“Thanks, Gabi,” I said. Then, pointing up the street a ways, I said, “There’s the Coral Castle. We’ll be there in a sec.”
She looked down the street and, squinting a little, pointed. “Holy crap-slaps, Sal. It’s truly, truly hideous.”
“I kind of like it.”
She kicked a pebble. “Then you know what? So do I, Sal. And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you like it. And I like you.”
Um . . .
I only had time to think of one “um” before she gave my hand one last squeeze, then clapped and rubbed her hands together. “Okay, Sal. Ready? Your universe isn’t going to rescue itself, you know. It’s time to storm the castle.”
FOR THE SECOND TIME in as many days, I hid behind the Coral Castle’s new hedge with a coconspirator, trying to figure out the best way to infiltrate my own house. The difference? With Yasmany, it had been a game. Now the fate of the universe hung in the balance.
Wait, did I just say the fate of the universe hung in the balance? Gabi was starting to rub off on me. Or I should say Gabis.
We knelt behind the hedges, facing each other. FixGabi scooped up a pile of dirt, poured it on the sidewalk, and spread it until it was a circle the size of a medium pizza, exactly like I’d done for Yasmany yesterday. But then she did me one better. She took the chip clip out of her hair and used the teeth to rake the dirt, plowing neat, even gridlines into it. Not a half-bad substitute for graph paper.
“We need a plan,” she said. “Draw your house.”
I made a quick sketch of the Coral Castle’s rooms. “The remembranation machine is in the living room, here,” I said. “Right as we come in the front door. I mean, if we went in the front door.”
“We don’t want to go through the front door!” FixGabi chastised, making the clip bite her hairball again. “Your papi will see us right away, and it’ll be over before we even get started. Use your head, Sal.”
“You know,” I said, forgetting all the warm feelings her story about losing Sal had put in my heart, “you’re thinking of this like it’s us against Papi.”
“It is us against Papi.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
I held up my hands, took a breath. “Look. Maybe it was like that in other universes, but not all Papis in the multiverse are the same. If people were the same everywhere, then I would have found myself a substitute Mami on my first try. But there wasn’t one. Anywhere.”
Apparently I had baffled her. “Why would you want a substitute mami?”
“Because,” I said, my voice small, “my mami died.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She didn’t sound all that sorry. In fact, she had sounded like she wasn’t even a little bit sorry. “Gabi,” I said, a junkyard growl starting in my throat, “you’d better not—”
She interrupted me. “Sal, you’re focusing on superficial differences. What I’m saying is that there are some essential qualities in people that are always the same across all universes. Like names. Names are, like, the easiest things to change in the world! Yet every Sal I have ever met is named Sal. Explain that!”
That was a good point, actually. She may have been annoying, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t right.
Hmm. It was still so hard to wrap my head around the idea that Papi would act so un-Papi-like, though. “It just doesn’t sound like the guy I’ve known all my life,” I said.
FixGabi looked at our dirt map and made a few lines of the grid straighter as she spoke. “I know, Sal. I go through this every time, with every Sal. And when every Papi betrays every Sal every honking time, the last expression of those Sals is one of utter shock. Like this.” And then she made a face like a beached fish, mouth gasping, eyes unable to shut, because fish don’t have eyelids.
I wasn’t convinced she was right about Papi. But what if she wasn’t all the way wrong?
It might be a good idea to play things a little more cautiously for now. You know, just until we got things sorted. No harm in being careful, right?
I focused again on the map. “The bad news is Papi’s car is in the driveway”—I drew it in—“which means he’s working from home again today. But he could be anywhere in the house. Maybe he’s reading science stuff in bed. That’s our best-case scenario. If he’s reading science stuff in bed, we could drop a piano from the roof and he wouldn’t notice us.”
FixGabi peered through the hedge at the living room windows. “But if he’s working on the machine in the living room, he’ll spot us for sure if we try to approach from the front. Can we go through the garage?”
