Archive Fic: [SGA] A Different Sort of Holy War

[ultranos]

Still digging around for old comment-fic collection.

Title: A Different Sort of Holy War
Author: ultranos
Rating: PG
Characters: Rodney McKay, Sam Carter, hapless tech personnel
Warnings: s4 spoilers, in that Sam is on Atlantis. Is the moratorium on that spoiler over yet?
Notes: written for surreallis's Pornucopia in October 2007. Twas my first fanfic, and I'm only just now remembering to archive it. God, I am such a bad fic-mommy.



Rodney McKay would be lying if he said he wasn't attracted to Sam Carter. She was hot and blonde and really, she shouldn't look that good in BDUs. She was even almost as smart as he was. If he were honest with himself, there were times where he thought she might be smarter, but then something would happen that would debase that notion.

This was one of those times.

"What is that?"

Sam looked up from her laptop screen. She raised an eyebrow. "It's the report I'm sending back to the SGC about the latest --"

"Yes, yes. But that!" He pointed at the screen. "That...abomination!"

Sam stared at him blankly. "What's wrong with my emacs terminal?"

"What's wrong? Oh nothing's wrong with it. It's a perfectly fine operating system, if only it had a text editor."

There was a long pause. Then, Sam put her palm over her eyes. "Oh god, you use vi. Why am I not surprised?"

"Of course I use vi, everyone knows vi is the superior text editor. Why anyone would use emacs is beyond comprehension."

"Are we really doing this? Honestly? I did not come to another galaxy to get into a holy war over text editors, McKay!"

Before Rodney could open his mouth to reply, his radio clicked. "Dr. McKay?" The voice was slightly panicked.

He shot her a 'we are not done with this' look before responding. "This is McKay."

"Oh thank god." The relief in the voice on the other end was palpable. "I'm really sorry, I couldn't stop him, and I told him you'd be pissed, but he wouldn't listen, and it's eating all the RAM!"

"What's eating all the RAM? What are you talking about?"

Rodney looked at Sam, who shrugged and stated "Maybe you should tell him to breathe."

The man on the other end of the radio must have either heard her or realized he needed to calm down because Rodney could hear him take a few deep breaths before responding. "I told Dr. Rodgers that all new software had to be run by you before being installed onto the Atlantis laptops. I told him you hated it when you couldn't just pick up a laptop and have it do what you wanted because 'some incompetent idiot' had messed up the .environment files..."

"Yes, yes. I get that. What did he do?."

The voice on the other end sounded miserable. "He installed Microsoft Office."

There was dead silence in the room as Rodney and Sam just stared at each other in horror. In a very quiet voice, Rodney asked "He did what?"

"He installed Microsoft Office," the voice repeated. "We've been battling Blue Screens of Death for the last ten minutes."

Sam pushed herself away from her laptop, stood up, and was at the door by the time Rodney got there. "It appears I have to go save everyone from horribly designed software." He held out his hand. "Truce?"

She took it. There was a wicked smile growing across her face. "How about I come down and help you reinstall something innocuous that Rodgers could handle? Something like pico?"

Rodney couldn't help but grin as he led her down to the besieged lab. "I like the way you think."

Comments

[mrspollifax.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha!!! Nothing like a common enemy, and all that. And yeah, Rodney totally *would* use vi, and Sam totally *would* use emacs, and ... awesome.

(I used to have this insanely huge set of emacs customizations that I dragged with me from job to job ... wonder if I still have those somewhere? Hehe.)

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's no way in hell the two of them would use the *same* editor. :)

Me, I use emacs. I once got trapped in a vi terminal on a box I was ssh'ed into and couldn't figure out how to exit the damn program. (I had to call someone for help. :) ) That experience kinda turned me off vi, although, to be fair, the key-commands in emacs are probably equally arcane. :)

[audabee.livejournal.com]

I'm only a couple of years late(ish) but I really enjoyed this so much. I should've known that Rodney would be a vi man.

So nice to read a fic that is both geeky and funny. Bravo!