Year Zero (12 page)

She looked me over, doing her level best to take the question seriously. I’m one fourth of her boss, after all. “No,” she decided. “They don’t. They do make you look a little … Irish, maybe? And short. Definitely short. But not fat.”

“Thanks,” I said, and she shut the door.

I looked back at the computer screen. Maybe I had to click the hyperlink again? I righted my chair, sat on it squarely, clicked the link … and was back in the tableau.

“Hi Nick!” Apparently the ugly green statue was feeling chatty. I knew its voice from somewhere, but couldn’t quite place it.

“Who … are you?”

“Oh, the green guy? That’s not me. That’s you!”

I recognized the voice now. It was Frampton. And it wasn’t coming from the ogre, it was coming from—nowhere in particular. “Excuse me?” I asked.

“That’s you. That’s your
char
acter! And I’m sorry about the dress. But I thought it would be cool to make you a Warlock. And, well, that’s what level one Warlocks wear, I guess. I tried to make it up to you by making you an Orc, but … it all came out a bit silly, didn’t it?”

This conveyed precisely zero information to me.

“Anyway, please click the button,” Frampton continued. “Carly’s kind of impatient, and I don’t want her getting p.o.’d.”

Button? I looked around and saw it. Hovering at shin
level to the ogre (to
me
?) was a red button that said Enter World.

“Touch your right thumb to your forefinger, like you’re making an okay sign, and the system will start tracking your body,” Frampton said. I did this, and the green guy started mirroring my movements precisely.

“How’s it doing that?” I asked, amazed by the tiny nuances of gesture that the system was picking up from me and rendering in my avatar.

“The glasses you’re wearing. There’s a … radar machine in them. Or something.”

Feeling like a digital puppeteer, I had my character reach down to the Enter World button and touch it. With that, my perspective shifted. It now looked like I was floating above, and slightly behind Greenie. And he (I?) was now hanging out with two other screwballs. One looked like a Black Sabbath roadie gussied up for a Halloween roller derby in the Bronx—massive iron gloves, a steel-tipped ruffled collar, armor held together by a huge skull-shaped fastener—that
sort of thing. The other one looked like a Moscow whore who’d somehow gotten trapped in a Tolkien novel. Wearing thigh-high boots and some scant strips of green cloth that were accessorized with a hunter’s bow and quiver, she had blond hair, pointy ears, luminous green eyes, and, well—let’s just say a nice set of lungs (as I once heard a squirrelly old bartender put it).

“I’m a Death Knight,” Frampton announced, as the S&M thug did this shuffling sort of dance step. “And Carly’s a Blood Elf.” The top-heavy trollop gave me the finger.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is World of Warcraft,” Frampton said, as his Death Knight applauded for some reason.

“You’re kidding.” Two friends of mine play WoW constantly, but I hadn’t tried it myself. I just thought it was an online video game with cartoonish graphics. But this was incredible.

“Don’t get too excited,” Carly said, as if reading my thoughts. “This is actually a highly enhanced version of Warcraft. The virtual reality interface in your glasses, the high visual fidelity, the gesture tracking, and the voice channel that we’re using were all created by Refined engineers, and aren’t available to human players on Earth.”

Boy, that took a lot of fun out of it. “So why are we meeting here?”

“Because the only two-way data connection that exists between Earth and the rest of the universe runs through Warcraft. A group of our hackers built it in order to have some small interactions with humans, since your planet’s off-limits to us. It’s totally illegal. But inevitable, given the fascination that the rest of the universe has with you. And the Refined beings who use it behave responsibly and don’t divulge their origins to the humans they
interact with.”

“But who do they say they are?”

“Koreans,” Frampton said.

Carly’s cartoon floozy nodded. “If you ever meet a Korean in WoW, you can bet it’s an alien patching in from far, far away. Ask him to name his president, or the main street in Seoul. He’ll just stammer.”

“The real Koreans are all playing some other game that takes place in an online tree, or something,” Frampton added dismissively.
²

“Got it. Well, how much time do we have to talk?”

“About fifteen minutes,” Carly said.

