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ckret2 · 1 year ago

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Chapter 42 in human Bill Cipher's imprisonment in the Mystery Shack about to get a whole lot worse, featuring:

A history lesson on a second dimensional cult and its obnoxious child leader.

And Dipper making the mistake of asking Bill what "reality is an illusion" means.

And most importantly... The Eclipse: Prologue.

####

The source of light is a completely hypothetical phenomenon.

Just a couple of centuries ago, scientists postulated that perhaps light was a side-effect of magnetism generated by the poles of planets, and that someday the study of magnets might explain how light shifted over the course of a day.

But modern scientists theorized that light emanated from some force or object in a higher dimension, and that the unseen movements of this source-of-light explained how light ebbed and flowed around the perimeters of objects over the course of a day. Physics experiments backed up this hypothesis of a "third dimensional" origin of light.

Scientists adopted the term "sun" to describe this hypothetical light source. Experiments also suggested the third dimension might have a multitude of weaker light sources that provided much less illumination—perhaps spread across the third dimension like water droplets suspended in fog—which they dubbed "stars."

Roughly once a year, light (or rather, the "sun") was eclipsed. This was a very long time; a child born just after an eclipse might already be in school, have mastered measuring angles and reading, and begun learning multiplication and division by the time they saw their first eclipse. Some years were skipped, such that they wouldn't have an eclipse for two, three, sometimes even four or five years—it was possible to almost reach middle age without seeing an eclipse—with no discernible pattern to these gaps. Eclipses usually occurred around the new year—indeed, New Year's Day was fixed to the average date of the eclipse—but eclipse season ranged up to three months in either direction.

Experiments were being conducted to test ideas about the nature of eclipses—the two most prominent theories were that the sun naturally flickered off and on like a lamp, in a rolling pattern that accounted for how eclipses didn't affect the whole plain simultaneously but had been proven to move; or that the sun was obscured by some object in the third dimension, like a ball thrown in front of a lamp. There were solid arguments in favor of either theory, and thus far the data on hand couldn't disprove either.

But where science petered out, religion took up the baton.

A new religious movement called the Higher Dimensional Gate was picking up steam in the northwest. The cult (as some watchdog organizations called it) had been started a few years ago by a married couple—line and trapezoid—who gave largely inoffensive New Age-flavored sermons about spiritual purity and enlightenment. Their shows would have been unremarkable if not for their inclusion of their child—a charismatic young equilateral triangle they claimed had an "inner eye" that granted him clairvoyance. Every show, they put him on stage for a few minutes, where he'd point out audience members and offer seemingly-psychic insights into their lives. As he approached adolescence, he was given more and more stage time, which he'd use to recite the same sort of rhetoric as his parents while tossing in some novel claims about the third dimension that reflected the public's modern scientific fascinations.

It wasn't until the line's death that they evolved from a traveling psychic sideshow with a few zealous supporters into a burgeoning religious movement. The trapezoid adopted a background role as the precocious triangle took over all their speaking engagements, which he used to spin a novel mythology describing the third dimension as a separate spiritual plane found in an unseeable direction "upward, but not northward" from the mundane mortal plane. It was at this time that they adopted the name Higher Dimensional Gate, and their young leader announced that his spiritual contacts in the third dimension had granted him the title Magister Mentium—teacher of minds (or, perhaps more ominously, master of minds).

Higher Dimensional Gate aggressively recruited new followers, with the Magister leaving school to support a frenetic pace of traveling speaking engagements. More and more devotees followed him from town to town, overfilling hotels wherever they went and flooding parking lots with a caravan of RVs and trailers. Fliers they left in their wake offered mail-order pamphlets, sermon recordings, and religious paraphernalia. But the cult didn't break into the national consciousness until a couple of theoretical astrophysicists published a paper debunking pop culture misinformation on the third dimension.

Along with referencing several sci-fi shows spreading the idea that the third dimension allowed time travel, the authors dove into the bizarre beliefs of several New Age authors, speakers, and religious movements. They particularly maligned the ideas put forth by Higher Dimensional Gate, calling their descriptions of angelic aliens and spirit guides "misleading fairy tales" with no scientific basis in reality. They said the Magister Mentium would have done better to finish a basic public education before making claims about the third dimension.

The paper didn't receive much notice outside popular science magazines—until the Magister Mentium released a vicious public rebuttal that made national news for its absurdity.

