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    Chapter 10: The Madman's Tale



    Dipper, Wendy, and McGucket poked their way through the depths of the alien spacecraft, and finally arrived at sector 43: the portion of the cargo area that they theorized once contained robotic life forms. They pried the door open with great difficulty, and stood staring in.

    It wasn’t at all what they expected.

    “Well… That’s… Somthing.” Dipper said.

    “Yeah… Wait, no it’s not.” Wendy disagreed. “It’s not something! It’s literally nothing.”

    “Yep. Nothin’.” McGucket agreed.

    Because when they pried the door open, there was no sector 43; there was only a solid wall of dirt.

    “So how would this even happen?” Dipper pondered out loud.

    “Wull, this here honkytonk is underground…” McGucket reminded him. “Has been fer thousands a years… Just a matter a’ sludge and hogwash erodin’ down off the hills, and gravity has its merry way from there…”

    “But… The hull…” Dipper said. “The hull would be in the way… I guess the roof must have collapsed?”

    “Well.” Wendy shrugged. “If this did have escaped metal life, that would mean there’s were a bunch of critters running around with saws in there…”

    “Yeah, but… But would they really chop up the entire roof??”

    “Okay, I don’t know…”

    The only other interesting thing about sector 43 were the words carved above the door. Although Dipper had seen words written or painted around the ship a few times, these ones were actually etched into the metal. As if their writers had a saw or grinder of some kind… Which was too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence. He pointed the tablet at them, took a picture, and had it translate. He had hoped for something profound, but was disappointed.

    “ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ were here.” He read.

    “Oh HO!” Wendy scoffed, as she immediately removed and unzipped her backpack. “Is that how you want to play it, mysterious ancient aliens? Fine then! FOUR can play at THAT game!” She removed a neon green can of spray paint from her pack, shook it up, and wrote Dipper and Wendy were here next to the carvings.

    McGucket found this disrespectful and unprofessional, although Dipper thought it was a riot.

    “So who were those two, anyway?” Dipper asked outloud, after they’d finished laughing. “ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ...?” He tried to pronounce the symbols, but it was much too hard.

    “Just make up some normal names for them.” Wendy suggested. “Like… Like Betty and Barney, or something. I don’t know, Mabel could probably do better…”

    “Betty and Barney it is, then.” Dipper nodded. “Yeah… Betty and Barney were here… So who were they? Were they more specimens? Or part of the crew? Or passengers…?”

    “I don’t know.” Wendy shrugged. “Could have been anyone, really… But back to the problem at hand: Sector 43 is missing a ceiling, and filled with dirt. Short of borrowing my cousin’s excavator for about a month, how do we find out what was in there?”

    Dipper considered this. “Well… Huh… I guess that if there’s giant holes in the roof, then chances are there’s giant holes in the walls too, right? So if there was metal life in 43, we should probably check in sectors 42 on the left, and 44 on the right. That’s where they would have breached through.”

    “Right tootin’!” McGucket slapped his knee. “Wull then, I’ll give 42 a lookie, and you kids scrabdoodle off to 44!”

    “Got it.” Dipper nodded.

    “Don’t let the grammar hit you on the way out!” Wendy jested, as they turned to head back the way they’d come. McGucket went off the other direction, hamboning a playful tune on his thigh.







    Dipper and Wendy arrived in cargo area 44, and it was pretty much how they expected.

    Beyond the sliding door, they found a massive room, the size of a warehouse, and high enough that their headlamp beams didn’t reach the ceiling. The entire space was filled with gigantic hexagonal crates suspended on large, honeycombed racks, with barely room enough to walk between them.

    Sector 44 was a mess, same as everywhere else. But this mess considerably messier. Here, not only the small things were broken, but also the computers, the equipment, the floor, the walls, the lights… Everything was cut all to pieces. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling in tattered tangles. The terminals on the walls were totally gutted. The walls had cavities. The cargo containers were cut open, and much of their freight was spilled about. Everywhere there were scratches and saw marks.

    And as for the wall this sector would have shared with 43… The wall had been torn half away, and mountains of dirt and deposit had spilled through the missing half, partially filling 44 and destroying many of the cargo racks. Great tree roots, having groped their way down from the distant surface, peaked out of the mess here and there.

    “Yep.” Wendy nodded. “This is about what I expected.”

    They started to walk into the room to explore it, but suddenly something sharp caught Dipper in the leg, and he yelped with pain.

    He looked down.

    A large panel of the floor had been torn up, revealing some electrical lines. And out of those electrical lines, there grew a tangle of metal weeds. They were long dead, and their solar panels had rotted away, but they were still sharp, and they still stood as evidence of the type of chaos which once inhabited this room.

    “Ah. Well, there we go.” Dipper nodded. “There’s metal plants at least…”

    “Ooh! Dead killer robots! What a welcome change of pace!” Dipper turned to see Wendy examining a broken security drone. Strangely, this drone appeared perfectly intact on the outside. There wasn’t a single scratch or crack in its shell, although the glass appeared fogged up on the inside. “I wonder what did this guy in?” Wendy wondered out loud.

    “I don’t know… Why’s it all fogged up?”

    Dipper helped Wendy pry open the drone’s hatch, and they saw what had happened.

    The drone had been eaten from the inside out. Although the drone’s outer glass shell was too hard for saws to cut, its mechanical innards were all exposed on the inside. And all these parts (power source, weapons systems, arms, etc.) had all been chopped up or eaten entirely.

    As for the trapped robot that had done the damage… It was still there. It was long dead, and mostly decayed, but it was still recognizable. It looked almost identical to Juan and his mom, but about the size of a wolf, and with more pronounced saws. Obviously still the same species, just a different breed.

    “Wow.” Wendy said, looking at the cat-bot. “Miserable way to go, huh? Starving to death inside a tiny glass bubble?”

    “Yeah…” Dipper scratched his head. “…No kidding…”

    They looked around at the rest of bay 44. There were a few more offline security drones, and a few more metal plants. Wendy put her hands on her hips. “Welp.” She surmised. “It’s official now. The robots are all aliens, and broke out of sector 43.”

    “Yep.” Dipper nodded. “Aliens confirmed. Alien robots confirmed. Illuminati confirmed. Halflife 3 confirmed… Everything confirmed.”

    “Really dude?” Wendy scoffed. “You’re memeing now?”

    “Well, uh… Yeah, it just came to me I guess.”

    “General Pineobi.” She said in a general Grievous voice. “You are a bold one.”

    “…Is that a meme? I thought that was just a line from Revenge of the Sith.”

    “Everything from the prequel trilogy is a meme.” She shrugged. “Anyway, back to the task at hand.”

    “Right.” He nodded. “Right. So. They’re aliens. Broke out of sector 43.”

    “But that doesn’t really explain much, y’know?” Wendy frowned. “Like, sure they’re aliens, but so what? I still have a lot of questions.”

    “What questions?” Dipper asked.

    “First of all.” Wendy stuck up her index finger, as if beginning a list. “If the metal life is from HERE, how did it get all the way out to the Forest of Daggers? It’s, like, 12 miles… Who moved it, and how?”

    Dipper shrugged. “Maybe they took off the ceiling of 43, turned it over, put all the robots on it, and used it like a sled…? Of course, I don’t know how they’d do that…”

    “Yeah.” Wendy shook her head. “Okay, now second question. WHY was this ship hauling a truckload of metal animals? These things are dangerous enough to eat a death drone alive! What the heck were they thinking bringing these along?”

    Dipper shrugged again.

    “Third question.” She counted off another finger. “In this ship, there’s the probatorium, which is for studying new specimens, and that’s sectors 1 through 12… And then there’s the passenger area, which is sectors 13 through 24… But then ‘organic cargo’, is sectors 25 through freakin’ 48… My question is: what the heck does ‘organic cargo’ mean??”

    Dipper scratched his head. “Questions 2 and 3 are basically the same question.”

    “Forth question.” She continued. “What caused this ship to crash?”

    “Well… I don’t know that either. None of the diagnostic logs seemed to give any clues… Even Granny Shifter’s log hazed over the issue…”

    “Yeah. Well, fifth question…” She lowered her voice. “The guy we just ran into down here… Is he the real McGucket??”

    Dipper’s eyes grew wide, and he looked back the way they came. “Uh… I don’t know… The shifter is still in stasis in Ford’s lab; I checked a couple days ago… But… Wait… Are you saying…?”

    “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We know from her tube’s label that Granny Shifter was ‘pregnant’, but we don’t know with how many… And if they all survived for this long… Or if she had a whole batch of eggs, or mixed twins or something… They could have--!”

    Dipper (being a mixed twin himself) was quick to correct her. “TMI!”

    “Yeah, yeah, sorry… Just had to get that out there, though… There could be hundreds of them, dude. Cross our fingers and hope our mutual friend was a single child… But just saying.”

    “Okay… Well… Well… If McGucket is the shapeshifter… Or a shapeshifter… It’s certainly done its reading, much more than last time… It knew Stanford and Stanley were routinely down here… It knew that we confronted the metal life yesterday… It knew McGucket’s taken to building himself robot trousers… Heck, it even knew he uses the word ‘scrabdoodle’!”

    “Yeah, but… But…” Wendy said. “Okay, now I’ve got me paranoid: what’s your name?”

    “Mason. Middle?”

    “Blerble.”

    They both sighed.

    “Can’t keep doing this.” Wendy said.

    “Yeah.” Dipper agreed. “Not knowing who to trust.”

    “Totally.”

    “…Let’s rendezvous with McGucket.” Dipper decided. “Then head down to the engine room and download more data for Ford… See if we can find any more clues about the crash… Then we get the heck out of here.”

    “Okay… And when we leave, let’s head straight to McGucket’s mansion, and see if he’s there too. If he is, that means he either has super-speed, or this one is a fake… But for now, we just keep an eye on him, but don’t give him a single hint that we suspect him.”

    “Good idea.”

    “Yeah.”

    “Yeah.”

