Mathématique: Chapter 63

“Come to Atlantis.” Sheppard shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. “Write on sheeted crystal with light pens. You’ll never go back. To paper, I mean.”

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Memory loss.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: Let’s start arcing this new arc, kids.

Chapter 63

Rush rematerialized in a small room of featureless white. The floor asserted itself against the soles of his shoes and the world pitched. His hands came to Young’s shoulders.

The other man steadied him on the room’s low platform.

“Thanks,” he breathed, disoriented. He shut his eyes and integrated over kinesthetic input.

“Gets pretty much everyone the first time,” Young said, one arm still wrapped around Rush. “Eventually, your brain learns to edit out the ground hit.”

“Ah.” Rush opened his eyes.

They looked at one another. Young seemed terribly immediate against the bright expanse of the walls. Rush was caught in a vertiginous sweep that involved gravity, perspective, and the fabric of spacetime. He shut his eyes again in a long blink. 

“You okay, hotshot?” Young watched him from beneath knitted brows. “You drink any water today?”

Rush made an effort to get his feet more solidly beneath him. “Why do I feel like the term ‘hotshot’ is being employed with some degree of irony?”

“Nope.” Young let him go, fighting a smile. “No irony. You’re always running in the red, is all.”

“Mmm hmm.” Rush stepped back, in full possession of his equilibrium. “Very convincing.”

Young’s expression broke into a grin, which he directed at his boots. “C’mon. ‘Hotshot’ is a serious nickname. Didn’t you disarm someone earlier today?

“John Sheppard,” Rush said.

“What about him?” Young asked.

“That’s who I disarmed. John Sheppard.”

“You disarmed—wait. Shep pulled a gun on you? Shep did? Colonel John Sheppard. Pulled a gun. On you.”

“That’s the one. Though, in fairness, he was trying to implant a transponder in my forearm. I was the one who pulled his gun.”

“Unbelievable.” Young had mostly mastered his amusement.

“Ta,” Rush said dryly.

“Sorry, not unbelievable that you pulled his gun—unbelievable that he tried it. He gave a speech to the whole strike team not six hours ago about how no one was supposed to try to take you by force. It was five minutes long. Passionate. The term ‘Nightmare Bar Fight’ was used to describe your style. Multiple times.”

Rush paused, considering this. It had a certain ring of truth to it. And yet. “Seems a bit much for an academic cryptographer, no?”

“Maybe not for a real hotshot one.” Young smirked at him.

“Mmm. Well executed,” Rush said.

“You like how I brought that back around?” Young stepped off the transport platform with the careful placement of cane and foot.

“I appreciated it, yes.” Rush followed him down. He scanned the room, noting a control console along one wall. There was a subtle plating pattern in the ceiling that matched the plating on the platform itself. Interesting. Like as not some a field gradient was necessary for matter reconstitution?

“Looks a fair bit like Star Trek,” Rush observed.

“You sound disappointed.”

“Yes well. One does like to be surprised, here and there.”

Young snorted. “I thought your intern was gonna have a stroke when we brought him up with the thing. We couldn’t get him out of the room for a solid ten minutes.”

“He’s here?” Rush asked.

“Yup,” Young said. “We gotta get you cleared by medical, then you can see him. Dr. van Densen’ll be the one checking you out, I’m guessing. She heads the med team up here.”

As they approached the door, it swished open with a sound Rush recognized from Astria Porta. Or, vice versa, rather.

“Do I know her?” Rush asked.

“van Densen? Nope.”

They stepped into a brightly illuminated corridor, lined by doors and lacking in windows.

(It probably wasn’t easy to carve windows into spaceships; the pressure differential on a metal-glass seal would be substantial.)

“This is the first time you’ve been on the Odyssey,” Young offered. “In fact, pretty sure it’s the first time you’ve been to space. Well,” he amended, choosing a direction and starting forward, “it’s the first time you’ve been to space and also been conscious.”

Rush huffed, unimpressed.

“Hotshot,” Young said, “don’t get weird with van Densen.”

“Get weird?” Rush echoed.

“Don’t, uh, ask her about her relationship to time, is what I mean.”

Oh yes?

He, Nicholas Rush, who’d done nothing but proceed through time in a linear manner (to his knowledge, thus far) was getting some kind of lecture on appropriate temporal comportment from Everett Young, who was, like as not, decoupled from a normal relationship with causality?

