Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dear Mom,

You’re never going to read this. I feel silly for even writing all this down. But I’ve never been one for diaries, and there’s been way too many crazy things that have happened to me in the last few days for me to just keep crammed in my head, and everyone else already knows what's been happening so I can’t rant to them, so you and this old lab report I pulled from the recycling bin will have to do. 

Besides, everyone else has been writing these letters home. Posterity, I guess. Even if Earth ever re-establishes contact, now or in the 1000 years it would take to fly back, these will probably never be declassified, though. 

So here goes, then. 

You remember the fellowship I got researching Proto Indo European language in Kazakhstan? You know, the one I left for last Thursday? Well, the fellowship is actually a little further away than Kazakhstan, and the language I’m researching is a little older than Proto Indo European. And, I guess it’s technically not a research fellowship, though I’m not sure what would be more appropriate. 

Sorry for lying. And sorry that this is how you had to find out. I guess I felt that me moving to Kazakhstan would be easier for you to swallow than me moving to the Pegasus Galaxy.

Three years ago, when I was still finishing my dissertation, I received an e-mail from the “Langford Archeological Foundation.” I’d spoken at a conference the week before about the development progression of different ancient languages. Dr. Langford had been interested in the research I’d begun into simultaneous developmental inconsistencies across multiple cultures, and had asked about my sources for this. Apparently, she had a “distinguished colleague and friend” whose research overlapped with mine in this area, and wanted to forward my paper to him.

Two days after I sent her my unfinished research, there were Air Force officers at my door. 

It was all pretty baffling, back then. The soldiers were very polite, but very serious, and very awkwardly stood with me in my living room as the man who they apparently took orders from, a bespeckled blond “Doctor Jackson,” beelined for my office. He spent an hour locked in that room, and emerged with the same fanatical glint in his eyes that I’d grown to both love and fear in my own thesis advisor’s eyes. 

Doctor Jackson apologized for the intrusion, said “You’ll be able to come and get these when you’re published,” and left, Air Force goons trailing after him carrying boxes of my research materials. 

Three months after that, I published my dissertation, defended my research, and was officially declared to be a Doctor. That night, the night you and dad took me to that steakhouse downtown where none of us got steak, I came home to find two letters on my kitchen table.

The first letter was from Dr. Jackson - Daniel, I learned. I kept that letter with me in my purse for six weeks straight, reading it any time I could take it out without fear of someone reading over my shoulder. After those first six weeks, I realized I should probably not carry it around so much, in case I lost it and it fell into the wrong hands. Since then, it’s lived in my bedside table drawer, and  now in my pillowcase. 

It went something like this:

Dear Doctor,

I’m sure it’s a thrill for you to see those words written out. I know they were for me, when I saw that for the first time. 

I wanted to apologize again for the strange intrusion into your life that myself and my colleagues made a few months ago. I know it didn’t make any sense for you then, and although the point of this letter is to explain why it was necessary for me to take your resource materials, including those precious original sources, I am sure that this will not actually make much sense for you. 

If you try and look me up, or ask any of your colleagues about me, then you’ll probably learn that I was a rising star in Egyptological Archeology in the mid-90’s - multiple published articles, invitations to join peer review boards, the works. At least, until I published research positing that Ancient Egyptian culture had been heavily impacted by extraterrestrial influences, and was laughed out of the scientific community and embarrassed so badly that I literally disappeared from society. 

In reality, I didn’t just “disappear.” I was approached by Dr. Catherine Langford, and asked to join a translation project for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for the US Air Force. I went to a secret underground base, didn’t sleep for three weeks, and translated not only the hieroglyphs but also some other weird script without a single clue of what was going on. 

What was going on was that I was right. I might have been laughed out of traditional academia for what I had theorized, about extraterrestrial influences in ancient Earth cultures, but I was more right than I had ever imagined. 

What I had translated were instructions to activate an ancient device that would prove my theories, and make it possible for us to set foot on alien worlds. 

That was several years ago, now, and since then I’ve lived a more incredible life and seen more incredible things than anyone has a right to. And now, I’m offering you an opportunity to follow that same path.

Catherine was right to send me your research. Over the past few months, I’ve been attempting to translate and pinpoint specific influences from a culture we call the “Ancients.” These people looked, talked, acted, and genetically were identical to humans today, with only a few marked differences. They were a vast, extremely advanced culture, but what we know of them is marked not by the presence of their civilization, but rather the outline of its absence. You, without ever knowing that there was even something to look for, were able to find one of those outlines, and set us on a path towards knowing more about the Ancients than we ever have before. 

There is a choice that sits before you now. The first choice is to burn this letter, and the other envelope in front of you. This is the smart choice. This is the choice that is safe, that will keep you safe and will preserve your life, your sanity, your dignity, your reputation best. You will continue living your life as you have planned to live it - finding a research and teaching position at a university somewhere, researching ancient languages and teaching the next generation of historians and linguists. 