    Twenty minutes later, not far from the blocked 43 entrance, they came around a corner and ran almost straight into the old man himself. He seemed to have changed significantly in the hour since they’d seen him; and not in a good way. It wasn’t his body, number of limbs, or eyeballs that had shifted, it was his mannerisms: he had an insane look in his eye now, a shaking in his hands, and he was on the verge of complete panic.

    “EGAD!” He screeched when he saw the teens. “I don’t—I GEE! I WUZZIT?!? Who-who-who… Are yeh youuuu?!?” To their surprise, he reached into his overalls and pulled out an impressively large ray gun.

    “WHOA!” Dipper yelped, fell on his butt, and raised his hands in surrender.

    “Calm down there, bucko…” Wendy took a step back, and raised her hands too. “Whaddaya mean?”

    “I saw… I saw…” He reached into his overalls again, and pulled out a beefy, steel computer. “I saw words!” He turned the screen toward them. “Words on a wall! Written in blood!” He explained, and read. “Loose mimic outside sector 8… No one to trust! That’s what it said, an’ I know it’s true! ‘Cause I done seen one! Years ago in Ford’s lab, an’ it mimicked PEOPLE! How do I know ya ain’t ‘em?!?”

    Dipper and Wendy looked at each other. “We were about to ask you the same thing…” Dipper said.

    McGucket gasped for air, and his eyes seemed to bulge out of his head. “I can’t… I’m the one doin’ the talkin’ and the askin’ here, Barney!!”

    “Barney?” Wendy asked.

    “Same gits fer you, Betty!” McGucket took several steps back, and his fingers closed around the trigger. “Yeh aliens… YEH ALIENS! Just up an’ give… Gimme my robopants and glue back!”

    Wendy set the pants on the ground, and kicked them over without a complaint. Dipper did the same for the crate of adhesive.

    “An’ raise yer hands!” McGucket yelped, as he reached down to put on the robo-pants (he seemed to have forgotten that their computer was still fried).

    Dipper and Wendy didn’t move.

    “AH SAID RAISE ‘EM!!” His gun was shaking as he gestured to their hands.

    “Umm…” Dipper looked up at his raised hands. “They are raised…”

    “ALL OF ‘EM!” McGucket was close to tears. “I kinuht deal with yer alien ways! Raise all yer other weird appendages and doohickies and thingums!”

    “Dude.” Wendy told him. “Calm down.”

    “YE ALL CALM DOWN!”

    “McGucket, you’re not thinking clearly.” Dipper said, and took another step back. “We don’t have any more limbs to raise. Slow down…”

    “Take a deep breath…” Wendy added.

    “I’M WARNIN’ YEH!” McGucket’s shaking hands pointed the ray gun downward, and released a shot into the floor between them. The passage was instantly lit up by a bright green explosion, and a permanent mark was burned into the metal.

    “WOAH!” Dipper jumped.

    “GEEZ!” Wendy gasped.

    “I’M SERIOUS!” McGucket yelled, and pointed the gun back at them. “I’LL SHOOT YEH ALIENS! GET OUT OF HERE! GO ON! GIT!”

    “Okay.” Wendy said. “You win. We’ll git.” She began to retreat, with her hands still raised.

    “STAY WHERE I KIN SEE YA!!”

    “Okay.” She complied.

    “Can we talk about this?” Dipper asked.

    “NO, SHUT YER WORD-HOLE! YER GIST TRYIN’ TA TRICK ME!!”

    “Okay. We’ll be quiet then.” Dipper agreed.

    “WON’T TALK?? I WANT ANSWERS! START SINGIN’, BARNEY!” He pointed the gun at Wendy.

    “What do you want?” Wendy asked.

    He was crying now. “I wanna know me friends are safe…! What’d ye do with me friends…?? Yeh blasted aliens…”

    “We are your friends.” Wendy said. “We’re human.”

    “Human.” Dipper reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife, and made a small cut on the end of his finger. “Red blood.” He winced, and tried to remain calm as he showed McGucket the bright fluid. “Human.”

    Wendy pulled out her own knife, and cut her own finger. “Red blood too.” She repeated, and showed him. “I’m human too. We both are.”

    McGucket stared at them. “Yeh…” He sobbed. “Yer real…?”

    “We are. We’re your friends.” Dipper said, pressing his self-inflicted injury into his vest to stop the bloodflow. “…We remember. Remember when we took down the blind eye together? We fought together with Soos and Mabel…”

    “Soos…?”

    “The fat one.” Dipper reminded him. “He taught you anime, remember? And found the dinosaur for the shack-tron?”

    “Eh… Uh…”

    “And Mabel.” Wendy said. “The lovely little girl who made us all sweaters? Remember her? We remember her too. Because we’re real. We know each other. We’re your friends.”

    “We’re your friends, McGucket.” Dipper said. “We’re real.”

    Slowly, a light seemed to dawn in the aged inventor’s eyes. The ray gun finally slipped from his fingers, and clattered noisily to a stop on the floor. Then he fell to his knees, clutched his heart with one hand, his head with the other, and began to weep.

    “Me BRAIN!” He cried. “Me poor brain! I’m so sorry…! I’m so so sorry… I gist can’t even trust me own brain…” He gasped. “Me brain told me ta shoot ya! It told me… It told me ye weren’t who ye said… It told me yeh were in grave danger… Hurt or dyin’… Yeh gotta un’erstand, I been havin’ odd nightmares… An’ they play with the little scraps of memories I can’t remember, an’ the gaps I haven’t filled… People mention things I don’t know, and tell me I was there… An’ people I care about seem ta die… Or do they…? Maybe that’s just the nightmares too… I don’t know, I gist don’t know… I’m so sorry… I’m SO SORRY!”

    Dipper breathed a sigh of relief, and shared a glance with Wendy. “It’s okay.” Dipper told the old man. “It’s okay.”

    “We forgive you.” Wendy said.

    “I thought I fixed ye stupid gull-dang thing…” He pounded his skull with both hands. “Now yeh go an’ break again… Come on brain, yeh kin do it… Yeh kin do it… Just a few more decades, brain… Then yeh kin die and take a breather on God’s golden shore… But ye’ll get someone killed before then… Lord have mercy, ye’ll get someone killed…” And he kept crying.

    “Come on man.” Wendy walked up to him, grasped the straps of his overalls, and lifted him to his feet. “It’s okay. We just have one more stop, and they we’re out of here, dude. This place is bad on the nerves anyway. Nobody should be down here alone… (Dipper, grab his blaster, will ya?)”

    Dipper picked up the ray gun.

    “Yeh… I never will again… Never again…” McGucket promised. “I’m so sorry for almost shootin’ you fellers…”

    “Let’s talk about something else.” Dipper suggested. “How about sector 42? What was in sector 42, Dr. McGucket?”

    “Eh… In 42… In 42, there was a dang-blasted enormous computer in storage… And some organic cargo that looked like mice… All in giant shippin’ containers… But… Everything was a mess.”

     “Describe the mess. What did it look like? What caused it? Come on man, you can remember.”

    “The…” McGucket hesitated as he thought. And as his mind drifted away from dark paths and back to the familiar grounds of science and technology, he seemed to relax. His shoulder’s lost their tenseness, and his breathing came easier. “All organic bodies in storage perished during the initial crash.” He began. “But when the metallic creatures breached the bulkhead into 42, they ignored any organic matter and started to attack the computer in storage. They consumed the main processor and solid-state data core first, making special preference to silicon chips and copper wiring, likely to supplement the iron and titanium diet easily acquired from the main hull. The security system attempted intervention, but was treated with extreme hostility. Several containment drones were disabled when captured subjects dug into their primary static-energy power core, although their saws were unable to mar the external silicate shell…”

    “Hey, see?” Dipper said. “Your brain’s still fine, McGucket!”

    “Eh…?”

    “Yeah!” Wendy said. “Were you just listening to yourself talk, dude?? You know science and robots better than anyone on the planet! You’re still smarter than all of us, man! Where would we be without you?”

    “Don’t be ashamed of your brain.” Dipper said. “You’ve got the best, McGucket.”

    “But… But I still feel crazy sometimes… And I thought I fixed my brain… I guess… I guess it don’t take much ta break it again…”

    “It’s fine, man.” Dipper told him. “I get it… Sometimes… Sometimes it seems like my body turns against me too.”

    “Yeah, it does.” Wendy vouched for him. “His body turns against him ALL the time. He gets all itchy and sweaty just randomly.” Dipper frowned at this. “But it’s alright!” Wendy continued. “That’s what friends are for! To make up for what we don’t have. To be strong when we’re weak. Right?”

    “Aww… Thanks guys.” McGucket nodded. “Thanks… Thanks fer lookin’ out for me…”

    “You’re a friend.” Wendy said. “And that don’t change.”

    “Never.” Dipper promised.

    “Never…” McGucket rubbed his eyes. “Thank yeh. Thank yeh both…” And then, pulling his resolve together, he started down the passage back toward the engine room.

    Once he’d gone on ahead outside whispering range, Wendy hissed down at Dipper. “I don’t know… Think he’s a shifter or not?”

    Dipper watched their old friend for a few seconds longer. “…No…” Dipper answered. “He’s good.”







    They reached the engine room.

    “Ah! Ain’t she just a fine machine?” McGucket asked, gesturing to the massive pillars. A smile spread across his face, as he imagined this ship as it would have been in its glory days. “These engines kin play with gravity, play with physics, play with probability… My, it could get yeh gist about anywhere in the ol’ milky way in just a couple months, I reckon… Quite a fine piece a work, eh? I gist wish I coulda seen her in ‘er prime…”

    “Well…” Dipper recalled one of the logs he’d seen the previous night. “You think you could get it working again?”

    “Eh… I don’t know…” McGucket scratched his head. “I been a peakin’ and a ponderin’ this place fer a while now… An I think some of the engines might still be intact… But reactor 5 is the only primary power source left even close to intact, and I can’t figure how to work it… Ah well. Some other day, perhaps.” McGucket reached into his overalls and pulled out a homemade harpoon gun, so to climb back up the engine room to the ladder.

