The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  Even then, it had come down to the wire. But I tracked the killer down. Erased him. Yanked the boy's life back from the brink. And gone home knowing I'd given him a second chance.

  People milled around us, laughing, enjoying the sunshine, drinking red wine. During my story, Dido had watched me with scorching intensity. Now, although she stood in place, she seemed to step back, withdrawing from the world of the tale to look at it from afar.

  "So what happened to him?" she said. "How did his life turn out?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean, you don't know? How can you save a little kid's life and not go back to see how he used his second chance?"

  I gazed up at the statue of the old man, who peered right back at me. "It's not that I don't want to know. But if I go back, I will see what happened. And lives are like missions: rarely ideal."

  Dido bulged one of her cheeks with the tip of her tongue. "Whereas now the story of his life could be anything. Infinite."

  I nodded.

  "That's stupid," she said. "No deal."

  "We had a bargain. A story for passage to Skald."

  "The deal was for a good story. You copped out on the ending. Give me triumph or tragedy, not some wishy-washy in-between."

  "The boy died in a car crash," I said. "Eighteen years old. There, now it's a tragedy. Happy?"

  She lifted one finger and made a tick-tock gesture. "Nope. Too late, the spell's broken. You ruined it."

  I bit my teeth together. "I could erase your little island from the entire timeline."

  Dido rolled her eyes. "Don't be like that. I've thought of a way for you to make it up to me. It's not fair that cops and criminals are the only ones who get to experience other worlds."

  "No." I drew back my chin. "Absolutely not."

  "I won't break anything. I just want to see whether the reality is better than a story." She stared me down with every drop of authority in her cold-ocean eyes. "This is the only way you'll ever get to Skald."

  I had the feeling I'd been played. I was angry enough to wring her neck. I knew how to make bodies disappear.

  Wherever she went, Dido would alter the timeline. Change the lives of everyone there. Some for the better, some for the worse. But Mara thought Jeni Sept could help us break the case against Davies. The sanctity of everything we stood for was at stake. I didn't have a choice.

  I took Dido to the backup facility. She wanted to go way, way back, but I held firm. Instead, I searched out a world where an early plague had shredded the Mediterranean, crippling Greece, Persia, early Rome, and the many seafaring North African peoples. It had set the Western world back by centuries. Even now, at the present edge of the timeline, they were still in a Renaissance-like era of a highly sophisticated medieval society that hadn't yet begun to automate its labor.

  After warning her that she could well die, I sent Dido back. Just a week before the present time. A taste of the past without undoing too much of the world's history.

  For me, of course, just a couple minutes passed between when she entered the Pod and when she returned (blessedly intact). For her, a week had gone by. She looked different. Grimier, but her dark blue eyes were aflame with memory.

  "How was it?" I said.

  "Wonderful experience," she said. "Bad story. No resolution. That's the problem with real life, isn't it?"

  She wouldn't say more, but the trip had sealed the deal. We took a zipcar to a private airport and climbed into a jet that didn't have a single straight line to its frame. Skald was the better part of 8000 miles away, but in less than three hours of suborbital flight, I gazed down on a permanent bubble rising from the shining blanket of the Catholic Ocean.

  The jet switched to a hover, bleeding height and speed. Ominous weapons platforms stood vigil around the bubble. The dome walls held back the sea; the land sat a couple hundred yards below the enveloping waters, lush and green.

  And incredibly hot. Stepping off the jet was like entering an open mouth. The palms at the airfield stood in perfect stillness. There had been some chop on our vertical descent to the field, but down here, there was no wind at all.

  The heat didn't seem to trouble Dido. She smiled airily. "I'm guessing you're here to find someone. Good luck."

  I swabbed sweat from my temples. "What do you mean?"

  "There are no public records of Skald's citizenship. You won't get any info out of our government, such as it is. We treat our privacy as seriously as you treat the timeline."

  "Then how am I supposed to find her?"

  She shrugged her elegant shoulders. "If you don't have an address, I suggest you ask around."

