Fic: A Road Traveled, More or Less (2/3)
Story info and warnings can be found in part 1.
Wednesday, 23:55 Atlantis Standard Time
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
"You can't argue with the data," McKay said as he gestured at the equations on the tablet in front of him. "All the results are within expected parameters. It only makes sense we move to the next logical step."
Zelenka continued to write on the whiteboard as he shook his head. "I am as eager to proceed as you are, but I still think it would be best to wait. Running simulations is all very well and good, but we need to get a better idea of how bio matter will react to the stresses created by the passage. We must be sure it is safe..."
"I'm going to start calling you Baba Zelenka!" Rodney scoffed. "We’ve been working on this going on three months! We moved from testing with non-reactives to bio matter almost two weeks ago, and there have been no abnormalities, no signs of cellular decay, no radiation, nothing! It’s perfectly safe, and I'm so sure of that, I'm willing to be the one who tests it!"
Radek turned to face him, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. "What harm is there in more testing?" he asked, weariness evident in his tone. "Despite Elizabeth's assistance in translating, our understanding of the documentation is incomplete. We still have to account for the mental component involved in operating the device, whether you like or not. Caution-"
"Oh ,COME on!" Rodney yelled, crossing his arms. "We have been over this a thousand times already! If it really needed an ATA carrier to operate, we wouldn't have been able to send the mice through. All that will happen is I just won’t go anywhere. What could possibly go wrong?"
Radek gaped at him. "What could go wrong? Do you hear yourself? There are so many possibilities I cannot even begin making a list of what could go wrong!"
McKay took a deep breath and then began again, speaking slowly, as if to a particularly dull pupil. "Look, all we’re going to do is take it for a test drive. We set it for next to nothing, say, a point zero one percent divergence from our reality. You run the interface and set the input parameters for the initial shift. I go see what’s happening *in a parallel universe* and then come back, none the worse for wear! I probably won’t even interact with that reality at all because I'll be a phase shift away from it!"
"Rod interacted with our reality," Zelenak reminded him, unhelpfully.
McKay pressed his lips together. "That was *different*. We had just ripped a rather large hole between the universes which he slipped through in that personal shield bubble of his, kind of like a golf ball going down a storm drain. And he was trying to interact with us! It was kind of the whole point of his being here. I’d just be going there to observe, with my handy dandy Ancient multi-D controller," he held up the wrist device and waved it around, "generating a phase bubble around me. No one would see me, and a click of a button would have me back home."
"And the possibilities of temporal anomalies?"
"You're grasping at straws! You've seen the results of the sims. There was less than one thousandth of a percent that there would be any time slippage. At worst, we skip a few minutes backward or forward instead of translocating sideways into another reality. Who knows, maybe I’ll suddenly appear and tell us that it works!"
They both stopped and glanced around the lab before Rodney looked sheepishly at Zelenka.
"Okay, if that was going to happen, it probably already would have, and since it didn't, it won’t."
Zelenka set his hands on the lab bench and leaned forward into McKay's space. "Or perhaps it did happen, and we are a divergent future timeline that was created when you came back to warn us not to do it without more testing!"
"Touchy," McKay groused, waving a hand in Zelenka's face. "You know, some theories postulate a divergent timeline is created every time we make an important decision. Somewhere, there is a universe created when I decided I was too busy to stop for a cup of coffee on morning." He considered that and frowned. "And I’m sure in that universe, I missed something extremely important because of a caffeine withdrawal headache and we all died very horribly."
Zelenka grabbed McKay's tablet and rapidly typed a few commands to bring up a 3-dimensional image that represented the progress of their recent simulations. "Here and here," he pointed out different areas of the display, "and even when we lowered the energy output, here - there was a spike, right across the spectrum. Whether you subscribe to M-Theory or infinite parallel universes, we are still looking at the possibility that introducing enough energy to transport a person to an alternate reality - even partially, within a temporal bubble - might fracture the matrix of the bubble and propel the viewer fully into the alternate reality, one that is far removed and radically divergent from our own. I believe this is where the mental component is necessary. To try and proceed without it will, at best result in simple failure. At worst, the results could be disastrous."
McKay shook his head. "Not if I compensate by buffering-" his hand darted past Zelenka’s to type in an equation - "Like so." He hit enter with a flourish. The image flickered and then evened out, the jagged spikes melting down into the smooth surface of the asymmetrical waveform like ice under the summer sun.
"Equations, Rodney. The numbers look good. The simulation looks good." Radek bit his lip, took a deep breath, and then pressed on. "You know better than anyone how sometimes what looks good in the simulation does not actually work when it comes to ancient technology."
McKay's face went slack with shock, and it took him a full five seconds to recover himself enough to respond."This isn’t-" McKay bit back his reply, anger suffusing his features as he turned away. "Yes. I do know," he said, voice tight, his entire body rigid. "Fine. We’ll do more tests."
Radek had hoped that Rodney would listen to reason without bringing up Doranda. Unfortunately, given the direction and tone of their last few arguments - and the fact Rodney's arrogance was hitting pre-Doranda levels - it seemed like the only thing that might make Rodney stop and consider the possible repercussions. "I want this to succeed, Rodney, every bit as much as you do," he affirmed. "I just want to be sure that nothing goes catastrophically wrong for us when we try it."
