She's all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is.
John Donne, The Sun Rising


    Atlantis was an unusual environment. In terms of social interactions, it was a closed space. The expedition team was about sixty-five percent scientists and thirty-five percent military presence, and each and every individual was away from his or her home territory. They were inside the bounds of no particular country, under no truly defined rules as set by a particular government. While they had the Stargate and could travel to other worlds, off-world travel was limited to specific teams, and even then friendly faces were rare.

    Isolation.

    On the other hand, personnel were in close quarters at all times. Actual "live" sectors of the city only accounted for a small percentage of the over-all space due to power constraints. The Gate Room served as a city-centre with all activity spiralling out around it, dense, close, packed. Labs, living quarters, military space; all of it taking up as much room as maybe two large high schools, surrounded by empty, dead hallways that could probably overlap with most of Manhattan. If you didn't run into someone in the halls, chances were that was due to a hostage situation.

    It had to happen eventually, really. When Rodney yells at his staff, or his team, or his bosses, or the soldiers, no one cowers or ducks or takes cover. They laugh or grin or yell back. That's how he knew he was in the right place, doing the right things with the right people. Everyone on the base is at least moderately intelligent in their respective fields, even the grunts and the cooks. They know what they're doing, they know Rodney is all bark and no bite, and they're not afraid to fight back. Rodney actually prefers that they fight back. Obviously.

    But Rodney is also not the most social of people. He can go for weeks without talking to anyone while working on a theory, and he doesn't miss that interaction. After his work has reached a stable point, he'll talk endlessly with sharp, wide-sweeping gestures and exaggerated expressions; will pack all those weeks of missed interaction into a small space, but at the end of the day he still wants time alone. Space.

    And now, well, Rodney has far better things to do with his time than patronize people with mundane questions. His brain is so full of understanding and information and ideas coalescing in his subconscious that it might actually be better, he thinks, if everyone took the week off until the Wraith attack would be over. Just give him some space and quiet so he can work without having to worry about the others mindlessly prodding the delicate and very dangerous equipment.

    The headache builds slowly.

    Partly, it is probably due to a lack of sleep. But who needs sleep when there's work to be done and so much information spilling out? Not Rodney. Rodney is busy. Rodney is important. Rodney is the only person with enough understanding of Ancient tech to rub together.

    Partly, it is probably due to being surrounded by frantic idiots. There is something about having three hives descending (though that's really the wrong word, he thinks, since regardless of whether or not they are on a planet, the ships are in space and so there is no "up" or "down", there is only that way or this way) that makes people freak out. Makes them freak out as if they didn't fully trust that Rodney McKay, certified genius, could get them out alive.

    Except they're not going anywhere. They're going to blow the hives away like dandelion fluff, with a soft exhalation of breath. Nothing more, nothing less. It will require less effort than most events to date have.





    "Just stick that one next to this one," Rodney gestures impatiently, his other hand fully occupied with a third ancient device. "And make sure they're touching."

    "But Dr. McKay, these two devices have nothing to do with each other!"

    Rodney spares a look out of the corner of his eye. "They're both Ancient. That's all they need to have in common." Common in an entirely different sense from the one he's currently ascribing to a certain scientist's intelligence.

    "But--"

    "Nanobots! It ran out of nanobots and so obviously it needs a transfer for just a few seconds and then they can replicate on their own!" The scientist shoves the two devices together with clumsy, killing hands (he is so, so fired when they find a way to contact Earth and the SGC) and storms out of the room.

    "Rodney," and Zelenka has the right idea, at least sounds a little angry, "I do not believe that shouting at him was necessary. This is not like you." What? What? So much for Zelenka.






    "Elizabeth," Carson says, stepping into her office and closing the door, "I'm afraid we have a problem."

    Atlantis is, in so many ways, one problem and one gift after another. "What is it?"

    "I've been researching the device," he explains, hands tucked and pressed deep into the pockets of his lab-coat, a nervous gesture, "and I don't think it was meant to be used repeatedly. Major Sheppard said that Rodney fired it several times--" over and over and over, Sheppard had said, eyes a little wild and hands clenched against his thighs, "but I believe that it only required a single fire."

    "Possible effects?" She needs to cut straight to the point; there are two days left after today.

    "I don't know, but certainly nothing good."

    If one of the other scientists were in the room, one of the meaner ones or someone pointedly unkind, they might have made a blue screen of death joke. Elizabeth's hand goes to her radio.






