Year Zero (16 page)

“And who’s the heartbreaker?” I asked, pointing at the orange grotesque.

Carly smiled, almost sweetly. “That’s Mllsh-mllsh, the show’s host.”

“This episode ran in the year 2 PK,” Frampton added. Seeing my blank look, he added “Pre-Kotter.”

“A law passed shortly after the Kotter Moment requires that all dates be expressed in Pre- and Post-Kotter terms,” Carly explained.
²

Frampton made another flicking gesture, and the static images came to life. Now, I’ve never heard a rabid hyena
shriek from rectal acid burns. But I’ll bet that sounds a lot like Mllsh-mllsh introducing a guest.

Carly and Frampton nudged each other and grinned nostalgically as he spoke. “His lisp was
so cute
,” Carly murmured.

Soon the bird was singing. And if this sound could be weaponized, its destructive power would put it somewhere between chemical and biological warheads.
³
Frampton and Carly shut their eyes and nodded along, adoringly.

“STOP IT,”
I yelped when I couldn’t take it anymore. Frampton paused the playback and gave me a hurt look. “Could we, uh—get back to talking about the Earth?”

“Right,” Carly said reluctantly. “So, your visitor is an angelic singer.”

“Angelic?
Him
?” I must have had a pint of blood gushing through my ear canals thanks to his caterwauling.

“God, yes!” Frampton said. “Didn’t you hear his timbre? Or those syncopated glottal stops?”

“Or the polyrhythms?” Carly asked. “His melodic subtlety, or—”

“All right, all right—I get the point. He’s got a golden throat, and makes a living from music.”

Frampton shook his head. “You mean
made
a living from music.”

“Humanity’s emergence made all Refined musicians completely irrelevant,” Carly said. “Glorious as it is, their collective output isn’t worth a Shaun Cassidy B-side.”

“So they must be pissed.”

Carly nodded. “They’re the only Refined beings that feel anything other than complete adoration for humanity. And even most of them don’t mind you, because they love your music as much as anyone. But there are some bitter ex-singers out there.”

“And this guy’s one of them,” Frampton said, consulting another data readout. “His career was just taking off around the time of the Kotter Moment. He was so mad at the universe that he ran off and joined the Guild’s Enforcement Brigade.”

Carly gave a low whistle. “Refined beings tend to be … rather docile,” she explained. “Only the most powerful organizations dare to bend the rules even slightly. The Guild is one of them—and their Enforcement Brigade is the closest thing we have to the Hells Angels. I wonder if his partner has a similar history. What does he look like again?”

“A vacuum cleaner with hands,” I said.

Frampton found Özzÿ’s race on his stereopticon. “Whoa,” he said, “this species is made of metallicam! And it’s the only metallicam species that can blend in on Earth.”

“So this is a very carefully chosen pair,” Carly said. “We have a human-hating ex-singer, and a metallicam being. Both of whom can fit in somewhat on Earth. And let me guess—Paulie’s the boss, and Özzÿ’s an ass-kissing pushover.”

I nodded. “Definitely. But how’d you know?”

“With no personal grudge against your race, Özzÿ is probably as gaga about humans as anyone else,” Carly explained. “So the Guild needed to send someone Paulie could manipulate and brainwash.”

“Makes sense. So what’re they going to do?” I asked.

“Something with metallicam,” Carly said. “That’s why you hire metallicam beings—because they can handle it safely. They’re too thick to do much of anything else.”

“And metallicam’s both an energy source and a weapon, right?”

Carly nodded. “In its raw form, yes—it’s kind of like uranium, or plutonium, only far more powerful. When it’s integrated into a living being in its organic form, as with Özzÿ, it’s no more dangerous than carbon or oxygen.”

“So do you think they’ll hit us with … a metallicam missile?”

Carly shook her head. “They need to do something much more subtle. Remember, it’s illegal to harm a primitive society. So they have to make it look like you’ve done yourselves in.”

“Right, but how would metallicam play into that?”

