04 - The Morpheus Factor Read online

  In the infirmary, Janet Frasier reviewed Jack O’Neill’s vital signs, observed the twitching of his eyelids, and compared the symptoms to previous examples of similar injuries she’d treated in the years that the Stargate had been in operation. After giving all of this her due and professional consideration, she pulled up a chair beside the bed and took O’Neill’s hand in hers and waited for her patient to wake up.

  It took long enough for her to begin to wonder about her chosen treatment protocol, but eventually the man in the bed stirred and muttered a curse. Smiling, the doctor glanced down the empty row of beds in the small ward. Sometimes the whole room was full of curses or, worse, moans and cries of wounded soldiers. This was highly preferable, all things considered.

  O’Neill stirred and cursed again, more loudly.

  Satisfied that his recovery was proceeding as expected, Janet relinquished his hand and began taking vitals all over again. By the time she finished, his brown eyes were open and watching her.

  “I suppose I’m hooked up to every machine in the shop again,” he said, clearing his throat.

  Frasier disconnected the saline drip and swabbed away the drops of blood at the back of his hand from the IV insertion. “You’re my only customer today,” she responded. “I have to justify them somehow.”

  “I keep telling you all I really need is some aspirin.”

  “And I keep telling you you’re not twenty-two and immortal anymore, Colonel.”

  He turned his head to follow her movement around the bed and back to the chair beside him. The movement was too sudden, and he winced and closed his eyes briefly.

  “They said you got brushed by an energy beam,” she said. “You’re very lucky. No broken bones this time, no scrambled internal organs. Just a mild concussion and a case of shock. Dehydrated too, though I don’t think that’s from whatever hit you. I expect you can probably be out of here in a few hours.”

  “That means I could get out of here now,” he said, but made no effort to throw back the sheet covering him and get out of the bed. “The guy shooting at me probably hit his own feet with his next shot.”

  “What happened this time?”

  “Ifll be in the report,” he said more or less automatically.

  She gave him a stern look. “That’s not the deal here, Colonel. I get all the good gossip ahead of time, remember? I have a Need to Know all the latest ways you’ve found to mess yourselves up so I can keep patching you back together. And I’m not releasing you until you talk.”

  For an instant a shadow crossed his face, and she regretted her mock threat. Telling Jack O’Neill he was being held prisoner was a stupid joke, stupid and in remarkably poor taste. Apologizing for it would only underline the reason it was particularly inappropriate, and she held her peace and her expression until he relaxed and gave her a wry smile.

  “All right, Major. As long as you don’t make me sleep.”

  “Oh?” She raised an elegant eyebrow. “You have something against sleep?”

  He sighed. “I think I’ve done too much sleeping lately. You wouldn’t believe what we ran into this time.”

  “Try me,” she said promptly and settled back into the chair like a child waiting for a story.

  * * *

  “Okay, that is a weird one,” Janet said thoughtfully nearly an hour later. “I’d love to get my hands on that incense they were burning. It clearly has psychotropic qualities. But that doesn’t begin to explain how they found real weapons that you dreamed about. Were they manufacturing them?”

  He stared at the ceiling, thinking. “There wasn’t time. And I don’t know how they could. We can’t duplicate Goa’uld technology for some of that stuff. How could they?”

  “Well, they got them from somewhere. Are you going back to find out? Because if you do, I want to place an order for the incense.”

  He shook his head, a little less painfully this time. “I don’t think so. I want to recommend against it. The whole idea of not knowing whether what you’re looking at is real—whether the guy next to you is seeing the same thing or something totally different—it’s not…” He fell silent. “How do you know what to shoot at?”

  “Or whether to shoot at all?” She nodded, understanding. “I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t dream about some of the really bad stuff, the biochem weapons. Can you imagine letting anthrax loose on your little furry friends? That really would wipe them out.” She considered. “Or not, I guess. They’re probably totally immune to Earth viruses. Although if you could safely eat their food, we’ve got to have something in common.”

  “Yeah, that would—” He stopped, and a look of horror crossed his face. “Oh, no. Oh, hell. I’ve gotta get out of here and talk to Hammond.” This time he did throw back the sheet and swing his legs over the side of the bed.

  Frasier watched with clinical interest as he supported his weight with his hands, observing the paleness of his face, the slight tremor in his arms. There wasn’t much point in telling him to get back to bed at this juncture; his own body would tell him whether he could get up and walk the few steps to the bathroom or closet. Her ace in the hole was knowing where his clothes were.

  “About what?” she asked as he caught his breath and prepared to stand up. He was nude, but he was a patient, and he’d been in her care so many times it rarely even occurred to either of them to be self-conscious about it.

  “I dreamed about NTS,” he said briefly. “I’ve got to talk to the team. Something Daniel said before we left.”

  “NTS?” The initials meant nothing to her. That they did to him, and something serious at that, was obvious.

  He heaved himself to his feet and swayed a bit. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he said, forcing himself to stand still. “When I get out, I want my uniform. Come on, Janet. This is important. Have your wardman page my guys and tell them to meet me in my office in ten minutes.”

