"Five People Who ..." by shaenie and fiercelydreamed [Five Things Challenge]
Title: III. Five people who the press won't care about when the Stargate Program goes public (and the reasons why the Atlantis expedition wouldn't have made it without them).
Authors: shaenie and fiercelydreamed
Summary: A thumb drive, a tally sheet, a single stripe, a NMR spectrometer, and a mediocre GPA; these are the things that save Atlantis.
Details: Gen, ~1,700 words, very vague spoilers through S4.
Notes: Installments 11-15 of the 25 Things series (which isn't linear -- each set stands fully independent of the others). Part I is here and Part II is here.
1. Staff Sgt. Ezekial Cho, Munitions. He's barely ever spoken to Colonel Sheppard, aside from briefings with twelve other people or a nod and smile in the mess, but Zeke actually likes that about his C.O. He spends more time with Dr. McKay and Dr. Zelenka, because when it becomes clear after six months that they can't count on resupply from Earth, the only sensible course of action is to go to the people that build things and explain to them what he needs. He'd understood about the one way trip when they'd come to Atlantis, and he'd been in war zones when the supplies had run out; his personal item had been a flash drive containing everything you ever wanted to know about how to make small arms.
During month ten, weeks before the Wraith lay siege to Atlantis, they use the last of the Earth-made bullets. By that time, Zeke has manufactured over two hundred thousand rounds of Atlantis-made bullets, and as far as he knows, Colonel Sheppard and the Marines never even notice the transition.
2. Dr. Anita Charmichael, PhD. Environmental and Experimental Botany, M.S. Chemistry. Most of 'Nita's work is comprised of spreadsheets and databases and long hours spent hunched over high-powered microscopes, but she keeps a tally sheet, too, purely for the personal satisfaction of it. It helps to be able to look at it and see the reassuring evidence that she's doing important work here, work that isn't limited to having the opportunity to study things no one on Earth has ever seen.
Her tally sheet looks like this:
Rodney McKay - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜
John Sheppard - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜
SGA-1 (other) - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜
SGA-2 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜
SGA-3 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜
SGA-4 - ｜｜
SGA-5 - ｜｜｜｜｜
SGA-6 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜
Other Personnel - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜
Each tic mark represents a life saved by an antidote developed in part by Botany -- eighty percent of them by 'Nita herself, as she's the resident expert -- as a direct result of an accidental exposure to a plant-borne toxin. The antidotes are mutual endeavors with Medical, of course. 'Nita is fairly okay with the fact that she's working almost entirely behind the scenes. She'd never wanted to work with people; that's why she became a laboratory scientist. Plants are nicer.
Even in Pegasus, plants are nicer, even though they've discovered dozens of plants that produce airborne toxins requiring nothing but to breathe in their immediate vicinity, and hundreds more that require only the most fleeting of physical contact to transfer enough toxin to the skin to kill a person. 'Nita often thinks that the plants in Pegasus are just as exotic and deadly as the rest of the occupants of the galaxy have proved to be.
3. Lance-Corporal Megan Fredriksen, Field Tactical Specialist. Sixty-eight days into her Atlantis deployment, Megan's squad goes to M1C-702 as back-up for SGA-1. The facility they find is deserted, and the mission force splits up for reconnaisance. The Colonel taps her to go with him and Dr. McKay.
It's her fifth field mission in Pegasus, but she learns fast, so when Colonel Sheppard trips the sensor on the far side of the lab and a sheet of blue light shoots up from the floor under his feet, she's the one who darts forward to catch him before he hits the ground. Every console in the place lights up red and the metal chamber echoes with a resounding security breach, self-destruct commencing in five--
It's Megan who heaves Sheppard at Dr. McKay --four-- knocking them both out into the hallway --three-- and it's Megan who lunges, grabs the handle on the lab's blast door --two-- and slams it shut between her and them, because she's been in Pegasus for sixty-eight days and that's long enough --one-- to understand that those two are not--
4. Dr. Abdissa Kitaw, PhD. Biochemistry, PhD. Human Nutrition Science. She isn't the head of Atlantis's Food Science Department -- that's her supervisor, Dr. James Gutierrez, who has half her graduate degrees and twenty more years of administrative experience. Not once has Abdissa ever envied him the position -- she abhors bureaucracy, lacks the social finesse for interdepartmental negotiation, and cannot imagine spending six hours per week coordinating cafeteria menus with the head chef. Labs have been home to her since she was seventeen, and she fully intends to die at the controls of an NMR spectrometer.