“It would completely destabilize your geopolitical system if anyone gained access to it,” she explained. “Energy supplies, balance of power—all of that would change, which could easily trigger wars. So maybe they’ll give it to Pakistan, or something. The program that we work for has … considered this scenario on a broad level. But we haven’t fully fleshed it out yet. So I’m not entirely sure how it might unfold.”

Ah, the mysterious program again. I forced myself to sound less snippy in discussing it this time. “I assume you can’t tell me about your program because it’s top secret.”

“Oh, it isn’t
secret
,” Frampton tittered.

Carly glared at her brother. “Yes, it’s … very much out in the open. But the public doesn’t know about the internal work that’s done by our researchers.”

“You mean your spies?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Our spies. Frampton and I are privy to their research. They recently uncovered the truth about the Townshend Line. And then another team with the program … 
predicted
that one of several powerful organizations might try to engineer your self-destruction. That’s why we came to New York—to try to settle the debt, so that nobody would have any reason to harm you.”

“Then why are you so shocked that the Guild is already on Earth?” I asked. “It seems like you should’ve expected them to be here.”

“We did. Only not this soon. The secret about the Townshend Line hasn’t broken yet.”

“Well, who knows the secret besides you?”

“Only a very, very high-ranking group of beings,” Carly said. “Have you ever heard of the Guardians?”

I nodded. “I have. In fact, for some reason, Özzÿ and Paulie think that
I
might be a Guardian.”

Carly gave me a stunned look. “But Guardians are wise, and dignified, and cosmopolitan. Haven’t these creatures met you?”

“Yes. They’ve met me. As I told you. And they think I might be a Guardian because they know that
some
body crossed the universe last night, just to pop into my office and pretend to disintegrate my iPhone.”

Frampton caught his breath. “Seriously?
Who
?”

Carly glared at him. “Well, keep them fooled, because they won’t do anything as long as they think a Guardian is
watching them. That’s your planet’s sole defense for now, because the Townshend Line obviously can’t protect it.”

“Well, luckily, I might have come up with something else that can,” I said, eager to share my other big news.

“I doubt it,” Carly said. “But let’s hear it anyway.”

“Okay. Let me start with a couple of questions. Have you ever heard of a treaty called the Berne Convention?”

Carly gave an oddly noncommittal shrug.

“It’s an international accord governing copyright enforcement on Earth,” I continued. “So in light of that, is there any possibility—even a remote one—that the Refined League might have signed it?”

“Of course not,” she snorted.

“Excellent. Next question. According to the Refined League, what legal system has precedence on the Earth itself? Our own laws and agreements, like the Berne Convention? Or Refined laws?”

“Your own laws,” Carly said. “The autonomy of primitive societies is sacrosanct in all matters, particularly legal ones.”

“Great,” I said. “So everyone agrees that the Berne Convention is the law of the land here on Earth. And meanwhile, the Indigenous Arts Doctrine requires the Refined League to honor humanity’s laws, rules, and norms as they pertain to humanity’s own artistic output. Correct?”

Carly rolled her eyes. “Of course. That’s what the Indigenous Arts Doctrine
is
.”

“So then what if our laws actually say … that our rules
don’t apply
to you? Wouldn’t your doctrine require you to respect our right to hold our own laws null and void in relation to you?”

“Of course,” Carly said. “But the Copyright Damages
Improvement Act doesn’t seem to provide an exemption for alien civilizations, now, does it?”

I shook my head. “No. But it doesn’t have to. Because my society doesn’t claim any restitution for acts of piracy that occur outside of the nations that have signed the Berne Convention. Seriously. So as far as our laws, rules, and norms are concerned, you can copy as many of our songs as you want to on your own planets, and never incur a fine.”

“I see,” Carly said. “So the fine only applies if we make allegedly pirated songs on the territory of a signatory nation?”

I nodded smugly. “You got it.”

“Which means countries like the United States?”

“Yep.”

“Which means cities like New York?”

“Well, yes. New York being located in the United States and all.”

“Which means places like the train stations and tunnels beneath New York?”

“Sure. Don’t, uh … go pirating any music down there.”

“Well, oops,” Carly said. “It turns out that every copy of every human song that the universe is listening to right now was made right under Track Sixty-one of Grand Central Station.”

