. : | a howling in the factory yard

There's someone in the bed with him. He can hear the breathing: soft, even, melodious. The sound of someone who belongs there, confident and self-assured.

That part isn't new.

He tells himself, eyes wide and open in the dark, feeling the weight of the covers pressing down against his skin, that the other body is Mitchell. That if he wanted to, he could throw out a hand, let it rest on the curve of Mitchell's hip, feel the weight of muscle and bone and scars beside him: unasked-for blessing, unhoped-for salvation, lover and partner and frontman and 2IC and entire world.

Then he moves wrong, or he gives himself away, and the body next to him opens eyes that flash luminescent gold.

Naquadah-eyes. Snake eyes. (He who plays at dice with death must expect the dog's throw; how long has humanity feared those two golden glimpses in the night? Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones.)

"Go to sleep," the monster he's lying next to purrs softly, before going back to whatever worlds it's conquering inside its mind. A parody of tenderness: that part's the worst. Brings back memories, ones better left untouched. He'd known, coming here, that he'd have to think about them again. Jail cell, halfway across the galaxy. Knives and acid and self-assured hands, on his skin, against his body; go away, go inside, wait for it to be over. Can't do that this time. Has to make the snake think he likes it.

The room's dark. (Dark and hideous; high-powered high-rise corporate condo hotel suite, home sweet home for the foreseeable future, Ikea-meets-Norman-Rockwell and just as soulless.) Doesn't matter. Snake can see him anyway.

He closes his eyes. Obedient, placid. Good little boy, willing to give the snake what it wants in exchange for what the snake can give him. He aches everywhere, tender and bruised, but the days when he can afford to notice those little details are long gone. Alive, unsnaked: those are his key indicators of success right now, and he's running two-for-two. He can handle a little bit of discomfort; Mitchell deals with --

Don't think about Mitchell. Don't think about anything but the mission. The key to a successful undercover operation is to be who you're pretending to be, even down in the depths of your mind where nobody but you can hear. He's spent every single fucking moment of the past twenty-four hours convincing the snake that he is who the snake wants him to be. If he spends equal time convincing himself, he's got a chance of pulling it off.

The clone. The copy. Seething with resentment, simmering with hatred, a skin full of rage with no possible outlet, ready to blow any fucking minute and not really caring who'll get hit in the explosion. Made himself smarter than O'Neill. Made himself stronger than O'Neill. Wants to find his way back into O'Neill's shoes, without any of the resources he might need to make the transition, and looking to ally with someone -- anyone -- who can give him the edge he'll need to succeed. Even an old enemy. (The enemy of his enemy might not be his friend, but can at least be an ally.) Such a fine line to walk. Interesting enough, valuable enough, to be trusted. (Eventually. Once he earns it.) Spirited enough, strong enough, to be allied with, rather than subsumed. Total capitulation would be suspicious. Total resistance would get him killed. There's not much of a middle ground there.

So he concentrates on keeping his breathing even, calm. He isn't fooling anybody, but it's important he makes the effort anyway. It's what his shadow-self would do.

Eventually the snake lets itself out. He fights the impulse for as long as possible -- the room is bugged; it would be foolish for Ba'al to place him in a room that was not bugged, and therefore he must assume he is being watched -- but in the end, he can't help it. He gets up and walks, still naked, into the bathroom. Big enough to hold a party in. He doesn't care. All he cares about is the shower.

Bruises on his arms. On his thighs. Snake strength; snake power. He turns the water on as hot as he can bear, stands beneath the spray. He can still feel the snake's hands, running over his ink, fascinated by the lines. Asking about the stories limned there. Had to give some of them up; couldn't be helped. Snake could read part of them, anyway. He'd lied about most of it. Spun it into something that fit the person the snake thinks he is. Still makes him feel dirty, to have said the words. Dirtier than the snake's hands on his skin. Dirtier than the snake's stolen body pressed up against his. But not sharing would be suspicious. They'd made a bargain. He'd guessed the snake would want access to his body (again), but he hadn't quite remembered how much the snake would feel entitled to his thoughts.

He crouches beneath the spray and blanks his thoughts. Mindfulness can come later. Much later. He's already accepted he'll have to set some principles aside for the time being. Today is the first day of a game he didn't particularly want to play, for stakes higher than he ever thought he'd play for again, and he doesn't have time to be squeamish. He's got a job to do, and he needs to be the person who can do it. No matter what it takes.

Eventually the hot water runs out. He doesn't notice until the needle spray turns freezing, shocks him back into his body, his self. He shuts off the taps with a hand that's steadier than he thinks it probably should be. He still doesn't feel clean. The towels are luxurious and comfortable, fluffy and oversized and soft as a whisper. That almost makes it worse.

When he sleeps, his dreams are a patchwork. A country he hasn't visited in twenty-five years. A language he no longer admits to anyone that he knows. The bare fevered memory-fragments he retains of a snake slithering down his throat. Waking up in a cold white box. Sunrise.

He doesn't sleep long.

Downtown Seattle. He'd been hoping he'd have more of a chance to build up a mental map before he went under, scope out the lay of the land and learn as much as he could before walking into Farrow-Marshall and starting the ball rolling. (And he's still fucking pissed at himself for having gotten caught, but you don't begin an operation like this already kicking yourself for your fuckups, so he doesn't let himself dwell.) Ba'al gave him a cell phone, a Bluetooth earpiece; he's supposed to wear it at all times. He's not stupid enough to think it's the only method Ba'al has for tracking him, and he doesn't want to find out what'll happen to him if he "forgets" to shove the phone in his pocket.

He spends Sunday exploring: down to the building's weight room for his morning workout, then up and out and away we go. He's testing the snake as much as the snake's testing him; the snake wants to watch what he does and how he does it, and he wants to watch how the snake watches him. Sure enough, he's only a few blocks away from the condo building before he notices that he's being followed: big men in black cars with tinted windows. (Earpiece radio, like Secret Service. No tattoos on their foreheads, but he knows better than most people what marks a sarcophagus can erase. He wonders if they really are Jaffa, and if so, how Ba'al managed to find Jaffa who could learn enough about American culture to avoid suspicion.)

He's careful not to even look like he's trying to make contact with anyone. He knows better than to think that the men he sees watching him are the only ones observing his behavior.

Instead, he just keeps running. Morning workout. Nothing to see here. Just him and Seattle, waiting to be discovered. He can't remember who first taught him the mnemonic for the order of downtown streets, but he's known it for a while: Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest. It's catchy. Farrow-Marshall owns three full blocks between Third and Fourth under dummy corporations: Madison to Spring, Spring to Seneca, Seneca to University. The condo building is at Third & Spring; his rooms are on the sixteenth floor, while Ba'al has (of course) the penthouse. Main office building is Fourth and Seneca. It's a nice area. He wouldn't mind living here. If it had been his choice.

He's pondering keeping going all the way up to Seattle U, weighing the pros and cons of a good long run up hill and dale with his thighs burning and his mind fucking quiet, when the cell phone buzzes. Makes him jump. He'd already forgotten he was carrying the fucking thing. The phone itself is shoved in his back pocket. The wireless headset clips to the shell of his ear, no heavier than heavy-gauge piercing jewelry, and rests not in his ear canal but against the side of his skull. Bone conduction, both to transmit and to receive. The connection hums to life without him consciously deciding to answer the phone; he isn't allowed the luxury of sending calls to voice mail.

"You weren't trying to go somewhere, were you, Jack?" Ba'al purrs. Crystal clear reception. Of course. The snake's voice sounds like it's coming from right over his shoulder, from inside his own fucking skull, and the pit of his stomach turns over. Add it to the list of things he's not allowed to think about. It's nothing but technology. Nothing more.

