“Well,” Daniel said after a long moment. He craned his neck to look upwards, brushing his hair away from his face as he tracked a flurry of birds spiraling into the air. “This is… unexpected.”
The center of the building’s winding corridors – “The center of the maze,” Daniel had quipped when they’d started navigating the building early that morning; “Watch out for the Minotaur!” – was actually an open-air arena, the ground covered with yellowing grass and pale blue wildflowers. About eighty feet in diameter, his mind supplied automatically. Make that eighty-one feet and four inches. It was empty and quiet, with nothing to indicate its purpose.
“Explains why the building was so big, though,” Sam said absently, also tilting her head to glance up at the cloudless sky above. “So what do you think?”
Daniel pursed his lips. “Jack would have suggested hockey. In the winter, anyway.”
“He would,” Sam agreed. “The local equivalent of soccer, maybe?”
“How about Quidditch?”
Sam rolled her eyes at him. “I told you I never read that book.” She took several steps forward. Dew left her shoes slightly wet as she scuffed her way through the tall grass. “I’m not so sure this place was for entertainment, actually. No seats, no stage.”
“There is that, though,” Daniel pointed out, waving at the wall to their right.
He watched as Sam turned to look at what had caught his interest. Mounted on the wall near the doorway was a huge black display panel, some twelve feet wide and eight feet high. Eleven feet, seven and a half inches wide. Eight feet high exactly, the annoying part of his brain clarified.
“We could take in some movies,” Sam murmured, her eyes bright with interest.
“Oh, yeah, like I’m going to listen to you complain about Men in Black again.”
She stuck out her tongue at him. “You liked Star Wars: Special Edition!”
“Greedo shot first,” Daniel said, a little sullenly. He ignored the all-too-common spike of wistfulness as he approached the black panel and ran a tentative finger down its surface. Smooth. Cool to the touch. Its blackness seemed almost tangible, swallowing up all light.
“It’s a blackboard,” he decided. He waved an arm expansively, gesturing at the open space around them. “They must have had classes in here.”
“Oh, yes?” Sam looked amused. “Was this the local university?”
He eyed the panel speculatively. “How long do you think it would take you to fill this with equations? Five minutes? Three?” He patted the black surface. “Go on, Sam. Calculate the speed of dark for me.”
“Oh, I would,” she said sweetly, “but since all you do all day is play in the dirt, I don’t think you’d understand it.”
“Ah, come on. Archeology rocks.”
“Of course it does,” Sam nodded, straight-faced. “You went to college to learn how to dig ditches.”
“I’ve seen your lab. You’re out to prove the second law of thermodynamics, aren’t you?”
“Archeologists do it in the dirt.” Sam dug the toe of her shoe into the ground for emphasis.
“What happens in the field stays in the field,” Daniel agreed solemnly. “Astrophysicists, on the other hand, do it periodically.”
“Don’t mess with the astrophysicist, Daniel,” Sam warned, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I know what the M stands for.”
Daniel snickered and held up his hands in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’ll surrender.”
Sam gave him a friendly poke, then stepped closer to the black panel. “It does look a bit like a high-tech blackboard, doesn’t it?” she mused. “I’m not getting any energy readings, though. How would it be powered?”
Daniel moved to the utilitarian frame and tried to pry a finger underneath. “It’s fastened to the wall pretty tightly,” he said. “Bolted in, or the local equivalent, maybe.”
“I’m going to go back to the outside hall and see if I can find anything in the wall,” Sam decided. “How about you?”
“I think I’ll leave our futuristic blackboard to you, so – Oh. Maybe I won’t.” He had just spotted the neat glyphs engraved into the wall below the mirror’s frame. “Interesting. Take a look, Sam.”
She squatted next to him, peering closely. “That’s – that’s the same writing you found on Argos, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Linear A.” He sat back on his heels and frowned.
“Can you figure it out?”
Daniel quirked a smile at her. “I can try. Or pretend, even.” He huffed a half-laugh. “I’ve got a lot more experience than anyone else on Earth, anyway. Teal’c and I worked on that tablet of Pelops’ together.” No matter how quickly he could translate these days, he still needed points of data. A single tablet, even one with multiple screens, just wasn’t enough. If only there had been time to learn more…
She squeezed his shoulder, then stood up. “Okay. You work on the writing; I’ll try to dig up some wiring. An hour?”
“Enough for a start,” Daniel said absently, already absorbed. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Right.” Sam disappeared through the doorway, leaving Daniel alone with only the faint sounds of birdsong to keep him company.
“Let’s see, now… Lessons,” he murmured. “Lessons of what? This is time, or possibly frame of time. Timeframe. Hours? Days? Years? Hm.”
He worked in silence for a while, then stood up, stretching more out of habit than necessity as he considered his progress. All jokes aside, his translations did suggest that the black panel was actually some kind of learning tool. Whether it was some kind of high-tech blackboard was another question entirely.
