The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We're here to do a job."

  "One that, if I weren't here, you'd be handling all on your own. Meaning no one would be going over the files while you're installing cameras anyway."

  She made good points. I had the feeling it would be a long week. "Grab your coat."

  She grinned. I opened the smallest, simplest cameras and pocketed them. The night was brisk and the air smelled humid and stagnant. Young people hustled down the damp sidewalks, pinpricks of light flashing from their eyes and plasma tattoos. I felt my inner pocket. This time and place was open enough with guns that the Pod had kitted us with pistols. Sleek ones. And that wasn't all. I hadn't had time to investigate the other gadgets just yet, but if they were what I thought they were, they'd be right on the line of anachronistic.

  Haltur didn't live far from the electronics shop. Same dingy neighborhood. Noise spilled from bars. Some of it might even have been music. Monofilament-sharp light sliced from arcades. Despite the thousands he must have been pulling from his contract work, Haltur lived in a walkup painted the sickly green of lichen failing to thrive. I got out one of the cameras, a matte button smaller than the tip of my finger, and stuck it beneath the lip of an iron trash can across the street from his front door.

  "Care to take advantage of this teachable moment?" Vette said, breath curling in the cold air.

  I stepped away from the bin, got out my tablet, and confirmed the camera was transmitting its shot of the walkup's front door. "Put it where it can see what you want to see."

  "This is incredible advice. Are you sure you don't want to charge me for it?"

  I headed to the intersection. Cars slushed past; most of their engines were silent, electric. The internal combustion models blatted like squalling children.

  For all their differences, it's strange how much the worlds have in common. While there are exceptions—I've been to one world that tried to eliminate traffic signals entirely through a cunning system of merge lanes, under- and overpasses, and roundabouts; in another, traffic guards were a role of high honor, and directed cars manually—almost all of them use a system of signs and/or lights.

  This one was no different. I stopped beside the streetlight, pretended to read an ad for a band that had played last week, and stickied another camera to the pole, aiming for a view of the sidewalk running past Haltur's apartment. That done, I headed back for the intersection at the other end of his building to do the same thing.

  "Can't bug him or his house," I explained. "But the hotel's close enough we can follow him the old fashioned way."

  "Beats sitting around."

  I smiled. She had no idea what she was getting into.

  We went back to the hotel. I set up the camera feeds for both our tablets and enabled a bot to start facegrabbing. It pulled the images of anyone who went in or out of Haltur's building and cross-referenced them against everything on the net, matching faces to identities and identities to social profiles. While that played out, I sifted through the flagged files and connections my tablet had spat out on Haltur's gestalt social network.

  Vette nodded off two hours later, slowly going limp in her chair, tablet sliding from her lap. I let its thump wake her. She looked at me, guilty.

  "It's okay," I said. "Get your sleep while you still can."

  "Is that supposed to disturb me?"

  "If we get down to the last couple days, there won't be time for anything but the hunt."

  She gave me a doubting look and returned to her tablet, tapping and sliding away on its oil-slick controls. Trying to impress me. About time.

  Haltur didn't leave his apartment the next day. People came and went from the building and my bots yanked their faces and compiled files. I ruled out all the other residents within hours. Their lives were too deeply embedded in the net to be fakes manufactured by a trespasser from Primetime.

  Haltur didn't leave the net, either. We monitored his circles, his squares. He was active in two or three or four at once, exchanging messages and files, accumulating social karma, building a castle of status one stone at a time. He had direct regular virtual contact with 2,017 different people, was just one more degree removed from tens of thousands. The haystack grew.

  "I haven't done this much sitting since my last flight to the moon," Vette said. "Your ass must be like two boulders."

  "One of the perks of the job."

  "You realize we haven't seen him. How do we even know he's in there?"

  I pulled up the feed of his building and brought it to the foreground of her pad. "Lights have been on and off."

  She nodded slowly. "What if he never leaves?"

  "Then we've got it easy. Even if we don't turn up any leads, we swoop in at the zero hour and intercept the killer."

  "The lights could be on timers. What about that?"

