[Inception fic] Somnambulism
Mar. 25th, 2011 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopOne of those many things I meant to post about last year but never quite got around to would have been a nice long spiel about how much I loved Inception and how badly I got (briefly) sucked in by the glorious insanity that was its fandom. Hence (give or take several months delay while both I and my beta reader found ourselves helplessly flat out with the pre-Waicon hustle), fic!
The idea for this one came from a thread on the kink meme (I think, I have failed utterly at finding the same prompt again since) asking for a Superhero AU where the characters have access to all their assorted dream-powers in real life. So Eames would be a shapeshifter, Cobb would be able to read minds, Ariadne would be able towalk through walls wait wrong movie warp reality or something, etc. A nice idea, and I have a weakness for superhero AUs at the best of times, but I really wasn't planning on writing in this fandom – at least, not until it struck me that the dream-powers it would be most interesting to see working IRL were some of those that hadn't come up in the thread at all...
Anyway, splitting it into two parts to post. The next one only needs a few final edits and should be done within a week at most.
Title: Somnambulism
Chapter: 1/2
Summary: [Superpowers AU] The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
Characters/Pairing: Implied Eames/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 9400 (this part)
Warnings: Not much more than you’d see in the movie. Violence, characters involved in morally dubious activities, writer tackling fandoms and/or subject matter outside her usual range – the usual.
The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
***
It takes a second meeting to leave a lasting impression, the main impression being the singular fact they get to have a second meeting.
It isn't the point man's face Eames recognises first – much later, he's going to be ashamed to realise he hadn't paid even passing attention to the his face first time around – it's the way he moves. The finest nuance of someone's posture can be as good as a fingerprint to the trained eye (it's certainly worse than a neon warning sign if you get it wrong), but Eames would have to admit that a lifetime of cultivating an appreciation for nuance becomes a little redundant when you're seeing a man run straight up the side of a building as though gravity were something that only happened to other people. He'd seen wall-crawlers before in his line of work, but this one had style. It had seemed a crying shame to see it all go to waste.
Eames had not actually cried over it. Maybe sighed wistfully a bit. He always did prefer to work with professionals.
So when he catches sight of someone scaling a fire escape below him without setting a foot on any of the stairs, his first thought, give or take a touch of not-even-grudging admiration, is, there's another one? As the someone (man, definitely a man) gets closer, he revises this to, they must have worked with the same trainer, ignores the whisper of adrenaline that shivers his way up his spine, and after that he's too busy moving to intercept to listen to what all those cultivated instincts are trying to tell him he's seen.
He has his gun trained on the spot where the man's head is going to pop up over the top of the wall a comfortable several seconds before it does, but in that crucial moment that he'd marked for getting this over with neatly, he sets his eyes on the man's face, and freezes. He honestly hadn't had the faintest idea he'd gotten a good enough look at the face of the last wall-crawler to recognise it again until he's doing it.
In the lists of suicidal mistakes one can make while looking into the face of someone who could beat your elevator to the roof of a multi-story building and still have time to adjust his cuffs, straighten his tie and select his favourite silencer before the doors open, this is so close to the top that it doesn't matter, and the only thing that saves Eames is that the other man has just done the exact same thing. It's an unspeakable relief to see his confusion mirrored in the offending party's face; in part, yes, because he hasn't been shot (again) (yet), but mostly because it's the best tell available that he hasn't gone insane.
Eames, master at making himself sound exactly how he needs to sound, is at a bit of a loss as to why his tone comes out so conversational when he says, “You know, I could have sworn I shot you the other night.” Yes, there'd only been a split second between seeing the other man raise his gun and hearing the shot, and no, he hadn't been in a state to see whether he'd hit his mark afterwards, and no, he hadn't gone back to check, but Eames is a very good shot.
The other man reaches for his gun, and the rest of the encounter (all point-three-five seconds) is depressingly familiar. Eames is not sure what other reaction he expected.
It takes him most of a minute to pull himself together, spitting the bullet into his palm. He'd kept quite a collection of specimens like it once upon a time, in memory of deaths cheated. Nowadays, he counts it as a greater victory if he can avoid getting shot in the first place. He usually throws them away.
He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and takes a moment to appreciate his own hypocrisy. The explanation is poetically obvious, no matter how unsatisfying – in one night, not just to be faced with the fact you're not the beautiful and unique snowflake you thought, but that the other guy somehow managed to wrangle anti-gravity powers into the bargain. The question is still there, how neither of them saw or heard the other getting up and creeping away last time they went through this, but in the face of all the other evidence it's probably just flagrant denial. He should probably spend his effort being glad he's up first.
He keeps his gun trained on the other man as he approaches, all the time expecting – something. Any sign of life, really. When several minutes have passed without so much as a twitch, he kneels carefully and wraps his fingers around the wrist of one outflung arm.
It's definitely a body, and – inasmuch as he's qualified to tell in this uncertain world – it's definitely dead.
“You're really not fooling anyone,” he tells it.
The body begs to differ.
He entertains the idea of lugging it home with him for the scientists to have a poke at for about five seconds before he remembers that he's not nearly enough of a masochist to bother. It doesn't take much longer for him to decide he's had exactly as much scouting as he can take for one night.
For all he knows, the other man got lucky the first time. Somehow.
He slips the bullet into a pocket as he turns away. It's not sentimentality; within an hour or two, he's going to need physical evidence to convince himself this wasn't all some crazy dream.
***
Once may be chance, twice coincidence, but three times can only be conspiracy.
“You and I have got to stop meeting like this,” says Eames.
The other man shoots him three times in the chest, and has just time to look surprised when Eames returns the favour on his way down.
***
Three nights of running scouting excursions and nothing to show for it but the very real concern that either his own mind or the universe at large is misbehaving in ways he should be worried about leave Eames feeling a little unprofessional. He has Thoughts – the kind requiring a capital 'T' – on the subject of professionalism in his field. He was a thief before he ever discovered he had the capacity to become a good forger, and he had years of experience in forgery under his belt before he became... whatever you call what he is now. So long as there's only the one of him he doesn't suppose it needs a name, other than the one he's in the habit of using nowadays.
Somewhere along that line, the majority of the work available for professionals in his field started to feel easy, in a disconcerting sort of way that was difficult to enjoy as much as he ought; even getting the chance to show off his many talents to a captive audience lost its lustre some time ago. In the same manner that surviving a bullet wound has ceased to be nearly as satisfying as finishing a job without getting shot, the pride he used to feel at pulling off a particularly flawless forgery pales next to that of pulling off the job using no-one's face but his own, and part of that, yes, is nothing more than pride, misplaced or otherwise, but part is prudence (what they don't know you can do they can't prepare for, not to mention the part where he never has been any good at holding form through a headshot), and only a little is for personal reasons of a sort he rarely remembers to examine except when drunk and maudlin at odd hours of the morning. But leftover at the end is still a part – no matter that he's in the sort of profession that set him up against someone who shot barbs out of their fingertips while hanging from the ceiling on his last job – where it just doesn't seem fair otherwise.
If there is a good chance the job will involve getting shot at, he prefers to work alone. That has very little to do with pride, and everything to do with the wretched guilt of watching some poor bastard get gunned down beside you while the worst you can complain of is having to play dead for a few minutes with a bullet under you tongue until everyone turns their backs. If that sort of sentiment is unprofessional of him, then professionalism can go hang.
Nevertheless, after three nights spent achieving only the questionable result of having put the enemy security even more on edge, he isn't feeling like he has much to be proud of.
“Let's talk about that offer of sending in some of your people as support,” he says to the men who are paying him that rather ridiculous sum to pull off this job.
“As backup?” they say.
“I was thinking more along the lines of as a distraction,” says Eames.
“How many do you need?” they ask him.
Eames remembers the wall-crawler who found him three times and should, by rights, have had him outgunned at least once, and tries to think of a way to phrase the answer that doesn't come out to the effect of, “How many do you mind losing in one go?”
***
They enter the maze at the same time, from different entry points. They're not ten minutes in before he gets the radio message to say the first team has found trouble. Eames doesn't ask whether it's the kind of trouble that runs at you up the side of a building; he's of two minds regarding whether he wants it to be, though considering the speed with which the point man found one intruder on the last few nights, it seems more or less inevitable.
Nevertheless, it doesn't really cross his mind that it could be anyone else when, hardly minutes later, a bullet impacts on the masonry not two inches from his left arm and sends Eames diving around the nearest corner. There he stops and waits, gun drawn, while two more bullets hit the ground where he was standing half a second previously. It's a sorry excuse for cover, but there's nothing better available, and he's capable of being realistic about his odds of outrunning the man who's chasing him.
By the fourth gunshot he's starting to feel insulted. Does that fool really think he's going to stick his head out back there if he keeps it up?
“Einstein, smart chap that he was, had an interesting way of defining of insanity; you might want to look it up when you've got a moment,” he hollers.
The shooting stops.
“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?” says the point man.
Eames feels suddenly light-headed. Now would probably be a very bad time to make a pithy comment like, 'Oh, you do talk, I was beginning to wonder.' There's something important about that voice that he's sure he's missing, but here he is, unable to get past the fact he's hearing it at all.
“On the other hand,” says the point man, without obvious malice, “doing it over a couple of times to make certain is a pretty good definition of the scientific method. Einstein could've told you a few things about that too.”
Something he's missing – like, for example, the fact that voice is coming from over his head. Oh.
Eames has just long enough to take in the sight of a man-sized shadow hanging upside-down from a window ledge above before being shot in the shoulder with a tranquilliser dart. He's dutifully impressed; it doesn't work – his body spits the drug back out just as fast as everything else it doesn't like – but he can't think of anyone else who's tried that one on him before.
He staggers under the impact, but it's ninety percent theatrics, staged to buy himself the time to get his own gun to an angle where he can return fire. He gets another three darts in the same arm for his trouble. The point man throws himself sideways out of the path of Eames' first shot, but the second gets him in the leg and gravity – joining the party late – does the rest.
He rolls on the landing and almost makes it back up before Eames' next bullet gets him in the back of the head. He goes down without a sound.
Several seconds go past before Eames moves, mentally getting his breath back. Then he makes himself walk up to the body, rolls it unceremoniously onto its back and checks its pulse, first on the wrist and again on the neck. No surprises.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asks aloud, but it's mostly habit; he's really not in the mood anymore. In the last week he's been shot twice in the head, three times in the chest and now four times with tranquillisers – and even if the point man's methods are getting further from effectiveness rather than the reverse, there's more at work here than random luck. He'd admitted exactly as much not a minute ago.
The scientific method, hm? thinks Eames Well, two can quip on that topic.
