by Rob Reid
“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?”
“Because it was what’s known as an autoliquidating force field,” mlah droned. “This is an immensely powerful, but very fragile construct that collapses irrevocably if it’s penetrated, even by an authorized visitor.”
This faintly got Carly’s attention. “You should have warned us,” she chided absently, wagging a finger at no one in particular.
“We did. Several times. But you paid no attention.”
I struggled to tune in to this wearying blather. As mlah’s voice drifted in and out of focus, I started to entertain myself with mental lists of the errands I wanted to get to next Saturday. “… we simply couldn’t resist the will of celebrities of your stature,” he droned. “… impossible to reconstruct the force field … anyone can now Wrinkle through …” And so on, and so on, and on, and on, and on …
A distraction finally rescued me when my iPhone vibrated. I checked it and saw that I’d just received a third text from Pugwash. I pulled it up along with the two unread messages that I had from him, and started by reading the first one. He’d sent it only twenty-five minutes before:
M I losing my mind there’s a parrot here talks in complete sentences says he knows you hfs hfs hfs
A few minutes later he had written:
Locked self in bathroom at my place get here now I blame you
And this most recent one said:
Hfs he’s singing make him stop can’t take it
I was processing all of this when Carly tugged violently on my sleeve, hauling me over to something that looked like a well.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The only full-access view of the Wrinkle Queue in the entire universe, apart from the one at Guardian Headquarters itself. This is part of the reason why we came to see pluhhhs.” With that, she shoved my head into it.
“Good God,” I whispered. It was the most … intricate sight I’d ever seen. I was surrounded on more sides than I knew I had, by millions of little twisty segments, all different. They came in an insanely wide range of lengths, and about a hundred distinct colors. Each was also spinning in one of about a dozen different ways, and they were all scintillating in one of maybe thirty distinguishable patterns. The segments were all in rapid motion. And as they scooted around, their front ends would often vanish, and then reappear in distant parts of the display. The image seemed to have an infinite resolution and depth to it, and I found I could zoom my perspective in and out at will, and also look at it from countless different directions simultaneously.
“Ghetto-ass 5D display,” Carly muttered from somewhere nearby. “You’d think they’d have a higher budget around here.”
“It’s … beautiful,” I said.
She let off an irked sigh. “You would think that. But I’ll grant you that it’s hugely interesting. Now, look at that tiny empty region. Over by the midsized thicket of slow-pulsing ultraviolet segments.”
Somehow I was able to locate this easily.
“That’s the one-hundred-forty-four-light-year sphere surrounding Earth,” Carly explained. “Nothing’s Wrinkling in and out of there, because so far nobody but we and the Guild know that the force field’s gone. Now I’ll have the display show us something that’s scheduled to happen in a few hours. Watch.”
With that, a midsized muddled-orange segment with a slow-twitching counterclockwise spin and a foggy blink to it started shooting straight into the empty region’s heart. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a transfer that’s scheduled to happen around ten-fifteen tonight. The point of origin is unknown for now, but it’s slated to arrive at the transmission facility beneath Grand Central Station. What’s-his-face says it was booked about a minute ago. That’s why I dragged you over here to look.”
“Who booked it? And what is it?”
“pluhhhs are still looking into that. But I’m sure Paulie booked it. Worst case, it’s the metallicam shipment we’ve been worrying about. Although it seems a bit early for that since he still thinks you’re a Guardian. Okay, out of the pool.” Carly yanked my head from the well-like display, and we were back in the control room. And that’s when Pugwash’s most chilling message arrived:
hmfs this guy is so cool he and I am going to make a fortune no need to come in fact PLEASE DON’T all under control
I looked at Carly, holding up my phone. “It’s from my cousin. Paulie’s had him cornered in his apartment for the past half hour.”
She shot me a concerned look. “Is it a hostage situation?”
“No,” I said, fighting a wave of panic. “They’re … making friends.” I looked back at the text. Pugwash must have written it while Paulie was booking that shipment. The two things had to be related.
I was about to mention this when Frampton waved frantically for my attention. “What … is that?” he asked when he caught my eye.
“What’s what?”
Then I noticed it, too. There was a slight disturbance in the room. It was … a flicker of light? A whisper of sound? Microscopic sparks?
Carly joined the guessing game, but was also stumped. So we held our breath, listened intently, and carefully scanned the room. Then it hit all of us at once—it was that lemur critter. Remember him? He was d
oing … something incredibly inconspicuous that we could barely catch out of the far corners of our eyes. In fact, he was … ah yes, he was standing in a blinding spotlight about a foot away from us, screaming into a deafening megaphone, and waving a magnesium signal flare.
