Year Zero (17 page)
Authors: Rob Reid
“No,” she answered.
I immediately relaxed.
Thank God
. Dangle a bunch of cash out there, and you can often talk one, or even two of the major labels into doing an experimental licensing deal—particularly if they think they can somehow screw everyone else over by doing this.
“There’s no way that the settlement can just be limited to each of the major music labels,” Carly continued, to my horror. “It has to be with absolutely everyone in the music industry. Literally. Every music label, big and small. Every music publisher. Every performing rights society, licensing collective, singer/songwriter. In short, it has to be with absolutely every music rights–holder on your planet. In every single nation and territory on Earth. Except North Korea.”
When you face something extraordinary that your entire history has prepared you to appreciate, time can all but stand still for you. They say this happened to Salieri when he first encountered Mozart’s music. To Edwin Hubble when he realized that the universe was expanding. And it happened to me as I considered the vast, utter, and yawning impossibility of Carly’s proposal:
The settlement has to be with absolutely everyone in the music industry. Literally
.
My, but where to begin? The industry has tens, even hundreds of thousands of bickering, autonomous players. A few major labels, hundreds of midlevel players, and countless ankle-biters. It would be impossible to get that many people and entities to agree on
anything
, even if they were all levelheaded, smart, and decisive. And the captains of the music industry are none of the above. Levelheaded? They still think they can wish (or sue) the Internet away despite a decade and a half of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Smart? They pay my firm millions a year to fight that doomed battle, when no number of lawsuits or Judiciary Committee perversions could really delay the arrival of The Future by one nanosecond.
And as for decisive, these people are clinically paralyzed by ignorance, arrogance, politics, bureaucracy, and, above all else,
fear
—fear of doing the wrong thing. And it’s not fear of hurting themselves that has them hamstrung. No—what brings on the night sweats is their fear of doing something that might inadvertently
benefit
someone they hate. And this is a real risk, because the giant music execs seem to hate everyone their businesses touch. They hate each other, for one thing. And boy, do they hate the musicians (spoiled druggie narcissists!). They certainly hate the radio stations that basically advertise their music for free (too much power, the bastards!). And they loathe the online music industry (thieving geek bastards!). They hated the music retailers, back when they still existed (the bastards took too much margin!). They hate the Walmart folks, who account for most of what’s left of physical CD sales (red state Nazi cheapskates!). They’ve always hated the concert industry (
we
should be getting that money!). And they all but despise the
music-buying public (thieves! they’re all a bunch of downloading geek bastard thieving-ass thieves!).
5
“What if we just get all of the major labels on board?” I asked desperately. “They represent about eighty percent of the market. What if we cut deals with them, and only pay the fines to the rest of the industry?” Scary as the majors were, I was even more worried about the hordes of people who
held the rights to just one or two published songs. I shuddered at the thought of merely tracking all of those people down. Forget about cutting deals with every last one of them—it simply couldn’t be done.
“You really don’t have the faintest idea of how much money we’re talking about, do you?” Carly asked.
I shook my head.
She turned to Frampton. “I think we need to spell it out for him.”
He nodded, fired up his stereopticon, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of Carter, Geller & Marks pens that he must have swiped from my desk. “These’ll come in handy,” he said, hanging on to one and setting the others down on a nearby table.
“The main issue,” Carly said, “is that every Refined being in the universe is carrying around personal copies of about twenty-five million of your songs.”
Frampton traced the number
25,000,000
in the air using the pen. The stereopticon tracked his movements, and beamed the digits into the space between us in his achingly gorgeous cursive.
6
“Oh, come on,” I said. “That’s an insane number of songs.” I have 25
thousand
songs on my computer, and it’s way more than I need.
“It’s actually
all
of the songs,” Carly said. “At least, it’s all the songs with any faintly meaningful commercial distribution on Earth.”
“But why do each of you need to have copies of every single one of them?”
“Let me answer that with a question: How many contacts do you store on your iPhone?”
“I don’t know—thousands.” Every name that has ever entered my Outlook software has made its way to my phone.
“And I’ll bet you really only call a few of them. But it’s trivially easy for you to store all that data, so why not? You never know when you might need a certain number. And who has time to organize them anyway? So you might as well keep all of them with you.”
I nodded. That was my thinking precisely.