He traced an aimless pattern on the black surface, then jerked his hand back when he realized he’d been drawing Earth’s point of origin. He winced. It had been a long time since he’d done that; he was glad Sam wasn’t there to see.
Then he wished Sam was there, because something was happening.
It seemed instantaneous. One moment, the panel was as black and flat as ever; the next, it suddenly had light and depth, as if a dark curtain had suddenly been flung open to reveal what lay behind.
It was a view screen, he decided as he consciously closed his mouth. Or… a window?
A window to where? Not to the other side of the wall, where he and Sam had both walked. He darted sideways to the door, and leaned into the silent hallway beyond. Sam had moved elsewhere; there was nothing there but dimly-lit walls of reddish stone.
He went back to – the window, he decided. A window to Somewhere Else. It showed walls of dark stone and tumbled rubble – and, oddly enough, water. It seemed to spatter directly onto the window, driven horizontal by some intense force.
But it wasn’t coming through.
Nothing was coming through, except the picture, Daniel realized after another moment. Neither sound, nor wind, nor the water and rubble piling up on the other side.
Daniel moved a little closer, peering through the window that slashed a gaping hole to Somewhere Else. He fought the temptation to reach out with a curious finger and poke at the puddle of water slowly forming at the right-hand edge. Gravity seemed to be twisted on its axis.
“Sam,” he radioed. “Can you get back here quick?”
Sam’s reply was cheerful. “Quick, or ‘quick-er’?”
Daniel leapt back as something dark thumped soundlessly onto the windowpane. It slid sideways, much as the water did, coming to a stop in long loops and coils.
He gulped a little. “Let’s make that quicker. It’s gone from interesting to weird.”
“Is that an archeological term you haven’t told me about yet, or –”
“I mean it, Sam,” he interrupted. “I don’t like this.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “I’m on my way. Don’t touch anything until I get there.”
“Spoilsport,” he muttered, but his heart wasn’t it. This was edging past weird into creepy.
Sam arrived in less than a minute, her eyes widening at the sight of the window to Somewhere Else. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him sideways, so they were angled to the window instead of directly in front of it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Standard military procedure, Daniel,” she said kindly. “Don’t stand where you might be a target.”
“Oh. Right.” Daniel frowned a little. “Except nothing seems to come through. I watched that – ” He pointed at the loops of something that looked oddly like a regular metal cable. “– land on the surface of the window. It didn’t come through. Neither does the water, though I’ve been watching it hit the other side and–”
“Why are you calling it a ‘window’?” Sam interrupted.
“What else are you going to call it?”
“That’s a good – Daniel, look out!”
Sam’s fist wrenched at the collar of his thin shirt and yanked him down hard. Daniel, too surprised to brace himself, found himself sprawled on the ground, watching as something rushed towards the surface of the window.
It won’t go through, he assured himself. Just like everything else on that side, it won’t come through.
“It” was a dark mass, growing larger as it neared the window. Daniel winced in anticipation of the silent smash against the panel –
And there was a soundless sizzle of energy, and a flash –
And the object came sailing though the window as if it there was no barrier there at all.
Daniel whipped around to trace the trajectory of the… people, his brain finally registered. Two people, holding each other tightly. Or possibly tied to each other. He couldn’t quite tell.
The speed of their entry caused them to fly nearly halfway across the arena before they finally crashed to the ground in a mass of flailing limbs. They rolled over once, twice, and finally came to an ungainly halt.
For half a dozen heartbeats, there was only silence. Then Daniel heard a muffled, “Ow.”
Well. They were alive, at least. Daniel rose smoothly to his feet, making sure he stayed out of the line of any other possible visitors from Somewhere Else. He started forward, ready to offer his assistance.
Then he heard a second voice.
“That’s it? ‘Ow?’”
Three words. But he knew that voice, recognized the lilt in the words, and it was all too easy for him to identify it as affectionate exasperation because he knew that person.
He swiveled to stare at Sam, who looked equally as shocked. Their gazes locked as silent communication passed rapidly between them.
“That – that was my voice, Daniel.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I thought so, too.”
“How can this be possible?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ouch, then? I’m going to have bruises on my bruises, and so will you.” There was a grunt, and a sudden flurry of limbs. “You do realize we’re still fastened together, right?”
Daniel swallowed, hard. “Sam, that’s my voice. Those two people must be us. Somehow.”
“That window. It has to lead to something.”
“Or somewhere. Maybe they’ll know?”
“Can you unfasten the clips? Either side would do.”
“I’m not even sure which hand is mine at the moment, Sam.”
“They don’t just sound like us, Sam. They sound like us.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
The two people in the grass rolled first in one direction, then the other. “Ow! Sam…”
“Daniel, that is your hand, and it is not in the right place at the moment!”
“Sorry.”
The tangled pair on the ground stopped moving.
“So, we’re just going to lie here for the time being?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“There might be people around,” said the man with Daniel’s voice, sounding hopeful. “Maybe they can help us.”
