Future Tense

(April and July 2018)

1-Chubby Guy, Cloudy Future

Some things never change. That's not right. In fact, all things change, only some very slowly. The pyramid, for example, arose in ancient Egypt because it is a super-stable form of construction. Build one right, anchor it on bedrock, and that sucker's there for millennia. Oh, it may be covered by rising seas or by sand dunes that grow a quarter-inch every ten years, but it will still be there, right where you put it, for thousands and thousands of years.

It may erode, given the right climactic conditions. Human agency may strip it of stone cladding or blocks, to be repurposed elsewhere. But, generally speaking, pyramids are sturdy, unchanging structures. Nearly unchanging. Rarely does one change rapidly.

Now, Bill Cipher had changed rapidly. Not just his mental form, the physical one he abandoned when he invaded the mind of (as he falsely believed) Stanford Pines. It was actually Stanley Pines's mind he entered, and in it Stan punched out Cipher, reducing him to insubstantiality, too weak to reclaim his physical form, which had been left behind as a smallish sandstone pyramid.

However, substantial though these forms are, that one failed to last. It crumbled to powder between August 2012 and some time in 2017. Before that happened, Stanford Pines had sealed it in a cage of steel bars, fearful that some force, maybe Bill himself, was attempting to reconstruct and vitalize it.

Whether the cage had anything to do with it or Bill Cipher's awareness, now fully relocated to the human boy Billy Sheaffer, was more responsible, the pyramid inside the cage had simply crumbled to sand. Unlike Ozymandias, in passing Cipher had left not even a shattered visage and two vast and trunkless legs behind. Cipher was gone, man, solid gone.

Therefore, Stanley Pines's solitary visit to the site might be regarded as a little questionable. His memory had been wiped when Cipher was erased, and he had been slowly regaining it over six years, almost. He still had blank spots, though operating as it does, by association, his recollection slowly, steadily grew.

You know how it is. A random whiff of something, maybe dry-erase markers, plumps you mentally down in the middle of your third-grade classroom, with Mrs. Devrey standing writing out a sentence, her big butt moving, the little fat bags under her upper arm doing a happy dance, and for a moment it's like you're right there, because you associate the scent of markers with that place, that time.

Or, another example, some idiot coming the other way on a rain-slick road tries to pass a truck, and without warning, there in your lane the car looms, right in front of you, and by instinct alone you yank the wheel and your car goes thumpity-bump onto the grassy shoulder and down the embankment, nearly but not quite, thank God, rolling over.

You know you'll have to shell out money for a tow truck and then you discover you blew a tire and have to call Triple-A, and while you sit there on the shoulder waiting in the dark, a cold rain riffing on your windshield, you reflect on how strange it was that in the instant you saw the approaching headlights, you felt as if you were ten years old again and sitting in the back seat of your dad's Caravan that night when he yelled, "Brace!" and the van smacked an unfortunate deer (in dreams you still feel the jolt and hear the spang and the scream of rubber on asphalt) and went spinning madly off the road and into a creek.

One memory prods another, and so it goes.

Stan's memory came back like that, bits at a time, one thing jostling another. First time he went to Vegas after Weirdmageddon, he started to sit in on a poker game and with his hand on the back of the chair, all at once he remembered, My God, I got married here years ago!

His wife's image swam in his mind's eye and then he remembered, Great marriage, it lasted six hours. Why was that? Oh, yeah, Rico's goons were after me.

And there he was, in the same casino where that hot mess happened. He changed his mind about the game, though.

What creatures we are. We swim through a sea of memories. In fact, for the most part we are memories. Our lives are the sums of our experiences, and those experiences are stored as memory.

These reflections did not go through Stanley's mind as he stood beside the empty cage on that spring day. His trip had nothing to do with recovering forgotten moments. He'd received a message. Well, a good many, all at the same time. An early-morning telephone call had wakened him and after he gruffly said, "Yah?" an odd artificial voice said, "Be at the Cipher statue site, nine this morning." Click.

