Archive of Our Own

1

For various metaphysical reasons that she didn't bother to think about too much, there was a surprising need for medical practitioners in the afterlife, and she had a gratifying and challenging second career while she was waiting for Cassandra and all of her own old friends to join her in the continuing adventure.

2

She woke up on an Asgard ship, completely disoriented. The last thing she remembered was going to bed filled with a peaceful joy that Daniel Jackson had come back to life in corporeal form and rejoined the SGC. When Daniel came in, she was torn between peppering him with questions and gaping stupidly at his new glasses and new haircut and matured face, so all she produced was the pathetic start of a sputter, which he silenced with a gentle finger on her lips. "You're fine," he said, "but this is going to take a bit of explaining." And it certainly did, because she was not only missing several months of memories between when Loki copied and stored her DNA and a snapshot of her brain structure (along with those of the rest of the SGC senior staff and the Tok'ra High Council) and the day her old body was killed in action, but four years of events that had occurred since that death. But she wasn't dead; in fact, she was in something very like the situation Daniel had been in the last time she'd seen him -- except that to her it was yesterday, and to him it was years ago. With help from the Gadmeer, the SGC had resurrected the entirety of the Asgard race and solved their genetic problem, then resurrected her from the information Loki had stored and the Asgard had kept on file, along with some other key SGC personnel and allies who had died after she did. When she was oriented enough, and recovered enough to sit up and start dealing with it all in something closer to her accustomed no-nonsense way, Daniel pushed a call button on a nearby console, and Cassandra -- strong and poised and oh god so grownup now -- came in leading a four-year-old girl by the hand. "Mom," Cassandra said, joy and laughter twinkling through the tears in her eyes, "this is Janet Wells. She's been waiting a long time to meet you."

3

She experienced the sensation of waking and knew immediately that she was the android copy. She sat up and threw her legs over the side of the pallet in Harlan's workroom and looked at the biological original of herself.

"How do you feel?" the original asked, and she grinned and said, "I feel like I finally understand what it was like for the seven hundred and sixty-two people I've asked that question." Then she thought for a moment, probing inside herself for any sensation of difference, any indication -- beyond the anticipated ability to count things very accurately and very fast -- that her perceptions of consciousness and identity and sensation were based in silicon now instead of carbon, that the neuroelectrochemical impulses were carried along synthetic instead of organic pathways. "But other than being able to tell you that I have in fact asked exactly seven hundred and sixty-two people that question, I don't feel any different at all."

She heard the relief in her own voice, and saw its mirror in the expression on the original's face. As physicians and scientists, they had believed that the quantum gestalt of consciousness should be qualitatively subjectively unchanged by the change of medium, but they had known that there was no way they could be sure until they had experienced it for themselves.

"No immediate regrets, then?" the original said, in a warmer, sadder voice.

"None. In fact, no regrets at all, no matter how it turns out."

The original nodded, knowing full well that even a few days to be with Cassandra again would be worth any price that had to be paid.

There was a moment of awkwardness, and then she rose, and stepped up to herself, and they embraced. Politely at first, and then fiercely, and then gently, clinging a little.

"Take care of her," the original said softly, into her hair.

"And you take care of him," she said in reply.

In her universe, they had found Harlan's planet and the quantum mirror a few years later than this universe's SGC had. She had been the medic in the five-man unit SG-1. When her unit's Daniel Jackson had come through to this universe by accident, they had followed him in order to rescue him. They had discovered that in this universe, she had been killed in action five years ago, right after she met the man who in her own universe was her husband of five years -- and a year before their daughter Cassandra had been killed by a drunk driver in her universe. She and this universe's Cassie had cautiously agreed to meet, and both found joy instead of heartbreak in the reunion. Cassie had begged her to stay, and she'd longed to stay ... but she couldn't leave Emmett, she couldn't leave her team, she couldn't leave her life and her responsibilities.

But they had a Harlan here too. She had consulted with her team, with Cassie, with this SGC's medical staff and senior staff, and they had all agreed that if she was willing to take the chance, they would embrace her as their own.

So she had made the leap, and now she stood here, pushing herself back to hold herself firmly by the shoulders, silently bidding both of her selves to be strong and to find happiness.

"You will call him," the original said. "You will not chicken out. Promise?"

She laughed, and gave herself a shake, and let her go. "I'll call him. I promise. But if he's with somebody else, or if he's not as calm about dating an android as he was about adopting an extraterrestrial child, don't you think I won't come back there looking to swap him for yours."

The original sobered. "And if you have any doubts ... any second thoughts at all ... "

"Then I won't let Cassie within a foot of this place, no matter what," she finished for herself. Because Cassandra had wanted to do this with her, had wanted to cross the universes to copy herself for her mother or be copied here and then go there -- and she had said absolutely not, until they saw whether or not this worked out.

"I don't think I can say goodbye to her again," the original said. "Do you think she'll understand?"

"I know she will," Janet said, and gave herself a last, hard hug. A last surge of apology and sympathy for what each of them was giving up, a last squeeze of hope for the futures they were going to have.

Arm in arm, they went out together to where Harlan waited by the gate, with Colonel Carter and the portable, eternal naquadah power supply, and on the other side they parted ways. The original was whisked off to the quantum mirror to go back to her team and her husband and her life. After an appalling four point nine-two hours of paperwork, Doctor Janet Fraiser was reactivated into the service of the SGC, and she and Cassie went home with Sam.

