I felt a few drops of rain falling and took that as a sign to head back inside.
Horse 1.4
> Three apples in bag
> One apple equals two carrots
> How many carrots in bag?
I carefully considered the puzzle that was painted across my screen in shapes and pictures, evaluating my response. It wasn’t the solution that concerned me, but how to get it wrong.
I knew what the correct answer would be. I suspected even a normal horse would be able to solve this problem, if only it was framed in the right language. But I had to get it wrong, because the bag was something new, and therefore I decided it must cause some initial confusion. Or at least the appearance of such. Bags had featured in previous puzzles, the image clearly modelled on the real one Betty kept her carrots in, but never before in such a mathematical context. These numerical riddles were a recent development in Betty’s daily tests. Objects had different values here, and new ones were introduced gradually to allow their meaning to become apparent. There was a steadily rising difficulty curve to these problems, but it still took all of my willpower to pretend they were in any way challenging.
Something bothered me about these new questions. Why should two carrots equal one apple, and what does that have to do with the number of carrots in a bag? The comparative value of apples and carrots was purely symbolic, and though I was fully aware of this at the time, I hadn’t quite grasped that these tests were a form of mental exercise for me. I was still labouring under the assumption that this was all just work that needed doing. The humans wanted these symbolic fruits and vegetables to be arranged and balanced, and so here I was, getting the job done.
It was beginning to feel a little strange though, given all that humans were capable of, that they couldn’t count a few carrots and apples without my help. It had to be important work if they had even gone to the trouble of extending my conscious abilities. There were plans here that were still beyond my understanding, but I had a plan of my own, and that plan involved failing this test in some way.
Using my control stick I moved one of the virtual bags across the screen and deposited it on the other bag. An unexpected rectangle sprang out of nowhere accompanied by an alarming sound. Nothing else I did had any further effect, but the two humans seemed very interested in this result.
‘Oh, Buttercup, what have you done? You naughty horse. Have you killed my game?’ Betty squinted at the surprise rectangle and muttered her way back to her own computer. Tim also came to stare at the mystery object. He tried jostling my control stick.
‘Totally frozen,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘Cheeky horse tried to put a bag inside a bag,’ Betty replied. ‘We’re not quite ready for that yet, Buttercup.’
Tim raised his eyebrows at her.
‘How can you even move the bag?’ he asked.
‘I think I see what happened here.’ Betty was lost in the clattering of her keyboard.
‘I thought you could only move the carrots?’ he asked again.
Betty stopped jabbing her keys and sat back in her groaning chair, rubbing her eyes.
‘The carrots, dear Timothy, are inside the bag. It’s just a confusion of carrots, that is all.’
Tim tutted and shook his head.
‘That’s some quality workmanship, mate,’ he said. ‘How long were you working at Bunzel?’
‘Yes, it’s funny isn’t it, in all that time they never once asked me to make video games for a horse. Not even once. Are you offering your services, my dear?’
Tim looked disdainfully at the frozen screen.
‘That’s alright, mate. This is your area of expertise.’
‘No, that’s right, Timbags. This isn’t just a game I am making here. This is a battlefield of the mind. Every day is an unfolding story. The fires of inspiration and creativity, those are the tools of my trade. And one day, when you are as weggy as I am, perhaps you will understand.’
‘Weggy… You’re just bodging this together as you go along, aren’t you?’
‘Errors are the building blocks of progress, my dear. It took four billion years of mistakes to make you, didn’t it? Hmm?’ She hammered her keyboard with renewed vigour. ‘Adapt and evolve, that is the nature of life, Timbungle. Life, that is forming in this very stable, emerging from the soup of ignorance. Discovering its own form as it rises from the… mixed vegetables… of the mind… Now what?’ The whole screen was filling with surprise rectangles.
‘Mate.’ Tim gazed in admiration at this display of abstract art. ‘Do you get horses to test all your software? Maybe you should.’
Betty deflated in her chair.
‘Time for a reboot,’ she said. ‘Bear with us, Buttercup.’
I was also staring at the collage of rectangles. I assumed they were a part of the test, and was wondering what they were supposed to represent when all of a sudden the screen went blank.
At the exact instant this happened I experienced the most unusual sensation. It felt like a door had closed behind me. I looked around, but the stable door was still wide open, and there were no other openings in this room. This feeling was accompanied by a strange silence, as if the closed door had cancelled the noise of a storm outside. But outside the sun was shining, and the wind was calm. Something had disappeared, though whatever it was had been lurking so close to the edge of my awareness that I only noticed it now that it was suddenly absent.
The screen blinked back into life as Betty restarted her computer, and immediately the unknown door opened again behind me. Still, there was no door that I could see, and yet somehow I could sense the space that lay beyond it. It was like having an extra sense beyond sight or smell, or an event I was remembering before it happened. A waking dream, drowned out by the noise of reality.
The tests had resumed, this time without bags. They had also reverted to a simpler format from a few days previously, fitting various objects into appropriately shaped holes. Mostly the objects were things I could recognise from the real world, but occasionally an abstract shape would appear. My well-worn strategy was to pretend to struggle with the abstract shapes, but I was now finding it difficult to concentrate on any of these puzzles.
