The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Did we do that?" Vette said, more quiet than I'd ever seen her. "Like, our coming back here, did it change the timeline?"

  "No." Again, I didn't quite believe myself. But there was something else here. I could already sense the dark connections rising from the depths. "But someone else did."

  "That's impossible. I just got out of theory, remember? Once we jumped in here, it became a closed loop for us. It has to play out as it currently stands. If someone else comes back from Primetime to a year before we got here, we won't notice those changes, because they won't actually step into this timestream until after what we're doing now has flowed back to them in the present."

  "I know," I said, although this particular subject was one that always knocked my head sideways. "Someone got here before us."

  "How? We left within thirty minutes of the Pods' alarm."

  "And they got here faster."

  "That makes zero sense." She laughed helplessly. "Why would they come back again? To undo what they just did?"

  I tapped at my tablet. "In a manner of speaking."

  "Well, Haltur's dead. Self-inflicted. Case closed."

  I shook my head. "We have three more days before the Pod snatches us up. Grab your gear."

  Vette was starting to look mad. "Where are we going?"

  "To see the dealer."

  That freshened her expression. "What are you up to?"

  "Finishing your lead."

  I stopped in the faded grandeur of the lobby to get out my pad. Yount was an off-grid ghost. A free radical in an age where everyone else was ensnared in the social net. I didn't even know where he lived. With just three days to track him down before we'd be snapped back to Primetime, I would normally have no chance to find him in the sprawling city.

  Except I'd listened to my gut.

  Last night at the club, the mobicam had injected his shoe with a beacon. The dumbest, simplest, most passive little device I had. On the chance Yount also had access to high-end security sanitation, I hadn't even activated it yet. I did now. My pad showed a grid of the city. A green dot lit up less than half a mile away. The system identified it as an apartment complex.

  Cabs whooshed past, but I wanted a few minutes to think. I started down the damp sidewalk. "Field test. How do we convince a wunderkind-turned-hermit to speak to us?"

  Vette bit her lip. "The Two Classic Means: threats or temptation."

  "Let's start with temptation."

  "I don't know anything about him."

  I gave her the rundown: child prodigy, education sponsored by a major corp, a rising star that suddenly went dark. "So?"

  She shrugged. "Could say we're from WesCo."

  "What if they had a falling out? That's why he went hermit?"

  "He sells drugs. We pose as buyers."

  "Pretty thin," I said. "He'll shrug us off."

  Her glare was as bright as the neon signs. "You've got better?"

  "Nope."

  She smiled, satisfied. A siren yowled, its cry echoing down the city's canyons. As we walked east, the upscale glass and steel structures fled in panic, replaced first by quaint, baroque rises, then apartments too shabby and beige to have any recognizable style whatsoever. Shells to prevent yourself from dying of the cold, that's all. And the dot leading me to Yount was within one.

  People littered the stoops and sidewalks. Few walked; most were just there, staring into the night, curled up under cardboard and three coats, sitting around smoking those sweet-smelling cigarettes, murmuring to each other, eyes glinting from deep hoods. We don't have much of what are known as poor people in Primetime. Seeing them in other worlds is always a nudge to the ribs.

  "Why do they just leave these people lying around?" Vette said, having similar thoughts. "Why would anyone want to come here?"

  "Same reason we do," I said. "Drugs."

  We reached the building indicated by my dot, a grimy walkup. Yount's name wasn't on the buzzers, but my little beacon indicated which apartment was his. I buzzed up.

  Seconds walked past and died. I reached for the buzzer. Before I could press it again, Yount's voice came through the intercom. "Yeah."

  "Looking to buy," I said.

  "This look like a department store?"

  "We're friends of Korry's."

  "Yeah?" Yount said. "What's your name?"

  "It matter?"

  "Know what, it doesn't. I wouldn't sell if you told me you were buddies with Kris Kringle."

  The line went dead. Vette shuffled her feet. I buzzed again, holding the button for three seconds.

  "Get off my doorstep before I take you off it in bags," Yount said.

