The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Lock the door," I said. "Help me barricade it."

  Vette swung it closed. "What's going on?"

  I grabbed the bear trap chair and dragged it across the cushy carpet. "It's about to get bad."

  "We're wrecking up the timeline like loose bulls. We have exactly zero hard facts about why any of this happened. And now it's about to get bad?"

  "Yes." I wedged the chair in front of the door and went for the desk, wiping dynamic picture frames and decorative trinkets to the carpet. "Grab an end."

  She helped me haul the desk to the door. I went for more chairs. Every second counted. Just ninety of them remained, but I feared it was too many. We'd barely scratched the surface of G&A's security. They must have heard the gunshots. Probably had live feed of the room. They wouldn't ask many questions.

  Motion on my tablet. The elevator doors opened, disgorging two men and two bots: one bulky and treaded, the other hovering unsteadily, football-sized. I punched up some quick calculations. 82nd floor. I hoped the Pods were punctual.

  The door rattled. "Open up!"

  "What?" I hollered.

  "Open the door or we open fire!"

  "Hang on," I said. "Something's blocking it."

  The door shook again. "You have locked the door. In ten seconds, we open it by any means necessary."

  I jiggled the handle. "Okay. I'm trying. It's like it's stuck or something. Are you security? Do you guys have it locked on your end?"

  The man outside the door began a countdown. We had a little less than a minute to go. When the man hit "two" and paused before "one," I called out, "Hey, I think I've got it!"

  I jerked the handle around some more. Vette watched me, gun ready, eyes wide. A pistol went off; the door handle jarred, dangling from its mount. A shoulder rammed into the door, which held firm, buttressed by the wall of chairs and desks.

  "What are we doing?" Vette hissed.

  "Stalling," I said. "In forty seconds, we're gone."

  I glanced at my pad. The mobicams showed the uniformed man gesturing to the wall. I grabbed Vette's shoulder and flung us to the floor.

  Paint and plaster showered inward with a gritty whump. A head-sized hole materialized in the wall. The airborne bot whirred inside and swiveled its blank face toward me. It looked like a miniature blimp, except that both of its side-mounted platforms came complete with a pencil-thin gun.

  "We surrender!" I said. My ruse failed. The lethal dirigible turned on me. We opened fire at the same time. My Guardian Angel lashed forward to intercept. The bot's bullets were the size of pencil leads, miniaturized to cut down on its weight and minimize recoil; even so, the force of the projectiles forced it backwards toward the hole it had blasted through the wall. The Angel absorbed the first few shots without problem, juddering with a rat-tat-tat series of metallic pings. I hit the bot a couple times, denting it. Vette opened up beside me. Her Angel turned coat, leaping to my defense just as mine dropped to the carpet, smoking and dead.

  A round made it past, shredding my ear. I gasped. Another sliced into my shoulder with white-hot numbness. The beleaguered Angel darted and plinked. Vette poured fire into the enemy bot, knocking it into the wall. It canted and spiraled toward the floor, firing dumbly, sending divots of carpet flying into the air.

  "Cover us," I said. "Don't let anything else through."

  A bullet banged through the hole in the wall, fired by an unseen hand. I ran to the back window. Lights glimmered in the mist, spread out for miles. I prayed the daisus didn't bulletproof everything and opened fire. The tough safety glass splintered but held fast.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Vette said.

  "Get ready to follow," I said. I kept shooting. Cracks spread in lines and circles. I drew back and kicked. The window crumpled outward. One more blow and it burst free from the frame, tumbling away into darkness. Odds were good it wouldn't land on anyone. Wind screeched through the vacant frame.

  More bullets burst through the wall. Vette cried out and covered her head, retreating toward the back of the office. A bang roared through the room, flechetting us with plaster. The new hole through the wall was big enough for a man to leap through.

  I glanced at my tablet. Ten seconds. I grabbed hold of Obo, his unconscious body lolling against me, as heavy as a sack of ball bearings, and dragged him to the edge of the empty window.

  "No!" Vette said.

