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  Enunciating clearly, O’Neill reminded her, “She wasn’t going to talk.”

  “Nor were the others.”

  They all turned to watch Teal’c come into the lab, and O’Neill grinned to see him weighed down with goodies.

  “Brought presents, did ya, Santa?” O’Neill took the zat Teal’c handed him, checked the charge, and passed it along to Jackson. He slung a second P90 over his shoulder and stuffed the extra magazines into his vest, leaving a few for Carter on the top of the monitor. He lifted his chin toward Teal’c’s prize. “They equipping marines with staff weapons these days?”

  Teal’c swung the weapon up. “There is a storeroom at the end of this corridor beyond the mess hall. There is not much of use, but they had this.”

  The nose of the weapon crackled as he activated it a few inches from O’Neill’s chest. With his index finger, O’Neill pushed on it until Teal’c gave in and let it swing away. “Might want to watch where you’re pointing that,” O’Neill advised mildly.

  “Who says he wasn’t?” Jackson’s smile was thin and did nothing at all to convince O’Neill he was joking.

  “Ah, the banter,” O’Neill sighed wistfully. “The bonding. The camaraderie.” He aimed a piercing glare at Jackson and went back to looming over Carter. “Captain, the clock is ticking.” And, he added to himself, some of us are in danger of dying sooner than others.

  “I know the time. Sir.” Over the last few weeks, O’Neill had measured to the millisecond the various increments of that delay between the reply and the ‘sir.’ Someday he’d have to make a chart, calculate the maximum interval so that he’d know when the time finally came to duck.

  In the meantime, he propped his chin on his fist and looked around. As he knew from their first stroll around the joint, there wasn’t much to the installation. Besides this room, with its banks of computers blinking away as they slowly churned raw data into useful intel, there was the mess, still smelling of bacon, a deck of cards scattered around the bodies of another tech and a marine. A bunk room held five empty beds and one still occupied by a dead guy — whether a soldier or a tech, it was hard to tell. Finally, there was the gate-room, with two marines full of holes lying where they fell at the foot of the ramp, and on the ramp itself, the body of the NID operative the thetas had used to give them a foot in the door. Having taken the brunt of O’Neill’s frustration, the body of the operative was in pretty bad shape, but O’Neill figured it was the operative’s own fault for poking his nose where it didn’t belong. The guy had trashed the thetas’ back-up power plant — Carter’s pride-and-joy — and as far as O’Neill was concerned, anything that the thetas did after that could be laid at the operative’s feet. When he’d blown up the power plant, he’d taken their only chance at a peaceful exit scenario. Now, they were going to have to find some other way to stay out from under the NID, and taking over this miserable outpost was a start.

  The gate itself was zipped up tight behind its iris, so at least the thetas wouldn’t have to worry about the cavalry showing up here for a show-down. That was a plus. But, for all its strategic value, and even without the addition of the dead bodies, the place was depressing: gray concrete blending into gray bedrock. Secondary Outpost “Hawaii” — so named, apparently, by someone with a healthy sense of irony — was just a way-station for shuffling NID personnel and equipment through the gate system, with all the comfort of a glorified galactic bus station, and no backup power units to warm the circuits of the weary traveling robot. A klick above them, as the monitor behind Teal’c showed, ground level was silent and still in the vacuum. The stars were more than half obscured by the oppressive, rust-colored bulk of a gas giant. Beside the monitor was a poster inviting them all to visit beautiful Hawaii, the real one, with the palm trees and the clear, blue water. Comparing the two views, O’Neill was willing to bet that this planet hadn’t seen liquid water in a billion years. Even Perseus, with its milky, listless sunlight that never penetrated into the endless warren of corridors and labs, was a gem compared to Outpost Hawaii.

  Aiming with his finger at the poster, O’Neill blew an imaginary hole in the paper beach. Not like he was ever going to see it.

  “Bingo,” Carter said suddenly, lifting her hands off the keyboard and sitting back in her chair. “We’re in.”

