Waves are Universal - Chapter 2
TO: All residents of Area 51
DATE: 6/21/34
FROM: Farmer Jake and Farmer Kevin
RE: Food
Hi, folks. As we move into July, we’re beginning to hit the height of the vegetable harvest season. Any and all help we could get picking and storing (canning, preserving, etc.) this year’s crop would be greatly appreciated. General McLaggen has once again graciously volunteered to give all scientists a three-month vacation to help us out with this, so claiming physics isn’t going to get you out of it. Besides, you people need to get some sunlight. :)
If you’re new to this, we’ll teach you everything you need to know. If you’re not new, we’ll give you a refresher anyway.
Thank you!
Jack plucks a tomato from its stalk and gently places it in the bucket on the ground next to him. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, certain that he’s done nothing to relieve the sweat and instead created mud. He considers himself a fairly simple guy - needing little more than The Simpsons and fishing and a bottle of Guinness to be happy - but after three weeks of vegetable picking, he really just wants to shoot something. His requests to be added to the perimeter duty roster have been denied for reasons that are fuzzy and seem to be dependent on a lot of ifs (if the Rak’har come back and if they show up here and if they see him, he’ll be instantly recognized) and since there’s a limited amount of running and lifting he can do before getting even more bored and because nobody needs to be trained in skills he has, he wakes up every morning, slathers on sunscreen and heads outside to learn about agriculture.
He thinks that this must be what going insane feels like.
Fortunately, he’s not alone. He grins through the leafy plants at Sam working her way down her own row. And he thinks that if he feels like he’s going insane, she must be holding onto the shreds of her sanity by her fingernails. She’s volunteered her help to every scientist she can find, but her offers have been met with a shake of a head and a we’re all needed outside mantra (and Alle is remarkably efficient at avoiding her anyway) so Sam gave up after a week of desperate attempts to be a scientist and joined Jack in the garden. Technically it’s a farm, based on size and the presence of a significant number of chickens and a few tractors and an irrigation network, but they find it easier to say that they’ve been gardening instead of farming.
The implication at the end of the day is flowers, not cow manure.
The efforts to maintain some level of normalcy don’t go unnoticed by Sam or Jack, especially once they realize that they have exactly one set of everything - though Sam does have three pairs of socks - and washing that every day isn’t the most pragmatic plan they’ve ever come up with. Jack thinks that it may be the only time in his life that he’s been encouraged to wear shorts on a military base. The military sticks with fatigues and BDUs and solid colors and several shades of khaki, but the civilians and scientists dress as though the world didn’t end but maybe their closets just got a little smaller. Flashes of color that once caught them off guard are now welcome breaks to the bland base walls that surround them inside and never-ending sandy desert outside. There’s a surprising amount of Day-Glo.
They have a routine now, settling into the repetition while they get used to the idea of waiting for someone else to figure out how they’re supposed to get home. Awake at five, Sam quietly brushes her teeth and then nudges Jack’s shoulder before she leaves for a morning run. She wakes him up again when she gets back and then hops in the shower, waking him up for a third time (Get up. No really, I mean it now) when she’s wrapped in a towel and retreats to the bedroom to change while he sleepily brushes his teeth and wonders how anyone could be awake enough to run five miles before coffee. She reminds him of oh-six-hundred departure times and how this really isn’t that bad at all in comparison as they walk to the mess for breakfast, and then outside before the Nevada sun gets too much and they retreat inside for lunch.
Afternoons are spent playing chess, sorting produce by size (a necessary aspect of agriculture so mind numbing that Jack is positive it was invented by farmers solely as a method of getting their children out of their hair), or Jack annoying Sam while she tries to read. Dinner, sometimes they sit back and watch a Dart Wars final battle, and then they return to their quarters. Jack whines about being bored, Sam grumbles about a knot in her right shoulder, they smile and say remember that time Daniel thought the ritual was for rain/good harvest/good hunting/thanks/friendship and it was really for fertility/love/beautiful women/handsome men/marriage and it involved nudity/alcohol/drugs/body paint? and Sam heads into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash the dirt out from under her fingernails while Jack puts the pillows and blankets back on the couch.
