XI

Ted had made a lot of decisions in his teaching career that he'd second-guessed. Futures could be made or destroyed in the classroom, and those stomach-churning occasions when decisions had to be made about interfering in a student's home life were even worse.

But none of that quite compared to the matter of Jon O'Neill.

It had seemed simple enough - a casual call to an old friend, asking if he could check out some margin scribblings when he had time. Ted was curious as to whether Jon really had just doodled something he'd seen on a TV show, or if the equations might betray a hidden deeper interest in the subject. Lord knew it wouldn't have been the first time he'd met a teenage boy who would almost prefer to admit to cross-dressing than to reading science journals in his spare time. It was the boys who didn't look like obvious geeks who fought their talents hardest - the others had been at the bottom of the high school pecking order long enough that compromising their social standing was the least of their worries.

Not that Jon had ever shown the slightest sign of caring about his popularity. Ted was beginning to suspect that he'd had much bigger things to worry about.

Who the hell was he, and what did he know that had the United States Air Force - the Air Force, for God's sake - tied up in knots?

He couldn't help but feel that Jon's disappearance the day after he'd pulled the boy aside to ask about those equations could not be a coincidence. The question was, had Jon fled under his own power, or had Ted's thoughtless phone call set something terrible in motion?

The two people he'd spoken to, Carter and Jackson, had seemed like friendly, young professionals, just trying to pin down a security leak with minimum hassle for all concerned. In a way, that was even more unnerving than if they'd been overtly threatening. It was a smooth and polished performance, as if tracking down teenagers over astrophysics-based national security issues was something they did every day.

Ted certainly didn't feel any more reassured when he turned up to work the next day to find them waiting for him in his office, accompanied by two of the most intimidating men he'd ever seen.

The big guy was, well, big. Roll-you-up-in-a-ball-and-play-basketball-with-you big. He had the serene, quiet dignity of someone who could drift through life in the sure knowledge that anyone who got in his way would soon be very sorry about it.

But it was the other one that Ted's nervous gaze was repeatedly drawn back to. He was only a few inches shorter than the big guy, and while he wasn't as visibly built as his impassive friend or even the pleasantly smiling Jackson, he had a kind of hard-muscled grace that suggested he could move very fast when it suited him. Ted had enough years under his own belt to recognise that anyone with hair that was grey verging on white should not be able to wear baggy pants, a yellow shirt, and sunglasses indoors without looking ridiculous. This was a dangerous man.

And there was something naggingly familiar about him.

"Mr Rasmussen." Colonel Carter's megawatt smile hadn't dimmed despite her more intimidating escort. Being only human, and not used to that kind of thing even before he'd developed the belly and the bald spot, Ted smiled back.

"Colonel. Doctor." His gaze flickered over to their two associates, but no introductions were given. "Did you find Jonathan?"

"The investigation's still ongoing," Jackson told him, if 'told' was an appropriate verb for such a non-answer.

"I hope he's not in any trouble," he said, eyeing the two 'bodyguards' again.

"Oh... that depends on what he has to say for himself when we catch up with him." Mr Grey Hair spoke up for the first time, and pulled off his dark glasses.

And Ted realised he was staring into the face of the future. More specifically, the future of one Jon O'Neill in about four decades' time.

It took him a moment to stammer back to life. "Uh, you're his-" he bit down on 'father' just in time, remembering Jon's orphaned status, "...uncle?"

"Cousin," the man corrected, nodding to himself. Then he pulled a dissatisfied face and let it smooth out again. "Removed," he added. "Or... the other thing. Daniel?" He swivelled round.

Jackson blinked at being addressed. "Um. Well, he's your... uncle's grandson? So that makes you his-"

"Grandfather's nephew," O'Neill overrode him, smiling in smug satisfaction at having arrived at a term he was happy with. Jon's goofy mannerisms, endearing in a teenager even when they were interrupting class, were somewhat disconcerting coming from a man whose age and bearing otherwise pushed all Ted's ingrained 'stand up straight and show respect' buttons.

Jackson looked mildly irked at being cut off, but recovered his smile quickly. "General O'Neill is... Jonathan's closest surviving relative," he explained. "So obviously, we're very keen to get all this straightened out."

Jon's whole family wiped out, right up to the grandparents? Christ.

...General?

Christ. Ted was torn between wishing he'd bothered to shine his shoes this morning, and wondering what the hell the US Air Force was smoking these days.

"What's all this about?" he asked plaintively. This was all too much for him, especially before he'd had his traditional fortifying cup of pre-school coffee.