“Come again?” I asked, straining to keep my attention on that piddling, vacuous, lethally boring speck of irrelevance that we know vaguely as mlah.
“I said,” mlah bellowed, “detailed instructions for getting to the transmission facility beneath Grand Central are written on the back of this.” He pressed a New York subway map into my hand.
“Gee, thanks,” I yawned, then struggled mightily to remember who I was thanking, and for what. Then I was fighting a looming narcosis, and Carly was bundling us out of the control room with the help of … someone, and we were back in our omnicab and rocketing skyward.
We had to replay the key points of our conversation with mlah several times from Frampton’s stereopticon before the details really stuck with us. And as the facts settled into my mind, a righteous fury gradually built in my chest. It was bad enough when I thought that Carly’s show was just going to tell the universe that the Earth was vulnerable to attack. But now we knew that she had directly destroyed our defenses when she insisted on getting passage through the Townshend Line!
After we watched the playback for the last time, I turned to Carly. “One could almost argue,” I said through gritted teeth, “that by coming to Earth to allegedly rescue us, you made something that … verged on being a misstep.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” she spat. “Technically, maybe. If you want to get all technically technical about it. But seriously—who the hell’s ever heard of anything as weird and obscure as a … what did he call it? An autoliquidating force field?”
“I would guess …” I struggled to maintain a tone of dignified understatement. “Pretty much anyone who knows … the first fucking thing about force fields.” Oops.
Carly suddenly looked like she was going to cry.
“So what do we do now?” I asked, much more gently. And I wasn’t going soft just to make her feel better. I really did need her advice on what to do next. She was the savviest person in our group, and she had really good instincts.9
Carly seemed to flirt briefly with an emotional collapse. Then I saw the old flintiness return to her eyes. “Well, I guess I got you into this mess. So dammit, I’m gonna get you out of it. And it’s pretty clear that this is a job for the Guardians themselves.” She turned to her brother. “Frampton, can we Wrinkle to Fiffywhumpy anytime soon?” She turned back to me. “That’s the planet where the Guardians are headquartered. It has even better Wrinkle access than this planet, so we should be able to get there quickly.”
Frampton consulted his stereopticon. “The Wrinkles are wide open, of course. But Fiffywhumpy has incredible defenses, and access to it is completely restricted.”
“I’m sure pluhhhs can cram us through somehow. The Townshend Line gives them all kinds of administrative superpowers in the Wrinklesphere. Contact … that creature. Insist that he put us through straightaway. And tell him to drop us into the office of humanity’s Intake Guardian, if he can.”
“Humanity’s what?” I asked, as Frampton contacted mlah through his stereopticon.
“Intake Guardian,” Carly said. “It’s a long story, but he’s the guy who will one day decide if and when your species is ready to get promoted, and become Refined. Every primitive species with any shot at becoming Refined is assigned to one. And who knows, maybe your Intake Guardian can accelerate you through the process. That could solve everything, because not even the Guild would dare to harm a Refined species.”
My eyes widened with hope, and Carly struck a noble pose. “I told you, there’s nothing to fear. Because my word is my bond. And I am not going to let Dad embarrass me!”
Frampton looked up from his stereopticon. “mlah is putting us though.”
“Brace yourself,” Carly warned me as we hunched down for the Wrinkle. “You’re about to visit the most secure planet in the universe.”
* * *
1. The capitalization rule is a particularly hard one. While pluhhhs are absent from virtually every article, reference text, story, and song ever written about the universe’s inhabitants, they’re mentioned in countless punctuation guides, all of which are unyielding on the point that “pluhhhs” should absolutely never be capitalized, even if it’s the opening word in a sentence, or is in a chapter or book title. Most of these guides go on to castigate the hypothetical author who would even mention pluhhhs in passing anyway—much less feature them in any sort of title.
2. Making a major grammatical blunder of their own. No sentence containing the word pluhhhs should ever be exclaimed!
3. Somehow this resulted in a seven-figure roaming charge, and it took me days to persuade Customer Service that it had to be a billing boo-boo.
4. String Reality is the deep physics of the universe. Our physicists only understand it faintly, and for now they’re cautiously calling it String Theory.
