Mathématique: From Nothing, Nothing Comes

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

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Alien-induced psychosis.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

From Nothing, Nothing Comes

Zelenka looks up, adjusts his glasses, and considers Rodney McKay, hunched behind the elegant metal curves of a Lantean console.

“No,” Rodney says, the color of his hair and the cast of his features made moderate by the gray light of a clouded sky. “No no no no no. I refuse to implement any solution that has the downstream effect of making this guy an idiot. What the hell are you thinking, Radek? Are you wearing a cortical suppressant?”

“I am thinking I am wanting him to live,” Zelenka replies pointedly. His eyes shift from Rodney to the silent sea and sky behind him, out beyond the glass and shields. “I am thinking that Thursdays will not be the same if he doesn’t.”

Zelenka had a not-so-secret affinity for the work of Dr. Nicholas Rush even before the man so thoroughly impressed Rodney on an offworld cryptography mission. Rodney’s not easy to impress. To do it, one must be intelligent and either forceful or attractive. Zelenka has only one of those three qualities, and so he receives positive reinforcement from Rodney only when Rodney is dying, or when he gets reprimanded by the IOA for not creating a sufficiently supportive working environment.

That’s fine with Zelenka. He loves the job. And he does not so much mind working with sensitive, high-maintenance egomaniacs.

At times, Rodney will bury the end goal so deeply beneath his concerns about secondary sequelae that nothing would be accomplished if it weren’t for Zelenka. He’s good at refocusing the other man, but Sheppard is better.

“‘Living’ is good,” the colonel says, from where he leans against a locked, bright console in this room they’ve appropriated for their first pass brainstorming session, before they’ll summon their “minions,” as Rodney likes to call them. 

Zelenka prefers to refer to them as “colleagues.”

“I’d rather die than live on a fraction of my IQ.” Rodney’s eyes are fixed on the display in front of him.

And.

Ah.

This hurts.

Zelenka knows where that sentiment comes from. Where it must originate. He has the urge to turn his head and look at Sheppard for unspoken confirmation. He resists that urge.

He’d rather die. Well. Rodney is one of the few people who can make such a statement with authority. But Zelenka doesn’t say this. Because that is not what they do. And, even if it were, it is a not a thing that should be done now.

“Z ničeho nebude nic,” Zelenka says, instead.

They look at him.

And that was not English. Well, Rodney doesn’t deserve English at the moment. Sheppard always deserves English, but people are not frequently getting what they are deserving.

“I’m not even gonna ask,” Rodney says, brow furrowed and hands spread over the monitors like the pianist he wishes he were.

“I’ll ask,” Sheppard says. 

Zelenka, now free to look at Sheppard, does so. The colonel is tired and wan in the gray light. He watches Rodney with so much pain in his expression that Zelenka looks to see where he might be bleeding. Nowhere but inside, it seems.

Sheppard angles his head at Zelenka, who, ah yes, hasn’t yet translated for him.

“From nothing, nothing comes,” Zelenka supplies. “I believe a cortical suppressant is our best option, given that we need a solution within hours.”

“We’re not doing that,” Rodney snaps.

“It won’t make him stupid,” Zelenka hears the desperate plea in his own words. Takes a breath. “It will simply prevent him from—”

“Accessing his higher cortical functions?” Rodney hisses.

“No,” Zelenka battles back. “It’ll prevent uncontrolled and repetitive waves of electrical potential that might damage him permanently. That will damage him permanently.” Sheppard and Rodney are both looking at him, which was his goal. “I am wanting the same things that you are wanting,” he says, speaking to only Rodney now. “We can write a program for fine control of interference. Titratable. You can titrate it. Or Carter can.”

“Oh, I’ll be the one titrating it,” Rodney says, a blustery front for a near surrender.

This is the way. They both know it is.

“And then,” Zelenka says, “Dr. Rush can do it himself, once he’s near his cognitive baseline. He’s a computational genius, yes?”

Zelenka hopes he’ll get to meet Nicholas Rush; he’s always liked pure mathematicians. He was one, once.

Rodney hesitates, torn, his expression conflicted, his hands still.

Zelenka has seen him sit exactly so. Many times. Rodney McKay hates the implementation of solutions that require destruction of any kind. It is, Zelenka thinks, a surprisingly poetic weakness in a physicist.

“So how’s this gonna work?” Sheppard asks, with a calculated ease Zelenka interprets as closet encouragement.

“Well,” Zelenka begins, freeing his hands from the tools he holds, “his problem is uncontrolled repetitive electrical discharge that is metabolically demanding and therefore damaging, yes?” He mimes standing waves with both hands.

Colonel Sheppard unclosets his closet encouragement. “That much I got from the briefing.”

“They have tried to control these electrical discharges pharmacologically, and it worked for a short time, but chemical control is now failing. Chemical.”

Rodney watches him intently now.

Sheppard looks to Rodney, then back at Zelenka. “I’m with ya,” he says.

“Physics trumps chemistry. Always. Yes? So we control by application of interfering electromagnetic waves, generated by paired devices fixed to exterior head.” Zelenka gestures at his own temples. “Cortical suppressants!”

“He thinks it’s gonna work.” Sheppard looks at Rodney. “You can tell because he drops words when he’s excited.”

Rodney says nothing until he says, “I don’t like it.”

