SGC Infirmary - Tuesday, October 14th, 1997
"Someone get Colonel O'Neill down here, this healing pod, bed, thing is driving me insane," Doctor Janet Fraiser ordered.
The medical pod was in the process of examining Airman Fredericks after he'd sprained his left wrist during his morning physical training in the gym. The medical team was trying to compare the readings on the displays with their own diagnostic equipment, but aside from the obvious ones like heart rate with the characteristic spike and a reading they were pretty sure was the oxygen levels the rest of the charts were all guess work.
- A new line has appeared -
SGC, General Hammond's office
"You're sure about this," General Hammond said.
"Sir, I have this bad feeling that we're going to need the training that place can provide, and more so, that we'll need to get to the end of whatever the dungeon planet has for us. The sooner the better," Colonel O'Neill replied.
The general sighed and ran a hand over his head, "I was afraid you'd say that. Though you'll be delayed somewhat as I've been notified they want another try at things. Seems they may have listened to reason this time, and are only sending a four man team with the explicit instruction to retreat before they get themselves killed. They'll be here by Thursday morning."
Colonel Makepeace knocked on the door to the general's office interrupting any further discussion.
"You have a moment, sir?" Makepeace asked.
"Makepeace," O'Neill said.
"O'Neill," Colonel Makepeace returned the acknowledgement.
"How can I help you, Colonel?" General Hammond asked.
"I may have been approached by the fools responsible for that group of idiots that came through here last week," Colonel Makepeace said.
"Oh?" Jack said.
"They, uh— tried recruiting me as a mole. And I have zero interest in being their catspaw, given the incompetence I saw on display," Makepeace said.
"Take a seat, Colonel," the general sighed.
"You know, I just realized that I have heard of these guys before," Jack snapped his fingers. "Part of those events related to my service jacket that we pretend doesn't exist, well, everyone referred to them as the Notional Idiot Department. I just wasn't making the connection," Jack said.
"Notional?" Makepeace asked.
"Yup, you heard me right," Jack said.
"Ah, the Negative Intuition Division?" Colonel Makepeace suggested, getting into the spirit of things.
"That too," Jack grinned.
The general snorted. "I think it might be time to introduce the two of you to a friend of mine. Unless you'd rather not know about this O'Neill."
"Oh, I am all ears. Besides, I still have contacts on that side of things that you might like to have digging into them too," O'Neill said, shifting his seat to the side to make room for Makepeace to pull the other chair forward for the coming discussion.
- A new line has appeared -
SGC Infirmary
"Aw shucks doc, what's the deal? I know I'm not due for a physical yet," Jack O'Neill said as he entered the doctor's demesne.
Janet Fraiser merely raised an eyebrow and pointed at the advanced medical pod that had been installed in a corner of the infirmary.
"What's it doing?" Jack asked.
"How can I be expected to evaluate this when it doesn't respond to anything me and my staff do and doesn't seem to allow us access to the patient while that golden field is up," Janet complained. "And I've been waiting hours for you to make it down here to help."
Colonel O'Neill walked over and started tapping at the hologram floating above the third airman to volunteer to use the thing.
"Right, so I think that's the authorization screen..." Jack said after a moment. "Now how to get it to register you and the rest of the medical staff."
The screen flickered and a new box appeared in front of Janet.
"This isn't very helpful," Janet said looking over the blocky text.
"Oh, I know this one, there should be an English translation option. The dungeon planet managed it in the safe room," Jack said, and poked at the holographic box until it seemed to fitz and then a single word of the blocky text changed to English like it was struggling.
"That seems a little slow," Janet said.
"Maybe it doesn't have the processing power for it?" Jack said. "Come on now, the dungeon training facility already has the english translations, can't you just download it from there?" Jack grumbled.
The hologram blinked out of existence and then a new screen appeared with a blinking counter and two buttons. There was also a familiar gate address on the display, but Jack figured that was just to confirm where the update was supposed to come from. Jack immediately pressed the one he'd come to associate with a confirmation, only for the base alarm to go off.
Jack let out a few colorful curses knowing this was somehow his fault.
