Mathématique: Chapter 19

Young’s ability to ignore the (admittedly gratuitous) academic barbed-wire masquerading as Nick Rush’s current personality was (endearingly) impressive.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 19

A genetic requirement.

It’d been a week since Rush’s escape from Cheyenne Mountain, since their impromptu drive along Route 24 with Vala in the backseat and a headache behind his eyes so bad it’d taken three days to shake.

A genetic requirement.

The more he considered it, the more it disquieted him.

On a surface level, the concept was antithetical to so much of what he believed. Even now, he pushed the idea away, this bounding of intellectual potential by and into a four-letter code, a digital yes or no sealed in an arrangement of nucleotides that would grant or withhold access in a chemical predestination worthy of John fuckin’ Knox.

But it went deeper.

Why did any human have any Ancient gene? Why did he have five of the bloody things? They’d need to’ve been put there, no? Seeded at some point along his ancestral line? And that was best case. Worst case he, himself, had been directly interfered with. By an alien race.

Seemed bloody odd that no one had brought this up with him directly.

He shut his eyes, killed the train of thought, and tried not to think of genetics.

If he could re-create himself, he would do it.

“—really the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings,” Young said pointedly.

Rush sighed and tipped his head back against the car seat.

“Don’t sigh, hotshot. Focus up. Everything follows from situational awareness. You’re a quick thinker. That’ll help with spur of the moment decisions—like, do I wait or do I run? That kinda thing. Though, the answer to that one is always run.”

Young was driving.

Young was driving and monologuing.

Young was driving and monologuing, and Rush was doing his best not to have a migraine on the eve of his first trip through the stargate.

“That being said,” Young continued, “there are some things you’ll wanna get in the habit of thinking about. Like the symbol config on the DHD. Not literally the address itself, which, yeah, is also important. That goes without saying. I’m talking about the spatial arrangement of panels, in case you have to dial under fire. Not that you will be. Under fire, I mean. But, if for some reason you are, you’re gonna need to dial the alpha site. Especially now. Post-foothold, they always tighten down the security protocols—”

Over the past few days, Young had done his best to condense the entire substance of a hypothetical (or maybe it was actual, Rush had no idea) military curriculum into a free-form, poorly organized, stream-of-consciousness lecture series disguised as conversations.

There was something a bit touching about the effort.

“You’re not a soldier, and you also seem to have a baseline mistrust for the chain of command for whatever reason, but, civilian or not, you’re expected to follow orders. You’re gonna have to just suck it up and do it, Rush, even if you can’t—”

There was something a bit touching about the man, full stop. Young’s ability to ignore the (admittedly gratuitous) academic barbed-wire fuckery masquerading as Nick Rush’s current personality was (endearingly) impressive.

Impressive enough to net him a week’s worth of increasingly elaborate dinners.

“— rationalize why it might be important. You have to accept that you’re not trained for this, hotshot. You need to defer to the people who are, and trust their experience—”

Alas, no amount of Wholesome American Concern was capable of turning Rush into a person keen on “trust.”

“—when it comes to making the right call.”

He rolled his closed eyes. As if there were any such thing as “the right call.”

Even if there were, how would one verify it?

“So when you’re told to run, you run. You’re told to dial the gate? You dial the gate.”

Behind his sunglasses, behind the closed lids of his eyes, the sun was searing.

“You listening, hotshot?”

“No,” Rush replied. “I’m trying to decide whether, in the unlikely event you found yourself in a mathematics competition where death was a potential outcome, my advice to you in that scenario would be better organized than yours to me in this one.”

There was a short silence.

“What,” Young demanded.

“The answer, I think, is yes,” Rush decided.

“I recommended you to go into the field.” Young growled. “I can unrecommend you.”

“Undermining your own judgment in the eyes of command?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Rush cracked his eyes open. “Meaning?”

“Nice try,” Young replied. “But you don’t have the security clearance for that one.”

“Ah.”

“Just—” Young gave him a devastatingly earnest look, “—don’t do anything stupid?”

“A statistical improbability.”

“Don’t break the DHD.”

“No promises.”

“And don’t get abducted,” Young said.

Rush looked into the blaze of late morning sun. “I’ll consider it.”

