04 - The Morpheus Factor

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  And something kept pushing back at him. Holding him down. He could fly or at least float, he thought, if it weren’t for whatever it was.

  The butterfly was looking back at him. The antennae were growing out of a head marked with lines of short red fur. It clashed horribly with the elegant yellow and blue wings that moved hypnotically back and forth.

  Vair winked at him.

  He was dreaming.

  The jolt of awareness almost woke him up completely, shoving him up against the barrier again. But he was still in the meadow, looking at the butterfly. The fact that he was trapped in the dream, couldn’t wake up, panicked him, and he fled deeper into unconsciousness.

  “Damn,” Janet said and tweaked the controls again. “No, don’t worry,” she reassured the apprehensive team surrounding her. “He’s just dropped into a deeper sleep level. I’ll bring him back into the beta zone.”

  He wasn’t going to be allowed to rest. The pressure kept bringing him back, back, back. He understood once more that he was dreaming, and he tried to dive back into the comforting, dreamfree darkness without success. Frustrated, he roared at the field of butterflies, and they all fled save the one that was still clinging to his fingertips, no matter how hard he tried to shake it off. Vair yelped in protest, a tiny, tinny voice he could somehow hear clearly above all the noise he himself was making, and it made him angrier.

  “Ow!” Carter said as O’Neill’s arm hit her across the chest. She moved back and away from the bed and its thrashing occupant.

  Wait—there’s a reason. There’s a mission. Practice.

  Once more he brought the butterfly up to his face.

  “Okay, little guy, fly away,” he said. “Go join your buddies. See, they’re waiting for you.”

  “Did he say something?” Daniel asked.

  Frasier shrugged. “Talking in his sleep?”

  The butterfly waved its wings back and forth with hypnotic slowness, unimpressed by the patently false croon.

  “You’re supposed to fly away when I tell you to,” O’Neill said, gritting his teeth. “Go on. Go!”

  The butterfly remained. Its head did, however, transform from that of a small red-furred alien back into that of a gray, fuzzy, big-eyed bug.

  “Well, if I can’t control you, I can still control me.” With that, O’Neill turned his back on the green field and started to walk away. The butterfly swung helplessly from his fingertips.

  He woke up.

  He found himself staring into a circle of worried eyes. They were friends, that much he knew immediately. It took him a few moments to adjust to the idea that he really was awake, back in the infirmary. His most immediate reaction was irritation. “What did you wake me up for?” he complained querulously. “I was gonna get rid of it. If you just gave me a couple more hours.”

  The team exchanged glances.

  “You had two minutes, exactly as I promise you, Colonel,” Janet said. “But time in dreams isn’t like time in the waking world. It might have seemed like hours to you.”

  “Rid of what, Colonel?” Carter asked.

  “The butterfly. It wouldn’t go away when I told it to, and then you woke me up.” He yawned mightily.

  “Tell us what happened,” Janet said, removing the electrodes. “Did you realize you were dreaming?”

  His brow furrowed beneath the clinging electrodes as he tried to grasp the memories, already beginning to fade. “Yeah, sure. That part worked just fine. I just couldn’t get the damn flutterby to go away when I told it to. All the others went. There was just this one hanging around. Damn thing looked like Vair.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Jackson observed.

  “If we had been available to help, we could have removed the butterfly, Daniel Jackson.”

  “Don’t you think I can get rid of a damned butterfly by myself, Teal’C?”

  “But, sir,” Carter interrupted gently. “That’s why we’re a team, isn’t it? So you don’t have to?”

  “Yeah, well, dammit, let’s try this again, shall we? If this plan is gonna work, I’d better practice a little harder. I’m not going to be outsmarted by little fuzzy aliens, dammit.”

