A few days later, Walters told Emily he’d reached a point in writing the code where he would need some input from someone with more experience before he could move forward. She would need to talk to McKay about getting some other team members involved. He suggested that Dr. Zelenka or McKay himself were the experts when it came to writing complicated code.
Emily frowned. She had zero experience dealing with difficult supervisors and didn’t have a clue how to approach McKay—Jackson and Lee were diametric opposites of him. She was completely unnerved by his contemptuous dismissal of her. If thoughts of the ridiculous dreams popped into her head, she stomped on them. She was determined to focus on her work, yet that was a source of frustration because she didn’t have the resources she needed to get it done—because of him! She’d been told that her needs would be a priority. Apparently no one told McKay. Or he didn’t care.
She surveyed her lab in disbelief. She had left behind a comfortable, relatively safe life—where she had finally established a few solid friendships—where her work was rewarding, fulfilling, and a source of real happiness. Now she was alone in another galaxy, in actual, real peril, just by virtue of her location, her work, her integrity, dismissed as unimportant.
She’d done this to herself, by hoping for something that apparently she just wasn’t meant to have. That was just. . . she didn’t want to think about that. She had thoughts of returning to the SGC, but dismissed them. She had signed a contract, but that wasn’t all. There was something about this place that had seduced her. It was peaceful here, serene, filled with light and beauty. Her ancestor had lived here and fled to Earth ten thousand years before and that gave her a sense of tangible connection going far beyond the fascinating sensation of being able to control doors and lights with her thoughts. Then there was the intellectual curiosity that she couldn’t deny. This place was a treasure trove of art, architecture and technology—an archeological find unlike anything she could dream of. She couldn’t leave it. Not yet.
If she was going to stay, she would have to fight for what she needed. She just wasn’t sure how that would be accomplished. She knew she was stubborn and that could be useful, but her first concern was how to control her temper so she didn’t sound like a lunatic. She mentally braced herself and asked Walters to show her where she could find McKay. When she learned his lab was just down the hall from her own, she was supremely annoyed. He had not stopped by once to check on her progress, the surly bastard.
The main science lab was a hive of activity. She tracked down McKay who was hunched over a laptop typing furiously. “Dr. McKay?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look up.
“I am returning Walters to you and need to discuss bringing in another computer specialist. In addition, I would like to brief a team of people who could be helpful with the other projects in my lab. If I could present my ideas and protocols once, it would save a lot of time.”
Moments passed and he still hadn’t looked up. She frowned and took a step closer. “Dr. McKay? Excuse me, Dr. McKay, can I please have your attention for a moment? Perhaps an appointment at a later time would be better?”
McKay finally looked up at her, irritation plain on his face. “What? Dr. Freed. Yes. No. There’s never a better time,” he said, glancing at her derisively. Then he shifted his gaze to speak loudly to someone across the room, “Radek! That simulation didn’t work either. We’ll have to narrow the parameters. Try . . . uh,” he stared off in space, right hand working at an invisible keyboard, “one-third less power, ok?”
“Yes!” a frazzled man she assumed was Dr. Radek Zelenka rolled his eyes from across the room. She could have sworn she heard him mutter in Czech that he had suggested that an hour before.
“It’s Freedman,” she said, feeling her face flush and a little heat seep into her voice.
“Hm?” he murmured distractedly.
“My name is Freedman, Dr. McKay,” she said, perhaps louder than she intended.
McKay’s eyes finally came to rest on her, seemingly for the first time. He inspected her appraisingly, not distracted for the moment. “Yes?” he demanded.
Emily sighed and refrained from reminding him that her face was at the top of her body, not under her blue uniform shirt. “I’m returning Walters.”
“Yes, I heard that,” he said flatly, his attention returning to the computer screen.
“A team, then? A programmer?”
McKay rolled his eyes. “We’re busy. It’s hard to spare anyone.”
She was going to have to be firmer. She tried to control her voice so she wouldn’t sound angry. “Dr. McKay, we would all benefit from better translation in our work.”
“I already wrote perfectly adequate translation software.” He waved his hand dismissively, starting to turn away.
