Jo Graham - Death Game

No, my mom wasn’t thrilled, but she wasn’t mad either. See, my mom? She’s the world’s biggest optimist. She believes in a Star Trek future. We’re going to reach this place where we don’t have wars anymore, and everyone is judged on their merits, not by the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. She thinks we can get there in two or three hundred years if we really try. She says look where we’ve come in the last three hundred years. Nothing is impossible.

And I’m with her. I believe in that Star Trek future too. I just think you can’t get there without Starfleet, without the people who go out and keep it safe, the people who explore and who make it real. They’re both so sure, my mom and dad, in their own ways. They’re both so sure that it could all be true. So I guess it wasn’t much of a shock to me to find out it was. The first time I walked into that gateroom in Cheyenne Mountain, it was like coming home. Yeah. This is the thing. This is the real thing, the thing I’m doing. Cause anything can be true if you make it so.

Afternoon came. The barge glided onward, drawn by plodding oxen.

John had been trying to chat up one of the guardsmen, but he came back at last and sat down with Teyla beneath the awning, on the right side of the barge now, out of the sun. “Three more hours or so,” he said, rubbing his stubbled chin. “If I got that right. So not too much farther to Pelagia.”

Teyla stretched out her legs flexing her bare toes, her boots and socks piled neatly beside the bench. “Not much longer then.”

John looked like he’d like to take his shoes off, but didn’t. “Not too much.” He had another drink of the lukewarm water they’d been provided and took his sunglasses off to wipe them on his shirt.

“It is your turn,” Teyla said.

“My turn for what?”

“To tell me a story,” she said, and gave him an offhanded smile. “I told you one last night. We have three hours with nothing to do except sit here. It is your turn to tell a story.”

“I don’t know any stories,” he said.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask when he had journeyed in the desert before and what had befallen him there, but Teyla thought that it was probably not a happy story, not a story for a time like this, and so she asked instead for something she thought he might actually answer. “It is your turn,” she said tranquilly. “You must tell one. I would like the story of how you came to Atlantis.”

Antarctica is really quiet. It’s just miles and miles of snow, miles and miles of nothing. No towns, no cities, no highways. No people. Nothing. It’s quiet. Even in good weather you have to rely on instruments. The ground pretty much looks the same, just mountains and glaciers, and the outposts are so small that you could miss them and just keep on flying until you ran out of gas in an endless sea of clouds and snow that all blend together.

I liked it. Like I say, it was quiet.

My duties were pretty minimal, just flying some brass and some scientists around, a fifty mile hop out to an advance research post on the ice. Fly ‘em out, sit around while they did whatever they did, fly ‘em back. It’s the kind of job you give a guy who’s too flaky to handle anything else. I didn’t mind that. It was probably true.

One time it was this guy, General O’Neill. We were just cruising along, everything pretty normal, and suddenly the radio was reporting incoming, some kind of rogue missile that could acquire a target on its own. I had a hell of a time dodging the thing, and it would have gotten us if it hadn’t shut down by itself suddenly. I’d never seen anything like it.

Didn’t know then that I had Carson to blame. He was messing around with the command chair and accidentally fired an Ancient drone. But at least he turned it off before he blew me and O’Neill to kingdom come.

So I was screwing around while O’Neill met with a bunch of people, got to talking to Carson, and there was this thing. You’ve seen our chair. You know how it looks. This one was just like it, cold and strange and eerily beautiful, like it was carved out of a snowflake.

And I wanted it. I don’t quite know how else to put it. It’s like it needed to be touched. It needed me to touch it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, or like something I’d dreamed a long time ago but forgotten. And so I sat down.

You know what happened then, right? It turned on. It turned on because of the ATA gene, because I have this gene, because I’m descended from some Ancient who went native on Earth thousands of years ago. And then everybody rushed in, and Rodney said, “Imagine where we are in the solar system,” like that was some big thing. Anybody can do that, right? It’s like knowing your own address.

But it didn’t look like just anything, lines of force and gravity drawn in blue fire like the best heads-up display ever invented, planets and asteroids and comets tracing perfect ellipses, streaming datapoints by the thousands eager and ready and waiting. I’d never seen anything like it. Never felt anything like it, an interface that moved like my thoughts, faster than any game, faster than anything I ever flew.

I looked at O’Neill, and I saw a shiver pass over his face. He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who felt it. He was the only one who knew what it could do, and what it felt like to do it, like sitting on top of turbos open all the way, an elevator ride straight to the top, charging for the ceiling like a bat out of hell. He knew. He knew how it could eat you, seduce you, pull you in and fill you up. I can’t explain what it feels like, Teyla. I don’t have the right words. An interface like that — you own it and it owns you, like being one thing, one consciousness.

And so Dr. Weir decided she wanted me on the Atlantis Expedition, kind of a human lightswitch to deal with Ancient technology. She asked O’Neill for me, and I guess he figured it was her party. He must have had a look at my record, but maybe that didn’t carry any weight with her. I don’t know.

I almost didn’t go. He tried to talk me into it. “I think anybody who doesn’t want to walk through a Stargate is crazy.” Sounded a lot like you, actually.

I flipped a coin.

It’s how you decide when you don’t care what the outcome is, when you figure why the hell not. Leave it to chance or fate or whatever. I flipped the coin and I waited a second, looking at my hand clasped against my wrist, wondering which one I wanted it to be. Stay, go back to Antarctica and fly in that quiet dream, go back to sleep and let the snow roll over me. Kind of a quiet life, actually. Stay stuck in grade until I’ve got my twenty years and then get out and do…something. Some kind of security work, maybe. Or be a private pilot for a corporation, flying guys like my dad from a meeting in Austin to a meeting in Tampa on their Lear Jet. That’s not so bad, really.

Or walk through a Stargate. Take a one way trip to a place you know nothing about, a place that could be anything.

Most of these guys did it out of curiosity. They wanted to know something so much — these scientists and engineers and Dr. Weir most of all — that nothing else mattered. Rodney and Zelenka and the rest — they’ve got some balls. They signed up for this knowing they were probably going to get killed and they wouldn’t even get a shot off at what took them down. Disease. Hostiles. Drowning in the gate room when the shield failed and the city died.