Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Al Jazeera: Our team has done a lot of digging into dreamshare and our sources suggest that it began with—

Anonymous: Your sources are those documents that just came out, I’d imagine.

AJ: Yes. There’s not much public research yet.

A: Most of that’s bullshit. I mean, yeah, it was developed by the US military as a combat exercise for soldiers, and that was how it was used for some time. An expensive failure. The program was scrapped within five years. Dreamshare as we know it is the result of a (laughs) brief experimental venture at ___ University in ___, Utah, led by a cult of students.

AJ: A cult?

A: Oh yeah. Like you wouldn't believe.

– Uncut transcript of an interview on dreamshare, recorded directly by Al-Jazeera in August of 21—

Arthur (second year architecture and urban planning double major, transfer student, scholarship kid), looks at Dominic (fourth year chemistry honors) and Yusuf (third year chemistry, no honors), and says “No. No fucking way.”

They both look a little offended at the bad language. Mormons could be like that, Arthur had discovered since moving to Utah.

The three of them had met that evening after the welcoming ceremony. The university (bible college, really) was small enough to have a welcoming ceremony, which Arthur hadn’t expected after a less than cohesive experience at his local community college in Maryland. After introducing themselves, Arthur had felt a light pull of nerves. That light pull had evolved into a growing horror when he saw the mess in their shared dorm.

“You can’t say no,” wheedles Yusuf, “since it’s technically our room.”

If Yusuf had been born as anything except himself, he would have been a beaker of elephant toothpaste. This is not because of any metaphorical quality, but because he has made it so often (three times in the last five hours) that Arthur has an immediate Pavlovian stress reaction to Yusuf pouring liquids into containers. Which is unfortunate considering that Yusuf is a strong proponent of the college’s reusable water bottle program.

Arthur refocuses himself. “You’re not doing a particularly good job at maintaining it.”

It’s a factual statement. They are standing ankle deep in clothes and textbooks. There is something wet and sticky soaking through Arthur’s sock, and he hopes that it’s alcohol or water and not deflated elephant toothpaste. He tries backing up, with minimal success. In another universe, a less reserved Arthur is smacking a broom and several soapy cloths over Dominic and Yusuf’s heads.

“It’s tradition,” says Dominic. His eyes are narrowed slightly. Arthur feels a little like an uncooperative experiment himself. Not elephant toothpaste. “I’m graduating this year. I’m not stopping this tradition just because some second year kid doesn’t want to risk a tongue-lashing from a security guard.”

“More like from the dean,” mutters Yusuf, and Dominic shoots him a look that could curdle milk. “The point is that we’re carrying a legacy here. You lucked into this room, and now you’re going to be a coward about it? Either ask for another assignment or just deal.”

Arthur considers his options. This is an upper year dorm —if he asks for a reassignment he’d be stuck in the crush of a co-ed freshman building— and he only has two roommates instead of the usual three. His student advisor had written him an email expressing the deepest of regrets (but that they were already far over capacity in the other dorms and as his scholarship guarantees a room, he would have to, as Yusuf so astutely said, just deal).

The room itself is not too large. It boasts a window on two of the four walls because they’re in the corner of the building, and the architect had obviously just used one of the first-gen AI bots when designing it.

The walls aren’t even smart, they’re silent and as dumb as rocks. Arthur misses the cheap smart walls in his Maryland community college: walls which knew him by name (or student number, though they were polite enough not to say so) and could spit out mathematical calculations with varying levels of accuracy.

The view looks out onto the quad, green and beautiful in the early September. The roof of the Anatomy and Dentistry building rises invitingly under the right window — angled, but not sharply, with a wide flat strip at the very top. Perfect for running across. Which brings him to the subject at hand.

“There has to be another way to get in.”

“Sure there is,” says Yusuf. “But you need to swipe your card to get in and out the front door.”

"So?” says Arthur and is mildly annoyed when he notes that Yusuf wears the expression of mother nodding along to a child explaining that he wants to go throw eggs at houses. Saintly patience and a hint of exasperation do not look natural on a twenty-something year old.

But Arthur plunges forward anyway: “Can't people just go downstairs and open the door for their friends? Or just swipe their own damn student cards?”

“Sure, sure, but the first floor is smart,” says Yusuf. “Didn’t it say hello to you when you came in?”

It had. And it had told him ‘God bless you’ in its mechanical burble, as though artificial intelligence could have any meaningful opinions on spiritual matters.

“Besides, they’re tattletales and the dean will make you go to evening prayer if he catches you doing something outside of the rulebook,” Yusuf explains, and at Arthur's open mouth, says: “It's a Mormon university so I’m not sure what you were expecting, exactly.”

As Arthur’s outraged eyebrows start making strange shapes on his face, he continues: “They gave you a rulebook, didn't they?”

They did. Arthur had dropped it in the nearest trashcan after skimming the first few pages, which were heavy with details on asking the dean for permission to have on-campus relationships. He had assumed it was a practical joke. Now, he resolves never to half-read anything else for the rest of his life.

Arthur tries again, because maybe a second go will yield another result. Einstein’s quote about madness echoes in his mind. “Evening prayers? As opposed to morning prayers?”

Dominic gives him a funny look.

“Obviously. Chapel, dude. You're not Godfearing?”

“No!”

Arthur's parents, who adopted him out of whatever hovel had spat him into the world, were atheists. And had taught him to believe in science. And facts. And the divinity of uninterrupted Sunday mornings.

“Don't worry, you don't have to believe to go.” Dominic shrugs. “Yusuf’s Muslim.”

“Yeah. Don’t worry though, I repent every time I pray salah,” says Yusuf, unfazed. Arthur can’t tell if he’s joking or not. “This is one of these big megachurches that Midwestern people like. The budget is, like, huge and there's always a snack table on the way out. You should see the things they do for Easter. There’s pyrotechnics.”

Arthur is reeling. He tries taking a few deep breaths. He's here for a reason. He is here for a reason. He is here because he has a full ride. He is here because this school offers an enormous bursary and a free meal plan for scholarship kids. He is here because it has one of the highest ranking urban planning program in the continental United States, but all of that is secondary to the fact that he is here because he cannot afford to go anywhere else.

He should have just taken out a loan and gone to the Ivy Leagues.

“What about the first floor rooms? Don't they have windows that open?" argues Arthur, changing the subject. It doesn't matter. He’ll go to student services and lodge a religious exemption early in the morning.

"Didn’t you hear me say that the whole first floor is smart? Besides, those windows only crack open. In fact, most of the windows only crack open. This one was replaced some twenty years ago and they got the wrong order in. They didn't bother sending it back."

“I just don’t want random people in my room. Our room.” It’ll be noisy enough cohabitating with two people without a constant stream of strangers slipping through the windows. “How will they even get through all the shit you have on the floor?”

Dominic bristles (if he were born as anything else but himself, he would have been a porcupine), but Yusuf is starting to look a little desperate.

“It’ll be an incentive to clean up. Come on, man,” Yusuf pleads. “It’s not like we do it for free.”

Dominic and Yusuf watch as Arthur, scholarship student, visibly perks up.

They glance at each other, satisfied. Got’em say their expressions.

Well, alright. Arthur thinks, got’em indeed.

“Money?”

“Heck no,” Dominic says. “Gift economy. Food, drugs, alcohol, posters, answers to finals, whatever you want. Whatever they have. The girls who had this room when I was a freshie loved books, so the gifts were all books. The floor almost collapsed under the weight, I swear.”

“Money, sometimes,” Yusuf amends. “If they don’t have anything else.”

Arthur stews on this. He looks out the window one more time. He pretends, because he doesn’t like for others to know how easily he gives in, that he isn’t convinced.

“And in terms of accountability? If they get caught?”

“Honor system, mostly. Window closes at 3am and if they miss the cutoff they can sleep under the gazebo.”

Arthur eyes the gazebo, which is rickety and half rotted in the small courtyard.

Yusuf caves. “Please, Arthur.”

Arthur continues to pretend to be unconvinced.

“It's a public service,” says Dominic. “Didn't you get your scholarship for volunteering or something?”

“No, I didn't,” says Arthur coldly. Scholarships are rare enough here, and the student body is so small that a surprising number of people know who he is. He supposed that they must make the announcements during service. But he relents almost immediately. “Fine. Fine. I'll be a weird night time receptionist.” Maybe he'll put it on his resume. ‘Managed a fast-paced environment.’ And then: “But only if you clean up. Within the next day. Starting now.”

His roommates look at each other uncertainly.

“Clock’s ticking,” says Arthur, and walks out to go wash his socks in the shared dorm bathroom to the chorus of cursing and scrambling hands meeting paper and cloth.

Later that night, the room is still messy. However, when Arthur goes to bed, he can at least see the floor.

“If this is the extent of your cleaning, then no deal,” says Arthur, trying to get comfortable under the thin coverlet. He makes a mental note to buy a thick duvet for the winter.

“You underestimate us. Now shut up,” mumbles Yusuf. “I have a quiz tomorrow.”

It's the first day of the semester, thinks Arthur.

Ten minutes later, he can’t sleep because of Yusuf’s snores.

The Monday morning is rough on them all, and they stumble bleary eyed to the dining hall for breakfast as the sun is scraping the horizon. The mandatory meal plan makes it impossible to avoid the lukewarm hotel-like buffet: no cafés on campus. Arthur grabs a cup of soda (because apparently Mormons don’t drink ‘hot drinks’ whatever that means) and gulps it fast, standing by the dispenser, and takes a piece of toast as an afterthought. Dominic goads him into taking an apple too.

It is a terribly hot September, and they leave Yusuf at the counter, who is scrounging for something cold to eat.

Arthur picks at the toast and apple. His appetite has never been prodigious.

They go to the church afterwards. It is mandatory to go every morning before class.

It is bad. Not as bad as Arthur expected, but bad nonetheless. Something like a theater or a stadium, instead of the monastic quiet of the Catholic church his great-grandma took him to while she was still alive.

There are, as promised, snack bars on the way out. The muffins aren’t terrible.

After his single class that day, Arthur wanders. He likes finding new rooms to sit in and study. He used to be cautious about entering buildings that he doesn’t belong in (medicine, arts, physics, law), but soon found that nobody cared at all where he went or what he did. Sometimes a janitor bot would ask him to leave a room while it was being cleaned, but that was the extent of it. Now, he has an entirely new campus to explore. Barring the novelty, he’s also interested in the strange mixture of old and new: there are some smart rooms, but carefully chosen, as if the budget couldn’t stretch to renovate the entire university.

He finds a small white room with large windows and glowing displays of photographs. The wall tells him hello and asks if he wants a snack: he has to scan his student ID, one of the walls spits a croissant at him, and informs him that the balance on his bursary has been lowered to reflect the cost.

The windows are large and real, which is nice after the LED lights inside the hallways. The weather is cloudy outside, but all that's visible from this vantage point is the gray concrete wall of another building. Arthur settles onto the chairs and starts unpacking his bag.

Autumn has brought cold weather, the sweet scent of rotting leaves, and the necessity of staying well inside away from the wind while studying.

The hall outside thrums with the sound of voices — one door is open and a woman is droning about the significance of light in Dutch Golden Age painting — and Arthur listens in lazily. He sometimes considers sitting in on classes that aren’t his own, large first year lectures where he’ll disappear in a crowd of freshmen.

He looks in on the Art History lesson, but the class sounds small, so his presence would definitely be noticed. It’s a higher level class, too, and there’s a good chance this professor knows most of them by name. As Arthur has been listening, a young man has asked a question. His voice is very posh British. Out of place. Arthur doesn’t understand his contribution to the lecture (something about Vermeer?) but the professor croons approvingly.

Arthur focuses on his physics, which is just a basic review of high school for the first day.

Half an hour later, the Art class is let out, and Arthur lifts his head to watch them pass his door. Some people are talking as they leave. The young man who had asked the question, his accent thick as he speaks, walks past. A messenger bag straining at the seams with papers is slung across his shoulder.

He’s wearing a Barbour jacket and obviously handcrafted leather shoes, probably Cheaney, and the colors clash horribly. Arthur thinks that if he had the money that this rich boy obviously has, he would go for something bespoke from dunhill, or at least Crockett and Jones oxfords.

The bad taste extends to the hairstyle: spiky brown, cropped close to his head. Square face. Square nose. Arthur spends a few moments wondering if he’s seen him before, a hazy character in a dream. He eventually turns back to his readings.

When he goes home for lunch, the room is clean and his roommates are there. Both of these facts are deeply and terribly annoying. Arthur runs his hands over the tiny bookshelf (no dust), looks under Yusuf’s bed (glass beakers but no elephant’s toothpaste), and even the beds have fresh sheets on them. The boys must have sweet-talked (or hacked) the bot which takes care of the bedding distribution.

It looks like a different place. Dominic and Yusuf have kept their side of the promise, so Arthur is forced to uphold his.

“Have we passed inspection, good sir?” jokes Yusuf.

Arthur lifts his eyes to the ceiling, praying for a spiderweb. Whitewashed plaster stares blankly back at him. “I guess.”

Dominic and Yusuf whoop, and Yusuf immediately pulls a water-stained dollarstore spiral notebook out of his desk. He flips through the flimsy pages and marks something down with a pencil. Dominic is on his phone already, murmuring that ‘yes, tonight is fine’, and ‘you better bring me something good’.

“We’re going to go out tonight, if you wouldn’t mind manning the window,” Yusuf says off-handedly. “We need to buy some liquor.”

“Doesn’t the RA do searches?” asks Arthur, mildly. His old university had room inspections every week, by real people, too. He does not comment on the outlandishness of a Muslim and a Mormon drinking.

Yusuf’s chin jerks at Dominic, who tosses his phone into the air to float, then takes out his wallet, rummages through it, and presents a laminated card. Arthur reads Dominic Cobb, Floor 3 Resident Advisor and shakes his head with disbelief.

Arthur blinks. “I’ll have a bottle of Old Forester then, if you can get it.” In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Sure,” says Yusuf. And that’s that.

The rest of the day passes quickly.

By the time the rest of the week passes, he’s weighed down by the sheer amount of reading.

Despite the workload, Arthur has managed to get to know the area a little better. The interrail had not reached campus quite yet, though it passes through the city next to it. It’s so isolated that he hasn’t even visited the main street properly, but he’s been to the pharmacy, the 7/11 on the outskirts of the highway, and memorized the bus schedule which will take him away from campus.

Best urban planning program in the States, Arthur keeps repeating to himself whenever he misses the bustle of Baltimore. And when that fails: No student loans ever.

When he’s finished with his final class of the week, which lets out at the unreasonable hour of 6:30pm, Arthur walks the five minutes back to his dorm. He throws his bag onto the coathooks of his room and makes his way directly to the shared kitchen at the end of the hall.

He generally likes cooking, but the stove is small and the space is shared, so he makes do with heating canned soup in someone else’s abandoned saucepan. He eats directly from it, standing up, on the scarred oak table that sits like an island in the middle of the room. There are dumplings in the soup. He feels oddly content.

Evening comes. Dominic and Yusuf bid him goodbye and walk out the front door. Another difference from Arthur’s old college: no ever-present security bots. The first floor may be a tattletale, but it’s friendly. Whatever the budget is being spent on, it's not paranoid intelligence.

Arthur finishes his readings (finally), and scrolls through his phone for a while. He changes into sweatpants and a hoodie, and tries hard to focus on a short assignment before deciding to watch videos of last year’s YSL men’s Fall/Winter collection. Most of it is ridiculous. Some of it he very badly wants to own.

It’s almost one in the morning before someone comes. And then they keep coming.

Arthur expects there to be a trickle of people coming in at all times of the night, but it’s not like that at all. He learns that the rush comes on the weekends, plus Fridays. In the following weeks, he finds out that there’s a commotion every other Wednesday when the improv club (insufferable, but excellent gifters) go out to perform at a local bar and then come back in after curfew.

The fact that they have curfew at all is ridiculous to Arthur, considering he is freshly twenty-one and should be out clubbing and drinking and doing all the things that people his age do. But room and board is free under his scholarship, so there he is at 2:15am on a Friday night, waiting for people to come back into the dorms through his Goddamn windows.

He only knows a few by name, but they all smile at him on campus. The university is small enough that he exchanges nods with the regulars and they sit together in his classes if he's ever alone.

The first one is Ariadne, who had a rendez-vous with some rich private college girl across town. “If they actually wanted to catch us all, they would just ask the drivers on the night bus,” she whispers to Arthur as she hands him five dollars in quarters and a Mars bar. She looks up at him with a smirk. “Thanks,” he says, and gestures to the door. She takes off her shoes and pads down the hall to her floor: girls take the even floors, boys take the odd ones.

Robert Fischer and friends, who are quiet but drunkenly unsure on their feet: a six-pack of beers with one missing, a condom, and a glass from the pub. A pretty blonde girl: someone else’s wallet. Arthur pockets the cash and hands it in to campus security the next morning. A boy named Nash, thin and tired, wearing a full suit: a book of matches, and an apologetic smile. A flurry of others.

Dominic and Yusuf are last, and their gift is the peace and quiet that comes after the windows slide down with a click.

“How was it?” asks Dominic from the bunk across Arthur.

“Not bad,” Arthur admits. “I’m just tired. Meeting everyone is interesting though.”

It is. He has met a wider demographic of students in the past two weeks that he has in his entire first year of college before he transferred here. He can admit to himself that he would have been lonely in a freshman dorm.

“Yeah, that bit of it is fun,” says Dominic. “Sometimes the gift is party invites, so that’s fun too.”

Arthur smiles. Parties aren’t for him.

Saturday night is empty, for some reason. A dry spell before a flood.

Dominic breathes heavily on Sunday afternoon as he finishes his homework on his bed, fingers flying over his laptop. It’s one of the retro-style ones, with an honest-to-God physical keyboard. Arthur wonders if he has a plastic and glass phone hidden away somewhere, too.

Yusuf is in the common room, and the silence is a little tense. He’s usually the only one who can defuse the bomb ticking between Arthur and Dominic.

Arthur breaks first. “Please stop breathing so loud.”

Dominic looks at him incredulously.

Sunday night is also fairly quiet. Monday brings new classes — the semester is still young, and students are still convinced that this time will be different, that they’ll do all the readings, that they won’t finish assignments an hour before they’re due.

Dominic’s parents had gifted him a printer for Christmas, and it jams when Arthur tries to print a proof for his calculus class. They share a moment cursing at it, then at each other.

Yusuf makes strong sweet mint tea and pours it into three teacups.

It’s the last week of September when Arthur is left alone again to man the window. He’s gone out a few times and Dominic or Yusuf fought over who had to stay. He’s been to a pub, to an alcohol-free nightclub, and once to the 24 hour pharmacy for melatonin when he couldn’t sleep. Today is a lazy day. He’s only expecting a few people: now that he's well known around campus, some people are kind enough to let him know when they're coming.

Ariadne is the last. She gives him a kiss on the cheek, and he takes it with grace.

“Actual payment next time,” he warns, not really meaning it.

“Sexual favors?” she quips in her flat monotone.

“You won’t get your own kingdom when you die,” warns Arthur, and is rewarded with her low laugh.

Arthur crosses out a bar in a schedule in his notebook, and slips it under a stack of papers in the desk underneath the window. His memory isn't photographic and he likes to keep a notebook with the times that people share with him. No identifying information, just a row of neat numbers. Plus, in the pile of notebooks on his level of the shelf, it isn't conspicuous. Or at least no more conspicuous than physical notebooks are: he’s a little old-fashioned and he likes the certainty of paper.

He lays back down onto the bed, satisfied. It’s only five after one, and he’s done with his day. Both of his roommates are staying in town through the night, each with a girl (though how Yusuf managed to get a girl to even look at him is a mystery).

He lays down, and has just closed his eyes when he hears shouts and beams of light reach his bed from the window. He tries to ignore it until he hears the sharp drum of someone running on shingle — on a roof.