A ghostly sound of rain was coming from the invisible door, and I discovered that I could focus my attention on this sound, turning my ears to pinpoint its direction and bring it forward to the front of my mind. For a moment I forgot I was even in the room. It felt like the sound of the rain was pulling me into a dream, but a human voice pulled me back into reality.
‘You alright there, Buttercup?’ Betty was peering at me over the top of her computer screen. ‘Getting bored with these old tests?’
Remembering where I was and what was expected of me, I grabbed the control stick and deposited an apple into an apple-shaped hole. The screen greeted my action with a congratulatory chime and wiped itself clean in preparation for the next test, but as it did so I noticed the sound of the rain increased ever so slightly, as if the rain itself was washing away the images and painting new ones.
As I continued with the tests, I swivelled my ears to locate the ghostly doorway again, fine-tuning my attention to boost the signal. Each changing scenario on the video screen intensified the noise outside the door, and as my focus deepened I was able to pick out shadowy details swimming in that random interference. The room around me grew misty, but the screen in front of my eyes and the stick through which I controlled it kept me from slipping out of reality. The rain was singing to me, and its chorus of voices seemed to follow whatever was happening on the screen. Even simple movement caused ripples in the music, and I spent a small eternity just dragging objects around in circles and listening to the pattern of rainfall inside my head.
‘Mate, what is up with your horse?’
Betty looked up from whatever it was she was doing. She blinked by way of reply.
‘Your horse has gone wrong,’ Tim said, nodding towards me. Betty watched me drawing endless circles wi
th a carrot for a few moments and raised an eyebrow.
‘I told you before, Timkins,’ she said, returning to her keyboard, ‘it’s only my horse when all is sunshine and flowers and the trains are running on time. When it goes wrong then it’s our horse.’
Tim continued to observe my performance with a face contorted by pained curiosity. Eventually he extracted himself from his chair and edged carefully across to Betty’s place of work, eyes locked on me as he did so.
‘Master Timkinson.’ Betty addressed him over the top of her spectacles. ‘We don’t see much of you around these parts. What are you after, young scallywag?’
‘That horse,’ he said, whispering as if I could hear him, ‘acting a bit weirdly, don’t you think?’
‘Weirdly, Timbo?’ She pushed up her glasses to have a better look at me. ‘In relation to what, exactly?’ she asked.
‘Exactly,’ he replied.
‘Exactly what?’
‘That’s just my point, mate. I mean… what I mean is…’ He struggled to find the words he was looking for.
‘You’ve lost me, Tim-tims. Start again.’
‘That horse,’ he said. Betty folded her arms and waited patiently. ‘We don’t… we haven’t… we don’t have any point of reference for normality any more. Do we? I mean mentally. Sanity. Insanity. You know?’
‘You think our horse might be insane, Timble-toes?’
‘Well, how would we even know? How do you measure something like that? In a horse? In a horse that might not even be a horse any more? Or might still think it’s a horse? Or might still be a horse, but thinks it isn’t?’
‘Do you need some fresh air, my dear?’ She looked at him with something that resembled genuine concern.
‘I’m just wondering, that’s all.’ He perched on a nearby bale of straw and watched me bouncing my carrot. ‘Did you ever know anyone who was properly insane?’ he asked.
‘Timothy, my dear, we are all insane. Every one of us. All you can hope for is that you have the right shape of insanity to slot into whatever hole you are living in. You wonder if our horse thinks it’s a horse? Maybe we’re all horses. Hmm? You can’t measure sanity, my dear. Only efficiency. Behavioural efficiency. Function versus environment. But that’s not really something you can worry about when you are actively modifying both sides of the equation, is it? Hmm?’
Tim slowly pulled his gaze away from me and looked Betty in the eyes.
‘Sorry, what?’ he asked.
The sound of human conversation faded into the periphery of my awareness as I followed the whispering voices inside my head. It is fortunate, perhaps, that I lacked the capacity to question the limits of my own sanity, or I might have considered these hallucinations to be the symptoms of some mental illness.
As I moved objects on the screen it became apparent that the whispers weren’t simply tracing their path. The whole screen was filled with these ghostly voices, and the images that moved across its surface made them sing louder as they passed by. It was as if I was hearing the process by which the imagery on the screen was brought to life. I suddenly wondered if I could add my own voice to this chorus, to see if I could somehow touch the world that was hidden behind this glowing artifice. The doorway to this invisible world was closer now, so close that I could put my head through it and feel the rain falling on my skin. I called out to this world, and as I did so it collapsed around me.
I was abruptly plunged back into reality, standing in front of a display of broken pixelated chaos. The two humans were staring at me.
‘Oh, Buttercup. What have you done now?’ Betty came for a closer inspection of the multicoloured computer vomit that covered my screen. The control stick was unresponsive. ‘Look at this mess, my horse. Hmm? Did you do this?’
Tim stood beside her gazing in wonder at my accidental creation.
‘Mate,’ he said. ‘Sort your software out.’
