Jack and Daniel drew closer together in the center of the room, back to back, searching for the source of the lights. They seemed to be in the walls themselves, random colors, blinking across the walls in a grid. Instead of blank whiteness, every slick plastic-stone surface in the room was covered in a checkerboard of color. The plates, the sink basin, even the toilet bowl all carried the pattern. Basic colors, all of them, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, violet. There was no brown, no gray, no pink or any kind of dark color. No blurring or mixing or gradations of color.
Daniel approached the wall first and reached out, pressing his palms against a couple squares of color. Each one was roughly twice the width of his palm. They were all blinking on and off in a regular pattern, and he watched it until he could pin it down. All the red squares would blink, then the blue, the yellow, and so on. While one color was blinking, the others remained constant. Daniel was sure it meant something. Sure that if he could just press the right colors in the right order, he could accomplish something. He whipped his head around quickly, trying to find the pattern, tapping his fingers against the wall.
"Do you hear that?" Jack asked, and Daniel raised a hand to him, waving his finger. His head was down, cocked to one side, his eyes flicking back and forth. Searching for the answer that he was sure was there.
Jack began to circle the room, listening hard, but he couldn't find the source of the sound. It was very faint, and seemed to come from everywhere. To his side, Daniel was muttering, and Jack wanted to shush him but knew it wouldn't do any good. Daniel was somewhere inside his head, making connections, and Jack decided to let the man work. He still carried the certainty that Daniel would solve the puzzle. He knew it was irrational, that Daniel wasn't infallible, but he believed it anyway.
The sound was getting louder, and Jack stopped searching for the source. It was equally loud no matter where he stood. His stillness seemed to distract Daniel in a way that his pacing did not, and Daniel stopped muttering.
"What's that noise?" he asked.
Jack shrugged and waved one hand in authoritative circles. "It's sort of a ticky, clicky, tappy sound."
Daniel stared at him. He was having one of the moments that he often had around Jack, when he wasn't quite sure if Jack was yanking his chain. But Jack looked perfectly serious, and Daniel had to admit his assessment of the sound was accurate. "It's like a hundred people fiddling with ballpoint pens," he said, and Jack blinked at him. Daniel felt obscurely smug that he managed to give Jack pause.
"I was thinking about a pack of dogs walking across a hard floor." Jack took in Daniel's look and waved an arm impatiently. "You know. The claws clicking on the floor."
"Because it's a ticky, clicky, tappy sound," Daniel said, deadpan.
Jack gave him a deeply suspicious stare. "Yeah."
"Ah," Daniel said, and focused on the sound. He was getting nowhere with the colors, and besides, he was far more comfortable with a spoken language than some strange color code.
Wishing that he still had his watch, Jack squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment and wondered how long the colors had been on. He was beginning to miss the whiteness. At least it was calmer. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking at Daniel. Or, to be more accurate, Daniel's back. Daniel's head was tilted up, and Jack could see his profile, his closed eyes, and his faintly moving lips. Daniel was listening. His hair brushed his collar and Jack wanted to fix it. To smooth down the bits that were sticking up. His hand was actually half raised when he realized what he was doing and dropped it.
Jack took two steps back and scowled at the lights. They were obviously messing with his head. The sound was pervasive, not loud, but impossible to ignore. He could close his eyes, but he couldn't shut out the sound. He had the sense that it was drilling into him, and he brought one hand to the bridge of his nose, expecting a headache. But his head was fine; the ache, when it came, was where he didn't expect it. Low in his belly, heavy, familiar, sweet. Jack shifted and took a deep breath, willing the ache to die down. He had excellent self discipline. He had always been able to control his body with great skill.
This time, however, his strong will got him nowhere. The ache persisted, and Jack began to hear a rhythm to the sound, a beat that seemed to match the low throb cycling deep in his belly. He opened his eyes in time to see Daniel, still listening intently, shift his weight from one foot to another and rub a fist into his gut, just above his groin. Jack closed his eyes again.
The lights, he told himself. Or the sounds. Or both. Maybe neither, maybe some kind of invisible gas in the room. Some alien energy rays. If it was just him, he could discount it as a strange, stress related hormone spike, but it was Daniel too, at the same time, and that was no coincidence.
Jack allowed his eyelids to slit open, and regarded Daniel again. Daniel's face looked slightly pink, but it was hard to tell, with all the colors behind him. His expression was still calm, concentrated, and thoughtful. One finger was tapping at his lips. Jack found himself staring at where Daniel was touching his mouth and he quickly looked away.
Daniel probably doesn't even notice, he thought. Daniel was so deep into figuring this out that nothing short of an aerial attack would get his attention. Jack, unfortunately, didn't have the luxury of distraction. He had nothing to think about but what was happening.
Prickling heat started to creep along the skin of his thighs, and when he shifted again, he grunted very quietly as the material of his pants slid over his groin. Jack risked a glance down, and was relieved to see that he wasn't obvious. Yet.
Jack cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and then shut it again. What was he going to say? 'Oh, hey, Daniel, any luck figuring out the deal with the lights and noise? And by the way, are you suddenly horny as hell for no reason or is that just me?'
Yeah. That would go well.
Besides, he didn't need to ask. He could see that Daniel kept shifting, that he was now biting his lip, that his chest was rising and falling in a series of deep, controlled breaths. Daniel felt it, alright. But Daniel didn't seem aware of his own body, and, of higher priority to Jack, Daniel didn't seem aware of Jack's body.
