Gasping as the woman wrenched the huge blood-drenched thorn from his side, Daniel's hands automatically went to grasp at the gaping wound. No sorrow in her eyes, she said, "Your plants have killed us all; now they will kill you too..."
As his knees grew weak and he crumpled to the ground, she stepped over him and walked away without a backward glance. Feeling the warmth of the blood coating his hands, he desperately grabbed the cloth around it and tried to press down on the wound. But, even now, he knew it was hopeless. After all, he already knew this was how Grelmin had met his corporeal end.
Feeling the warmth begin to drain from him, he breathed, "Jack."
His heart pounding in his chest, Jack looked down to where the binding to Daniel should be and found he could barely even sense it at all. Pulling himself up off of his seat, he almost went to leave the table but managed to stop then forced himself to sit down again. He drained his glass of imaginary whisky in the hope it might rid him of the ominous feeling that now hovered over him.
"Jack, are you all right?"
Spinning in his seat, he cried, "Daniel?"
His miraculously whole friend smiled at him.
"Surprised to see me?"
With the sensation of being stabbed still so fresh in his mind, he quickly asked, "Are you okay? I thought something might've..."
Daniel just smiled again.
"I'm fine. And now I know what we have to do. Come on..."
As his friend grabbed him by the arm and went to pull him from his seat, he asked, "Can I just leave? What about the...?"
"Jack, just trust me. Come on."
All the earlier uncertainty and nervousness was gone from Daniel's gaze so, with blind faith, Jack followed him off the cliff.
This time, there was no sensation of the walls trying to pull him in all directions at once. Instead, they took three steps on the casino floor before he looked down to see stone beneath his feet.
Looking round at Daniel, he saw they again stood in the pedestal room... but the room as it must've looked back when the device was newly-constructed. There sat the pedestal, not only miraculously whole again but positively gleaming and Gizmo's device sat in the centre not attached by clumsy wiring but fully integrated sitting within the circle of purple crystal. Light streamed into the room, through windows that'd opened in the walls around him. Remembering himself, he turned to look at Daniel who was a step behind him looking round the room with an odd recognition as if having just met with an old friend.
Noticing his gaze upon him, his friend looked down again.
"Look."
Directing Jack's gaze to an alcove which had appeared in the wall to the left of the pedestal, he saw that the still form of Carter was held upright within it by a set of sleek metal restraints. Turning, he saw that, behind the pedestal, Teal'c's still form was similarly held.
"Daniel, what is this? What's going on?"
With the fascination in his tone which only Daniel could have over something that had caused them so much pain, his friend replied, "This is the device as it was all those years ago. We never found the alcoves but they were designed to ensure optimum power distribution. The device was able to compensate for our relative positions in the room but if we'd have been in these the first time the transfers would have probably been successful even given the missing memory buffer and failing crystal power source."
"Which would have been bad, right?"
Confused for a moment, Daniel looked at him then away at the device again.
"Right, sorry. Yes, that would have been bad, of course. But you have got to admit that a device capable of doing what this one does and being able to compensate for a century or so of disrepair as well as..."
Seeming to catch himself going off on a tangent, he trailed off and started again.
"The point is that we can use this device to help you reverse the process."
Okay, so he was starting to get the whole fascinating/relevant difference, Jack admitted grudgingly as he replied, "Great. How?"
"It's actually surprisingly easy. We just have to let the process continue. The device in the real world can sort us all back into our rightful bodies - all you have to do is allow that to happen."
"Okay, but how do we not end up hairy?"
Daniel blinked owlishly a couple of times.
"Hairy?"
Rolling his eyes, he said, "Ha'ranas, hairyness, hairy. It's practically self-explanatory."
His friend just looked at him for a moment before replying, "You just need to let the process continue until I tell you to stop. Then stop it."
"How do I do that?"
"Well you are the awareness..."
Sharply, Jack retorted, "Oh don't you start calling me that too..."
"Sorry. What I mean is you control all of this; you always have. You just need to use the power you've been given."
