Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  “And how do we do that?” She was the one who had persuaded me that this was hopeless in the first place.

  “By carrying out the plan that Frampton and I have already developed to sabotage the airing of tomorrow’s show. All of this actually fits perfectly with it.”

  “Great. What is it?”

  “In a few hours, I’m holding a press conference in which I’ll tell the universe that I’m in a romantic relationship with an Earth-based Guardian,” Carly said. “It’ll be a colossal news story. When Dad sees how huge it is, he’ll definitely want to run with it. Which means he’ll have to play along with the idea that there’s a Guardian living on Earth. Once he’s on board, I’ll show him our proof that the Guild is on the cusp of destroying humanity. And then he’ll definitely let me take our lawyer to the Guardian Council.”

  “But he doesn’t seem to care about protecting humanity.”

  “He doesn’t. But he’ll definitely want to protect his new story line.”

  “That sounds … kind of nuts. But it could work.”

  “It only has to work for a couple of days—maybe a week, tops. Because once our lawyer gets a chance to address the Council, humanity should be safe, and we can call the whole thing off. But you need to try to buy us some time on your side, too, because this is no shoo-in, and we need a Plan B.”

  “I agree—and I think I might have one,” I said. About twenty minutes earlier I’d gotten a text from Judy that grudgingly accepted my apology for being MIA all afternoon, and confirmed the next day’s meetings with Fido and the big CEO. And I had some ideas for those meetings that could just set off some fireworks.

  “Two minutes until our connection breaks off,” Frampton warned. Earth and Zinkiwu wouldn’t be able to reconnect again until the next morning.

  “We’ll need to schedule things very carefully during the coming days,” Carly said. “Because along with everything else, you and I need to generate some more footage together.”

  “We … what?”

  “Nick, I’m about to tell the universe that I’m in a relationship with an Earth-based Guardian. I can’t just make a wild claim like that without some evidence.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that you have to play the Guardian that I’m involved with. My own stereopticon has captured lots of footage of you and me together, and of you with my family. And now we have Manda’s recordings of you running around New York, which is a huge windfall for us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it shows that you’re really from Earth. Nothing that’s shot with a stereopticon can be modified without the changes being logged in a metafile that viewers can access. So everyone will know that the New York footage is authentic. That, combined with the footage of you and me together, will be enough to electrify the entire universe at the press conference. But we’ll need more than that to keep the story rolling for the next few days. Remember, Sonny & His Sirelings is high-budget reality programming. Everything needs to be scripted very carefully, or it’ll seem fake.”

  “O-kay. Got it. Well … what do we need?”

  “Scenes of the two of us eating in two or three different restaurants. A quarrel about my career. Me lost in thought in a taxi. You bringing me a box of chocolates to apologize. Us building a sand castle that towering waves fail to destroy. A motorboat chase involving guns and a grenade launcher through the canals of Venice.”

  “Sounds … fine.”

  “That, and about twelve hours of sex tapes should get us through a week of episodes.”

  “Wait—what?”

  “Nick, the viewers would see right through a relationship that isn’t completely saturated in sex. In Refined society, the reproductive arts are second only to music.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I desperately needed time to process Carly’s bizarre suggestion. It pointed to dimensions of Refined society that I didn’t know existed, and raised hundreds of profound questions about cultural relativism on galactic scales.

  Well—one, anyway. “And are you guys as … adept at the reproductive arts as you are at, say, interior design?”

  “Oh, we’re way, way adepter.”

  With that, my id seized uncontested control of my mind. I let it have its way for a moment before launching a clumsy bid to reclaim my moral center. “But … well, it’s complicated,” I nattered pathetically. “I mean, she’s not my girlfriend. Not yet, and—probably not ever. But …”

  Carly’s rasterized nympho nodded understandingly. “Manda, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think she’s perfect to play your neighbor. It fits great with the footage that we already have, obviously. We’ll just keep her as a minor figure for the first two episodes. Then the third one will start with you coming home from buying me flowers, and finding a refrigerated package addressed to Manda down in your lobby. She won’t answer when you buzz up. So you’ll use a spare key that she’s given you to put the package into her freezer before it thaws. And when you walk into her kitchen, you’ll find the two of us having sex on a counter.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Trust me on this one. Nothing works better in a story line than infidelity and female bisexuality. It’s an iron law of physics.”

  “Five seconds until the connection breaks,” Frampton said.

  “Now try to get those music licenses,” Carly said. “My idea might not work.” And with that, the connection broke.

  NINETEEN

  PLAN B

  Manda, Meowhaus, and I were still in Pugwash’s apartment at eight o’clock the next morning. We were running on exactly two hours of sleep, having spent most of the night creating our “recruiting pitch” for Judy. Pugwash had learned how to access a stereopticon’s library of pre-rendered objects and effects when he and Paulie assembled that scene of him falling from the window. Between that and Manda’s recording and projecting skills, we were able to concoct a 3D show that could shock & awe anyone into believing that aliens are entirely real. The plan was for Manda to hide behind my office desk when Judy came by to take me to the meeting with Fido later that morning. I’d get Judy to shut the door on some pretext, and then Manda would crank things up on the stereopticon. This should get Judy on board. Then we’d basically repeat or modify the process as appropriate in our meetings with Fido, and with the music label CEO that we call The Munk.

