The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  Just as we'd predicted, its new path flowed through what used to be Green Valley Ranch. The patchy green fields of the past had been plowed under by pavements and apartment blocks and waterfront diners, all of which had been leased out, no doubt, by Hockery's organization. The organization that had existed in a previous incarnation of this time and place as Greene & Associates, a wing of a daisu organized crime syndicate. Which was itself puppeteered by non-Primetime time travelers.

  A snarled, far-reaching web. But with any luck, that would make it easier to trace, even in this silenced world.

  We trekked over the ridges, the fields of green grass and black rocks. The air was a neutral non-temperature. Sunlight struggled to paw through layers of gray clouds. I angled toward the river. Not because I expected to find the answers in its new path. But because the city was a corpse. That meant the river might be our only source of food and water until the Pods zapped us home.

  My expectations were quickly proven wrong.

  A campus lay on the foothills, a couple miles of empty grass separating it from the city. From a distance, I'd thought it was a college, but occluded sunlight glinted from something metal around its perimeter. A wire fence. A solid barrier stood right behind the first fence, half covered in ivy, painted with a chameleonic substance that blended its surface to the surrounding ground, grass, and leaves. This substance had failed in parts, mangeing the ten-foot wall with cold gray blotches. Every couple hundred feet, a small round tower poked from the fence.

  "Careful," I pointed. "The city's dead. But its defenses might still be breathing."

  I angled away from the river, meaning to bypass the campus altogether, when I spotted a familiar logo on the bunker-like front gates. I stopped and zoomed in. It wasn't a perfect match to the one I'd seen in the previous version of this point in time, but it was nonetheless impossible to miss: the interlaced "G&A" of Greene & Associates.

  I checked the site against the map I'd compiled from our last visit to this when, a thriving world where our largest concern was saving a programmer named Korry Haltur from a grisly death. "That's new."

  "I smell a detour." Vette got out her pistol. Compared to the heavy, cannon-like revolvers we'd been carrying just a couple hours ago in the 19th century, the weapon looked like a toy. "Think it's haunted?"

  I didn't know if she was speaking metaphorically, but I got out my tablet as we approached the closed gates. I didn't see any lights or hear the buzzing of electrified wires. The tablet confirmed there were no electromagnetic readings of any kind. Considering this facility looked quasi-military, and no doubt had its own internal backup power systems, I took that to mean this world had met its end years and years ago.

  The gate's magnetic lock was useless, but it was still sealed by metal rods, portcullis-style. Like the outer electric fence, it was topped by razor wire. My synthleather jacket was knifeproof (against conventional blades, at least—I doubted it would help against this era's more exotic edged weapons), so I slung it over the wire and helped Vette climb up top. Straddling the jacket, she lent me a hand up.

  Artificial grass paved the space between the outer electric fence and the chameleonic inner fence. I paused to get a read on one of the little towers, which I suspected contained automated guns of some sort, but they showed as unpowered too. As Vette and I helped each other up the ivied walls, the surface shifted color, attempting to blend itself with our dark clothes.

  A host of buildings waited on the other side. Seal-sleek cars decayed in the lot. Several jammed the exit to the gate. One had a body inside. A skeleton rested on the asphalt, one bleached arm outstretched, the other missing completely.

  "You ruled out nukes and poison," Vette said. "What about a virus?"

  My skin tingled. Our immune systems were robust marvels, but they weren't impervious. Especially if a virus had been designed to cause doomsday.

  "Whatever happened was years ago," I said. "Without hosts, most viruses die pretty fast."

  "Really? What about the ones whipping around on airless, frozen asteroids?"

  I approached the front door of a large and windowless white building. "Anyway, there are bodies here. People died fast. Too fast for a virus."

  "Which raises another question—what are we hoping to find? If there were any survivors, I hope they would have taken care of their little skeleton problem."

  "The dead might not be able to talk." I knelt beside the door and eyeballed its locks. "Their machines will."