I had Greenie nod. This was consistent with what the concierge had said about the duration of Wrinkle connections. “And not only can we exchange data, but our bodies can theoretically travel through the Wrinkle during this time, right?”

“Exactly.”

“But you’ll get trapped on Earth for many hours if you come over, so you won’t make the jump.”

“We won’t,” Carly confirmed.

Phew
. The last thing I needed was these two stomping around New York in their damned robes, having seizures every time a song came on.

“But you can,” she added.

“What?” Somehow I managed to say this calmly.

“But
you
can.”

Christ, she said it again!
“But … I’m afraid of heights.”

Okay, that was pathetic (but true—which I guess makes it more pathetic). But no one had mentioned the faintest possibility of me getting yanked through umpteen zillion miles of space, and I didn’t like the idea one bit. I mean, I’m a lawyer—not an investment banker! The law is a safe haven for the bright, ambitious, and
cripplingly risk-averse
. I wouldn’t even bungie jump—and she wanted me to
what
?

“Something … unexpected has happened,” Carly was saying. “Something that could be very dangerous. And it calls for more than just a twenty-minute chitchat between us.”

“But wait.”
Wait!
“Won’t I get stuck for a day if I come over there?” Or devoured, or zapped, or probed, or dropped, or crushed in a giant trash compactor, or offed by a mutinous computer, or colonized by an alien fetus, or …?

Carly’s avatar shook her trampy little head. “Once we’re done on our planet, we plan to take you to a restricted facility that has near-constant Wrinkle access to the entire universe. It’s called a Wrinkle Vertex. From there, we can send you straight home, so you won’t get stuck.”

“Yes, but … isn’t that dinosaur about to charge us?” This was more than just a cowardly attempt to change the subject (although it did serve that purpose nicely), because a dinosaur really was about to charge us.

“T-Rex, level fifty,” Frampton hollered, his avatar turning to Carly’s. “Hang back, squishy. I’m on it.” He turned to me, pointing at the incoming beast. “That’s from a real Warcraft server,” he said reverently. “It’s exactly how things look to human players on … 
Earth
.” With that, his avatar pulled a monstrous double-headed ax out of thin air, and dashed off to
battle the dinosaur. His prey was pretty nicely rendered. But compared to his own avatar’s down-to-the-micron fidelity, it looked like a cheap animation.

I turned to Carly’s digital harlot. “Look, the Wrinkle won’t close for a while yet. So before I put my life in your hands, you need to tell me a lot more about what the hell is going on.”

As I said this, Frampton’s avatar beheaded the dinosaur with a single blow. “WOOt!” he crowed in a triumphant falsetto as he stomped back toward us. “WOOt, woot, woot!”

“Time is tight, so this will be highly abridged,” Carly said.

“Go for it.”

She and Frampton proceeded to give me the lowdown on the Refined League’s discovery of Earth back in the seventies, and the decades that everyone had since spent ecstatically contemplating our music.

“Which brings us to the reason why we came to you,” Carly said several minutes later, having carefully hung on to the punch line.

“Well—yes, I’ve been wondering.” It’s hard to tell with an avatar, but I got the sense that she was starting to glower a bit.

“Back when the most ancient societies first became fully Refined, their focus transitioned from science—which they had thoroughly conquered—to the development of culture, which is a never-ending pursuit,” she said. “An entirely new social, political, and economic order arose. One based wholly upon the creation, sharing, and savoring of the Noble Arts, which are now the prime focus of our existence. At the core of this order is something that
we call the Indigenous Arts Doctrine. It’s the basis of our entire economy, moral code, and legal system. It has been the cornerstone of our society for over five billion years. To give you a faint inkling of how ancient and sacred this doctrine is to us, it’s about twenty-two
million
times older than your Constitution.”

“Which makes it twenty-one point six million times older than the Articles of Confederation,” Frampton added professorially, earning a deeply irritated glare from Carly’s direction.

“Got it,” I said. “So, what does the Doctrine say?”

“Very simply, that every work of creative art must be shared and savored in accordance with the rules and the norms of its society of origin. Those rules are inviolable, whatever they may be. And they must be universally respected.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said. If a bit vague. And uptight. “Could you give me an example?”

