The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  In cold fury, I prepared for another trip. The Pod spat out everything I needed. Within minutes, I was back in Stephen Jaso's world—but decades deeper into his future. This time, there hadn't been any accidents. He had attended a school called MIT. Gotten his doctorate. Taught theoretical physics at Princeton. Been hired by the government. At 63, he'd been honored with the Nobel for his revisions to Einstein's work.

  I returned to Primetime, made a third jump. A hundred years ahead. Jaso was dead, of course, but his work had flourished. They'd built wormholes. Stitched together the neighboring stars.

  And turned their worlds into a paradise.

  I no longer cared about evidence. I had everything I needed to know. And wrath burned in me like napalm.

  I returned to Primetime with a plan taking shape in my head. At the backup facility—deserted except for myself, the Pods, and the corpse of the man who'd meant to kill Stephen Jaso—I plotted the murder of Kellendor Davies.

  I called a meeting with Vette. Not at the hill in the park. We'd gone there too often. Perhaps I was paranoid. But I'd come too far to take a single chance. Instead, I met her at a lake on the south side of town. I rented a little boat, the kind lovers use to pass a dreamy afternoon, and paddled us out to the middle of the water. Only then did I stop the small talk.

  I let go of the oars and sat back, panting. "Can you get me a meeting with Davies?"

  "No." She shielded her eyes against the glare from the water. "But one of my new friends can. When do you need it?"

  I was going to need a little time to heal. "Two days."

  "I'll see what I can do." Vette folded her arms. "What did you find out?"

  "Nothing."

  "Horseshit."

  "It's better you don't know."

  She snorted. "We used to work together. I've been on the sidelines ever since we came back from the apocalypse. Is it because I forgot what happened?"

  I glanced across the placid waters. "It has nothing to do with that."

  "I didn't know what I was doing, okay? We come back, my head feels like it's about to explode, the Pods are asking me whether I want to forget, and I think they're talking about dying, and I do want to forget—just the last part—so I tell them yes, and next I know—"

  I took her hand. "I don't hate you, Vette. You did what you needed to do."

  She laughed a bit, sniffed. "Sometimes, the look you get in your eyes, I wish to God I hadn't."

  "It was a good life. If you want, I'll tell you about it sometime."

  "For now, I just need to know one thing."

  "Shoot."

  "How often did I let you be on top?"

  I smiled down at the water. Toughing through her emotions with jokes. One of the reasons I'd fallen in love. "About as often as you woke up first."

  She laughed. I had already set up one message to be sent to Vette in the event I didn't make it back. Once I returned to the facility, I wrote a second. One just for her.

  That finished, I climbed into the Pod. The first time I told it what I wanted, it refused me. But I knew that was protocol. I insisted. It put me to sleep and went to work. I got up groggy. My left arm was numb to the biceps. I waited for my head to clear, then programmed a destination into the Pod. I wasn't headed anywhere just yet, but after what I was about to do, I had the feeling I'd need to lie low for a while.

  Assuming Vette came through with my meeting, I had a day and a half of open time. It was going to be tough. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my hands wrapping around Davies' throat.

  I couldn't chance staying at my apartment, so I slept in the Pod. I'd set it up with another command. If they came for me, it would jet me off to another time—and it wouldn't bring me back for a full week. Long enough for my messages to be automatically sent to Vette. With any luck, that would do enough damage for them to forget about me.

  Needless to say, I had thrown our cautious, piece-by-piece plan to the winds. Maybe that was a mistake. But I refused to let them erase one more Stephen Jaso.

  Day broke. I heard from Vette. She'd gotten me into his schedule. The following afternoon. I wished it were that same day. I didn't want the extra time to think.

  I thought I could make it inside Central. I wasn't so sure about getting out. But it didn't matter. This had gone on far too long.

  In the end, I had the Pod put me to sleep. I awoke. Stretched. Jogged around the facility. And then it was time. I carried nothing but my wallet and my link. I dropped down to the tunnels, climbed into a zipcar, ordered it to Central. It hustled through the tunnels at impossible speed, delivering me to my fate and the platform beneath Central. Before leaving, I had the Pod dose me with a cocktail to moderate anxiety/adrenaline—Central security didn't just check for weapons, but for unusually elevated mood—and I approached the checkpoint feeling eerily calm.

