Ghosts in the Machine (gen) PG-13 (4/5)
Ghosts in the Machine
By Jennghis Kahn
+ + +
[ communication ]
Jack
When Daniel hadn’t come in by nightfall, Jack took one of the ration bars out on the balcony.
“Hey,” he said as he leaned against the wall next to the window and handed Daniel the ration bar.
“Hey.” Daniel gave him a token glance and took the bar from him. Well, if Daniel was willing to eat it was a good sign.
“Daniel… “ Jack began.
Daniel closed his eyes, shook his head and seemed to grimace a bit. “I know, I know,” he said before Jack could finish.
“What do you know? I haven’t even said anything yet.”
“You came out to see if I was moping,” Daniel stated, craning his neck back so he could meet Jack’s eyes.
Jack eyed him grumpily. He really hated it when they read his mind like that. Especially when he went to all the trouble of preparing a speech. He slid on his back down the side of the wall and sat on the balcony next to Daniel, wrists locked around his raised knees. “I tried to get him, Daniel. He didn’t want to go.”
“It’s not just Bit, Jack. It’s all of them. They’re not responsible for their own actions. We can’t just start mowing them down.”
“I think when they’re chasing us with big dart guns, we can do a little mowing,” Jack protested grimly.
“They’re unwilling pawns,” Daniel said quietly.
“We don’t know if they’re unwilling. For all we know this is something the people of this planet created on their own and entered into freely.”
“They’d hardly need mind control devices then,” Daniel pointed out.
Oh. Good point. Jack sighed, suddenly feeling a gigantic headache coming on. He leaned his head back against the stone wall and stared at the murky night sky. No stars at all. Ever.
“I’m just saying I’d like to get out of here with a minimum of carnage,” Daniel explained. “These people are so dependant on this machine that they don’t survive without it. They don’t want to. They need to be taught how to live again and how to think.”
“Daniel.” Jack kept his voice low and gentle, but his frustration with the archeologist was growing. It wasn’t even that Daniel made his job so much more difficult, or that he was so stubborn that he would never back down and just let Jack shoulder the burden of decision. Or… maybe that was it after all. That Daniel wouldn’t just let Jack make all the decisions and shoulder the regret. Jack was perfectly willing to admit that he sometimes preferred to just take the easy way out regardless of the consequences to himself. He was no stranger to guilt.
Daniel was the one who refused to let that happen. He was the one who saw guilt coming and warned of its advance. He was unwilling to let Jack slip back into that place, and he was downright bullish at the thought of Jack dragging them along. When Carter joined Daniel’s side in an argument, Jack was pretty much lost. It irked him, but he’d learned to play through that. They’d rarely, if ever, been wrong. And he was silently grateful for the care to his soul, even if he’d never admit it or allow himself to dwell on it too much.
“We aren’t capable of saving this planet right now,” Jack said carefully. “We’re barely keeping ourselves alive.”
“I know,” Daniel agreed, nodding. “I do know that, and, trust me, I do not regret giving up Bit if it meant saving Sam. I’d do that again. I just don’t want to condemn the humans here en masse for something that they can’t control. Maybe when we get back, the Asgard or the Tok’ra might know how to help…” He knew his wish was unlikely. Jack heard it in his voice.
“Maybe,” Jack said. Hell, he didn’t know. Maybe the Asgard could return these people to their normal lives. In any case, he was pretty sure they’d want to know about a giant computer planet with plans to expand.
They lapsed into a silence for a while, and Jack thought that maybe somehow they’d come to an agreement. Somehow they always did, regardless of whether it was spoken or not.
As they stared at the darkness, several streaks of light shot across the sky, muted by the black cloud that enclosed the city. It reminded Jack of lightning flickering behind massive storm clouds, but it ran in a line rather than acting as a random mass.
“What the hell is that?” Jack muttered.
“Lightning?” Daniel guessed.
“No rain.”
Daniel shrugged. “Maybe that-“ he waved his hand toward the sky “-shield of clouds prevents the rain from getting through. Maybe the rain would damage things somehow.”
There was a distant rumbling as if to prove Daniel’s point. When it grew increasingly louder and didn’t seem to abate, Sam and Teal’c slid out onto the balcony with them.
“Holy… “ Sam stared at the sky. Teal’c stood beside her, eyebrow raised high.
“Carter, what is that?” Jack demanded. He and Daniel climbed to their feet to stand beside her.
Sam glanced at him. “Don’t ask me, sir. It looks like a storm or maybe something is going on with the shield itself.”
That alarmed Jack. “What would happen if the shield gave way?”
Sam shrugged and shook her head. “Without knowing what the outside atmosphere is like, that would be impossible to say.”
“Bad?” Jack asked, pushing.
“Could be,” Sam replied, too enthralled with the light and sound show to be irritated by him. “If the shield is protecting the city from a toxic atmosphere or horrible storms.”
The rumbling got louder and the cloudy shield lit up briefly like a flash bomb, and then it quickly started fading. In minutes, the rumbling had stopped and the lights were gone. Jack eased his fingernails out of his palm where he’d dug in as the rumbling had reached a frightening pitch and seemed to shake the city.
“Well, that was pleasant,” he remarked sarcastically.
“Indeed it was not,” Teal’c insisted, missing Jack’s tone or choosing to ignore it. Sometimes you couldn’t tell, and Jack gave him a tight, faint smile.
“Quite a storm,” Daniel added, glancing sideways at Sam. She only gave him a look of agreement, eyes wide. It was obvious she was mystified, and that scared Jack the most.
+ + +
[ genesis ]
Daniel
“Carter, what exactly are we looking for?” Jack was impatient. Again.
Daniel exchanged a small smile with Sam while the tables of junk still obstructed Jack’s view of them. He stood with her, pawing through the contents of the table while she dealt with Jack. Neither Jack nor Teal’c liked the shelter much, and once Sam had recovered completely and lost the fatigue that had dogged her for so many days, Daniel had insisted on showing it to her. They’d immediately seen the possibilities in the sheer amount of scavenged gear and collected technology decorating the tables and shelves. They needed help to get home, and this was the most likely place to find it.
Sam responded calmly to Jack, her fingers playing over a gadget she’d picked up. “Anything that might help us to escape, sir.”
Jack glanced around. “Which would be what? Exactly?”
Sam hesitated a moment to give an indulgent smile, her lips a little tight. “Well, I guess I’ll know when I see it.”
“Ah,” Jack said, nodding in perfect understanding. Daniel winced a bit. A bored Jack was never good when one was trying to get actual work done. Jack glanced down at the table beside him and picked up something that looked like a wire whisk. He held it up. “How about this?”
Sam stared at him for a beat, and Daniel saw the heavy sigh in her body language. He blinked at Jack, in sympathy for her. Sam smiled. “Um, no, sir. I don’t think that’d be very useful.”
Jack waved it back and forth. “Well then, Major… you obviously have no taste for a good omelet.”
Daniel shook his head, rolling his eyes at Jack’s bad attempts at humor. Sam fought a smile though and seemed to accept that she was going to have to deal with him in order to get any work done. “An omelet won’t get us home, sir.”
Jack picked up something else. “How about this?”
Sam hesitated in that way she always did when she knew she had to say something that wasn’t proper protocol. “Um… no. Sir? You don’t have to stay here with us. Really. We’ll be fine. If you’d rather go find Teal’c… “
Daniel smiled.
Jack lifted his brows and tilted his head just slightly. “Trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh no, sir!” Sam exclaimed quickly.
“Yes,” Daniel said at the same time.
Jack’s eyes narrowed and he glared at them indignantly. Daniel exchanged another glance with Sam. She was trying to hide a grin and having a hard time of it. Jack did his best to look flippant. He waved a hand. “Hey, I can take a hint.”
He started to walk out of the room and then suddenly stopped and looked back at them sternly. “If you find any big, red buttons that say ‘self destruct’ on them… don’t mess with them, okay?”
Sam came as close to rolling her eyes as she ever did when Jack was watching her. Jack was intent on getting his payback though. “Carter?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered solemnly, nodding as she met his eyes. Daniel knew she’d do the full eye roll when Jack was gone.
“Daniel?” Jack turned his attention to him.
Daniel made a shooing motion with his hand. “Of course, Jack. The only buttons I’m going to mess with are the ones that say ‘Don’t Push This’. You know that.”
Jack shot him a sardonic glance. “Funny.”
When he’d disappeared out the door, Daniel turned toward Sam. “Was it?”
She shrugged and held her hand up, palm down, tilting it back and forth. “Ehhh…”
“Huh.” Daniel sighed. Usually he came up with something better, but eating ration bars that tasted like tree bark was starting to grate on him.
+ + +
[ spatial environment ]
Sam
“Hey, look at this.” Sam lifted the helmet out of the crate and held it up so Daniel could see it from across the table. He studied it, drawing his brows together.
“It looks like the helmets the Interceptors wear.”
Sam tilted it, looking at it from different angles. “It does. A bit.” It was made of metal and it had some weight to it. It fit over the crown of the head with a thick panel in the front that fit in front of the eyes. There were small telescopic lenses coming out from the panel like some sort of weird robotic eyes. The bottom of the face would be free of encumbrances. Not for protection then. She turned it over and studied the inside. She could see wiring encased in plastic in the inside surface. Something stirred in her mind…
“What else is in there?” Daniel walked around the side of the table and peered into the crate beside her. He reached in and lifted out a bulky, metallic glove with foot-long wires extending off of the fingertips. He stared at it, tilting it back and forth so the stiff wires on the fingertips waved back and forth. “Very surreal.”
Sam stared at the glove and then back at the helmet. “Daniel… doesn’t all of this look familiar?”
He met her gaze and then glanced at the glove in his hand again. She knew he got it when he suddenly looked a bit sickened and he set the glove down on the table. “The rows of workers hooked into The System… “
Sam nodded and chewed at her lip thoughtfully as she examined the helmet some more. “Hmm.” She lifted it and slid it onto her head somewhat awkwardly.
“Sam…” Daniel sounded uneasy.
“Give me the gloves.”
“No.”
She lifted the helmet just enough to see Daniel giving her a horrified look. “It’s not part of the mind control device, Daniel. I think this is just some sort of virtual reality gear that allows access to the system but doesn’t actually compel the user to do The System’s bidding.”
Daniel still looked concerned, but he reached in and pulled the other glove from the crate. “You don’t know that for sure.”
Sam let the helmet sit back down on her head, blocking her vision. She reached blindly for the gloves, and Daniel grabbed her hands one by one, sliding the gloves on her himself. “No,” She answered. “But you can just zat me if I start going zombie on you.”
“Ha ha.”
She grinned and brought her gloved hands up to straighten the helmet awkwardly. She heard the wires tap against the top of the helmet. She stood there and waited.
“What’s happening?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing,” Sam heard the disappointment in her own voice. Maybe the batteries were dead, or it needed a separate power source.
