Hydra Page 5

  “Right,” Daniel said. All the arguments against it wouldn’t get him anywhere, and to make matters worse, he wasn’t entirely sure the guards weren’t necessary. He pulled out his chair and sat down in front of his imperfect mirror image. This Daniel was a retro model with longer hair. The uniform was current, though, and the anomaly jarred Daniel. He pointed to it. “You have the most recent SGC patch. You shouldn’t.”

  His counterpart smiled, a little lopsided. “I wear what they give me. And this is what they gave me.”

  Daniel nodded slowly. “Guess you’re going to tell me who the ‘they’ is.”

  “The NID, we think.”

  “Ah.” There were more questions in Daniel’s head than he could sort through or articulate, so he abandoned the list and settled on the easiest first. “I’m not quite sure what to call you.”

  “I can see how that’d be strange.” The robot’s eyes narrowed, something Daniel recognized as a tic of his own, an outward sign of working on a problem. “To me, I’m you. To me, you’re not really me anymore. But to you, I’m not me.”

  “Well, that’s…confusing.”

  “Try being me for a while. Then let’s talk about confusing.”

  “I see your point.” Daniel shifted in the chair and glanced at the camera, which wasn’t on. Yet. “How about if I just call you Dan?”

  “That’s fine.” Dan smiled. “Odd, but fine. No one’s ever called me that.”

  “That’s why I chose it,” Daniel answered, saw the understanding register on Dan’s face. A name that wasn’t his, for someone who wasn’t him.

  “Of course it is.” Dan didn’t smile, exactly, but close enough for Daniel to know there was no resentment there. Daniel wasn’t sure why; if he were the duplicate, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be so gracious. Only one of them could be Daniel Jackson in the world Daniel knew and embraced. “I guess I don’t really feel much like a Dan.”

  Daniel cleared his throat. Jack would have a field day with the idea of giving Dan a name at all. It’s a thing, Daniel, Jack would tell him, at his earliest opportunity. It’s not human. Daniel batted the little Jack voice in his head away with a frown.

  “You still hear Jack, don’t you? Disagreeing. Editorializing.” Dan was watching Daniel with the kind of intensity Daniel usually reserved for things he had to decipher and translate, and he twitched a little to think anyone could understand the inside of his head so well.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Be glad you can turn it off.” Daniel tapped his ear. “I hear Jack in real time. When he’s nearby.”

  “Internal radios, right.”

  “Thinks out loud, sometimes,” Dan said.

  “Huh.” Daniel picked up his pen and said, “So you were created…where?”

  “I’m not sure, actually. The handler calls the planet Perseus, but that’s not all that illuminating. I woke up in a lab, surrounded by officers wearing military uniforms. We were all there. They gave us uniforms and we got dressed.”

  Daniel’s eyebrows gave him away. “You woke up naked?”

  “No one there seemed surprised by it, so we tried not to be.”

  “We? So, there’s…the team…”

  “We were all duplicated.”

  “So, the Jack I saw on the battlefield on Eshet?”

  Another nod. “My team. They called us SG-Alpha.”

  “I see.”

  “You should stop that,” Dan said. “Those little asides to indicate you’re listening. I know you’re listening.”

  Daniel opened his mouth, closed it. He tapped the pen on the paper. This really wasn’t going the way he’d hoped it would. But what had he hoped, really? That they’d strike up a friendly conversation, exchange war stories about where they’d been all this time, what they’d done? He hoped like hell Jack wasn’t outside watching. The whole thing left him unsettled in ways he’d rather Jack not know, because it would just be fodder for a hundred of those arguments Jack found so tedious.

  “If you’re wondering when I was created — 5 months, 24 days, 11 minutes, and 5.4 seconds ago.”

  “By the time you say it, the time is inaccurate,” Daniel said. “That must be annoying.”

  “I try not to think about it that way,” Dan answered. “It’s just one more tool, like your pen or your paper. One more way to catalog the world around me. Whatever world it may be.” He pointed at the wall clock. “The one in my head is more accurate than any of yours. For instance, it tells me I have 23 hours, 6 minutes, 37 seconds and change of power left.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I die.”