If he'd been able to read the language of the rapid sequence of looks that passed around, he would have picked up enough information to write a book. Somewhere in the middle of it, Colonel Carter was clearly tagged to do the talking.

"Jon is... part of a Air Force scheme not dissimilar to witness protection," she explained. "His parents were involved in research for a highly classified project that has an impact on national security."

"But how did Jon get mixed up in it?" he asked. Astrophysics wasn't exactly something you could pick up from an accidental glance or two.

"Er, we think his parents may have had him memorise some key information prior to their deaths," Jackson chimed in. "They had reason to suspect that someone was out to destroy their research, and they didn't know who outside the family they could trust."

"Oh, God, you mean they were murdered?" Ted clutched the edge of his desk.

"Jon's... been through a lot," Jackson hedged, which pretty much confirmed it for him.

"More than you can possibly guess," O'Neill added, with a strange expression.

"We're not looking to punish him," Carter spoke up. "We just want to talk to him about the security breach and find out why it happened."

"Yeah. Just a little talk," said O'Neill, with a shark-like grin that was not remotely reassuring.

"And I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to hand over any copies you have of the papers you faxed Doctor Visnadi," she added.

"It hasn't been graded yet," Ted protested weakly as he headed for the stack of homework assignments.

"Oh... well, I'm sure Jon will be happy to make the work up." Jackson exchanged glances with his colleagues, and smiled.

But, as Ted handed over the work and ushered them out of his office with some relief, he couldn't help suspect that Jon O'Neill would never set foot in his classroom again.

"Well, he doesn't know anything," Daniel observed, tucking his hands into his pockets as they left the school building.

"Or he's a very good actor," Sam put in. Daniel pursed his lips thoughtfully for a beat.

"He doesn't know anything," they wryly chorused together.

"Kids. In the back." Jack jerked a thumb at them. He'd managed to commandeer the passenger seat from the get-go, citing the privileges of age, rank, and longer legs. Teal'c, of course, was driving.

"We set Jon up with his own apartment?" Daniel asked. He knew was probably bad to get in the habit of referring to the young Jack by his assumed name, disassociating him from the true identity he had just as much a right to as his older counterpart, but it did make the conversation less cumbersome.

"You think, what, we should have given him minders?" Jack imbued the word with, well, exactly as much disgust as his clone would have held for it, considering they were almost the same person.

Only 'almost', because in the year that had passed, their experiences had diverged. More than that, their bodies had diverged. Take an adult man, and place him in the body of his fifteen-year-old self - did he become fifteen? Did he think and feel exactly as he would if he were still an adult, or did hormones and the physical structure of the brain make him an emotional teenager? Did he get crushes on girls his age, or women more appropriate to 'his age' - and did either way feel disturbing to him, or did instinct and biology make it natural? Was instinct biology? Did Jack's new body possess reflexes it had never been trained to, or was even a simple task like catching a ball something to relearn now that all the dimensions had changed?

It was a fascinating window into the secrets of human identity. But Daniel doubted either version of Jack would see it that way.

"We should have made more of an effort to keep in contact with him," Sam said, obviously feeling guilty. Daniel could sympathise.

Maybe the reason they were all so eager to assign the clone his own identity was because that meant it wasn't Jack they'd shoved into an ill-fitting high school lifestyle and abandoned to get on with it.

"No. We shouldn't," Jack said shortly. Daniel understood that, too. He was an old hand at leaving places behind at short notice, and he knew the temptation to keep contact was the worst way to keep opening old wounds. All Jack's clone would have got from well-meaning efforts to reach out to him was a constant reminder of who he wasn't.

Unfortunately, while they'd elected to leave Jon alone, that didn't mean everyone else had. Daniel reached for his translation notes and went over them again.

"Are those the inscriptions from the device we retrieved from Bradleigh Biotech?" Sam asked him.

He nodded absently. "Yes. It's... tough to translate accurately, the language is..." he wrinkled his forehead, "a little unusual. Very poetic, even for the Ancients. I hesitate to try and make any kind of conclusion on the basis of such a rough translation, but it seems to be- well, it could be some kind of-"

"It's a lava lamp." Jack bluntly reaffirmed his original reaction.

Daniel had to reluctantly concede that he almost had a point. "It, uh, it does appear that it's a therapeutic device of some sort, intended to stimulate the mental processes in some way. Like a, a meditation aid or... some kind of child-development scheme."

"I got zapped by the alien equivalent of a musical mobile?" Jack demanded.

"Er... broadly speaking," Daniel allowed. "From what I can gather, there should be a second component to the device; what we have would be used by the parent - or, or teacher, or doctor - to set the, um, the learning program that would play on the second device."

