Mathématique: Chapter 84

“Courtship reliably distracts me, you know that.” Vala’s smile glittered with mischief, and she lifted a hand from Young’s hip to gesture at McKay and Keller, as though bidding up their price at auction.

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

Text iteration: Late morning.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 84

In the late morning, after a session of collaborative detail work on the bones of Colonel Young’s plans for SG-68, Rush got his first look at the Nautilus Suite.

The rooms were painfully bright, even with the city tinting glass for him as they went. As Young led him through a tour that underemphasized aesthetics and overemphasized security features, it occurred to Rush that he was not at all a tropical paradise sort of person.

The sea was a rippled pane that drowned every room with a view of it.

His own rooms (the chambers of “Merlin,” no less) were a concealed and coiled museum that ended in a windowless box carved into a naquadah girder. The presence of the city seemed fainter inside the spar of metal, far from running circuits and resonant crystal.

It was tolerable, he supposed.

Young’s room, for the record, was bloody awful. Sun and vistas everywhere. Pale stone, mirrors, glass light fixtures—Rush might as well carry a pair of icepicks to slide into his own eye sockets each morning.

As they descended a nautiloid coil on their way back to the common area, Young looked over his shoulder. “You’re gonna crush Woolsey’s heart if you tell him how much you hate the Alien Wizard Suite he picked just for you.”

Rush skimmed fingertips along the curve of a silver handrail. At the base of his mind, Atlantis shivered. “I’m sure it’s very nice. At night.”

Young snorted. “Most people also find it nice in the daytime?”

Rush frowned at a metal panel mounted on a central spoke at the base of the curved ramp. It was masquerading as a door, but had more in common with a barricade. “I’m not at all certain you’re well-served by a set of rooms so grandiose they take a quarter hour to survey?”

Young patted the door’s retracted bolts like a favored dog. “I’ve decided I like this place. Pick the right spot to make a stand, and SG-68 could hold it against a small army.”

Wrung out though he was, Rush wasn’t above appreciating Everett Young’s casual martial competence. (The black Lantean fatigues didn’t hurt either.)

Rush twirled the pen he’d stolen from the colonel through his fingers as they passed through the arced hall that had housed Merlin’s retinue. With provocative politeness, he asked, “And what constitutes a ‘small’ army?” 

He was flirting again. Was it something worth worrying about, how easily the tendency surfaced? An ingrained habit? A quality he’d worked to attain? A quality he’d worked to bury?

Young glanced over his shoulder, flustered and intrigued in a way Rush quite enjoyed. “Depends on context. In this case, ‘small’ means relevant to its likely goal. Say: taking and holding the city. A thousand humans. Two hundred and fifty Wraith. That’s a guess. I’ve never seen Wraith in action.”

“Hmm.” Rush spun Young’s pen over the back of his hand.

Young stopped just inside the windowless security station that separated the public and private portions of the Nautilus Suite. “That’s mine.” He indicated the pen with his gaze.

“Is it? Apologies.” With a flourish, Rush presented it to Young.

Young drew the pen from Rush’s fingers with a gratuitous brush of skin on skin.

Rush arched an invitational eyebrow.

“You’re a lot of work,” Young growled.

“I’ll have t’take your word for it, I’m afraid,” Rush replied.

“Memory-free, you’re extra work,” Young clarified.

“Others have implied the opposite.” Rush turned and led the way past a double bank of monitors humming with concealed crystal. Water flowed along the bases of the walls in shining grates.

“Oh yeah?” Young asked. “Who?”

“McKay, mostly.” The far door of the security station opened at Rush’s approach and he stepped into the blue well of the vestibule. “He prefers the past version of me. The one with the intact memory.” As Rush passed the fountain in the center of the room, he swiped a finger through a perfect streaming arc. A soft chime sounded as displaced water hit a metal edge.

When Young spoke, the words carried a tentative quality. “Not sure it’s a good idea to think of yourself as two separate guys.”

Rush quirked a you-think-so-do-you eyebrow, passed below a turquoise mosaic of a ringed planet, and entered the common area. The room had another murderous ocean view, which tinted from sparkling to manageable as he passed the frame of the door. Eli’s gaming console was already connected to a wall-mounted screen. Rush noted two chairs, two couches (aspiring divans, really), upholstered in stone and taupe, and a scattering of coffee and end tables.

Young stood beside him. “What do you think? Not bad for a War Room.”

“A War Room,” Rush repeated, full of instinctive disapproval.

“You don’t like war?”

Now Young was flirting.

Rush suppressed a smirk. “It wants a board,” he said. “Whiteboard, chalkboard, mystical alien crystalboard—doesn’t matter. Something t’write on.”

Young gripped Rush’s shoulder, turned him ninety degrees, and pointed at a sheet of misted glass with silver pens clipped to its edge.

“Fuck right off.” Rush found his own tone startling, brimming as it was with devilish approval and breathy enthusiasm. He stepped away from Young, approached the board, and unclipped a silver stylus.

Young’s words followed him, full of heat and charge. “In a room like this, most people are gonna get excited about the view, not the chalkboard.”

Rush dragged the stylus over the glass, free-handing a perfect circle of light. “I strike myself as difficult to impress.”

“Nailed it.”

The naquadah balcony beyond the windows gleamed like gunmetal in the shadow of Sanctuary Tower as Rush ticked off forty-degree arcs along his circle. 

“Gotta be weird,” Young offered, “figuring out your personality as you go.”

Rush nodded.

A mnemonic block had been difficult to wrangle in Boston, but here, on Atlantis, he needed his memory. What if he’d known something crucial? Something related to Morgan le Fay? To Young’s quantum alter ego? All he had was declarative mythology of the British Isles, which was, troublingly, crammed with stories of memory and recognition: Tam Lin. Thomas the Rhymer. Stories of stripped memory, stripped context, stripped spatial and temporal tethers. And he was from Morgan’s ground. From Morgan’s bloody line.

The city stirred at the base of his thoughts.

“What are you thinking about?” Young asked.

Observation, Rush could say, or Morgan le Fay and centuries of warnings against straying off path and into fairy country. He swept a hand through his hair and reseated his glasses. Relational quantum mechanics, he ruled out as far too close to the concept of superposition.

None of it. He could bring none of it. Even shorn of his past, he was layered in secrets.

Rush reclipped the stylus to the board and turned to look at Young. “Where are y’from?” he asked, wistful and slow.

Young tensed, then went rigid. Pain flickered across his face and was quickly suppressed. He clamped a hand to his back, leaned into his cane, and grimaced at the floor.

“I—” Rush began, certain he’d crushed a painful subject under a mnemonic boot, but without the fuckin’ faintest idea of what it had been.

“It’s fine,” Young said.

There was a long silence.

Then, “I’m from Guernsey, Wyoming,” Young said.

