MAL 3 : I Remember
Repairing the Architect
The garage door clicked as it was raised. The ominous looking van slowly drove in and stopped.
Inside, 34 year old Ariadne sat on a bench, cuffed, exhausted from the flight time, totally clueless of where she was, and now she was about to find out what would happen to her next. She sat still, heart pounding, blood churning, and could hardly bear the possibility that this was all Mal's doing. She was sure after the brain damage she sustained from flinging herself into heavy speeding traffic, Mal was dead. Now she had creeping fears Mal was back.
The truck lurched to a halt. She heard a loud clank as the doors were unlatched, and opened. Ariadne squinted in the bright light trying to get a glimpse of the people looking at her.
A suited man waved at her indicating she was supposed to step out. She got up, and slowly stepped out.
"Welcome back, Ariadne," said a familiar voice. She looked up and saw a middle aged Japanese businessman walking up to her. He reached out for a handshake. Not wanting to endanger herself, she shook his hand.
"Do you remember me? I'm Mr. Saito. You worked for me once, a long time ago."
Ariadne shook her head, "No, sir I don't"
"It will come to you. This way please," he said politely, leading her out of the huge garage through a maze of corridors to a small meeting room.
The strange tasting stew was probably the first thing she'd eaten in days.
"Sorry to have disrupted your schedule," Saito was saying, "But, it turns out we need your help."
She looked at Saito, still not remembering who he was, swallowed her food and asked, "Did Mal send you to kidnap me?"
Saito, a young man and young woman she did not recognize looked at each other.
"No, she didn't," Saito replied, "But our problem just so happens to be Mal. Do you remember Mr. Cobb? Arthur? Eames? Yusuf? You worked with these men once. You built the dream environments."
Ariadne shook her head.
"I don't remember. I think you got the wrong person."
"We checked. You're the one we've been searching for over 15 years now. If you remember Mal, then why don't you remember us?"
She only replied with a shrug. Saito reached out, and placed a chess piece- a large pawn- on the table in front of her.
"Do you remember using that?"
She picked it up. It's weight felt funny.
"It was your totem." Saito said, "The object you used to confirm whether you were in reality, or a dream."
"I guess I worked for you," Ariadne conceded, "But I don't remember anything. Those guys' names are familiar…Arthur…"
"Why do you remember Mal, and nothing else?"
Ariadne looked at him. She did remember, "Mal invaded my dreams, and she was everywhere, and she always hurt me, and never stopped."
"I know," Saito said, "And I know how she got in your head. You ran away, thinking you could escape from her, but she was always in your thoughts, your memories, and your dreams?"
Ariadne shed a tear, not wanting to think about it. "Please, sir, I don't want to talk about it. She always kept me in limbo…all those sand buildings…I would be stuck there for hundreds of years at a time…seeing nothing move…nothing…just two little kids playing in the streets with Mal…"
"Those two kids are right here sitting beside me. They're Cobb's children, James, and Phillipa. They wanted to meet you, to see the architect who almost killed Mal."
James and Phillipa looked at her, and said their greetings, and asked her questions about Cobb's final moments, but she remembered nothing.
"I don't remember." Ariadne said, wiping away a tear, "I don't want to remember. Any good memories I had were destroyed by Mal."
"But you have to," Phillipa insisted, "Because we need your help. We need you to help us bring back our father."
"He's dead," Ariadne argued bitterly, "Mal killed him. There's nothing you can do. I don't know how the hell I lived with Mal, she'll be way worse on him, after all, he tried to kill her- I mean the projection. I shot her, and I paid for it, but Cobb, he was the one who could destroy her by releasing his guilt. What makes you think she'll let him get away with that?"
James and Phillipa looked uneasy.
"Go on, tell us what you know. Tell us what happened when you went into his subconscious to look for him." James ordered.
"Fuck you guys," Ariadne hissed bitterly, "Just can't resist, can you?"
