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laliandra What's this you say, two fics in rapid succession? Yes, yes I say, because Inception fandom is crazy, inspirational and also Dubai. I feel like one of those woman on the Shopping Channel, "If Inception Fandom can make a serial procrastinator finish two fics in one week, just imagine what Inception Fandom can do for YOU" * earnest face, intense eyes*
Anyhow! This fic actually came first but then it kicked my ass all over town and so I ran off and took the train to cutesville (it's nice there). But now I feel something in between "I think I'm actually done :)?" and "D: compulsion to edit every word D:" And then the whole thing become more and more canon so I thought I'd better post before the whole fic had already been done.
So! Here comes the usual Rambling Disclaimer Explanation thing. I feel like I should say that this fic is very different to Say I'm The Only Bee In Your Bonnet (but if you are after more coffee/papers/banter AU you should read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thehoyden 's diner!AU which is the fic mine wants to be when it grows up). Also, although this was written for a kink_meme, I seemed to have missed the whole kink part. Unless, like me, you get hot under the collar for introspective backstory and boys in uniform ;)
Fic! It is below the cut and on the AO3 for your reading enjoyment.
Improvise, Adapt and Overcome
Summary: For Arthur, war is losing. For this (awesome) prompt at the kink_meme.
Disclaimer: a) Inception is still not mine b) I have never been in the military
Many thanks and hearts to kaiserkuchen and shiningartifact for all their help, cheerleading and comma aid <3<#.
Excerpt from the arrest warrant
Possessions - 4 wallets (none the defendants own), 3 packs playing cards, one key for room 258 the New Yorker, five dice.
Arthur's lawyer looks at him with a familiar combination of bemusement and annoyance.
"You couldn't just have stayed in the school?"
"No," Arthur says, simply. He could feel his brain cells atrophying there.
"You're 17. They can try you as an adult, now, you know," the lawyer adds, like Arthur didn't know.
He spends most of the the trial trying to work out how they caught him. He'd conned his way across half of the country with nothing more than his brain and a good suit. Turns out the staff of the really good hotels don't ask too many questions of a smartly dressed, good looking, confident young man.
And then the FBI - which, gratifying much? - had showed up and that had been that.
The judge looks down at Arthur.
"It's prison or the army, kid," she says.
Arthur considers. Both options involve giving up a lot more than he would like. Jumpsuit versus uniforms, a small, panicked part of his brain suggests. At least learning to kill people wouldn't be dull.
"Enlist me," he says, and smiles, like he's doing them a favour, giving himself to them.
Excerpt from Psychological Entry Testing - Possible Issue/Risks. He scored highly on all tests ( See Appendices B through E) and was in top3 percentile for multitasking (see Functionality Test - App. C) so managing boredom will be key. Definite issues with control, possibly stemming from childhood (See Psych. Eval. - App. F). This will most likely manifest in inclinations toward partition and detachment which should not be a combat issue, but may make return to civilian life difficult.
Arthur thinks he's made the right decision. They’ve fast tracked him into Marine Corps training, which appeals to his sense of self worth. The mindset comes naturally enough. Be neat, do as you are told, try and be the best. The weaponry is so gorgeous that Arthur is in love, and people keep making him solve puzzles. Basic training, though. That blows. On day four they run up the hill, down the hill, then halfway up the hill they do sit up and halfway down they do press ups. And Arthur starts to think fondly about jumpsuits.
After 2 hours of that he lies out on his perfectly made bed and doesn’t think of anything at all. He can't remember the last time that happened.
“Oh god, I feel like I just went 20 rounds with really acrobatic twins.” The man flopping onto the bunk next to him groans. They’ve slept next to each other for four days, and hardly exchanged a word. Clearly today has broken more than just their bodies.
“Lou,” the man says, and holds out a hand without moving from his ceiling-staring sprawl. Arthur sits up, goes to brush his hair neater before he remembers the buzzcut, and shakes it. “Arthur,” he replies.
Lou says, “Probably not for long.”
Arthur frowns, says, “What?” Most of his unit have been here a week, and they all feel one step ahead of him.
“It’s not really Lou. But I’m black and play the trumpet.” Lou-though-not-really shrugs. “So you’ll probably end up as something else by the end of the week.”
Arthur ends up as Tart which somehow becomes Lemon Tart which becomes Lem. It’s odd and Arthur can think of a dozen better things to do with his name, but it sticks. It could have been worse, Daniel Cheng ends up as Jenny “cos he’s small enough to be a girl” and David, who has nervous habits, is Do-Over. He sleeps the other side of Arthur and remakes his bed 8 times every morning.
“Don’t you worry about Sargent Major finding fault?” he asks Arthur, who is already dressed, shined and ready for inspection.
“I make sure I get it perfect first time,” Arthur tells him absently, thinking about the course they’d run yesterday. He’s sure he could get his time down by 17 seconds.