“It’s the same way for us with music,” Carly continued. “We can store all of your songs in a microscopic space. So why not always have our own copies of all of your music with us? That way, if we ever think about, hear about, or read about any particular song, we’ve already got it. Even if the local network blinks—or even if we’re in a Wrinkle, and can’t access a network. So everybody has a copy of every single song on them at all times. Then, as you know, the maximum fine is $150,000 per song.” Frampton jotted this second number in the air. The stereopticon did the multiplication, and beamed out the number $3,750,000,000,000.00 in a perfect mimicry of his glorious handwriting.
“And that’s uh … thirty-seven …?” I was straining to parse all the zeros.
“Just under four trillion dollars
per being
,” Carly said. This vastly exceeded America’s all-time record budget deficit. “Which wipes out every individual in the universe. And as for the organizations, they typically copy backup data on behalf of the beings that work for them, or are affiliated with them. So they’re wiped out, too. Your idea of paying off twenty percent of the liabilities to get rid of the tiny plaintiffs would require each and every Refined citizen to write a
check for up to $750 billion. That’s way over 10,000 tons of gold, and almost nobody has that kind of money. And then we’d still have to deal with the major labels, obviously. You see, the maximum debt is simply ruinous. And I don’t think you really fathom its magnitude.”
“Okay, fine. Then what
is
the maximum debt? Across everyone?”
“Well, with about four hundred billion galaxies in our bubble of the universe,” Carly said, as Frampton scribbled madly, “and an average of about twenty-five Refined species per galaxy, and about eighty billion beings per species, we get to—that.”
The number $3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 appeared at the bottom of all the calculations.
“$3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.” Frampton said solemnly. “Do you have any idea how much money that is?”
“How do you even
say
$3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000?” I asked.
“Three trillion yottadollars,” he answered. “And I know it’s hard to even conceive of that much money. But if you can imagine that this pen represents a trillion yottadollars,” Frampton held up the pen that he’d just been using. “Then three trillion yottadollars would look … like
this
.” He grabbed two more pens from the table, and gestured grandly at the trio.
“And a yottadollar is …?” I asked.
“One septillion dollars,”
7
Carly said. “That’s the net
worth of maybe twenty trillion Bill Gateses. And to repeat—we’re talking about that, times three
trillion
.”
“I guess the musicians of Earth are all … pretty rich then.”
“The
people
of Earth are all
sickeningly
rich,” Carly corrected me. “You included.”
“But I don’t own any music rights.”
“You don’t have to. You just have to live in a country with at least one remotely successful songwriter, or music label. If you do, then a certain percentage of their gargantuan wealth will go to your government, in taxes. That then becomes sovereign wealth—which is jointly owned by each of a nation’s citizens. And the Refined League’s citizens are listening to music from every nation on Earth. Except North Korea. So all non–North Korean humans are revoltingly rich.”
8
“But a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per track is
just the maximum fine,” I said, frantically. “Jammie Thomas herself was never fined much more than half of that.”
9
Frampton crossed out the three and the first zero from his grand total, and replaced them with a “15” followed by thirty-six zeros. This number was still a bit on the large side. But then I thought of something that should help a whole lot more. “And wait a second—since you guys didn’t actually
know
that you were infringing, I think there’s a provision in the law that could knock the fine
way
down … to something tiny, like two hundred dollars a song!”
“Gee, that would add up to a mere five billion dollars per being,” Carly said, “which would only bankrupt most people a few thousand times over.”
“Oh … right,” I said.
“And besides, we’d need to have
‘no reason to believe’
that we were infringing in order to benefit from the loophole you’re talking about,” Carly added, quoting directly from the law in question. “And we’ve had access to every law on your books since you first started posting them to your Internet—which surely qualifies as ‘having a reason to believe’
that we were infringing. So I’m afraid we can’t fix the ridiculous cosmic mess that your demented laws have created quite that easily.”
That did it. “That
our laws
created? I’ve got news for you, Carly. We created
our
laws for
us
. We never asked
you
or anybody else to follow them.
You’re
the ones with the deranged honor code that says it’s better to exterminate a species than to violate the letter of one of its idiotic laws!”
“
Nothing
in our code says
any
thing about exterminating
any
species,” Carly snarled. “Particularly not humanity—which the Refined League adores, respects, and reveres in ways that human minds are too puny, backward, and pathetically underpowered to comprehend!”
