Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  There was a sludgy, gurgling noise, and a mountainous snail-like creature hove into view. Its mucus-drenched head protruded from a spiky metallic shell. It had something of a face, which was dominated by a solitary, unblinking eye. Beneath this was a gaping maw that seemed to contain a pilot light. As the creature oozed out of the tunnel, its body and shell expanded—kind of like a balloon coming out of a narrow tube. Once it fully entered our Solitary, Removed & Forsaken Corpuscle™, there was hardly any room for the rest of us.

  I had no trouble acting scared like Frampton requested, because it turns out to be remarkably easy to feign terror in the presence of alien beasts that horrify you on a deep visceral level. This one left a fetid brown slick wherever it slid. Its breath smelled like the entrails of kittens and bunny rabbits who had been given hours to dread their fate before being slowly devoured and digested. It had four gigantic, lobsterlike pincers that seemed to be made from corrugated steel and barbed wire. And the worst thing was that giant eye. When it turned toward me, I felt like I was naked—naked under a floodlight attached to a huge magnifying glass operated by my entire eighth-grade science class, including the impossibly hot Heather Logan, and that Forlenzo guy who always took my lunch money.

  After staring me down, the grim peeper turned to Carly and Frampton. There was a moment of recognition as it faced two of the most dazzling stars in all of creation. This was followed by several quite uneventful moments, during which Carly shifted from a completely blasé posture to one of morbid horror. Damn, she’s good, I thought. Her faked vertigo in the omnicab had been slapstick, in retrospect. But this was Oscar material.

  Our jailer pointed a pincer toward the tunnel. “After you, Fame Girl,” he rumbled.

  Frampton gave me a wild-eyed look as his sister crawled into the leaden passage. I grinned and winked. He shook his head and started trembling. I winked again, and faked some trembling of my own. He trembled more violently, and I stole a glance at Bugeye to see if he was buying the act. But he wasn’t even looking at Frampton—he was peering down the tunnel after Carly. Which meant that Frampton wasn’t acting at all. Which meant that he was genuinely freaking out. Which couldn’t be good. I thought back to his whispered words from moments before. “Trust me,” he’d said. “It’s all under control.” Based on that, I had assumed that Frampton—Frampton—had everything under control. Shit.

  “Now you two, go,” the rumbling voice commanded. Frampton and I started crawling down the tunnel. Bugeye brought up the rear. All was pitch-dark after he plugged the entrance with his shell and his massive gut. His slimy under-parts made gruesome slobbering noises against the tunnel floor as he crawled behind us.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered to Frampton.

  “The fame field. I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t work.”

  “You were counting on your fame to get us out of this? Please—it’s not like this place is staffed by the Pluhhhs!”

  “pluhhhs,” he corrected me. “And no, we knew it was protected by some tough guards. But everyone’s vulnerable to our level of fame. Nobody but pluhhhs twist into knots with burning eyeballs. But one way or another, everyone always completely loses it in front of us. Until now.”

  As he said this, I saw a faint gray patch ahead of us as we approached the end of the short tunnel. It led into a darkened room with maybe five watts of ambient light illuminating it. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a stone podium in front of us, and a single stone bench facing it. It was hard to be sure in the darkness, but I could have sworn there was a framed portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging on the far wall.

  The creature gestured for us to sit on the bench, and took his own position beside the podium. He rummaged behind it, and hauled up something that looked like a sheep’s carcass. When he hoisted it onto his head, I realized it was a powdered wig.

  “The Wholly Autonomous Boundary Court of Fiffywhumpy is now in session,” he rumbled. “You are all hereby accused of violating the planet’s sovereignty by entering its gravitational well without permission. If you feel that you are not guilty, one of you may now address the court. Otherwise we’ll move straight to sentencing.”

  I gave Carly a desperate look. But she was already giving me a far more desperate look. “Say something,” she hissed. “You’re the lawyer.”

  She had me there. So I turned to the jailer, my eensy superpower’s calming energy kicking in. “Your Honor. Before I begin my statement, may I ask if you know exactly who your defendants are?”

