The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

But she found the strength to speak. She took my hand in hers. It trembled. "I'm so glad we got lost here."

  She held my hand. She smiled. One last breath, a sleep-like, fading gasp, the sound of a body letting go of the world.

  After all we'd made it through, I almost killed myself then, first with my pistol—I couldn't pull the trigger—and then through apathy. Toward the fields. My health. My very hunger. My stomach didn't care if nothing was inside it, so I didn't care to feed it.

  After a few weeks, my appetite came back. It was months after that before my appetite for life began to hesitantly reappear, but in time my gloom burned away as surely as the June fogs. The balance of my sadness swung and I walked through the grassy hills with tears in my eyes, so grateful that we'd had so long together, that we had quite literally shared a world of our own.

  It was a miracle, wasn't it? How strange it was that coincidence and causality had brought us together. Allowed us such a long and happy life. One that was caused by the death of billions, the end of this world's humans, but that wasn't our fault. We'd had to work with what we'd been given.

  I was several years older than Vette. My knees weren't good and neither was my back. I think that's what killed me. I was down at the creek, fly fishing, and I must have slipped, because I can remember shouting out, and how cold the mountain-fed water felt on my chest, and how scared I was.

  But then it goes dark. My next memory is white numbness. The touch of the Pods. Opening my eyes to Primetime.

  My hands were smooth. Years ago, I'd lost the tip of my left ring finger chopping wood, but it was whole again. I remembered. We hadn't been stranded after all. The Pods had shown up just two weeks late, yanking us away from our shack on the G&A campus, bringing us here.

  For a moment, both sets of memories coexisted in my head. My long togetherness with Vette, our lives ending in natural deaths. Or our swift rescue by the Pods. Both outcomes had been real, but the latter outcome was becoming more real; Mara had changed our pasts, and our previous life was washing away like a castle made of sand.

  But you don't have to lose it. Memory is its own dimension, distinct from space and time. Your past may change, but your memory of that past has the power to persist, particularly when you've got the Pods to help you hang on to it. It's a choice. There in the white safety of the Pod's walls, I could feel my new history bulging in my brain, an expanding bubble that threatened to force my old memories out of my head.

  I chose to remember.

  The Pod opened. The light was so bright. Mara was there, her face as grave as the world I'd just left.

  She touched my shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

  I was still pretty confused. "What happened?"

  "Something went wrong with the Pods."

  "No shit."

  "We're still looking into it. Look, for us, this was just a few minutes ago."

  "I remember how it works." I followed her down the hall. At first I shuffled beside her, back bent with remembered pain, but then I straightened up a little and it was fine, so I arched my back and it was fine too, and I remembered how good it felt to be young. "Where's Vette?"

  "She's with Lummings," Mara said.

  Took me a minute to dredge up the name. The CR chronopsychologist. "Am I next?"

  "If you want to be."

  I nodded, then remembered something else. I fished inside my faux-leather jacket for the non-wireless memory chips. In one timeline, I'd bashed them out of their owners' skulls almost forty years ago. In another timeline, my new one, I'd extracted them less than a month ago, and there were still little bits of hair and bone clinging to the jacks.

  "Here," I said, handing her the bag of memories. "We took these from G&A's people. I never had the know-how to plug them into my own machine."

  Mara weighed the bag in her palm. "Are you okay?"

  "G&A was behind it. I'm hoping the proof is in one of those chips."

  "Why would they go back in time to lay the foundation for an empire, then destroy the whole thing a couple centuries later?"

  "Maybe they accomplished what they came for. Or maybe they recognized we were with the Cutting Room in Old Brownville and engineered an apocalypse to cover their tracks."

  Mara nodded, troubled. "Things have been moving fast here, too. Davies wants to speak to you."

  "At Central? When?"

  "As soon as you're ready. This is getting serious, Blake."

  I gave her a sideways eye. "You don't say."

  She looked sufficiently awkward, then got back to business. "We'll start cracking these chips. Should I let Davies know you're on your way?"