  "Korry Haltur," I gambled. "He's dead."

  A long pause. "You police?"

  "Independent."

  Another pause. The light on the lock switched to open. I pushed through, Vette on my heels. The cramped foyer smelled like mildew and urine. The stairs creaked beneath me. Sloppy spraypaint fuzzed the walls. Behind me, Vette looked equal amounts compelled and disgusted.

  We reached Yount's floor. He opened the door before I could knock. He was small and smart-eyed and his skin seemed to be drawn too tight over his face, pronouncing his nose and teeth. His apartment smelled like spices and cooking oil. Paper books weighed down every available surface. Besides a shiny stereo and some less-shiny kitchen appliances, there were no identifiable electronics. The blinds were shut. A single bare overhead light interrupted the darkness.

  He stood in the door, blocking the way in. "What happened?"

  "We shouldn't talk out here." I gestured down the hall. "Don't know who's got ears."

  Yount snorted. "Who's gonna bug this termite mound?"

  "Given what happened? Nobody good."

  His face went guarded. He swore and stepped back. I smiled like you would at a funeral. He closed the door behind us. I got out my wand and waved it around the apartment, checking for bugs. It wasn't just for show.

  Yount watched me, sharp eyes trying to place my look, my bearing. "You Fed?"

  "We're not law." I finished my sweep, collapsed my wand, and returned it to my pocket. "Not any you need to worry about."

  "So Korry's dead."

  I fixed my eyes on his. "Overdose."

  He paled. Unless he had glandular implants, that wasn't a thing a man faked easy. "He ODed?"

  "Last night. Right after he saw you."

  Yount shook his head, dazed. He reached out behind him into empty space. "Why are you here?"

  "Korry was in danger. We were looking out for him."

  "Bullshit."

  "You fed him the dose. It was hot. The question is why."

  His face grew very careful. He glanced at Vette, then my hands. "Where does this go?"

  "Depends," I said. "Did you know?"

  "Locked-tight certain? No. Suspicious? Sure."

  "Where do you get your stuff?"

  He gave me a sick little smile. I thought I'd have to work it out of him, maybe physically, but it was like my question opened a valve that had been ready to burst for a long time. He sat on the stained couch and gazed into space.

  "Normally, I cook for myself," he said. "Korry's dose, they prepped it for me."

  "Who?" Vette said.

  "The daisu."

  "The daisu," I repeated, fishing.

  "I should have seen it coming." Yount spoke as if to himself. "My shit's the best in town. Because I cooked up the recipe. Thought I was darknet, too small to notice or care about, but they knew all along. It's blackmail. Link me to a body, then come calling for my recipe. You'll see."

  "If it came from the daisu, why'd you take the shot?"

  He closed his eyes and sighed. "They told me they were testing something new. Wanted to see if my best client could tell the difference—but didn't want to be tied to it themselves just yet. Didn't want to tip off the competition." He shook his head, eyes still closed. "They let me know they were fine letting me run my own shop, but this favor was one of the costs of doing business."


  "When the mob knocks, you answer," I said.

  "I should have known. I was just scared." He gazed at his hands. "Why Korry? Why burn his ticket?"

  "Maybe he owed," Vette said.

  "Wrong. Kid was rich. His card could crack the sidewalk."

  "You want to learn why?" I said. "Then give me a name."

  Yount looked up. His eyes glittered, calculating, then he smiled hard and shook his head. "It's daisu. Nothing you can do."

  "Why don't you let me see for myself."

  "Daisu, man."

  I smiled. "You asked who I am? I'm no one. I'm a ghost. A few days from now, no one here will ever see me again."

  "Yeah, because they'll mulch you and spread you over their soybean fields," Yount muttered. I didn't say anything. He sighed. "Your life, your loss. You want a name? Obo Tanzuki."

  "Why are you telling us this?" Vette blurted. "Won't it come back on you?"

