U is for Unread (Stargate SG-1 - gen, 640 words)
Over at the Stargate SG-1 Alphabet Soup, sg_fignewton was asking for pinch-hitters, so I put my hand up and have scribbled the following little entry for the letter U and the episode Upgrades...
U is For Unread
...Or as good as unread. Good. Bad. Whatever.
He stares at the two piles of books by his desk - a little less than clearly, since the glasses he hadn't needed during that glorious burst of alien-enhanced speed reading were hanging from one hand, gently swinging from his fingers. One pile - about twenty of them, all sizes and shapes and threatening unsteadily to topple over - have a post-it note on top, scrawled in his own hand, the writing made even more chicken-scratchy from the excitement he still remembers. Read in one night!
The other pile - about thirty, even more unsteady - have a similar even chicken-scratchier note. To read tomorrow night!! Except that the tomorrow night in question never came.
The Atenik armbands that upgraded the three SG-1 humans so well, that made them so superhuman and so stupidly reckless, that nearly killed them, are gone. And he knows better than to even mention in his General's or his doctor's hearing that he rather wishes they could try again. Just to get all the way through that beckoning, mocking to-read pile...
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
No, he sighs. The point is, with the disastrous descent back into merely-human, he doesn't even remember most of what he read anyway, it had been all surface, no depth. Just as Sam had found the book she wrote - "in two hours!" - was astonishing in quantity and astonishingly absent in quality, and almost blushed her way into an even deeper decline as she deleted it from her hard drive.
He morosely twirls the glasses around by one earpiece, hooked by a finger and thumb.
It wasn't all ego - oh some of it was, for all three of them, he knows that, Sam knows that, Jack knows it too. But it wasn't all ego. He simply loves the act of reading, more than anything short of digging in dirt, loves it so much that over the years he's couldn't even begin to calculate how many books he's got through reading the normal, human, slower and okay, deeper way -
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
- but as many as he does, he can't catch up. People like him always have more books than time, would even if the time was near limitless, always have a to-read list.
And with his work, his time is anything but limitless, isn't it?
Just for a short time though... he really thought, with the armband and the upgrade, he could do it. He was going to clear his to-read list for the first time since the age of what, 15? - and face the world - worlds - oh hell, galaxy - clear-eyed and totally knowledgeable and emptyhanded without those toppling piles of books he needed, wanted to get to and never, ever could, wanted to get down and just kept adding to.
With the help of an ancient technology, not have any books left to read the next day...
Daniel stops, and thinks about that for a minute. He absently puts his glasses back on, still staring and the piles that come into focus as he does so, and he reads - slowly and carefully - the titles, all those esoteric, abstruse, obscure headings that call to him from two or three thousand centuries or more, that have so much to teach or challenge or just infuriate him. And he starts to smile.
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
He crumples the post-it notes, and throws them in the vague direction of the trash; still smiling, he maneuvers the two piles together into one uneven, unclearable, amazingly inviting structure of books he has to read, or read again. Sometime.
Who, after all, would want a day without any books left to come?
-the end-
U is For Unread
...Or as good as unread. Good. Bad. Whatever.
He stares at the two piles of books by his desk - a little less than clearly, since the glasses he hadn't needed during that glorious burst of alien-enhanced speed reading were hanging from one hand, gently swinging from his fingers. One pile - about twenty of them, all sizes and shapes and threatening unsteadily to topple over - have a post-it note on top, scrawled in his own hand, the writing made even more chicken-scratchy from the excitement he still remembers. Read in one night!
The other pile - about thirty, even more unsteady - have a similar even chicken-scratchier note. To read tomorrow night!! Except that the tomorrow night in question never came.
The Atenik armbands that upgraded the three SG-1 humans so well, that made them so superhuman and so stupidly reckless, that nearly killed them, are gone. And he knows better than to even mention in his General's or his doctor's hearing that he rather wishes they could try again. Just to get all the way through that beckoning, mocking to-read pile...
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
No, he sighs. The point is, with the disastrous descent back into merely-human, he doesn't even remember most of what he read anyway, it had been all surface, no depth. Just as Sam had found the book she wrote - "in two hours!" - was astonishing in quantity and astonishingly absent in quality, and almost blushed her way into an even deeper decline as she deleted it from her hard drive.
He morosely twirls the glasses around by one earpiece, hooked by a finger and thumb.
It wasn't all ego - oh some of it was, for all three of them, he knows that, Sam knows that, Jack knows it too. But it wasn't all ego. He simply loves the act of reading, more than anything short of digging in dirt, loves it so much that over the years he's couldn't even begin to calculate how many books he's got through reading the normal, human, slower and okay, deeper way -
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
- but as many as he does, he can't catch up. People like him always have more books than time, would even if the time was near limitless, always have a to-read list.
And with his work, his time is anything but limitless, isn't it?
Just for a short time though... he really thought, with the armband and the upgrade, he could do it. He was going to clear his to-read list for the first time since the age of what, 15? - and face the world - worlds - oh hell, galaxy - clear-eyed and totally knowledgeable and emptyhanded without those toppling piles of books he needed, wanted to get to and never, ever could, wanted to get down and just kept adding to.
With the help of an ancient technology, not have any books left to read the next day...
Daniel stops, and thinks about that for a minute. He absently puts his glasses back on, still staring and the piles that come into focus as he does so, and he reads - slowly and carefully - the titles, all those esoteric, abstruse, obscure headings that call to him from two or three thousand centuries or more, that have so much to teach or challenge or just infuriate him. And he starts to smile.
"S-see the point is... I can read really fast!"
He crumples the post-it notes, and throws them in the vague direction of the trash; still smiling, he maneuvers the two piles together into one uneven, unclearable, amazingly inviting structure of books he has to read, or read again. Sometime.
Who, after all, would want a day without any books left to come?
-the end-