![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
gemmi999.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sga_flashficTitle: The World is Flat (and 4 other reasons McKay hates globalization)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gemmi999
Rating: PG-13 for language
Pairing: GEN
Word Count: 1270
Author's Note: Because I'm fairly sure I'm on crack
Summary: Sometimes, McKay dreams about going back in time, if only to disable the Zed PM before he and the others traveled through the Stargate.
The World Is Flat (and 4 other reasons McKay hates globalization)
I.
He’s fairly sure that somewhere on this god-forsaken-planet, surrounded by urbanites and meterosexuals, he should have been able to find a decent cup of coffee. Even if he had to resort to the speakeasy’s that had sprung up practically overnight since the government outlawed coffee. He’d only been off-world for six years, most of which had been spent fighting insane space vampires. He deserves as much fucking coffee as he wanted, regardless of how it would affect trade relations with Cuba, Chile, or whatever-fucking-country was currently feuding with the United States Government.
Fucking globalization, fucking terrorists, fucking idiots in the White House who seemed to think that funding coffee production—COFFEE PRODUCTION—would somehow equate to supporting the global war on terror. It was his worst nightmare come true, but eviler, because he’d never imagined enjoying a cappuccino would somehow equate to pledging support for suicide bombers.
McKay huffs to himself, sniffs loudly, and looks at the decaying husk of what used to be known as Starbucks. It had been such a pretty building, once, filled with baristas, and the heavenly sent of roasted beans mixed with artificial sweetener (he had to watch his sugar intake—the studies were inconclusive regarding weightless environments and blood sugar levels) and now it was this dead thing.
He kicks lightly at the ground in front of him and thinks about finding one of the mythical speakeasy’s. They’d existed during prohibition, and that had only banned alcohol. This was so much more serious.
II.
Sometimes, McKay dreams about going back in time, if only to disable the Zed PM before he and the others traveled through the Stargate. He wonders what would have happened if they’d just never opened the entire Pegasus galaxy’s can-of-worms, and he’d just locked himself up in the area 51 research labs.
He’s been locking himself up there for the past four months, since his victorious return to Earth, and it really isn’t that bad. He has all the lemon chicken and lemon squares and lemon cream pie he could ever want, even if it just sits on a shelf and stares at him morosely. He has no coffee, but that’s become par-for-course, and the internet is wicked fast, much better then the wireless system he’d set up around Atlantis.
His office has all the comforts of home, and he’s fairly sure he could have handled just living there instead of traveling and exploring and learning and breathing and existing within the Pegasus galaxy. He definitely wouldn’t have missed meeting the Wraith, and while Teyla and Ronon are good friends, he just wants sometimes, to go back to that fateful day and just—he breathes heavily—stop it.
He only admits this late at night, when its dark out and there isn’t any coffee to keep him company. He lays awake and physically hurts, thinking about everything he had to give up to come home, and knows that it would have been better to just leave that world locked.
Instead, he often turns over and dials random 800 numbers and murmurs in a sleep weary voice to somebody in Bangladesh or China. He asks for helpful hints regarding finding mythically lost wallets, how to boil the perfect cup of tea (which isn’t illegal), and what to do when you want to tear off your own limbs to stop the aching, the muscle memory.
The phone calls never last long, and they’re never quite enough to pull him past the edge of his despair, but he enjoys the accents and amuses himself by trying to guess which city he’s managed to reach. He’s mostly never right—the accent can be really tricky to sort out—but he doesn’t care. It’s mindless, and it keeps him from going crazy.
Sometimes, that has to be enough.
III.
When he wakes up in the morning, he reaches over the edge of his bed and pulls out a laptop hastily stowed the evening before—not shut down, because that would stop whatever he was downloading at the moment. He brightens the screen and stares at the Azureus logo aimlessly. The downloading isn’t what’s important, although he is gleeful when he finishes collecting the entire series (both old and new) Doctor Who, but rather it’s the amazement he feels because he knows that whomever is giving him the documents could be next door, or half-a-world away.
