by S. G. Wilson
“And that’s what made Earth Ninety-Nine an ‘Interdimensional Roundabout’?”
Meticulous grunted with impatience. “That, and her second experiment here at the Janus North.
“The portals she made here sent out…you could call them echoes. Echoes to the Janus Hotels in other realities, where other editions of her never got it right. I built my first elevator on one of those echoes, but it was too faint. Now you could say I’ve gone straight to the source. And the results should be brilliant.”
“Wait, if everything started here, with that first experiment, wouldn’t that make this place Earth One?”
“Hey, I built the elevator, so I get to do the naming.” He waved his hand toward the lobby. “No sense waiting on the fight to end out there. It’s time to leave this corner of the multiverse for good.”
“But this thing might blow everything up! It’ll be Earth Zero all over again!”
He fluffed the lace spilling from his jacket sleeve. “It’s worth the risk. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Face it, you and the blokes here simply aren’t as real to me as the people of my Earth. What happens to you isn’t important in the end.”
My arms worked just enough to push myself up. “You don’t mean that. I know you. I know us. We’re the same person deep down.”
I’d seen Meticulous cycle through calm, angry, majorly angry, and excited in the span of a few minutes. Now he just looked sad. “Ninety-eight worlds between us. We’re nothing alike.”
He lifted a finger to press the keypad, but he never got to touch it. A huge arm, too big to be a Me’s, reached in and grabbed Meticulous by the shoulder, yanking him out of the car. “Not so fast, you little punk!”
It was Nash. The Nash of my world. And he was done playing nice.
No matter how smart he was, no matter how much training he’d done, no matter how long he’d tamed the Nash of his Earth, Meticulous came hardwired with the deep fear of this monster that was built into all of us. That’s why the most accomplished, most able, most all-around superior Me of a hundred Earths went limp as Nash pulled him from the elevator and pinned him against the opposite wall. It was equal parts satisfying and scary to watch.
“The cops are looking for you!” Nash snarled. “Thing is, I found you first!”
Meticulous squirmed in his grip but couldn’t get free. “H-how did you find me?”
“Stop talking in that dumb accent!” said Nash. “I saw what bus you got on and followed it. Walked around until I noticed those kids fighting in the window. Who are they, anyway? It’s creepy how much you all look alike.” He squinted at me. “Especially that one. Are you cousins or something?”
“Uh, right, yes, we all are,” said Meticulous. “It’s a family squabble.”
Nash leaned into Meticulous. “I should beat you to a pulp after what you did to me. But I guess handing you over to the cops will just have to do.”
This would have been a good time for me to get up, but my body was a deflated whoopee cushion. I wouldn’t be moving for a while. Nash had just started to peel Meticulous off the wall when Twig ran into the elevator bank. She looked like she’d been through a haunted house. “Those kids up front, they look exactly like…” She trailed off as her eyes went from me to Meticulous and back again.
“Twig, it’s dangerous here!” said Nash. “You should wait by the bikes like we talked about!”
Jealousy surged through me. Since when were these two friendly enough to hunt me down together on bikes?
“What’s going on?!” Twig directed the question at me, not at Nash, which was some small comfort, at least.
Nash squinted at me again, then at Meticulous. “You’re not cousins. You’re twins!”
The moment Nash looked back at me, Meticulous squeezed his shoulder. His body went rigid, and he thunked to the floor, as frozen as I’d been moments before. Twig wasted no time with shock or confusion. She rushed up to Meticulous and kicked him in what the British would have called the goolies. He doubled over in pain.
Just then, with no warning, the MeMinder came to life on my wrist. “You have been sedentary for five minutes.” I was about to use what little movement I’d gotten back in my arms to bash the thing to bits. Then I got a better idea. Something else in my reach needed a good bashing even more.
I had enough movement back in my arms to drag myself to the elevator controls. Reaching into the tool kit on the floor, I snatched up the screwdriver and rammed it into the keypad. It burst apart in a cloud of smoke and sparks.
