04 - The Morpheus Factor

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  “That would presuppose the Kayeechi would be willing to ally with us,” Jackson answered. “I didn’t see any sign they wanted allies. Only weapons. And if they haven’t encountered the Goa’uld yet, why should they get into our war? They have a war of their own to fight.”

  “And if they can pull bombs out the same way they could zat guns, there may not be anything left of them to help us anyway,” Carter added.

  “But all you saw was a bright light. Maybe they don’t have a bomb out of your dream. Maybe you’re just Thomas Edison.” Hammond was arguing both sides with equal facility, forcing his people to consider all the possibilities.

  Frasier was listening quietly to the conversational flow, which darted back and forth like leaves in churned water. Once the summary had been made, the debate about what had really happened was open. It was difficult to tell who was on which side, however.

  “Unfortunately, sir, if it’s true, this particular dream has the potential to destroy everything on that world,” O’Neill pointed out. “If they could create a zat gun out of absolutely nothing, there’s no reason they couldn’t create a high-yield nuclear bomb the same way.”

  “I’m finding this very difficult to believe,” Hammond said. “I know we talk about dreaming things up, but usually it takes billions of dollars to do it. You’re talking about cutting a lot of corners in R&D.”

  O’Neill sighed. “Sir, I don’t really believe it either. But I saw the guns. I was shot at. You know how convincing that can be.”

  “Unless your first guess about an arms cache was correct,” Hammond pointed out. “They could have had access to the guns all along.”

  “I’d like to think that was the case. But I don’t believe it. Honestly, sir, I don’t know what to believe. But I know what I’m afraid of.”

  “Telepathy and telekinesis maybe?” Jackson speculated. “It’s a big universe out there.”

  Hammond thought about it for a few very long minutes, weighing the possibility that his primary team had completely lost all their marbles versus their so far extremely respectable track record. Jackson was right: It was a big universe out there. “Very well. Your recommendation, Colonel?”

  O’Neill closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out again. “My recommendation is twofold, sir.

  “Our mission calls for peaceful contact. We may have inadvertently provided the natives, who may be mentally highly advanced but technologically are not, with a weapon far beyond their capability to handle wisely. I believe we have a responsibility to undo that damage if we can. That’s the first thing.

  “The second thing is that once that’s done, we shut the door and never go back there.”

  Hammond scanned the rest of the team. They seemed to be in agreement; at least no one was making faces or muttering to him- or herself.

  “Are you sure they’re not technologically advanced?” he asked, just to be sure. “Could they have had cities floating in the sky like the Nox, somewhere you couldn’t see them?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir. Everything we saw was consistent with a low-tech culture.” Jackson was definite on that point. “As for the bomb, well, maybe it wouldn’t destroy everything on that world. Just everything we know about.” At the look O’Neill shot him, Jackson went on. “We don’t know anything about what could be on the next continent over, Jack. I’m just saying that there could be a very highly organized technological culture on the other side of the planet, and we just landed—”

  “In Wonderland? I doubt it. The Gates tend to show up in proximity to the most developed culture on the planet, at least for the time they’re built. Whether you want to argue cause or effect there—”

  “It is true,” Teal’C confirmed. “The Goa’uld assume that the civilizations nearest the Gate will reflect the greatest advancement on the planet.”

  “But didn’t we have a Gate in Egypt? And Iceland?” Carter shivered at the memory and glanced at O’Neill.

  “The Goa’uld are not always correct,” Teal’C said dryly.

  “At the time the Gate was set in place there, Egypt was among the most highly advanced cultures on Earth. We don’t know whether there might have been one in China too, of course, but—”

  “All right, that’s enough,” Hammond snapped, bringing the flat of his hand down on the table. He had seen enough late-night bull sessions to recognize one when it took wing at his own conference table. “The bottom line, Colonel. Is there any reason—does Earth have any reason—to expend further materiel and budget, not to mention personnel, on P4V-837?”