  "Trust," I said. The second bot rumbled through the wall, its turret spinning to life. I rolled over the edge.

  I fell with my face to the clouds. White-hot rounds lanced across the sky. Vette followed me out the window, bullets racing over her head. She screamed even louder than the thunder of the minigun.

  Wind stole the breath from my lungs, cold and relentless. I tumbled past dark windows. Still clinging to Obo, I turned into the fall, realigning myself facedown, spreading my legs to exert as much wind resistance as possible. For a couple seconds, the lights of cars and streets stayed where they were, small glowing pockets against the blackness of night.

  Then they swelled surreally, closer and closer, growing with terrifying speed. Banks of dark windows flashed by too fast to count. The street was just a couple hundred feet away now, pedestrians gathering around the sidewalk where the broken window had landed a few seconds before. In a moment, they would be in for another, much splattery-er surprise.

  I probably should have ran my calculations a second time. Confirmed the Pods always came exactly on time. Been a better person—

  Everything went away.

  Difficult to describe. A whiteness, a numbness, a fuzzy absence. Time doesn't disappear, but your sense of its proportion goes away, just like on hallucinogens (yes, I've tried those too), like a call on a lake at night and you can't tell whether it's from the other shore or right behind you: has it been a second? A year? And just when you think it's forever—worse, that it might already have been forever—it all rushes back.

  I came to in the comforting whiteness of the Pod, a white plastic enclosure with a spherical dome, eight feet across. I was still clinging to Obo, whose trip across the dimensions hadn't stirred him from his chemically-induced slumber. A few flaky shards of glass had come with us. My ear hurt pretty bad. Blood dribbled from it and my shoulder, beading crimson against the smooth plastic floor.

  The hatch opened with a sigh. Mara stuck her head inside and goggled. "What did you do, Blake?"

  "Things got weird," I said.

  She noticed my wounds, then stared at Obo. "Who's Sleeping Beauty?"

  "He'll need to be sanitized."

  "He's not Primetime? Then why the hell did you bring him back?"

  "Dataport in his head. It's the key." I sat up and almost fainted from the pain. It had been years since I'd been shot. "Mind debriefing me in medical?"

  Her expression thawed. "Let me give you a hand."

  Before helping me out, of course, she got a team to take Obo away to the labs. Once he'd been secured, she helped me limp along to medical.

  "How's Vette?" I said.

  Mara smiled. "Confused."

  "But alive. Everything where it should be."

  "You sound surprised."

  "Like I said, things got weird." My gut hurt, too. I frowned. Apparently I'd been shot more than I thought.

  Mara slotted me into a medtube and the machines got to work. I explained the details as best I knew them: how Korry Haltur had been killed days before the Pod's records indicated, implying a second change to the timeline; how his death had led us to Josuf Yount, former wunderkind, now freelance drug dealer; and from there to Obo Tanzuki, instrument of Haltur's untimely death.

  "What's the connection to Primetime?" Mara said. "Why is someone from here getting involved in offworld gangland politics?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I'm hoping the answers are encoded in Obo's head. Work fast. Whatever they're doing to that world, it's in flux right now."

  "Then get your rest. We might need you soon."

  I raised an eyebrow—normal
ly, I'd be off rotation for a couple weeks—but Mara turned and left. The medtube played me music I didn't like. Mechanical arms prodded, cleaned, and swathed. My skin tingled and itched as the devices restored it. I slept.

  The tube must have put me out with something. Mara came for me the next day. I was groggy and stiff and the tube's chemical cocktail only helped so much. My gunshots looked good, though. Pink, tender, but mending. Mara met me in her office, which was aswarm with screens and even a few piles of self-printing paper.

  She sat on her desk and pinched a flat, thumbnail-sized object between her fingers. "Got it."

  "Obo's chip? Did you crack it?"

  "They're barbarians, Blake. Encryption didn't last three seconds. We pulled the files off your pad, too."

  "And?"

  She tapped the tip of her nose. "Yount was right. Haltur was working for Greene & Associates. Above-board stuff, not the criminal wing of the enterprise. But he was too good with computers. Too curious."

