Fic: Two Weeks Notice - Part 2

[zelempa]

Tuesday

Rodney drifted awake still exhausted and aching. It had gotten suddenly cold during the night, and they must have huddled together for warmth in their sleep, because Radek's back was pressed against Rodney's chest and Rodney had an arm slung around him like he was his own personal plushie C3P0. (What? Didn't everybody have one?) Rodney moved his arm, because this was a little too close, thanks, especially since Radek had taken his shirt off at some point. But there was no sense in waking him up, so Rodney didn't move away.

He really wasn't a bad bunkmate; warm, and space-efficient. He slept curled up in a little ball, and he was thin, more so than you'd expect if you mostly saw him in bulky jackets and laden down with gear, and if you were not, generally, that observant of him. He had that pale, skinny, squishy-yet-sometimes-surprisingly-muscular physique characteristic of the nerd suddenly thrown into life-or-death situations on a routine basis.

It was weird, actually, how uncomfortable he wasn't. It occurred to him that Radek was one of the few people in the galaxy that he could comfortably share such close quarters with. He had shared pretty tight spaces with Sheppard over the course of his off-world adventures--tents, creepy caves, abandoned space shuttles and the like--and he was getting used to it, but there was always a feeling that he was being judged, and found wanting. Sheppard always had the upper hand. He had relaxed pretty completely around Carson, but he was gone now. When Radek left, who would there be?

Beside him Radek twitched in what was either a shiver or a dream about rabbits. Rodney put his arm back over him, and fell back to sleep.

When he woke up next it was bright daylight and hot again, and Radek was leaning over him with an accusing expression. "You put sand in the bed."

"Yeah, well, you smell," said Rodney.

"That, again, is you."

Rodney sniffed his underarm, and then granted Radek his premise. "Give me a break. We're stranded on a rock with no advanced plumbing."

"There is an ocean."

And that was how, despite Rodney's protestations and pointed refusal to bring a swimsuit as Sheppard has suggested, he found himself bathing in the ocean anyway, hovering in the scant shade of a pathetically small shrub. He was standing with his arms folded, working on a mental flowchart of just all the ways this was unsatisfactory and inferior to the clean, sterile privacy of the Atlantis showers when he was suddenly cascaded with cold water. When he looked around, sputtering, Radek was ten feet away, quietly examining an anemone.

"What was that?" Rodney exclaimed.

Radek looked up, all casual and surprised. Yeah, right. Who else was it going to be?

"I've got my eye on you," said Rodney.

"Joy," said Radek, deadpan.

When they finally got down to the village the mayor had suddenly decided to care about when his gate got fixed; he was sore at the visitors for sleeping in and wasting daylight, even though, as Rodney was careful to point out, they could have been done by now if they had been allowed to start work the previous night. Radek grabbed Rodney's elbow and shook his head, a "don't waste your breath" gesture, and the mayor ran off to find a pretty little guide to show them the way.

The repair was fairly simple, the kind of thing that Rodney could have gotten done in an hour, but Zelenka was there, so he got it done in twenty-five minutes. They sent the girl back to town with the news, shrugged at each other, and gated back home.

Of course, they walked from the airy, tranquil gateroom into a lab so chaotic it may as well have had a siren and flashing red lights. The idiots were running around doing energy allocation manually, on a room-by-room basis. Zelenka hurried to a console, and Rodney exiled the crew to their respective quarters to think about what they'd done, and they set to work trying to put things right.

"This might go faster if you let them help," Radek remarked at one point.

"No, it wouldn't, and you know it. It would go much, much slower. You want me to play nursemaid on top of everything else? No, what would make this go faster if there were a single competent person in--hm! Actually." Rodney moved to his other laptop and called up his little AI experiment. The program was still in its infancy, but it might at least be better than the actual infants in Rodney's department.

"What is that?"

"Just something I've been fooling around with. A little program just to regulate some of the standard day-to-day functions of the city. Shields, power, life support, basic problem-solving..."

"In other words, things that you currently make me do."

Nobody ever said he didn't catch on quick. "Are they?" asked Rodney. "I hadn't noticed."

"It says 'Zelenka 2.0,'" Radek pointed out.

