Title: The Wrong Button
Author: knightshade
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: Through Season 5
Pairing: Jack and Daniel friendship
Prompt: Jack always knew that one day Daniel was going to press the wrong button.
Summary: Everyone makes mistakes.
Disclaimer: I don't own Stargate or its characters. See MGM, Gekko and a whole host of others.
Author's Notes: This was written for ApocalypseKree! Thank you very much to triciabyrne1978 for the beta!
The Wrong Button
Jack always suspected that one day Daniel would push the wrong button and the world would end. It was a worry in having a curious archeologist on his team.
Although he had to admit that he was glad that when it did happen, the world Daniel destroyed wasn't their own.
---
Jack had to admit that he was curious about this one. They'd gone off on a standard mission to P377-528 not expecting much out of the ordinary. They knew it was a formerly Goa'uld held world but what they'd found had totally shocked them all. They'd taken the 'artifact' -- if they could even call it that -- back to Earth with them, Teal'c carrying it very gingerly and Daniel suggesting he carry it over his should like Atlas. Once they had it back, Daniel and Carter fought over the view from the lighted, magnifying lens until Jack had gone in search of a second one, not wanting to see his two science-minded friends come to blows. Now they were both so engrossed that they'd ignored the dinner he'd brought them and were ignoring him too as he peered over their shoulders.
"This is amazing. Just incredible. They have their own Great Wall of China!" Daniel gushed without taking his eyes away from the magnifier.
"Did you notice Germany?" Sam asked, half a world away looking through her own lens. "There seem to be ruins from what could be their Berlin Wall." Daniel looked up and blinked, before horning in on Carter's view.
"Can I see?" Jack asked.
They both looked at him like he had four heads.
"Hey, I'm interested. It's not every day you find a beach ball sized replica of the earth."
"I think there's one in the General's office if I'm not mistaken. They're commonly called globes," Daniel said, not even looking up.
Jack crossed his arms and glared at him. "The one in Hammond's office isn't populated with living people."
"It's not just people, sir, there are animals and plants. It's a completely self contained ecosystem. The plasticized material that forms the outermost layer of the globe even perfectly replicates the actual height of Earth's atmosphere. And when we put it under the mass spectrometer I modified, we could see that areas with a high concentration of humans had high carbon dioxide levels in the air above them and areas over forests had more oxygen."
Jack leaned over and looked through the clear outer shell down toward the surface. He couldn't resist. He lifted his hand up to tap on it but without even looking up, Carter reached out and grabbed his wrist.
"Don't do that, sir. For all we know, you could cause a natural disaster."
"Right." Jack pulled his hand back and clasped it in his other one behind his back, trying to resist the temptation. "Are you sure they're real people and not models or little robots or something? I mean, I put little plastic people on my train set when I was a kid."
"They produce heat," Carter said, gesturing to a camera that Jack presumed was IR.
"And we can see them move," Daniel said impatiently.
"Well, I might know that if someone would let me look ."
Daniel backed away from his lens and rolled his eyes, obviously realizing that if he just let Jack have his way, he'd stop interrupting. "Here. Go ahead."
Jack grinned and maneuvered the lens so that it was pointing over the US about where Colorado Springs would be. "Do you think they have a gate?"
"I don't know. We could keep the camera over Cheyenne Mountain and see if we get any heat spikes that might indicate power surges." Carter moved the camera and glanced through its viewfinder to get it set up.
Daniel rested back on the lab bench, sipping his coffee. "If so, it would be amazing to find out the address and visit it."
Carter looked up with a quick smile. "I'd feel like I was in a fish bowl knowing that people were watching me."
"How do you know we aren't in some fish bowl exactly like this with someone looking down, watching us?" Jack asked.
Sam looked up at the gray ceiling. "Well, at least they can't see me in here."
---
Jack was on his way back from breakfast when Daniel ran into him in the hallway. Almost literally.
"Is there a fire that someone forgot to mention?" he asked.
Daniel paused, but his speech was hurried. "Sam just called. The globe's atmosphere is collapsing."
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
"Coffee," Daniel called over his shoulder, having already turned back in the direction of the lab.
Jack appropriated the whole pot from the cafeteria and brought it back to Carter's lab. Both she and Daniel were staring down at mini-Earth with glum expressions.
"Are you sure?" Daniel asked.
"Positive," Carter said. "Here, look. Here are my readings on the Amazon area from yesterday." She slapped a stack of pages onto the desk next to the globe. "And here are today's." She waved the second set in the air in front of Daniel. "They globe appears to be shutting down. It's out of balance. More carbon dioxide is being created than destroyed and it's all over the planet, not just where there's a high concentration of humans."
"Could it be their version of global warming or climate change? If they are human, they probably aren't behaving any differently than we are."
"No, it's not climate change. This is a catastrophic break down in their atmosphere. Daniel, I think the 'planet' is dying. I think that whatever is keeping this globe in balance is giving out."
