Destiny chair interface

From The Stargate Omnipedia

Destinychairinterface.jpg

Technology on board the Ancient deep-space exploration ship Destiny, which serves as a point of interface between the ship's control systems and a human member of the crew. The chair stands in the center of the ship's Control Interface Room. When a person sits in the chair, a set of nodes connect to his or her temples and allow for direct mental access. There are no buttons or other manual controls on the unit -- rather, the user's hands are hand down with physical restraints.

The exact function of the chair, and the amount of access it gives the person to the ship's systems, remains something of a mystery. It has been very dangerous to the ship's crew thus far, as the scientists from Earth attempt to figure out how to use it. The first person to sit in the chair was Dr. Franklin, who ended up in a near-catatonic state for several weeks.

After that incident Dr. Nicholas Rush and his team added safeguards: a buffer to slow down the transfer of information, and a limit to the range of the user's brain that the device can access. This allowed Rush to use the chair safely -- not to fully access the ship's systems, but to retrieve a single, key piece of information about how they might crack the computer system's master password.

Rush suggested that the chair will not interface with a non-human, and will even filter out non-human elements from someone who has been infected. At least the latter part of this was a ruse, however, so that he could convince Everett Young and the others that Chloe Armstrong had been cured.

The chair interface is a predecessor to the Ancient repository of knowledge, an Ancient device discovered in two different places in the Milky Way Galaxy. That device downloads a library of information from the Ancient civilization into the user's mind. It is probably also an early version of the Ancient control chair, technology that uses a mental connection to give a user access to perform functions such as firing drone weapons and flying the city of Atlantis.

KEY EPISODES

Life - The new crew discovers the chair and the Control Interface Room, prompting Rush to make it the science team's number one priority.
Justice - Possibly manipulated by Dr. Rush, Franklin sits in the chair -- with disastrous consequences for him.
Human - With new safeguards in place, Rush uses the chair to discover a clue to Destiny's master password. But he must endure a lucid dream reliving the darkest period in his life -- the slow death of his wife.
Sabotage - Stuck in the void between galaxies and under attack, Colonel Young tries to use the chair to send Destiny back into F.T.L. But Franklin takes his place, saving the ship ... and completely vanishing from the sealed room.
Pathogen - Rush suggests that he can use the neural interface to purge Chloe of alien influence, later confessing to her that she is not really cured.
Twin Destinies - After accidentally killing Colonel Telford, an alternate version of Dr. Rush decides to plug himself into the chair and go down with the ship as the other Destiny falls into a star.
Hope - To save Ginn and Amanda Perry's disembodied minds, the crew put Chloe into the chair and download the two directly into the ship's computer system.
Seizure - Rush sits in the chair to download his own mind into the ship, in order to enable a romantic encounter with Amanda -- and is trapped when the simulation does not terminate.