Futura Memoratia

Chapter 3 resistere (resist)

“Poetic?  You said she passes out, throws up.  What’s poetic about that?” he asked incredulously.

“She says she can see the wormhole, Rodney,” Carson said with exasperation.  “She experiences movement through space.”

He huffed and grinned with disbelief.  “Yeah, right.”

“You think that’s impossible, then?” Elizabeth asked, frowning at him.

He tilted his head, conceding a little bit.  “Well, no, not impossible.  But pretty unlikely.  Hundreds of people from Earth have experienced gate travel and here in Pegasus, everyone does it.  We’ve never heard reports of anyone experiencing anything like this before.”

“Maybe.  But it’s not a question we ask every bloody person we meet, now is it?  You don’t know that it isn’t a rare phenomenon here or anywhere else.  Oh—and she has a natural ATA gene,” Carson commented, with raised eyebrows.  “She’s heterozygous dominant, like I am.”

Rodney rolled his eyes.  “Well, that would make it even less likely, then, wouldn’t it?  I mean, come on—they were the gate builders.  Why would they rampantly use a technology that made their people sick?  It’s ridiculous.  This woman clearly has issues.”

Elizabeth held up her hand to put an end to the discussion.  “Well, regardless, she’s here and she’s one of the most valuable linguists on Earth.  We’re lucky to have her.  She has some interesting proposals and the IOA has very high expectations for her work.  What kind of support staff have you set her up with?” she asked Rodney pointedly.

He shifted in his chair.  “She’s using one of my best computer specialists right now for her software,” he said, annoyed.

“And?”  

“What?  She hasn’t asked for anything else.”

“At the SGC she supervised a team of scientists, dedicated solely for the purpose of researching artifacts and devices.  Her work comes highly rated.  They say she is thorough, cautious, brilliant.  It would be foolish not to utilize those talents here as well.”

“I’ve read her file,” he said flatly, rubbing his shoe against one of his legs under the table.

“Give her a team, Rodney.”  

He sighed.  They’d already argued about this and Elizabeth wasn’t budging.  He was thinking about rehashing it, bringing up some new arguments, but Elizabeth headed him off with a distraction.

“Ok, you said you wanted to talk about Arcturis?  You said you have a new idea to make that work?  Let’s hear it,” she said, staring at him unblinkingly.

He sat up and cleared his throat.  He knew it was going to be hard to convince Elizabeth to have anything more to do with the project, which she clearly considered a dead topic now.  

“Yes, yes.  I came up with a new idea and I’ve taken the liberty of doing some of the preliminary math.  I think it’s doable.”

Elizabeth leaned in, her brow furrowed.  “What is it?”

“Well, the idea is. . . an alternate reality drive.  I could create a drive, to be installed on one of our ships or a jumper, that would propel the occupants through the dimensional rift so they could map and explore all the relevant alternate realities.”

“And the purpose of this would be?  How is this related to Arcturis?” she asked, her eyes narrowed.

“Well, our last experiment with the interdimensional bridge worked.  It was successful—except that we tapped into an alternate reality that was inhabited by some of our counterparts.”  He shifted in his seat uncomfortably.  “If we could map these realities and come up with a way to use the bridge to connect with a reality that’s uninhabited, then we’d be golden, wouldn’t we?”