Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  “Well, there’s up to 150,000 reasons why not per copy,” I said. “But that aside, isn’t it just insane to make a billion copies of a song on Earth, and then send all of them to Planet X? I mean, it’s a lot more efficient to just send one copy to Planet X, and make the rest of them there, right?”

  Carly shrugged. “In theory, sure. But in reality, our networks are so fast that efficiency concerns are irrelevant.”

  “Well, great then,” I snapped. “So because you have fast networks and a crazed appetite for digital souvenirs, you set up shop in New York and started making trillions of illegal copies of our songs.”

  “Thousands of octillions,” Frampton clarified.

  “Okay, sure. That many. And in doing that, you completely screwed up the Berne Convention angle. Fine. Bravo. But still, there has to be some other loophole we can exploit.”

  “Such as?” Carly sneered, clearly convinced that no simple solution could possibly exist, given that she hadn’t come up with one.

  “Well … I don’t know, what about exchange rates? Our multinationals are always pushing income and debt into different currencies to minimize taxes and whatnot. And you guys are multigalactic. So don’t you suppose there’s a way to get rid of the debt using exchange rates?”

  “No,” Carly answered, without a moment’s thought.

  “Seriously, though. The American dollar can’t be widely used in the rest of the universe. So why not make the exchange rate really favorable to yourselves? Decree that a million bucks is worth just one of your transmeteorite dinars, or whatever.”

  “Nick,” Carly said, “you don’t know a thing about astrophysics, do you?”

  “It wasn’t a huge subject of mine at law school, no.”

  “Well, if it was, you’d know that the common heavy elements are all created in supernovas, which are distributed fairly evenly from galaxy to galaxy. That makes the noble metals similarly rare—and similarly precious—everywhere.”

  As if that explained a thing. “What are noble metals? And why do I care?”

  “Silver, gold, iridium, platinum, and so on. Since they’re similarly rare and precious everywhere, they’re the natural basis for exchange rates throughout the cosmos—just as they have been throughout much of your own history. And since the various hard currencies of Earth already buy certain amounts of these metals on your global spot markets, we can’t set exchange rates for your money arbitrarily. They’re set by your metal prices and by ours.”4

  I sighed heavily and gazed at the bewitching landscape of Paradise City, hoping it would cheer me up. “Okay, then it sounds like the only way out of this situation is to get a massive legislative change through the U.S. Congress somehow. Or to get a deal done with some key players in the music industry. So my first question is, do we really need to cut deals with … each of the major music labels?” The answer was probably yes, given that we had supposedly bankrupted the entire universe. But maybe Carly was exaggerating for effect when she told me that.

  “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 organiz
e 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 anything 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 terrifie
d, 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 (129I). Since 129I 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.