The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  I cocked my head. "Are you asking—?"

  "You've proven you can handle the front. Shouldn't be more than an hour a day. What do you say?"

  Pride surged in my heart. "Absolutely."

  Like that, I was promoted. Each morning, Lee helped Joachim don his suit, then ran his personal office while he strolled across the ashy surface. Meanwhile, I handled the front desk, deflecting attention-seekers, gatekeeping the few I found worthy in to see Lee. With the front to myself, I tested my pad's cracking software on the office tablet, taking mental notes and then honing the code in my bunk after lights out.

  It was a laborious, painstaking process. I couldn't risk pushing the office tablet hard enough to trip any alarms. I had limited time to troubleshoot, too; Joachim's walks never took more than an hour. But I worked bit by bit, sending my virtual probes deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of G&A's encryption.

  While I waited to break through, I laid the groundwork that would allow me to access Joachim's office and thus his tablet, which he left recharging on his desk each evening. His office was secured with two locks: a numberpad, and a DNA scanner keyed to himself and Lee. When I had the front to myself, I collected stray hairs from the floor. When Joachim or Lee went into the back room, I watched them tap away at the numberpad and recorded their strokes on my eye cameras.

  Before and after hours, Joachim called Lee into his office, leaving me to open and close the day's operations. The subjects they discussed were rarely compelling enough to distract me from my twiddling with the pads—except once. And I might have missed it if I hadn't bumped one of the plastic envelopes received that day to the floor.

  I bent down to pick it up. As I did so, I heard Joachim speak a very distinct word: "Haltur." Then: "Talk about a fiasco."

  I strained my ears. Lee made a noncommital noise. "I believe those were what you'd call growing pains. I understand they've made significant upgrades to their process."

  "I should fucking hope so," Joachim laughed ruefully. "The first 'process' was a straight-up murder!"

  Footsteps. I glanced down at my tablet. Lee popped her head through the doorway, gave me a look, and closed the office door.

  To allay suspicion, I usually went a few days between approaching Vette in the cafeteria, where conversations were rare enough that each murmur of voices was a distinct note within the monotonous symphony of plastic cutlery. This night, I found her at once and explained what I'd heard during Joachim and Lee's morning meeting.

  "I don't get it," she said, glancing side to side. "They're killing people in other worlds? Why?"

  I spooned thin, salty gravy over my cornmash. "Maybe they're grooming another world to relocate to. They don't have enough power to go back and fix their own past, but they can move in on another timeline easily enough."

  "But they've already proven they can alter their own past. That's how they were able to buy Brownville. Then blow it up and move here instead."

  I frowned in thought. "To throw us off the trail, then. Leave their world dead and relocate to one we're not watching."

  "Nice theory," Vette said. "Now don't you think it's about time to find some facts to back it up?"

  "I'm working on it."

  "Seems more like you're working on another promotion."

  "I'm a delivery boy," I said. "For an hour a day, I'm upgraded to receptionist. Why would I care about that?"

  "For the same reason I suddenly care about growing red, ripe tomatoes," Vette said. "Because you're drugged."

  "I'm feeling better. My body's fighting it off."

  "Or your brain's just getting used to it." She prodded a cube of orange soy. "How soon until you're ready to take the next step?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, don't count on me to make the breakthrough. I don't even know why I wound up in agriculture. There's nothing to see down there."

  "Because our options were very limited." I was starting to get annoyed with her. This was my mission. I knew what I was doing. "Know what? I'm ready. I'll go tonight."

  I expected that to annoy her back—in our past life together, I'd learned how to push every one of her buttons—but she just smiled. "Let me know how it goes."

  I had blurted it out, but I felt confident I could do it. I had been refining my software for days. It could easily worm itself into the office tablet's vitals. Unless Joachim's managerial network operated on a completed different architecture, it shouldn't be any problem.

  Yet for some reason, I'd hesitated in making the attack. I'd told myself I wanted everything to be perfect before I risked making a move, but I think it went deeper than that. It was as if I'd been afraid of losing my made-up job.

