I have two questions for the Linda Cipher AU! (More might come in the future lol)
-What do some of Linda’s friends/colleagues/family members think of Linda during her time with Bill/after the initial breakup? Especially with how it seems like she gets worse and worse overtime?
-Also does Bill have any alternative forms (such as a more human form) in this AU? Or is he just his funky triangular self?
Excited to see more of this AU’s development :)
Okay, so. In my mind, she fucked the triangle. It is the triangle she dated, the triangle she had a partnership with, and the triangle she had kids with. But in the Star Wars special, Candace specifically says “Oh cool, mom remarried?”, meaning she WAS publicly married to SOMEONE. Most likely someone who at least APPEARED human enough to have seemingly 100% human kids with.
But Bill doesn’t have a physical form in the human world, and he certainly doesn’t have the ability to make his own body here. (Sorry human bill fans.) We know he can possess people (my friends and I even tossed around the idea he might have possessed one of her colleagues), but then that’s a whole other person he’d have to make a deal with to bring into this and I’d prefer to keep the story cleaner than that. This isn’t about Linda being with some random guy who Bill happens to be possessing, this is about Linda being with Bill.
We know he can possess corpses, but I don’t think Linda would agree to keeping a deceased human body in her house, even if it’s just a vessel for her husband to keep up appearances. What’s far more likely, especially in a show with hyper realistic prosthetic and robotic technology like Phineas and Ferb, is for her to make him a puppet. Or at least, have one commissioned.
With that established, let me throw you a curveball. Do yall remember this guy?
This guy is Professor Parenthesis (pronounced paren-thesis, like a college paper), a former colleague and current wannabe arch nemesis to Major Monogram. He was introduced in the OWCA Files special. When promo materials of this dude were first going around, there was a pretty decent chunk of the Phineas and Ferb fandom who theorized he might be the biological Flynn father, since he bears a not insignificant resemblance to Candace and Phineas.
Then the episode aired and we found out he was actually a bug piloting an android.
So. You know. That kind of killed the theory. And now the Book of Bill’s come out and the closest we’ll ever get to canon confirmation of a possible biological father for the Flynn kids is a one-off joke implying that Linda had intimate relations with a sentient demonic extra dimensional triangle, so the theory’s like, extra turbo dead.
What I’m about to propose is absolutely not true. Professor Parenthesis is shown to be a skilled roboticist, and most likely built this android from scratch himself. But WHAT IF this was a discarded android that Professor Parenthesis found, studied, fixed, and modified for his own purposes? That would be much easier for him to do than building it from scratch himself, considering the amount of large heavy machinery it contains.
I don’t think Linda has much experience working with robotics, but Linda very much strikes me as a collaborative scientist, not the lone pioneer that Ford tried to be. She could very easily have found fellow scientists in other fields to help her develop technology like this, and she could say she wants it for the possibility of remote space exploration, making it easier for people to experience space and do tasks such as space station repairs without spending money sending actual people into space.
She’d argue it should be as humanoid as possible, since humans are used to piloting ourselves and she’d say the transition should be as immersive and seamless as possible. She could also propose the technology could be used for other purposes, such as the development of artificial limbs. She wants a remotely pilot-able android that mimics the human experience as much as possible, including the dexterity and sensory feedback of an above-average human body to compensate for a large variety of skill levels. And she thinks this sort of technology will need several prototypes, some of which will fail.
It’s not too difficult for her to obtain a “failed prototype” as a gift for her partner.
When people meet Linda’s new partner, she introduces him as William Cipher Birchtree, long-lost heir to the Birchtree family legacy of Ciphertology, named for their god. He seems strange, but he makes her happy, and though his beliefs are peculiar, he also seems to be a good match for her wit, and it’s not like there aren’t scientists with strange beliefs out in the world. Her colleagues tease her for her involvement with the cult, but her work is sound, revolutionary even, and she works exceptionally well with her colleagues. Even if she’s getting bizarrely involved with her husband’s obscure cult.
When she breaks up with her partner - her husband - she cuts off all ties to the scientific community. She destroys her own life’s work - a portal to other dimensions, one specifically designed to make faster-than-light speed travel feasible by taking advantage of foreign laws of physics - and renounces it all, warning everyone she knows never to use the portal.
She can’t skip town though, she kept most of her technology in the basement, and she doesn’t want anyone else getting their hands on it and potentially letting her ex husband through. And beside which, her daughter’s best friend lives next door. She can’t bring herself to cut out her safety net entirely, and not many of her neighbors were even aware she was an astrophysicist in the first place. So she stays in Danville. And, eventually, she meets someone who loves her even when she’s not being revolutionary.
