Year Zero (31 page)

Carly ignored the question. “pluhhhs also told me that the Wrinkle was just ninety-eight seconds from activating when you suckered Paulie into shutting it down. So that was truly brilliant work.” Her smutty little avatar flashed me again.

“And was it metallicam?”

“Apparently. The Wrinkle was to originate in a metallicam depot.”

“And how long will it take them to rebook it after the episode airs?” I asked.

“The episode broadcasts tomorrow morning at nine fifty-eight, New York time. And Paulie will be able to establish a connection between the depot and Grand Central just an hour and a quarter after that.”

“So we’re looking at eleven-fifteen or so.”

Carly’s ray-traced jezebel nodded. “And one other thing. Paulie apparently intended to relay the metallicam out to five different points on Earth shortly after it arrived under Grand Central. pluhhhs haven’t figured out exactly where the target destinations were, but they’re working on it.”

“I might actually have some evidence on that front.” I finally told her that Manda and I had ended up with Özzÿ’s stereopticon. I then described the thumbnail documents that Paulie was looking at when we entered the transit bay. Given the stereopticon’s panoramic lensing and unlimited resolution, Manda should have picked up detailed images of all of them.

Carly told me to have Manda jab a USB cable into the stereopticon (assuring me that a perfect socket would form to accommodate the plug as she did this), and to connect the other end of it to the computer that my Bono glasses were attached to. “So why didn’t you tell me that you guys had a stereopticon?” Carly asked grumpily, as Manda followed her instructions. The answer was that I’d been annoyed by all of her stonewalling right after I arrived on her planet, and had decided to keep that fact to myself for a while. Then we got all distracted by fighting for our lives and whatnot, and I’d simply forgotten to mention it.

“Because nobody tells you anything, duh,” I said, shrugging.

Once we had access to the stereopticon’s recorded footage, Carly summoned a virtual plasma TV (not a standard Warcraft feature, I’m sure), and we gathered our avatars around it as she fast-forwarded through the evening. At one point, she slowed it down for a scene of Manda, Pugwash, and me walking through the city streets. “Bear with me, this
is actually really useful,” she said, shifting to a playback angle that set me off against the city’s skyline. She tweaked at this for a few seconds, then jumped to the part where we all joined Paulie and Özzÿ in the transit bay. Here, the first thing she zoomed in on was Özzÿ sliding the coasterlike pads around his small table.

“Do you know what he’s doing?” I asked.

“Practicing,” Carly said. “When the metallicam Wrinkles in, it will arrive on that table. He’ll then need to array the containers in just the right way for the outbound five-way Wrinkle to work. A burger-flipper could probably do it. But given that it’s metallicam, he’s wise to practice his moves.” She paused the playback and stared at Özzÿ.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“I see …” She gave me a worried look, and pointed at the TV screen. “I see an incredibly useful recording. One that you’re telling me was made with Özzÿ’s own stereopticon. Which is bizarre, because Paulie should have deactivated that thing the instant he knew it was missing. It’s a huge security hole for them.”

“I’ve been wondering why it hasn’t been shut down myself. But why would
Paulie
be the one to do it?”

“Because Özzÿ’s stereopticon is a sensitive part of the Guild’s data infrastructure. So I’m sure he was supposed to report it the moment he lost it. And Paulie or someone else in his chain of command should have investigated, and crippled the thing by now.”

“Aha. In that case, I think I know what’s going on.” I reminded her about how I had persuaded Özzÿ to not let on that I’d caught him in my apartment. “So the poor dumbshit’s so scared for his job that he can’t tell anyone that he lost his stereopticon,” I chuckled.

Carly’s animé ho nodded slowly. “That, or it’s all a setup, you’re the dumbshit, and they’re using the stereopticon to spy on you.”

“Oh, well, I’ve … carefully considered that possibility, and believe that it’s quite remote.”

“Yeah, right. I’d say it’s a fifty percent chance, and you’re considering it for the first time right now. But since we’re already sunk if you’re the sucker, let’s assume that Özzÿ’s the dumber-shit of the two of you for now, and play it that way.”

