stargateficrec | I, Rodney by alex51324 (PG13)

Show: SGA

Rec Category: Alternate Universe
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Elizabeth Weir, Jeannie Miller, Aiden Ford, Radek Zelenka, Carson Beckett.
Pairings:
Categories: GEN
Warnings: Swearing and Violence
Author on LJ:

alex51324
Author's Website: Alex’s Fic Journal
Link: I. Rodney

Why This Must Be Read: This is an AU where Rodney is a robot. Rodney is a self learning robot, in a way like Data in STNG but with emotions. He want to learn, want to work, wants to achieve and wants to fit in. There were many points when reading this fic that almost brought me to tears with the hurt and loneliness he goes through and its not just because he is a genius. Many of the expedition have to take a closer look at both Rodney and themselves as all is not as straight forward as it seems being a robot.

Rodney was not a computer. He didn’t have perfect recall of everything that had ever happened to him, and his memories of his first few months, when his brain was reorganizing almost every day, were especially foggy.

But he was fairly sure that his earliest memory was of the day with the blocks. It was one of the days that Dr. Ingram brought his daughter to the lab—later, Rodney suspected that his wife probably thought he was spending quality time with her, rather than using her as a tiny, unpaid lab assistant.
But that was later, and at the time, he’d only noticed that Jeannie, unlike the real lab assistants, didn’t know enough to keep out of his way. He’d been building a tower, the tallest ever, 48 blocks, and was about to add the 49th—one of his favorite numbers, the square of a prime—but the girl snatched the 49th block out of his hand and knocked down the tower, laughing.

Screaming—he hadn’t been able to talk yet then—he snatched a block up off the floor and threw it at her. Dr. Ingram said something, and pulled Jeannie away, but Rodney didn’t notice, because the block hadn’t behaved the way he had expected it to. He had thought that it would fly in a straight line from his hand to her head. That didn’t happen. Instead, after leaving his hand, the block immediately started to lose altitude, and it hit the ground long before it hit Jeannie.

Not only that, but every block that he threw displayed the same unexpected behavior. He’d spent what must have been the better part of an hour throwing blocks, observing their trajectories.

Years later, he’d learn that Dr. Ingram and his team had written up the incident as their creation’s first temper tantrum, demonstrating that he reacted to frustration in exactly the same way that a real child would.

Rodney never told them any different.