In Violation of Copyright [Part 1 of 2]
.
Also known as the one in which I apply the cinematic principles of Inception to a literary medium. Or, in which I am a dork, as usual, but magnified by 20 due to dream state.
The point is, whatever this is, I am proud of it. And I would love if you read it.
Title: In Violation of Copyright
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: the Dream Team and the subjects of their latest big heist. Background Arthur and Eames something going on.
Words: 16300. Split into two posts.
Rating: Light R
Warning: Horror tropes, violence within dreams, mood whiplash.
Notice: No authors, living or dead, professional or otherwise, were harmed in the construction of this story. At least not as far as I know.
Je ne regrette: Rien.
Summary: They’ve pulled off Inception, and had some time to regroup-but what’s the next step where the exchange of ideas is concerned? (The answer: Intellectual Property.)
In Violation of Copyright
inception
cover art by pinstripesuit
“Then why don’t we make him think he came up with it?”
Of course it’s Eames’ idea. Eames is a fan. Arthur is entirely unsurprised.
“We’ve done it before,” Eames goes on. The workshop in New York is extremely well-lit and, in Arthur’s realistic opinion, indefensible. “The rest of it is a matter of extraction, nothing more by half.”
“Except the part where it’s someone else’s idea.” Yusuf speaks up first. Arthur’s not thankful, but lets the conversation flow. “In order for this to work, we can’t touch the idea. Or even confirm its strength.”
“Or compatibility,” Ariadne adds. “What if it turns out to be something our client can’t use?”
Their client, according to Arthur’s reconnaissance and Saitoh’s explication, if not precisely in that order, is bestselling author C.R. Nottingham. Both the C and the R are false, but the Nottingham is real. It provides Eames and Saitoh with a measure of amusement. Arthur just wondered what kind of symbolism-obsessed bastard was writing this script. Possibly Nottingham himself.
Dom scoffs. “Honestly, if that man managed to write and sell an entire series of books about government conspiracies to poison string cheese, I doubt there’s an idea he can’t write.”
“The string cheese was only in one book,” Eames says. “And it was an allegory.”
“The point is, the man’s a hack.” Arthur looks under his eyebrows at Eames. “And it’s a valid point. We don’t even know if he can use the idea after we plant it, even if it takes. A good idea doesn’t make a valid execution.”
“Spoken like a kindred spirit,” Eames says, and Arthur doesn’t have to roll his eyes to see the smirk across Eames’ stubbled jaw. “You can’t fake an imagination, otherwise we wouldn’t have you.”
“Namely someone who is entirely comfortable using what’s in the minds of others.”
“Well then you and Nottingham should get on famously.”
“Whether he accepts the transfer or not, all the component operations can be done,” Dom interrupts, which Arthur praises inwardly as a good sense of narrative, not to mention professionalism. “We can extract an idea, we can conceal an idea, we can plant an idea and make Nottingham give it to himself. It’s not exactly simple. It’s never simple. But it’s possible.”
Saitoh nods. He’s standing opposite where Dom is pacing, everyone else sitting in chairs wheeled to all angles. (Arthur has been drawing trajectories between them for the last ten minutes.) “Mr. Nottingham’s representatives are willing to pay for the possibility. Mr. Nottingham does not, and cannot, know about the installation.”
“Neither can whoever we extract from,” Ariadne says. “We'd have to keep them separated the whole way down.”
She gets up and goes to the dry-erase board, which everyone has to face now (except Dom, still pacing, and Arthur is counting the song for him in his head, first in four at quarter-equals-sixty, to equals dotted quarter, to eighth equals one-eighty, eighth never equals eighth). She picks up the nearest pen and uncaps it. “We have to take Nottingham down at least-“ Squeak. That pen leaves nothing behind on the board. Ariadne shakes her head and picks up a new one, orange. “We have to take him down at least three levels.” This pen works, and she draws;
“For the extraction to work, we have to take the person we’re stealing from down two;
“And for us to make the transfer, since you can’t bring an idea into the real world, if you can make it take a tangible form at all, both the level ones have to be the same place.” She erases both of them and puts a new one somewhere between the two columns;
“And that’s also going to spread us out,” Ariadne finishes. “At least one person has to be kicked out of two-prime to bring the idea to Nottingham’s path, and then get put back under.”
“And someone has to stay with the person we’re stealing from after the heist. That means different levels of sedation in an otherwise shared dream.” Yusuf considers, curling his fingers together but only pulsing one of them. “It can be done.”
“We have enough people for all the levels.” Ariadne is staring at the board again, pen in hand, leaking its toxic scent into the air. Arthur pictures her drawing neural networks and smiles. She taps the pen tip onto the board a couple of times, then adds an R over the 1 and turns all her lines into arrows. “If it’s that delicate, Yusuf has to be present all through two-prime, which means sending three people into two-prime besides the subject.”
“And one of them has to be me,” Dom says, and stops pacing (Arthur has managed to subdivide the quarters into quintuplets) to join Ariadne at the board. “It’s my dream. I steal the idea, pass it off to Yusuf and whoever gets to carry it down Nottingham’s path, and stay there with the subject until you kick us both up.”
Dom doesn’t go past the second level any more, and it’s taken him eight months to get even that far. Arthur calls it prudence. He doesn’t listen to what anyone else calls it.
“Which means I’m the third man in this company.” Eames waves to Dom, who has taken the pen from Ariadne and added his name to the arrow. Dom adds Eames’ too. “I’m the only one who can carry it down.”
“No you’re not,” Arthur says instinctively.
It’s a bad idea. “Fine, not the only one. Just the best.” He swats the back of Arthur’s chair. “Stick to what you’re good at, Darling, that’s why you’re here.”
The flowchart reads;
and Dom still has the pen.
“It is why you’re here,” Dom says, but at least his smirk is more private, more effacing than aggressive. “We need you to run with our ideas.”
-
The conductor hands Nottingham back his ticket. “Transfer at Croton-Harmon.” Nottingham nods and goes back to basking in the glow of his laptop with his hands poised impotently over the keys. Of course it’s a Mac, Eames thinks, and continues to hide behind a copy of Nottingham’s own Following Eyes. It’s actually rather boring the second time around. Brain popcorn gets stale too, it seems.
After a few more glares from the sun shining on the Hudson river, unmitigated by the plexiglass windows of the train, Eames gets up and stretches, tight below the belt. “Hey,” he says, affecting a New Yorker’s tone (as close to generic as is possible for a city with nearly as many accents as bloody London), “could you watch my stuff a sec?” He puts the book down on his suit jacket, deliberately.
He gives Nottingham a moment to glance at the book, waits for wistfulness or recognition or ire or-
“Hey. You’re him!” Eames leans over the off-blue vinyl seat. “You’re C.R. Nottingham. Holy shit, I wish my partner was here, he loves you even more than I do!”
Nottingham’s skin is too dark to blush, but by that expression he probably doesn’t anyway. He says, “Thanks,” with a kind of self-deprecating shyness that isn’t genuinely either.
“Do you usually take this line? I thought you were back in Canada, I had no idea you were still in New York.”
“I’m spending the summer in Westchester.”
“Awesome, is it for research?”
“I don’t know.” That sounds true, so Eames doesn’t press it, in or out of character. “But I do enjoy the quiet,” Nottingham goes on, looking back at the computer. An old document is up, long, and evident, and complete. “Maybe something will come of it.”
Eames nods, eagerly. “Maybe. Hey, um, I do have to, uh, go, but when I come back will you sign my book? Seriously, Bradley’s your biggest fan, and he got me hooked too.”
“Sure,” Nottingham says like he expected just that, and fishes in his laptop case for a pen. “To Bradley and...?”
-
“Mervin?”
“Milton was too obvious,” Eames says, propping his feet up on Arthur’s thighs for all of two seconds before Arthur shoves them down. He smirks. Arthur would call it insufferable if he hadn’t endured it for so long already. “At least to an American.”
“He’s Canadian.”
“He’s more American than I am.” Eames slides Arthur the book a little more pointedly, tapping his fingers on the signature on the inside cover. “Get your graphology on, or whatever it is you do on point.” Just for show, he lifts his knees, bringing his feet up on their shining snakeskin toes, and executes a port de bras in four-and-a-halfth position.
Arthur takes the book. He hasn’t quite gotten to this one yet. Nottingham has published sixteen books and twelve short stories, and Arthur’s read about two thirds of the way through all of them in a week. Honestly, the rest of the work is much more interesting. Nottingham’s plots are, generally, whodunnits with the duns and the its shuffled through, whostoleits, whokilledits, whoinfectedits, whoreanimatedits-well, only one of those-and the its range from an unpopular senator to the aforementioned string cheese. Currently, he is reading a whonukedit. He suspects China.
“So,” Arthur says, proceeding to use the book as a coaster for his bottle of mineral water, “tell me about your hero.”
Eames laughs. He’s dropped the mocking ballet to sprawl in his chair, doing a peculiar swivel that moves the wheels without apparently jostling the seat. Arthur is briefly captivated. “First off, he’s no one’s hero, least of all mine. Sure I like the books-they’re a good read in airports, and when you’re coming off a job that actually used the rest of your brain. Some people knit. I read pop horror.”
“You say knit like it’s a bad thing.”
“Let me guess, your grandmother taught you.”
“Actually, I don’t know how at all.” Arthur admits, though, “I like to watch. Old ladies on busses somehow manage to look like they’ve gone over to Buddha when they do it.” Besides, if Eames is as thorough as they both know he is, he knows precisely what Arthur does when he’s bored. But this isn’t about boredom.
Eames gives him a smirk that wrinkles in enough at the top to quantify as a smile, with a decent enough margin of error. “C.R. Nottingham. His real name’s an open secret-the first two short stories were published under Alexander Nottingham. Most people think the C.R. comes from Christopher Robin.” Eames is fiddling with something in his pocket, probably his totem? Does he have one now? Arthur concentrates on Eames’ face. Propriety is propriety. “Born in Vaughan, near Toronto, started his humble career as a janitor at York University and probably would have been promoted, except an American publisher bought The Next Tallest Elm. Suddenly the bloke finds himself living in Upper Manhattan in the eighties with a new life complete with wife, kids, and yearly book deals. It’s a wonder cocaine never found its way into the mix.”
“Never?”
“Not his drug of choice. Hospitalized for alcohol poisoning four times, twice in the last year. Ours will make the fifth. The first two didn’t stop him writing. At this point, only the fans notice, considering he shits out film adaptations. His representation’s paying us in royalty percentages instead of hard cash for a reason.”
Arthur makes a few interpretive mental notes on how to find the author in the book, how to determine whether it’s conscious or referential.
Eames is still fiddling, but the magical swiveling chair has ceased to be magical, just swiveling. “So, that’s enough for a primer. What have you found en pointe?”
“Things we should anticipate in Nottingham’s subconscious,” Arthur starts, after a gulp of water. “Locomotion, French art deco, and predictable twist endings.”
