Eleanor Owens
A month had passed since my final interview, and thanks to General Hammond, I was essentially hired on the spot. I had sold most of my belongings, only what I could pack up in the shipping crate myself and fit in my little car. The route was only a 12-hour drive, but with a nice per diem granted for the move, I decided to break it into a 3-day trip. My background work with a former professor of mine in the southwestern states had paved the road to where I am now, but that didn't mean it was smooth. I never took time to see things along the way when working under his tutelage, and I didn't have the fondest memories of Utah historically from prior work visits. So, I took the time to dust off my hiking boots and walk the Canyonlands again.
I took the time to appreciate the life I was carving out for myself. My older brother was a firefighter in Kansas City. He was so proud of his work and the contributions he made for our home city. A few years ago he died with that same courage and integrity protecting the community we loved, and I think that was the catalyst I needed to leave the self-destructive archeological program I was a part of and move on to my position at Area-51. There I spent a couple of years learning about parts of the Stargate program I was allowed access to and found a new love for the world of cultural anthropology. To imagine worlds out there untouched by Earth, but still so similar to us. Really seeing how humanity spreads across the galaxy and not only survives, but thrives to an extent that they have their own cultures and practices unthought of here. These other civilizations with practices, recipes, stories and songs that make them so uniquely themselves. I could drown myself in back cataloged mission reports and still not have enough reading material to satiate this desire to learn more. When I heard a rumor that a new position was opening up at the Stargate Command I was one of the first to submit my resume thinking there was no way I would ever be offered the spot. It was definitely a surprise that I was accepted, especially since I was on the bottom of the list of qualifications. I was given another week to house hunt, and quickly moved myself into a cozy single bedroom bungalow between the base and downtown. The home was the perfect size for me to start on this new adventure, and there was a working herb garden in the back as a plus.
Now here I was, today on the first day of a new position. I had gone through the security checkpoint gate, and was standing in the parking lot in front of Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base clutching the strap of the distressed leather messenger bag my brother had given me the first day of college. It slumped across my body in nervous anticipation with my hands shaking alongside it. They shouldn't be, after all I had worked hard to get to this point. When I was given that phone call about my acceptance the woman on the HR department line told me that General Hammond seemed to have a real interest in my background work prior to Area-51.
There were multiple papers that I had attempted to have published when working on my doctorate, a doctorate I had never finished. When I sent them out to various journals they were always sent back and dismissed. The premise of them always fell back on the concept that outside forces had intervened in Earth's development. I knew that my old professor, Dr. Edward Yoke, was contracted through the US Military to send certain artifacts back to various bases for inspection. We had been told that it was mostly to make sure that the items remained protected and safeguarded, but seeing the intricate detailed pieces buried alongside clay pottery shards made from tools that would never have been able to smelt or pierce metal, metal that was not even indigenous to the area, I started calculating my own theories. I kept them to myself when I became a running joke among my colleagues, but I still attempted to publish them. Towards the end I had been contacted by Area-51 and offered a position that I couldn't refuse, answers to my turned down papers.
I was told that someone would be waiting to guide me through the tunnels and corridors of the base maze. I needed help with actually getting into the base today, and as I walked toward the bustling intersection of military personnel, businessmen, doctors, scientists, I couldn't help but feel out of place. There was a man standing against a fence looking bored, holding a thin folder in his hands. He was lanky and tall, with golden blonde hair in a perfectly shellacked quiff and dark circles under his eyes. I walked up to him with a false confidence plastered across my face, but knew instantly he could sense I wasn't as collected as I had imagined.
I tried to keep my voice upbeat and cheerful, but it squeaked out, "are you waiting for someone?"
"Owens?" His voice was deep and clearly annoyed.
"Present," I waved my fingers and smiled playfully, but was met with a grimace.
"Follow me." He muttered and we walked inside the tunnel into the base. There was silence between us as I followed behind his fast paced walking, like a duckling trying to keep up with a mother that didn't want them. After what felt like 20 minutes of just endless walking through tunnels of blue and gray walls, we arrived at an office with a camera and a pleasant young man sitting behind a desk. He took my picture, asked what I was doing on the base, and my escort quickly shut down the conversation.
After my ID card was printed, he motioned for me to follow him down further into the depths of the mountain. He briefly would explain that my card allowed access into the base, into any Stargate Command location, and only a Stargate Command location. I nodded and after numerous elevator floors into the depth of the mountain we arrived.