There was a sudden flailing of arms and legs again. “Or there might be enemies around here – what were you going to say? ‘Hello, we’re peaceful explorers from another dimension’?”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
Despite the bizarre reference to “another dimension,” Daniel and Sam exchanged bemused glances and silent nods, and started towards the squirming bodies.
“Daniel, hold still! Just don’t move, okay? I’ll figure out how to do this –”
“Excuse me,” Daniel called, coming to a halt about ten feet away. Nine feet, eleven inches. Shut up, brain. He held his hands up, displaying open palms. “Maybe I can help?”
The two people on the ground went still.
“Ah, hello?” It was the man who sounded like Daniel. And now, from closer up, Daniel realized that he looked a lot like him, too. His soaked hair was shorter than Daniel’s own, which was decidedly odd; he hadn’t worn his hair that short since his early teens. And the man had glasses, Daniel noted with a sudden pang of nostalgia. And –
Daniel took three long strides forward, and stared.
The two people lying on the ground, trussed together, were wearing BDUs. The clothing was dripping wet, and he could see silver puddles forming in the grass, but they were unquestionably the same kind of BDUs that he and Sam had worn for nearly a year. And now he could see the shoulder patches: SG-1.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, gaping. He sensed Sam coming up alongside him, and knew that she’d seen the BDUs as well. A sudden wave of homesickness swept through him at the sight.
And wasn’t that just ridiculous?
“Hello?” the Daniel lying on the ground tried again. “I’m – I’m Daniel Jackson, and this is Major Carter. We could use a little help, if you…” His voice trailed off, and Daniel knew that he had properly focused on their faces for the first time.
“Major Carter?” Sam repeated blankly.
“Oh, here we go,” said the Sam lying on the ground, her voice equally flat. “Not again. Daniel, they’re –”
“You’re us,” Daniel told them, his voice absurdly calm. “At least, you seem to be.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve had any experience with the quantum mirror before?” his doppelganger said. “It would be really helpful if you had.”
“Quantum mirror?” Daniel turned and stared at the window, still shimmering. He noticed, with some alarm, that something else had hit the other side of the mirror. Fortunately, it hadn’t come through; it looked like a kind of motor, or perhaps some other piece of heavy machinery.
“Quantum mirror?” Sam repeated, and Daniel could tell, from the change in her voice and the shift of her posture, that she was intrigued. “How does that work, exactly?”
“It’s not my field of expertise, of course, but –”
“Daniel,” interrupted the Sam – the major? – lying on the floor. “Maybe I can explain it to… Sam. After we get this harness off, okay?”
“Oh! Oh, right, of course.” The short-haired Daniel on the ground twisted his neck to look at them hopefully. “Could you help us unfasten this harness, please? It’s a little awkward to do ourselves.”
Daniel started, then stepped forward. “Yes, of course. Let me see.” He knelt in the grass and focused on the harnesses. They’d been clipped together on both sides, and he could see why it was awkward for two people lying down to unfasten them. He reached out and fiddled with the metal clip closest to him, unfastening it easily. He reached across the tangled bodies to get the other one…
And then stopped, frozen. Staring.
The Daniel on the ground – SG-1 Daniel? – was trying to be helpful by twisting out of his way. Daniel could see that the man had badly scraped the knuckles of both hands during the awkward landing. Both hands, and a small scrape on his left cheek, were… bleeding.
Bleeding.
“Sam,” he whispered, too shocked to remember to communicate via their inner radios. “Sam. They’re human.”
“They’re what?”
“Look.” Daniel, moving carefully and precisely, unbuckled the second clip and helped… himself to his feet. Sam did the same for… herself.
“Thank you,” said SG-1 Daniel, a little breathlessly. He unbuckled the soaked, heavy leather straps and tugged the harness over his head, throwing it to the ground with an expression of relief. The other Sam did the same.
Daniel watched, bemused, as SG-1 Daniel squinted at him through the blurred, wet lenses of his glasses. The man swiped his hands futilely against the dripping fabric of his trouser legs, then winced, looking down at the scraped and bleeding knuckles. “Ow. Sam, have you got any antiseptic wipes? Never mind; I should have some in my vest.” He started fumbling through his vest pockets.
The other Sam, meanwhile, was smiling tentatively at his own Sam. “Major Sam Carter,” she introduced herself again. “You’re, uh, Doctor Carter? Your hair doesn’t look long enough for –” She cut herself off, her expression a little chagrined, and tried again. “Sorry. Doctor Carter?”
“Um. Technically, yes. I usually go by Captain Carter, though,” Sam answered, looking as dazed as Daniel felt at the sight of the blood oozing sluggishly from those scraped knuckles. “Uh, what was that you were saying about a quantum mirror?”
“Oh. Well, come over here, and I’ll explain. I don’t suppose you’ve found a colorful remote-control device, have you…?”
Daniel watched Major Sam lead his Sam back to the window – the quantum mirror? – talking rapidly as they went.
