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Chapter 22: Irredeemable

Author’s Note: All people are born evil. Nobody has to teach you to lie and cheat and steal and think angry, murderous thoughts like a wild animal. But if you're lucky, your parents will be responsible to raise you kind, loving, and selfless.

Some people never have that luxury.

Wendy and Robbie reached the top of the hill first, while Stan and McGucket’s old legs struggled to keep up. “So…” Robbie scratched his head and looked around when Wendy came to a stop. “Like, what are we doing here?”
“Ugh.” Wendy sighed. “I guess this is the part of the tradition where I act needlessly cryptic while you put it all together for yourself, huh…? Kay, see those weird cliffs over there?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, and now we’re at the top of a circular hill…”
“Yeah…?” Robbie looked around for a few seconds. Then, faster than Wendy expected, his brain connected the puzzle pieces. His jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. “Wha… OOOOOOH… Duuuuuude…”
Wendy bent down, wrapped her arms under a large rock, and levered it off to the side, revealing the smooth titanium hatch leading straight down into the Earth. “Consider yourself educated.” She grunted.
“Whaa… So… So like… So like there’s acutally aliens…?!?” Robbie demanded. “Like, literal, actual aliens?”
“They’re all dead.” Wendy answered, as she tried to fit her fingers into the seam around the hatch. “Every last one; dead…” Her fingers weren’t small enough to get a grip in there. “Urgh… Dang it! My kingdom for a magnet gun…”
“Uh… Here. I got this…” Robbie bent down beside her, and stuck his own fingers into the gap. His were able to fit somehow, and together they lifted the hatch open.
The deep, black, shadowy pit of the triangular vent yawned open below them, promising mystery, danger, and rumors of ancient horror for any who might brave it. Wendy started down the ladder without a second thought, pausing only briefly to slip on a headlamp. Robbie was wearing a headlamp too all of a sudden, and he followed her more hesitantly, just as Stan and McGucket came over the rise.
Stan’s half-hearted request to “Hey, wait up!” caused him to hesitate one more time, but Wendy was getting further ahead, and he didn’t want to lose track of her. Stan’s sigh of “Ugh… Kids…” Echoed down the shaft after them, fading in volume with the light.
Down they went.
It was just as dark, wet, and creepy as Wendy remembered. The rugged tendrils of Earthly tree roots seemed out of place among the smooth curves and hard seams of the aged metal. The blackness extended as far as the illumination of their headlamps would reach, interrupted only rarely by a stray beam of sunlight from above, shining down through cracks in the damaged dorsal hull. The faint, ghastly echoes of their movements and breathing whispered back at them from the distance. And now, more than ever, Wendy felt like she was being watched. But none of it held her attention for long. Sure, ‘aliens’ once held a kind of wonder, but that magic was long dead.
For now, there was only the mission. She pulled out Dipper’s journal, and turned to a page he’d put down after their last adventure down here: a map of the wreck. According to it, their destination should be somewhere straight below…
For Robbie, of course, the magic of this place was only just getting started. And he wondered with great anticipation what other secrets the ancient tomb had to offer.
Stan and McGucket caught up to them near the bottom of the ladder, and together the party descended ever deeper, toward the control room at the center of the ship.

-Warning: 4 unknown intruders registered in crucial engineering sector.
-Drones 154 and 155 respond.
The security system became active. The red lights of two armed security drones winked to life deep in the ship, and their spherical bodies hovered off the ground.
Normal programs were very strict for dealing with those who would tamper with the ship. When unauthorized personnel attempted to access any crucial area, procedure dictates they be treated with extreme hostility. If the intruders were sentient, capture and containment was priority. If the intruders were non-sentient or overly hostile, termination was permissible.
-Hostility and threat assessment programs running.
-Following program 003: Drones 154 and 155 move to intercept and analyze.
They began to make for the center of the ship.
-Warning: System error!
-Warning: System error!
For some reason, they stopped, and approached no further. Because long ago, their security officer had installed another program in their mainframe. This program told them that the reactor control room was a very special case. If intruders ever breached this room, they were to follow an alternative procedure.
-Following program +8*%__!3/e^){nB--______: Stand by, observe, and await instruction.
-Drones 154 and 155 standing by.

The control room’s blast doors creaked upon stiffly, and the musty smell of ancient death puffed out of the seam. Unfazed, Wendy and Stan put their fingers into the crack and levered it even farther open; now wide enough to walk through. The beams of their lights swept the room’s interior, illuminating the hundreds of high-tech controls, consoles and screens. But Robbie had expected all that. What he hadn’t expected were the dozen semi-squid-like alien bodies, lying crusty and mummified across the floor in various position of pain. And he hadn’t expected the graffiti either; insane scribblings of alien madness scrawled across the walls in odd-colored blood.
“WOOOAH…” He blinked in a radical sort of way. “Duuuuuude…”
Stan and Wendy stepped boldly through the door without a hint of fear, leaving Robbie standing with McGucket.
“It’s harmless…” The inventor muttered. “Nothin’ in there that kin hurt ya… What killed em all is long gone…”
Robbie looked at him. “Well, yeah, I could guess that much, but—”
“Harmless.” McGucket repeated again, and Robbie realized that he was talking to himself. “Just death… Folks die all the time… What killed ‘ese fellers is dead. What killed ‘em is dead… And their madness died with ‘em… the madness died with ‘em… It’s okay…” The old man finally convinced himself, and took one hesitant step through the doors. “It’s okay…”
Robbie peaked in after the other 3, unsure whether he should be wary or not. “Hey, uh… Like… What the heck happened in here?” He gestured to the bodies. “Who are these things?”
“The ship’s engineers…” McGucket answered. “Murdered after a cruelest fashion…”
“Got nuked.” Stan stated simply.
Wendy felt he needed a better explanation than that. “Okay, so like…” Her mind drifted back to her and Dipper’s adventure down in this wreck. They’d probed around this room out of curiosity, and happened to find the journal of the last sane engineer… Was it really only 6 days ago? “They locked themselves in here during the crash.” She explained. “When the rest of the ship was going nuclear, they sealed the doors to stay safe… And, uh… I guess… Okay, the engine of the ship was going all screwy, tearing up reality or somesuch.” She pointed to the scrawled words on the walls. “They started to lose their sanity, their grip on reality, even began to see into the future I guess… I’m not sure how much of it was Bill Cipher’s doing, but he was there too. He got into their dreams, brains, sanity… And he tore their minds apart… And… The last sane engineer, that guy…” She pointed. “I guess he was working on a modification to contain Bill’s weirdness… And then he lost it. He opened the door, and the radiation from the rest of the ship cooked them all alive… Sterilized them too, which is why they never rotted… And now here we are.”
“Oh…” Robbie frowned. “So… But you killed ‘Bill’, right? So this is all, like, literally perfectly harmless in every way now?”
“Yep.” Stan nodded.
“I guess.” Wendy shrugged.
“So…” Robbie pointed a thumb at McGucket, whose eyes were darting about, and whose hand seemed to be nervously seeking out the handle of his death ray. “What’s he on about?”
“Oh, heh…” McGucket immediately let go of the death ray when he realized how he must seem. “You know me… Just… Just a tad superstitious is all… Heh… Eh… Sorry…”
“Hey.” Wendy put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re all on edge. Just get the computer running, man…” She gave him a pat. “Then we can blow this pop stand. Yeah?”
“Yeh…” He seemed to regain some measure of confidence as he remembered their mission, and managed to tear his eyes away from the bodies long enough to make it to the main console on the other side of the room. From there, he leaned the death ray against a wall, and fished a small library of tools out of his overalls. Once his hands were wrapped around the familiar screwdriver and soldering gun, they steadied. “Okay, uh… Ya still got that computatraption on ya?”
“Yeah…” Wendy unslung her backpack, and pulled out the power control coupling.
“Kay, ya wanna get that installed while I start in on this?” He pointed to a loose panel on the wall. “If my reckoning of the pipelines and wiring is proper, it should go somewhere right in there…”
The other 3 managed to roll the panel aside, and sure enough, there was a series of 8 slots behind it, each shaped exactly like the device Wendy carried. 7 of the slots were blocked with the destroyed pieces of burned-out older ones, but the last slot was empty.
The coupling fit perfectly.
To one side of McGucket’s console, a single small green light flickered on.
“Wull, I’ll be a horn-swaggled boilerplate, I think we can get it runnin!” He laughed once, then caught himself. “This… I… Sorry, it’s just… This… This woula been a happy day…”
“How long you need?”
“Eh…” McGucket fished out a beefy computer, and plugged it into the console. A few more green lights turned on, and he began to type. “Gimme two hours?”