He checks his email compulsively, at least thirty times an hour, and the different news websites. He feels the need to keep abreast of the war-on-terror, the vile thing that had stolen his coffee away, and he finds the natural disasters somewhat amusing. He knows that Earth has been fucked over one too many times to be fixed by reducing carbon emissions, he knows that global warming is real, he knows that the various natural disasters are only a hint of what is to come.
It keeps his day-to-day life manageable, and fun.
Sometimes, when he glances up at the clock, its past 10:00 am and he realizes he’s spent the entire morning laying abed, looking at nothing. Heaven.
IV.
He didn’t think about 9/11 on a regular basis—tried to let it slip his mind, only to have it pop up at inconvenient moments (like when he was trying to find a way to Google speakeasy’s and have it produce some form of readable results). People had created websites and blogs and comics, all detailing the need to reinforce the ban on coffee, and often had pictures of the towers falling, as if to shame people into compliance). He didn’t consider the US a military state, but there were some out there that did, and they wore the towers falling like a badge of honor.
He didn’t think about suicide bombings on a regular basis, either. It reminded him far too much about Pegasus, and what they’d resorted to, in the end. Trying to kill off Wraith Queens and Replicator strong-holds the only way they knew how.
He didn’t think about war, or famine, or pestilence, or death. He’d gotten over the mythical four-horsemen when he was a child and had to put away childish things.
He didn’t think about a lot of topics, most especially what he’d left behind. The pain was too real, too fresh, to merit in-depth studies.
If only he could control his dreams.
V.
He’s fairly sure that somewhere, on this god-forsaken-planet, he should have found peace from his memories. He should have been able to sit down in coffee shops and drink the bitter liquid; should have been able to walk down the streets of Paris and enjoy the scent of freshly-baked-bread. He’s fairly sure there were a lot of things he should have been able to do.
He read once, before he left for Atlantis, that the world was flat. That globalization had leveled the playing field (for both the good guys and the bad ones) and that the Earth would radically change within the next ten to fifteen years.
He’d been gone six, and came home to a world so unfamiliar, it might as well have been another scouting expedition, a first-contact mission.
He tries to settle in as best as he can; he mourns his losses and sleeps the sleep of the righteous. He works, and lays abed, and does everything anyone has ever told him to do, in order to fit in.
It doesn’t work, but after awhile that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, anymore.
If only he could find a damn Coffee Bean, then things would get better.
Author:
gemmi999Rating: PG-13 for language
Pairing: GEN
Word Count: 1270
Author's Note: Because I'm fairly sure I'm on crack
Summary: Sometimes, McKay dreams about going back in time, if only to disable the Zed PM before he and the others traveled through the Stargate.
The World Is Flat (and 4 other reasons McKay hates globalization)
I.
He’s fairly sure that somewhere on this god-forsaken-planet, surrounded by urbanites and meterosexuals, he should have been able to find a decent cup of coffee. Even if he had to resort to the speakeasy’s that had sprung up practically overnight since the government outlawed coffee. He’d only been off-world for six years, most of which had been spent fighting insane space vampires. He deserves as much fucking coffee as he wanted, regardless of how it would affect trade relations with Cuba, Chile, or whatever-fucking-country was currently feuding with the United States Government.
Fucking globalization, fucking terrorists, fucking idiots in the White House who seemed to think that funding coffee production—COFFEE PRODUCTION—would somehow equate to supporting the global war on terror. It was his worst nightmare come true, but eviler, because he’d never imagined enjoying a cappuccino would somehow equate to pledging support for suicide bombers.
McKay huffs to himself, sniffs loudly, and looks at the decaying husk of what used to be known as Starbucks. It had been such a pretty building, once, filled with baristas, and the heavenly sent of roasted beans mixed with artificial sweetener (he had to watch his sugar intake—the studies were inconclusive regarding weightless environments and blood sugar levels) and now it was this dead thing.
He kicks lightly at the ground in front of him and thinks about finding one of the mythical speakeasy’s. They’d existed during prohibition, and that had only banned alcohol. This was so much more serious.
II.
Sometimes, McKay dreams about going back in time, if only to disable the Zed PM before he and the others traveled through the Stargate. He wonders what would have happened if they’d just never opened the entire Pegasus galaxy’s can-of-worms, and he’d just locked himself up in the area 51 research labs.
