Glitch - 6
Jan. 25th, 2011 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabi_essentiallyOnce again, I'm sorry for the extra wait! I was actually going to give this like maybe one or two more chapters, but then I had this crazy idea for something else to do and it might be a bit longer than I'd originally thought.
Thank you for bearing with me, you guys, because I'm struggling with this one more than with the others. I don't want to get repetitive and boring, but I realize I do have a style and a pattern and certain things that I really like writing (Arthur and Eames in peril, Arthur and Eames being megabadasses, etc.) So I'm trying to mix it up a bit. And I took on a lot of tentative fills that I'm trying to fit in. So I still hope I can get at least most of them. ^_^
Anyway, once again, thank you all a ton! And here we go! ^_^
** ** ** **
The swamp loomed to Arthur's right. Or maybe to his left. Right and left, up and down, these ideas were suddenly abstract and meaningless. Dimensions twisted in and on themselves: the bridge over the icy stream seemed actually to be under it this time. The water flowed upstream instead of down.
The man on the bridge, though – he was still there.
Eames. Don't let him fall.
Arthur looked up—or maybe down—and understood that he was dreaming. Eames wasn't really there, waiting for him to stop him from plunging into the water. Not yet.
He was here to accomplish something.
So, Arthur looked straight ahead, regardless of which direction "ahead" lay. It didn't matter, and he felt strangely secure with that paradox.
Straight ahead of him was a world of glowing wires. These seemed to have no pattern to them. They looped, twined, met, forged larger paths, broke away, circled back. Blue sparks jumped from one wire to the next at speeds he could only identify as "light."
And it was endless. Endless. This tangle of hot wires, busy with power and surging with electricity, it made up the entire world the entire universe. Every experience he could imagine. Arthur stared at the endless tangle before him, for a long time, considering.
He was looking at his own neural network.
When he formulated this notion, a sheaf of pathways blazed to life, blinding him. He felt the static in the air around him, and he was so small, so lost in all of this, that he cried out with the knowledge and tried to turn away.
I'm in my own mind, he desperately wanted to tell someone. I'm looking at everything I've ever been and done and known and I can't fathom it, I can't fathom it, it's too much.
But there was no one to tell, and certainly no one to lead him through this endless maze. All he had, inside his own mind, was himself.
He guessed that was all anyone had, dreamsharing notwithstanding. No one could ever make their way through this. Not in a lifetime and not in a hundred lifetimes.
He remembered Cobb at that moment. Cobb the extractor, who could navigate this kind of matrix. Except Cobb didn't see what he saw, did he? He didn't see the whole thing. All Cobb saw was bits, portions, infinitely small compared to the whole, raw thing. He stole spare parts, bots of information, located in corners that were, conveniently, tucked away close to the surface.
But you need to go deeper.
Arthur had never really considered this kind of depth before. He was dreaming; of that he was aware. But dreams were real while you were in them. And he was inside his own tangled mind, utterly lost.
He knew he was supposed to find something, to extract something from himself. Something that was not on the surface, but had been placed deep inside him. Not an inception – those were meant to look like his own ideas. This was not an idea and it was not a deception. Instead, it was something bright, blue, burning with voltage. Something implanted, with purpose.
It was deep in the center, misfiring. Making him misfire. He could feel it pulsing.
"Which way do I go?" he asked aloud, to no one. To himself. Or maybe to the glitch.
A scuttling sound got his attention and his first instinct was to turn away, turn and just run as far and as fast as he could. He spun on his heel, only to face another endless expanse of his own jangled wires. He was stuck inside his own mind and now the Glitch was chasing him.
He turned back, and there it was: the little, scuttling, metallic thing that had poisoned him inside and out. Everywhere he looked, it still stood directly in front of him.
Arthur curled his hands into fists. He would not be intimidated by this alien thing inside of him. He'd taken minds apart at his leisure, and things that other people feared had stopped registering on his radar years ago. This, he could handle.
It blinked up at him with electric blue eyes on flexible stalks and clicked its claws. It stared at him, and Arthur stared back.
"You're not going to attack me," he said.
Click click...
He gathered up all of his considerable courage and took a step towards it. It took a few scuttling steps back.
"I could crush you with my heel," he told it. "I should."
It blinked at him and didn't move.
He took a step toward it, then another, considering just stepping on it to see what would happen. Yet it stayed where it was, looking up at him, and perhaps seeing him, or registering him in some way.
He wanted to see it more closely, so he crouched down and looked it over. His palms felt sweaty, and his skin crawled. Its cobalt-blue beak housed a deadly needle-tongue that it had driven into the back of his neck and paralyzed him. If it happened again, now, while he was under, he would not wake up. He'd suffocate under the pressure of his own caving lungs. He swallowed hard and leaned in a little closer.
"They implanted some neurological program," he said, addressing the creature, which was really no more than his own image of what they—whoever "they" were—had done to him. "I see you like this because you paralyzed me. I gave you eyes because..."
He thought about this one, wracked his brain. It blinked at him, waiting.
"Because it spies on me? Like a remote vision?"
He didn't know if this was true or not. If so, then remote dreamsharing was right around the corner from this. People would be monitored, catalogued, terrorized. Far worse than any mind-crime he'd ever been party to. He wiped his hand across his mouth and continued.
"But you're giving me information, too. It's not a one way street. Because." He strained to put it together. He'd been trained to understand dreams, symbolism, the mind and how it worked. He didn't remember it, but it was old, ancient training, ingrained somewhere in him. He had been trained on how the mind assimilated ideas and...