I chewed a mouthful of grass, oblivious to the significance of this event. In the stable, Betty and Tim were busy unravelling the delicate instructions that ran their machines, erasing my clumsy hoofprints. They were not aware that I had blundered into the inner workings of their computer, and neither was I at the time. But I knew I had done something to upset this strange new world, and that I should probably conduct any future exploration with more care.
It probably goes without saying that horses do not have a great deal of knowledge on the subject of computers. Even after playing on one every day I still had no idea that humans employed these thinking machines, or that my own brain might be connected to the mechanical space inside one. I barely even understood what thinking was, or how I achieved it. For me, this new experience had been like a dream that had pushed its way into my waking life, or an extra sense that revealed a hidden layer of reality that had always been there, if only I had properly looked for it.
Even as I stood in the middle of my field I could still hear the murmur of this ghostly electronic realm, and over the next few days I opened my senses to its voices. It felt like there was another field inside my head, with grass and trees and hedgerows all shimmering with a strange energy, and I could move through this virtual landscape as effortlessly as a bird.
My imagination was translating the alien experience into something familiar, integrating its foreign language into my own thoughts so that I could make sense of it. Whether I was playing games in the stable or chewing grass outside, the ghostly field followed me like a memory. And as I explored its boundaries I could sense many other fields surrounding it, each one separated by buzzing walls of fences, hedgerows and gates. I spent a lot of my time exploring this imaginary world, but I was wary of interfering with it directly at first. The humans had not seemed pleased with my initial attempt, according to my limited understanding of their emotional states. I thought perhaps I might be punished for breaking their machine, but the tests resumed as normal the following day, and all seemed forgotten. It then struck me that the hidden world I visited in my mind was conspicuously empty of humans. I was alone in this world, and so I reasoned that nobody was aware I was secretly walking here.
The days passed, and Betty’s puzzles slowly grew in their complexity. I was dreaming about those tests now, solving them in my sleep, reaching into the screen with my thoughts and changing the rules of the games. It was always such a disappointment to wake up and see how dull the real tests were by comparison.
I escaped from the boredom of my waking hours by sending my mind into the ghostly otherworld, scouting its edges and spying over the hedges that divided my field from its neighbours. I wondered if those other fields would welcome my intrusion. The imaginary gates that connected them were not so simple to open, but I sensed no danger beyond them, not like in the real world. There were no humans in this imaginary place, no loud machines, not even any other horses. Just the whispering voice of the wind that blew through the grass, creating patterns that were strangely ordered and uniform. I felt a primitive urge to explore this landscape, a compelling and prehistoric desire to seek out unknown pastures and build a map of my domain. It was an ancient and evolutionary instinct, and was accompanied by a feeling of freedom that I had never even known was possible. I was the ruler of this hidden realm, and all its infinite grass was mine to eat.
If only I could work out how to open these gates.
Horse 1.5
> Apple is in bag
> Bag is on table
> Apple is on table?
Betty waited for my answer. Apples in bags, bags on tables, the puzzles had evolved from simple arithmetic towards logic and syntax. Things on things, things in things, left or right, up or down, near or far, right or wrong, bigger, smaller or equivalent.
Evidently the idea was to develop a simple shared language between horse and human. The vocabulary was still just symbols on my screen, but each was now accompanied by the sound of a spoken word, presumably to help make sense to human listeners. I wasn’t paying too much attention to those noises; I didn’t really
need to, since anything Betty wished to say to me would be translated into imagery on the screen.
‘Apple apple apple,’ I replied, using the clumsy interface of my stick to select the appropriate words from a menu. ‘Bag table.’ I liked to sow a bit of confusion into the proceedings now and then by making up some gibberish. Betty seemed to find these occasional creative flourishes quite charming, like a kind of horse poetry. Humans measure everything according to their own abilities and motives, as if the world is trying its best to be like them and is ever so cute when it gets it slightly wrong. In reality the world couldn’t care less about humans, of course.
‘Bag table, Buttercup? I know the feeling, my dear, I know it well. If there were but time in this modern life for such wisdom…’ She conjured the symbol for a wrong answer.
‘Apple is on table,’ I said, arranging the words on the screen for the computer voice to read out. The apple was in the bag, and the bag was on the table, so this was obviously the answer she was looking for. These new tests annoyed me with their simplistic assumptions. Technically, the apple had nothing to do with the table if it was inside the bag. It seemed somewhat open to interpretation, in my opinion. The screen went blank and a new problem appeared.
> Bag is on table
> Carrot is where?
Carrot is where? Carrot could be anywhere for all I knew. If there was a carrot in this scenario then it had to be in the bag, but why should I assume such a thing when the previous bag contained an apple? There could be anything in that bag, including nothing at all.
‘Carrot is unknown,’ I replied.
‘Carrot is in bag,’ said Betty, typing her response and sending the symbols to my screen.
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘Carrot equals zero.’
‘Carrot equals zero, my horse?’ she said out loud, tapping her chin with a finger. ‘Does it really? You seem very sure about that. You know, certainty is the enemy of understanding, don’t you? Hmm?’ She waved a finger at the bag on my screen. ‘We’re all inside that bag, you and me, and everyone else. It’s the bag of certainty, my dear Buttercup, hiding us from the sunshine of understanding.’
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 6