His brow creasing at the odd phrasing of his friend, another thought occurred.
"Daniel?"
There was an overlong pause before his friend blinked in recognition and turned.
"Yes?"
"Aren't you forgetting the ever so small matter of Gizmo? You know, psychotic scientist with a god complex who wants to keep us crammed inside my head for the good of all mankind."
There was a sudden flash of annoyance on the civilian's face before he pulled himself into check.
"No, I didn't forget him. He's no longer an issue."
That pulled Jack up short.
"You what?"
"I set the memory matrix to delete itself. We need the processing space to make this work right."
As Jack found himself looking funny at his friend yet again, he slowly said, "Uh, Daniel?"
Smiling, his friend turned to him.
"Yes?"
"When and how did you figure out how to do all this? I mean, I know glowy you had a plan but..."
"I'll explain it all later. What's important right now is that it'll work."
Shrugging, he replied, "All right. So no more Gizmo?"
"Not for much longer."
Gasping for air, he held the bunched cloth of the robe tight to his abdomen but could still feel the blood oozing out past his fingers. Stumbling forward, he slid in through the doorway of the ‘office' and collapsed down beside the desk. Looking up, he saw Grelmin's device sat on the desk in several pieces. He must've been making modifications when this'd happened and his modifications became a lot more extensive than he'd intended. Daniel grudgingly admitted that the ability to convert that device from one use to another in such a short time, whilst losing blood at a worrying rate, was rather impressive. The guy was a genius of Machello proportion all right. It was just a pity he hadn't so much walked the line between genius and madness as used it as a diving board to plunge deep into the depths of insanity.
Tearing off the bottom of the robe to make himself a pressure bandage, and try and stem the flow, he suddenly became aware of a voice not much more than the echo of a whisper.
"All right. So, no more Grelmin?"
"Jack?"
His friend was nowhere to be seen and he couldn't identify where the voice had come from but he froze when a very familiar voice replied, "Not for much longer."
He was currently in no state to get up and go in search of the voices but he tried yelling, "Jack! Jack, help!"
The only result was a spasm of pain which sent him into an excruciating coughing fit. As it subsided, he pressed his makeshift pressure bandage tighter against his side.
"So what do I have to do?"
"It's easy. All you have to do is..."
"Jack, no... Jack, don't listen."
But, even now, he felt himself shiver from something other than the blood loss. This situation had his friend so far out his comfort zone he must feel like he was drowning and it was clear that he was his anchor point even without the visual aid of the tether between them. Jack had got past the point of incredulity long ago. Ever since he'd woken up on the ‘planet', his friend had been looking to him for answers. Why wouldn't he listen to him if he finally appeared to have some?
As the voices faded away again, he glanced out the open door at the world outside. Even at this point in the planet's history, the vegetation was fast becoming the only thing visible from here to the horizon...
It was then he realised, with a shiver, the horizon was an awful lot closer than usual... and the sky appeared to be fading away to nothing.
"Oh crap."
He knew he wasn't going to last long but, given the way the horizon appeared to be coming to meet him, he just might live long enough to experience being wiped from existence.
Struggling to his feet, he steadied himself against the wall and looked out of the doorframe to see that the ‘world' around him now appeared to end about a hundred feet from his position. Beyond that, there was nothing but white emptiness. This office was where Grelmin had died so it had to be the central point; the final memory to be deleted. Even so, it wasn't going to be around for much longer. And one way, or another, neither was he.
Wiping irritably at her nose, Janet was beginning to wonder if even the increased dose of antihistamine she'd taken was really enough to keep her allergies at bay on this planet. It certainly wasn't helping sitting in the great outdoors for hours directly next to a wall covered in flowering climbing plants but there wasn't really anything else for it. Doctor McKay had rigged up a relay from the scanners inside the pedestal room so that they could monitor from out here instead of being completely in the dark like last time when Grelmin had tried to double-cross the Colonel. There was a lot of interference but McKay had said that was because of the shielding effect of the material the pedestal room was constructed of. He'd also gone off in a tangent as to how exactly he'd come up with his oh so clever idea to boost the signal but she'd just tuned him out after that.