He bends over and rests his hands on his thighs, gulps for air. Dodging pedestrians and dirty looks on a crowded city street, the stop-start-stop of waiting for red lights and cars making right turns, makes his running a hell of a lot more intermittent than it is back -- than it is when he doesn't have to worry about those little details; he's been running twice as fast as he really should, to compensate. The snake's giving him a chance to protest innocence, to explain his activity, so he doesn't bother. He doesn't want to get used to justifying himself to a fucking snake. Doesn't want the snake to get used to him justifying himself, either. "Yeah," he says. "Out for a run. You need a quart of milk while I'm out here?"

Ba'al laughs, soft and silken and malicious. Makes his fucking skin crawl. "I'll take a cappuccino, actually," it says, and hangs up.

The dialtone sings in his ear, cuts out after a second. He alters his trajectory, cuts three blocks over, wrong way down a one-way street. It's a petty victory; his minders will catch up with him anyway. It's a lovely clear winter day, the kind that's so rare as to be a precious jewel; for once, it's not raining. Clear enough that he can just see Mt. Rainier, peeking through the buildings and the few faint clouds on the horizon. A couple of pedestrians swear at him as he weaves his way through the crowd, dancing on light feet through the push and crush of foot traffic.

Little tiny independent coffee shop over on First, across from the Harbor Steps, one of the last holdouts against the Great Starbucksification of Seattle. When he gets there, he runs past it without turning his head to look, then drops down to a jog and turns around. Honey, I'm home. Oh, shit, forgot the ice cream at the office. He waits in line -- it's a popular place -- and shifts his weight from foot to foot, feigning impatience. Couple of dirty looks from the people around him; he ignores them and studies the chalkboard menu with its pastel handwritten items, its freehand margin drawings. When it's his turn, he orders a latte for himself, a cappuccino for his notional lord and master.

The barista doesn't even give him a second glance; he's no different than the other thousand people who have been through these doors so far today. No smiles. No chitchat. He fishes a few bills out of his jeans pocket and hands them over to pay for his order, barely glancing down at their faces, then pulls another dollar bill, crumpled and damp with his sweat, from the depths of his pocket. He presses it flat against the counter, folds it in half both lengthwise and widthwise, and drops it into the tip jar. As an afterthought, he adds the coins he gets in change. He shoves the bills the cashier hands him back into his pocket and gathers up the cups in both hands; he doesn't look back as he turns to leave.

A little while after he's gone, he knows, somebody behind the counter -- he doesn't know who, and he doesn't want to know -- will decide, seemingly on a whim, to tidy the bills in the tip jar. Pull out the wad of cash, straighten each bill, bundle them together. Unfold the amateur origami and put it, unremarked upon, with the others. Anyone watching won't even notice eyes flicking down to the serial number of the bill. Old code, one he's been using for decades. If the second number of the serial number is odd, it means everything's going according to plan. Second number even, things are heating up but still okay. Drop a five in the jar, it means to check the next drop-box in the cycle, for important information. No tip at all means he's about to disappear and will make contact again when he's ready to surface.

The route the information will have to take to get back to O'Neill is circuitous and tortured; O'Neill won't be getting the intel for a few more days, still. Shallow information channel. Single bytes of information, a lone and lonely ping in the wilderness: present and accounted for. All hands mustered. Hi-ho, we're away to spur and saddle; into the frontier we go.

When he gets back to the condo building, he doesn't bother with the elevator; he runs all thirty flights of stairs up to Ba'al's penthouse, careful to keep the coffee from sloshing. He doesn't stop to shower first. Let the snake think he's at its beck and call; he'll play along. For now. But that doesn't mean he can't show his contempt in a thousand small ways. He wouldn't want the snake to get too complacent, after all.

Monday. He rises with the dawn, slips out to go running; it's smart to establish your patterns as soon as you can. Snake doesn't even let him get out of downtown before it yanks him back, this time. He swallows the snarl and goes to get the fucking coffee.

He hadn't exactly been expecting torches in the corridors and gold lamé uniforms, but when building security gives him his ID badge and instructions to report to the executive floor, he's expecting something with a little more flair than fluorescent lights. The Evil Overlord's lair shouldn't be carpeted in industrial grey.

Elevator opens up onto a reception area: curved wooden walls, glass-and-metal reception desk occupied by a pretty young man. Looks Filipino. Black hair, worn long, tied back in a neat ponytail; a tiny diamond winks at one earlobe. Wearing a black suit that looks like it probably cost a couple grand. Doesn't look up from the purposeful mouse-clicking.

He glances around himself; the hallways on both sides are blocked by clear glass walls, the doors controlled by keycard readers. "Mr. Balim is expecting you," the receptionist says, still without looking up, and gestures a hand at the door set into the wooden wall behind him.

He puts some extra swagger in his hips as he strides across the reception area, cup of coffee in either hand. He doesn't know who else in residence knows who, what he is, who knows there's something other than an arrogant teenager behind his fuck-you stride. In his jeans and t-shirt (still clammy from his morning workout, his morning run on the damp and misty streets of dear old muggy home sweet home) he sticks out like a sore thumb, in this quietly elegant Pacific Northwest corporate enclave. The artwork on the walls alone probably cost more than the entire house in --

Stop. Rewind. The door the receptionist pointed at opens automatically just as he's nearing it. He walks through it without stopping, as though he'd been expecting it to open for him. (Lesson learned a long time ago: when startled, when nervous, step forward.) There's another hallway behind the door, stretching out with nondescript doors on either side. At the end is a glass-walled office, lavishly appointed; in front of it, another desk, this one occupied by a young woman who's just as attractive as the receptionist outside, in an entirely different way. Her blonde hair is worn long too, piled on top of her head in a bun that's secured by three hairsticks. She's wearing a silk kaftan in imperial purple, stiff and heavy with golden embroidery.

Behind her, in the fishbowl office, the snake is sitting behind a desk made of elegant bloodwood. It's wearing a grey pinstripe suit and a tasteful blue tie, shuffling papers from one stack to another on the desk. Beyond it, out the floor-to-ceiling windows, Seattle stretches out, disappearing into the grey and haze of a dreary winter morning, yesterday's perfect clear day nothing but a memory.

He comes to a stop in front of Esmeralda the Wonder Secretary's desk. "Mr. Balim is expecting me," he says, trying for a snide impersonation of the guy at front reception. His shoulderblades itch with the knowledge that he's standing at the end of a hallway that only looks deserted; he doesn't know who's lurking behind those doors, who might be behind him. Can't show it, though. Here in this building, he's playing Balim's pet, arrogant and self-assured.

The woman looks up, and something -- in her face, in her voice -- makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He'd been cloned without the naquadah in his blood that O'Neill had never admitted to (out loud), lingering remnants of that brief and disastrous trip to Tok'raville. Its lack is a weakness. He'd never wanted it, never let anyone know he could use it, but it'd come in fucking handy here-and-now. Without the itchy pins-and-needles, spiders-under-the-skin sense of snake radar, he's reduced to observation, analysis, instinct. He'd give a lot to know if he's creeped out by her because she's a snake or a Jaffa or just otherwise somehow wrong.

"Yes," she says, his attitude seemingly rolling right off her. "He is. You can go in."

He does so, juggling the cups of coffee so he can open the glass door to the snake's office. It's odd; he would have predicted the snake would want concealment, want to be able to hide away in its office with nobody able to observe. Like this, it's on display. Maybe it wants to keep an eye on things.

"Good morning, Jack," the snake says, not looking up. "I trust you slept well."

He ignores it. "Pissed in your coffee again," he says, shoving it onto the corner of Ba'al-or-Balim's desk. "Tomorrow I'll shit in it."

