Year Zero (14 page)

She and Frampton were standing to either side of me. They were wearing their mullah and nun outfits again, only without the sound-blocking headdresses. Carly had a cascade of silky chestnut hair tumbling well below her shoulders, while Frampton had this crazed red mop that sprang out in corkscrews and pleats in all directions (and his jihadi beard—presumably a fake—was gone). The room was totally white, and utterly featureless.

“So where are we?”

“The planet we’ve been living on for the past six years,” Carly said. “It’s called Zinkiwu.
¹
And you are now in my home.”

“And how far are we from Earth?”

“About eight billion light-years.”

Now, that got my attention. Of course, I already knew that I’d traveled a huge distance. But it’s one thing to know that in an academic sort of way, and another thing to viscerally grasp the fact that you’ve just—what,
crossed the universe
? In a faster-than-light manner that upends humanity’s entire understanding of physics? As I reveled in the awesome historic weight of my journey, the first words to flash through my mind were
Eat it, Backstreet Bitch
! Now people would taunt
him
for having
my
name. “Who are you—the pissant singer,” they’d ask. “Or the man who shattered every law of motion as we’d ever understood them?”

“I just traveled … a trillion times faster than light,” I murmured, as I processed all of this.

Carly gave me an agonized look. “Please, Nick. That would shatter every law of motion as we’ve ever understood them.”

“Wait—what? Then how far did I go?”

“What did you clock the Wrinkle at, Frampton?”

“Two minutes, forty-one seconds,” he answered.

Carly looked at me. “I’d say you came about eighty feet.”

“But … but I thought you said we were eight billion light-years from Earth!”

“We are.”

“Then how did I get here by moving eighty feet?”

“Because we were briefly about eighty feet from the boundary of a nine-dimensional heptagon whose lesser vertex included your office’s hypermeridian,” she sniffed, like a fallen Nobel laureate reduced to teaching fractions to a dull fifth-grader.

“Whoa, slow it down for the Earth boy. How’d you get me here? In really simple terms.”

Carly rolled her eyes impatiently. “For about twenty minutes, the deep geometry of the cosmos allowed us to fold a tiny corner of the universe over on itself in one of the higher dimensions. And that brought your office within eighty feet of here, along a hidden vector. Whereupon we started reeling you in. Quite slowly, as you now know.”

“Wait—you
folded
the universe?”

“Yes,” Carly said. “The Refined League does that many billions of times per second to move beings and data around. In this case, we put a transitory Wrinkle into a very narrow quadrant of the seventh dimension.”

I was starting to see why the ersatz concierge had been unable to explain Wrinkles to Manda and me in formal English.
Carly managed to do a decent job of it by way of an analogy, though. She told me to imagine a huge map of the Earth painted onto a gigantic sheet. We can call it Flat Earthland.
²
Its two-dimensional inhabitants zip around it like cutout dolls on a paper map. Suppose a girl named Flat Stacey moves from Flat Boston to Flat Dubai. That’s seven thousand miles, and she’s homesick. Now imagine that the vast sheet of Flat Earthland actually exists in a three-dimensional place—and that Flat Stacey has the power to fold it over on itself. If she does this, putting the fault line somewhere in the Atlantic, her childhood home could end up hovering just a few feet above her new pad in Flat Dubai—even as it’s also several thousand miles to the west for someone sliding along the sheet.

If Flat Stacey knows how to travel in the third dimension, she can now pop in on her family even faster than she can cross the street. And when she leaves Flat Earthland, she’ll experience something like my own short, strange trip through the Wrinkle. First, she’ll start moving at right angles to every normal dimension of her daily life. Floating above Flat Dubai, she’ll be able to see into closed rooms, and behold the innards of objects that she normally just sees the surfaces of. And much as I had zipped across the universe, she’ll be able to travel to the farthest corner of Flat Earthland in moments if it’s folded over, and practically touching her starting point.

“I hope that makes sense to you, because we really need
to get back to saving humanity,” Carly said after describing all of this.

“Oh … right.” I was so giddy from my journey that this little issue had slipped my mind. “So, you said that someone’s trying to destroy Earth. But I thought you’d come to save us from
self
-destruction?”

