A gigantic circular thing dominated the clearing. It carried the appearance of a carefully machined stone ring. But only the appearance, mind you. Around its periphery its builders had engraved it with runes, strange eldritch shapes that appeared to contain meaning beyond the squiggles that they might have appeared to be to an observer that indulged in just a hasty inspection.
The ring was about forty centimetres thick and approximately five metres in diameter.
Its very appearance carried a message of foreboding. If it were a map, the makers would have written 'here be dragons' and they would have been right. But in ways that the ancient cartographers would never have realised. Or even dreamt off for that matter. Not even after sneaking out to the refrigerator in the middle of the night to snack on the left over curry from dinner a couple of nights ago, and then to waking, screaming, afterward with their heart pounding and their sheets soaked with the sweat of fear. Not even then.
The heavy stone ring rotated slowly within the confines of its stony shroud; finally drawing to a halt with a precision that was impressive in a machine of that size. Something went click with a solid sort of sound that is characteristic of large stone hitting stone, but the note was pure, as though it was made from accurately shaped large stones with remarkably few impurities, oh and a nice line in audio engineering. At equal intervals around the circular stone structure, the builders had arranged stone chevrons that were able to move into and out of mesh with the ring. This motion was executed with a similar machine like precision to that exhibited by the rotation of the ring. One of those had just locked into place while we watched.
One after another, each of the chevrons dropped into position, forming a sequence by landing with a pregnant click that might have signified something satisfying to anyone who happened to be standing around and watching things happen. Luckily there were none of those people things hanging around, so this introduction can take place without any of those inconvenient actions to describe, like what all the people standing around are actually doing. If they all just stood still it might be OK, but they insist in moving and exercising something they call free will and that plays havoc with the exposition phase of the narrative, where we must set the scene. This is especially true when an apparently inanimate object like a giant ring of stone takes it upon it's self to start moving purposefully without any obvious mechanism to do so. If there are people standing around it they react in the most profoundly chaotic manner.
OK, that's out in the open now. We can go back to the task of setting the scene here.
Continuing…
If the ring had been formed from stone, it should have left a sizeable dent in the dirt…
Well actually it did. We can see that it did even from this far away. If we move closer we can see that the bottom of the ring was buried about thirty centimetres into the loam, but that could be accounted for by the gradual accretion of dirt that accumulated as a consequence of the ring's disruption of the flow of wind across the plain. OK, that explains what happened there but…
If anyone measured the density of the material from which it had been fashioned, they would have realised that it should have left a sizeable dent in space-time. A negative dent and more aptly named a wormhole by the scientists of Earth, not that there are actual worms involved, except for the Goa'uld - who are vaguely wormy.
This kind of wormhole is the sort of mathematical extrapolation that dizzy mathematicians make from quantum physical mathematics. The nature of those calculations suggested that exotic matter, that is matter with a negative energy density, could be used to stabilise the boundaries of a wormhole in space-time.
Try that one on for size. It's a real conceptual stretch.
Is it real? Or is it a figment of the half-arsed and fundamentally flawed oversimplifications that come out of the mathematical models that humans have developed to describe the underlying mechanisms that make up the universe?
They are good questions and humans do not ask themselves these questions often enough.
As it turns out the answer was actually the former, but the latter was a hell of a sentence. And should remain in this narrative, if only to prove that nonsense can be formed by employing standard words without the grammar checker built into the word-processing software making any kind of objection.
Having established the spatial wormholes are theoretically feasible, we should consider what might happen should a race with sufficient technological prowess attempt to fashion such a device. It might look just like the thing that occupied the centre of the clearing.
That might be the case if they had a flair for ancient Egyptian imagery, that is. Or was that the other way around? History doesn't record. The winners write history, but they often go away before it gets read. In this instance it is unfortunately true once again, they were not available to interrogate, because you can only have a winning streak for so long before some punk comes along with a new slant on the old game and kicks your complacent ass. Afterwards, it is only your monuments that are left behind and the punks often marvel at them, but really, the only way those who come after you can understand you, is to dig holes and play with your garbage. Sort of makes a mockery of winning, when you think about it, but that's the long view, sentient beings tend to work to a shorter horizon than that. Their attention ranges beyond the instinctive desire to procure their next meal, although they do consider this subject on occasions, but it usually falls short of the reason behind the universe's existence (except for the occasional unwashed and undernourished guru that occasionally turns up on the top of mountains.)