“Well, if we’re so revered and backward, why didn’t you try looking out for us a bit? By—oh, I don’t know, maybe glancing at our legal code before making jizillions of yotta-copies of our music? And by the way, the Copyright Damages Improvement Act was written decades
after
you set up shop in Manhattan. If just one of you had stopped having songasms long enough to look it over, we never would have gotten into this mess!”
“But we had waited for
most of the universe’s history
to discover your music. Compared to that, the time since the Kotter Moment has been the batting of an eyelash! We were just indulging in a fleeting appreciation of your ingenious art before exposing ourselves to the rest of your barbaric society!”
“And you couldn’t even have a
cheap intern
glance over our legal code?”
“It’s not that easy, Nick. Interns are unionized in our society, and—”
The entire apartment suddenly vibrated gently, kind of
like a cellphone receiving a text message (a really huge cellphone that you and two other people are standing inside of).
“The omnicab’s here,” Frampton announced, clearly relieved to change the subject. He walked over to a door just to the left of the giant window looking onto the city, popped it open and—stepped right out of the building. Carly followed him. And there they stood, suspended in midair, impatiently waving for me to join them. I tiptoed to the edge of the abyss. Using both arms to brace myself firmly on the inner doorjamb, I peered down. There was … nothing. Just miles of empty space between us and the ground.
Carly heaved a sigh, and somehow walked across the air toward me and slid an arm around my waist. Then in one fluid motion, she tipped me backward, spun me ninety degrees, and popped me right through the doorway toward her. This happened so fast that I didn’t even move my arms from their raised, bracing position until I was already beside her on the far side.
My pores instantly doused me with ice-cold sweat as adrenaline flooded my system. And—nothing happened. It took my body several seconds to accept that it wasn’t falling. “How are we … doing this?” I finally managed to half gasp.
“Doing what?” Carly asked, as if we were just sitting around the kitchen table on a sunny afternoon.
“Floating, in … midair,” I managed.
“Nick, we’re standing on solid concrete!”
But as she said this, Frampton suddenly fixed us both with a look of bug-eyed horror. He caught Carly’s eye and slowly shook his head, pointing downward. They both looked at their feet. And then—just as Wile E. Coyote stops defying gravity the moment he realizes there’s no ground beneath him—we started to drop.
1.
Nor would I say
abjectly terrified
, because that, too, would be a shameful understatement.
2.
And yes, “Pre-Kotter” and “Post-Kotter” are both abbreviated PK. Being as muddle-headed as everyone else in the months following the Kotter Moment, the Refined lawmakers didn’t consider how much confusion this would cause until it was too late. There was a grassroots movement to fix things with a PK/AK dating system (Pre-Kotter//
Anno
Kotter). But it was doomed, because Refined legislative decisions can only be overturned if a subsequent vote passes with a larger proportion of votes than the first one—and the vote that instituted Pre- and Post-Kotter time was unanimous, so it will have to stand forever.
Luckily, the Refined League has done much better by its adoption of our years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as time units (which the legislature also mandated in those brief, heady days of total obeisance to humanity’s awesomeness). All time was previously measured in “Standard Intervals,” which are derived from the half-life of iodine-129 (
129
I). Since
129
I has a half-life of 15.7 million years, this was useful in measuring things like the universe’s age (876 Standard Intervals). But daily life was larded with clumsy sentences like, “I’m off to mail that letter—I’ll be back in 0.000000000000605 Standard Intervals,” or “she’s way too young for him—she’s only 0.0000153!” Everyone was also constantly depressed by the thought that they’d never live to see their first birthdays.
3.
And I mean this literally. The Advanced Societies have hacked every firewall on our Internet in their relentless study of our musical history, and they found that “Malignant Acoustics” was once a key domain of Soviet military research. The program flourished until 1932, when the playback of an especially lethal recording killed everyone within ten miles of the lab that created it. Of course, Stalin would have gladly killed everyone in a
hundred
-mile radius for such a titillating new weapon. But the loss of the entire research team ended its development. As for the local civilian deaths, a cover-up pinned the blame on a lichen famine (lichen being a staple of the Soviet diet back then). The whole episode is memorialized in “Experiment IV,” a majestically haunting 1986 hit by Kate Bush, who must be an ex-KGB agent or something.
4.