  “It’s about time,” O’Neill muttered and, ignoring her irritated look, came around the desk and yanked a chair over to sit beside her. “So, what’s interesting?”

  As it turned out, O’Neill’s idea of interesting and Carter’s and Jackson’s were all different. In the end, he had to concede the field, shoving himself away from the desk and letting Jackson take his place. There was a lot of stuff to sift through, most of it packed away in little encrypted boxes. For about the millionth time since he’d known her, Carter repeated her low-key rant about not having some kind of direct interface with computer technology, because fingers — even her fingers — were slow, and the computer’s buffer was even slower. Of course, there was no way the NID was going to give them that kind of easy access. They were lucky the bastards left them enough brains to make sentences, let alone the wherewithal to get cozy with their computers. He told Carter to quit bitching and left them to it.

  By the time she called him back to the lab, he’d gone over the installation again, with Teal’c in tow to tell him, “I already looked there, O’Neill,” every time he opened a door or a drawer. He counted their ammo ten or fifty times and finally lay down in the bunk room to stare at the ceiling and watch the time ticking by inside his head. In the next bunk, the dead guy stared at the ceiling too. Finally, Jackson pinged him on internal radio, inviting him back to the control room.

  “Okay,” Jackson said as O’Neill came around the desk again and looked at the monitor over their shoulders. “We’ve been able to access the mission logs and to dig into some of the status reports. This one — ” He clicked open a window and sat back to crane his neck at O’Neill. “ — is the background intel on that device we were sent to Eshet to retrieve.” On the screen was an image of the bagel-sized device Jackson had held up smugly in the burning village, the one a whole bunch of people had died to protect. It was black and round and covered with a fine network of curlicues O’Neill figured were numbers or letters. He could feel his brain already working on the translation, but he looked at Jackson for the explanation instead. Jackson had the context to make sense of the data. “And you can see that I was right about it,” Jackson was saying, “and why our friends at the NID didn’t want us to know what it really was.”

  O’Neill looked at the squiggles and lines on the device. “Wow, that is fascinating. It’s all so clear.”

  Jackson opened his mouth, but Carter cut him off. “It’s a power source. Or, at least, it’s part of one. The idea is that there’s at least two pieces that work together. According to the records, the guys on Perseus speculated that this one is like a key, it grants access, primes the pump so to speak. Somewhere, there’s a control device that regulates the energy, converts it into something useable. In time I could figure it out — ”

  “If we had time, Captain, we wouldn’t need to figure it out.” O’Neill stood up and scowled at the Hawaii poster. “It’s moot, anyway. We don’t have the other piece. Or this pump thing that needs priming.”

  “True,” Jackson said, “but those people were trading partners in a group of three other planets. According to the log, the NID suspected that the pieces might have been hidden on one or more of them.”

  He brought up a series of gate addresses, and O’Neill slotted them into place in his memory. Three planets. “Crap.” The ticking clock in his head sounded like thunder.

  Shrugging, Carter said, “Well, it narrows the field, anyway. Three is a heck of a lot better odds than a few million. In the meantime, here’s something you might like.” She shifted her chair over to displace Daniel and opened another window.

  In it were another gate address and a series of images of what looked like t
he gloomiest hospital in the galaxy. Leaning forward and squinting (although more from habit than necessity), O’Neill could make out a number of beds sticking out like spokes from a central hub. In the background were pipes and ductwork and a lot of dingy concrete.

  “Okay, again, fascinating.”

  “It’s the first,” Jackson said, pointing at the screen as though O’Neill wasn’t already staring at it.

  “The first what?” O’Neill shrugged off his irritation at the obliqueness, because he also knew that this sort of thing happened when Jackson was excited, when his brain was leaping ahead to implications and forgetting to make his mouth explain for the class.

  “The place of our origin.”

  O’Neill could feel Teal’c moving in behind him to look at the screen, too. “That is untrue,” Teal’c said. “We originated from the NID lab on Perseus.”