The ring rotated again, slowly, moving in the opposite direction this time. From the ring came a rumble like a grinding wheel lazily crushing cornhusks that accompanied its majestic progress. It was a sound that filled the otherwise expectantly silent clearing with a new and dangerous foreboding. Well it would have been if there was any one there to listen. Those sorts of things have value judgements attached to them, and unless you have the sort of nervous system that responds to those sorts of things, then they are just so much noise in the forest. The ponderous rotation and counter rotation continued remorselessly until a sixth hieroglyphic from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a final robust click.
There was a pregnant pause; it endured just long enough to lend an air of expectancy to proceedings. It was the sort of precisely fashioned pause that you would expect from any Creator who had a flair for the dramatic. As we shall see later, a flair for the dramatic is just a by-product of the wicked sense of humour that the creator of this universe displayed.
From within the ring, a burst of cloud rocketed almost five metres into the clearing. It swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly and formed a shimmering interface that remained suspended inside the stone ring. It looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical, and didn't slosh onto the floor. That was a poor piece of camouflage. Any fool could see that was not the sort of behaviour that you would expect from a pool of water.
The silhouette of a man stepped through the interface and surveyed the scene that confronted him.
Only moments (or aeons depending on which side of the singularity in the equations defining the gate operation you assumed that we approached the mathematical limit from) Colonel Jack O'Neill led the SG-1 team into the stargate and made the disorienting roller coaster ride to the other side. He stepped through the final portal, lurching to a halt on the far side of the interface and then proceeded to stumble clumsily to a halt after a fraught passage of fifteen or twenty metres. He stayed upright this time, so he did a little victory dance and punched the air.
"Yesss!" he said.
Beneath his marine combat helmet, Jack O'Neill's face set in an expression of mild curiosity. It sat well among the other careworn lines that it encountered on his face. Someone once told Jack O'Neill that he looked like a worn out version of the guy who played MacGyver in that woeful old television program. He couldn't see the resemblance himself. And he has tried. A few times he had found himself in front of a mirror making critical assessments of the features nature had provided for him and he has cursed his luck. He was tallish, extravagantly fit for his age, which was middling, his aerobic fitness levels reflecting his active role in stargate exploration.
O'Neill walked back over to stand beside the stargate, where he had just come through from Earth. We can see the shimmering surface of the event horizon. It glows from within. Illuminated by the leakage of the mighty power it consumes in holding itself open, and back lighting O'Neill so that he appears to be little more than a black interruption in the passage of light. It is such a pity that a visually spectacular display of that nature can go unseen by anyone (except for us of course, but we don't count in this instance).
Only moments (or eons, see previous description of nauseating passage through wormhole.) earlier, Jack O'Neill had been standing below (weeeeell below) a Mountain outside the city of Cheyenne, state of Wyoming in the country called the United States of America on Sol III of the Milky Way (It is important to be specific in these things because there are a lot of places in this little universe and you might get them confused). It was part of a top secret military research facility known as SGC. Guess what - that stood for Star gate Command. Subtle huh?
In the years that followed the stargate's initial discovery, uncovered in an archaeological dig in the back blocks of Egypt, the US government scratched their collective heads and wondered what to do with the thing. In the end they secreted (as in secret, not secrete, that's just a yuck concept in this instance) it beneath the Rocky Mountains outside Cheyenne, hiding it from the world's prying eyes by the simple expedient of burying it in a secured military compound.
And then they tried to work out what it did. After all if you had found a giant stone ring, deliberately buried beneath the sort of rubble that looked like the reject material from a pyramid brick manufacturing facility, you might wonder why they had gone to so much trouble to hide it and what it might be used for. Especially if you had even the remotest suspicion that it might make a useful piece of martial technology.