  Jackson and Carter subsided, looking guilty. Carter reached for the pitcher and poured a glass of water for herself and Frasier. Jackson shoved a glass her way, and after a moment, she filled one for him too.

  O’Neill took a deep breath and answered Hammond’s question. “Only if we want to assume P4V-837 will go on existing, sir. Nuclear weapons are more than they could have possibly bargained for. I don’t want to take responsibility for that particular nightmare. It’s like—” He searched for an analogy, and his face hardened in remembered pain. “It’s like giving a kid a gun without telling them what it is, sir. I don’t want to live with that.”

  “But you can’t control your dreams, and neither can they,” Hammond objected. “And they had to ask you to show them how to use the zat guns and energy staff. If you just dreamed a test, they couldn’t get anything useful out of that. Could they?”

  O’Neill thought back over the dream, over what he had remembered from classified lectures as he watched the bomb, trailing its wires, being set into its cradle, and remembered Vair, watching his every movement, his every expression.

  “I think I dreamed enough,” O’Neill said bleakly. “I know I was thinking about how the bomb was inert on the test tower, and then I was in the control room when they set it off. All they’d know is the destruction. They wouldn’t know anything about the radiation or just how much power we’re talking about. If they set off the real thing, it’ll wipe out their neighbors, but it’ll take them out too. And probably most of the immediate surroundings for the next ten thousand years or so.”

  The six people seated around the table contemplated that possibility. Even Hammond closed his eyes to repudiate the horror of it; it was one thing to have such things as a deterrence against an enemy who had them too for the same reason. It was something else entirely to jump from stone axes to radioactive ruins literally overnight. And he still wasn’t convinced it was even possible.

  “You seem awfully certain that they’d be willing to use such a weapon, Colonel. Perhaps they’ve got more sense than we do.”

  “The Kayeechi would use any weapon they believed would give them victory,” Teal’C said. “They are desperate. They believed they are fighting for their survival. They may be right. Given the opportunity to strike a mortal blow to their enemy, they will do so.”

  “And to themselves in the process,” O’Neill said softly. “But they don’t know that.”

  Hammond bit his lip. Then he said slowly, “But if all they saw was a bright light, Colonel, why would they assume that it was a weapon? And how could they make the translation between a ‘bright light’ and a functional bomb?”

  There was a small silence around the table. Then O’Neill cleared his throat. “There was more than a bright light, sir. If they were seeing my dream, they actually saw a unit on a test tower. They saw the triggering mechanism. And they’d know it was a weapon from my reaction. I don’t think it will take the Kayeechi long to put together their own nuclear test, even if they only recreate what they saw through my eyes. Remember, they created functional zat guns and energy staffs from nothing more than that.

  “They’ve got the potential for a bomb. I don’t know how they did it, but they took it from my mind. I gave it to them.”

  Hammond started to respond. Before he could speak, however, Daniel jumped in again. It wasn’t entirely clear whether he was trying to provide a counterargument to the proposal or ju
st offer some comfort to O’Neill.

  “Okay, so they got it out of your dream, but that doesn’t make you responsible for it. It was a nightmare, after all. Jack, you can’t be blamed for this. You can’t control dreams. And it’s not your fault you know what you know.” Jackson was repeating himself, trying to convince the other man. It wasn’t working.

  It did provide an opportunity to interrupt, however, and the general took it. “Even given the possibility that you’re right, Colonel, how would you propose to undo what you’ve done? It seems that horse is out of the barn.”

  O’Neill started to answer then stopped. “I was thinking I could undream it,” he said at last. “But we don’t have the ability the natives have—we think they have—to do whatever it is they do. They’re as far beyond us in that area as we are beyond them in hardware.”

