Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.
Last time: Radek reflects on his time-management skills and feels better about his relationship with Anna. Well, at least he knows that whatever mess he makes is worth taking the time to clean up. And Anna has a request regarding some orange rocks she's found (chapter 68 and 84… and other chapters, but that's the gist of it).
Chapter 98. Tomorrow.
He tried not to feel too sorry for himself. After all, Elizabeth was a very busy woman. He was busy, too; probably didn't have time for things like… like dinner. Even though he ate dinner every day. With Anna. He shouldn't give that up, especially not right now. Things were going… well, not-awful.
She was still on the glum side of content. Should be expected.
Radek sighed and collected his things. One last checkup on Jumper Six and it would be ready to take on a test flight. That poor little thing really had been through a lot. It was there when two Atlantis crew people died. It was a Puddle Jumper, yes, but if Jumper Six were a person, it would find that hard to deal with.
Higginson's memorial service had been small, like Collins'. Back-to-back with Patterson's service, and Radek was surprised to find that just as many people attended one as the other. Completely different people, except for a few who attended both.
Everybody had somebody. Nobody had everybody.
Radek remembered talking to Elizabeth about writing condolence letters for Patterson and Higginson. Patterson had a sister in Vancouver, Canada. All of the letters had started to sound the same, no matter what sort of personal touch Elizabeth tried to put in each one.
It wouldn't look the same to Patterson's sister. She'd never see any of the other condolence letters. Radek didn't tell her that, though. Just because she'd never see the others didn't mean they shouldn't be different. Shouldn't be personal. In many ways, it was the thought that counted… but he didn't say that, either, because that was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.
Thoughts meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.
He stepped into the Jumper Bay and looked fondly at the ships sitting quietly in the bay. This really took him back to his first days on Atlantis. Walking in here early in the morning, nothing but his tablet and a cup of coffee to keep him company.
And the Jumpers. He never told anyone, but he'd given them names. Czech names. Referring to each of them by only their numbers got tiresome. It was probably a bit silly, but he worked many long hours in here alone. He was tired of speaking English all the time, and "his girls" didn't care what language he spoke. He talked to them all the time. Jumper Six's name was Káťa. Jumper Two was Anna.
He couldn't very well own to that, now, could he?
How much had changed in such a short time. A year ago, he only spoke Czech when he was angry, or knew he wouldn't be listened to, anyway. In an irony of human condition, saying something they couldn't understand seemed to force them to notice he was there.
Now, every day, he shared a conversation with his daughter whom, only a year ago, he hadn't seen in eight years.
Radek walked into Jumper Six and pulled down the crystal access panel and lifted up the grate in the floor. Everything looked to be in good condition, but he certainly wasn't going up in this thing without a thorough check on all the systems. Probably four of them.
This was the fourth check now, right?
What could he do to get out of this…?
"McKay to Zelenka?" Rodney's voice said in his ear.
Radek hesitated a moment in surprise before going to answer. "Yes, Rodney?" Honestly, couldn't he just do with a pager instead of this always-on telephone right in his ear?
"Yeah," Rodney answered. "Where are you?"
"Jumper Bay." Radek sighed and leaned down into the cavity in the floor with his cable. The connection to the Jumper's main computer down here was a pain to get at. Made Radek think that the Ancients had some sort of automated way to do these sorts of things…
"Oh."
Rodney didn't say anything else, and Radek might have been confused, but a second later he was too engrossed in his scanning to notice. Was that a hiccup in navigation? He seriously hoped not. He'd combed through the code and mechanics of that system what felt like one-hundred times already.
"Zelenka."
This time, Rodney's voice wasn't in his ear. He'd left the Puddle Jumper door open—because why would he close it?—and Rodney apparently took that as an invitation to come right in.
Radek looked up from his seat on the floor. "It's urgent?"
"No." Rodney put his hands in his pockets and wandered over to look down at the readings running by on Radek's tablet. "What you doing?"
"Checking for malfunctions. I thought I saw something in navigation, but it disappears whenever I look for it." Radek sighed and waited for Rodney to accuse him of blindness or something.
Miraculously, he didn't. "A ghost in the machine, huh?" he asked. His tone said it was a joke, but Radek couldn't figure out what was funny about it. "A, uh… gremlin in the engine?"
"What?"
"Never mind." Rodney sighed. "Busy tomorrow?"
Radek almost just answered his usual yes when he realized that, of course, he was busy tomorrow. "It's your day off, isn't it?" And he was busy because Rodney asked him specifically if he could switch days with him.
Yes, he would be busy. And no thanks to Rodney.