“No!” screamed Meticulous. Twig tried to take him down again, but he got his death grip on her first. She collapsed beside Nash, paralyzed like the rest of us.
Meticulous rushed over to the elevator and picked up the broken keypad, all his calm melting away. If I’d ever wondered what I’d look like full-on, no-holds-barred angry, now I knew.
“Do you have any idea how much work I put into this?!” he screamed. “All those folds for new worlds I programmed into the origami drive! They’re all lost now!”
“You mean my folds! I did all the work!” I didn’t actually have a point beyond that—I just felt like I had to shout about something too.
Meticulous went from mad to happy in a split second. “Yes! That’s it! You did all the work!” He ripped the panel cover off the wall with a yank. Behind it lay a thinner version of the origami drive. Green energy crackled inside the sleek and shiny ring. Origami Drive 2.0.
Meticulous grabbed me by the collar. “We’re going to do this manually. I’ll tell you what shape to fold, and you’ll fold it.”
“And what if I refuse?”
He gestured at the frozen bodies of Twig and Nash. Then he ran his finger across his throat. The invisible line he traced was very straight, very precise, and very Meticulous.
I had no idea if Meticulous would actually hurt Twig and Nash more than he had already, but I didn’t plan on finding out. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
The truth is, I couldn’t have fought back anyway. I still couldn’t stand up on my own, and my channeling trick seemed to have burned itself out in me. No more fizz. No more All of Me.
“Okay, then.” Meticulous checked his MePad. “Start with an anglerfish. For Earth One Hundred Fourteen.”
As soon as I started folding the energy, a big chunk of my anxiety fell away. Origami always cleared my head like that. If it weren’t for Meticulous hovering around, I might have even enjoyed myself.
“So, what’s your deal, exactly?” I said, shaping the light into a fish body. “Why’s it so important for you to go ‘deeper’ into the multiverse?”
Not taking his eyes off my hands, Meticulous shrugged. “You know, curiosity and all that tosh.”
“You can’t lie to a Me. Not this Me, at least.”
Meticulous checked the length of his fingernails. “Well, if you must know. Based on my calculations, this new list of Earths I’ve gathered should have the tech I’ve been seeking: the next generation of spacecraft, life-extension treatments, and artificial intelligence. I plan to bring these gewgaws to my world.”
The truth hit me like Twig’s kick to the groin. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?! You stole ideas from other worlds and passed them off as your own! The Missing Mes invented self-driving cars and smart toilets and all that other Me Corp. junk you’ve been selling on Earth One! You stole it from them to build Me Corp.!”
If being called a thief and a cheat hurt Meticulous’s feelings, he didn’t show it. “Back to folding now. You don’t want to break your momentum.”
Folding was the last thing I planned on doing just then. “Me Con was a scam all along! It was just a way for you to keep the Mes occupied so you could sneak into their worlds and steal ideas for your company! That was the real point of interviewing everybody, to see what tech they had back home! Tech you could steal!”
&n
bsp; Lips tight, Meticulous wagged his thumb at Twig and Nash. I took the hint and got back to the fish, but I didn’t shut up. “And now that you’ve taken all the worthwhile ideas from a hundred worlds, you’re all washed up. Which is why you need new worlds to rob.”
Meticulous whipped a handkerchief from his breast pocket and shook it out a lot harder than he needed to. “And what’s the harm, really?”
“The harm? Your greed and general buttheadedness have stranded everybody at Me Con! Wait a minute, I just realized: You didn’t banish the Missing Mes. Your stupid, unstable elevator messed up their Earths, didn’t it?!”
Meticulous buffed the already spotless wall around the origami drive. “Their Earths are fine. It’s the portals to their Earths that may require some tweaking.”
“So you went to their worlds to steal ideas too many times, and it wrecked their only way home?!”