"Take it easy," Saito said, "Try to understand that they did not know how they lost their parents. They want to know of this projection that turned Mr. Cobb's limbo into a prison and infected the minds of the team, including you. They are not dead; they are all in a coma. If they have been conscious this time, and imprisoned in their own limbo by Mal, they have been imprisoned for over 160 thousand years."
Ariadne's eyes widened, and she replied, "Then they're just as good as dead because they won't remember a thing, and that's just from time alone. God knows what Mal's been doing to them since."
"And that's where you come in," Saito said, "You were the only one who escaped from lapsing into a coma. We need your help-"
"What can I do?" Ariadne snapped back, pounding the table, "Don't you get it? Mal's carved up all our minds and shredded our memories to the point we can't think! She put us all through a fucking blender! And she'll do the same to you! Your parents are gone, get over it! If you go into Cobb's subconscious, Mal will fucking kill you."
There was a tense pause of uncomfortable silence, and then she asked, "How do you dream anyway?" Apparently her amnesia was selective.
"The PASIV sedation machine. It puts you to sleep and places you in a shared dream." Saito said.
"What, like a dream machine of some sort?"
At the same time someone brought in a large bulky looking steel suitcase and placed it on the table and unlocked it. The man opened it to reveal the apparatus inside, and the second Ariadne saw it, her eyes bulged and she screamed at the top of her lungs. She jumped up out of her seat and hit the floor. She scrambled to her feet and backed herself into the wall, hitting the water cooler.
Everyone else was startled by her panic attack, especially James and Phillipa.
"Get that thing away from me! Get that fucking thing away from me! You're not hooking me up to that thing!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.
"Royson, get this out of here!" Saito demanded. The man slammed the metal suitcase shut and quickly removed it from the room. Ariadne stood hunched against the wall sweating and breathing heavily.
"Are you okay?" Phillipa asked.
"Stay away from me!" Ariadne shot back.
"Why are you so scared of that?" Saito demanded.
Ariadne continued to hyperventilate for a few minutes, "Just…just gimme a minute."
A minute later, she started to calm down. She covered her face with one hand and started sobbing.
"Are you okay?" Saito asked.
Still crying, Ariadne nodded.
"Now please tell us why seeing the machine scared you."
Ariadne tried to regain her composure, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, took a deep breath, and said, "Because, that thing will bring back Mal. I just got rid of her, and doing so hurt like hell. I am not going into any sort of dream- not even for a second, and I don't care what you people say. You see me? You see how screwed up I am? This is nothing compared to what Mal's done to the others. You wanna end their misery, just take a gun and blow their heads off!"
LAter, Saito, James and Phillipa met in another meeting room with a medical professional Fischer hired to over see the participants. He sifted through a fat stack of papers- the profile on Ariadne compiled from the information collected on her.
"As you can see, Mr. Saito, her reaction to seeing the sedating device is a very strong indicator of traumatic experiences she's endured in dream space or limbo. These records from Pasadena Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles tell us that the woman has been literally possessed by her own projection of Mal- a mind virus. Of course, the doctors at Pasadena saw her condition as a mystery, but we all know that her suffering is Mal's doing."
"So is that why she threw herself off of a bridge into the middle of the freeway?" Saito asked.
"That was a suicide attempt, carried out shortly after she escaped from the hospital. Apparently being locked up made it easier for Mal to haunt her. Of course she lived, but after being hit by a car going well over 50 miles per hour, the impact left her body mangled with injury and she suffered a severe head injury. She was in the hospital for eight months recuperating. These reports indicate that since the accident, she has not seen Mal, which leaves me to believe that the part of the brain containing the memory of the projection was injured and the memory destroyed. I've run her through some tests, and it shows that her memory has been reduced to fragments. Intact memory she has only exists from when she woke up in the hospital to the present. She can remember fragments of what happened 15 years ago. I am afraid that the talents she acquired working with building dreams has been lost."
"I want her put under and team sent in to examine her subconscious," Saito ordered.
The doc chuckled, "Sir, you are going to have no luck in convincing her to agree to be put under. You saw her reaction the sight of your dream machine, what makes any of you think she will allow anyone to stick the IV in her wrist?"
