Thanks to everyone who reviewed. This chapter is a little choppy and, I think, blegh, but hopefully, it will make the next few chapters flow better.
Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.
- Li
Matryoshka
A design principle that denotes a recognizable relationship of similar object within similar object
Chapter Seven
Contracting firms, Ariadne discovers during the car ride back to the warehouse, are absurdly easy to fake. In the two short hours she spent at Professor Miles' lecture, Arthur has already registered and provided a detailed history for their own firm. Whether it's because of his extraordinary talent or just lax French laws, she isn't quite sure, but the fact remains that she and Eames are due to visit Frechette's godfather in two days.
"I booked the earliest date possible so you could have enough time to build the model and teach it to us," Arthur explains.
"I'm not entirely sure I'll be able to pull off a believable contractor guise in just two days," Ariadne confesses. "I know nothing about it."
"Don't worry, Eames will cover for you. Leave the talking to him," he advises. "Focus on taking in everything you see, especially the details. Intricacies in familiar objects tend to stand out more than the bigger picture."
"Is that a psychology thing?" she teases.
He almost smiles. "Could be."
The remainder of the ride passes in relative silence to the soundtrack of a faded, sepia tune (he calls it Softly As In A Morning Sunrise). Ariadne finds herself actually enjoying the point man's mute company; the customary need to fill the air with words and phrases has all but disappeared. With her affirmation to stick to the job, it's as if a barrier of uncertainty has collapsed between them. She's never been aware of its existence, but not that it's gone, it's suddenly that much easier to breathe.
She takes the opportunity to study him, really look at him for the first time and try and see more than just a collared shirt and slicked back hair. If Arthur notices her side glances and the occasional downright stare, he doesn't say anything.
In the short time it takes to drive from the university back to the warehouse, Ariadne discovers a number of things she's never noticed about the point man, little things that have never been given the time or the opportunity to surface. They are impossible to describe – mannerisms and depth and a million other things in between, but they all fit in so perfectly that Ariadne knows she will never mistake them as belonging to someone else.
"Looks like Eames is back," Arthur observes as he parks his own inconspicuous vehicle behind the electric blue, low-riding convertible blocking the warehouse's back entrance. He jilts its side view mirror when they squeeze past to get inside and makes no attempt to reposition said mirror.
The offending forger is deep asleep in a lawn chair beside Yusuf's desk, an IV drip dangling from his slack grasp. The chemist looks up from his monitor at the sound of the door sliding closed and waves them over.
"I've just finished my sedative," he tells them excitedly. "Provides a crystal clear dream, but when the target wakes up, they'll only remember some hazy, nonsensical dream provided by their own subconscious. It's great for providing a cover."
"Does it work?" Ariadne asks.
"Works fine on me. I've already tried it out once on Eames today with excellent results. This is his second time. He should be done any minute now."
Sure enough, barely thirty seconds later, Eames' eyes blink open and he sits up groggily.
"I see the two you are back from wherever you disappeared off to this time," he murmurs the moment he catches sight of Arthur and Ariadne standing above him. "I had a dream about you," he continues, nodding at the point man. "Or at least my subconscious tells me I did. You were getting ready to fly off the top of the Bloody Tower wearing a Big Bird costume. Pity it didn't actually happen. Let me know if you decide to try again – I'd love to get a picture."
"You'll be the first to know," Arthur promises.
Yusuf, busy jotting down numbers and graphs, is above all the banter. "Excellent. All the readings of your brain activity indicate that you actually had a lucid dream, so the sedative is working perfectly." He turns to Arthur and Ariadne. "I want to run a few trials with each of you, just to make sure it works the same on everyone."
"I'll go first," Ariadne volunteers, rolling up her right sleeve. "Arthur and Eames can go figure out how in the world they're going to turn me into a contractor."
"Contractor? Who's going to believe that slip of a girl could be a contractor?"
"I'll explain later," Arthur mutters, pulling the confused forger to his own desk.
Ariadne lies back in the chair Eames just vacated and listens to Yusuf talk as he wires her to the sensors on his desk. "Once the dream starts, I want you to build – change the dream as much as you can. Only your own subconscious will be in there, so there's nothing to worry about. When you wake up, you should hopefully remember nothing of it." He attaches a new needle to the tube of sedative and swabs her arm with a cool, cotton ball drenched in alcohol. "Ready?"
She nods. He slides the needle into a blue-green vessel that stands out clearly against the pale skin of her inner wrist and she in turn slides into unconsciousness.
She's in the middle of a large square with not much in it besides towering mounds of rubble that are spewing dust into the cloudless sky. A few projections idle listlessly against the piles of stone and glass, all of them seemingly unperturbed by their surroundings. Ariadne, however, can't stand to see so much space and materials going to waste, so she immediately sets to work raising structures from the ground with her mind.
A glittering, glass palace emerges first, assembled from the shards of empty bottles. She models it after the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, which has always been one of her favourites. A more abstract structure follows, all chrome and black marble slabs, arranged into crystalline patterns balanced on an impossible base. She never has to worry about foundations or budgets here; she simply has to dream and the visions become real.
The projections ignore her as she transforms the rubbish heaps into extravagant buildings, aware that she is the dreamer. Even when her creations become more and more wild, they give her little more than the odd glance. Soon, she's carving bridges and bending buildings over each other again, relishing the sensation of playing god for as long as it lasts, all the more because she knows she won't remember any of it when she wakes.
He finds her as she's constructing a park, impeccably dressed as always. Her stomach clenches in fear when she sees him approaching but she forces herself to remain exactly where she is. After all, she reasons, he's only her projection.
"Hello Ariadne."
