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Fic: Dreams of Convenience
Teaser
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
CHAPTER FIVE
John Sheppard suspected that his job would be a great deal easier if Atlantis didn’t flood every time there was trouble with the computers. Being at sea fulfilled several mythic components of the Atlantis legend and meant that things generally smelled nice, but it was a pain a lot of the time. When he was on the mainland and thought no one was watching, John Sheppard had been known to do things like pet trees and watch the grass grow.
This particular flood had produced no lingering damage and had served the bonus of putting off his appointment with Heightmeyer for almost two hours. High school, particularly the end, was not John’s favourite time to remember and this memory in particular was painful. He didn’t like rehashing his failures, or things he considered his failures, even if it might mean saving the city.
“What happened after the game?” Heightmeyer had two voices and this one was kind of infuriating.
“We had a party. It was homecoming of senior year.” This had been bad enough. He wasn’t going to give her any more than she needed.
“Did Alia go with you?”
“No,” John said. “She wasn’t invited.”
“Did it rain?”
“It poured.” John knew he was going to have to tell her eventually. “It poured just like the almanac said it would. She was a good driver and that truck was dependable, but she slid…hydroplaned…and…that was the end.”
“I’m sorry John.” No one was a doctor here, and no one had rank. It made him feel a bit better.
“I could have – ” John said and then stopped. He couldn’t have. He’d always known that.
“I know, John.”
John left the office feeling heavy and wishing the sun wasn’t shining quite so brightly.
------
“I don’t see how this is going to help you.”
“Ronon…please just tell me what you’re dreaming.”
“It’s my dream. It’s none of your business.”
“Please, Ronon. Just a little bit.”
“I fight.”
“The Wraith?”
“No…some girl. It’s just training.”
“Is she Satedan?”
“How could that possibly matter?”
“Just answer the question.”
“She’s not wearing a uniform and I don’t recognize her. She could be from anywhere.”
“And you only fight?”
Ronon glowered at her.
“Okay…you only fight.”
------
Rodney always paced when he came to talk to Kate. She moved her chair specifically for his appointments so she could see him where ever he was in the room. He rampaged up and down her office like a drunken gazelle and ranted about the various neuroses that other people had that he dealt with effectively on his own and thus did not need her assessment of his character. She generally tried to book him the last appointment on Friday afternoons.
“I’m right on the edge of something big,” Rodney said, fiddling with one of the puzzle sculptures on her desk. “I can feel it. It’s major. A huge breakthrough. My dream might be the key to this whole thing.”
“Do you ever get to the end of it?” The key with Rodney was to provoke him. If he thought she was asking stupid questions, he would talk her ear off.
“No!” Rodney set the puzzle down and moved to the window slats. “Someone always wakes me up.”
“How far do you get before you get interrupted?”
“The Wraith attack.” Rodney peered out the window and then ran his finger on the ledge, apparently checking for dust. “You really should clean these things.”
“I’ll have a word with my staff,” Kate said sarcastically. “What happens when the Wraith attack?”
“Alarms, panic, explosions…the usual.”
“And that’s when you wake up.”
“Yes. I am about to save the world, and then I wake up.” Rodney moved back to the desk and picked up another puzzle.
“That must be very frustrating.” Sometimes she just couldn’t resist.
“Yes. I am so glad I could finally talk to someone who is qualified to point that out to me. I never would have figured that out by myself.”
“Is there a woman in your dream who is not a member of the expedition?”
“How did you know that?” Rodney set the puzzle down and for the first time in her memory, gave her his full attention. It was mildly unsettling.
“Rodney – ”
“Right.” He paused. “Yes. Her name is Alison. She’s…a scientist. She’s the one who works with me.”
Kate looked out the window for a moment, deep in thought. She looked back at Rodney, who was actually sitting in the chair where he was supposed to be.
“Thank you, Rodney,” she said. “That’s enough for now.”
------
Kate sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands. Radek moved about the room setting things in order. He was compulsively neat and always tidied up before he went to bed. Apparently, he bought into that ‘cluttered mind’ thing Kate’s mother had always tried to sell her. He chattered away to her, studiously avoiding any mention of dreams, about the various riddles from the day. Right in the middle of laughing about how blue jell-o might help them save the city, he realized that she wasn’t listening and came to sit beside her.
