"Unscheduled off-world activation!" The fellow Canadian whose name Rodney had never bothered to learn stared at his screen in confusion. "It's Colonel Sheppard's IDC."
"How about... no?" John waved at the guy, as if to make sure he knew there was only one John Sheppard on this mission.
"He's right, Colonel." Rodney double-checked the sixteen character pass code. "What the..."
"There are six extra numbers."
"I know." Rodney stared at the numbers for a minute, then looked to Elizabeth. "Lower the shield."
"Rodney, that is not John-"
"It's my ATM pin. There's no one in this galaxy that knows that number. Elizabeth, the Gate isn't just used for travel between worlds."
Elizabeth could feel the headache starting, the one she affectionately called Gate Team One. "You think there's an alternate team on the other side of that horizon?"
"We live in the lost city of Atlantis on a planet in the Pegasus galaxy. I'm saying that's more likely than someone miraculously guessing the Colonel's IDC and my six digit, randomly generated pin code." Rodney knew stranger things had happened. Like finding your mission leader frozen in the basement. And that was just in this galaxy. Half of SG-1's mission reports read like a sci-fi TV show. They ran into alternate realities and time travelers on a yearly basis.
Oh, this was going to be a fun headache. "Major Lorne, get a security team in here. We're dropping the shield."
John grabbed Rodney by the elbow. "You don't think that's actually us, do you?"
"Us or a reasonable facsimile of us from another reality." Or robotic clones, but Rodney didn't think John was ready to hear some of the really unusual things that had happened at the SGC in the early years.
"Wonderful." It was a full time job keeping up with one Rodney. He didn't know what he was going to do with two.
Eight fully armed Marines formed a horseshoe around the gate and in the fifteen seconds between them taking position and the shield being dropped, Rodney ran half a dozen different scenarios through his mind: Alternate universes, time travelers, a Genii plot (the last of which was really unlikely, or Rodney would have brought it up before telling them to open the iris). None of them included John Sheppard walking through the gate alone, gray streaking his hair, glasses perched on his nose, and carrying a laptop case.
He took three steps forward and raised his hands in a sign of submission. "Nick."
Lorne hesitated for just a moment, before he stepped forward and started searching their visitor. No one on Atlantis called him Nick. Hell, he didn't think anyone here even knew his first name. "Any weapons?"
"All I brought was my computer and some snacks. I have your Swedish Fish." Indeed, in the laptop bag there was junk food, including a paper sack of Swedish Fish.
"I don't like Swedish Fish."
"I think you mentioned something about needing them to trade for sexual favors." Their temporal visitor grinned.
"Right." Nick pocketed the fish. "He's clean."
At that, the Marines lowered their weapons and the future John walked past them, stumbling more than a little, to where his current self, Rodney, and Elizabeth were standing, staring. Ignoring himself, John pushed his laptop bag into Rodney's arms. "Take care of that." Then he threw up on Elizabeth's shoes and passed out.
---
"I threw up on Elizabeth." John was pretty sure that he'd never been more embarrassed.
"It wasn't actually you, Colonel." Rodney would admit that the look on Elizabeth's face had been priceless, though. "If he even is you."
"He is." Carson tapped his test results. "Ten years older, but naturally, and somewhat the worse for wear."
"I'm amazed you even made it to forty five, Colonel Suicide-Run." And Rodney actually was amazed. The likelihood of losing John, at any moment, kept Rodney awake more often than he'd admit.
There was a slight groan and the man in the bed opened his eyes. "I hurt too much to be dead." He sat up shakily. "Tell me it's late 2005."
"It's late 2005." Carson pulled a pen light from his jacket and peered into John's eyes. "Your pupils..."
"I'm dying." John said it with absolute certainty and a seeming lack of care.
"You're what?" John Sheppard had suspected he'd never live to collect his pension, but it was supposed to be a sudden thing, like maybe in an explosion, or from a battle wound gained in yet another pointless skirmish with the Genni, or from having his life drained to nothing by the Wraith, or, hell, maybe from the venomous bite of a not-snake on their next mission to PX-something-something. That he made it to thirty-five had more to do with sheer dumb luck and the lack of any large-scale military conflict in the eighties and nineties than any true desire to grow old on his part. He was, in the end, his father's son.
"Dying. I'm dying." He sat up in bed. "Or so you tell me, Carson, over and over again. As often as you can. To try and talk me out of my fool's errand."
"Fool's errand?" Rodney sidled up a chair to their guest's bed.
