Disclaimer: Purely for fan purposes; no copyright infringement intended.
Author's original notes: Tabula Rosa was a great story, but I couldn't see Carter standing around saying, "Dr. Keller will find a cure before that happens," and actually waiting around for her to do it…I figured even with her slate wiped clean, she'd be at least trying to do something. So this is a what-if Carter had been able to act like the Carter we used to know. My apologies to Atlantis fans—I made the transition with the colonel and am, like her, still learning the ropes.
She hated the job. It sucked the life out of her and gave her nothing back in return. She didn't even get a chance to play with all the fancy new toys that came with it…no time for science or tinkering. The pressures and demands of command ate up every moment. No more trips through the Gate. She was stuck behind a desk trying to fill the shoes of a much-missed, much-loved predecessor and not accomplishing the task to anyone's satisfaction- especially her own.
Early days yet, she tried to encourage herself. She'd known it wouldn't be easy. She'd seen Jack endure the same struggle after the general left; and Landry after him. And, of course, the great Dr. Weir herself during her brief stint as commander of the SGC. Only, Carter hadn't exactly been paying attention that time. She'd been too tied up desperately trying to keep the ultimate sacrifice of a good man from being in vain. The change in her command structure had been just one more obstacle to overcome at the time, and once the world and Jack had been brought back from the edge of certain disaster, Elizabeth had already been as good as gone. It was here in Atlantis she'd made her mark and earned the regard and love of those under her leaving behind her a gaping hole. A void Carter couldn't fill, an ache she couldn't assuage, and expectations she was destined to never meet…early days or not.
She hated the job, and she wasn't too fond of the surroundings either. If she'd wanted to live at sea she would have joined the Navy. She shook her head. The last was just her irritation talking…the city and its surrounding waters were more than beautiful. The fact that they were on another world...she should have loved it. But she didn't. The open, soaring vistas of the city had their own sort of beauty, but they made her feel exposed and vulnerable. Even on the best of days, working in Atlantis' soft, alien lighting gave her a vague headache and a wish to be happily working under the harsh, bright lights back in the concrete, rabbit warrens of the SGC. But, then everything did. She missed home.
Missed the people back home. Her team who were busy 'out there' doing her job…the one she loved and had given up for this one she hated. And everyone else as well: Siler, who could read her mind and knew just what needed fixing without her having to explain every move; Walter, who knew to start dialing, or dropping the blast doors, or brewing the coffee before she'd even started to give the order, no questions asked; even Folger.
There had already been too many people no longer a part of her day to day life before this quasi-exile in the Pegasus Galaxy: General Hammond who been gone long enough she shouldn't still expect to see him at the head of the briefing table, though she did; Janet, whose loss still hit her like a physical blow every time she woke up in the infirmary under a stranger's care; and of course, Jack. Jack who should never have given up the team, never left it for her to try to take his place, never have not been the one to lead the team through the Gate and back again.
Jack. Why had she let him talk her into accepting this assignment? "Come on, Carter," he'd cajoled, "it'll be fun." He'd smiled his most sincere smile, but his eyes hadn't joined in on the fun. She'd had no idea why he wanted her to take the job, but nevertheless it had been apparent he did. And far be it from her to disappoint General Jack O'Neill…so here she was and here she'd remain and hate the job or not, she'd do it.
Until she couldn't remember how anymore. She flopped back in her chair and let out a long sighing breath. Command stunk. Back home in such a crisis, she'd be knee-deep in theories and possibilities to combat whatever problem came up, but here she was stuck directing and ordering people until there was no time for anything else. She should be busy coming up with solutions instead of listening to others reporting one more discouraging failure after another. Or worse, listening to them restate the obvious for the upteenth time and wait for her to order them to do what they should have already been doing in the first place. Or even worse, seeing them look to her for reassurances and promises that all wouldn't be lost, that they'd find a way out of this mess…they always did.
False assurances had never come easily to her. Hers were less convincing than Jack's old 'plenty of time, Carter' which hadn't even fooled Teal'c. Especially when she had her own doubts. Not about the Atlantis personnel. They'd held out against a galaxy of bad guys more or less on their own…for all her frustration at them, they'd do.