McKay's posture relaxed slightly and he huffed as he looked back over his shoulder at the test results on the tablet. "Fine. Even if it's not a - what did Sheppard call it, an Ascend-o-matic? Even supposing it isn't Ascension related, it still doesn't make sense. I can understand that you would want to be in the right mental state before heading off to explore a different reality, but seriously! It can't be that much different than getting psyched up for an away mission to a potentially hostile planet. The best the linguists could come up with was "Controlling the realities of time and space with your mind"? What exactly is that supposed to mean anyway? It's pure Ascension psychobabble, every word of it!"
Wednesday, 23:55 Atlantis Standard Time
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
They'd only stayed in the bubble long enough to establish that the universe they'd shifted into was a virtual carbon copy of their own. Rodney had insisted they collapse the displacement field and work in this reality in order to conserve the charge in the DSCs as long as possible. They had the capability to make at least a dozen more shifts fully charged, but maintaining the displacement field drained them quickly.
After almost an hour of watching Radek and Rodney pour over the data McKay had downloaded, argue, type furiously, run a simulation, then do it all over again, Sheppard was nearly ready to strangled them both. He pushed off the wall he'd been lounging against.
"I'm checking the perimeter," he said as he pulled out his glock to re-check the magazine, then holstered the sidearm.
"I still think we should talk to the 'us' from this universe," Rodney complained.
Sheppard let out a sigh. Rodney and Radek had been all for contacting their counterparts in this universe for assistance, but he'd overruled them.
"Look, there's plenty time to get friendly once I've done a little re-con," he reasoned as he snapped the P90 on to its harness." I just want to make sure they're not, I don't know - Mirror-universe versions of us or something."
"That would be highly unlikely," Radek said, but Rodney cut him off.
"Geek!" he proclaimed, pointing a finger at him."You are a bigger nerd than anyone on my staff!"
Sheppard flipped him off. "Be back in 10."
He walked down the corridor, weapon at the ready. On their Atlantis, this section was off limits because of unrepaired damage, first from the shield collapse when the city was under the ocean, and then again during the storm and the Genii invasion. It had never been a priority to fix it, and it looked like the same held true here.
Atlantis had been every bit as responsive to him here as back home, though if pressed, he'd have to say something was off - like a slightly different flavour for lack of a better description. He'd politely asked the city not to show their life signs on any internal sensor sweeps, and McKay had been able to get into the mainframe and confirm that they weren't on the grid.
Sheppard didn't see anyone - not that he expected to -but he felt a little less homicidal when he entered the room again. "Anything?" he asked as he set down the P90.
"It just doesn't make sense," Rodney griped, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. "There were no recent failures or power spikes - nothing we can find to account for why the sensors would have failed to detect inbound ships. We should have seen them coming!"
Radek made a frustrated noise and McKay peered over his shoulder at the data on the tablet. "What the hell is that?"
"This is the report I sent to Elizabeth." On the screen was a log with various graphs and charts. "This is all the data we've compiled from the live trails with the AR machine" He indicated a particular line graph. "You see how each data set has a signature unique to its own universe."
"Yes, yes," McKay agreed impatiently. "What does that have to do with-"
"Look at this," Zelenka interrupted, and pulled up another log. "I've graphed out the results from the scanner logs." He tapped another key, maximizing a screen.
McKay frowned again."That can't be right. Are you sure you have the inverse tangent set up to return degrees, not radians?"
Zelenka looked offended, but McKay just waved it off. "Yes, I know, stupid question, I had to ask. Okay, run a side by side comparison with the energy output analysis for the AR device, overlapping the analysis from the sensor log report, and throw the results into a bode plot."
There was no sound but the tapping of keys and the whirring of the hard drive for several minutes as the data compiled. With a flicker, the screen refreshed, presenting them with a new graph comprised of both data sets.
"Muj bože!" Radek breathed out softly.
Rodney stared damning results, face ashen. "It was our fault," he whispered.
Sheppard shouldered McKay out of the way to study the results himself. The beginning of the graph had disparate green and blue lines that quickly overlapped into a solid red line. There were a few variances along the line, but it was pretty much solid. "Rodney," he growled, his tone a question and demand. The equations made sense, but he didn't really understand what the raw sensor data meant.
Rodney brought up the original sensor data graph. "Look here," he instructed, pointing to dips and squiggles on the screen.
"I get the numbers, Rodney," he bit out. "Explain the part about how it's our fault."
"This is the spectrum our sensors are calibrated for," he said, indicating the highs and lows. "The energy signature of a Wraith hyper drive engine falls well within that, and we can generally detect them by the time they hit the heliopause of the Lantean system." Rodney brought the new model back up. Sheppard could see how the blue line suddenly dropped when the AR data was superimposed over it, almost like it was being pulled off course.
"The AR machine created - well, for lack of a better description, a probability bubble around Atlantis. We didn't see the Wraith coming because while we were using the alternate reality device, the sensors were looking at other realities. Or, to be more accurate, the most probable realities - the ones that happened most often."
John stared at the screen, a sick feeling twisting in his gut as he listened.
Radek continued. "It was a kind of hysteresis error, as the effects lingered for at least several hours after each use. By the time the remnant flux density began to dissipate, we were running another test. None of the technicians saw anything the atypical about the sensors because they aren't trained to look at the waveforms and energy signatures - they were looking for occurrences."
"The Wraith could have been heading toward us for weeks," McKay said bleakly, shame colouring his every word. "It should have occurred to me to run checks on key systems to be sure the device wasn't interfering with anything mission critical. I'm supposed to be the brilliant one, and now everyone is dead because of my stupidity."
"Was there anything in the database to indicate this thing would screw with the sensors?" Sheppard asked, his face hard.
