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John stood on the balcony above the gate room, crossing his arms against the railing as he waited for the latest intake to beam down from the Daedalus. In addition to the usual rotation of military personnel, there were several new scientists in this batch, sent out to do a more in-depth investigation of some of the new spaces that had lit up since the ZPM had been plugged into the city. McKay and Zelenka's teams had their hands full just keeping track of all the critical systems, and the rest of the expedition occupied only a fraction of the city's infrastructure; they could definitely use the extra hands to check it all out.
Normally, John left new civilians to their own departments' care for their initial welcome to Atlantis, but there was an extra notation in one of the files that had piqued his curiosity today.
"Sheppard?" McKay greeted him, wrinkling his brow as he ascended the stairs from the gate room floor. "What are you doing here? We didn't have a mission I forgot about, did we?"
"No, not today," John shook his head. "Waiting for the newbies. There's supposed to be one in this bunch with an ATA gene even stronger than mine, and I want to see how the city reacts to him."
"Stronger than yours?" McKay asked, puzzled. Then his eyes narrowed. "It's not O'Neill's clone, is it? I know he's supposed to be off in high school or college or something, but I never believed that story; O'Neill's worse than you. He'd have been bored inside a month. I always suspected they'd ship him off to us eventually ... well, either that or change his identity and start over somewhere out of the reach of certain interested parties, but statistically speaking...."
"No, Rodney," John replied, amused. Sometimes it still threw him, all the crazy things the SGC had faced; starting fresh with his transfer to the Atlantis expedition had had its benefits, but it also caught him off guard on a regular basis. That whole thing with Caldwell wouldn't have happened if he'd really grokked the whole snakes-in-the-brain possibility of infiltrators and taken a few more security precautions. "It's not O'Neill's clone. Or O'Neill himself, before you ask. Some guy named Dr. Gerard–"
"Mayhem?" McKay seemed more distressed at that than he had about the prospect of O'Neill Mark II; he actually leaned away from John, then lifted the tablet in his hands and began tapping frantically away. "No, they didn't. They couldn't have. Why the hell would they send him? I thought they were shipping him down to Antarctica!"
The passenger manifest for the Daedalus appeared on the tablet, and he hastily scrolled through the scientist section before pausing on one particular name. "I know his name wasn't there the last time I looked. Someone snuck him in, because they knew how I'd react!"
"How so?" John frowned. He had to wonder at the nickname; McKay had only been at Area 51 and in Siberia before Atlantis, right, not a field team? "I'd have thought you'd jump at the chance to have someone in your department who can interact on that level with the city's systems. The notes Colonel Carter put in his file...."
McKay looked up from his tablet again at that, and bristled like an annoyed cat. "Oh, I might have known it would be her. Of course she knows what he's like; she was in charge of R&D at Area 51 for several months before she went back to SG-1."
"Rodney," John said, drawing out the name for emphasis. McKay wasn't exactly soft-spoken about his disdain for the foibles of other human beings, but this seemed a little excessive. "Is this another Kavanagh situation?"
"Worse," McKay replied in dire tones, then turned to stare down at the gateroom floor as a faint mechanical noise echoed through the air and several columns of white light formed in the center of the cleared space. "You'll see soon enough, I'm sure."
The lights throughout the gateroom dimmed distinctly and flickered as the streaks of light resolved into a small crowd largely dressed in the expedition uniform – then went out entirely as the DHD console erupted into a shower of sparks. For several breaths, just long enough for John to reach for his radio and a chorus of swearing to erupt from the rest of the people gathered in the gateroom, the lights stayed down; then they flickered back to life, revealing a slightly singed Chuck still sitting at his now-soot-stained station.
Throughout it all, McKay didn't budge; not even to page Zelenka. He simply stared grimly down at the newcomers, arms crossed over his chest, as one of the medic-trained personnel moved to check Chuck over.
John raised his eyebrows at him. "You're not rushing to investigate the problem?"
"Just wait," he said, tone clipped and irritable as the crowd below drifted apart, leaving one individual isolated from the group.
The scientist – probably the aforementioned Dr. 'Mayhem' Gerard – was dressed in the same uniform as everyone else in his department, in a grey-blue shirt under a tan jacket with similarly colored panels on the front and an American flag on his sleeve. But somehow he made the ensemble look extra disheveled. His dark brown hair rivaled John's in wild volume, a visible bruise bloomed on one cheek, and a butterfly bandage had been taped next to his eye. He was also crouching on the floor, one hand pressed to the decking, as he shot a madcap grin up at McKay.
