"Well, love, it's been twenty-four hours and I haven't found anything to cause any concern. So, I'm ready to release you," Dr. Beckett was saying cheerfully as he perused her chart.
Emily breathed a sigh of relief and set aside the tattered paperback book she'd been reading. There was something familiar about Beckett, she thought, as she watched him fill out the discharge papers. He reminded her of someone, but she couldn't identify who that might be. She was sure she'd never met him.
He was friendly, surprisingly easy to talk to. She liked him. She usually stuttered and sputtered with most men—or said something stupid or wildly inappropriate—but with him she found herself fairly calm and easy. He'd expressed an interest in her experiences with gate travel. He disliked it too, though not for the same reasons.
He was the first person she'd told about her perception of the gate that didn't seem skeptical or dismissive—instead he seemed fascinated, prodding her for more details. She didn't normally share much in the way of her inner thoughts or feelings with others, particularly about something that personal, but he had such an affable nature that she found herself being more candid than usual. He sat by her bedside talking with her and making her feel at home much longer than was strictly necessary, she thought.
"I'll get the welcoming committee on the radio. Someone will give you a tour, show you to your quarters, help you settle in and brief you on policies and procedures so you can start your work. Pleased to meet you, Dr. Freedman," he concluded with a warm smile and a handshake.
A young soldier arrived, friendly and efficient in manner. He didn't waste any time heading for her quarters, where he said her personal belongings were waiting for her. He pointed out a few landmarks along the way, presumably to help her get her bearings. She couldn't stop gazing in awe at the architectural details, the stained glass, the decorative stonework, the views of the ocean surrounding the city. She paid more attention to where she was going, though, after she bumped into a pillar that stood in the middle of a corridor. She pulled up short and blinked, examining the green, bubbling liquid with reverence—that this sort of artwork had survived ten thousand years without maintenance.
"Here we are, ma'am. These are your quarters." He indicated a blue light that was adjacent to the door. "The scientists have these lights keyed to your unique biosignature." He shrugged, as if to say he had no idea how that was accomplished. "You wave your hand over them or touch them to open the door. You have a few neighbors, but not many yet. This is a new section of the city, just opened for new arrivals by Dr. Weir."
She tentatively waved a hand over the lights, watching as the door slid open. The room inside glowed with golden light from some large, stained glass windows that dominated the small room. She had barely taken that in, when the soldier was handing her a stack of papers and booklets.
"In here," he pointed at one booklet. "You will find detailed instructions on how to use the facilities. It's pretty important that you read that carefully. They don't exactly work like you might expect."
She looked at him quizzically. Crap. Was he talking about the toilet? But he had already moved on to other things. He handed her a tiny radio, meant to sit on her ear, and demonstrated how it was used. He emphasized this was her lifeline to get help around the city, so she paid strict attention. She felt flustered, rushed, and realized suddenly he was turning to go.
"Wait," she said, clutching the shifting mass of paperwork to her chest with one hand so she could hold up the other to stop him. "Could you come back in an hour and show me to my lab?"
He grinned knowingly. "One hour," he said, nodding, and left.
She set the stack of paper on a low, glass-topped table and sank into a cream-colored, armless chair, gazing at the room in astonishment. This was her new home.
It was more than one room, she realized moments later with surprise, and it was certainly nothing like the military accommodations she had sometimes used at the SGC when she was too tired or too obsessed with a project to drive home to sleep. Filled with light, artistic stone elements encrusting the walls—like the rest of the city, it was a place of contemplative beauty. She quickly realized, as she explored, that this small apartment had originally been meant for a family. That made sense, after a moment's thought. The Ancients would certainly have had families when they lived here at the height of their civilization, before the Wraith had made their existence untenable.
It didn't take long to unpack. They hadn't let her bring much. There were some books, a few sentimental objects—some of the smaller artifacts from her private collection. She'd brought a fair amount of toiletries, not knowing what would be available in the commissary. Her hair was unforgiving and needed constant care and feeding like a demanding pet. She put those things away in the bath and hesitantly experimented with the fixtures in that room.
