Enough About Me

by S. G. Wilson

  Like a toddler refusing to take medicine, the Rip did its best to keep Meticulous and me from getting in. The storm pulverized us and our flying coffin of a ride as we barreled through the pinball-machine sky.

  I knew we might get crushed or ripped apart at any moment. I could even accept that we might die very, very soon. I just wished I’d had more time. Time to see Mom and Dad again. Time to tell Twig how I really felt about her. Time to say goodbye to Motor, Hollywood, Resist, and all the other Mes. Even the ones I didn’t like very much.

  “You’re wishing you could have said goodbye,” said Meticulous, removing his leg from my rib.

  “When did you get so good at reading Mes?” I said, lifting my elbow from his stomach.

  “Lots of time to reflect when I was stranded on that horrible, awful Earth where you left me.”

  “You’re bringing that up again?”

  “And I always will.” I could tell he was smiling, even if I couldn’t see it.

  We had no view window to see the Rip, but I knew we were getting closer, because the fizz came back, hotter than ever. So much energy poured into me that I could have burst out of the metal cocoon with nothing but a flex of my arms.

  “I can feel it again,” I said. “The fizz.”

  “Me too,” said Meticulous. “I never thought I’d admit this, but it’s…invigorating. I can see why you rely on it so much. I’d become a lazy incompetent just like you if I let myself rely on this crutch.”

  I laughed.

  The shaking stopped all at once, and for a peaceful moment, we flew straight and calm.

  “Eye of the storm!” said Meticulous. “We made it inside the Rip!”

  After what we’d gone through to get there, I would have expected to end our flight with an epic crash landing. Instead, the Stitch just sort of stopped with a soft thunk.

  And sat there.

  “Did we just land?” I asked. “Aren’t we in the sky?”

  “We’re in the Rip,” said Meticulous. “It’s not the sky; it’s not the land. It’s sort of in between, or inside out. Basically, you’ll just have to see for yourself.”

  “Can we breathe out there?”

  Meticulous scowled. “This is where the manky magic comes in. A feature None of Me added. I don’t approve, but I didn’t have time to think up a scientific approach.”

  The Stitch started to bend and buckle like a soda can getting stepped on. I panicked all over again as the metal shell collapsed around our bodies. My brain managed to think past the fear and adrenaline just enough to realize this wasn’t any random flattening. The metal was foil-wrapping around me on purpose, like it had been preprogrammed to do this. In moments, what I’d figured would be my coffin changed into a suit of armor that fit me like a glove.

  A clear faceplate formed in front of my eyes, letting me see the inside of the Rip.

  We stood in an endless chamber made from clear green goop. It was like being stuck inside a bottle of Fierce Green Apple Gatorade. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the chamber were just clear enough to show a view outside like nothing even a video game designer could have dreamed up. Hundreds of Earths floated all around us, exact copies of the same planet drifting along at the dead pace of three-day-old birthday balloons. Every so often, one of these Earths would crash into another, and a hole would open in the floor, spraying a fountain of fire and sparks that usually sputtered out after a few seconds. Some of these eruptions didn’t stop, and others looked as large and steady as geysers that wouldn’t run out anytime soon.

  “Welcome to the crawl space of the multiverse,” said Meticulous. He wore a Stitch suit of his own. “The broken buffer between Earths. The Rip.”

  “Stop being such a goof,” I said. I’d never admit it to him, but I’d grown to enjoy his flair for drama. “So what’s up with those geysers?”

  “That’s what we’re here to fix. They’re the ruptures that have been forming at a growing rate these past months.”

  He pointed to a nearby geyser so large that the goop shot from it in thick ribbons that danced in the air.

  “How do we fix that?!” I said. “And all the others. There must be dozens!”

  “Hundreds,” said Meticulous. “It’s bad, but not as bad as it looks. They’re all connected, just like the Earths around us are connected. So in theory, if we fix a few of the bigger ones, the others should more or less follow their lead and fix themselves too. It’s all in how we fold them.”

  “Fold? As in, origami?”

  “What else?” he said, heading toward the nearest rupture. He waved for me to follow.

  Moving through the Rip felt like walking along the deep end of a swimming pool. A smaller geyser popped up at our side, and the blast sent me stumbling. I stopped myself just before falling headfirst into the rupture. Up close, I could see patterns in the green energy spilling out of it. They broke apart and merged together and spun around in an endless dance. The longer I looked, the more I thought I saw little origami folds inside them. “It’s beautiful!” I said.

  “Quite,” said Meticulous. “Has your digital display kicked in?”

  As soon as he said this, my faceplate lit up. A MePad interface framed its edges with a menu bar.

  “Activate the Automatic Origami Folding Array command,” said Meticulous.

  I saw the command in the menu and blinked at it. Something clicked in the suit, and I felt the chest plate unfold and re-form into a small cannon barrel. Meticulous’s suit did the same. Folding Array Enabled flashed on my screen.

  “Point it at the rupture!” said Meticulous. “Hurry! It’s about to blow!”