Unacceptable.

“I’m extremely normal,” Rush informed Young.

“Yeah, of course you are, all I’m saying is maybe save your, um, metaphysical commentary, if you have any, until we can get you in with Dr. Lam.”

He was being patronized, which would’ve been pure dead annoying if it weren’t so fuckin’ tragic. Rush had only a sliver of the knowledge he should have, but at least he was aware of his missing context. Colonel Young hadn’t a scrap of insight into his complex metaphysical status.

“Dr. Lam would be a psychiatrist, then?” He kept the question as neutral as possible.

“No.” Young glanced over at him. “No, she specializes in infectious disease. My point is that while van Densen’s fine for a clearance check, Carolyn Lam is your doctor. She can handle weird metaphysics questions. She helped out with your D minor problem.”

“The D minor problem resulted from an infectious disease?” Rush heard the disapproval in his own voice. “I’m no medical doctor but cortical suppressors seem like a poor choice for—”

“No,” Young interrupted. “Sorry, this is hard to explain in a reasonable way. Especially since no one understands the D minor thing. We don’t think it was infectious. Something happened to you on an alien planet.”

“Y’just said I hadn’t been to space,” Rush objected.

“Travel through the stargate er, via the DHD, whatever the hell happened—you went planet surface to planet surface.”

“Seems a bit of a fine point.” Rush frowned at Young over the tops of his glasses.

“Yeah,” Young said, his expression apologetic. “I’ll give you that one.”

“Keep score, do we?”

“Sometimes.” Young smiled at the tops of his boots.

“Y’haven’t explained these at all.” Rush tapped the device at his left temple with two fingers. “Why is my consciousness trying to compose D minor symphonies?”

“We think it might have something to do with your genetics.” Young winced as the sentence drew toward completion.

“My genetics?” Rush pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is becoming fair fuckin’ ridiculous.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking this’ll be a pretty rough ride, hotshot,” Young said sympathetically. “Trying to get by, missing all your history.”

“The thought had occurred.” Rush reseated his glasses.

“A bunch of people are on deck to help you out,” Young offered as they rounded a corner. “Including Daniel Jackson. He’ll be great. You can ask him about his relationship to time all you want.”

“Y’realize I don’t make a habit of walking up to people and asking them about their metaphysical state, correct? You’re a special case.”

“Thanks? I think? I’m just saying Jackson scores a ten outta ten on the Weird Metaphysical Experiences Scale. So, y’know. If you had any weird metaphysical experiences, he’d be your go-to.”

“I’m troubled this is a metric you have at your fingertips,” Rush said. “Out of curiosity—where would y’rank yourself on that scale?”

“Huh,” Young said. “Never thought about it. Maybe a two? Eh. Make it a three.”

Privately, Rush was fair certain Everett Young should be ranking a solid ten on such a scale. He himself might also rank a ten. It was possible Rush’s relationship to his own theoretical Mozartian variant was akin to this Everett Young’s relationship to his black-fatigued alter ego. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but the more he interacted with this man, the more he favored a hypothesis that featured a superpositioned pair as well as collapsed variant pairs, of which he and this particular incarnation of Young would represent one pair in a sea of variants. 

The difficulty was—

A superpositioned pair, presuming such a thing was possible, would have to come from somewhere. The key questions then became—what would the relationship of that pair (the Ur-Pairing?) be to the arrow of time? What about causality itself? How possible would it be for such a pair to physically interact with D-branes other than their original brane of origin?

There was a case to be made that he himself was destined to become “Mozart.” That Colonel Young would end up, somehow, in faded black fatigues.

If one was truly superpositioned, would one know one’s own originating brane? Would one have origins anymore? Could other variants attain superposition, blending the entity at the top?

Ah, fucking hell.

He’d chosen cryptography over quantum mechanics for a reason. He’d choose latte art over quantum mechanics, given the option. He’d need to brush up on the mathematics of quantum mechanics and the philosophy tethering those mathematics to physical reality. And dear god, but didn’t that seem like a pit of uneasy aggravation?

Perhaps there was something to be said for Young’s approach.

“You’ve ‘never thought about it’,” Rush echoed contemplatively, eyes wandering over the track lighting that lined the upper edges of the walls.

