for sam carter

[more_flexible]

It was Sunday and Jack had a date. Okay, so it wasn't a date so much as it was an appointment, but that made it sound so...so business like. And with the way he was anticipating Sam's reaction, he couldn't treat this like business.

Jack went to her hut in New atlantis with a single flower in hand. That was just a formality- a nice touch. What he had planned would make that flower pale in comparison. He asked her a few questions about what she knew about black holes, dimensional barriers, and temporal theory. It was a nice conversation for the walk from her place to the spot where the blue box stood. Jack smiled at her and stepped up to the door with the key.

"It's not too late to run away. Are you sure you want to come in?" he asked.

Comments

[gate_expert]

Sam eyed him. She still wasn't quite sure what he was up to, but if he wanted her to peek in a phone box, she would humor him. "No way," she said. "I wouldn't miss it for anything." She took a minute to take a quick look around the box. It looked perfectly normal, to her eyes, though she would have killed for a scanner right then. Jack seemed to know what he was talking about regarding science in general, but she was pretty sure he was full of it regarding the TARDIS.

Doctor Who was even less real than Wormhole X-treme, she was certain.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

Jack gave a nod and unlocked the door. Then he pushed the door open and stepped to the side. Even through the narrow door, the console was clear, in far too deep for reason and logic. It took a special sort of physics to explain it.

"Ladies first," he said, gesturing for her to go in.

[gate_expert]

"Holy Hannah!"

That was all Sam could say; she hadn't even got in the door all the way before standing perfectly still, just staring. Everything she knew about physics, everything she knew about the world went right out the window for a moment.

For once, Sam was completely speechless.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, that about sums it up, huh?" Jack asked, amusement lacing every word. He gave her a minute to just take it in, then he laid his hand on her back and pushed just enough that he could get inside and stand next to her.

"Take your time. Sam, this is the TARDIS." He looked around, then raised his voice a little. "This is Samantha Carter. She's a friend."

The lights of the room pulsed in response.

[gate_expert]

It was a little like Jack pushing her through the event horizon for the first time--at least, that same sense of wonder and amazement at seeing something utterly new that she hadn't felt in a long, long time. Not even the things she'd seen in the Pegasus Galaxy had given her this kind of thrill, the kind that came fromseeing something completely unexpected and totally new.

The lights blinked at her.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "This is..." She walked in, looking around, not daring to touch anything, but examining it all very closely. It looked so real, even though everything in her years of training and education told her was not possible.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, I know," Jack grinned. He'd seen the TARDIS enough...what he was focused on was her face.

"That's the console. The column is the time rotor. But...you probably knew that if you've seen the show. I swear...she's no prop."

[gate_expert]

"I don't even know what to say," said Sam. She hadn't really watched it other than the odd episode here and there--and watched nothing in the last year, since anything related to space or science, even fiction, only served to remind her what was forbidden to her and pissed her off--but she knew enough to know that there was a TV show called Doctor Who and the Doctor went around in a phone box having adventures.

But this? Either this was an extremely sophisticated prop, or Jack was seriously telling the truth.

The skeptic in her piped up for a minute, and she reached out to touch the back wall, expecting it to waver or disappear, like the illusion created and maintained by the dome on P3X-289 for the inhabitants there. But no, it was solid. No illusion, no hologram she had ever seen before looked or felt anything like this.

"This is amazing," she said in a slightly awed voice. Sam had seen more alien tech in her career--Ancient, Goa'uld, Jaffa, Replicator, Ori, Wraith, and countless others--than she could even keep track of anymore, but it had been a very long time since she had seen something so far beyond her understanding that she didn't have a clue how to explain it.

"How is this even possible?"

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

Jack knew for a fact that Sam knew her stuff, so he leaned back against the console as he explained.

"It's powered by the nucleus of a black hole and it uses mercury and Artron particles for fuel. She's a living being, grown over...who knows how long. If she were working properly...and if the Doctor was still a Time Lord instead of human...they'd be telepathically linked. The TARDIS imprints you when you travel in her so you can withstand the pressures of temporal changes.

As for the size, that's simple. We're in a pocket dimension. Well, dimensionally transcendental space. She's small on the outside because that's really just a portal from the dimension out there to the dimension in here. She looks like a police box because the Doctor stopped once in London and the chameleon circuit made her look like that to blend into the surrounding landscape...but the circuit broke and he never bothered to fix it.

From what I understand, she's an outdated model. A TT-40...not that that really means anything here. She's like nothing else in the universe. Any universe. Gallifrey is gone and this is the last TARDIS...just like the Doctor is the last Time Lord."

[gate_expert]

"A black hole," Sam mused. "We've had a lot of experience with them, namely that powering a stargate with a black hole can keep it open for longer than its normal thirty-eight minute window, even indefinitely, but I've never heard of using a black hole to power a ship." It was an intriguing idea, though--Sam didn't quite understand the mechanics of the application, but it was one of those things she could feel lurking around the edges of her understanding, waiting for her to catch up with it. It was maddening, and thrilling.

"And this pocket dimension--you're talking about a pocket of space that exists separately from the normal dimensions of space, in the way that time in a temporal bubble moves separately from the normal flow of time! Of course! I've only applied that to time dilation, and never even thought about how that could be applied in that way, but--wow. Just, wow, this is incredible." Her brain was thinking so many things at once that her mouth just couldn't keep up, so all she ended up doing was stammering and grinning like a school girl with a crush.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, like a temporal bubble, but instead of time, it's time and space. In a bubble the space is the same dimension, just contained withing a temporal field. The TARDIS is more like...like..."

He stopped and looked around, then picked up two scraps of paper with hasty notes scribbled on them. One he folded in half, the other he folded in quarters.

"This is our dimension," he said, holding up the half sheet. "And this is the dimension within the TARDIS."

Then he slipped the quartered piece between the fold, and then pointed at the hole where the sheet would fit into a three ring binder.

"And that's the door we walked through."