-
After a week, the chart looks like this;
the obnoxious orange dry-erase marker having run out of ink on day six, or between, when someone forgot to cap it. Back at the hotel, Dom’s shoes are still soaked through from running out to get new markers yesterday. Ariadne is back at the chart, penning in her own name right at the top.
“On any level that both the subject and Nottingham are on, we need at least two of us to keep them separated,” she says, putting the pen cap in her mouth and capping it that way. “One of them’s Arthur-but Arthur can’t stick by Nottingham if we need him to believe level one isn’t a dream. I’m the other one by default, but if we play it straight that’s going to cause problems when I follow Nottingham down the other two levels. There are two ways around it.”
“The first one’s that you put all our work on Miss Charles to some good use,” Dom says, then waits to make sure Ariadne comes to the correct conclusion on her own.
“Level one is too sensitive for that.” She smiles. She knows he’s testing her. Good. “The way around it would be to take this down to the same level two, merging two and two-prime, but that would pit Nottingham against the subject and actually make things harder.”
She looks rather pointedly at Eames, and rubs a twinge of saliva off the marker cap. Dom is reminded that Miles told him Ariadne was better.
Eames laughs. “If you wanted to learn a little forgery, love, you could have asked.”
-
“Her name is Inoue Miyu.” Saitoh pours Arthur coffee out of a French Press. The way he does it, Arthur expects Saitoh to mix the aspartame in for him without asking how much. “She is an Administrative Assistant in the New York branch of one of my companies. You do not need to know which.”
It turns out that Saitoh doesn’t mix the sweetener into Arthur’s cup, but he does pull his hand away to reveal the correct number of packets. Arthur accepts the French Press from Saitoh with one hand and goes for the weighted die in his pocket with the other. He pours. “Why her?”
“I know that she possesses a wealth of ideas.” Saitoh drinks his coffee black and, as it turns out when Arthur is done pouring, in very small sips as if he expects it to be stronger. “She is so rich that she has been using company time and resources to invest them.”
“This would be a very different heist if I took that literally.”
The die in Arthur’s pocket feels right, the dimples and the heft line up, but he won’t roll it here to check. He lets it back into his pocket and starts tearing apart the packages of aspartame, all three at once, over the still surface of the coffee.
“She is writing fiction at her desk,” Saitoh says, “most of it not for publication. Her time at work is spent online with a group of similarly unpublished writers and bloggers. I have no doubts as to the extent of her imagination. One idea, even a powerful one, would not be missed.”
There’s a spoon. Arthur picks it up and stirs the coffee. The windows of the office shake once, powerfully-a pigeon has just dive-bombed it and falls on top of the air conditioner, unconscious or dead. Arthur and Saitoh both stare at that for a moment.
Saitoh drinks another sip of coffee. “She will also be easy to deceive and subdue, in reality and level one. I have noticed that to be true of people with exceptionally vivid imaginations.”
-
“The first thing you have to wrap your mind around is that Forgery is Architecture of the self.” They are walking in a dream-neither of theirs, to be safe, Yusuf is testing his compound for duration on Dom and Eames just thought to kill a couple of birds with one stone-and Dom has given them a little too much to work with. Eames takes Ariadne by the wrist, thumb at the small, and leads her out of the projection-filled elementary school auditorium and into the lobby. It is covered in tiles that beg in some particolored way or another for world peace. Only the two teenaged volunteers manning the snack table for the school play are out there, and they pay Eames and Ariadne no mind at all. “That’s how I caught on, at any rate. I was an Architect first.”
“I thought we were all Architects first,” Ariadne says.
Eames smirks. A pair of doves on the painted tile wall pull their olive branch a little tighter. “Have you ever built a character?”
Ariadne thinks about it a moment, then nods.
“Who’s the most recent?”
“French class, I think. We have-had, I guess-to write skits to practice grammar and present them in front of the class.”
“Have you latched on to any archetype in particular?”
“Other than the American Exchange Student who doesn’t know anything?” She laughs, plays with the collar of her shirt. “Last time I played the receptionist at a hospital. We learned all the vocabulary for socialized medicine.”
“God bless the education system.” Eames gives her a little shove toward the near bathroom doors, opposite the auditorium and the little folding table with teenagers and tupperware. “I want you to walk out of that WC as a French medical receptionist. You have ten seconds.”
Ariadne, evidently, assumes that the ten seconds start now instead of from the moment the door closes, because she scurries off like she’s just been swatted on the bum by a nanny. (Eames considers conjuring this up at a later scenario.) Eames counts to ten, not caring precisely how long the seconds are, and has his eyes on the door when Ariadne emerges from the bathroom.
She says, in confident Parisian French, “I am sorry, but we do not accept your insurance card here.”
The teenagers shriek in fear and throw cupcakes at her.
“A little too ‘French’,” he tells her, once he’s kicked himself out to catch up. “Too much archetype, not enough article. Your characterization was incomplete enough to be a Matisse.”
-
“There are a couple of ways I can do this,” Yusuf is explaining, and only to Dom, because sometimes things work that way. Dom’s kids adore Yusuf. They’d still be climbing all over him and pulling his hair if Dom hadn’t put them to bed. (James wishes his hair was curly. Dom remembers that when James was really small, just born, it was, and Mal would wind each curl around her fingers to train it. Sometimes after long car rides or picnic afternoons the boy would look like he just stepped out of the Italian Baroque.) “No matter which, I have to conceive of the sedatives without dreams to conceive of them within. I think it’s a little more precise that way. I mean, I can build them in the dream to time off exactly as planned, but if I’ve never managed it in the real world I’ll worry about it, and worrying about it will give Arthur a hard time on the level with me under, not to mention the rest of us.”
Dom blinks instead of nodding, and traces his thumb over the rim of his glass. It’s too dry and shallow to sound. “And the mixes you’ve gotten aren’t perfect enough?”
“The compounds themselves are fine,” Yusuf says. His glass is plain empty, except for ice. Dom gets up to go to the refrigerator door and fill it. (The refrigerator is filled with whatever the kids want for snacks, but Dom still hasn’t cooked more than breakfast and grilled cheese for them in this hotel. They love New York, they’re excited to spend so much time here, Philippa said the Statue of Liberty looks like Mommy, Dom thinks the nose is too straight and the forehead’s too unmarked and Mal never wore that much green.) “And I’ve even worked around the problem of depth and strength. If we wait, and actually set up the top level to accommodate us for only a half-hour like Arthur wants us to, we won’t get sent to limbo if we’re killed, so we can keep using violent kicks. It’s the method of distribution that has to change. Either I have to wire the PASIV on level one so that you get the lion’s share of the dose and stay under until we kick you, or I have to sedate you additionally before we all go under together and let the PASIV just make up the difference.”
“So lay down the pros and cons.”
“Well, the con gets laid down either way,” Yusuf says with a smile. He takes back his glass and drinks almost all of it. “If we give you half of the sedative before everyone else, you’re out for most of level one, and if I’m administering it that leaves me out too.”
“Not that you all can’t handle it on your own,” Dom says.
“Not that we can’t. But it’s always better if we don’t. The fix for that is if I minimize the time you have to spend under and just hit you with something like we did to Fischer on the plane. If I make it slow-acting enough, I mean.”
“And the cons of the other way around?”
“It means that Arthur has to spend a lot of time monitoring the dispersal of the sedative. It’s not just a matter of making your IV a little wider than the rest. There’s a reason you don’t try to take out a cheetah with an elephant gun.”
“And because we’re leaving Arthur and Ariadne up there alone, and Nottingham’s the subject, he’s not going to have much time to watch. I get it.”
“I mean, Arthur can do it,” Yusuf says. There’s only ice in his glass, but he tries to drink the dregs anyway. Dom just holds on to his glass. “And he will if he has to.”
“But telling him to do it from the start means he’ll do that and a thousand other things.”
“It’s what he does best.”
Yusuf chews on his ice. Dom is glad that the kids aren’t watching, it might make them pick up the habit.
-
“Use a different color.”
At Arthur’s-well, it’s not a request, and he’s grateful Eames acknowledges that-Eames switches out the blue marker for the green. He puts the cap neatly in the insert at the back of the pen. Arthur watches it twist. “Time in level one, half an hour at most,” he says, and scrawls it in at the corner of the 1. “Actually, no. We have to reckon this by how long Dom needs to extract and transfer.”
“Level one’s going to scare the subject up, no matter how careful we are,” Dom says. “An hour under, all three of us. Once you leave, I’ll just stay.”
Eames markers in, 00:01:00 next to 2-prime. “That subdivides into-”
“Three minutes on level one,” Arthur says, tipping back his chair and not looking up from Courier 56, “and if you think we all need half an hour on level one and give us ten minutes to get two-prime set up, Dom should be prepared to stay under for another five hours and forty minutes.”
Eames throws the pen at Arthur. It leaves a streak, presumably green, down Arthur’s left temple.
Fine. Arthur closes the book, un-tilts his chair, and goes to the board. He erases everything Eames wrote so far-his handwriting is illegible anyway. He doesn’t bother to check if Eames is smirking or scowling. Eames can probably manage both at the same time, or maybe there’s an expression that has both meanings that Arthur can’t describe.
Arthur writes, and says, “Thirty minutes on level one, less ten for establishment. That should be enough to get us on both paths. Three minutes under at level one for an hour at level two-prime to conduct the extraction on two-prime, and seventeen minutes equals five hours and forty minutes grace for Dom to stay there. Two minutes to make the transfer on one, leaving fifteen maximum equating to five hours maximum on Nottingham’s two, of which you need how much, Eames?”
“To talk him open? Two hours.”
“Six minutes on level one, two hours on level two, leaving nine on one, three grace hours for Yusuf on two, and you and Ariadne a maximum of sixty hours on level three.”
He counts backward.
“Which leaves you alone with Nottingham for thirteen minutes before we put him under, Ariadne. Twelve if he cooperates.”
“I never get tired of watching you do that,” Eames says. “What’s next, a reading of the phone book?”
“Starting with the Fs and skipping to the Us.” Arthur keeps writing.
He licks his fingers and tries to rub the ink off his cheek.
-
“Good evening.”
Eames is no longer alone in a white room with no windows, just a one-way mirror he’s on the wrong side of and an open door into a dark hallway. His interrogator comes around to the long side of the rectangular table that Eames has his cuffed hands propped on.
Said interrogator is a distinctive redhead, with the authoritative sensibility that was fetishized in film noir and that people still make the tragic mistake of falling for in real life. She wears a cobalt tweed skirt-suit that reminds Eames of Saitoh’s samurai-bespoke more than anything else, except for how columned her body is. Eames will pick at the sartorial choices later. “Is it evening?”
“It is what I say it is,” she says. She sits and arranges several files, and he sees why she picked the long side of the table to lay out the charges. “Detective Lafayette, FBI.”
“That name’s going to give him pause, love.”
“We can change it,” Ariadne says in the one-way mirror. “How’s the rest?”