It'd seemed like a good idea to be able to monitor what was going on but, now, endless hours later, she wasn't so sure. Sure, she could watch the various monitors and make educated guesses as to what was going on but, unable to go in and tend to her patients, they just reminded her how ineffectual she'd been in this whole situation. She kept telling herself that this wasn't a medical problem and there was no reason she should be able to fix it but that's what she'd told herself during the Stromos incident and it hadn't made her feel any better then either. Three of their hearts had stopped the last time they'd tried this. According to the recorded EKGs, Sam, Daniel and Teal'c had all been asystolic for close on forty seconds before their hearts had spontaneously resumed a normal rhythm. If she had to sit watching their EKGs flat-line in real-time, did she have it in her not to rush in there?
She glanced over her shoulder at where McKay stood, laptop in his arms, as he drifted to and fro between all the various monitors before tapping at the keyboard before him. She was starting to see why the man appeared to require an almost constant stream of food because he must burn up a lot of energy with his seeming inability to sit in one place for long.
Making a curious sound of discovery, he said, "That's not right. The readings are all..."
Janet replied, "Yeah, these EEG readings are...."
"Hmm, what...? Oh, no, not the ones on your little doctor toys. I mean my readings."
Taking a deep breath, she managed to civilly reply, "What is it?"
"This device, the little one, it's been draining power like crazy since we got here. I'm talking like ten times the average power readings we recorded from it on earth."
"And the reactor can't cope?"
"What? No, it's a naquadha reactor. It'll cope fine. In fact, funny story actually, there was this one time, in Moscow, when we managed to power..."
As Janet's eyes narrowed, he trailed off then refocused.
"What's concerning me is it's not doing it anymore."
"Not doing what?"
"Not draining power."
"What does that mean?"
"From what we learned about it on earth, the amount of energy the device needs depends on what's going on at the time but, when it's active, there's a constant baseline that, no matter how high the spikes are, the activity eventually falls back down to. Right now, the device is functioning at less than a quarter of that."
Aware she was repeating herself, she asked, "So what does that mean?"
"Well, first time this happened, they didn't take any readings and second time it didn't work right so we've got no baseline. So bottom line I don't know what these readings mean and I don't like not knowing what things mean"
She just looked at him until he read the plea for a better explanation.
"Okay, look, the big device is drawing power; a lot of power. But the little device, the memory buffer, its power rate dipped right down and now it keeps decreasing by increments. If it keeps doing that, then its not gonna take that long until it turns off all together."
"And?"
"And like I said I don't know. But, call me a pessimist; I don't think it's a good thing."
Jack rubbed absently at where his side still ached and tried to ignore the odd chill that was slowly seeping through him. In front of him, Daniel was scanning across the device with a practiced eye and sporadically attending to his watch.
As far as he got Daniel's plan, he just had to step into the alcove as a sort of symbolic surrender and the process would officially strip him from his position as head honcho and would have to put them all back where they came from in order to restart the selection of the most hairy of them. That was when he was supposed to put the mental brakes on the whole thing. Result: one team back in their own bodies with no homicidal tendencies or life-threatening degenerative brain conditions. If this actually worked, he most definitely owed Daniel a drink.
So close to a possible end to this damned nightmare, he was impatient to get started.
"Daniel, what exactly are we waiting for?"
Distractedly, his friend replied, "We can't begin until the deletion is closer to its completion. Don't worry, he'll be permanently erased soon enough."
Crossing his arms, he found himself looking oddly at his friend. Okay, so he wasn't gonna lose any sleep over the end of the existence of that genocidal maniac either but there had almost been amusement to his friend's tone. He sighed; maybe it was just him living in a nostalgic world where Daniel was still the compassionate idealist.
Glancing at his watch again, Daniel continued, "It should all be over soon. Why don't you get into position?"
