Year Zero (13 page)
Authors: Rob Reid
“Nine days ago.”
Frampton’s animated thug leaned close. “That’s less than
one thirty thousandth
of the age of the Magna Carta,” he whispered dramatically.
Digital Carly turned and stared at him, eyes narrowed.
Frampton’s avatar shrugged defensively, which gave off a thundering clank. “I’m trying to translate this into his terms,” he explained, pointing a rusted iron glove my way.
The enraged strumpet kept staring him down.
“Carly. Nick is a
lawyer
. That means he thinks in terms of
laws
, like the Magna—”
As he was saying this, Carly grabbed her own double-headed ax out of thin air and lopped off his head. His body fell almost majestically—like an ancient oak, say—while his head flopped like a suffocating fish. Moments later, his remains vanished.
Carly returned her gaze to me. “As I was saying. We figured this out nine days ago. And I’ll tell you, it caught us off guard. Because
trillions
of civilizations have integrated with the Refined League across the ages.
All
of them have contributed art to our shared heritage.
All
of that art came with inviolable, and universally respected, rules. And
nothing
remotely like this has ever happened before. Ev-er.”
“Seriously? Across trillions of societies?” I asked.
“Trillions and trillions.”
“And over billions of years?”
“Billions and billions.”
“And throughout all of that … you’ve seriously, honestly, never encountered anything like the Copyright Damages Improvement Act?”
“Not even close. Our top legal scholars have researched it thoroughly. And they unanimously agree that it’s the most
cynical, predatory, lopsided, and shamelessly money-grubbing copyright law written by any society, anywhere in the universe since the dawn of time itself.”
Wowsers
. I was weirdly kind of proud of Judy and the firm for the next four seconds or so. Not even the open-source ayatollahs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation had ever denounced their work quite this definitively. “So that one little law,” I marveled, “has turned the entire universe … on its head.”
“It has,” Carly said. “Which is why we think someone’s about to destroy the Earth.”
“Whoa …
WHOA
! To what?”
“Destroy the Earth.”
“To
WHAT
?”
“Destroy the Earth.”
“Destroy the EARTH?”
“Yes. Deee-stroyyy thuhhh Eaaaaaaarrrrrrrrth.”
“But
why
?”
“In order to cancel out that ridiculous debt,” she said with a bit more relish than I cared for.
“But that’s absurd just don’t pay the fine it’s not like the music labels have telescopes do they I mean not really big ones anyway so seriously they’ll never know I mean Christ I’m not gonna tell them am I no siree ma’am!” With that, I all but disbarred myself with a single run-on sentence, since I was proposing that I aid and abet
the entire universe
in reneging on its debts to my own firm’s clients.
“It’s not that simple,” Carly said. “Because the culprits seem to think they can’t get around the debt without getting rid of you.”
“But … that would be un
gentle
manly.” I realized how stupid this sounded as I said it. But despite everything that
Carly had told me about the profound logic underpinning the Indigenous Arts Doctrine, it still seemed like the Refined League lived by some deranged chivalric code.
“Exactly how gentlemanly do you think owing someone all the wealth in the universe would make you?” she asked.
Good point
. I owed a few hundred bucks on a credit card back in college, and would have gladly destroyed the planet of the collectors they unleashed on me. And it turns out that I live there.
“But there’d be no more Oak Ridge Boys,” I argued desperately.
3
“People would manage,” she answered. “Remember, you’ve given us quite a legacy to work through.”
4
Frampton’s recapitated avatar rejoined us at this low point of the conversation. “Stupid corpse run,” he muttered.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay. Okay. We need to think this through. Okay?”
“We do,” Carly said. “But—”
“First thing, you need to tell me about that … dangerous unexpected development that just happened.”
“No arguments there, Nick. But—”
“And then—I need to tell you about this thing called the Berne Convention that might just fix all of this!”
“Sounds grand. But—”
“And, oh—I’m meeting with two people tomorrow who are hugely influential in the music industry. They may be able to help us!”
“I can’t wait to hear more, Nick. But first, you have a decision to make. The Wrinkle between our planets closes in forty seconds. If you want to save humanity, you need to make the crossing.
Now
. I can pull you over here. But I can’t do it without your permission. So—decide.”
Forty seconds?
I thought. What happened to the two-minute warning? Isn’t there a law about that? And how could I know who to trust here? That damned parrot hadn’t given me any ultimatums like this—so maybe he’s the good guy. Yeah, maybe he’s like a space cop! And Carly’s an intergalactic kidnapper! Or maybe she’s just completely delusional! And what about the Berne Convention? That would fix everything, right? So maybe
this trip wasn’t even necessary! Or maybe it was! Maybe it was incredibly necessary! But how could I process all of this in
forty seconds
?
But then I realized that she was actually giving me thirty-nine seconds more than I really needed (well, maybe more like ten seconds, because this whole thought process clearly took more time than it should have). My gut told me that the Earth was in danger. It also told me that the parrot was the bad guy. And if I was right about this, it meant that everyone and everything I loved was in jeopardy on this
fragile blue eggshell dot of a flimsy gossamer island
planet. That included my family. Puppies. NATO. God. Democracy. Did I mention God? And above all, Manda. And yeah, fine—
that crazy, ne’er-do-well cat of hers, too
!