Eames lope-crosses his legs beneath the table, drops the handcuffs, and prepares to wait another ten seconds for her to change. “If you’re going to keep that hip-to-waist ratio, wear trousers.”
-
“What does she write?”
Saitoh slides Dom, Eames, and Yusuf matching files in ice-blue sleeves. Arthur already has one, which Dom can see he is reading with about as much gusto as the endless hail of Nottingham. Dom just opens his own set. Saitoh has included a cover page and index.
“First, here are the websites she visits. As many of these are social networking sites with protected accounts, I have taken the liberty of accessing them and including the relevant information in the appendices. The rest, she and her associates display publically.”
Eames thumbs through the packet. Dom is still on the table of contents. Yusuf is laughing nervously. “She does this on company time?”
“Yes.”
“Well they do say an idle brain is the devil’s playground.” He turns a page and chuckles. “Can’t imagine what she’d do if hers wasn’t swinging.”
Dom reads around the text, tapping his fingers and skimming the page. “Where does she go to write when she isn’t at work?”
“Cafés,” Arthur answers, farther in the packet than any of them, without the faintest trace of a blush (like Yusuf’s) or a smirk (like Eames’). “Innocuous ones, indoors.”
Dom considers this a moment. “I’ll build one.”
He is aware of everyone, Arthur included, putting down the files and looking straight at him. He wrings his hands and decides, no, this is real, and they’re only looking at him because he said something important.
Saitoh’s the only one to actually question it. “You will?”
Dom looks him in the eye and blinks instead of nodding.
-
Arthur stares.
No one asks if anyone else is ready.
-
Miyu’s computer explodes. There was barely a tendril of smoke to alert her to it. First she gasps, then she screams, and then suddenly she’s surrounded by her coworkers and the clients and anyone else who can move. By the time Dom and Saitoh reach her, she’s still staring at the monitor, as if she’s wondering why it’s intact when the tower blew. Her reflection is wide-eyed, well made-up, pale as a silk sheet. She isn’t looking at the slashes on her shins at all. Blood stains her footless tights a darker black around the tears.
By the time they get her to the ground floor, the ambulance is already waiting. She’s clinging to the neck of the man carrying her and crying and her hair is coming out of its bun. Dom has been seeing that style with the braided bangs everywhere in the city. They load her up into the ambulance. Saitoh tells her she’ll be all right, it is his company, he will take responsibility for her and make sure her parents know. Yusuf locks eyes with Saitoh, and then with Dom, before the back doors of the ambulance close. He’s already giving her oxygen.
“Remind me never to work for you again, if that’s what you do to your employees,” Dom says as he slides into the driver’s side of Saitoh’s car and prepares to chase the ambulance.
Saitoh only smiles.
-
Ariadne says, “Put him down there,” so Arthur wheels Nottingham’s stretcher into place, with space for a curtain between. She and Yusuf have already strung Miyu up, and Eames moves in to help Arthur with Nottingham. There’s space for an entire window and hospital curtain between the two beds, and the sound the stretcher makes skittering across the tile floor would probably be enough to wake anyone up.
“Last one up draws the curtain,” Eames says to the general assembled, but looks to Arthur just as he tapes the IV down on Nottingham’s hand. “And the first one up checks.”
“Aren’t you lucky you never have to close any doors,” Arthur tells him, then looks around for a chair to sleep in. Yusuf’s already claimed the plush brown one by the foot of Miyu’s bed, and Ariadne’s moving hers into place nearest the PASIV. Saitoh’s connecting her. Dom is stretching out on the floor. There is a third empty stretcher, which won’t be empty any more when Eames claims it, which takes him all of the space between two peaks on Nottingham’s heart monitor.
“I’ve slept tighter,” he offers, hand outstretched, eyes squinted against the lowlight that the curtain doesn’t block.
Arthur unfolds a plastic chair and plunks it pointedly down on the tile. After a moment sitting-the chair really isn’t comfortable at all-he folds his arms on the foot of Eames’ cot, endures a laugh, and waits for the sedative to kick in.
-
“Quite a realistic prison you’ve got here, Darling.”
And it is, too, when Eames looks around it. Arthur is at the warden’s desk, keys in hand, American police uniform circa 1940 crisp but somewhat ill-suited on his shoulders. He makes an interesting cop, Eames thinks. The hat’s about the only thing that Eames thinks Arthur should leave on.
“You’d know,” Arthur says, coming from behind the desk as if he’s getting the office straightened out. He unlocks the door to the back hallway on cue for Nottingham’s railing, I didn’t do anything! Let me go! I-I have a lawyer, I get to call him, let me go. “How does it compare to a Kenyan prison?” Arthur asks Eames, collected and somewhat intriguingly frightening. “A Swiss prison? A Thai prison?”
Eames laughs and lets Arthur lead him along. He takes stock of his own uniform and loosens the tie. “My view from this side isn’t as frequently reinforced.” The complex is just that, complex, crisp and white-collar, and the projections they pass together are busy but not bustling. Eames remembers; Arthur’s dream, Nottingham’s projections, and Miyu is technically a tourist for now.
At the end of this hallway, Dom and Yusef are escorting Miyu through one door and into another. She’s not struggling in her handcuffs and Yusuf’s grasp, she’s just plain terrified. They’re apt to have an interesting time in her subconscious, aren’t they.
“What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?” Arthur says, a step ahead of Eames when Eames was expecting a What’s all this, then?
“She’s been picked up on possession,” Dom says, going along with the script. He’s in plainclothes, as is Yusuf, and Eames wonders why Arthur couldn’t have dreamed them both into something more fitting. Dom gets the door open. “Denies it, but said she’d submit to a polygraph.”
Never mind that this isn’t how that, or anything, actually works in prison, and Eames would be the first to say so. He hangs back until he’s certain that he’s not walking as himself, and cuts in front of Arthur to get into Miyu’s space. He’s read Saitoh’s file, he knows what goes on in this girl’s head. “Come back and check on us in a bit, Sarge,” he says, muting his accent to match the image he’s forged, American again, dark and a bit gentle. Good cop with an edge. “I’ll get things set up for her.”
Miyu looks small and wary, and stands only as high as Yusuf’s chest. In dreams, her hair is undone, except for one braid in front, and her clothing is much less conservative than her secretary separates, all brightly colored layers, two shirts, patterned tights. She can’t be older than Ariadne. Her makeup is smudged. It had been intricate around her eyes before she started crying.
Eames looks at her and smiles. “It’s okay. You want me to stay with you?”
Shivering, she nods.
Dom’s got the door open by now, and his face is all in shadow from a naked bulb and a raked fedora. Yusuf escorts her in-Arthur passes the door by entirely, nodding at Eames in the curt fashion that, in film, gets put in slow motion and set to a deep, rolling sound effect. He mouths, “Eight minutes,” and sets off down the hall toward Nottingham’s screaming.
Eames is the last in, and shuts the door behind Yusuf. They sit Miyu down at a glass table, the kind that’s perfect for cheating at cards. “Are you calm enough to write?” Dom asks her, having gone to a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, ice-blue like Saitoh’s.
Miyu sits. Her knees buckle-her legs must still be in pain, up in the hospital. “In a bit,” she says, and closes her eyes, gathers herself. She’s been cuffed in front, and rests her hands on the table, so Dom lays out the papers around her.
Dom says, all business, “I can get your medical information if you need it. Have you ever seen a lie detector before?”
“No,” she says. She’s still shaky.
Dom nods at Yusuf, who brings out the briefcase with the second PASIV and starts setting it up. Arthur’s added a few bells and whistles, a heart monitor like the one in the hospital, a screen for her to look at so she doesn’t see the tubes. All according to plan, that. Yusuf starts to explain to her how it works, which is close to how a real polygraph does work so Eames doesn’t interrupt, not yet. He makes sure Miyu can see him at all times, can get used to his posture and facial expressions, even if he’s not going to keep this forge the next level down. By the time Yusuf’s gotten around to giving her a pen to start filling the forms out, allergies and history and social security number, Miyu’s stabilized enough that she doesn’t even notice the needle going in with the patch.
Dom sits opposite her. The lighting warps only a little, but not even Eames can see Dom’s face. Yusuf hooks him to the machine just the same. “Are you done?”
Miyu says, “Yes.” The PASIV-posing-as-polygraph chirps, and the screen reads, TRUE.
“We’re going to start with a couple of simple questions, all right?” The sedative isn’t running yet. Dom starts, “What is your name?”
“Miyu Inoue.”
“Nationality?”
“American.”
“First-generation?”
“Second.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.” Well, Eames was wrong about that one, the screen reads TRUE the same as the rest.
Dom makes a note on one of his files. His veins swell around the needle. “Occupation?”
“Administrative Assistant.”
“Would you consider yourself a model employee?”
“Yes.” FALSE. The sound gives Miyu a start, and the heart monitor pulses accordingly faster. Up to 120, so it seems.
“Just to be sure of that,” Dom says after making a mark, “tell me a lie.”
Miyu thinks a moment, and answers, “I speak fluent Japanese.” It is indeed FALSE, at least according to this dream.
Dom smirks and writes that down. “Is that one of the reasons you’re not a model employee?”
“It is when everyone expects you to.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I stopped going to Saturday school when I was a kid. I didn’t want to learn.” TRUE.
“What did you want to do instead?”
“Play. Write. Watch TV.” All TRUE.
Eames leans against the air duct and listens, carefully. Nottingham’s stopped screaming, and he can hear Ariadne-well, Detective Schaunard-every few breaths. He nods at Yusuf, who pushes the button and takes over the interrogation.
Dom gets up from his chair and leaves it to Yusuf. There’s another chair, just within reach, and Dom drags it across the floor as Yusuf asks, “Have you ever been accused of a crime?”
“Yes.”
“What was the nature of these charges?”
“Drug possession, back in college.”
“Acquitted?”
“Dropped.”
“Why?”
“They said if I turned in the person who brought the pot to the party, they’d let it go.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to get kicked out of school.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wanted to get a good, easy job so I could write my book.” TRUE. The sedative starts to kick in, and she blinks very quickly, rolls her neck, leans down over her handcuffs. The pressure on the heart monitor slows, 80.
Yusuf asks her, “What’s your book about?”
She and Dom are asleep before she can answer.
-
One Escher-hall away, Arthur glares back at a projection guard and unlocks another door.
“Mr. Nottingham, your lawyer has declined to answer his phone, and so has your wife,” Detective Schaunard is saying, leaning on the table with her palms spread. It gives Arthur a bit of a start. Ariadne’s really perfected the character. Also, he’s glad that Dom isn’t running this track at all, because more of Ariadne’s Schaunard comes from Mal than Dom could possibly be comfortable with. Sure, the hair’s red, but the cut’s almost a mirror, and the face comes to the same kind of peaks just over the eyebrows. The pants are a nice touch. “Considering that they haven’t answered, I think I’m being generous in allowing you to call them when you’ve sobered up in the morning.” She looks back at Arthur. “Hello, Sergeant.”
He shuts the door, circles the table, goes to stand by the vent. “You wanted to see me?”
