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[identity profile] dossier.livejournal.com posting in [community profile] sga_flashfic
Habits of a Lifetime (Left Behind challenge)
~1050 words
McKay, Gen. [livejournal.com profile] dossier
eta: fantastic remix by [livejournal.com profile] jadesfire2808, True Colours (The Mother's Love Remix)


When Rodney was four, his mother gave him a Big Chief tablet with a fat, soft pencil. He sat at the kitchen table and carefully wrote down his ideas. They were small ideas, like him, but the way his mother stood next to him and beamed proudly made him happy, too. When he was finished, he would carefully tear them out of the tablet and take them to his room. He was afraid to let his mother have one, what if she didn't bring it back, how would he remember his idea? When she insisted, he laboriously copied it and told her she could have that one.

When Rodney was six, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote out his ideas on thin sheets of college rule notebook paper with a blue Bic pen. The pen fairly flew across the page, the cheap ink leaving blue smears in his haste; Rodney rarely went back to cross anything out or try to correct minor mistakes in spelling or punctuation. He held the paper at an angle so he wouldn't smudge it too badly, but that downside to being left handed was miniscule compared to finding out how much easier things were with the correct dominant hand. His mother no longer stood next to him in triumph to watch her prodigy, but Rodney sometimes still made her a copy.

When Rodney was eight, he bought a typewriter at a garage sale for three dollars. He sat in his room typing his ideas out on the old Underwood manual. It was tall and heavy, and the keys were stiff, but they slammed the type bars onto the paper with a satisfying smash. He had to use the one finger on each hand because they were the only ones strong enough, but eventually with practice he could touch type with all but the pinkie. He sometimes put a piece of carbon paper between two sheets when he wanted to give his mom a copy, but he discovered the premeditated act of making a copy caused him to freeze up and think too slowly. Rodney didn't make copies very often.

When Rodney was ten, his paternal grandmother gave him an electric typewriter and he sat in his room typing his ideas out with lightning speed. The model of typewriter had a correction button, so you could backspace over your mistakes, but Rodney never used it. He'd learned to be accurate the first time on the Underwood and the Selectric was like heaven on speed. It was quiet (compared to the Underwood) and fast, very fast, and Rodney put the old typewriter under the bed.


When Rodney was thirteen, his paternal grandfather gave him a Vic 20. Rodney was confounded because it was brand new and came with game cartridges, like Space Invaders. But he humored his grandfather and they played together, watching the little pixilated aliens fall from the sky. It wouldn't be very long before Rodney discovered what the Vic was really good for: he programmed the lights at the school Valentines’ Day dance to chase each other across the room and flash in time with the music. He still wrote his great ideas on the Selectric and stored them in the rows of wide three ring binders on the book shelves; they were dated because that was the only thing the pages had in common with each other.

When Rodney was fifteen, his maternal grandmother gave him a KayProII word processor. It had a screen instead of paper, but the keyboard looked just like the Selectric's. The screen glowed and the words were orange, but Rodney didn't care, it was fast and quiet. He stored all of his great ideas on wide, leathery disks until Christmas when he received the printer he'd requested. Rodney spent the rest of Christmas day in his room, feeding a ream of paper into the printer so he'd have it on paper in case the KayPro ever died.


When Rodney was seventeen, he learned about off-site storage. The house had burned to the ground, he swore he wasn't responsible he hadn't even been there, and all of Rodney's notebooks were reduced to ashes. All of his thin 5 1/2-inch floppies were gone, the Underwood, the Selectric and the Vic 20 and the KayProII all went up in smoke. He mourned their loss for a while until he learned that his mother had set the fire on purpose. He never saw her again because they locked her up in the Looney bin, and Rodney wasn't mourning anymore, he was furious. There wasn't any way to recover the work of a lifetime, and while adults scoffed when he said this, he knew it was true. Rodney got his father to give him some of the insurance money and he bought a new Amiga and rented a lockbox at the bank. He still saved the paper copies at home, but all of his work was backed up onto disks and taken to the bank once a week. Rodney had no way of knowing that his disaster recovery plan was cutting edge stuff, until he logged onto the BBS with a modem at 9KPBS. The world became a wide open place.

The computer at home was fine until Rodney discovered the university lab's mainframe. Rodney still saved disks and took them to the bank, but the Amiga gathered dust because he was never home to use it--he spent most of his waking hours at the lab. He put the Amiga in a garage sale when he moved to another university for his master's degree.

When Rodney arrived at Atlantis, he left behind the lock box at the bank. He'd signed a ten year lease and automatic withdrawal papers and left the key at the bank for the SGC in case he never came back. He didn't really need the 5 ½-inch floppies, or the 1.44mb diskettes, or the CD's or the DVD's that contained everything he could possibly think of—including paper copies of his dissertations, and the beginnings of other, as-yet-unwritten papers.

Rodney no longer fears losing his lifetime's work, because now there is so much more at stake and he realizes that he is more than the accumulation of knowledge.

