[Inception] Mixture
some Tak 'n Arthur, and Arthur's irrational dislike of forgers.
warnings: post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary Sue). language: pg-13 (for f*** and s***).
pairing: none/gen.
timeline: several months post-movie; the day after Tak.
disclaimer: Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.
notes: 1) i think someone who has chronic insomnia would have problems with a 'standard' somnacin mixture, hence Yusuf's duty of figuring out how heavily Tak needs to be sedated. 2) tempera is a kind of paint. 3) as i recall, 80 fahrenheit (about 27ish C) is actually on the cool end for Mombasa. they average closer to 28C (something like 85F), and get up to 32+C (90F).
Mixture
Yusuf’s fingers make little tinkling noises as he pokes through his case.
The look on Tak’s face is something between skeptical and amused.
Arthur takes the opportunity to watch her-gauge her reactions, get a handle on her.
“Any allergies?” asks Yusuf. The tinkling noises pause as he slips a few tiny glass vials from the case (Tak’s eyes lock on the colored liquids before following stained brown fingers back to the case). “Any daily medications, prescription or otherwise?”
“No and sleep aids,” Tak says. After a moment, she leans forward to peer into Yusuf’s case.
Yusuf makes a noise of disapproval and draws out another vial to look at its label. “How strong?”
“Over-the-counter.”
“Right, let’s try this on for starters.” Yusuf picks up a tiny, slender syringe and fills it in odd proportions from the vials he’s taken from the case, wiping the needle after each one to keep his chemicals pure.
Arthur hooks up to the PASIV-Tak looks away and flinches when Yusuf slips the second lead into her wrist (doesn’t like needles, that’s interesting).
He stands alone in the dream for a long time. After thirty minutes, he comes back up.
“That’s no good,” says Yusuf. He takes up another little syringe, fills it again in a way that looks, to Arthur’s untrained eye, like the same proportions as before. Again, he wipes the needle between vials, as though keeping paint pigments separate.
Abruptly, Arthur realizes that dream-chemistry, unlike most kinds of chemistry, is not a science-it’s an art. It isn’t a matter of precision, it’s a matter of quick and intuitive guesswork, of adjustments after-the-fact. The realization is isolating. Arthur is a technician, not an artist, and there is something very lonely about being a machine among animals. He hasn’t felt lonely since he was nearly five, new backpack on his shoulders while his mother tearfully kissed his cheek and shooed him off to his first day of kindergarten.
How strange.
It’s a drawn-out process, finding a mixture that works for Tak. Despite her size, she’s difficult to put under and difficult to keep under (which is interesting, watching her flicker in and out of a dream in mid-sentence). If she’s going to be a dreamer, she’ll need to be dosed to get any kind of stability.
It takes four attempts. Four mixes, like trying to pick out the perfect color for a room.
When they finally get her asleep for the full five minutes, she builds a city like Arthur’s never seen. It’s some kind of twenty-fourth-century affair, bits of Blade Runner and Fifth Element and Star Wars. She manages several changes before Arthur’s sub cons even start to look interested. He ends the dream before they turn actively hostile.
Tak has a mile-wide grin when they wake up.
“That’s more like it,” Yusuf declares happily. “Tough little customer. Interruptive, circadian arrhythmic…”
“You’ve settled on a mixture?” Arthur asks impatiently.
“Good enough to go on with. Have to see how it goes with more than just the two of you.”
Arthur nods. “Give us another five minutes, then, and we’ll get to work on some proper instruction.”
The next dream is simple-a suburban area overlooking the ocean. It looks like somewhere in Japan, and very nearly deserted…the occasional hunched old lady tending a shop or skinny old man bicycling past them.
“Is this real?” he asks with a frown.
“Most of it.”
“That’s no good.”
She looks at him. “Because I won’t be able to tell it’s a dream? Please. I always know when I’m dreaming.”
Over-confident.
His frown deepens. “Arrogance is a weakness, Miss Shibuya.”
“Tak,” she says. “For God’s sake, Tak. Your pronunciation kills me, Mr. Clarke.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Call me Arthur.”
“Fair enough.”
“Everyone eventually gets lost in a dream, Tak,” he tells her. “Even the best of us. That’s why we use totems.”
“Totems?”
“Some small, unique object that would behave differently in dreams, or that a stranger wouldn’t be able to fake. Something you could carry with you at all times, possibly hidden.”
“A locket you never open, a ring with engraving on the inside,” she guesses. “Maybe a hand-made keychain or a loaded die? And you’d have to make sure no one else knew the trick of it.”
Exactly.
Even though she’s looking away, he nods. “If your totem is ever compromised, or if you suspect it may have been compromised, you should replace it immediately.”
She speeds up to outpace him a bit and turns around to walk backward in front of him. “Why not carry more than one?”
“Needlessly complicated,” he replies. “If you have more than one, that’s more things to force yourself to remember when you’re getting lost.”