McKay shook his head. "No. I mean, I never read anything like that, and I read all the documentation, but I should have thought about the possibility." His let out a derisive laugh. "I should have realized the kind of disruption it might cause, I mean, it only makes sense there would be something..."
Sheppard had heard enough. He reached out and caught Rodney by the shoulders, giving him a firm shake. "There was no way you could have known. It wasn't your fault." He looked over to where Zelenka sat, catching his eyes. "Neither one of you."
Rodney jerked free of his grip. "I'm the CSO, John! I'm the genius who always pulls our asses out of the fire at the eleventh hour!" he yelled, gesticulating wildly. "Only this time, I screwed up and it's too late - no last minute save, no instant replay - they're all dead. Game over!"
Radek spoke hesitantly. "There is... one thing. Maybe."
McKay's gaze snapped around to Zelenka. "What thing?" he demanded. "What are you talking about?"
"We worried about the potential temporal displacement," he continued, absently rubbing his chin with one hand as he spoke. "We spent many hours making sure the shift would be stable, that there would be no inadvertent time slippage."
Rodney's face lit up as he caught where Radek was going. "But if we remove those constraints, we could go back -"
"We could warn ourselves!"
"McKay, are you saying we could go back in time?" Sheppard asked sceptically. "Stop this from happening?"
"Yes! Well, theoretically anyway." He looked up at the Colonel. "I mean, we were trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening. To do it deliberately, and accurately, well, that remains to be seen."
"We should begin immediately," Radek said. "The longer we wait the more difficult it will become."
"Why?" asked Sheppard.
Radek lifted his wrist to indicate the DSC. "Outside the bubble, we are no longer insulated from the passage of normal time. The more time passes, the farther out of step we are with our own universe and the harder it will be to go back and affect any kind of change."
"We need to re-establish the displacement field, and get to the AR device on this Atlantis as soon as possible," Rodney said as he stowed his tablet in his pack. "We've probably only got enough charge to maintain a constant field for a couple of hours, and I don't know how long it's going to take us to rewrite the code, so chop, chop. Let's get moving, shall we?" He tapped a command on his DSC and promptly vanished.
"That is so weird to watch," Sheppard grumbled as tapped a code in his own wrist device and Rodney came back into view. Once he saw that Radek was with them, Sheppard took point and started on the shortest path to the lab.
It wasn't long before they were moving into a more populated area of the city. Sheppard felt a little like a voyeur as he walked the halls, watching people who couldn't see him. It was especially eerie knowing that in his universe, some of these people were now dead, victims of an incursion they never saw coming.
A pair of marines on late patrol came around the corner, and something twisted in his gut as he recognized Philips and Vargas. He firmly shoved it away, reminding himself that if McKay and Zelenka could make this work, he was going to make sure those two got a very special commendation each, even if they would have absolutely no idea why.
A few minutes later they were approaching the lab, and Rodney, impatient to get started, took the lead. Sheppard just grinned and went to take up a position outside the door when he saw Rodney stop dead.
"Oh crap."
Zelenka stepped up beside him to peer into the open lab. "This is not unexpected, Rodney. He is, after all, you."
Sheppard glanced over his shoulder to see the McKay from this reality hunkered over his laptop. "Is this going to be a problem?"
"I need access to that AR machine in real-time," Rodney explained. "Unfortunately, I recognize that look. It's the one I get when I'm stymied by a problem and I'm not leaving till I've got it solved." He sighed morosely. "He's not going anywhere soon."
***
Rodney stared blankly at his laptop, the recent conversation replaying in his mind.
He was an arrogant man, and that wasn't likely to change. It was just a natural by-product of being the smartest man in two galaxies. But it was tempered with caution now. The knowledge that people could die - had died in fact - as a result of his mistakes weighed heavy on him. He would never intentionally place lives at risk for the sake of his professional pride. That Radek might think him capable of doing so stung deeply.
Suddenly anger gripped him. He rose from his seat and walked over to the Ancient device at the centre of all the fuss. The control console was not all that unlike the ones in the control gate room. Ancient script adorned buttons and tabs and there was a screen that lit up with data when the device was active.
There was a circular platform next to the control console the observer stood on to began their trip. It was made of the same odd grey material as the control chair, with clear crystal panels that glowed blue once it was initialized. There were four personal control units sitting on a nearby table.
The only thing holding back live testing was the mental component referenced in the documentation on the device. He'd spent weeks going over the machine itself, and while there was nothing about it that resembled any of the ascension devices they'd run across so far, he couldn't figure out what else it could be. It wasn't like pulling up a jumper HUD or interfacing with the control chair. The thought of altering or controlling time, space and reality with your mind sounded suspiciously like something you could only do if you were a glowing squid, and he'd already had a close encounter with that particular brand of Ancient insanity.
Rodney picked up one of the personal control units and, on a whim, snapped it closed around his wrist. The metal warmed instantly and the display on the top activated, indicating a full charge. He nudged the indicator, dialling it up to the setting they’d used when sending some lab mice through earlier that day. He could feel mild vibrations through his arm as the device synched itself to its counterparts.
"I could do this right now," he mused. "I could just step up and... and *go* for it."
***
"Yes, you can," McKay said encouragingly as he walked up behind his alternate self. "You could take a little spin, go have a little look - you know that it's perfectly safe. Everything will be fine!"
Sheppard looked over, startled. "McKay, what the hell are you doing?"
"I am trying to get uninterrupted access to the AR device for 5 minutes so that I can make the changes I need to get us home," he said.
