Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 16-17, 2017)
12: What Could Possibly?
That evening they all met again in Ford's laboratory. Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy were tired after a long day of hot retail action. Stanford seemed none the worse for having lost sleep and burning the candle at the Shack end, the Institute of Anomalous Sciences end, and the Guys in Black end (he had to authorize a Chupacabra investigation in south Texas, though he grumbled, "It'll be a coyote with mange. It almost always is.").
He had filled all the pages in a yellow legal pad front and back with arcane mathematics, spitball hypotheses and means of proving them, and doodles of computer-component schematics, some of which would give a sane engineer (if there were such a being) a fit of hysterics followed by nightmares. "I think I have at least a partial solution," he said. "But we need to test the process to see if it will work."
"This isn't another Portal dealey, is it?" Mabel asked with evident apprehension.
"No, not at all," Ford said. "It's completely different. In a few respects. And there's at least a seventy per cent chance that it won't allow the Dreamscape to leak into our reality. Perhaps even seventy-two!"
"Dreamscape or Mindscape?" Dipper asked. Once he had assumed they were different names for the same thing—but Stanford had told him that was not quite the case. "The Dreamscape is, if you will, an appendage of the Mindscape," Stanford said. "The Mindscape is the greater realm—it spreads across at least several thousand dimensions, and maybe many, many more. The Dreamscape is centered on our reality. It's the realm from which dreams and nightmares come—I really should think of a better name for the Nightmare Realm, because it's something different, a physical reality that is less a dimension than a ragged kind of interdimensional foam, populated by exiles and criminals from a thousand million worlds. However, for the time being, we can say that the Dreamscape is the realm of ideas and memories that sleeping human minds can access at times—"
Well, we don't need the whole lecture. We're not enrolled in Paranormal Studies 1102: Realms of Reality, taught by Dr. Stanford Pines. That's enough.
One thing that Dipper had learned, or taught himself on his own, was that he could visit the Dreamscape. At first the passageway had been through the sleeping mind of Grunkle Stan back when Bill Cipher had slipped into Stan's sleeping mind to discover the combination to the Shack's safe—which he had done, through a complex con job that involved his impersonating Soos.
Since then, through autosuggestion, Dipper could send himself into REM sleep and will his consciousness into lucid dreams. In them he had visited the incorporeal form of Bill Cipher, who had alternately messed with him, advised him, and at least once saved his life. Now Cipher, fading fast from the Mindscape, lacked the energy to penetrate the barrier into the Dreamscape to chat with Dipper.
But Dipper could still explore the land of dreams.
That evening, under Stanford's direction they rigged up an odd kind of platform. The base was a three-foot-on-a-side square covered with alternating layers of aluminum foil and damp blotting paper wet with a saline solution. Copper alligator clips on diagonally opposed corners led to a jury-rigged contraption made of pegboard, printed circuits, arcane components that were at best half real, and for some reason a toy monkey whose mouth opened and closed, whose eyes bugged out, and whose arms moved as he banged together cymbals and chattered.
The monkey, of course, was the key component.
At midnight, with Wendy, Mabel, and Dipper looking on, Stanford fired up the device. Buzzers buzzed, bells tinkled, beepers beeped, multicolored lights flashed, and finally the monkey solemnly banged the cymbals.
"We are ready for the test," Stanford said. "Dipper—you're the contact on the other end. Put yourself into the Dreamscape and find the monkey."
"I'll try," he said. He went into the niche where Ford had once stored his collection of Cipher memorabilia, dropped a cushion on the floor, and sat on it. He closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and let himself drop into a light autosuggestive trance. As the sounds of the lab faded, he breathed slowly and regularly.
And then he opened his eyes in a dream. As always, the Dreamscape was a gray-scale realm, blacks, whites, and probably at least fifty shades of gray, but no color. Colors did exist, but they were rare here.
He was still in a version of the lab and still in the basement of the Shack, except the Shack had pulled itself apart. Now the first floor—he could see the underside of the building, floor joists and flooring, floating twenty feet above. The basement had risen and now seemed to be on the ground level. It lacked a ceiling now, and through the gap between walls and floating Shack, Dipper could glimpse distorted pine trees and even the totem pole, leaning over so the top figure, Kolus, younger brother of the Thunderbird, could peer inside.
"Sorry," it said. "Always been curious about what's inside there. Did Mabel get her pig back?"
"Oh, yeah," Dipper told it. "He's got a daughter now and he's living a happy life on a farm."
"Good." The totem pole straightened back up. Dipper wondered what he was supposed to do next. That was one of the problems of visiting the Dreamscape—your thoughts became mushy, and remembering who and where you were and what you were about became problematic.
"I'm supposed to listen for . . . something," he told himself aloud. "What is it?"
The only thing he could really hear was an annoying clattering. If I can stop that, maybe I can hear whatever it is I'm listening for.
Somehow the basement had transformed into a maze. Dipper threaded through it, the clattering growing louder—and then he saw the toy monkey sitting on the floor, mindlessly banging its cymbals.
As he looked down on it—
Sheets of lined paper showed up, materializing on the floor. Dipper leaned down and picked them up. One had Mabel's handwriting on it;
When you had an accident in second grade, I gave you my spare pair of panties to wear.