  Yount laughed sourly. "These people stole my original formula. Rushed it to the black market and paid off the judges to criminalize it before I had a chance to perfect it. I'd spent years on it. When they stole it, they stole my life."

  "What is this thing?" I said.

  "Same thing I was selling Korry." He narrowed his eyes at it. "And if you're after Obo, you might want some yourself."

  He went to a dresser and removed a bag of small green pills.

  Vette drifted forward. "What does it do?"

  A brief and brittle smile emerged from Yount's clouded face. "Lets you see the future."

  "That all? I can do that now."

  He cocked his head, still holding out the bag. Vette glanced at me from the corner of her eye. I took the bag and pocketed it. Vette blinked.

  "What now?" Yount said, totally disinterested, like he was stuck in a conversation with an ugly stranger explaining what they'd dreamt about the night before.

  "We talk to Obo," I said. "I don't need drugs to see your future from there. They'll come for you. You need to leave tonight."

  He spread his hands at his dim apartment, the flaking paint and the cancer-shaped water stain on the ceiling. "But how could I ever leave a place like this?"

  I chuckled politely. We left. After the gloom of the apartment, the ads and lights glared from the night. Rain misted down so finely I could hardly feel it on my face, but the streetlights caught each dust-small drop, illuminating them in bright cones.

  "Okay," Vette said. "First off, what?"

  "Specifically?"

  "What's the daisu? A gang?"

  "Organized crime." Shielding my device from the rain, I slid links from my pad to hers. "Legal and illegal wings. Sounds like Obo's part of the latter."

  She frowned at the files, keeping one eye on the sidewalk. "And you want to go after him. Just the two of us."

  "They're up to something weird. I want to find out what."

  "Why kill Haltur, anyway? What's he got to do with anything?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But the OD was a coverup. The first time they killed him was a screwup. Too obviously a murder. They gave him a hotshot to try to throw us off, but the Pods had already caught the original killing."

  A man called at Vette from the steps of a smoke shop. She stared him down until we passed. "And you think Obo knows why. Is he from Primetime?"

  "Doubtful. Orgs like the daisu don't let strangers past the lowest levels. But he's the only lead we've got."

  We left the poor district behind, returned to the faded splendor of the hotel. I yanked everything the net would give me on Obo Tanzuki. He was daisu, but not just on the illegal side: he was a junior executive at Greene & Associates. Such things can be forged, but his degrees backed him up.

  Anyway, his history didn't matter. Fact or forged, it had bought him the present. 82nd-floor office at G&A. A home in the burbs. Three wives (not simultaneously—I'd only been to one world where polygamy was common).

  And security ranging from the high-tech newest (G&A's patrolbots) to the oldest and crudest (three personal bodyguards).

  We were looking at a challenge. We needed him cut off. Isolated enough to be scared enough to confess to the Haltur assassination. Harder yet, to his Primetime links, if he had them. That meant separating him from his guards and rendering him incommunicado to G&A and the daisu, although those two were probably one and the same. We'd be working with limited resources. Plenty of money, but little time and zero contacts.

  It was after midnight. A shade less than three days before the Pods would displace us back to our native time and place. I decided to sleep on it. It might be the last rest I got before time ran out.

  I got up before the sun. First challenge was running Obo down. There was a chance he'd fled the city after passing Yount the spiked drugs. I headed to a coffee shop a couple miles away and made a call to his office through a public pad. I informed reception I was calling on behalf of some bigwig whose name I'd pulled from another firm. The name was big enough to provoke the assistant into informing me that while Mr. Tanzuki was in the building, he would not be available until early that afternoon. I told the guy I'd call back.

  It was just past 7 AM. Pretty early for a gangster to be in the office. On a hunch, I went to a net cafe down the block and called up Obo's house. A servant answered. I used the same name I used at G&A. The lady of the house was out of the country, but if I liked, I could be patched through to Mr. Tanzuki. I thanked him, disconnected, and went back to the hotel.

  Vette was entrenched in her tablet. She swung her feet off the table and rubbed her eyes. "Office is out of the question. It's got more security than most countries. Do we hit him in transit? Or at home?"

