Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  The physiological differences between Paulie’s species and our own parrots must be significant. Because over the next several seconds, his feathers went from canary yellow, to bitter orange, to kamikaze red. As he spun through the color wheel, Paulie started vibrating with rage—much as Özzÿ had when Manda taunted him. But he held his peace.

  I turned to his sidekick. “How about you, Özzÿ? Why don’t you tell me about your little table?”

  Özzÿ pushed the coasterlike things around it more frenetically. “I’ve never seen you, never ever, not even once in my life, Your Illustriousness,” he wheezed.

  Ah yes—I’d talked him into keeping Paulie in the dark about our first meeting. Well done, Özzÿ. Glancing at my watch, I decided to quit while I was ahead. I was supposed to meet Carly and Frampton in Warcraft in less than an hour. And my work here was done, since Paulie clearly wouldn’t be trying anything rash until after tomorrow’s episode of Sonny & His Sirelings proved that I wasn’t a Guardian after all. I turned to The Boss. “These two aren’t talking, so please take us back to the surface.”

  He nervously consulted his stereopticon. “That might be tricky. It turns out that it’s … a little crowded outside.”

  “A little crowded?”

  “Maybe a lot crowded.” The Boss walked over to one of the walls. “Now, don’t panic. This’ll be like a one-way mirror. No one outside can see us.”

  He waved three of his limbs in a complex pattern. With that, the walls and the ceiling all vanished, and we beheld … every Decapus on Earth. They filled the entire cavern, and every tunnel feeding into it. The floor was completely invisible beneath their tightly packed bodies.

  “Whoa,” Manda said.

  This being my first spontaneous subterranean alien mob, I was briefly terrified. But then I realized it was a peaceful spontaneous subterranean alien mob. No one out there was pushing or shoving. A few were chattering, but most were silent. And everyone was holding limbs with three or four neighbors in a way that was almost reverential. Then I noticed the first placard. It looked like a slapdash sign made by one of those Meadowlands drunks who paints his face green, and sobs when the Jets lose. It featured three hand-drawn glyphs—an eyeball, a Valentine-like heart, and a ravenous fish. Scanning the crowd, I saw a few similar signs, as well as a banner that was covered with a vertical cascade of words: Musical, Angellic [sic], Nice, Debutantey, and again, Angellic (and again, [sic]).

  I turned to Manda. “Hey, it looks like you’ve got some … fans.” The eyeball, heart, and toothy fish had to mean “I Love Shark.” And the first letters in the cascade of words spelled out M-A-N-D-A.

  “Holy shhhhhhh …” She didn’t finish the thought, but I got the gist.

  Paulie had put two and two together as well, and turned to The Boss. “You coulda warned me that you’d brung your colony’s favorite singer down here.” He was testy, but had more or less reined in his temper (and his feathers were almost back to their normal yellow color).

  “I didn’t,” The Boss said defensively. “She just became their favorite singer a couple minutes ago.” He went on to tell Paulie about the sighting that occurred as we were approaching his work space. “My team says that after that, the news that an actual singer had actually come to the actual cavern spread like lightning,” he concluded, consulting his stereopticon. “Even though most folks hadn’t heard of her, the whole colony naturally started listening to one of her songs. And it’s already the biggest hit down here since ‘Macarena.’ ”

  Paulie instantly relaxed and got a blissed-out look on his face. “God, I love that song,” he whispered huskily.

  “Don’t get me started!” They both sighed and gazed absently into the distance—The Boss mouthing the words to the Macarena song, and Paulie miming the steps of the Macarena dance.

  “Gggggggggh!” Something about this fascinated Meowhaus.

  “Maybe next time, we can get Los del Río down here,” Paulie said wistfully.

  “Are they the ones who sing ‘The Macarena’?” I guessed.

  They both looked at me like I’d crashed the State of the Union and asked who the loudmouth at the podium was. “The Macarena?” Paulie asked. “The Macarena? It’s Macarena! No goddamn definite article, you troglodyte! And yes—Los del Río is the band behind the greatest dance song since the Big Bang.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but I was raised by wild dogs. Now, tell me how you’re getting us out of here? And don’t forget to call me Your Illustriousness this time.”