She blocked him and strove to appeal to him intellectually, “Yes. It’s serviceable. It’s adequate for rough translations, but completely misses the nuances of the Ancient language. Surely you can see that this could create serious problems in dangerous situations when accuracy is imperative. What I want to create is very sophisticated and will solve that problem. I’m talking about preventing accidents here, Dr. McKay. I’m talking about bringing the database to life—making it useful for everyone—not just for the few people, like me, who can actually read it properly.”
He was starting to walk away but she planted herself in front of him, consciously thwarting him, her voice growing louder, though she continued to try to rein in her tone, “I’m certain you will see the value in that once you give me an opportunity to show you. If you could take a moment to come down to my lab, I can quickly show you what we have so far. And if you could give me a small team to work with for a few hours a day, I can start releasing some of the artifacts to your lab for testing and experimentation.”
“Yes, well, that would be good, wouldn’t it?” He shot her a sarcastic glare. “I wasn’t very happy when Weir made me set those aside. I mean, you aren’t really a scientist, are you?”
“Excuse me?” She was shocked that he would say such a thing.
“Come on, Dr. Freedman. You studied art, architecture, history, languages, right? You’re just a glorified linguist who likes to dig up dusty, old, primitive stuff. Hm? Ancient Egypt is hardly applicable here. You don’t have anything of value to contribute.” He was gesturing dismissively again.
Oh, he had gone too far. She felt her voice rising, her anger becoming clearly evident, but she felt powerless to back down. She rounded on him. “Dr. McKay—are you saying you get to decide whose doctorate is valid and whose isn’t? Because I’d like to be certain you’ve seen my full list of credentials before you throw the last thirteen years of my life away! I may not have a doctorate in physics, but I have studied the hard sciences and math as well as rigorous curricula in archeology. I’ve been working with a team of scientists at the SGC for five years, doing just what I’m supposed to be doing here. When I accepted this position, it was with the understanding that I’d be continuing my work. I am one of the foremost authorities on Ancient dialects—the only authority on the Lantean dialect, I might add. I am, in fact, the person who deciphered the secrets of inverted letters in the Ancient language. I do have something of value to contribute here.”
She started to flounder, but she had captured his attention, finally, she noticed. He was eyeing her warily. Maybe the only way to deal with fire was fire, she thought, tugging on her uniform jacket. With effort, she brought her voice back down a notch and said, with conviction, “I have travelled from another galaxy to do this work in—in a spirit of cooperation, I might add. I’m trying to be patient, but you’re forcing my hand, Dr. McKay. I don’t want it to come to this—but, if you won’t give me what I need, I’ll be compelled to go to Dr. Weir. I’m certain she won’t mind permanently assigning some people to my lab, rather than sharing them with you. And I. . . I will demand only the best, most highly qualified personnel, I assure you.” She paused for a moment dramatically, then hammered her last sentence home, “Either way, my projects will move forward.” She stared him down, realizing after a moment that the room had gone silent, but she kept staring. And then staring some more.
And he glared back. Until finally he looked away, his face reddening, clearly trying to avoid his own temper flare. “Fine,” he grit out and started to slam down his laptop, then, clearly thinking better of it, set it down more carefully.
“What?” she asked contemptuously, her eyes narrowed with doubt.
He tossed his right hand in the air manically, indicating the door. “Let’s go down to your little lab so you can show me what you want my help with. I’ll send over a couple of people after lunch to help you with the devices.”
“Now?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes, now,” he replied, rolling his eyes.
“Good. I want Dr. Zelenka to come as well,” she demanded.
His eyes bulged for a moment, then he bellowed, “Come on, Zelenka! We’re going down to the archeology lab for a few minutes.”
McKay led the way, charging purposefully down the corridor, his right shoulder down and the fingers of his right hand twitching. Dr. Zelenka came up beside Emily and introduced himself quite pleasantly.
She dropped her anger away completely and greeted Zelenka formally, extending her hand. “Dr. Zelenka—what a pleasure to finally meet you after such a long electronic correspondence. I hope you are well?”
As the door to McKay’s lab shut behind them, she could have sworn she faintly heard people cheering.
Acutely aware of McKay’s impatience and doubts, she didn’t waste any time. She ran down her objectives quickly and showed them what Walters had been working on.
McKay was clearly exasperated. “What you’re talking about is incredibly complex, Dr. Freedman.”