"Yeah, no, I mean for lunch or… um, yeah." Rodney hesitated like he had more to say, but didn't know how. "Are you?"
"What?"
"Busy?"
"I guess not." Radek sighed, unclear why he was agreeing at all. Wasn't he just talking to himself about how he hadn't seen Elizabeth in days? But it was good, because he needed to spend time with Anna? Where did Rodney fit in here?
He didn't.
He was Radek's boss.
"No, no, it's fine," Rodney offered a second later. "You know, I think it's going to be chicken salad sandwiches. We'll be lucky if there's Jell-O."
"No, I will see you tomorrow." Radek sighed and put his tablet to one side to try to figure out exactly why it was fine. "Anna is spending the whole day in the lab tomorrow, anyway. She has some sort of project she wants my help on…"
Rodney nodded with a half-smile, like that was cute. Like it was ridiculous.
Rodney probably didn't know how rare it was that Anna wanted to spend her day in his lab. Even rarer she wanted his help. She was like her mother: wanted to do things on her own or learn failing.
"Um." Rodney turned to go. "Great."
Radek watched him leave.
Didn't ask what that was all about. Doubted the answer would be to his liking even if he did. He wasn't due for a performance review any time soon, and he was doing incredibly well this year. He'd had an actual idea that was better than anything Rodney could come up with at the time. It didn't work. But it was better than Rodney's concurrent nothing.
Rodney always got the last laugh, though.
Life wasn't fair.
He was definitely going to need some heavier processing power to figure out what was wrong with navigation in here… He left the tablet connected to the jumper and put it down inside the cavity in the floor, covering it with the grate before he left. For some reason, jumper systems were not linked with Atlantis's, so they usually had to do their scans in person. Radek supposed that the Ancients had to have determined a way to do it remotely, but it was on some sort of toggle… perhaps only on when the jumpers were away. But, then…?
Maybe the Ancients were just that hands-on with everything.
He went down to the lab to do the scans there, using the tablet to reroute the jumper scans. In other words, this was going to be hours of waiting. And hours of poring over readings that it took hours to accumulate.
The usual suspects were in the lab already, talking quietly over their cups of coffee. They said hello, exchanged a few pleasantries. Wondered how Anna was doing. The usual.
Silence after just a minute or two.
Radek set his computer to scan and search for any immediately obvious errors, even though he knew it would probably be up to him to find the ghost or the gremlin or whatever it was. These Ancient computers were somewhat like their creators: they rarely, if ever, found errors with themselves.
Okay, that was a little like any old Human, too.
He didn't get too far on that line of philosophical thought before he realized Anna was walking toward the little desk he'd cleared for her. It had remained so, mostly clear, except sometimes people put their coffee there while doing work on the servers. Radek was sure Anna wouldn't have minded.
"Oh, hello. I didn't know you were going to come today," Radek said. They'd talked this morning. Anna asked if she could work with him tomorrow on a "little project." Radek couldn't begin to guess what that was, but he was pleased as anything she'd asked.
"I wasn't going to, but I really didn't want to work on this paper." She shoved away her tablet and then put an oddly familiar—yet totally wrong—orange rock on her desk.
She looked at him expectantly as he got out of his chair.
"What is this?" he asked.
"My project."
"The one I'm supposed to help you with?"
She smiled, nodded, and stayed silent.
It looked like a ZPM. It wasn't. It couldn't be, because where would she get one? And besides, there was something off about it. But it looked like one, and that was weird. Where did she get it and what did she plan to do with it?
"It's not what it looks like, I guess," Radek offered.
She shook her head, and turned the rock over. "Not yet."
Alright, maybe Rodney was right. It was cute. And ridiculous.
On the other hand, he didn't want to toss out the possibility that there were rocks out there that the Ancients harvested and used to make their near-infinite power supplies. And why hadn't they thought of this before? Probably the tyranny of the urgent. Too busy trying not to die to worry about having power in the future. The Ancients kept rooms in which they made viruses, replicators, holograms, any number of things. Why not ZPMs, too?
It was a tantalizing possibility, certainly. Also cute and ridiculous.
"At least, I hope it can be. I don't know what it is, but I've scanned it." She took a moment to open some files on her computer.
Geology files. Molecular maps that Radek knew very little about. Somewhere in the neighborhood of nothing. But he did know about ZPMs, and ZPMs didn't look like this. But they weren't exactly dissimilar to this, either.
"I just wanted to get everything set up for tomorrow, so you didn't have to spend a lot of time…" she said quietly, turning to one of the little CPUs standing on the desk Radek set aside for her. Connected a wire to her tablet and started transferring the files.
