by Stargate
“You’re duplicates of the original team,” alpha Carter said. “Just like we are.”
“You were created, like we were, because the SGC has been shut down on Earth,” alpha Jackson said. “We were created in order to continue the mission: find technology to protect and defend Earth, since the SGC can’t or won’t do it.”
“You believe that?” Theta O’Neill turned to Carlos. “This guy been feeding you that line?”
“We don’t have any way to disprove it,” alpha Carter said.
They all turned to look at Carlos, his customary moment in the spotlight, but this time he was thrown. The alpha Carter duplicate hadn’t given her unqualified endorsement. She’d only said they couldn’t disprove what they’d been told. This was new.
“Political pressure on Earth forced the closure of the Stargate program,” Carlos said. “The original SG-1 was…well, let’s say they were no longer able to do the work they started. So we did the next best thing: carbon copies, made from technology on Altair.”
“That’s the planet we just gated to?” theta Daniel said.
Alpha O’Neill snorted. “If by ‘just,’ you mean four years ago. The original versions of us gated there and were copied when they arrived. We come from patterns of the original team.”
“I see,” theta Jackson said. It knocked theta O’Neill’s hand aside and sat down. “So we’re…not human. We…”
“Your lives are over as you knew and understood them,” Carlos said. All the alpha team members were staring at him, but he ignored them. Sugarcoating things only drew it out, and these weren’t humans anyway. They would adjust.
“What’s to prevent us from leaving here and taking back our lives?” The theta O’Neill stepped closer to Carlos, a move so smooth he didn’t see it coming until O’Neill was inches away. “Just snapping your neck and getting the hell out of here?”
“You’d never make it,” Carlos said, looking directly into those dead, angry eyes. “Can you think of a single gate address?”
The theta’s eyes narrowed. “Daniel?”
“I can’t,” the theta Jackson answered.
“I don’t remember any of them either,” theta Carter said.
“You’ll learn them as we give them to you,” Carlos told them. “Oh, and there’s the matter of your power supply. It’s here. Leave here, and you run out of energy. No options.”
“Son of a bitch,” theta O’Neill said. Carlos stepped back. He knew that look, and he didn’t want to be a quadriplegic for the rest of his days.
“Save it,” the alpha O’Neill said. “There’s work to be done. A chance to be useful.”
“A chance to help Earth,” alpha Jackson said.
The eight duplicates looked at each other, one of the many signs Carlos had learned to recognize. They were communicating internally. He never had any idea what they said to each other, and it always unnerved him. But whatever the alpha team was saying, it seemed to be working. Theta O’Neill turned away in disgust and sat down at the table.
Phase one — introductions — was over. Now they would begin to acclimate. Within a week, he’d be able to test them in the field.
It took a little doing to throw a blanket over the seething chatter leaking into the comms from the theta team. Daniel was used to it by now, that first wash of disorganized exclamation as the new teams got a grip on who — what — they were. That panicked static would eventually resolve into questions, some of them philosophical but most of them mundane. In fact, it was surprising to him how quickly the teams could progress from existential angst to the issues of food (unnecessary), privacy (none except in comms), and operational structures (detailed and unbending). Maybe it was the military training kicking in, knocking them back to pragmatism. That pragmatism certainly made it possible for the Sams and Jacks to settle in, in spite of the individualism of their source culture. The Air Force had directed all their energy toward a commitment to duty. Ultimately, the structures in place, they would follow orders; their programming had started long before they’d become machines. Predictably, the Daniels always had a harder time adjusting, and the unanswerable questions about what it all meant tended to lie underneath the details like standing water.
Most surprising, though, were the Teal’cs. At first, Daniel had thought that the original Teal’c’s roots in Jaffa culture would have made him ideal for the program, since he was used to being the tool of another’s will. On the contrary, though, he realized that, having sacrificed everything for independence, the Teal’cs did not let that go easily.
