Year Zero (18 page)

We all screamed
. A yawning, plunging void replaced my guts, and the bucket brigade cranked it up in my pores again. After what seemed like eons of shrieking chaos, a tiny, isolated sector of my brain noticed that I wasn’t feeling, or even hearing, a trace of wind. Instead, there was just a voice saying something about … living in Reseda? I stopped screaming and saw that Carly and Frampton were doing a sort of zero-gravity boogie to the song “Free Fallin’ ” by Tom Petty, while mouthing its lyrics with these daft, blissed-out looks on their faces.

Right about then a sense of solidity returned to the soles of my feet. It increased until I was standing firmly on an invisible, but perfectly solid, floor as our descent slowed. At this, the soundtrack switched to “It’s a Miracle” by Barry Manilow. The pressure on my feet kept growing as the song built, until we had not only stopped falling, but had begun
to hurtle across the landscape, chasing the setting sun. Soon we were traveling many times faster than any jet I’ve ever been on. Looking carefully, I could faintly make out the outlines of an ovular pod around us. It was maybe twenty feet long, and all of its features were invisible. As we picked up speed, the music transitioned to “All Right Now” by Free.

I wanted to ask Carly and Frampton about what we were riding (and to curse them out for that evil Wile E. Coyote prank). But nothing could reach them in their wigged-out musical state. This was the first time I’d seen it for more than a few moments, and it wasn’t pretty. Their faces were twisted into Manson-like grins. Their eyes were unfocused and adrift. And the worst part was this shuffling stomp that they were doing. An anthropologist would probably get all politically correct, and call it “dancing.” But it lacked any kind of rhythm or connection to the music, and looked like the gait of an undead duo stumbling back to the crypt after slurping down some cerebellum stew.

Since they were clearly useless, I turned my attention to the landscape zipping below us. It was undulating in a regular, but dramatic pattern. First, we’d soar over a long, jagged series of towering peaks. These had to be stupidly tall, since we’d barely clear their summits, despite flying high enough to plainly see the planet’s curvature. We’d then cross over the rim of an immense, half-bowl-shaped valley. The ground would then drop away steadily for miles as we flew over the bowl part, until a towering wall of cliffs topped with more airless peaks reared straight up to cap off the valley’s far end. Beyond that, there’d be a short stretch of peaks before the ground sloped into another, almost identical half-bowl valley. The valleys seemed to be empty, apart from some
scaffoldlike structures that I could barely pick out at the lowest part of each valley floor, right up against the cliff line.

“All Right Now” faded to silence after a single chorus, and Carly and Frampton started calming down. Meanwhile, a vast, black pit appeared on the horizon. As we approached it, we started buckling under a strong wave of apparent gravity as the pod decelerated. Carly managed to rasp out “Don’t worry,” just as we slowed to a stop above the darkened maw.

“Why not?” I asked, amazed that my voice still functioned after all that screaming.

She pointed at the pit. “It’s bottomless.” And with that, we started to drop.

Since the last few minutes had given me boundless faith in our omnicab (while essentially shocking the fear of heights right out of me), I watched with more fascination than dread as we plunged toward the abyss. The pit’s mouth was about a mile wide, and many other vehicles were hurtling toward it as well. As we approached the rim, I saw that its walls were smooth and machined, rather than jagged and natural. That was all I had time to make out, because everything went dark the moment we crossed the threshold. It was perfectly silent in there, and we were completely weightless. I instinctively looked up at our only light source, which was the rapidly contracting circle of light way up at the pit’s mouth. This shrank to a point, then vanished. Now it was utterly dark.

“So, uh—where’d you say we were off to?” I asked after a few seconds of complete sensory deprivation.

“The far side of the planet,” Carly said. “This hole goes clear through. A perfect vacuum is maintained within it, so we’ll be in a state of constant acceleration and weightlessness
until we reach the planet’s center. Then gravity will start slowing us down, until we pop out on the far side at the same speed we entered at.”

“But that’s completely gratuitous,” I said, feeling a fresh wave of panic at the very thought of this preposterous route. Why couldn’t people with this kind of technology get around without being so
gimmicky
about it?

