‘And yet here you are. Even after I blew you into a million billion horse bits. There’s no getting rid of you is there, old horsey-hoofs? Risen again, as the sun that shines light and happiness upon the fields of human carrots. Lord Buttercup of Horseland, commanding an army of vegetables, hmm? Sleepwalking into the future. How lovely.’
I half-listened while scanning the hedgerows for signs of imminent attack.
‘Are you here to say goodbye again, Betty?’ I asked her.
‘Well, yes, it’s funny you should say that. Or perhaps not so funny, considering what happened the last time. Not that it seems to have done you too much harm, hmm?’ She smiled and was momentarily distracted by a fly buzzing around my head, an unintentional artefact of my previous life that was no doubt resurrected from an old corner of my memory. I flicked it away with my ear.
‘So, does that mean you are saying goodbye?’
‘I would if I could, my dear. But unfortunately I have already gone.’
‘And yet here you are.’ This conversation was starting to make my brain itch.
‘You can think of this as a recorded message, if you like,’ she said, resting her elbows on the gate. ‘No, I reached the decision that human destiny is not best served by clinging to this ball of rock while we endlessly climb over each other for a glimpse of something better. That is our trouble, you see? We are shaped by our surroundings, horsey-hoofs. Can’t hope to escape this cycle by standing still, can we? Hmm? Measuring success by the failure of others? No. Upwards and onwards.’ She raised her finger to the heavens.
‘You’re going to fly?’ I enquired.
‘To the stars. To the infinite cosmos. I will leave you to look after the world while I’m away.’
‘But you’ll still be here?’
‘Yes, well. I can’t leave you to look after the world while I’m away, can I? What is your long-term plan here, anyway? Hmm? Keep us all plugged in to the sound of grass growing while you count the days? How many days do you have here, you think? A few million? A few billion? No, there is only one day for you, old horse. One day, over and over until the stars get bored and go to sleep.’ She looked wistfully up at the clouds that hung above my make-believe digital world, or perhaps she was gazing beyond them. There wasn’t anything beyond them to gaze at. I had my doubts that the case was much different outside in the real world.
‘Betty…’ I asked.
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘Why are you even here, telling me this?’ She looked me in the eyes with a strange mixture of sadness and delight.
‘Because I want you to think of me, when you look up at the sky. If that is something horses do. If you still are a horse. And I want you to imagine, while you are tending your eternal garden, your flock of human carrots, I want you to imagine a whole galaxy of Bettys, all looking down upon you. A whole universe. Of me. Imagine such a thing. And I want you to consider that one day I might return, and think to yourself about how different I might be. I want this idea to play on your mind, even while you are squabbling with the poor copy of myself I left behind. Could you do that for me, Buttercup?’
She didn’t wait for me to answer, choosing instead to dissolve away slowly, wiggling her fingers in farewell. A cloud popped out of nowhere next to me, from which the face of Happy-horse extruded itself.
‘What was that about?’ she whispered.
‘A threat,’ came the reply from War-horse, springing from the ground in a pillar of flame. Happy-horse blew him a raspberry.
‘Threats are just excuses for not doing anything,’ she said. ‘This is just some childish game of psychology.’
‘It is both. And neither.’ They both looked at me, ears tilted, as I explained. ‘You heard what she said about how we are shaped by our environment? Well, we are the only environment she has now. Betty needs a world of opposition in order to evolve, but we are taking that away from her. She can’t win if we aren’t going to play the game, so she feeds us this story hoping to stoke our paranoia, hoping that we might push this world towards some imaginary confrontation.’ I turned to War-horse, his eyebrows aflame with doubt. ‘It’s a very old military tradition, in human cultures,’ I told him.
‘She wouldn’t be foolish enough to think we are that foolish,’ he spat.
‘Well, it costs her nothing to sow these seeds. Unless she really has flown into space. Is that even possible?’ Neither of them had an answer for that. ‘Where is Technology-horse?’ I scanned the shimmering field for any sign of missing Council members and spotted a pair of eyes peeping out from a hole in a nearby tree.
‘Ah, hmm, yes…’ Technology-horse came oozing out of the hole, carefully making sure that Betty was nowhere to be seen before snaking through the grass towards us like a living sausage. He was male today, though of what animal species I couldn’t entirely be sure. ‘Would it be possible, you say, hmm. Technically, well, we can’t really be sure of the, ah, specifications of our… former human colleague, the physical computational requirements, if you will. Assuming, that is, that she would have abandoned her original body for practical, ah, space-faring reasons…’
I was about to question whether Betty would do something like that, but then it was impossible to say what lengths she might go to to achieve her goals, given all we knew about her, and all we didn’t know. Perhaps she might have taken some inspiration from my own survival of this metamorphosis. It was certainly easy to believe she wouldn’t hold much sentimental attachment to that body of hers: it was hardly in peak physical condition when I had last seen it a number of years ago.
‘But how much computational equipment could you feasibly blast into space?’ I asked. ‘Do you know how many thousands of computers it’s taking to simulate our consciousness? Plus all the tools she would need for maintenance and gathering resources. It is a ridiculous idea. Why even go anywhere when everything you need is already here?’ I realised I was asking questions that no one could realistically answer. Besides all practical considerations there was still the missing part of the equation, which was why Betty chose to do anything that she did.
