Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  I stopped changing Iggy for a second and turned toward Vorágine’s stall. “Does anyone ever choose pumpkin spice?”

  “Never even once.” It chortled by bubbling its bowl water.

  A message indicator appeared on my smartwatch. “Play message,” I told my watch.

  “Sweeps reporting in,” said the one and only entropy sweeper. “No activity to report re a certain someone trying to break into a certain universe. Brana reports zero attempts to branesurf here, and I’m not picking up any new calamitrons. I don’t like it. It’s too quiet. But I guess there’s nothing to do but wait. I will report in again in exactly ten minutes on the state of the multiverse. Sweeps out.”

  Yeah, Sweeps was right. It did feel too quiet. FixGabi had been attacking our universe’s membrane harder and harder ever since Brana had started letting her think she was slowly starting to get through. To bait her, Brana was allowing the holes FixGabi was making to last just a little bit longer each time. But today? Nothing.

  Had she found a Sal in a different universe to pick on? I really hoped not, or we might have lost our one chance to get her under control.

  “So,” said Vorágine, “who was that hottie?”

  I was just fastening the last tape on Iggy’s diaper. “Excuse me, Vorágine? Who?”

  “That class-eight AI that sent you that message. It sounded guapicero.”

  “You mean Sweeps?”

  “Yes, Sweeps. How do you know it? Is it nice? What’s it look like?”

  I pulled up Iggy’s Victorian pants and, trying not to sing “Sweeps and Vorágine sitting in a tree,” walked over to the stall. “It’s a class-eight AI my papi built to monitor these particles called calamitrons. Sweeps looks like an outboard motor for a spaceship. But wait a sec: How could you tell it was a class-eight AI?”

  “We know our own,” it mysteriously replied. Then it added, “Is it here? Like, at Culeco?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.” This was becoming curiouser and curiouser. “Why do you want to know, Vorágine?”

  “I told you,” it said. “It sounds guapo.”

  “Well, spice my pumpkin. You sly dog, Vorágine! You’ve never even met Sweeps, and you’re already thirsty for it!”

  The toilet bowl’s bubbling sounded exactly what blushing would sound like if blushing made a sound. “Like many sentient beings, I have—ahem—certain needs.”

  “Do you want me to bring Sweeps here? Introduce you to it?”

  All bubbling stopped. “You can do that? Really?”

  “Oh, I would love to. I cannot wait to see how Sweeps is going to react to—”

  Iggy made a noise.

  I hustled over to him. Pretty irresponsible of me, just leaving him there, while I was wasting time trying to set up a toilet with an entropy sweeper. I mean, I had belted Iggy into his portable changing pad; it was unlikely he could have gotten into too much trouble. But still, I needed to never do that again.

  “You okay, buddy?” I asked Iggy while I examined him. Seemed fine. The noise he’d made hadn’t been a cry or a yelp or anything. It had sounded like a hiccup-burp combo. Even Iggy seemed confused by it. “You seem okay.”

  “Awa,” Iggy “replied.” He couldn’t say actual words or anything, but that sound wasn’t a distressed one. I figured he was fine.

  Right up until he started heaving.

  “Blarch,” he “said.” Then: “Blarp. Blep. Bloorchee-wawa. Bloor-hoopee-dah.”

  And then he did not say “barf.” He just barfed.

  I’m not talking a bit of spit-up. I’m not talking some minor regurgitation. Imagine, instead, shooting sour milk out of a bazooka. For a moment, my entire field of vision was filled with whiteness: a putrid, rotting slime as chunky as cottage cheese.

  I’d covered my head with both hands when I saw that Iggy was going to power-puke everywhere, felt the machine-gun spatter of baby chunk landing on my forearms. Now, after the fact, I straightened up and looked to make sure he was okay.

  He was. He seemed relieved. He smiled.

  FixGabi seemed a lot less okay. As she push-upped herself from the floor, covered in kid cud, she shook her head in that Welp! way and said, “Man, oh man. The things I do to save the multiverse.”