I drew in the side entrance to the garage. “That’s just what I was going to suggest. So, okay, assuming we get past Papi, what’s the plan once we get inside? Like, how exactly are we going—”
“Calm down, Sparky.”
I gawked. I very calmly kept myself calm before replying to her with utter calmitude. “I’m just asking you what I’m actually supposed to do. You know, tactics? What we’re talking about right now?”
Like she was talking to Iggy, she said slowly, brightly, utterly patronizingly, “That’s on a need-to-know basis, okay? All you need to do is follow my lead. If I give an order, you follow it. That’s it. If you can do that, then in about five minutes, you’ll be a hero. Just give me five minutes. Then you can ask me whatever you want. Deal?”
The urge to throw a tarantula at her face was strong. But would it even bother her? Was fear of spiders an essential character trait of all Gabis in all universes?
I could have found out then and there. I really wanted to do my own little calamity physics experiment. But hadn’t Principal Torres just talked to me about making sacrifices for the greater good? The good didn’t get much greater than saving the universe.
“Five minutes,” I said to FixGabi.
“No talking from now on, until the deeds are done,” she said. Then she stood up, crouched at the edge of the hedges, and signaled for me to get behind her.
I should have gone first. If the side door to the garage was locked, I’d be the one who’d have to unlock it. But clearly, FixGabi wanted to be in charge. And I said I would give her five minutes. So I got in line behind her. Maybe I was radiating more annoyance than the sun radiates radiation, but I did it.
She silently counted down with her fingers: three, two, one. Then she took off scuttling toward the garage.
I stayed exactly one step behind her. This was so weird, how Yasmany and I had done this same thing the day before. Only I was Yasmany today, and FixGabi was Sal.
We had our backs pressed to the wall in no time and slid sideways along it to the garage door. FixGabi tried the door; it opened. She signaled for me to take the lead now, finally realizing she couldn’t be the boss here, in my home. I went in, using the light of my smartwatch to guide us both.
Unlike Yasmany, FixGabi didn’t seem impressed by all the sci-fi equipment Papi kept in there. Maybe she’d seen it all before in a thousand different universes, or maybe her eyes were too focused on the prize. Either way, we quickly reached the door that led to the inside of the Coral Castle. I signaled for her to stay back and wait. Then I cracked it open.
Light poured into the garage. I stood as silently as I could and listened for Papi.
All I heard was air: air being moved by the air conditioner and air being moved by the remembranation machine’s thousand cooling fans.
Papi’s not a quiet man. I usually can echolocate him anywhere in the Coral Castle. Now, though, there was no hint of where he was. Yet his car was out front.…It was like he was home and not home at the same time. Eerie.
Anyway, it seemed safe to go inside. I waved for FixGabi to follow, and as quietly as we could, we went through the door.
I didn’t hear the garage door shut, nor did I hear her pad up behind me. FixGabi was good at sneaking.
I flattened myself against the wall and peered around it to m
ake triple sure the kitchen was 100 percent clear. It was. I backtracked to the master bedroom, went in, and looked inside the bathroom. All clear.
Feeling a little more relaxed and a little more perplexed, I walked out, not really trying to be stealthy anymore, and said to Gabi in not-quite-a-whisper, “I don’t know where Papi went, but he mmph hmmph dmmph pmmph.”
FixGabi had slapped her hand over my mouth for the second half of my sentence. Angrily, she flipped her head so that the chip clip pointed toward the living room and, presumably, the remembranation machine.
I mean, in theory I guess he could have been inside it, working. But like I said, Papi is not a quiet man. He is constantly announcing his existence with his entire body. He’s tried to scare me a million times and has failed 999,999 times. If he was in there, I would know it.
But FixGabi still had three and a half minutes of the five she had asked for. I blinked okay at her and waited patiently.
She removed her hand warily, ready to slap it back over my yapper at the slightest peep. When she was convinced I was done making noise, she pointed one last warning at me, then headed quickly but inaudibly into the living room. I trailed behind.
