Year Zero (22 page)

My second Wrinkle
started out like the first one. But it ended in an eerie ultraviolet haze that seemed to go on infinitely, in all directions. I felt paralyzed and half mad, and I lost all sense of time—unable to tell if seconds or centuries were ticking by. Then it was over, and we were in our pod, high above a topaz landscape that was covered with an intricate network of serpentine rivers and tiny lakes.

“What was that?” I asked, relieved to be out of there.

“We passed through the penumbra of a gamma ray burst,” Carly said. “It happens every so often. Gamma ray bursts are the most violent events in the universe, and they severely warp the fabric of space and time.” She looked at Frampton. “How long were we in there?”

He consulted a display from his stereopticon. “About five hours.”

“Wow,”
I whispered, unsure if I was surprised at how long or how brief this was.

“We got lucky,” Carly said. “Sometimes it’s days. And we don’t have days.”

“Right,” I said, alarmed. “The episode airs around ten tomorrow morning, doesn’t it? What time is it now?”

“Not quite seven at night on the East Coast,” Frampton said. “And we’re five minutes from the Townshend Line’s headquarters.”

“Got it,” I said, shaking my head to clear it out. “Well, while we’re heading over there, why don’t you tell me more about the Pluhhhs. They sound like total badasses.”

This put both Frampton and Carly into stitches.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“First of all, it’s not
the
pluhhhs, it’s just pluhhhs,” Carly managed through her giggles. “And second, pluhhhs are anything but badasses. In fact, they’re the most tedious, irrelevant, and forgettable species in the entire cosmos.”

“Which is why they took on the job of quarantining your planet,” Frampton said.

Carly nodded. “Back when every Refined being in the universe wanted to storm the Earth to catch some live music, the team responsible for keeping them all out was guaranteed to become the least popular group of beings in existence. So only the folks who
already were
the least popular beings in existence would take the job. Enter pluhhhs.”

They’re called pluhhhs, she explained, and not Pluhhhs, pluhhh’s, nor (certainly)
the
pluhhhs because they’re too boring and inconsequential to merit any capitalization,
punctuation mark, or definite article.
¹
They hail from a planet that spawned ten different intelligent species deep in its evolutionary past. The other nine were all hulking, violent, venomous carnivores. In the local schools (which everyone attended together, due to a well-meaning but ultimately disastrous court ruling), gang activity and interspecies strife pushed annual homicide rates into the double digits—and any faintly interesting or charismatic pluhhh was taunted, wedgied, and devoured long before it could reach reproductive age. Under this evolutionary pressure, pluhhhs gradually became a stunningly monotonous and unassertive species. Eventually they were so bland, passive, and inoffensive that their population was able to explode and dominate the planet. This caused its other intelligent inhabitants to become so lethally bored and disengaged from the world that they lost all interest in life, and gradually died out.

“But pathetic, drab, and trivial as they are, pluhhhs should be able to shed some light on what’s happening with the Townshend Line,” Carly said.

“They also have access to the Wrinkle Queue,” Frampton added.

Carly nodded. “It displays all the Wrinkles that are booked throughout the universe at any given time. It’ll let us see if Paulie’s arranging to bring anything to Earth.”

“Like metallicam?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

I shuddered. “Well, it sounds like it’s a good thing we came. Is there anything else that we should get from the Pluhhhs while we’re here?”

“pluhhhs!”
they corrected me.
²

“And yes, there is one other thing,” Carly said. “Özzÿ told you that he and Paulie are staying at ‘the local base.’ I’m sure this is the music collection and copying facility under Grand Central, because it’s a Guild operation, and there’s no other Refined outpost anywhere near Earth. pluhhhs know all about this facility, because it uses the Townshend Line’s infrastructure to transmit music out of New York. So they can probably tell us how to access the base from the city’s surface.”

“Interesting,” I said. “But what would we do there?”

“The species that runs the New York operation is gentle and friendly. So I doubt they know a thing about what their uppermost bosses are planning for Earth. If you tell them what’s happening, you may be able to drive a wedge between them and Paulie.”

As she said this, my jacket pocket started to hum with a familiar buzzing.

“What the hell,” I said, pulling out my phone.

“Text messages?” Carly guessed.

I nodded. About a dozen had queued up since I’d left Earth, and they were all coming in now.

“While it’s relaying all that music out of New York, the Townshend Line infrastructure picks up other electromagnetic signals, too,” she explained. “I guess your SMS frequencies
are among them.
³
But don’t even think about replying—it’s a one-way thing.”

I looked back at my screen. There were five increasingly shrill texts from Judy demanding to know where the hell I was, and how far I’d gotten in procuring some Milk Bone for Fido. She’d sent the last one about an hour before. It simply said GUESS I WAS WRONG WHEN I DECIDED I WAS WRONG ABOUT YOU.

Dammit!
Judy’s outrage was understandable, as it’s unheard of for an associate to go AWOL on a senior partner right before a key meeting. Of course, the terminal career ramifications of this would be entirely moot if I didn’t derail the metallicam plot. But on that far more important front, I
needed
to recruit Judy as an ally. She might then help me recruit Fido, or the CEO of the giant music label that we were also supposed to meet with tomorrow. If anyone could arrange the sweeping licenses that we needed, it would be the three of them, working together. But that wasn’t going to happen if Judy cut me off.

