The jumper was crowded with supplies when Daniel leaned forward to hit the DHD on the front control panel to dial the gate. Not that it mattered so much, with the inertial dampeners.
The kawoosh splashed out. "Here goes nothing," Jack said, and thought the jumper forward through the event horizon.
Even Daniel was surprised by the spacious cavern they found themselves in. Gone the huge tree roots, the crumbling stone. The gate no longer canted (didn't yet cant), and aside from a cloud of dust that puffed up as they arrived, it looked merely empty, not old. As they came in, lights even came on, and the ceiling retracted smoothly, a pool of harsh sunlight cutting through the dust.
"Wow... " Daniel breathed. "This place... it was filled with tree roots and the great unwashed... it's beautiful. Jack, ask the jumper where the power is coming from..."
"Wha..oh." Jack cut off as the HUD popped up and showed a blinking light in a schematic.
"I think we should check that out before we go dashing off." Daniel stated. "This place had nothing like this, before, and if there's something we can use..."
The jumper settled to the floor of the gate terminal. The DHD was missing, as before, but the place seemed twice as big without the massive trunks penetrating from the surface. The door eased open onto a carpet of dust, Daniel sneezed violently and gestured for the rest to follow him.
They moved together through the tunnels, and it felt for a moment almost right, then Sam squinted and Jack smiled and Teal'c moved like someone still trying to find his place, and the strangeness of it redoubled. Daniel sighed. "If this is anything like the ancient facilities we've seen in the past, we need to figure out if there is still a ZPM here.
At Sam's questioning glance, he reminded her, "The thing they dug up in Giza with the power source. If we can find one here, it will simplify things. A lot."
They moved through a narrow corridor, and found a door, then another corridor, "Are we going in the right direction?" Jack asked.
"Yep. I mean, I think so. Um..." Sam frowned.
Then they turned a corner, and found it. "Oh. My." Jack breathed out. Full chair platform. Another room off of it. "This wasn't here when you were here, Daniel?
"There was a giant tree in the way. I didn't even know this corridor was here.” Daniel moved around the space, found a monitor, unceremoniously grabbed Jack’s wrist and slapped his hand on the console to activate it, and started tapping.
Jack frowned, started to say something, then shut his mouth as the screen started rapidly scrolling strange symbols. “No, that’s fine, Daniel, just use my hand.”
"You can read that?" Sam asked.
"I'm looking for some sort of schematic, map, something to tell me how much is here... ah."
Daniel pointed through a tall archway. "Sam? Will you come look at this?"
They moved through into another room, and Daniel went to a low platform in the middle, pressed a few buttons, and watched as three ZPMS slid up out of the platform. All glowing brightly. "Sam, there's your power source."
They spent the rest of the day there, Daniel explaining what they were seeing, Sam tinkering, Jack walking around initializing equipment, Teal'c exploring the vicinity. Jack finally had enough and said, "Kids, we really need to eat, figure out what we're doing next, where we're going."
"We just need another..." Sam started, but Jack cut her off with a terse, "Ah! No! Food. A place to sleep. Take stock of what we have. We've got the rest of our lives in this place, you all do NOT have to drive yourselves into the ground over this. Daniel, were you two always this way?"
Daniel chuckled, then laughed, until a moment later tears were streaming down his face.
Jack looked at him through narrowed eyes. "I'll take that as a yes, then. Teal'c, would you help me set up camp?"
Setting up camp meant unloading the jumper, to make room for them to sleep inside on the narrow benches. In the process, the backpacks emerged. Daniel stopped as he found them, took a deep breath, then checking inside each one, he handed one to each of his companions in turn. "I think you should each open 'your' own... I know Sam kept a journal. If you have questions..."
Sam frowned as she took the pack. "Are you sure? I mean this has got to be hard for you...
"Better now than later. I really think that you need to understand what you did this for." He looked down. "Besides, we could be here, together, a long, long time."