We stepped into a seemingly empty hallway and he led me past offices, explaining each position. Science labs with people tinkering away at multiple side projects, the cafeteria where I was offered a coffee but as I went to accept my escort dragged me back to General Hammond's office. The general gave a small head nod in acceptance through a window and went back to his business. I had sent him an edible arrangement as a thank you for the interview and I was worried now that it was an awkward gesture. I couldn't help myself, I was an over gifter. Any conflict, any scrap of attention tossed my way, I returned tenfold in baked goods or homemade canned jams. I had my mother to thank for that personality quirk. It has been greatly appreciated at my last position as there wasn't really anything else to enjoy in the desert fortress. Once a week I'd bring in cookies or a torte and it felt comforting knowing I was offering something to someone, anyone to enjoy just for a moment. I had a feeling that wouldn't fly as much here. My office at Area-51 was much more secluded with my peers, we were not to interact with Military personnel, we had one job and that was stuck to the items brought to us. Here I could tell that we all seemed to act like a body, each system depending on the other in order to function.
After multiple floors and corridors we made our way to the gate itself. It's as if my organs could sense it, coiling in on themselves and tensing with each step closer. We walked into the gate room and my jaw dropped. A large metal structure was holding the engraved ring in place, a platform was built in front of it for easy access, but the power of the ring itself took a moment to settle in. It sat there, gleaming over its domain, unaware that the vast majority of the world around it had no idea of its existence. I had never even seen a picture of the ring, just descriptions of it and not one of the words used to describe it did the majestic power justice.
"So this is it. Intergalactic travel." My words trembled and I stepped onto the metal grate that led up to the ring.
There was nothing but silence to answer me.
My mind was racing as I spun around and looked up at a group of people huddled around computers looking over us in a wide window. "I feel like it should be bigger. Why is it just the size of a fancy garage?"
"A what?" I heard a laugh from across the space. A tall man in glasses with an arm in a sling was mending what appeared to be a circuit breaker.
My escort rolled his eyes. "Shut it Siler." He started down the hall to leave, and I scurried after him, hoping I would have the time to gawk again at a later date.
"Am I allowed to go in without assistance?"
"Why?" His eyes slid to me and narrowed as I tried to keep up with his long strides.
"Don't you ever just want to touch it? Thousands of years went into that. It's living history, active history."
"The novelty wears off."
"Maybe for those that go through it, it would."
He let out a grunt of disapproval and continued with the tour. "Essentially, your position is to input the cultural data from the established planets that are visited and organize them, as well as their respected resources and relics, that way the information is more readily available for mission debriefing or referencing."
I smiled politely once again, at the man in his dress blues and felt both over and under dressed in a pair of high waisted pleated tweed pants and a black turtleneck. My loafers made small thuds against the slick polished concrete floor behind the various thick soled boots clunking around me. Men and women in lab coats and camouflage, blue suits and flight suits, hazmat covers and then me all making our way through these corridors.
"You're, I guess it would be your office, but it's more like the codex supply room, is in here. It's conveniently located across from Dr. Jackson's office. If you have any questions about where something should go, he'll point you in the right direction." He paused and looked across the hall at the closed door. "Honestly, he'll probably just do it better than you. Or at least, think he can." My smile dropped and I looked back at the closed door. "Though he's usually out in the field with SG-1 midweek."
"Luckily for me, it's Monday." I was attempting to coax answers on where Dr. Jackson may be now. I was keenly aware of the man on paper, knowing prior about his work with the Stargate and all the accolades that he would never publicly be given as I scoured through any files I could grasp at my last position. Like my own personal codex of stories that I had never imagined I would be able to hear first hand. I was excited to be able to work alongside him, but more importantly eager to put my own questions about cultural similarities of humans on different planets to use in studies.
"Is it?" My guide checked his clock. "So it is. Well, inside," he opened the metal door and I saw the dusty room that held crates of tablets in cuneiform and bejeweled sacred jewelry. My eyes widened at the sheer amount of items and the lack of space.
"This is it?" There was no hiding the flat disappointment in my tone.
"Yes? What were you expecting, a museum? Ma'am this is the Air Force, not the Smithsonian."
I took in a deep inhale and then looked back at him. "I'm aware Lieutenant..."
"Erickson."
"Right. Lieutenant Erickson. Where is this all supposed to fit?" I cocked my head to the creaky metal shelves.
"Ah! Yeah, the Asgards have equipped us with a sort of shrink invisible thing." He picked up a small handheld stone and pointed it at a scarab sculpture on the table that seemingly disappeared. "It goes into the computer."
"They're shrunken down to their molecular form and scattered in the atmosphere. You have to point the remote, move it into the box, and give it a file name on your tablet to retrieve it again." A woman with cropped blond hair was in the doorway.
"Colonel Carter," the man coughed.
"Colonel Carter!" I felt my face break into a large smile and reached a hand out as she returned the hello. "I've read some of your mission reports, I am quite a fan of your work."
"Thank you, I will appreciate your work here. It'll make life a lot smoother. Have you met Daniel yet? I know he will look forward to monitoring your progress for a while."
