Enough About Me

by S. G. Wilson

  Meticulous gazed overhead with a peeved look on his face. “I hadn’t expected another storm so bloody soon.”

  “Storm?! What storm?! Since when does the Rip do storms?!”

  “When too much energy builds inside, the Rip shoots it out as cosmic lightning, for lack of a better term,” said Meticulous. “If the bolts touch down on the ground, they’ll either dump something from another Earth or take away whatever they hit and dump it somewhere else.”

  “How’s that even possible?!”

  Meticulous dusted imaginary fluff off his coat. “How to explain so a mind at your level can understand?” He clapped his hands together. “Oh, I know! Think of the Rip as a clogged loo. If you don’t take a plunger to it, the transdimensional energy inside it overflows and spills all over the place. That’s how Earth Zero wound up so barmy. I suspect that a stray bolt from the Rip is also what did in my second elevator.”

  My throat went dry. “You know about that?”

  “Yes, yes. I saw the wreckage when we broke into the Janus earlier this evening.”

  The explosion. My mind went back to a nightmare I’d relived hundreds of times already. There I stood in the elevator bank of the Janus North, still choked up. I’d just said goodbye to Motor Me, Resist Me, and Hollywood Me, who’d left my Earth in Meticulous’s new and improved dimension-hopping elevator, version 2.0.

  The one that wasn’t supposed to blow up.

  I didn’t even remember the blast, just the doors shutting and the gentle squeak of the car gliding away. Then I woke up in the hospital. My friends Twig and Nash had heard the bang from the front lobby and pulled me from the wreckage. They hadn’t seen any sign of the other Mes, or even the elevator car. Just a big empty chute and lots of rubble. I’d worried nonstop about the trio ever since. I could only hope they’d reached another universe before everything went kablooey.

  “My friends might be dead because of your stupid elevator and the stupid Rip you created!” I said.

  Meticulous stroked his earlobes. “You’re the one who damaged the control panel. It was part of the insulation protecting anyone inside from the erratic energies outside the elevator. So if anything, this was your fault.”

  “No way!” In truth, though, I worried he might be right. Had I sent my friends to their doom? How could I live with myself?

  “Let’s just move on,” said Meticulous. “Aren’t you curious how I got here without my elevator?”

  “Not really. No.” Sure I was curious, but I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” he said. “I made sure that Caveman, Barbra, and myself got struck by the Rip. Isn’t that brilliant?!”

  Here’s the thing about having an evil-genius double from an alternate universe. There’s no avoiding the fact that under way different circumstances, you could have wound up like them. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy into their evil-genius nonsense. “You let the Rip zap you on purpose?!” I said.

  “Of course.” Meticulous saw how confused I looked and sighed. “Obviously, that was the only way to power my portal paper.”

  “What’s portal paper?”

  Meticulous reached into his coat and pulled out a piece of yellow parchment as crinkly as a pirate treasure map. The paper sparkled as if it had been coated in glitter at a kindergarten crafts table. “It doesn’t look like much, but it lets me get around.”

  “So you invented a new form of traveling the multiverse just to visit me?”

  Meticulous tidied his hair. “Actually, I was aiming for my Earth. Still a few kinks in the system. And that’s where you come in. Turns out it’s right lucky we landed here, because you’re the perfect Me for the job I have in mind.”

  “I’m not working for you!”

  “Not even if the job is to get me home so I can finish the Stitch?”

  “Is this the part where you want me to ask what the Stitch is?”

  “It’s a smashing technology I’ve developed that will fix the Rip once and for all.”

  The Rip thundered overhead. Caveman and Barbra huddled together in fright.

  Meticulous scowled at the sky. “There shouldn’t be a bloody storm right now,” he muttered to himself.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “When we met, you couldn’t have cared less about fixing the Rip. Now you’re saying you were building a fix for it before you got stranded?”

  “Quite. I’ve always wanted to fix the Rip. I just wasn’t in a hurry. But now I can’t ignore the danger. If it could snatch up this dodo creature from whatever monstrous Earth spawned it, there’s no telling what other horrors the Rip is shuffling between other Earths.”

  “It could make all Earths like Earth Zero!” I said.

  “Eventually. But I’ll put a stop to that codswallop before it happens.”

  He walked over to Caveman and patted the shuddering Me on the shoulder. “There, there, we’ll come out of this right proper.”

  “Oh, now I get it!” I said, watching the two of them. “Making friends with Caveman has given you a tiny ounce of human feeling.”

  Meticulous scrunched his nose like I smelled bad. Caveman aped the look.

  “How can you say that about a fellow Me?” said Meticulous. “Aren’t we all the same deep down? Isn’t that what you’re always on about?”

  “I’m nothing like you!”

  “Now listen. If you help Caveman and myself make it back to Earth One, I’ll cut a deal with you. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones and overlook what you did to me.”

  “You overlook what I did?! What about what you did to me?!”

  We might have gone on like this, but a bolt of cosmic lightning tore loose from the Rip and zapped us.

  Trust me when I say that sort of thing tends to shut anybody up.

