Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was two am when Arthur's phone rang.

"Phillipa?"

"I'm in a bind," she said. "Can I crash at your place?"

"What kind of bind?" Arthur asked her, refusing to go in blind. Not even for a kid who'd once called him Uncle Arthur.

"It's not legal trouble. There was a problem with my room, and I can't get ahold of my friends."

"You know your dad would sort that out for you."

"Dad's in Osaka."

Cobb would fly back this instant if he needed to. Hell, if Cobb knew there was a problem, Phillipa would have a new pad, a free taxi ride, and dinner waiting for her when she got there. Saito had deep pockets. But Phillipa had been wary of his thing with Cobb for years now, and Saito respected that. She had a million-dollar emergency fund she mostly used for charitable donations, and Saito considered his duty done.

"I'll come pick you up," Arthur said, rather than try and talk some sense into her. "Where are you?"

"Don't be silly; I’ll take an Uber."

Nineteen-year-old Phillipa Cobb arrived with no obvious bruises and Lilly Pulitzer leggings under her oversized thrift-store hoodie. She was carrying a laptop case and nothing else.

"No suitcase?"

"I had to get out in a hurry."

"Oh yeah?"

"Not legal trouble. Don't text my dad."

Arthur was going to get her settled, interrogate her, and then text her dad.

He still remembered her as a little girl after the whole Thing was settled, well on her way to becoming unhealthily codependent. Now look at her, going straight to the other end of the spectrum. That just went to show you what lots of therapy and two very cushy private schools did to a kid.

Arthur made her coffee and let her ditch the laptop case on the guest bed. He'd moved his PASIV to a new location, along with half his guns. When she'd finished pretending to unpack, she came back to join him with the laptop and a sleeve of cheap shortbread cookies.

"I don't know if Dad told you, but the dorms are kind of sh- crap."

"He didn't tell me, but I’m not surprised. It's a mediocre school."

Phillipa rolled her eyes. Saito was the only one who hadn't questioned where she chose to get a degree. He'd only stepped in when she tried to take out a student loan.

"Well anyway, there was a minor problem and I need somewhere to crash for a few days."

"Did it burn down?"

"That would've made the news."

And Cobb would know already, for sure.

"What then?"

"A pipe burst."

"In your room?"

"Leading into the building. A sewage pipe. They wouldn't let us back in."

"Uh huh."

He didn't tell her she was being ridiculous. She was smart enough to know that already. Arthur was sure the sewage leak, if it existed, now had some Proclus Global subsidiary crawling all over it. Her crummy dorm would become luxury accommodations in two days.

"That does sound like an emergency," he said, to rub it in. She was a big girl; she could take it.

It was very satisfying to watch her recoil at the thought of Cobb's anxious face. It was his worst, squintiest face.

Arthur was content with his revenge and shoved a takeout menu in her direction. It was for a place that served breakfast. Nothing else was open at this hour except Wafflehouse.

Phillipa hugged her knees to her chest while he called it in. Maybe she'd be asleep by the time the food got in. Maybe she wouldn’t. Sitting like that, she looked about five.

"Do you still do dreamshare?"

"Do I what?"

Phillipa rolled her eyes. "I'm not dumb. Dad does consulting for PG Architecture. There's a whole reddit expose in r/wideawake that's been gilded like, fourteen times."

None of those words made any sense in any language Arthur knew.

"Anyway, that's not why I asked. I got...a recruiter offered me a job. Firmware improvements for the PASIV device. Something to give the dreamers more control."

"That's down to the somacin," he said.

"Yes and no. There's like, an interaction between the two. The guy said I had a really solid grasp on the theory and he could give me practical experience. Six figures with retirement fund type experience. He offered to pay for the rest of my degree, but that's, y'know, already paid for."

They both jumped when someone banged on the door, but it was just their food. Arthur made sure to grab the gun he kept behind the fridge before he went to open it.

There were no gaps in the journey to and from the kitchen, just as there'd been no gaps between her arrival and him ordering. He wasn't paranoid about it the way Cobb had been, but everything about this conversation made the back of his neck itch.

"Are they teaching you this shit in school?" Arthur asked. "I thought you were learning accounting."

"There's so much on the internet. So much about everything. There's even, like, dreamblr.io and five different reddit subs, and like I don't go on piratebay but I know there's a bunch of shi - stuff going down on there, you know? Like, super sketchy dream exchange."

Arthur stared at her. "You know most of those are Feds."

"Oh. Well, that's what everyone says. I'm not stupid. Dad would murder me."

"And I don't care what you've read online. PG Architecture just does real world buildings; Saito doesn't pay your dad to build for dreams."

Phillipa nodded. Her eyes got big. "Does that mean he pays you?"

"Once. A very long time ago."

Phillipa stared at him, drop jawed. Then she turned her stare to her laptop. Maybe she spent too much time on that thing.

"Who tried to recruit you, and when?"