The second option is to not burn this letter, and to open the other envelope in front  of you. If you do, then you will find an airplane ticket for Tuesday afternoon. Taking this path… isn’t the smart, or easy choice. But personally, I think this is the right one. This is the path that will take you beyond the world you’ve known, and will allow you to see the universe as it truly is. This is the hard path, where you will never be able to tell anyone what you will learn and know. You will never be able to publish your research, which I can guarantee will still be changing the course of human history. 

I hope you make the right choice.

Yours,
Dr. Daniel Jackson

Based on the earlier content of my letter, Mom, I guess it’s kind of obvious what I did with that ticket. 

But just in case you want it said, I’ll say it: I got on the plane. I went to Colorado. I found a secret base underneath a mountain, and on my first day there I met a visitor with five eyeballs and a forked tongue who was there to negotiate lunar mining rights in exchange for canned olives. 

That’s why I moved to Colorado! I know you were worried I moved there because of that fight we had after you set me up on a blind date with your dermatologist’s nephew, and about why I haven’t been calling as much. But, as much as I will never forgive you for that awful date, it had nothing to do with why I moved. And I’ve been meaning to call you more, it’s just that it’s hard to do small talk when my entire life is classified. Now, I guess it will be even harder, considering that I don’t really get reception 3 million light years away. 

I didn’t exactly end up here on accident. There’s a whole team of us that signed on to this mission, about a hundred of us from all over the world - scientists, soldiers, doctors, engineers. I guess I felt that I had to be one of them - it didn’t seem exactly fair to send them all off and not go with them, considering I was the reason why they were even able to go.

The linguistic research that I’ve been doing the past three years has been all about figuring out who the hell these “Ancients” were. The things that I have been able to piece together has been.. Astounding. The things these people did! Their scientific advancements, their medicine, their philosophy, their travels throughout the universe interacting with other cultures… All I can hope for the Human Race is that we one day come close to mirroring the Ancients, not just in appearances, but in the ways we view and interact with the universe.

More recently, we discovered one of the first and only Ancient archeological finds on Earth itself - most traces of their culture have been erased, either intentionally when they left the planet, or unintentionally through the natural course of time. But this outpost in the Antarctic that we discovered was preserved in the ice and snow, and has managed to stay in remarkably intact conditions across millions of years. Even their technology and databases have remained functioning, after getting a major boost of power. 

Since the discovery, all of the linguists working for the Stargate program redirected efforts towards translating and making their databases actually functional for us. But after the initial push to make things operational, and to set up the interface, just Dr. Jackson and myself have been working on understanding the actual content within the database - the others have gone back to the more practical day-to-day translation research for the various languages and artifacts the exploration teams bring back to us through the Stargate, and the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) few have returned to their duties as cultural liaisons and interpreters on the actual expeditions. 

I was the one to find the references to the pegasos kixias , which steadily increased in frequency as we looked at more and more recent information. The translation of these words itself was easy enough - kixias was easily identified as a mutual root word for the Ancient Greek terms meaning “wheel” and “galaxy,” and we still call the Pegasus Galaxy by the same terms the Ancient Greeks did. The actual work that was needing to be done was understanding why the Ancients were referring to it with such increasing urgency. 

Eventually, the dots connected for us, and we identified the Pegasus Galaxy as the location of the long-lost city of the Ancients, the great repository of their knowledge, that Doctor Jackson had been, separately, researching for months.

Our work from that point was figuring out how the hell we could even get to the Pegasus Galaxy. Earth has been building ships, and was working on adapting alien technology in order to build Faster-Than-Light engines, but the threats that we faced were coming soon , and the military folks didn’t like knowing that there were options that would save us without having a way to reach them. 

Mom, I could tell you all about the long hours I spent researching the Ancient database, meticulously translating each page and wishing everything was just slightly less top-secret so that I could hire a grad assistant to do more grunt work, but I think that’d be a pretty boring section of an otherwise very weird and very exciting letter. 

Suffice it to say, but eventually we figured our problems out, and figured out how to get from the Milky Way all the way to Pegasus by stepping through a doorway. 

Dr. Jackson originally wanted to be the lead for archeological and linguistic research on the expedition. If he had gone, then I would probably have had to stay on Earth, and my life would be much simpler, still. But Daniel is also one of the founding members of SG-1, and with the recent promotion of our dearly-beloved General O’Niell taking him out of the field, it was more and more important for Daniel to stay and continue to lead Stargate operations on Earth. 

Daniel ended up recommending me for the position. A promotion that let me hire a post-grad to do my grunt work, and made me the official expert of the Ancient languages and databases that we’d discovered so far for the expedition. 

I guess I am a really excellent candidate for the job, too - they’d very briefly considered outsourcing and finding someone new, but nobody else had the knack for Ancient that I’d had so far, and most everyone else had things to lose.

That’s the one downside, I guess, to this promotion. We’re pretty sure that it’s going to be a one-way trip. 