He’s been locking himself up there for the past four months, since his victorious return to Earth, and it really isn’t that bad. He has all the lemon chicken and lemon squares and lemon cream pie he could ever want, even if it just sits on a shelf and stares at him morosely. He has no coffee, but that’s become par-for-course, and the internet is wicked fast, much better then the wireless system he’d set up around Atlantis.
His office has all the comforts of home, and he’s fairly sure he could have handled just living there instead of traveling and exploring and learning and breathing and existing within the Pegasus galaxy. He definitely wouldn’t have missed meeting the Wraith, and while Teyla and Ronon are good friends, he just wants sometimes, to go back to that fateful day and just—he breathes heavily—stop it.
He only admits this late at night, when its dark out and there isn’t any coffee to keep him company. He lays awake and physically hurts, thinking about everything he had to give up to come home, and knows that it would have been better to just leave that world locked.
Instead, he often turns over and dials random 800 numbers and murmurs in a sleep weary voice to somebody in Bangladesh or China. He asks for helpful hints regarding finding mythically lost wallets, how to boil the perfect cup of tea (which isn’t illegal), and what to do when you want to tear off your own limbs to stop the aching, the muscle memory.
The phone calls never last long, and they’re never quite enough to pull him past the edge of his despair, but he enjoys the accents and amuses himself by trying to guess which city he’s managed to reach. He’s mostly never right—the accent can be really tricky to sort out—but he doesn’t care. It’s mindless, and it keeps him from going crazy.
Sometimes, that has to be enough.
III.
When he wakes up in the morning, he reaches over the edge of his bed and pulls out a laptop hastily stowed the evening before—not shut down, because that would stop whatever he was downloading at the moment. He brightens the screen and stares at the Azureus logo aimlessly. The downloading isn’t what’s important, although he is gleeful when he finishes collecting the entire series (both old and new) Doctor Who, but rather it’s the amazement he feels because he knows that whomever is giving him the documents could be next door, or half-a-world away.
He checks his email compulsively, at least thirty times an hour, and the different news websites. He feels the need to keep abreast of the war-on-terror, the vile thing that had stolen his coffee away, and he finds the natural disasters somewhat amusing. He knows that Earth has been fucked over one too many times to be fixed by reducing carbon emissions, he knows that global warming is real, he knows that the various natural disasters are only a hint of what is to come.
It keeps his day-to-day life manageable, and fun.
Sometimes, when he glances up at the clock, its past 10:00 am and he realizes he’s spent the entire morning laying abed, looking at nothing. Heaven.
IV.
He didn’t think about 9/11 on a regular basis—tried to let it slip his mind, only to have it pop up at inconvenient moments (like when he was trying to find a way to Google speakeasy’s and have it produce some form of readable results). People had created websites and blogs and comics, all detailing the need to reinforce the ban on coffee, and often had pictures of the towers falling, as if to shame people into compliance). He didn’t consider the US a military state, but there were some out there that did, and they wore the towers falling like a badge of honor.
He didn’t think about suicide bombings on a regular basis, either. It reminded him far too much about Pegasus, and what they’d resorted to, in the end. Trying to kill off Wraith Queens and Replicator strong-holds the only way they knew how.
He didn’t think about war, or famine, or pestilence, or death. He’d gotten over the mythical four-horsemen when he was a child and had to put away childish things.
He didn’t think about a lot of topics, most especially what he’d left behind. The pain was too real, too fresh, to merit in-depth studies.
If only he could control his dreams.
V.
He’s fairly sure that somewhere, on this god-forsaken-planet, he should have found peace from his memories. He should have been able to sit down in coffee shops and drink the bitter liquid; should have been able to walk down the streets of Paris and enjoy the scent of freshly-baked-bread. He’s fairly sure there were a lot of things he should have been able to do.
He read once, before he left for Atlantis, that the world was flat. That globalization had leveled the playing field (for both the good guys and the bad ones) and that the Earth would radically change within the next ten to fifteen years.
He’d been gone six, and came home to a world so unfamiliar, it might as well have been another scouting expedition, a first-contact mission.