“Well, maybe it has an ‘on’ switch,” Daniel suggested. She felt his hands grab the helmet and he tilted her head from side to side as he examined it. “I don’t see anything,” he said. She felt him pressing randomly against the metal.
“Hold on,” she lifted the helmet off carefully and handed it to him. Then she examined the gloves on her hands. They were made of metal and segmented to fit her fingers very closely. The wires that waved rigidly from each finger made her pause. Not so much wires as… antennae. She looked at the long wrist sections. On the left glove there was a small sliding piece. “There!” she said, holding up the glove so Daniel could see the switch.
He hesitated, glancing worriedly into her eyes for a moment.
“It’s okay,” she reassured him, even though she had no idea if it was really okay or not. His curiosity would get the better of him, she knew.
He slid the switch to its opposite position, and helped her put the helmet on again. There was an off-putting, heavy feeling of disorientation and then suddenly there were blue lights in front of her eyes and she was seeing a wall of numbers. “Holy Hannah… “
“What? What is it?”
“I’m seeing something.” She brought her hands up and began testing the wall. The numbers bent and wavered as she pushed through them. She turned around. More numbers and now she saw a line along the side. When she pushed at it, the whole panel of numbers slid aside and revealed another. “Wow.”
“What?” Daniel sounded exasperated.
“I think I’m in the system, Daniel. This is computer code!”
“Well, does it know you’re there?” Daniel’s voice was past concern now.
“I don’t know. The whole system must be basically wireless. It’d have to be in order to keep this many people under control.” She was moving panels rapidly now and taking a good look around. She felt Daniel steady her a few times before she ran into a table or the wall as she spun around to look at everything.
“Will it help?” Daniel asked her, squeezing her arm to get her attention.
Sam was so lost in the wonder of it that she almost didn’t hear him. She grinned beneath the helmet toward his voice. “If anything is going to, it’ll be this.”
+ + +
Jack
Jack opened the door to the shelter with a rivulet of anger in his gut. He was as glad as anyone that Carter had found the virtual reality device and seemingly a way to enter the system without being noticed, but she, and Daniel he might add, both still needed to sleep and stay healthy. They’d been messing around with the device all day today, and he’d specifically told them to be back at the church by nightfall.
It was well past now.
He walked down the hall carrying his pack in his hands, listening. He didn’t hear anything, which concerned him a bit. The two scientists together working on a problem were usually so oblivious of their surroundings and yakking so much that he’d been tempted to tape their mouths shut from time to time to get any peace.
He walked through the main storage room and into one of the alcoves along the side where they’d cleared the floor and set up a perimeter so Sam could use the device and not trip over anything and break her neck. As he hesitated in the doorway, he saw her standing there, helmet firmly in place, hands moving occasionally as she studied some virtual file in front of her eyes.
Daniel was sitting on the floor amongst a pile of books and blankets, head tilted against the wall, fast asleep. His glasses were still in place on his face, one of his field journals and a bit of pencil open on the floor next to him.
“Hey!” Jack barked loudly, startling both of them so badly they jumped. He felt a small sense of satisfaction at that. Daniel jerked upright and straightened his glasses, staring up at Jack in surprise. Carter whirled around, one weirdly gloved hand coming up to push the helmet high enough to reveal her eyes. The antennae waved wildly from her fingertips.
“Sir!”
“What the hell did I tell you about coming home before nightfall?” Jack demanded, trying not to wince at how much he sounded like his father.
Sam and Daniel glanced at each other. Sam guiltily, and Daniel with a ‘told you so’ expression on his face. Daniel stuck with her though, licking his lips before giving Jack a faint shrug. “It’s hard to know when it’s night time when we’re underground.”
Jack had tried to force them to move their little operation to the church, but whatever signal the virtual reality device was receiving had gotten worse the further away they’d gotten from the shelter. He’d let them return to the shelter under the condition that they returned to the church by nightfall. Just in case…
“Did you think about walking outside and checking?” Jack felt at his sarcastic best.
“Sorry, sir,” Sam said a bit sheepishly. “You wouldn’t believe the information we’ve found though.” There was excitement in her eyes.
“Really?” He might just forgive them. “We can get home?”
“Oh,” Sam looked a bit guilty again. “No, not that. I found a group of files archiving the planet’s history. Daniel and I have been going through it all day!”
“It’s fascinating.” Daniel nodded with a similar excitement.
“I’ll bet.” Jack wasn’t done being sarcastic yet. They hadn’t suffered enough for making him and Teal’c worry.
Daniel gave him an incredulous look. “Jack, this archive explains what happened to these people. It’s like a log of events from ancient history to present day.”
“So?”
Daniel looked irked. Good. “Do I really have to tell you the importance of learning the history of what happened here?”
“Will it help us get out of here?”
“Well… maybe.”
“It’ll help us understand,” Sam offered. “And the more we understand, the easier it will be to find weaknesses.”
Weaknesses. Okay, Jack like the sound of that. “Go on.”
Daniel picked up his journal and shifted to his knees with eagerness. “Well, humans recorded the history for centuries and then entered it in this database where it was updated regularly in textual form. When the humans became incapable of doing this, The System itself continued to do it because it’s in the programming.” Daniel glanced at Sam. “I read a lot of the text myself, but Sam was the only one who could understand the computer’s language for the later entries.”
Jack made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Can I have the condensed version, Daniel?”
Daniel blinked at him and sighed. “Basically they built this huge computer about a century ago as a way of sharing information. They wanted to archive their history. As the archive grew, it became more accessible to the whole of their society. They archived each discovery and each science experiment. It became a huge database. Their technology started taking huge leaps forward in all the sciences because the information was readily available to anyone who wanted to experiment. As the computer technology jumped forward, they started to come up with ways to make it even more accessible.”
“Their original idea seems to be exactly what Daniel’s first thought was. A hive mind type of thing,” Sam interjected, but when Daniel picked it up again, she slid the helmet back on and went back to her exploring.
“Yes,” Daniel agreed. “They couldn’t quite get the technology to work right though. They went from having to hard-wire people into the database to a more wireless approach with receiving gear that they wore on their heads, but it didn’t allow them to share ideas with each other. It only allowed them to receive information from the database. The human resources needed to keep the computer running and the archive updated were tremendous. This whole society sort of turned inward and became obsessed with building The System. That was the nickname given to the whole machine. They also wanted a guardian angel. They strived to make The System a sentient being.”
“When did the mind control come in?” Jack asked. He opened his pack and pulled out two sleeping bags, rolled tight. He threw one to Daniel and began untying the other and laying it out. Daniel was on autopilot and he absently began spreading out the sleeping bag while talking animatedly.
“Several generations later. The system began to take on this sort of god-like aspect. It did everything for the people. It provided all the answers to their questions. It ran their utilities and defended the planet. They started neglecting the other sciences in favor of expanding The System in an effort to make their lives as easy and stress free as possible.”
“And boring,” Jack muttered. Daniel only gave passing acknowledgement to his comment.
“The admirable existence was to serve The System. They evolved in their coding to make it as self-sustaining as possible. Somehow, we’re not sure how, things changed… and the people became slaves to The System rather than the other way around. They worshipped it. Being connected was on par with ascending to a higher plane. The problem was it needed people to help expand, and if they weren’t doing enough on their own, it found a way to force them into service.”
Sam was still standing and working with the virtual reality device, but she spoke as she listened to them. “The only thing they didn’t really explore or conquer was space travel. They were too focused on The System.”
Daniel nodded, helping Jack as he pushed the books out of the way and started rearranging the blankets to make a third sleeping pallet. “The whole city was reorganized and re-built to facilitate the growth and the comfort of The System.”
“Comfort?” Jack stared at him.
“Heat and static electricity can destroy the delicate components of a computer, sir.” Carter waved her hands in the air, moving panels. “And as the computer grew in both power and size, it released a tremendous amount of heat.”
Daniel nodded again. “They built the heart of the computer underground and then covered it with a city made of heat-resistant, non-conducting metal. They didn’t bother tearing most of the old city down. They just built over it. That’s why we keep running into old tech beneath the new.”
“Ya think?” Jack eyed him.
“The taller buildings that go up into the shield are actually fans used to blow the heat away from the central processing unit and the memory archives,” Daniel said.
“What about the shield?” Jack asked, suddenly taking an interest.
“It’s a strange mix of different chemicals and compounds, some of which are incredibly similar to the metal used on the buildings,” Sam said. She turned toward them, the telescopic eyepieces fully extended and her antennae-ridden fingers held motionless before her. She looked like some weird, mutant insect-girl, and Jack grinned at her. “It’s purpose is to protect the city from electrical storms and heat and to provide a better environment for a running computer. It controls the temperature to a certain extent and it keeps the humidity low.”
Daniel looked at Jack. “The system doesn’t know right from wrong. It just follows its central programming. Survive and expand. Eventually, it used up all the planet’s resources. At least within a reasonable area. There is very little mention of any other cultures on this planet, and I don’t think the rest of the planet is very hospitable to human life. They had to just stop building once they ran out of materials.”
Well, that explained the church and the shelter and why there were rows of ancient houses where the city simply stopped.
“So it can’t expand anymore,” Jack stated. He felt relieved by that.
“Um, I wouldn’t say that,” Sam suddenly said, lifting her helmet off and looking at both of them.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Some of the last entries put in by humans were about developing space travel. They wrote programs and had started simulations just before succumbing to the mind control. The computer has been working on it all this time.”
“It wants off the planet. It knows it has to find a new home with new resources to expand,” Daniel said pensively.
“It’s building a space ship?” Jack asked, just a little sarcasm and disbelief in his voice.
Sam looked at him. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t need to build one if it can capture one another way.”
“How?”
Sam drew her brows together with a worried frown. “That storm we saw the other night, you said you’ve seen lights in the sky before like that?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, a few times. I didn’t hear that rumbling and feel that shaking, but the lights are pretty frequent.”
“I don’t think that was lightning, sir.” Sam swallowed. “I think it was long-range anti-aircraft fire.”
Jack stared at her, dread settling heavily in his gut.
“Oh my God,” Daniel whispered.
“Wonderful,” Jack said. “Just wonderful.”
+ + +
[ corrosion ]
“Why don’t they just use the stargate?” Jack asked as he stretched out on the bedroll he’d made of blankets and slid his hands beneath his head for a pillow.
Sam was unlacing her boots while sitting on the sleeping bag to his left. “Well… “ She frowned. “Maybe it tried. I suppose that once the human workers go through the gate, and the gate shuts down again, the signal is cut off. The workers would no longer be under the mind control. Worse, they’d be cut off from the database. These people have been under control for so long that The System has to tell them everything. Only the most basic and unconscious human behaviors are still independent. Breathing and moving and sleeping.”
Daniel’s voice came from the other side of Jack. Jack had separated them, knowing they’d never get any rest if they were within whispering distance of each other. “I didn’t see much reference to the stargate in the archive either. It may have been a fairly new discovery before the mind control took over. The system may not fully understand the purpose of the gate.”