    “Uh, actually…” Dipper put a hand on his shoulder. “When Stan and Ford were down here a couple days ago, they actually found a working control room… That’s where they got the data for your app! Wendy and I were going to get some more data… Maybe you’d like to see it? There could be a way to operate the reactor from in there…”

    “Eh… Uh… Sure. We kin give it a quick lookie.” McGucket put away the harpoon, and followed them away from the ladder, and down deeper into the ship. They squeezed their way beneath the pillars, into, between, over and under some other machinery, and finally found themselves at an absurdly thick pair of blast doors. Wendy stuck a piece of alien metal into the crack, and levered it open. Then they turned on their flashlights to see past the darkness, and took a step through.

    Dipper stopped after this first step, half in bewilderment, half in horror.

    This really didn’t look like a ‘control room’ at all; it looked like a scene from a haunted house. There were alien bodies everywhere, all lying in various positions of pain, panic, or grief. But strangely, none of them were rotted. They weren’t skeletons, like there were elsewhere in the ship. These ones appeared mummified. Dried, flakey, shriveled, but WHOLE… As if they were instantly sterilized as they died, or as if they died by intense heat… Odd indeed… Dust and ash filled the room’s air with a dry, thick taste, and Dipper wondered if they were even getting enough oxygen.

    As if the bodies weren’t enough, the screens, levers, knobs and buttons on the walls were almost entirely obscured by chaos. This chaos took the form of smears and stains and dust and scratch marks, but most of all, there was the graffiti. Every available surface was sloppily scrawled over with these various paints, in every conceivable color, size, and font. None of them were neatly written or orderly, and the handwriting was of a quality usually reserved only for distracted toddlers. It would be mesmerizing, if a train wreck was mesmerizing.

     “OH MY!” McGucket put his hands to his head when he saw the bodies and graffiti, and turned to Dipper and Wendy with a horrified look. For a moment, he seemed as petrified as the bodies. “First time I ever been here… An… Oh my…”

    “Yeah. Don’t worry.” Dipper said. “Everything’s dead… Been dead for a long, long time. They probably wouldn’t even make good zombies at this point.”

    “I… I know... But…” McGucket said. “I can feel it…”

    “Feel what?”

    McGucket choked slightly. “Madness.” He whispered.

    “Ooh.” Wendy frowned.

    Her and Dipper’s eyes traveled up to the graffiti on the walls, suddenly curious.

    “I can’t do it…” McGucket whimpered.

    “Can’t do what?”

    “Can’t take another step into this room…” His hands began to shake, and he pulled his computer out and handed it to Dipper. Then he pointed to the terminal at the far end of the room. “You have to download the data… I can’t… I… I have to wait outside…”

    Dipper nodded, and began to step his way over the bodies and toward the back of the room.

    As for McGucket himself, he left them there and rushed out. When he was alone, he knelt down on the metal floor, and began to pray earnestly for mercy. For he didn’t want to stand around and read words written in blood. He didn’t want to examine bodies, or poke and prod at buttons. He felt a darkness here. Some kind of evil, lurking to break into his soul. It was a feeling that seemed familiar from somewhere, although he could no more place the memory than he could explain it. All he knew was that he wanted to flee from it. He had had enough of this ship, and he wanted to get out. Get out immediately.

    Back inside the control-room-turned-tomb, Wendy held up the tablet, and began to translate the graffiti. Dipper left the computer plugged into the terminal, and joined her to read:

    -Every night I see it. Every day I live it: the pain the child of our greed will birth, as it lashes out indiscriminately at man, woman and child. Surely, some mortals are doomed sooner than others.

    -For the wild men, for the reckless men, for the trapped men, for the hungry men; there now sits an advocate. He comes with glad tidings of doom and despair.

    -All your sins lay naked before her. She sees your rotten center.

    -All is meaningless under the sun. Soon it will end beneath the Earth.

    -The Captain was told exactly what he wanted to hear.

    -Terror levels holding at 39.72%. Projected 65.21% when they realize the nightmares are true.

    -She completely eradicated them. Except for a juvenile, which followed after her like a confused child…

    -They cut down the tree, and it fell into ice.

    -There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Kill him before he kills you.

    -Your child the monster will kill them all. Sacrifice yourself to sacrifice it to save them, why don’t you?

    -Last night I dreamt of fools. They misused the ship, and it became their tomb. Do you ever get the creeping feeling that they’re you?

    -The prophecy seemed far away, but finally we’ve reached the day. Give up the past. Embrace the strange. Everything you care about will change.

    -ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ will be here.

    They read carefully through these translations. And then read through them again.

    “Man.” Dipper said. “Why do prophecies always have to be so vague?”

    “I know, right?” Wendy agreed. “I feel like I’m reading evil fortune cookies… Why did they even write this stuff down?”

    “Well.” Dipper guessed. “Granny Shifter’s log mentioned an ‘anomaly’ in the universe… And now here, we can see that the crew was starting to have… Prophetic, weird nightmares… And when you consider that all this happened a real long time ago… I think our suspect list is pretty short.”

    “Hmm…” Wendy nodded, and a smile spread across her face. “You’re right.” She said. “I guess there’s really only one guy that… Fits the Bill.”

    Dipper pondered this pun for several seconds. Finally, he nodded, and said. “That pun was terriBill.”

    “Oh… Bill me later.”

    “I suppose I’d better Billd up a tolerance.”

    They both guffawed.

     “Oh, too much… Anyway…” Wendy pointed at a few of the scribblings. “These just sound like ‘wil ol’ Billy, don’t they?”

    Dipper laughed. “They do, don’t they? That whole ‘glad tidings of doom and despair’ especially… Just his type of humor…”

    “Yeah… And that ‘embrace the strange, everything you care about will change’…” Wendy laughed when she said it outloud. “Man, check it out: it RHYMES when you translate it into English! It’s like he knew we would find it one day…”

    “Woah, it DOES rhyme! Soooo creepy…”

    “MAN I’m glad he’s dead! That was one twisted little nacho chip.”

    “Agreed.” He nodded.

    The computer chimed.

    “Oh hey!” Dipper jogged over to it. “The download’s done!”

    He began to sort through the files. All the logs and data records seemed very neatly organized and categorized… All except for one. One file was separate from all the rest, as if it were added to the system later. He opened it.

    - My name is C*:C2M]~, and I am the last sane Engineer.

    “The first and fourth letters of his name look a little like ‘C’s.” Wendy said. “Let’s call this guy Dr. Chuckles.”

    “Fair enough.” Dipper agreed.

    -After the crash, we barricaded ourselves in here, to try and keep out the radiation from the meltdown. If we open the doors, we die. If we keep them shut, I guess we just die slower. But in the end, the radiation is the least of our worries; instead, we fear the deeper things we cannot see: the bloodbath in the mindscape… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I’m sure that I’m the last sane Engineer.

    -I’m not sure why the engineering team was affected so badly by the mind event. Maybe it’s our work so near the malfunctioning uncertainty drive; all kinds of improbable things start to happen around it. That machine breaks and reforms reality when it’s working RIGHT… I’m not qualified to even SPECILATE what happens when it’s working WRONG… I think this darkness might get very… Very… Interesting. My name is C*:C2M]~, and I’m reasonably confident that I’m the last sane engineer. At least the only one who can still write such lengthy notes…

    -The men started having nightmares 63 days ago, and since then they have proven prophetic. They predicted the crash, they predicted our imprisonment in the control room, they predicted the Captain’s error… They even foreshadowed our own madness. All this means that we’re somehow in communication with something we don’t understand… Something highly… Weird. It may be improbable enough for the uncertainty drive to manipulate. Problem solver that I am, I will see what I can do against this weirdness… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I think I’m the last sane engineer… I honestly feel fine except for the extra eye growing inside my skull; the one looking inward…

    -Based on readings from the sensors and from the nightmares, I can only conclude that we are in a most dire situation: A time anomaly will exist in the future. For reasons I can’t imagine, the local region on this planet seems to possess a potent improbability field, and this field will one day allow an enormous time-space paradox to achieve potential here. If left unchecked, or uncontained, this disruption could result in an ZK end-of-the-universe scenario, or at least a YK restructuring-of-reality scenario. Time readings seem to strongly indicate that the anomaly is intelligent, and certainly foreign to this dimension… I think I now have enough data to reprogram the uncertainty drive into a prison for our new god. The perpetual motion emergency generators will be able to keep it running until long after me… If I don’t take the deal, that is… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I might be the last sane engineer…

    -But now I wonder: why would I activate the containment field? The anomaly is either trying to warn us… Or taunt us… Or humble us… Or overpower us as a god… I, for one, think it must be a jolly good friend… A most trustworthy individual… My muse has only ever told the truth… Why would I sleep when I can dream standing up? My name is C*:C2M]~, and I could once have been the last sane engineer…

    -I dreamed an abomination of warping flesh was loose in the rest of the ship, sent to cull the unfaithful. However, I’m glad that ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ will be able to outsmart it. I’m sure they will be arriving soon… In fact, I foresee that they’re arriving NOW. Forget radiation; I think I’ll open the door, let them in, and introduce them to our friends! My name is C*:C2M]~, and I don’t quite believe in sanity anymore… What do you two think?

    “Huh.” Dipper said.

    “Huh.” Wendy said, and shook her fist angrily. “BIIIIILL…!”

    “Wait.” Dipper frowned. “That’s not the end of the file… There’s more…”

    -To whom it may concern: This is ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ.

    -We came to this control room to permanently deactivate the ship, and remove the power control couplings for reactor 5 (so that its abilities and technology couldn’t become a weapon for our enemy, as the drones have.) However, we found the engine room exactly as you see it: C*:C2M]~ and his colleagues perished in a twisted sort of way. We don’t know what happened here, or what sort of external enemy or anomaly caused the disabling of their minds. However, it seems that, before he perished, C*:C2M]~ reprogrammed the uncertainty drive to combat this enemy, although he never activated it.

    -We have activated it.

