Just about the only person who looked restful was Sam.
Janet stood clutching the clip-board, reviewing the latest results. No one ever understood. It was her job to run the tests, find the solution, apply it, patch up the patient and move on. No one ever took the time to consider the emotional attachments. And for a team as close as SG-1 and General Hammond, when one of them got hurt she had to think of all five of them as her patients.
Colonel O'Neill was still in deep denial and hadn't had any sleep in fifty-four hours; General Hammond had reached the classic anger and frustration stage; Daniel kept running in and out, his distress far too clear for everyone to see and twice as disruptive; Teal'c was perhaps the easiest to work with, despite his alien nature, yet she was learning to see beneath his stoic visage and knew that even he wasn't immune.
Communication was nigh on impossible.
"What on God's own Earth was that?"
"I wish I knew, General," Janet said. "She insists that she's speaking normally. She says she can think herself saying the words and can't understand why it sounds so wrong to us."
"Wrong, Doctor? I haven't heard a noise like that in all my born days."
"Yes, Sir. That's why we had the first briefing in your office. She is trying not to talk. Trust me, you don't want to hear her shouting; her tonal range is quite broad. At its quietest, there are harmonics and subsonics which could temporarily immobilize an unsuspecting person. At it's loudest, this close, she could easily incapacitate all of us. It really is quite frightening."
"It's been 36 hours, Doctor," Hammond had that look of impatience which only meant trouble.
The easy part was telling them what she knew. "Sir, there's nothing physiologically wrong." The hard part was convincing them. "After the Colonel brought her to OR she regained some awareness but was, as you've just heard, unable to communicate." The General had only just heard the noise coming out of her mouth, but the Colonel had caught the full force of it more than once and it had near scared the life out of everyone else who'd heard it.
"She appeared to have an immediate relapse." The Colonel didn't try to interrupt her; that was good. "Some seconds later, she came to again. We tried to hold her, but the way she reacted... I had to sedate her."
Janet paused. Briefings were easier when they went like this. First, make the General think he was in control. "Go on, Doctor," Hammond obliged.
"Yes, Sir. The initial attack has so far been the worst. The first time, there was blood loss, consistent with concussion and trauma to the ears and eyes."
"Like a Goa'uld shock grenade."
"Yes, General, but the severity indicated she would have had to have been hit by several of them at extremely close quarters. Of course, I only have anecdotal evidence, but bleeding is unusual."
"And there were no grenades."
"Yes, Colonel. Anyway, we cleaned the blood away and began monitoring. EKG, EEG, we're monitoring everything we can think of. Full blood works, the lot. She's aware now." The hard part was not letting the frustration show. "We've done MRI and CAT scans. I've got x-rays and enough data to fill a book on what a woman would be like if she was at the peak of physical condition and in perfect health."
"Let me get this right, Doctor: what you're basically saying is there's nothing wrong except that she can't see or hear or talk?"
"More than that, General. We're getting the proper responses to both homologous and heterologous stimuli. It's as if the signals entering the brain are quite simply not being interpreted. There was nothing on her last screening to indicate anything with the potential to cause trauma on this scale. There's nothing now. We're doing the fullest analysis possible. So far, apart from a blood-count anomaly, she's clean."
"It's biological?"
"No, General. At least as far as I can tell. We did a full comparison. We started with the signature from the symbiote. No change." Janet paused. "And I don't mean any significant change, I mean no change at all."
"So just what have you found, Doctor?"
"Sir, this is where it gets complicated," Janet said. "We did the usual standard blood tests first. For completeness, to start with, we did both darkfield and phase contrast. For the most part there was nothing wrong, so we did more tests. At first I thought there was an error on the first blood work-up. It was so far off the mark, I had another sample taken. It's just about our only clue to what could possibly be wrong. We're taking samples every six hours now."
Janet turned to one of the computers and pulled up a graph. "This shows the count of healthy red blood cells over the last 36 hours. It's far too low." Janet clicked the mouse. "This overlay shows the normal red cell count." Another click. "We've only got a few data points, but we can extrapolate." Janet paused to let them look at the graph. It should be obvious what was wrong. "Sir, what we're seeing is something like hemolytic anemia, when the bone marrow is unable to compensate for the destruction of red blood cells. There are a number of causes, but nothing I know of that could possibly make it this advanced."
"Doctor, correct me if I'm wrong, but this graph doesn't look right."
