Year Zero

Aliens suck at music
. And it’s not for a lack of trying. They’ve been at it for eons, but have yet to produce even a faintly decent tune. If they had, we’d have detected them ages ago. We’ve been scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life for generations, after all. And we’ve actually picked up thousands of alien anthems, slow dances, and ballads. But the music’s so awful that
it’s always mistaken for the death rattle of a distant star. It’s seriously that bad.

Or more accurately—we’re that good. In fact, humanity creates the universe’s best music, by far. We owe this to a freakish set of lucky breaks. For instance, the combined gravitational pulls of the various bodies in our solar system tug the fluids of our inner ears in
juuuuust
the right way to give us an exquisite sense of rhythm. Certain deeply bewitching tonal patterns are meanwhile wired right into our brain stems, because they map to the sounds
that our distant
ancestors’ ancient prey once made. These two, and several other long-shot rarities combine to give us musical superpowers that no other civilization can match.

The irony is that in every other artistic form that matters to the rest of the cosmos, we’re the dullards. In sculpture, fashion, and synchronized swimming, we rank in the bottom percentile, universe-wide. Découpage and pyrotechnics aren’t even considered to be high expressive forms here, grotesquely stunting our development in those fields. And while we did manage to get off to a decent start in stained glass, we lost all interest in it just a century
before LEDs and nanopigments would have taken it to radical new levels. Meanwhile, the plays, dramatic series, and films that we make are in the “so bad, it’s good” category, with our crowning achievements providing ironic late-night amusement to smirking hipsters on countless planets.

All of this is according to the standards of the Refined League—an obnoxiously brilliant and peaceful confederation of alien societies that spans the universe. To join it, primitives like us first have to attain a certain middling mastery of science. Pull that off, and we’ll be promoted to the Refined ranks. We’ll then be handed all of the technological secrets that we haven’t yet cracked for ourselves, as a sort of cosmic graduation gift. And that
will free us up to spend the rest of eternity creating and consuming great art—just like every other Refined species.

The bad news is that most societies destroy themselves with nuclear, biological, or nanoweapons long before achieving Refined status. And when this happens, Refined observers do nothing to stop the annihilation. This may sound heartless. But it’s actually a prudent form of self-defense—since
any society that’s violent and stupid enough to self-destruct on H-bombs might easily destroy the entire universe if it survives long enough to invent
something with real firepower.

Humanity first drew attention to itself back when the Pioneer 10 probe crossed a certain threshold out beyond the orbit of Jupiter. When a planet lobs something that far into space, it tends to mean that intelligence has arisen on it. And so the Refined League’s equivalent of an admissions office—which was already dimly aware of the Earth’s existence
¹
—decided to check in to
see if we had any artistic potential (as well as to see if we planned to keep throwing crap into space, because at some point, we might hit something). A scouting craft soon entered our solar system. It detected several broadcast signals, and routed the strongest one (WABC-TV in New York) to a distant team of anthropologists—who then found themselves watching a first-run episode of the hit sitcom
Welcome Back, Kotter
(the one in which Arnold Horshack joins a zany youth cult).

Before I get into what happened next, I should mention that music is the most cherished of the forty so-called Noble Arts that Refined beings revere and dedicate their lives to. It
is indeed viewed as being many times Nobler than the other thirty-nine Arts combined. And remember—their music sucks.

The first alien
Kotter
watchers initially doubted that we had music at all, because everything about the show screamed that we were cultural and aesthetic dunderheads. Primitive sight gags made them groan. Sloppy editing made them chuckle. Wardrobe choices practically made them wretch.

And then, it happened.

The show ended. The credits rolled, and the theme music began. And suddenly, the brainless brutes that they’d been pitying were beaming out the greatest creative achievement that the wider universe had ever witnessed.

Welcome back, Welcome back, Welcome back
. On Earth, these lyrics were a humble cue to hit the bathroom before
What’s Happening!!
came on. But everywhere else, they were the core of an opus so sublime that the Refined League reset its calendars to start counting time from the moment it was first detected. And so, October 13, 1977; 8:29 p.m. EST became the dawning moment of Year Zero to the rest of the universe.

Countless Refined beings perished before the new era was even a minute old. The delight triggered by the
Kotter
song released so much endorphin-like goo in their brains that they hemorrhaged, bringing on immediate, ecstatic death.
Welcome back, Welcome back, Welcome back!
Others died from neglecting sleep, meals, or bathroom breaks as they obsessively replayed the
Kotter
theme over the ensuing weeks.

The period following the “Kotter Moment” (as it’s known) passed in a haze. Everyone was so stunned that it
was months before they thought to scan our TV spectrum more deeply. Once they did, more waves of rhapsodic joy swept the cosmos.
Good Times. Happy Days. Sanford and Son
. Each new theme song added to the ecstasy—and to the casualties. Soon they discovered the Top 40 stations of the AM spectrum. They listened to
“Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, and the immortal “Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste of Honey. More rhapsodic joy. More hemorrhaging brains.

But with every deadly new discovery, the survivors got a bit hardier.
Kotter
was like an inoculation that toughened everyone up for Olivia Newton-John, who in turn prepared the cosmos for Billy Joel. So as the music got marginally less awful, the mortality rate paradoxically dropped. And by the time they started exploring the FM frequencies, most Refined beings were ready for what they found. By then it was mid-1978. The FM dial was jammed with what we now call Classic
Rock, and some stations occasionally played entire albums from start to finish. The last big die-off occurred when WPLJ broadcast both sides of
Led Zeppelin IV
. And anyone who survived that had what it took to safely listen to even the most stellar rock ’n’ roll.

Decades later, the exaltation inspired by our works had barely diminished. But the universe had ignored its inboxes, errands, and to-do lists for decades. And so, everyone reluctantly started returning to business. Politicians started governing again. Accountants started accounting again. Most significantly, alien anthropologists began studying other aspects of human society.

And that’s when it hit them. They owed us an ungodly amount of money.

Even if she’d realized
that my visitors were aliens who had come to our office to initiate contact with humanity, Barbara Ann would have resented their timing. Assistants at our law firm clear out at five-thirty, regardless—and that was almost a minute ago.

“I don’t have anyone scheduled,” I said, when she called to grouse about the late arrival. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know, Nick. They weren’t announced.”

“You mean they just sort of … turned up at your desk?” I stifled a sneeze as I said this. I’d been fighting a beast of a cold all week.

“Pretty much.”

This was odd. Reception is two key-card-protected floors above us, and no one gets through unaccompanied, much less unannounced. “What do they look like?” I asked.

“Strange.”

“Lady Gaga strange?” Carter, Geller & Marks has some weird-looking clients, and Gaga flirts with the outer fringe, when she’s really gussied up.

“No—kind of stranger than that. In a way. I mean, they look like they’re from … maybe a couple of cults.”

From
what
? “Which ones?”

“One definitely looks Catholic,” Barbara Ann said. “Like a … priestess? And the other one looks … kind of Talibanny. You know—robes and stuff?”