They filed in around the now empty jumper, and sat on the floor around the time machine. Jack slid a little closer to Sam, resting his elbows on his knees with his...the other Jack's pack between his legs. Without searching, he opened a side pocket and pulled out a spiral notebook.
Sam found a paper journal on top of an assortment of tools and clothing inside... "Can we call them Sam, Jack and Teal'c one?" she asked. "It would simplify things in my head. Then I can say, 'This is Sam One's backpack' and not get crazy.”
Teal'c's eyebrow went up as he opened the unfamiliar cordura backpack and found a more familiar leather pack inside, which contained a tube made of hardened hide. Removing the cap for the tube, he withdrew several scrolls of papyrus. "I am not accustomed to keeping a record of my activities," he stated. Unrolling one, he found, in his own hand, a timeline of events dated in three ways: according to the Goa'uld calendar, according to the Earth calendar, and marked from the time he renounced Apophis. The list of each and every time SG-1 had saved the (day, galaxy, world) continued on three arm-length scrolls, with a running tally at the top of each page.
"Um, Daniel, have you read them?" Sam asked hesitantly, surprised when she opened the book to discover the handwriting not entirely familiar. It was firmer, faster, more confident than what she was used to seeing flow from her hand.
He nodded. "After yo...they died. It was so surreal. Is. Reading those, especially Teal'c's timeline, helped put it in perspective. When you three showed up, my heart fell, it meant we'd gotten it wrong, and all that work. I lost so much. But perhaps we've gotten it right. I have to believe that. It might be that the biggest problem before was that I would have stayed the rest of my life there if you hadn't showed up. Or maybe Ra would have caught me and goa'ulded me and learned of the future... deciding to take the gate with him to nip the Tau'ri 'problem' in the bud. It felt so wrong, every day, from the moment we couldn't get back to the jumper, and now that feeling is gone. I don't know how I know, but I really think that we're going to be okay now. And hey, we get to explore an ancient outpost the rest of our lives, hopefully without any Goa'uld breathing down our necks."
Jack nodded absently. "Nice. And hey, maybe I can find a lake or something where I can fish."
Daniel laughed. "You were--I mean Jack One was-- always crazy about fishing. Especially if there were no actual fish involved. That was our last fun time together, the four of us, before this whole thing started--fishing at Jack's place. It was the first time you actually got Sam up there..."
Sam cocked her head and wrinkled her nose. "Fishing? Me? The oth..Sam one seems like she was so different."
Daniel smiled, but it didn't reach his sad eyes. "Sam was amazing. She could fix almost anything, and she was one of the first people I've ever met who could actually lose me by explaining things too much, she was so smart. And kind. And there are few people in the world I'd rather have had watching my back in a firefight. Hell, she was saving my butt more times than not, all of us."
"You loved her?" Sam asked, "we were, I mean you and she were a..."
"No, not like you’re thinking," he shook his head, remembering when he was on the other side of that question. "We were just very, very good friends. She was like a sister to me. One of the people I could really trust." He looked over at "Sam two". "You are her, in most of the ways that count. You just don't have the confidence she gained learning to fly, and doing battle for 8 solid years in a place where she was undoubtedly the smartest person there. But you've done pretty darn well in figuring out some of the most confusing problems SG-1 has ever dealt with. Sam-one took months to settle in to the point where she wasn't constantly overcompensating. You've got time."
Sam straightened her back at the compliment. "You know, this is why I came back. So that in the do-over, I can get it right again. But did I...did she ever make mistakes?"
Daniel laughed. "See, there's the thing. When Sam got it right, she saved the world. When she got it wrong, the whole galaxy was in jeopardy. She blew up a sun once."
"Oops." Sam looked sheepish.
"No, it was actually something she planned on doing, and it was necessary at the time. That was one of the times she got it almost right."
"So did she have a boyfriend?" Sam finally asked.
Daniel smiled wryly. "Well, several, at various times. They had a bad habit of ending up dead. Although she and Jack-one were awfully close, it wasn't until it became obvious we weren't going back that they let the whole Sir/Carter thing drop and stopped worrying so much about regs. Read the book," he said gesturing at the journal in her hands. "It's in there."