Eames reaches for his radio.
“I've changed my mind. I want that backup here. Tell them to bring a stretcher.”
The backup looks rather disappointed when they find out he's not injured.
They look even more displeased when they find out he wants them to lug a human body back to base and he won't tell them why.
***
There's a saying in the forgery business: You don't have to be bisexual to work here, but it helps. In some parts of the world, the march of memetic mutation has rendered it into something more along the lines of: If you're not when you start, you will be by the end of the year. The implication in either version is that anything else would be doing it wrong. Like most witty generalisations it's not in any sense true, but it does betray a couple of very basic truths about the nature of the business – if you don't go in with a certain curiosity about people, a certain willingness to try (for lack of a less weighted term) 'new things', you're unlikely to go very far.
Out of the fraction of a percent of the population born with the fundamental physiological malleability one needs to mould their body at will, only an even smaller fraction are cut out for true forgery. There's plenty that can be done to modify the human body that has nothing to do with the need to pass as human, let alone as someone specific. Eames has known people who can compress themselves until they can slide through a crack in a wall barely two inches wide, grow bone spurs from their knuckles, stretch their limbs until they stand fifteen feet tall and all manner of other stomach-turning tricks. There are limits, of course; mass is a constant that even shape shifters are limited to gaining or losing by the usual methods, and there is only so far one can deform the human body and still have it function (something more than a few learn the hard way). There are side effects to contend with as well; it's a rare thing to meet a flesh sculptor with more than a year or two's experience in the business who hasn't developed some quirk about their features that tips them a little way down the side of the uncanny valley – face too stiff, eyes just a little too far apart, mouth that spreads just a little bit too wide when they smile. It's the job that comes with complimentary botox, as the joke goes, which is almost polite when you consider that plastic surgery has nothing on what shapeshifting can do to your features.
This is only one of many points of contention fuelling the contempt that most of the professional forging community holds over those who specialise in using their talents in a less subtle capacity (as if they ever needed any more justification for rivalry than being the superpowered equivalent of the split between rugby and football, or knitting and crochet). Say what you like about forgery as a profession, it's obvious no proper forger would ever forget how to make themselves look human. (Relatively few forgers will readily admit that flesh-sculpting is among those ‘new things’ they had tried but found themselves ill-suited to.)
In retrospect it's a shame that there hadn't been more dialogue between the two factions, or maybe someone in the forgery business might have guessed a little sooner that, like so many obvious things, this was a generalisation doomed to be proven false in every possible regard.
Eames has rarely found cause to regret having come to the business late. He’s always found learning from other people’s mistakes to be infinitely preferable to learning from one’s own.
***
“Would you like to tell me why you brought back a human body?” says Mr Charles when Eames gets back.
“Oh, it's not for you, it's for your science team,” says Eames. After spending the last twenty minutes following a corpse home and jumping half out of his skin every time the motion of the stretcher had made it twitch suspiciously he is far too tired and far too fed up for diplomacy. “I thought I'd get them something to show my appreciation for how helpful they've been.”
The thin line of Charles' mouth speaks of a whole world of objections warring to be the first one out.
“But since we're talking,” Eames goes on, “tell me something: your suspicions about this 'top secret research' going on in that facility, do they in any way involve human cloning?”
When you're as good with body language as Eames is, it's plain embarrassing to see someone go pale that obviously right in front of you.
“I'll get them on it right away,” he says.
“Good man,” says Eames.
***
“Call me Mr Charles,” is the first thing the man hiring him on behalf of Mr Fischer had said when they met.
The way he'd pronounced 'Mr Charles' made it such an obvious alias that Eames had momentarily entertained the idea that this was all a double bluff and that was actually his real name. He and his assistants were serious men in serious suits, and they all fitted the stereotype of the same to such an astonishing degree that Eames was occasionally surprised to be reminded that none of them actually made a habit of wearing sunglasses indoors. He could just tell they were going to hate each other.
He hadn't met Mr Fischer. It was made clear he wasn't going to meet Mr Fischer at all, and that if pressed, Mr Fischer could be expected to deny any knowledge that anyone meeting Eames' description was working for him or any of his subsidiaries in any capacity, and this may well have been true. Mr Fischer is a powerful man who wants a particularly difficult job done for him, and he's rich enough not to have to care how. Eames has the idea that if it weren't for the sake of attaching a high profile name to this job he wouldn't have heard Fischer's name at all – even allowing that a lot of what gave the name its high profile status are probably not the most welcome of reasons.
At least a couple of years must have passed since the worst of the media storm blew over, but it's going to be a lot longer than that before anyone who lived through the collapse of Fischer-Morrow will readily associate the name with anything else. The true poetry shall always remain in the timing, when what had been anticipated as perhaps a slight stock drop in the wake of Maurice Fischer's death turned into the entire conglomerate going belly-up overnight, for reasons that, underneath enough economic jargon to fill a whole season's worth of financial gossip columns and late night talk shows, are still essentially shrouded in mystery to this day. The best conspiracy theories go so far as to propose the old man planned the whole thing as his last laugh against the world.
“The Mr Fischer?” Eames had asked.
“Was buried in a private ceremony two years ago,” he was told, as though there were real chance he could actually be that stupid. “We're authorised to retain your services on behalf of the junior Mr Fischer, R-”
“Robert, yes, right,” Eames had returned, “you may have missed my meaning there, but when I said 'the Mr Fischer', I was in fact referring to the remaining Mr Fischer, distinguished by, as you point out, still being alive.” It's certainly not as though Robert's name hadn't had its own share of news time, what with his father leaving the son who was to inherit his empire with naught to his name but a multi-million dollar trust fund stocked with the riches to allow any man to live in relative luxury to the end of his days. Eames does not recall feeling particularly sorry for him when the story broke, though if it's been this many months and his own lackeys still haven't learned to think of him as 'the' Mr Fischer yet, Eames has to allow that maybe the poor sod does deserve some kind of pity.
Most of Robert Fischer's remaining luck had probably been expended simply getting out of being personally indicted for any part of what went down. By the time everything was dying down though he'd come under just enough real suspicion and scrutiny that it would take a very determined conspiracy theorist to seriously doubt that everything that happened had come as just as much a shock to him as to the rest of the world. Indeed, it's a mystery which Eames quickly learns he's still very much invested in solving, and it seems that an awful lot of ex-employees of one of those more mysterious Fischer-Morrow subsidiaries have turned up in the employ of a discrete research facility in South Africa owned by Proclus Global, a company which has done very well for itself in the wake of its chief competitor's demise. Which is a bit like observing that the wolves will do well for themselves once you've cleared the cheetahs out of their range, really, but one can hardly say the younger Mr Fischer doesn't have reason to be suspicious.
The situation is thus:
Eighteen months earlier, an area measuring roughly two square kilometres on the outskirts of Johannesburg was leased 'for redevelopment' by Proclus Global. If what they've done with it since is half as interesting as the history of the region, then the next item on their agenda will probably involve pitching the film rights.
The original lease on the area, then more than an hour west of the city limits, was held by a mining company by the name of Milton Deep. By the time the area's mineral wealth had run out, urban sprawl had caught up with them, and the directors were only too pleased to refit what remained of their facilities and sell up at a profit before the whole region was swallowed up into the maw of an encroaching industrial zone, following which it enjoyed a good three years of booming production before the honeymoon period came abruptly to an end. In light of what later became evident about Milton's shining legacy it's a wonder the boom lasted that long before suddenly the excavation for a new basement was inexplicably managing to undermine the wall all the way on the other side of the street, and there were cracks forming just under all the roofs on the other side of town as the foundations sloped very slightly sideways, and all the while it was getting harder not to notice that the edge of the main pit that all the regulators had signed off as unconditionally stable was getting closer by the month, not to mention a dozen other warning signs that, to their credit, most of the more mobile businesses spotted for what they were relatively quickly, and had themselves well into the process of clearing out before it had even made the news.
At any rate, productivity in the area was well past its peak by the time the earthquake actually hit and half the remaining foundations all liquefied at once. Realistically, the quake probably didn't do much worse than to speed up the inevitable, but it certainly got them there by the most dramatic means possible.
By the time the new batch of regulators, these ones more thoroughly certified and rather less well paid, had been through and declared the worst of the settlement was over this time and reconstruction – within more careful limits – was possible again, no-one wanted anything more to do with the place. Miles of chain-link fence and bold placards declaring the whole area condemned haven't done a thing to dissuade a population of several thousand squatters from moving into any remaining building which hadn't completely sunk into the mud, but anyone with real money had taken one look at the sordid history of the place and decided to invest it somewhere more historically stable.
Until eighteen months ago, when Proclus had showed up with a generous offer to take the whole area off the government's hands and walked away with all the deeds by the end of the week. The official propaganda had been full of cheer about the possibilities of urban renewal, which came closer to being dirty words in a land where the first stage of 'urban renewal' invariably involved evicting the current residents from the gutter they'd been eking out their living in and transplanting them all somewhere worse. Given the spin quota in all those glossy leaflets it hadn't been particularly remarkable that over a year has now passed without much sign of any real urban renewal going on. What’s more remarkable is that in that time not more than a handful of the previous residents seem to have been asked to leave. It's understood that somewhere inside, well away from any edges, Proclus have found something with walls that still stands on its own and set up shop, arranged to have private security instated and all the amenities reconnected, and have since proceeded to run up a slightly terrifying electricity bill for a facility of their size, but done little else. They pay their bills and even their taxes, with a regularity and enthusiasm that Eames finds rather suspicious, and have been responsible for a lot of helicopter traffic over the heads of the squatters, but otherwise the city probably hardly knows they're there.
“I can see why you're worried about what they might be up to in there,” Eames had said. “They sound absolutely despicable.”
Eames had watched Mr Charles consciously suppressing two different nervous ticks while his assistant said, “You of all people, Mr Eames, should be aware that one's public face and one's private are rarely one and the same.”
“I'm not sure I like what you're implying about me,” said Eames, tone light and glib, but it had been hardly even worth remarking that there were only a very few plausible reasons why a corporate entity would choose to set up a research facility in the middle of a thrice-condemned South African slum, and when they were known to be already in the act of flying most of their staff in by private helicopter every morning, cost was no longer among them.
Then there's the fact that the security involved – even for a site located on the outskirts of a city internationally known for its crime rate – sits somewhere in that region between 'excessive' and 'insane'. Proclus may not be so draconian that their employees don't get any time off to spend in the outside world; Fischer's people have managed to find out a lot about their employees (and while surveillance footage alone will always be second-best to meetings one's marks in person, the level of detail they've gotten out of it would impress any forger) but how to put it all to use is a more difficult problem. That Proclus has taken precautions to protect virtually everyone in their employ from the possibility of telepathic espionage more or less goes without saying in this day and age. Out of the entire company, Mr Charles had managed to find a total of exactly one janitor who hadn't had the ubiquitous TF chip implanted in the base of his skull, and all attempts at exploiting this only made it clear that he hadn't any more idea what's going on in there than they did.
