For every day that passed in the simulation, only about two hours had gone by in reality. By the time night had fallen in Atlantis, John and Elizabeth had been on the mainland in the simulation for four days.
"I feel like all we do is sleep," Elizabeth commented as she curled up on the floor of the jumper.
"It makes the time pass faster," John pointed out.
"If you say so," she replied, before coughing into her hand.
"You've been doing that all afternoon," he told her. "And you're starting to sound worse."
"I'm fine," Elizabeth tried to tell him. John reached over and felt her forehead.
"You've definitely got a fever."
"It's just a cold. I mean, it's freezing in here." He slid into the pilot's seat and started messing with the controls. "What are you doing?"
"Raising the temperature."
"And then what? When we run out of power, it's going to be even colder than it is now."
John hesitated. "We might not run out."
"No offense, but I don't want to take my chances with 'might'."
"All right…but if you're getting worse tomorrow…"
"Deal." He picked up his blanket and draped it over her on top of the one she already had. "John, what are you doing?" He stopped her from attempting to give the blanket back.
"Trying to make sure you don't freeze. Now go to sleep."
Beckett looked up from the papers that were spread on his desk when one of the med techs came in the door to his office. "I think we have a problem," the woman said. He followed her back out into the main area of the infirmary. "I went to check on Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard – she's got a fever."
"How high?"
"Almost 102."
Beckett sighed. "All right. Let's run some tests and figure this out."
It was taking some teamwork to keep things in the city going. Rodney was spending most of his time in the labs working with his team on what to do with the device providing the simulation, but a few threatening looks from Ronon had gotten him to help out with running things in the city. Teyla had picked up a lot of the slack, which didn't sit well with people like Sergeant Bates, but Ronon was always willing to help her out as needed with some good old-fashioned bullying. In all honesty, even Bates could admit that they really didn't have time to argue such things. No one knew when Elizabeth and John would be back to working, and they needed to keep Atlantis running in the meantime.
The few hours it took for the medical team to run tests were hours that they really couldn't spare. Elizabeth was up to a fever of 104.3 and pneumonia was quickly setting in.
"She was already working herself into the grave before all this started," Beckett told Teyla, Ronon, and Rodney as they had a late-night meeting in the conference room. "What was left of her immune system wasn't able to handle much. To make matters worse, the time difference between the two realities is doubly working against us."
"What do you mean?" Teyla asked.
"Her symptoms are appearing and worsening so quickly that we can barely keep up in this reality."
"But you can treat her for them?" Ronon inquired.
"We tried giving her antibiotics when all she had was bronchitis. In the simulated reality, it takes so long for the medications to work into her system that she already had pneumonia before the antibiotics could do anything. It would seem, at this point, that the only option we have is getting them out of the simulation."
"Preferably without killing them in the process," Rodney pointed out.
"We know now that efforts to cut power to the device affect the scenario that it is creating – we can't try that again unless things get more desperate than they already are."
"What if we don't CUT power," Rodney suggested, "We just REDUCE it?"
"What will that do?" Teyla asked.
"Everyone started disappearing from the simulation in the first place because the device wasn't powerful enough to hold an entire city's worth of people inside."
"Aye," Beckett agreed, "But it can stably hold about twenty or less, and right now it's only got two."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "I'm aware. But what if we get its power levels to the point where it CAN'T even support two?"
"Sheppard and Weir would be forced out of the simulation and wake up," Ronon answered.
Rodney smiled. "Exactly."
John knew that Elizabeth had gotten much worse in the past three days, but also knew there wasn't much he could do about it without outside help; there wasn't anything in the first aid kits on the Jumper that would do anything for her. He adjusted the temperature inside the jumper when Elizabeth was sleeping, hoping that might help, and made sure she got more of their rations that he did. However, her cough was getting worse, her fever was raging, and he'd never say it out loud, but she looked like hell.
"Here," John told her, helping her sit up a little from her nest of blankets on the floor and drink the water that he was holding.
"How long was I asleep?" Elizabeth asked.
"A few hours." Her body was wracked with a fit of shivers.
"God, it's so cold," she muttered. He knew it was because of her fever more so than anything else, and while John didn't want to make things worse by totally bundling her up, he wasn't going to just let her freeze. He sat on the floor next to her and pulled away one of the blankets she was tangled up in, then pulled the other one more securely around her and held her close.
"Just think," he said, "When the Daedalus gets here you can go take a hot shower in some quarters for probably an hour or so." Elizabeth smiled.
"That sounds pretty nice right about now. I'm sure this stupid cold will be gone in no time once we get in a…well, a slightly warmer climate." The Daedalus' internal environment was a far cry from summertime in Washington DC, but almost anything was better than what they were currently dealing with.
John tried to smile. "I'm sure," he quietly said.
TBC...