  “Yes,” the beast rumbled. “I read the metadata attached to your Wrinkle. From this, I know your names, and the identities of your home planets. And of course, I recognize your two colleagues.”

  I know your names, and the identities of your home planets. As the words were leaving his lips, I knew what I had to do—but I hated it fiercely. Cynical as the legal profession can be (and cynical as I can be about it), I had long ago promised myself that I would never lie in a courtroom. However flawed, humble, or alien a court might be, it’s a sacred space of justice. Yet I was now preparing to tell the most personally debasing lie that I could imagine—and I would be doing this as an active counsel before a magistrate.

  “You may begin your statement now,” the jailer said impatiently.

  I stepped toward the podium; begged Moses, Themis, and every other law-giving prophet and goddess for mercy; and began. “When I first joined the Backstreet Boys, I was a young idealist, fresh out of law school. And I’ve since learned that … Sadness is beautiful. Loneliness is tragical. So check out the shape of my heart.” With that, a little bit of my soul died. I prayed that this would do the trick, so that I wouldn’t have to lie again.

  The mighty eye gazed at me. “You’re that Nick Carter?”

  I smiled bashfully and nodded once, figuring that a simple flick of the neck shouldn’t count as a second lie.

  “Millennium is one of my favorite albums,” the voice rumbled. “Proceed.” There was a brief silence, then, “I believe you left off with ‘check out the shape of my heart.’ So … proceed.”

  “Right. Well. Even with all of my youth and idealism, I didn’t realize that I was embarking on a path that would soon make me one of the most famous beings in the entire universe.”

  “I see,” the jailer rumbled. “But it’s not going to work, you know.”

  “What’s not going to work?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend you’re some naive, uneducated nitwit—it’s beneath the dignity of a Backstreet Boy. I’m talking about the fame thing. It’s not going to work. You see, I’m famous, too. Famous enough that nobody else’s fame charge can even affect me.”

  “Wait a second,” Frampton said. “I know you. You were on Aural Sculptures!”

  “Over a hundred times, across a period of thousands of years,” Bugeye said. “You must remember this one.”

  He took a deep breath, but before he could make a sound I gave a panicked yelp. Everyone looked at me. “Please,” I said. “No singing while court is in session. We … take an oath about this on Earth. And I’d hate to break it.”

  The jailer held his fire. Meanwhile, the interruption had given me an idea.

  “Your Honor,” I asked. “If you were a regular guest on Aural Sculptures, it would imply that you were a renowned singer until my planet’s discovery ended your musical career.”

  “That is correct.”

  “In light of that, shouldn’t you recuse yourself from these proceedings, given that you have personal reasons to deeply resent at least one of the defendants?”

  “That will not be necessary, because I have nothing but gratitude for you and the other songsmiths of Earth,” the jailer rumbled. “For one thing, I adore your work even more than most Refined beings. For another, my personal circumstances actually improved significantly the day I stopped singing professionally.” He turned his eye to Carly. “I’m from a collective patrimony species, you see.”

  Carly turned to me like a court interpreter. “It means his species
has always made its artistic output the shared property of its entire civilization. In societies like his, artists earn no income, and live in collectives that are supported by philanthropy. Kind of like monks—only with lots of parties, drugs, and groupies.”

  “When we became Refined, the Indigenous Arts Doctrine mandated that we continue to follow our ancestral customs pertaining to art,” the jailer added. “So our artistic output became the shared property of our new community, which is now the Refined League as a whole. And we maintained the ancient rules preventing our artists from making personal incomes from their work.”

  “So being a singer didn’t pay so well?” I asked.

  “It didn’t pay at all,” he groused. “We had to take vows of eternal poverty in order to get into Noble Arts school.”

  “That’s nuts,” I said indignantly. It never hurts to bond with your jailer.

  “Tell me about it! I mean, it was fine when I was two thousand years old and only wanted to party and nail hotties. Particularly because music is absolutely my first love. But as I got a bit older, I started wanting a place of my own.”