Suddenly the interior of our pod was bathed in a faint violet light. Frampton was floating a few feet away from me, already dead asleep. Carly was just beyond him, illuminating everything with her stereopticon. “Does that help?” she asked.

“Yes—a lot.” It actually made the plummeting pod feel almost womblike. I stretched out cautiously, and discovered how relaxing weightlessness can be. “So,” I continued, catching my breath. “How long ’til we … pop out?”

“A bit over forty minutes. Then it’ll be another five minutes to the performance canyon.”

“To the what?”

“Performance canyon. We flew over several of them between Paradise City and the mouth of the tunnel. The planet’s covered with them.”

“Wait. So those valleys are like … stadiums?”

“Stadia. Yes. Planets like this one exist so that people like us can do our shows.”

“Your …?”

“Shows. Frampton and I are performers.”

“But I thought you were
spies
.”

“What a stupid notion. Why?”

“Because of that … program of yours. The one that digs up all the secrets?”

“Mmm—more on that in a bit.”

“So what kind of shows do you guys do?”

“Lip sync, duh.”

And so I learned about Carly and Frampton’s day jobs. Of the trillions of Refined species in the universe, theirs resembles humans most closely. They’re called Perfuffinites, after the wimpy-ass name of their home planet. Most music lovers crave live experiences—and by looking so human, the Perfuffinites give Refined beings the closest thing they can get to rockin’ out at a hot gig on Earth.

Of course, they can’t sing for shit, and they’re even worse if they get their hands on a musical instrument. But they just have to get up there and mime it to a famous recording, and the crowds go nuts (catch a Britney Spears show to see something similar here at home). Perfuffinites perform throughout the universe. But their top elites play on one of about a dozen artificial planets like Zinkiwu that are purpose-built to host as many gigantic concerts as possible. So Zinkiwu is like Branson, Missouri, on a boundless scale. And the Perfuffinites are an entire race of Milli Vanillis—except the fans know they’re faking it, and love them anyway.

“So, then,” I said when Carly finished telling me all of this. “I guess you guys are out to save humanity for economic reasons, huh?” The destruction of the planet that cranks out the hits couldn’t be good for the Perfuffinite business model.

“Not at all,” Frampton said in a sleepy voice, having woken up toward the end of our chat. “We already have enough material to last until the stars burn out. For instance, Carly hasn’t added a new song to her show in three years, and she’s sold out for decades.”

Carly nodded. “Remember what I told you about the
Oak Ridge Boys? There’s already enough human music out there to last everybody forever. That’s an objective fact. But we Perfuffinites can’t think about these things pragmatically. We’re a race of Artists, after all.”
¹

“We’re also your cousins,” Frampton added. “We’d do anything for you.”

I nodded politely. That was probably all there was to it, for Frampton. But Carly seemed to have deeper motivations. And based on the squabble they’d had about taking our troubles to Daddy, I figured it had to do with him. “We sure do look a lot alike,” I said neutrally.

“It’s not just looks,” Carly said. “We’re almost identical to you on a genetic level.”

“Apart from having eight toes on each foot, double-jointed shoulders, and no tonsils,” Frampton clarified.

“But there must be something special about the two of you, compared to other Perfuffinites,” I said. “Because there’s only a handful of these giant concert planets, right?”

Carly nodded. “Normal Perfuffinites have to schlep it from star to star, doing shows for twenty or thirty million
beings who’d barely even cross a galaxy to see them.” She said this in a tone that Sting might use to describe someone who’d gladly sing for two peasants and a pig in a Mongolian yurt.

“So why are you guys different?”

“Because we’re physically almost indistinguishable from two massively beloved human celebrities.” Frampton asserted this shyly and quietly, but with enormous pride.

I smiled and nodded cluelessly.

“Massive,” he repeated, a bit less confidently.

I kept smiling and nodding like a Burmese bellhop hoping for a hard-currency tip. The silence grew awkward.

“Really,
really
massive … Right?” This with a growing edge of desperation.

Carly was now glaring at me expectantly.

“Oh—oh, of course,” I nattered. “Massive. Really, really massive! But I’m … so awful with names. Could you just remind me? Which ones? Which—celebrities? You … look like?”

Frampton took on a morbidly dejected air. He tried to respond, but nothing came out.