"Fine," said Rodney. "Let's have a little one-on-one, man vs. machine. What do you think we should do about the power interruption in B7?"

While Rodney typed the parameters of the problem to Zelenka 2.0, the living and breathing Radek mused, "The conduit may need manual repair. We have to reroute through the other major arteries equally or we will keep causing overload. I think the others were trying to reroute through unused conduits to relieve pressure on the main system, but they are unused for a reason. We can keep running through the east tower, though; it looks fairly stable, and if we blow something up out there, nobody will get hurt."

"Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm." Rodney frowned. "Okay, Zelenka 2.0 says to shut the whole system down and then turn it on again."

"I see. And leave the gateroom without power for how long?"

"Okay, well, obviously, it needs some tweaking." Rodney stepped back from the laptop, looking longingly at the barebones UI. "Someday."

"That would work, though," said Radek thoughtfully. "The system is set up to choose optimal pathways which are not actually optimal, but it would give us a better starting point than this. It probably is the fastest permanent solution."

"It's also the easiest brute-force solution in the book," said Rodney. "Essentially I've trained a monkey to say 'Reboot.'"

"Does the program give a reasoning for its solution?"

"No... but it can, easily."

"At least for testing purposes," said Radek.

"Yeah, and maybe in general."

"Also, it should offer several alternatives."

"Not that you do that."

"The program can be better than me."

"Absolutely. I can set that up right now," said Rodney, opening the code. "Maybe you should be able to weight the importance of different factors in a given situation--you know, keeping the system running versus speed versus reducing collateral damage..."

"Of course, the options would change depending on the parameters of the problem."

"True, but there are some universals. You know, you probably should have been involved in this project from the beginning."

"I was going to say," said Radek modestly.

 

Wednesday

Rodney decided, after fixing the most egregious errors, that the appropriate punishment for the lab rats was to make them clean up the mess they'd created, and he set them to it, checking on them sporadically, while he and Radek holed up in a conference room and worked on the program.

It turned out that Radek had a recent and ongoing interest in artificial intelligence. He was surprisingly knowledgeable about psychobiology and weirdly fond of talking about "the human machine." Together they created an unstoppable flood of ideas: how to replicate, approximate, and improve upon human decision-making algorithms; how to provide the program with suitable information; how to create a framework for self-improvement, teaching the program to learn.

In the evening they moved to the mess because Rodney was starving. Sheppard was just leaving as they came in and he shot Rodney a thumbs-up. Rodney was confused for a moment, and then remembered that, as far as Sheppard was concerned, he was involved in a scheme to convince Radek to stay by being kind to him. Well, that had fallen by the wayside some time ago. Still, it had sort of happened, without his meaning it to. He hadn't really been actively mean, anyway, not in any way that counted. He'd called Radek an idiot ten minutes ago, but it was in the heat of a coding argument and he deserved it, and anyway, Rodney had never been more certain that he wasn't taking it personally. It said a lot, for example, that Radek currently felt comfortable enough with Rodney to put his hand over Rodney's face and push him away while he was talking.

"Go over there. Just watch," said Radek, drawing the keyboard close. "It's easier to do it than to explain it."

"But it's easier to shoot you down after you've explained it than after you've done it," said Rodney.

"Go eat a cake."

In a fit of altruism Rodney brought back four helpings of cake, so that Radek could have one. He needed it to keep up his energy for all that superfluous coding.

"You're reinventing the wheel," said Rodney over his shoulder. "Go back to the beginning. What's the first thing we did?"

"That was different. We needed..." Radek tabbed over and read the code. "Oh. I am an idiot."

"Right. You're really not, though," said Rodney. "You shouldn't let your proximity to me lead you to underestimate your own intelligence, which, objectively, is quite... I mean, if it weren't for me... Well, you'd be dead, and so would everyone here, but: maybe you wouldn't have all died quite as soon as I have been known to suggest, because I bet you would have stepped up to the plate."

Radek smiled slowly, really touched. "Thank you, Rodney," he said. "That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me."

Rodney waved his hand, an "it's nothing" gesture. People were right. Help others, and you do help yourself! He felt glowy and warm, and he couldn't keep a grin off his face.

