Three Days in the Life of Rodney McKay - Part 1: The Day McKay Learned Sheppard was Smart (original) (raw)
Written for the SGA_Secret Santa Exchange
Title
: Three Days in the Life of Rodney McKay
Author: tepring
Recipient: sa_si_le
Pairing: John/Rodney Friendship
Rating: pg 13
Word Count: ~5K
Warnings: none
Summary: Rodney McKay was an ambitious man, but his ambitions were of the intellectual variety. He could care less about money as long as there were plenty of people around telling him he was the smartest guy in the room. He had that title neatly wrapped up (whenever Sam wasn't on base) until a certain John Sheppard sauntered into the Antarctic Base. Story features early days of Atlantis, so enjoy "researching" references to those first season episodes!
Day 1: The Day McKay Learned Sheppard Was Smart
Rodney McKay was an ambitious man, but his ambitions were of the intellectual variety. He could care less about money as long as there were plenty of people around telling him he was the smartest guy in the room. The money he did care about was the kind that got him equipment and minions to do the stuff he didn’t like to do. For a while, the Stargate Program had been perfect – he was usually the smartest guy in the room, and it was well funded. He rose rapidly in the scientific ranks and was sure he’d soon be posted at the SGC itself where the real science happened.
And then he’d hit the blond wall.
Samantha Carter, it turned out, was just nearly as smart as Rodney and the fact galled him. To add insult to injury, all of her “experience” put him at a disadvantage. He didn’t deal well with people he couldn’t intimidate intellectually. They disrupted his modus operandi and even while a part of him recognized it as petty and pathetic, his only coping mechanism was belligerence and stubbornness.
When Teal’c was trapped in the Stargate’s buffer, Sam had been right and Rodney had not only been wrong, he’d been an ass. And he’d spent months in Russia because of it. When he’d finally been released from exile, he’d jumped at the chance to work with Dr. Weir at the Antarctic Outpost because it kept him from having to go back to the SGC. Secretly, he respected Carter a great deal, and he’d internalized the lesson that experience mattered. He desperately wanted to become the expert on Ancient technology so he’d never be in a position to have to compete with Sam Carter again.
Rodney still wasn’t sure if it was Siberia or the week he spent “vacationing” at his home, er apartment, that convinced him to go on the Atlantis expedition a year later. If you asked, he’d tell you – in great detail – how his decision was based on the achievements for science he hoped to make on behalf of mankind. That the personal risk factors were mitigated by the benefit of knowledge he alone could tease out of the discovery. Of his respect for Dr. Elizabeth Weir and, so on and so forth.
The truth was, Rodney decided to join the one-way, sure to be suicide mission to another galaxy full of man-eating intelligent life forms (he was actually surprised that part turned out to be true) because there just wasn’t anything on Earth that was interesting any more. They could only pull so much out of the bits of technology the Ancients had left behind in Antarctica. Siberia convinced him that the SGC wasn’t his optimal career path, and that painful, god-awful boring week at a-home-that-wasn’t-a-home convinced him that the private sector held even less promise of fame, fortune and Nobel prizes than the SGC.
Most importantly, he was certain to be the smartest guy in the room – whichever room the intergalactic wormhole decided to spit the expedition out into. Until Major John Sheppard sat in the Ancient chair and it came to life like he’d never seen before.
“Think about where we are in the solar system,” he’d told the Major, wondering if the man had any clue what he was asking. Did these Army-types even know the Earth orbited around the sun?
When a breathtakingly beautiful image of the sun and all of its satellites, complete with perfectly scaled golden orbital trails, glowed into being above their heads, Rodney fought a surge of jealousy the likes of which he hadn’t felt since his dad had given his sister a copy of the Feynman lectures and told him that Jeanie’s gift was in physics and that Rodney was more suited to theoretical math. (That moment was, in part, why Rodney had completed his first doctorate in astrophysics, out of spite. The fact that his 2nd doctorate – and most of his work since – was in math and programming – i.e. programming stone-age-by-comparison Earth technology to interface with Ancient technology - failed to impress any irony upon him.)
Rodney had only survived that first excruciating day by repeating over and over the words he'd said to Elizabeth: “It’s not advanced. It’s a random characteristic” as he put the chair, via the Major, through a set of test scenarios he’d only imagined being able to complete.
Despite his mantra, there were warning signs. Major Sheppard didn’t seem challenged by the complicated tasks Rodney was setting to run his interface programs through its paces. If anything, Sheppard seemed bored.
“Access the targeting program, then select a ground-based target,” he said, no longer having to coach the Major through the “think about then identify then select” routine. He’d been able to use normal instructions after the first ten minutes as the Major had adapted to the Ancient filing system’s interface remarkably quickly.
The visual display over the chair flickered and glowed, but Rodney was concentrating on the data flowing over his screen. When he glanced up to begin his next instructions, he pulled a double-take.
“Got something against Baltimore, have you?” he asked, realizing that the Major’s chosen ground-based target wasn’t a Middle Eastern warlord’s compound, but a city block in the middle of the down-town district. The image vanished immediately and the Major didn’t reply, so Rodney just went on to his next instruction.
After two hours, the Major was chuffing under his breath with each new test and squirming in the chair. After a particularly long gap between instructions during which Rodney was enthusiastically debugging code that had been fighting him for weeks, he looked up and saw the display flashing with selection after selection as the Major went ransacking through the Ancient database.
“What are you doing? Stop that!” Rodney bellowed, diving for the interface monitor that was trying to keep up with the Major’s antics. Sheppard didn’t stop and Rodney could almost hear the man’s shrug in his laconic reply.
“I’m bored. Just looking around to see if these Ancient guys left any tunes laying around.”
Rodney was too stunned by what he was seeing to reply for a long moment. Sheppard was systematically searching the database and adding mental comments as he went that Rodney’s interfaces translated into peculiarly Sheppard-esqe English: “Weapons stuff. Power grid. Sciency physics stuff. Cool! Spaceships! Environmental controls – that McKay guy needs to really check this folder out. It’s freakin’ cold in here. Map of the Stargate network – wonder what that is.” And so on.
It had taken McKay three weeks to train that sgt. whats-his-name, Markham?, to navigate the three-dimensional file structure and find even the top level directory from the chair. Most of what they’d learned was due to McKay’s interfaces.
“Stop!” McKay finally stuttered out again. “I mean, that’s all for now. You can go.”
“Ok,” Sheppard replied, just as casually, and the display winked off with a pop. The chair slowly shushed into its upright position. When the Major hopped out and made as if to wander away without so much as a goodbye, Rodney felt inexplicably annoyed.
“If you broke anything, I’m going to report it to General O’Neill,” he snapped.
Sheppard just waved over his shoulder. “I turned on the safeties for all of those drone things. Doctor Trigger-happy would have detonated the whole load under your butts if he’d worked just a little harder at it.”
And with that he left, leaving Rodney to splutter.
Slapping angrily at his keyboard and muttering, Rodney called up the drone interface and dug into some folders he hadn’t visited before. He grew so immersed, he didn’t notice that the shifts were changing around him and the crew was dimming the lights for night-mode.
An hour later, he felt a shudder tickle his spine. “I’ll be damned.”