"Well?" McKay said sharply, in a voice loud enough to carry.
"I'm the unchecked electrical damage in a key relay, inflicted after the lightning storm when the naquadah in the gate reacted to surging energy flows, that gradually set up a resonance with the frequencies the Asgard use for their transporters," Dr. Gerard said, still grinning. "Oops."
He got all that just from his ATA connection to the city? John's eyebrows raised further. That could really be useful. He didn't see why it had McKay so bent out of shape.
"Good to know. Now follow all the little ducklings off somewhere safe so I can fix it," McKay replied tartly, making a shooing gesture as he descended the stairs.
"Good to see you too, McKay," Dr. Gerard smirked, as he rose out of his crouch.
John made a mental note to have Lorne make an appointment with the guy. He had a feeling his tenure on the city was going to be ... interesting.
Lorne hadn't understood what put McKay off so strongly about Dr. Gerard at first any more than the colonel did, but after rotating his team through guard duty for the exploration group a few times – just in case there were any more Wraith hibernating somewhere, however unlikely that might be – he thought he was starting to get it. He probably should have taken note when Zelenka turned an unhealthy color and started swearing in Czech when the new group walked into the mess hall at the end of their introductory tour, but like Sheppard, he'd been a little fascinated by the guy's apparently magical ability to interact with Ancient technology.
Flying the jumpers was already amazing enough; the idea of being one with the alien ship to the point you didn't need the computers to read its systems was very, very appealing. After this latest experience, though – well, considering what had happened the last time McKay had taken out a newly repaired jumper, he was starting to reconsider his idea of taking the man along with him on a test flight.
"Tell me what you saw, again?" Lorne asked the scientist that had been closest to Dr. Gerard. "You said he sensed there was something wrong with the transporter?"
"More or less," the annoyed woman replied. "We kept telling him not to walk off on his own, after what happened in the freezer rooms we discovered yesterday – don't ask, you really don't want to know. But we've been marking teleportation cubicles as we find them, to better orient the maps. He just stuck out his hand, and said, 'I'm the petty engineer who decided he was above actually going to the transporters damaged during the siege to decommission them, and locked them out of the master maps instead'."
"And he just ... touched it?" Lorne said, exasperated. "Did you see which location he selected?"
"No," she scoffed. "I wasn't going to go in there with him! Why? Isn't he on the city's sensors?"
"You would think," Lorne replied dryly. He'd tried calling Dr. Gerard after one of his men had announced that the scientist had disappeared, and only received one brief reply: a wet sort of sputtering sound, followed by "I'm the radio headset that no one's bothered waterproofing yet, despite the fact that we all live in a floating city...." A statement that had dissolved into static. "But either he's in one of the old flooded sections, or it somehow beamed him off the city, and Dr. Weir says the transporters have started sending people to randomized destinations. Knowing what he pressed would give Dr. Zelenka a starting place to solve the problem."
"Sorry, Major." She shrugged, then wrinkled her nose. "Although, he caught his hand in that malfunctioning door at the base of the tower this morning? There might be a smudge on the controls."
She didn't enter the cubicle to check it herself, though. Lorne didn't blame her. He sighed, then stepped in, squinting at the map ... and winced. "Dr. Weir?" he announced, triggering his radio again. "It looks like he may have tried to transport to one of the outer balconies that took damage during the siege." He read off the exact notation, then visually measured how far it was from the jumper bay. "If one of the pilots takes a jumper out..."
There was no warning; one second he was squinting at the map, the next a surge of white light threw him ... somewhere else. An indoor transporter, and not one in good order either, judging by the way the panel instantly went dark and the door refused to open no matter how much he prodded at it.
"Major Lorne? Major, please respond," the radio in his ear squawked.
"...and if someone could take a crowbar down to–" he read off the new coordinates, "–that would be very much appreciated. Apparently the system is now randomly activating as well."
"Understood, Major," Weir replied, a wry note in her voice. "We'll get someone to you as soon as we can, but given the other reports that are coming in, that might take a while."
Two hours later, staring into the grinning face of a damp Dr. Gerard, Lorne was ready to have Kavanaugh thrown in the wraith cage the next time he came anywhere near Atlantis – and having listened to the chaos going on in the rest of the city, a lot more understanding of McKay's attitude about Mayhem.
They had checked to make sure the scientist's extreme expression of the ATA wasn't because he was some kind of descended Ancient like Chaya, hadn't they? He made a mental note to ask McKay when his team got back from their off-world mission, and held up a hand.