When he fired up his computer to check on the morning news, a blue screen popped up with big white letters: CIPHER STATUE SITE 9 AM TODAY.

When he turned on the dining-room TV a few minutes later, a newsreader looked up, seemingly straight at him, and said, "This just in. Be at the Cipher statue site by nine."

Weirdly, Sheila, Stan's wife, was right beside him and when he asked, "What'd that guy just say?" she set down her coffee cup, stared at him blankly and then replied, "The Senate just approved the Supreme Court nominee."

She had not noticed the newscaster's mention of nine A.M. and the Cipher statue.

Crap, it's something paranormal, Stan thought.

That caused him to walk down the Mystery Trail and to wade through the overgrown grass to the small clearing where the Cipher effigy had landed in August 2012. He stood beside the empty steel cage, his feet wet from dew, just before nine in the morning of old Bill Shakespeare's probable birthday as the seconds clicked down to nine on the dot.

Stan wasn't much surprised when a guy beamed into existence, like the guys on the old Star Trek TV show that Ford used to love to watch. He was a pudgy fellow with Coke-bottle glasses and brown hair, and he wore like a blue-gray disco suit or something. He said, "D-do no-not be alarmed! I, I, I mean you no-no harm!"

"Yeah, well, you ain't all that alarming," Stan said gruffly. "You're the time-travel guy, right?"

"I'm Blendin Benjamin Blandin," the guy said, miraculously without stuttering. "And y-yes, I c-come from the year Twenty Snyeventy Th-thirty-one. We-we of the Time Paradox Avoidance and Elimination squad want you to d-do something f-for us."

"Who's 'we,' what do you want, and what's in it for me?" Stan asked.

"F-first, you are Stanley F. P-Pines and not his b-b-br-bro, twin Stanford?"

"Yeah," Stan said. "You want my ID?"

"Not nuh-necessary if you'll l-let me suh-scan you."

"If I do, you gotta marry me," Stanley said. When Blandin just looked shocked, he added, "That's a joke. Yeah, I guess."

"Th-this won't hu-hurt," Blandin said, holding out something that looked a little like a cell phone and a little like nothing else. Blendin pushed a button or something, like the doctor in Star Trek who pointed his salt-shaker thing at a guy and said, "He's dead, Jim."

However, Blandin said, "Your mo-mo-morphological suh-stats check out. Listen, I've got all the tuh-time in the world, b-but let's do this quick. You know wh-what a tuh-time line is?"

"Yeah, I think so," Stan said. "My nerdy brother and nerdy nephew talk about that sometimes. It's like there's a whole mess of other universes that are nearly like ours but not completely, right? Like some guy does something and that causes a new time line to branch off. In one time line, in the distant past some guy eats a random butterfly, so in that one in the present New York is named You Nork. In the other one, the butterfly eats the guy, and in that one it's New Cocoon."

"R-roughly," Blandin said.

"So how come you want me to do your dirty work?" Stan asked. "Somethin' needs changing, you do it yourself."

"It do-doesn't w-work that way. Changes are un-unstable unless they o-o-originate within the ti-time line itself."

"OK, to keep you from having to repeat, I'll say I accept that. So what do you want me to do? And why do I hafta do it?"

For a moment Blandin looked as if he didn't know whether to respond or not. Then he said reluctantly, "Our puh-problem is that if we don't do-do anything, th-this time line is going to lo-lose Suh-Soos."

Stan tensed, his fists clenching. "Say what?"

"I c-can't guh-give you details, suh-sorry. It's vi-vitally i-important to us that Soos luh-lives. The puh-pivot point's coming up this Juh-July. If I can puh-persuade you to take a certain c-course of action, this t-time line will be puh-preserved and the alternate w-won't happen."

"OK, I think I'm getting' some of this. Look, I don't mean to insult you, but try singin' instead of talkin'. Sometimes that helps control a stammer. Hey, didja know that stammering is a mark of high intelligence?"

Looking surprised, Blandin sang in a passable tenor, "I'll try that and see if it helps. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, well I'll be darned, and thank you Mr. Pines!" The tune wasn't much, but it might charitably be called musical.

