Games of Chance by X-parrot (second verse challenge) 1/2
Title: Games of Chance (~12,000 words)
Author: xparrot
Characters: Rodney, Sheppard, Team, etc.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Season 4 cast/spoilers (post-BAMSR, pre-The Kindred)
Notes: Many thanks to gnine for ironing out key plot wrinkles, and naye for beta/cheerleading far above and beyond the call of duty.
I am not an astrophysicist, nor do I play one on TV. I do, however, delight in tormenting them, in more ways than one, so I humbly implore any physicists in the audience to give my technobabble the same pass that you would the show.
Summary: Sheppard's got one chance, and Rodney is going to find it, no matter what.
Games of Chance
X-parrot
Rodney's never actually been very good at chess. Sure, he could beat the pants off his high school club, but that just took reading through a couple Bobby Fischer books to defend his genius reputation. He's no grand master. On Atlantis he rarely plays.
It's not like chess is really about intelligence, after all. It's not about reading people, either, or military strategy, or else a computer couldn't master it, not a simple Earth adding machine, anyway. All chess boils down to, in the end, is predicting all potential moves, and choosing the best, a tiresome sorting of odds and possibilities. The likelihood that your opponent will do that if you do this, or this if you do that, and Rodney's got better things to do with his time. It's not guesswork but game theory, probability calculations, and the odds have never been in Rodney's favor. In any given poker hand, he'll get the pair of twos and the guy across the table will be dealt the straight flush. Statistically unlikely but proved in infrequent practice. So usually he doesn't bother, just moves what pieces look smart to him at the time.
Rodney is good at the endgame, the chess puzzles-black mates in six, white mates in ten, finding the single exact path that forces one side to victory, the other side to defeat. He enjoys the straightforward simplicity, even if he kind of abhors it, too, for being so abstract and irrelevant to the messy facts of reality.
Same as he hates Schrödinger's cat, and yet appreciates the truth of it. Even though he knows that if he's opening the box, the cat's probably dead.
Pessimism, he's been told. Rodney prefers to call it honesty.
Sheppard, now, is annoyingly good at chess. He's never played Zelenka, but Rodney knows what side to bet on, should that match ever be arranged. It's not that Sheppard is Deep Blue in black fatigues; he's smarter than the hair makes him look but he's no super-computer. As far as Rodney can tell, he plays chess like he flies, by the seat of his pants and with a death-defying daring that pays off. Unless Sheppard really is that smart, and the risks are calculated. They might be; his subconscious might be a computer after all, spitting out probabilities that he accepts as instinct. It would explain how he lasted this long. Given the career he's lead, Sheppard's survival is something of a statistical anomaly.
It should be Sheppard sitting here now, not Rodney. But if Sheppard were here, then Rodney wouldn't have to be anyway, and that's more of an irony than he can bear to think about right now.
* * *
Rodney lays it all out, thirty-one planets they've combed from the database, with Wraith relays or outposts or landed hive ships, all likely possibilities. It takes him five attempts to convince Colonel Carter to try them, backtracking and repeating but he's finally on the right track, with armed teams of Marines assembling in the gateroom. There are going to be casualties, sending people to Wraith-occupied worlds, but those hypotheticals don't matter.
He fast-forwards because he's on a time limit here, skipping over the blaring of the gateroom alarms as the returning teams come in hot. Sometimes they make it back intact; sometimes they're missing men. Some teams don't return at all, don't even get the chance to dial back and make a report, and Rodney has to try again, and again, this team and that one, arguing with Sam about which men to order through the 'gate, until he gets an answer.
It'd be easier just to send Ronon through to all of them, but this way's more efficient, more worlds covered simultaneously, and Rodney's painfully aware of every passing second, even as he watches days flicker past.
Twentieth world is the jackpot and he almost misses it, maybe did miss it a couple permutations back. The Marines make their report in Sam's office with their spines stiff and straight, four parallel lines, and she calls Rodney in, shows him what they found.
Wasting time, but Rodney has to see for himself, he can't help it. He has to know for sure, so he rewinds and volunteers for the mission to M8G-723. No one's particularly surprised; Sam doesn't protest and Major Mbali just nods and puts him the middle, Ronon on point.
Rodney was in such a hurry that he hadn't gotten the full intell on the planetary situation from the previous team, though that would be a few days out of date anyway. The Wraith only have a couple guards on the gate when they charge through, quickly taken down.
It's not a parked ship but a small facility, a Wraith science lab, on another of those desert worlds they're so partial to, purple-brown sands blowing over barren dunes. The structure is nestled in that wasteland like a lone seashell on an endless beach, a couple spiraling stories high. At the sound of gunfire, more drones come marching out. The Marines hold them off, while Rodney leads Ronon scrambling over the sands, left of the building, as the previous mission had described.
The Wraith don't bother digging graves for their leftovers, but baked under the hot reddish sun the corpses won't smell much, and over time the winds slowly sift sand over them. The freshest are still uncovered, unburied, meals only a day or two dead, though so desiccated from the feeding that they could pass for millennia-old mummies.
Looking down at them, Rodney claps his hand over his mouth and nose, and breathes through his mouth like he can smell the putrefaction anyway, impossibly. But he doesn't allow the churning of his stomach to force him to look away, as Ronon bends over the body on the top of the pile. Doesn't look away as Ronon reaches down, tears something from the neck of the blackened husk and holds it up, chain dangling from his fist, twirling and twinkling obscenely in the sunlight.
Rodney squints at the dog tags, reads the block print capitals, SHEPPARD JOHN A, USAF, and thinks he's going to be sick after all. Before he can be, denial rises up in him like the bile burning in his gorge, and the hologram of dog tags and desert shudders and fractures away into nothing around him.
* * *
The mission to P3X-950 wasn't supposed to be anything special, practically downtime, another make-do assignment while they waited for Teyla to have her kid and get back in the game. Atlantis had been trading amicably with Luarong for a couple years. The Luarongi were technologically advanced, luckily living on a planet far from any of the main Wraith throughfares. While they didn't often ally with other worlds, they had enough interest in Earth medicines and weapons to invite the Atlanteans over every few months to maintain good relations.
Sheppard's team hadn't been to Luarong before, and Rodney was pleased at the chance to check out the Luarongi nuclear power generators, still fission, but a far cry from the inadequate Genii research and a step or two above modern Earth tech. The Luarongi were happy to give him a tour, with Sheppard sticking close to elbow him mid-lecture when necessary (Sheppard had an uncanny sixth sense about when Rodney was going to inadvertently mention naquadah, though it wasn't like the word on its own would mean anything to them anyway.) They were also suitably impressed by Ronon's gun, and fascinated by Sheppard's comments on their up-and-coming aeronautical research (only about twenty years past the Wright Brothers, but they'd have something in the air versus the darts, when the Wraith did come. Sheppard wanted to fly one, naturally, and was put out to be apologetically informed that there were no open test flights.)
It was a relaxingly satisfying visit, up until the point they were heading back to the stargate citadel and were captured by the Wraith worshipers.
Not proper Wraith worshipers, they found out later, when the stunning had worn off and the hoods had been ripped off their heads. The Gate Minister's Primary Aide, black hair falling in tangles from her formerly sleek bun and a purpling bruise down the side of her face, explained to them between gulping sobs, while the chanting rose and fell around them. The cult had existed on Luarong for centuries, but had only gained a dangerous number of followers in the last few years, since news had come of the Wraith awakening.
They believed in sacrifice to appease their leather-fetishist vampiric gods, believed it was their offerings, and not luck, that had kept the cullings from their world, and with every day passed that Luarong stayed untouched, more people began to believe.
The object of their devotion was surrounded by obelisks à la Stonehenge and covered by a great granite disc, a giant stone manhole cover. It wasn't until that was slid aside that they understood the Aide's terrified tears.
Luarong's second Stargate was set in the ground like a swimming pool. They had a list, the Aide explained, eleven sacred addresses memorized by the high priests, dialed at random and the sacrifices were thrown through, one to each, under every full moon.
