MEMOIRS OF
MAJOR GENERAL JACK O'NEILL
(Re-activated)
3. P4C-970
Chapter Four
By Arrietty
2008
Three days later, we ventured out into the city. This time we weren't travelling between work and our apartment, which seemed to be the only thing we'd done so far. It wasn't much of a change as everything looked the same.
We got lost a few times, but Faxon had drawn us a rough map that Sam seemed to know how to read, which was good as I had no idea because it didn't look like any map I'd seen before.
"The museum is here," she pointed to a large oval building across the narrow street.
There weren't any vehicles on the road, everyone walked or used the transport pads. We'd already found out the hard way that our pass cards wouldn't work the transport pads so we had to use the monorail or walk. Walking wasn't a bad thing as we were both sadly out of shape.
We sauntered over to the building, there were a few families queuing up to enter. We joined the queue, although a few glances would go in my direction. I'd noticed this before; they would look at my hair, then their eyes would glance straight to my ankle and there wrapped around my boot would be the tag. A sign that I was a prisoner-come-test subject, then the glance would travel to Sam's boot and then they'd look away.
We had been issued with clothing from the wide variety of greys. Our BDU's had been confiscated along with everything else we owned, including the much damaged photo of SG-1. This was a hard blow to me; I really didn't want to lose that.
It was finally our turn and I went first. I swiped the card through the machine, but it rejected the card.
"You try," I said to Carter. Maybe my card wasn't working.
She swiped the card, but it didn't work either. Disappointed, we left the queue and walked along the street a bit.
"Why wouldn't they want us to go in there?" I asked.
Sam shrugged, "I really don't know, but I have a sinking feeling that the only place we will ever be allowed to enter is our apartment and the back door of where we work." She sounded annoyed and with good reason.
"Where else is there, where we could go?" I peered over her shoulder at the map.
"How about here?" She pointed with her finger to a small dark grey square with something that looked like a tree in the middle.
"Is that a tree?" I asked incredulous.
"Yeah, it does look like one doesn't it." Sam's brilliant smile flashed across her face. "Oh, how I miss the countryside."
I nodded before taking her hand. We decided to walk to the park, it didn't look like it was far to go.
I could smell the plants from around the corner, we nearly broke into a run, but we got enough weird glances from the inhabitants of this city without drawing more interest. So we walked fast instead. The sight that met us around the corner was solid disappointment mixed with relief at the green. A group of small buildings surrounded a large patch of neatly mown lawn with one medium sized tree in full leaf in the dead centre. A few flowers in groups around the edges gave a splash of yellow colouring. Dotted here and there were some bench seats set into concrete overlooking the small green.
We couldn't help ourselves; we pulled off our boots and stood on the soft grass. Sam immediately lay down on the grass and breathed in the aroma. I watched her visibly relax, most probably for the first time since we'd arrived.
"Hey!"
I spun around to see who was yelling.
"Hey! You! Get off the grass." One seriously annoyed Aschen was almost coming at a run.
"Sam, quick." I pulled her arm up and we quickly went over to the concrete path.
"What do you think you are doing?" He was angry. "You should know that you aren't allowed on here. See," he pointed to a notice, "Can't you read?"
"Actually," I grimaced, "I don't understand the Aschen writing."
His eyes travelled down to my bare feet, I knew it wasn't those that he was looking at, but the tag that wrapped itself around my ankle.
"We can't have anyone walking on here. There are too many people and if everyone does what you've just done there won't be any grass left."
"We are sorry, we weren't aware of the rules," Sam apologised.
"All right, but don't let it happen again." He walked off quietly, no sign of the anger that was evident only moments before. It was a shame I'd have really enjoyed a good scrap in the middle of his precious grass.
"Jack, come." I felt a tug on my hand. "We need to find something useful, something we can use to get away from here."
"I know, Sam." I gave her one of my crooked grins. "Hey, that place looks interesting." I pointed to a rather dilapidated building on the other side of the green.
After putting our boots back on, we walked along the concrete path, careful to miss the grass, around to the building.
"I bet we can't enter," I said grumpily.