I was briefly mute as the absurdity of this sunk in. Finally, “You … seriously make your copies—on Earth?”

“You got it,” Carly said.

“Under Grand Central Station?”

“Yep.”

“In
New York
?”

“Well, yes. Grand Central being located in New York and all.”

This couldn’t be. “Seriously,” I said. “Of all of the billions of planets in the universe—”

“Sextillions,” Frampton clarified.

“Fine. Of all the
sextillions
of planets in the universe, why do you have to copy all of your damn music on
Earth
?”

“First of all, it’s
your
damn music,” Carly snipped.

“Well—yes, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?”

“And secondly, the original plan was just to set up a listening post.”

“A listening post?”

Carly nodded. “No one wanted to lose access to your music after the Townshend Line went up, so our engineers had to build a monitoring station to pick up the new songs in your radio broadcasts. And it had to be somewhere on Earth itself, since the force field prevented them from putting a probe anywhere within a hundred and forty-four light-years of your solar system.”

“But why pick Grand Central?”

“They wanted to install just one outpost, so as to minimize the risk of discovery,” Carly said. “And New York was the right city, because of the quality and density of its radio stations. The only place they identified that was likely to lie undisturbed indefinitely was an abandoned underground spur connected to Grand Central’s rail network. So they built the listening post there—and then popular demand forced them to put the copying facility in there, too.”

“Popular demand?”

“Sure, everyone thought it would be really cool to have copies of your music that were made right in the NY of C,” Frampton explained. “I mean, why not?”

“Well, there’s up to 150,000 reasons why not per copy,” I said. “But that aside, isn’t it just insane to make a billion
copies of a song on Earth, and then send all of them to Planet X? I mean, it’s a lot more efficient to just send one copy to Planet X, and make the rest of them there, right?”

Carly shrugged. “In theory, sure. But in reality, our networks are so fast that efficiency concerns are irrelevant.”

“Well, great then,” I snapped. “So because you have fast networks and a crazed appetite for digital souvenirs, you set up shop in New York and started making trillions of illegal copies of our songs.”

“Thousands of octillions,” Frampton clarified.

“Okay, sure. That many. And in doing that, you completely screwed up the Berne Convention angle. Fine. Bravo. But still, there
has
to be some other loophole we can exploit.”

“Such as?” Carly sneered, clearly convinced that no simple solution could possibly exist, given that she hadn’t come up with one.

“Well … I don’t know, what about exchange rates? Our multinationals are always pushing income and debt into different currencies to minimize taxes and whatnot. And you guys are multi
galactic
. So don’t you suppose there’s a way to get rid of the debt using exchange rates?”

“No,” Carly answered, without a moment’s thought.

“Seriously, though. The American dollar can’t be widely used in the rest of the universe. So why not make the exchange rate really favorable to yourselves? Decree that a million bucks is worth just one of your transmeteorite dinars, or whatever.”

“Nick,” Carly said, “you don’t know a thing about astrophysics, do you?”

“It wasn’t a huge subject of mine at law school, no.”

“Well, if it was, you’d know that the common heavy elements
are all created in supernovas, which are distributed fairly evenly from galaxy to galaxy. That makes the noble metals similarly rare—and similarly precious—everywhere.”

As if that explained a thing. “What are noble metals? And why do I care?”

“Silver, gold, iridium, platinum, and so on. Since they’re similarly rare and precious everywhere, they’re the natural basis for exchange rates throughout the cosmos—just as they have been throughout much of your own history. And since the various hard currencies of Earth already buy certain amounts of these metals on your global spot markets, we can’t set exchange rates for your money arbitrarily. They’re set by your metal prices and by ours.”
⁴

I sighed heavily and gazed at the bewitching landscape of Paradise City, hoping it would cheer me up. “Okay, then
it sounds like the only way out of this situation is to get a massive legislative change through the U.S. Congress somehow. Or to get a deal done with some key players in the music industry. So my first question is, do we really need to cut deals with … 
each
of the major music labels?” The answer was probably yes, given that we had supposedly bankrupted the entire universe. But maybe Carly was exaggerating for effect when she told me that.