Luarong had three moons, though he didn't know the synodic periods of any of them, Rodney thought in a sort of numb haze that might have been disbelief, or the aftereffects of the Luarongi taser that left a hangover worse than the Wraith's weapons, if better than a zat's. His headache spiked as the chanting around them crescendoed, and then the freaks in the gray robes and pointed hoods were grabbing Sheppard-of course they were grabbing Sheppard, he'd put himself in the front of the line. How, Rodney couldn't guess, but he knew Sheppard.
He shouted, struggled up against the ropes hobbling his ankles. By then they'd already had to stun Ronon twice, and two more gray-robed fanatics grabbed Rodney by the arms, pressed their tasers to his chest but didn't pull the triggers, giving him a chance to stay still.
Sheppard looked at him across the stargate's broad circumference, as someone dialed the unseen DHD and the event horizon fountained up through the ring, splashed down into the rippling wormhole.
Lit by wavering indigo, Sheppard mouthed something to him. Rodney couldn't make out what. He yelled and thrashed and the bastards in the dingy wannabe Klan gear applied their tasers. The world whited out in an electric flash of pain, and the last thing Rodney saw was Sheppard getting stunned himself, falling backwards, limp, into the stargate, not-so-virgin sacrifice thrown into the mouth of a blue-toned volcano.
The next thing he knew was the retort of gunfire-and what did it say of his life, that he could distinguish a P-90's bang-bang-bang from any old alien ammunition-and rough hands were working at the cords around his wrists. "Relax, Dr. McKay, we'll have you out of these in a sec."
The Luarongi government, valuing trade relations over their own reputation, had contacted Atlantis immediately after the abduction. The strike force was joint Earth and Luarongi, using Atlantis equipment to track the energy signature of the second gate as the Luarongi had never managed.
The rescue arrived just after the nick of time, thirty seconds too late. The two high priests were easily identified by their scarlet hoods, but they both were dead, bullets riddling one, burns from Luarongi blasters smoking on the other. They died clutching blasters of their own, and their secrets died with them, eleven gate addresses to Wraith worlds.
Sheppard had been sent to one of them, stunned unconscious and hobbled hand and foot. But alive, when he had dropped through the event horizon. He didn't return to Atlantis or the Alpha site, however, so something must have found him, stopped him.
The Wraith didn't fall mindlessly on every human they encountered; chances were reasonable that he had been captured, stored away for a later feeding. "They kept me for a week or two," Ronon said, "before they put a tracker in me."
"Many Wraith know of Colonel Sheppard," Teyla said. "They may recognize him, imprison him for interrogation."
Rodney didn't say anything, wondering what the odds really were, when you took desperate hope out of the equation.
"You know I'd authorize the rescue mission in a split second," Sam said, "but we need an address. We don't have any idea where to search. The Luarongi are tracking down the remaining cultists, but they don't even know if there are any others who knew the addresses, and that's still eleven planets, possibly all Wraith-occupied."
"We have the addresses of plenty of Wraith planets," Rodney said. Many were well-known across the worlds, warnings passed by word-of-mouth, and the Atlantis teams took strict notice of all of them. "We could try the most likely, send a few teams of Marines, basic reconnaissance-"
It would be easier to hate Sam if her eyes weren't brimming with compassion and shared loss. Sheppard wasn't on her team, but he was an officer under her command, and becoming a friend, too. "Rodney, I can't risk so many people-" And she knew better than to finish, 'for the life of one man,' and Rodney wanted to hate her for that, too, and couldn't. "Even if they're all willing volunteers, and I know they would be. But we need better odds than that."
A game of probability, and Rodney realized there was a chance. If Sheppard were lucky enough, and he always had been before, so it was a long shot worth taking.
* * *
'M8G-723, Wraith facility,' Rodney enters onto his tablet, and saves it. But it's not enough. Not when it might already be too late, and there's no point in risking lives if they can only ever bring back a corpse. And the more information he has, the better their chance of success will be.
He checks the timestamp-a good week from now. So there should be time, if the body had been only a couple of days old.
Rodney wipes his hand over his face. He's cold enough to shiver but his hand comes away damp with sweat, and he's breathing hard. He sips water from a bottle and sets it down, leans back and works his hands into the straps, tightening them around his wrists with a thought. Then he turns back the clock and tries again.
He doesn't waste time, gives Sam the whole picture, complete disclosure. She hesitates, but she doesn't disbelieve him; they both understand the theory behind it. Teyla and Ronon stand by him, unquestioning, and his heart swells with it, to have their trust even when they can't follow the scientific proof. They know this isn't about discovery or ego, not with Sheppard's life at stake.
No time to bask in that, though, and door number one was the right pick, so he fast-forwards. The planet looks the same, dull violet sands and two Wraith drones standing watch. Major Lorne's leading this team, along with Rodney and Ronon and two Marines. They make short work of the guards and stride in when the facility's maw gapes open, gunning down the Wraith marching out to fight them.
It is a laboratory of some kind. Not humans or cloning; ships, maybe, but Rodney doesn't waste time finding out. He speeds things up, moments flickering past like strobe lights. The structure's not that big, without a basement, what you see is what you get. But the passages are twisting and confusing, and it's slow going with Wraith coming at them every few meters in. Still drones, mostly, but these take longer to fall under the gunfire.
"They've fed recently," Ronon says ominously, and Rodney flips ahead, and there, down a side passage, walking into the corridor of cocoons, bodies sealed in the walls. The Wraith didn't have time to fully feed, and the half dozen corpses are old but still recognizably human. Still recognizable, Sheppard's gray hair hanging over his sunken, wrinkled face.
Ronon makes a low, wordless, terribly human sound; and Rodney's gut twists and rewind, before he's even consciously aware, jumping back to the gate, first foot landing on this desert world, dusty under his boots. He breathes deeply and the air seems drier, like he can almost feel the grit of holographic sand between his teeth.
Stutter of P-90 fire as the pair of guards go down, "This way," Rodney says, charging forward, and Ronon follows. Lorne shrugs and gestures for the Marines to back them up. This time they're almost to the facility when the entry opens and the wave of Wraith emerge, and one of the Marines gets stunned. Lorne leaves the other man to guard him, and they go in.
Once inside, Rodney knows the way, better than he did, anyway, guiding them somewhere to the left. But no good, when he skips, because the corridor's still a crypt, drained cadavers staring at them with empty, accusing eyes.
Rewind, and this time he goes slow enough to keep track of the route, memorizing which turns to take. Rewind again, but they're still too late, even when he knows where to go, the fastest way to get there. Not fast enough, again and again and again, and Rodney's head is pounding and Sheppard is always, always dead. "Still warm," Ronon says, reaching to shut John's milky, staring eyes. Still alive, when they come through the gate, but then the Wraith are under siege and devour their captives to fight.
"If I knew the way," Ronon complains, as they make their way down the halls of the facility, "I could go faster by myself," and Rodney gawks at him, and rewinds. Back to before they enter the gate, time Sheppard maybe can afford. With luck.
In Sam's office, he sketches a diagram on his tablet, a crude map of the facility, marking Sheppard's cocoon, along with the twenty-four Wraith and where they're usually encountered. Ronon nods, big arms folded, and Lorne whistles, "Be nice to get intell like this more often!" and Rodney shakes his head, because he's not supposed to be listening to this, has no time to be watching these trivialities play out.
But it's easier to sit back and watch the minutes unspool than to force them ahead. This timeline is so very narrowly unlikely, hard to focus on. His eyes feel gritty, as if with dust that isn't real, but he's afraid to blink them. The track might jump if he does, and he'll be back in one of those other realities where Sheppard's definitely not going to survive, instead of only probably.
There's something harder about it when the timeline's recursive, when he's referring back to previous loops. Anti-paradox restrictions? But that's absurd; there are no paradoxes in an infinite multiverse. Anything can and does and will happen, that's the point. Perhaps the system's not designed to show potential outcomes below a certain probability. A measure to keep things from spontaneously levitating, or the universe exploding. One in ten million, maybe, or one in a hundred billion.
Though the improbability doesn't seem right to Rodney, because Sheppard's dead if he can't figure this out, so even given infinite realities, why would he be choosing to do anything but this?
They go through the gate at full-tilt, providing cover fire for Ronon while he blows past the guards and shoots his way into the facility, entry rustily grating open for him when he blasts the controls. The Wraith defense squad isn't yet waiting for him behind it, and he disappears down the twisting corridors before Rodney and Lorne and the Marines make it to the entrance.
