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Five things Teal'c brought back in 'Unending'
1. The clothes on his back.
2. The items in his pockets, including several sentimental keepsakes: a 'cheat sheet' that Daniel Jackson had written for him by hand on a piece of paper to help him remember some of the more complex Ancient glyphs, when Teal'c was learning Ancient; a wristlet that Vala Mal Doran had braided for him; some hairs from one of Colonel Carter's bows, which he had been carrying in order to analyze them in hope of replicating something closer to natural animal fibers for her to use, after she had stated offhandedly one day that the synthetics never provided quite the tone she sought; a lucky coin that Colonel Mitchell had pressed upon him in a moment of bitterness, saying he hoped it would work better for Teal'c than it had for him. When the time is right, he will return the coin, and Colonel Mitchell will be stunned, and then moved, and then embarrassed, and will then joke about starting a collection, and all will be well.
3. A deeper love, respect and appreciation for Colonel Mitchell, Samantha Carter, Vala Mal Doran, Daniel Jackson, and most of all General Landry, from whom he carries no keepsakes but the knowledge that there is far more to the man than he had come to believe over their first two years working together, which will benefit them both in the years to come.
4. His memories. If no one remembered, it truly would be as though that time had never happened, and it did happen, and there was beauty and honor in it. It should be remembered. It should be preserved. The people those five people became should live on, and they will live on in his mind and his heart, if only for the remaining span of his life.
5. Himself -- his full self, incorporating within it all the days of his life, including the months in the time loop with Colonel O'Neill and the years on the ship with his five comrades. They believe it is a burden, but he sees it as a gift. He does not want to lose pieces of himself, entire swatches of his experience; he believes that he has lost some that he is not even aware of -- weeks of life and a harsh death on Earth in Ancient Egypt, for example -- and it makes him uneasy. Though it is at times a burden of the heart, and though at times he envies his comrades the return of their youth, for him it is far preferable to be whole.
The sixth thing Teal'c brought back in 'Unending'
On the chain around his neck, hanging next to the Tau'ri identification tags he has worn for nearly sixty of their years, a small data-storage device. A hybrid of Asgard and Tau'ri technology, it is the shape of a teardrop, the size of a house key, as smooth and opalescent as the interior surface of one of the freshwater mollusk shells he collected as a boy from the bleak shores of the lake a day's walk from his village on Chulak. It reminds him of how many of those shells were broken, shattered by the heavy boots of the warriors who drilled there, razor shards that could cut through even the calluses of his hard bare feet; of what joy there was to find one whole and intact to bring home to his mother, for her to set on the sill to catch the sun, a spot of color in their cheerless home.
He lifts the chain over his head and unthreads the device. Nothing in the data stored on it relates to their personal experience of those fifty years. Nothing that he can bring to mind, at any rate, and he is familiar with all of it, having had ample time to digest it while it was being produced. Nonetheless, he pauses one last time in his quarters back on Earth, his SGC quarters that smell of concrete and candle wax and still carry a whiff of the last meal he ate there and no stale scent of absence though he has been away from them for half a century, and considers the weight of the nearly weightless object in his palm.
General Landry's memoirs end with the day that General O'Neill arrived in person at his residence to tell him about the Stargate Program and convey the IOA and Joint Chiefs' offer to command the SGC, and his books on tactics and leadership will require no declassification to be approved for use in the training of military personnel on this planet, should he choose to make them available for distribution.
The many books and papers by Colonel Carter are scientific texts that she could have produced before they set foot on Odyssey that fateful day, had she had a spare few decades in which to write while on active duty. What they represent about her state of mind -- the years during which she believed that she would find a way out of their predicament and return with work to present to the scientific community, the years during which she wrote for pleasure and from habit but with dwindling hope that her works would ever be shared, and the years during which she wrote nothing at all -- is known only to him, now. If she guesses at some of it, draws conclusions from the texts she didn't write as much as from the texts she did, he does not believe it will do the timeline, or her, any harm. Perhaps she will not even read the texts; in all likelihood she will not have time, and may prefer merely to acknowledge them and store them against the day that the Stargate Program is revealed to the public. Or against a different day, decades from now, when her life has gone however it will go, and can no longer be influenced by anything to be found there. Though she did not type them, they are hers, and so is the choice.
Daniel Jackson will without doubt read his own prodigious output, most likely arguing with his own conclusions, muttering at the screen, debating whether to edit or leave well enough alone, perhaps eventually coming to respect the sentience that produced those works. Perhaps he will enter into a relationship with these remnants of a self he will never come to be, acknowledging that the Daniel Jackson who wrote these words knew things that he does not know, had time that he hasn't had to ponder and process what information they share. Included in the data is everything that Daniel Jackson translated and learned from the Asgard database on the ship, and this Daniel Jackson knows that understanding it will be the work of a lifetime -- will perhaps understand that he did that work, in another life, and will feel his own burden lightened. Most likely he will enter the works into the SGC record for others to devote their lifetimes to while he pursues the work he has not yet done.
Vala Mal Doran will enjoy an hour's amusement at the work she produced, and will perhaps be affected in some way by the evidence of what she can achieve when she puts her mind to it. Even with her preternatural ability to read between the lines, however, she will never know that what started out as a joke, The Art of the Con for Reasonably Intelligent People written because "everybody else is writing bloody books," and turned into a fascinating and significant examination of subterfuge and persuasion, also turned into a source of pain and frustration for her. She will never know how invested she became in the work by the end, and how she deleted it when she was finished, in angry anguish that no one beyond the six of them would ever see it. She will never know how Teal'c retrieved a backup copy and restored it to her, or how grateful she was when he did -- or the terror she expressed at the notion that she could wipe out weeks of her life with one tap of a key.