Sam looked to find the slot to swipe our cards, but there didn't seem to be any, so she just pushed the door open. Inside, it was dark and musty. Books covered with dust were piled high to the ceiling. Dim lighting illuminated the dusty shelves in the distance.
"Can I help you?" A mans voice floated up behind a huge pile of pristine looking books.
Sam led the way and we edged ourselves around the pile of books. Nestled in amongst them was an elderly man, his hair, white, long and in disarray. A large magnifying glass on a metal arm hung between him and an old tattered book laid open upon the desk.
"You don't look like . . ." I found myself faltering through lack of words.
"I know, I get lots of looks in the streets, of which I imagine you do too," he said before leaning around the desk and looking pointedly at my ankle.
He then pointed to a similar device on his foot that was tucked under the desk.
"Which planet are you from?" asked Sam the ever curious person that she is.
"From here, I am Aschen, but I did something that was illegal many years ago, so I was one of their first test subjects. Soon they ran out of the local population and then went further a field. Of which, I assume you are from." He looked back down to his book and lovingly stroked the pages.
Sam asked another question. "What do you do here?" She waved her arm out over the many books.
"I restore books, they are all being destroyed by the atmosphere, and I don't want that," he shrugged, "so here I am."
He looked back up from his book and stared at me. "What are you doing here," he asked.
"We are from the planet called Earth and were captured several weeks ago, they pumped us full of gloop and now here we are." Short and succinct the way I liked it.
Sam obviously didn't think so. "We are their latest experiment and we survived. So I think it was a success."
"It depends," he said non-committedly.
"We were wondering," Sam continued, "If we could look at some of your books. It would be nice to know a bit about the history of your people."
"Of course, of course," he pushed himself away from the desk, it was then we saw he was in an Aschen form of a wheelchair. He saw our eyes resting on his mode of transport. "I too was an experiment, I told you. Mine didn't work out as well as yours." He spun around and pulled down some books and banged them onto the desk beside him. A cloud of dust billowed up and made him cough.
"Go on ahead, help yourself, I'm busy." He turned back to the book he was restoring slightly humming to himself.
He was unlike any Aschen I'd ever met before. I liked him.
For the next two hours we rummaged around the books, looking for anything that might give us some kind of clue of how we could get into the building that housed the Stargate. I was over by the dirty covered windows. My legs were tired; they were still not one hundred percent after my malaise. I was sitting on the floor with two piles of books either side of me. I'd already found one book that I didn't understand the technical drawings in, so I had put that one aside, but mainly they were just lots of unreadable Aschen writing or pictures of weird looking animals and plant life.
"Jack." An excited Sam popped her head over a pile of books in front of me. A large dirty smudge was smeared across one cheek, it made her very endearing. "I've found something interesting."
I scrambled to my feet, bringing the technical book along with me. We walked a long way down the dark dusty shelves of books. There were millions of them, how Sam had managed to find something in this lot was amazing.
"Look," she said with her arm outspread in a flourish.
Sitting on a desk was an old computer. It looked very much like the ones that were used in the 90's; large heavy looking monitors and huge big boxed computers to hold all the circuit boards in.
"Does it work?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," she answered.
"Well find out," I said irritably. I twisted around to look for the book man up the front, but he seemed to be quite happy where he was.
Sam crawled down under the desk and started pushing wires and plugs into sockets. The odd swear word wafted up from down there, but I ignored her and started on another pile of books. I had quite a pile of them now beside me opened up with this same odd looking animal in them. It intrigued me. It had the hugest two horns I'd ever seen on any animal before, a large thick neck with four stubby little legs. The tail was that of a horse, the nose that of a wilder beast. And that is just about the only resemblance of an Earth animal I could see, because it was coloured red, blue and purple. The trees in the distance were dark green like the tree in the lawn and the grass was covered in a myriad of coloured flowers, everything from yellow, to red to purple. The animal blended in perfectly. At first I thought it was something that had been coloured afterwards, but no, all the pictures had the colourful landscape with these strangely brightly coloured animals roaming the wild. It was amazing. How could these people have destroyed something so beautiful?
"It's working," Sam's triumphant voice whispered.