"You could grow in my brain." Horror seized him when he considered it. This program, expanding in his mind, filling him up like a long-fingered tumor. "That could happen. It's happened to others. You could assimilate me. But I assimilated you. The Glitch, the program. Or at least a small part of it."
Click...click...click... It snapped its claws at him. Oddly benign.
"You're the projection of the small part of the program that my brain assimilated. What I took from it. If it's using me, watching me or tracking me or whatever... then I can turn it around?"
It blinked.
"I could disarm you. I could use you."
Slowly, on as many as twelve legs, it turned its hardware body around. One blue eye swung back over its silicone shell and looked at him, as if waiting.
"I already know where the rest of it is," he said. "I just need to follow you?"
It didn't answer; couldn't, because it was a part of his mind, and it knew what he knew, nothing more or less.
Arthur stood back up. "Show me where it is."
The creature-projection swung its flexible eye forward again, and began scuttling ahead.
It skipped across his mind like a pondskater bug. He went after it, treading as lightly as he could on his own axons and cell bodies, stepping gently across his own synapses. Once, watching it, he remembered swimming in a pond as a child, and the path he was on blazed to life. The action potential hit him at 300 miles per hour at least, stealing his breath and making his hair stand on end with static. It sizzled through him, almost burning him alive and he drew in a breath to scream, but it was over before it even began.
He flew forward in its wake, landing on his hands and knees, gasping.
The Glitch stopped skittering ahead and turned to look back at him.
"I see," Arthur said, struggling to catch his breath. "How can I know when I'm about to walk into one of my own memories?"
Click click.
"I can't. Of course. I have to clear my mind."
It moved onward, and downward. He followed it, until he was sure he was deep inside his own network. The wires were denser here, thickly tangled into masses and knots, burning with life. Proprioception, experience, where thoughts were formed, where they became words, and where ideas became actions.
The light pulsed brighter, almost blinding, and his eyes watered in the dream. The heat grew to an almost unbearable degree and he could hear it: the harsh, grating buzz of a short-circuit.
When his vision cleared and his eyes adjusted, he looked up from the bundle of nerves on which he was standing. When he saw it, it sucked his courage dry.
A writhing mass of organic wires, seething with electricity, burned before him. It twisted, tangled in on itself, expanded and ate up the resources around it. And it stood at the height of at least five of him, with width and depth equally towering.
This burgeoning thing was a cancer. An inorganic piece of information that was nonetheless invading the surrounding areas. This was the reason he couldn't dream. It was eating his thoughts and changing them. The idea that it was not inception, but an actual implant, fed to his neural pathways through chemicals into his veins, made him feel sick with loathing.
How could he assimilate this? It was so much bigger than he was. There was no way.
He wiped at his streaming eyes, feeling hopeless, wanting to run from this sickness they'd put inside of him. Just run, wake up, let someone else cut it out of his mind. There were people on the other side of sleep, ones that could help him. That had offered to help.
But I told them no. I said I'd do it.
The little Glitch thing clattered its metallic pods against one of his cell bodies. It glanced at him again with its moving eyes. Then it turned and walked into the storm. The current singed it immediately into nothingness ... his little projection. Arthur stared after it, panting.
He had followed it this far.
He had no idea how his physical body would react if he played with this thing inside of him. He didn't know if he could wake up from such a thing. If he could endure it at all. He also didn't see any other options. What he needed to undo was at the center of that electrical mass they'd stuck him with. He had to go through with it, or live with this storm burning inside him for the rest of his days – which would be measured in the minutes he was allowed to rest, and the days, long and endless, in which he couldn't. Anything was better than that. It had to be.
Three steps, taken with confidence lent to him by desperation, brought him to the edge of the twisting mass. Bolts of lightning leapt from its edges. His skin felt tight and burned already.
Just get through it. Just get through it; it's down there and you can undo what they did.
He stepped into the storm.
Electricity surged through every muscle he had, every fiber, every nerve, every cell. It scorched him to nothing, dried his blood and marrow, and if he was screaming, he never heard himself. Every sense was shattered.
** ** ** **
Eames felt the glitch as soon as he got into Arthur's head. It wasn't just the unbearable heat or the feeling of every one of his nerves jumping. Arthur might not have put his finger right on it. He was a vastly experienced dreamwalker, but without his memory functioning at top form, he might have missed the cues from his own brain.
But those same cues assaulted Eames as soon as he stepped inside. He felt the heat of disease in this dream. He'd seen what had happened to Arthur topside, as if someone had shot a thousand volts through him. Like someone with a tumor in their motor center. He'd witnessed that kind of thing before.
The heat of this sickness didn't feel like the sticky, damp heat of infection, but rather dry, acrid, like burnt metal. Or worn-out, dangerous hardware. The smell of electricity he'd noticed topside was stronger here in the dream.
If he kept going, it would infect him. Arthur didn't question it, Cobb seemed sure, and Eames didn't have any doubt either.
But Arthur's mind felt tired. Worn thin. And most frightening of all, it felt sluggish, like the systematic shutting down of a system. He was fading, perhaps dying even as Eames walked through his mind.
And maybe Eames would do this to save anyone's life, or anyone he found worthy enough to put his skill set (and maybe sanity) at risk. It wouldn't do to let anyone suffer and die when you could save them, even at personal cost. But when it was your oppo, your partner, someone who had your back and you were supposed to have theirs, then you just went ahead and walked through the minefield to retrieve them. It was just what you did.