  “But you can control dreams,” Frasier interrupted thoughtfully. The others at the table jumped, startled to realize they’d forgotten her presence. She looked up, slightly embarrassed. When she realized they were all looking at her, waiting for her to go on, she did so, with growing confidence. “Or at least, some people claim you can. And it might go along with the ‘triggering’ you mentioned, Dr. Jackson. And isn’t that exactly what you said the aliens were doing? They made you dream it.”

  “Major, would you care to elucidate?” Hammond was grateful for the change in vector. The discussion was getting tangled up in who was to blame, and that wasn’t the issue. He wasn’t absolutely sure the issue had been identified yet. Maybe Frasier could clarify matters.

  “On our world, it’s called dream awareness. Some people call it ‘lucid dreaming’. You’re asleep, you’re dreaming, but you’re aware of the fact, and you can actually control what happens in the dream—your own actions and even the actions of others.”

  “You’re rigging a dice game with Morpheus,” Jackson murmured. “Using loaded dice.”

  “Go on, Doctor.” Hammond leaned forward, his interest piqued. “Do you mean human beings may have something like the… ability of these aliens?”

  “Well, sir, over a hundred years ago a man named van Eeden wrote about awareness of dreaming while actually in the dream state. Since then, it’s become well known that stimulation of certain centers in the brain with different chemicals, lights, or even sounds can result in very different kinds of dreams: good dreams, nightmares, even dreams with consistent kinds of results. I’ve seen a study that showed some people responded to certain kinds of allergy medication. In those individuals the medication stimulates certain brain centers. They’d have nightmares, but nightmares where the dreamer always triumphed. It affected a very particular area of the brain in a very specific way.

  “Studies of people in the dream-awareness state show that they tend to exhibit characteristic brain patterns. People can be trained to reach that mental state through biofeedback. Or it can be”—she hesitated, then went on with distaste—“induced for short periods.”

  “Oh my. That’s amazing,” Carter said excitedly. “I’ve heard people claim they knew they were dreaming when they were having a nightmare and were trying to wake up from it. But I’ve never heard they could direct the dream.”

  “Controlled dreaming? Sounds like a dream come true,” O’Neill waxed ironic.

  “Theoretically,” Frasier answered. “Or really, more than theoretical.”

  “There’s a certain aspect of danger in it too, of course. Freud said that our minds preserve memories and emotions we may not remember consciously. Emotions we can’t deal with easily are disguised in our dreams as other things. You don’t know what you might dredge up in that arena.”

  “I never had dreams like that,” Teal’C muttered.

  Jackson shot him an extremely skeptical look.

  “Well, we don’t know enough about your brain,” Frasier said to the Jaffa apologetically. “Or how your symbiote might affect those particular kinds of mental states. But we have some idea about our own. And about the dreaming techniques. It’s been done in the laboratory, at least. The success rate isn’t a hundred percent by any means, but some amazing things have been reported.”

  “So we could use this technique, maybe induce it with some kind of cerebral stimulation, and have a pretty good chance of undoing what we did?” Carter asked.

  “What I did,” O’Neill corrected her. “Then we have to. I can’t inflict nuclear weaponry on a culture that’s not ready for it. I have a responsibility to those people.”

  “Wait just one minute, people,” Hammond said. “You’re talking about messing around with the brains of my people, Doctor, and I’m not willing to take that risk. This sounds extremely chancy. And I suppose it would take some time to learn this technique you’re talking about. You don’t do this sort of thing overnight. If Colonel O’Neill is right, it may be too late already.”

  “But, sir,” Jackson said, “maybe it isn’t too late, either. And if it isn’t, we can’t just let them take a weapon like that out of Jack’s mind and let them totally destroy themselves. If there’s a chance we can undo that damage, or prevent it from ever happening, we have to try. We have a moral obligation.”

  The two men—young archaeologist and weathered general—faced each other over the table eye to eye.

  “I have a moral obligation to protect my world,” Hammond said at last. “That doesn’t include throwing away my best resources to correct a mistake that might not even be real.”