Everyone has things tying them to Earth; their family, their career, their friends. I’ve never really had a career outside of the Stargate program, so there wasn’t a career or reputation that I’d be giving up, and at least I’m not married and don’t have kids. As sad as it was for me to have to re-home my houseplants, I can at least replace those, hopefully; as far as I know, the only people considered to come on this mission were those without families to leave behind. 

I know I’m leaving you behind, and I’m sorry for that. It’s not even been a week, and I’m already missing your voice. I don’t know what they’re going to tell you all, when it becomes obvious that we’re lost and not able to come home ever. Whatever they tell you, Mom, I hope they tell you how much I love you and Dad. I hope they tell you something kind; maybe that I died doing something heroic. 

The hope, now that we’re here in Atlantis, has been to continue our research into the Ancients, as well as the other worlds in this galaxy. We’ll do our research, document the hell out of everything , and hopefully be able to re-establish contact with Earth. My best bet is that we will find some way to relay information home; that would mean that we could transmit messages, so that at least you will know that we are safe and haven’t abandoned you. The hope is that we will be able to establish a means of physical transportation - another powersource for the Stargate for instantaneous travel, or FTL engines in our starships for the long way around.

But I’ll be honest, Mom. I wouldn’t tell you this if I thought you’d ever actually be able to read this, but I’m not certain if we’ll make it that long. 

Our very first hours in the city of Atlantis nearly killed us all. This beautiful, magnificent city, which we traveled three million lightyears to find, nearly destroyed in one day, all because we turned the lights on.

And then, the moment we step off-world onto another planet in this galaxy, we apparently meet the energy vampires that have been farming human worlds for the past 10 thousand years, get a whole crew kidnapped and some killed by these vampires, and end up waking them all up from their semi-permanent hibernation. 

So yeah. The past week has been kinda insane.

I’m hopeful that things will improve. We’ve made some friends with the locals already, and they’re helping us establish trading partnerships for resources. The botanists we brought along have been macgyver-ing us a hydroponics lab with seeds we’ve brought from Earth and some promising plants we’ve found here, too. I don’t think we’ll have to live off of military field rations for too much longer. 

Plus, I’ve got a really nice room here. Ocean views! Although, it’s kinda hard to find a room that doesn’t have an ocean view. As far as we can tell, the whole planet is basically water, with one Asia-sized continent that’s an hour or two’s flight from here. 

The city itself is huge . Rafaela (who is from Portugal and lives across the hall from me - she’s also working on figuring out how we can use and access the computer systems in the city) says that it’s about the same size as the island of Manhattan, which makes it more insane to me that when we first arrived it was completely submerged. 

Every single time we walk into a new room, we find something new and incredibly amazing. When this information makes it back to Earth, I hope that these advancements will be actually used, and not just given to Area 51 to lock away. There’s a library that Dr. Corrigan found that we’re going to start working through cataloging, though with all the other discoveries we’ve had, I think that’s going to be on a slow simmer for the foreseeable future. 

The main thing that Dr. Weir has asked the Science teams, especially Anthropology, to look for anything that could help us re-establish power to the city and its defenses. The easiest way for us to figure this out would be to gain access to the Atlantis Government’s primary data core, and be able to do semantic searches for the ZPM’s that we know they used. But, unfortunately, that would require 1) the ability to access the entire Atlantis Government database, 2) for the database to be structured for easy semantic searches like Earth scientists are used to, 3) for the data to not have been corrupted or degraded over the past ten thousand years, and 4) for any mentioned ZPMs we find to still be there, and to still have power.

What Dr. McCay, who I am unfortunately having the opportunity to work more closely with since he’s officially full-time with the Stargate program now, has decided that what is more important than finding a ZPM is figuring out how to build one. He’s apparently tasked me and Petra, my post-grad, with finding an instruction manual. Unfortunately for Dr. McCay, and therefore for Petra and I, the Ancients apparently had little use for “instruction manuals.”

The work is slow. The nights in this city are uncomfortably humid, despite the near-constant breeze we get coming in from the ocean. Everyone is stressed and panicking and a little bit tense, which has resulted in some unfortunate apologies being needed after somebody took a bit too long in the bathrooms. 

But, especially for the expedition members that I’ve already worked with at the SGC, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them doing as well as they are now. There’s this strange sense of… being electrified, by being in this place, being a part of history, by learning about our own origins as humans. We’ve all been helping advance the course of human history for years now, but it’s one thing to do mind-bending research during the day and then swing by the grocery store for cereal afterwards, and it’s another to be living in another galaxy , in the mythical lost city of Atlantis, walking the halls of predecessors whose legacy we are only beginning to grasp at. 

It's inspiring, to say the least. 

I’ve run out of room on these pages, Mom. So I should probably stop here. There’s so much more that I could tell you, and we’ve only barely gotten here. I’ll try to write another “letter” for you soon.

I love you. I am going to keep the faith that I’ll be able to tell you that again myself soon. Don’t miss me too much, and know that despite (or honestly, maybe because of) the danger, I’m having the best time of my life.

Love you,

Your Daughter, the Astronaut.