12
Mark daren't look at his sister much, not only because she was so embarrassed but because he was going to laugh if he did. Dixon returned into the room, bright red trying to suppress the laughter, after all Jack was his boss! He failed miserably and excused himself to the control room, they could hear his laughter floating upstairs every so often for the rest of the meeting.
"What about the clones then?" Jack changed the subject, "you said you had problems? What kind of problems?"
Nom hissed and Nol stood. Jack held his hand up.
"If you are asking for our help I think it would only be polite if YOU spoke to us!" he directed the speech at the female, "after all you speak to the Asgard"
"The Asgard are our equals" Nol spoke
"Then let THEM solve your problem" Jack told them and he stood and started to leave the room, Thor hissed at the party and a translation came through his chair
"Do not upset O'Neill, we are unable to help in this matter, and if you alienate him we will be willing to sever the ties we have with your race once again, he is important to us, YOU are not"
Mark was astounded by the speech! He had read the mission reports, especially the one about the planet K'Tau as it was part of the 'this is why we stopped messing with the safety protocols' lecture he received, and his earlier visit to the Asgard homeworld in the 'we don't know how this happened but it did' part, he knew that the Asgard held the General in high regard, he did not realise just HOW high. He watched as Jack came to a halt on hearing the speech, surprise on his face, but he did look as though he were willing to walk out of the room, Mark was not sure if it was a bluff or not, because if HE had been in that position he doubted he could have walked.
The female Furling stood and crossed to Jack, who stood watching the aliens, she bowed her head and held out a hand, which elicited a gasp from the males of her species. Jack shook hands with her and she said "I apologise, I was very arrogant, however our policy has always been that contact with the younger races should be kept to a minimum, and since we have started to decline so much it has become engrained in our customs"
"Now you see that really is downright rude, I'm glad you came to your senses" He gestured to her to be re-seated and then asked "So, what can we do for you" Jack may not be a world class diplomat, but Mark realised when you held that much power, you didn't need to be!
"Our main problem is a strange one, as you will recall Thor offered to copy the personalities of your children and download them into clones, as we created four of each sex we chose four of each sex of Furling to host the souls, everything seemed to progress satisfactorily, we speeded up maturation, however we chose a factor of 4 for the children here, we chose a factor of 15 for the children at home. Conception to 'birth' takes less than an hour and they were fully mature exactly 486 earth days from the day we arrived home" Sam looked up
"You mature at 20?" she asked, Mark was always astonished at how quickly she could do that! He needed a pen and paper to work something out that complicated.
"Yes, Furlings have several stages of maturity, the last, at which we consider ourselves to be full adults happens at 20 of your years, after that our major changes are all heading towards death. However, the problems with the children started before they reached this level, they started approximately 364 days after birth, what you would call a year." No one corrected the alien, she was only out by one day after all, or two if it was a leap year, which was being a bit of a pedant Mark knew, but he couldn't stop himself thinking it even if he could censor what came out of his mouth.
"So what went wrong?" Jack asked
"The children started defying authority! They insisted they be allowed to do things that we told them were not allowed, or even, in some cases, dangerous. The males especially were almost self destructive in their actions, always finding more and more danger to put themselves into, while the females seemed to go through enormous emotional upheaval and would fly into great rages"
The parents around the table looked at each other, but it was Jane who said what they were all thinking, "Teenagers"
"Have they not returned to rational behaviour recently?" Teal'c asked with a straight face.
"The problems have abated somewhat since, however they are insisting we allow them ships, or access to the Stargate network so they can 'go explore', the males are exhibiting aggressive behaviour to any Furling not of their group who approaches a female, the females seem to accept this, in our society a practise you call 'marriage' is no longer a viable option, the population is so small, and females are outnumbered 3:1 and as such the leader of any household, the female, must take at least 2 and more often up to 5 mates, this being the case we attempted to introduce the cloned females to prospective partners and the males caused several injuries to them, though luckily no deaths as yet! We cannot afford for this to continue, our society is breaking down as it is! We need help!"