  I had to jury-rig my tools from my first aid and emergency kits, and after several fruitless minutes struggling with the locks, I was pretty sure we'd have to blast our way inside. As I poked and scraped, the wind moved through the old cars and silent lots, carrying plenty of dust but no sound besides its own moans. Then the first lock gave, and the second followed, and I knew I could take the rest, too.

  The door opened smoothly. The entry was dark and smelled like dirt and ever so faintly of rot. I strapped my pad to my chest and switched it to flashlight mode. I wasn't worried about batteries. It was filled with tiny piezomotors that fed the batteries with every movement. Even with era-appropriate inefficient motors, if the light died, I could revive it by shaking the pad up and down.

  We advanced down dusty tunnels, exploring windowless offices and labs. In addition to the bodies lying every which way, something was very wrong: everything with a microchip was gone. Computers, tablets, phones, watches, even business cards. I came to a stop in a dark lab, gazing over the desks and ceiling-height machinery. Bodies sprawled on the grimy floor, callously left behind to be claimed by time and decay, but the equipment had been meticulously stripped of any part that could store information.

  "They scrubbed the place." Vette's voice echoed off the walls. "Could they have known we were coming?"

  "Could be. Or if this was a war, they might have been hiding sensitive data." I gazed down at the bodies. "But they forgot something."

  I turned in a circle, passing my light over the room. It glinted off something on one of the desks, a large metal paperweight shaped like a whale. I picked up the cool object, knelt beside one of the bodies, and pulled the desiccated scalp and hair away from the skull.

  "What are you doing?" Vette said.

  I replied by bracing my boot on the skull like a croquet ball and then bashing it with the paperweight. The bone was tougher than I expected; the impact made a sharp crack, but left just a hair-thin fracture. I tried again. Two more whacks, and the bone caved in. I set down the weight and fished inside, removing a wetware memory chip, its attached datajack, and a bit of attached skull.

  "Oh my god," Vette said.

  "Hope you don't mind getting your hands dirty." I deposited the hardware in one of my inner pockets. "Seen any hammers around here?"

  She shook her head. "Oh man, the negative karma. I'm going to come back as a snake's colon."

  She complained the whole time, but dove in regardless of her many qualms. We went room to room, examining every corpse for brain chips and smashing their skulls as carefully as skulls can be smashed. There were eighteen different buildings on the campus, as well as several tunnels linking them together, and gaining entrance to and scouring them all took us the better part of two days. We slept as necessary, retiring to a groundskeeper's shed that was blessedly free of bodies. We still hadn't seen any living creatures bigger than birds, squirrels, and a couple feral cats, but I had us sleep in shifts anyway.

  While Vette snoozed, I attempted to tap into the chips, but immediately hit a brick wall. The Pod had fitted my tablet with jacks to match the equipment from the prior incarnation of 22nd century Brownville, but in this version, the plugs no longer fit. Some of the chips were wireless-capable, but interfacing meant rigging up software compatible with their OS. My period-appropriate tablet was capable of writing most of its own code, but I had to put in several hours of troubleshooting before it was even capable of reaching the chips' encryption. Around dawn of our second morning in Apocalypse Brownville, I
set my pad to work on the chips' security, rousted Vette, climbed over the campus walls, and headed for the river.

  We'd been rationing food and would be good for another couple days, but our water was down to the last swigs. Trees paneled the rocky banks. We made our way to the shore, rocks scraping and groaning beneath our feet. Vette drank what was left in her bottle, dipped it in the gray water, then brought it to her mouth.

  "Don't," I said.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, was this your water?"

  "It's a bad idea."

  "To drink water? I'm thirsty."

  "For dysentery?"

  She frowned. "What's that?"

  "One of the many things that lives in untreated water. Why do you think the only things we drank back in the 19th century were coffee, tea, and beer?"

  "Because we could? Wait, how do you treat water? Do you have something in your kit?"

