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sga_flashfic-title- The Phoenix: Lucy and Fred
-author- Sophonisba (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saphanibaal)
-rating/warnings- Suitable for general audiences. Gen.
-spoilers- "38 Minutes"; general for first season.
-characters- Guest appearances by Rodney, Miko, Zelenka, Elizabeth, and Sheppard.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. I think the song this was inspired by was written by Julia Ecklar (she certainly sang it on Minus Ten and Counting, which I don't even own a copy of).
-word count- 1872
-summary- There are worse things, on the whole, to be reincarnated as.
The Phoenix
They first noticed it with the puddlejumpers: that some of them simply responded better, felt friendlier, were more willing to "tell their pilots their names," as men have claimed for the craft they steer or fly for millennia.
It proved to be that way with much of the Ancient technology. Several of the expedition members said, not in Dr. McKay's hearing, that the souls of Ancient machines were nearer to the surface than those of Earthly ones.
(It was Dr. Kusanagi whom he eventually chanced upon saying as much, and when he berated her for encouraging superstitions, she opened wide, betrayed eyes on him and said sadly, "So it is not true, then, that freedom of religion is permitted in Canada?" He replied, after he'd finished spluttering, that as long as it didn't interfere, uh, with her work, he'd, um, refrain from, uh, um, commenting on her personal life. It was generally agreed that she had carried off the honors from that encounter.)
Others claimed that it was merely variances in technology, earlier-built devices more sluggish in comparison to later ones. Dr. Zelenka suggested that if the codes he and his had found built into certain items were in fact serial numbers, either the Ancients were in the habit of reusing them, or had no thought of consecutive numbering for parts, or ease of use had nothing to do with earlier or later manufacture.
Most of them didn't think about the whys at all, letting it subsume into the general mix of contradictions and wonders that was Atlantis.
Lucy
Lucia had been excited when she left for offplanet science camp -- she'd been camping before, of course, when she was a little kid, back before menarche, but this was real, this was offplanet, the campers would be junior members of the expedition itself, to go for and come bring items and enter data and help dig for samples.
And it was. She'd expected the heat and the dryness and the sweat that evaporated and left her skin well begrimed before they returned to base camp and the refreshers. She'd expected the sweetness of food cooked under the starlight and the views they would have and the time Naran Lal found the irritant plant by falling into it and needing to be taken back through the gate to have the resulting rash treated.
She hadn't expected the cliff to fall on top of her.
They were Alteran, Asura, Lantean; they were lifting the fallen rocks almost before the last of them fell. One or two of the campers were still alive when they were uncovered, and those were the first to be rushed to the new biostatic healing units.
Lucia and her compatriots followed them, gently borne in on floating pallets, arranged as neatly as the pulped mess could be before laid within the naquadah coffin-like boxes.
Which healed the more intact of the bodies within them, and left them comatose.
Lucia's parents visited her in the house of healing. Her father arranged for her care and tried wilder and wilder theories to awaken a mind within her now-whole skull; her mother gave way to despair early, claiming that the aura of Lucia's soul and heart was long gone, that only an empty shell remained to be tended, that they should have put a stone for her in the family memorial garden long since.
When at last her father arranged for her to be tried in a new, improved version of the healing unit, although she opened her eyes and blinked at them, she was as helpless as a newborn, having to relearn how to speak, how to feed herself, how to stand. For years he assumed that his daughter had lost her memories, until it became clear that they were there, but without reference or linking chains, coming to mind out of order and context.
Lucia's mother held, with some justification, that Lucia had indeed died, and that this was a new soul, a new person, a new daughter. She named the girl Alia, and Alia herself set Lucia's stone in a part of the memorial garden that memory suggested her sister had loved.
*
Lucy was always the most eager of the puddlejumpers, who flew a little faster, who responded a little quicker (than, indeed, most of her pilots wanted her to), who carried about with her the tension of a being wanting to just go, go, go.
She won the informal races until Drs. Weir and McKay put a stop to them, stating that when machines overcompensated for pilot deficiencies there was really no point. Major Sheppard, who as XO hadn't been invited to compete against his men, quietly suggested afterwards that perhaps an aerial manuever competition would suit.
Those proved to be far more skill-dependent -- Lucia herself had never practiced precise forms of the bodily or creative arts, much preferring good-enough-to-go on her way to getting somewhere.
