In a Clean White Room

Measure after measure, Beethoven spoke to Mozart. Across space and time. Through the medium of music.

“Unscheduled—” Harriman’s voice came slower this time. “Unscheduled on-world activation? I repeat: unscheduled on -world activation.”

All the other boys/ Try to chase me/ But here’s my PGP key/ So encrypted message me maybe

“You in love with her, Jackson?” Young asked, quiet in a quiet room.

“You feel like you know Mozart?” Eli asked. “Like, Mozart Mozart? Volfgahng Amadeus? That guy? The guy who made child stardom seem like a good idea when it definitely, definitely was not? The dead guy. The dead guy who you’ve never met one time in your life. That Mozart.”

To leave, Val will have to shoot him. He’s made that the price of the door.

“So—six days from now, I will get a burning cake?” Ginn asked.

Eli zipped his jacket and eyed the sheeting rain, lit to orange in the glow of streetlights. “It’s like you’re the responsible straight man in the zany romantic comedy of your own life, dude!”

Young spent the day on his couch, staring at the ceiling, imagining what the end of the world would look like from the sidelines.

Like a Cosmo Quiz, there’s always one crap option outta three. This time, it’s Thing C. And Mitchell’s doin’ it.

Mid-September in Harvard Square was a terrible time to embark on a career as an aspiring, amnestic, hipster barista.

“You’re gonna rescue me,” Telford whispers.

P=NP. Prove.

“Damn it, hotshot.” Young looked up, as though he could see into low Earth orbit. 

He woke alone, beside a river.

Young could smell smoke. Or, he thought he could. It was fire season.

Vala Mal Doran prays for luck to the dead false god who’d stolen her life and lived in her spine.

Telford looked away, his gaze fixed on nothing. “Do you ever wonder,” he began, “whether the story you tell yourself about your life and your choices is real?”

“It’s not a date,” Jackson said sharply. “It’s a dinner meeting to discuss Vala’s cultural acclimatization.”

Relief isn’t a sentiment Amanda Perry typically encounters, let alone inspires.

To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.

Rodney McKay hates the implementation of solutions that require destruction of any kind. It is, Zelenka thinks, a surprisingly poetic weakness in a physicist.

Lam rested a hand atop her dialysis machine and looked up at Young, determined and wry. “This is a time of nightmares.”

Nicholas Rush was wired for D minor.

Unseeing, Teal’c stares at the sour cream, the cilantro, the Blazin’ Jalapeño Doritos, the cheese.

“‘Jacksonesque’?” Young repeated. “He’s gonna love that one. So much.”

One could not disappoint the dead. That was true. That was axiom.

“Do y’have cooking wine?” Rush asked. “I feel like lighting something on fire.”