Chapter 223 - Trinity - Part 3
Having called everyone back to the control room, Eventus had spent the ten minutes it had taken everyone to gather sifting through the outposts data systems for any sign of successful psionic infiltration with a fine toothed comb.
Thankfully there had been nothing more than the purged files he had discovered earlier, which had been semi-expected given he knew the Atlantis Expedition had originally made it through the location with only a single oddly timed death. Though of course it was better to be sure then end up mind controlled by a psionic impression with the type of impetus likely to form under circumstances like this planet had faced.
“All right,” he began. “For the sake of the humans I'm going to start by prefacing what I'm about to say with this. As far as Lantean scientific studies have been able to prove, ghosts as you know them do not exist.”
“See,” McKay said smugly to Zelenka. “What did I tell you?”
“Not the time, Rodney.” Zelenka scowled back.
Ignoring the two's interplay, Eventus continued. “Higher dimensional superstructures, aka souls, do not linger in this dimension after the body decays past the restoration point.”
“At least not naturally,” Silvina added in.
“Right,” Eventus nodded in agreement. “But when a strong enough psychic dies in a moment of extreme emotion, or enough people with psionic potential die around the same time in the same general place with similar extreme emotions, their remaining mental energy can form into a knot that temporarily lingers in this dimension as a semi-corporeal structure resembling the being or strongest of the beings that spawned it. And on even rarer occasions that knot of energy can form into a lemniscate-like shape that allows the semi-corporeal structure to exist indefinitely.”
“So psychic ghosts,” Shepard said to McKay, who shot the soldier an annoyed glare in return.
“Both of those types are extraordinarily dangerous," Eventus went on. “They are variable levels of sentient, driven primarily by whatever emotion formed them, and can possess any singular or multiple combination of psychic abilities.”
“So what,” Sheppard frowned. “They can move things around, throw fire, and read minds?”
“They can theoretically do pretty much everything your various ghost stories suggest ghosts can do.” Eventus said.
“Though from the warning stories I was told as a child the vast majority should not have the energy to do more than the most minor of things,” Silvina admitted, shooting Eventus an unsure look.
“It's a scale depending on a lot of different factors,” Eventus offered, not really wanting to go that deeply into the subject with the current situation hanging over their heads. “But that doesn't really matter here because the persistently energy field of Death Worlds changes things. Research done while traveling through the mostly dead galaxy where the phenomenon was discovered suggests the energy field basically forces stabilization of psionic impressions at the point of creation. Which means, like the lemniscate types, there's none of the energy loss that normally causes the danger to be mostly weighted towards ones with control type abilities.”
“And control type abilities would be?” Sheppard asked, drumming his fingers tensely on the stock of his p90.
“About what you'd expect from the name,” Eventus admitted. “Influencing minds, controlling minds, projecting emotions, infiltrating dreams, and infiltrating data systems.”
“A dream infiltrator caused the loss of the Boreal, a sister ship to the Aurora, during the early days of the war.” Silvina volunteered.
“No,” Eventus corrected, grimacing slightly at the reminder of that particular creature. “That was an electron based fear parasite from one of the restricted planets.”
Silvina blinked, cocking her head slightly before brushing a few stray hairs that had escaped her ponytail back behind her ear. “What were they doing on a restricted planet?”
“I have no idea,” Eventus truthfully admitted. “It was a classified mission at the time and I haven't had a reason to look it up since I became High Councilor.”
“Um,” Zelenka interrupted with a raised hand. “You still haven't explained what exactly we're looking at here.”
Eventus cringed slightly as the realization hit home that he and Silvina had in fact been about to go on a completely off topic digression in the middle of a serious matter. “Right, sorry, so this planet is full of psychic death radiation. Is inhabited by hundreds, possibly thousands, of ghosts, a significant portion of which probably hate Lanteans since we accidentally killed everybody that lived here. And this outpost was not designed with the usual precautions against ghosts and only avoided
“And you don't have a proton pack you can just zap them with?” Sheppard asked hopefully, causing Silvina to shoot him an odd look.
“Proton weaponry is not known to be effective on energy creatures of this type," she corrected.
“It was a media reference,” McKay scowled at Sheppard for a moment before glancing over at Eventus with a somewhat hopeful look on his face. “But ah, do you have something that can kill them?” His shoulders slumped slightly. “Or, trap them?”
A fair question given they usually did have things like that, but in this case Eventus was going to have to disappoint the scientist. “Ghost traps have been considered restricted technology since long before I was born due to most of the scientists who were trying to work out various uses for them dying horribly.”
“Uses for them?” Sheppard repeated skeptically. “So what, they were trying to make ghost powered generators or something?”
Eventus blinked in surprise, not having expected anyone to guess that given how insane it sounded. “Actually, yes. There were a couple other things, but ghost powered generators were the big thing.”
“Huh,” McKay muttered, sounding almost contemplative. “Assuming you were able to find one that was self-sustaining in nature, you would be talking about functionally infinite energy so long as you had some way to convert it into a usable form.
“Rodney, no.” Zelenka said.
