Year Zero Read Online Free
Author: Rob Reid
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 haveimagined 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
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 haveimagined 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
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