“Do prdele,” Zelenka mutters, casting his gaze at the ceiling. “Why.”

“Because there’s no exit strategy, Radek.” Rodney speaks with bottled lightning bolting through every clause and phrase. “Because I don’t want to do that to him and I don’t want to leave him like that. He’s also, apparently, an abduction target. You don’t affix a blazing electronic signature to someone like that and then make it impossible to take off without insanity, electrophysiological decompensation, seizure, and death.”

“I don’t see why you treat this as permanent.” Zelenka pleads his case, meeting Rodney’s electric objections with ground, rather than competing current. “There may be genetic solutions. There may be pharmacologic solutions. This may stop spontaneously. He may gain conscious control of whatever process is causing this discharge. We need time. He needs time. This will give it to us.”

“I treat it as permanent because Altera will always exist and if that city did this to him, which seems likely, then it’ll keep doing it. It’s not going away. I treat this as permanent because he’s not here. He’s not here, and we’re not there, and that’s going to make fine-tuning difficult, time consuming, and ultimately imperfect. I treat it as permanent because if someone used this kind of untested, 1.0, beta-version, electric club on my cortex and it caused any kind of cognitive damage? I’d be furious.”

“But you’d be alive.” Sheppard leans into the crystal windows, backing himself with the clouded day, the gray sea. “Come on, McKay, if you don’t like this, then what else have you got?”

“With four hours left on the six hour window that Lam gave us?” Rodney pours all his indignation into the question, then cuts it to zero, kills all his momentum, and says, “Nothing.” He looks away from his own honesty.

“If you wish to continue thinking,” Zelenka offers quietly, “I will build it.”

The room is quiet.

Rain begins to fall beyond the windows, pattering against the glass, singing off the silver quay.

“You build it,” Rodney says, defeated. “I’ll start laying in the code architecture that’ll control the cognitive rheostat. Or whatever.”

“You are going to code it?” Zelenka asks. “But then—”

The only coding language in which Rodney has sufficient proficiency for a task of this magnitude and complexity is—

“Coding it in Ancient will make it more difficult for a terrestrial or LA programmer to alter it.” Rodney hunches over his monitor, his brow already furrowing with intent. “We build it with Lantean hardware? We run it with Lantean code.”

“Plus, it’s classy,” Sheppard adds.

It also cuts down the pool of individuals able to edit the program once it’s in place. Only a few Milky Way scientists will have sufficient familiarity with Ancient to alter the device.

Samantha Carter.

Amanda Perry.

Bill Lee.

Jay Felger, may God help him. May God also not let him anywhere near this cortical suppressant.

And of course, Dr. Rush himself.

“And of course it’ll be classy,” Rodney snarls, already, no doubt, designing control modules.

“And stylish.” Zelenka drops his eyes to the magnifying lens over his spun naquadah and tiny shards of crystal that he’s coaxing into circuits. “But, primarily? Functional.”

“I’ll pass the message up the chain that you guys have something.” Sheppard pushes away from the rain-streaked glass at his back. On his feet, he stumbles, as though walking across the deck of a storm-tossed ship. He staggers into an empty lab bench, catches himself.

Zelenka and Rodney are on their feet, but Sheppard, recovering, waves them away.

“Are you gonna need these monstrosities we’re making?” Rodney snarls, fiery tone and frightened eyes. “What happened on that planet?”

“I’m fine, Rodney.” Sheppard steadies himself, then heads for the door. “Just tired.”

“Real convincing!” Rodney shouts after him.

And then, it is only Zelenka and Rodney in the glass-enclosed Fab Lab beneath the gray sky. There’s silence between them. Beyond the windows, beyond the singing droplets on the quay, Zelenka sees patter patterns of rain on the gray surface of the sea.

He picks up his jeweler's tools and bends over his shards of crystal, his gossamer naquadah.

An eerie quiet descends, full of all the soft sounds rain makes falling through energetic shielding to strike windows and silver walkways. 

A silent Rodney McKay is an unnerving Rodney McKay.

Zelenka puts down his tools and looks up.

Rodney leans into a lab bench, wrists braced, shoulders hunched, as though the city itself presses down on him.

“Rodney,” Zelenka says, concerned.

“Ugh,” Rodney mutters. “Who am I kidding.” He looks at Zelenka. “It is a good idea,” he says, a quiet admission.

This is even more unnerving than the silence.

“Thank you?” Zelenka says.

“What do you say we make two sets?” Rodney’s eyes dart to the doorway Sheppard had used. “Just in case.”

Zelenka softens his expression, allows Rodney to see he’s understood. They hold one another’s gaze, unease and contingency planning and a hundred shared traumas vibrate between them. He nods.

Zelenka focuses again on the delicate loops of wire, destined to become circuitry. In his peripheral vision, he sees Rodney take his seat, place his fingers on the keys of his laptop.

“It will not be for them like it was for you,” Zelenka says quietly.

Rodney says nothing, and Zelenka thinks of him as he was—and, God willing, will never be again—mentally unmade by a parasite over that long and terrible span of weeks. How he came to the lab, but how he moved with foreignness there, his hands lacking dexterity and his mind lacking first words and then concepts as he unraveled slowly, with acute awareness.

“How do you know?” Rodney’s eyes, again, move to the doorway.

“Because we’ll not allow it to be so,” Zelenka says.

“No,” Rodney agrees, “we won’t.”