The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (23 page)

Like most of the facility, the alley walls were plain gray stone blasted smooth and sealed with transparent polycarbon. Shortly before the offices of Julia Crensley, the walls turned robin's egg blue, stenciled with abstract patterns. Her door was fake hardwood, name embossed on a plate that may have been real brass. I knocked.

"Come in," a man called. I entered a reception area similar to the one at Joachim's offices. A youngish man sat behind the pale blue counter.

I indicated the envelope. "For Julia Crensley."

"And you are?"

"Adam Loria, on behalf of Mr. Joachim."

The assistant extended his hand. "I'll see she gets it."

I shook my head once. "I was instructed to deliver it to her myself."

He laughed humorlessly. "Indeed. I said I'll see she gets it."

I glanced behind me, then sat in one of the two wireframe chairs against the wall. "Please let me know when she's available."

The assistant lost his smile. "Are you new?"

"And I intend to become old. I'll stay until I make my delivery."

He gazed at me, as if the heat of his eyes might warm my seat to intolerable levels. I ignored him. Eventually, he returned to his screen.

A while later, another messenger arrived and asked to see Ms. Crensley. He was denied. He left his envelope at the desk. Crensley's secretary glanced my way, as if to tell me that's how it's done.

I waited. The door at the back of the room remained closed. The assistant twiddling with his tablet. Sometimes footsteps shuffled down the hallway beyond the front door. A deep hum resonated through the floor. After a couple of hours, I could hear a second, even deeper hum playing beneath the first.

My tablet informed me that I had fifteen minutes until my scheduled lunch, meaning I should conclude all current business. The secretary favored me with a smarmy smile.

After five minutes, his mirth evaporated. Five minutes after that, and he looked like he might be sick.

"You're going to be late," he said.

"My stomach can wait."

"They'll come for you." He glanced toward his employer's door. "Do you want to cause a scene?"

I cocked my head. "Seems to me that's your decision."

"I severely doubt Mr. Joachim will appreciate being dragged into this."

"That I missed lunch?" I said. "I expect he'd be annoyed to be interrupted over something so trivial."

The man pressed his lips together, got up, and entered the door to Julia Crensley's office. Murmurs filtered through the door. Shoes clicked. The door opened, revealing a blond woman whose long hair was beginning to turn a striking shade of white.

She smiled unreadably. "I understand you have something for me."

I handed her the envelope. "From Rupert Joachim."

"Wonderful." Her smile turned ironic. "Will that be all?"

I bowed my head. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Crensley."

She snorted and returned to her office. The text on my pad had turned red. Directions to the cafeteria flashed insistently. I shook my head and walked briskly through the tunnels to the indicated location.

A couple hundred bald-headed support staff lined up to be fed what turned out to be a pink, starchy mush and spongy yellow cubes. No payment was required for the lunch, but my glass of water was deducted from my daily ration. I took my tray to a table and poked the yellow cubes. They appeared to be soy. The pink mush tasted vaguely of tomatoes.

Feeling eyes on me, I glanced up. A man in a forest green uniform leaned against the far wall, casually watching me eat. I hadn't eaten since leaving Primetime the night before. I cleaned my plate, stacked my tray, watched the others finish their meals, then returned to Joachim's office when time expired on my pad.

His assistant raised her brow my way. "Where were
you
?"

"Making my delivery," I said.

"For four hours?"

"You told me to make sure Ms. Crensley received it personally."

The woman sputtered with laughter. "Don't tell me she
saw
you."

I had more than a few questions, but couldn't pose any without exposing my ignorance. "I almost missed lunch."

She blinked. "I'm impressed. I'll give you that. But we've got work to do. You can't spend that long on each delivery."

"Understood," I said, and was overwhelmed with sudden frustration, which was replaced just as quickly by apathetic acceptance. They wanted me to hand-deliver messages that could be exchanged more quickly and efficiently by the most basic electronic systems? Fine. I'd be their errand boy. It didn't matter to me. I just needed to fit in. To avoid attention until I exposed whatever Silas Hockery/Rupert Joachim was up to.