“Well, it is broadcasting an intelligent, repeating code toward the gate, Daniel. It seems to at least understand that people can come through the gate to this world.”
Daniel suddenly sat up. “But that fits, Sam. These people have lost the ability to reproduce. There have been no pregnancies or births since the mind control began. At least none that have been recorded. And everyone we’ve seen so far has been at least 30 years old or older. As workers grow old and die, The System can’t replace them. It would want more humans to come through the gate. It could easily have learned how to lure people here and then immediately neutralize them and press them into service.”
“Another reason to shoot down a ship or two. It would have enough materials to build an entire space ship around itself… and it wouldn’t need a big human crew. It could find another planet. A bigger one with more humans and more natural resources.”
“And then it could expand like crazy.”
“Exactly.”
Jack sighed. “Hey! This is all very ominous, I agree, but it’s late and I want to sleep.”
Daniel looked down at him, glasses glinting in the darkness. “Jack, this is what we’ve been looking for. We finally understand what happened, and Sam has access to the system. We can make plans now.”
“Can we get off this rock tonight?”
“Well, no. Of course not.”
“Then I want to go to sleep. And you two are going to lay down and be quiet and go to sleep too.”
“But, sir…” Carter started with the protests too.
“Or else I will shoot you myself right now!”
There was blessed silence. Jack settled down and stared at the ceiling of the shelter. His scientists tossed and turned and fidgeted for a while and then gradually slipped off to sleep, one after the other.
Jack stayed awake for a long time. He’d never wanted a beer so much in his life.
+ + +
[ lines of reason ]
Carter found maps the next day. Detailed, perfectly scaled, three-dimensional maps of the city and the buildings and everything in between. She could twist the images to look at them from any angle or fly through the buildings and see every layer of construction. She could see maps of the energy signals and output for every level of every building. Jack put the helmet on to take a look and promptly took it off again and handed it back to Sam.
“It’s been 15 years since the last time I threw up due to motion sickness. I don’t intend to start again now.”
Sam had blinked at him and raised one brow. He’d given her burgeoning crew cut a quick but thorough rub, and then walked outside to see what Teal’c was up to.
When he’d wandered back inside to see what progress she’d made, Daniel was in the virtual reality get-up and there was a hologram of a map filling the room. Carter walked around within it looking amazed and excited. Jack could practically see the gears turning in her head.
“Holy crap,” he said.
Carter whirled and smiled at him, and Daniel turned his head, tilting it and the helmet back so he could look out through the bottom. The hologram wavered.
“Jack, we think we’ve found something!”
“Let’s hear it.” Jack refused to let himself feel too excited. The words, “We found something!” coming from these two could easily mean, “Ooh, pretty science things!”
“We found a detailed map of this shelter and of the tunnels below. One of them leads to something called the Power Field, and Sam thinks it might be the power source for the entire city.” Daniel started gesturing rapidly as he talked, and the hologram pitched back and forth, flickering madly.
“Daniel! Stop fidgeting, you’re giving me a headache!”
Daniel glanced at the hologram and then at his antennae-laden hands. He lowered them to his thighs and pressed them there. “Sorry. We really need to go take a look at this thing though. The entire system must need tremendous amounts of energy to run. It’s possible we could knock out certain parts of the programming through the power field.”
“How far away is it?”
“About five miles, sir.” Sam told him. “Underground, of course. It looks like the actual power field is outside of the city.”
“Outside, like outside of the protective shielding?”
“Yes sir.”
Jack mulled this over. “T and I can take a look.”
Sam held up a hand. “Ah, you don’t know everything yet, Colonel.”
He made a ‘go on’ motion with his hand.
She glanced at Daniel with a conspiratorial look. “Show him the stargate.”
The stargate? Okay, now he was starting to feel excited. Despite the fact that Carter had known which building the stargate was in, she hadn’t had any memory of its exact location or how to get there. Jack was pretty sure their good luck, if you could call it that, was running out, and they wouldn’t be able to just waltz in there time and time again to search for the stargate. Not without being shot full of darts anyway.
Daniel made a few side-to-side motions with his hands and a tall, narrow hologram appeared. The schematics of a cylindrical building.
Jack stared at it. “Is that the building where you two were being held?”
Sam nodded. “Yes. And look down at the bottom.”
Jack scanned down the building, noticing a level toward the bottom where there seemed to be a mass of swirling lights. He squatted down on his heels and studied it.”
“That’s the level where you found me,” Sam explained, walking around to hunker down beside him. “It’s where the original computer was built and held. Basically its BIOS chips and CPU are housed there along with all means to control peripheral agents.”
“Carter…” Jack warned.
“The system’s brain lives there.”
“You couldn’t just say that in the first place?” Jack grumbled.
She flashed him a grin. He liked that grin. It was a genius grin, and it meant her brain was in turbo. She pointed below the brain level to the very bottom space. Jack saw several dense rooms of lights and in the very middle was a glowing circle. The stargate.
“Sweet,” he muttered. “How do we get there?”
Sam shook her head. “I’m not sure yet. There’s no elevators that I can see that go down that far. I see one staircase… here.” She pointed to a narrow, diagonal shaft running alongside the bottom level. “But that passes straight through the central processing room, and we’d be noticed for sure. The system doesn’t care about or even see any agents that aren’t emitting location pulses from the homing chips, or who aren’t plugged into the central consciousness. That’s why we could essentially move around like ghosts, unseen and ignored. But you disturbed that status quo by engaging the Interceptors, sir. It’s labeled us as bugs now, or crawlers, and we’d be pursued as a potential threat once we enter the building again. Our images and energy signals are listed in the archive as a dangerous virus.”
“So, what are you saying? There’s no way for us to get to the stargate?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.” She turned toward him with that expression on her face. The one that said he was in for another long explanation as she tried to educate him on something. “We can’t get in through any traditional means, and I’m sure the recycling chute has been neutralized by now, but I think there’s an entrance the system might have ‘forgotten’ about. I think it’s possible because it’s an entrance we’ve forgotten about ourselves with our own gate.”
“Carter.”
“This isn’t the original location of the gate, sir. The Ancients didn’t place it in that building. When this society found the gate, they had it moved here.”
Jack’s eye widened. “And they needed a really big door to get it in there!”
Sam pointed to a thin, rectangular shape running up from the gateroom. “They needed a really big door to get it in there,” she agreed.
Jack studied it. “Where does it end?”
Sam indicated a big square area two stories above the gateroom. “This is at ground level. It’s shape and size and the location make me think we’re looking at some sort of… garage.”
“The trucks,” Jack said. “Those trucks have to come from somewhere.”
Sam nodded, eyes glittering. “Yes! That has to be it, sir. And it makes sense. The room would have to be big enough to slide the gate through in order to reach the shaft.”
Jack slid his gaze from Sam to Daniel and back again. “I knew there was a reason I rescued you two.”
Sam glanced away from him with an embarrassed smile, and Daniel lifted the helmet to look at him as if he were made of feathers, but Jack knew exactly how to read them. Thanks, Jack. We love you too.
“Sir, I think Daniel and I should check out the power field while you and Teal’c recon the garage and The System’s master building.”
Jack hesitated. “Carter, we have no idea what’s outside of this city.”
“I know, but I think it’s doubtful there’s much of anything, and neither you or Teal’c is going to know which circuits to selectively disable.”
That was true. Realistically speaking, sneaking around the building where The System’s brain was housed was going to be trickier.
“Okay,” he assented. “We’ll head out tomorrow morning. Recon only!” He pointed a finger at them. “You two take full packs, MOPP suits included. I don’t care if it’s only 5 miles away, I want you prepared for anything. Carter, you go over every inch of those MOPP suits. Who knows what they’ve been through since we got here. “
“Yes sir.” She was eager and raring to go, and headed immediately back to the church to go through their packs.
Jack watched as Daniel removed the virtual reality gear and set it carefully into a small pack they’d found in the shelter’s supplies. “Hey,” he called quietly. Daniel turned to look at him. “I know this is like telling both the pot and the kettle not to be black, but could you please keep an eye on each other and not get so caught up in your work that you don’t see the big alien coming up behind you?”
For once Daniel didn’t offer sarcasm in return. He smiled faintly, blue eyes piercing deep into Jack’s worry. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “We can do that.”
+ + +
[ spiral out ]
Teal’c
Teal’c braced his legs and watched the rain of garbage from the chute. He stood on the side of the junk pile, just outside of the impact area. O’Neill stood a few feet to his left, neck craned upwards to look up the chute.
A few stray pieces of garbage were easily deflected by Teal’c’s forearm, and then the rain slowed and stopped. Both of them took several struggling steps up to the top of the heap and looked up into the chute.
“It looks the same,” O’Neill stated.
Teal’c studied the inner structure with trepidation. Looks could be deceiving. If there was one thing he’d learned in the years since his service with Apophis, it was that gem of advice. He leaned down and picked up a small piece of scrap metal and tossed it up to the ridge where they’d caught the hook for their rope. It hit and bounced harmlessly away.
O’Neill glanced at him and then picked up his own piece of scrap. He threw it up against the ladder beneath the door that led within. It hit amid a shower of sparks. They both shielded their eyes.
“Electrified,” Teal’c said.
Jack didn’t appear surprised, but he looked grim. He picked up another piece of metal and threw it hard against the door. There was a sudden whistling amplified in the enclosed space of the chute, and several darts hit the door and stuck where the metal had touched.
Teal’c and Jack raised their P-90’s, but a quick look told them the darts were automated and aimed toward the door.
“Ouch,” Jack remarked.
Teal’c agreed but said nothing. They were not getting in by this means again.
The short walk to The System’s master building was a quiet one, although O’Neill did occasionally let loose with a comment about how much he hated this planet and the city and how much he missed The Simpsons and how the first thing he was going to do when they got home was take everyone out for a huge steak.
Teal’c had grunted a non-committal reply. He usually did, except when Jack was really on a roll and then Teal’c had learned that he had to give some sort of verbal acknowledgement to the rant or Jack would only go on and on. Teal’c found it amusing that O’Neill would snap at Sam and Daniel for their seemingly endless techno babble, when O’Neill himself could be a tremendous pain in the ass from time to time. Especially on those rare occasions when he was right about something and knew it. Then they all suffered.
But they all put up with it, because they respected Jack. He was worthy of it. And they loved him. There was nothing that O’Neill wouldn’t do for any of them, and they all knew it.
O’Neill pulled out a folded piece of paper as they got up close to the black surface of the master building. Sam and Daniel had spent the evening before drawing maps onto Daniel’s journal paper from the holograms in the archive.
“Let’s see…” O’Neill turned the paper around to orient it and themselves to the right angle. Daniel had marked it with the junkyard and the church so they could recognize which side of the building they were looking at.
“What are we looking for, O’Neill?” Teal’c slid his gaze up the tall building, studying the sides and then the dark, grainy sky above.
“Carter thinks there’s a big garage here on ground level. Those trucks came from somewhere. We need to find it.”