  "Then you'd better pay close enough attention to rule it out."

  She tried to conceal her impatience by returning to her files. My report to Mara wouldn't be rosy. Vette was smart. That much was clear. But she didn't think with the caution necessary for an agent. Just being in this world was changing its history. By stopping the murder—a killing that had never taken place in the original timeline—we hoped to undo more disruptions than we caused, but every action carries unknowable risk. You have to deploy them like a sniper's bullets or a martial artist's movements. Nothing wasted. Everything with purpose. Always at the proper moment, no sooner nor later.

  We were only a couple days in, and Vette was itching to get out in the world, to start stomping butterflies, to break causality's chains and throw them into time's chaotic tides. So far, she'd done an awful lot of clowning, presenting the impression of someone who wasn't competent to take the Cutting Room's calls, let alone represent us in the field. I had a hunch this was a front. A defense mechanism meant to lower my expectations and thus blunt my critiques of her work. Either that or deliberate self-sabotage. Fear of success.

  I didn't have time for either. I had a job to do.

  "He's into drugs," she said. The sun had long set and icy neon light speared through the hotel shades.

  "So?"

  "You know. Drugs. One of the few things besides sex that's so awesome people will kill for it."

  "Those motives don't apply here." I rubbed my eyes. Shimmering motes danced on my retinas, ghosts of the tablet I'd been staring at all day. "Somebody from Primetime doesn't Pod off to kill somebody in another world over a kilo of powder. They're here to kill for fun."

  "Drugs are fun, aren't they? I took stream to make it through the Academy." She grinned toothily. "Don't worry, I quit. But these coders work themselves to the wrapper, don't they? Bet he takes something."

  I decided to give her some rope and see how high she hanged. "A lot of this is gut-work. Spotting the patterns computers can't. If your gut points to drugs, then follow the drugs."

  Vette tipped back her head, examining me. "Want some more coffee?"

  I nodded. In every world I've been to, coffee flows like water. It's hard to believe in God once you discover there's no single plan for the universe—that there is no single universe—but if there's proof, it's that coffee is everywhere.

  We slept in shifts. People came and went from the apartment. The following afternoon, a fast food delivery boy in a blue uniform jumped off his bike, chained it to the stoop, and rang Haltur's buzzer. It was the third time the service had come to his place since our arrival. I frowned and executed deep checks of everyone employed at the restaurant. Would be a good way to get access to a man who never seemed to leave his home.

  I asked Vette about the drug lead. She got vague, told me she was still exploring. I let her. Worst-case, it would teach her not to waste time rabbit-trailing the first half-baked lead her data coughed up.

  I kept up my reading, letting my instincts take me from person to person in Haltur's sprawling social circle, delving deeper into anyone who came at him too strong or whose skimpy virtual history suggested a Primetime trespasser.

  But I'
d learned my lesson from Prince and the Jaso boy. The human spiders hiding in the web of worlds were getting craftier. The CR tries to keep its methods—its very existence—a deadly secret. As it is, we don't notice every crime. Our solve-rate on the ones we do pursue struggles to reach fifty percent.

  Now word was getting out. They were learning how we hunted. To survive, they had to fake histories as elaborate as any native. Our task was getting that much tougher.

  Night stole over the city of glass razors and electric heavens. Haltur's frantic online life stopped cold just before midnight. Calling it quits early. I got up and brushed my teeth, thinking I'd grab some sleep myself.

  "He's moving," Vette called.

  "And?"

  "And he's going to meet his dealer. They were talking right before he shut down." Her face appeared over my shoulder in the bathroom mirror. "The dealer's a blank card. Haven't been able to track his virtual name to a physical identity. Shouldn't we see who it is?"

  I spat out mint-flavored foam. "Where's Haltur?"

  She held up her pad. In the mirror, superimposed green lights tracked a figure down the dark sidewalks. "Just left."

  I grabbed my coat and ran to the elevator. "This is just recon."

  "I know," Vette smiled.

  The wood-paneled doors opened with a ding. "Don't get lost on Haltur. If the killer's there, and he makes us, the whole mission is blown."