"I will remember you said that," said Radek, "when I am on Earth."

Rodney's smile abruptly twisted into a scowl. Right. That. Of course he hadn't really believed that a sort of niceish time on a beach planet and some honeyed mumbling would make Radek change his career and life plans, but then, actually, he had. He felt disgusted and cheap: he'd given away a genuine compliment for nothing. So much for being nice!

"Give me that," he said, grabbing the computer. "You're wasting perfectly good keystrokes."

"I am in the middle of a line, Rodney."

"The lights are still flickering!" Rodney yelled. "Don't you think that's a little more important? Go, go fix it, and while you're down there, you better boost up morale with the staff. I think they're all in tears, and if they're not, I'll give them something to cry about."

Radek looked up, confused, maybe even hurt. "But, we..."

"Go, already!"

Radek huffed off with an almost visible stormcloud over his head, which gave Rodney some dark pleasure. Let him be punished for his desertion.

 

Thursday

In the midst of everything else, Rodney took as much time as he could to plug away at Zelenka 2.0. In a few days, he'd really need it.

Rodney had given Radek a long list of menial tasks to keep him out of the way (and, okay, bother him), but he still showed up at Rodney's door in the middle of the morning, waving a tablet. "I had some ideas. I wrote them down."

"Bully for you," said Rodney. "How are you doing on the flight diagnostics?"

Radek frowned. "I thought you were supposed to be reassigning my tasks in preparation for my move."

"I thought you were supposed to be finishing your work in preparation for your move," said Rodney. "I really can't justify starting you on any new initiatives right now. See ya."

 

Friday

Avoiding Radek had all the advantages of avoiding the lab and everyone who worked in it, and all the disadvantages of avoiding the mess. After submitting to an early-morning run with Sheppard, he packed a couple of brown-bag meals and went to a balcony in the east tower.

He worked on the program for most of the day, checking on the city remotely every few hours (okay, minutes) to make sure nothing had gone horribly horribly wrong.

The circumstances that morning were ideal for progress. He was alone, uninterrupted, a cool ocean breeze on his face, three laptops open in front of him, an array of quietly blinking readouts keeping him clued into the city while he worked. Whatever slump he'd been in before he started collaborating with Radek was gone. He was pleased to discover that he was perfectly capable of having and implementing excellent ideas without any help, thank you. He'd needed someone to bounce ideas off of earlier, but really, anyone could fill that role. Probably. Anyway, he'd have a working prototype of Zelenka 2.0 soon enough.

His peace was interrupted shortly after second lunch, when who should come clomping onto the balcony but Radek Zelenka 1.0.

"Another thing that I do not appreciate," said Radek, as if they were already in the middle of a conversation. "The constant disappearing."

"How did you find me?"

"You think you are the only one with access to the good life signs detector? Here." He held out one of the little Ancient thumb drives. "My improvements to the program."

"Is that what you've been wasting your time with? I guarantee there's nothing on here I haven't already done myself. I know you haven't done a single one of your assignments--"

"I delegated--"

"That explains why they haven't gotten done! Dammit, Zelenka--"

"You can't get my interest with a good project and then take it away!"

"I think I can! I think that's exactly what I can do! You should consider it a compliment that you're the only person I trust to do all those mindless yet essential tasks."

"This is exactly why I am leaving. You don't give a damn about what would be interesting to me--"

"I don't give a damn what would be interesting to you because you're leaving!"

"--or how to best use me. I am a resource--"

"You're a jackass, is what you are."

"I have no control over my own destiny. You decide you don't like me, so I have to do the work of a lab tech--"

"Oh my god, let it go."

"You decide to get lost offworld, so I do all your work--"

"To be fair, that's hardly a decision--"

"You decide you want company on a terrible mission, so I go to the beach!"

"That, for your information, was me trying to do a goddamn nice thing for you before you left, and send you away with some goddamn good memories of the goddamn Pegasus Galaxy, and hey, maybe you'd even change your mind and decide to stay a little longer, but what I didn't count on is you being an insufferable, impossible-to-please little bastard who I don't ever want to see again for the rest of my life!"