They began by simply walking around the building and looking at the walls. There were many indentations, and even obvious panels that were meant to open in some way, but nothing that was big enough to admit a truck, much less a stargate. It took them nearly an hour to circle around the building.
“Well, that was useless,” Jack muttered.
Teal’c studied the building silently for a moment. “Perhaps not, O’Neill. We now know that it is not in an obvious place. Those trucks did come from somewhere…”
They walked the circuit again, and were nearly all the way around when Teal’c suddenly glanced down and stopped. “O’Neill.”
“What do you got?” O’Neill walked back to him.
Teal’c stared down at the black, metallic surface of the ground and then pushed the toe of his boot through a light coating of black dust. It revealed a straight and narrow crack. O’Neill stared at it and then scraped at the area next to it with the sole of his boot. More of the crack was revealed. They glanced at each other.
“Sweet!” O’Neill exclaimed as they walked along the outline of the crack, scraping the dust away with their boots. Several minutes later they’d uncovered a large door in the ground next to the building. “Controls?” O’Neill asked, glancing around for something that might open the door. They looked but found nothing except a panel on the side of the building that, when opened, hid a series of ports that had to be accessed by the correct plug.
“Crap.” O’Neill grumbled.
“Major Carter may be able to figure out how to open this door, O’Neill. It is very close to the room that Daniel Jackson marked on the map. I feel certain that this is the door we were looking for.”
“Me too, but let’s just take another walk around, and make sure, all right?”
Teal’c nodded. In fact, it would be wise for them to walk most of the area around this building and familiarize themselves with the layout. When the time came to act, he wanted nothing to surprise them. He wanted nothing to come between SG-1 and their home. He would do whatever it took to make sure nothing did.
+ + +
[ horizon ]
Sam
The hike through the tunnel in full packs took not quite two hours. Neither of them rushed, but they were both in good shape despite their recent bouts with mind control and could easily handle a 5-mile walk without trouble. The floor of the tunnel was amazingly clear of debris, but with only one flashlight between them, it was hard to avoid the fear of tripping or wondering if the ceiling would suddenly dip down and they’d run into it face first. The air was still and dead, but it wasn’t stagnant. Fresh air was leaking in from somewhere.
“Maybe we’ll find an entire civilization outside of the city,” Sam said, trying to make conversation more than anything. She didn’t think they’d find anything of the sort, but you just never knew.
Ahead of her, Daniel snorted with amusement. “Jack thinks we’ll find evil aliens.”
“I thought we already found those,” Sam muttered. She inadvertently tread on Daniel’s heel and put a hand out to touch his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Daniel replied absently. She put her hand on his pack and left it there to keep walking space between them and let him lead her along. He turned his head to glance back at her in the darkness. “They aren’t evil, Sam. The system is just a computer, and it can’t be evil.”
“What about HAL 9000?”
Daniel smirked. “You’ve been talking to Jack.”
“Well, it’s a valid point.”
“HAL 9000 was just trying to preserve its own existence.”
“What about The Matrix?”
Daniel laughed. “Now you’re just trying to get me going.”
“Why not? Machines take over the world and enslave the human race.”
“Do you think we depend too much on technology?” Daniel asked. His voice was serious.
“Maybe,” Sam answered. She thought about it. It was true really. The human race based most of its science and evolution on technology. They bet their lives on it everyday. “The fact is, that technology is making our lives easier and longer, but some people argue that it’s also taking away our ability to relate to one another. And everything that makes us human.”
“Um, Wow.” Daniel sounded surprised. Not so much at what she said, but at the fact that she was the one saying it.
“I’m aware of the irony, Daniel. But I’m the one who sees the strides we make everyday. Sometime I’m fascinated by the direction technology is taking, but sometimes I’m a bit uneasy about it too. It’s by no means a sure thing to an easier future. Technology and computers run all of our major weapons systems. They have the ability to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth.”
“You’re not very surprised that this happened on this planet, are you?” He asked her.
“Not as much as I should be, I think.”
They walked in silence for a few moments before Sam suddenly felt Daniel’s hand fumbling back and grabbing for hers. She took it, oddly touched. He brought the flashlight up to show her his smile as he stopped and turned to her. “Well, then I’m glad we have a math genius on the team who can hack computers and knows how they think.”
“They don’t-“
He grinned. “I know, I know… I’m just saying…”
She grinned back.
He turned back and took a few steps forward before bringing the light around to bear on the path, and she heard him grunt as he suddenly ran into something. It was too late to stop herself, and she ran right into the back of his pack, letting out her own surprised yelp as they both bounced back and sprawled out onto the floor of the tunnel.
“Crap,” Sam mumbled, struggling to right herself with the heavy pack on her back. Daniel lay on his back and shone the flashlight up ahead of them and onto a big metal door with a wheel mounted in the middle to control the lock.
“I found the door!” He exclaimed brightly.
Sam rolled her eyes and used his shoulder to lever herself up onto her feet. He took her offered hand and she pulled him up beside her.
“Think this is the end?”
Sam shrugged. “The distance seemed about right. Hard to tell for sure though. We’d better get into the MOPP suits before we try and open it though. The colonel will kill us if we’re poisoned to death by the atmosphere.”
She got another snort of amusement from Daniel with that one.
They shrugged their packs off and pulled the MOPP suits on over their clothes, tying down the ends and then examining each other for gaps or missed connectors.
The wheel on the door stuck fast at first. Sam tapped on it with the hilt of her knife, and they alternated the tapping to free dried rust along with both of them straining to push the wheel around. Gradually it began to move and then finally it slipped free and the bolts holding the door slammed open.
They both had to pull at the door to swing it open.
Light hit them first. Bright and startling and a little fear inducing. There was sand outside of the door, and then Sam saw grass. Daniel was already stepping through the door, and she quickly moved up to follow. And then she saw the sun.
She let out a surprised “Ooh” inside of her MOPP helmet. Daniel glanced back at her and held his zat ready. She brought her P-90 up and moved ahead of him, stepping away from the door. There were several small rock formations around the door, shielding it and providing the structure needed for its security. The sun shone in a blue sky and she felt the warmth immediately through the suit. When she glanced up and back she saw the dark cloud of the shield surrounding the city. It looked like a black dome with points sticking out of the top.
The ground was mostly hard-packed sand, but there were a few green plants. The plants seemed to indicate an atmosphere of oxygen and nothing toxic. Daniel tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he pulled her up to where he stood, looking around the ridge of the door and out onto a plain next to the dome of the city.
She inhaled sharply.
The plain was covered in windmills. They ran in rows, hundreds of them. All of them turning busily, their blades glinting in the sun, and doubtlessly spinning rotors located below ground, driving the shafts of hundreds of electrical generators. It was an actual field of power. Holy Hannah.
A short slide down the side of the ridge they were on, and they were walking out onto the field. The wind was stronger here. The shelter of the ridge had protected them from its force. It sent their suits rippling over their bodies and tore at their helmets. Sam wished she had any of her equipment to take environmental readings. She thought that the atmosphere was likely safe, but anything dangerous in the air could possibly kill with one breath. She grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and pointed at the grass growing around the base of one air-powered turbine and then at her helmet, indicating that she was going to take it off and test the air.
Daniel hesitated and then gave her a thumbs up.
She undid the clasps and then slowly lifted one corner of the flap on the helmet. Air rushed inside and she breathed it in. It was fresh and clean. She grinned and pulled the entire helmet off, the wind immediately running through the short hair on her scalp. It was hot and dry. Daniel pulled his off too, reaching up to stabilize his glasses as the wind hit him.
“This is amazing!” he exclaimed, excitement in his voice.
“Wind turbines!” She said, nodding. “If the wind is always like this, the city has an endless supply of power.”
“I have to admit,” Daniel said, turning to look around them. “I didn’t think the power field would be an actual field of power. I thought maybe it would be more like a bunch of levers like at the SGC.”
Sam grinned. “Me too. God, can you feel that sun? It seems like forever since I’ve felt it.”
Daniel looked up toward the sky and closed his eyes. She watched the sun hitting his face, pale and scruffy with beard. A sudden sobering thought hit her.
“Daniel, this isn’t actually a good thing for us. There’s no way we can take out all these turbines and interrupt the flow of power. Not to mention that it’s likely diverted and allocated around the city in another location altogether.”
Daniel met her gaze and sighed. “We don’t have any explosives anyway, which is what it would take to destroy all of this. Let’s take a look around.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Sam warned.
They walked along the nearest row of turbines, the wind ripping wildly at their suits. When Sam turned to glance back, she could see where the heat was being exhausted from the city. Shimmering, blurry waves of heat radiated upward above the dome. “I don’t think this wind is completely natural!” she said, raising her voice to catch Daniel’s ear.
He glanced back at the waves of heat and then at her. “You think they changed their climate by propelling all that heat into the atmosphere?”
She shrugged. “It’s possible. Who knows what else is being exhausted? I think it’s been happening for decades. If it wasn’t the most stable planet to begin with…”
“Yeah.”
They kept walking, and Sam was trying to keep a mental count of the rows of windmills, but she gave up after a few hundred feet.
When they stopped for a quick water break, the air around them was filled with a low moaning. They stared at each other, perplexed, until suddenly Daniel smiled and pressed the cap back on top of the canteen. The moan stopped. When he lifted it again, the moaning immediately filled their ears.
Sam grimaced. “Creepy!”
“I’ve witnessed the same effect at the tops of some Arizona canyons where I’ve gone to study Anasazi ruins. The wind intensifies at the rim. It’s just like blowing across a jug.”
She looked around them then. “How high do you think we are?”
Daniel shook his head, and they walked on. They were nearly to the end of the field. As they drew closer, Sam could see that there was some sort of cliff edge just beyond the last row. The rocks turned up a bit, so she couldn’t see the drop, but she could see distant bluffs of dark rock and tan patches that she guessed were more plains of the light, hard-packed sand.
She scrambled quickly up the rock edge and slowed as the drop came into view and she realized how drastic it really was. Holy… the city was actually on a plain thousands of feet high! When she stood, she looked out over the vast desert below… and she stilled, paralyzed.
Daniel came up behind her, and she heard his gasp. One of his hands had come up to touch the small of her back as he’d approached, to alert her to his presence. Now she felt it grip the fabric of her MOPP suit tightly and he stood close to her, just as still.
The desert plain below was vast. As many miles wide as they were high. And scattered across that plain were the hulking wrecks of dozens of spaceships. Different sizes and shapes and in various states of destruction and burial, the desert floor was filled with them.
“Holy shit,” Daniel swore beside her, his voice almost ripped away by the wind.
“This is what those lights in the sky were,” Sam said softly, confirming her own earlier suspicion. “It’s shooting ships down out of space.”
Some were long burned husks, black and red with rust and ash or buffed to a sharp shine by the soft sand blowing along the desert floor, propelled by the insane winds. Other wrecks were not so old, and they rocked in the wind, noses buried in brown drifts. Sam counted thirty before Daniel tugged at her hand, and they made their way back toward the door and the tunnel and the other half of SG-1.