  The door closed behind me. Machines whirred from the walls, scanning my clothes, my skin, my brain. I stared straight forward, waiting for an alarm to blare, for sirens to whirl, for masked men to storm through the door and haul me away to the dungeons.

  The machines retracted to the walls. The door opened. I stepped into Central.

  The elevator carried me hundreds of feet into the sky. I was early; at Davies' floor, I gazed out the window at the city spread beneath me. I wondered if it took that much effort to keep them in the dark. I had bought into it without question, too. So easy to believe what you're told. To discard doubts. There is comfort in letting those above you lead you by the hand while you watch the sidewalk pass beneath your feet.

  Davies' assistant saw me in, gave me a seat, handed me coffee. It was very good. Perhaps its flavor was augmented by the chance it would be the last thing I'd ever taste.

  I laughed out loud, drawing a look from the assistant. I was being awfully melodramatic. It wasn't about me. It was about Stephen. And the untold hundreds like him. My anger surged. I was ready.

  "Commander Davies will see you now," the assistant said.

  "Thank you." I rose. There was an argument for killing the assistant, but I'd been in Davies' office before. It was virtually soundproof. Screaming wouldn't save him. I entered, closed the door behind me.

  Davies sat behind his desk, gazing at me with his copper-flecked eyes. "Seen a lot of you lately, Din."

  I settled on the edge of the chair across from him. "Are we being monitored?"

  "Closed recording only. Contents of this room are too sensitive even for security."

  I couldn't be certain he was telling the truth, but I supposed it was irrelevant. I'd only need a few seconds. Security wouldn't have time to react. "I'm here for Stephen Jaso."

  He shook his head. "Not familiar."

  "You should be. You ordered his death."

  Without changing expression, Davies reached for his desk. I'd been anticipating the movement. I lurched forward, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him into his own momentum, slamming his face into the cherrywood surface. I pinned his neck with my other forearm.

  "Not long ago, he was murdered. I thought it was just another Primetime psycho off to get his kicks in secret. I saved Stephen, but it turned out he was fated to die anyway. Car crash, age eighteen."

  "You need to do three things," Davies said, face mushed by the desk. "Let go of me. Stand down. And—"

  I twisted his arm and bore down on his throat. He choked, spewing spittle on the desk.

  "I wasn't finished," I said. "I let the case go. Accidents happen. You learn to let them go. I did—until I learned about Siri Mercer. Murdered by a trespasser. Agent named Jeni Sept saved her life. Except fate had it in for Siri, too. She bought it in a plane crash. Real shame. She was brilliant, too. Could have changed the world."

  Wrath roaring in my veins, I pressed down as hard as I could. Davies' face purpled. He tried to get his legs under him, but I swung around the desk and kicked out his knee. I took a deep breath and eased up enough to let him get his air.

  "And she did, didn't she? Just like Stephen did. Until you erase
d them. Because they were leading their worlds to a future you could never let them have: time travel."

  Davies laughed dully. "In minutes, you'll be dead."

  "Primetime isn't a fluke. It's no accident that we're the only world with time travel. Whenever another world comes close, you send someone back to destroy it. To murder their greatest minds. And we've been doing this for years."

  "It's the only thing that keeps us safe!" He shouted with such thunder I nearly lost my grasp. His eye bulged up at me. "You don't leave a weapon like that lying around. This isn't handing a pistol to a child. It's gifting a nuke to your worst enemy."

  "Bullshit! You're destroying their future because you're scared!"

  "You're the one shoveling shit, Agent. If we let these worlds build time travel, they could strike Primetime at any point. Wipe us out. As many worlds as they please. Instead, we cull a few lives. Leave billions in peace. And secure not just our future, but the future of every world in the multiverse."

  This was mutually assured destruction-style madness, the kind of thinking that enabled humans to reduce other humans to faceless threats to be exterminated at any cost, but I let it slide. There were still a few things I needed to know.