"Master and slave," said Sam, nodding. Daniel frowned.

"Um, there's no evidence the Ancients ever-"

She cut him off with a warm smile. "Computer terminology, Daniel. A master-slave network has a single computer acting as a server that distributes information to all the client terminals - as opposed to the peer-to-peer model, where any station can send or receive requests for services. As near as we can tell, the data stream from the device is unidirectional, which suggests a host-based or master-slave setup."

Hosts, masters, slaves... was it him, or did all this computer terminology sound disturbingly Goa'uldish?

"So there's a second part to this gizmo out there?" Jack, as usual, mentally strip-mined their discussion for practical implications and ignored almost all of the rest.

"We think so, sir."

"Then where is it?" he demanded.

"Here, possibly," Daniel said, as Teal'c pulled up outside Jon's apartment block.

"Here?"

Sam rejoined them around the other side of the car. "Well, insofar as we can guess at the organisation's motives, it seems likely that they were attempting to use the device to, uh... stimulate-" she grimaced even as she said it, "your clone."

Jack raised a finger... then just let it float there for a while. "Not gonna touch that, Carter," he decided eventually.

"Thank you, sir," she said, with feeling.

"What were they hoping to gain from it? Their own real live captive Ancient?" Daniel made a face as he provided his own answer.

"Hey, he's no more an Ancient than I am," Jack reminded them.

"Perhaps he is now," Teal'c said gravely.

"Even your brief exposure to the particle stream caused unconsciousness and increased brain activity," Sam said. "And to be honest, sir, we really don't know yet what the long-term effects might be."

Jack wrinkled his nose. "That's reassuring."

"The odds are that your clone has been subjected to a considerably longer exposure. It's possible that the slave device converts the energy into a less harmful form, but still, your own bad reaction shows that this technology was never intended for use on somebody who possesses the ATA gene without being a full Ancient. If the device is attempting to 'repair' his mental condition to the standards that would be considered normal for an Ancient... there's no telling what it might do to him."

"It's P3R-272 all over again," Daniel said soberly.

Jack raised an eyebrow. "P3R... 90210... being?"

Daniel made a vague gesture toward his head. "Ancient head-sucker thingy."

"Ah."

Jon's apartment was a bust. Come to think of it, Daniel was beginning to wonder why they ever bothered doing these kind of searches, since they inevitably turned up nothing but the fact that someone else had been there before them.

"Is there a special secret organisation maid service somewhere?" he asked Sam. "Cleaning, tidying, removal of incriminating evidence..."

Jack's cell phone chirped, and he wandered a little distance away to answer it. Daniel flipped through a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that had been left on Jon's coffee table. No annotations, although there was a doodle of a bumblebee on page 57. Rather endearingly, it had been outfitted with a speech bubble that read 'Bzzz bzzz'.

Jack flipped his phone closed and rejoined them. "That was Walter. He says we've had a message through from our Swedish allies."

Glances were exchanged. Conclusions were not reached, unless 'Why yes, I do believe Jack is insane,' counted, and nobody could call that news.

"Uh..." Daniel began. Jack's eyebrows lowered impatiently.

"It's phone code. Unsecured line, Daniel! Swedish, Norse... Asgard?"

Before he could form a response to that typical piece of Jack-logic, there was a familiar white flash, and they were beamed out of the apartment.

John could feel that the scanner device had been switched on long before he got anywhere near it. The humming that floated out of the patterned crystal door, however, was not coming from the machine but from the Czechoslovakian scientist sat on the floor, cheerfully murdering symphonies while he checked readings.

"Going well?" John drawled as he walked in.

The pillar thing in the centre of the floor was now lit up, blue bars flickering up and down the sides like the lights on a stereo. Instead of the original six power crystals there were now nine, the extra three hooked up in a complicated arrangement that involved a lot of wires, clips, and duct tape. The cracked one had been removed to one of the worktops, and now had a note taped to it that said: 'Do not throw. Does not bounce.' John made a mental note to find out which marines had been given the duty of carrying Zelenka's equipment for him.

"The device is now operational," he confirmed. "How is Doctor McKay?"

John contemplated for a moment, in order to deliver le mot juste. "...Argumentative."

"Ah."

As they both knew, a cranky McKay was a healthy McKay. It was when he became suspiciously subdued and well-behaved that you started to worry.

He waved a finger at the alien pillar. "So... what does it do?"

Zelenka rubbed his head - looking decidedly fluffy after hours of crawling about in restricted spaces - and considered. "It lights up panels here, here, and here, displays a message that I cannot yet read, and vibrates at a frequency of- Hmm." He paused to consult one of the connected instruments, found it wasn't the one he wanted, and leaned over to reach another.