“What is it?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
“There is just so much of it!” She was suddenly on the edge of tears and he pulled her into his arms, murmuring things she didn’t understand in her ear.
“It’s always like that.” She felt his smile press against her head. “When Colonel Sheppard’s team got stuck in the wormhole, I was so terrified. I couldn’t go into the briefing with the others. I was afraid my words wouldn’t get out and that they would shoot all my ideas down. I went straight to the jumper bay, not because I had an idea, but because I didn’t want to face the others.”
“But you worked it out. You always work it out.”
“But never by myself.” He pulled her face around so that she was looking at him. “Everything this galaxy has ever put in our path needed collaboration. Someone always gets an idea, but then someone else always works alongside to finish it.”
“I’m not supposed to break confidentiality.”
“You don’t have to,” Radek said. “What do you need?”
“I…need to know what links the dreams.” Kate hesitated. “I know what links all the dreams; I just have to picture it somehow.”
“Then find someone who can picture it. If I’ve learned anything in the past few days, it’s that the people on this expedition have a wide variety of talents.”
“I’m not used to being in the centre of things.” Kate smiled a little. “I usually just mop up afterwards.”
“Welcome to Atlantis, muj drahy.”
“Will you teach me Czech?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I will no longer have my mysterious allure.”
She giggled. And that was the end of that conversation.
------
“Dr. Weir?” Kate said from the door to Elizabeth’s office.
“Yes?” Elizabeth looked up from the screen and then smiled. “Dr. Heightmeyer. Please, come in. Just give me a moment.”
Kate took the seat across from Elizabeth and waited for Elizabeth to finish whatever riddle she was collaborating on.
“More language riddles. I hate puns in foreign languages.” Elizabeth smiled and turned her full attention to Kate. “What can I do for you?”
“Do we have a composite sketch artist with us?” Kate asked with no preamble.
“You mean someone who draws faces from descriptions? Like at a police station?” Elizabeth confirmed.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“I know we have some artists.” Elizabeth said. “I’ll ask around and see who will come forward.”
“Thank you, Dr. Weir,” Kate said. “I’ll need to set up another round of appointments with all the dreamers too.”
“I figured as much.” Elizabeth smiled. “I knew you’d figure it out.”
“I haven’t figured it out, Dr. Weir,” Kate said, also smiling. “But we will.”
------
“Okay, that’s just creepy.”
The conference table was covered with sketches, one from every person who had been in the room when the flash went off. Kate had used three different artists just to be sure but the results were the same. Regardless of who described the girl from the dream or who drew the picture, there were thirty pieces of paper in front of her and all of them looked up at her with the same face.
“How is this even possible?”
“I’m not exactly sure, Dr. Weir,” Kate said, looking away from the table in front of her to the laptop computer that held her results and observations. “I had a hunch, but…this is a surprise to me as well.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” John said.
“Yes, Colonel, we can see that,” Rodney snapped.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” John added. “This is not…my friend. I mean it looks like the girl in my dream and the girl in my dream was Alia, but that is not her.”
“He’s right,” Elizabeth said suddenly. “My dream takes place in South Africa. The girl is black. I…I don’t know why I never thought about it, but John’s right. It’s not her…but it is.”
“Colonel Sheppard and Dr. Weir are correct,” Teyla said. “This is very strange.”
Ronon shuffled through several of the sketches but remained silent.
“That’s why there was a flash!” said Rodney, snapping his fingers. “Radek said that the data wiped itself to a black screen and the flash came from somewhere else, but we haven’t really had the time to look into it yet.”
“I ran some brain scans on a few of the people who were in the room,” Carson said. “Everyone is healthy, but I noticed some oddities in the CAT scans that I did. Usually when a person dreams, memory centres all across the brain are activated. Every scan I took has activity in the same place.”
“How can we all be remembering the same thing?” Ronon asked.
“We aren’t,” Carson said. “It’s not the memory itself; it’s where the memory is located.”
