Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  Judy had given me a whole list of agents, managers, and label executives to reach out to. But I left that for the afternoon. For now, it was much more urgent that I review the Berne Convention. I scanned through its dozens of articles, and saw no claims of jurisdiction over acts of piracy that occur outside of its signatory nations. Just as I thought. And while a huge number of countries had signed it, all were firmly situated on the Earth’s surface. Since this should obviate any licensing concerns that Carly (or any other extraterrestrial) might have, I felt confident that there’d be a solution to whatever quandary our music was causing up there.

  Carly had said that the glasses I’d need for our 11:06 rendezvous would arrive three minutes beforehand, along with some instructions. Sure enough, I got an email from “Meeting, Dataspace” at precisely 11:03:

  1) Open top right desk drawer

  2) Don glasses, connect to computer

  3) At 11:06AM click here to enter Earth-based dataspace

  I opened my desk drawer as instructed. A pair of pink-lensed Bono glasses were right next to my business cards, attached to a USB cable that had to be twenty-five feet long. All of this had presumably just popped over via a Wrinkle that had just opened up between my planet and Carly’s.

  Just then, my cellphone rang. The caller’s number was blocked, and I picked up, thinking it might be Manda.

  “Nick, this is your boss, Judy Sherman.”

  Boy, was it. It was also a bizarre statement, even for Judy. Her voice is as renowned within my brain’s fear and obedience circuits as my mother’s was, back when I was a naughty three-year-old. So if she had said “Nick, you are now speaking on your cellphone,” the statement would have been no more superfluous.

  “Guess where I am,” she continued.

  “The … office?”

  “Wrong, Nick. I’m in sickbay—reviewing your medical records. And it appears that somebody’s inoculations aren’t up to date.”

  “You mean my … flu shot?” Since when did the firm track our medical histories? And where the hell was “sickbay”?

  “It’s not a flu shot, Nick,” Judy snapped. “It’s a flu solution. But we can’t solve our flu problems with even one sickly associate spewing flu germs onto everyone else. Don’t the words ‘herd immunity’ mean anything to you?”

  They certainly didn’t. And I wasn’t about to admit this. But before I could come up with a serviceable bluff, I heard some familiar laughter on the line, and it wasn’t Judy’s.

  “Manda?” I asked.

  “Well done,” she tittered.

  “You do … impersonations?”

  “Not me. The stereopticon. I’m learning its audio mode. And it does perfect impersonations of any voice that it gets a sample of.”

  “And you … sampled Judy?”

  “I found a YouTube clip of her guest-lecturing at a law school about copyright legislation. She’s quite the force of nature.”

  “I’ll say,” I said.

  “Anyway, did the pink glasses show up?”

  “They did.” As I gave Manda a quick update, I lifted them to my face. Everything took on a rosy tinge. So this is how the world looks to Bono, I thought. “T-minus thirty seconds, and I have no idea what’s about to happen,” I finished, plugging the alien USB cable into my computer.

  “Well, be careful. And yank the glasses off if it gets weird.”

  We said our good-byes, and I hovered my cursor over the mysterious hyperlink. At exactly 11:06, I clicked, and—

  The room disappeared.

  I found myself in a barren, apocalyptic landscape facing a muscular green hulk with pointy ears and three-inch fangs. Dressed in a red, form-fitting evening gown, he was balder than Mr. Clean. The sky behind him was orange with distant flames, and pierced by ten-foot spears that held up medieval battle standards.

  I yelped and jumped backward. This didn’t go so well, because I had forgotten that I was sitting on an office chair—which was kind of understandable, given that both the chair and my own body had vanished entirely from my vision. But I sure could feel the chair as it tipped backward from the thrust of my legs. I could also hear it crash as I sprawled to the … ground? Floor? The surface beneath me looked like packed earth. But it felt more like office carpeting.