“Yeah yeah. You’re probably about an eight, I’d say.”

“Seems low, given my present circumstances.”

“Well, I grant I don’t know the whole story on your end—but you gotta meet Jackson before you calibrate your scale. He spent time as incorporeal energy.”

Rush quirked an eyebrow.

“Maybe you and Vala and I can watch some Wormhole X-treme episodes. They hit the more ridiculous highlights of the Jackson’s life, I’m pretty sure.”

“The Wormhole X-treme franchise is based on the experiences of a real person?” Rush asked.

“Loosely. A group of people, actually. A team called SG-1. Jackson and Vala are on it. The team, I mean. Watching the show might not be a bad way to get you up to speed. I know they made Teal’c a robot—but other than that—”

“Teal’c?”

“Yeah, he’s an alien, but on the show they made him a robot.”

“Ah. Naturally. Just the one name, then?”

“Yup. Like Cher.” 

“Right. And Vala is also a Wormhole X-treme character?” Rush asked.

“Nah, she’s new. I think they’re writing her in now.”

“Ah,” Rush gave the featureless wall a meaningful look. “Someone’s going to need to make me a deck of flashcards to keep all of this straight.”

“I bet Jackson’ll do it for you. Wonder if we could get Jackson to hate-watch Wormhole X-treme. Maybe if we bought him some of that fancy hipster beer he likes. And told him it was something else. Some classic movie, maybe. Doctor Zhivago.”

Rush let his eyes wander over the curving corridors of the Odyssey, hoping for an exterior window. There had to be one somewhere. “Y’want to lure Dr. Jackson into watching television based loosely on his bizarre metaphysical experiences, and y’want to do this under false pretenses?”

“Good point. When you put it that way, yeah, that does seem like something that’ll go real bad real quick.”

“What did you do without me all this time?”

Young’s expression was piercing, full of pain and doubt. “No idea, hotshot.” He looked nearly indistinguishable from his spectral alter ego in that moment, other than the cane and the civilian clothes. What was it the man had said, on the shadowed edge of a New York rooftop?

We’re wrapped up in each other across space and time.

Yes well. So it seemed.

Young turned down a side corridor, motioning Rush to follow. “C’mere. You wanna see the planet?”

“It’d be something of a waste to spend an evening on a ship in orbit an’ not look out the bloody window.” Rush shook his hair back.

“Agreed.” Young stopped in front of a door as unremarkable as all the other doors they’d passed, pulled out his wallet, and swiped an ID card. “Observation deck.” He motioned Rush through.

The room was darkly paneled and dimly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the planet below. Rush walked forward slowly, coming right to the pane of the window. They were positioned over the Atlantic Ocean. The Eastern Seaboard of the United States approached from the west in a carpet of light. The curvature of the planet was appreciable, and the diffuse glow of the sun cast a bright crescent at the edge of the atmosphere.

“High Earth orbit.” Young came to stand next to him, leaning on his cane. “Ground track moves west because our velocity is less than Earth’s rotational speed.”

Rush raised his eyebrows, glancing over at Young. “Have a physics background, do you?”

Young looked away, fighting another smile. “I think that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. No, no physics background. You pick up a thing or two in this line of work. Plus, I like the view.”

“Love a good window,” Rush agreed, looking back at the planet. “I’d imagine that’d be something of a consistent perk when it comes to Air Force employment?”

“Air Force: do it for the view.” Young glanced over at him. “We could put that one on a T-shirt.”

“Hmm,” Rush said. “There’s a truly excellent physics pun buried in there somewhere.”

“Is there?”

“Mmm. Scientific definition of a force, plus the physical displacement inherent to a view, coupled with something one does for work—I don’t quite have it. It’ll come to me.”

Young’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the caller ID and pulled it out. “Hey Shep,” he said. “Yeah,” Young glanced at Rush. “He’s here.” There was a pause. “We stopped on the observation deck.” There was another pause. “Yeah. Sounds good. And that way I can—” Young cleared his throat and said, “—return your sidearm?” He grinned at whatever Sheppard said next. “Oh yeah. Very reasonable.” There was a long pause. “Okay,” he said. Another long pause. “Uh huh. I look forward to reading your report.” He couldn’t quite keep the laughter out of his voice as he ended the call. He looked at Rush. “It’s important to me that he never be allowed to live this down.”