The snake shows teeth. Not a smile, except in the way it is: graciousness in victory, the satisfaction of someone who's got the upper hand and is enjoying watching a captive struggle. The familiarity makes his stomach turn again. "I had wondered yesterday what the special flavor was, yes," it says. Pops off the lid of the cappuccino, takes a deep swig, unconcerned at the prospect of any additives. They both know he's lying. It'd be too suspicious if he didn't rattle the bars of the cage, though; he's presented himself to Ba'al as a wild card, and he has to play the role to the hilt.

He rocks on the balls of his feet. Light. Balanced. Ready for anything. Weeks, months, to get ready for this -- physically, mentally -- and he still feels too slow, too sluggish. No way to defend himself if the snake decides he'd be a good addition to the Snake Army. It's a risk he has to take. He's banking on Ba'al wanting to conquer him first, to bring him to heel before putting a snake in his head. He's banking on Ba'al believing it can control him better as a human, without having to struggle with a snake's ambition and a snake's potential treachery. Still, the back of his throat itches: sense-memory, the feeling of soft tissue tearing and rearranging, and then, the blackness.

Don't think about it.

"What's on the agenda?" he asks. "Bet you've got a lot of questions to ask me."

"I do, yes," the snake says, standing up. "And I'd like to introduce you to the executive team. And then I'll introduce you to your team."

He keeps his voice even, controlled. The snake has a habit of dropping little pearls like that and waiting to see how he'll react. So he doesn't react. "I'm not exactly a team player."

The snake smiles again. "Learn to be."

Introductions.

Mayfield, executive VP, analytics. Blonde woman, pretty smile, dead eyes. Bezian, executive VP, global dev and acquisitions. Mid-forties, tall, solid, a dangerous man trying to appear less dangerous than he is. Cocumél, executive VP, operations. Slender and greying, wearing glasses whose lenses look so thin that they're probably cosmetic rather than correctional. Roberts, executive VP, strategy. Black man, shaved head, too young for the senior position he holds; he looks barely twenty-five. Yao, CFO. Tiny Asian woman, her waist-length hair in a hundred little braids, each beaded and belled. Rickowski, CTO. The only one dressed less formally than full business armor, aging hippie complete with full beard and long grey hair, looks like he was probably programming mainframes back in the day.

He has no fucking idea which of them, if any, might be snakes. Which of them know what's going on. Ba'al doesn't enlighten him.

He's being given a team of four, reporting to Rickowski on paper, actually reporting directly to Ba'al. The snake knows about Nielson-Mitchell, knows the extent of his technical talent. It also knows that talent doesn't surface overnight; if he has it, O'Neill must have had it too, must know things that only someone who was there would know. So he's being put in charge of the group that's been trying to crack the SGC's security, on the theory that an insider will know all the ways to hammer down the doors.

He doesn't ask why Ba'al wants the network broken. O'Neill had said that Ba'al hasn't managed to get people inside Homeworld, inside the SGC -- that all the snake's information is coming through its plants in the NID -- but neither of them is willing to bet the bank on it; they aren't naive enough to think their intel is perfect. But the fact the snake wants him trying to crack the system is a good sign that it might be the truth. If Ba'al had people in the SGC, it wouldn't need him to break in.

Unless it already has broken in, or it already has people on the inside, and it wants to put him through his paces, cross-verify against already known intel. Test of loyalty: will he tell it the things it already knows to be true?

No way of knowing which, but one thing is clear; Ba'al is getting information from somewhere. O'Neill had told him about the last operative who'd tried covert infiltration. Nobody knows how Ba'al managed to spot the guy as a ringer. He has no intention of sharing that fate. It's why he chose the method he did; impossible to blow a cover story when it isn't a story at all, and the only parts he's actually lying about are things the snake can't actually verify, like his desires and goals and motivations. Mitchell had protested this particular tactic, but --

Don't think about Mitchell.

The snake hands him over to Rickowski, who leads him out of the executive playpen and keycards him through one of the glass doors leading off the reception area, down the hall, through another door. That one's glass too, but it's the first one he's seen up here that isn't transparent; some grey-smoked coating opaques it. Rickowski doesn't give him a guided tour, but he thinks this is where the snake keeps all the projects that don't fit into the model of a nice normal multinational conglomerate. Rickowski just leads him over to a cube pod in the corner, tucked away from the rest of the teams, and leaves him there without performing introductions; "Mr. Balim would like to see you after lunch," is all he gets.

He's left eyeing the four people who are eyeing him back. He sticks his hands in the pockets of his jeans and tries for "causal slouch", despite the fact that he's spent all morning on high alert. "Hey," he says. "Might as well show me the toys."

Four of them, one of him. He'd been thinking that his apparent calendar age would work against him, but the former leader of the team doesn't look to be much older: Virta, first name unknown, a skinny kid with strong cheekbones, buzz-cut blond hair, and skin white enough to indicate that he probably hasn't seen the sun in months, if not years. Virta seems friendly enough; he's the one to make the introductions, last names only. Chen, early twenties, face neutral and iPod earbuds in his ears, speaks with a heavy Chinese accent that necessitates fierce listening despite the fact that the words being spoken are impeccable English. Suzukimo, probably twenty-five or twenty-six, possibly Japanese, possibly Korean; her hair is short, spiky, and purple. Cacirelli, early twenties, brown hair, indeterminate ethnicity, who sets off every single damn one of his subconscious sentries; he wonders if Cacirelli might be a snake. (Wouldn't put it past Ba'al to have another snake on the team. Someone to keep an eye on things. Someone to report back.)

Only takes a few minutes for him to realize they're all smart as fuck, casually amoral, and damn fucking good hackers and crackers at once. Only takes a few minutes after that for him to realize Virta's the smartest. Alpha geek. They get the dick-waving out of the way fast enough; Virta seems willing to accept him, pursuant to a demonstration of his talents, and they're down to talking tech inside of half an hour. The team's good. Too good; it's a wonder they haven't broken the system yet.

Eventually they go to lunch. (Topic of conversation: the no-surprises-there study Ohio just released on voting machine security. "Please," Chen says, with a snort; "we already knew that. There were three separate groups trying to sell the '06 midterm elections." Pause, smirk. "I was on the team that actually managed to do it.") Virta keeps watching him, out of the corner of one eye, when nobody else is watching. He ignores it; he wasn't expecting to be bosom buddies up front.

He leaves them after lunch, with promises to bring in his deconstructions of the vulnerabilities in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator tomorrow. Started the analysis as a lark. He and Mitchell (don't think about --) had kicked around the notion of doubling as security consultants in between software jobs. Turned to it more seriously when the security press as a whole started paying more attention to the flaws in the algorithm. He'd been thinking of publishing the paper, establishing some credibility in the security world, when this whole thing had blown up in his face. Now he's glad he didn't. Easier to pretend to be a black hat if your name isn't scrawled all over the white-hat blogs.

He's halfway down the hallway when the cell phone in his back pocket vibrates. "You're late for your appointment," Ba'al says in his ear.

"Didn't know I had one," he snaps back. Nobody around him looks at him oddly; he's not the only one wearing an earpiece, and the spectacle of people apparently talking to themselves is probably common. "If you want me to keep a set schedule, get me a secretary." Rickowski hadn't specified a time, just that Ba'al wanted to see him after lunch. If this isn't just the snake yanking his chain, if Rickowski had been instructed to tell him a specific time, it means Rickowski is trying to fuck him. He'll have to keep an eye out for that.

"Perhaps I will," the snake says. "Conference room four. Melissa will show you where it is."

Click.

Melissa turns out to be the real name of Esmeralda the Wonder Secretary, the one that pings all of his sense of wrong; the more he watches her, the more he wishes for that built-in snake radar. She brings him to a tiny conference room, where Ba'al and Cocumél are waiting. "Have a seat, Jack," the snake invites. "We have some ... questions."

