Year Zero (11 page)

The room was perfectly silent as everyone waited for Judy to signal whether they should love or loathe this idea.

“A change in the law would oblige Homeland Security to redirect at least part of its budget to the new ‘file-sharing front’ in the war on terror,” I continued. “So the country might end up with a few less police radios and TSA agents. But some portion of the redirected funds would inevitably accrue to this firm, in the form of legal fees.” I didn’t betray a shred of the yawning horror that I felt. This had to be career hara-kiri.
But I was doing it with style.

I went on to cite three relevant rulings, as well as the
sections of the Patriot Act that we’d need to tweak. After I’d laughed so hard at his original joke, Randy had written the whole thing out for me in legalese, complete with this supporting detail. It was so funny and comprehensive that I remembered it all clearly. I now felt cheap and guilty to be presenting his ideas as my own—silly, I guess, given that there was zero chance that
he’d
ever
want to use them at work himself. But Judy’s scathing performance review said that I did “NO original thinking,” and this was clearly a case in point. Still, I could sure do a gorgeous job delivering someone else’s ideas, and that was (slightly) better than nothing.

As soon as I fell silent, Judy started circling the table predatorily, like Robert De Niro in
The Untouchables
. “Nick, I … don’t know what to say.”

Step. Step. Step
.

“Other than that your idea is demented. It’s warped. And it’s—well, it’s a cry for help.” She paused for a good five seconds as she continued to circle. “We’re in a state of war.”
Pause
. “A global crisis.”
Pause
. “One of the few good things to come from this is that Congress occasionally sets aside its greed long enough to do something for the common good.”
Pause
. “And you’re proposing that we exploit this fact, so as to cynically promote the parochial interests of our paymasters.”

“That’s an excellent summary,” I said. It really was.

Judy halted her pacing, and stood right behind me. “Maybe it’s true that our firm … 
manipulates
the system. Occasionally. Strictly to serve our clients’ interests, of course. Cynics might even accuse us of profiteering from it. But you’re recommending that we willfully
pervert
it. On an utterly base level.”

By now people were gazing intently at various points between their noses and the conference room table. Just as the tension was peaking, Judy cracked an ironic smile. “But the real problem with your idea is that it’s so fucking obvious we’ve already tried it twice, with no luck. So I need you to come up with something more original. And cunning.”

Everyone relaxed, and I basked in a warm, giddy surge of relief.

“September 11th was years before you started here, so you’re off the hook for not knowing what we tried back then,” Judy said, now smiling almost kindly. “We were so close. We’d put together a whole package of measures that would have lumped Napster and Kazaa right in there with truck bombs. And they were actually in
the working draft
of the Patriot Act. But then the press got wind of it. And after that, not even Fido could push it
through.” The awkward hush morphed seamlessly into a memorial silence for that great, lost opportunity.

The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. I was only half there, my brain fogged over from lack of sleep, cold medicine, the drubbing I’d just taken from Judy, and (oh yeah!) agitation about the incipient alien threat to my planet.

Judy wrapped things up around ten by saying “Okay, everyone but Nick—bug off.” Aliens, my monster cold, and sleeplessness fell from my mind again as the room cleared out.

As soon as we were alone, Judy said, “That was brilliant stuff, Nick. Very creative, very topical. And you pulled it out of thin air. But enough about you—here’s something cool about me. When I realize that I’ve been wrong about something, I don’t fuss about it. I just embrace the new reality.
Pronto. I’m always triangulating, readjusting. And it looks like I was wrong about you.”

I just stood there—less shocked than when Carly atomized my iPhone, sure, but not by much.

“And that frankly changes everything for you,” Judy continued. “The rest of the partners like you. But I was a holdout, and we all know I can veto anything. And now you’ve won me over. So, yay-rah—go you.”

I nodded, although Judy wasn’t looking at me (uttering some of the most momentous words that a young attorney could hear within these walls, she was meanwhile checking email on her old school BlackBerry).

“So you know the drill from here,” she said. “Fido’s coming through New York tomorrow, and I have a ten o’clock meeting with him.
Bastard!
”

For a moment I thought she was denouncing our main patron in Washington. But she was just irked by an email. She fell silent, her thumbs thrashing a retort into the keyboard.

“Anyway,” she continued, actually looking at me now. “It’s my monthly one-on-one with Fido, but you’re coming. It’s time for you to start meeting the folks who are the firm’s bread and butter. So as to establish personal relationships with them to the mutual benefit of yourself and the partnership, blah, blah, blah.”

So this was it. The Omen. I was actually getting the call.

“And this’ll be a doubleheader,” she added. “The Munk’s in from L.A. tomorrow, too. We’ll be dropping in on him right after Fido.”

I nodded again. She was referring to the CEO of a vast music label—one who famously clutches apples and other loose food with both hands when he eats, chipmunk-style.

“You sit closer to the elevators than me, so I’ll come by your office at nine-thirty tomorrow, and we’ll head out,” Judy finished. “Got it? Oh, and since you’ll be meeting Fido, why don’t you spend the afternoon trying to score him some Milk Bone?”

Like all pets
, Fido loves his treats. So every so often, we try to give him one. “Milk Bone” is our internal code for the little goodies that make him feel cherished. And since he has unusual appetites, they’re notoriously hard to arrange. Most senators are happy if you rally lots of funding for their campaigns. Others can be wooed with decadent junkets fueled by thousand-dollar single malts. But Fido’s a
devout Mormon with no funding concerns, so none of that works.