“Done,” Rush said archly. “McKay’s theory was that John Sheppard has such strong insubordinate tendencies he can’t respect even his own authority.”

Young laughed aloud at that one. “That—that sounds right to me.”

After a few quiet kilometers of sea passed beneath them, the door to the observation deck swished open.

John Sheppard and Rodney McKay entered the room, still dressed in their much-abused formalwear, identical expressions of exhausted hope on their faces.

McKay bent double in relief at seeing Rush, one hand on his chest, one hand on the wall. “OhthankGOD,” he breathed, like he’d just completed a marathon. 

Sheppard grinned at the pair of them. He approached, his jacket open, his collar unbuttoned and stained with blood from the cut along his hairline. “Hi.” He pulled Rush into a hug. “I appreciate not needing to chase you around Manhattan. I’d have done it, though.” He let Rush go and turned to Young. “And you. C’mere.” He wrapped his arms around the other man. “That was a three-way Hail Mary. Me putting you there. Him getting to you. You convincing him. How’d you do it?”

“Still not sure.” Young locked eyes with Rush over Sheppard’s shoulder. Sheppard let him go, and Young produced the man’s sidearm, handing it over with a (mostly) straight face. “You owe us dinner for this.”

“Oh yeah?” Sheppard asked.

“Think of all the forms you won’t have to fill out,” Young said.

“I’ll buy you guys dinner,” Sheppard agreed. “We have to bring McKay, though. Otherwise he gets sad.”

McKay, still leaning theatrically against the wall, glared at Sheppard. “Shut up. I don’t get sad.”

“I haven’t spent money in, I don’t know, five years?” Sheppard smirked. “I could probably buy you a restaurant. McKay, you want a restaurant?”

“No,” McKay replied, “not really.”

“Again, sorry about the tagging-you-by-force thing,” Sheppard said, looking at Rush. “I had a whole Riemann Hypothesis metaphor I was gonna use. You know how the critical line—”

“Shhh,” McKay said, approaching. “SHHHHHH. Save it. What if you need it in the future? He could decide to run away at any time.”

“I’m not planning on it.” Rush looked at Sheppard encouragingly.

“Okay so, picture the zeta function as—”

“Or,” McKay broke in, “don’t picture it, because literally no one wants to hear John Sheppard talk to Nick Rush about the Riemann Hypothesis.” He glared at Sheppard. 

“Hey.” Sheppard gave McKay a small shove, then shifted his attention to Rush. “I’ll tell you later. I need a glass board anyway. Or paper. Do you like paper? You seem like a paper guy.”

“He’s been known to write on a wall, here or there,” Young said dryly.

Rush quirked a brow. “Have I really? Strikes one as a bit ostentatious.”

“Come to Atlantis.” Sheppard shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. “Write on sheeted crystal with light pens. You’ll never go back. To paper, I mean.”

“Atlantis,” Rush repeated. The word snapped free like it had been waiting there next to Mozart’s sonatas and cryptographic hash functions. Wrought metal and glass. Water and sky.

“Mmm hmm.” Sheppard gave Rush a significant look, then stepped behind him. Resting a hand on Rush’s shoulder, pointed along a directional vector into deep space. “It’s that way,” he said softly.

“You can tell?” Rush asked.

“Always,” Sheppard replied.

“So this is going to be hell for us.” McKay turned theatrically to Young. “Absolute hell. Have you realized this yet?” He snapped his fingers at Rush and Sheppard. “Hey. Lantean Dream Team. I hate to break this up before someone solves another Millennium Prize Problem, but we showed up for more than hugs and cross-galactic comparative analyses of writing materials.”

For some reason, McKay decided to glare at Rush this time.

Rush felt (slightly) hurt by this.

It was an irrational hurt, given he didn’t truly know McKay. But—he’d dreamed of the man for weeks now.

McKay was, arguably, the only person who felt at all familiar to him, even if that familiarity was borrowed.

As Rush looked at him, McKay’s glare lost its edge. Turned uncertain.

“Take a hug where you can get a hug, I say.” Sheppard stepped away from Rush. His eyes turned serious. “Everett, I know you’re not gonna like this, but Landry called an emergency briefing. You, me, Mitchell, Carter, Teal’c. McKay’s gonna escort Rush to medical.”