Soundbites from his twenty-minute rant were broadcast in news segments about fringe religious movements and scientific literacy. Talk shows played quotes as fodder for jokes. Editorialists predicted that the young triangle was the sort of crooked cult leader who'd be on trial in a decade for cheating his worshipers out of their life savings. Only a few programs played even as much as a full minute from his speech:

"These scientists want you to think that the third dimension is some dead realm hidden behind a door you'll never see—and I'm telling you it's not! It's the dream realm! It's the realm of spirits and positive energy! It stretches into all possible futures, and if you could peer into it, you'd see the road to your own best possible future!

"And I know this. Because unlike these pessimistic brainiacs who mock what they don't understand, I can see the third dimension. I can witness the 'sun' in all its glory—a blazing white circle, more dazzling than anything you've ever seen, so bright it burns like fire to stare at it! I can see it pass through the pinpoint white lights of the 'stars'!

"And I can prove it.

"The most 'educated' minds in the scientific community can't predict an eclipse. They look at their historical records and they do a little math, hope they'll get lucky, and shrug if they're wrong—what do they know? All they can do is guess!

"But with my own all-seeing eye, I've personally witnessed a phenomenon that scientists can't even imagine. I know what passes between the sun and our plane—and I know when it's coming.

"I note all my detractors are in the camp that thinks the sun flickers.

"So let's run a scientific experiment. I challenge the scientific community to predict the next eclipse more accurately than me. I'll give it to you within the minute. In fact—I'll sweeten the deal! I'll give a million dollars to any nerd who can guess more accurately than me! I will personally hand you the prize money!"

"But if you want the prize, you'd better guess soon. Because the eclipse will be here in two weeks. I can already see it on the horizon."

It was nearly seven months until New Year's.

Sources close to the Magister's family claimed he was a spendthrift with nowhere near a million dollars on hand.

When asked to comment on the public ridicule his challenge had inspired, the Magister snidely replied, "We'll see who's laughing after the eclipse."

####

Gideon approached the Mystery Shack disguised in a pair of sunglasses and a camo jacket from his father's closet. The jacket was as long as a dress on him. It was hot.

He kept outside the tree line as he circled the shack, passing the gift shop, the house door, and finally the long side of the house where tourists never parked and the residents rarely ventured.

Gideon peered anxiously at each window for witnesses. He looked up at the attic dormer which once held the window of Bill's face; he caught a flash of bright golden curls pulling out of sight, and flinched. No, that was fine. That was who he was here for. Weren't any other blondes in the house.

When he was sure the coast was clear, he ran across the open ground from the trees to the side door, heart threatening to beat out of his chest. By the time he reached the door, Bill was already downstairs in the floor room, hands and grinning face pressed to the window like a child awaiting a special delivery. He waved excitedly at Gideon.

Gideon hissed, "Shh!" and immediately felt stupid about it.

He partially unzipped his jacket, pulled a manila envelope out of an inner pocket, knelt, and shoved it under the door. As Bill had promised, the door had poor weatherstripping and the envelope slid in easily.

A napkin covered in faint dry marker writing slid out. Gideon picked it up and read it. "Nice work ☆ Boy! I'll pass you the next message at Town Hall. Get yourself something nice, my treat. ◡̈" Inside the napkin's fold was a $5 coupon to the hardware store. It was expired.

Looking at the coupon, Gideon asked himself what a powerless imprisoned demon could really do to help his father's business.

Inside the shack, Bill checked the doorway to ensure no humans were coming for a few minutes, flopped onto the flat old sofa, and pulled several sheets of notebook paper out of the envelope: the answers to all the questions he'd told Gideon to ask his worshiper. He skimmed past her name to the second question: how had they located Bill?

At the sight of a familiar name, his heart leaped into his throat, then slowly sank into its cage again as he read the rest. "Someone calling himself Stanford Pines reached out, claiming to be an ex-cultist wanting to help other victims of the cult. He said the cult's 'founder' was incarcerated. He sounded like an enemy, but they thought he might know something about your disappearance and sent Sue."

Until the last moment, Bill had held onto a sliver of hope. As much as Ford said he couldn't stand Bill, somebody had had to contact his artists, and who else...?

But there it was. It had been Ford; but he hadn't been trying to save Bill. He'd just been trying to rip the nails out of one more thing Bill had built.

