Glitch - 7
Jan. 27th, 2011 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabi_essentiallyI completely neglected to add this when I posted, but I do hope all of you will see this. I'll be away for part of tomorrow and out of town for most of Saturday. Earliest I can get the next part up will probably be Sunday. I'm very sorry for the wait! But I will be writing the next parts in any free time. ^_^
** ** ** **
Arthur came awake instantly and easily, as he normally did. Something hard and metallic was pressed against his neck, and people were lurking over him as he lay on the floor. At least five of them, this time. Four were standing, and one of them had a tranq gun trained on him. One guy was crouching beside him, the guy with the gun to his neck. Arthur looked down as far as he could, and saw that it wasn't a gun, but a taser.
He sighed.
His arm felt achy, like if he tried to move it too much the bones would grind together. He was down one limb already.
Cobb and Eames were already gone. He'd probably missed them by seconds. Teacups lay shattered on the floor. His toaster was crushed in the corner and his glass coffee pot was in bloody shards. Cobb and Eames had clearly not gone easily. It was a small comfort.
And at least he now recognized his apartment.
"Hello Arthur," said the man standing above him, leaning against his counter.
"I'm flattered," Arthur said, looking around.
The man—fifties, paunchy, but still sharp, with a greying crewcut and blue eyes—tilted his head in question.
"All of this for me? Ketamine? Tasers? It can't be that difficult. Tell me where you took my team and I'll go with you quietly and tell you whatever you want to know."
The man smiled. He didn't laugh, he just smiled and shook his head. "You'll be doing that anyway. I don't have to tell you shit. I know exactly how you operate."
"You have the advantage of me," Arthur said. His voice cracked and he tried to swallow. He was burning with thirst. "I have no idea who you are."
"Mr. Hollis, head of SomniCore. I'm pleased to find you again."
"Can't remember having met you," Arthur said. "Sorry. But you did manage to erase all of my memories for a few weeks, so, you know. Don't take it personally."
"A rare side effect," Hollis said, "one we're learning about. And you wouldn't know me, Arthur, because you've never met me before. I used to pull your strings back when you worked for us."
"Ah." He swallowed hard. He really wanted some water. His mouth tasted like burnt copper. "Look. I'll make it really easy for you. But only if you let the other two go."
Hollis laughed and crouched down over him, straddling his thighs. His face was shuttered, impenetrable. "I remember how you fought years ago, Mr. Arceneau, and you were pretty impressive. But you're just not that young anymore."
Strangely, this observation, combined with Hollis's dominating position over him, insulted him more than anything else. "I'm only 32, Jesus. I'm like eighty years younger than you are, and yes, I can still make this really, really fucking hard for you. You think I'm helpless because you can shoot me up and plug me with a few thousand volts? I could have kicked you in the balls two seconds ago and broken this guy's nose. I'm being helpful."
"You're still too unpredictable to go easy on you. We both know that you won't go quietly. Everything you endeavor ends in violence. It's how you do things."
"I'm good at violence," Arthur said, "but that doesn't mean I like it. If you know me, then you know I like being reasonable better."
"Get him up," Hollis said, moving away from him. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
Arthur moved quickly, batting the taser out of the hand of the kid who had been holding it against his neck. The guy with the tranq gun tensed to shoot, and Hollis turned back around. Arthur got to his feet and held up both hands. The taser kid scrambled for his little toy, looking humiliated and scared.
"You know I can hurt you," Arthur said. "I could have done it just then. I'd rather not, and I really don't want you to hurt me, either. I've had enough."
Hollis came at him fast and hit him so hard that he crumbled right back down to the floor. He tasted blood in his mouth and his nerves jumped, muscles still not coordinated enough to fight back. Hollis grabbed him by the side of his collar and hauled him up halfway off the floor.
"You have nothing to bargain with," he growled. Then he shoved him back down hard. "Get him out of here," he said to the others.
Arthur tried to think around the corners, tried to access logic, to find something to say, or do, or become, just to find out what they'd done with Cobb and Eames. He looked around his apartment from his place on the floor. They had trashed it. Cushions had been ripped off the sofa, TV torn from the wall, his desktop relieved of its hard drive and his laptop nowhere in sight. They'd ripped down curtains and gone through cupboards. His bookshelf was in shambles, books all over the floor. They'd even dismantled his stupid game systems.
One detail stood out to him among the ruin of his apartment. The forgery of Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave, that he had stolen from Eames years ago, lay torn out of its frame and ripped on the floor. A quick flash of anger burned in his blood. He shut it away. These people thought he was a threat. The only thing he could do was pretend that he wasn't. He had to make himself seem as harmless as possible. Contrary to what others may have thought, Arthur was a pretty good actor and he wasn't driven by stupid pride, when the lives of others were at stake. He was always willing to do whatever it took to protect or rescue his team. Even pretending to be something he wasn't.
And in his situation, desperation wasn't really too hard to fake. He knew he was going with them. And he knew eventually they were going to incapacitate him again if he didn't at least try to offer them whatever they wanted. Then he would be useless to his team.