"Rodney, no!" Zelenka exclaimed, following after him. "You are the one who said gene carriers should not operate the device themselves! What are you thinking?"
"Look, we just need him out of here for a few minutes!" McKay argued as they watched the other Rodney. "You're the one who had been insisting that this is not an ascension device. If something weird happens, we're right here. You can drop out of the bubble and intervene."
***
Rodney felt his pulse quicken and he shook his head as he huffed out a laugh. He was crazy to even consider it, especially after the many weeks he'd spent arguing against the very idea. He was the champion of the scientific method, defender of the quantifiable. Unlike Colonel Fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, he didn't do things on a whim. It was simply absurd. Unthinkable. Madness.
It left him feeling strangely giddy.
This was one of their most tantalizing discoveries yet. But more testing wouldn't tell them anything they didn't already know. And he *knew* the machine itself was safe. If Radek was right and it wasn't Ascension related - he was going to go out on a limb and trust him on that one - then he should be able to initialize it with no ill effect. Then he could set it for solo use and go for a five minute jaunt, just long enough to take a peek around another reality. After all, he could always come back right away if the situation warranted it. He could even set an automatic recall to pull him back after five minutes in case something went wrong and he couldn't shift back himself.
He stepped behind the main control panel to initialize the platform and set the auto-recall, holding his breath as it powered up. When there was no unexpected surge and the power indicators showed the same results as they did when Radek operated the console, Rodney was flooded with relief. One for Radek - he rolled his eyes, knowing that the other man would be insufferable after this. After adjusting the initialization sequence to allow for individual override control from a DSC, he went to stand on the platform. He tapped the activation code into the wrist device and a soft chime began to sound from the console. Rodney frowned. That hadn’t happened when they sent through the inanimate objects or the mice.
A few seconds later the platform lit up beneath him and he felt a tingle, like a static charge, running all over him from head to toes. He held his hands out in front of him. He could see the displacement field forming around him. He made a concerted effort to breathe calmly and adjusted the settings on the DSC to a 0.01% differential.
A second, more discordant tone joined the initial chime. He wondered if it could be some sort of reminder to whoever was manning the controls. Only that didn’t make sense, the documentation specifically mentioned lone travellers being able to self actualize their destinations...
He got a Very Bad Feeling that he had missed something Really Big, that perhaps the mental component Radek had been so adamant about was more important than he'd realized.
"Off! Off! OFFOFFOFF!" he chanted, hoping he could deactivate it with his gene the way they were able to control so much other Ancient tech, but to no avail. It made sense, since the machine had to be manually activated that he wouldn't be able to just turn it off with a thought, but now he was caught in the middle of something with no idea what was happening. Even worse, if he stepped off the disk with the bubble already forming around him, it could be very bad -
"Oh, shit!"
***
"McKay! What the hell is happening?"
"I don't know, I DON'T KNOW! It's never done that before, it shouldn't be doing that, he did everything right!"
"As far as we know," Radek interjected. "This does not mean that we are correct. Evidence would suggest we were not."
"Oh, does it make you happy to be able to say I told you so?
"Rodney! Focus! Is there anything we can do?"
***
Rodney wished for just a moment that he’d never found this lab, never come to Atlantis, that he'd stayed at Area 51, that he could just *listen* to the brilliant staff he’d surrounded himself with, and oh god, he’d much rather have a boring life back on earth with his cat than a smear of temporally displaced atoms spread across countless universes -
"Hey McKay, you in here? What's all the racket about?"
He opened his eyes to see Sheppard enter the lab, as he often did late in the evening, no doubt coming to harass him into leaving for the night.
"John!"
Sheppard stopped short, caught off guard by the use of his first name. It took him a full few seconds to process what he was seeing and then he darted across the room to the console. He looked down at the controls, helpless frustration on his features. "Rodney, what the hell are you doing? How do I turn this off?"
A third sound blared out and there was no mistaking it for anything but an alarm. The coolly indifferent voice of the Atlantis AI cut in. "Parameters supplied for trans-dimensional shift insufficient; disengaging controller from matrix. Displacement Field will engage in 10 seconds."
"Hit the blue and gold control in the lower left of the panel!" Rodney said desperately. "And think off as hard as you can!"
"I'm thinking off!" Sheppard yelled as he hit the control. It made a 'blaaat' noise nothing happened. "This isn't working, Rodney!" He hit the control again with the same result.
"It's just not fair!" Rodney moaned. "Of all the times I could pick to trust the judgement of people who are not as smart as me! Just once I would have been happy to be proved wrong!"
Sheppard tapped his radio, "Radek, get down here now! McKay's in trouble!"
"Oh god," Rodney looked at Sheppard, wide-eyed and desperate. "John! I don't know what's going to happen - if I don't make it back, tell Jeannie I love her, tell Radek my most brilliant papers are on the H: drive, tell Elizabeth-"
"Tell them yourself when you get back," Sheppard ordered and he moved as close as possible to the platform without touching the energy field. "You better come back, Rodney, because if I have to come looking for you, you're gonna be very sorry!"
"John..." McKay reached out as if to touch Sheppard, then curled his fingers back in. "I wish I'd been braver, that I'd told you how I felt..."
"Field Engaged."
"RODNEY!"
Just like that, Rodney winked out of existence, right before his eyes. He was still trying to gain his bearings when Zelenka came running in.
"What is it? What has happened?" he demanded, glancing around while trying to catch his breath. "Where is Rodney?"