  “Not us us.” Jackson made a little circle with his finger to include the four of them. “I mean us us.” The circle got wider. “Our kind. This is where it started. Altair.”

  O’Neill rocked back on his heels and frowned skeptically. “That’s the Garden of Eden? Sorry, but that does not look to me like the home of state-of-the-art android manufacturing.” Even as he objected, though, there was another stutter in his head, a fragment of a not-memory, something from the meat-memory that felt like déjà-vu. He chewed his lip for a moment and stared at the image on the monitor, the vast sprawl of machinery fading into the shadowy distance. “They were there,” he said. “The original SG-1.”

  Nodding, Carter clicked through a few more shots of the installation, stopping at the picture of a round-faced guy with a big, somewhat uncertain smile. “Meet Harlan, our maker,” she said.

  O’Neill braced himself on the back of her chair and leaned closer to the screen to tap Harlan’s forehead with a finger. “I always thought God would be, I dunno, more imposing.”

  “I did not,” Teal’c answered. “In my experience, gods are less impressive when personally encountered.”

  Carter backed up to a long shot of the cavernous interior of Harlan’s installation and zoomed in on a sparkly metal disco ball-type thing floating near the ceiling. “Maybe he can make it up to us.”

  “By teaching us the Hustle?”

  “By giving us this power source.”

  O’Neill smiled. The day was starting to look up.

  SGC

  October 30, 2002, one day after invasion of Eshet

  Jack found Carter in her lab, perched on her tall stool at the counter leaning close to her laptop screen and chewing on a pencil, which wasn’t exactly a decent substitute for the lunch she’d skipped.

  “More nutrition in a power bar,” he said from the doorway.

  Jumping at the sound of his voice, she dropped her pencil. He picked it up off the floor on his way in and handed it back to her.

  “Thanks, sir.” She took the pencil, almost put it back in her mouth, but thought better of it and dropped it into the cup beside the laptop.

  He circled around behind her so he could get a look at the screen. It was filled with what looked like one giant paragraph. “Light reading?”

  She shook her head like she wished that were true. “No, actually.” She paged down. The paragraph continued without a break. “This is some of the material the Daniel duplicate provided. I’m just trying to sort through it.” After highlighting a section, she cut it and moved it to another window. “The duplicate organizes information just like Daniel does.”

  “Illogically?”

  Carter flashed him a grin and went back to shuffling information between windows. “Daniel’s not illogical, sir. He just has his own way of putting things together. He thinks in terms of narratives. In his mind, things only make sense when they’re laid out like a story. Apparently the duplicate thinks the same way.”

  “But the robot is a robot.” It didn’t seem right. Jack expected to see charts and graphs. Something more...mechanical.

  “I know!” Now Carter was all aglow with that geeky excitement that meant that in fifty words or less she was going to rocket out of the range of normal-guy understanding. He braced himself internally and got ready to deploy his cut-to-the-chase expression. “It’s fascinating,” she went on with a nod toward the screen. “You would think that the programming — and that’s not even counting the differences in somatic response to stimuli, and the way that information is delivered and processed — would result in some kind of radical restructuring of the duplicate’s worldview.”

  “You would think that,” Jack said, but Carter was on a tear and continued like she hadn’t heard him.

  “There must be an incredibly sophisticated system for converting that kind of input and processing into the simulation of Daniel’s consciousness.” Struck by an idea, she stopped abruptly and lifted her head, gazing into the middle space. “I wonder if he’s aware of it. If he can experience the technology as technology, I mean, or if it’s all seamlessly translated into simulated human responses.” Another pause as she worked it out. “No, he must have some awareness, or how would he be able to consciously access his enhanced abilities?” She turned to Jack like he might have an answer. “Unless it’s not conscious. I mean, you don’t have to consciously think about every little thing in order to, say, access your hand-to-hand training, right?”

