Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  Could be the fun part had just started... John frowned, fractionally worried. It was the silence that got him. Experience had taught him to expect wailing and gnashing of teeth. "Rodney?"

  No reply. If possible, the legs looked even limper.

  "Could be I -was wrong..." John disengaged himself from the wall, grabbed the legs, and pulled.

  McKay was surprisingly heavy. Which, come to think of it, would be natural for a guy who believed that seventeen meals a day constituted a healthy diet. Under the skeptical eye of Zelenka, John kept pulling, exposed a midriff-literally; the shirt had ridden up, and his life was now complete-a chest, a neck, and eventually a sullen and perfectly conscious face.

  "I'm bleeding," announced McKay, holding up his right forefinger by ways of proof. The microscopic smear of blood on it must have come from the scratch on his forehead. "Severe head trauma, possibly intracranial hemorrhage. We all know what that means, don't we?"

  "No," said Zelenka. "Tell us."

  "You had to ask for it, didn't you?" John muttered darkly and let go of Rodney's ankles.

  "No, but he'll tell us anyway, and he enjoys it more if he's asked."

  McKay looked wounded. It cost him a valuable second, during which Elizabeth Weir entered the lab, Teyla and Ronon Dex in her wake, thus preventing a lecture on the consequences of endangering the greatest mind in the known universe.

  "What happened?" she asked, staring at Rodney.

  "I presume my pupils are fixed and dilated?" he said.

  Okay, they were now crossing the pain threshold. John flicked on the flashlight mounted atop his P90 and shone the beam, interrogation-style, directly at his teammate's eyes. McKay yelped and slapped an arm across his face.

  "Seem pretty reactive to me," John informed him and turned to the expedition leader. "Looks like this is some old-fashioned archive terminal, though the console doesn't work. Which explains McKay. Inasmuch as McKay can be explained."

  From Ronon's end came a soft snort. By his standards, the Satedan looked positively cheerful. McKay's scowl in no way diminished his glee.

  "Old fashioned?" Weir raised an inquiring eyebrow. "As in museum piece?"

  "If those among us who actually know what they're talking about could get a word in edgeways, it'd be much easier to grasp." Evidently Rodney had convinced himself that a brain aneurysm wasn't on the charts for the immediate future and scrambled to his feet. "It's not a museum piece. It's more like a... science project."

  "A nuclear device?" Teyla asked. She did a great line in deceptively innocent.

  "No! Just because I built one, doesn't mean... Never mind." McKay waved his hands as if to chase off a swarm of gnats and focused on Elizabeth as the person most likely to let him finish a thought. "You know about Tesla, right? Turn-of-thecentury-the one before last-picturesque equipment, results we still can't reproduce."

  "Such as alternating current," Zelenka suggested serenely.

  "That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it. What I am trying to say, and I'd be grateful to be spared further inanities, is that this"-McKay stabbed a finger at the con- sole-"was built from the Ancient equivalent of Radio Shack components. Which explains the somewhat crude look. The device itself, however, which by the way is not an archive terminal as my esteemed colleague seems determined to believe, is highly sophisticated. As a matter of fact, you could say it's a standalone computer."

  "Mac or PC?" John blurted out.

  "Cray, if they'd been able to make any headway on quantum computing. This device is at least as powerful as the Atlantis mainframe, and it's not connected to any other system."

  "It's also dysfunctional," Zelenka reminded him.

  "Was," said Rodney. "Was." Going by the look on his face he'd been building up to this ever since was dragged out from under the console. "It was simply a question of reconnecting the power supply and overriding the security features. So now-"

  "You're saying it was password protected?" Elizabeth asked with immaculate timing and deflated McKay's voila moment.

  "Yes," sighed Rodney. "Are you sure you want me to continue?"

  The question dropped into a trough of silence, and John found himself holding his breath. If anyone decided to reply, this could take a very, very long time.

  "Thank you," McKay said at last and moved in front of the console. "As I was saying, I was able to override the security features, so now-"

  "Rodney?" Elizabeth again.

  Across the room, Teyla bit back a smile. Ronon was somewhat less subtle.