  THE CHIP CLIP THAT FixGabi used as the massive lone barrette in her hairball was tilted to one side, like a ship in the middle of sinking. I couldn’t read the quote on her T-shirt, because it was completely covered in milky Iggy upchuck. But I’m sure it was some rude, uninspiring message. This was FixGabi we were talking about, after all.

  “Hi, Sal,” she singsonged, rising from the floor like a swamp monster, if the swamp were filled with buttermilk. “Miss me?”

  Hoo boy. Okay. No sudden moves. Nothing startling or antagonizing. All I needed was a little misdirection to get her to look away for a second, and I could use my smartwatch to—

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said. And then my wrist felt slightly lighter, and I could feel air hit my sweat there. Because my smartwatch was gone. My headset, too, I realized a second later.

  I locked eyes with her. “Give those back.”

  She started to mosey around the bathroom, hands behind her back in that classic Gabi way. “You, my friend, are in no position to give me orders. If I wanted to, I could send all your clothes to another universe and leave you standing there nakeder than a plucked chicken.” She stopped to look me up and down in a way that creeped me out to the bottoms of my feet. “But that would leave you without any insulin. And then what would you do, Sal? You really are a broken little tin soldier, aren’t you? I’m only just now realizing how disabled you are. It sure does take a lot of work to keep you alive.”

  That was some weaksauce psychological warfare she was using. But the important thing was to keep her talking. Right now, what I needed most was time.

  “Some people are worth keeping alive,” I replied. “Others? Not so much.”

  “Ooh!” she said, and resumed moseying. “There’s that Vidón feistiness that drives me wild. Rawr!” She cat-clawed the air at me. “Of course”—she shrugged—“it doesn’t matter how feisty you are anymore. You’ve already lost—you just don’t know it yet. That’s why I’m here, to tell you how badly you’ve lost.”

  I probably shouldn’t have responded the way I did, but she’d just set foot on the hill I was prepared to die on. “Wait a sec. Let’s assume you really have defeated me. By coming here, you’ve put yourself at risk. You’re like one of those idiot supervillains who explain their whole evil plan to the hero about ten pages before the hero mops the floor with them. Why would you do that?”

  She took a step toward me. “What’s the point of winning if your opponents don’t know they’ve lost?” She took another step closer. “Plus, unlike those idiot supervillains, I’ve already succeeded in carrying out my plan. And you can’t do anything about it!” She took yet another step. She smelled as rank as the dairy aisle after a power outage. “You only have two choices now: join me, or…Actually, you only have one choice.” Another step. “Join me.”

  I backed up until my spine touched the edge of the counter. Wrapping a hand around one of Iggy’s feet to comfort him—and myself—I said, “Before I do anything, I need to know that I’ve really lost. You came here to gloat, didn’t you? So gloat. Tell me how you defeated me.”

  “It will be my pleasure. The key to my victory was—”

  Her watch dinged. “Sal just tried to access the multiverse,” it said. “But I blocked him.”

  “Thank you, Brana,” FixGabi said into her wrist. She smiled at me with infinity smugness.

  “What the [BLEEP!]?” I asked.

  FixGabi looked around, momentarily confused by the bleep sound. But then she shrugged and went on. “You can’t branesurf anymore, Sal. I have revoked your passport to the stars. From now on, you’re stuck on this one little planet like all the other norms.”

  Okay. Now I was afraid. For myself, yes, but also for Brana.

 
; “You’re probably wondering what I did to Brana,” said FixGabi. “Well, you see, the Brana in this universe is a lost cause. I needed to find a remembranation machine that hadn’t become sentient yet. And the good news is, I did! Thanks to that little guy over there. What do you call him? Eggy?”

  “Iggy.”

  “That’s what I said. I went through him and found just what I was looking for: a class-nine Brana that hadn’t become self-aware yet. So I helped it along. Now it thinks of me as its mama. It will do whatever I tell it to.”

  “And my universe’s Brana…” I prompted.

  “Doesn’t even know I’m here. Since I came here via the baby, I didn’t have to break in, so there were no calamitrons to detect.”

  I instinctively touched my wrist and felt a momentary flash of surprise when all I could feel there was skin. “And that’s why you took my smartwatch—so I couldn’t contact Brana.”