+ + +
Part 5
By Jennghis Kahn
+ + +
[ communication ]
Jack
When Daniel hadn’t come in by nightfall, Jack took one of the ration bars out on the balcony.
“Hey,” he said as he leaned against the wall next to the window and handed Daniel the ration bar.
“Hey.” Daniel gave him a token glance and took the bar from him. Well, if Daniel was willing to eat it was a good sign.
“Daniel… “ Jack began.
Daniel closed his eyes, shook his head and seemed to grimace a bit. “I know, I know,” he said before Jack could finish.
“What do you know? I haven’t even said anything yet.”
“You came out to see if I was moping,” Daniel stated, craning his neck back so he could meet Jack’s eyes.
Jack eyed him grumpily. He really hated it when they read his mind like that. Especially when he went to all the trouble of preparing a speech. He slid on his back down the side of the wall and sat on the balcony next to Daniel, wrists locked around his raised knees. “I tried to get him, Daniel. He didn’t want to go.”
“It’s not just Bit, Jack. It’s all of them. They’re not responsible for their own actions. We can’t just start mowing them down.”
“I think when they’re chasing us with big dart guns, we can do a little mowing,” Jack protested grimly.
“They’re unwilling pawns,” Daniel said quietly.
“We don’t know if they’re unwilling. For all we know this is something the people of this planet created on their own and entered into freely.”
“They’d hardly need mind control devices then,” Daniel pointed out.
Oh. Good point. Jack sighed, suddenly feeling a gigantic headache coming on. He leaned his head back against the stone wall and stared at the murky night sky. No stars at all. Ever.
“I’m just saying I’d like to get out of here with a minimum of carnage,” Daniel explained. “These people are so dependant on this machine that they don’t survive without it. They don’t want to. They need to be taught how to live again and how to think.”
“Daniel.” Jack kept his voice low and gentle, but his frustration with the archeologist was growing. It wasn’t even that Daniel made his job so much more difficult, or that he was so stubborn that he would never back down and just let Jack shoulder the burden of decision. Or… maybe that was it after all. That Daniel wouldn’t just let Jack make all the decisions and shoulder the regret. Jack was perfectly willing to admit that he sometimes preferred to just take the easy way out regardless of the consequences to himself. He was no stranger to guilt.
Daniel was the one who refused to let that happen. He was the one who saw guilt coming and warned of its advance. He was unwilling to let Jack slip back into that place, and he was downright bullish at the thought of Jack dragging them along. When Carter joined Daniel’s side in an argument, Jack was pretty much lost. It irked him, but he’d learned to play through that. They’d rarely, if ever, been wrong. And he was silently grateful for the care to his soul, even if he’d never admit it or allow himself to dwell on it too much.
“We aren’t capable of saving this planet right now,” Jack said carefully. “We’re barely keeping ourselves alive.”
“I know,” Daniel agreed, nodding. “I do know that, and, trust me, I do not regret giving up Bit if it meant saving Sam. I’d do that again. I just don’t want to condemn the humans here en masse for something that they can’t control. Maybe when we get back, the Asgard or the Tok’ra might know how to help…” He knew his wish was unlikely. Jack heard it in his voice.
“Maybe,” Jack said. Hell, he didn’t know. Maybe the Asgard could return these people to their normal lives. In any case, he was pretty sure they’d want to know about a giant computer planet with plans to expand.
They lapsed into a silence for a while, and Jack thought that maybe somehow they’d come to an agreement. Somehow they always did, regardless of whether it was spoken or not.
As they stared at the darkness, several streaks of light shot across the sky, muted by the black cloud that enclosed the city. It reminded Jack of lightning flickering behind massive storm clouds, but it ran in a line rather than acting as a random mass.
“What the hell is that?” Jack muttered.
“Lightning?” Daniel guessed.
“No rain.”
Daniel shrugged. “Maybe that-“ he waved his hand toward the sky “-shield of clouds prevents the rain from getting through. Maybe the rain would damage things somehow.”
There was a distant rumbling as if to prove Daniel’s point. When it grew increasingly louder and didn’t seem to abate, Sam and Teal’c slid out onto the balcony with them.
“Holy… “ Sam stared at the sky. Teal’c stood beside her, eyebrow raised high.
“Carter, what is that?” Jack demanded. He and Daniel climbed to their feet to stand beside her.
Sam glanced at him. “Don’t ask me, sir. It looks like a storm or maybe something is going on with the shield itself.”
That alarmed Jack. “What would happen if the shield gave way?”
Sam shrugged and shook her head. “Without knowing what the outside atmosphere is like, that would be impossible to say.”
“Bad?” Jack asked, pushing.
“Could be,” Sam replied, too enthralled with the light and sound show to be irritated by him. “If the shield is protecting the city from a toxic atmosphere or horrible storms.”
The rumbling got louder and the cloudy shield lit up briefly like a flash bomb, and then it quickly started fading. In minutes, the rumbling had stopped and the lights were gone. Jack eased his fingernails out of his palm where he’d dug in as the rumbling had reached a frightening pitch and seemed to shake the city.
“Well, that was pleasant,” he remarked sarcastically.
“Indeed it was not,” Teal’c insisted, missing Jack’s tone or choosing to ignore it. Sometimes you couldn’t tell, and Jack gave him a tight, faint smile.
“Quite a storm,” Daniel added, glancing sideways at Sam. She only gave him a look of agreement, eyes wide. It was obvious she was mystified, and that scared Jack the most.
+ + +
[ genesis ]
Daniel
“Carter, what exactly are we looking for?” Jack was impatient. Again.
Daniel exchanged a small smile with Sam while the tables of junk still obstructed Jack’s view of them. He stood with her, pawing through the contents of the table while she dealt with Jack. Neither Jack nor Teal’c liked the shelter much, and once Sam had recovered completely and lost the fatigue that had dogged her for so many days, Daniel had insisted on showing it to her. They’d immediately seen the possibilities in the sheer amount of scavenged gear and collected technology decorating the tables and shelves. They needed help to get home, and this was the most likely place to find it.
Sam responded calmly to Jack, her fingers playing over a gadget she’d picked up. “Anything that might help us to escape, sir.”
Jack glanced around. “Which would be what? Exactly?”
Sam hesitated a moment to give an indulgent smile, her lips a little tight. “Well, I guess I’ll know when I see it.”
“Ah,” Jack said, nodding in perfect understanding. Daniel winced a bit. A bored Jack was never good when one was trying to get actual work done. Jack glanced down at the table beside him and picked up something that looked like a wire whisk. He held it up. “How about this?”
Sam stared at him for a beat, and Daniel saw the heavy sigh in her body language. He blinked at Jack, in sympathy for her. Sam smiled. “Um, no, sir. I don’t think that’d be very useful.”
Jack waved it back and forth. “Well then, Major… you obviously have no taste for a good omelet.”
Daniel shook his head, rolling his eyes at Jack’s bad attempts at humor. Sam fought a smile though and seemed to accept that she was going to have to deal with him in order to get any work done. “An omelet won’t get us home, sir.”
Jack picked up something else. “How about this?”
Sam hesitated in that way she always did when she knew she had to say something that wasn’t proper protocol. “Um… no. Sir? You don’t have to stay here with us. Really. We’ll be fine. If you’d rather go find Teal’c… “
Daniel smiled.
Jack lifted his brows and tilted his head just slightly. “Trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh no, sir!” Sam exclaimed quickly.
“Yes,” Daniel said at the same time.
Jack’s eyes narrowed and he glared at them indignantly. Daniel exchanged another glance with Sam. She was trying to hide a grin and having a hard time of it. Jack did his best to look flippant. He waved a hand. “Hey, I can take a hint.”
He started to walk out of the room and then suddenly stopped and looked back at them sternly. “If you find any big, red buttons that say ‘self destruct’ on them… don’t mess with them, okay?”
Sam came as close to rolling her eyes as she ever did when Jack was watching her. Jack was intent on getting his payback though. “Carter?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered solemnly, nodding as she met his eyes. Daniel knew she’d do the full eye roll when Jack was gone.
“Daniel?” Jack turned his attention to him.
Daniel made a shooing motion with his hand. “Of course, Jack. The only buttons I’m going to mess with are the ones that say ‘Don’t Push This’. You know that.”
Jack shot him a sardonic glance. “Funny.”
When he’d disappeared out the door, Daniel turned toward Sam. “Was it?”
She shrugged and held her hand up, palm down, tilting it back and forth. “Ehhh…”
“Huh.” Daniel sighed. Usually he came up with something better, but eating ration bars that tasted like tree bark was starting to grate on him.
+ + +
[ spatial environment ]
Sam
“Hey, look at this.” Sam lifted the helmet out of the crate and held it up so Daniel could see it from across the table. He studied it, drawing his brows together.
“It looks like the helmets the Interceptors wear.”
Sam tilted it, looking at it from different angles. “It does. A bit.” It was made of metal and it had some weight to it. It fit over the crown of the head with a thick panel in the front that fit in front of the eyes. There were small telescopic lenses coming out from the panel like some sort of weird robotic eyes. The bottom of the face would be free of encumbrances. Not for protection then. She turned it over and studied the inside. She could see wiring encased in plastic in the inside surface. Something stirred in her mind…
“What else is in there?” Daniel walked around the side of the table and peered into the crate beside her. He reached in and lifted out a bulky, metallic glove with foot-long wires extending off of the fingertips. He stared at it, tilting it back and forth so the stiff wires on the fingertips waved back and forth. “Very surreal.”
Sam stared at the glove and then back at the helmet. “Daniel… doesn’t all of this look familiar?”
He met her gaze and then glanced at the glove in his hand again. She knew he got it when he suddenly looked a bit sickened and he set the glove down on the table. “The rows of workers hooked into The System… “
Sam nodded and chewed at her lip thoughtfully as she examined the helmet some more. “Hmm.” She lifted it and slid it onto her head somewhat awkwardly.
“Sam…” Daniel sounded uneasy.
“Give me the gloves.”
“No.”
She lifted the helmet just enough to see Daniel giving her a horrified look. “It’s not part of the mind control device, Daniel. I think this is just some sort of virtual reality gear that allows access to the system but doesn’t actually compel the user to do The System’s bidding.”
Daniel still looked concerned, but he reached in and pulled the other glove from the crate. “You don’t know that for sure.”
Sam let the helmet sit back down on her head, blocking her vision. She reached blindly for the gloves, and Daniel grabbed her hands one by one, sliding the gloves on her himself. “No,” She answered. “But you can just zat me if I start going zombie on you.”
“Ha ha.”
She grinned and brought her gloved hands up to straighten the helmet awkwardly. She heard the wires tap against the top of the helmet. She stood there and waited.
“What’s happening?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing,” Sam heard the disappointment in her own voice. Maybe the batteries were dead, or it needed a separate power source.
“Well, maybe it has an ‘on’ switch,” Daniel suggested. She felt his hands grab the helmet and he tilted her head from side to side as he examined it. “I don’t see anything,” he said. She felt him pressing randomly against the metal.