“It seems we have a celebrity on our hands,” she says, with perfect condescension. “You ever heard of C.R. Nottingham?”
Arthur gives the nastiest, most Eamesain smirk he’s conjured yet. “Never.”
-
“Double iced Grande raspberry latte?”
Miyu looks up from her computer, doesn’t quite meet Dom’s eyes, and shakes her head. She stammers. “Yes.”
Dom smiles at her and nudges the cup onto what little space remains on the table. “Drifted off a bit there?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She smiles, and shakes her head, and turns back to her computer. The projections at the other tables stop staring at Dom over their books and straws. The only one who doesn’t stop looking is Yusuf, behind the counter, ladling ice and caramel into a blender.
Dom nods, and pulls away from the table. “Sorry I interrupted you,” he says, and straightens out, turns-
-and crashes into a cold drink and an extremely attractive woman.
Mocha slush and whipped cream sandwich between Dom’s shoulder and the woman’s chest, and, being slush, doesn’t precisely spray as much as lance through the air and splatter on Dom’s face. What misses Dom’s face falls, with a little architectural nudge, on the keyboard of Miyu’s computer.
Miyu’s consistency in having delayed reactions is a bit off-putting. She takes a moment to process, and then she gets up and sputters and shrieks.
The attractive girl shoves Dom aside and starts scooping the semiliquid away from the computer. “Oh god, dear, I’m so sorry,” she says-the voice is British but Dom can’t place the accent, all he knows is it’s not clean Received, but crisper than Estuary. “Let me get the napkins-did I get you or just the computer?”
“Just the computer.” Miyu’s already gone for the stand nearest her, ripped out a stack of napkins, and scurried back to the laptop. “Do you have any books with you? I need to turn it over.”
“Here, sure,” the lady says. She takes a large art history textbook out of her satchel and sets it down on the table among Miyu’s notes. They upend the computer over the books, screen draped over the table’s edge.
By now, Dom’s stepped back around the counter to change his apron, and Yusuf is teasing him in character. The lady at the table-Eames, in an immaculate forge as a somewhat sticky late-twentyodd brunette with skin about the same color as the beverage down her shirt-keeps daubing at the table. She’s drawing the eyes of the projections, not Dom, so Miyu believes it’s real. Good.
“I really am sorry,” Eames tells her. “Should I stay here to make sure it starts up again?”
“Yeah, if you want.”
Eames smiles-the woman’s smile is easy, a bit self-deprecating. “Same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I was lucky I’d backed everything up. And I was still under warranty.”
“I’ve got a couple of months left on mine.” Belatedly, Miyu takes the USB drive out of its port. It blinks blue LED and peters out. Dom knows. “It should be okay.”
Eames has finished cleaning up, even though there’s still a dark stain down the tight white shirt. He sits down at Miyu’s table, looks over at Dom. “I didn’t get you too badly, did I?”
Dom shakes his head. “Let me get you another drink, that was my fault. Venti mocha frappe?”
“Yes, exactly. Thank you.”
Dom ties on his new apron and goes to the cash register, listening, planning, moving imaginary customers imaginary coffee. All according to plan, thus far. Eames has caught her attention, Yusuf’s passing him espresso shots that do anything but caffeinate-
-At the table, Eames’ forge laughs nervously. “Honest to god?”
“Yeah,” Miyu says, “You look a lot like her. When the computer dries I’ll show you what I mean. I know it sounds weird, but it’s like you stepped out of my head.”
All eyes in the café flicker to Dom, Eames’ included.
-
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Nottingham is shaking, falls back in his chair. It screeches on the tile and he almost keels over. Arthur takes a step forward, considers catching him, doesn’t need to. “I’ve-I’ve written so much, you have to have heard of something. Courier 56? Oil on Canvas? Eight Ounces, that was a movie last year. Something, anything!”
“You see what I have to work with,” Schaunard is taller than Ariadne, so Arthur is conscious of adjusting himself to meet her knowing glance.
“I do,” Arthur says. “You want me to bring in some backup?”
“Not just yet. Get someone on figuring out who Mr. Nottingham really is.”
“Okay, fine!” Nottingham shouts, bringing his palms down on the table. That probably hurt, maybe enough to convince him this isn’t a dream at all. “Alexander Nottingham. That might check out faster.”
Arthur raises an eyebrow. “Don’t see how you get a C and an R from Alexander.”
“Please,” he says. “Look me up under that name. I have fingerprints in Canada, you can check them, anything-but I am what I say I am. I’m a writer. I’m not just some drunk. You have to believe me.”
There are groans and yells in the hall. Someone starts banging on the door from the outside.
Ariadne-Schaunard-nods, quickly. “Take care of that,” she tells Arthur, lets the double entendre hang in the air like a naked bulb. And then she adds, to Nottingham, “You have to calm down. I’ll get you some water.”
Arthur makes sure the door is shut again before he punches the first aggressive projection in the jaw. It wouldn’t do to let Nottingham see that. Or the second, whose neck Arthur breaks with his nightstick and a twist.
-
“So there’s this soccer player, and she’s trying to negotiate a better contract and get off her current team. But her team’s just been bought by the Russian mob and she finds out that’s why she can’t leave. She tries to get out by reporting them but you can guess how well that goes, and soon they’re catching her with vinegar instead of honey if you know what I mean. There might be something to do with hostages, I haven’t decided. I’d kind of like them to be all we have your boyfriend or something. Anyway, there ends up being this big chase scene during a big international game. I can’t decide what country it’s in, Hungary or Slovakia or somewhere in the former Soviet Union, definitely, and she teams up with this operative.”
“And I look like the football player?” Eames asks, cheekily.
“No, the operative. I always thought that if it was a movie she could be played by Eliza Dushku, but she’s too pale. Dushku I mean. You’re closer. You’re not an actress, are you? Maybe I should pitch it as a treatment instead of a book.”
“It does sound cinematic,” Eames agrees. “A bit Tarantino.”
“Get out, I love Tarantino.”
Eames laughs with her and tries not to think about looking like someone in her head. He’d tried to conjure up someone she could trust, not someone she could write. “Have you written any of it?”
“This one? Yeah, some. I should check if my computer’s dry,” she says, and is careful of the drinks as she lifts the laptop off the textbook and turns it right-side up.
As Miyu pushes to turn it on, Eames looks over at the counter. “Oi, is my new drink ready?”
Dom looks up, and puts down the shot of espresso he’s just poured out. “Yeah, just a sec.”
Oh, he heard the same as Eames heard, that’s written somewhere in Dom’s face. Yusuf’s practically wearing it on his sleeve. Well, they can’t fault Eames for being a little too thorough, now can they?”
The computer makes its requisite bwong when it starts up. Ah, another Mac. Miyu sighs in relief, and toasts with what’s left of her iced latte. “It lives.”
Eames even gives her a phew as well. “Love your desktop.”
“Thanks!” Arthur had researched that one meticulously, and Eames will give credit where credit is due, later. “Can’t bring it to work, so I might as well play, right?”
“Well, not like you can’t play at work,” Eames says and smirks. He likes this character, it’s a pity she’s technically not Eames’ at all. “You can write at work, can’t you?”
Dom comes by with a mop, a bucket, and Eames’ unnecessarily girly (if delicious) drink. He puts the latter down on the table just as Miyu plugs her USB into the laptop.
“Sometimes,” Miyu says. “The writing I’m doing at work...it’s okay because it feels like practice, you know? I have lots of ideas. But if one of them was about to get me out of having to work at all, I’d know.” She scrolls through her files, opens one folder and then another. “Lots of ideas, yeah. Sometimes I think the good ones are just waiting for me to catch up with them, you see what I mean?”
To distract her while Dom plugs a second USB in, Eames covers Miyu’s hand with one of his own. They’re both still sticky from the spilled drink. “More than you think.”
-
Arthur crushes an inmate’s nose. His uniform is short-sleeved, so the blood runs down the inmate’s mouth and chin and the entire length of Arthur’s forearm.
In some ways, it is easier fighting through level one projections than level two. For one thing, with a few somewhat notable exceptions, resistance is less immediately lethal and generally straightforward. Crowds will suffocate you, the weather will break, and if there’s fire or gunfire it’s always coming your way, so the best defense is to be a step ahead. On the first level under, a dream is a dream.
For Arthur, the counting makes it harder. Not that his actions count, in that meaningful way, because they don’t-that the only ones that mean are the ones that buy him time. What he does up here changes nothing and affects none (unless the sleepers are directly involved), as long as he gets their headphones on and their kicks primed.
Arthur doesn’t brag about the kick he reverse-engineered the time they first pulled off inception.
Today, he won’t brag about holding off a prison riot singlehandedly.
So when he steps over a heap of unconscious and mangled convicts to unlock the door and fill Dom’s coffeeshop with Edith Piaf played twenty times slower, Arthur is not counting bodies. He’s counting seconds on three different clocks.
-
Dom never quite knows how to describe what sound the sky makes-it’s an assault of warped brass and evokes, more than anything else, a speeding train declining to stop for you. Either way, when it blares twice more, half as close together, Dom signals to Yusuf.
Diversion on top of diversion; Yusuf pulls the crank on the cappuccino steamer, and hot milk sprays everywhere. Yusuf curses, loud and convincingly enough that he might actually be hurt, and drops the pitcher with the remaining milk on the floor. Miyu and Eames’ projection stop looking quite so intensely into each others’ eyes, and are out of their seats like the good samaritans they should be.
The crowd of projections is thick enough, all surging forward to check if Yusuf’s all right. Good. Dom sits down and takes over Miyu’s laptop, scrolls through the files for the most dissuading and protected, for something that sets it off, that click behind his eyes that means jackpot.
“It’s fine,” Yusuf is saying, but the projections don’t seem to believe it. They smother him. “I’ll just go in the back and wrap it up, see, not even red."
On the one hand, Dom thinks as he scrolls through, the trauma they counted on in Miyu’s dreams is entirely necessary to induce. In reality, the last thing Miyu remembers is that she was carried out of her office after an injurious freak accident. They need the fear and the chaos to make her drive Eames and Yusuf away-there, that file, Dom makes the transfer to his own USB and, safely, extracts it.
He doesn’t get to internally articulate the on the other hand before Eames does something unexpected, but predictable.
Namely, vault over the counter and get Yusuf in a headlock, holding a stiletto against his eye.
Yusuf’s mouth opens and half-closes like a fish nosing at flakes in the tank. Dom holds on to the USB and gets up, tense, conciliatory. “Miss, I don’t know what you’re getting at-”
“Nothing, love,” Eames says, playing up an extremely uncomfortable fatale that doesn’t do much for his forge’s femininity. “I’ve just been waiting for my opportunity with this dear chap.” He pecks Yusuf on the cheek. “Hand it over or I’ll take it over.”
Dom manages “You won’t-” and Yusuf gets out an “I don’t-” before the knife goes in.
Miyu’s subconscious does the sensible thing and panics.
