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FIC: FOUR OF CLUBS, PART 7
Title: Four of Clubs
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: OMC/OMC (David Serkey/Constantine Fitzweiss)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 33,424
Summary: CIA Agents David and Constantine are partners in the Agency's Mindcrime division, working on a new project to combat the illegal usage of PASIV devices for extraction. There is also a secret, a lot of damage, and a slow train-ride into hell.
WARNINGS: Violence, some graphic imagery, and slash of course. David is not a healthy guy.
The units they built to install in our heads, so we could stop mutilating the backs of our necks, weren't legal for testing in the U.S. So we reached out, contacted Interpol about a collaboration. We got the green light to have our surgery in France, and continue to test the device there.
"France," I said, of all places. "Really? Why are they so friendly to this idea all of a sudden?"
"Different prototype testing policies," Champ growled, eying me in a way that suggested I might kindly shut the hell up and let him finish. "They'll actually allow you two to waive your rights as human beings over there and allow us to stick black boxes in your brains. Over here, you' d have to fully understand every facet of the technology and how it functioned."
I wrinkled my nose up because I hardly cared how it worked, I just knew it did and they'd stop poking holes in me every damn day. "That's too risky if we're field operatives."
"Exactly," Champ agreed, "Last thing we need is for this tech to wind up in the wrong hands, too. I don't want anyone to know shit they don't have to. Hell, I don't know any shit I don't have to. People fucking around in any brain they can get their hands on just to see what goodies they can get. Too dangerous for anyone to have the whole fuckin' story."
"I don't speak any French," I half-complained, more out of amusement.
"I got that," Con said, and grinned when I looked at him in disbelief. "I took it in high school and then my Ma made me continue in language courses. Probably a bit rusty, but it'll come back, right?"
I couldn't argue. And the thought really did amuse me - Con's not the sort you imagine speaking French.
"We known each other seven years, and you never mentioned it?" I asked him, and he just shrugged. It hadn't exactly come up, I'd give him that.
"I'd have told you if you'd have asked," he said, and smiled. Apparently he enjoyed that he still had a secret after all these years. He probably thought he had at least two, but the one he'd left unsaid was hardly a secret to me.
"When do we go?" I asked Champ, who was probably about to explode through all our buddy-cop banter like a comic book superhero.
"Book your tickets, boys," he answered. "You're expected."
I was surprised he wasn't coming, but apparently he was too important to mindcrime hierarchy on this end to try and manage his subdivision and recruit training from overseas. Instead, he'd stay home and manage us from afar. I almost thought I'd miss his gruff, barking presence, but he told us to get the fuck out 'cause he had another appointment.
I figured I'd get enough Champ Cixous through my phone or work-email that I'd survive. He was good at berating from a distance.
-
France was just half a world and a nine hour plane-ride away. I was glad we were flying from DC, it meant we only had one layover. Turned out we had to fly up to Boston and across the ocean out of Logan Int'l instead of flying straight across.
Con kept his totem secure this time. We'd shipped the Hayabusa back to his Ma, which cost an arm and a leg, so we'd left D.C. with nothing behind on that last big leap into the real unknown.
Every day we were getting closer to having it. I for one, could not wait for this shit to hit for real. I was still hearing occasionally from the guys we left back in Chicago branch office, from the various mindcrime divisions cross-country, and they were doggedly doing the best they could. The teams that survived their first year became almost untouchable. It was the wild west all over again, with the best of the best training new team members in how not to get caught.
They thought they were smart, a new breed of criminal all over again. Better than the best bank robbers, cat burglars, art thieves. I could not wait to hit them with this.
So when we arrived in Paris international, and it happened again - thank god in the john - I didn't say anything about it. I knew, even as I lay there, that this would ruin the project. I never piss in urinals, and in this case I'd have landed right in the fucking thing if I had. But, I crumpled half onto the toilet like a drunk, one hand gripping the seat like an anchor and the entire rest of my body refusing to heed my commands at all. The other hand trailed into water fouled by my own urine, and I thought - been a long time since I've been here, hasn't it.
Funny how life has to knock you down when you're headed for the top. Like it has to remind you, every so often, that the depths from which you ascended would be happy to have you back. Well, I had news for life; if this was the worst it fuckin' had, I was going to kick its goddamn teeth in. I'd been born in hell. The floor of the Paris International shithole was pretty fancy in comparison.
When it was done with me, I got up, washed my hands a good long time, and went back to Con outside. He didn't say anything at all. Sometimes, a guy takes a leisurely shit. The rule is, you don't ask.
-
Interpol put us through our paces. They had a team on payroll, pulled out of prisons to enjoy a slightly more comfortable confinement, like zoo animals. So they ran a mock extraction and we showed a bunch of foreign top brass what our LUCID did and explained better our need for the permanent installations intended. Positioning and placing the LNR's took time. In dreamspace, where time is magnified from minutes into hours, days, weeks - those minutes were critical.
Still, we'd never tried it before, and under these ideal conditions, we destroyed 'em, as Champ would have said.
When we moved out of the LUCID's space and into the dream network we were infiltrating, we became ghosts - we could be seen, heard, but not touched. The team couldn't kill us out of the dream that way, couldn't keep us out of anywhere with walls or mazes. We were just ever so slightly out of synch, which worked to our advantage. You can't run, you can't hide, we were the eye in the sky.
It was a good feeling. Even though we knew shit would evolve more in a real situation, we saw the fear come into the Interpol team's eyes. After the dream ended, they were shaken. We'd rocked their whole world, and we were about to start taking down their friends, their family. There wasn't shit they could do about it. I felt like dynamite.
Con and I bought those assholes steak dinners, like their last meals on death row, and sent our condolences with the food.
-
The surgery was scheduled for a week and a half later, giving us downtime before, and a long recovery time anticipated afterwards. We knew this wasn't a joke, but it didn't quite hit us. We were alive, felt good. I knew that the shit occasionally happening to me wasn't going on with Constantine, because I'd have seen it on him. Also, he was such a good guy, he'd have reported it. Had faith that they'd sort the trouble out rather than cut their losses and scrap the whole project. I figured it must have been a fault with me, rather than the machine. Maybe I'd just been way overdoing it.