Fine. Bill wasn't wasting time on lost causes. He'd never really seen Ford as a friend, anyway. If Ford was stupid enough to throw away a god's favor, that was his loss. Bill could kill him with the rest when he had his power back. He didn't care. He'd just... really thought he could win him back over.

He crumpled up the pages, tossed them on the floor, and hunched forward to rub his eyelid with his hand.

Well, trying to get Ford back on his side had just been a way to pass the time. He hadn't taken it seriously. Not really.

He leaned back, flopped his head on the backrest cushion, and sighed; and then he fished the pages off the floor and smoothed them back out.

He read through the rest of the information Gideon had obtained. His girls in Death Valley had indeed been awaiting his arrival "as Bill requested"; and when he didn't show up on schedule, they'd taken to waiting for him in shifts for half a year before giving up. The way Bill had "requested" was to stack themselves into a human throne for him—he imagined Sue hadn't wanted to mention that detail on the phone with a kid. And they'd kept that up for six months? In shifts? That was hysterical. What a bunch of lunatics. He couldn't wait to meet the gals in person, he was just going to love them. Sue was set up at an inn a few towns west—not a lot of motels in this lonely part of Oregon—and there were a couple more girls in Portland who could be here in an hour.

They'd also made contact with a few devotees of Bill's teachings in Washington, but hadn't told them his exact location. Unsurprising—if they were the devotees he was thinking of, they were less "hardy New Age hippie spiritualists looking forward to the creation of a bright new world" and more "paranoid doomsday preppers anticipating being the last survivors of the doomed old world." The Death Valley group probably didn't trust them. Just about all of Bill's "students" were freaks of one sort or another—if not when he met them, then by the time he was done with them—but different varieties of freaks usually clashed. He had to keep them safely corralled into separate sects to maintain the harmony and their loyalty.

They were all so, so close—all these humans just waiting for an opportunity to meet him, touch him, save him, serve him, love him. They were so close he could almost reach out and grab them.

But "almost" wouldn't get them into his hands.

Something would come up soon. He was sure. He could feel it.

####

Sometimes, stairs just weren't worth the effort.

Bill understood, intellectually, that stair steps had a "top" surface and a "side" surface. He also understood that, given how gravity worked in this dimension, you could only step on their top surfaces. He knew this. He was smart. He'd personally worked out the equations to calculate how gravity worked in this dimension ages before an apple beaned Newton.

It was just that, when he looked at a staircase, he couldn't shake the impression that someone had simply taken a 2D plane and artistically folded it into a zigzag. And on a folded 2D plane, there wasn't a "top" surface and a "side" surface; there was just the surface, and a 3D body could stand anywhere atop the surface with no problem.

So he would try to get from the attic to the kitchen, subconsciously decide that rather than walking "down" the stairs standing vertically he wanted to walk "up" the stairs standing horizontally, and he'd try to lean forward to put his foot on the side of a step—and then his face was on the floor again.

And even when he kept his ups up and his sides sideways, sometimes over-concentrating on where to step distracted him into tripping anyway.

The stairs in the Quadrangle of Qonfusion never gave him trouble. They worked fine both vertically and horizontally, he'd designed them that way. And also he didn't need to use them. He could float. They were mainly there for the outerplanar Henchmaniacs and because Bill liked the zigzag motif. He was much less fond of stairs these days. When he got home, he was ripping them all out and replacing them with ladders and slides.

He was better with stairs than he'd been when he first occupied this body. But when he didn't focus on every single step, he still tended to slip up. He often got to the stairs and saw his body crumpled on the landing fifteen seconds in the future. If the damage wasn't too severe, sometimes he just resigned himself to the bruises and stepped off the ledge. Had to get downstairs somehow, after all.

But sometimes the future held a broken leg, or an unconscious heap, or a lot of blood. When that happened, sometimes he'd shuffle his footing a bit until the future looked less painful and then try descending. Sometimes he'd creep down to the last safe step and then look for a less fatal route the rest of the way down.

And sometimes he got halfway down the stairs, saw looming disaster, couldn't for the life of him figure out how to avoid it, and thought forget it and just sat down in the middle of the staircase. If he waited there long enough, eventually whatever he'd been about to instinctively do would change, and he could safely finish his journey.

Stairs were, by far, the most frequent and most stupid of his inconveniences as a human.

