Hydra Page 15

  “All right,” Jack said finally. “Carter, handle it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dan’s jaw was set, but he said, “Thank you,” like it cost him. This time when he turned his back, he went to the Jack robot, bent down, and picked it up in his arms.

  Daniel couldn’t watch.

  He turned to Asha and said, “We’ll come with you.” But she was already moving away, as if assured of his compliance. He glanced back at Jack. At Jack’s tiny nod of permission, he followed, Jack and Teal’c behind him and Sam at the rear, a line of dark green on the harsh plain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NID Primary Project Site, Perseus (P66-421)

  September, 2002; one month before the invasion of Eshet

  “Is this all of it?” Carlos sorted through the color-coded files, losing bits of stray paper as he shuffled the folders. He’d asked for a comprehensive briefing. It was getting more difficult to wrap his head around the scope of what they were creating, and he was going to have to fully account for the technology acquired (or lack thereof) soon. It was impossible to predict when he might be visited by someone higher up in the chain of command. It was also impossible to predict who that person might be. Carlos loved the job but not the uncertainty. Better to be prepared. He held out the thin sheaf of papers marked ALPHA to Peterson and said, “After five months of accumulating data, shouldn’t there be more on the first team?”

  “These are briefs and summaries,” Peterson told him. He looked like a guy who’d been staying up a little too late and not eating enough to compensate. There was a pinched look around Peterson’s eyes, and his complexion was grayish. “I didn’t think you’d want entire project files on every team.”

  “I’m most interested in your analysis of the theta team,” Carlos said. “Whether or not the programming changes are effective.”

  “I have some mission video for you,” Peterson said. He flipped through a stack of DVDs, selected four, and handed them to the lab technician standing beside him. “Load those, please.” Peterson sat back in the chair and adjusted his glasses. Behind the lens glare, his blue eyes looked gray. “The alpha team was engineered to be as close as possible to the originals, with some slight memory alterations — no recall of specific gate addresses, no recall of power specifications, short-term perfect recall only.”

  Carlos pushed one of the folders around in a circle on the table with his index finger. “Has this prevented the teams from engaging in escape-oriented behaviors?”

  “Thus far.” Peterson produced a flowchart and placed it in front of Carlos with a gesture suspiciously like a proud flourish. “As you can see, each successive team has had their abilities changed as well according to schedule. The results are mixed. The enhanced communication abilities permit teams to speak to one another directly, instead of just within one group, but this has been problematic for the handler. They often leave the handler out of the loop until the last minute.”

  “A solvable problem, I assume,” Carlos said.

  “Eventually.” Peterson set the team roster on the table and turned it so Carlos could see. “Once all the teams are back in from the field, we’ll begin a period of further adjustment.”

  “The kill switch?”

  Peterson angled his head in a reluctant shrug. “We’ve integrated it in the zetas and the thetas.” He slid a folder in Carlos’s direction. “The field test on the zetas was less than optimal.”

  Carlos scanned the file. “You fried them.”

  “There was no way to reacquire core memory or conscious function once the switch was activated. The units are still intact, and we hope to be able to reload the personalities, but it’s going to take some time. It’ll be a clean slate with them. We lost a lot of data.” Peterson’s glasses were slipping down his nose, and he shoved them back up with a knuckle before dabbing at his forehead with a tissue. “As a result, though, we’ve modified the switch in the thetas. We hope these modifications will allow us to shut them down without sacrificing the memory core.”

  Hope, speculation, stabbing around in the dark. In Carlos’s neck and at the base of his skull, the headache he never seemed to get rid of squeezed him harder. He wondered if it was possible for his own tense muscles to snap his bones.

  “Theta team just arrived back from its second mission,” Carlos said. He’d chosen the mission himself, a planet with non-hostiles so the chance of active resistance would be lessened. “How have the personality changes manifested?”