"To save the city." John met his past self's eyes. "I lost her, and it's killing me. Literally."
"Yeah?" His future self was staring at Rodney like he was water in the desert, and suddenly John couldn't stand this for another second.
"Get out," his other self said, with more kindness than John would have given himself credit for. "You're head's about to explode. Go and run. Rodney can help me save the world."
Apparently, he knew himself too well. "He's good at that." John forced himself to show some restraint. He gave Carson a nod and walked calmly out the door, said hello to the marines standing guard at the door, walked calmly around the corner of the hallway out of sight and ran.
---
John was only too glad to get out of the infirmary. Looking at himself in a mirror was a task these days. Looking himself in the eye was a little out of reach. He tracked down Ronon using the internal scanners and joined him on what probably wasn't his first lap around Atlantis' central spire.
They ran in silence, and John was glad. He had no interest in knowing his own future. He had apparently outlived his City and that was one of his worst nightmares.
He was not, despite rumors to the contrary, a clone of Jack O'Neill. The General already had a clone, and, as far as John knew, he was alive and well back on Earth, a college student majoring in history and languages. And if O'Neill Jr. had decided to live out his second life as Dr. Daniel Jackson to avoid competing with his own myth, John didn't know how anyone could expect it of him. John, unlike O'Neill, would probably never save Earth, except in the round about way of not letting the Wraith through the gate. John was happy to stay far away from the planet of his birth, with the best brains Earth could spare, in a city that welcomed him with open arms.
He knows she's not alive, not in any real way. He knows her 'affection' for him is simply a result of the extraordinary strength of his ATA gene. He knows that Atlantis is not a woman, that she's not sentient, that she doesn't love him –but he loves her all the same. He doesn't want to outlive her, and he doesn't want to see her sink back below the ocean, forever. He doesn't want to see her die.
John stopped running and sank to his heels. Ronon stopped in his tracks, and turned back. "You okay?" When John didn't answer, Ronon dropped to the floor and sat beside his taskmaster in silence.
---
When Carson was finally done poking and prodding and left them alone, John spoke. "Go ahead and ask, before you implode."
"I'm dead. Right? I'm dead. That's why I didn't come with you." That was the only explanation. Rodney just hoped he hadn't drown again. John's fondness for suicide missions against orders aside, there was no way the people in charge would have sent John alone if there was any other way.
"Three months ago, from the same thing that's killing me." John leaned back on the pillows. "Which I still haven't forgiven you for, by the way. I had to proof the math for this little trip all by myself."
"The SGC couldn't find anyone to help you?" John gave Rodney his patent smirk. "Never mind. We were doing this on our own." Rodney knew they'd both do anything for Atlantis. They'd already given each other up for her, why not what ever time they had left?
"The City was deemed an acceptable loss. She took the enemy with her. You and I thought that was a crock of shit, even before we started getting sick." John pulled his laptop bag off the bedside table and took out what looked like the kind of necklace teenage hippies wore.
"From what?" Why was John screwing around with jewelry at a time like this?
"We interfaced with Atlantis. The human brain isn't meant to do that." John twisted the charm and Rodney took a closer look. It was a blue crystal dangling from a gold chain. After a minute, John let go of the chain and the crystal stayed suspended in mid air. "After that, the City had to take over some of our neurological maintenance. Not a problem when you're in the control chair for an hour or two a day. Big problem when the one thing keeping you alive is rusting on the sea floor."
"We..." There was something flickering around the charm. "What is that?"
It was a hologram. A beautiful, life sized busty, blonde hologram, dressed in the gray uniform the civilians wore inside the city, now wearing the necklace. "This, my friend, is Ananke. Ananke, are you cohesive?"
The image flickered for a few more moments, before becoming solid. "I am, John." Her image was floating in midair and she seemed to walk down an invisible set of stairs until she was standing on the floor. She was, Rodney noted absently, slightly above the normal height for a woman, and slightly below the normal weight. He was still analyzing the technology that would have gone into creating her when she reached out and touched Rodney's face. "Rodney. It is good to see you again."
"Yes, yes, I'm sure." Rodney couldn't help flinching. She felt real, warm and soft. It was deceptive. If you didn't see her materialize, you'd think she was real. An ethereal beauty but a real woman.
The hologram looked hurt, but dropped her hand. "I disturb you. I understand."
"Sweetheart, could you link up with the city? I've got a lot of work to do." John linked fingers with the hologram and squeezed her hand. "Pull up the ZPM curves and we'll see what we can do about their power bleed."