Rush’s self-blind intellect offered up a collection of detailed data on Wyoming. Names of towns. Rivers. Mountain ranges. The population densities of cities. As though he’d committed such a list to memory. Backing all of it was a bold geography of forested slopes, dry plains, lake and rock and sky. He couldn’t imagine why he’d constructed a functional population density map in his own mind. Every possible scenario seemed improbable, unspeakably tragic. Mass casualties, alien ordnance diverted, a crashing ship—and he’d taken part in it. He must have, given this mental map, this territory over which a deadly Poisson distribution might fall?

“Did something happen to Wyoming?” Rush asked.

“To Wyoming?” Young replied. “No.”

“I seem to—” Rush hesitated, “—know quite a bit about it?”

“About Wyoming?” Young smiled faintly. “Makes sense.”

“Does it?” Rush asked. When nothing was forthcoming, he did a quick mental verification, then said, “I’ve no such data for Colorado, where, apparently, I lived for months?”

Young nodded at the floor. “Let’s table this until you get your memories back, hotshot.”

Over the blue plate of the sea, the shadow of the tower shrank as the sun arced toward its zenith. The strangeness of the moment held like an open melodic cadence.

“All right,” Rush said.

The door to the vestibule slid open and Eli entered. He hesitated on the threshold, eyes darting from Rush to Young and back. He tucked his laptop under one arm and zipped his open expedition jacket. “Hey boss,” he said, a cautious note in his voice.

“If you’re so keen to confer a title,” Rush replied with breezy provocation, “I suspect ‘professor’ would be most appropriate?”

“Ha. Nice try.” Eli sent another surreptitious glance at Young as he crossed the room to join Rush beside the misted alien crystalboard. “I’m never going to college. Not in a million years. Check out the sweet alien palace where I live now!” He gestured at the vast expanse of ocean beyond the sliding glass doors to the balcony. “My room has two showers. One for me, one for cool alien plants. Seriously, there’s a sheet of hydroponics in my bathroom? It looks awesome. This place has ruined me for all other places. I bet there’s all kinds of cool alien tech to find.”

The city, hooking into the idea behind Eli’s words, rose in Rush’s consciousness with a soundless hills-of-mist melody that vibrated above and below the dampening field of his cortical suppressors.

Morgan’s crushed-crystal mantle amplifies her presence. Her power hits the walls and fountains ceilingward. Her bare feet, in electric contact with the plated naquadah, press relational to her mass. The Nautilus Suite coils around her, protecting the treasure that is falling water, standing water, waxing moon, and starlit mist.

“Deceit.” Morgan’s voice: satin sweet and edged with poison. Morgan’s mind: a black swan erupting from still waters.

“Explain.” Merlin’s clothes are mud-spattered and rustic: an undyed tunic; a leather belt hung with crystal tools; trousers pocketed with small instruments; mid-calf boots so worn their soles are giving way. His windblown hair is streaked with gray. Structure arcs and bends his presence. The wind sings around the edges in his mind. He labors over a box of dark naquadah, cast from metal and night. A wheel of translucent amber, inset into the box’s lid, hoards the weak light of a clouded day.

“You cannot mechanize truth,” Morgan says. “Deceit and intelligence are inseparable.”

“Boss?” Eli’s voice came from another world.

Rush blinked, shook himself, and the bright day snapped back.

“What the hell was that?” Young was closer, approaching, leaning into his cane.

But Rush lost the room again as Atlantis poured tech and beauty into his thoughts like a waterfall of gems through a narrow fissure. Rush was losing consciousness to geodesics of rose and blue, amber locks, lavender EM fields, devices glittering like chipped shards of wet aquamarine under equatorial sun. //Stop,// he told the city. //Stop.//

The incomprehensible images of light-limned tech slowed.

“Hey.” Young was in his personal space, impossible to ignore, smelling of sun-warmed stone and the alien herbs of Athosian soap.

Their hands were tangled, Rush realized. It was only after his fingertips lost their grip on the cortical suppressors at his temple that he understood Young was prying his hands away. That he’d dropped his cane to do it.

“Pay less attention to the city.” The colonel shifted his stance, stepped a little closer, then clamped his hands around Rush’s wrists with significantly more leverage. “Pay more attention to me.”

“Right,” Rush breathed.

Young held his gaze. “Pull that shit again, and we tamper-proof your technoswag.”

Promise? Rush managed not to say as the city rode an outgoing tide in his thoughts.

“Uhhh, I’m thinking we do that anyway?” Eli said, right at Rush’s shoulder.

Rush flinched, regrounded, then dug in against his own disorientation with academic poise. “Sit.” He indicated the nearest couch with a stern glance.

“The Scary College Professor Routine works a lot better when you don’t have a Space Colonel actively policing your technoswag,” Eli informed him.

Rush glanced pointedly at the doubled grip Young had on his wrists.

The colonel grunted in wordless disapproval and unclamped his hands.

Rush (wholly caving to his own provocative impulses) patted Young’s broad shoulder.

“You’re a lot of work,” the colonel growled, dark and full of promise.

“Oh my god, he really is.” Eli retrieved Young’s cane from the floor and offered it to the colonel.

Young took it with a nod, leaned into it, then limped back a few small steps.

Rush collected himself and glared again at Eli. “Sit.”

“Still too soon,” Eli said, “but I’ll give it to you. Out of pity.” He slouched onto the end of a couch. “Maybe join me before you pass out?”

Rush ignored the offer. Instead, he crossed his arms, put his shoulder into the edge of the misted glass panel he’d inscribed with a perfect circle, and said, “We’re unifying with SG-68.”

“What?” Eli sat up straight. “Dave! No!”

“Eli,” Young growled.

“Sorry. Do-over. ‘Nick’!” Eli paused to embellish Rush’s (actual) name with air quotes. “No!”

“Yes,” Rush replied.

“Bad idea. Really bad. Have you never seen a movie? A TV show? If we’ve learned one thing from Dr. Levant over the years it’s that the Air Force isn’t to be trusted!”

“‘Dr. Levant’ is not a real person,” Rush broke in. “His real-life inspiration, on the other hand, is very much integrated with the military and more than a little put out at you, if you’ll recall, after you and Vala forced him into a life of digital knavery?”

“Yeah, and the experience scarred me for life, thanks SO much for bringing it up. But Dave! You can’t put the ‘Air Force’ in charge!”

“Every time you call him ‘Dave’ you owe me ten pushups,” Young said.

“What? No,” Eli said, aghast. “Vetoed!” He looked imploringly at Rush. “Our plan to be nocturnal and live a life of math and video games is…off the table?”

“That was mostly your plan, I think,” Rush said.

“Nocturnal,” Young repeated, a speculative note in his voice as he eyed Rush.

Rush tried not to look away. Failed. 