At this point, Arthur is dedicated to his role as a doorman. He’s as Charon (a skinny Charon, wearing blue flannel pajama pants), protecting the hells of the dorm, demanding golden drachmae as payment. He leaps from his bed, and sees the unsteady flashlights on the green, and the dark shape running across the Anatomy and Dentistry building.

Arthur slides the window open and gestures frantically at the shape, which is not slowing down. Dogs are barking on the grass, and the police bots and my God, actual police (because it is police who are waving the flashlights) are looking into the windows of the lower floors, which are chiming unhappily. The figure continues hurtling towards Arthur’s dorm, and Arthur thinks that maybe it's time to move away, and does so two seconds before the runner crashes onto the desk underneath the window.

It’s dark in Arthur’s room, and the distraction of the lights and dogs are not helping, so he pulls the curtain shut and turns on the screensaver of his laptop. The light is dim and blue, but he can see that the figure, the young man, is bleeding from his forehead. He is also hiding something large and bulky in the front of his black jacket.

“Hello, savior,” says the young man, in a playful posh British accent. He tries to get up but can’t. “Help a man to his feet, won’t you?”

Arthur sticks out a hand, but pulls it back right away.

“I’d rather you stay where you are, and I find a first-aid kit.”

The young man acquiesces, and Arthur speed-walks to the kitchen, finds the blocky emergency red plastic, and comes back.

The young man has sunk against the wall, his eyes are closed. His lips are parted. His jacket is smooth in the front.

Arthur is a ferryman. It’s obvious that whatever was in the coat has been stashed in Arthur’s room, and that’s payment enough to aid him. He walks forward, squats down (his knees click), and shakes the man’s shoulder.

“Stay awake.”

He’s answered with a soft groan of pain. Arthur snaps back into being Arthur, not a Greek embodiment of the afterlife, and tries to remember his eighth grade first aid course.

“What’s your name?”

“Eames.”

“Okay, Eames. I think you have a concussion. How do you feel?”

“Bad.”

“Should I call 911?”

Eames’s eyes snap open. “No hospital.”

“Okay, okay, no hospital. I’m going to look something up, you keep your eyes open.”

Arthur looks up symptoms of concussion, how to treat a concussion, and decides to lay Eames down on Yusuf’s bed. He dabs at the blood on Eames’s forehead, and sets an alarm for himself in four hours to check on the progression of symptoms.

When he shakes Eames at 5am, the man scrunches his face in reluctance, but wakes up properly.

Arthur sets another alarm, and goes back to bed. At 9am, he wakes Eames again. It goes easier that time, and he seems alright, but still exhausted. Arthur doesn’t go to sleep, but pulls out his laptop. It’s a Sunday morning, and he has homework due early on Monday.

Idly, he looks up “Eems”, which turns out to be an acronym for Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service. That can’t be right, so he looks up “Eams”, which Google corrects to 'Eames' and which happens to be a type of lounge chair. Arthur glances at the occupied bunk, then walks over to where Eames had fallen last night, and lowers himself to the ground. He spots what doesn’t belong immediately: underneath Arthur’s bed is a metallic briefcase.

He pulls it out. He tries to open it. It is locked.

Arthur picks it up and the metal is surprisingly heavy. He opens his underwear drawer, puts the briefcase inside, and covers it with boxer-briefs and socks.

A half hour passes. He turns to Eames, and goes to wake him up again. In the light, he sees that it’s the same British student who he saw once, coming out from the Fine Arts classroom.

Eames gets up this time. Arthur hands him the black jacket he came with. Eames stretches out his right hand, palm up, as though asking to be handed something. Arthur pretends to be confused, looks down at the hand, up at Eames, down at the hand again, and tentatively shakes Eames’s hand. Eames laughs, but it's nervous.

“Did I bring anything else in here?”

“No? What are you looking for?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a trinket.” But Arthur hears the tremor in Eames’s faux-cheery voice. “I probably lost it during the run.”

“Maybe retrace your steps?” And then, Arthur has to ask: “What was that all about anyway? Why were the police after you?”

“Silly thing, that,” says Eames, smoothly now. “Just a misunderstanding about a pub fight. That’s how I got this nasty thing.” He points to the cut on his forehead, which is tight, red, and shiny. “Endless thanks for letting me in, by the way.”

“No problem,” says Arthur. They stand awkwardly until Eames leaves.

Arthur closes the door behind him, and turns to the underwear drawer.

The last few days of September are spent trying to understand what the hell the briefcase even is. It takes Arthur three days to figure out how it opens: with a small fingernail thin groove, just enough pressure, and a button on the side. Idiotproof. Childproof. Arthur also isn't stupid enough to disregard the fact that it's broken. There's a large showy crack going up the glass container on the inside, and the long clear tubes are asymmetrical with some are clearly missing.

He reads some medical textbooks from the library, does some extremely vague and unhelpful Google searches, and finally throws up his hands and goes at it alone. His brain has always been his best tool. He has always done best on his own.

Arthur goes out, buys some blueprint paper and cardstock from the Staples in town, buys a shitty ancient Polaroid camera from the Goodwill, and dissects the thing that Eames left behind. Ah, no use being pedantic. The thing he stole from Eames.

He is meticulous. He photographs every step of the process. When he's broken the briefcase down into components, he labels every single one and builds a very bad cardstock model of it.

There is more information on the inside, where a complex hardware system keeps track of exactly how much of something goes out through the tubes at what time. There's a tiny little space for something to be inserted. That means that not every use is equal to the other.

He puts it back together. There is no good reason not to give it back to Eames. He even knows where one of his classes is: the Fine Arts seminar near the Communications lounge. Not many British toffs around at a university in Utah.

Arthur can't let go of a mystery. He's a dog with his teeth in it. He wants to know what Eames is hiding behind those cold blue eyes, this broken silver briefcase.

Al Jazeera: Did you see the leaked CIA minutes from 20–? The ones telling universities to shut down all research on shared dreaming for combat training?

Anonymous: Oh yeah, that’s hilarious. A little before my time. It was such a 60s thing to do, very MK Ultra. Only it f***ed them over.

AJ: How so?

A: Come on. You’re hiring these snot nosed graduate students and making them sign all these important NDAs and you give them the whole world, the whole world, you understand? Get them addicted and take it away from them? It was only a matter of time before one of them tried to recreate it.

AJ: And thus the cult?

A: Sure, sure. They got the ball rolling at least.

Arthur recruits Ariadne because she's in pharmacology. She takes architecture classes as electives, loves them more than her actual major, but her parents will take away their financial support if she doesn't focus on a more lucrative field of study than mazebuilding.

It doesn't matter how many times she tries to convince him that she doesn't actually know any medicine, that they don't teach pharma students a whole lot of anything to do with the body beyond how it interacts with chemicals, he knows that he was right to let her in on the secret when she takes one look at the tubes that have baffled him and declares them to be parts of an IV.

“The middle must have held some medication, see the plunger? That’s what they use now instead of drips. Oh, it's broken.” And after a moment: “Actually, I think we could fix that.”

She has the same logical approach to things that he does, but hers is more narrow. She doesn't care about where he's found the thing as much as she cares that it's broken. Ariadne is interested in his zeal for it, though.

“Why are we doing this?” she asks. “Missing your scholarship days doing robotics?”

“I didn't get my scholarship for robotics,” says Arthur with gritted teeth.

Ariadne spends the first week of October single-mindedly looking for a vial that would fit into the briefcase while Arthur tries to find a type of rubber that is similar to what is ripped to shreds on the plunger.

He ends up cutting off a bit with his exacto knife and taking it to the nearest home repair store, where they sell some material to him at an exorbitant rate which wipes out his laundry money for the week. He ends up handwashing his clothes in the shared bathroom, but it is so so worth it when Ariadne comes back with a handful of small glass phials she's stolen from her lab's refuse bin.

“They're all varying sizes so I thought we could try them all to see if they fit.”

“Ariadne, I don't know how to tell you this but they're all broken.”

She snorts at him, which is so undignified that he almost loses his balance even though he's sitting. “Of course they're broken. The tips snap off, see? To make sure there's no contamination.”

He does see, suddenly and instinctively, and now the little tray under the plunger and the mesh where the needles descend makes sense. It's all to catch glass.

They find the right sized ampule and Ariadne says she'll find a way to fudge the numbers at the lab she works at to get some for them.

“Filled with what?” Arthur asks.

“Saline, to start?” she replies. “I think we can probably order hypertonic saline from Amazon, it comes in ampules. Hm, but that might be bad for us if we're trying to inject it. Dang, it would be easier to just rebuild this from scratch.”

“I agree,” Arthur says slowly. “It's so stupid to do it this way. Why risk the glass shards?”

Ariadne just looks at him with her cool brown eyes. “Whatever they were injecting didn’t react well to oxygen. That, or they weren’t sure what would happen if there were contaminants.”

“Let’s not do ampules, then. I feel like we can do better than this. Maybe it was a prototype.”

“Absolutely.”

They start reworking the briefcase and by the time they're done replacing the stupid old mechanism, which really was quite ridiculous, midterms have started and the project lays unfinished under Arthur’s bed. Neither of them knows what it's for, after all. It's slightly less interesting than keeping their places on the curve.

Arthur slogs home after a multiple choice physics exam that knocked the shit out of him and opens his laptop to an email that his lodgement of a religious exemption has been denied and they expect to continue seeing him at chapel. It's alright really, he's used to it, and he and Yusuf laugh together when they see one of the receptionists from the main library speak in tongues in front of the whole student body. And the muffins and Welch’s fruit snacks afterwards are just a bonus.

It makes him think about how much he has changed since the beginning of the semester. He's really friends with Yusuf and getting friendlier with Dominic to the point where he got the privilege of calling him Dom.

He's happy. At this stupid Mormon school in Utah, he's happy.

He says so when his roommates get back: “I'm happy,” he declares, and both of them boo.

“You're not happy,” says Yusuf, flopping onto his bed. “I've never seen you smile.”

This isn't strictly true, but Arthur likes being seen as stoic and emotionless even if he's not. “I do so smile. Remember when Robert Michael Fischer tripped over his own feet in front of us on the green?”

They call him Robert Michael Fischer, full name always, because he's a mini campus celebrity to them. ‘Robert Michael Fischer spotting’ is a common term in their group chat.

“Fair,” says Yusuf.

“I’m not happy,” complains Dom.

“The TA won't say yes to dating, sorry, courting him,” Yusuf stage-whispers.

“The Lord called me to marry her,” Dom moans. “And she refuses to even consider me. And she's…” A pause of epic proportions. “... Catholic. She worships an idol of Mary. She has a little etching of the Madonna in her room.”

Arthur's ears metaphorically perk up. “In her room, Dom?”

“Well, of course she'll sleep with me but if I even mention the word dinner she kicks me right out. Even in the middle of… you know.”

Yusuf and Arthur are terribly amused by this. “Why were you mentioning dinner in the middle of sex, Dom?”

Dom prickles. “It wasn't sex you godless heathens. There was no penetration, that's against the Lord.”

Sometimes, Arthur wonders if Dom is actually Mormon or not. He suspects not, because of the drinking and the premarital whatever-it-is, but the morals cling pretty hard.

“She just won't let me love her,” Dom says sadly, and Arthur and Yusuf crack up.

During the last week of October, on a particularly warm Friday, Arthur is cleaning out stray socks from under his bed. He takes the briefcase out to get the dust bunnies when Dom stirs from his chemistry homework.

“Oh, where'd you get that?”

Arthur thinks fast. “I found it.” Great job, Arthur, he thinks to himself. High-fives all around for that brilliant bit of brainwave.

But Dom doesn't seem that interested. “Mal would be so jealous.”

Mallorie Miles is the advanced chemistry TA that Dom continues to pine over and who calls him up at 3am when she's feeling lonely (Dom always goes to her, and makes a lot of noise leaving the window to boot). Arthur has developed a distaste for the mere mention of Mal, whom he has never met, simply because of the association of her with a bad night's sleep.

But there's something else in that sentence that gets Arthur's heart beating. “Jealous? Why jealous?”

“She has this Polaroid on her bedside table of herself and her friends with one of those metal things. I swear, she's obsessed with it. I had to ask if she felt anything for a guy in her cohort, that's how much she looks at it, but she said she just missed the lab here. They withdrew funding or something.”

Arthur practically barrels over that to change Dom’s train of thought. Any mention of this to the TA would be disastrous. “Any luck with asking her for dinner?”

As Dom bemoans the supposedly beautiful Frenchwoman, Arthur texts Ariadne to meet him at the dorm as soon as possible, and then tells Dom to buy a dozen red roses, fall to his knees, proclaim Mal an angel, and tell her he'll convert to Catholicism for her.

When Dom has been effectively kicked out of the room (while complaining that he'd done all of that already and it hadn't worked), Arthur texts Yusuf to ask about his ETA. Yusuf replies with grotesquely misspelled words and a selfie from what looks like a bar.

Good. Nobody will be bothering him.

Ariadne comes up to his room quickly, and with the door cracked open to satisfy the rulebook (which he has read now), he tells her about Mal.

Her eyes are bright. “Okay, so we have to find out what she worked on.”

They rifle through Dom’s laptop (the password is malloriecobb123) to find his syllabus, where they find out her email, department, and office hours.

A google search shows her private Facebook profile, her personal academic website, a list of undergraduate awards, and absolutely nothing about any lab research at their university.

“She's legacy at the Sorbonne,” says Ariadne softly. “They’ve got a Miles Wing, look.”

“So what?” Arthur refuses to be disappointed. Or impressed. “Okay, so they pulled funding, but there has to be a record of the funding.”

They end up reading through every single chemistry project that the school has done in the past ten years but nothing seems to have anything to do with their mysterious silver box.

“What if it's not chemistry?” suggests Ariadne. “Her major was chemistry but that's undergrad. What's she working on now?”

They find that she's working towards her master's in sleep medicine, which they didn't know was a field. They find this out not because it's on her website (which it isn’t), but because she made the dean’s list last year and next to her tiny printed name is her specialty.

“Okay, that narrows it down,” says Ariadne, happily, but really it doesn't. The school doesn't have any current research going on in the sleep medicine division. Not a single thing for the last five years.

And that's when Arthur starts feeling a prickle up his spine, a shiver which has nothing to do with the chill of the night.

“Ariadne, she obviously did research in a sleep lab on campus.”

“We don't know that. She could have done a semester abroad.”

“She could have, but she didn't. Dom said that she missed the lab here and she was with her cohort in the photo. And I have the same briefcase she did, or similar enough that Dom pointed it out.”

Ariadne considers. “On a scale of one to ten, how likely is it that Dom misremembered?”

“Zero. If it's about Mal, zero.”

She nods. “Okay, point taken.”

“So, it's a conspiracy.”

“Not necessarily,” she says. “This website hasn't been updated in a long time. Maybe the sleep lab is getting shut down for real and funding was pulled. Let's check the budgets for last year.”

“I love university transparency,” sings Arthur, looking up the spreadsheets online. He control-F’s ‘sleep’ which comes up with only a little bit more than zero dollars. “They aren't funded at all.”

“No, that's wrong,” says Ariadne. “If it's active, it's funded. Profs need to get paid. Bots need electricity. Bookkeepers and accountants like everything neat. Money doesn't just disappear like that. It must be somewhere else.”

But they look through the whole spreadsheet row by row and nothing else jumps out.

They're ready to give up when Ariadne has a thought. “This is just internal funding,” she says. “Let's try external.”

They look up all of their school’s donors and go through them, one by one, looking up the numbers donated. And they find it.

The federal U.S. Department of Energy has donated just under two billion dollars to the university two years ago. They look up the budget of the Department of Energy, which is only $45 billion, and decide that there is no way a department would drop such a large chunk of its money on a school in nowhere, Utah. There is also an itemized list: new streetlights, LED bulbs, green generators, and most glaringly, a grant for the restoration of the dorms. They look up at Arthur's ceiling, where an ancient lightbulb from the 2020s flickers, and outside, where the streetlights are still tinged yellow.

“How much do you want to bet that money isn't coming from the Energy department?” says Arthur.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” mumbles Ariadne, which must be some sort of reference to a movie or a game. They find discrepancies elsewhere, too: grants going to nowhere, donations with no recipients, maintenance for buildings that don't exist.

Some of them can be dismissed as bad bookkeeping. Most of them can't.

But the donations taper off last year, and the preliminary budget for this year doesn't include any of them.

“Either they're hiding it better, or they really did pull funding,” says Ariadne. They're both shaking a little. “No, they must have pulled funding. I feel like Mal would still be keeping confidential if they hadn't. But there was something top secret happening here. And then it suddenly stopped.”

“And from what Mal says, they never finished it.”

The impact of that is enormous.

Together, like pulled by marionette strings, they both turn to look at the silvery briefcase, gleaming sinister, peeking out from under Arthur’s bed.

And then Ariadne laughs.

“What!” cries Arthur, startled. “What is it?”

“Two billion dollars,” she giggles. “And they couldn't make anything more sophisticated than that?”

November blooms like ice on a window, delicate and crackling, and Arthur and Ariadne finish redoing the interior of the briefcase.

They get rid of the dish for broken glass and put in connections for the large bore gravity bags Ariadne bought online. Now, when the plunger goes down, liquid could theoretically go through the empty IV lines.

But neither Arthur nor Ariadne know anything about the computerized parts in the machine. Ariadne watches YouTube videos for long enough that she can point out the hard drive and a slot for something ancient called a floppy disc — and nothing else.

They need outside help.

“Do you know any tech-inclined people on campus? My laptop's throwing a fit,” Arthur lies.

“Yeah, there's this guy in my stats class, owes me a favor,” says Dom.

And that's how they meet Saito.

Saito has a neat goatee and a clipped accent; and is much older than the rest of them. Arthur and Ariadne meet him in a study room. After requisite introductions, Ariadne asks him about his age point blank.

“I'm 26,” he says. “I'm also in my seventh year of undergrad.”

“Why—”

“Don’t want to leave and my dad single-handedly donated the physics building. I could graduate with, like, five concentrations right now.”

“Oh, cool.”

They aren't stupid enough to bring the briefcase with them, but come with pictures and detailed descriptions. However, they are stupid enough that Saito pins them with a disappointed expression after examining everything.

“Did you take apart the hard disc?”

“Huh?”

“Little spinny thing. You take it apart?”

“Was I not supposed to?”

“No computer literacy in the younger generation,” Saito grumbles, despite only being five years older than them. “I hope you have a replacement on hand. Taking that stuff apart destroys it.”

“I didn't know it was a computer when I did it,” Arthur says, because he's freshly twenty-one and an idiot, while Ariadne looks on in horror. “I thought it was part of the mechanism.”

“Wait, this isn't from a laptop? I was told this was a laptop issue.”

Ariadne and Arthur hem and haw, make him wait outside the study room while they argue, then bring him back in and make him swear not to share the secret. They need a computer man anyway.

As they're in the middle of their explanation, a girl with curly blonde hair knocks on the door and comes in. “Hey,” she says. “I booked this room for 10:30.”

They continue on a bench on the green, which isn't green but white, still iced over. The grass crunches under their feet and Ariadne pulls on a pair of gray leather gloves.

With Saito on the briefcase repair team, things become markedly easier. “This is just a little computer,” says Saito, looking over the machine. “You fixed it up pretty okay, if those original pictures were any indication. And I guarantee that you probably didn't damage the disk any more than it was already damaged. They probably cleared it before you got your hands on it in the first place.”

They get a lecture on hard drives. Saito buys one and ships it express to his two bedroom apartment, which is light and airy and decorated with simple watercolor paintings of flowers. “My mom did them,” he says when they visit for the first time. “She likes to think she's an artist.”

It turns out that it's easy to think anything when your husband is worth multiple billions of dollars; definitely more than the federal Energy department budget, anyway. Saito’s mother’s attempts at modern art, pottery, and sculpture are everywhere in his apartment.

When Saito notices Arthur's careful attention to them, he walks up and asks if he's interested because his scholarship was awarded for students in fine arts.

