The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  I pulled out the tablet I'd taken with me from the base on the moon of a dead world. I unpaused the recording. In Joachim's office, Davies materialized with a whomp of compressed air.

  "Oh my god," Vette said after the tape finished. We hadn't had time to revert to our original faces and her expression of horror looked plastic, fake. "We're doomed. We can't fight Central. They're Central."

  Mara looked as if she'd already resigned herself to a fate worse than Lee's. "We don't have a choice. We'll find out why they're in this—and then we'll take them down."

  VI

  The three of us stood in silence in the park on the hill, our task hanging between us like the death of a friend. Challenging Central was madness. If the measure of an object's power is its lack of limits, then Central was the most powerful group in Primetime: not only was it unbound by local or international law, it was unbound by the laws of time. Exposing it would require monstrous effort and diabolical cunning.

  "I think it's time you two took a vacation," Mara said.

  "Huh?" I replied. "We've just discovered G&A is Central's puppet, and you want us to head to the beach?"

  She squinted at me. "Come on, Blake."

  "Oh," I said. "'Vacation' is a metaphor, isn't it."

  "The Cutting Room has been called off the case. If we hope to finish this, we damn well better act like we're following orders."

  Vette scratched her stubbled head. "By pretending we're on leave. Which protocol demands after a mission. So what will we be up to?"

  Mara gazed into the patchwork trees. "You're going to stay in town. After a few days, you're going to put in a transfer to Central."

  "But I've barely been with the Cutting Room for a month, subjective-time."

  "Which means you've lasted longer than a quarter of our graduates. You're ambitious, aren't you?"

  Vette glanced at me sidelong. "Yeah."

  "Then you've decided you're too big for the CR. They call it 'Central' for a reason, right?" Mara waited until Vette nodded, then turned to me. "We're going the opposite with you. You're getting as far away as you can: Skald."

  "Skald?" I said.

  "Skald?" Vette gaped.

  "Should I know this place?"

  "Nobody should. That's the whole point."

  I frowned. "Then how do you?"

  "Before I entered the Academy, I tried to immigrate there." She raised her eyebrows at Mara. "How are you going to get him in?"

  Mara hoisted her shoulders. "That's his job. I can't be seen getting involved. Anyway, I still have the CR to run. We've got other cases than this one, you know."

  "Why am I headed to this mystery land?" I said.

  "Before your time, we had an agent named Jeni Sept. She was good. Extremely good. Wasn't any older than you when she retired out of the blue."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't director then. Even if I had been, I doubt I would have been privy to the facts—because from what I gathered, it was a clash with Central. A very nasty one."

  I glanced downhill, but the park was large and the trees screened us from anyone who might be nearby. Even so, I lowered my voice. "You think it may have been related to this? From what we've seen, Davies started this secret little project a few months ago, tops."

  Mara gritted her teeth. "Before they got quashed, the rumors suggested Sept had some serious qualms about Central's accountability. There was talk of a proposed off-world site. It sounded crazy at the time, but if Central's been aiming for a project like this for decades, we need to know about it."

  Vette laughed. "Yeah, but there's no way Blake can get to Skald."

  "Then why not bring Sept here?" I said.

  "Like that's any easier?"

  "This is ridiculous. Just let her know I'm on my way."

  Mara gave a little laugh. "That's not happening, either. If Central's tipped to my interest in her, they might get to Sept first. I know she's still on Skald—I messaged her earlier today—but I can't probe deeper than that."

  I threw up my hands, beyond exasperation. "If it's impossible as you make it sound, I'd better get to work."

  "You'd better," Mara agreed. "I'm going to work a few angles of my own. But above all, be discreet. We only talk about this in person. We can't risk Central catching wind of this until our case is ironclad."

  Vette scuffed at the dirt. "Do you really think they'd do something?"

  "I think they'd kill us on the spot." Mara narrowed her eyes, as if in pain. "To keep this secret safe, they might even be willing to erase us."