So I didn't mind the break from working. Con and I took in the sights, played tourist. We even went to the Louvre, which neither of us had any real interest in. We stared at hundreds of pictures, guide pamphlets in hand, and he translated a couple of sections for me. I looked longer at the nude studies, I won't lie. Not everyone can appreciate a Mondrian, but well painted tits are universal.
Con got caught up in 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps', on temporary loan from the Chateau de Malmaison, apparently finding something to relate to in that dramatic depiction of L'empeur. Something about his knowing gaze, commanding eyes. The hand extended forward like he'd command his troops to march onward until they hit ocean again, and they'd do it as expected. Not out of fear or because they mindlessly did as they were told, but out of love. The painter shared my name.
I bought him a print. A big one, to hang in his assigned living space. Told him as I gave it to him, "We'll make it to fucking Moscow, partner. Only this time, they won't know to fucking burn it before we get there."
He didn't laugh, just looked at me, and smiled. Smiled real, smiled at me. For me. My doubts, my worries about my own memories and what I could see in them vanished. It was the same as I'd seen on him when we were fishing all those years ago. Constantine was in love with me, and he didn't quite know it yet.
But he was almost there.
-
The enormity of what we were about to do to ourselves hit us both hard on the day of the actual surgery, for me at about the time they were shaving my head. Not just a quick buzz, either. I hadn't kept my hair that short since living with my father - but this was... shaved clean. Bare.
Con looked ridiculous, like a cancer patient. I stayed away from mirrors. If baldness was in my future, I didn't want any previews of how that would look. We waited in pre-op together, anxious. I think we both believed it'd somehow get called off, that the word would get out somehow that we weren't totally ready.
I was thinking about how possible it was, in this risky experimental surgery we were about to undergo, that one of us might not survive. That the last thing I'd remember was a nurse asking me to count backwards from ten, or that I'd wake up again and he'd be gone. I didn't believe in it, though. Not really. We both existed too strongly.
"Tell me something no one else knows?" I finally asked, to cut the silence. We laid around on hospital beds in hospital gowns under cheap blue blankets that were easy to sterilize. Anxious. Talking would make it easier - and I wondered if the oppression of the moment might get him to admit... But he gave me something different instead.
"You remember my dog?" he asks - rhetorically. I remember the dog, in a sudden and perfectly formed image of my hands lifting its lifeless head onto its paws, glassy sightless eyes. Long, soft black fur under my fingers that was faintly wet with shed tears. I remembered. I nodded.
"When I was a cop - barely a cop, even - I got this call from a woman way out in the ass-end of our precinct's authority. She said there was this dog in a drain, and it was stuck there. That someone should come shoot it. Put it out of its misery and keep it from hurting anybody.
So I'm envisioning this - I don't know. Big old wolf looking thing, half dead and torn up, looking to kill anything that got into reach. Like I'd go shoot it, big old cop standing in the face of the big bad wolf and pulling the trigger. I didn't know any better, I guess.
But I get there and it's just - him. This pathetic black mutt, stuck on something way back in this maybe three foot opening. A drainage culvert alongside the road - couldn't really call it a highway out that far. I realized the woman wanted me to shoot him because she figured it'd be too much trouble for any adult to go down in there and get him out, and she didn't trust a kid not to get himself bit.
So I did it. I got down into the mud and crawled up into this smelly, god-knows-what's-come-through-it pipe. And he's all tangled when I get to him, nervous as hell and probably half starved but you couldn't tell under all the fur and mud. You could barely guess what color he was under there.
He's got bungee cords and fishing line and plastic bags and all this shit wrapped around his whole back half and I don't know if that's just a bunch of crap he got into or maybe someone tried to drown him or what. I just knew I had to get it off of him. I wanted to rescue that dog, because jesus christ he needed to be saved and not just shot down to die in all this gross sludge.
So I started to cut him free, and some of it must have hurt, because I was working in the dark, talking nonsense and feeling my way for all these things holding him there, but he just put his head down over my shoulder, like he'd let me do anything. Because all he wanted was someone to just touch him at that point. Even if it hurt, even if he died, it was okay 'cause he wasn't alone anymore.
I don't know why or how the press got there. They got some great footage of my mud-covered ass as I worked, I guess. But they were going full force when I finally got him loose. I put my arms around him to start edging us backward and out, and I guess the camera lights must have hit his eyes because he turned right around and bit the fuck out of me.
Hard as hell, like those K-9 unit dogs will clamp on your arm and suddenly I was bleeding like crazy.
And I realized that as much as he and I wanted to be out of this hole, we had to go slow. I had to hide my arm - hide the damage because no one would want a dog that bit like that. They'd just put him in a cage at the shelter, all the way in back, and he'd get the 'dangerous' tag. They'd give him the gas.
After all that work, all that trust, he was worth so much more than that. He needed someone who wouldn't just throw him away when he was inconvenient.
I hid the bite, wrapped my sleeve around it the best I could so the blood wouldn't show in pictures, and put my arms around him again. He just - relaxed, all of a sudden, just like that. Resigned himself that even after his mistake - and I knew he regretted it - I wasn't gonna hurt him. That he trusted me to do what was best.
I knew then he had to be my dog. That maybe he already was."
As Con finished, he looked reflective, then at me. Apologetic. I realized, looking into his eyes, that he was thinking of the puppy he'd rejected. Now surely it was a dog, probably living with some kid who was now half grown, the two of them aging together. That puppy who couldn't possibly have taken the place of the animal I callously thought was just that. But he felt bad about it anyway, felt bad he'd shut me out. God, what an idiot I'd been.
"Now it's your turn," he told me, the corner of his mouth turning up a little, as the nurse came in finally. I laughed a little. Nervous - the real weight of how much he'd just given me felt almost oppressive.
"Yeah, alright," I answered, trying to think of anything I possibly had of equal value. The nurse - anesthesiologist I guess, stayed quiet after telling us she was about to sedate us, sensing we'd be fine to talk each other down without panicking. I had no idea what to expect as she pushed my dose, then Con's, like maybe we'd have ten or so minutes while we gradually dozed off. She moved away, and I finally realized what I could offer.
"When I was fourteen, I ran away - " but that was as far as I got. Lights out.