John just stared at the empty transport platform. "I have no idea."
Continued in part 3.
Wednesday, 23:55 Atlantis Standard Time
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
"You can't argue with the data," McKay said as he gestured at the equations on the tablet in front of him. "All the results are within expected parameters. It only makes sense we move to the next logical step."
Zelenka continued to write on the whiteboard as he shook his head. "I am as eager to proceed as you are, but I still think it would be best to wait. Running simulations is all very well and good, but we need to get a better idea of how bio matter will react to the stresses created by the passage. We must be sure it is safe..."
"I'm going to start calling you Baba Zelenka!" Rodney scoffed. "We’ve been working on this going on three months! We moved from testing with non-reactives to bio matter almost two weeks ago, and there have been no abnormalities, no signs of cellular decay, no radiation, nothing! It’s perfectly safe, and I'm so sure of that, I'm willing to be the one who tests it!"
Radek turned to face him, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. "What harm is there in more testing?" he asked, weariness evident in his tone. "Despite Elizabeth's assistance in translating, our understanding of the documentation is incomplete. We still have to account for the mental component involved in operating the device, whether you like or not. Caution-"
"Oh ,COME on!" Rodney yelled, crossing his arms. "We have been over this a thousand times already! If it really needed an ATA carrier to operate, we wouldn't have been able to send the mice through. All that will happen is I just won’t go anywhere. What could possibly go wrong?"
Radek gaped at him. "What could go wrong? Do you hear yourself? There are so many possibilities I cannot even begin making a list of what could go wrong!"
McKay took a deep breath and then began again, speaking slowly, as if to a particularly dull pupil. "Look, all we’re going to do is take it for a test drive. We set it for next to nothing, say, a point zero one percent divergence from our reality. You run the interface and set the input parameters for the initial shift. I go see what’s happening *in a parallel universe* and then come back, none the worse for wear! I probably won’t even interact with that reality at all because I'll be a phase shift away from it!"
"Rod interacted with our reality," Zelenak reminded him, unhelpfully.
McKay pressed his lips together. "That was *different*. We had just ripped a rather large hole between the universes which he slipped through in that personal shield bubble of his, kind of like a golf ball going down a storm drain. And he was trying to interact with us! It was kind of the whole point of his being here. I’d just be going there to observe, with my handy dandy Ancient multi-D controller," he held up the wrist device and waved it around, "generating a phase bubble around me. No one would see me, and a click of a button would have me back home."
"And the possibilities of temporal anomalies?"
"You're grasping at straws! You've seen the results of the sims. There was less than one thousandth of a percent that there would be any time slippage. At worst, we skip a few minutes backward or forward instead of translocating sideways into another reality. Who knows, maybe I’ll suddenly appear and tell us that it works!"
They both stopped and glanced around the lab before Rodney looked sheepishly at Zelenka.
"Okay, if that was going to happen, it probably already would have, and since it didn't, it won’t."
Zelenka set his hands on the lab bench and leaned forward into McKay's space. "Or perhaps it did happen, and we are a divergent future timeline that was created when you came back to warn us not to do it without more testing!"
"Touchy," McKay groused, waving a hand in Zelenka's face. "You know, some theories postulate a divergent timeline is created every time we make an important decision. Somewhere, there is a universe created when I decided I was too busy to stop for a cup of coffee on morning." He considered that and frowned. "And I’m sure in that universe, I missed something extremely important because of a caffeine withdrawal headache and we all died very horribly."
Zelenka grabbed McKay's tablet and rapidly typed a few commands to bring up a 3-dimensional image that represented the progress of their recent simulations. "Here and here," he pointed out different areas of the display, "and even when we lowered the energy output, here - there was a spike, right across the spectrum. Whether you subscribe to M-Theory or infinite parallel universes, we are still looking at the possibility that introducing enough energy to transport a person to an alternate reality - even partially, within a temporal bubble - might fracture the matrix of the bubble and propel the viewer fully into the alternate reality, one that is far removed and radically divergent from our own. I believe this is where the mental component is necessary. To try and proceed without it will, at best result in simple failure. At worst, the results could be disastrous."
McKay shook his head. "Not if I compensate by buffering-" his hand darted past Zelenka’s to type in an equation - "Like so." He hit enter with a flourish. The image flickered and then evened out, the jagged spikes melting down into the smooth surface of the asymmetrical waveform like ice under the summer sun.
"Equations, Rodney. The numbers look good. The simulation looks good." Radek bit his lip, took a deep breath, and then pressed on. "You know better than anyone how sometimes what looks good in the simulation does not actually work when it comes to ancient technology."
McKay's face went slack with shock, and it took him a full five seconds to recover himself enough to respond."This isn’t-" McKay bit back his reply, anger suffusing his features as he turned away. "Yes. I do know," he said, voice tight, his entire body rigid. "Fine. We’ll do more tests."
Radek had hoped that Rodney would listen to reason without bringing up Doranda. Unfortunately, given the direction and tone of their last few arguments - and the fact Rodney's arrogance was hitting pre-Doranda levels - it seemed like the only thing that might make Rodney stop and consider the possible repercussions. "I want this to succeed, Rodney, every bit as much as you do," he affirmed. "I just want to be sure that nothing goes catastrophically wrong for us when we try it."