-
.
On to Part 2
.
Also known as the one in which I apply the cinematic principles of Inception to a literary medium. Or, in which I am a dork, as usual, but magnified by 20 due to dream state.
The point is, whatever this is, I am proud of it. And I would love if you read it.
Title: In Violation of Copyright
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: the Dream Team and the subjects of their latest big heist. Background Arthur and Eames something going on.
Words: 16300. Split into two posts.
Rating: Light R
Warning: Horror tropes, violence within dreams, mood whiplash.
Notice: No authors, living or dead, professional or otherwise, were harmed in the construction of this story. At least not as far as I know.
Je ne regrette: Rien.
Summary: They’ve pulled off Inception, and had some time to regroup-but what’s the next step where the exchange of ideas is concerned? (The answer: Intellectual Property.)
In Violation of Copyright
inception
cover art by pinstripesuit
“Then why don’t we make him think he came up with it?”
Of course it’s Eames’ idea. Eames is a fan. Arthur is entirely unsurprised.
“We’ve done it before,” Eames goes on. The workshop in New York is extremely well-lit and, in Arthur’s realistic opinion, indefensible. “The rest of it is a matter of extraction, nothing more by half.”
“Except the part where it’s someone else’s idea.” Yusuf speaks up first. Arthur’s not thankful, but lets the conversation flow. “In order for this to work, we can’t touch the idea. Or even confirm its strength.”
“Or compatibility,” Ariadne adds. “What if it turns out to be something our client can’t use?”
Their client, according to Arthur’s reconnaissance and Saitoh’s explication, if not precisely in that order, is bestselling author C.R. Nottingham. Both the C and the R are false, but the Nottingham is real. It provides Eames and Saitoh with a measure of amusement. Arthur just wondered what kind of symbolism-obsessed bastard was writing this script. Possibly Nottingham himself.
Dom scoffs. “Honestly, if that man managed to write and sell an entire series of books about government conspiracies to poison string cheese, I doubt there’s an idea he can’t write.”
“The string cheese was only in one book,” Eames says. “And it was an allegory.”
“The point is, the man’s a hack.” Arthur looks under his eyebrows at Eames. “And it’s a valid point. We don’t even know if he can use the idea after we plant it, even if it takes. A good idea doesn’t make a valid execution.”
“Spoken like a kindred spirit,” Eames says, and Arthur doesn’t have to roll his eyes to see the smirk across Eames’ stubbled jaw. “You can’t fake an imagination, otherwise we wouldn’t have you.”
“Namely someone who is entirely comfortable using what’s in the minds of others.”
“Well then you and Nottingham should get on famously.”
“Whether he accepts the transfer or not, all the component operations can be done,” Dom interrupts, which Arthur praises inwardly as a good sense of narrative, not to mention professionalism. “We can extract an idea, we can conceal an idea, we can plant an idea and make Nottingham give it to himself. It’s not exactly simple. It’s never simple. But it’s possible.”
Saitoh nods. He’s standing opposite where Dom is pacing, everyone else sitting in chairs wheeled to all angles. (Arthur has been drawing trajectories between them for the last ten minutes.) “Mr. Nottingham’s representatives are willing to pay for the possibility. Mr. Nottingham does not, and cannot, know about the installation.”
“Neither can whoever we extract from,” Ariadne says. “We'd have to keep them separated the whole way down.”
She gets up and goes to the dry-erase board, which everyone has to face now (except Dom, still pacing, and Arthur is counting the song for him in his head, first in four at quarter-equals-sixty, to equals dotted quarter, to eighth equals one-eighty, eighth never equals eighth). She picks up the nearest pen and uncaps it. “We have to take Nottingham down at least-“ Squeak. That pen leaves nothing behind on the board. Ariadne shakes her head and picks up a new one, orange. “We have to take him down at least three levels.” This pen works, and she draws;
“For the extraction to work, we have to take the person we’re stealing from down two;
“And for us to make the transfer, since you can’t bring an idea into the real world, if you can make it take a tangible form at all, both the level ones have to be the same place.” She erases both of them and puts a new one somewhere between the two columns;
“And that’s also going to spread us out,” Ariadne finishes. “At least one person has to be kicked out of two-prime to bring the idea to Nottingham’s path, and then get put back under.”
“And someone has to stay with the person we’re stealing from after the heist. That means different levels of sedation in an otherwise shared dream.” Yusuf considers, curling his fingers together but only pulsing one of them. “It can be done.”
“We have enough people for all the levels.” Ariadne is staring at the board again, pen in hand, leaking its toxic scent into the air. Arthur pictures her drawing neural networks and smiles. She taps the pen tip onto the board a couple of times, then adds an R over the 1 and turns all her lines into arrows. “If it’s that delicate, Yusuf has to be present all through two-prime, which means sending three people into two-prime besides the subject.”
“And one of them has to be me,” Dom says, and stops pacing (Arthur has managed to subdivide the quarters into quintuplets) to join Ariadne at the board. “It’s my dream. I steal the idea, pass it off to Yusuf and whoever gets to carry it down Nottingham’s path, and stay there with the subject until you kick us both up.”
Dom doesn’t go past the second level any more, and it’s taken him eight months to get even that far. Arthur calls it prudence. He doesn’t listen to what anyone else calls it.
“Which means I’m the third man in this company.” Eames waves to Dom, who has taken the pen from Ariadne and added his name to the arrow. Dom adds Eames’ too. “I’m the only one who can carry it down.”
“No you’re not,” Arthur says instinctively.
It’s a bad idea. “Fine, not the only one. Just the best.” He swats the back of Arthur’s chair. “Stick to what you’re good at, Darling, that’s why you’re here.”
The flowchart reads;
and Dom still has the pen.
“It is why you’re here,” Dom says, but at least his smirk is more private, more effacing than aggressive. “We need you to run with our ideas.”
-
The conductor hands Nottingham back his ticket. “Transfer at Croton-Harmon.” Nottingham nods and goes back to basking in the glow of his laptop with his hands poised impotently over the keys. Of course it’s a Mac, Eames thinks, and continues to hide behind a copy of Nottingham’s own Following Eyes. It’s actually rather boring the second time around. Brain popcorn gets stale too, it seems.
After a few more glares from the sun shining on the Hudson river, unmitigated by the plexiglass windows of the train, Eames gets up and stretches, tight below the belt. “Hey,” he says, affecting a New Yorker’s tone (as close to generic as is possible for a city with nearly as many accents as bloody London), “could you watch my stuff a sec?” He puts the book down on his suit jacket, deliberately.
He gives Nottingham a moment to glance at the book, waits for wistfulness or recognition or ire or-
“Hey. You’re him!” Eames leans over the off-blue vinyl seat. “You’re C.R. Nottingham. Holy shit, I wish my partner was here, he loves you even more than I do!”
Nottingham’s skin is too dark to blush, but by that expression he probably doesn’t anyway. He says, “Thanks,” with a kind of self-deprecating shyness that isn’t genuinely either.
“Do you usually take this line? I thought you were back in Canada, I had no idea you were still in New York.”
“I’m spending the summer in Westchester.”
“Awesome, is it for research?”
“I don’t know.” That sounds true, so Eames doesn’t press it, in or out of character. “But I do enjoy the quiet,” Nottingham goes on, looking back at the computer. An old document is up, long, and evident, and complete. “Maybe something will come of it.”
Eames nods, eagerly. “Maybe. Hey, um, I do have to, uh, go, but when I come back will you sign my book? Seriously, Bradley’s your biggest fan, and he got me hooked too.”
“Sure,” Nottingham says like he expected just that, and fishes in his laptop case for a pen. “To Bradley and...?”
-
“Mervin?”
“Milton was too obvious,” Eames says, propping his feet up on Arthur’s thighs for all of two seconds before Arthur shoves them down. He smirks. Arthur would call it insufferable if he hadn’t endured it for so long already. “At least to an American.”
“He’s Canadian.”
“He’s more American than I am.” Eames slides Arthur the book a little more pointedly, tapping his fingers on the signature on the inside cover. “Get your graphology on, or whatever it is you do on point.” Just for show, he lifts his knees, bringing his feet up on their shining snakeskin toes, and executes a port de bras in four-and-a-halfth position.
Arthur takes the book. He hasn’t quite gotten to this one yet. Nottingham has published sixteen books and twelve short stories, and Arthur’s read about two thirds of the way through all of them in a week. Honestly, the rest of the work is much more interesting. Nottingham’s plots are, generally, whodunnits with the duns and the its shuffled through, whostoleits, whokilledits, whoinfectedits, whoreanimatedits-well, only one of those-and the its range from an unpopular senator to the aforementioned string cheese. Currently, he is reading a whonukedit. He suspects China.
“So,” Arthur says, proceeding to use the book as a coaster for his bottle of mineral water, “tell me about your hero.”
Eames laughs. He’s dropped the mocking ballet to sprawl in his chair, doing a peculiar swivel that moves the wheels without apparently jostling the seat. Arthur is briefly captivated. “First off, he’s no one’s hero, least of all mine. Sure I like the books-they’re a good read in airports, and when you’re coming off a job that actually used the rest of your brain. Some people knit. I read pop horror.”
“You say knit like it’s a bad thing.”
“Let me guess, your grandmother taught you.”
“Actually, I don’t know how at all.” Arthur admits, though, “I like to watch. Old ladies on busses somehow manage to look like they’ve gone over to Buddha when they do it.” Besides, if Eames is as thorough as they both know he is, he knows precisely what Arthur does when he’s bored. But this isn’t about boredom.
Eames gives him a smirk that wrinkles in enough at the top to quantify as a smile, with a decent enough margin of error. “C.R. Nottingham. His real name’s an open secret-the first two short stories were published under Alexander Nottingham. Most people think the C.R. comes from Christopher Robin.” Eames is fiddling with something in his pocket, probably his totem? Does he have one now? Arthur concentrates on Eames’ face. Propriety is propriety. “Born in Vaughan, near Toronto, started his humble career as a janitor at York University and probably would have been promoted, except an American publisher bought The Next Tallest Elm. Suddenly the bloke finds himself living in Upper Manhattan in the eighties with a new life complete with wife, kids, and yearly book deals. It’s a wonder cocaine never found its way into the mix.”
“Never?”
“Not his drug of choice. Hospitalized for alcohol poisoning four times, twice in the last year. Ours will make the fifth. The first two didn’t stop him writing. At this point, only the fans notice, considering he shits out film adaptations. His representation’s paying us in royalty percentages instead of hard cash for a reason.”
Arthur makes a few interpretive mental notes on how to find the author in the book, how to determine whether it’s conscious or referential.
Eames is still fiddling, but the magical swiveling chair has ceased to be magical, just swiveling. “So, that’s enough for a primer. What have you found en pointe?”
“Things we should anticipate in Nottingham’s subconscious,” Arthur starts, after a gulp of water. “Locomotion, French art deco, and predictable twist endings.”
