Residual Charge
Posted on Tue Sep 1st, 2026 @ 2:11pm by Pilot Officer Aisling Quinn
Mission:
Echoes of the Fallen (Joint Mission SG-1 & SG-2)
Location: Technical Lab, McMurdo Base
Timeline: Following the Abydos mission
3520 words - 7 OF Standard Post Measure
The crystal had been sitting on the bench for twenty-three minutes before Aisling touched anything.
Not the crystal itself. She had learned that particular lesson already.
It rested inside a clear isolation enclosure at the centre of the workbench, palm-sized and annoyingly pristine beneath the lab lights. Whatever metalwork surrounded the crystal had the unmistakable Goa’uld habit of being far more decorative than Aisling thought any sensible piece of engineering had a right to be. Gold-toned fittings curled around the darker centre, with no obvious screws, seams or anything else that suggested its designer had ever considered the possibility that somebody might want to take it apart.
Her coffee sat several feet away, safely outside the taped boundary she had put around the bench. It had been hot when she brought it in.
That was optimistic of her.
Aisling leaned closer to the enclosure, hands braced against the edge of the bench as she studied the latest passive readings on the monitor beside it.
Nothing.
Or, more accurately, nothing she could prove was anything.
“No radiation worth getting excited about. No heat. No obvious transmission.” She glanced through the clear panel at the crystal. “Very well behaved altogether, aren’t you?”
The crystal remained magnificently unconcerned.
“Mm. That’s what you want me to think.”
She straightened and reached for the notebook sitting beside the keyboard. The official lab system was recording everything, obviously, but she still preferred having something physical beside her when she worked. A few figures were already boxed off, others joined by arrows and question marks, with possible control? written beside one cluster of readings and then underlined once.
Aisling looked at it for a moment before adding a second question mark.
There. Scientific rigour.
She set the pen down and turned back to the containment rig.
The scorch across one of her gloves on Abydos had been minor. Barely worth the medical patch afterwards. Even so, every time her hand got close to the crystal she could remember the crack of energy through her fingers and the involuntary Ah, feck! that had followed it.
Today she was wearing insulated gloves.
She was also using remote probes.
And the bench had its own breaker.
Lessons had been learned.
“See?” she murmured while adjusting the angle of one of the sensors through the enclosure ports. “Personal growth.”
The passive probe moved slowly around the assembly without making contact. Aisling watched the display as it mapped the object again, comparing the scan against the data they had captured on Abydos. The external structure was straightforward enough to describe, if not understand. Conductive pathways. Several materials the SGC database could only identify provisionally. The crystal itself was worse. Its internal structure scattered half the readings she threw at it and returned others in ways that made very little sense.
She frowned and shifted to another window.
The room on Abydos had gone dark when Aaron pulled the assembly from the pedestal. That much was simple. Crystal out, Goa’uld systems down.
Simple was bothering her.
Aisling rested one hip against the bench and brought up the chamber telemetry again. Power levels from the MALP. Communications interference. The spike immediately before the system died. She moved through it slowly, back and forward a few seconds at a time.
“Come on.”
Another pass.
She stopped.
Then went back.
There was a fluctuation buried under the larger power signature, small enough that it could easily have been interference from everything else going on in that room. Aisling enlarged the section and stared at the waveform.
“Huh.”
She reached for the notebook again.
It was not enough to call a discovery. Not even close. But it was enough to make her pull the chair nearer and forget entirely about the coffee behind her.
For the next several minutes there was only the quiet hum of the lab, the scratching of her pen and the occasional click of keys.
Eventually Aisling sat back, looking from the old Abydos recording to the crystal sitting silently inside its enclosure.
“Right,” she murmured.
A little smile appeared.
“Let’s find out what you actually were doing down there.”
Aisling did not connect the crystal to anything for another forty minutes. Most of that time went into building the sort of test rig she hoped would prove unnecessarily cautious, because unnecessarily cautious was still considerably better than explaining to someone why half the technical lab had gone dark.
The setup occupied the neighbouring section of bench, cobbled together from equipment that had the reassuring advantage of being both replaceable and very definitely made on Earth. A low-output laboratory supply fed through current limiters and isolation components before reaching a small interface board she had built specifically for the test. Separate instruments watched voltage, current and signal behaviour without sharing a direct path back into the lab systems. It was not elegant, and there were enough clipped leads involved to make anyone with an appreciation for tidy cable management quietly unhappy, but everything important was protected.
