Year Zero (3 page)

“Anyway,” Carly continued. “We want a license to regions that your record labels can’t possibly care about. Specifically, all points one hundred forty-four light-years beyond your solar system.”

Frampton stretched his arms wide. “That’s over a hundred
trillion times
the distance from here to Staten Island!”

“I’m afraid the music industry actually cares immensely about even the remotest markets,” I said. “In fact, almost every contract that it generates contains language like this.” I picked up a document at random from my desk and gazed at it. “ ‘The terms of this contract shall apply past the end of time and the edge of Earth; all throughout the universe; in perpetuity; in any media, whether now known, or hereafter devised; or in any form, whether now known, or hereafter devised.’ ” I actually know this clause by heart, and can reel it off like a cop reciting the Miranda rights. But unless I pretend to read it from a document, people think I must be joking.

A brief, gloomy silence followed. “Well, if that’s the case,” Carly finally said, “it’ll be a lot harder than we thought to save your melodious asses.”

Save
our asses? “From what?” It took every bit of self-control that I’d honed as a kid at the bottom of the testosterone pyramid to say this with professional calm.

“Self-destruction,” Frampton said grimly.

“Yeah,” Carly said, then mimed ironic quotation marks with chilling enthusiasm. “Self-destruction.”

“Oh,
that
,” I said languidly, while teetering on the brink of terror. “But why come to me about this?”

Carly’s testy façade dropped, and admiration flitted briefly across her face. “Because we need to enlist the greatest copyright attorney on Earth. If not … the universe.”

I allowed myself to savor the sound of this for a few moments. But there was no sense in pretending they had the right guy. “Then you really ought to talk to
Frank
Carter, who started the firm back in the seventies. Old guy, rich as hell. Sits in a huge corner office two floors up. Although he only comes in about once a month these days. No relation to me, I’m afraid.”

Carly looked horrified. Frampton looked terrified. She pointed at me and fixed him with a murderous look. “I thought you said he ran the firm.”

Frampton quaked. “I thought he
did
.”

Carly paused, apparently putting two and two together. Then, “No,
you
thought he was a Backstreet Boy, and were looking for any excuse to meet him!”

“Well—not en
tire
ly.”

Carly looked like she might hit him.

“Because there’s the firm’s name! It’s
Carter
. And something, and something!” Frampton pointed at me. “Nick
Carter
!”

“You honestly thought a Backstreet Boy was moonlighting as a
lawyer
?”

“As a
music
lawyer!”

“Seriously?”

Frampton just grinned obsequiously and gave her a terrified shrug.

Carly turned her withering gaze to me. “Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me
anything
?” she demanded, as if I was part of some conspiracy.

I shrugged neutrally and turned to Frampton, angling to keep the spotlight on him.

Carly kept staring me down. “Mr. Carter,” she continued, after reining in her outrage somewhat. “How senior are you around here?”

“Well, it’s hard to say exactly. But out of a hundred and thirty attorneys, for now I’m probably …” I thought for a moment. “Top hundred?”

Frampton cringed further. Carly glowered as if I’d somehow arranged all of this just to spite her. “In that case,” she said, “it seems that my colleague and I have pulled you into deadly waters that are well over your head.”

Whatever you might think, it’s no fun when aliens talk about drowning you, even metaphorically. “But luckily there’s a lifeguard out there, and his name is
Frank
Carter,” I said brightly. “His old assistant has all of his contact info. So why don’t we track him down and pass the baton to him?”

“Because it sounds like he’s retired, and probably half senile,” Carly snapped. “And besides, we don’t have time. The gateway back to our planet closes in one minute. If we don’t leave before then, we’ll be stuck here with you for almost a day before it opens again. And I don’t think you want that.”

You got that right
, I thought. In fact, I wanted nothing to do with these extraterrestrial freaks. Ever. “Well, then,” I chirped. “We better get you into that gateway of yours pronto, huh?”