Ronon leaves Wraith stunned and dead in his wake, and the others that attack are quickly dispatched-they go down fast, even the unmasked males; they haven't fed yet. Rodney's pulse is hammering and he skips ahead, until he's coming into the corridor. Wraiths dead on the floor, and one drone looming, reaching like a zombie in a low-budget movie. He holds his finger down on the trigger, and it finally collapses.
And there, there, struggling against the sticky binding tendrils of the Wraith cocoon. His hair is still dark and his face has only the usual laugh lines around the eyes, now drawn tight with fury, frustration, pain.
Rodney's grinning, this timeline and in reality, too, mouth open and his cheeks hurting from it. "God, John, you're-"
"Rodney!" Sheppard rasps desperately, clawing at the cocoon, "get me out of this-Ronon-!"
Ronon's not in the corridor, Rodney realizes, not applying one of his many knives to cutting Sheppard free. He's nowhere in sight, and then Rodney looks past the seared and bloodied Wraith corpses.
The dreads are bleached white and brittle, like just another Wraith's; and the blackened skin is so shrunken to the skull that the features are unidentifiable. But the skeletal fingers are still curved around the hilt of his gun, the power cell gleaming red and alive above them.
"The male was going to eat me, and then Ronon's blaster got all of them and I thought we were okay," Sheppard's saying, throat hoarse like he's been screaming. "Until the stunner took him down, and why the hell didn't he have backup, it fed on him in front of me, goddamn it, why didn't you have his six, McKay-"
Rodney doesn't hear him; he's fallen to his knees, and back in reality he's straining against the wrist straps, head slammed back against the headrest of the chair and eyes shutting on this nightmare, not what he wanted, not what he chose, reset reset reset-
* * *
It had been one of Rodney's pet projects for a number of months now, back-burnered when he had been working on the Replicator virus, but always in the back of his mind. Especially after they learned about Elizabeth. He worked on it alone, one of the few he didn't even bring Zelenka in on. Not because he thought Radek might appropriate his work-that's only a joke between them; they respect one another too much for that.
But he might lose Radek's professional esteem if he knew about this; it was skirting too close to the edge of mad science. Tempting fate, doctoring destiny-those wild here-there-be-dragons places at the fringes of sensible reality, where the Ancients treaded fearlessly but a human physicist risked reputation and sanity to follow.
The principles it was based on were firm enough, really. Conceptual theories of quantum decoherence become irritatingly prosaic after you've had a couple conversations with your too-cool-for-school self from an alternate universe. Most physicists in the Stargate program accepted the many-worlds interpretation as basic fact and went on from there.
It wasn't the theory that was at fault; it was what you could potentially do with it. What the Ancients had been attempting. Or maybe they hadn't been at all, and the reason the original project hadn't gotten anywhere was because it was just a game, a party trick. Rodney didn't know, didn't much care.
The Chair in the chair room, hooked into Atlantis's virtual brain stem and controlling the drone defenses and hyperdrive and everything else significant, was called The Chair, but it was not the only control chair in the city. They had discovered a few others similar if not identical to it, designed for guidance over more minor systems. One was apparently a construction device, though the attached machine was inoperative; another had some kind of medical/biological scanning function-"Perhaps it really is a dentist's chair," Carson Beckett had remarked, after which no volunteers could be finagled to sit in it.
They found another chair room on the north pier shortly after the Wraith siege, when the new ZPM was bringing all manner of hitherto unknown systems online. Like all the chairs, it could only be operated by the ATA-enabled, and so it took some time for the right investigators to examine it, but after that everyone in the city with the gene was lining up to try it.
According to Ancient database entries it was designated, roughly translated, as Staring into Tomorrow through a Prism, but the expedition soon took to calling it the F.T.C, the Fortune Teller Chair. Sheppard had, of course, been among the first to test it, so Rodney was inclined to blame him for that one, though he hadn't been there at the time to know for sure.
Rodney supposed that 'Fortune Teller' was meant to evoke images of mysterious crystal balls, wrinkled old women concealed behind clouds of incense and heavy damask curtains.
The first thing that came to mind for him, however, was the craze Jeannie had gone through, back in whatever grade she'd been in when he had been filling out college applications. She and her bratty friends had spent their time giggling over fortune tellers, paper squares folded into pointed little mouths. Pick a color, spell it out opening and closing, pick a number, lift the flap and the fortune teller would tell you your randomly selected future, written out on the triangle underneath. Which boy band idol you were going to marry, or how many kids you would have, or how much money you'd make.
All the fortune tellers Jeannie made for him, Rodney recalled, gave him a choice of working at McDonald's or Tim Hortons. Except the one that banished him to Siberia, which was a little eerie, in retrospect.
The name wasn't so very inappropriate, though, because the Ancient's chair wasn't much more than a high-tech version of the same.
The holograms were visual and audio, and as vividly convincing as hallucinations. The futures they showed, however, were no more real than daydreams, no more revealing than one's own speculations. They fooled you at first because they weren't so easy to manipulate; you couldn't simply blink your perfect life into being. You had to choose, to make the decisions which would lead to the future you wanted to see, going back and choosing again when it worked out wrong. As many times as you liked, but it could get frustrating, failing again and again. And some people, in the chair, couldn't find their path to their ideal at all. An infinity of alternate realities, but no way to get there from here.
But it wasn't anything more than a game, a roleplay of your own life. The sophisticated holograms were drawn direct from the subject's mind and memories; the projected futures were based only on one's own flawed and uninformed perspective of the universe. As a tool for psychological analysis, it would be no doubt useful, and for all they knew that was what the Ancients had used it for. But the only fortunes it told were the ones you could already figure out for yourself, minus the admittedly cool holograms.
Except that for a simple wish-fulfillment game, the programming was terrifically complex, Rodney had noted in his original report. The probability matrices used to calculate potential futures were beyond any math he knew, applied quantum mechanics on a scale that was inconceivable under the limitations of binary-based Earth computers. More than half of Atlantis's networking power could potentially be accessed by the FTC. There was no need for its models to be so accurate, not for the purpose of mildly entertaining visions.
Visions and scenarios scanned from the minds of humans, not Ancients, Rodney realized one day. The system processed whatever data it was given, but it could handle far more variables than a simple human psyche could provide. He didn't believe in prognostication, but the Ancients were far beyond astrology and reading tea leaves, so maybe they'd been onto something.
He didn't think much more about it, until he met a man called Davos, who took his hand and showed him an impossible, undeniable glimpse of a future Davos could not possibly know. A true future, or at least a highly probable one.
After which Rodney began to wonder if destiny was such a closed book after all.
* * *
Rodney tells Ronon the truth. He doesn't know what else to do.
He tries stunning Ronon, but that gets the mission scrubbed and Sam sending him for a psych evaluation. He tries scheduling the op when Ronon's off sleeping, but Sam just calls him in anyway.
Finally he tries engineering a malfunction that locks Ronon in the gym, and that works, except the mission is a failure. Sheppard drained and dead in the cocoon when they find him, every time. There's no one else who can move as fast as Ronon, not through a base of Wraith.
He convinces Sam to send a small army, twenty-five Marines, half the complement of Atlantis, but the Wraith panic under siege and feed on all their captives early. He tries sending Ronon alone, a one-man strike force armed with maps and full intell. Ronon doesn't come back. Skip ahead a week, and the reconnaissance team returns with Sheppard's dog tags and Ronon's fang necklace, taken from corpses discarded in the sand.
He tries the original mission again, Ronon charging ahead, and when he reaches the corridor Sheppard's thrashing wildly against the cocoon and Ronon's body lies on the floor. This time he doesn't immediately rewind, but fast-forwards to when they come home through the gate, Lorne and two Marines and Rodney himself, and Sheppard, carrying Ronon's corpse with the help of one of the Marines, and after them come five feeble and frightened ex-prisoners, staring about themselves in wonder. They're all safe and alive, and Rodney twists in the chair and the holograms fragment, melt away, the vision banished before he can hear Teyla's voice, though he glimpses her face for an instant, staring at them from the control deck, before he can close his eyes.