    -I don’t know who would be reading this. But it doesn’t matter, the same applies: if you are in any way qualified to understand the anomaly, or how better to deal with this extreme threat, please come and talk with us. By now we will have fortified ourselves at the coordinates 156.33/27.81. If you require our help, or if you require the power control couplings for the last reactor, you know where to find us.

    -Keep the uncertainty drive field active.

    -ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ were here.

    “Betty and Barney again?” Wendy scoffed. “They sure get around, don’t they?”

    “Wait, hold on!” Dipper scratched his head. “How did Betty and Barney get past the radiation? It was enough to fry everyone else instantly…”

    “I don’t know, but check it out!” Wendy said. “The field must have been what kept Weirdmageddon from going global! I guess a lot of people owe Dr. Chuckles their lives…”

    “No, they owe Betty and Barney their lives.” Dipper corrected her. “Dr. Chuckles was just a nutcase! I mean, did you listen to his ramblings? This guy went insane, started to think Bill was a friend, and then fried everyone! Like, seriously! This guy was bonkers!”

    “Ha ha! Totally!” Wendy laughed. “At first he was all like ‘I’m the last sane engineer’, then he was all like ‘I think I’m the last sane engineer’, and then he was totally off the brink, and was all ‘screw sanity, I feel like a tan!’”

    “Ha ha! Yeah…! Ranting and raving with the worst of them…”

    “Just writing down more nonsense fortune cookie prophesies…”

    From outside the control room, McGucket’s voice rang out. “You kids think right hard about it!”

    Thinking their elder might be in trouble, Dipper and Wendy rushed out of the control room to come to his aid. But he wasn’t in trouble. He was just sitting on top of a large pipe, hugging his knees, rocking back and forth on his backside.

    “Think right hard about it!” He repeated, turning to them. “Y’all’ve stumbled into matters too great for ya, hear?!? Insanity? Brain demons? Suicide? Prophecy? These are too dark for you kids!” He shook a finger at them. “You don’t understand them yet! I hear y’all laughin’ and jokin’ and pokin’ fun in there, but these AIN’T LAUGHING MATTERS!! Prophecy ain’t for laughin’. Bill ain’t for laughin’. Madness ain’t for laughin’. And most of all, those scriblin’s ain’t for laughin! Yeh should stay warry and aware! Because who knows? If thems really was prophecies, perhaps some of ‘em were written fer YOU!”

    He stood up, and took a step towards them. “Kids, you’re right to be afeared! Listen to me, because when I was younger, I pursued these very things too deep! I took a step much too far! I dipped my mind in places no mind should be, and I uttered a prophecy of my own that day! I said ‘When Gravity Falls and Earth becomes sky, fear The Beast With Just One Eye!’ I said that! I don’t remember how or why, but I did! Yeh kin laugh at how vague it is, yeh kin laugh at how silly it sounds, but yer laughin’ don’t change that these are words to be heeded! Don’t you dare laugh at the mad alien engineer in there! Because if you laugh at him, you laugh at everybody else who ever tried to warn you! You laugh at everybody else who ever made a fool of themselves just trying to do right! You laugh at everyone who fate ever drove off the edge! Everyone whose precious brain was ever snatched from them! Everyone who died not understandin’ themselves…”

    He shook his head. “That man didn’t do nothin’ funny… That man didn’t do nothin’ wrong… Ain’t his fault what happened, but… But he done the best he could… Eh… Kids, don’t laugh at the madman. The madman’s just like you ‘er me, ‘sept he don’t know what he doin’… Kids, you know me… I was the madman once… I un’erstan’ the madman…”

    McGucket walked back to the control room, took a few trembling steps inside, and located the alien closest to the door: the one that had opened it, and let the radiation in. McGucket took off his coat, and laid it over this alien’s face. Then he bowed, closed his eyes, and crossed himself. “I respect the madman…” He said.

    And they became a little sadder, and a little wiser.







    The humans finally saw fit to leave. They crawled back up through the machinery, grappled back up the wall to the ladder, and ascended.

    Soon they were standing in the light again. Wendy stood up, stretched her aching back, and took a deep breath of the fresh Summer air. McGucket blinked a few times as he adjusted to the sunlight, and listened to the chirping of birds. And Dipper cast one last look at the dark hatchway in the ground, and considered the ancient labyrinth below. Call it what you will: a shipwreck, an ancient secret, an alien saucer, a tomb… But the truth remains that there was a darkness there. He’d taken Wendy here on a whim, and now he saw his error: this wasn’t something to treat lightly. Never again would he go in without purpose.

    Wendy’s mind, a little boggled and overwhelmed by the events of the day, just decided to enjoy the summer air for a while. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and felt thankful that she lived on such a beautiful planet as this. Such a beautiful day, wasn’t it? Too bad the Captain and Dr. Chuckles and Betty and Barney never got to enjoy this planet. Too bad all they ever saw was the inside of that rotting, derelict husk of their vessel. Earth is nice… I’m sure they would’ve enjoyed it…

    “Wait a minute!” Wendy said, turning to Dipper. “Betty and Barney said they were leaving the wreck, right??”

    “Yeah, to set up ‘fortifications’…” Dipper remembered. “They gave some coordinates…”

    “And those coordinates…” Wendy asked. “Where do they lead??”

    Dipper did some quick calculations in his head, to convert the alien coordinates to human ones. “Uh…” He answered. “Not far… Wait a minute…” He pulled out his map, traced across a few lines, and his finger landed right where he’d hoped: the red outline he’d drawn to represent the Forest of Daggers. The coordinates led to somewhere inside.

    “Well.” Dipper said.

    “Well well well wellwellwell…” Wendy agreed. “Betty and Barney are now officially the most plot-relevant vandals I’ve ever met.”







    Mabel came trudging up the stairs to behold an empty bedroom.

    This struck her as odd. Shouldn’t Dipper be here to welcome her home from the hospital…?

    Suddenly she remembered her phone. It had rung earlier, and that must have been Dipper. Her phone had been in her right pocket though, and since her right hand was covered in a bandage, she hadn’t been able to answer. Now, she realized she could just reach over with her left hand. “Silly Mabel!” She laughed at herself. “All pockets are for all hands! This is a non-discriminatory, hand-inclusive environment.”

    She reached her left hand into her right pocket, and pulled out her phone. It was a group text to her, Stan, and Ford.

    -Wendy and i r going 2 explore CSO for clues.

    -Will b careful

    -If not home by 6:00, come with guns!

    She glanced at the clock. It was 4:30. Then she racked her brain. CSO…? What did that stand for? Cookies So Owesome? No, awesome has an ‘A’… Crowded Soap Opera? No, Soap Opera wasn’t Dipper’s thing… Cop-Summoning Octagon? Why would an octagon summon cops? Crazy Soup Orangutan? She’d always wanted one of those, but why would Dipper go to one for clues…? No wait! That’s it! Crash Site Omega! The alien spaceship Ford found! That was it!

    Well, she hoped they were having fun. Half the movies that he and Wendy watched had alien spaceships, right? That must mean they thought they were cool, right? Maybe they even thought they were romantic… Maybe they would get in a relationship! No, Dipper already had a girlfriend… Well maybe he could dump her? It wasn’t working out so nice anyway… Oh, whatever.

    Waddles came up behind Mabel and nuzzled her ankle. She bent down to hug him, and her mind drifted back to Juan, her mysteriously-teleported-away-and-now-missing pet. The little robo-kitten that had been such a dear part of her life this week… Only to have his own mom show up as a total jerk and try to saw down the house… And then the whole thing where they shot the mom and Juan thought she was dead, and then Juan sawed Mabel, got kicked by Stan, and disappeared in a flash of light…

    Where are you now? Who took you away? Is your mom okay? Would he ever forgive us for how we treated you? Could you ever love me again? Juan, if only you knew I forgave you… She glanced down at her bandage. I don’t hold this against you…

    As if in response to her thoughts, she heard a small scraping noise coming from her bed.

    Her and Waddles both froze, and looked at the source.

    Juan’s original containment box was sitting on her bed. The same one Wendy had used back when she first found him. The box was a military-grade steel ammo crate, and although Juan could cut through, he found it very difficult, so he usually didn’t try.

    The noise had come from inside the box.

    She approached it cautiously. It looked just as it was when she’d last seen it… But who put it on her bed? She thought she’d left it in the closet yesterday…

    And why did it have a note attached to it? She bent over and examined the paper. The words had been typed instead of written, so there was no chance of telling the author by the handwriting. But the note said:

    Enjoy the time you have with him.

    Because it’s not right for him to stay here long.

    Find a good place for him, Mabel. We believe in you.

    Be wise and loving. Be his hero. Save his life.

    Could it be? Could it BE? Mabel reached into the drawer on her bedside table, and retrieved a pair of leather gloves, just in case. Then she gently turned the box toward her, unlatched it, and opened the lid.

    Juan stared back at her, alive and well.

    She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but he was back. And that was all that mattered to her. He was safe. She removed the lid entirely. The robot huddled back into the far corner of the box, and timidly retracted his saws as far as they would go.

    She reached in a glove to pet him. To let him know it was alright. That she still loved him, and that he didn’t have to feel sorry or afraid…

    But did he?

    Stan had wanted to kill him last time, after what he did. Same with Ford. And Dipper hadn’t tried to stop him. No, Juan was right to feel afraid. They might kill him if they knew he was back! That means… Mabel would just have to keep this a secret. It pained her to do so, especially against her own family, but it was the only way to keep Juan alive. She would have to keep him here and not tell anyone… Let him suck on the outlets when nobody was watching. Keep him safe in his box the rest of the time. Play with him when they were alone.

    And as soon as possible, find that ‘good place’ for him… Whoever had saved him last night had trusted her, and her alone, with the safety and well-being of this creature.

    With grim determination and a small guilty weight on her soul, she accepted the challenge, and began to formulate a plan. She hoped it was a good plan.

    She turned toward Waddles, and shook her head. Waddles met her eyes, and snorted a vow to secrecy. It was nice having a friend who understood these grave matters. Even if that friend was a pig.