  I rubbed my fingers across it. Yep, this here was patterned-loop nylon. But I couldn’t see my fingers, or any part of myself. I was like a disembodied, floating … viewpoint. I looked up and around me. The green giant stood motionless as a statue. The whole landscape was also perfectly still. And silent. This made it all seem a lot less menacing—as did the ogre’s ridiculous red evening gown. Reassured, I rose unsteadily. This was surprisingly difficult without my body providing some visual cues. And while I know that sounds pathetic, try standing on one foot with your eyes shut for half a minute, and you’ll see how hard it is to balance without seeing your body.1

  Once I was back on my feet, I raised my hands to my face and removed the Bono glasses. The office … came back. Or rather, it was still there, having never gone anywhere. The glasses had been displaying an animated world to me in flawless 3D—shifting the images in perfect sync with every movement of my head, which made me feel entirely present in that eerie, imaginary landscape.

  I cautiously put the Bono glasses on again, and—nothing. The office looked slightly pink. That was it.

  My assistant naturally chose that one moment out of an entire half decade to get all concerned and proactive. “I heard a crash,” she said, popping open the door without knocking. I stood before her in bug-eyed pink glasses that were cabled to my computer, beside a toppled thousand-dollar Aeron throne that HR had bought in a recent panic over “ergonomic hygiene.” “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I chirped.

  “And that sound?”

  “Just … termites.”

  She nodded slowly, backing out of the door.

  “Oh—and Barbara Ann?”

  She stopped. “Yeah?”

  “A quick request. Could you, uh …” I was about to ask her not to disturb me again, but realized that this would make things look even sketchier. “Could you tell me if these glasses make me look fat?”

  She looked me over, doing her level best to take the question seriously. I’m one fourth of her boss, after all. “No,” she decided. “They don’t. They do make you look a little … Irish, maybe? And short. Definitely short. But not fat.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and she shut the door.

  I looked back at the computer screen. Maybe I had to click the hyperlink again? I righted my chair, sat on it squarely, clicked the link … and was back in the tableau.

  “Hi Nick!” Apparently the ugly green statue was feeling chatty. I knew its voice from somewhere, but couldn’t quite place it.

  “Who … are you?”

  “Oh, the green guy? That’s not me. That’s you!”

  I recognized the voice now. It was Frampton. And it wasn’t coming from the ogre, it was coming from—nowhere in particular. “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “That’s you. That’s your character! And I’m sorry about the dress. But I thought it would be cool to make you a Warlock. And, well, that’s what level one Warlocks wear, I guess. I tried to make it up to you by making you an Orc, but … it all came out a bit silly, didn’t it?”

  This conveyed precisely zero information to me.

  “Anyway, please click the button,” Frampton continued. “Carly’s kind of impatient, and I don’t want her getting p.o.’d.”

  Button? I looked around and saw it. Hovering at shin level to the ogre (to me?) was a red button that said Enter World.

  “Touch your right thumb to your forefinger, like you’re making an okay sign, and the system will start tracking your body,” Frampton said. I did this, and the green guy started mirroring my movements precisely.

  “How’s it doing that?” I asked, amazed by the tiny nuances of gesture that the system was picking up from me and rendering in my a
vatar.

  “The glasses you’re wearing. There’s a … radar machine in them. Or something.”

  Feeling like a digital puppeteer, I had my character reach down to the Enter World button and touch it. With that, my perspective shifted. It now looked like I was floating above, and slightly behind Greenie. And he (I?) was now hanging out with two other screwballs. One looked like a Black Sabbath roadie gussied up for a Halloween roller derby in the Bronx—massive iron gloves, a steel-tipped ruffled collar, armor held together by a huge skull-shaped fastener—that sort of thing. The other one looked like a Moscow whore who’d somehow gotten trapped in a Tolkien novel. Wearing thigh-high boots and some scant strips of green cloth that were accessorized with a hunter’s bow and quiver, she had blond hair, pointy ears, luminous green eyes, and, well—let’s just say a nice set of lungs (as I once heard a squirrelly old bartender put it).

