Chapter 1
At presumably the same dinner table, you can see a young Japanese man eating, there are guards around him and two sleek businessmen pitching him an idea, one of them is the traveler from before, but he is well taken care of, in his mid thirties, in clean expensive clothes, and he is talking.
“What is the most resilient parasite?” He asks the Japanese man “A bacteria? A virus? an intestinal worm?”
The Japanese man stops as he is about to put food in his mouth, but he stops and stares at the others and decides to eat it anyways, obviously not liking where the conversation is going.
“uh, what Mr. Cobb is trying to say.” interrupts the younger one with dark slicked back hair and bowtie.
“An idea.” Cobb answers himself, realizing that he needs to change the direction of his pitch a little bit, especially since he could hear his food start to wiggle as he mentioned the last one “Resilient. Highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” He points to his head for emphasis.
“An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks. right in there somewhere.”
“For someone like you to steal?” The Japanese man says, putting food into his mouth seemingly uninterested in the conversation still.
The younger man interjects again, trying to get some momentum “Yes, in your dream state, your conscious defenses are lowered, and that makes your thoughts vulnerable to theft, it is called extraction.”
“Mr. Saito” Cobb begins “We can train your subconscious mind to defend itself, from even the most skilled extractor.”
“How can you do that?” Saito asks, still unamused.
“Because I am the most skilled extractor. I know how to search your mind and find your secrets. I know the tricks, and I can teach them to you so that even when you’re asleep, your defense is never down, it is called lucid dreaming.” He stands “Look if you want my help, you’re gonna have to be completely open with me. I need to know my way around your thoughts better than your wife, better than your therapist, better than anyone. If this is a dream and you have a safe full of secrets I need to know what is in that safe. In order for this all to work, you need to completely let me in.”
Saito smiles, wipes his face off, and stands.
“Enjoy your evening Mr. Cobb, Mr. Arthur, as I consider your proposal.” he walks out and you can see a party that he is going back to in the big mansion.
The younger one looks at Cobb and says “He knows” you can see the building lights starting to shake and he looks up “What is going on up there?” The table starts shaking as well.
Cobb looks at his watch and checks the time, it is analog and the second hand is going incredibly slow.
In the streets of a south american city, there seems to be a riot. Molotov Cocktails, big sticks, throwing things and just straight up angry people. Inside a small apartment, we see Cobb asleep, sitting on a chair. A man with long hair is sweating, and watching as the riot seems to be getting closer and closer. a huge explosion rips through the city. He runs over and checks on Cobb and a cord that connects Cobb, Saito, and Arthur. You can hear a machine pulsing and he checks the connection to make sure that they are all three connected to it as it is pumping in an unknown substance to them. A connection from each of the dreamers to a briefcase in between them.
Cobb and Arthur are holding drinks and walking around a terrace, it is dark outside. They are watching the party and making sure that things don’t take a turn for the worse. things keep shaking and they are deriving a plan.
“Saito know, he is playing us.” Arthur says.
“Doesn’t matter, I can get in, the information is in the safe. He looked right at it when I mentioned secrets.”
“What is she doing here.” Arthur motions to a girl walking a distance away from them.
“Doesn’t matter, I will take care of this, head back to the party.”
“Okay, make sure you do, and no caveman, we are here to work.”
Cobb glares at him and Arthur walks back inside. The woman is looking off the side where the ocean was earlier, but in the distance is blur and the sound of the ocean. The end of the shared dream space, The Boundary. Straight down you can see the ocean for about 15 feet before the boundary.
“If I jumped, would I survive?” The girl is looking down towards the bottom blur.
“A clean dive... perhaps.” he looks down and you can almost see a shade of dark blue through the blur “Mal, what are you doing here?”
“I thought you might be missing me.” she says.
“You know that I am.” he seems sad as he says this, as he looks into her eyes “but I can’t trust you anymore.”
“So what?” she says.
Cobb and Mal end up in a bedroom, so much for eluding her and sticking with work. He did manage to pick a bedroom near his objective though. She is up and looking at the pictures on the wall and the books on the shelf. Cobb is lying on the bed.
“It looks like Arthur’s work.” She remarks, looking at the designs on the wall and all of the pictures.