She offers to share the bed, but he declines with a smile and says that the couch is more comfortable than it looks (they both know it isn’t) and after he switches off the bathroom light and steps out into the living room in his boxers, he sticks his head into the bedroom to wish Sam sweet dreams. She tells him the same and turns out her light as he shuts the door, but her eyes stay open until the light filtering underneath her door disappears and she hears him settle down into slumber.
Sleep for eight hours, repeat.
He sleeps on the couch because this isn’t a question of if they’ll get back, it’s a question of when they’ll get back and he doesn’t want to deal with the multiplying now what scenarios that would undoubtedly develop if they shared a bed. Because at this point, after only three weeks, they’re hugging and laughing and enjoying each other’s company and she’s dropped the sir (mostly) and he calls her Sam (occasionally) and the flirty touches and looks that develop in the next weeks (glances and soft fingertips on jean-covered thighs that neither shy away from) tell him that sharing a bed might start innocently but would most definitely lead to something quite a bit less so.
***
“O’Neill.”
Jack looks up from his green beans and squints into the sun to make out the shape of the person talking to him. He vaguely recognizes the man - Rodgers, Rodriguez, Rocco, whatever - as the one who routinely turns down his requests to do something other than pick vegetables. “Yeah?”
“You and Carter are going into town tomorrow. Briefing’s at the mess in ten.” He walks off.
“Town?” Jack lifts an eyebrow at Sam.
She shrugs.
Town, it turns out, is Las Vegas.
Though the city itself was subject to a direct hit when Earth was attacked, a Costco, a Sam’s Club and a Super Wal-Mart all managed to survive intact. The military spent the first several weeks in frantic reorganization of the stores, transferring all perishable items to the Costco so they’d only need to keep the energy running in one building. Most survivors voluntarily relocated to the base but a few fringe groups remain in the city, requiring military protection around the stores to prevent looting. Troy - who Jack remembers as the guy yelling about his boat and who, Jack finds out, was the current leader of SG-1 when this mess happened and has since been reassigned to Supply Guy - steps onto a table to give a practiced speech about avoiding getting shot.
“Grocery 1 has reported increased zombie activity around the Bellagio and Grocery 2 mentioned something about a new group on 95-South. Yes?” He nods to Jack, who has his hand raised.
“Sorry. Zombies?”
“Living dead. Crazy people who have survived on canned beans and Gatorade for five years and will shoot you on sight because they’ve been living in hell for so long they don’t remember what it’s like to be human.”
“Ah.”
His attention returns to the group. “Hawthorne’s handing out supply assignments. You are responsible for what is on that list and nothing else. Use the buddy system when you are inside the building. You get in, grab your stuff, get back to your truck. Each truck has four people. You leave only when your entire group is back and no truck travels alone. Got it?” A chorus of yeses rumbles through the crowd. “Good. We leave at 0630 tomorrow. Get some sleep; it’ll be a long day.”
***
Back in his BDUs and boots, Jack palms the butt of his P-90. He leans casually against the Escalade he was pointed toward by someone with a clipboard and peers out at the parking lot around him. Most of the vehicles in the lot are big, trucks and SUVs and a few Hummers, but scattered amidst the hulk are smaller cars, sensible four-door sedans, hybrids and Smart Cars, all of which might have once prevailed in practicality but no longer see any action. All of the cars people are gathered around have been modified: doors and rear windows torn off for easier shooting, M60s mounted to point out the back window, and Jack’s pretty sure he sees a flamethrower on one. He thinks it’s a bit overkill for people who have been labeled so comically as zombies but then he sees the bullet holes that riddle the bed of the truck next to him.
He checks his watch and finds some comfort in the Air Force being unable to tell time in any reality. He taps his sunglasses and they fall from the top of his head onto the bridge of his nose. It’s early, barely 0700, but the sun is already intense, beating down on his neck. He’d scoffed when Carter offered him sunscreen, but she’d looked at him with a glare eerily akin to Janet’s you will either drop them willingly or I will find a nurse to tie you down look and he’d caved, feeling silly, but he thinks now it was a good plan. Carter bends over to retie her boot.
