Stargate Universe: Season 3: On The Other Side

Disclaimer: I don't own SGU. If I did, I would have privately funded the show AND bought the airtime from the SyFy bastards to air it.

Summary: At the end of the untimely SGU series finale, Gauntlet, Eli was stuck with two weeks to fix the final pod or die to let the others make the jump. This is my continuation of the show. New enemies, old enemies, old faces, and more are soon to come.

A/N: Also, I apologize if anyone seems out of character. I hope to do better as time goes on.

Chapter 1: Revival

Everett Young woke up with a start as the stasis pod deactivated and the cover slid up. He stepped out and glanced over, watching as Dr. Nicholas Rush woke up, followed by the others. One glance told him all he needed to know. Eli wasn't in the pod, and he wasn't standing around waiting for them. A pang of sadness went through Young as he registered the probable loss of the most brilliant member of the expedition. Rush came to the same conclusion, and shook his head in regret before he walked over to the control panel and began analyzing it.

Chloe looked around, noticing Eli's absence as well. "Where's Eli?" she asked.

Young looked at her. "One of the pods was more damaged than the rest. Rush figured that one person could stay out for two weeks to try and repair it before having to shut off life support and die. Eli volunteered. And, apparently, he didn't make it."

Chloe nodded. "I see." she said, tears welling up in her eyes. Eli was dead. She broke down crying a few moments later, and Camile Wray walked over to comfort her.

"I suppose we should contact Earth. The rest of you, go check things out elsewhere." Young said. Rush nodded in agreement, following him. Before Rush left, he looked at Chloe.

"Chloe, I know it's difficult, but would you please go check out the bridge? We need to know where we are and the ship's status. You're the best qualified here. Besides, it should help to get your mind off things. Besides, Eli's smart. I'm sure he found some way to survive."

Chloe nodded hesitantly. "Okay." she said, choking back sobs and heading out.

The others stood around, staring at each other, unable to really comprehend that Eli was gone, before dispersing to go check out the state of affairs.

Chloe walked to the bridge, opening the door with a sigh. When she walked in, she stopped in her tracks, seeing a lone, naked figure standing in front of a console, tapping away. The person's hair was over a foot long and hung around his head in a wild mane. Surrounding the person was what seemed to be an army of kinos sporting various attachments, ranging from robotic arms to pistols to other things she couldn't identify. As she entered, the person typed something, and one of the kinos turned to face her, sporting two pistols, one attached to either side of it with tiny grasping arms on the triggers. It stared at her. Chloe tried to ignore it and focus on the figure. "Hello?" she called softly. The person ignored her.

She tried again. "Who are you?"

The person tapped on a remote. A kino hovering next to the person, this one sporting a tin-can hat, rose and turned as well. The person spoke without looking at her, its voice exasperated. "We've been over this before. You are a hallucination, created by my subconscious to preserve what remains of my sanity. And, quite frankly, you aren't helping."

Chloe recognized the voice. "Eli?" she asked tentatively. "You're alive?"

"Of course I'm Eli, and of course I'm alive, Halluci-Chloe. Otherwise, I wouldn't be hallucinating you." he said. ""Now go away. I have to finish preparing things for when the real you and the real others wake up. Speaking of which, where is Halluci-Scott? You two tend to hang out together, after all."

"Oh, God, Eli, we thought you were dead!" she said, running to him and embracing him. Eli stared at her.

"This can't be real. But it feels real." he said. He pressed a button on the remote, and the kino hovering next to him spoke in what was clearly an attempt at Eli impersonating an English accent and using ventriloquism to make it sound like the Kino was talking.

"It's elementary, my dear Eli. This Chloe claims to be real, but how could she be? Barring a malfunction, which is impossible, as we both know you're a bloody genius, those pods should still be shut for another day at least."

Eli scoffed. "No shit, Sherlock. Now, Halluci-Chloe, I have work to do. Go back to wherever you came from and leave me be."

Chloe nodded, wondering what else was wrong with Eli's mind. "Okay, Eli." she said, then turned and left. Before she did so, the gun holding kino that had been watching her moved to follow.

"Let the hallucination go, Hovernator." Eli said, stopping the kino with the push of a button and then speaking through the speakers in another voice, this one an impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"You aren't Sarah Connor, hallucination. Go. And don't come back." As soon as the doors closed, she picked up her radio and spoke. "Colonel Young, Dr. Rush, this is Chloe. I've found Eli."

Rush was the first to respond. "Is he alive?"

"Yes. I don't know how he survived, but he's on the bridge."

Young asked the next question. "Is he okay?"

"Well, he's standing around naked, talking to kinos and looking like some kind of wildman." she said.

"We're on our way." Young said. "Earth's going to have to wait for an update."

As the duo headed to the bridge, the radio beeped again. "TJ to Young."

"This is Young. Go ahead, TJ."

