The Android's Complaint

Author: Geonn

Email: neil_j_miser@yahoo.com

Rating: PG13

Pairings: Sam/Janet

Category: Angst

Series: Fourth in the Complaint Department Series

Website: www.realmoftheshadow.com/geonn.htm

Disclaimer: These folks don't belong to me. I stole them from MGM's toybox without asking their mommies for permission. I promise to return them more or less unscathed.

Spoilers: "Children of the Gods," "Tin Man," "Double Jeopardy,"

Archive: Yes, just let me know where it'll be.

Notes: While the other three stories in this series takes place over the span of the same day, this story takes place in a completely different setting.

Summary: Another Sam says good-bye.

Special Thanks to Hl for the banner.


"Approximately 0.68 seconds which, for an android, is an eternity." Brent Spiner

 

Oh, how it hurt.

Like my arms had been turned to matchsticks and I was being used to start every campfire for every Boy and Girl Scout troop in America. I had never thought it possible to actually *push* my hands through a force field. I may have been living as a synthetic being for three years, but I was still thinking like a human. 'No, Sir, we can't lift that tree trunk because... oh, I guess we *can* lift that tree trunk.' But still... it hurt. And it hurt bad.

There are times in a soldier's life when they have to accept their own death. I've felt it, more than once. Fighting for the refugees on Chulak during my first mission through the Stargate, I entertained the possibility I might not be going home. Dozens of times in Desert Storm. But this time... my entire body was on fire. I knew I was being electrocuted (I didn't even want to think of how much voltage was being transmitted up my arms at that moment), but I had a mission to complete.

Oddly, I could still feel my heart pounding. Three years and I was still having phantom pains from an organ I no longer possessed. But I shoved my hand back through the shield, gritting my teeth against the pain as I tried to do as my human counterpart had instructed. 'Pull out the green crystals. Pull out the green crystals. I have to pull out the green crystals.' Behind me, the real Carter and O'Neill were holding off the forces of the Jaffa.

I couldn't get past how much they had changed! Colonel Jack O'Neill with gray hair! And, to tell the truth, it suited him rather well. There was a scar over his eye now; probably the result of one of their many adventures through the Stargate.

Two green ones down. Who knew how many I had to go. I took a few deep breaths and pushed my hand through again. Sam - the real me, as odd as that sounds - had cut her hair short. VERY short. I had never kept it very long, but still... it was a bit of a shock. Teal'c... well, Teal'c looked exactly the same, of course. But Daniel wasn't there. I wondered if he was just with another team or if... or if something terrible had happened to him. It stood to reason; the last time I saw the SGC, it wasn't exactly the healthiest place to work.

Of course, the last time I had set foot on the base, the woman I loved had called security and sent me down to a holding cell. I never even got a real chance to say good-bye to her. The real Sam went home to her. The real Sam was living her (our) life. A year after our abandonment (I really can't think of it as anything else, I am sorry to say), I convinced Daniel to let me open his chest and examine him. We must have made quite an odd sight; him sitting shirtless on a diagnostic bed and me with my hand buried in his stomach. The funniest thing was how absolutely *bored* Daniel looked...

The results of that examination had led to my creation of a self-destruct device (which had recently thoroughly taken care of our Inquistor and badly burned the skin of my left cheek) and a battery pack that gave us forty-eight off-world hours. O'Neill (our O'Neill, the synthetic one) hadn't buried the Stargate as he had promised. I never really expected him to. We started going through on missions. A thoroughly stupid idea in retrospect, but we had figured that the universe was big enough for two SG-1 teams.

I had never gotten over the loss of Janet and Cassandra. Our relationship had lasted three months, two weeks, two days, seven hours and twenty-one minutes (stupid synthetic brain). Cassandra had arrived a few days after we started sleeping together, forming a bond between us that I really doubted would ever be broken. How old would Cassie be now? Fifteen? Sixteen? Was she learning how to drive? Irritating Janet and the real Sam with her boyfriends and teenage angst? God, what I wouldn't give just to see Cassandra roll her eyes at me.

"That's it!"

Colonel O'Neill. I turn and see that the doors have all been secured; the Jaffa that were swarming the area have all been cut off. I see Sam looking at me (like looking into a mirror, only... not) and I force myself to remain upright for a few seconds. The thing about electrocution is that, while it's happening, you can still stand. You can function, understand, finish whatever you need to do. At least, that was the case in *this* situation. But as soon as you're cut off from the voltage, you realize how painful it was. How it burnt. I collapsed without grace to the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

I knew I was dying. An odd sensation, even odder - more odd? My mind wasn't working right - than realizing you *may* die. I could feel myself dying. The curse of being synthetic. My legs wouldn't work anymore. I didn't have to try to move them to find that out. Sam was moving towards me now, moving very slowly (although, more likely my mind was slipping. She was probably moving regular speed and my neuro-net was filtering it to my optical nerves in a slower-than-normal progression).