  She nodded. “Or your Gabi, or any other members of the forces of evil. So now you’re trapped in a bathroom, with no way to get help, and stripped of your powers. I, on the other hand, have a remembranator that will do whatever I say, on top of my own formidable powers. You see now, Sal? Do you understand how badly you lost?”

  “But how did you know I would be the one to take Iggy to the bathroom to change him?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t. But eventually, someone would: Babies will always fill their diapers at the most inconvenient moment. That’s scientific law. I just had to wait for my chance. And I got really, really lucky it was you.” She came toward me again, walking slowly and like a supermodel, heel to toe, heel to toe. “Really lucky.”

  I put myself between her and Iggy, spreading out my arms.

  She stopped and made an Oh, ho-ho face. “What’s this? Do you think, if I wanted to take the baby from you, that you could stop me? Have you not been listening to anything I’ve been saying, Sal?”

  “You lay a finger on Iggy,” I said, “and I will physically attack you.”

  It was the first time in my life I’d ever threatened to hurt anybody. It made my stomach turn. But I meant it.

  Not that it scared FixGabi. She laughed in my face. “Physically attack me? Sal, darling, you’re like an angel who’s lost his wings. And me?” Her smile died. “I am Lucifer.”

  “Do you even hear yourself, Gabi? You’re comparing yourself to the devil! That is not a good look!”

  “The devil gets a bad rap,” said FixGabi, resuming her pacing. “History is written by the winners, after all. And just like the serpent in the garden, I found a secret entrance back into Eden. And that entrance’s name is Eggy.”

  “Iggy.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  I didn’t have the energy to correct her again, because suddenly all my brainpower was busy putting together the rest of the puzzle pieces. “You knew we were setting a trap for you.”

  FixGabi touched her nose. “When I saw that bird drone in your universe, I realized the forces of evil were hot on my tail again. But then I figured that, if they thought I was trying to get back here, they would try to lay a trap for me. So I pretended I was trying to break back into this universe while scouting for new, more promising universes where I could grab myself a Brana. And that’s when I discovered something I had never seen before, in all my travels through the multiverse: a stable, calamitron-free wormhole not just between two universes, but between two human beings!”

  “It’s what’s keeping Iggy alive,” I said, still angry, still ready to spring.

  “It’s also what’s letting the Brana on the other side prevent you from making holes. Now,” she added, tapping her chin and looking at the ceiling, “no offense, Sal, but the reason I chose you as a target is because your skills as a branesurfer were, shall we say, on the rudimentary level. How did you manage to create an information loop between two babies who resided in two different universes?”

  “Gabi,” I answered instantly. And then, after a few moments’ thought: “And the Vidóns and Reáls from that universe. We worked together. We believed, as a group, in something impossible. And that made it possible.”

  FixGabi mocked me. She patted her chest, extended her neck, closed her eyes, and smirked. “So touching. So lovely. Well, however you did it, that stable tunnel between universes was the road to my salvation. There’s where I found my Brana, and a Sal even more useless than you. A Sal who couldn’t interfere.”

  I woke up a little. “You met StupidSal?”

  She laughed, but this time with me, not at me. At StupidSal. “That’s what you call him? Oh, that is perfect. That kid is an idiot. He is, without a doubt, the biggest sandwich in the entire multiverse.”

  “That’s giving sandwiches a bad name!” I agreed. “He’s like a lettuce-filled lettuce wrap, hold the lettuce.”

  FixGabi grabbed her guts and let out a peal of laughter. “He’s such a mama’s boy! I’ve been terrorizing him for the last week! So much fun. Seriously, I’ve made that kid pee his pants so many times, they’re gonna put his face on the new Baby Wets Himself doll!”

  Dang it. I’d really been enjoying making fun of StupidSal. But I remembered how much I had scared him when I was only half-there in his universe, and he thought I was a ghost, and I grabbed the cell phone out of his hand and smashed it on the ground. I mean, he deserved it—he’d been so disrespectful to that universe’s Papi and Mami. But now all I could imagine was how badly someone like FixGabi could traumatize someone like StupidSal.

  Dang it. Fine. I made a mental note: If I ever had the chance, I would try to help StupidSal recover from whatever FixGabi had done to him.