Nodding, he dropped his hands into his pockets and headed over to one of the empty alcoves. Peering into it, he said, "Cosy."
Stripping off his jacket and stepping in, he felt the ache in his side echo through him again and shivered even though the heat in here was stifling. Going to rub his arms in an unconscious effort to heat himself up, he noticed that the sensation of the bond around his wrist was all but gone.
Turning to Daniel, he brandished his bare arm at him.
"This thing seems to be wearing off."
Squinting at his waving arm, Daniel's brows knitted.
"What thing?"
"Y'know, the vine thing. I mean you're standing six feet from me and I still can't..."
Realising his friend still didn't appear to know what he was talking about, he dropped his arm back down and, carefully, said, "Daniel, the bond. What's happened to it?"
Looking a little flustered, his friend vaguely replied, "I'll explain everything later. Besides, it won't matter after we do this."
As Daniel gestured for him to lower his arm, he complied then found himself wincing as the manacles bound his limbs tightly to the rough stone wall and caused his head to impact against it rather unpleasantly.
More an accusation than an outburst of pain, he levelly said, "Ow."
Not sparing him more than a glance, Daniel continued, "Enough space should be freed in the memory buffer for us to move onto the next stage."
"Great. A little warning might've been nice though."
Ignoring his petulant comment, his friend seemed to input a sequence of commands then quickly made his was to the final alcove. Stepping inside, he placed his arms down to his sides and smiled gently as he said, "Now, finally, we'll see what this device was really capable of."
Going to roll his eyes at his friend's very misplaced enthusiasm, Jack found himself distracted by the device kicking into life. There was a loud rumbling as the walls shifted to cover the windows leaving them in darkness save the glow from the device. With an insidious sense of déjà vu, he watched the purple crystals light up one by one before the beam shot towards the ceiling. Then, suddenly, it split into four and he found one coming directly towards him. Shutting his eyes, he braced himself for...
It took several seconds to realise that not only had nothing hit him but, also, that the manacles were gone. Opening his eyes, he found himself sitting in Vegas again.
Rolling his eyes, he groaned, "And, we're back."
Glancing around, he saw he had the same supporting cast as before only now everyone seemed to have equivalent stacks of chips. He looked round to see Daniel, on his right, was already eagerly laying down his stake.
Sighing, he pushed in his chips in.
"Daniel, why are we here again?"
"The process is continuing. We just have to play along and be patient and we'll get the desired outcome."
The odd phrasing of his friend once again unsettling him, he spared a glance to where the bond should connect him to Daniel. There was barely a ghost of a sensation of the tether around his wrist. And yet his friend was so close he could reach out and actually touch him. It was strange; almost as if...
His train of thought interrupted by the croupier, he tapped on the felt and another card landed beside the first two.
Sighing, he half-turned to his friend.
"Seriously, though, why a casino? I mean, as ways to choose the best guy for the job, a game of chance seems a pretty sucky way to do it. Why not a fight or a sporting contest or, y'know, something with a little skill involved?"
Absent-mindedly, the civilian replied, "Yes, a fight to the death would have been more appropriate."
So used to bantering with his friend, it took a moment to realise that there had been no trace of sarcasm to his statement. Did Daniel just say he'd rather this was a fight to the death?
His derailed thought now coming back with a vengeance, he continued, "Or, y'know, maybe something a little more lethal - like ice hockey. Of course, then you'd win for sure cos we all know how you rule the rink."
Daniel nodded in agreement and got back to the game leaving him to try not to gape openly as his mind reeled.
Oh boy, this is not good.
Reigning in his emotions, he pushed in his next stake and calmly, almost as if speaking to the croupier, asked, "Where's my friend, you son of a bitch?"
All innocent bewilderment, his ‘friend' replied, "Jack? What're you...?"
He could keep that expression up all day and it wouldn't do him any good. Because now he'd actually engaged his brain he could see that Daniel'd been acting funny ever since he'd reappeared at the table. Only, he never really had reappeared and that explained everything because this was...