  Next time you nearly get struck by a bolt of cosmic energy shooting from a glowing hole in the sky, remember to close your eyes and cover your ears. I wish I had. I couldn’t see or hear anything after the strike from the Rip hit the ground between Meticulous and me.

  Hands grabbed my arms and helped me up. When my eyes and ears came back online, I saw Caveman at my side, propping me up with his smelly arm. Meticulous stood nearby, staring at something on the ground that hadn’t been there before. An origami snake eating its own butt.

  This was like no origami I’d ever made. Like no origami anyone on my Earth had ever made. They called it the Impossible Fold, an origami of the famous tail-munching snake from mythology that represents infinity. Or something.

  “The ouroboros,” said Meticulous, awestruck. “I read about this in my origami research!”

  To make a perfect loop like the ouroboros with a single sheet of paper, you couldn’t just shove the tail into the mouth and call it a day. There wasn’t supposed to be any break anywhere. That should have been impossible, like calculating pi to the final digit or finding a try-not-to-laugh internet video that actually makes you laugh. This origami wasn’t supposed to exist, but here it was, fresh from some other Earth.

  “It’s impossible to fold, or even calculate,” I said. “No origami artist has tackled it, not even cheaters like you who map out crease patterns on computers.”

  Meticulous scowled. “That’s not cheating. It’s preparation.”

  “Where’s the art in that?” I said.

  “Spoken like someone with rubbish math skills. Now open it! There may be a note inside.”

  Fingers trembling, I cracked open the perfect fold. Inside was a bad doodle of a unicorn, pretty much the way I might have drawn it. And below the picture, my crummy handwriting:

  Make it here, pronto.

  Ours sincerely,

  Me

  “Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

  Meticulous peered at the unicorn from different angles.
“It’s obviously the origami key for the Earth this anonymous Me wants us to visit. Smells like a trap.”

  “Says the Me who trapped ninety-nine Mes at Me Con,” I said.

  Meticulous tugged on his lacy cuffs. “That was different. In any event, I’m not going to yet another Earth. I’m going to Earth One. And you’re getting me there.”

  Ignoring him, I looked over the spot where the origami had landed, hoping for a clue about the mystery Me who’d sent it. There, in the dirt, I saw a charred candy bar wrapper and picked it up. Bowel Blocker, it read.

  “Motor Me!” I yelled, waving the paper at Meticulous. “Authentic Earth Eleven junk food! This belonged to Motor!”

  Meticulous shrugged. “There could be lots of Bowel Blockers out there on any number of Earths. It’s likely nothing but trash that got sucked into the storm and sent here.”

  “This has got to be more than coincidence. Motor’s out there with the others, alive and safe. I just know it!”

  Meticulous pointed to the sky. The Rip had shrunk behind the night clouds. “The storm is still on for noon. We need to focus on that.”

  How could I, or any version of myself, focus on the weather, with so many questions still in the air? Who was this mysterious new Me? Was it Motor? And if not him, then who?

  I only knew one thing for sure: the multiverse was back in my life, whether I wanted it there or not.

  If the guards had had their way, they’d have forced all the kids at Youth Development to skip every meal, class, and recreation break until one of us fessed up to trashing the center. But state law required we be fed, educated, and exercised at specific times of the day, so there was no getting around breakfast.

  That’s why Meticulous and I were stuck in the canteen line together when we should have been searching for Caveman and Barbra. While Meticulous had been catching a few minutes of sleep in the common yard before sunrise, the prehistoric pair had snuck into the building and wrecked the place. It had been the quickest, most destructive vandalism rampage the center had ever seen. The canteen had survived countless hours of rough use by teen vandals, but Caveman and Barbra had reduced it to rubble in no time flat. They’d knocked over all the tables and chairs and scratched them up for good measure, leaving behind piles of trash and smearing the floors and walls with waffle batter, mac and cheese, and other food sludge from the kitchen.

  The inmates were too busy gossiping about who’d done all this to notice Meticulous beside me. He’d traded in his fancy-boy clothes for a standard juvie uniform and slipped on a pair of glasses he’d found in a trash pile. It wasn’t much of a disguise, so I made us take the last table in the back corner to avoid notice.

  Meticulous picked up a chair and chuckled at the sight of teeth marks on its legs. “Oh, Caveman, you mischief-maker.” He said it like a parent oblivious to just how much of a monster his kid is.

  “How did you and Cave end up as friends?” I said. “I thought you hated all Mes.”

  Meticulous waved away the remark and sat down. “I don’t hate Mes. I’m just annoyed with them for not living up to their full potential. To my potential.”

  I took a seat next to him. “I’m so glad to have your unique brand of positivity back in my life.”

  Meticulous chuckled. “Admit it, mate. You’re chuffed to see me.”

  “Hardly.”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t been hoping beyond hope that some Me, any Me, would come visit? Even a Me you hate? Just to know that a Me made it out okay?”

  He had me there. I’d stayed up more than one late night worrying about my friends, not to mention the other Mes still stuck on Earth Zero. Since when was Meticulous so good at understanding how I felt? How any Me felt? Reading Mes was supposed to be my thing.

  “That’s right, you’re not the only Me who knows what other Mes are thinking,” he said, rubbing it in even more.