-
After a week, the chart looks like this;
the obnoxious orange dry-erase marker having run out of ink on day six, or between, when someone forgot to cap it. Back at the hotel, Dom’s shoes are still soaked through from running out to get new markers yesterday. Ariadne is back at the chart, penning in her own name right at the top.
“On any level that both the subject and Nottingham are on, we need at least two of us to keep them separated,” she says, putting the pen cap in her mouth and capping it that way. “One of them’s Arthur-but Arthur can’t stick by Nottingham if we need him to believe level one isn’t a dream. I’m the other one by default, but if we play it straight that’s going to cause problems when I follow Nottingham down the other two levels. There are two ways around it.”
“The first one’s that you put all our work on Miss Charles to some good use,” Dom says, then waits to make sure Ariadne comes to the correct conclusion on her own.
“Level one is too sensitive for that.” She smiles. She knows he’s testing her. Good. “The way around it would be to take this down to the same level two, merging two and two-prime, but that would pit Nottingham against the subject and actually make things harder.”
She looks rather pointedly at Eames, and rubs a twinge of saliva off the marker cap. Dom is reminded that Miles told him Ariadne was better.
Eames laughs. “If you wanted to learn a little forgery, love, you could have asked.”
-
“Her name is Inoue Miyu.” Saitoh pours Arthur coffee out of a French Press. The way he does it, Arthur expects Saitoh to mix the aspartame in for him without asking how much. “She is an Administrative Assistant in the New York branch of one of my companies. You do not need to know which.”
It turns out that Saitoh doesn’t mix the sweetener into Arthur’s cup, but he does pull his hand away to reveal the correct number of packets. Arthur accepts the French Press from Saitoh with one hand and goes for the weighted die in his pocket with the other. He pours. “Why her?”
“I know that she possesses a wealth of ideas.” Saitoh drinks his coffee black and, as it turns out when Arthur is done pouring, in very small sips as if he expects it to be stronger. “She is so rich that she has been using company time and resources to invest them.”
“This would be a very different heist if I took that literally.”
The die in Arthur’s pocket feels right, the dimples and the heft line up, but he won’t roll it here to check. He lets it back into his pocket and starts tearing apart the packages of aspartame, all three at once, over the still surface of the coffee.
“She is writing fiction at her desk,” Saitoh says, “most of it not for publication. Her time at work is spent online with a group of similarly unpublished writers and bloggers. I have no doubts as to the extent of her imagination. One idea, even a powerful one, would not be missed.”
There’s a spoon. Arthur picks it up and stirs the coffee. The windows of the office shake once, powerfully-a pigeon has just dive-bombed it and falls on top of the air conditioner, unconscious or dead. Arthur and Saitoh both stare at that for a moment.
Saitoh drinks another sip of coffee. “She will also be easy to deceive and subdue, in reality and level one. I have noticed that to be true of people with exceptionally vivid imaginations.”
-
“The first thing you have to wrap your mind around is that Forgery is Architecture of the self.” They are walking in a dream-neither of theirs, to be safe, Yusuf is testing his compound for duration on Dom and Eames just thought to kill a couple of birds with one stone-and Dom has given them a little too much to work with. Eames takes Ariadne by the wrist, thumb at the small, and leads her out of the projection-filled elementary school auditorium and into the lobby. It is covered in tiles that beg in some particolored way or another for world peace. Only the two teenaged volunteers manning the snack table for the school play are out there, and they pay Eames and Ariadne no mind at all. “That’s how I caught on, at any rate. I was an Architect first.”
“I thought we were all Architects first,” Ariadne says.
Eames smirks. A pair of doves on the painted tile wall pull their olive branch a little tighter. “Have you ever built a character?”
Ariadne thinks about it a moment, then nods.
“Who’s the most recent?”
“French class, I think. We have-had, I guess-to write skits to practice grammar and present them in front of the class.”
“Have you latched on to any archetype in particular?”
“Other than the American Exchange Student who doesn’t know anything?” She laughs, plays with the collar of her shirt. “Last time I played the receptionist at a hospital. We learned all the vocabulary for socialized medicine.”
“God bless the education system.” Eames gives her a little shove toward the near bathroom doors, opposite the auditorium and the little folding table with teenagers and tupperware. “I want you to walk out of that WC as a French medical receptionist. You have ten seconds.”
Ariadne, evidently, assumes that the ten seconds start now instead of from the moment the door closes, because she scurries off like she’s just been swatted on the bum by a nanny. (Eames considers conjuring this up at a later scenario.) Eames counts to ten, not caring precisely how long the seconds are, and has his eyes on the door when Ariadne emerges from the bathroom.
She says, in confident Parisian French, “I am sorry, but we do not accept your insurance card here.”
The teenagers shriek in fear and throw cupcakes at her.
“A little too ‘French’,” he tells her, once he’s kicked himself out to catch up. “Too much archetype, not enough article. Your characterization was incomplete enough to be a Matisse.”
-
“There are a couple of ways I can do this,” Yusuf is explaining, and only to Dom, because sometimes things work that way. Dom’s kids adore Yusuf. They’d still be climbing all over him and pulling his hair if Dom hadn’t put them to bed. (James wishes his hair was curly. Dom remembers that when James was really small, just born, it was, and Mal would wind each curl around her fingers to train it. Sometimes after long car rides or picnic afternoons the boy would look like he just stepped out of the Italian Baroque.) “No matter which, I have to conceive of the sedatives without dreams to conceive of them within. I think it’s a little more precise that way. I mean, I can build them in the dream to time off exactly as planned, but if I’ve never managed it in the real world I’ll worry about it, and worrying about it will give Arthur a hard time on the level with me under, not to mention the rest of us.”
Dom blinks instead of nodding, and traces his thumb over the rim of his glass. It’s too dry and shallow to sound. “And the mixes you’ve gotten aren’t perfect enough?”
“The compounds themselves are fine,” Yusuf says. His glass is plain empty, except for ice. Dom gets up to go to the refrigerator door and fill it. (The refrigerator is filled with whatever the kids want for snacks, but Dom still hasn’t cooked more than breakfast and grilled cheese for them in this hotel. They love New York, they’re excited to spend so much time here, Philippa said the Statue of Liberty looks like Mommy, Dom thinks the nose is too straight and the forehead’s too unmarked and Mal never wore that much green.) “And I’ve even worked around the problem of depth and strength. If we wait, and actually set up the top level to accommodate us for only a half-hour like Arthur wants us to, we won’t get sent to limbo if we’re killed, so we can keep using violent kicks. It’s the method of distribution that has to change. Either I have to wire the PASIV on level one so that you get the lion’s share of the dose and stay under until we kick you, or I have to sedate you additionally before we all go under together and let the PASIV just make up the difference.”
“So lay down the pros and cons.”
“Well, the con gets laid down either way,” Yusuf says with a smile. He takes back his glass and drinks almost all of it. “If we give you half of the sedative before everyone else, you’re out for most of level one, and if I’m administering it that leaves me out too.”
“Not that you all can’t handle it on your own,” Dom says.
“Not that we can’t. But it’s always better if we don’t. The fix for that is if I minimize the time you have to spend under and just hit you with something like we did to Fischer on the plane. If I make it slow-acting enough, I mean.”
“And the cons of the other way around?”
“It means that Arthur has to spend a lot of time monitoring the dispersal of the sedative. It’s not just a matter of making your IV a little wider than the rest. There’s a reason you don’t try to take out a cheetah with an elephant gun.”
“And because we’re leaving Arthur and Ariadne up there alone, and Nottingham’s the subject, he’s not going to have much time to watch. I get it.”
“I mean, Arthur can do it,” Yusuf says. There’s only ice in his glass, but he tries to drink the dregs anyway. Dom just holds on to his glass. “And he will if he has to.”
“But telling him to do it from the start means he’ll do that and a thousand other things.”
“It’s what he does best.”
Yusuf chews on his ice. Dom is glad that the kids aren’t watching, it might make them pick up the habit.
-
“Use a different color.”
At Arthur’s-well, it’s not a request, and he’s grateful Eames acknowledges that-Eames switches out the blue marker for the green. He puts the cap neatly in the insert at the back of the pen. Arthur watches it twist. “Time in level one, half an hour at most,” he says, and scrawls it in at the corner of the 1. “Actually, no. We have to reckon this by how long Dom needs to extract and transfer.”
“Level one’s going to scare the subject up, no matter how careful we are,” Dom says. “An hour under, all three of us. Once you leave, I’ll just stay.”
Eames markers in, 00:01:00 next to 2-prime. “That subdivides into-”
“Three minutes on level one,” Arthur says, tipping back his chair and not looking up from Courier 56, “and if you think we all need half an hour on level one and give us ten minutes to get two-prime set up, Dom should be prepared to stay under for another five hours and forty minutes.”
Eames throws the pen at Arthur. It leaves a streak, presumably green, down Arthur’s left temple.
Fine. Arthur closes the book, un-tilts his chair, and goes to the board. He erases everything Eames wrote so far-his handwriting is illegible anyway. He doesn’t bother to check if Eames is smirking or scowling. Eames can probably manage both at the same time, or maybe there’s an expression that has both meanings that Arthur can’t describe.
Arthur writes, and says, “Thirty minutes on level one, less ten for establishment. That should be enough to get us on both paths. Three minutes under at level one for an hour at level two-prime to conduct the extraction on two-prime, and seventeen minutes equals five hours and forty minutes grace for Dom to stay there. Two minutes to make the transfer on one, leaving fifteen maximum equating to five hours maximum on Nottingham’s two, of which you need how much, Eames?”
“To talk him open? Two hours.”
“Six minutes on level one, two hours on level two, leaving nine on one, three grace hours for Yusuf on two, and you and Ariadne a maximum of sixty hours on level three.”
He counts backward.
“Which leaves you alone with Nottingham for thirteen minutes before we put him under, Ariadne. Twelve if he cooperates.”
“I never get tired of watching you do that,” Eames says. “What’s next, a reading of the phone book?”
“Starting with the Fs and skipping to the Us.” Arthur keeps writing.
He licks his fingers and tries to rub the ink off his cheek.
-
“Good evening.”
Eames is no longer alone in a white room with no windows, just a one-way mirror he’s on the wrong side of and an open door into a dark hallway. His interrogator comes around to the long side of the rectangular table that Eames has his cuffed hands propped on.
Said interrogator is a distinctive redhead, with the authoritative sensibility that was fetishized in film noir and that people still make the tragic mistake of falling for in real life. She wears a cobalt tweed skirt-suit that reminds Eames of Saitoh’s samurai-bespoke more than anything else, except for how columned her body is. Eames will pick at the sartorial choices later. “Is it evening?”
“It is what I say it is,” she says. She sits and arranges several files, and he sees why she picked the long side of the table to lay out the charges. “Detective Lafayette, FBI.”
“That name’s going to give him pause, love.”
“We can change it,” Ariadne says in the one-way mirror. “How’s the rest?”