-Warning: Intruders have lifted the pre-ignition safety locks on reactor 5 without authorization.
The drones were programmed with a very particular set of skills: containing escaped test subjects, breaking up fights between passengers, defending restricted areas, pacifying external dangers, that sort of thing. Their entire minds were devoted toward threat assessment and combat.
But here was something else: the intruders actually appeared to be fixing the ship’s last remaining reactor. This type of situation was considerably outside the range of what they knew how to think about. There were absolutely no pre-programmed procedures for dealing with beneficial intruders.
The drones may not be very smart, but they were smart enough to know when they weren’t smart enough. -Warning: Directive unclear. Living officer, please advise. They requested.
But of course, the security officer had been dead for a long time now. A very long time. Their inquiries hadn’t received response for ages and ages… But they didn’t question that. They didn’t have the capacity to understand that. As far as they knew, their overseer was simply in the restroom or sleeping or something.
So they didn’t question it either when, for the first time in millennia, this very same overseer suddenly started giving them input again.
-Input: Stand by at long range and do not engage. Was the command. -Analyze the intruders’ biology and search for deviant life signs. Do not consider hostile until instructed.
-Directive accepted. Awaiting further input.
-Input: Display sensor feed on my monitor.
-Sensor feed linked. Awaiting further input.
-Input: That’s all for now.
-Drones 154, 155, 157 and 158 standing by. Welcome back, Lieutenant.

Two hours was a long time to wait when you’re on-edge, and even longer when you’re standing still in one place.
Twenty minutes in, they found themselves already bored.
Stan was asleep on one of the alien seats, a magazine propped up on his lap.
McGucket, who had no seat nearby and still had work to do, pressed a button on his robotic trousers to lock himself in an upright pose. His quiet hummed song joined Stan’s snoring as the only sounds in the room.
Wendy, still too restless to sit, just leaned back against a wall and stared at the insane alien graffiti. These words which once told the future… She wanted to read again what they said.
Robbie was even more restless than her. He wasn’t quite sure what to do while he waited, so he curiously broke the head off one of the dead bodies and began to examine it. It had three eyes, a sideways opening mouth… The mummified skin was thin and crusted, but must have once had the form of flexible scales… Fascinating. He smacked the skull against a wall, hoping to break it open to see what might be hidden inside.
“HEY!” Wendy noticed what he was doing, and barked in his direction.
He froze.
“Look, just…” She sighed, shrugged, motioned for him to set the head down. “Hey man, just a little respect, huh?”
“Right, right, yeah…” He set it down hastily. But then he thought about her comment for a moment, and frowned. “Wait, respect?” He asked. “What, for him?”
“For all of them. Dude.” Wendy spread her arms. “People died here, okay? Just… You know.”
“The work they did here kept Weirdmageddon from goin’ global…” McGucket muttered over his shoulder. “They’s heroes in their kind…”
“Well, sure, good for them.” Robbie shrugged. “But they weren’t doing it for you, they were probably just trying to save their own skins! And did a mighty fine job of it too… Look at these suckers!”
“Hey man, look—”
“What?” Robbie asked. “So they tried to save themselves, went hilariously mad, then killed themselves and accidentally, randomly, unforeseeably, did a favor for you a couple thousand years later… So what? They’re all just dead now, so who cares? I mean… They’re not even people, they’re just… lanky squid-type things.” He gave the detached head a spiteful little kick, and it rolled off. “Who cares?” He repeated.
Wendy and McGucket stared at him for a minute. McGucket subtly crossed himself as he turned back to his computer. Wendy shrugged and folded her arms.
Robbie put his hands on his hips. “What?” He asked again.
“Look…” Wendy told him. “If I’ve learned anything this past week, it’s that aliens are just folks… Sure, they may have tentacles or three eyes or scales or… Or they might have metal skin or might’ve grown up on some asteroid a dozen galaxies away, but in the end… They’re still just folks… These guys…” She spread her arms. “They probably had wives, or… Or parents, or kids, or… Eggs, or whatever the heck, I don’t know… But there were friends, family, people who cared about them. They died right in the middle of their hopes and dreams, they still had their souls… Somebody on some asteroid a dozen galaxies away still missed them… Somebody waited every day for them to come back except they didn’t. Somebody wished they’d never left except they did…. Somebody loved them. They’re not monsters. They’re not aliens… They’re just… People…”
Robbie frowned.
As if this idea were entirely new to him. As if it made him think.
Wendy turned back to the graffiti.
McGucket kept typing.
Stan kept Snoring.
Robbie spoke up again. “You ever met an alien?”
Wendy nodded. “Betty and Barney. Well… We called them Betty and Barney. Dunno how to pronounce their real names… But they were the farmers responsible for the Forest of Daggers, and we met their ghosts. They were pretty decent actually. Didn’t try to haunt us, even though they could’ve… Didn’t try to kill us, although they could’ve tried… Didn’t have to help us escape, but I think they did… I dunno.” She opened Dipper’s journal to a sketch he’d made of the two specters, and showed it at Robbie. “These were them… Good people.”
He took the book gently, and studied the faces. They looked monstrous, to be sure. Mouths full of razor-sharp saws, haunting, ghostly electric eyes, and nightmarish metallic skeletons floating in the air… Yet she said they were decent people. She said they were just folks. Dead folks. Loved folks… Even friendly to the organic living… They had names… They were… Friends…
Robbie closed the book and handed it back to her.
They were silent for a few moments more.
Then Robbie stood up, flipped his headlamp back on, and made for the door.
“Where you going?” She asked.
“I dunno…” He shrugged restlessly. “Just wanna look around. Wanna get out of here.”
She glanced back at McGucket, standing next to Stan’s sleeping form. They can handle themselves. Wendy thought. And she looked at the alien bodies. “Yeah. Me too.” She stood up and started after him. “And it’s dumb to go alone anyway…”
“Right…”

-Completed scan of intruders. The drones reported back. 4 bioforms, all carbon-based, aerobic, terrestrial vertebrates. Species unknown. Speed and strength moderate. Weaponry and defensive capabilities unknown. Bioform 1 is recognized from previous intrusion; threat level 16, high. Other threat levels unknown.
-Input: Do any of the intruders display abnormalities?
-Bioform 2 possesses an alternative body chemistry including: slightly adjusted air and fluid handling cycles, no adrenaline and other ordinary biological markers, and inconclusive bone density. Awaiting further input.
-Input: I want drone 154 to lock its sensors on bioform 2. Give me control of drone 154’s basic movement controls.
-Controls linked. Awaiting further input.
-Input: That will be all.
-Drones 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, and 164 standing by.

