Enough About Me

by S. G. Wilson

  Meticulous stepped out from behind the curtain, tying the cravat of his new colonial-style outfit. “I don’t see how deadly thrill rides will help anybody achieve ‘inner peace.’ And I especially don’t see the value of those Me challenges. What’s to be gained from flipping a bottle for hours on end?”

  “Dance challenges, eating challenges, bucket challenges, all challenges have always been an integral part of life on Earth Zero,” said Prez.

  “Seriously?” I said. “They’re mostly just for laughs where I’m from.”

  “They entertain us too. But they also inspire us to be our best. They’re an indispensable way to connect, spread values, teach important life lessons.”

  “Quite,” said Meticulous. “People are certainly at their best when stuffing their mouths with marshmallows to the point of slobbering.”

  Prez laughed, although with the slightest hint of annoyance. “Say what you will, but my run for the presidency was helped in no small measure by the exposure I got when I competed in the national Origami Challenge.”

  “Brilliant, you can fold paper,” said Meticulous. “Just what I’m looking for in a leader.”

  Prez and Meticulous played a game of who-can-fake-smile-the-longest.

  “So,” I said, if only to break up the tension, “this is definitely a cool setup you’ve built. But if you got all this stuff from the Rip, how’d you find it and haul it here? I thought the Rip dumped its deposits at random all over the place.”

  Juvenile Hall lowered his voice like he was letting us in on a big secret. “Dig this. We’ve managed to exert some control over the Rip.”

  “Rubbish!” said Meticulous.

  “What sort of control?” I asked. “You can just dial up whatever you want?”

  “Hardly,” said Juvenile Hall. “We’ve made a connection to the Rip that lets us monitor all the jazz that’s coming in and direct it here.”

  “That’s impossible!” said Meticulous. “First of all, you’d need the technology I developed for the origami drive. Then you’d need some kind of probe, plus something to launch it into the Rip.”

  Juvenile Hall pointed to a missile launcher off in the distance. “Dig that, daddy-o.”

  Prez nodded. “Refitting that thing to launch our probe is just one of Juvenile Hall’s innovations as chief scientist around here.”

  “Scientist?” I had a hard time tamping down my surprise.

  “He’s no scientist!” said Meticulous. “He’s a dodgy hooligan!”

  Juvenile Hall smirked. “You’re stereotyping me. Not cool, man. You wanna know why I wound up in juvie? ’Cause I was cooking up an origami drive of my own back on my Earth. Got it close to working too. But then it kinda blew up my lab.”

  Meticulous sniffed. “I doubt you were that close. Nobody smart enough to achieve a level of control over the Rip would use it to build some barmy theme park!”

  “Heck, the REAL loot we sock away!” Cowboy said as a roller coaster powered by a booster rocket flew past.

  Acupuncture pointed to a building on the edge of the common. It looked like someone had scooped the roof off the White House and dumped the Taj Mahal on top of it.

  “I get it now,” said Meticulous. “You keep the best doodads for yourself, like the palaces that come your way.”

  “Not at all,” said Prez. “I sleep in a dorm with the other Mes. We use the Taj Ma White House for storage.”

  “What do you store?” I said.

  “Y’all wouldn’t believe the geegaws we got stabled in there,” said Cowboy. “Renewable-energy generators strong enough to power a city! Water purifiers that can scrub a river clean as a whistle!”

  Meticulous eyed the Toga Mes circling around the Taj Ma White House on patrol. “And how many Mes do you have guarding the place?”

  Prez laughed. “These things aren’t for you to steal for your corporation. They’re for everyone to share. They’re going to be our gift to every Earth in the multiverse!”

  “Gift?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sending the Mes home empty-handed,” said Prez. “They’ll be taking these wonders with them, to their Earths.”

  “They’ll share these miracles and use them to restore balance and peace to their worlds,” said Acupuncture. “And if they don’t, we’ll knock some sense into them!”