Fred
Elophredon Torolz was a technician, as he'd say if anyone ever asked him. He was, he prided himself, a good technician: when he fixed things, they stayed as fixed as new-built would have and sometimes longer; when they couldn't be fixed properly, he said so and then jury-rigged some sort of kluge for the nonce, to be replaced with good solid work as soon as whatever crisis they might be in were over.
He also found himself, somehow or another, drifting into qualifying as an emotional therapist. It wasn't anything he'd particularly set out to have; he liked talking and listening to people, and other people were drawn to his calm good sense and charitable heart, and on the long voyages of the dreadnoughts he served on it only made sense to get along with others... and then, seeing as he'd been functioning as an emotional therapist for two and a half Standard Years, getting licensed only made sense.
And Elophredon liked people, although, granted, he liked machines more; the exploratory dreadnoughts were some of the best places to see more of those, to work with every system on the ship, to rig new and innovative devices in response to the ship's need, and to deal with the crude mechanical devices (and the crude technical notions) of the groundling worlds.
He spent too much time, perhaps, with some of those, disregarding the rules stating that technical advancement of lower sentiences was only to take place under carefully controlled conditions, his explanation always that when something was shown to not be working, the logical and sane thing was to fix it.
"Once you start interfering with cultures, you have to keep doing it," Chief Technical Officer ImKhei told him once, back on the Winter Wind. "You can't just change something and take off, it's worse for them in the long run than if you just left them to come up with answers themselves, and the Lantean Alliance can't afford to keep pouring resources into a thousand worlds -- that's why the Council regulates limited assistance, limited to what we can afford to keep going indefinitely."
"They were trying to do geometry without base numerals or a zero," Elophredon protested. "That's made for errors creeping in even to skilled mathematicians, and then a building would have come down on their heads or something."
CTO ImKhei of the Failian ImKheis rubbed his temples slowly. "Oh, go and sin no more."
It is perhaps unsurprising that of those Ancients who are worshipped by name, the cult of Eylfreddin (Ofredo, Ilafred, Ephredoan) is one of the most popular.
*
Elophredon Torolz was also famous as one of the first Alterans in the Pegasus Galaxy to Ascend. At first, he devoted his time to watching and waiting, against the day when the Ori should turn their attention towards the Milky Way, only looking in on the Pegasus Galaxy now and then.
Then he started looking in more and more often.
Then he started changing little things.
Then larger things.
"It was broken," he'd explain, afterwards, or "it was sluggish," or "the Wraith was about to take people home and eat them."
Just about the time he stumbled across the location of the Sapient Asuran Weapons (whose existence had come as a nasty shock to him; a Torolz had worked on the project, and Elophredon had had no idea that a kinsman was involved in such a morally bankrupt and logically unsound design, let alone that the Council had passed in in the first place) and started setting his mind to what could be done about them that would be both just and merciful, for pity's own sake, his fellow Ascended decided that they had put up with the multiplanar aftershocks of his meddling for quite long enough, and were tired of Elophredon listening to their prohibitions and then doing as he pleased anyway.
Given the lack of precedent, it was fortunate indeed that they did not blot him out of physical or astral existence, as happened to some others who could not keep the process under control.
The Eragach found Friedonius, as they named him, naked and memoryless on a mountainside. Although little enough came back to him, and much of that seemingly sick-rye-dreams, he had a gift with engineering that was legendary, and that brought him to work on their warships at the time when the uneasy stellar lines between them and the Qenesoar flared up into open warfare.
Friedonius served them well, helping design ships sleeker and faster than they had had, accompanying the flagship out on a shakedown cruise that wound up guest star at a Qenesoarn ambush. He was desperately coordinating repairs, trying to keep the Invilgator together and whole, when a shot overloaded a conduit and blew out the entire corridor. He was vaporized before he even knew the shot had hit.
(The Invilgator eventually surrendered, her hulk towed to be cannibalized to replace the ships she had killed, her officers tried and executed and her crewmembers made prisoner. The outrage served as enough of a bloody shirt for Eragach to defeat Qenesoar mostly by being willing to give quarter but never to ask for it, driving both star-nations into such wreckage that they were smoothly annexed by Eltare two generations later: millennia afterwards, they were split among System Lords as Eltare fell to the Goa'uld.)