Silence fell between them as Young pulled through the security checkpoint. They flashed their IDs in a simultaneous press of plastic to glass.

“This isn’t the way things are supposed to go,” Young said, as the guards waved them through. 

“Oh no?” Rush pitched his voice somewhere between a true interrogative and pure rhetoric. He looked up at the unrelenting blue of the sky as Young pulled into a parking spot.

Did it never rain here?

“No.” Young killed the engine but made no move to exit the car.

Rush looked over at him.

“This is such bullshit,” Young whispered.

Rush quirked a brow.

“Sending you offworld with no training to speak of because to train you would be to create a leakable record? So instead they’re sending a guy through the gate without clearance, with nothing on the books. Doesn’t feel right. There’s shit you’re supposed to do before you go through the gate. Physical evaluations. Mental evaluations.”

“I can’t say I’m sorry to’ve missed the mandatory orientation,” Rush replied, his hand on the door handle.

“Those checkboxes you skipped over? They exist for a reason, Rush.”

“I’m sure.” A quick flex of his wrist swung the car door into a waiting wall of heat. He stepped into it, then turned to watch Young drag himself out, one hand wrapped around the top of the car, where the sun-absorbing black paint must have been painfully hot.

Young stared him down behind sunglasses. “You’re a lot of work.”

“Are y’worried about me?” He shut the passenger side door.

“Maybe,” Young muttered.

“Adorable,” Rush decided.

“Shut up.”

Wordlessly, Rush held up three fingers.

“Damn it,” Young sighed.

They didn’t speak as they entered the base, nor as they rode the elevator down to level twenty-one, nor as Young led the way to the empty locker rooms. The colonel opened a locker that was clearly his own and pulled out a set of newly issued green fatigues, sized to fit Rush.

“Get changed,” Young said. “You can leave your stuff in there.” He indicated the locker with a tilt of his head. “Then report to the gate room.”

Rush felt the mental crack of a shattering assumption but did his best to betray nothing. He began unbuttoning his shirt. “You’re not coming.”

“No.” Young didn’t look at him.

“I was under the impression—” he paused, realizing the idea of Young accompanying him could be traced back to his own mind.

“I’m on light duty.” Young landed the words like an apology.

“Right,” Rush said. “I knew that.”

“This mission’s been compartmentalized.” Young averted his eyes and Rush pulled a standard-issue black t-shirt over his head. “People pulled from different places and told the bare minimum. They’re scrambling a special team for this. Personnel with the least LA contact and the best skills.”

Rush sighed, sending his shoes into the bottom of Young’s locker with a hollow clang. “So who’s nominally in charge of this thing?”

“Nominally?” Young echoed, a faint note of disbelief in his voice.

Rush shrugged.

Young looked at the ceiling, presumably praying for patience, then said, “No idea. All personnel decisions were General Landry’s. I’ve got a ten minute window to brief whomever it is that starts—” he looked at his watch, “—about three minutes from now.”

“Right.” Rush finished with the pants and started on the boots. “See you later, then.”

Young gave him a fond look. “Keep it together, hotshot.”

Rush scowled. “Don’t fuckin’ undermine my credibility to whomever you brief.”

The corner of Young’s mouth quirked. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Don’t break your other leg.”

“Shut up, Rush.”

Rush didn’t look up from tying his boots, but he did pause, shift his grip on the laces, and hold up four fingers.

“Remember what I told you about being aware of your surroundings. Whatever happens, make sure you don’t lose track of your position relative to the gate. Always know how to dial home. Don’t forget to send your GDO code, and for god’s sake, don’t lose your GDO.”

Rush sighed, wondering if he’d done anything specific to indicate profound incompetence to Young. Several candidates came to mind. He suspected no matter how many times he pulled Young out of an anoxic gas, he’d never live down the fact he’d developed heat exhaustion in his own apartment.

“Yes yes.” He finished tying his boots and pulled on his jacket, which seemed to come with pre-equipped pockets. It lay heavy across his shoulders.

“Gate room,” Young said on his way out the door. “Assembly in ten.”

Rush nodded.