  "No way. If they mess with Primetime's timeline, they'll be executed."

  "By who? They're the ones in charge of protecting it."

  "Let's agree the consequences would be dire," I said. "I've got work to do."

  Vette snorted. Mara smiled indulgently. I was itching to get to Skald, but I headed straight to the backup CR facility. I still looked like Adam Loria. It wasn't such a bad idea to be incognito at that moment, but I had no intention of running around wearing the face of somebody from G&A. Not when Kellendor Davies and possibly the whole of Central was puppeteering the off-worlders' operations.

  Inside the stripped-down facility, I conversed with the Pod about my new look, then lay down on the fleshy mattress inside it while it put me to sleep and rearranged my face. I woke groggy and with that puffy, stiff feeling you get when you would be in horrible pain if not for a numbing agent.

  I sat on the plain white floor and waited for my head to clear. I thought about asking the Pod to fill me in on Skald, but stricken by sudden paranoia, I kept my questions to myself. With the fog dissipating from my brain, I walked outside, dazzled by the seas of concrete between the boxy buildings, wandered to the nearest tube stop, descended to a zipcar, and returned to my apartment, which was feeling more and more like it belonged to a stranger. It took me fifteen minutes of pawing around just to find my link.

  I shook the sleek device to charge its batteries. The screen flared to life. I ordered it to start pulling info on Skald and quickly discovered why Vette had been so skeptical I'd be able to get there: from a certain perspective, Skald didn't exist.

  Physically, it was real enough. Legally was another matter. Seventy years ago, a consortium of private citizens had purchased territory rights to a patch of ocean thirty miles from the capital of Jolles, an island nation in the South Catholic Ocean. (A much better name than most of you use—there's nothing pacific about the Pacific.) At the time, the administration of Jolles had considered it one sweet deal: the investors paid far more than the fishing or mineral rights were worth, and the owners weren't doing anything with it anyway. In essence, it was free money.

  Jolles' politicians felt rather less smug several years later when the investors' project began in earnest. Part of the patch of ocean, it turned out, included an active undersea volcano. It wasn't expected to crest the surface for eight hundred years, but the investment group had also ginned up a method to induce the sub-oceanic vents to belch up titanic quantities of magma. Within two years, they'd raised the mountain's peak to within spitting distance of the surface. The potential value of this emergent landmass was beyond estimation.

  Pressured by Jollean attorneys, the world court set to work. Citing environmental concerns—some of which were genuine—they ordered the investors to cease tampering with the volcano. The ensuing legal battle became legendary in those circles, ranging from heretofore unexplored extents of ownership rights (the investors were dredging up magma from below the Earth's crust; who owned that rock? How deep into the surface do mineral rights run?) to the Jolleans' right to sell the plot of ocean in the first place.

  For more than six decades, the land-raising project had been on hold. But that hadn't stopped the team of speculator-philosophers from continuing to pursue their goal of creating a new, independent nation. They had simply created dry land through another method: building a gigantic dome that reached all the way to the surface, complete with retractible roof. The ultimate gate
d community.

  They'd hired a second squad of lawyers to draft a constitution. Sought international recognition (and had even gained it from the Slavic Confederacy and Greater Northern China). And imposed the strictest limits on travel and immigration the world had ever seen.

  I filled out their travel application and sent it into the ether. Before I could pull up an article on Skaldic culture, a reply flashed on my screen. I had been rejected.

  I frowned. We'd see what Mr. Joachim thought about them treating his personal assistant that way.

  I frowned harder. I reminded myself that I was in Primetime, and Rupert Joachim/Silas Hockery wasn't my boss. He was my prey. It hadn't yet been a day since I'd left the underground moon base; the Pod must not have swept the drugs out of my system while I was under.

  The rejection notice included a link to an appeal. The revised application to appeal was significantly longer. And significantly stranger. While the first round had been a standard application for travel, focusing on my goals for the trip and my professional background, the appeal questionnaire was perversely personal. It asked my favorite book. My most hated movie. The last time I'd had sex.