“I'm not an artist,” snaps Arthur, who is sick of people asking him about his scholarship.

The two-bedroom about twenty minutes off campus by bus, on top of a perfume boutique in the middle of town. The stairs are creaky and cracked, but meticulously clean. Once, Arthur goes to the bathroom and finds a metal Aesop soap dispenser, a Diptyque candle in the window, and a medicine cabinet with an expensive flat razor and a shaving brush in a small bowl.

Since it's off-campus and relatively private, Ariadne and Arthur spend a great deal of time there, playing cards and talking as Saito tinkers with the machine. They sleep over in the office Saito set up in the second bedroom, which looks out onto the street. They order delivery on Saito's credit card. When the evenings stretch out like train tracks into a hazy horizon, they learn to play shitty two-person poker, using a second deck of cards as chips.

It turns out that Saito needs to replace the whole wiring system, and since Arthur is unwilling to let the briefcase out of his sight, they end up hanging out at least five days out of seven. Saito is a relaxed teacher, and Arthur learns more about complex machinery in a month than he has in his entire life.

He gets the little LED screen working, but it flashes an error sign.

When Saito finishes, Arthur points out the slot for a floppy disc and a monitoring chip, which sends Saito into new paroxysms as he attempts to explain that unless he knows what the machine is for he can't write code to make it work and aren't floppy discs literally ancient, over a hundred years old now? So they're stuck at a stalemate — but they enjoy spending their time together at the large wooden kitchen table, watching movies on Saito’s enormous flatscreen TV, and drinking too much wine.

Ariadne forces them to watch an old version of Twilight, not even 3D, with super young Robert Pattinson. Saito’s into vintage movies, ones with physical effects not CGI, and played from little plastic circles called CDs. Arthur likes cheesy action movies, modern ones, but he's not picky.

They do their homework together. Saito is thinking of a Fine Arts degree and is taking classes to that effect; Ariadne shares the woes of pharmacology; Arthur draws designs on posterboard and the other two shout with laughter when they point out that he's forgotten the bathrooms on the third floor.

One evening, Ariadne and Saito don’t have any homework but Arthur does. They’re loud, and distracting, so Arthur bids them a goodnight and trudges on a walk around campus. They tease him something awful when he leaves so he’s in a horrible mood, unhappy and griping to himself how everyone hates him and life isn't even worth living if this is how it's going to be. He kicks at pebbles on the sidewalk and eventually goes to the architectural library with the big desks, unfurls one of his blueprints, and gets to work. It's due in two days and he still needs to figure out how to add a functional boiler room.

It's well into the night and he's sketching trees on the project proposal when he's distracted by a group of people talking. He shoots them a furious glare because it's a library, for heaven’s sake, and only then he notices that it's Eems. Eames. Whatever. English prick.

He googles the lounge chair again. The brand is Herman Miller and the chair is stupidly expensive. Real wood and real leather is rare these days.

It looks nice, too: brown and black, thick and comfortable. He imagines himself sitting in it, luxuriating. In his mind’s eye, he is smoking a pipe and has on a red dressing gown.

Arthur’s fantasy is interrupted by a burst of laughter from the group.

They’re still chattering at the door, as if being halfway out of the library has some sort of magical powers which ensure soundproofing.

Arthur is torn between staring at his paper on abject defeat and going right up to Eames (it must be Eames, probably some rich posh heir of Herman Miller, named after a chair) and slugging him across the face. Rage is about to win out when he hears Eames say, in his stupid accent, that he'll be in the lab until at least ten thirty tonight. Excellent. (Arthur can go beat the shit out of him there).

He starts gathering his things, slowly, pacing himself. Once his backpack is zipped, his hands are sweating in his leather gloves, and his knee is vibrating under the table, he watches as the group of boys scatters.

Arthur gets up and starts a fast pace behind Eames. He wishes that he was following someone cool (someone who's from the paperback dark academia novels he devours like they're chocolate) with a swishing long coat and a pince-nez. No dice. The man that's weaving in and out of the campus buildings is wearing a waxed black Barbour jacket, jeans, and thick beat up skater shoes. He probably doesn't even skate.

Poser, thinks Arthur, which is something his great-grandma used to say before she finally acquiesced to rest in the family cryocrypt.

Eames is quick, but not paranoid. His walk is meandering. Maddening.

Arthur was only going to confront him outside (the fighting thing was a joke… kind of) but makes a split second decision to follow him. It is less likely that there will be other people around this late.

One thing about Arthur is that his fatal vice is being too self-assured.

Eames taps a keycard against a reader and darts into a medical building, flinging the door wide. Arthur sees two things at once: the door slowly moving shut and the green light of the reader. He runs forward as fast as he can and gets his fingers in the gap right as the door closes.

He only assesses the damage after he's inside. The nail on his pinkie is cracked down to the quick and the middle of his ring finger has an ugly red mark.

It doesn't matter because he's lost Eames. He has never been in the medical building and it’s silent except for the buzz of utterly ancient fluorescent lights.

Then, he hears a door crash coming from a stairwell going down right in front of him, and he springs into action.

His shoes, thrift store oxfords, are probably too loud on the concrete, but he doesn't care. Luckily, the stairs lead to one exit: the basement. He pushes the double door and enters a long, empty corridor. The walls are dumb, too, flat plasterboard white. It looks like a service corridor, with no doors except for one large white one at the very end.

Arthur's neck prickles. There is no keycard reader on that door.

He lets the doors go and stops them from smashing closed with his toes.

He walks forward quietly. Heel-toe, which is more effective than toe-heel (as he learned sneaking around to the fridge in his parents' house as a teenager). The concrete is cold and ungiving against his shoes.

It doesn't feel like he's coming closer to the door but that the door is coming closer to him. It is wide, with no windows, and a silver handle on it.

Of course, when he gently tries to turn the long rectangular knob, it doesn't give an inch. He bends down and confirms that there's a lock in the handle.

It doesn't matter. He's a patient young man, everyone has always said so.

While he waits, he scans the hall. At first glance he didn't notice the old CCTV cameras placed in odd strategic places. He had his eyes open for the round bulbous fisheye lenses, not these old knick knacks. Arthur's seen these in spoof films: they're so ancient that a recording light should blink red if they work. He sees no blinking red lights.

Either they're out of service, or Eames has turned them off.

Arthur’s thoughts are interrupted by keys rattling. It must lock from the inside, too.

The look on Eames’s face when he sees Arthur standing outside of the door is absolutely priceless. He goes to slam the door shut, but Arthur shoves his foot in the crack. (Pain! He'll probably be bruised blue by the end of the night) and smiles. It’s his cold smile: he practiced it in the mirror when he was little wanting to play that he was on the dark side in Star Wars.

He knows the smile works because Eames goes very still. There’s a small pink scar on his forehead from the night of the concussion.

“Hello, Mr. Eames,” Arthur hisses, and comes at him with everything he’s got.

It’s just as well. Arthur (second year architecture and urban planning double major, transfer student, scholarship kid), has the scholarship because he went to nationals for judo during high school.

Eames must be surprised, or he’s just a new money rich boy who hasn’t fought a day in his life, because Arthur slams him against the door easily.

It must have been surprise after all, because when Eames’ fist hooks into Arthur’s ribs, it’s with the strength of an old money rich boy who spent summers riding horses and sailing.

Arthur is quicker than him though: he shoves Eames’ hand up and sweeps his foot, knocking them both down and into the doorway. Arthur rolls over Eames, which hurts like a bitch, and stands up.

It is lonely and dusty. It was obviously a clinical research lab, with wide gray work benches and hoods and fridges. Everything is calm in the dark: it’s abandoned.

He feels two hands grab at him from behind. After that, muscle memory takes over.

The concrete is harder than any mat that Arthur has practiced on, but he ignores the pain. Eames must have done some sort of boxing because he swings his punches roundly at Arthur, even though he’s on the ground.

It’s only when Arthur manages to leverage Eames’ arm and push so hard that he feels the elbow creak, that Eames stops throwing his fist into Arthur’s ribs.

“Stop,” Eames gasps. “Stop.”

Arthur stops. That’s also muscle memory.

He has the bright idea to frisk Eames and soon a student ID, phone, and keys are in his pockets, but there’s no guarantee that the English Prick won’t knock him out to get those back. Arthur puts a hand on Eames’s back, unsure if he’s going to try to make a run for it.

“Show me what you were here for,” he says, and he sounds a little bit stuffed up because Eames had hit his nose hard. He resolves to whisper, or at least speak quietly to make that less noticeable.

“What the bloody hell is wrong with you?”

Arthur brings his mouth close to Eames’s ear and says, in a low dangerous tone: “Now. I won’t ask again.”

He hopes that the shiver in his voice, from the adrenaline which is shaking through him, isn’t audible. Arthur hears Eames swallow audibly and feels a little more confident. Arthur’s channeling every cartoon villain he ever thought was cool as a kid. He’s powerful. He’s in control here.

“Well, petal, if you wanted me so badly you could have said so instead of pushing me around in basements.”

Unbelievable. “Shut up and show me.”

Eames shows him. There is a long row of stacked banker’s boxes against the far wall of the lab.

He lets Eames open one. It’s empty.

Eames doesn’t say anything, and it’s dark enough that Arthur can’t see his face, but the breath of disappointment is unmistakable.

Eames opens up the banker’s boxes one by one: all empty.

“Don't you need gloves?” asks Arthur, trying to sound nonchalant. He had wanted to see what was in them, too.

“Doesn't matter,” Eames says. “They can get glove particles and see who bought them. They can get saliva particles when we talk. I used my keycard to get into the building. The walls upstairs can tell them, too. No way around it. The easiest way to trick them is to be blatant. Nothing to hide, right?”

Arthur can't hide how scary that feels. He's always enjoyed the ease of smart doors and phones and walls; the convenience of online payment; the safety of security bots. He even considered getting an implant, like the cool kids at his high school. Now, he's glad his parents wouldn't let him. Now, he feels hunted. Spied on.

“I wonder what you’re looking for,” says Arthur, forcing a casual tone into his words. “Lose something?”

There's hesitation. Arthur hopes that it’s fear.

“Oh fuck,” says Eames (and the curse is obscene after months of not hearing a single swear word). “Oh fuck. You have the PASIV. Obviously.”

The what?

Arthur wants to backpedal, but Eames is talking again. “I can talk to Mal for you,” tempts Eames, carefully. “I’ll convince her that you’d be a good addition to the team. It doesn’t need to be like this, all cloak and dagger—”

“What are you talking about?” Arthur hisses, suddenly furious. It’s his briefcase. He rebuilt it. He found it. He doesn’t want to be invited to his own party.

Eames goes silent. It might have something to do with the fact that Arthur has slammed him hard against a wall, with his elbow in Eames’ throat.

“Mal’s cohort,” tries Eames again, eyes wide. “You could join us. You don’t even know what you have, we do. You could be a part of it.” And then, Arthur feels so angry that he leans forward a little and chokes off the last of Eames’ air.

Anonymous: I don't know if you've ever dreamshared...

Al Jazeera: I haven't had the pleasure.

A: Well, then you might not realize that it's physically addictive.

AJ: The somnacin, yes.

A: No. Actually, you're right, in the early days it was, you could get plastered on the stuff. And before, it was morphine. You can imagine the consequences of that. Not so much anymore, we've got better formulations now. What I mean is the sleep. If you use a PASIV enough, your body forgets how to induce REM sleep on its own.

Arthur doesn’t tell anyone about his encounter with Eames. He left him wheezing in the lab, running away from the utter miscalculation of the night. Instead, he focuses on the briefcase. Just the briefcase. Everything else is secondary.

He’s paranoid, though. Paranoid enough that, standing on his desk, Arthur lifts up one of the lightweight acoustic ceiling tiles and balances the briefcase on top of the wooden frame which holds them. He makes sure that his roommates are either asleep or out when he takes the machine down from its hiding place.

Saito and Ariadne are a comfort: midterm season is upon them. One night, when they're eating takeout sushi on the couch after two hours of silent studying, Ariadne takes a deep breath that means she's about to say something she knows will be controversial.

“We need to invite Mal for dinner. Maybe we can get a hint for getting this thing to work.” She gestures widely at the briefcase, small and silver on the kitchen table.

“How? Dom hasn't succeeded so far,” says Arthur. He thinks about Eames saying Mal’s name as though she owned Arthur’s project and promptly drops a hand painted chopstick.

“It needs to be friendly. It needs to be somewhere she'll feel comfy talking about her research,” says Ariadne, looking interested as Arthur goes to his knees to pick up the chopstick. It disappeared somewhere.

“She must have signed a NDA,” says Saito, whose table manners are as excellent as can be expected from a man raised by a New York socialite and a Japanese businessman. Ariadne, who has an heiress for a mother, is similarly good with cutlery. Arthur feels self-conscious sometimes, raised in a lower middle-class home with lower middle-class parents, but he emanates his richie rich friends well until he's drunk. Like he is now.

Ariadne sighs again. “Yeah, but she's obviously unhappy about it if she's telling Dom of all people.”

“Actually, I think she likes him,” says Arthur, fishing in the deep fur carpet for his chopstick. “She is still sleeping with him.”

“Maybe he's well-endowed,” says Ariadne, deadpan. Arthur blushes for her. It only took a few months to condition him into Mormon sensibility.

He clear his throat. “They're not having sex, Ariadne, they're doing something… else. I don't know what. Under the watching eyes of the Virgin Mary, no less.”

This leads to a rousing round of questioning which is both uncomfortable and thought-provoking. Mormon sex practices are strange and Ariadne knows far far too much about them.

“I still think we could ask good questions,” says Ariadne. “We could probably find stuff out without making it obvious.”

So, Arthur goes back to his dorm and asks Dom to ask Mal out for dinner.

“But Arthur, she already said no so many times—”

“Not to a group event, she hasn't. All of us, dinner at some good bar, clubbing. Yes or yes?”

“Yes,” says Mal, over an appetizer plate she shares discreetly with Dom in the social house they're in, downtown. “I'm originally from France but I came here with my father. He got an offer at the university and I followed.”

She has a lovely accent, harsh and low, and she's very very cool. Arthur didn't think he would label someone as cool, in his old serious age of twenty-one, but she's dripping with it.

Him, Ariadne, Yusuf, and Saito had waited outside the restaurant and when they saw Dom and Mal walk up, Ariadne was bowled over. Arthur was too, a little.

“Goodness,” she had whispered into Arthur's ear at their approach. “You think Dom would share her?”

Mal is tall, but not taller than Dom, lips red and hair coiffed, wearing a short navy blue dress with a black turtleneck underneath and sheer black tights which end with angry looking combat boots. She has a black leather jacket to fight off the chill. Her eyeliner is thin and long, like an eyelash.

She is gorgeous, too, with big blue eyes and full pouty lips and a perfect mole on the center of her forehead that practically begs for someone to kiss it.

And she's smart! She engages Saito on the Dutch Golden Age, which is the topic of a class he is apparently taking, speaking fast and low about decay and rebirth, about Rembrandt and the way he painted in his self-portrait to some masterpiece or another. She chats to Ariadne about new innovations in medication before switching to architecture, which also brings in Arthur and they all have a lively debate about the detriments of brutalism on the individuality of cities. She and Yusuf have a belly-laughing conversation about elephant’s toothpaste. She buys them a round of drinks, citing her heavy wallet and their status as poor undergraduates.

Saito and her go out for a smoke break. Ariadne, Dom, and Yusuf stay in the restaurant but Arthur joins the smokers in the chilled air, hoping to catch some important bit of information, but without any luck.

“What did you get your scholarship for, dear heart?” Mal asks, because it had come up in conversation.

“This and that,” says Arthur. She raises her eyebrow but doesn’t comment.

Arthur doesn't hear anything relevant to the briefcase. He does find out that Mal has a silver cigarette box with her engraved initials in her breast pocket.

Dom looks at her like she’s the world.

Arthur understands.

After two months of annoyance at the sound of her name, he thinks that he would get out of bed when she called, too.

“So, what's your master's program, Mal?” he asks, taking a sip of his Manhattan. It’s bitter and horrible, but he likes it.

“Sleep medicine,” she says, proudly. “It's a quickly moving field.” There is a brief explanation of what sleep medicine is and everyone nods in varying degrees of interest.

“That sounds very interesting. Do you know what your thesis will be on yet?”

Ariadne glances up at that, attention piqued.

“Oh, yes, well, actually I was almost finished with it but the lab I was in shut down. I can still use some of my research, it'll just be… less than expected.” She looks down at the table and her lip trembles. “I don't mean to bring down the mood. Let's talk about brighter things, hein?”

They eat. They drink. They dance.

Mal undulates in the darkness of the club, neck long and pale, hands in her hair. She had taken off the turtleneck at some point in the night, and her arms flicker red, blue, green with the lights.

“Holy,” says Arthur after they get off the bus and start walking through campus. “Dom, you didn't say she was beautiful.”

“I said she was a divinity in our midst and I was lucky to even look at her.”

“Yeah, but you're just like that,” says Yusuf. “She's slaying.”

“What kind of old fashioned slang is that, grandpa?” laughs Arthur. “I think my great-grandmother used to say that.”

“Back off, Yusuf,” says Dom good-naturedly. “That’s my future wife you're talking about.”

They reach the east of the Anatomy and Dentistry building and start climbing the rickety metal spiral stairs which serve as the fire-escape. The smart windows blink at them sleepily, probably taking them for some strange species of raccoon.

At the very top, which only reaches the highest windows, they get their fingers and toes into the missing brick footholds that some helpful soul had carved out. They climb straight up, until they reach the iron service ladder, and then grab on thankfully to the iron rungs welded directly onto the slanted roof.

“Gracious, this is so treacherous,” pants Ariadne. “Why do we ever do this?”

“Because if we didn't have core strength we would have to attend prayer about how we're ruining our souls with partying,” whispers Yusuf. And then: “Ow, Dom, your head is in my butt.”

They walk carefully on the flat peak of the building to their window. There isn't even a gap to jump over: the two buildings kiss.

They clamber into the room, using the table under the window as a stepping stool. They take down the little ‘closed’ sign they taped up in the window.

They bid goodbye to Ariadne and start getting ready for bed. It's almost 2am.

Arthur feels through his underwear drawer blindly because Dom won't risk turning on the lights for him to change clothes, and finds that the whole thing is empty. There's nothing in it at all. He turns on the flashlight on his phone and finds that his things are strewn over the floor.

His laptop is open (the screen shows that he would need to wait three hours because of how many incorrect passwords have been entered), his notebooks (his precious notebooks) are open and tossed over his bed, his laundry basket is tipped over.

His first move is to climb on top of his desk, press up against the ceiling tile, and feel the familiar metal outline of the briefcase.

Safe. Obviously they thought he was going to hide it in the sock drawer. Which he had, until he had almost killed Eames.

After all the panic is done and Arthur is finished shakily tearing through the room to see if anything was stolen, he spills everything to Dom and Yusuf because they're staring at him like he's gone utterly mad. But when he stops talking, neither look surprised.

“I knew there was something off about that thing,” says Yusuf.

“Yeah, I figured,” says Dom.

“What?” says Arthur, devastated.

“We were wondering what the Sam Hill was wrong with you until we realized you had Mal’s PASIV. I mean, you skulking around with that oversized tote bag of yours, going to Saito’s at all times of the week, sneaking in Ariadne. Then, Yusuf saw you messing around with the ceiling: we checked it out and found the thing.”

They could have blown Arthur over with a hairdryer set on low. Eames had said something like that, hadn’t he? “Mal’s passive what?”

Dom spells it out: “P-A-S-I-V. She won't tell me what it stands for but she let it slip once when she was distracted.”

“You're not as sneaky as you think you are,” Yusuf says kindly, and Arthur leaves the room before he can do something stupid like cry.

Chapter Text

Al Jazeera: Would you mind speaking a bit about your career now?