  “Hey, was that a compliment?” O’Neill asked the room at large. The comment escaped from him unintentionally, falling into a sudden pool of silence at the table. He winced as he realized they’d all heard it.

  Hammond glared at him. “It’s a realistic assessment of your value to this program, Colonel, and don’t you forget it. I don’t do compliments.”

  “Yes, sir,” O’Neill said innocently. “Of course not, sir.”

  Hammond gave him a beady glare. O’Neill decided that shutting up was the better part of valor, at least for the moment.

  Jackson wasn’t giving up. “Sir, part of our value lies in our willingness to take risks, explore—”

  “Strange new worlds,” O’Neill put in. “New civilizations.” This whole conversation had taken on an air of unreality for him, as if he were back dreaming on P4V-837 again. He could no more repress his responses than he could stop breathing.

  Jackson, along with the rest of them, ignored him. Even Hammond pretended he couldn’t hear. “This is a new area with considerable potential for gain, sir. As for risk, well, every time we step through the Gate we’re taking a risk. Why should this be any different?”

  “All we’d have to do is go back, get some of that incense stuff, bring it back, and try it out here under controlled conditions,” Carter said with rising excitement. “We can see if we can manipulate our own surroundings right here at the Complex! Maybe it’s not just something on P4V-837. Maybe it’s something we can actually use against the Goa’uld!”

  “Absolutely not!” O’Neill said before Hammond had a chance to open his mouth. “I’m not going to turn whaddayacall’em—Morpheus—loose in the Complex. Especially not when Janet’s been talking about biochemical weapons, and thank you so much for planting that suggestion, I might add. What if I start dreaming about that instead of solving the problem?”

  “We’ll just have to come along and make sure you don’t,” Jackson said determinedly. “You’re not going to do this alone, you know.”

  “Am I talking to myself here?” Hammond asked rhetorically with an air of finally getting a word in edgewise. “I thought I vetoed this idea.”

  “No, sir, you aren’t, and you haven’t yet, but I think this is a way for us to help Jack and undo the damage and fulfill our primary mission to obtain new technology and weapons against the Goa’uld. You’ve got to give us the chance, General. Please.” Jackson had applied all the earnestness he had to his argument. It was a considerable amount.

  The team held its breath.

  Hammo
nd was wavering.

  “It’s my duty, sir,” O’Neill said softly into another pool of silence. He met Hammond’s gaze across the broad table. “Daniel’s been doing my talking for me, but it’s something I have to do. I have to try, at least. You understand that.”

  Rather than answering his subordinate directly, Hammond shifted focus to his medical expert. “Doctor Frasier, does this have a hope in hell of working?” the general asked. “And what is the risk to Colonel O’Neill if he tries it?”

  Frasier, finding herself on the hot seat, swallowed and said, “Yes, sir. I think it does. There are certain mechanical learning techniques we can combine with biofeedback training to help speed the process, and we can artificially maintain the necessary electrical activity level in the brain. I think it’s possible. There really shouldn’t be any risk, except—”

  “Except what?”

  “Well, sir, the part we don’t know about is how the Kayeechi turn dreams into reality. Normally, what you experience in the dream state is just imagination, a mental construct if you will. But in this case we have some evidence that what happens in the dream reality actually is, er, real. Dr. Jackson says he bit his lip.”

  “And it still hurts,” he supplied, probing the raw place.

  “He might have done that while he slept. But that doesn’t explain the smell of liquor the rest of the team detected on him after his last walk through the dream world.”

  Jackson shuddered suddenly, seeing an overlay of this same room in ruins with Hammond lying dead. He shook his head hard to make the vision go away. “It sure tasted real.”

  “So I can’t say there is no risk at all, sir. I just don’t have any idea how to measure it. But I believe we can do it, yes.”

  “Artificially maintain?” O’Neill was still back on methodology. It was his turn to swallow nervously, but he nodded. “There you have it, General. Piece of cake.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN