LORNE: No sign of the rest of the crew. Whoever attacked the ship must have taken them prisoner.
McKAY: Including our friend.
SHEPPARD: Stop calling him that. It’s weird.
DEX: Then what do we call him?
SHEPPARD: I don’t know. Let’s go with… Todd.
(Rodney grimaces at him.)
SHEPPARD: It’s a guy I knew in college. He was very pale.
McKAY: Todd’s a terrible name!
SHEPPARD: You got a better one?
McKAY: As a matter of fact, I do…
SHEPPARD (interrupting): You know what? Forget I asked.
McKAY: Our old anti-Replicator technology relied on disrupting the bonds between each individual nanite cell. They just collapsed in a pile of dust, right?
SHEPPARD (sarcastically): We’re familiar with the technology, yes.
McKAY: Right. Well, the thinking was always to continue down that line: to break the bonds, to turn them off, sever their connections to one another, because dust we can deal with, right?
CARTER (impatiently): Rodney.
McKAY: We do the opposite. Instead of severing their connections, we significantly dial up their attraction to one another. We turn each cell into an incredibly powerful nanite magnet. You know, one cell attracts another cell, those two attract two more, and as more and more nanite cells bond to the core group, they become stronger and stronger and stronger – to the point where every Replicator cell on the planet, in orbit, all of them, are massed in this, in this, in this giant super-dense blob.
(He grins at the other two. They stare back at him in disbelief.)
SHEPPARD: A “super-dense blob” – that’s your great idea?
McKAY: It is, yes, actually.
SHEPPARD: What do we do with the blob, then? Aren’t we in danger of creating some Godzilla-sized super-Replicator?
McKAY: No – at least, not at first. Look, this is not their normal form of bonding. I mean, it’ll take them some time to adapt, to figure out how to function within the new parameters.
CARTER: How much time?
McKAY: Well, I mean, I hate to speculate.
SHEPPARD: Oh, since when?!