He wasn’t sure how Sheppard would feel about his snap acceptance to participate in the training of SG-68, particularly because it’d create difficulties in keeping their sleep/wake cycles reversed. But, unlike Sheppard, Rush wasn’t in the field confronting the Wraith on a daily basis. He was certain he could get by on irregular sleep. It’d just require a bit of coordination. And there was no guarantee that sleeping simultaneously would pose a problem; just a strong supposition.

Rush looked back at Young to find the colonel eyeing him like he’d just keyed in on the motive behind Sheppard’s proposed circadian reversal. 

“Well I don’t start before 9 AM,” Eli preempted whatever Young might have said. “Not with the amount of gaming we’re supposed to be doing.” He eyed Rush with disapproval. “And, speaking of that, boss, you need to put in several hours per day outside any team-based gaming. Your skills are garbage. We’re gonna get repeatedly destroyed in Spar Caverns if you don’t hone your mystical spinning.”

“There are other, more important—” Rush began.

“You sure about that, Dave?” Eli interjected, his eyes glinting with the force of what he wouldn’t speak aloud. “Are you sure there are things more important than the game?”

“Twenty pushups,” Young said.

“No, damn it,” Eli turned back to Rush. “You saw—” he trailed off, reorganized his thoughts, and tried again. “You saw what it was like,” he said fiercely. “How seriously J Shep takes it.”

“I did,” Rush admitted.

“So I insist you become a competent mystical spinner.”

“Fine,” Rush sighed.

“Huh.” Eli leaned back against the couch, one arm draped across its back. “That was easy.” He frowned. “Now I feel like I should have negotiated for more. Mystical spinning and life weaving?”

“Don’t push your luck,” Rush said.

Ginn emerged from the blue well of the vestibule, her hair a deep auburn in the sea-toned light. The stripes on her jacket matched the shaded ocean beyond the windows.

Eli lifted his arm from the back of the couch and squared his shoulders at the sight of her. He straightened up and slid toward the end of the couch, making room.

“It’s unwise to negotiate from a state of informational deficiency,” Rush continued with sly sympathy. “Y’might’ve found a way to argue free of physical training, for example.”

“My what!?”

“Eleven to noon daily,” Young confirmed.

“An hour a day?” Eli gaped.

“Physical training is important.” Ginn took a seat on the stone-gray couch beside Eli, her expression grave. “Scientists are valuable commodities.”

Eli gave the girl a weak smile. “Oh. Ha. Really?”

“You were nearly stolen from Boston,” Ginn reminded him.

Rush leaned a little harder into his alien whiteboard and watched Eli stare anxiously at Ginn, no doubt floundering for something to say. Ginn, for her part, regarded Eli with intimidating poise, while Young frowned at the pair of them. Given Ginn and Eli were civilians of comparable rank, Rush doubted the colonel had grounds to forbid fraternization between them.

For Rush’s money, fraternization was looking increasingly likely.

“So,” Eli said awkwardly. “Nice day, huh?”

“Yes,” Ginn replied. “Very nice.”

Rush studiously looked away and did his best not to smirk.

Greer and James entered together from the vestibule.

“Sorry we’re late, sir,” James said. “We ran into Colonel Sheppard.”

“He’s offworld for the day,” Greer added, as he and James settled on the second couch. “He wanted us to let you know.”

Young nodded, then invited Rush to close ranks at the front of the room with a subtle tilt of his chin.

Rush unclipped a silver stylus from the edge of the board, then came to stand at the colonel’s shoulder.

“Welcome to the daily briefing,” Young said.

“Daily?” Eli echoed.

Rush sympathized. His mind was a morass of instinct divided along a mnemonic line and rebelling against itself. He was fair certain that under normal circumstances, he’d have strongly sided with Eli on this one. But Young intrigued him. Beneath the man’s stolid demeanor there was a subversive edge, sharp enough to break the bonds of space and time.

Young ignored Eli. He looked to each member of SG-68 in turn. “While this is formally a protection detail, there’s a good chance we’ll be deployed into at least one galactic conflict.”

“Is that a metaphorical ‘we’?” James asked, crisp as her fatigues.

“No, lieutenant. I’m talking about the people in this room.”

There was an unspoken implication behind all Young had said and omitted earlier in the day when they’d planned this meeting. Rush was curious to see if it’d be explicitly voiced, or—

“You’re thinkin’ they may deploy our Planetary Asset, sir?” Greer asked with calculated indolence.

And there it was. Part of it, at least. Rush met the sergeant’s gaze, which was direct and challenging, but edged with a wry complexity that made Rush more than a little curious.

“Yes, sergeant, I am. Right now, while cypher-solving is ongoing, we’ve got some downtime. I suggest we use it to turn ourselves into the kind of unit that can flex hard enough to stick with that Planetary Asset when it happens. Right now, we’re not there.”

“Getting rid of that cane is probably step one,” Eli muttered mutinously.

“Eli.” Rush experimented with holding the colonel’s line. “Enough.”

“Okay okay.” Eli raised his hands.

“He’s right.” Intriguingly, the colonel softened in response to Rush’s overt support.

“I am?” Eli asked.

“Every person sitting in this room has at least one deficiency,” Young said. “Some of us, myself included, have several. So let’s take advantage of the friendly territory to sharpen up as fast and far as possible.”

“Yes sir,” Greer said.

“I like it,” James added.

Ginn gave the colonel a solemn nod.

“Oh, so…we’re, like, voting on this?” Eli asked. “Because I—”

Rush knew from experience it was best to cut the lad off before the energetic wave of his rhetoric had time to crest. He spun his silver stylus to catch Eli’s eye, and broke in with, “You will participate in combat training, physical conditioning, and whatever else the colonel deems necessary for your safety. That or enter the Witness Protection Program while remotely completing your bachelor’s degree. Your choice.”

“Without combat training, it is very easy to die,” Ginn offered.

“Uh, cool.” Eli smiled wanly. “Okay. Combat training it is.”

“What’s the plan, sir?” Greer asked.

Young shifted his weight, like his back was hurting him. “Dr. Rush and I came up with a hybrid training model: competency floors and skillset acquisition. Physical competency is a must. Everyone in this room has an hour of combat training daily and is working towards the Marine Corps fitness standards, effective immediately.”

“Marine Corps fitness standards?” Eli protested.

Greer made no attempt to file the wolfish edge off his grin.

Rush couldn’t say he was enthusiastic about the idea either. The days alone were headache-inducing enough. He wasn’t looking forward to adding a dedicated workout to his routine. As if in response, the city deepened the tint on the window at Rush’s back, and he sent it a restrained wave of gratitude.

“Intellectual competence is also critical. Everyone in this room needs enough Ancient to read the Lantean signage and operate consoles and doors.” Young put more weight on his cane. “Everyone needs to master the basics of galactic history. We all need context for what we’ll be up against.”

“What about the protection detail for our civilian assets, sir?” James asked.