Carly shook her head. “We still have forty-nine seconds. And we need to arrange our next encounter with you, because it looks like you’re all we’ve got. The gateway will reopen for roughly twenty minutes tomorrow morning. Since you’ve now met us, we won’t need to come in person. Instead,
we’ll connect to an Earth-based dataspace. You will meet us there. And you will need these.”

She held up a set of pink, wraparound safety lenses. They looked a lot like the odd specs that Bono always wears.

“They have been specially built to interface with one of your primitive computers. We will teleport this pair to you tomorrow at eleven oh-three a.m., and simultaneously email you instructions for joining us in the dataspace exactly three minutes later. Frampton and I will now exit by way of a Wrinkle. Don’t be alarmed.”

“By way of a what?”

“A Wrinkle,” she said. And then added enigmatically, “The universe is pleated.”

And that was when I finally sneezed—while making a botched effort to rein it in, which only made it sound like I was gagging on a pool ball.

“We could probably help you get over that cold,” Carly said, cocking an eyebrow. And with that, the two of them knelt to the floor and bent low, as if praying toward Mecca. Then, in the course of about three seconds, they faded entirely from sight.

I used to think
that English-speaking aliens who conveniently look, dress, and act human only turned up in lazy science fiction. But as Carly and Frampton dematerialized, I became grimly aware of how well they’d also fit into a psychotic hallucination. My distant uncle Louie blathers constantly about aliens. He’s completely unhinged when he’s off his meds—and they say that stuff runs in families.
Meanwhile, no physical trace of my close encounter remained. There was no blinking ray gun carelessly left on a side table. No dropped Space Pesos made from strangely durable alloys that would confound scientists. My iPhone was also in perfect working order. And even if I turned out to be entirely sane—well then, great, it meant that an alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up.

Then I remembered my audio software. I couldn’t have
imagined the meeting if my computer recorded it! I giddily tapped the space bar to get rid of my screensaver. Nothing happened. So I clicked and jiggled the mouse. Nothing again. Then I jabbed several times at the keyboard. Finally, I twisted my fingers to hit the defibrillating CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys—a gesture I associate so strongly with both annoyance and panic that my hand now reflexively
makes it when I’m caught in traffic, stuck in a long line, flying in extreme turbulence—you name it.
¹

Click. Click. Click!

Several seconds of blank screen were followed by a flurry of digital Post-it notes. The top one declared that
∼e5D141 .tmp has encountered a problem.
Next we had
Windows is currently in the middle of a long operation.
This was followed by
Cannot delete ysh53qch .3w4: There is not enough free disk space
, and so on. The gist of this trove of insight was that my audio software’s recording
(if there ever was one) had drowned in the maelstrom of the Windows OS. I was about to ritually denounce the entire Microsoft empire when the door flew open.

“Dude, got a moment?” It was the guy from the next office over, Randy Cox. Not waiting for an answer, he slid onto the chair that Frampton had just vacated. Six-two, brawny, and with a thick head of wavy brown hair, Randy’s a decent guy who joined the firm two years after me. “Fido’s coming to New York the day after tomorrow,” he said, fixing me with a meaningful look. “I thought you might want to know. Given that you’re
due for the Omen, and all.”

Our firm has so much internal jargon that we could probably foil a wiretap with it, and I know its terms as well as I know the names of the states. But I was too frazzled to muster anything more than a shell-shocked gaze.

“Fiiii-do,” Randy repeated, as if teaching a new word to a thick preschooler. “Coming to town. Senator Fiiii-do. Fido.”

I nodded mutely. Fido is our hazardously impolitic nickname for a man who can only be described as the music industry’s pet senator—a high-ranking Republican. I think he honestly views himself as a fiercely principled advocate of The People. But he’s firmly on our leash. And like any good pet, he obeys his master’s voice.

“He’s coming through town the day after tomorrow for some fund-raising,” Randy continued. “Judy’s got an hour on his calendar.”