I wasn't really surprised, if anything was going to work, Sam could get it going.
She picked up a pile of what looked like floppy disks, but larger than a CD and blew the dust off them. I pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her, so she could wipe any dust off them. It wouldn't do the computer any good shoving dust into it.
She smiled her thanks and started typing. Fortunately, Daniel had filled her in on a few of the basic Aschen words and she still remembered quite a few from when we were in negotiations with them in 2001. It didn't take her long to find something useful. Sam shoved a disk into the computer and started to download some information.
"Have you found a way out of here?" I asked.
"I think so, but I need some paper, preferably a large sheet of it."
I looked pointedly at all the books. "No, plain paper," she said.
"Okay, I'll go and ask matey up at the front desk." She nodded and pulled out the full disk and put in another one.
The man was wiping some kind of cleaning fluid over a large tome when I arrived at the front desk.
"Did you find anything interesting?" he asked as I approached.
"Yes, actually we did; some pictures of colourful animals. They are really quite striking. Sam wants to draw some, do you have any paper we could have. You know large sheets. " I held out my arms quite wide to show how big.
"Yes, up there," he pointed to a cupboard quite high up. "In fact, while you're up there, can you get a whole lot down as I can't reach anymore?"
"Of course." I opened the door and was met with gentle showering of dust. It made me cough and my eyes water. I blinked my eyes to wash out the dust and pulled down a ream of what looked like poster sized paper.
I pulled off a couple of sheets and dumped the rest down within easy reach of the book restorer.
I thanked him and then walked down to the back of the library.
By the time I'd arrived, Sam was studying the monitor which was covered with schematics of something.
"Here's the paper. I think it is man made, I don't think a tree has had anything to do with it. What ya got there?"
"Schematics of the defence system surrounding the Stargate."
I was speechless.
"It is very out of date, but it has the basics and I don't think it will have changed much. Well, I hope it hasn't. Did you get the paper?"
"Yes," I proudly produced the two sheets.
"That won't be enough, I need lots of those."
"Oh, okay." I swivelled around on my heel and marched right back to the front of the library again.
"Hi, my name is Jack." I waved at the man who was gently turning over a page of the book he was working on.
"Hello, my name is Telaran." He smiled.
"I thought as we are going to be here for a while, we'd get down to names. My friend down there is Sam."
"You have very short syllables in your name," he commented.
"Yes, I suppose we do, but they are shortened from a birth names. Anyway," I said, trying to change the subject, "Could we please have some more paper?"
"Yes, of course you can, take as much as you need. Actually, I found these left over from years ago, maybe you can use them." He handed me a box of what looked like crayons, but they weren't made of wax but of a more chalky substance, a bit like oil pastels.
"Oh, thank you," I gave him a cheery wave and sauntered back down to where Sam was busy sketching what was on the computer.
I dumped the sheets of paper on the floor beside her and proceeded to clear a space about ten feet from the computer. It didn't take long and I put the paper on the table. It was made out of metal; I hadn't seen much wood around her even in this old building. Then I began to sort through the books, it took quite a while to find more photos of this strange animal. Idle curiosity I suppose, the fact that there was such a colourful animal had me intrigued and I wasn't any use to Sam.
Over the next several days, Sam sketched more schematics from the computer and downloaded information onto the floppy disks. By the time we'd finished, Sam had four sheets full of lines and circles, that didn't mean squat to me and I had about six half decent sketches of the animal. Merrin would've been proud.
It was the twelfth day that Sam announced she'd finished. It took us all the rest of the day just to hide the computer again and make it look like we'd never found it. On the other hand, the table was awash with sketches made by yours truly. I found five chairs and placed them around the table.
I glanced over to where Sam had been working on the computer there was no sign that we had disturbed it at all. In fact the books that we had cleared off the table were now covering it completely with the dustcover just peaking through the books.
"I think that'll do," Sam sighed.
"You sure you've got everything?" I asked.
"No, but I now need time to study these schematics, they are very different to what I'm used to and they're most probably out of date."
"You'll work it out; I've absolute faith in you." I grinned to give her encouragement. She just huffed in reply.
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