“Robbie…? Hey, your brain broke or what?” His eyes seemed to be fixed on the far wall of the vast engine room, as if mesmerized or perplexed by something. She snapped her fingers in front of his face to bring him out of his daze.
“Oh, uh…” He shook his head and turned back to her. “Yeah, sorry, I just, like… Sorry. Just spaced out for a minute…”
She looked where he’d been staring a moment ago, but couldn’t make out anything except perfect blackness in the distance. “Did ya see something?”
“I don’t know… What’s over that way anyway?”
“Uh…” She pulled Dipper’s journal back out, and opened it to the incomplete map he’d made of the wreck. “Uh… I don’t think we’ve ever been below the cargo level…” She studied the map. “But from this, it looks like there’s probably a ramp on that side leading down… So I think it’s new territory. Not sure.”
He thought for a moment longer. “Could we check it out?”
“Why?”
“Like… I dunno… It’s cool?”
“Why is it cool?”
“I dunno! Like…! I dunno, if we’ve never been down there we should probably just check it out, right?”
She blinked. “You totally saw something.”
“I don’t know…” He repeated. “It’s dark…”
“That’s so…” She checked her backpack: an axe, a crowbar, a list of handy spells, some snacks… She was ready as she ever would be. “All right, fine. We’ll go. HEY MCGUCKET!”
“Eh?”
“Robbie saw something toward the SouthEast side, so we’re gonna go exploring, okay? Looks to be further underground.”
“Eh… I dunno… How long you be gone?”
“Hour and a half? Before you’re through with that. If we’re not, wake Stan and call Ford.”
“All right… Uh… Be careful an’ stuff… We don’t know what all’s down here.”
“We kinda do…” Wendy mumbled.
So they set out, picking their way across and between the miscellaneous machinery of the engine room. Eventually a large, tall wall loomed up before them, unclimbable and impassable save for a pair of blast doors standing at the bottom. They were open just about wide enough for a security drone.
Wendy squeezed through first, Robbie followed, and they found themselves at the top of a long passageway, gently curving deeper into the blackness ahead. Wendy checked the map and saw nothing; they really were in uncharted territory now. Hesitantly, she returned the journal to her pack as they started their descent.
“So…” Maybe 5 minutes later, Robbie broke the silence again. “You said everything down here is dead, right?”
“Huh? Oh yeah…” Wendy nodded. “Well, ‘cept for the drones, a’course.”
“The what now?”
“Don’t worry; they’re stupid. If you don’t feel fear they’ll just ignore ya. And if they don’t, you can just shoot ‘em… Don’t let ‘em grab you though.”
“Okay… Yeah, but… But I was talking about aliens… You’re sure nothing survived the crash? Like, those engineers all died after the fact, and whoever ‘Betty and Barney’ were, they lived long enough to do their thing… Like… It seems totally bogus that everything died…”
“Yeah… There were a few survivors.” Wendy admitted. “But they were picked off. Hunted down and killed one by one.”
“…All of them?”
“To a man.”
“…By what?”
“A shapeshifter.” Wendy recognized how scary that probably sounded, and explained. “Okay, so, this, uh… Let’s see, this ship was an explorer, like Christopher Columbus, right? And it was exploring planets all over the galaxy, collecting specimens and junk like that… Well, just like Christopher Columbus, their Captain was a grade-A sack of crap. Didn’t care whether the ‘test subjects’ were intelligent or dangerous or whatnot, he just kept doing his thing, trying to use them for his own purposes… Well, it kinda blew up in his face after the crash, because this one test subject, this shapeshifter, got free. And she was real mad because of all the things they’d done to her, and she was also really, really smart I guess. She hacked the security system, took control of the drones, and killed everyone left. Kinda… I guess I kinda get it, but still. A lot of innocent people died.”
Robbie considered this for a while, a strange look on his face. “Oh.” He finally said.
They kept walking.
When the tunnel forked, Robbie suggested they take the small passage to the left, but Wendy said they may as well follow the larger route to whatever end it held. Robbie reluctantly agreed.
Turns out, that end was water. Wendy supposed they were underground, and not too far from a lake, so some flooding made sense.
The surface was utterly dark and filthy; bits and scraps of decayed wreckage stood on top of the miry surface, and a smell like an ancient, rusty swamp wafted from it; a reek quite unlike anything they might have imagined before. It made sense; this water hadn’t moved in thousands of years, just stood there, stagnant, while the metal hull slowly rusted, and whatever growth could manage grew and died on the sparse nutrients. Was this earthly life, trapped down here in this isolated bog? Or was it some plant, fungus, or foul contamination from worlds away, carried within the ship’s own stores?
Who knows. Needless to say, they wouldn’t be swimming.
So they turned around and trekked back up the tunnel to the fork Robbie had first suggested. It seemed to Wendy like as good an option as any.
This tunnel was narrower, and branched off into many rooms and passages. Some of the doors were locked; others were rusted shut, others opened into flooded chambers, and the rest stocked equipment or furniture decayed beyond recognition.
Nothing of interest. They continued down the tunnel. Neither of them were really sure where they were going or what they were looking for, but at least they weren’t lost. The hallway was basically straight, and wider than the surrounding passages, so as long as they stayed close to it, they would always have their sense of direction.
But the tunnel ended, as all tunnels do. Toward the end, it seemed to flatten; the metal was buckled and bent, and seemed to have been collapsed upwards…
“What caused this?” Robbie frowned.
Wendy thought. “Oh.” She realized. “We’re down at the bottom of the ship. This is the part that was crushed when it hit the ground.”
“Ah.”
Wendy shrugged. “So… Where are we going, man? What are we even doing here? I mean, you thought you saw something, but we didn’t find anything. You happy?”
“Well…” Robbie looked around. All the ship seemed perfectly silent for a moment. “Have…” He stuttered, as if something very large were on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t know how to let it out or if he should. “You ever had weird dreams, Wendy?” He blurted.
Wendy blinked. “Weird dreams. Whoever heard of such a thing.”
“W-w-well yeah, I know, like…” He stuttered. “I know all dreams are weird, but have you ever seen like, something totally bogus and crazy and it totally sticks with you because I don’t know?”
“Elaborate.”
“Like… I don’t know… Like somebody else’s dream? Have you ever dreamed somebody else’s dream? Like… Like if things turned out different, and your life didn’t look like it did, then you might have seen what you saw… But you can never quite remember, and you know it’s not a real memory, but it just sticks with you? Like… Somebody’s been in your head…?”
“Well that was just needlessly cryptic.” Wendy informed him. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s… It’s just…” Robbie ran his hands through his hair, and seemed much more focused and alert than he usually did. His headlamp beam swept the walls. “It’s just that I, like, totally remember this hallway!”
Wendy looked around. It didn’t look like any hallway she’d ever seen. Like any hallway that had ever existed in the human world. She looked back at him. “Did you see it in a movie or a video game or something?” She guessed.
“No, no, I mean… Not the colors or the feel, but the exact shape… That collapsed bit there just clicks somehow… Even this little seam in the floor right here… And I think this door leads to a side passage that goes deeper…!” He walked over to a random, unassuming hatch, and gave it a push. Surprisingly, it wasn’t rusted shut, and eased slowly open. “Does that make any sense?”
Wendy frowned at the door for several seconds. Then frowned at him for several seconds. “…Do you ‘remember’ what’s back there?” She asked.
He shook his head.
“…Well…” She shrugged. “I’ve seen flying eyeballs turn people to stone. I’ve seen kids magically cloning themselves. I’ve seen Soos with a pig’s brain. I’ve seen alien robot ghosts.” She pulled out McGucket’s ray gun, gave the hallway behind them a quick check, then nodded toward the open door. “After all that, this ain’t so weird. Lead the way, o prophet.”
This new way was small and cramped. A veritable maze of twisted metal, snaking below and between walls, through the cracks between separated panels and severed pipes, the one single path through this wreckage of the vessel’s lower reaches. There was room enough for a person to easily squeeze through, as Wendy and Robbie were steadily proving, but never enough space to stand up or really get a sense of direction.
But bizarrely, Robbie seemed to know where he was going.

-Warning: Final safety locks have been released on reactor 5. Intruders could begin startup procedures at any time.
-Input: Disregard. Do not interfere.
-Warning: Intruders 1 and 2 are now approaching location designation ‘Keep’.
-Input: Disregard. Continue long-range observation. This is all part of the plan.
-Drones 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 174, and 175 standing by.