  I squinted one eye. "Stumbled on something he shouldn't have."

  "And was going to go live with it."

  "What was it?"

  She gave me a funny look. "That's not in the files."

  "What if he did go live with it?" I paced toward the wall. "Then someone in Primetime went back to undo it. Killed him before he leaked, erasing the spill. Only they hired it out to low-level thugs. First effort was too sloppy. Tried the OD to cover their tracks, but we were already on to them."

  "Plausible."

  "But we still have no idea who went back from our world. Or why."

  "Well." She had that funny look again, as if she couldn't tell whether she should love or hate the thing she needed to tell me next.

  I folded my arms. "Well what?"

  "You're right. We don't know who. But we've got a lead."

  "Back to Brownville?"

  "Yeah, but not what you're thinking." She shook her head. "Easier to show you. Come on."

  She led me through the white, spartan hallways to the grounds outside the facility. In the grassy field there, Vette clung to the top of a brown horse, an oversized hat bouncing on her head, the sides of its brim curled up, as if it were sneering at itself. As I watched, the horse galloped harder, jolting Vette off into the grass.

  "Had them shipped from upstate last night," Mara said.

  "Okay," I said. "Why?"

  "Because." My superior officer paused. Maybe I still had a touch of the drugs in my system, but in that moment, I was completely certain Mara was trying not to laugh. "Our leads point to the same where. Brownville. It's the when that's different."

  "One that likes horses," I said slowly.

  Mara nodded. Across the field, Vette dusted herself off and went to fetch her ten-gallon hat. Mara couldn't contain herself any longer. She burst out laughing. I joined her.

  Neither of us would be laughing for long. Causing the end of the world has a way of killing your sense of humor.

  III

  It's amazing what a difference a few hundred years can make. 19th century Brownville lay below us, a couple hundred clapboard homes, shacks, churches, and saloons clustered around the river as it fed into the sea. Empty prairie rolled to all sides, soft green grass on the hills ringing the city, brown weeds and gray sage tufting the valley floor. Three hundred years from now, the entire basin would be a gridwork of buildings. Light would pour from it like a lost piece of heaven. Compared to the dirty glamor of the city's bulging future, looking down on this frontier version was like the difference between microscoping a human egg and meeting the person it would grow into.

  And according to a dead programmer from the future, the secret to his death was somewhere in this past.

  Vette's horse turned restlessly, stirring dust. She glowered at it, tugging at the reins. "I'd rather walk."

  I didn't disagree. Before jumping here, we'd spent two more days in Primetime to let me heal up and so the both of us could absorb our ad hoc training, including a full day spent in Accelerated Virtual Immersion, a dreamlike program that felt like a subjective week and had filled my head with all kinds of skills, language, and culture.

  Despite this, I felt horribly out of place, obviously out of time. I'd never been back this far. We're almost never sent further back than the second half of what is generally classified as the 20th century. Individuals and criminal groups with access to time travel can't penetrate deeper. The expenditure of energy necessary to propel yourself that far back is too obvious. It lights up the Pods like burst stars.

  Yet a trespasser was here now.

  I guided my beast down the strip of dirt that served as a road. Getting the horses into a Pod had been a story in its own right. Sunlight browned the hills and glazed the ocean. I had a revolver on my hip and a rifle on the saddle. I usually wound up armed when I visited other worlds, but never this publicly.

  "What are we looking for again?" Vette said.

  I pushed my wide-brimmed hat up my forehead. "How can you not know that?"

  "Didn't seem worth learning until we got here."

  "Ottoway."

  "Who's that?"

  "It's not a who, it's a where." My horse stepped funny, bouncing me in the saddle. My whole lower half was going to be sore tomorrow. "That's what Korry Haltur believed, anyway. It was in the G&A files, but there was no modern record of it. Haltur traced it back to here and now."

  Vette glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. "Flimsy."

  "Like an old shirt. But if someone's here, they could change hundreds of years of history."

  A hawk keened from the clear blue sky. She scanned the hardpan. "Guessing there's not a lot of internet around here."