Of more concern is that among what little is known about what goes on inside the compound there's the fact that every employee allowed on site, from the scientists to the pilots to the lunch staff, is subjected to retinal scans, fingerprinting and weight checks as a matter of signing in in the morning, and Eames doesn't know a single forger in the business who can reliably pass all three. Getting oneself on the staff legitimately is an even more impossible task; Proclus Global has made it very clear they are not hiring. Not for permanent positions, and not on a temporary basis, and not even if three of their five pilots have mysteriously come down with food poisoning on the same day. Eames doesn't know whether to be impressed or offended.
Traditional subterfuge is not going to work. Mr Charles and his associates have already gone to considerable expense making sure of this. They're resorting instead to good old fashioned thievery, which means sending people to approach the facility under cover of darkness and sneak, or, if necessary, break in. Beyond that point more or less anything Eames can discover about what's going on inside will be more than Fischer's associates know already, provided he can get it back to them. Even the task of getting a half-decent set of candid photographs of the facility from the outside had taken many weeks of failed attempts for barely adequate results.
With that admission, what ought to be a relatively straight-forward plan rapidly begins to fall apart as it becomes clear that the only available blueprints predate all post-quake refurbishments – if they are in fact the blueprints for the right buildings – and the only information they've got on what to expect within was extracted from the mind of a lowly janitor who – for all they know – might as well have had the images planted there to be found. While the facility itself occupies only a tiny fraction of the total area formally leased by Proclus, slightly off the geometric centre, their security patrols jealously guard everything up to the outer fence. And while it may not be more than a kilometre or two to the centre from any outer edge, the aftermath of the quake has made area within a labyrinth of collapsed walls and unstable ground. Direct routes through all that do not exist; one is lucky to get far without having to climb – a couple of those who've tried go so far as to swear the damned architecture actually moves in there. It's not without reason that Proclus's employees are airlifted in. On the other hand, it's a safe guess that the security teams themselves have much better maps of the place, because almost anyone who's tried to get in runs afoul of armed guards with itchy trigger fingers well before they find their destination. The regular police force may not bother with the place, but Proclus takes a very dim view of intruders. It's believed, for example, they have at least one meta-human operative working for them full time, but no-one knows for certain, because no-one who's got a good look at him (or possibly her) has come back to tell the tale. His (or her) existence is mainly inferred from the fact that two different highly qualified meta-human operatives sent in so far haven't come back out.
“Hang on, back up a minute,” Eames had said at this point. “This is the same area you said had a population of... how many thousand squatters?”
“Best estimates place it at at least forty thousand.”
“Who – one presumes – are coming and going at all hours and who Proclus hasn't shown the slightest interest in displacing?”
“Yes.”
“And yet it's your people security always zeros in on?”
“Without fail.”
Eames scratched his chin. “How?”
“If we could tell you that, Mr Eames, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.”
“You have tried bribing the locals to sneak you in, at least?”
“It's not an option.”
“Why on earth not? These people are living on, what, a price of a sandwich a week? There must be someone in there willing to give you something to work with.”
“It's an avenue we've explored,” he'd been told, shortly. “It brought us to a dead end. We're looking into other options.”
The only remotely optimistic thing he'd heard in that meeting was the general assertion that, given how their security was so focused on keeping anyone from getting near their operations, it appeared they might not have bothered with more than the most elementary measures for inside the facility. 'Optimistic' is by far the only way Eames could think of to describe that assumption.
And that, apparently, was as much as he got to know before signing on officially.
When it had become apparent that no-one was going to answer the obvious question, Eames leant back in his chair and studied Mr Charles and his assistant for any sign they might be much better actors than they seemed to be. It was beyond his imagination to convince himself they were, but he'd missed something in all this, and he hadn't been too proud to ask for it.
“Gentlemen,” he'd said, “to be frank with you I haven't the faintest idea why you think I'm your man.”
The assistant had made what was probably an attempt to exchange glances with his boss, but Mr Charles had looked right back at Eames when he'd countered, “Let me pose you an alternate question: who would you suggest would be the man for it?”
“Well.” Eames had had to think about that. The first two options that come to mind were bound to be ideas that they'd tried already, and it couldn't have been a good sign that next one he'd thought of of was wholly fictional.
“Then you see our problem, Mr Eames,” said Charles. Later, this would stand out as being the closest he'd come to displaying a sense of humour in most of their association.
There'd been a bit too much more back and forth along these lines before they get to the point, but Eames did eventually gather he was being hired because,
1. He was good.
2. He was so far from being the obvious candidate that it was spectacularly unlikely that Proclus would have had anyone with his exact skill set in mind when they designed their security.
And possibly also 3. If it did go wrong, he had a much better than average chance of coming back from this alive to try again.
They'd tried obvious. They'd tried subtle. They'd probably even tried thinking outside the box. They'd certainly exhausted 'reasonably priced'. They were down to throwing everything at the wall in the mad hope that anything might stick. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, not the sort of thing Eames liked to hear in these meetings.
But the job had been worth a lot of money, and he couldn't pretend they'd not done a very good job of making him just a little curious about what he might find going on in there. That and the fact he hadn't taken a job that had really stretched him in over a year.
“I'm going to want half my fee in advance,” he'd told them in the end, “and the understanding that I make no promises of any kind.”
They'd hardly exchange glances before telling him those were perfectly acceptable terms.
***
“Any advice?” he'd asked them, before his first outing into the labyrinth.
“Shoot to kill,” he was told, deadly serious.
Fifteen minutes before he met the point man for the first time, Eames took his first few steps beyond the outer boundary fence.
Five minutes before, he'd checked his compass for the third time, trying to make sense out of how the hell he'd gotten turned around twice in the last few minutes while doing nothing more challenging than following a straight line down one of few clear stretches of road. His GPS remained stubbornly inactive.
Two minutes after, he'd been well beyond having the temper left to do anything but call it a night.
***
Within a matter of hours the body has come back negative for cybernetic implants, negative for tetrodotoxin or any of the known 'zombie' neurotoxins, and negative for surgical scarring, cosmetic or otherwise. The forensics team can't find so much as a filling; by all evidence this was a man in the prime of life and perfect physical health. Give or take the bullet hole in the back of his head.
“They're running tests for the genetic markers that would indicate rapid aging, somatic cell transfer – all the usual jargon, but they tell me we won't have the results for another day, no matter who I threaten to fire,” says Charles. “But the reality is that if they've gotten this to work – if you're right and we're looking at a fully realised human clone – then they must be somewhere beyond anything the textbooks can tell us how to look for.”
Through the observation window over the theatre, Eames watches a woman in surgical scrubs pull a sheet over what's left of the body. They haven't bothered to sew up the autopsy scars.
He wonders if that's done it, if whatever mysterious force has reanimated this man and sent him back to torment Eames each time thus far could survive being drawn and quartered, sampled, catalogued and sent back for a second opinion. It feels like the wrong question. He's having more than his share of trouble convincing himself that the body split open on the slab below ever belonged to the man who keeps tracking him down in the labyrinthine streets, who's all motion and intent, sleek and agile and breathtakingly efficient even as he's breaking laws so old that most of human history never bothered to name them. Washed out in the harsh glare of surgical lighting, his features are almost unrecognisable as those Eames remembers catching in glimpses between one shadow and the next.
Voyeurism doesn't usually make him this uncomfortable – it's practically in his job description – but then again, he's never faced the problem of how you look someone in the eye after seeing exactly what they look like inside out.
“I don't know why you're asking me,” he says to Charles, not bothering to modulate his tone. “For all I can tell you he was one of identical quadruplets.”
“Mr Eames,” says Charles, with very deliberate patience, “at this point in time the only reason we have to believe that he was anything but an ordinary operative is your word that you've encountered and disabled his duplicates on more than one occasion. We can run every test known to man, but the only way we can be sure is going to require you to bring us a second body to compare.”
Eames takes a moment to admire the subtext of that statement. It wouldn't be at all hard to interpret it to imply that this is his chance to fulfil his obligations quickly and be on his way with the rest of his fee by the end of the week. However, it stops short of actually saying as much, leaving his employers free to wait until they have the results in their hands before deciding whether they want him to do more than play a morbid game of fetch to earn his fee, or whether he's already seen too much and should be sent packing before he gets any closer to the truth. He'd be a fool to imagine the latter isn't a real possibility, and as insulting as that might be on a professional level, he'd be an even greater fool to pretend that wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable way to get out of this job. Given the choice, he'd rather be paid for his work than his silence, but money is money, especially in those quantities.
He looks down through the window and tries out the idea that it could be that simple. He's already more than halfway convinced that his half-hearted clone theory is nothing more or less than exactly what Mr Charles expected him to return with from the start, and it has the advantage of being just far-fetched enough to have some merit. The only problem with the idea that he's spent the last three nights killing clones of the first point man is that he knows he saw the man recognise him, and it doesn't matter how many bodies he brings home or how genetically identical the scientists declare them, it's not going to tell Eames why.
“I don't believe that's what you hired me for, Mr Charles,” he says, voice careful.
Charles, to his credit, doesn't sound like he's having to deviate too far from his script when he says, “You have something else in mind?”
“I might,” says Eames. He hadn't really intended to elaborate on that right away, but Charles is looking at him expectantly and he might as well think aloud as not. “Four nights running now he – or one of his vengeful brothers – has found me within minutes of entry, but I couldn't help but notice your distraction team came through with only a run in with a few armed thugs in security uniforms. I haven't any more idea how they're doing it than you do but the pattern is interesting: it suggests they might be making some clever assumptions about the relative risks posed by one man with the balls to go in solo.”
Charles nods, content to follow Eames' logic as far as it goes. “What are you thinking?”
“Tomorrow night, I forge something discrete and go in with your team, and we see if that gets me any further.”
“What you may be forgetting there is that my team found trouble and were chased out a good several minutes before you were,” says Charles.
“Have a little faith, Mr Charles,” says Eames.
