In a Clean White Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P=NP. Prove.

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

He woke alone, beside a river.

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

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

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

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

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

To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.

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

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

Nicholas Rush was wired for D minor.

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

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

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

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

Jackson sat on a woven blanket, in the midst of a sea of tiny flames. He looked up at Rush and his eyes were the blue of desert sky arced over picked-clean bones.

The Dodge Charger was a man’s car.

“Are you going to look at that?” Vala glanced at the legal-pad filled with math. “Or just stand in your doorway like an artistically disheveled Ambassador of Men’s Dress Shirts?”

Dr. Levant looks at Colonel Danning, his whole mind burning behind his eyes. “You don’t understand,” he says softly.

“Did y’just call me ‘gate bait’?” Rush asked.

Rush hated photons. They were the cheap grief of the cosmos.

There was no escaping the fact Young’s bones were bolted together.

“Hey,” Sheppard says, warm and slow, like death isn’t seconds away. “Close your eyes, touch the floor, and ask the fields to stop, maybe.” He gives Rush the smile that’ll never come when he poses for pictures.

“You think this adorably-cut jacket is regulation?” Vala hopped from the desk and twirled. “Think again.”

“Local Math Professor Who’s Never Seen a DHD Thinks It Looks ‘Wrong’,” McKay said, like he was workshopping headlines for a satirical newspaper.

“The whole world owes me coffee,” Jackson said, and while his delivery was light, those blue-fire eyes were anything but.

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

Carolyn Lam changes her direction, spinning on the axis of the naquadah in her pocket.

“ But I’m not dressed for a car-jacking, handsome,” Vala said, faux seduction dripping from her words. “I could use a new shirt.”

“You ever driven a real car, hotshot? Something with more than two ponies worth of horsepower?”

Sam Carter is alone.

“I’m going to make my continued involvement with the stargate program contingent upon you taking a computer literacy class,” Rush snarled.

“Believe it or not,” Vala said, “we’re here to rescue you.”

“Less talking,” Young said grimly, as the sound of gunfire approached their position, “more climbing.”

Quantity. Structure. Space. Change.

“This phone has seen some times. It knows the world now.”