Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first layer of the dream worked well. They chose a secluded place, no projections, because while Arthur couldn’t gain access to the subject’s un-redacted military file, it was pretty safe to assume that he’d been militarized. With no projections there were no random people shooting at them Matrix style, so identifying the opposition would be much simpler.

They put him under again almost immediately into the second level, which by default had to be more populated so that they could approach him. Eames had a beautiful woman all set up for the task.

That was when things started to fall apart. Arthur had never seen anything like it before. Given a normal, life-like setting, the subject always populated it with normal, life-like people.

The people former Corporal Jake Jensen populated the club with had heads made of soccer balls. Pink ones.

“Well, this is bizarre. Is he a big football fan, then?” Eames commented, face and voice bland in a way that told Arthur he was put off.

“His niece is on a youth soccer team called the Petunias,” Arthur said, thoughtful. They stuck out like sore thumbs, but so did his security, which also didn’t have soccer ball heads. That meant they might be able to pull a Mr. Charles, but just the thought had Arthur twitching with phantom pain from the first time Cobb tried that scam, never mind that it had worked the second. Cobb could pull stuff off that nobody else could.

Then Arthur saw it. The bartender had a normal head. At a closer look, so did a projection of one of his teammates in a cowboy hat sitting on a couch across the room. Carlos Alvarez, nickname Cougar, he identified quickly. So, maybe people important to the dream or subject were given normal features? The fill-ins marked obviously as unimportant by outlandish characteristics?

De-humanized, Arthur realized, and wasn’t that an odd way for military training to manifest itself in the subconscious? Arthur had been in military minds before, and they looked a lot like his. Organized, meticulous, regimented, controlled, everything just so in a way that always made extraction dangerous whether the subject had training or not. In comparison, Corporal Jensen’s mind was chaos. But it still had the military hallmarks that said that what they’d expected going in wouldn’t push them too far astray, and maybe looking like they’d been marked important by Jensen’s subconscious would keep them off the security’s radar.

“Go for it anyway,” Arthur told the forger. Eames shrugged and did a whole body shake that settled him into a beautiful olive-skinned woman, who walked away from him and around the edge of the dance floor, casually sliding up next to the subject and ordering a drink.

“Mind if you get that?” Eames asked the subject, stretching out against the bar with a sultry smirk.

“Wow,” Jensen said, a grin creeping its way across his face. “Is this one of those dreams? Are you supposed to be some version of Aisha? If you are, Cougar’s gonna show up any second and shoot you.”

Arthur’s heart hit his throat. His mouth went dry even as the pounding of his pulse roared in his head. No, no, no, this was not happening, where the fuck was Cobb when you needed him? It was a nightmare. It was every Extractor’s worst-case scenario.

By the way Eames twitched, he’d realized it too. Damage control. Arthur thought frantically. What would Cobb do?

Arthur pulled his gun and shot Eames in the back of the head. He’d be able to get word to Ariadne, and no need to blow their cover. Jake Jensen and every pink soccer ball with eyes turned to look at him, just as the nondescript security forces stationed around the room all turned into different versions of the man’s AWOL Special Ops team and started making for him. Arthur ducked into the crowd on the dance floor, having no illusions that the security would hesitate to shoot the de-humanized projections but hoping that their large, pink heads might be distracting. He made his way in as direct a manner as possible to Corporal Jensen, gun out, and spotted the man looking confused and searching for a better vantage point.

Arthur took out the bartender, who had pulled an AK-47 of all things from under the bar. Jensen’s face started turning red. “Why the hell can’t I change anything?” He demanded of the room, just as Arthur managed to reach him. Apparently, Arthur’s crazy/hastily created plan had worked. Jensen was confused enough by the nature of the dream to not really notice that he was in real danger.

The security projections were another story. Something made of fire kicked him hard in the chest, and Arthur had been shot enough times to recognize that he’d taken a high-powered rifle round to the left breast, less than half an inch off his heart, just before he could grab Jensen to use as a shield. Arthur stumbled into him instead, managed to hook his bum arm around Jensen’s neck and put a gun to his head.