“An emergency briefing,” Young repeated. “On the Odyssey?”

“Yeah.” Sheppard’s eyes flashed to Rush, then back to Young. “There’ve been a few complications from the Au Coeur Op. But McKay will stick with him. Like glue. Right, Rodney?”

“Dermabond.” McKay nodded resolutely. “If he gets abducted, I will also get abducted. Then I’ll rescue him. Immediately.”

Sheppard and Young stared at McKay. 

“Try again.” Sheppard let a hint of lethality into his tone.

“No one gets abducted?” McKay said.

“Better,” Sheppard replied.

“I can’t control everything in the universe, no matter how much I want to,” McKay replied. “I’m trying to demonstrate that my commitment level is high. Sorry I don’t have a P-90 to aggressively hold while saying it.” McKay glanced at Rush, communicating something along the lines of can-you-believe-the-idiocy-I-have-to-confront-on-a-daily-basis?

Rush tried to wordlessly communicate his sympathy while simultaneously wondering what a P-90 might be.

McKay looked surprised.

This prompted some confusion on Rush’s part.

McKay’s expression softened into something that seemed to suggest—pained understanding.

Perhaps he’d overdone sympathy and ended up somewhere else?

“What?” Sheppard asked, presumably in response to the silent eye conversation.

“Nothing,” McKay said shortly. “Nothing.”

Sheppard looked at McKay.

McKay looked at Sheppard.

They glanced at Rush, then back at one another.

Rush looked at Young.

Young shrugged. “There’s a reason we call them McShep,” he said.

Gently, Sheppard clapped McKay on the shoulder. “I get it.” He shifted his focus to Young. “And it’s ShepKay, by the way. Everyone agrees.”

“No one agrees,” McKay said. “McShep has more of a ring.”

“Uh huh,” Young said, unimpressed. “Who’s in medical?”

“They brought Lam up,” Sheppard replied.

“The Odyssey has a med team.” Young’s words came slowly. “Headed by Sandy van Densen, last I checked.”

“Yep,” Sheppard said, “they’re busy. Lam’s already here.”

Something wordless and important passed between the two colonels. McKay caught Rush’s eye and gave him a significant look. Unfortunately, what the significant look might signify was lost on Rush.

Young nodded at Sheppard, then fixed Rush with a strong glare. He rested two fingertips on Rush’s chest. “Do NOT get abducted by the Lucian Alliance,” he growled.

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

“Rodney,” Sheppard said, mild as California sun, “don’t let him get abducted by the Lucian Alliance.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, colonels!” McKay gave them a saccharine wave. “Bye! Enjoy your classified briefing!”

Sheppard and Young left the room. The door swished shut behind them with a pneumatic hiss.

“Ugh,” McKay said. “They’re a lot. I mean, to be fair, John and I are a lot. You and John are a lot. You and I have, on at least one occasion, been a lot. You and Colonel Young are a lot. Eventually, my goal is for me and Colonel Young to be a lot. Even things out. Physicists like symmetry. You think it’ll happen?”

“What?” Rush asked.

“Yeah.” McKay looked out the observation window. “Nice planet. You live there, I guess?”

“That’s my understanding,” Rush said, perplexed by the question. “Aren’t y’from Canada?”

McKay smiled, and it was a small, pained thing. He crossed his arms. “Yes. And that’s the second time you’ve pointed it out. Tonight. At no time, ever, in our entire acquaintance, have you even once asked or cared where I’m from. And now? You somehow just—know.”

“Is that a problem?” Rush asked, uneasy.

“Almost certainly.” Brisk and businesslike, McKay faced Rush in the dim light. “Before we go to medical, let’s get a few things straight, shall we?”

Rush said nothing. He could tell from remembered dreams that Rodney McKay was upset. Upset and trying to hide it.