***
The modus operandi favoured by Mr Charles' people is to make themselves look like a local gang, which is a better strategy for distracting attention away from Fischer's involvement than not attracting attention at all, but it suits Eames' purposes. They last all of six minutes, twelve seconds of picking their way down a two-level street punctuated by intermittent amounts of rubble before meeting trouble tonight, which is hardly a record. After four nights of encounters with the point man, it's bloody anticlimactic that what finds them is nothing more exciting than a five-man team of Proclus's armed security thugs – fairly well matched to Fischer's team, come to think of it. They're passably effective but not especially efficient at their job; it's the work of a minute to separate one out from the pack. A bullet catches Eames in the back of the leg as he runs but it practically bounces straight back out. He hardly even stumbles.
***
Out of all the things that could have gone wrong with the plan, having to drag an unconscious man back an extra half a block ranks only high enough to ward off the superstitious feeling it was all going a little too well. The meeting point is an old shed with no door and only one surviving window pane, so close to the edge of the zone that you can see the fence through the back window and, perhaps thanks to a worrying network of cracks in the roof, unoccupied by any of the locals. As long as it can postpone collapse for the next twenty minutes or so that will be more than enough.
Two of Charles' men are there to meet him; one guards the door while the other cuffs the mark's hands and feet together and props him up in a folding chair. They probably don't have more than a few minutes before they're tracked back here, but that's all they'll need. The man is already groaning his way back to the uncertainties of consciousness by the time they have him upright. Eames motions his second man to hold up the torch, props his folding mirrors on a windowsill and is putting the final touches on the security guard's face by the time the man blinks himself awake, squinting stupidly at Eames through a haze of concussion. His only objection is to groan as Eames tilts his chin up to peer through a magnifying lens into each of his eyes.
“Back with us?” says Eames, conversationally.
“Who the...” the man mutters, dealing with very real reason to wonder if his eyes are playing tricks on him. He catches up all at once and jerks against his restraints, mouth twisting into a snarl.
“I know what you are,” he says, voice accusing and only slightly slurred. He has a broad American accent to go with his buzz-cut hair and unmemorably ugly features – presumably brought here from the original facility along with the rest of the staff – and a manner that suggests a man who wants nothing more from his job than the chance to re-enact action movie clichés; who probably made it into private security because both the army and police force thought better of hiring him. The ID in his wallet calls him Simon Matthews. Eames is not at all bothered to find himself deciding they probably wouldn't have liked each other even if they had met in much better circumstances.
“I hope you're planning to use the politically correct term,” he says, moving around the man and peeling out each of his fingers in turn so that he can peer at their shapes under the torchlight.
“You think you're gonna make this work?” Matthews slurs, clearly having decided to play the role of the tough guy in this scenario. “You think... my buds.... won't know?”
“No really, do go on,” says Eames, gesturing. “This is fascinating.”
The lopsided twist of Matthews' mouth edges up a notch. “Think I don't know what you're trying to do? You keep me talking long enough, think you can get in here,” What was probably meant to be a gesture to point at his head is aborted by the cuffs.
“Give yourself some credit, Mr Matthews,” says Eames. “A full profile of a man like you under duress would take me... oh, at least twenty minutes longer than we have to spare.” Fortunately for him, there's only one kind of reaction he needs to see tonight.
“Fuck you, you fucking scalper,” hisses Matthews. “When they get their hands on you they're gonna tear you... tear you a new...” At the sight of Eames drawing a gun he seems to lose his train of thought.
“For the record, I was going to do this even if you hadn't called me that,” says Eames, and shoots him in the leg, taking careful note of the cadence of the man's scream.
***
Forgery was in what amounted to its second generation when Eames came to it. Much as it had during the rise and fall of telepathic espionage before them, the world was wising up to the existence of the forgers and learning to take precautions. Biometrics had gone from a niche product to a booming business within the space of a few months. Finger printing, iris scans, retinal scans – within a year or two they were promising on-the-spot DNA verification – technologies that were never before the concern of any but the rich and paranoid were becoming commonplace, and the forgers were going from being well ahead of the curve to struggling to keep up with it. The golden age was over, never to return, and in the faces of the men and women who had pioneered their profession the toll was starting to show.
The temptation is always there in forgery to make improvements to oneself – subtle things mostly, the sort that might just as plausibly be explained away by a more dedicated workout routine, a different brand of moisturiser or a new tattoo. Partial forgeries are looked down on in the business as a general rule, but they're mostly harmless. Certainly anyone who can shift to give themselves the legs of a champion athlete isn't going to hesitate for principle's sake when a job goes bad and they find themselves on the run down a blind alley with a half-dozen armed thugs in pursuit. It's easy to take that sort of thing too far (not for nothing do the flesh scupters of the world have their own repertoire of botox jokes at the forgers' expense) but the long and short of it is that anyone who's likely to make that kind of basic mistake was probably never cut out for forgery in the first place. The greater danger is in the risk of going native, of taking the old adage that to pull off a successful con the first person you must fool is yourself several steps too far.
The first to fall were the ones everyone expected – the man whose extraction plan fell through, turning what was to be a week impersonating a member of the Russian Mafia into four long months, waking and sleeping, sober or drunk, or the woman who fulfilled the excruciating cliché of falling in love with her mark. The ones who couldn't get out until they'd forgotten they wanted to. The nasty surprise waiting in the wings was that anyone could lose themselves in their work just as easily – that sooner or later, most everyone would. In the same learning process by which forgery goes from challenging to routine to deceptively easy, the mind and body begin to show the same strain of any other over-stretched muscle, and things begin to stick. Forgers started to forget they didn’t really have a preference for Earl Grey over English tea, that they didn’t really blink too slowly when bluffing at poker, that they didn't really grow up in Argentina and have only ever visited South America on business. Before long, they were pouring over old photographs of themselves just to find out exactly what shade of brown their eyes used to be, the way their hair fell over their face when they ducked their heads, how they used to smile at their loved ones. The same men and women who pioneered the business can barely forge themselves anymore, reduced to caricatures of who they might have used to be.
While it might not be obvious to the layperson why this is such a spectacularly terrifying fate, it spells professional suicide. If you can't keep your own persona straight, you've a snowball's chance in hell of managing anyone else's.
You will be by the end of the year is a warning too.
***
It's remarkable how little time people will waste on confirming a colleague's identity when they find him lying on the street with a gunshot wound in his leg. After all, everyone knows that even the best forgers can't hold a form with bullet holes in it.
Then again, most forgers don't have the luxury of knowing the bullet stays there only as long as they want it to.
***
The fifteen minutes that follow are not among the more enjoyable of Eames' career, carried like a sack of potatoes over a succession of shoulders as the security team weaves its way around the refuse heaps and half-collapsed structures that make up the terrain between them and home. The other men bitch loudly about how completely fucking useless he is, whether he's put on weight, etc, in what is mostly a good-natured attempt to keep him distracted, while Eames grits his teeth and makes himself focus on keeping track of their voices, the route they're following – anything he might need later. It's too dark for him to get a good look at any of their faces, unfortunately.
What people forget about this sort of classic Trojan Horse gambit is that it rather depends on there being some point in the process where the horse is left unattended to get on with it. Sooner or later, he's going to have to cut and run. After a couple of terse radio conversations they've assured him there's a doctor waiting back at base (that 'base' has the facilities to treat a gunshot wound is worth making note of in itself), so it's not going to be that long before some nice person with an expensive medical degree is going to want to take a close look at his leg for him, and Eames may be very good at what he does but that doesn't mean he has any faith in his ability to hold a form while under anaesthetic. He can probably wait until the last minute and fake a panic attack on the table, but it's going to be touch and go. The important part is getting inside; once there he has three pre-prepared personas to choose from, all loyal employees and all known to work long after hours – and his unmatched talent for improvisation. With a little luck, good old-fashioned thievery will take care of the rest.
Naturally, going in with such a detailed and well-formed plan is only asking for something to go wrong, and the first sign of it happening is the sound of the man who's carrying Eames muttering, “Well, look who the fuck it is now.”
“He can probably hear you from here, Spencer,” says one of the others – Mashiya.
“What?” groans Eames, who is not in a position to have any idea what they're looking at.
“Our friendly company wall-crawler,” says Mashiya. “I'll see what he wants.”
Spencer makes it loudly and deliberately known he is not going to be stuck holding Matthews' fat ass off the ground while this goes on (and less deliberately known that he's more than a little shaken by the idea that 'the wall-crawler' heard him). By the time Spencer has him down on the ground and moves to give him a clear view, Eames is prepared for the sight of Mashiya talking to the point man. He tries to make up his mind whether he's been expecting this development. He's uncomfortably aware that they never did figure out how this point man has found him every night until now, and it's only the fact he hasn't so much as glanced Eames' way yet that's keeping him from being very worried.
“About my height, dark blonde hair, English accent,” the point man is saying. “Bound to be some kind of meta, though I couldn't give you a fix on what.”
“Didn't get that good a look at any of them,” Mashiya replies, apologetic, “unless Matthews saw the guy who shot him.” They both turn to look at Eames.
Eames wants to laugh but sticks to shaking his head, trusting that any expression he's making will pass for a grimace. The point man turns away, but not before Eames catches what can only be frustration stretched across his face.
“I'll take your man in,” he says. “I want the rest of you back out there with your eyes peeled.”
If Mashiya has any thoughts about being sent out to look for rogue metahumans while leaving an injured man with 'the company wall-crawler', he hides it well. “Yes, sir.”
It occurs to Eames, as he's being lifted and slung carefully over the point man's shoulder, that this doesn't necessarily mean that the point man doesn't know who he's really carrying. It's just not like he has any options but to play along even if he does.
Part 2
The idea for this one came from a thread on the kink meme (I think, I have failed utterly at finding the same prompt again since) asking for a Superhero AU where the characters have access to all their assorted dream-powers in real life. So Eames would be a shapeshifter, Cobb would be able to read minds, Ariadne would be able to
Anyway, splitting it into two parts to post. The next one only needs a few final edits and should be done within a week at most.
Title: Somnambulism
Chapter: 1/2
Summary: [Superpowers AU] The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
Characters/Pairing: Implied Eames/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 9400 (this part)
Warnings: Not much more than you’d see in the movie. Violence, characters involved in morally dubious activities, writer tackling fandoms and/or subject matter outside her usual range – the usual.
The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
***
It takes a second meeting to leave a lasting impression, the main impression being the singular fact they get to have a second meeting.
It isn't the point man's face Eames recognises first – much later, he's going to be ashamed to realise he hadn't paid even passing attention to the his face first time around – it's the way he moves. The finest nuance of someone's posture can be as good as a fingerprint to the trained eye (it's certainly worse than a neon warning sign if you get it wrong), but Eames would have to admit that a lifetime of cultivating an appreciation for nuance becomes a little redundant when you're seeing a man run straight up the side of a building as though gravity were something that only happened to other people. He'd seen wall-crawlers before in his line of work, but this one had style. It had seemed a crying shame to see it all go to waste.
