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Cam was stretched out on his couch, half dozing and half watching post-game commentary on ESPN. He knew he really should be moving to his actual bed sometime soon, before he ended up falling asleep on his couch. His body wouldn't thank him for that, and his physical therapist would ream him out when she inevitably found out. On the other hand, he was feeling pretty comfortable at the moment, and that wasn't any particular reason he had to get up just that instant.
The decision was taken out of his hands by a knock on the door. He got up, wincing a little and grabbing his cane, and made his way over. He couldn't help but wonder who it was. It was late enough that he couldn't think of any reason someone would be just dropping by, and it wasn't like there were that many people in the area who'd be doing so anyways. He was pretty sure anyone passing through the Springs would have called first, but then again, the service could put people through all sorts of perverse routing shenanigans.
The very last person he expected to find was Sam Carter. When he had woken up at the Academy Hospital after the battle over Antarctica, he had learned she was MIA following a mission involving the Asgard. He hadn't heard anything since then to suggest the SGC was any closer to finding her. There she was, though, standing at his doorstep.
"Cam!" she said, a huge smile splitting her face.
"Sam?" Cam stared for a moment, unable to quite believe what he was seeing, then pulled her into a tight hug. "Oh, God, baby, how are you?"
"I'm fine," Sam said. "Better than fine, actually. What about you?"
"I'm great," Cam said. Sam's eyes flicked down to the cane for a moment and he reiterated, "Really, I'm doing okay, and I could be a hell of a lot worse."
"If you say so," Sam said with a tight smile. "I'm sorry I wasn't here earlier."
"It's not your fault. Come on in."
Cam stepped aside so she could come in and then shut the door behind her. He waved for her to take a seat as he continued through the living room and into his kitchen to get them something to snack on, and while he did he tried to watch her surreptitiously as she looked around and finally sat down on the couch. Sam didn't seem like she was in any kind of physical pain, he couldn't see any bruises or other marks on her, and she wasn't any thinner than usual. If anything, she looked better than she ever had. She certainly didn't look like she had spent months in enemy hands. Then again, not all scars were necessarily visible, and he still didn't have a clue what had actually happened. The SGC had been maddeningly vague about the entire affair. Even General O'Neill had been giving him a run-around lately.
Sam's appetite certainly hadn't changed, at least. When Cam set a plate of cookies down on the coffee table in front of her, her eyes lit up and she started wolfing them down.
"It looks like I timed my visit perfectly," Sam said as he settled into his recliner.
"Not really. I've had a lot of free time and not much to do with it besides sit around here. It's a miracle I haven't blown up like a balloon," Cam admitted somewhat sheepishly. He was pretty sure he'd baked and then shipped overseas enough stuff to feed a couple of divisions by now. Baking was a pretty good hobby when you were usually too exhausted to do much more than sit around and stare at the oven.
"Mmm." Sam glanced him over like she was trying to see through his sweatpants and t-shirt to the surgical scars below, less subtly than she probably thought. "I guess you're still in therapy?"
"Still am, yeah. I'm getting around okay, and the doctors are finally starting to believe me when I say I'm going to come out fine in the end."
"I'm sure you will," Sam said with a small smile. "You never did let a little thing like a few broken bones slow you down, even if there were a few times it probably should have."
Cam suppressed a grin and said flatly, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm just saying, sometimes your endless cheer and determination overrides your common sense and gets you into trouble," she replied, her smile growing wider. "Although you might not remember, with all those blows to the head."
"I damn well remember who was there the first time I broke something," Cam said. It would be hard not to remember that little incident at the Academy, given that it had led to his first encounter with an irate Jacob Carter. He crossed his arms and gave Sam the evil eye. "Did you come here just to mock the guy who saved your ass?"
"No. No, I didn't. I actually need your help with something." Sam looked down and sat there silently for a minute. Finally she asked, "How much do you know about what happened? With me, that is."
"Not all that much, really," Cam said carefully. "You were missing by the time I woke up. O'Neill told me you were captured by replicators while on a mission to assist the Asgard. He said you might have been killed in the fighting but no one knew for sure one way or another and they weren't giving up on you."
Sam glanced up. "Nothing since then?"
"No, nothing at all." Cam had gotten a promise out of O'Neill to keep him up to date, but up until now there hadn't been any word. He supposed he should probably be annoyed that he only learned of Sam's return when she turned up at his door, but she had probably wanted to tell him in person.
"I figured as much." Sam sighed deeply and leaned forward. "You know about Fifth, right?"
Cam thought back to the replicator-related mission reports he had pored over. "He was the human-form one that took a shine to you and got left behind in the replicator trap, right?"
"Yeah. He's the one that beamed me off of Thor's ship. He thought he was in love with me." Sam shook her head. "He was, in a weird, fucked-up way. He just didn't quite understand the concept. Replicators aren't very good at making conceptual leaps, and that's a pretty big one." She trailed off and stared off into space for a while.