  That was a genuinely difficult question. As with most things, time travel was to blame. Within Primetime's timestream, it had been just a few days ago, when Vette and I were trapped in the apocalypse. While we were there, however, I had lived several years longer than Vette before I'd bought the farm myself, meaning that subjectively speaking, the answer was more like eight years.

  Not wanting to let slip that I worked for CR—I'd been skirting anything professional with vague answers about working for the government—I went with the Primetime-objective answer. Completing the dozens of questions took nearly two hours. I sent in my revised application and waited, halfway expecting another automated rejection, but after a minute of gazing at my screen with no reply, I returned to researching what little there was to find about Skald.

  Based on its founders and early history, I'd expected the place to be a standard libertarian utopian project. Either that or yet another attempt to revive the free market by reintroducing need, want, and commodified labor. These two groups popped up on a regular basis, but mostly did so online. Establishing their own micronation would have been quite a coup.

  But Skald was nothing of the sort. Its founding philosophy, if it could be said to have one, seemed to be that it would be really neat to artificially grow a new island and then live there. Its residents—who faced more screening than applicants to Central or presidential security combined—were an eclectic mix of artists, entrepreneurs, philosophers. That and the booters. This last group generally identified as some combination of the above, but most worlds would recognize them as Primetime's equivalent of hobo drifters.

  I was reading one of the many forums dedicated to speculating on Skald's interest in booters (theories ranged from the neurochemical rehabilitation of these societal dropouts to a sinister mercenary army with no love of country and nothing to lose) when the response came back for my revised travel appeal:

  "We're sorry, but your life has been deemed too boring to accept."

  I sat back. I was deeply and inexplicably insulted. Childishly, I wanted to try again, to argue that my life was in fact one of the most unusual and interesting in all Primetime, but there was no option to make a third application, and when I tried to return to Skald's national site, all it fed me was a blank screen.

  I glared at it, mentally composing a brusquely devastating note to Skald's board of tourism, concluding with the wish their whole damn not-island would sink back below the sea.

  Because this idea was stupid. Even if I could talk, trick, or bribe my way to Skald, there was no guarantee ex-agent Jeni Sept would have anything to tell me. I should be spying on Kellendor Davies at Central. Returning to pre-apocalyptic Brownville to see whether any other Central agents showed up to do business with G&A. This was a waste of time, a wild goose chase.

  Several thoughts clicked at once.

  The first thought had to do with a myth. One that wasn't just common across worlds, but across the indigenous cultures of every world, making it one of the oldest and most widespread legends in the multiverse. Many know it as Atlantis. And its story was something of a mirror image of Skald.

  The second had to do with its name. I'd taken it for a play on the place's physical origins, something to do with volcanic heat or calderas, but I realized I'd seen it before. A quick search turned up the definition. A storyteller-poet from the Dark Ages of Northern Europa.

  The third had to do with the booters. Depending on your perspective, they were either holy fools or idiot romantics. But just about everyone would agree they offered a unique perspective and set of life experiences. And many passed the time telling their stories of travel in coffee shops, cafeterias, and amphitheaters.

  The fourth and final thought was the wording of my second rejection.

  I cleared my link and made some calls.

  I don't have a lot of friends. Cutting Room agents are mercurial, secretive, and prone to disappearing for months on end. Sometimes for good. It's hard to maintain relationships of any kind. But the people willing to tolerate such an arrangement tend to be pretty interesting in their own right. Within two hours, Ev the journalist put me in contact with Georg the ethnographer, who in turn connected me to Dido Williams. Reportedly, Ms. Williams had an in with Skald's travel council. She lived just across town, and when I called, she answered.

  Her face appeared on my link's screen. She was fortyish, with eyes the color of a cold sea and a smile as ironic as a Greek tragedy.

  "I'll meet you," she told me, "but you need to understand what this is."