“Theoretically, the moral centres of the brain will always be located in the same place,” Kate said quietly.
“Yes, and you could publish if you could come up with an explanation that didn’t involve alien intervention,” Rodney snarked. “How exactly does this help us?”
“Could it not be what the Ancestors intended?” Teyla asked
“What do you mean?” Kate replied.
“When we first encountered the ethical questions, we thought it might have been a failsafe to prevent an intelligent but malevolent race from accessing highly sophisticated technology. Could not the Wraith or perhaps even the Genii pretend to know the answers if faced only with a computer?”
“She has a point,” John agreed.
“Would it not then follow that our dreams provide them with some further insight to our personalities?” Teyla asked.
“That’s the hypothesis I was trying to prove,” Kate admitted. “I don’t have the slightest idea how they did it, but testing your subconscious minds might be the way you finally pass or fail this test.”
Rodney’s computer beeped loudly and everyone started.
“Uh…sorry. I have it set to go off when someone asks to submit a riddle-answer,” Rodney apologized. “I’ve been monitoring this one myself, and it looks pretty good. I can’t see any glaring errors in it in any case.”
“Enter it,” Elizabeth said.
Rodney tapped a few keys and then entered his security code and the code that would translate the answer into Ancient. Kate took the opportunity to fix a few of the spelling mistakes she’d made while typing her notes on the way to the briefing when suddenly, the screen went black.
“Rodney?” she exclaimed, instinctively pulling her hands back from the keyboard.
“I don’t…It just.”
“Not again,” Ronon mumbled.
“Wait!” Zelenka said. “Something’s happening.”
White pixels appeared on every running computer in the city of Atlantis. They increased in number and moved faster across the screen, spinning randomly. Finally they began to take shape and resolved to a single Ancient word.
“Sleep,” said Elizabeth, looking over Kate’s shoulder. There were several moments of silence. “Looks like we have the last part of the test.”
------
Chapter Six
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
CHAPTER FIVE
John Sheppard suspected that his job would be a great deal easier if Atlantis didn’t flood every time there was trouble with the computers. Being at sea fulfilled several mythic components of the Atlantis legend and meant that things generally smelled nice, but it was a pain a lot of the time. When he was on the mainland and thought no one was watching, John Sheppard had been known to do things like pet trees and watch the grass grow.
This particular flood had produced no lingering damage and had served the bonus of putting off his appointment with Heightmeyer for almost two hours. High school, particularly the end, was not John’s favourite time to remember and this memory in particular was painful. He didn’t like rehashing his failures, or things he considered his failures, even if it might mean saving the city.
“What happened after the game?” Heightmeyer had two voices and this one was kind of infuriating.
“We had a party. It was homecoming of senior year.” This had been bad enough. He wasn’t going to give her any more than she needed.
“Did Alia go with you?”
“No,” John said. “She wasn’t invited.”
“Did it rain?”
“It poured.” John knew he was going to have to tell her eventually. “It poured just like the almanac said it would. She was a good driver and that truck was dependable, but she slid…hydroplaned…and…that was the end.”
“I’m sorry John.” No one was a doctor here, and no one had rank. It made him feel a bit better.
“I could have – ” John said and then stopped. He couldn’t have. He’d always known that.
“I know, John.”
John left the office feeling heavy and wishing the sun wasn’t shining quite so brightly.
------
“I don’t see how this is going to help you.”
“Ronon…please just tell me what you’re dreaming.”
“It’s my dream. It’s none of your business.”
“Please, Ronon. Just a little bit.”
“I fight.”
“The Wraith?”
“No…some girl. It’s just training.”
“Is she Satedan?”
“How could that possibly matter?”
“Just answer the question.”
“She’s not wearing a uniform and I don’t recognize her. She could be from anywhere.”
“And you only fight?”
Ronon glowered at her.
“Okay…you only fight.”
------
Rodney always paced when he came to talk to Kate. She moved her chair specifically for his appointments so she could see him where ever he was in the room. He rampaged up and down her office like a drunken gazelle and ranted about the various neuroses that other people had that he dealt with effectively on his own and thus did not need her assessment of his character. She generally tried to book him the last appointment on Friday afternoons.