"What were you looking for?" he asked, pulling himself to his knees. "I'll get it for you."
"The program and device you used to undo our Glitch program," Hollis said.
He cast about in his mind desperately for something to say, for a way to explain. "There was no program, there's no device." He stood up again. His legs felt shaky, muscles jerky and weak, as if he'd already been shocked a few hundred times. "I did it inside my head. The others have nothing to do with this, and they don't know anything. You have to know that. Let them go, let me see you let them go, and I'll show you exactly how I did it. If you can't agree to my terms, not only will you never know, but I'll kill a few of you and cost you a lot of time and money into the deal. You know I will." So much for passive, he thought. But it needed to be said, because it was logical. They already knew he would fight for his life.
Hollis rolled his eyes. "I've really heard enough of your bullshit. There's nothing we can't find out from you, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's also nothing more you can do for your team; that's over. You're out of resources and you have nothing to bargain with. When we're done with your two partners, we'll shoot them in the fucking head and dump the bodies, and you still won't be able to do anything about it."
Arthur forgot his plan to act helpless; fury overrode everything. He pictured Eames on the bridge, about to fall, and briefly, he thought of the torn painting. Then he launched himself at Hollis.
It took about seven seconds.
He broke Hollis's nose. The guy with the tranq gun fired. Arthur dodged it and the dart hit the kid who had been holding the taser. The tranq-gun guy stood in his living room, looking shocked. Arthur grabbed the business end of the gun and rammed the stock back into the guy's teeth.
It was the fifth guy who brought him down, grabbing the taser from the stunned, tranquilized henchman-kid and jabbing it into his shoulder.
For the second time that morning, electricity became all he knew.
** ** ** **
Arthur awoke strapped to a bed, a white tiled ceiling looming over him. For only a second, he thought he was back in the hospital, and that going home with Eames, and subsequently seeing Cobb and getting dragged off, had all been a dream. Nurse Emma would come in and he would tell her he'd remembered his identity and he could find his way home now.
But the way his muscles ached and burned, and the way his heart still beat erratically told a different story.
And then Hollis was standing over him. His nose was bandaged, but blood seeped through the tape.
Arthur knew it would be a stupid move to grin at him and say I told you, so he didn't. It really didn't matter that he'd lost control of his rage and had taken a few more people out. At the end of the day, he still had nothing to bargain with, and he still had to try to give something up in order to get Eames and Cobb back. So he bit down the righteous feeling he got from seeing Hollis bloody and bruised.
"I'll give you what you want," he said.
"After that little display?"
"Asking me to not react to this is stupid. I'm supposed to sit there and let you threaten my team, threaten my life? You're being unreasonable."
"I don't need to be reasonable," Hollis said. "You're strapped to a table. We put you under, and we put your partners under. We extract whatever you and Mr. Eames did – don't worry about infecting anyone else, we have that covered – and then we dispose of you."
The mention of Eames and of putting him under lit the fire of hope in his chest. Eames was still alive. Cobb probably was too, if they suspected him of being a part of it.
But they wouldn't be alive for long if he couldn't get free.
"Can I please have some water?" he asked.
"Fuck you," Hollis said.
"So you're sadistic too, or is this personal? It's not just business?" He licked his lips and tried again. "How hard would it be to just bring me a glass of water, you dick?"
Hollis stared down at him, his bruised eyes narrowed, and Arthur got it. It was personal. They wanted the altered Glitch in his head, but it was more than that. He'd hurt this company deeply, viscerally. He'd taken out nine of their agents during their first little go-around, four more before being brought here. He'd undone their program and made it his. And worst of all, he'd bloodied Hollis in front of his men. He'd made them look stupid and weak.
Eames had always warned him that his smugness would eventually piss off the wrong people. He wanted to say, I can still hurt you, even like this, but he refrained. The time for arrogance and surety had passed.
Hollis stared him down for a few seconds—not hard, in his position—and then turned on his heel and walked away. Arthur sighed and let his head fall back onto the plain white sheets. He looked around the room. Grey walls, and glass windows on the second floor, so that people could look down and observe, like an operating room in a medical school. At least it looked clean.
A few seconds later, a man in white scrubs came back into his room with a glass of water. He slid his hand under Arthur's hair with impersonal professionalism and held the straw to his lips. Arthur drank the whole thing, though it didn't go a long way towards soothing his thirst.
Still, he said "Thanks" when he was done. The guy nodded and left him alone.
They couldn't all be sadistic here. That was unlikely. He'd have to find someone he could manipulate. Eames was so much better at this kind of shit. Arthur could pull off deception if he had to, but he wasn't class at it; he had to work, had to think logically about what to say, how to act out of accordance with truth. Eames could just read what people wanted from him and then deliver it. How often had he done something that Arthur wanted him to do, without Arthur even having to say anything? Probably a lot more than he knew about, he thought.
