Year Zero (9 page)

“Fine, I guess.”

“See? You missed that,” the projection said in that toneless voice.

“I beg your pardon?”

“When I asked you how you were feeling, my visual cues conveyed sarcasm, condescension, an absence of genuine concern for your well-being, carnal interest in your female companion, and an utter lack of physical strength or stamina on my part. You should have belted me.”

“But you’re just a projection!”

“True. And I am also just a computer algorithm.” The image unleashed another achingly beautiful kaleidoscopic pattern as it said this. Then, “I cannot believe that you let me get away with that.”

“With what?”

“With this.” The sublime light pattern repeated. “Ghastly wars involving entire galaxies could be justifiably waged over far less insulting conduct.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“Thank you,” the concierge said, flashing another gorgeous pattern that was no doubt a grievous insult. “I have now scoured your Internet, and have identified several ersatz concierges that were created by your own society, and are in current and active use throughout it. I strongly suggest that you allow me to import and implement one of them.”

I caught Manda’s eye. She shrugged. “Sure,” I said.

“Earth’s most popular ersatz concierge has had hundreds of millions of users—although its usage has declined rather dramatically in recent years. Shall we try that one?”

I really, really, really should have asked why the thing was shedding users. Instead I shrugged and said, “Why not?”

The dazzling, octodimensional projection instantly transformed into a flat rendering of a paperclip with googly eyes.

“
That’s
an ersatz concierge?” Manda whispered after a shocked silence. “Dear God …”

As she said this, the paperclip’s eyes darted cunningly from side to side. Then a cartoon bubble appeared above its head reading, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?”

It was Clippy—the despised emcee of Microsoft Office. I knew him well. Because while he had allegedly retired long ago, my firm—like so many others—had clung to the Clippy-infested Windows XP operating system for years beyond its expiration date, staving off the expense and trauma of a Windows
upgrade
. That process had finally started eighteen months back. But copyright associates are low in the priority queue—and I had been slated to get upgraded “next month” for as long as I could remember.

“Okay, go back,” I said.

Clippy stared at me impassively.

“Stop it. Cut it out. Go back. Use the other interface. Use the gem thing.”

As I said this, Clippy’s eyes started darting again as he scribbled on a notepad with an animated pencil. Another cartoon bubble appeared. “It looks like you’re making a list. Should I format it?”

I fell into an appalled silence. Then Manda gave it a shot. “We do not want to use this ersatz concierge,” she enunciated clearly. “Please return us to the previous one.”

Clippy gazed back with bovine incomprehension.

We went on to try every command, plea, and threat that we could think of. But we couldn’t get back to the prior concierge.
Luckily, the stereopticon’s projector mode was still working fine (“If you download Windows Media Player, I’m throwing you under a bus,” Manda warned it). But we wanted the old concierge back. We had a thousand questions, and Clippy couldn’t answer any of them.

Or could he?

“Okay, so we’re stuck with Clippy,” Manda said, over an hour later. “But I’ll bet the same knowledge base is still sitting beneath him. We just have to figure out how to access it. So let’s think—is there
any
way to get useful information out of Microsoft Office?”

Now that was a stumper. “Well … it has a Help menu, right?”

“It does. But that’s barely useful when you actually have questions about Office. You’re thinking the right way. But we need to get the software to kick out information that’s not just about the software itself.”

“Well … it puts squiggly red lines under words that are spelled wrong, right?”

Manda nodded slowly. “Right. So it must have some kind of embedded dictionary. Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”

I grabbed both from my desk, and handed them over. She positioned the paper on the coffee table right under Clippy and wrote “S-P-E-L-I-N-G.” Clippy got that pervert-on-the-playground look again, and a squiggly red line appeared beneath her word. A small menu popped up next to it. It included four guesses at what Manda was trying to spell, an “Ignore” command, and a few other options.

Manda touched a finger to the correct spelling of “spelling,” and the word was immediately corrected. For a moment we thought the device had actually rearranged the ink
on the page. But it was just projecting the correct spelling in a way that blotted out the misspelled word. With the correct spelling now displayed, a new menu appeared. One of the options was “Look Up.” Manda touched this, and a definition for “spelling” appeared.

“Cool,” I said. “But I don’t really see how—”

She was already scribbling something new on the page. G-A-R-D-I-A-N.

“Brilliant,” I said, realizing what she was up to.

The new word got a squiggly red line. She selected the proper spelling for “Guardian,” and selected the Look Up command as soon as it appeared. The first definition to come up was “Protector.” The second was far more interesting:

“Pay dirt,” I whispered.

Manda gave me an amazed look. “So why would Paulie and Özzÿ think that
you’re
one of those?”

I shrugged. “Maybe Carly and Frampton’s visit to me made me seem … important to them, in some way?”

“Despite the fact that they don’t know who Carly and Frampton are.”

“Or maybe
because
they don’t know who Carly and Frampton are. I mean, they could be nobodies. They came to me because of a dumb mistake, after all. So maybe the parrot’s jumping to conclusions based on their screwup.”

Manda nodded slowly. “Possibly. Then again …” She looked at me intently. “Maybe the parrot’s right.”

“What?”

“I mean, are you
sure
you’re not a Guardian?”

“Of course I’m sure. I don’t even know what a Guardian is!”

“Well, maybe it’s like being the Dalai Lama, and you don’t know it yourself until someone shows up and tells you.”

I considered this. “Well, maybe. But … a parrot?”

“Probably not, but … hey, how about this? Are you totally sure you were born on Earth? I mean, you’re not adopted or anything, are you?”

“No, my mom gave birth to me. In
Denver
.”

“And you’ve seen the birth certificate? The long-form one, I mean.”