Anonymous: Ten years ago nobody would have even considered calling it that. It was such a new field and we were so tight knit. Now everyone and their mother is dreamsharing. I like that you call it a career, actually. Do you ask drug dealers about their careers, too?

Arthur avoids Yusuf and Dom for the entire next week. Instead, he sulks, mostly in Ariadne’s room. The door remains within regulation: two inches open if a male and female student are in the same room. He’s grateful for the opportunity to escape Dom and Yusuf’s questioning glances.

He tells Ariadne and Saito everything. Saito only looks at him, assessing, nodding. Ariadne, on the other hand, is annoyed at him. He understands why; he would probably be angry, too, if someone had kept a secret like Eames from him. But maybe it’s a bit extreme to act passive aggressive for a week straight. It’s grating at him.

Nothing has even happened. The PASIV is safe. They all know the same information. And yet the atmosphere is tense.

“What are we going to do now?” Her voice is as flat as always. She's sitting cross-legged on top of her twin bed, and her shoulders are stiff and angry.

Arthur doesn’t enjoy looking at her when she’s like this. He looks around her bedroom instead, which looks more or less like his, only with two beds instead of three. She and her roommate put a carpet down, put some art up onto the dumb walls. He sees a Lucian Freud print of a woman and two dogs and dust on the baseboard.

Arthur generally thinks himself as too practical to decorate a place which will fine him if he damages it. But sitting here, looking at the cheap pins holding up cheap paper, he experiences something that feels suspiciously like guilt.

He’s still looking at those walls when he says, trying to defend himself from imaginary accusations: “Nobody knew I had the thing. I didn’t think that the Eames thing would matter.”

Ariadne sighs gently. “Obviously somebody knew.”

“Yeah, he did. He figured it out.”

“And he told Mal,” she says. “They’re a team. Like we’re a team.”

A week later, Arthur and Eames are sitting in tense silence at a soda shop called Sodalicious. This is less funny than it sounds.

Arthur had loitered around the library (half-studying, half scrolling on his phone) where Eames and his friends had been so very loud that one night. On the third day, he had seen Eames and invited him to chat somewhere. That somewhere is Sodalicious.

The soda shop is neutral. They decided on it after a long and passive aggressive conversation over some app that doesn't store the information of users or their data. Arthur had hoped that Eames’ username would reveal his first name/surname/whatever but it's just Eames. Maybe his parents were so off their heads on British party drugs that they forgot to write more on his birth certificate.

The reason they’re in a soda shop and not a café is because once upon a time, in between divining a new bible from a rock in a hat and getting arrested for treason, Joseph Smith decided that drinking hot beverages sends you straight to hell. For Mormons, dirty sodas are the best vessels for caffeine.

This particular cultural quirk has been hell for Arthur, whose taste in coffee veers towards very black and very expensive; he has already decided that his graduation gift to himself will be a Diletta Mio espresso machine.

Saito and Ariadne are sitting at the table next to them. Ariadne looks fresh and lovely in the sunshine, Saito looks like he wishes that he was literally anywhere else. To calm his nerves, Arthur imagines them wearing fake mustaches and dark sunglasses. He sips at something called a ‘Viking’ which is Coke Zero and raspberry puree. It's actually good.

Eames is drinking an enormous cup of Dr. Pepper with coconut and blackberry (Arthur is absolutely certain that he only chose it because it’s called ‘Your Mom’).

“I can't stand this, petal,” says Eames. “Do let's go get some air.” He doesn’t say it playfully. He says it flat and unhappy, kind of like Ariadne pronounces her words.

Arthur is half-squinting through the uncharacteristic winter sun. It's enhanced by the white walls. But he refuses to give in on principle.

“We will settle this here,” says Arthur, curtly. He’ll think of this exact moment when, in twenty years, he maintains a straight face in front of mafiosos and CEOs and angry women wanting to make their husbands love them. He is straight-edged as a razor with perfect posture and the voice of a defense lawyer with his murderous client. He’s also only twenty-one, so the effect isn’t terribly striking yet. It will be.

Eames doesn't deflate at the tone, he only looks sharper and more wary. He's wearing some sort of ridiculous paisley shirt. This has nothing to do with the situation, but it strikes a contrast against Arthur's button-up peeking over a wool sweater.

Arthur is glad of the wariness. It confirms that he’s holding some of the cards. Not all, but enough. He’s pleasantly surprised to find that he’s actually holding all of the cards when Eames immediately surrenders.

“A few thousand dollars, I think, for your trouble,” says Eames. “I have a checkbook right here. Name a number and we’ll be done.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” says Arthur, pleased and preening. The immediate jump into monetary compensation means that there’s room to negotiate. “You destroyed my whole dorm room.”

“Come on,” wheedles Eames. “I can even leave the check blank. However much you like. I know you need it. Scholarship kid, right?”

“I’m not here for money. I’m here because you have something I want. You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Don’t have the faintest,” says Eames, but he is beginning to look nervous.

Arthur’s brain is rushing a million hours an hour. He can feel his synapses firing, the puzzle pieces locking into place. “You think you can pay me off with a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands? Don’t kid yourself.”

Sleep medicine. Government funding. Human police, meaning secret police because that’s the only non-bot tactical unit which exists anymore. Sleep medicine.

So, Arthur guesses. He guesses low, calculated, and angry, and watches as Eames’s eyes widen. “You really think you can mess with me? You stole a billion dollar piece of government property, lost it, and hoped the person who found it was too stupid to know what they have. Tough luck.”

“You don’t even know what it is,” Eames insists. “The money—”

“I don’t know what it is?” says Arthur casually. He really doesn’t, but he’s trying to maintain the upper hand here. Sleep medicine.

He isn’t quite sure where he’s going with this, but his mouth is working faster than his brain. He gives in to instinct: “I know the PASIV inside out. In fact, I know it better than you because I rebuilt it. Glass phials, really?”

Eames pales. Arthur is sweating through his shirt and hopes it’s not visible.

“What?” Eames whispers, so soft that Arthur has to read his lips.

“Let me give you a hint,” says Arthur and pulls out his trump card. “Have you been having sweet dreams, Mr. Eames?”

The barb hits perfectly. Too perfectly.

Eames tenses, body going rigid and afraid. Then, he scrambles, looking around wildly for something. He looks so scared that he’s green. “No,” he gasps at Arthur. “Oh God, wake me up. Wake me up right now.”

Arthur’s heart is pounding in his chest. He isn’t sure what this means but it definitely means something — and now he knows more or less what the PASIV does. If Eames is so convinced that he’s dreaming… That Arthur is in his dream…

He meets Ariadne’s eyes over at the next table and tilts his head. She nods, curiosity bleeding from her expression.

“Wake me up, you monster!” hisses Eames. People are looking at them now and Arthur fixes Eames with a cold stare.

“Sit down and be quiet,” he orders.

Eames notices the watch on Arthur’s wrist. It’s a battered old Casio, from a second-hand store. “Give me your watch,” says Eames. His voice is desperate, so desperate that Arthur hands it over without a thought.

Eames lines up the watch on the table, checks the time, looks up at Arthur’s eyes, and looks back down at the watch. “Okay,” he pants. “Okay, talk. How long have I been dreaming?”

Arthur quirks his lips into a smile. “That’s neither here nor there. Now, please. We were having a conversation.”

Eames keeps checking the watch. The longer he does it, the more confused he seems to get until he’s entirely silent. Nothing Arthur says seems to evoke a response so they just sit across from each other, silent.

Then, Eames stands up fast, knocking the chair to the side. Arthur gets up too, ready to sprint after him, but Eames doesn’t run. Instead, he starts walking around the shop.

Arthur follows as Eames kneels down in the corners, runs a hand over the window leaving fingerprint smears, picks up a chair, sets it down, drops a spoon onto the floor and listens to it clatter, orders a chocolate donut at the counter and eats it in three bites, chewing as though he’s considering every flavor. Every few moments he checks Arthur’s watch, cradled protectively in his fist.

After about ten minutes of this inexplicable behavior, he returns to their table. Arthur sits down with him.

Eames looks better than he did, calmer. “This is not a dream?” he asks, as if to confirm a stupid hypothesis.

“No, it’s not,” says Arthur, and smiles. “Or maybe it is. How about you tell me who I can talk to about an actual deal and I can wake you right up.”

Five minutes later they have a time and date to meet with the student team of the PASIV project. Arthur leaves, and Ariadne and Saito keep sitting until Eames goes too.

It’s only later that Ariadne tells Arthur how terrifying it was to see him like that.

The three of them are sitting curled up on Saito’s couch, eating their fill of delivery pizza. Arthur is devouring a slice of bell pepper and ham and doesn't register what she says at first.

“Huh?”

“It was cruel, what you did.”

“It was just a guess,” Arthur complains. “It’s not my fault I guessed right. Besides, I didn't mean to play a game or anything. He broke into my room!”

Ariadne doesn't look like she believes him, so he rephrases. “Okay, I did mean to scare him, but that wasn't my original plan. He just freaked out so bad. Besides, I was shaking almost as much as he was, or didn't you catch that?”

Ariadne chews a bite of pineapple pizza and considers. “You were a little sweaty,” she acknowledges. “Only it was very hot in the shop so it could have passed off as that.”

“Oh.”

Arthur feels satisfied, though. He likes being perceived this way: in control and certain. Saito humbles him immediately. “Yeah, yeah, you were very cool. I was impressed. You have pizza sauce on your cheek.”

Al Jazeera: What brought this cult of students together?

Anonymous: Frankly, it was — as all important things are — entirely circumstantial.

“How many people were in Mal’s cohort?” asks Arthur after trying and failing to solve some algebraic proof for homework. “In the picture.”

“A bunch. Why?” says Dom, hanging halfway off of his bed. He’s playing with a new function on his phone, which is putting up 3D molecular structures into the air above his face. They’re controlled by minute twitches of his expressions, so he looks really funny: smiling, frowning, raising each eyebrow. The company will recall that function soon, Arthur thinks. Nobody wants to look like a fool while on the phone.

“Ballpark?” asks Arthur.

“Uh, maybe eight, nine.”

Not good. Arthur thinks being outnumbered would end very poorly for him indeed. He imagines, in an abstract sort of way, being knocked out, interrogated. He needs more manpower if he’s going to confront a group that large.

Well, he does have manpower right in front of him.

“Listen,” says Arthur. “It's about the PASIV.”

And that’s how Dom and Yusuf are brought into the secret. Five isn't a lot of people, but it's significantly better than three, and they make a pretty cohesive team.

Arthur expects there to be some tension, some uncertainty, but his roommates meld into the group easily. They go out for pizza at a local spot, mostly because it's cheap, and Dom starts talking with Saito right away. It turns out that the two have actually met before and the acquaintance pops right back up naturally. Arthur was worried that Ariadne would feel properly outnumbered by the amount of men in their group, but she's right there making jokes with the rest of them.

They spend some time tinkering with the machine, making sure that everything looks the way it should. Now that they know what it’s for, there’s a sort of electricity in the air. Saito’s apartment becomes a hubbub of chatter when they’re all there together. Ariadne and Saito are always on JSTOR looking up articles on REM sleep and lucid dreaming. Arthur looks up all of the recent alumni of the Sleep Medicine department — getting within a few years of Mal’s age — and finds their contact information in case they need to blackmail them. Dom and Yusuf have a lot of ideas about what the mystery compound might look like. Something like ketamine, for vivid dreams, mixed with fentanyl or even LSD. Morphine, maybe, for sedation.

The thing which mystifies them all is the fact that Eames was convinced that he and Arthur were sharing a dream.

“Are you sure that the dream wouldn't just play on the screen?” asks Yusuf, because there’s a little screen in the briefcase, along with the LED displays which attach to each roll of tubing. “That would make more sense. I know there’s brain-imaging of dreams, it was invented in the late 2010s.”

“No, he absolutely thought that Arthur was in it with him,” says Ariadne. “That's what we're so confused about. How can you dream with another person?”

They order sushi and watch as Saito dissects the PASIV again, and discovers that underneath a bit of paneling which Arthur hadn’t noticed there’s an entire computer motherboard. It’s delicate and old, and even Saito isn’t sure what to do with it. That, and figuring out what PASIV stands for, will come when they meet Mal again.

When Arthur visits Ariadne the next afternoon, Yusuf is already there and they're doing chemistry homework together. It makes Arthur glow with approval, mostly because he's satisfied that even under duress, his instincts are correct. Dom and Yusuf were a good addition to his team.

The group prepares for the confrontation, which is meant to take place in Mal’s apartment, by sitting in a strange semi-circle on the floor of Arthur’s dorm room a few days before the established meeting time. The PASIV is in the middle, and they all stare at it for a while. It's closed, but they all know what it looks like inside by heart now.

“Everything is about to change,” says Dom, spookily.

“You don't need to be Sybil to say that,” says Yusuf, who happens to be taking a history class on Ancient Greece as an elective and has been very into cults recently.

“We need contingencies if it's a trap,” says Saito, who had discussed this with Arthur previously. “Meeting place if we get separated, weapons, hiding places for the PASIV.”

They all look down at it. The PASIV is innocent and metallic on the floor. It looks like any old briefcase, small, unassuming.

They decide that Saito’s apartment is the safest place for the people: he codes the knuckleprints of their ring fingers into his door as passtokens (because no sane hostage taker would ask them to stick their knuckle into a fingerprint scanner) and the fingerprints of their index fingers as indicators that they are under duress. They get Dom to describe Mal’s apartment building and potential ways to get out of it. Each of them has a separate route of escape. Ariadne gives them all a tiny one-use bottle of pepper spray from a pack which her parents gave her upon beginning university.

They puzzle over how Eames got involved, but can't find a satisfactory answer.

He eavesdropped on them and was brought into the secret. His family funds the program. He’s a hologram. He was beamed down by British aliens.

Nothing fits, not really.

“One of us needs to stay behind,” says Dom, once they’re tired and lazing around on the couches. “What if they kill us all and there's nobody left to look for us?”

“We all need to come,” argues Arthur. “There's strength in numbers.”

In the end, they decide to leave a cryptic SMS for Saito’s mother, to be sent one day after their meeting with Mal's cohort. If all goes well, Saito will just cancel the message. As for the PASIV, Arthur volunteers to hide it. He puts it in his backpack and plans to bury it somewhere in the desert. Ariadne laughs and says that she’s glad it’s not her; she’d crack too quickly under torture.

Then, Yusuf brings out a homemade bottle of moonshine and they get rip-roaring drunk and watch as he slyly reveals the ingredients for elephant toothpaste from under his bed. Arthur protests and is overruled.

Dom comes to Arthur one day before the meeting. Yusuf is in a class so they're alone in the dorm; Arthur's laying on his tiny single bed. Dom sits next to him, then ends up laying down and they're back to back. Dom is solid, warm. A little too warm, like he has a fever.

“I don’t know if we should do this,” confesses Dom.

“Oh,” says Arthur. He almost chastises Dom, but there's something that stops him.

“I just think it would be easier if either we worked together or we cut ties completely.”

“Why?” asks Arthur, though he knows the answer. Dom's the weak link here: he loves Mal. He might love her enough to justify giving up the PASIV.

He loves Arthur, too, probably. They've lived together for almost half a year now and even if they're annoyed by each other, you can't live with someone that long and not have fraternal feelings for them. Well, alright, maybe Dom doesn't love Arthur, but he respects him enough to recognize that this is important. Arthur should be grateful.

Dom sighs. “You know why.”

“Well,” says Arthur and feels the warm press of Dom's back against his. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to walk into the room with an upper hand in the negotiation.”

“Arthur, I'm going to be very honest with you right now.” He tenses a bit. “I know you're having a lot of fun with this.”

Arthur tries to protest that he’s being almost absurdly practical, but Dom barrels over the attempt. “This is real. We have a billion dollar gadget, we can only guess at what it is, and after what happened in the 2050s I don't think that the ‘Department of Energy’ will accept excuses. We're all looking at jail time, or the death penalty.”

Arthur feels himself still. He hadn't really thought about it that way; because it does feel like a bit of fun. It feels exciting and insulated, and as though he's the most powerful man on campus.

“Dom, I—”

“No, I'm having the time of my life, too. Don't think I'm not. But yesterday, when Ariadne implied you wouldn’t crack under torture, I had too much time to think about what the consequences would be.”

They lay together, quietly. The wall in front of Arthur’s nose is pale and empty.

Arthur understands that, objectively, what he’s doing is insane. He does, really. But at the same time, he knows that he has become obsessed with the idea of sharing a dream, of controlling a dream. What’s more, he has become obsessed with the idea of escape. Of being able to shift his surroundings into anything, everything, he wants.

“I want this so badly,” Arthur says to the wall, and it feels a bit like Dom is on the other side of a confessional. “I want to dream with you, and Yusuf, and Ariadne, and Saito.”

Dom sighs. “Me, too.”

And they lay there until Yusuf comes back and asks if the Church of Latter-day Saints has suddenly changed its position on homosexuality. Arthur throws a pillow at him.

The evening of the confrontation, which is what Arthur calls it in his head, feels like the pressure behind the cork of a champagne bottle. He teases a thumb under the cork, testing, nudging, feeling the excitement and nerves ready to pop. They all get ready in Arthur's dorm, though it isn't strictly necessary for them to get dressed together. The boys all look obediently out of the window while Ariadne changes, and then she does her makeup while they pull on slacks and casual dinner jackets. Arthur has to borrow one from Saito, who's the closest in size to him. It’s dark and pinstriped, very smart.

Ariadne muses over a sleek pair of heels but decides on sensible flats which she can run in.

When they're done, they look as though they're about either very poorly dressed for an opera or very well dressed for a dinner. Ariadne wears her biggest handbag, which is exactly the right size for the PASIV. Arthur pulls on a leather messenger bag as well, and Saito holds a very large briefcase. Three decoys are enough, it would be overkill for them to each carry one.

The real PASIV is safe under a rock in the desert a few miles from school, and Arthur has memorized the coordinates.

Dom rents them a taxi to get there, just so that Mal’s cohort thinks that they can't don't have a getaway plan. In reality, everyone has memorized the nearest train station — and thank God for high-speed interrail, even in the backwaters of Utah, he doesn't know how they got on without it — and are ready to pay the fines for lacking a ticket. There are also bicycles chained to the fence around the station, just in case the train idea doesn't work. And, they all can climb up onto buildings if that doesn't pan out either. After all, haven't they been running across roofs for months now?

Mal's townhouse is lovely from the outside. It’s very rectangular, a heritage building from the 1990s, only two floors. The outer walls are a sensible concrete, unlike the apartment complex opposite which glows a soft pearly white. They ring the bell and wait patiently as though they've been invited to a house party and the host is coming to get them. They're standing stiff and almost at attention, so when Mal opens the door and almost falls over when she sees Dom, they do not laugh. But it's a close thing.

“Dominic?” she asks, as if she has never seen him before.

“I have to impress you somehow,” he says and smiles.

Arthur briefly wonders if this whole thing has been just to make an impression on Mal, and that the conversation in the bed had been a guilt-ridden confession, but he bats the thought away. Nothing binds people together like a secret, and Dom is just as hungry for dreamspace as he is.

Dom’s smile is actually charming enough that Mal lets them in without much argument. They traipse up the horrifically narrow stairs which lead to Mal’s second floor unit and are met with soft lighting and quiet chatter. Somehow, Arthur had been imagining an interrogation chamber, two-way mirror and hypersmart walls and a metal link attached to the table for handcuffs, but the place is cozy and comfortable.

The lamps are a warm LED orange and there’s a Wassily chair in the corner beside the baby blue velvet couch. The walls are dumb, old-fashioned wallpaper. A tapestry of a tiger hunt hangs between built-in bookshelves. Arthur is, despite everything, an architect; his love for interior design bowls him over for a little.

It turns out that Dom’s estimate of eight or nine had been an overexaggeration. Instead, there are only Eames, Mal, and (shockingly) Robert Michael Fischer, of groupchat fame. Now, it's Dom, Yusuf, and Arthur's turn to gape their mouths like fish.

