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A quick review of John�s bio readings�much worse than I�d thought when he�d taken off through the door the moment it opened�told me that Atlantis was, as usual, right.
�Sheppard, Atlantis is gonna do something to make the temperature more bearable for you. I�m not entirely sure how she�s going to do it, but she�s going to take power from my generator so until you get to the Control Tower I�m going to be out of touch,� I said.
�I�m not wild about the fact that you don�t know how she�s doing this,� John said.
�And as touching as that sentiment is, Atlantis kinda calls the shots when it comes to these things,� I said honestly, because, really, if she wanted to, Atlantis could do whatever she wanted, with or without my permission. �Just keep moving. You�ll be back inside before you know it and we�ll have you back in your time, air conditioning and all, in no time.�
�Be careful,� John warned.
�You too,� I replied before flickering out, going back to being nothing more than the Ancient version of ones and zeros.
ATLANTIS
It is my fault that the Guardians were torn apart. I tried so hard, I really did, but my shield wouldn�t go up in time to stop the beam and Elizabeth, the purest soul to ever be my Guardian, was fatally injured, on my watch, in my main spire, and I was helpless even to cushion her landing when she was thrown through the air with all the shattered glass and torn metal.
It was my fault that Elizabeth was hit with the Asuran beam. If I had been able to raise my shield faster, or if I�d been able to get enough power to lift off without lowering the shield in the first place then the beam never would have struck my main tower and Elizabeth never would have been hit and thrown across the main atrium of my Control Tower with metal and glass and blood flying everywhere.
Scratch that. Going back even further it was my fault that my latest�last�inhabitants, my beloved Guardians, even came in contact with the Asurans in the first place. If I had been able to warn them of the Asurans, the human-form Replecators, they may never have gone to M7R-227, and if they did John certainly wouldn�t have allowed Elizabeth to accompany them; but, considering what Earth and the SGC had gone through with the human form Replecators in the Milky Way it is highly possible that they would have avoided M7R-227 altogether. Without alerting the Asurans to the fact that I still exist, that I wasn�t destroyed during the Wraith siege like they assumed, no first strike against the Asuran fleet would be necessary because the Asurans wouldn�t have created the fleet. And because there was no fleet to strike against Oberoth never would have sent the beam at me and my people and Elizabeth never would have been hit.
I couldn�t warn my Guardians about the Asurans, though, because Archytas, the creator of the Replecators in their most basic form, the one who kept working on the nanite technology despite the Council�s directives, removed all record of his work before he left Atlantis for Earth and made sure that not even I was able to crack the coding that he used to hide al evidence of his greatest mistake. So, the whole time that John and Rodney and Teyla ad Ronan and Elizabeth were preparing to go to M7R-227 I was screaming as loud as I could, causing problems in all my programs�water that was supposed to be hot came out cold and vice versa, automatic doors were less automatic than usual, and I even managed to get some writing to appear on several computer screens� except I didn�t manage to figure out how to make the writing make any sense which just made Doctor Zelenka and several others waste two days running diagnostics on me to find out what was wrong, and my warnings all fell upon deaf ears.
Normally I love my new Guardians, my new inhabitants, more than I did my creators. My creators always treated me as a device; a weapon to be used against enemies, a ship to get them from point A to point B, a location to do their work and live their lives. A thing, nothing more. My new inhabitants, however, have always treated me with a kind of reverence that I�m not certain I entirely deserve, but that I enjoy anyway. They brought life to my corridors once again, or, perhaps for the first time because my creators never seemed to enjoy life the way the people from Earth do. What were once auxiliary data storage rooms became places where people would gather to watch what they call movies, or TV shows, or to listen to various kinds of music in so many languages I doubt I could ever learn them all. Open spaces that were once used for storage of tan or white cloth and tan or white clothing became game rooms, where balls were thrown, things called board games were set up and played by groups at a time, and laughter almost always rang