Title: Macgyvering The Stargate
Characters: Samatha Carter, Catherine Langford, Francis Madison (OC).
Summary: In between the movie and the series, Sam works on the problem of dialing somewhere other than Abydos. ONESHOT.
Category: Gen.
Rating: K.
A/N: I found a draft of this in an old computer backup, gave it a little polish and here it is. It was inspired by the endless debates (arguments?) that occurred on forums at the time about how the gate address/co-ordinate system worked.
… "You know, Dr Carter, Dr Jackson may have been a very good archaeologist, but he didn't know very much about astrophysics."
Sam continued to watch the dialing computer crunch numbers, working its way through yet another algorithm. Eventually, she answered. "I don't think I ever said he did…"
"Well, you just related his about his idea of how the six symbols correspond to co-ordinates to the General back there."
"Mmmm."
"And it's totally inaccurate."
Sam finally looked at her current assistant. Civilian, pedantic, pompous but a very smart mathematician. "I know that. It's not possible that the coordinate system Dr Jackson described could be adequate."
"Then why repeat it like that?"
Sam smiled, mostly to herself. Dr Francis Madison was very clever when it came to numbers and very clueless when it came to people. "Because it's as good an explanation as any for the average person. Given that the gate itself is what handles the co-ordinate calculations, we don't need to compute them ourselves."
Francis pondered this. "Are we sure of that?" he answered dubiously. "I mean, we know nearly a hundred signals the gate gives off, but we understand only thirty seven. Maybe the reason we haven't found another working address is because the dialing program needs to contribute… something?"
"Well, if you can think of somewhere to start…" Sam suggested wryly. The complexity of the Stargate – both in what it did and how it functioned – took her breath away. Humans had worked on it for decades, and Sam suspected it would be her life's work.
"I'll think about it." Francis said absently, staring down at the mysterious ring below.
He did, everyone else there did and Sam did too. A great deal of trial and error identified that there was something more involved. "It's got to be a compound co-ordinate system," was how Sam explained it to Catherine Langford. "So the six symbols have to each mean something more than just a single reference point each."
"And the point of origin that Daniel identified?"
"The primary purpose of that seems to be to tell that gate to activate. But our diagnostics do show something more happening…"
Catherine sighed. Their time had run out; they had failed to dial any other world. She had asked for more – begged for more time to work on the system. But the powers that be controlling their funds had decided they weren't willing to invest any more into it right now. It would continue only as a minor project, for Sam and her assistants to work on as a low-priority theoretical problem in between other tasks.
Eventually, of course, it took the proof of Apophis's visit and another suggestion from the not-an-astrophysicist Daniel Jackson to highlight the importance of stellar shift – and give Sam the clue she needed to finally get the computer to calculate the right signals that the gate needed to successfully dial-out to somewhere beyond Abydos. Those years of work – all the data they had accumulated, all of it fell into place, the foundation for this last little adjustment. At last the gateway to the galaxy was unlocked, and only time would tell if it was a Pandora's box… or not.