  Since there’d be no getting through Manda’s adoring public, we quickly agreed that the only way out was a Wrinkle. Paulie figured out that he could place us within a block of where he’d put Pugwash. And this time, we let him send us.

  * * *

  1. His flashlight, hand-cranked radio, and Mardi Gras beads failed to impress, however, since the chief’s son had recently brought in three crates of Pop Rocks and an iPod Touch.

  2. You can’t really call them “arms” or “legs,” because each of them doubles as both of those things—as well as a trunk of sorts (they breathe through them, like elephants), reproductive gear in two cases (there’s no telling which ones), and an off-ramp for liquid waste in another (but if you ever meet one of these guys, don’t worry—Decapus etiquette will protect you from shaking hands with the limbs that you’d rather not touch).

  3. I later learned that the rushed schedule forced them to “grab the whole store” quite literally—leaving nothing behind but a smoking shell laced with exotic compounds that are unknown on Earth. Our federal government did a brilliant job of covering all of this up, and to this day, several top-ranking agents are completely freaked out over it.

  4. When this happened, sophisticates throughout the universe delighted in the newly unleashed archives of jazz and classical. But to this day, most folks remain loyal to the pop, disco, and (above all) blistering hard rock that dominated the airwaves during that first magical year of discovery. For this reason, hip-hop, which didn’t emerge commercially until late 1979, never caught on in the Refined League to the degree that it did here on Earth.

  EIGHTEEN

  AVATARDIER

  “Seriously? He canceled it?” I leapt to my feet and did a little jig that looked even stupider on my Warcraft avatar’s brawny green body than I expected. Carly celebrated by having her Blood Elf avatar flash me with that pornographic chest. Then Frampton’s Death Knight leapt toward me with his right hand overhead. I bounded toward him and met the high five, briefly forgetting that my actual body was surrounded by the fragile flotsam of Pugwash’s live-in scrapbook of an apartment. Out there in reality, my hand connected with something that felt indigenous and expensive—silky fibers arrayed on some sort of twig skeleton that I smashed to atoms.

  “Dammit,” Pugwash’s disembodied voice whined from outside our Warcraft scene. “That merkin stand was from Borneo!”

  “Sorry, dude,” I said. “But saving the world calls for a bit of celebrating.” I’d just learned that Paulie had canceled the inbound Wrinkle that Carly and I had seen in the queue at pluhhhs base. Since he’d surely rebook it once Sonny & His Sirelings made it clear that I wasn’t a Guardian the following morning, I’d only saved the world for ten or eleven hours. But it was a start.

  “So tell me more,” I asked Carly’s virtual tart.

  “Well, from the timing records that pluhhhs gave me, I can confirm that Paulie booked the Wrinkle right after your idiot cousin told him about your childhood.”

  “Why are you calling my cousin an idiot?” I asked. The answer to this was self-evident. But Pugwash could only hear my end of the conversation, and I thought he’d enjoy knowing what the most famous babe in the universe had just called him.

  Carly ignored the question. “pluhhhs also told me that the Wrinkle was just ninety-eight seconds from activating when you suckered Paulie into shutting it down. So that was truly brilliant work.” Her smutty little avatar flashed me again.

  “And was it metallicam?
”

  “Apparently. The Wrinkle was to originate in a metallicam depot.”

  “And how long will it take them to rebook it after the episode airs?” I asked.

  “The episode broadcasts tomorrow morning at nine fifty-eight, New York time. And Paulie will be able to establish a connection between the depot and Grand Central just an hour and a quarter after that.”

  “So we’re looking at eleven-fifteen or so.”

  Carly’s ray-traced jezebel nodded. “And one other thing. Paulie apparently intended to relay the metallicam out to five different points on Earth shortly after it arrived under Grand Central. pluhhhs haven’t figured out exactly where the target destinations were, but they’re working on it.”

