Futura Memoratia

Chapter 1 itinere (journey)

Dr. Emily Freedman stared gravely at the blue puddle of the event horizon through the windshield of the puddle jumper.  Her stomach churned and beads of sweat were forming on her forehead and the nape of her neck.  She was trying to keep her breathing even so her companions wouldn’t notice her distress, but she knew she probably wasn’t fooling anyone.  She was terrified, yet hopeful, and could barely keep a coherent thought in her head.  She clung to the thought that something new and exciting lay on the other side of the gate—regardless of whether it was what she was hoping for or not.  Surely, it would be well worth the risk of taking the journey.

Some people found the act of walking through the Stargate to be unsettling for various reasons, mostly psychological, although most didn’t experience any feelings about the matter at all, once through the ring a few times.  Emily quickly discovered, after joining the SGC, that her own reaction was quite unique.  She seemed to sense the wormhole itself.  While most people who traveled through the gate sensed only a fraction of a second of displacement, if that, her brain detected more of a sensation of movement through space, that seemed to be over almost before it began, leaving her swaying,  on the verge of passing out, disoriented, and nauseous with the beginnings of a pounding headache. 

It was embarrassing.  Surrounded by servicemen and other experts, she hated the fact that she looked like a complete idiot every time she went through.  She tried valiantly to hold it together somehow, employing various medical interventions with the help of the SGC doctors, but nothing prevented it from happening.  She was the butt of running jokes.  No one wanted her on their team.  Having spent her life among the best and the brightest, always striving to excel, this was something that was beyond her control and it was holding her back from doing the very job she felt she’d been molded for.

After one of her more pitiful off-world excursions about four years prior, she’d been called to a meeting with General Hammond and Dr. Daniel Jackson.  It was a very uncomfortable moment for all of them, she imagined, and probably a first in SGC history.  Another ignominious notch in her belt.  Dr. Jackson had recruited her himself.  Archeologists with an open mind and a facility for learning languages were highly prized at the SGC for obvious reasons.  

Emily had happened across one of Dr. Jackson’s papers while in graduate school. His theories about the great pyramids and their possible use as pre-historic, extra-terrestrial landing pads had gotten him laughed out of the halls of the most prestigious universities years before.  Yet Emily was fascinated by Jackson’s new approach to these mysteries and didn’t see how anyone with an open mind could completely rule them out.  Maybe she had indulged in too much science fiction, but considering how far human civilization had come in the short time since the industrial revolution, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to her.  

From Sabots to PDA’s in little over a century?  From her perspective, this immensity of cultural development over such a comparatively short span of time, made spaceships seem not so much out of the realm of possibility to her, given the number of known star systems that could potentially support life in the universe.  Surely there were other civilizations who were ahead of them on a developmental scale.  She couldn’t see why no one else seemed to come to the same conclusions.

She learned from Jackson’s example, however, and kept those thoughts to herself throughout the grueling years of her education.  Once, she googled him to see if he had done any work since that paper had been written.  She couldn’t find anything except a couple of cynical and erroneous references to his work.  She had, however, found an old mailing address buried deep in the search engine’s results.  On a lark she wrote him a letter, telling him of her interest in his theories, her own academic progress, and her dreams of the future.