“How many times are you gonna fix that thing?”
She bites back a sharp sigh and tugs the lace a little tighter. “It’s a new lace.” Satisfied for the moment, she stands up. “Is this much firepower really necessary for a trip to Vegas?” Each person milling around the parking lot is equipped with at least an MP7 and a zat as a sidearm.
Jack shrugs. “Zombies,” he says with a grin.
Sam rolls her eyes behind her sunglasses and frowns at her boot, still not sure that it’s right.
Alle walks past them, clipboard in hand as she discusses with Troy whether they need ten packs of paper towels or fifteen. Her feet clad in combat boots, she’s chopped off a pair of desert BDU pants into shorts and skipped the jacket in favor of a white tank top. A P-90 is slung around her back.
“Now that’s just wrong.”
“It’s hot out,” Sam says, assuming that Jack’s talking about the fact that Alle clearly ignored the dress code memo. She wants to do the same thing, and it’s nowhere near the hottest part of the day.
“I mean the gun. She’s a civilian.” He clenches his teeth against the idea of any child of his carrying a weapon, regardless of the circumstances and whether or not he actually had a role in her creation.
Sam turns to look at him. “We give Daniel a gun.”
“That’s different.”
She cocks an eyebrow as she looks at him over the rim of her sunglasses. “How?”
“It just is.”
“Right.” She pushes her sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose and leans against the car.
After a few seconds, Jack throws up his hands. “I’m just saying…”
“She could probably kill you,” Sam offers with a playful grin. “Sir,” she tacks on as an afterthought.
“You mock me?”
“Oh, look, we’re getting ready to go.”
Jack follows her line of sight and focuses on a group of people who look like they’re in charge nodding and waving. Alle pulls a ball cap onto her head (he’s secretly pleased that it’s a Cubs hat) and then grasps the exposed frame of a Jeep and swings herself into the reversed back seat, settling the gun in her lap. She nods again to Troy and the group checks their radios.
“Alright, people. Let’s move out!” Troy shouts and jogs back to the Escalade where Sam, Jack and a young captain named Andrews are waiting. “Who’s riding shotgun?”
The other three look at each other and shrug and play a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, which lands Sam in the shotgun seat. She climbs in and smiles to herself, thinking that shotgun might actually mean something on this trip.
Half an hour into the ninety-minute drive to the city, Sam notices the first physical evidence that anything bad happened here. A pickup truck lies on its side in the right-hand lane ahead of them and as they pass, she glimpses one skeleton inside and another halfway out, looking like whoever it used to be tried to crawl out before they died. She grimaces.
“It gets worse,” Troy says to her from the driver’s seat without taking his eyes off the road. “Wouldn’t recommend looking.” He turns on the SUV’s CD player and cranks up the volume so the sounds of Quiet Riot can be heard over the roar of the air as they speed across the highway.
And it does get worse. Cars smashed into each other in multi-car pileups bear the scorch marks of fire, bones of their occupants blackened inside. Vehicles remain parked in lanes where drivers and passengers got out to walk, choosing to abandon their ride and tempt the elements but scattered skeletons along the shoulder tell of their inevitable death. Occasionally a skull or a rib or a foot lays nowhere near the rest of a body, hints of coyotes and scavengers. There’s been some attempt at cleaning it up over the past five years, but mostly in moving the mangled metal frames to the left lane to allow for easier travel.
By the time they reach the outskirts of Las Vegas, Sam feels like she wants to throw up and it has nothing to do with the heat or the bumpy ride. Jack places his hand on her shoulder and tries to connect with her eyes through their sunglasses; she’s not alone in the feeling.
The city itself is a disaster. Someone had tried to clean up by making stacks of bodies, now completely decomposed into eerie piles of bones on street corners, but had given up or died in the process. Some still have clothes on and one survivor with a macabre sense of humor posed two skeletons next to each other on a bench, one with its arm around the other making a thumbs up sign. There’s a fedora jauntily set on its head and a tattered pink feather boa wrapped around the neck of its companion.
They pass casinos and hotels, destroyed by bombs and weapons no one expected. The Eiffel Tower lies in parts on its side and the Stratosphere cuts buildings in half where it smashed to the ground.
