It was that simple. Humans had won the world, because they learnt the rules of the game, while none of the other players even realised they were playing. The realisation struck me like a slap on the backside, and I stamped on the stable floor.
Betty and Tim were staring at me with startled expressions.
‘That horse really wants its carrot, mate. Maybe we should give it some help.’
Betty backed away a few steps, keeping her eyes on my hooves.
‘Are you concerned for my safety, Timothy dear?’ she said.
‘No, I just thought it might speed things up a bit.’
She continued backwards until she reached a bale of straw and sat down heavily.
‘You know, Timbo, there are many flavours of intelligence. Did you know that? Did you know, for example, that if you take a mouse that can find its way through a maze, you can then force that mouse through a fine mesh, and the resulting mouse-paste can be poured into a completely different maze, where it will still manage to drip its way to the exit?’
They looked at each other for a few seconds.
‘You what, mate?’ he replied.
Intelligence, it seems, is a difficult subject to talk about, even when you know what it is. For the majority of intelligent creatures, horses included, understanding how clever you are has about as much relevance as understanding how many legs you have. Regardless of how ‘clever’ or ‘stupid’ different life forms may seem comparatively, they are each equally proficient in being what they are, and striving for anything further than that is pointless when the world provides you with everything you already need. In a sense we are all simply pools of water seeking to fill the cracks and contours of the environment we find ourselves in. I’m assuming this was the point Betty was trying to make with her liquidised mouse story. Or it might just have been more of her random nonsense. Intelligence can only really be measured by the changes you consciously force upon the world.
After a few more minutes I decided it was time to consciously force my own change on the world, and claim my well-deserved payment. Clasping the stick between my teeth I moved the virtual carrot on the screen towards the virtual horse, instinctively taking care to move it in a way that could still be interpreted as random, should I wish to pretend that this was purely accidental. It was important, after all, that the task should not appear too easy.
Once carrot met horse, it disappeared with a neighing sound. This seemed somewhat peculiar at the time. With hindsight I’m guessing the virtual horse was meant to be congratulating me on a job well done. Betty sprang up from her straw bale with a neighing sound of her own.
‘Weh-heh-heh-hell! Look at the clever horse!’ She came and fussed over me as I snatched my carrot from her hand. Even Tim stopped scowling for a few seconds, blinking at me in surprise. ‘What about that then, graph-boy? You see anything interesting there in your tea leaves? Hmm? You listening to me, Timpson?’
Tim snapped out of his trance.
‘Tea leaves?’
‘Brain activity, Timpkins. Good God almighty. What do your divine numbers have to say?’
‘Numbers,’ he mumbled as he buried himself in his glowing charts and diagrams. ‘Nothing,’ he said at last.
‘Nothing?’
‘Nope,’ he confirmed. ‘There was a small spike, around five minutes ago. When you were dicking around with that carrot, I guess.’
‘Well, Buttercup,’ she said, patting me on the neck. ‘Are we ready to start flying now?’
Horse 1.3
Their enthusiasm was short-lived. I got the next test wrong on purpose, partly to maintain the illusion that this was hard work, but also I was interested to see how they would react. I was no longer simply doing this for the carrots. I could see now that there were greater forces at play in this stable, a subtle balance of power, control and persuasion. It was therefore imperative that I gain some understanding of these humans if I wanted to improve my position in the order of the universe.
At this point it still hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why my life had taken this unusual turn. I just assumed that I had been chosen for my natural talents. The humans needed someone to move pictures of carrots around on a screen, and obviously I was the right horse for the job.
Betty and Tim had their own little screens, presumably with their own carrots to move around, but I wasn’t fooling myself that this made me their equal. Not in their eyes, at least. It was their world I was living in, and their pointless tasks I was performing. Nevertheless I was trapped now, by the promise of greater things. I had risen above my fellow horses, and the order of the universe no longer seemed so static.
‘No, no, no. What are you doing, horse-pants?’
I was failing another one of Betty’s tests. The aim of the game was to move the virtual carrot to the virtual horse, with the task becoming slightly more complex as the days passed. Sometimes there was a wall in the way, sometimes the horse was moving, or hiding behind a tree. It was nothing I found even remotely challenging, and pretending that it was became a challenge in itself. There was a fine line to tread here. I needed to inflate my value without seeming incompetent. I also had to fight the urge to show off at times. So each new problem would be met with trial and error, regardless of how obvious the solution. If I got too bored I would even start inventing my own problems, making up my own rules. Such initiatives might not win me as many carrots, but it felt necessary to remind these people that this was my time they were spending.
The current puzzle consisted of two carrots and two horses. The horses were standing together, but I only had control of one carrot, and one carrot did not appear to be enough to solve the problem. This had me stumped for a while, until I chanced on the random discovery that moving one carrot to the other would join them together. The answer was simple after that, but it annoyed me that it required some arbitrary new mechanism that I could only have stumbled on by accident, so I decided to lead the pair of carrots on a journey that covered every point of the screen except where they were supposed to end up.
