Interlude 2
But how to go back? The Key could remember the spell that had created Dawn Summers, and bound it to her, but the Monks had been corporeal when they had done it. They had been on the planet that they had created Dawn Summers on. Now, the Key wasn't even sure which planet that was.
It could remember the gate address, but that wasn't enough. The gate address that it knew was a "local number." It didn't know the area code. Most gate addresses used only seven of the nine chevrons on a gate. An eight chevron address allowed connections between galaxies. The SGC had never learned what the ninth chevron might do, and they had never had access to the power necessary to use it, even if they had, but now the Key did. In its burst outward it had reached to every gate that could be reached in the universe—even those that used a nine point address—but it hadn't been paying attention in those first moments. It couldn't remember where it had started.
There weren't that many possibilities: only 1,521 addresses. Most of them wouldn't have any gate at all, and most of the remaining gates would have a DHD. It knew that Earth's gate didn't. It quickly eliminated all but three. Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if any of those three gates were in use. An operating gate, without a DHD, had to be Earth's. The Key had several billion years of practice being patient. While it waited, it thought about the second problem: communication. It had to be able to communicate with the SGC, if this was going to work. The Key knew the GDO code that had been assigned to Dawn Summers, but it knew nothing about what the frequency was, or how it was encoded. If it couldn't reproduce that, it would have to do something else. Something that would be hard for the SGC to miss.