“Eyes open,” Troy says, turning off the music. “Bellagio’s up ahead on the left. Shoot to kill; these guys aren’t really living anymore.”
The fountains are still and Sam lifts her gun and aims as she thinks she sees movement out of the corner of her eye. The water stinks of stagnancy, but she knows the stench is nowhere near what it must have been years ago with an entire city of decomposing bodies.
Jack returns a volley of machine gun fire in the general direction of a shotgun blast. The shots echo across the empty streets and then there’s silence until they pull up at the Costco with the rest of the caravan.
It takes them ten minutes to run through the store and pick up bags of frozen fruit, three jars of mayonnaise, two thirty-six packs of toilet paper and a giant box of Tootsie Roll pops. They meet back up at the Escalade and load in their “purchases” with the others: paper towels, cashews, chocolate chips, vitamins and truly the biggest bags of frozen peas Jack has ever seen. Once another car is ready to go, Troy signals for them to get back in and he guides the Escalade back onto the road and speeds out of town. Tom Petty serenades them on the way back.
“You okay?” Jack asks Sam later that night once they’ve eaten dinner and showered.
She shakes her head and rubs her arms. Sitting down on the couch, she curls herself into a corner and tucks her knees to her chin. “I’ve seen all the disaster movies. But…” she trails off and shakes her head, unable to voice the feelings. This isn’t her reality, which makes it feel worse even though it should be comforting. In thirty years, it could be hers.
“C’mere,” he says, scooting closer to her. He tucks his arm around her and she immediately leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder. They sit in silence, her eyes closed and his staring at the wall, until he brushes a kiss against the top of her head. “We’re gonna get home,” he says quietly, knowing her unspoken fear because it’s his as well.
“How do you know?” She asks in a small voice, never less sure of anything.
He smiles. “Because you’re the smartest person I know. And some version of you gave birth to someone who seems to have inherited more of your genes than mine. We’ll get home.”
***
Two weeks later, Sam’s afternoon ritual (a ritual that began three days ago when Jack ordered her to stay inside after she acquired a fairly worrying sunburn) of being lazy and reading a book is interrupted by a knock. She opens the door, shocked to see Alle standing on the other side.
“Hey,” Sam says, trying to mask her surprise at seeing someone who has been so successful at avoiding her for three months voluntarily standing just outside her quarters.
“Uhm, do you and Jack want to come over for dinner? I mean, the mess does a good job, but sometimes you want to feel like you don’t live on a military base, you know?” Alle plays with her hands as she babbles and explains that she and Zach snagged a set of quarters with a kitchen.
Sam smiles, understanding the feeling even if she doesn’t understand the sudden change in heart. “Sure,” she accepts. “What time?”
“Seven. See you then.” Alle turns and disappears again after offering an awkward wave.
Dinner passes by in a whirl of wonderful food, vegetarian fajitas with tortillas that seem hell bent on ripping and causing no end of laughter when guacamole and salsa drip onto hands and plates. Sam figures that at least one of their alternate reality selves was an amazing cook or it’s a skill Alle picked up elsewhere; Sam can barely chop broccoli when she’s not making soufflé and she knows that Jack can grill a steak but wouldn’t know what to do with a potato if it told him. The company’s surprisingly good, too, with Zach and Alle sharing offworld stories, tales of post-apocalyptic pranks and the one time they road tripped to Minnesota to raid the Mall of America and came back with a car piled to the brim with Legos, the weirdest varieties of peanut butter they could find, Lake Wobegon t-shirts, a giant stuffed Trix rabbit and seven pairs of roller skates. Sam and Jack, in turn, share stories of their SG-1, endless card games around campfires, mistranslated declarations by town leaders that resulted in accidental drunken nudity, the one time Sam ate something she shouldn’t have and turned blue for a week, and a very memorable incident in which Daniel was summarily tossed in jail for wearing glasses.
Sam nudges Jack’s leg with hers under the table when she notices Alle begin to retreat. Jack nods, silently agreeing with Sam that their presence might become too much in ten minutes. Sam offers to clean up.