  “Sure. And maybe a little nest egg,” I goaded.

  “Exactly—a little nest egg! Then the Kotter Moment came. And suddenly our services were no longer desired by anyone, and we singers were released from our vows. So now I get to live the second half of my life just for me.”

  “So being a jailer is actually closer to your heart?”

  “Closer to my colon,” he corrected me. “We don’t have hearts, because our veins pump our blood. So we associate love and passion with our colons. Anyway, in answer to your question, jailing sucks. But in a few years I’ll earn my pension, and then I can devote my last four millennia to macramé, which has always been my second love.”

  “Wait … you get four thousand years of pension for working—how long?”

  “Forty-three point three years. I’ve been at it since the Kotter Moment, and I still have a few years to go. Shocking, huh?”

  “Well, it may be a little … imbalanced.”

  “A little? It’s completely imbalanced!” the jailer said bitterly. “I have friends who started working right after their larval stage, and they got pensions for the full eight thousand years of their adulthood, for the same forty-three point three years on the job. So you’d think they’d cut the work requirement in half for someone like me, right?”

  Carly turned to me. “Rules governing Art aren’t the only things that are frozen in place when new civilizations join the Refined League. Laws connected to state pensions are also immutable. And since gaining access to Refined technology often results in huge jumps in life expectancy, many societies get locked into contracts that give their present civil servants, as well as all of their future civil servants, lifelong pensions in exchange for working less than one percent of their productive years.”

  “But how can they afford that?”

  She shrugged. “They can’t. In cases like that, the society ends up owing its government retirees its entire economic output for all of eternity. Something like this happens in roughly one society out of three. Which is how the Guild came to control a third of the assets in the universe.”

  “But that’s insane! Why are state pensions so sacred?”

  “Because government workers want them to be. And government workers run our government, odd as that may sound.”

  “Wait a second.” I turned from Carly to the jailer. “You must be a member of a government union, right?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Which makes you a member of the Guild.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Then there’s no way you can preside over this trial—you have a huge vested interest in getting rid of us!”

  “Do not,” the jailer said.

  “Do so!” Frampton snapped, clearly no stranger to courtroom polemics.

  “Do not.” The jailer thundered this so loudly that a thick curtain of dust fell from the ceiling. The rest of us fell into a stunned silence. “So with that settled, why don’t we get back to our little trial?”

  “Okayyy,” I said. “Shall I make an opening statement?”

  “You’ve already made it, Backstreet. You have also been arraigned, and have entered your plea. And I hereby find all of you guilty of aggravated trespassing on the Guardian world of Fiffywhumpy, thereby violating one of the universe’s sternest laws. And I sentence you to death by incineration.”

  “To what?”

  “Incineration. What do you think this thing’s for?” The jailer made the pilot light in his mouth glow several times more brightly for a moment. Then he turned away and blew hard against the wall behind him, coating it briefly in a deep blue flame.

  “Wait a second—we want to appeal,” I demanded. “To an actual Guardian.”

  “Your request is hereby solemnly received, carefully considered, and curtly denied.”

  “But … shouldn’t it at least be considered by a higher authority?”

  “Normally, yes. But this is a Wholly Autonomous Boundary Court. That means there is no higher authority than me.”

  “Are you saying your authority exceeds that of the Guardians? On their own planet?”

  “Of course not,” the jailer said. “But the legal boundary of the Guardians’ planet is about twenty feet thataway.” He pointed at the floor with one of his pincers. “We’re right under the roof of a building that’s over a hundred miles tall. That puts us just barely into low orbital altitude—which means we’re beyond the jurisdiction of any planet. That’s why it’s called a Boundary Court.”

  “But that makes a complete mockery of any notion of justice! How can you even call this a legal system?”

  “Hmm, you raise a good point,” the jailer allowed. “But if we were in the star-spangled banana republic that you call home, do you really think a case like this would have Guantánamo fair judge than me? Oops—I mean, gone to a more fair judge than me?”