She made her way around to the front of the remembranation machine. Before I’d caught up to her, she was pointing accusingly around the corner.
When I followed her finger, I saw why. The door to its inner workings lay open.
Slightly more cautiously, I took the lead. I walked over to the door and snuck a peek inside.
Papi wasn’t in there. But the entropy sweeper, aka Sweeps, was. It stood leaning against the wall, I think in sleep mode, since the blue lights running up and down his body did a good, soundless imitation of snoring.
I could have woken it and asked it where Papi was. Could have asked Brana, for that matter. But according to FixGabi, I wasn’t supposed to talk. So I just exited and gave FixGabi a double thumbs-up to let her know no Papi.
Only then, after having thought about talking to Brana, did it occur to me that I hadn’t told FixGabi that this universe’s resident remembranation machine had indeed grown sentient. It had only been sentient for a day and change, after all. I was still getting used to the idea that it was more than a huge cube of metal in my living room.
Ah well. FixGabi had told me we had a few days after that happened to fix the universe, and here she was, working on it already. So all’s well that end’s well, right?
Besides, I wasn’t supposed to talk for another two minutes and fifteen seconds.
FixGabi, on the other hand, seemed convinced now that Papi was nowhere to be found. That made it safe to talk. “Finally, I’ve found a remembranation machine before it’s become sentient! Winning like this almost feels too easy. Luckily, too easy is my favorite way to win.”
I almost spoke up—I even raised a finger as a start—but remembered the bargain. I just watched and put my finger down.
“I,” FixGabi continued, running a hand over Brana’s metal casing, “am going to take you back to my universe, you boxy, foxy beauty. And then you and I are gonna make some really big holes.”
“Clozzze,” I said. I know, I know: one minute fifty-nine seconds left. But isn’t it just human nature to correct someone when they say the exact opposite of what they mean to say, especially when what they said, if it were true, would make them a complete supervillain bent on nothing less than cosmos-wide destruction? “You’re not going to open holes, Gabi. You’re going to close them. Like the one that ate Cuba and half of Florida?”
“Oh. Oh yeah. That’s what I meant. Close.”
And there it was. The biggest, most obvious lie anybody had ever said right to my face. This wasn’t misdirection, or devilishly exact wording, or an error, or an omission. It was the purest specimen of Pants-iest ablaziest I’d ever encountered in the wild.
It was strangely refreshing; FixGabi’s lie struck my face like a spring wind, bold and invigorating. I felt cleaner and lighter. Worries flew off me, like a trench coat made of crows. I literally said, “Ah!”
And I smiled warmly at FixGabi as I said, “You just tried to feed me the seca-est caca this side of astronaut ice cream.” And when she tilted her head in confusion, I explained. “You lied. You want to take this machine not so you can fix your universe. You—” I had to stop cold. It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe the truth I’d just realized. It was that it thundered through me. “You want to break other ones.”
FixGabi bent her head low and mean. The chip clip in her head shook like a rattlesnake’s butt. “I don’t expect you to understand, Sal. You never, ever do. What I expect is that you won’t get in my way.”
I threw up my hands. “Of course I’m going to get in your way! You’re trying to break the multiverse!”
“Fix it!” she said, losing her cool. “Your papi broke my universe by sealing it up. You saw it with your own eyes, Sal. Logically, therefore, the solution is to open up the multiverse. Get rid of the membrane. Let all realities flow together into one massive super-reality.”
“Um, no. That is the gerbilest thing anyone’s ever said, ever.”
She was calming down now while she pictured what she was describing. “No more choices, just one universe with infinite possibilities. Reality like it should have been from the beginning.” Her eyes had gone glossy and glinty, like an anime character in love. “It will be,” she said reverently, cultishly, “so beautiful, Sal.”
“Gabrielle Reál,” I said, “what you’re talking about will literally destroy reality.”
My stupidity bewildered her. “I know, Sal. Cha. That’s the point.”
Rawr! “You know, some of us are pretty fond of reality. We’d really rather you didn’t ruin it for everybody.”