No, he tells himself, turning the synthetic object in his big blunt fingers, there is nothing personal contained in the data, except inasmuch as creative works are deeply personal -- profound expressions of the minds and hearts of their makers. He did not have access to the directories that contained the private journals of those who kept them in electronic format, and Daniel Jackson's were all handwritten, left behind in the quarters that ceased to be, along with all of the things they had made, collected, all of the small and sometimes silly items that had come to have emotional significance for them over the years. All the plants that General Landry had seeded and grown and tended. Vala Mal Doran's mad cacophony of knickknacks and toys and seemingly random objects. The clothes they had worn, the beds they had slept in ...
He stands abruptly, and leaves his quarters. He approaches Doctor Lee with a request for aid and discretion, and gets both. Within two days, the device has been returned to him, along with a box of neutrally labeled data disks and five encryption keys.
He delivers Cameron Mitchell's first. Mitchell has been what General O'Neill would call hinky since their return, as though some sense of his prolonged confinement clings to him -- as though some extrasensory perception makes him subliminally aware of the future he will never live through. Teal'c has seen him like this before, has seen other warriors respond similarly in delayed reaction to a near-catastrophic event. For some, it is as though the worst did happen, in the fraction of a second before they acted to stop it from happening. For some, the price of courage is terror deferred, panic and horror experienced over the many peaceful nights that follow a successful but harrowing battle; for some, the quantum universes are not so discrete as the scientists believe, and a corner-of-the-eye vision of all the disasters averted persists. Teal'c hopes that Mitchell investigates the disks that he hands over to him, the designs and code for the virtual environment that he developed, and comes to believe that the worst did not happen.
Mitchell had claimed that all he wanted was to fly again -- to feel free again -- but it seemed to Teal'c that the freedom and the sensation of flight he experienced were intellectual and emotional more than psychological or physical. The concentrated focus he put into developing the engineering and programming skills to implement his dream of a waking dream were what kept him sane through years of confinement. His studies of neurology and neural-technological interfaces, his nuts-and-bolts work on prototype after prototype, kept his own mind and hands occupied to a degree that no game or simulation could have. What he produced makes the Gamekeeper's chair seem a primitive video game by comparison.
The ramifications of the technology are grave and glorious -- the uses it could be put to, and the misuses. Teal'c's hope is that deciding what to do with his creation will distract Mitchell from the anxiety he cannot shake off, and that the evidence that those years were not wasted will work subliminally to neutralize that anxiety entirely. Not long ago, in Mitchell's subjective time, he read in Colonel Carter's report about the crippled version of himself she encountered in an alternate universe. Teal'c suspects, though he would never venture to say, that the future-Mitchell-crippled-by-confinement is one too many 'almost's for Mitchell to handle, after that. Restoring this work to him, perhaps, will convey that imprisonment failed to debilitate him -- will calm him on a level that Teal'c has never been able to reach.
"Hold up," Mitchell says when Teal'c attempts to depart his office while he's unlocking the files on the first disk. "What's with all the ... " He cocks his head at the schematics that a couple of mouse clicks bring up on his monitor. "Has Sam seen this?" When Teal'c declines to reply, he swivels slowly in his chair. "Does Sam know about this?"
"That remains for you to decide," Teal'c says. "The disks and their contents belong to you."
"And that's all you're gonna say about it," Mitchell says. "And whether I toss this stuff in a drawer or not is up to me."
"It is," Teal'c says.
Mitchell turns back to the screen, pausing, pondering. His hand hovers over the mouse but does not fall. Before he makes his choice, Teal'c slips away.
He delivers Vala Mal Doran's data, and General Landry's, and Daniel Jackson's, all without comment. None of them invite him to stay while they have a look. He continues on to Colonel Carter, with a phone call first to make certain that he is not disturbing her, because she has gone home for the night.
In her tidy, cheery house -- the home of a soul fundamentally transient, even though she has lived there for nearly a quarter of her life -- he takes his single liberty, commits the one act he will allow himself to influence any response to the material he is delivering. He hands Colonel Carter her disks and key, asks her forbearance, and inserts into an audio player the one extra, smaller-capacity disk he made from the data that Doctor Lee converted for him, intending to make it playable in just this way, and to separate it from the rest.
They sit together on her sofa as the haunting, meditative voice of the cello fills the room. After a few minutes of what another Colonel Carter once described to him as mathematics' most profoundly human expression, this Colonel Carter says, in the same voice, "I feel as though I should know this piece, but I don't recognize it. Who wrote it?"
Quietly, he says, "You did."
More slowly, perhaps already knowing the answer but obliged to ask, she says, "Who's playing it?"
In his lowest, gentlest voice, Teal'c says, "You are."
They sit and listen for the remainder of the hour, not speaking, and he sees expressions pass across Samantha Carter's face that he has not seen in many, many years. He also sees expressions that he has never seen on any Samantha Carter's face: intimations of the much older woman she will someday be, a woman he does not yet know, a woman different from the one he grew old with, a woman he hopes he will live long enough to know. As the music ends, she opens her eyes, and looks at him, and says, "That was ... beautiful. I don't know how you came to have it, and I don't think you should have played it for me, but I'm glad you did. Thank you, Teal'c."
She stands, and so he stands, a silent exchange: she will need to be alone with this for a while, and so he will take his leave. He returns the embrace she offers, pressing close the tangible return of her youth, the solitary days and hours she has not suffered. Then he steps back, inclines his head deeply in love and respect, and leaves her home to return to the SGC.
He has brought back one unbroken shell from the years crushed to dust along the shores of never-was.
Content, he moves on, into what will be.