danieljackson | New verse with malcolmeffect

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New verse with malcolmeffect

Daniel tossed his pencil at the mess on his desk with a frustrated sound. He leaned back in the chair with a sigh, running his hands through his hair. "I give up. I'm just not seeing it."

The it being a translation he'd been working on for about 36 hours straight. Which equaled out to about 15 cups of coffee and 5 pencils worth. Now the text was starting to look like a bunch of squiggles, no matter how often he adjusted his glasses.

The text had been found on a mostly deserted planet, PT-586. The building structures there seemed to say there had once been an advanced culture...but it seemed to have disappeared into thin air. All that was left was their writings. There was a pattern, but it just didn't follow any languages Jackson was familiar with. The letters were a collection of dashes, dots, and circles. More of a methodical code than anything...

Code...methodical...

"That has to be it," Daniel said aloud. "It's a math based language...which means I'm a bit out of my league." He picked up the phone, calling General Hammond. He was going to need help on this one.

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Ian had just left his office when he noticed the military officers down the hall. It wasn't uncommon to see them on campus so Ian didn't pay them too much attention as he started for his classroom.

"Dr. Malcolm?"

Ian turned to see the officers were coming toward him. He stopped wondering what was going on. He could imagine a number of things; Hammond, Ja'nee, the Costa Rican incident that was still be hushed.

He shifted his bag and smiled when they got up to him.

"Ian Malcolmm. What can I do for you?" Ian realized how stupid that sounded as soon as it came out but his mind was racing.

"We need you to come with us."

Ian looked over the uniforms in silence. He had learned not to challenge the government asking you to do something.

"Uh.. I'm teaching..in.. well, right now."

"You'll have to cancel."

Ian felt panicked but asked them to wait. Back in his office he left his notes with Brenda, his graduate student to teach. He didn't tell her much, just that he had something that had to be taken care of. With his cane in hand he came back out to see the men still waiting. He had dreamt they would be gone. Nodding he followed them down the hall toward the back of the building. He still had no idea what was going on.

The phone rang, jerking Daniel out of his sleep...which he found he had fallen asleep on his desk again. Rubbing his eyes, he grabbed the ringing phone. "Dr. Jackson...oh good, he's here? I'll be right down."

He took his glasses down from the top of his head back to his eyes and grabbed a couple of books and papers that he think he would need for the briefing.

A few minutes later, he was stepping out of the elevator, shuffling the things in his hands, trying not to drop anything as he was making his way to the conference room.

Malcolm was thoroughly frazzled by the time he got to where ever this place was. They'd shuffled transportation enough that he knew this was something secret. This had been the same manner that he'd been smuggled out of Costa Rica though he didn't remember much of it.

After arriving he was ushered into a conference room. A woman brought him a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He ate and she came back, gave him more coffee and disappeared. A short time later he heard someone outside the door. He wondered why he was here. He was worried about Ja'nee and would have called her but they had taken his cellphone hours ago. That left him to sit and wonder why he was here, underground.

Thankfully, there was a lieutenant who opened the door for Daniel as he had his hands full with his research materials. "Dr. Malcolm...I presume. Pleasure to meet you," he gave him a smile with an offered handshake, which promptly dumped some of his papers onto the table. He made an annoyed sound, trying to gather it all up and back in order.

Ian stayed in his seat when the door opened. He wasn't sure what to expect. The man who looked as disorganized as a kid during their first days of college wasn't what he had imagined coming through the door.

Yes. I'm Dr. Malcolm. Ian watched all the stuff fluttering around but didn't help. He was more than a little annoyed about being pulled all the way out to wherever this was.

"Sorry to interrupt your teaching schedule like that. I...that is, we, need your help on something..." He spread out the papers on the table, putting them in a certain order. They were representations of the walls of the room they had found with it's blocks of text. "Oh, sorry, I'm Dr. Daniel Jackson. I specialize in linguistics and translation. I understand you're an expert on advanced mathematical theories?"
He pointed at a couple of the pages. "We found these inscriptions...well, ok, I can't really say where exactly they were found, but they were all in the same room and they seem to follow some sort of pattern. It's a brand new language, I wouldn't even begin to imagine how to pronounce it. The fact is, I can't seem to translate it but there are signs that it might be based in mathematics. So I was hoping you might have some ideas that I wouldn't..."

We? Who exactly is we? Malcolm was relieved to hear this wasn't about anything he thought it might be.

Chaotician. Ian corrected. Ian looked over the pages at a glance first then more closely. Ian took his time comparing the lines of "text" for a moment before speaking.

