Damn.  This was another one. 

Claire leaned her forehead wearily against the palm of her hand, elbow propped on her work table. 

‘It’s just a job.  Just a way to put food on the table.  Just a job.’  The litany twisted through her brain. 

But that was the problem, wasn’t it?  It wasn’t just a job.  What they were doing was… bizarre.  And these texts… Nothing made sense; the parts didn’t seem to belong to the same entity.  The text itself looked ancient, closely allied in form and construction to the Egyptian and other northern African and middle eastern languages and dialects she’d studied for more than forty years.  But the symbols were printed—in the most modern of senses—on a material that she’d never seen before.  It was much too smooth and sophisticated in formulation to be as old as it had to be, and the edges were smooth and sharp in a way that could be produced only by modern machining. 

But worse than the asynchrony of the parts, the information was highly disturbing.  This was the third such text they’d given her in the last week.  There was no question that the subject of the writing was weaponry design.  She was far from an expert on the tools of war, but she was sure nothing she’d ever encountered—neither in her life-long devotion to the early history of the planet nor in her modern life—had been anything like the device described in this text.  And there were a number of words and expressions which were completely new to her as well.  One—apparently a material component of the weapon—appeared repeatedly, both here and in the other two similar texts they’d ordered her to translate.  ‘N-A-something-something-D-A-H.’  That was the best she could do so far, and she couldn’t come up with any clues to help with the rest.

She sighed and lifted her head, returning her gaze to the problematic pages.  Strange as the materials were, they weren’t really what bothered her the most.

The worst thing about everything was… everything.  Leaning back in her chair, she let her eyes drift closed.  How had they come to this?  Working deep underground, under the control of the Air Force.  Two very small, uninformed cogs in a Big Secret government enterprise.  They’d been the best.  Just what was it that had started their feet down the path that ended here?

Fiercely, she closed off that avenue of thought.  She knew.  It hadn’t been immediate, but she knew.  One fraction of a moment in time.  She knew.

Shaking her head sharply, Claire reached out to pull a couple of surgeon’s gloves from the pop-up box at the back of the work table.  Enough wasting time.  She carefully picked up the mysterious sheets and carried them over to her preparation bench.  Laying them on the readied plate of glass, she pulled a second plate from the rack and set it gently atop the pages, holding the stack together with one hand while her other placed clips around the edges to keep the sandwich stable.

She’d been doggedly working on the translation for an hour when a tap on the open door brought her head up.  She smiled as her husband entered the workroom.   He looked mildly excited—rare for a man who could be used for a dictionary illustration of ‘calm.’

“Claire, can you leave that?  I want to show you something.”

Her brows arched.  “Oh?  Something interesting?”

“Something… unexplainable.  Come?”

She stood and arched her back, suddenly feeling the strain of an hour bent over the table.  “Yes, please.  I could use a break.”

She hummed in pleasure as his big hands rubbed gently over her aching back.  “Or not, if you’re willing to keep that up for another thirty minutes or so.”

He laughed gently and kissed the side of her neck.  “I’d be delighted, except… I really want you to take a look at this, Claire.” 

Sighing in mock-disappointment, she turned and slid her arm around his still-trim waist. 

“All right.  Five minutes, then I want some more of that back action.  I don’t bend as well as I used to.”

He pulled her snugly against his side and murmured into her hair as he guided her steps out the office door, “You bend just fine, as far as I’m concerned.”

Claire sputtered in astonishment.  “Just tuck that thought away and save it until we’re home, Dr. Jackson.  I definitely think we can do something with it.”

As the elevator door hissed back, revealing a pair of airmen, she reluctantly pulled free of his hold, then slipped her arm through his.  A feeling of warmth washed through her body.  No matter what… regardless of larger impacts… this remained strong.  To heck with deep dark political/military secrets.  This was more real than any plots and machinations.

His lab was two floors above hers.  Even more distant from Whatever It Was that periodically rumbled deep down in the bowels of the facility.  It wasn’t deemed necessary, so they’d never been told just what Whatever was.  Somehow, it was tied to the amazing artifacts and texts they’d been given to work on.  But her imagination wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of Whatever.

Mel unlocked his door and ushered her in, gesturing toward a strange object sitting in the corner. 

“What…?”  Claire approached slowly.  The artifact was about four feet tall, a heavy, crudely fashioned base supporting something that looked like a wide, irregularly shaped frame.  The area within was dull and non-reflective. 