  “But you can be taken back and recharged…right?”

  “Doesn’t work that way.” Dan took what appeared to be a deep breath. For some reason, that made Daniel’s hair stand up again. He half-expected Dan to be a wax statue, and statues don’t breathe. “It’s…I’m an alkaline battery, not a rechargeable. Once the juice is gone, it’s gone.”

  “But you can leave your power source for short periods and return to recharge, can’t you?”

  “Something like that.” Dan’s impatience smoothed into a tolerant look, like a parent gives a confused child. “As long as we aren’t drained completely. It’s complicated.”

  “Should I get Sam?”

  “She wouldn’t understand either. Which, actually, might be a problem.” Dan tapped his chest. “Power sources are the real issue, we think. That’s why I came here. To warn you. And because I’m pressed for time, I’ll have to hit the highlights. You can connect the dots.”

  Daniel drew his pen across the paper and wrote in Asgard: sounds more like Jack.

  “You try having only Jack as your primary source of company and see what happens to you,” Dan said, which gave Daniel the creeps because he was reading upside down and in a language Daniel had learned after the first set of duplicates was left behind on Altair, and getting the gist anyway.

  “How do you know this language?” Daniel asked, pointing to the Asgard scrawls.

  “They gave us access to some of your mission data,” Dan said. With an apologetic twitch of his eyebrows, he tapped his head. “I, uh, learn fast.”

  Daniel sighed. ‘Fast’ probably meant milliseconds. It was enough to make him wish for an upgrade. “So you woke up naked in a lab, and…”

  “Ah. Right. Naked in the lab, with my team, and they gave me a uniform. They told us we’d been created as a last resort, that the real SG-1 was dead and we were needed to find alien technology for the defense of Earth at all costs. It all sounded convincing, at first.”

  Daniel thought about waking up in a lab and knowing he wasn’t himself, the real Daniel, and still having to carry on, create a life independent of what Daniel Jackson is. Was. “You thought you were all that was left of me.”

  “Well, it’s difficult to think of myself as anyone but Daniel Jackson, as you might imagine. Especially when I thought you were dead and I was the only Daniel Jackson of any kind around.” Dan tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. “Turned out that was wrong too.”

  A low, sickening suspicion was churning in Daniel’s stomach. “How many other teams are there?” he asked.

  “Not sure. I know of eight. Well, there were eight manufactured. Not all of them woke up. Four of them lasted. That’s…not relevant to what we need to discuss. They aren’t a threat to you, and I don’t have time to play it all out for you right now.” There was a whole history there he waved away with his hand as he leaned forward to level his gaze at Daniel. Daniel found himself searching the blue eyes for some sign of artificiality. He wasn’t sure if he was more or less disturbed to find none.

  “Why would they need so many teams? I don’t understand.”

  “We can go where human teams couldn’t — or so they told us. We traveled to gates underwater, worlds on fire, any place human lungs would burn with the toxins in the air or collapse from the pressure. We understood we were disposable.” Dan went back to looking at his hands, but the
bitterness crept into his voice. “Jack reminded me every time we went through the gate that it was no different than what it was before. Every mission’s a risk.”

  “He’s always been about the mission,” Daniel said, thinking of the horror any version of Jack would feel at being a carbon copy, and a disposable one at that. “About protecting Earth. We all are.”

  “Even if you aren’t privileged to be a part of the thing you protect anymore,” Dan said. “Ever again.”

  Daniel’s stomach turned over, eating itself with acid. “Why not just make your own power sources and take off during a mission? You must have known a thousand gate addresses.”

  “Couldn’t. There were key bits of knowledge erased from our programming. Earth’s gate address, for one. The practical understanding of our power sources, for another.”

  “You’re saying the NID tinkered with Harlan’s original programming?” Daniel stopped taking notes and stared. It should have occurred to him from the moment the robot mentioned the NID. They never had pure motives for anything. “To keep you from discovering the truth?”

