The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (22 page)

"Infiltrated the lunar base of the multiverse's first non-Primetime time travel org? Not that I can recall." I flexed my strangers' hands. "But I've had a skinswap before. Sometimes they have to send us places our natural ethnicity would be a liability. You only get vertigo when you look in the mirror."

"Then these moon-people better not be big on makeup," Vette grumbled.

The fog in my head lightened, but didn't clear up completely. This was normal. A long-acting immunonervous suppressor the Pods used to keep our changed bodies from rejecting themselves. Once Vette and I came around enough to walk and talk without having to concentrate on each word and step, I asked the Pods to let Mara know we were ready.

She was waiting for us across the building. We left the Pods, crossed a yawning, empty room, climbed three flights of stairs, and knocked on a numbered door. Mara opened it. Inside the dorm-like room, a woman sat at a table, coffee steaming in front of her. She glanced up. I froze. Her face was identical to Vette's.

"This is Willa," Mara said. "She's going to teach you how to pass as the people you appear to be."

"What about my double?" I said.

"He was disinclined to help. Willa, on the other hand, is rather less sympathetic toward her former employers. She'll tell you everything you need."

I was highly skeptical—if I was going to impersonate this man, I was going to need every last detail of his life and mannerisms—but saved my objections for afterward.

"Mara has told me about your world," Willa said. She eyed Vette for a long moment, then looked at me. "You won't last three days in mine."

"I just came back from the apocalypse," Vette said. "I think I can handle outer space."

"We'll see."

She explained. G&A's lunar facility was composed of two distinct tiers: management, and support. "Management" consisted of G&A's leadership, which had been evacuated to the facility in the months ramping up to the apocalypse. "Support" were the people who kept the place and its leadership running. And to hear her tell it, they were essentially slaves.

They had been tricked there with the promise of employment too good to be true. No mention that it would be off-planet. No hint that they would never be allowed to leave. Willa had gone in for an interview at what she believed was a bank. She had been drugged. And she'd woken up beneath the surface of the moon.

She'd spent the last several months farming a world with no oxygen or water of its own. Hydroponics, mainly. Underground. For her work keeping management fed, she was awarded no salary. No rights. Instead, she was given a bed to sleep in, food to eat, air to breathe. She was an object of labor.

"Do you know the worst part?" Willa said, following a detailed breakdown of a seventeen-hour workday. "You'll thank them for it."

"Yeah, it sounds like a real day at the nude beach," Vette said.

"You'll see."

I didn't know about the woman's pessimism, but I did understand why Mara had selected Willa to replace. Her life sounded completely anonymous. She had coworkers, but they had no time for friendships or any relationships deeper than the ones they found working together. To hear her tell, none of them
wanted
anything more. It was as if all hope had been suffocated by the knowledge they were kept beneath the surface of the moon, and that back home on their Earth, everything they'd ever known was just as dead as the dusty, windless ground above their heads—ground they would never touch for themselves.

We took a break to grab some food. Vette walked with me down the quiet hall.

"Place sounds creepy as hell," she said.

"After we expose it, it will all be erased."

"Except not. I mean, even if we clean the whole thing up—stop the apocalypse, neutralize G&A—it will still have happened once, right? Willa and the others, they can choose to remember."

"That depends how far back Central goes," I said. "If they revert to the original timeline, undo everything G&A's changed, causality will be so different Willa will never have existed in the first place."

"Holy shit, that isn't comforting in the slighest." Vette's shoes squeaked on the smooth floor. She cleared her throat. "Speaking of—I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Forgetting." Her altered voice was so soft I could barely hear it. "I had to choose so fast. I didn't think you'd want to remember, either."

"Maybe I made the mistake." I gave her a wink. "Oh well. Can't change the past, can we?"

There was only one other person in the cafeteria, a tech who'd been with CR longer than anyone I knew; I wasn't surprised Mara had brought him here to to lend a hand. We waved to each other. After Vette and I finished eating, we headed back to continue our briefing.

