The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller Read online

  THE

  CUTTING ROOM:

  THE COMPLETE SERIES

  Edward W. Robertson

  © 2013

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The Cutting Room originally appeared as a six-part serial novel. This set includes every volume of the story.

  I

  The boy sat alone on the swing, twisting from side to side, right foot trailing through the dirt. In eight days, that foot would be found in a Dumpster behind the Safeway. His arms would turn up in the trash behind a hamburger joint across the street from the police department. The insult would spark the cops to talk a good game, but a few months later, the case would go cold. It would be as if the killer had vanished from the earth. Decades later, the cops would go to their graves without knowing who had sent six-year-old Stephen Jaso to his.

  This wasn't a hypothetical. This was the future. And I was there to stop it.

  The park stretched a couple blocks in all directions. Big place. Stands of pines and elms. A roofed-over platform near the parking lot for grilling and low-rent weddings. A side street split the parking lot; on the other side, a set of brick bathrooms stood outside a baseball diamond. Lots of places for a young boy to be taken and strangled. Even so, I didn't think the murder would be committed here; the park ran alongside the town's main north-south drag. But there was a decent chance this is where the killer would pick him up.

  Our mantra is much like a doctor's: first, do no harm. Causality is a thing that can drive you mad. My very presence was changing the course of particles. A man driving down the street could glance my way, miss the red light, and plow down a child. Protocol insists on exhausting observational methods before attempting direct intervention.

  So I sat on a bench a hundred yards from the boy, snapped pictures with my eyes, and took analog, pen-and-paper notes on park-goers' behavior and my speculations regarding it. Profile would suggest a male, probably white, between the ages of twenty and sixty, but you could never rule out surgery. Even a projection of some kind. So I took notes on everyone: male, female, young, old. Extra time on anyone who lingered. When a thirtyish woman stopped to talk with him, I filled three pages, cranking up the zoom on my eyes.

  After a while, the boy hopped down from the swing, wandered to the spiraling, multi-colored slide, and watched two girls and a boy run up its steps and giggle down the slide. He never asked to join them. Reserved, but yearning for contact. Easy to see why the killer had marked him.

  Stephen Jaso went on staring at the children on the slide until his mom walked out from the covered grills, took him by the hand, and led him to the car. Home was just a few blocks away. I followed them there and parked down the block.

  I killed time browsing the files on my laptop, which was slow and bulky and confoundingly era-appropriate; before it flung me across the dimensions, the Pod had instantly summed up the case as the lowest of lo-fi—this was a single murder, not an attempt to found the Fourth Reich—and denied me access to all Anachronistic Tech. Not even a dot-cam. The Pod had already compared the before/afters from the news. The only discrepancies between the two timelines it found in the media came after the discovery of Stephen's body, but I didn't entirely trust the Pods' analysis. Anyway, I had nothing better to do. If nothing else, poring through articles and video would help immerse me in the period.

  Stephen didn't emerge from his house for the rest of the day. The sun sank into the high brown hills, scorching the clouds as red as fresh blood. Cars came and went. No creepers. Nothing to set off my highly attuned (if organic and untrustworthy) internal radar. I took photos just in case. When there were no headlights coming, I browsed the dossier of potentials the Pod had spit out in the minute before it sent me on my way. Most were employees from Central, but there were a few cartels and foreign operatives too. Nothing popped out.

  The lights clicked off one by one. A dog barked from somewhere far away. Day one ended as quietly as days can end. I had six more of them to reverse-engineer the boy's murder before it became permanent.

  It's okay if it doesn't make sense yet. A lot of it still confuses me. Making time travel real hasn't made it any less complicated.

  Here are the basics. There isn't one Earth, there are many, all on their own streams of time. Ours—we call it Primetime—is the only one with the ability to reach into the past. And for whatever fluke of physics, it's much easier to travel to the past of other streams than to our own. We can't keep tabs on all these other worlds. Even if we had the incomprehensible resources to watch everything, the very act of observing it would change it, corrupting its future. Defeating the point.

  This makes them vulnerable. To all the secret passions of anyone who can steal, bribe, or jury-rig their way to the right technology. Primetime's shadows descend on the other worlds to kill and rape and rule and laugh. Some of the hardliners argue we should leave these other worlds to their fate. That people like me are changed by the experience of cleaning up another world's past, meaning that my own future—and thus a part of the future of Primetime—will be altered, too.

  But we owe them. Because they're defenseless. Because when you're a time traveler from a parallel dimension, you can kill a six-year-old boy and vanish, forever, without a trace.

  My name is Blake Din. I am an agent of the Cutting Room, and it is my job to stop them.

  I didn't sleep much that night. I got up before the Jaso boy was due at school. As soon as he got on the yellow bus, I drove to the school. There was a small risk I'd miss something, but you can't let the killer see you. You'll spook them. They'll come back to another time to do it instead. Then what have you done? Wasted a week of your life and corrupted the pasts of billions of lives.