"Don't want to hear it, doc. Don't want to hear it."
Carson glanced at the ceiling as the lights in the infirmary flickered, and reached reflexively for his radio. In his recent experience, that usually meant one thing. "Beckett to control room. Could someone tell me what part of the city the exploration team's in today?"
After the first few incidents, the Canadian sergeant up there – Chuck – had started keeping track of their schedule. "Uh – it's their rest day, doc. Why?"
"Oh, nothing – just had a brief fluctuation in power down here. I'm afraid I'm a wee bit jumpy. Thanks."
He shook his head, then turned back to the file he'd been updating, entering Dr. Gerard's latest round of minor physical injuries and the prescribed treatment. In the weeks he'd been on the city, he'd been electrocuted, trapped in a malfunctioning door, thrown off the city by a malfunctioning transporter, tripped over debris in one of the damaged section of the city, temporarily swapped his consciousness with that of a visiting ally's child, and even slipped on a discarded fruit peel, among other incidents. Each occurrence had only two things in common with the rest of the list: Dr. Gerard, though usually the focus of the fallout, was never seriously injured; and human negligence, malicious or accidental, generally featured somewhere in the cause.
It was to the point where Carson was starting to wonder if the man might be doing it all intentionally somehow – or whether he was perhaps related to a member of SG-1. There was terrible luck, and then there was Mayhem's luck. Honestly. He'd have been tempted to run the man's DNA for off-world origin, if someone hadn't already tested him to verify the ATA. Perhaps a blood test for naquadah, or a trip through the Ancient MRI, next time he came in might be in order? The Goa'uld had snuck one of their own aboard in Caldwell not that long ago; perhaps the Trust had found another way to get a snake past the SGC's screening?
The lights fluctuated again, this time taking the computer screens down with them for several seconds, though fortunately it didn't appear to have affected the data he was entering. Carson frowned and keyed the radio again, this time for McKay.
"Rodney? Are you perhaps performing any tests on the power systems today?" He knew the engineers planned to briefly step down the ZPM while more thorough repairs were done to replace McKay's patch job after the entity imprints possessing Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard had wrecked the power room, but he'd thought that wasn't supposed to happen for several more days, until after the Daedalus had returned to collect their temporary guests. For safety's sake, if nothing else.
"No; we're moving the latest shipment of drones from the Tower planet into the storage bays today. Why?"
Carson winced at the reminder of that mission; really, he needed to stop taking house calls. "I'm seeing a few fluctuations down here. The exploration team is on a rest day today, correct?"
"Of course," his friend snarked back. "Otherwise, do you think I would have risked moving these things around? You're enough of a menace with them; I don't want Mayhem anywhere near them. Have you checked to make sure he isn't near you? Didn't he fall off a pier again yesterday?"
"Of course I checked," Carson replied irritably. "It's the exploration team's rest day; I highly doubt...."
The power fluctuated a third time – and this time, with a loud fizzling sound, his laptop abruptly caught on fire.
Carson swore and immediately reached for a fire extinguisher; and he'd thought the thing would be surplus to requirements, given how much Ancient technology relied on crystals instead of wires! By the time the flames had died out, though, the lights were back up – and this time, every screen appeared to have reset.
"Okay, even I caught that one," McKay said. "Let me just.... Ah. Seems that the nearest naquadah generator was one of the ones we had to run hot, and it finally reached its shelf life; sorry. It unbalanced the power distribution system temporarily. Zelenka reports he has it isolated now; you should be good."
"Except for my laptop," Carson sighed. Though he could finish his data entry through the city's systems; he just preferred a modern keyboard. He reached for one of the large touch screens, and pulled up the file–
ERROR, the system reported, in simple Ancient glyphs. FILE CORRUPTED.
Carson tapped the file a second time; then, alarmed, started checking other patient files. Each one he tried, thankfully, opened. But when he went back to Dr. Gerard's a third time....
CORRUPTED DATA PURGED, it announced. Then the directory refreshed, without any sign of the file.
Carson put his head in his hands, then called McKay again.
The man really was Mayhem incarnate.
Elizabeth rubbed at her temples, processing the latest report regarding the exploration team's discoveries in the city. She'd been hoping for some useful technology, or perhaps additional informational databases, or at the very least a more comprehensive idea of how the Ancients themselves utilized the city, to come out of the project. Not ... this. She didn't know how she was supposed to word her report to the IOA without making either her own people, or the exploration team, sound cartoonishly incompetent.
