Authors Note: The reviews were awesome, guys! Thank you so much (and keep 'em coming). Also, a huge thank you to my beta, Mara Jade Jedi.
Chapter Three: A Lack of Communication
Daniel couldn't believe that they'd called in Stevens. Even with all of his objections! Sure, he had been speaking to them in Ancient Egyptian, but the frantic waving and groaning should have been universally understood.
Stevens was the one of those frustratingly keen, annoying, geeky types that wouldn't know a piece of Sumerian cuneiform if it hit him on the head! (Cuneiform was typically carved in stone. Daniel could probably knock Stevens out if he could get his hands on the large tablet currently in his office.) Stevens was a lot like Daniel had been a lifetime ago, which was probably the main reason he found him so irritable.
"What did I do to deserve this?" Daniel said to himself in an obscure dialect of German he'd heard on '245.
"Dr. Jackson… what do penguins have to do with anything?" Stevens mistranslated.
Daniel hit his head against the backboard of his infirmary bed a couple of times in frustration.
Frustrated with the translator, Sam was taking a much needed break. She went to check up on Daniel, but found him deep in conversation with Stevens. He was also rocking back in his bed, hitting his head, and looking like he was wishing that he actually had brain damage. Sam decided that it probably wasn't a good time to tell him that she still hadn't figured out the translating device. Seeing that Janet wasn't in the infirmary, Sam headed in the direction of the observatory laboratories (Janet's likely hiding spot).
She walked in on Janet staring at several electron micrographs. Janet was examining the bulk sample of 'green goo' the Colonel and Teal'c had retrieved a couple of hours earlier.
"What's up?" Sam asked, putting on a lab coat and a pair of latex gloves.
"Look at this," Janet didn't offer the micrographs, but pointed to the compound microscope next to her.
Sam put on her safety glasses and asked, "What am I looking at?"
"The substance that's apparently 'infected' Daniel," Janet described, still staring in disbelief at the micrographs.
Sam looked at the sample and fiddled with the contrast for a bit. She had only taken a couple of undergraduate biology classes, but she was fairly certain…
"Are these eukaryotic cells?" The type of cell that made up all plant and animal life on Earth.
"Yep. At first I wasn't sure, but…" Janet handed her the micrographs, which were a much more detailed picture of what Sam had just seen under the 'scope.
"So Daniel has been inflected with an organism? It's alive?" Sam pointed to the sample under the glass 'cage'. Could Daniel not have been delusional? Could there be an intelligent life-form inside him?
Janet was obviously uneasy by the idea. "It fits our own basic definition of life. I'd be tempted to relate it to algae, based on its physical appearance… but the cells? They're not plant cells like algae. They're remarkably similar to our own."
"Maybe that's why your initial post-mission checkup came up clean for Daniel?"
"Maybe. What I don't understand is why Daniel's body hasn't attacked the foreign organism. There should be some sort of immune response to the presence of these cells, but that's not the case –he's not showing any of the typical symptoms. Admittedly, they're close to our own cells, but they're not identical –membrane, signal, receptor proteins, something should be acting as an antigen!"
Somewhere in Janet's rant, Sam's limited knowledge of cell biology failed her. "Wait a sec, Janet. You lost me."
Janet raised an eyebrow, impressed despite herself. After organizing her thoughts, she took a deep breath and tried to explain what she was saying within a context that Sam would understand: "Why do we want to grow, or clone, organs?"
Janet's question only served to confuse Sam further. "For organ transplant," she answered, not sure where Janet was going with her example.
"Because when you take one human organ and place it into another human being, there's always a high risk of rejection. Even though they are both from humans. An organ is unique to the person it comes from. There are specific proteins on the organ's cells making it unique. When a foreign organ is introduced to a patient, the body's immune system recognizes these proteins and attacks the new organ, often killing the patient in the process. Organ donation aside, I don't know why Daniel's immune system isn't attacking these foreign cells."
"Unless they've managed to disable or mask their presence to the immune system somehow."
The idea was sound, but it was the way Sam phrased her sentence that bothered Janet, "It sounds like you believe Daniel –that it's intelligent."
"We've met so many different forms of life. What if this is our first contact with an intelligent single-celled organism? A smart cell."
"We have no way of knowing that these cells can work independently of each other. Let alone whether they are 'intelligent' according to our definition of the word. It would take months, years of research to confirm or disprove that, Sam, and I don't know what sort of effect it would have on Daniel by that time." Janet seemed to visibly age before Sam's eyes, slouching in her stool, wiping her eyes hard.
"If it's masking its presence from the immune system," Janet backtracked, "I need to find a way to 'unmask' it. Could be our only way to kill it."
"Best idea I've heard all day," added the Colonel from the doorway of the lab. He had been listening quietly to the exchange until he was ready to add his own two cents. Sam's eyes narrowed at the Colonel's intrusion.
"You want to kill off a living organism that for all that we know might be trying to peacefully communicate with us?" Sam countered.
"It's not giving us much of a choice, Carter."
"With all due respect, sir, where would we be today if we killed every new species we came into contact with? This should be our last resort. We should be trying to communicate with it!" Sam's angry voice echoed in the lab. Thoughts of "insubordination" and "commanding officer" were pushed aside. They were too close for that to matter.
Janet glared at the pair and Jack took the unsubtle hint; he jerked his head, pointing into the hallway. Sam followed him out the door, gearing up for a fight.
"Communicate with it?" Jack quoted her, "For crying out loud, I can't believe we're going to go through this… again."
"If we hadn't communicated with the orb, you'd be dead right now, sir."
"And if we hadn't communicated with the Entity, I wouldn't have had to shoot you twice with a zat gun, Carter!"
The tension was thick, neither willing to stand down. Glaring hard at his stubborn second-in-command, Jack felt his body sway towards her. Couldn't she just see for a minute that Daniel was going crazy! They had to kill this thing!
He opened his mouth to articulate these thoughts, but was shocked to find himself a mere inch away from Carter's face. The tension wasn't anger any more… it was decidedly different.
Their noses touched…
"COLONEL! SAM!"
They jerked away from each other suddenly, as if burned. What the hell had almost happened there? But as usual there was no time to think about their near-miss. Jack and Sam ran back into the lab, hearing Janet cry out desperately again.
TBC
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