-
I woke in a white world of curtains, my head heavy. My neck was stiff as hell and I was on my front, supported in an 'o' shaped pillow that allowed me to breathe face down as I was. I felt lax, like I couldn't even maintain tension in my body. My field of vision was filled with pristine hospital floor. My head felt like it had been screwed into place for a while, and maybe it had been, I hadn't asked any specifics. But I was obviously alive.
It felt like no time had passed and like eons had gone by, a paradox of sensation that I struggled with like consciousness. I could hear monitors going, measuring my ascending heart rate as the pattern changed from sleeping to waking. Measuring my breaths. The tones were different for each, it only took me a couple minutes to match them up. Longer because I became aware of a second set of tones that didn't synch with mine at all as my patterns changed. They became audible, a little distant, when mine stopped overlapping them as my heart and breath climbed out of unison.
Constantine. There, alive, breathing and his heart beating. Normal, regular rhythms. There was an appaternal beep from the machine echoing my heart as I realized, and then I focused on matching us together again. When the sounds were unified indicators of life, I fell back asleep, more reassured than I'd almost ever felt.
-
LUCID LOG HR. 94 - SINGLE SUBJECT
We have a lot of time recovery to talk, and I hadn't forgotten Constantine's request. That in his story, it could have been me just as easily he'd dragged out of a drain, and that he'd told me how he worked by telling that story to me.
It gave me hope, that story, because even though he'd found his dog in a pile of shit, tangled and pathetic where everyone else had given up on it, he'd kept it. Kept it even after it ripped him up and surprised him. How easily that was a metaphor for me, only he and the dog had grown older together. Companions for life, and I could not express how much I wanted that for myself.
We learned the patterns of the night nurses, we knew when we'd have a couple hours to ourselves. We closed the distance, laying close out of necessity with our hands joining between us on the narrow hospital bed.
"My turn," I tell him, in that space of closeness - because time seems to alternately race and hesitate here in the hospital - where days go by routine. Here, right now, with quiet all around us, I'm ready. It's hard to see his eyes in the dark, but knowing they're on me helps, the contact helps.
"My mother and father split soon after I was born. I didn't really care, I had my older brother and my mother, and to me that was good enough.
Except, somehow along the way, I started to become more like that absent member. I'm not sure exactly how, but when my eyes didn't darken like hers and I wasn't a baby anymore - my hair, my face. My mother saw too much of him when she looked at me, and it brought out the worst in her. It was like he'd turned her into this triggered animal, and when I looked like him, sounded, acted like him as I got bigger, she'd realize she could fight that fear she had of him, the one I woke up in her. She was bigger, stronger than what made her afraid, at last.
It finally all hit a head when I was thirteen. My voice was changing, I was getting taller. She realized, maybe, that she wouldn't have physical power over me much longer. I could almost see those moments in her eyes.
Whatever it was, when I was having one of those typical teen moments of defiance - wouldn't clean my room or do my homework or some shit - she seized me roughly. She flipped me all the way over and smashed the top of my head against the living room floor. It was just this huge amount of rage, all pouring out in this sudden attack I couldn't predict. It dazed the hell out of me. The pain, sudden reorientation of up and down.
Next thing I knew she and my older brother are in this knock down drag-out brawl, and I had never seen that happen before. We all realized in that moment when my brother pinned my mother down to the floor with one fist cocked back and calling her out, that I was going to tear everything apart. And because I had no idea why or how, there was nothing I could do to stop it.
So she sent me away to live with the father I had never even met. My brother tells me he started drinking that year. God, he was seventeen. I wasn't even there and just my echoes were fucking everything up. I have no idea why my father agreed to take me on. Maybe he understood that he should have some responsibility for the small scale copy of himself that he'd irresponsibly wrought upon the world. Maybe he just didn't care enough about me to bother arguing with my mother.
Maybe he thought, somewhere in his alcohol mired brain, that I could fix him. Like he'd miraculously change into a responsible, adjusted adult because I needed him to be one. But when I got there and it was just - me - he realized that I was halfway him already.
He lived in upstate New York, which is half farms and nothing and the other half old woods and nothing. New York's one of the most populated states in the nation, no one pictures cows and forests, but if you go far enough north - there they all are, in this miracle of contradictions.
My father lived in this - cabin. It was half broke-down always cold as hell even in the summer, which was sort of a blessing. It barely had electricity, indoor plumbing that was delicate as hell. The shower was cold and the only thing to do was watch the antiquated old TV he had. He always dominated that. So I got antsy. More and more - cabin fever. That's a good way to describe it.
When summer ended, I didn't bother going to school - or rather, I went the first day and quit. These were rural kids, moving at the sedate pace of drugged cattle. They were learning shit - disinterestedly - that I had learned years before.
I made one friend - if you could call it that. She was two years older and she'd let me use her shower after we'd fool around so I could have hot water. She liked me because she liked sex, and she was under the mistaken impression that guys under fifteen couldn't get her pregnant. I didn't bother correcting her - and I also didn't knock her up.
My father didn't give a shit about me skipping three and a half months of school, but finally a light bulb went on somewhere at social services or the truancy offices or something, and someone showed up to tell him. To correct him - about my attendance. When it became a hassle, got attention, then he cared.
I was fourteen, and the country was driving me crazy. I was ready for this fight, but he won it. He was good at violence, a pro at causing pain - the only two things besides drinking he did well. Lots of practice, I guess.
It was the only time he ever touched me. His cabin was right on the tree line. When he was done with me, more interested in going back to his beer and network T.V., I went into the woods.
I didn't have a plan, had no idea why, I just - wanted to be in there. Like it called me just for this. I'm a city boy, my whole life to that point had been navigating neat square blocks and public transportation. I practically owned Manhattan and could get anywhere else in N.Y.C. with a little extra time to look at subway routes.
This was a whole other world. I walked as straight as I could for hours, but it didn't matter. When it got cold, when I got hungry - I turned around to go back. I thought - I don't know, thought I could call my mother. Beg her to go back, promise I'd stay in my room, keep it clean. She'd never even have to see me if she didn't want to, but I couldn't be with my dad any longer.
It didn't matter though. I was lost. Walking back the way I came didn't work. Everything was unfamiliar. The woods had me, and they weren't going to let me go until they were - done with me, like everyone else. That was the first idea that seized me, as night became day, and then wore on again to night.