If it was the military everything would be fine. The military was as close as it got to legal dreamshare. They were a bunch of assholes, but she wasn't in imminent danger. Recruiters loved to scope out schools for teenagers who wouldn't think too hard about what they were signing up for.

"Two suits, about three weeks ago."

"Phill...."

She picked at her leggings. "Cobol Engineering. The saw my 3D designs on reddit and tracked me down."

Shit. "I'm calling your dad."

"What? No!"

"Phill." Arthur leaned down so he could look her in the eye. "You came to me for a no bullshit answer. Here it is. If you're serious about wanting to mess around with the PASIV, you can sell your soul to the military or you can let Saito set you up with whatever shell corp he's running his operation through these days. You stay the fuck away from everyone else."

That couldn't have been it. Not if she was here in his place at whatever-o'clock.

Arthur waited her out, while she looked everywhere but at him. Her knees, her laptop, her food that was getting colder by the second.
Then-

"Someone else came by a few days ago. Morrow Industrial Group. He asked me a bunch of questions, but it wasn't about my designs. It was a really weird vibe. I told him I'd already taken another offer and he said he could top it. Anything I wanted. I said, I've never even heard of this company."

"MIG is just the Fischer-Morrow corporation in a hat."

She blinked at him. "I don't know them either."

"Like I said, a long time ago. Did they do anything to you?"

"No, they were just really pushy. Really pushy. I was kinda glad when that pipe burst. I've been getting weird comments on dreamblr. And the lock is acting funny, but it might just be that my roommate did something when she was drunk. It might be nothing."

Might, except something was pinging her subconscious so strongly that she didn't feel safe.

"Give me your phone."

She had forty notifications altogether, just from social media. When this was all over, he was going to have to talk to Cobb about his daughter spending so much time online. That was a problem for tomorrow. Instead he found the number she'd saved in her contacts as "Final Solution", which was both creepy and unnecessarily dramatic. Teenagers.

"Yeah hi this is - you gave her your direct number? Not your secretary?"

"Duh," Phillipa said, subdued, while on the phone Saito said "Let us skip the pleasantries, Arthur."

Ten minutes later Arthur watched from his kitchen window while a conspicuous black car settled itself at the end of the street. Across the way, one man assumed position on the roof of a fast-food restaurant. Those were just the ones meant to be seen. Saito was no doubt sending a flock of security staff to sweep Phillipa's campus.

Phillipa was poking at her breakfast, now that she'd gotten that mess off her chest. She'd gotten watery-eyed over the phone with Saito and Cobb - the latter of whom had been very loud in his concern. He'd made her promise to call before she tried to go back to school - Arthur resigned himself to an indeterminate house guest - and then sent Arthur a flurry of agitated texts.

"Uncle Arthur."

"Phill."

Plastic scraped against styrofoam.

"Dad and Saito. They're really intense."

Arthur blamed it on whatever had happened to them in Limbo, not that he'd ever admit that out loud. Cobb had tried to explain it once, but the result had been the sort of repetitive meandering mess that only made sense in dreams. Somehow come back with me had turned into come back to me, had turned into...whatever the hell they were doing now.

So. "Yeah kinda."

"What's up with them? If Saito doesn't pay Dad to do dreamshare..."

"Your dad did one job for Saito, a long time ago, and in return Saito did him a favor. There were a lot of favors." If one called not going nuts in limbo a favor.

And after that they were. Well. They flew back and forth to see each other several times a year. Cobb didn't want to uproot the kids permanently to Japan, and Saito didn't want to relocate permanently to the States. Arthur figured once James turned eighteen, they'd pick one. Once Cobb had implied they both got a kick out of clandestine meetings in high end hotel rooms, which was more than Arthur had ever wanted to know about a friend slash work partner.

The one coherent thing Cobb had ever said about the mess was "It's like an itch in my brain, when I think of growing old without him. Like it goes against some fundamental part of me." So whatever had happened to them in Limbo was -

- was enough to make Arthur leery of the entire concept of inception. They'd all kept their success on the down low, and so far no rumors had reached them of another attempt. There would be one eventually, just like people had tried before them. If they were lucky, the Fischer job would be the world's only success.

"One time," Phillipa hunched forward, trying to lean over her knees and her plate at the same time. "Dad said - we were arguing and Dad said that Saito had given him something more important than money, but he wouldn't say what it was."

"That's his business. What's important is that he loves you, Phill, and he's looking out for you. Even Saito's looking out for you, when you let him."

"I guess," she mumbled, which was teenager for "fuck off."

Arthur shrugged and went back to the window, where Saito's security goons were still casing the street.

"Get some sleep, kid. We'll figure this out."

Around ten a.m., while Phillipa was drooling all over his couch, a woman toting a suitcase knocked on the door. She wasn't any kind of bombshell, just an average forty-something Japanese woman in a skirt suit. She held her lanyard up so Arthur could check her ID through the peephole.

She was one of Saito's secretary's assistants. Arthur hardly needed to glance at the picture Cobb had sent in advance, especially because he'd also received a blow by blow of her journey up the street.