  I shook my head. "We'll have to boil it. That's why I brought this tub from the lab. Now help me gather wood. Dry stuff burns best."

  "You don't say." She rolled her eyes and stood up from the bank. "I'm not that much of a city girl."

  "It's not the city that leaves us clueless," I said. "It's Primetime."

  There was plenty of good wood lying around the grassy banks, which was more proof this place was uninhabited, but as the harsh-smelling smoke wound up through the canopy, I kept a careful eye on the strip of forest lining the river, ears sharp for the snap of twigs, the shuffle of leaves. After ten minutes, I donned gloves and muscled the tub off the platform we'd rigged up over the fire. Steam flourished as it cooled.

  Vette poked at the smoldering logs with a long, narrow branch. "What do you think happened here?"

  "Don't know."

  "Don't you care?"

  "Should I?"

  She laughed in disbelief. "Brownville's gone! Maybe the whole world ended!"

  I glanced at the still-steaming tub. "All that matters to us is Hockery's group. G&A. It appears they went back to Old Brownville to get the money to fund this place. The answers to the next question—what's this place for?—are probably in the memory chips. If we find out what's on them while we're here, Mara can act the instant we get back to Primetime."

  "And decoding them is a one-person job. Why don't I check out the city while you crack away at the chips? Looks like everyone's dead to me."

  I blinked at her. "Because even if everyone's gone, and so is whatever killed them, that means the city's a wilderness. We explore it together or not at all."

  She rolled her eyes, but the issue was settled. I filled our bottles, two gallon-sized jugs, and a big waterproof sack I'd scavenged from the campus. I set the sack beside the trees, grabbed a few oranges from a tree beside the river, and headed back to the facility.

  In the time we'd been out, my pad had cracked the encryption on a couple of the chips. While it worked away at the rest, we set Vette's to analyzing the contents of the decoded files. Initial results were disappointing: reports on employment numbers, discussion of a more robust paternity leave, tens of thousands of pages on the world's competing hardware companies. Nothing deeply proprietary or revelatory. I had the sinking suspicion anything along those lines would be secured inside the chips that lacked wireless interface.

  Those would have to wait until our return to Primetime. The only alternative would be heading into the city for parts, and even if we could find the right equipment to jack in to the chips, and it wasn't too corroded by the sea air to be useful, I'd have to patch the parts into my own tablet's power supply. That was beyond me. If I made a go at that, all I'd wind up with was one more piece of busted electronics.

  With both tablets in use, Vette didn't have the light to explore the tunnels or the windowless main building, but she was still able to poke around many of the other shacks, warehouses, labs, and dorms. She said she was looking for food and any bodies we may have missed, but I thought she was looking for clues about the past. I wasn't surprised when she brought none back. This world's breaking news had been stored electronically. Records of its most recent history had died with its networks.

  She did rustle up a few packages of freeze dried noodles, which we boiled and seasoned with their single-serving spice packets. After finishing the noodles, I licked the empty packet. The oranges from the river were sweet and pure, but far from filling. Not that the noodles were much better. My stomach grumbled an hour later.

  As I worked with the pads, I found myself straining my ears. It took me a couple days before I understood what I was listening for: anything at all. Gunshots. Car engines. The drone of a plane. These things never came.

  I worked my way through every chip with wireless access, but it was all day-to-day business material—human resources decisions, plans for an overseas acquisition, logistics of office supplies. If I'd had a network to tap into, I could have cross-referenced names against backgrounds to try to tease out the deeper meaning of this facility, but that door was closed to me.

  Yet I was placid about our apparent lack of leads. Back in Primetime, the Pods would take mere minutes to spit out the proper equipment to reach the non-wireless chips. They'd tear through the encryption like tissue paper and root out G&A's deepest secrets before I had time to blink. Even if the info on the chips turned up incomplete, we could return to a point before Brownville and its world went apocalyptic and find the answers there.