“Great. One—I’ve spent, oh, I don’t know, the last several months of my life doing you a bunch of favors, occasionally up close but mostly from a distance, that you don’t even know about. Like, to be clear, even if you had your memories, you still wouldn’t know about them. Partially because of the transgalactic need-to-know policy, which is restrictive and stupid, but also because I don’t think you paid all that much attention to anything outside your cypher set. This annoys me, because by now we should be friends, but we aren’t. That makes this awkward. Two—John Sheppard’s had a tough year. A VERY tough year. And you are just heartbreak city right now so please do your best, which, damn it, you probably will, so you know what? Forget Two. Two can take care of itself. Well, Two can’t take care of itself, but that’s not your problem right now. It’s my problem. Three—stop looking at me like that. Four—this was supposed to be Two. I’ll do you a favor, and I’m telling you it’s a favor, so you know. The favor is this: I’m going to explain what’s going on right now, even though no one wants me to, because—because I just am. Because I know what it’s like to have people try and decide what you can and can’t understand or handle or whatever and I—everyone’s having a VERY hard time right now, and I just—this is my choice,” McKay’s voice cracked, and he looked away. “Sorry. Sorry. Everything’s a lot. All the time. I fight soul-sucking monsters. Did you know that? Literally they suck your soul out through your chest. And by soul I mean, I don’t know. Proteins. Ugh, who cares.” He wiped his eyes. “And great. What’s your security clearance level?”

“No idea,” Rush said, taken aback.

“Yeah,” McKay said, his voice breaking. “OF COURSE you don’t know. Well, you hacked my Gate Bridge, even if it was, arguably, more social engineering than anything. I can argue you’re a level four by default if they drag me in front of the IOA.”

They stood in silence.

McKay’s expression was locked on the slow sweep of the planet below. His eyes glinted, too bright in the dim room.

Rush wasn’t sure how to proceed; he only knew that he wanted to say something. Because, other than Young’s quantum mechanical alter ego, Rodney McKay was the only person with whom Rush had even a sliver of a connection. Even if it was borrowed. Based in dreams.

“Rodney,” Rush said quietly. “Did you build these?” He tapped a fingernail subtly against his cortical suppressor.

“More or less.” McKay toyed with the edge of a white shirt cuff. “I laid down the code that runs on them.”

Rush nodded. “Piezoelectric circuitry, wired to crystal, running Ancient software, which creates an EM field across my cortex in real time without interfering with higher cognitive processes.”

McKay looked at him, eyes wide. “How could you possibly know that?”

Rush decided against mentioning Dr. Geiszler’s MATLAB program. “When I sleep,” he said, “I dream from Colonel Sheppard’s perspective. Which means I dream of Atlantis. Flying. You.”

“Me?” McKay echoed. 

“You. Countless times. Coming to his rescue. Adjusting the devices attached to his head.”

McKay stared at him. “Oh,” he said, weakly. “You dream of me? That’s—surprising. It shouldn’t be? And yet. Here I am. Surprised.” He paced away, along the floor-to-ceiling windows, then turned back to Rush. “I pictured you dreaming of Sheppard, somehow. He’s the dreamy one.”

(Rush didn’t wholly disagree.)

“But you’re dreaming AS Sheppard,” McKay continued. “So you—you know me? That’s how you knew I was Canadian, isn’t it? From dreams. My uniform. I mean—John can make Absurdist Americanos. He recognized Eli Wallace. It makes sense. So you must also know the Atlantis team. By sight, at least. Teyla and Ronon. Woolsey. Zelenka, probably. Radek Zelenka? He built your hardware. He’s got a flair for marrying crystal shards to circuit boards. He wants to meet you so much. It’s a little.” McKay broke off, looking down at the planet below. “It’s a little bit sad,” he finished.

They were so terribly strained—these Air Force personnel. As though they’d given more than they had. All of them. Over a prolonged period.

Had he, himself, been the same way?

It seemed likely. 

“Y’said you were going to tell me what was going on?” Rush moved to stand next to the man.

Beneath them, the East Coast of the United States was an irregular carpet of electric light.

“Yeah.” McKay cleared his throat. “I’m regretting it already.”

“Why?” Rush asked.

“Because you won’t get it,” McKay said. “It’s not your fault. But—you used to be like me. Putting on a real good show. For everyone. Even yourself. Especially yourself. But you’ve got no show now, Nick. You’re very different. It’s hard to watch.”

Rush’s head ached. He had sore muscles running from the base of his skull to his fingertips. He felt bruising along his ribs where Dale Volker had tackled him. He wasn’t sure what to say to Rodney McKay. He wasn’t sure what to say to any of these overburdened Air Force personnel. 

