The Gold Bugs
(May 2016)
1
Battles are messy. This a fact of life or, if one happens to be on the wrong end of a weapon, of death. A hundred and fifty-odd years ago, men clothed in blue and gray fought savagely against each other, each side determined to kill the other. Why this is so is for socio-political reasons, but for simplicity's sake, we'll say that each side detested the other's choice of color in clothing.
The struggle raged on for days, nay, weeks. And then the victorious side took possession of the bitterly-disputed land, the defeated side scattered and regrouped somewhere else, and peace reigned for about fifteen minutes. And then the victorious side packed up and abandoned the bloody ground it had tried to win with so much pain and loss of life. Just marched away, seeking their foes to renew the fight elsewhere. And the fight to kill the other inappropriately clothed fellow humans resumed, just as fierce as ever.
Honestly, it's enough to make a sane person weep.
But in leaving the field, the victors always and inevitably left a patch of land significantly changed from what it had been. And now, we, the descendants of the men in blue and the men in gray, having forgotten our enmity (well, except once every four years) stroll over the healed earth and now and then one of us stoops and says, "Hey, look! A rusty old bayonet!" Or a lead slug, or a Minié ball. And we blithely pick up these instruments of death, the crusted blood of a person very much like us long since weathered off their surfaces, and take them to display as souvenirs, or sell them on eBay, with no thought of the soul of the man that our little trinket killed.
Well, it's not as though the dead could be recalled to life by the discovery of that blade, that ball.
Is it?
There are always souvenirs to find. Because battles are messy.
They always leave detritus behind.
Even if the foes are human on one side and on the other, not.
2
An entomologist would take one glance at a male of the species and immediately and with some complacency decide it was a specimen of Plecoma.
Oregon folks call them "rain beetles."
They have a curious lifestyle. Oh, like all their kind, they begin as eggs laid by an expectant mother beetle; the eggs hatch into larvae, grub-like pale creatures that creep through the soil in chthonic darkness and feed on the fibrous smaller roots they find, particularly roots of fruit trees. When they mature, the larvae grow large and flaccid, and then they pupate, forming a sort of clear shell around their bodies. And then they turn to liquid and re-build themselves as scarab-like beetles, deep reddish-brown, the males significantly larger than the females.
Only the males fly.
The flightless females burrow beneath the ground.
Once they mate, the sexes separate, each going its own way, never to see their insignificant other again, like rock stars passing through town and having one-night stands. And so, the cycle begins again.
Well, then.
The hitch is that the creatures we are thinking about are not rain beetles, though they superficially resemble them. If an entomologist captured one, dissected it, and sampled the DNA, the results would be astonishing.
Because the DNA would be like no other creature's on Earth.
Because the gold bugs are not from Earth. Their world exists in another space, another time, another dimension. Eons ago, when the entity known and loathed as Bill Cipher ripped through a multitude of dimensions recruiting an army, a few of the insects leaked into the Nightmare Realm. Disregarded by the sentient monsters, they somehow survived and reproduced.
On that day in August, 2012, when the sky ripped apart and Bill and his minions plunged into the reality of Gravity Falls, half a dozen or more of the insects came through the rift with them.
One male. Five female. At least. Oh, maybe two males, six females, something like that. No one will ever know, and it doesn't matter.
When Stanley Pines by a heroic sacrifice sent Bill and his followers (all but one, anyway) reeling back through the rift, the insects did not return with them. They remained on Earth.
These beetles are not destructive. They do not decimate orchards, eat people's homes, spoil food, or carry disease. They can't. Their biology is quite different from Earth creatures' biology. Heck, they can't even digest fibrous roots. They would have died of starvation, had their digestive systems not been adapted to eating . . . dirt.
Well, soil, sand, dust, and so on. Their guts extract basic chemical elements and recombine them into the nutrients they need to survive and flourish. But they excrete what they do not use, and when one dies, its body yields the elements back to the world. Zero-sum. Pretty harmless.
Prolific, though. One female can lay a thousand eggs. They multiply rapidly. However, and we can be grateful for this, their numbers are self-limiting, governed by their environment. At any one time, there will be no more than roughly six hundred thousand of these beetles. We don't have to worry about them eating the world.
Of the six hundred thousand, only about five to six thousand will be males. They fly around just before dark and just after dawn, for maybe thirty, forty minutes, and then doze away the rest of the day. The females, like the rain beetles they resemble, burrow down into the ground and bother no one, save perhaps the occasional feral Gnome a stray mole man or two.
Neither male nor female gold bugs ever stray outside the Valley.
They can't. Their millions of years in the Nightmare Realm caused them to evolve to need weirdness as well as elements to survive.
A weirdness field covers the Valley around Gravity Falls. The insects can't go outside it. Well, they can, but they die instantly. Hardly makes the trip worthwhile.
As of 2016 in the Valley there were between three and five thousand males. Except for a two-week mating season in late summer, they had nothing to do. They simply idled away the time, sometimes munching some dirt, sometimes, well, I don't know. Arguing politics. Boasting about their sexual prowess. Drinking beer. Whatever males do.
But that spring, something inside them had changed. Now, they weren't smart. Beetles are not intelligent, or even in any meaningful way sentient. They don't know anything much, and their decisions are limited: Dark. Sleep now. Light. Fly now. Hungry. Eat now. Aroused. Find mate now. That's about it.
Somehow, though, a new imperative had emerged in the cluster of neurons that controlled their actions—not even enough to be called a brain, really.
Now they felt a new urge: Find gold. Swallow. Fly to special place. Excrete.