After a moment she nods her understanding. “So anyone can get lost. But that means we could use dreams of real places to make it harder for a mark to tell he’s dreaming. All we have to do is make sure we check our totems.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “A valid point. But if you build a place that you have memories of, you could bring in projections from those memories, and that could compromise us.”
Tak pauses at the side of the road, stretches a hand up, starts doodling with the clouds. “Okay. So. Places we’ve seen in photographs, places we’ve only been in passing, places we’ve seen in movies, like I did earlier.”
Yes. In fact, he’s been planning to have her reconstruct things from photographs (carefully, a room or a building at a time). “The danger exists for every person on the extraction team; and while you may know immediately that you’re dreaming, someone else may not.”
As she moves her finger, the clouds over the ocean puff and smear like tempera.
Arthur’s left eyebrow twitches. “Please pay attention.”
“I am paying attention. Duck.”
“Wh-” A soccer ball hits him in the back of the head.
Three young boys cackle and jeer.
Arthur runs a hand over his hair, tugs his jacket straight, kicks the ball back to the little brats.
“Mm-hm,” says Tak, still doodling. “So, what were you going to teach me before you decided to lecture me about dreaming real places?”
“You’ve seen the kind of things you can change without drawing too much attention. The layout of a city. The layout of a building. In unobtrusive places like stairwells, elevators, alleys. There are some things that will piss off even an untrained subconscious in a heartbeat.”
“Fun shit like flying, right?” she sighs. “Playing with physics, changing the rules. Things that would make real people sit up and go ‘what the fuck’…”
Aptly put. He nods again. “But you can get away with a little more if the subject is distracted. Not too much, mind…but a little. Sometimes, that’s plenty. It’s important to keep control of your own thoughts, too, to keep from accidentally changing things-graffiti, posters, radio, television.”
Tak puts the finishing stroke on a prowling housecat, its tail a wisp of windblown cirrus extending from a crouched bank of stratocumulus. “What about people?”
Arthur isn’t sure what she means. “What, change one projection into another?”
She shrugs. “Or yourself. If you can do something like tie a staircase in a knot, can’t you do something simple like change your clothes? Or your hair? Or…everything?”
“Yes and no,” he answers cautiously. “It’s possible in theory, but the average person isn’t observant enough to convincingly mimic another person, and many of the ones who are can’t consciously let go of a lifetime of self-identity.”
Slowly, she turns. And then she isn’t Tak anymore. Arthur’s looking at a copy of himself, except that it’s wearing a shit-eating grin.
He’s never seen someone forge on the second successful dream-sharing session. The fact that she seems to know this is grating (his left eyebrow twitches again).
“As I said, the average person,” he concedes. “It’s not just looks, Tak. If your mannerisms are too far off, it’s the same as anything else the subconscious determines to be out-of-place.”
Tak schools her borrowed features into a stern frown. “Of course,” she says in his voice.
He snorts. “And you’ll have to do better than just the face and voice to fool someone who actually knows me.”
“Give me a few more days.”
Again, over-confident. Annoying. He files away the arrogance as typical of forgers. God, he hates dealing with forgers…their arrogance, their artistic temperament, their eccentricity, their imprecision. His fingers go cold as that odd, isolated loneliness hits him again.
Machine among animals.
He takes a calming breath. “Changing your features to imitate someone else-real or imagined-is called forging, and it has its own dangers. First and foremost, of course, is discovery. The average subconscious reacts very badly to a person literally changing identities. If your control slips, if you’re caught next to the person you’ve forged, if the subject determines you’re a fake in any way, the sub cons will be on you in seconds. The other principle danger is the same as building from memory. Forge too well, and you may come to believe you’re the person you’ve forged.”
She looks out at the ocean. “Can you forge?”
Because her back is turned, he allows a wince. “Not well. I can put on a convincing con, but only as myself. I’m the wrong kind of liar to be a forger.”
“What about Mr. Cobb?”
“I told you, the average-”
“But you’re not average, are you?” she says. “You and Mr. Cobb led a team on an impossible mission and succeeded.”
“Mostly because of the quick thinking of our forger,” Arthur grudgingly admits.
He refuses to mention the fact that they should’ve had months to work a long con, that Eames had only needed to think quickly because Arthur’s research had been imperfect (Arthur still doesn’t know who trained Fischer, but he will, and then he’ll beat the crap out of whoever-it-is).
“So it’s hard, forging?” Tak glances over her shoulder, face set in a speculative expression Arthur has seen himself make in photographs.
He shrugs. “It’s like painting. Some people can do it decently, some people can’t do it at all.”
“And some people can do it very, very well.”
“And like painting,” he goes on, “you’ll need training and practice to get good at it.”
She shifts back to her own shape. “Since you suck at it, I guess I’ll wait for that kind of training.”
He narrows his gaze at her and tells himself that hitting her won’t solve anything.
“Tell me what else I can do with a PASIV machine, Arthur. It was designed to explore the subconscious, right? So…clearly, it could be used for something like psychotherapy. I could talk to a projection of Mr. Cobb and see exactly how you think of him, exactly the reactions you expect of him…”
She catches on quickly. Very quickly.