McKay's posture relaxed slightly and he huffed as he looked back over his shoulder at the test results on the tablet. "Fine. Even if it's not a - what did Sheppard call it, an Ascend-o-matic? Even supposing it isn't Ascension related, it still doesn't make sense. I can understand that you would want to be in the right mental state before heading off to explore a different reality, but seriously! It can't be that much different than getting psyched up for an away mission to a potentially hostile planet. The best the linguists could come up with was "Controlling the realities of time and space with your mind"? What exactly is that supposed to mean anyway? It's pure Ascension psychobabble, every word of it!"
Wednesday, 23:55 Atlantis Standard Time
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
They'd only stayed in the bubble long enough to establish that the universe they'd shifted into was a virtual carbon copy of their own. Rodney had insisted they collapse the displacement field and work in this reality in order to conserve the charge in the DSCs as long as possible. They had the capability to make at least a dozen more shifts fully charged, but maintaining the displacement field drained them quickly.
After almost an hour of watching Radek and Rodney pour over the data McKay had downloaded, argue, type furiously, run a simulation, then do it all over again, Sheppard was nearly ready to strangled them both. He pushed off the wall he'd been lounging against.
"I'm checking the perimeter," he said as he pulled out his glock to re-check the magazine, then holstered the sidearm.
"I still think we should talk to the 'us' from this universe," Rodney complained.
Sheppard let out a sigh. Rodney and Radek had been all for contacting their counterparts in this universe for assistance, but he'd overruled them.
"Look, there's plenty time to get friendly once I've done a little re-con," he reasoned as he snapped the P90 on to its harness." I just want to make sure they're not, I don't know - Mirror-universe versions of us or something."
"That would be highly unlikely," Radek said, but Rodney cut him off.
"Geek!" he proclaimed, pointing a finger at him."You are a bigger nerd than anyone on my staff!"
Sheppard flipped him off. "Be back in 10."
He walked down the corridor, weapon at the ready. On their Atlantis, this section was off limits because of unrepaired damage, first from the shield collapse when the city was under the ocean, and then again during the storm and the Genii invasion. It had never been a priority to fix it, and it looked like the same held true here.
Atlantis had been every bit as responsive to him here as back home, though if pressed, he'd have to say something was off - like a slightly different flavour for lack of a better description. He'd politely asked the city not to show their life signs on any internal sensor sweeps, and McKay had been able to get into the mainframe and confirm that they weren't on the grid.
Sheppard didn't see anyone - not that he expected to -but he felt a little less homicidal when he entered the room again. "Anything?" he asked as he set down the P90.
"It just doesn't make sense," Rodney griped, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. "There were no recent failures or power spikes - nothing we can find to account for why the sensors would have failed to detect inbound ships. We should have seen them coming!"
Radek made a frustrated noise and McKay peered over his shoulder at the data on the tablet. "What the hell is that?"
"This is the report I sent to Elizabeth." On the screen was a log with various graphs and charts. "This is all the data we've compiled from the live trails with the AR machine" He indicated a particular line graph. "You see how each data set has a signature unique to its own universe."
"Yes, yes," McKay agreed impatiently. "What does that have to do with-"
"Look at this," Zelenka interrupted, and pulled up another log. "I've graphed out the results from the scanner logs." He tapped another key, maximizing a screen.
McKay frowned again."That can't be right. Are you sure you have the inverse tangent set up to return degrees, not radians?"
Zelenka looked offended, but McKay just waved it off. "Yes, I know, stupid question, I had to ask. Okay, run a side by side comparison with the energy output analysis for the AR device, overlapping the analysis from the sensor log report, and throw the results into a bode plot."
There was no sound but the tapping of keys and the whirring of the hard drive for several minutes as the data compiled. With a flicker, the screen refreshed, presenting them with a new graph comprised of both data sets.
"Muj bože!" Radek breathed out softly.
Rodney stared damning results, face ashen. "It was our fault," he whispered.
Sheppard shouldered McKay out of the way to study the results himself. The beginning of the graph had disparate green and blue lines that quickly overlapped into a solid red line. There were a few variances along the line, but it was pretty much solid. "Rodney," he growled, his tone a question and demand. The equations made sense, but he didn't really understand what the raw sensor data meant.
Rodney brought up the original sensor data graph. "Look here," he instructed, pointing to dips and squiggles on the screen.
"I get the numbers, Rodney," he bit out. "Explain the part about how it's our fault."
"This is the spectrum our sensors are calibrated for," he said, indicating the highs and lows. "The energy signature of a Wraith hyper drive engine falls well within that, and we can generally detect them by the time they hit the heliopause of the Lantean system." Rodney brought the new model back up. Sheppard could see how the blue line suddenly dropped when the AR data was superimposed over it, almost like it was being pulled off course.
"The AR machine created - well, for lack of a better description, a probability bubble around Atlantis. We didn't see the Wraith coming because while we were using the alternate reality device, the sensors were looking at other realities. Or, to be more accurate, the most probable realities - the ones that happened most often."
John stared at the screen, a sick feeling twisting in his gut as he listened.
Radek continued. "It was a kind of hysteresis error, as the effects lingered for at least several hours after each use. By the time the remnant flux density began to dissipate, we were running another test. None of the technicians saw anything the atypical about the sensors because they aren't trained to look at the waveforms and energy signatures - they were looking for occurrences."
"The Wraith could have been heading toward us for weeks," McKay said bleakly, shame colouring his every word. "It should have occurred to me to run checks on key systems to be sure the device wasn't interfering with anything mission critical. I'm supposed to be the brilliant one, and now everyone is dead because of my stupidity."
"Was there anything in the database to indicate this thing would screw with the sensors?" Sheppard asked, his face hard.