  I was feeling good about our prospects. We didn’t actually need to change the law or get impossibly sweeping music licenses to achieve our goals. We just needed enough cooperation from either Fido or The Munk to buy us some time. A rough outline of a law to erase the universe’s debts signed by the senator might convince Paulie that we were on the cusp of getting him what he wanted. Or maybe a nonbinding memo of understanding to the same effect from The Munk. Something impressive but meaningless (and therefore painless for Fido or The Munk to write) should do the trick. And we only needed to buy a few days. By now, Carly would have routed our evidence to Guardian 1138. And if her campaign to recruit her show’s lawyer went as planned, they should have their audience with the Council soon.

  “Holy crap,” Pugwash bellowed. “Are you sure there’s no way we can license this?” He was standing in the middle of his living room with my Bono glasses on, snapping his head around as he took in the sights of the enhanced alien version of Warcraft. He’d be hanging out in there until Carly or Frampton showed up with an update on their progress—presumably when the next Wrinkle connection opened, in a bit under an hour. After that, he’d go wait in the Waldorf’s lobby, in case we needed him to rush down to the cavern beneath Grand Central to talk to Paulie or the Decapuses.

  As he checked out the Warcraft vistas, Pugwash started wriggling and rubbing his hands over his body in a creepy, but oddly familiar way. “I haven’t had this much fun since puberty,” he said. “And I’m just moving an avatar around!” He wriggled some more.

  “Are you doing …?” I asked.


  He caressed his hips with both of his hands.

  “Is that the Macarena?”

  “Makha-reeeeee-nyu,” he corrected me, sounding like a Pakistani samurai hailing a cab. “And yes, I can’t get that damn song out of my head.”

  “Speaking of music, see if you can get a digital copy of the awful song that our jailer sang right after sentencing us all to death,” I asked, vaguely wondering if that precise sentence had ever been uttered in the English language before. “Both Carly and Frampton should have captured it on their stereopticons.” Of course, there was probably no way to get their audio into a format that our computers could read, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  “Sure—what do you need it for?” Pugwash asked, transitioning to a Texas two-step.

  “An insane backup plan that I thought up while I was falling asleep. The jailer said that his song is the jointly owned property of everyone in the Refined League. So maybe we can get Google or someone to make a zillion illegal copies of it, to offset the copies that everyone in the Refined League has of our music?”

  “What a stupid idea,” Pugwash said, easing into the cha-cha.

  “Probably. But I want to get every iron into the fire that I can. Anyway, don’t hurt yourself in there. And remember to contact me the instant you hear from our alien friends.” The last thing we needed was for him and Frampton to break into an impromptu dance party and lose all track of time.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll call,” Pugwash said, switching to a groovy sixties-looking boogie. A couple steps into it, he started making those kiddie-on-a-balance-beam moves that I know so well.

  “Incoming!” I shouted instinctively. But neither Manda nor Meowhaus know my family’s argot—so the warning was lost on them, and they both jumped halfway across the apartment when Pugwash unleashed another twenty-megaton sneeze.

  Once everyone had recovered from that, Manda, Meowhaus, and I headed downstairs and hailed a cab. I was going straight to the office, while Manda would be swinging by her apartment to change into her paralegal garb, and to drop off Meowhaus.

  “Your idea for copying the jailer’s song is interesting,” she said as our cab headed north.

  “There’s actually a ton of problems with it. But our other plans could all fall through, so we may as well have an extra backup.”

  “Then why don’t I set up a C-Corporation to own the song’s copyright?” she suggested. “A lawyer that I work with specializes in start-ups, and I incorporate things all the time. We can figure out how to distribute the stock to the Refined League later, if we actually need to.”

  “Sounds good, but how long will it take? Remember, we have Judy at nine-thirty.”

  “Seconds. My firm has this template that makes it go incredibly fast. And if I file the documents with Delaware, they can incorporate it in less than an hour for a thousand-dollar fee.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely. And if Pugwash manages to get me a copy of the song, I can also hit the Library of Congress website and register the copyright in the C-Corp’s name.”

  By 8:45 I was in my office and struggling to keep my eyes open. Right around 9:00, my assistant Barbara Ann rang through. “I have Joseph Stalin on the line for you. Says he’s calling from … Prussia?”

  “Ah, Stally. Please put him through.” This would be Pugwash. He resents Barbara Ann for being both attractive and completely indifferent toward him (common as this is), and retaliates by identifying himself as renowned figures that she’s too dim to know about whenever he calls. I have amassed quite a collection of Post-it notes saying things like “Kissinger can’t make lunch on Tuesday,” or “that Steven Hawking guy called again,” or “Oogo Shavez has an extra Mets ticket for tonight.”

  “Dude, turn on your Skype,” Pugwash said as soon as he was patched through. “I’ve got Carly networked in through Warcraft via my computer, and she has news. And keep me on the phone so I can listen in—I can only connect her to one Skype account, and that’ll be yours.”

