What the terminal covers: Bill Cipher's lore in the Gravity Falls universe

Before you can use a terminal responsibly you need to know whose voice you are hearing. The site presents itself as a machine, but machines in this universe have authors, and in Gravity Falls the author of every corrupted file is the same one-eyed triangle.

Bill Cipher, briefly and mechanically

Bill Cipher is an interdimensional demon that can be summoned and released into a person's mind, drawn as a one-eyed yellow triangle in a top hat and bow tie, superficially like the Eye of Providence. He cannot touch the physical world. He gains influence by entering a person's mind, and he does it by deal, usually structured as a question whose price is whatever the person wants most. Where a mind breaks without a deal, he simply moves in. He is voiced by Alex Hirsch, the same person who voices Grunkle Stan and Soos.

What the triangle is doing

The design is an argument, not a mascot. A one-eyed triangle is the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye, which appears on the Great Seal of the United States and on dollar bills. Rendering that as a grinning, cheerful face with a top hat and bow tie makes the all-seeing claim legible as a joke rather than a threat, which is the joke. The top hat and bow tie place him as a carnival sideshow barker, which is the same register as the Mystery Shack and as Gravity Falls itself. And the name reads as a pun on a bill of sale, because that is what every deal with him is.

This is our analysis of the design rather than a statement by the creator, and we label it as such.

Why Bill is the right narrator for this site

Three of the last four Gravity Falls publications put Bill at the centre: the finale's real-world statue shot, the 2016 Cipher Hunt to find that statue, and now a novel he narrates alongside a terminal he appears to be running. A character whose whole method is making information transactional is the natural owner of a lookup interface, because a terminal is exactly that. You bring a term, it returns what Bill thinks the term is worth.

The vocabulary you will meet

Commands on a terminal like this tend to fall into families, and it helps to know them before you start typing:

• Character names. Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Stanford, Soos, Wendy, Pacifica, Gideon, McGucket, and of course Bill himself.
• Places. Gravity Falls, Oregon, Piedmont, the Mystery Shack, Confusion Hill, and the various dimensions the show uses.
• Cosmology and mechanism terms. The vocabulary around minds, deals, dimensions, and the barrier between them, which is where the show does its most precise worldbuilding.
• Artefacts. The journals, Stan Bucks, the fez, the cryptex, and related objects.
• Unrelated words. Community reports consistently describe the terminal responding to terms that have nothing to do with the franchise at all, which fits a machine that is really a mind.

What you will actually get back is not something we can enumerate, for the reason given on the how it works page: the input space is open-ended, so any list of commands is a record of one person's session rather than a specification. Type things, note what comes back, and treat silence as a real answer.

Where to read more

The character's full arc is covered on our companion site in Bill Cipher explained, the book that gives him a first-person voice is in the book and terminal relationship, and the ciphers inside the responses are covered in the decoding guide. The character reference on the companion site places Bill alongside the rest of the cast if you need the wider context.