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Dead Moths Don't Fly by Jb
Whoa… look at that! It’s a… a… it’s gotta be a… Well, I’m pretty sure it’s a… Actually, I really don’t have the faintest idea what that thing is, but I sure as hell want to find out. God, just look at it… it’s just, just stunning. "Jack! Hey, you guys! Have a look at this …" I wonder if those striations are just on the exterior or if they’re actually imbedded? It’s hard to tell; the surface looks pretty flat, almost satiny smooth… but those swirls of texture... and the colours… Maybe I can feel… "Daniel!" Jack sounds mad. "Don’t touch…" Aaah… ouch! Too late, Jack. Oh, God… oh, no… Uhh, Jaa… "…that! Dammit! Carter, get the gate open, quick! Teal’c, you – okay, yeah, good. No, no, just scoop him… let’s go folks…" Argh. Yeah, ow, let’s…
just…
Oh, what now? We’re two minutes out of the gate, I haven’t even had a chance to put on my hat, and he’s already running off chattering on about… What is that? It’s big and it’s colourful, whatever it is, and it looks like some sort of metal or something, so it might mean… Wait… what the hell is he doing? Oh, no… "Daniel! Don’t touch…" Too late. He touched it. Oh, shit… look at that… he’s lit up like a goddam Christmas tree, for Christ sake. I shoulda brought my catcher’s mitt, ’cause it looks like his eyeballs are about to shoot right out of his head. "… that! Dammit!" Oh for crying out loud, his knees are giving out. The look on his face – I’ve definitely seen that before. That’s a ‘oh-shit, Jack’ Daniel-look if I ever saw one. Okay, so it’s serious… "Carter, get the gate open, quick!" Oh good, she’s already there. Her eyes are as big as Daniel’s – No, correct that… Daniel’s eyes are closing… "Teal’c,
you –" There. Teal’c’s got him. Daniel’s still
moving around a bit, trying to stay on his feet. "No, no, just
scoop him…" Thank God, the gate’s open. "Let’s
go folks…"
The scientific community’s best answer to the nature versus nurture controversy once again lays spread out on one of my infirmary beds. Up until the day I encountered Daniel Jackson, I was a firm believer in those cognitive theories of human development which postulate that, by and large, who and what we are is the product of a process of learning through interaction with our environment. Now I’m not so sure. At least, in the case of this one self-contained social-biological-behavioral entity, I’m not so sure. Because this man – this highly intelligent, usually very effective adult person – continually displays behaviors which constitute unqualified support for theories proposing a biological/genetic basis for psychosocial development and human behavior. Because he just never learns. He just, just does this kind of stuff, over and over and over again. Wow, will you look at that? It looks like he’s developing some sort of a rash… but one like I’ve never seen before. Look at all the colours… Boy, oh boy, it’s not just on his arm – the one that owns the hand that touched the thing that the Colonel said looked like a giant metallic upside-down rainbow ice-cream waffle cone – it seems to be spreading. I’d better get a closer look. Where’s the scissors? Oh, here… Holy cow! It’s a darn good thing he’s unconscious… if he knew what we were doing right now he’d be totally embarrassed. Gee… look at that… that’s so amazing, there’s no way I can get close enough to fully appreciate it without bumping my nose… Whoa! It’s even… look at that… it’s even there…
I can’t help but notice, though, no one has tried to touch it. Even at the beginning, two days ago, when I woke up to find myself indelicately dressed in my best birthday suit and surrounded by curious faces, they didn’t try to touch it. Oh, Janet did, but she was careful to double-glove and double-gown herself first. Just being prudent, she told me. Prudence… Jack says I don’t have any of that. Even now that Janet has confirmed that it’s not transmissible, the only people who actually touch it – touch me – are the medical staff, and they still wear gloves. Nobody else has even tried… of course, that might be mostly because since the nurses pulled that psychedelically painted urinal joke on me, I’ve been glaring at everbody so hard that they probably think I’m on the verge of violently attacking them. Well, actually, I have to admit… it was apropos. Even my urine is a swirl of dilute primary colours, a lazily buoyant kaleidoscope of twisted strands all suspended and entwined. Before they took out the catheter, people actually came in specifically to sit on the ground and watch the gentle motion of the fluid in the collection bag. Sam sat there for almost an hour yesterday. I look like a washed out version of a Peacock Butterfly, minus the black, of course. Gently muted reds, oranges, yellows, blues, a little bit of pale violet here and there… I may look like a butterfly, but I feel like an idiot. Why do I do stuff like this? Jack keeps telling me all the time – has been, for over two years now – not to touch anything that I don’t already have intimate physical knowledge of… Gosh, I wonder if that includes Sa… oh, never mind. I’m a curious person. Really, really curious. All my life, that curiosity has been both a blessing and a curse. Without it, I wouldn’t be the anthropologist/archaeologist/linguist/explorer that I am… I wouldn’t be here, at the SGC, doing the things I am both compelled and love to do, with the people who have come to mean so much to me. Hell, without it, the SGC itself might not even be here. On the curse side… well, Jack has a lot to say about that. I won’t even bother castigating myself further by being explicit about the downside. I guess the real issue here isn’t why I do stuff like this, it’s why I don’t not do stuff like this. Janet says that for a man of my intelligence and experience, that by now I ought to know better, and seeing as I apparently don’t know any better… Well, apparently she thinks I’m a hopeless case. Jack, of course, is always ranting at me about risk assessment, and judgement, and exercising some self-control. Boy, I… I just don’t know what to say. I do tend to get a bit single-minded about some things, and I am very persistent about following my intuitions. But hey, all in all those qualities have been more helpful than harmful in a lot of situations we’ve found ourselves in. I mean, I’m not stupid, and I like to think that I’m pretty adaptable. When I think of all the horrible things that have happened to me over the last few years, all the pain, both physical and emotional… well, I adjust… I, cope. So, why can’t I adjust my behavior when I run across the latest fascination? This morning, in yet another instant replay of his recurrent rant of the last two days, Jack asked me what it would take for me to finally get it into my head that I need to use some discretion. He thinks I’m too impulsive for anyone’s good. When he said that, Janet just smiled and offered the opinion that maybe I’m just one big mess of instinctive reactions; that maybe, when it comes to the things that really turn my crank, I’ll never learn. The look she got from Jack held the promise of something to be truly feared, should she continue along that vein. Unsurprisingly, she decided she had other patients to attend to just then. I guess I can be kind of impulsive at times, but I’m not really sure that’s what it is – impulsivity – that makes me leap before I look. I get, well, passionate about things… I have an overwhelming need to know, to feel, things. I don’t know, maybe Janet is more right than Jack… It’s like I’m a moth drawn to a flame… at least, it feels just like that to me. I remind myself, everytime we set out on a mission, to keep hold of the reins, but then I see something or hear something interesting and… and, I just find myself doing things. And I do feel, most of the time, like I’m actually flying. I get an incredible high from being suddenly confronted with a tantalizing unknown, from chasing after knowledge and discovering new and wonderful truths. I’ve got a lot of that kind of flying to do… it’s part of my very soul, it’s what I live for. Yup. Like a moth to a flame… which, of course, is a highly instinctive behavior; quite impossible for that to in any way be a product of learning from experience. For obvious reasons. God. You know, I sure hope that in fact Jack is the one who’s more right than Janet… impulsivity or a lack of discretion can be dealt with, but the other… the thought that I might be destined by my instincts to be just like a moth, flying without conscious thought or awareness into flames, is worrisome even to me. Because like I said, I’ve got a lot of flying to do just yet… And dead moths don’t fly.
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