“Manda!”

Eventually we turned our attention back to Clippy, but he didn’t have a lot more to tell us. We spent the next hour scribbling countless words onto the page (Humans, Earth, Carly, and so forth). Almost everything produced a simple, standard-English definition. The one word we scored on was “metallicam”—the element that Özzÿ had apparently come to Earth to “handle.”

“Good God …” Manda said as we read this. “It’s like plutonium on steroids. What are these creatures up to?”

I shook my head slowly. “Whatever it is, it … has something to do with our music.”

Manda nodded. “With all those Who fans out there.”

“Yeah, and that strange license that Carly asked me about.”

“So what do we do now?” Manda said after a long pause. “Call the FBI? The air force? NASA?”

I shook my head. “We may as well go straight to Bellevue and ask to be fitted with straitjackets.”

“Not if we show them the stereopticon.” She held it up. “If this isn’t proof that we’ve met aliens, then what could be?”

“It’s an extraordinary machine. But it won’t make anyone believe in little green men. It’s much easier to think that the CIA—or Apple—can build something that cool in a secret lab.”

Manda nodded slowly, unconvinced.

“And speaking of Apple—I hear they can shut down a stolen iPad remotely,” I continued. “And I’m sure Özzÿ can do that with his stereopticon. So by tomorrow, we may not have anything more than a clear plastic chunk to show off.”

“But you can convince anyone to believe anything—even
aliens
. I mean, I just saw you turn Özzÿ into putty. You’re the best talker I know. It’s like your … superpower.”

Well, that was an awfully nice way of putting it. And maybe my knack for steering through loaded conversations was something of a white-collar superpower. I had seen others practiced in the workplace, after all.
¹
But as anyone
who has one will tell you, the real trick with a superpower is knowing its limitations. And mine has plenty. It can help you ace a job interview, but it won’t make you partner. It can get you a second date, but not a girlfriend. And when it comes to Saving the World—well, give me invisibility, telekinesis, or omniscience any day.

With that in mind, I shook my head. “I may be kind of smooth, sometimes. But I’m still just a midlevel lawyer who can’t tell the Big Dipper from Ursa Major.
²
If I thought I’d have an ounce of credibility with him, I’d take the stereopticon straight to Carl Sagan.
³
But I don’t know the first thing about cosmetology.
⁴
So if I tried to tell him that we’d swiped it from an alien, I’d probably end up drinking hemlock in a loony bin. Just like Galileo.”

“You’re right,” Manda agreed, suddenly looking quite concerned. “You should absolutely not talk to any scientists about this.”

“It’s a deal.”

“So now what?” she asked.

“Sleep, I’d say. Then, as for tomorrow, I should go into work first thing. If all of this really is connected to our music, then my firm’s probably the best place in the world to figure out things like Carly’s licensing situation.”

“But isn’t that practically impossible?”

“
Getting
her the license is probably completely impossible. But that may not be necessary.”

Manda gave me a hopeful look. “Why not?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about this thing called the Berne Convention. It’s over a hundred years old, and basically says that each nation that signs it will honor, and help to enforce, the copyrights of the other signatories. Every major country in the world has signed it, and most of the ankle-biters, too.”

“But not many alien planets.”

I nodded. “Exactly. And I can’t think of any reason why the Convention would apply to actions taken in nonsignatory territories. So even if the aliens are determined to follow our laws for some deranged reason, our own legal frameworks probably don’t indicate that our laws apply to them.”

“So Carly’s people can probably do whatever they want to without a license.”

“Exactly. Which means there may not be any problems at all. Not with her, and not with Özzÿ and Paulie—although I want to do a bit of research into this to be sure.”

“Then you should definitely go to the office tomorrow. Is there anyone there who could help you with this?”

I nodded again. “Potentially. I’ve got this weekly meeting at eight that’s led by a woman named Judy Sherman. She’s one of the most powerful partners in the firm, and she knows the copyright laws inside and out. In fact, she literally wrote a lot of them. She also knows everyone who matters in the music industry. Not only that, but she must have pictures of most of them with goats, or something. I mean, they’ll seriously do whatever she tells them. So maybe I should try to recruit her somehow?”

Manda nodded energetically. “That sounds perfect.”

“One problem though. She kind of hates me. In fact, she’s probably about to fire me.”

Manda thought about this. “Well, what if Özzÿ’s heavy metal orb tells her not to?”

“What do you mean?”

Manda hefted the stereopticon. “I know you’re skeptical. But if I can figure out how to work this thing, it could be an awfully persuasive tool. Seriously—if she sees it in action the way we did tonight, she’ll believe whatever you tell her about the aliens.”

I nodded slowly, only partly convinced. “You may be right. So assuming someone doesn’t disable it, you can call in sick or something, and work on it some more while I’m at the office.”

Manda nodded. “But as a first step, I’ll try to get the old concierge back. There’s a ton that we could learn from him.”

“Totally agree. Also, at eleven oh-six, I’m meeting with Carly and Frampton in that ‘Earth-based dataspace’—whatever that is. Assuming they actually send me the glasses that I’ll need to interface with it beforehand, like they said.”

Our plan now set, I walked Manda and Meowhaus down the hall and got a chaste good-night hug, then went home to toss and turn the night away.

The next morning
I found an empty seat next to my buddy Randy Cox in the main conference room at exactly 7:59. I’d hit the snooze alarm three times, and arrived with a minute to spare at the cost of not having breakfast. My stomach was growling audibly.

“Dude,” Randy said in a private murmur. “Why don’t you grab one of those crêpes?” He pointed at a side table, where mounds of Manhattan’s freshest fruit and finest pastries were arrayed.