DOOM!
A/N: I am confused by the reviews. There now appears to be multiple Julies. Are they clones? Are they imposters? Their presence baffles me. How can I tell my Julie from the rest of them? Julie! Julie! Where are you? Return to the secret bunker! I am hastily throwing together a 'spa' . I can only hope that it will please you... any of you.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ELATION
Damn it. Damn it!
He leaned in close to his monitor and watched the security feed as the medical team somberly zipped Dr. Chaplin into a plain black body bag. He couldn't help the thought that echoed through his mind.
McKay did this. McKay killed her.
His gaze settled on the subject of his hate. Mr. "I'm the smartest in two galaxies" was looking downright horrid. Bruised and battered, panting and pale, McKay sat and leaned heavily against the balcony rail as a nurse monitored his vitals. His shadowed eyes followed the progress of the body bag, while his shoulders slumped with obvious guilt.
Good, he thought, good. McKay should feel guilty. If not for him, Chaplin would be alive. Barbara didn't deserve to die today. He'd liked her. She was a good person—she shouldn't have died due to one of McKay's mistakes.
Damn it. If it wasn't for that rat bastard with his snappy fingers and bossy commands and ability to think so goddamned fast, things never would have gotten this serious. No, Barbara's death was McKay's responsibility. If the so-called chief scientist hadn't blown apart the panel in his haste, the doors would have opened on their own – after everyone was soundly unconscious within.
He was in control, not McKay, and would have sent the 'open' command – eventually.
Most would have been brought back, right? There had been a medical team right outside the door.
Besides, if people had died inside that room, then it was their own damn fault. Beckett picked the wrong people who were incapable of treating their patients – or maybe those in the room were just too weak and couldn't take a little oxygen deprivation.
They'd all be suffering from a bitch of a headache for the rest of the day. That fact alone made him smirk coldly.
Still…no one was supposed to die, but if someone did get killed due to McKay's ineptitude, it wasn't his fault.
It was McKay's, and the Canadian needed to be taught a lesson.
The observer curled his fingers away from the keyboard and leaned back in his chair as he continued to take in the scene. He gave a dark smile as the image on the screen showed Beckett holding his aching head. Weir and Heightmeyer seemed to have suffered somewhat less than the others, and were standing unsteadily. Ronon and Teyla, obviously still suffering from their previous encounter with genius, hunched together along a console, looking absolutely miserable. Sheppard stood to one side, watching McKay, a hand pressed to his forehead. Yes, they all looked as if they suffered.
They deserved everything they received. And they deserved much worse.
The people in the room watched as Barbara was lifted to a gurney, and the watcher watched it all.
He'd come so close — so very close. But even in his defeat, he'd won a victory. Yes, the demoralization on display was enough to sate him for the time being.
He felt his shoulders shake with a combination of restrained laughter and genuine fear. Never before had he felt anything quite like this. He was elated and hyper and terrified and nauseated all at the same time. How could so many feelings be felt at the same time? He didn't understand it. He liked it and hated it. He wanted more and wanted it all to stop. He wanted to run away and hide and shout to everyone that he had made this happen!
When he'd started, all he'd wanted to do was hack into a few of Atlantis' systems — just to show he could, and to screw with the great McKay and all those who went to him to fix everything around here. It wasn't like compromising the different systems was that hard, not anymore at least, not now that he'd perfected his viral code and could modify it to come back whenever anyone tried to delete it. But, after the first few successes…he didn't just want the laugh anymore.
Now, the challenge, the risk and the reward were almost as necessary as breathing.
Now…now he wanted to win.
It was like an addiction. When something was perfect, revered even, like Atlantis, there was something fantastically cathartic about poking holes in it, messing with that perfection, bringing it down and taking it over and mocking its creators for their hubris.
And when someone lorded over that perfection…that person, those people (his eyes followed the 'command staff' as they congealed together, whispering to each other)…they needed to be taken down.
When he was a kid, it had been diagnosed as stereotypical teenage rebellion. Instead of shoplifting, or spray-painting his name over buildings, he did his damage with a computer.
He was good at it.
He had hacked every major system he could get into. Of course, back then, internet security wasn't as good as it was now. Still, even as they grew harder to find, there were always holes to exploit, redundant systems that could act as backdoors, glitches in the masses of coding that created a gateway for people like him.
And he was good. Very good. He kept pushing the envelope, trying harder, getting further. He even managed to hack the FBI a few times, and that had been amazing. He'd felt like a god.
But he had finally been caught, at age seventeen, when he'd attempted to hack into the IMF. There had been a whirlwind of activity, with everyone shouting his name, and struggling to get their hands on him. It was the first time his parents ever seemed to take note of him. He remembered hearing his mother say, "My baby… my baby," as he was led away in cuffs.
But he wasn't a baby anymore, and the CIA had made him an offer, so he said goodbye to everything he had known, and went with the men in suits.