He tries to settle in as best as he can; he mourns his losses and sleeps the sleep of the righteous. He works, and lays abed, and does everything anyone has ever told him to do, in order to fit in.
It doesn’t work, but after awhile that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, anymore.
If only he could find a damn Coffee Bean, then things would get better.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 06:15 am (UTC)And hex you, author, for even daring to write about banning coffee. From your keyboard to the Devil's ears...
DragonLady
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:18 am (UTC)Rodney couldn't stay in Pegasus--I tried hinting at that, but I'm not sure I was successful. They were finished, and it was time to come home.
And yes, hex the author for even daring to mention the possibility of someday in the future banning coffee. I'm allergic to caffeine, so it isn't that big a deal to me...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 06:58 am (UTC)I like this combination of Rodney's story with this wider picture of what the Earth has become--implications too of "was it worth protecting?"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:20 am (UTC)Trying to kill off Wraith Queens and Replicator strong-holds the only way they knew how.
I wanted to hint that the world had changed, and the people within it had changed as well. The entire team wasn't killed off, but they weren't the same people that to Rodney, that's as good as being alone.
And yes--I was trying to question if it was worth protecting. At what point do you fight the fight that needs to be fought, versus the fighting the fight your ideals lets you fight. There's a fine line, and once you've crossed it--does the rest of the battle even matter?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 10:38 am (UTC)This rocked.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:21 am (UTC)Who is this Francis Fukuyama? Should I read some of his stuff?
Thanks for reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 11:19 am (UTC)Great story, I really felt the emotions he felt. My only nitpick is that 'speakeasy's' doesn't have an apostrophe :) You can just add the s onto the end.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 01:45 pm (UTC)Somehow, I don't think coffee would make much difference. Poor Rodney.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:23 am (UTC)Interesting (and frightening) future you've created there.
The future is frightening, both in this fanfic, and in the real world. There are some serious issues that need to be addressed, and I wanted to bring that sense of desperation to the fanfic.
And, while coffee might not fix everything, Rodney really like's his dream. And sometimes, dreams are all that let people live their lives. Hoping for a different future.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 03:33 pm (UTC)Well done
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:29 am (UTC)And, yes, that was totally unrelated to your comment, except that it reminded me of this amazing article I read upteenth years ago.
Earth was meant to feel alien, in that anyplace you visit, after a long absence, can feel alien and strange. And you do think that you're dreaming, for awhile. You keep thinking about how it used to be, and comparing it. Chances are, if Rodney had been on Earth during the banning of the coffee, it wouldn't have had such a huge impact. He would have stockpiled it and used it sparingly.
But he wasn't there, and couldn't stockpile, and he felt like he was dreaming.
Thanks for reading, and commenting!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:34 am (UTC)And yes, it's interesting. I like imagining different ways the future could go, and how things can affect it. = ]
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 11:51 pm (UTC)Oh. COFFEE. =(
Oh. You so totally opened Kat's politics box. Dear me. =D
Fantastic. *hearts*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:33 am (UTC)I'm letting myself have half-a-second of fangirlness. OMG! I love your fic. Thank you for writing it, and posting it, and being so deliciously prolific! THANK YOU!
And yes, coffee. *smiles* -- I'm actually allergic to caffeine, so I gave up coffee nearly four years ago. But, I remember how it tastes, and it was good. *misses*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-02 03:51 pm (UTC)Oh, it totally is. Love this line and Rodney's utter belief in it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-19 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-03 06:40 am (UTC)Lovely ficlet.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-18 06:22 am (UTC)On another note, the story was good in that I can just see Rodney running himself stupid trying to escape one ugly/frustrating situation & ending up in another just as bad or worse.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-19 05:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-22 07:57 am (UTC)I enjoyed this reflection. A lot. They're all valid concerns given our current state of affairs. And I can't imagine what it would be like to disappear for a few years and then return. It's all changing so fast...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-19 06:15 am (UTC)That inquiry aside, it's a marvelous piece of writing. Insightful and thought-provoking. Nice work. ^^
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-19 02:29 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-20 02:36 am (UTC)