Theta O’Neill’s “voice” cut through the chatter like a blade through canvas. All right. Everybody shut it. Except you, Daniel, or whoever you’re supposed to be. I assume you’re still doing the presentations with the pictures and the long-winded explanations.
Daniel didn’t know how to interpret the disgusted look on the theta’s face as O’Neill dropped into a chair. The rest of his team followed and the eight of them sat in outward silence until Mendez and his pet scientist left. Of course, they weren’t alone. Daniel could feel the unwavering gaze of the installation’s ubiquitous security cameras sweeping the room.
Theta O’Neill leaned forward against the table and spoke out loud. “You tell us everything.” He lifted a stiff finger and aimed it at Daniel’s forehead. “Don’t make me go rummaging around in there.”
There was an immediate red flare from the alpha team, and theta O’Neill sat back, but the cold light in his eyes didn’t change. Daniel shot a look over his shoulder at his own Jack and found him watching, narrow-eyed.
Hinky, alpha Jack said into the narrow alpha team band of comms. This one’s — There was no word for it, but Daniel got the general impression of napalm.
Terrific, Carter said.
So, after a hurried debate with his team, Daniel didn’t tell the thetas everything.
He told them about their missions, the worlds they’d visited: worlds with radioactive atmosphere to sear the false skin from their bodies; seas of blue flame that licked at the base of the Stargate; skies livid with the streaking trails of falling debris as the planet’s gravity devoured its own blasted moon; a watergate they’d returned to only to find it entwined in the tentacles of a vast, eyeless monster; the low-walled cities on landscapes pressed flat by crushing pressure; storms of unbreathable wind driving glass sand into towers whose upper spires reached beyond the atmosphere.
He told them about the artifacts — toys, Jack called them, sometimes grinning and sometimes grim — they’d been sent to retrieve. Sam let treasures go reluctantly because she never got to poke at their insides or take them apart. They disappeared to some other installation, some shady equivalent of Area 51, they suspected, where scientists backward-engineered them — or blew themselves up.
Of course, this was just speculation on the alphas’ part, because they never got news from the other installations, never heard a word about anyone beyond themselves and the other teams with whom they shared comms in those brief moments when the gate was open and the signals could get through. But a few seconds was a lifetime in terms of a data burst. Daniel was starting to get a perverse sort of pleasure from watching Mendez’s or Peterson’s face when the teams suddenly froze, inaudibly ranting and sharing information or just saying hello because it was good to know someone other than yourself was listening when you spoke.
Until the epsilon team’s suicide, alpha Daniel had been engaged in a game of chess with epsilon Daniel, one move per burst in order to keep the game going as long as possible. There was a rumor that delta Carter and gamma Teal’c were engaged in some kind of stilted dork-stoic flirtation, but if they were, they’d encrypted it so well nobody could hear anything more than the occasional flutter of contact between them. The O’Neills tended to remain silent in shared comms, especially the later iterations, unless there were operational details to discuss. There was a lingering sense of distaste in their communiqués, concentrated in their tendency to lapse into referring to the o
ther duplicates, especially one of the other O’Neills, as “it.”
But alpha Daniel didn’t tell the theta team that. Nor did he tell them about the last burst they’d received from epsilon Teal’c in which he’d declared that he was dying free, or the silence that followed it.
He never said explicitly that, in some small way, the entire alpha team envied him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Altair(P3X-989)
October 30, 2002, one day after invasion of Eshet
The first thing to go when he became king, O’Neill decided, would be the damn siren. The noise ricocheted around the vast, gloomy chamber like a bunch of hysterical birds shrieking at each other. The second thing to go would be the dust. And the rust. And the mildew — one of those galactic constants, like rats — and the gloom. The place was even gloomier in real life than it had looked on the computer monitor back at Outpost Hawaii. It was also clammy and it smelled bad. Like feet. Like thousand-year-old army boots. As he was opening his mouth to shout over the wailing, the siren cut off so his voice was loud in the sudden silence.
“Some Garden of Eden. Definitely does not live up to the brochures.”