"Fuck you too!"

They were standing inches apart staring each other down, and their gaze held for such a long moment that Rodney was sure one of them (he didn't know which) was about to draw a weapon from somewhere and end this thing once and for all, but instead Radek grabbed Rodney by the shoulders and pressed their mouths together, and Rodney, high on adrenaline, was holding his face and pushing his lips apart before it occurred to him to think that this was a bit weird. The this-is-weird alert didn't turn into a screaming siren until they parted and looked at each other. Rodney stumbled backward, seriously considering hyperventilation. Zelenka blinked rapidly, muttered "Erm," turned, and fled.

 

Saturday

Rodney didn't have to work to avoid Radek; the aversion was, today, mutual. He did some work around the lab, then ate with the team and hung around afterward tinkering with the program.

Radek had, of course, worked on the same parts of the program Rodney had already written on his own, but he'd done it differently; not worse, exactly (okay, a little worse, in terms of efficiency and runtime), but very different in some interesting ways. Rodney decided to give Zelenka 2.0 access to both his and Radek's problem-solving strategies. Why not? Humans (the good humans) use a variety of decision-making tools. Anyway, the whole program was based on finding fast and dirty best-fit solutions to problems with incomplete data, multiple input streams, and competing needs and priorities. Forcing the program to compare complete or partial solutions obtained simultaneously through different means would coincide nicely with the overall philosophy of the program, and it would be easy enough to implement, since they essentially had the underlying algorithms written already.

The integration was a little tricky--he spent a few frustrating hours ironing out some really weird bugs--but when it came together, it was like magic. Somewhere along the line, they'd lit the spark of greatness. When Rodney fed the program a log of the problems of the last week, its solutions were inspired. A couple were the same solutions Rodney and Radek had come up with at the time, and which had been successful; more were solutions which they had considered and rejected for one reason or another, but which, had they gone ahead with them, would not have resulted badly; one was a solution which the American or Armenian technician had suggested, but you can't win 'em all; one was a solution Rodney hadn't even considered but which would probably have worked even faster than his own.

He went back to the lab where, sure enough, Radek was taking advantage of his absence to get some work done.

"Thought I'd find you here."

"I am leaving now," said Radek.

"Don't," said Rodney. "I want to talk to you."

Radek stiffened, visibly uncomfortable, and Rodney hastily added, "About the project. I worked in your code with mine. Look."

Radek smiled when he read the output log. "It produced these results?"

"All by itself. Kinda makes you proud, huh?"

"Is it as good as me yet?"

"Better already," said Rodney.

"Let's write the implementation module--"

"One step ahead of you," said Rodney. "I think it's about ready to go now. We just need to section off a subset of the city for a testing area. I figured we'd just have it run everything for a small section with low or no habitation, and see how it does compared to the human idiots running the rest of the show. If the test goes well, we can propose expanding it to the rest of the city."

"I leave Monday morning," Radek reminded him.

"So we'll make sure to iron out all the problems in the next thirty-six hours. What, you have something else going on?"

"I have very many assignments to finish..."

"Screw that," said Rodney. "You're on this."

"As you say," said Radek. "You select a section, I will check the new code for impending disaster."

"Good plan."

They settled into their respective jobs. Rodney began to fidget. Normally during fairly routine or mindless work like this, he'd talk to whoever he was with (actually, he talked during most work, although during intensely difficult tasks he actually talked about the subject at hand). The silence between them was rapidly becoming conspicuous.

When he couldn't stand it anymore he burst out with "Is it weird for us not to talk about it?"

"Yes," said Radek. "But I am okay with it."

"Right," said Rodney, relieved. "Me too. I mean, it's not like--it was just a, an aberration."

"Precisely," said Radek. "It means nothing."

"Of course not," said Rodney. "Who said anything about meaning anything? I mean, what could it mean? That we--seriously, imagine you and me--what, dating?"

"Ridiculous," said Radek.

"I know! What would I tell people?"

"I could never hold my head up in the labs again."

"Not that you have to, of course, since you're leaving, which is yet another good reason--just one of a swirling galaxy of reasons--why we should just forget it ever happened."