"So sing out what you want me to do," Stan said.

"I have to give you," Blendin trilled, "a disturbing glimpse of the future!"

If anyone had happened along, they would have thought something very odd was going on as a tubby guy in a jumpsuit serenaded a grumpy-looking fellow in a red fez and black suit.

And they'd be right.

So now it was July, and Stan stood on the steps of the City Hall with Mayor Cutebiker, who addressed not only Shaundra Jimenez and Toby Determined—reporters—but also an assembled crowd of about a hundred citizens who had nothing else to do at eleven on a Saturday morning.

"Fellow Gravity Fallers!" Tyler Cutebiker said, "Speaking as Mayor, I'd like to thank you all for your support over these past six years for me as Mayor. It's been a great ride for me, your Mayor, and I hope you find your lives better today than they were during never mind all that."

A listless cheer went up.

"Thank you," Tyler said. "But at this point in my career as Mayor, I want to pursue some other pursuits. Like parachuting! That's on my bucket list. Oh, and adding to my bucket collection! But it wouldn't be fair to you if I, your Mayor, split my time, because as you know, being Mayor, which I am, requires a person's full-time concentration. Therefore, as my first term in office winds down, I am retiring from my position as Mayor of Gravity Falls."

A somewhat more enthusiastic cheer rose.

With his hands on his hips, Tyler said in a mincing sort of way, "Now, all you know that the City Council has implemented some changes in the old laws. In the future, marriage to woodpeckers is not legally sanctioned."

"Aw!" said a disappointed voice from the crowd.

Tyler waved his finger. "Now, now! This change does not affect current arrangements! And what you do on your own time will not be challenged, so long as the other party does not object. Whatever you and a woodpecker want to do is your business, as long as you and the bird both consent. Live and let live is our motto now."

Someone else called out, "I thought it was West of Weird."

"It is," Tyler said. "But I was speaking metaphorically. Anyway, I'm stepping down as Mayor of Gravity Falls. Now, as you know" (most of them didn't) "we have also overhauled the election code, so that from now on, instead of relying on eagles and birdseed and what-not, we're going to have plain old boring elections. It's the American way!"

A voice in the crowd chanted, "USA! USA! USA!"

Tyler nodded. "I am going to recommend a friend of mine and a leading citizen of our community and Justice of the Peace at large, Mr. Stanley Pines, whose criminal record has been expunged, to replace me as Mayor. Of course, we'll throw open the election to any other candidate who qualifies by coming to my office, the Mayor's office of me, the Mayor, to sign the candidate's book by the deadline of five PM next Monday. Then we'll have a week of campaigning, and then on Tuesday, July 17, we will cast our votes. Stanley, do you want to say a few words?"

Stan shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. I'm not gonna stand here and tell you I've been an angel. I haven't. But like Tyler, who's the Mayor of Gravity Falls" (Tyler swelled visibly) "has told you, my record has been cleared, and I've been on the straight and narrow for these past six years."

A woman called out, "You and your brother gave us the free clinic! They saved my daughter's life! Bless you, Stanley Pines!"

Manly Dan, way in the back, boomed out, "You bring Woodstick back every year! Them tourists spend money! Best of all, Sev'ral Timez always visits!"

Stan waved his big hands. "OK, right, yeah, I'm a businessman, right? If you elect me Mayor, I'll carry on Tyler's tradition and work for the betterment of all." He hesitated. Blendin Blandin had told him some things, but he wasn't sure if he was supposed to keep them secret. Well—maybe he could avoid detail. He took a deep breath and resumed, "I'm not gonna lie to you. Some hard times are comin'. I'll help us get ready to face them. We'll all have to hang tough and be strong, but I pledge that if I'm your Mayor, Gravity Falls will sail through the rough times and emerge not worse, but better. And I promise to work for the benefit of all."

The crowd applauded, and afterward, some shook his hand and wished him well.

But in Gravity Falls, you can never be too sure about anything.

This was going to be a worrying week.