“I realize that. The Ancient language is incredibly complex. The lack of punctuation and of spaces between words alone make it difficult for most who study it to read, but that isn’t so very different from languages like Latin. However, unlike Latin, Ancient has a unique way of combining words to create new meaning. And there’s more. My particular expertise lies in the relationships between words with inverted letters, something that we previously had disregarded the importance of. I have discovered that it can greatly change the meaning of a single word or word combination in ways we hadn’t understood before. Here. Let me show you.”
She grabbed a notebook and deftly marked out three words to show them. “These three words mean, at their most fundamental: fire, safety and danger.”
She looked up. Zelenka was nodding agreement and McKay was looking annoyed. She plunged on, “If you combine the first two words like this,” she scribbled again, “it means ‘fire-proof’ more or less. But, now listen carefully, when combined the opposite way,” she continued to write, quickly but accurately, “with one small change, just one letter inverted, it essentially means ‘caution: fire hazard’—and if that isn’t enough for you, you add the third word and it means ‘explosion imminent’.”
She looked at them pointedly. “I can think of about five more permutations of these three words with letter inversions that I personally have seen, all with different shades of meaning. Context is very important, but surely you can see how quickly a person could go from thinking something is fire-proof to blowing themselves up.”
McKay was scowling at the words she had written. Zelenka looked surprised and said, “That could be a problem.”
“Obviously. Gentlemen, this is just one example among thousands—the Ancient vocabulary is immense and far exceeds English in its rampant use of synonym—these three words could easily be replaced with dozens of others and mean relatively the same thing. I have notebooks filled with data that I have compiled on various word families and the effects of inverted letters on meaning and tone. We can’t just have anyone translating these documents. It means risking lives. This software is the only way I can think of to get us to a safer, more effective means of translation—fast. It would take a team of people with my expertise a lifetime to manually translate the entire database—and we don’t have a team. There is no such team in existence. Right now—it’s just me.”
McKay and Zelenka exchanged furrowed brows. McKay was softening, she could see it. He was seeing reason. He hadn’t said anything, but he was clearly thinking very hard.
She sighed, not sure what else she could say that would finally convince him. “Look, we’ve already lost Atlantis once—nearly lost it several other times. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be here forever. We need to get serious about accurately translating and downloading this database and getting as much of it transferred to Earth as humanly possible.”
They stood there a few moments. She searched their faces, but they seemed to be deep in thought and she didn’t want to break the spell. Suddenly, McKay pulled up a stool to the computer station, scrunched up his face, and started scrolling through the code Walters had written. Zelenka joined him there and they started babbling back and forth in technical jargon.
“Perhaps we should add a component of AI,” Zelenka suggested.
“Yes, yes, of course AI. Not too much or it’ll go haywire and find meaning in every letter combination. Just enough to extrapolate from the data she inputs about these inverted letters. Oh, Walker! That just isn’t going to work.” He was typing fervently now.
She watched them work for a little while, but they had clearly forgotten she was there. So, she pulled up a chair at another work station and started back in on translations, books and papers spread out around her. She was working on operating manuals and schematics for various medical equipment and it was very slow going.
* * *
Rodney tapped out a few more keystrokes, scrolled back through the code he had written over the last half hour, and checked his watch. It was mid-afternoon already. He was surprised so much time had passed—Zelenka had left for lunch hours ago. He was starving. He hadn’t expected the project to capture his interest for this long. Freedman’s ideas about the translation software were unique and presented a challenging puzzle.
He stood up and frowned. Freedman was perched on a stool on the other side of the lab, absorbed in some kind of paperwork, scribbling, sorting through piles of paper, books and notebooks before scribbling some more. He shouldn’t have given her such a hard time. Weir had been right to say that he didn’t have adequate time to supervise the research into all of these devices, but he just didn’t like the idea of turning them over to someone else. He felt like he’d earned them. Pulling one of them out of this lab and tinkering with it was his favorite rainy day activity.
He sighed. He had browsed through Freedman’s file. She did have extensive experience dealing with these kinds of artifacts, co-supervising a lab at the SGC with Jackson—and they wouldn’t be here without Jackson, of course. She would be doing the annoying part of the work, he supposed—trying to decode the text and symbols on the devices, trying to find references to them in the database. Maybe he would still get a crack at a few of them, he thought, shrugging. Reading Ancient wasn’t one of his strengths, he knew. Frankly, he sucked at it, but he would never, ever, admit that to another living soul.
