While studying the stargate unearthed in Antarctica four years ago and, subsequently, two dead Jaffa frozen in the ice for more than two thousand years, Maj. Carter makes an amazing discovery. Over the videolink, she tells Antarctic team biologist Dr. Francine Michaels that she might now have definitive proof that the Antarctic stargate may be one of the oldest in the galaxy � between five million and seven million years old, predating the continental shift on this planet ... and the existence of humanity

Dr. Michaels' fellow researchers, Dr. Wood and Dr. Osborne, come in from the freezing cold announcing they've come up with something. The news is big enough to get Carter, Col. O'Neill, Teal'c, Jonas Quinn and Dr. Janet Fraiser on a plane to the Antarctica site

In the quarantine lab is a block of ice containing what appears to be a woman in her thirties. Dr. Michaels had named her Ayiana, which in Cherokee means "eternal bloom". After Ayiana thaws out, her tissue cells are found to be perfectly intact

When Dr. Fraiser shines her penlight into Ayiana's eye, the pupil contracts. They hook up Ayiana to an EEG and detect Delta waves and a weak heartbeat. Dr. Fraiser is just about to fibrillate when Ayiana's heartbeat rises to normal. She is conscious

According to the age of the ice in which she was frozen, Ayiana is several million years old � just as Carter estimated the Antarctic stargate to be. Teal'c notes that she could be neither Goa'uld nor Jaffa because those races began using an Earth stargate only thousands of years ago. That means she could be one of the Ancients � the species that invented the stargate � and that humans might have evolved from them!

Dr. Michaels falls to the floor. An unknown virus has ravaged her immune system. In hours, Fraiser says, Michaels will be dead. The contagion begins spreading to everyone on the base. It is surmised that the virus came from Ayiana

Meanwhile, Col. O'Neill and Teal'c have rescued Dr. Woods, who had become lost in a raging snowstorm. Woods is in deep hypothermia and near death. Ayiana puts her hands on him and he is cured in moments. It weakens her to do this, yet she readily cures Dr. Michaels as well as everyone else infected by the virus � then collapses before she can cure Col. O'Neill. He and Ayiana are transported back to Stargate Command, where Ayiana dies

O'Neill seems doomed when Thoran, one of Stargate Command's closest Tok'ra allies, offers a solution: There is a Tok'ra symbiote in need of a host. The symbiote can heal Col. O'Neill

"Over my dead body," O'Neill whispers to Carter when she proposes the idea. But he finally agrees when she explains that no Tok'ra symbiote would stay long in an unwilling host

O'Neill's fate lies in the hands of the Tok'ra as he is taken to their world through the stargate

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