  “Since the inception of those changes with delta team, each successive team’s reaction to the changes has been an order of magnitude greater. Theta team is closest to the desired outcome.” Peterson clicked on the wall screen monitor and keyed up the video. He selected one of the images on the screen. “This is delta team’s first mission.”

  Carlos watched as the scene played out before him. He remembered this mission profile: two pieces of technology to acquire, both Asgard devices enabling short-distance teleportation. Onscreen, the delta O’Neill was beating the town elder down into the ground. The delta Carter and Jackson stood by and did not intervene, but both looked as if they were the robot equivalent of nauseated.

  “This is footage from Teal’c’s internal recorders. As you can see, only the O’Neill duplicate was capable of immediate aggression. The remaining duplicates did not participate.”

  “But they didn’t attempt to stop it,” Carlos said.

  “No.”

  Carlos nodded. This was a key benchmark in the operational development. “You’ve introduced the Goa’uld code into the program now?”

  “Most of it. We’ve extracted what we can from the symbiote code captured during the first duplication attempt of the real Teal’c. Portions of it were given to the theta team during the duplication process.”

  “Has it been fully integrated?”

  “See for yourself.” The screen briefly darkened, then lit again, to reveal theta team advancing on a row of villagers kneeling in the snow. The villagers’ faces were almost hidden inside fur-lined hoods, but their postures clearly indicated their fear. In the background, long, low boats nosed up onto a rocky shore. Skin tents leaned into the wind, and in the open flap of the one just at the edge of the picture’s frame, there was a small, round face, all wide, dark eyes and an open mouth. Crying. The sky above the water was a piercing blue Carlos knew would make his eyes tear up if he were there. These folks didn’t have much to offer, beyond themselves and a passive resistance that made a useful test of the thetas’ limits. Carlos watched as theta O’Neill and Teal’c argued briefly, then turned their anger on the villagers.

  After a few moments of the vivid carnage, Carlos nodded to Peterson, who switched it off. He had a strong stomach, but such calculated death wasn’t what he’d signed on to do. He was only a facilitator. “They’re certainly more aggressive, but will they continue to take orders?”

  Peterson hesitated, and then set down the remote. “Their handler has documented a marked increase in oppositional behavior. They’re like teenagers. They feel free to do as they please without long-term consequences.”

  “What did you expect?” Carlos sat forward, stared Peterson in the eye. “When you engineer out morality and conscience, why wouldn’t they do what they want to do, and the hell with orders?”

  “We tried to achieve a balance,” Peterson said. “Complete obedience and no ethical compunctions.”

  “Are they all similarly impacted?”

  “The Daniel Jackson of this team has shown marked reluctance to comply with certain kinds of orders. He is usually in direct conflict with the O’Neill duplicate.”

  “Conscience?”

  “Expediency. He seems to feel violence is not the fastest answer to the problem. He prefers…” Peterson hesitated, looked away from Carlos. “He seems to prefer psychological torture.”

  “So you’ve bred me a unit of psychopaths and one sociopath for good measure,” Carlos said. He tilted his head back in the chair and la
ughed. “Perfect.”

  “They get the job done,” Peterson said, his tone turned frosty.

  Carlos sighed. As usual, he joked and the lab rats thought he missed the point. “Kidding,” he said, and waited for Peterson’s face to relax as much as it was capable of. The guy was a walking heart attack waiting to happen. “All right. Recall the remaining teams one at a time and begin adjusting their programming.”

  “I recommend you leave the alpha team as is, for baseline comparison,” Peterson said. “In case we have to revert to the original state, for safety reasons.”

  “Agreed.”

  Peterson gathered up his materials and left Carlos sitting there among the piles of atrocities done in the name of protecting Earth. Strange that he no longer saw any of it as optional.