He took a few steps and found himself in a swamp, surrounded by hot mud that sucked on his boots and tried to pull him under. (He thought he remembered Arthur muttering something about an icy river or stream. This was hardly icy, but then Arthur had been burning up, topside.) An electrical storm flickered on the horizon, over a twisted bridge.
Arthur and his love of the strange. Fondly, he wondered how it was that he'd once thought Arthur had no imagination. He had it, but he preferred subtleties.
Eames tried to move on, and quickly (that storm was lighting up the sky in the distance,) but the stream held him back almost purposefully. This was Arthur's dream. And inasmuch as Arthur was still conscious, and his brain was still functioning (the dream hadn't collapsed; Eames held tightly to that hope,) Arthur was somehow trying to keep him out.
"Fuck your heroics," Eames said, and moved onward.
His legs pushed against the mud. His breath burned in his lungs and sweat covered him. He struggled closer to the bridge and when he looked up, he saw a figure standing on it, backlit by blasts of lightning on the horizon.
He knew this man was himself. Arthur had babbled to him to stay away from the bridge, and now he saw what Arthur had seen. He didn't know why Arthur's projection of him was standing perilously close to falling off of this bridge into treacherous, disgusting muck, and he cared even less. What he did care about was the fact that the lightning in the distance was becoming duller and slower.
Eames pushed onward through Arthur's trap of a swamp, meant to keep him out.
But now even the swamp was fading.
Arthur's will to keep him out was diminishing. Which meant only one thing. Arthur was fading.
"Arthur," Eames called. The desperation he heard in his own voice made him feel sick. "Hold on, Arthur, if you can hear me at all."
A weak flash of light burst through the sky, as if in response.
And then—and Eames thought he'd gone insane for a second—an army of crabs, seemingly from nowhere, lined up in front of him like little sentinels. Crabs, they looked like honest to god crabs. Well, sort of, if crabs had twelve horrid legs.
"Really, Arthur?" he called out, laughing, a little unhinged. If Arthur was still trying to keep him out, then he was still holding on, somewhere. "I could say so many things."
The vile things were small, horrible, with blue beaks and shiny blue eyes, staring at him from atop moving stalks. They had actual claws too, and they all made threatening clicking noises at him.
We'll stop you, we'll paralyze you, we may even kill you, or at least we'll make you wake up, so turn back.
He didn't hear any of this in words, only in intent, and what he could piece together from the things that Arthur had screamed in his nightmares and babbled afterwards.
"Call your fucking weird little guards off, Arthur. I'm coming in whether you give me crabs or not. Really, what are you trying to tell me?"
As one, they clicked at him.
Eames pressed forward and they huddled themselves into a wall. He looked at them more closely.
They actually weren't crabs. They were little metal things. Some sort of ambulatory bot, silver and black, silicone and electric. It hit him all at once: These were Arthur's projection of the Glitch that was inside of him. They were his twisted visual of the sickness crawling through his mind. Eames almost had to respect his macabre aesthetic.
But why was the Glitch stopping him from coming through? If it was functioning on its own, then clearly this was a barrier to keep him from saving Arthur. But these actually felt like Arthur himself. He weighed both options and kept coming back to the feeling that it was not some machination of the disease keeping him out.
What had Arthur done? The idea that he had somehow merged with whatever they had implanted into him made Eames feel shaky and horrified. No good could come of that.
He wiped his muddy hands across his face, through his hair, and on his shirt. Then he dug his legs in, shoved himself forward, and swatted the crab-glitch-things out of his way. They hissed, and squealed like metal on metal, and clicked and scratched and screamed. But not one of them actually hurt him as they toppled around him.
Yes, these were Arthur's; he was controlling them.
Arthur didn't seem to realize that it was too late for him to back out. Whatever had infected Arthur's mind was already in his. They'd shared the dream, and the script for this program was now inside him, too.
Oh well.
He walked on.
What he eventually came to was a clearing in the fading swamp, and a nondescript building that nonetheless looked exceedingly familiar to him. He'd seen it years ago, only fleetingly, but enough that he would never forget.
SomniCore had been a megacorporation that pre-dated even his own dreamwork, though the Cobbs and Arthur had been pioneers for them. This had gone badly for them even before Mal's suicide and Arthur had, years ago, been held in this under-the-radar building and tormented for information for over a day.
As far as Eames knew, Arthur had seen very little of the building itself, but he had obviously gleaned enough to recreate it for his dream. But, why the old SomniCore building? That company had collapsed in on itself years ago, or so Eames had assumed when bigger problems—problems named Cobol—had presented themselves. Why was it still on Arthur's mind, after all this time?
The old building hadn't any distinguishing features and that had been the point. This version of it, however, was covered in organic looking wires. Every so often a current would surge through them, connecting them briefly. The wires climbed the outside of the building like white vines. They did not cross the door, which Eames now approached.
He didn't knock. He just pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.
The original building had had an entrance room, stairs, doors, hallways, offices and interrogation rooms. The inside of this was just one spacious, open room with endless concrete walls. At its center was a small computer station, its screen lit up in blue with scrolling white text.
Operating the computer, his back to Eames, was Arthur.
Small, metal creatures skittered around at his feet. A few climbed up the outside of his trousers, up his back. One nestled on his shoulder. They looked different to the little crab-like things he had seen before. These looked more formed. They were still made of metal, but had less legs, and their eyes were more reasonably proportioned, now sitting on top of their heads in pairs, like spider-eyes. Still glowing blue, though. They had retained their clicking claws but had lost the cobalt-blue beaks, replaced by shining silver pincers under their mouths.