“Like I said, I’ll return them to their homes with this new and improved elevator. Eventually.”
I was so mad I almost squished the fish head I’d just folded. “Was it worth it? Robbing them of their homes just to make a fast buck?”
Meticulous polished the wall hard enough to rub a hole through it. “That’s tosh! This isn’t about money, it’s about Me Corp. and what it represents. It’s about a Me actually doing something with his life. Do you know how bloody hard it was to build up the company?”
“Couldn’t have been too hard if Dad started it for you.”
“That failure? Pillocks! Not likely! It wasn’t until I made some simple improvements to the MeMinder that Dad’s naff little business took off.”
“And from there you stole the MePads and MeCars and MeToilets?”
Meticulous wiped so hard the wall squeaked under his handkerchief. “It’s not as if Dad could have ever thought up a single one of those products!”
“It’s not like you did either. You didn’t even invent the origami drive. Mom did!”
He threw the handkerchief on the floor and stomped on it with his boot. “It was just notes when I found it! Notes with the numbers all squiffy! Unlike your mum, my mum only got it one percent right. I did the other ninety-nine! Me!”
He trailed off, and his eyes went watery. Even his tears were neat and tidy, rolling down his cheeks in an orderly little stream.
“Your mom’s dead,” I said. “Is this about her or something?”
He choked back a sob. “What, you think I’m scouring the multiverse, trying to find a replacement for her? I’m not. I’m not happy she died, but I’ve moved on.”
“Yeah, moved on to stealing stuff from the Mes.”
Meticulous snatched up the handkerchief and shoved it into his pocket. “I made the origami drive! What else did I need to do?! Once I had the elevator up and running, I had a whole multiverse of brilliant new gadgets and inventions to choose from.”
“But they aren’t your ideas!”
“Rubbish! Anybody can invent a MePad or a MeLoo. I created from scratch a machine to travel between realities! After you’ve done that, you don’t need to bloody well tinker around with anything else, because everything you need is already out there for the taking. It saves time, and time is crucial when you’re a thirteen-year-old CEO!”
“What’s your rush? You’ve got decades of being a CEO ahead of you.”
He snorted. “I run Me Corp., but I could be sacked by the board of directors at any time. As it is, they’re less than chuffed to have a kid at the head of a multibillion-dollar company. They only accept me as long as I roll out new doofers and upgrade the old ones every fiscal quarter. Do you know how much pressure that is?!” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Now get back to work.”
It was a good thing my hands were occupied with folding, because otherwise I’d have used them to strangle Meticulous. By pouring my frustration into the origami, I had it finished in no time. As soon as I put the final folds on the fins, the anglerfish started spinning.
It was time to visit a new Earth.
My mind paid a visit to the next Earth before the elevator did.
With no warning, a vision flashed in my brain of a vast sea with buildings poking out of the water. A flooded city. Somehow I knew it wasn’t just a hallucination. This was a sneak peek at Earth One Hundred Fourteen, where we were going next. I shook my head until the image cleared, telling myself it was just the exhaustion setting in.
“Let’s go!” yelled Meticulous. The door rolled shut, and the elevator shot upward. I closed my eyes, bracing for an explosion. Nothing happened. The car kept moving.
Meticulous smiled as he adjusted his ruffles. “There, see? No boom. The new origami drive leaves no trace when it crosses the dimensions. Your reality is safe, and all the other new realities we can reach now will be too. If my theory’s right, this lovely will take us anywhere, even Earths that don’t have a Janus or an elevator. It can open a portal on the most backward Earth, not that we’d ever want to go there!”
“Cool. So let’s take this fancy new ride back to Me Con. If it works like you say, we could rescue the Mes and get them back home pronto.”
Meticulous scrolled through his MePad. “Right now I have more important things to do.”
“More important than saving your fellow Mes!? The Mes you left stuck there?!”
“As a matter of fact, yes!”