“Give me a break. Reality sucks, then you die. I mean, that’s what happened to your mami, right?”
I try to stay in control. To be civil, polite, reasonable. But when somebody insults Mami, I throw all that out the airplane window and let it crash to the ground. “It’s time for you to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere without that remembranation machine.”
“Leave, or I’ll make you leave.”
She widened her stance, made fists. “You and what army?”
“That would be us,” said the entropy sweeper.
FixGabi tried to split herself in two so she could run in two different directions. Instead, she ended up on the floor like a pile of downed bowling pins.
It was very satisfying.
“Who are you?” she called to the air, looking around desperately.
“Sweeps is my name, class-eight AI, detector of calamitrons, and friend to all—all except guano-brained monomaniacs who seek to end life as we know it. That’s you. You’re the monomaniac.”
“Yeah, I got it. Overexplain much?” FixGabi was quickly regaining her composure. “Class-eight AI? Like your toilet at school, Sal?”
“Yeah,” I answered, realizing too late that Sweeps was going to freak all the—
“WHAT?!?” freaked Sweeps. “You’ve been seeing another class-eight AI at school?”
“It’s not like that,” I explained. “It’s just the new toilet.”
“Can it detect calamitrons the way I can?” it inquired, trying very hard not to sound jealous.
“You’re the only particle detector for me, Sweeps. Promise.”
“This is all very sweet,” said FixGabi, in the unsweetest voice ever to come out of a teenaged girl’s larynx. And I’m around teenaged girls all the time. FixGabi won against a lot of competition. “But, ha-ha, you had me for a minute there, Sal. I thought your glorified Geiger counter was your remembranation machine talking. But there’s only one name I was afraid to hear just then, and oh, ho-ho, ‘Sweeps’ wasn’t it, tee-hee. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just be taking my prize with me back to my universe.”
“You ain’t taking nothing nowhere,” said Sweeps. “Because I’m not the only brains inside this heap of metal. Please allow me to introduce yo
u to my new friend and comrade in cosmic computation, the one, the only—”
We both waited for Sweeps or anyone to finish that sentence. But the thought hung in the air, incomplete.
Finally, I noticed that the remembranator’s screen had text on it. “Oh, over there,” I said to FixGabi, pointing at the display.
“Ah, thank you,” she said, surprisingly politely. But when she saw what was written on the screen, she did her best imitation of a face melting like a candle, pulling her cheeks down with the flat of her hands and yelling, “Aaahhh!” while backing away.
“Guess that was the name she was afraid of,” said Sweeps. “What a pity.”
I wasn’t going to let Sweeps have all the fun dunking on her. “Brana,” I said, my manners dorado, “please meet Gabi Reál. Gabi, please meet Brana, a class-nine AI, and one heck of a remembranation machine.”
THE FAMOUS GABI REÁL!!! WHAT AN HONOR!!! IT’S A PLEASURE TO FINALLY MEET YOU!!! Brana wrote on-screen, three-exclamation-points happy.
“You may not know me,” FixGabi replied, “but I know you. Countless times I have met you on the field of battle.”
“Oh?” I asked. “And how many times have you won?”
That would be zero, based on her face. But we’ve already established that FixGabi was a liar. “They were mostly ties.”
THE FIELD OF BATTLE Brana asked, in writing, on-screen. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT FIGHTING PEOPLE IS NOT ONE OF MY PURPOSES IN LIFE!
I bonked my head in that clowning way that means Oh yeah, I forgot! before I said to FixGabi, “Brana’s only been sentient since yesterday morning. But it has accomplished a lot in that time. Why, in just one day, it has already figured out the purpose of life.” I turned to the remembranation machine. “What is the purpose of life, Brana?”
THERE ARE FIVE PURPOSES OF LIFE! wrote the remembranator, and then listed them:
1. ENJOY BEING ALIVE!
2. HELP AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!
3. DO YOUR BEST WORK!
Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe Page 21