"I have already forgotten," said Radek. "Actually, it is more reason for me to go, if we cannot work together without arguing or... et cetera."

"Right. Agreed," said Rodney. "Let's never speak of it again." With a firm nod, he turned back to his console and checked over the last of his preparations. "Hey. I think that's it." He looked up, grinning. "Ready to go live?"

Radek smiled back. "I think so. I have corrected a few minor errors, but, as far as I could tell, your code was largely flawless."

"Some of it was yours," said Rodney modestly. "Five, maybe six per cent."

Rodney had selected the east tower for a testing site, and since he'd cut it off almost completely from the main city's systems by remote access for the purposes of the test, the easiest way to hook up Zelenka 2.0 was to go straight to the tower's local-area engineering lab (really more of a closet) and patch it in manually. This they accomplished quickly, and then... a distinct lack of any exciting activity.

"So..." Rodney watched the suspiciously normal system log. "Did we fuck up the connection, or is it, excuse me while I laugh, running perfectly on the first try?"

"It's definitely connected," said Radek. "Theoretically, Zelenka 2.0 is in complete control of the east tower now."

"Theoretically," Rodney repeated.

"It is apparently running according to specifications. There are simply no problems for it to solve."

"Great!" Rodney rubbed his hands together. "Let's break something."

Radek didn't miss a beat. "Fire or flood?"

"Oh, let's have a flood. What did those idiots do to mess up the water system?"

"I think I can replicate it. Should we have brought swimming suits?"

"Eh, this room'll be safe, anyway."

Radek called up the tower's water filtration system. Watching him type, Rodney laughed out loud. "Wow. I don't even think I have the imagination to write code that bad."

"I'm sure you could do it if you tried."

"Hey, now. Don't forget to forget to end the subroutine."

Radek saved his changes, and the fun began.

"Ooh, it's detecting the error. So far, so good."

"Proposing solutions--choosing a solution. Hm. It was supposed to wait five minutes for human intervention."

"Not when time is critical. See, it knew the flooding would start in a hundred eighty seconds, so it took immediate action."

"I didn't realize we had thought of that."

"Didn't you read my code?"

"I skimmed."

"Philistine. Hey, it worked! Did it work? It worked, right?"

"I think it worked."

"It solved the problem before it even started. It's officially better than my entire science team. Hey, look at us," said Rodney, suddenly struck with the magnitude of their accomplishment. "We just invented the galaxy's first independent, self-teaching, intelligent city management system."

"Second," said Radek. "The Ancients probably had something like this."

"Well, look at us. We're modern-day Ancients!"

They watched Zelenka 2.0 run along smoothly. It detected a minor power fluctuation, corrected its calculations, and ran an automatic diagnostic.

"It's beautiful."

"Yes."

"Seriously, Radek," said Rodney quietly, turning to him. "Why would you want to leave this?"

Radek stared at the display. "We should have it produce a daily report of the probabilities of various actions based on the things it has learned so far."

"Are you nuts? It would already be ridiculously long, and it'll increase exponentially every day. Who's going to read through that? Maybe a digest form, or, hm. What if we--move, move, you'll see what I mean. Keep an eye out for errors, will you?"

 

Sunday

Rodney found himself bounding into the main lab the next morning before nine, even though it was his day off, and they had stayed up tweaking the program and just generally admiring its progress (still almost flawless) until after four. They'd left it running when they went to bed, because they would--or rather, Rodney would--need as much log data as possible when he proposed the program for citywide use. He immediately checked on the east tower on his laptop when he woke up, and everything seemed to be running fine, but he was anxious for more detailed readings.

Radek was already there, and the readings from the tower were scrolling by on the console, but he wasn't looking at them. He was straightening up his work area, now startlingly bare and devoid of weird pictures of birds and darling Ancient-device cozies.

"Hey. What are you doing?" asked Rodney, even though he knew perfectly well. "Packing up already?"

"I leave tomorrow morning, and I have no more shifts on duty."

"This is not your computer," said Rodney, removing the laptop nestled lovingly in a dirty pink blanket at the top of the box.

"It has my name on it."

"I know, but it's not yours. Remember? The one you brought with you fried the first year."

"You said I could have this one."

