woman, and Rodney wonders if she’s Beth. “Maybe they just wanted to keep a bit of home with them, so they made their elaborate make-believe world come true.”
Rodney turns to Sheppard and Miko. “What do you think?”
Miko doesn’t answer; she looks as stunned as Rodney feels.
Sheppard finishes off the ham sandwich. “I still think it’s a great story.”
Rodney and Miko walk back to the astrophysics lab in silence. Sheppard had to stay and get his brain scanned (‘sort of a this is your brain, this is your brain on Ancient kind of thing,’ he’d explained).
At dinner, Rodney finds himself tipping bits of blue jello off his spoon into his bowl. It falls in accordance with the law of gravity: nine point eight meters per second per second. Well, nine point three, here on Atlantis, but the principle holds true and that makes him feel a little better. Afterwards, he goes back to his lab and spends a few hours deriving all of the laws of wave mechanics, just to calm his mind. About three-quarters of the way through, something occurs to him.
For once, Rodney actually knocks on Sheppard’s door-it is a little late for social calls-but the Major answers wearing a scowl that says Rodney’s concession to civility didn’t win him any brownie points. He’s squinting under the hall lights, his hair smooshed and his face marked from the pillow.
“McKay,” he says flatly.
Rodney become keenly aware of the fact that it’s 3:27 AM. He decides to get right to the point. “They were joking, right? About the whole…you know, the Greeks and the Romans. That was some sort of twisted social science humor.”
“Don’t fuck with the linguists, Rodney,” John says tiredly. “They’ll fuck you right back.”