“Dude, if I had time to redo my covers, I would throw this pillow at you,” Chuck says from opposite.
Arthur says, “Whatever, your aim is for shit, Forster.” He grins.
At the end of their thirteen weeks they are allowed a sending off. Someone has made a playlist of songs about war and fighting, some more tenuously so than others, and someone else - probably Zobby - procures a small lake of cheap, nasty vodka. It turns out to be just as effective as the less throat scalding stuff.
By the time Pat Benetar's "Love is A Battlefield" comes on, Arthur is drunk enough to join Jenny, Charmin’Marvin and Aaron in their best Molly Ringwald-in-The-Breakfast-Club impression. He is very, very good, if he says so himself. Also, Chuck stuffs 43 dollars into the top of his sweats. Arthur thinks, oh, so this is what they meant about men you would kill and die for.
Excerpt from Echo Base Airstrip Log.
Supply jet arrival 16:05.
Projected cargo - 3rd Company (Marine Corps) - 30 men
Cargo received - 3rd Company (Marine Corps) - 26 men
Arthur reads and Arthur listens. They say war is hell, war is long periods of boredom, war is a dream, a movie, a means to an end. For Arthur, war is losing. They lose vehicles, ground, men, Arthur loses count of the number of times a day he thinks, “If I were in charge...”
It’s just so poorly done, half the time. The equipment doesn’t work, the maps aren’t right, no one speaks the right language. And there’s nothing Arthur can do apart from be neat (clean his guns, pick off his targets, knot his tourniquets), follow orders (retreat) and try his best (not to die).
They all become a little more intense, here, Do-Overs’s compulsions and Lou’s jokes multiplying exponentially day by day. Losing detail until they become caricatures of themselves.
Arthur doesn’t notice the parts that are falling away from until he remembers that 6 hours earlier he’d said, “This way we gain back half the town. Should only lose 5-8 men.” And hadn’t noticed. So he does the exercises they taught in Psych, locks away the parts too fragile, too easily mislaid. Even though the doctor said he should probably stop doing those.
It’s easy to keep count of the members who make it home. One, two, three.
Transcript of Morpheus program selection interview with Dr Bennett, camp psychologist. The following lines have been highlighted.
Q: What do you dream about most often?
A: Nothing in particular.
Q: I think you're lying.
A: I'll have to get better at it, then.
...
Q: All you brought back was an Escher print ? Interesting choice.
A: I like paradoxes.
Arthur and David are the only two marines chosen from the interviews. Arthur would call it luck, except he couldn’t stack these odds.
"A program to improve and train the mind through subconscious simulation," David quotes, straightening the edges of his Greens jacket. "Should be great, right?"
Arthur, who has read both Ender’s Game and The Men Who Stare At Goats, allows himself a non committal, "Hmm."
He watches David - the nicknames belonged to the company - fiddle with his collar a little more until he can’t take any more. He straightens it, quick and efficient, fingers affectionate on the edge of the lapel.
“I am a little concerned about how much you love these,” David says, brushing something invisible off Arthur’s shoulder.
“I dream of suits,” Arthur confesses. He does, some nights, of shops where he can buy anything he wants, of soft wool and silk.
David snorts. “Of course you do.” The smile at corner of his mouth is too soft to be mocking, though. Arthur is good with details. “Did you tell that woman about the drowning dreams? The ones that you wake up gasping from? I’m guessing she asked.”
“No,” he says. He’s only ever told David and Lou about them, and only because he couldn’t avoid it, brain still half asleep, still caught in an oxygen starved tension. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“It is called The Morpheus Program,” David deflects, like the good person he is. “And they don’t exactly do subtle round here.”
Arthur winces. “Come on. They’ve got to be more complicated than that, right?”
David is extremely smug when the first thing the scientist says is, “What do you know about dreams?”
The first report from the Morpheus Project opens with “Our minds are the new scene of the battle.”
There’s 3 from special forces, 1 regular army, 1 Navy and 2 probably-spies. At least that’s what Arthur has decided they are, because everything about Sarah and Jack is a mystery apart from the fact that they are extremely smart and give off an indefinable air of danger. Arthur isn’t used to other people making him feel less than first in either of those categories, and he’s not sure how he feels about it.
After the first debrief, after Sarah has made about 5 points about the fallibility of sensory perception, lucidity, neural pathways and psychosis about 5 seconds before Arthur was about to say the exact same thing, after Arthur has limited himself to 3 sarcastic comments, he sighs. The man sitting next to him, the jockish Lieutenant from the 33rd, says, “Used to being the smartest person in the room. huh?”
David nearly laughs himself off his chair. Arthur feels himself start to grin in spite of himself.