"Do you have ANY form of military?" Jack asked, Mark thought that the question was totally non sequitur if he was honest, but he had already decided not to bring attention to himself as he really shouldn't be in the meeting anyway, but unless someone noticed him they wouldn't ask him to leave.
"We have no military, we do not have the population to sustain casualties, we therefore do not engage in military action and have no need for the institutions that are needed to support such actions"
"Shame" Jack said, "You ask almost any military man why he joined and he will tell you it was to curb his natural wildness, burn off extra energy, or it was a choice between gaol and joining up. It's a great way to tame young men, women tend to want to serve their country and stuff, lads just want to beat the crap out of people" It was an insight into the General that Mark was glad to get, though he had to wonder which was his decision. He wasn't wondering long, Thor asked for him
"And what reason closest resembles your motivation for joining the Airforce O'Neill?"
"I was recruited" he told them, they all looked at him but he didn’t expand on it.
"Sir?" Sam asked, Mark was looking him right in the eye, he saw something there that unsettled him.
"I was at a summer camp, we had 'war games' I managed to 'kill' 45 other students single handed, I had signed up before I left at the end of the week."
"Impressive" Teal'c said
"Yeah, well the camp management weren't best pleased that last day, they set 5 teams of 4, all armed with blanks up against me, I actually put 7 in hospital, and most of the rest needed first aid, none of them got off a shot, I wasn't armed. The AF recruiter was VERY pleased however"
"Wow!" Sam said, she was impressed "some achievement sir,"
"Yeah well, if I had known then… I was in special ops within the year, and we weren't playing pretend by that time," he scrubbed his face with his hands, as if brushing away the memories "I just hope Jon remembers and doesn't fall for it again, even though he is already being watched by the CIA for recruitment"
Mark wrote 'Jon?' on his pad, he would ask later, he continued observing.
"This is all well and good General O'Neill, however it does not help our problem, we dare not risk even a single life, there are too few of us, we need help"
Jack looked down at the table as if trying to read an answer in the wood grain.
"All I can say is that you are in more trouble than you know. The children, clones… whatever are acting as their human counterparts would in the same situation, if you try to share the females you will have casualties, and still nothing will be resolved, if you don’t the only breeding you will see will be amongst the children and they will not be producing Furlings, they will produce DNA that is yours, but I am guessing that they will be in all other respects human."
Fer dipped his head "This is what our philosophers believe as well, we do not want just our DNA to survive if WE cannot!"
"What if…" Sam said "you were to clone HUMANS and put Furling personalities into them? Would the same happen?"
"We cannot know for sure" Thor said, "You are such a strong and unwielding race that it is possible that your DNA would overwrite the weaker Furling souls, why do you ask?"
"Just bear with me a moment, Heimdall, you have genetic samples from both humans and Furlings?" The small doctor nodded "I am wondering is there any way to make a hybrid?"
"It is very unlikely, though the races look similar, the same degree of difference exists between the two as between the Asgard and yourselves, we would not be able to make a hybrid of our two races"
"Then how is Graces blood helping you?"
"We are using it to study the changes over time of the blood, we keep it viable and expose it to various things, such as radiation, or even repeated cloning, so far her cells have remained almost impervious, only high doses of radiation seems to effect them, but it will be a long time before this information can be used to save our race, we have no illusions about that"
"Oh" she looked disappointed "Then I doubt that my idea would work, I was going to suggest artificial insemination of a human/Furlings by the Furling/humans. If the laws of genetics plays out you should get 1 Furling/Furling out of every 4 offspring of the second generation" The aliens looked at her surprised.
"How do you arrive at that Colonel Carter?" asked Heimdall Sam explained all about the monk Gregor Mendal and his experiment of cross breading wrinkled peas and smooth ones, she moved over to the doctor and used his laptop to get a page about the man and his research.
"Fascinating" Nom said after reading the translation, "such an experiment done by such simple methods, in such detail over so many generations! It is something we never considered as our knowledge of such things was passed to us by the ancients"
"Yes well, Thor always comes to us if he wants stupid ideas" Jack said "Will it work?"
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