"Grelmin, you can give up the act cos I'm not buyin' it anymore."
There was a moment of indecision on Daniel's face before he replied, "Oh very well, it makes little difference now..."
With that, the figure in the tux morphed into Grelmin. Unlike Daniel, he looked completely ridiculous in the tuxedo.
Standing up, Jack's chips scattered as he grabbed at the black cloth of the imposter's outfit.
"What did you do with Daniel?"
Then, all of a sudden, that oddly discordant conversation about erasing Grelmin from the memory matrix came back to him with a vengeance.
"He presented too many anomalies so I had no choice but to replace him. He is gone."
Sitting on the ground with his head resting against the frame of the door, Daniel watched blankly as the world around him continued to disintegrate. Heaving another breath, he found it did nothing to combat the dizziness that overwhelmed him as the dots continued to dance across his greying vision. The skin on his shivering hand looked almost white as he raised it to feel the bond to Jack was almost gone. He closed his eyes and cursed his glowing double for not having talked his friend into getting the three of them out while he could've. Now, in trying to save him, he'd doomed them all.
His hand thudding heavily back to the ground as the last ounce of energy left him, he opened his eyes to see nothing but white all around him.
But before the fog of non-existence could encroach upon this last sanctuary, his other hand dropped away from the blood-drenched cloth of the robe and slipped to the ground. The chest ceased to rise and fall with a final, strangled, exhalation and the head slipped lifelessly to the side, eyes still open but glazed and unseeing. There were only moments more before the last memory of Grelmin was wiped from the matrix and the matrix ceased to be.
"What the...?"
Looking up from her monitors at the exclamation from the man behind her, Janet turned.
"What?"
"The device, the little device, just turned itself off."
"Didn't you think that was the way it was heading anyway?"
"Yeah but it blipped."
"What?"
"It blipped."
"Blipped?"
Distracted by his readings, he replied, "Yeah, blipped."
"I'm only a silly old medical doctor so I don't really understand all these fancy physics terms. Blipped?"
As he spun the laptop round so she could see for herself, she saw a graphical display of readings over time which she took an educated guess to be power usage. As McKay gestured towards it, she saw a huge spike that went off the top of the screen.
Finally explaining, he said, "In the last few seconds before it switched off, the memory buffer was siphoning more power from the generator than the pedestal used in the last five minutes."
Confused, she said, "It overloaded itself?"
Distractedly closing the laptop and offloading it into her unprepared arms, McKay dashed over to the remote monitors. As she grappled to keep the computer from slipping from her grasp, he bent over one of the monitors.
Shaking his head, he came back over and, using her as an impromptu stand, pushed the laptop open again. Sighing pointedly, she wasn't surprised to find him oblivious to her annoyance as he tapped away at the keyboard.
She leant to the side to see around the screen.
"Well?"
There was a moment where the scientist seemed to be wondering why his laptop stand had a head before he replied, "It didn't overload. The power poured into it but went through it into the pedestal."
Without warning, the laptop was pulled back out of her hands as McKay got back to his pacing. Sighing again, she sat down, looked over her ‘little doctor's toys' again and sniffed in a rather congested manner. Glancing at her watch, she decided it couldn't hurt to take an extra allergy pill. Picking up the canteen, she downed her pill then took an extra swig.
Seeing McKay's questioning gaze on her, she replied, "Allergies."
"To what?"
"Pollen amongst other things."
Sitting down next to her and setting down his laptop, McKay said, "Citrus."
Confused, she asked, "What?"
Making an odd face, he replied, "Me. I'm allergic to citrus fruits. Deathly allergic actually."
"Yeah, I know. Sam told me."
Well, not so much told me as ranted at me about how she was going to cram an orange down your throat if you even thought about calling her a dumb blonde again. Good first impression you made, McKay.
Not able to hear the part of the conversation that had been in her head, he seemed to brighten.
"Sam talks about me? What does she say?"
Unsure quite what to reply, she dug into her bag and pulled out a couple of granola bars.
"Here, you get low blood sugar, right? Better have one of these."