  “Seriously, how much do you plan to charge for all this loot?” said Meticulous. “Better be careful about the exchange rates. They use actual bread as currency on Hollywood’s Earth. It’s a right pain to convert that into pounds.”

  “That’s the coolness of it all, man,” said Juvenile. “We won’t be charging nothing.”

  “Way we figure it, all them Earths out there need our help, by gum!” said Cowboy. “And it’s our duty to provide it.”

  Meticulous wagged a finger at Prez. “So that’s it! You want to be the one who controls who gets what! You want to be an influencer! The greatest influencer in the multiverse!”

  Prez shrugged. “If being an influencer means influencing the gradual improvement of every Earth out there, then call me an influencer.”

  “But what about when you run out of stuff to hand out?” I said.

  “What do you mean, run out?” said Acupuncture. “It’s a great big multiverse out there, and it blesses us with its glorious bounty every day. It’d better, or else!”

  “Yeah, I don’t see this particular water hole drying up,” said Cowboy.

  “Oh, it’ll dry up, all right,” said Meticulous. “Once I, with Average as my assistant, fix the Rip once and for all.”

  “I’m not your assistant!” I said.

  Prez and his team looked confused.

  “Yo, who said anything about fixing the Rip?” said Juvenile Hall.

  “We plan on leaving the Rip open for a long, long time,” said Prez. “After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t nix it.”

  Most Mes you could read like a picture book. Prez was more like a top secret file with all the important lines blacked out. He controlled his face so well that I had no idea what was going through his mind as he told us again, in all apparent seriousness, that he actually believed a tear in the fabric of reality was no big deal.

  “The Rip is a gateway to other worlds,” said Prez. “It’s too precious a resource to just throw away. Meticulous, surely you can see the benefit.”

  Meticulous looked like someone had just told him with a straight face that the world was flat, or that perfect attendance at school was something actually worth celebrating with an award. His disbelief had left him speechless, so I spoke for him. “There won’t be any benefit for anybody if the Rip blows up everything.”

  “You just need to see the same facts we’re seeing,” said Prez. “Juvenile Hall, would you show them the Rip monitor?”

  Juvenile Hall pulled up a screen on his MePad that featured a cartoon of the Rip shooting lightning down on tiny Earths all lined up in a row. Each bolt would strike an Earth, then rebound and hit another Earth nearby. The cycle continued over and over. A smaller screen on the side recorded which Earths got struck, plus lots of other numbers that made no sense to me.

  “Now that we got our peepers on the Rip, we don’t miss much,” said Juvenile Hall. “Dig this: we even saw you cats comin’ from Earth Ninety-Nine.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That thing can tell who and what comes through the Rip? Did it record where my family and friends got zapped to?”

  Meticulous, still tongue-tied, gave me a grateful nod. And for the first time ever, I felt like we had something in common besides DNA.

  Juvenile Hall scrolled through the log of numbers, stopping at an entry just a few hours old. “Solid, man! Here’s a reading of several cats getting transferred from your Earth to another, but I can’t get a clear fix anywhere. Too much interference at th
e scene. Still, they made it!”

  Like a toilet that’s just been unclogged, I felt waves of relief flow through me. Mom, Dad, Twig, Nash, Lil Battleship, Caveman, and Barbra were all okay. I had no idea where they were or how to get there, but at least they’d survived. And if they’d escaped death, chances seemed better than ever that Motor, Hollywood, Resist, and the Virals had too.

  Meticulous looked happy enough to speak again, but him opening his big mouth wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Just because you have some AccuWeather multiverse forecast now, you really think you can control the Rip? It’s an unstable menace! It can’t be tamed!”

  Prez clapped his hands together. “But that’s just it: you two have proven the Rip can be tamed! You controlled the Rip enough to travel here, didn’t you?”

  “Hardly!” I said. “We’re lucky to be alive!”

  “Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” said Meticulous. “I knew what I was doing when I brought us here. But in general, sure, I agree with Average for once. The Rip is much too dangerous for anyone else to mess with. It has to be shut down.”