  “I might actually have some evidence on that front.” I finally told her that Manda and I had ended up with Özzÿ’s stereopticon. I then described the thumbnail documents that Paulie was looking at when we entered the transit bay. Given the stereopticon’s panoramic lensing and unlimited resolution, Manda should have picked up detailed images of all of them.

  Carly told me to have Manda jab a USB cable into the stereopticon (assuring me that a perfect socket would form to accommodate the plug as she did this), and to connect the other end of it to the computer that my Bono glasses were attached to. “So why didn’t you tell me that you guys had a stereopticon?” Carly asked grumpily, as Manda followed her instructions. The answer was that I’d been annoyed by all of her stonewalling right after I arrived on her planet, and had decided to keep that fact to myself for a while. Then we got all distracted by fighting for our lives and whatnot, and I’d simply forgotten to mention it.

  “Because nobody tells you anything, duh,” I said, shrugging.

  Once we had access to the stereopticon’s recorded footage, Carly summoned a virtual plasma TV (not a standard Warcraft feature, I’m sure), and we gathered our avatars around it as she fast-forwarded through the evening. At one point, she slowed it down for a scene of Manda, Pugwash, and me walking through the city streets. “Bear with me, this is actually really useful,” she said, shifting to a playback angle that set me off against the city’s skyline. She tweaked at this for a few seconds, then jumped to the part where we all joined Paulie and Özzÿ in the transit bay. Here, the first thing she zoomed in on was Özzÿ sliding the coasterlike pads around his small table.

  “Do you know what he’s doing?” I asked.

  “Practicing,” Carly said. “When the metallicam Wrinkles in, it will arrive on that table. He’ll then need to array the containers in just the right way for the outbound five-way Wrinkle to work. A burger-flipper could probably do it. But given that it’s metallicam, he’s wise to practice his moves.” She paused the playback and stared at Özzÿ.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “I see …” She gave me a worried look, and pointed at the TV screen. “I see an incredibly useful recording. One that you’re telling me was made with Özzÿ’s own stereopticon. Which is bizarre, because Paulie should have deactivated that thing the instant he knew it was missing. It’s a huge security hole for them.”

  “I’ve been wondering why it hasn’t been shut down myself. But why would Paulie be the one to do it?”

  “Because Özzÿ’s stereopticon is a sensitive part of the Guild’s data infrastructure. So I’m sure he was supposed to report it the moment he lost it. And Paulie or someone else in his chain of command should have investigated, and crippled the thing by now.”

  “Aha. In that case, I think I know what’s going on.” I reminded her about how I had persuaded Özzÿ to not let on that I’d caught him in my apartment. “So the poor dumbshit’s so scared for his job that he can’t tell anyone that he lost his stereopticon,” I chuckled.

  Carly’s animé ho nodded slowly. “That, or it’s all a setup, you’re the dumbshit, and they’re using the stereopticon to spy on you.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve … carefully considered that possibility, and believe that it’s quite remote.”

  “Yeah, right. I’d say it’s a fifty percent chance, and you’re considering it for the first time right now. But since we’re already sunk if you’re the sucker, let’s assume that Özzÿ’s the dumber-shit of the two of you for now, and play it that way.”

  “Got it. Great … plan.”

  “And if Özzÿ really is that stupid, we can bet he’ll get caught soon enough. And when he does, they’ll definitely start spying on you through his stereopticon. Unless Paulie throws a tantrum and cripples the thing before it occurs to him to do that.”

  I thought of how Paulie couldn’t stop himself from brawling at Eatiary when he should have focused on interrogating me. “I’d give the tantrum high odds.”

  “Let’s hope so. Anyway, let’s look at those images.”

  Carly had no trouble enlarging Paulie’s thumbnails until they were easily legible. They turned out to be letters in several human languages, which she converted into documents that we could hold in our virtual Warcraft hands.

