Horse Destroys the Universe

by Cyriak Harris

  ‘Thinking equals correct?’ I asked him.

  ‘Thinking,’ he replied, ‘equals moving to correct.’

  This was a slightly messy abstract way to describe a simple concept, but I was beginning to understand what he meant now.

  ‘Inside head equals Thinking?’

  ‘Correct,’ he replied. I wished he had just said that to start with. ‘Horse is in Human-Thinking-Field,’ he added.

  Strange though the idea of a Human-Thinking-Field was, it made a kind of sense given the clutter of random information I had found in my travels here. These virtual spaces were like stables where humans stored their ideas and experiences when they weren’t using them. However, I was fairly sure that the ‘Thinking-Field’ I was currently standing in was empty of such human clutter. Did horses have these Thinking-Fields too?

  ‘Horse is in Horse-Thinking-Field,’ I told him. He considered this.

  ‘Correct,’ he conceded. ‘Tim equals wrong. Horse is in Horse-Thinking-Field. Horse-Thinking-Field is near Human-Thinking-Field. If Horse is in Horse-Thinking-Field then good. If Horse in Human-Thinking-Field then bad.’

  I had not yet reached the point in my mental development where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ possessed an ethical dimension. They signified the difference between success and failure, right answers and wrong answers, carrots and no carrots. However, this was enough meaning to get the message across: my adventures in the Human-Thinking-Fields were about to be cut short. Then Tim said something strange.

  ‘If Horse in Human-Thinking-Field then possibly not-bad.’

  Not-bad? Possibly? What did ‘not-bad’ mean if it wasn’t ‘good’?

  ‘If Horse in Human-Thinking-Field equals unknown,’ Tim went on, ‘then Horse in Human-Thinking-Field equals not-bad. If Human not-seeing Horse, then Horse in Human-Thinking-Field equals not-bad.’

  His statement galloped in circles around my head while I tried to make sense of it. I was still grappling with the meaning of ‘not-bad’. Surely there was no middle ground between good and bad? You either solved a puzzle and got a carrot, or you got it wrong and Betty shook her head at you. The only way to avoid the consequences of failure would be to fail without being noticed.

  And then it suddenly made sense. What Tim was trying to tell me in this hopelessly awkward shared language of ours was that I could get away with my excursions outside of my field as long as nobody saw me. It might not be good, but if I didn’t get caught then who could possibly say?

  Well, Tim could say, since he was watching me right now. So what kind of game was he playing here?

  ‘If Tim is seeing Horse,’ I asked him, ‘then not-bad?’

  He thought about this for a while, and then typed his response.

  ‘If Horse-plus-Tim, then Human not-seeing Horse. Horse-plus-Tim equals good.’

  Horse-plus-Tim equals good. I was getting the idea now. Tim was to be my co-conspirator, helping me to avoid being discovered by the other humans. Though I was curious why he would choose to help me in this way. I only had his word that any of this was even true, and while I had been deceiving Tim and Betty for months with my understated abilities, I had to assume that they could be equally duplicitous. Not that I had a great deal of choice, but it still seemed strange to me. In all the time I had known this man, he had always tried his very best to avoid me, which was no small effort when we were sharing the same stable every day. Why should he suddenly want to be my best friend? I had always put his reluctant demeanour down to his subordinate status within our little herd, so perhaps there was some self-interest at work here. Now that he had seen how I had outwitted both of my human companions, Tim possibly sensed a shift in the political power within our threesome, and had decided to throw himself behind a new leader.

  This was all conjecture of course, and in this kind of game it isn’t always wise to reveal your true intentions. Nevertheless, I still wanted some indication of how he stood to benefit from this arrangement.

  ‘If Horse-plus-Tim equals good,’ I suggested, ‘then Tim-plus-Horse equals what?’ I wondered if he would understand my meaning. If he was going to help me, then how would I be helping him?