“Still our top priority,” Young said. “Neither Rush nor Eli goes uncovered by someone from our team for any length of time beyond the confines of this suite.”

Rush sighed. Young had been relatively circumspect about that particular requirement of the schedule when they’d worked the thing out, but it’d been hard to miss.

“Understood,” James said.

“Competency floor is meant to be cleared and not replaced,” Young continued. “Once you’ve met the Marine Corps reqs,” the colonel glanced at Greer, “you’re done with that piece. You spend your time learning Ancient and digging into galactic history. Two hours a day go to clearing floor competencies.”

Greer and James glanced at one another.

Ginn looked like she was memorizing every word out of Young’s mouth.

Eli muttered something beneath his breath.

There was a deep satisfaction to learning, to the acquisition of skillsets. Such things had inherent merit, but they were particularly reassuring in times of uncertainty. Young knew as much. Eli, Rush assumed, would realize the same. Ginn looked quietly excited. Maybe she’d be a good influence on Rush’s recalcitrant intern. 

“Questions?” Young asked.

“Yeah.” Greer eyed Rush. “Why does the doc look like he’s sharpening his knives over there?”

Casually, Rush spun the light-pen through his fingers.

Young glanced at Rush, then did a double take, likely at the academic villainy that oozed from Rush’s bearing. “I put him in charge of the flex blocks.”

Eli, outraged, said, “I won’t go to college so you made one!?”

“If y’want to frame it that way, I won’t stop you,” Rush said lazily.

Eli huffed. “Don’t pretend like this isn’t the best day of your life.”

“It’s up there,” Rush admitted, “but the colonel gives me far too much credit—”

“I really don’t.” Young’s understated appreciation threatened the cool flow of Rush’s sentence.

“—in that,” Rush continued, remarshaling his academic cadences, “while the flex tasks are my design, they’re heavily informed by the colonel’s assessments of individual strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find them problem-based. Peer mentoring and strategic partnerships are strongly encouraged.”

Eli raised his hand. “Is it too early to say I hate this?”

“Far too early,” Rush confirmed. “Eli, Sergeant Greer: the pair of you have been partnered. You’ll be training with and ultimately serving as part of Dr. Zelenka’s roving technicians. You’ll be dispatched to various points around the city and responsible for repairs of Ancient tech.”

“I don’t know the first thing about Ancient tech,” Greer said.

“Which puts you in a better position than Eli,” Rush said smoothly, “who believes himself well-versed, but in fact has been trained on a video game with very little bearing on reality.”

“Hey,” Eli said weakly.

“Sergeant, you’re doubling as Eli’s security while you’re deployed.” Surreptitiously, Young pressed a hand to his lower back.

“Got it,” Greer said.

“Next pairing will be Ginn and the colonel,” Rush continued, “who will join a Lantean historical team and work to assemble and categorize the breadth and depth of Ancient responses to civilization-scale threats.”

Ginn’s dark eyes snapped to Young with electric intensity.

“Um what?” Eli said. “Excuse me? That is so cool. I want that one.”

“Crawl enough alien ductwork and I’ll consider it,” Rush said like pouring poison into porcelain. “Meanwhile, the lieutenant and I will be making a study of electrostatics.” 

“What…is that?” James asked.

“The place where math meets energy shields.” Rush kept the explanation vague. “You have demolitions training yes? You’ve some ability to assess structural weaknesses? In literal architecture?”

James nodded. “The math though…I haven’t done math since high school.”

“Yes well. No time like the present,” Rush said lightly.

Backlit by a tinted seascape, spine full of metal, Young watched him with a heated, speculative expression, equal parts appreciative and challenging. A feral anticipation rose in Rush at the implied wildness beneath the colonel’s bound rigidity—a fighter-pilot passion that might yield to an unlocking. Rush wanted to drag the man over every line he’d drawn and rip the order out of him, just to see if it would come.

It’d be difficult.