They left him there for a few hours and it was good. He knew Eames was alive. It was a strange knowledge, one that felt firm and real in the depth of his mind. He felt his presence, as if it were lurking inside of him. If Eames was alive, Cobb likely was, too. Arthur was able to rest, even sleep. It wasn't the most ideal or comfortable of positions, strapped down and confined, but at least he was in an actual bed and he could sleep without jolting himself awake every few seconds, paralyzed with terror.
When he did drop off into dreams, they were lucid, if utterly strange now. Spider-crab-bots followed him everywhere, for one thing. That unnerving blue glow that he knew came from his eyes lit the dark corners of his mind. But that was not the strangest aspect.
The oddest, most surreal thing about the dreams was that Arthur felt someone else in them. He wasn't hooked up to the PASIV, because he knew what that felt like. He wasn't hooked up to anything at all, yet he still knew that he was somehow dreamsharing.
He wandered the halls of his dream until he finally picked a room that looked like his old dorm at the Dream Tech, and sat at his desk. He chose a book from his dream-bookshelf at random and opened it to any page, as if researching. This was how his mind filled in the gaps, and found things that he already knew, but didn't know he knew. He read an excerpt from the book and it told him:
When remote dreamsharing is finally perfected, the use of the PASIV device will be unnecessary and outdated. Dreamwalkers will have to find new ways to militarize or otherwise protect their thoughts. People will be monitored, catalogued, terrorized. Far worse than any mind-crime you've ever been party to.
If there is any legal upside to remote dreamsharing, it's that it will become almost impossible to hide crimes, and missing persons will become a non-issue. If you become linked to another person via mind-virus remote dreamsharing, you would be able to find them anywhere, provided they were dreaming at the same time that you were.
Arthur slammed the book closed, knowing, for then, all he needed to know. He had infected Eames with this dream-bug. As slight as the connection seemed to be, he could, in theory, locate him through it.
This also meant that anyone else could possibly locate either of them – unless of course, he had changed the program enough to make himself untraceable...
The overwhelming presence of another dreamer, or maybe more than one, interrupted his process. And again—he didn't know how—he recognized the scent. He knew logically that these people weren't even in the same room as he was. But the part of his brain that picked up scent activated anyway, in response to the stimuli. He breathed in deeply and turned.
"Arthur?" Eames said. He looked hazy, only a shadow, a shape that he recognized: broad shoulders, strong stance. Beside him, a dimmer shadow, even more distant and vague.
"Eames?" Arthur said.
"Arthur!" the other person called.
"Cobb?" Arthur answered.
It was almost comical, and he nearly laughed, half hysterical with hope.
And then they were both gone. Their shadows disappeared, the sense, the scent, everything.
So, they had somehow infected Cobb, too. It was weaker with him. He wondered how they had done it.
It didn't matter. Arthur prided himself on being one step ahead of everyone else. And even strapped to a table in a clinic somewhere in New York, he was still one step ahead, and intended to remain so.
** ** ** **
When Eames came around, it was to a mostly dark room with a single bed attached to the wall by chains. The door was heavy concrete like the walls, and a single barred window on the door let in the only light. There was a toilet in the corner, and a desk screwed into the wall next to it.
He'd seen the inside of institutions before and didn't need to be told where he'd been thrown.
He had come awake in the back of the van, head throbbing, bloody, and immediately been put back under with some kind of compound that didn't feel familiar to his system.
He rolled onto his side on the bed, and bright, flashing pain flared to life behind his eyes. He stumbled off the bed and to the toilet, vomiting nothing but tea and then dry heaving for a few minutes.
He knew what a concussion felt like, too. Combined with whatever they had drugged him with – not good.
He'd barely seen them throwing Cobb into a black SUV before himself having been thrown into a van. He hadn't seen Arthur.
"Well," he said, testing out his voice, which sounded scratchy and hollow, "he'll have thought of something clever."
The sound of footsteps headed down the hall; Eames counted two sets of them. The shadows crossed the window on the door to his room, and then he heard the keycard slide through. When the door opened, someone flicked on fluorescent lights and he shielded his eyes. The light was worse than anything.
"Eames."
Gingerly, he looked up, lifting his head from its less than lovely resting place. "Cobb?"
"Jesus Christ, get a doctor in here," Cobb said, with surprising authority.
The man standing behind Cobb didn't seem to respond to said authority. He shrugged and said, "Sorry, that's not my job."
Cobb, looking haggard but sharper than he previously had, came into the room and knelt beside him. He looked him over, checking what was obviously a cut on his head, and looking into his eyes carefully.
"How bad is it?" Cobb asked him.
"Mild concussion," Eames said. "And whatever they drugged me with. Any idea where we are? Where Arthur is?"
Cobb leaned in a little closer, though there was really no need to whisper. Old habit, Eames guessed. "This is the place they were going to ship Arthur to if you hadn't gotten there. I heard them talking about him so I'm sure he's here, too."
"So we only delayed the inevitable."