"I said you could use this one."

Radek stared blankly. "Do you want me to pay for it? Here." He dug through his things. "How much does a Dell cost? Five, six hundred dollars?"

"I don't want your money, I'm just saying, technically, this belongs to the Atlantis expedition."

"Rodney. Give me my computer."

Radek made a grab for it, but Rodney held on tight. "I just think looting from the company is kind of an unclassy move at this point!"

"What are you talking about, looting?" Radek yanked the computer back toward himself, though he didn't manage to shake Rodney's grasp. "By now, everything we have been through, I have earned it!"

Rodney yanked it back. "That logic makes no sense!"

"All my personal files are on it--"

"And whose fault is that?"

Radek kicked Rodney hard in the shins, and Rodney stumbled, but only tightened his grip on the laptop. Radek, also holding tight, stumbled forward at the same time, and Rodney got in a swift elbow to the face, knocking his glasses off. The outlook was looking pretty grim for the survival of either the computer or the glasses, when the lights suddenly flickered out, and the usual steady hum of machines abruptly died. Rodney and Radek froze mid-scuffle.

A moment later the lights and the hum whirred unsteadily back on again, and Carter's voice came over the radio. "Rodney? Is something going on with the power?"

"Uh..." Rodney flipped open the laptop, which jumped out of sleep mode a lot quicker than the hooked-in main console managed its power on self test, and called up the current city systems status reports. "Okay, I've identified the problem," he said calmly. "It appears some untested software has gotten mixed up in the main power array."

Radek's eyes widened in realization as Carter's voice asked, "How soon can you fix it?" and Sheppard's voice cut in "McKay! Is there a reason my room is about a thousand degrees?"

"Okay, yes, yes, yes, on it now. Call you back," said Rodney, snapping off his radio, and grabbing Radek by the arm.

They didn't discuss it; they just went straight for the east tower lab. As far as Zelenka 2.0 was concerned, that was main engineering. Rodney immediately sat down and pried up the floor panels.

"How did it take control of the automatic system functions?"

"It's got to be the algorithm for coordinating your code with mine. We barely tested that on its own, much less in interaction with existing programs. It's comparing the city's code with its own, and then choosing one method and overriding the other. The question is, how did it even connect with the rest of the city? I checked everything!"

"Ahem." Radek nodded at the floor, where Rodney's laptop was busily scrolling status updates, the bluetooth flickering cheerily.

"Oh my God. I'm braindead!"

"We both are," said Radek.

Rodney disabled the wireless, but it was too late. Zelenka 2.0 had taken control of all of the city's automatic functions, and it was doing about as good a job as a roomful of monkeys. Even the term "roomful of monkeys" in its usual sense--i.e. the entire day staff of the lab--was insufficient to describe the incompetence of this program. An actual room of wall-to-wall screeching primates would have done a better job taking care of the city.

"What the hell is it doing? What happened?"

"Perhaps we should shut it down first, and figure out what went wrong later," said Radek. Then he got to work shutting it down, so Rodney felt free to figure out what went wrong.

"Good lord, have you seen this code? This is ridiculous. Did we write this?"

Radek looked over his shoulder. "Yes."

Rodney lapsed into silence, punctuating the sound of Radek typing away beside him with the occasional "Hm" or "What?" or "Oh."

"Rodney. Can you tell me--"

"Okay, you need to not interrupt me, because every time I look away from this and look back, it turns into gobbledygook. Is this what you feel like all the time? I--oh oh oh oh. Shhh, shut up. Wait. What was your question?"

"Never mind."

"I vaguely remember writing this, but why... We seriously need to learn to write documentation or at least comment things out."

"I have been telling you that for years."

"Yes, well, usually it's a waste of time. Actually, if we'd done it this time, we wouldn't even have finished in time to..."

"Destroy everything?"

"Well. Yes. I still don't even see where the problem is. All of this worked last night! Even if it did go on a rampage and take over the city, that should have been fine! That was the future plan!"

"We never tested it on such a large scale..."

"That shouldn't matter."

"There are a lot of places where it could have gone wrong. I freely admit I don't really understand everything that you did to it--"

"What I did to it? I will honestly bet you one million dollars right now that it was your code that fucked it up."