The hologram flickered out of sight and Rodney stared at the spot where she'd been. "Sex toy?"
"3-d personal tactile holographic mainframe interface."
"So, sex toy."
"Fine. Yes, a sex toy. Radek overwrote her basic programming, but she's still a bit... affectionate."
"Affectionate, right." He was surprised Ananke hadn't kissed John goodbye, if she kissed. If she'd been designing as a holographic call girl, she probably didn't. Rodney wondered if he could get a look at her code, to see how interactive she really was.
"Don't be jealous." John reached out and grabbed Rodney by the wrist. "She's just a machine. You, you're flesh and blood. Flesh and blood I watched die. All we did, everything we gave up? It came down to nothing, Rodney." Rodney absently noticed that there were small, half moon shaped scars on John's forearm. He recognized the shape. When you dug your fingernails into skin, they made those marks, but to do it deeply enough to scar… John hadn't done that to himself. "Atlantis sank to the bottom of the ocean and you died screaming. Cracked the ulna in my wrist while you did it."
'Everything we gave up.' That was a loaded sentence. Rodney tried to uncurl John's fingers from his wrist. They didn't do casual touching anymore, not since they'd stopped the not-so-casual touching. "What happened?"
"I'd be interested to know that myself." They hadn't noticed the door to the infirmary door quietly snick open, or Elizabeth's presence.
"A new enemy, the Grue. What happened was a kind of domino effect, one small thing that ruined everything. If I can find what causes the entropy, we won't lose the city." John still hadn't let go of Rodney's arm and Rodney, for the moment at least, had given up on trying to pry him off. "All your plans, Elizabeth. All gone to waste."
"The city was destroyed." She'd hoped that somehow, it was something else. That maybe it had been the death of a person that had sent him back, but Elizabeth supposed she had known, somewhere inside, that John wouldn't have done this for one person. "How, John?"
He shook his head. "Too much knowledge about the future isn't good for you, Elizabeth. There are some things coming that I have to let happen, even if they aren't nice things."
"What can we do to help?" Elizabeth knew the way they'd lost the City was probably violent and messy, if John wouldn't tell her. She'd try and wring it out of him later.
"I'll need Radek." Out of the corner of his eye, John could see Rodney's look of confusion and cut off the coming rant. "He's an engineer, underneath all the physics. What I'll be doing to the power systems isn't that complex, we don't need to steal Rodney away from his field work. Besides, they're Radek's designs."
"Of course." Elizabeth's eyes were on the grip John had on Rodney. "Afraid he's going to escape?"
"Something like that." John forced himself to let go. "You know Rodney. Turn your back on him and he gets shot, gets stabbed, dies of a degenerative brain disorder..."
"I see." Her A-team was inseparable. Who knew what had happened to Teyla and Ronon, but they'd obviously lost Rodney, if John had been sent alone. "If there's anything I can do, John…."
"I know where to find you." John looked at the clock. "If I can get our kindly Scot to let me go, I need to get down to the labs and help Radek."
"You haven't called him yet." John had said he had the same degenerative brain disorder that Rodney's future self died of. Maybe it affected the memory first.
"I don't have to. Ananke will have gone to see him already."
---
Radek reached for his coffee mug and found it empty. He stared forlornly at the bottom of the mug then set it back down. Rodney had been out of the lab for a few hours, so there was possibly coffee still in the carafe, but it would be cold and even if it wasn't, the pot was all the way across the room. If he waited, Rodney would come back and make a fresh pot, then Radek wouldn't have to move and leave the power curves. Even if he couldn't get Rodney to actually bring him coffee, which, Radek knew was a one in a million chance, he at least wouldn't have to make it.
He went back to his work, until the sound of glass clinking on ceramic distracted him. Someone was pouring coffee into his cup. "One sugar, muj miley?"
"Yes, please, Krista. Packets are in-" For a moment, he'd forgotten where he was. That voice, it sounded so like his wife's. She'd said that exact thing, so many times, just like that. But Krista was dead. He'd buried her the month before Jack O'Neill had found the way station in Antarctica. Radek slowly raised his eyes from the screen. There was a blond woman putting sugar in his coffee. He'd never seen her before, and Radek prided himself on knowing everyone. With Rodney running around off-world, Radek ran the labs day to day. He made an honest effort to learn their people's names, and he definitely knew their faces. "You do not belong here."