"Then we'll sedate her, and while she's sleeping, we connect her to the machine and the team will look at her from there."
"Good luck, doing so will cause her to never trust anyone again and you'll be required to force her to comply each time. Her level of distrust can also make her subconscious a very hostile environment, and if Mal is still lurking around in there, which I doubt- I'm gonna say that your team had better be prepared for the worst."
"We will."
Ariadne walked around the room examining the comatose bodies of the team she once knew. Her memory of them came back. Yusuf, the quirky Persian who made the sedatives for the Fischer job; Eames, the dashing Forger, and Arthur-
The charming young Arthur who kissed her during the Fischer job; were all frail, hollow frames of the men she knew. Their eyes and ears were covered. She walked up to the gurney where Cobb lay. He looked the most aged of the group. He had grey hair, his skin wrinkled more, his face hallowed and bony. She lifted off the cloth that covered his eyes, and saw they were open, and darting around. She wondered if he was actually awake and his Mal was standing over him right next to her in his vision. Then the eyes looked at her.
"Cobb," she said, removing the ear plugs, "It's me, Ari-"
"Get away from there!" Saito said, startling her. He quickly shoved her aside and covered Cobb's eyes and ears.
"Wh-what did I do?"
"You just alerted Mal of your presence here. Cobb's not the one who can see or hear you. Mal is. She was looking at you through his eyes, and she's the one listening."
Ariadne nodded, and stepped back, "Sorry, I didn't know…"
Saito looked her in the eye, and said, "Never do that again. So, have you had much thought on dreaming or are you still firm in your resolve?"
"I'm not dreaming." Ariadne said strongly, "and I don't know If you noticed, but if you put me under and bring others into a dream, Mal's going to infect them too. It's really not worth it. You'll just make more people suffer."
Saito didn't reply when Ariadne walked away.
Later that night, the Dream Scouts arrived. Dream scouts were people who worked for Fischer's umbrella of dream tech companies by venturing into dream space on endless experiments and research. Saito ordered a team of 50 experienced scouts to enter Ariadne's limbo. Each of them had over 500 hours' of Limbo training, and for good measure, a lot of them were architect dreamers.
Saito informed them of Ariadne and her condition, and the dangers they would possibly face in her limbo.
A woman by the name of "Ausparra", a veteran dream scout was among the elite. She specialized in the field of manipulating projections, and kept a mind-virus projection of her own which she controlled. She was called a shade master, and was called in for things like this. She had logged more than 20 years of dream time in only a six month period.
Ariadne lay passed out on a gurney as they wheeled it out into one of the large rooms or dream labs. Someone slipped a powerful sedative in some water she drank, and it would knock her out for 18 hours. A powerful sedative was required for anyone to access limbo.
In the last 15 years, there had been huge milestone advances in dream sharing technology. The signature PASIV device was replaced by a computer (which acted as a peripheral to a standard computer) that was connected to more efficient sedating devices. Using new computer hardware and software, the human brain was analyzed and decoded like a hard drive, so was the rest of the nervous system.
Using this software allowed for scientists to identify what was happening in someone's brain during a dream and allowed for streaming audio and video from the person's brain as they ventured through the dream.
Using the computers, scientists discovered just how messed up Ariadne's brain really was. Like a computer, in which the operating system is made of files that work together, the brain seemed to operate the same way. "Files" of Ariadne's memory were found to be corrupt, 'shattered,' missing, or wrongly placed. Processes were scrambled and data routes throughout the brain and nervous system were mangled. It was almost as if she had been struck by lightning. A computer program that could identify a 'parasite' or 'virus' in the human brain was not available.
Audio clips (from her past thoughts), videos, text files downloaded from Ariadne into a computer revealed Mal's horrors. One video shown walking down a street, and Mal appeared out of thin air, and stabbed her in the abdomen. Blood was seen then disappeared like nothing.
Nothing on her memories of the Fischer job or architecture school was found.
Then came time to get the dream started. Everyone was hooked to computers that were all connected.
A button was pressed, and all of them passed out, relaxed by the gentle heat of the somnacin flowing through their blood streams.