*
Fred was the most solid and reliable of the puddlejumpers, always doing what was asked of her/him but seldom more. The science staff first made Fred's acquaintance when they were pulling him to pieces trying to work around Aylee's problem (no one would ever catch Fred failing to retract one of HIS drive pods), and thereafter would have used him for all experiments had AR-5 not become so fond of him.
Fred was loyal, they pointed out. Fred was solid. Fred behaved, and missions with Fred generally went well. (On the rare occasions when things went wrong, it was due to some human or other animal -- or the occasional plant -- onplanet, and Fred was the one that got them out of it.)
The preference turned to rabid overprotectiveness once Sciences' track record with puddlejumpers became obvious, of course.
-author- Sophonisba (
saphanibaal)-rating/warnings- Suitable for general audiences. Gen.
-spoilers- "38 Minutes"; general for first season.
-characters- Guest appearances by Rodney, Miko, Zelenka, Elizabeth, and Sheppard.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. I think the song this was inspired by was written by Julia Ecklar (she certainly sang it on Minus Ten and Counting, which I don't even own a copy of).
-word count- 1872
-summary- There are worse things, on the whole, to be reincarnated as.
The Phoenix
They first noticed it with the puddlejumpers: that some of them simply responded better, felt friendlier, were more willing to "tell their pilots their names," as men have claimed for the craft they steer or fly for millennia.
It proved to be that way with much of the Ancient technology. Several of the expedition members said, not in Dr. McKay's hearing, that the souls of Ancient machines were nearer to the surface than those of Earthly ones.
(It was Dr. Kusanagi whom he eventually chanced upon saying as much, and when he berated her for encouraging superstitions, she opened wide, betrayed eyes on him and said sadly, "So it is not true, then, that freedom of religion is permitted in Canada?" He replied, after he'd finished spluttering, that as long as it didn't interfere, uh, with her work, he'd, um, refrain from, uh, um, commenting on her personal life. It was generally agreed that she had carried off the honors from that encounter.)
Others claimed that it was merely variances in technology, earlier-built devices more sluggish in comparison to later ones. Dr. Zelenka suggested that if the codes he and his had found built into certain items were in fact serial numbers, either the Ancients were in the habit of reusing them, or had no thought of consecutive numbering for parts, or ease of use had nothing to do with earlier or later manufacture.
Most of them didn't think about the whys at all, letting it subsume into the general mix of contradictions and wonders that was Atlantis.
Lucy
Lucia had been excited when she left for offplanet science camp -- she'd been camping before, of course, when she was a little kid, back before menarche, but this was real, this was offplanet, the campers would be junior members of the expedition itself, to go for and come bring items and enter data and help dig for samples.
And it was. She'd expected the heat and the dryness and the sweat that evaporated and left her skin well begrimed before they returned to base camp and the refreshers. She'd expected the sweetness of food cooked under the starlight and the views they would have and the time Naran Lal found the irritant plant by falling into it and needing to be taken back through the gate to have the resulting rash treated.
She hadn't expected the cliff to fall on top of her.
They were Alteran, Asura, Lantean; they were lifting the fallen rocks almost before the last of them fell. One or two of the campers were still alive when they were uncovered, and those were the first to be rushed to the new biostatic healing units.
Lucia and her compatriots followed them, gently borne in on floating pallets, arranged as neatly as the pulped mess could be before laid within the naquadah coffin-like boxes.
Which healed the more intact of the bodies within them, and left them comatose.
Lucia's parents visited her in the house of healing. Her father arranged for her care and tried wilder and wilder theories to awaken a mind within her now-whole skull; her mother gave way to despair early, claiming that the aura of Lucia's soul and heart was long gone, that only an empty shell remained to be tended, that they should have put a stone for her in the family memorial garden long since.
When at last her father arranged for her to be tried in a new, improved version of the healing unit, although she opened her eyes and blinked at them, she was as helpless as a newborn, having to relearn how to speak, how to feed herself, how to stand. For years he assumed that his daughter had lost her memories, until it became clear that they were there, but without reference or linking chains, coming to mind out of order and context.
Lucia's mother held, with some justification, that Lucia had indeed died, and that this was a new soul, a new person, a new daughter. She named the girl Alia, and Alia herself set Lucia's stone in a part of the memorial garden that memory suggested her sister had loved.