“The subject is partial to similar tastes.” Cobb replies, getting up out of the bed and preparing for work.
Cobb is looking out the window and sees that he is a little closer to the end of shared dream space then he would like, and it will be trying to suck him in. He grabs a chair and hands it to Mal.
“Keep a hold of this so that I can get down.” As she grabs the chair, it turns into a rope. He wraps part of it around his arm and opens the window.
“Do the children miss me?” She asks.
“I can imagine.” he says and starts rappelling down the wall. He goes down one story and then all the tension in the rope is gone, he looks up as he begins to fall and sees the rope flying towards the Boundary. He lets go of the rope, so as to not get sucked in. He stops himself in mid fall, seemingly held up by nothing, one floor below where he wanted to be. He hears a gasp and sees that a man and a woman inside the building have noticed him, The two immediately charge the window and start opening it up, yelling at him and extremely angry. He grabs a hold of the ledge and pulls himself up into the place he was originally planning. No watchers on this floor. The window is bullet proof, but that shouldn’t be a problem. He grabs a small black item from his pocket, sets it on one side of the window and the it just opens, the latch on the other side didn’t move or budge, but the thing it was holding seemed to have “slipped away” from it. He is back near the room that he originally had seen the party in, but the party guests had all left. Thousand of random things left, hats from different eras and societies were all just scattered about as well as clothes, jewelry and wallets. Almost like they were all just randomly chosen as an article to show that there was a party there. He can’t be seen here because the party is over now. There is a small mirror on the wall and he looks into it, there is no reflection. He sets his hand on it and transforms his reflection over. Now invisible, he can move about freely, as long as he stays quiet.
He walks slowly over to the room that he had been in and there are two security guards. he positions himself in between them and realizes that getting past them is a lost cause. he pulls out his pistol and realizes that he forgot to silence or make it invisible.
“What is that?” says one guard, seeing the gun floating in mid air and raising his weapon.
Cobb puts the gun back and pulls it out again, this time it is silenced and invisible. The two men blink in astonishment and then look at each other. Blood splatter the wall next to them and they both drop an instant later..
Cobb reaches in his pocket and pulls out the black item again, he sets it on the door and it opens. It is the room that they had eaten dinner in. None of the lights are on, and it is pitch black. He quickly changes to night vision and walks towards where he figured the safe would be. The walls of the room pull back and he pushes it open. There is a safe that requires a combination to open. Cobb just puts his black item on it and it too, just glides open without a fight. There is a manilla envelope inside. Cobb puts it in his jacket and the light turns on. It temporarily blinds him as he switches back to normal vision.
“Turn around.” Saito says.
Cobb instantly has his gun out and trained at the door, Mal has Arthur at gunpoint and there are three guards and Saito with her. Cobb makes eye contact with Arthur and Arthur shakes his head. Cobb sets down his gun on the table and slides it towards saito.
“Now the envelope, Mr. Cobb.” Saito seems very ticked off.
“Did she tell you?” Cobb asks, copying the envelope size and thickness quickly and pulling out a fake copy of it “Or have you known all along?” He throws the envelope at Saito and Saito catches it.
“That you are here to steal from me, or that we are actually asleep?” Saito responds, harshness in his voice “I want to know the name of your employer.” Mal cocks her gun.
“There is no use threatening him in a dream, right, Mal?” Cobb asks, thinking that he can easily get out of this situation.
“That depends on what you are threatening.” She replies “Killing him would just wake him up, but pain…” She stops and points the gun at his knee and pulls the trigger, a loud gunshot is heard.
“That still isn’t going to work in here.” Arthur says. Looking down at his leg. The bullet is paused an inch away from his knee and it drops to the floor, he nods in appreciation at Cobb.
Mal smiles and takes a glove off. Points one finger at his leg that she had shot at and he finger grows toward it, inserting itself into the leg. Arthur screams. The leg shrivels up and tears off of him and blood is coming from it, as his leg shrivels into nothingness. Mal’s finger retreats back to where it is supposed to be at.
“Pain is in the mind.” She smiles at him and walks over to his other side “and judging by the decor, we are in your mind, aren’t we Arthur?” her hand raises towards his other leg, two bodyguards still holding him up. He is writhing in pain.