  Just as we swiveled the barrels at the flailing ribbons of goop, more energy than ever blasted from the rupture, knocking us back. The geysers all around us rose even higher and the floor shook. A message on the display read Origami Array Malfunction, followed by Rip Destruction Imminent.

  I looked around for Meticulous but didn’t see him anywhere. I screamed his name as the geyser before me grew higher and higher.

  With no real idea what I was supposed to be doing, I reached out and grabbed the ribbons wriggling from the rupture. They were as wide and as flat as paper, so I did what came naturally to me.

  I folded them.

  Folding the rupture was like trying to wrestle a gang of inflatable floppy balloon men during a hurricane. The whipping tentacles of energy bucked in my hands, ready to slip away any second. But with more fizz in me than ever, I managed to hold on.

  Meticulous appeared at my side, looking dumbstruck through his faceplate. “I don’t believe it!” he said.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  He pointed to a cluster of Earths behind him. “I got hoofed all the way over there. Need a hand?”

  I held down the folded flaps, which kept jumping around in my hands, eager to break free. “Sure. What sort of fold were these doohickeys going to make?”

  “A combination of at least twenty, and that’s just to start. That’s why the origami array would have come in handy.”

  “We have to fold this twenty more times?!”

  “And the next rupture may need different folds altogether. There’s no single perfect fold that will fix everything.”

  My brain nearly melted from the lightbulb that turned on inside it. I twisted the flaps in my hands to start a new fold. “There is a fold that might just fix everything. That’s what he was trying to tell us with that note.”

  “What are you on about?” said Meticulous. He caught on the next moment. “The ouroboros? But it’s the Impossible Fold!”

  “Yeah, and we’re in an impossible situation. What have we got to lose?”

  * * *

  —

  It took everything Meticulous and I had learned about origami in all our thirteen years. It took his genius-level math. It took my imagination
. It took every skill and mental power of every Me that we could both borrow through the fizz.

  But together, we did it. We turned a cosmic tear into an ouroboros, the Impossible Fold that fed into itself.

  The rupture sealed over like it had never come apart. Then the ruptures all around stopped spewing their ribbons of energy, and soon enough they sealed up too. And just like that, the Rip wasn’t a Rip anymore.

  My head fizzed, and I saw a vision of Earth Zero in my brain. The Rip disappeared from the sky, and with it, all the people, creatures, buildings, and other stuff that didn’t belong there. I saw Prez and the Twig of his Earth holding hands as they watched the junkyard of the multiverse turn back into an empty canyon again. A perfectly lovely canyon.

  “It’s working!” I told Meticulous. “I can see it working.”

  We turned to each other and almost made the motion to hug. Then we thought better of it.

  “Listen, what you did—” I started.

  “What we did.”

  “Always correcting me.” I smiled. “That’s just one of the reasons it’s been horrible being with you these past few days.”

  He grinned back. “I just realized we’re even now. You trapped me on a prehistoric Earth, and now I’ve trapped you here. Guess I’ve really shown you up.”

  We laughed, but it got old fast as the realization sank in: there was no escape from this place, a place that wouldn’t even exist in a few moments.

  Then a hand punched through the floor of the Rip, followed by an arm and a head. A hooded head.

  “None of Me?” Meticulous and I said together.

  The dark wizard Me pulled himself all the way out of the hole and stood before us, his black cloak swirling around, even though there wasn’t any wind. He reached for his hood to pull it off. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Scars? Green lizard scales? Extreme tattoos and piercings?

  Nope. When the hood came away, he looked just like us.

  “You know, you’re the first actual Mes I’ve met in person,” he said in a perfectly normal Me voice. The hole he’d just busted through covered back over like it had never been there.

  “What were you doing, uh, down there?” I said.

  “I wasn’t exactly down there, more like all around this place.” He cringed. “It was gross. I came here to slow the Rip’s spread and got stuck. It was kind of like leaning too far over to fix a car engine and getting trapped under the hood. And I say that as someone who’s only seen cars on visits to other Earths that have them.”

  “Thanks for clarifying that,” I said.

  We all laughed more than the joke deserved. But that’s how it goes when you’ve saved the multiverse together and are about to die.

  “So you became part of the Rip?” said Meticulous.

  “The part keeping it together,” said None of Me. “I was able to nudge it a little here and there for brief periods.”

  “You sent me to Average’s Earth when my portal paper failed,” said Meticulous, catching on.

  None of Me nodded. “That was about all I could manage. Beyond the note I sent.”

  “That was a killer ouroboros!” I said.

  He chuckled. “I cheated with magic to make that. I couldn’t do it myself. That’s why I got so excited to find your Stitch, Meticulous.”

  “You did a brilliant job finishing it,” said Meticulous. “But why didn’t you launch it?”

  “Never finished programming it in time,” said None of Me. “The Rip got so bad that I had to pop back up here. I thought I could just lay down a bandage to hold things together and get back to my lab. Instead, I got trapped.”

  “And that’s when you reached out to Mes who could finish the job for you,” I said.

  None of Me shuddered as if recalling a nightmare. “It wasn’t until I saw the Rip from the inside out that I realized how bad the problem was. I knew it was going to take you two working together to really finish the job.”