“All right, I’m in,” I said.
“Then this is very important—get
out
of the chair, and crouch down on the floor for safety,” Carly said. “And then, Science will do the rest.”
“And TAKE OFF THE BONO GLASSES,” Frampton shouted. “You’ll want to see everything!”
“You have three seconds,” Carly warned.
Despite the rush and a sudden surge of abject terror, I managed to carefully remove the Bono glasses as instructed. But I forgot to get out of my chair.
1.
But DO NOT DO THIS unless you are wearing full pads and a helmet, and are standing on an OSHA-certified crash mattress with an attending paramedic. And even if you take these precautions, in no event will this book’s author or publisher be liable for any direct, special, incidental, indirect, or consequential damages of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, your standing on one foot with your
eyes shut.
3.
When she was giving me the background on the Kotter Moment and everything else, Carly had mentioned that the band behind the novelty hit “Elvira” has a particularly gargantuan alien following—and then shocked me further by reporting that the boys were still putting out albums, racking up a half dozen releases over the past several years. Surely, a lot of joy would leave the cosmos if this
suddenly stopped.
4.
Carly had also told me that Refined beings can happily spend months digging into the nuances of a single album—and that humanity had therefore already produced far more music than anyone could explore in many lifetimes.
IN THE WHITE ROOM
Imagine you’re sitting
in a cramped New York office, and the wall in front of you starts receding. It’s like some invisible crew has started pulling back part of a movie set. Now imagine that the wall to your right is receding in the same manner. Likewise the wall to your left, and the wall behind you. So we have all four walls pulling back together—and they’re picking up speed. You look up, and the ceiling’s also in full retreat. You look down, and the floor’s in on it, too.
It gets weirder. Although the room is flying
away
from you in six different directions, you now realize that it’s not flying
apart
. Walls, ceiling, floor—they’re still bound tightly together. And no, they’re not stretching or growing. They’re all the same size as before, and attached at the same seams—even as they’re zipping off on separate vectors.
As you consider this impossibility, you realize that the
room isn’t moving—it’s
you
. It’s like thinking that a neighboring train has started rolling, and then realizing that it has stayed put, and it’s your own train that’s in motion. In other words, you’re moving away from all the boundaries of a stock-still room at once. I guess you might have this sort of experience if you suddenly started shrinking. But that would only pull you a few inches back from each of the walls before you vanished into nothingness. In this case, the walls, ceiling, and floor are moving much farther than that—two feet, then three feet, five, eight, thirteen …
In short, you’re rapidly moving away, and at right angles to …
everything
. Or at least to each of the three simple dimensions that you’ve known during your life on Earth.
You start drifting in some unnameable direction and the scene shifts. You’re now looking into the neighboring conference room. And you see all of it—each of the walls, plus the ceiling and the floor, are fully in your gaze simultaneously. Crazy! But that’s nothing compared to the conference table. Somehow you’re seeing its …
innards
, even as you view its familiar surfaces. You see its wooden fibers, as if you were a termite or something. And this isn’t a simple cross-section—you’re seeing
all
the insides of the table at once. Somehow it all fits into your field of view, along with the surfaces that you’d normally see if you were standing in the room.
You drift farther, and now all of New York City spreads out before you. And I do mean all of it—the surfaces & innards, the subways & basements—the works. The city’s lights then recede into points—points that blur into swirly patterns. And that’s when it hits you that you’ve left New York far behind. Those points of light were stars, those swirls are galaxies, and you’re zipping past them at impossible
speeds.
This beats IMAX
, you think. Then you’re embarrassed to have such a vapid thought as you behold this celestial majesty.
So it beats … IMAX 3D
?—and you’re mortified that this is the loftiest thought you can muster despite seven years of higher education, until you then decide that “celestial majesty” was adequately clever, and get back to the show.
Now there’s one monstrously bright … something, and you’re blinded by the light, and it must be the surface and interior of a giant star, and whoa, it’s approaching fast, and you’re zooming up to a planet that’s orbiting the star, and toward this vast, wildly modern city—floating buildings, flying cars;
total Jetsons shit
!—but you can’t parse it, because it’s going by too fast, and you can’t really tell surfaces from innards because you’ve never seen most of this stuff before, but you’re coming up to the top floor of this immense building that’s
floating
eight miles high above the ground, and then you’re looking into this little room, and there are two figures standing there, and you can still see everything—walls & floor, skin & clothes, even blood & organs—and your reptilian brain’s trying to view Carly’s unclad flesh separately from her clothes & viscera (you pervert) when you’re suddenly back in the normal three dimensions, and falling hard on your ass, because the chair you were sitting on when you slid out of the first room is long gone, and on top of that you’re popping out at least two feet above the floor.
“That’s why you should always crouch when you catch a Wrinkle,” Carly said, as I tumbled. “If you start out touching the floor at several distinct points, it will place you on the floor on the other end. If you’re not even touching the floor, then who knows?” She said this as if we’d gone over the concept for weeks, and I just refused to get it.