Eames had not actually cried over it. Maybe sighed wistfully a bit. He always did prefer to work with professionals.
So when he catches sight of someone scaling a fire escape below him without setting a foot on any of the stairs, his first thought, give or take a touch of not-even-grudging admiration, is, there's another one? As the someone (man, definitely a man) gets closer, he revises this to, they must have worked with the same trainer, ignores the whisper of adrenaline that shivers his way up his spine, and after that he's too busy moving to intercept to listen to what all those cultivated instincts are trying to tell him he's seen.
He has his gun trained on the spot where the man's head is going to pop up over the top of the wall a comfortable several seconds before it does, but in that crucial moment that he'd marked for getting this over with neatly, he sets his eyes on the man's face, and freezes. He honestly hadn't had the faintest idea he'd gotten a good enough look at the face of the last wall-crawler to recognise it again until he's doing it.
In the lists of suicidal mistakes one can make while looking into the face of someone who could beat your elevator to the roof of a multi-story building and still have time to adjust his cuffs, straighten his tie and select his favourite silencer before the doors open, this is so close to the top that it doesn't matter, and the only thing that saves Eames is that the other man has just done the exact same thing. It's an unspeakable relief to see his confusion mirrored in the offending party's face; in part, yes, because he hasn't been shot (again) (yet), but mostly because it's the best tell available that he hasn't gone insane.
Eames, master at making himself sound exactly how he needs to sound, is at a bit of a loss as to why his tone comes out so conversational when he says, “You know, I could have sworn I shot you the other night.” Yes, there'd only been a split second between seeing the other man raise his gun and hearing the shot, and no, he hadn't been in a state to see whether he'd hit his mark afterwards, and no, he hadn't gone back to check, but Eames is a very good shot.
The other man reaches for his gun, and the rest of the encounter (all point-three-five seconds) is depressingly familiar. Eames is not sure what other reaction he expected.
It takes him most of a minute to pull himself together, spitting the bullet into his palm. He'd kept quite a collection of specimens like it once upon a time, in memory of deaths cheated. Nowadays, he counts it as a greater victory if he can avoid getting shot in the first place. He usually throws them away.
He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and takes a moment to appreciate his own hypocrisy. The explanation is poetically obvious, no matter how unsatisfying – in one night, not just to be faced with the fact you're not the beautiful and unique snowflake you thought, but that the other guy somehow managed to wrangle anti-gravity powers into the bargain. The question is still there, how neither of them saw or heard the other getting up and creeping away last time they went through this, but in the face of all the other evidence it's probably just flagrant denial. He should probably spend his effort being glad he's up first.
He keeps his gun trained on the other man as he approaches, all the time expecting – something. Any sign of life, really. When several minutes have passed without so much as a twitch, he kneels carefully and wraps his fingers around the wrist of one outflung arm.
It's definitely a body, and – inasmuch as he's qualified to tell in this uncertain world – it's definitely dead.
“You're really not fooling anyone,” he tells it.
The body begs to differ.
He entertains the idea of lugging it home with him for the scientists to have a poke at for about five seconds before he remembers that he's not nearly enough of a masochist to bother. It doesn't take much longer for him to decide he's had exactly as much scouting as he can take for one night.
For all he knows, the other man got lucky the first time. Somehow.
He slips the bullet into a pocket as he turns away. It's not sentimentality; within an hour or two, he's going to need physical evidence to convince himself this wasn't all some crazy dream.
***
Once may be chance, twice coincidence, but three times can only be conspiracy.
“You and I have got to stop meeting like this,” says Eames.
The other man shoots him three times in the chest, and has just time to look surprised when Eames returns the favour on his way down.
***
Three nights of running scouting excursions and nothing to show for it but the very real concern that either his own mind or the universe at large is misbehaving in ways he should be worried about leave Eames feeling a little unprofessional. He has Thoughts – the kind requiring a capital 'T' – on the subject of professionalism in his field. He was a thief before he ever discovered he had the capacity to become a good forger, and he had years of experience in forgery under his belt before he became... whatever you call what he is now. So long as there's only the one of him he doesn't suppose it needs a name, other than the one he's in the habit of using nowadays.
Somewhere along that line, the majority of the work available for professionals in his field started to feel easy, in a disconcerting sort of way that was difficult to enjoy as much as he ought; even getting the chance to show off his many talents to a captive audience lost its lustre some time ago. In the same manner that surviving a bullet wound has ceased to be nearly as satisfying as finishing a job without getting shot, the pride he used to feel at pulling off a particularly flawless forgery pales next to that of pulling off the job using no-one's face but his own, and part of that, yes, is nothing more than pride, misplaced or otherwise, but part is prudence (what they don't know you can do they can't prepare for, not to mention the part where he never has been any good at holding form through a headshot), and only a little is for personal reasons of a sort he rarely remembers to examine except when drunk and maudlin at odd hours of the morning. But leftover at the end is still a part – no matter that he's in the sort of profession that set him up against someone who shot barbs out of their fingertips while hanging from the ceiling on his last job – where it just doesn't seem fair otherwise.
If there is a good chance the job will involve getting shot at, he prefers to work alone. That has very little to do with pride, and everything to do with the wretched guilt of watching some poor bastard get gunned down beside you while the worst you can complain of is having to play dead for a few minutes with a bullet under you tongue until everyone turns their backs. If that sort of sentiment is unprofessional of him, then professionalism can go hang.
Nevertheless, after three nights spent achieving only the questionable result of having put the enemy security even more on edge, he isn't feeling like he has much to be proud of.
“Let's talk about that offer of sending in some of your people as support,” he says to the men who are paying him that rather ridiculous sum to pull off this job.
“As backup?” they say.
“I was thinking more along the lines of as a distraction,” says Eames.
“How many do you need?” they ask him.
Eames remembers the wall-crawler who found him three times and should, by rights, have had him outgunned at least once, and tries to think of a way to phrase the answer that doesn't come out to the effect of, “How many do you mind losing in one go?”
***
They enter the maze at the same time, from different entry points. They're not ten minutes in before he gets the radio message to say the first team has found trouble. Eames doesn't ask whether it's the kind of trouble that runs at you up the side of a building; he's of two minds regarding whether he wants it to be, though considering the speed with which the point man found one intruder on the last few nights, it seems more or less inevitable.
Nevertheless, it doesn't really cross his mind that it could be anyone else when, hardly minutes later, a bullet impacts on the masonry not two inches from his left arm and sends Eames diving around the nearest corner. There he stops and waits, gun drawn, while two more bullets hit the ground where he was standing half a second previously. It's a sorry excuse for cover, but there's nothing better available, and he's capable of being realistic about his odds of outrunning the man who's chasing him.
By the fourth gunshot he's starting to feel insulted. Does that fool really think he's going to stick his head out back there if he keeps it up?
“Einstein, smart chap that he was, had an interesting way of defining of insanity; you might want to look it up when you've got a moment,” he hollers.
The shooting stops.
“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?” says the point man.
Eames feels suddenly light-headed. Now would probably be a very bad time to make a pithy comment like, 'Oh, you do talk, I was beginning to wonder.' There's something important about that voice that he's sure he's missing, but here he is, unable to get past the fact he's hearing it at all.
“On the other hand,” says the point man, without obvious malice, “doing it over a couple of times to make certain is a pretty good definition of the scientific method. Einstein could've told you a few things about that too.”
Something he's missing – like, for example, the fact that voice is coming from over his head. Oh.
Eames has just long enough to take in the sight of a man-sized shadow hanging upside-down from a window ledge above before being shot in the shoulder with a tranquilliser dart. He's dutifully impressed; it doesn't work – his body spits the drug back out just as fast as everything else it doesn't like – but he can't think of anyone else who's tried that one on him before.
He staggers under the impact, but it's ninety percent theatrics, staged to buy himself the time to get his own gun to an angle where he can return fire. He gets another three darts in the same arm for his trouble. The point man throws himself sideways out of the path of Eames' first shot, but the second gets him in the leg and gravity – joining the party late – does the rest.
He rolls on the landing and almost makes it back up before Eames' next bullet gets him in the back of the head. He goes down without a sound.
Several seconds go past before Eames moves, mentally getting his breath back. Then he makes himself walk up to the body, rolls it unceremoniously onto its back and checks its pulse, first on the wrist and again on the neck. No surprises.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asks aloud, but it's mostly habit; he's really not in the mood anymore. In the last week he's been shot twice in the head, three times in the chest and now four times with tranquillisers – and even if the point man's methods are getting further from effectiveness rather than the reverse, there's more at work here than random luck. He'd admitted exactly as much not a minute ago.
The scientific method, hm? thinks Eames Well, two can quip on that topic.
Eames reaches for his radio.
“I've changed my mind. I want that backup here. Tell them to bring a stretcher.”
The backup looks rather disappointed when they find out he's not injured.
They look even more displeased when they find out he wants them to lug a human body back to base and he won't tell them why.
***
There's a saying in the forgery business: You don't have to be bisexual to work here, but it helps. In some parts of the world, the march of memetic mutation has rendered it into something more along the lines of: If you're not when you start, you will be by the end of the year. The implication in either version is that anything else would be doing it wrong. Like most witty generalisations it's not in any sense true, but it does betray a couple of very basic truths about the nature of the business – if you don't go in with a certain curiosity about people, a certain willingness to try (for lack of a less weighted term) 'new things', you're unlikely to go very far.
Out of the fraction of a percent of the population born with the fundamental physiological malleability one needs to mould their body at will, only an even smaller fraction are cut out for true forgery. There's plenty that can be done to modify the human body that has nothing to do with the need to pass as human, let alone as someone specific. Eames has known people who can compress themselves until they can slide through a crack in a wall barely two inches wide, grow bone spurs from their knuckles, stretch their limbs until they stand fifteen feet tall and all manner of other stomach-turning tricks. There are limits, of course; mass is a constant that even shape shifters are limited to gaining or losing by the usual methods, and there is only so far one can deform the human body and still have it function (something more than a few learn the hard way). There are side effects to contend with as well; it's a rare thing to meet a flesh sculptor with more than a year or two's experience in the business who hasn't developed some quirk about their features that tips them a little way down the side of the uncanny valley – face too stiff, eyes just a little too far apart, mouth that spreads just a little bit too wide when they smile. It's the job that comes with complimentary botox, as the joke goes, which is almost polite when you consider that plastic surgery has nothing on what shapeshifting can do to your features.