It takes Rodney a few attempts to reinitialize the scenario after it's shut down, to navigate back through convincing Sam to send the mission. She keeps refusing and he keeps slipping into realities where Sheppard's corpse rots unclaimed and unidentified under a reddish sun a thousand light years away, keeps having to reset and start over. His head is pounding and he forgets the right words, the right choices to make. Once he slips and the timeline jumps and he's been put in the infirmary, tied wrist and ankle to the bed and sedatives pumped through an IV to keep him from shouting, an embarrassing retread of the enzyme incident.
He ends up having to play out the conversation with Sam in real-time; she's looking at him warily, but she calls in Lorne and they're back on track. Ronon and Teyla still stand by him, at least.
Rodney doesn't know what else to do, so this time he tells Ronon the truth. "You go and save Sheppard, but you die. You're on your own, and the Wraith stun you from behind."
Ronon nods, serious. "Okay, then I won't let them."
He sounds so confident that Rodney almost believes him. Is desperate to believe him, forewarned is forearmed and maybe this is enough, is all it takes. But when he tries again, Ronon's still dead, and Sheppard's still hoarse and furious and stricken, and this time his hair is shot with silver-"The thing was feeding on me, and then Ronon stunned it, and then they got him from behind, the bastards-"
Rodney thought it might be easier, knowing that Ronon knew the risks, that it was a willing sacrifice on his part, but it just hurts worse. Like he might as well be the Wraith who killed him, by his own hand, and Rodney feels like he can't breathe, knows he's starting to hyperventilate and it takes all his will to stop. The hologram of Sheppard's prematurely aged face stares at him, until he rewinds back to the gateroom.
"Why don't you want me to go?" Ronon demands, looming. Rodney, looking at him, guesses the prickling in his eyes are tears, even if his face is dry in this timeline, even if Ronon was never really dead and it was just an unrealized possibility.
"You die," he says. "Even when you know you're going to, you still go and you still die."
Ronon nods, exactly as he did before, just as serious. "But Sheppard lives?" he asks.
"It doesn't matter!" Rodney cries. "I've played it out a dozen times-" Two dozen? A hundred? He can't remember, and that's wrong, he should be taking notes, recording all experimental variables, but there's no time-"I play it out and every time at the end, Sheppard's dead. Except when he isn't, and then you're dead. Like it's a fucking either/or proposition. An infinity of realities to call on and I got the damn switchboard, press one to hang up or two to stay on the line, choose your life or choose his, and this isn't what was supposed to happen-"
Those were only his thoughts, but he's speaking them aloud within the holographic timeline; there must have been a short circuit in the chair's interactive mental interface. Ronon just looks at him. "Sheppard's there," he says, "and I'm here. So it's my choice."
"No," Rodney says, "no, it isn't. Not here-everything that happens is my choice; all the multiverses I can see are the ones I create. That's the way it works, these choices are mine."
Ronon's face darkens. "If you think you can tell me what to do, McKay," he growls, but Rodney just flaps his hand at him.
"No, you're sentient, you make your own universes, every move you make-you're valid, you're real, and it's your choice whether you eat the tubers or the bread, or whether your gun's on stun or kill. But I can't see it from here. That's the only limit the chair has now, can't avoid the observer effect, so I have to restrict my point of view to what I can personally affect-"
"McKay," Ronon says cautiously, "you're not in that chair now."
Rodney starts laughing. "Not from your point of view, no," he says, and then rewinds, because this is accomplishing nothing, nothing, and he's running out of time. Sheppard's running out of time.
It's still his choice, all his choices. And he can't choose between Ronon or Sheppard, can't pick one teammate's life over another; that's not a choice that's his to make.
But his own life-that's his decision. Not an option he usually considers, not rationally, not readily, but he's getting down to the wire here and it's not like it's the first time. He knows he's got the strength of will to do it, and John won't be around to stop him. If there's a way...
All Ronon needs is a moment, for the Wraith to be distracted a single extra instant, long enough for him to kill it first.
Lorne yells when Rodney takes off down the corridor, "McKay, get back here!" but he doesn't listen. He knows this base well by now (he's been here a dozen times, a hundred times, before), knows where the Wraith will come from, where to shoot. Lorne and the Marines can't keep up, and Rodney feels as powerful as Ronon, running down the twisting passages ahead of them, working the system, playing the game-
The Wraith doesn't even stun him; the drone smashes him into the wall with the butt of its stunner, then slams its hand against his chest.
There's no sensory connection between the holograms and the chair. Dying feels like nothing; everything just goes black. Game over. The dead can't make decisions, so there's no alternatives for the system to show. No way to know if he succeeded or failed, and Rodney's high-pitched, humiliated giggle echoes through the dark room's empty spaces, because of course he should have realized that before.
He rewinds. Lorne shouts, "McKay!", and he keeps running, and this time he knows when to duck, tilting the P-90 up to fire. Except there's two Wraith, a tattooed male behind the drone, and the stun flares bright over Rodney's vision-
Rewind again, duck and twist and the P-90 spatters bullets in an arc and he's gasping but alive. Alive, and running, not as fast as he knows he can run, but he can't make himself go faster, can't seem to catch his breath. It doesn't matter, as long as he's fast enough.
He's not. Three drones guard this door, and even knowing the exact angle of their stunners, the exact timing of their shots, he's not a soldier, not Ronon Dex. Again and again but this isn't Doom or Duke Nukem, isn't programmed to be beatable. This is reality, and past that door Ronon is dying or Sheppard's already dead, and there are not enough alternatives here.
No, of course there aren't, and he's going mad, or stupid, because these narrow parameters are self-imposed and he's got a multiverse to exploit. He rewinds back to the gateroom, before they've set foot on the Wraith's planet, tersely explains the new rules.
"I don't know, Doc," Lorne says, scratching his head, "you're sure you can remember the place that accurately?"
"I can," Rodney said, "because I did before, and I wouldn't have been able to if it hadn't been within my capabilities. There is no cheat code in the chair's system; what I see is what I can do, what I will do. You want Sheppard alive, you listen to me."
If they're looking at him oddly, it hardly matters, because Lorne nods, says, "Okay, then, we'll follow your lead."
"Follow exactly," Rodney stresses, and Lorne bobs his head again, only rolling his eyes a bit.
The first try's a failure, he's not used to the Marines' cover fire and gets clipped in the shoulder, not a life-threatening wound, but it distracts him enough for the male to grab him. The next two runs go better, and the fourth time, Lorne and his men draw the Wraith away from the door, give Rodney enough time to get it open and dive through.
This passage is small and shadowed and filminess like cobwebs brush his face; he claws the strands off with one hand and keeps going.
He hears the stunner before he's close enough to see the blue flash, comes pounding around the corner and the Wraith is kneeling, hand raised, black coat spread over the floor like spilled oil. Rodney brings around the P-90 and the Wraith jerks as the bullets impact, hisses and tries to turn and crumples to the floor instead, lies on its side bleeding and still.
"Rodney?" Sheppard says, staring at him for a second, and then he squirms against the cocoon. "Get me outa this thing, you got a knife?"
"Ronon?" Rodney pants, and Sheppard shrugs as well as he can, grimacing because he's bound up in sticky Wraith swaddling.
"Just stunned," he says, "you got the Wraith before it laid a hand on him," and that's almost a macabre pun and Sheppard's almost smirking, even tied up, and Rodney stumbles backwards until his back hits the wall, slides down it with his hands shaking.
"Rodney?" Sheppard asks, and Ronon groans, and without sensory input Rodney can't feel the tears dripping down his cheeks, but he knows they're there, that they will be there, when he's living this triumph in reality.
"McKay?" Lorne's voice asks through his headset, weary and almost afraid. "Status? You there?"
"Here," Rodney says, fumbling for the button. "Here, I'm here, we're all here, we got Sheppard and we're okay."
"Great," Lorne says, life returning to his voice, "then let's get the hell out of here. We'll be waiting for you here-doesn't look like there's any more Wraith alive, but can't be too careful. We lost O'Malley, but Rodriguez and I will-"
And that's all Rodney hears, all Rodney lets himself hear. He doesn't give himself a second more of Ronon waking or Sheppard's gaze on him, just cuts it all off and sits alone in the darkness, no one watching him and nothing to see.