Alle meets her in the kitchen a few minutes later, a notebook clutched in her hand. She nervously shifts her weight from foot to foot while Sam finishes scrubbing a pan. Sam doesn’t say anything, merely dries her hands and waits for the other woman to speak. The silence in the kitchen is broken only by the men in the next room chatting as they pile dishes and clear the table.
“I feel like I’m eight,” Alle starts, laughing a little, remembering times past when she anxiously asked her mother to check her homework, “but I think my math is wrong somewhere. And I’ve been staring at it for days and can’t find it and you’re the only one besides Boyd who comes close to having a clue what any of this means and he drives me nuts. Can you take a look at it?”
Sam nods and accepts the offered well-worn notebook. She may be thirty years behind on the math, but she knows how to error check and catch up fast. “Sure.” As Alle nods her thanks and turns to go, probably to vanish, Sam speaks up. “Thanks for dinner. It was nice.”
Alle looks over her shoulder and smiles a hint of a smile that Sam recognizes, even in its smallest form, as hers. “Cooking dinner makes it seem a little less like the world ended,” she says quietly, pausing a moment before continuing her exit.
***
Jack wakes up, thirsty, and furrows his eyebrows when he glances over at the bedroom door and sees light glowing around the doorframe. He drains a glass of water before padding barefoot over the mismatching rugs tossed over the cold floor, transitioning from neon cartoon fish to muted brown and green flowers to bright purple shag without a second thought. He knocks softly before grasping the knob and pushing the door open.
Sam sniffs, barely awake, and stretches her long legs underneath the warm covers. She rubs at her eyes, smiles at Jack, and returns her focus to the carefully-printed equations and diagrams in front of her. The detail amazes her: annotated explanations crowd the margins exactly where she’d be stumped on the logical jump without them.
“Uh uh,” Jack shakes his head and sits on the bed next to her, wishing he could forget the sudden knowledge that the bed is way more comfortable than the couch. He plucks the pencil from her fingers and slides the notebook with all of its theories and math and hope for the future away from her pillow. “No more homework,” he teases when she protests him putting the notebook on the nightstand. “Bedtime.”
Sam covers a yawn, suddenly aware of how exhausted she is and that she’s been awake for twenty hours straight. “Okay,” she mumbles, her eyes fluttering closed as her head drifts back down to the pillow.
Jack smiles and brushes a stray lock of hair out of her face. “Night, Carter,” he whispers, reaching over her to turn off the light.
***
Despite the inconsistent numbering system, Alle’s lab isn’t hard to find once someone points Sam to the correct level. Sam follows the dull thudding until it becomes louder, transforming into a discernible beat and then into some fairly vile hip-hop lyrics blasting out of an open door at the end of a hallway. Alle is bent over her desk with her back to the door, her head bouncing in time with the music. Sam knocks loudly, surprised when Alle looks over her shoulder and turns the volume down and gestures for Sam to come in; she’s impressed that anyone could hear anything less than a grenade explosion with the speakers up that loudly.
“Did you find it?”
Sam nods and offers her the notebook, open to the page with the ħ outside the parentheses instead of inside. She smiles when Alle curses under her breath at the small mistake that caused pages of inexplicable predicted results and waits patiently while she rapidly changes all of the affected equation lines.
“Thank you,” Alle says, looking up once she’s finished. “This makes a lot more sense now.”
Sam smiles at her. “You’re welcome. Do you need any help? Pulling weeds is really boring and Jack’s benched me anyway because of the sunburn.” The offer rushes out of her mouth before she has a chance to recall Alle’s earlier request: she’s used to people automatically asking for her scientific help and this is the first time she can remember that she’s had to offer.
Alle rubs at her eyes. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I haven’t slept in a while.” She waits for Sam’s nod of understanding before she continues. “You’re over thirty years behind on this stuff. I wrote my dissertation based on breaking laws of physics that you still consider unbreakable. I cannot take a week off to get you up to speed.”