McKay shook his head. "No. I mean, I never read anything like that, and I read all the documentation, but I should have thought about the possibility." His let out a derisive laugh. "I should have realized the kind of disruption it might cause, I mean, it only makes sense there would be something..."
Sheppard had heard enough. He reached out and caught Rodney by the shoulders, giving him a firm shake. "There was no way you could have known. It wasn't your fault." He looked over to where Zelenka sat, catching his eyes. "Neither one of you."
Rodney jerked free of his grip. "I'm the CSO, John! I'm the genius who always pulls our asses out of the fire at the eleventh hour!" he yelled, gesticulating wildly. "Only this time, I screwed up and it's too late - no last minute save, no instant replay - they're all dead. Game over!"
Radek spoke hesitantly. "There is... one thing. Maybe."
McKay's gaze snapped around to Zelenka. "What thing?" he demanded. "What are you talking about?"
"We worried about the potential temporal displacement," he continued, absently rubbing his chin with one hand as he spoke. "We spent many hours making sure the shift would be stable, that there would be no inadvertent time slippage."
Rodney's face lit up as he caught where Radek was going. "But if we remove those constraints, we could go back -"
"We could warn ourselves!"
"McKay, are you saying we could go back in time?" Sheppard asked sceptically. "Stop this from happening?"
"Yes! Well, theoretically anyway." He looked up at the Colonel. "I mean, we were trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening. To do it deliberately, and accurately, well, that remains to be seen."
"We should begin immediately," Radek said. "The longer we wait the more difficult it will become."
"Why?" asked Sheppard.
Radek lifted his wrist to indicate the DSC. "Outside the bubble, we are no longer insulated from the passage of normal time. The more time passes, the farther out of step we are with our own universe and the harder it will be to go back and affect any kind of change."
"We need to re-establish the displacement field, and get to the AR device on this Atlantis as soon as possible," Rodney said as he stowed his tablet in his pack. "We've probably only got enough charge to maintain a constant field for a couple of hours, and I don't know how long it's going to take us to rewrite the code, so chop, chop. Let's get moving, shall we?" He tapped a command on his DSC and promptly vanished.
"That is so weird to watch," Sheppard grumbled as tapped a code in his own wrist device and Rodney came back into view. Once he saw that Radek was with them, Sheppard took point and started on the shortest path to the lab.
It wasn't long before they were moving into a more populated area of the city. Sheppard felt a little like a voyeur as he walked the halls, watching people who couldn't see him. It was especially eerie knowing that in his universe, some of these people were now dead, victims of an incursion they never saw coming.
A pair of marines on late patrol came around the corner, and something twisted in his gut as he recognized Philips and Vargas. He firmly shoved it away, reminding himself that if McKay and Zelenka could make this work, he was going to make sure those two got a very special commendation each, even if they would have absolutely no idea why.
A few minutes later they were approaching the lab, and Rodney, impatient to get started, took the lead. Sheppard just grinned and went to take up a position outside the door when he saw Rodney stop dead.
"Oh crap."
Zelenka stepped up beside him to peer into the open lab. "This is not unexpected, Rodney. He is, after all, you."
Sheppard glanced over his shoulder to see the McKay from this reality hunkered over his laptop. "Is this going to be a problem?"
"I need access to that AR machine in real-time," Rodney explained. "Unfortunately, I recognize that look. It's the one I get when I'm stymied by a problem and I'm not leaving till I've got it solved." He sighed morosely. "He's not going anywhere soon."
***
Rodney stared blankly at his laptop, the recent conversation replaying in his mind.
He was an arrogant man, and that wasn't likely to change. It was just a natural by-product of being the smartest man in two galaxies. But it was tempered with caution now. The knowledge that people could die - had died in fact - as a result of his mistakes weighed heavy on him. He would never intentionally place lives at risk for the sake of his professional pride. That Radek might think him capable of doing so stung deeply.
Suddenly anger gripped him. He rose from his seat and walked over to the Ancient device at the centre of all the fuss. The control console was not all that unlike the ones in the control gate room. Ancient script adorned buttons and tabs and there was a screen that lit up with data when the device was active.
There was a circular platform next to the control console the observer stood on to began their trip. It was made of the same odd grey material as the control chair, with clear crystal panels that glowed blue once it was initialized. There were four personal control units sitting on a nearby table.
The only thing holding back live testing was the mental component referenced in the documentation on the device. He'd spent weeks going over the machine itself, and while there was nothing about it that resembled any of the ascension devices they'd run across so far, he couldn't figure out what else it could be. It wasn't like pulling up a jumper HUD or interfacing with the control chair. The thought of altering or controlling time, space and reality with your mind sounded suspiciously like something you could only do if you were a glowing squid, and he'd already had a close encounter with that particular brand of Ancient insanity.
Rodney picked up one of the personal control units and, on a whim, snapped it closed around his wrist. The metal warmed instantly and the display on the top activated, indicating a full charge. He nudged the indicator, dialling it up to the setting they’d used when sending some lab mice through earlier that day. He could feel mild vibrations through his arm as the device synched itself to its counterparts.
"I could do this right now," he mused. "I could just step up and... and *go* for it."
***
"Yes, you can," McKay said encouragingly as he walked up behind his alternate self. "You could take a little spin, go have a little look - you know that it's perfectly safe. Everything will be fine!"
Sheppard looked over, startled. "McKay, what the hell are you doing?"
"I am trying to get uninterrupted access to the AR device for 5 minutes so that I can make the changes I need to get us home," he said.