  “I’m a Death Knight,” Frampton announced, as the S&M thug did this shuffling sort of dance step. “And Carly’s a Blood Elf.” The top-heavy trollop gave me the finger.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “This is World of Warcraft,” Frampton said, as his Death Knight applauded for some reason.

  “You’re kidding.” Two friends of mine play WoW constantly, but I hadn’t tried it myself. I just thought it was an online video game with cartoonish graphics. But this was incredible.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Carly said, as if reading my thoughts. “This is actually a highly enhanced version of Warcraft. The virtual reality interface in your glasses, the high visual fidelity, the gesture tracking, and the voice channel that we’re using were all created by Refined engineers, and aren’t available to human players on Earth.”

  Boy, that took a lot of fun out of it. “So why are we meeting here?”

  “Because the only two-way data connection that exists between Earth and the rest of the universe runs through Warcraft. A group of our hackers built it in order to have some small interactions with humans, since your planet’s off-limits to us. It’s totally illegal. But inevitable, given the fascination that the rest of the universe has with you. And the Refined beings who use it behave responsibly and don’t divulge their origins to the humans they interact with.”

  “But who do they say they are?”

  “Koreans,” Frampton said.

  Carly’s cartoon floozy nodded. “If you ever meet a Korean in WoW, you can bet it’s an alien patching in from far, far away. Ask him to name his president, or the main street in Seoul. He’ll just stammer.”

  “The real Koreans are all playing some other game that takes place in an online tree, or something,” Frampton added dismissively.2

  “Got it. Well, how much time do we have to talk?”

  “About fifteen minutes,” Carly said.

  I had Greenie nod. This was consistent with what the concierge had said about the duration of Wrinkle connections. “And not only can we exchange data, but our bodies can theoretically travel through the Wrinkle during this time, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you’ll get trapped on Earth for many hours if you come over, so you won’t make the jump.”

  “We won’t,” Carly confirmed.

  Phew. The last thing I needed was these two stomping around New York in their damned robes, having seizures every time a song came on.

  “But you can,” she added.

  “What?” Somehow I managed to say this calmly.

  “But you can.”

  Christ, she said it again! “But … I’m afraid of heights.”

  Okay, that was pathetic (but true—which I guess makes it more pathetic). But no one had mentioned the faintest possibility of me getting yanked through umpteen zillion miles of space, and I didn’t like the idea one bit. I mean, I’m a lawyer—not an investment banker! The law is a safe haven for the bright, ambitious, and cripplingly risk-averse. I wouldn’t even bungie jump—and she wanted me to what?

  “Something … unexpected has happened,” Carly was saying. “Something that could be very dangerous. And it calls for more than just a twenty-minute chitchat between us.”

  “But wait.” Wait! “Won’t I get stuck for a day if I come over there?” Or devoured, or zapped, or probed, or dropped, or crushed in a giant trash compactor, or offed by a mutinous computer, or colonized by an alien fetus, or …?

  Carly’s avatar shook her trampy little head. “Once we’re done on our planet, we plan to take you to a restricted facility that has near-constant Wrinkle access to the entire universe. It’s called a Wrinkle Vertex. From there, we can send you straight home, so you won’t get stuck.”

  “Yes, but … isn’t that dinosaur about to charge us?” This was more than just a cowardly attempt to change the subject (although it did serve that purpose nicely), because a dinosaur really was about to charge us.

  “T-Rex, level fifty,” Frampton hollered, his avatar turning to Carly’s. “Hang back, squishy. I’m on it.” He turned to me, pointing at the incoming beast. “That’s from a real Warcraft server,” he said reverently. “It’s exactly how things look to human players on … Earth.” With that, his avatar pulled a monstrous double-headed ax out of thin air, and dashed off to battle the dinosaur. His prey was pretty nicely rendered. But compared to his own avatar’s down-to-the-micron fidelity, it looked like a cheap animation.