Jack leaned over, "Ooo, can I see?"
She swatted his hands. "Maybe later. Read your own." She focused on the first page.
I can't believe I actually let Daniel talk me into this...
She closed her eyes, then closed the book, and said, "I think I need to sleep first."
Teal'c and Jack stretched out on the floor, leaving the long benches for Sam and Daniel. Jack flipped through the notebook, which was scant on text and long on outlines and tactical plans on the few pages he actually looked at. "Sam," he said, "looks like you're going to have to read us a story. Later..."
The stiller they got, the dimmer the lights from the ship and the terminal became, until they were asleep, and it was dark.
Jack looked at Sam and Daniel warily. "You want me to sit on that. And think at it?"
Sam nodded. Daniel bit back his exasperation and said, "You are the only one of the four of us who has any chance of really getting in there. Just think, "Map of this planet"."
"And we can't stay here? Seems roomy enough... got a nice barcalounger..."
He sat in the chair. "And look, a TV!" as the HUD popped up over his head. “If only we could get the Simpsons on this thing...”
Daniel's eyes glinted. "Just think, MAP, please, Jack. We can't stay here. We need to go someplace enough off the beaten track that we won't have to worry about screwing things up and getting our future selves trapped in this what-will-be godforsaken hole."
"Alright, what do you want to see, kiddies?" Jack gazed at the globe that appeared in front of him.
"Um, can it tell us where on the planet there are still buildings? Maybe real living quarters? A shower?" Sam asked, pulling at her robe.
Little red dots started to appear. There were about 8 clusters, a cluster at each pole, two temperate zone and four near the equator.
"Can it show us which of those has the most consistent climate? Least seismic activity? Least iffy weather? Decent growing season?"
"All that, eh?..." But before Jack could even ask the question in his head, three of the clusters dropped out, and ancient text appeared next to the remaining five. "Daniel..." Jack started.
"Give me a sec. Um... this one right here (he pointed at the one of the temperate zone) is the gate terminal. This one here... Looks like a science station but... Daniel reached up and started touching the air the display hovered in. Text started flicking rapidly past.
"I think we've got a choice of two. This one here is temperate zone. He pointed to a spot a little bit away from the coastline of one of the continents. "400 feet above sea level. Between two mountain ranges. Growing season most of the year if I'm... Oh." He stopped. "Why would the growing season fluctuate from a tiny short bit of the year to most of the year?"
Sam blinked. "Must have one hell of an axial wobble. Jack, can you bring up another screen"
Jack was about to say, "Sure," when another screen popped into view. "Hey! Wha..."
Daniel grinned. "It's paying better attention than you do, Jack. Just listen, even if you don't understand... I think the computer must be answering questions as you hear them."
Jack frowned. The screens flickered.
"Just relax, Jack. This thing is doing it for you."
The displays steadied. Sam looked at the one in front of her and asked, "Does this place have a way of tracking astronomical data?" A flood of information started streaming past, but the ancient text was incomprehensible. "No, can it give me, oh, a graph by year for the past 500 years or so of the degree of axial tilt?" The display displayed a single line of text. "Daniel?"
He spoke rapidly, words falling over themselves. "It wants to know which solar cycle you want as your primary measure... when we say year, we mean one circle of the last planet Atlantis was on in this galaxy around it's star. Our time system, Sam, what's the time standard we use in atomic terms?"
She answered without thinking, "A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. 1 minute=60 seconds, 1 hour=60 minutes, 1 day=24 hours, 1 year=365.256363051 days on January 1, 2000 AD, which is about 4,995 years in our future."
Jack stared at her. "You just know that."
She shrugged. "It's one of the basics. If you're going to mess around with the kinds of things we mess around with in astrophysics, you kind of have to know your frame of reference."
More text flickered. "Okay, it looks like the year here is currently 421 ish days, a day is 25.83 hours. You'll like that, Sam."
"Okay, so back to my question," Sam continued. "Is the axial tilt on this planet changing? Graph over time, please."