Ariadne blanches. The greeting is definitely not a good sign. She has to remind herself to breathe when he steps closer, taking in her handiwork.
"I like what you've done, but don't you think Frechette will get suspicious if he sees people walking upside down?" projection-Arthur asks, pointing at the folded over city around her.
"Well, that's why it isn't for him," she replies. It feels silly talking to her own subconscious, but she feels rude ignoring him.
"Then why waste time building it?"
"Because…"
The architect stops, unsure how to continue. How did you explain to your own subconscious the exact nature of your fascination with dreaming, all while it pretended to be someone else?
She coughs and starts again. "Because I like it," she answers, aware of how ridiculous her words sound, even to her own ears.
"I see."
She can tell he's not impressed by her answer, but she doesn't care. Every moment spent talking to this shade of Arthur is one more moment of creation lost. She takes his further silence as permission to ignore him and returns her concentration to building a glamorous water fountain to top off her park.
The projection is perfect, displaying not a single emotion as he – it – follows her into the corners of her dream, sometimes commenting on her creations, other times simply standing on the outskirts. She becomes accustomed to its presence and, lost in dreaming, soon forgets the fear that had permeated through her at its appearance. It returns full fledge, however, when she suddenly finds herself looking down the barrel of a gun with no idea how she got there. Her last thought before it fires is relief that, assuming Yusuf's sedative works (and there's no reason why it shouldn't - the man is as much a genius in his own right as she is), she won't remember all this when she wakes.
"What happened?" Yusuf demands the moment she opens her eyes and shoots up into a sitting position, heart racing. "All your readings just skyrocketed."
Ariadne opens her mouth to tell him some nonsense about being attacked by pigeons that she vaguely seems to remember, but closes it when she sees Arthur and Eames from the corner of her eye, bickering at the far end of the warehouse. With an impact not unlike a tsunami, she recalls the feel of cold metal against her skin and the even colder glint in Arthur's gaze when he pulls the trigger. She opens her mouth to tell Yusuf about the glitch in the sedative, only to check her voice immediately at the thought of what the cautious point man will do if he finds out about her dreams; he'll never allow her to go with them on the job. So she closes her mouth again, giving the overall impression of a particularly dimwitted goldfish.
"Um…I remember something about a pigeon attack," she replies at last.
"Hmmm…"
Ariadne nearly blushes at the chemist's monosyllabic response. She knows this particular hmmm well, her grandmother having used it often whenever she thought she was being told something that was less than the absolute truth.
"You're sure you don't remember anything?" Yusuf insists. "Nothing besides pigeons?"
"Nothing," she repeats, trying her best to appear the picture of a lost, wide-eyed, innocent little girl. After a few seconds of intense scrutiny, Yusuf buys the act and turns to his monitors.
"I don't understand that peak at the end," he mutters more to himself. "All the readings were fine, and then suddenly…It's like you died, but the subconscious would never attack itself…"
Araidne untangles herself from the tubes and wires and takes advantage of Yusuf's preoccupation to zero the timer, which indicates another eleven seconds left to her dream. No need to leave any incriminating evidence behind.
She makes her way back to her own desk on slightly shaky legs. The dilapidated desk chair that she's been nagging Arthur to replace has never felt more comfortable as it supports her drooping form. Half completed models and a scalpel await the architect exactly where she left them, but she has neither the energy nor the motivation to pick them up. Instead, Ariadne finds herself curling up with her spinning head cushioned between her hands.
She'd assumed that the feeling of ease with Arthur in the car would naturally extend to her dreams. She'd even been looking forward to falling asleep, eagerly anticipating an Arthur-free dream, or at least one where he would feature in a more pleasant role. But it seems she'd been wrong to expect things to be different. If anything, the latest dream worries her a dozen times more than her nightmares of the past few days. For the most part, she'd only been scared for her sanity before, but now she wonders what it means that Arthur's popping up unannounced into her dreams through her subconscious. And it wasn't even the man that she knows – she'd have nothing against his appearance – but a mocking facsimile that could never recreate all the facets of his personality.
She swallows hard, eerily reminded of Mal shaking the bars of her prison within Cobb's mind. But Arthur wouldn't be the same, would he? She can't imagine the pristinely dressed point man, even a shadow of him, smouldering away in the recesses of her mind. Then again, she can't picture him holding a gun to her head either, and her projection had done just that. So maybe he isn't that far from becoming another Mal.
The thought of Arthur becoming a twisted and feared thing in her mind makes Ariadne sick and she has to force back the bile rising to her mouth. There must be something wrong with her subconscious to change someone so wholly perfect into an unrelenting monster – she definitely can't be completely sane.
She thinks of the anonymous help billboards posted along all of Paris' major bridges – but who would believer her? The only people who can help her are in this dingy warehouse and she can't tell any one of them. Not Yusuf or Eames, and certainly not Arthur himself. They'd make her leave, force her to forget about the job and focus on the real world for the time being. And that time would turn into weeks and months and years of waiting for a day that would never come. College would turn into internment, which in turn would become a job of a different kind, where the best reward she could ever hope for would be a window office with a few withering plants in the corner. There would be no more creation, no more dreaming, no more paradoxes, no more wobbly second-hand furniture in a dimly lit warehouse of questionable history, no more gel and spearmint. As certain as she is that she would prefer to never see projection-Arthur again, she would rather face his polished gun a hundred times over than risk never seeing the real, flesh and bone Arthur, and Eames and Yusuf. Because as much as she loves dreaming, reality would always be better.
When Arthur and Eames finally stop arguing long enough to fill her in on just how she's going to pass herself off as a seasoned contractor, Ariadne is back to chiselling away at linoleum models with a scalpel in each hand and her bishop tipped over beside her.