After maybe 20 minutes of crawling and scrambling and dodging hard corners in the tight space, they emerged into a wider hallway, collapsed about 20 feet in either direction. Robbie pointed to a metal panel jammed in place against the wall, and said he thought that a way forward was hidden behind it.
But Wendy didn’t help him move it. Instead she stood back, and sighed. “You know Robbie.” She started reluctantly. “As a general rule, you never really admit your mistakes or make apologies. One of the reasons we broke up.”
“Uh?” He tried to jiggle the panel sideways, hoping to loosen it. “What?”
“Normally.” She continued. “You’re kinda like ‘ugh, whatever’ to everything. Not really excited or curious… You’re kinda adventurous, but never on your own, and only to impress people, especially Tambry. And you’re much more interested in girls than with aliens.”
“Well…” He found the jagged part that the panel was caught on, and realized he had to push it in to pull it out. “So…?”
“But today you apologized for everything.” She said. “You told me everything you should have said a year ago, really sucked it up and acted the gentleman. And then, you ventured down into an alien ship on your own volition, without Tambry, not to impress me, really for no reason at all… And then, you willingly followed your weird space dreams through cramped little tunnels, and… And now… Now a girl’s been pointing a gun at your back for fifteen minutes and you haven’t even noticed.”
“Huh—AGH!” Robbie finally turned around, and saw her standing in a ready stance, holding the blaster nice and steady at her hip, aimed right for the center of his torso. He jumped to his feet and put up his hands. “What the heck, Wendy?!? What are you-what are you doing?!?”
“Being a lot less stupid than you think I am.” She smiled humorlessly. “Taking the initiative before we get wherever you’re going.”
“Wai—HUH?” He frowned. “Wait, you think I’m the shapeshifter? What the heck?”
“Hey.” She told him. “Calm down. The Shifter’s been dead for thousands of years, why would I be paranoid about her now?”
“Well…” He frowned, as if struggling for an answer. “Well… Well Mabel told me that there’s one alive today! And it’s in a bunker that Ford made!”
“Oh right… You do know about that one somehow. Of course. You’re right. I should be paranoid of him.” Wendy nodded. “Now again, calm down. If you’re really Robbie, then you’ll be able to prove it, and you’ve nothing to fear. Right?”
“Like…” He took a deep breath, and seemed to calm down. “Like, yeah, I am Robbie… But… But you could be a shapeshifter too…! I think… I think you’re the one who’s acting suspicious, and!”
“Except I’m not the one with a gun pointed at my crucials.” She reminded him. “So let’s not change the subject, huh?”
There was a brutish sort of wisdom to that. “…Okay.” He nodded.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” Wendy asked.
“Tambry.”
“That was an easy one. Band name.”
“Robbie V. and The Tombstones.”
“Address?”
“42nd Pinewood Blvd.”
“…Dad’s job?”
“He runs the morgue and the graveyard with mom. And really creepy about it, too… Stupid…”
“What are your talents?”
“Guitar, singing… Spray painting, like, totally counts as a talent too, and…”
“And your secret talent?”
“I… Uh…” His eyes fell. “Drawing anime… Except its actually called manga but nobody understands…”
“Biggest regret?”
“Uh…” He appeared to be hesitating but was really racking his brain. “Hypnotizing you…”
Wendy thought for a moment. She needed a better test; some knowledge that only her and Robbie would know… Something that Robbie would never have told anyone in a million years…
“What color was my bra that night?” Wendy asked.
“Huh?”
“My bra. That night. What color?”
“I…” He frowned. “I…”
She waited.
“I…” He shook his head. “I…” His voice got small, fearful. “I think… White?”
She sighed, glad for some certainty at last. “Wrong answer.”
“…I mean… It might’ve been grey.”
“Strike two.”
“Pink? I… Look, that really wasn’t the part I was paying attention to, alright?”
She put up a hand and stopped him there. “Trick question.” She informed him. “Robbie never saw anything of the sort… And got a black eye for trying.”
The shapeshifter closed his mouth.
“All right.” Wendy’s voice was low, steady, and deathly serious. “Now here’s how it’s gonna work, dude: You’re gonna shapeshift reeeeeaaaal slowly into something nice and harmless. And then you’re gonna tell me exactly how and when you escaped, what you’ve been doing since, and who you’ve hurt along the way. You gimme any sort of trouble? This thing melts a hole. SAVVY?”
Very slowly, Robbie’s clothes, hair, and headlamp disappeared, melting back into his flesh. His skin paled, and stretched, and dissolved. The mass that was left seemed to expand, morph, and twist, and finally Wendy was looking at the alien’s true form. Its lumpy white hands clasped on top of its head, and it kneeled on the floor in a position of surrender. Two large, bulbous red eyes locked with Wendy’s.
And the weird toothed mouth tried a hesitant smile.
“Well.” She hadn’t heard the creature’s true voice in a long time, and it brought back some awful awkward memories. “All that talk.” His voice rolled. “All that talk about how aliens aren’t monsters… About how they’re just people… Respect them, you said. Treat them as equals, you said. I met some decent folks, you said… All that talk, and now you’d shoot me…”
Wendy shook her head. “It’s not about what or who you are man… It’s about what you’ve done. You’ve lied. You’ve stolen. You tried to kill us. You have killed for all I know, and I can’t ignore that. Now. How. Did you. Escape.”
“…Stasis tube malfunctioned for some reason about a week ago.” He said. “Then… A few days later, Robbie came down to freeze some samples he and Mable had been collecting from the robotic forest… He left the door open.”
“Robbie. You did what with him?”
The shapeshifter didn’t say anything.
Wendy bit her lip, and moved on. “Who else have you hurt?”
He shook his head. “No one.”
“…You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” He told her.
“Prove it.”
“Call Tambry. Tell her she spent the week with an alien. She’ll be surprised. She’ll be conflicted. She’ll want to talk to me. Because I was a great Robbie. Better than he ever was; you said it yourself: he was prideful, self-centered, lustful. A real jerk. He was taking his life on a wild wide to nowhere. But I was a good boy. People who thought they knew me knew I cared… Tambry loves Robbie more now. And if she had him back? It would be a rude awakening…”
Wendy almost did make the call. But she wasn’t all that confident in her ability to hold somebody at gunpoint while talking on the phone. It was like distracted driving; not a good idea. And besides, she wasn’t all that confident in her phone’s ability to get cell service way down here.
“So.” Wendy said. “Just one question then. Why haven’t you killed me today? Why lead me off toward wherever this is? Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.” He told her.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
She considered that for a moment. “Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“You’re so mature.” He scoffed.
“YOU’RE so mature.” She corrected him.
“I’m telling you the truth, woman! I remember this place, but I don’t know where or how and I just want to see what’s down at the end!”
“And I will shoot you! IN THE FACE!”
“Where I CAME FROM! Please!”
She swallowed her next threat, and glanced at the wall panel he’d been trying to move out of the way. “How can I trust you?” She asked. “What can you plainly tell me? And after all you’ve done, why shouldn’t I shoot you? In the face? Right here? Right now?”
“I…” He looked at the panel as well. “I…” He turned back to her. His little claws clicked as he thought for a moment. “Wendy Corduroy.” He finally blurted. “What if you were raised by gnomes?”
Wendy pondered this, and decided it was an interesting thought experiment. She took on a more comfortable stance. “Go on.”
“What if a horde of tiny little men found you as a toddler, and kept you chained up in a big hollow stump, deep in the forest? You never knew your parents. You never knew who or what you were. ‘Human’ was a word they never used, not even ‘female’, you didn’t even have a name, only ‘monster’. ‘Specimen’. ‘Creature’. ‘Biologic anomaly!’ You were a peculiar giant, with red hair, long arms and legs, and muscles the size of their torsos; capable of feats of strength they’d never even imagined.”
“Okaaaay…” Wendy frowned.
“They would come into your stump every once in a while.” The shifter continued. “Just to poke and prod you and admire how fast you were learning their language, learning to play chess, learning to use tools, learning to perform little tricks for them. Ever since you’d learned what ‘person’ meant, you knew that you were one, or at least longed to become one… But you hadn’t the faintest idea how, and they would not listen. To them, you were nothing. You were a pet sometimes, when they were feeling generous. You were an annoyance other times, and they would shun you…
“But mostly… Mostly they treated you like a prize animal, as if they were fattening you up to eat you. Every time you were a little bit bigger and fatter they would congratulate themselves and say ‘Wow! Look at her! Soooo marvelous!’ And they fed you beans, nothing but bucketfulls of beans, and you never knew what anything else tasted like… Until one day… You realized what your basic instincts were saying: that meat was food as well. And you began to wonder what a gnome would taste like if you shaved off the beard and cooked it… You reasoned that gnomes were weak. You could probably bend them, break them, tear them up, they were so small…
“With such ideas in your head, one day you tried to escape. You tore open the shackles on your feet. You got out of the stump, and tried to read their notes, find out who you are, find out what more there is beyond your tiny world. You wanted the answer, just a simple answer to a simple question: Who are you? So simple!
“But it didn’t work. They locked you in a cage, with a whole truckload of beans for company, and then they forgot all about you. For 30 long years they forgot about you, left you alone with the echoes for company. When you were old… Old enough to be an adult. Old enough that you should have finished a nice education. Old enough to excel at a wonderful job. Old enough that by rights you should have settled down with a nice little man and become a mother of two, old enough that you should be surrounded with family if all were right in the world… When you were OLD…! That was when you finally escaped…
“If you were raised by Gnomes, Wendy Corduroy, would you have done any differently than I?”
The shapeshifter rose to his feet, and took a step towards her.
No matter his story, that was a step too far. She pulled the trigger.
The laser bolt hit the Shifter right in the chest. But it wasn’t nearly as powerful as she’d hoped, and the creature didn’t stop. Before she could let off a second shot, it had snatched the weapon from her hands, and smashed it to pieces on the floor.
Now his gigantic, hideous head was mere inches from her face. Wendy stood her ground silently, her fingers twitching as she contemplated reaching for another weapon, wondering if a fight was necessary, wondering if a fight would even work…
She looked down, and watched his flesh shift and stretch over the blaster wound, shrinking and closing and scarring over and healing completely. In only a minute, it was like there was no wound at all.
She looked back up at his face.
The red, lidless eyes glared at her. The claws around the mouth clicked quietly. His mucus layer rippled and his breath reeked.
He turned away from her, grabbed the metal panel stuck against a wall, and ripped it free. He tossed it down the hall, and it clattered to a stop at the end with a great noise.
There was, indeed, a tunnel hidden behind it.
Without a sound, he collapsed into a slightly narrower form to fit better.
“Lead the way then dude…” Wendy mumbled, and started after him.
The shifter turned and glared down at her one more time. “And my name.” He snarled. “Is Sam.”

-Warning: Intruders have begun Reactor 5 startup. Power output: 5% and rising. Coolant levels sufficient.
-Warning: Intruders have access to all remaining ship systems and engines.
-Warning: Intruders 1 and 2 are presently entering location designation: ‘Keep’.
-Input: Assign bioforms 3 and 4 a threat level of 20. Combat preference: Immediate lethal force. You are clear to engage. Take no survivors.
-Threat reassessed. Antimatter pellets loaded and launchers charged. Drones 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 174, 175 and 179 engaging.
-Drones 154, 180, 181, 182, 183, and 188, standing by.
-Input: Reserve forces, prepare to enter Keep.

Wendy began to make out a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of her, she saw the Shifter’s silhouette emerge from the passage, stand up straight, and freeze.
She came up behind him, and stood slowly.
The room was maybe the size of a 3-car garage. It was all collapsed on one side, and all other easy entrances were closed off. It wasn’t quite dark, thanks to a few glowing computer screens set up near the center. It wasn’t quite dry, thanks to a small trickle of clean, fresh water flowing down through a broken pipe.
And it wasn’t quite empty.
Wendy’s first thought was ‘storage room’, judging by the piles of hexagonal crates stacked and littered near the corners.
But there were also the bodies.
Dozens of skeletons stuck to the wall with what looked like giant-sized spider webbing, hanging there with their feet maybe 3 feet off the ground, and their arms stretched out horizontally, as if crucified. Most of them were the squid-type aliens that made up most of the ship’s crew. Some were a little different; probably some of the other passengers who’d bought passage as colonists… There were even a few humans. But there was one; one of them had a mouth made of saws, and a metal skeleton, and Wendy remembered having met his ghost. Barney. The man who’d died trying to kill the original shapeshifter.
Speaking of which.
In the center of the room, hunched over a collection of glowing computer screens, there stood a single living figure. Its fingers quietly tapped out some kind of command on the computer, and a few lights flashed. A half-dozen security drones hovered in through openings high on the walls, and turned their red triangular gaze down on the two new visitors.
The figure stood to its feet, and turned around.
And twirled a tape measure in its hand.
“Hello Sam.” It said.