  “Hmm,” Jack said, simulating deep thought.

  Carter recognized the gambit for what it was and grinned again, this time a bit self-consciously. “It’s really interesting,” she finished, somehow managing to look as though after all these years there was still some unquenchable hope in her geeky heart that he might actually agree.

  “Fascinating.”

  She clearly didn’t buy it, but her mouth quirked up in an acknowledgment of this minimum level of effort. The smile faded, though, as she contemplated the screen.

  “What?”

  “It’s weird.”

  “What is? Besides the obvious, I mean.”

  She slumped for a second, thinking about it, then sat up straighter. “We never really got a chance to study the original duplicates that died in the conflict with Cronus, and while we were with them, well, there was other stuff on our minds.”

  “Like saving the galaxy. Again.”

  She nodded and scrolled text up the screen and back down again. “The robots went off to Area 51 in crates and...I don’t know. It was different. This — ” She pointed at the screen. “It’s like reading Daniel’s own reports, his journal.”

  “It’s a machine, Carter.”

  “I know that, sir. I do. But the way he talks about the conditions he’s lived under. The restrictions.”

  “We all live under restrictions.” Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets and went around the other side of the counter. He couldn’t see the screen from over there.

  “I know that, too. But they don’t have anything but missions and waiting for missions.”

  “Neither do you.”

  At that, she gave him a look that was calculatedly blank and therefore not the least bit insubordinate. “The difference is I can leave anytime I want.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I could resign my commission.” She slid off the stool like she was going to prove it to him and waved an arm at the door. “I could do a...a tour of Europe on my Harley if I want to. I have a say.”

  Jack came back around the counter and stepped between her and the door. “But the Harley has no say. That’s the point.”

  They stood toe-to-toe for a long moment.

  “So,” Carter said finally, tilting her head a little and looking at him like she was trying to see inside his head. “Do you dislike them because they’re not enough like us, or because they’re too much like us?” When he didn’t answer, she let out a long sigh and turned to climb back up onto her stool. She kept her eyes on the screen. It wasn’t until he was almost to the door that she added, not quite to herself, “The Harley’s not conscious. That’s the point.”
/>   Daniel was doing his level best to give Jack a headache. At least, that’s how Jack thought of Daniel’s approach to explaining just exactly what the hell had happened on P-whatsis, Eshet. Despite the fact that Daniel was hoarse from talking with the robot for the last four hours, he didn’t seem to have a lot of answers to the important questions. Like, for instance, how to go about turning off the fake Jacks running around in the universe.

  What bothered him most was the idea that the NID was behind this thing. It had been two years since he’d pretended to be a traitor in order to infiltrate their ranks. They’d taken down over twenty of the core personnel, including at least one mole inside Stargate Command itself. It had been a significant victory, or so they’d thought at the time. Considering that they’d recently exposed Senator Kinsey’s connections to the remnants of the NID’s black ops, he was starting to think the network was much more decentralized and dangerous than they’d suspected. Which was saying a lot, because Jack knew exactly how calculated each covert ops decision was and how determined the NID would be to reach its mission goals.

  It made his skin crawl to think of any version of himself out there dancing to the NID’s tune, little robot puppets at the whim of people who wanted the wrong things for the right reasons.

  Jack put his hands flat on the conference table, waited for Daniel to pause in his briefing, and launched in. “So to recap: nothing we’ve done has made a dent in the NID’s operations, and there are a bunch of robots that look like us going around killing people. Does that sum it up?”

  Daniel blinked. “Well, it’s somewhat of an oversimplification, but…yes.”

  “Okay. Then as I see it, the first priority is to, I don’t know, stop them from killing people?”

  “That’s going to be easier said than done, Colonel,” Carter said. She glanced at Daniel. “Especially now that they’re working from their own agenda. We have no idea where to find them, and we can’t gate to Perseus without a working IDC. If the duplicates have occupied one of the NID’s off-site bases, they’re protected by an iris there too.”