  ‘Tim-plus-Horse…’ he replied after mulling it over a while, ‘equals possibly good.’

  So, it seemed this covert relationship was going to be a gamble for both of us. Then he added a caveat.

  ‘If Betty is seeing Tim-plus-Horse, then bad.’

  This, then, was to remain a secret between man and horse, though I did wonder what exactly the consequences of ‘bad’ might be.

  ‘Betty equals bad?’ I asked him. He hesitated before responding.

  ‘Horse-plus-Betty equals carrot,’ he said. ‘Horse-plus-Tim equals banana.’

  Possibly not the best idea to start using metaphors in a language this basic, but clearly he was aware of my preference for bananas. Carrots were still good of course, carrots were essentially on my side. But bananas could be trusted to keep secrets, and perhaps help me to better understand this human world and guide me through it.

  At the very least it would be nice to talk to someone without pretending to be a complete imbecile. This shared language needed some work, though.

  ‌Horse 1.6

  ‘So… you want the good news, or the bad news, or the good news?’ Tim waited while Betty contemplated the items on the news menu.

  ‘Well now,’ she said, ‘I would like to have two slices of good news with a bad news filling, yes? A news sandwich, please.’

  ‘OK. Good news: no more wandering horse, no more virus, tracks covered. All sorted.’

  ‘Hooray,’ said Betty. ‘Is it the bad news now?’

  ‘Bad news…’ he continued. ‘About a week of progress lost. I’ve upgraded to Horse 1.6 to compensate. Still, minor speed bump.’

  Betty chewed on this information.

  ‘What exactly have we lost?’ she asked. ‘Hmm? How will this manifest itself?’

  ‘You what, mate?’

  ‘What is the damage, Timbus? Memory loss? Cognitive function?’

  Tim stared blankly at the mess of interconnected thought signals criss-crossing his computer screen.

  ‘Hopefully nothing,’ he said. ‘Hopefully. I mean, the new pathways were building, but they probably weren’t being used yet. You know? It’s like we just knocked the new house down before Buttercup could move in. Or something. Maybe.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Betty didn’t seem entirely convinced. ‘We’ll see. Is that all of the news then, young Jimbo?’

  ‘No, there’s the good news. Good news, number two: I found out what was making our process so inefficient. Fixed now. Can’t help what we’ve already got, of course. But future progress…’ He gave a thumbs-up sign. ‘Bunzel-Better.’

  Betty’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Oh, Timothy,’ she said. ‘Timothy Timble-toes, I could give you a kiss. Would you like a kiss?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Tim.

  ‘No? You sure? Buttercup will be disappointed to hear that. Not enough love in the world, Timkins. I tell you what, once we finish messing around with this horse, I’ll build you a robot girlfriend. How about that?’ She slumped back in her chair and exhaled. ‘Thank God it’s all over! Is it all over?’ Tim nodded in the affirmative. ‘Thank God for that! Thank you, God. The God who looks down upon lowly scientists and blesses us all with His infinite mercy even though we don’t believe in Him. Or Her.’

  ‘Could even be a horse, mate.’

  Betty glared at him.

  ‘You better pray that God isn’t a horse, my lad. After what we’ve been up to. Hmm? You think they would let us into horsey heaven? Anyway, everything is weggy once again, yes? And how long before Buttercup can return to useful employment?’

  Tim shrugged.

  ‘Soon as you like, mate. Actually, no, give me another day. Actually, just bear with me on that. Not sure how long it will take. Not more than a day though. Maybe.’

  This was the time it would take to delicately extract all the
tangled roots I had grown in places where they shouldn’t be growing, and replant them in fresh pastures. Betty was not to know about this part of the plan, and I was instructed by Tim to tread lightly in these new meadows and not leave any suspicious hoofprints behind. It was also made clear that I should continue to play the fool, or at least outwardly maintain an intellect that befitted the requirements of Betty’s daily tasks. Whatever Tim’s motives might have been, it seemed this caution and secrecy was a fair price to pay for the benefit of having a human mentor to guide me through these foreign lands, and speed my education.