“I’m right on the edge of something big,” Rodney said, fiddling with one of the puzzle sculptures on her desk. “I can feel it. It’s major. A huge breakthrough. My dream might be the key to this whole thing.”
“Do you ever get to the end of it?” The key with Rodney was to provoke him. If he thought she was asking stupid questions, he would talk her ear off.
“No!” Rodney set the puzzle down and moved to the window slats. “Someone always wakes me up.”
“How far do you get before you get interrupted?”
“The Wraith attack.” Rodney peered out the window and then ran his finger on the ledge, apparently checking for dust. “You really should clean these things.”
“I’ll have a word with my staff,” Kate said sarcastically. “What happens when the Wraith attack?”
“Alarms, panic, explosions…the usual.”
“And that’s when you wake up.”
“Yes. I am about to save the world, and then I wake up.” Rodney moved back to the desk and picked up another puzzle.
“That must be very frustrating.” Sometimes she just couldn’t resist.
“Yes. I am so glad I could finally talk to someone who is qualified to point that out to me. I never would have figured that out by myself.”
“Is there a woman in your dream who is not a member of the expedition?”
“How did you know that?” Rodney set the puzzle down and for the first time in her memory, gave her his full attention. It was mildly unsettling.
“Rodney – ”
“Right.” He paused. “Yes. Her name is Alison. She’s…a scientist. She’s the one who works with me.”
Kate looked out the window for a moment, deep in thought. She looked back at Rodney, who was actually sitting in the chair where he was supposed to be.
“Thank you, Rodney,” she said. “That’s enough for now.”
------
Kate sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands. Radek moved about the room setting things in order. He was compulsively neat and always tidied up before he went to bed. Apparently, he bought into that ‘cluttered mind’ thing Kate’s mother had always tried to sell her. He chattered away to her, studiously avoiding any mention of dreams, about the various riddles from the day. Right in the middle of laughing about how blue jell-o might help them save the city, he realized that she wasn’t listening and came to sit beside her.
“What is it?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
“There is just so much of it!” She was suddenly on the edge of tears and he pulled her into his arms, murmuring things she didn’t understand in her ear.
“It’s always like that.” She felt his smile press against her head. “When Colonel Sheppard’s team got stuck in the wormhole, I was so terrified. I couldn’t go into the briefing with the others. I was afraid my words wouldn’t get out and that they would shoot all my ideas down. I went straight to the jumper bay, not because I had an idea, but because I didn’t want to face the others.”
“But you worked it out. You always work it out.”
“But never by myself.” He pulled her face around so that she was looking at him. “Everything this galaxy has ever put in our path needed collaboration. Someone always gets an idea, but then someone else always works alongside to finish it.”
“I’m not supposed to break confidentiality.”
“You don’t have to,” Radek said. “What do you need?”
“I…need to know what links the dreams.” Kate hesitated. “I know what links all the dreams; I just have to picture it somehow.”
“Then find someone who can picture it. If I’ve learned anything in the past few days, it’s that the people on this expedition have a wide variety of talents.”
“I’m not used to being in the centre of things.” Kate smiled a little. “I usually just mop up afterwards.”
“Welcome to Atlantis, muj drahy.”
“Will you teach me Czech?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I will no longer have my mysterious allure.”
She giggled. And that was the end of that conversation.
------
“Dr. Weir?” Kate said from the door to Elizabeth’s office.
“Yes?” Elizabeth looked up from the screen and then smiled. “Dr. Heightmeyer. Please, come in. Just give me a moment.”
Kate took the seat across from Elizabeth and waited for Elizabeth to finish whatever riddle she was collaborating on.
“More language riddles. I hate puns in foreign languages.” Elizabeth smiled and turned her full attention to Kate. “What can I do for you?”
“Do we have a composite sketch artist with us?” Kate asked with no preamble.
“You mean someone who draws faces from descriptions? Like at a police station?” Elizabeth confirmed.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“I know we have some artists.” Elizabeth said. “I’ll ask around and see who will come forward.”