As I watched my organic counterpart make her way across the floor, I couldn't help but... hate her a little bit. What's the opposite of narcissism? Not important... Here I was, capable of living for thousands of years if Harlan was any example, and she was the one who got to live the full life. She had the SGC and her gadgets. She had a father and brother (assuming, of course, she ever reconciled with them.... God knows I thought about it often enough while I was wasting time in that sweltering hellhole of a planet). Most importantly, she had Janet and Cassandra.

She was still alive. She would go back through the Stargate to her life and her family. Would she shed a tear for her fallen 'sister'? Or had she even thought about me since I was left behind with the rest of the faux-SG-1?

I moved my arms a bit, just to prove I could. Mini-victory for me there... Samantha was knelt next to me then, looking down into my eyes. I wondered what it felt like to watch yourself die... I wanted to ask her so many questions; about Janet, about Cassie, about Mark and Dad. I wanted to wish her luck. What I *really* wanted, what I'm *ashamed* of wanting, was to be the one still standing. Selfish? Hell yes.

By that time, it was getting harder and harder to think. I closed my eyes and took a quick inventory. 'Teal'c? Teal'c, are you there?' I called, using my internal radio. No response. 'Colonel O'Neill?'

'Car-ter.'

'Sir.' I wasn't alone. But he sounded so... 'Are you all right, Sir?'

'Darian... helping me. Won't la-last much longer. How are you doing, Carter? Sam?'

'Dying, Sir. Looks like... we went... in a blaze of glory.'

'Always knew we would. I j-j-just wanted to take one Goa'uld down with me when I died.'

'Chronus is defeated, O'Neill. Dead.' Teal'c's voice. 'For my father.'

I felt his death and wanted to cry. Tears were beyond me. I couldn't even open my eyes anymore. Was I already dead? I thought back over my life in Harlan's factory. It was a modern-day trial of Sisyphus. Every day we fought an uphill battle to maintain a world whose sole inhabitants were those fighting to keep it alive. I had gone from theoretical astrophysicist to holding up a wall so it wouldn't crumble on top of me.

 

Before I managed to create the first battery pack prototype, life in the factory was damn mundane. I once operated on my foot to pass the time (since we didn't need sleep) and had nearly crippled myself in the process. Luckily I was able to inspect my left foot and use what I saw to repair my right. When self-surgery got monotonous (which, in and of itself, is a scary idea), I turned to creating a better system for the factory so we wouldn't have to bust our asses day in and day out to keep it running. I succeeded in that, then realized I had only created longer periods of boredom to fill.

I've tried to tell myself it was only the boredom that made me do It. The loneliness that came with living with just four other souls. By that point, I was doing everything but carving Janet's name into my arm. My mind wouldn't leave me alone; thoughts of her, of Cassie, of that other ME living my life. I tried not to think about doing It. Tried to push It out of my mind. But, somehow, It kept coming up. So, after months (three months, one week, six-- *stop it*) of avoiding It, I went to Colonel O'Neill and we...

We... well, whatever you want to call it. Slept together, did the deed, hid the pickle, formed a beast with two backs, did a little horizontal mambo, took a refresher course in anatomy, and hundreds of other euphanisms. We took off our clothes, laid on a stretch of catwalk and rubbed against each other for a while. We only did It once, and it was bad. Truly awful. He called me Sara and I tried to imagine he was Janet (a futile exercise; Janet's fingers weren't *that* big). When we finished, he simply got dressed and asked if I had taken care of a blown transformer on Level Three. 'Yes, Sir,' I had said. And our relationship went back to normal. Last I heard, he was 'with' Daniel.

And now, I was laying on the floor of a Goa'uld control room while the real SG-1 finished the mission. I was dying. My mind was starting to go. Some subprocessor at the base of my skull was beeping silently. On top of everything, my battery was running low. I wanted to laugh at the irony. Which would I die of first, I wondered. Electrocution or lack of power?

Teal'c was dead. Daniel had been decapitated and then I had helped that woman blow up his body. O'Neill was also dying. So why fight my own death? If SG-1 was going down, they might as well go down as a whole. Some kind of... poetic justice in that, I think. The Four Musketeers, together even in death. No one left to mourn, no one to feel guilty for surviving... all of us dying for the same cause while our counterparts went on living. Justice.

Why hadn't Harlan made a synthetic of Janet? She had no reason to be on that mission, but... still... I... wanted her. It was a selfish idea. I've been having a lot of them lately. I'm dying, I'm... entitled to it. I forced my eyes open and stared up. Everything was quiet (or had my aural passageways degraded so far that I was deaf?) Either way, it was peaceful. I had a few seconds (3.44920194 seconds, but time is relative) to ponder things...