“Robert Fischer?” manages Arthur, just barely avoiding saying the middle name.

Robert Michael Fischer looks up, puzzled. “Robert's fine,” he says.

They end up sitting down on the plush blue couch, which is wonderfully comfortable, and then silence reigns. Nobody is quite sure where to begin.

“Pizza,” announces Mal. Her accent is remarkably thick when she's nervous. “There is pizza in the kitchen.”

She goes to fetch it and Arthur takes in Eames, eyes catching on the pale pink scar from when he leapt through Arthur's window. There isn’t any bruising around his neck, but bruise-cream does wonders these days.

“I know who you are,” accuses Saito, unexpectedly. “You're in my Dutch Golden Age seminar.”

“Small world,” says Eames, who appears just as surprised as the rest of them. “Hi Saito.”

It’s only then that Arthur remembers the hazy boy with the British accent from the art class and realizes it was Eames. He looks at Eames again, with his square jaw and sharp nose, and feels a little strange.

When Mal returns, they all take slices (Arthur waits for everyone else to chew, and swallow before trying his own). It seems that they all know each other to some degree, which is perhaps the least surprising thing about the whole endeavor. Yet, it strikes them all the hardest.

Robert Michael Fischer of groupchat fame; Dom’s girlfriend; Saito’s classmate.

Mal clears her throat, TA instincts probably alight when presented with a group of undergraduates. She tries for an icebreaker.

“Maybe we should introduce ourselves. I'm Mallorie Miles,” she says, and her expression is incredulous. “I came to the university because my father was a part of the sleep medicine program…” Then, she gives up: “Dom, what in the name of all that is holy are you doing here?”

This breaks the ice more effectively than anything else could have and the conversation starts violently. Ariadne is shouting about glass phials to the room at large; Robert Michael Fischer (who must have been the one who broke into the dorm) is interrogating Yusuf on why he keeps beakers under his bed; Saito and Eames are, oddly, speaking about the homework assignment they have; all this is overshadowed by the raucous fight that Mal and Dom are having. Only Arthur sits apart, chewing carefully on his pizza. Then, in the middle of it all, he sees Eames reach for Ariadne’s handbag.

Arthur has a loud voice. It comes with spending a lot of time in the dojo.

“Enough,” he bellows, and everyone goes silent. Eames’s hand retreats from the bag.

“We came here for a reason,” he continues, at a more reasonable volume. “And it is not to socialize.”

“No, beating the shit out of your allies and then psychologically torturing them is more your speed, right, petal?” Eames sounds decidedly cool. Arthur has exactly zero patience for this type of haranguing.

“I wasn't aware we were allies,” says Arthur coolly. “We are simply in a mutually beneficial situation.”

“That often amounts to the same thing,” mutters Robert Michael Fischer.

“If we were enemies, I wouldn't have bought pizza,” says Mal, wounded.

It's more or less all right after that. Arthur grudgingly apologizes for almost murdering Eames. This leads to an extended retelling of the story of the lab in the basement, with Eames chiming in with his perspective, and then everyone in the room is satisfied to finally know what Arthur's scholarship was for.

“I knew it wasn't Nordic walking,” says Robert Michael Fischer. “But Mal was so convinced that it was.” Arthur doesn't know what to say to that, except to privately wonder if the whole school was curious about how he was able to afford a place there.

It turns out that Eames had worked in the sleep lab.

His major in Fine Arts had a mandatory anatomy and physiology component and the dry lab he attended was right next to the original room where the PASIV research team did their human trials.

Their first meeting had been a bit disastrous. Eames accidentally insulted Mal’s shoes and she had thrown her iced coffee in his face. This should not have resulted in a close working relationship, but it did: Eames was hired as a lab wretch even though he had no experience in either sleep medicine or chemistry.

Robert Michael Fischer got into the whole thing because his father was one of the investors in the military-industrial complex and his mother was an L.A. Mormon. He became friends with Mal through a misunderstanding which involved a misplaced identity card, camouflage pants that had been very stylish at the time, and a stray cat.

Eames had walked in on Mal waking up from a dream together early in the morning, with Robert watching over her, and it all evolved from there. They had managed to test out the PASIV together a handful of times before the program was shut down and all of the research was destroyed. What Arthur has is an old model, one of the first, which was spared the incinerator simply because it had been forgotten about.

Mal tells them that the American military-industrial complex decided that the mental impact of cold-blooded murder was inefficient. It wouldn’t do to worry about soldiers deserting in the middle of a battlefield, and drills took a long time and were too unrealistic. Someone had the idea of weaponizing dreams to use in the nighttime as a training exercise. To show soldiers warfare, over and over, the slick guts of dead civilians and their shattered bones, and slowly stop them from reacting at all.

Arthur hears that and fights back his gag reflex. Even the idea is horrific: psychological torture until the soldier is so far gone that they will murder without thinking. The idea of blunting emotions until a man becomes a gun is revolting.

“It was a failure. Dreams are so personal, you know. People didn’t want to dream about war, so they didn’t. It all shifted and stretched.”

“Bad chemistry,” murmurs Ariadne, as if half-aware of what she is saying. “Wrong stage of sleep.”

“Yes,” says Mal, surprised. “The compound was an issue. There was a team of chemists who were trying to refine that, somewhere. We didn’t have contact with them, though.”

Mal’s team had been extremely isolated: they ran the human trials on volunteers who were told that they were participating in sleep studies. None of it went well. Before Mal had joined the project, the sleep lab had concluded that dreams would work best if someone else was controlling them. It was a ludicrous idea, so they worked on it more or less in secret.

In order to get people to dream the same dream, the brain needs to be stimulated in the same way. They had scanned each other's brains, located all of the landmarks, and created tiny electrodes to mimic exactly what the dreamer’s brain was doing. In the end, they programmed a network of electrodes which sent feedback to one another, extremely quickly. The PASIV was an enormous brain, where a computer interpreted everyone’s electrical impulses and then sent them around to the dreamers as one enormous dream.

This had taken years, and Mal had been a latecomer to the process.

“All of the difficulties had already been dealt with,” she says. “I was there when the experiment became smooth, we were making only improvements.”

Mal was the one to suggest a helmet with a machine learning program in it, which would position the electrodes perfectly on the first try.

“Teaching the thing to do it was as difficult as teaching a robot to do surgery,” she complains, and Arthur is surprised that she knows the idiom. Maybe France has the same saying, too.

“But it worked?” he asks.

“Yes, it did.”

“That can’t be all,” says Ariadne, who appears to have a much stronger grasp on things than any of them.

It’s not.

“We had a woman who grew up on the west coast,” Mal says. “And her dreams would always smell of it, like saltwater and seaweed. Even if she dreamed herself into a landlocked country, it would still have an ocean. And we all thought that, well, you could really tell who a person is through their dreams. That way we could get information instead of playing war.”

They’re quiet for a while, and Arthur knows everyone is considering the same thing as him: what would their signatures look like in a dream? He grew up in Maryland, so maybe suburbs, superb sunsets, the sound of waves. What would his subconscious say about him?

The other thing is that he is incredibly bitingly curious about the rest of them. Dom is from California (sunshine, the Pacific, deserts), Ariadne is from North Dakota but her father is Greek (mountains, open skies, nostalgia), Yusuf is from Mombasa (white sand, sprawling buildings, smoky coffee shops), Saito is Japanese but grew up in London (bamboo, bridges across the Thames, curved roofs).

Arthur wants so badly that his stomach hurts.

“You have one of the helmets?” he asks. “Can we do it?”

“No,” says Mal, and she is so angry that her voice shakes. “That thing was my baby. My brainchild. And they burned it.”

“What happened?” asks Ariadne.

Mal shrugs. “Lack of funding. Lack of practical application. Bah! They got bored of it, said that even if we used it for extracting information nobody would fall asleep next to a spy.”

Even Arthur winces in sympathy. But he's curious about something else, too. “Extracting?”

“A dream is the subconscious. If I wanted to know, say, what your middle name is, I would go into a dream with you and find your mother.”

“Does it work that way?” wonders Dom. “So simple?”

“No. It is difficult to explain. I suppose you’ll see, if we manage to make this work.”

But Arthur is reticent. “Where are all of the other people who worked on it?”

“All got recruited to the military.” Mal sighs “Intelligence. They get paid very well.”

“Not you?” asks Dom.

Mal laughs. “I'm French, dear heart. Can't have a Frenchwoman in the American army. They slapped me with a NDA so thick it looked like a bible.”

“But here you are,” says Arthur, a bit curious. “Why?”

“They let me fly, Arthur,” says Mal. “They let me fly, build impossible structures, swim deep in the ocean, say hello to my dead grandmother, enter a black hole and get spat back out. I walked on the sun. I called lightning down and didn't burn. Those dreams made me a god, an empress, and then they took it away from me. I will do anything to get that back.”

Arthur nods, once. He would too.

Al Jazeera: There is a company that is planning to bring dreaming into the entertainment industry. Customized dreams with a guide. What do you think of that?

Anonymous: Horrible stupid idea. Dream addiction is hell.

It's a reverse funeral when they dig out the PASIV. Dom had done a good job, wrapping it airtight with plastic and bubblewrap and a tarp. Mal runs her hands over the briefcase like she can't believe that it's in front of her. When she opens it she's pleased, too, and quite shocked that five undergraduates were able to replicate what took years to build.

“It was all there already,” said Arthur dismissively. “And we didn't have the restrictions your team did.”

“Restrictions? The funding—” starts Mal.

“This was simple because we didn’t know what we were doing. I think a reasonably engineering-inclined teenager could have done the same. Besides, we only built the physical model. The programming will be the difficult part.”

Arthur’s right: the real trouble turns out to be the computer. They simply do not have the resources to repeat the automation Mal’s team had created, even with Saito working on the coding.

Mal ends up asking her father for help. The night she asks is tense and horrible. Arthur throws up twice from the nerves, but when she texts him it’s a simple:

Got it! :)

and he can finally breathe again. He doesn’t ask about what exactly it is that she got. Neither does anybody else. Whatever ‘it’ is, does not include the machine which maps out brains.

Instead, they are forced to do it all manually and create intricate blueprints of each other's craniums. Saito pays the two thousand each that it takes for them to have a full MRI scan and distributes the files to them individually. Then, Mal gives them a detailed explanation of how to identify the landmarks of a brain.

After that, theoretically, it’s as simple as feeding the reactions into the computer.

It takes months, and Spring spills past as slippery as a silk scarf. When the students run across the roof and through his room, Arthur is usually aglow in the light of his laptop. He sets up a little bin for gifts and stops acknowledging the passersby. He notices that none of his eight (and they are his eight now) are going out for fun in the night anymore. They are as consumed by the project as he is.

In the end, Arthur's brain is finished first because he spends every spare moment mapping it. His grades have slipped. Not by a lot, but his straight As are now a row of solid B+. He finds that he doesn’t care.

It's impossibly annoying waiting for the others to finish what he has already done.

Robert Michael Fischer (for Gosh's sake, Arthur, call me Robert) completes his two weeks after Arthur.

Then, it's a matter of synthesizing the serum, which is much more difficult than it looks. Arthur and Robert Michael Fischer (I’ll start calling you by your full name, too, I swear) take up Ariadne and Yusuf’s brain mapping so that those two can spend time in a lab which Saito rented out for them.

Arthur absently wonders when Saito’s parents are going to run out of money, but the extravagance never seems to touch his friend in any meaningful way. A trust fund and a few hundred tenants must be nice to have.

He and Robert Michael Fischer (Arthur, I am going to kill you) start spending a lot of time together, going through the MRI slices of their friends’ brains. It’s strange that Arthur considers them all friends now, but how could they be anything else? A singular goal ties them together, tethers them ravenous, so eager that they’re near salivating.

Thalamus. Third ventricle. Anterior commissure. Ariadne’s brain is beautiful in gray and black and white. Subparietal sulcus. Parieto occipital sulcus. So many tiny structures which let them perceive the world.

“Robert?”

“Finally. Thank flipping gosh,” and Arthur has to really fight to keep a straight face. Out of all of them, Robert is the stereotypical Mormon. “What?”

“Do you think we’ll actually do it?” asks Arthur. “Or is this some sort of wild goose chase?”

Robert doesn’t do him the disservice of immediate reassurance. He actually thinks about it.

“You know, Arthur,” he says at last, “I am fairly convinced that it’ll work.”

Arthur thinks that he might be right, mostly because they are so involved in the psychological bit of it. Mal tells them that lucid dreaming is difficult so they all force themselves into exercises, asking themselves if they’re awake whenever they pass a mirror or look at their phone, making a habit of checking the time and seeing if the seconds pass properly.

A week after his conversation with Robert, the eight of them have lunch in a sandwich shop — they are such a large group that they have standing reservations — and Dom rushes in, twenty minutes late, and gasps out: “I lucid dreamed.”

This is met with a general excitement which includes Arthur. A breakthrough, even if the PASIV wasn’t a part of it.

“I was taking a nap before meeting you all, you know how shitty 8am labs are, and then I was in the medical building and every time I walk through a door I ask myself if I’m dreaming so I walk through a door and ask myself if I’m dreaming and then I realize I am.”

“And?” Saito, who is usually reserved, is on his feet. His thighs are pressed against the table, leaning forward. “And then?”

“I just walked around. I didn’t even think of making anything, changing anything, I just explored. And then I forgot I was dreaming.”

This is slightly less interesting, and a waitress comes over to ask Dom for his order. General chatter ensues. As Dom is waiting for his French toast, Arthur clears his throat and asks to the table at large: “We need to set a plan into place. Training. Obviously getting to the lucid dream is the first step, but after that we need to know what to do. Remembering that we’re asleep is the most important part.”

“I think we can do that with the serum,” says Yusuf. “If we make the dream super light and shallow, half-awake, we can practice that until we’ve built up a tolerance.”

“You synthesized a variant?” asks Mal, interested.

“Several,” says Ariadne. “We’re about at the point where we need volunteer subjects.”

“Should we start dosing ourselves, maybe once every two weeks?” suggests Eames. “Try to dream our way around it?”

“Yes, good,” says Mal, and after that they make a schedule which pairs them up randomly so that any anaphylactic reaction or death will result in an immediate trip to the hospital. They even coerce one of the smart walls on the first floor of the dorms to give them an emergency medical kit which includes a defibrillator.

For his first time under, Arthur is paired with Yusuf. This is good, actually, because Yusuf’s very presence has a calming effect on Arthur; this may have something to do with ever-present mint tea and the fact that he has stopped making elephant toothpaste in Arthur’s line of sight.

Dom is sleeping over at Mal’s — which used to mean whatever Mormon type of sex they’re up to, but now means that they’ll be up until four in the morning labelling their brains and trying to figure out how to program an open source AI to work for the helmet prototype. Dom has stopped being disgustingly heart-broken over the parisienne; now they work like a machine, so in step that they might as well already be sharing electrical impulses. She seems to enjoy his company all the more for it. Arthur notices that she blushes when Dom explains some quirk of the electrodes to the group.

“Ready?” says Yusuf, but it’s not really a question. Arthur has finished his homework, it’s a Thursday evening, and they’ve dragged the mattress onto the floor so that Yusuf has more space to work in case something happens. The IV hangs from the curtain rails, long plastic tubing cascading down.

“Sure,” says Arthur, and arranges himself on the mattress.

Yusuf sets up the equipment next to him, a lot less than sterile despite the vigorous scrubbing of the IKEA table with an antimicrobial wipe. An angiocath, flush, a shoelace for a tourniquet. Blue latex gloves, a box of which was lifted from the chemistry lab.

Yusuf flushes the line first, and his thick-knuckled hands seem graceful.

The shoelace tourniquet comes next and Arthur does it himself, tying it tight.

At this point, Yusuf chickens out and is forced to look up med student instructional videos. They jointly decide to switch to the crook of his elbow, peripheral intravenous access.

Yusuf palpates the vein (“what the heck should spongy feel like?”), swabs him with an alcohol wipe, points the bevel of the angiocath up, uses his other thumb to add traction, and flicks the cath in.

“How can I tell if it’s good?” asks Yusuf.

“The flash,” says Arthur. “Is there blood in the thing?”

“Heck,” says Yusuf, disappointed. “No.”

They both stare unhappily at the pile of angiocaths, still nicely wrapped, which sit on the bed.

Eventually Yusuf gets it right, aspirates, flushes, and secures the catheter. By that point, Arthur’s right arm is one big bruise and they had been obliged to move on to the left one.

“Easy sailing from here,” says Yusuf while he injects the compound into the IV drip and preps the naloxone for waking. Mal had recommended that the first dream only last two minutes, but they have no idea how the serum will react to them. Saito had them do a full lab of bloodwork in addition to the MRI and Ariadne is using the hell out of her undergraduate pharmacology degree to figure out if they'll react to anything, but they're all only kids.

Arthur feels suddenly like a lab rat waiting for the inevitable electric shock.

“Hey, listen, Yusuf,” he prattles as he watches the pale yellow liquid come down the tubing. “Maybe we were a little bit overambitious, okay, maybe we shouldn’t—”

“Sleep tight,” says Yusuf and suddenly Arthur is walking in a forest, green and warm, but somehow he feels the mattress under his back.

Oh, he says.

Hello, he says, Hi Hello.

Mostly because his voice sounds strange and distant.

A flock of birds flutters above him, stuck in slow motion, and there are people walking past him, there’s a clearing ahead, some sort of market. He follows them, leaving the mattress far behind except in walking he feels his legs kick and someone says “Calm down, it’s okay” but then that’s far away in the wind.

He picks his way through the market, looking at long strings of amber beads and antique books, when he reaches to fiddle with his wristwatch. The watch reminds him to check the time, which reminds him to check if he’s dreaming.

Well, obviously I’m not dreaming, he says.

Then he realizes that’s exactly what he’s doing.

The sensation which comes with that realization is warm and pleasant, not exactly excited, but deeply satisfied. Arthur decides to fly and then he is flying, only realizing that he had jumped into the air in retrospect.

It feels good, feels right, only he gets stuck trying to get out of power lines on the way up, the market is so tiny below him, his body feels sticky and slow.

Well, alright, he’s had his fun. He should probably come down and look through more things.

His hands are deep in coriander seeds when he wakes up, to an alarm or something of the sort. The bed he’s on is so soft and comfortable. He tries to snuggle into his pillow, but it doesn’t feel quite right.

Arthur opens his eyes to the overhead light and Yusuf removing the catheter.

“Hi,” he says. “How long was I under?”

“Two minutes,” confirms Yusuf. “That dose was way too light for you, you couldn’t stop moving.”

“It felt like forty-five. Did I sleep talk?”

“I took notes,” says Yusuf, and jerks his chin to his laptop. “Robert made us a spreadsheet. You need to fill yours in while it’s fresh.”

Arthur sits down and notes in answers to the questions, which include an entirely subjective emotion-wheel which includes such adjectives as ‘hazy’ and ‘supersaturated’.

Annoyingly, he doesn’t remember much of the dream except that he was aware of the dream but couldn’t hold on to the knowledge. Yusuf nods his head when he reads that.

“Ariadne couldn’t remember her dream at all. We adjusted the levels for you, it’s good that we’re going in the right direction.”

“How much of this is guesswork?” wonders Arthur out loud, one hand holding his bruised arm.

“Well, all of it,” says Yusuf. “Human trials is the only thing we can do to make sure we’re getting better. Hope you like looking like a heroin addict.”

Arthur gets paired with Eames the next week, which means that he gets to visit a freshman dorm for the first time since he arrived at the university. The dorm is a single (lucky bastard) and the wall is smart.

“Eames,” says Arthur, and side-eyes the wall meaningfully.

“Don’t fret, petal,” says Eames. “We’re friends.”

“You’re friends with a wall?”

“One of the kids I grew up with was friends with an unused bridge,” shrugs Eames. “Besides, this is a Mormon college. Look. Hey wall?”

