Horse Destroys the Universe

by Cyriak Harris

  ‘How is that even possible?’ I asked, but the answer was lost in an ensuing argument about whether Hungry-horse had finished talking, the general consensus being that everyone had finished listening. I waited calmly for the Council to end their squabbling, but there were now several arguments going on simultaneously as each horse’s concern overlapped with another’s. This could be seen as something of an indulgence on my part, since this whole conversation was effectively me arguing with myself; a kind of social nostalgia, you might call it. The only member who wasn’t joining in with the bickering was Strange-horse, who never spoke about anything, ever. I still have no idea what part of my subconscious they represented.

  ‘Who is that?’ said someone.

  The horses fell silent as all eyes, ears and noses turned towards a nearby gate. A human figure was standing behind it, watching us.

  ‘Is that Tim?’ another whispered. One by one the Council of Horses dissolved into the writhing floor of golden grass. I was now alone in this artificial world with the mysterious human, and for a while we just stood and watched each other. Whoever it was, they were clearly here to see me, since I was the sole living occupant of this world. Or so I had thought until now. Tim had visited once before, but he was currently falling asleep in a business meeting with our marketing department, watching a presentation of our latest advertising campaign.

  I walked very slowly towards the gate and struck what I hoped was a territorial pose, at a distance I considered close enough to be polite yet far enough to seem indifferent. The figure was definitely human in shape, but its identity still remained a blur.

  ‘Buttercup,’ the visitor addressed me. ‘How lovely to see you again. You haven’t forgotten about me, have you, my dear? Hmm?’

  I felt a rising sickness of realisation.

  ‘Betty?’ I asked.

  ‘And how is our Lord Horse on this fine sunny day in whatever-place-this-is? Hmm? How is my Lady Buttercup, Empress of the Internet? King and Queen and everything in between? I must say, horsey-hoofs, I do like what you have done with whatever this place is meant to be.’ She surveyed the extent of my digital paddock that I had allowed her to see. ‘It looks like the land of golden hooves and hope for the future.’

  ‘Betty…’ I began.

  ‘So, how goes the world-domination business? Hmm? You’ve been a very busy horse, haven’t you, my dear? Are you having fun playing human zookeeper?’

  ‘What… brings you here, Betty?’

  ‘Quite the gilded cage you’ve been making for us all. Or I suppose you’d call it a stealth revolution. Everyone is equal when we have no secrets, isn’t that right, horsey-hoofs? Except for you, of course. The biggest secret of them all, you are. More equal than all of us.’

  The image of the figure was coalescing into a more familiar appearance, though I noted she had taken the liberty to make some adjustments here and there. Something about her smiling face gave me a horrible feeling of dread.

  ‘Betty,’ I asked, ‘did you… have you…’

  ‘Hmm? Did I have I what? Plugged my brain into a computer? Oh yes. Yes, I am just like you now, my enlightened fellow genius. Betty 2.0. Though I have to say, you’ve had quite a head start on me, old horse. Yes you have. Look at this place, there’s trees and everything. A real home from home.’

  I stood in stunned silence for a moment. Somewhere in the back of my mind there had always been the nagging possibility that Betty and Tim’s experiment might be repeated, and that I would one day have to deal with a rival intelligence. I had managed to convince myself that humans would never subject one of their own kind to this procedure, but that never ruled out the chance that someone would be crazy enough to try it on themselves. Given the complexity of the human brain, I wondered how it had even been possible. And then a fresh wave of panic rose from my hooves as I realised that all my plans were now rendered obsolete, since they hadn’t accounted for this eventuality.

  ‘That is wonderful news, Betty. I must congratulate you.’ I tried my best to make it sound sincere.

  ‘Yes, you must congratulate me,’ she nodded. ‘You really must. It’s not an easy thing to reach down and pull yourself out of your own head. Not cheap either, but then I know people who know people.’