"Unscheduled stargate activation," Walter's voice came over the base intercom.
SGC, Stargate operations, Control room
"And that's how you control the stargate," Ernest said, with the excitement of a kid being given an exclusive tour of Santa's workshop.
"Yup," Captain Carter replied. "We started off with the basics that Doctor Langford had already established and worked forward from there. Those racks there are computers with trillions of transistors on silicon microchips. They're wired into an access crystal on the gate that sends and receives signals hundreds of times a second."
"That would explain how enigmatic the whole thing seemed to us," Ernest replied. "We were just starting to experiment with digital encoding using vacuum tubes. Oh, those machines were so unreliable and filled multiple rooms and entire floors. Getting the response times just right would have been a nightmare."
"The interesting part is the DHD module that we picked up just last mission," Carter said.
"Oh?" Ernest asked.
"Yes, it triggered a diagnostic program remotely from my lab," Carter said.
Just then the two were interrupted by the stargate activating, and Carter made sure they were out of Sergeant Harriman's way while she used the nearest terminal to access her own copy of the readings from the stargate.
SGC Infirmary
A moment later there was a progress bar that sped to completion and the bed holograms all disappeared before returning in english this time.
"Thank you, Colonel, I think I can take it from here," Janet said, seeing how all the holographic screens were now in front of her and there appeared to be some sort of application process that was registering her as the designated medical professional.
"I think I need to go up to the control room to fill them in anyway," Jack said. "They'll not have a clue what just happened."
SGC, Stargate operations control room
"Anyone care to explain what just happened?" General Hammond said.
"Something on the base activated the stargate. This log entry here indicates that the connection was initiated from our end and not offworld," Captain Carter said.
"How?" the general asked.
"Well, it wasn't the new dialing console that was powered down while I finished going over those example programs on the program crystals," Carter said.
"There's a signal spike here," Walter said, pointing to one of the readouts from the sensors monitoring the gate.
"That's a massive data transfer," Captain Carter said after a moment. "I think we can safely say it's all being sent from the other side."
"Ah, you're all here," Colonel Jack O'Neill said.
"Sir?" Captain Carter said.
"I believe I know what caused the latest mystery," Jack said.
"Well, don't keep us in suspense, Colonel," General Hammond said.
"Captain Fraiser was having issues with the uh, medical pod that we brought back from Heliopolis, and since it seemed to respond so well to me, she requested I go down and try and get it to cooperate with her and the rest of the medical staff. In the process we may have told it to download some updates like an English translation pack and apparently the easiest way for it to do so was through the stargate," Jack replied.
"I can't fault you. She's a definite menace, but she's also the best in her field," General Hammond sighed.
"Ah, sir, I was just about to head out for that thing," Jack said. "At least before Fraiser had someone all but drag me down to help her, if we're done here?"
"Go ahead, colonel," General Hammond said.
"Is it always this exciting around here?" Ernest asked Captain Carter as the room cleared.
"Only some days," Carter replied jokingly, "I wanted to show you the new dialing module we picked up."
"Lead the way," Ernest grinned.
- A new line has appeared -
Colorado Springs, Random Payphone
"Feldspar's Pizzeria, what's your fresh pie today," the voice answered from the other end.
"Tell Chef I need the special delivery for Starflight," Jack said.
"Anything else?"
"Spicy Supreme if you would, and ask Chef if he still hates canned pineapple," Jack said.
There was a little silence then the voice replied, "Chef said canned pineapple will get you an army of angry Italians up your ass."
"I'd prefer the angry Italians honestly, they've actually got brains," Jack snarked and hung up.
The colonel returned to his truck and pulled a piece of paper out of his glove compartment, there was a series of numbers scribbled on it that told him what to tune his radio to.
"This is KMRL radio. Your MAGIC Rock station, I'm your host Jeff Wright. Don't be wrong, Colorado, listen the Wright way here on KMRL. We have a call in request. Caller, you are on the air," Jack paused to listen as the radio host went through a short chat, as he listened, he caught the three indicator phrases that this was the correct caller for him...except that two of them had come from the DJ, not the caller, and he suspected that the first couple of things the caller had said were codes for the DJ. Then the DJ was back with the requested song. "Up next we have a request for Angus, if you're out there man. Here's Sweet with Fox on the Run."