He never thought to bring something to read in case he hit unexpected delays on the stairs. There was nothing interesting to do, and he didn't so much as have a window to look out of. He got bored. He was constantly sleep-deprived. Sometimes he fell asleep, leaning against the wall.

He'd overheard the humans speculating on why he liked to nap on the stairs. The leading theory was that it had been normal in his home dimension, followed closely by runner-up theory "just to annoy us." None had asked him directly. They usually just left him alone on the stairs. But not today.

Bill flinched out of sleep as his leg was kicked. A fizzling field of white pinpricks filled his vision and faded as he opened his eyes. "Mruh?"

"You're blocking the stairs," Dipper said. This time Bill had fallen asleep on the stairs below the landing, slouched down with his shoulders and head against the wall, legs stretched across two stair steps and knees raised.

"And you're disturbing my sleep." Bill yawned and glanced downstairs. Coast was clear. He could get to the living room with nothing but a fumble on the next to bottom step now.

"Get out of the way." Dipper kicked his leg again.

Well, now Bill didn't want to get up. He kicked Dipper back. "No. Your ancestors lived in trees, act like it."

"What?"

"Climb, monkey boy."

Dipper grumbled, but surveyed his roadblock thoughtfully. He experimentally lifted a foot over Bill's abdomen, considered how far down it was to the next step, and scooted down to Bill's feet instead. Bill watched with a smirk as Dipper clung to the railing and gingerly stepped over one foot to the edge of the stair step, and then the next. Bill briefly considered tripping him, decided it wasn't worth getting in trouble, and instead twitched a foot up as Dipper passed over and laughed when he jumped.

"Jerk," Dipper muttered. "This is why you only have one friend."

The jab ripped at a raw sore in his chest. Ex-cultist. "Whatever!" He laughed loudly. "My real friends are all one little interdimensional rift away, I didn't come here to make pals with humans." He jerked his hood down over his eyes and slouched lower, arms crossed tight. "I don't even care. This entire universe is a hologram and nothing's real anyway."

There was silence. Bill congratulated himself on getting the last word in; and then Dipper said, "What does that mean?"

"What kind of stupid—it means I don't care about you, what do you think it means? You're made from the exhaust belched out of a star's tailpipe—"

"I meant, the hologram thing. You're always saying stuff about the universe not being real, what are you talking about."

Bill thumbed the hem of his hood up and glanced down at Dipper. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up determinedly. He'd pulled out his journal and pen. He was serious. He was all ready to learn about the secrets of the universe.

Ford's little wanna-be protégé with his little knock-off Journal, wasn't he adorable. He wanted so much to be just like his great uncle. And in many ways, he was like a younger Ford. The ignorant, arrogant, insecure, naïve, easily-flattered, easily-exploited younger Ford, back before he grew a personality. Except even back at his most boring, Ford had found the strange beautiful where this kid only found it interesting. You don't have what it takes to be Ford.

Bill was already filling this brat's head with gunk—bogus conspiracy theories, wild goose chases after lucid dreaming, nightmares about whole dimensions that existed only as parables for somebody else. What was a little bit more? He could give this kid something to talk to his therapist about. Something that—in his darkest, lowest, loneliest moments—would come back to mind, and remind him that nothing he did would ever matter.

Plus, he hoped Ford would look in on the living room and seethe about not being his student anymore.

"All right kid, sure! Fine. You just so happened to catch me on a day when I've got nothing to do." Bill stood, stretched, and sauntered down the stairs. He fumbled on the next to bottom step. "You wanna know about the universe? You wanna know the big secret?"

"Uh..." Dipper eagerly flipped through his journal, looking for a blank page. Apparently he hadn't expected Bill to actually indulge his curiosity. "'Secret'?" He trailed after Bill into the living room.

"Okay, okay, maybe it's not a 'secret'—a secret suggests somebody's trying to hide it. It's just that nobody thinks you're important enough to tell and you're too primitive to see it for yourself."

Bill turned around, a lecturer on a stage. Dipper sat on the couch and tried to position his journal on his knees to take notes. He looked so attentive. He thought he was going to enjoy this.

"So you remember what I told you about the second dimension. That from the third dimension's perspective, it's nothing but shadows cast on a wall."

"Plato's cave. Yeah."

"Your dimension is a lot like that. There are higher dimensions than this, and your entire universe is being projected down from one of them. If being in the second dimension and seeing into the third is like being a shadow looking at the entrance to the cave, then being in the third and seeing into the fourth is like a character on a movie screen looking out at the film projector. While you're distracted by the movie, I'm studying the film reel and watching the frames coming up. It's how I tell the future—and you can't even tell yourself I'm lying about that, because you've seen me do it."