He still backs up the laptop, but now it goes to a crystalline database that’s ten thousand years old, and still the newest thing around.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 06:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jimpage363.livejournal.com
Very nice insight into Rodney and his weird family background and who he could be. I liked the subtlety of your characterizations of his parents and family.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 06:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jimpage363.livejournal.com
I don't think your writing was too spare at all. it was clear enough to tell the sotrywithout affectation and that is very much to be admired!
I certainly can sympathize with your desire to write short and meaningful pieces and I certainly know how much work that can be. You seem to have it down!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 06:26 pm (UTC)
paian: blank white (mckay blue)
From: [personal profile] paian
So neat to see the evolution of Rodney through the evolution of recording media. Nice tactile details -- the blue smears of the ballpoint, the smash of the Underwood keys, the glowing orange letters on the screen. The intimation of genuine insanity in his family is creepy and sad and interesting. I wonder if he wishes he'd had a backup of the house, or a backup of his mom, or if he's ever tempted to back himself up.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 10:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] umbo.livejournal.com
I really liked this. Nice job.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:10 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
thank you!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 10:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 2naonh3-cl2.livejournal.com
i like it. an interesting view on Rodney and his weird-assed family. though one thing, i'm pretty sure that Rodney/David Hewlett is right-handed.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:12 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Yeah, I was 90% sure that I was wrong about the left handedness but I took the 10% and some literary license to go with it. thank you!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 10:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dorcus.livejournal.com
Maybe because I can not only sympathize but down right identify with your Rodney here (*I* bought a type writer much the same way, *I* printed up/out all my "big ideas", *I* have three ring binders of Important Things), I found this piece awesome. : )

Except I had a Brother's Pro and my screen had green words, not orange. ; )

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:15 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Man we had a pile of computers at home when I was a teenager, and I can never remember which one was which color--one was normal at green and the other was cool (to me) because it was orange.

But yeah, like me, I think Rodney as a child would have been a very big saver. thanks!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 10:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hth-the-first.livejournal.com
This is really striking and...God, I can't think of the word I want. Good thing you're better at this than I am *g* I found myself reading each paragraph twice and then three times, once for the physical detail (and OMG, some of those things just struck such a chord of memory in me, too, from the Big Chief tablet to the 5 1/2" discs to the fucking Amiga) and once more for the sense of Rodney's seriousness of purpose, his utter devotion to the small ideas that define his life, and a third time in the context of a child who is trying to create control and definitions in a world that's disfigured by insanity. I love the twinning of the bleeding-edge-ness of his technology with the, sort of, emotional conservatism of his compulsion to keep *everything,* to document *all* his thoughts, to make his interior, intellectual world immutable in the way that everything else is not. Really, I think this is extraordinary.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:19 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I dunno, I think you probably said it better than the story! I didn't want to overinvest any section with too much, so I tried to put in just one detail & one clue per era, but in the end it still all added up to Rodney.

thank you so so much, I think I have to go retire and perhaps squeal a little!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 10:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mirabile-dictu.livejournal.com
Gosh, I liked this Rodney. I also liked the structure of the story; it was both clever and insightful. Thank you!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cynicatlantis.livejournal.com
Very cool - it's all the little things that really make Rodney an interesting character, IMO, and you've addressed several of them here: things such as his unusual family, and the fact that he really is a creature of habit (in an almost OCD-like way, at times).

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-21 11:22 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I think that Rodney is really trying to overcome that OCD-ness, and he really has grown a lot since SG1 season 5. I <3 Rodney so much!

Thank you!

Re: ack

Date: 2006-03-21 11:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cynicatlantis.livejournal.com
LOL :P

He certainly has grown a lot since we first met him, but at the same time he's never betrayed his original character. All his character development so far is logical, given his circumstances.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-22 02:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] adafrog.livejournal.com
Great story. I love thinking of little Rodney keeping everything in binders. And then his mom setting fire to the house was just so wrong-but in that really right way.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-22 06:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mercurydraconix.livejournal.com
a crystalline database that’s ten thousand years old, and still the newest thing around

I loved this line. All throughout he's moving on to bigger and better things, discovering the new technology even as he's discovering new things, and the way it echoes to Atlantis and Ancient tech is great.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-22 01:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] palebluebell.livejournal.com
I loved this idea of Rodney leaving himself behind, with the things in the safe deposit box representing him moving on and opening up space so he could become something else..well that's how I read it, at least.

This was wonderful and left an impression - thank you.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-24 09:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kuonji14.livejournal.com
Wow, sorry, I'm not good at profound comments, but I thought I'd say:

The two things that stuck most with me were the 4yr old copying his ideas (b/c I remember when I was little and writing was HARD, and it seems such a Rodney thing to do) and the fire. OMG, I literally scrolled up again and willed that not to happen, b/c I really cannot imagine losing all those ideas and memories, esp. for a guy who lives on such.

Great look at Rodney's cool personality and his family.

(no subject)

Date: 2006-03-24 09:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kuonji14.livejournal.com
oh, and the last two lines were awesome

(no subject)

Date: 2008-02-21 02:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] linziday.livejournal.com
Very cool! Love Rodney-insight stories and this is one of the best.

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