Arthur opened his mouth to speak, gurgled up blood instead. Christ that hurt, but Arthur reminded himself he’d been kneecapped before so ignore it. It was already excruciating to breathe. He wouldn’t last much longer, but he needed Jensen to realize what was going on before he died and the dream collapsed, or his new plan wouldn’t work either, not that Arthur really thought it would, but he was hoping what would Cobb do might get him out of this situation.

So Arthur tried again. “Call ‘em off.” He managed to gasp through the blood. “Or I shoot you.”

“What, in a dream?” Jensen demanded, not scared, just as any real lucid dreamer wouldn’t be. “How is that even a threat? I’ll just wake up.” Arthur shifted his gun from Jensen’s head to his shoulder socket, pushing it against his flesh so he knew Arthur’s intent without words that Arthur couldn’t speak, blood already drip drip drip-ing from the bottom of his shirt and landing in a growing puddle on the club floor beneath their feet.

“I’ve been shot before.” Jensen told him, “though never by anyone as handsome as you.” Which was just- not what Arthur was expecting him to say, especially when he was bleeding all over the man’s back. Tongues were always a bit looser in dreams, even for those who could control them, but Arthur’s research had suggested a mostly hetero-normative male. Something else his history had missed, apparently, not that Arthur felt he could have discovered the man was a lucid dreamer with research, which was part of what made them so frightening.

Though he really should have caught the homosexual leanings, or whatever that was. It affected the approach. His focus had been too split running both Extraction and Point.

“Call ‘em off.” Arthur gurgled again, spit the blood out, and managed: “Or I start here and move on until I find out what I need to know.”

Corporal Jensen had a sort of aha moment. “Wait, seriously? You’re an Extractor? Didn’t Major Rivers say you guys wouldn’t work-”

Arthur opened his eyes to the warehouse on the first level with an abruptness that said he’d died of a headshot. He hadn’t seen it coming. Sniper, Arthur remembered about the teammate named Alvarez.

Eames was leaning over him, face white. “Arthur, he’s a lucid dreamer.”

“I got that Eames, thank you.” Arthur snapped, sitting up and removing the needle line from his wrist. “The dream’s collapsing, we don’t have much time. Ariadne, I need a projector with pictures of his team and family, and you need to remove all the windows from this building.”

Ariadne just looked at him, wide-eyed. She opened her mouth to speak. “Now.” He told her, cutting her off. “Or we all die.” His tone was harsh, but it needed to be to get her moving, not asking him questions. The windows started bricking over. “Eames, help me tie him down. You’re muscle. Ariadne, you don’t exist. Stay behind him, out of his line of sight. And for god’s sake, neither of you do anything that might make him realize he’s still dreaming.”

When Jensen woke forty-five seconds later, he was strapped down into a chair and Arthur was ready.

“Technically, a lucid dreamer such as you is naturally resistant to normal methods of Extraction.” Arthur freely admitted to the Corporal, continuing their conversation as if Jensen’s security projections hadn’t just shot him to death. Jensen sort of blinked, taking stock of the warehouse and the chair he was tied up in, the table in front of him with the laptop and the PASIV device clearly visible. His gaze slid over to Eames, who had turned himself into a beefy-looking security guy in a suit. Coupled with Arthur’s own suit, they looked official. Jensen seemed to buy it, at least for now. Any second he could realize that he was still in a dream.

Arthur clicked the projector on. The most recent surveillance photo Arthur had of Jensen’s sister and niece flickered into focus on the wall behind him. Jensen went pale. Good. Arthur thought, a little mad at himself for implicitly threatening a child, but this was the only way they’d get the information now, and Arthur couldn’t afford to botch this job. It was his first running the crew, serving as Point Man and Extractor, and if he botched it there wouldn’t be any jobs for a long time.

Arthur may have gotten rich off the Inception job, but no one could know they’d succeeded, so that didn’t bring any other jobs in, and Arthur lived for this. It was the only thing he’d ever enjoyed in his entire life – though Arthur was planning to avoid filling both roles for a single job ever again. It was insanity. He didn’t know how Cobb had run himself as both Architect and Extractor for so long.