  The very act of having this thought cleared my head of a fog I hadn't know was there. I readied myself for bed, waited for the lights to go out, for the men around me to start snoring. I kept myself awake making last-second tweaks to my code. Adding more flexibility. Given that the rest of humanity was dead, I doubted Joachim's security would be particularly more robust than Lee's, but I didn't want to risk this midnight trip a second time.

  I waited until 1 AM, then dropped out of bed, dressed, and entered the humming hallways. The facility's guards made sure we ate each meal, but apparently management believed our chemical supplements were all the security they needed. And they may well have been right. Until Vette had recentered my thinking, I'd been plodding down the same old rut, placidly assuming it would lead me to the skies.

  Footsteps shuffled hollowly. I knifed down one of the alley-tunnels. A green-uniformed guard wandered past. I continued forward, padding along in my socks. My tablet was tucked into my waistband along with a baggie of loose hairs. At reception, I punched in the code and fed Lee's hair into the DNA scanner. The lock turned green. The office was lit only by the faint glow of electronics. I walked to the door in the back. This time, I entered Joachim's codes and hair.

  The light went green.

  I locked the door behind me and sat at my boss' desk. My menagerie of code-monsters cut straight through Joachim's security. But I quickly discovered his system was structured akin to the facility itself: progressive layers, each more difficult to access than the last. So far, all I could access was the same constellation of files I could have grabbed from Lee's network. By my read, three more layers awaited beneath that.

  My hands flew over my tablet, rearranging my artificial creations and flinging them into the maze on Joachim's. Within minutes, I wormed into the second layer, then sent my code against the third while I paused to run a quick snoop-and-snatch through the new files I'd just revealed. That accomplished, I returned my attention to the assault and discovered my troops had died a noisy virtual death.

  My heart thumped. I saw no sign of alarms from Joachim's tablet, however, so I could at least credit myself for writing sneaky failures. A quick look at the logs revealed the third-level security was very aggressive toward aggression, but hadn't deployed attacks against my more passive programs until they too had sprung from the shadows. I revised my code, converting eager soldiers into the binary equivalent of birdwatchers, bumblers, and nappers. Things that could back right through the maze, too innocuous to draw wary eyes. After a couple experiments, I gathered my new troops for a fresh wave.

  The door to the outer office clicked open, then clanked shut.

  Heart thundering, I shut down Joachim's tablet and stuffed mine into my waistband. A light flicked on from the other room and wedged beneath the door to Joachim's office. It provided just enough visibility to see that I was totally screwed.

  The office was spare to the point of austerity. Even the desk was spindly-legged, with glass sides and drawers. Nowhere to hide. I glanced at the airlock, but its inner doors were shut. Opening them would invoke an angry thrum of motors. No way to conceal that from whoever was in reception. I froze, willing the intruder to go away, but their steps carried toward the door to Joachim's. The keypad beeped.

  I spun in a circle. The panel beside the desk was pain
ted to mimic a landscape, but I had seen Lee use it before. I opened it. A weak smell of garbage wafted from the chute. I climbed on the desk, inserted myself into the chute, and let go.

  My shoulders bumped against the tight walls as I fell. The chute felt impossibly close; if it narrowed, it would crush me. Fetid wind blew past my nose. Just as I began to fear I'd be smashed to pulp by the landing, the chute angled. I slid down the slope, rustling plastic paper stuck in the seams of the walls. My palms skidded through slimy patches. The slope leveled further. I braked my socked feet against the tight metal walls; in the moon's low gravity, I slowed quickly. It was perfectly dark, but I could hear the draft of an open space ahead. I pushed out hard with all my limbs and scraped to a stop.

  One foot dangled down into empty air. Through blind groping, I discovered I was at the joint of several garbage chutes. I wormed my way around the hole, felt around until my hand encountered another upward-sloping tube, and wriggled inside. I peeled off my socks. The space was so tight and the gravity so low that I could climb upward using nothing more than the friction of my skin.