From the looks of it, Saito or Cobb had pointed her in the direction of a Dillard's and said "go for it". Everything in the suitcase had tags attached. A gift receipt was tucked neatly into a side pocket, along with an abundance of travel sized toiletries. There was also a bagel and coffee for Arthur.

Cobb broke down and called him not long after.

"MIG was just a coincidence; it's Cobol we should be worried about."

"She said MIG was weird and pushy."

"So did every female employee Saito hired after the MIG recruiters bungled the job."

"Yikes."

"Cobol is tired of hiring 'freelancers' for their jobs. They want a legitimate veneer. When they realized she was related to me, they may have thought they'd have some leverage."

"To encourage her to sign on."

"Something like that. We're still digging."

"The chance at a government contract really brings out the worst."

Everyone who once paid extractors was now trying to forge the straight and narrow, or to at least look like they were. Dreamshare was poking its head above ground.

"I wanted to keep them away from all of this," Cobb said. Apparently it was confession time.

"Every adult in their lives is in the business. It was going to happen."

"I was so angry when Miles showed her how everything worked - she's not one of his students, she's a kid. She's my kid. After everything that happened, he just...."

"According to her it's all online anyway. She would've found it eventually."

Cobb made a despairing noise. Arthur caught a muffled complaint about smartphones.

"Everyone else has been scouting her. Was Saito going to make a move?"

"She's a shoo-in for an accounting position, if that's what you mean."

Which was its own answer. Cobb only rarely poked his nose into Saito's quasi-legal dream business. Arthur knew he still went down for about thirty minutes every few days, because it was the only way he could dream. Cobb stuck to his own head; he didn't even like to dream with Saito. Being burned once was enough to keep him away from a hot stove.

"Maybe you'll want to make her a better offer than accounting," Arthur said. "Just in case."

"Fuck."

By three, Phillipa had stopped sawing logs and taken to her laptop. Not for schoolwork. Arthur glanced at the screen long enough to see “r/nostupidquestions: What’s the deal with Morrow Industrial Group and Fischer-Morrow?” and decided that he didn’t want to know.

He also saw the open message thread on her phone. “Final Solution” had sent her a link to MIG’s page on Glassdoor and a single additional message in Japanese. Arthur’s language skills were rusty – Saito’s secretary’s assistant’s assistant only ever emailed him in English – but he was pretty sure it said Hobbies are best enjoyed separately from one’s profession. Finish your degree.

“It’s so stupid,” Phillipa said. To Arthur, and not her laptop. “Does he even have hobbies?”

Other than pretending to be the James Bond to Cobb’s Pussygalore? “You’d know better than I would.”

“All he does is plot world domination and keep Dad on the phone all night.”

Arthur couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Is that seriously what you think they talk about on the phone? World domination?”

“Ugh, I wish that was all they talked about. One time I walked in while Dad had him on speaker. I think I’m traumatized for life.”

If that was the only source of trauma in her life, things had worked out pretty damn well. Saito’s goons were still out in force on Arthur’s street; Cobb was back to texting, now about all the different ways Phillipa’s college of choice was a nightmare. She could’ve gone to a community college and lived at home. She could’ve gone to either USC.

Cobb’s neuroses were inheritable traits, from Arthur’s point of view. Phillipa was up to fifteen tabs on her web browser and three nested together on her phone, not counting the ones she’d had open when she started. She went back and forth between her texts and a bunch of increasingly incoherent message boards.

“Was he like that with Mom?”

“What, disgusting? Worse.” Arthur thought about the last few jobs, the way Cobb’s issues had nearly ruined everything. “They were really wrapped up in each other. He and Saito are pretty lowkey in comparison.”

She scratched at the messy bun that was slowly sinking into a messy ponytail. “I don’t even remember them dating. It’s like he was suddenly just…there.”

Arthur didn’t have an explanation for that, so he didn’t say anything.

“I don’t actually want to go into accounting.”

“Then do engineering. Design the world’s first smart coffee pot. Build some interstates. I don’t think they care what you major in so long as you graduate.”

“I guess.”

Arthur watched her fidget, ignoring the buzz of yet another text message. He sighed. “Your parents met because they were both studying architectural design. They were obsessed with each other. And obsessed with dreaming. Not to be insensitive, but that didn’t end well. So your dad doesn’t like your favorite quasi-legal hobby, and Saito doesn’t like it because your dad doesn’t like it but he’s also not exactly stopping you. So do what you want. You can be a chemist or something, whip up new compounds, or you can...I dunno, get a degree in juggling. You’re smart enough to blow up a sewage pipe, you can figure it out.”

Phillipa’s eyes bugged out.

Arthur wasn’t stupid. The recruiters were real, but the conveniently timed sewage problem was something she’d come up with on her own. Maybe she’d meant to be stranded with no clothes or maybe it worked too well. Arthur didn’t care. He got up and shoved his gun in one of the kitchen drawers.

“You don’t need an excuse to come and see me, you know.”

“You-! I-! Yes I do, you’re never home!”