Eames stood stock still, afraid to move.
"Come in," Arthur said without turning around. "And be quiet for a second."
Eames managed to take two steps toward him. One of the spider-crab things crawled down the back of Arthur's shirt. His mouth went dry.
"Arthur, what are you..."
"Shush," Arthur said. "Give me a minute. I'm rewriting the script." His fingers flew over a keyboard that Eames could now see was holographic. "They hacked into my dreams, right? Stupid bastards hacked the wrong hacker."
"The Glitch machine, it was a dream-program," Eames said. His voice sounded hoarse and shredded. "You couldn't extract it from yourself..."
"Right, so I overrode it. The program was shit but it had potential," he said. He had his Working Voice on, the one that said he was pretty confident in what he was doing. "They're trying some kind of remote dreamshare thing but they were using it to, A, keep tabs, and B, just see how badly they could fuck people up when they tried to extract." Tiptaptiptap, as Arthur's fingers danced over non-existent keys. "I think the idea was for it to be released by extractors when they tried to break in, and obviously for it to spread like a computer virus, only through dreamwalkers. And the added effect was that they could actually use it to track you. Which they are, by the way. Tracking me, I mean. You were right, I was supposed to live so that they could see how it worked, and so that I could spread it. Which I did. To you, asshole. I told you not to come down here."
"Arthur, you were dying."
"Maybe for like, a second, topside."
"No. For more than a minute." Eames hated that he couldn't see Arthur's face; that all he could see of him was his back, and those crawling little creatures scuttling around and on him.
"Well, it doesn't matter," Arthur said. "I reprogrammed it anyway, so I'm reprogramming yours, too. I don't know who they thought they were fucking with, trying to grab me for this. Jesus. They should remember from the last time."
"They?"
"SomniCore."
"Christ."
"Yeah, right?"
Arthur sounded a little more like himself, and Eames took a few more steps toward him. Blue light flashed every time he moved his fingers. The spider-crab creatures looked up at Eames, regarding him with silent calm.
"Erm, Arthur, those things on you... They're very disconcerting."
"I redesigned them," Arthur said. "They were my projection of the glitch to begin with. I obviously can't get rid of what they put in me, so... I changed the program, and the design of the projections of it changed as well. A little more streamlined, I think. A little more normal looking." He finished what he was doing at the computer with a pronounced tap on the "enter" bar, almost a flourish. This was always Arthur's "I'm done typing" signal, so familiar that Eames felt himself exhale in relief. The blue screen of the computer shut down with a whine. A second later it flared to life again and showed a desktop of Escher's Puddle, with a few innocuous looking folders on it, tucked into corners. Arthur's real-life desktop, and obviously the hard-drive of his mind as well. "Never fuck with a Mac guy," Arthur said.
"Arthur," Eames said. Something was still bothering him, prickling at the back of his neck when he looked at Arthur and he didn't know what it was, where it was coming from. "Turn around for me, would you?"
Arthur spun the chair around to face him. His hair was styled back, as it always was when he was working. He looked severe and put-together, as he often did. His self-satisfied, close-lipped smile looked the same, too: slightly smug, strangely child-soft. He was clean-shaven and smooth, and still had a smattering of freckles.
However, the sharp brown eyes that Eames had grown fond of over the many years were now incandescent blue. Real, true incandescence - they lit his face in a glow that looked like electricity.
Eames fell back a few steps.
"What?" Arthur said. "We'll be fine. We're sharing the dream, right? So the program you're infected with should reboot the next time you go under. We should wake up soon, so..."
"Arthur, your, your..." He waved his hand ineffectually in front of his own eyes.
Arthur frowned. Then he raised his hand to his own eyes. He must have seen how the light bathed his hand in color, because he raised one eyebrow in surprise. He didn't actually know what he looked like. All at once, Eames was terrified for him, and worse, as he had never been before: almost terrified of him.
"That's...weird," Arthur said. "Who assimilated who, I wonder?"
"Let's wake up now, darling," Eames said. He licked his lips, nervous, eager to be away from this strange Dream Arthur, with glowing eyes and metal spiders crawling all over him. "Come on now, let's get out of here. Your body is still exhausted and I don't know what your condition is topside. You scared the hell out of me and Cobb. Why don't you go up first and give me the kick, so that..."
Something blindingly painful resounded through his bones and cut him short. Eames fell to his knees, gripping his head. "Fuck," he grit out.
"Eames?" Arthur came up to him and crouched down, placing a hand on his shoulder. Eames looked up at him, unable to form words. If this Dream Arthur had been at all readable, he would have looked concerned, maybe even scared. One of his spider-creatures crawled from his hand onto Eames's shoulder.
Eames didn't care about that. The pain bore down on him, tearing through his head, down his shoulders, down his arms. This had nothing to do with dreams. This was going on in his body.
Someone was hurting him on the outside. Someone had gotten into Arthur's apartment. They had probably subdued Cobb as well.
"Fuck, someone's topside with us," he breathed. "Arthur, wake up before they get you, fucking stop them, go, go, go."
Without question, Arthur pulled a gun and blew his own brains out. His spider-creatures scattered, squealing in high-pitched, metallic whines. The dream started to collapse.
It didn't matter. Time was different up there and they'd probably taken Eames and Cobb out of the house minutes before Arthur woke up.