  “Whatever.” I looked around for the umpteenth time to make sure we weren’t attracting any attention. “We need to focus on finding Caveman and Barbra.”

  “Agreed. We should be able to slip away after breakfast.”

  “Count me out! After this, it’s visitation time, then classes. And mixed in there somewhere it’ll be my turn to get interrogated about this mess. Really looking forward to that. ‘Sorry, Officer, this is just another case of my stupid duplicates showing up and ruining my life yet again.’ ”

  Officers O’Fartly and Pooplaski (real names O’Hartly and Poplaski) swore they’d interview each and every one of us about the vandalism until the guilty party emerged. They were already questioning Lil Battleship, who always got in trouble, even for stuff he didn’t do. The poor kid never caught a break. Both parents gone, his brothers and sisters out of the picture, and his grandmother dead a month after he entered juvie. Given what he’d been through, I had no right to complain about my life.

  Meticulous crunched a spoonful of dry cereal. He preferred his milk on the side, just like me. I hated reminders of how we could be alike. “I didn’t come here to ruin your life,” he said. “If I’d wanted revenge, I’d have gotten it by now. And don’t worry, I’ll protect you from your fellow inmates.”

  “Hey, I get by just fine here.” I had Resist Me to thank for that. Among the videos Click and Dare had posted online was grainy footage of Resist beating up a bunch of Viral Mes during our rumble with them at the Janus. The video looked just enough like me to fool everybody into thinking I knew something about fighting, so nobody had messed with me. Not yet, at least.

  Meticulous dug a fork inside his breakfast burrito, scooping out the insides and leaving the outer shell intact. This was one particular eating habit we didn’t share. Maybe it was an Earth One thing. “Obviously, your internet reputation has shielded you so far, as well as your friendship with Petite Cruise Liner,” he said. “But it’s only a matter of time before someone tests you. And you don’t have your precious fizz to rely on.”

  I tried not to look so surprised. “What makes you think I can’t fizz anymore?” The truth was, I hadn’t fizzed since the elevator blew up.

  “Please. I’m a Me. I know these things.”

  I didn’t see the point of lying. “Okay, let’s just say the fizz is gone.”

  Meticulous smiled in triumph. I think he lived for these petty little moments of victory. “I thought as much. You know what your problem is? You’ve lost what little self-confidence you once had. You feel wracked with guilt about what you did to me and the other Mes.”

  “You mean what you did to the other Mes!” I hissed.

  Meticulous propped his feet on the table. “Plus, being cooped up here as a common criminal is getting to you.”

  “It’s your fault I’m here in the first place!” I said. “And put your feet down! It’s not allowed!”

  His feet stayed put. “Is it my fault your legal defense was for tosh? Oh, right, you wouldn’t know. You haven’t earned a law degree like me. The truth is that on some level, you believe you’re a bad person. You see yourself as more of a None of Me than an All of Me.”

  “None of Me? What are you talking about?”

  He took another nibble of his breakfast burrito. “You haven’t heard of None of Me? The Most Evil of Mes, as he’s known?”

  “I thought you were the most evil of Mes.”

  “Such a wit! None of Me was the bogeyman of Me Con awhile back, sort of the opposite of All of Me.” He chuckled. “Remember how some of those prats mistook you for All of Me?”

  They’d called me a lot of things at Me Con—including several assorted curse words—but being mistaken for the legendary All of Me was the most embarrassing of all.

  Meticulous scooted his tray around the table with his foot. “Instead of a hero like All of Me, None of Me is thought to be a dastardly villain. Some Mes claim he’s possessed by a demon. Others say he’s a dark wizard.”<
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  “You mean there’s an Earth with magic?! Cool!”

  Meticulous slammed his foot on the table, shaking my tray. “The idea of magic is a daft fantasy! The multiverse and every Earth in it run on science!”

  “You almost sound personally offended by the idea of magic.”

  “Enough yip-yap. Time is ticking. By my calculations, the next Rip storm hits in less than two hours. We’ve got to be ready.”

  “Not gonna happen. I have a big final today, and if I don’t pass, I’ll get held back in school. And I have my visitations coming up.”

  He sat up even straighter. “When you say visitations, you mean—”

  “Twig. And Mom and Dad, of course.”

  “Oh.” He tried to play it cool, but I’d seen that haunted look on his face before. His version of Mom had died, and he got touchy whenever she came up.

  The silence between us might have lasted a lot longer if Lil Battleship hadn’t come along to sit at our table.

  Now I had to introduce my good friend, the most dangerous inmate in juvie, to my worst enemy, the most dangerous Me in the multiverse.

  Things were about to get a lot more awkward.

  Lil Battleship was too worked up to register the fact that a barely disguised twin of me shared the table with us.

  He launched right into his story. “So I’m leaving the interrogation room after getting the third degree from O’Fartly and Pooplaski, right? Then I see this messy-looking dude, all covered in flour and other stuff. Kind of looked like you, now that I think about it. Anyway, he’s running down the hall, chasing this bird thing! Though it’s like no bird I’ve ever seen!”

  I shared a look with Meticulous.

  “Uh, did you stop them?” I asked Lil Battleship.