‘What? You nearly had it, you big hairy idiot. Honestly. Come here and have a word with this horse, Timothy. Hmm? Timbolio? Aren’t you meant to be doing something over there?’
Betty’s companion sighed, pulling himself painfully away from his phone.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked. ‘I’ve moved us to Horse 1.3.’
‘Well maybe you should check and make sure our horse is actually using it. We’re not exactly doing our Bunzel-Best over here.’
Tim grudgingly summoned a page full of numbers on his computer.
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Well, we’ve already filled up all the new space, so the horse must be doing something with it.’ He was in the process of crawling back into his phone when he felt the unnerving presence of Betty looming over his shoulder.
‘Are we not interesting enough for you, my young Timbus? You’re not seeing another horse behind my back I hope?’
‘Mate, what do you want?’
‘What I want,’ she said, striding back across the room, ‘is not the issue here. It’s what I’ve got.’ She pointed at the carrots waltzing together on the big screen. ‘I’ve got imaginary horses that are going hungry. It’s not right, Timkins.’
‘Well…’ Tim searched vacantly for an answer that might be swirling in the dusty air. ‘Who’s to say?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Who’s to say what’s right, mate?’ he said, creeping back into the world of his phone. ‘We never got this far before. Maybe this is normal.’
‘Maybe this is normal,’ Betty repeated, her eyes following the dancing carrots. ‘That’s some astounding wisdom right there. Astounding. You truly are a gleaming ray of sunshine in the desert of ideas. Look at me, Timothy. Stop pretending you have any real friends. It’s just you, me and Buttercup, for all eternity.’
Tim put his phone away and folded his arms.
‘What?’ he said. ‘OK, look. Maybe it’s a threshold type o
f thing. You know? Like we have to push a certain amount before the next domino falls over. You know what I mean?’
‘And what can your mystical charts tell us about that?’
‘Not a lot, mate. Not unless you can quantify “Bunzel-Better”. Can you? Bit abstract, that…’
Betty opened her mouth to respond but her voice was replaced by the sound of a horse neighing. I had finally decided to give the virtual horses their carrots, in the hope that it might stop these two humans from babbling at each other.
‘It’s carrot time,’ Tim said, sneaking back into his phone as I nudged Betty in the back and nibbled her shoulder.
‘What do you think, Buttercup?’ she asked me. Was she asking my opinion? Or just wondering what was going on inside my head?
I had been wondering that myself. The pain and irritation from my illness had disappeared by now, but it had left something in its place. A dull feeling that clung to my scalp like the weight of a harness. It was a few days later when I stumbled upon the reason why.
I was lingering near a corner of the field that I usually avoided. It was a boring corner; the grass didn’t grow well here and the view was blocked on one side by the wall of a building. There was a window in this wall, and I thought I had seen a shadow moving behind it, but it turned out to be something even more curious. It was a horse, staring back at me. Not that this would have been curious in itself, but there was something wrong with this horse. There was something attached to its head, a small box with a wiry stick sprouting from the top. It had the look of one of Betty and Tim’s contraptions, and as I moved to get a better view of it, I made the disturbing discovery that this was actually my own reflection.
Shaking my head didn’t seem to remove the box, and rubbing it against the wall was painful enough to convince me that it was a permanent fixture. I stared at this thing for a long time, willing it to give up its secrets. How long had it been there? This poisoned crown was probably the reason why the other horses had abandoned me, but witnessing this physical change in my appearance triggered a wave of further questions about myself, how my life was different now, and how those two humans might be involved in this transformation.
The view in this window had suddenly given me a lot more to think about.
‘Where is our favourite horse?’ Betty had returned to find an empty stable. Tim looked around as if he had hardly even noticed.
‘On strike, I guess?’ He didn’t appear to be all that concerned.
‘On strike? Yes that’s right, dear. All the horses are on strike. They want shorter hours and longer carrots.’ She slumped into her chair. ‘Good God almighty. How long is this going to last? You need to get out there and apologise, Jimbo.’
‘What have I done?’ he asked.
‘I don’t even want to know. That is between you and Buttercup, my dear. Now get out there and beg that horse for forgiveness.’
‘I might not come back either,’ he mumbled.
‘Come on, Jimbus. We have science to do. These video games aren’t going to play themselves. We need a horse in here.’
Tim shrugged.
‘I’m getting some pretty good results,’ he said, nose pressed to his screen.
‘Good results?’ She extracted herself from her chair and peered over his shoulder. ‘You’re getting nothing, my dear. You’re eating a horse sandwich without any horse in it.’ Tim’s table creaked as Betty sat on it, uncomfortably close to his hand. ‘It’s not all about graphs and numbers, hmm? You, me and Buttercup, we are a family. That horse is our baby, Timothy, yours and mine. Our massive, hairy baby, with hooves. We are a part of this experiment, you and me. We are the walls of the maze. Yes? We are the bread in the horse sandwich.’
‘Mate, can you hear yourself right now?’ He lurched back as Betty aimed her finger at his nose.