*
part 2
Author: xparrot
Characters: Rodney, Sheppard, Team, etc.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Season 4 cast/spoilers (post-BAMSR, pre-The Kindred)
Notes: Many thanks to gnine for ironing out key plot wrinkles, and naye for beta/cheerleading far above and beyond the call of duty.
I am not an astrophysicist, nor do I play one on TV. I do, however, delight in tormenting them, in more ways than one, so I humbly implore any physicists in the audience to give my technobabble the same pass that you would the show.
Summary: Sheppard's got one chance, and Rodney is going to find it, no matter what.
Games of Chance
X-parrot
Rodney's never actually been very good at chess. Sure, he could beat the pants off his high school club, but that just took reading through a couple Bobby Fischer books to defend his genius reputation. He's no grand master. On Atlantis he rarely plays.
It's not like chess is really about intelligence, after all. It's not about reading people, either, or military strategy, or else a computer couldn't master it, not a simple Earth adding machine, anyway. All chess boils down to, in the end, is predicting all potential moves, and choosing the best, a tiresome sorting of odds and possibilities. The likelihood that your opponent will do that if you do this, or this if you do that, and Rodney's got better things to do with his time. It's not guesswork but game theory, probability calculations, and the odds have never been in Rodney's favor. In any given poker hand, he'll get the pair of twos and the guy across the table will be dealt the straight flush. Statistically unlikely but proved in infrequent practice. So usually he doesn't bother, just moves what pieces look smart to him at the time.
Rodney is good at the endgame, the chess puzzles-black mates in six, white mates in ten, finding the single exact path that forces one side to victory, the other side to defeat. He enjoys the straightforward simplicity, even if he kind of abhors it, too, for being so abstract and irrelevant to the messy facts of reality.
Same as he hates Schrödinger's cat, and yet appreciates the truth of it. Even though he knows that if he's opening the box, the cat's probably dead.
Pessimism, he's been told. Rodney prefers to call it honesty.
Sheppard, now, is annoyingly good at chess. He's never played Zelenka, but Rodney knows what side to bet on, should that match ever be arranged. It's not that Sheppard is Deep Blue in black fatigues; he's smarter than the hair makes him look but he's no super-computer. As far as Rodney can tell, he plays chess like he flies, by the seat of his pants and with a death-defying daring that pays off. Unless Sheppard really is that smart, and the risks are calculated. They might be; his subconscious might be a computer after all, spitting out probabilities that he accepts as instinct. It would explain how he lasted this long. Given the career he's lead, Sheppard's survival is something of a statistical anomaly.
It should be Sheppard sitting here now, not Rodney. But if Sheppard were here, then Rodney wouldn't have to be anyway, and that's more of an irony than he can bear to think about right now.
* * *
Rodney lays it all out, thirty-one planets they've combed from the database, with Wraith relays or outposts or landed hive ships, all likely possibilities. It takes him five attempts to convince Colonel Carter to try them, backtracking and repeating but he's finally on the right track, with armed teams of Marines assembling in the gateroom. There are going to be casualties, sending people to Wraith-occupied worlds, but those hypotheticals don't matter.
He fast-forwards because he's on a time limit here, skipping over the blaring of the gateroom alarms as the returning teams come in hot. Sometimes they make it back intact; sometimes they're missing men. Some teams don't return at all, don't even get the chance to dial back and make a report, and Rodney has to try again, and again, this team and that one, arguing with Sam about which men to order through the 'gate, until he gets an answer.
It'd be easier just to send Ronon through to all of them, but this way's more efficient, more worlds covered simultaneously, and Rodney's painfully aware of every passing second, even as he watches days flicker past.
Twentieth world is the jackpot and he almost misses it, maybe did miss it a couple permutations back. The Marines make their report in Sam's office with their spines stiff and straight, four parallel lines, and she calls Rodney in, shows him what they found.
Wasting time, but Rodney has to see for himself, he can't help it. He has to know for sure, so he rewinds and volunteers for the mission to M8G-723. No one's particularly surprised; Sam doesn't protest and Major Mbali just nods and puts him the middle, Ronon on point.
Rodney was in such a hurry that he hadn't gotten the full intell on the planetary situation from the previous team, though that would be a few days out of date anyway. The Wraith only have a couple guards on the gate when they charge through, quickly taken down.
It's not a parked ship but a small facility, a Wraith science lab, on another of those desert worlds they're so partial to, purple-brown sands blowing over barren dunes. The structure is nestled in that wasteland like a lone seashell on an endless beach, a couple spiraling stories high. At the sound of gunfire, more drones come marching out. The Marines hold them off, while Rodney leads Ronon scrambling over the sands, left of the building, as the previous mission had described.
The Wraith don't bother digging graves for their leftovers, but baked under the hot reddish sun the corpses won't smell much, and over time the winds slowly sift sand over them. The freshest are still uncovered, unburied, meals only a day or two dead, though so desiccated from the feeding that they could pass for millennia-old mummies.
Looking down at them, Rodney claps his hand over his mouth and nose, and breathes through his mouth like he can smell the putrefaction anyway, impossibly. But he doesn't allow the churning of his stomach to force him to look away, as Ronon bends over the body on the top of the pile. Doesn't look away as Ronon reaches down, tears something from the neck of the blackened husk and holds it up, chain dangling from his fist, twirling and twinkling obscenely in the sunlight.
Rodney squints at the dog tags, reads the block print capitals, SHEPPARD JOHN A, USAF, and thinks he's going to be sick after all. Before he can be, denial rises up in him like the bile burning in his gorge, and the hologram of dog tags and desert shudders and fractures away into nothing around him.
* * *
The mission to P3X-950 wasn't supposed to be anything special, practically downtime, another make-do assignment while they waited for Teyla to have her kid and get back in the game. Atlantis had been trading amicably with Luarong for a couple years. The Luarongi were technologically advanced, luckily living on a planet far from any of the main Wraith throughfares. While they didn't often ally with other worlds, they had enough interest in Earth medicines and weapons to invite the Atlanteans over every few months to maintain good relations.
Sheppard's team hadn't been to Luarong before, and Rodney was pleased at the chance to check out the Luarongi nuclear power generators, still fission, but a far cry from the inadequate Genii research and a step or two above modern Earth tech. The Luarongi were happy to give him a tour, with Sheppard sticking close to elbow him mid-lecture when necessary (Sheppard had an uncanny sixth sense about when Rodney was going to inadvertently mention naquadah, though it wasn't like the word on its own would mean anything to them anyway.) They were also suitably impressed by Ronon's gun, and fascinated by Sheppard's comments on their up-and-coming aeronautical research (only about twenty years past the Wright Brothers, but they'd have something in the air versus the darts, when the Wraith did come. Sheppard wanted to fly one, naturally, and was put out to be apologetically informed that there were no open test flights.)
It was a relaxingly satisfying visit, up until the point they were heading back to the stargate citadel and were captured by the Wraith worshipers.
Not proper Wraith worshipers, they found out later, when the stunning had worn off and the hoods had been ripped off their heads. The Gate Minister's Primary Aide, black hair falling in tangles from her formerly sleek bun and a purpling bruise down the side of her face, explained to them between gulping sobs, while the chanting rose and fell around them. The cult had existed on Luarong for centuries, but had only gained a dangerous number of followers in the last few years, since news had come of the Wraith awakening.
They believed in sacrifice to appease their leather-fetishist vampiric gods, believed it was their offerings, and not luck, that had kept the cullings from their world, and with every day passed that Luarong stayed untouched, more people began to believe.
The object of their devotion was surrounded by obelisks à la Stonehenge and covered by a great granite disc, a giant stone manhole cover. It wasn't until that was slid aside that they understood the Aide's terrified tears.
Luarong's second Stargate was set in the ground like a swimming pool. They had a list, the Aide explained, eleven sacred addresses memorized by the high priests, dialed at random and the sacrifices were thrown through, one to each, under every full moon.
Luarong had three moons, though he didn't know the synodic periods of any of them, Rodney thought in a sort of numb haze that might have been disbelief, or the aftereffects of the Luarongi taser that left a hangover worse than the Wraith's weapons, if better than a zat's. His headache spiked as the chanting around them crescendoed, and then the freaks in the gray robes and pointed hoods were grabbing Sheppard-of course they were grabbing Sheppard, he'd put himself in the front of the line. How, Rodney couldn't guess, but he knew Sheppard.
He shouted, struggled up against the ropes hobbling his ankles. By then they'd already had to stun Ronon twice, and two more gray-robed fanatics grabbed Rodney by the arms, pressed their tasers to his chest but didn't pull the triggers, giving him a chance to stay still.
Sheppard looked at him across the stargate's broad circumference, as someone dialed the unseen DHD and the event horizon fountained up through the ring, splashed down into the rippling wormhole.
Lit by wavering indigo, Sheppard mouthed something to him. Rodney couldn't make out what. He yelled and thrashed and the bastards in the dingy wannabe Klan gear applied their tasers. The world whited out in an electric flash of pain, and the last thing Rodney saw was Sheppard getting stunned himself, falling backwards, limp, into the stargate, not-so-virgin sacrifice thrown into the mouth of a blue-toned volcano.
The next thing he knew was the retort of gunfire-and what did it say of his life, that he could distinguish a P-90's bang-bang-bang from any old alien ammunition-and rough hands were working at the cords around his wrists. "Relax, Dr. McKay, we'll have you out of these in a sec."
The Luarongi government, valuing trade relations over their own reputation, had contacted Atlantis immediately after the abduction. The strike force was joint Earth and Luarongi, using Atlantis equipment to track the energy signature of the second gate as the Luarongi had never managed.
The rescue arrived just after the nick of time, thirty seconds too late. The two high priests were easily identified by their scarlet hoods, but they both were dead, bullets riddling one, burns from Luarongi blasters smoking on the other. They died clutching blasters of their own, and their secrets died with them, eleven gate addresses to Wraith worlds.
Sheppard had been sent to one of them, stunned unconscious and hobbled hand and foot. But alive, when he had dropped through the event horizon. He didn't return to Atlantis or the Alpha site, however, so something must have found him, stopped him.
The Wraith didn't fall mindlessly on every human they encountered; chances were reasonable that he had been captured, stored away for a later feeding. "They kept me for a week or two," Ronon said, "before they put a tracker in me."
"Many Wraith know of Colonel Sheppard," Teyla said. "They may recognize him, imprison him for interrogation."
Rodney didn't say anything, wondering what the odds really were, when you took desperate hope out of the equation.
"You know I'd authorize the rescue mission in a split second," Sam said, "but we need an address. We don't have any idea where to search. The Luarongi are tracking down the remaining cultists, but they don't even know if there are any others who knew the addresses, and that's still eleven planets, possibly all Wraith-occupied."
"We have the addresses of plenty of Wraith planets," Rodney said. Many were well-known across the worlds, warnings passed by word-of-mouth, and the Atlantis teams took strict notice of all of them. "We could try the most likely, send a few teams of Marines, basic reconnaissance-"
It would be easier to hate Sam if her eyes weren't brimming with compassion and shared loss. Sheppard wasn't on her team, but he was an officer under her command, and becoming a friend, too. "Rodney, I can't risk so many people-" And she knew better than to finish, 'for the life of one man,' and Rodney wanted to hate her for that, too, and couldn't. "Even if they're all willing volunteers, and I know they would be. But we need better odds than that."
A game of probability, and Rodney realized there was a chance. If Sheppard were lucky enough, and he always had been before, so it was a long shot worth taking.
* * *
'M8G-723, Wraith facility,' Rodney enters onto his tablet, and saves it. But it's not enough. Not when it might already be too late, and there's no point in risking lives if they can only ever bring back a corpse. And the more information he has, the better their chance of success will be.
He checks the timestamp-a good week from now. So there should be time, if the body had been only a couple of days old.
Rodney wipes his hand over his face. He's cold enough to shiver but his hand comes away damp with sweat, and he's breathing hard. He sips water from a bottle and sets it down, leans back and works his hands into the straps, tightening them around his wrists with a thought. Then he turns back the clock and tries again.
He doesn't waste time, gives Sam the whole picture, complete disclosure. She hesitates, but she doesn't disbelieve him; they both understand the theory behind it. Teyla and Ronon stand by him, unquestioning, and his heart swells with it, to have their trust even when they can't follow the scientific proof. They know this isn't about discovery or ego, not with Sheppard's life at stake.
No time to bask in that, though, and door number one was the right pick, so he fast-forwards. The planet looks the same, dull violet sands and two Wraith drones standing watch. Major Lorne's leading this team, along with Rodney and Ronon and two Marines. They make short work of the guards and stride in when the facility's maw gapes open, gunning down the Wraith marching out to fight them.
It is a laboratory of some kind. Not humans or cloning; ships, maybe, but Rodney doesn't waste time finding out. He speeds things up, moments flickering past like strobe lights. The structure's not that big, without a basement, what you see is what you get. But the passages are twisting and confusing, and it's slow going with Wraith coming at them every few meters in. Still drones, mostly, but these take longer to fall under the gunfire.
"They've fed recently," Ronon says ominously, and Rodney flips ahead, and there, down a side passage, walking into the corridor of cocoons, bodies sealed in the walls. The Wraith didn't have time to fully feed, and the half dozen corpses are old but still recognizably human. Still recognizable, Sheppard's gray hair hanging over his sunken, wrinkled face.
Ronon makes a low, wordless, terribly human sound; and Rodney's gut twists and rewind, before he's even consciously aware, jumping back to the gate, first foot landing on this desert world, dusty under his boots. He breathes deeply and the air seems drier, like he can almost feel the grit of holographic sand between his teeth.
Stutter of P-90 fire as the pair of guards go down, "This way," Rodney says, charging forward, and Ronon follows. Lorne shrugs and gestures for the Marines to back them up. This time they're almost to the facility when the entry opens and the wave of Wraith emerge, and one of the Marines gets stunned. Lorne leaves the other man to guard him, and they go in.
Once inside, Rodney knows the way, better than he did, anyway, guiding them somewhere to the left. But no good, when he skips, because the corridor's still a crypt, drained cadavers staring at them with empty, accusing eyes.
Rewind, and this time he goes slow enough to keep track of the route, memorizing which turns to take. Rewind again, but they're still too late, even when he knows where to go, the fastest way to get there. Not fast enough, again and again and again, and Rodney's head is pounding and Sheppard is always, always dead. "Still warm," Ronon says, reaching to shut John's milky, staring eyes. Still alive, when they come through the gate, but then the Wraith are under siege and devour their captives to fight.
"If I knew the way," Ronon complains, as they make their way down the halls of the facility, "I could go faster by myself," and Rodney gawks at him, and rewinds. Back to before they enter the gate, time Sheppard maybe can afford. With luck.
In Sam's office, he sketches a diagram on his tablet, a crude map of the facility, marking Sheppard's cocoon, along with the twenty-four Wraith and where they're usually encountered. Ronon nods, big arms folded, and Lorne whistles, "Be nice to get intell like this more often!" and Rodney shakes his head, because he's not supposed to be listening to this, has no time to be watching these trivialities play out.
But it's easier to sit back and watch the minutes unspool than to force them ahead. This timeline is so very narrowly unlikely, hard to focus on. His eyes feel gritty, as if with dust that isn't real, but he's afraid to blink them. The track might jump if he does, and he'll be back in one of those other realities where Sheppard's definitely not going to survive, instead of only probably.
There's something harder about it when the timeline's recursive, when he's referring back to previous loops. Anti-paradox restrictions? But that's absurd; there are no paradoxes in an infinite multiverse. Anything can and does and will happen, that's the point. Perhaps the system's not designed to show potential outcomes below a certain probability. A measure to keep things from spontaneously levitating, or the universe exploding. One in ten million, maybe, or one in a hundred billion.
Though the improbability doesn't seem right to Rodney, because Sheppard's dead if he can't figure this out, so even given infinite realities, why would he be choosing to do anything but this?
They go through the gate at full-tilt, providing cover fire for Ronon while he blows past the guards and shoots his way into the facility, entry rustily grating open for him when he blasts the controls. The Wraith defense squad isn't yet waiting for him behind it, and he disappears down the twisting corridors before Rodney and Lorne and the Marines make it to the entrance.