  "Yeah." A memory worked its way through the confused sludge of my head. "Even if G&A wiped out the planet, the people running it wouldn't have killed themselves. They must have hatched out of the timeline. If you send someone back before the apocalypse and watch who jumps out—maybe go back to the Old West first, ID Silas Hockery and match him to whatever name he's using at G&A—that should help you track them offworld."

  "You've put some thought into this." Mara laughed dryly. "Guess you had plenty of time, huh?"

  I laughed through my nose. After what I'd been through, if anyone else had said that, I might have punched them.

  I headed for the elevator—some technology is perfect from the moment it's conceived—and took it down to the first basement, which was just as bright and airy as everything else at the facility. Several zipcars hung suspended from the line built into the back wall. I climbed into the pod-like car. Buckles hugged me around the thighs, hips, and chest. I spoke my destination and the zipcar accelerated silently down the system of gridded tubes built into the floor of the city, the capsule swinging up and down to avoid other cars. I laughed out loud. After so many years with nothing but bicycles, carts, and my own two feet, it felt like magic.

  Central was halfway across the city, but my ride didn't last long. The zipcar decelerated and emerged from the pristine tunnel into Central's equally pristine basement. It swerved off the mainline and popped its hatch.

  The only entrance into the building led straight to security, a short, hollow tube. I stepped inside. The door sealed behind me, popping my ears. A team of machines dislodged from the wall to confirm my genetic identity and that I was carrying nothing dangerous or capable of taking recordings of any kind, meaning they had to disable the cameras in my retinas. This was quick and painless, however, and I was quickly allowed to the elevators, which lifted me 120-odd stories to Davies' level.

  Up top, I paused for a view of the city I hadn't seen in decades. It was a gorgeous if somewhat pretentious fusion of tech and nature. Towers challenged the sky, some as thin as needles, others as broad as hills. The largest structures were hills, their green slopes carefully sculpted to accommodate thousands of households, as well as the multitude of shops, which weren't shops in the profit-driven sense typical to most eras, but were instead more akin to hobbies for those who ran them, and who accumulated status based on the overall social appreciation of their patrons.

  Few of us had real jobs. The ones who did tended to view them as callings, which is how you wound up with men like Kellendor Davies running the world.

  I knew him by face and name, but I'd never spoken to him directly, and he'd only spoken to me while addressing my graduating class at the Academy. As his assistant guided me to his office, I saw he'd since allowed his hair to gray and recede from the temples, leaving him with a stark widow's peak the color of beaten iron.

  With a flick of his eyes, he directed me to a seat. "Agent."

  "Sir," I said.

  "Won't waste time." He had a clipped, abbreviated style of speech that was much-imitated around CR whenever Central imposed on our business. "First. Your work is outstanding. Worried about protocol, but times are tough."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Second. And I want you to hear this from me. You're done with the case."

  "Commander Davies—"

  He lifted one finger from his wooden desk. "
Save it. Mara Riesling says you just spent forty years on mission."

  "I'm here," I shrugged. "I'm fine."

  He gazed at me. The copper flecks in his brown eyes suggested Curtish heritage, or at least the desire to project it. "You don't care to save face. That's fine. I'll be straight: this has moved beyond you. The Cutting Room is here to protect other worlds. But these events pose a threat to Primetime."

  Meaning it had come under jurisdiction of Central. Arguing with Davies would be like arguing with a boulder, but I had to try. "We don't know the group in question is from outside."

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands, gentling the sternness of his expression. "This isn't about you. You? You're capable. I don't give a shit how long you were locked out of the world. If this were a Cutting Room issue, I'd send you back out right now."

  "But you don't take chances with Primetime."

  "Sharp like a knife." He smiled for the first time since I'd walked into his spartan office. "Take a break if you want one. I'll keep you in the loop. You've earned that much."

  "Yes, sir. Is there anything else?"