“Mom…”

Description

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Chapter 22: Irredeemable

Author’s Note: All people are born evil. Nobody has to teach you to lie and cheat and steal and think angry, murderous thoughts like a wild animal. But if you're lucky, your parents will be responsible to raise you kind, loving, and selfless.

Some people never have that luxury.

Wendy and Robbie reached the top of the hill first, while Stan and McGucket’s old legs struggled to keep up. “So…” Robbie scratched his head and looked around when Wendy came to a stop. “Like, what are we doing here?”
“Ugh.” Wendy sighed. “I guess this is the part of the tradition where I act needlessly cryptic while you put it all together for yourself, huh…? Kay, see those weird cliffs over there?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, and now we’re at the top of a circular hill…”
“Yeah…?” Robbie looked around for a few seconds. Then, faster than Wendy expected, his brain connected the puzzle pieces. His jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. “Wha… OOOOOOH… Duuuuuude…”
Wendy bent down, wrapped her arms under a large rock, and levered it off to the side, revealing the smooth titanium hatch leading straight down into the Earth. “Consider yourself educated.” She grunted.
“Whaa… So… So like… So like there’s acutally aliens…?!?” Robbie demanded. “Like, literal, actual aliens?”
“They’re all dead.” Wendy answered, as she tried to fit her fingers into the seam around the hatch. “Every last one; dead…” Her fingers weren’t small enough to get a grip in there. “Urgh… Dang it! My kingdom for a magnet gun…”
“Uh… Here. I got this…” Robbie bent down beside her, and stuck his own fingers into the gap. His were able to fit somehow, and together they lifted the hatch open.
The deep, black, shadowy pit of the triangular vent yawned open below them, promising mystery, danger, and rumors of ancient horror for any who might brave it. Wendy started down the ladder without a second thought, pausing only briefly to slip on a headlamp. Robbie was wearing a headlamp too all of a sudden, and he followed her more hesitantly, just as Stan and McGucket came over the rise.
Stan’s half-hearted request to “Hey, wait up!” caused him to hesitate one more time, but Wendy was getting further ahead, and he didn’t want to lose track of her. Stan’s sigh of “Ugh… Kids…” Echoed down the shaft after them, fading in volume with the light.
Down they went.
It was just as dark, wet, and creepy as Wendy remembered. The rugged tendrils of Earthly tree roots seemed out of place among the smooth curves and hard seams of the aged metal. The blackness extended as far as the illumination of their headlamps would reach, interrupted only rarely by a stray beam of sunlight from above, shining down through cracks in the damaged dorsal hull. The faint, ghastly echoes of their movements and breathing whispered back at them from the distance. And now, more than ever, Wendy felt like she was being watched. But none of it held her attention for long. Sure, ‘aliens’ once held a kind of wonder, but that magic was long dead.
For now, there was only the mission. She pulled out Dipper’s journal, and turned to a page he’d put down after their last adventure down here: a map of the wreck. According to it, their destination should be somewhere straight below…
For Robbie, of course, the magic of this place was only just getting started. And he wondered with great anticipation what other secrets the ancient tomb had to offer.
Stan and McGucket caught up to them near the bottom of the ladder, and together the party descended ever deeper, toward the control room at the center of the ship.

-Warning: 4 unknown intruders registered in crucial engineering sector.
-Drones 154 and 155 respond.
The security system became active. The red lights of two armed security drones winked to life deep in the ship, and their spherical bodies hovered off the ground.
Normal programs were very strict for dealing with those who would tamper with the ship. When unauthorized personnel attempted to access any crucial area, procedure dictates they be treated with extreme hostility. If the intruders were sentient, capture and containment was priority. If the intruders were non-sentient or overly hostile, termination was permissible.
-Hostility and threat assessment programs running.
-Following program 003: Drones 154 and 155 move to intercept and analyze.
They began to make for the center of the ship.
-Warning: System error!
-Warning: System error!
For some reason, they stopped, and approached no further. Because long ago, their security officer had installed another program in their mainframe. This program told them that the reactor control room was a very special case. If intruders ever breached this room, they were to follow an alternative procedure.
-Following program +8*%__!3/e^){nB--______: Stand by, observe, and await instruction.
-Drones 154 and 155 standing by.

The control room’s blast doors creaked upon stiffly, and the musty smell of ancient death puffed out of the seam. Unfazed, Wendy and Stan put their fingers into the crack and levered it even farther open; now wide enough to walk through. The beams of their lights swept the room’s interior, illuminating the hundreds of high-tech controls, consoles and screens. But Robbie had expected all that. What he hadn’t expected were the dozen semi-squid-like alien bodies, lying crusty and mummified across the floor in various position of pain. And he hadn’t expected the graffiti either; insane scribblings of alien madness scrawled across the walls in odd-colored blood.
“WOOOAH…” He blinked in a radical sort of way. “Duuuuuude…”
Stan and Wendy stepped boldly through the door without a hint of fear, leaving Robbie standing with McGucket.
“It’s harmless…” The inventor muttered. “Nothin’ in there that kin hurt ya… What killed em all is long gone…”
Robbie looked at him. “Well, yeah, I could guess that much, but—”
“Harmless.” McGucket repeated again, and Robbie realized that he was talking to himself. “Just death… Folks die all the time… What killed ‘ese fellers is dead. What killed ‘em is dead… And their madness died with ‘em… the madness died with ‘em… It’s okay…” The old man finally convinced himself, and took one hesitant step through the doors. “It’s okay…”
Robbie peaked in after the other 3, unsure whether he should be wary or not. “Hey, uh… Like… What the heck happened in here?” He gestured to the bodies. “Who are these things?”
“The ship’s engineers…” McGucket answered. “Murdered after a cruelest fashion…”
“Got nuked.” Stan stated simply.
Wendy felt he needed a better explanation than that. “Okay, so like…” Her mind drifted back to her and Dipper’s adventure down in this wreck. They’d probed around this room out of curiosity, and happened to find the journal of the last sane engineer… Was it really only 6 days ago? “They locked themselves in here during the crash.” She explained. “When the rest of the ship was going nuclear, they sealed the doors to stay safe… And, uh… I guess… Okay, the engine of the ship was going all screwy, tearing up reality or somesuch.” She pointed to the scrawled words on the walls. “They started to lose their sanity, their grip on reality, even began to see into the future I guess… I’m not sure how much of it was Bill Cipher’s doing, but he was there too. He got into their dreams, brains, sanity… And he tore their minds apart… And… The last sane engineer, that guy…” She pointed. “I guess he was working on a modification to contain Bill’s weirdness… And then he lost it. He opened the door, and the radiation from the rest of the ship cooked them all alive… Sterilized them too, which is why they never rotted… And now here we are.”
“Oh…” Robbie frowned. “So… But you killed ‘Bill’, right? So this is all, like, literally perfectly harmless in every way now?”
“Yep.” Stan nodded.
“I guess.” Wendy shrugged.
“So…” Robbie pointed a thumb at McGucket, whose eyes were darting about, and whose hand seemed to be nervously seeking out the handle of his death ray. “What’s he on about?”
“Oh, heh…” McGucket immediately let go of the death ray when he realized how he must seem. “You know me… Just… Just a tad superstitious is all… Heh… Eh… Sorry…”
“Hey.” Wendy put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re all on edge. Just get the computer running, man…” She gave him a pat. “Then we can blow this pop stand. Yeah?”
“Yeh…” He seemed to regain some measure of confidence as he remembered their mission, and managed to tear his eyes away from the bodies long enough to make it to the main console on the other side of the room. From there, he leaned the death ray against a wall, and fished a small library of tools out of his overalls. Once his hands were wrapped around the familiar screwdriver and soldering gun, they steadied. “Okay, uh… Ya still got that computatraption on ya?”
“Yeah…” Wendy unslung her backpack, and pulled out the power control coupling.
“Kay, ya wanna get that installed while I start in on this?” He pointed to a loose panel on the wall. “If my reckoning of the pipelines and wiring is proper, it should go somewhere right in there…”
The other 3 managed to roll the panel aside, and sure enough, there was a series of 8 slots behind it, each shaped exactly like the device Wendy carried. 7 of the slots were blocked with the destroyed pieces of burned-out older ones, but the last slot was empty.
The coupling fit perfectly.
To one side of McGucket’s console, a single small green light flickered on.
“Wull, I’ll be a horn-swaggled boilerplate, I think we can get it runnin!” He laughed once, then caught himself. “This… I… Sorry, it’s just… This… This woula been a happy day…”
“How long you need?”
“Eh…” McGucket fished out a beefy computer, and plugged it into the console. A few more green lights turned on, and he began to type. “Gimme two hours?”