  "I know."

  "Then act like it." Outside, green light bounced from the low clouds, shading the night with ghastly tones. I jogged down the street, keeping one eye on my pad's camera feed. Haltur was a couple blocks past one of the intersection cameras. While we were still blocks away, he turned a corner and escaped the camera's sight.

  I ran harder. Young people looked our way, tats blinking on their faces. Trash filled the gutters, mushed by the day's rain. Cars hissed along on roostertails of mist. Music pulsed through the night, digital fuzz and rhythmic beeps.

  Green light winked from my pad. It had spotted Haltur ahead on the sidewalk. I nodded at Vette and slowed to a walk, putting my tablet away. Holo ads projected from shops, ethereal little women beckoning us inside, naked but nippleless.

  Vette laughed. "Fun city."

  "How can you have fun without nipples?"

  She swiveled. "Did you just joke?"

  Over the next block, the run-down buildings transitioned to aggressively ugly architecture: asymmetric windows, faux-organic knobs reaching from eaves and doorways. Like something spat out by bugs. Ahead, Haltur descended a street-level stairwell into a boisterous club. I stopped in front. At the bottom of the stairs, two rotund men with even rotunder biceps patted down a man and his date. I started down.

  Vette grabbed my arm. "I brought my gun."

  I nodded. "We're not going in. Argue with them. Act drunk."

  She looked puzzled, then smiled. "I can manage that."

  At the concrete landing, the bouncers shuffled over to stop us. "Spread 'em."

  "Spread what?" Vette said, sharper than the skyscrapers penetrating the clouds.

  The men cocked their heads. Vette got louder. While they bickered, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a dull polymer marble, and dropped it on the toe of my shoe, muffling the noise. It rolled past the bouncers into the thumping club.

  I took Vette's elbow. She yanked it away. I muffled my grin. "Come on, girl. Can't you tell when we're not wanted?"

  One of the bouncers smirked behind his mirrored shades. "Oh, I want plenty. But nobody gets in without a search."

  "So you can get your hands on this?" Vette cupped her jacketed chest.

  Overdoing it. I took her elbow again. This time, I didn't let her shake me off. "We're done here. Let's go get you another drink."

  She scowled at me, then let herself be led back up the stairs. Which didn't stop her from slurring obscenities at the amused bouncers blocking the doors. Up top, a kid in a purple leather jacket jostled me, but I pretended not to notice. Another bar down the street was nine-tenths empty. I took her inside.

  "Wait, you're serious about the drink?" Vette said.

  "Need somewhere close and quiet. The transmission range on that thing is just a few hundred yards."

  The old man behind the bar asked to see her ID chip. She provided it, started to order a Primetime drink, realized her error, and pointed at a bottle of whiskey. "Two of those. On ice."

  The bartender ginned up our drinks. I opened a tab and found a corner booth. I put my back to the wall and my tablet on my lap.

  The screen showed a floor-level view of shiny shoes and knobby metal chair legs. Light strobed, shredding the darkness. I fitted my earbud, winced, and twiddled the pad into screening out the music, which sounded like two cars doing vicious battle. As the music faded, two voices picked up. Male. The tablet IDed one as Haltur.

  "Where'd you get that thing?" Vette said.

  "The mobile cam?" I scooped up the second man's voice and started a net search for matches. "Thought it might come in handy."

  "...awful fast," the stranger was saying.

  Haltur laughed. He didn't sound happy. "I work hard."

  "Work? Stuff's supposed to be fun."

  "Early retirement is more fun. Look, you got it, or you gonna play Saint Peter with me all night?"

  "Saint Peter?" said the stranger. "I got the shit. That means you got to call me God."

  "Can you even grow a beard?" Haltur said. "All right. Shit. Listen, God, I got a real big project ahead of me and I'm all out of jet fuel. If You could find time in Your busy schedule to tap me into some of what I need, I swear I'll run right home and sacrifice a fatted calf. My firstborn. Whatever You want."

  The man laughed. "Six bills."

  "God's a real gouger," Haltur muttered.