“Know the feeling?” He asks. “I’m Arthur, by the way. So you don’t have the think of me as The Snarky One. And this is David.” He nearly says, my CO, but he’s not even sure if they have ranks any more. It’s another thing Arthur isn’t sure how he feels about.
The man flashes perfect teeth at them. “Cap. Short for Captain America,” he explains, shrugging.
He’s really called Tyler, of course, Mom’s apple pie and Stars and Stripes and the quarterback Prom King in a blond haired, blue-eyed package. He spent three years fighting, although he doesn’t look old enough to have, and he’s here because he managed to fortify a goatshed and hold off an entire raiding party from there.
The scientists talk a lot, but there’s nothing quite like practical experience, and the experience is nothing short of extraordinary. They drop into their own dreams to start, the world fading away drip by drip, goodbye to the walls, then the doctor by the bed, then nothing but the ache of the I.V. And then a dream. Arthur knows that dying in here only makes you wake up (and he wonders how they found that out, if someone volunteered) but he’s careful anyway. It seems such a waste of this place, a world that you can make exactly as you wish. The jolt you get from Dream Death never gets any less terrible, and there’s no end to the teasing you when you have to report back that you couldn’t outrun your own mind.
Reporting back always seems like kind of a joke, frankly, because they could say anything. Literally anything.
Zach dreams of boats. Every time. They get back, and he says, “Boats again, sir,” and gets to go back to base early. He could be lying, no one here is exactly short of a brain cell or two. But then again, Zach’s a boy from Chicago who joined the Navy at 16; Arthur wouldn’t be surprised if he’s always dreamed of boats.
Arthur is considering hooking him up to a lie detector. He shouldn’t, probably, David will yell at him and Jack will give him a really hypocritical talk about ethics.
But then it turns out that Zach has just jumped ahead a few steps and has been pre-constructing perfect armadas for his own mind. Arthur gets to step in and see, eventually, the second exciting step that is Dreamsharing. He feels bitter and envious in there - all this time Zach had been getting this perfect dream, and the rest of them had been forced to put up with whatever shit their subconscious threw at them. Zach’s projections turn on Arthur almost as soon as they see him.
The first dream Arthur builds is a revelation. Everything is exactly how he planned.
It’s still not known what effects prolonged exposure will have on the subjects. It seems that the subconscious builds up a kind of resistance, becoming more self aware, inhibiting both easy access from to and by the subject.
They thought they knew about limbo. Sarah gets to name it after a month spent in there, sitting on a beach waiting for her kick.
“I felt it, and then I shot myself,” she’d said, shrugging. Her jaw had been set tight.
Arthur hacks into her laptop one night and finds the things she isn’t telling them. He tells himself it’s his job to know. Maybe it’s just that his perception of the boundaries of privacy has been warped by dropping into other people’s minds, seeing the darkest, secret corners of them laid out in front of him. How beautiful it had been, how anything was possible. How she’d gone through the motions of shooting herself every day, so that she would remember it was what she had to do, even though it wasn’t what she wanted.
He starts having dreams of the desert. It's blue, like the sea, and the company is disappearing into it, the sand coming in like water and Arthur can't stop it.
They didn’t know they could lose people to it. Arthur is supposed to be the organised one. He should have done the math.
They have a funeral for Cap in a dream, the whole 21 gun shebang, flags and tears and dress uniform. They can’t have one in reality, where Cap sits locked away, brain still buried somewhere in itself, under the sea and sand of 10 minutes in reality, a lifetime in limbo.
David comes to Arthur’s room that night, leaning awkwardly on the door-frame, a bottle of vodka in his hand. They drink in silence, less coke in the glass with every round.
“I’m quitting the program, Lem,” David says, just as Arthur is knocking back what is essentially a straight shot. The burn shouldn’t be a shock.
“You could, too. Stop putting our minds and bodies on the line. Wear what we want to. I certainly plan to.“
Arthur tries, “It’s not that I don’t...”
“And you’re not,” David states, mouth a flat line. He knows Arthur better than any person ever has, Arthur realises with a horrid jolt. He knows that Arthur still loves dreaming, loves it and all its danger, despite and because.
Arthur says, “And you can give this up?” It seems unimaginable, like throwing away the most precious thing you’ve ever been given, shining and impossible.
“Sure thing,” David says with an easy shrug. “I enjoy reality. I really enjoy being sure of my own sanity.”
David had set the team a test once, two versus two, to steal his own personal file. Arthur won - of course, a game with knowledge as the prize - and his reward had been reading it with David sitting next to him providing commentary. And that’s how Arthur knows, among other things, that David’s greatest fear has always been losing his mind, tipping over from compulsion to addiction.
“You’ll be missed,” Arthur admits.
David grins at him, gaze slipping slightly, blurred. “You’ll be fine,” he says, certain. “You better had be, anyway. Make us proud.”
