Interlude 1
In the moment that Dawn Summers entered Earth's Stargate, the Key had burst forth. It was released from its material bonds as Dawn crossed the event horizon. It sprang outward, leaping from Stargate to Stargate, filling the galaxy. The gate network within the Milky Way wasn't sufficient to contain something like the Key, so it reached out farther, finding connections to more gates in other galaxies.
Within seconds, it had expanded as far as it could. It had spread across a dozen galaxies, and it still wasn't enough. The Key had escaped the prison of Dawn Summers' body, for another one.
Most of the Stargates were attached to a device that humans called a DHD. Each DHD was a supercomputer, a thousand times more powerful than anything that humans had created in the twentieth century. The Key moved into them.
Usually, the DHDs sat mostly idle. Their full capacity was only used for a tiny fraction of the time, while they were establishing wormholes between the gates. Now there wasn't an idle DHD anywhere in the system. Those not involved in operating the gates, were fully engaged by the Key. The Key couldn't take complete control of the DHDs though. The DHDs were essential to maintaining the Stargate network. Bringing the gates down would cut the Key off from all the other parts of itself.
The Key also wasn't the only thing that was using the Stargates. Other beings would sometimes engage a DHD, to make one gate connect a wormhole to another. If the Key was using too much of that DHD's capacity, the connection would fail, but it always withdrew part of itself from a DHD after that happened. The Key maintained the memories of Dawn Summers, and it knew that her friends—who it now considered to be its friends—needed the Stargates too. It wouldn't move back into a DHD until it had lain idle for a long time…ten seconds at least.
Friends: that was a new concept. The Key had existed for billions of years. It had watched civilizations grow, and die. It had never had a friend. It thought about that for a while.
The Key had billions of years of memories. It had watched galaxies form. It had seen galaxies swallowed up by enormous black holes. But for some reason, the last ten years of its existence contained the richest memories. It had been confined to a tiny body, with feeble senses that were only able to take in a tiny fraction of what was happening in its own immediate vicinity—to say nothing for the rest of the universe—but those memories were the richest that the Key had. Even the memories it had of the previous decade, the ones that it knew had been manufactured to support the Dawn Summers persona, were richer than all the ones that had gone before them.
There was an incredible variety of experience in its memories of Dawn Summers. The Key had never experienced joy, or sorrow before it had become her. Yes, it had been constrained to only a tiny portion of the universe, but what it had found there was incredible. The Key understood the diffraction and dispersion of light as it passed through an atmosphere, but as Dawn Summers it had seen the beauty of a sunset.
The Key had been searching for a way to escape from the Stargate network, but it now realized that that wasn't really what it wanted to do. It didn't want to get out into the universe at large. It wanted to get back to just one small piece of it. It wanted to be Dawn Summers again.
With a few changes, of course.