“Hold on,” she lifted the helmet off carefully and handed it to him. Then she examined the gloves on her hands. They were made of metal and segmented to fit her fingers very closely. The wires that waved rigidly from each finger made her pause. Not so much wires as… antennae. She looked at the long wrist sections. On the left glove there was a small sliding piece. “There!” she said, holding up the glove so Daniel could see the switch.
He hesitated, glancing worriedly into her eyes for a moment.
“It’s okay,” she reassured him, even though she had no idea if it was really okay or not. His curiosity would get the better of him, she knew.
He slid the switch to its opposite position, and helped her put the helmet on again. There was an off-putting, heavy feeling of disorientation and then suddenly there were blue lights in front of her eyes and she was seeing a wall of numbers. “Holy Hannah… “
“What? What is it?”
“I’m seeing something.” She brought her hands up and began testing the wall. The numbers bent and wavered as she pushed through them. She turned around. More numbers and now she saw a line along the side. When she pushed at it, the whole panel of numbers slid aside and revealed another. “Wow.”
“What?” Daniel sounded exasperated.
“I think I’m in the system, Daniel. This is computer code!”
“Well, does it know you’re there?” Daniel’s voice was past concern now.
“I don’t know. The whole system must be basically wireless. It’d have to be in order to keep this many people under control.” She was moving panels rapidly now and taking a good look around. She felt Daniel steady her a few times before she ran into a table or the wall as she spun around to look at everything.
“Will it help?” Daniel asked her, squeezing her arm to get her attention.
Sam was so lost in the wonder of it that she almost didn’t hear him. She grinned beneath the helmet toward his voice. “If anything is going to, it’ll be this.”
+ + +
Jack
Jack opened the door to the shelter with a rivulet of anger in his gut. He was as glad as anyone that Carter had found the virtual reality device and seemingly a way to enter the system without being noticed, but she, and Daniel he might add, both still needed to sleep and stay healthy. They’d been messing around with the device all day today, and he’d specifically told them to be back at the church by nightfall.
It was well past now.
He walked down the hall carrying his pack in his hands, listening. He didn’t hear anything, which concerned him a bit. The two scientists together working on a problem were usually so oblivious of their surroundings and yakking so much that he’d been tempted to tape their mouths shut from time to time to get any peace.
He walked through the main storage room and into one of the alcoves along the side where they’d cleared the floor and set up a perimeter so Sam could use the device and not trip over anything and break her neck. As he hesitated in the doorway, he saw her standing there, helmet firmly in place, hands moving occasionally as she studied some virtual file in front of her eyes.
Daniel was sitting on the floor amongst a pile of books and blankets, head tilted against the wall, fast asleep. His glasses were still in place on his face, one of his field journals and a bit of pencil open on the floor next to him.
“Hey!” Jack barked loudly, startling both of them so badly they jumped. He felt a small sense of satisfaction at that. Daniel jerked upright and straightened his glasses, staring up at Jack in surprise. Carter whirled around, one weirdly gloved hand coming up to push the helmet high enough to reveal her eyes. The antennae waved wildly from her fingertips.
“Sir!”
“What the hell did I tell you about coming home before nightfall?” Jack demanded, trying not to wince at how much he sounded like his father.
Sam and Daniel glanced at each other. Sam guiltily, and Daniel with a ‘told you so’ expression on his face. Daniel stuck with her though, licking his lips before giving Jack a faint shrug. “It’s hard to know when it’s night time when we’re underground.”
Jack had tried to force them to move their little operation to the church, but whatever signal the virtual reality device was receiving had gotten worse the further away they’d gotten from the shelter. He’d let them return to the shelter under the condition that they returned to the church by nightfall. Just in case…
“Did you think about walking outside and checking?” Jack felt at his sarcastic best.
“Sorry, sir,” Sam said a bit sheepishly. “You wouldn’t believe the information we’ve found though.” There was excitement in her eyes.
“Really?” He might just forgive them. “We can get home?”
“Oh,” Sam looked a bit guilty again. “No, not that. I found a group of files archiving the planet’s history. Daniel and I have been going through it all day!”
“It’s fascinating.” Daniel nodded with a similar excitement.
“I’ll bet.” Jack wasn’t done being sarcastic yet. They hadn’t suffered enough for making him and Teal’c worry.
Daniel gave him an incredulous look. “Jack, this archive explains what happened to these people. It’s like a log of events from ancient history to present day.”
“So?”
Daniel looked irked. Good. “Do I really have to tell you the importance of learning the history of what happened here?”
“Will it help us get out of here?”
“Well… maybe.”
“It’ll help us understand,” Sam offered. “And the more we understand, the easier it will be to find weaknesses.”
Weaknesses. Okay, Jack like the sound of that. “Go on.”
Daniel picked up his journal and shifted to his knees with eagerness. “Well, humans recorded the history for centuries and then entered it in this database where it was updated regularly in textual form. When the humans became incapable of doing this, The System itself continued to do it because it’s in the programming.” Daniel glanced at Sam. “I read a lot of the text myself, but Sam was the only one who could understand the computer’s language for the later entries.”
Jack made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Can I have the condensed version, Daniel?”
Daniel blinked at him and sighed. “Basically they built this huge computer about a century ago as a way of sharing information. They wanted to archive their history. As the archive grew, it became more accessible to the whole of their society. They archived each discovery and each science experiment. It became a huge database. Their technology started taking huge leaps forward in all the sciences because the information was readily available to anyone who wanted to experiment. As the computer technology jumped forward, they started to come up with ways to make it even more accessible.”
“Their original idea seems to be exactly what Daniel’s first thought was. A hive mind type of thing,” Sam interjected, but when Daniel picked it up again, she slid the helmet back on and went back to her exploring.
“Yes,” Daniel agreed. “They couldn’t quite get the technology to work right though. They went from having to hard-wire people into the database to a more wireless approach with receiving gear that they wore on their heads, but it didn’t allow them to share ideas with each other. It only allowed them to receive information from the database. The human resources needed to keep the computer running and the archive updated were tremendous. This whole society sort of turned inward and became obsessed with building The System. That was the nickname given to the whole machine. They also wanted a guardian angel. They strived to make The System a sentient being.”
“When did the mind control come in?” Jack asked. He opened his pack and pulled out two sleeping bags, rolled tight. He threw one to Daniel and began untying the other and laying it out. Daniel was on autopilot and he absently began spreading out the sleeping bag while talking animatedly.
“Several generations later. The system began to take on this sort of god-like aspect. It did everything for the people. It provided all the answers to their questions. It ran their utilities and defended the planet. They started neglecting the other sciences in favor of expanding The System in an effort to make their lives as easy and stress free as possible.”
“And boring,” Jack muttered. Daniel only gave passing acknowledgement to his comment.
“The admirable existence was to serve The System. They evolved in their coding to make it as self-sustaining as possible. Somehow, we’re not sure how, things changed… and the people became slaves to The System rather than the other way around. They worshipped it. Being connected was on par with ascending to a higher plane. The problem was it needed people to help expand, and if they weren’t doing enough on their own, it found a way to force them into service.”
Sam was still standing and working with the virtual reality device, but she spoke as she listened to them. “The only thing they didn’t really explore or conquer was space travel. They were too focused on The System.”
Daniel nodded, helping Jack as he pushed the books out of the way and started rearranging the blankets to make a third sleeping pallet. “The whole city was reorganized and re-built to facilitate the growth and the comfort of The System.”
“Comfort?” Jack stared at him.
“Heat and static electricity can destroy the delicate components of a computer, sir.” Carter waved her hands in the air, moving panels. “And as the computer grew in both power and size, it released a tremendous amount of heat.”
Daniel nodded again. “They built the heart of the computer underground and then covered it with a city made of heat-resistant, non-conducting metal. They didn’t bother tearing most of the old city down. They just built over it. That’s why we keep running into old tech beneath the new.”
“Ya think?” Jack eyed him.
“The taller buildings that go up into the shield are actually fans used to blow the heat away from the central processing unit and the memory archives,” Daniel said.
“What about the shield?” Jack asked, suddenly taking an interest.
“It’s a strange mix of different chemicals and compounds, some of which are incredibly similar to the metal used on the buildings,” Sam said. She turned toward them, the telescopic eyepieces fully extended and her antennae-ridden fingers held motionless before her. She looked like some weird, mutant insect-girl, and Jack grinned at her. “It’s purpose is to protect the city from electrical storms and heat and to provide a better environment for a running computer. It controls the temperature to a certain extent and it keeps the humidity low.”
Daniel looked at Jack. “The system doesn’t know right from wrong. It just follows its central programming. Survive and expand. Eventually, it used up all the planet’s resources. At least within a reasonable area. There is very little mention of any other cultures on this planet, and I don’t think the rest of the planet is very hospitable to human life. They had to just stop building once they ran out of materials.”
Well, that explained the church and the shelter and why there were rows of ancient houses where the city simply stopped.
“So it can’t expand anymore,” Jack stated. He felt relieved by that.
“Um, I wouldn’t say that,” Sam suddenly said, lifting her helmet off and looking at both of them.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Some of the last entries put in by humans were about developing space travel. They wrote programs and had started simulations just before succumbing to the mind control. The computer has been working on it all this time.”
“It wants off the planet. It knows it has to find a new home with new resources to expand,” Daniel said pensively.
“It’s building a space ship?” Jack asked, just a little sarcasm and disbelief in his voice.
Sam looked at him. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t need to build one if it can capture one another way.”
“How?”
Sam drew her brows together with a worried frown. “That storm we saw the other night, you said you’ve seen lights in the sky before like that?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, a few times. I didn’t hear that rumbling and feel that shaking, but the lights are pretty frequent.”
“I don’t think that was lightning, sir.” Sam swallowed. “I think it was long-range anti-aircraft fire.”
Jack stared at her, dread settling heavily in his gut.
“Oh my God,” Daniel whispered.
“Wonderful,” Jack said. “Just wonderful.”
+ + +
[ corrosion ]
“Why don’t they just use the stargate?” Jack asked as he stretched out on the bedroll he’d made of blankets and slid his hands beneath his head for a pillow.
Sam was unlacing her boots while sitting on the sleeping bag to his left. “Well… “ She frowned. “Maybe it tried. I suppose that once the human workers go through the gate, and the gate shuts down again, the signal is cut off. The workers would no longer be under the mind control. Worse, they’d be cut off from the database. These people have been under control for so long that The System has to tell them everything. Only the most basic and unconscious human behaviors are still independent. Breathing and moving and sleeping.”
Daniel’s voice came from the other side of Jack. Jack had separated them, knowing they’d never get any rest if they were within whispering distance of each other. “I didn’t see much reference to the stargate in the archive either. It may have been a fairly new discovery before the mind control took over. The system may not fully understand the purpose of the gate.”
“Well, it is broadcasting an intelligent, repeating code toward the gate, Daniel. It seems to at least understand that people can come through the gate to this world.”