It had been three years since I had seen Janet Fraiser. But she had inhabited my dreams every night. I was one of the few unlucky souls who meets their soul mate and then loses them. I knew the torture of knowing the perfect person was out there. I even knew where my perfect person was. But someone else had her. Someone else who looked, talked, acted, WAS just like me. I wanted to talk to the real Sam. I wanted to tell her to... make sure she... didn't... screw up her relationship... with Janet. There couldn't be anyone else. She could *not* screw this up the way she (okay, we) had screwed up so many past relationships.

For a moment, I felt like I could find the strength to get up and find the real Sam, to tell her all of this. But it passed quickly. My head lolled to one side and I closed my eyes again. In the darkness, I felt the power source ticking down. My energy was fading. The electrocution I had suffered would kill me first. I was almost cert--

---

My eyes opened and I tried to groan. No sound came out, though.

Alive? Or dead? Where? Was I?

find couldn't I a -- I couldn't find a landmark to show I where me was. Thoughts jumbled. Dead? Robot heaven? Or hell? Heaven robots do... Do robots go to heaven? What what what what was wrong with I? Me -- I couldn't -- can't -- cannot think. Help. Help. Harlan? Harlan? Home? Sam I am. I am Sam. Sam Sam Sam Sam. Sam. Samanthaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Scream. Scream to want I -- I want to scream. Can't. Face! Face over my face! I see face! JANET FACE! I blink at her, one slow down move of my eyelids, one slow up move of the right. Left eye still shut. Damn eye. Open eye! Janet see wanna -- I want to see Janet!

 

Janet! Janet! Sweet, sweet, Janet, love Janet! Janet smiles! Beautiful Janet smile. "Hey there," Pretty Beautiful Janet said in her Beautiful Sweet Soft Janet voice.

'Hello, Janet!' I want to scream. 'Hello, my love! I will never leave you again! I've missed you so much!' What comes out of my mouth is, "J'n... t..."

"Shh," she says, brushing her face with my hand... I mean, my face with her hand. Confused. Haveta... straighten... mind... thoughts. What wrong with me? "Sam is trying to revive you with a naquadah reactor." Voice so soft. Face so pretty. Like angel. Maybe me -- I am in heaven. Janet angels in a Janet heaven. Peace forever. "How are you feeling?"

Sad. Sad lonely depressed tired afraid lonely exhausted long sleepy dead I... feel... dead... not alive no more. Janet doctor. Janet make dead Sam better? "J'et," I say.

"I'm right here," she say.

Right here? She right here all the time. All the live long day, kids used to say. hahahahahahahahaha. Mind ruined. Can I cry? I try.

Janet sees the tear and I see her see the tear. It makes her face looks sad. Janet no sad. Janet happy. Janet have Sam and Sam have Janet. But not me. Not this Sam. I open mouth and snap teeth shut. Janet jumps. I scare Janet and that make me sad. I sorry Janet. I look down and see... and see... and see wires. Into my body. My breastses are naked and Janet's hand is on my upper chest. Warm Janet hand. Soft Janet hand. I'm still crying. My chest is open. I look ugly and metal and fake. No want Janet see me like this.

Thinking like big green man. The... big green man on... the Bill Bixby on that old show. What show? Credible Hulk. Like Hulk thinking. Sam. I am Sam. I am Sam. Sam I am. But Sam is not me. Sam lived here. Sam loved Janet. Sam lived. I just made in lab. I open my mouth 'gain and say, "Noooo."

Janet frown at me. "No what?" she asks. "What is it?"

Power into me more now. Thinking a little more clearly. I close my eyes and try again. "No... more... life."

She look sad. Sam is behind her now. Real Sam. Not 'Other Sam', not 'First Sam'. *REAL* Sam. The one and only. I just pale imitation. I realize now they won't want to break me. They feel too bad to cut off my life power. I lay my head on pillow and say, "Sam..." She looks down at me. "Love..." I pointed at Janet and Sam smiles.

Sam take Janet's hand and squeezes it. I cry when I see Janet kiss Sam's hand. Kiss Sam's finger. Janet's lips on Sam's skin. Janet leans down and puts hand on each of my shoulders, her face over mine. Just like dreams. "Janet loves Sam," she tells me. Then, she kiss my lips. If heart I had, it would have exploded. So long. so long I waited, wanted, dreamed of one more kiss. Before she can pull back, I disconnect myself from Real Sam's naquadah reactor. I die with Janet Fraiser's lips on mine, the press of her flesh still fresh on my mind.

And that is a helluva peaceful way to go...

End


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