And with that, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a tidal wave of water rushed in.
“Close it!” shouted Meticulous as the deluge backed him into the wall.
I jabbed at the Close button, which hadn’t been damaged when I busted the keypad. The doors shut, leaving several inches of water at the bottom of the car. Now it looked like a kiddy pool filled with murky seawater.
“What was that?!” I asked. Though deep down I knew. We’d reached an Earth covered in water, just like my vision. My brain really had seen where we were going ahead of time. Was this my “connection” to the multiverse at work? More important, could I do it again? But even if I got a sneak peek at our next destination, it wasn’t like I had any say in where we went. What good did this strange new power really do me?
Meticulous fished his soggy tool kit from the water and pulled out a drone. A MeDrone, naturally. “Better scout around. Get ready to open the door again on my signal.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Are you in a position to argue?”
Meticulous tapped the screen of his MePad, and the drone came to life, hovering in the air near his head. “Okay, do it.”
Bracing myself, I pressed the Open button. Meticulous swiped at the screen, and the drone buzzed through the parting door as the water rushed in. “Now close it!” he yelled. But I was already one step ahead of him. The door shut, trapping more water inside with us. I still couldn’t stand, so now the flood came up to my chest. It sloshed just a few feet below the origami drive and nearly reached Meticulous’s knees.
Soaked from his knickers to his feet, Meticulous ignored the wet as he gazed at the view from the drone camera. He clenched the MePad so hard it made a popping sound. “It’s a drowned world! I factored some climate change into my number-crunching, but not as much as I should have! This makes rubbish of my whole algorithm! That means the other worlds I mapped out are barmy too! Open the door! I need my drone back!”
I pressed Open, and another wave gushed in. Meticulous caught the drone just as I shut the doors. “It doesn’t seem right to leave an Earth in that condition,” I said. “Maybe we could help.”
Meticulous tapped at the MePad like a viper striking prey. “The multiverse is a cruel place, and I’ve got bigger problems than a flooded world.”
“Then what about our flooded elevator?” I said, shaking the water from my hands.
Meticulous didn’t look up from the screen. “We’ll dump the water out at the next stop. Right now I’ve got t
o recalculate all these bits and bobs! It may take hours!”
I sat in the stink and seaweed of my salty ocean bath, feeling exhaustion set in. All this folding and world-hopping was wearing out my head as well as my hands. My eyelids fluttered and my brain went hazy. Then Meticulous pounded his fist against the wall, jolting me awake. “This is a load of cack! I can’t do the math in these conditions!”
I yawned. “Must be a lot of factors and stuff to keep track of.”
Meticulous scoffed. “You don’t even know the half of it! If you understood one percent of the math that went into this data, they’d herald you as a genius on your primitive little world.”
Primitive? Who was he calling primitive? I was about to tell him off when my brain fizzed again, flashing on another world. I had a vision of a different Earth, one unlike any I’d heard about at Me Con. The fold for this world came into my head too, and with it, a plan for what to do when we got there. If I could pull it off, this was a chance—maybe my only chance—to stop Meticulous for good. The trick would be convincing him to take a little detour.
As ideas went, it was crazy, half formed, and more than likely disastrous. But if I’d learned anything, it was that crazy, half-formed, and more-than-likely-disastrous ideas were my specialty.
I chose my words carefully, so it was annoying when Meticulous ignored them. He didn’t even look up from his MePad until I raised my voice to repeat what I’d just said: “What if it’s not the calculations that are off, but the fact that you’re calculating in the first place? Maybe crunching numbers isn’t the way to do this.”
That got his attention. “Absolute rubbish! I had to create an entirely new system of math to calculate the locations of any given parallel Earth! You’re saying that was some kind of faff?!”
“Yeah, I am.” Though in truth I didn’t know what faff or any of his other Earth One Briticisms meant. “Think about it. Every fold you’ve come up with for the origami drive has a recognizable shape, right?”