  I fired up Skype and answered an inbound call from SpaceVixen4Uxxx. Up popped a window displaying Carly’s cybertramp.

  “Bad news,” she said as soon as our connection was live. “There’s a wildcat strike under way on Zinkiwu. Everything connected to media and communications is completely shut down. It started five minutes after I announced my press conference. So there’s no way I can hold it now.”

  “Let me guess—the Guild’s behind it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Do you think they know what you were planning to say?”

  Carly’s saucy little proxy shook her head. “Not a chance. Only you and Frampton know that. But they do know that I’m working with you.”

  “How so?”

  “Apparently, the jailer reported that we were traveling together right before he … stumbled down the steps.”

  “So they shut down the press conference as a precautionary step to keep you quiet.”

  “Exactly,” Carly said. “Meanwhile, the episode that spills the beans about there not being a Guardian on Earth goes live throughout the universe in an hour and a quarter.”

  “Of course. So now what?”

  “You definitely need to buy us a few days by getting something promising for Paulie from your senator, or that CEO. Meanwhile, pluhhhs are going to pull me and Frampton over to their planet as soon as you and I are done talking. Then they’ll try to push us through to the Guardians’ planet again. I don’t know if we’ll make it, though—the Guild will be watching for us there, and we know what happened last time.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, be careful.”

  “We will be. pluhhhs will keep a tracking beam on us, and they’ll yank us back if someone tries to hijack our Wrinkle at the very end of the trip again. And whether we make it through to the Guardians or come back to pluhhhs, we’ll be on a planet that’s at a Wrinkle Vertex. So we’ll be able to come straight to Earth at any time, if circumstances warrant.”

  “Got it. Then let me tell you my schedule, so you’ll know where to find me.” I gave her the details on my meetings with Judy, Fido, and The Munk.

  “Got it,” Carly said. “Don’t be surprised to see me or Frampton at some point.”

  “I won’t be. Do me a favor though, and skip the religious garb, okay?”

  The Blood Elf said nothing.

  “I mean, there’s lots of hats and things that you can wear to hide your sound-blocking gear, right?”

  She was motionless as well as speechless.

  I jiggled my mouse, and the cursor was motionless, too. Naturally. My PC was having one of its thrice-daily seizures. “Goddamn Windows!” I snarled under my breath.

  “Crashed again, huh?” I’d forgotten that Pugwash was still listening in on the phone.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You know, you really should have made the switch years ago.” Pugwash is a committed Mac snob, and not even the apparent advent of doomsday on Earth could diminish the smug warmth that this fresh sign of the PC’s inferiority was giving him. “Anyway, I should go see if I can reconnect with Carly in Warcraft. I lost her when I put her through to talk to you on Skype. But before that, I did manage to get a copy of that god-awful song for Manda.”

  “You did? How did you translate the audio from their format to ours?” I can barely send a spreadsheet from one computer to another without encountering some boneheaded compatibility issue.

  “It was easy. Your Bono glasses are connected to my laptop through that USB cable. So I just recorded the audio that flowed through the computer while Carly played the song. Things like that are really easy on a Mac.”

  “Great. Anyway—”

  “Also, my computer never crashes, and it’s practically immune to viruses.”

  “Well, that’s great, too. Listen, Manda’s about to get here and—”

  “And best of all, wireless networking’s a breeze. Unlike on a PC. And the retail stores are a great resource. I can walk to three of them
from my loft. Have you heard about their training classes?”

  I eventually got him off the phone. A few minutes later, Barbara Ann rang to tell me that Manda had arrived. “Send her in,” I said.

  Despite everything, my heart gave a little flutter when the door opened. Manda is simply stunning in her professional garb—no surprise, I guess, coming from someone who’s stunning in a Radiolab sweatshirt. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt, along with a blue satin blouse and a navy blazer that was nipped in at the waist. It all made for a fine display of her curves, while still being appropriately modest for a modern American office. The only thing that didn’t fit the look was that garish necklace, but it was the least tacky form that Manda had found in the stereopticon’s repertoire.

  We had fifteen minutes before Judy was supposed to drop by to take me to Fido. Given how late she always runs, I figured this would give us at least a half hour to ourselves. “So you got the song?” I asked.

  Manda nodded. “Your cousin emailed it to me while I was in the cab coming over. And here on Earth, it’s already the copyrighted property of Intergalactic Music—a bouncing baby corporation that entered the world just a few minutes ago.”

  Before I could high-five her, Barbara Ann rang through again. “Judy’s here,” she announced.

  Of course she was. The innate sense that tells Judy exactly how much lateness will make a media baron think she’s maximally awesome must also alert her whenever an early arrival will be cripplingly troublesome for the person she’s about to meet with.

  “Dammit, Judy’s here,” I told Manda. She didn’t have time to take a single step toward her hiding spot behind the desk before the door blasted open.

  TWENTY

  SHOCK & AWE

  Judy made a beeline for Manda, who must have looked like a professional homunculus of herself, being similarly gorgeous, elegantly dressed, accessorized with a lawyerly attaché—and infuriatingly young. “I’m Judy Sherman,” she said, extending a hand, and oozing warmth. “Who are you, and why the fuck are you here?”