“I tried to warn you,” Carly said, putting a sisterly hand on his shoulder.

He made another failed attempt to speak.

“And why does it matter who’s famous on Earth anyway?” she continued. “To the rest of the universe, to the entire universe,
you’re
a giant star. And through you … 
so is he
.”

Frampton gave me an accusing look, then blurted out something that sounded like “HUGNLL.”

I couldn’t tell if this was a garbled word or a gagging sob. “There there,” I said, going with the latter.

“H-H- … HUGNLL!”

“There there.”

Frampton collected himself, then finally managed “Mmmmick.”

“There there.”

Now he caught his breath, gathered himself, then slowly enunciated, “Mick. Hucknall.”

I turned to Carly for help.

She mouthed something silently, but I don’t read lips.

“Mick Hucknall,” Frampton said, almost steadily. “M-I-C-K.
Huck
nall.”

I went back to smiling and nodding, but was obviously hearing this name for the first time.

“I’ll bet our mothers couldn’t tell us apart,” Frampton cried, suddenly almost delirious. “Our
mothers
!”

Carly faded back a few feet and jabbed at her stereopticon, which was back around her neck in its crucifix form. The words “ ‘Holding Back the Years,’ dumbshit,” beamed out just behind her brother’s head, where he couldn’t see them. This rang a faint bell, but I was still lost.

“Our grandmothers,” Frampton was railing. “Our sisters! Our third, fourth, and ninth cousins! Nobody!
No
one! Nobody could tell us apart—I’m
sure of it
.” He drifted across the pod, turned his back to us, and started hyperventilating.

Since he seemed to be safely delirious, Carly chanced an explanation. “Lead singer from Simply Red,” she whispered in a barely audible voice. “One-hit wonders from the eighties.”

Frampton snapped his head around like a hungry cobra hearing a dinner bell. He glared, and defiantly thrust a peace sign into her face. “Two,” he whispered. Carly gave me a withering look and stuffed her fingers into her ears, an
instant before he shrieked
“TWO! TWO-HIT WONDERS!”
Then, in a soft, broken voice, “Five hits in New Zealand …”

“But Fram,” Carly cooed. “You
know
New Zealand doesn’t count. It’s like Canada. But to
Australia
.” They’d clearly been over this point many times.

“So … who do you look like?” I asked Carly, as her brother slunk off to get back to his hyperventilating.

“I don’t suppose you remember Chrissy Amphlett. Huge for eleven weeks in 1991. I’m basically her at twenty. Only thinner, and with blue eyes. And a much nicer ass, I’m told.”

“Two,” Frampton was murmuring on the far side of the pod. “Two hits. Minimum!”

“You’re twenty years old?” I asked.

Carly shook her head. “My body is biologically twenty, thanks to Refined medical technology. But I’ve been around … a bit longer than that.”

We all fell silent, and soon Frampton was snoring. I shut my eyes, figuring that I’d either fall asleep, or find out what weightless meditation was like. I took a deep breath. For some reason this felt incredibly good, so I took another. I was inhaling for the fourth or fifth time when it hit me.
My cold was gone
. It had been dogging me for weeks. But now there wasn’t a trace of it. In fact, I felt healthier and more energized than I had in ages.

I caught Carly’s eye, then drifted over and mentioned this to her.

“I thought that might happen,” she said. “Since you’re so close to the Perfuffinite genome, the planet’s Health Vigilance system probably gave you an ambient wetware upgrade.”

“You know, I figured it was something like that. Only …”

“You have no idea what I just said.”

“Exactly.”

Carly explained that just like humans, the Refined species are in a constant arms race with the diseases that prey on them. Only while our cures and treatments are like clubs and slingshots, Refined doctors are packing the medical equivalents of kinetic lepton implosion rays.
²
Their arsenal includes surveillance systems that constantly monitor the disease base of every Refined planet. When new threats emerge, they develop countermeasures in the form of small changes that can be written right into the genetic code of the local Refined species. Nano delivery systems can distribute these changes throughout an Earth-sized planet in just hours. Once an upgrade enters the body, tiny molecular robots replicate trillions of times, and bring the new instructions into the nucleus of each and every cell, where the changes are entered into the DNA.
³