Year Zero (8 page)

“
THAT—
” he wheezed.

“
THAT—
”

At this he made a horrible gagging sound, hacked a few times, and then faded from sight, as he caught his Wrinkle back to the safety of his base. I instantly spun around to see what had caught Manda’s eye and prompted her bizarre outburst.

It was a giant paw attached to a furry arm the size of a telephone pole.

“Meowhaus, you’re a hero!”
Manda said, dashing right through the paw itself as if it were a puff of steam.

I tried to avoid its spectral claws, and followed her into the living room. There I saw that Meowhaus had gone back to batting curiously at Özzÿ’s stereopticon, which he’d apparently nosed out of the bedroom. The paw in the kitchen was a live feed of his batting arm, massively enlarged and projected in three dimensions. When he saw us, Meowhaus bit into the stereopticon and the projection shut off. His teeth got some kind of purchase on it, and he proudly dragged it to Manda’s feet.
Ggggggggggh!
he trilled, and started nuzzling her legs.

“I was hoping Özzÿ would leave this thing behind,” Manda said, picking up the glimmering gadget, then setting it gingerly on my coffee table.

“I’d forgotten that he’d left it on the floor.”

“So did I—until the mighty Kong started swatting around the kitchen door. It scared the hell out of me, until I saw the black cat fur. Then I did everything I could to get Özzÿ to beam up before he remembered his toy.”

So that was why she started taunting him. “Brilliant,” I said. “You really got him gasping for breath.”

“Well, he wasn’t the only one. Nick, what the
hell
is going on?”

As I started into a rundown on my first two alien encounters, we sat down at the coffee table and popped open the Pappy Van Winkle. We both urgently needed a drink or four. And the luscious stuff indeed helped us both to calm down.

“Well, I’m glad we got this thing,” Manda said when I finished my story, picking up the stereopticon again. “I don’t trust Özzÿ one bit. And maybe losing this will mess up his plans, whatever they are.” She held the alien device up to her eye, squeezing and tweaking at it.

“Whoa, lookithat,” I yelped. A giant 3D projection of Manda’s squinting eye was suddenly suspended above the living room.

“Wow,”
she whispered as she saw this. She squeezed one of her fingers slightly, and the image vanished. She squeezed another finger, and the projection of Meowhaus’s thwacking paw reappeared. Apparently, the stereopticon was a recorder as well as a projector. “Check it out,” she said, handing it to me. “It suddenly has these … buttons on it. And it feels
incredible
in your hand.”

I took it from her. It was almost transparent when it was shut off, like a chunk of Lucite. It also had a perfect heft to it—enough weight to feel substantial but not a gram more, so I felt like I could carry it effortlessly for hours, even days.
I tightened my grip. It fit my hand as if an ergonomic wizard had shaped it precisely to my palm. As I was admiring this, a tiny bulge under my index finger smoothed itself away into a glasslike nothingness, and I realized that it was dynamically reshaping itself to my grip. I squeezed harder. It gave slightly in some areas, and bulged out in others, establishing a flawlessly comfortable equilibrium in moments. I squeezed harder still. The glassy surface became almost rubbery, and allowed itself to squish in a downright therapeutic manner—like one of those squeezy balls that the HR people hand out at crunch time to keep you from climbing a clock tower with an M16. I squeezed a couple more times and felt tension melting away from my shoulders and back.
Awesome
.

I loosened my grip and ran my fingertips across its surface. They immediately slipped into four faint indentations. These had to be the buttons that Manda had mentioned. They seemed to have materialized because the device somehow sensed that I was looking for them. I squeezed the one under my index finger. It slid downward with an almost sensual clicking action, and the recording of Meowhaus’s swatting paw reappeared. I squeezed again, and the image switched to a recording of Manda’s eye. I squeezed with another finger, and it shut off entirely.

“In
cred
ible. Wanna give it another try?” I handed it back.

Manda took it and clicked a few times. Soon she had Özzÿ’s giant orb emerging from the floor.
“Check it out,”
she said—but somehow her voice was muted entirely out of our hearing and replaced by the deep, menacing boom that had emanated from the orb earlier. This put us both into hysterics—with Manda’s laughter rendered as a demonic
Mwahahaha!
Delighted, she used her cool new voice to bellow
“Silence, Earthling.”
Then,
“By Grabthar’s hammer—you shall be avenged!”

I was enjoying this and draining my glass (on the vague logic that fine bourbon must surely fight colds) when the parrot suddenly materialized on the coffee table. I would have done a spit-take if the whiskey hadn’t been quite so awesome.

“So, we just had a lovely chitchat with your co-worker,” I said in a raspy, flu-infected voice that was starting to sound as bad as Özzÿ’s.

The parrot sat motionless, staring hard at a point in the middle distance.

“By the way, this is my neighbor, Manda Shark. Have you met?”

He continued to stare, unblinking and motionless.

“Would you … care for a drink?”

At that, Meowhaus rose, stretched languidly, and leapt over to the coffee table, where he passed through the parrot’s body just as easily as Manda had passed through the image of his paw. Manda was still holding Özzÿ’s stereopticon, and I could see that it was glowing softly again. As Meowhaus settled back in the space between us, she and I both realized that the parrot was just a projection.

I peered at it closely. “That’s definitely the guy from dinner. And it’s a perfect image.” Even from inches away, the parrot looked entirely real and present.

“I can feel some buttons under my fingers again,” Manda said, hefting the stereopticon. “They disappear if you hold on loosely. But they’re back now.” She started flexing her fingers in different combinations, trying to see what other tricks the device had up its sleeve.