“I’ll explain later, Daniel,” he heard Sam reassure him. “Talk to the other… you and see if you can find out what’s going on.”
Daniel sent back a quick acknowledgement and turned to his – human – double. SG-1 Daniel had managed to wipe his glasses dry on something before locating his antiseptic wipes, and he was now absently dabbing at his hands while he looked around the arena with interest.
“Is this a temporal thing, then?” SG-1 Daniel asked. “Because I haven’t worn my hair like that in two years. Of course, it wasn’t my idea to get it cut, so maybe that just didn’t happen to you.”
“Temporal?” Daniel’s brows rose. “As far as I know, you and, ah, Major Sam just fell through a window from Somewhere Else. You haven’t exactly explained where that somewhere is. Are you saying you’ve traveled from my future to get here? Because I don’t see how that’s possible.” Because you’re human, and you’re bleeding. You can’t be a future me.
SG-1 Daniel’s brows rose too, in a kind of unconscious mimicry. “Huh. Four years on SG-1, and you still think there’s such a thing as impossible?”
A very real pain shot through Daniel at the apparently innocent question. “I haven’t been part of SG-1 for three years, now,” he said quietly.
SG-1 Daniel stopped dabbing at his hands and stared at him. “But you’re here. Off-world.”
“Yes.”
Daniel watched the man’s gaze dart to his non-descript clothing – the thin, light shirt and dark trousers, the simple shoes in place of sturdy boots, the absence of any supplies or weapons – then back to his face. “And you’re no longer part of SG-1.”
“No.”
Daniel saw a kind of wild hope rise in SG-1 Daniel’s face. He took a second to wonder, a little insanely, if his own emotions and reactions were just as transparent, or if it was only because this human Daniel was himself that he was able to read him so easily.
“Have you – did you get your Sha’re back?”
Daniel closed his eyes. Slowly.
“No,” he whispered. “But I hope someone else helped her when I couldn’t.”
He opened his eyes and stared at SG-1 Daniel, whose own expression mirrored his anguish and regret. The silence was broken only by the murmur of voices behind them, as the two Sams settled earnestly into their discussion.
“Let’s start again,” SG-1 Daniel said finally.
***
Ten minutes later, all four of them sat together on the grass in front of the window to Somewhere Else – no, the quantum mirror. It was still working, although more rubble had piled onto the other side and the rain, as far as they could tell, showed no sign of slacking.
Daniel observed that while he and Sam sat side-by-side, and SG-1 Daniel sprawled comfortably across from them, Major Sam was sitting just behind her Daniel, her posture erect and her body language wary. Watching his six.
“So, there are an infinite number of universes out there,” Daniel summed up, “and there’s something called a quantum mirror that allows movement between the universes. And you and you,” he nodded first at Major Sam and then at her Daniel, “were on a mission with SG-1,” it can’t be, it’s not fair, SG-1, Jack and Teal’c! “And you found one of these mirrors, which activated itself. And several crises happened all at once, and you came through the mirror to our side until it’s safe to go back.”
“Right,” the human versions of themselves said simultaneously. Then Major Sam added thoughtfully, “Daniel translated a marker left by Atropus that referred to ‘seeking wisdom at her gateway.’ Since we were trying to find a way into the lab, we all just assumed that ‘gateway’ referred to the locked door.”
“Only it meant the mirror,” SG-1 Daniel finished, his expression rueful. He pulled up a flower by its roots, sniffed it, and tossed it aside. No sign of allergies, Daniel noted. Either this Daniel had never suffered from them, or his Janet Fraiser had put him on a proper regimen of antihistamines.
He wanted to whap himself over the head for the sudden, ridiculous pang of loss that shot through him at that thought. He couldn’t possibly miss sneezing, could he?
“Do you think the activation of the mirror was the booby-trap?” he asked, consciously forcing his mind back to the subject at hand.
“It would be a pretty quick way of getting rid of any trespassers,” Sam suggested, but Major Sam shook her head.
“I think something went wrong. The shaft actually collapsed, and it seemed entirely accidental that the mirror activated. If that was the real booby-trap, Atropus would have needed to go to an awful lot of trouble to reset things for the next person who tried to break into the lab.”
“Your files suggested it was thousands of years since Cronus overthrew Atropus, right?” Daniel asked. “And you said that the shaft itself was in bad shape?”
“Rungs and platforms crumbling away,” SG-1 Daniel nodded. He was plucking at the grass now. “You’re probably right. Whatever trap was there was in bad shape, and it backfired on us.”
“Huh,” Major Sam said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Ten equals eight.”
“What?” SG-1 Daniel squinted at her.
“Ten equals eight,” she repeated. “Remember the colonel and the Ancient’s repository? How he wrote out that formula for calculating stellar drift on the blackboard? I couldn’t understand any of it until he added a note: ten equals eight. The Ancients used a numerical system of base eight, not base ten.”