  She strode across the spongy grass toward a waiting car. I grimaced and fetched a sock from my luggage to wipe off the sweat. This was beginning to feel very much like a mission to one of the other worlds. A trip to a strange land with no contacts and almost zero resources at my disposal.

  Which meant I had plenty of experience at my back.

  A settlement rose from the grass a quarter mile from the airport. On the assumption that Skald had no underground zipcar network, I went inside the small terminal to ask about transportation. Travel to and from Skald was entirely private and apparently rare—the travel desk was a kiosk staffed by a lone woman who was perfectly happy to pull double duty as concierge. She offered to call me a car service, but after learning I might need to travel extensively, she advised me that much of Skald wasn't easily accessible by car, and suggested I take advantage of one of their free bikes instead.

  I was skeptical, but the vehicles were fat-tired off-roaders with piezo-electric engines and rugged carbon frames. Skald was just a few miles across. I mounted up and rode into town.

  It wasn't exactly a metropolis. A few hundred homes and stores. Most had wide windows or open walls and roofs thatched from palm leaves. Probably artificial, but they added a nice look. Solar-powered fans stirred a breeze through the streets. I took a walk around. Plenty of restaurants, but with more of a neighborhood vibe than a touristy one. Several grocers with attached cafes, like a small supermarket or a large bodega.

  I had expected it all to be ultra-ritzy, luxurious offerings for the elite investors who had the cash and the pull to be a part of Skald, but instead the town was simple and practical. It wasn't here to leech money from wealthy tourists or locals. It was here to serve its people.

  Which made it easier for me. I'd drop by everywhere that saw a lot of traffic, starting with the bodegas.

  The first was little more than a wide roof shading the stacks of fresh produce and packaged food. Rolled up canvases could be lowered to close it up in case of storm, but given Skald's unique geographic position, I expected the rain mostly fell straight down. Men and women sat in the shaded cafe, hair tousled by the ceaseless fans, sipping iced coffees. I headed to the counter, where a middle-aged man with a deep tan operated a brightly polished old fashioned espresso maker.

  "I'm looking for a woman named Jeni Sept," I told him. "Friend of a friend. Do you know her?"

  The man frowned, thought, and shook his head. "Never heard of her."

  I held up my link, which displayed a picture of her face. Mara's most recent picture of her, anyway, which meant it was years out of date. "Recognize her?"

  "If I did, would she be in some kind of trouble?"

  "Not at all. I'm just here for advice. It's very important."

  He shook his head. "Never seen her."

  I didn't think he was lying, but I would have killed for a dose of Josuf Yount's little green pills to help read the patterns on his face. Should have had the Pods gin me up something similar. Such things were highly illegal in Primetime, but Skald didn't seem to have much in the way of customs or security. Given its invite-only exclusivity, there was probably no need.

  I left the man my contact info, a printout of Sept's face and name, and tried the next grocer/cafe. No luck there, either. At the third, a woman stood in a dirt circle at the edge of the cafe. At first I thought she was preachin
g, but she was reciting a story of some kind. Possibly an old poem, given the references to Ancient Greece. As I spoke to the proprietor, the storyteller wrapped up and was rewarded with a smattering of applause. Figuring such people were well-traveled, I waited for the small crowd to finish congratulating her, then approached the woman, who was brown-skinned, sun-wrinkled, and equally capable of deep gravity and soaring levity.

  "I'm searching for someone," I said. "If you can help me find her, I'd be happy to swap stories with you." I grinned. "Maybe give you something a little more recent than Odysseus."

  She smiled, eyes crinkling. "Sounds like this is a story in itself."

  "Not one I can tell now. But once I can, it'll be big."

  The woman tipped back her head and pursed her mouth. "Promise me you'll tell me it before anyone on Skald. If your woman's here, I'll find her."

  "Deal." We shook on it. Her hand was dry and strong. I fed her Jeni Sept's name and photo.