I was already lean - my father's ideas of meals were pretty spartan. I would eat whatever hadn't gone rancid. By the third day, I was starving. Really and truly hungry. I'd never felt that way before, like my middle was this empty void and anything would have been welcome. But - what was poisonous? What would kill me?
I did find a little water to drink here and there. Gross ponds, streams occasionally, but I had no way to carry it.
I was utterly reliant on the woods, and they gave me as little as possible. Time became unmeasurable. I did eventually stop being hungry - I forgot how to feel it. I k new I had to eat, but there was nothing to eat. The painful sensation was useless, so my body shut it down.
I saw animals I'd never seen before. Hawks. Vultures. The vanishing tails of foxes. Once, a bobcat. I huddled down into some tree roots and prayed it didn't see how weak I was, that its fear of me would keep it away.
Getting up again, getting moving again took almost everything I had. Never once did I find an end to the trees. I began to doubt that one existed. The idea took hold of me that I had always been in the wood, that everything else I had known had been my madness, played out in my mind. That I was the solitary creature of my kind and no others had ever existed.
I had been so long in the woods that the concept of anything else was too difficult for my mind - slowly shutting down like the rest of me for lack of food to fuel it.
I don't know how long after that I heard the wolves. It seems like exactly the same moment. Howls and barks raised up around me and I thought, they'll take me at last. But it wasn't me they were hunting.
It was - was evening. Hard to tell in the trees, but still just light enough to see clearly. I heard the footsteps first, heavy and rushing, crashing heedlessly through undergrowth, and then the heavy breath. Labored, like a great whushing bellows, and I froze. Stopped, even though I knew I'd never get going again, I was ready to surrender, and I wanted to see them.
They must have been ripping it apart while it ran. This deer - a stag, I guess - just comes flying out of the brush. From invisible to there in an instant, right next to me. Passed by me in touching distance and at top speed, and I could see everything wrong with it. Half it's damn face was ripped off and it was just dropping blood, bottoming out. It was already dead, but it was still running - wouldn't stop. Some impulse, some momentum in its dying muscles carried it forward at full momentum until it finally hit an obstacle.
It hit a tree, just yards from me, crumpled up unnaturally and fell down as still as death. that was all it had, it was out. And not a wolf to be seen.
Thirteen hours later they pulled me out of the woods. I had gone from the outskirts of Dolgeville through Ferris Lake Park and nearly fifty miles north all the way to Five Ponds. My father had never reported my absence, but when my mother had called on some maternal instinct, and he'd been evasive, she worried. I was gone five hours shy of fourteen days. Two weeks.
As the paramedics put a blanket over my numb, unfeeling shoulders, I threw up the only contents my stomach had - raw venison."
I pause. There's no real memories of the events I'd glossed over. Nothing solid or real to give Constantine, only images that shift and change every time I returned to them. I had gone into the woods a city boy, and what had come out was unrecognizable. Romulus.
"My father was deemed unfit to raise children - even one so obviously his own. My mother, having assured herself of my continued existence, considered her duty fulfilled.
I lived for four years in foster care, with only occasional apologetic letters from my brother as any indicator that my family was still alive.
My foster family was saintly - god help them. They really tried, really genuinely felt for me and wanted me to get better. If I'd have been sent to them instead of my fuckin' father - well, I'm not gonna try to guess. They got me, but the damage was already done.
I'd close my eyes and see trees, hear the pounding thuds of racing hooves, muffled by leaf litter but no less desperate. See that wounded animal racing away from the invisible predators behind it.
On the worst nights, I could taste it, and it was like lycanthropy. I had to get out of the house, couldn't take the walls, and I'd climb out the window and head for whatever trees I could find, equally terrified of the tree line and having to be there.
I eventually found other trouble to get into. I got older, figured a few things out."
The rest hardly matters. I've told Con something that I hadn't ever told anyone - that when I'd been in those woods, I'd been afraid. Not just hungry or cold or half-animal with fever, but actually scared. Terrified that nothing had ever existed but me and that place. That there was no end and my memories were untrue. And I hadn't thought that I was going mad but rather that I had been so always, and only then had I finally found sanity.
Constantine is quiet, solemn, but he understands that while it didn't sound like that much if you turned it around and made it impersonal, and there were others who experienced worse, who went through it every day, and with no hope of coming back as I had - he understands all that and also what it means as something personal.
"Thank you," is what he finally says, all that really can be said, because he can't reach back and make it better, but if I trusted him like he now knew I did, he could get me back out into the light.
-
We slowly recovered. The doctors watched us obsessively for signs of rejection, for negative side effects to the immunosupressants we had to take until our bodies learned that the implants were now part of them. We stayed healthy. Guess our brains weren't so smart as to reject what was bad for them.
We played a lot of cards, our heads wrapped up like mummies at first and then less and less bandages as the weeks passed. Constantine's hair grew back faster than mine, or maybe it just seemed that way since he'd always kept it so short. I felt somehow diminished without the lion's mane of curls I'd gotten used to having. The sensation was akin to what I'd imagine a shaved cat must have felt.
But we made it - finally graduating to outpatient care and that was when it really became - real, you know? We'd passed again. Now instead of the dreaded long needles. we had two permanent jacks mounted into the backs of our skulls, otherwise invisible and internal. We could pug in as quick as you jack headphones into a stereo.
The techs said it would solve the problem of sound, too. That they had branched the receptors into our auditory as well as visual receptors.
We could have won the lottery and not been as excited. We wanted to try again, see what we could get with sound, with these new even closer connections.
Our baselines cleared with a fifteen percent improvement over LNR's and we were cleared back into use to teach the computers how to process how our brains processed sound first, then dreams of sound, interpreted through our minds.
We were supposed to report anything odd, any discomfort or side-effects. If anything it was better - even logging extra hours. I told myself not to do it, not to rush back in after my absence, not with how close Con was, but I did it anyway. Just too many opportunities, too many things I couldn't stand not to change.
I snuck around Constantine, left the building when he did and then came back when I was sure he was gone so he wouldn't suspect how long I was actually there.
It wasn't that long before we got the green light to run another simulation against the Interpol team. We were beyond ready, wanted to know what they could throw at us now that they knew what was coming.
We figured we should do some prep work in the dream to get us back in the swing of working together. So, the night before our re-match, certain we'd come up with a few surprises of our own, we plugged in.