Arthur raises a glass to that, to their choices, and together they finish the bottle, telling stories until they can’t any more, slurring themselves into sleep.
The next time they go into a dream that Arthur has built, Sarah scuffs her feet on the ground.
“Why is the floor blue?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Athur lies.
He gets rid of the sand, eventually, but he can never stop his dreams having a blue tinge.
Extract from the Incident Report
The PASIV device was taken whilst being used on a recon misson, by a man impersonating Commander Jackson of 4th Commando. The Commander’s identification had been taken at dinner by an unidentified young woman, possibly of French origin.
Arthur doesn’t recall having seen this projection before.
“My name is Dom Cobb,” the man says, and grins. He’s handsome, in a square jawed kind of way, and very aware of his own charm. Extractor, then. “I’m here to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Arthur says, “I beg to differ,” and shoots him.
When the man, Dom, appears a week later, Arthur panics internally. He was so sure that he wasn’t dreaming. He retraces his steps, working his model of the new battlefield, walk to the lab, breakfast in the mess, shower. It’s real.
“Don’t think this means I won’t shoot you,” he warns.
Dom sits down on the bed in the middle of the room, calculatingly non threatening, arranged so that Arthur can see he’s not carrying any weapons. Nothing obvious, anyway. “I figured as much,” he says.
Arthur leans on the table, the gun easily within reach beside the mock up forest. “What do you want?” he asks.
Dom tilts his head, persuasive,and says, “You, in a manner of speaking.”
“You’re not my type.” Arthur deadpans.
“Never fear, kid. I only want you for your brain.” He pauses theatrically. “Well, that and your dazzling proficiency with a huge range of deadly weaponry.”
Arthur says, “Isn’t this breaking the whole Entente Cordiale thing we’ve got going on?” because that’s the polite way of saying that the army are spied upon and spy on the criminal underworld that has sprung up. Amateurs and academics and teams who break into minds for money - extractors, and architects and thieves, oh my.
Turns out dreams are worth at least a million a piece, according to the source they picked up in December. Which is a point, actually.
“Shouldn’t you be offering me riches beyond my,” he huffs a laugh, “wildest dreams?”
“Nah,” Dom says, and stands up again. “That’s not what would make you work for me. I’ve seen your files.”
Arthur finds that he’s reached for his gun. But he looks at Dom, the clean cut of his suit, the laughter all around his mouth, and he feels a pull of something, that dizzy sense of something like possibility.
Dom stills to serious again, eyes vivid under the bright lights and fixed on Arthur like he’s lining him up for the kill. “You’ll work with me because I’m the best. And because together we can blow everyone else out of the water. Because, Arthur, seriously, don’t you ever just want to have a little fun?”
Arthur puts the gun down.
Blueprint of a mineshaft. It has notes written in the margins, four hands, two languages (three, if you count American English as separate, and Eames does). The only truly legible one reads “Just who is testing who, here?”
The music starts and Arthur grins, and then kicks out one more support out. There is a very satisfying noise of something collapsing up above them.
He comes back to himself, reality wrapping itself round him, pervasive and elusive. Everyone else is already awake; Dom is twirling Mal under his arm and Eames is lounging amused on his armchair. Arthur has known the man for three weeks and that smirk is already irritatingly familiar.
“Did you guys do all that just to impress me?” he says, with a lazy wave that Arthur supposes is meant to sum up ‘infiltrate and subsequently destroy an entire mining complex with nothing but some boxes and a hammer’.
Not all of it, Arthur thinks.
“No,” he says, just as Mal says, “Well, I didn’t,” with a sunny smile for Eames and a quick, sharp glance at Arthur. It should be upsetting that Mal’s unrepentant wicked streak only makes her more attractive, but Arthur is used to it. Dom, however, seems never to get over it, and he kisses her fast on the cheek, smiling helplessly.
"That’s what you get when you run with the Cobbs," Dom says, doing that thing where he tries to look like a Criminal Mastermind. Even though Mal and Arthur have repeatedly told him not to, Mal using some really expressive hand gestures.
“Hey,” Arthur complains. “Just because I didn’t marry into this gang...”
Dom gives him a look that is fond in spite of himself, because Dom is a not-so-secret sap about many things, and Number 1 of those is his marriage and Number 2 is his team.
“The Cobbs and Arthur?” he offers. Dom stopped using Arthur’s surname after it became clear that distinguishing between ‘person you follow without question’ and ‘Commander’ didn’t come easily to Arthur. He’d kept snapping to attention. “Cobbs and Co.?”
Mal swoops on Arthur, smacks a kiss onto each cheek and says, "We couldn’t do it without you, petit. You are truly my second favourite thing that Dom ever stole from the military."
Arthur sighs. "I guess I can't compete with the PASIV."
"You're ex-military?" Eames asks Arthur, one eyebrow perfectly arched, mouth caught up in a quirk.