  McKay exploded. "Do you think this is funny? I've spent two days trying to-"

  "No, I don't think it's funny." As so often, Weir's calm undercut his outrage. "I'm just not sure if it's wise to activate the computer. You said power had been disconnected. In my admittedly limited experience things don't unplug themselves, so there may be a reason why someone has taken this device offline. And I'd like to remind everybody that, a few doors down from this room, is the bio-physics lab where we found the nanites."

  She had a point, and it coincided with John's own concerns, the ones that explained why Colonel Sheppard was pulling scientist-sitting detail. Not that a P90 would have been of any earthly use against the robo-bugs that had infected a third of the expedition a year or so ago. If nothing else, the incident had taught them to beware of accidentally breaking things in this sector of the city. "You're thinking this is mad scientist central?" he asked Elizabeth.

  "Until we've found proof to the contrary, it's safer to assume exactly that and to act accordingly. Which means no switching on or opening stuff until we know what it is or does."

  "Elizabeth, this is a computer," Rodney declared in the tones of a saint pushed to the brink of his forbearance. "We know what computers do."

  He had a point, too, and Zelenka seemed to agree. "If Rodney is right, Dr. Weir-"

  "Of course I'm right."

  "If Rodney is right," the Czech repeated, pretending he hadn't heard, "and anything should go wrong, all we need to do is pull the plug again, but-"

  -given that it's unlikely to be running Windows, nothing will go wrong," finished McKay.

  Feeling Elizabeth's eyes on him, John returned her gaze and shrugged. "If push comes to shove, Tll switch it off," he said, patting the P90.

  At last she gave a brisk nod. "Alright. But be careful."

  "Naturally."

  Looking a lot happier than he had a minute ago, Rodney struck a sequence of keys on the console's control pad. The keys bore Ancient symbols, and John couldn't for the life of him say whether they represented the local version of QWERTY or something more cryptic. What was the Ancients' position on touch-typing, anyway? His ruminations were interrupted by a hologram lighting up above the console. It winked in and out of existence a couple of times-almost as if it'd gone a tad rusty during the past ten millennia-but eventually it stabilized.

  Teyla gasped, McKay and Zelenka stared at each other, Elizabeth took a step back. John knew he was standing there with his mouth hanging open, but he couldn't help it.

  "This is different," observed Ronon, sounding moderately intrigued.

  The hologram looked young, fifteen or sixteen at the most, but that wasn't the issue. It also looked-

  "Is this your idea of a joke?" Whirling around, McKay glared at John.

  "I wish," he said, vaguely grateful for an excuse to retrieve his lower jaw from the floor. "But I wouldn't know where to start. Besides, my hair would never do that!"

  Which was true-and annoying. The hologram sported a mop of sleek black curls instead of a cowlick that vigorously resisted any attempt to get it under control. Otherwise, however...

  Zelenka blew out a slow, stunned breath. "Well, I guess now we know where you get the ATA gene, Colonel."

  "He may be correct," murmured Teyla. "The likeness is remarkable."

  Apparently, the hologram was thinking along the same lines. It blinked, smiled at John, and finally said, "And who might you be?" Even the voice was similar, s
till adolescent and scratchy, but definitely similar.

  "You first."

  "I am Ikaros."

  "Turn it off!" Zelenka hissed, suddenly white as a sheet. "Rodney, turn it off!"

  "No! Please..." It was the heart-wrenching whimper of a child lost in the dark, and no computer program in the world should have sounded like that.

  An icy fist clutched John's gut. "Do it, McKay!" he barked.

  A split-second too late, as it turned out. Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, Dr. Rodney McKay had done as he was told. The hologram feathered to nothing. An instant before it vanished, John could have sworn he saw tears on the boy's face. His face...

  "It's not a boy," he whispered to himself, fingers tight around his gun. "And it damn well isn't me!"

  "Anybody care to explain what that was all about?" Elizabeth asked softly.

  Hands trembling, Rodney disconnected a diagnostic cable from his laptop. Finally he turned back to them, almost as pale as Zelenka. "Al."

  "What?"

  "Artificial intelligence."

  "What's so scary about it?" Asking the question, Dex looked even more blase than usual. Next he'd put his feet on the table. "I thought we'd already seen that with the computer virus on Daedalus."