"No. You bought him a few valuable hours to get his shit together before they got him. Otherwise they would have grabbed him when he didn't even know who he was or what he did." Cobb whispered the last part in his ear. "He had a few minutes to change the program. It might save his life."
"Break it up," said the guard at the door.
Cobb backed off, but left his hand on Eames's shoulder. "It's SomniCore," he said.
"Yeah, I know. Any idea what they want?"
Cobb nodded, his eyes dark and a little distant. "They want me to extract it from you. They're going to try you first, because they think I can't extract from Arthur, or that he won't let me or that we have some kind of secret back up plan to thwart them." Cobb's eyes said that he might actually believe this himself. "They're going to try to get it from Arthur themselves first, before letting me see him. I don't know how he is, though."
"He's all right," Eames said, trying to convince himself as much as Cobb. "This means, you know, they're going to infect you with the program. If you extract it from me."
"I know."
"It could ruin you."
Cobb only smiled. "Let them think so," he said, his voice not even a whisper this time.
That sounded hopeful, though Eames wasn't sure how realistic it was. A wave of dizziness hit him and he rested his head on his arm. Cobb actually rubbed his back.
"I'm not one of your children," Eames said. He didn't mean to snap, but he hated coddling.
"Sorry," Cobb said, though he didn't remove his hand. "I have my kids and my students. That's all I know anymore." His voice was almost theatrically above a whisper as he said this. "I'm not the extractor I used to be. I kind of lost my edge, just dealing with students all day, being a Dad at home."
Eames glanced up at him. Cobb's eyes were brighter, a little coy. He was a terrible liar to anyone who could read him.
"Then let's do this," Eames said. "Come on, tell them to bring it in and get on with it. I haven't got all day."
Cobb signaled the man at the door. "Bring the PASIV," he said. "He'll do it willingly. You remember the condition: I get to see Arthur after this."
"Sure," said the guard.
Another man in white scrubs came in with a PASIV, one of the newer models. This one was black, and much smaller than the one Eames had always used.
"Are you going to be all right, going under?" Cobb asked him.
"I've been in worse situations than this. I can't forge with this drug in my system and with a concussion, but since that won't be necessary, it shouldn't be too bad. I apologize in advance for any structural disturbances caused by my incapacity."
"Don't worry about it," Cobb said, rolling up his sleeve.
Eames noticed that the man in white scrubs who had brought the PASIV was also rolling up his sleeve, too.
"Piss off," Eames said. "You're not invited."
"Chaperone," the guy said. "I'm already infected. And you don't have a choice."
"You've no idea how your version of the program is going to work with, or against mine," Eames warned.
The guy shrugged. "Not up to me."
Cobb was quiet during this whole thing, and before slipping the needle into Eames's arm, he looked pointedly at him. I got this, his look said.
Eames found himself wishing he'd worked with him a bit more in the past, so that he could at least be in on the plan, or know the way he worked. Arthur probably knew.
"Let's go," Cobb said, and the orderly put them all under.
** ** ** **
Cobb opened his eyes to Eames's dream, which ended up being a ship, due to the swaying he felt in his head. Crashing waves tore at the sides of it. Cobb immediately felt ill with nausea, and a vicious, sticky pounding inside his head.
"Sorry," Eames said, leaning over the side of the boat. "Where's the third guy?"
"Looking for us," Cobb said. "Your ship is a maze; he's somewhere in the bottom. I'm still pretty good at improvising. We don't have much time. Where's the Glitch?"
Eames seemed inclined to stare at him, his mouth hanging open. Finally he said, "I don't know where it is. I don't know how it manifests in me yet. This is the first time I've been under since then apart from being unconscious, and I don't remember that."
"I just have to give them a piece of information, that's all. Anything will do. That will get me to Arthur and if I can get them to let me go under with him, we can figure this out."
Eames didn't answer. He just stared out ahead at the sea, as if he could see something out there. A crab scuttled across the deck of the ship. Cobb glanced at it. On second look, it seemed less crab-like and more spider-like. Its eyes were strangely blue.
"Eames, come on," Cobb urged.
"Shush," Eames said, waving a hand behind him.
Cobb did not want to shush. He had only a few minutes to get something of the program to show them he had at least tried, enough to get himself infected, and then he would demand to see Arthur, or totally retract his help. He knew they needed him, and they would be more reasonable with him than they would with Arthur, whose defiance always got him into trouble.
"Eames," Cobb said, sterner this time.
"Arthur?" Eames said. He was still staring out over the water.
Cobb looked into the distance. Beyond the roaring waves, and beyond the mist they created, there did seem to be a rocky island jutting up out of the water. He couldn't see clearly enough to make anything else out.
"Not possible," Cobb said. "Unless they brought him in and hooked him up. I doubt that."
"It is possible. Remote dreamsharing. We shared a..."
"Eames!" a voice called back.
Cobb would know it anywhere. "Arthur!" he shouted over the waves.
He heard the distant reply: "Cobb!"