Jack left the song playing on the radio because it was a good song and pulled out his atlas. Within a few moments he'd found Fox Run park just a short drive north of the city and was on his way.
- A new line has appeared -
Colorado Springs, Fox Run Park
Jack O'Neill strolled through the park, happy the park wasn't crowded for the time and day and found a picnic table with a view of the lake to relax. He plopped the grocery bag with sunflower seeds he'd brought along to throw at the non-existent birds, so he could snack on them while he waited.
He'd not been sitting there very long when someone sat at the picnic table on the bench behind him.
"How's Marge," the other man said. Jack heard the crinkle of a newspaper being used to help reflect the voice.
"Still with Homer," Jack replied, with the next sequence to the code he'd established with this contact. If for example he'd have said she was spending some time with the Bouviers that'd have sent a different message.
"At least someone's happy," the man replied, this was both a finisher for the code phrases and a statement of how the man's line of work was going these days.
"You know if you ever want to change tracks I know a guy..." Jack said, fairly certain who he was talking with at this point but intentionally not acknowledging any names, even in his own head.
"Same here, it's just not the same without you and Kowalski around."
"Trust me, you'll want to come my way, and the offer's open for anyone on your team or that your team works with too," Jack said.
"I'll let them know but don't hold your breath. Now, you don't look nearly panicked enough for an army of angry Italians ready to take issue with your choice of toppings. What's happening?"
"That's 'cause I'm not, we managed to prevent them from using it on our pizza, but it doesn't change the fact that it was in the same kitchen."
"How serious could it be?"
"Take a look at the paperwork on the Surstromming they brought with their chef... not to mention the chef wasn't there voluntarily." Jack handed him a copy of the datasheet on the chemical weapons they'd brought along.
"Well, shit. And you're not asking us for that army of angry Italians because?"
"I need some passive intel on that bunch of idiots in the Notional Intelligence Dumping ground. Not active, not guns blazing, but if you see their name attached to something or someone, paperwork whatever, they stuck their nose into my business and it's just begging to get cut off," Jack said.
"And you don't want us going in guns blazing yet?"
"They have notional support from the big man in the big house. But, we think they lied to the guy so we're using a soft approach until we can dump what we have on the big-man's desk. Worse, we think these are a rogue sub-group, because our official contacts have been clueless when we called them."
"Out of curiosity. If I were interested, though, would that involve travel?"
"My frequent flier card maxes out in a single step of every trip," Jack replied dryly
"Right — and you don't want to get out of there?"
"The ride can be a little rough, but the destinations are more than worth it. Most of the time."
- A new line has appeared -
SGC - Captain Carter's Lab
"As you can see the dialing console uses the same symbols as the stargate, and there's an internal power system, and the ability to interface with an external system for programming and review of console logs," Carter said.
"And those card slots in the back?" Ernest asked, poking around the DHD module.
Carter tapped a few keys on the terminal she'd hooked up to the DHD panel. "Those are macro program cards, they can override the behavior of the dialing device and the stargate, for example this one here looks like it can take the incoming matter buffer and redirect it to an alternate address."
"So, you could use that instead of the Iris?" Ernest asked.
"I think so, yes, I'd just need to enable this flag in the program here and tie it to the status of the iris, if the iris is open then travel can happen normally, if it's closed the gate will redirect travelers to one of the addresses from this list here." Carter pointed at the code on the screen. "It's surprisingly intuitive."
"Are there any other interesting macro programs in there?"
"Quite a few yes, this one here for example will immediately disconnect an incoming connection and dial back. This one should turn an outgoing connection into an incoming one by instructing the destination gate to reinitialize as though it had just dialed back, but if I'm reading the code right it causes the safety disconnect timer to malfunction and has to take over the disconnect timer manually."
"Quite a few different possible programs then, Captain," Ernest said.
"Yup, and room for me to write a few of my own," Captain Carter grinned.
"What if you," Ernest started and continued on to explain his idea to the Captain that would change how they handled the security implications of the stargate.