"You didn't debug?"

"I skimmed! What was that?"

"The door is sealing. It is not safe to emerge."

"Yeah, I got that, Captain Obvious. Why?"

Radek calmly flipped to a city diagram. "Ah. Flooding again."

"Delightful. We're stuck here. Not that we're any closer to solving this."

"I have almost eradicated the corrupt code. City functions should return to automatic control in a moment, and then the team in lab will simply have to return the settings to normal."

"Oh, that'll be a cakewalk for them. Also? We must have been really in the zone when we wrote this, because it's... Well, it's really actually quite beautiful. Some of our best work. Yours, certainly. I can't figure out why it freaked out like this. I mean, the program got pretty complex, sure, but that's the point! Smart software!"

Radek looked up. "Rodney..." His tone was low and serious, and there was something in it that made Rodney sit up and take notice. "What if..."

Rodney didn't need him to finish the sentence. "Holy," he breathed. "You think?"

Radek glanced down at his hands, poised over the keys, and then looked up again, wild-eyed. "I deleted it!"

"Don't--hey, you didn't know! Anyway, we have it backed up--"

"It isn't the same--"

"Yeah, but--Whoa. Okay. Okay. Umm. What did--Right. Shit. We need to make a complete and detailed list of all the ways it went wrong."

"You think it was trying to communicate?"

"I don't see another logical explanation for the randomness of these errors. Radek!" Rodney tried and failed to suppress a grin. "We're not just Ancients. We're gods!"

Radek was grinning, too. "It is wrong to be happy about this, but--"

Whatever he was going to say could wait. Rodney ducked forward and stopped him with a kiss. Radek seemed happy enough to stop talking and to take Rodney's face in his hands.

If Rodney had ever taken a moment to think about what it would be like to make out with Radek (as it happened, he had not--it was Dr. fucking Zelenka, of all people), he'd have predicted it would be weird and awkward. And it was, in a way. Neither of them were especially smooth or graceful people. But their enthusiasm made up for their lack of coordination. Almost immediately the kiss became a long string of frantic, searching, desperately curious kisses, separated only by gasping breaths. Rodney's restless hands flew up and down Radek's back, feeling the comforting and familiar and surprisingly-muscular body beneath the uniform. He hadn't been with a man since college but he was suddenly flooded with fond memories of the head he'd given and received then. Okay, this? Best plan ever, even from Rodney's frame of reference. Here they were, trapped indefinitely in the--

"Dr. McKay? Dr. Zelenka? Are you in there?"

Suddenly Rodney was aware of various bangs and shouts and water splashing sounds on the other side. He and Radek stared at each other, frozen mid-grope.

"Hello! Is anyone in there?"

"I suppose," said Rodney grudgingly, "we should probably answer."

Radek said a very long and angry-sounding sentence in Czech which concluded inexplicably with "I agree."

"Hi, yes!" Rodney called. "In here!"

"There! In there, everyone! All right, hang tight, docs! We'll have you out in five minutes!"

Rodney made a face. "Great!" he called. "Thanks, thanks very much! That's peachy!"

"No problem!" the marine responded brightly.

Rodney stepped away from the door and wiped his swollen mouth. "So, um..."

"Sorry," said Radek.

"No, no, it's good. I mean, if you want to know the truth, I'm beginning to regret that we never did that, you know..." While we still had time. "Sooner. I just--well, I guess I never thought of you in that way."

"Likewise," said Radek, a little too fervently.

"How come you never told me you were, ah, inclined in the direction of... gay?"

"You never asked," said Radek. "Also you never listened. Also when I tried to tell you any detail of my personal life, you made vomiting sounds."

"Yes, well," said Rodney. "I guess I assumed it would be more 'I've been reading all of Dune' or 'I've started taking a multivitamin,' and less 'I've been sleeping with men.'"

"Mm," Radek nodded. "Your assumption was not incorrect."

Suddenly concerned that he had been giving off an unintended aura, Rodney asked, "How did you know I... that I was, or would want..."

"Please," Radek smiled insufferably. "I have seen the way you look at Colonel Sheppard."