Turned out my role would be somewhat more challenging than Vette's. Adam, the man I was to mimic, had just been promoted a few days before we were slated to enter the timeline. He was to join the personal support staff of Rupert Joachim, one of G&A's management heads. Of more interest, Mara and the Pods suspected Joachim was the latter-day alter ego of Silas Hockery, whom we'd last encountered when he was buying up the Brownville of the Old West.

"Don't expect much," Willa told me. "Joachim is notoriously tight with his circle. You'll be lucky if you're ever allowed in his office."

"That's why we're giving you a full month under," Mara said. "With any luck, that will be long enough to earn his trust."

I glanced between them. "And what exactly am I supposed to find?"

"
Supposed
to find? Nothing. This could be the most frustrating mission you've ever been on. I wouldn't be surprised if you came back empty-handed."

"Then what would you
like
me to find?"

Mara tapped out points on her fingers. "First, their past—how did they reach time travel when no other world has? Second, their future—now that they've got it, what do they plan to do with it? Third, anything and everything that's going to help us understand what's happening."

"In other words, I'm looking to rectify the slight problem that we don't know shit."

She smiled with half her mouth. "That would be an accurate summary."

Willa told me what little there was to know about the man the Pods had caused me to resemble. Adam Loria. An eager worker, motivated to achieve his superiors' goals, but otherwise as dull and listless as the rest of support.

Adam had refused to participate in our briefings, but the plan required that he be removed from the other world; to keep him from going to Central, Mara kept him at the facility with us. And she kept video of everything he did: how he ate, how he talked, how he slept. I absorbed this all in a sped-up simulation created by the Pods. Studied how he gesticulated when he couldn't find the right words, how he held his fork. It was possible that none of it mattered, that no one cared enough about Adam to notice if he suddenly started pronouncing the G's on his gerunds, or waving his hand when he sneezed, but we couldn't be too cautious. We weren't just hiding from G&A anymore. We were also hiding from our own people.

As I studied video of Adam, Vette worked directly with Willa, who didn't know that Mara had been taping her ever since her entry to Primetime, too. Vette studied these records as well, refining her take on the person whose skin she wore.

I wondered if the two off-worlders understood the implications. If their help proved useful, they'd most likely wind up erased. In their best-case scenario, the fix to their timeline would be positioned after their births, allowing them to continue to exist, but they'd never be allowed to leave Primetime. Not after what they'd learned.

After a few days of prep, we were healed and in character. The Pods had fitted us with period-appropriate clothing: baggy gray coveralls for Vette, a simple white uniform and sturdy boots for myself. I didn't feel ready for the magnitude of the task, but every moment I spent studying left Primetime vulnerable to trespassers.

Willa came to watch us go, studying Vette and her replicated face. "You shouldn't go. It will break you."

"It can't be that bad," Vette said.

She was frowning, but the virus of doubt had made it past her mental immune system. This was another reason I had chosen to remember our decades in the wastes of post-human Brownville: yes, experience could hurt you. It could wear you down, break your will, sicken your spirit. Some memories feel like they'll never heal.

But experience can inoculate you, too. I had survived an extra forty years. Lived past the end of all things. Carried on after the death of my wife. If something horrible awaited us on this other moon, I wanted those memories—and how I had made it through them—close at hand.

We entered the Pods. The white light erased us from Primetime. Floating, numbness. And then we existed again.

The bed was still warm beneath me; by this world's timeline, the real Adam Loria had been snatched from it a fraction of a second before. I had the impression of a wide space, but when I reached up, my fingers bonked into the ceiling, jamming them. I took my bearings.

I sat on the top bunk of a large sleeping-room. A couple weak night-lights showed just enough of the floor to move around. Not that anyone here was taking advantage. The people I shared the darkness with breathed softly, fast asleep.

The bed didn't feel like it should be as comfortable as it was. My whole body felt light. My heart beat with immense power. It took me a foolishly long time to realize the gravity was much lower than I was used to.