“Of course she does,” I said, partially regaining my wits. Judy is one of the firm’s most powerful (and dreaded) partners, and manages our relations with countless outside bigwigs. She meets privately with Fido almost monthly.

“I thought you’d find this interesting. Given that it may be your turn.”

I nodded again. Each year, our firm hacks mercilessly at its cadre of long-serving associates, dropping the ones with no hope of ultimately making partner. And I was now in my seventh year—a notoriously lethal time. You know you’ve survived year seven if (and only if) you receive The Omen. This comes when a senior partner (like Judy) takes you around to meet privately with some of the firm’s most prominent outside allies (like Fido). If you don’t get
The Omen by early March, you never will. And with February almost over, I was running out of time. I was also battling political headwinds
that were bigger than me—and even Judy—in that our firm’s patent litigators were starting to eclipse the copyright group that Judy heads. Our group was still printing money. But with patent troll clients shaking down businesses for ever-larger payouts over ever-more questionable patents, we were no longer the
firm’s ascendant team. This made it that much harder for copyright associates like me to survive.

I managed to give Randy a calm, skeptical look. “Do you honestly think Judy will let me through the gate?” She had been openly hostile toward me for months.

“Of course she will. She’s like a lazy seventh grader. She only bothers to be mean to the people she really likes.”

Randy wasn’t just being nice, as this interpretation was actually consistent with Judy’s odd temperament. But unlike him, I had read my performance reviews. “Nick gives good meeting,” she had written recently. “But does NO original thinking.” Sadly, I could see where she was coming from. I do
give good meeting
—a result of my ability to stay weirdly cool under fire, and to make people think that I know what’s
happening when I don’t (another old survival tactic. I defused countless childhood plots by conning my brothers and cousins into thinking I was on to whatever they were planning against me, and had already alerted the grown-ups—when in truth I had no clue). The trouble is that this sets expectations high—so high that when people figure out that I’m occasionally quite clueless, they tend to overcorrect their assessment of me, and decide that I must be a full-time
idiot.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, as my phone vibrated from a text message landing in its gullet. I slid it from my pocket. “I assume your info came from The Gretch?” Judy’s
assistant Gretchen has a harmless crush on Randy, which he parlays into a steady stream of intelligence about the mighty boss’s calendar.

“Of course.”

I glanced at the inbound text.

Take me to your leeeeeea-der, Earth boy!

My hands turned to ice as my thoughts returned to my alien-addled Uncle Louie. I meanwhile noticed that my phone had matched the sender’s callback number to “Paulie Stardust”—which made zero sense, because that name wasn’t listed anywhere in my contacts.

“I figure that if the partners are thinking of Omening you, they may give you a little trial by fire over the next couple of days,” Randy continued. “And forewarned is forearmed.”

I forced my mind back to our conversation. “I know. I … really appreciate the heads-up.” Randy was in fact doing me a huge favor. If the partners are on the fence about someone, they’ll often stage an ambush at Omen time to see if the person can think creatively under acute, unexpected pressure. Last year, they gave a woman ten minutes to prepare an hour-long rebuttal to a
Wall Street Journal
editorial that denounced a growing
tsunami of frivolous patent litigation for smothering the tech industry (no mean feat, as the piece was essentially correct on every point). The associate had to present her rebuttal to the full office, and did a great job.
²
The next day, she received The Omen, and is now very much on track for partner.

“I bet if they’re gonna mess with you, it’ll be at the weekly meeting with Judy tomorrow morning.” As Randy said this, my phone vibrated with another message from Paulie Stardust:

All your base are belong to us!

“I … I’ll bet you’re right,” I answered.

Randy rose and opened the door. “So. You may want to brace yourself.”

The phone vibrated one last time as he left:

Come directly to Eatiary. All will be revealed.

This was followed by an address I didn’t recognize. I looked it up on my phone’s map as Randy left. Eatiary, whatever it was, was on the Meatpacking District’s outer fringe. Spooked to the core, but determined to get to the bottom of this, I headed to the elevators.