"He isn't in office," Erickson cut off.
I stood there quietly cupping my hands together in front of me as I watched Carter look the man over and squint in disapproval. She began talking to him about an event that happened last week and as my eyes darted back and forth between the two I found he had placed the stone down on the stainless steel table in the middle of the room.
Walking over and lifting the stone I inspected the inscription on it. There was a clear left and right side. I placed a gum wrapper from my pocket onto the table, and swiped my thumb over the right pointed at it. It was gone, in thin air. Thankfully the table was not affected. The sensor in it must detect some mental signaling as well to pinpoint exact precision. I gingerly swiped through the tablet given to me and created a file under the name 'gum,' left it open as I swiped left on the smooth stone and just like that, the tablet showed a file. I clicked on it, and saw a three dimensional form of the wrapper. I swiped right again and saw the wrapper reform on the table where I was pointing. I was thankful in my prior office for being able to have hands-on work with some Asgardian tech, or else I'd be more lost than I already felt.
"I think I have it from here," I interrupted their bickering and they turned in my direction. "Thank you both."
Carter smiled, nodded and walked away. Erickson rolled his eyes and went in the opposite direction. I glanced back at all the crates at my disposal and started on my first task.
After three hours of detailed cleaning, 4 used packages of q-tips, 2 bottles of rubbing alcohol, and a dying battery on my mp3 I gathered up my trash and tied it off. I took my detail brushes and placed them in their case as I heard a cough from behind. I jumped and turned around to see a figure leaning on the lab table behind me. He pushed his wire rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and waved. His dark sandy brown hair was cut short but still managed to look disheveled on top.
"I did introduce myself, but I see now you couldn't hear me." He smiled cordially.
"Hello," I responded, blinking dumbly. "I'm Eleanor Owens." I wrapped the headphones around my portable music player and laid it on the table next to my brush case. "The new cataloguist."
"Daniel Jackson," he got off the table and crossed his arms, "you uh, have this all figured out?"
"I believe so. I'm not sure if there is a method in which you expect it all to be cataloged. General Hammond told me to use my own discretion, but I was told that you may be..."
"Meticulous?"
A small smile tickled at the corners of my lips, "I believe word around town is that you're hard to please."
His hands fell into his pockets and I realized how much taller than me he was even from across the table. He had a black t-shirt and a matching green pair of pants and jacket on. He looked like every other enlisted personnel around us, and it seemed contradictory to everything that I was taught. I'm not sure what I expected though, a plaid blazer with patches on the elbows and a wooden pipe perhaps. I surely wasn't expecting him to look so comfortable, and he was much younger than I had thought. He seemed to be in his mid thirties, and I would be lying if I said that he wasn't attractive, that was definitely something that I had not planned on. "I see I have a bit of a reputation, that's unfortunate. Well, it's better than Jack constantly calling me anal retentive." He pursed his lips to keep back a laugh. "I trust your judgment. However I would do planet, race, religion, and practical use as starting off points."
"I was going to upload them one crate at a time and go from there." I glanced over at my lunch sack and back at him. "Do you have lunch plans? I'd appreciate time to pick your brain on some items I've found."
He nodded and walked toward the door. "I was actually here to ask the same of you. I took the liberty of looking at your past work, and I had some queries over the time you took in the Mojave."
I felt a blush creep over my cheeks. He knew of my work, I didn't have a fraction of the accolades that would even make me remotely noticeable, but here was Dr. Jackson saying he knew of my very hard to find photographs and theories.
I grabbed my lavender vinyl sack lunch and followed him into the dining hall in the attempts at finding an empty table. He took a salad bowl and a plate of the day's entree and sat across from me. We spent lunch conversing about cultural differences in humanities history here and other planets, about our backgrounds and our respective concepts for the work we had coming up. I was engulfed in every word he said, clinging to every sentence and stretching it with questions of my own. The way he seemed genuinely interested in what I was proposing, it was refreshing and unexpected, and for once in a very long time it felt as if someone else was just as interested in what I had to say in return.
A chair scraped beside us and my attention was dragged back to our surroundings. "Daniel," An older man in the same plain black t-shirt and green pants sat down and folded his arms. His eyes were narrowed in confrontation already, head cocked to the side.
"Jack," Dr. Jackson mirrored. "This is Eleanor Owens, it's her first day."
"O'Neill, thank you for the fruit basket."
"The one I sent the general?" I balked.
"Was it for Hammond? Well, I liked the chocolate covered pineapple." He seemed unphased and turned back to Daniel giving him a look that they seemed to share privately between them both and I felt it was my cue to leave.
"Have a pleasant afternoon Dr. Jackson," I turned to O'Neill, "sir."
