Colonel Sheppard strutted nonchalantly into McKay's lab, his expression one of extreme boredom.
"Hey McKay," John said dryly, "Heard you were doing stuff and I'm bored so I thought I'd drop in, so to speak."
McKay looked up from his work, a little annoyed,
"What, does my lab look like an amusement park to you," then he realised what he was saying,
"Whoa, you must be really bored if you decided to come here for fun."
"Extremely bored. Haven't been off-world in three days and we aren't scheduled for another week yet. I pity those poor souls who never go off-world."
"Believe it or not, Colonel, some people do like it here."
"So, got anything interesting I can do? Things to test?"
Sheppard raised his eyebrows, almost with a look of anticipation.
"Not really, there's just this one devise Zelenka found yesterday in one of the lower levels, still haven't completely finished cleaning up from the hurricanes. But anyway, it looks pretty interesting but I haven't had a chance to translate the test yet."
John look at the small object Rodney had indicated. It was a silver and blue box, lit from the inside. It was hard to describe. Shiny, yet dim, transparent yet opaque. Even to himself John had trouble describing the thing.
A memory flickered in the back of his mind at the sight, too brief for him to grab on to. The flicker of his own recognition intrigued him. It was like he knew, but didn't know. It was like something made almost perfect sense. Almost.
"Mind if I take a look at it?" Sheppard asked, needing both something to break the boredom and to satisfy his curiosity as to why he felt he knew something he was sure he didn't - or shouldn't - know.
"Yeah sure," McKay replied, only looking up from his work for a second, "knock yourself out. Not literally, though."
John reached out to pick up the strange item, then hesitated, instead picking it up with a cloth from nearby.
McKay looked up, noticing the strangely cautious action. John Sheppard was not a generally cautious person.
"What, you afraid to touch it?" Rodney said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
"Strangely so," John muttered in reply, ignoring the sarcasm that dripped from the words and instead focusing all his attention on the item in hand.
"You said there text or something with this thing?"
"Like I said before, I haven't gotten around to translating it yet."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, can I just look at it anyways?" the Colonel asked, still giving the thing his full attention.
"What, you think you can read Ancient now?" the scientist mocked, putting his work aside. He needed a break anyway, and it was quite amusing to see John's new-found interest in science. He pulled up a file on his laptop and put it on the display.
It was about two paragraphs or so long, written in that impervious, almost Latin language of the Ancients, with a little bit of file corruption at the end.
John looked at it, murmuring under his breath for a moment until he was pretty sure he had found whatever it was he was looking for, but McKay could only speculate on the goings on in Sheppard's head. He put the device back in its tray with the cloth and cleared his throat.
"Experiment 144 - Dream Catcher," he announced to Rodney, "This experiment was designed to capture singular thoughts and store them for automatic playback at the user's own discretion. In times such as these it is pressing that not a single thought be overlooked lest it be the key to destroying the Wraith.
Many are beginning to despair and I fear I find myself agreeing with them. It very well may be futile to hope for the defeat of the Wraith, there has even been talk in recent months of leaving Atlantis. The war has been raging for almost a hundred years now and one way or another it will soon be coming to an end.
Well, back to the experiment...The rest looks corrupt..."
"And what was that?" McKay queried, quite unimpressed.
"I dunno, I was just reading it."
"Oh right, so you can read Ancient now then?"
"I was just...dunno...saying what it looks like it says," John tried to explain, but he knew it was a pitiful attempt to explain his gut instinct as to what the words were.
"So you were just making it up as you went along then?"
"I dunno," John shrugged, turning his back to Rodney and slinking back out into the corridor, his bored expression back in place and muttering something about 'a whole damn week to go', or something like that, McKay didn't really care.
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A few days later...
McKay finally caught up with his target, panting.
"Colonel Sheppard," he said, tapping the Colonel on the shoulder to get his attention.
"Yeah?" John asked, turning to face Rodney. Damn. He had been taking a nice slow stroll around Atlantis. His stroll, he supposed, that was now over.
"Hod you know?" McKay demanded. Sheppard just rolled his eyes.
"How did I know what, Rodney? I'm a Lieutenant Colonel, not a mind reader," he remarked dryly.
"About the…the thing. You know. Experiment Dream Catcher," Sheppard just raised an eyebrow, "oh come on, the text you translated yesterday!"
"What about it?"
"Your translation was exact. How did you know what it said?"
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