“Got it. Great … plan.”

“And if Özzÿ really is that stupid, we can bet he’ll get caught soon enough. And when he does, they’ll definitely start spying on you through his stereopticon. Unless Paulie throws a tantrum and cripples the thing before it occurs to him to do that.”

I thought of how Paulie couldn’t stop himself from brawling at Eatiary when he should have focused on interrogating me. “I’d give the tantrum high odds.”

“Let’s hope so. Anyway, let’s look at those images.”

Carly had no trouble enlarging Paulie’s thumbnails until they were easily legible. They turned out to be letters in several human languages, which she converted into documents that we could hold in our virtual Warcraft hands.

“Goddamn,” I said flipping through the English material. It included a letter addressed to the president, as well as ones to the heads of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NSA, and so forth. The letters identified several unstable regimes and violent insurgencies that had just gotten their hands on an immensely destructive substance. They assured our leaders that the recipients had been fully apprised of the substance’s inherent dangers, and that they would therefore
surely
use it responsibly. However, the letters said:

The letters ended with latitude and longitude numbers that pinpointed the locations of the five metallicam caches down to the millimeter, followed by a flurry of X’s and O’s. Attached to each was a page of elaborate mathematics.

“What’s all this?” I asked, looking at the equations.

“Scientific proof of the letter’s claims,” Carly said. “Any skilled physicist who examines it will know this is all for real.” She turned to her brother’s avatar. “How’s the foreign stuff looking?” As she and I read through the English material,
Frampton had been applying translation tools to the rest of it.

“Very reassuring,” he said.

“Why? What did you find?” Carly asked suspiciously.

“The letters are mostly instructions for using metallicam as an energy supply. Which is good, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Assuming we want all of the world’s energy to come from—” I glanced at the list of metallicam recipients. “Al-Qaeda, Myanmar, a band of Hutu rebels, the Serbian Maoist party, and some guy named Mahmoud in Karachi.”

“But I’m sure those guys will do the right thing if they finally feel
needed
,” Frampton insisted. “And on top of that, Paulie’s sending them all tons of safety instructions.”

“Seriously? What do they say?”

“Well, let’s see … this letter to al-Qaeda warns them to absolutely never follow a certain eight-step process with their metallicam, because if they do, Israel will be destroyed by a monstrous wave of radiation. It’s very detailed, so Paulie obviously takes safety seriously. He even underlined the words
absolutely never
twice!”

A quick inspection showed more of the same in the other documents. Paulie was basically giving some raving lunatics the tools and instructions they needed to wipe the Earth clean of the nations that most annoyed them. He was meanwhile divulging the details of this to some lesser lunatics with massive militaries at their disposal. Once the latter group had Paulie’s letters authenticated by scientists, five nuclear-armed nations (and Estonia!) would plunge into a mad, violent race to snatch the metallicam out of five global flash points before somebody else did. Humanity’s self-destruction was the only plausible result of this—either with or without
the eventual detonation of the metallicam itself. And one way or another, the crazed scramble would surely trigger unlimited news coverage during the days (or hours) before everything blew up.

“Is this enough evidence for Guardian 1138 to get the Council to shut Paulie down?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Carly said slowly. “But remember what he said about the Guild having the best lobbyists and lawyers in the universe. They may be able to obfuscate things if we manage to raise the issue to the Council.”

“Seriously? But how?”

“Guardians are famously logical and literal-minded. So they might completely miss the irony in these letters. And even if they don’t, they might be persuaded to let things take their course and see if humanity survives. Remember—their highest duty is always to make sure that self-destructive species actually self-destruct before they become dangerously sophisticated.”

“So then what do we do?”

“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I think I know someone who could turn the tide for us. After our show became such a huge success, Dad decided to build an amazing legal team for our family’s media company—and he found a real superstar to become our lead attorney. This guy’s actually argued three cases in front of the Guardian Council in the past, and he’s hugely respected.”

“He sounds incredible. But how will you get him on our side? Doesn’t he take his orders from your father?”

“He does. So step one is getting Dad on our side.”

“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.