Gold was easy enough. Oregon streams contain flakes and dust of gold. The beetles could dive into shallow streams, tumble small stones, snatch up a little glittering gold.
Find gold. Swallow. Fly to special place. Excrete.
And that for some reason felt good.
Do it again!
3
The Oracle called on the Axolotl.
That sounds almost like the beginning of a rhyme by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, doesn't it? Except snarks and owls and pussycats normally don't have the fate of worlds depending on their idle chats.
The Oracle did not leave her mountaintop and did not journey to the Axolotl's home; the Axolotl did not ring her up and ask if she were busy. Transdimensional beings do not work like that.
The Axolotl's home, basically, is Everywhere. And Everywhen. Even the impossible corners of unreality. The Axolotl did not have to travel; it was already there.
"I am worried," the Oracle confessed. "Will you have some tea?"
"Thank you," the Axolotl replied kindly. "I do not drink . . . tea."
"The child is returning to the scene of the breach," the Oracle said.
"In one potentiality, yes."
(One branch of philosophy holds that whatever is capable of happening must, in some version of reality, happen. Another branch of philosophy holds, nuh-uh!)
Now a potentiality is only the shadow of intent that the sun of possibility projects before the traveler on the road of time.
Sorry. Philosophy brings that out in writers. Take it another way: When you intend to do a thing, you gradually approach that thing in time—"I'm going to clean the yard today"—and when the time comes, you either do it or don't do it. Until the time comes, the potentiality for the event exists. The shadow lies before you.
Of course, in some cases if some people say, "I'm going to do this or that," or "This or that is going to happen," those people then behave as if their intention were fact, though they do absolutely nothing to fulfill that intention. The guy who said he would bring his truck over so you could move that old couch is that sort of person. Politicians are the same kind.
But whether one really means to carry out the intention or not—the shadow lies there. The possibility is there. That possibility is what the Axolotl means by "potentiality."
Because each possibility is like one smug little domino just waiting to knock over a billion more, potentially changing the whole course of history. It's probably quantum.
"That potentiality," said the Oracle, "is the one we must worry about."
The Axolotl calmly replied, "Think of it as the boy's first test."
"It is too early to test him."
"Better too early than too late."
"I care for these humans, you know."
Warmth and a sense of consent radiated from the Axolotl. "Someone must. You are the best one for the job."
Wait, that's not fully correct. You must understand, when we say the Oracle and the Axolotl talked, that is the gist of what happened, but in detail it is wrong in as many ways as it is possible to be wrong and in a few ways that are impossible. They exchanged feelings and thoughts, but they did not physically talk.
They were not even physically in the same space. Or the same time. Transdimensional creatures have no limitations to space and time, which means that they find it difficult to make reservations at a nice restaurant.
Anyway.
What the Axolotl—for want of a better word—said might also be rendered as "You are a good mother to your adopted children." Or "You serve your purpose well." Or—well, general approval and consent, all right?
"What if—" the Oracle struggled a little with the concept and said "Dipper," though as we have seen she did not physically speak, and "Dipper" might have come across as "boy-marked-with-the-sign-of-the-confluence-of-stars-that-makes-him-special-to-our-purposes." But—"What if—Dipper—has not yet calmed the boy's impulsive urges to destruction and power?"
"You already know," the Axolotl said.
"In that event, Cipher has had his last chance. You must destroy him."
"A waste. But, yes."
The Oracle gathered her thoughts. "But that is not enough. This world must be—"
"Yes. As well. The time and place of Cipher's eradication must be sterilized."
The Oracle radiated sadness. "I do not want that to happen. I was against extending Cipher a second chance. You know this."
"I favor redemption. When redemption is possible."
"And I favor extermination, when no redemption is possible. Shall the Earth suffer for your mistaken hope?"
"Time will tell."
"You can change time."
"Yes."
"But you won't."
"No."
"If worst comes to worst—before you destroy it all—may—may I intervene? May I help Dipper? Rescue him, at least?"
"Hmm."
"That is no answer."
The Axolotl did the transdimensional equivalent of giving her an enigmatic smile. "I will have to think about that."
4
And meanwhile, insofar as that word has meaning when we speak of different dimensions and different realities, in the Valley around Gravity Falls, the insects left as detritus from the battle in which the humans took back the Falls from Bill and his hench-maniacs busied themselves.
They were not evil. Not at all. They had no wills, no intentions, no malice. They were only dimly aware that Earth creatures like Gnomes and humans and boy bands existed. Their biology was too different for them to feel any kinship with Earthly animals and plants.
They were just the litter of war. Bullets left on the battlefield. Buttons off a rotting uniform. A ring from the decomposed finger of a newly-married man who had enlisted to fight for the blue or the gray and who had unluckily been in the path of a bullet.
Just a souvenir of war.
But they buzzed in the warm mornings and evenings of May, finding flecks of gold, ingesting them, and flying to the stone effigy in the woods. They would land on it, creep about, and then excrete the gold. Fly away to find some more.
Little by little the statue began to acquire a shining patina.
The human eye couldn't even see it at first. Just random glints and glitters.
But the Cipher effigy was turning—oh, so slowly—to gold.
The End
Author's Note: Now and then I have to remind everyone that Gravity Falls is the property of Disney and of its creator Alex Hirsch. I do not own the show or its characters, and I make no money from writing these fanfictions. I do that just for my own satisfaction, to practice my craft as a writer, and, I hope, to please readers who enjoy fanfictions. This applies not only to this particular story, but to all my fanfictions about the little town just west of weird.