"Doctor Sheppard will need you in the ZPM room shortly, after he is released from the infirmary." She set the paper packet beside the cup, the little strip of paper she'd torn off tucked inside the larger piece, just like Krista had always done, then stirred the coffee so the sugar didn't settle on the bottom.
"Who are you?" She set the spoon down on the packet, so the coffee from the spoon wouldn't leave a puddle on the table. When he'd had to type his papers on a typewriter, he'd lost more than one page to coffee stains. Krista had put a stop to that. In Czechoslovakia, she'd used a plate, but in America, the little paper packets were handy and disposable.
"I am yours." She pressed the cup into his hands. "I've missed you, Radek."
His hands were numb around the coffee cup. This was a cruel joke. His wife was dead, and she had looked nothing like this... this blond bombshell that looked like she'd walked out of Rodney's fantasies. "Who are you?"
"The Alterrans named me Ananke, and that is what the Lantians called me as well." The woman sat beside him. "I am the AI holographic mainframe interface. You found me, overlaid my original design with something more... human. Something familiar."
The gate activation. She'd come with the other Sheppard, from the future. "Why would I do such a thing?"
"For Atlantis. The city was designed to interact with the Alterrans. They all possessed what you call the ATA gene. But among the Lantians, the natural gene was rare and the artificial gene doesn't always take. You got sick of being ignored, while Atlantis bowed and scraped for Doctors Sheppard and McKay."
"Colonel. Colonel Sheppard." An alternate reality, then. The man who'd come through the gate must have been from an alternate reality and not from the future.
"Not anymore." The stranger, Ananke, that was what she'd called herself, squeezed his knee. "Drink your coffee, Radek. John will need us soon."
---
It took a while to convince Carson that there was nothing he could do for John, and that there was no reason to keep him cooped up in the infirmary when there was work he should be getting on with. Radek was already with the ZPM, and the power consumption rates for the past six months were up on the monitor. John could see his hands shake a little when he lifted them from the keyboard.
"She came to see you."
"Yes." The ceramic cup was in pieces on the floor and coffee covered one wall which, luckily, had no circuitry exposed.
"I couldn't have stopped her, even if I'd tried. She loves you."
"She is machine. Machine I make to act like my dead wife, yes?" Radek pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger. "I am dead in your future, or I would have made this journey with you. I think I am glad I am dead."
"It wasn't like that. She's not a... sex toy. The original interface was degraded. You couldn't interact with it." How must it have seemed to Radek, to see Ananke's body language with out any clue why he'd done it? "There was no time to build a new overlay so you used a hologram template from the entertainment database. The generator program worked like it was meant to. It programmed all the subtle cues you wanted in a woman, all those little things Krista did. You could never quite weed out the framework that made her love you, there wasn't enough time."
"It is no less disturbing." She'd gone away when he'd started to cry. Radek was grateful for that. "You have a program for improving power usage?"
"Afraid it's not that easy, Radek. Got a soldering iron?"
---
"You are distracted." Teyla loomed above him, a concerned look on her face. "And possibly concussed. Should I call Dr. Beckett?"
"M'fine." John thought about getting up, then decided not to. He'd just lay here, humiliated, for a while. He'd gotten used to Teyla beating him, but she usually had to at least try.
"You are not fine." Teyla dropped into sitting position beside him and folded her sticks in her lap. "I have dropped you four times, and you ran yourself into the ground this afternoon."
"Let me guess. A little Setedan told you." John folded his arms behind his head. "It's our... guest. Carson says he's me, but he's not. Have you seen him yet?"
"I have not." Or at least, she had seen nothing but the bottoms of his shoes. "He has been working with Dr. Zelenka."
"There was no rank on his collar, and he was wearing glasses. Glasses! I'm a pilot, Teyla, and a soldier. That guy... he's soft."
"You are not made of stone, Colonel." She was tempted to peer under his eyelids. Maybe she'd hit him too hard.
"I'm not him either." There were only two reasons John could think of why he'd resign his commission and go back to academia. One: They'd forced him to abandon the city, and he'd done something to torpedo his career. Two: He'd done something equally stupid with Rodney, and they'd forced him to resign or even court martialed him. "I should not be the sole survivor of this foursome, Teyla. And he came alone, so I must be."
Teyla gave a small mental sigh. Only John Sheppard would feel guilty about the deaths of three people still living. "This is a war. We are soldiers."
"He's not."
"Perhaps you should ask why." He would not, Teyla knew that. They would have to do it for him.
End of Part One