  I turned to Carly and Frampton. They both had their eyes shut and were moving their lips furiously, as if atoning with some deity.

  “Guys,” I said. “Do something … famous!”

  Carly popped open an eye and shook her head. “It’s hopeless, Nick. This guy’s a superstar himself. And there’s also no way we can Wrinkle out of here. The SensoryEmbargo™ system would prevent it, even if we had prebooked an outbound Wrinkle. And we didn’t.”

  “Carly’s right,” the jailer said. “There’s no way out. And even though I’ve personally attended three of her shows on Zinkiwu, and am a huge fan of hers—I’m a huge fan of all of you, really—I have to do what I have to do. But I do have one small piece of good news.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The oath that you made to never listen to singing during a trial is now moot, because court is adjourned. So before your incineration, I can honor you all with my own race’s equivalent of the song ‘Taps.’ It’s somber. It’s moving. It has a great dance beat. And because of the collectivized ownership of art in my native society, it’s now the patrimony of all of the Refined League. So in a sense, it’s your song, too.” He took a deep breath.

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for any sound to be more brutal than Paulie Stardust’s singing on Aural Sculptures. But this guy was the Slipknot to the bird’s Hannah Montana. I almost begged for an immediate incineration. But even as my will to live collapsed under the sonic assault, my mind instinctively scrambled to find a way out. Certain phrases that the jailer had said kept running through it. I’m a huge fan of all of you … Music is my first love … I adore the music of Earth more than most Refined beings. By the time his song ended, I had a desperate, long-shot getaway plan.

  “So,” the jailer rumbled. “Do you have any last requests?” He looked at Carly and Frampton, but their eyes were still shut tight, their lips moving a mile a minute. He turned to me. “How about you?”

  “Just one,” I said.

  “What is it?”

/>   “Please take me thaaaaat way,” I crooned, pointing at the floor. Carly and Frampton’s eyes immediately popped open.

  “Tell you what—we’re only here by mistake,” I ad-libbed to the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ cloying, insipid hit, “I Want It That Way.”

  “Tell you what—please do this just for my sake …” I started snapping my fingers in time with the song. The jailer’s eye widened, and his pilot light went out.

  “Tell you what—I never really meant to stay …” Now the jailer’s eye was rolling up, up, up, revealing a bloodshot mass of tissues and green goo lying beneath it. Carly’s and Frampton’s legs started to spasm violently.

  I pointed at the floor, swaying my hips like Shakira. “So please take me thaaaaat way.” With that, Carly and Frampton busted out their shambolic dance moves, and the jailer joined in with a sort of epileptic two-step. As I launched into a second chorus, it struck me that this was the first time that a human had sung a note in the actual presence of any of these music-addled aliens. Sure, it was an a cappella version of a crap song performed by a nonsinger. But I can more or less carry a tune. And the scale of the Perfuffinite concerts on Zinkiwu had demonstrated how much these loons love even the least authentic live performances. As for the jailer, however immune he was to fame, no Refined being is inured to our music—and my song was rapidly enslaving him.

  As I hit the third refrain of the chorus, I started clapping in time with the beat, and strutting around the courtroom. My groupies followed me, doing this creepy-ass zombie march. I started pointing theatrically at the floor every time I said “please take me that way.” Soon enough the jailer caved in, and rotated his eye in a peculiar way while facing the podium. This caused half of the floor to drop like a trapdoor.

  As the floor fell away from us, it transformed into a sort of carpet that flopped down and covered the top several steps of an otherwise transparent staircase that descended below us as far as I could see—maybe the full hundred miles to the planet’s surface. It was your typical stairwell, with about twenty steps separating each landing, and the staircases switching back and forth as they went down. But the steps and landings were clearer than museum glass and were surrounded by these unreflective, jet-black walls. The effect was one of an endless tunnel, tapering downward to a point beyond seeing. I pointed at the top step, commanding my disciples to lead the way. Comfortable as I’d become about heights, there was no way I was blazing a trail into that seemingly infinite pit.