Carly’s manga streetwalker nodded. “Sure. Take live dramatic performances.”

“You mean plays?”

“Exactly. Some of the universe’s finest plays are created by a society that evolved on a planet with such a nurturing climate that they never had to make buildings, roofs, or cellars. Nothing ever came between their ancestors and their cherished, sheltering sky. And so, by their ancient tradition, their plays must always be performed in open-air amphitheaters, with no roof or other structure coming between the performers and the heavens. This is an inviolable rule
throughout the universe—wherever their works are produced, and regardless of who’s putting them on.”

“That sounds very respectful.”

“It is,” Carly said. “Which is appropriate. Because they didn’t wrap their plays up in some scummy, greedy rule that didn’t
merit
respect, did they?”

I said nothing, assuming that this was just a bizarre rhetorical question.

“
Did
they?” she barked.

“Well—no,” I allowed.

“Another species creates the universe’s most sublime stained-glass patterns. In the dawning days of their civilization, they had an especially feared predator whose skin was the color that your designers call ‘harlequin shamrock.’ The society’s earliest glass masters forbade the use of their predator’s hated color in their craft, and that ancient ban remains in effect to this day. So certain frequencies of green light cannot be used in
the society’s patterns anywhere in the universe, regardless of who’s cutting glass for those patterns. Again, the rules and the norms of the society that generates the art apply to that art everywhere.”

Right then I had a grim premonition. “And that brings us to the Earth’s music, doesn’t it?”

“Boy does it. And I must say, the rules connected to your music are quite strange.”

“But despite that, they’re … inviolable, huh?”

“Yes. And they must be universally
respected
.” Carly spat out this last word as if it were the name of a barbarous tribe that had conquered her nation, slaughtered her people, and salted their ancestral lands. “And they apply throughout the universe. Wherever, and whenever, your music is shared and savored.”

“And according to our eternal rules, when you … share and savor our music …?”

“We do so in a manner that your society defines as
piracy
.” As Carly said this, her bump-mapped hussy mimed a set of ironic quotation marks so violently that she might have torn gashes in the fabric of reality itself if we weren’t in a computer simulation.

“You don’t say.”

“Ohhh, but I do. And someday, you really have to tell me how the American people arrived at that fine of up to $150,000 for every single copy of every single song that gets pirated. You see, I’m a history buff, Nick. And this turns out to be the single most consequential decision in the history of the
entire fucking universe
.”

“Oh. Well, you see, that’s an approximation of … damages.” I actually had no idea how Judy had dreamed up that demented number.

“Damages?
Damages
? As in—one solitary person downloading a single copy of a single song causes up to $150,000 worth of
harm
to a multinational media company?”

“Well, maybe they’re rounding up slightly, but—”

“Rounding
up
? To what? To the nearest three-twentieths of a million dollars?”

“Wow! Did you just do that in your head? Because if you did—”

“Nick, Can you name one other thing whose price
rounds
to $150,000?”

“Relatively few mass-market goods, I’ll grant you, but—”

“Oh, I can tell you, Nick. Lots of four-bedroom houses in Phoenix
round
to $150,000.”

“Well, Phoenix is a bit off the beaten track, and—”

“Off the beaten track? It’s the
sixth largest city in the most powerful country on Earth
. And McMansions there can cost less than a pirated copy of ‘My Sharona’!”

That was tough to rebut, so I shifted topics somewhat. “So how much money does the Refined League owe our music industry at this point?”

“All of it,” Carly said flatly.

“All of it? As in …?”

“As in, all of the wealth ever created throughout every cubic inch of the universe since the Big Bang.”

“All that, huh?”

“As in, all of the wealth that could conceivably be created by every conscious being that will ever live between now and the heat death of the universe, trillions of years in the future.”

“All that, too?”

“As in, an amount that’s so much larger than even the
sum
of those first two numbers, that the factor by which it exceeds that sum is itself far too large to even be meaningful in traditional monetary terms.”

“
Damn
that’s a lot,” I said, not following this in the least, but figuring a quick, emphatic response was called for. “And when exactly did you all realize that you had this … little debt problem?”