"We may have a problem. I've just gone over the revivals. Only our pods deactivated."

"Some kind of malfunction?" Young asked.

Rush shook his head, then reached for his own radio. "Nothing to be worried about, Lieutenant Johansen. Eli and I wrote the program to wake our section up first. We've got another twelve hours before the others wake up to give the senior staff time to get things in order and decide on our next step. Rush out."

Young looked at him. "And why didn't you mention this before we went in?"

"Well, I figured it could be mentioned now." Rush replied. The rest of the journey was in silence.

When they reached the doors leading to the bridge, they noticed that everyone who had woken up had gathered as well, having heard Chloe's explanation.

"So Eli stayed out and risked his own life? Man, that takes guts." Greer said.

"You would have made the same sacrifice, Sergeant." Young said as he walked up.

Greer nodded. "Yes, sir, and I have a lot of respect for anyone who would. I wouldn't have expected it to be Eli, though. That kid never seemed the type."

"The toughest situations always bring out the most in people." Lieutenant Scott said.

"Enough chat. We need to find out how stable Eli is mentally and physically and how he survived." Rush said, opening the door. He walked in, to see Eli standing there, facing him, totally naked. However, it was apparent that this wasn't the same Eli who he'd let stay out of stasis. Eli had trimmed down and was even somewhat muscular.

"Hello, Rush." Eli said. "At least you aren't a hallucination. Or are you? Had we had time to study them, would you have found a way to hijack a drone command ship, or all of them, and use them as an escort fleet for Destiny? Or to destroy everything that happened to get between this ship and completing its mission?"

Rush smiled. "Do you really need to ask that, Eli?"

Eli nodded. "Yep, you're real. I suppose I should get my clothes on, then." he said, then looked at the others. "Are they real?"

"Yes, Eli, they're real. And I would suggest putting some clothes on." Rush said.

"Oh, right . . . sorry. There's not much need for modesty when you're alone with only yourself for company for five years, two weeks, and six days. Should have been an even three weeks, though. We must've been going faster after the recharge than I thought, so we closed on the first gate in the chain faster. Anyways, my clothes are currently in the shuttle, hanging over the window to block out that God-awful FTL view. Funny story how I survived, you know."

"I'm very interested in hearing that." Colonel Young said, then looked at Scott and Greer. "Get the man's clothes." he said, then looked at Eli as the two friends headed off. "Start talking, Eli. And explain why you said five years."

Eli nodded. "Well, I finished the 1700 pages of reading on the stasis pods after the first day. There were solutions, but none that could be implemented with the supplies available or in the time I had left. So, I went through Destiny's cargo manifest and found plenty of survival supplies, most of which were still just fine. The Ancients stored perishables in small stasis chambers, you see, that barely took any power at all, partially due to independent power systems that only used Destiny's main power to recharge once every few thousand years. They aren't even listed in the main systems because they're an independent set-up. So I grabbed what I could, loaded it in the shuttle, found a power generator and a spare recharging plate, and, well, took the two weeks to prepare my living quarters for hopefully just the next three years. Attach the power generator and recharging plate to the shuttle's systems, and voila. I've been living predominantly in what amounts to about a hundred-and-fifty square feet after the shuttle was fully loaded with crates upon crates of supplies. Anything that could possibly be useful, I took with me. I also took a couple of hundred kinos because I expected to be documenting a lot of stuff. I had five years to go through both the Tenaran Archives and the ancient database. That's a lot of information, and I doubted I'd have enough room on my hard drive to hold all the Kino footage. So I decided to take as many as I could. But I'm going to be so happy when we have some real food. I've been eating what are, chronologically speaking, like, eight-million-year-old nutrient bars and drinking, for the most part, recycled water for five years. And we're out of chalk, Rush. I burned through the entire stockpile writing stuff on crates and walls, then memorizing it, cleaning it off, and starting over. I also invented four-person chess, four-person-four-dimensional chess, wrote three novels, more textbooks than I care to imagine, several new TV series, several continuations of cancelled TV series, countless poems and songs, and two Klingon screamo operas. I figured out how to boost the efficiency of the FTL drives, shields, and weapons, along with improving Destiny's power storage abilities. I even figured out how to safely restore Ginn and Amanda Perry to the main systems without any unnecessary risk. Oh, and, as you can see, I worked out. Within the first six months, I was running on only five hours of sleep a night, if that. Anyways, when I started making key modifications to some of the systems, namely life-support and some small semi-permeable force-field generators I wired into the main systems, I blew a power conduit. Power started bleeding out of the jump reserves. I managed to fix that by, well, let's just say ripping out a couple of recharging plates and reconfiguring them to jump energy from one to the other across the gap in the circuit in the form of dangerous, unconstrained lighting bolts jumping from metal spires welded onto each plate in corresponding positions is pretty scary, especially when the wires are live. I am now the master of remote-operating the maintenance bots. Unfortunately, by the time I fixed it, a good amount of power had bled out. That's why it took two extra years. There's more to it, but I'll get to that later. Oh, and Earth doesn't know we're still alive. I didn't use the stones to let them know after the three-year mark had passed because, quite frankly, people on Earth are idiots." he said, his mental state obvious from the stream-of-consciousness narration he gave.