His assistant (her name was Lee, I'd later learn) handed me four envelopes, identical except for the sigils in the upper right corners.

"Pass them as high as you can get them," she said. "But don't take all day."

"Whatever you say."

Out in the tunnel, I scanned each one. My tablet suggested the most efficient route for delivery. I followed it to a T. With each delivery, I asked to hand it to the intended recipient myself, and each time I was denied. Sometimes I wasn't even allowed to deliver them to a personal assistant, and had to settle instead for leaving them with another bald-headed nobody like myself.

As the day wore on, and I trudged down a succession of plain gray tunnels to deliver meaningless messages to people whose only responsibilities appeared to be the fielding of these pointless missives, I grew less and less interested in anything beside completing my task and moving to the next one.

My curiosity continued to fade. It was as if the narrow walls were constricting my very spirit. Just lifting my foot to take the next step burnt more energy than I thought I had left. Yet I continued as if compelled. Each time I returned to Joachim's office and Lee handed me a new letter, it felt like a tangible reward.

I shook off my ennui by late afternoon. I began to worry I might not see Vette the whole time I was here—according to my tablet's map, the farms were three levels down. I hadn't left my level all day.

Dinner arrived and my pad directed me to a different cafeteria. It was far vaster, but the menu was little different. Same spongy cubes. At least the starchy mush was greenish rather than pink. I received my tray and scanned the faces, searching for Vette. Someone jabbed me in the back. I turned, wary, and met a familiarly unfamiliar face.

"Willa," I said.

"Adam," Vette replied.

We took a table together. There was very little chatter. I chose my words carefully, paring my questions down as far as I could.

"So?" I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Lots of tomatoes."

"Anything juicier?"

Vette gazed into space. "No. You?"

"I haven't even seen him in person yet."

Plastic silverware clunked against plastic plates. Workers filed to the trash chutes and sent their few uneaten scraps tumbling to the recycling center in the bowels of the facility. About half the employees wore white uniforms like myself, the other half donning gray like Vette. The few with proper hair stood out like desert flowers. Not a single one of the suit-wearing higher-ups was present.

"This is terrible," Vette said. "One day and I already want to kill myself."

I frowned. It sounded like it should be a joke, but her tone was all wrong. "I know you're not serious, but are you serious?"

"What are we talking about?"

"I feel weird, too. As hollow as a cup. All I want to do is finish my work and go to bed."

"Maybe it's being underground," she murmured. "Look at them. They're walking around like somebody pulled the bones out of their shoulders."

"Could be the culture. Rigid caste systems have always caused less happy societies."

Vette watched a guard detach from the wall and stop a worker from scraping a half-full plate of food down the garbage chute. "Or we're being drugged."

I laughed humorlessly. "Yeah."

"Not joking. Watch the garbage chute. The food is drugged, and they force you to finish it."

I stopped with a soy cube halfway to my mouth. "Oh shit."

"What are we supposed to do? Not eat?"

My stomach lurched. "Our faces are different, but our metabolisms are the same. Primetime-strong. With any luck, they'll adjust, filter it out."

"You know that's not going to happen."

I stared at the sludge on my plate. "Then we'll have to depend on the strength of our cause."

My belief did little to ward off the crushing feeling that descended on me as I returned to work after dinner. It was as inexorable as a mudslide and just as suffocating. Yet I remained oddly dedicated to delivering Joachim's foolish little messages. I concentrated on diverting that dedication to my primary task, but it took constant focus.

They dimmed the lights at 8 PM, simulating an evening that didn't exist below ground. An hour later, we were ordered back to our bunk. In the bathroom, workers massaged dry soap into their skin. I attempted to take the briefest of showers, but my water ran out before I'd rinsed off all the suds. I climbed into bed. The lights went out. That was my day.

I had the feeling we were in trouble.

The next day came and went just like the first. I was never allowed to see anyone from management. I saw my own boss—Joachim—once, shortly before lunch. He had a triangular mustache and piercing brown eyes.

"Heard you saw Crensley," he said.

"At great effort," I said.

"Good work. Keep it up." He returned to his office.