Eames lope-crosses his legs beneath the table, drops the handcuffs, and prepares to wait another ten seconds for her to change. “If you’re going to keep that hip-to-waist ratio, wear trousers.”
-
“What does she write?”
Saitoh slides Dom, Eames, and Yusuf matching files in ice-blue sleeves. Arthur already has one, which Dom can see he is reading with about as much gusto as the endless hail of Nottingham. Dom just opens his own set. Saitoh has included a cover page and index.
“First, here are the websites she visits. As many of these are social networking sites with protected accounts, I have taken the liberty of accessing them and including the relevant information in the appendices. The rest, she and her associates display publically.”
Eames thumbs through the packet. Dom is still on the table of contents. Yusuf is laughing nervously. “She does this on company time?”
“Yes.”
“Well they do say an idle brain is the devil’s playground.” He turns a page and chuckles. “Can’t imagine what she’d do if hers wasn’t swinging.”
Dom reads around the text, tapping his fingers and skimming the page. “Where does she go to write when she isn’t at work?”
“Cafés,” Arthur answers, farther in the packet than any of them, without the faintest trace of a blush (like Yusuf’s) or a smirk (like Eames’). “Innocuous ones, indoors.”
Dom considers this a moment. “I’ll build one.”
He is aware of everyone, Arthur included, putting down the files and looking straight at him. He wrings his hands and decides, no, this is real, and they’re only looking at him because he said something important.
Saitoh’s the only one to actually question it. “You will?”
Dom looks him in the eye and blinks instead of nodding.
-
Arthur stares.
No one asks if anyone else is ready.
-
Miyu’s computer explodes. There was barely a tendril of smoke to alert her to it. First she gasps, then she screams, and then suddenly she’s surrounded by her coworkers and the clients and anyone else who can move. By the time Dom and Saitoh reach her, she’s still staring at the monitor, as if she’s wondering why it’s intact when the tower blew. Her reflection is wide-eyed, well made-up, pale as a silk sheet. She isn’t looking at the slashes on her shins at all. Blood stains her footless tights a darker black around the tears.
By the time they get her to the ground floor, the ambulance is already waiting. She’s clinging to the neck of the man carrying her and crying and her hair is coming out of its bun. Dom has been seeing that style with the braided bangs everywhere in the city. They load her up into the ambulance. Saitoh tells her she’ll be all right, it is his company, he will take responsibility for her and make sure her parents know. Yusuf locks eyes with Saitoh, and then with Dom, before the back doors of the ambulance close. He’s already giving her oxygen.
“Remind me never to work for you again, if that’s what you do to your employees,” Dom says as he slides into the driver’s side of Saitoh’s car and prepares to chase the ambulance.
Saitoh only smiles.
-
Ariadne says, “Put him down there,” so Arthur wheels Nottingham’s stretcher into place, with space for a curtain between. She and Yusuf have already strung Miyu up, and Eames moves in to help Arthur with Nottingham. There’s space for an entire window and hospital curtain between the two beds, and the sound the stretcher makes skittering across the tile floor would probably be enough to wake anyone up.
“Last one up draws the curtain,” Eames says to the general assembled, but looks to Arthur just as he tapes the IV down on Nottingham’s hand. “And the first one up checks.”
“Aren’t you lucky you never have to close any doors,” Arthur tells him, then looks around for a chair to sleep in. Yusuf’s already claimed the plush brown one by the foot of Miyu’s bed, and Ariadne’s moving hers into place nearest the PASIV. Saitoh’s connecting her. Dom is stretching out on the floor. There is a third empty stretcher, which won’t be empty any more when Eames claims it, which takes him all of the space between two peaks on Nottingham’s heart monitor.
“I’ve slept tighter,” he offers, hand outstretched, eyes squinted against the lowlight that the curtain doesn’t block.
Arthur unfolds a plastic chair and plunks it pointedly down on the tile. After a moment sitting-the chair really isn’t comfortable at all-he folds his arms on the foot of Eames’ cot, endures a laugh, and waits for the sedative to kick in.
-
“Quite a realistic prison you’ve got here, Darling.”
And it is, too, when Eames looks around it. Arthur is at the warden’s desk, keys in hand, American police uniform circa 1940 crisp but somewhat ill-suited on his shoulders. He makes an interesting cop, Eames thinks. The hat’s about the only thing that Eames thinks Arthur should leave on.
“You’d know,” Arthur says, coming from behind the desk as if he’s getting the office straightened out. He unlocks the door to the back hallway on cue for Nottingham’s railing, I didn’t do anything! Let me go! I-I have a lawyer, I get to call him, let me go. “How does it compare to a Kenyan prison?” Arthur asks Eames, collected and somewhat intriguingly frightening. “A Swiss prison? A Thai prison?”
Eames laughs and lets Arthur lead him along. He takes stock of his own uniform and loosens the tie. “My view from this side isn’t as frequently reinforced.” The complex is just that, complex, crisp and white-collar, and the projections they pass together are busy but not bustling. Eames remembers; Arthur’s dream, Nottingham’s projections, and Miyu is technically a tourist for now.
At the end of this hallway, Dom and Yusef are escorting Miyu through one door and into another. She’s not struggling in her handcuffs and Yusuf’s grasp, she’s just plain terrified. They’re apt to have an interesting time in her subconscious, aren’t they.
“What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?” Arthur says, a step ahead of Eames when Eames was expecting a What’s all this, then?
“She’s been picked up on possession,” Dom says, going along with the script. He’s in plainclothes, as is Yusuf, and Eames wonders why Arthur couldn’t have dreamed them both into something more fitting. Dom gets the door open. “Denies it, but said she’d submit to a polygraph.”
Never mind that this isn’t how that, or anything, actually works in prison, and Eames would be the first to say so. He hangs back until he’s certain that he’s not walking as himself, and cuts in front of Arthur to get into Miyu’s space. He’s read Saitoh’s file, he knows what goes on in this girl’s head. “Come back and check on us in a bit, Sarge,” he says, muting his accent to match the image he’s forged, American again, dark and a bit gentle. Good cop with an edge. “I’ll get things set up for her.”
Miyu looks small and wary, and stands only as high as Yusuf’s chest. In dreams, her hair is undone, except for one braid in front, and her clothing is much less conservative than her secretary separates, all brightly colored layers, two shirts, patterned tights. She can’t be older than Ariadne. Her makeup is smudged. It had been intricate around her eyes before she started crying.
Eames looks at her and smiles. “It’s okay. You want me to stay with you?”
Shivering, she nods.
Dom’s got the door open by now, and his face is all in shadow from a naked bulb and a raked fedora. Yusuf escorts her in-Arthur passes the door by entirely, nodding at Eames in the curt fashion that, in film, gets put in slow motion and set to a deep, rolling sound effect. He mouths, “Eight minutes,” and sets off down the hall toward Nottingham’s screaming.
Eames is the last in, and shuts the door behind Yusuf. They sit Miyu down at a glass table, the kind that’s perfect for cheating at cards. “Are you calm enough to write?” Dom asks her, having gone to a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, ice-blue like Saitoh’s.
Miyu sits. Her knees buckle-her legs must still be in pain, up in the hospital. “In a bit,” she says, and closes her eyes, gathers herself. She’s been cuffed in front, and rests her hands on the table, so Dom lays out the papers around her.
Dom says, all business, “I can get your medical information if you need it. Have you ever seen a lie detector before?”
“No,” she says. She’s still shaky.
Dom nods at Yusuf, who brings out the briefcase with the second PASIV and starts setting it up. Arthur’s added a few bells and whistles, a heart monitor like the one in the hospital, a screen for her to look at so she doesn’t see the tubes. All according to plan, that. Yusuf starts to explain to her how it works, which is close to how a real polygraph does work so Eames doesn’t interrupt, not yet. He makes sure Miyu can see him at all times, can get used to his posture and facial expressions, even if he’s not going to keep this forge the next level down. By the time Yusuf’s gotten around to giving her a pen to start filling the forms out, allergies and history and social security number, Miyu’s stabilized enough that she doesn’t even notice the needle going in with the patch.
Dom sits opposite her. The lighting warps only a little, but not even Eames can see Dom’s face. Yusuf hooks him to the machine just the same. “Are you done?”
Miyu says, “Yes.” The PASIV-posing-as-polygraph chirps, and the screen reads, TRUE.
“We’re going to start with a couple of simple questions, all right?” The sedative isn’t running yet. Dom starts, “What is your name?”
“Miyu Inoue.”
“Nationality?”
“American.”
“First-generation?”
“Second.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.” Well, Eames was wrong about that one, the screen reads TRUE the same as the rest.
Dom makes a note on one of his files. His veins swell around the needle. “Occupation?”
“Administrative Assistant.”
“Would you consider yourself a model employee?”
“Yes.” FALSE. The sound gives Miyu a start, and the heart monitor pulses accordingly faster. Up to 120, so it seems.
“Just to be sure of that,” Dom says after making a mark, “tell me a lie.”
Miyu thinks a moment, and answers, “I speak fluent Japanese.” It is indeed FALSE, at least according to this dream.
Dom smirks and writes that down. “Is that one of the reasons you’re not a model employee?”
“It is when everyone expects you to.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I stopped going to Saturday school when I was a kid. I didn’t want to learn.” TRUE.
“What did you want to do instead?”
“Play. Write. Watch TV.” All TRUE.
Eames leans against the air duct and listens, carefully. Nottingham’s stopped screaming, and he can hear Ariadne-well, Detective Schaunard-every few breaths. He nods at Yusuf, who pushes the button and takes over the interrogation.
Dom gets up from his chair and leaves it to Yusuf. There’s another chair, just within reach, and Dom drags it across the floor as Yusuf asks, “Have you ever been accused of a crime?”
“Yes.”
“What was the nature of these charges?”
“Drug possession, back in college.”
“Acquitted?”
“Dropped.”
“Why?”
“They said if I turned in the person who brought the pot to the party, they’d let it go.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to get kicked out of school.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wanted to get a good, easy job so I could write my book.” TRUE. The sedative starts to kick in, and she blinks very quickly, rolls her neck, leans down over her handcuffs. The pressure on the heart monitor slows, 80.
Yusuf asks her, “What’s your book about?”
She and Dom are asleep before she can answer.
-
One Escher-hall away, Arthur glares back at a projection guard and unlocks another door.
“Mr. Nottingham, your lawyer has declined to answer his phone, and so has your wife,” Detective Schaunard is saying, leaning on the table with her palms spread. It gives Arthur a bit of a start. Ariadne’s really perfected the character. Also, he’s glad that Dom isn’t running this track at all, because more of Ariadne’s Schaunard comes from Mal than Dom could possibly be comfortable with. Sure, the hair’s red, but the cut’s almost a mirror, and the face comes to the same kind of peaks just over the eyebrows. The pants are a nice touch. “Considering that they haven’t answered, I think I’m being generous in allowing you to call them when you’ve sobered up in the morning.” She looks back at Arthur. “Hello, Sergeant.”
He shuts the door, circles the table, goes to stand by the vent. “You wanted to see me?”