The display flicked into a stable chart. "That explains it. The planet is rotating on it's axis, but the axis is slowly rolling.. that is weird. Right now," a little red mark appeared on the chart, "hmmm... it looks like we've got almost no axial tilt. Extend that to show where it will be in 5000 years... Right. In 5000 years there will be almost 60 degree axial tilt. Which means we're fine for our lifetime, but no wonder there's nothing but the gate terminal left in our time, this place must have been nearly unlivable 5000 years ago, too. I wonder when this place was built..." The graph extended and the numbers stopped. "Holy Hannah!”
“That’s a lot of zeroes,” Jack said.
“Well, we know that the great alliance happened millions of years ago,” Daniel said. “Most of the stargates are at least a million years old, the oldest as much as 50 million years old. One of the ancient places we visited was so old that the planet was mostly molten lava. We’re lucky this place is still here.”
“Is everything here that old?” Sam asked.
More data.
Daniel looked at the map Jack had brought up first. "Okay, given that information, I bet some of these places have taken a hell of a beating. Which ones are still the most intact? What was built most recently?"
All the remaining dots faded except for one, sitting near the equator. "Zoom in, please," Daniel said.
They blinked. And blinked again. "Zoom in more."
"Do you guys see what I see?" Daniel asked.
"You mean that symbol at the end of Earth’s gate address?" Sam traced the lines with her finger. "Are those buildings?" Suddenly she frowned and pursed her lips. "Hoo. Of course. When the axial tilt is at its worst, 60 degrees, you have one side of the planet becoming horribly hot, the other side becoming relentlessly cold, the seasonal variations would be extraordinary... but the equator is the only place where life has a chance to actually thrive. If they terraformed this place, things probably favored stuff that would survive in the equatorial zone no matter what... The weather must get insane when the tilt is bad. Talk about weather extremes, I bet you're shifting from hurricanes to blizzards without much in between. This place here looks like the only place besides the gate they bothered maintaining through the last bad spell. It looks like they didn't want anyone thinking staying for the long term would be a good idea."
"Well, that's all right for us," Jack shrugged. "We just want a good 30-50 years, right? I mean, assuming I'll live to be about 112."
"It should be perfect." Sam smiled. "Anyone advanced enough to come here should be advanced enough to figure that out, right? So that equator site, is it just that one building?"
A diagram of the site appeared, rotating to show three dimensions. "Four stories underground? Couple surface buildings? What's in there... um, broken down by floor?"
The layout spread out into four separate floor plans, ancient text labels in each room... Daniel read them aloud, gesturing at the display "Power, food prep, lab, lab, lab, not sure what that is, okay. Looks like the top floor is several large rooms. A communal eating area. Another chair room. That looks almost like an amphitheater... next floor down is all living space. Looks like it housed up to 50 or 60 people... Next floor down is laboratories and such. And the bottom is machinery, power, shield... Oh, this bit up here is for growth, growing.. green... Ah, hydroponics? This is incredible. It's like the Antarctic outpost on steroids. And it says it is shielded... shield... They grew it. Into the bedrock. The buildings on top are outbuildings. Used for animal husbandry, workspace, projects that should be outside..."
"We have to go. Don't we have to go?" Sam was almost bouncing off her feet with excitement. "This is... it's like expecting to go camping and ending up at the Ritz. It's perfect. Does it have showers? How far away is it? Does it have power?"
Daniel laughed. "Looks like in the jumper we can get there in next to no time. And power... Yes... it has power."
"Can I sit up now?" Jack asked plaintively. "My back is killing me. What about this place?" He gestured expansively. "We need to do anything here?"
Sam frowned as a new display came up. It was clearly an illustration of the ZPM's in the next room. "What does that say, Daniel?"
He looked. "Hmm. Power levels are good now. Hey, I wonder if these were what was lighting the place... what systems are being left on here? Looks like a low level of power, just enough to keep the lights on and the temperature controlled... will last for another 6000 years or so at this level."