Eames still came awake in the back of someone's van, with his arms bound behind his back.
** ** ** **
NEXT PART
Thank you for bearing with me, you guys, because I'm struggling with this one more than with the others. I don't want to get repetitive and boring, but I realize I do have a style and a pattern and certain things that I really like writing (Arthur and Eames in peril, Arthur and Eames being megabadasses, etc.) So I'm trying to mix it up a bit. And I took on a lot of tentative fills that I'm trying to fit in. So I still hope I can get at least most of them. ^_^
Anyway, once again, thank you all a ton! And here we go! ^_^
** ** ** **
The swamp loomed to Arthur's right. Or maybe to his left. Right and left, up and down, these ideas were suddenly abstract and meaningless. Dimensions twisted in and on themselves: the bridge over the icy stream seemed actually to be under it this time. The water flowed upstream instead of down.
The man on the bridge, though – he was still there.
Eames. Don't let him fall.
Arthur looked up—or maybe down—and understood that he was dreaming. Eames wasn't really there, waiting for him to stop him from plunging into the water. Not yet.
He was here to accomplish something.
So, Arthur looked straight ahead, regardless of which direction "ahead" lay. It didn't matter, and he felt strangely secure with that paradox.
Straight ahead of him was a world of glowing wires. These seemed to have no pattern to them. They looped, twined, met, forged larger paths, broke away, circled back. Blue sparks jumped from one wire to the next at speeds he could only identify as "light."
And it was endless. Endless. This tangle of hot wires, busy with power and surging with electricity, it made up the entire world the entire universe. Every experience he could imagine. Arthur stared at the endless tangle before him, for a long time, considering.
He was looking at his own neural network.
When he formulated this notion, a sheaf of pathways blazed to life, blinding him. He felt the static in the air around him, and he was so small, so lost in all of this, that he cried out with the knowledge and tried to turn away.
I'm in my own mind, he desperately wanted to tell someone. I'm looking at everything I've ever been and done and known and I can't fathom it, I can't fathom it, it's too much.
But there was no one to tell, and certainly no one to lead him through this endless maze. All he had, inside his own mind, was himself.
He guessed that was all anyone had, dreamsharing notwithstanding. No one could ever make their way through this. Not in a lifetime and not in a hundred lifetimes.
He remembered Cobb at that moment. Cobb the extractor, who could navigate this kind of matrix. Except Cobb didn't see what he saw, did he? He didn't see the whole thing. All Cobb saw was bits, portions, infinitely small compared to the whole, raw thing. He stole spare parts, bots of information, located in corners that were, conveniently, tucked away close to the surface.
But you need to go deeper.
Arthur had never really considered this kind of depth before. He was dreaming; of that he was aware. But dreams were real while you were in them. And he was inside his own tangled mind, utterly lost.
He knew he was supposed to find something, to extract something from himself. Something that was not on the surface, but had been placed deep inside him. Not an inception – those were meant to look like his own ideas. This was not an idea and it was not a deception. Instead, it was something bright, blue, burning with voltage. Something implanted, with purpose.
It was deep in the center, misfiring. Making him misfire. He could feel it pulsing.
"Which way do I go?" he asked aloud, to no one. To himself. Or maybe to the glitch.
A scuttling sound got his attention and his first instinct was to turn away, turn and just run as far and as fast as he could. He spun on his heel, only to face another endless expanse of his own jangled wires. He was stuck inside his own mind and now the Glitch was chasing him.
He turned back, and there it was: the little, scuttling, metallic thing that had poisoned him inside and out. Everywhere he looked, it still stood directly in front of him.
Arthur curled his hands into fists. He would not be intimidated by this alien thing inside of him. He'd taken minds apart at his leisure, and things that other people feared had stopped registering on his radar years ago. This, he could handle.
It blinked up at him with electric blue eyes on flexible stalks and clicked its claws. It stared at him, and Arthur stared back.
"You're not going to attack me," he said.
Click click...
He gathered up all of his considerable courage and took a step towards it. It took a few scuttling steps back.
"I could crush you with my heel," he told it. "I should."
It blinked at him and didn't move.
He took a step toward it, then another, considering just stepping on it to see what would happen. Yet it stayed where it was, looking up at him, and perhaps seeing him, or registering him in some way.
He wanted to see it more closely, so he crouched down and looked it over. His palms felt sweaty, and his skin crawled. Its cobalt-blue beak housed a deadly needle-tongue that it had driven into the back of his neck and paralyzed him. If it happened again, now, while he was under, he would not wake up. He'd suffocate under the pressure of his own caving lungs. He swallowed hard and leaned in a little closer.
"They implanted some neurological program," he said, addressing the creature, which was really no more than his own image of what they—whoever "they" were—had done to him. "I see you like this because you paralyzed me. I gave you eyes because..."
He thought about this one, wracked his brain. It blinked at him, waiting.
"Because it spies on me? Like a remote vision?"
He didn't know if this was true or not. If so, then remote dreamsharing was right around the corner from this. People would be monitored, catalogued, terrorized. Far worse than any mind-crime he'd ever been party to. He wiped his hand across his mouth and continued.
"But you're giving me information, too. It's not a one way street. Because." He strained to put it together. He'd been trained to understand dreams, symbolism, the mind and how it worked. He didn't remember it, but it was old, ancient training, ingrained somewhere in him. He had been trained on how the mind assimilated ideas and...