"It's just Daniel," the corners of his eyes crinkled and I felt a grin echo from mine in return. O'Neill's eyebrow cocked up at his response and my face flattened in embarrassment. I turned on my heels to leave checking my watch. It was already 15:00 and I still had more to do before I wanted to end the day.
Jack
"Daniel." I repeated myself as his eyes followed the woman out the door and snapped back at me.
"Jack." He let out an exhale and I reached for the mandarin on his tray.
"Did you get to meet our newbies yet?" My fingers started to peel away at the orange, bits of lacy pith collecting into a pile that I swept up and placed back onto his tray.
"Yes, her help here will substantially shorten my usual time in office so I can focus my energy elsewhere." I looked back at him blandly, he knew that wasn't what I had asked, but instead he was skirting around the question.
"I'm going to put a pin in that little comment." I plopped a segment into my mouth and grimaced. "I'm talking about Rineman and Torres, our new Inspector Generals two floor up." I swallowed the under ripe piece and put the rest on his tray.
"I have no reason to go up to the Legal office." My answer back was a small shrug. "Do I have a reason to go to Legal, Jack?" His eyes narrowed and I just responded with a look of innocence.
"Others have come to me saying they're poking around. You'd think in their first few weeks they'd focus on getting paperwork filed and all. Clearly the higher ups feel like it wasn't being done justice. But, Dr. Lee mentioned not so casually that Torres just stood in his doorway for an hour with a notepad, then continued on with no questions asked, and has been doing this frequently."
"I haven't had anyone talk to me, then again I'm not always in the office."
"Do you keep it locked?"
"No, if anyone needs a book or whatever else I may be working on, I tend to not shut people out."
"Apparently that's Owen's job now. Lock your door." I stood up, feeling I had made my point, and went to go find Teal'c for our sparring match.
Eleanor
The day had ended with a swell of excitement, and I was looking forward to being able to make myself a permanent resident within this eclectic family. I gathered up all my belongings, taking the extra notes of what I needed to bring from home to make the office a space more or less a reflection of me. When walking around through the day I noticed some members had pictures of their loved ones, awards, even plants on shelves. I'd like a pothos or two to be honest, something to breathe life into the space. I had peeked my head into Dr. Jackson's office across from me after lunch and noticed that he had brought bookshelves worth of art pieces, and a small couch even in his spacious room. If I was going to be on my feet for a large chunk of the day, the least I could do was have a soft cushioned rug under my feet.
I turned off the lights and shut the door behind me when I heard a grating voice down the hall. "Owens!" I took in a deep sigh and turned to him.
"Lt. Erickson?"
"I'm supposed to walk you out today so you don't end up," he sucked in his teeth and squinted, "lost."
"Thank you," I nodded, "whenever you're ready, I can be escorted." He broke his conversation with a group of men that were crowded around him, and walked up beside me. There was an awkward silence that lingered with us all the way to the elevator. He pressed and held down the main floor button until the doors snapped shut and I felt the creaky whoosh of the lift.
"How was your day?" The question felt more of a formality than genuine, but surprising from him nonetheless.
"Very nice. I anticipate that there will be a lot of challenging and frustrating days in the future. In the best way of course."
There was a pregnant pause and he glanced over at me as I pretended to be unaware. "I saw you at lunch with Dr. Jackson."
"Yes, it was nice to have an introduction. I suppose we will be working alongside each other frequently."
"Like your supervisor?"
"No." My voice took on a flat annoyed tone. "General Hammond made it very clear this was a private contracted position. I report to him alone, and have the ability to work on projects assigned by anyone needed."
"In that case, I would be wary of Jackson." The elevator doors opened up to a lobby with other uniformed personnel flooding in as we walked out through the glass turnstiles, through the tunnel into the base of the mountain, and into the parking lot.
"Thank you for your concern lieutenant." We kept walking and I searched around for my keys in my bag to keep myself busy.
"SG1 has a reputation for being, well, assholes. They get whatever they want, when they want, and the rest of us have to fight for any sort of recognition or a scrap of funding for our own missions. Jackson's the same with his main character syndrome. He'll use you to do all his pointless work, and free up time to go on expeditions someone else hasn't had the opportunity to do."
"To my knowledge, he is the head of the research department and a leading expert on many fields here. I feel like that gives a little leniency." We had reached my dark green Mini Cooper and I put my hand on the door.
"Fields that he conveniently discovered." He tsked and looked at me flatly. "You're already standing up for him."
"I don't know him, to be fair I don't know any of you." I opened the door and tossed my bag in. "But thank you for walking me out to my car, and for the warning. I can assume you'll allow me to drive home unaccompanied now."
He scowled and walked away shouting back over his shoulder. "I'll see you tomorrow at 7 by the front door."
"Looking forward to your cheery face." I muttered and slid into the malt leather seats looking forward to sinking into my new couch with leftover take out and reruns on TV.