-Warning: Intruders have lifted the pre-ignition safety locks on reactor 5 without authorization.
The drones were programmed with a very particular set of skills: containing escaped test subjects, breaking up fights between passengers, defending restricted areas, pacifying external dangers, that sort of thing. Their entire minds were devoted toward threat assessment and combat.
But here was something else: the intruders actually appeared to be fixing the ship’s last remaining reactor. This type of situation was considerably outside the range of what they knew how to think about. There were absolutely no pre-programmed procedures for dealing with beneficial intruders.
The drones may not be very smart, but they were smart enough to know when they weren’t smart enough. -Warning: Directive unclear. Living officer, please advise. They requested.
But of course, the security officer had been dead for a long time now. A very long time. Their inquiries hadn’t received response for ages and ages… But they didn’t question that. They didn’t have the capacity to understand that. As far as they knew, their overseer was simply in the restroom or sleeping or something.
So they didn’t question it either when, for the first time in millennia, this very same overseer suddenly started giving them input again.
-Input: Stand by at long range and do not engage. Was the command. -Analyze the intruders’ biology and search for deviant life signs. Do not consider hostile until instructed.
-Directive accepted. Awaiting further input.
-Input: Display sensor feed on my monitor.
-Sensor feed linked. Awaiting further input.
-Input: That’s all for now.
-Drones 154, 155, 157 and 158 standing by. Welcome back, Lieutenant.

Two hours was a long time to wait when you’re on-edge, and even longer when you’re standing still in one place.
Twenty minutes in, they found themselves already bored.
Stan was asleep on one of the alien seats, a magazine propped up on his lap.
McGucket, who had no seat nearby and still had work to do, pressed a button on his robotic trousers to lock himself in an upright pose. His quiet hummed song joined Stan’s snoring as the only sounds in the room.
Wendy, still too restless to sit, just leaned back against a wall and stared at the insane alien graffiti. These words which once told the future… She wanted to read again what they said.
Robbie was even more restless than her. He wasn’t quite sure what to do while he waited, so he curiously broke the head off one of the dead bodies and began to examine it. It had three eyes, a sideways opening mouth… The mummified skin was thin and crusted, but must have once had the form of flexible scales… Fascinating. He smacked the skull against a wall, hoping to break it open to see what might be hidden inside.
“HEY!” Wendy noticed what he was doing, and barked in his direction.
He froze.
“Look, just…” She sighed, shrugged, motioned for him to set the head down. “Hey man, just a little respect, huh?”
“Right, right, yeah…” He set it down hastily. But then he thought about her comment for a moment, and frowned. “Wait, respect?” He asked. “What, for him?”
“For all of them. Dude.” Wendy spread her arms. “People died here, okay? Just… You know.”
“The work they did here kept Weirdmageddon from goin’ global…” McGucket muttered over his shoulder. “They’s heroes in their kind…”
“Well, sure, good for them.” Robbie shrugged. “But they weren’t doing it for you, they were probably just trying to save their own skins! And did a mighty fine job of it too… Look at these suckers!”
“Hey man, look—”
“What?” Robbie asked. “So they tried to save themselves, went hilariously mad, then killed themselves and accidentally, randomly, unforeseeably, did a favor for you a couple thousand years later… So what? They’re all just dead now, so who cares? I mean… They’re not even people, they’re just… lanky squid-type things.” He gave the detached head a spiteful little kick, and it rolled off. “Who cares?” He repeated.
Wendy and McGucket stared at him for a minute. McGucket subtly crossed himself as he turned back to his computer. Wendy shrugged and folded her arms.
Robbie put his hands on his hips. “What?” He asked again.
“Look…” Wendy told him. “If I’ve learned anything this past week, it’s that aliens are just folks… Sure, they may have tentacles or three eyes or scales or… Or they might have metal skin or might’ve grown up on some asteroid a dozen galaxies away, but in the end… They’re still just folks… These guys…” She spread her arms. “They probably had wives, or… Or parents, or kids, or… Eggs, or whatever the heck, I don’t know… But there were friends, family, people who cared about them. They died right in the middle of their hopes and dreams, they still had their souls… Somebody on some asteroid a dozen galaxies away still missed them… Somebody waited every day for them to come back except they didn’t. Somebody wished they’d never left except they did…. Somebody loved them. They’re not monsters. They’re not aliens… They’re just… People…”
Robbie frowned.
As if this idea were entirely new to him. As if it made him think.
Wendy turned back to the graffiti.
McGucket kept typing.
Stan kept Snoring.
Robbie spoke up again. “You ever met an alien?”
Wendy nodded. “Betty and Barney. Well… We called them Betty and Barney. Dunno how to pronounce their real names… But they were the farmers responsible for the Forest of Daggers, and we met their ghosts. They were pretty decent actually. Didn’t try to haunt us, even though they could’ve… Didn’t try to kill us, although they could’ve tried… Didn’t have to help us escape, but I think they did… I dunno.” She opened Dipper’s journal to a sketch he’d made of the two specters, and showed it at Robbie. “These were them… Good people.”
He took the book gently, and studied the faces. They looked monstrous, to be sure. Mouths full of razor-sharp saws, haunting, ghostly electric eyes, and nightmarish metallic skeletons floating in the air… Yet she said they were decent people. She said they were just folks. Dead folks. Loved folks… Even friendly to the organic living… They had names… They were… Friends…
Robbie closed the book and handed it back to her.
They were silent for a few moments more.
Then Robbie stood up, flipped his headlamp back on, and made for the door.
“Where you going?” She asked.
“I dunno…” He shrugged restlessly. “Just wanna look around. Wanna get out of here.”
She glanced back at McGucket, standing next to Stan’s sleeping form. They can handle themselves. Wendy thought. And she looked at the alien bodies. “Yeah. Me too.” She stood up and started after him. “And it’s dumb to go alone anyway…”
“Right…”

-Completed scan of intruders. The drones reported back. 4 bioforms, all carbon-based, aerobic, terrestrial vertebrates. Species unknown. Speed and strength moderate. Weaponry and defensive capabilities unknown. Bioform 1 is recognized from previous intrusion; threat level 16, high. Other threat levels unknown.
-Input: Do any of the intruders display abnormalities?
-Bioform 2 possesses an alternative body chemistry including: slightly adjusted air and fluid handling cycles, no adrenaline and other ordinary biological markers, and inconclusive bone density. Awaiting further input.
-Input: I want drone 154 to lock its sensors on bioform 2. Give me control of drone 154’s basic movement controls.
-Controls linked. Awaiting further input.
-Input: That will be all.
-Drones 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, and 164 standing by.

