02. Crack the Code
Elizabeth had never denied her ability to sniff out moral ambiguity, ethics, and other such things that seem to be unknown or simply ignored throughout the Pegasus galaxy. Even with the nanites feeding her brain the necessary information, she was still able to splice the relevant from feelings that are still being processed in the few moments she had once she was in the freezing dark of space.
She hadn't cracked their code, per se; that had been all Rodney.
What she was able to crack was the Replicators' unintentionally programmed need to ascend.
She didn't feel bad, seeing their frozen, horrified faces as they realized what had happened, their stiff unbending bodies floating in space beside of her as they lost the one ability the ancients had programmed them to unerringly do—replicate.
The ethical part of her screamed, a last dying protest of entropic justifications, finally fading to a whimper.
The frozen faces are there, but she didn't feel any regret, as if a replicator could feel anything really. Instead, Elizabeth, the part of her that was still there, regretted not giving Atlantis what they needed. She drifted instead, with the only family she had left—a family of stiff, betrayed screams. In that cold vacuum, she decided that she had done the right thing.
As she watched the stars drift past, the nanites still attempting to fix or compensate for the lowering energy levels, she only really rued the fact that she didn't tell Atlantis how to crack the code.
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