Every potential Pegasus nutrient source passes through Abdissa's laboratory. With the other fourteen members of the research team, she develops a full biochemical profile of each sample: composition, nutritional attributes, toxic properties, allergenic properties, psychotropic properties, catalytic reactions. In the first eight months of the expedition, she screens out items that would have been fatal to thirty-seven of Atlantis's personnel and catches all five Genii attempts to send them poisoned supplies via intermediaries. Four days after the Wraith Siege ended, while Gutierrez is still unconscious in the infirmary, she emerges from the lab, corners Dr. Weir in her office, and insists that the wave of relief personnel include an IT specialist dedicated full-time to the food science laboratory. Four months later, they have a database capable of modeling all potential favorable and unfavorable interactions between every catalogued Earth and Pegasus digestible. Seven months after that, Abdissa engineers an MRE that can be synthesized from the six most abundantly traded crops in the Pegasus galaxy. It's nearly tasteless and has the texture of cold refried beans, but it has a nutritional profile so complete that it can sustain a person with no risk of deficiency diseases for upwards of five years.
When the first major ambush of the Hybrid War damages the Atlantis Stargate and forces the expedition to spend twenty-one weeks in hiding on an atmosphere-less planet while they make painstaking repairs to the control tower, not one of the four hundred and sixteen personnel suffers from malnutrition.
5. Geoffrey Collins, MPT. The only reason Geoff finds out about the job is because Bev Gilchrist, his former clinical supervisor, sends him an email saying: there's a position in my organization that I want you to apply for. The application she attaches seems unnecessarily long. He fills it out anyway, because the email address he's supposed to send it to has the same domain name as the one she uses to contact him, and he figures it's worth the time if there's a chance he'll run into her at the interview. She's a great lady, and around the same time he got his license she totally dropped off the map.
No one ever contacts him for an interview, so he doesn't get to see Bev, but five weeks later there's a job offer in his inbox from weir.e@ioa.org.
Being a physical therapist on Atlantis is simpler than everyone made it sound during his orientation, because ultimately, the work is the same. The stories in the case files are a lot more exotic now, but their conditions usually aren't: compound fractures, amputations, nerve damage, carpal tunnel. Every now and then, somebody stumbles onto some awesome new medical device that leads to recovery otherwise not humanly possible, but Geoff never bothers waiting for one of those to show up. He does what he knows how to do; most of it isn't flashy and a lot of it takes his patients months of strain and repetition. Still, given time and patience, they heal.
Geoff's good at his job because he likes it. There's something really rewarding about working with someone for a long time, guiding them through the pain and exhaustion, and being there to watch them get strong again. They talk to him, and he likes that too, because after a while they'll start to tell him things they don't say to anyone else. It's a way to distract themselves from the discomfort during a session, but they look a little looser when they leave at the end. He doesn't think he says anything important to them, just asks a few questions while he's working them through the treatment, expresses sympathy, that kind of stuff. But he figures it's good for them to talk.
In his third or fourth year, he and Jennifer are wrapping up a case review session, and he mentions in passing that he's never really figured out why Dr. Weir hired him. It's not like it weighs on him or anything; he's here, he's happy, that's about all that counts. Still, it hasn't escaped his notice that everyone on Atlantis is incredibly smart, with credentials and medals from here to Kentucky, and he's a guy who fumbled his way through every part of his education but the clinical stuff.
When he says it, Jennifer just looks at him for a few seconds with a weird expression on her face, then she goes over to her computer and clicks through a file tree. "Here," she says, in the I'm-the-boss tone she mostly uses on people who won't comply with treatment, and she plunks the laptop down in front of him.
On the screen is Bev's letter of recommendation, with the official SGC insignia imprinted in the header. A lot of it is the usual formal stuff, praise and endorsement -- flattering, but not likely to stand out. But the last thing typed above her signature is this:
Whatever his CV says, it isn't important. As the head of the SGC's Rehabilitative Services I can tell you that this is the one you want to hire. I trained him and I still can't explain it, but every patient assigned to him gets better.