This is only one of many points of contention fuelling the contempt that most of the professional forging community holds over those who specialise in using their talents in a less subtle capacity (as if they ever needed any more justification for rivalry than being the superpowered equivalent of the split between rugby and football, or knitting and crochet). Say what you like about forgery as a profession, it's obvious no proper forger would ever forget how to make themselves look human. (Relatively few forgers will readily admit that flesh-sculpting is among those ‘new things’ they had tried but found themselves ill-suited to.)
In retrospect it's a shame that there hadn't been more dialogue between the two factions, or maybe someone in the forgery business might have guessed a little sooner that, like so many obvious things, this was a generalisation doomed to be proven false in every possible regard.
Eames has rarely found cause to regret having come to the business late. He’s always found learning from other people’s mistakes to be infinitely preferable to learning from one’s own.
***
“Would you like to tell me why you brought back a human body?” says Mr Charles when Eames gets back.
“Oh, it's not for you, it's for your science team,” says Eames. After spending the last twenty minutes following a corpse home and jumping half out of his skin every time the motion of the stretcher had made it twitch suspiciously he is far too tired and far too fed up for diplomacy. “I thought I'd get them something to show my appreciation for how helpful they've been.”
The thin line of Charles' mouth speaks of a whole world of objections warring to be the first one out.
“But since we're talking,” Eames goes on, “tell me something: your suspicions about this 'top secret research' going on in that facility, do they in any way involve human cloning?”
When you're as good with body language as Eames is, it's plain embarrassing to see someone go pale that obviously right in front of you.
“I'll get them on it right away,” he says.
“Good man,” says Eames.
***
“Call me Mr Charles,” is the first thing the man hiring him on behalf of Mr Fischer had said when they met.
The way he'd pronounced 'Mr Charles' made it such an obvious alias that Eames had momentarily entertained the idea that this was all a double bluff and that was actually his real name. He and his assistants were serious men in serious suits, and they all fitted the stereotype of the same to such an astonishing degree that Eames was occasionally surprised to be reminded that none of them actually made a habit of wearing sunglasses indoors. He could just tell they were going to hate each other.
He hadn't met Mr Fischer. It was made clear he wasn't going to meet Mr Fischer at all, and that if pressed, Mr Fischer could be expected to deny any knowledge that anyone meeting Eames' description was working for him or any of his subsidiaries in any capacity, and this may well have been true. Mr Fischer is a powerful man who wants a particularly difficult job done for him, and he's rich enough not to have to care how. Eames has the idea that if it weren't for the sake of attaching a high profile name to this job he wouldn't have heard Fischer's name at all – even allowing that a lot of what gave the name its high profile status are probably not the most welcome of reasons.
At least a couple of years must have passed since the worst of the media storm blew over, but it's going to be a lot longer than that before anyone who lived through the collapse of Fischer-Morrow will readily associate the name with anything else. The true poetry shall always remain in the timing, when what had been anticipated as perhaps a slight stock drop in the wake of Maurice Fischer's death turned into the entire conglomerate going belly-up overnight, for reasons that, underneath enough economic jargon to fill a whole season's worth of financial gossip columns and late night talk shows, are still essentially shrouded in mystery to this day. The best conspiracy theories go so far as to propose the old man planned the whole thing as his last laugh against the world.
“The Mr Fischer?” Eames had asked.
“Was buried in a private ceremony two years ago,” he was told, as though there were real chance he could actually be that stupid. “We're authorised to retain your services on behalf of the junior Mr Fischer, R-”
“Robert, yes, right,” Eames had returned, “you may have missed my meaning there, but when I said 'the Mr Fischer', I was in fact referring to the remaining Mr Fischer, distinguished by, as you point out, still being alive.” It's certainly not as though Robert's name hadn't had its own share of news time, what with his father leaving the son who was to inherit his empire with naught to his name but a multi-million dollar trust fund stocked with the riches to allow any man to live in relative luxury to the end of his days. Eames does not recall feeling particularly sorry for him when the story broke, though if it's been this many months and his own lackeys still haven't learned to think of him as 'the' Mr Fischer yet, Eames has to allow that maybe the poor sod does deserve some kind of pity.
Most of Robert Fischer's remaining luck had probably been expended simply getting out of being personally indicted for any part of what went down. By the time everything was dying down though he'd come under just enough real suspicion and scrutiny that it would take a very determined conspiracy theorist to seriously doubt that everything that happened had come as just as much a shock to him as to the rest of the world. Indeed, it's a mystery which Eames quickly learns he's still very much invested in solving, and it seems that an awful lot of ex-employees of one of those more mysterious Fischer-Morrow subsidiaries have turned up in the employ of a discrete research facility in South Africa owned by Proclus Global, a company which has done very well for itself in the wake of its chief competitor's demise. Which is a bit like observing that the wolves will do well for themselves once you've cleared the cheetahs out of their range, really, but one can hardly say the younger Mr Fischer doesn't have reason to be suspicious.
The situation is thus:
Eighteen months earlier, an area measuring roughly two square kilometres on the outskirts of Johannesburg was leased 'for redevelopment' by Proclus Global. If what they've done with it since is half as interesting as the history of the region, then the next item on their agenda will probably involve pitching the film rights.
The original lease on the area, then more than an hour west of the city limits, was held by a mining company by the name of Milton Deep. By the time the area's mineral wealth had run out, urban sprawl had caught up with them, and the directors were only too pleased to refit what remained of their facilities and sell up at a profit before the whole region was swallowed up into the maw of an encroaching industrial zone, following which it enjoyed a good three years of booming production before the honeymoon period came abruptly to an end. In light of what later became evident about Milton's shining legacy it's a wonder the boom lasted that long before suddenly the excavation for a new basement was inexplicably managing to undermine the wall all the way on the other side of the street, and there were cracks forming just under all the roofs on the other side of town as the foundations sloped very slightly sideways, and all the while it was getting harder not to notice that the edge of the main pit that all the regulators had signed off as unconditionally stable was getting closer by the month, not to mention a dozen other warning signs that, to their credit, most of the more mobile businesses spotted for what they were relatively quickly, and had themselves well into the process of clearing out before it had even made the news.
At any rate, productivity in the area was well past its peak by the time the earthquake actually hit and half the remaining foundations all liquefied at once. Realistically, the quake probably didn't do much worse than to speed up the inevitable, but it certainly got them there by the most dramatic means possible.
By the time the new batch of regulators, these ones more thoroughly certified and rather less well paid, had been through and declared the worst of the settlement was over this time and reconstruction – within more careful limits – was possible again, no-one wanted anything more to do with the place. Miles of chain-link fence and bold placards declaring the whole area condemned haven't done a thing to dissuade a population of several thousand squatters from moving into any remaining building which hadn't completely sunk into the mud, but anyone with real money had taken one look at the sordid history of the place and decided to invest it somewhere more historically stable.
Until eighteen months ago, when Proclus had showed up with a generous offer to take the whole area off the government's hands and walked away with all the deeds by the end of the week. The official propaganda had been full of cheer about the possibilities of urban renewal, which came closer to being dirty words in a land where the first stage of 'urban renewal' invariably involved evicting the current residents from the gutter they'd been eking out their living in and transplanting them all somewhere worse. Given the spin quota in all those glossy leaflets it hadn't been particularly remarkable that over a year has now passed without much sign of any real urban renewal going on. What’s more remarkable is that in that time not more than a handful of the previous residents seem to have been asked to leave. It's understood that somewhere inside, well away from any edges, Proclus have found something with walls that still stands on its own and set up shop, arranged to have private security instated and all the amenities reconnected, and have since proceeded to run up a slightly terrifying electricity bill for a facility of their size, but done little else. They pay their bills and even their taxes, with a regularity and enthusiasm that Eames finds rather suspicious, and have been responsible for a lot of helicopter traffic over the heads of the squatters, but otherwise the city probably hardly knows they're there.
“I can see why you're worried about what they might be up to in there,” Eames had said. “They sound absolutely despicable.”
Eames had watched Mr Charles consciously suppressing two different nervous ticks while his assistant said, “You of all people, Mr Eames, should be aware that one's public face and one's private are rarely one and the same.”
“I'm not sure I like what you're implying about me,” said Eames, tone light and glib, but it had been hardly even worth remarking that there were only a very few plausible reasons why a corporate entity would choose to set up a research facility in the middle of a thrice-condemned South African slum, and when they were known to be already in the act of flying most of their staff in by private helicopter every morning, cost was no longer among them.
Then there's the fact that the security involved – even for a site located on the outskirts of a city internationally known for its crime rate – sits somewhere in that region between 'excessive' and 'insane'. Proclus may not be so draconian that their employees don't get any time off to spend in the outside world; Fischer's people have managed to find out a lot about their employees (and while surveillance footage alone will always be second-best to meetings one's marks in person, the level of detail they've gotten out of it would impress any forger) but how to put it all to use is a more difficult problem. That Proclus has taken precautions to protect virtually everyone in their employ from the possibility of telepathic espionage more or less goes without saying in this day and age. Out of the entire company, Mr Charles had managed to find a total of exactly one janitor who hadn't had the ubiquitous TF chip implanted in the base of his skull, and all attempts at exploiting this only made it clear that he hadn't any more idea what's going on in there than they did.
Of more concern is that among what little is known about what goes on inside the compound there's the fact that every employee allowed on site, from the scientists to the pilots to the lunch staff, is subjected to retinal scans, fingerprinting and weight checks as a matter of signing in in the morning, and Eames doesn't know a single forger in the business who can reliably pass all three. Getting oneself on the staff legitimately is an even more impossible task; Proclus Global has made it very clear they are not hiring. Not for permanent positions, and not on a temporary basis, and not even if three of their five pilots have mysteriously come down with food poisoning on the same day. Eames doesn't know whether to be impressed or offended.
Traditional subterfuge is not going to work. Mr Charles and his associates have already gone to considerable expense making sure of this. They're resorting instead to good old fashioned thievery, which means sending people to approach the facility under cover of darkness and sneak, or, if necessary, break in. Beyond that point more or less anything Eames can discover about what's going on inside will be more than Fischer's associates know already, provided he can get it back to them. Even the task of getting a half-decent set of candid photographs of the facility from the outside had taken many weeks of failed attempts for barely adequate results.