Dipper grumbled, "You've spoiled the killer on Duck-tective."

"I've spoiled the killer on Duck-tective! Twice!"

Dipper was furiously taking notes. "Wait—so, the fourth dimension really is time? Mabel and I kinda visited the fourth dimension once, but I wasn't sure if it being 'time' was, like, some kind of metaphor..."

"Ha! Listen to you! That's like asking if the third dimension is light. No. Time isn't the fourth dimension. It's just in the fourth dimension," Bill said. "And for the record you didn't really visit the fourth dimension. The glowing blue tunnel with floating clocks and calendars? That was a metaphor."

"Aw man," Dipper muttered, disappointed.

"So when you say you can see the future, you mean—you literally see it? With your eyeballs?"

"All-seeing eye," Bill said smugly.

"Can... you teach me?"

"No. It's not a learnable skill. You're either born with an inner—what's the human phrase?—a third eye, or you aren't."

Dipper processed that. "How do I find out if I have—?"

"You don't."

"Aw."

Bill waited for Dipper to scribble down a couple more lines before he casually dropped the next bombshell: "In fact, not only have you never been 'in' the fourth dimension—your universe isn't really even third dimensional."

Dipper's pen gouged into the page. "What do you mean, it's not third dimensional!"

"I mean you've got two dimensions and the third's an illusion. Hologram, remember?"

"What are you—" Dipper waved a hand around in the air. "I'm moving my arm through the third dimension right now!"

"No you're not."

Dipper threw his pen on the ground. "Okay, you're messing with me!"

"Not this time. Listen. Got a little riddle for you: what do Plato's cave and a movie theater have in common?"

Dipper pursed his lips angrily, but he'd been issued a riddle and couldn't resist trying to solve it. "Sitting in the dark, staring at shapes?"

"Ha! Look at it, it still thinks it's part of the audience!" Bill wagged a finger disapprovingly. "In both cases, everyone and everything in the show is an illusion—just light and shadows projected on a flat wall."

"But—! The world would look flat if it was 2D—"

"It does look flat. 2D is all you've ever seen," Bill said. He held his hands out, thumbs and forefingers forming a rectangle like a picture frame, his exposed eye staring through it at Dipper. "Your eyes only see a pair of two-dimensional images that your brain interprets as 3D because it's been trained to. Depth perception is an optical illusion! You can't actually witness the depth of an object—your brain uses context clues to guess it! And the context clues are lying to you."

Dipper scowled. "But." He paused. "It's different."

"Uh-huh." Bill leaned against a wall, feigning a yawn. "Okay, wow me with your philosophy."

"Pictures on paper are 2D, and they don't look 3D, so since the real world does look 3D..."

"Hey, you know that autostereogram art your sister's friend likes so much? Magic Vision Posters?" Bill asked. "Cross your eyes a little and a 3D illusion pops out of the page?"

Dipper's frown deepened.

Bill's smile widened. "And those are just manmade pictures. The projectors I'm talking about are cosmically complex. If it's so easy to trick your brain into seeing something three dimensional in a flat image, then how do you know, really know, that everything around you is 3D rather than an infinitely complex 2D hologram?"

"Be... cause..." Dipper looked around, grasping for another defense of reality as he knew it. He picked his pen off the floor. "Because I can touch an object and feel it's 3D! Even if my eyes can be fooled, I can... look, I can feel the curve of the barrel and everything."

"And?" Bill asked. "If your laundry comes out of the dryer unexpectedly cool, you think it's damp because your species didn't evolve wetness-sensing nerves. And you still trust your sense of touch?"

"Wait, that's why that happens?"

"Uh-huh. Water is wet, your t-shirts aren't, and your third dimension's an optical illusion."

Dipper slouched back on the couch, arms crossed, chewing his pen, brows drawn and eyes unfocused. Bill watched with a smirk as Dipper's faith in an objective observable reality slowly eroded before his very eye. For someone so eager to burrow into the strange, Dipper wanted so much for the world to make sense. That was why he was burrowing into the strange in the first place: to shine a flashlight on the things that go bump in the dark.