Aisling looked over it once more, then gave a small nod to herself. “Beautiful.”
She checked the isolation again anyway.
The crystal remained sealed inside the enclosure, connected only through the insulated feed-throughs built into its side. Her notebook had gained another page of figures and rough sketches by the time she finally settled onto the stool in front of the controls, one foot hooked around its lower bar while she studied the baseline readings.
“Right. Tiny amount first. We’ll see if we can manage that without anyone getting offended.”
She brought the supply up carefully.
For several seconds, nothing changed. The crystal sat exactly as it had before, dull and apparently inert beneath the lights. Aisling waited, watching the monitors rather than the object itself, then nudged the input a fraction higher.
That got its attention.
A clean rise appeared across the primary channel, exactly where she expected it, but a second response followed elsewhere in the assembly. Aisling leaned closer, her expression tightening into concentration as she watched it settle. The crystal was accepting the input, but something inside it was also altering the way that power moved through the surrounding structure.
“Hullo.”
She reduced the supply again. The primary reading dropped immediately, while the second pathway held steady for several seconds before correcting itself independently. Aisling stared at it, then reset the entire test and started again from zero.
The same thing happened.
She repeated it with a slightly different input, then once more after adjusting the current limit. Each time, the response changed with her, not randomly and not quite proportionally either. Whatever the assembly was doing, it was actively regulating what she fed into it rather than simply conducting power onward.
Her pencil moved quickly across the notebook while the lab system recorded the cleaner version. She drew a rough block around the secondary pathway, added an arrow beside it and wrote independent regulation? before pausing over the question mark.
“That could still make you a very clever battery,” she told the crystal. “Don’t get notions.”
The signal monitor twitched.
Aisling stopped writing.
A narrow series of pulses had appeared along one of the channels. They lasted only a few seconds before dropping away, but when she repeated the test they returned at almost exactly the same point. She reset the trace, ran it again and watched the pulses emerge for a third time.
There was structure in them.
Not language, at least nothing she could identify as language, but neither was it the sort of dirty electrical noise she would expect from an unfamiliar power circuit. The intervals were too regular, and when she altered the input slightly, the pattern altered with it.
Aisling sat forward, forearms resting against the edge of the bench as she enlarged the trace. “Well, that’s different.”
She ran another low-level test, changing the input by fractions rather than simply increasing it. The power regulation responded first. A moment later the signal shortened its interval and settled into another repeating pattern.
Her attention shifted almost immediately to the Abydos telemetry still open on the neighbouring monitor.
The chamber had gone dark when Aaron removed the crystal from the pedestal. At the time, that had seemed straightforward enough. Take out the power source and everything connected to it shuts down. The explanation still worked, at least partly, but the thing sitting inside the enclosure was beginning to look considerably less passive than they had assumed.
Aisling pulled the fluctuation she had found earlier from the MALP data and placed it alongside the live trace. They were not identical, and she would have distrusted the result if they had been, given how much interference had been running through the chamber at the time. But once she adjusted for the degraded recording, the timing began to look uncomfortably familiar.
She ran the comparison twice before she allowed herself to smile.
“Well. You’re definitely not just a battery.”
The smile faded into concentration again as she added another note beneath the earlier question.
Signal function confirmed. Purpose unknown.
That distinction mattered. She could show that the assembly accepted power, regulated it across separate pathways and produced a patterned output of its own. She could not yet tell whether that output had controlled the pedestal, spoken to the sarcophagus, communicated with the older technology beneath the Goa’uld additions or simply reported the state of the system back to something else entirely.
Aisling tapped the pencil gently against the notebook and looked through the enclosure at the crystal.
“So what were you talking to?”
She left the low-level test running and watched the signal pulse steadily across the monitor, already considering what she could change next without getting greedy.
Aisling spent the next half hour trying to answer that question without asking the crystal anything too ambitious.