  “Maybe I can change your tune,” said Prez.

  He nodded to Acupuncture, who pulled a car key fob from his pocket and clicked it. A garage door on the side of the Taj Ma White House opened, and a blue convertible limo flew out, gliding on a cushion of air.

  “Yep, we got us a hover limo,” said Cowboy.

  Meticulous made a fart noise with his lips. “I came across hover tech like this years ago but found it too dangerous to use.”

  “Jump back, Jack!” said Juvenile Hall. “You mean to tell me you found a gizmo and didn’t steal it?”

  “Ha ha, you’re brilliant,” muttered Meticulous.

  Acupuncture pressed the fob again, and the limo’s doors popped open.

  “Hop in,” said Prez. He pointed toward a wide canyon just outside the boundary of Me HQ. “Let’s take a tour of the junkyard of the multiverse.”

  Big Ben with a giant digital clock display blinking twelve o’clock over and over. A bagpipe-playing robot blaring the Jurassic Park theme song on a loop. A family minivan decked out with spiked wheels, missile launchers, and a back-seat gun battery.

  As Acupuncture flew the hover limo into the canyon, I couldn’t wrap my head around the sheer amount of stuff the Rip had dumped there. Endless rows of alternate-Earth buildings, vehicles, furniture, and other random garbage lined the ledges and filled alcoves dug into the dirt walls.

  Meticulous seemed unconcerned about all this strangeness as he scrolled through the limo’s built-in monitor, skimming through memes and other clips. I figured he must have been desperate for screen time after being stranded with no electronics for so long. That had been my fault, like so many other things.

  With Prez and Cowboy distracted by an avalanche of cinnamon rolls the size of beanbag chairs, I whispered to Juvenile Hall in the seat beside me. “Tell me something. How do you…move on after being locked up?”

  “Move on?” asked Juvenile Hall. “Whoa, man, that’s a crazy scene to think about. I’ve still got more of my sentence to serve when I get back. Probably longer, now that I’ve been gone so long. They must think I ran away. But listen, bad is as bad does, you feel me? Don’t let that place do a number on your head. You’re more than just a kid in juvie.”

  “Thanks for saying that. And I also wanted to say it’s really cool of you not to get mad at me for ditching everybody at Me Con.”

  “Aw, it’s nothing,” said Juvenile Hall. “It ain’t like any of that was your fault, man. You got detained, that’s all.”

  I appreciated the words, but I still felt like an all-around louse.

  We passed a ledge stuffed with an entire living room furniture set covered in disco ball mirrors. “So why does so much stuff from the Rip come to this spot, anyway?” I asked.

  “Because of that.” Meticulous pointed to a big steel dome at the bottom of the canyon. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to notice we were flying straight for it. “Whatever’s under that is drawing the Rip like a magnet,” he added.

  Prez raised his hands in mock surrender. “Right again. How do you do it?” He nodded to Juvenile Hall, who tapped a button on his MePad. The dome swung open, knocking aside a couple of copies of famous statues: David carrying a skateboard and Ronald McDonald as The Thinker. Underneath sat a huge ring of steel mounted on a platform like a satellite dish.

  At the sight of it, Meticulous and I jinxed each other again: “You built a giant origami drive?!”

  The machine looked almost exactly like the engine Meticulous had used to power dimension-hopping elevators, just blown up ten times as big.

  Meticulous squinted at the ring. “It’s not finished.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because if it were complete, it could make portals to other Earths like the original.”

  Meticulous scowled at me. “I was supposed to say that!”

  Prez laughed. “Oh, you two! But you’re right, it’s a work in progress. This origami drive lets us harvest the Rip but not control it. But now, with your help, we can change that.”

  Acupuncture circled the platform, looking for a place to land.

  “Origami drives are dangerous, and I’m through with them,” said Meticulous. “We need to focus on fixing the Rip, not exploiting it. Look how much worse it’s gotten since you opened that dome!”