Gently, she brushed her fingers across the rough surface of the ‘frame’ part of the artifact.  Then she moved around to look at the back.  It looked just the same as the front.

“Well, it’s strange.  An ugly picture frame?  Target for some weird game?”  She looked at Mel and shrugged.

He smiled and held up an odd, triangular device.  “Move away and watch.”  When she was safely away from the frame, he fiddled with one of the small dials on the triangle… and the matte surface of the interior of the object flickered, then settled into an image.

Exclaiming in surprise Claire moved closer.

“Careful!  Don’t touch it!”  Mel’s grabbed her arm and pulled her away.  “I tossed a pencil at it, and it, well… I guess it ate it.  Anyway, the pencil vanished.”

She stared at the image in the frame.  It was pretty uninteresting.  Just an empty room, possibly a store room.  Certainly not something you’d consider decorative.

“What’s it for?”

“Haven’t any idea.  But look here…”  Mel fiddled with the other knob on the triangle, apparently the control for the frame.  The image flickered again, and when it settled down, the image had changed.  Another room, brightly lit, showing a table with several odd, tagged artifacts placed along its length.  He nudged the dial again, and they both exclaimed at what appeared to be a perfect replica of Mel’s lab.  If the image hadn’t been so emphatically missing their own bodies, Claire would have sworn it was simply a mirror’s reflection.

“That’s… interesting,” she said slowly.

Nodding, he continued to fiddle with the small knobs.  “Hadn’t seen that one before.”

Another twist, and the image became a smoking, shattered hallway.  Another, and what appeared to be the same hallway, but without the damage or the smoke.

“Good heavens!”  She moved closer again, reaching out but not quite touching.  “How many images are stored in it?”

“I haven’t seen quite the same one twice.  Honey, back away.  I’m not completely convinced that we’re looking at stored images.  I mean… who’d record these particular pictures?”

She moved back to stand beside him, still staring at the odd apparatus.  “I don’t know.  But what else could it be?”

“I haven’t the…  Claire!”  He grabbed her as a strangely armored figure appeared in the image.  They gaped at the creature, who seemed as stunned as they were.  Abruptly, it lifted a long stick and pointed it in their direction.  The teardrop-shaped tip flared.  With a cry, Mel dropped to the floor, dragging Claire with him, as a bolt of fire erupted from the picture in the frame.  Desperately, Mel scrambled to his feet, pointed the triangular control at the image, and twisted the first knob.  The surface immediately dulled to its original state.

“Dear God!”  Claire scrambled to her feet, eyes glued to the scorched wall opposite the device.  “Just where did that thing come from?”

Mel grimaced.  “Do you actually think they would have told me?  Dr. Carter brought it in with this lot…”  He gestured toward a collection of oddities jumbled together on his light table.  “The rest seem to be simply inanimate artifacts.  Unusual, some of them, but none has offered to stand up and shoot at me!”

Cautiously, Claire again approached the frame.  Other than its odd appearance, it seemed perfectly normal, now that the center was again dull and pictureless.  She reached slowly toward the matte surface.

“Claire!  Don’t!”

“I don’t think… I think it’s inert when it’s dull like this.”

“You think!  Please, honey.  Let’s not get adventurous.”

Sighing regretfully, she pulled her hand back.  “Heaven knows we wouldn’t want to take any risks…”

He moved close and pulled her into his arms, rubbing his nose in her salt and pepper hair.  “I know, I know.  This wasn’t what we’d planned for ourselves.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist and tilted her head up to kiss him.  “We are what we made ourselves, Mel.  It’s just that… lately I’ve been thinking a lot about things.  About… well, about Danny.”

He stiffened and turned his face away, gazing vaguely at the frame. “Don’t, Claire.  We put that behind us thirty years ago.”

“Did we?  Or did we let it bleed the fire out of our lives?  I just can’t help thinking…”

He silenced her with another kiss.  “Let it go, love.  Just let it go.”

For a long moment, they held each other.  Then Claire pulled free and reached up to stroke Mel’s silvered hair.  “So… what are you going to tell them about that artifact?”

“Right now?  Nothing.  I’m not about to turn this over to an idiot like Makepeace until I know more about it.  I can just imagine his eyes lighting up at the thought of getting his hands on a box full of pet… fire breathers, or whatever that thing was.  Not only am I not telling them about it, I’m not even going to admit the existence of that control device.”