She'd brought some clothing, but not much, knowing she would spend most of her time in uniform. There was a pile of new uniforms in the size she had requested lying on top of the full-sized bed. After a short while she curled up on one of the chairs in the living area and looked around with a fragile smile, waiting for her escort to return.
The city is massive, she thought, as her guide showed her to her lab. Atlantis was a maze of corridors, levels, interconnecting bridges and breezeways. It was so vast, taking transporters from area to area was necessary, which was a bit unnerving, but she thought she could get used to it. At least they didn't make her sick.
The archeology lab was a spacious L-shaped room, already set up with multiple stainless steel cabinets, workbenches and a small desk, shoved in one corner. Another one of her crates was there, full of her work-related books and notebooks. The benches and cabinets were littered with artifacts and there was an Ancient console there for interfacing with the Ancient database.
She donned some gloves and began to carefully pick up, cursorily examine, and sort the artifacts into categories. She hadn't expected there to be so many, but then she hadn't really anticipated just how enormous the city was. On other worlds, they were lucky to find one object and finding a few in one place to study was like a cache of treasure. But here, the objects to be studied numbered in the dozens—possibly more if this wasn't the complete inventory. Pirate's booty.
Sometime later she realized she was ravenous. She'd accidentally missed the midday meal in her zeal to sort and assess her new work environment. She pulled a piece of folded paper from her pocket and checked her watch, set to Atlantis time before leaving Earth. The mess was currently serving a hot meal. She nervously activated the radio on her ear to request an escort from the welcoming committee.
She found an empty table near a window and sat down by herself, sighing. Starting over again, making acquaintances, was never fun. This could be a long assignment. There were probably going to be a lot of lonely meals in her future.
"Well, hello, love," someone chirped cheerfully above her. It was Dr. Beckett. "Mind if I join you?"
"Of course! Please, sit." She gestured at the open seat across from her and smiled, pleased to have company after all.
He shot her a pleasant, but frank expression of sympathy, "It's a bit much, isn't it? Coming to Atlantis, I mean."
She looked at him with surprise. Either he could read her thoughts or it was written all over her face. "It certainly is." She smiled and shook her head.
"So," he said, with a lighthearted smile, waving his napkin in the air, "have you discovered the benefits of having the ATA gene? You know, lights turn on for you, doors open for you, room and shower always perfect temperature? There aren't too many of us here with the naturally expressed gene, you know. It's just myself, Colonel Shepherd, and now you. There are many others who have undergone the gene therapy, but it isn't exactly the same, you know."
She smiled. "I've been experimenting with it a little bit and it is just extraordinary, isn't it? Feels sort of. . . magic. But the ATA gene therapy doesn't fully reproduce the effect? Why would that be?"
"Well, we aren't completely sure and we're still working on it, though it isn't a priority since it works well enough as it is now, but I suspect that those of us with the natural genes are either homozygous dominant or—" He paused as he leaned across the length of the table for the salt.
"Meaning both of our parents gave us a copy of the ATA gene, right—two copies?" she put in, thinking back to her college genetics course.
He looked surprised. "Yes, exactly. That would be exceedingly rare. The gene itself is rare enough, but for both parents to have a copy and for both copies to actually appear in one of their offspring is statistically, well, I haven't calculated it exactly, but it's mind-boggling." He busied himself with opening his water. "I've tested Colonel Sheppard and he actually is homozygous dominant—which, as I said, should be nearly impossible, but was likely the norm among the Ancients. I believe it explains why he's so proficient with the technology. It's quite intuitive for him—he achieves the neural interface effortlessly. I, however, am heterozygous dominant. I have one ATA gene and one recessive gene—the recessive gene being the common gene for humans, of course—and my experience with the tech is not quite as easy as the Colonel's."
