Thank goodness that's over, Jon O'Neill thought to himself. Well, I lasted long enough to graduate anyway. Longer than last time around, he reflected.
Nevertheless, make a note to self. Once is enough. Not even when being driven demented by Jack Snr will you ever suggest redoing High School - or anything else - again. EVER.
No repeat of Academy. No repeat of being a junior officer. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to redo something he had already done in his past. Well, Jack Senior's past. Almost the same thing.
Oh, it hadn't been that bad really. Primary mission objectives accomplished after all. Sort of.
He found himself trying to justify himself to himself. Better than doing it to his other self. Well, anyway, he needed to rehearse his lines.
OK, so it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Treat High School as prep for a long term penetration mission - learn the language of the natives, learn the lie of the land, the unspoken cultural assumptions. In short, learn how to blend in.
After all, if he had a sixteen year old's body, he needed to be able to relate to other sixteen year olds. And to learn how they related - or didn't - to his 'own' generation. True, he'd managed to get away with playing the role his mind still told him he ought to, briefing a bunch of SGC pilots on the new X302s.
But I only got away with it because they had already been briefed to expect weirdness, he admitted to himself. And because I was the only one with the knowledge they needed. He didn't kid himself that he could get away with it again. For a starter, he had to convince George to trust him again - and George had yet to recover from his violation of a direct order to stay away from the X-302 briefing.
Oops, he thought, scratch out George. That's General Hammond to you kiddo, he reminded himself.
So he was now full bottle on youth culture. Yep, he, an opera loving child of the baby boomer generation could now SMS with the best of them, knew what a muggle was, could name the American idol. Hell, he even knew the lyrics of an Eminem so-called song.
The only little problem had been whom he had blended in with. First time around, he'd been one of the in crowd, a sports jock and a bad boy. He'd followed the bands of the time. The opera had actually come later, courtesy of some enforced education on the part of one of his early COs.
This time around, it had been much harder. Too old, too inflexible I guess, he thought.
It wasn't the body - it worked just fine. In fact, it really went a long way to make up for having to start over again. He'd really enjoyed taking up hockey again, with no knees threatening imminent destruction if he pushed them too far. He'd even kind of enjoyed the surging hormones in his body. In short, physically, he felt great.
No, it was the mind that was the problem.
School had turned out to be like being locked in an endless, boring and pointless briefing. And briefings weren't his strong point at the best of times. So he'd decided to liven them up.
It had helped that he did actually know most of the answers. He'd been expecting to struggle in class. Sure, he'd done lots of study in the Air Force - it was pretty much compulsory. At the Academy he'd done the standard Batchelor's degree, with a heavy aeronautical engineering focus. When he'd moved out of flying, after Vietnam, and into being an SF, he'd always known he had to keep up his foreign language competency levels - or face getting the boot. And as he'd moved up the ranks, he'd attended the requisite staff colleges, and picked up his Masters in order to qualify to be a Colonel.
All the same, he was used to thinking of himself as the dumb member of the team. And he'd really wanted to start again so that he could truly understand what Carter was babbling on about. He just hadn't taken into account the fact that being the slower one in a group of geniuses didn't actually mean he really was dumb. At all.
I picked all the courses I stuffed up last time around, he thought plaintively.
Except that it had turned out he really had absorbed more from Carter's techno-babble than he'd ever realized. Must have been by osmosis, he thought. He certainly hadn't been consciously trying to understand her. Well, at least not most of the time.
And it had turned out that years of report writing - however reluctantly performed - hadn't done any harm to his English skills either.
It hadn't been obvious at first - the textbooks hadn't been familiar, and one or two of the teacher's hadn't really wanted the right answer - just the prescribed one. So he'd started needling the teachers. It had been easy really.
He'd been impressed, though, at how quickly they had diagnosed the problem: viz boredom. It had taken them only a week to decide to advance him two years to the final term of the final year of High School. The Air Force were going to be pissed that their little babysitting scheme was only going to last such a short time, he'd thought.
Even after he'd joined the final year class though, he'd been able to top the class with ease.
It really hadn't helped that, at first at least, he really hadn't known how to relate to his new peer group. Nor did they deal well with people who acted like their parents. Grandparents actually, he admitted to himself. 'Gross' had been the assessment of his greater interest in the female teachers - the older ones - rather than the girls in his class. Oh he'd learnt eventually - but by then it was too late.
Which had led him inevitably to be part of the geeks group.
So now, he was a fully paid up member of Generation Y. And Generation Yers were technologically literate. As a result, he knew how to hack into a computer. Even a very secure computer.
He wondered how many of his former colleagues would take up the invitation - currently emblazoned onto every screen in the SGC - to attend his graduation. He hoped George would.
© February 2004 The characters mentioned in this story are the property of Showtime and Gekko Film Corp. The Stargate, SG-I, the Goa'uld and all other characters who have appeared in the series STARGATE SG-1 together with the names, titles and backstory are the sole copyright property of MGM-UA Worldwide Television, Gekko Film Corp, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions and Stargate SG-I Prod. Ltd. Partnership. This fanfic is not intended as an infringement upon those rights and solely meant for entertainment. All other characters, the story idea and the story itself are the sole property of the author.