"You could grow in my brain." Horror seized him when he considered it. This program, expanding in his mind, filling him up like a long-fingered tumor. "That could happen. It's happened to others. You could assimilate me. But I assimilated you. The Glitch, the program. Or at least a small part of it."
Click...click...click... It snapped its claws at him. Oddly benign.
"You're the projection of the small part of the program that my brain assimilated. What I took from it. If it's using me, watching me or tracking me or whatever... then I can turn it around?"
It blinked.
"I could disarm you. I could use you."
Slowly, on as many as twelve legs, it turned its hardware body around. One blue eye swung back over its silicone shell and looked at him, as if waiting.
"I already know where the rest of it is," he said. "I just need to follow you?"
It didn't answer; couldn't, because it was a part of his mind, and it knew what he knew, nothing more or less.
Arthur stood back up. "Show me where it is."
The creature-projection swung its flexible eye forward again, and began scuttling ahead.
It skipped across his mind like a pondskater bug. He went after it, treading as lightly as he could on his own axons and cell bodies, stepping gently across his own synapses. Once, watching it, he remembered swimming in a pond as a child, and the path he was on blazed to life. The action potential hit him at 300 miles per hour at least, stealing his breath and making his hair stand on end with static. It sizzled through him, almost burning him alive and he drew in a breath to scream, but it was over before it even began.
He flew forward in its wake, landing on his hands and knees, gasping.
The Glitch stopped skittering ahead and turned to look back at him.
"I see," Arthur said, struggling to catch his breath. "How can I know when I'm about to walk into one of my own memories?"
Click click.
"I can't. Of course. I have to clear my mind."
It moved onward, and downward. He followed it, until he was sure he was deep inside his own network. The wires were denser here, thickly tangled into masses and knots, burning with life. Proprioception, experience, where thoughts were formed, where they became words, and where ideas became actions.
The light pulsed brighter, almost blinding, and his eyes watered in the dream. The heat grew to an almost unbearable degree and he could hear it: the harsh, grating buzz of a short-circuit.
When his vision cleared and his eyes adjusted, he looked up from the bundle of nerves on which he was standing. When he saw it, it sucked his courage dry.
A writhing mass of organic wires, seething with electricity, burned before him. It twisted, tangled in on itself, expanded and ate up the resources around it. And it stood at the height of at least five of him, with width and depth equally towering.
This burgeoning thing was a cancer. An inorganic piece of information that was nonetheless invading the surrounding areas. This was the reason he couldn't dream. It was eating his thoughts and changing them. The idea that it was not inception, but an actual implant, fed to his neural pathways through chemicals into his veins, made him feel sick with loathing.
How could he assimilate this? It was so much bigger than he was. There was no way.
He wiped at his streaming eyes, feeling hopeless, wanting to run from this sickness they'd put inside of him. Just run, wake up, let someone else cut it out of his mind. There were people on the other side of sleep, ones that could help him. That had offered to help.
But I told them no. I said I'd do it.
The little Glitch thing clattered its metallic pods against one of his cell bodies. It glanced at him again with its moving eyes. Then it turned and walked into the storm. The current singed it immediately into nothingness ... his little projection. Arthur stared after it, panting.
He had followed it this far.
He had no idea how his physical body would react if he played with this thing inside of him. He didn't know if he could wake up from such a thing. If he could endure it at all. He also didn't see any other options. What he needed to undo was at the center of that electrical mass they'd stuck him with. He had to go through with it, or live with this storm burning inside him for the rest of his days – which would be measured in the minutes he was allowed to rest, and the days, long and endless, in which he couldn't. Anything was better than that. It had to be.
Three steps, taken with confidence lent to him by desperation, brought him to the edge of the twisting mass. Bolts of lightning leapt from its edges. His skin felt tight and burned already.
Just get through it. Just get through it; it's down there and you can undo what they did.
He stepped into the storm.
Electricity surged through every muscle he had, every fiber, every nerve, every cell. It scorched him to nothing, dried his blood and marrow, and if he was screaming, he never heard himself. Every sense was shattered.
** ** ** **
Eames felt the glitch as soon as he got into Arthur's head. It wasn't just the unbearable heat or the feeling of every one of his nerves jumping. Arthur might not have put his finger right on it. He was a vastly experienced dreamwalker, but without his memory functioning at top form, he might have missed the cues from his own brain.
But those same cues assaulted Eames as soon as he stepped inside. He felt the heat of disease in this dream. He'd seen what had happened to Arthur topside, as if someone had shot a thousand volts through him. Like someone with a tumor in their motor center. He'd witnessed that kind of thing before.
The heat of this sickness didn't feel like the sticky, damp heat of infection, but rather dry, acrid, like burnt metal. Or worn-out, dangerous hardware. The smell of electricity he'd noticed topside was stronger here in the dream.
If he kept going, it would infect him. Arthur didn't question it, Cobb seemed sure, and Eames didn't have any doubt either.
But Arthur's mind felt tired. Worn thin. And most frightening of all, it felt sluggish, like the systematic shutting down of a system. He was fading, perhaps dying even as Eames walked through his mind.
And maybe Eames would do this to save anyone's life, or anyone he found worthy enough to put his skill set (and maybe sanity) at risk. It wouldn't do to let anyone suffer and die when you could save them, even at personal cost. But when it was your oppo, your partner, someone who had your back and you were supposed to have theirs, then you just went ahead and walked through the minefield to retrieve them. It was just what you did.