Her doubts were about herself, her command abilities, and her not failing the men and women entrusted to her care. Such doubts were normal enough with a new command but unwelcome and disheartening in the circumstances. She couldn't help wondering if things had always worked out before because there'd been a competent leader who knew what she was doing in charge, instead of Sam Carter who couldn't think with the press of the responsibilities of the job resting so heavily on her shoulders, the needs of the entire Atlantis expedition screaming out for her to do something, and a wracking headache threatening to wipe away everything she knew and understood.
She had no answers to those kind of questions. No more than she had solutions to the current pressing problem. Sighing, she rose to leave her office. Sheppard and McKay were on their way up; time to pretend she was in control and confident in it.
"We've stocked the mess with food, water, and blankets to care for the incoming," she informed them. "There won't be nearly enough beds, but we'll just have to make do."
"Well," McKay said, "we may need to think about ordering all non-essential personnel to report to the Mess Hall. I mean, they're gonna wind up there anyway, and this way we won't have people with no memories wandering the hallways." She didn't care for the suggestion at all herself. The hall would already be overrun with the overflow from the infirmary. And she'd been taught by the best to not voice pessimistic thoughts—she'd rather think they weren't all 'gonna wind up' anywhere without their memories. Jack wouldn't have stood for that kind of talk, but he wasn't here. And as much as she hated the idea, it did have merit.
Sheppard agreed with it as well. "I'll send Lorne and a team out, make sure those orders are followed," he said.
She bit her lip and debated with herself the right course of action. People were going to be confused and frightened enough without a show of military might. She thought it would be a huge mistake to send armed soldiers after them, but letting them mill about in the halls touching who-knows-what and doing who-knows-what surely wasn't the answer either. In the end, she let things stand as the people from Atlantis outlined them. They were good people…with the exception of McKay, of course.
She led them back to her desk though neither she nor the men following her really thought of it as belonging to her. Still someone had to keep the seat warm, and for unfathomable reasons Jack and those over him had decided she was the one. She handed out the bottles of stimulants.
McKay began to fuss, "Do we know what's in these?" No, McKay, she wanted to say, doctors always hand out medication they know nothing about-makes waiting for the results all the more exciting. Heedless of her growing irritation, he went on, "Because I'm allergic ..." Of course, he was. Carter bit back her exasperation. Finding his niche at Atlantis had gone a long way towards making McKay more human. At times he even seemed almost tolerable, especially since he'd dropped the whole 'sex' thing. He hadn't given her any of the trouble she'd expected-she hadn't even had to pass on Jack's threat to send him on a one-way trip through the Gate if he so much as caused her an iota of trouble. But he was still a pain.
Sheppard saved her having to fight through her headache and vertigo to shut him up. "Just take it," he ordered. And they got back to the business of saving the city. One more thing not to like about the job. Used to be she got to save the world, now she was down to one, mainly-uninhabited city. She would have been glad for that particular change but the weight of her responsibilities weighed, if anything, more, much more, than they had with the SGC. For obvious reasons. Being 'the man' wasn't all it was cut out to be-and she didn't even get the parking space that went with it. She outlined her actions cutting Atlantis off from contact through the Gate and that pretty much wrapped up the meeting.
"What happens when we all start losing our memory?" McKay asked her, and she brushed him off with the hope that Dr. Keller would find some cure before that happened. He wasn't fooled and neither was she. They couldn't just sit around expecting the good doctor to pull them out of this one.
First off, damage control. One: Keep people safe. How did you reassure a city full of frightened people who wouldn't know their own names let alone who they could trust, who they should turn to for help? Certainly not by sending out the troops against them, but they couldn't be allowed to wander the city. As much as she hated the thought of her troops firing on their comrades, altercations were bound to happen. Stunners then. And reassuring messages playing throughout the city.
Two: Keep people oriented. They had approximately six hours from the onset of the headache and dizziness to complete memory loss. Everything that could be had been shut down or placed under computerized control, but that wouldn't last long without maintenance. The city couldn't function without oversight and involvement. People wouldn't know how and where to find their basic needs if the disease progressed through the city population at the rate it appeared to be spreading. The search for a cure would come to a complete standstill if the doctors and researchers lost their specialized knowledge. And those put totally down by the disease couldn't be cared for without that expertise, as well.