She varied the input in small steps, changed the modulation on the test signal, and let the assembly settle fully between each run. The pattern it returned was stubbornly consistent in one respect and annoyingly evasive in every other. It was clearly responding to what she gave it, but not in any simple one-to-one way. Some changes altered the timing of the pulse sequence, others shifted the way power moved through the surrounding structure, and a few appeared to do absolutely nothing until she repeated them in a slightly different order.
That was the part that caught her attention.
Aisling pulled the chair closer and started building a comparison table beside the Abydos recording. The more she lined the results up, the less the original chamber data looked like random interference. There were fragments of the same timing buried inside the noise, not enough to reconstruct whatever the system had been doing, but enough to show that the crystal had been active before Aaron removed it. It had not simply been sitting in the pedestal providing current. Something had been passing through it.
“Right,” she murmured, pencil moving quickly across the page. “So you were talking.”
The obvious question remained who or what had been listening.
She brought up the chamber layout from the mission record and glanced between it and her notes. The sarcophagus had been separate. The Goa’uld additions had been grafted onto older architecture. The pedestal sat in the middle of all of it, connected through conduits that disappeared into the surrounding structure. Any one of those could have been part of the exchange.
Aisling deliberately left the answer blank.
Guessing was easy. Getting attached to a guess was how people started seeing evidence where there was none.
She ran the sequence again, this time changing only the shape of the input rather than its strength. The crystal answered almost immediately. The returning pulse was sharper, more organised than before, and for several seconds the monitor showed a second trace riding underneath the first.
Aisling’s expression changed.
“There you are.”
She captured the run and replayed it twice. The secondary pattern was brief, but it was clean enough to prove that the assembly could return more than one response at a time. Power regulation on one path, structured signal on another. Whatever its original purpose had been, the thing was acting far more like an interface than a simple energy source.
She marked the result in her notebook, then sat back and looked at the rig.
There was one more test she wanted.
Not much more input. Just enough to see whether the response continued to scale or whether it reached a threshold and changed behaviour. The current limiter would catch anything excessive, the interface board was sacrificial, and the whole test remained isolated from the wider lab systems.
On paper, it was reasonable.
Aisling hesitated anyway.
“Don’t make me regret this.”
She increased the input by a fraction.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the crystal answered.
The return pulse spiked hard enough to flatten the trace.
A sharp crack snapped across the bench before Aisling could reach the control. The interface board flashed white, one of the capacitors burst with a violent pop, and a spray of sparks bounced harmlessly against the inside of the shielded section. The smell of burnt insulation hit almost immediately as the breaker tripped and killed the supply.
Aisling jerked back from the bench, chair legs scraping against the floor.
For several seconds she simply stared at the enclosure.
The test rig was dead.
A thin curl of smoke rose from the blackened interface board. One connector had partially melted, and the little status light on the supply had gone dark.
The crystal itself looked untouched.
Not cracked. Not scorched. Not even particularly warm according to the surviving passive sensor.
Aisling blinked once.
“Ah, go on.”
She leaned forward again, cautiously this time, and checked the containment indicators before doing anything else. Everything beyond the sacrificial section was still isolated. No secondary fault. No leakage into the lab systems. No sign that the crystal had retained an active charge.
Only then did she let herself look properly at the damage.
“Well, that’s one way of answering.”
She reached for the keyboard and pulled up the buffered telemetry from the seconds immediately before the failure. The interface had died, but not before the monitoring system captured the pulse that killed it.
Aisling stopped moving.
The spike had not come from the power supply.
It had travelled the other way.
She enlarged the trace, checked the channel mapping, then checked it again. The crystal had taken the input, altered it, and driven energy back through the connection strongly enough to overwhelm the interface before the protection circuit could react.
That changed things.
A passive component did not do that.
Neither did a simple battery.
Aisling reached slowly for her notebook and wrote beneath the last set of results.
Active feedback confirmed.
She looked at the smoking board, then added another line.
Magnitude unknown. Earth made interface insufficient.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth despite herself.
“Fair enough.”
She sat there for another moment, the lab smelling faintly of scorched plastic around her, while the crystal rested behind the clear panel looking exactly as innocent as it had an hour earlier.
Aisling was beginning to dislike that about it.
She gave the ruined interface board ten minutes before she went anywhere near it.