He spent a moment inventorying his pockets, which contained a device he assumed was a GDO, two silver-wrapped power bars, a compass, a set of small field binoculars, a knife, a pen, three plastic bags labeled with a red and black biohazard symbol, and a slim volume entitled Managing the Emerging Crisis: A Linguistic Approach, edited by Dr. Daniel Jackson.

He opened the book, squinted at the minuscule type, then pulled out his glasses. At the top of each page was an English phrase. Below it were corresponding phrases in different languages with a phonetic guide to pronunciation:

Don’t shoot!
Kree tol! (Goa’uld)
Non sagittent! (Ancient)
Ikke skyt! (Asgardian)
Rin nok! (Goa’uld, Tok’ra variant)
Ne pafas! (Noxian)
Ch’kan. [with falling intonation on last syllable] (Later Unas, P3X-888 regional variant)
Saehara avet! (Tollan)
Ahash? [hissed with rising intonation] (Wraith)

Fuckin’ Jackson. The man was inescapable. Rush shut the book, pocketed it, and proceeded to the gate room.

He’d seen the gate only once, after he’d pulled apart its internal schematics (on paper, in code, in his mind). He’d needed to see it. He’d needed to know it truly existed. That it was a material as well as a mental construct. That the lock was real. That it had a physical correlate.

He’d never seen it active.

When he arrived in the embarkation room, the gate dominated the space just as he remembered it, sitting perfectly centered at the base of a long vertical shaft that stretched the length of Cheyenne Mountain. Two technicians fussed over a robotic probe at the base of the ramp. Near a crate of equipment, looking it over with a familiar stillness, was Amanda Perry.

Rush stepped to her side. “Please tell me they’ve concocted some way for you to come along.”

The flicker of her eyelids and the tilt of her head suggested he’d surprised her. He moved to stand in her line of sight.

“I wish.” Her smile carried none of the regret he heard in her voice. “But I’ll only be a radio wave away.”

He nodded and sat on a sturdy-looking plastic bin that was positioned next to Perry’s delicate equipment.  From between the padded slats of the crate, he saw the styrofoam kit containing a custom-designed, classical-to-quantum, USB-to-crystal interface.

“Nervous?” Perry asked.

“No.” Rush looked determinedly at the gate.

“Liar,” Perry shot back, the amused quirk of her mouth robbing the word of bite.

Rush gave her a one-shouldered shrug.

“We’re as prepped as it’s possible to be,” Perry said bracingly. “If this works, you’ll be advancing the field of quantum hacking well beyond the current state of quantum computing, which isn’t how these things are supposed to go.”

“I do not ‘hack’,” Rush replied archly.

“Let’s call it 'Q-Hack',” Perry replied. “We could start a weekly quantum cryptanalysis interest group.”

Rush quirked a brow.

“What?” Perry said. “The Historical Unit has a book club.”

“I’ve no interest in starting an interest group.”

“I think you might want to reconsider,” Perry said. “Word on the Science Grapevine is that continued funding for the Icarus Project is contingent on us fulfilling a special request.”

“Us?”

“Well, if you’re looking for accuracy, it’s really only you; but I’m willing to join your team.” She gave him a smile full of math and devilry. “There’s been a suggestion/order to render your cypher set for embedding in a highly anticipated MMORPG.”

Rush failed to place the acronym. “A what?”

“A computer game,” Perry supplied. “For the masses.”

He stared at her, not so much at a loss for words as at a loss for thoughts. Incontrovertible stupidity had that effect on him, especially when it came as a surprise.

“Could you repeat that? I can’t have understood you correctly.”

She gave him a sympathetic lift of the eyebrows. “A game,” she repeated. “A massively multiplayer online role-playing game. This comes straight from Jay Felger and he’s usually not wrong. At least, not about departmental gossip. Or video games.”

He stared at her.

“Like, a video game? That humans play? For fun?” She watched him uncertainly, as if working out whether he was professionally traumatized or being purposefully obtuse.

Rush braced his hands against the crate that he was sitting on. “What could the purpose of such a request possibly be?”

“Harnessing the untapped genius of the proletariat? Crowd-sourcing the gamers? A work-around for academic cryptography, as a field? Irritating you to the point of psychological insolvency?” Perry listed.

Rush stared into the black shaft above them.

“My condolences,” Perry said, amused. “I figured I’d give you a heads up before the powers that be corner and proposition you.”