Rush traced the lacy line of light where land met sea. “I suspect we’re friends,” he offered.

“What?” McKay brought a hand to his chest, as though checking for damage beneath the narrow lapels of his jacket.

“You said we weren’t friends, but I think we must have been.”

“No,” McKay said. “We don’t like each other. I’m doing this out of professional courtesy.”

“You’d know, I suppose.” Rush didn’t look at him.

“Oh shut up with that face,” McKay said, defeated. “Fine. We’re ‘friends.’ You’re VERY likable right now. It’s super annoying and honestly a little triggering for me. Triggering enough that I’m doing all kinds of hypothesis-generating about Lucian Alliance drugs. I wish my brain would leave me alone about it.”

Rush used his aching right hand to massage his aching left hand.

“There was a time,” McKay said. “When I lost—I lost a lot of my defenses, intellectual and personal, to an alien parasite. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Like, all. We don’t need to get into the details, but there were some similarities to your situation. Because you were—well, you were very defended. Very. And now you’re zero defended. Nobody likes that. Even I, who didn’t even know you all that well, feel weirdly loyal to Past You. And Past You? He would hate this. I mean, despise. But Present You is likable. Incredibly likable. Too likable. It’s concerning. Present You also makes Past You seem like way less of an asshole and way more tragic. Not a lot of people will expect that. I didn’t. It’s an intense mix.”

Rush nodded. “My wife died last April.”

“What?” McKay breathed.

“I was married.” Rush shrugged apologetically. “My understanding of the timetable is that my wife died in April. I seem to have joined the Air Force around the same time. I’m guessing this probably accounts for some of the more dramatic change in my demeanor?”

“Oh god.” McKay brought an arm across his chest, as though bracing his ribs. “And you found this out how?”

“The internet,” Rush said.

“Right. Sure. The internet.” McKay stared down at the night covered planet, stricken.

Rush hooked a hand over one shoulder and tried to press away the ache at the base of his neck.

“So you were grieving, presumably, and whatever they did—disrupted that.”

“Seems likely, yes.”

“I have this desire,” McKay said, his gaze fixed on the planet below, one hand open like he was ready to receive something out of the air, “and it’s really strong. The desire is to do right by Past You. Even if that’s not necessarily the best thing for Present You. But Present You is the one who’s here. Intellectually, I know I should be acting in the best interests of Present You. Already I can tell that a lot of people will have this exact problem. So, um, do you have a preference?” He turned to look at Rush.

Rush hesitated.

“You can say it,” McKay said, his expression effortfully stoic. “Whatever it is you think I don’t want to hear. Better me than anyone else. I’m telling you—I get it. I get it in a way most people won’t. A deeply personal and intensely awful way.”

Still, Rush hesitated.

“I lost most of my cognitive abilities over a period of weeks. Kind of like rapid onset dementia? I knew it was happening. It wasn’t a great time for me. But ah. There was a strong memory component to the experience. Different than your situation. But with enough commonalities to—” McKay toyed with the cuff of his dress shirt. “Well.”

Rush nodded. 

“Tell me.” McKay looked up at him. “Whatever it is, I swear to god, I won’t tell a soul.”

“He seems dead.”

“Past You?” McKay asked, trying to control his expression, mostly succeeding.

“Yes,” Rush confirmed.

McKay compressed his lips. “Uh huh. Yup. Of course he does. Like another person. Unreachable. Not actually you.”

“Not just unreachable. Categorically unknowable.”

“And, for you, yes. He might be. Because those things on your head, those things I let Zelenka talk me into coding, are the things that’ll keep it that way and, damn it, I knew. I knew—” McKay broke off, struggling heroically to control his expression. “They said you were dying; they said there was no time, but I never wanted this, and I am just. Really sorry. I’m not the guy who murdered Past You. But I am, for sure, the guy keeping him dead.”

“Not sure I’d look at it quite that way,” Rush began.

“Oh yeah? Well, what do you care? Past You is dead,” McKay snapped, high-energy, high-volume, in high Earth orbit.

Rush opened his hands.

“Sorry.” McKay’s tone softened. “But—don’t try to be nice to me about this. I don’t need it. I don’t want it.”