  Meanwhile, one of the little, fuzzy aliens in question was becoming more and more bewildered as he sought the Gate room and, incidentally, something useful from the Tall Ones. At one point he entered a small room, only to have the doors slide shut behind him. When they opened again, it was to reveal a completely new set of hallways and rooms. And it was getting more and more difficult to stay unnoticed. Even when the Tall Ones failed to see him, others noticed the epidemic of rubbed eyes and abruptly shaken heads where he had Shaped past, a fleeting impression that could not be pinned down.

  He had come to this place to do reconnaissance on the strange Tall Ones, to see if they were any threat—no, in truth, to steal whatever he could from them in aid of his own people’s battles. Steal, because those who were not Kayeechi could not understand the Shaping, the dreamwalk. It made peaceful contact impossible, just as it was impossible with the Narrai.

  But this place was a horror. Things without souls watched on behalf of the Tall Ones, spoke for them, recorded bits and pieces of the fleeting signs of his passage. He did not know this place well enough to shape it true, and despaired of being able to shape it at all.

  There were wonders aplenty—suns and nights born from a tiny stick on the wall or a button—yet he had seen no true sun since he’d found himself in this place. It was a vast place; only pieces of it were familiar from the dreaming. These Tall Ones must be very powerful indeed to have made such intricacies. The great light must be but a small part of what they could do to their enemies. If he could only find the place they stored such weapons, such wonders!

  He scuttled into yet another of the endless rooms and found himself looking down through a clear wall at a stone circle much like the one at home. At the foot of the circle, the aliens were setting yet another of their machines in place. He could hear a great voice talking: “…SIX encoded…”

  A few heartbeats later, the Gate below him opened with a roar, and he saw that his hands were leaving sweat marks on the clear wall in front of him.

  The little machine waited until the Gate had settled itself and then trundled through.

  He could remember snatches of dreams about traveling through a Gate. It was cold. Much, much better to Shape through dreams.

  But even though he had found the Gate, there were no new weapons he could use here. He watched the shimmer of the Gate a while longer and then gave up, barely avoiding a pair of Tall Ones who were entering the room as he left it.

  One of them looked after him, puzzled, but by that time Vair had Shaped emptiness, and there was nothing to see.

  He was getting a little desperate.

  The Tall One who had opened the way for him was sleeping again. He slept a great deal, Vair thought, but that was so much the better for him. He could feel the Tall One’s mind tugging at him, seeking to draw him out of the Shaping and back into the dream, but Vair had walked in many places, and the Tall One was a child in such things.

  And that in itself was confusing. How could they have all these things without Shaping? They must somehow but they didn’t. It was more than an honest Kayeechi could understand. His grip tightened on the hilt of his knife as he shaped away from the seeking eyes of more of the aliens.

  Vair found himself in a small room with a door that led into yet another room. There were metal boxes and tables everywhere. There were handles set in the sides of some of the boxes; he tugged on one, experimentally, and the side slid out smoothly, becoming a box itself, full of mysterious black things, cords and thin flat discs perfect in their similarity.

  A noise came from the inner room, and Vair stepped back behind the taller of the boxes as yet another Tall One stepped out and sat in a chair wedged into a tiny opening.

  What is this? Vair demanded, tired of not having names for these shapes.

  Desk. Filing cabinet.
Drawer. Computer. Disks, came the answers from the sleeping Tall One, and then the answers stopped abruptly, as if something about them had startled the sleeper. He could not ask for too much for fear of waking him; too many demands focused the mind.

  Vair shaped past the seated Tall One and its desk to go through the inner door and see what he could find.

  He was disappointed to discover only another room, larger than the first, with yet another Tall One seated behind a desk examining a file. In one corner of the room was a pole from which hung a striped banner, and behind the human was a symbol on the wall. This desk was made of wood, while the one in the outer room was metal, and there were no filing cabinets here. This alien, like many of the others, was dressed in blue cloth with many symbols attached; watching him, Vair tried to shape his tunic to match without much success. He felt a rush of pity for this Tall One. While all the aliens were sadly lacking in facial patterns as far as he could tell, this one, he noted with a shudder of horror, didn’t even have a full cranial cap as the others did. He wondered what evil fate had befallen this unfortunate and how he still lived despite it all.