He approached her warily; she hadn’t left for lunch either. She was new and he should probably try to be more friendly. He really didn’t want her going to Weir and telling her what an ass he’d been. She’d threatened to do as much and he guessed, considering the big fuss the IOA had made about sending her, maybe she’d been justified. She wouldn’t know or care that he was annoyed by an extra project—a rather weighty project at that—on his plate when there were already so many irons in the fire.
She hadn’t noticed him standing there. He glanced around uneasily. His first impression of her had been that she was just another mousy sycophant. She’d seemed so hesitant and uneasy that night in the mess; he’d caught her sending him strange, furtive looks. She’d proved that theory wrong, though, he thought, a smirk creeping up on his lips. Apparently she would only take so much before she would push back. Her wild-eyed anger had been, well, pretty hot, actually. She could be pretty interesting to have around.
He came to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to look up, so he cleared his throat. She startled precipitously and looked around in confusion for a moment before she noticed him standing there.
“So, what’s all this?” he asked rather pleasantly, he thought.
She blinked a couple of times and stood to face him, searching the room like she expected Zelenka to still be there, too. “This is a translation of medical diagnostic equipment operations manuals and their schematics. It’s the first thing Dr. Weir wanted me to work on.”
He looked at the papers spread out on the bench, puzzled. “But you’re working it out longhand? With reference books? On paper? Looks tedious.” He tried to keep the disdain out of his voice. He really did.
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Yes, yes, of course, that’s why you need me.” He smiled smugly, sticking his hands in his pockets. Of course, don’t they all?
She pressed her lips together and nodded gravely, looking annoyed.
He rubbed his hands together. “Look, um, I was just about to go to the mess for a late lunch. You hungry?” He wasn’t exactly meeting her eyes, but geniality wasn’t his strong suit, especially with women he didn’t know. Hopefully she would see that this was a peace offering.
As if on cue, Freedman’s stomach grumbled audibly. “I think that’s a yes,” she said, smiling broadly and shaking her head. She seemed to stifle a giggle.
“That was impressive.” He smirked. She was really something. “Shall we?”
As they walked down the hall, she asked, “So, Dr. McKay, you haven’t said much about the translation software. Can it be done?”
Who does she think she’s talking to? “Yes, yes, of course. I’m not sure we can manage absolutely everything you’ve imagined, but yes, we can come very, very close. It’s going to take a lot of time though, to write the code and, well, I really don’t envy you—the amount of time required to do the data entry will be staggering, but I think you know that.”
She smiled again, brightly. “Well, that’s a relief. I was told on Earth that I was aiming too high, that I should settle for something that can actually be done. This is really good news.”
He snorted softly. “Who told you that? Dr. Lee?”
“No, I never got a chance to talk to Dr. Lee about it. I had a few scientists with some computer expertise assigned to my lab for some time. One of them was a Dr. Kavanagh. He was the one who told me I could never achieve what I wanted.”
He frowned and raised an eyebrow. “Kavanagh? Pony tail? Real jerk?”
She frowned and nodded, looking a bit mystified. “Um, yes.”
He shook his head slightly. “No imagination. You would have done better with Lee or Carter.”
She shrugged and he could have swore there was a smirk forming on her lips before she said, “They weren’t available to me for such a large project. Things are pretty hopping there most of the time. I started learning C++ in my spare time, but it was slow going with all of my other responsibilities. Although my language ability lent itself to easily understanding the basics of computer code, designing the complex, multilayered algorithms needed for this kind of complicated software was far beyond my limited experience. Walters completely reworked everything I had managed so far in just a few hours.”
She was trying to learn C++? In her spare time? Oh, these liberal arts types. The world is just full of unicorns and fairies to them, isn’t it? “Yes, well, we can’t all be good at everything,” he said, not able to resist a superior lift of his chin.
She seemed to be amused by that, and continued, “No, it’s good to have a niche. So, you see the value, now, in what I want to develop?”
If he hadn’t been looking, he would have thought she was grinding that comment home, but her expression was simply earnest. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes though, as he replied, “Yes, yes, I think it’s quite ingenious and will be. . . very. . . valuable to our work here. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t think of it myself. But, ah, of course, we’d need someone with your language expertise to complete the work.”
“Thank you.” She seemed to smile a secretive little smile to herself.