He suspected that was how he liked it.

~~~

In the late afternoon, Rush sat on a bench of silver filigree, opposite Jennifer Keller and Rodney McKay. Ornamental Athosian greenery spilled from planters on the shaded terrace off the infirmary’s east wing. The sun sank behind Atlantis’s central tower, and the city’s silhouette cast a blue-slate shadow over an otherwise sparkling sea.

The breeze smelled of salt and alien apple blossom.

Keller had dubbed this place the “healing garden,” and considered it a formal extension of her territory. A path meandered through floral displays and past small decorative fountains that concealed weather-proof alcoves with caches of diagnostic equipment. Here, as everywhere, running water limned the edge of the terrace and slid along grooves beside the glass doors that led to the infirmary’s interior.

A bench away, Vala sat with eyes closed and hands outstretched. A Goa’uld device nestled in her stacked palms like a glowing ruby. Young stood in front of her as she made slow passes over his lower back, aiming to mend superficial damage without heating the bolts and plates screwed into the bone of his spine.

McKay ghosted a fingertip over the tropical-hued screen in Keller’s hands. “You’re getting spikes here that don’t match his baseline. The deltas are small, but they’ll sum to—”

“Rodney,” Keller interrupted, “you’re supposed to be cognitively engaging him, not backseat neuromodulating.”

“Oh. Right.” McKay’s expedition T-shirt matched the blue vault of the sky. “So, what do you think of all these, uh, plants?”

Rush didn’t dignify that with a response. “Why aren’t you with Colonel Sheppard?”

“Let’s see: he decided Major Teldy’s team could use backup while investigating an abandoned Wraith lab full of horrible alien monstrosities and in his infinite wisdom he also decided he’d leave his team behind to do other things like care for newborns and fix the brains of Fields Medalists and strategize with Radek about leading the B Team to public victory on the blood steps of the Temporal Shrine, so.”

“Did he at least take Ronon?” Young growled.

“Nope,” McKay said. “Because if he takes Ronon, Teyla will be offended. If he takes Teyla, then I’ll be offended. And he can’t take me, because I need to fix Nick,” he finished, with the kind of satisfaction that implied he took a great deal of pleasure from simple applications of first-order logic.

Rush indulged himself in an understated eye roll. 

“And you don’t like Wraith labs,” Keller added.

“No one likes Wraith labs.” McKay scooted closer to Keller and hovered a finger over the screen. “This is the auditory cortex? It’s spiky.”

“What do Wraith need with—” Young lost the rest of his sentence to a clenched-teeth groan.

“Sorry, handsome!” Vala winced without opening her eyes, and the red gem in her hands blazed brighter.

Keller glanced up, gaze sharp, but when she saw Young’s face relax, she returned to contemplating the brainwaves beneath her fingertips. “There’s a lot going on in the auditory cortex, but it’s all low amplitude. I’d rather target the single highest peak in the diff.” She tapped the surface of the screen with a short, bare nail. “It’s limbic.”

“Yeah,” McKay said, “okay.” He leaned in to look over Keller’s shoulder.

The pair of them sat cheek-to-cheek with nearly identical scowls of disapproval as they studied Rush’s misbehaving electrophysiology.

For a long moment, no one spoke. The sea breeze sang around silver edges. A faint sound of chimes carried on the wind, as though the city had been engineered for sonic as well as visual shimmer.

The low hum of Vala’s device shut down.

She threaded her wrist through its grip, grabbed Young by his hips, and leaned to the side to get an unobstructed view of McKay and Keller. After studying their matching scowls, she winked at Rush. 

Rush opened a hand in acknowledgement.

“Vala?” Young asked. “What are you doing.”

“Courtship reliably distracts me, you know that.” Vala’s smile glittered with mischief, and she lifted a hand from Young’s hip to gesture at McKay and Keller, as though bidding up their price at auction.

“What?” McKay’s blue eyes widened. “Courtship! I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”

Keller’s tiny, angelic smile implied the doctor took particular pleasure in her ability to fluster the Pegasus Galaxy’s (self-described) greatest intellect.

“She knows what I’m talking about.” A gust of wind fluttered Vala’s hair as she gave Keller an approving once-over. “Sorry for the interruption, handsome. You’re nowhere near done.”

“Are you two gonna fix his brain?” Young growled at McKay and Keller.

“I’m not at all sure it needs fixing?” Rush added, and Atlantis leaned reassuringly into his thoughts.

“This morning,” Young said, all his stubbornness on display, “you got hijacked by the city. I don’t want that happening again.”

Vala pouted sympathetically at Rush. “He’s got control issues, doesn’t he?”

“Vala,” Young began.

“Shh. I’m working!” Vala shut her eyes and reignited her healing device.

“I don’t have ‘control issues’,” Young announced.

“Oh join the club,” McKay said, unimpressed.

“I think we’re all in agreement that cognitive ‘hijacking’ is bad.” Keller focused on Rush. “I’ll be making a very small adjustment to one of the six interacting wave functions that define your cortical field. It should eliminate a city-induced spike and bring you closer to baseline.” She glanced at McKay and pointed at Rush with her pinky finger.

“All right.” McKay leaned back, crossed his legs, draped an arm over the bench behind Keller, and said, “Nick, free-associate about the intersection of causal set theory and loop quantum gravity,” with smug confidence.

This honestly seemed a bit much on an overbright day after a mostly sleepless night. Rush pressed two fingertips to the space between his eyebrows. “Rodney,” he sighed.

“It’s for your own good! Perry told me she made you a packet of math to calibrate you the first time.”

“Who’s Perry?” Rush rubbed his temples, avoiding the cortical suppressors.

“Ugh. That’s sad. C’mon. Get your hands off your head, propose spacetime is fundamentally discrete, and go from there.” McKay gestured at Vala, Young, and Keller. “You think these guys know de Sitter space from the FLRW metric? Think again. I designed this with zero humiliation for you. Zelenka’s not even here.”

Keller favored McKay with her disgruntled-cherub frown, then shifted her gaze to Rush. “It’ll help with the fine-tuning if you’re cognitively engaged,” she said apologetically.

“Fine.” Rush looked up the central tower, a pillar of shadow backlit by azure sky. He banished the world from his thoughts and began visualizing ordered networks. “Spacetime takes the form of a locally finite, partially ordered set, where the order relation is causal precedence.” His envisioned web of relation dulled as the pain of his headache sharpened. “Events are vertices.”

“Sure,” McKay said. “Keep going.”

“Edges connect causally related pairs. Antichains, or collections of unrelated vertices, constitute independent sets.” The pain in Rush’s head lost localization, turned diffuse. Part of his body. Part of the world.

“Look at this.” Keller showed McKay her screen. “When I try and smooth the association area spikes, I get activation in the cingulate cortex and insula. He doesn’t like it.”

“I don’t, actually,” Rush agreed.

McKay straightened out of his confident sprawl and looked over Keller’s shoulder. “Keep going.” He glanced up at Rush. “Nick, you were getting to Cauchy surfaces?”

“Space at an instant.” Even looking into shadow, the day was so bright. The city, like water, searched out the lowest places in the shifting energetics of his mind. “Hypersurface sigma.”

“Is this what I think it is?” McKay murmured to Keller. 

“Periaqueductal gray,” Keller confirmed, “probably counteracting an active stressor.”

“Yeah. See? Wrong direction. Damn it.” McKay’s brows drew together. “Look at that gain. Why is it so high? There are more variables in the mix than there should be.”

The bench dug into Rush’s thighs, he felt the sheath of his boots, the pressure of the reflected shine coming off ocean water. There was no glass for the city to tint here; they were outside. He squinted into the deepest shadows at the base of the tower and wondered why they weren’t helping him more.

Keller blew her bangs out of her face. “He told me yesterday it was the city.”

“Oh,” McKay said. “Great.”

“Hotshot, is this hurting you?” Young asked.

The whole world hurt. Which argued for no. “Antichains accrete,” Rush said, as a visualization he hadn’t been attending to ran to completion, “and are embeddable in both de Sitter space and the FLRW metric.”

“He seems off to me.” Young’s tone sharpened.

“Probably.” McKay’s gaze flicked between Young, Rush, and the screen. “Don’t overcorrect.”

“I’m not,” Keller insisted. “Look at the rest of the transform.”

The city reached in. Took hold.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. The devices at his temples flared blue, faded, flared again. The pressure was waveform, like the beat of the tide.

“Guys,” Young said sharply.

A bright veil lifted on a bright day and a woman hazed into existence at his side. The dark of her upswept hair was lost to the shine of the day. The white of her track jacket etched a clean line against shadowed leaves.

“Hello, little facet.” Morgan le Fay braced spectral hands against their shared bench. She turned to him, close and intimate, old and young, borne on Lantean waves of electromagnetism cresting and breaking through gaps in the field that Keller and McKay adjusted.

Rush saw his own bone structure in the sharp delicacy of Morgan’s features.

Morgan met his gaze, curious and bold. “Our devices and cities, our ships and infrastructure have their own agency.” She offered the words like an explanation as she wisped to mist and rue at her edges. “Wider latitude than ever we dreamed. You might call it a workaround.”

Rush tried to speak, found he couldn’t.

The cortical suppressors at his temples pulsed and burned.

“You and I in particular might make interesting uses of such a hole in the rules of the world. Shall we try something?” Morgan crossed bare feet at the ankles and let the warm sea wind blow through her.

“Uh oh,” McKay said, his eyes on Keller’s screen.

“Hotshot, say something,” Young demanded.

“Look at the shine of the sea,” Morgan said.

Rush, full of mistrust, kept his eyes on the shadows of her eyes, the idea of darkness in her mist-tipped hair. 

“You think I’ll lead you astray? Tempt you off a path? Steal your time?” She smiled, mischievous and delighted. “Medieval propaganda, but not wholly unfounded, I admit. We’re very similar, Nick. Look at the sea. I’ll show you how.”

Rush hesitated, but only for a pair of offended heartbeats. He needed information. In the mostly veiled environment he was operating in, any context was of immense value and therefore worth immense risk.

He turned his head and looked into the light-spangled sea.

“The common ground between us is vast.” Morgan’s breath cooled the shell of his ear. “I imprisoned my greatest rival. So did you.”

The shine drained from his sight, replaced with a vision of gray sky behind too-still pines. They sat on a cement porch, modest and cold. The world was cold, but the air was eerily still. No calls of birds, no gusts of wind. Meters away, Everett Young, dressed in faded black fatigues, lay in a hammock, his gaze fixed on a November-cold dock. Rush saw a version of himself standing at its end, staring into unnaturally still waters. He was dressed in black, but the cut of his jacket misted and shifted at its edges. He had wrapped his own arms around his chest as though giving himself a hug. The stance was strange. Unfamiliar. It made him look like someone else.

“This is a prison,” Morgan said softly, experimentally, as if worried she might be overheard. “Each page a universe-wide, bound and pressed into a great book of graves. This is where dangerous realities come to rest after they’re stripped of ordinal unfolding.”

Rush burned with the desire to speak. To ask her why she was showing him this. Distantly, buried beneath this silent world, he heard the chime of Lantean wind, the voices of his friends.

“Nick,” Young called from the tight-woven net of the hammock. “C’mere.”

“Great arrays of causality define space and history.” Morgan misted against the white paint of the small cabin, her eyes a washed-out approximation of darkness beneath a sky of pale, still clouds. “They’ve chosen you for an act that will ripple across all existence. I wonder why?”

As she spoke the question, the image dissolved back into the bright Lantean day.

He wanted to ask for more, but he couldn’t, words were inaccessible, half his cognition gone to a problem on loop quantum gravity. He felt the strength of the Lantean grip on his personal energetics, careful and powerful.

“You’ll see me again,” Morgan told him. “Take care, little facet,” she advised with faux kindness and real caution. “And take direction when it comes your way.”

“Got it!” Keller broke the city’s grip on his mind, and the image of Morgan shattered to the shadow of the central tower, the winding garden path, the scent of Athosian flowers.

Rush shook himself.

“That,” McKay said, “was electrophysiologically nuts.”

Rush felt hulled out by the strain of all that had just happened. He stared at the empty spot on the bench beside him, wondering if Morgan le Fay still sat there. If she’d ever sat there, what sitting on an individual brane could even mean for a superpositioned entity.

“I was…here the whole time?” Rush did his best to ask the question casually.

“Okay, as a question, I don’t love that,” McKay said. “But, yeah. You were.”

“What did you experience?” Keller asked.

“He does not look normal,” Young growled.

“Not sure,” Rush answered Keller.

Vala slid gracefully into the empty air Rush was staring at. She wrapped a hand around his elbow and leaned into him, her chin hooked over his shoulder. “The colonel and I don’t approve of this at all.”

“Sorry,” Rush breathed, collecting himself. 

“And it’s not that we don’t trust babyface MD—” Vala continued.

McKay snorted a laugh.

“Hey,” Keller grumbled.

“—but do say something mathematical to put our minds at ease, won’t you?” Vala finished.

“If causal set theory underpins quantum gravity,” Rush said, still shaken, “space emerges from the relational order of events.”

“Brat,” McKay muttered.

Vala planted a kiss on the skin beside his cortical suppressor. “Good. Now be witty.”

“No,” Rush said.

Leaning into his cane, Young limped to Rush’s side. “How’s the headache, hotshot?”

Rush studied the colonel, unsettled by the view he’d gotten of Young’s superpositioned aspect, tangled in a hammock, staring at Rush’s silhouette on a cold dock. Had he…done something to the man? Had Mozart?

“Hey.” Young swatted the edge of Rush’s boot with his cane.

Rush looked up at him.

“Focus up,” Young said. “How’s the headache?”

“It’s fine,” Rush replied. “Photosensitive only. I do feel—sharper.” And it was true. The city pressed at the base of his mind, but it was less heavy than it had been earlier in the day. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Keller said, “but I’m running the diff again.”

Young hooked two fingers beneath Rush’s chin and tipped it up, then looked into his eyes, like he could discern the quality of Rush’s thoughts from gaze alone.

Rush felt untethered, like the colonel’s eyes contained an otherworldly drop through a multiverse of living and dead branes. He felt dizzy. Unglued. Had he been looking at his own future on that cold, dead dock? Someone else’s? Was he suborned to his superpositioned aspect, a part of him, in some causal chain? His memory stripped, loaded with Ancient gifts and injuries that had been planted to detonate, generations back and/or branes away.

“Either way,” the colonel decided, “he’s had enough neuromodulation for today.”

That was probably true.

“Plus,” McKay added, “it’s almost time for dinner.”

“You have a one-track mind.” Keller locked the screen and slid it into the bag at her feet.

“Hey,” McKay said. “My mind has at least three tracks. At least.”