  "One more thing." He extended his hand. We shook. He nodded. "Thank you for your service."

  I took the tube back to my apartment building, which was large enough to have its own stop. My room smelled funny, the same way someone else's house smells distinctly like them. I sat by the window and watched the city move. After the silence and stillness of Brownville, the crowded plazas and pedestrian bustle felt unreal. I opened the window to hear them laugh and shout to one another.

  I called Vette, but she didn't answer. Probably still with the doctors. I lay in bed to watch the ceiling. I didn't feel tired, but I wound up sleeping for two days.

  I was awaked by the insistent warble of my link. It was Mara, voice-only.

  "Hey," she said. "You remember where we watched the meteor shower a few years back?"

  "The park over on—?"

  "Yeah. Can you come meet me there?"

  I rubbed my eyes. "Now?"

  "Unless you're busy," she said dryly, as if she could see the lines the sheets had left in my skin after two days asleep.

  "I'll be there."

  I rinsed off and got dressed and took the tubes to the north side of the city. I got off at one of the larger parks, a grassy plateau of paths, playing fields, and friendly little restaurants. A trio of hills climbed from one end of the preserve. I hiked up the tallest, which was cool and densely wooded. All of the trees were harvested from other worlds—none native to Primetime, although with most of them, you'd have to be a botanist to know the difference. I didn't know why the park's designer had assembled them here, or if it had even been legal, let alone ethical, but many of us who swam in the timestream felt an affinity for it: our own friends might not understand us, but if anyone could, it would be these alien trees.

  Mara waited for me at the top, shaded by the long, bladed leaves of a tall tree. Its bark was a pastel rainbow.

  "You were right," she said. "The apocalypse was a coverup."

  "I thought we were off the case."

  She smiled. "I didn't get those orders until after I'd inserted our agents."

  I chuckled. "To pin down the trespassers? Did you see where they jumped out to?"

  "Yes and no. From what we saw, no one associated with G&A evacuated the timeline prior to the apocalypse."

  "Then you missed something. No way they let themselves die."

  She shook her head. "It didn't make sense to me, either. Until we tapped into the memory chips you brought back."

  My heart thudded. "And?"

  "There were blueprints. For a facility. One the Pods think was established as a base of operations for time travel."

  "Is that what all this was about?" My head went light. "Another world finally develops time travel. A group of gangsters gains access to it, goes back in time to make a fortune on land and water rights, then leverages that in the future to consolidate their new empire. Only they caught wind of us. Tried to throw us off the trail by faking their death."

  Mara blinked. "That could be."

  "So have the Pods tracked their new facility?"

  "They didn't have to. It isn't on another world—it's on the dark side of their moon."

  My eyebrows shot up. "What? How the fuck do we get into that?"

  "It's all set up," Mara said. "I know you've been through a lot, Blake. But I wanted to offer you first shot at it. You, and the person who's been with you all the way."

  For a moment, I thought she meant she was about to return to fieldwork. Then another figure stepped from the thicket of trees.

  "Vette." I grinned, stepped toward her. "Strange trip, wasn't it?"

  She didn't say anything, but she didn't have to. I had known those eyes a lifetime. I could read them like a sailor reads the wind.

  She had chosen to forget.

  "It's going to be dangerous," Mara said. "Not just physically. If Davies catches word of this, he'll axe us all. No one will blame you if you don't want to go."

  "It's fine." I forced a smile. A cold wind cut across my heart. "What have I got to lose?"

  V

  Here in the jungle, my mistakes are as obvious as the steam dripping from the ferns and the monsters howling from the wilds. But this clarity comes only with the benefit of time. It's a trick, and the dirtiest one there is. Time isn't to our benefit. It isn't our friend. It only offers its understanding after the fact. When the moment is long lost. When it's far too late to do us any actual good.

  At least I got to see some wonders along the way.

  Rewind the tape. The jungle hadn't happened yet. Instead, I stood on a hill forested by trees alien to my world, Primetime, and listened to Mara explain the broad strokes of our next step.