Carly nodded. “The two are related. To be more precise, we believe that someone intends to
help
you to self-destruct.”

“You mean like … assisted suicide?”

Frampton shook his head. “More like
involuntary
assisted suicide.”

“Which sounds like an antiseptic term for murder,” I said.

“What say we go with genocide?” Carly suggested breezily. “There’s quite a few of you, after all.”

“Well, whatever we call it, who’s behind it?” I asked.

“We’re not sure,” Carly said. “One of several organizations that are dismayed to be losing all their wealth to you.”

“But that could be anyone with any money at all, right?”

She shook her head. “Actually, virtually no one in the Refined League harbors any violent intentions toward humanity. We’re Re
fined
, after all.”

“You’re also incredibly loved,” Frampton added. “We’re all way, way happier than we ever were before, and it’s because of your music.”

Carly nodded. “And most people’s lives won’t change anytime soon anyway, because individuals will retain full access to their possessions and savings as long as humanity’s wealth remains in escrow. Things are different for organizations. Our banking laws have already severely restricted what they can do with their former wealth.”

“Got it. And when will everything be … transferred to humanity?”

“Not until your civilization is advanced enough to qualify as Refined itself,” Carly said.

“
If
that ever happens,” Frampton added.

Carly nodded. “An overwhelming majority of species self-destruct long before becoming Refined.”

“With or without ‘assistance’?” I asked.

“Always without,” Carly said. “It’s a huge crime to interfere with a primitive society. And like I said—most societies do themselves in anyway. Humanity is actually very lucky so far. You’ve made great strides against hunger, disease, and extreme poverty. You also did a masterful job of fending off a modern ice age with your CO
₂
production. And you’ve survived for several decades with nuclear weapons. Few get this far. But you’re now on the verge of creating a host of highly destructive nano, bio, and olfactory weapons, and you’ll have to learn to live with them, too. Only one society in four gets through the final phase of development that you now face.”

I considered this. “And the organizations that you mentioned want us to be one of the three out of four that doesn’t make it, because that way, they’ll get their money back, right?”

“Actually, I’d say that certain brutal factions
within the top leadership
of the organizations want you to self-destruct,” Carly said. “I’m sure you’re adored among the rank and file.”

“So in Warcraft, you said there’s been a dangerous new development. What is it?”

She looked at me grimly, clearly preparing to share the most jarring news yet. “Shortly after we returned from
Earth yesterday, we were notified that another alien party had crossed the Townshend Line after us. We don’t know who they are, or where they came from. But we fear the worst.”

“Oh, you mean Paulie and Özzÿ?” It was weirdly satisfying to have my own bombshell to drop on these two for a change. “Sure—they swung by right after you left.”

Now
that
led to an awkward silence.

“Did you … happen to notice what they looked like?” Frampton finally asked.

“Paulie looks like a parrot. And Özzÿ looks like a vacuum cleaner. Only with hands.” It turns out that I had to say this out loud to appreciate how truly stupid it sounded.

“Are you sure it wasn’t swamp gas? Or maybe ball lightning?” Frampton asked, twirling a finger around his temple as he shot Carly a skeptical look. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you. But the so-called UFO sightings on your planet always turn out to have simple, natural explanations.”

“Oh, I’m sure about this one. I have another witness. Two, if you count the cat.”

“Then why did you wait until
now
to tell me this?” Carly demanded.

“Wait until now? I’ve been here for like five minutes! And when we were in Warcraft, it was
your
turn to do the talking—given that
you
were asking
me
to take an eight-billion-light-year leap of faith!”

Carly didn’t even hear this. “Seriously! Why doesn’t anybody
ever tell me anything
?”

“I promise, I’ll tell you everything, starting now,” I said as soothingly as I could. “Paulie showed up first. He met me in a restaurant, about an hour after you left. He’s a nasty little hoodlum with a bright yellow plumage. And he tawks like he’s from Brooklyn, maybe thirty or forty years ago.”

Carly and Frampton swapped an alarmed glance. “You mean he talks like Vinnie Barbarino,” Frampton said quietly.