“And Atropus was basing her formulae on Ancient mathematics?” SG-1 Daniel sat up a little straighter, abandoning the current mangled patch of grass. “Because of the mirror? I thought we’d never determined that the quantum mirrors were built by the Ancients.”
“Maybe Atropus did know,” Major Sam said, shrugging. “Or it was a guess. Maybe the mirrors were made by the Ancients. Maybe it was the Nox…”
“Or the Furlings?”
Major Sam chuckled. “Who knows? Don’t ask me how Atropus even knew about the Ancients and base eight.”
“So that’s why it jumped from seven to ten.”
“Exactly! It was eight, but I read it as ten, so –”
“Excuse me,” Daniel finally interrupted.
The two humans stopped their incomprehensible back-and-forth chatter and focused on him. “Yes?” SG-1 Daniel asked politely.
“What are you talking about? About the only thing I understood in there was the Nox.”
Major Sam and SG-1 Daniel glanced at each other, then at Daniel and Sam.
“You know,” Major Sam said carefully, “there’s obviously a difference in our timeline and yours. Maybe we should try to narrow it down.”
“He married Sha’re,” SG-1 Daniel mentioned, staring down at his own hands. He started stabbing aimlessly at the grass again.
Daniel swallowed. “You – you asked me before if I’d saved her…?”
SG-1 Daniel looked up. “My Sha’re… died,” he said simply. “About eighteen months ago.” He gave a weak chuckle. “Well. Eighteen months, one week, four days. She’s free, now. At peace.”
Major Sam reached out and squeezed his arm.
“I don’t know what happened to my Sha’re,” Daniel said, trying to keep his voice steady. “As far as I know, she’s still Amaunet’s host.” And now there’s no one to search for her and get her back.
“Maybe we should try Abydos again,” Sam quietly suggested via their internal radio. “Maybe Hammond found some way to save her before it all went down.”
Daniel nodded mutely, and Sam, bless her, briskly changed the subject. “Okay, look,” she said. “Let’s go through events, all right?” She reached out and touched SG-1 Daniel’s hand, tracing the scraped knuckles with a gentle fingertip. “I take it you didn’t go to P3X-989.”
The human versions of them suddenly stilled.
“P3X-989,” Major Sam repeated slowly. It was easy to see that she was stalling for time.
“Comtraya?” Daniel prompted, watching her carefully.
“Comtraya,” SG-1 Daniel repeated. “Oh. Harlan. You’re…”
“Not human?” Sam suggested, her eyes a little sad.
“Don’t say that,” SG-1 Daniel snapped. “Don’t ever say that!”
Sam sat back, blinking. She was clearly as startled as Daniel at the vehement reaction.
Major Sam made calming motions with her hands. “Okay, hold on a second. You went through to P3X-989 and met Harlan…?”
“Yes. Harlan thought he was doing us a favor and made us ‘bet-ter.’” Sam was matching her counterpart’s matter-of-fact tone, and Daniel could tell that she was using it as a defense against their own intense pain over the subject. “He transferred our consciousnesses into android bodies and – and destroyed the originals.” She scrutinized the two guests. “I’m assuming that while you met Harlan, that didn’t actually happen to you, since you’re – well, flesh and blood.”
SG-1 Daniel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“We went back to Earth before we realized what had happened,” Sam continued. “Janet Frasier discovered the change, and General Hammond had us confined to base.”
“But we couldn’t survive away from P3X-989,” Daniel said, picking up the thread of the story. “At least, not then. We nearly ran out of – battery power, I guess you might say. Hammond sent us back to the planet alone, just in time to save us from shutting down entirely.”
“That’s when we found out that we couldn’t leave. And there was an… accident.” Sam blinked hard, and Daniel knew she was trying to hold back tears. It still hit him hard sometimes, too. “Harlan hadn’t realized that Teal’c’s symbiote was a separate consciousness, and he merged their minds together. Teal’c went – he went crazy. Harlan had to destroy him after he k-killed the colonel. Harlan tried to fix the colonel afterwards, but there was nothing he could do.”
She rose to her feet then, turning away from the others and taking several compulsive steps toward the doorway. Daniel could read grief in the slump of her shoulders, and he wanted to go after her – not just talk via internal radio, but offer physical comfort. But Major Sam squeezed SG-1 Daniel’s arm again – not in reassurance this time, but as a warning. The human Daniel’s mouth, once again open to speak, closed without saying a word.
“Listen, you don’t have to talk about this,” Major Sam said, her voice a little too loud. “I can see it’s uncomfortable. Maybe Daniel and I can search through the building and see if we can find the mirror’s controller…”
“We would probably recognize it more easily than you,” SG-1 Daniel said in agreement, but Daniel’s intimate knowledge of his own tones of voice made it easy to recognize that the man was reluctant to follow Major Sam’s lead.
The two of them were hiding something.
“Sam,” Daniel coaxed, “come back. I think we need to get these two to open up a little.”