“Mm.” He waved her ahead of him to the serving line, unconsciously furrowing his brow.
The mess was virtually empty, since it was mid-afternoon. They set their trays down opposite each other and started to eat. She was back to sneaking furtive looks at him, which was unsettling. He couldn’t tell what that was about, exactly.
“So, how many languages do you speak?” he asked. Her file hadn’t been specific on that point.
“Well. . . .” She picked at her food thoughtfully. “I don’t know the exact number. There are so many I’ve studied. Many I’m fluent in. Others. . . conversant. Still others I wouldn’t really count as I haven’t studied them long enough to do much more than translate them with the aid of a reference.”
“Wow. I would think you would keep a tally,” he said, incredulous.
“Well, maybe someone like you would.” She shrugged. But she didn’t make it sound like an insult, just a statement.
“Yes, I would.” He said with certainty and took a big bite of salad.
They ate silently for a few minutes and then she seemed to decide to jump in and fill the silence. “It started when I was very young. My mother knew some Spanish and she knew that childhood was a good time to learn a language. So when I was about three, I guess, she started teaching me and apparently I loved it. I quickly outgrew her knowledge so she hired a native speaker and I learned to read and write Spanish and English at the same time.”
That sounded unusual. His parents had pushed him from a young age, but three? “What does your mother do?”
“She’s a professor of plant science.” She chewed thoughtfully. “So, by the time I was 5, I was fluent in Spanish and over the next few years my mom hired other native speaking tutors for other romance languages—Italian and French. Then I studied the classics, Latin and Greek. I just sucked them all in like a little sponge, she always says. Let’s see, then it was German and Russian—that was by high school. Around that time, I started taking trips. I would go to a different country each summer and enroll in some kind of accelerated, immersion language course. I did Mandarin, then, um. . . .” she paused, like she was trying to remember which language had come next.
“You’re kidding!” He was astonished. “You fluently speak all of those languages? Damn. I’m from Canada and I don’t even speak French!”
She looked down at her tray and shrugged. “Yes. And now many more. It’s like my brain is just wired for it. Maybe because I started so young, what was a facility became a template. I really don’t know. It’s supposed to be harder for adults than for children, but it’s never gotten harder for me. I do know there are others like me. I’ve met them.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. A few. Mm. The egg salad is good.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and continued, “At the SGC I learned Goa Uld and Ancient and several others. It’s my understanding there are some remnants of Ancient spoken as prayers here in Pegasus. I hope to get a chance to observe that while I’m here.”
“Hm.” He couldn’t help but look at her with newfound appreciation. She suddenly seemed more appealing. She was pretty, he thought, his mouth quirking up slightly on one side, but she didn’t seem to know it. She didn’t have any artifice. She talked about her vast knowledge of languages like she was talking about the weather—without any trace of self-importance. He would expect someone who had accomplished so much at such a young age to be supercilious and he would have respected that because of the hard work and drive it must have taken. For her to be completely without vanity was. . . a puzzle.
He realized they were staring at each other intently, then she blinked and looked down, saying, “Yes, well, like I said, it’s nice to have a niche. You have yours and I have mine. I was also interested in science, so I decided on archaeology as my career before I even got to high school. That way the language ability would be an asset instead of an aberration. I just wasn’t interested in working as an interpreter, which was what I was expected to do. I double-majored in anthropology and chemistry as an undergrad and seriously considered biochem for grad school, but decided to continue with anthropology after all. I wasn’t even finished with my doctorate when Dr. Jackson recruited me to the SGC. No education on Earth could have adequately prepared me for that.” She smiled nervously. “Sorry to go on about myself.”
“No, no, that’s just, well, really something.”
“What about you? How did you come to find yourself here?” she asked, looking curious.
“Well, my dad was a Physics professor.” He paused to take another bite.
She seemed to digest this information and rushed to say, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” He was perplexed.
She looked flustered. “Your father, he passed away?”