  It seemed oblivious to its deformation. It sighed in exasperation and turned a page. It was, the sleeper informed him when he coaxed once again, reading. Vair could not understand what might be so fascinating about the thin leaves with symbols on them.

  Still, what interested a Tall One might be useful, so he came around the desk and looked over its shoulder.

  His cheek brushed lightly against a hairless pate, and the Tall One jerked around in irritation at the tickling.

  Which was how George Hammond found himself nose to nose, finally and unmistakably, with a Kayeechi.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The roar the general let out was enough to frighten almost anyone, let alone the sergeant sitting in the front office. Vair, who had faced angry Narrai over their own nests with the splattered yolk of their eggs oozing between his toes, was nearly as startled, but only by the fact that the Tall One’s reaction had included a direct grab for his throat. The horribly multiple fingers managed to close only on a wisp of his fur before he Shaped himself away. He did not linger for the invasion of summoned security.

  “Sir, are you sure—”

  It wasn’t a wise question to ask a general. He was emphatically sure, and it was up to the major in charge of the day watch to find the intruder.

  That wisp was evidence enough, as far as George Hammond was concerned. Once the scientists got hold of it, they agreed that it was indisputably not of this Earth. However, that left unanswered the question of how the alien had penetrated the Complex—even unto the CO’s sanctum sanctorum—and where it was now. Surveillance tapes were pulled and reviewed. Security personnel were questioned closely. And SG-1 was summoned forthwith out of the infirmary and to the general’s office.

  “What do you know about this, people?” he asked.

  “Nothing, sir,” they responded.

  “Honest,” O’Neill added plaintively.

  “What did it look like, sir?” Jackson inquired earnestly.

  Hammond glared, aware that his next words would in any rational world brand him as a hopeless crackpot. Fortunately things at the Stargate Complex were not always entirely rational. “I saw a little fellow, not very tall. He was wearing an Air Force uniform. He had big blue eyes and a funny pattern of hair outlining his eyes and mouth and… I think it was his nose. I grabbed for him and got hold of a scrap of the hair,” he added, not quite defensively.

  Rather than questioning his sanity, the team looked at O’Neill, who said in a strangled voice, “Sir? What color was the hair?”

  “Red. Sort of auburnish. Why?”

  “I think I know who it was.”

  The team looked startled. Its leader looked ill. “I think it was Vair,” he continued as if he was reluctant to reach his conclusion. “He showed up in my dream. Dr. Frasier and I were trying out this lucid-dreaming thing, and he was there.

  “And it looks like now he’s here. Somewhere.”

  “Are you telling me,” Hammond said grimly, “that this was just something you … dreamed up? This thing got through our security as if it didn’t exist, because you were dreaming about it?”

  “Uh,” O’Neill responded, uncharacteristically groping for words. “Well, sir, I don’t know how else it could have happened.” He, along with the others, was standing at rigid attention in front of Hammond’s desk. Even Jackson, who had the military background of a tree sloth, was exhibiting his very best posture.

  “Oh, at ease,” Hammond snarled. Jackson slumped. Carter and O’Neill assumed a position of parade rest and waited for the next onslaught. Teal’C shifted his weight slightly.

  “Look at these tapes,” Hammond said, punching up a series of vidcaps on the wall monitor behind his desk. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Vair,” O’Neill said promptly. “That’s him. Absolutely.”

  The others agreed.

  “But where’d he go?” Carter asked a moment later. The space on the tape that had been occupied by a small alien was now occupied by an empty corridor.

  “Now you see him, now you don’t,” Jackson murmured.

  “Dr. Jackson, your report assures me that these aliens possess a very primitive technology. And aside from their talent for teleportation and psychokinesis and pulling things wholesale out of people’s heads, I suppose you may be right.” Hammond’s words were laced with heavy sarcasm.