Ronon leaves Wraith stunned and dead in his wake, and the others that attack are quickly dispatched-they go down fast, even the unmasked males; they haven't fed yet. Rodney's pulse is hammering and he skips ahead, until he's coming into the corridor. Wraiths dead on the floor, and one drone looming, reaching like a zombie in a low-budget movie. He holds his finger down on the trigger, and it finally collapses.
And there, there, struggling against the sticky binding tendrils of the Wraith cocoon. His hair is still dark and his face has only the usual laugh lines around the eyes, now drawn tight with fury, frustration, pain.
Rodney's grinning, this timeline and in reality, too, mouth open and his cheeks hurting from it. "God, John, you're-"
"Rodney!" Sheppard rasps desperately, clawing at the cocoon, "get me out of this-Ronon-!"
Ronon's not in the corridor, Rodney realizes, not applying one of his many knives to cutting Sheppard free. He's nowhere in sight, and then Rodney looks past the seared and bloodied Wraith corpses.
The dreads are bleached white and brittle, like just another Wraith's; and the blackened skin is so shrunken to the skull that the features are unidentifiable. But the skeletal fingers are still curved around the hilt of his gun, the power cell gleaming red and alive above them.
"The male was going to eat me, and then Ronon's blaster got all of them and I thought we were okay," Sheppard's saying, throat hoarse like he's been screaming. "Until the stunner took him down, and why the hell didn't he have backup, it fed on him in front of me, goddamn it, why didn't you have his six, McKay-"
Rodney doesn't hear him; he's fallen to his knees, and back in reality he's straining against the wrist straps, head slammed back against the headrest of the chair and eyes shutting on this nightmare, not what he wanted, not what he chose, reset reset reset-
* * *
It had been one of Rodney's pet projects for a number of months now, back-burnered when he had been working on the Replicator virus, but always in the back of his mind. Especially after they learned about Elizabeth. He worked on it alone, one of the few he didn't even bring Zelenka in on. Not because he thought Radek might appropriate his work-that's only a joke between them; they respect one another too much for that.
But he might lose Radek's professional esteem if he knew about this; it was skirting too close to the edge of mad science. Tempting fate, doctoring destiny-those wild here-there-be-dragons places at the fringes of sensible reality, where the Ancients treaded fearlessly but a human physicist risked reputation and sanity to follow.
The principles it was based on were firm enough, really. Conceptual theories of quantum decoherence become irritatingly prosaic after you've had a couple conversations with your too-cool-for-school self from an alternate universe. Most physicists in the Stargate program accepted the many-worlds interpretation as basic fact and went on from there.
It wasn't the theory that was at fault; it was what you could potentially do with it. What the Ancients had been attempting. Or maybe they hadn't been at all, and the reason the original project hadn't gotten anywhere was because it was just a game, a party trick. Rodney didn't know, didn't much care.
The Chair in the chair room, hooked into Atlantis's virtual brain stem and controlling the drone defenses and hyperdrive and everything else significant, was called The Chair, but it was not the only control chair in the city. They had discovered a few others similar if not identical to it, designed for guidance over more minor systems. One was apparently a construction device, though the attached machine was inoperative; another had some kind of medical/biological scanning function-"Perhaps it really is a dentist's chair," Carson Beckett had remarked, after which no volunteers could be finagled to sit in it.
They found another chair room on the north pier shortly after the Wraith siege, when the new ZPM was bringing all manner of hitherto unknown systems online. Like all the chairs, it could only be operated by the ATA-enabled, and so it took some time for the right investigators to examine it, but after that everyone in the city with the gene was lining up to try it.
According to Ancient database entries it was designated, roughly translated, as Staring into Tomorrow through a Prism, but the expedition soon took to calling it the F.T.C, the Fortune Teller Chair. Sheppard had, of course, been among the first to test it, so Rodney was inclined to blame him for that one, though he hadn't been there at the time to know for sure.
Rodney supposed that 'Fortune Teller' was meant to evoke images of mysterious crystal balls, wrinkled old women concealed behind clouds of incense and heavy damask curtains.
The first thing that came to mind for him, however, was the craze Jeannie had gone through, back in whatever grade she'd been in when he had been filling out college applications. She and her bratty friends had spent their time giggling over fortune tellers, paper squares folded into pointed little mouths. Pick a color, spell it out opening and closing, pick a number, lift the flap and the fortune teller would tell you your randomly selected future, written out on the triangle underneath. Which boy band idol you were going to marry, or how many kids you would have, or how much money you'd make.
All the fortune tellers Jeannie made for him, Rodney recalled, gave him a choice of working at McDonald's or Tim Hortons. Except the one that banished him to Siberia, which was a little eerie, in retrospect.
The name wasn't so very inappropriate, though, because the Ancient's chair wasn't much more than a high-tech version of the same.
The holograms were visual and audio, and as vividly convincing as hallucinations. The futures they showed, however, were no more real than daydreams, no more revealing than one's own speculations. They fooled you at first because they weren't so easy to manipulate; you couldn't simply blink your perfect life into being. You had to choose, to make the decisions which would lead to the future you wanted to see, going back and choosing again when it worked out wrong. As many times as you liked, but it could get frustrating, failing again and again. And some people, in the chair, couldn't find their path to their ideal at all. An infinity of alternate realities, but no way to get there from here.
But it wasn't anything more than a game, a roleplay of your own life. The sophisticated holograms were drawn direct from the subject's mind and memories; the projected futures were based only on one's own flawed and uninformed perspective of the universe. As a tool for psychological analysis, it would be no doubt useful, and for all they knew that was what the Ancients had used it for. But the only fortunes it told were the ones you could already figure out for yourself, minus the admittedly cool holograms.
Except that for a simple wish-fulfillment game, the programming was terrifically complex, Rodney had noted in his original report. The probability matrices used to calculate potential futures were beyond any math he knew, applied quantum mechanics on a scale that was inconceivable under the limitations of binary-based Earth computers. More than half of Atlantis's networking power could potentially be accessed by the FTC. There was no need for its models to be so accurate, not for the purpose of mildly entertaining visions.
Visions and scenarios scanned from the minds of humans, not Ancients, Rodney realized one day. The system processed whatever data it was given, but it could handle far more variables than a simple human psyche could provide. He didn't believe in prognostication, but the Ancients were far beyond astrology and reading tea leaves, so maybe they'd been onto something.
He didn't think much more about it, until he met a man called Davos, who took his hand and showed him an impossible, undeniable glimpse of a future Davos could not possibly know. A true future, or at least a highly probable one.
After which Rodney began to wonder if destiny was such a closed book after all.
* * *
Rodney tells Ronon the truth. He doesn't know what else to do.
He tries stunning Ronon, but that gets the mission scrubbed and Sam sending him for a psych evaluation. He tries scheduling the op when Ronon's off sleeping, but Sam just calls him in anyway.
Finally he tries engineering a malfunction that locks Ronon in the gym, and that works, except the mission is a failure. Sheppard drained and dead in the cocoon when they find him, every time. There's no one else who can move as fast as Ronon, not through a base of Wraith.
He convinces Sam to send a small army, twenty-five Marines, half the complement of Atlantis, but the Wraith panic under siege and feed on all their captives early. He tries sending Ronon alone, a one-man strike force armed with maps and full intell. Ronon doesn't come back. Skip ahead a week, and the reconnaissance team returns with Sheppard's dog tags and Ronon's fang necklace, taken from corpses discarded in the sand.
He tries the original mission again, Ronon charging ahead, and when he reaches the corridor Sheppard's thrashing wildly against the cocoon and Ronon's body lies on the floor. This time he doesn't immediately rewind, but fast-forwards to when they come home through the gate, Lorne and two Marines and Rodney himself, and Sheppard, carrying Ronon's corpse with the help of one of the Marines, and after them come five feeble and frightened ex-prisoners, staring about themselves in wonder. They're all safe and alive, and Rodney twists in the chair and the holograms fragment, melt away, the vision banished before he can hear Teyla's voice, though he glimpses her face for an instant, staring at them from the control deck, before he can close his eyes.