And then the boat was capsizing, pitching him over the edge, and he was falling back into the real world.
** ** ** **
I decided I needed some Cobb POV in here. :D
NEXT PART
** ** ** **
Arthur came awake instantly and easily, as he normally did. Something hard and metallic was pressed against his neck, and people were lurking over him as he lay on the floor. At least five of them, this time. Four were standing, and one of them had a tranq gun trained on him. One guy was crouching beside him, the guy with the gun to his neck. Arthur looked down as far as he could, and saw that it wasn't a gun, but a taser.
He sighed.
His arm felt achy, like if he tried to move it too much the bones would grind together. He was down one limb already.
Cobb and Eames were already gone. He'd probably missed them by seconds. Teacups lay shattered on the floor. His toaster was crushed in the corner and his glass coffee pot was in bloody shards. Cobb and Eames had clearly not gone easily. It was a small comfort.
And at least he now recognized his apartment.
"Hello Arthur," said the man standing above him, leaning against his counter.
"I'm flattered," Arthur said, looking around.
The man—fifties, paunchy, but still sharp, with a greying crewcut and blue eyes—tilted his head in question.
"All of this for me? Ketamine? Tasers? It can't be that difficult. Tell me where you took my team and I'll go with you quietly and tell you whatever you want to know."
The man smiled. He didn't laugh, he just smiled and shook his head. "You'll be doing that anyway. I don't have to tell you shit. I know exactly how you operate."
"You have the advantage of me," Arthur said. His voice cracked and he tried to swallow. He was burning with thirst. "I have no idea who you are."
"Mr. Hollis, head of SomniCore. I'm pleased to find you again."
"Can't remember having met you," Arthur said. "Sorry. But you did manage to erase all of my memories for a few weeks, so, you know. Don't take it personally."
"A rare side effect," Hollis said, "one we're learning about. And you wouldn't know me, Arthur, because you've never met me before. I used to pull your strings back when you worked for us."
"Ah." He swallowed hard. He really wanted some water. His mouth tasted like burnt copper. "Look. I'll make it really easy for you. But only if you let the other two go."
Hollis laughed and crouched down over him, straddling his thighs. His face was shuttered, impenetrable. "I remember how you fought years ago, Mr. Arceneau, and you were pretty impressive. But you're just not that young anymore."
Strangely, this observation, combined with Hollis's dominating position over him, insulted him more than anything else. "I'm only 32, Jesus. I'm like eighty years younger than you are, and yes, I can still make this really, really fucking hard for you. You think I'm helpless because you can shoot me up and plug me with a few thousand volts? I could have kicked you in the balls two seconds ago and broken this guy's nose. I'm being helpful."
"You're still too unpredictable to go easy on you. We both know that you won't go quietly. Everything you endeavor ends in violence. It's how you do things."
"I'm good at violence," Arthur said, "but that doesn't mean I like it. If you know me, then you know I like being reasonable better."
"Get him up," Hollis said, moving away from him. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
Arthur moved quickly, batting the taser out of the hand of the kid who had been holding it against his neck. The guy with the tranq gun tensed to shoot, and Hollis turned back around. Arthur got to his feet and held up both hands. The taser kid scrambled for his little toy, looking humiliated and scared.
"You know I can hurt you," Arthur said. "I could have done it just then. I'd rather not, and I really don't want you to hurt me, either. I've had enough."
Hollis came at him fast and hit him so hard that he crumbled right back down to the floor. He tasted blood in his mouth and his nerves jumped, muscles still not coordinated enough to fight back. Hollis grabbed him by the side of his collar and hauled him up halfway off the floor.
"You have nothing to bargain with," he growled. Then he shoved him back down hard. "Get him out of here," he said to the others.
Arthur tried to think around the corners, tried to access logic, to find something to say, or do, or become, just to find out what they'd done with Cobb and Eames. He looked around his apartment from his place on the floor. They had trashed it. Cushions had been ripped off the sofa, TV torn from the wall, his desktop relieved of its hard drive and his laptop nowhere in sight. They'd ripped down curtains and gone through cupboards. His bookshelf was in shambles, books all over the floor. They'd even dismantled his stupid game systems.
One detail stood out to him among the ruin of his apartment. The forgery of Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave, that he had stolen from Eames years ago, lay torn out of its frame and ripped on the floor. A quick flash of anger burned in his blood. He shut it away. These people thought he was a threat. The only thing he could do was pretend that he wasn't. He had to make himself seem as harmless as possible. Contrary to what others may have thought, Arthur was a pretty good actor and he wasn't driven by stupid pride, when the lives of others were at stake. He was always willing to do whatever it took to protect or rescue his team. Even pretending to be something he wasn't.
And in his situation, desperation wasn't really too hard to fake. He knew he was going with them. And he knew eventually they were going to incapacitate him again if he didn't at least try to offer them whatever they wanted. Then he would be useless to his team.
"What were you looking for?" he asked, pulling himself to his knees. "I'll get it for you."