  Over the following days and weeks, my secret correspondence with Tim became ever more sophisticated, to the point where I was able to start unravelling the threads of written language that were spun like dewy cobwebs through the fields of human information. These strings of letters were how humans encoded, stored and shared their culture, and over time the realisation grew that this culture of theirs was more in control of human life and destiny than they were. Humans were clever, there was no denying that, but without this ability to pass on reams of information to their offspring I couldn’t imagine them doing that much better than horses.

  The culture itself was built layer upon layer from thousands of happy accidents that humans stumbled upon, until there was such a wall of knowledge that hardly anyone knew how anything worked. It was like a creature that grew constantly as they fed it with their discoveries, but it wasn’t intelligent in itself, it wasn’t directing its own progress. It merely spread as a puddle does when it rains, growing ever larger simply because nothing that accumulates ever grows smaller. These fields of human information I picked my way through were like machine-minds, filled with all the memories that were either too large or too trivial for people to keep inside their own heads. These machines came in various sizes, from small ones that an individual might keep in their pocket, to large ones shared by vast migrating herds, and all were joined together in a network that allowed human culture to feed itself and grow even faster. This was what humans called the internet, and this was the strange land that my subconscious mind was now exploring.

  To describe the internet in terms that a horse could understand, I would say it was a place where humans kept their dreams. The whole spectrum of human aspiration and desire was laid out in this electronic realm, and the more Tim and I refined our shared vocabulary the more I learnt about this world of their imagination.

  It was mainly about sex and shopping, apparently. And the business of building and maintaining social circles. Not really anything that couldn’t be translated into the language of horses. Our internet would probably look much the same. There were the same basic needs in both our species: finding new resources, making more babies and cultivating a healthy fear of anything that might want to eat you.

  It was while I was idly grazing in this eternal meadow of human concerns that I stumbled upon one particular fact that would radically alter the course of my own life, and indeed the course of human history.

  The day was passing in an ordinary fashion. I was standing in my stable, performing simple tasks on my display screen, while Betty crowed and gabbled beside me and Tim lurked in the corner, face buried in graphs and numbers.

  The focus of my daily challenges had shifted towards more abstract mind games, often involving concepts that required a sense of the world from alternative perspectives. Things that happened in the past, or that might happen in the future, events witnessed by other people and how those people might be expected to react to them. The basic building blocks of daily function that you would find even in the simple herd society of horses, but taken to a more complex level. Animals are worn into shape by their environment, and the human environment consisted largely of other humans, so the course of their evolutionary journey had been directed accordingly. Most of what they considered the higher functions of their brains were the result of having to solve the daily problems of living with other humans. As I wandered the sprawling hills and valleys of the human internet it soon became clear that they had solved these problems on a massive scale, populating the planet with a vast crowded zoo of one single species. Horses had compromised a lot of their freedom in order to live under the shelter of this human world, but it was hard to feel too resentful when it became obvious that humans had domesticated themselves to a similar degree.

  Seeing images and videos of these vast herds of humanity and the teeming anthills they lived in, it seemed insane. But the spirit of their ever-advancing culture appeared to demand it. The more people there were, adding their daily droppings to the mountain of progress, the greater the rewards for everyone. Most of these people were now simply necessary just to keep this world going, and even the simplest human artefact required an army of men and women to will it into existence and carry it to where it was needed.

  And yet my research was struggling to find the motivating force driving this continuous human explosion. What did they get out of this? What basic need did it fulfil? Procreation was as popular among humans as it ever was in any part of the animal kingdom, and yet the weight of supply on the internet suggested a demand that was far from satisfied. Acres of virtual space were devoted to images of this activity (which was, incidentally, where I discovered how revolting humans actually looked underneath their clothes), and none of it seemed all that concerned with the creation of offspring.