  I had a lot more questions, but didn’t know where to start. I was too tired to think straight anymore.

  “So, you two ready to go?” said None of Me.

  “Wait, what?” I said. “I thought we were all stuck here now.”

  “Which is another way of saying we’re about to disappear from existence along with the Rip,” said Meticulous.

  “You’re right,” said None of Me. “This place may be fixed, but it’s not supposed to exist in the first place. And definitely not now.”

  “And by my calculations it’s about to pop its clogs any second,” said Meticulous.

  “There’s no way out,” I said.

  None of Me raised a hand, and his palm lit up with green light. “Normally we would be stuck here, but the Rip is too busy dying to care about the rules right now.”

  The air next to each of us folded, and three portals appeared.

  I looked through the doorway into Earth Ninety-Nine and saw my room in juvie. Lil Battleship lay asleep on his bed, looking freaked out even in his sleep. I could relate.

  If he’d made it back, then Mom, Dad, Twig, and Nash must have made it back too.

  Thrilled, I looked over at Meticulous to share the news, but he wasn’t in a talking mood. He gazed through his portal into his office, where his version of Dad sat at his desk, weeping as he stared at a holo of Meticulous and Mom in their younger days.

  “Well, imagine that,” Meticulous muttered to himself. “He does care after all.”

  “Average, you’ve been away a night and a day,” said None of Me. “Meticulous, you’ve been away much longer. You two ready to go home?”

  “Yes!” we said, jinxing yet again. We looked at each other and laughed.

  “I almost forgot!” I told None of Me. “A message from Twig. Your Earth’s Twig. She says hey.”

  The look of hope on None of Me’s face was one I promised myself I’d see again the next time I looked in a mirror. I figured if he could still smile after all he’d been through, then I didn’t have anything to frown about.

  I wanted to tell him all that and more, but the portals sucked us through before we could so much as say goodbye.

  That was okay, though. It might have been a little awkward for all of us anyway.

  The very large hands of a very large person shook me awake. “Meade! Meade!”

  Lil Battleship?

  For just a moment I thought for sure I’d gone back in time to the other morning when I’d sleep-peed on my roomie and he’d needed to save face. Then I saw that Lil Battleship was dressed for breakfast and free of pee. Eardrum and Slime must have already left to go eat.

  Lil Battleship thrust out a fist, but it was to bump, not to hit. Then he gave me a quick hug.

  “So glad you’re okay, bro,” he said, slapping me on the back as we pulled apart.

  “So where did you end up?” I asked.

  Wrong question. His face went tight, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. It was like I’d just asked him about his pet without knowing the pet had died. “You first,” he said. “I wanna hear it all.”

  So I ran him through everything, which actually took less time than I would have imagined. It helped that I’d already practiced telling chunks of the story to my Me friends along the way. Mainly, though, Lil Battleship caught on quickly. He understood my tale better than I would have if I hadn’t already lived it myself.

  He whistled low when I finished. “Man, and I thought I had a crazy trip.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  The super-short version was that Lil Battleship, Mom, Dad, Twig, Nash, Caveman, and Barbra the dodo had all wound up on an Earth more or less like our own. The only real differences, in Lil Battleship’s mind, were that nobody had thought to invent cheese and they all tended to talk like Yoda. “Not even as a joke!” said Lil Battleship.

  He told
me how Mom had gotten excited to learn that her old research had been right and there was a multiverse after all. Dad had been thrilled to see that his little Me Co. was a huge Me Corp. there. And Twig got inspired to see her local counterpart writing important stories as the country’s leading investigative journalist and documentarian. Nash, meanwhile, freaked out about being so far from home and had a nervous breakdown. Caveman and Barbra wound up babysitting him the whole time.

  As for Lil Battleship, his double had died young, but the rest of his family hadn’t, and he’d tracked them down. He clicked with all of them, especially his alternate brother, a music producer who uploaded Lil Battleship’s music to the internet. His tunes were just getting some serious attention when Lil Battleship got zapped back home. I hadn’t realized that fixing the Rip so everything could go back to normal would actually cause my friend harm.

  I started to apologize, but Lil Battleship had more news. “So before you woke up, Eardrum and Slime caught me up on what went down here while we were gone.”

  “By ‘caught up’ you mean you all had a fight?” I asked.

  Lil Battleship smiled for the first time since telling his story. “Nah. We talked, for real. First of all, according to them, you and me are heroes around these parts for our daring escape.”

  “That’s probably the only reason they were nice to you,” I said.

  “No doubt. But that’s just the start. Apparently, the government’s launching an investigation into this place. Some mystery informant sent over all kinds of online files about the bad stuff they’ve been up to here.”

  “Seriously?”

  “There’ll be a hearing and everything. They’re gonna interview us all, so we can dish whatever dirt we like about O’Fartly and Pooplaski and the rest. They even say our sentences will get reviewed and possibly thrown out on account of all the violations they’ve already found. Why the weird look? Aren’t you happy?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s just that it seems like a weird coincidence this would happen right after all the weirdness we’ve been through.”