  Under the table, two hands exchanged a plastic bag and a credit chip. Each hand retreated to its owner's respective pocket, then disappeared above the table.

  "Gotta log." Haltur's feet shuffled as he stood and walked away.

  I moved the camera, craning for a better view of the stranger. "Looked like a very average, everyday drug deal."

  "It did." Vette sounded sad about it. She took a drink, glancing at the bartender, who'd been watching her all the while. The man winked. She snorted and turned back to me. "What now?"

  I checked my search progress. "IDed the voice. Josuf Yount. We'll give it a few minutes to see if this sparks any other developments, then head home."

  Down in the club, Yount continued to sit at his table, tapping his toes to the muted music. He made no calls. Sent no messages. No one came or went from his table. Oddly hermetic for a dealer, but I didn't make him to be from Primetime—he was too comfortable here. Still, there was something off about him. Maybe Vette was getting to me. Whatever the case, I rolled the mobicam next to his shoe. A needle projected from the cam's side and penetrated Yount's rubber tread. Finished, I ordered the cam to melt down, then cut the link.

  Back at the hotel, Haltur had already dug back into his networks, posting up a storm. Whatever he was on had pumped him up with more wattage than the sun-bright theater marquee across the street.

  With nothing more pressing to do, I plugged in a deep search for everything on Josuf Yount. While the tablet's bots crawled the infinite tangle of the web, I took stock of where we were at. Which wasn't far. No true suspects had emerged. We'd culled many partial suspects from Haltur's far-flung online tribes—a couple of stalker-types after the famous (in his circles) coder; all the women who'd been responding to him on a dating site (a private one, though its security hadn't lasted three minutes against our souped-up software); a handful of nearly-anonymous presences whose online footprint wouldn't fill a thimble. That was it.

  But I wasn't worried. Yet. It was still relatively early in the game. We had four full days before the killing. That's how these things always go: a lot of nothing early on, the fuse crawling toward the keg, then boom. It all blows out at once.

  Anyway, unless the murderer had pul
led some serious tricks on the cops, we knew Haltur would be killed in his room. Worst-case, we'd break into his apartment and hide in his closet waiting for the assassin to come around.

  The sun rose. Through the gap in Haltur's curtains, the lights burned on. Traffic flooded the streets. The lights stayed lit, the curtains motionless. No blue-uniformed food peddlers biked up to the stoop. Noon came and went. As twilight fought through a sifting, mist-like rain, I pulled up the latest records. Haltur's most recent post was timestamped 2:27 AM. Sixteen hours ago.

  My gut knew we had a problem, but guts don't have words. Instead, it tightened, then soured and twisted.

  "Suppose he's sleeping it off?" Vette said.

  I pulled my head out of the files on Yount, who had turned out to be an interesting figure. Raised in one of Brownville's poorest neighborhoods, he'd excelled in science. By age 15, a pharma company called WesCo had sponsored his enrollment at Loramount University, one of the country's most exclusive. Before he'd been old enough to drink—the legal age here was twenty—he'd churned out a few dozen patents, advanced polymer refinements mostly, slimming their profile while beefing their strength, but he'd made a couple genuine breakthroughs, too.

  Then, less than two weeks after earning his doctorate, he'd disappeared. Not just from the public sphere, but from the virtual one as well. Little wisps of him remained, a post here or a comment there linked to an account my bots had flagged as his, but that was it. Three years later, here he was, dealing drugs out of a basement Brownville nightclub.

  All of which had nothing to do with Haltur and his epic nap. Before I could open my mouth to tell Vette it was probably nothing, but it might be time to ramp up into invasive spying of our partial suspects' networks, my tablet camera caught a siren wailing down the damp and grungy streets.

  Through our tablets, we watched them load Korry Haltur's body into the wagon and take him away.

  "What?" Vette said. "He wasn't supposed to die for another three-plus days."

  "Maybe he's not dead," I said.

  But I didn't believe it. My doubts were confirmed less than an hour later when a nurse leaked to his Bi0 network that former gaming legend and current code wizard Korry Haltur had died of a drug overdose.