I stared at the ceiling for minutes on end, waiting to be grabbed by armed guards alerted to my intrusion. When none came, I slept instead. It was the first good sleep I'd gotten since returning from the apocalypse.

Some hours later, the lights all flicked on at once. Men swung their knees out of bed, coughing, bleary-eyed. There were no windows in the gray walls. The workers' faces were just as blank. Everything was new, but I did my best not to look interested in any of it.

I headed for the bathroom, an open communal concrete space. It was for use by my entire bunk, but it was virtually deserted. The toilets were airplane-style: metal, no water in the bowl. I emerged to wash my hands, but the faucet wouldn't turn on until I scanned Adam Loria's chip the Pod had replicated and inserted into the back of my hand.

The faucet's readout informed me that, with typical drinking and toilet usage held in reserve, my daily water allotment would allow me ninety seconds of faucet-usage or twenty seconds of a shower.

This explained my bunkmates' cavalier approach to hygiene. I declined to wash my hands.

I had just a few minutes to myself before the workday started. Willa had provided me with a rough sketch of the facility, but one of the few features on the tablet in Adam's personal locker was a proper map of the grounds. Some areas were blanked out—apparently Adam had no need to ever visit these parts of the structure—but more than enough remained for me to pick out Joachim's offices and my route there.

While I was still tracing an alternate path, my tablet chimed. An automated message alerted me that unless I began moving now, I would be late for service.

I jogged down the tight halls. Gray dust gritted the floor, so fine and thin it almost felt sticky. It clung to the legs of my pants, leaving ashy streaks. Stupid. Why was my uniform white? Why wasn't it gray like Vette's? It made no sense.

As it turned out, there was actually a very specific logic to it, but I wouldn't understand until several days later, after I'd begun to understand this place. Vette's uniform was gray because it didn't matter. She was hidden away downstairs. But
I
was running around in view of management. My uniform was white because they
wanted
to see if I was keeping it clean.

In the tunnels, other servants passed the opposite way at a swift walk. Hallways forked and intersected. The lights were small and white and dim. Now and then, an electric cart whirred down the halls, and servants pressed themselves against the walls and allowed the vehicle to pass. Inevitably, it held two people. A chauffeur, and a business-suited man or woman whose gaze was firmly locked to the screen of a tablet.

I took one wrong turn on the way, but arrived at Joachim's office with ninety seconds to spare. His name was stenciled onto what appeared to be a frosted glass door. Uncertain of protocol, I hedged my bets by knocking twice, then immediately stepped inside.

A woman sat behind a counter that was as black as outer space. Thirtyish. Her white uniform was similar to my own, but unlike myself and the men I shared the bunkhouse with, she had been allowed to grow her hair. Her red locks followed the sweep of her chin. She stared at me until I began to believe I had done something wrong.

"Loria." She scooted an envelope across the counter. "See she gets this personally."

"Of course."

She gave me a scornful smile. The envelope looked like paper, but had the smoothness of plastic. It had no address, just a square sigil in the upper right corner. I nodded to the woman and closed the door behind me.

Just in case there were cameras on me, I walked down the tunnel and took a random turn before I examined the envelope. It was sealed and no name had magically materialized on it. Gritting my teeth and hoping, I scanned Adam Loria's tablet over the square sigil.

A name and directions appeared on my pad.

Julia Crensley. Same floor as the one I was currently on. My tablet calculated it was an eight-minute walk. I joined the flow of people heading down the hallways. I was finally beginning to grasp the scale of this place. The G&A facility was far larger than what we had at the Cutting Room. I supposed they had to be self-sufficient, capable of generating their own food and oxygen and of creating water or extracting it from the moon's craters and frozen dust. Even so, it felt too big.

There was a slight gymnasium smell to the recycled air. I would probably stop noticing it shortly. Directed by my pad, I followed a main hall wide enough for cart traffic, then cut through a couple of "alleys" that would hardly allow two pedestrians to squeeze past each other.