That afternoon, I was sent to pick up an actual package. Lee opened it at her desk, extracted a silvery suit, and smiled. She brought it inside Joachim's room and closed the door.

It took me several days to fully understand my job was, in essence, to act as a mobile phone/secretarial proxy for men who were too busy and important to actually speak to each other.

In terms of productivity, sending a warm body instead of an electronic message made no sense. But this place wasn't a factory. It was a society. The rules of which quickly became clear. The higher a man's status, the more attendants he had under his personal command. I was a messenger, but the mere act of using me to deliver Joachim's words sent a message behind the message: Joachim was important. So important he had enough servants to use them to hand-deliver the most trivial notes.

And it was quite possible there was a fractal element to this message-within-a-message. Sending me instead of an impersonal email might be perceived as an honor. That honor, however, would vary based on the status of the person receiving the personal message. As I was the least of Joachim's servants, sending me on his social errands rather than a more trusted employee was an implied comment on whatever business-aristocrat Joachim was sending me to see.

On top of
that
, it was fairly rare that I was seen in person by another person of stature. Instead, I was typically received by that manager's own staff, and the internal rank of the white-uniformed underling seeing
me
had repercussions of its own.

In short, it was even more tedious and convoluted than the logic and mechanics of time travel. And dealing with it left me very little time for anything but the immediate task at hand.

Which I remained artificially devoted to. Enslaved by the drugs. My mood was a paradox of apathetic determination. There were times when I forgot why I was here in the first place. But this wasn't entirely to my disadvantage. The harder I worked to deliver Joachim's messages, and to get them in the hands of the higher-ups, the more I elevated my own and thus Joachim's status.

I had no idea how this social currency circulated, but word made the rounds even quicker than the bevy of servants delivering questions, orders, requests, and proposals. Once gossip spread that I had unwittingly bluffed my way into seeing Julia Crensley in person, it was rare that I wasn't fielded by no less a figure than a manager's personal assistant. Someone with hair. No more baldies for me.

They were on their toes now, though. I made no further breakthroughs. After a while, I rarely made more than a token effort to trick or bluster my way in to see management. I had a schedule to keep.

The first week went by. Three weeks remained. I figured that if I just kept plugging along, there was a chance I'd be elevated enough to visit Joachim's office by the end. Break into his computer. Intercept messages. Anything to help me figure out what he and this facility were doing here.

In the meantime, I tried to think outside Joachim. Large portions of my tablet map were blanked out. That could be because the function of these spaces was irrelevant to Adam Loria, delivery boy and gofer, but it could be because they were secrets. As I rabbited up and down the halls, I kept my eyes and ears open, hoping for glimpses of open doors, snatches of talk. There was little of either. Most of the sensitive machinery appeared to be downstairs, maintained by specialists, sequestered from the pointless bustle of management's assistants.

I got up, went to work, ate, went back to work, ate again, worked, slept. Repeat.

Joachim had several other bare-scalped messengers, but I only saw them when we returned to the office at the same time, or on the rare occasions when Lee delegated one of us to fend off an especially lowly messenger from one of Joachim's colleagues/rivals. The fact I had competition—all of them with more seniority than myself—made my swift promotion all the sweeter.

"Loria," Lee said after I came back from my latest run. She crooked a finger at me. "Mr. Joachim has entrusted me to deliver a particularly sensitive message to Korol in engineering."

"That's great," I said.

She examined my face. "It
is
great. I may be gone for as long as three hours tomorrow. In my stead, Mr. Joachim has decided to entrust you with the duties of the front desk. Do you understand what that entails?"

"Not letting anyone in to see Mr. Joachim?"

Lee snorted. "Some are allowed to see him. Fortunately for all of us, we won't have to rely on your judgment in my absence. The desk tablet has a record of all scheduled appointments and deliveries. As these arrive, you will consult the schedule and see whether or not the subject is to be fielded by you or allowed to see our employer. On the rare occasions when someone is too trivial even for yourself, I have arranged the schedule so that one of your coworkers will be present so that you may delegate the matter to them."