    The Puddle Jumper is already two-thirds of the way to the satellite. There is no point in recalling it when they are already so close to the goal, to a very serious first line of defence. There is also no point in advising either of the members accompanying Rodney to watch for any unusual behaviour. He would hear, or know, or observe, and that could only make things worse.

    Elizabeth took thirty-three seconds to stare at her hands and wish she could fix everything. That was all the time she could devote to regrets.






    In the two years that Rodney had lived in the States, three things had bothered him. One was that the money all looked the same, which was stupid when you wanted to just dig into your wallet and grab something blue to pay for your coffee with. He shouldn't have to look at the numbers on the boring not-quite-green papers. Also, the pictures on their currency sucked.

    The second was that people laughed at him for his accent, his slang and sometimes even his common word usage or spelling. Frequently, they asked him if he was sure, because of the Raising*. Which was stupid, because everyone knew that chesterfield and serviette and zed were perfectly acceptable words used just about everywhere except in America**.

    The third, and the most annoying of all, was the forced educational interaction. While Rodney was mentally in his third year of University (College they called it there, even though if he had been in Toronto his college would have been a sub-set of his University or, god forbid, a technical school), the teachers and doctors at his very expensive school thought that he needed to "interact with people his own age". Which meant that three days a week Rodney attended third year lectures at the College, and two days a week he was forced to sit through a "gifted" grade six class. (Sixth grade they called it.)

    Grade six was boring, stupid, pointless, and filled with moronic barely-teenaged girls who fussed over what colour to paint their nails and boys who spent much of their time snickering over Dr. Who and completely missing the point of any given episode.

    Social Interaction, Rodney learned quickly, was really, really dumb.






    The only real problem Rodney had found with the device was that the information didn't make him a better pilot, or make the Ancient tech respond to him any faster or more easily. He knew what things did, intuited how to fix them, but as for skill or finesse, he still needed a pilot (often Sheppard), other pairs of hands. A device that should have made Rodney more fully autonomous and independently capable only made him feel more dependent than he ever had before.

    It was almost a physical pain, that incompetence.

    His headache built, slowly.







    The rear compartment was stocked with two Naquadah generators, several control crystals, some of the smooth, cool Ancient wiring and a pile of the clumsy, awkward tools that Earthlings used for fixing delicate equipment. Rodney spent eighteen minutes moving the equipment to the front compartment and re-sorting it into bags for use in a zero-gravity environment or, god forbid, in space. "Whose bright idea was this?"

    While Grodin was smart enough to play technician on some of the control-centre equipment, he was certainly nowhere near Rodney's intelligence, even pre-device. Miller, their pilot, was so incredibly less intelligent that he barely ranked as "sentient" on Rodney's current sliding-scale, and his piloting skills were certainly no match for Sheppard's.

    Fifteen hours in a 'Jumper with two morons was nowhere near Rodney's definition of fun. Not that he had much time for fun lately-- there was far too much work to do before the Wraith arrived.

    The amount of space being wasted, devices being uselessly prodded back in the city without his input was enough to have him twitchy twenty minutes into the ride.






    It looked a lot like some of the crystals Rodney had seen under microscopes in his chemistry classes. Sharp, angular and direct spikes extending away from a central point; beautiful like something found in nature, efficient like few man-made things would ever be. Even dark and without power it had a look of light about it, some undefinable sparkle that danced along the relays under Rodney's skin and made his hands itch to touch it.

    If he could get this working he could finally use some of the knowledge filtering through his brain to invent something new.

    Second-generation Atlantean equipment.







    "How much can we save?"

    "Pardon?"

    "The Ancient database," Elizabeth clarified, crossing her arms and staring past the self-destruct simulation. "We brought hundreds of hard-drives with us originally. How much do you think we could save?"

    "With Rodney's improved compression code?" Zelenka's eyes lifted upwards to some imaginary visual mathematics hovering just above his forehead. "Ten... maybe thirteen?"

    "Percent?"

    How do you decide what parts of a civilization to save when you don't know what they were trying to tell you?






    Even docking the Jumper was clean, easy; parts sliding into place like less than ten thousandths of a second had passed since their last activation instead of ten thousand years. His space suit took away some of the elegance and clarity from the situation, of course, but there were precautions that had to be taken. Oxygen levels, pressurization, power sources... A necessary evil designed some decades ago.






    Grodin was really a perfect example of how far beyond them all Rodney was. Peter Grodin was agruably one of the best and brightest technicians on Atlantis, which was why Rodney and Elizabeth had agreed that he should be in charge of the main control centre above the Gateroom in the first place.