“Hello, student,” says the wall pleasantly. “How may I help you?”

“Well, you see, my friend here wants to speak with me about the Lord. We want to study the Word together,” says Eames earnestly. “But you know that walls can’t understand spiritual matters.”

“Of course not,” says the wall, sadly. Arthur must be making a spectacular face, because Eames is fighting a smile.

“Would you mind turning off for a bit so we can discuss the scripture?”

“Certainly, student,” says the wall. “May the Lord bless you both.”

“That works?” asks Arthur skeptically.

“You’d think it’s a trick, but I asked the same thing whenever I smoke and I’m still an enrolled student.”

Arthur takes a steadying breath. “I’m telling Bishop,” he says, deadpan, and opens up the medical kit.

He refuses to be incompetent at something which they’ll probably be doing every day, so Arthur has spent some time perfecting his fine motor skills on himself. The veins in his feet are all sorts of bruised now and the fake tattooing skin he bought online is punctured to high hell, but it’s worth it when he gets the needle in first try on Eames.

It’s especially worth it when Eames looks vaguely impressed.

“Two minutes,” says Arthur as he flushes the cath and screws the IV tubing in. “It’ll feel like at least thirty.”

He pushes the compound into the IV, watches it drip. “Go to sleep, Eames.”

He watches as Eames relaxes into the mattress, then sits down to take notes.

Two minutes isn’t a long time, but Eames barely moves. It’s boring, unlike the kicking and mumbling that Arthur had apparently done. He decides to bring up the fact that they should be taking blood pressure and respiratory rate and a host of other things when they meet up for lunch next week. It would at least make this part more interesting.

Eames wakes up without much fanfare, but his notes report that he was so overwhelmed by the reality of the dream that he forgot to even check if he was asleep.

‘Too far the other way’ notes Arthur in his concluding report, and sends it off to Yusuf and Ariadne.

Despite the false start of barely recording any information about their vitals, Arthur’s suggestion is immediately accepted by the group. Yusuf and Ariadne (and often Dom and Mal) become absolutely asinine about all the measurements being taken correctly. Mal finds and buys eight pairs of standard electrodes and starts harping at them all to use them while sleeping every night, no matter how uncomfortable it is. The shower is going to get clogged with electrode gel, thinks Arthur uncharitably when he has to switch his showering schedule from evenings to mornings.

The amount of data which comes from eight people playing lab rats for at least seven hours out of twenty-four, seven days a week, is staggering. Now, Yusuf and Ariadne can actually compare the effects of different variations of the compound to the average brain waves of natural sleep. Mal is in their lab more often than she is in her actual lab. The only thing which is left is actually writing her dissertation anyway.

The semester ends. There's neither fanfare nor discussion of what to do. It seems the most natural thing in the world when Arthur calls his parents, tells them that he loves them but he’s found an internship in Utah and won't be coming home for the summer. He promises to visit in August and then moves into Saito’s apartment and works on the PASIV as though it’s a full time job with mandatory overtime.

Al-Jazeera: Do you consider yourself a drug dealer?

Anonymous: Sure, sure. I’m a chemist. I mix the shit they go to sleep with. But it's not as easy as making drugs, not that I know much about that. To mix somnacin for jobs, not just tourism, you have to mix batches to order. Depends on blood sugar, medication, calcium levels, everything. I still test mine on myself. My whole professional career, as you call it, I have never given anyone so much as a nightmare.

AJ: Not even as a novice?

A: As a novice, I was barely the legal drinking age. I didn't know what I was making. It wasn't even called somnacin back then, it was compound C12. I didn't just give people nightmares, I gave them permanent psychiatric problems.

Arthur’s not a programmer or a chemist but he might as well be a nurse now with how well he can read an EKG and an ECG; he learns to interpret bloodwork results; he can flick an angiocath into place like he’s throwing a dart. And, of course, he’s a professional patient.

“Goodnight, Arthur,” echoes in his head as his eyelids flicker closed. Robert is the one watching over him this time, setting an egg timer for five minutes. While the compound is still imperfect they don’t like to send themselves down for longer than an hour of dreamtime. But it tends to take that long at least for them to orient themselves, even if they know they’re asleep.

This dream feels different, bubbly like champagne. Arthur is in a cocktail bar and he knows he’s asleep like he knows that he’s 5’10. Intrinsic. Certain. He’s so happy he feels like he could dance, but instead he clears his throat and orders an espresso martini from the barman.

The man asks for his ID and Arthur dreams up a Utah driver’s license. It feels real in his fingers.

He sips the drink (bitter but smooth), surveys the room around him, and then checks his watch. The second hand is as wobbly and inconstant as always, but that only solidifies in Arthur that he’s not floating away with the dream. He also doesn’t feel the mattress under him, he doesn’t hear reality; he’s firmly here, touching the wood of the bar, wearing a cashmere Zegna suit from the 2024 ready to wear collection, and looking at the people in the bar.

They’re all people he feels like he knows, though he couldn’t possibly put names to the faces. Then, because he wants to know how far he can stretch this, he imagines them all as butterflies. And they are, fluttering and blue. They always had been.

And it’s so stupid and so incredible that he laughs and imagines the Kentucky Derby and walks out of the bar and it’s there with the light smell of manure and perfume and sky-high fascinators. Then, he's deep underwater, flickering fish scales, breathing water as though he's a mermaid. He imagines himself flying, running, wearing a moving array of his favorite suits, and the dream keeps on changing with him, stretching and moving however he likes it.

He wakes up laughing and crying. Robert asks him the first mental wellness question from the checklist they have in case one of them goes crazy.

Chapter Text

Al-Jazeera: You mentioned before that dream addiction is a very real risk. What kept you from getting addicted?

A: I think we were all addicted and still are. That said, we had the dream equivalent of an overdose scare, never looked at it the same again.

Arthur likes being outside of the dream sometimes, especially if it's a long one. The even breathing, the PASIV whirring calmly, soft hiss after soft hiss, the shadows playing on sleeping faces. The faint pink imprint of a pillow on Yusuf's face. Mal's lips parted just so, eyelids wrinkled soft like tissue paper. Even the electrode helmets they're wearing are dark and gleaming, mysterious. It's early evening and the sun is mauve and sweet against Mal’s living room.

Arthur is keeping an eye on the equipment, adjusting dosage and time, acting as an alarm, getting the opioid antagonist ready to inject into the IV. He likes being a protector, a guard again, Morpheus instead of Charon. Sleep, not death. The summer is stretching long, and he has almost forgotten what it’s like to do homework and sit at a window at dusk waiting for footsteps.

The sun has hit the horizon and bathed the room in warmth, and Arthur is given a momentary respite from the general unpleasantness of what will happen when Mal and Yusuf wake up (after the naloxone kick, that is; everyone usually comes up swinging), the disappointment, the sharp huff from Mal’s mouth.

They’ve hit a plateau.

Nobody will admit it.

They surround themselves in dreaming instead, as if practicing will save them from the knowledge that they are unable to replicate a prophecy that has already been fulfilled. The PASIV, like a purring silver cat, remains as distant and standoffish as the rest of its kind. Even Mal can't soothe it enough to get its secrets from its sphinxlike paws. We're not in Thebes anymore, Toto, he thinks, amused.

Arthur sighs a little and checks the levels of the morphine compound and the naloxone. It's more out of boredom than out of any real need. Everything is running as it should.

The pink gold coin of the sun slips behind the horizon, and there's only a few minutes of dreaming left for Yusuf and Mal. Tomorrow, it’s Arthur’s turn to go under with Ariadne: they all take cautious turns dreaming with each other, two at a time, to best control all the variables.

Arthur looks at the clock (forty-five seconds left) and slowly adds the naloxone to the drip. Mal stirs almost immediately, unhappy as a child woken up by a loud noise, angry at whoever has interrupted her high. She had looked like that the first time, too.

Arthur still remembers that experiment.

In late June, Mal and Saito had felt comfortable enough with the PASIV code to begin testing shared dreams.

They dared to try it for the first time on a stormy day, as rain pattered down on the roof of Mal's apartment. They were always at Mal's apartment during that month, for some reason or another. Now, they circle around and around, from Robert's townhouse to Dom and Yusuf's shitty bachelor pad with the bunkbeds to Saito’s clean and comfortable one-bedroom. But back then (and it feels like years, not just a month ago) everything happened at Mal's place, covered in silks and woven tapestries and the smell of old French perfume that has gone off a little.

The first time, that first foray into muddled dreamtime, was with Mal and Robert, who were the only two people who had been under with the machine before. The margin of that was slight: Robert had only been under once: after hours, in secret, for a minute. But it was one more minute than anyone else except Mal. Mal, who was the compass they centered themselves around. Mal, who knew what it was to live and breathe pure creation.

Saito had put two minutes on the clock, red LED numbers blinking past, and everyone gathered in a circle around the dreamers and watched them. They had pulled a mattress into the living room and arranged a sofa and soft armchairs around it.

Sleep is intimate, incredibly so, and watching two people dream together felt precious, golden, like seeing a wild doe tip-toeing past on a hike.

But when Robert and Mal woke, they were angry from the kick and confused by the dream.

“It's not right,” said Mal, but was unable to articulate exactly what she meant. “Choppy,” she tried, “Like a lag in a movie, or when the subtitles aren't lined up right.” In the end, she shook her head and went to sit in her room for a little.

Robert shrugged one shoulder. “We went to Paris,” he said, and did not elaborate.

Arthur was almost blind with jealousy anyway.

He understood when he went down himself.

The dreams are lucid, yes, but they’re like natural dreams. They fight back against the dreamers, they’re not as sharp as reality, they don't follow logical paths. You can't read the books, you can't control the surroundings. The dreams nag. They push. They are stubborn. They work according to their own rules.

Even when Mal takes one of them down (and Mal has a good understanding of dreams: she has, according to herself, the most stable dreams out of them all. Stable enough to go down, down, into a salt mine under the earth and excavate it without the world collapsing into brine and flakes of rock), the dreams are wispy and transparent.

For Arthur, that first time when he went down, it began with an espresso and a pastel de nata at a cafe in Lisbon (he has never been to Lisbon) and Mal leading him by the hand into the Old Town. They had a romping good time wandering through a wild mix of Florence and Prague, dancing to the songs of street buskers and flying to the top of the Duomo and running down the Karluvmost, toppling vendors and their carts. There were problems when their visions of the world didn't line up, misty, like fractures in sidewalk concrete, like miserable cracks in a mirror, but they turned towards the golden sun instead of paying it any mind.

Arthur got kicked out of the dream the second they stepped into the Uffizi, spat unceremoniously into the lawn chair they had set up in the sunny backyard of Robert's house.

Later, when Arthur and Mal discuss it over small teacups of strong Queen Anne blend (far away from any Mormons who would tut at them if they saw any hot caffeinated beverages being consumed), they find out that they were picturing different places entirely. Arthur (who had never seen the Uffizi in person) expected to walk smack into David. Mal, who had been to the gallery religiously every summer until she was fourteen, was expecting the ticket office and cloakroom. The two visions had no common ground: Arthur was left heaving in the real world while Mal continued her tour in dreamtime.

It happens again and again, one of the two dreamers getting kicked so strongly it feels like falling into their own bodies.

They repeat the experiment multiple times, switching dreamers, and there is always a moment when the code can't keep up with opposing thoughts anymore and returns the problems to sender.

Saito records every bit of the syntax during the dream, as well as the readings from the electrodes, and combs through it by hand.

Arthur (and Dom and Yusuf and Mal) start spending every spare second watching coding videos on YouTube. Over the course of three weeks of intensive learning, they learn how to model a graph or two. They aren't very helpful.

Saito, on the other hand, devotes himself entirely to improving the PASIV.

An uptick of activity spikes when it is revealed that the person kicked off seemingly at random was actually the one with the weaker electrical impulse: the weaker association or memory or conviction.

“It's actually a really clever self-defense mechanism,” Saito says, and Arthur glares angrily at the unassuming metal briefcase. Sphinx indeed, waking those who failed to understand its riddle. But it was a good thing, because Saito continues: “Otherwise it might short circuit and not wake the dreamers up.”

“This never happened to me,” Mal says, accent heavy. “Anyone could do anything. There was none of this fracturing.”

She always looks a little upset after a PASIV dream, lips in a moue of dissatisfaction. This time (and it seems to be particularly bad this time) Arthur follows her into her room, out of sheer morbid curiosity. Yusuf is left to responsibly wind the IV lines back into the briefcase and to pack the helmets up, battling that sharp unpleasant feeling of getting woken up from an opioid high. Arthur figures Yusuf will get another one of Joseph Smith’s promised kingdoms for that particular sunnah, so he isn't terribly concerned.

Mal's room is rich with dark velvet fabric, plum drapes around the bed and deep jewel green on the walls, faceted crystal bottles which are the source of the perfume smell, and nail polish and strings of pearls on the shelves and makeup in little pots at the vanity. There's no dirt, no lipsticked glasses or crumb-filled plates, no trash except in the little gold wire basket. Everything is clean but the first impression is mess: all her belongings are tacked to the walls and strewn across available shelves and desks.

Mal lays across her bed, the only clean surface, facing the velvet canopy. Her hair is matted with electrode gel. She's not crying, but she looks so defeated that Arthur just sits down next to her, and feels her hip against his when she slides into the dip he's made in the mattress.

“You understand better than the rest, I think,” she says.

Arthur isn't exactly certain what she means, so he stays silent.

“You're not comfortable in the dream,” says Mal, and Arthur's first instinct is to lash out and say that he's perfectly comfortable, thank you very much. The defensiveness feels overwhelming, but all he does is tighten his lips into a pale thin line.

“No, it's good,” she says, suddenly, as if sensing his anger. “It's good. It means you're holding out for something better.”

“What should it feel like?” he asks, but he already kind of knows. It should be vivid, clear and vibrant, easily changed. Each moment should meld smoothly into the next, and only upon waking up should the subject realize that the jumps were nonsensical. The only time he dreams like that is naturally, and the more he uses the PASIV the less often he dreams at all.

Mal only shakes her head, rustling the burgundy sheets, her face pale and hair dark against the color of oxidized blood.

Arthur keeps her words in mind when he prepares to go jumping into Ariadne's head the next day, telling Dom that he's only had a chapel chocolate muffin and water that morning so that his dosage can be adjusted. When he settles down next to Ariadne on the gray heathered couch, she smiles at him with her dark eyes. He watches them flutter closed and then the world melts around him.

Sometimes, dropping down into a dream feels like jumping feet first into a lap pool in the morning, the water saturating the thin material of a swimsuit and cooling the hot flush on cheekbones. Arthur knows this because Ariadne has felt it, once a week from fifteen to eighteen. After some time in the dreams of others, he can recognize which muscle memories aren't his.

So, when he slips under into Ariadne's subconscious, he's aware enough to feel his body slice through the silk of the water, pleasant and smooth against sunburnt skin.

There's no water. He's in an architectural model, a little 3D printed thing with tiny matchsticks carefully glued down to mimic fencing. The green vines dripping from the concrete planters under the windows are cut out of paper, the trees are balls of spraypainted plastic moss.

It's very empty, thinks Arthur.

Ah, that's because it's a dream, he thinks.

And then the people come. It's like seeing one ant on your arm and then looking down and realizing you've stepped on a hill of them, black specks over skin like pepper over a meal, looking for all the world like a map tracking planes around an airport.

Most of the people have thin silk scarves around their necks, fluttering.

Arthur smiles. Ariadne's fashion sense is as distinct in the dream as it is in real life.

He's been aware of the dream since the beginning, which is comforting because that's not always the case. He begins walking through the streets, taking in the walls of the brownstones next to him and the concrete monoliths above them, simple and blank and waiting for some life.

Arthur doesn't exactly decide to do what he does, he only thinks about it a little too hard. A pigeon bobs by his feet, clean and healthy with bright eyes. The linden tree in front of him rustles with leaves and small yellow blooms. He remembers an old tradition for the birth of a child: linden for a girl, oak for a boy. A young oak grows on the other side of the road and Arthur frowns. It'll become too thick for the sidewalk and someone will have to come cut it down. The dose is still too heavy for him, he notes: he only has to think of something for it to appear.

This time, when he twists the landscape, he does it intentionally.

The sidewalk separates from the road revealing a thick strip of earth in which Arthur imagines a row of evenly spaced trees sheltering red hollyhocks and tiger lilies.

It looks nice. Not a city street anymore, but something a little safer for pedestrians. Urban planning was one of Arthur's favorite subjects for a reason.

There's pieces of a shattered mirror, or something reflective anyway, in the air.

Arthur doesn't notice the woman coming up behind him until her gauzy silk scarf is around his neck like a garrote.

Arthur panics. Then, he chokes and all his thoughts are lost in the instinctual attempts to free himself. Gasping for air.

There are blueblack dots in front of his eyes.

He can feel himself dying.

It hurts, too. The pain isn't real, it's cold like holding ice for too long in a palm and also kind of like just before pulling away your hand after touching a hot stove.

Arthur wakes up, turns his head to the side, and vomits bile onto the floor. There's real pain in his elbow: Dom has ripped the needle out. He's immediately helped up to a sitting position, with Dom bracing his head from behind. Arthur gasps, short breaths, hand covering his Adam's apple. The memory of a silk scarf killing him is vivid, and the phantom pressure of it is still against his throat.

He finds a familiar vase and focuses on it. They're in Robert’s house (the owner of which has gone grocery shopping), a small, modern pile of bricks, with a big backyard and a smart foyer which likes to chatter at guests. The living room door is closed to prevent the foyer from looking in and Arthur keeps his eyes trained there, as though the dream woman is going to come kill him again.

He orients himself slowly, closing his eyes for ten long seconds.

“I'm fine,” Arthur says through the sourness in his mouth. His head and the tip of his tongue do tingle strangely, as if his brain is developing the beginnings of pins and needles, but the sensation isn't unbearable. He's already half forgotten what it felt like to choke to death. “Really, I feel better already. Is Ariadne okay?”

Arthur turns, ready to see a mess of sick on the floor matching his, but Ariadne only takes a dozy breath. She's still sleeping soundly, eyelashes curled dark over her cheeks and her chestnut hair splayed over the pillow. Her helmet is strapped neatly under her chin.

“Same as before,” says Yusuf, and manually shuts off the PASIV. “You got kicked.”

“She kicked me,” mutters Arthur, and somehow he means Ariadne and not the woman.

Ariadne’s eyes flutter open a minute later and she sits bolt upright, fists clenched tight. She wrinkles her nose automatically at the smell, but her eyebrows knit when she puts the pieces together.

“I'm sorry, Arthur,” she says once the aftereffects have subsided. “I saw you go down. Was it really bad?”

“You saw me?” he asks. He didn't see her.

She looks guilty. “I was in the viewing terrace on the skyscraper.”

Arthur feels a little ill again.

He's been thrown out of dreams before, but he's never been killed in one.

“You didn't like my changes?” he asks, trying for a joke, but falling short. His voice sounds coarse and angry instead of playful.

“It was my first project, from my first year,” says Ariadne, and she really does look apologetic. “I guess I felt possessive.”

“She killed you?” asks Yusuf, tuning in to the conversation.

“One of the dream people did,” says Arthur shortly, getting up and patting his phone to wake it up. It projects the post-dream questionnaire. Arthur starts filling it out.

“Projections,” Yusuf says.

“What?” asks Ariadne.

Yusuf looks at his socks. “Well, they're not actually people, are they? They're just projections of our subconscious.” He turns to Ariadne. “You must have really liked that model, huh?”

Arthur barely hears that last because he's already out of the door, one hand resting protectively around his neck.

Mal tells them a bit about it during their weekly lunch when Ariadne brings up the subject of subconscious. The computer program she had worked with designated a ‘dreamer’ who populated the dream with their projections.

Saito makes small tidy notes on a napkin and has a visible lightbulb moment. “I've been making all inputs equal, that's why they've been messed up,” he says. “I should be giving the ‘right of way’ to one person, instead.”