  She considered. “They couldn’t come down here and talk to you while you’re lying down?”

  “No. I’ve got to report this to Hammond, and I’ve got to get—” He swayed, cursed again, and muttered an apology.

  Whatever those initials stood for, he was seriously worried, and no off-the-shelf medical soothing was going to calm him back into bed. He needed to talk to the boss. “Shower here, so if you get dizzy you can hit the panic button. And come back right after you talk to Hammond so I can make sure you’re not just faking it.”

  “Would I do a thing like that?” he asked, supporting himself on the end of the bed and measuring the distance to the next source of support.

  “In a heartbeat, Colonel.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at her. “I have no secrets from you at all, do I, Major?”

  She gave him a long and interested look from the top of his head to the tips of his toes and back. “Not even one, Colonel, and I plan to keep it that way.”

  He still had the ability to blush, she noted with wicked glee.

  * * *

  On certain rare occasions, the predebriefing meeting that the members of SG-1 regularly held had an air of “let’s get our story straight”. There was never any actual intent to deceive, but generally the team had to make choices about what they did and did not pass on in their reports. If nothing else, the experience of repeatedly visiting new worlds provided an embarrassment of riches, knowledgewise. Hammond, on the other hand, was notorious for wanting a bottom line.

  The bottom line on this one was fuzzy, to say the least.

  “Okay, folks, looking for consensus here,” O’Neill said, leaning back gingerly in his chair and looking at each of the other three in turn. “Is P4V-837 a world we ought to go back to? Strike off the list entirely? What? Teal’C?”

  The Jaffa considered. “If the Goa’uld had visited that world before,” he considered, “it seems likely that the Kayeechi would already have the weapons that they… appeared… to acquire from us, by whatever methods. Since they did not, and their only method of acquiring such weapons
appears to be from us, they do not seem to have a great deal to contribute to our battle.

  “Besides,” he added with a distinctly annoyed expression, “a return to that world would subject us once again to the confusing discrepancies in our perceptions. Those discrepancies could be dangerous. The fact that they were not seriously so this time appears to be a matter of luck.”

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said. “When you look at it, they had to have had contact with a number of different cultures in order to produce those different visions of reality. It’s as classic a case study in cultural diffusion as you could ask for. I’d love to go back, if there was some way to ensure that I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.”

  “They’d only have to pick those images out of our minds,” Carter disagreed. “There’s nothing that says they’d ever encountered other aliens. Though I really would like to know how they did it,” she added. “To be able to manufacture something out of someone’s dream—or even see it in someone’s dream to begin with—suggests an incredible power.”

  “But it is not a power we can use,” Teal’C rumbled. “If we are not Kayeechi, it is inaccessible and useless to us.”

  “I wonder what the other side in their war is capable of,” Daniel mused.

  “Does that matter?” Carter asked. She glanced at O’Neill, who was silently listening to the debate, offering no opinion one way or another. She wished the color in his face was a little better; he looked wrung out and worried, as worried as the little purple alien had been back on P4V-837. She started to speak. As she did so, the door to the office opened, and Janet Frasier slipped inside. Jackson immediately rose to offer her his chair, but she shook her head and sat on a low metal file cabinet beside the door.

  “Does it matter?” Carter asked again, when the doctor had settled. Her presence made the small office, with its desk and bookcases and posters and wallboards, even more cramped, if possible. It would have been tight with three people. Five was overload. Daniel was sitting with his feet propped up on the rim of the metal wastebasket.

  On the other hand, it was a real relief to have Frasier there in case O’Neill fell on his face, which looked like an actual possibility. “They’re in the middle of a war. They seemed like nice people—at least up until the end—but we certainly can’t trust them. We can’t trust anything about that world.”

  Daniel was insistent. “No, but we can learn from it. I don’t know about you, but I saw things in that city that didn’t come from my mind. They don’t just take weapons. They have art, music, technology—all the things we saw at those celebrations.”

  “It was illusion,” Teal’C declared. “At the end, when we all saw the battlefield”—there was a small pause, during which each of them made some small gesture to indicate that yes, in fact, they had all seen a battlefield—“none of the other things, the city, existed.”

  “I guarantee you that zat gun existed,” O’Neill said dryly. “My brains still feel like they’ve been scrambled. And Janet says the injuries are typical for a near miss.”

  The team looked to the doctor for confirmation, and she provided it.

  “The thing I’m worried about is what else they may have taken out of our dreams,” O’Neill went on. “How they do it is a subject for the weaponeers. The fact that they manage it is something I will personally attest to. There was no indication before we arrived that they’d ever seen an energy staff, a zat gun, an automatic pistol. Are we agreed on that much?”

  They all nodded.

  “So we arrive, we have a happy little party, we fall asleep, and we dream. It looks like the Kayeechi have a way to direct the dreaming to some extent. They wanted to know what kind of people we are, and they wanted to put us in scenarios that called for self-defense to see what kind of weapons we’re familiar with. Still with me?”

