Sam taps the remote for the quantum mirror. It's probably pointless, but she still thinks it must be possible to make it work the way she wants it to.
She's flipped through dozens of settings at this point. Most of them were dark; some she couldn't see anything about the surroundings. Plenty of military installations. One swamp. One that looked sort of like a closet.
It might be useless, but she's not ready to give up completely. Not yet, anyway.
"So how's it going?"
She turns to find Colonel O'Neill in the doorway, hands in his pockets.
"Slow."
He chuckles, striding over to where she's sitting in front of the mirror, notebook next to her, although she hasn't done much in the way of note-taking so far. "Daniel mentioned you were trying to work out some kind of order. I take it there's nothing to report?"
Sam sighs. "There has to be some way of predicting the different settings, sir. Or at least understanding why they're accessed in the order they are. If I can find some kind of pattern, that's the first step to creating some kind of matrix that would let us dial it at will, instead of just guessing."
"So you really just have to go through all of them?" He screws up his face. "There's no way to know where you end up?"
"As far as we know, this is the only way."
"Sounds like Wheel of Fortune."
She shrugs. "At this point, that's exactly what it is."
"Any damn dirty apes?"
She tries, and fails, to bite back a smile. His jokes are terrible. "Haven't hit that one yet, sir."
"Well, never say never."
She's expecting him to wander off, maybe find something else to do. But to her surprise, he perches on a stack of crates beside her, hands folded in his lap.
"Sir?"
He shrugs. "May as well see how it works. Besides, Daniel's work is much more boring than this."
She has the sneaking suspicion it's more that Daniel tells him to go away because he's being annoying. "Of course, sir."
He watches her click through a few more, but nothing interesting appears. Just dimly-lit rooms with varying levels of boxes stacked in corners.
And then she clicks the remote one more time.
Oh.
Oh.
Because that's definitely her. And that's definitely Jack O'Neill.
And the storage room must not have surveillance cameras in this reality.
"Whoa."
She chances a look at the colonel beside her. He's staring at the mirror, his face frozen in shock.
The room on the other side of the mirror is dimly lit, but there's no mistaking what those two are doing.
Sam's face is burning; she shuts her eyes briefly, but that's so much worse, because the soft, hushed, frantic sounds they're making –
The other Sam sucks in a sharp, breathy gasp, and she realizes, flushing even hotter, that the other Jack O'Neill knows how to do that thing with his fingers, the one that makes her whole body arch and shiver and tremble.
And if that Jack O'Neill can, then surely this Jack O'Neill -
Not going there, Sam.
She hears a soft groan, and then the other Sam gasps. "Oh, yes, sir –"
She jabs the remote, and the mirror goes dark.
It's just her and Colonel O'Neill, all alone in this quiet storage room, the grunts and muffled moans of their alternate selves ringing in their ears.
Sam swallows hard, carefully not looking at his hands. Or his mouth. Or his…anything else.
He finally clears his throat. "I, uh. I'm gonna –" He jerks his thumb over his shoulder.
"Yeah." She smiles tightly.
"I'll, uh, see you later?"
"Yes, sir."
She says it without thinking, before she remembers how the other Sam said it, just a minute ago.
The colonel blinks, his face reddening, and she could swear she sees his gaze fall to her mouth before he turns and walks out the door, leaving her in the storage room with a quantum mirror, a remote control she can't really control, a notebook full of questions, and the lingering visual images of Jack O'Neill pinning her back against the wall and making her whimper.
She drops her pen and puts her head in her hands.
It's been a weird morning.