"No, Sir. The graph is right. It's the count that's wrong. Red blood cells live about 4 months. If they're not replaced at the rate they die, the count goes down."
Hammond looked at the graph again. "So you've started transfusions?"
"No, Sir."
"No? But —"
"Sir. The last work-up was done seven days ago. There was nothing wrong. Two days ago the count was low enough to be fatal. Since then it has returned to safer levels. Only marginally safer, but safe enough. It would appear that she's recovering on her own. I don't want to risk jeopardizing that."
"So something between seven and two days ago caused all this?"
"I'm not so sure, Sir. The numbers I'm finding when analyzing the blood samples are all wrong. If she's recovering normally, I'd expect the red cells to be young; they're not – they're old. More than that, they're very mature and getting progressively less old."
"You've lost me, Doctor."
"I don't believe this was the result of what happened two days ago. The red cell count is increasing, not because she's recovering but because she's not got worse yet."
"Because it hasn't happened yet," Jack said quietly.
"Yes, Colonel," Janet said, pleased with the Colonel's interpretation. It meant he was paying attention and analyzing the situation. It also meant, she hoped, that he was coming to an understanding of what had happened. "The graph has the shape of what I'd expect to see at the end of such a crisis. Except, of course, it would be going in the opposite direction, time-wise."
"You mean whatever was responsible occurs sometime in the future?"
"Yes, General."
"How far in the future? I can't think of anything scheduled for SG-1 that would put any of them in any immediate danger."
"That's proving difficult to predict, Sir." Janet said. "So far, with so few data points, the margin of error is too great. With each sample we take —"
"Narrow it down for me, Doctor. If the count was so low, as you said, it could be four months away."
"Somewhat less, Sir. Assuming a constant rate of decay of healthy red cells. However, if something occurred to alter her system... I don't know if the oldest died first, or if something accelerated their aging, or if the youngest were removed."
"And there's nothing to indicate what it could be?"
"No, Sir. Her blood, so far, is clean."
"Then you expect whatever it was to eventually show in the analysis?"
"Given time, yes, Sir."
"It's beyond my comprehension, Doctor, truly it is."
"Sir, what's occurring isn't normal in any sense of the word." Janet waited. There was more, but they had to realize it themselves.
"The sensory loss?" Hammond asked. "That occurred in the future, too?"
"If it had I would have expected some kind of deterioration. All I know is that her eyes and ears are in perfect health. As I said, her brain is receiving the signals, but she can't see or hear."
"Except when she's dreaming."
"Yes, Colonel, but even that is not consistent. After the immediate relapse, she slept peacefully after being sedated. When she woke she claimed to have no memory of the first dream, but she did complain of a severe headache. And she did remember waking to bright flashing lights that may have been after-images." Janet paused. "Or prior-images. We just don't know."
"Then these dreams could be relevant?"
"Sir, almost every time she lapses into sleep, there's an increase in brain activity consistent with a hypnagogic hallucination, accompanied by a hypnic jerk a few minutes later when she wakes. Neither is sufficient to cause the reaction she's experienced."
"Hypno-what?"
"A very vivid dream, General, followed by a sensation of falling," Janet explained. "Not at all rare, in fact it's quite common."
"And she still remembers nothing?"
"We're encouraging her to sleep. Sensory deprivation can be traumatic in its own right. In between, we go over everything that has happened since her last mission. We've already exhausted everything she did during the day leading up to the attack."
Janet paused, took a slow breath. Now it was her turn.
"I think we're looking at two separate events," Janet said. "Sometime in the future something will happen which will cause the hemolysis. We've got no clue yet because there are absolutely no signs of any associated symptoms. So far her system is coping well, but we are prepared if they do manifest themselves.
"If her condition is traveling backwards in time we've got a far greater problem.
"The second event is the first dream that caused the trauma. Naturally, we have no knowledge of anything, outside of theoretical physics, that lives backwards in time. But we can hypothesize on the aspects.
"Sir, it may be that she can't remember her dreams because to her she hasn't had them yet.
"It is possible that before the moment when the trauma occurred, brain and cognitive function ceased. If, in our time frame, cognitive function ceased before brain function...
"The conclusion is inescapable." She'd held them long enough to deliver the impossible. "What we're witnessing is the result of that future catastrophe. She may never recover."
The Colonel already had an idea, but the shock on the General's face was almost one of horror.
"Two days ago, Sam died."