With that admission, what ought to be a relatively straight-forward plan rapidly begins to fall apart as it becomes clear that the only available blueprints predate all post-quake refurbishments – if they are in fact the blueprints for the right buildings – and the only information they've got on what to expect within was extracted from the mind of a lowly janitor who – for all they know – might as well have had the images planted there to be found. While the facility itself occupies only a tiny fraction of the total area formally leased by Proclus, slightly off the geometric centre, their security patrols jealously guard everything up to the outer fence. And while it may not be more than a kilometre or two to the centre from any outer edge, the aftermath of the quake has made area within a labyrinth of collapsed walls and unstable ground. Direct routes through all that do not exist; one is lucky to get far without having to climb – a couple of those who've tried go so far as to swear the damned architecture actually moves in there. It's not without reason that Proclus's employees are airlifted in. On the other hand, it's a safe guess that the security teams themselves have much better maps of the place, because almost anyone who's tried to get in runs afoul of armed guards with itchy trigger fingers well before they find their destination. The regular police force may not bother with the place, but Proclus takes a very dim view of intruders. It's believed, for example, they have at least one meta-human operative working for them full time, but no-one knows for certain, because no-one who's got a good look at him (or possibly her) has come back to tell the tale. His (or her) existence is mainly inferred from the fact that two different highly qualified meta-human operatives sent in so far haven't come back out.
“Hang on, back up a minute,” Eames had said at this point. “This is the same area you said had a population of... how many thousand squatters?”
“Best estimates place it at at least forty thousand.”
“Who – one presumes – are coming and going at all hours and who Proclus hasn't shown the slightest interest in displacing?”
“Yes.”
“And yet it's your people security always zeros in on?”
“Without fail.”
Eames scratched his chin. “How?”
“If we could tell you that, Mr Eames, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.”
“You have tried bribing the locals to sneak you in, at least?”
“It's not an option.”
“Why on earth not? These people are living on, what, a price of a sandwich a week? There must be someone in there willing to give you something to work with.”
“It's an avenue we've explored,” he'd been told, shortly. “It brought us to a dead end. We're looking into other options.”
The only remotely optimistic thing he'd heard in that meeting was the general assertion that, given how their security was so focused on keeping anyone from getting near their operations, it appeared they might not have bothered with more than the most elementary measures for inside the facility. 'Optimistic' is by far the only way Eames could think of to describe that assumption.
And that, apparently, was as much as he got to know before signing on officially.
When it had become apparent that no-one was going to answer the obvious question, Eames leant back in his chair and studied Mr Charles and his assistant for any sign they might be much better actors than they seemed to be. It was beyond his imagination to convince himself they were, but he'd missed something in all this, and he hadn't been too proud to ask for it.
“Gentlemen,” he'd said, “to be frank with you I haven't the faintest idea why you think I'm your man.”
The assistant had made what was probably an attempt to exchange glances with his boss, but Mr Charles had looked right back at Eames when he'd countered, “Let me pose you an alternate question: who would you suggest would be the man for it?”
“Well.” Eames had had to think about that. The first two options that come to mind were bound to be ideas that they'd tried already, and it couldn't have been a good sign that next one he'd thought of of was wholly fictional.
“Then you see our problem, Mr Eames,” said Charles. Later, this would stand out as being the closest he'd come to displaying a sense of humour in most of their association.
There'd been a bit too much more back and forth along these lines before they get to the point, but Eames did eventually gather he was being hired because,
1. He was good.
2. He was so far from being the obvious candidate that it was spectacularly unlikely that Proclus would have had anyone with his exact skill set in mind when they designed their security.
And possibly also 3. If it did go wrong, he had a much better than average chance of coming back from this alive to try again.
They'd tried obvious. They'd tried subtle. They'd probably even tried thinking outside the box. They'd certainly exhausted 'reasonably priced'. They were down to throwing everything at the wall in the mad hope that anything might stick. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, not the sort of thing Eames liked to hear in these meetings.
But the job had been worth a lot of money, and he couldn't pretend they'd not done a very good job of making him just a little curious about what he might find going on in there. That and the fact he hadn't taken a job that had really stretched him in over a year.
“I'm going to want half my fee in advance,” he'd told them in the end, “and the understanding that I make no promises of any kind.”
They'd hardly exchange glances before telling him those were perfectly acceptable terms.
***
“Any advice?” he'd asked them, before his first outing into the labyrinth.
“Shoot to kill,” he was told, deadly serious.
Fifteen minutes before he met the point man for the first time, Eames took his first few steps beyond the outer boundary fence.
Five minutes before, he'd checked his compass for the third time, trying to make sense out of how the hell he'd gotten turned around twice in the last few minutes while doing nothing more challenging than following a straight line down one of few clear stretches of road. His GPS remained stubbornly inactive.
Two minutes after, he'd been well beyond having the temper left to do anything but call it a night.
***
Within a matter of hours the body has come back negative for cybernetic implants, negative for tetrodotoxin or any of the known 'zombie' neurotoxins, and negative for surgical scarring, cosmetic or otherwise. The forensics team can't find so much as a filling; by all evidence this was a man in the prime of life and perfect physical health. Give or take the bullet hole in the back of his head.
“They're running tests for the genetic markers that would indicate rapid aging, somatic cell transfer – all the usual jargon, but they tell me we won't have the results for another day, no matter who I threaten to fire,” says Charles. “But the reality is that if they've gotten this to work – if you're right and we're looking at a fully realised human clone – then they must be somewhere beyond anything the textbooks can tell us how to look for.”
Through the observation window over the theatre, Eames watches a woman in surgical scrubs pull a sheet over what's left of the body. They haven't bothered to sew up the autopsy scars.
He wonders if that's done it, if whatever mysterious force has reanimated this man and sent him back to torment Eames each time thus far could survive being drawn and quartered, sampled, catalogued and sent back for a second opinion. It feels like the wrong question. He's having more than his share of trouble convincing himself that the body split open on the slab below ever belonged to the man who keeps tracking him down in the labyrinthine streets, who's all motion and intent, sleek and agile and breathtakingly efficient even as he's breaking laws so old that most of human history never bothered to name them. Washed out in the harsh glare of surgical lighting, his features are almost unrecognisable as those Eames remembers catching in glimpses between one shadow and the next.
Voyeurism doesn't usually make him this uncomfortable – it's practically in his job description – but then again, he's never faced the problem of how you look someone in the eye after seeing exactly what they look like inside out.
“I don't know why you're asking me,” he says to Charles, not bothering to modulate his tone. “For all I can tell you he was one of identical quadruplets.”
“Mr Eames,” says Charles, with very deliberate patience, “at this point in time the only reason we have to believe that he was anything but an ordinary operative is your word that you've encountered and disabled his duplicates on more than one occasion. We can run every test known to man, but the only way we can be sure is going to require you to bring us a second body to compare.”
Eames takes a moment to admire the subtext of that statement. It wouldn't be at all hard to interpret it to imply that this is his chance to fulfil his obligations quickly and be on his way with the rest of his fee by the end of the week. However, it stops short of actually saying as much, leaving his employers free to wait until they have the results in their hands before deciding whether they want him to do more than play a morbid game of fetch to earn his fee, or whether he's already seen too much and should be sent packing before he gets any closer to the truth. He'd be a fool to imagine the latter isn't a real possibility, and as insulting as that might be on a professional level, he'd be an even greater fool to pretend that wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable way to get out of this job. Given the choice, he'd rather be paid for his work than his silence, but money is money, especially in those quantities.
He looks down through the window and tries out the idea that it could be that simple. He's already more than halfway convinced that his half-hearted clone theory is nothing more or less than exactly what Mr Charles expected him to return with from the start, and it has the advantage of being just far-fetched enough to have some merit. The only problem with the idea that he's spent the last three nights killing clones of the first point man is that he knows he saw the man recognise him, and it doesn't matter how many bodies he brings home or how genetically identical the scientists declare them, it's not going to tell Eames why.
“I don't believe that's what you hired me for, Mr Charles,” he says, voice careful.
Charles, to his credit, doesn't sound like he's having to deviate too far from his script when he says, “You have something else in mind?”
“I might,” says Eames. He hadn't really intended to elaborate on that right away, but Charles is looking at him expectantly and he might as well think aloud as not. “Four nights running now he – or one of his vengeful brothers – has found me within minutes of entry, but I couldn't help but notice your distraction team came through with only a run in with a few armed thugs in security uniforms. I haven't any more idea how they're doing it than you do but the pattern is interesting: it suggests they might be making some clever assumptions about the relative risks posed by one man with the balls to go in solo.”
Charles nods, content to follow Eames' logic as far as it goes. “What are you thinking?”
“Tomorrow night, I forge something discrete and go in with your team, and we see if that gets me any further.”
“What you may be forgetting there is that my team found trouble and were chased out a good several minutes before you were,” says Charles.
“Have a little faith, Mr Charles,” says Eames.
***
The modus operandi favoured by Mr Charles' people is to make themselves look like a local gang, which is a better strategy for distracting attention away from Fischer's involvement than not attracting attention at all, but it suits Eames' purposes. They last all of six minutes, twelve seconds of picking their way down a two-level street punctuated by intermittent amounts of rubble before meeting trouble tonight, which is hardly a record. After four nights of encounters with the point man, it's bloody anticlimactic that what finds them is nothing more exciting than a five-man team of Proclus's armed security thugs – fairly well matched to Fischer's team, come to think of it. They're passably effective but not especially efficient at their job; it's the work of a minute to separate one out from the pack. A bullet catches Eames in the back of the leg as he runs but it practically bounces straight back out. He hardly even stumbles.
***
Out of all the things that could have gone wrong with the plan, having to drag an unconscious man back an extra half a block ranks only high enough to ward off the superstitious feeling it was all going a little too well. The meeting point is an old shed with no door and only one surviving window pane, so close to the edge of the zone that you can see the fence through the back window and, perhaps thanks to a worrying network of cracks in the roof, unoccupied by any of the locals. As long as it can postpone collapse for the next twenty minutes or so that will be more than enough.
Two of Charles' men are there to meet him; one guards the door while the other cuffs the mark's hands and feet together and props him up in a folding chair. They probably don't have more than a few minutes before they're tracked back here, but that's all they'll need. The man is already groaning his way back to the uncertainties of consciousness by the time they have him upright. Eames motions his second man to hold up the torch, props his folding mirrors on a windowsill and is putting the final touches on the security guard's face by the time the man blinks himself awake, squinting stupidly at Eames through a haze of concussion. His only objection is to groan as Eames tilts his chin up to peer through a magnifying lens into each of his eyes.
“Back with us?” says Eames, conversationally.
“Who the...” the man mutters, dealing with very real reason to wonder if his eyes are playing tricks on him. He catches up all at once and jerks against his restraints, mouth twisting into a snarl.
“I know what you are,” he says, voice accusing and only slightly slurred. He has a broad American accent to go with his buzz-cut hair and unmemorably ugly features – presumably brought here from the original facility along with the rest of the staff – and a manner that suggests a man who wants nothing more from his job than the chance to re-enact action movie clichés; who probably made it into private security because both the army and police force thought better of hiring him. The ID in his wallet calls him Simon Matthews. Eames is not at all bothered to find himself deciding they probably wouldn't have liked each other even if they had met in much better circumstances.