"I don't mind," Radek said. In fact… the more he thought about the possibility of making ZPMs, the more this was looking like a potentially fruitful line of questioning she'd stumbled into. "Even if it turns out to be nothing, the idea is very much worth my time."
Not to mention Anna. Anna was always worth his time. But this idea…?
He'd never been so proud in his life.
Radek managed to stifle the wide grin and the puffed-up feeling in his chest and go to his desk. When Anna went for it, she really went for it. Wanting to make a ZPM? He couldn't think of a more ambitious project.
"What are you doing tomorrow?" Anna slid the chair over from her empty desk to Radek's and jumped up onto it. Her files were still transferring. "I mean, will you be busy?"
Radek looked at her sideways, feeling needlessly popular. He wasn't sure he liked it a few minutes ago when Rodney came calling for his lunch hour tomorrow, but this wasn't so bad.
#
He looked at her sideways, like he wasn't sure what she was doing there or how to respond to her now that she was there. Looked pleased about it, though. Whatever it was. He shook his head and answered, "Just working. It's Rodney's day off, so I will be covering for him."
Anna didn't bother to point out that meant almost nothing. After all, it was a Sunday, Radek's day off, and here he was in the lab. Working like there was no such thing as a day off. "Don't you usually have Mondays?"
"Ah, yes, I do." Radek looked up, as if only just realizing that this was a strange development. "He asked if we could switch days tomorrow."
"Oh." That made sense… considering it was Rodney's birthday tomorrow.
Radek made a face, then, like he was extremely confused. "Except he asked if I wanted to have lunch." He looked at Anna with an expression of mock horror. "I think he's going to fire me."
"Can he fire you?" Anna wondered. She guessed if Rodney could have decided on his own to fire anybody, the entire science department might have turned over twice since the Daedalus started making its runs between Atlantis and Earth.
"No, I don't think so." Still looked confused, though.
About the lunch. It was confusing, but apparently nobody in the lab knew the first thing about anybody else. Anna sighed and shrugged. "I doubt he's going to fire you, anyway. He probably just wants to have lunch, because… well, probably because it's his birthday."
Silence fell on the lab, like maybe Radek forgot that Rodney, as a human, probably had to be born sometime. He wasn't constructed or programmed, despite all appearances. To make it all the more baffling, Rodney wasn't having a celebration. He was having lunch.
And Radek was invited.
"Huh."
That was all the response Anna figured he was going to give about that.
"I do remember Rodney asking me to have lunch with him once last year. I remember it because it was strange. Never did before, never did again." He looked apologetic, like he'd definitely said no, and probably said it rudely. "Well, I have time this year..."
"Even though you don't have time?" Anna smiled a little when he shrugged.
"Time is relative."
They laughed like it was funnier than it was. Maybe humor was relative, too.
"How can I help you with this?" he asked suddenly.
Anna didn't know what to say about that, since he'd already made it pretty clear that it wasn't a ZPM, could never be a ZPM, and even if it could have been, they wouldn't know how to do it. She sighed and glanced toward the rock. It really looked like one, though. Even Radek recognized that.
"I don't know. I just want to see if it could be a ZPM."
Radek tapped his fingers on the desk idly for a few moments. "I don't suppose this will make a difference," he mumbled as he went to a nearby box and pulled out a multitude of scanning devices. He handed Anna one, keeping one for himself, and said, "We should collect as much data on it as possible," he said. Then he smiled. "And we can go scan our own ZPM and run comparisons."
Anna felt her eyes widen ever so slightly. "The real one?" She'd never been allowed in the ZPM room, even when she went with Rodney to run checks on the room. He always sent her to do something else somewhere else. She'd never seen the real ZPM up close. It would be like…
There was no apt comparison for it.
"Unless there is an equally-informative counterfeit ZPM we can use." Radek chuckled.
Anna couldn't help her excitement as she got to scanning the orange rock on her desk. She looked at him happily as her tablet ate up the data she fed it. "Maybe we do have an equally-informative counterfeit ZPM."
"No way to know until we scan them."
A/N: I GOT A JOB, Y'ALL! So I'm back! … I think you noticed that, though. So much for my goal of The Long Goodbye by next year. I'll still give it a shot… I can at least promise getting to (if not through) The Tower by next year. Anyways, back to our regularly-scheduled program.
How are all of you, by the way? How was your summer? Been a while.
Thank yous & Etc.
Ms. Meow- I was definitely having a time. Wouldn't say I was "enjoying" it, because looking for a job is stressful... but I got to spend lots of time with my family, so that's nice. :) Thanks for sticking around all this time!
Next time: I don't know why I even bother with you sometimes.