"Damn," Jack said with a low, whistle of appreciation. "Maytag man ain't got nuttin' on those Ancients of yours. They do know how to build 'em.”
“So, when were the power units last replaced?” Sam asked.
More text, and Daniel blinked. “Five thousand years ago,” he said. “When the complex at the equator was built. So, about ten thousand years before our time.”
“Didn’t you say this was abandoned five thousand years before that?” Jack said.
“Someone probably used it the same way we are.” Daniel said. “Someone who knew how to change the batteries.”
Later, as they dug into their supplies for a meal, Sam pulled out her counterpart’s journal.
From the diary of Sam One
1
I will kick myself for the rest of my life for letting Daniel talk me into this. However long that is. This place is dangerous for me, dangerous for us, and we've gone from stepping on bugs to eliminating whole species, in a temporal paradox sense. Not that there’s really a paradox, if the multiverse theory is correct, but I think we’re getting a sense of why there are so many of the alternate realities. It’s our fault. Oh, not entirely our fault, we never invented the time machines, but we used them. God only knows how many loops there will be from this one, I suspect we are the primary, given the choices we’re making, but oh lord, the idea of losing all that we worked so hard for... I don’t mind dying here, oddly enough, but the thought of Ra living, or Apophis, or Anubis, or any of the other threats we worked so hard to defeat.... we can’t let that happen. Hopefully the camera and the ZPM will be enough that if we’ve screwed up badly enough, but not too badly, someone will come fix it. I hope.
2
Oddly enough, while I am still angry with myself for letting us do this, I’m not angry at Daniel. I’m the one who is supposed to have known better.
Jack is acting weird. Weirder than usual. I catch him looking at me, a smile here, there, between his massive sulks about home. I’ve had just about enough of the stupid high school shit, I’m not twenty anymore. I gave up Pete to finish this business with him even before this fiasco. I am not going to live the rest of my life without figuring THIS out. It’s not like the frat regs even exist 5000 BC. Thank god that birth control is not an issue, just think how THAT could screw with the timeline. Pun intended. I’ve got another year or two before I even have to think about that, and dammit, this is NOT going to wait that long.
3
I hate sand. The language, I've been working with Goa’uld for 8 years, it’s close enough, but good god, I am SO much better at reading it than hearing it, and it is going to take me months to get the hang of this. They keep touching my hair and the men keep making offers to Jack and Daniel. We must get out of here. Every day we are here, we increase the risk of permanently screwing up EVERYTHING we hold dear. I’m used to roughing it, but this... Most of our emergency supplies were on the jumper. That means that in a week, I’m going to have to figure out something less I make “unclean” these oh-so-pristine robes.
I itch.
4
The high school thing does have one thing going for it... necking. It took surprisingly little encouragement. The situation around us sucks, but I feel like I can cope a little more with it. Because this... this could almost make it worth it. He was apparently making arrangements to leave my chain of command before we left on this fool's errand. Said that if we did get back, somehow, we’d figure it out.
5
The boys, well, Teal’c and Jack, anyway, have started rousing the rabble. They’re convinced they can make Ra go away and not break the timeline doing it. I’ve given up trying to convince them otherwise, I actually don’t think we’ll be able to go back at all. Because if my theory is correct, it is nearly impossible to travel back in time and then forward again and have it be the exact same timeline. I was looking at the situation with the solar flare, and if I’m right, we had at least one, and possibly many loops before an SG-1 managed to go back in time and get back to the future without getting killed. Otherwise, no note. No note, boom. The universe seems very accommodating of new timelines, I guess conservation of mass isn't relevant across realities. Gives some credence to the whole concept of intelligent design, because otherwise any time anyone tried to go back or forward in time, the power requirements would make it impossible, and if they managed to find the power, they’d just rip it all to shreds. Multiverse makes that not so much a problem. Which means that what we do here has changed, will change what comes next, the trick is to leave enough clues in place that if someone comes back to sort things out, they actually have a chance of it. Still. I want the future of the world I’m living in now to be at least as good as what we had when we left the SGC. But I’m getting less and less concerned about the minutiae, because we already changed it. Will change it. And probably will change it again. What we need is a reality in which there is an SGC which has people like us doing the things we do, fixing the things we fix, just, with a ZPM when they need it. Is that so much to ask?