So. Cocumél's a snake after all. Or at least a human-or-Jaffa in on the plan. Good to know.

He spends the rest of the afternoon in the too-close quarters (snake to the left of him, snake to the right of him) spilling his guts about the SGC's secrets. Singing like a canary, la la la, anything the fuckers want to know. Fooled you: he doesn't know anything of strategic value, not anymore. Changed the codes, locked the doors, as soon as they'd realized what Loki had done; all his information is four years out of date. Still, they ask about the people, about the processes. Friendly little chat. Nothing at all like the interrogation techniques he learned in his days at Ft. Benning, the tricks he had used on him in Iraq. There's no torture, no coercion. Just a couple of buddies shooting the breeze. They don't even lock the door to keep him from getting out.

In exchange for this courtesy, he doesn't try to get out. Tidy little arrangement all around. He answers their questions, whole and complete. It makes his stomach turn to rat out his friends -- breaking his oaths, breaking his commitments; betrayal -- but it needs to be done. Ba'al's got people in the NID anyway. O'Neill and Barrett think anywhere up to half the active agents might be on the snake's payroll. It's unlikely he's telling the snake anything the snake doesn't already know, and he's pretty sure this interrogation is less about gaining information and more about finding out what information he's willing to give. So he gives it all. Proof of his willingness to cooperate. Yes, I'll play ball.

Even if it makes him feel dirty.

It's New Year's Eve, but the building's still busy when he gets out of his little kaffeeklatsch around dinnertime. Either Ba'al doesn't believe in giving holidays, or it offers generous bonuses for working through them. The snake doesn't want his company tonight -- which means the snake wants to see what he'll do when he isn't being watched, which of course means the snake is going to be watching him. Or having people watch him. So he just heads back over to the cubicle pod where he's been given a desk, intending to log on to the mainframe with the ID Rickowski provided him; he might as well kill an hour or two setting up his system before heading back to the Godawful corporate housing.

Rest of 'his' team's taken off for the evening, except for Virta, who's got his (bare) feet on the desk, his keyboard in his lap, and a pair of state-of-the-art monster headphones, not on his ears, but around his neck. Tinny music comes from them; he can't tell what Virta's listening to, distorted as it is, but it sounds like it has a heavy bass line. Virta's fingers are on the keyboard, but he's not typing, just drumming his fingers lightly on the keycaps and staring at one of the four monitors on his desk.

"Hey," he says, as he passes by Virta's side of the cube, drops down into his own desk chair. Two to a cube, one on each side, the walls just high enough to see over when you're sitting down. Virta's his cubemate. Between the time he went to lunch and now, the IT Faeries deposited another desktop and a laptop on his desk, bringing his hardware booty up to match the rest of the team's: two desktops, each dual-screened, and an entertaining assortment of peripherals. He pulls one keyboard closer to him and reaches down to boot Desktop #1.

"Hey," Virta says: distracted, absentminded. Tap, tap, tap. He wonders if Virta even knows he's here, if the return greeting was automatic; he's been told that he's had entire conversations with Mitchell (don't think about Mitchell) while deep in hack mode, without retaining a word of them later. But a minute later, just as he's setting up his .bashrc with all the aliases he can't live without, Virta growls softly and lets his feet down from the desk. "Fuck. I don't suppose you know anything at all about sendmail."

"Not much," he says. "Bitch to configure. That's about it. I use qmail."

Virta snorts. "Yeah, thanks, I have no desire to use something cooked up by a rabid weasel. Gimme postfix any day. This isn't for me. I'm this close to figuring out how to do something useful with this buffer overflow, but every time I think I'm getting somewhere it falls apart, and I can't tell if it's my code or their config. You got a sec to gimme some eyeballs?"

The fact that Virta's asking at all is a sign that he's already won some respect. "Sure," he says. Wheels his chair over, spins to face the monitor Virta's staring at. Virta's got three or four xterm windows open. Virta uses emacs. He decides not to hold it against the kid. "Whose mail you trying to read?"

Virta smirks. "The President's. Here, line 281. I can get the buffer to overflow, I just can't get it to actually execute arbitrary code instead of just triggering a crash. Lemme call up the code I'm trying to inject, it's self-modifying --"

The time it takes Virta to pull up another xterm, highlight the sections to show off, gives him enough time to school his expression. He doesn't think Virta's talking about, say, the president of the Thursday night book club. This bunch of Wunderkinder he's been saddled with have never met a lock they didn't want to pick, and the snake seems to be bending over backwards to make sure they're happy to pick the locks the snake points them at. Intellectually, he can understand the appeal: the thrill of challenge, the thrill of being somewhere you're not supposed to be. He's picked a few locks of his own, in his day.

Emotionally, he's horrified. Once upon a time, back when he'd first gotten interested in computing -- far earlier than anyone would ever believe of him -- he'd made himself a promise: it would be for him and him alone. He knew full well that if he'd ever displayed any aptitude, if he'd ever so much as hinted at the talent he discovered, his dear and gentle masters would have found some way to use it for their own purposes. (He remembers those days. Height of the Cold War, two years on loan to the boys in the three-letter agencies, part of a short-lived and highly-classified program that was described in cool and bloodless terms like "redistribution of assets" and resulted in lies on his records that claim he was at the Pentagon and nightmares that still surface, just when he thinks they've finally slipped away.) To use those skills now in the service of someone else's interests -- and not just anyone else's, a snake, the snake -- makes him want to claw off his own skin.

Can't be helped.

"Here," Virta says, wiggling the mouse's pointer over the bits he wants to highlight.

He leans in closely and makes himself think of nothing more than the intellectual challenge. "Huh," he says, after a minute. "Yeah. I see why it's driving you batshit. You got that in a code repo somewhere for me to check out, or should I copy it over to my home directory and stare at it from there?"

Virta sighs. "Dammit. I was hoping you'd take a look at it and have a flash of inspiration. I'll copy it over for you so you can glare at it in your spare time. If you get anything, let me know."

"Yeah," he says. Absently. He's still staring at Virta's screen; there's something there, but he can't tell what it is. Gonna drive him bugfuck nuts, too, now that Virta's shown him. Dammit. "You got any plans for tonight?"

"Nah," Virta says. "Sent everyone off for their New Year's plans already. Cacirelli's going to some LARP thing in Bellevue, Suzukimo has a party at the Wet Spot -- which I so did not need to know -- and I don't know what Chen's doing, but he was pretty eager to get out of here. I was just going to chill for a while, do some work. I figured I'd watch the fireworks from the windows later. Once it gets past seven or so, the boss doesn't mind us breaking out the beer, and we can usually con the security guys down in the lobby into bringing the pizza delivery upstairs for us if we order them a pie, too."

"Ham and pineapple on mine," he says, and swivels back to his own workstation.

By the third beer, they're swapping lines of code back and forth like they've been working together forever. By the fourth, someone gets the idea -- he thinks it was Virta, but he's not positive -- to see what sort of mischief they can wreak with the fireworks set to go off at the Space Needle in another hour or so, just for shits and giggles.

Turns out the pyro company made the mistake of keeping their controlling computers Internet-connected. And they're running an unpatched version of WinME. "Candy from a baby," is Virta's opinion.

The 'technical glitch' that necessitated manual detonation of the fireworks is all over the newspapers on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday, the team's listening to him like he's been directing them forever. On Thursday, he gets a brainwave about what Virta's doing wrong in his sendmail exploit in the middle of another round of 'discussion' with Ba'al and Cocumél, and is saved from the moral dilemma of whether or not to mention it by coming back from the session to find that Virta's had the same idea. Still doesn't work, but it gets them closer.

By Friday, the snake's dropping hints about how pleased it is that he's fitting in so well.

Downtown Seattle. He amuses himself while he's running by coming up with other expansions for the street mnemonic. Joint Cooperation Masks Secretly Unleashed Predators. Job's Challenges Mean Secrecy Under Performance.