By then the smoke had cleared, every surviving meter agreed there was no voltage left in the test circuit, and she had checked the isolation breaker often enough that even she had to admit it was probably still off. She opened the shielded section and removed the damaged board with insulated tools, turning it over beneath the work light. The underside was worse than the top. One trace had burned clean through, two components were beyond saving, and the connector nearest the crystal had acquired the sort of blackened edge that generally meant it had enjoyed its last useful day.
“Sorry,” she murmured to the board as she dropped it into the damaged-equipment tray. “You did your best.”
The crystal received no such sympathy.
It remained inside its enclosure while Aisling stripped the rest of the temporary rig back to its passive monitoring configuration. She disconnected the power supply completely rather than trusting the breaker alone, removed the signal generator and capped each of the feed-throughs she had used. Anything capable of putting energy into the assembly went onto the other side of the bench.
There were more tests she could have run. That was the irritating part.
A different interface might survive the feedback. She could increase the isolation between the crystal and the monitoring equipment, build something with a wider tolerance or start looking at ways to absorb whatever it pushed back. Given another few hours and access to the right components, she could probably make a decent attempt at all three.
Aisling looked at the scorched board.
“Not tonight.”
There was no audience to impress and no reason to turn curiosity into stupidity just because she had found something interesting. Whatever the crystal had been doing beneath Ra's pyramid, it had been connected to technology they did not have here and designed by people who had never needed to worry about whether their equipment met an Earth electrical standard.
She pulled the recorded data together instead.
The report started slowly, mostly because every sentence seemed to invite another question. The assembly accepted external power and redistributed it through multiple independent pathways. That much she could demonstrate. It generated structured signal traffic in response to controlled input, and fragments of the same behaviour appeared in the Abydos telemetry while the pedestal system was still active. The final test had also proved, somewhat enthusiastically, that it could drive energy back through an attached circuit.
After a moment's thought, Aisling added active power and signal interface to the working description, then immediately followed it with precise function undetermined.
She read both lines twice and left them alone.
The temptation to write control device was there, but she did not have enough to support it. It might have controlled the chamber. It might have authenticated whatever was connected to it. It might simply have been one part of a larger network whose other pieces were still buried beneath Abydos.
And then there was Zeus.
Aisling paused over the keyboard.
His staff had shut down an active Stargate and dialled another address without anyone touching the DHD. She had no evidence connecting that ability to the crystal sitting on her bench, and she was not about to manufacture one because both involved Goa'uld technology doing things they did not properly understand.
She added a short note recommending comparison with any available records concerning direct Stargate control systems and left it at that.
Her notebook was less restrained.
Beside the diagram of the assembly she wrote what were you connected to?, circled it, and underneath added what happens when the right thing answers?
Aisling stared at the second question for a moment before closing the notebook.
“That'll do.”
The lab had gone properly quiet around her. Without the test rig humming away, she became aware of the ventilation overhead and the occasional distant vibration from somewhere deeper in the McMurdo complex. Her abandoned coffee was still sitting where she had left it, untouched for long enough that calling it coffee now felt generous.
She stood, stretched the stiffness out of her shoulders and gave the containment display one final check.
No power.
No measurable heat.
No active transmission.
Exactly what she wanted to see.
Aisling reached for the cold mug.
Behind her, one of the passive monitors chirped.
She stopped.
It was a tiny sound, no more than the notification tone for an instrument crossing a preset threshold. When she looked back, the display had already returned to baseline.
Aisling set the mug down again and walked slowly back to the bench.
The event log showed a single pulse.
Small. Brief. Barely above the sensitivity floor of the sensor, but clean enough that she could not dismiss it as noise without looking at it properly. She checked the disconnected supply lying several feet away, then followed the loose cable from the signal generator to where it ended on the bench.
Nothing was connected to the enclosure.
Her gaze settled on the crystal.
For the first time all evening, there was the faintest trace of light somewhere inside it. Not enough to illuminate the enclosure, barely more than a dull amber thread beneath the darker surface.
Then it vanished.
Aisling stood very still for a second, lips pressing together as she considered the entirely reasonable option of pretending she had not seen that.
“Ah, would you ever feck off.”
She reached for the containment controls and increased the isolation level, then pulled her chair back towards the bench.
Apparently the coffee was going to have to wait a little longer.
Pilot Officer Aisling Quinn
SG-2 Member, SGC