She wrinkled her brow, thinking it through. "Oh, so this controls the level of gene expression, you think?"
Beckett nodded, looking impressed with her deduction. "I do. It's not much of a sample size, to be sure, but I do think it plays a role. If you think about the genes for height or hair color, for example—we do know they, at least, have an additive effect. Two fairly short-statured parents can produce a quite tall offspring if each parent happens to donate the particular chromosome with more height-encoding alleles. It's much the same with hair color." He gestured at her. "Say, for example, hypothetically, it takes ten alleles that code for brown to cause the gene expression for dark brown hair like mine, then it would take but four or five to code for the lovely chestnut color of yours. It's far more complex than that, of course, but you get the general idea."
She swallowed and said, "That's just fascinating. I'd be curious to know where I fall."
He raised his eyebrows and waved his fork around. "It's simple enough to test. I have blood samples from your stay in the infirmary. I'd be happy to test them, simply to satisfy my own curiosity. I could set up a PCR and run a gel tomorrow if there aren't any major crises to interfere."
She smiled. "Thanks, that would be wonderful."
He sent her a conspiratorial look. "Just you wait til they expect you to start flying jumpers and they need you to initialize every bit of equipment they're using. God forbid they expect you to sit in the control chair. Actually, I imagine they will test you on that, like they have everyone else. They have a ranking system. I'm number two behind Colonel Sheppard. It'll be interesting to see where you rank after we see what your gene status is."
"Hm." She frowned worriedly. "I can't really see myself doing any of those things."
He nodded with chagrin. "Well, I've always felt the same way, but sometimes it's necessary to have all hands on deck, so to speak. It's better now that so many of the personnel have had the gene therapy, though."
They ate in silence for a while and she realized he never explained why the gene therapy didn't work as well. "But, um, so the gene therapy, it would mimic heterozygous dominance, wouldn't it? Why isn't it the same?"
He nodded and swallowed. "Well, we've come a long way with somatic gene therapy, but it's still in its infancy. I can only assume we aren't getting full coverage of the somatic cells. With fewer cells expressing the genes, fewer of the proteins and enzymes are produced that make the interface with the technology possible. The therapy is a watered-down version of it, really. We're lucky it works at all. But it does work, about fifty percent of the time. There are quite a few people who have an immune response to the vector, a mouse retrovirus, and they simply can't incorporate the gene at all."
Dr. Beckett started tucking back into the food on his tray, then looked up and seemed to be distracted by something he saw across the room. He raised his hand to flag someone down, "Rodney, I'd like you to meet someone—"
"Not now Carson. I've got to talk to Sheppard." Dr. McKay hurried by, his face buried in a tablet computer, precariously balancing a tray laden with food out in front of him.
Emily held her breath as he went by, bending over her own food to hide her expression as her heart pounded in her chest, chiding herself for being such a fool.
But it was Dr. Beckett who looked sheepish. "You'll have to forgive Dr. McKay. He has a one-track-mind, I'm afraid."
She smiled nervously. "It looks like he's busy."
"Yes. Isn't he always?" he said with a frown.
The next morning Dr. Elizabeth Weir stopped in the lab to see how Emily was settling in. "Dr. Beckett told me you were released from the infirmary yesterday. I see you've already done some rearranging?"
"Yes. This group of artifacts appears to be very similar to some things we've already studied on Earth." Emily gestured to a small grouping laid out on a nearby stainless steel workbench. "That just needs to be confirmed, of course. This other group is completely unknown, but is well-marked and shouldn't present much problem in determining function."
"Good. But there were far more objects placed in this lab over the last 2 years—" Weir broke in quizzically.
"Yes. I locked the rest away in this set of compartments," she said, indicating the stainless steel cabinets. "Those artifacts are unmarked with anything I recognize and will need to be examined with the utmost care. Because I have the ATA gene, I could initialize them with minimal contact and not even realize it. Then anyone touching them could be affected adversely. It's far better to keep them isolated."