And so the US Military establishment did what they always did, they filled a room with experts in every -ology from archaeology to zoology and gave them the sort of budget that would feed most of Rwanda (or rather fill too many warehouses to count while the rebels prevented the food from getting through to the population they were 'liberating from the tyrannical regime of (insert latest dictators name here)') and still have enough left over to cover the third world's debt.
The investigation team worked out what it was, (a circle of exotic matter. Now that caused some consternation, since many of the scientific community considered that an impossibility. See the previous dissertation on the nature of mathematical modelling applied to the workings of the universe) and they worked out how it worked and all that, but they never came up with a way to control it.
The ring was somewhat lacking in usefulness, if it couldn't be controlled.
They suspected the control of the ring had something to do with the runes arranged around the outside, but no amount of cryptographic analysis gave them the answer. They kept looking at it the wrong way. It was like trying to read a map if you thought it was in code, no amount of cryptographic analysis is going to decode the English language. Code needs rules, and we all know how the 'rules' work in English. They didn't need a cryptographer (or twelve) they needed a linguist.
This untenable condition existed until they enlisted Daniel Jackson, one time crackpot archaeological theorist, and now a valued member of the stargate investigation team.
He was one weird unit. He actually read the stuff.
It was a language that he understood.
Language is not cryptography; it's coded into the neural hardware that we carry in our skulls. Bucket loads of it's meaning is carried in the body language, the tone, the tenor and worst of all in the idiom. Here's an example, 'the road to nowhere'; we all know where that leads. Imagine an alien with an English language phrase book trying to work that one out.
Jackson's work was pivotal in the deciphering of the gate runes. And of course his reward for a job well done - was another job and because of that we will hear a lot more about Jackson later. In fact, he is the man who just stepped from the event horizon, and he plays a key role in the rest of this story.
He picked himself up from where he landed, dusted himself off ineffectually and marched back to stand behind Jack O'Neill. He took in the beautiful day that awaited them. He sucked in enough of the local air to fill both of his lungs. That was not a clever thing to do. There is another thing that needs to be stated at this point regarding Daniel Jackson. He suffers badly from allergies. Hayfever is his life. There he was, in a forest full of plants that used pollen as part of their breeding cycle and he has sucked a huge lung full of the stuff in.
He sneezed - a lot.
While he suffers, we will continue with the narrative.
Daniel Jackson's PhD was actually taken in Egyptology, and he once upon a time made a living as an archaeologist, but we can forgive him, he can't help his lack of education, or the glaring conceptual gaps in his knowledge base.
The linguistic skills that make him so valuable to the SGC is sort of a hobby that he added on the side, just something to make the job easier.
And the job was easy for a while.
Then he went and developed some crackpot theory about the ancient Egyptian monuments being built by aliens. And that made the job difficult. It gets hard to find a job in archaeology when your pet theory conflicts with the pet theory of the old guy with the chequebook.
That was some time ago of course. He is now a valued member of the SGC program, although that was not always the case. Before the runes were translated he was a pariah, a latter day exponent of the theories of Erik van Dannekin. He had discovered evidence that the Egyptians had been enslaved by a race of aliens and further that the pyramids and other giant stonemasonry achievements of their culture were the symbols of these god-like interlopers. Jackson missed out on the vast tabloid sums on offer for crackpot theories; his celebrated predecessor had extracted all of that two decades earlier. Jackson was left with just the ridicule and derision without gaining any of the financial rewards, or even his own short-lived television program. Does any one out there remember 'chariots of the gods'?
It wasn't all doom and gloom. After a few sorry moments, that same theory made his new job easier. You have to understand that the US military didn't have just a theory about the aliens that built the Egyptian monuments. They knew for a fact that humans built the monuments, it was just that they were slaves to a bunch of parasitic aliens. It was a good theory, the one that Jackson developed, and it was almost right.