Authors: shaenie and fiercelydreamed
Summary: A thumb drive, a tally sheet, a single stripe, a NMR spectrometer, and a mediocre GPA; these are the things that save Atlantis.
Details: Gen, ~1,700 words, very vague spoilers through S4.
Notes: Installments 11-15 of the 25 Things series (which isn't linear -- each set stands fully independent of the others). Part I is here and Part II is here.
1. Staff Sgt. Ezekial Cho, Munitions. He's barely ever spoken to Colonel Sheppard, aside from briefings with twelve other people or a nod and smile in the mess, but Zeke actually likes that about his C.O. He spends more time with Dr. McKay and Dr. Zelenka, because when it becomes clear after six months that they can't count on resupply from Earth, the only sensible course of action is to go to the people that build things and explain to them what he needs. He'd understood about the one way trip when they'd come to Atlantis, and he'd been in war zones when the supplies had run out; his personal item had been a flash drive containing everything you ever wanted to know about how to make small arms.
During month ten, weeks before the Wraith lay siege to Atlantis, they use the last of the Earth-made bullets. By that time, Zeke has manufactured over two hundred thousand rounds of Atlantis-made bullets, and as far as he knows, Colonel Sheppard and the Marines never even notice the transition.
2. Dr. Anita Charmichael, PhD. Environmental and Experimental Botany, M.S. Chemistry. Most of 'Nita's work is comprised of spreadsheets and databases and long hours spent hunched over high-powered microscopes, but she keeps a tally sheet, too, purely for the personal satisfaction of it. It helps to be able to look at it and see the reassuring evidence that she's doing important work here, work that isn't limited to having the opportunity to study things no one on Earth has ever seen.
Her tally sheet looks like this:
Rodney McKay - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜
John Sheppard - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜
SGA-1 (other) - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜
SGA-2 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜
SGA-3 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜
SGA-4 - ｜｜
SGA-5 - ｜｜｜｜｜
SGA-6 - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜
Other Personnel - ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜｜｜｜｜ ｜
Each tic mark represents a life saved by an antidote developed in part by Botany -- eighty percent of them by 'Nita herself, as she's the resident expert -- as a direct result of an accidental exposure to a plant-borne toxin. The antidotes are mutual endeavors with Medical, of course. 'Nita is fairly okay with the fact that she's working almost entirely behind the scenes. She'd never wanted to work with people; that's why she became a laboratory scientist. Plants are nicer.
Even in Pegasus, plants are nicer, even though they've discovered dozens of plants that produce airborne toxins requiring nothing but to breathe in their immediate vicinity, and hundreds more that require only the most fleeting of physical contact to transfer enough toxin to the skin to kill a person. 'Nita often thinks that the plants in Pegasus are just as exotic and deadly as the rest of the occupants of the galaxy have proved to be.
3. Lance-Corporal Megan Fredriksen, Field Tactical Specialist. Sixty-eight days into her Atlantis deployment, Megan's squad goes to M1C-702 as back-up for SGA-1. The facility they find is deserted, and the mission force splits up for reconnaisance. The Colonel taps her to go with him and Dr. McKay.
It's her fifth field mission in Pegasus, but she learns fast, so when Colonel Sheppard trips the sensor on the far side of the lab and a sheet of blue light shoots up from the floor under his feet, she's the one who darts forward to catch him before he hits the ground. Every console in the place lights up red and the metal chamber echoes with a resounding security breach, self-destruct commencing in five--
It's Megan who heaves Sheppard at Dr. McKay --four-- knocking them both out into the hallway --three-- and it's Megan who lunges, grabs the handle on the lab's blast door --two-- and slams it shut between her and them, because she's been in Pegasus for sixty-eight days and that's long enough --one-- to understand that those two are not--
4. Dr. Abdissa Kitaw, PhD. Biochemistry, PhD. Human Nutrition Science. She isn't the head of Atlantis's Food Science Department -- that's her supervisor, Dr. James Gutierrez, who has half her graduate degrees and twenty more years of administrative experience. Not once has Abdissa ever envied him the position -- she abhors bureaucracy, lacks the social finesse for interdepartmental negotiation, and cannot imagine spending six hours per week coordinating cafeteria menus with the head chef. Labs have been home to her since she was seventeen, and she fully intends to die at the controls of an NMR spectrometer.