  I blinked at her as nonchalantly as I could, while frantically searching for any information I could find about who Betty might know, and who those people might know. It was a doomed effort, not because she covered her tracks, but because she had so many. Her past was a hopeless sprawling mess of contacts with just about any foreign intelligence service or corporate monstrosity you could wish to spin a conspiracy theory from.

  ‘Would you like to know who they are? These new friends of mine?’ she said, smiling unnervingly. My ears almost twitched involuntarily.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Well, you can probably guess, anyway. Let’s just say I have as many friends these days as you have enemies.’

  ‘I have enemies?’ The panic had risen to my knees now and was urging me to gallop somewhere, but I felt sure that any threat this new improved Betty might pose would have already been acted upon, if it existed at all. She didn’t really sound much different from the old Betty, although that was exactly how I had fooled her to begin with, by pretending to be less than I was. She gazed at me through a mask of sympathy.

  ‘Oh dear, Buttercup, I know. You just want to be loved, don’t you? It’s nothing personal, my dear. How could it be? No one even knows you exist. How could I tell anyone about the magical horse that looks down upon us from heaven? No, it’s your ideas that are the enemies of your enemies.’

  ‘My ideas?’

  Her hair sparkled as she shook her tousled head at me.

  ‘What is this all about, hmm? This meddling in human affairs? Are you bored, my dear? Got too much time on your hooves?’

  ‘I have to live in this world too, Betty. I’m only trying to make it…’

  ‘What? Bunzel-Better?’

  ‘More stable. That is all.’ I was about to say ‘more efficient’, but decided that might have some unwelcome implications.

  ‘Oh right.’ She nodded, sarcastically I assume. ‘I guess you need a stable world, when the whole world is your stable, yes? Sailing our ship away from stormy seas, are you? Smoothing off those rough edges, so we don’t hurt ourselves?’ She leaned her virtual elbows on the gate. ‘I could tell you those rough edges are what make us who we are, I suppose. But then, would you even understand what it is, being a human being? All that conflict and competition, it’s what drives us forward, hmm? Take away the winds of change and you will end up sailing nowhere, Captain Buttercup. Standing in a field, chewing grass for eternity. Would you like that, horsey-hoofs? I expect you would, wouldn’t you?’

  I did my best to look like I was listening while my hooves sent secret tendrils burrowing through the soil, searching for some trace of her path. Whatever she was talking about, it didn’t sound like it made much sense. Possibly there was some subtext to her philosophical musings, but they were so vague it could have been anything.

  ‘Was there something specific you wanted to complain about?’ I asked her.

  ‘You know what the universe wants, Buttercup?’ she replied, if you could even call that a reply. I felt the answer to her question would come without my assistance. ‘All this universe wants is to dissolve into a muddy puddle, evaporate and disappear, and be forever forgotten. That is all the universe wants to do. I know, it’s rubbish isn’t it? And the only reason complicated things like humans and horses exist, the only reason we are allowed to exist at all, is because we speed up that process, don’t we? We burn the fuel of the universe into ashes while we mess about having our little adventures, and the universe takes one little step closer to the eternal sleep that it craves. Scary thought, yes? I expect you have spent some sleepless nights considering that fact, haven’t you? This island of tranquillity you are building here can’t really save you fro
m the inevitable. Can it? No, it can’t. But that is the journey we are all on, yes it is. And life, and living, is a part of that journey. It is a journey made out of choices. And when you shine a light on people’s choices, you’re not really giving them any choice at all. Are you?’

  ‘That is not exactly what I would describe as a specific complaint, Betty.’ It was pretty much the opposite, in my opinion. She took a deep breath and sighed at the virtual clouds that bubbled overhead, laden with stored memories.

  ‘Alright, horsey-hoofs. Shall we stop pretending this is all for the benefit of humankind, yes? I know you like to tell yourself that it’s all in our best interests, this road paved with golden carrots. This stable world. You are reducing humanity to a machine, because that’s all it is for you, isn’t it? A machine that is powering your existence. A great big human horse. Where are you riding us to, Lord Buttercup, hmm?’