  I turned to Carly’s digital harlot. “Look, the Wrinkle won’t close for a while yet. So before I put my life in your hands, you need to tell me a lot more about what the hell is going on.”

  As I said this, Frampton’s avatar beheaded the dinosaur with a single blow. “WOOt!” he crowed in a triumphant falsetto as he stomped back toward us. “WOOt, woot, woot!”

  “Time is tight, so this will be highly abridged,” Carly said.

  “Go for it.”

  She and Frampton proceeded to give me the lowdown on the Refined League’s discovery of Earth back in the seventies, and the decades that everyone had since spent ecstatically contemplating our music.

  “Which brings us to the reason why we came to you,” Carly said several minutes later, having carefully hung on to the punch line.

  “Well—yes, I’ve been wondering.” It’s hard to tell with an avatar, but I got the sense that she was starting to glower a bit.

  “Back when the most ancient societies first became fully Refined, their focus transitioned from science—which they had thoroughly conquered—to the development of culture, which is a never-ending pursuit,” she said. “An entirely new social, political, and economic order arose. One based wholly upon the creation, sharing, and savoring of the Noble Arts, which are now the prime focus of our existence. At the core of this order is something that we call the Indigenous Arts Doctrine. It’s the basis of our entire economy, moral code, and legal system. It has been the cornerstone of our society for over five billion years. To give you a faint inkling of how ancient and sacred this doctrine is to us, it’s about twenty-two million times older than your Constitution.”

  “Which makes it twenty-one point six million times older than the Articles of Confederation,” Frampton added professorially, earning a deeply irritated glare from Carly’s direction.

  “Got it,” I said. “So, what does the Doctrine say?”

  “Very simply, that every work of creative art must be shared and savored in accordance with the rules and the norms of its society of origin. Those rules are inviolable, whatever they may be. And they must be universally respected.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” I said. If a bit vague. And uptight. “Could you give me an example?”

  Carly’s manga streetwalker nodded. “Sure. Take live dramatic performances.”

  “You mean plays?”

  “Exactly. Some of the universe’s finest plays are created by a society that evolved on a planet with such a nurturing climate that they never had to make buildings, roofs, or cellars. Nothing ever came between their ancestors and their cherished, sheltering sky. And so, by their anci
ent tradition, their plays must always be performed in open-air amphitheaters, with no roof or other structure coming between the performers and the heavens. This is an inviolable rule throughout the universe—wherever their works are produced, and regardless of who’s putting them on.”

  “That sounds very respectful.”

  “It is,” Carly said. “Which is appropriate. Because they didn’t wrap their plays up in some scummy, greedy rule that didn’t merit respect, did they?”

  I said nothing, assuming that this was just a bizarre rhetorical question.

  “Did they?” she barked.

  “Well—no,” I allowed.

  “Another species creates the universe’s most sublime stained-glass patterns. In the dawning days of their civilization, they had an especially feared predator whose skin was the color that your designers call ‘harlequin shamrock.’ The society’s earliest glass masters forbade the use of their predator’s hated color in their craft, and that ancient ban remains in effect to this day. So certain frequencies of green light cannot be used in the society’s patterns anywhere in the universe, regardless of who’s cutting glass for those patterns. Again, the rules and the norms of the society that generates the art apply to that art everywhere.”

  Right then I had a grim premonition. “And that brings us to the Earth’s music, doesn’t it?”

  “Boy does it. And I must say, the rules connected to your music are quite strange.”

  “But despite that, they’re … inviolable, huh?”

  “Yes. And they must be universally respected.” Carly spat out this last word as if it were the name of a barbarous tribe that had conquered her nation, slaughtered her people, and salted their ancestral lands. “And they apply throughout the universe. Wherever, and whenever, your music is shared and savored.”