I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

As Summer Sweetly Fades

(August 2016)

Somehow we never quite do all the things we would love to do. Problems and challenges crowd in, distractions pop up, and the days, however long they are in summer, still are too short to hold all our hopes and wishes. The last days of August 2016 find Dipper and Mabel looking ahead to being seventeen and seniors. Changes are coming, but how does one prepare for changes unknown and unguessable?

1

Ariel was a fast learner, no doubt about that. In fact, Stanford Pines would call her an instantaneous learner. She could visually scan a long complex document on the computer monitor and then recall it letter-perfect and word for word.

She explained, though, that she had help. "I am an instrument," she said.

And her flute was an instrument—and a sentient construct. It had deep ties to her consciousness, and the flute, the commander, as Ariel called it, actually held all the memories. It collected information on humans, how noble and good they could be and how low and evil. Ford hoped the two sides at least balanced out.

However, if she was a learner, Ariel was also a teacher. Ford talked with her for hours every day, not interrogating her, but letting her explain. Very few humans on her world, Woldercan (she wrote it out for him, hesitating on the spelling), could read or write. Fewer than a hundred.

She had some trouble at first deciphering type fonts, because the machines on Woldercan had imparted the skills of reading and writing based on information sent back to that world in the 1500s, when a professional scribe in London had adopted a lively pet raven that was not, in fact, a raven at all, but a robotic probe from Woldercan in disguise.

The scribe, a lonely, kind, absent-minded, ascetic man, welcomed it and it perched on the back of his chair as he bent over his paper, pens, and inks and worked away, fair-copying everything from religious tracts and school-book manuscripts to plays for the common stage. Though he wrote a fine secretary hand—the kind of handwriting Shakespeare would have learned at school—he also loved and practiced calligraphy and had devised his own script, graceful and most delicate.

This script was what the raven learned. The scribe copied out reams of material in his special script, just for himself, not for the hungry press, pronouncing the words as he finished them (an old habit of his). The raven watched, recorded, and sent on the information. The machines of Woldercan received it some sixty-seven years later and filed it away as human writing.

The scribe lived to be sixty-eight years old, and for forty-one of them he kept his pet raven. It gave every appearance of being affectionate, and he needed affection in his lonely life. It never even occurred to him to wonder why the raven ate so little (at night it secretly distributed the food he gave it but that it could not swallow to mice) and why it never pooped. It was enough for him that it would murmur softly, nuzzle his cheek, and always listen quietly, nodding to him, when he wished to talk to someone.

When he died, the raven visited his tomb as the priest and the sexton interred him—there were no other mourners—and then flew away. It was still about in 2016, its mission the same as ever: Record information and send it back. At present it made its home in an old house in Quebec. Long story, of interest primarily to ravens.

At any rate, the machines saw no value in teaching many humans to read and write, for there was nothing for them to read and no reason for them to write—but to preserve the skill, they did teach a few. Ariel, whose rapport with the machines was more advanced than any other human's on the planet, had been chosen as one of the few.

Ford wondered why the machines had not simply cloned the humans. Ariel frowned slightly as he explained the concept, and she came to understand what cloning meant. "That is against programming," she said. In turn, as much as she could, she explained that in the dim remote past, the natives who—presumably—had created the machines had ingrained in the fundamental code a law against the machines' meddling with human biology.

Which raised another concern. Ford had her learn about Earthly pathogens. On Woldercan, the machines had eliminated all microscopic organisms that could cause disease in humans. Not so on Earth.

However, as it emerged, Ariel was probably immune to all disease organisms. Or, more precisely, she carried in her blood microscopic machines—nano-machines—that sought out and destroyed any germ before it could affect her. Technically, these did not alter her biology—and there was no rule that a machine couldn't destroy a cold virus or a plague bacterium.

Still, Ford made sure that she read volumes on medicine, biology, genetics, and more. And oddly enough, at Mabel's urging, he also gave Ariel books on art, aesthetics, ethics, religion, and philosophy. These puzzled her in a way that the science tomes did not. "No one agrees?" she asked Ford. "Some say to believe one thing is true, others to believe the opposite is true? How can this be?"

Ford smiled in a weary way. "Young lady, if only we humans could understand the difference between certainty and surmise, wishful thinking and faith, we'd be better off. Look here: One of my professors, an extremely eccentric man who was a geneticist, once told us in a lecture, 'Never forget the spiritual side of your learning.' When some students laughed, thinking it was a joke, the professor said, 'No, seriously: What are the tenets you should hold to as if they were a sacred trust? Mine are simple: Never knowingly harm another person. Protect yourself if you must, but do that without hatred, and once the threat is overcome, stop there. At some point in your life, you will desperately need a second chance. Earn it by giving others their second chances. You may one day need forgiveness, so forgive others. Live so the world will be better by your being in it. Promote growth, not destruction. And if you have not done so yet, then as soon as possible, grow yourself a conscience.'"

And then Ford had to explain what a conscience was. It was very baffling in a way—but in another way, Stanford began to feel that Ariel was educating him as he educated her.