  I pulled into the lot of the public library across from the school and watched Stephen hop down from the bus. He carried his backpack over both shoulders, clinging tight to the straps. I took a few pictures of the parking lot to compare against the ones I'd taken of the park and his home street. He struggled with the school's front door, which was much too large for him, and went inside. Perhaps foolishly, I drove off.

  My first stop was the Dumpster behind the supermarket. It was a warm spring day and I parked in the shade and rolled down the window. A security camera hung from the wall, but it was pointed at the loading gates. I made a note of its field of vision. A few years back, in an effort to stop an abduction, a CR agent named Villarreal had scoped out a gas station parking lot. He never got his man, but the gas station camera caught him visiting the scene on three different nights. When the woman went missing, it was Villarreal's face on the news.

  The supermarket backlot was flanked by the backs of a strip mall and a department store. It wouldn't take any planning to dump the remains in this empty, quiet place. I wouldn't find him here. I started the car and drove aimlessly, to get a feel for the town and on the off chance anyone was following my visits to multiple future crime scenes. It was hardly my first time piloting a car—the Cutting Room facility includes several warehouses, gyms, libraries, and lots to brush up on obsolete skills—but it felt strange to be behind the wheel again.

  I had five hours before school let out. Plenty of time to check out the other Dumpsters. Nothing exceptional about them. With the exception of the one at the Wendy's across from the police station, all were tucked away behind shops and out of range of security cams. I didn't see anyone suspicious. Took pictures of the cars anyway. Sometimes you pull leads, but when you don't, the only way to catch a break is to collect as much data as possible and see if any patterns shake out.

  The police would never work out where the killing would take place, so I was already out of locations to scout. I went back t
o my motel and spent an hour transferring images from my eyes to my laptop and setting up a simple search/compare. Nothing popped up. I'd check them manually that night.

  I went back to the Safeway to buy a book and took it to a bench outside the library across from the school. I turned the pages to keep up appearances, but mostly I took pictures of the street, the parking lot, the grounds. The chain of the flagpole clanked limply against the tall metal rod. Mothers parked in the main lot and waited in the safety of their cars. Their engines were startlingly loud.

  But not as loud as the bell that marked the end of school, or the flood of children that followed.

  They burst down the steps, laughing little goblins decked out in bright windbreakers and cartoon t-shirts. I didn't have anything in my eyes except a basic camera, but it wasn't hard to pick Stephen out from the crowd. He walked alone, watching the others, expression one part fear and one part hope. No one paid him any mind.

  The kids lined up for the buses idling along the curb. Others ran to the parking lot and hopped into their parents' cars. Stephen walked across the trimmed green lawn, heading for a bus. He stepped onto the sidewalk directly in the path of a man in a suit.

  The man bowled into him, grabbing onto Stephen's shoulders to keep himself and the child upright. His face bent in anger. Stephen stumbled, knees banging into the sidewalk, elbows on the grass. The man pursed his lips and bent down to help the kid up. One knee of Stephen's slacks was torn. Beneath, his skin was scraped. He looked sad but didn't cry.

  The man put his hand on Stephen's shoulder, speaking to him. I would have given anything for a proper microphone. The man glanced at the front doors, reached into his pocket, and handed Stephen something, which the boy pocketed. They both smiled. Stephen picked up his bag and jogged toward his bus. The man watched him go.

  I took pictures steadily. What if it had gone down like this instead? Not as a careful piece of stalking, but a chance encounter? The man continued down the street. I swore. Twenty years from now, I could reverse-search his image on the web and pull together his identity in minutes. Five years after that, I could feed the image into a database and have his info handed to me on a platter. In this disconnected age, if you wanted to run down a man's ID, you had to get out and use your legs. I hopped out of the car and strode down the opposite sidewalk, lagging a block behind.

  He fit the profile. Late thirties, white, unobtrusively handsome. A bit on the white collar side, but he might be dressed up for the occasion. He didn't glance behind him. Three blocks later, he drifted from the sidewalk into a broad parking lot and went into a hardware store.

  I hustled back to the car and parked in one of the store's outer rows. Ten minutes later, the man emerged with two heavy plastic bags and headed back toward the school. I let him get a couple blocks up, then pulled out, drove past, and parked at a flower shop two blocks from the library. I turned off my car and got out my book and pretended to read. He bobbed by, sweat filming his temples. I let him get to the crosswalk before I got out.

  The next block took him into a tree-lined residential neighborhood. The houses did their best to look old, but it was a Northwestern desert town and nothing had been here longer than seventy years. The man unlocked the door of a house with ivy fringing its porch and went inside.

  I walked past the other side of the street, taking pictures. There was no car in the driveway. That can be a sign; when you're from another world, it isn't always easy to get your hands on items that require an identity. But the killer had a car. The Dumpsters were spaced miles apart. No way he made that circuit on foot with sixty pounds of child slung over his back. Not without being seen.

  I went back to my car and parked down the street. Crows cawed from the thicket of leaves. The surf of traffic rolled from a few blocks away, but this little block was virtually silent. I kept one eye on the street while I thought up an approach. It's best to just break in. Not let them see you at all. We try to keep it secret, but they know the CR exists. Many are well aware that as soon as the Pods detect a change, a person like me will materialize to try to prevent them from ever having made that change. It's their job to be careful, to elude the Pods' distant eye. It's my job to be just as stealthy, to track them down before they know I'm here.