  NID Primary Project Site, Perseus (P66-421)

  September, 2002; one month prior

  to invasion of Eshet

  Daniel still wasn’t able to think of himself as “alpha Daniel,” no matter how many times the lab rats called him by that name or how many different nicknames Jack ascribed to him (Jack had already abandoned “action Jackson” and “alpha-falfa,” and his current favorite was “robogeek”). Daniel thought of himself as Daniel Jackson, which complicated things immeasurably by a certain emotional standard, even though there wasn’t much Daniel couldn’t measure in the blink of an eye these days.

  No doubt he wasn’t supposed to think of himself as human since he wasn’t, but he couldn’t help that either. The technicians they dealt with daily were polite, but Daniel always had the feeling that he was like a very expensive vegetable peeler to them; useful and time-saving but ultimately replaceable with a hundred identical models. To them, the plethora of Daniels and Jacks and Sams and Teal’cs were tools to be manipulated to their best advantage. It fascinated and repelled him in equal measure. Every day he looked at his hands, with their realistic skin and fingernails, and thought about what makes a human human — the life’s blood, or their memories, or their spirit. The sum total of everything Daniel recognized as Daniel Jackson was in him, but it was as if time had stopped somewhere and Daniel had been unfrozen out of it, a relic from his own past. He knew the year was 2002, and he knew the real Daniel’s life had carried on in ways he couldn’t imagine, in whatever time he’d had before he’d died. He wondered about all the things Daniel might have found, in the time before the SGC was shut down. He worried about Skaara and Sha’re in his weaker moments.

  Holding on to the slender thread of Sha’re’s memory, to the idea that the human Daniel might have found her, made the prospect of never seeing her again bearable.

  He wasn’t supposed to feel things as deeply, to want and to grieve, to feel helpless, but all those things were as strong in him as they always had been. The thought crossed his mind — you’ve only been alive five months — and he reminded himself again, as he had a hundred thousand times before: his feelings were only a copy of what existed in the human Daniel.

  Sometimes he wondered about the thought processes, the odd way information flowed through his brain. It felt the same, or he guessed it was the same, though most things came to him now with a peculiar crystalline clarity, a sharpness of knowing that left nothing to chance or guesswork, no fuzziness of recall. It took much of the fun out of research; the moment he learned a fraction of the information, much of the rest extrapolated within his logic circuits and took root.

  Those were the kind of thoughts that were painful for Jack, so Daniel never discussed them with him. If it was hard for Daniel, it was impossible for Jack, who wanted nothing more than to do these things that were asked of them and earn a blissful release from service.

  Daniel had no idea what would happen to his consciousness when that day came. He tried to imagine himself as a bundle of circuits, the image that would have made Jack wince, and dispassionate logic failed him. Not for the first time.

  Daniel. Sam, calling him on the internal comms. Delta team is finally returning.

  The deltas had been on their mission for 4,805.21 seconds. Daniel had no idea why he distilled it down that way. Perhaps because he could.

  He made his way toward the gate-room to welcome them back, as the alpha team always did, but stopped midway when chaos erupted, the deltas all talking over each other at once. He automatically separated them out into discrete threads, cataloging the hundreds of emotional cues in their communications. Fear, despair, anguish, grief, betrayal — those were strongest. They lied to us, they lied, delta Jack was saying, those sons of bitches. Delta Sam’s stream of information — planet designation, indigenous peoples, lack of technology — was sprinkled with disbelief: We saw them with our own eyes, she said, all of them. Jack added to the puzzle, confusion, rage: They were talking to the SGC. It had to be.

  It was the delta-team Daniel who sorted it out, finally, his voice easing over the others, soothing them down to a dull roar: We’ve been played for fools. SG-1 is still pursuing off-world missions, just as they always have. Everything we were told is a lie.

  Daniel stopped dead in the middle of the hallway, caught up by his team’s Jack, and the instructions Jack sent out with the force of a shouted order: Don’t give anything away. Any of you. Don’t report this. They can’t know we know.

  All the remaining teams were on-site. All of them heard it, Daniel knew. Chatter ceased.