Sam turned her head back to him and offered a pained smile. She returned to the group, sitting down a little closer to Daniel this time. He reached out and put his arm around her shoulder, offering what support he could. He felt relieved when Sam reached up a hand to grip his fingers in her own.
“We dialed Earth to explain what happened,” Sam told the humans, her voice remarkably steady. “General Hammond sent a coded message back. After that, well… There wasn’t any going back to Earth anymore.”
“I don’t understand,” SG-1 Daniel said. Major Sam openly glared at him, but he stared pointedly back at her before turning to Sam and Daniel. “What was the message? Can you tell us what happened?”
Daniel and Sam glanced at each other.
“Do you want me to do this?”
“No. I will.” Sam licked her lips, then raised her chin and addressed the humans. “Did you ever meet the Tollan?”
“Yes, of course,” Major Sam said. “We rescued a group of them from Tollan, not long before…” Her voice trailed off.
“Not long before P3X-989?” Daniel finished for her. “Yeah. So did we.”
Major Sam looked a little wistful. “Was it the same group of people?”
SG-1 Daniel snorted a little. “I think Sam wants to know if you had a Narim, too.”
Daniel hid a grin as he glanced sideways at Sam in time to see her flush a little. He was glad to see she was shifting her focus to better memories. “Oh, did your Narim have a thing for your Sam?” he asked brightly.
Major Sam jerked back a little. “Narim did not have a thing for me,” she muttered.
“That little gadget of his said otherwise,” SG-1 Daniel countered, his eyes lit with the same spark of mischief that Daniel felt himself. “And then, of course, when I walked in on you in the control room…”
“Okay, okay!” Major Sam rose to her feet and glowered down at her snickering Daniel. “I’m going to go hunt for the controller. The mirror has stayed on so far, but there’s no guarantee if won’t close at any moment, and then we’ll lose our universe.”
“We didn’t see anything like what you described,” Sam pointed out mildly, disentangling herself from Daniel’s arm and rising to her feet as well. “But I can help you search.”
“Great!” Major Sam said heartily, and Daniel felt a frisson of unease. Once again, he had the distinct feeling that their human doppelgangers were keeping something back.
“Wait a minute,” SG-1 Daniel protested. He deliberately settled back into the grass, shifting to a spot where the ground hadn’t absorbed the dampness of his clothing. He seemed to be making a pointed statement about his intention to stay right where he was. “Sam, I want to hear this…”
“Don’t you also want to get back home?” Major Sam demanded.
“Yes,” SG-1 Daniel said. “But you don’t think there’s a controller here, any more than I do.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to look,” Sam suggested, her expression uncomfortable.
Daniel could see that his Sam, like her doppelganger, didn’t want to talk. To be honest, he didn’t care that much for the topic himself. But it was clear that SG-1 Daniel was anxious to discuss the matter, and he couldn’t help wondering if further conversation might reveal whatever it was the humans weren’t telling them.
“So your Tollan were the same as ours.” He watched both Sams stop halfway to the doorway. “Did you also run into a smarmy little weasel named Maybourne?”
“Oh, yeah.” SG-1 Daniel tore up an entire clump of grass and shredded them viciously. After a moment, he added in a flat voice, “He wanted to keep the Tollan on Earth to exploit them. We managed to get in touch with the Nox, and Lya came and got them off-world.”
“The same thing happened with us,” Daniel nodded. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched both Sams. The two of them glanced uneasily at each other, as if unsure whether to stay or go. “Did you get into trouble?”
SG-1 Daniel frowned, thinking. “We must have,” he said doubtfully. He raised his voice. “Did we get into trouble, Sam?”
Major Sam rolled her eyes. Sam rolled her eyes right back. Both Daniels exchanged grins. Apparently, the ability of Daniels to annoy Sams was a multi-dimensional trait.
“Yes, Daniel. We got into trouble,” Major Sam said, returning to the pair sitting on the ground. “I don’t suppose you remember that you and Teal’c almost got shot?”
“Lya made sure nothing happened,” SG-1 Daniel protested.
“Actually, I was talking about afterwards,” Daniel said. “In our universe, things got a little ugly in the aftermath.”
“Colonel O’Neill was issued a reprimand,” Major Sam admitted. “I had a censure placed on my file, too.”
“Really?” SG-1 Daniel sat up, surprised. “You never told me.”
“There wasn’t much point.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” SG-1 Daniel complained. “You didn’t do anything, technically. It was Teal’c and me who were in the Gateroom, not you.”
Sam came back to the group then, looking a little interested. “You didn’t mess up the programming in the control room computers so the Gate couldn’t be shut down?” she asked Major Sam.
“I did,” Major Sam replied, a little puzzled. “They couldn’t prove it, but they suspected enough…”
“Oh.” Sam sat down wearily by Daniel’s side again. “In our universe, they did manage to prove that I’d done some reprogramming. They couldn’t prove that I’d actually committed sabotage, but it left us in a very precarious position. General Hammond couldn’t shield us from everything.”
