Trapped in a strange world. On the run from a dim-witted rendition of myself. Feeling itchy and sweaty in frilly clothing. Maybe I shouldn’t have skipped school after all.
As soon as the doors opened on the parking garage, I spotted Meticulous’s limo in the RESERVED FOR CEO space in front of me. Only when I grabbed for the handle did I remember I didn’t have the keys. I yanked at it anyway. “Open up already!”
A red light under the handle pulsed along my palm, and the limo’s robot voice piped up. “Acknowledged. Welcome back, sir.” The locks clicked and the doors swung open.
Before I could hop in, a pair of arms wrapped around me from behind. Hollywood Me.
“No idea how you got to this gosh-darned world, but you messed with the wrong gosh-darned Me!” He tightened his grip, which didn’t feel much stronger than mine. “I trained in all forms of martial arts for my role in Pallin’ with the Shaolin! So don’t even think about it!”
I didn’t know the first thing about wrestling, and neither did Hollywood. It was easy to break free of his hold, but he didn’t give up. He came at me again, and we went at it some more, sliding along the side of the limo. Our identical bodies got so tangled together we must have looked like conjoined twins.
Just before we reached the back bumper, I managed to twist Hollywood around so his head hovered over the trunk. “Trunk!” I yelled.
Nothing happened.
Hollywood smirked. “You’re on British soil. They call trunks boots.”
“Boot!” I screamed.
The lid swung up, barely missing the back of Hollywood’s head. “Hey!” he cried, letting go. “That almost hit me!”
I’d been hoping the lid would knock him out, but I guess that sort of thing only happens in movies. Now I needed a new idea, because wrestling was getting us nowhere. As Hollywood came at me, I shot my hand at his neck…and tickled him. There was a particular patch of skin just under the left side of my jaw that never failed to seize up my entire body whenever Mom, Dad, or Twig got me there. Something told me Hollywood might have that weak spot too.
I guessed right. As soon as I touched him there, Hollywood squealed with laughter and curled up his body, shielding himself against more tickling. That left him unprepared for the shove that came next. I pushed his unbalanced body into the empty boot, just wide and deep enough to fit an obnoxious Me. I tucked in his feet with one hand and slammed the lid shut with the other.
I wasn’t too keen on taking a limo with my look-alike screaming in the back, so I searched around for some other ride. In the next space sat a sleek red MeScooter sipping power from a charging box. It was so beautiful I couldn’t resist reaching out and touching it. A red light inside the handlebar grip scanned my hand, and the bike hummed to life.
“Welcome, sir,” said the scooter’s robot voice. “Fancy a ride?”
The scooter moved like butter on wheels, racing me far from Me Corp. headquarters in a matter of minutes. It was so fun to ride, I almost forgot I was supposed to be making a getaway.
At a stoplight, I tried to figure out the fastest way to the Janus. A robot voice blared behind me: “Citizen, please move forward!” The words blasted from a MeCar convertible behind me. Rattled, I backed into the car’s bumper, setting off its alarm. “Collision! Collision!” I turned all the way around for a better look. An old lady snoozed in the back seat, oblivious to the racket.
A British-style police siren split the air a block away. Great, cops were the last thing I needed. I cranked the throttle and zoomed off.
Turns out it’s not so hard being chased in a world of self-driving cars. The robots were programmed to follow the rules of traffic, but Meticulous’s scooter let me drive however I pleased. I buzzed past countless cars obeying the speed limit without fail, their robot voices nagging me:
“Citizen! No weaving between cars!”
“Citizen! No running a stop sign!”
“Citizen! No going the wrong way down a one-way street!”
Their warnings scared me at first, until I realized the cars and the people they carried couldn’t do a thing about it.
But despite all my darting and dodging, the siren grew louder and louder. I looked back and saw the robot cars turn aside like a wave to make room for the police cruiser. The cop behind the wheel drove with no robotic aid. That meant she could bend the rules of traffic, just like me.
“Pull over!” her partner shouted through a speaker.
Even if I’d wanted to pull over, how could I ever explain myself? I kept going. Before too long I reached the sketchy warehouse district at the edge of downtown, which had plenty of alleys for losing cops. But no matter where I turned, the cops kept popping up. I was no expert getaway driver, but they really shouldn’t have been able to follow me that well. Then I noticed a flashing radar icon on the scooter’s view screen. It looked just like the Find My Device app on my phone. D’oh! They’d been tracking me all along.
I zipped behind a store called Breath of Fresh Heir, full of items with pictures of the royal children on them, and ditched the scooter there. Dashing away on foot, I turned a corner just as the cops pulled up. It was only a few blocks to the Janus, but everything seems far when you’re wearing knickers and hose over jeans. A fresh coat of sweat covered me by the time I reached the hotel’s employee entrance and slipped inside.
The empty hotel felt creepier than ever. Maybe that’s because now I knew this wasn’t just an old, abandoned hotel, but an old, abandoned hotel from another dimension. I rushed to the elevator bank and pressed the call button. The door couldn’t have rattled open fast enough.
Right when I stepped inside, the cops reached the front entrance and pounded on the glass. Even without a code, they’d be inside in no time. I glanced over at the elevator control panel and realized with a wet-towel slap to my brain that I didn’t know how to get back to my Earth. I’d never paid attention to the “floor” I’d left from. Which of these hundred buttons would take me there?
The entrance doors banged open and the cops burst in. Completely freaked, I pressed the first button handy: zero. It lit up like a green Christmas tree light.
Only after the elevator started moving did I remember the last origami note, the one that had told me to press zero in the first place.
That meant I was headed to Me Con, whether I liked it or not.