  “My dream was about the Book of the Dead,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “Especially the part where the heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at, to see if the Osiris is worthy of the afterlife.”

  “I thought Osiris was the God of the Dead,” Carter said, puzzled.

  “It’s also the term used to describe the dead person.” Daniel leaned forward in his chair, slipping automatically into lecture mode. “In the Book of Going Forth by Day—”

  “Hold it,” O’Neill interrupted. “We’re not in class right now, Professor. The point is that you were tested, right?”

  “And Etra’ain said that I sought justice. Ma’at is the symbol of truth. I guess in the context of my focus on Egyptian archaeology, it makes sense that I’d dream that particular ceremony.”

  “And afterward, you seemed to have actually entered the dreams we were having,” Carter mused. “Still looking, for truth?”

  “I was awake then,” Jackson protested. “At least, I’m pretty sure I was.” He shuddered suddenly, remembering.

  “They take our dreams and make them into reality,” Teal’C said uncomfortably.

  “No, they couldn’t be real,” Jackson protested. “I saw all of you dead. I saw me dead.”

  “An alternate reality,” Carter suggested. “As if they’re trying out the dreams to see which ones fit the best. And then they take the stuff they want, and somehow… it becomes real.”

  “And the stuff they want is weapons.” O’Neill leaned back. “Daniel, did you see anything that indicated they actually understood what they’d gotten from us? That they understood the implications of zat guns and energy staffs even after we showed them what they could do?”

  The archaeologist paused, thinking, obviously trying to pick genuine clues to the culture out of the tumble of conflicting, possibly illusory impressions of P4V-837. “Not really,” he said. “I wish I could go back and…” He looked up and smiled briefly at the looks of distaste on the faces of his teammates. “Well, you know what I mean. Based on the foods we ate, and the fact that we were actually housed in a cave, I almost think that their culture is technologically very primitive, maybe just above the hunter-gatherer stage in fact. The only processed food I remember is bread, and it wasn’t highly refined bread. The utensils were relatively simple. They seemed to rely on us for the more sophisticated images of what we saw, but they didn’t really know how to make use of it. Otherwise maybe we’d have been sleeping in a basic hotel room instead of the cave.”

  “Maybe they just couldn’t make an entire city zap into existence that fast,” Carter said. “The weapons were relatively small.” She shook her head. “But you said you were here, Daniel. That’s pretty large scale.”

  “So was the coral city and your island,” O’Neill pointed out.

  Carter shook her head. “I keep remembering this little thing called the Law of Conservation of Energy, and I want to know how they could take a dream and turn it into something real you could shoot somebody with. They’ve created an entire culture based on imagination and too many baked beans. It’s impossible.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” O’Neill contradicted. He spun his chair around—there was just room behind the desk to do it—and stared at the poster of the galaxy on the back wall of the office. “They managed somehow. They really did reach into our dreams and come out with real weapons. And that’s what bothers me. I’d hate to think that we were responsible for obliterating their entire world.”

  “With a couple of zat guns?” Jackson asked, surprised. “I mean, surely they can’t maintain them without us there to keep dreaming for them. They may have weapons, but they don’t have the means to even keep them clean. They don’t even know they have to.”

  “I’m not talking about zat guns.” O’Neill’s chair squeaked as he came back forward and swung around to face them. “I’m talking about full-blown thermonuclear bombs.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, SG-1 assembled for its formal mission debriefing in the glass-walled room overlooking the Gate. They were unusually subdued, George Hammond thought as he came in the door. No joking or sma
ll talk or heated discussion this time. Just the soft shuffling of papers being looked over one last time, the clinking of ice in the water pitcher.

  “Be seated,” he said as the team rose automatically at his entrance. He took his place at the head of the table and looked down its length.

  Janet Frasier had remained standing. “Sir.”

  “Yes, Major?”

  “Request permission to remain for the briefing.”

  “Certainly, Major.”

  The formalities having been observed, Frasier sat down again across from Major Carter, diagonally from O’Neill.

  Interesting, Hammond thought and took another look at the team leader.

  Frasier wouldn’t have permitted O’Neill to be here if she didn’t think he was up to it, but there were circles under his eyes and the water pitcher trembled a tattoo against the glass as he poured. He set the pitcher down again a little more sharply than necessary and took a deep breath.

  One of these days, son, you’re going to find out you have limits, Hammond thought.

  The other members of the team looked tired too, but not as exhausted, and they didn’t move as if they remembered a time when every bone hurt. They sat back in their chairs and waited for the colonel to speak.

  O’Neill took a swallow of the water and cleared his throat. “Our mission objective was to perform reconnaissance, determine threats, and if possible make peaceful contact with the inhabitants, if any, of the planet designated P4V-837.” He stared down at the piece of paper in his hands for a moment as if he’d forgotten what it was for. “I think we failed.” He sounded doubtful.

  “Stealing dreams is certainly one way to win an arms race,” George Hammond said. He’d heard a lot of bizarre stories in his time, but this one was in the running for top ten, at least for this week. “Can we use the Kayeechi’s ability against the Goa’uld?”