The CIA trained him to use his skills for them.
He never went to college, never found a girlfriend, never really had a life outside of the computers he worked on. The only thrill he achieved, his only reason to live, was the rush he felt when he completed a successful hack.
The CIA loaned him out to the SGC during the height of the war with Anubis, and he'd worked on cracking Go'auld systems, hacking into spaceships and pirated Ancient equipment. Once in, nothing could stop him. He was credited with taking down one ship all by himself. A virus, perfectly placed, and the ship vented its entire atmosphere—along with every living thing on board.
He'd hidden his unmitigated glee. So much destruction had been caused by his fingers. He'd feigned humility as people solemnly clapped his back in thanks. Apparently, loss of life, no matter whose life, was something to be sorrowful about. He'd learned to pretend to believe in that.
In reality, he knew that there were those that deserved to live — and those that needed to die. Chaplin was one of those that should have lived, she'd been his friend, but even as he watched her gurney shunted out of the room on the surveillance system, he realized, deep down, that he didn't even care about her.
Most of humanity annoyed the hell out of him and the world was too full of people.
When the chance to go to Atlantis, to another world, was offered to him, he jumped at the chance. After all—what greater challenge was there than to hack the most technologically advanced city ever created?
But, as it turned out, there were so many distractions, so much to do, he didn't immediately get that itch to ruin what he was working on, to infect the Ancient computers the same way he'd so destructively infected systems back home. They were just too far beyond his understanding, and it was all he could do to carve out even one corner of the database that he could call his "own." You can't hack what you don't comprehend. He was effectively neutered, until such time as he could make sense of what he'd immersed himself in.
Plus, there was that constant threat of being eaten by the Wraith thing. That was pretty distracting.
The worst part, though, the thing that was the most distracting and disheartening, was the horrible feeling that, possibly...
Probably...
Almost definitely...
Rodney McKay might be smarter than him.
It was the when the Trust planted the seeds to turn the ZPM into a bomb that he saw just how good the chief scientist was. He'd stayed behind with the last of the personnel, trying to help McKay save the city, and, at one point, he'd looked up to see McKay type on the two computers on his station, hit a series of keys on the Ancient console, roll his chair to another station and type into another laptop, then roll over to the DHD and do it again with two more laptops.
McKay was running five computers and three Ancient consoles as effectively as if he'd been eight different people.
That sort of speed, memory retention and efficacy was awesome, in the truest sense of the word. Most people, even genius level people, couldn't maintain that many separate levels of coding in their head at the same time—it wasn't human.
Except, apparently, it was. Because McKay was human.
But, as it turned out, he also wasn't God. Despite the superhuman level of McKay's work, the city still would have exploded. Sure, McKay's work, putting up as many dams as possible to forestall the ZPM overload, had given Sheppard and Weir the time to find the codes, but McKay hadn't, in the end, been the one to prevent it on his own. It meant he was fallible.
It meant he was hackable.
So, he had really learned two things that day. One, that McKay was better than him. And two, that McKay could be beaten.
And he resolved that night, lying alone in his bed while parties celebrating yet another near miss rang through the halls outside his door, that he would do what the Genii, the Wraith, the Asurans, the Trust, and the Go'auld could not. Because he was better than all of them.
He would take control of Atlantis, and beat McKay.
His plan though, it kept changing. Like his desire to hack bigger and more complex systems, Atlantis was like a drug he couldn't get enough of. Each time McKay found his code or rewrote and righted the system he'd so carefully screwed with in the last few weeks, it'd both thrilled and enraged him.
He'd laughed hysterically at all the accidents and humiliations he'd so carefully orchestrated, but McKay and his minions had charged in and fixed every single one of them, forcing him to up the stakes each time.
And he knew they were getting more dangerous.
And it just made it even more incredible.
It was mere coincidence that Zelenka had been standing on the Jumper Bay floor when it'd started to open, but when he'd seen the look of sheer terror in Radek's eyes as he fell— it was a whole new feeling of power and fear.
He shivered.
But now he had a problem. McKay, Weir and the others knew there was a hacker. Hell, McKay had probably known for a while, but, in his egotistical mind, the man hadn't been able to fathom the idea that it could be one of his own doing it. It had made things easier. Now it would get hard. McKay was zeroing in on his viral coding, and, this time, as McKay had worked to open the conference room doors, he had actually gone up against McKay in real time, trying to stop the chief scientist from circumventing his work. And he'd failed—McKay had opened the door. It meant his code had to be better, harder to change, more difficult to find.
McKay wouldn't defeat him next time. He would do whatever it took. He would win this, because he was better than them. He was better than all of them. He would beat McKay.
And he'd bring down Atlantis at the same time.
He started typing.
TBC
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A/N: I wonder who that is... REVIEW! Tell me how much you adore me!
And while you do that... I will return to my work on the spa. It will be fabulous.