“Robbie…? Hey, your brain broke or what?” His eyes seemed to be fixed on the far wall of the vast engine room, as if mesmerized or perplexed by something. She snapped her fingers in front of his face to bring him out of his daze.
“Oh, uh…” He shook his head and turned back to her. “Yeah, sorry, I just, like… Sorry. Just spaced out for a minute…”
She looked where he’d been staring a moment ago, but couldn’t make out anything except perfect blackness in the distance. “Did ya see something?”
“I don’t know… What’s over that way anyway?”
“Uh…” She pulled Dipper’s journal back out, and opened it to the incomplete map he’d made of the wreck. “Uh… I don’t think we’ve ever been below the cargo level…” She studied the map. “But from this, it looks like there’s probably a ramp on that side leading down… So I think it’s new territory. Not sure.”
He thought for a moment longer. “Could we check it out?”
“Why?”
“Like… I dunno… It’s cool?”
“Why is it cool?”
“I dunno! Like…! I dunno, if we’ve never been down there we should probably just check it out, right?”
She blinked. “You totally saw something.”
“I don’t know…” He repeated. “It’s dark…”
“That’s so…” She checked her backpack: an axe, a crowbar, a list of handy spells, some snacks… She was ready as she ever would be. “All right, fine. We’ll go. HEY MCGUCKET!”
“Eh?”
“Robbie saw something toward the SouthEast side, so we’re gonna go exploring, okay? Looks to be further underground.”
“Eh… I dunno… How long you be gone?”
“Hour and a half? Before you’re through with that. If we’re not, wake Stan and call Ford.”
“All right… Uh… Be careful an’ stuff… We don’t know what all’s down here.”
“We kinda do…” Wendy mumbled.
So they set out, picking their way across and between the miscellaneous machinery of the engine room. Eventually a large, tall wall loomed up before them, unclimbable and impassable save for a pair of blast doors standing at the bottom. They were open just about wide enough for a security drone.
Wendy squeezed through first, Robbie followed, and they found themselves at the top of a long passageway, gently curving deeper into the blackness ahead. Wendy checked the map and saw nothing; they really were in uncharted territory now. Hesitantly, she returned the journal to her pack as they started their descent.
“So…” Maybe 5 minutes later, Robbie broke the silence again. “You said everything down here is dead, right?”
“Huh? Oh yeah…” Wendy nodded. “Well, ‘cept for the drones, a’course.”
“The what now?”
“Don’t worry; they’re stupid. If you don’t feel fear they’ll just ignore ya. And if they don’t, you can just shoot ‘em… Don’t let ‘em grab you though.”
“Okay… Yeah, but… But I was talking about aliens… You’re sure nothing survived the crash? Like, those engineers all died after the fact, and whoever ‘Betty and Barney’ were, they lived long enough to do their thing… Like… It seems totally bogus that everything died…”
“Yeah… There were a few survivors.” Wendy admitted. “But they were picked off. Hunted down and killed one by one.”
“…All of them?”
“To a man.”
“…By what?”
“A shapeshifter.” Wendy recognized how scary that probably sounded, and explained. “Okay, so, this, uh… Let’s see, this ship was an explorer, like Christopher Columbus, right? And it was exploring planets all over the galaxy, collecting specimens and junk like that… Well, just like Christopher Columbus, their Captain was a grade-A sack of crap. Didn’t care whether the ‘test subjects’ were intelligent or dangerous or whatnot, he just kept doing his thing, trying to use them for his own purposes… Well, it kinda blew up in his face after the crash, because this one test subject, this shapeshifter, got free. And she was real mad because of all the things they’d done to her, and she was also really, really smart I guess. She hacked the security system, took control of the drones, and killed everyone left. Kinda… I guess I kinda get it, but still. A lot of innocent people died.”
Robbie considered this for a while, a strange look on his face. “Oh.” He finally said.
They kept walking.
When the tunnel forked, Robbie suggested they take the small passage to the left, but Wendy said they may as well follow the larger route to whatever end it held. Robbie reluctantly agreed.
Turns out, that end was water. Wendy supposed they were underground, and not too far from a lake, so some flooding made sense.
The surface was utterly dark and filthy; bits and scraps of decayed wreckage stood on top of the miry surface, and a smell like an ancient, rusty swamp wafted from it; a reek quite unlike anything they might have imagined before. It made sense; this water hadn’t moved in thousands of years, just stood there, stagnant, while the metal hull slowly rusted, and whatever growth could manage grew and died on the sparse nutrients. Was this earthly life, trapped down here in this isolated bog? Or was it some plant, fungus, or foul contamination from worlds away, carried within the ship’s own stores?
Who knows. Needless to say, they wouldn’t be swimming.
So they turned around and trekked back up the tunnel to the fork Robbie had first suggested. It seemed to Wendy like as good an option as any.
This tunnel was narrower, and branched off into many rooms and passages. Some of the doors were locked; others were rusted shut, others opened into flooded chambers, and the rest stocked equipment or furniture decayed beyond recognition.
Nothing of interest. They continued down the tunnel. Neither of them were really sure where they were going or what they were looking for, but at least they weren’t lost. The hallway was basically straight, and wider than the surrounding passages, so as long as they stayed close to it, they would always have their sense of direction.
But the tunnel ended, as all tunnels do. Toward the end, it seemed to flatten; the metal was buckled and bent, and seemed to have been collapsed upwards…
“What caused this?” Robbie frowned.
Wendy thought. “Oh.” She realized. “We’re down at the bottom of the ship. This is the part that was crushed when it hit the ground.”
“Ah.”
Wendy shrugged. “So… Where are we going, man? What are we even doing here? I mean, you thought you saw something, but we didn’t find anything. You happy?”
“Well…” Robbie looked around. All the ship seemed perfectly silent for a moment. “Have…” He stuttered, as if something very large were on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t know how to let it out or if he should. “You ever had weird dreams, Wendy?” He blurted.
Wendy blinked. “Weird dreams. Whoever heard of such a thing.”
“W-w-well yeah, I know, like…” He stuttered. “I know all dreams are weird, but have you ever seen like, something totally bogus and crazy and it totally sticks with you because I don’t know?”
“Elaborate.”
“Like… I don’t know… Like somebody else’s dream? Have you ever dreamed somebody else’s dream? Like… Like if things turned out different, and your life didn’t look like it did, then you might have seen what you saw… But you can never quite remember, and you know it’s not a real memory, but it just sticks with you? Like… Somebody’s been in your head…?”
“Well that was just needlessly cryptic.” Wendy informed him. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s… It’s just…” Robbie ran his hands through his hair, and seemed much more focused and alert than he usually did. His headlamp beam swept the walls. “It’s just that I, like, totally remember this hallway!”
Wendy looked around. It didn’t look like any hallway she’d ever seen. Like any hallway that had ever existed in the human world. She looked back at him. “Did you see it in a movie or a video game or something?” She guessed.
“No, no, I mean… Not the colors or the feel, but the exact shape… That collapsed bit there just clicks somehow… Even this little seam in the floor right here… And I think this door leads to a side passage that goes deeper…!” He walked over to a random, unassuming hatch, and gave it a push. Surprisingly, it wasn’t rusted shut, and eased slowly open. “Does that make any sense?”
Wendy frowned at the door for several seconds. Then frowned at him for several seconds. “…Do you ‘remember’ what’s back there?” She asked.
He shook his head.
“…Well…” She shrugged. “I’ve seen flying eyeballs turn people to stone. I’ve seen kids magically cloning themselves. I’ve seen Soos with a pig’s brain. I’ve seen alien robot ghosts.” She pulled out McGucket’s ray gun, gave the hallway behind them a quick check, then nodded toward the open door. “After all that, this ain’t so weird. Lead the way, o prophet.”
This new way was small and cramped. A veritable maze of twisted metal, snaking below and between walls, through the cracks between separated panels and severed pipes, the one single path through this wreckage of the vessel’s lower reaches. There was room enough for a person to easily squeeze through, as Wendy and Robbie were steadily proving, but never enough space to stand up or really get a sense of direction.
But bizarrely, Robbie seemed to know where he was going.

-Warning: Final safety locks have been released on reactor 5. Intruders could begin startup procedures at any time.
-Input: Disregard. Do not interfere.
-Warning: Intruders 1 and 2 are now approaching location designation ‘Keep’.
-Input: Disregard. Continue long-range observation. This is all part of the plan.
-Drones 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 174, and 175 standing by.