“No,” he said.

“I know.” Perry practically dripped glee-edged sympathy.

“I can’t—” He freed up a hand to gesture vaguely at the walls.

“I know,” Perry said.

“How could anyone possibly—”

“I know,” Perry said.

“Why.”

“You have my pity.”

“I’d prefer your empathy, frankly.”

“You might be in luck there.” Perry flashed him a mischievous smile. “Especially if you ask me nicely. But we could use more help if they succeed in pushing this on us, hence, the interest group.” She lifted a conspiratorial eyebrow. “Any interest group is only an internal memo away from becoming a computational task force, if it comes to that.”

“It won’t come to that, because it’s fuckin’ ludicrous.” A small muscle in his jaw began to twitch. “It’d require a computational model of the entire cryptographic system,” he said. “It’d require an interactive proof assistant integrated with graphical processing. It’d require automated proof checking. Do I look like a specialist in automated theorem proving?”

“Yes,” Perry said. “Didn’t you prove P equal to NP?”

“Ugh, fuck right off. I have some depth of experience with proof complexity, but that’s hardly the same thing.”

“I can’t wait to watch you explain the subtle distinctions to a U.S. Senator.”

“Do we even know whether the logical foundation should be monotonic on non-monotonic?”

Perry grinned. “This is not the way to go.”

Rush tipped his head to look at her over the tops of his glasses? “Oh really? Because I’m fair fuckin’ certain that logical consequence relation is fair fuckin’ salient. But please. Enlighten me. How would you proceed?”

Perry smirked. “What I mean is,” she paused to swallow, “this is not the way to go if you want to convince them their request is ridiculous. Because it sure seems like you’re already—”

“I’m not,” Rush snapped. “I’m not. It’s out of the question. Absolutely out. I won’t code this into some—”

“Bleeding edge, top of the line, MMORPG?” Perry supplied.

“Into some game to dig up a misunderstood underachiever as a personal assistant that I. Do. Not. Need.”

“I get it,” Perry said, the corner of her mouth quirking again, “but I’m not the one you’ll have to convince.”

Rush sighed.

“Sorry to bring this up now.” Perry’s eyes flicked toward the dark arch of the gate. “I know you’ve got a lot going on, but I didn’t want them to blindside you before you could calibrate your disdain up to levels lethal to this kind of bureaucratic crap.”

“Yes well.” He tugged at his unfamiliar green jacket. “It really doesn’t matter, because it’s not remotely feasible.”

Perry regarded him with a wise-eyed and skeptical sympathy that didn’t bode well for his chances of arguing down pointless assignments from poorly educated politicians.

Perry cleared her throat. “Are you ready for this?”

He shook his hair out of his eyes. “Meaningless question.”

“You got me,” she admitted, “but there’s something about leaving the planet that seems liberating. No matter the circumstances.”

“Not if one’s required t’come back,” Rush said, darkly.

She looked at him searchingly. “Well, I’ll be here if you have trouble with the entanglement and you want to phone a friend.”

“Thank you,” he said.

A collection of gun-bedecked people walked into the room. Colonel Young lead the pack, conversing quietly with another man with dark, spiked hair and a black uniform of a subtly different cut than others Rush had seen around the base. Behind them came a man in a charcoal jacket with blue strips angling from the shoulders. He scanned the room and zeroed in on Rush and Perry with an intent, interested look. Three young soldiers, dressed in green and accessorizing with rifles, brought up the rear.

“Oh god,” Perry squeaked.

Rush looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“They’re pulling out all the stops for you, my friend,” she murmured. “That’s Rodney McKay.”

“Who’s Rodney McKay?” Rush whispered.

“Oh, only the guy who built an Intergalactic Gate Bridge between two galaxies, traversing the greatest interstellar distance on record. Only the guy who’s considered the preeminent expert on Ancient technology: including stellar drives, geodesic shielding principles, and zero-point energy. Only the guy who walked through an energy-based life-form to manually throw an active naquadah generator into an open gate. Only the guy who managed to think his way out of a lethal genetic modification. That’s all.”

“Quite the resume,” Rush replied.

“He must’ve come through Midway for you,” Perry said absently.