~~~

After the evening meal, Rush stood on the balcony outside the colonel’s opulent bedroom. The distant stars shone overhead. Wisps of cloud near the far horizon gleamed with the coming rise of the moon.

Young had spent twenty minutes detailing the security features associated with the windows, glass doors, and balcony. Rush made every effort to focus, especially given the colonel’s rather inspiring take on competency in the face of galactic-level threats, but it’d been a bit of a day.

Atlantis braced his fatigued and aching thoughts with structural sympathy.

The cool night breeze worked itself inside his half-zipped jacket.

The city slid the image of the active Lantean stargate beneath the barrier of his cortical suppressors, penetrating deep and painless. Vibrations that should have been music patterned the air and his thoughts with the quality of built span, of high arches designed to meet strong winds and the pressures of living atmosphere.

Sheppard was home. Boots to naquadah.

Rush’s cortical suppressors warmed his temples. Working hard, no doubt.

At his back, glass doors embossed with a nautiloid spiral cracked down their center and slid wide.

Young stepped into the night. “Shep’s back.” He pointed at his in-ear radio.

I know, Rush didn’t say.

Young crossed the balcony to join him at the rail. “I asked him to meet us here.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Young said, “he needs a talking-to.”

Rush smiled faintly. “His usual state, I expect.”

Young snorted, then swept his eyes over Rush. “You’re exhausted.”

Rush nodded. “I’m porous to this place.” With a dreamy remove, he felt himself trace the line of a cortical suppressor, work a thumbnail between it and his skin—

Young tangled his fingers with Rush’s, warm and immediate. The physical contact broke the compulsion and Rush shivered faintly.