  "Is that why you partnered with Greene & Associates?" I said. "Too many assassinations for you to handle by yourself, so you decided to outsource?"

  Face still pressed into the table, he snorted. "Think, fool. You think you're the first to catch a whiff of this? To turn up your righteous little nose?"

  "Jeni Sept. Great cover story, making everyone think she'd moved to an island no one could ever visit her on. But you disappeared her."

  "Which, for the record, I hate. Our best agents are the ones most likely to catch on. Cry foul. And force us to remove them. That's why we moved off-world. To put ourselves out of sight."

  "Or maybe you were ashamed."

  "To keep my world safe? To keep agents like you from getting their heads chopped off? Never."

  Some of the details were still guesswork—I could only assume Korry Haltur had discovered the operation and been killed for it, though it was possible his murder, the one that had set us on this long and winding trail, had been related to G&A's more pedestrian criminal enterprises—but it was all in place now. Davies couldn't have moved Central or CR off-world without drawing attention, so he'd started a shadow wing instead.

  Transporting resources from Primetime would be logistically difficult as well as obtrusive, so he'd started from scratch. Gone to Brownville's organized crime with an offer they couldn't refuse: do his dirty work, and he'd turn them into time-dancing, world-skipping gods. But instead of moving forward step by drudging step, they'd taken a shortcut. Gone back to frontier times to consolidate their power. I didn't know if that had been Davies' idea or Rupert Joachim's, but either way, it had left ripples.

  Which we'd followed back to the source.

  I hadn't bought Davies' justifications. He was a murderer, hundreds of times over. Which meant he'd stolen the freedom of the future from hundreds of worlds. For all his talk, I still intended to take his life. Even if I proved unable to tear down his poisoned institutions, they wouldn't be able to bring him back. Not without changing Primetime. The one thing we can never do.

  I don't say this to justify myself. Just the opposite. With what happened next, you might want to absolve me of my actions. Anyone in my position would have done the same. And be rendered blameless.

  But I want the blame.

  As I stood over Davies, pressing him into the table, fleshing out the final details of the case, he'd been doing some wriggling. Nothing I couldn't handle. But it had been a ruse. A maneuver to shift my weight far enough off his center for him to squirt to the side, brace himself against the desk, and deliver a mule kick straight at my balls.

  It wasn't a great angle, and he had little leverage, but it doesn't take much. I dropped with a groan.

  If Davies had been your average manager, he might have called security. Everything could have been different. But he'd been in the field. Spent decades there. Long enough to learn that when you put your opponent down, you make sure he never gets back up. In a flash, he flipped open his desk door and grabbed a long-bladed hunting knife.

  He came at me from the side. I sat up. He thrust at my face. I raised my left hand and took the blade straight through my palm. White light seared through my nerves, but he hadn't been expecting that. Blade entangled, he attempted to withdraw, pulling his elbow back toward his body, but I stood and followed him in. And splayed my fingers.

  This time, the pain blinded me. My skin shredded as a spring-loaded bone stiletto burst from my wrist. I'd had the Pod put it there. Completely organic. The one weapon I could sneak through Central security.

  I slammed it forward, twisting my hips to put my full weight into the strike. The point slid straight through his ribs. My elbow jarred. Davies gurgled and embraced me, clenching my side, but his knife was trapped between us. He struggled, slapped at me, then staggered. I withdrew the stiletto and let him fall to the carpet.

  Primetime medicine being what it is, I made sure to stab him through the eye, too. Straight through to the brain. I may have even wiggled the weapon around. I was angry. For Stephen and everyone like him.

  Finished, I stood and took stock. My left hand had been cut straight through. After retracting the stiletto, my wrist was a sticky mess. Davies' blood was on me, too, though his wounds were so narrow they weren't bleeding much. I went to his private restroom to clean up the best I could. Wouldn't have to be sparkling. Just enough to make it outside.