  "Not exactly."

  "So how do we find...anything?"

  "The old fashioned way." Hesitantly, I urged my horse faster toward the dingy town. "We talk to people."

  She spat into the dirt. Already in character. "Sounds like a lot of work."

  Smoke rose from chimneys, smudging the perfect skies above Brownville, which lived up to its name much better at present than it would three centuries from now. The clank of a smith's hammer drifted from the patchy woods upstream. A uniformed man galloped past us on the trail without sparing us a glance.

  I slowed as we approached the tents flung up around the city's edges. It smelled like sulphur and rotting mud. Vette scowled and tied a bandana around her mouth.

  "Those are for the trail," I said. "Keep out the dust."

  "I'd like to keep out the shit, too."

  On the boardwalks outside the nicer shops, filthy men jabbered and joked, backs laden with shovels and picks and rifles and packs. Several eyed Vette. The only dirt on us was what we'd picked up on the ten-mile ride into town. I made a note to tell her to quit bathing. Riders and carriages plowed down the street, careless, trusting the pedestrians to skedaddle out of the way.

  I stopped in front of a three-story inn with prices for rooms and whiskey posted out front. Money's always trickier before the digital era—the CR has fewer resources in place, and you can't exactly wire more over if you run low—but the Pods had dummied up several pounds of gold and silver coins along with our clothes and weapons. I stopped my horse, awkwardly lowered myself to the ground, tied my mount to the hitching post, and stepped inside, boots clunking on the planks.

  A few men sat around tables with smudgy glasses of beer. Couple more at the bar, where a man with a stupendous salt-and-pepper mustache watched the scene with professional avuncularity. I approached and asked him for a room for me and my wife as well as stabling for our horses. He showed me upstairs and sent a boy out to tend to our mounts. We went to the barn to get our gear off our horses, which smelled like dirt and fresh sweat. Sunlight lanced through the gaps in the wooden walls, impaling swirling motes of dust.

  "Your wife?" Vette murmured.

  I glanced around to make sure the stableboy was out of earshot. "This age doesn't take kindly to couples in sin. Only way to talk together with the doors closed is if we're
married. Otherwise, everyone in town's going to be watching our every move."

  "And what about the bed?"

  "We've got bedrolls. I'll take the floor."

  She nodded, mollified. We brought our stuff up to our room, then returned to the bar, where I ordered us both a beer. The avuncular bartender opened a conversation, which is just what I was hoping would happen.

  "Travel far?" he said, voice heavy with the deep timbre of a rolling ship.

  "Oakwood," I said, naming a town a couple hundred miles east. Even the Pods didn't know too much about this time and place—they're passive gatherers of information who do much better in digital eras; when you observe a thing too closely, you change it, which is anathema to our mission—but they'd put together enough backstory for us to pass. Hopefully.

  "What brings you to Brownville?"

  I sipped my beer, which tasted earthy but was mostly good. "I'm not entirely sure."

  The man laughed. The glint of his teeth beneath his wide whiskers made him look feral. "Hell of a long way to ride, then."

  Other than the organic cameras in my eyes, we had no way to spy on the people here. Normally, I preferred to follow the Pods' lead and stay back, exposing nothing, but that wasn't an option. I took a calculated risk.

  "Looking for Ottoway." I leaned forward and dropped my voice. "Pretty sure it's hereabouts."

  He cocked his head to the side, hands on the scarred wooden bar. "Ottoway."

  "You know it?"

  The man thought a moment, then shook his head. "Nope. But that don't mean it ain't here."

  I nodded and considered the bar. "We're like to stay here a while. If it comes up, you'll let us know?"

  "Sure. A man's got to take care of the people under his roof."

  In Primetime, this would have been delivered ironically, a commentary on a patriarchy so outdated it hardly qualified as a joke, but the man's expression was as solid as his bar. I smiled and extended my hand. We shook. The man walked down to see to a new customer.

  "What now?" Vette said. "Or are you hoping to find answers in the bottom of that mug?"

  "Nope. But maybe in the bottom of one I buy for the other people here."