Those are the dangerous ones, she thought. The ones that no sane person would volunteer to touch, much less handle for extended periods of time—each passing hour increasing the chance that an accident could occur. But. . . this was the nature of her work. One aspect anyway. Despite the single accident that had shaken her confidence to the very marrow, she knew that she was good at it.
Weir was nodding agreement.
"It looks like they've been well-cataloged so far, so I'll be cross-referencing the locations of their discovery in the database in hopes that we can find some clues about what these instruments do before we start work on any of them."
Weir regarded her thoughtfully. "I appreciate your caution. How about the translations? Tell me about your plans for that."
"Of course. I brought along the beginnings of translation software that I've been developing. But I'll need some assistance from the computer specialists here to interface with the Ancient database and to further develop the software. My own programming skills are. . . poor, quite frankly. I don't have much experience in that area. If I can communicate what I need and we can get something going over the next few months, we should be able to quickly make some headway on the list you left for me. But until that happens, I'll work on the translations manually."
"Have you met Dr. McKay yet?"
"No, not yet." She willed her expression to remain pleasantly engaged, nothing more.
"I'll send him down so you can talk about what kind of assistance you need in detail."
Weir excused herself and Emily sat down to work, trying not to quiver with the anticipation of meeting McKay. Not knowing when or where she would finally meet him was unsettling. She consciously avoided thinking of him, but from time to time her mind would spontaneously wander and she would catch herself daydreaming, with images from the dreams burbling to the surface, filling her with foreign feelings that she didn't recognize and didn't know how to handle.
She knew, realistically, that the whole thing was insane. There was no reason to think that the dreams were anything more than a figment of her imagination. Though how her imagination could have conjured a real person she hadn't actually met, she had no idea. Most disconcerting was the fact that she couldn't actually remember the encounter with the artifact. Her scribbled notes from that day were the only evidence that the event had even occurred. Without the revelation the notes provided, would she have been driven to act unconsciously? Was that the intended design of the device? It was a scary thought. She was lucky to know, to be able to remain consciously aware of it, and to maintain control. Yes, she had let it bring her here—but merely to satisfy her curiosity. She wouldn't necessarily act on anything. She just hoped she wasn't jeopardizing her career with this absurdity. With effort, she stifled her jangled nerves and focused on her work.
Emily quickly fell into her regular work rituals, which meant that she only stopped long enough to eat and sleep. Coffee, in quantity throughout the day, allowed her to sublimate the latter as much as possible. Back home, it would have been diet coke, but that wasn't possible here. So, military-grade coffee with generic blue packets of artificial sweetener was doing the job. It was so easy to become obsessed with a translation or an object and spend hours with it, checking and cross-checking facts, only stopping when fatigue or hunger completely intruded into her mental space. It seemed to be hard for most people to understand, but this was her happy place.
She forgot about McKay, whom she still hadn't encountered, and happily employed a computer specialist that he sent in his place. He didn't interrupt her much, just worked doggedly at the tasks she laid out for him. He quickly got a laptop interfaced with the Ancient database and started writing code for the translation software.
What she was asking for was complicated. Ancient was a highly nuanced and complex language. It was critical that the many layers of meaning within a combination of words, especially if one of those words contained an inverted letter, would be revealed. Dr. Walters told her he would get the basic structure in place, but that other team members would need to be rotated through to try to achieve the level of detail that she was insisting on.
Ancient—or more properly, Alteran—was similar in many ways to Latin. It was likely the foundation of Latin, albeit with a completely different alphabet. Yet there was one important aspect to Ancient that had been largely overlooked in the early years of the Stargate program—sometimes certain letters were inverted. To the uninitiated, it seemed to mean very little, but her research, particularly with regards to the Lantean dialect, had shown that it actually added layers of meaning to a word that could completely change the tone of a document, if one was in the know. It was a secret code within the language itself. It really took an expert to get the full meaning from a text—and that was her.