Young gave Rush’s hand a small shove as he let go, as though purposefully returning it. “Seems like a problem.”

“Can’t say I disagree.” Rush thought of Morgan le Fay’s city-mediated appearance. “Though it comes with advantages as well as drawbacks.”

“Yeah? Name one.”

The night breeze fanned Rush’s hair. “You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“That’s a tough ask, hotshot.” Young looked over the sea as the first of the planet’s two moons slid above the horizon, gleaming behind gauzy clouds.

“Why?” Rush asked.

“Why?” The colonel gave him an amused once-over. “Because you’re a cute mathematician with alien amnesia. That’s why.”

“Hmm.” Rush smiled faintly and leaned into the silver balcony rail.

Young turned serious. “And you’ve got a pan of quantum multiverse bullshit on the back burner. I don’t like it.”

As Rush studied Young’s stubborn profile, he suspected the colonel had accumulated enough frustration that he was on the verge of a poorly considered choice. “Don’t wade into quantum fuckery before it’s time. And don’t corner Colonel Sheppard into whatever you’ve—”

“So he knows,” Young said, dangerous and quiet.

“He fuckin’ doesn’t,” Rush snapped.

“You’re a bad liar, hotshot,” Young growled.

Thrown, Rush paused.

Everything in him rebelled against the colonel’s statement. Instinctively, natively, came the conviction that he was an incredible liar. Skilled. Proficient. The treacherous hills-of-mist melody of Morgan le Fay, enchantress, deceiver, sang in his blood. He could almost hear it. At his temples, his cortical suppressors pressed into his skin like someone’s fingers.

What did that mean?

Young’s expression lost its bullish edge. “You okay?”

Rush took a breath, steadied himself. “Don’t press Colonel Sheppard for detail.”

“Shep doesn’t need you looking out for him,” Young said.

“Are you familiar with Bayesian priors?” Rush asked.

“Priors,” Young repeated, a grave note in the word.

“Yes. Priors reflect an assumed probability distribution before new information has been taken into account?”

“So—a math thing,” Young clarified.

Rush frowned. “Yes, a ‘math thing’. I suppose you’ve answered my question. You aren’t familiar?”

“With math priors? Uh, no.”

Behind them, the balcony door slid open.

They turned to see Sheppard, lit by the warm light of Young’s bedroom. His hair looked as though it’d been crushed beneath a helmet and only half-heartedly accepted whatever re-spiking he’d done. He had a streak of dirt over one cheekbone, and his fatigues were damp and powdered with dust.

“You summoned him,” Young said.

“Summoned?” Sheppard crossed the silver terrace to join them at the rail. He came to stand at Rush’s elbow. The faint scent of sweat and petrichor came and went as the wind shifted.

“With math,” Young clarified.

“What kinda math?” Sheppard drawled.

“Bayesian priors,” Rush sighed.

“Best kind of priors, I hear,” Sheppard said.

“Are there other priors?” Rush asked.

“Yeah. Religious ones,” Sheppard said. “Alien religious ones. They’re an Ori thing. Bad News. Never met one.” He looked to Young. “You?”

“Not in person,” Young said. “I don’t hear good things.”

“Bayesian priors though.” Sheppard leaned into the rail like they’d lined themselves up at a bar. “Those I have met.” He gave the pair of them a suggestive look.

Rush and Young stared at him.

Sheppard cleared his throat and, awkwardly, straightened.

“Were you flirting?” Rush inquired, deliberately torquing the conversation away from whatever Colonel Young had planned.

“What!? No.”

Young looked away with a crushing mix of amusement and sympathy.

“It’s difficult to charm multiple parties simultaneously,” Rush pointed out.

Sheppard stared mutely at him.

Young couldn’t wholly throttle his laughter, though he made a heroic attempt. “You got some kind of internalized flirting dictionary we should be aware of, hotshot?”

“Actually, I think I may,” Rush admitted. “The depth and organization of my thoughts on the subject suggest dedicated study.”

“Explains a lot,” Young said.

“Flirting, as a communicative medium, is underrated and needlessly tethered to sexuality,” Rush informed them.

“I don’t know about ‘needlessly’,” Sheppard muttered.

“Certainly it can be employed in that direction,” Rush allowed, “but it’s an all-purpose interpersonal tool to deepen connection. Look at Vala’s application of it; it’s impossible to say no to the woman.”

“Seems like a talent you kept a pretty tight wrap on, before your memory got wiped,” Young offered.

“Yes well.” Rush hesitated, torn between the advantages of diving into a new conversational track and defending Sheppard with a step-function argument built on a foundation of Bayesian priors. “Charm without heart,” he said, “is nothing but paper-thin manipulation.”

Under the light of the rising moon, he invited his own instincts home.

There was a paradox behind and beneath the mnemonic veil that separated him from his life. For all the agreeable facility he displayed toward these Air Force personnel he didn’t truly know—still, Vala had called him sad. Seen an unhealed thing within. Coral McClure had worried for him constantly. For all Eli’s posturing, the child had turned fiercely loyal. Unnaturally loyal?

It occurred to Rush, suddenly, how willing he’d been to go with Dale Volker. How gently the man had turned him down.

McKay. McKay could see something in Rush. Something upsetting.

And Young had called him a bad liar. Moments back. Under these very stars.

The Greeting, Dale Volker had named it.

At the base of his mind, Atlantis coiled around stemlines of structure the way an animal might seek warmth or light.

Sheppard watched him. Silently. Urgently. Eloquently. As though the man felt the interaction between the city and Rush’s mind and worried Rush would speak of it aloud.

Young’s gaze flicked between them, then settled on Rush.

“It is mine,” Rush said, his focus still internal. “It must be.”

“What?” Young prompted.

“The flirting. The charm. I’ve a mix of posh and working-class vocal tics and a strong RP gloss on a Scots accent that foregrounds in academic settings. There must’ve been a time I worked for those things. The flirting must be the same. I don’t see how something like that gets conferred by a pharmacologic agent.”

“Conferred.” Sheppard stood like an offering to the Gods of Neutrality.

“It’s definitely yours,” Young said, slow, confused, whatever plans he’d had for this conversation shredding beneath Rush’s compelling redirection. “It has to be yours.”

“Yes,” Rush agreed. “But the foregrounding, the relative strength of charm as set against my likely historical baseline—”

“No,” Sheppard said, too quickly.

“You understand what he’s talking about?” Young demanded.

“No,” Sheppard said again.

“I’m speaking about what a Lucian Alliance drug called ‘The Greeting’ might do to the minds it’s used on,” Rush said.

“You think it made you charming?” Young asked. “Try again. You were always charming.”

“This charming?” Rush pressed.

Young dropped his eyes.

“Yes,” Sheppard answered instead. The moon rose above the thin shred of cloud at the horizon, illuminating the planes of his face. “This charming. I object to your framing.”