"The program and device you used to undo our Glitch program," Hollis said.
He cast about in his mind desperately for something to say, for a way to explain. "There was no program, there's no device." He stood up again. His legs felt shaky, muscles jerky and weak, as if he'd already been shocked a few hundred times. "I did it inside my head. The others have nothing to do with this, and they don't know anything. You have to know that. Let them go, let me see you let them go, and I'll show you exactly how I did it. If you can't agree to my terms, not only will you never know, but I'll kill a few of you and cost you a lot of time and money into the deal. You know I will." So much for passive, he thought. But it needed to be said, because it was logical. They already knew he would fight for his life.
Hollis rolled his eyes. "I've really heard enough of your bullshit. There's nothing we can't find out from you, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's also nothing more you can do for your team; that's over. You're out of resources and you have nothing to bargain with. When we're done with your two partners, we'll shoot them in the fucking head and dump the bodies, and you still won't be able to do anything about it."
Arthur forgot his plan to act helpless; fury overrode everything. He pictured Eames on the bridge, about to fall, and briefly, he thought of the torn painting. Then he launched himself at Hollis.
It took about seven seconds.
He broke Hollis's nose. The guy with the tranq gun fired. Arthur dodged it and the dart hit the kid who had been holding the taser. The tranq-gun guy stood in his living room, looking shocked. Arthur grabbed the business end of the gun and rammed the stock back into the guy's teeth.
It was the fifth guy who brought him down, grabbing the taser from the stunned, tranquilized henchman-kid and jabbing it into his shoulder.
For the second time that morning, electricity became all he knew.
** ** ** **
Arthur awoke strapped to a bed, a white tiled ceiling looming over him. For only a second, he thought he was back in the hospital, and that going home with Eames, and subsequently seeing Cobb and getting dragged off, had all been a dream. Nurse Emma would come in and he would tell her he'd remembered his identity and he could find his way home now.
But the way his muscles ached and burned, and the way his heart still beat erratically told a different story.
And then Hollis was standing over him. His nose was bandaged, but blood seeped through the tape.
Arthur knew it would be a stupid move to grin at him and say I told you, so he didn't. It really didn't matter that he'd lost control of his rage and had taken a few more people out. At the end of the day, he still had nothing to bargain with, and he still had to try to give something up in order to get Eames and Cobb back. So he bit down the righteous feeling he got from seeing Hollis bloody and bruised.
"I'll give you what you want," he said.
"After that little display?"
"Asking me to not react to this is stupid. I'm supposed to sit there and let you threaten my team, threaten my life? You're being unreasonable."
"I don't need to be reasonable," Hollis said. "You're strapped to a table. We put you under, and we put your partners under. We extract whatever you and Mr. Eames did – don't worry about infecting anyone else, we have that covered – and then we dispose of you."
The mention of Eames and of putting him under lit the fire of hope in his chest. Eames was still alive. Cobb probably was too, if they suspected him of being a part of it.
But they wouldn't be alive for long if he couldn't get free.
"Can I please have some water?" he asked.
"Fuck you," Hollis said.
"So you're sadistic too, or is this personal? It's not just business?" He licked his lips and tried again. "How hard would it be to just bring me a glass of water, you dick?"
Hollis stared down at him, his bruised eyes narrowed, and Arthur got it. It was personal. They wanted the altered Glitch in his head, but it was more than that. He'd hurt this company deeply, viscerally. He'd taken out nine of their agents during their first little go-around, four more before being brought here. He'd undone their program and made it his. And worst of all, he'd bloodied Hollis in front of his men. He'd made them look stupid and weak.
Eames had always warned him that his smugness would eventually piss off the wrong people. He wanted to say, I can still hurt you, even like this, but he refrained. The time for arrogance and surety had passed.
Hollis stared him down for a few seconds—not hard, in his position—and then turned on his heel and walked away. Arthur sighed and let his head fall back onto the plain white sheets. He looked around the room. Grey walls, and glass windows on the second floor, so that people could look down and observe, like an operating room in a medical school. At least it looked clean.
A few seconds later, a man in white scrubs came back into his room with a glass of water. He slid his hand under Arthur's hair with impersonal professionalism and held the straw to his lips. Arthur drank the whole thing, though it didn't go a long way towards soothing his thirst.
Still, he said "Thanks" when he was done. The guy nodded and left him alone.
They couldn't all be sadistic here. That was unlikely. He'd have to find someone he could manipulate. Eames was so much better at this kind of shit. Arthur could pull off deception if he had to, but he wasn't class at it; he had to work, had to think logically about what to say, how to act out of accordance with truth. Eames could just read what people wanted from him and then deliver it. How often had he done something that Arthur wanted him to do, without Arthur even having to say anything? Probably a lot more than he knew about, he thought.