  I searched for a first aid kit. Nothing. No needles, either. Just when I thought I was going to have to bundle my hand in rags and hide it in my pocket, I spotted a tube of combined epoxy/putty under the sink. It was for plumbing, but it was the best I had to work with. I smeared it over my hand and wrist. It bonded in seconds. My skin tugged with each motion, but it stopped bleeding. I washed my hands, smoothed my hair in the mirror, and walked outside.

  Davies' assistant looked up. I gave him a small smile and nod and went into the hall. The elevator dropped me off in the lobby. I had to pass through another security checkpoint, but it was just there to make sure no one tried to sneak in through the exit. I was paid no mind.

  I climbed into a zipcar, gave it the backup facility's address. My hands began shaking so hard I nearly dropped my link. Verbally, I ordered it to call Mara.

  "Blake?" she answered. Her face loomed as she drew closer to her link's screen. "What happened?"

  "I moved," I said. "Can't talk. Meet me at the backup."

  "Got it." She hung up.

  The zipcar dropped me off a couple blocks from the facility. I headed upstairs, glancing to all sides. I was certain it couldn't be that easy, that they'd have someone waiting to intercept me, but the only footsteps echoing across the lonely concrete were my own.

  Inside, I had the Pod treat my hand and wrist. I wasn't going on the lam after all. There was more work to do. I'd need to be in top shape. Finished, I set the Pod to new coordinates. Familiar ones.

  Mara arrived as the machine finalized the trip. She was breathless, red-faced. "What's happening?"

  "Primetime isn't unique," I said. "The other worlds have time travel. They would, anyway. Except Central systematically exterminates anyone who's going to help develop it."

  "What?"

  "That's what this entire case has been about. Davies has been expanding their operations. Taking them off-world. If we hadn't caught them, they would have been hidden for good."

  I explained the connections, keeping them brief. Mara had a few questions, but her tone and expression told me she believed. By the end, she gazed at nothing, shaking her head, as if I'd told her both her parents had died in a zipcar malfunction.

  "You should have come to me," she said, voice thick with emotion. "Talked it through."

  I flexed my left hand. The Pod's repair job had been quick and dirty. I didn't have much feeling, and m
y palm was stiff, but my fingers worked well enough. It had also modified my bone stiletto to extend and retract without damaging my flesh. It didn't need to look perfectly natural anymore. Security wasn't as advanced where I was heading. I'd had the Pod print out a satchel of supplies, too. I shouldered the bag.

  "What's done is done," I said. "It's time to tie up the loose ends."

  "You're going somewhere else?"

  "The G&A moon base. Central's been running this program for years." I stepped inside the Pod. The hemisphere sealed me in with the smell of warm plastic. "Killing Davies was a start, but if his people get to Joachim before I do, they'll move the whole thing. Leap somewhere else. We may never find them."

  "I see." Her voice came clearly through the speakers. "I'm so sorry."

  "Sorry?" I glanced up at the Pod's empty white ceiling. "For what?"

  "He's right, isn't he? They could wipe us out at any moment. We can't let them have time travel. No matter the cost."

  I went dead still. "What are you doing, Mara?"

  "Saving us." She choked back a sob. "I'm so proud of you, Blake."

  "Mara!"

  The world went white. Numb. I floated between worlds. Time became a single point, infinite and meaningless. I wanted to scream, but I didn't exist.

  Reality snapped back around me. I stood in a lush jungle, steamy and sweltering. Monstrous ferns erupted from the rich earth. Trees soared to colossal heights. Ahead, one of the trees lumbered forward—but it wasn't a tree, it was a neck, thirty feet long and attached to the biggest land-dweller any world has ever seen. The creature stretched its neck and chomped down on a high branch, stripping the leaves. I could hear its teeth grinding from here.

  Behind me, an ear-tearing roar boomed through the jungle, curdling my blood.

  I sank to my knees. She had sent me back further than I knew possible. By millions and millions of years. To lose me in the past. Nothing but the Pods at Central and the Cutting Room could have the power to reach back this far. Even if I concocted some crazy scheme to record what I knew, to try to preserve it for others to find, it would never survive tens of millions of years of caustic volcanoes, shifting continents, and erosive weather.