After maybe 20 minutes of crawling and scrambling and dodging hard corners in the tight space, they emerged into a wider hallway, collapsed about 20 feet in either direction. Robbie pointed to a metal panel jammed in place against the wall, and said he thought that a way forward was hidden behind it.
But Wendy didn’t help him move it. Instead she stood back, and sighed. “You know Robbie.” She started reluctantly. “As a general rule, you never really admit your mistakes or make apologies. One of the reasons we broke up.”
“Uh?” He tried to jiggle the panel sideways, hoping to loosen it. “What?”
“Normally.” She continued. “You’re kinda like ‘ugh, whatever’ to everything. Not really excited or curious… You’re kinda adventurous, but never on your own, and only to impress people, especially Tambry. And you’re much more interested in girls than with aliens.”
“Well…” He found the jagged part that the panel was caught on, and realized he had to push it in to pull it out. “So…?”
“But today you apologized for everything.” She said. “You told me everything you should have said a year ago, really sucked it up and acted the gentleman. And then, you ventured down into an alien ship on your own volition, without Tambry, not to impress me, really for no reason at all… And then, you willingly followed your weird space dreams through cramped little tunnels, and… And now… Now a girl’s been pointing a gun at your back for fifteen minutes and you haven’t even noticed.”
“Huh—AGH!” Robbie finally turned around, and saw her standing in a ready stance, holding the blaster nice and steady at her hip, aimed right for the center of his torso. He jumped to his feet and put up his hands. “What the heck, Wendy?!? What are you-what are you doing?!?”
“Being a lot less stupid than you think I am.” She smiled humorlessly. “Taking the initiative before we get wherever you’re going.”
“Wai—HUH?” He frowned. “Wait, you think I’m the shapeshifter? What the heck?”
“Hey.” She told him. “Calm down. The Shifter’s been dead for thousands of years, why would I be paranoid about her now?”
“Well…” He frowned, as if struggling for an answer. “Well… Well Mabel told me that there’s one alive today! And it’s in a bunker that Ford made!”
“Oh right… You do know about that one somehow. Of course. You’re right. I should be paranoid of him.” Wendy nodded. “Now again, calm down. If you’re really Robbie, then you’ll be able to prove it, and you’ve nothing to fear. Right?”
“Like…” He took a deep breath, and seemed to calm down. “Like, yeah, I am Robbie… But… But you could be a shapeshifter too…! I think… I think you’re the one who’s acting suspicious, and!”
“Except I’m not the one with a gun pointed at my crucials.” She reminded him. “So let’s not change the subject, huh?”
There was a brutish sort of wisdom to that. “…Okay.” He nodded.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” Wendy asked.
“Tambry.”
“That was an easy one. Band name.”
“Robbie V. and The Tombstones.”
“Address?”
“42nd Pinewood Blvd.”
“…Dad’s job?”
“He runs the morgue and the graveyard with mom. And really creepy about it, too… Stupid…”
“What are your talents?”
“Guitar, singing… Spray painting, like, totally counts as a talent too, and…”
“And your secret talent?”
“I… Uh…” His eyes fell. “Drawing anime… Except its actually called manga but nobody understands…”
“Biggest regret?”
“Uh…” He appeared to be hesitating but was really racking his brain. “Hypnotizing you…”
Wendy thought for a moment. She needed a better test; some knowledge that only her and Robbie would know… Something that Robbie would never have told anyone in a million years…
“What color was my bra that night?” Wendy asked.
“Huh?”
“My bra. That night. What color?”
“I…” He frowned. “I…”
She waited.
“I…” He shook his head. “I…” His voice got small, fearful. “I think… White?”
She sighed, glad for some certainty at last. “Wrong answer.”
“…I mean… It might’ve been grey.”
“Strike two.”
“Pink? I… Look, that really wasn’t the part I was paying attention to, alright?”
She put up a hand and stopped him there. “Trick question.” She informed him. “Robbie never saw anything of the sort… And got a black eye for trying.”
The shapeshifter closed his mouth.
“All right.” Wendy’s voice was low, steady, and deathly serious. “Now here’s how it’s gonna work, dude: You’re gonna shapeshift reeeeeaaaal slowly into something nice and harmless. And then you’re gonna tell me exactly how and when you escaped, what you’ve been doing since, and who you’ve hurt along the way. You gimme any sort of trouble? This thing melts a hole. SAVVY?”
Very slowly, Robbie’s clothes, hair, and headlamp disappeared, melting back into his flesh. His skin paled, and stretched, and dissolved. The mass that was left seemed to expand, morph, and twist, and finally Wendy was looking at the alien’s true form. Its lumpy white hands clasped on top of its head, and it kneeled on the floor in a position of surrender. Two large, bulbous red eyes locked with Wendy’s.
And the weird toothed mouth tried a hesitant smile.
“Well.” She hadn’t heard the creature’s true voice in a long time, and it brought back some awful awkward memories. “All that talk.” His voice rolled. “All that talk about how aliens aren’t monsters… About how they’re just people… Respect them, you said. Treat them as equals, you said. I met some decent folks, you said… All that talk, and now you’d shoot me…”
Wendy shook her head. “It’s not about what or who you are man… It’s about what you’ve done. You’ve lied. You’ve stolen. You tried to kill us. You have killed for all I know, and I can’t ignore that. Now. How. Did you. Escape.”
“…Stasis tube malfunctioned for some reason about a week ago.” He said. “Then… A few days later, Robbie came down to freeze some samples he and Mable had been collecting from the robotic forest… He left the door open.”
“Robbie. You did what with him?”
The shapeshifter didn’t say anything.
Wendy bit her lip, and moved on. “Who else have you hurt?”
He shook his head. “No one.”
“…You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” He told her.
“Prove it.”
“Call Tambry. Tell her she spent the week with an alien. She’ll be surprised. She’ll be conflicted. She’ll want to talk to me. Because I was a great Robbie. Better than he ever was; you said it yourself: he was prideful, self-centered, lustful. A real jerk. He was taking his life on a wild wide to nowhere. But I was a good boy. People who thought they knew me knew I cared… Tambry loves Robbie more now. And if she had him back? It would be a rude awakening…”
Wendy almost did make the call. But she wasn’t all that confident in her ability to hold somebody at gunpoint while talking on the phone. It was like distracted driving; not a good idea. And besides, she wasn’t all that confident in her phone’s ability to get cell service way down here.
“So.” Wendy said. “Just one question then. Why haven’t you killed me today? Why lead me off toward wherever this is? Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.” He told her.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
She considered that for a moment. “Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“You’re so mature.” He scoffed.
“YOU’RE so mature.” She corrected him.
“I’m telling you the truth, woman! I remember this place, but I don’t know where or how and I just want to see what’s down at the end!”
“And I will shoot you! IN THE FACE!”
“Where I CAME FROM! Please!”
She swallowed her next threat, and glanced at the wall panel he’d been trying to move out of the way. “How can I trust you?” She asked. “What can you plainly tell me? And after all you’ve done, why shouldn’t I shoot you? In the face? Right here? Right now?”
“I…” He looked at the panel as well. “I…” He turned back to her. His little claws clicked as he thought for a moment. “Wendy Corduroy.” He finally blurted. “What if you were raised by gnomes?”
Wendy pondered this, and decided it was an interesting thought experiment. She took on a more comfortable stance. “Go on.”
“What if a horde of tiny little men found you as a toddler, and kept you chained up in a big hollow stump, deep in the forest? You never knew your parents. You never knew who or what you were. ‘Human’ was a word they never used, not even ‘female’, you didn’t even have a name, only ‘monster’. ‘Specimen’. ‘Creature’. ‘Biologic anomaly!’ You were a peculiar giant, with red hair, long arms and legs, and muscles the size of their torsos; capable of feats of strength they’d never even imagined.”
“Okaaaay…” Wendy frowned.
“They would come into your stump every once in a while.” The shifter continued. “Just to poke and prod you and admire how fast you were learning their language, learning to play chess, learning to use tools, learning to perform little tricks for them. Ever since you’d learned what ‘person’ meant, you knew that you were one, or at least longed to become one… But you hadn’t the faintest idea how, and they would not listen. To them, you were nothing. You were a pet sometimes, when they were feeling generous. You were an annoyance other times, and they would shun you…
“But mostly… Mostly they treated you like a prize animal, as if they were fattening you up to eat you. Every time you were a little bit bigger and fatter they would congratulate themselves and say ‘Wow! Look at her! Soooo marvelous!’ And they fed you beans, nothing but bucketfulls of beans, and you never knew what anything else tasted like… Until one day… You realized what your basic instincts were saying: that meat was food as well. And you began to wonder what a gnome would taste like if you shaved off the beard and cooked it… You reasoned that gnomes were weak. You could probably bend them, break them, tear them up, they were so small…
“With such ideas in your head, one day you tried to escape. You tore open the shackles on your feet. You got out of the stump, and tried to read their notes, find out who you are, find out what more there is beyond your tiny world. You wanted the answer, just a simple answer to a simple question: Who are you? So simple!
“But it didn’t work. They locked you in a cage, with a whole truckload of beans for company, and then they forgot all about you. For 30 long years they forgot about you, left you alone with the echoes for company. When you were old… Old enough to be an adult. Old enough that you should have finished a nice education. Old enough to excel at a wonderful job. Old enough that by rights you should have settled down with a nice little man and become a mother of two, old enough that you should be surrounded with family if all were right in the world… When you were OLD…! That was when you finally escaped…
“If you were raised by Gnomes, Wendy Corduroy, would you have done any differently than I?”
The shapeshifter rose to his feet, and took a step towards her.
No matter his story, that was a step too far. She pulled the trigger.
The laser bolt hit the Shifter right in the chest. But it wasn’t nearly as powerful as she’d hoped, and the creature didn’t stop. Before she could let off a second shot, it had snatched the weapon from her hands, and smashed it to pieces on the floor.
Now his gigantic, hideous head was mere inches from her face. Wendy stood her ground silently, her fingers twitching as she contemplated reaching for another weapon, wondering if a fight was necessary, wondering if a fight would even work…
She looked down, and watched his flesh shift and stretch over the blaster wound, shrinking and closing and scarring over and healing completely. In only a minute, it was like there was no wound at all.
She looked back up at his face.
The red, lidless eyes glared at her. The claws around the mouth clicked quietly. His mucus layer rippled and his breath reeked.
He turned away from her, grabbed the metal panel stuck against a wall, and ripped it free. He tossed it down the hall, and it clattered to a stop at the end with a great noise.
There was, indeed, a tunnel hidden behind it.
Without a sound, he collapsed into a slightly narrower form to fit better.
“Lead the way then dude…” Wendy mumbled, and started after him.
The shifter turned and glared down at her one more time. “And my name.” He snarled. “Is Sam.”

-Warning: Intruders have begun Reactor 5 startup. Power output: 5% and rising. Coolant levels sufficient.
-Warning: Intruders have access to all remaining ship systems and engines.
-Warning: Intruders 1 and 2 are presently entering location designation: ‘Keep’.
-Input: Assign bioforms 3 and 4 a threat level of 20. Combat preference: Immediate lethal force. You are clear to engage. Take no survivors.
-Threat reassessed. Antimatter pellets loaded and launchers charged. Drones 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 174, 175 and 179 engaging.
-Drones 154, 180, 181, 182, 183, and 188, standing by.
-Input: Reserve forces, prepare to enter Keep.

Wendy began to make out a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of her, she saw the Shifter’s silhouette emerge from the passage, stand up straight, and freeze.
She came up behind him, and stood slowly.
The room was maybe the size of a 3-car garage. It was all collapsed on one side, and all other easy entrances were closed off. It wasn’t quite dark, thanks to a few glowing computer screens set up near the center. It wasn’t quite dry, thanks to a small trickle of clean, fresh water flowing down through a broken pipe.
And it wasn’t quite empty.
Wendy’s first thought was ‘storage room’, judging by the piles of hexagonal crates stacked and littered near the corners.
But there were also the bodies.
Dozens of skeletons stuck to the wall with what looked like giant-sized spider webbing, hanging there with their feet maybe 3 feet off the ground, and their arms stretched out horizontally, as if crucified. Most of them were the squid-type aliens that made up most of the ship’s crew. Some were a little different; probably some of the other passengers who’d bought passage as colonists… There were even a few humans. But there was one; one of them had a mouth made of saws, and a metal skeleton, and Wendy remembered having met his ghost. Barney. The man who’d died trying to kill the original shapeshifter.
Speaking of which.
In the center of the room, hunched over a collection of glowing computer screens, there stood a single living figure. Its fingers quietly tapped out some kind of command on the computer, and a few lights flashed. A half-dozen security drones hovered in through openings high on the walls, and turned their red triangular gaze down on the two new visitors.
The figure stood to its feet, and turned around.
And twirled a tape measure in its hand.
“Hello Sam.” It said.

“Mom…”