  As per Dr. Weir's orders they'd moved the party to the conference room to discuss the implications of their find. "He's got a point, Rodney," she said.

  Oh, that's right, Elizabeth! Go on, encourage him!

  Rodney McKay hadn't forgotten his and Dex's first encounter, and he wasn't inclined to forgive it anytime soon. At the moment, however, some clarification might be in order, else they'd still be sitting here tomorrow morning. Unacceptable, because a) he was starving, and b) he fully intended to be back in that lab long before tomorrow morning to make sure nobody, but absolutely nobody, laid a hand on that computer.

  "Rodney? You did say that virus was artificial intelligence, didn't you?" Weir kept digging.

  Why did people insist on quoting him on explanations that weren't quite... accurate? "I, uh, may have got carried away a little at the time," he offered.

  "You'? Carried way? Never!"

  "In the heat of battle." He shot Sheppard a scathing glance. "The malware on the Daedalus was sophisticated, and yes, I suppose it had heuristic components in that it was able to learn from our reactions and predict our likely next steps, which of course could also have been an advanced form of fuzzy logic that allowed it to respond according to preprogrammed parameters, not dissimilar-"

  "Rodney," Elizabeth interjected. "Your point?"

  "I exaggerated, okay? It was impressive, but it lacked one vital defining element of true A.I. Fact of the matter is HAL doesn't exist."

  "Hal?" Across the table from him, Teyla looked confused. "You mean Sergeant Walker?"

  "Cultural reference, Teyla." Sheppard grinned. "HAL is short for Heuristic Algoritlun, and it-he-was a supercomputer running a spaceship in a movie."

  "HAL also killed the entire crew of the spaceship," Radek added dolefully. Trust the Slav soul to put a joyous spin on things. "Similar to what the virus on the Daedalus tried to do."

  "As the good colonel was saying," Rodney cut in, wishing he'd never made the reference in the first place, "it's a movie. Not real. In real life we're decades -possibly centuries-away from developing AT. Even the Asgard haven't got it, and that should tell us something."

  "Why? I mean, why haven't they got it?" asked Sheppard.

  "I can only tell you why we haven't got it. True artificial intelligence requires consciousness- self-awareness- and the only computer capable of producing it that we know of is the human brain. Now, if you put the storage and processing ability of an average three-pound brain in I.T. terms, you'd be talking random access memory in the order of a couple hundred terabytes. A state-of-the-art computer with this kind of RAM capacity would be the size of a house, and it'd run hot enough to bum itself out in seconds.

  "I'm fairly certain that the Asgard, for instance, could get around that quite easily, which brings me to the second issue, and that's-"

  "Never mind, Rodney." Apparently Elizabeth wasn't interested in issues. "What makes this computer you found different?"

  Squinting at Rodney, Sheppard, who up to now had been poured in his chair, suddenly sat up very straight. "You mentioned quantum computing."

  "That is what I suspected looking at the configuration of the device, and, if anything, your juvenile look-alike confirmed it."

  "Oh, it did, huh? How?"

  Rodney wondered if anybody else could hear the edge of distrust in the colonel's voice. The surprise wasn't the fact that it irked, but the fact that it irked so much.

  That might take a while.

  The echo of that unpleasant memory was drowned out by a voice that insisted to know why Dr. Rodney McKay, of all people, should care whether some glorified flyboy trusted him. Too right! Two years of diligent-no, faithful-service in the face of incomprehension and ridicule, and then one mistake and they crucified him. One single mistake! Okay, the mistake had taken out five sixths of a solar system. He was a great man. Great men made great mistakes. So there!

  Only, the real problem lay on a different, altogether less cosmic level; all but dismissing the death of one of his scientists, not to mention Zelenka's warnings, he'd gone to John Sheppard and asked for his trust. And the colonel had given it, run interference with Elizabeth Weir, just so that Rodney could satisfy... what? Curiosity? An itch to get a ticket to Stockholm? Perversely, somewhere, in an unacknowledged corner of his psyche, he'd known that having Sheppard's trust meant more than winning the Nobel Prize. And he'd promptly gone and rewarded it by damn near killing the man...