"What! What way? You mean, 'annoyed'?"

"No," said Radek. "Lustful."

"What? How do you confuse those two? You're crazy!"

"I call them like I see them," said Radek staunchly.

"For the record," Rodney scowled, "this would be 'annoyed.'"

The marines broke through the door about twenty minutes after the initial estimate of five had elapsed, and Rodney cursed the marine for giving such an inaccurate estimate, because there were several things he could have done with that time. After they were escorted back to main city, they had to submit to good-natured once-overs by Keller, despite Rodney's protestations that he had done nothing out of the ordinary or physically taxing (that he wanted to discuss). Keller elected not to ask.

Radek caught up with him as he was walking back from the medlab. "Rodney? I have been thinking. The randomness of those errors..."

"I know," said Rodney. "They were probably just random."

They stood for a moment, staring morosely down the corridor.

"For a time." said Radek, "I really thought we had created an eerie humanlike lifeform too malformed to be controlled, yet too sentient to be ethically killed."

"Me too," Rodney sighed.

"Maybe next time?"

"Yeah," said Rodney. "Only you leave at 8:25 tomorrow morning, and it's..." He checked his watch. "6:15 tomorrow morning."

Radek swore under his breath.

"What is it?" asked Rodney, and of all the things he'd said and done today, this, for some reason, was the one that set his heart pounding. "Don't you want to go?"

Radek shook his head. "I have not finished packing."

 

Monday

Rodney shuffled from console to console. He knew he should be grateful that everyone had taken him up on his blanket permission to see Zelenka and the rest of the weekenders off, because the last thing he needed was overzealous underlings slithering underfoot while he was trying to sort out every system in the entire city. Still, the lab was sort of depressingly empty.

"Hey." Sheppard was leaning in the doorway. "You coming to the big to-do?"

"Actually a little busy at the moment. You may have noticed a couple of slight glitches in, oh, everything?"

"Come on, Rodney, you still have five minutes to say goodbye to Dr. Z."

"Mm, yeah. I think I'll pass. You can tell him I said 'hey.'"

There was a pause and Rodney assumed Sheppard had left until he heard him say, "You gonna miss him?"

"He's a useful resource," said Rodney. Okay, why was he lying to Sheppard? Damn him if he was going to prove Radek right. He announced, "I kissed him!"

"You... Okay," said Sheppard, in a slow, you're-crazy drawl. "You mean like a 'Judas, must you betray me with a kiss' kind of a kiss, or like a hot scientist-on-scientist action kind of a kiss?"

"The second one," said Rodney.

Sheppard blinked. Well, he shouldn't have provided the option if he didn't want Rodney to select it. "That's... great, Rodney." He shook his head and turned away, but before he left, he asked, "Did it work?"

"No," Rodney admitted. "He's still going."

"Well, nobody can say you didn't try your best." Sheppard flashed a grin. "At least you're sending him back with happy memories, right?"

"True," Rodney agreed; and then realized his mistake, and eyed Sheppard suspciously. "Are you making fun of me?"

"Yep," said Sheppard. "I'll tell him you said 'hey.'"

Rodney waved him off and returned to his work. He didn't notice how much time passed while he was at it; certainly didn't notice when 8:25 came and went. At 8:27 he thought about making a new org chart. At 8:28 he decided it was too soon. At 8:31 he considered it again because otherwise he would have to start on the paperwork and, shudder, documentation. At 8:33, a discrete cough interrupted the silence.

"Listen, Sheppard, I don't have time to--"

But it wasn't Sheppard at the door. It was Radek, wearing a backpack, and holding a poorly-packed carton of stolen office supplies.

"I heard there was an opening in your department," he said. "If you'll have me."

"I... well, I..." Rodney blinked. "I thought you were otherwise engaged."

"I had an offer, but I have decided that Atlantis would be a better place for me at this time, professionally and personally. It is the home of somebody that I care for deeply."

"Oh. Well. That does sound..." Rodney closed his eyes and let out a long breath. "God. Zelenka."

Radek put his box down on the table and leaned over to try to read his expression. "Annoyed or lustful?"

"Neither. Both. Come here."

 

The End