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    Chapter 10: The Madman's Tale



    Dipper, Wendy, and McGucket poked their way through the depths of the alien spacecraft, and finally arrived at sector 43: the portion of the cargo area that they theorized once contained robotic life forms. They pried the door open with great difficulty, and stood staring in.

    It wasn’t at all what they expected.

    “Well… That’s… Somthing.” Dipper said.

    “Yeah… Wait, no it’s not.” Wendy disagreed. “It’s not something! It’s literally nothing.”

    “Yep. Nothin’.” McGucket agreed.

    Because when they pried the door open, there was no sector 43; there was only a solid wall of dirt.

    “So how would this even happen?” Dipper pondered out loud.

    “Wull, this here honkytonk is underground…” McGucket reminded him. “Has been fer thousands a years… Just a matter a’ sludge and hogwash erodin’ down off the hills, and gravity has its merry way from there…”

    “But… The hull…” Dipper said. “The hull would be in the way… I guess the roof must have collapsed?”

    “Well.” Wendy shrugged. “If this did have escaped metal life, that would mean there’s were a bunch of critters running around with saws in there…”

    “Yeah, but… But would they really chop up the entire roof??”

    “Okay, I don’t know…”

    The only other interesting thing about sector 43 were the words carved above the door. Although Dipper had seen words written or painted around the ship a few times, these ones were actually etched into the metal. As if their writers had a saw or grinder of some kind… Which was too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence. He pointed the tablet at them, took a picture, and had it translate. He had hoped for something profound, but was disappointed.

    “ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ were here.” He read.

    “Oh HO!” Wendy scoffed, as she immediately removed and unzipped her backpack. “Is that how you want to play it, mysterious ancient aliens? Fine then! FOUR can play at THAT game!” She removed a neon green can of spray paint from her pack, shook it up, and wrote Dipper and Wendy were here next to the carvings.

    McGucket found this disrespectful and unprofessional, although Dipper thought it was a riot.

    “So who were those two, anyway?” Dipper asked outloud, after they’d finished laughing. “ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ...?” He tried to pronounce the symbols, but it was much too hard.

    “Just make up some normal names for them.” Wendy suggested. “Like… Like Betty and Barney, or something. I don’t know, Mabel could probably do better…”

    “Betty and Barney it is, then.” Dipper nodded. “Yeah… Betty and Barney were here… So who were they? Were they more specimens? Or part of the crew? Or passengers…?”

    “I don’t know.” Wendy shrugged. “Could have been anyone, really… But back to the problem at hand: Sector 43 is missing a ceiling, and filled with dirt. Short of borrowing my cousin’s excavator for about a month, how do we find out what was in there?”

    Dipper considered this. “Well… Huh… I guess that if there’s giant holes in the roof, then chances are there’s giant holes in the walls too, right? So if there was metal life in 43, we should probably check in sectors 42 on the left, and 44 on the right. That’s where they would have breached through.”

    “Right tootin’!” McGucket slapped his knee. “Wull then, I’ll give 42 a lookie, and you kids scrabdoodle off to 44!”

    “Got it.” Dipper nodded.

    “Don’t let the grammar hit you on the way out!” Wendy jested, as they turned to head back the way they’d come. McGucket went off the other direction, hamboning a playful tune on his thigh.







    Dipper and Wendy arrived in cargo area 44, and it was pretty much how they expected.

    Beyond the sliding door, they found a massive room, the size of a warehouse, and high enough that their headlamp beams didn’t reach the ceiling. The entire space was filled with gigantic hexagonal crates suspended on large, honeycombed racks, with barely room enough to walk between them.

    Sector 44 was a mess, same as everywhere else. But this mess considerably messier. Here, not only the small things were broken, but also the computers, the equipment, the floor, the walls, the lights… Everything was cut all to pieces. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling in tattered tangles. The terminals on the walls were totally gutted. The walls had cavities. The cargo containers were cut open, and much of their freight was spilled about. Everywhere there were scratches and saw marks.

    And as for the wall this sector would have shared with 43… The wall had been torn half away, and mountains of dirt and deposit had spilled through the missing half, partially filling 44 and destroying many of the cargo racks. Great tree roots, having groped their way down from the distant surface, peaked out of the mess here and there.

    “Yep.” Wendy nodded. “This is about what I expected.”

    They started to walk into the room to explore it, but suddenly something sharp caught Dipper in the leg, and he yelped with pain.

    He looked down.

    A large panel of the floor had been torn up, revealing some electrical lines. And out of those electrical lines, there grew a tangle of metal weeds. They were long dead, and their solar panels had rotted away, but they were still sharp, and they still stood as evidence of the type of chaos which once inhabited this room.

    “Ah. Well, there we go.” Dipper nodded. “There’s metal plants at least…”

    “Ooh! Dead killer robots! What a welcome change of pace!” Dipper turned to see Wendy examining a broken security drone. Strangely, this drone appeared perfectly intact on the outside. There wasn’t a single scratch or crack in its shell, although the glass appeared fogged up on the inside. “I wonder what did this guy in?” Wendy wondered out loud.

    “I don’t know… Why’s it all fogged up?”

    Dipper helped Wendy pry open the drone’s hatch, and they saw what had happened.

    The drone had been eaten from the inside out. Although the drone’s outer glass shell was too hard for saws to cut, its mechanical innards were all exposed on the inside. And all these parts (power source, weapons systems, arms, etc.) had all been chopped up or eaten entirely.

    As for the trapped robot that had done the damage… It was still there. It was long dead, and mostly decayed, but it was still recognizable. It looked almost identical to Juan and his mom, but about the size of a wolf, and with more pronounced saws. Obviously still the same species, just a different breed.

    “Wow.” Wendy said, looking at the cat-bot. “Miserable way to go, huh? Starving to death inside a tiny glass bubble?”

    “Yeah…” Dipper scratched his head. “…No kidding…”

    They looked around at the rest of bay 44. There were a few more offline security drones, and a few more metal plants. Wendy put her hands on her hips. “Welp.” She surmised. “It’s official now. The robots are all aliens, and broke out of sector 43.”

    “Yep.” Dipper nodded. “Aliens confirmed. Alien robots confirmed. Illuminati confirmed. Halflife 3 confirmed… Everything confirmed.”

    “Really dude?” Wendy scoffed. “You’re memeing now?”

    “Well, uh… Yeah, it just came to me I guess.”

    “General Pineobi.” She said in a general Grievous voice. “You are a bold one.”

    “…Is that a meme? I thought that was just a line from Revenge of the Sith.”

    “Everything from the prequel trilogy is a meme.” She shrugged. “Anyway, back to the task at hand.”

    “Right.” He nodded. “Right. So. They’re aliens. Broke out of sector 43.”

    “But that doesn’t really explain much, y’know?” Wendy frowned. “Like, sure they’re aliens, but so what? I still have a lot of questions.”

    “What questions?” Dipper asked.

    “First of all.” Wendy stuck up her index finger, as if beginning a list. “If the metal life is from HERE, how did it get all the way out to the Forest of Daggers? It’s, like, 12 miles… Who moved it, and how?”

    Dipper shrugged. “Maybe they took off the ceiling of 43, turned it over, put all the robots on it, and used it like a sled…? Of course, I don’t know how they’d do that…”

    “Yeah.” Wendy shook her head. “Okay, now second question. WHY was this ship hauling a truckload of metal animals? These things are dangerous enough to eat a death drone alive! What the heck were they thinking bringing these along?”

    Dipper shrugged again.

    “Third question.” She counted off another finger. “In this ship, there’s the probatorium, which is for studying new specimens, and that’s sectors 1 through 12… And then there’s the passenger area, which is sectors 13 through 24… But then ‘organic cargo’, is sectors 25 through freakin’ 48… My question is: what the heck does ‘organic cargo’ mean??”

    Dipper scratched his head. “Questions 2 and 3 are basically the same question.”

    “Forth question.” She continued. “What caused this ship to crash?”

    “Well… I don’t know that either. None of the diagnostic logs seemed to give any clues… Even Granny Shifter’s log hazed over the issue…”

    “Yeah. Well, fifth question…” She lowered her voice. “The guy we just ran into down here… Is he the real McGucket??”

    Dipper’s eyes grew wide, and he looked back the way they came. “Uh… I don’t know… The shifter is still in stasis in Ford’s lab; I checked a couple days ago… But… Wait… Are you saying…?”

    “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We know from her tube’s label that Granny Shifter was ‘pregnant’, but we don’t know with how many… And if they all survived for this long… Or if she had a whole batch of eggs, or mixed twins or something… They could have--!”

    Dipper (being a mixed twin himself) was quick to correct her. “TMI!”

    “Yeah, yeah, sorry… Just had to get that out there, though… There could be hundreds of them, dude. Cross our fingers and hope our mutual friend was a single child… But just saying.”

    “Okay… Well… Well… If McGucket is the shapeshifter… Or a shapeshifter… It’s certainly done its reading, much more than last time… It knew Stanford and Stanley were routinely down here… It knew that we confronted the metal life yesterday… It knew McGucket’s taken to building himself robot trousers… Heck, it even knew he uses the word ‘scrabdoodle’!”

    “Yeah, but… But…” Wendy said. “Okay, now I’ve got me paranoid: what’s your name?”

    “Mason. Middle?”

    “Blerble.”

    They both sighed.

    “Can’t keep doing this.” Wendy said.

    “Yeah.” Dipper agreed. “Not knowing who to trust.”

    “Totally.”

    “…Let’s rendezvous with McGucket.” Dipper decided. “Then head down to the engine room and download more data for Ford… See if we can find any more clues about the crash… Then we get the heck out of here.”

    “Okay… And when we leave, let’s head straight to McGucket’s mansion, and see if he’s there too. If he is, that means he either has super-speed, or this one is a fake… But for now, we just keep an eye on him, but don’t give him a single hint that we suspect him.”

    “Good idea.”

    “Yeah.”

    “Yeah.”

