Year Zero Read online

  That said, something told me O’Sama wasn’t joking. He just seemed too … earnest. “I do not have, never have had, and never will have any relationship whatsoever with the Backstreet Boys,” I said, hoping to forever banish the topic from the intergalactic agenda.

  “Really?” O’Sama’s obvious devastation confirmed that he had been completely serious.

  Sister Venus gave him a shocked look. “You didn’t honestly think—”

  And that’s when we got Rickrolled. If you’re not familiar with the aging prank, it’s a sonic ambush that causes you to hear a snippet of Rick Astley’s foppish late eighties hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Rickrolling had its heyday during the late Bush era. But like bell-bottoms, it stages occasional resurgences, and we were in the midst of one. I figured that the culprit was my unattainably gorgeous neighbor, Manda Shark. We’d had drinks the night before, and at some point she must have slyly changed my phone’s primary ringtone. And now someone was calling, filling my office with that cheesy chorus.

  Normal reactions to Rickrolls range from eye rolls to ironic sing-alongs. But my visitors started trembling, almost convulsing. And as they clung to their chairs for support, they took on an ecstatic air that was almost smutty. I instinctively grabbed my phone and muted the ringer.

  “Big … music fans?” I ventured as they calmed down.

  The nun nodded, catching her breath. “Almost any of your music can prompt that sort of reaction from us. Which is why we chose outfits with headdresses. They conceal devices that can completely silence our hearing when we’re not in a sealed room, to protect us from the ambient music that fills the public spaces in your society.”

  O’Sama reached a finger under his turban and made a flicking gesture. “You see, I can’t hear a thing now,” he bellowed, then flicked his finger back the other way.

  “Then I better change a setting on my computer,” I said, sliding over to my keyboard. “Otherwise it’ll play some Michael Bolton whenever an email comes in.” That was a lie. Neither of them could see my monitor, and I was actually launching the software that I use to record depositions and other interviews. If they wouldn’t let me shoot the meeting on my cellphone, an audio recording would be better than nothing. “Anyway. You know my name. Do you mind if I ask for yours?”

  “You can call me Carly,” the nun said.

  I nodded agreeably, although I’d been hoping for something a bit more exotic.

  The mullah smiled gently. “And you can call me Frampton.”

  “Pleased to meet you both. So anyway—it sounds like you’re big music fans. And you need representation. In what specific ways can Carter, Geller & Marks be helpful?”

  Carly leaned toward me, almost conspiratorially. “We need a license to all of humanity’s music. One that will allow … a rather large number of beings to play it. Privately and in public. And to copy it. And to transmit it, share it, and store it.”

  Decades of marveling at Hollywood aliens hadn’t prepared me for this dry request. But my career at a sharp-elbowed copyright and patent law firm absolutely had. “That should be feasible,” I said, managing to sound like Carly was the third extraterrestrial to make this request today. “And exactly what music are you seeking licenses to?” I struggled not to sniffle as I said this. I failed.

  “Every song that’s been played on New York–area radio since 1977. Or has ever been sold or widely traded on the Internet.”

  “That would be … complicated, but quite manageable.” This thigh-slapper came straight from my firm’s equivalent of a cunning marketing script. The partnership owes much of its lavish income to conversations that begin a lot like this one (albeit with Earthlings). A prospective client imagines that our music-saturated society must surely have a rational and well-defined set of rules governing music licensing. They come to us because we famously know everyone in the industry. So naturally, we can get them their licenses in a trice—right?

  You’d think. But music licensing is an arcane thicket of ambiguity, overlapping jurisdictions, and litigation. This is a disastrous situation for musicians, as well as for music fans and countless businesses. In fact, it suits absolutely nobody—apart from the cynical lawyers who run the music labels, the lobbying groups, the House, the Senate, and several parasitic law firms like my own. Collectively, we are wholly empowered to fix the entire mess. But that would result in a needless loss of extravagantly high-paying legal work for all. So we indignantly denounce the situation to our respective patrons, wave our fists at each other in public, and then privately chuckle slyly over drinks.

  In this environment, conversations with prospective clients need to be handled delicately. You don’t want them to look back later and think that you were overpromising in a no-win situation. But you certainly don’t want to talk them out of attempting the impossible.

  “Why would it be complicated?” Carly asked. “Is it … hard to get this sort of music license?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say hard.” This part of the pitch calls for offering some misleading relief. But as I started to deliver it, I recalled with a pang that the firm was about to trim some deadwood, and that I was a likely victim. They didn’t hate me around here; I just wasn’t viewed as being partner material, and would probably be shown the door within weeks. So why should I loyally push their greedy agenda until the bitter end? Particularly to a pair of extraterrestrials who probably lacked American currency anyway?

  Carly tugged impatiently at her crucifix. “So, if it’s not hard, what is it?”

  “Utterly impossible,” I said, with the reckless swagger of the noble corporate renegade that I’m not. “You can get close to a license as sweeping as that. But it’ll cost you a fortune. And it’ll take months at best—more likely years. And once you think you’re done, there will always be lots of loose ends. Thousands at least. Ones that people can sue you over. And when they do, your defense could drag on for years—at four to nine hundred dollars per billable hour.”

  “But what if we want a license for places where no rational person would expect any of your music to ever sell, or even be played?” she pressed.

  “Like where?”

  At this, Frampton got to his feet and leaned across my desk. “The far side of the Townshend Line,” he intoned, with the gravitas of a wizard invoking dungeons deep and caverns old.

  Carly glared at him. “How would he know about the Townshend Line? You and I are the only beings who have ever crossed it.” She turned back to me. “The damn thing’s completely overrated anyway.”

  “Completely,” Frampton agreed, retaking his seat.

  “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 entirely.”

  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.

  * * *

  1. No, we haven’t stopped the spread of pirated music or movies online, nor have we slowed it even slightly. But we do get paid pornographically vast sums for trying our very best.

  2. Our client didn’t have a leg to stand on. But the Big Three paid a half billion dollars to get rid of us rather than cede the market to the Japs (their word, not mine) while awaiting trial. Within the firm, this is remembered as our finest hour.

  TWO

  PIECES OF EIGHT

  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.