"You mean like a power source?"
"Maybe."
Daniel and Jack leaned down in front of the desk to look at the base of the clear globe. A series of lights winked and blinked at different rates. "Everything seems to be on."
"I know, but if you'll notice, the orange one isn't blinking at the same rate that it used to."
Daniel stood up straight again and crossed his arms. "Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"Okay, so what do we do?"
"I don't know. I have no clue how this globe is being powered. It's possible it was an electromagnetic field in the lab we found it in on P377-528 that was keeping it going. But whatever it is, the globe isn't stable anymore. And I don't know how to fix it."
"Do you think we should take it back?" Jack asked.
"I don't know, sir. But we don't have much time. Based on my calculations, the atmosphere will be degraded to the point of being toxic to the inhabitants in a matter of a few minutes. It was so far gone by the time I noticed it, and it's crashing fast." Carter looked down, pulling on her lip and crossing her arms as she thought. Jack could see the gears turning. "We've been so fascinated by what's going on in the globe, maybe we should have been playing attention to how it works."
Daniel leaned down again and squinted at the base. "The labels on the buttons seem to be similar to Ancient, but they're not exactly right. Maybe it's a code."
"Can you translate them?" Carter asked.
"I think…" he trailed off, furrowing his brow and staring at the text. "Yes. Safety. The green crystal is labeled with a word that looks similar to the Ancient word for safety."
Sam crinkled her brow. "Safety?"
"Yeah, well, maybe it'll put everything on hold. Or maybe it's an interlock that'll let in outside atmosphere."
"We're out of time," Carter said, peering into the globe with her modified instruments.
Daniel hit the green crystal.
At first nothing happened. There was no sign of change at all.
Then Carter gasped.
It only took a second and then even Jack could see it. The area around the globe's equator suddenly started to brown. Not slightly, not subtly, it just went brown. And the brown was spreading.
Carter's eyes were back in the scope. "Oh my God." She paused and looked up, her eyes wide. "It's dying."
---
Jack wasn't surprised to find Daniel in his office. He wasn't surprised to find him buried in books. He was just a little bit surprised to see the mug within easy arm's reach at this time of night. "Coffee, Daniel?"
Daniel sighed and glanced up just slightly. "I figured I wasn't going to get any sleep anyway."
Jack nodded and approached the overflowing desk to pluck the mug out of Daniel's reach.
"See the thing is, it's not standard Ancient and at first I thought it was more of a code, but it's not. I think it's, uh something like a dialect. And the part that tripped me up was that what looked like the etymology for 'safe' or 'safety' was really more along the lines of 'fail safe' which makes a little more sense, given the catastrophic effects that pushing the button seemed to uh, seemed to have." Daniel was still marking his notes with a highlighter and acting as though he wasn't even hearing what he was saying, but Jack knew better.
He crossed behind Daniel, and peered down at the book before pulling it away from him. "It's not your fault, Daniel."
"Um, no. Actually, it is," he said, taking the book back and avoiding Jack's eyes. "I misinterpreted the text and I pushed the button ending civilization as they knew it."
Jack wasn't fooled by the academic assessment of the situation and Daniel's apparently detached manner. "We don't know they even had a civilization."
"No, we don't." He set down his pencil sharply and glared up at him. "But we think they were living their lives as we're living our lives here on Earth and in one foul swoop, I destroyed that."
"We don't know that they wouldn't have died anyway. You tried to do what you could in a limited amount of time."
"You can't just write them off because they might have died."
"We've all made mistakes, Daniel. It's part of the job. We've all had people die because of decisions we've made."
He ran a hand through his hair. "I took out a whole world, Jack."
"We don't know what kind of world that was or what its people were like or if they were really alive like we are."
"Do you think that really matters? I killed them. Because I made a stupid assumption in translating the wording on some buttons, they're gone."
"We all make mistakes, Daniel. Sometimes we check each other and stop that from happening. Remember the Enkarans? If it weren't for you and that hologram, I would have ordered the destruction of an entire civilization trying to save them." Jack let out a sigh and sank down onto the corner of the desk. "Sometimes we just get lucky. We were all responsible for nearly destroying K'Tau by gating through their sun. Remember that?" Jack looked down. "And sometimes we just don't get lucky. We've all killed people. Sometimes whole armies, sometimes whole planets." Jack paused and gave Daniel a significant look. "And sometimes just one person who means the whole world to us."
Daniel sighed. "Jack…"
"Daniel."
"Okay, you're right. It was a mistake. I didn't do it intentionally, but that doesn't make me feel any better."
Jack shook his head slightly and looked down at his hands. "No. It doesn't."
"Then why are you even here?"
Jack leaned over and let his hand fall on Daniel's shoulder. "Returning the favor." Then he got up and went to the door. "Go to sleep, Daniel. Everyone makes mistakes. All we can do is learn from them."
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-knightshade
August 14, 2007