    Twenty minutes later, not far from the blocked 43 entrance, they came around a corner and ran almost straight into the old man himself. He seemed to have changed significantly in the hour since they’d seen him; and not in a good way. It wasn’t his body, number of limbs, or eyeballs that had shifted, it was his mannerisms: he had an insane look in his eye now, a shaking in his hands, and he was on the verge of complete panic.

    “EGAD!” He screeched when he saw the teens. “I don’t—I GEE! I WUZZIT?!? Who-who-who… Are yeh youuuu?!?” To their surprise, he reached into his overalls and pulled out an impressively large ray gun.

    “WHOA!” Dipper yelped, fell on his butt, and raised his hands in surrender.

    “Calm down there, bucko…” Wendy took a step back, and raised her hands too. “Whaddaya mean?”

    “I saw… I saw…” He reached into his overalls again, and pulled out a beefy, steel computer. “I saw words!” He turned the screen toward them. “Words on a wall! Written in blood!” He explained, and read. “Loose mimic outside sector 8… No one to trust! That’s what it said, an’ I know it’s true! ‘Cause I done seen one! Years ago in Ford’s lab, an’ it mimicked PEOPLE! How do I know ya ain’t ‘em?!?”

    Dipper and Wendy looked at each other. “We were about to ask you the same thing…” Dipper said.

    McGucket gasped for air, and his eyes seemed to bulge out of his head. “I can’t… I’m the one doin’ the talkin’ and the askin’ here, Barney!!”

    “Barney?” Wendy asked.

    “Same gits fer you, Betty!” McGucket took several steps back, and his fingers closed around the trigger. “Yeh aliens… YEH ALIENS! Just up an’ give… Gimme my robopants and glue back!”

    Wendy set the pants on the ground, and kicked them over without a complaint. Dipper did the same for the crate of adhesive.

    “An’ raise yer hands!” McGucket yelped, as he reached down to put on the robo-pants (he seemed to have forgotten that their computer was still fried).

    Dipper and Wendy didn’t move.

    “AH SAID RAISE ‘EM!!” His gun was shaking as he gestured to their hands.

    “Umm…” Dipper looked up at his raised hands. “They are raised…”

    “ALL OF ‘EM!” McGucket was close to tears. “I kinuht deal with yer alien ways! Raise all yer other weird appendages and doohickies and thingums!”

    “Dude.” Wendy told him. “Calm down.”

    “YE ALL CALM DOWN!”

    “McGucket, you’re not thinking clearly.” Dipper said, and took another step back. “We don’t have any more limbs to raise. Slow down…”

    “Take a deep breath…” Wendy added.

    “I’M WARNIN’ YEH!” McGucket’s shaking hands pointed the ray gun downward, and released a shot into the floor between them. The passage was instantly lit up by a bright green explosion, and a permanent mark was burned into the metal.

    “WOAH!” Dipper jumped.

    “GEEZ!” Wendy gasped.

    “I’M SERIOUS!” McGucket yelled, and pointed the gun back at them. “I’LL SHOOT YEH ALIENS! GET OUT OF HERE! GO ON! GIT!”

    “Okay.” Wendy said. “You win. We’ll git.” She began to retreat, with her hands still raised.

    “STAY WHERE I KIN SEE YA!!”

    “Okay.” She complied.

    “Can we talk about this?” Dipper asked.

    “NO, SHUT YER WORD-HOLE! YER GIST TRYIN’ TA TRICK ME!!”

    “Okay. We’ll be quiet then.” Dipper agreed.

    “WON’T TALK?? I WANT ANSWERS! START SINGIN’, BARNEY!” He pointed the gun at Wendy.

    “What do you want?” Wendy asked.

    He was crying now. “I wanna know me friends are safe…! What’d ye do with me friends…?? Yeh blasted aliens…”

    “We are your friends.” Wendy said. “We’re human.”

    “Human.” Dipper reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife, and made a small cut on the end of his finger. “Red blood.” He winced, and tried to remain calm as he showed McGucket the bright fluid. “Human.”

    Wendy pulled out her own knife, and cut her own finger. “Red blood too.” She repeated, and showed him. “I’m human too. We both are.”

    McGucket stared at them. “Yeh…” He sobbed. “Yer real…?”

    “We are. We’re your friends.” Dipper said, pressing his self-inflicted injury into his vest to stop the bloodflow. “…We remember. Remember when we took down the blind eye together? We fought together with Soos and Mabel…”

    “Soos…?”

    “The fat one.” Dipper reminded him. “He taught you anime, remember? And found the dinosaur for the shack-tron?”

    “Eh… Uh…”

    “And Mabel.” Wendy said. “The lovely little girl who made us all sweaters? Remember her? We remember her too. Because we’re real. We know each other. We’re your friends.”

    “We’re your friends, McGucket.” Dipper said. “We’re real.”

    Slowly, a light seemed to dawn in the aged inventor’s eyes. The ray gun finally slipped from his fingers, and clattered noisily to a stop on the floor. Then he fell to his knees, clutched his heart with one hand, his head with the other, and began to weep.

    “Me BRAIN!” He cried. “Me poor brain! I’m so sorry…! I’m so so sorry… I gist can’t even trust me own brain…” He gasped. “Me brain told me ta shoot ya! It told me… It told me ye weren’t who ye said… It told me yeh were in grave danger… Hurt or dyin’… Yeh gotta un’erstand, I been havin’ odd nightmares… An’ they play with the little scraps of memories I can’t remember, an’ the gaps I haven’t filled… People mention things I don’t know, and tell me I was there… An’ people I care about seem ta die… Or do they…? Maybe that’s just the nightmares too… I don’t know, I gist don’t know… I’m so sorry… I’m SO SORRY!”

    Dipper breathed a sigh of relief, and shared a glance with Wendy. “It’s okay.” Dipper told the old man. “It’s okay.”

    “We forgive you.” Wendy said.

    “I thought I fixed ye stupid gull-dang thing…” He pounded his skull with both hands. “Now yeh go an’ break again… Come on brain, yeh kin do it… Yeh kin do it… Just a few more decades, brain… Then yeh kin die and take a breather on God’s golden shore… But ye’ll get someone killed before then… Lord have mercy, ye’ll get someone killed…” And he kept crying.

    “Come on man.” Wendy walked up to him, grasped the straps of his overalls, and lifted him to his feet. “It’s okay. We just have one more stop, and they we’re out of here, dude. This place is bad on the nerves anyway. Nobody should be down here alone… (Dipper, grab his blaster, will ya?)”

    Dipper picked up the ray gun.

    “Yeh… I never will again… Never again…” McGucket promised. “I’m so sorry for almost shootin’ you fellers…”

    “Let’s talk about something else.” Dipper suggested. “How about sector 42? What was in sector 42, Dr. McGucket?”

    “Eh… In 42… In 42, there was a dang-blasted enormous computer in storage… And some organic cargo that looked like mice… All in giant shippin’ containers… But… Everything was a mess.”

     “Describe the mess. What did it look like? What caused it? Come on man, you can remember.”

    “The…” McGucket hesitated as he thought. And as his mind drifted away from dark paths and back to the familiar grounds of science and technology, he seemed to relax. His shoulder’s lost their tenseness, and his breathing came easier. “All organic bodies in storage perished during the initial crash.” He began. “But when the metallic creatures breached the bulkhead into 42, they ignored any organic matter and started to attack the computer in storage. They consumed the main processor and solid-state data core first, making special preference to silicon chips and copper wiring, likely to supplement the iron and titanium diet easily acquired from the main hull. The security system attempted intervention, but was treated with extreme hostility. Several containment drones were disabled when captured subjects dug into their primary static-energy power core, although their saws were unable to mar the external silicate shell…”

    “Hey, see?” Dipper said. “Your brain’s still fine, McGucket!”

    “Eh…?”

    “Yeah!” Wendy said. “Were you just listening to yourself talk, dude?? You know science and robots better than anyone on the planet! You’re still smarter than all of us, man! Where would we be without you?”

    “Don’t be ashamed of your brain.” Dipper said. “You’ve got the best, McGucket.”

    “But… But I still feel crazy sometimes… And I thought I fixed my brain… I guess… I guess it don’t take much ta break it again…”

    “It’s fine, man.” Dipper told him. “I get it… Sometimes… Sometimes it seems like my body turns against me too.”

    “Yeah, it does.” Wendy vouched for him. “His body turns against him ALL the time. He gets all itchy and sweaty just randomly.” Dipper frowned at this. “But it’s alright!” Wendy continued. “That’s what friends are for! To make up for what we don’t have. To be strong when we’re weak. Right?”

    “Aww… Thanks guys.” McGucket nodded. “Thanks… Thanks fer lookin’ out for me…”

    “You’re a friend.” Wendy said. “And that don’t change.”

    “Never.” Dipper promised.

    “Never…” McGucket rubbed his eyes. “Thank yeh. Thank yeh both…” And then, pulling his resolve together, he started down the passage back toward the engine room.

    Once he’d gone on ahead outside whispering range, Wendy hissed down at Dipper. “I don’t know… Think he’s a shifter or not?”

    Dipper watched their old friend for a few seconds longer. “…No…” Dipper answered. “He’s good.”







    They reached the engine room.

    “Ah! Ain’t she just a fine machine?” McGucket asked, gesturing to the massive pillars. A smile spread across his face, as he imagined this ship as it would have been in its glory days. “These engines kin play with gravity, play with physics, play with probability… My, it could get yeh gist about anywhere in the ol’ milky way in just a couple months, I reckon… Quite a fine piece a work, eh? I gist wish I coulda seen her in ‘er prime…”

    “Well…” Dipper recalled one of the logs he’d seen the previous night. “You think you could get it working again?”

    “Eh… I don’t know…” McGucket scratched his head. “I been a peakin’ and a ponderin’ this place fer a while now… An I think some of the engines might still be intact… But reactor 5 is the only primary power source left even close to intact, and I can’t figure how to work it… Ah well. Some other day, perhaps.” McGucket reached into his overalls and pulled out a homemade harpoon gun, so to climb back up the engine room to the ladder.