“Maybourne tried to rough me up outside the mountain,” Daniel remembered. “He said he was glad to get at me away from the security cameras.” At the alarmed expressions on Major Sam and SG-1 Daniel’s face, he hastily added, “But Sam was with me, so I was fine.”
“Nobody messes with Daniel when I’m around,” Sam muttered. Daniel gave her a nudge of reassurance, then subsided. Silence fell as the foursome gloomily remembered those days when the euphoria over the Tollan's escape had died away, leaving them to pick up the pieces in an atmosphere of suspicion and resentment.
“So,” SG-1 Daniel said finally. “What do the Tollan have to do with the situation with Harlan? You said something about a coded message from General Hammond?”
Sam’s pinched expression told Daniel that she regretted mentioning it in the first place. Major Sam seemed reluctant to continue the conversation, too. And Daniel wasn’t all too certain that he wanted to discuss it himself.
But there was still that question of what Major Sam and her Daniel were not telling them.
“This is worth it,” he told Sam. “I have to know what this other Daniel is keeping back.”
“All right,” Sam finally replied. “But you do it, Daniel. I… I can’t.”
“It’ll be okay, Sam. I promise.” Daniel hoped it was a promise he would be able to keep.
Aloud, he said, “The thing with the Tollan happened about two months before P3X-989. We’d gone on only one mission before that –”
“Antarctica?” Major Sam asked, grimacing. “The colonel suffered a broken leg and internal bleeding?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said with a wince of his own, remembering how Jack and Sam had almost died. “Anyway, the point is – well, we’d made a lot of people angry. People who thought that we’d robbed Earth of the chance to get hold of really advanced technology, rather than stopping our government from acting no better than the Goa’uld themselves.”
SG-1 Daniel had gone white. “They wanted to… examine you?” he whispered.
“General Hammond’s message begged us to bury the Stargate on P3X-989 and never try to come back to Earth,” Sam said levelly. “Maybourne had received clearance to start by taking one of us apart – to literally see what made us tick.”
“So we buried the Stargate,” Daniel finished. “And we left it like that for quite a while.”
Major Sam and her Daniel looked at each other.
It struck Daniel, as he watched them, that they were communicating every bit as much as he and Sam did when they spoke via their internal radios.
“So what made you unbury the gate?” Major Sam finally asked. She waved vaguely at the grass and the small birds wheeling overhead. “I mean, this obviously isn’t P3X-989.”
“Actually, it is,” Sam corrected her.
“It is?” Major Sam and her Daniel asked simultaneously. Major Sam added, her voice incredulous, “but Harlan told – Harlan said that the surface of his world was uninhabitable!”
“Harlan,” Daniel said, suddenly too weary to question her change of verbs, although he did make a note to ask her about it later. “Harlan – our Harlan, anyway – was in charge of building maintenance when he was created. Science isn’t exactly his strong suit.”
“Eleven thousand years ago, the planet’s surface was uninhabitable,” Sam clarified. “Some kind of catastrophe quadrupled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cut the amount of oxygen to barely ten percent of the norm. The last of Harlan’s companions died about two thousand years after that. In the millennia since then, the planet’s atmosphere recovered.” She, too, sounded incredibly tired, weighed down by the sheer futility of what they’d endured. “By the time Harlan changed us into androids, the planet’s surface had long since been restored. There’s little need to work on the plant, except maintaining our power source, so… Daniel and I get away sometimes, to go exploring…”
She stopped, regarding their human counterparts with something that Daniel uneasily identified as something between jealousy and resentment. “Looks like we picked the right time to do it,” she added bitterly. She stood up. “You two will be all right here, won’t you? Daniel and I had better get going, before our power levels run too low.”
Daniel hastily rose and put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve got plenty of time left, Sam,” he said, his voice quiet and calm. “It hasn’t even been half a day yet.”
She glared at him, but Daniel gazed steadily back. She pulled away from his light grip and stalked over to the mirror, glaring at the rain still dancing on the other side of its surface and essentially ignoring the others.
Daniel sighed a little, then turned away, choosing to give her time. He sat back down with their doppelgangers, trying to ignore the little stab of grief at the sight of Major Sam drinking from her canteen. Three years since he’d last tasted food or drink…
Major Sam swallowed a last gulp of water and hung her canteen back on her belt. She got up, less gracefully than Sam and Daniel could manage, and frowned down at her Daniel.
“Stop making them talk about things they don’t want to talk about,” she said pointedly.
“Because you don’t want to talk about things they ought to hear?” SG-1 Daniel countered.
At that, Sam – who apparently had been listening to the conversation, despite the eloquent statement of her ramrod back – swiveled to face them, pacing forward to stare down at SG-1 Daniel. “What is it you think we ought to hear?” she demanded.