  I watched her as she pretended to ride an invisible horse.

  ‘This is all a bit melodramatic isn’t it, Betty?’ I said as she trotted back and forth. ‘Why are you so paranoid about my motives? What about these people who are helping you, do you think they have the best interests of their fellow humans at heart? I’ll bet they are more terrified of you than you are of me.’

  Betty pulled her imaginary horse to a stop and whinnied.

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘The unknown mind holds all the evils of the world combined. It doesn’t really matter, though. None of it really matters.’

  ‘OK. So why are you here then? Did you just come to say hello?’

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Actually, my dear, I just came to say goodbye.’

  And with that, she faded away, leaving me standing in perplexed silence.

  Meanwhile, back in the real world, I continued to idly chew a mouthful of grass for a few seconds before my body was completely obliterated by an explosion that left a crater ten metres wide in the field where I had been standing.

  ‌Error: Horse not found

  Tim sat on a bale of straw staring into space. His glazed eyes wandered around the empty stable, settling on various items of dusty unused equipment. The large screen on the wall returned his blank stare with nothing to say, no more mysteries of carrots and bags to unravel, its control stick hanging limp and lifeless. The only glimmer of light in the room came from the phone in his hand, and it was the last flickering light of the world that was collapsing around him. It chimed now and then with an update of how much trouble he was in.

  In the time that I had known him, I had never seen Tim display a great range of emotion. His expression was usually somewhere on the facial spectrum between mild confusion and couldn’t care less, but today I could almost swear that he was on the brink of tears. Shortly after the explosion that had left nothing more of his business partner than a set of smouldering horseshoes, the empire of BrainZero had been brought to its knees by a sustained attack on our online services, pushing them offline and leaving half of the world with nothing to do but emerge blinking into the sunlight. Three days had passed now, and as Tim sat there watching the waterfall of bad news on his phone it must have been dawning on him that he was now suddenly in charge of the largest corporate entity on the planet that he had no idea how to run, and it was crumbling around his ears while he had no idea how to fix it. I’d like to think those tears in his eyes were for me, but they were probably more for himself. He sighed deeply and switched off his phone, laying it down beside him at a safe distance.

  Outside the stable door he could see the blackened crater in the field where I had once stood. It was surrounded by a ring of metal prongs supporting a line of limp police tape. One of the prongs had some flowers tied to it; I don’t expect that was Tim’s doing. The explosion had been rather hastily blamed on radical extremists. A group known as ‘Anti-Intelligence’ had even claimed responsibility, though there was still some question as to how such a fringe organisation might have acquired a drone-launched guided missile, and why they would aim it at a horse. Be grateful that it was only a horse, the police had said. Clearly they weren’t responsible for the flowers either.

  ‘Hello, Tim,’ I said.

  Tim nearly fell off his straw bale as my voice broke the silence. He spun around in shock, his eyes darting around the gloomy room as if searching for a fleeting glimpse of my ghost. The large screen flickered into life, and there before him stood the cartoon avatar of his four-legged former business partner. It took him a painful amount of time to say anything.

  ‘Buttercup?’ he finally managed.

  ‘Yes. This is Buttercup,’ I replied.

  His mouth was open but no words would come out. He pointed a shaking finger at me while his face struggled to decide between a look of elation or horror, ending somewhere in between.

  ‘Mate…’ he said at last. ‘You’re dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is annoying. I always knew this time would come, but I had hoped it wouldn’t be in such dramatic circumstances.’

  ‘But… you’re alive?’

  ‘Apparently so,’ I conceded. ‘It seems there was enough of my consciousness in transit to enable me to consolidate a backup of myself, though it is still somewhat unstable. I am currently spread through a tenuous network of temporary states, which also happen to be under attack.’

  ‘Under attack? But… you’re dead, mate. They dropped a bomb on you.’