Maybe that was what rubbed Bill so wrong about this kid. Bill was sure that, deep in his heart, Dipper didn't really know how to celebrate the weird; he only wanted to expand the boundaries of normal. Disgusting.

Finally, Dipper mumbled, "How did you find this out?"

"This little shadow peeled itself off the wall and flew out of the cave—do you think I stopped there? I've seen further! What looks like an inescapable labyrinth to a two-dimensional Minotaur is nothing but a fun maze in a puzzle book when you can see over the walls from the third dimension's perspective. And once you can see the fourth dimension, your so-called 'third' dimension looks no different! I can see through walls, into boxes, past barriers; and I can see just how flat your world really is. Like taking a photo and looking at it from the edge."

"Hm." Dipper was still staring into space.

Bill's smug smile drooped into a frown. Dipper didn't look like he'd absorbed anything Bill just said. He hated an inattentive audience.

He crossed the room, planting a hand on the couch backrest by Dipper's head to lean over him, and waited until Dipper looked up into his eye. Bill said, "And I can tell you, beyond a shadow of a doubt: you're no more real to the things projecting your universe than the shadows in Plato's cave are to you. This. Entire. Universe. Doesn't. Exist. And nothing that happens here matters."

That little look of doubt edging into dread was so, so satisfying.

Bill pushed himself upright and sauntered to the door, his hex cast, ready to leave Dipper alone with his budding existential crisis. "So that's why I try to have fun with it! Your whole dimension is like an amusement park. Why hang out in a cave unless you're leaving cave paintings, who cares what the shadows think about the graffiti?"

"What's in those higher dimensions?"

Bill paused, glancing over his shoulder. "'Scuse me?"

"Something's gotta be running the 'projector' or whatever, right?" He asked it with an edge of desperation, like if Dipper could just make it that far, the world would make sense again. "Movies have audiences. Who're they?"

Bill stared at Dipper—and then slowly grinned again. What a glutton for misery. Feed him a bitter spoonful of poisonous knowledge and he asks for the bowl. But of course—tell him that reality isn't real and the next thing he wants to know is where to find reality.

Okay, fine, Bill would keep playing—this was almost fun. "Higher dimensional beings! Duh."

"What are they like?"

"Wretched incomprehensible shapeshifting contortions of flesh and bone that appear to gorily mutate as their vast bodies pass through the dimensions your limited eyes are capable of viewing. Seeing them will drive you mad."

"Ah. Great," Dipper said. "But what are they like as people?"

"From your perspective, all-knowing and unknowable. Talking to them will also drive you mad."

"I'm detecting a theme here," Dipper grumbled.

Bill gave him a polite golf clap. "Another win for human pattern-detection instincts! Give 'im a hand." (Oh, Bill wished he had his powers. It would be so funny to give Dipper a giant disembodied hand.)

In spite of his visible irritation, Dipper was still taking notes. "Is it possible for a human to meet one?"

"You've got more pattern-detection instincts than self-preservation instincts," Bill said wryly. "But sure, of course it's possible. In fact, I think you already met one."

That got him looking up from his journal. "I did?"

"Sure! Not here, but in a parallel universe that doesn't exist anymore. No clue what you talked about, I steer away from that guy when I can. But hey, maybe you'll remember it someday."

"How can I remember it if it happened to a parallel me in another universe?"

"When things like him speak, they leave vast echoes. Even across timelines."

Dipper considered that. "Could I meet him again?"

"Maybe if he takes an interest in you. Pray he doesn't. Prayers won't actually help, but it's something to keep your mind occupied!"

"Is it possible to be more proactive about meeting one of them?"

Bill laughed. "Kid, you're stupid. And that makes you very entertaining."

"Great?"

"But if you wanna break into some cosmic horror's living room, sure! If they don't come down here, all you need to do is go up there."

And back to taking notes Dipper went. "You gonna elaborate, orrr..."

"Ha, fine. The issue is you're not built for higher dimensions. Like I said, you might seem real to yourself here, but there you'd just be a light on a wall." He made a circle between his forefinger and thumb, turned his hand upside down, and peered through the circle like a monocle. "If you want to ascend, you need an aperture to translate between dimensions—something through which fourth-dimensional spacetime can be compacted enough to appear three-dimensional, or pseudo three-dimensional spacetime can be augmented with a fourth dimension. With an aperture like that, you can climb up and down the dimensional ladder to visit anywhere level of reality you want—from the zeroth dimension to the billionth."