It wasn't that any one incident was unbelievable; it was the bulk of them, taken all together. Again and again, the city's technology had malfunctioned, in often spectacular and frequently extremely unlikely ways. It was enough to make her wonder, in a moment of dark amusement, if the Ancients had had the concept of insurance; and if, since they were living so many long-shot options these days anyway, they might be able to press a claim as distant descendants and inheritors of the city? It wasn't as though the builders weren't still alive, after all; they were merely on another plane of existence. Perhaps they could even pay out in ZPMs?
"I mean, I know his team was specifically sent to explore the city," she complained to her command team, "but the man's been everywhere. After you aired your initial concerns, I had the military teams accompanying them constantly recording their progress – but viewing the tapes back just makes it seem even more surreal."
Every time something went wrong – and something almost always went wrong, at least once per shift – Dr. Gerard instantly turned to narrate it to the camera, as if he were the fault in question. It was enough to make her wonder if he'd had prior acting experience. Though of course she couldn't check, as somehow his files had deleted themselves from the system. Carson had been particularly irate on the subject.
"You should watch the clip show someone put together from Area 51's surveillance tapes," Rodney replied, mouth twisted wryly. "At least here, it's only Ancient technology interacting."
Elizabeth decided she didn't want to know. But. "Thankfully, the Daedalus will be back tomorrow. Before the team departs, however ... I've received a direct order to allow Mayhem – sorry, Dr. Gerard – access to the control chair. Apparently, the American representative to the IOA is ... concerned that we haven't taken advantage of the opportunity already."
"You mean he wants an American civilian – theoretically, someone he'd have more control over than either Colonel Sheppard or a Canadian citizen – proven able to control the city," Rodney replied, tartly.
John wrinkled his brow. "Are you saying you think all the incidents have been what, sabotage? Because someone's still angry Weir got her way after the siege?"
"No, no, haven't I been telling you? Dr. Gerard is mayhem incarnate, not maliciousness. Ten to one the only thing Coolidge even looked at in his file was the genome report. He probably thinks the man will just sit down, light everything up, and give him ammunition for his next scathing memo. Instead of, I don't even know, asking it where its weakness is and inevitably sinking us to the bottom?"
"Wait – asking it where its weakness is?" Elizabeth straightened in her chair. "Is that what you think's happening?"
"I don't know what else it could be," Rodney replied, throwing up his hands. "It's like he's drawn by a magnet to every possible system that might have been damaged or connected to something that was damaged or even should have had more maintenance than we've been able to give it."
John drew a sharp breath, as he seemed to put something together. "Is it just that he wants to fix things? And wants to insure that everyone else who should also be fixing things are doing their jobs? But his expression of the ATA is so strong that the city is taking his subconscious wishes as suggestions?"
"Aye; and don't forget his injuries," Carson chimed in.
"His injuries?" Teyla spoke up. "I had not observed that they have grown any more or less severe during his time in Atlantis."
"But they should have, shouldn't they?" Ronon added, narrowing his eyes. "What happened before he got here should have healed. And some of what happened since he got here really shouldn't have."
"Exactly, lad," Carson replied. "Only I can't make any accurate comparisons, due to the incident with the files."
"I don't suppose you could examine the chair in advance and find some reason it has to be offline for the rest of his visit then, Rodney?" Elizabeth asked, wincing.
Rodney shot John a look; John stared back, then sighed. "Fine, I'll go down there and click my heels together. Don't blame me if I really do find something, though."
Mayhem smiled sharply to himself as he knelt next to the control chair. Finally, they were starting to catch on.
Granted, it wasn't the expedition's fault that they were so drastically understaffed. Or that Ganos Lal had done such a hack job on the database trying to wipe out any hint of Moros' sangraal technology. Really, she'd have done better trying to censor Janus; Moros had only been trying to save humanity, not push the horizons of science until they doubled back screaming in horror from the abyss.
Anyway – showboats, all of them. The Ascended were only allowed to guide, not interfere; but guiding could take so many forms. Just think what might have happened if he hadn't been here to subtly point out how many ways things could have gone wrong! They'd have to come up with all new ways to screw up, now – but at least they'd mostly survive long enough to do it.
There were worse things to be than the semi-Ascended equivalent of a janitor.
Besides, it was so much fun. Maybe he'd even moonlight in insurance next; Dr. Weir had had an amusing idea, there.
"I'm the power bar crumbs someone left behind on the hand control," he began, as he broke Colonel Sheppard free of the short-circuited system.