  "Home," I said. "Get us a car. I'll take care of the entry."

  Before I headed out, I did some spying. Most of Obo Tanzuki's life was screwed down tighter than a wingnut, but the daisu had neglected certain elements of his security. Like the GPS on his cars. Those were protected by the corporation that provided the service. My Primetime-enhanced software hammered through their walls in minutes. Most of Obo's vehicles were at his house in the hills, but one was parked underneath G&A HQ.

  With that lined up, I headed back to the electronics shop where I'd gotten my cameras. My clerk was there. She had most of what I needed nice and legal. After a bit of dancing—me trying not to be too obvious while she felt out whether I was a cop—she set me up with the not-so-nice-nor-legal stuff at a meet that night.

  Night became midnight; midnight became wee hours. All the while, Obo's car hadn't moved. I had a pretty good idea what that meant and I didn't like it. While Vette snored, I went to the bathroom and took one of the little green pills. As I waited for it to kick in, I trudged through the brisk and quiet streets to another cafe and used their pad to call up Obo.

  I gave the all-night receptionist a new name, just as prestigious. After a moment on hold, he connected me to Obo. I hung up.

  My head telescoped in on the answer. Obo was living at his office. At least while his wife was away. It was probably safer, especially if there was any blowback over Haltur's murder. According to GPS, his car hadn't moved in two days, yet he was in the G&A building. Vette and I were down to two days. With the man's wife out of the country for another week, it was likely we'd never see Obo Tanzuki in the flesh.

  Unless we went to him.

  On my way back to the hotel, headlights flared behind me. I had the urge to swerve further into the sidewalk and hug the buildings. I held course. A car swished through a monstrous curbside puddle. A wave of rainwater drenched me scalp to soles.

  I stopped in shock, but not from the water. A couple of pigeons dislodged from an eave and winged down the street. They're going to bank left, I thought. They did. On the walk back, I forgot about Obo and lived in the present, watching everything that moved—cars, people, nocturnal birds. Most times, I couldn't predict where they'd go, what they'd do. But sometimes it was different. More often with the people than the cars, and most of all with the birds.

  And then my
mind spat out an answer to that, too.

  Back in the room, I shook Vette awake. She didn't look happy about it.

  "We have to get into his office," I said.

  "Oh really?" She pulled the sheets over her face. "Because my religion specifically prohibits suicide."

  "He's living there. Probably because of its security. If so, he's not leaving any time soon."

  "Then we're done. You've seen the specs. The only way we get through the front door is if we buy a tank."

  "So we don't use the front door."

  "Side or service access is no different. It all funnels through security at some point. To get around it, we'd have to fall in from the sky." She opened her eyes. "Oh. So we fall in from the sky."

  I grinned. It was too early in the morning to get to work on logistics, but that made it the perfect time to break into Haltur's apartment. The paramedics had taken nothing but his body and his drugs. His pad was still there. I transferred its contents to mine. Didn't look like I could crack his homebrewed encryption, but the Pods would have much better luck.

  I was getting logy by the time the sunlight failed to fight through the constant clouds. I drank some coffee and thought about finding something stronger. As we drove the rental car across town, first to another electronics shop, then a sporting goods store, I caught my second wind.

  The unknown part of the map would be securing access to one of the few buildings in Brownville significantly taller than the G&A tower. But it turns out there are few wheels you can't grease when you don't care how much it costs. Bribe in place—our cover story was that we were foreign adrenaline junkies looking for the best Brownville could offer—we left our wings with the night manager of the Cotter Tower and returned to our hotel to wait out the day.

  Vette leaned on the windowsill and watched the street. "It's gone by so fast."

  "Always does. But you did good."

  "Doesn't that depend how it ends?"

  "Even so. Most people find this extremely disorienting. Sixty percent of new agents never make a second trip. Ninety percent don't make it to their fifth."

  "Lucky me."

  I paid close attention to my pad. "You don't have to go with me to the tower."