Read Online The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller by Edward W. Robertson - Free Book Online
Authors: Edward W. Robertson
Tags: thriller, Science-Fiction, adventure, Time travel, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Sci-Fi, cyberpunk, High Tech, Science Fiction - Series, futuristic, post apocalyptic, Dystopian, Dystopia, Sci-fi thriller, serial novel, The Cutting Room
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this sparks any other developments, then head home."
Down in the club, Yount continued to sit at his table, tapping his toes to the muted music. He made no calls. Sent no messages. No one came or went from his table. Oddly hermetic for a dealer, but I didn't make him to be from Primetime—he was too comfortable here. Still, there was something off about him. Maybe Vette was getting to me. Whatever the case, I rolled the mobicam next to his shoe. A needle projected from the cam's side and penetrated Yount's rubber tread. Finished, I ordered the cam to melt down, then cut the link.
Back at the hotel, Haltur had already dug back into his networks, posting up a storm. Whatever he was on had pumped him up with more wattage than the sun-bright theater marquee across the street.
With nothing more pressing to do, I plugged in a deep search for everything on Josuf Yount. While the tablet's bots crawled the infinite tangle of the web, I took stock of where we were at. Which wasn't far. No true suspects had emerged. We'd culled many partial suspects from Haltur's far-flung online tribes—a couple of stalker-types after the famous (in his circles) coder; all the women who'd been responding to him on a dating site (a private one, though its security hadn't lasted three minutes against our souped-up software); a handful of nearly-anonymous presences whose online footprint wouldn't fill a thimble. That was it.
But I wasn't worried. Yet. It was still relatively early in the game. We had four full days before the killing. That's how these things always go: a lot of nothing early on, the fuse crawling toward the keg, then boom . It all blows out at once.
Anyway, unless the murderer had pulled some serious tricks on the cops, we knew Haltur would be killed in his room. Worst-case, we'd break into his apartment and hide in his closet waiting for the assassin to come around.
The sun rose. Through the gap in Haltur's curtains, the lights burned on. Traffic flooded the streets. The lights stayed lit, the curtains motionless. No blue-uniformed food peddlers biked up to the stoop. Noon came and went. As twilight fought through a sifting, mist-like rain, I pulled up the latest records. Haltur's most recent post was timestamped 2:27 AM. Sixteen hours ago.
My gut knew we had a problem, but guts don't have words. Instead, it tightened, then soured and twisted.
"Suppose he's sleeping it off?" Vette said.
I pulled my head out of the files on Yount, who had turned out to be an interesting figure. Raised in one of Brownville's poorest neighborhoods, he'd excelled in science. By age 15, a pharma company called WesCo had sponsored his enrollment at Loramount University, one of the country's most exclusive. Before he'd been old enough to drink—the legal age here was twenty—he'd churned out a few dozen patents, advanced polymer refinements mostly, slimming their profile while beefing their strength, but he'd made a couple genuine breakthroughs, too.
Then, less than two weeks after earning his doctorate, he'd disappeared. Not just from the public sphere, but from the virtual one as well. Little wisps of him remained, a post here or a comment there linked to an account my bots had flagged as his, but that was it. Three years later, here he was, dealing drugs out of a basement Brownville nightclub.
All of which had nothing to do with Haltur and his epic nap. Before I could open my mouth to tell Vette it was probably nothing, but it might be time to ramp up into invasive spying of our partial suspects' networks, my tablet camera caught a siren wailing down the damp and grungy streets.
Through our tablets, we watched them load Korry Haltur's body into the wagon and take him away.
" What? " Vette said. "He wasn't supposed to die for another three-plus days ."
"Maybe he's not dead," I said.
But I didn't believe it. My doubts were confirmed less than an hour later when a nurse leaked to his Bi0 network that former gaming legend and current code
Down in the club, Yount continued to sit at his table, tapping his toes to the muted music. He made no calls. Sent no messages. No one came or went from his table. Oddly hermetic for a dealer, but I didn't make him to be from Primetime—he was too comfortable here. Still, there was something off about him. Maybe Vette was getting to me. Whatever the case, I rolled the mobicam next to his shoe. A needle projected from the cam's side and penetrated Yount's rubber tread. Finished, I ordered the cam to melt down, then cut the link.
Back at the hotel, Haltur had already dug back into his networks, posting up a storm. Whatever he was on had pumped him up with more wattage than the sun-bright theater marquee across the street.
With nothing more pressing to do, I plugged in a deep search for everything on Josuf Yount. While the tablet's bots crawled the infinite tangle of the web, I took stock of where we were at. Which wasn't far. No true suspects had emerged. We'd culled many partial suspects from Haltur's far-flung online tribes—a couple of stalker-types after the famous (in his circles) coder; all the women who'd been responding to him on a dating site (a private one, though its security hadn't lasted three minutes against our souped-up software); a handful of nearly-anonymous presences whose online footprint wouldn't fill a thimble. That was it.
But I wasn't worried. Yet. It was still relatively early in the game. We had four full days before the killing. That's how these things always go: a lot of nothing early on, the fuse crawling toward the keg, then boom . It all blows out at once.
Anyway, unless the murderer had pulled some serious tricks on the cops, we knew Haltur would be killed in his room. Worst-case, we'd break into his apartment and hide in his closet waiting for the assassin to come around.
The sun rose. Through the gap in Haltur's curtains, the lights burned on. Traffic flooded the streets. The lights stayed lit, the curtains motionless. No blue-uniformed food peddlers biked up to the stoop. Noon came and went. As twilight fought through a sifting, mist-like rain, I pulled up the latest records. Haltur's most recent post was timestamped 2:27 AM. Sixteen hours ago.
My gut knew we had a problem, but guts don't have words. Instead, it tightened, then soured and twisted.
"Suppose he's sleeping it off?" Vette said.
I pulled my head out of the files on Yount, who had turned out to be an interesting figure. Raised in one of Brownville's poorest neighborhoods, he'd excelled in science. By age 15, a pharma company called WesCo had sponsored his enrollment at Loramount University, one of the country's most exclusive. Before he'd been old enough to drink—the legal age here was twenty—he'd churned out a few dozen patents, advanced polymer refinements mostly, slimming their profile while beefing their strength, but he'd made a couple genuine breakthroughs, too.
Then, less than two weeks after earning his doctorate, he'd disappeared. Not just from the public sphere, but from the virtual one as well. Little wisps of him remained, a post here or a comment there linked to an account my bots had flagged as his, but that was it. Three years later, here he was, dealing drugs out of a basement Brownville nightclub.
All of which had nothing to do with Haltur and his epic nap. Before I could open my mouth to tell Vette it was probably nothing, but it might be time to ramp up into invasive spying of our partial suspects' networks, my tablet camera caught a siren wailing down the damp and grungy streets.
Through our tablets, we watched them load Korry Haltur's body into the wagon and take him away.
" What? " Vette said. "He wasn't supposed to die for another three-plus days ."
"Maybe he's not dead," I said.
But I didn't believe it. My doubts were confirmed less than an hour later when a nurse leaked to his Bi0 network that former gaming legend and current code
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