5. If it’s hard to imagine your body stretching into an invisible dimension, picture something analogous on Flat Earthland. Suppose its otherwise flat inhabitants have these crazy retractable arms that can stretch for thousands of miles into the third dimension. They’re not aware of these strange limbs—but if one of them is mad at someone, his invisible arm might reach out and bop his rival, even from far away. Neither party will be consciously aware of this. But the person who gets hit will start thinking hostile thoughts about the jerk who just bopped him, and at some point his own invisible arm will strike back. As for us humans, it turns out that all kinds of crap sticks out of our bodies into the fourth, fifth, and eleventh dimensions—including fame batteries (and, yes, retractable arms for unconsciously bopping our enemies).
6. The way this works mechanically with humans is that as soon as you recognize someone famous (which feels like it happens from a distance, but actually involves some icky physical contact in the eleventh dimension), the difference in charges between your attention batteries forms a current of sorts (fifth dimension), which gets a series of mechanical gears whirring in hyperspace (fourth dimension). These wind up and thwack your amygdala (third dimension—if you dissected a sheep’s brain in biology class, you’ve cut through one of these). Your thwacked amygdala then pumps out a cocktail of hormones and other goo, and now you’re stammering, dropping things, and generally making an ass of yourself.
7. Carly later told me that none of this stuff actually does anything—it’s just there to impress the churlish bands of schoolkids that troop through on field trips every few days.
8. Short for mlahh. This is what passes for a jaunty nickname among pluhhhs.
9. Well, usually.10
10. Or at times, anyway.
THIRTEEN
THIS IS THIRTEEN
The end of this Wrinkle was even creepier than the last one. This time, everything went blank as we approached our endpoint. Not black—that would have been claustrophobic, but familiar. Here, it truly went blank. It was an absence of input so complete that it was chilling. It was beyond a blackout, beyond blindfolding—maybe even beyond blindness, because not only were my senses shuttered, but I briefly had no ability to imagine, or even recall, any sights or sounds. Then it was over, and we were crouching on the floor of a dark, egg-shaped chamber.
“What happened?” I asked. “Toward the end, it was like a … like a …”
“Sensory embargo?” Frampton said.
“Yeah, that’s—a great way of putting it.” Bizarrely so, coming from him.
“He’s not being poetic,” Carly said. “SensoryEmbargo™ is a trademarked term. It’s a security product that prevents beings on inbound Wrinkles from peeking at sensitive installations.”
“Oh. So we’re in a top-secret building?”
“A top-secret planet. Fiffywhumpy is the Guardian Council’s headquarters. Everything about it is secret.”
&n
bsp; “Wow. Have you ever been here before?”
“That’s classified,” she snapped.
Frampton was consulting his stereopticon. “We’re surrounded by thirty feet of lead on all sides. It’s as if we’re in some kind of a … solitary, removed, and forsaken corpuscle.”
“Solitary, Removed & Forsaken Corpuscles™ make the universe’s most secure prison cells,” Carly explained. “Our Wrinkle appears to have been hijacked at the last instant, and funneled into an isolation chamber in one of the Guardian Council’s dungeons.”
“Wait. We’re in jail? For what?”
“For violating one of the sternest laws in the universe.”
“What … did we do?”
“We trespassed on the Guardians’ planet.” She took in my horrified expression and shrugged. “Yeah, it was a totally criminal move. Sorry.” As she said this, a manhole-sized indentation formed in the wall, and then sank away from us, leaving a tunnel in its wake. “Oh my,” Carly yawned. “It looks like an extruded pathway to a summary courtroom.” She crawled a few feet into the dark, leaden tunnel. “Helllooooo? Mr. Jailer? Can we step on it?”
Frampton turned to me while she was briefly out of sight. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “She’s just messing with you. Like when we stepped into the omnicab, and pretended we were falling.”
“More pranks? Seriously? Wasn’t it enough to scare the crap out of me once?”
“Dad made her feel stupid, and then you almost made her cry,” Frampton whispered. “This is her way of … moving on. And it’s a lot better than the way she dealt with things when we were kids. So trust me—it’s all under control. Just play along, and pretend you’re really scared. It’s the best thing for all of us.”
“C’mon, Jailmeister,” Carly was shouting, as she crawled back into our cell. “Let’s get this trial going; we don’t have all day.”
“Actually, I have to arraign you before I can try you,” boomed a deep, rumbling voice from the tunnel. “But luckily, I’m a full-service guy. Incarceration, arraignment, trial, sentencing, and punishment. We can get through the whole shebang in twenty minutes or less—guaranteed.”