The repetition pattern is interesting. Is this all of the text?

Ian had relaxed now that he knew why he was here and honestly it looked interesting.

Daniel adjusted his glasses. "Well, General Hammond is working right now to get you clearance but till then...I'm afraid that's classified."

"Well, there were a couple more rooms and that was just one building, we really didn't get a chance to cover much ground. I'd assume there's more but this was all we could take back for this...uh...trip." He dug through his stuff and found the photographs of the room in question. The text was written in black along the sides of the pale blue walls. The room was empty except for a cube on the floor in the very middle. The room seemed square too from what the pictures could show.

"There seem to be 63 individual symbols in groups of 9. Now I don't know if the group would be a word or if each individual symbol is a sound or an idea..." Daniel sat down across from him. "I've compared it to everything I can, for all I know it's not even a language. It might be some sort of code...or decoration."

Ian sighed at the mention of anything being classified but focused on the work. Ian took off his sunglasses, finally, to look at the photographs.

What's the cube?

Ian took up two of the pages, comparing them and then setting them back down.

Seven groups. He was talking to himself more than Daniel. Finally he looked at the other man pointing out a group of symbols.

These three seem to be repeated in similar locations. These three too.

Ian looked puzzled. If this was a decoration the pattern would be regular.

Malcolm pointed back at the photograph. The pattern isn't uniformly distributed..uh.. like someone decorating a wall.

Ian went back to looking at the symbols and talking to himself again. Why would everything be in threes except the number of groups?

Daniel was happy that someone besides himself was finally taking an interest in this. "We don't know what that's for. It seems to be solid all the way through with no markings on it whatsoever. Could be a pedestal for something...could also be a random chair, although the position of it in the room is a bit too precise for that theory."

It was comforting to hear that it wasn't decoration. That would have meant all of his work would have been a colossal waste of time, although Jack would certainly have never let him hear the end of it. "Ok...so we've got seven groups of symbols on each wall...63 symbols total in groups of 9...and these three symbols tend to be next to each other often." Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Sorry, I've been staring at these for about 2 days now. More numbers just aren't helping."

The room is square?

Ian was curious. Even if archeology wasn't his field he did like challenges. Ian laughed at the comment. Uh.. you're asking a chaotician to decipher a language.

Ian smiled still but took another serious look at the pages. I don't study history but math usually follows a pattern. If something is in groups of threes or nines; which are really the same pattern, then it follows through the whole series.

With this.. Uh... Ian pointed at the photo while collecting his thoughts. It should be 6 or nine groups if it follows a regular pattern. This has seven.

Ian went back to the pages trying to figure out why there'd be a deviation from a usual pattern in an ancient system.

Daniel nodded, putting his glasses back on and picking out one of the pictures for reference. "Yes, exactly square. In fact all of the rooms are. 14 x 14 x 14 meters, down to the milimeter as far as our measuring equipment can tell."

"And seven is an odd number, it's like six with an odd man out...although there are seven symbols in a stargate...address..." Daniel realized the minute he said it, he really couldn't take it back.

Ian barely heard what Daniel was saying. He was mentally number crunching for patterns. The word address caught his attention because it seemed so out of place in the discussion.

The address? Ian didn't get it but he did see something in the patterns that demanded more attention. Malcolm looked over Daniel's shoulder at the photograph and then the papers in front of him.

I don't think this is a language.

Daniel perked up at that. "It's not? What do you think it is?"

Are these in the same arrangement they are at on the wall? Ian was drumming his fingers on the table while looking down at the pages intensely.

"Yes...wait!" Daniel switched two of the papers. "Now they are."

Malcolm was sure of what he was thinking now. He flipped over the last one and got the nearest writing instrument. At the top he put the repeating three symbols = to 'A'. After he listed all the other symbols and assigned them letters. After he numbered the panels.

The repetition isn't linear. But if you correlate non-adjacent sets... Malcolm started listing out the first and fourth set of symbols as 'A'= a string of variables that he'd already assigned to the symbols.

The variables repeat in the equation allowing you to drop some of them. He wrote out more to the equation that eventually came down to two assigned letters from each of the blocks of symbols were equal to 'A'.

That's the equation for the vector describing a shifting object in three dimensional space.

Malcolm stopped writing and questioned how crazy what he just did seemed. We do a demonstration similar to this where the students have to determine the probable location of a rat roaming free on a grid. It's two dimensional but the process would be very similar.

Ian rubbed his eyes. Not because he was tired but because hew as waiting for his reputation to burn again for sounding crazy.

New verse with malcolmeffect

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