"Yes," Arthur says, warily.
"That..." Eames sweeps Arthur over with his strange mixture of disinterested intent. "Explains a lot."
Anyhow! This fic actually came first but then it kicked my ass all over town and so I ran off and took the train to cutesville (it's nice there). But now I feel something in between "I think I'm actually done :)?" and "D: compulsion to edit every word D:" And then the whole thing become more and more canon so I thought I'd better post before the whole fic had already been done.
So! Here comes the usual Rambling Disclaimer Explanation thing. I feel like I should say that this fic is very different to Say I'm The Only Bee In Your Bonnet (but if you are after more coffee/papers/banter AU you should read
thehoyden 's diner!AU which is the fic mine wants to be when it grows up). Also, although this was written for a kink_meme, I seemed to have missed the whole kink part. Unless, like me, you get hot under the collar for introspective backstory and boys in uniform ;) Fic! It is below the cut and on the AO3 for your reading enjoyment.
Improvise, Adapt and Overcome
Summary: For Arthur, war is losing. For this (awesome) prompt at the kink_meme.
Disclaimer: a) Inception is still not mine b) I have never been in the military
Many thanks and hearts to kaiserkuchen and shiningartifact for all their help, cheerleading and comma aid <3<#.
Excerpt from the arrest warrant
Possessions - 4 wallets (none the defendants own), 3 packs playing cards, one key for room 258 the New Yorker, five dice.
Arthur's lawyer looks at him with a familiar combination of bemusement and annoyance.
"You couldn't just have stayed in the school?"
"No," Arthur says, simply. He could feel his brain cells atrophying there.
"You're 17. They can try you as an adult, now, you know," the lawyer adds, like Arthur didn't know.
He spends most of the the trial trying to work out how they caught him. He'd conned his way across half of the country with nothing more than his brain and a good suit. Turns out the staff of the really good hotels don't ask too many questions of a smartly dressed, good looking, confident young man.
And then the FBI - which, gratifying much? - had showed up and that had been that.
The judge looks down at Arthur.
"It's prison or the army, kid," she says.
Arthur considers. Both options involve giving up a lot more than he would like. Jumpsuit versus uniforms, a small, panicked part of his brain suggests. At least learning to kill people wouldn't be dull.
"Enlist me," he says, and smiles, like he's doing them a favour, giving himself to them.
Excerpt from Psychological Entry Testing - Possible Issue/Risks. He scored highly on all tests ( See Appendices B through E) and was in top3 percentile for multitasking (see Functionality Test - App. C) so managing boredom will be key. Definite issues with control, possibly stemming from childhood (See Psych. Eval. - App. F). This will most likely manifest in inclinations toward partition and detachment which should not be a combat issue, but may make return to civilian life difficult.
Arthur thinks he's made the right decision. They’ve fast tracked him into Marine Corps training, which appeals to his sense of self worth. The mindset comes naturally enough. Be neat, do as you are told, try and be the best. The weaponry is so gorgeous that Arthur is in love, and people keep making him solve puzzles. Basic training, though. That blows. On day four they run up the hill, down the hill, then halfway up the hill they do sit up and halfway down they do press ups. And Arthur starts to think fondly about jumpsuits.
After 2 hours of that he lies out on his perfectly made bed and doesn’t think of anything at all. He can't remember the last time that happened.
“Oh god, I feel like I just went 20 rounds with really acrobatic twins.” The man flopping onto the bunk next to him groans. They’ve slept next to each other for four days, and hardly exchanged a word. Clearly today has broken more than just their bodies.
“Lou,” the man says, and holds out a hand without moving from his ceiling-staring sprawl. Arthur sits up, goes to brush his hair neater before he remembers the buzzcut, and shakes it. “Arthur,” he replies.
Lou says, “Probably not for long.”
Arthur frowns, says, “What?” Most of his unit have been here a week, and they all feel one step ahead of him.
“It’s not really Lou. But I’m black and play the trumpet.” Lou-though-not-really shrugs. “So you’ll probably end up as something else by the end of the week.”
Arthur ends up as Tart which somehow becomes Lemon Tart which becomes Lem. It’s odd and Arthur can think of a dozen better things to do with his name, but it sticks. It could have been worse, Daniel Cheng ends up as Jenny “cos he’s small enough to be a girl” and David, who has nervous habits, is Do-Over. He sleeps the other side of Arthur and remakes his bed 8 times every morning.
“Don’t you worry about Sargent Major finding fault?” he asks Arthur, who is already dressed, shined and ready for inspection.
“I make sure I get it perfect first time,” Arthur tells him absently, thinking about the course they’d run yesterday. He’s sure he could get his time down by 17 seconds.
“Dude, if I had time to redo my covers, I would throw this pillow at you,” Chuck says from opposite.