  Daniel, Carter, Teal’c. Down here to the bunk room. Daniel turned and followed the order immediately. The human Daniel might not have an appreciation for being ordered around by his Jack, but Daniel had figured out quickly that in this environment, he was out of his depth. This was no equal-opportunity team. He was a warrior here.

  They didn’t need a bunk room, because none of them slept, but it was a resting spot for downtime and repairs. They didn’t even need to see each other to communicate, but old habits died hard, and Daniel supposed it soothed all of them to see each other, to work things out face-to-face. They really were all they had. It was true of their team and to some extent of the gamma, and delta teams, but the teams after that were…different. Less interested in teamwork. Daniel was grateful his team had been the first duplicated. It would have been too hard to bear if they had lost even this simple camaraderie.

  Teal’c was waiting beside Jack in the bunk room. Sam arrived a few seconds after Daniel. It was remarkable how much could be said with only a look, and the one on Jack’s face was eloquent.

  What do we do now? Sam asked him, still on private comms, sitting down at the small table where lab gadgets and gear were scattered.

  We bide our time, Jack said.

  Until we can warn them, Daniel said, following the thread.

  Yes. Jack met his eyes, and then Teal’c’s, and Sam’s.

  We don’t even know… Daniel began, thinking of the things that had been kept from them, everything they needed to find their way home...to Earth. There was no home. Only a world they had to protect as if it were still their own.

  But he stopped, because they would find a way. An opportunity would come. It always did. And if it didn’t, they would make one of their own.

  A little over three weeks later, the theta team dropped off the grid.

  It was the kind of thing Piper told them in somber tones, as if the alpha team couldn’t figure it out on their own, but in fact all the teams were way ahead of the handler. Jack thought they were NID, though they’d never come out and said so. It added up; all the pieces were starting to fit. SG-1 off-world meant there was an SGC functioning, and whatever the duplicates were doing now, it wasn’t directly serving the interests of Earth. One of the gammas — their Jack — had suggested that they were just doing what had to be done, and maybe now that they didn’t have a code of conduct to adhere to, they should relax and revel in the freedom to procure technology. But alpha Jack had said what Daniel knew he would, an encapsulated speech about honor and duty being the only code they had.

  Daniel was pretty sure none of the other teams believed it, and the del
ta team was totally silent on the issue.

  They were summoned to a briefing a few hours after the thetas went off the radar. Daniel sat with his team around an ugly metal briefing table, watching Carlos Mendez in his navy suit and his impeccable tie as he watched them back, and he could understand why the deltas were so quiet.

  “Your objective for this mission is simple and non-negotiable,” he said. On the screen, a picture of the theta uniform patch appeared. Mendez said nothing else, but the watchful look in his eyes changed, became something Daniel found harder to quantify. Not regret. Resignation, maybe.

  “You feel like telling us why? Or are we just your little killing machines?” Jack sat back in the chair, skirting dangerously close to an invisible line that would alert Mendez they were on to him. Sam warned Jack on the comms, in a pointed way the human Sam would probably have envied. Daniel thought the real Sam probably had bitten her tongue raw over the years trying not to tell Jack what she really thinking.

  Mendez pointed his pen at the screen. “This team has gone rogue. We don’t know why — ”

  That’s a lie, Sam said, and told the team that via her pattern recognition software she’d identified fourteen separate facial muscle contractions indicating deception.

  “ — and it doesn’t matter. You should all be more aware than any of the personnel on this base that there’s no one more dangerous than one of you gone rogue.”

  “Aren’t you worried we’re next?” Jack lounged back in the chair, and his internal comms squawked, Now we’re personnel. Nice.

  Mendez smiled the tiniest smile it was possible for a person to smile and waited a beat before answering. “There are other teams.”

  Daniel couldn’t help his sarcasm. Nice loaded threat. And with layers of meaning, too. Didn’t think he had it in him. Sam hid her smile.