"Rodney, no!" Zelenka exclaimed, following after him. "You are the one who said gene carriers should not operate the device themselves! What are you thinking?"
"Look, we just need him out of here for a few minutes!" McKay argued as they watched the other Rodney. "You're the one who had been insisting that this is not an ascension device. If something weird happens, we're right here. You can drop out of the bubble and intervene."
***
Rodney felt his pulse quicken and he shook his head as he huffed out a laugh. He was crazy to even consider it, especially after the many weeks he'd spent arguing against the very idea. He was the champion of the scientific method, defender of the quantifiable. Unlike Colonel Fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, he didn't do things on a whim. It was simply absurd. Unthinkable. Madness.
It left him feeling strangely giddy.
This was one of their most tantalizing discoveries yet. But more testing wouldn't tell them anything they didn't already know. And he *knew* the machine itself was safe. If Radek was right and it wasn't Ascension related - he was going to go out on a limb and trust him on that one - then he should be able to initialize it with no ill effect. Then he could set it for solo use and go for a five minute jaunt, just long enough to take a peek around another reality. After all, he could always come back right away if the situation warranted it. He could even set an automatic recall to pull him back after five minutes in case something went wrong and he couldn't shift back himself.
He stepped behind the main control panel to initialize the platform and set the auto-recall, holding his breath as it powered up. When there was no unexpected surge and the power indicators showed the same results as they did when Radek operated the console, Rodney was flooded with relief. One for Radek - he rolled his eyes, knowing that the other man would be insufferable after this. After adjusting the initialization sequence to allow for individual override control from a DSC, he went to stand on the platform. He tapped the activation code into the wrist device and a soft chime began to sound from the console. Rodney frowned. That hadn’t happened when they sent through the inanimate objects or the mice.
A few seconds later the platform lit up beneath him and he felt a tingle, like a static charge, running all over him from head to toes. He held his hands out in front of him. He could see the displacement field forming around him. He made a concerted effort to breathe calmly and adjusted the settings on the DSC to a 0.01% differential.
A second, more discordant tone joined the initial chime. He wondered if it could be some sort of reminder to whoever was manning the controls. Only that didn’t make sense, the documentation specifically mentioned lone travellers being able to self actualize their destinations...
He got a Very Bad Feeling that he had missed something Really Big, that perhaps the mental component Radek had been so adamant about was more important than he'd realized.
"Off! Off! OFFOFFOFF!" he chanted, hoping he could deactivate it with his gene the way they were able to control so much other Ancient tech, but to no avail. It made sense, since the machine had to be manually activated that he wouldn't be able to just turn it off with a thought, but now he was caught in the middle of something with no idea what was happening. Even worse, if he stepped off the disk with the bubble already forming around him, it could be very bad -
"Oh, shit!"
***
"McKay! What the hell is happening?"
"I don't know, I DON'T KNOW! It's never done that before, it shouldn't be doing that, he did everything right!"
"As far as we know," Radek interjected. "This does not mean that we are correct. Evidence would suggest we were not."
"Oh, does it make you happy to be able to say I told you so?
"Rodney! Focus! Is there anything we can do?"
***
Rodney wished for just a moment that he’d never found this lab, never come to Atlantis, that he'd stayed at Area 51, that he could just *listen* to the brilliant staff he’d surrounded himself with, and oh god, he’d much rather have a boring life back on earth with his cat than a smear of temporally displaced atoms spread across countless universes -
"Hey McKay, you in here? What's all the racket about?"
He opened his eyes to see Sheppard enter the lab, as he often did late in the evening, no doubt coming to harass him into leaving for the night.
"John!"
Sheppard stopped short, caught off guard by the use of his first name. It took him a full few seconds to process what he was seeing and then he darted across the room to the console. He looked down at the controls, helpless frustration on his features. "Rodney, what the hell are you doing? How do I turn this off?"
A third sound blared out and there was no mistaking it for anything but an alarm. The coolly indifferent voice of the Atlantis AI cut in. "Parameters supplied for trans-dimensional shift insufficient; disengaging controller from matrix. Displacement Field will engage in 10 seconds."
"Hit the blue and gold control in the lower left of the panel!" Rodney said desperately. "And think off as hard as you can!"
"I'm thinking off!" Sheppard yelled as he hit the control. It made a 'blaaat' noise nothing happened. "This isn't working, Rodney!" He hit the control again with the same result.
"It's just not fair!" Rodney moaned. "Of all the times I could pick to trust the judgement of people who are not as smart as me! Just once I would have been happy to be proved wrong!"
Sheppard tapped his radio, "Radek, get down here now! McKay's in trouble!"
"Oh god," Rodney looked at Sheppard, wide-eyed and desperate. "John! I don't know what's going to happen - if I don't make it back, tell Jeannie I love her, tell Radek my most brilliant papers are on the H: drive, tell Elizabeth-"
"Tell them yourself when you get back," Sheppard ordered and he moved as close as possible to the platform without touching the energy field. "You better come back, Rodney, because if I have to come looking for you, you're gonna be very sorry!"
"John..." McKay reached out as if to touch Sheppard, then curled his fingers back in. "I wish I'd been braver, that I'd told you how I felt..."
"Field Engaged."
"RODNEY!"
Just like that, Rodney winked out of existence, right before his eyes. He was still trying to gain his bearings when Zelenka came running in.
"What is it? What has happened?" he demanded, glancing around while trying to catch his breath. "Where is Rodney?"
John just stared at the empty transport platform. "I have no idea."
Continued in part 3.