‘If you don’t come outside with me and talk to that horse,’ she said, ‘then you will take its place. Hmm? Have a think about that.’
Tim grabbed his monitor to stop it shaking as Betty jumped up from his desk, sauntering over to the open doorway to gaze in what was presumably my direction.
‘What is going on in that head of yours, my horse?’ she asked nobody. ‘I was talking to the horse people just now. They say Buttercup was standing in the corner for a whole hour, just staring at the wall. What is going on between those ears?’
Tim snorted.
‘We all do that, mate. Staring at stupid shit for hours. You think anything’s going on between your ears when you’re watching… whatever… Celebrity Waterskiing?’
‘Celebrity Waterskiing, Timothy? Is that what has you glued to your phone all day like a zombie?’
‘Mate, I just made that up, it’s not real.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ she asked. Tim thought about it for a few moments.
‘Not really, no. It’s just an escape though, isn’t it. Escape.’ He pointed at the doorway to the outside world. ‘From you and your stupid tests.’
‘Me and my stupid tests. You think you’re so weggy don’t you, Timboofus?’
‘Weggy?’
‘That’s what you kids say, isn’t it? Besides, horsey-hoofs didn’t come galloping back in here when I left the room, so by a scientific process of elimination I can only conclude that it’s all your fault.’
Tim puzzled his brows at her.
‘Weggy?’ he said.
I was standing at the far end of the field, gazing into the heavy clouds and thinking. The sound of Betty’s footsteps was approaching from behind me. She was making her usual babbling noises, and with no recording devices nearby I have no record of what she might have been saying to me, but I was beginning to suspect that there was information hidden within these sounds. Certain words came up again and again in certain situations, and the way the humans took turns in sharing these noises suggested they were listening to each other. Birds seem to make noise just to tell the world they are there, horses too sometimes. But with humans it was becoming clear that nearly everything they did was specifically designed to make somebody else do something for them.
Seeing my unfamiliar reflection in the window had awakened me to the fact that I had changed. This thing on my head, the pain, the dreams, the ideas, the other horses turning their backs on me, everything was related, and the common theme that threaded its way through this chain of altered circumstance was Betty and Tim.
Everything started changing the day they appeared. If the box on my head was making me different, I had to assume these two people were responsible, or at least benefiting from it in some way. I hated this feeling of being an object in their human world, to be bent into whatever shape they needed. This thing attached to my brain was just another kind of saddle, and the games they watched me play every day were the reason why they made me wear it. It was filling my head with ideas, but not for my benefit. It was only so that I could help them feed their pretend carrots to their pretend horses. I hated it.
But there was a problem, because I also liked it. I liked being better than the other horses. I liked knowing how things worked, and why things happened. Everything I learned made me more important. But ultimately there would always be the humans looking down on me, using my new skills for their own gain.
Eventually Betty left me alone, patting my backside as she returned to the stable. And after a while, to my surprise, Tim emerged blinking into the sunlight. He sheepishly made his way towards me across the field, looking back occasionally to the island of human civilisation he was leaving behind. Standing at what he obviously considered a safe distance, he mumbled a few awkward words to me before scuttling back to his hole.
I pulled up a mouthful of grass and chewed on it, pondering the meaning of this visitation. Clearly my services were needed in the stable, to the point where my human colleagues would come out here pretending I was their equal, talking to me like I was one of them. But it wasn’t really me that they valued, it was the abilities they had given me, and now an idea was growing in my mi
nd.
If cleverness was so precious to these humans, then perhaps this was something that carrot-game theory could be applied to, suppressing the supply in order to maximise the demand. In a sense I had already begun this experiment; they had obviously saddled my head with more ability than was necessary for the tasks I had to perform, despite my selective failures. Or was it because of my failures? If solving their puzzles required a certain level of intelligence, then pretending to be stupid might be a way to fool them into giving me more.
The carrot game called for subtlety though. It was a game of bluff and deception. If I always failed a certain percentage of their tests at random then they might suspect I was faking it. No, in order to be convincing I would have to be strategic in my idiocy, judging each task on the degree of intelligence it required, making sure I always passed the easy tests but struggled on the harder ones. I would also have to precisely and continuously balance my apparent level of stupidity in order to suggest there was a gradual improvement. Too dumb and they might give up altogether, or settle for giving me only the simple tasks. There had to be the occasional flash of potential, to show them what I could be capable of if they just turned on the taps of creativity a little bit more.
I was convinced this plan would work. It might seem hopelessly ambitious to expect to win a battle of wits against superior minds, but such analysis was still beyond my intellectual horizon. It is almost impossible to imagine what someone with more intelligence than you is capable of thinking – you may as well try to guess the number of leaves on a tree you’ve never seen.
Of course, this meant I would have to go back to the stable and carry on playing their games. Half of me still hated the idea of capitulating to their demands, but the other half was intrigued by how far I could work this to my advantage. Could I ever hope to be as clever as my human friends? Perhaps some small corner of my mind entertained such a fantasy, but my main goal at this point was to take control of my existence and grab whatever I could while I was doing it.
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 5