“Oh get t’fuck, will you?” Rush smiled faintly.

“Ha.” McKay sniffed. “That’s a little better. Still way too nice. But, getting there.”

“You’re fair fuckin’ difficult,” Rush informed him.

“Wow, you bringing your whole IQ to bear here? Because that’s a genius-level insight if I ever heard one. You’ll want to pace yourself. This isn’t a sprint, Nick. It’s a marathon. In which we’re usually sprinting.”

“Noted,” Rush said dryly.

They watched the planet in silence.

“I’m going to work on this,” McKay said, finally. “I have—some shredded optimism in me somewhere. But, more than that, we have a doctor on Atlantis. She’s incredible. She fixed me, when there was no hope left. She and I, together, may be able to fix you. She’ll tell you we can’t do it. She’ll tell you we can’t, over and over again, in a really convincing manner. Everyone except me will believe her. And then—one day—” he opened a hand, looked at Rush, then dropped his eyes and shrugged.

“I appreciate the optimism, Rodney,” Rush said. “But I won’t hold you to it.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll hold me to it.” McKay stood in his worse-for-wear suit, shoulders hunched, head bowed, staring down at the floor.

“Shall we?” Rush asked.

“Hmm?” McKay asked, lost in thought.

“Go to the medical wing, or bay, or—wherever we’re supposed to be going?”

“Um.” McKay didn’t look at him.

“Don’t tell me you’re secretly on the payroll of the Lucian Alliance,” Rush said, his tone as dry as he could make it.

“What?” McKay looked up, offended. “Ew. Don’t insult me.”

“Apologies.” Rush looked at McKay expectantly.

“So, believe it or not, all of that stuff we just talked about—it wasn’t what I was referring to when I said I’d tell you what was going on.”

“Really?” Rush asked.

“Yeah, I know, right? Sure seems like it should’ve been enough,” McKay whispered. “But no. What I wanted to tell you is—even though you won’t understand what this should mean—Vala Mal Doran was badly hurt tonight, trying to get you out.” 

McKay paused there, watching him.

“Ah,” Rush said.

“She’s your friend. A good one. A real one. Not sure if you know that.”

“Colonel Young mentioned it. I was teaching her calculus.”

“Seriously?” McKay smiled wanly.

“So I’m told,” Rush replied.

“Well, I guess that’s why she was asking me about solids of revolution. I thought she was a linguist, but she’s not. She’s a former con artist with a math hobby. We talked about Gabriel’s Horn while she took my measurements. She told me she considers you her terrestrial BFF.” McKay looked searchingly at Rush.

“Will she be all right?” Rush wished he had any idea what she looked like. Which of the four women she’d been.

“Two of the best surgeons on the planet are working on her now,” McKay said. “It was David Telford who shot her. With an Air Force sidearm. The rest of the fight was Zats. We think he targeted her. She was wearing Kevlar under that dress, of course. But he shot her in the thigh. Cracked the bone, hit the artery. You can bleed out in minutes that way.”

“He was trying to kill her?” Rush asked. “Her specifically? Why?”

McKay looked away. “Two theories. One: the Lucian Alliance and the Trust have teamed up, weird as that sounds—uh, wait. You have no idea who any of these people are. Okay scratch that. One: her interstellar con-artist past is catching up with her. Two: it’s an attack on Daniel Jackson.”

“The archeologist?” Rush asked.

“Uh, sure. I mean, I guess he’s an archeologist? That’s probably not how I would describe him. I think of him more as a linguist? But yeah. He and Telford were enemies. And Jackson and Vala were close. Are close.”

“Which one was she?” Rush asked. “Of the women in the elevator—which one?”

McKay flinched like a man at the end of his resources, who’d been scraped raw by the world too many times to count. But, when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “Long black hair. Burgundy dress. Boots to the knee.”

McKay stared down at the planet.

Rush stared down at the planet.

“So this whole thing I’m doing right now,” McKay said, “having this heart-to-heart where I dredge up my least favorite recent memories—it’s not even for you, is it? I mean, from your perspective, I’m pouring one on the floor for a guy who isn’t here anymore.”

Rush opened a hand. “An’ yet, here you are, crashing ahead anyway. Because—”

“Because we’re friends,” McKay admitted, quiet and sad-eyed. “You complete math brat.”