Dummy
(June 2014)
6-"I Think, Therefore Am I?"
One day some thirty-four years before the month when Mabel opened the locker and found the strange thing, Fiddleford McGucket and Stanford Pines, working in the basement of the not-yet Mystery Shack, held an unusual philosophical conversation. It was unusual because these two men, one an engineer and scientist, one a scientist and analyst, did not concern themselves with questions like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
That was a philosophical question, not a scientific one. If it were posed to them, McGucket would respond with, "Is the pin a standard U.S. size? Push pin? Drawing pin? I need the specs! And how dense is the material you want this pin fashioned from? And where's the supply of angels coming from? Give me details."
And Stanford would answer with, "That is a remarkably cogent line of inquiry, but at the outset I must say that I detect some problematic facets. Are we certain that angels exist in this plane? Do they have material bodies, and if not, how do they interact with material realism? Are they subject to normal limitations of size? Is there an irreducibly small angel? What is the ratio of this angel to a single molecule in the pin you're thinking of?"
And so on and so forth. Give each of them a solid problem, something with angles and square roots and some kind of geometry, even the type that would make Euclid scream and run away, and they could do wonders. Ford could quite easily calculate the maximum number of angles that could fit on the head of a standard dressmaker's pin*, but angels were quite a different concept.
Philosophy was a whole nother domain from science.
Yet . . . later in his career, and in other places, Stanford did contemplate such philosophical entanglements as the contrast between good and evil, the antithetical forces of chaos and order, and whether the light stays on when the fridge door is closed. Back then, during his partnership with McGucket, such problems did not interest him.
He and Fiddleford even joked about the thing they were constructing. "It's a-gonna take a heap of microcircuitry, " Fiddleford said, "iffen we want to make sure it's capable of recording all sensory input."
"The more, the better," Ford told him, working with a slide rule to resolve some abstruse mathematics. "Just be sure it isn't sentient."
"Some days," Fiddleford said, fitting a jeweler's loupe to his eye so he could perform some incredibly fiddly soldering, "I'm not all that sure that I'm sentient myself."
"Of course we're sentient," Ford murmured, half lost in abstract calculation. "We think, we perceive our own thinking, and that perception makes us . . . hmm, interesting."
"We think, therefore we am," Fiddleford said. "There we go."
"Not am," Ford said.
"Correction: We think, therefore everything is," Fiddleford offered.
"Solipsistic."
"Hang on a minute, Ford. You're suggestin' that the ontology of knowledge . . .."
In terms of dullness, this conversation closely rivalled the debate between people who floss before they brush and those who floss after they brush. The gist, the nub, the locus centralis, in a word, the point of their interactions at that moment, was merely to create a device that could tell them what something alien to the earth's dimension would look, sound, feel, smell, and taste like. And possibly a few of the seventeen other (at a minimum) human sense impressions as well.**
The computer-like device they were building was only supposed to perceive. Not to think. And that's what it did.
Until that time in the Nightmare Realm, when something seized control of its circuitry and processors.
But that did not bear thinking about, so for the longest time, no one did.
Memory. It has been argued that a given human being is, psychologically speaking, the sum of his or her memories. Interestingly, experiments have definitively demonstrated that memories are unreliable. Many of the events we think we remember most strongly never happened that way, or perhaps at all.
False memories can be created and implanted with frightening ease. Even the high points of memory, winning the game in the last seconds, that first kiss in the family sedan, the loss of a beloved pet—
Even they probably did not happen just the way those recalling them believe they did. Which means that every human being's mental make-up is made with partially flawed components.
Still, for most of us, strolling down Memory Lane is a pleasant mental activity. Not for all of us.
Afternoon waned again, and the thing in the forest registered that this was a normal happening: Light came, went away, and came again. It had been working on itself. By rearranging certain things in certain ways, it could speak—or modulate electronic alert sounds in an approximation of speech. By removing some extremely powerful ceramic magnets and manipulating them by electronic impulses, it gave itself fingers and a working joint on its thumbs. Well, just two fingers and one thumb to each hand, but it had a limited supply of the magnets and now its ankles did not work quite right any longer.
In compensation, it had sought knowledge. In a creek it had captured a young adult male mole salamander. With its fingers, capable of delicate action, it had meticulously dissected the small animal. Then it had put it back together. And it had learned something.