It takes Rodney a few attempts to reinitialize the scenario after it's shut down, to navigate back through convincing Sam to send the mission. She keeps refusing and he keeps slipping into realities where Sheppard's corpse rots unclaimed and unidentified under a reddish sun a thousand light years away, keeps having to reset and start over. His head is pounding and he forgets the right words, the right choices to make. Once he slips and the timeline jumps and he's been put in the infirmary, tied wrist and ankle to the bed and sedatives pumped through an IV to keep him from shouting, an embarrassing retread of the enzyme incident.
He ends up having to play out the conversation with Sam in real-time; she's looking at him warily, but she calls in Lorne and they're back on track. Ronon and Teyla still stand by him, at least.
Rodney doesn't know what else to do, so this time he tells Ronon the truth. "You go and save Sheppard, but you die. You're on your own, and the Wraith stun you from behind."
Ronon nods, serious. "Okay, then I won't let them."
He sounds so confident that Rodney almost believes him. Is desperate to believe him, forewarned is forearmed and maybe this is enough, is all it takes. But when he tries again, Ronon's still dead, and Sheppard's still hoarse and furious and stricken, and this time his hair is shot with silver-"The thing was feeding on me, and then Ronon stunned it, and then they got him from behind, the bastards-"
Rodney thought it might be easier, knowing that Ronon knew the risks, that it was a willing sacrifice on his part, but it just hurts worse. Like he might as well be the Wraith who killed him, by his own hand, and Rodney feels like he can't breathe, knows he's starting to hyperventilate and it takes all his will to stop. The hologram of Sheppard's prematurely aged face stares at him, until he rewinds back to the gateroom.
"Why don't you want me to go?" Ronon demands, looming. Rodney, looking at him, guesses the prickling in his eyes are tears, even if his face is dry in this timeline, even if Ronon was never really dead and it was just an unrealized possibility.
"You die," he says. "Even when you know you're going to, you still go and you still die."
Ronon nods, exactly as he did before, just as serious. "But Sheppard lives?" he asks.
"It doesn't matter!" Rodney cries. "I've played it out a dozen times-" Two dozen? A hundred? He can't remember, and that's wrong, he should be taking notes, recording all experimental variables, but there's no time-"I play it out and every time at the end, Sheppard's dead. Except when he isn't, and then you're dead. Like it's a fucking either/or proposition. An infinity of realities to call on and I got the damn switchboard, press one to hang up or two to stay on the line, choose your life or choose his, and this isn't what was supposed to happen-"
Those were only his thoughts, but he's speaking them aloud within the holographic timeline; there must have been a short circuit in the chair's interactive mental interface. Ronon just looks at him. "Sheppard's there," he says, "and I'm here. So it's my choice."
"No," Rodney says, "no, it isn't. Not here-everything that happens is my choice; all the multiverses I can see are the ones I create. That's the way it works, these choices are mine."
Ronon's face darkens. "If you think you can tell me what to do, McKay," he growls, but Rodney just flaps his hand at him.
"No, you're sentient, you make your own universes, every move you make-you're valid, you're real, and it's your choice whether you eat the tubers or the bread, or whether your gun's on stun or kill. But I can't see it from here. That's the only limit the chair has now, can't avoid the observer effect, so I have to restrict my point of view to what I can personally affect-"
"McKay," Ronon says cautiously, "you're not in that chair now."
Rodney starts laughing. "Not from your point of view, no," he says, and then rewinds, because this is accomplishing nothing, nothing, and he's running out of time. Sheppard's running out of time.
It's still his choice, all his choices. And he can't choose between Ronon or Sheppard, can't pick one teammate's life over another; that's not a choice that's his to make.
But his own life-that's his decision. Not an option he usually considers, not rationally, not readily, but he's getting down to the wire here and it's not like it's the first time. He knows he's got the strength of will to do it, and John won't be around to stop him. If there's a way...
All Ronon needs is a moment, for the Wraith to be distracted a single extra instant, long enough for him to kill it first.
Lorne yells when Rodney takes off down the corridor, "McKay, get back here!" but he doesn't listen. He knows this base well by now (he's been here a dozen times, a hundred times, before), knows where the Wraith will come from, where to shoot. Lorne and the Marines can't keep up, and Rodney feels as powerful as Ronon, running down the twisting passages ahead of them, working the system, playing the game-
The Wraith doesn't even stun him; the drone smashes him into the wall with the butt of its stunner, then slams its hand against his chest.
There's no sensory connection between the holograms and the chair. Dying feels like nothing; everything just goes black. Game over. The dead can't make decisions, so there's no alternatives for the system to show. No way to know if he succeeded or failed, and Rodney's high-pitched, humiliated giggle echoes through the dark room's empty spaces, because of course he should have realized that before.
He rewinds. Lorne shouts, "McKay!", and he keeps running, and this time he knows when to duck, tilting the P-90 up to fire. Except there's two Wraith, a tattooed male behind the drone, and the stun flares bright over Rodney's vision-
Rewind again, duck and twist and the P-90 spatters bullets in an arc and he's gasping but alive. Alive, and running, not as fast as he knows he can run, but he can't make himself go faster, can't seem to catch his breath. It doesn't matter, as long as he's fast enough.
He's not. Three drones guard this door, and even knowing the exact angle of their stunners, the exact timing of their shots, he's not a soldier, not Ronon Dex. Again and again but this isn't Doom or Duke Nukem, isn't programmed to be beatable. This is reality, and past that door Ronon is dying or Sheppard's already dead, and there are not enough alternatives here.
No, of course there aren't, and he's going mad, or stupid, because these narrow parameters are self-imposed and he's got a multiverse to exploit. He rewinds back to the gateroom, before they've set foot on the Wraith's planet, tersely explains the new rules.
"I don't know, Doc," Lorne says, scratching his head, "you're sure you can remember the place that accurately?"
"I can," Rodney said, "because I did before, and I wouldn't have been able to if it hadn't been within my capabilities. There is no cheat code in the chair's system; what I see is what I can do, what I will do. You want Sheppard alive, you listen to me."
If they're looking at him oddly, it hardly matters, because Lorne nods, says, "Okay, then, we'll follow your lead."
"Follow exactly," Rodney stresses, and Lorne bobs his head again, only rolling his eyes a bit.
The first try's a failure, he's not used to the Marines' cover fire and gets clipped in the shoulder, not a life-threatening wound, but it distracts him enough for the male to grab him. The next two runs go better, and the fourth time, Lorne and his men draw the Wraith away from the door, give Rodney enough time to get it open and dive through.
This passage is small and shadowed and filminess like cobwebs brush his face; he claws the strands off with one hand and keeps going.
He hears the stunner before he's close enough to see the blue flash, comes pounding around the corner and the Wraith is kneeling, hand raised, black coat spread over the floor like spilled oil. Rodney brings around the P-90 and the Wraith jerks as the bullets impact, hisses and tries to turn and crumples to the floor instead, lies on its side bleeding and still.
"Rodney?" Sheppard says, staring at him for a second, and then he squirms against the cocoon. "Get me outa this thing, you got a knife?"
"Ronon?" Rodney pants, and Sheppard shrugs as well as he can, grimacing because he's bound up in sticky Wraith swaddling.
"Just stunned," he says, "you got the Wraith before it laid a hand on him," and that's almost a macabre pun and Sheppard's almost smirking, even tied up, and Rodney stumbles backwards until his back hits the wall, slides down it with his hands shaking.
"Rodney?" Sheppard asks, and Ronon groans, and without sensory input Rodney can't feel the tears dripping down his cheeks, but he knows they're there, that they will be there, when he's living this triumph in reality.
"McKay?" Lorne's voice asks through his headset, weary and almost afraid. "Status? You there?"
"Here," Rodney says, fumbling for the button. "Here, I'm here, we're all here, we got Sheppard and we're okay."
"Great," Lorne says, life returning to his voice, "then let's get the hell out of here. We'll be waiting for you here-doesn't look like there's any more Wraith alive, but can't be too careful. We lost O'Malley, but Rodriguez and I will-"
And that's all Rodney hears, all Rodney lets himself hear. He doesn't give himself a second more of Ronon waking or Sheppard's gaze on him, just cuts it all off and sits alone in the darkness, no one watching him and nothing to see.
*
part 2