What was it with women and their non sequiturs? He shook his head. “That’s not where I was going with this, but yes, he did. Anyway. He, ah, insisted we, my sister and I, would be. . . well rounded—read us the classics as bedtime stories, made us study piano, stuff like that. He encouraged our interest in science from an early age. He actually hoped I would be a medical doctor, but I wasn’t cut out for that. But he seemed to be, I don’t know, pleased, that both my sister and I were following in his footsteps, you know. I think he hoped we would one day collaborate and solve the mysteries of the universe together.” He smiled briefly and took another bite. “So, I completed two doctorates, astrophysics and mechanical engineering. Then I was recruited to Area 51 and did some work at the SGC too. There was a brief, unpleasant stay in Russia, then, Antarctica, and then I ended up here.”
“Impressive. Your sister did come here to do some work, recently, didn’t she? Did you solve some important mystery of the universe?” She was smiling again. She seemed prone to smiling a lot which was highly unusual for someone with her level of education, expertise and obvious intelligence. It wasn’t that she wasn’t serious or competent, she just. . . smiled so easily. It was odd, but strangely attractive.
He frowned. “Well, if you know she was here, then you know the answer to that. We thought we had at first, but it was unfortunately at the expense of our counterparts in an alternate universe. It was very disturbing. I’d rather not talk about it. But it was, you know, good to work with my sister.”
She shot him an open, frank look. “You’re lucky to have had a sibling to share your childhood with. It must be a nice feeling to always know there is someone out there who has your back.”
“Mm.” He looked at her quizzically and kept eating. What an odd thing to say.
After a long silence, he shifted uncomfortably in his chair and remembered what Carson had mentioned in the staff meeting other day. “So, ah, you’re the one who gets sick from gate travel, aren’t you? Carson said something about you actually sense the wormhole? What’s that about?”
Freedman sighed and finished chewing, eyeing him uncertainly. “I don’t really know.” She grimaced and looked reluctant. “It’s rather embarrassing.”
“Really? Why?”
She hesitated briefly. “Well, it was bad enough that they suspended me from gate travel. About four years ago, I was put on desk duty because they decided it was too dangerous to send me off-world. You know things can go south pretty quickly off-world and having a team member disoriented and sick for at least twenty minutes after gating, well, that’s not good.” She shrugged and picked at her food, looking sort of miserable, he thought.
“Huh. But you still went through the intergalactic bridge?” If she knew she got sick from gate travel, even if it was just some psychosomatic silliness, why would she decide to go through thirty-four of them at a go?
She looked chastened. “Yes. They told me to wait for the Daedalus, but it’s probably going to take months to repair and get back here and I was impatient to get started. Minutes rather than months sounded like a good trade-off, for some momentary discomfort. But it ended up being worse than that. I, um, passed out,” she admitted. He noted that she looked embarrassed and there even seemed to be some color on her cheeks. “In retrospect, it was a lot of gates. They drugged me up at the midway point though, and. . . the second half was. . . very interesting.”
“How so?” he asked, looking over a big bite of salad.
She set her fork down and frowned, eyebrows knit together. She was hesitating again, but finally said, “Up until then, my experience of the wormhole was not the same instantaneous transfer that everyone else feels. I was always left with an impression that quickly faded as I became. . . overcome with dizziness and nausea. I just. . . couldn’t maintain the concentration to sort of keep the memory of it fully fleshed out.”
“Hm,” he said, watching her closely.
Freedman looked at a point in the distance, as if seeing something in her mind’s eye. “But the second half of the intergalactic bridge was quite different. They medicated me with God only knows what and I was somehow able to stay conscious on the second leg. It seemed to take a really long time to pass through those gates, though, as you know, it was actually only something like fifteen to seventeen minutes.”
He leaned in, listening intently, and she glanced at him, pushing her hair back nervously under his gaze.
“It was such a surprise, really, and nothing I could ever have imagined on my own.” She looked incredulous. “It was like. . . zooming through these tunnels. . . that were comprised of undulating blue-green light. First, in the space between galaxies, it was just darkness and straight, just me and the wormhole—no stars, you know? And then. . . I could see the Pegasus galaxy growing larger and larger in the distance and it was really, incredibly beautiful—like the pictures from NASA, but so much more. . . real. . . three-dimensional. . . and enormously vast. It looks like glittery clouds—all those millions of stars. It was amazing, really.” She glanced at him again, nervously.
He stopped eating and just watched her, frowning. She’s serious, he realized. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. Despite her obvious nervousness, though, she was compelling to listen to.