“Oh come on,” McKay grumbled. “It's just a thought experiment.”
“Today it's a thought experiment,” Zelenka returned. “Tomorrow you're trying to build a ghost powered FTL drive that drags us all into hell.”
“That was a good movie,” Sheppard interjected fondly.
“As to the weapons,” Eventus continued, once more ignoring the byplay. “Those were all taken aback to Earth in the evacuation, and I don't have the subspatial materials needed to build more.”
There had been some concern that there might have been psionic impressions floating around on various worlds from the days of the plague. Cleaning them up had been one of the responsibilities of those who had been forced to stay behind, but nobody really knew how effective they had been in their responsibilities.
“Energy being energy, a big enough discharge of anything is technically capable of dispersing the psionic energies. But big enough in a context the humans would understand is being ground zero of a megaton level nuclear detonation and scaling up from there depending on the strength of the psionic impression.”
As far as he knew the record was currently held by a maintenance corps team three hundred and twelve thousand years ago who had tried everything they could think of to disperse one of the self-sustaining types before luring it onto their transport and suiciding themselves into the systems sun.
“So we’re leaving then,” Sheppard guessed.
“No,” Eventus corrected, pointing to himself and Silvina. “To minimize the risk of attracting the ghosts in a concentrated manner, we’re leaving. With us gone it should be safe enough for you to finish surveying the outpost for salvage.”
“Is it safe to do that?” Zelenka inquired, glancing around the control room with a nervous look in his eyes. “If this equipment is haunted won’t bringing it back to Atlantis just bring the ghosts back with us?”
The question was enough to make Eventus’s lips twitch slightly in suppressed amusement since it made it clear that Zelenka was building a mental picture of their circumstances based on horror movies.
“That’s not a thing,” he reassured the scientist. “Only information systems are vulnerable to that type of infiltration, and the outpost uses the standard operating system that’s set up to automatically purge data blocks that are corrupted in that manner.”
Which was why the external sensor logs, alongside several other external sensor connected governing systems, had been formatted and shut down.
“And the only system I haven’t checked for that yet is the weapon targeting sensors since they’re a standalone part of the weapon system itself.”“Which you’re going to do before you leave, right?” McKay asked hopefully.
“Of course,” Eventus nodded.
“What about the Stargate?” Sheppard inquired with a slight frown. “These things can’t follow us back through them, can they?”
“Not under normal circumstances,” Silvina told him. “The Stargate’s repulsive membrane is calibrated to repel those types of energy fields.”
Sheppard glanced over to McKay who just rolled his eyes.
“The thing that keeps air and water from passing through the gate.” he glanced over at Silvina. “I assume the exceptions to those normal circumstances involve some sort of containment or shielding?”
“I do not know,” Silvina confessed, looking expectantly at Eventus. “You would have to ask either a Stargate engineer or member of the maintenance corps.”
“Pretty much,” Eventus confirmed. “As you might imagine given the length of our history the list of exceptions is rather long, but the only two we should have to worry about here is someone being possessed or something hitching a ride on a computer or something. You’d know if the first had happened, as you only really get the sort of subtleness where such a possession isn’t immediately noticeable in cases where the psionic impression forms from positive and negative emotional balance.”
Sheppard raised an eyebrow at him. “And by immediately noticeable you mean?”
“Suddenly turning psychotic,” Eventus began with the most obvious before continuing down the list of his own experiences. “Huddling in a corner crying in fear, all of the sudden trying to have sex with everyone, randomly becoming obsessive about another person.”
“So acting like a horror movie villain,” Sheppard said in a tone that made it clear he had hit the point of full on skepticism.
“Emotional extremes connected to how people died don’t tend to produce stability,” Eventus shrugged. “Which is why the more dangerous cases tended to be people who either didn’t notice the sudden personality change and gave the psionic impression free reign, or liked the psionic impression better than the person it was possessing.”
“That last actually happens?” Silvina inquired as a thinly veiled look of disgust settled across her features.
Eventus gave a sad nod. “Not with any Lantean I’ve ever heard of, but I’ve encountered it several times on human worlds, and maintenance corp records have it occurring often enough to be a notable trend with certain types of impressions.”
“So,” he turned to the humans. “Any questions?”
For a moment nobody said anything, then Zelenka once more raised his hand. “How would we know if one of those infiltrated one of the laptops or tablets we brought along?”
“Easily,” Eventus said. “Either it would burn out the silicon based microcircuitry of your devices when trying to enter them or there would be a number of highly noticeable screen and programing distortions connected to the relatively low processing power of said devices.”
“Hendrik měl samozřejmě pravdu.” Zelenka grumbled under his breath.
Grinning as the man’s words reminded him of several Earth myths, Eventus couldn’t help himself. “If it matters for that, copper phone lines would absolutely have the thickness needed to provide a workable transmission pathway for ghosts.”
“To ne!” Zelenka scowled at him.
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Author’s Notes: For those wondering, Zelenka said “Of course Hendrik was right” and “It doesn’t!”. And no, I'm not going to expand on who Hendrik was, because Zelenka's always funnier that way.