Cobb hold his hand up and his gun flies back to his hand, his aim is at Arthur. A single bullet tears through his head and he drops to the floor.
Back at the apartment, Arthur’s eye open up. He jumps out of the couch
“What are you doing? It is too soon!” The long haired man screams when he notices Arthur is awake.
“I know Nash! The dream is collapsing, I am going to try to keep Saito under a little bit longer. We’re almost there.”
He takes the needle out of himself and grabs a new needle, swaps them on that cord and walks over to Saito, who is lying on a bed in the other room. He stabs it into Saito, making it “his dream.”
Back in the dream, Arthur drops to the floor, at the exact moment, the ceiling falls in. Cobb lightly kicks the giant table in front of him and it flies at the henchmen, Saito, and mal. Saito and Mal jump out the door behind them and the two henchmen duck under the table, barely making it. Cobb points his hand at the ceiling and another big chunk of it comes down, smashing one of the henchmen. The other starts firing at Cobb.
Cobb holds one hand up at the henchman and as he does, his body flies directly at him, the bullet that was directly at him seems to curve around and miss him, as if caught in the air current around his body. Cobbs hand lands directly on his head and pushes him through the table, splitting it in two and opening the doorway to him. Saito and Mal are nowhere to be seen. He grabs the envelope and starts to open it when he hears a side door open and sees a bunch of men shuffling in. He pulls out his gun and takes them out as they enter, but the numbers are overwhelming, so he runs out of the room. The roof in the dining room collapses as he leaves. He rushes down some stairs and tries to get out of the open area.
Saito and Mal are underneath something that seems safe at the time.
“He was close,” Mal remarks “Very close.”
Saito opens the manila envelope and realizes that all of the pages are blank.
Saito lets out a scream and runs into the big area that Cobb had just entered and sees Cobb flee down some stairs. Mal doesn’t seem to be following with them this time.
When he is at the top of the stairs, he sees Cobb at the bottom, facing him.
“I know some of my own ways around this dreamworld Mr. Cobb, you did not give me my envelope when I asked for it, and you are going to have to give that back.” A burst of fire erupts from saito’s right hand, where the envelopes had been. It grows to about the size of a man’s head and he throws it down the stairs.
Past the fireball you can barely see Cobb taking a knee and putting one hand on the ground. A huge pillar comes up from the middle of the stairs and blocks the fireballs path as well as Saito’s. The pillar then disconnects from the crumbling building and heads towards Saito. Saito doesn’t have enough time to react and is mostly crushed by the pillar. His legs pinned down.
Cobb, worried that Saito will bleed out quickly, takes a look at his papers and sees “Classified” written on the first page. He hears more guards coming and flight to the top of the building, above where everything is collapsing and away from the guards.
“This isn’t going to work” Arthur says, checking Saito’s sleeping body on the bed and the machine in the briefcase, he had connected the tube from his arm to Saito, trying to make Saito the architect of the previous dream, but it was still collapsing “Wake him up.” he points at Cobb.
Nash runs up to Cobb and shakes him a bit. He then slaps him on the face.
Cobb, mid flight, is thrown to the side due to the smack and impact, the dream destabilizes and he keeps himself in, rubbing his hands together.
I am running out of time! He flies even higher above the building and away from all of the noise and crashing into the night sky. The moon is full and there are a million stars out, barely present past the end of the shared dream space.
“He won’t wake!” Nash screams, wondering why this isn’t working.
“Give him the kick” Arthur yells at him.
“What?” He exclaims confused by this order.
“Dunk him.”
Cobb felt the kick and held onto the dream, creating a light from his eyes so he could read the papers. He didn’t have to hold himself up in the sky anymore since the gravity was missing since the kick started. He read the paper as quickly as possible and then he noticed it started raining. Spinning around, he could see that there were a couple of guards that had used the non gravity moment to jump towards him, but they were being enveloped from water, seemingly coming from above and below, all the places that the shared dream space ended. Cobb let the water wash over him.
Arthur heard the splash followed by a click. He looked up to see Saito with a finger to his mouth, motioning his silence, as well as a gun in Arthur’s face.