  The sparkle faded from the old woman's eyes. "You're sure she's here?"

  "My friend spoke to her just the other day."

  "Well, I never have. And after thirty years of spinning yarns for a place to sleep each night, I've stayed in just about every home on the island."

  "The offer stands." I gave her my contact info. "If she turns up, please reach me at once."

  She agreed, but her voice was far from hopeful. That dented my spirits. I had no doubt she knew a good portion of the island's several thousand residents. There were four other proper towns, though, as well as a good deal of individual homesteads scattered around the hills and jungles. I had a lot left to search.

  The jet had traveled fast enough that I had actually gained a few hours of daylight, but as I hopped on my bike to ride to the next town, a fast shadow fell over the island. The sun dropped enough to be cut off by the ocean held at bay above our heads. It felt eerie and alien: the sky was bright blue, but the light felt overcast, as if the planet had been pulled twice as far from the sun.

  At least the semi-sunset brought a breeze with it. I pedaled up the road, stopping on a lonely hill to get a look at the lay of the land. Toward the island's center, sharp black peaks thrust from the soil, climbing nearly to sea level. The rest of the hills and flatlands lay well beneath it, however, and except for the circle of sky overhead, we were walled in by a disturbing gradient of ocean: clean, minty blue near the top of the dome, but navy and nearly black in the deep waters level with the edge of the land. And the next town, Edge City, was right there in its shadow.

  I biked up to it. The dome wall loomed higher and higher, the only thing between me and billions of tons of seawater. If it failed, there would be no surviving. The only thing in doubt would be whether I'd die from being crushed or drowned.

  I ignored the blue-black wall as best I could and headed for the first bodega I saw. The structures varied starkly from the tropics-themed homes in the last town. Here, many were built into hillsides, insulated by the earth. Many were pressed flush with the wall of the dome, where they presumably had some kind of heat-exchange running to the water outside.

  This was confirmed by the system of canals latticing the landscape. These ran every which way, flowing calmly behind houses, between shops, through expansive public gardens. Arched footbridges crossed them at regular intervals. Crabs rested on the rocks of the shores, waving their claws at each other and the residents, many of whom appeared content to sit in the shade and watch the water go on its way. The air was no less muggy than it had been inland, but it was noticeably cooler.

  When it came to my search, however, everything else was the same. No one had seen Jeni Sept or known anyone who went by that name. My spirits darkened further. It could be that everyone on the island had conspired to keep her identity secret, but that made no sense, as she'd been plenty open with Mara about her location. More likely, she was either a hermit, or she wasn't here at all.

  The sky dimmed and so did the wall of sea. I had been up for 24 hours and crossed a third of the globe. Time to crash. But when I asked one of the grocers about a hotel, she informed me there wasn't one in town.

  "Sweetie, don't cry." She reached for my shoulder. I raised an eyebrow; I was frustrated, but not that shaken up by my lack of lodging. She smiled warmly. "I've got a spare room. You can tell me your story over breakfast."

  I accepted. She had her cashier show me to her house, which was just a few canal-crossings away and dug into the side of a low hill. The cashier showed me the bathroom, the kitchen, and the spare room, then left. Very trusting. I supposed would-be thieves didn't have many places to run to.

  I stayed up thinking about what story I'd tell the owner come morning. It was bizarre how they treated tales as currency, especially when you could mint new coinage on the spot. But then again, my thinking had become very off-world. Primetime was post-scarcity. Even on an island like Skald, no one had to worry about having the material cash for food, housing, trips to the doctor. They didn't have to extract material compensation from every transaction.

  And it made sense, in its way. If all the needs of the body are met, that leaves the needs of the soul. The idea dovetails with time itself. There are multiple ways to think about time. One is raw causality. My realm. If you chop down a tree, then it will fall to the earth. Causality is purely physical. The body.

  But understanding why a tree falls isn't satisfying. We want to know the meaning of the falling tree. Alongside and overlapping with religion, stories are the major way we understand the world—and our selves. Stories are the soul of time. Meaning's net.

