Transitions by Stargate

Author:Stargate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Fandemonium Books
Published: 2011-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Rodney McKay was positive that he was developing a fever. He could feel it. There! A bead of sweat, originating somewhere between his shoulder blades, shook loose and slid down his back like an icy little finger. He groaned.

“You look fine to me, Rodney.” Radek Zelenka’s response was mechanical, and he never even bothered to glance up from the computer screen.

“How would you know?” snarled Rodney. “You haven’t looked at me.”

Radek peered over the monitor at Rodney. “You look fine to me.”

“I’m sweating.”

“So am I. I shut down all non-essential environmental systems in this sector two hours ago, so we can divert the energy to the shield. The current temperature in the lab is”— he rattled out a tattoo on the keyboard, then his head popped up again, like a chipmunk peeping from its burrow— “eighty-two point four degrees Fahrenheit and rising.”

Twenty-eight degrees Celsius, for those who liked to use a comprehensible measure of temperatures.

A nice, sultry day at the beach.

Sure. He could dream.

And he still wished he’d had the foresight to keep a thermometer in his desk, along with the aspirin, cold and flu remedy, and antacids. But Zelenka’s explanation was plausible. By Zelenka’s standards.

Then again… Rodney furtively felt his forehead but couldn’t tell any appreciable difference. His palms were just as hot. And sweaty.

He supposed he might as well work until he was overcome by the disease. He had no doubt that he would be infected. After all, he’d been given the ATA gene.

“Nice going, Carson,” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t suppose it occurred to you to take the attendant risks into account.”

“What?” Zelenka piped up.

“Nothing!”

Rodney tried to focus on the latest rampage of the computer virus, and decided that, maybe, quantum computing wasn’t such a cool gadget after all. Especially when your malware operated by the rules of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which meant that, every time you thought you’d finally caught a glimpse of the little bastard, it switched quantum states and turned into something else entirely. When that happened, all you could do was wait until a new trail of destruction showed up elsewhere in the system.

Which, fundamentally, was what Rodney had been doing for the past several hours. That and praying that, wherever the beast cropped up next, it wouldn’t affect anything essential for survival.

“Uh, Rodney?”

“What? I’m trying to think!”

“We just had a power fluctuation in the shields.”

So much for things nonessential… Damn! “Well, what do you expect me to do? Rattle my beads and chant magic spells? Reroute the power, for God’s sake!”

Zelenka gave a despairing little grunt. “I’m starting to run out of places to reroute stuff through. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Yes. Fine. Magnificent. I shall consider myself warned. Now let me think.”

After precisely two point five seconds of blessed silence— certainly not a stretch of time in which a useful thought could be conceived, but silence nonetheless— static whooshed through the ear-bud of his com set. Hot upon its heels followed the nasal, wannabe-Oxbridge tones of the duty technician in the control center.

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