Surgeon General's Warning
by MargieJ
The usual disclaimers here- don't own 'em, would join 'em in a heartbeat. Thanks to The Other Sandy, who beta-read for me.
This is pre-fifth season; with no spoilers.
"Daniel, have you been here all night?" Sam asked, shoving a stack of papers, two pencils, three partially-empty coffee cups, and two very old textbooks aside to put down her breakfast tray.
"Um? What time is it?" Daniel looked up, clearly not focused on the present.
"Breakfast time, Daniel," said Jack, shoving more clutter aside to make room for himself and Teal'c at the cafeteria table. "What's so fascinating at oh-six-hundred on a Tuesday morning, anyway?"
"Well," the archaeologist brightened, clearly entering Enthusiastic Scientist Mode, "that culture that SG-5 encountered on P2A-447 has a fascinating history. Evidently, their technology had evolved to approximately the point of late twentieth-century Earth's; you know, cars, telephones, TV, reliable medicine, plumbing, all the things we take for granted. And then something happened."
"What?" asked Jack, around a mouthful of breakfast. Sam sneaked a peek. Today's nutritional disaster seemed to be Lucky Charms.
"Well, I can't quite tell. It looks like they had a plague about five hundred years ago, one that was even worse than the Black Death of Earth's fourteenth century. If these documents are correct, well over three-quarters of their population was killed, and their civilization just collapsed. They're now an agrarian society, forming small communities of interrelated farmers." Daniel continued to describe the planet's inhabitants in great detail.
Jack's eyes began to glaze over.
"I do not understand, Daniel Jackson. How is a disease that destroys a culture so mystifying?"
"It's not the disease, Teal'c, it's how the disease interrelates with this particular form of architecture." Daniel unearthed several photographs clearly taken by the UAV. "See, these are the remains of the cities that existed before the plague. In almost the exact center of each is a new building, evidently built at just about the time the plague started. I can't figure out what the buildings are for; the locals won't let anyone in the cities, claiming that everyone who goes near these buildings will die a horrible death."
"How could the buildings cause disease?" asked Sam.
"Well, I don't see how a building could actually cause a disease, but they seem to be associated in some way. Maybe the ziggurats were built as biohazard containment sites and failed, or hospitals, or maybe they were religious structures built to appease whatever gods these people used to worship, or maybe-"
"Whoa! What did you call them?"
"Ziggurats, Jack. They're a type of architecture seen here on Earth in ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Look at the pictures," he hauled them to the center of the table, "they're basically pyramidal, but built step-wise, with platforms instead of smooth rising faces. At the top, there's usually an altar-"
"Well, that explains what happened to the people, then." Jack leaned back with his cup of coffee.
"What? How could an altar kill off millions of people? Even the Aztecs at their most extreme couldn't kill off three quarters of the planetary population. That makes no sense, Jack." Daniel picked up his own cup of (stone-cold) coffee and took a sip.
Jack waited for the precise moment when Daniel's mouth was full of coffee. "The Surgeon General's been saying for years that ziggurats are hazardous to your health."