  To approach the man's house, then, I needed a seamless cover story. But every second I spent here thinking about it was a second I wasn't watching the Jaso boy.

  I pulled out and cruised past the Jasos' house. Nothing remarkable. I circled back to the hardware store and spent a few paper dollars on picks and tools, then went back to the motel for a quick nap. The first thing I saw when I woke to the evening sun was the phone. Wires connected it to the wall. And all the phones were like this.

  As I shrugged off the fog of sleep, I assessed what little I knew. There was something off about the man. If I could prove he was an intruder here and now, I could execute him, take his body away, and wait for the Pod to whisk us back to Primetime. Stephen would never know anything had been wrong.

  I drove back to the man's house, drifting up to the curb at the edge of his yard. I popped the hood and disconnected one of the fuses, then spent another minute poking around, keeping an eye out for any helpful neighbors. Leaving the hood propped up, I toweled off my hands, careful to leave some of the grease in my knuckles and nails, put my lockpicks in my pocket, and knocked on the man's front door.

  He answered with a reserved smile. "Can I help you?"

  "Car broke down." I jerked my thumb at the sedan, its hood raised in the universal sign of distress. "Can I use your phone?"

  His smile took on a layer of sympathy. "Of course. Come on in."

  I stepped inside. It certainly wasn't impossible to get a phone, but it was one of those things intruders rarely bothered with. Then again, most of them rented motel rooms or lived out of vans. This guy had a house.

  His black shoes sat on a carpet in front of the closet by the door. Hardwood floors stretched wall to wall. The place smelled lived-in. Mail on the coffee table. I blinked, snapping pictures through my pupils. The letters were addressed to David Prince. The name rang no bells. Only an idiot would use his Primetime name offworld, but I'd crosscheck later. But the fact he got mail at all meant he was almost certainly normal. Not normal-normal; he had, after all, walked several blocks to a hardware store in his suit. But he belonged.

  "Phone's right over here." He led me to the kitchen. An antique phone hung from the wall.

  "Got a yellow pages?" I said.

  He smiled, opened a cabinet, and handed me a book. The name on its address label matched the letters on the coffee table. I pawed over to automotive, then glanced at his tie, as if just now noticing his upscale dress.

  "Am I interrupting? Are you expecting guests?"

  David waved his hands. "No, go right ahead. I work from home. When I started up full-time, I learned I got a lot more done if I put on a suit rather than hanging out in sweatpants all day."

  I laughed and ran my finger down the list of phone numbers. "What do you do?"

  "Computers."

  "Software?"

  He shrugged. "Started out there. Security and data retrieval. But lately I've gotten into making desks." He honked with laughter. "What can I say. The money's not half as good, but it's twice as fun."

  "You don't say." I dialed up one of the auto places, who told me they'd send a truck around, but that it could be an hour and they wouldn't be able to take a look at the car until tomorrow morning. I agreed to everything and hung up. "Know what, I'm going to take another poke at it myself."

  David smiled. "Need a hand?"

  "I'll be fine. Thanks so much."

  He saw me outside. I waved and bent over the engine. The front door closed. I jiggled the wires around, putting on a show, then got in and tried to turn it over, getting nothing. I fiddled around with the engine some more, then reconnected the fuse, drove back to the motel, called up the garage, and canceled the tow truck.

  I opened my laptop, fed
in the name "David Prince" and the pictures I'd taken of his face. I got no hits on either. That didn't rule him out completely—my database was only a collection of Central employees, known criminals, and a few private tech workers—but the man felt legit. He had a house. A phone. Got bills. He didn't talk like someone from Primetime, either. No modern slang. Had the archaic cadence of the late 20th century. He was a dead end.

  I burned a few hours comparing pictures from the park to my database, then drove past the Jasos' and parked at the end of the block to watch the night. A truck banged past at dawn, jolting me awake. My heart jumped. Sleeping in a car by the curb was the sort of thing that got you talked to by cops. Cops usually weren't big fans of people who couldn't prove they existed. I glanced at the house. All quiet. I went back to the motel.

  I'd been spending too much time watching from too close. I might already have spooked the killer. I headed to the park to people-watch and think things through.

  I spread my book on my lap. Early yellow light gleamed on the cold morning dew. I'd been here a couple days. Seen the boy. His routines. He led a very average life. Go to school, go home, the park, errands with mom. According to the news the Pod had sent with me, on the day of the event, Stephen Jaso would go to school in the morning and never come home. On my laptop, I had news reports stretching years after the killing, but no one had ever figured out exactly when Stephen disappeared. His teacher wouldn't remember whether she'd seen him after lunch—would he be taken at recess? When school let out? In front of his house when the bus dropped him off? A couple of classmates would tell police he'd gotten on the bus, but one girl would claim he hadn't. Would he wander away after school and be taken then?

  Whatever would happen, it centered around the school. It was time to stop following the victim and try to circle around to the killer.