“Rodney —”
“No! Okay?” He pointed a feverish finger at Zelenka. “No! You didn’t spend any time down there… I was working with Angelus for two days, and we were doing stuff! I’m sure of it… The algorithms he was generating were just, I dunno, magnificent! Okay, I know it was only preliminary modeling, but in terms of compression rations, the encoding…” He trailed off, his eyes widening. “Oh my god.”
“What now?”
“Carter was saying he can project false images… In the briefing, those medical scans she showed us. What… What if he was doing the same thing to me?”
Zelenka gave up on what he was doing and spun his seat around to face McKay. “What are you babbling about?”
“What if all my experiences down there were fake?”
“That’s ridiculous… Rodney, I studied the surveillance footage myself — it’s just image manipulation of an extremely advanced kind. Pixels, that’s all. There’s no way that he could create a false memory.”
“Are you sure?” McKay felt short of breath. The lab, with its gloomy lighting and flickering terminals, was closing in on him like a vice. “Those marines you saw. What if they didn’t know they weren’t real?”
“Rodney, you’re being ridiculous.” Zelenka frowned. “I think you’re also hyperventilating. You need to sit down.”
“Ridiculous, huh?”
“Yes. There’s no telling what happened to the marines — you said in the briefing that you encountered Replicators who had been altered, infected by this chimera, this hybrid. Not copied as evil clones. What happened to those marines was probably the same thing.”
McKay blinked at him. “You think so?”
“If you’re worried, get Keller to check you out.” He went back to his workstation. “If there’s a diagonal scratch on your x-ray film, then you’ll know.”
“Did she check Cassidy? She was in the with Angelus for a while.”
“Not as long as you. And yes, Keller checked her out. She’s fine.” Zelenka’s expression darkened for a moment. “Physically.”
“Okay…” McKay took a couple of deep breaths. “Okay, you may be right. And yeah, I could go down to the infirmary, might put my mind at rest…”
“Unless there’s a printer malfunction,” said Zelenka, his voice devoid of emotion. “Something that puts a scratch on the film somewhere.”
McKay narrowed his eyes. “You’re an evil little man, did you know that?”
Zelenka didn’t reply. McKay stood where he was for a moment, then retrieved his chair and sat back down. “Maybe you’re the fake instead. Angelus built you specially just to make me nervous.”
“In which case,” said Zelenka, giving him a nasty sideways look, “it’s working really well, isn’t it?”
There came a time, when McKay started to download the nanite code from his laptop, that he no longer had anything to do. He realized that it probably wouldn’t be for long, but until the translated information started to build up in his output store, all he’d be doing down in the lab would be staring at swathes of raw code coursing down a monitor screen and trying not to get into a fight with Zelenka.
Oddly, the thought of some time to himself was no respite. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts, and neither did he want to waste the slack period on useless make-work, not while the hybrid was no doubt busy with its own loathsome projects at the heart of the lockdown zone. So instead of going to the mess hall, or having a bath to try and rid himself of some of the Chunky Monkey smell, he went to find Sam Carter.
She was in the control room, which was no great surprise. Since returning to the Atlantis McKay had learned just how different life there had become for everyone: the city had been taken to a state of alert and had remained that way. There was no downtime any more. All marines were active and either on guard duty or inducted into Teyla Emmagan’s army of message runners, while the science staff were all working on problems that related, directly or indirectly, to the thing on the west pier. Even the support personnel were involved in emergency procedures.
And Carter was coordinating them all. The pressure on her must have been immense.
McKay almost felt guilty about intruding on her, but as soon as she saw him she gave him a tired smile and beckoned him over, and he decided he might well have been providing a welcome break for her.
They went out onto the internal balcony, overlooking the Stargate. Across the open space McKay could see that Sheppard and some of his marines were in the conference room, talking animatedly. The multiple doors were still open. “I guess he’s not discussing anything private,” Carter ventured.
“Either that, or it’s because of the smell,” said McKay sniffing his own sleeve and grimacing. “This stuff doesn’t come off.”
“What was it again?”
“Rotted algae. I tell you, I’ve been to some weird places since taking this assignment. But that planet has got to be one of the most, I dunno, yucky that I’ve ever seen.”
“Yucky,” repeated Carter, smirking.
“You know what I mean. We’ve been to all kinds of planets. Most of them are pretty nice, considering. I mean, the Ancients didn’t put many Stargates on worlds that weren’t habitable. And there are some that are dangerous, or really harsh, or whatever… Chunky Monkey wasn’t any of those things. It just rained all the time and it smelled bad.”
“Let’s hope it was worth a few showers,” Carter replied. “How’s it going with the nanite code?”
“It’s translating. It won’t be too long before I can start sorting through it for clues.”
Carter turned away from the gate and leaned back against the rail. “Anything we find out could help us. If the lockdown expands again, or if anything else happens, I’m going to have to launch the drones.”
“Really? You’re actually going ahead with that?”
“I hope I don’t have to. We’d have to saturate the pier with them, and I don’t even want to think about how much damage that could do.”
“It would be one hell of a risk, Sam. You do realize that the explosive power of a drone has never been accurately measured? From what I’ve been able to model in the past it’s got more to do with the power source in its control than in the drone itself — when we used naquada generators to power them they didn’t pack anything like as much punch as they do with a ZPM in the chair.” He shook his head. “Get it wrong and you could blow the city in half.”
“So give me alternatives. Tell me about the APE.”
“Oh, that. Well… Talk about a two edged sword…” He gave a wry chuckle. “Put it this way, if it hadn’t worked so well I’d be able to build you one right now. All the readings I took on it were in my PDA, and the pulse cooked it.”
“Yeah, Sheppard said it affected the jumper, too.”
“Only the cloak. Everything else was powered down…” He paused. “Okay, not only the cloak. It kind of screwed up the lifters too. And the sensors.” He looked away and cleared his throat. “And the hyperdrive.”
“So everything, really.”
“Well, yeah, pretty much. But the stuff that was powered down just needed rebooting. I managed to get it all working okay with a little tinkering.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “I guess your definition of ‘okay’ is different from John’s.”
“Ah, picky. So using the hyperdrive was like riding a jackhammer all the way home… I can fix it.”
“I wondered why you used a gate to get back.”
“Yeah, we just found the nearest one and dialed back. It was probably a short cut, anyways.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Look, the important thing is that the Replicators brought the APE with them specifically to kill the hybrid. Laetor and the other infected Replicators were shut down by the pulse when it went off, so he couldn’t know it hadn’t worked. The hybrid got away.”
“And pretended to be Angelus?”
“Maybe. If that’s what happened, I still can’t figure out why… We’ve still only got half the picture right now. But Sam, if the plans to the APE were in Laetor’s head — and if he was part of the Asuran collective at any time I can’t see why they wouldn’t be — then I bet you any money I could beef it up.”