*
Lucy was always the most eager of the puddlejumpers, who flew a little faster, who responded a little quicker (than, indeed, most of her pilots wanted her to), who carried about with her the tension of a being wanting to just go, go, go.
She won the informal races until Drs. Weir and McKay put a stop to them, stating that when machines overcompensated for pilot deficiencies there was really no point. Major Sheppard, who as XO hadn't been invited to compete against his men, quietly suggested afterwards that perhaps an aerial manuever competition would suit.
Those proved to be far more skill-dependent -- Lucia herself had never practiced precise forms of the bodily or creative arts, much preferring good-enough-to-go on her way to getting somewhere.
Fred
Elophredon Torolz was a technician, as he'd say if anyone ever asked him. He was, he prided himself, a good technician: when he fixed things, they stayed as fixed as new-built would have and sometimes longer; when they couldn't be fixed properly, he said so and then jury-rigged some sort of kluge for the nonce, to be replaced with good solid work as soon as whatever crisis they might be in were over.
He also found himself, somehow or another, drifting into qualifying as an emotional therapist. It wasn't anything he'd particularly set out to have; he liked talking and listening to people, and other people were drawn to his calm good sense and charitable heart, and on the long voyages of the dreadnoughts he served on it only made sense to get along with others... and then, seeing as he'd been functioning as an emotional therapist for two and a half Standard Years, getting licensed only made sense.
And Elophredon liked people, although, granted, he liked machines more; the exploratory dreadnoughts were some of the best places to see more of those, to work with every system on the ship, to rig new and innovative devices in response to the ship's need, and to deal with the crude mechanical devices (and the crude technical notions) of the groundling worlds.
He spent too much time, perhaps, with some of those, disregarding the rules stating that technical advancement of lower sentiences was only to take place under carefully controlled conditions, his explanation always that when something was shown to not be working, the logical and sane thing was to fix it.
"Once you start interfering with cultures, you have to keep doing it," Chief Technical Officer ImKhei told him once, back on the Winter Wind. "You can't just change something and take off, it's worse for them in the long run than if you just left them to come up with answers themselves, and the Lantean Alliance can't afford to keep pouring resources into a thousand worlds -- that's why the Council regulates limited assistance, limited to what we can afford to keep going indefinitely."
"They were trying to do geometry without base numerals or a zero," Elophredon protested. "That's made for errors creeping in even to skilled mathematicians, and then a building would have come down on their heads or something."
CTO ImKhei of the Failian ImKheis rubbed his temples slowly. "Oh, go and sin no more."
It is perhaps unsurprising that of those Ancients who are worshipped by name, the cult of Eylfreddin (Ofredo, Ilafred, Ephredoan) is one of the most popular.
*
Elophredon Torolz was also famous as one of the first Alterans in the Pegasus Galaxy to Ascend. At first, he devoted his time to watching and waiting, against the day when the Ori should turn their attention towards the Milky Way, only looking in on the Pegasus Galaxy now and then.
Then he started looking in more and more often.
Then he started changing little things.
Then larger things.
"It was broken," he'd explain, afterwards, or "it was sluggish," or "the Wraith was about to take people home and eat them."
Just about the time he stumbled across the location of the Sapient Asuran Weapons (whose existence had come as a nasty shock to him; a Torolz had worked on the project, and Elophredon had had no idea that a kinsman was involved in such a morally bankrupt and logically unsound design, let alone that the Council had passed in in the first place) and started setting his mind to what could be done about them that would be both just and merciful, for pity's own sake, his fellow Ascended decided that they had put up with the multiplanar aftershocks of his meddling for quite long enough, and were tired of Elophredon listening to their prohibitions and then doing as he pleased anyway.
Given the lack of precedent, it was fortunate indeed that they did not blot him out of physical or astral existence, as happened to some others who could not keep the process under control.
The Eragach found Friedonius, as they named him, naked and memoryless on a mountainside. Although little enough came back to him, and much of that seemingly sick-rye-dreams, he had a gift with engineering that was legendary, and that brought him to work on their warships at the time when the uneasy stellar lines between them and the Qenesoar flared up into open warfare.
Friedonius served them well, helping design ships sleeker and faster than they had had, accompanying the flagship out on a shakedown cruise that wound up guest star at a Qenesoarn ambush. He was desperately coordinating repairs, trying to keep the Invilgator together and whole, when a shot overloaded a conduit and blew out the entire corridor. He was vaporized before he even knew the shot had hit.