Yeah, Just Can't Make Stuff Up Perfectly. Whatever.

It's raining today. Big shock there; it's been raining every day since he got here save for one. Today it's a thin drizzle that needles through his t-shirt and jeans to take up rest against his skin, mingling with the sweat to create a layer of damp unpleasantness. He ignores it. He's running up Cherry today, some half-formed notion of heading over to Lake Washington, waving at Mercer Island, running back. Different route each morning. He's starting to get the sense of what's where by now. Two weeks' worth of running every morning, aiming for ten miles or so a day, never quite making it before the snake pulls the puppet-strings again. Gives him a pretty good idea of what the city's like, neighborhood by neighborhood. He's starting to be able to feel Seattle, beneath his feet. That can only be an advantage.

Going all right so far. Better than he'd feared. The snake is giving him room, letting him stretch out, letting him get used to things. (Giving him more rope to hang himself. Waiting to see if he's here to cooperate, or if he's here to cause problems.) Mornings he sits in the conference room with it and Cocumél. They've moved along to what-ifs now: asking him what the SGC would do in such-and-such a scenario, what O'Neill would do. He can't put together the snake's plans from the questions it asks. He's pretty sure at least half the questions are decoys. What if Farrow-Marshall went public with the program, forced disclosure to the media. What if the IOA withdrew funding from Atlantis. (That one's easy: he has no fucking clue. All he knows about the IOA is that O'Neill has about as much use for them as tits on a bull, and he can't exactly relay that opinion without giving away that he's been in touch with O'Neill.) Who's got a brain, and who's dead weight.

He answers everything, and watches the snake's reactions, filing them all away in the corners of his thoughts he's earmarked for write-only access. Things he won't let himself think about where the snake can watch him. The snake's always watching him. He's spotted the bugs in the apartment already. Or rather, he's spotted two of the bugs in the apartment already. There are probably more. His life is an open book; he's playing this role for an audience of one, and it's the most critical performance of his life.

When he's running, though, he can loose that control a bit. Let himself think. An hour or two every morning when he can lay down the charade before he has to head back into the lion's den. He's not stupid enough to believe he isn't being watched, but he has a little more leeway.

Afternoons he spends with his team. They're okay. Completely unconcerned about the fine points of morality, but hey, everybody's got weaknesses. He'd hire Virta away from the snake in a fucking instant if he could trust the kid longer than it would take to say 'industrial espionage'; the kid's that good. Clever and fast, ruthlessly focused, intent on work and capable of ignoring everything else around him in pursuit of a project. Not the type of person he would have ever imagined liking -- black-hat hacker, 0-day exploit writer, hacktivist, phone phreak, born thirty years too late for the "glory days", the type of guy who believes that thirty years ago was the glory days -- but they've both got the habit of working late, and they're starting to have actual conversations as they do. He's almost starting to consider Virta a friend.

No clue what Virta knows, or what the rest of the team knows. He doesn't think they know much. He's pretty sure the snake doesn't explain its plans to a bunch of teenage hackers. (Would be nice if it did; he could wrap this up faster and go the hell back home, because he's reasonably sure that in another few weeks, Virta will be eating out of his goddamn hand.) But the snake isn't likely to explain to his information-junkie techno-ronin that the end goal of all the hide-and-go-seek they're playing is total world domination.

Then again, it probably wouldn't matter if the team knew. He's positive they don't actually care about petty concerns like national security (or, hell, the continued survival of the human race); Suzukimo just wants to live rich, Chen's a Chinese national and doesn't give a fuck about the US government, Virta's been taking console-cowboy contract jobs for the highest bidder, including the foreign equivalents of the Three-Letter Agencies, since maturing enough to sound like an adult in email. And he's starting to get convinced that his suspicions were correct, and Cacirelli is a goddamn snake. If the snake plays them right, it could have a tiny army of people pulling informational strings across the globe anytime it wanted.

He's one of those people now. The snake lets them pick their own projects, but it steers them. And since he showed up, suddenly the targets have shifted. Before, Virta says, they were being aimed mostly at Farrow-Marshall's business competitors. Now, all of a sudden, it's the big guns: the White House, the Pentagon, the military's SIPRnet and NIPRnet, the NSA. The SGC. He's being expected to take point on cracking all the systems he used to have access to in his own right.

He tries not to think that the snake's probably got him trying to break in so it can have proof of his own double agency.

Wouldn't find anything anyway. O'Neill's smarter than that. The briefcase boys are looking for him right now, he knows. Putting on a good show, exactly the way they would if he'd gone to ground for real. (Hell, for most of them it is real. There are five people who know the true story: O'Neill, Carter, Reynolds, Barrett, and -- There are five people who know the true story. He can't help but wonder if that's four too many.) If he's here for long enough, he'll do something that will make himself show up on their radar -- draw money from one of his own bank accounts, use one of his own credit cards -- and let them stage a freakout that he's in the hands of the snake. But he's saving that trick for if he needs more of a cover story. For now, the snake seems to be buying what he's selling.

For now.

The phone buzzes in his back pocket just as he's crossing 23rd. "Good morning, Jack," the snake murmurs in his earpiece. (Starting to forget he's even wearing the damn thing; the snake's made it clear he's to have it in at all times, and it's unobtrusive enough that he's even found himself sleeping in it. When he sleeps.) "You're late."

He drops down to a jog, cursing inwardly. He'd just managed to hit the right level of semi-trance-state to get some real thinking done. "You want me punching a timeclock, I'm out of here. I had enough of that for thirty years."

"We're waiting for you," the snake says. "I'll trust you won't forget to stop for coffee."

Click.

Two weeks in. Not dead. Not snaked. Not trusted yet, but that's all right. He wasn't expecting this to be easy.

It takes three weeks for the snake to decide it's wrung him dry of all the useful information it can get out of him right now and drop him into the Happy Hacker Home full-time. He runs the odds, figures it's worth pushing a little: "Is that it?" he demands. "When am I going to get to do something useful?"

The snake only smirks. (Makes him want to put a fist in that self-righteous face.) "You are doing something useful. I need the information your team can provide. Get me that, and then we'll talk further."

Careful, calculated. He pushes back the chair he'd been sitting in, kicks the leg once he's standing. "If I'd wanted to do nothing but sit at a keyboard all day, I wouldn't have bothered coming. At least let me offworld, dammit."

"In time," the snake says. "In time."

He's done his best to make sure the snake thinks he's gunning for revenge against the Asgard, too. It makes sense for the persona he's built, or at least enough sense that the snake might buy it; they're not exactly known for comprehending the subtleties of human motivation. And it gives him a reason why he would have come to the snake, instead of setting up as an independent. He has to keep remembering to push those buttons. Too suspicious for him to just take what the snake hands to him without protest.

The Happy Hacker Haven isn't a bad place to be working. Comfortable chairs. Decent equipment. Fridge stocked with sixteen different kinds of caffeine, hot and cold running snacks throughout the day. The snake believes in keeping its minions happy. It's almost easy to forget why he's really here. Until one of them says or does something to remind him that they're breaking six dozen laws as a matter of course. Until the team decides to go out to lunch and he has to call the snake to tell it he's leaving the building.

Until he stays too late into the night and the snake calls him to let him know it was expecting a booty call.

Not every night. No rhyme or reason. Sometimes the snake wants to fuck him. Sometimes the snake wants him to blow it. Sometimes the snake likes it when he mouths off; sometimes it's annoyed by it. Sometimes the snake brings him up to the penthouse; sometimes it shows up at his door. Sometimes, rarely, it spends the night. Like it wants to fucking cuddle or something. (Like it's trying to see if he'll take the chance to attack in the middle of the night.)

