Chapter 226 - Trinity - Part 6
Watching from the bridge of the Enterprise as the entire outpost was slowly pulled off the planet, John Sheppard couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t just done this from the start instead of spending most of the day surveying the place.
He turned to the captain's chair where Trebal was sitting with a focused look on her face. “You guys really used to do stuff like this all the time?”
“No,” Trebal answered somewhat tersely. “Five hours ago I did not even know such a procedure was possible.”
“Ah, Colonel.” Lorne interjected, drawing John's attention to the side station the Major was sitting at. “I'm pretty sure she's focusing on the tractor beam, might not want to distract her.”
“Oh,” John winced, turning back to Trebal with an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
Taking a few steps over to stand next to Lorne, John leaned down a bit. “So what did she mean by she didn't even know this was possible five hours ago?”
“She had to learn it from a training manual Eventus left on the ship,” Lorne explained. “Apparently it's this really old technique, and when I say old I mean like way back when dinosaurs were running around the Earth, that was mostly used by miners and terraformers.”
“Huh,” John muttered, letting that sit for a moment before continuing. “You guys getting along all right with everyone here?”
“Oh yeah,” Lorne grinned. “The Aurora’s crew is great, the Tria’s a bit less so, but they just finished losing a war so you can’t exactly blame them for being a bit terse with things.”
That about tracked with what John had experienced.
“Honestly,” Lorne continued. “The best part is they’ve been able to run us through some actual training drills for ship operations. And those have been a lot more useful than the training manuals that I’m pretty sure you need a PHD to actually understand.”
“Never had much trouble with em myself,” John honestly admitted. “Though the one on control chair operations is kind of useless for anything but telling you the various systems the chair can access since it assumes whoever’s reading it can connect at the same level the Ancients do.”
And he was pretty much the only member of the expedition who could even get anywhere near to that.
“All right,” John smiled as he straightened up. “Radio me if you need anything, I’m going to go make sure McKay isn’t trying to put together a mini version of that thing in the ship's science lab.”
Thanks to the internal transporters it took less than a minute to reach the science lab McKay was using to go over all the data he had grabbed from the outpost.
The lab itself wasn’t really any different from the multitude of similar rooms on Atlantis, a stretched octagon with a central control console alongside a few additional control stations up against the walls.
McKay was of course at the central console, typing away on his laptop as strings of incomprehensible data were holographically projected above the console.
“Still a fan of the keyboard I see,” John joked as he walked over to stand next to the scientist's chair.
“Can’t get used to the Ancient one’s,” McKay admitted without looking up from his work. “Their physical keyboards are just a mess, and the lack of haptic feedback from the holographic versions throws me off.”
John couldn’t really argue with that, for all the Ancient’s technical skills a lot of their stuff felt like it was designed by people who’d never even heard the words ease of use.
“So what exactly am I looking at here?” He inquired as he glanced over at the still scrolling numbers. “The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
“Close,” McKay grinned excitedly. “I've been going over the Ancient's various attempts at getting zero point energy to work, and it's some really interesting stuff.”
“And by interesting you mean?” John asked, wanting to know how just much work he was going to need to do to keep the scientist from biting off more than he could chew.
McKay held up this hand with his thumb and pointer less than an inch apart. “They were this close to making it work. Heck, from what I'm reading here it did work. They just ran into unpredictable spikes in chaos particle production when scaling the whole thing up to a point where it was useful for actual energy generation.”
“All right,” John said slowly, not liking the direction this was heading. “So they couldn't get it to work.”
“No,” McKay agreed. “But they kept working at it till the absolute last moment, and looking at the math, I'm pretty sure we can finish what they started.”
“McKay,” John said firmly. “The last time the ancients tested the thing it killed everyone on the planet and turned it into a literal ghost world.”
McKay began to open his mouth and John held up a finger. “We saw Eventus explode that ghost on the security cams.”
“Yes,” McKay rolled his eyes before shooting John a slightly patronizing look. “But that wasn't actually a ghost, it was an energy based lifeform of some kind. Like the fog people on M5S-224, or that energy cloud I saved the city from.”
“Okay…” John put forward, deciding to save that argument for later. “Let me put this another way, assuming you ran a new test with this, and something didn't work, how big would the explosion be?”
