Fic, 5 Ancient Gadgets... by fiercelydreamed and shaenie (A,V, or M Challenge)
Title: Five Ancient Gadgets on Atlantis Rodney Would Absolutely Piss Himself with Glee if he Found
Series: 25 Things
Author(s): fiercelydreamed and shaenie
Rating: R for language
Pairing: er, gen-ish?
Spoilers: Through S-4, for the series; none in this installment (I think!)
Length:1000+
Challenge: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral (We're going to go with mineral on this one)
Summary: Because some mental tangents absolutely not related to how good the ass of a certain senior staff member looked in their BDUs today don't actually need to be recorded for posterity.
Notes: fiercelydreamed made me. Don't let her tell you different. The second 5 in the series are here: Medical TMI for the WIN!



I. Five Ancient Gadgets on Atlantis Rodney Would Absolutely Piss Himself with Glee if he Found.

1. The Neural Transcriber. Because nothing sucks worse than having an earth-shatteringly brilliant breakthrough on one of the key mathematical mysteries of the last two millennia and then losing it because you can't write it down fast enough.

Midway through the initial test, Rodney will turn beet red, grab it off the table, and bundle it off to one of his secure sub-labs for "recalibration" -- in this case, jury-rigging a way for the user to make session edits. Because some mental tangents absolutely not related to how good the ass of a certain senior staff member looked in their BDUs today don't actually need to be recorded for posterity.

2. The Schematic Scanner. You put something under it, and you get a 3D holographic breakdown, including the base composition of each component. It works on nearly anything, including Earth tech, though when Rodney tries to put a ZPM in it, the readout will inform him that it will take 2.5 years to deliver a schematic breakdown. Both Carter and Zelenka will argue with him for two days before he admits that they need the scanner itself more than they need a ZPM two and a half years from now, but it won't stop him from scouring all the abandoned labs in the city until he finds another scanner, into which he will immediately shove one of their (many, many, many, damnit) depleted ZPMs before he shoves the whole thing into a cupboard and locks it, labeling the outside with the date on which to open it.

When the time finally rolls around, he'll be irritated to find that the breakdown shows several components and elements that don't exist according to modern science, but it won't hit him too hard since he figured out how to make an APM (Axis Point Module) the summer before, which is like a ZPM only multi-platform.

3. The accelerated REM simulator. Half an hour in it confers all the benefits of a full nine hours of sleep -- and you can keep thinking while it cycles. It sounds too good to be true, but it's one of the only Ancient devices that actually has no hidden catch-22s or incredibly problematic side effects whatsoever. It doesn't give you tumors, you don't slowly become psychotic without realizing it, and it has no negative effects on your biochemistry or genetic structure. The Ancients developed it to maximize the amount of time they could spend focusing their energies toward Ascension.

If and when the expedition finds it, Rodney will spend three weeks waxing rhapsodic about its productivity-enhancing benefits before realizing, to his horror, that even after his biological imperative to sleep has been removed, he still misses sleeping.

4. The Multiphasic Extruder. Okay, so it sounds horrible, like it might be some sort of medical mad-science gone awry, but what it does...

Rodney has a list of three hundred and forty-one unidentified metallic or crystalline alloys used in the construction of Atlantis and in the makeup of much of the Ancient tech in their possession, painstakingly compiled by taking tiny samples and forcing the chemists to work long, painful hours at decoding them. He has a second list, compiled from schematics in the Ancient database, of the names and chemical compositions of materials the Ancients used to build things; the second list is more than a thousand entries long. In the four years the science team has been on Atlantis, they've managed to cross-reference only fifty-seven of these alloys. There are many many reasons for this, but the primary two are 1) because there are hundreds more schematics in the Ancient Database than there are actual pieces of Ancient tech, which means that while they have blueprints out the yang, they don't have working or even broken examples of more than a comparative handful of devices to reverse engineer, and 2) because the Ancients Periodic Table of Elements has seventy-four more elements on it than the Earth equivalent, many of which (Rodney suspects) don't exist at all in the Milky Way Galaxy. Things like kryptonite and illudium (damn Sheppard and his sticky naming tendencies, though even Rodney has to admit they're easier to remember than XX-114 and YY-209, which is what they are on his list), which turn out to be rare even in Pegasus, and practically impossible to find anywhere else, and absolutely essential in the construction of the control crystals that the Ancients used in practically everything.

All of which means, in short, that they have a thousand blueprints of a thousand theoretically fascinating and useful devices that they have no way to build.

Unless they someday stumble across the Multiphasic Extruder, which given even the tiniest sampling of almost any substance can fabricate and reproduce it in potentially unlimited quantities with sufficient raw materials such as sand, salt, carbon of any variety, and almost any form of a complex cohesive binding substance (such as water).

5. The Disintegrator Beam. Because no matter how much he makes fun of Colonel Destruction, Rodney likes to make things go boom just as much as the next scientist. Of course, Sheppard will immediately attempt to name it the The Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, and they will spend a combined total of thirteen hours, four minutes, and twelve seconds arguing about why it should/should not be named after the device Marvin the Martian had attempted to use to blow up the Earth. Rodney argues that it can't be the The Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator because it doesn't cause an explosion, merely a breakdown of fundamental structural integrity, a sort of super duper-entropy inducer, plus it's much bigger and more impressive looking than a stick of dynamite. John argues that it's more in line with the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator than anything as simple as a disintegrator beam since it shoots out of Atlantis' central spire like the wrath of hell and can take out a Wraith Hive ship if it so much as grazes it; he maintains that what it looks like has nothing to do with whether or not the name suits it.

In the end, they'll both be trumped by -- of all people -- Lorne, who will call it the Death Star to the Marines, and the name will stick even though it doesn't look anything like a planetoid either.

Rodney and John will both be secretly annoyed that they didn't think of it to begin with.