6
Mmmmm. Much better. He’s still a kid at heart, and as long as we mind the knee, he feels like a much younger man. Except for that sweet experience thing that... mmmm. Things are getting dangerous, we’re hungry and filthy a lot of the time, but we do, sometimes, forget.
We’re starting to play the “guess the future” game. Jack wants to go find out, says it’s no fun if we don’t know, but good god, we’ll tie causality in a knot and then shred it into confetti if we screw around with the timeline any more. Leave that for those who come after us. If anyone does read this, and I screwed up your future, I’m really, really sorry. It seemed like a good... no, it seemed like a terrible, but necessary idea at the time. And we’re all about taking chances.
By my calculations, we've been here for three months.
7
The women have finally gotten over my hair, which is now longer than I’ve had it since high school, and have taken me in. I now know how to survive a period without making a mess without a tampon, and myriad other small tasks. When I learned enough of the language to express frustration at having my hair fondled and being so obvious, one of the women brought henna and indigo and blackened my hair, used henna on my skin, and I’m now less conspicuous than I was. But nothing will cover the blue eyes. I would say I don’t recognize myself, but my only mirror is a bowl of water, so it’s not huge. Jack looks at me funny, says he misses the old Carter, but we all miss the old life, and mostly I just kiss him and shut him up because I don’t want to think about it too much. I think the henna helps protect my skin, because I don’t burn quite so much. Or maybe I’m used to it. There is a surprising amount of trade, probably because of the Goa’uld, so we’re finding things here I never would have expected. Even chocolatl, though I’m having to add sweet to it myself. A rare treat, though. Not quite a candy bar, but still. They still call it Food of the Gods, probably because it comes in the cargo ships and is offered out on feast days. Daniel is in archaeologist heaven. I think of all of us, he is the most content.
8
We've been here almost a year. I told Jack that next year we’d have to stop the nookie because that’s when the Implanon will stop working. He was annoyed, and said he’d just have to get “thatdirtyrottensnakehead Ra” off his planet so we could go home already. I started to tell him I didn't think we’d be able to go back, and he just cut me off and said, “Staying here will happen over my dead body. We are going back. Then it won’t matter if it wears off or not.”
9
Daniel is worried. He thinks something is going to happen. He’s going to another village to see if he can confirm the rumor one of his friends told him. I wish he’d take Teal’c with him, but Teal’c is off with Jack rousing rabble. They wouldn’t wait for Daniel to return. I’m so worried.
Kebi just came in to tell me the Jaffa are looking for “the blue eyed woman”. She is the wife Katep, so I will give this to her and have her get it back to Daniel, presuming he manages to escape. I keep telling myself that this is worth it, if that ZPM gets back to the future. They must have defeated Ra without us once, if we are captured, hopefully they can do it again. I will never forgive myself for letting Daniel talk us in to this. Must go, if I can hide before they get here, maybe this won’t be a disaster after all....
Addendum by Daniel Jackson (prime), 4 years later, just after the last entry.
Over Jack’s dead body, indeed. They were captured, and someone spoke of the blue eyed woman who lived with Jack. I’d been living with Katep for some time already, and the one who betrayed them simply did not know about me. There was no posturing, no imprisonment... they were simply hauled out into the village square and shot by Jaffa. I don’t think Ra knew about them. No daring SG-1 rescue... I didn't see it, but my imagination is enough, and their bodies... I snuck in late and zatted them gone, Sam had impressed on us what a Bad Idea it would be for someone to find our remains, with our modern dental work and various rods and plates they've used to glue us back together over the years. Her journal was handed to me, silently, by Katep's wife and I will add it to the stash we had tucked away. I’ve told Katep how important it is that when I die, that stash must be destroyed, or tucked into the tomb at Giza. --Daniel Jackson, Prime(ish)