“What about Dr. Carter?”

“Well… I’ll deal with that when it becomes necessary.  I’m not completely convinced that she’ll agree that we should keep it quiet; they’ve got her pretty indoctrinated into their philosophical position about this stuff.  She might feel obliged to go to West.  No, on the whole I think it best that we keep it between us for now.”

She nodded, then stroked his lined cheek.  “I’d better get back to those documents.  They’re going to be bad enough without adding this little toy.  I’m sure they’re all about weapon designs, though there are some concepts and terms that I can’t make any sense of.  I’ll…”

She was interrupted by the raucous clangor of alarm bells and buzzers.  They hurried out into the stark hallway, wincing from the volume of the alarms and the harsh flashing of red and yellow lights.

Considering the racket, the calm of the hallway should have been odd.  A head popped out of a door further down the hall, then immediately disappeared.  But that was all. 

Claire and Mel exchanged a bemused look, then grabbed each other as the floor beneath them vibrated rhythmically.  Abruptly, it all stopped.  As if a master switch had been pulled somewhere, the noise, the lights and the vibrations ceased.  Whatever had once again spoken.

“It… ah, shouldn’t there be something we’re supposed to do when this sort of thing happens?”  Claire shook her head in confusion.  “Mel, we really need to get someone to explain some things to us.  I’m not happy working in the dark like this.”

He nodded, mouth grimly tight.  “There’s secrecy, and then there’s secrecy.   I never imagined the kinds of things they were going to ask us to work on when we signed those agreements.  I think it’s just about time to have a little discussion with General West.”

Claire sighed, looking again up and down the deserted hallway.  “I agree.  There are other places we can hang our shingles; I’d hate to be responsible for translating something that will end up putting some of the weaponry I’m reading about into the hands of our military.  Especially since the election.”

Mel grimaced.  “There is certainly that.  Ah, well…”  He kissed her gently, then gave her a little push toward the elevator.  “We’ll talk about it at home tonight.  For now, off to your lovely words, my dear.  I’m going to play with my Bizarro frame.  See if I can figure out what it really is.  Take care, sweetheart.”

She stroked his face one more time, then headed down the hall.  Stairs.  She didn’t need an elevator to go down two floors.

A muffled invitation answered Claire’s tap on the lab door.  Mel looked up as she slipped through the door.  His face was uncharacteristically flushed with excitement, the control for his strange frame clutched tightly in his hands.

“I thought you might like to take a break and have a cup of tea with me.  Looks like you’re having much too much fun, however.”  She laughed at the slightly guilty expression on his face.  “I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that you’ve made some progress.”

“Yes!  Ah… that is, I think so.  Come here, love, and look!”

Eagerly, he grabbed her hand and pulled her beside him.  The device was activated; the scene depicted was one of the several images of a storeroom Mel had found as he explored the library of photos, or whatever they were, in the frame.

Mel was pointing a slightly unsteady finger at a pad of paper lying on the floor in the pictured store room.  She looked at him in puzzlement, then back at the picture.  “So… they were a bit sloppy that day, were they?”

“Um, no.  Not at all.”  He wrapped his arms around her from the back, tucking her body into the curve of his.  “That notebook… it didn’t start out there.  I mean, it wasn’t there when I… ah, hmmm.”  His irritated murmur vibrated against her back.  “I put that there.”

She pulled away far enough to twist around and look into his face, her own brows arching in surprise.  “You mean, you’ve figured out how to manipulate the pictures?  Is this some kind of… Photoshop for artists with no imagination?”

“No!  No, no, no.  I…”  Looking around the room, he reached quickly for a small calculator sitting on the side counter.  “Watch!”

He tossed the calculator at the surface of the image.  There was a sort of slow flare of light, then the little machine appeared… in the image.  It arced a few feet into the pictured room, then dropped soundlessly to the floor, slid a few additional feet, and came to rest against the shelving along the back wall.

Claire stared at the altered image, jaw hanging.  That was just… impossible.

“Mel…?  What… how…”

He tightened his arms again, pulling her firmly against his chest.  “I’m not sure, but… actually, I’ve got an idea.  A really wild idea.  And I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk to Doctor Carter about this.”

"Talk to Dr. Carter about what?" 

They jumped at the unexpected question, spinning around to see Doctor Samantha Carter standing in the open doorway, elegant brows arched quizzically.