“Thank you, Dr. Weir,” Kate said. “I’ll need to set up another round of appointments with all the dreamers too.”
“I figured as much.” Elizabeth smiled. “I knew you’d figure it out.”
“I haven’t figured it out, Dr. Weir,” Kate said, also smiling. “But we will.”
------
“Okay, that’s just creepy.”
The conference table was covered with sketches, one from every person who had been in the room when the flash went off. Kate had used three different artists just to be sure but the results were the same. Regardless of who described the girl from the dream or who drew the picture, there were thirty pieces of paper in front of her and all of them looked up at her with the same face.
“How is this even possible?”
“I’m not exactly sure, Dr. Weir,” Kate said, looking away from the table in front of her to the laptop computer that held her results and observations. “I had a hunch, but…this is a surprise to me as well.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” John said.
“Yes, Colonel, we can see that,” Rodney snapped.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” John added. “This is not…my friend. I mean it looks like the girl in my dream and the girl in my dream was Alia, but that is not her.”
“He’s right,” Elizabeth said suddenly. “My dream takes place in South Africa. The girl is black. I…I don’t know why I never thought about it, but John’s right. It’s not her…but it is.”
“Colonel Sheppard and Dr. Weir are correct,” Teyla said. “This is very strange.”
Ronon shuffled through several of the sketches but remained silent.
“That’s why there was a flash!” said Rodney, snapping his fingers. “Radek said that the data wiped itself to a black screen and the flash came from somewhere else, but we haven’t really had the time to look into it yet.”
“I ran some brain scans on a few of the people who were in the room,” Carson said. “Everyone is healthy, but I noticed some oddities in the CAT scans that I did. Usually when a person dreams, memory centres all across the brain are activated. Every scan I took has activity in the same place.”
“How can we all be remembering the same thing?” Ronon asked.
“We aren’t,” Carson said. “It’s not the memory itself; it’s where the memory is located.”
“Theoretically, the moral centres of the brain will always be located in the same place,” Kate said quietly.
“Yes, and you could publish if you could come up with an explanation that didn’t involve alien intervention,” Rodney snarked. “How exactly does this help us?”
“Could it not be what the Ancestors intended?” Teyla asked
“What do you mean?” Kate replied.
“When we first encountered the ethical questions, we thought it might have been a failsafe to prevent an intelligent but malevolent race from accessing highly sophisticated technology. Could not the Wraith or perhaps even the Genii pretend to know the answers if faced only with a computer?”
“She has a point,” John agreed.
“Would it not then follow that our dreams provide them with some further insight to our personalities?” Teyla asked.
“That’s the hypothesis I was trying to prove,” Kate admitted. “I don’t have the slightest idea how they did it, but testing your subconscious minds might be the way you finally pass or fail this test.”
Rodney’s computer beeped loudly and everyone started.
“Uh…sorry. I have it set to go off when someone asks to submit a riddle-answer,” Rodney apologized. “I’ve been monitoring this one myself, and it looks pretty good. I can’t see any glaring errors in it in any case.”
“Enter it,” Elizabeth said.
Rodney tapped a few keys and then entered his security code and the code that would translate the answer into Ancient. Kate took the opportunity to fix a few of the spelling mistakes she’d made while typing her notes on the way to the briefing when suddenly, the screen went black.
“Rodney?” she exclaimed, instinctively pulling her hands back from the keyboard.
“I don’t…It just.”
“Not again,” Ronon mumbled.
“Wait!” Zelenka said. “Something’s happening.”
White pixels appeared on every running computer in the city of Atlantis. They increased in number and moved faster across the screen, spinning randomly. Finally they began to take shape and resolved to a single Ancient word.
“Sleep,” said Elizabeth, looking over Kate’s shoulder. There were several moments of silence. “Looks like we have the last part of the test.”
------
Chapter Six
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We're almost done, I promise.
no subject
You know, that's really the best reason ever for not publishing an article. I wish we could use it.
Thought I was never going to review, huh? I am amused in many, many ways, that despite everything Radek still comes across as smarter in this than Rodney, which is pretty much typical. And also lovely. I kinda want to cuddle Radek to death.
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