Arthur says, “Whatever, your aim is for shit, Forster.” He grins.
At the end of their thirteen weeks they are allowed a sending off. Someone has made a playlist of songs about war and fighting, some more tenuously so than others, and someone else - probably Zobby - procures a small lake of cheap, nasty vodka. It turns out to be just as effective as the less throat scalding stuff.
By the time Pat Benetar's "Love is A Battlefield" comes on, Arthur is drunk enough to join Jenny, Charmin’Marvin and Aaron in their best Molly Ringwald-in-The-Breakfast-Club impression. He is very, very good, if he says so himself. Also, Chuck stuffs 43 dollars into the top of his sweats. Arthur thinks, oh, so this is what they meant about men you would kill and die for.
Excerpt from Echo Base Airstrip Log.
Supply jet arrival 16:05.
Projected cargo - 3rd Company (Marine Corps) - 30 men
Cargo received - 3rd Company (Marine Corps) - 26 men
Arthur reads and Arthur listens. They say war is hell, war is long periods of boredom, war is a dream, a movie, a means to an end. For Arthur, war is losing. They lose vehicles, ground, men, Arthur loses count of the number of times a day he thinks, “If I were in charge...”
It’s just so poorly done, half the time. The equipment doesn’t work, the maps aren’t right, no one speaks the right language. And there’s nothing Arthur can do apart from be neat (clean his guns, pick off his targets, knot his tourniquets), follow orders (retreat) and try his best (not to die).
They all become a little more intense, here, Do-Overs’s compulsions and Lou’s jokes multiplying exponentially day by day. Losing detail until they become caricatures of themselves.
Arthur doesn’t notice the parts that are falling away from until he remembers that 6 hours earlier he’d said, “This way we gain back half the town. Should only lose 5-8 men.” And hadn’t noticed. So he does the exercises they taught in Psych, locks away the parts too fragile, too easily mislaid. Even though the doctor said he should probably stop doing those.
It’s easy to keep count of the members who make it home. One, two, three.
Transcript of Morpheus program selection interview with Dr Bennett, camp psychologist. The following lines have been highlighted.
Q: What do you dream about most often?
A: Nothing in particular.
Q: I think you're lying.
A: I'll have to get better at it, then.
...
Q: All you brought back was an Escher print ? Interesting choice.
A: I like paradoxes.
Arthur and David are the only two marines chosen from the interviews. Arthur would call it luck, except he couldn’t stack these odds.
"A program to improve and train the mind through subconscious simulation," David quotes, straightening the edges of his Greens jacket. "Should be great, right?"
Arthur, who has read both Ender’s Game and The Men Who Stare At Goats, allows himself a non committal, "Hmm."
He watches David - the nicknames belonged to the company - fiddle with his collar a little more until he can’t take any more. He straightens it, quick and efficient, fingers affectionate on the edge of the lapel.
“I am a little concerned about how much you love these,” David says, brushing something invisible off Arthur’s shoulder.
“I dream of suits,” Arthur confesses. He does, some nights, of shops where he can buy anything he wants, of soft wool and silk.
David snorts. “Of course you do.” The smile at corner of his mouth is too soft to be mocking, though. Arthur is good with details. “Did you tell that woman about the drowning dreams? The ones that you wake up gasping from? I’m guessing she asked.”
“No,” he says. He’s only ever told David and Lou about them, and only because he couldn’t avoid it, brain still half asleep, still caught in an oxygen starved tension. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“It is called The Morpheus Program,” David deflects, like the good person he is. “And they don’t exactly do subtle round here.”
Arthur winces. “Come on. They’ve got to be more complicated than that, right?”
David is extremely smug when the first thing the scientist says is, “What do you know about dreams?”
The first report from the Morpheus Project opens with “Our minds are the new scene of the battle.”
There’s 3 from special forces, 1 regular army, 1 Navy and 2 probably-spies. At least that’s what Arthur has decided they are, because everything about Sarah and Jack is a mystery apart from the fact that they are extremely smart and give off an indefinable air of danger. Arthur isn’t used to other people making him feel less than first in either of those categories, and he’s not sure how he feels about it.
After the first debrief, after Sarah has made about 5 points about the fallibility of sensory perception, lucidity, neural pathways and psychosis about 5 seconds before Arthur was about to say the exact same thing, after Arthur has limited himself to 3 sarcastic comments, he sighs. The man sitting next to him, the jockish Lieutenant from the 33rd, says, “Used to being the smartest person in the room. huh?”
David nearly laughs himself off his chair. Arthur feels himself start to grin in spite of himself.
“Know the feeling?” He asks. “I’m Arthur, by the way. So you don’t have the think of me as The Snarky One. And this is David.” He nearly says, my CO, but he’s not even sure if they have ranks any more. It’s another thing Arthur isn’t sure how he feels about.