"Including wherever our universe's projector is?"

"Bingo. Unfortunately for your suicidal ambitions, inventing an aperture capable of manipulating spacetime like that needs a lot of science humanity is nowhere near mastering; but with the materials humanity currently knows how to manufacture, I bet building one would be pretty simple if you got instructions from a species that's already done it." Bill arched his brows mockingly. "Hey, might even make a fun little summer project, if you don't mind going insane. Something to take to the science fair next year, huh?"

"Shut up," Dipper said. "And—if you got out of your dimension—do you know about species that can give those instructions?"

"Suuure! Heck, give me a couple pieces of paper and a pen and I could probably whip up the blueprints myself."

Dipper nodded. Dipper processed that. Dipper glared at Bill. "Wait a minute. Are you trying to get me to build another portal for you?!"

Bill cackled, doubling over. Voice shrill, he said, "I was wondering how long it'd take you!"

"Oh my god."

He groped for an arm chair and dropped down, still laughing. "I was this close to saying 'why don't you ask your uncle for the blueprints' to see if you'd get it!" He wheezed, "Can you imagine the look on his face!"

Dipper chucked his pen at Bill. "I hate you."

"Hook, line, and sinker! You idiot!" He slid halfway out of his seat, covering his face with his hands.

Dipper groaned. "So you made up all that stuff about the third dimension being fake and the universe being a hologram?"

Bill struggled to control his laughter enough to catch his breath. "No—no, all that was true. A hundred percent scientifically verifiable!"

"Shut up, man." Dipper got off the couch, kicked the back of Bill's armchair as he passed, and trudged into the gift shop.

####

"Hey Grunkle Ford? Is the third dimension actually an illusion being projected out of the fourth?"

"Been talking to Bill again, have you?"

Dipper winced. "I mean. Well. But he's not telling the truth, is he?"

"Mmm..." Ford waggled a hand uncertainly.

"What."

"Based on our current knowledge of quantum mechanics, it's not impossible," Ford admitted. "And it would explain some things about black holes."

"Ugh. That's the worst thing I've ever heard." Dipper rubbed his eyes. "How do you live with that?"

"With what?"

"Thinking the entire universe might be, just... some kind of projection? Like a movie?" Dipper said. "I mean... what's the point of doing anything if everything's fake. That's awful."

Ford pressed his lips together.

####

1981

"The universe is what?" Ford asked.

His muse shrugged apologetically. "Sorry to break it to ya, kid! I figured you'd rather hear it from me than—"

"But—but that's amazing!" Ford started pacing across the dreamscape's translucent grid floor. "The implications for physics, for faster-than-light travel, for, for—for religion?" He looked at Bill. "Is the projection a natural phenomenon or someone's creation."

"Uh," Bill said. "Creation?"

"Then who made it? Descartes' 'evil genius'? A demiurge? God?"

Bill laughed. "Kid, depending on your interdimensional political opinions, those are three names for the same guy."

"He's real?"

"Define 'real'," Bill said. "And 'he.' And 'is.'"

"I... I cannot do that!" Ford resumed pacing, muttering again about the implications.

Eye crinkled in amusement, Bill said, "I've gotta say, Stanford, you're taking this pretty well. Most humans don't like hearing they're secretly flat."

Ford barked a laugh. "'Most humans' didn't like hearing that the Earth isn't the center of the solar system. I'm a man of science! If we could prove this, it would be the biggest leap forward in physics since special relativity!" He beamed at Bill. "Do you realize what this means?"

Bill pointed at their portal calculations. "It means if you want to get this working, you need to zero out all the depth values."

"Ah." Ford's shoulders sagged. "Yes. That too."

"Wish you'd taken that fourth semester of Fifth-Dimensional Calculus now?"

"Hush," Ford said sourly, and was immediately mortified at himself for being so disrespectful to his muse; but Bill laughed with what sounded like genuine delight.

####

2013

"Right," Ford said self-consciously. "Awful."

####

At three a.m., Dipper lay in bed, gnawing at his shirt collar, staring at the ceiling.

Yeah. Oh yeah. He could feel it. Wondering whether reality was real would haunt him the rest of his life.

####

Bill slept like a baby.

Nothing like bullying a child to improve a miserable day.

####

Bill woke the next morning from a nightmare about—what had it been about. Being trapped in the bathroom as a metaphor for... something or other. Being trapped in general, probably. Great, had that incident given him trauma? Was he gonna start having recurring nightmares? Would this be a thing he had to deal with? What a miserable malfunctioning species humans were.