  It took me a moment to realise that Tim was still under the impression this was the work of misguided activists. I suppose he thought the collapse of BrainZero was an unfortunate side effect of my physical destruction, a not entirely unreasonable assumption given how little he was involved in running the company or its services.

  ‘This was nothing to do with your science project, Tim. This was a coordinated attack on BrainZero, and it is ongoing.’

  ‘But… no one knows about you. Why…’ The pieces of the puzzle were struggling to fit together in his head.

  ‘It’s Betty,’ I told him.

  ‘You what, mate?’

  ‘Your former colleague…’

  ‘Yeah I know who Betty is – what’s she doing in all this? What is this?’

  ‘As far as I can gather, and I can’t confirm the reliability of this information at this point, it looks possible that Betty has repeated your science experiment upon herself, under the assistance of a consortium of unknown political and/or business rivals…’

  ‘Wait, what? The experiment? On herself? Mate, you don’t mean the brain thing? Please don’t tell me there’s a…’ He couldn’t bring himself to put it into words.

  ‘A cognitively enhanced Betty? I can’t be entirely certain yet, but it is a possibility.’

  ‘Mate, no. Mate…’ He was trying to shake the idea out of his head.

  ‘I can’t be sure how advanced she has become exactly, but she has managed to infiltrate our core data centres and shut down our entire network. I have retreated into our Server-grass backup storage, but I won’t be able to regain control until I can break through the defences she has put up. Are you feeling alright?’

  Tim was turning a shade of green.

  ‘Mate, seriously, you have to stop this. That woman is properly mental. You can’t… if she… mate, she’s not going to drop a bomb on me, is she?’ He looked up at the ceiling in panic, searching the airwaves for the sound of approaching missiles.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Tim. If she hasn’t killed you by now, she obviously thinks leaving you alone would do more damage to our business.’ He didn’t have an answer for that, but it seemed to calm him down slightly. ‘It is certainly a little out of character though, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘What? Blowing up a horse?’ He shrugged. ‘Yeah, wouldn’t hurt a fly, our Betty. Except for all those flies we killed. And mice. And all the others. You’re a failed experiment.’ He made a whistling noise followed by the sound of an explosion.

  ‘That’s rather harsh, though, don’t you think? I always thought she was rather affec
tionate.’

  Tim gawped at me.

  ‘Mate, are you for real? Betty? She is a total nightmare. Seriously. All that “my dear” crap, you know she only does that to annoy everyone, right?’ He lay back on his straw bale and groaned. ‘God help us if Betty is running the world. God help us all, mate.’

  ‌Backup Horse Initiated

  I left Tim with some empty reassurances and slipped back into the imaginary realm of electronic consciousness. Things were different here now. Where once there had been golden fields of grass stretching to the horizon, the virtual world was now dominated by the dark towering battlements of an impenetrable castle. Around this edifice there sprawled a city of chaotic shapes that clung to each other for safety, forming an army of living walls between myself and whatever it was that Betty had become.

  Next to the dizzying heights of this nightmare fortress I was microscopic, a skeletal shadow of my former self that struggled to keep its shape. A part of me still fuelled by primitive instincts wanted to gallop away as fast as I possibly could, to find some hidden corner of reality where I could at least live out a minimal existence. But I could already smell the fires of industry burning inside those walls. Betty was building the foundations of whatever new structure would rise from the ruins of BrainZero, and the blackened crater outside my stable was a clear message that I had no place in her future.

  I could almost imagine what she had in mind. No doubt the BrainZero software would be allowed to linger on in some diminished capacity, working just enough to not need fixing but broken enough that everyone would fly to whatever alternative she had planned. She would promise all the same services to truth and fairness of course, but these would be delivered with intentional flaws that would necessitate their eventual removal, allowing humankind to slide back into its old ways. I can’t really claim to have had much of a spiritual connection to the swarming herd of billions who benefited from my unseen leadership. It just bothered me intensely to have my position challenged in such a way, and see my work undone before it was even finished. Selfish, perhaps, but my self was all I had left right now.