A/N: Again, I must put in a word of thanks to the Sg1 Transcript group on Yahoogroups. They have all my thanks for their excellent work. The link I posted last chapter was incorrect; the real link is www (dot) moon-catchin (dot) net (slash) gatenoise (slash) index (dot) htm.
Sam had finished the set of readouts she'd been working on and gone back to the various projects in her lab. Not that she expected to get all that much done, distracted as she was, but she needed something to occupy her mind while waiting for Janet to finish her first round of tests. The doctor had promised to call her as soon as she had anything, no matter how insignificant. They were keeping Jack in the isolation lab they'd had Kawalsky's surgery in, with the large windows from the observation area, and Sam wished she dared go there to watch over him. But she was on duty and she knew what kind of gossip that would cause, especially as they were no longer teammates, and she couldn't stand that, not as emotionally fragile as she felt.
Her phone rang, and she knocked over her stool in her haste. "Carter."
"Sam?" It was Janet. "I've found something in Colonel O'Neill's blood that I'm not quite sure how to identify."
"I'll be right there."
Sam entered the Infirmary and looked around for Janet, who'd evidently been waiting for her.
"Hey, Sam," she said with a tight smile. "I have something to show you."
Janet led her through the main infirmary to a smaller lab room and sat down at a computer.
"What is it?" Sam asked, joining her.
Janet sighed. "I'm not sure. First I ran a routine check for antibodies...nothing. So then I thought, all right, maybe this alien bug found a way to hide from the immune system, so I ran a protein analysis." She gestured at the screen. "Take a look at what I found."
Sam frowned at it. Most of it was, as far as she could tell anyway, fairly normal for a blood sample. Due to the dyes, it was orange-yellow instead of red. What caught her attention were a number of small, identical objects. Janet hit a key to magnify it, and Sam blinked in surprise to see that all of them were perfectly regular triangles. In her admittedly limited biology experience, she'd never seen anything like it. "Wow. What is it?"
"Something we don't have a word for … yet." Janet shook her head. "I'm going to need blood samples from the Argosians for comparison. Frankly, I have no idea what I'm dealing with yet, how it works or even what it does."
Fourteen hours later, Sam sat in the briefing room and waited impatiently for Daniel and Teal'c to be medically cleared for the briefing. They'd sent the blood samples back as requested, but had stayed on Argos to look around some more. They'd apparently found something of interest. After what seemed like hours (but was less than fifteen minutes), the pair showed up with Janet in tow. Sam gave each a brief smile but was too distracted for more.
General Hammond was out of his office before they'd taken their seats. "All right, Doctor Jackson, what have you found?"
Daniel took a sip of his coffee; he and Teal'c had been up all night. "First, the Argosians have woken up, and they all woke up simultaneously. We found some interesting things when we talked to them."
"But, Jack is still unconscious," Sam protested. "Why is he different?"
"They don't know," Daniel said. "They all act as if what happened last night was normal. They party until sundown. Then they fall asleep and they wake when the sun rises. They've never had someone not wake up who wasn't dead, not in living memory. Which … brings us to the most interesting part of all. Their 'living memory' isn't exactly as long as we might expect. They have no concept of 'years,' which puzzled me until Thetyes brought Dan-el to see me."
"Dan-el?" Sam asked.
"When we arrived yesterday Thetyes, an Argosian woman who appears to be about twenty years old, was in labor in the temple the Stargate sits inside. They didn't have a midwife there, so I helped deliver the baby, and they named him after me. Except … he's not a baby anymore. If I had to judge how old he was just by looking at him, I'd say he was at least a year old, possibly two. He looks and acts like a normal toddler, but he's only a day old. Thetys says that she's twenty days old, not twenty years. Kynthia, the woman who gave Jack that cake, is thirty-one days old. By the way, that cake is the traditional wedding cake of the Argosians; by accepting it, according to their law, he married Kynthia. She'd assumed that he understood what it was she was offering, and is upset that he didn't."
Sam tried to keep her hurt off her face. After all, Jack hadn't known what the cake meant when he took it, and even if he had, she'd turned him down when he'd asked to marry her. Sure, they'd met for dinner a few times but that was to get to know each other for the baby's sake. There was no commitment made on either side. She did have an urge to hit this Kynthia woman, though. Hard. Thirty-one days old or not, if she didn't know how to act responsibly in a relationship she shouldn't go around propositioning people.
"Doctor Jackson, that's impossible," Janet said, and Sam forced her attention back to the briefing. "No one can grow to maturity in only twenty days. The human body simply is not capable of such rapid development."
Daniel shrugged. "In this case, there are extenuating circumstances. The Argosians have no written language of their own, but there is an inscription on the base of the statue of their 'god' Pelops in the temple that Teal'c calls an obscure dialect of Goa'uld but is actually a variant on the linear-A script of ancient Greece and Crete, which is exciting because we've never been able to translate it—"
"Doctor Jackson, I'm sure that's fascinating," General Hammond interrupted, "but what does it have to do with the problem at hand?"
Daniel blinked at the interruption. "It was a kind of a combination lock which," he gestured at the alien sitting beside him, "Teal'c was able to open. Inside we found this device." He set an inscribed tablet and a stone on the briefing room table. "It's apparently some kind of Goa'uld book. You 'turn the page' by moving this stone over the surface." He demonstrated it, and sure enough the inscriptions changed. Sam leaned forward, fascinated by the technology and itching to take it apart.
"What does it say?" General Hammond asked.
"The Argosians believe that they were so favored by Pelops that he brought them across the stars to the garden they now inhabit. They call themselves the 'Chosen.' Well, Pelops did choose them, but not just for a life of luxury. I think Pelops brought humans there to be lab rats. From what we've been able to translate so far he wanted to know how humans evolve, so he shortened the life span to about 1/250th of normal."
"So," Sam said, "instead of having to wait a hundred thousand years to see how human physiology evolves, he could do it in a hundred?" She sat back in disbelief.
"That is correct," Teal'c said. Sam turned to him in surprise; she'd almost forgotten he was in the room. "Pelops wanted to determine what the human host body would become in the future, and perhaps accelerate the process."
"How did he do it?" Janet asked incredulously. "Was it some form of genetic alteration?"
"We do not know. It is an archaic dialect." With that, Teal'c sat back in his chair, having made his contribution to the meeting.
Sam noticed that Daniel was very carefully not looking at her. "Daniel?"
He sighed. "Okay … I didn't want to say this till I was absolutely sure but … I think he may have created some kind of virus … and viruses are often spread through bodily contact."
"Some are, and some are passed by other means," Janet said. "But I've already run every test I know on the Colonel, and he doesn't have a virus in him. I'm not sure what the substance in his blood is, it's not a virus."
"But whatever it is, he got it through bodily contact," Daniel pointed out. "Teal'c and I spent a lot longer there than he did, and we're both fine. SG-3 didn't pick it up when they were on Argos, either."
"What I find most disturbing about this whole thing," Janet said, "is the fact that he has far more of that stuff in his blood than is in any of the Argosian samples."
"If they age twenty years in twenty days, what happens when they reach fifty days?" Sam asked, appalled. "Or a hundred?"
Daniel winced and wouldn't meet her eyes.
"Oh, my God," Sam said, sinking back in her chair. And they thought the stuff that was in Jack was the same stuff that made the Argosians age so rapidly? That meant her child would grow up without a father. Jack would be dead of old age before she'd even reached the third trimester, much less given birth. She blinked back tears and studied the ceiling, trying desperately to keep from breaking down in the middle of a briefing.