He's getting better at pretending that he likes it. He's getting better at not needing to shower as soon as the snake lets itself out.

He's the first one in, most mornings, now. He's not sleeping much. Up by 0500, down to the weight room, out for a run. Snake still calls every time he crosses the invisible line. He's tried to map the outlines of his playpen, the point past which the snake will grab him by the scruff of the neck and haul him back. No rhyme or reason to that, either. Some mornings he can go for miles. Some mornings the snake calls him before he's even out of downtown. He'd be happier if there were patterns. Something to analyze. Something to predict. It's keeping him off-balance, cranky. Paranoid. (More paranoid.)

First one in. Every morning. Start time's discretionary. Some days Virta doesn't roll in until after everyone else is back from lunch, and Suzukimo is doing polyphasic sleep this year, so she wanders off to nap in an unused conference room every four hours. Nobody says a word. Apparently nobody keeps an eye on them, which of course means that the surveillance is far more subtle. (Worries him. Snakes aren't subtle. But this snake isn't stupid, so he has to assume they're being watched: cameras, keyloggers, audio bugs. Eyes on him constantly. Makes the skin on the back of his neck stand up.) He hasn't seen Rickowski since the first day he was here. Hasn't heard from him, either. For all he knows, in another week or so somebody's going to ask him why he hasn't been filing regular reports.

Last one out, most days. They all work twelve, fourteen hours; he does sixteen as a matter of course. If he's in the office, he's not in the snake's bed. Snake can't bitch at him for working so late when it's to the snake's advantage. He's writing kilolines of code, project after project, attempt after attempt. To anyone observing, to anyone following along, it looks like he's taking wild leap after wild leap at the system he's chosen as his own particular target, windup and let fly, crushed when it doesn't work. Back up, start again. Toss some ideas around the team, careful not to choose any one partner more than others. Careful to bitch in the irc channel no more or no less than any of the others. (Although he's elected the unanimous king of the your-mom joke pretty quickly.)

He knows he's being watched. And he knows it's not just surveillance. The kids on his team all have a basic level of competence, but Cacirelli's not in the same league as the rest. Has to be some reason the guy gets kept around, and the more he watches the guy, the more he's convinced the creepy-crawly feeling he gets around him isn't paranoia, it's some subtle cues his subconscious has put together. Everything about the guy screams snake.

Makes him nervous. Fucking hell nervous, because he's been adding up the number of people who trip his ersatz snake-radar, and he does not like the numbers he's coming up with. It's not urgent enough to use up one of the drop-boxes that will get intel back to O'Neill's hands, especially since they could only set up three, and he doesn't have proof yet. But he's keeping notes. Mental ones. Can't write anything down. Can't look too closely. Can't seem too interested. Have to pretend to be exactly what the snake thinks he is: frustrated hacker, angry young/old man, resentful, annoyed. Chafing at the bit to accomplish something. Committed. (Trustworthy.)

Anyone watching him (Cacirelli, whoever's got the job of monitoring his network ID and his keylogged activity, the snake) will see him trying at a target, over and over again, and almost succeeding. He should get a fucking medal. Because it's always tough as fuck to fail plausibly when you already know what's going to succeed. And it'd be too suspicious if he walked straight in and broke things immediately. (Can't take too long, either. Balancing act. Another one.)

He didn't pick the SGC to start with; he's banging on Area 51's system. Had good reasons to start there, ones he could share with the snake and make plausible. The SGC is probably the most secure computer system on the planet. (Most secure, not completely secure -- like the man once said, the only secure system is one that's powered off, sealed in concrete, and dropped to the bottom of the ocean in a lead-lined safe, and even then someone really determined would find a way in -- but there's a lot of value in that "most".) Groom Lake has more people, fewer military, a greater overlap between the walled-off garden and the Internet at large. (At the SGC, you have to leap through six different hoops to even access the Internet on a machine that can also access the internal network; the geeks had bitched for years about that.) Get a lever in at Area 51, there's a good chance you can follow it back; compromise the account of someone who timeshares, Groom Lake and the SGC, and you have the place to stand to move the world.

The snake bought it. His team thinks he's brilliant. He's got a thousand bucks on the line with Virta: whichever one of them can start reading Landry's mail first wins it.

He's not worried about having to pay up. Because building a plausible hole to exploit -- something hidden, something hard-to-find, something that requires a flash of genius and a hell of a lot of hard work to figure out -- was Carter's part of this op. And Carter's damn fucking good at what she does. When he finally cracks it, when he finally gets in, it won't be for real; it'll be plausible snake-bait, a honeypot containing only the things they want the snake to know.

He's saving it for when he thinks the snake is just ready to finally believe him.

Downtown Seattle. Judicious Cover Management Supposes Unrelenting Perseverance; he still hasn't relaxed his vigilance. He thinks he's managed to make the second tail the snake's got on him, could slip both of them whenever he wanted. He's pretty sure it wouldn't bother to use three, but pretty sure isn't positive, and he's not ready to risk it. He's been building a reputation for not rattling the bars of the cage. Too much.

It grates at him. He isn't learning anything. Nothing worth reporting, at least; so far the sum total of his knowledge is scattered handfuls of unconnected fact, any of which could probably be deduced from the outside. Nothing that justifies using up one of the one-time contact channels. Those are reserved for things where the reward of the information being passed outweighs the risk of the snake catching him using it. They only had time to set up three dead-letter drop-boxes, but at least they're good ones this time, ones that won't look suspicious if he uses them, ones he can get to without compromising his persona. He still doesn't want to use them until he has to, and particularly not this early, because he'd have to be insane to send something in plaintext and he hasn't figured out, yet, how to steal enough time unobserved to do the encryption. He's pretty sure he's being constantly watched. Snake probably has entire divisions of people, just waiting for him to fuck up.

Once upon a time, back in the days when he was doing HUMINT on loan to the Boys Who Have No Name, the limiting factor on the number of contacts he could have made would have been the number of one-time pads he could memorize, to encrypt those messages. Shouldn't carry a pad with him openly; both the Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa knew to look for them, no matter how small you managed to etch them, and getting caught with a sheet of random-noise letter-groups meant getting put on the fast track for disappearance. But there's a trick to it. Get the right kind of receptive-memory state, sing them to yourself in groups of five, each pad mentally tagged to a different tune, and you can get the absolute and perfect recall you need. Some people can do it. Some people can't. He'd always been more reliable at it than most.

He's memorized three one-time pads for this op, one per drop-box, a thousand characters each. Fucking bitch to do; he's out of practice, but all those tricks the monks taught him for hacking the inside of his own head have all kinds of interesting uses. You can pack a lot of information into a thousand characters, if you also set up (and memorize) code-groups for situations you think are likely to turn up, and this op has a better vocabulary (without having to resort to code-books) than some he's been on, since he and O'Neill share the type of memory where old code-books go to die; he can still recite the ones for Poland, forwards, backwards, sideways. (VIRT means "mission achieved, requesting pickup". CUMY means "initial run aborted, attempting backup plan". Yadda.) But you also can't re-use the cipher keytext, not without certain exposure; that's why they call them one-time pads. Cryptanalysis is better than it used to be, back in the bad old days: one slip and you're pulling down your pants and begging to be fucked. (Ha. Ha.)

Cryptography is better than it used to be, too; there are a double dozen ciphers he could be using, theoretically unbreakable under the limits of current computing power. But they all have one dual critical weakness, and it's the same weakness all modern crypto systems have: they require a fucking ridiculous key length (which is not the problem -- a 1024-bit RSA key will be reasonably secure against brute-force for at least a few more years, a 2048-bit key even longer; a 4096-bit key will probably be good until long after he's dead and buried, and if you can memorize a one-time pad, you can memorize an RSA key) and they require a computer to do the enciphering.