The man flashes perfect teeth at them. “Cap. Short for Captain America,” he explains, shrugging.
He’s really called Tyler, of course, Mom’s apple pie and Stars and Stripes and the quarterback Prom King in a blond haired, blue-eyed package. He spent three years fighting, although he doesn’t look old enough to have, and he’s here because he managed to fortify a goatshed and hold off an entire raiding party from there.
The scientists talk a lot, but there’s nothing quite like practical experience, and the experience is nothing short of extraordinary. They drop into their own dreams to start, the world fading away drip by drip, goodbye to the walls, then the doctor by the bed, then nothing but the ache of the I.V. And then a dream. Arthur knows that dying in here only makes you wake up (and he wonders how they found that out, if someone volunteered) but he’s careful anyway. It seems such a waste of this place, a world that you can make exactly as you wish. The jolt you get from Dream Death never gets any less terrible, and there’s no end to the teasing you when you have to report back that you couldn’t outrun your own mind.
Reporting back always seems like kind of a joke, frankly, because they could say anything. Literally anything.
Zach dreams of boats. Every time. They get back, and he says, “Boats again, sir,” and gets to go back to base early. He could be lying, no one here is exactly short of a brain cell or two. But then again, Zach’s a boy from Chicago who joined the Navy at 16; Arthur wouldn’t be surprised if he’s always dreamed of boats.
Arthur is considering hooking him up to a lie detector. He shouldn’t, probably, David will yell at him and Jack will give him a really hypocritical talk about ethics.
But then it turns out that Zach has just jumped ahead a few steps and has been pre-constructing perfect armadas for his own mind. Arthur gets to step in and see, eventually, the second exciting step that is Dreamsharing. He feels bitter and envious in there - all this time Zach had been getting this perfect dream, and the rest of them had been forced to put up with whatever shit their subconscious threw at them. Zach’s projections turn on Arthur almost as soon as they see him.
The first dream Arthur builds is a revelation. Everything is exactly how he planned.
It’s still not known what effects prolonged exposure will have on the subjects. It seems that the subconscious builds up a kind of resistance, becoming more self aware, inhibiting both easy access from to and by the subject.
They thought they knew about limbo. Sarah gets to name it after a month spent in there, sitting on a beach waiting for her kick.
“I felt it, and then I shot myself,” she’d said, shrugging. Her jaw had been set tight.
Arthur hacks into her laptop one night and finds the things she isn’t telling them. He tells himself it’s his job to know. Maybe it’s just that his perception of the boundaries of privacy has been warped by dropping into other people’s minds, seeing the darkest, secret corners of them laid out in front of him. How beautiful it had been, how anything was possible. How she’d gone through the motions of shooting herself every day, so that she would remember it was what she had to do, even though it wasn’t what she wanted.
He starts having dreams of the desert. It's blue, like the sea, and the company is disappearing into it, the sand coming in like water and Arthur can't stop it.
They didn’t know they could lose people to it. Arthur is supposed to be the organised one. He should have done the math.
They have a funeral for Cap in a dream, the whole 21 gun shebang, flags and tears and dress uniform. They can’t have one in reality, where Cap sits locked away, brain still buried somewhere in itself, under the sea and sand of 10 minutes in reality, a lifetime in limbo.
David comes to Arthur’s room that night, leaning awkwardly on the door-frame, a bottle of vodka in his hand. They drink in silence, less coke in the glass with every round.
“I’m quitting the program, Lem,” David says, just as Arthur is knocking back what is essentially a straight shot. The burn shouldn’t be a shock.
“You could, too. Stop putting our minds and bodies on the line. Wear what we want to. I certainly plan to.“
Arthur tries, “It’s not that I don’t...”
“And you’re not,” David states, mouth a flat line. He knows Arthur better than any person ever has, Arthur realises with a horrid jolt. He knows that Arthur still loves dreaming, loves it and all its danger, despite and because.
Arthur says, “And you can give this up?” It seems unimaginable, like throwing away the most precious thing you’ve ever been given, shining and impossible.
“Sure thing,” David says with an easy shrug. “I enjoy reality. I really enjoy being sure of my own sanity.”
David had set the team a test once, two versus two, to steal his own personal file. Arthur won - of course, a game with knowledge as the prize - and his reward had been reading it with David sitting next to him providing commentary. And that’s how Arthur knows, among other things, that David’s greatest fear has always been losing his mind, tipping over from compulsion to addiction.
“You’ll be missed,” Arthur admits.
David grins at him, gaze slipping slightly, blurred. “You’ll be fine,” he says, certain. “You better had be, anyway. Make us proud.”
Arthur raises a glass to that, to their choices, and together they finish the bottle, telling stories until they can’t any more, slurring themselves into sleep.
The next time they go into a dream that Arthur has built, Sarah scuffs her feet on the ground.
