Part Nine: Entitlement
On the one hand, being completely alone gave him the quiet he needed to think and work and, of course, think. On the other hand, if a genius did something immensely brilliant and there was no one around to hear about it, did that brilliance actually happen?
Conversely, if a lesser colleague did something stupid and McKay wasn't there to publicly correct him, would that person ever see the error of his ways?
Neither Lorne nor Steward stood at the intellectual borders of genius or stupidity. They were average in all respects. Still, he needed them for their presence, like having someone around to hold down the center of a piece of ribbon being tied into a bow: He didn't need them for anything other than the tip of one finger, perhaps, but that fingertip made all the difference.
Now they were gone. McKay sat listening to the whir of machinery, the buzz of light ballasts. He tapped his headset.
"This is Dr. Rodney McKay. If anyone can hear this, please respond."
He tapped up the city-wide biometrics, looking for life signs. None appeared. With a sigh, he brought up a diagnostics grid, seeking information on energy fluctuations in his lab, in the city itself. Nothing unusual. Nothing interesting, either. Standing to stretch his back, McKay realized that he was bored, as if having no one around took away the impetus to care.
Then he remembered.
The city was completely empty of human occupants….but McKay wasn't necessarily alone. The city… Now, the city had no one to talk to but him. At last. Like a wallet left unattended, she was ripe for plundering.
The chair belonged to him, now. Sheppard had never been particularly forthcoming about how he dealt with Atlantis as an entity and Carson was completely phobic about everything. Incredibly, he man who discovered the ATA gene was himself utterly petrified about using it. McKay took fiendish delight in sitting the physician on the Throne of Atlantis and watching him quiver like a frightened rabbit. It was almost as amusing as watching Zelenka nervously prepare to go off world though the big, bad stargate.
If anyone were entitled to possess the soul of the city, it was McKay. He wanted to manipulate it, make it submit to his will because he more than any other knew what to do with it. He hadn't spent more than a few minutes in the chair himself. Successful recipients of Beckett's gene therapy had entre but no special privileges. Atlantis liked them well enough; she just didn't seem to respect them. So McKay had taken to throwing Carson or Miko or Lorne into the seat, ignoring their pleas for mercy. They acted as if they were capable of destroying all life in the universe by simply planting their butts down in the chair.
McKay chuckled with delight. The chair activated as he sat upon it. He felt himself diving toward connection. He felt like a swimmer stroking downward to the ocean floor, as hard as it was for him to imagine such a thing.
Atlantis resisted, as he suspected she would. She wanted someone else, of course, Sheppard or anyone fortunate enough to be carrying around a home-grown strand of genetic material that made them…not better. Different. Freaks, almost. Irritating people.
McKay was a true Renaissance Man, blessed with an off-the-scales intellect that everyone surely envied even if they refused to show it. How insulting that Atlantis would prefer a lesser mind as long as the double helix beneath it were prettier. Becoming annoyed, McKay quit asking for a conversation and instead demanded that Atlantis respond.
"Enough," he said. "Tell me what the hell is going on!"
The dive wouldn't end. She wasn't giving up anything. He dug in, holding his breath until his lungs felt strained to bursting, airless with effort.
"Tell me!" he repeated, desperate not for answers, now, but for obedience. He had the gene. This wasn't him asking her out to a movie, this was Dr. Rodney McKay taking that which was rightfully his, expecting cooperation in return.
McKay was not a talented soothsayer. However much he wanted to work at this until he possessed everything the city had to offer, the effort began to drain him. Atlantis could take as well as receive. Just as exhaustion began to creep over him, it happened. He connected. Not for long, not the protracted embrace he wanted, but a quick enveloping submersion followed by a buoyant sense of rising.
The city responded half-heartedly, like a blind date who liked the flowers but detested bonbons. With a mental shrug, McKay took whatever Atlantis was willing to give, for the moment.
Now Atlantis pulled back a single curtain, lifted her skirt to show him the tiniest bit of lace at the bottom of her petticoat. McKay saw within his mind a giant city map, zooming in and out of places familiar and new. He felt the city's coyness, its willful limits in this. The map moved jerkily to and fro, then stopped. There before his closed eyes hung a diagram of the southeast pier. A red arrow pointed to a tiny room tucked away in the bowels of it. Next to the arrow the words "You Are Here" appeared in red.
Smirking, McKay could not resist his own sarcasm. "Welcome to Atlantis Mall. The Sharper Image is located on the second floor next to the food court."
The city did not get his joke.
"Droll today, aren't we?"
Atlantis didn't respond to this, either. It was telling him something, of course, and McKay assumed he was to make haste to the pier.
…..
He was in the chair room.
Then he was in the humid, smelly confines of a structure on the southeast pier.
McKay could have questioned this, for even in this odd galaxy instantaneous travel without an obvious mode of transport was something of a rarity. Having crossed his mind that it was indeed strange, the idea passed quickly enough.
Coming to a small room no larger than a walk-in closet, McKay noticed the blinking lights of one of the naquadah generators within. He loved these machines and hated to have had to sacrifice two of them. Necessity was certainly the mother of invention; he simply wished that the mother of invention made naquadah generators a whole lot easier to build.
Curiously, this generator was humming loudly, like a threatening growl. Naquadah generators typically made a high-pitched singing sound or none at all. Now that he was thinking about it, a naquadah generator had not been placed in this part of the city at all. And, now that he was loosening up all of the dreamlike crap that was floating in his head, McKay realized—for the first time? Again? He couldn't remember—that there was no logical explanation of how he'd arrived this close to the edge of the city in such a short amount of time. No transporters delivered here; he could not recall walking very far.
"I'm asleep," he muttered, letting his wide eyes gaze around, expecting to see fantastic creatures or armies of terrifying beings, simply because that is what his dreams had consisted of lately.
Nothing. Only the bare room with the generator and its suspicious-sounding hum. He recalled a recent nightmare in which he was walking in a store back in Toronto, back home. He passed shelves stocked with everyday things, like soap and shaving cream, ballpoint pens and greeting cards. And, for some reason, these innocuous items scared the living daylights of out him. He awoke from that dream in a cold sweat, heart pounding in his throat. Now he neared the generator, an everyday thing in Atlantis, and shook with fear at the tiny noise emanating from it.
He had endured a number of impressively huge surprises of lateApproaching the power source, he told himself to be careful, that he didn't want anymore surprises. That is what he mumbled—"No surprises. No surprises."—as he reached out to touch the generator's shiny outer casing. He thought of pens and pencils, cotton balls and aspirin. Everyday things on Earth. That is what he thought about the moment his fingertips barely settled on the base.
It was so fast, McKay had no time to withdraw his hand, let alone fully comprehend how stupid he had been. The jolt killed him instantly, leaving a small burn on his left hand, blowing off his right leg and leaving a mess in between.