Rush waited.

“Your hypothesis is that the LA drug foregrounds prosocial neural pathways. Whether that’s a downstream consequence of the mnemonic block or a second, engineered feature—either way, to falsify your claim we’d need to solve the hard problem of consciousness.” Sheppard faced him down, breathless and more than a bit appealing with alien dirt streaked over his cheekbone.

“You seem to’ve thought about this with enough depth to imply you consider it a real possibility,” Rush said.

“I argued about it with McKay,” Sheppard replied. “The whole thing can be explained by the lack of personal memories, leading to a deintensification of grief which results in more available charm. It’s the most parsimonious explanation and should be afforded a higher Bayesian prior than any other option.”

“Now that,” Rush said, turning to Sheppard and leaning into the rail with a small smile, “is flirting.”

“Shep,” Young growled at Rush’s back, “he’s tryin’ to throw you. Don’t let it happen.”

Sheppard steeled himself and squared off with Rush. “This is a costly hypothesis to chase down,” he said. “It’s gonna upset everyone and it doesn’t have a solution we can lock onto. Don’t—”

“I think it’s true,” Rush cut in, smooth and even. “All your objections hold within a specific context window. And I think you’re aware of that.”

“This,” Sheppard whispered, all broken edges and night wind, “isn’t charming.”

“Anyone wanna translate into English?” Young prompted.

Rush flicked his gaze to Young. “The ‘context window’ is the one in which my memories are missing forever. If I get them back, new data will be introduced and conclusions will be easier to come by.”

“Was I supposed to understand that?” Young cut an increasingly statue-like silhouette against the sky.

Sheppard sighed. “He thinks the LA drug is making him likable. And he’s accusing me of being disingenuous about the way I’m framing my arguments against the idea.”

Young leaned into his cane and scowled at Rush with meta-irritation, as though he knew Rush had dragged them into an existential swamp of his own choosing with the express purpose of ducking a confrontation about quantum mechanics.

Deal with it, Rush suggested with the lift of an eloquent eyebrow.

“I object to the whole premise.” Moonlight washed color from Sheppard’s face and deepened the black of his hair and his Lantean fatigues. “The self isn’t a fixed entity. You lock into the idea that the LA drug did some indefinable thing to you—some thing you can’t measure or quantify or verify? It’s a dead end and a great way to make yourself miserable. It’s also a way of attacking the foundations of your own mind, something I’m sure you did before that drug got dropped on you. You’re likable. How do I know? I liked you. That’s how. You don’t need to come up with a magical pharmacologic agent to explain a thing that doesn’t need explaining.”

“If I’m so natively likable,” Rush said, twisting the knife of his argument with delicacy, sympathy even, “where’s my family in all of this? A friend that predates my involvement with the Air Force? Anyone at all from the whole of my life?”

“Intergalactic travel makes it hard.” Sheppard didn’t look at him.

“Ugh this is the most ‘you guys’ thing I’ve ever seen,” Young growled. “Knock it off.” He eyed Rush. “Stop hunting your own personality for sport.”

“I can see how such an approach might lead to recursive instability,” Rush admitted.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Sheppard’s eyes caught the starlight. “I’m also taking the metaphysical position that the self is a function that evolves over time and is, by its nature, never stable.”

Rush hesitated.

There was a deep inconsistency in Sheppard’s position. Or, at a minimum, a well-concealed hedge. Because if the man really believed what he was saying, he wouldn’t have placed a moratorium on exploring a romantic relationship. But he had. From the beginning. Rush was tempted to call him on it.

But the moment opened, faded, passed.

And Rush let it go.

“McKay thinks you’re too nice,” Sheppard whispered.

Young jumped in before Rush could speak. “Yeah, and Jackson thinks you’re evolving away from trauma triggers that aren’t accessible and Vala thinks you’re her platonic soulmate regardless of the state of your brain while Eli thinks you hung the moon. Keller’ll have her opinion. But that’s all any of this is ever gonna be. Opinion.”

“Mind sharing yours?” Rush asked.

Young looked out to sea. “I’ve been on the receiving end of an LA drug. Not the one you got. A different one. Also a memory stripper. Also, maybe, meant to engineer some goodwill toward a particular individual.”

Sheppard looked up. The rising moonlight gleamed in his hair.

“It held hard,” Young continued, “for a good long while. But, eventually, it started to come loose. Like my own brain was looking for a truth it could sense. Jackson had to—Jackson was the one who ripped the veil away. Even now—” Young shook his head. “I don’t know the correct position to take on Telford. What he did. Even Jackson.” Young stopped, then restarted. “Even Jackson, just last night, talked about David like he—” Young broke off.

“Everett,” Sheppard said.

Young shook his head. Gathered himself. “For whatever reason, hotshot, you do present a little differently, carry yourself a little differently. I’m not gonna dismiss the possibility that the LA drug has something to do with your charm-forward personal style. That being said, when it hits, it’s pretty on brand. Like everything else, we’ll keep an eye on it.”

Rush motioned back and forth between himself and Sheppard. “We’ve already decided you’re the reasonable one,” he said, as cool as the falling starlight. “There’s no need t’continually reapply for the position with such bloody-minded tenacity.”

Sheppard snorted.

“My opinion,” Young said softly, “is that a real attempt should be made to get your memories back. We shouldn’t let it slide. If your charm pathways got a boost? For my money, the purpose of that boost is to convince you and everyone around you that it’s better to leave you as you are.”

No one spoke.

The sea breeze sang around the edges of the balcony.

“I should go.” Sheppard turned his face into the wind. “Get cleaned up.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Young said.

Rush watched them go, worried Young would be raking Sheppard over quantum coals, but certain that if he tagged along to run interference, he’d only intensify the impulse.

The moon gleamed off the peaks of wavelets on the dark pane of the sea.

His mind ached with an injury he couldn’t sense. He wanted to pour himself into a piano until he disappeared. He wanted Sheppard to weaponize his rationalism and deconstruct him into nothing. He wanted to provoke the commander of SG-68 into some loss of control, any loss of it; he wanted to unlock something, he wanted to understand why he’d wept when the superpositioned aspect of Everett Young had appeared on that rooftop. He wanted to look at his mind and life from a vantage point of quantum privilege and if destruction was the price, he’d pay it.

He wanted, more than anything, to speak with that alternate version of Young again. What had Morgan meant to imply with that vision of a cold dock, a hammock like a net? Young’s face had been worried. Lined with grief. So had his own. What did it mean?

Atlantis curled itself against his mind, soothing, content, dense with presence, showing him no edges.

He pressed his hip into the narrow rail of the balcony overlooking the sea.

“I could use some perspective,” he whispered, half invitation, half invocation.

Rush lingered on Young’s balcony, hoping for a response.

But the world offered nothing but sea and sky and waves to the line of the horizon under the low, full moon.