The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (24 page)

"I'm honored."

"You should be terrified. Do you know what happens if you screw up? Let a person of insufficient standing inside?"

I frowned. "Mr. Joachim would lose standing."

Lee nodded. "So will you. And you have no standing to lose. Meaning you'll be demoted right back to hauling soy to the kitchens."

"I won't let him down." I meant it, too: my chemically-enhanced pride in my work ethic had my spine straight as a rail.

I had a full day until the desk became briefly mine. Lee spent every spare minute teaching me the ins and outs of the job. How to check the software for the appropriate meeting-categorization of incoming messengers. How to log new appointments (but
not
how to categorize them—she would take care of that). How to deny higher-status visitors such as herself without leaving them feeling as if they'd been insulted. How to deny lower-status visitors such as myself while leaving them feeling as if they
had
.

Somehow I found this all tremendously exciting. The drugs, no doubt. That night, despite the hollowness inside me, I could hardly sleep from anticipation.

I woke, got ready for work, and delivered my morning messages as always. Right after my lunch, Lee beckoned me behind the desk. A sense of power surged through me.

"Don't let us down," Lee said.

She left me with the hum of electronics and the knowledge the only thing standing between Mr. Joachim and the horde was myself.

In hindsight, my sense of accomplishment was madness, but what can I say. The drug was more powerful than I'd thought.

I waited with relish for the first of my appointments. Ten minutes after Lee departed, a man knocked on the door. I allowed him in. He was bald, white-suited.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but Mr. Joachim is presently engaged. Would you like to leave a message?"

"Please," the man said. He handed me a plastic envelope and left.

I was terribly disappointed I'd only been able to tell him "No" once.

Messengers came and went. Two tried to push me, but I refused to yield, and they retreated in defeat. A couple hours into my reign, a man knocked and entered. He wore a white suit, but a shock of black hair swept from his scalp, shiny with chemicals and care.

"Mr. Joachim, please," he said.

I pretended to check my schedule. "I'm sorry, but Mr. Joachim is presently engaged. Would you like to leave a message?"

A frown flickered on his mouth. His gaze lifted to my bald pate. "I have here a revision to not just the location, but also the time of Mr. Joachim's meeting with Chronostatistics."

That lifted my eyebrows, but I had to protect my cover. "When is the meeting to take place?"

"Tomorrow."

"Morning or afternoon?"

"Afternoon."

"Then Mr. Joachim will still possess plenty of time to react to these changes when I present them to him this evening."

The man combed his fingers through his hair. "This could have serious repercussions for the rearrangement of his schedule."

"Repercussions we are fully capable of handling." I reached for the envelope. "Should we encounter any unforeseen difficulties, however, I hope we can rely on your help."

The man nodded thoughtfully. "Of course."

He left and that was that. I found myself with a gap in my schedule, which I used to poke around the desk tablet as much as I dared. Except for a few pieces related to scheduling and hierarchy, all the files were locked away from me, but even this shed some insight. Demand for Joachim's attention far outstripped that for all but a handful of other managers and a couple of people who appeared to be technical types. These techies were located in the below-levels. In rooms that were blank spaces on my personal map.

Sounded like something for Vette to look into. Myself, I needed a way to tap into Joachim's files. These appeared to be stored on a different network from the one I could access through my G&A-issue pad, but if I could dummy up the right program, and get direct access to Joachim's terminal, I might be able to hack my way inside.

Lee returned before dinner. She nodded at me, entered Joachim's office, returned a minute later, and checked my logs.

"Nice work," she said.

"Thank you," I said. I hadn't deviated from the schedule in the slightest.

At night, I stayed up late tucked under the covers, devising sets of subroutines programmed to assemble more powerful lockpicks of their own. The kind that might break Joachim's security. By day, it was business as usual. I delivered messages. Did my best to penetrate to the higher-ups, but was universally rebuffed. Attempted without success to scout the blank spaces on my map. When I saw Vette, she mostly wanted to talk about the intricacies of growing tomatoes in a completely artificial, sterile, and low-gravity environment, but she said she'd see what she could see on the lower levels.

Three days later, with my mission half over and almost nothing to show for it, I got called into Joachim's office.

It was more expansive than the facility's cramped halls, but most of the space was vacant, a smug display of power. Landscapes adorned the walls. A desk, chairs, the usual.

Other parts were as far from normal as you could get. A window (or perhaps a viewscreen; weren't we underground?) looked out on blackness—and Earth, a beautiful marble of green and white and blue. From this far away, you would never guess an intentional cataclysm had erased humanity from its surface. Yet even this vista wasn't the most unusual piece of the office. A silvery one-piece suit hung from a rack beside a massive circular door that resembled the entrance to an underwater castle.

"What's that?" I said.

Mr. Joachim looked at me as if I'd asked what floors were for. "It's an airlock."

"In your office?"

He smiled winningly. "One of the perks of command."

"Do you use it often?"

"Every day. Morning constitutional. I'd go crazy if I couldn't see the sun." Joachim folded his arms. "That's what this is about, in fact. When I'm out, I need Lee to man my office. But that leaves me with a gap at the front desk."

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.