    But Grodin was so incredibly dumb. Compared to Rodney he was a complete moron, incapable of following even the simplest of requests.

    "Hold on," Rodney snapped, "I need to--"

    Gravity re-engaged.






    "Ow!"

    "Sorry! I thought you were ready!"

    "Obviously," And Rodney snarled, face pressed numb and tingling back into firm awareness of pain, "not." Clumsy was exactly the word to describe these people and their weak technology and non-existent understanding and their medical voo-doo that had yet to cure his ever-increasing headache.

    Vertebrae damage, part of his brain supplied un-helpfully. A quick wiggle and shift proved otherwise, but he took Miller's hand-up and rubbed at the small of his back before heading directly to what was probably the main panel.

    A quick scan of the display proved that the fault within the system was not power-generation as they had originally thought but distribution. A misplaced or damaged connector, which thankfully Rodney had thought ahead to. This was a war satellite and a key piece of defensive technology. The Ancients wouldn't have let that sit because of some measly power problem.

    Just in case though, he hooked up one of the Naquadah generators.






    "We are at war, Elizabeth," Radek said slowly, carefully, "and in war, there are casualties."






    "The power conduit's been hit," Grodin said from another display a moment after Rodney had begun to explain the situation. "We'll need to re-route around the damaged circuits."

    "Your grasp of the painfully obvious," Rodney sneered, "never fails to impress me, Peter." Grodin rolled his eyes in response, and Miller just twitched a small smile. Morons, the lot of them.

    "The damaged circuit should be located somewhere here," he continued in spite of them.

    "That's outside the ship!"

    "Yes, Miller, it is. Lovely to see that you're still with us." You want something done? You've got to do it yourself.







    Do it yourself was what Rodney had learned to do through over a decade of post-secondary education. When the curriculum was too base, the Professor too blind, the student population too hopelessly inept, Rodney had written over a hundred personal papers and submitted them to various scientific journals and committees.

    Which was why, while the rest of his class had been entering third year, Rodney had been turning down a teaching position, accepting his next diploma, his next honorary degree, and then accepting a job with the military.

    He had never seen a member of his first year Astrophysics class again.







    The big positive about the team was that all three of them were inoculated with the ATA gene therapy, and that it had taken in each very quickly. Additionally, Grodin and Miller had some technical training. "Miller, you'll stay inside to confirm the connection. I, obviously," and he had to gulp a little inside at the thought of some slight agoraphobia in relation to floating free in space on the outside of a military satellite 15 Puddle-hours from Atlantis, "will do the actual repairs, and Grodin will pilot so that, if needed, he can pass me further tools."


    Having much of the workings accessible via the outside of the satellite had originally seemed silly and unlike the usual, highly efficient designs of the Ancients until he had remembered Ascension. In an energy state the vacuum would hardly matter and repairs would be little more than a flicker of one mind against the circuitry. Rodney could only imagine how clean, how light and discreet it would be; like the fluttering of a heartbeat, a pulse through the thin layers of skin at the wrist.

    Instead, he had to fumble in his overly-large, one-size-fits-all space suit, large fingered gloves clambering over the panel and inside to lay connections between points, to replace a fractured piece with something suitably if not perfectly similar from the city. Brilliant foresight on his part, if matched with awkward execution.

    They had Forty-five minutes left.







    "We're good on this end, McKay," and Rodney was grateful to stumble back into the rear-compartment, to feel his feet settle into the floor and pull off the suit; breathe real, honest-to-goodness unlimited air. No time limit required. "Power is building and we'll be ready to fire by the time the Wraith get here."

    "We'll pick you up now," Grodin spoke up from the controls, "We should have a few minutes."

    "No, get a fair distance from the satellite and cloak. You can pick me up after we've destroyed the hives." Military through and through, and for once Rodney agreed.








    The Wraith ships emerged from the spidery-light of hyper-space with a jolt, and even cloaked, Rodney shivered. They were massive and bright and dark and very, very near. The first blast, a lean yellow-green beam, cut through the large ship easily. It fell apart in the middle of nowhere, collapsing and exposing it's innards to space.

    "Yes!" Grodin breathed, tapping into communications with Atlantis again. "Weir, this is Grodin. We have a kill!"

    "Good work! Keep us informed." Elizabeth was barely audible over the cheering.

    "Will do, Atlantis."

    The second shot from the satellite fired at the exact same time as a barrage from the next hive; sharp green attack sliding past multiple fragmentary shots. For a moment, it was too bright to tell what had happened. Another dead hive in the water; the sides of the satellite singed.

    "Miller, come in! Miller!"