  Meticulous pointed to the sky. The Rip had grown darker, crackling with lightning again. “Your experiments are tearing the Rip apart even faster than if you’d left it alone! You’re making it worse!”

  “No, we’re making it better,” said Prez. “The drive keeps most of the Rip’s storms focused on this spot, which spares the rest of Earth Zero the worst of it. Now the bulk of the random stuff ends up here instead.”

  “Then why is the Rip dropping deserts and maple syrup lakes all over the place?” I said.

  “And why is the Rip going all to pot on other Earths too?!” said Meticulous. It was a relief to be arguing on his side and not against him for once.

  A bolt shot down from the Rip and struck the drive. The ring filled with a familiar field of green energy, the stuff I called transdimensional goop. Another bolt blasted the platform, missing the drive by inches. It left behind a rawhide dog chew toy in the shape of a full-size human.

  With no warning, Acupuncture spun around in the driver seat and hurled needles at Meticulous and me. Once the points dug into our shoulders, we couldn’t move a muscle between us.

  As Acupuncture flew the limo directly over the origami drive, Prez reached across Meticulous and popped open the door by his side. “Wish it didn’t have to be like this, but our timetable’s been pushed up, and we don’t have a second left to convince you.”

  Juvenile Hall pulled down his shades to look me straight in the eyes. “Sorry, daddy-o.”

  He and Prez scooted out of the way so Cowboy could grab Meticulous and me by the arms and toss us out the door.

  We dropped until we smacked into the field of green goop. It caught us like a circus trapeze net, springy but solid. Hanging there felt like being stuck in the moment when your chair tips back too far and you have no idea whether or not you’ve reached the point of no return.

  From the limo above, Cowboy lassoed some sort of power cable to an antenna on the drive. Juvenile Hall plugged the other end of the cable into a MeMinder charging pad.

  Movement trickled back into my muscles, but as I squirmed to get free, the goop bounced right along with me, never letting go. It was like I’d been woven into a trampoline. It didn’t help that Meticulous thrashed around too, bouncing us even more. For a second there I worried we might get thrown off the thing, but we seemed thoroughly stuck.

  “Stop it already!” I shouted.

  Meticulous growled a series of British curse words and went still. Even so, it took
forever for us to stop shaking. There wasn’t much to do but watch Prez in the limo up above as he placed his MeMinder in the charging cradle.

  “What gives?” I called to him. “What are you doing?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Meticulous. “He’s leeching your power. He’s taking away your precious fizz so he can access it through his MeMinder.”

  Prez beamed at us, and even after what he’d just done, I still couldn’t deny how charming he was. “Well done figuring that out! Again, I’m sorry to inconvenience you like this, but you two are the secret ingredient we’ve been missing. The ability you both share to fizz is quite a gift. Now it’s time to share that gift with the rest of us!”

  “What are you on about?” said Meticulous. “I may be exceptional, but I don’t fizz. I don’t rely on any special powers!”

  “Not according to our readings, man,” said Juvenile Hall. He held up his MePad, which showed a picture of Meticulous surrounded by an aura of light. “The origami drive scanned you, and it don’t lie, Jack. It shows you can fizz, just like we figured. You can’t do it as much as Average, but you still got the goods.”

  In a huff, Meticulous stomped his foot, making the web of goop quake worse than a bouncy house at a five-year-old’s birthday party. “Average got those powers at birth!” he whined. “From his mum trying to open portals while he was in the womb! That never happened to any other Me!”

  “You’ve done a lot of experiments with portals too,” Acupuncture said from the driver’s seat. “Maybe you were affected by all that like Average.”

  “Whatever the case,” said Prez, “there’s no denying you’ve got the fizz.”

  Cowboy tugged on the cable to make sure it was secure. “Ain’t it funny, Meticulous? You done bragged about how you could master any skill, but all along you were just cheating with superpowers, like Average.”

  “Now, now,” said Prez. “Let’s remember that we’re all Mes here. So, shall we get this dough on the road?”