They left him there for a few hours and it was good. He knew Eames was alive. It was a strange knowledge, one that felt firm and real in the depth of his mind. He felt his presence, as if it were lurking inside of him. If Eames was alive, Cobb likely was, too. Arthur was able to rest, even sleep. It wasn't the most ideal or comfortable of positions, strapped down and confined, but at least he was in an actual bed and he could sleep without jolting himself awake every few seconds, paralyzed with terror.
When he did drop off into dreams, they were lucid, if utterly strange now. Spider-crab-bots followed him everywhere, for one thing. That unnerving blue glow that he knew came from his eyes lit the dark corners of his mind. But that was not the strangest aspect.
The oddest, most surreal thing about the dreams was that Arthur felt someone else in them. He wasn't hooked up to the PASIV, because he knew what that felt like. He wasn't hooked up to anything at all, yet he still knew that he was somehow dreamsharing.
He wandered the halls of his dream until he finally picked a room that looked like his old dorm at the Dream Tech, and sat at his desk. He chose a book from his dream-bookshelf at random and opened it to any page, as if researching. This was how his mind filled in the gaps, and found things that he already knew, but didn't know he knew. He read an excerpt from the book and it told him:
When remote dreamsharing is finally perfected, the use of the PASIV device will be unnecessary and outdated. Dreamwalkers will have to find new ways to militarize or otherwise protect their thoughts. People will be monitored, catalogued, terrorized. Far worse than any mind-crime you've ever been party to.
If there is any legal upside to remote dreamsharing, it's that it will become almost impossible to hide crimes, and missing persons will become a non-issue. If you become linked to another person via mind-virus remote dreamsharing, you would be able to find them anywhere, provided they were dreaming at the same time that you were.
Arthur slammed the book closed, knowing, for then, all he needed to know. He had infected Eames with this dream-bug. As slight as the connection seemed to be, he could, in theory, locate him through it.
This also meant that anyone else could possibly locate either of them – unless of course, he had changed the program enough to make himself untraceable...
The overwhelming presence of another dreamer, or maybe more than one, interrupted his process. And again—he didn't know how—he recognized the scent. He knew logically that these people weren't even in the same room as he was. But the part of his brain that picked up scent activated anyway, in response to the stimuli. He breathed in deeply and turned.
"Arthur?" Eames said. He looked hazy, only a shadow, a shape that he recognized: broad shoulders, strong stance. Beside him, a dimmer shadow, even more distant and vague.
"Eames?" Arthur said.
"Arthur!" the other person called.
"Cobb?" Arthur answered.
It was almost comical, and he nearly laughed, half hysterical with hope.
And then they were both gone. Their shadows disappeared, the sense, the scent, everything.
So, they had somehow infected Cobb, too. It was weaker with him. He wondered how they had done it.
It didn't matter. Arthur prided himself on being one step ahead of everyone else. And even strapped to a table in a clinic somewhere in New York, he was still one step ahead, and intended to remain so.
** ** ** **
When Eames came around, it was to a mostly dark room with a single bed attached to the wall by chains. The door was heavy concrete like the walls, and a single barred window on the door let in the only light. There was a toilet in the corner, and a desk screwed into the wall next to it.
He'd seen the inside of institutions before and didn't need to be told where he'd been thrown.
He had come awake in the back of the van, head throbbing, bloody, and immediately been put back under with some kind of compound that didn't feel familiar to his system.
He rolled onto his side on the bed, and bright, flashing pain flared to life behind his eyes. He stumbled off the bed and to the toilet, vomiting nothing but tea and then dry heaving for a few minutes.
He knew what a concussion felt like, too. Combined with whatever they had drugged him with – not good.
He'd barely seen them throwing Cobb into a black SUV before himself having been thrown into a van. He hadn't seen Arthur.
"Well," he said, testing out his voice, which sounded scratchy and hollow, "he'll have thought of something clever."
The sound of footsteps headed down the hall; Eames counted two sets of them. The shadows crossed the window on the door to his room, and then he heard the keycard slide through. When the door opened, someone flicked on fluorescent lights and he shielded his eyes. The light was worse than anything.
"Eames."
Gingerly, he looked up, lifting his head from its less than lovely resting place. "Cobb?"
"Jesus Christ, get a doctor in here," Cobb said, with surprising authority.
The man standing behind Cobb didn't seem to respond to said authority. He shrugged and said, "Sorry, that's not my job."
Cobb, looking haggard but sharper than he previously had, came into the room and knelt beside him. He looked him over, checking what was obviously a cut on his head, and looking into his eyes carefully.
"How bad is it?" Cobb asked him.
"Mild concussion," Eames said. "And whatever they drugged me with. Any idea where we are? Where Arthur is?"
Cobb leaned in a little closer, though there was really no need to whisper. Old habit, Eames guessed. "This is the place they were going to ship Arthur to if you hadn't gotten there. I heard them talking about him so I'm sure he's here, too."
"So we only delayed the inevitable."
"No. You bought him a few valuable hours to get his shit together before they got him. Otherwise they would have grabbed him when he didn't even know who he was or what he did." Cobb whispered the last part in his ear. "He had a few minutes to change the program. It might save his life."