Daniel suddenly sat up. “But that fits, Sam. These people have lost the ability to reproduce. There have been no pregnancies or births since the mind control began. At least none that have been recorded. And everyone we’ve seen so far has been at least 30 years old or older. As workers grow old and die, The System can’t replace them. It would want more humans to come through the gate. It could easily have learned how to lure people here and then immediately neutralize them and press them into service.”
“Another reason to shoot down a ship or two. It would have enough materials to build an entire space ship around itself… and it wouldn’t need a big human crew. It could find another planet. A bigger one with more humans and more natural resources.”
“And then it could expand like crazy.”
“Exactly.”
Jack sighed. “Hey! This is all very ominous, I agree, but it’s late and I want to sleep.”
Daniel looked down at him, glasses glinting in the darkness. “Jack, this is what we’ve been looking for. We finally understand what happened, and Sam has access to the system. We can make plans now.”
“Can we get off this rock tonight?”
“Well, no. Of course not.”
“Then I want to go to sleep. And you two are going to lay down and be quiet and go to sleep too.”
“But, sir…” Carter started with the protests too.
“Or else I will shoot you myself right now!”
There was blessed silence. Jack settled down and stared at the ceiling of the shelter. His scientists tossed and turned and fidgeted for a while and then gradually slipped off to sleep, one after the other.
Jack stayed awake for a long time. He’d never wanted a beer so much in his life.
+ + +
[ lines of reason ]
Carter found maps the next day. Detailed, perfectly scaled, three-dimensional maps of the city and the buildings and everything in between. She could twist the images to look at them from any angle or fly through the buildings and see every layer of construction. She could see maps of the energy signals and output for every level of every building. Jack put the helmet on to take a look and promptly took it off again and handed it back to Sam.
“It’s been 15 years since the last time I threw up due to motion sickness. I don’t intend to start again now.”
Sam had blinked at him and raised one brow. He’d given her burgeoning crew cut a quick but thorough rub, and then walked outside to see what Teal’c was up to.
When he’d wandered back inside to see what progress she’d made, Daniel was in the virtual reality get-up and there was a hologram of a map filling the room. Carter walked around within it looking amazed and excited. Jack could practically see the gears turning in her head.
“Holy crap,” he said.
Carter whirled and smiled at him, and Daniel turned his head, tilting it and the helmet back so he could look out through the bottom. The hologram wavered.
“Jack, we think we’ve found something!”
“Let’s hear it.” Jack refused to let himself feel too excited. The words, “We found something!” coming from these two could easily mean, “Ooh, pretty science things!”
“We found a detailed map of this shelter and of the tunnels below. One of them leads to something called the Power Field, and Sam thinks it might be the power source for the entire city.” Daniel started gesturing rapidly as he talked, and the hologram pitched back and forth, flickering madly.
“Daniel! Stop fidgeting, you’re giving me a headache!”
Daniel glanced at the hologram and then at his antennae-laden hands. He lowered them to his thighs and pressed them there. “Sorry. We really need to go take a look at this thing though. The entire system must need tremendous amounts of energy to run. It’s possible we could knock out certain parts of the programming through the power field.”
“How far away is it?”
“About five miles, sir.” Sam told him. “Underground, of course. It looks like the actual power field is outside of the city.”
“Outside, like outside of the protective shielding?”
“Yes sir.”
Jack mulled this over. “T and I can take a look.”
Sam held up a hand. “Ah, you don’t know everything yet, Colonel.”
He made a ‘go on’ motion with his hand.
She glanced at Daniel with a conspiratorial look. “Show him the stargate.”
The stargate? Okay, now he was starting to feel excited. Despite the fact that Carter had known which building the stargate was in, she hadn’t had any memory of its exact location or how to get there. Jack was pretty sure their good luck, if you could call it that, was running out, and they wouldn’t be able to just waltz in there time and time again to search for the stargate. Not without being shot full of darts anyway.
Daniel made a few side-to-side motions with his hands and a tall, narrow hologram appeared. The schematics of a cylindrical building.
Jack stared at it. “Is that the building where you two were being held?”
Sam nodded. “Yes. And look down at the bottom.”
Jack scanned down the building, noticing a level toward the bottom where there seemed to be a mass of swirling lights. He squatted down on his heels and studied it.”
“That’s the level where you found me,” Sam explained, walking around to hunker down beside him. “It’s where the original computer was built and held. Basically its BIOS chips and CPU are housed there along with all means to control peripheral agents.”
“Carter…” Jack warned.
“The system’s brain lives there.”
“You couldn’t just say that in the first place?” Jack grumbled.
She flashed him a grin. He liked that grin. It was a genius grin, and it meant her brain was in turbo. She pointed below the brain level to the very bottom space. Jack saw several dense rooms of lights and in the very middle was a glowing circle. The stargate.
“Sweet,” he muttered. “How do we get there?”
Sam shook her head. “I’m not sure yet. There’s no elevators that I can see that go down that far. I see one staircase… here.” She pointed to a narrow, diagonal shaft running alongside the bottom level. “But that passes straight through the central processing room, and we’d be noticed for sure. The system doesn’t care about or even see any agents that aren’t emitting location pulses from the homing chips, or who aren’t plugged into the central consciousness. That’s why we could essentially move around like ghosts, unseen and ignored. But you disturbed that status quo by engaging the Interceptors, sir. It’s labeled us as bugs now, or crawlers, and we’d be pursued as a potential threat once we enter the building again. Our images and energy signals are listed in the archive as a dangerous virus.”
“So, what are you saying? There’s no way for us to get to the stargate?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.” She turned toward him with that expression on her face. The one that said he was in for another long explanation as she tried to educate him on something. “We can’t get in through any traditional means, and I’m sure the recycling chute has been neutralized by now, but I think there’s an entrance the system might have ‘forgotten’ about. I think it’s possible because it’s an entrance we’ve forgotten about ourselves with our own gate.”
“Carter.”
“This isn’t the original location of the gate, sir. The Ancients didn’t place it in that building. When this society found the gate, they had it moved here.”
Jack’s eye widened. “And they needed a really big door to get it in there!”
Sam pointed to a thin, rectangular shape running up from the gateroom. “They needed a really big door to get it in there,” she agreed.
Jack studied it. “Where does it end?”
Sam indicated a big square area two stories above the gateroom. “This is at ground level. It’s shape and size and the location make me think we’re looking at some sort of… garage.”
“The trucks,” Jack said. “Those trucks have to come from somewhere.”
Sam nodded, eyes glittering. “Yes! That has to be it, sir. And it makes sense. The room would have to be big enough to slide the gate through in order to reach the shaft.”
Jack slid his gaze from Sam to Daniel and back again. “I knew there was a reason I rescued you two.”
Sam glanced away from him with an embarrassed smile, and Daniel lifted the helmet to look at him as if he were made of feathers, but Jack knew exactly how to read them. Thanks, Jack. We love you too.
“Sir, I think Daniel and I should check out the power field while you and Teal’c recon the garage and The System’s master building.”
Jack hesitated. “Carter, we have no idea what’s outside of this city.”
“I know, but I think it’s doubtful there’s much of anything, and neither you or Teal’c is going to know which circuits to selectively disable.”
That was true. Realistically speaking, sneaking around the building where The System’s brain was housed was going to be trickier.
“Okay,” he assented. “We’ll head out tomorrow morning. Recon only!” He pointed a finger at them. “You two take full packs, MOPP suits included. I don’t care if it’s only 5 miles away, I want you prepared for anything. Carter, you go over every inch of those MOPP suits. Who knows what they’ve been through since we got here. “
“Yes sir.” She was eager and raring to go, and headed immediately back to the church to go through their packs.
Jack watched as Daniel removed the virtual reality gear and set it carefully into a small pack they’d found in the shelter’s supplies. “Hey,” he called quietly. Daniel turned to look at him. “I know this is like telling both the pot and the kettle not to be black, but could you please keep an eye on each other and not get so caught up in your work that you don’t see the big alien coming up behind you?”
For once Daniel didn’t offer sarcasm in return. He smiled faintly, blue eyes piercing deep into Jack’s worry. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “We can do that.”
+ + +
[ spiral out ]
Teal’c
Teal’c braced his legs and watched the rain of garbage from the chute. He stood on the side of the junk pile, just outside of the impact area. O’Neill stood a few feet to his left, neck craned upwards to look up the chute.
A few stray pieces of garbage were easily deflected by Teal’c’s forearm, and then the rain slowed and stopped. Both of them took several struggling steps up to the top of the heap and looked up into the chute.
“It looks the same,” O’Neill stated.
Teal’c studied the inner structure with trepidation. Looks could be deceiving. If there was one thing he’d learned in the years since his service with Apophis, it was that gem of advice. He leaned down and picked up a small piece of scrap metal and tossed it up to the ridge where they’d caught the hook for their rope. It hit and bounced harmlessly away.
O’Neill glanced at him and then picked up his own piece of scrap. He threw it up against the ladder beneath the door that led within. It hit amid a shower of sparks. They both shielded their eyes.
“Electrified,” Teal’c said.
Jack didn’t appear surprised, but he looked grim. He picked up another piece of metal and threw it hard against the door. There was a sudden whistling amplified in the enclosed space of the chute, and several darts hit the door and stuck where the metal had touched.
Teal’c and Jack raised their P-90’s, but a quick look told them the darts were automated and aimed toward the door.
“Ouch,” Jack remarked.
Teal’c agreed but said nothing. They were not getting in by this means again.
The short walk to The System’s master building was a quiet one, although O’Neill did occasionally let loose with a comment about how much he hated this planet and the city and how much he missed The Simpsons and how the first thing he was going to do when they got home was take everyone out for a huge steak.
Teal’c had grunted a non-committal reply. He usually did, except when Jack was really on a roll and then Teal’c had learned that he had to give some sort of verbal acknowledgement to the rant or Jack would only go on and on. Teal’c found it amusing that O’Neill would snap at Sam and Daniel for their seemingly endless techno babble, when O’Neill himself could be a tremendous pain in the ass from time to time. Especially on those rare occasions when he was right about something and knew it. Then they all suffered.
But they all put up with it, because they respected Jack. He was worthy of it. And they loved him. There was nothing that O’Neill wouldn’t do for any of them, and they all knew it.
O’Neill pulled out a folded piece of paper as they got up close to the black surface of the master building. Sam and Daniel had spent the evening before drawing maps onto Daniel’s journal paper from the holograms in the archive.
“Let’s see…” O’Neill turned the paper around to orient it and themselves to the right angle. Daniel had marked it with the junkyard and the church so they could recognize which side of the building they were looking at.
“What are we looking for, O’Neill?” Teal’c slid his gaze up the tall building, studying the sides and then the dark, grainy sky above.
“Carter thinks there’s a big garage here on ground level. Those trucks came from somewhere. We need to find it.”