“The specific version the Ancients were testing here?” McKay asked.
“Yeah,” John confirmed with a nod.
Fidgeting with his stylus for several seconds as he did the mental math, McKay finally nodded to himself. “Assuming an overload occurred and we couldn't stop it? The energy release would be enough to wipe out about two thirds of this solar system.”
“But,” he held up a finger. “I wasn't talking about the version the ancients were testing here. Oh, it's brilliant, and would absolutely solve our energy problems forever if it worked, but with the project data Evan provided us I'm like eighty percent sure it's just completely unworkable at the scale they were hoping for.”
“All right,” John said, hiding his relief since McKay would just take that as encouragement. “So what's the solution you think you can get to work?”
“Garbage bins,” McKay grinned. “It's the same solution Evan's old teammate was working on. Divert the chaos particles into the pocket of subspace time contained within a zed-pm.”
“And that's safe?” John asked.
McKay made a so-so motion with his free hand. “Assuming you can actually get the particles into the pocket of subspace time, mostly. Unlike the type of subspatial encapsulation the Ancients used for other types of dangerous materials, the pocket of subspace time within a zed-pm is naturally stable until the interior reaches a point of maximum entropy. At which point it basically just collapses into non-existence. So the only potential risk would be a particle backflow event, but as long as you disabled the power draw mechanism there shouldn't be any real risk of that.”
John considered that for a moment. “What if you blew the thing up?”
“The zed-pm?” McKay blinked, clearly considering the question. “Well, normally they're the very definition of fail-safe, at least, so long as they're not purposefully sabotaged. But I suppose the collapse of the connecting aperture might allow a few particles to end up back in our universe.”
Putting a pin in that to ask about later, John instead went with the more immediate question. “And the reason the Ancients couldn't get it to work?”
“Because while getting energy out of a zed-pm is relatively easy,” McKay began. “Getting anything back into one is nearly impossible.”
“Which is why you can’t just recharge them,” John nodded, recalling something to that effect from an earlier conversation now that McKay had mentioned it. “But you think you’ve figured out how to do it?”
“Yes!” McKay grinned happily. “See, the problem the Ancients were running into is that the small pocket of subspace time inside a zed-pm is purposefully designed with a higher vacuum state than our own. Think of it like…” He furrowed his brow for a moment before he grinned again. “A can of aerosol whipped cream, press the top and the cream comes out because the pressure inside the can is greater than the pressure of our atmosphere.”
“Thinking about dinner?” John asked, since it was getting about that time.
“...Anyways.” McKay continued without answering. “That means that if you want to add anything new to the can, you have to do so with a higher level of pressurization than the can already has. Which at its most basic is the same problem with getting anything into the interior of a zed-pm, only instead of needing a little bit of pressurized gas you need absurd levels of energy.”
“Allright,” John followed along.
“The Ancient who was working on the problem had this idea that would allow them to bypass the energy requirements almost entirely by temporarily shifting the particles into a different dimensional phase,” McKay went on. “The problem she couldn’t nail down was the temporarily portion of that.”
“Why does it have to be temporary?” John asked, feeling sure he was missing something important in this. “Hell, if you can move the stuff out of phase so it doesn’t affect us, why do you need to stick it in a garbage can at all?”
McKay shot him a dry look. “Because leaving the particles phased for longer than a few seconds risks tearing a hole in the fabric of space time.”
“Let’s not do that then.” John winced, recalling the recording he’d seen of the near miss with a similar circumstance that SG1 had suffered at the edge of Earth’s solar system.
“But I figured out the solution that she couldn’t,” McKay said proudly.
John gave him a skeptical look. “You did? Alone?”
“Well,” McKay reluctantly began. “Technically Merlin solved most of it, but I’m the one who figured out that his system for entangled phase shifting could theoretically be used to solve this problem.”
“See,” John sighed in relief. “That actually makes me feel a bit better about all this.” He held up a finger to forestall McKay’s inevitable bragging. “But I still want you to go over everything with the Ancients before running any actual tests.”
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Author’s Notes: Cut to Eventus crying in despair as he’s forced to try and make sense of the most advanced piece of technology he's every seen, aka Merlin’s bullshit.