Second part's the dealbreaker. Rijndael, Serpent, Blowfish, Twofish (red fish, blue fish) -- you can't do them in your head, or with pencil and paper, the way you can do the simple XOR encipher of the good ol' days. And he will be fucked (yeah, just take the sarcasm as a given) if he's stupid enough to believe that Ba'al or its people aren't looking over his metaphorical shoulder for every bit of computer use: keylogging, server-log monitoring, Van Eck phreaking, hell, shoulder surfing even.

But he's not the only person who's had this problem. And irony of ironies, it wasn't at the behest of the Boys In The Three Letter Agencies that it was solved; a science fiction author who needed a plot point called up the best mind in the business, and nowadays all you need to generate your keystream and encrypt your text is a deck of goddamn playing cards and a mutually-agreed-upon starting layout (memorized; he's got dozens).

Power to the fucking people, right on, yeah.

And you can re-use drop boxes, where you can't re-use one-time pads -- if you have to, if it's crucial -- but he doesn't know how long he's going to be here, and he doesn't want to, can't, risk blowing his contact's cover. He doesn't know which one of the baristas at the coffee shop is the one O'Neill planted; what he doesn't know, he can't give away, in the face of torture or a snake in his head. (Not that he thinks Ba'al would have a problem causing the entire staff to disappear, but hey.) He doesn't know how the guy (or girl) gets information back to O'Neill. Doesn't know how O'Neill found him (her), or why O'Neill is willing to trust him. Doesn't need to know. But they're on high alert and full paranoia, and that means he can't take the risks he would otherwise normally be willing to take: no direct handoffs, no slipping a folded-up and enciphered message into the tip jar, no face-to-face meets with a courier like the courier he used to be.

He's out on the edge of a very long line, and he can't see who's standing at the other end of it. It's not the first time he's been deep under. But it's the first time he's been so deep for such high stakes. It's the kind of operation where being able to hear a friendly voice on the other end of a line would mean so much. It's also the kind of op where he can't risk it. Not once. The only comfort he has, cold comfort indeed, is that O'Neill's watching for him. Not overtly; that would raise too much suspicion. But watching for his influence, watching for the ripples his actions are making. He's not as alone as it feels. O'Neill. Carter. Barrett, at the NID. By now, someone will have gotten word back to --

Don't think about Mitchell.

So: up to the marina, back down again, dodging human obstacles the whole way (Jackass Conduct Might Stop Ubiquitous Pedestrians); the rain doesn't keep the locals off the streets any more than it does him. In for coffee (second number odd). He's left little puddles halfway up the stairs (he still runs them, every morning, and he doesn't give a shit about the looks he gets) when the phone buzzes to life in his back pocket. Too much to hope to get through one morning without a message from On High. "You're early this morning, Jack," the snake says.

He's pretty sure the snake thinks that calling him Jack gets on his nerves. He hasn't done anything to disabuse it of the notion; it might come in useful later. "Yeah, funny thing," he snaps. "Something kept me up all night; it just wasn't worth trying to sleep."

"Tsk. You're a growing boy; you need your rest." It's not quite mockery. Not quite. Teasing, almost. "There's nothing saying you have to be here first thing in the morning, you know."

The moments when the snake acts human are the moments that creep him out the worst. "Yeah, yeah," he says, rounding the corner of the stairwell, trying not to let his breathing give away the amount of energy he's expending. "If I wasn't, who'd bring you your fucking coffee?"

"Perhaps you have a point," the snake concedes. "I'll see you in a few moments."

Click.

Nothing useful to send back up the chain yet. Bits and pieces. Nothing more. A few names, a few facts, a few figures. He hasn't been able to piece together anything on the snake's motives, goals, plans. He doesn't even fucking know how many fucking snakes are in the building.

All he can do is hope that the snake finds him useful as something other than an errand-boy and fucktoy, or else his grace period isn't as long as it's going to need to be.

Up-up-up the stairs, latte in one hand, cappuccino in the other: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve stairs and turn, again and again. Keycard reader at the top floor. His card will get him anywhere above-ground, which means there's nothing interesting above-ground. In this building, at least. He hasn't gone exploring yet.

So much of this is about positioning: the snake extending tiny feelers of apparent trust, waiting to see what he'll do with them. Waiting to see if he'll grab the reins and run. Layers upon layers. Tests within tests. Circles within circles.

If he were here as a double agent, as a spy, he'd be trying to gain information: trying to explore, trying to find out something to report, trying to exceed the access he's been given or use the access he's been given to find something worth reporting. (Of course, he is here as a double agent. But not a stupid one.) So he can't go looking. But if he were here as a smart double agent, he'd know that the snake would be expecting a double agent to gather intel, over-compensate to avoid being spotted, not display the basic level of curiosity any person would display. So he can't not go looking, either. Either way is suspicious. Just a question of how suspicious he wants to be. And in which direction.

(Shall we play a game? How about Global Thermonuclear War. Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?)

For once he's not the first person in. He's taken to leaving a change of clothes at the office, for the days he gets rainsoaked on his morning run; by the time he gets changed, Virta and Chen are both at their desks, wearing headphones. (Heavy metal for Virta, bubblegum K-pop for Chen.) From the state of the cube pods, they've probably been there all night; the cleaning crew only touches the place if it's deserted, and there are empty cans of Jolt and Red Bull and Diet Dew everywhere. (Code monkey like Fritos; code monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew. Code monkey think maybe manager want to take over goddamn Earth himself.)

Virta's frowning at a screen full of code, tapping his thumb to page-down (in what's probably the rhythm of whatever he's listening to) so quickly that it means he's not actually reading it, just skimming in hopes that a keyword will jump out at him. (Virta has a pathological aversion to using grep; he says it annoys him.) Chen's not doing anything, just fapping around on Russian-language cracker message boards. (He doesn't sweat it. He's technically in charge of the team, and he's pretty sure he's supposed to be cracking the whip to get results, but a). he knows that trying to micromanage a hacker is like trying to teach a cat how to do tricks; b). the team works sixty-hour weeks minimum, he's not going to begrudge them a little bit of downtime to clear their heads if a problem is being particularly stubborn; c). he doesn't exactly plan to give up his habit of reading Slashdot and his morning blogroll over coffee, either.)

He doesn't say anything to either of them, just sits down at his desk. Headphones mean 'don't bug me': either the wearer doesn't want to interact with another human being, or they're deep in the middle of a problem and verbal input will crash their concentration field. Headphones mean communication via email, irc, or internal Jabber server only. (He isn't of the generation that natively learned to treat voice as a priority interrupt while text goes on the stack, but he sure as hell figured out the value of that hacker communication style fast enough. He looked up the studies, once. Some bright scientists did brain scans. Deep hack mode produces a brain-wave pattern that takes twenty minutes to achieve; an interrupt can fuck your whole morning.)

So he pulls up his keyboard. Logs into the computer. Twenty-five character password. Looks like line noise. And God help you if you use the secure server for surfing or webmail or even mp3s. The corporate network and Subversion servers don't even have a gateway to the Internet; getting stuff in or out requires a manager's permission and the deployment of the good old-fashioned sneakernet (no matter how high-latency it is). Or it does here, at least; the rules are probably different when you're not on the snake's Christmas-card list.

He's got his morning routine down to a science. Two desktops to log onto. On one, his .gnomerc lauches Firefox, Thunderbird, and xmms; on the other, the secure server, it launches BitchX and Psi, and reattaches his screen session containing screen after screen of code. Doesn't take him long to scan through his email, dismiss everything as unimportant. He's just finishing up the morning blog crawl (eBay's barring listings for MMORPG property, Rupert Murdoch's fucking goons have somehow managed to get SecLists.org's mailing list archives pulled offline by abusing the DMCA again, and oh, look, Microsoft is already working on the first service pack for Vista, an operating system that's not even out the door yet) when movement in the corner irc window catches his eye:

<@azimov> hey nielson, before you get too busy <@azimov> lan party tonight <@azimov> cybergate, 9pm <@azimov> playing unreal tournament <@azimov> you in?