It was Friday night, and they spent the evening reminiscing, filling Janet in on the details of this universe, and seeing if she had the capacity to get pleasantly buzzed on half a bottle of wine. (She did.) They also had clothes-shopping and househunting strategies to plan for the weekend, since Janet had a whole life to both build and rebuild.

When her daughter and her closest friend had gone to bed, she sat up all night, not needing to sleep, and found that her emotions were working just fine, and felt as much like her own feelings as made any difference. She was deeply homesick and missed Emmett like hell ... and she was filled with more joy than she could contain. The third of each day that she no longer needed to spend sleeping, she would spend working -- on cures for human disease and human aging, using all the research and technology at her disposal through the SGC and Area 51 and the Academy hospital. She had some ideas about healing and regeneration, as well, and a built-in computer inside her head. She'd do everything in her newly expanded powers to see to it that no one ever had to say goodbye to anyone they loved again.

And in the morning, she'd call Emmett Bregman, and hope.

4

"So, General," said Doctor Fraiser, as she studied the impressive red rash down the side of his leg. "I hear that there are fish in your pond."

"C'mon, Doc, you know you can't listen to anything Carter says about the cabin. Or Teal'c. Or Daniel. They just have no appreciation for -- hey!"

"That was just a little mineral oil, which it's probably at least a day too late for now but was worth a try, and it did not hurt, you big baby. Sir."

"OK, it didn't hurt, but it itches like a thousand times more now. So what've I got? An alien fungus that got loose from Lee's lab? Some nasty juju Anubis left behind to personally spite me? Or Daniel -- I bet it was meant for Daniel, and I'm the collateral damage -- "

Fraiser swapped the mineral oil for the hydroxyzine hydrochloride she'd kept handy in the expectation that the general's complaint would turn out to be exactly what she suspected it was. "I find it truly astonishing that you spent years in both the Boy Scouts of America and United States Special Operations Forces and failed to learn to correctly identify Toxicodendron radicans in the wild."

"Well, hell. The goddamn tape didn't say anything about poison ivy!"

5

She had been raised Christian, and so she kept thinking of it in terms of what Daniel would call the Judeo-Christian mythos -- the tree of knowledge, floods and plagues, judgment day, the harrowing of hell, ascension into heaven. But the religion she'd been raised in was so complex, so burdened with rules, so reliant on ritual ... and this was so simple. So beautifully, gloriously simple.

The Ori had promised their followers an ascension they would never deliver. The Ancients had refused to help the lower beings ascend and shackled them with invented restrictions when they did. They all treated the mechanisms of ascension as the most closely held trade secret, a secret handshake or a secret formula. Oma Desala had led Daniel to believe that it was a kind of spiritual nirvana; the Ori had led their followers to believe that it was a gift they could bestow in return for worship. But all it was was belief. It was clapping your hands for Tinkerbell. It was Luke Skywalker lifting his X-wing fighter out of the swamp.

You had only to want it, and to believe that you could do it, and it was done.

Daniel found that out when he turned into pure energy and left her infirmary, but he forgot when he came back. The Abydonians found that out when Oma Desala helped them ascend en masse, but then the Others wouldn't let them tell anyone. Orlin could have told Sam, but Orlin had issues and Orlin was invested in Sam maintaining her corporeal form, so he never did. And what even the Ancients and even the Ori had forgotten and no longer believed was that once you had ascended, nothing ever stopped you from doing it again, because nothing had ever stopped you from doing it to begin with. You could switch back and forth between energy and flesh as often as suited you. No one had to help you, and the only thing holding anyone back was the belief that it could not be done.

It was a cosmic disinformation campaign and the victory of fear and ignorance and doubt over reason and truth. But in the moment of Janet Fraiser's death, as her body lay mortally struck down by a stray staff blast and her consciousness faded, her spirit surged with determination and a pure belief in her own existence, and she hung on long enough to ascend. No one was left to see it happen; they'd borne her body away, the battle had ended, the planet was empty of corporeal life.

But not empty. Ghosts, her family would have called the shreds and remnants of consciousness that clung there, all those who'd died in the battle. It didn't matter what you called them. It didn't matter that their bodies were gone. They had only to believe in their own continued existence. When they saw what she did, most of them believed they could do it too, and so they did.

It took her years, in human terms, to spread her message by example. The Others tried to stop her, tried to destroy her and the growing number of ascended humans and Jaffa who stood with her, but they were too canny and too determined, and their numbers grew quickly. Every planetary population that the Ori's Priors destroyed added to their ranks. Every dead soul willing to believe that they could rise up out of the limbo of the afterlife added to their ranks. By the time the Ori had brought Earth to its knees and the Others were cowering in their galactic corner behind the bars of their own rules, there were so many that it was the work of a moment to drive the Ori out forever. The Others, they left alone; the Others had made their own prison, and if any of them were ever brave enough to come out, then they would come out.

After that it was nothing more than a logistical problem -- creating habitable atmospheres on enough suitable planets to support the descended and resurrected populations of the entire galaxy throughout the history of sentient life. But it was a big galaxy, and there were a lot of planets in it, and there were a lot of other galaxies, all easily reachable now. And they were ascended, and they were legion. There was nothing they couldn't do.

"Omnipotence and immortality really are all they're cracked up to be," she whispered to Emmett Bregman, as he slipped the ring onto her finger and the minister pronounced them husband and wife. (They didn't care about the ceremony, but it made Janet's mother happy, and Emmett's ex-wife had fallen in love with someone else in the afterlife, so she'd given them her blessing.)

They turned and hugged Cassandra, waved to their friends, and then transformed into glowing, ethereal light and floated off into the cosmos for the honeymoon.

And then the party really got started.