She pressed on her lips with her fingertips for a moment, thinking. “And then at the edge of this galaxy, the wormhole started to. . . arc around the stars. It was mild at first—something like a roller coaster, I suppose. Tolerable. Even. . . exciting. But then it began to feel like. . . the other times I’d gated—spiraling around star after star. I remember feeling like I’d been sucked into a vacuum cleaner, or something. I think the stars. . . they may have been closer together at that point—clusters, maybe? I don’t know much about how galaxies are formed. I came very close to passing out again, right before we arrived.”
She frowned and furrowed her brow, clearly lost in thought, seemingly forgetting he was even listening. “It was very noisy. I was alone and it was surreal, yet somehow peaceful—until the motion became more violent. But. . . early in the journey, those moments, I. . . well, it felt like I was the only person in the universe and I was given a great gift to see it that way.”
She stopped speaking and looked at him searchingly.
Something about her story seemed familiar. He squinted, trying to place the thought that was just. . . there, then snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Jodie Foster.”
“Jodie Foster?” she repeated vacantly.
He was warming up to the idea. He had to be right. “Contact. The movie. 1997. You saw it, yes?”
She shook her head and then stopped, tilting it a bit, and said, “Maybe? Yes?”
She seriously needed to hear this, before she repeated this absurd story to someone else. He nodded, gesturing at her with his hand, palm up. “It must be some kind of subconscious transference from the movie images.” He sat back smugly with his arms folded, shaking his head. “I bet Beckett never saw that movie. He’s not really into sci fi. Of course that doesn’t explain your physical symptoms, but it’s probably psychosomatic. You might want to have a chat with Heightmeyer over that one.”
Freedman closed her eyes for a moment, then abruptly rose. “I need to get back to work. If you’ll excuse me?” She gathered her things to go, her face blank and expressionless.
He stood up too, feeling suddenly sheepish, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. He found himself babbling at her, “Of course. I’ve got work to do in my lab for the rest of the day. Radek will be working on the software and, ah, I’m going off-world on a mission tomorrow. I’ll be in touch, when I can, to keep you updated on the progress. I’ll, ah, let you know when we’re ready for you to do your data entry.”
“Yes. Thank you,” she said quietly, then started to go.
He sat back down, then immediately stood back up again. “Hey, wait. I didn’t say anything to offend you, did I?”
She stopped in her tracks but didn’t turn.
“I was just thinking aloud. No one really knows what happened out there except for you.”
“It’s ok, Dr. McKay,” she said quietly over her shoulder.
“You can call me Rodney.” He felt a little uneasy for some reason.
She nodded and walked off to return her tray.
“Can I call you Emily?” he called after her. But she didn’t look back.
Rodney sat back down and idly popped a few grapes in his mouth, mulling over her sudden departure. Freedman was something of an enigma. This story—well, there was no way to quantify it, that was for sure, he thought with derision. Yet. . . she hadn’t really wanted to tell it, had she—had gotten quiet and fled when he was disbelieving. It probably wasn’t real, but she thought it was, he realized, rolling his eyes. He’d hurt her puny feelings, he guessed. Why did everyone have to be so sensitive? Wasn’t skepticism what science was about? What else would anyone expect him to say or think? Except. . . she hadn’t been the one to bring it up, had she? He shrugged and frowned.
And what was with that hair? Most of the women around here had rather severe and unimaginative hairstyles, both the scientists and the military women. Freedman’s hair seemed to have a life of its own, coiling and springing in every direction around her face. His sister had curly hair but it was nothing like Freedman’s, which was just. . . wild. She didn’t toss it around coquettishly like some girls he’d known, but it still seemed to find a way to. . . intrude on her comfort or something, and she frequently pushed it back or tucked it behind her ear.
The fact that she stood up to him kind of had him bothered though he didn’t like admitting it to himself, since he had recently started seeing Katie again. It had taken a long time for him to get over the embarrassment of their first disastrous date—with Cadman stuck in his head.
They didn’t spend a lot of time together, but it was a nice, comfortable thing he had going and he was doing his best not to screw it up. Still, he reluctantly admitted to himself, it would be nice to be with a girl who spoke her mind and was willing to challenge him. But who was he kidding? Freedman was probably already attached. He slurped down the last bite of jello, sighed and got up to dump his tray in the tray return so he could return to work, pushing thoughts of the enigmatic Dr. Freedman to the back of his mind.