  “I do not, however, welcome the idea that they may traipse through this facility at will just because someone has a bad dream! I want this stopped, Colonel. I want this hole plugged. Am I making myself clear about this?”

  “Yes sir,” O’Neill said, because that was what one said to a general in this kind of mood.

  “And I want this Vair, or whatever his name is, captured!”

  “Easier said than done,” Jackson murmured. The rest of them stared straight ahead, not daring to look at their civilian colleague.

  “What exactly do you mean by that, Dr. Jackson?”

  Jackson swallowed. “Well, sir, he might not actually be here, if you see what I mean.”

  “I do not,” Hammond barked. His fingertips rolled against each other as if seeking a sensation that had been experienced and was now gone. “I saw him. I pulled some of his hair. They’re looking at it in the lab right now. What do you mean, he might not be here?”

  “Well, sir—” Jackson looked at the others, but they could offer no help. “I think maybe Vair’s being here is, well, part of the Shaping that the Kayeechi do. It’s not actually clear where their reality really lies.

  “He could be here as a result of Jack’s dream, but in the long run I don’t think he’s really here here.”

  “And how do you explain the hair, Dr. Jackson?”

  “Well, sir…” Jackson took a deep breath. “Maybe it was part of his created reality.”

  “Dr. Jackson, you are making absolutely no sense at all. I have concrete evidence of the physical reality of that alien in my office. He was here. That means he’s still here in this Complex, and I want him found.”

  “Unless he’s gone back home the same way he came, sir.”

  Hammond opened his mouth to blast the younger man into oblivion, then closed it again slowly. “If that’s the case, Doctor, how can we ensure our security? We’ve got no way to control or deny him access or even keep him once we’ve caught him.”

  Jackson had no answer for that one.

  “That’s security’s worst nightmare,” Carter remarked. Then she looked as if she wished she hadn’t. The words fell into a little pool of silence. No one had the courage to comment on the inadvertant pun.

  “Sir—” O’Neill dared to push his luck.

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  O’Neill had a feeling that he’d better come up with something good or that might be the last time he was addressed by that particular rank.

  “Sir, given that there seems to be a link betwe
en the alien Vair and myself, there’s no reason to assume that a similar link doesn’t exist between the other members of the team and the other Kayeechi who were in their dreams. Although,” he added with painful honesty, “Vair was the main one.”

  “So if the rest of you fall asleep, you may open the way for a whole horde of these beings? Let me guess. You think you should all go back on this wild-goose chase,” the general growled. “What are you going to do when you get there? Ask them pretty please not to do this anymore? I don’t think lucid dreaming is the solution.”

  “Sir, we don’t know what the solution is. All we know is there seems to be a link between us—me anyway—and one of the Kayeechi. I can’t break that link here. It doesn’t matter anymore if I’m awake or not. He seems to have full access to the place. We have to assume that all the others—Eleb, Etra’ain, Shasee, who knows how many others—will too. Unless we all go back, I don’t know how we can close all the doors.” He paused. “I’m not sure how we can anyway but I am sure we can’t find the solution on Earth.”

  Hammond stared at him. “You understand, don’t you, Colonel, that unless those doors can be closed, you and your team are a threat to the security of this planet? As you’ve just pointed out, we have no way of knowing what else might materialize through your dreams.”

  O’Neill swallowed, imagining a roc let loose in the Gate room. “Yes, sir.”

  “I would hate to lose this team, Colonel. But I’m prepared to if necessary. The four of you—and Dr. Frasier—are ordered to return to P4V-837 to resolve this issue—and you may not come back until you have.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A thorough search of the Complex and an intensive review of surveillance tapes revealed no signs of the alien once it had disappeared from Hammond’s office. Nonetheless, SGC Security made it a point to continue the search through the night. Meanwhile, SG-1 forced itself to get a few hours sleep before trying to complete their preparations to go through the Gate once more.