- A new line has appeared -
SGC, General Hammond's office
"Sir," Captain Doctor Janet Fraiser knocked on the door.
"Come in," George Hammond shoved the bottle of tums he was about to open back into a drawer as he spotted the doctor.
"I'm going to ignore that, and jump right to why I'm here," Doctor Fraiser said.
"I appreciate that, Doctor," the general said dryly.
"There've been some increasingly insistent proposals from the medical researchers at Langley regarding Teal'c's symbiote. I'd been rejecting them but with the new immune system booster drugs they've been working on and now the medical pod that SG1 brought back, I'm running out of denials," Doctor Fraiser explained.
"I see, Captain, I don't make it a habit to order the men and women under my command to undergo experimental procedures," General Hammond said.
"I wouldn't ask you to, and I hope you know me better than that," Captain Janet Fraiser said.
General Hammond sighed, "You can ask him."
- A new line has appeared -
SGC Infirmary
"It's not too late to back out," Fraiser said.
"No, Doctor Fraiser. I have agreed to assist you in this endeavor, if my assistance can aid in removing the Jaffa's reliance upon the primta, I must participate in these trials. Just promise me that the symbiote will not be removed from the base," Teal'c said.
"I have my most trusted ensuring just that," Fraiser said.
"Then we should proceed," Teal'c said.
"Alright Teal'c, administering the first immune boosting compound test now," Fraiser said, and moved the needle to the injection port in the saline IV bag.
- A new line has appeared -
SGC, Daniel's office
Catherine smiled as Daniel laid out the pages of notes he'd made on the ancient language and started explaining his ideas and theories to her.
"So this is all the examples for that block style writing we've managed to get. This is from the dungeon, and this page from heliopolis, this one is Jack's kino remote." Daniel said. "I also suspect it might be related to Latin, but that's a suspicion based on a few words from the hologram on the dungeon planet. Specifically, it called the stargate an Astria Porta, and named the hostile bugs, Iratus bugs."
"I can see how you came to that conclusion but those symbols don't look much like what we know of as the Latin alphabet," Catherine said.
"True, but our modern alphabet descended from several prior alphabets, and these symbols specifically have some resemblance to the early phoenician," Daniel said, placing copies of both mentioned alphabets on the table between them.
"This character here that looks like an L rotated upside down looks like it could be an A, but then it could also be the letter gimmel," Catherine muttered.
"I asked one of the programmers to write up something that would cycle through each letter and check with a few common latin words to see if that would get me anywhere," Daniel said, dropping a stack of papers on the table. "So far I think this is the closest one that makes the most sense but there's still large parts that are roughly incomprehensible like this line here about a fruit of the earth being the answer."
"Don't forget most cultures have their own in-jokes and sayings that don't always translate, sometimes you just don't have the context, but that's a problem with most translations."
"I also noticed that the characters have mirror counterparts, which was a problem with this page here because the scan image I gave the program was upside down and it gave me two different results based on which direction it was facing when read in."
- A new line has appeared -
SGC Infirmary - Late Evening October 14th, 1997
"No immune responses for test compounds one through four, unfavorable reaction to compound five, the symbiote appears to have filtered all the test compounds out so far," Doctor Fraiser noted the results in the log. "Teal'c, are you sure you want to continue?"
"I am sure doctor," Teal'c said while laying reclined on the infirmary bed.
"If you're certain. Alright, beginning test number six," Janet Frasier picked up the sixth syringe and presented the prepared symbiote tank for Teal'c to place his primta within while they tested the latest compound.
Once the symbiote was safely contained, she injected the latest compound into the intravenous tube and watched Teal'c's vitals.
- A new line has appeared -
Omake:
Daniel: "Jack what are you doing?"
Jack: "Huh?" continues pressing buttons on the ancient handheld computer
Daniel: "Jack..."
Jack: "What?"
Daniel: "What are you doing?"
Jack: "Playing Legend of Zelda."
Daniel: "How?"
Jack: shrugs; "this thing scanned the game cartridge, only annoying part is all the text is in ancient, somehow."