He took a few steps and found himself in a swamp, surrounded by hot mud that sucked on his boots and tried to pull him under. (He thought he remembered Arthur muttering something about an icy river or stream. This was hardly icy, but then Arthur had been burning up, topside.) An electrical storm flickered on the horizon, over a twisted bridge.
Arthur and his love of the strange. Fondly, he wondered how it was that he'd once thought Arthur had no imagination. He had it, but he preferred subtleties.
Eames tried to move on, and quickly (that storm was lighting up the sky in the distance,) but the stream held him back almost purposefully. This was Arthur's dream. And inasmuch as Arthur was still conscious, and his brain was still functioning (the dream hadn't collapsed; Eames held tightly to that hope,) Arthur was somehow trying to keep him out.
"Fuck your heroics," Eames said, and moved onward.
His legs pushed against the mud. His breath burned in his lungs and sweat covered him. He struggled closer to the bridge and when he looked up, he saw a figure standing on it, backlit by blasts of lightning on the horizon.
He knew this man was himself. Arthur had babbled to him to stay away from the bridge, and now he saw what Arthur had seen. He didn't know why Arthur's projection of him was standing perilously close to falling off of this bridge into treacherous, disgusting muck, and he cared even less. What he did care about was the fact that the lightning in the distance was becoming duller and slower.
Eames pushed onward through Arthur's trap of a swamp, meant to keep him out.
But now even the swamp was fading.
Arthur's will to keep him out was diminishing. Which meant only one thing. Arthur was fading.
"Arthur," Eames called. The desperation he heard in his own voice made him feel sick. "Hold on, Arthur, if you can hear me at all."
A weak flash of light burst through the sky, as if in response.
And then—and Eames thought he'd gone insane for a second—an army of crabs, seemingly from nowhere, lined up in front of him like little sentinels. Crabs, they looked like honest to god crabs. Well, sort of, if crabs had twelve horrid legs.
"Really, Arthur?" he called out, laughing, a little unhinged. If Arthur was still trying to keep him out, then he was still holding on, somewhere. "I could say so many things."
The vile things were small, horrible, with blue beaks and shiny blue eyes, staring at him from atop moving stalks. They had actual claws too, and they all made threatening clicking noises at him.
We'll stop you, we'll paralyze you, we may even kill you, or at least we'll make you wake up, so turn back.
He didn't hear any of this in words, only in intent, and what he could piece together from the things that Arthur had screamed in his nightmares and babbled afterwards.
"Call your fucking weird little guards off, Arthur. I'm coming in whether you give me crabs or not. Really, what are you trying to tell me?"
As one, they clicked at him.
Eames pressed forward and they huddled themselves into a wall. He looked at them more closely.
They actually weren't crabs. They were little metal things. Some sort of ambulatory bot, silver and black, silicone and electric. It hit him all at once: These were Arthur's projection of the Glitch that was inside of him. They were his twisted visual of the sickness crawling through his mind. Eames almost had to respect his macabre aesthetic.
But why was the Glitch stopping him from coming through? If it was functioning on its own, then clearly this was a barrier to keep him from saving Arthur. But these actually felt like Arthur himself. He weighed both options and kept coming back to the feeling that it was not some machination of the disease keeping him out.
What had Arthur done? The idea that he had somehow merged with whatever they had implanted into him made Eames feel shaky and horrified. No good could come of that.
He wiped his muddy hands across his face, through his hair, and on his shirt. Then he dug his legs in, shoved himself forward, and swatted the crab-glitch-things out of his way. They hissed, and squealed like metal on metal, and clicked and scratched and screamed. But not one of them actually hurt him as they toppled around him.
Yes, these were Arthur's; he was controlling them.
Arthur didn't seem to realize that it was too late for him to back out. Whatever had infected Arthur's mind was already in his. They'd shared the dream, and the script for this program was now inside him, too.
Oh well.
He walked on.
What he eventually came to was a clearing in the fading swamp, and a nondescript building that nonetheless looked exceedingly familiar to him. He'd seen it years ago, only fleetingly, but enough that he would never forget.
SomniCore had been a megacorporation that pre-dated even his own dreamwork, though the Cobbs and Arthur had been pioneers for them. This had gone badly for them even before Mal's suicide and Arthur had, years ago, been held in this under-the-radar building and tormented for information for over a day.
As far as Eames knew, Arthur had seen very little of the building itself, but he had obviously gleaned enough to recreate it for his dream. But, why the old SomniCore building? That company had collapsed in on itself years ago, or so Eames had assumed when bigger problems—problems named Cobol—had presented themselves. Why was it still on Arthur's mind, after all this time?
The old building hadn't any distinguishing features and that had been the point. This version of it, however, was covered in organic looking wires. Every so often a current would surge through them, connecting them briefly. The wires climbed the outside of the building like white vines. They did not cross the door, which Eames now approached.
He didn't knock. He just pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.
The original building had had an entrance room, stairs, doors, hallways, offices and interrogation rooms. The inside of this was just one spacious, open room with endless concrete walls. At its center was a small computer station, its screen lit up in blue with scrolling white text.
Operating the computer, his back to Eames, was Arthur.
Small, metal creatures skittered around at his feet. A few climbed up the outside of his trousers, up his back. One nestled on his shoulder. They looked different to the little crab-like things he had seen before. These looked more formed. They were still made of metal, but had less legs, and their eyes were more reasonably proportioned, now sitting on top of their heads in pairs, like spider-eyes. Still glowing blue, though. They had retained their clicking claws but had lost the cobalt-blue beaks, replaced by shining silver pincers under their mouths.