Cobb stays under the water and sees Saito pushing Arthur through the door and into an unsuspecting Nash. Gun in front of him. Cobb jumps out and hit Saito, knocking his gun down and then hitting him in the jaw. The punch knocked him on the ground and he looks for his gun, not able to find it, he sees that Cobb already has it in his hands.
“You came prepared.” Cobb said smiling down at Saito.
“I always have a gun in this apartment, no one in my security team even knows where this apartment, how did you find it?”
Arthur and Nash got back up, looking outside at the mob that seemed to be getting closer.
“Hard to keep a love nest like this a secret.” Cobb tells him “Especially when there is a married woman involved.”
“She would never…”
“Yet, here we are.”
“You got what you came for, leave.”
“Not quite, there was a key piece of information missing, wasn’t there?”
“They are getting closer!” Arthur tells Cobb.
In a bullet train, a young Japanese kid slips headphones on Nash’s ears and hits the play button. A instrumental song plays in the headphones.
“You held back that information because you knew what we were up to, the question is… why let us in in the first place?” Cobb is back in the apartment, trying to figure out what went wrong.
“An audition.” Saito replies.
“Audition for what?”
“It doesn’t matter, you failed.”
“I extracted every piece of information that you had in there.”
“But your deception was obvious. Leave me and go.”
Music plays slowly, quietly, and ominously from apparently nowhere.
Nash, Cobb, and Arthur look at each other, but Saito doesn’t seem to notice it.
“My employers won’t take no for an answer, we are just going to have to do things the old fashioned way.”
Cobb punches Saito in the face.
“Tell us what you know!”
“I can’t see!” Saito reaches for his eyes and tries to see if anything is there stopping him from seeing. Since there is nothing covering his eyes, he assumes it was the punch that knocked his sight out. He start to panic and grab at his face.
Cobb kicks him and Saito’s face hits the ground.
Saito starts laughing.
“Faster Cobb!” Arthur yells as you can hear the mob breaking down doors near them.
“I have always hated this carpet.” Saito says, feeling the carpet under him “It is stained and frayed in such distinctive ways.”
Cobb looks over at Nash, angrily, Nash shrugs, seemingly oblivious.
“But very definitely made of wool. I am laying on polyester.” He pulls himself up “Which means I am not in my apartment. You have lived up to your reputation. I am still dreaming.” He claps twice, like you would to make a clap on light turn back on “Fix my sight, and there we are.”
Cobb looks over at Arthur, but Arthur has apparently just disappeared.
In the bullet train next to Nash, an alarm is going off in Arthur’s headphones and Arthur wakes up. He then proceeds to take the needle out of his arm.
“How did it go?” the Japanese kid asks him.
“Not good.” Arthur checks the remaining countdowns.
“A dream within a dream.” Saito smiles “I am impressed.”
Cobb hangs his head, defeated.
“But this is my dream, so not only can I do things like this.” Fire comes out of both of his hands “I can also change the rules of the dream.”
“But you see, Mr. Saito.” Nash replies, smiling.
“We’re not in your dream.” Cobb informs him.
“We are in mine.” Nash says as all the walls crumble and the mob heads towards him. The fire dissipates from Saito’s hands.
The crowd grabs Nash and tears him away. Saito looks around and sees that Cobb has disappeared too, leaving him in the middle of an angry mob that doesn’t seem to care about him at all.
An alarm is going off and Cobb wakes up in the bullet train. Arthur is up in Nash’s face yelling at him.
“How could you get the carpet wrong?” Arthur says, giving him a shove.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Nash whines back at him.
“You are the architect.”
“I didn’t know that he was going to rub his cheek on it!” Cobb grabs Arthur and pulls him away from Nash, then hands the Japanese kid a wad of bills.
“Let’s go.” Cobb tells them.
“And you…” Arthur looks questioningly at Cobb “What was that?”
“I had it under control.” Cobb replies without looking at him while packing everything up.
“I’d hate to see out of control.”
“We don’t have time for this, I am getting off at Kyoto.”
“Why? He isn’t going to be checking every compartment.”
“I can’t stand trains.”
“We can give him one minute. One more minute of sleep.” He pushes the button and takes the needle out of Saito’s arm, folds it into a cloth and puts it back into the briefcase. Closing the briefcase.
“Every man for himself.” Cobb says as they all leave the compartment.