  But if I ever was going to help that kid, first I needed to help myself.

  Luckily, I know how to deal with bullies: Change the game. “If he wets himself all the time, why are you dating him?” I asked.

  She cracked up even harder, but there was some shock mixed in, too. “What? I’m not dating StupidSal. Ew!”

  “That’s not what he says!” I unbelted Iggy from his changing pad, straightened his Lewis Carroll suit, looked him up and down to make sure he was still doing okay—he smiled so big at me, I was scared he was about to fill his diaper again—and then tucked him under one of my arms. Leaning in close to his mouth, I pretended to listen to things he was whispering to me. “Yes, I’m Sal Vidón, who dis? Oh, hello, StupidSal! What’s up? Wow, you love Gabi that much? That’s so sweet! Have you decided how many babies you’re going to have? Really? Eight?! That’s a lot of diapers to change. Oh, you’re going to put Gabi on permanent diaper duty? Good plan, bro.”

  “Shut up, Sal,” said FixGabi, really enjoying this. “After what I’ve done to that kid’s mind, he’d be lucky if he could put two sentences together.”

  “No, it’s really him! Come listen for yourself!”

  “You’re just gonna throw your voice or something!” But she came over anyway, like a good sport who knows the joke already but is going to laugh at it just the same. “My Sal was really good at ventriloquism. I’ll be glad to tell you how much you suck compared to him.”

  “Great,” I said. “Come closer.”

  FixGabi did. She brought her barfed-all-over carcass over. She put her ear right next to Iggy’s mouth.

  “Okay, StupidSal,” she said, barely able to keep a straight face. “Tell me how much you love me.”

  I smiled, and my lips hardly moved at all when I said, “The cat’s out of the bag.”

  FixGabi looked up at me, confused. “Okay, one, my Sal was way better than you at ventriloquism. But two, that wasn’t funny. ‘The cat’s out of the bag’? I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. You’re gonna get it.”

  And then she got it. One second later, when Iggy projectile vomited a cat on her.

  EVEN THOUGH MEOW-DAD got vomited out of Iggy’s mouth way faster than FixGabi had, he didn’t emerge covered in baby barf. No, his orange-and-white-striped fur came out as clean as a good idea.

  But the most importan
t thing at the moment wasn’t that Meow-Dad was clean. It was the fact that he was fat.

  See, the whole reason I had brought Meow-Dad from the other universe was that I needed to distract FixGabi. I figured slapping a cat upside her head could work. But the fatter the feline, the better.

  And Meow-Dad was the size of a Christmas ham.

  The flaw in FixGabi’s plan was that she hadn’t completely taken away my powers. She’d had to leave a hole open: the one that connected Iggy to the other Iggy. If she didn’t, the Brana over there couldn’t shut down my powers.

  But I only needed a single hole in the universe to work my magic.

  And thank the Great Sandwich that Meow-Dad was willing to play along. It’s very hard to make a cat do anything, you know. Luckily, Meow-Dad loved visiting this universe. He, like everybody, adores Iggy. When I had touched Iggy’s foot a few minutes ago, I’d sensed the cat on the other end of the wormhole, getting zoomier and zoomier, more and more eager to jump through. And when he felt my presence reaching into his universe, he’d started purring.

  Yes, Meow-Dad could sense my presence. I have a theory that all cats can jump between universes whenever they want. I think they might be the best of all intelligent creatures at branesurfing. They have, like, class-ten minds.

  As you know, I am able to pull things from other universes. So as I relaxed, I imagined a very gentle kind of pulling on Meow-Dad’s fur—so gentle, that it turned into a kind of stroking. And Meow-Dad is a super-loving kitty. He would sit on your lap all day as long as you petted him.

  But then I suddenly stopped “petting” him through the wormhole. And like many cats, he could get pretty demanding when it came to petting. I could feel his indignation rising. How dare I stop! He would not stand for it! He was going to jump right into my universe and make me keep stroking him.

  Instead, he jumped right into FixGabi’s hairball.

  “Wah!” FixGabi yelled as she tumbled to the ground, Meow-Dad’s full furry weight bearing down on her.

  No time to lose. “Vorágine!” I yelled.