Eames stood stock still, afraid to move.
"Come in," Arthur said without turning around. "And be quiet for a second."
Eames managed to take two steps toward him. One of the spider-crab things crawled down the back of Arthur's shirt. His mouth went dry.
"Arthur, what are you..."
"Shush," Arthur said. "Give me a minute. I'm rewriting the script." His fingers flew over a keyboard that Eames could now see was holographic. "They hacked into my dreams, right? Stupid bastards hacked the wrong hacker."
"The Glitch machine, it was a dream-program," Eames said. His voice sounded hoarse and shredded. "You couldn't extract it from yourself..."
"Right, so I overrode it. The program was shit but it had potential," he said. He had his Working Voice on, the one that said he was pretty confident in what he was doing. "They're trying some kind of remote dreamshare thing but they were using it to, A, keep tabs, and B, just see how badly they could fuck people up when they tried to extract." Tiptaptiptap, as Arthur's fingers danced over non-existent keys. "I think the idea was for it to be released by extractors when they tried to break in, and obviously for it to spread like a computer virus, only through dreamwalkers. And the added effect was that they could actually use it to track you. Which they are, by the way. Tracking me, I mean. You were right, I was supposed to live so that they could see how it worked, and so that I could spread it. Which I did. To you, asshole. I told you not to come down here."
"Arthur, you were dying."
"Maybe for like, a second, topside."
"No. For more than a minute." Eames hated that he couldn't see Arthur's face; that all he could see of him was his back, and those crawling little creatures scuttling around and on him.
"Well, it doesn't matter," Arthur said. "I reprogrammed it anyway, so I'm reprogramming yours, too. I don't know who they thought they were fucking with, trying to grab me for this. Jesus. They should remember from the last time."
"They?"
"SomniCore."
"Christ."
"Yeah, right?"
Arthur sounded a little more like himself, and Eames took a few more steps toward him. Blue light flashed every time he moved his fingers. The spider-crab creatures looked up at Eames, regarding him with silent calm.
"Erm, Arthur, those things on you... They're very disconcerting."
"I redesigned them," Arthur said. "They were my projection of the glitch to begin with. I obviously can't get rid of what they put in me, so... I changed the program, and the design of the projections of it changed as well. A little more streamlined, I think. A little more normal looking." He finished what he was doing at the computer with a pronounced tap on the "enter" bar, almost a flourish. This was always Arthur's "I'm done typing" signal, so familiar that Eames felt himself exhale in relief. The blue screen of the computer shut down with a whine. A second later it flared to life again and showed a desktop of Escher's Puddle, with a few innocuous looking folders on it, tucked into corners. Arthur's real-life desktop, and obviously the hard-drive of his mind as well. "Never fuck with a Mac guy," Arthur said.
"Arthur," Eames said. Something was still bothering him, prickling at the back of his neck when he looked at Arthur and he didn't know what it was, where it was coming from. "Turn around for me, would you?"
Arthur spun the chair around to face him. His hair was styled back, as it always was when he was working. He looked severe and put-together, as he often did. His self-satisfied, close-lipped smile looked the same, too: slightly smug, strangely child-soft. He was clean-shaven and smooth, and still had a smattering of freckles.
However, the sharp brown eyes that Eames had grown fond of over the many years were now incandescent blue. Real, true incandescence - they lit his face in a glow that looked like electricity.
Eames fell back a few steps.
"What?" Arthur said. "We'll be fine. We're sharing the dream, right? So the program you're infected with should reboot the next time you go under. We should wake up soon, so..."
"Arthur, your, your..." He waved his hand ineffectually in front of his own eyes.
Arthur frowned. Then he raised his hand to his own eyes. He must have seen how the light bathed his hand in color, because he raised one eyebrow in surprise. He didn't actually know what he looked like. All at once, Eames was terrified for him, and worse, as he had never been before: almost terrified of him.
"That's...weird," Arthur said. "Who assimilated who, I wonder?"
"Let's wake up now, darling," Eames said. He licked his lips, nervous, eager to be away from this strange Dream Arthur, with glowing eyes and metal spiders crawling all over him. "Come on now, let's get out of here. Your body is still exhausted and I don't know what your condition is topside. You scared the hell out of me and Cobb. Why don't you go up first and give me the kick, so that..."
Something blindingly painful resounded through his bones and cut him short. Eames fell to his knees, gripping his head. "Fuck," he grit out.
"Eames?" Arthur came up to him and crouched down, placing a hand on his shoulder. Eames looked up at him, unable to form words. If this Dream Arthur had been at all readable, he would have looked concerned, maybe even scared. One of his spider-creatures crawled from his hand onto Eames's shoulder.
Eames didn't care about that. The pain bore down on him, tearing through his head, down his shoulders, down his arms. This had nothing to do with dreams. This was going on in his body.
Someone was hurting him on the outside. Someone had gotten into Arthur's apartment. They had probably subdued Cobb as well.
"Fuck, someone's topside with us," he breathed. "Arthur, wake up before they get you, fucking stop them, go, go, go."
Without question, Arthur pulled a gun and blew his own brains out. His spider-creatures scattered, squealing in high-pitched, metallic whines. The dream started to collapse.
It didn't matter. Time was different up there and they'd probably taken Eames and Cobb out of the house minutes before Arthur woke up.
Eames still came awake in the back of someone's van, with his arms bound behind his back.
** ** ** **
NEXT PART
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Date: 2011-01-27 10:12 pm (UTC)I hope you'll like it! ^_^