I shot him a blank look.

“John Travolta’s character on
Welcome Back, Kotter
?” Carly said, like a teacher chiding me for not having read Chaucer. “
Kotter
was our first exposure to English, obviously. And for a while, everyone spoke it like Vinnie Barbarino. Until we started digging up some of your other shows about six months later.”

“That’s when I started speaking like Tattoo on
Fantasy Island
,” Frampton said. “Zee plane! Zee plane!”

Carly rolled her eyes. “He didn’t stop until yesterday. I told him he wasn’t coming to Earth talking like that.”

“Zee plane! Zee plane!”

“Stifle,” Carly snapped.

Frampton stifled.

“Anyway, a few groups kept up with the Barbarino thing. Strictly thugs, because we learned that Brooklyn had a rough history. So this isn’t good. What else do you know about him?”

“I think his full name is Paulie Stardust. Ring any bells?”

They both shook their heads. “Although that’s probably his Exalted name,” Frampton said.

Carly nodded. “After the Kotter Moment, everyone took on an Exalted name in the Absolute Universal Language that had just been adopted.”

“You mean … English?”

Carly nodded again. “American English. As spoken in sitcoms and on AM radio at the time. Anyway, most people usually go by their original names. So if this Paulie guy is famous, we probably know him by the name he grew up with.”

“If it helps, he said his organization recently lost something insane like a third of the assets in the universe.”

At this, Carly and Frampton exchanged a truly horrified look, and Frampton said something that sounded like “A big ape.”

“Huh?”

“It’s an acronym,” he said. “It stands for the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Intergalactic, Galactic, and Planetary Employees. But we usually just say ‘the Guild’ for short.”

“What is it?”

“The leading union of government employees,” Carly said. “And until recently, they were the wealthiest organization in the universe. But now you have all the money. And I suppose they want it back. Tell us more.”

I gave them the lowdown on my meetings with Özzÿ and the parrot.

“This is incredibly bad,” Frampton said when I finished. He started looking furtively around the empty, featureless room, as if for a hiding place.

“How bad?” I asked.

He turned to Carly.

She folded her arms and shook her head.

“
Dad
bad,” he said, looking at her almost sternly.

I was wondering if this was an intergalactic supervillain with a superlame name when Carly sniffed, “He’s saying we should run off and beg our daddy to fix all of this for us.”

Our
daddy
? I hadn’t pegged these two for brother and sister. But it kind of made sense.

“We have to go to Dad,” Frampton said, suddenly showing something like a backbone. “He’s the only one who can fix this.”

Carly folded her arms tighter and stamped her foot.
“But I haven’t even
tried
yet. And what can
Dad
do that I can’t?”

“He can keep the Secret from being revealed, for one thing,” Frampton said. Somehow, I could hear that capital
S
in there.

“Well duh-hickey, the Secret doesn’t matter anymore,” Carly said. “The Guild has obviously figured it out somehow. They’re already on
Earth
.”

“But there’re a dozen other groups like them that don’t know yet,” Frampton said. “And if the Secret breaks, we’ll have to deal with all of them.”

Carly glared at him.

“Look, what’s more important to you,” he asked. “Proving that you’re as good as Dad? Or actually saving the human race?”

Carly just glared some more. Which pretty much answered that question.

“So, uh,” I ventured. “We’re about to get to the part where you tell me about the Secret, right?”

Frampton nodded. “It’s about the Townshend Line.”

“What about it?”

“It
sucks
,” Carly spat. “It turns out that it’s like ninety-nine percent marketing. But no one actually tries to cross it, because nobody knows how crappy it is.”

Frampton nodded. “This is probably the best-kept secret in the universe. But it’s about to get out.”

“And when it does, so many Who fans will show up that the Earth will collapse into a black hole?” I guessed.

Carly shook her head. “That was a heat-of-the moment thing. Everyone’s gotten used to living with your music since then. Which I guess is why they never made the Townshend Line really robust. People must have been less interested
in bum-rushing the Earth once they all caught their breath. Until this debt thing happened.”