“Yes,” Arthur confirms.
“And if I were the subject, you could talk to my projection of my uncle to see how I feel about him. The exaggerations would be quite telling, I’m sure. Hm. And if a stray projection appeared, we could tell whose it was by the way it acted. My version of Mr. Cobb would probably be cheerful, absent-minded…with fuzzy pink hair-ties in his pockets and finger-paint stains on his shirt…flinching every time he heard a woman speak French.”
Arthur shrugs.
“You could use it to help coma patients, couldn’t you,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like a question.
“But there wouldn’t be much money in it,” Arthur replies.
Tak twirls a step, like a little girl, and now she’s wearing a Japanese high school uniform. Pleated blue skirt, crisp sailor collar. “Ooh, the practical approach. A neat way to avoid having to talk about your opinion.”
Perceptive. Persistent.
He arches an eyebrow. “I don’t see that my opinion matters. I have a profession, I’m good at it, and it pays well enough to dress me in the clothes I like and board me at the hotels I enjoy. I get a sense of accomplishment from it, the jobs that pay well do so because the people involved on either side are extremely wealthy and often rather amoral, and I give a healthy percentage of that pay to charities. I have no compulsion to be any more directly altruistic.”
She moves her mouth silently, repeating his words to herself (more directly altruistic), almost as if she’s testing the flavor of them, or practicing the cadence of his speech. “Could you use a PASIV for something more mundane?” she asks. “Just to speed up normal processes? Contemplation, philosophy, problem solving, memory training, lessons…”
“Yes, provided you have or can get a good supply of the chemicals. The time-compressive aspect of dream-sharing was the use which interested the United States Government, but one of the original purposes of PASIV technology was intellectual organization.” He’s ready when the boys kick their soccer ball too far again, leans back just enough to dodge (they complain and chase after it). “That’ll be a good exercise in control for you. Sit down for a few sessions and work on consciously putting your thoughts into some media so that you can move them around, organize them, put some away…”
Tak reaches into her shirt and pulls out a key on a chain. She goes to the nearest house, unlocks and opens the front door.
Inside, the house becomes a cozy study, dimensions all wrong for the outside. The girl really is learning fast.
She grabs a book from an overstuffed shelf and opens it, fanning the pages with her thumb (the stuttering noise of paper hitting paper is loud in the snug room). Papers fly free, notes and cards and tidbits, filling the air with the smell of old newsprint.
The fact that she put her thoughts on paper is interesting. She could’ve put sound bites on the radio, video clips on the television, any number of things on a laptop. So she likes hardcopy, handwriting. She probably writes things down in the waking world, too-maybe even on colored sticky notes like these.
Somewhere in the distance, in some nearby room, a music box tinkles out a plaintive little tune.
Arthur watches her sit down on the floor and start shuffling things. The writing varies, but he thinks it’s all hers, in pencil and marker and colored pens.
Whatever she’s doing, she seems enthralled by it, so Arthur leaves her to it. He takes a seat in a leather wingback and tries to plan out a training schedule for her.
Two or three sessions a day, max, to make sure she doesn’t suffer any side-effects from the drugs. Perhaps play with building more semi-familiar locations. Get her used to building from someone else’s blueprints, get her used to learning someone else’s dream. He and Cobb have been tossing around the idea of a cooperative variety of architecture, of multiple dreams that mimic one another or fit together; maybe she and Ariadne could learn to make it work.
And he’ll have to track down Eames; he doesn’t have the first clue how to teach someone to forge. Finding Ariadne will be easy (she went right back to university after the Fischer job), but finding Eames after a job is always a headache…he hides too well (though Arthur hates to admit it), almost jealously protective of his Eames identity, even though it’s just another false name. Maybe it’s been long enough that Eames has stopped bothering to hide. Maybe he’s home in Mombasa, wearing ugly shirts (‘This is what Kenya finds fashionable these days, darling.’) and sipping hot tea in eighty-degree-heat.
Arthur would be a lousy point man if he banked on that chance. He loses track of time, mentally listing out all the contacts to try, all the paper trails to sniff out.
They wake without incident when the timer goes off.
Tak blinks at the hotel suite, and at Yusuf when he leans in to look at her face and check her vitals.
“Enough for today, I think,” Yusuf says. “Let’s wait and see if you suffer any ill effects. If you do, we can make some more adjustments tomorrow.”
She nods slowly, as though she’s having trouble shaking the dream.
Arthur unhooks from the machine and opens the briefcase waiting by his chair. He takes out a handful of postcards and sets them down. “Study those, Miss Tak, and find yourself a totem. Tomorrow, you’ll be building a passable simulacrum of Grand Central Station. Same time.”
She gives him a long, penetrating look that reminds him uncomfortably of the way Saito looked at them from the erroneous carpet in Nash’s dream. It’s a look that says ‘is that the best you’ve got?’ and ‘I’ve got you now,’ and ‘you’ve really underestimated me.’ Then she gathers up the postcards and tucks them into her bookbag. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Arthur.”
.End.
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