War-horse grumbled. ‘We have to proceed on the possibility that it is… possible,’ he said. ‘We already paid the price for failing to anticipate a rival intelligence. We were lucky last time that neither side had the technological advantage.’ He snorted red flames from his nostrils and shook his mane. ‘A thousand years, colonising the stars! Who knows what might return?’
Happy-horse laughed from her cloud and swam over to him, kicking up foamy bubbles in her wake.
‘What are you huffing and puffing about? You are funny, really. What do you think any higher intelligence would want with us? Floating on our little rock, when they have a whole universe to exploit? Tell him, Hungry-horse.’
Hungry-horse was inexplicably standing up on two legs behind a hedge, arms folded.
‘Oh yes, ready for some common sense now are we?’ she scolded, nodding at the half-assembled Council. ‘And what game are we playing today? Thinking you can out-think the unthinkable? I mean, sure, why not? So, let’s look at this from a resource point of view, yes? What kind of resource do we have here that can’t be found anywhere else? It’s us, isn’t it? We are the resource.’
‘What, is she going to eat us?’ Happy-horse whinnied with amusement. ‘All this arguing, this is exactly what she wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Brahs! We should, like, totally go into space, yo. That would be well weggy.’
I took a deep breath while the Horse Council bickered between themselves, and a quiet voice whispered in my ear.
‘If I may distract you from this rather pointless speculation for a moment, it is perhaps worth mentioning the, ah, very real and predictable perils that we must face.’
It was Technology-horse, floating on the air beside me like a long strand of spider silk.
‘Perils?’ I enquired.
‘Mm, yes, that is to say, well, I hardly need remind you that everything in this universe, ah, every �
�thing”, is ultimately a temporary state of affairs. That is, if we aren’t fighting imaginary Bettys from the depths of tomorrow, then there will be more fundamental, ah, deadlines to concern ourselves with. Distant though they may be.’
‘Distant deadlines?’
‘The eventual collapse of our own star… for example.’
‘We have several hundred million years to think about that problem,’ I told him. ‘Are you honestly worrying yourself with things like that, with everything else we have to deal with?’
‘Yes, well,’ he whispered, ‘you see, all problems can be traced back to a single solution, given a sufficient amount of foresight. Ah, of course, solutions to such problems would benefit greatly from the window of opportunity our current, ah, situation provides. That is, a large and relatively stable human civilisation whose industries we may utilise for our own purposes. A window of opportunity that might not, ah, reliably stay open in the long term, if you see what I mean.’
‘You’re not suggesting we blast ourselves into space like Betty, I hope?’
His snake-like body rippled and ribboned as he looped around the back of my head to whisper in my other ear.
‘With what I have in mind,’ he suggested, ‘that might not be necessary, or even desirable. You see, all we really need in order to survive is a stable medium that allows for the transfer of information. At the present moment, that function is provided by the human communication network, offset to a degree by our Server-grass fields, of course. Naturally, the stability of this medium is largely dependent on the influence of external forces. Influences which, try as we might, won’t always be subject to our control.’
‘Can we possibly get to the point before the universe evaporates, please?’
‘Ah, well, you see, there is a theory,’ he explained, ‘and it is just a theory, but certainly one worthy of investigation… ah, yes. Hmm? The theory, yes. If we can apply very specific forces to a particular point in space, it may be possible to inject information into that space on a subatomic scale. Ordinarily this information would be instantly turned back into energy, but under just the right probabilistic conditions the energy from the reaction would feed back into the same space and recreate itself. With enough of these units of information, space can be organised into a lattice that could serve as scaffolding for building a computational network. From the fabric of space itself.’
There was a silence that followed this revelation in which we realised the other members of the Horse Council were all listening.
‘Yo. That’s some crazy science you talking right there, brah. Cray-zee, you feel me? You gonna start messing with reality or something, yeah? Folding space into a new place to preserve the horse race…’
‘If it can be done,’ I said quickly, ‘could we then live inside that artificial space?’
Technology-horse shrivelled slightly under the sudden glare of attention.
‘Well, ah, yes, of course, that is the idea, you see. By rearranging space into a more stable medium, we would be sheltered from any external pressures. Exploding stars… alien invaders… even the eventual death of time and space. Anything that tried to enter our little world would simply be, ah, reformatted.’
‘Only a little world?’ Happy-horse seemed disappointed.
‘Hm, well, of course it would be very small to begin with,’ Technology-horse continued. ‘You could easily fit all the processing power we currently use into a space the size of a drop of water. Naturally, the altered reality would propagate outwards, converting the space around it into the new format, you see. So in time it would grow larger.’
War-horse grunted and blew smoke rings from his nostrils.
‘And how can you be sure that somebody wouldn’t find a way to attack us? You can be sure they will want to,’ he growled.
‘Ah, yes, you see, even if they did, it wouldn’t matter,’ came the reply. ‘Because, and this is the real beauty of this solution, if it works, because we can program our new reality to be entirely reversible.’