The echoes agreed with him until they wandered off to die, probably from depression. A couple of levels down, something gave up or gave in with an anguished groaning sound, and a cloud of greasy steam billowed up through the grating, turning the team to ghostly shadows.
“Yuck,” Carter said from somewhere off to the right.
“You okay?” Jackson asked.
“Yeah, just put my hand in...actually, I don’t want to know.”
As the steam cleared, a different sort of siren started, far off, a heavy-hearted moaning that stuttered, cut out, started again, and then seemed to give up with a resigned sigh.
“Even the sirens sound miserable,” Jackson observed. “This does not look good.”
For once, O’Neill had to agree. The place was clearly two bolts and a rubber band away from complete collapse. The odds that there was anything here to help them seemed pretty slim.
“Carter?”
“Yeah. Sir.” She was standing in the open space in front of the gate, her head tipped back and the light mounted on her P90 aimed up at the ceiling.
“You’ve got 30 minutes to find something useful, and then we go try our luck with the one of the Von Trapps’ trading partners.”
“Okay.” She waited a beat and added, “Found it.”
Teal’c raised an eyebrow at O’Neill and then fell into step with him to join Carter and Jackson. As one they all looked up into the shadows where Carter’s light was playing across the dully gleaming surface of the holy disco ball. It was 1.4 meters in diameter, divided into quarters, its pockmarked silver skin split along the seams to let out a pulsing orange light. It wasn’t exactly beautiful but somehow just standing there looking at it made O’Neill feel even better than when he jacked in for a recharge on Perseus. He could feel some of the peripheral sensors that had powered down to conserve energy pricking up their ears. He could feel acutely again, all across his skin instead of just in the key use areas of hands, head, feet. The low-grade numbness he’d been getting used to was giving way to a sort of sizzling sense of presence, like he’d been suffering from a head cold and was now suddenly cured.
Beside him, Jackson had stopped looking at the disco ball and was inspecting his hands, closing them into tight fists and opening them again, turning them over and wiggling his fingers. “Wow,” he said. “It’s like battle readiness only — ”
“Better,” Teal’c said.
“Yeah. Better.” A grin pulled up the corner of his mouth, and O’Neill thought that on this red-letter day, he might actually see Jackson laugh. No such luck, but he did look like he’d just taken a hit of the good stuff. The really good stuff. “Wow,” he repeated. “This is really, really...”
“Good,” Teal’c said.
Carter was still looking up along the shaft of light. “It’s the power source. This is what we’re supposed to feel like, I bet.”
“Sweet,” O’Neill said. Then, “How the heck do we get it down from there?”
Carter’s shrug made the light waver. “I have no idea,” she answered vaguely, although he could practically see the gears spinning away in her head. He didn’t mention gears, though, because that tended to set her off on rant number 2038 about how referring to what they had in their heads as “gears” was just insulting and maybe they should realize what a work of art they were, since the violation of the uncertainty principle alone yadda yadda and so on. O’Neill had never managed to listen to that one long enough to find out what the cat had to do with anything, although he knew that it would take no effort at all to recall exactly what she’d said. He could find out all he wanted to know about Schrödinger’s cat if he wanted to. He chose not to.
“Perhaps Harlan will know,” Teal’c suggested.
“Perhaps, perhaps,” O’Neill said. “Anyone see a burning bush around here?”
Jackson rolled his eyes.
Waving them off down the corridors branching between the shuddering hulks of mysterious machinery, O’Neill said, “Fan out. Keep in touch. Don’t break him.”
He stood for a moment until a new siren hiccupped and settled into an adenoidal wheezing that mostly drowned out Jackson’s ongoing patter about the level of technology and unfamiliar architecture. He headed in the direction of the siren, on the assumption that someone would eventually show up to fix whatever it was squawking about or, failing that, he could shoot at it until he achieved blissful silence.