Even if they proved effective in staving off the worst effects of the disease, they simply didn't have the resources to make stimulants available to everyone in the city. The doctors, the soldiers, and her top personnel would max out the supply rapidly; the Daedalus would eventually arrive to transport more down, but then, quite likely, their lack would already have wreaked havoc with all their minds.
She began her own stop-gap measures and issued the order for everyone to record the bare essentials of their responsibilities both on paper that was to be posted around their work areas and on computer recordings that were set to play over and over again. They wouldn't keep the city going for long…there wasn't time to record the detailed instructions that would really be needed, but maybe, just maybe they'd be enough to prolong the inevitable long enough for a solution to be implemented before it was too late.
Before the disease ran its course and left them like Linea had left the people of Vyus. Mentally children lacking the basic knowledge of how to survive in this alien world let alone the wisdom to regain what they had lost. If that's where it ended. The report of Dr. Baxter's death she'd just received meant the disease might not leave any survivors behind it. Though she wasn't sure the loss of all their memories wasn't its own sort of death. Without the memories of a lifetime of experiences and relationships, weren't the people they had been as lost as though they were dead?
It was all more than she could think about. She needed to get her own recordings made while she could. She'd covered as much of the technical aspects that she thought would be helpful and not just overwhelming to herself in a confused state. At least she thought she had…she'd begun to catch herself forgetting things and couldn't be sure she'd sufficiently covered anything. But, there was so much more she would have liked to record…things that weren't so very vital to the running of her command, but still very vital to the person behind the command. The memories of the people who had touched her life, made her into the person she was. Daniel and Teal'c…her father and mother…Jack. A lifetime of experience had brought her to this point…what would she be without them?
And. And…hadn't she been here before? Her thoughts were running in circles, and the room with it. She lay her head down on her desk and waited for the wave of dizziness and nausea to pass. A call from Dr. Keller woke her. She shook her head to clear it of the fog eating away at her mind and found she'd lost time. It was apparent the doctor's stop-gap measure was failing…and so was her own. There were gaps in her memory large enough to step through and people were dying down in the…place where sick people went—the mess hall. No, the mess hall was where you went for jello and …coffee; the infirmary. That's where people were dying…in the infirmary. Where Janet worked—only Janet was dead. So the infirmary was where the dead people were, so where was it the sick people were before they died?
Maybe she should ask the Dr. Not Janet. The one that was still alive. The one, she realized with a jolt, who was saying she knew what was wrong with them. With an effort, she listened to Dr. Keller's discovery of the root of all their problems. A childhood disease. The chicken pox of the Pegasus Galaxy. No, not chicken pox. Small pox. Deadly, nasty, virulent…but treatable…treatable with a common, everyday variety of weed—like scurvy and dandelions. Hurray for weeds, hurray for dandelions…
"Let's go get some," Sheppard said, and she wondered why he wasn't already on the way.
"Take a jumper," she ordered.
He looked at her oddly, "Um…didn't you have the Gate disabled?"
"Did I?" she asked. No, she'd never do that. Kinsey. If the Gate was shut down it had to be Kinsey…he was always to trying to shut the program down. Well, just as well. It would ground them for a few days, and she'd have time to go sleep off whatever bug she was coming down with and Janet wouldn't be the wiser. She watched as the people in the room wandered off to do whatever they were doing and was vaguely aware she had things to be doing as well.
What was it she was supposed to be doing? Oh, yeah. Making recordings. To remember by. Who am I? I am Sam…but though I like green jello, I'll pass on the green eggs and ham…and how am I ever going to get everything that I need to remember recorded if I can't think any clearer than this and how is Sheppard going to get back here with…the dandelions, if his mind is as clouded as mine? And who's going to remember what to do with them if he does make it back?
Teyla. And…the one guy. That's right, the two of them were clean. No sickness. No mush for brains. No pain eating through their skulls. Hurry up then, because I'm losing it…losing everyone I know and love.