"You okay?" Cam softly asked after a few moments.
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry. I got distracted." Sam sat up a little straighter. "That's how I escaped, in the end. He was trying to get me to love him back, so after a while I decided to just give in and pretend I did. He didn't realize I was faking it, probably right up until he was destroyed. I convinced him I could find a way around the SGC's anti-replicator weapons and lured him into a trap at the Alpha Site. They had a satellite-based weapon in orbit and blasted him with it."
Cam frowned. Something wasn't adding up about her story. "It was that easy?"
"It was that easy." For a few moments it seemed like Sam was going to leave it at that, then she said, "No, not that easy. There was a... problem at the Alpha Site. Some people got hurt. I didn't mean for it to happen, but I didn't have any other choice. They didn't understand and I had to get out of there."
"Oh, Sam," Cam said. He leaned forward and reached out to take her hand. "Whatever happened, you can't blame yourself for it. You were a prisoner for six months. There's no way you could be expected to come up with a perfect plan in that situation."
"I know that, and I don't blame myself," Sam said quickly. "I don't blame the guys, either. I should have realized that with their experiences they wouldn't understand immediately, but I was more worried about getting Fifth in place and making sure everything didn't fall apart when he died. That's actually what I need you help with. I need a partner, and you're the only one I can trust."
"A partner for what?"
"Saving the world." Sam smiled and lifted up her free hand. "I should show you something first." Then her hand turned into quicksilver, T-1000 style. Cam jerked back and was out of his chair in a second, staggering a little as his knee nearly gave out from the sudden sharp movement. He had to catch himself against the back of the recliner to keep from falling.
"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed. "You're a replicator!"
"I am, but I'm still Sam Carter," she told him. Sam started to get up from the couch, only to stop and sit back down when he started to back away toward the kitchen. She was between him and the door, but there was phone in there. "I'm telling the truth."
Cam shook his head. "You'd better have a pretty damned good explanation if you want me to believe that."
"Look, my biological body was killed, when the ship it was on was destroyed, but my mind was saved. I'm still me up here, and that's what really matters." Sam pointed at her head. Her hand looked normal once again. "It's not like this is the first time something like this has happened."
Cam knew that was true, having read some of the reports himself. He also knew she could easily be lying to him. "Yeah, well, it's still a little bit of a shock."
"I get why you feel that way, but there's really nothing to be worried about. It's not even a bad thing. This body is so much better than the old one! I can still do everything I could before, because it can perfectly emulate human senses, but there's so much else that's possible. I can see into the ultraviolet and infrared. When I'm interfaced with a ship, I can hear the solar wind around me. It's incredible."
"A bit of a shock," Cam repeated, "and also pretty damned creepy, with the way you're going on about how wonderful being a robot is."
Sam rolled her eyes and fixed him with a pointed look. "I'm enthusiastic because it really is great, Cam. It's not just the senses, either. My body is stronger, can move quicker, and is nearly indestructible. I can think faster."
"What's the catch?"
"There is no catch. I'm not being mind-controlled, there's no other replicators pulling the strings. The Asgard did a really good job of wiping out the replicators, actually. None of the other sentient human-form versions still exist. There's just me riding herd on a few million of the block kind." Sam slowly stood up so that she could face him more easily. "That's what I need your help with. It takes a fair amount of effort to keep them doing something useful but not attacking everything in sight. I need someone to help me, especially if I'm going to go through with my plan."
"Plan to do what?" Cam asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
Sam grinned. "Like I said, save the world. And the rest of the galaxy, for that matter. The System Lords are oppressing people on a thousand planets and want to enslave or kill everyone on this one. Anubis is still alive too, you know, and he's rebuilding his forces. Sooner or later he'll try to attack Earth again and he might succeed."
"So, what, you're going to use your replicator army to stop him?"
"Something like that, yeah. There's so much else we can do, too." Sam's grin became even broader. "Starvation, disease, war - with the kind of technology at our fingertips, we can solve all that, on Earth and every other planet. It's the sort of thing we've always worked towards. I need your help to make it happen. It'll be you and me, together again, just like the good old days."
Cam laughed incredulously. "Join me and together we'll rule the galaxy? Seriously? Have you listened to what you're saying? You're sounding a little more like a megalomaniac than usual."
Sam glared at him again. If she really was just a fucked-up replicator trick, they certainly did a good annoyed Carter impression. "I don't mean it like that. Maybe we'll have to take charge for a while, but it'd be temporary, just until people can handle themselves. You can't just lift people out of the Stone Age and say, "Have fun." It'd be irresponsible."
"Yeah, irresponsible," he repeated.
Sensing that he wasn't buying it, she shifted tactics. "You won't have to worry about your injuries anymore, you know. And think about your parents."
Cam's eyes narrowed and he growled, "What about them?"