"Break it up," said the guard at the door.
Cobb backed off, but left his hand on Eames's shoulder. "It's SomniCore," he said.
"Yeah, I know. Any idea what they want?"
Cobb nodded, his eyes dark and a little distant. "They want me to extract it from you. They're going to try you first, because they think I can't extract from Arthur, or that he won't let me or that we have some kind of secret back up plan to thwart them." Cobb's eyes said that he might actually believe this himself. "They're going to try to get it from Arthur themselves first, before letting me see him. I don't know how he is, though."
"He's all right," Eames said, trying to convince himself as much as Cobb. "This means, you know, they're going to infect you with the program. If you extract it from me."
"I know."
"It could ruin you."
Cobb only smiled. "Let them think so," he said, his voice not even a whisper this time.
That sounded hopeful, though Eames wasn't sure how realistic it was. A wave of dizziness hit him and he rested his head on his arm. Cobb actually rubbed his back.
"I'm not one of your children," Eames said. He didn't mean to snap, but he hated coddling.
"Sorry," Cobb said, though he didn't remove his hand. "I have my kids and my students. That's all I know anymore." His voice was almost theatrically above a whisper as he said this. "I'm not the extractor I used to be. I kind of lost my edge, just dealing with students all day, being a Dad at home."
Eames glanced up at him. Cobb's eyes were brighter, a little coy. He was a terrible liar to anyone who could read him.
"Then let's do this," Eames said. "Come on, tell them to bring it in and get on with it. I haven't got all day."
Cobb signaled the man at the door. "Bring the PASIV," he said. "He'll do it willingly. You remember the condition: I get to see Arthur after this."
"Sure," said the guard.
Another man in white scrubs came in with a PASIV, one of the newer models. This one was black, and much smaller than the one Eames had always used.
"Are you going to be all right, going under?" Cobb asked him.
"I've been in worse situations than this. I can't forge with this drug in my system and with a concussion, but since that won't be necessary, it shouldn't be too bad. I apologize in advance for any structural disturbances caused by my incapacity."
"Don't worry about it," Cobb said, rolling up his sleeve.
Eames noticed that the man in white scrubs who had brought the PASIV was also rolling up his sleeve, too.
"Piss off," Eames said. "You're not invited."
"Chaperone," the guy said. "I'm already infected. And you don't have a choice."
"You've no idea how your version of the program is going to work with, or against mine," Eames warned.
The guy shrugged. "Not up to me."
Cobb was quiet during this whole thing, and before slipping the needle into Eames's arm, he looked pointedly at him. I got this, his look said.
Eames found himself wishing he'd worked with him a bit more in the past, so that he could at least be in on the plan, or know the way he worked. Arthur probably knew.
"Let's go," Cobb said, and the orderly put them all under.
** ** ** **
Cobb opened his eyes to Eames's dream, which ended up being a ship, due to the swaying he felt in his head. Crashing waves tore at the sides of it. Cobb immediately felt ill with nausea, and a vicious, sticky pounding inside his head.
"Sorry," Eames said, leaning over the side of the boat. "Where's the third guy?"
"Looking for us," Cobb said. "Your ship is a maze; he's somewhere in the bottom. I'm still pretty good at improvising. We don't have much time. Where's the Glitch?"
Eames seemed inclined to stare at him, his mouth hanging open. Finally he said, "I don't know where it is. I don't know how it manifests in me yet. This is the first time I've been under since then apart from being unconscious, and I don't remember that."
"I just have to give them a piece of information, that's all. Anything will do. That will get me to Arthur and if I can get them to let me go under with him, we can figure this out."
Eames didn't answer. He just stared out ahead at the sea, as if he could see something out there. A crab scuttled across the deck of the ship. Cobb glanced at it. On second look, it seemed less crab-like and more spider-like. Its eyes were strangely blue.
"Eames, come on," Cobb urged.
"Shush," Eames said, waving a hand behind him.
Cobb did not want to shush. He had only a few minutes to get something of the program to show them he had at least tried, enough to get himself infected, and then he would demand to see Arthur, or totally retract his help. He knew they needed him, and they would be more reasonable with him than they would with Arthur, whose defiance always got him into trouble.
"Eames," Cobb said, sterner this time.
"Arthur?" Eames said. He was still staring out over the water.
Cobb looked into the distance. Beyond the roaring waves, and beyond the mist they created, there did seem to be a rocky island jutting up out of the water. He couldn't see clearly enough to make anything else out.
"Not possible," Cobb said. "Unless they brought him in and hooked him up. I doubt that."
"It is possible. Remote dreamsharing. We shared a..."
"Eames!" a voice called back.
Cobb would know it anywhere. "Arthur!" he shouted over the waves.
He heard the distant reply: "Cobb!"
And then the boat was capsizing, pitching him over the edge, and he was falling back into the real world.
** ** ** **
I decided I needed some Cobb POV in here. :D
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