He debated asking her what “Midway” might refer to, but instead he said, “Ah.”

Rush stood as the group approached, and Perry reversed her wheelchair.

The team fanned around Young. “Guys, this is Dr. Nicholas Rush. Rush, this is Colonel John Sheppard,” Young tipped his head at the man in black with the spiked hair.

“Hey.” Sheppard hybridized a salute and a wave.

“Sergeant Greer,” Young continued, going around the circle, “Major Reaves, Airman Atienza, and,” he paused, glancing at the remaining man, who could only be Rodney McKay, “your tech help.”

“Oh very funny.” McKay stepped forward, his hand extended. “Dr. Rodney McKay.”

They shook.

“I pictured you taller.” McKay stepped back.

“I didn’t picture you at all,” Rush replied coolly.

Sheppard smirked. “Now that we all know each other,” he turned to the control window overlooking the room and raised his voice, “you guys wanna fire this thing up?” He pointed at the stargate with his thumb.

“Why Atlantis personnel?” Rush asked Young in an undertone as Perry struck up a conversation with McKay.

“The LA doesn’t have a foothold in the Pegasus Galaxy,” Young said. “Greer and Atienza just came up for team assignment through the internal military track, and Reaves is coming back from six months of extended maternity leave. The whole team’s had no contact with the LA.”

“I see,” Rush said.

“McKay’s an ass, but he knows his stuff,” Young said. “And Sheppard—well, Shep was a genius call on Landry’s part.” He glanced at Rush and then away again. “For a lot of reasons. Stick with him, do what he says, and you’ll be fine. You’ll like him. He’s your kind of guy.”

Rush looked at Sheppard, who was speaking intently to the three other military personnel, directing his comments mainly toward Greer and Atienza with an occasional glance in Reaves’ direction. He tried to discern anything in the man’s demeanor that seemed particularly noteworthy, but came up with nothing. He was good looking. That was it.

“You look skeptical,” Young said.

“This is not an unusual state for me.”

“I get that.”

“My ‘kind of guy’?” Rush asked, dry as dust.

“Smart, hotshot. He’s smart.”

“Hmm.”

“Stay out of trouble, will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” Rush replied coolly.

The overhead speaker came on. “All nonessential personnel, please clear the gateroom.” The words frayed with static as they echoed faintly off the cement.

“That’s me.” There was a rueful note to Young’s tone. “Nonessential.”

There wasn’t anything Rush could say to that, but he watched Young leave, following Amanda Perry out of the room.

He flinched as chevrons lit with metallic clangs and the gate began its silent spin, angular speed coming up and rapidly stabilizing before halting again as the first chevron engaged. It spun back the other way before the second chevron locked. Its motion resembled nothing so much as a permutation-based lock—even the rotation and stop of the ring suggested it. He found it nearly impossible to believe that so many people had seen this exact motion, so many people had used the gate as a door, and yet—and yet, no one had thought to look for the lock that must be there.

Another chevron slid into place.

He sighed. His best ideas were usually products of inductive reasoning.

Another chevron locked.

(Inductive or not, he’d been right.)

Another chevron locked.

“You seen it in action before?” Sheppard stepped to his shoulder.

Another chevron locked.

“No,” Rush replied.

“It’s dramatic,” Sheppard said, half appreciation, half warning.

The seventh chevron locked and a nascent event horizon exploded into an unstable vortex that extended into the room and tore apart the air. It was chaotic, stochastic, irregular, and with a non-zero vorticity that made it look like nothing so much as a literal fluid as space warped to tearing and stabilized across an event horizon with a diameter that should’ve been a physical impossibility.

Rush steadied himself, then studied the shimmering field.

“It’s blue,” he said.

“Yeah,” Sheppard replied.

“Why?” Rush asked.

“Why not?” Sheppard countered.

“Because it’s a one way tear in space time from which nothing should emerge, including light?”

“McKay,” Sheppard shouted back over his shoulder. “Why’s the event horizon blue?”

“Because that’s the color of the cosmic ocean,” McKay was bent over the MALP.

“Thanks, Carl,” Sheppard replied. “Seriously. Why blue?”

McKay looked up. “Wait, seriously seriously? Are you actually asking me this?”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said.