There was also a series of texts from Manda. It began with some updates on her exploration of the stereopticon’s feature set. Once she mastered the voice mode, she tried her hand at rendering objects in ways that made them seem physically present. Around 2:00, she’d sent me an image of herself posing with a cartoonish baby elephant in front of my couch.
By the way, where tf are you
she added in text. An hour later, she sent a shot of an entirely real-looking baby elephant winding up to smash its trunk through my plasma screen.
DUmbo’s getting really worried about you, CALL DAMMIT or the tv gets it.
A couple hours later, she sent a photorealistic rendering
of Judy popping out of a giant layered birthday cake in my kitchen.
Judy promises a raise and a piece of cake if youd call. OK fine the cake is a lie but seriously WHERE R YOU am really starting to panic.

As I was processing all of this, the omnicab started dropping rapidly toward the ground. Seeing two messages from Pugwash in the queue, I decided that whatever he was pestering me about would have to wait.

The omnicab touched down beside a structure that looked like a small adobe hut. Its sole feature was an ornate door etched with arabesque patterns that were so beautiful they made my eyes ache. “One more thing before we go in,” Carly said. “While it’s easy enough to grasp the concept of pluhhhs, you’ll find that it’s very difficult to maintain awareness of an actual pluhhh individual. They’re just too tiresome to merit the slightest bit of attention. So you’ll have to concentrate very hard whenever you interact with one.”

We exited the omnicab and the glorious door slid up. It opened directly onto a platform that was perched at the pinnacle of a soaring chamber of cathedral height. As soon as we all stepped onto it, the platform swooshed us soundlessly downward.

The chamber’s floor was staffed by a teeny receptionist. Heeding Carly’s instructions, I locked my eyes on her and focused intently. She looked like a gray, bedraggled lemur, with hunched shoulders and patchy fur. As we approached, she glanced up and froze in place. With that, her body lifted off her chair, twisting violently at the torso. It completed a full circle, then dropped to the floor where it sprawled, arms and legs pointing upward at obtuse angles. With that, her retinas ignited.

Eccentric as this greeting was, it almost put me to sleep. “What was that all about?” I yawned.

“Fame differential,” Frampton whispered. “It affects almost everybody we meet—but no one as badly as pluhhhs.”

I looked to Carly for help. “Fame is a by-product of Conscious Attention,” she explained, “which itself is one of the six fundamental forces of nature as organized under String Reality.
⁴
As such, it creates measurable fields that can impact the physical world.”

Frampton nodded. “Kind of like a magnet.”

“Fame stores up in a sort of battery that’s attached to your body in the fifth dimension,” Carly continued.
⁵
“Whenever you, or something you’ve created, draws attention, a charge builds up in that battery. Then when you encounter another conscious being who recognizes you and knows of your works, your fame fields interact. If there’s a very large difference between them, the being with the weaker field is impacted in some way.”
⁶

“Usually they just act really, really stupid, and do whatever we tell them to,” Frampton said.

“But pluhhhs are so thoroughly irrelevant that they have this sort of antifame charged up in their batteries,” Carly said, “and when they recognize someone hugely famous like me or Frampton … well, you’ve just seen the effects. Come on, the control room is this way.”

We walked down a short hallway and entered a towering gallery that was dominated by a wall of massive 3D monitors displaying renderings of Earth from every conceivable angle. There were aerial views of cities, topographical maps with minute resolution, heat maps, real-time population maps, and brilliant Earth crescents rising above the lunar surface. In front of this was an enormous bank of switches and buttons, and a sea of brightly colored lights that winked on and off in frenetic patterns.
⁷
Five gray pluhhhs were milling about in the foreground.

Frampton strode in like the giant celebrity he is, making little pistol shapes with his fingers that he waved at the team. “Love your work, boys. Love your work!” he said.
Four of them made garbled sounds and contorted right into variations on the receptionist’s akimbo position. Frampton turned to the one who was still standing. “Hey there, mlah.
⁸
So great to see you again.”

mlah quavered, but stood his ground.

“mlah has a remarkably celebrity-resistant constitution,” Carly told me. “He’s the one who helped us get to Earth yesterday.”

“How’d he do that?”

Carly blinked. “I have no idea, actually. Because of the fame field, Frampton and I usually just sort of … ask for things, and they happen.”

“So, mlah,” I said, trying my best to focus on the monotonous gray blur in front of me. He locked eyes with me instantly—no doubt relieved to be talking to a fellow nobody for a moment. “How’d you, uh … enable these two to go to Earth yesterday?”

“I suspended the force-field generator temporarily,” mlah said in this impossibly flat, bland voice that was hard to heed even slightly.

“Hey, speaking of Earth, we have a little question for you,” Frampton said.

mlah braced himself and looked at his incandescently famous visitor.

“Remember how you told us that someone else crossed the Townshend Line right after we got back from Earth?” Frampton said, then paused and checked his diver’s watch, his concentration clearly going to hell. Then, “Oh yeah.
Any, uh, guesses as to how they might have gotten through that … incredibly awesome force-field thing of yours?”

“We were wondering if you’d ever ask,” mlah managed. “When you and Carly crossed the Townshend Line’s boundary after I suspended the field generator, it had the effect of destroying the force field. Completely and permanently.”

“Huh. That’s incredibly interesting,” Frampton said, clearly not the slightest bit interested in any of this boring-ass crap. “Why’d it, uh, have to go and do that?”