Naturally the military couldn't have a man who stayed at school until he was twenty five, and spent his time sprouting those sorts of things to anyone who would listen, especially since they were almost true. They had a couple of choices; they could have him shot, or they could hire him on to work for them.
It was a close run thing, but hiring him won them over.
Since then he has been a vital cog in the great SGC machine, (Oh yeah, there was that thing about the thermonuclear device on Abydos. And the fact that Jackson stayed there with Shar'rea after O'Neill and team blew up the space ship that Ra was flying. And yeah, Jackson only came back when they found out that Ra wasn't the only Egyptian God who was really a Goa'uld, but that Apothis was out there as well. And there was all those others who called them selves system lords and… That'll take all day, so we'll just stop there. Except to tell you that Shar'rea was later kidnapped by the Goa'uld and her body was used to house one of their larvae and then they made her pregnant with a human baby and finally she was killed. Jackson thinks all that sucks and he hates the little wormy bastards more than Teal'c and that is saying something.)
Jackson was seriously pissed off with the Goa'uld by that stage. In fact things have got to the point where Indiana Jones and Lara Croft are not the only archaeologists who carry guns. Jackson doesn't do such a cool line in bull-whips, or look anywhere near as good in the tank-top and shorts combo, but he does a great line in distracted investigation in the face of pressing peril.
He also does great unconsciousness and he also has resurrection down pat as well. He's seen the inside of nearly as many of the Goa'uld sarcophaguses as he has Egyptian tombs.
So that was how he found himself standing in field full of artistically arranged rocks, surrounded by an atmosphere laden with pollen, as part of the exploration team known as SG-1 commanded by Colonel Jack O'Neill.
Jackson ran his hand through what used to be a foppish hairstyle before he surrendered to US military convention and had it cut shorter. He was wearing glasses, which is not really in keeping with the amount of weaponry slung from his person, but it does add a bookish air to his otherwise threatening military presence, making a fashion statement about the nature of his involvement in the stargate program. Jackson is also tallish, with the boyishly regular features of a man who might have made a career in television news reading if he had been older and done his apprenticeship covering stories in war zones.
He stares at things with the curiosity of the over educated. If we look closely we can see evidence of that now that he has finished sneezing.
"Well this looks like an exciting jaunt," Jackson commented.
Back where they came from - a small insignificant planet named Earth in all correspondence between the local inhabitants (well a small minority of the inhabitants, but they were the only ones who called it anything. In fact they were the only one's to develop any sort of expressive language. Not that you can draw much in the way of conclusions about a people who name their home planet after 'dirt'. Although, to give them their due, I suppose they did give it a capital letter. That's one thing I suppose) the stargate lay hidden and secure beneath the Cheyenne Mountains. That's the military kind of secure. Nothing turned net nerds on like the idea of a secret military establishment, we've all seen enough movies to know how easy it is for a greasy haired and unshaven pack of failed yuppies to break into the secured servers throughout the world. There is no protocol that is proof against a guy with a modem, a lexicon full of bad jargon and an under-utilised bathroom/laundry. So the SGC had a bit of a problem with electronic security. Physical security, that was another matter. You had more chance of getting into the place from another planet than you did of getting in there from anywhere on Earth. If you've followed all this to it's logical conclusion, then you will have realised that we have the situation where the semi-literate written reports prepared by the Star Gate Command exploration teams find their way onto sites like the one from which you down loaded this story. They get heavily edited by bored high-school students and the occasional university graduate with nothing better to do, so that the document you down load from this site has less of the piss poor grammar, and lousy spelling, but they remain otherwise correct. Meanwhile no one gets in and no one gets out without a presidential order. You have to wonder about the bureaucratic mind, and the Military mind and the scientific mind and the… never mind.
"Lot of nothing, just scrub and forest," O'Neill told Jackson, who didn't need to be told this, possessing as he did a pair of optical sensors of reasonable quality (baring the need for corrective lenses) and he took the same optical data through to the bio-ware processor inside his skull. O'Neill and Jackson also shared a reasonable correlation of conceptual schema, so the observation regarding the nature of the terrain was fatuous and unnecessary. That has never stopped O'Neill from stating the obvious in the past and probably never will, he being too old a dog to learn new tricks regarding his behaviour.