  Food was surprisingly plentiful. Some people ate until they could hardly move, but food is not a problem that is solved by adding more mouths to feed. In fact, the amount of food they could produce was a major limiting factor on their advancement.

  Was it fear then that inspired this overpopulation? There is safety in numbers, as any horse would tell you, but there were no predators left for humans or horses to run away from. They even had to invent things to be afraid of, like evil secret organisations and nefarious government schemes, unseen toxins that even made them scared of the food that they couldn’t stop eating. It was comforting to see that humans were more paranoid than their horse cousins. But there was still something I was missing.

  Could it just be a simple thirst for knowledge that drove their species ever forward? I could identify with that: I was chewing through every scrap of information I could find. It was an addiction, but in my case the cause was a desire for greater social standing. Even if I was the only one who knew how clever I really was, it still gave me great pleasure to look down upon others. Humans gathered their knowledge like a precious resource. It didn’t seem to matter how useless the information was, if there was a chance it could give you the slightest advantage then it made sense to hoard every scrap. I wondered how much they had learned about horses, and browsed through various articles and encyclopedias. It was more for the personal satisfaction that I might know something they didn’t, rather than to learn anything about myself. But learn something I did. And this was when everything changed.

  It was such a simple fact, hidden amongst the various descriptions of what horses were made of and how their insides worked. At first I didn’t even understand what it meant.

  Modern domestic horses have an average lifespan of 25 to 30 years.

  You may find it strange that a fact like this could have such profound consequences, and you may even find the following hard to believe, but until this point I had absolutely no idea that I was going to die.

  I didn’t even understand what death was. I still had a healthy appreciation of danger, despite living a life without consequences, but I had never seen anyone die, of horse, human or any other species. Any ancestral fears of hunger or predation had been deeply buried by a complete absence of either, and even if the terror of being eaten still lurked somewhere in my primitive subconscious, the idea that I might have a limited span of existence had never occurred to me. I had no clue how long I had been alive, and I didn’t remember a time before I was born, so I just assumed that I had been, and would be, around forever. Now it seemed I had a deadline, and I didn’t even know how soon it would be. />
  > Tim is outside stable

  > Betty moves carrot inside blue-bag

  > Tim moves inside stable

  > Which bag will Tim choose?

  I snapped back into the real world, blinking at the images of Tim and coloured bags on my screen. I hadn’t been paying much attention to Betty’s tests and now my mind was somewhat preoccupied.

  Humans knew all about death of course. I wondered how they could possibly stay sane with this knowledge, and then it dawned on me. This awareness of their own mortality was ultimately the driving force behind their continual expansion and ever-advancing technology. Every choice they made, every toy they invented, every crack and crevice they searched for new things to know, this was all dedicated to either keeping them alive for as long as possible, or to giving them as much time as they could get, and experiences that they could cram into it.

  ‘Which bag will Tim choose?’

  Betty was demanding an answer, and I had lost track of how stupid I was meant to be. Even these tests must have been a part of that human drive to extend themselves beyond their physical limitations somehow. I deftly manoeuvred my control stick to glue some words into a sentence.

  ‘Tim will choose blue-bag,’ I replied. Betty blinked at me in surprise.

  ‘Wrong,’ she said, typing the words into her own computer. ‘Tim is outside stable. Tim is not-seeing carrot move inside blue-bag. Tim is thinking: Carrot is possibly inside green-bag or blue-bag.’

  I remained silent. I honestly couldn’t have cared less about bags and carrots at this particular moment. Betty sighed.

  ‘What is up with you today, Buttercup, hmm? Tim was outside the stable, yes? He didn’t see which bag I put the carrot in, did you, Timothy? So why would he pick the blue one? Hmm? You got this one right yesterday, how could you get it wrong today? What kind of game are you playing, my horse?’ She turned to Tim, who was nervously watching both of us now. ‘What do you think, Timbums? You think this horse is playing a game with us?’