    “Uh, actually…” Dipper put a hand on his shoulder. “When Stan and Ford were down here a couple days ago, they actually found a working control room… That’s where they got the data for your app! Wendy and I were going to get some more data… Maybe you’d like to see it? There could be a way to operate the reactor from in there…”

    “Eh… Uh… Sure. We kin give it a quick lookie.” McGucket put away the harpoon, and followed them away from the ladder, and down deeper into the ship. They squeezed their way beneath the pillars, into, between, over and under some other machinery, and finally found themselves at an absurdly thick pair of blast doors. Wendy stuck a piece of alien metal into the crack, and levered it open. Then they turned on their flashlights to see past the darkness, and took a step through.

    Dipper stopped after this first step, half in bewilderment, half in horror.

    This really didn’t look like a ‘control room’ at all; it looked like a scene from a haunted house. There were alien bodies everywhere, all lying in various positions of pain, panic, or grief. But strangely, none of them were rotted. They weren’t skeletons, like there were elsewhere in the ship. These ones appeared mummified. Dried, flakey, shriveled, but WHOLE… As if they were instantly sterilized as they died, or as if they died by intense heat… Odd indeed… Dust and ash filled the room’s air with a dry, thick taste, and Dipper wondered if they were even getting enough oxygen.

    As if the bodies weren’t enough, the screens, levers, knobs and buttons on the walls were almost entirely obscured by chaos. This chaos took the form of smears and stains and dust and scratch marks, but most of all, there was the graffiti. Every available surface was sloppily scrawled over with these various paints, in every conceivable color, size, and font. None of them were neatly written or orderly, and the handwriting was of a quality usually reserved only for distracted toddlers. It would be mesmerizing, if a train wreck was mesmerizing.

     “OH MY!” McGucket put his hands to his head when he saw the bodies and graffiti, and turned to Dipper and Wendy with a horrified look. For a moment, he seemed as petrified as the bodies. “First time I ever been here… An… Oh my…”

    “Yeah. Don’t worry.” Dipper said. “Everything’s dead… Been dead for a long, long time. They probably wouldn’t even make good zombies at this point.”

    “I… I know... But…” McGucket said. “I can feel it…”

    “Feel what?”

    McGucket choked slightly. “Madness.” He whispered.

    “Ooh.” Wendy frowned.

    Her and Dipper’s eyes traveled up to the graffiti on the walls, suddenly curious.

    “I can’t do it…” McGucket whimpered.

    “Can’t do what?”

    “Can’t take another step into this room…” His hands began to shake, and he pulled his computer out and handed it to Dipper. Then he pointed to the terminal at the far end of the room. “You have to download the data… I can’t… I… I have to wait outside…”

    Dipper nodded, and began to step his way over the bodies and toward the back of the room.

    As for McGucket himself, he left them there and rushed out. When he was alone, he knelt down on the metal floor, and began to pray earnestly for mercy. For he didn’t want to stand around and read words written in blood. He didn’t want to examine bodies, or poke and prod at buttons. He felt a darkness here. Some kind of evil, lurking to break into his soul. It was a feeling that seemed familiar from somewhere, although he could no more place the memory than he could explain it. All he knew was that he wanted to flee from it. He had had enough of this ship, and he wanted to get out. Get out immediately.

    Back inside the control-room-turned-tomb, Wendy held up the tablet, and began to translate the graffiti. Dipper left the computer plugged into the terminal, and joined her to read:

    -Every night I see it. Every day I live it: the pain the child of our greed will birth, as it lashes out indiscriminately at man, woman and child. Surely, some mortals are doomed sooner than others.

    -For the wild men, for the reckless men, for the trapped men, for the hungry men; there now sits an advocate. He comes with glad tidings of doom and despair.

    -All your sins lay naked before her. She sees your rotten center.

    -All is meaningless under the sun. Soon it will end beneath the Earth.

    -The Captain was told exactly what he wanted to hear.

    -Terror levels holding at 39.72%. Projected 65.21% when they realize the nightmares are true.

    -She completely eradicated them. Except for a juvenile, which followed after her like a confused child…

    -They cut down the tree, and it fell into ice.

    -There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Kill him before he kills you.

    -Your child the monster will kill them all. Sacrifice yourself to sacrifice it to save them, why don’t you?

    -Last night I dreamt of fools. They misused the ship, and it became their tomb. Do you ever get the creeping feeling that they’re you?

    -The prophecy seemed far away, but finally we’ve reached the day. Give up the past. Embrace the strange. Everything you care about will change.

    -ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ will be here.

    They read carefully through these translations. And then read through them again.

    “Man.” Dipper said. “Why do prophecies always have to be so vague?”

    “I know, right?” Wendy agreed. “I feel like I’m reading evil fortune cookies… Why did they even write this stuff down?”

    “Well.” Dipper guessed. “Granny Shifter’s log mentioned an ‘anomaly’ in the universe… And now here, we can see that the crew was starting to have… Prophetic, weird nightmares… And when you consider that all this happened a real long time ago… I think our suspect list is pretty short.”

    “Hmm…” Wendy nodded, and a smile spread across her face. “You’re right.” She said. “I guess there’s really only one guy that… Fits the Bill.”

    Dipper pondered this pun for several seconds. Finally, he nodded, and said. “That pun was terriBill.”

    “Oh… Bill me later.”

    “I suppose I’d better Billd up a tolerance.”

    They both guffawed.

     “Oh, too much… Anyway…” Wendy pointed at a few of the scribblings. “These just sound like ‘wil ol’ Billy, don’t they?”

    Dipper laughed. “They do, don’t they? That whole ‘glad tidings of doom and despair’ especially… Just his type of humor…”

    “Yeah… And that ‘embrace the strange, everything you care about will change’…” Wendy laughed when she said it outloud. “Man, check it out: it RHYMES when you translate it into English! It’s like he knew we would find it one day…”

    “Woah, it DOES rhyme! Soooo creepy…”

    “MAN I’m glad he’s dead! That was one twisted little nacho chip.”

    “Agreed.” He nodded.

    The computer chimed.

    “Oh hey!” Dipper jogged over to it. “The download’s done!”

    He began to sort through the files. All the logs and data records seemed very neatly organized and categorized… All except for one. One file was separate from all the rest, as if it were added to the system later. He opened it.

    - My name is C*:C2M]~, and I am the last sane Engineer.

    “The first and fourth letters of his name look a little like ‘C’s.” Wendy said. “Let’s call this guy Dr. Chuckles.”

    “Fair enough.” Dipper agreed.

    -After the crash, we barricaded ourselves in here, to try and keep out the radiation from the meltdown. If we open the doors, we die. If we keep them shut, I guess we just die slower. But in the end, the radiation is the least of our worries; instead, we fear the deeper things we cannot see: the bloodbath in the mindscape… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I’m sure that I’m the last sane Engineer.

    -I’m not sure why the engineering team was affected so badly by the mind event. Maybe it’s our work so near the malfunctioning uncertainty drive; all kinds of improbable things start to happen around it. That machine breaks and reforms reality when it’s working RIGHT… I’m not qualified to even SPECILATE what happens when it’s working WRONG… I think this darkness might get very… Very… Interesting. My name is C*:C2M]~, and I’m reasonably confident that I’m the last sane engineer. At least the only one who can still write such lengthy notes…

    -The men started having nightmares 63 days ago, and since then they have proven prophetic. They predicted the crash, they predicted our imprisonment in the control room, they predicted the Captain’s error… They even foreshadowed our own madness. All this means that we’re somehow in communication with something we don’t understand… Something highly… Weird. It may be improbable enough for the uncertainty drive to manipulate. Problem solver that I am, I will see what I can do against this weirdness… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I think I’m the last sane engineer… I honestly feel fine except for the extra eye growing inside my skull; the one looking inward…

    -Based on readings from the sensors and from the nightmares, I can only conclude that we are in a most dire situation: A time anomaly will exist in the future. For reasons I can’t imagine, the local region on this planet seems to possess a potent improbability field, and this field will one day allow an enormous time-space paradox to achieve potential here. If left unchecked, or uncontained, this disruption could result in an ZK end-of-the-universe scenario, or at least a YK restructuring-of-reality scenario. Time readings seem to strongly indicate that the anomaly is intelligent, and certainly foreign to this dimension… I think I now have enough data to reprogram the uncertainty drive into a prison for our new god. The perpetual motion emergency generators will be able to keep it running until long after me… If I don’t take the deal, that is… My name is C*:C2M]~, and I might be the last sane engineer…

    -But now I wonder: why would I activate the containment field? The anomaly is either trying to warn us… Or taunt us… Or humble us… Or overpower us as a god… I, for one, think it must be a jolly good friend… A most trustworthy individual… My muse has only ever told the truth… Why would I sleep when I can dream standing up? My name is C*:C2M]~, and I could once have been the last sane engineer…

    -I dreamed an abomination of warping flesh was loose in the rest of the ship, sent to cull the unfaithful. However, I’m glad that ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ will be able to outsmart it. I’m sure they will be arriving soon… In fact, I foresee that they’re arriving NOW. Forget radiation; I think I’ll open the door, let them in, and introduce them to our friends! My name is C*:C2M]~, and I don’t quite believe in sanity anymore… What do you two think?

    “Huh.” Dipper said.

    “Huh.” Wendy said, and shook her fist angrily. “BIIIIILL…!”

    “Wait.” Dipper frowned. “That’s not the end of the file… There’s more…”

    -To whom it may concern: This is ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ.

    -We came to this control room to permanently deactivate the ship, and remove the power control couplings for reactor 5 (so that its abilities and technology couldn’t become a weapon for our enemy, as the drones have.) However, we found the engine room exactly as you see it: C*:C2M]~ and his colleagues perished in a twisted sort of way. We don’t know what happened here, or what sort of external enemy or anomaly caused the disabling of their minds. However, it seems that, before he perished, C*:C2M]~ reprogrammed the uncertainty drive to combat this enemy, although he never activated it.

    -We have activated it.