“You’ve been going through the gate for four and a half years, and it just now occurred to you to wonder why it’s blue?” McKay stepped back from the MALP, and it ascended the ramp. “Oh,” he said, looking at Rush. “Right. New Guy. Critically Thinking New Guy. The blue light is emitted from a unique force field that demolecularizes matter and queues it up for transmission. The fluctuations you see are a product of the ‘real’ event horizon influencing the field. You should know this—aren’t you the guy who looked at the internal schematics and managed to turn them into the mother of all Mensa challenges?”

“At no point was ‘blue’ specified,” Rush replied.

“Ah, well, here’s a tip: active force fields tend to emit, and this one is always active when the gate is on.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “I can see that.”

“You’ve gotta integrate this stuff on the fly,” McKay snapped his fingers, projecting a little too much confidence to be wholly believable. “That’s another tip. Theoretical to practical. Like that.” He snapped his fingers a final time, looking not at Rush but tracking the MALP as it vanished through the gate. He moved to Reaves’s shoulder and peered at her hand-held video interface.

A muscle in Rush’s jaw twitched subtly.

“He’s—” Sheppard shifted his weight. “An acquired taste.”

“Surely you jest,” Rush replied.

“He and this other guy, Radek Zelenka, run a journal club on Atlantis. It’s devoted to computational complexity theory,” Sheppard kept his voice low.

Rush turned to look at him.

“Once a month,” Sheppard said. “For about a year now. I go. Nice paper, by the way.”

“Read it, have you?”

“Little bit.” Sheppard drummed his fingers over the strap of his rifle in a slow pattern. “Don’t out me.”

“Are you talking about me?” McKay shouldered one of the packs on the gateroom floor and approached. “You have that look like you’re talking about me.”

“Nope,” Sheppard said lazily. “I was telling Dr. Rush about his fan club on Atlantis.”

“It’s not a fan club.” McKay’s eyes flashed toward Rush, then dropped away. “It’s a journal club.”

“Potato, potahto,” Sheppard said.

“And it’s not devoted to Nick Rush. It’s devoted to computational complexity theory.”

“And, of the fourteen meetings you guys have had, how many featured—”

“He’s very influential within the field,” McKay said sullenly.

Rush stepped away, leaving them to the friendly flow of their cut and riposte. He moved laterally, away from the crated crystals and electronics, to stand at the base of the ramp opposite the open gate. He hadn’t wasted time picturing the immensities of the distances that the gate network warped to nothing or the physical sensations of being warped himself. Such things had been immaterial to his purposes. But because he’d not spent any time anticipating this moment, he found himself taken aback at the physical appearance of the active gate and the feeling it elicited.

Relief.

As if simply by looking at the thing, a pressure valve had opened in his mind and the closed system in which he found himself had given way to an option that’d always existed, even though he hadn’t known it.

“It’s not as bad as all that.”

Greer stood next to him, eyes fixed on the gate.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re eyeing that thing up pretty good,” Greer said. “I’m just letting you know it’s not that bad.”

“I don’t waste my time anticipating the inconsequential.”

“For a science guy?” Greer asked, with a rhetorical acidity Rush quite liked. “That’d be a first.”

“Such a pronouncement would carry a bit more weight if you seemed at all experienced,” Rush replied. “How old are you?”

“Old enough,” Greer said.

Overhead, General Landry’s voice echoed through the speakers in the wall. “MALP telemetry is clear. You have a go.”

“Reaves, Atienza, you’re on point,” Sheppard said. “Greer, you’re with McKay.”

Sheppard moved to stand next to Rush as the other four sorted themselves and started up the ramp. Ahead, the team cast dark outlines against the bright blue of the gate until, one by one, they vanished into emitted light.

Sheppard, who’d been a half-step ahead of Rush as they ascended the ramp, stopped on the threshold of the open gate.

Rush paused as well.

“It’s only your first time your first time,” Sheppard offered, almost tentative.

Rush supposed that was true.

He extended a hand, and his fingertips grazed the rippling barrier, disappearing from sight as they entered the blue of the event horizon. His nerves transmitted nothing but the idea of air (still and isothermic relative to his skin).

There was no point in further ceremony or empirical testing.

With his eyes open, he stepped through the gate.