He glances over at Virta. Nothing but the back of Virta's head. He hasn't gone out of his way to be too sociable, but he hasn't gone out of his way to push people aside, either, and Virta's perpetually genial, always willing to extend a hand. Can't trust the guy further than he could throw him, but at least he's a human voice. It's something.

<@jdn> can't <@jdn> got plans with the boss, can't make it tonight <@azimov> man <@azimov> he's got you on a short leash <@jdn> yeah, he bought me in the slave markets of iskanderun <@jdn> i pine for the day when i can make my escape

As soon as he hits enter and the words appear in their irc channel, Virta snorts, on the other side of the cubicle. "Yeah, right," Virta says. "You're fucking him, aren't you."

Virta sounds unimpressed. Doesn't much care, one way or the other; wants to know because information is his stock in trade, not because of any particular need to judge. Virta just likes knowing what's going on around him.

Only a second to figure out how to play it. By the time his brain catches up, he's already finding himself grinning, wide and bright. "He's fucking me," he says. "Every damn night. Best I ever had. You only wish you could get a piece of this."

The lies burn his lips, but he lets them pass. Somebody's listening. Gotta be. He has to show them he's willing to play ball.

The snake bends him over the back of the chair, face-down. One hand on the back of his neck. One hand on his hip. Just enough leeway to break the hold. If he wanted to. He wants to. Can't. The space is an offering: test, trust. What would it take for you to fight me?

More than this. We're just getting started.

"It's so comforting to know you enjoyed my hospitality enough to want to come back to it," the snake is purring at him. Slime, slithering in one ear, out the other. He almost expects the room to tilt, any minute now, walls becoming floors becoming ceiling becoming walls.

He hisses. Pushes into the touch. (Makes himself.) If you can keep your head while those about you -- "I want what you have," he says. Snarls. "I'm using you. You know I am. If your price for letting me use you is you using me in return, I'll suck it up and deal. At least I'm getting laid out of the bargain."

The snake runs a hand over his ass. Nice ass. Mitchell keeps telling him --

Don't think about Mitchell.

"I keep forgetting, you prefer men now," the snake says, soft and deadly. "Or is that something you always carried, hidden?"

He makes himself laugh. Half the time they're doing this, the snake keeps pushing him to talk about O'Neill. Wants to know how much of O'Neill is left in him. It's almost like the snake wants to play with an old familiar toy, the one that got away, the one it couldn't quite ever manage to conquer. He encourages the impression. He has to. It's his best defense. Gambling everything on the snake's sense of unfinished business: first you break him, then you snake him.

He's planning on being long gone by the time the snake realizes he's never going to break. Until then, he's going to have to keep walking the tightrope. Enough cooperation to be useful, enough lip to be a challenge. Every capitulation here prompts rebellion there. Give a little, take a little. A mutually beneficial relationship. Together they're the evil Tok'ra. (Ha. Ha.)

So he reaches for the right balance between pulling away and leaning in, playing revolted and needy all at once. "You wanna fuck me, fuck me," he snarls. "If you want to play around with a conversation about feelings, I have work to fucking do."

"My dear Jack," the snake says. "Haven't you realized that everything's a game?"

He has. That's the problem.

Smile for the audience.

Downtown Seattle: Jack Can't Mess Snakes Up Personally, so today he's running along the Sound, right on the other side of Alaskan Way, full-out on the railroad tracks. Grey and misty today, but it isn't actually raining yet, even though it looks like it might start any minute.

Four-minute mile. Three-fifty-five. Three-fifty. He pushes it, harder, harder. Hurts like hell, but he puts the pain elsewhere. He's getting used to shoving things back into the depths of his head again; some skills just need dusting-off.

Snake yanks his chain when he gets to Pier 90. Ring, ring, Avon calling, and he drops down to a jog instead of the full-out push he's been pushing. "Jack," Ba'al whispers in his earpiece. "We've talked about why you shouldn't try to lose your bodyguards."

He's proud that his voice doesn't sound like he's been running. This body's good for something after all. "Wasn't trying. They lost me. Seems like you need some better henchmen there, Skippy."

"Are you applying for the job?" Smug. Amused. Ba'al lets itself banter more often during these morning chats. He thinks it might be the time when Balim is closest to the surface, the persona the snake plays for observers and cameras and all the people who don't know the real deal. He gets how the role could become so comfortable as to shine through even when the snake's not trying; his own personal sense of self-identity is hard-won, but he's even caught himself slipping. Daniel could probably get a paper out of it: long-term undercover operatives, language-use patterns and self-identity, for the use of. Longer you play the role, the more you come to believe in it. Longer you pretend for everyone else, the more you start to pretend for yourself.

He'll have to watch that.

"You offering?" he counters.

Ba'al laughs again. "If I thought you'd accept, I might," it says. "Don't forget my cappuccino."

Click.

He doubles back. Cuts across the railroad tracks again. After a minute, he can just pick out the unmarked black car, pacing him slowly down Elliott, ignoring the horns blaring behind. He resists the temptation to blow them a kiss. No love lost there. They're loyal to Ba'al and Balim: to the snake and the role the snake is playing. No allies behind the Naquadah Curtain this time. He hasn't even tried to strike up a conversation with them; they aren't going to be on his side.

At one point Mitchell (don't think about Mitchell) had called this a game of chess, but chess is simple: attacker, defender. This is more muddy. The players aren't clear, and neither are the alliances. Ba'al/Balim. Farrow-Marshall. The SGC. Homeworld. The IOA. The Trust. The NID. And that's just here; God only knows what's going on in the galaxy at large. (O'Neill briefed him from top to bottom before he came, but briefings are shallow, pale imitations of being there to know it for yourself. He doesn't let himself hope that his lack of knowledge isn't going to fuck him over in the end, because the minute you have to start using words like 'hope', you've already lost.) And the playing field's fractal; pick an enemy, any enemy, and look at them in isolation: the same struggle they're all fighting out as a whole is duplicated internally. Zoom in, zoom out. Doesn't matter. Everyone's in bed with someone and fucking over someone else.

Except for him. He doesn't answer to anybody but himself; nobody's pulling his strings. He might be allied with O'Neill, but O'Neill doesn't control all of him, no matter how much O'Neill might think he does. (Doesn't plan on enlightening him, either. Best to hold some things until you need them. Save your pocket cards until after they make or break you on the river.)

So. Not chess. Risk, maybe; shifting alliances, half-hidden in the darkness, webs of trust and betrayal, hundreds of possible strategies. And he's stuck in a land war in Asia with someone else holding all the cards, but it's okay, because for an Air Force boy, he's always been better at boots on the ground than he has any right to be. One man can do what an army can't; he learned that a long time ago, in those missing years, back in all the places O'Neill doesn't think about anymore.

To win this, he has to play the game smarter than anyone else is. Not just once; constantly. One mistake and he's dead or worse, and the snake wins. Slip too far in one direction or another and it's vivat serpentis, amen.

Time to step it up.

Coffee shop's got a peppermint mocha on special this morning. He orders their largest size; the sleep deprivation is starting to take its toll on him. Folds up a dollar, drops it in the tip jar. (Second number odd.) Grabs Ba'al's cappuccino and his mocha and saunters out to the curb; kicks the quarter-panel of the car that's idling there. First time he's acknowledged its existence.

"Hey," he says, when the oversized man (Jaffa) in black t-shirt, black jeans, black sunglasses rolls down the window, looking surprised. "You guys might as well give me a lift. I think I'm getting a blister."

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