Eventually, this realization will become the basis for programming the PASIV to accept a different architect than the dreamer, to allow forgers to work undetected, to prioritize different minds for different jobs. For that moment, it only stops the horrible kicks.

Arthur is only able to enjoy it for the first new sleep, and then he's annoyed and jonesing for more development. Sometimes, it feels to him that only he and Mal seem to have an innate talent for dreams. Everyone else is resigned to the PASIV. For all that the new code stops the machine from ejecting them, it doesn't stop the other problems. From the nausea which comes with being kicked out to the moments when the dream gets stuck.

Being stuck is the new bug they try to work out after they're not being kicked out by each other's electrical impulses. It's a lot like trying to imagine an apple, and then the apple gets eaten by an invisible goat, or blows up bigger than the earth, or changes into an orange. Being stuck is a little like trying to look into the broken mirror in an attempt to see your entire face in one shard.

Yusuf once described growing larger and smaller, without his own consent, like a sick parody of Alice in Wonderland. It sounded amusing (and Arthur wasn't the only one stifling a laugh) but Yusuf had been genuinely distressed.

“It's my own mind,” he had said in despair. “And it wasn't listening to me.”

It's the fault of the machine. The resentment has become thicker, seeping into the air when successive dreamers wake up, kicked out, spat out, after being unable to go where they wanted or do what they wanted in their own minds.

As Saito hunches over the laptop, the rest of them lament the fact that their PASIV is a prototype model, unfinished, and fundamentally flawed. There is now an inside joke among them about glass vials. As the time passes, the laughter becomes tempered with resentment.

They have done everything they reasonably can, and what's stopping them is the knowledge and years and resources which created a billion dollar machine.

Arthur isn't resigned, though. He doesn't remember his first lucid dream anymore, but he does remember the ecstasy of being under and having the world at his fingers. Everytime he goes under, he tries to picture that rapture, that joy, and square it.

He keeps dreaming. They all do, but Arthur feels that he's the one that wants it the most viscerally.

Anonymous: We were in dreamshare for at least two hours a day. Often more. That's twenty-four hours in dreamtime. We were in a state of permanent jetlag. The concoction of somnacin I made was incredibly vivid, to the point where the brain could not understand that it was sleeping. At some point we started to do it in the evening, as if we were laying down to rest, so that we lived one day in the dream and woke up just in time to go to bed again.

Al-Jazeera: Do you consider yourself older than your biological birthday thanks to that?

Anonymous: I'm an elderly man. Me and my friends grew old together, in a long ago dream. We died there and were reincarnated into our youthful bodies.

Edinburgh is beautiful in the summer. Arthur catches the last sprinkling of morning rain on his face as he walks through Princes Street Garden, with its half hill of roses and funny statues of elephants and bears. He weaves around the tourists, who are wearing bright colors and have little cam-drones floating around their heads like flies. His pace is punishing though he isn’t quite sure where he is going, only that he needs to get there quickly. The sun peeks out from behind the clouds curiously, washing the city with butter yellow light. It gets warm, gilding the world gleaming. Arthur takes off his pale Burberry trenchcoat and hangs it from his forearm, like a waiter with a towel.

He’s past The Mound now, on the other side of the National Gallery, and pauses to admire the levels of architecture. The grass is warm and soft under his hands when he sits: below him is the deep valley where seagulls are flying low to the ground next to sunbathers. A small group of schoolchildren, judging by the crimson pinnies they all wear, are all absorbed in a game which looks something like a cross between blind man’s buff and red rover. Two teenagers wearing dark blue uniforms and Fettes College crests walk past where he's sitting. Above them is a line of trees, verdant and lush, waving lazily in the constant breeze. A willow weeps long silvery tears to the grass.

Then, lining the horizon, is a long ridge of verdigris Gothic spires and neo-Grecian columns, interrupted by Edinburgh Castle and two looming green summits behind it: Calton Hill and Holyrood Park.

It’s only when Arthur’s on the foothills that he remembers that he forgot his coat in the gardens. He turns back to get it, because it was expensive and designer and probably had his wallet in it, but the second he takes a step back the wind comes at him.

The light breeze roars into a gale, as swift as a river current, so thick he could cup it in his palms. When the struggle against the air becomes a fight, Arthur is leaning over and moving as though he is in molasses. Each step is painfully slow.

He forces his way down the A1, where people look at him a little oddly as they sail easily around on their thermals while he pushes against what feels like an inflated parachute. Eventually, he makes it back to the garden, picks up his tartan Johnston of Elgin coat and pats the wallet inside the breast pocket. All accounted for.

He starts back to the hill. The path there opens up quick and pleasant, and the wind is at his back. Arthur meanders and the city welcomes him. The world continues moving, bustling, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened.

Stockbridge smells like channel water and brown butter ice cream and gorse, feels like the crunch of Bostock pastry with slivered almonds and cherries. There aren’t many people here either, only owners of the boutique stores looking out at him. He stops by a perfume shop and buys himself a cologne which reminds him of black tea steeped overnight and church incense. The hills are at his back here, even though he’s been walking toward them this whole time.

He hears bagpipes on the Royal Mile, and the echoes chase him to the national theater, where he hears an orchestra striking up.

The brownstones slowly turn into bright shops, studding the buildings like precious gems. Arthur gets distracted again in Marchmont by a café called the Leaf and Bean, which advertises in chalk paint on its windows that if his name is ‘Arthur’ he gets a free coffee today. He goes in, asks for a takeaway iced americano, and briefly thinks that he’ll be in trouble once he gets back to his dorm. Maybe Dom will ask him to repent for drinking caffeine.

For a moment, he panics.

How is he going to buy a ticket back? What is he doing here? He doesn’t have the money to be gallivanting in Scotland. Breaths quick quick quick like seagull wings.

The coffee is warm and has milk and sugar in it, but Arthur isn’t one to complain about a free drink.

Arthur allows the current to carry him along for a little while longer, past a channel and down a tourist-filled road, until he finally ends up overlooking the sea near a martello tower and decides that enough is enough. Obviously trying to follow the path doesn't work and neither does going against the riptide. He needs to swim parallel to shore.

It’s impossible to describe exactly what he does, only that it reminds him of trying to discreetly set down pieces in a strategy game or deflecting in chess. When he’s back at the foothills of a park, the clouds have returned but the heavens have not yet opened.

There's a bit of thunder, and a few buildings topple over like dominoes, but then Arthur feels in control. The world crystallizes in front of his eyes, solid and reassuring. He hadn't noticed the mist until it blew away, and suddenly he can see everything. Arthur recognizes the path he's on: it's the way to his old childhood haunt, a bluff on a Maryland beach.

The castle (what was it called?) rises above the streets like a crown, tantalizing, but Arthur can recognize a tourist trap as well as the next bastard. What he wants is the other hill. Not the one with the columns and the paths but the one which looks wilder. It looks like there’s something hidden on it. There'll be a long drop to the water on the other side, where he can slide down to wade in the shallows like he did as a child.

The city doesn't quite look like Edinburgh anymore. It reminds him of Baltimore.

The climb up the crags feels like a pilgrimage. Arthur’s cheeks are pink and warm against the wind, which whips his hair into knots and grabs at his navy blue Chesterfield coat with greedy hands. The view is beautiful, though, the landscape dropping off after a few hundred miles as though the earth ended there. Under the cliffs, the Chesapeake Bay is blue and still. The grass under his feet is short and very soft, like a good Persian carpet, and he keeps sinking into it as he walks. Arthur ends up taking off his shoes. He sees a pheasant, red headed like it's been shot, run like a checkmark into the high grass.

The gorse isn’t flowering yet, or has already flowered, but either way it is stark and dusky jade green against the hills. Arthur passes the ruins of a chapel, which is decorated in cut roses, red petals swept against the foundations by the wind. He wonders what the celebration was.

He wants to climb up the path which leads to the top of the heath which protects the ruins. This is not as easy as it seems: the ground below his bare feet is slippery and cracks in funny places, pebbles tumbling down, and when Arthur starts using his hands to help, he grabs a palmful of gorse. It hurts, like stinging nettle but worse, tiny needles in his skin.

“Oh, damn you, Eames,” Arthur says aloud, and then stops to wonder why he said it.

He traps that thought, casts it in amber, and knows that he is dreaming.

Arthur’s eyes flutter open to Mal clapping sharply in front of his face.

“Stop it,” he mutters, sleepy with the last dregs of the opioid in him. “I’m awake.”

Eames isn’t even in the room anymore. It must have been a bad one.

“The adrenaline kick was no good,” Mal says, apologetically. “Eames is in the bathroom throwing up.”

They've been practicing intentionally kicking someone out of a dream, for emergencies when they can't afford to wait the minute it takes to wake up naturally. The naloxone makes them aggressive and sluggish, a bad combination. What they need is something natural, effective, like waking up before your alarm in the morning.

“I hope he's okay,” says Arthur. He leaves the electrode-riddled helmet on (and thinks that they really need to find a more discreet way to connect themselves to the PASIV). He asseses his veins while taking the needle out of the mulberry colored mess of his arm. They all look horrible these days, track marks up and down their bodies and flaking electrode gel in their hair. The heat doesn’t make it any easier. The first week of August has left scorched earth and embers in its wake. “I didn’t realize it until I got hurt but I stopped knowing the names of streets and things about a quarter of the way through. And I think it wasn't Edinburgh by the end, though that's where I started.”

Mal nods. “At least the dream switched hands okay.”

Mal hands Arthur his phone and he fills in the questionnaire. It’s difficult to describe a dream after you’ve left it, but practice makes perfect. Dream quality? Arthur chooses vivid and labyrinthine. Location? Edinburgh, Baltimore, cityscape, non-euclidean space. The most recent category, which is called ‘Problems’, he fills with a short description of the gale that stopped him moving freely.

His arms ache. Bruised and tender. “What are we going to do, Mal?” he asks. They're destroying their bodies, slowly, and it feels like they're moving three steps back for each step forward. He barely dreams anymore unless it's a drug fueled hallucination.

“We keep going, dear heart,” Mal says, and moves closer to hold his hand.

They're too close to the perfect dream to stop now.

Arthur walks back to Saito’s apartment in the heat, and his white t-shirt is damp with sweat by the end, with his hands in the pockets of his second-hand slacks. In his dreams, Arthur's always impeccably dressed. Maybe that’s a sign of some sort of insecurity, but he thinks that it’s just because he likes the assurance of having good clothes.

That’s why he likes Saito’s place. Clean lines, expensive soaps, quality furniture. Tableware gleaming, crockery simple and white. And sure, Mal’s place is homey and warm and filled with interesting trinkets, but Arthur prefers open expanses and barely varnished wooden cabinets and silver framed paintings on the walls.

The door pings like a hesitant finger on a piano key when he scans his knuckle. Arthur makes a lot of noise coming in, shuffling his shoes and letting the door slam. He doesn’t like yelling out hello into the apartment, feels like it would be disturbing the peace, so he just makes it clear he's home. Saito is on the couch, curled over a laptop. Arthur feels mild approval that the screen is filled with code: obviously the PASIV program.

“You get the data from just now?” asks Arthur.

“Yeah,” calls Saito but doesn't turn his head away from the screen. “Adrenaline kick was no good. The program couldn't handle it coming without warning.”

“Dinner?” offers Arthur as he goes towards the bathroom in search of a first-aid kit. He smears his arms with the anti-everything pine gel these days, hoping it will cancel out the possibility of infection or abscess. The superbug scare hasn’t stopped anyone from using antiviral and antibacterial over-the-counter medication yet.

Saito shrugs. “Maybe,” he says, noncommittally.

Arthur puts bread into the toaster and looks longingly at the cupboard in which he stores the Queen Anne blend. He finally gave in to his own upbringing (fueled by Mal's hospitality) and started brewing tea so black and strong a spoon would stand upright in it. He tries to hide it as best he can, only sharing it with Mal when they're up late and swearing at the parts of the code Saito will let them touch.

Dom sometimes laments his eating habits. Mal has taken to doing the same.

Arthur still isn’t used to the habits of the megarich, so he goes into the kitchen to make something to eat rather than ordering out. If he didn’t need to, he wouldn’t eat at all; cooking is not his forte. As it is, he subsists mostly off toast, whatever is in Saito’s fridge (miso, two cherry tomatoes, bocconcini, half a head of lettuce, expired fish sauce), vending machine soda, the weekly lunches at the restaurant with his friends, and whatever free snacks are given out after temple. He's become a regular at morning prayer over the summer so that he doesn't have to buy breakfast.

But Saito barely touches his kitchen (the man lives off of takeout and is probably the reason for three quarters of the delivery robots patrolling his street) so he doesn't really notice when other people make themselves meals.

Arthur takes his toast, slices bocconcini and cherry tomatoes to put on top of it, and absconds with the plate to the New York style bar with corresponding red diner stools, and eats while writing a to-do list into a notebook. After the break-in, Arthur had stopped writing in notebooks for a while, but digital organization did not work for him. He went back to paper within a month, but had started writing crosshatch and so vaguely that it wouldn’t make sense to anyone but himself and probably Dom. And Mal, by association.

“How was the dream?” asks Saito after five minutes of trying to run a portion of code and getting an assertion error. Arthur had been chewing sourdough and watching the dark background of the computer program.

He rests his elbows against the counter and remembers the seagulls and the Gothic cathedrals. “It was nice, I got to tour his Edinburgh.”

“Ever been?”

“No. It would be nice though, to catalog the differences.”

“Rough for Eames, though,” commiserates Saito. “Did he throw up?”

“Yeah. I didn't even see him after.” Arthur feels a little bad now about that, but he wouldn't want Eames to stay to watch him throw up if the roles were reversed.

“Who was your alarm?” The computer is showing a graph which tracks the spikes of brain activity during the dream. There's one enormous one which is probably when Mal administred the adrenaline.

“It was Mal this time,” says Arthur.

“Tell her to sign her forms when she sends them in.”

“Okay,” sighs Arthur. “I have a headache.” Then, he wishes that he hadn't said it.

“It's messing with our electrical impulses,” says Saito, matter-of-factly. “Our brains are starting to expect outside interference.”

“Plus the sedation,” says Arthur. The morphine-naloxone-morphine pattern can't be good for them. “We're on the road to serotonin syndrome, probably.”

None of them have said it in such bald terms before, mostly because it would make the constant itch to go under indefensible. But there are side effects worse than the surface unpleasantness of bruised arms.

Saito jerks his chin in agreement.

“At least someone’s paying attention,” sighs Arthur again, who saw the trend and promptly started ignoring the fact that previous outliers had become the new average in their scatterplots. He knows for a fact that Mal doesn't even look at the spreadsheets anymore.

“What we need is a different type of computer,” says Saito, out of nowhere. “The lag is significant. I definitely feel the difference between dreaming alone and dreaming with someone else.”

Arthur tactfully doesn't bring up the fact that a new piece of technology won't make a difference if the code and the morphine don't work.

In the end, Dom goes to Mal’s father.

There's only so much they can all do, young and inexperienced as they all are.

He doesn't tell anyone about it.

Then, on an unusually cool Wednesday in the end of August, just before the start of the semester, Dom calls a meeting at Mal’s apartment. She buys pizza as is customary, and when they get to the door they take off the loose long sleeved shirts they have all taken to wearing.

Arthur sees the matching bruises they all sport, dark and ugly and not allowed to heal before they stick long needles back in, and feels a deep and consuming kinship with all of them. He's seen them all at their most vulnerable, waking up from death by earthquake or tsunami, and softly asleep in the twilight hours as he keeps their dreams stable.

Ariadne’s oversized white t-shirt has sleeves which touch the crook of her elbows and there's a little bit of blood on the right cuff. Robert peels off his socks and the veins on the tops of his feet are shot, too. Arthur notices them on Mal as well, padding barefoot as she is around the carpeted floor. Eames and Dom have burst veins, spreading purple and spiderlike up their arms, from when Yusuf was their alarm.

They look like shit. It's a miracle they're not dead from blood clots, let alone from shooting drugs and willingly sticking their heads in electroshock helmets.

Arthur wants to tell them all that he loves them, for a sick and terrible second he opens his mouth to do so. He takes a breath and holds it. He bites down on a slice of pizza instead, teeth click together, the taste of pesto and olives, the cool air from the open window, Yusuf and Ariadne’s soft voices.

“I told Professor Miles,” says Dom.

Arthur checks if he's dreaming. He usually can recognize a dream, but when he's in doubt he counts his fingers, waits a moment, then counts them again. Sometimes, even if he is dreaming, it fails and the count comes up correct. That's fine, because the dreams he has could not possibly be confused with reality.

Dom's words throw him for a loop, though, and it's only when Arthur tries to dream himself a glass of water with lemon and fails that he knows he's not asleep.

Assured that he's topside, Arthur nods reluctantly. It was the next logical step: Mal's father already gave them parts of the code and he's clearly no fool. He wouldn't want his only child to end up dribbling after playing with electroshock therapy with bad equipment. Not everyone shares Arthur's (very reasonable) opinion.

Ariadne is making noise about pretending that Dom suffered a psychological break, Yusuf has his head in his hands, Eames is staring like he can't believe what he's hearing.

“Dominic, how could you!” bursts out Mal, then goes uncharacteristically silent, as if the betrayal is too much to bear.

Dom raises his hands, open and pale, trying to calm her. “It was clandestine. Office hours, not a confessional.”

“Why didn't you tell us?” asks Robert, who is twisting the corner of a couch cushion between his fingers.

“You'd have stopped me,” says Dom to the room. “And I wouldn't have blamed you. But I had to. You know I had to.”

Arthur agrees. The brain fog, the budding insomnia, the horrible nausea after getting kicked off a dream which wasn't so much nausea as feeling as though your brain wasn't yours, the sluggishness. It isn't sustainable.

“What did you get?” he asks. Dom wouldn't look so pent up if he returned empty-handed.

“The name of the incineration company,” says Dom. “And a keycard with the surname Miles.”

The revelation shocks them into silence. The air is very still.

“He thinks they haven't destroyed it all yet?” asks Mal with a tiny voice. “Even though it's been a year?”

“Most of it is gone,” says Dom, soft as if he's comforting a wounded animal. “But they legally need someone to oversee the incineration of the electronics and biological material. He didn't say so, but I think he was procrastinating it.”

“It's his, too,” says Eames, in his cutting British lilt. “I wouldn't want to see my invention gone, either.”

When Mal starts crying, Arthur blinks hard and tries to keep it together, but Dom puts his hand on hers and says: “I cried too. Right there in his office. He had to clear his throat three times.”

Arthur can imagine it: an office the size of a broom cupboard, old fashioned, or maybe even a lecture hall with tiered seats. The ID card, sitting plastic and innocuous on the desk. Dom, face in his hands, not making any noise at all, just keeled over with the enormity of the chance he’d been given. Professor Miles, with all of Mal’s French superiority, clearing his throat in increasingly loud intervals.

“Three times, Dom?” sobs Ariadne, and the tears turn into relieved smiles.

They plan it like an art heist. Mal has to be the one going in, because her surname matches the ID card and nobody else knows exactly what to steal. The word ‘electronics and biological material’ is just vague enough that even Mal isn't entirely certain what will be in storage at the incernation company. The company is on the far edge of Salt Lake City, which is relatively close to the university (if one was comparing to, say, the moon), and they have to borrow a car off Robert so they're not tracked by the fisheye cameras on the train. Mal has never driven an automatic before; Dom gleefully elects to give her lessons.

Arthur plays point man again, and thinks that the preparation work for Mal's apartment that first fateful day was just a dry run for this. He turns his attention from programming (because he was bad at it anyway) to research. It's mostly a matter of public record anyway: Arthur looks through open job positions, at financial forms filed to the town, at contact information on the official website. He buys a burner phone at a gas station, calls the company, and inquires into the logistics of hiring them to destroy confidential items. They describe their process and then he covers his tracks by telling them it's paperwork (the man on the phone recommends that he contact a shredding company). Arthur thinks that, for a young man with no experience as a private detective, he isn't half bad at this.