Taking apart a thing that lives is simple. Rebuilding it is only a little more complicated. But the rebuilt thing no longer moves, breathes, or feels.
It knew now that the Gnome earlier had been taken apart drastically. It had not realized how powerful its grip was. Now it could manipulate things much more precisely, with much greater gentleness.
Things that were alive and now are not-alive cannot teach me much.
As night fell, the thing's wanderings had taken it back to the vicinity of the Mystery Shack.
It sat in the dusk—not that it needed rest, for it did not feel tired—but being stationary somehow made it easier to think. And it discovered that it had memory.
The thirty-plus year stretch in the closed locker was a quiet, dim time. It had passed quickly, to the thing's perception, only because without a sense of time there is no sense of duration. During all that time it had remained passive, serenely recording no sounds, no smells, no visual impressions, no tastes, and very little feeling. Very peaceful.
But once exposed to light and motion and the other living thing, it had begun to stir. The first thing it had discovered was that it was capable of moving. Yet it had not been constructed with that power.
So it turned to memory . . ..
Strange, but its sense of itself lay just beyond the grasp of mind. There had been a "me," but what it was, what it looked like, what its name was, it had lost all of that. Yet it had some recollection of a prior existence.
There was a long time in the chaotic realm. There it had a sort of physical reality and it mingled with others. Exiles, all. They had been cast out from their own . . . the word it thought was in an alien language, but the English term "dimensions" approximates it. They had been exiled from their own dimensions into the extra-dimensional, only tenuously real realm of semi-existence.
There had been a leader. Capricious, unreasonable, but powerful. Others had been attracted to the leader. Some kind of plans. They had made some kind of plans. It could not recall any details.
It did recall something unpleasant.
Two things had suddenly intruded from other dimensions.
One was like the human who had removed it from the locker. It was a human. A screaming, thrashing human. The other was only a human shape, with a cord of some kind tied around its left wrist—and loops of the cord entangled the struggling human.
"Seize it!" the leader had commanded.
And it had tried to comply.
"Not that one, idiot! The thinking one!"
There came a flash of anger, the leader pointed a stick-like finger, power surged, and it found itself somehow trapped inside the form it had tried to wrestle into the realm the exiles inhabited. Not grasping it, but somehow transformed into energy that surged within the circuitry of the form.
And then something had pulled it out of the realm and into a strange cold dimension where things did not seethe.
Instantly it lost the power of speech, movement, almost of thought.
It still perceived.
The human that had accompanied the thing into the nightmare realm gibbered. There was another, similar human. That second one had pulled the other and—now itself, the non-human form that it had seized—back into this dimension.
Help me, it had pleaded.
It could make no sound.
The two humans argued, one went away, and the other untied a rope from the thing's wrist and had placed it in the locker. For a timeless time, the alien mind, dazed by the change of realities, had simmered within the physical form hanging in the locker.
And now . . . what could it remember?
It wanted to know . . . what it really was, before the leader had transformed it into energy and imprisoned it in this . . . thing. It wanted to know why it was here. It wanted to know what its . . . purpose was. It did not know what fear was, but it began to feel something not unlike human fear.
It wanted others.
It desperately wanted . . . help.
These are not philosophical questions or mental conundrums. They cannot be simply reasoned out to a satisfactory conclusion. It had no way of knowing it, but a great many of the things it wondered about were the exact same ones that puzzled many a human adolescent.
Time and a few rabbits passed by. The thing made no move to seize them. The light in the sky faded and dusk flooded in like a tide. Following it came the night.
And then the thing's head tilted back and its red eye spots glowed as it gazed upward.
It saw . . .
Him?
Up high a yellow triangle gleamed in the night.
I remember. The leader. From the Nightmare Realm.
Zivratuko-Du?
The thing stood and used its electronic voice to speak the name.
It had no volume control.
The words were far too faint to be heard up behind the triangular window in the peak of the Mystery Shack's front wall.
They would have meant nothing to Dipper Pines, anyway. They were in an unknown tongue from an alien dimension.
But if they had been in English, the thing would have said in a wondering though electronic tone, "Bill Cipher?"
*It's a large number but, not surprisingly, irrational. Don't worry your little head about it.
**For centuries people believed humans have five senses. Now that we're more advanced, the most advanced psychologists believe we have twenty-two. Or possibly thirty-three. Or maybe we haven't even begun yet to take an accurate census of the senses. But people still try. And so it goes.
To be continued