ATONIEK ARMBANDS: An advanced piece of wearable alien technology created by a long-dead culture,
which grants its user heightened strength, speed, and other enhancements.
The Atonieks appear to have created the devices to help in a war many millennia ago.
While the technology was remarkably effective the enhancements it provided were short-lived,
leaving their users vulnerable ... likely leading to the downfall of their civilization.
The Atoniek armbands are the invention of an advanced civilization that thrived in the
Milky Way Galaxy many thousands of years ago, before the rise of the Goa’uld.
The technology enhances more or less all of the wearer’s natural abilities – not only
strength and speed but also visual acuity, mental dexterity, and more.
The Tok’ra archaeologist Anise spent her career studying the Atoniek, hoping one day
to find surviving samples of the armbands that could be studied and put to practical
use against the Goa’uld.
Eventually she succeeded, only to discover that the devices would not work at all on
a Tok’ra subject.
She turned to the Tok’ra’s allies on Earth, enlisting the human members of SG-1 for human
trials.
The Atoniek armband is metallic in appearance, and locks over a subject’s forearm.
The device injects the subject with a unique virus, which appears to serve as a means of
interfacing with the wearer’s physiology.
Thus a low-level fever is typical during use, and the technology requires several hours
before the interface is fully realized.
This allows the user to gradually acclimate to their growing strength and other enhancements.
When the armband has reached its full potential, an indicator on its center will illuminate
with a solid green light.
The device’s use of an injected virus to interface with its wearer also explains why
the Tok’ra cannot use the armbands – and why Goa’uld and Jaffa would also likely
find them useless.
The Goa’uld symbiote’s natural healing abilities appear to be so effective that the
armband will not even clamp onto the forearm at all, likely because the viral interface
is instantly rejected by the host body.
Because the Atoniek armband so dramatically increases a person’s speed, one side effect
is a near constant hunger – since their metabolism has to work overtime to keep up
with the calories their body is burning.
Because the armband radically enhances the wearer’s natural abilities, while also making
them feverish, users may end up with an inflated sense of their own power and indestructibility.
Users may place their own desires above others – acting more impulsively, neglecting the
orders of their superiors, or charging headlong into dangerous situations.
Aside from this altered mental state, the armband technology suffers from two additional
drawbacks.
First, once the device has been fully activated it is evidently impossible to remove.
This may be because the injected virus creates a physiological bond between the device and
the body.
So long as the virus is spread throughout the system, the armband is held firmly in
place.
Second, because it depends upon the virus to interface with the body and enhance its
abilities, the armband will also only be effective so long as the virus is allowed to proliferate
throughout the body.
As a user’s immune system begins to beat back the virus the person will be left feeling
ill – and eventually, collapse from exhaustion.
With the viral load compromised, the armband will fall off completely – potentially leaving
a warrior in the middle of a compromising situation.
And because the body has now produced significant antibodies against the virus, the technology
cannot be used again by the same person.
SG-1 themselves experienced this after taking the armbands into the field.
Jack O’Neill, Samantha Carter, and Daniel Jackson used their enhancements to infiltrate
a fortified Goa’uld shipyard, destroying a new prototype battleship being constructed
by Apophis.
But when the armbands failed during the mission the team found themselves trapped behind enemy
lines, and barely escaped with their lives.
Thus the armbands themselves may have contributed to the Atonieks’ downfall millennia ago.
Had the devices been deployed among their armed forces to any large degree, the Atoniek
armies soon would have found themselves weakened and surrounded by their enemies.
The very technology devised to help them win their conflict might be responsible for their
eventual extinction.
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