  "Which is?"

  "A formality for Georg. No one goes to Skald."

  "I'll change your mind," I said.

  "You won't," she laughed. "Meet me at Tripaldi Fountain. Now."

  She cut the connection. I took the elevator to the basement and hopped a zipcar to Mezzonar Plaza, one of the city's many parks/markets/public squares. This one was loosely Roman in style and attracted a great deal of citizens to its gardens, trattorias, and osterias, which smelled of fresh bread, steaming tomato sauce, and grilled fish. I glanced around, snapping pictures of faces with my eye-cams and running them against known Central agents, but there were no matches. Then again, if they were watching me, they'd have no need to send a live body.

  Tripaldi Fountain was one of three in the plaza. It was made of terraced stone and crowned by a white stone statue of an old man carrying a lantern and peering down into the square. His cynical expression appeared unconcerned by the fact the fountain's water was flowing directly from his penis. Dido Williams waited for me at the fountain's base.

  She made a flicking gesture. "Say your piece so I can tell you no and we can both get on with our lives."

  I took another glance around the square. A pigeon trundled up to me, head bobbing. "What is Skald for?"

  "Existing, I imagine."

  "You can do that anywhere. What's the island's purpose? Why go to all the trouble of creating it?"

  "Because it wasn't there. You get one more question, Socrates. Then my obligation to Georg is fulfilled."

  I smiled. "What's Skald's interest in stories?"

  She cocked her head, blond hair hanging straight down. "Stories?"

  "Don't play dumb. It's right there in the name."

  "Which everyone assumes is as meaningless as every name." A sharp light entered her eyes as she examined me anew. "We like them. They're one of the few things that are truly infinite. And when you tie that to the experience of them, that's when things really get interesting. Some of us wonder whether experiencing a made-up story can seem as real as living it for yourself. If that's true, then you could make magic real. Live forever. In any world you please."

  "I know there's no point trying to bribe you with money," I said. "I don't have any political favors to offer. Can't help you with your legal troubles. But I can give you
stories. Secret ones. Things no one else has ever heard."

  Dido grinned, crocodilian. "In exchange for a visitor's pass to Skald?"

  "That's the deal."

  "We've already got millions of stories. Hundreds of people inventing new ones every day."

  "But this one is true," I said. "And it's from another world."

  Her eyebrows twitched. "Are you with Central?"

  I shook my head. "Cutting Room."

  She bit her lower lip, showing her fangs. "Let's hear it."

  I had chosen my story carefully. Everything I did in other worlds was highly classified; disclosing off-world intelligence could get me imprisoned. And virtually everything I'd done for the CR was in their internal records—and Central's. If what I told Dido got back to anyone there, it could destroy me.

  But the real story of six-year-old Stephen Jaso wasn't on record. My report had been a cleaned-up version with my malfeasance expunged. I could use the actual events without fear of it getting back to Central; if it did, I'd simply call Dido Williams a liar, or tell them I'd fed her a false story. Even if they sent the inquisition for me, the investigation should be messy and long enough for me to bring down Davies first.

  "We have strict rules of chrono-sanitation," I said. Water splashed in the fountain. Sun gushed down from the sky. "In an ideal mission, that world's people never know we're there. But few missions are ideal."

  Dido smiled in anticipation. I may not be a natural storyteller, but when you spend your life thinking about causality, you learn how things fit together. What's vital and what can be cut. So, changing only the names, I told her about Stephen Jaso, a kid whose future had been altered by a Primetime predator. The entity tasked with noticing changes noticed. The man tasked with undoing those changes was sent back to undo the boy's death.

  But every avenue the man tried hit a dead end. Every lead died a quiet death. As time ticked down, he grew increasingly desperate. In just a few days, the predator would win. The boy would die. And the man would go home knowing the death was his fault.

  So I explained that I had made the choice to break our most sacred commandment. I had approached the boy. Told him I was from the future. That he was in danger. And I needed his help.