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: OMC/OMC (David Serkey/Constantine Fitzweiss)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 33,424
Summary: CIA Agents David and Constantine are partners in the Agency's Mindcrime division, working on a new project to combat the illegal usage of PASIV devices for extraction. There is also a secret, a lot of damage, and a slow train-ride into hell.
WARNINGS: Violence, some graphic imagery, and slash of course. David is not a healthy guy.
The units they built to install in our heads, so we could stop mutilating the backs of our necks, weren't legal for testing in the U.S. So we reached out, contacted Interpol about a collaboration. We got the green light to have our surgery in France, and continue to test the device there.
"France," I said, of all places. "Really? Why are they so friendly to this idea all of a sudden?"
"Different prototype testing policies," Champ growled, eying me in a way that suggested I might kindly shut the hell up and let him finish. "They'll actually allow you two to waive your rights as human beings over there and allow us to stick black boxes in your brains. Over here, you' d have to fully understand every facet of the technology and how it functioned."
I wrinkled my nose up because I hardly cared how it worked, I just knew it did and they'd stop poking holes in me every damn day. "That's too risky if we're field operatives."
"Exactly," Champ agreed, "Last thing we need is for this tech to wind up in the wrong hands, too. I don't want anyone to know shit they don't have to. Hell, I don't know any shit I don't have to. People fucking around in any brain they can get their hands on just to see what goodies they can get. Too dangerous for anyone to have the whole fuckin' story."
"I don't speak any French," I half-complained, more out of amusement.
"I got that," Con said, and grinned when I looked at him in disbelief. "I took it in high school and then my Ma made me continue in language courses. Probably a bit rusty, but it'll come back, right?"
I couldn't argue. And the thought really did amuse me - Con's not the sort you imagine speaking French.
"We known each other seven years, and you never mentioned it?" I asked him, and he just shrugged. It hadn't exactly come up, I'd give him that.
"I'd have told you if you'd have asked," he said, and smiled. Apparently he enjoyed that he still had a secret after all these years. He probably thought he had at least two, but the one he'd left unsaid was hardly a secret to me.
"When do we go?" I asked Champ, who was probably about to explode through all our buddy-cop banter like a comic book superhero.
"Book your tickets, boys," he answered. "You're expected."
I was surprised he wasn't coming, but apparently he was too important to mindcrime hierarchy on this end to try and manage his subdivision and recruit training from overseas. Instead, he'd stay home and manage us from afar. I almost thought I'd miss his gruff, barking presence, but he told us to get the fuck out 'cause he had another appointment.
I figured I'd get enough Champ Cixous through my phone or work-email that I'd survive. He was good at berating from a distance.
-
France was just half a world and a nine hour plane-ride away. I was glad we were flying from DC, it meant we only had one layover. Turned out we had to fly up to Boston and across the ocean out of Logan Int'l instead of flying straight across.
Con kept his totem secure this time. We'd shipped the Hayabusa back to his Ma, which cost an arm and a leg, so we'd left D.C. with nothing behind on that last big leap into the real unknown.
Every day we were getting closer to having it. I for one, could not wait for this shit to hit for real. I was still hearing occasionally from the guys we left back in Chicago branch office, from the various mindcrime divisions cross-country, and they were doggedly doing the best they could. The teams that survived their first year became almost untouchable. It was the wild west all over again, with the best of the best training new team members in how not to get caught.
They thought they were smart, a new breed of criminal all over again. Better than the best bank robbers, cat burglars, art thieves. I could not wait to hit them with this.
So when we arrived in Paris international, and it happened again - thank god in the john - I didn't say anything about it. I knew, even as I lay there, that this would ruin the project. I never piss in urinals, and in this case I'd have landed right in the fucking thing if I had. But, I crumpled half onto the toilet like a drunk, one hand gripping the seat like an anchor and the entire rest of my body refusing to heed my commands at all. The other hand trailed into water fouled by my own urine, and I thought - been a long time since I've been here, hasn't it.
Funny how life has to knock you down when you're headed for the top. Like it has to remind you, every so often, that the depths from which you ascended would be happy to have you back. Well, I had news for life; if this was the worst it fuckin' had, I was going to kick its goddamn teeth in. I'd been born in hell. The floor of the Paris International shithole was pretty fancy in comparison.
When it was done with me, I got up, washed my hands a good long time, and went back to Con outside. He didn't say anything at all. Sometimes, a guy takes a leisurely shit. The rule is, you don't ask.
-
Interpol put us through our paces. They had a team on payroll, pulled out of prisons to enjoy a slightly more comfortable confinement, like zoo animals. So they ran a mock extraction and we showed a bunch of foreign top brass what our LUCID did and explained better our need for the permanent installations intended. Positioning and placing the LNR's took time. In dreamspace, where time is magnified from minutes into hours, days, weeks - those minutes were critical.
Still, we'd never tried it before, and under these ideal conditions, we destroyed 'em, as Champ would have said.
When we moved out of the LUCID's space and into the dream network we were infiltrating, we became ghosts - we could be seen, heard, but not touched. The team couldn't kill us out of the dream that way, couldn't keep us out of anywhere with walls or mazes. We were just ever so slightly out of synch, which worked to our advantage. You can't run, you can't hide, we were the eye in the sky.
It was a good feeling. Even though we knew shit would evolve more in a real situation, we saw the fear come into the Interpol team's eyes. After the dream ended, they were shaken. We'd rocked their whole world, and we were about to start taking down their friends, their family. There wasn't shit they could do about it. I felt like dynamite.
Con and I bought those assholes steak dinners, like their last meals on death row, and sent our condolences with the food.
-
The surgery was scheduled for a week and a half later, giving us downtime before, and a long recovery time anticipated afterwards. We knew this wasn't a joke, but it didn't quite hit us. We were alive, felt good. I knew that the shit occasionally happening to me wasn't going on with Constantine, because I'd have seen it on him. Also, he was such a good guy, he'd have reported it. Had faith that they'd sort the trouble out rather than cut their losses and scrap the whole project. I figured it must have been a fault with me, rather than the machine. Maybe I'd just been way overdoing it.