Rush nodded. "Interesting. Now, if you figured out how to safely restore Ginn and Amanda, where are they?"

Eli looked down. "They were in quarantine, right? Well, although I figured out how to restore them to the main systems, the quarantined section can't be accessed from the shuttle. My solution can only be implemented from a main console. And it'll take about twelve hours to get everything ready."

Rush clapped his hands together. "Well, we'd better get started on that, then. Eli, if you'll start setting it up?"

Eli shook his head. "Uh-uh-uh, Rush. We have other priorities, and they don't include either of our sentient-artificially-generated-hallucination-girlfriends. We've already recharged, and now we need to resupply. We should be nearing gate-range of the first gate in the chain shortly. It's a jungle-world, breathable atmosphere, plenty of vegetation, fresh water, and animal life. We'll have about a week on the clock, since I told Destiny we'd need a lot of time to fully resupply. We can improve our collection efficiency by utilizing at least one other kino sled with certain programming modifications, as well as applying those modifications to the first one. We essentially slave-circuit the kinos together. One remote controls the actions of one kino, and those actions are repeated by the others. There is also a large amount of metal and mineral deposits surrounding the gate, which we can use for raw material. I've already reprogrammed the repair robots to be used for mining to collect the materials we need. After that, we can begin implementing the modifications to Destiny's systems that I've devised."

Just then, Young's radio beeped. "Lieutenant Scott to Colonel Young."

"This is Young. Go ahead, Lieutenant."

"We're going to need some time to get to Eli's clothes. There are so many crates and boxes blocking the entrance that we can't see a way through."

Eli beckoned for the radio, and Young gave it to him. He spoke. "Lieutenant Assface, this is Eli. To get through-" he was cut off by Scott's exclamation.

"WHAT did you just call me, Eli?"

Eli paled. "Sorry about that. Forgot I was talking to the real you instead of the hallucination. Anyways, as I was saying, to get through, push the topmost crate of the leftmost visible column as far left as possible. Then push the topmost crate of the column immediately to the right of it into the spot you just vacated. Push the next two vertical boxes in that same column back two spaces, then climb onto the bottom crate. There should be enough clearance between them and the rightmost column to slip through. Navigate the narrow corridor minefield of scattered crates, broken kino remains, nutrient bar wrappers, and random gadgets, gizmos, and widgets between the walls of the crates, and you should reach the cramped living area. My clothes are pinned up over the windows where crates aren't blocking the view."

A few moments later, Scott spoke. "We're through."

Greer spoke. "Damn, Eli, how did you survive in here for five years? And how'd you take a crap?"

"I wasn't just living in there; I used the space suit when I needed to get out of that cramped space. I used the ship's bathroom. The generators I discovered supplied enough power to turn a few systems online, although I kept life support off. I handled that problem in a more inventive way. Now just get my clothes." he said, then clicked the radio off.

Rush looked at him. "Eli, I fail to see why restoring Amanda and Ginn isn't a priority for you. They're the two most brilliant people on this ship beside you or me, and we're going to need their help."

Eli snorted derisively. "Oh, give it up, Rush! We both know you just want to go back to your simulated life with Amanda Perry! You could care less about the mission when she's around! You say that you care about the mission, but you don't! Not when she's around! And not now! Because all you care about is her! You're a pathetic, miserable, self-pitying man who wants his long-lost love! When we found a way to use Langara to set up a supply line that would help us continue the mission, you ran away from your duty to the mission so you could spend some time with the one who got away! Time that was all in your head and that nearly killed you! You can claim you care about the mission, but it's only secondary compared to your love for her! And the only thing above her is your own pathetic skin! If you'd stayed out, you would have pushed the deadline and doomed us to drifting for hundreds or thousands of years at best, dying at worst just for a few more days to find a solution to a problem that you couldn't fix in a million years! Don't forget that the woman I love is in there as well! I'd love to bring her out, but the long-term survival we'd need them for hinges on our immediate survival, which we can manage without them! And they've been out of commission for five years. Another few days won't hurt! But you aren't thinking rationally! All you can think about is that you can have your lover back! I'm smarter than you, Rush, and we both know it! I'm not the fucking protegee anymore! I should be in charge of the scientists, not you! The student has surpassed the master! Accept it! Shut up, shove your self pity back up your ass where it belongs, and do what I tell you to!" he yelled, climbing up to the raised entranced platform and getting right up in Rush's face as he did so. "I found a way to survive without fixing the pod, but you wouldn't have. You would have pushed the deadline to try and fix an irreparable pod because you can't accept failure and there was no guarantee another method would have worked! You would have condemned us to save your own miserable skin! Now, I'm the one calling the shots! Amanda Perry and Ginn will be brought back online when I say so, and not before! Am I clear, Mr. God-Complex? Am I fucking clear, Mister I-Think-I'm-Jesus-Fucking-Christ-Because-I'm-A-Megalo-Fucking-Maniac?" he yelled, then took a breath. Rush started to recover from his shock and was about to retaliate when Eli continued. "Shut up and do as I tell you, Rush. If I ever hear you trying to undermine me again, I swear, I will fucking kill you. I will take a gun, put it to your miserable little head, and empty the magazine into your miserable fucking skull." This final threat/statement was said in a calm, collected, cold voice, and the look in Eli's eyes said he was serious.