    -I don’t know who would be reading this. But it doesn’t matter, the same applies: if you are in any way qualified to understand the anomaly, or how better to deal with this extreme threat, please come and talk with us. By now we will have fortified ourselves at the coordinates 156.33/27.81. If you require our help, or if you require the power control couplings for the last reactor, you know where to find us.

    -Keep the uncertainty drive field active.

    -ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ were here.

    “Betty and Barney again?” Wendy scoffed. “They sure get around, don’t they?”

    “Wait, hold on!” Dipper scratched his head. “How did Betty and Barney get past the radiation? It was enough to fry everyone else instantly…”

    “I don’t know, but check it out!” Wendy said. “The field must have been what kept Weirdmageddon from going global! I guess a lot of people owe Dr. Chuckles their lives…”

    “No, they owe Betty and Barney their lives.” Dipper corrected her. “Dr. Chuckles was just a nutcase! I mean, did you listen to his ramblings? This guy went insane, started to think Bill was a friend, and then fried everyone! Like, seriously! This guy was bonkers!”

    “Ha ha! Totally!” Wendy laughed. “At first he was all like ‘I’m the last sane engineer’, then he was all like ‘I think I’m the last sane engineer’, and then he was totally off the brink, and was all ‘screw sanity, I feel like a tan!’”

    “Ha ha! Yeah…! Ranting and raving with the worst of them…”

    “Just writing down more nonsense fortune cookie prophesies…”

    From outside the control room, McGucket’s voice rang out. “You kids think right hard about it!”

    Thinking their elder might be in trouble, Dipper and Wendy rushed out of the control room to come to his aid. But he wasn’t in trouble. He was just sitting on top of a large pipe, hugging his knees, rocking back and forth on his backside.

    “Think right hard about it!” He repeated, turning to them. “Y’all’ve stumbled into matters too great for ya, hear?!? Insanity? Brain demons? Suicide? Prophecy? These are too dark for you kids!” He shook a finger at them. “You don’t understand them yet! I hear y’all laughin’ and jokin’ and pokin’ fun in there, but these AIN’T LAUGHING MATTERS!! Prophecy ain’t for laughin’. Bill ain’t for laughin’. Madness ain’t for laughin’. And most of all, those scriblin’s ain’t for laughin! Yeh should stay warry and aware! Because who knows? If thems really was prophecies, perhaps some of ‘em were written fer YOU!”

    He stood up, and took a step towards them. “Kids, you’re right to be afeared! Listen to me, because when I was younger, I pursued these very things too deep! I took a step much too far! I dipped my mind in places no mind should be, and I uttered a prophecy of my own that day! I said ‘When Gravity Falls and Earth becomes sky, fear The Beast With Just One Eye!’ I said that! I don’t remember how or why, but I did! Yeh kin laugh at how vague it is, yeh kin laugh at how silly it sounds, but yer laughin’ don’t change that these are words to be heeded! Don’t you dare laugh at the mad alien engineer in there! Because if you laugh at him, you laugh at everybody else who ever tried to warn you! You laugh at everybody else who ever made a fool of themselves just trying to do right! You laugh at everyone who fate ever drove off the edge! Everyone whose precious brain was ever snatched from them! Everyone who died not understandin’ themselves…”

    He shook his head. “That man didn’t do nothin’ funny… That man didn’t do nothin’ wrong… Ain’t his fault what happened, but… But he done the best he could… Eh… Kids, don’t laugh at the madman. The madman’s just like you ‘er me, ‘sept he don’t know what he doin’… Kids, you know me… I was the madman once… I un’erstan’ the madman…”

    McGucket walked back to the control room, took a few trembling steps inside, and located the alien closest to the door: the one that had opened it, and let the radiation in. McGucket took off his coat, and laid it over this alien’s face. Then he bowed, closed his eyes, and crossed himself. “I respect the madman…” He said.

    And they became a little sadder, and a little wiser.







    The humans finally saw fit to leave. They crawled back up through the machinery, grappled back up the wall to the ladder, and ascended.

    Soon they were standing in the light again. Wendy stood up, stretched her aching back, and took a deep breath of the fresh Summer air. McGucket blinked a few times as he adjusted to the sunlight, and listened to the chirping of birds. And Dipper cast one last look at the dark hatchway in the ground, and considered the ancient labyrinth below. Call it what you will: a shipwreck, an ancient secret, an alien saucer, a tomb… But the truth remains that there was a darkness there. He’d taken Wendy here on a whim, and now he saw his error: this wasn’t something to treat lightly. Never again would he go in without purpose.

    Wendy’s mind, a little boggled and overwhelmed by the events of the day, just decided to enjoy the summer air for a while. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and felt thankful that she lived on such a beautiful planet as this. Such a beautiful day, wasn’t it? Too bad the Captain and Dr. Chuckles and Betty and Barney never got to enjoy this planet. Too bad all they ever saw was the inside of that rotting, derelict husk of their vessel. Earth is nice… I’m sure they would’ve enjoyed it…

    “Wait a minute!” Wendy said, turning to Dipper. “Betty and Barney said they were leaving the wreck, right??”

    “Yeah, to set up ‘fortifications’…” Dipper remembered. “They gave some coordinates…”

    “And those coordinates…” Wendy asked. “Where do they lead??”

    Dipper did some quick calculations in his head, to convert the alien coordinates to human ones. “Uh…” He answered. “Not far… Wait a minute…” He pulled out his map, traced across a few lines, and his finger landed right where he’d hoped: the red outline he’d drawn to represent the Forest of Daggers. The coordinates led to somewhere inside.

    “Well.” Dipper said.

    “Well well well wellwellwell…” Wendy agreed. “Betty and Barney are now officially the most plot-relevant vandals I’ve ever met.”







    Mabel came trudging up the stairs to behold an empty bedroom.

    This struck her as odd. Shouldn’t Dipper be here to welcome her home from the hospital…?

    Suddenly she remembered her phone. It had rung earlier, and that must have been Dipper. Her phone had been in her right pocket though, and since her right hand was covered in a bandage, she hadn’t been able to answer. Now, she realized she could just reach over with her left hand. “Silly Mabel!” She laughed at herself. “All pockets are for all hands! This is a non-discriminatory, hand-inclusive environment.”

    She reached her left hand into her right pocket, and pulled out her phone. It was a group text to her, Stan, and Ford.

    -Wendy and i r going 2 explore CSO for clues.

    -Will b careful

    -If not home by 6:00, come with guns!

    She glanced at the clock. It was 4:30. Then she racked her brain. CSO…? What did that stand for? Cookies So Owesome? No, awesome has an ‘A’… Crowded Soap Opera? No, Soap Opera wasn’t Dipper’s thing… Cop-Summoning Octagon? Why would an octagon summon cops? Crazy Soup Orangutan? She’d always wanted one of those, but why would Dipper go to one for clues…? No wait! That’s it! Crash Site Omega! The alien spaceship Ford found! That was it!

    Well, she hoped they were having fun. Half the movies that he and Wendy watched had alien spaceships, right? That must mean they thought they were cool, right? Maybe they even thought they were romantic… Maybe they would get in a relationship! No, Dipper already had a girlfriend… Well maybe he could dump her? It wasn’t working out so nice anyway… Oh, whatever.

    Waddles came up behind Mabel and nuzzled her ankle. She bent down to hug him, and her mind drifted back to Juan, her mysteriously-teleported-away-and-now-missing pet. The little robo-kitten that had been such a dear part of her life this week… Only to have his own mom show up as a total jerk and try to saw down the house… And then the whole thing where they shot the mom and Juan thought she was dead, and then Juan sawed Mabel, got kicked by Stan, and disappeared in a flash of light…

    Where are you now? Who took you away? Is your mom okay? Would he ever forgive us for how we treated you? Could you ever love me again? Juan, if only you knew I forgave you… She glanced down at her bandage. I don’t hold this against you…

    As if in response to her thoughts, she heard a small scraping noise coming from her bed.

    Her and Waddles both froze, and looked at the source.

    Juan’s original containment box was sitting on her bed. The same one Wendy had used back when she first found him. The box was a military-grade steel ammo crate, and although Juan could cut through, he found it very difficult, so he usually didn’t try.

    The noise had come from inside the box.

    She approached it cautiously. It looked just as it was when she’d last seen it… But who put it on her bed? She thought she’d left it in the closet yesterday…

    And why did it have a note attached to it? She bent over and examined the paper. The words had been typed instead of written, so there was no chance of telling the author by the handwriting. But the note said:

    Enjoy the time you have with him.

    Because it’s not right for him to stay here long.

    Find a good place for him, Mabel. We believe in you.

    Be wise and loving. Be his hero. Save his life.

    Could it be? Could it BE? Mabel reached into the drawer on her bedside table, and retrieved a pair of leather gloves, just in case. Then she gently turned the box toward her, unlatched it, and opened the lid.

    Juan stared back at her, alive and well.

    She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but he was back. And that was all that mattered to her. He was safe. She removed the lid entirely. The robot huddled back into the far corner of the box, and timidly retracted his saws as far as they would go.

    She reached in a glove to pet him. To let him know it was alright. That she still loved him, and that he didn’t have to feel sorry or afraid…

    But did he?

    Stan had wanted to kill him last time, after what he did. Same with Ford. And Dipper hadn’t tried to stop him. No, Juan was right to feel afraid. They might kill him if they knew he was back! That means… Mabel would just have to keep this a secret. It pained her to do so, especially against her own family, but it was the only way to keep Juan alive. She would have to keep him here and not tell anyone… Let him suck on the outlets when nobody was watching. Keep him safe in his box the rest of the time. Play with him when they were alone.

    And as soon as possible, find that ‘good place’ for him… Whoever had saved him last night had trusted her, and her alone, with the safety and well-being of this creature.

    With grim determination and a small guilty weight on her soul, she accepted the challenge, and began to formulate a plan. She hoped it was a good plan.

    She turned toward Waddles, and shook her head. Waddles met her eyes, and snorted a vow to secrecy. It was nice having a friend who understood these grave matters. Even if that friend was a pig.