'Damn.  Double damn.'

Sam Carter shook her head, darts of frustration twitching at the strained muscles of her back and legs.  She let her body relax, plopping onto her butt and staring resentfully at the ugly artifact.

She'd been examining this dratted thing for more than two days now, and was nearing the deadline of General Hammond's reluctant grace period.  Approximately another thirty-six hours, and she was going to have to let them attempt to destroy the mirror.

It wasn't that she didn't agree with him… It was a very dangerous device to leave intact, especially in the hands of bozos like the ones the NID seemed determined to recruit.  It was just that… well… she just couldn't stand to let them incinerate it before she'd figured out how the blasted thing worked.  But it just sat there, silently mocking.  It was an insult to her training and intellect.

So far she hadn't even figured out how to get into the frame, let alone discovered the first thing about the tantalizing dimension-bending function of the mirror.  She'd carefully dissected the control device, and even reassembled it so it functioned apparently normally—well, normally for a joystick for an inter-dimensional Playstation.  But she hadn't actually discovered anything from the small remote.  What she'd understood of its innards hadn't revealed anything really novel.  And the rest… well, she'd have a far better chance helping Daniel translate all twenty-whatever of his languages.

All she'd figured out for sure was that the technology was completely different from that which drove the 'Gate. And, though her knowledge of Tollan and Asgard applications was limited, this thing just had a different 'feel' to it.  Her instincts with regard to technological style were as sound as Daniel's to linguistic and cultural nuances.  She just knew this was unrelated to the others.

She'd discussed her findings with Daniel, and they were agreed that in all probability they were looking at the product of a civilization which they hadn't yet encountered, either artifactually or personally.  His excitement matched hers, though it was driven by different imperatives.  He was busily applying himself to the scant materials they'd gathered which hinted at new, advanced races, looking for anything that seemed to suggest knowledge of a device which allowed one to step from one reality to another.

She let her body rest against the wall, closing her scratchy eyes and tilting her head back tiredly.  Besides the obvious siren song the mirror sang for her ears, she was perversely glad it had dropped back into their laps.  It had led to some serious shaking up, what with meeting alternate selves and men apparently risen from the dead, and the guys had gotten a bit bashed around doing their 'save the world' act for a brand new universe.  However, it was now providing an excellent distraction for Daniel.

Her throat tightened as she recalled their all-too-recent and devastating encounter with Machello's obsessive hatred for the Goa'uld.  Stupid, stupid, brilliant man.  Had he never given a thought to anything beyond exacting his revenge in as thorough and destructive a way as possible?  Had he never thought about the innocents who could be caught in the recoil?

Innocents like Daniel. 

She'd experienced many moments of horror in her life.  She still felt touches of the intense sorrow she'd experienced at losing her mother.  Her father's difficult acknowledgement of his own mortality had struck hard.  And she'd thought nothing could match the devastation of having her body appropriated by another as her own consciousness was shoved into a dark, windowless corner.

But she'd been wrong.  Nothing equaled the desperate sorrow and hopelessness of seeing her dear, brilliant friend stripped of his intellect and identity.  Seeing Daniel curled up in the middle of that awful white room, hands, feet and face bare.  Watching him crush himself into that corner, tears spilling from eyes that had clearly already shed so many.  And that last sight as they'd been firmly ushered out of the room, of the hulking orderlies pinning his helplessly struggling body to the floor as he'd been injected with the drugs that were robbing him of himself.

She figured that was the ultimate. 

And it was almost worse to watch Daniel try so hard to pretend it had never happened.  Other than an absolute refusal to allow any psychiatrist or psychologist near him, he'd tried hard to return to business as usual.  No accusations, no recriminations.  But also no smiles.  He'd never been one to smile a lot, but since the white room he'd withdrawn into himself with all the stubborn determination so characteristic of the man.  And she hadn't seen the corners of that lush mouth curl up in an honest smile since they'd returned from the Linvris chamber.

So it was a joy and a relief to see him throw himself at a problem like the mirror.  He still wasn't smiling, but at least he was talking to her; at least he was allowing himself to become absorbed in something other than the fight to appear “normal.”

Sighing, she shook herself out of her reverie and turned her attention back to the mirror.  Once she'd lost custody of the infuriating thing, she'd have a war council with Teal'c and the colonel.  Surely Daniel couldn't hold out against the three of them.

In the meantime, she was down to thirty-five hours.