“Why is the floor blue?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Athur lies.
He gets rid of the sand, eventually, but he can never stop his dreams having a blue tinge.
Extract from the Incident Report
The PASIV device was taken whilst being used on a recon misson, by a man impersonating Commander Jackson of 4th Commando. The Commander’s identification had been taken at dinner by an unidentified young woman, possibly of French origin.
Arthur doesn’t recall having seen this projection before.
“My name is Dom Cobb,” the man says, and grins. He’s handsome, in a square jawed kind of way, and very aware of his own charm. Extractor, then. “I’m here to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Arthur says, “I beg to differ,” and shoots him.
When the man, Dom, appears a week later, Arthur panics internally. He was so sure that he wasn’t dreaming. He retraces his steps, working his model of the new battlefield, walk to the lab, breakfast in the mess, shower. It’s real.
“Don’t think this means I won’t shoot you,” he warns.
Dom sits down on the bed in the middle of the room, calculatingly non threatening, arranged so that Arthur can see he’s not carrying any weapons. Nothing obvious, anyway. “I figured as much,” he says.
Arthur leans on the table, the gun easily within reach beside the mock up forest. “What do you want?” he asks.
Dom tilts his head, persuasive,and says, “You, in a manner of speaking.”
“You’re not my type.” Arthur deadpans.
“Never fear, kid. I only want you for your brain.” He pauses theatrically. “Well, that and your dazzling proficiency with a huge range of deadly weaponry.”
Arthur says, “Isn’t this breaking the whole Entente Cordiale thing we’ve got going on?” because that’s the polite way of saying that the army are spied upon and spy on the criminal underworld that has sprung up. Amateurs and academics and teams who break into minds for money - extractors, and architects and thieves, oh my.
Turns out dreams are worth at least a million a piece, according to the source they picked up in December. Which is a point, actually.
“Shouldn’t you be offering me riches beyond my,” he huffs a laugh, “wildest dreams?”
“Nah,” Dom says, and stands up again. “That’s not what would make you work for me. I’ve seen your files.”
Arthur finds that he’s reached for his gun. But he looks at Dom, the clean cut of his suit, the laughter all around his mouth, and he feels a pull of something, that dizzy sense of something like possibility.
Dom stills to serious again, eyes vivid under the bright lights and fixed on Arthur like he’s lining him up for the kill. “You’ll work with me because I’m the best. And because together we can blow everyone else out of the water. Because, Arthur, seriously, don’t you ever just want to have a little fun?”
Arthur puts the gun down.
Blueprint of a mineshaft. It has notes written in the margins, four hands, two languages (three, if you count American English as separate, and Eames does). The only truly legible one reads “Just who is testing who, here?”
The music starts and Arthur grins, and then kicks out one more support out. There is a very satisfying noise of something collapsing up above them.
He comes back to himself, reality wrapping itself round him, pervasive and elusive. Everyone else is already awake; Dom is twirling Mal under his arm and Eames is lounging amused on his armchair. Arthur has known the man for three weeks and that smirk is already irritatingly familiar.
“Did you guys do all that just to impress me?” he says, with a lazy wave that Arthur supposes is meant to sum up ‘infiltrate and subsequently destroy an entire mining complex with nothing but some boxes and a hammer’.
Not all of it, Arthur thinks.
“No,” he says, just as Mal says, “Well, I didn’t,” with a sunny smile for Eames and a quick, sharp glance at Arthur. It should be upsetting that Mal’s unrepentant wicked streak only makes her more attractive, but Arthur is used to it. Dom, however, seems never to get over it, and he kisses her fast on the cheek, smiling helplessly.
"That’s what you get when you run with the Cobbs," Dom says, doing that thing where he tries to look like a Criminal Mastermind. Even though Mal and Arthur have repeatedly told him not to, Mal using some really expressive hand gestures.
“Hey,” Arthur complains. “Just because I didn’t marry into this gang...”
Dom gives him a look that is fond in spite of himself, because Dom is a not-so-secret sap about many things, and Number 1 of those is his marriage and Number 2 is his team.
“The Cobbs and Arthur?” he offers. Dom stopped using Arthur’s surname after it became clear that distinguishing between ‘person you follow without question’ and ‘Commander’ didn’t come easily to Arthur. He’d kept snapping to attention. “Cobbs and Co.?”
Mal swoops on Arthur, smacks a kiss onto each cheek and says, "We couldn’t do it without you, petit. You are truly my second favourite thing that Dom ever stole from the military."
Arthur sighs. "I guess I can't compete with the PASIV."
"You're ex-military?" Eames asks Arthur, one eyebrow perfectly arched, mouth caught up in a quirk.
"Yes," Arthur says, warily.
"That..." Eames sweeps Arthur over with his strange mixture of disinterested intent. "Explains a lot."
