stringertheory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stringertheory) wrote2022-06-25 09:07 pm
stringertheory) wrote2022-06-25 09:07 pm
Cogito Ergo Sum
Title: Cogito Ergo Sum
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter
Word Count: 1196
Categories: character study, angst, introspection
Spoilers/Warnings: Covers post “In the Line of Duty” (2.3) through “The Tok’ra: Part 1 and Part 2” (2.11/2.12). Spoilers for the same.
Summary: Sam deals with her blending with Jolinar and wonders exactly who she is in the aftermath.
“You’re going to be okay.”
Everyone kept telling her that. You’re going to be okay. Janet started the refrain, murmuring it in her best soothing bedside tone the first time Sam regained consciousness and was actually aware she was in the infirmary. Sam wouldn’t meet her eyes and turned her face to the wall. You’re going to be okay.
The cadence was picked up by every visitor: the colonel, Daniel, Teal’c, the general. Every random nurse who caught her awake when they came over to check her vitals repeated the phrase, like the words alone would fix everything. As if her being alive fixed it all.
They even got Cassie in on it. Cassie, who had just days before stared at Sam with terror in her eyes, who had hidden from Sam like she was back on Hanka, walking among the dead. The same Cassie that Sam—that her, it, we, us—had threatened with death. Cassie had put her small hand on Sam’s arm, looked Sam in the eyes, and smiled.
“You’re going to be okay.”
Sam didn’t feel okay. Sam didn’t feel anything. Sam felt too much.
There was so much more inside her than there had been before, and she wondered what it had pushed out. There was only so much space, after all, and she’d already filled it up with astrophysics and military regulations and mechanical engineering and memories, so many memories, all her own. And yet she had glimpsed more, vast databases more, and how could she have known so much and how could she have known so little?
Was she still her? Could she still be her?
She felt like she’d gone through a blender and been papier-mâchéd back together again. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to tell whether all the original pieces had been used in the new version of her. Even if they had, she wasn’t really her anymore. Her brain had changed.
Neural pathways were as close to a soul as Sam would let herself believe in. The connections that were formed, synapse to synapse: those were what made a person an individual. Every habit picked up and broken, every skill learned and forgotten, every memory and personality quirk and physical tic were right there, mapped out in electrical impulses.
Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Sam could hear Daniel’s voice in her mind, going off on a tangent about how that wasn’t what Descartes had meant, but it still fit. What a person thought was who they were, pathways alight with existence.
And therein was her fear.
She’d gotten a glimpse of Jolinar’s mind, of everything that was stored there. More than she could comprehended or handle, entire lifetimes worth of being it would have taken her a lifetime to process. While she could only remember bits here and there without context or chronology, it had all still been shared with her, for a brief time. And if she had known it, if it was still there even in a kaleidoscope form—random bits only occasionally shifting into solid images—then it had made pathways. It was hers now, it was part of her, it was her.
Her soul had shifted. What might she have become in the rending?
It was soldering wires, it was making new connections. Something had to burn in the process. And if a solder got overwhelmed, it burned out.
Sam let Janet complete her scans: one a day for a week, one a week for a month. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at the results. Janet told her they were normal, that everything was normal, that they matched her scans from before. And Sam didn’t comment on how there was now a Before in her life, a pre- and a post-era. The Sam Before, the Sam After.
“How are you doing?”
That was what they moved to next. Once she was no longer in a fugue state, everyone asked how she was doing. It was sincerely meant: everyone who asked actually waited for her response, watched her face to gauge if she was telling the truth. It was another check up, sans infirmary. And Sam told them: I’m fine. And she was. She was just fine. She was New Sam who felt like Old Sam but knew better and she was fine.
They started back on missions and she went back to doing what she had always done. She didn’t talk about what happened, not really, only as much as she had to with the base shrink to get back on active duty. She didn’t talk about it, but she never stopped thinking about it. And she turned it into a tool because she had to, because if there were potential allies out there they had to find them. They needed all the help they could get, even if her brain had been rewired in unknown ways.
So she purposefully went into the kaleidoscope, mentally strode into it like it was nothing more than a windstorm on a desert planet. She did her best to catch the memories that seemed to purposefully evade her grasp and ignored the dreams she could never fully remember but that left her trembling with emotions she had not earned.
“How are you doing?”
She was fine, she was holding it together, she couldn’t come apart again. So far she hadn’t found any burned out solders, but she wondered if there were new ones tapped in that she couldn’t see. Maybe something of Jolinar had simply integrated itself into her instead of overwriting anything. Maybe Jolinar had been assimilated into already existing pathways and had changed Sam in ways she would never be able to know were now different.
She thought herself in spirals. She finally asked Janet for the scans and they were her, just her, and they were them. She was them now, at least in ways the scanners couldn’t pick up.
In the end, there was nothing she could do about it. That made it easier, somehow, knowing that it had happened and she was still alive and she was the only thing that had changed. The shifting of an axis and the world kept spinning.
She was okay and she was doing fine and if there was more to her than just her it would all be her in the end. She focused on clearing up the memories and she figured out how to deal with the feelings and it all became just another thing she could do, catalogued beside helicopter schematics and reactor calculations and diagnostic code. She was the top of her class, she was a bright young Air Force officer, she was the only person they knew of who had once been a host and survived. Write it down on her CV.
By the time they made contact with the Tok’ra and her dad was given a choice, she knew exactly how to describe it to him. She knew what would happen and she knew what he needed but still she struggled with the words. So she took his hand and she started with Dad, you’re going to be okay.