Rush recovered enough to speak and try to reason with him. "You don't know what you're saying, Eli. You aren't in your right mind. The five years of isolation have affected your mind. You don't mean that. You'll regret it when you've recovered. Now, stop this nonsense and help me bring Ginn and Amanda out of quarantine so they can help."

In a flash, Eli had grabbed Colonel Young's sidearm from its holster, taken the safety off, cocked it, and pressed the barrel against Rush's forehead. His finger tightened around the trigger. "Don't fucking tempt me, Rush!" he snarled.

Colonel Young's first instinct was to try and wrestle the gun from Eli, but he knew that antagonizing an agitated, slightly-psychotic self-made hermit with a gun would only end badly. He also knew Eli could at least kill Rush before the aging colonel could get the gun from him. So he decided to reason with Eli, holding everyone else back with a look. "Everyone, just take a step back. Let me handle this. Why don't you go look around? Look, Eli, you don't want to do this. I'll admit, he probably deserves it, but we need him. Almost as much as we need you. You aren't a killer, Eli, and if you pull that trigger, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Just put the gun down and we can talk this out."

Eli nodded. "Fine. He lives. But I call the shots on everything science-related from now on. I'm the better choice. We all know it. And we also all know that Rush will go right back into the simulation if I bring Amanda out. So here's the deal: We resupply at the planet, and then I bring Ginn and Amanda out, but keep my hand on the 'delete' button for Amanda's program. If Rush refuses to listen to me, I delete her. Is that clear, Rush? This is a hostage situation. You want Amanda to live, you follow my orders."

"You've gone mad." Rush spat.

Eli nodded. "I'm sure we all know that. You'd be, too, if you'd spent five years mostly confined with only yourself for company." he said, then lowered the gun, popped the bullet in the chamber out, put the safety on, and offered it to Colonel Young. Young took it, then looked at them.

"Would you two care to join me in reporting back to Earth? Once Eli has his clothes, of course."

Rush shook his head. "I don't have the time, and I doubt Eli does, either. We've got a lot of work to do. We have to go over systems reports, start prioritizing repairs, begin working on getting this ship functional again . . ."

Eli shook his head. "I already took care of all that, Rush. Why do you think I was on the bridge? Of course, I haven't begun any serious hardware repairs as I didn't have that kind of manpower."

Rush nodded. "Very well, then. I suppose we could spare the time to report in."

"And to have a psychological evaluation done, if that's okay with you, Eli?"

Eli nodded. "Sure."

A few minutes later, Scott and Greer returned with Eli's clothes. He got dressed quickly, but it was obvious that the clothes no longer fit him well due to having gotten in shape. However, they would do for now. The trio headed to the communications lab they'd set up when they first arrived, with Scott and Greer tagging along to operate the system and brief whoever the trio switched with.

Scott activated the system, and the trio looked at each other before placing their stones on the panel.

They looked around, disoriented at first. An airman standing by the door noticed, and walked over. Colonel Young smiled, then spoke. "I'm Colonel Young. This is Doctor Rush and Eli Wallace. Could we speak to General O'Neill and Colonel Telford?" he said, looking at the other two for confirmation on which one was which.

The airman nodded. "Of course. They've been expecting you ever since the three-year mark passed. I'll let them know you've arrived. And, I know you've been out of touch for five years, so I'll give you fair warning: it's General Telford now. If you'll please follow me to the waiting room, sir?"

The trio followed him into the waiting room and sat down. The airman went to inform the two generals of the arrival of the first visitors fromDestiny in five years.

A few minutes later, they were called in. Jack O'Neill and David Telford smiled as they entered. Young returned the smile.

Jack spoke first. "So . . . have a good nap?" he asked.

Young nodded. "Good enough. And congratulations on the promotion, General Telford."

Telford spoke. "Thank you, Everett. Now, I think we have a lot to talk about. It's been a long five years, and the news varies between good, bad, and worse."