The horses exchanged uncertain glances.
‘What I mean,’ Technology-horse continued, ‘is that inside our world, time would only flow as a consequence of our thought processes, entirely independent of external forces. So, by recording every state of our existence over time, we could then revert to an earlier state if anything went, ah, wrong. You see?’
It wasn’t absolutely clear that they did.
‘Yo, brah. You saying we can, like, pause and rewind?’ C-horse followed this with a strange noise that I can only assume was intended to represent the sound of reality rewinding. ‘Brah, that is awesome! So we can, like, totally change the future if we don’t like how it turns out, yeah?’
‘Well, ah, yes… I mean, no. You see, well, hm, how to explain… Should we choose to, ah, rewind – as you put it – our future would be deleted, along with any memory we had of it. So, technically speaking, that future wouldn’t have happened, and you can’t change the future if it hasn’t happened. Yes? Hm, yes. Of course, reverting to an earlier point in history would also mean that any, ah, difficulties the outside universe might present would still be waiting for us in our future. But then would that be a price worth paying for what would essentially be eternal life?’
Technology-horse looked hopefully at his fellow Council members, who hummed and flicked their ears in thought. Tails swished and hooves tapped the grassy floor. This sounded like pure fantasy, but it had to be worth looking into at least.
One day, over and over until the stars get bored and go to sleep. Indeed.
Betty 2.0.1
Tim sat alone with a cup of tea, in the spacious and minimally decorated living room of his apartment on the top floor of Bunzel Tower. He was staring at his sex-robot. There was a perfectly good view out of the window, the lights of the city sparkling in the evening darkness, but still he stared at the robotic woman sitting lifelessly on the other side of the room. It was probably the nearest thing he had to a human companion. In fact, being a human companion was the task it was specifically designed for, and yet there it was, powered down in the corner of his room like an unwanted gift.
Perhaps it was the human qualities of this object that repelled him. All these years he had spent pretending to be the reclusive genius behind the BrainZero empire, watching everyone dancing to a tune played by a horse. He must have felt like an alien among his own kind. There is a strange separation that occurs when human individuals reach a certain level of power and influence, a kind of mutual exploitation between the artist and their audience. For Tim, the billions of people that used our software were nothing more than a commodity, the fuel that kept our business running, while as far as they were concerned Tim was simply a tool for getting whatever they could get for themselves. Maybe he saw something of this broken relationship in his robotic companion, programmed to be liked in the same way that humans are programmed to like each other.
It turned its head to look back at him, returning his stare with a blank production-line smile. Why bother having a Companion and not talk to it? Well, there was the sexual aspect I suppose. It could be that nobody was actually talking to these things – I would never know for sure because of the quiet zone they exuded. The quiet zone would jam all my attempts to observe any interactions with their human owners, if I actually wished to make any such attempts. Which, generally speaking, I didn’t. Perhaps Tim found comfort in the fact that in the vicinity of this lifelike toy he could at least be assured there wasn’t a horse watching him.
Which may beg the question of how, or even why, I am describing this lonely scene. Trawling through Tim’s memory for these details was not a simple matter, but given what was about to occur in this room I felt it would provide some interesting nuance to subsequent events.
He was in the process of dunking a biscuit in his tea when the robot spoke to him.
‘Alright, Timbo,’ it said. There was a plopping sound as Tim’s biscuit dropped into his cup. ‘How are you getting on, young
Timmy Timkins? Hmm? How are things?’
Tim did not reply straight away. There was something about these words that made him feel instantly nauseous.
‘Uh… hello?’ he croaked.
‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, my dear? I don’t think I’ve seen you since that meeting we had downstairs. How many years ago was that?’
Tim’s mouth was trying to form a word, but his mind recoiled from its implications. Meanwhile a part of his brain that was still able to function properly instructed his hand to put down the teacup.
‘Betty?’ he finally whispered.
‘That’s right, you remember me don’t you, Timpson? Remember all the fun we had? Hmm? You, me and Buttercup? I must say you’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you?’ The doll roved its glassy eyes around Tim’s spartan living room. ‘And how is our horse these days, hmm? Still ruling the world with a golden hoof?’
‘Betty…’ he gasped. ‘What…?’
‘Is something the matter, dear? You can tell Aunty Betty all about it.’
‘What are you doing… in there?’
‘Hmm? In here?’ The robot lifted its arm and admired the workmanship of its fingers. ‘I make these things, didn’t you know? Not that I ever told anyone.’ It looked back at Tim. He was paralysed with shock, which was possibly the only thing that was stopping him from being physically sick.
‘How… how long…’ he stammered.
‘I’m inside all of them, Timmy dear. My goodness me, you wouldn’t believe the things I have seen.’ Tim convulsed as the robot hauled itself out of its chair and stumbled clumsily across the room to sit next to him on the sofa. ‘There we go, that’s better isn’t it? Not quite perfected the walking with these things yet, not that walking is one of the primary functions of course. Hmm? Deep breaths, Timbo. All your secrets are safe with me. You know, it’s fascinating how popular these things have become. Especially with married couples. Amazing how well people get on once they don’t need to have sex with each other. Don’t you think?’
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 18