  "Why the subterfuge?" I said once she was done. "Greene & Associates aren't Primetime. That means we can do whatever we want to them. Considering they're capable of altering our past, we should wipe them out right now."

  Mara snorted. "If the idea is to convince Davies to shut down the entire Cutting Room, then yes, that's a wonderful plan."

  "We could at least snatch up one of their leaders. Interrogate him."

  "That's a less terrible idea. Unless the subject kills himself. Or he doesn't know enough. Afterwards, do we keep him here? Try to wipe his brain and send him back? The more obvious our move, the more likely G&A is to do something we won't like."

  I tried to think through the implications and quickly gave up. "Almost makes you think we're better off letting Central take over."

  Mara tipped her head to the side. "Almost. Except they're still scrambling to catch up. And my contact says they're planning to dig back further, wipe it out at the source. Good plan. But."

  "What if G&A alters Primetime first."

  "Or Central misses something. Or messes up, prompting G&A to come for us." She gritted her teeth and gazed through the blue leaves of a tree that stood alone in the small clearing. "Davies pulled us too early. We've never had to worry about another world being able to reach Primetime. This is new to everyone. Am I willing to risk our careers for this? Absolutely. But we're risking them the right way. Smart. Quiet. Simple."

  I didn't see what was so simple about snatching up two workers from a secret moon base, replacing them with Vette and myself, and spying on the G&A leadership, but I supposed there was a serpentine sneakiness to it. Maybe it would make more sense once we got underway.

  The three of us walked down the hill to a tube stop at the corner of the park. Vette glanced my way now and then, but if she were tempted to talk, to explain why she'd chosen to forget the lifetime we'd just spent together, she kept it to herself. A part of me was glad. This mission was like a hand on a wound, stanching the blood. If that hand were tugged away by talk, it could all come pouring out.

  But perhaps I felt intact for other reasons. I had had years and years in that dead world to come to terms with her death. I'd already said goodbye to her a long time ago
.

  Down in the tunnel, we linked two of the two-person zipcars. Mara spoke an address I didn't recognize. The cars sped along beneath the city, rushing past others coming and going. We came to a stop a few minutes later and I followed Mara aboveground.

  I emerged into what could have been a completely different city. Most of our streets—which aren't used for vehicular traffic, but as plazas, public spaces—are paved with slate or granite or fieldstone. Surrounded by grass or trees or desert gardens of boulders and succulents.

  Here, both the buildings and the spaces were plain to the point of unfinished. The lack of pedestrians only furthered this impression. Mara strode a few blocks to a windowless concrete cube. The lock blinked, waiting for her voice and DNA. She provided both and the door allowed us inside.

  To what looked like a prototype of our main facility. Large main hall flanked with a gym, bunks, archive, modular open spaces that could be converted into training and simulation. And at the back of the hall, the colossal round double doors that would lead to the Pods.

  "Is this place what I think it is?" I said.

  "You better recognize it," Mara said. "Otherwise I might have to send someone else."

  "Why is there a second facility?"

  "For situations like this one."

  I followed her across the open space to the double doors. "Don't tell me Central doesn't know about this place."

  "I'm hoping they've forgotten. It hasn't been used in our lifetime." She stopped at the doors and faced the small black button the Pods watched through. The doors opened, a little stiffly. There was no carpet or decor to swallow the echo of our feet.

  "And don't tell me we're leaving already. I hardly know what's going on."

  "You'll need a couple days to prep." Mara narrowed her eyes in sympathy. "And to heal."

  The Pods dominated the room, a cluster of hemispheres of varying size. Mara took Vette to one of the smaller half-domes, which opened without being ordered. A plain white mattress sat on the floor, seamless.

  Vette stepped out of her clothes and gave me a little wave. "See you in a while. Sort of."

  Mara touched her shoulder. "Don't worry. You'll be startled at first, but it's wholly reversible."