So I didn't mind the break from working. Con and I took in the sights, played tourist. We even went to the Louvre, which neither of us had any real interest in. We stared at hundreds of pictures, guide pamphlets in hand, and he translated a couple of sections for me. I looked longer at the nude studies, I won't lie. Not everyone can appreciate a Mondrian, but well painted tits are universal.
Con got caught up in 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps', on temporary loan from the Chateau de Malmaison, apparently finding something to relate to in that dramatic depiction of L'empeur. Something about his knowing gaze, commanding eyes. The hand extended forward like he'd command his troops to march onward until they hit ocean again, and they'd do it as expected. Not out of fear or because they mindlessly did as they were told, but out of love. The painter shared my name.
I bought him a print. A big one, to hang in his assigned living space. Told him as I gave it to him, "We'll make it to fucking Moscow, partner. Only this time, they won't know to fucking burn it before we get there."
He didn't laugh, just looked at me, and smiled. Smiled real, smiled at me. For me. My doubts, my worries about my own memories and what I could see in them vanished. It was the same as I'd seen on him when we were fishing all those years ago. Constantine was in love with me, and he didn't quite know it yet.
But he was almost there.
-
The enormity of what we were about to do to ourselves hit us both hard on the day of the actual surgery, for me at about the time they were shaving my head. Not just a quick buzz, either. I hadn't kept my hair that short since living with my father - but this was... shaved clean. Bare.
Con looked ridiculous, like a cancer patient. I stayed away from mirrors. If baldness was in my future, I didn't want any previews of how that would look. We waited in pre-op together, anxious. I think we both believed it'd somehow get called off, that the word would get out somehow that we weren't totally ready.
I was thinking about how possible it was, in this risky experimental surgery we were about to undergo, that one of us might not survive. That the last thing I'd remember was a nurse asking me to count backwards from ten, or that I'd wake up again and he'd be gone. I didn't believe in it, though. Not really. We both existed too strongly.
"Tell me something no one else knows?" I finally asked, to cut the silence. We laid around on hospital beds in hospital gowns under cheap blue blankets that were easy to sterilize. Anxious. Talking would make it easier - and I wondered if the oppression of the moment might get him to admit... But he gave me something different instead.
"You remember my dog?" he asks - rhetorically. I remember the dog, in a sudden and perfectly formed image of my hands lifting its lifeless head onto its paws, glassy sightless eyes. Long, soft black fur under my fingers that was faintly wet with shed tears. I remembered. I nodded.
"When I was a cop - barely a cop, even - I got this call from a woman way out in the ass-end of our precinct's authority. She said there was this dog in a drain, and it was stuck there. That someone should come shoot it. Put it out of its misery and keep it from hurting anybody.
So I'm envisioning this - I don't know. Big old wolf looking thing, half dead and torn up, looking to kill anything that got into reach. Like I'd go shoot it, big old cop standing in the face of the big bad wolf and pulling the trigger. I didn't know any better, I guess.
But I get there and it's just - him. This pathetic black mutt, stuck on something way back in this maybe three foot opening. A drainage culvert alongside the road - couldn't really call it a highway out that far. I realized the woman wanted me to shoot him because she figured it'd be too much trouble for any adult to go down in there and get him out, and she didn't trust a kid not to get himself bit.
So I did it. I got down into the mud and crawled up into this smelly, god-knows-what's-come-through-it pipe. And he's all tangled when I get to him, nervous as hell and probably half starved but you couldn't tell under all the fur and mud. You could barely guess what color he was under there.
He's got bungee cords and fishing line and plastic bags and all this shit wrapped around his whole back half and I don't know if that's just a bunch of crap he got into or maybe someone tried to drown him or what. I just knew I had to get it off of him. I wanted to rescue that dog, because jesus christ he needed to be saved and not just shot down to die in all this gross sludge.
So I started to cut him free, and some of it must have hurt, because I was working in the dark, talking nonsense and feeling my way for all these things holding him there, but he just put his head down over my shoulder, like he'd let me do anything. Because all he wanted was someone to just touch him at that point. Even if it hurt, even if he died, it was okay 'cause he wasn't alone anymore.
I don't know why or how the press got there. They got some great footage of my mud-covered ass as I worked, I guess. But they were going full force when I finally got him loose. I put my arms around him to start edging us backward and out, and I guess the camera lights must have hit his eyes because he turned right around and bit the fuck out of me.
Hard as hell, like those K-9 unit dogs will clamp on your arm and suddenly I was bleeding like crazy.
And I realized that as much as he and I wanted to be out of this hole, we had to go slow. I had to hide my arm - hide the damage because no one would want a dog that bit like that. They'd just put him in a cage at the shelter, all the way in back, and he'd get the 'dangerous' tag. They'd give him the gas.
After all that work, all that trust, he was worth so much more than that. He needed someone who wouldn't just throw him away when he was inconvenient.
I hid the bite, wrapped my sleeve around it the best I could so the blood wouldn't show in pictures, and put my arms around him again. He just - relaxed, all of a sudden, just like that. Resigned himself that even after his mistake - and I knew he regretted it - I wasn't gonna hurt him. That he trusted me to do what was best.
I knew then he had to be my dog. That maybe he already was."
As Con finished, he looked reflective, then at me. Apologetic. I realized, looking into his eyes, that he was thinking of the puppy he'd rejected. Now surely it was a dog, probably living with some kid who was now half grown, the two of them aging together. That puppy who couldn't possibly have taken the place of the animal I callously thought was just that. But he felt bad about it anyway, felt bad he'd shut me out. God, what an idiot I'd been.
"Now it's your turn," he told me, the corner of his mouth turning up a little, as the nurse came in finally. I laughed a little. Nervous - the real weight of how much he'd just given me felt almost oppressive.
"Yeah, alright," I answered, trying to think of anything I possibly had of equal value. The nurse - anesthesiologist I guess, stayed quiet after telling us she was about to sedate us, sensing we'd be fine to talk each other down without panicking. I had no idea what to expect as she pushed my dose, then Con's, like maybe we'd have ten or so minutes while we gradually dozed off. She moved away, and I finally realized what I could offer.
"When I was fourteen, I ran away - " but that was as far as I got. Lights out.