(The Invilgator eventually surrendered, her hulk towed to be cannibalized to replace the ships she had killed, her officers tried and executed and her crewmembers made prisoner. The outrage served as enough of a bloody shirt for Eragach to defeat Qenesoar mostly by being willing to give quarter but never to ask for it, driving both star-nations into such wreckage that they were smoothly annexed by Eltare two generations later: millennia afterwards, they were split among System Lords as Eltare fell to the Goa'uld.)
*
Fred was the most solid and reliable of the puddlejumpers, always doing what was asked of her/him but seldom more. The science staff first made Fred's acquaintance when they were pulling him to pieces trying to work around Aylee's problem (no one would ever catch Fred failing to retract one of HIS drive pods), and thereafter would have used him for all experiments had AR-5 not become so fond of him.
Fred was loyal, they pointed out. Fred was solid. Fred behaved, and missions with Fred generally went well. (On the rare occasions when things went wrong, it was due to some human or other animal -- or the occasional plant -- onplanet, and Fred was the one that got them out of it.)
The preference turned to rabid overprotectiveness once Sciences' track record with puddlejumpers became obvious, of course.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 05:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-24 11:52 pm (UTC)Well, that's pretty much it; with the caveat that since according to most theories of metempsychosis you get the next incarnation you deserve in some form or another, these are all people who one way or another deserved to be something as cool as a puddlejumper. ^_^
(In re Fred -- by their own covenant, none of the Ascended Ancients can keep him from performing to the limit of his reincarnation's powers, now that he is once more a part of the physical world. Whatever might govern reincarnation, it's something with rather more authority than even enlightened mortalish beings should hope to claim.)
Er. Does that help?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-24 11:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:07 pm (UTC)It might make more sense in the context of the song; Jerry Pournelle had a copy of it on his website (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view242.html#phoenix) last I checked, linked to from the map and from text below it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:29 pm (UTC)Forgive me, I think I'm just thick.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-24 11:28 pm (UTC)So these are two of them, and I've since written more.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-25 12:00 am (UTC)I don't believe in reincarnation, so that possibility never entered my mind!
Thank you for explaining. *grin*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-25 12:52 am (UTC)(Unless it goes beyond disbelief to outright repugnance, of course -- a lot of early fantasy is set in worlds where white males are superior to the rest of humanity, and depending on the presentation this may well obscure whatever value the story has qua story.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-25 01:16 am (UTC)And yes, it makes a good story. *grin*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 05:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:08 pm (UTC)I've loved the song for years, so...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 06:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:09 pm (UTC)I have more in the works (these were the only two that were done in time for the deadline). Thank you for your comments!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 11:04 am (UTC)Quite unsurprising.
I like this glimpse back into the first society to live in Atlantis, no matter how fragmented the glimpse is. Although you might want to make it just a little more clear what exactly the connection between people and puddlejumpers is. (And now I'm wondering what the Alterans called the puddlejumpers.) Simple reincarnation?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:36 pm (UTC)^_^
//I like this glimpse back into the first society to live in Atlantis, no matter how fragmented the glimpse is.//
Well -- as I said above, these are the completed bits of an incomplete work. It might be more understandable in toto.
//(And now I'm wondering what the Alterans called the puddlejumpers.)//
Portavehica, -ai. ^_^ (Portaucai for short. The modern gate-speech is usually stannlzaltris, -es, remaining female.)
But yes, simple reincarnation -- one of the ones Lorne named blinked a paraphrase of Jane Austen at Rodney once when he wound up flying it back with a broken arm and Ronon was in the back trying to keep Teyla and Sheppard prone, and Rodney is going to find the responsible party and kill them sideways, because it was NOT FUNNY.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:59 pm (UTC)...y'know, that says a lot about the Alterans, that they were so nonchalant about what everyone else would consider very very cool. Didn't even bother coming up with a proper name for them.
(what was the paraphrase? pretty please?)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-19 12:41 am (UTC)...it's a shuttle. That goes through the gate. ^_^
//(what was the paraphrase? pretty please?)//
:<error-correction> in essence, i think you are very much what you always were:
(Lorne thought he was naming them after saints, btw.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-29 12:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-30 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-18 08:00 pm (UTC)(Now, what songbook? Have you an ISBN, or was it printed privately?) ^_^