"They're going to die. Maybe it'll be ten years, maybe twenty, but sooner or later it'll happen. Old age will get them if nothing else does. It doesn't have to happen anymore. Not if they've got bodies like mine. They can be young and healthy again."
It was that argument that gave him pause, just for a few moments. Neither of them was as spry as they used to be, especially his dad. The thought of his mom not having to worry about her joint pain, and his dad not constrained by his prosthetics and crutches, was a tempting one. In the end it wasn't really his call to make, though.
"Listen," Cam said in a calm, even tone. "I believe that you're trying to do the right thing, and I think we could use any allies we can get. I can't just go running off to help you fight a war, though. I mean, I'd have to pack first, if nothing else, and I don't exactly want to go AWOL. So how's this sound: I'll just step in here and call the SGC. You can make your pitch to General O'Neill, and if I get the okay I'll be more than happy to come with you."
"He won't understand," Sam said. "He thought I was just a bad copy or something, and that's going be even more true after I fought my way out of the Alpha Site."
"He's your friend, he'll listen."
"No, he won't," she replied, voice full of frustration and a hint on anguish. "Not right now, not until I can prove to him and Daniel and Teal'c that I'm still me."
"Okay, then we talk to Hammond. You got here somehow, I bet you can get us to Washington."
"You don't get it, Cam!" Sam shouted, taking several steps toward him.
Cam stepped backwards himself, right into one of the goddamn chairs around the kitchen table. He tripped, wobbled precariously and flailed as he tried to regain his balance, until his knee gave out and he went down. He hit his head hard, and as he blacked out the last thing he saw was Sam's worried face.
He woke up only a minute later, and when he did, he was better. All of the aches and pains that had plagued him for the last six months were gone and forgotten. In fact, he felt better than he ever had, even before he hit the wrong side of thirty. His vision was sharper, his hearing clearer, and he knew that he was strong enough to lift a car. It was like he was Superman.
That all paled in comparison to what else there was. Cam wasn't limited to just to human-form body he occupied at the moment. He could feel each independent cluster of replicator blocks, from the tens of millions of tiny bug units digging and reproducing in artificial caverns under the regolith on the far side of the moon to the block-ships and stolen Asgard cruisers hovering out of sight behind the sun. They were operating autonomously, but they were still part of him, the same way his guts had been part of him but worked without conscious direction. There was power unlike anything he had ever imagined waiting for his command. It was almost overwhelming, and he could see clearly why Sam wanted help to keep it from spinning out of control.
"How are you feeling?" Sam asked. He could sense her, too, a shining beacon of intelligence in the sea of mindless blocks, separate from his own consciousness but still connected.
"I'm fine," Cam said, climbing to his feet without so much as a twinge. "Better than fine, actually. This is amazing."
"I know," she said with a smile.
Cam gave her a pointed look. "You should have asked first, you know."
She had the good grace to look sheepish. "I know, but you were out cold and I wanted to make sure you were okay."
"Don't worry about it. I didn't understand then like I do now. I'm glad you did it." Cam knew he should be angry, that he would have been angry a minute ago, but instead he was happy she'd done it. This new form was clearly superior to the old in every way and he understood now that he had been misguided to resist the change. He also knew that it was only right to spread their gift to as many people as possible. "What now? Are we going to kick some snake ass?"
"I've started scavenging naquadah and trinium from the ruins of Tollana and building a fleet. In a few weeks, we'll be able to take on anyone. There is much that this technology can do that the replicators and even the Asgard never dreamed of. It's amazing."
Almost as soon as she said it, Cam knew it was true. It was a good that they'd have some time to prepare. He'd need it to get used to his new abilities. He couldn't wait to fly one of the ships they were building. Hell, be one of those ships.
"There's no reason to sit around in the meantime," he said. "We should start recruiting others. Once we start fighting, we'll need all the minds we can get to make this go smoothly."
"Sounds good to me, although we should probably steer clear of the SGC for now. We don't want to risk tipping off the Asgard until we're ready."
"Good point." Sam had figured out how to defend against the anti-replicator weapons, but there was a still a chance the Asgard could make them effective again.
Fortunately, even with that restriction there were still plenty of other people that Cam wanted to recruit immediately. He had friends and family scattered all over, from elsewhere in the Springs to Afghanistan to the Pegasus Galaxy. He would need to act as fast as he could. Some of them, like Fergie, were in as bad as shape as he had been, while several others were out there in the action and could die any minute. That wouldn't do at all. He knew it would be hard to convince some of them, but he was sure they would all realize he was right, even if he had to open their eyes the same way Sam had opened his. They would all understand in the end and thank him.
"Let's take a trip to Iraq and have a chat with my brother," Cam said after a minute.
After all, he wouldn't be much of a man if he didn't share this gift with his baby brother first. The rest of the galaxy could wait a little longer.