While it sucks that this system plugged a loophole that could have saved humanity from imminent destruction and all, it does have some cool practical advantages. For instance, should you ever pop over to the nearby Andromeda galaxy, you’ll be able to tip the bellman, load up on souvenirs, and pay your hotel bill by converting dollars into the local currency based on the spot rates for certain metals. You’ll also be able to tell any passing Andromedan roughly what he owes on that pirated copy of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” that he’s been rocking out to all morning. It could be as much as six pounds of platinum. Which will be unwelcome news, given that your average Andromedan earns maybe three ounces of platinum per month. He’ll probably curse you a blue streak, just like Carly tends to when the subject of our fines comes up. But while the novelty value of watching a hot young nun swear like a sailor is immense, hearing that from an eight-ton cockroach covered in genitalia-like tendrils would be another matter. And creatures fitting this description are actually on the cuddly end of the spectrum in Andromeda.
5.
And ironically, the music label brass reserve their harshest bile for anyone who manages to rescue them from looming oblivion. For instance, you could power a city on the hatred that any decent label exec feels toward MTV. This loathing began the moment MTV put the decrepit record business back in the forefront of youth culture in the eighties, ushering in an era of unprecedented prosperity.
“Bastards!”
the label guys still snarl if you ask them about this today. “They were makin’ money
offa our stuff
!” A more recent case is Apple. Back in the late nineties, the labels sued many of the early online music pioneers out of existence. Then, for years after that, they refused to let the survivors sell their catalogs. This amounted to embargoing their music from the legions of young folks who wanted it in a digital form, and insisting that these would-be customers either steal it, or do without it. Thus they managed to drive an entire generation of music lovers to discover and master the tools of digital piracy, and—surprise!—music sales collapsed. Eventually the major labels released limited chunks of their catalogs online. But they did this with so many restrictions, exceptions, asterisks, and raised middle fingers that the pirating hordes they had midwifed barely noticed. Then a miraculous lifeline appeared when Apple launched the dead-simple iPod music player, and then later connected it up to an online store. Suddenly, people were buying downloadable music in droves. For a decade after that, Apple was the main bright spot in the labels’ business, growing when almost all other channels were shrinking, and gradually becoming the world’s number one music retailer. And of course, this earned them gales of rage from the labels.
“The cheapskate geek bastards!”
they’ll snarl if you catch them after a couple of drinks on the right night. “They have too much power! They take too much margin! AND they’re makin’ money
offa our stuff
!”
6.
Penmanship being one of the many Noble Arts for which pretty much any nonhuman could win international awards on Earth.
7.
Carly later explained that she derived the term
yottadollar
from the language of data storage, which is pretty expressive when it comes to big numbers. If you’re over twenty-five, you may remember that we used to measure hard drives in megabytes—which are units of a million bytes. By the midnineties we started counting in gigabytes—or billion-byte units. These days, most new hard drives are measured in terabytes. Meanwhile, big boys like Google work mainly in petabytes—the next thousand-X move up the food chain. To measure all of humanity’s data, you have to go up at least another notch to exabytes (it’s said that everything ever uttered by every person in human history could fit into a five-exabytes text file). And if that’s not enough, a thousand exabytes make up a zettabyte (a word I hadn’t heard before Carly introduced me to it, but Wikipedia tells me it’s real). Finally, there are a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte—not that any human has ever seen one. And just as a yottabyte is one septillion bytes, a yottadollar is one septillion dollars.
8.
To give you a sense of how much money is involved here, consider Greenland, which has the planet’s second-least popular music catalog. Exactly one of their songs made it to the Refined League (by way of a world music album that sold briefly in a few Starbucks stores, and ended up on Napster). The cut that each Greenlander is hypothetically due from that one song vastly exceeds the Earth’s entire GDP.
9.
Ms. Thomas is a legendary figure in my line of work—akin, say, to the first enemy soldier captured during a world war. The first file swapper to actually go to trial, she was sued for sharing an odd mix of twenty-four songs (ranging from Vanessa Williams’s unspeakably schmaltzy “Save the Best for Last” to Def Leppard’s porn-tastic metal anthem “Pour Some Sugar on Me”). After the first jury found against her (in all of five minutes), her fine was amended so many times via appeals, judicial motions, and a retrial that I’ve lost track of what she’s owed over the years—but it’s been as low as a couple thousand dollars per track, and as high as $80,000 each.