Dipper blinked. He had forgotten that! On a cold morning as they got off the school bus, he had—leaked just a little big, and he'd started to cry in embarrassment. Mabel had reached way down into her bookbag and had handed him a pair of underwear—she sometimes sat on dusty or paint-spattered or damp surfaces, and her mom had started making her pack a spare—and said, "Hurry and put these on. Nobody will know."
He had wrapped his own damp underwear in sheets of paper towels and had tossed them into the bathroom waste bin. It had worked. He felt weird, but he had got through the day and as soon as they came home that afternoon, he'd put on proper boys' underwear. And he'd had to talk Mabel out of putting her pair that he'd worn into her scrapbook . . . .
The other note was from Wendy. It read,
For a day or two, I thought my mother might have been a gerbil.
That made Dipper grin. Manly Dan, suspecting his daughter was getting serious about a boy, had sort of tricked Wendy into getting a serious beer buzz to get the truth from her. He'd happened to let something slip: "Remember, your mama was a Berble." Because of a serious feud between Dan and his wife's family, Wendy had never known her mom's maiden name—or, for that matter, her own middle name. She knew the initial but had thought her middle name was "Barbara" for as long as she could remember.
No, it was "Berble," in honor of Amanda Berble Corduroy. However, in her tipsy state, she'd heard what Dan said as, "your mama was a gerbil."
And since it was Gravity Falls—
Luckily, that got straightened out quickly. A final sheet of paper materialized at his feet. It bore Stanford's neat handwriting:
You told me something about yourself that even Stanley did not remember. What was it? As soon as you get these messages, return and try to bring them with you.
Clutching the pages, Dipper sat on the floor, closed his eyes, and willed himself to—
"He's waking up," Mabel said.
"And you brought back the papers!" Wendy said. "Good job, man!"
"Now, now," Stanford said. "Let's make sure we succeeded. Mason, you should have had messages from Wendy and Mabel about personal information. Did you?"
He nodded. "Mabel reminded me of when she lent me something personal in the second grade. Wendy mentioned the time when she first learned what her middle name really was. And you meant that Grunkle Stan didn't remember that my real name is Mason. He knew that, but he hadn't seen us in so long that he forgot it."
"Give the messages back to the people who wrote them."
Dipper passed them out. Mabel said, "Yep, this is mine. See?" she flipped the paper over and showed a very small thumbnail sketch of Waddles's face.
"Mine, too," Wendy said. "But I just put a pattern of nine dots on the back of mine."
"And this is my message," Ford said. "Very well. We know now that the transporter can send material objects into the Dreamscape. The two constructs do have a material component—the insects in the case of the false Wendy, and molecules of air in the case of the Mason one."
"I hope they'll be happy with each other," Wendy said. "Me, I think I'd have to strangle Dippy sooner or later."
"Will that work, though?" Dipper asked. "I mean, even in the Dreamscape can they survive?"
"I think they should," Stanford said. "They have enough consciousness and sentience to become more real—in their own definition of that term—in the Dreamscape than here in the material realm. The Wendy construct will become, for all practical purposes, a human; the Mason construct should eventually develop a quasi-material reality."
"Won't they be lonely?" Mabel asked.
"Not necessarily," Stanford said. "People visit the Dreamscape nightly. They'll be able to meet anyone who dreams of Gravity Falls. It will be a weird kind of existence, but the two of them should be able to adjust. And there—as in Mabel's bubble—they can be any age. Perhaps they'll mature, or perhaps they'll be happier regressing to childhood. But dreamers will awaken thinking of them only as passing visions and memories, not as real people, and the constructs won't perish there—assuming they survive the passage."
"You'll have to explain that to them," Mabel said. "But Xyler and Craz—they're different. They can't go back to Dream Boys High, because there's no such place. It's just a movie!"
"I'm working on that, too," Stanford said. "Were you able to find the videotape?"
"Yeah," Mabel said. "It was under my old bed upstairs, in a box of stuff. But it's in bad shape. I mean, my Mom had it when she was a teen, and there were a couple places where the picture and the sound went way off, all glitchy and scratchy."
"Give it to me before you go to bed," Stanford said. "I just may be able to use it to resolve the boys' issue."
"Bill Cipher could make this so much easier," Dipper said. "If he were here."
"I don't believe he can directly interface with you any longer," Stanford said. "I'm sure that young Billy Sheaffer could be the intermediate—but do you want to involve him?"
Dipper had already had the argument with himself: Billy Sheaffer might be able to help, might even be able to re-create a version of Mabel's bubble for the rogue entities who had somehow survived its bursting.
But—Bill Cipher was supposed to be learning how to live an ordinary life as a human and, with all the restrictions of that, to make himself better than he had been. Creating artificial realities, intervening in the lives of sentient creatures—that might set Billy on a wrong, destructive path.
"No," he said. "I don't think we should ask that much of him."
"I hope the duplicates and the movie guys will agree to what we're doing," Wendy said.
Ford nodded and replied, "The choice is between a kind of life and oblivion. I think I can predict which they will choose."
"I just hope when I'm dreaming, I never see Dippy Fresh," Dipper said. "And that when I dream of Wendy—I only dream of my Wendy."
"Sweet, dude," Wendy said.
"Well," Mabel said, "I hope that now and then I'll dream of Dippy Fresh. He's like the baby I never had."
"Thank God," Dipper said.
Because that was crazy creepy on more levels than he wanted to think about.