They began by simply walking around the building and looking at the walls. There were many indentations, and even obvious panels that were meant to open in some way, but nothing that was big enough to admit a truck, much less a stargate. It took them nearly an hour to circle around the building.
“Well, that was useless,” Jack muttered.
Teal’c studied the building silently for a moment. “Perhaps not, O’Neill. We now know that it is not in an obvious place. Those trucks did come from somewhere…”
They walked the circuit again, and were nearly all the way around when Teal’c suddenly glanced down and stopped. “O’Neill.”
“What do you got?” O’Neill walked back to him.
Teal’c stared down at the black, metallic surface of the ground and then pushed the toe of his boot through a light coating of black dust. It revealed a straight and narrow crack. O’Neill stared at it and then scraped at the area next to it with the sole of his boot. More of the crack was revealed. They glanced at each other.
“Sweet!” O’Neill exclaimed as they walked along the outline of the crack, scraping the dust away with their boots. Several minutes later they’d uncovered a large door in the ground next to the building. “Controls?” O’Neill asked, glancing around for something that might open the door. They looked but found nothing except a panel on the side of the building that, when opened, hid a series of ports that had to be accessed by the correct plug.
“Crap.” O’Neill grumbled.
“Major Carter may be able to figure out how to open this door, O’Neill. It is very close to the room that Daniel Jackson marked on the map. I feel certain that this is the door we were looking for.”
“Me too, but let’s just take another walk around, and make sure, all right?”
Teal’c nodded. In fact, it would be wise for them to walk most of the area around this building and familiarize themselves with the layout. When the time came to act, he wanted nothing to surprise them. He wanted nothing to come between SG-1 and their home. He would do whatever it took to make sure nothing did.
+ + +
[ horizon ]
Sam
The hike through the tunnel in full packs took not quite two hours. Neither of them rushed, but they were both in good shape despite their recent bouts with mind control and could easily handle a 5-mile walk without trouble. The floor of the tunnel was amazingly clear of debris, but with only one flashlight between them, it was hard to avoid the fear of tripping or wondering if the ceiling would suddenly dip down and they’d run into it face first. The air was still and dead, but it wasn’t stagnant. Fresh air was leaking in from somewhere.
“Maybe we’ll find an entire civilization outside of the city,” Sam said, trying to make conversation more than anything. She didn’t think they’d find anything of the sort, but you just never knew.
Ahead of her, Daniel snorted with amusement. “Jack thinks we’ll find evil aliens.”
“I thought we already found those,” Sam muttered. She inadvertently tread on Daniel’s heel and put a hand out to touch his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Daniel replied absently. She put her hand on his pack and left it there to keep walking space between them and let him lead her along. He turned his head to glance back at her in the darkness. “They aren’t evil, Sam. The system is just a computer, and it can’t be evil.”
“What about HAL 9000?”
Daniel smirked. “You’ve been talking to Jack.”
“Well, it’s a valid point.”
“HAL 9000 was just trying to preserve its own existence.”
“What about The Matrix?”
Daniel laughed. “Now you’re just trying to get me going.”
“Why not? Machines take over the world and enslave the human race.”
“Do you think we depend too much on technology?” Daniel asked. His voice was serious.
“Maybe,” Sam answered. She thought about it. It was true really. The human race based most of its science and evolution on technology. They bet their lives on it everyday. “The fact is, that technology is making our lives easier and longer, but some people argue that it’s also taking away our ability to relate to one another. And everything that makes us human.”
“Um, Wow.” Daniel sounded surprised. Not so much at what she said, but at the fact that she was the one saying it.
“I’m aware of the irony, Daniel. But I’m the one who sees the strides we make everyday. Sometime I’m fascinated by the direction technology is taking, but sometimes I’m a bit uneasy about it too. It’s by no means a sure thing to an easier future. Technology and computers run all of our major weapons systems. They have the ability to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth.”
“You’re not very surprised that this happened on this planet, are you?” He asked her.
“Not as much as I should be, I think.”
They walked in silence for a few moments before Sam suddenly felt Daniel’s hand fumbling back and grabbing for hers. She took it, oddly touched. He brought the flashlight up to show her his smile as he stopped and turned to her. “Well, then I’m glad we have a math genius on the team who can hack computers and knows how they think.”
“They don’t-“
He grinned. “I know, I know… I’m just saying…”
She grinned back.
He turned back and took a few steps forward before bringing the light around to bear on the path, and she heard him grunt as he suddenly ran into something. It was too late to stop herself, and she ran right into the back of his pack, letting out her own surprised yelp as they both bounced back and sprawled out onto the floor of the tunnel.
“Crap,” Sam mumbled, struggling to right herself with the heavy pack on her back. Daniel lay on his back and shone the flashlight up ahead of them and onto a big metal door with a wheel mounted in the middle to control the lock.
“I found the door!” He exclaimed brightly.
Sam rolled her eyes and used his shoulder to lever herself up onto her feet. He took her offered hand and she pulled him up beside her.
“Think this is the end?”
Sam shrugged. “The distance seemed about right. Hard to tell for sure though. We’d better get into the MOPP suits before we try and open it though. The colonel will kill us if we’re poisoned to death by the atmosphere.”
She got another snort of amusement from Daniel with that one.
They shrugged their packs off and pulled the MOPP suits on over their clothes, tying down the ends and then examining each other for gaps or missed connectors.
The wheel on the door stuck fast at first. Sam tapped on it with the hilt of her knife, and they alternated the tapping to free dried rust along with both of them straining to push the wheel around. Gradually it began to move and then finally it slipped free and the bolts holding the door slammed open.
They both had to pull at the door to swing it open.
Light hit them first. Bright and startling and a little fear inducing. There was sand outside of the door, and then Sam saw grass. Daniel was already stepping through the door, and she quickly moved up to follow. And then she saw the sun.
She let out a surprised “Ooh” inside of her MOPP helmet. Daniel glanced back at her and held his zat ready. She brought her P-90 up and moved ahead of him, stepping away from the door. There were several small rock formations around the door, shielding it and providing the structure needed for its security. The sun shone in a blue sky and she felt the warmth immediately through the suit. When she glanced up and back she saw the dark cloud of the shield surrounding the city. It looked like a black dome with points sticking out of the top.
The ground was mostly hard-packed sand, but there were a few green plants. The plants seemed to indicate an atmosphere of oxygen and nothing toxic. Daniel tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he pulled her up to where he stood, looking around the ridge of the door and out onto a plain next to the dome of the city.
She inhaled sharply.
The plain was covered in windmills. They ran in rows, hundreds of them. All of them turning busily, their blades glinting in the sun, and doubtlessly spinning rotors located below ground, driving the shafts of hundreds of electrical generators. It was an actual field of power. Holy Hannah.
A short slide down the side of the ridge they were on, and they were walking out onto the field. The wind was stronger here. The shelter of the ridge had protected them from its force. It sent their suits rippling over their bodies and tore at their helmets. Sam wished she had any of her equipment to take environmental readings. She thought that the atmosphere was likely safe, but anything dangerous in the air could possibly kill with one breath. She grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and pointed at the grass growing around the base of one air-powered turbine and then at her helmet, indicating that she was going to take it off and test the air.
Daniel hesitated and then gave her a thumbs up.
She undid the clasps and then slowly lifted one corner of the flap on the helmet. Air rushed inside and she breathed it in. It was fresh and clean. She grinned and pulled the entire helmet off, the wind immediately running through the short hair on her scalp. It was hot and dry. Daniel pulled his off too, reaching up to stabilize his glasses as the wind hit him.
“This is amazing!” he exclaimed, excitement in his voice.
“Wind turbines!” She said, nodding. “If the wind is always like this, the city has an endless supply of power.”
“I have to admit,” Daniel said, turning to look around them. “I didn’t think the power field would be an actual field of power. I thought maybe it would be more like a bunch of levers like at the SGC.”
Sam grinned. “Me too. God, can you feel that sun? It seems like forever since I’ve felt it.”
Daniel looked up toward the sky and closed his eyes. She watched the sun hitting his face, pale and scruffy with beard. A sudden sobering thought hit her.
“Daniel, this isn’t actually a good thing for us. There’s no way we can take out all these turbines and interrupt the flow of power. Not to mention that it’s likely diverted and allocated around the city in another location altogether.”
Daniel met her gaze and sighed. “We don’t have any explosives anyway, which is what it would take to destroy all of this. Let’s take a look around.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Sam warned.
They walked along the nearest row of turbines, the wind ripping wildly at their suits. When Sam turned to glance back, she could see where the heat was being exhausted from the city. Shimmering, blurry waves of heat radiated upward above the dome. “I don’t think this wind is completely natural!” she said, raising her voice to catch Daniel’s ear.
He glanced back at the waves of heat and then at her. “You think they changed their climate by propelling all that heat into the atmosphere?”
She shrugged. “It’s possible. Who knows what else is being exhausted? I think it’s been happening for decades. If it wasn’t the most stable planet to begin with…”
“Yeah.”
They kept walking, and Sam was trying to keep a mental count of the rows of windmills, but she gave up after a few hundred feet.
When they stopped for a quick water break, the air around them was filled with a low moaning. They stared at each other, perplexed, until suddenly Daniel smiled and pressed the cap back on top of the canteen. The moan stopped. When he lifted it again, the moaning immediately filled their ears.
Sam grimaced. “Creepy!”
“I’ve witnessed the same effect at the tops of some Arizona canyons where I’ve gone to study Anasazi ruins. The wind intensifies at the rim. It’s just like blowing across a jug.”
She looked around them then. “How high do you think we are?”
Daniel shook his head, and they walked on. They were nearly to the end of the field. As they drew closer, Sam could see that there was some sort of cliff edge just beyond the last row. The rocks turned up a bit, so she couldn’t see the drop, but she could see distant bluffs of dark rock and tan patches that she guessed were more plains of the light, hard-packed sand.
She scrambled quickly up the rock edge and slowed as the drop came into view and she realized how drastic it really was. Holy… the city was actually on a plain thousands of feet high! When she stood, she looked out over the vast desert below… and she stilled, paralyzed.
Daniel came up behind her, and she heard his gasp. One of his hands had come up to touch the small of her back as he’d approached, to alert her to his presence. Now she felt it grip the fabric of her MOPP suit tightly and he stood close to her, just as still.
The desert plain below was vast. As many miles wide as they were high. And scattered across that plain were the hulking wrecks of dozens of spaceships. Different sizes and shapes and in various states of destruction and burial, the desert floor was filled with them.
“Holy shit,” Daniel swore beside her, his voice almost ripped away by the wind.
“This is what those lights in the sky were,” Sam said softly, confirming her own earlier suspicion. “It’s shooting ships down out of space.”
Some were long burned husks, black and red with rust and ash or buffed to a sharp shine by the soft sand blowing along the desert floor, propelled by the insane winds. Other wrecks were not so old, and they rocked in the wind, noses buried in brown drifts. Sam counted thirty before Daniel tugged at her hand, and they made their way back toward the door and the tunnel and the other half of SG-1.
+ + +
Part 5