  A half foot at a time, I pushed myself up the black tube. When I reached a vertical rise, the pad slipped from my waist. I wedged my body against the wall, trapping it, then awkwardly transferred the tablet to my front. Climbing higher, my hand scraped the end of the chute. A panel gave under my hand. I pulled myself out into a dark office.

  I hurried into its reception area, then eased open the door into the halls. The lights were dimmed, the tunnel empty. I walked swiftly down it until I got my bearings. I headed straight for my bunk's bathroom and rubbed myself down with dry soap to remove most of the worst smells and stains. I had banked enough water for a shower, but for the moment it would be too noisy.

  Quiet as a shadow, I hauled myself up to my bunk, slid my tablet under my pillow, and lay still. I was half asleep when the door opened, fanning light inside from the hallway. Whoever was there watched us for a couple minutes before closing the door and walking away.

  In the morning, I showered and inspected myself for damage, but showed just a small scrape on my left elbow. As soon as I stepped into Joachim's reception, Lee beckoned me over.

  "Seen anything funny lately?" she said.

  "Like what?"

  "Someone hanging around. Unauthorized attempts to access our network. Anything."

  I pretended to think. "Not that I recall. Why?"

  She sighed in annoyance. "We think someone tried to break in last night."

  "What? What happened?"

  "Someone entered the office without access. They were gone before security arrived."

  "Who was it? One of Mr. Joachim's rivals?"

  "We don't know." She glanced at Joachim's office. "But it won't happen again."

  She handed me the day's messages and I headed into the tunnels. I was relieved to hear I'd made a clean escape, but Lee's last words sounded ominous. When I got back, a man in a gray uniform was installing an old school key-operated lock on Joachim's door.

  "We'll need your tablet tonight," Lee told me. "Security upgrades."

  "Sure thing." I snatched a waiting envelope off her desk and practically ran down the tunnels. At the offices of its recipient, I informed the assistant I would need to hand it to Mrs. Ulner myself. Refusing to take no for an answer, I used the wait to repeatedly overwrite all the files I'd stolen from Joachim's pad, then deleted them along with hundreds of dummy files I'd ginned up to help lose the originals in the morass.

  As Lee closed up the office, I handed over my tablet. For the last week, I'd kept at bay the hollowed-out, subservient ennui brought on by our drugged food, but as I trudged to the cafeteria, it surged over me like floodwaters. I sought out Vette, sat down, and stared at my plate.

  She laughed. "You look like your master just scheduled you to be neutered."

  "More or less," I said. "Lost all my files. Don't think I can get back in. I'm completely shut out."

  "Sounds like you should kill Lee."

  "What?"

  "You're her backup, right? If she dies, you take her place."

  I squeezed my temples. "This isn't a conversation."

  Vette shrugged. "What's the big deal? This is essentially a feudal empire, isn't it? Assassination for personal gain is all part of the game."

  "Hacking into a computer is one thing," I said, keeping my voice low. "Hacking into a person is quite another."

  "Well, you've got to do something to earn Joachim's trust. It's been three weeks. Clock's ticking."

  "I don't have enough time. I can't work my way up the food chain in a week." I chewed a spoonful of starch, but I couldn't get myself to swallow. "I should just walk outside and die."

  "You don't have to kill her," Vette said. "You could just disable her. Take her out of action for a week while you swoop in as the savior."

  I set down my spoon with a plastic click. The idea came to me wrapped up like a present: first, it was a welcome surprise, and second, I didn't know what the idea was yet, just that I had it. I sat there at the table, trying not to think too hard, allowing my semi-conscious mind to unwrap it without damaging whatever was inside.

  "I've got it."

  Vette looked up from her plate. "Yeah? Gonna break her kneecap? Shove her down the stairs?"

  "I'm not going to cripple her body," I said. "Just her reputation."

  She gave me a crooked look. "I like where this is going."

  It took me a few days to set up. I had to watch him on his walks. Get the timing down. It turned out I needed Vette's help, too; confined to the underlayers, she'd made a few contacts there, including in the division known as Extra-Site Maintenance and Utilities. She procured schematics for the suits. I built a simple simulator and honed my timing. When Joachim's suit was sent to the lower levels to be serviced and refilled, the oxygen tanks were given special attention.