“It seems we have a celebrity on our hands,” she says, with perfect condescension. “You ever heard of C.R. Nottingham?”
Arthur gives the nastiest, most Eamesain smirk he’s conjured yet. “Never.”
-
“Double iced Grande raspberry latte?”
Miyu looks up from her computer, doesn’t quite meet Dom’s eyes, and shakes her head. She stammers. “Yes.”
Dom smiles at her and nudges the cup onto what little space remains on the table. “Drifted off a bit there?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She smiles, and shakes her head, and turns back to her computer. The projections at the other tables stop staring at Dom over their books and straws. The only one who doesn’t stop looking is Yusuf, behind the counter, ladling ice and caramel into a blender.
Dom nods, and pulls away from the table. “Sorry I interrupted you,” he says, and straightens out, turns-
-and crashes into a cold drink and an extremely attractive woman.
Mocha slush and whipped cream sandwich between Dom’s shoulder and the woman’s chest, and, being slush, doesn’t precisely spray as much as lance through the air and splatter on Dom’s face. What misses Dom’s face falls, with a little architectural nudge, on the keyboard of Miyu’s computer.
Miyu’s consistency in having delayed reactions is a bit off-putting. She takes a moment to process, and then she gets up and sputters and shrieks.
The attractive girl shoves Dom aside and starts scooping the semiliquid away from the computer. “Oh god, dear, I’m so sorry,” she says-the voice is British but Dom can’t place the accent, all he knows is it’s not clean Received, but crisper than Estuary. “Let me get the napkins-did I get you or just the computer?”
“Just the computer.” Miyu’s already gone for the stand nearest her, ripped out a stack of napkins, and scurried back to the laptop. “Do you have any books with you? I need to turn it over.”
“Here, sure,” the lady says. She takes a large art history textbook out of her satchel and sets it down on the table among Miyu’s notes. They upend the computer over the books, screen draped over the table’s edge.
By now, Dom’s stepped back around the counter to change his apron, and Yusuf is teasing him in character. The lady at the table-Eames, in an immaculate forge as a somewhat sticky late-twentyodd brunette with skin about the same color as the beverage down her shirt-keeps daubing at the table. She’s drawing the eyes of the projections, not Dom, so Miyu believes it’s real. Good.
“I really am sorry,” Eames tells her. “Should I stay here to make sure it starts up again?”
“Yeah, if you want.”
Eames smiles-the woman’s smile is easy, a bit self-deprecating. “Same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I was lucky I’d backed everything up. And I was still under warranty.”
“I’ve got a couple of months left on mine.” Belatedly, Miyu takes the USB drive out of its port. It blinks blue LED and peters out. Dom knows. “It should be okay.”
Eames has finished cleaning up, even though there’s still a dark stain down the tight white shirt. He sits down at Miyu’s table, looks over at Dom. “I didn’t get you too badly, did I?”
Dom shakes his head. “Let me get you another drink, that was my fault. Venti mocha frappe?”
“Yes, exactly. Thank you.”
Dom ties on his new apron and goes to the cash register, listening, planning, moving imaginary customers imaginary coffee. All according to plan, thus far. Eames has caught her attention, Yusuf’s passing him espresso shots that do anything but caffeinate-
-At the table, Eames’ forge laughs nervously. “Honest to god?”
“Yeah,” Miyu says, “You look a lot like her. When the computer dries I’ll show you what I mean. I know it sounds weird, but it’s like you stepped out of my head.”
All eyes in the café flicker to Dom, Eames’ included.
-
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Nottingham is shaking, falls back in his chair. It screeches on the tile and he almost keels over. Arthur takes a step forward, considers catching him, doesn’t need to. “I’ve-I’ve written so much, you have to have heard of something. Courier 56? Oil on Canvas? Eight Ounces, that was a movie last year. Something, anything!”
“You see what I have to work with,” Schaunard is taller than Ariadne, so Arthur is conscious of adjusting himself to meet her knowing glance.
“I do,” Arthur says. “You want me to bring in some backup?”
“Not just yet. Get someone on figuring out who Mr. Nottingham really is.”
“Okay, fine!” Nottingham shouts, bringing his palms down on the table. That probably hurt, maybe enough to convince him this isn’t a dream at all. “Alexander Nottingham. That might check out faster.”
Arthur raises an eyebrow. “Don’t see how you get a C and an R from Alexander.”
“Please,” he says. “Look me up under that name. I have fingerprints in Canada, you can check them, anything-but I am what I say I am. I’m a writer. I’m not just some drunk. You have to believe me.”
There are groans and yells in the hall. Someone starts banging on the door from the outside.
Ariadne-Schaunard-nods, quickly. “Take care of that,” she tells Arthur, lets the double entendre hang in the air like a naked bulb. And then she adds, to Nottingham, “You have to calm down. I’ll get you some water.”
Arthur makes sure the door is shut again before he punches the first aggressive projection in the jaw. It wouldn’t do to let Nottingham see that. Or the second, whose neck Arthur breaks with his nightstick and a twist.
-
“So there’s this soccer player, and she’s trying to negotiate a better contract and get off her current team. But her team’s just been bought by the Russian mob and she finds out that’s why she can’t leave. She tries to get out by reporting them but you can guess how well that goes, and soon they’re catching her with vinegar instead of honey if you know what I mean. There might be something to do with hostages, I haven’t decided. I’d kind of like them to be all we have your boyfriend or something. Anyway, there ends up being this big chase scene during a big international game. I can’t decide what country it’s in, Hungary or Slovakia or somewhere in the former Soviet Union, definitely, and she teams up with this operative.”
“And I look like the football player?” Eames asks, cheekily.
“No, the operative. I always thought that if it was a movie she could be played by Eliza Dushku, but she’s too pale. Dushku I mean. You’re closer. You’re not an actress, are you? Maybe I should pitch it as a treatment instead of a book.”
“It does sound cinematic,” Eames agrees. “A bit Tarantino.”
“Get out, I love Tarantino.”
Eames laughs with her and tries not to think about looking like someone in her head. He’d tried to conjure up someone she could trust, not someone she could write. “Have you written any of it?”
“This one? Yeah, some. I should check if my computer’s dry,” she says, and is careful of the drinks as she lifts the laptop off the textbook and turns it right-side up.
As Miyu pushes to turn it on, Eames looks over at the counter. “Oi, is my new drink ready?”
Dom looks up, and puts down the shot of espresso he’s just poured out. “Yeah, just a sec.”
Oh, he heard the same as Eames heard, that’s written somewhere in Dom’s face. Yusuf’s practically wearing it on his sleeve. Well, they can’t fault Eames for being a little too thorough, now can they?”
The computer makes its requisite bwong when it starts up. Ah, another Mac. Miyu sighs in relief, and toasts with what’s left of her iced latte. “It lives.”
Eames even gives her a phew as well. “Love your desktop.”
“Thanks!” Arthur had researched that one meticulously, and Eames will give credit where credit is due, later. “Can’t bring it to work, so I might as well play, right?”
“Well, not like you can’t play at work,” Eames says and smirks. He likes this character, it’s a pity she’s technically not Eames’ at all. “You can write at work, can’t you?”
Dom comes by with a mop, a bucket, and Eames’ unnecessarily girly (if delicious) drink. He puts the latter down on the table just as Miyu plugs her USB into the laptop.
“Sometimes,” Miyu says. “The writing I’m doing at work...it’s okay because it feels like practice, you know? I have lots of ideas. But if one of them was about to get me out of having to work at all, I’d know.” She scrolls through her files, opens one folder and then another. “Lots of ideas, yeah. Sometimes I think the good ones are just waiting for me to catch up with them, you see what I mean?”
To distract her while Dom plugs a second USB in, Eames covers Miyu’s hand with one of his own. They’re both still sticky from the spilled drink. “More than you think.”
-
Arthur crushes an inmate’s nose. His uniform is short-sleeved, so the blood runs down the inmate’s mouth and chin and the entire length of Arthur’s forearm.
In some ways, it is easier fighting through level one projections than level two. For one thing, with a few somewhat notable exceptions, resistance is less immediately lethal and generally straightforward. Crowds will suffocate you, the weather will break, and if there’s fire or gunfire it’s always coming your way, so the best defense is to be a step ahead. On the first level under, a dream is a dream.
For Arthur, the counting makes it harder. Not that his actions count, in that meaningful way, because they don’t-that the only ones that mean are the ones that buy him time. What he does up here changes nothing and affects none (unless the sleepers are directly involved), as long as he gets their headphones on and their kicks primed.
Arthur doesn’t brag about the kick he reverse-engineered the time they first pulled off inception.
Today, he won’t brag about holding off a prison riot singlehandedly.
So when he steps over a heap of unconscious and mangled convicts to unlock the door and fill Dom’s coffeeshop with Edith Piaf played twenty times slower, Arthur is not counting bodies. He’s counting seconds on three different clocks.
-
Dom never quite knows how to describe what sound the sky makes-it’s an assault of warped brass and evokes, more than anything else, a speeding train declining to stop for you. Either way, when it blares twice more, half as close together, Dom signals to Yusuf.
Diversion on top of diversion; Yusuf pulls the crank on the cappuccino steamer, and hot milk sprays everywhere. Yusuf curses, loud and convincingly enough that he might actually be hurt, and drops the pitcher with the remaining milk on the floor. Miyu and Eames’ projection stop looking quite so intensely into each others’ eyes, and are out of their seats like the good samaritans they should be.
The crowd of projections is thick enough, all surging forward to check if Yusuf’s all right. Good. Dom sits down and takes over Miyu’s laptop, scrolls through the files for the most dissuading and protected, for something that sets it off, that click behind his eyes that means jackpot.
“It’s fine,” Yusuf is saying, but the projections don’t seem to believe it. They smother him. “I’ll just go in the back and wrap it up, see, not even red."
On the one hand, Dom thinks as he scrolls through, the trauma they counted on in Miyu’s dreams is entirely necessary to induce. In reality, the last thing Miyu remembers is that she was carried out of her office after an injurious freak accident. They need the fear and the chaos to make her drive Eames and Yusuf away-there, that file, Dom makes the transfer to his own USB and, safely, extracts it.
He doesn’t get to internally articulate the on the other hand before Eames does something unexpected, but predictable.
Namely, vault over the counter and get Yusuf in a headlock, holding a stiletto against his eye.
Yusuf’s mouth opens and half-closes like a fish nosing at flakes in the tank. Dom holds on to the USB and gets up, tense, conciliatory. “Miss, I don’t know what you’re getting at-”
“Nothing, love,” Eames says, playing up an extremely uncomfortable fatale that doesn’t do much for his forge’s femininity. “I’ve just been waiting for my opportunity with this dear chap.” He pecks Yusuf on the cheek. “Hand it over or I’ll take it over.”
Dom manages “You won’t-” and Yusuf gets out an “I don’t-” before the knife goes in.
Miyu’s subconscious does the sensible thing and panics.
-
.
On to Part 2
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