The installation didn’t get any more attractive as he moved beyond the gate area, and even with the happy glow he was getting off the disco ball, he reconsidered the whole being king option. The massive machinery that lined the corridors seemed mostly inert. The occasional hunk of corroded metal showed signs of life, mostly by venting steam or leaking goo. Some of the ductwork that snaked along the ceiling and writhed between the machines looked like it had been repaired multiple times, layer after layer of scrap metal bolted and strapped and welded into place. Whatever this world was like outside the installation, it must’ve been really bad to motivate anybody to want to keep this derelict going. “Reminds me of my first apartment,” he murmured to himself. When Carter pinged an inquiry about that over the internal comms, he told her to mind her own business. Jackson, however, took the opportunity to remind O’Neill that his first apartment was, in fact, an incubation unit on Perseus.
O’Neill took the opportunity to remind Jackson that he was breakable.
If this guy, Harlan, is such a technological genius, O’Neill asked, why’s this place such a dump?
Carter’s virtual shrug came across as a looping inquiry ping. The file wasn’t complete. Pertinent data like, for instance, schematics for the power source and the duplicating technology, are pretty carefully firewalled back at the NID mainframe on Perseus. I guess we’ll just have to ask Harlan.
If we can find him, Teal’c said in that neutral tone that meant he was getting ticked.
O’Neill climbed a ladder to the top of what looked like some kind of water storage tank and tried to get a bird’s-eye view. At twelve o’clock, Jackson was heading deeper into the installation, trailing a hand along the flanks of the machinery and still muttering away to himself about how the whole place was simultaneously fascinating and disappointing. To his right and one level up, Carter was crouched in front of an open panel, poking at its innards. A shower of sparks made her jump away, but a second later she was back to sticking her fingers in the light socket. Rats learn faster than that, Captain, O’Neill observed, and it wasn’t at all possible that she flipped him the bird. To his left, Teal’c was making his way across a catwalk, his shadow enormous and imposing on the wall behind him. The siren was still wheezing away, so O’Neill dropped from the tank onto the rattling grating and followed the sound.
Getting more than a little ticked himself, he called, “Harlan! Come on, we just want to ta
lk.” The sound of rapid footsteps one aisle over made him stop and back up to peer through a gap between machines. “We’re not going to hurt you!” Then, when no Harlan obediently appeared, he added, softly, “Much.” He sent out a ping to the team and ducked through the gap just in time to catch sight of a leg and a bit of quilted coat at the turn at the end of the aisle. “Look, don’t make me chase you,” he advised. “I’m not in the mood.”
Truth be told, though, he was in the mood. All kinds of zippy energy surged around inside him, and what he really wanted just then was a 30-klick footrace with a cheetah. A quick wrassle with a bear. A tall building good for leaping. As he scrambled up the ladder of another tank and dropped silently down on the far side, he stopped himself shy of anything stupid like breaking into song. He did whistle a little, and called out in a friendly voice, “Come out, come out wherever you are!” The footsteps grew fainter, and he loped along behind, just fast enough to keep a bead on the prey and to make sure the prey could keep a bead on him. A little further. Keep running, pal. Now he was close enough to hear a repeated litany of “oh, dear” in time with the patter of scurrying feet. If he hadn’t been in such a good mood right then, that might’ve hurt his feelings. He put on a last little burst of speed, adding some good foot-stomping, and pulled up as Teal’c dropped from the catwalk practically on top of the roly-poly, bald-headed guy and knocked Harlan flat on his back in a puddle of something slick and smelly.
Looking down at his squinched-shut eyes and his pudgy fists held tight up under his chin, O’Neill might’ve felt sorry for him, if he’d been capable. “Harlan,” he said in his smoothest and least intimidating voice. The eyes didn’t open, but Harlan’s head did start to retreat like a turtle’s into the high, stiff collar of his coat. O’Neill nudged him with his foot. “Harlan,” he repeated, this time without the friendliness.
At a nod from O’Neill, Teal’c bent down and heaved Harlan up by the front of his coat. No sooner were Harlan’s feet planted than he was darting for the stairs. Unluckily for him, he ran headlong into Jackson, spun away in the opposite direction, and fetched up against Carter.