  “We were the first team off the table. The ones that came after us were…different.” Dan winced. “Harder. More callous. They were working to take all the humanity out of the teams, make us pure soldiers. It didn’t take with all the teams. But the last team, the theta team…something is wrong with them on a fundamental level. The moral center of their programs is gone. They are a threat.”

  “So you were the prototype, but the NID wanted something a duplicate of any of us wouldn’t give it.” Daniel rubbed a finger over the bridge of his nose, warding off the incipient headache. “And they had to strip away everything we are to get there.”

  “Worse than that.” Dan rested his arms on the table, hands folded in front of him in their restraints. To Dan, with strength far beyond that of a normal human, they had to be just a formality, a symbol of his position here. “The theta team has gone rogue, off the radar. We were sent to find them. That’s why we were on Eshet. We tracked them there but arrived too late, got cut off from the gate by your friends, the angry Jaffa. Finding you was just good luck.” His thin smile didn’t reach his eyes. “And confirmation once and for all that everything we’d been told was a lie.”

  “They’re killers,” Daniel said, thinking of the village, the screaming girl in the middle of the trail, the terror on her face. “It was them, in the village.”

  “Yes.”

  “Those people must have been half-insane,” Daniel murmured. “Three versions of the same people. My God.”

  “One SG-1 is enough,” Dan said wryly.

  Daniel nodded. “But what was the rogue team looking for?”

  “Autonomy.” At Daniel’s questioning look, Dan added, “They want technology to enable their Sam to build an independent power source.” More softly, he said, “They know they’ve been lied to, just like we do. They have nothing left to lose.”

  “And once they get the power source…”

  “Try to imagine a version of Teal’c or Jack — or you — with no conscience,” Dan said. “There’s the answer.”

  Daniel didn’t have to do much imagining; he’d seen bits and pieces of that nightmare in various forms. “Tell me how we can stop them.”

  “I can’t help you,” Dan said. “I can never go back. The gate on Perseus has an iris, and my GDO codes will have been locked out. None of the off-site bases will be accessible to me either.”

  “But you know where they are?”

  “Yes. We figure the thetas will try to hole up in one of them. I’ll give you all the intel I have, and maybe you can make something of it.” Dan reached for Daniel’s pen, then seemed to think better of it. “A laptop would be better. I can type much faster than I can write it all longhand.”

  Daniel pushed back the chair and went to tap on the door. When the airman stationed outside opened it, he said, “Please arrange to have a laptop and several external hard drives brought down. And get Colonel O’Neill.”

  “Okay, Dr. Jackson.” The airman clicked the door shut and set off down the hallway at a loping jog.

  Daniel turned back to the robot, who was watching him with sadness in his eyes. It wasn’t difficult for Daniel to think of him as human, as his own being, and Dan would be dead in a day. He looked at his watch. Twenty-three hours. Less than a day. He gestured at Dan to raise his hands. When he did, Daniel pulled out his penknife and sliced through the restraints. “You knew you wouldn’t make it back,” Daniel said. “You came anyway.”

  “Someone had to warn you. We saw our opportunity the minute you came through the gate.” Dan’s thin smile was back. “We still love Earth, even if we don’t belong here. Even if we were never meant to be.”

  “That’s Jack talking,” Daniel said.

  “That’s all of us.” Dan stood up and went to the back wall, pressed his fingers against it. “We’re prisoners of our own desire to be alive as much as we were prisoners of the NID. None of us wants the lives we have. We’re not grateful for them. They aren’t any kind of lives at all. We don’t…we aren’t…like you. Like SG-1 is. Should be.”

  “What do you mean?” Daniel waited, but Dan said nothing more. The weight of Dan’s way of life, the isolation and lack of anything they’d ever wanted or known, settled on Daniel’s shoulders. It struck him then that Dan didn’t know about Sha’re, hadn’t asked about her.

  It might have been kinder to leave the truth unsaid, but Daniel couldn’t imagine a version of himself who wouldn’t want to know. “You haven’t asked about Sha’re,” he said quietly.