"Okay, let me rephrase that," John said. "What is it for?"

Zelenka grinned. "Ah. You are after the technical version." He paused briefly. "That... may take some time."

The vessel they had been transported aboard was clearly Asgard in design. Nonetheless, Teal'c did not relax until he saw O'Neill do so.

"Hey, Thor." He raised a hand to shoulder height in a little wave.

Even Teal'c, whose experience with tracking had taught him greater observation skills than most Tauri, had great difficulty telling one Asgard from another before they spoke. However, even on those rare occasions SG-1 encountered several of the race together, O'Neill seemed to have no difficulty picking out his friend.

His teammates, and many others at the SGC, had often remarked in wonder at the rapport O'Neill had struck with such a lofty representative of a race so alien, where the greatest of diplomats would have feared to even try. Teal'c kept his own counsel. Warrior souls called to one another, and no boundary of race could stand between them. His time among the Tauri had taught him that there were more routes to close kinship than the Jaffa acknowledged, but the one he had known longest was the most universal.

The burden of battles lost and hard won was always visible in the eyes of those who carried it. Teal'c had seen it in O'Neill on Chulak, and known in that instant that while hundreds had stood before him and made claims even more grandiose, here at last was a man who knew the weight of what he offered and still offered it.

He had no doubt Thor had seen the same in O'Neill's eyes, and realised that the Tauri were not so young and foolish as the Asgard had believed.

"O'Neill." Thor bowed his head respectfully.

"It couldn't wait 'til we got back to the Batcave?" O'Neill asked, spreading his hands.

Teal'c had, through the convenience of DVD rental, familiarised himself with the mythology of the warrior known as Batman, but Thor was doubtless uncertain to what O'Neill referred. Wisely, however, he merely blinked and continued.

"I was summoned to your planet by a signal indicating some urgency."

"Summoned? Who by?" Daniel Jackson stepped forward. Thor tilted his head.

"If you are unaware of the origin of the signal, then I am equally uncertain."

He touched a control, and a simple repeating pattern appeared on the nearest screen. The letters T, H, O, R, followed by the Tauri gate symbol cycled across the display again and again.

"The alphabet of the Tauri," Teal'c observed.

"Yeah, we kind of got that, Teal'c," O'Neill said, scratching his neck. Teal'c did not take offence.

"Who apart from us would know to signal the Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet by name?" Daniel Jackson wondered.

"Thor, how did you pick this message up?" Colonel Carter asked. "Any method of communication used on Earth would take thousands of years to reach even the closest Asgard-controlled world."

O'Neill cocked his head. "Taking yourself a little vacation in Tauri space?" He slipped his hands into his pockets and briefly rose up on his toes. "You know, that fishing invitation still stands. I got this cabin, miles from anywhere..."

"I do not believe it would be wise to subject the Asgard to the creatures you call 'mosquitoes'," Teal'c interjected. His old team leader displayed a look of affected hurt that Rya'c would not have thought to get away with as a small child.

"The method by which the signal was transmitted was of great interest to us." Thor moved his hand, and the display switched to a chart, perhaps of frequencies. Colonel Carter could not have read the Asgard notation, but stepped forward to study it nonetheless. "It shares traits with communication technologies used by the Ancients."

All of them looked to O'Neill. He looked back.

"Hey, what?" He shrugged innocently.

"Sir, do you remember what you were thinking when you activated the device yesterday night?" Colonel Carter enquired.

"Yeah, I was thinking 'Ow,' and 'I should know better than to let these guys tell me the technology's safe'."

"Nothing about the Asgard?" Daniel Jackson pressed.

"Not at the time, no."

"O'Neill, you have had further contact with Ancient technology?" Teal'c was unable to ascertain whether Thor was merely interested, or concerned.

O'Neill scrubbed a hand through his hair. "A little zap... I'm fine." The tense set of his features would seem to belie that conclusion, but it was doubtful an Asgard could read human body language well enough to discern the presence of a headache. "Can you pinpoint the origin of the signal, Thor?"

The Asgard nodded. "It is coming from a region only a short distance south of here."

That was puzzling to them all. "Within Colorado?" Daniel Jackson raised his eyebrows.

"Perhaps it is an accomplice of the conspirators we captured," Teal'c suggested.

"In that case-" O'Neill reached for his concealed weapon, and Teal'c drew his own zat'nikatel, regretful that his staff weapon was unsuitable to carry while on Earth, "-beam 'em up."