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter
Word Count: 1196
Categories: character study, angst, introspection
Spoilers/Warnings: Covers post “In the Line of Duty” (2.3) through “The Tok’ra: Part 1 and Part 2” (2.11/2.12). Spoilers for the same.
Summary: Sam deals with her blending with Jolinar and wonders exactly who she is in the aftermath.
“You’re going to be okay.”
Everyone kept telling her that. You’re going to be okay. Janet started the refrain, murmuring it in her best soothing bedside tone the first time Sam regained consciousness and was actually aware she was in the infirmary. Sam wouldn’t meet her eyes and turned her face to the wall. You’re going to be okay.
The cadence was picked up by every visitor: the colonel, Daniel, Teal’c, the general. Every random nurse who caught her awake when they came over to check her vitals repeated the phrase, like the words alone would fix everything. As if her being alive fixed it all.
They even got Cassie in on it. Cassie, who had just days before stared at Sam with terror in her eyes, who had hidden from Sam like she was back on Hanka, walking among the dead. The same Cassie that Sam—that her, it, we, us—had threatened with death. Cassie had put her small hand on Sam’s arm, looked Sam in the eyes, and smiled.
“You’re going to be okay.”
Sam didn’t feel okay. Sam didn’t feel anything. Sam felt too much.
There was so much more inside her than there had been before, and she wondered what it had pushed out. There was only so much space, after all, and she’d already filled it up with astrophysics and military regulations and mechanical engineering and memories, so many memories, all her own. And yet she had glimpsed more, vast databases more, and how could she have known so much and how could she have known so little?
Was she still her? Could she still be her?
She felt like she’d gone through a blender and been papier-mâchéd back together again. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to tell whether all the original pieces had been used in the new version of her. Even if they had, she wasn’t really her anymore. Her brain had changed.
Neural pathways were as close to a soul as Sam would let herself believe in. The connections that were formed, synapse to synapse: those were what made a person an individual. Every habit picked up and broken, every skill learned and forgotten, every memory and personality quirk and physical tic were right there, mapped out in electrical impulses.
Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Sam could hear Daniel’s voice in her mind, going off on a tangent about how that wasn’t what Descartes had meant, but it still fit. What a person thought was who they were, pathways alight with existence.
And therein was her fear.
She’d gotten a glimpse of Jolinar’s mind, of everything that was stored there. More than she could comprehended or handle, entire lifetimes worth of being it would have taken her a lifetime to process. While she could only remember bits here and there without context or chronology, it had all still been shared with her, for a brief time. And if she had known it, if it was still there even in a kaleidoscope form—random bits only occasionally shifting into solid images—then it had made pathways. It was hers now, it was part of her, it was her.
Her soul had shifted. What might she have become in the rending?
It was soldering wires, it was making new connections. Something had to burn in the process. And if a solder got overwhelmed, it burned out.
Sam let Janet complete her scans: one a day for a week, one a week for a month. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at the results. Janet told her they were normal, that everything was normal, that they matched her scans from before. And Sam didn’t comment on how there was now a Before in her life, a pre- and a post-era. The Sam Before, the Sam After.
“How are you doing?”
That was what they moved to next. Once she was no longer in a fugue state, everyone asked how she was doing. It was sincerely meant: everyone who asked actually waited for her response, watched her face to gauge if she was telling the truth. It was another check up, sans infirmary. And Sam told them: I’m fine. And she was. She was just fine. She was New Sam who felt like Old Sam but knew better and she was fine.
They started back on missions and she went back to doing what she had always done. She didn’t talk about what happened, not really, only as much as she had to with the base shrink to get back on active duty. She didn’t talk about it, but she never stopped thinking about it. And she turned it into a tool because she had to, because if there were potential allies out there they had to find them. They needed all the help they could get, even if her brain had been rewired in unknown ways.
So she purposefully went into the kaleidoscope, mentally strode into it like it was nothing more than a windstorm on a desert planet. She did her best to catch the memories that seemed to purposefully evade her grasp and ignored the dreams she could never fully remember but that left her trembling with emotions she had not earned.
“How are you doing?”
She was fine, she was holding it together, she couldn’t come apart again. So far she hadn’t found any burned out solders, but she wondered if there were new ones tapped in that she couldn’t see. Maybe something of Jolinar had simply integrated itself into her instead of overwriting anything. Maybe Jolinar had been assimilated into already existing pathways and had changed Sam in ways she would never be able to know were now different.
She thought herself in spirals. She finally asked Janet for the scans and they were her, just her, and they were them. She was them now, at least in ways the scanners couldn’t pick up.
In the end, there was nothing she could do about it. That made it easier, somehow, knowing that it had happened and she was still alive and she was the only thing that had changed. The shifting of an axis and the world kept spinning.
She was okay and she was doing fine and if there was more to her than just her it would all be her in the end. She focused on clearing up the memories and she figured out how to deal with the feelings and it all became just another thing she could do, catalogued beside helicopter schematics and reactor calculations and diagnostic code. She was the top of her class, she was a bright young Air Force officer, she was the only person they knew of who had once been a host and survived. Write it down on her CV.
By the time they made contact with the Tok’ra and her dad was given a choice, she knew exactly how to describe it to him. She knew what would happen and she knew what he needed but still she struggled with the words. So she took his hand and she started with Dad, you’re going to be okay.