Every potential Pegasus nutrient source passes through Abdissa's laboratory. With the other fourteen members of the research team, she develops a full biochemical profile of each sample: composition, nutritional attributes, toxic properties, allergenic properties, psychotropic properties, catalytic reactions. In the first eight months of the expedition, she screens out items that would have been fatal to thirty-seven of Atlantis's personnel and catches all five Genii attempts to send them poisoned supplies via intermediaries. Four days after the Wraith Siege ended, while Gutierrez is still unconscious in the infirmary, she emerges from the lab, corners Dr. Weir in her office, and insists that the wave of relief personnel include an IT specialist dedicated full-time to the food science laboratory. Four months later, they have a database capable of modeling all potential favorable and unfavorable interactions between every catalogued Earth and Pegasus digestible. Seven months after that, Abdissa engineers an MRE that can be synthesized from the six most abundantly traded crops in the Pegasus galaxy. It's nearly tasteless and has the texture of cold refried beans, but it has a nutritional profile so complete that it can sustain a person with no risk of deficiency diseases for upwards of five years.
When the first major ambush of the Hybrid War damages the Atlantis Stargate and forces the expedition to spend twenty-one weeks in hiding on an atmosphere-less planet while they make painstaking repairs to the control tower, not one of the four hundred and sixteen personnel suffers from malnutrition.
5. Geoffrey Collins, MPT. The only reason Geoff finds out about the job is because Bev Gilchrist, his former clinical supervisor, sends him an email saying: there's a position in my organization that I want you to apply for. The application she attaches seems unnecessarily long. He fills it out anyway, because the email address he's supposed to send it to has the same domain name as the one she uses to contact him, and he figures it's worth the time if there's a chance he'll run into her at the interview. She's a great lady, and around the same time he got his license she totally dropped off the map.
No one ever contacts him for an interview, so he doesn't get to see Bev, but five weeks later there's a job offer in his inbox from weir.e@ioa.org.
Being a physical therapist on Atlantis is simpler than everyone made it sound during his orientation, because ultimately, the work is the same. The stories in the case files are a lot more exotic now, but their conditions usually aren't: compound fractures, amputations, nerve damage, carpal tunnel. Every now and then, somebody stumbles onto some awesome new medical device that leads to recovery otherwise not humanly possible, but Geoff never bothers waiting for one of those to show up. He does what he knows how to do; most of it isn't flashy and a lot of it takes his patients months of strain and repetition. Still, given time and patience, they heal.
Geoff's good at his job because he likes it. There's something really rewarding about working with someone for a long time, guiding them through the pain and exhaustion, and being there to watch them get strong again. They talk to him, and he likes that too, because after a while they'll start to tell him things they don't say to anyone else. It's a way to distract themselves from the discomfort during a session, but they look a little looser when they leave at the end. He doesn't think he says anything important to them, just asks a few questions while he's working them through the treatment, expresses sympathy, that kind of stuff. But he figures it's good for them to talk.
In his third or fourth year, he and Jennifer are wrapping up a case review session, and he mentions in passing that he's never really figured out why Dr. Weir hired him. It's not like it weighs on him or anything; he's here, he's happy, that's about all that counts. Still, it hasn't escaped his notice that everyone on Atlantis is incredibly smart, with credentials and medals from here to Kentucky, and he's a guy who fumbled his way through every part of his education but the clinical stuff.
When he says it, Jennifer just looks at him for a few seconds with a weird expression on her face, then she goes over to her computer and clicks through a file tree. "Here," she says, in the I'm-the-boss tone she mostly uses on people who won't comply with treatment, and she plunks the laptop down in front of him.
On the screen is Bev's letter of recommendation, with the official SGC insignia imprinted in the header. A lot of it is the usual formal stuff, praise and endorsement -- flattering, but not likely to stand out. But the last thing typed above her signature is this:
Whatever his CV says, it isn't important. As the head of the SGC's Rehabilitative Services I can tell you that this is the one you want to hire. I trained him and I still can't explain it, but every patient assigned to him gets better.