  “Goddamn,” I said flipping through the English material. It included a letter addressed to the president, as well as ones to the heads of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NSA, and so forth. The letters identified several unstable regimes and violent insurgencies that had just gotten their hands on an immensely destructive substance. They assured our leaders that the recipients had been fully apprised of the substance’s inherent dangers, and that they would therefore surely use it responsibly. However, the letters said:

  I still thought you might want to know about this anyway, just in case you feel funny about these guys controlling something that makes your entire Nuclear Arsenal look like a flaccid spitball. Oh, and PS! I should mention that this stuff could also be used as an inexhaustible source of CLEAN ENERGY. Cool, huh?! Of course, that doesn’t do you much good, because it’s sitting at the coordinates that I’ve listed below, none of which lie in territory that you control (at least not yet, huh???;-)

  Oh, and PPS! I’ve also forwarded all of this Information to the leaders of Russia, China, India, Israel—and even Estonia (why not?!). I figured they might want to know, too. In fact, I kind of hit “send” on my note to the Chinese an hour early by mistake (oops!). For all I know, they may already be on their way to try and seize the stuff (sorry ’bout that!).

  The letters ended with latitude and longitude numbers that pinpointed the locations of the five metallicam caches down to the millimeter, followed by a flurry of X’s and O’s. Attached to each was a page of elaborate mathematics.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, looking at the equations.

  “Scientific proof of the letter’s claims,” Carly said. “Any skilled physicist who examines it will know this is all for real.” She turned to her brother’s avatar. “How’s the foreign stuff looking?” As she and I read through the English material, Frampton had been applying translation tools to the rest of it.

  “Very reassuring,” he said.

  “Why? What did you find?” Carly asked suspiciously.

  “The letters are mostly instructions for using metallicam as an energy supply. Which is good, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Assuming we want all of the world’s energy to come from—” I glanced at the list of metallicam recipients. “Al-Qaeda, Myanmar, a band of Hutu rebels, the Serbian Maoist party, and some guy named Mahmoud in Karachi.”

  “But I’m sure those guys will do the right thing if they finally feel needed,” Frampton insisted. “And on top of that, Paulie’s sending them all tons of safety instructions.”

  “Seriously? What do they say?”

  “Well, let’s see … this letter to al-Qaeda warns them to absolutely never follow a certain eight-step process with their metallicam, because if they do, Israel will be destroyed by a monstrous wave of radiation. It’s very detailed, so Paulie obviously takes safety seriously. He even underlined the words absolutely never twice!”

  A quick inspection showed more of the same in the other documents. Paul
ie was basically giving some raving lunatics the tools and instructions they needed to wipe the Earth clean of the nations that most annoyed them. He was meanwhile divulging the details of this to some lesser lunatics with massive militaries at their disposal. Once the latter group had Paulie’s letters authenticated by scientists, five nuclear-armed nations (and Estonia!) would plunge into a mad, violent race to snatch the metallicam out of five global flash points before somebody else did. Humanity’s self-destruction was the only plausible result of this—either with or without the eventual detonation of the metallicam itself. And one way or another, the crazed scramble would surely trigger unlimited news coverage during the days (or hours) before everything blew up.

  “Is this enough evidence for Guardian 1138 to get the Council to shut Paulie down?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Carly said slowly. “But remember what he said about the Guild having the best lobbyists and lawyers in the universe. They may be able to obfuscate things if we manage to raise the issue to the Council.”

  “Seriously? But how?”

  “Guardians are famously logical and literal-minded. So they might completely miss the irony in these letters. And even if they don’t, they might be persuaded to let things take their course and see if humanity survives. Remember—their highest duty is always to make sure that self-destructive species actually self-destruct before they become dangerously sophisticated.”

  “So then what do we do?”

  “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I think I know someone who could turn the tide for us. After our show became such a huge success, Dad decided to build an amazing legal team for our family’s media company—and he found a real superstar to become our lead attorney. This guy’s actually argued three cases in front of the Guardian Council in the past, and he’s hugely respected.”

  “He sounds incredible. But how will you get him on our side? Doesn’t he take his orders from your father?”

  “He does. So step one is getting Dad on our side.”