Jack couldn't count on Daniel being oblivious forever. And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to ignore his own condition much longer. Jack gathered the material of his uniform jacket in one hand and squeezed it, then tugged at it a few times. He tilted his head back, stared at the ceiling, and blew a hard stream of air through tight lips. He thumped a fist lightly against the wall behind him. He wanted to hit harder, but it wouldn't do to catch Daniel's attention. Wouldn't do at all.
As the pressure increased, Jack wondered if he even had a choice. Because if this kept up, he was going to come in his pants without once having touched himself, something which had not happened since he was fifteen and found a porn tape belonging to his older brother.
Then the lights stopped, all at once, and the walls were white again. The noise didn't fade, but rather cut off abruptly, and the sudden silence was stunning. Jack blinked and rubbed his eyes, the colored squares still visible as vague blobs on the insides of his eyelids, but fading fast. The internal pressure was fading too, and he slumped against the wall, a lungful of air whooshing out of him.
"Dammit," Daniel growled. "I didn't have time to distinguish any of the separate sounds."
"It's noise," Jack replied, wondering if his face was as pink as Daniel's.
Daniel wasn't quite looking at him. "It might be more than that. The design of this room seems to suggest a very precision oriented society. Everything is so stark and clean and... and mechanical. Maybe we're dealing with artificial intelligence. That clicking sound could be a kind of computer language."
"And you're going to try and talk to it?"
"It's all I have to work with," Daniel said, shrugging. He was still looking around the room, only meeting Jack's gaze for a moment, and then slipping away again. Jack began to wonder if Daniel was quite as oblivious as he thought.
Well. Better not to dwell. It happened, it was weird, but it was over now and with any luck, it wouldn't happen again.
Daniel was tapping his short, blunt fingernails against one wall, trying to imitate the pattern that he'd heard, but already his memory of the sounds was fading. He thought about the colors, flashing in their steady way, one each second, like a visual clock. His mind jumped on that idea, turned it from side to side, poked at it, and filed it away for future consideration.
Maybe if he followed the pattern, touched each color just as it flashed. That wouldn't be too hard. Or maybe the opposite colors should be touched. Green as red flashed, blue as orange flashed, and so on. Or he could follow the colors, one step behind. Or ahead? Maybe it was a test of logical reasoning. If he could predict where the colors would be...
"Earth to Daniel," Jack said, gnawing on one of the fruits. "Come in, Daniel."
Daniel held up a finger without turning around. He took off his glasses and tapped the frame against the wall, but it didn't produce the sound he wanted. The noise from before was clear and crisp and defined, but his glasses made only a muffled, flat tap. The colors offered too many possibilities, none of which he could try until they came back. If they came back. The sounds were too unlike any language he knew to stay in his mind, and he couldn't reproduce them anyway.
Daniel, well aware that Jack expected him to figure this out, put his glasses back on and tried not to glare. He could be resentful that Jack wasn't even trying to figure this out, that all the responsibility rested with him, but that would be pointless.
"Dan-iel," Jack called again, injecting several extra syllables into the name.
"What?" Daniel snapped. He caught his arms folded and deliberately dropped them to his sides. "What, Jack?" Softer this time.
Jack regarded him steadily. "Come here," he said. "Eat something. My stomach says it's lunchtime."
"Mine doesn't," Daniel replied, a frustrated frown still creasing his forehead.
"Come on. We've got..." Jack held up one of the root vegetables and shook it enticingly, "...these things. Mmm, space carrots."
Daniel told himself to quit acting like a petulant child. "Okay," he said, taking the pale orange tuber and sniffing it skeptically before taking a small bite. To his surprise, the taste was light and a little sweet, and the flesh was softer than he expected. "Not bad. How's the fruit?"
Jack licked his lips and said, "Fruity."
Daniel blinked, coughed a little, and sat against one wall, taking a piece of bread and a couple strips of meat with him. Jack followed suit, and they shared a quiet meal, staring at the blank wall across from them and chewing methodically. They were not touching, but they were close enough for Daniel to be aware of Jack as a heat source, and he thought how much more depressing this place would be if he were alone.
"So," Daniel said when he had finished eating, "what did you think?"
"Boring, but edible," Jack replied, licking fruit juice from his fingers.
"I was talking about the lights."
Jack paused, a fingertip still in his mouth, and then he withdrew it quickly. "Right," he said. "Very... colorful." He pulled one knee up, found an errant thread along the seam of his uniform pants, and picked at it.
"Ye-es." Daniel drew the word out in a way that clearly said 'thank you, Captain Obvious.' "Anything besides that?"
"The colors were square?"
At Daniel's impatient huff of breath, Jack lifted his hands in the air. "Look, Daniel, what do you want from me?" he asked, irritation coloring his voice. "I saw colors. Square, flashing colors. And I heard the noise, which I think we've discussed quite enough. Tappy. Clicky. We covered it."
Daniel nodded slowly, his gaze focused on the toe of Jack's left boot. He could see dirt ingrained in the seam between the sole and the leather. He wondered how many different worlds Jack had on his boots. "So you didn't notice anything else?" He thought about boots while he asked this, and succeeded in keeping his voice calm and steady.
There was a long pause, during which Daniel did not look up, and that alone was enough to tell Jack exactly what Daniel was referring to.
"No," he said flatly. "Nothing else."
"Really."
"Yes, Daniel, really."
Daniel nodded and rose to his feet. He cupped his hand high in the water stream and drank from his palm, water slopping down his chin and dampening his shirt collar. "Yeah," he said. "I didn't notice anything either."