After a moment, the parrot came to life. “Listen,
Roomba,” he said in his Brooklyn voice. “I just met with Nick Carter. And he know things. Things no human oughta know. So I figure, he’s gotta be one of the nine trespassers. You know … from way back. Worse, he seems to know the truth about the Townshend Line. And no one but a Guardian should know that. So he might even
be
a Guardian. And if he is, we can’t do nothin’. He could have spy gear down here. Full support from HQ. The works. And with all that, he’d already be on to us. In fact, I kinda think he
is
on to us.

“So me, I gotta file a report with Central. Right now. So you need to step in. And here’s whatcha do. Book the first Wrinkle you can into Carter’s apartment. And prebook the very next one out. Should give you an hour or two at his place. Then go through everything. His papers. His music. His goddamn socks. Figure out if he’s a Guardian. If he is, we can’t do
nothin’
. But if he ain’t … it’s showtime. Now that the Townshend Line is down, ain’t nothin’ can stop us. ’Cept a Guardian.” With that, the projection vanished.

“A sort of 3D voice mail?” Manda guessed.

“Yeah—those had to be Özzÿ’s marching orders from the boss.”

“And did any of it make the slightest bit of sense to you?”

“No.”

“It sounds like we want them to keep thinking you’re a … Guardian,” Manda said. “Or else. I didn’t like it when he said ‘it’s showtime.’ ”

“I’d keep working on my Guardian impersonation, if I only knew what one was.”

Manda nodded gravely. “Meanwhile, what’s that Townshend Line thing that he mentioned?”

I shook my head. “Carly and Frampton mentioned it, too. But I don’t know what it is.”

Manda started methodically pressing different key combinations into the stereopticon. “I’ll try to get the message back. Maybe it’ll make more sense the second time.” After a few tries, something radically different materialized a few feet above the coffee table.
“Whoa …”

It was the size of a basketball and looked like a dazzlingly ornate gem. It had thousands of glowing facets, with countless colors, textures, and levels of opacity dancing between them. For a moment I thought it was spinning. But it was actually standing still, as its facets shuffled and re-sorted in ways that suggested a clockwise rotation. Then I realized that depending on how you looked at them, the shuffling facets could also suggest rotation on several other axes as well. Then for the tiniest moment, I could perceive rotation on a dozen different axes at once. It was a sensational bolt of clarity—a billion-megawatt version of the
aha!
moments that I’d get from those Magic Eye stereograms as a kid. What I was seeing was an extreme physical impossibility. And for that one instant, the glittering projection was more beautiful than anything I’d ever imagined.

Moments later, it emitted an agonizingly harsh sound. It was like hundreds of consonants crammed together over the din of a paper shredder gagging on shattered glass.

I shook my head slowly when the noise finally stopped. “That was
awful
.”

“I am sorry,” a flat and oddly genderless voice said. “I detect that you speak English. American, yes?”

“Bull’s-eye,” I said, guessing that the dreadful noise had been the sound of an alien language.

“You are now in Ersatz Concierge Mode. You may ask any question.”

“Any … question?”

“Of course. This is Ersatz Concierge Mode.”

I considered this, then went with a classic. “What’s the fastest animal on Earth?”

“The cheetah,” the voice answered immediately. “Why not try something harder?”

“Sure. Um … what’s the Townshend Line?”

“The Townshend Line is the notional surface of a spherical region centered around the planet Earth,” the androgynous, expressionless voice said. “It has a one-hundred-forty-four-light-year radius, and is the boundary of the most powerful force field ever created. It was built in 1978 to keep several trillion fans of The Who from storming the planet in hopes of attending one of the band’s shows. The Townshend Line was designed to be impenetrable. However, nine unidentified trespassers are known to have infiltrated to Earth prior to its creation. They are still believed to be there.”

Manda and I exchanged stunned looks.

“What else?” the concierge prodded. “You are starting to bore me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then tell us about … Wrinkles.” That was another word that seemed to keep coming up.

“Wrinkles enable the near-instantaneous transfer of matter or data in three-dimensional space. They become accessible in irregular, but predictable intervals between any two given locations. They remain open for periods of roughly nineteen minutes. If two locations lie nearby each other in three-dimensional space, connections open between them perhaps a dozen times per day. If they are far apart, they open less frequently.”

“That explains everything,” Manda said, nodding slowly.

“It does?” I asked.

“Well, not
every
thing. But it explains a lot. Carly and Frampton must have been on a long-distance Wrinkle, because if they stayed more than a few minutes, they were going to get stuck—for almost a day or something, right?”

I nodded.

“And it sounds like Özzÿ was in your apartment for maybe two hours. So he must have taken one Wrinkle in, and then a later one out. And since the Wrinkles were just a couple hours apart, he must have come from someplace ‘nearby.’ Whatever that means.” She turned to the glittering concierge. “What constitutes ‘nearby’ for Wrinkles?”

“Distances less than roughly four thousand of your statute miles.”

Manda and I swapped a worried look. It seemed that Özzÿ and the parrot were staying somewhere on Earth.

“Got it,” Manda said, looking around for something to take notes with. “And how do Wrinkles work?”

“Your language lacks the necessary vocabulary for a technical explanation. I could attempt a more informal description. But first, I would suggest that we switch to an interface that is native to your own society.”

“To a what?” I asked.

“A native user interface. They are preferable because a great deal of communication is nonverbal. I am currently using a visual and cultural layer that conveys context, emotion, and emphasis in a manner that’s inscrutable to you, but plainly obvious to certain aliens, including the one who previously carried this stereopticon. For instance,” the concierge paused. “How are you feeling?” As it asked me this, a beguiling pattern of ruffling facets and blinking colors unfolded on the projection’s surface.