He does, however, have a mad inner craving that we can help satisfy—a primal desire he shares with most red-blooded American men. Which is to say that conservative, God-fearing, and borderline elderly as he is, Fido secretly wishes he was a rock star. To be clear, his rock ’n’ roll fantasy is more Osmond than Osbourne. But he takes it incredibly seriously—so much so that he has actually released several albums over the years (mainly on religious and
patriotic
themes). So, if part of your job is making Fido happy, you occasionally strong-arm someone into putting a snippet of his music into a movie. Or, you get a Nashville D-lister to leave him an admiring voice mail. Or, you blackmail somebody into performing one of his songs in a concert.

Judy had given me a whole list of agents, managers, and label executives to reach out to. But I left that for the afternoon. For now, it was much more urgent that I review the Berne Convention. I scanned through its dozens of articles, and saw no claims of jurisdiction over acts of piracy that occur outside of its signatory nations. Just as I thought. And while a huge number of countries had signed it, all were firmly situated on the Earth’s surface. Since this should
obviate any licensing concerns that Carly (or any other extraterrestrial) might have, I felt confident that there’d be a solution to whatever quandary our music was causing up there.

Carly had said that the glasses I’d need for our 11:06 rendezvous would arrive three minutes beforehand, along with some instructions. Sure enough, I got an email from “Meeting, Dataspace” at precisely 11:03:

I opened my desk drawer as instructed. A pair of pink-lensed Bono glasses were right next to my business cards, attached to a USB cable that had to be twenty-five feet long. All of this had presumably just popped over via a Wrinkle that had just opened up between my planet and Carly’s.

Just then, my cellphone rang. The caller’s number was blocked, and I picked up, thinking it might be Manda.

“Nick, this is your boss, Judy Sherman.”

Boy, was it. It was also a bizarre statement, even for Judy. Her voice is as renowned within my brain’s fear and obedience circuits as my mother’s was, back when I was a naughty three-year-old. So if she had said “Nick, you are now speaking on your cellphone,” the statement would have been no more superfluous.

“Guess where I am,” she continued.

“The … office?”

“Wrong, Nick. I’m in sickbay—reviewing your medical records. And it appears that
some
body’s inoculations aren’t up to date.”

“You mean my … flu shot?” Since when did the firm track our medical histories? And where the hell was “sickbay”?

“It’s not a flu
shot
, Nick,” Judy snapped. “It’s a flu
solution
. But we can’t
solve
our flu problems with even one sickly associate spewing flu germs onto everyone else. Don’t the words ‘herd immunity’ mean
any
thing to you?”

They certainly didn’t. And I wasn’t about to admit this. But before I could come up with a serviceable bluff, I heard some familiar laughter on the line, and it wasn’t Judy’s.

“Manda?” I asked.

“Well done,” she tittered.

“You do … impersonations?”

“Not me. The stereopticon. I’m learning its audio mode. And it does perfect impersonations of any voice that it gets a sample of.”

“And you … sampled Judy?”

“I found a YouTube clip of her guest-lecturing at a law
school about copyright legislation. She’s quite the force of nature.”

“I’ll say,” I said.

“Anyway, did the pink glasses show up?”

“They did.” As I gave Manda a quick update, I lifted them to my face. Everything took on a rosy tinge.
So this is how the world looks to Bono
, I thought. “T-minus thirty seconds, and I have no idea what’s about to happen,” I finished, plugging the alien USB cable into my computer.

“Well, be careful. And yank the glasses off if it gets weird.”

We said our good-byes, and I hovered my cursor over the mysterious hyperlink. At exactly 11:06, I clicked, and—

The room disappeared.

I found myself in a barren, apocalyptic landscape facing a muscular green hulk with pointy ears and three-inch fangs. Dressed in a red, form-fitting evening gown, he was balder than Mr. Clean. The sky behind him was orange with distant flames, and pierced by ten-foot spears that held up medieval battle standards.

I yelped and jumped backward. This didn’t go so well, because I had forgotten that I was sitting on an office chair—which was kind of understandable, given that both the chair and my own body had vanished entirely from my vision. But I sure could
feel
the chair as it tipped backward from the thrust of my legs. I could also hear it crash as I sprawled to the … ground? Floor? The surface beneath me looked like packed earth. But it felt
more like office carpeting.

I rubbed my fingers across it. Yep, this here was patterned-loop nylon. But I couldn’t see my fingers, or any part of myself. I was like a disembodied, floating … viewpoint. I looked up and around me. The green giant stood motionless as a statue. The whole landscape was also perfectly
still. And silent. This made it all seem a lot less menacing—as did the ogre’s ridiculous red evening gown. Reassured, I rose
unsteadily. This was surprisingly difficult without my body providing some visual cues. And while I know that sounds pathetic, try standing on one foot with your eyes shut for half a minute, and you’ll see how hard it is to balance without seeing your body.
¹

Once I was back on my feet, I raised my hands to my face and removed the Bono glasses. The office … came back. Or rather, it was still there, having never gone anywhere. The glasses had been displaying an animated world to me in flawless 3D—shifting the images in perfect sync with every movement of my head, which made me feel entirely present in that eerie, imaginary landscape.

I cautiously put the Bono glasses on again, and—nothing. The office looked slightly pink. That was it.

My assistant naturally chose that one moment out of an entire half decade to get all concerned and proactive. “I heard a crash,” she said, popping open the door without knocking. I stood before her in bug-eyed pink glasses that were cabled to my computer, beside a toppled thousand-dollar Aeron throne that HR had bought in a recent panic over “ergonomic hygiene.” “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” I chirped.

“And that sound?”

“Just … termites.”

She nodded slowly, backing out of the door.

“Oh—and Barbara Ann?”

She stopped. “Yeah?”

“A quick request. Could you, uh …” I was about to ask her not to disturb me again, but realized that this would make things look even sketchier. “Could you tell me if these glasses make me look fat?”