“I hope you're planning to use the politically correct term,” he says, moving around the man and peeling out each of his fingers in turn so that he can peer at their shapes under the torchlight.
“You think you're gonna make this work?” Matthews slurs, clearly having decided to play the role of the tough guy in this scenario. “You think... my buds.... won't know?”
“No really, do go on,” says Eames, gesturing. “This is fascinating.”
The lopsided twist of Matthews' mouth edges up a notch. “Think I don't know what you're trying to do? You keep me talking long enough, think you can get in here,” What was probably meant to be a gesture to point at his head is aborted by the cuffs.
“Give yourself some credit, Mr Matthews,” says Eames. “A full profile of a man like you under duress would take me... oh, at least twenty minutes longer than we have to spare.” Fortunately for him, there's only one kind of reaction he needs to see tonight.
“Fuck you, you fucking scalper,” hisses Matthews. “When they get their hands on you they're gonna tear you... tear you a new...” At the sight of Eames drawing a gun he seems to lose his train of thought.
“For the record, I was going to do this even if you hadn't called me that,” says Eames, and shoots him in the leg, taking careful note of the cadence of the man's scream.
***
Forgery was in what amounted to its second generation when Eames came to it. Much as it had during the rise and fall of telepathic espionage before them, the world was wising up to the existence of the forgers and learning to take precautions. Biometrics had gone from a niche product to a booming business within the space of a few months. Finger printing, iris scans, retinal scans – within a year or two they were promising on-the-spot DNA verification – technologies that were never before the concern of any but the rich and paranoid were becoming commonplace, and the forgers were going from being well ahead of the curve to struggling to keep up with it. The golden age was over, never to return, and in the faces of the men and women who had pioneered their profession the toll was starting to show.
The temptation is always there in forgery to make improvements to oneself – subtle things mostly, the sort that might just as plausibly be explained away by a more dedicated workout routine, a different brand of moisturiser or a new tattoo. Partial forgeries are looked down on in the business as a general rule, but they're mostly harmless. Certainly anyone who can shift to give themselves the legs of a champion athlete isn't going to hesitate for principle's sake when a job goes bad and they find themselves on the run down a blind alley with a half-dozen armed thugs in pursuit. It's easy to take that sort of thing too far (not for nothing do the flesh scupters of the world have their own repertoire of botox jokes at the forgers' expense) but the long and short of it is that anyone who's likely to make that kind of basic mistake was probably never cut out for forgery in the first place. The greater danger is in the risk of going native, of taking the old adage that to pull off a successful con the first person you must fool is yourself several steps too far.
The first to fall were the ones everyone expected – the man whose extraction plan fell through, turning what was to be a week impersonating a member of the Russian Mafia into four long months, waking and sleeping, sober or drunk, or the woman who fulfilled the excruciating cliché of falling in love with her mark. The ones who couldn't get out until they'd forgotten they wanted to. The nasty surprise waiting in the wings was that anyone could lose themselves in their work just as easily – that sooner or later, most everyone would. In the same learning process by which forgery goes from challenging to routine to deceptively easy, the mind and body begin to show the same strain of any other over-stretched muscle, and things begin to stick. Forgers started to forget they didn’t really have a preference for Earl Grey over English tea, that they didn’t really blink too slowly when bluffing at poker, that they didn't really grow up in Argentina and have only ever visited South America on business. Before long, they were pouring over old photographs of themselves just to find out exactly what shade of brown their eyes used to be, the way their hair fell over their face when they ducked their heads, how they used to smile at their loved ones. The same men and women who pioneered the business can barely forge themselves anymore, reduced to caricatures of who they might have used to be.
While it might not be obvious to the layperson why this is such a spectacularly terrifying fate, it spells professional suicide. If you can't keep your own persona straight, you've a snowball's chance in hell of managing anyone else's.
You will be by the end of the year is a warning too.
***
It's remarkable how little time people will waste on confirming a colleague's identity when they find him lying on the street with a gunshot wound in his leg. After all, everyone knows that even the best forgers can't hold a form with bullet holes in it.
Then again, most forgers don't have the luxury of knowing the bullet stays there only as long as they want it to.
***
The fifteen minutes that follow are not among the more enjoyable of Eames' career, carried like a sack of potatoes over a succession of shoulders as the security team weaves its way around the refuse heaps and half-collapsed structures that make up the terrain between them and home. The other men bitch loudly about how completely fucking useless he is, whether he's put on weight, etc, in what is mostly a good-natured attempt to keep him distracted, while Eames grits his teeth and makes himself focus on keeping track of their voices, the route they're following – anything he might need later. It's too dark for him to get a good look at any of their faces, unfortunately.
What people forget about this sort of classic Trojan Horse gambit is that it rather depends on there being some point in the process where the horse is left unattended to get on with it. Sooner or later, he's going to have to cut and run. After a couple of terse radio conversations they've assured him there's a doctor waiting back at base (that 'base' has the facilities to treat a gunshot wound is worth making note of in itself), so it's not going to be that long before some nice person with an expensive medical degree is going to want to take a close look at his leg for him, and Eames may be very good at what he does but that doesn't mean he has any faith in his ability to hold a form while under anaesthetic. He can probably wait until the last minute and fake a panic attack on the table, but it's going to be touch and go. The important part is getting inside; once there he has three pre-prepared personas to choose from, all loyal employees and all known to work long after hours – and his unmatched talent for improvisation. With a little luck, good old-fashioned thievery will take care of the rest.
Naturally, going in with such a detailed and well-formed plan is only asking for something to go wrong, and the first sign of it happening is the sound of the man who's carrying Eames muttering, “Well, look who the fuck it is now.”
“He can probably hear you from here, Spencer,” says one of the others – Mashiya.
“What?” groans Eames, who is not in a position to have any idea what they're looking at.
“Our friendly company wall-crawler,” says Mashiya. “I'll see what he wants.”
Spencer makes it loudly and deliberately known he is not going to be stuck holding Matthews' fat ass off the ground while this goes on (and less deliberately known that he's more than a little shaken by the idea that 'the wall-crawler' heard him). By the time Spencer has him down on the ground and moves to give him a clear view, Eames is prepared for the sight of Mashiya talking to the point man. He tries to make up his mind whether he's been expecting this development. He's uncomfortably aware that they never did figure out how this point man has found him every night until now, and it's only the fact he hasn't so much as glanced Eames' way yet that's keeping him from being very worried.
“About my height, dark blonde hair, English accent,” the point man is saying. “Bound to be some kind of meta, though I couldn't give you a fix on what.”
“Didn't get that good a look at any of them,” Mashiya replies, apologetic, “unless Matthews saw the guy who shot him.” They both turn to look at Eames.
Eames wants to laugh but sticks to shaking his head, trusting that any expression he's making will pass for a grimace. The point man turns away, but not before Eames catches what can only be frustration stretched across his face.
“I'll take your man in,” he says. “I want the rest of you back out there with your eyes peeled.”
If Mashiya has any thoughts about being sent out to look for rogue metahumans while leaving an injured man with 'the company wall-crawler', he hides it well. “Yes, sir.”
It occurs to Eames, as he's being lifted and slung carefully over the point man's shoulder, that this doesn't necessarily mean that the point man doesn't know who he's really carrying. It's just not like he has any options but to play along even if he does.
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Date: 2011-03-25 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-26 05:31 am (UTC)Delurking briefly!
Date: 2011-03-25 06:20 pm (UTC)*cough* Tiny typo. I am trying to be good about remembering to review when I see things if I am ever going to edit for people.
Otherwise! I stalk you for fic, and I am pleased to see Inception added to the list. This is fun, it's clever, it draws you in, and I am v. much looking forward to seeing how Arthur's power works - because I doubt it's just as simple as anti-grav. (For some reason I have also found myself using present tense more lately, too. It definitely works for this, where the timeline is skipping back and forth but it's always Eames, always in the moment.)
Re: Delurking briefly!
Date: 2011-03-26 02:27 pm (UTC)I stalk you for fic, and I am pleased to see Inception added to the list.
Well, I'm pleased to hear from you! If you don't mind me asking, any other fic in particular? I'm always curious about what people are actually reading and enjoying out of my work. ^^;
This is fun, it's clever, it draws you in, and I am v. much looking forward to seeing how Arthur's power works - because I doubt it's just as simple as anti-grav.
Glad to hear it - as much fun as I had with the idea this is a style of story I've never really tried before *and* a new fandom (with a ridiculously high standard for fic), and that always leaves you extra nervous about whether you've gotten it to work. As for Arthur's powers, yeah - anti-grav abilities are pretty common in this world, coming back from the dead is really not. But more on that in the next chapter.
(For some reason I have also found myself using present tense more lately, too. It definitely works for this, where the timeline is skipping back and forth but it's always Eames, always in the moment.)
Present tense was something I didn't use myself either until I encountered a few particularly awesome fic writers who managed to sell me on how effective it could be when used well - like you say, it does give you that in-the-moment feel and that can make the story flow a lot more easily. I tend to flip back and forth between present and past in my own fic, but this story very definitely wanted to be in present tense and I certainly wasn't going to argue.
Re: Delurking briefly!
Date: 2011-03-31 03:45 am (UTC)I think I stumbled across you via XXXHolic (The Epic One), read the Guilty Gear on a whim, and stuck around for anything else delicious that came by. (Vel is also a friend of a friend(Flidget), so you are a friend of a friend of a friend? Almost as good as a second-cousin's former roommate!)
Inception does have a very high-brow fandom, so I'm glad you're adding to it! I'd say it's working; it can be challenging to juggle discontinuous time-lines, but that definitely fits the theme and the canon nicely.
You can never argue with a determined story idea. XD At least, there's no winning against them. Present's great for action, and that's what you have a lot of in this one. Of course it's not for everything, but writing's about using what you've got wisely.
I shall look forward to the next part and the reveal!
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Date: 2011-03-25 06:48 pm (UTC)hahah wow so Eames can't die? Ever?
I wonder what's up with Arthur? I mean, I love his power, defining gravity, awesome. But what is with the mulity personas? Two part power?
I wonder if Arthur knows he's holding Eames...hehe can't wait until part 2. Love this!
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Date: 2011-03-26 05:31 am (UTC)hahah wow so Eames can't die? Ever?
I wonder what's up with Arthur? I mean, I love his power, defining gravity, awesome. But what is with the mulity personas? Two part power?
I would explain, but this is all stuff that will get covered in the next part, so. ;)
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