Taking the bar from her, he paused for a moment then said, "She could die, couldn't she? I mean, she could be dead already, couldn't she?"
Looking at him, she replied, "I don't know. I don't know how this will end. But I know if there's the slightest chance for them to pull through then I'd never bet against SG-1."
Daniel's not dead. No way is he dead. He can't...
But no matter how loudly he tried to think it, he couldn't rid himself of the almost hypothermic chill that had seeped into every part of his being nor ignore the fact that he could no longer feel the tether around his wrist.
Calmly, almost as if expecting gratitude for his thoughtful disposal of Daniel, Grelmin said, "Now the matrix is free, we shall be able to progress at speed. It shall not be long until dominance is determined and this process shall come to its glorious completion."
All he wanted to do right at that moment was break Grelmin's neck but he was distracted as the rather drunk Teal'c pushed all his remaining chips across the felt.
His stomach somersaulted as he watched the cards begin to patter to the table. What if Teal'c lost? Then he'd be out of this game and shoved somewhere to be used as raw materials for the Ha'ranas. If he'd lost, there was no more stalling.
Then again, this was a game, Jack thought sourly, that they were all gonna lose. Hell, it was a game they'd already lost, he thought, as he guiltily recalled Daniel's last request to him.
Keep everyone in the game, Jack.
But...hang on, he'd interpreted ‘the game' to mean keeping everyone at the blackjack table... but that just represented fight for control of his body, didn't it? That was the game everyone had to stay in. Hey, but who had decided that this had to be the way it was represented? Him, right, because this was his head, wasn't it? Grelmin had always talked about the advantage he had; the power. He'd managed to think the pedestal device into activating. Why shouldn't he be able to dictate the rules of a little ole' game? And the forum...
Desperate, but not even slightly sure this would work; he shut his eyes and concentrated.
"Irish?"
Opening his eyes again, he saw that nothing had happened. Sagging, he looked back towards the point where Daniel had vanished. He was failing him; he was failing all of them... Why wasn't it working?
He thought back to when he'd activated the pedestal; he hadn't really believed that he could do it, had he? No, he'd just done what Daniel asked of him because, when his friend looked at him like that, he had to take that leap of faith even if it was off the edge of a cliff. That same look had been in his eyes when he'd asked him to keep everyone in the game...
Shutting his eyes again, he let Cynical Jack take a backseat for a moment and focused on the part of him that would follow Daniel over that cliff every time. He tried to ignore the noises around him and concentrate on forming the picture. Deliberately curling his fingers around thin air, he pulled his curled hand back to his shoulder before flicking it forward and...
Opening his eyes, he saw he'd managed to cast the line perfectly into the tranquil lake. His fingers now curled around his favourite fishing rod, he saw the chequered sleeve of his shirt and knew he was in the outfit he'd worn last time he was here. He looked around to see his friends and Grelmin sat on deckchairs next to him with fishing rods in their hands. Randomly, they were still in their Vegas attire - now they were the ones looking out of place.
With a satisfied tone, he said, "New game. First one to catch a fish wins the lot."
Watching their rather lousy attempts to cast their lines out, Jack was somewhat amused by the expressions of these twisted versions of his friends.
"Hey, Irish, did I have one too many Black Russians or what? Where the hell is this?"
"This," Jack said, "is my place. And what I say goes. So go fish."
Examining the fishing rod with an expression like she'd just been handed roadkill to look at, the luscious Samantha said, "Fishing?"
He grinned at her as he realised that, fantasy or not, he'd finally managed to get Carter to the cabin.
"Fishing."
His expression soured as he turned toward the final member of the group who was looking at the fishing rod like he wasn't sure which end was up. The satisfaction he felt that he'd managed to stall the inevitable again dissolved as he realised that without Daniel and his plan, there really was only one way this would end.
Don't give up, Jack.
The thought struck him so hard that he almost looked around to see who'd spoken. It took a few moments more for him to realise that the bond wrapped around his wrist was there again...