Sam swallows her pride and gets it. She gets why she’s been stuck honing her agricultural skills instead of invited four levels underground to assist in the effort to undo catastrophe. She gets it because she’s been in Alle’s exact position more times than she’d like. She gets the unbearable stress that comes with everyone depending on you to save the world and how that leads to mountains of empty soda cans and crumpled coffee cups and very little sleep and a level of crankiness not usually found in nature. And she understands the conflicted frustration that comes from needing one more pair of hands but not wanting to stop to train that pair of hands. However, she knows that while she might not be the smartest person in the room right now, she’s really damn close and really damn close is better than nothing. “Can you take one day off to get me up to speed on the basics I don’t know? I’ll pick up the rest as I need it.”
Alle squints and tilts her head, examining the woman in front of her. There’s a lot she’ll have to explain, but if this Sam Carter is anything like her mother Samantha Carter, she’ll only need it explained to her once and she’ll be able to apply it immediately. “Alright. Meet me for breakfast at 7:30 tomorrow. We’ll start then.”
***
At the sound of the door closing and a body slumping against it, Jack looks up from his collapsed house of cards. “You okay, Carter?” He hasn’t seen her since early that morning except for a brief wave at dinner, where she unsuccessfully tried to eat pasta and take notes at the same time.
She opens one eye. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
She opens the other eye and reaches down to touch the floor, stretching out muscles stiff from hours of an uncomfortable chair and frantic note-taking. “For every time I tried to explain something way over your head. I am really sorry.” The part of her that isn’t a scientist and doesn’t understand that condescension comes with sleep deprivation wants to curl up in a ball and cry and go back to pulling carrots.
Jack stands and walks over to her. He places one hand on her shoulder, mindful of the sunburn hidden beneath the t-shirt, and gently guides her into a hug. They’re now three months in and it occurs to him that he hasn’t witnessed her showing even the smallest amount of panic, desperation, worry or homesickness. That concerns him: he’s at least mentioned that he misses annoying Daniel and that he hopes Teal’c has managed to find someone else to introduce him to the finer ways that humans entertain themselves (though he really doesn’t hope; he desperately wants the dubious honor of explaining Mexican midget wrestling to the Jaffa). He presses his lips to the top of her head. “It’s okay.”
Sam rests her head on his shoulder and slowly brings her arms around his waist. She shakes her head. “No, it’s not. They’ve had seven years to figure out how to get people like you and me home and they have no idea.” She feels the emotion rise up inside her but she can’t quite find the energy to care and shove it back down again. “I want to go home and they’ve had years to work on it and I don’t even know what math they’re using. I don’t even know where to start.” She’s aware that she sounds whiny and petulant and a little bit hysterical but as the first hot tears fall onto her cheeks, she gives in.
Jack feels her shudder against him and he holds her tighter as she starts to cry; he’s not entirely sure what to do with a crying Carter (Sam), but he rubs slow circles on her back and she sort of melts into him. He sticks with the circles, occasionally murmuring what he hopes are calming, confidence-restoring words, until her breathing steadies.
She sniffles a few times before working up the courage to pull away from his chest. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her cheeks dry with the back of her hand.
Jack looks at his shoulder and the noticeable wet spot on the green fabric of his shirt. He shrugs. “It’ll dry.” He knows that’s not what she’s apologizing for.
Sam looks up at him and manages a watery smile. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’ll be on the couch,” he says, letting her know that he’s there if she wakes up in the middle of the night needing another hug.
Teeth brushed and face washed and pajamas on, Sam hesitates by the bedroom door. She bites her lip and plays with the hem of her shirt. “Jack,” she says in the general direction of the couch. His first name still sounds foreign to her and she isn’t quite sure how to ask him to come to bed without it sounding like the proposition it isn’t.
He sits up. “Want company?”
She swallows and nods. “Do you mind?”
He stands up and shoots her a look - he wouldn’t have offered otherwise - before following her into the bedroom. He waits patiently for her to get settled, curling into the blankets just the way she likes, before sliding in next to her. She turns out the light and rolls over, tucking her head underneath his chin. He closes his eyes and he can almost pretend that this is any number of ice cold planets and they’re hiding out in a cave somewhere trying not to freeze to death. But she shifts against him and he instinctively slips an arm around her back and he remembers that they aren’t in a cave, they’re in a bed and that hypothermia is not imminent.
But maybe it’s another form of survival.
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