O'Neill's booted feet were halfway submerged in the soft dirt floor of the clearing. They had been clean and shiny before he stepped though the gate and he was not looking forward to the job of cleaning that gunk off them.
O'Neill turned back to face the stargate, and so doing he looked directly into the optical cloak that protected them for the violent storm of radiation that would otherwise be emitted from the stargate wormhole's event horizon. O'Neill wondered, and not for the first time, just what exactly he was looking at. It had been explained to him, but not having developed the same conceptual schema as the explainee, O'Neill completely failed to grasp the whole explanation.
He had managed to work out that the Symbols engraved into the circumference of the giant toroidal piece of stonemasonry represented addresses, locations in space where other gates awaited. Inside the circle of runes was a visually disturbing damper/interface, one that was modulated from within the wormhole portal so that it cloaked the event horizon. As we said earlier, it looked like some one had suspended the surface of a swimming pool in the vertical plane. And then the bastards had neglected to tell the water that it should run away and sulk (like it would have done if it had been proper water rather than some half baked alien construct left behind by a bunch of arrogant bastards who only wanted the lesser races that came after them to refer to them as the ancients). At least the Asgards had the common decency to give themselves a proper name. OK so they fashioned themselves as Gods. And they Lorded it over the Norse people as though they really were gods.
We know all that.
Hubris is not just a human affliction, all right. We are not alone in thinking we have a divine right to the divine. Yes, other races in this universe suffer from the same thing. OK. We have got that out of the way so we can move forward.
*
"It's just a thought," General Hammond ruminated, "but I think we need not go quite that far back. I'm not quite sure that you understood what I meant when I said I wanted you to start from the beginning."
Around the table, several other members of the military management were visibly struggling to either stay awake or restrain their natural tendency to tell him to "hurry the hell up," or words to that effect, you know, those ones with a similar number of syllables in the expletive adjective.
There were universal expressions of gratitude displayed all around the table.
Teal'c raised an eyebrow in mute query.
"Let's concentrate on the nature of what you found after you got over there," suggested General Hammond. "Keep to the things that are pertinent."
"Under the circumstances," rumbled Teal'c, "many things may not seem pertinent until we examine them later. I simply felt that it was important that everything is brought out as it occurs. Doctor Jackson has spent many hours explaining the nature of thorough investigation to me."
Around the table, many knowing looks were exchanged. Groans were suppressed. They had all had the misfortune to have one of Daniel Jackson's briefs wheeled into their offices at some stage. As much as the military leadership hated wading through the things, the non-com staff particularly hated carrying the things. At least it sat on a desk (well the volume that you were reading, plus the volume which explained the glossary of terms, the rest waited in the bookshelf glaring at them malignantly). The non-coms had to lug them from Out-tray to In-tray, because the secretarial staff refused to try.
"Perhaps we should try to use the Samantha Carter model of investigation and reporting," suggested General Hammond.
Teal'c nodded in understanding. "I have spent many hours gaining an understanding of her methods of operation as well."
*
"Ah, primeval landscape, type II," commented Jackson.
To Jack O'Neill's discerning eye, there seemed to be two types of landscapes on the far side of a stargate. Those are best characterised as trees and scrub, or sand and dunes.
"I think we did that one already," O'Neill said dryly. Most things of the things that O'Neill said were said dry. He could tell you it was raining and it would sound dry. That is because the style of his vocal delivery has something to do with his long career in military, or it might have been the fact that his son died accidentally while playing with O'Neill's gun, or lots of other things, that only confuse the issue and in no way explain the behaviour. Most of the people who knew him concluded that his vocal delivery style could simply be a result of the way his sense of humour was wired up and there ain't nothing that can be done about it. Some people are just like that. Hey it takes all kinds and he was certainly of the classification: kind, one of.
We should note that Teal'c and Daniel Jackson came through the stargate portal almost simultaneously.
We have already met Teal'c in this narrative, we need not labour his description again. He stepped up to join the conversation between O'Neill and Jackson.