  "Rodney?"

  "What?" he snapped, then regained his bearings. "Oh. What was the question again?"

  "Not sure I can remember that far back." Sheppard shot him an odd look and sighed. "The question was how a hologram that, uh, bears some vague resemblance to me would confirm that the thing in that lab is a quantum computer."

  "The, uh, speed of it. The speed," stuttered Rodney, scrambling to recover a train of thought he'd lost somewhere among pointless regrets.

  "It didn't strike me as any faster or slower than any other computer here." Elizabeth sounded skeptical.

  Et tu, Brute?

  At age three he'd explained to his kindergarten teacher how Fibonacci numbers worked. The woman had had the nerve to punish him for lying. This kinda felt the same. And by the way, just because you're paranoid, McKay, doesn't mean they're not out to get you...

  Zelenka jumped in the breach. "Rodney is right," he said. "It was the way the hologram responded. For it to react the way it did to Colonel Sheppard, the computer had to perform a vastly complex situational analysis and recognize the fact that the colonel is the spitting image of its hologram." He frowned. "Why would an image spit?"

  "I think it actually is spit and image," Elizabeth offered. "Can we get back to the subject?"

  "Ah." Zelenka looked utterly unenlightened and picked up his thread again. "The recognition of oneself, say, in a mirror or as similar to somebody else is an ability exclusive to"-he'd probably been about to say humans and remembered the presence of Teyla and Dex-"intelligent, self-aware life. Primates, for instance, can't do it. A child will need approximately two years to learn it. For computers as we know them, it's out of the question. Even assuming they were capable of such a task, it would take considerably longer than it did for the computer in the lab.

  "You see, conventional computers work with bits, with each bit holding a one or a zero. The computer transports these ones and zeros to logic gates and back. A quantum computer on the other hand operates with a vector of qubits, which can hold a one, a zero, or, a superposition of these..." Radek petered out, staring at Dex who'd begun to pick his teeth and inspect the booty. He sighed, defeated, and groped for the lowest common denominator. "Fundamentally it means that quantum computing is instantaneous. That's what makes it so attractive. To beg
in with, it would revolutionize communications. Encryption would become both unnecessary and pointless, because-"

  "I think we're getting off track again," Rodney said abruptly.

  "I think we're very much on track." Trust Sheppard to pick up on a diversion. "I'm starting to get interested. Why would encryption be unnecessary?"

  "Because a quantum computer can crack any code in a heartbeat. Plus, in theory, your message is received the instant it's sent." Part of Rodney wanted to hedge, but there really was no point. If he didn't say it, Radek would. "Meaning it's impossible to intercept. If something's got no gap, you can't drive a wedge in it."

  "In other words, if we'd had a quantum computer three weeks ago, the Wraith wouldn't have gotten the jump on the Daedalus." John Sheppard projected the intimidating enthusiasm of a used car dealer, which was out of character. As a rule he had the military fixation on grabbing hold of every piece of new and improved technology-likely-to-be-turned-into-a-tactical-advantage well under control.

  Unfortunately, recent events justified his enthusiasm. The Wraith had figured out a way to intercept and decrypt Atlantis's communications with Earth and had promptly dispatched two hive ships to the coordinates where Daedalus was set to emerge from hyperspace on her last trip to the Pegasus galaxy. What had saved Colonel Caldwell and his crew's collective bacon was sheer fluke. The hive ships' timing had been off by a shake, allowing Daedalus to escape back into hyperspace with only minor damage. Of course codes had been changed immediately, which was roughly as effective as sticking a Band-Aid over a leak in the Hoover Dam. If the Wraith had done it once, they could do it again, and the next time the Daedalus or whoever else happened to come their way might not be so lucky. If the Atlantis expedition was to safeguard lives and vital supply lines, communications had to be protected. A quantum computer could do just that.

  Rodney felt himself shunted into the unenviable position of a pebble trying to slow down an avalanche and slanted a look at Elizabeth Weir who would have the last word on whether or not the possibilities were going to be explored. Here was hoping for reservations about recklessly boosting computer sciences into the twenty-fourth century.