  When I finished with the chips, we still had a full day before the Pods were due to return us to Primetime. To humor Vette, and because I'd built up a little curiosity myself, I agreed to go into the city and see what there was to see.

  A couple miles of open land separated the campus from Brownville. Wind ruffled the grass. The outskirts waited under a pointless sky. We followed the road, taking everything vital with us in case we got delayed and couldn't return to campus: water, oranges, weapons, tablets, memory chips.

  There was little to see. Cars clogged the outgoing roads. A few held bodies. Other dead rested here and there on sidewalks, across doorways, in parks. Dirt and grime blinded the windows. Pigeons shuffled on eaves. There were no obvious wounds to the bodies, which had mostly been reduced to bones and hair. Could have been a virus, chemicals, nanobots. The city's one newspaper held no clear clues. No bold headlines about impending war or asteroids. It was all gone, as simply and as cleanly as that.

  We headed back to the campus, pursued by the fall of night. A strong wind surged from the north and I had to lock our shed's door to keep it from flying open. The angry gale blew itself out by sunrise. We ate more oranges, which I was growing mightily sick of—I'd started nibbling the peels just to get a different flavor. After gathering up everything we'd brought in with us—a useless gesture, considering there appeared to be no human timeline left to ruin, but habits die hard—we sat in the grass and waited for the Pods.

  The moment came and went. We stayed.

  Vette gazed up at the gray clouds. "Is it late?"

  "Yeah."

  "Are they ever late?"

  "No."

  "So," she said slowly, "this is the point where you explain what it means that the thing that's never late is late."

  "It means we wait," I said. "And tomorrow we get more clean water."

  "Tomorrow? How long do you think it's going to be?"

  "I don't know, Vette."

  "Jesus. I'm just asking."

  I knew that, and I was sorry, but I knew something else, too. The Pods would never come. I waited another 24 hours, just to be sure, just to let the reality soak into my brain. The following afternoon, as we sat in the woods around the boiling pot, thick white smoke in the air, dirt under our fingernails, I leveled with her.

  She gave me a blank look. "I don't understand."

  "They're not coming. Not ever."

  "I don't get it."

  "The Pods never miss their time," I said. "Not by a second. Not by a second of a second. If they're not here, then something went wrong."

  "In Primetime? Can't they just reset th
e Pod? Send it here tomorrow instead?"

  I gazed at the dirt. "When we came here, we interrupted the past. Primetime is what—six hundred years ahead of this place? Seven hundred? Those seven hundred years of interrupted future have to play out before Primetime can touch it again."

  "But that makes no sense," Vette said. "They're all separate worlds. Separate timelines."

  "And they all exist on the same grand continuum. I told you before, when you go back, you create a closed loop. Until this timeline catches up, reaches the same point in the continuum as when we last left Primetime, it's closed off to Mara and anyone she's going to send back for us."

  "My brain's about to pour out my nose. So they're going to come for us—"

  "Probably."

  "—but not until this present has caught up to their future. What does that mean for us?"

  "We go back to the drop point," I said. "Leave something telling them we're here at the campus so that when they travel to this time they can be sure to find us."

  Vette rubbed her fist across her forehead. "Which will happen, but hasn't happened yet, because we have to live it out first before they come make changes to it."

  "Right. So we'll stay at the campus for a month."

  "What then?"

  "We have a choice to make." Maybe it would have been kinder to spare her this. To never raise the question at all. But she deserved to make it for herself, and I wanted her to have the time to make it right. "Either we live out these lives, or we kill ourselves."

  She gaped. "What?"

  "We don't have to stay here forever. Just a month. That will give them a wide enough window to find us. After that, there may not be a point."

  "But how can we just kill ourselves?"

  "Because it might be better than going on." I gestured vaguely toward the dead city, then stood, brushed the grass from my pants, and gazed at the silent, swirling sky. "You don't have to decide now. But I want you to think about it."