"Hmm," said Teal'c and then lapsed into silence while the other two waited for him to speak. He gets no invitations to speak after dinner. Lets' face it, after a four course dinner you need a rousing orator if you are going to avoid falling asleep in the remains of your dessert, so that sort of long pause is going to be extremely annoying. Teal'c does not care. He is happy with that aspect of his personality, because it beats the hell out of the life he led before joining the SGC team. At least now he gets to walk around and talk to people.
Teal'c and Jackson stood beside Jack O'Neill, (standing in the moist loam). They turned back toward the stargate and waited. Only three-quarters of the team had come through the gate as yet. For once the straggler was not Daniel Jackson, who had more ways to delay a departure through the gate than a Russian Airline.
After a pause, while they all stood around like a stale reception committee with something better to do, one more person came through the portal. Major Samantha Carter was the straggler, but we will forgive her tardy timekeeping because she was worth the wait. In that respect she has a lot in common with Janet Fraiser.
Let's watch Samantha Carter for a sec, because the three male members of SG-1 were doing that, and besides, there's not much else going on. Watching Carter is a common pastime in the SGC compound. It has something to do with the way human male's neural pathways are configured. In order to optimise the development of the species and ensure the best genetic mixing, there is a geometric affiliation between the male attention span and their idea of the optimum female anatomical arrangement. Geneticists are considering a theory related to the geometric spiral found in nature with the aspect ratio of 1:1.618. It seems to be linked to the nature of DNA and the gene complexes that form the basis of all life on Earth. Carter has commonly regarded as the best combination of those traits in the SGC compound, narrowly winning the admiration contest over Janet Fraiser because Carter is a bit taller than the auburn haired medic. So watching her walk through the event horizon and across the now trampled patch of loam is not going to be such a great hardship, so there was probably no need to remind you to do so.
As for the true Samantha Carter, the reasoning and cogitating consciousness that is supported by that biological containment system that just happens to have that optimum structural arrangement, she has an impression of her own worth that far exceeds the narrow bounds of the male mating cataloguing system by which she is often judged (favourably). She has a PhD in physics but you could never tell the extent of her impact on the male of the species from that observation.
It is such a crass understatement, but Carter was a handsome woman. She was still somewhere in the early phases of the transition from young to the 'uncertain age' of female matriarchal hierarchy. For the adult male of the species that is the time when a woman has her greatest appeal.
The degree to which Samantha Carter was physically attractive was something of which Jack O'Neill was uncomfortably aware, despite her blonde hair now being cut relatively short, and crushed beneath a combat helmet that looked one size too large for her, and her unfortunate dress sense. Military clothing comes in two sizes (too big and too small). Carter seems to be afflicted with some sort of condition that ensures that she can only ever find a quartermaster who only ever has the too-small size in stock, and it fits her like a glove. Little does she know that money exchanges hands among the non-coms to ensure that this state of affairs continues.
Ethically, she is purely Earth based military like O'Neill and also like O'Neill she was overloaded with malevolent gear when she stepped through the gate. She carried a gun; she had a knife and grenades on the webbing around her waist. Her helmet crushed her hair into a shaggy fringe that protruded around the edges. Her combat fatigues moulded themselves to a shape that was worth a second look, especially if you like them with metallic objects of malevolent intent clipped and stashed all over her person. That group includes most of the SCG non-coms and all of the males among the officer cadre.
OK, we have a complete team now.
*
"Perhaps we should cut to the investigation Teal'c," suggested General Hammond. "this has been a wonderfully detailed exposition."
What was really going through his head was a comparison between the length and effort involved in this briefing and the task of herding thirteen year olds into the bus for a football match. General Hammond thought the latter might have taken less time, and less effort.
Teal'c took a sip from the glass of water that some one had provided for him.
"I don't know about the rest of you," began Colonel Makepeace. "But it's only," he checked his watch, "six forty four and I am in need of another cup of coffee."
General Hammond handed him his empty cup. "Carry on Teal'c," he said.