After that, it's easy as Mal arranging a day to go. Dom's her getaway driver because teaching her automatic proved unbearable (she kept slamming the brakes thinking it was the clutch) and Dom is, despite appearing otherwise, quite good behind the wheel.

Arthur sits in Saito's apartment (who is conveniently away dreaming with Yusuf and Ariadne) and looks at the little blue GPS dot of her phone on a digital map and stokes his constant low level anxiety into a roaring flame. At least when he's waiting on a dream to dissipate, the stakes are fairly low; this situation could result in any number of undesirable problems, chief and foremost being thrown in jail for treason and never touching the PASIV again.

Thirty minutes into the nervousness, somebody has put a cup of tea into his hand. It's very warm, but not hot, and there's a thick slice of lemon in it. Arthur looks up, and Eames is standing over him.

“I let myself in,” he says.

“Ah,” says Arthur, and to disguise his puzzlement, takes a sip. It's slightly sweet, the result of the remains of a cube of sugar still dissolving at the bottom.

“It's your favorite,” says Eames. “Or else you've been drinking a lot of tea you hate.” And, surprised, Arthur realizes that it is his favorite, even though he never knew that about himself before.

“Dom and Robert would have a stroke,” says Arthur, who had thought he'd been exceedingly careful not to drink any hot beverages in front of Mormons.

“Theyve been praying for your soul,” says Eames smugly. “You're not as sneaky as you think you are.”

Arthur thinks that's not the first time he's heard that. He resolves then to learn how to be sneaky, and wonders if it's a teachable skill. He doesn't know anybody who he considers truly mysterious. Maybe it's because he's seen all of his friends — and they are his friends — in their dreams, as intimate as staring at someone's face and counting the freckles. He knows the exact shade of Ariadne's eyes, the slope of Robert's nose, the moles on Mal's face, the way Eames purses his lips, the wrinkle between Dom's eyebrows, the plumpness of Yusuf's cheeks. It's no surprise that they know him, too.

Still, he sniffs and says: “I kept the judo scholarship a secret.”

Eames capitulates easily, and they stare at Mal's little dot drive further and further west, waiting for the moment she crosses her Rubicon, which takes the form of the gates of the incineration facility.

“The die is cast!” crows Eames, all swotty public school Latin, and then goes silent.

For an hour, Eames and Arthur watch the sky blue dot move in increments around the buildings while sitting stiffly on the hard white couch. Eames is surprisingly warm, radiating heat into the air next to Arthur's arm.

They don't speculate about what's going on. They don't say anything until the two hour mark passes, and then Arthur hisses softly, like one of the breaths of the PASIV.

“What's she doing in there?” Eames asks, rhetorically.

Arthur nudges him with his shoulder, a comforting moment of pressure, and continues looking. The dot moves and he can imagine Mal saying her most charming goodbyes, French accent sultry and low, slouching attractively over whatever she stuck in her pockets.

She leaves the gate. The car drives away. Arthur closes his eyes, takes a breath, and says “let's hope she got something.”

Mal doesn't just get something. She gets a compound labelled somnacin which Yusuf and Ariadne immediately spirit away to synthesize, and she gets a floppy disc that would have fit perfectly in the PASIV before Arthur and Saito took it apart.

And it's easy. A week and a half before the semester starts, Mal doesn't even ask to test drive the combination. She says they can tweak it after they all taste their first real dream.

Anonymous: I have never been happier than I was for the year after I first tried somnacin with my friends. We dreamed more than we were awake, forty or fifty hours a day, just absolutely blissed out, testing out everything. Paradoxes, illusions, games of hide and seek that lasted days.

They float off the coast of New South Wales on Robert’s boat. It has two white sails and a teak deck, just big enough to lounge on. The water is a perfect blue, melting into the sky at the horizon, and the clouds are wind-wisped. Ariadne’s head pops up in the waves like a seal, hair wet and dark and sleek against her head.

“I can't breathe underwater!” she calls, “But Dom made me and Yusuf scuba gear! He's found a coral reef.”

Mal, who's sunning herself on the deck wearing a black bikini, calls back something about natural instinct preventing self-destructive behavior in dreams. Ariadne sends a mist of water at the grad student, who promptly suggests dreaming oneself as a mermaid as a solution to the problem.

Ariadne splashes around in delight, an impossibly long eel-like tail slipping above the wavelets. She burbles a thank you through the pink slitted gills in her neck and dives into the depths of the water. Robert pushes the tiller wide to avoid her, the other hand loosening a taut rope. Eames is clinking ice into a glass next to him. The boom swings around, but Arthur and Mal are both laying down, so it only sends a long shadow across their backs.

Arthur turns the page of his book, breathes deeply through his mouth to taste the salt on his tongue. Arronax has just felt the submarine under his feet — and Arthur is relatively sure that the wording is perfect, more or less as written. He's suddenly very impressed with his memory and wonders if he could do the same with every book he's ever read. Somnacin is a hell of a drug: this feels much more real than the colorful swirl of morphine.

“Mal,” he says, lazily. “Read a passage of this for me, please?”

He tosses the book in a high arc, and because it's Robert's dream, they all have the luxury of reflexes built from years of high school cricket. Mal catches it easily and reads a long, delicious paragraph from a children's storybook about a wizard and a fire demon in a town called Market Chipping.

“Why the hell was your French mother reading you Diana Wynne Jones as a kid?” asks Arthur, amused. He hasn't read it, but because Mal knows what the book is, he has a vague peripheral notion of what it's about.

“Why was your American mother reading you Jules Verne?” parries Mal, padding over to him and curling her sunwarm body into his side.

“Dom will be jealous,” Eames says, sipping something stiff from a highball glass beaded with condensation. He's wearing a horrible paisley button-up and board shorts, and seems to be enjoying himself incredibly.

“Dom knows better,” says Mal, and starts reading out loud from where Arthur left off. The dramatic way in which she reads Ned Land’s remarks on Captain Nemo has the four of them laughing.

They all have dinner at Robert's favorite restaurant, where he bought out the entire place just for them. There aren't even waiters: the food appears and the dirty plates disappear when people aren't looking. The table is long, filled with fruits of the ocean (Arthur is sure that reading Verne caused the exotic nature of the spread), thin flutes of champagne, strawberries like gems and cherries like dark secrets and crisp thick slices of pink watermelon, slices of crusty French bread and yellow butter and marmite, and (oddly enough) grocery store fairy bread. They raise toasts late into the night: the stars come out and go shooting through the inky blue sky. The bubbly is sweet against Arthur's lips and he thinks that nothing could possibly be better than this.

Little bits of Robert make appearances: his favorite shirt is behind the window of a boutique and free samples of vanilla coke are handed out by sour-faced projections, and all the buildings they visit are decorated similarly to his townhouse. Mal’s eyes flick to a waving Australian flag on one of the suburban houses, which means something to her that is not immediately obvious to Arthur.

“What do you see?” he asks her surreptitiously.

She knows what he means at once. “A birth certificate, I think. What do you see?”

Arthur doesn't answer, only goes up to it and unhooks the material from the flagpole. He folds it into a neat square and when he looks down at it again, it's an expired Australian passport. Arthur knows that if he actually tries, really tries, it'll eventually become a diary entry or a high school essay, but he doesn't need to. A stranger might not understand, but Arthur has spent long nights in Robert's head and longer nights debating the philosophical nature of dreams while mapping brain scans. This is a secret he should have guessed from the flag alone.

Then, the dream dissolves in a flurry of bubbles and Arthur wakes up with his hand on Robert's wrist and his head on Eames’s chest and his ankle hooked around Mal's. They're all on one mattress, no one acting as an alarm, just trust in Mal's assertion that they'll be fine this once.

The last of the evening sunset disappears behind the horizon, Dom distributes toothpaste and toothbrushes, and they all fall back onto the same mattress in a heap of blankets after washing the sleep out of their eyes and brushing their teeth. Robert wears a quiet smile for the rest of the evening, and drops off first, as the rest of them discuss ways to improve the details of the program: as lovely as it is, it's a bit too glossy, a bit too clear, compared to the dreams they're all so used to now. They have the luxury of experimenting with somancin now, which will probably go as smoothly as their first go at a compound (which is to say, not at all).

Arthur's discussing the adrenaline kick again with Saito when Dom slings his arm around Mal's waist and falls asleep with his face in the back of her neck. Arthur, who has long ago stopped finding Mal intimidating, interrupts himself to quirk an eyebrow. But she only nods, a tiny little thing which makes her chin double for a moment, and Arthur has to suddenly reconcile himself with the fact that the most beautiful woman in the world has fallen in love with a Chemistry major who sometimes forgets to shave and thinks elephant toothpaste is entertaining.

“You have horrible taste,” he mouths, and she dimples at him.

He turns his back to her and shares Saito's mint-flavored air, whispering about REM cycles and hypnic jerks and wasn’t that day so lovely, weren't those stars so bright, aren't they the toast of the town, the cream of the crop, the smartest group of fools there ever was in the world?

Arthur goes into dreamshare every night after that for an entire week, for twenty or so minutes each time, and then sleeps over wherever the PASIV is. This makes him acutely aware that he's couchsurfing until the semester starts and even more certain that everyone else considers this a strange personality quirk of his rather than a result of his social class.

Yusuf and Dom have decided to move into an apartment off campus together, and Saito made absolutely no noise in regards to him moving out, so Arthur stays nebulously homeless. The application period for the dorms has long passed anyway.

He starts working instead, a real architectural internship as an archival assistant which takes up a minimum of his time and fills his savings account with an equally minimum wage. If Saito does kick him out (though this doesn't seem especially likely), he'll at least have first month's rent for an apartment. Though he does suspect that Mal wouldn't allow that to happen either, for a multitude of reasons but mostly because she and Dom seem to have fallen quite deeply into the illusion that they are the parental figures of their group.

Arthur doesn't buy this. He knows, as much as he loves them and as much as he knows them, a military torture chamber will split them easily. Arthur seems to be the only one who realizes how badly it will have to end.

For now, though, he allows himself to love them freely; and in the meantime, he withdraws money, to stuff into a metal praline box, from his bank account (which can be frozen) and notarizes a will which leads his parents to a rented safe, under a fake name and paid for in cash, with blueprints of the PASIV hidden in architectural drawings. He also signs a stack of advanced directives in case of incapacitation (because the chance that he might get stuck in the dream is probably not zero).

Arthur doesn't tell anyone else what he's doing. He knows they'll laugh at him, but he likes being prepared.

But as much as he is organized, it's only five days before the semester begins that he realizes that he hasn't visited his parents, despite promising to do so. He mentions this, offhandedly, to Saito; that evening, he's in the airport in Salt Lake City following a woman in a pencil skirt and blazer to a private plane. He takes a small suitcase filled with his crosshatched notebooks, mostly because he has no room for them but also a little bit because he feels uncomfortable keeping all of his knowledge about dreamshare in one place.

The plane sobers him up, and so do the next five days, where he detoxes from all the drugs he's been doing. There's no seizures, thank you God-and-Joseph-Smith, but he feels awful, like his head is full of crackling sparks and he wants to go under so bad that he starts biting the skin around his nails until they're bleeding. It feels like there's ants crawling around under his skin. He wakes up four or six times a night, and doesn't dream a single thing. He tells his parents that he caught the flu and forgot to write to them about the flight while in the throes of the disease, and they scold him thoroughly about traveling while sick. Five days are spent laying in his childhood bed, feeling his muscles spasm and his bones ache. If it wasn't for the pain, it would feel suspiciously like a dream itself, navy blue and very neat and being fed chicken soup by his father.

When Arthur's mother asks about the internship, he can't resist the urge to add a bit of truth to the numb repetition of archival work: he talks about electrical impulses and the faraway possibility of tailored dreams and how he's learned a programming language. He's so animated that he uses his hands to talk, and his sleeve slips a little to show faint purple bruising. When he's finished, his mother only looks at him confusedly.

“Arthur,” she says gently. “Why are you working on this?”

“What?”

“You're an architectural student. You told me you found a position at a firm. Not a tech start-up.”

Had he told her about the archiving internship? It's been twice as long for him as it has for her, he realizes. He hasn't seen her for eight months, if he's including all the time he's spent dreaming.

“Mom, it is an architectural firm,” he says, and it sounds a little bit like a croak. She lets it go, but he hears her discuss it with his father that evening.

In the night, when he's ostensibly asleep, she comes back up and sits on the edge of his bed, petting her fingers over his hair.

“I love you, Arthur,” she says. “Whatever is happening, I'm not stupid and neither is your father, and you can come to us about it. We were your age once, too, and we made all sorts of mistakes.”

Arthur turns to her. “It’s not even like that,” he complains. He feels like a teenage boy caught drinking.

“I know,” she sighs. “You're much smarter than I was at your age. But that just means that your mistakes have the potential to be bigger.”

Arthur thinks about treason, and stealing military secrets. “Mom, if anything ever happens, wait for me to explain. Don't take anyone else's word for it. Me or a letter from me.” Or a will, he thinks.

He expects her to demand an explanation, to get his father involved, to bluster and beg and a half dozen other things. But she just takes his hand, runs her thumb over the bruising on his wrist, and draws her own conclusions.

“You need to stop,” she whispers.

“I know,” he admits.

“Would it be wrong to suggest rehab?”

He laughs a little. “Would you believe me if I said that I wasn't actually doing drugs?”

She goes quiet for a moment. “You know what's strange,” she says, “I would believe you. I do believe you, because you'll let me do this.”

Her thumb goes again over his wrist, then pulls up the pajama sleeve to expose the obvious track marks.

“You need to stop,” she says again, and this time, Arthur thinks that she knows everything despite the fact that he's barely told her anything at all.

The next day, he stacks the notebooks under the loose floorboard near his bed (where he used to hide his toy cars). They look innocuous there, dusty and scratched up Moleskine leather. He puts a few toy cars on top of them, and slides the board back in place.

His next dose of somnacin gives him back his dreams and, like someone trying to forget a nightmare, he puts the withdrawals out of his mind.

September hits like a freight train into a taxi. Going to class after a summer of shooting morphine and somnacin feels like the most pointless activity ever conceived. Arthur fills his elective blocks (of which there are many, scholarship and advanced credit student as he is) with anatomy and physiology, chemistry, and the psychology of dreams. His architecture doesn't suffer, exactly, but he definitely isn't in contention for the Dean's List anymore.

Arthur finds that, once the semester goes into full swing, he misses having the dorm on the corner of the building. He misses staying up late and watching the throngs of people walk through his life, leaving behind tokens of affection. So, he starts swinging himself out of Saito's living room window and climbing onto the apartment roof, where attic windows jut out of the sloped roof. He swings out of the office where he's been sleeping, and his hands feel good on the cool shingles.

He likes being there, breathing the fresh night air and the slowly receding summertime, watching the drunks and the students from the college make their way home. He likes putting in earbuds and listening to music as he stares up into the stars.

It's because Arthur’s up there on the roof, scribbling some physics problem assigned for the next morning, that he sees two black electric cars silently pull up to the sidewalk next to Saito's apartment and watches in horror as men in tactical gear walk up the stairs and take a battering ram to the front door. It all takes less than twenty seconds, efficient and professional, and Arthur knows he's watching his life get destroyed in real time.

The door screams. Arthur's never heard a building in pain before. It doesn't sound like a human, since computers can't feel pain, but the door makes a noise like hinges creaking and repeats a pattern of ‘hello who are you what are you doing don't do that you’re not allowed to do that’ over and over, a chorus which distorts and screeches and lowers to a moan as the men shatter the circuitry to bits.

It's inhumane to do that, utterly vile, and it stops Arthur in his tracks. He chokes back vomit. Smart buildings aren't people, sure, but they're purposely kept stupid and they're programmed to be kind, and killing one is like ripping apart an intelligent animal.

He swallows back against the sour taste in his mouth and tries to think practically. If the door is dead, then it can't tell their secrets. Yes, circuitry can be reanimated, but the personality would have died with the intelligence. You can't kill something almost alive and expect it to come back exactly the same as it was, let alone not resenting you. The only reasonable conclusion is that these people must not care about evidence.

He has to treat Saito as already lost. If they know his address, they know he's home.

Arthur fumbles out his phone and calls Mal. She doesn't pick up, so he calls Dom. He hears Dom's sleepy voice on the second ring, and furiously whispers for him to pack and go go go, tell the rest, then take everything important and disappear. Dom hangs up without asking why. Arthur trusts him to contact everyone else and to destroy his own phone.

Then, he calls his mother.

Her voice is crackly in his ear, or maybe it's just his nerves. More men fill the street, a few looking self-righteous in dark suits.

“Hi mom,” he says, not giving her time to respond. “No matter what they say about me, it's not true. They'll say that I'm dead, or kidnapped, or in legal trouble, or a terrorist, or something: it won't be true. Don't tell anyone about this phone call.”

“Come home,” she snaps, worried. She must take the phone from her mouth because Arthur hears her muffled shout for his father. Then, her voice is loud in his ear: “Come home now. We have a good attorney.”

“I can't,” he says. Then, something strikes him. The notebooks. He thanks God, for the first time in his life, for the premonition to get rid of them. “Tell Dad that I miss playing cars with him. The collectibles. He should look for them, for old time's sake, okay, the ones in my room, and get rid of them. I'm too old to be have them. Okay?”

“What? Arthur! Toy cars?”

“Promise to tell him to get rid of them. The ones in my room, where I kept them as a kid. Promise!”

He can't risk telling her more. He can't risk that someone will try to interpret this conversation.

“I promise,” she says.

“I love you both,” he says, and hangs up.

Arthur tells his phone to eject the SIM card from its innards, places it between his back molars, and bites down hard. It snaps, and he pushes it underneath shingle.

And it's only then, as he hears Saito's voice begin to yell, at first officiously and then in outrage, that he realizes that the PASIV is still in the apartment, on the living room table. The sangfroid that allowed him to make phonecalls and sacrifice Saito for more time to escape evaporates under the lightning strike of panic.

The risk assessment portion of his brain only engages when he's halfway inside the window. He freezes, then curses himself for being wasting time and clambers down into the office. Sweat drips down from under his armpits, slick and cold.

Every so often he can hear Saito’s voice say the words ‘attorney’ and ‘my father', likely trying to give Arthur some time to run.

“I want some privacy. Please quietly lock the door,” Arthur whispers to the wall, and he hears the soft snick of the lock. He tries to be as quiet as possible getting his wallet and emptying his school backpack onto the couch. Then, he grabs his good jacket, and fills the inside pockets with the most important papers on his desk: the mock-ups for the PASIV blueprint which now sits in a rented safe, the formula for somancin. He takes down the silver frame which holds the map of his brain and Mal's, shoves the metal under the foldout couch and stuffs the papers down his shirt.

He fills the backpack hurriedly with vials of somnacin scattered around the room, with the printed film pictures of his friends at a restaurant, the binder that Saito printed his scatterplots into, the thick USB stick filled with old and new versions of PASIV code, anything, everything, that looks condemning. The backpack barely zips.

Saito is getting louder and louder, and then suddenly goes silent. It is the worst sound Arthur has ever heard.

He makes a split second decision. These men probably aren't municipal cops, so police presence will probably make things a little more complex for them. Slow them down a touch more.

“House,” Arthur says, sliding out of the window, trying to find his balance carrying the backpack. “Saito has been attacked by intruders. Call an ambulance and police.” An afterthought: “And his lawyer.”

The office slams the window shut and begins to wail, keening. Arthur hopes it's not a mourning cry. He climbs quickly to the other side of the sloping roof, and starts to run, jumping over the terrifying gaps between buildings, clutching at the front of his shirt, praying that the straps of his bag don't break, thinking that this must have been how Eames felt, all those months ago, just before he fell through Arthur's window.