-
I woke in a white world of curtains, my head heavy. My neck was stiff as hell and I was on my front, supported in an 'o' shaped pillow that allowed me to breathe face down as I was. I felt lax, like I couldn't even maintain tension in my body. My field of vision was filled with pristine hospital floor. My head felt like it had been screwed into place for a while, and maybe it had been, I hadn't asked any specifics. But I was obviously alive.
It felt like no time had passed and like eons had gone by, a paradox of sensation that I struggled with like consciousness. I could hear monitors going, measuring my ascending heart rate as the pattern changed from sleeping to waking. Measuring my breaths. The tones were different for each, it only took me a couple minutes to match them up. Longer because I became aware of a second set of tones that didn't synch with mine at all as my patterns changed. They became audible, a little distant, when mine stopped overlapping them as my heart and breath climbed out of unison.
Constantine. There, alive, breathing and his heart beating. Normal, regular rhythms. There was an appaternal beep from the machine echoing my heart as I realized, and then I focused on matching us together again. When the sounds were unified indicators of life, I fell back asleep, more reassured than I'd almost ever felt.
-
LUCID LOG HR. 94 - SINGLE SUBJECT
We have a lot of time recovery to talk, and I hadn't forgotten Constantine's request. That in his story, it could have been me just as easily he'd dragged out of a drain, and that he'd told me how he worked by telling that story to me.
It gave me hope, that story, because even though he'd found his dog in a pile of shit, tangled and pathetic where everyone else had given up on it, he'd kept it. Kept it even after it ripped him up and surprised him. How easily that was a metaphor for me, only he and the dog had grown older together. Companions for life, and I could not express how much I wanted that for myself.
We learned the patterns of the night nurses, we knew when we'd have a couple hours to ourselves. We closed the distance, laying close out of necessity with our hands joining between us on the narrow hospital bed.
"My turn," I tell him, in that space of closeness - because time seems to alternately race and hesitate here in the hospital - where days go by routine. Here, right now, with quiet all around us, I'm ready. It's hard to see his eyes in the dark, but knowing they're on me helps, the contact helps.
"My mother and father split soon after I was born. I didn't really care, I had my older brother and my mother, and to me that was good enough.
Except, somehow along the way, I started to become more like that absent member. I'm not sure exactly how, but when my eyes didn't darken like hers and I wasn't a baby anymore - my hair, my face. My mother saw too much of him when she looked at me, and it brought out the worst in her. It was like he'd turned her into this triggered animal, and when I looked like him, sounded, acted like him as I got bigger, she'd realize she could fight that fear she had of him, the one I woke up in her. She was bigger, stronger than what made her afraid, at last.
It finally all hit a head when I was thirteen. My voice was changing, I was getting taller. She realized, maybe, that she wouldn't have physical power over me much longer. I could almost see those moments in her eyes.
Whatever it was, when I was having one of those typical teen moments of defiance - wouldn't clean my room or do my homework or some shit - she seized me roughly. She flipped me all the way over and smashed the top of my head against the living room floor. It was just this huge amount of rage, all pouring out in this sudden attack I couldn't predict. It dazed the hell out of me. The pain, sudden reorientation of up and down.
Next thing I knew she and my older brother are in this knock down drag-out brawl, and I had never seen that happen before. We all realized in that moment when my brother pinned my mother down to the floor with one fist cocked back and calling her out, that I was going to tear everything apart. And because I had no idea why or how, there was nothing I could do to stop it.
So she sent me away to live with the father I had never even met. My brother tells me he started drinking that year. God, he was seventeen. I wasn't even there and just my echoes were fucking everything up. I have no idea why my father agreed to take me on. Maybe he understood that he should have some responsibility for the small scale copy of himself that he'd irresponsibly wrought upon the world. Maybe he just didn't care enough about me to bother arguing with my mother.
Maybe he thought, somewhere in his alcohol mired brain, that I could fix him. Like he'd miraculously change into a responsible, adjusted adult because I needed him to be one. But when I got there and it was just - me - he realized that I was halfway him already.
He lived in upstate New York, which is half farms and nothing and the other half old woods and nothing. New York's one of the most populated states in the nation, no one pictures cows and forests, but if you go far enough north - there they all are, in this miracle of contradictions.
My father lived in this - cabin. It was half broke-down always cold as hell even in the summer, which was sort of a blessing. It barely had electricity, indoor plumbing that was delicate as hell. The shower was cold and the only thing to do was watch the antiquated old TV he had. He always dominated that. So I got antsy. More and more - cabin fever. That's a good way to describe it.
When summer ended, I didn't bother going to school - or rather, I went the first day and quit. These were rural kids, moving at the sedate pace of drugged cattle. They were learning shit - disinterestedly - that I had learned years before.
I made one friend - if you could call it that. She was two years older and she'd let me use her shower after we'd fool around so I could have hot water. She liked me because she liked sex, and she was under the mistaken impression that guys under fifteen couldn't get her pregnant. I didn't bother correcting her - and I also didn't knock her up.
My father didn't give a shit about me skipping three and a half months of school, but finally a light bulb went on somewhere at social services or the truancy offices or something, and someone showed up to tell him. To correct him - about my attendance. When it became a hassle, got attention, then he cared.
I was fourteen, and the country was driving me crazy. I was ready for this fight, but he won it. He was good at violence, a pro at causing pain - the only two things besides drinking he did well. Lots of practice, I guess.
It was the only time he ever touched me. His cabin was right on the tree line. When he was done with me, more interested in going back to his beer and network T.V., I went into the woods.
I didn't have a plan, had no idea why, I just - wanted to be in there. Like it called me just for this. I'm a city boy, my whole life to that point had been navigating neat square blocks and public transportation. I practically owned Manhattan and could get anywhere else in N.Y.C. with a little extra time to look at subway routes.
This was a whole other world. I walked as straight as I could for hours, but it didn't matter. When it got cold, when I got hungry - I turned around to go back. I thought - I don't know, thought I could call my mother. Beg her to go back, promise I'd stay in my room, keep it clean. She'd never even have to see me if she didn't want to, but I couldn't be with my dad any longer.
It didn't matter though. I was lost. Walking back the way I came didn't work. Everything was unfamiliar. The woods had me, and they weren't going to let me go until they were - done with me, like everyone else. That was the first idea that seized me, as night became day, and then wore on again to night.