“Let’s calm down,” Daniel said hastily. He reached up a hand and tugged Sam back down onto the grass. Major Sam, looking more frustrated than ever, sat back down as well with a noisily expelled breath, although she seemed to deliberately choose a spot a little further away than before.
“Harlan said something about a few of the ‘others’ committing suicide, of sorts, by walking beyond the reach of the power source in the plant,” SG-1 Daniel said slowly. “I take it that’s not a problem any more?”
Daniel wasn’t sure if this was more evasion, but he chose to answer the question. “Sam did a lot of tinkering. The first was a kind of – mini-MALP, I guess. That was for me, really.” He gave Sam a sad smile, and she reached across and rubbed his shoulder, her own distress clearly forgotten in her desire to help him with his.
“Why?” Major Sam asked, despite her apparent determination not to take part in the conversation.
Daniel swallowed. “Eight months after we came to P3X-989, it was one Abydos year to the day from when Sha’re and Skaara were taken by Apophis. We couldn’t leave the planet for any real length of time, but we knew we could survive for forty-five minutes or so. With our enhanced bodies, that would have been enough time to get to Nagada and back. I needed… I had to let Kasuf know what was happening. Even if I couldn’t keep my promise, he still deserved to know.”
SG-1 Daniel’s fingers dug into the grass. He seemed to be biting his lip in an effort to stop himself from speaking. Daniel eyed him, wondering how the history of that bleak anniversary had gone on the other side of the mirror.
“We needed to make sure the Stargate on Abydos wasn’t buried before we tried to go through,” Sam said. “So I put together – well, as Daniel said, it was a mini-MALP. We could toss it through the Gate and get information relayed back. We didn’t need much; just a visual to confirm that the mini-MALP had safely made it through. It worked.”
“General Hammond is a good man,” Daniel said quietly. “Jack must have told him about the promise I made before we left Abydos, because our mini-MALP showed us that a regular MALP had arrived on Abydos as well. I guess the general knew I couldn’t keep my promise on my own, so he did the next best thing, by sending someone to Abydos to let Kasuf know. After that –” He shrugged. “There was no point in going myself and forcing Kasuf to see what I’d become.”
SG-1 Daniel was slowly shaking his head. “It’s not –” he started, then stopped. Major Sam had slashed an urgent hand downwards.
“You can’t, Daniel,” she said urgently. “Never mind false hopes. It might not be the same here and all you’ll be doing is destroying the last bits of identity they have –”
“And if it were you,” her Daniel said, his voice sharp, “If you had to choose between ignorance and painful knowledge, what would you prefer?”
“It’s not that, Daniel. You see they’re okay. How could it possibly help…?”
“I don’t care.” SG-1 Daniel’s voice had dropped – not only in volume, but by several dozen degrees. He was leaning close to Major Sam, his entire body trembling. “They are real people and they deserve to know.”
Daniel blinked. He hadn’t used that tone of voice himself since he’d confronted Maybourne on that day outside the mountain, lashing out at him for his treatment of other sentient beings.
Silence stretched between them all, an uneasy ribbon that frayed and whined under pressure. Then Major Sam took a deep breath, placed a gentle hand on her Daniel’s shoulder, and spoke.
“The same thing happened to us in our universe,” she said. “The subsequent chain of events is clearly different, but considering the similarities, you might be mistaken in your assumptions.”
Sam and Daniel looked at each other, then back at their guests.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked carefully.
“We did meet Harlan,” the human Daniel said. “And he did make androids of us.”
“But, but…” Daniel couldn’t stop himself from stammering. “But you’re human. We saw you bleed. Our Harlan said there was no way to change us back.”
“He didn’t change us back,” Major Sam said, her voice very gentle now. “I don’t know what happened here. We might be wrong. But in our universe, Harlan didn’t transfer us. He made copies.”
Daniel jerked back, feeling those three words jolt into his spine like a physical blow. All those questions he’d struggled with over the years, wrestling his doubts into submission or quiet acceptance, came rising out of the depths of this new uncertainty, laughing and jeering at his very sense of identity.
Was their sense of self built on a fallacy, a mockery of life that had no real life of its own?
I might be the real Daniel Jackson.
I might not.
And if there really are two of us – or were two of us – where does that leave me now?
He turned his head slowly, feeling as if he was operating in gravity several times greater than the norm, to gaze at the stricken face of his closest friend. “Sam?”
Stuttering silence for a moment, then: “Daniel. Daniel. This can’t be. I’m not – she’s not – I have to be real. Daniel. I might still be alive. Does that – what does that make… Am I real? Make them go away Daniel I can’t Daniel…”
Daniel, shaking visibly, reached out and embraced Sam very, very carefully. She buried her face in his shoulder, and said nothing at all.
Major Sam and SG-1 Daniel – the humans, the real ones, the originals who had robbed them of what little peace of mind they still possessed – had gotten to their feet and moved away. Giving them space. Time to grieve, Daniel wondered bleakly? Or time to think?
Or time to hope?
***