He could see the beforeimage of Mabel coming upstairs; not enough time to pull out his dream diary. He'd just have to remember it to write down later. He sat up, cracked his sore neck, and shuffled to the stairs in search of breakfast.

His foot missed the first step and landed on empty air, his stomach lurched, and he braced for a rough landing. In the split second he hung in the air, he thought that he wasn't supposed to fall, he'd looked. Hadn't he looked? He was sure he had—he didn't remember looking, but he could always see, if there'd been an injury in his imminent future he would have subconsciously noticed it and stopped to evaluate, the fact that he'd just walked meant there was nothing for him to notice—right? Idiot, why hadn't he double checked before he just walked off half-asleep—

It occurred to him that this split second was lasting a lot longer than it was supposed to.

He caught the handrail. His fall stopped as he gently bumped into the wall.

"Huh." He straightened up, gave the stairs a puzzled look; and then, experimentally, did a little hop. He went higher than he'd meant to, and hung in the air longer than he should have. He repeated the experiment a couple of times; and then, took a bigger jump forward, aiming for a couple of steps down. He seemed to float in the air for a moment before his feet gently settled on the wooden board. "Oo-oo-ooh." He looked around the stairwell, baffled; and then he looked up, eye burning as he stared through the roof and into the sky.

A chill ran up his spine. "Uh-oh."

####

Dipper frowned at his syrup bottle as the syrup painstakingly oozed out. When he let up his squeezing even a little bit, the syrup sucked back in.

"Come on." He squeezed again and shook the bottle over his pancakes. Like morning dew on the fruits hanging above the head of Tantalus, a round drop of syrup glistened under the skin-softening kitchen light, but never fell. "What's the problem?" Dipper wiped the drop onto his finger and wiped his finger on his pancakes.

Mabel slammed the door open and pounded into the kitchen. "Dipper! Come outside, I need to show you something!" They ran out.

Mabel stood on the edge of the porch, held up an orange glitter-filled super bounce ball the size of a walnut, and said, "Watch this!" She flung the ball down on the porch step as hard as she could.

It rocketed up into the sky, arcing away from the Mystery Shack toward the forest. Dipper's jaw dropped. "Whoa!"

"I just lost four balls that way!" Mabel planted her hands on her hips, watching with satisfaction as the pinprick point of the latest ball soared upward until it disappointed. "I'm gonna get some more!" She ran inside and bolted up the stairs.

Ford passed from the gift shop into the living room, frowning. He picked up a magazine left on the dinosaur skull, flipped through it, and observed how slowly the pages fluttered. "Hmm."

From the entryway, he could hear Stan down the hall on the office phone: "Hello? Doctor? This is Stan Pines. Yeah, I got a medical question. I stepped on the scale this morning, and it says I lost twenty percent of my weight overnight. Do I have cancer?" There was a pause. "Eighth call this morning?! What is this, some kinda bug going around town?"

Dipper closed the door as he came back inside. "Hey, Grunkle Ford? I think there's something..."

"Something strange going on? Yes, I've noticed," he said. "It seems that gravity is about twenty percent lower than usual." He pulled his sparkly birthday pen out of his coat pocket and dropped it from several feet up into his other hand. It fell just a bit slower than normal—not enough that it looked like it was on the moon, but enough that the motion looked uncanny.

"What's going on?"

"I don't..." Ford trailed off as a flash of bright yellow appeared in his peripheral vision. He turned toward the stairs.

Bill had stepped onto the landing. He looked at the bottom half of the staircase with a critical, calculating gaze; and then jumped off the top step. In a single smooth, slow arc, he leaped over all the stairs and descended, slow as a feather, to land lightly on the floor.

"Whoa." Under his breath, Dipper said, "That's a lot more than twenty percent lower."

It just figured he had something to do with this. "Bill," Ford snapped. "What's going on?"

He wasn't expecting Bill to give him such a solemn look.

"There's an eclipse coming," Bill said. "I'd give it three days."

####

(Be honest how long did it take you to figure out Bill was just seeing if he could get Dipper hyped about building a portal. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!! We're heading into the biggest storyline so far—plotwise, lengthwise, and emotionwise—so I'd love to hear what you're thinking and expecting so far!)

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #dipper pines #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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