I was already lean - my father's ideas of meals were pretty spartan. I would eat whatever hadn't gone rancid. By the third day, I was starving. Really and truly hungry. I'd never felt that way before, like my middle was this empty void and anything would have been welcome. But - what was poisonous? What would kill me?
I did find a little water to drink here and there. Gross ponds, streams occasionally, but I had no way to carry it.
I was utterly reliant on the woods, and they gave me as little as possible. Time became unmeasurable. I did eventually stop being hungry - I forgot how to feel it. I k new I had to eat, but there was nothing to eat. The painful sensation was useless, so my body shut it down.
I saw animals I'd never seen before. Hawks. Vultures. The vanishing tails of foxes. Once, a bobcat. I huddled down into some tree roots and prayed it didn't see how weak I was, that its fear of me would keep it away.
Getting up again, getting moving again took almost everything I had. Never once did I find an end to the trees. I began to doubt that one existed. The idea took hold of me that I had always been in the wood, that everything else I had known had been my madness, played out in my mind. That I was the solitary creature of my kind and no others had ever existed.
I had been so long in the woods that the concept of anything else was too difficult for my mind - slowly shutting down like the rest of me for lack of food to fuel it.
I don't know how long after that I heard the wolves. It seems like exactly the same moment. Howls and barks raised up around me and I thought, they'll take me at last. But it wasn't me they were hunting.
It was - was evening. Hard to tell in the trees, but still just light enough to see clearly. I heard the footsteps first, heavy and rushing, crashing heedlessly through undergrowth, and then the heavy breath. Labored, like a great whushing bellows, and I froze. Stopped, even though I knew I'd never get going again, I was ready to surrender, and I wanted to see them.
They must have been ripping it apart while it ran. This deer - a stag, I guess - just comes flying out of the brush. From invisible to there in an instant, right next to me. Passed by me in touching distance and at top speed, and I could see everything wrong with it. Half it's damn face was ripped off and it was just dropping blood, bottoming out. It was already dead, but it was still running - wouldn't stop. Some impulse, some momentum in its dying muscles carried it forward at full momentum until it finally hit an obstacle.
It hit a tree, just yards from me, crumpled up unnaturally and fell down as still as death. that was all it had, it was out. And not a wolf to be seen.
Thirteen hours later they pulled me out of the woods. I had gone from the outskirts of Dolgeville through Ferris Lake Park and nearly fifty miles north all the way to Five Ponds. My father had never reported my absence, but when my mother had called on some maternal instinct, and he'd been evasive, she worried. I was gone five hours shy of fourteen days. Two weeks.
As the paramedics put a blanket over my numb, unfeeling shoulders, I threw up the only contents my stomach had - raw venison."
I pause. There's no real memories of the events I'd glossed over. Nothing solid or real to give Constantine, only images that shift and change every time I returned to them. I had gone into the woods a city boy, and what had come out was unrecognizable. Romulus.
"My father was deemed unfit to raise children - even one so obviously his own. My mother, having assured herself of my continued existence, considered her duty fulfilled.
I lived for four years in foster care, with only occasional apologetic letters from my brother as any indicator that my family was still alive.
My foster family was saintly - god help them. They really tried, really genuinely felt for me and wanted me to get better. If I'd have been sent to them instead of my fuckin' father - well, I'm not gonna try to guess. They got me, but the damage was already done.
I'd close my eyes and see trees, hear the pounding thuds of racing hooves, muffled by leaf litter but no less desperate. See that wounded animal racing away from the invisible predators behind it.
On the worst nights, I could taste it, and it was like lycanthropy. I had to get out of the house, couldn't take the walls, and I'd climb out the window and head for whatever trees I could find, equally terrified of the tree line and having to be there.
I eventually found other trouble to get into. I got older, figured a few things out."
The rest hardly matters. I've told Con something that I hadn't ever told anyone - that when I'd been in those woods, I'd been afraid. Not just hungry or cold or half-animal with fever, but actually scared. Terrified that nothing had ever existed but me and that place. That there was no end and my memories were untrue. And I hadn't thought that I was going mad but rather that I had been so always, and only then had I finally found sanity.
Constantine is quiet, solemn, but he understands that while it didn't sound like that much if you turned it around and made it impersonal, and there were others who experienced worse, who went through it every day, and with no hope of coming back as I had - he understands all that and also what it means as something personal.
"Thank you," is what he finally says, all that really can be said, because he can't reach back and make it better, but if I trusted him like he now knew I did, he could get me back out into the light.
-
We slowly recovered. The doctors watched us obsessively for signs of rejection, for negative side effects to the immunosupressants we had to take until our bodies learned that the implants were now part of them. We stayed healthy. Guess our brains weren't so smart as to reject what was bad for them.
We played a lot of cards, our heads wrapped up like mummies at first and then less and less bandages as the weeks passed. Constantine's hair grew back faster than mine, or maybe it just seemed that way since he'd always kept it so short. I felt somehow diminished without the lion's mane of curls I'd gotten used to having. The sensation was akin to what I'd imagine a shaved cat must have felt.
But we made it - finally graduating to outpatient care and that was when it really became - real, you know? We'd passed again. Now instead of the dreaded long needles. we had two permanent jacks mounted into the backs of our skulls, otherwise invisible and internal. We could pug in as quick as you jack headphones into a stereo.
The techs said it would solve the problem of sound, too. That they had branched the receptors into our auditory as well as visual receptors.
We could have won the lottery and not been as excited. We wanted to try again, see what we could get with sound, with these new even closer connections.
Our baselines cleared with a fifteen percent improvement over LNR's and we were cleared back into use to teach the computers how to process how our brains processed sound first, then dreams of sound, interpreted through our minds.
We were supposed to report anything odd, any discomfort or side-effects. If anything it was better - even logging extra hours. I told myself not to do it, not to rush back in after my absence, not with how close Con was, but I did it anyway. Just too many opportunities, too many things I couldn't stand not to change.
I snuck around Constantine, left the building when he did and then came back when I was sure he was gone so he wouldn't suspect how long I was actually there.
It wasn't that long before we got the green light to run another simulation against the Interpol team. We were beyond ready, wanted to know what they could throw at us now that they knew what was coming.
We figured we should do some prep work in the dream to get us back in the swing of working together. So, the night before our re-match, certain we'd come up with a few surprises of our own, we plugged in.