  I don't know how Vette accomplished that last part. Given the dark turn her thinking had taken, I didn't want to ask.

  By the time I was ready, we had just six days until the Pods were scheduled to displace us. Even if this cuckoo plan worked, I still had several barriers between me and the information I sought. I was going to need every minute I could get my hands on.

  That morning, I entered the office with a question about the new security on the tablet at the front desk. It so happened that Lee was helping Joachim climb into the silvery suit that would keep him safe from the vacuum outside.

  Lee glanced over her shoulder, brows bent in an impatient vee. "Yes?"

  "Nothing," I said. "It can wait."

  I backed out, making sure none of the door's locks engaged as I closed it. Behind the front desk, I sat on the edge of my seat, keeping both ears open. Someone knocked from outside, startling me; I answered it, brusquely took their envelope, and informed them there wasn't a chance in hell they'd see Mr. Joachim that day.

  The door was still clicking shut in my hand when Lee screamed.

  I bolted through the door to Joachim's. Lee faced the wide viewscreen.

  "What is it?" I said.

  She pointed. The screen showed a panorama of gray, the flat, dusty landscape punctuated by boulders and small rills. Several dozen yards out, Joachim lay facedown in the grit, his silver suit perfectly still.

  "He fell," Lee said. "Why doesn't he get up?"

  "He just fell? What's wrong?"

  "I don't know." She brought her tablet to her mouth. "Mr. Joachim! Can you hear me?"

  He remained still.

  "Is he breathing?" I said. "Don't you have access to his vitals?"

  "Yeah. Yeah." She swiped at her tablet, calling up the feed to Joachim's suit. "He's got no oxygen!"

  "We have to do something," I said.

  Lee gazed numbly at her screen. "I'll call security. They'll send someone for him."

  "There's no time. He's risking brain damage every second he's out there. Three more minutes and he'll be dead."

  She continued to stare at her pad, as if it
would assess and solve the problem for her.

  I snapped my fingers under her nose. "Lee! I need your help. I'm going outside."

  She blinked at me. "But we don't have a second suit."

  "Cycle the airlock. As soon as I'm headed out, call medical and security. Be ready to open the door as soon as I'm back."

  "But you'll die!"

  "Maybe," I said, just as I'd mentally rehearsed. "But we don't have any other choice."

  Lee tapped commands into the airlock's pad. A metallic hum reverberated through the room. The outer doors closed with agonizing slowness. I breathed deeply and steadily, attempting to flood my bloodstream with oxygen. The outer doors finished their cycle. Air hissed into the closed chamber. Long seconds later, the hissing ceased. The inner doors parted.

  I gave Lee a thumbs up and stepped inside.

  She reversed the inner doors and they came together like praying hands. The vents began to suction the atmosphere from the small metal chamber. My ears popped. I took a last breath and let some of it out to reduce the pressure-damage to my lungs. My eyes bulged. The noise of the wind faded. The outer doors opened in perfect silence, revealing an ascending staircase smeared with fine gray dust.

  Have I mentioned this was a stupid plan? It was possible I would die. Equally pressing, it was possible Joachim would die, and I would be transferred or demoted, with little chance of prying my way deeper into G&A's secrets before the Pods flung me back to Primetime. Even if I executed my rescue with flawless aplomb, there was no guarantee it would get me more than a Christmas card.

  But it was perhaps not as stupid as it sounds. There are more myths around the vacuum than there are of the ocean.

  For instance, as I climbed the stairs, I didn't feel particularly cold. The feeling of cold is caused by the heat of your body radiating to colder particles around you, so I didn't freeze for the same reason I couldn't hear my feet thumping up the steps: there was no atmosphere to carry my heat away. I didn't explode, either. There just isn't that much difference between one atmosphere and no atmospheres. I felt pressure on my eyes, ears, lungs, and anus, but it was nothing more than discomfort.