    The only response was one last cutting beam from the satellite amid complete radio silence.






    "Jumper three, come in; report."

    "All three hives have been neutralized!" Rodney was fairly bouncing in his seat; giddy at his own success.

    "We may have lost Miller," Grodin said, all too seriously. "We still have to check the satellite."

    "That's not important right now! We took down three hive ships in less than ten minutes! We should be celebrating! Cele--"

    "Rodney? Rodney?" Frustrating to be on the other side of a radio connection with little to no idea as to what was happening on the other end.

    "He's seizing!"








    Sergeant Miller died of an electrical overload just seconds after the hive barrage. The satellite was not built to be staffed during combat, and the impact of the attack had been dispersed through the satellite in an electrical charge. At the sheer level of power involved, death had probably been nearly instantaneous.

    Rodney remained unconscious for four days in the Atlantis infirmary after his seizure aboard the Jumper; temperature raised in a moderate fever.

    "His brain couldn't handle the stress," Beckett said, adjusting Rodney's IV. "He should come to soon enough, though."

    "Yeah, sure, but why hasn't he woken up yet?"

    "Radek thinks his brain is...rebooting." Beckett shrugged in Sheppard's general direction.

    "Yes, cleaning out unusable interface," Zelenka nodded, pressing his glasses back up his nose and glancing at Elizabeth. "Return to last restart."

    "Are you saying the device put something like a virus in Rodney's brain?"

    "No, no! Not at all! Just wrong software."

    "That's the worst analogy I've ever heard," Rodney groaned, "And I hate you all."







    Upon firing the device, Rodney had seen stars. They were bright and had filled the whole of his vision, blinding him to anything but the light and the flashes of brilliance shot directly into his brain.

    Watching the funeral rites for Miller, he knows that those stars were less bright than these lives are. Those stars could never match, even given an infinity of time and space, the impression a single breath from a single living being at any given moment.

    I never want to see stars again, he thinks, and turns away to hurl.






    The Daedalus arrived later that week, ready to fight a battle that was already over. They came bearing a nearly-full ZPM, a large number of highly trained staff and military, and a ride home. Colonel Caldwell came ready to do battle, and seemed almost disappointed that the major fight was already over.

    "Not quite," Elizabeth told him in their first meeting. "They know exactly where we are and exactly what our defences are. We're still a sitting duck."






    Rodney, on the other hand, remembered everything and nothing. While the intuition and understanding the device had temporarily gifted him with had faded, he retained the knowledge he had applied in those few days alongside full memory of how he had acted and felt; how unimportant Miller's death had felt inside his own mind. He felt guilty for not caring, and then mourned the loss of the knowledge he had been on the path of before feeling guilty for that; a loop he had trouble escaping.

    The Wraith were still coming, and he had work to do. His headache was finally gone.





    An excerpt from Dr. K.Heightmeyer's final report on the mental status of Dr. R. McKay:

    Every person follows predictable, repetitive patterns. Their path from bed to bathroom, their favourite restaurants, meals, activities. Regularly scheduled social events-- soccer practice and Hockey Night in Canada. Dr. McKay is no exception. He strives constantly to increase the field and application of his knowledge; to increase his base of material. His extraordinary intelligence limits, on occasion, his observation and understanding of human interactions. It has been evident in his habits, activities, his social tendencies. The device in question was designed for a different people and may be a case of too much, too soon.

    Many of the highly intelligent races were have encountered in the Universe have been either incredibly detached or incredibly vicious. All reports indicate that the Wraith are possibly further along developmentally than we ourselves are, and their disregard for life including their own is incredible. The Ancients who built this city made machines that would work only for their own kind, seemingly uncaring that the Wraith posed a threat to all other inhabitants, not only of this galaxy, but of others as well.

    It is possible that too much intelligence is as dangerous as too little. Regardless of his behaviour while under the influence of the device, the staff of Atlantis are genuinely pleased to have Dr. McKay back to his old self. Flaws and all.






*Canadian Raising: Canadians tend to answer certain questions with statements that use the same high-ending as a question. To many foreigners, it sounds like this:

Q: What is your name?
A: Rodney McKay?

The end of the statement is "raised" like the end of a question. To Canadians, this actually sounds more polite, and to not raise the end of many sentences comes off as rude and harsh. Unfortunately, in other countries it sounds like they are unsure of the answer.

** Chesterfield: A type of couch or sofa.
Serviette: A napkin.

Not really used very commonly.

The Canadian five-dollar bill is blue and has a scene from a hockey game on one side.