  “She’s not mine to ask about,” Dan answered.

  “The feelings are the same,” Daniel said. “The need to know.”

  A long silence, and then, not looking at Daniel: “Yes.”

  “She died,” Daniel said, stopping there because even now, after so many years, to speak of it brought the raw anger and grief rushing up as if it had never been dealt with or set aside. “Teal’c killed her to save me when Amaunet attacked me. He had no choice.”

  “So he took her from you twice.”

  Daniel bristled, a bit. “No. The Goa’uld did that. Teal’c saved my life.”

  Dan sat down on the cot in the corner and stared at a fixed point on the floor. “I never allowed myself to think of her,” he said. “She could only be one man’s wife. I’m not even a man.”

  For a moment, Daniel had a flash of having the same conversation with every one of the Daniel duplicates, and bile rose in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said, though it felt empty, and there were no better words to ease the moment.

  “So am I,” Dan said. “For you, I mean.” He looked up at Daniel. “We thought we were doing something to help Earth, you know. Something important, to give our existence meaning.”

  Daniel bit back the urge to apologize again for the misery this version of himself had gone through. One purpose in his life, and now he knew even that was a lie, that there was no greater good being served by his actions.

  “Anything else about your life you’d like to share?” There was bitterness in the question, and just a bit of envy. Daniel supposed Dan was allowed.

  “I’m going to take what you’ve told me to Jack. There might be something we can do.”

  “Hope so,” Dan said. He jerked his chin toward the clock. “Time’s running out. And my team isn’t expecting me back.”

  To hear such a casual acceptance of death threw Daniel. “What’s going to happen to the rest of your team?” he asked.

  Dan looked away, and in the silence that followed, seconds slipped away, irretrievable. “They’ll continue with the mission. Keep looking for the thetas. After that…” He spread his hands and let them fall to hang limply between his knees. “They have as much reserve power as I have. And as many options.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said softly, but he bit back the rest of the platitudes and thanks he wanted to give. They couldn’t comfort Dan, just as they wouldn’t comfo
rt Daniel if the shoe was on the other foot. “I’ll be back shortly,” he said instead, and Dan nodded.

  In the corridor, Daniel watched the airmen parade by with their arms full of cords and computers and drives, and concentrated on the breath filling his lungs, the too-rapid heartbeat pulsing beneath his warm, live skin. Amazing how grateful and guilty it made him feel, in equal measure.

  NID Secondary Outpost “Hawaii” (P7A-025)

  October 30, 2002, one day after invasion of Eshet

  “You know,” Jackson said, with just enough of that bored condescension in his voice to make O’Neill’s hackles rise, “dead people aren’t exactly the best source of information.”

  The body at his feet was a heap of broken angles held together by a lab coat. On the far side of the room, the technician’s glasses lay on the floor against the wall, and one of her hands was stretched out along the floor, as if reaching for them. Jackson stepped over the body and went to retrieve the glasses, then held them up to the light to squint through the lenses. He cleaned them briefly on his shirt before brushing the technician’s hair out of the blood on her forehead and settling the glasses back on her startled face. In O’Neill’s mind something stuttered, an image of another Jackson shoving his glasses up his nose and looking owlishly at him, his mouth opening to protest, or to argue, or maybe to laugh. That was the meat-memory, not his own. In his short life, O’Neill had never seen Jackson laugh.

  “We could’ve interrogated her,” Jackson continued.

  “She wasn’t gonna talk.” O’Neill knew the look. The technician was a worker bee and a true believer; no way she was going to spill without authorization from five levels of superiors.

  “I could’ve gotten through to her.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” O’Neill said, turning his back on him and leaning over the monitor to watch Carter’s fingers blurring with motion over the keyboard. “Besides, we don’t need a meat-brain. We’ve got Carter. Right, Carter?”

  She flicked him a glance and went back to “getting through” to the outpost’s mainframe. “It would’ve been quicker to have the access codes,” she observed dryly with a little nod toward the dead technician.