“Unfortunately for you,” Arthur continued. “Considering that we cannot use normal methods in order to gain the information we need, we will have to resort to other techniques. This photo was taken five days ago as your sister picked her daughter up from school. As you can see, we have obviously easily gained access to your family.”

Jensen swallowed. “What do you want me to do?” He asked, but it was not an admission that he would do it, Arthur could tell. Jensen was assessing the situation, trying to figure out what they wanted.

Arthur obliged him. “You recently hacked into our client’s secure database and copied information. Our client would like to know what information you gained.” Jensen laughed.

“You can’t be serious, Extracto-dude. Do you have any idea how many evil mega corporations I’ve hacked in the last two months alone? You gotta do better than that. Anyway, half of them didn’t even have what I was looking for, so if they didn’t I wouldn’t have any use for the info, you know? I was looking for something specific.” From his position looming over Jensen, Eames mouthed ‘Extracto-dude’ at him. Arthur would never hear the end of it. “And on top of that, why should I help you when I know that any second my team is gonna come in here and shoot you again. Hell, for all I know, Mickey Mouse is gonna pop into existence with an AK-47 and start firing.”

There was a pause. Arthur very seriously did not look at Ariadne to see if she had fallen for the suggestion. Thankfully, no such thing happened. Eames punched Jensen, smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth.

“Aw, come on, that would have been cool, right?” Jensen protested, smile not dented by his bloody lip. “Anyway, you guys wouldn’t believe me even if I told you what I’d found.”

“You’re correct,” Arthur told him, and wheeled the table with the laptop and PASIV device closer so that the laptop was in Jensen’s reach. “That’s why you’re going to show us. As long as we get the information and evidence we need, you’re free to go, and your family is safe.” Arthur promised.

“Why should I believe you?” Jensen asked, still smiling.

Arthur smiled back. “We’re Extractors. I think you can deduce from our normal methods how we like to handle information gathering. This is the alternative.”

*

Jake Jensen woke up in his stakeout van. He blinked at the change in scenery, and checked his watch. Ten minutes. Jensen saw, surprised. It had felt like hours. Weird dream, or real Extractors? Jensen wondered to himself. He remembered he’d been in a really tame (compared to his usual) dream where people had soccer ball heads, and Cougar had been there and some chick had approached him at the bar, and he’d been thinking Cougar was gonna shoot her for hitting on him/shooting him, depending on if she’d been Aisha or not. (Aisha didn’t always look like Aisha, initially, but she always introduced herself that way. The woman had never gotten the chance to introduce herself, so Jake had no idea who she was supposed to be.) But someone else had shot the woman. An Extractor. Jake remembered.

The part he was having trouble with was after Cougar had shot the man trying to scare him with dream pain. Everything had fallen apart. He’d woken up. But, not really, which was- weird. He hadn’t been able to remember how he got there, which was one of those signals Major Rivers had taught, but that could also have been explained by drugs and kidnapping . . . Jake had assumed it had been from this very van, but here he was, with only ten minutes missing.

The real problem was that Major Rivers had said when you woke up from an Extraction dream, an induced dream, you woke up. Jake had experienced false wake-ups in regular dreams before, but Major Rivers had said that wasn’t possible in induced dreaming.

So, real or not real? Jake asked himself. After a second, he decided it didn’t matter. If it had been real, then the information he’d given them was no sweat off his nose. He’d realized pretty fast those guys didn’t have what he was looking for, no traces of Max in their system. He’d pulled out quickly, thankfully, and didn’t see anything incriminating enough to warrant dream extraction, which probably meant the company wasn’t going to send people to kill him. Hopefully. Not that the team couldn’t handle it, of course, but they didn’t really have the time to worry about that at the moment.

On the other hand, if it hadn’t been real, then his imagination was getting weirder, but how was that new? Satisfied with his deduction, Jake slid lower in his chair and turned his attention back to his surveillance equipment. He didn’t notice the discrete needle mark on the inside of his left wrist until much later, when Cougar asked him what it was from with a furrowed brow. Jake had laughed and told him the story.