  The people of Skald knew that better than anyone. With physical goods devalued by abundance, they traded the currency of the spirit instead.

  Back to the physical, I wasn't sure how Skald handled their large, voluntary booter population, but I'd soon pick up that it was a patronage system, where social honor was gained by housing the wandering storytellers. The few who fell through the cracks were fed by the matter printers available in each town, which happily transformed raw material into nutritious edibles.

  While I noodled on all this, the fans whirred softly. The air smelled like earth and sea salt. I fell asleep before I'd chosen a story. In the morning, woken temporarily by a skylight, then more permanently by the proprietor's knock, I was too tired to come up with something new.

  So as she fed me a breakfast of whitefish, toast, kelp salad, and coffee, I told her about my life. Raised by my mom after my father died young. Aptitude for the military, but having no interest in such a ceremonial organization, I'd applied for Central instead. Hadn't made it, but I'd been good enough for the Cutting Room. Been there ever since.

  It was disjointed, heavy on summary, and light on resolution, but the woman grinned anyway. Debt paid, I continued my hunt.

  I searched high and low. I visited the remaining towns, the handful of visitors. I checked in with the grocers, the storytellers, the island's lone post office, the airport. None of my efforts turned up a single hint of recognition. Four days in, having explored the island from shore to shore, having slept in three different houses and once in the open grass of a warm night, I called Mara through my link.

  "I don't think she's here," I said.

  Mara looked confused. "'Here' being?"

  I held up my link and scanned it across the dome walls and the deep blue waters beyond, then pointed it up at the bowl of sky. "The place I wasn't supposed to be able to get to. I'm here. And our target isn't."

  "Don't tell me you've combed the whole island. How can you be sure?"

  "Because no one here has ever seen her. Either she changed her face and name, or she's lying to you."

  Mara shook her head. "Face is the same. Signs her messages with the same name, too. Let me shoot her a line and see what she has to say."

  I nodded and closed the connection. I biked back to see the old woman who'd performed the Greek play, but she hadn't turned up word of Jeni. As I stood outside the cafe eating a pineapple curry and wondering what to
do next, Mara's ID came up on my link. I answered.

  "She says she's in Edge City," Mara said. "Know it?"

  "Canal town," I said. "And unless she never leaves her hole, she isn't in it."

  "How about you check again?"

  "I will. Then I'm coming home. I don't know what's going on, but this feels like a dead end."

  Mara nodded. "Fair enough, but be thorough. She's got no reason to lie to me."

  I didn't know about that. They'd worked together for years. Jeni Sept could have a secret resentful agenda. Or it could be a part of old CR politics we weren't privy to. I biked through the gentle hills, sweating, glad to be back in the water-cooled climes and canals of Edge City. This time, I went door to door. Not everyone answered, but if they didn't, their neighbors did. As always, no one knew Sept.

  I left messages with storytellers across the island to give me a jangle should she turn up, then biked to the airport to ask if they could let Dido Williams know I was ready to leave. The concierge made a couple calls, then informed me Ms. Williams was engaged, but would be happy to lend me the use of her jet. Where would I like to go?

  For just a moment, I was tempted to tell her Asia, the Outback, or that I wouldn't be leaving after all. But I couldn't leave Central to puppeteer an illicit off-world time travel org like G&A. They were thugs. Mobsters. Whatever they were up to, it was bad news for billions of lives on dozens of timelines.

  So I flew back to the city. Caught up with Vette, whose transfer to Central was already being processed. It sounded like she'd make it. I congratulated her, then headed to the park on the hills to meet Mara.

  "I don't get it," Mara said. "Jeni's been telling me she lives in Skald for years. Why lie?"

  I gazed at the sky. It felt good to be away from the sea walls. The darkness of them. The creatures suspended unseen within them. I cocked my head. "How do you talk to her? Voice? Video?"

  She shook her head. "Text."

  "Have you seen her in person since she left the Cutting Room?"