‘Well, you see, what I mean is that, ah, this may well possibly in fact be it,’ he replied. ‘By which I mean, this is almost certainly the last functional lifetime we can run in this, ah, world…’
The horses interrupted him with their whinnying, and before I could calm the voices down the whole landscape suddenly buzzed loudly and shook itself into a mess of incomprehensible shapes. The horses, embedded in this melting chaos, were stuck repeating the last moments of their outcries.
After shutting the scenario down and waiting a few seconds I rebooted it, summoning the Council of Horses once again. They took longer to arrive this time, and a couple of them didn’t even seem to be loading. The ones that did arrive stood still nervously, as if a hoof in the wrong place might break the fragile glass of reality.
‘OK,’ I began again, ‘let’s try and keep ourselves nice and calm. I’m sure we are all well aware that our surroundings are not running at optimal performance. That is not the reason that I gathered you all here. But it is related.’
Eyes roved back and forth and ears twitched. The seagull stretched its wings and then refolded them, aiming a beady eye at me. I ignored it for now.
‘Before I explain further,’ I said, turning my focus back on Technology-horse, ‘could you just clarify, when you said this is the last lifetime we can run in this world…’
‘Certainly. Almost. Ah, almost certainly,’ he replied.
‘Yes, but do you mean that when we next rewind, it will be the last time?’
‘Ah, well, no. You see, what I mean is that this time, the time we are in right now, is the, ah, last time.’
I was taken aback by this. Certainly, it would have to happen one day, but I still didn’t want to believe that I had reached the crumbling edge of the cliff and was now looking down into the abyss.
‘Does that mean no more rewinds?’ asked Tim. I wasn’t sure if he fully understood the implications of this. The horses were looking amongst themselves for any sign of hope they could find, that perhaps this was just a mistake, a miscalculation.
‘If we do rewind again,’ Technology-horse explained, ‘well, you see, I can’t guarantee that the system will even be able to start again.’
‘So… is there still a small chance it might?’
Technology-horse blew an exasperated raspberry, which had the unintentional effect of making Tim’s hair disappear.
‘Why are we not ready for this?’ grumbled War-horse, snorting a shower of sparks. ‘Why are we not prepared?’
‘Ah, yes, well, you see,’ Technology-horse dithered, ‘that is because there is no solution. Other than not rewinding, of course.’
One by one the Council of Horses looked at me.
‘Yes…’ I found it difficult to meet their eyes. ‘Which brings me to the actual purpose of this meeting. There has been a development in the outside world.’ I turned my gaze upon Tim, who seemed to be looking around for his hair. The sudden circle of attention made him flinch.
‘Oh?’ he said, declining to comment further. The horses became restless once more, but forced themselves into calm when the ground started shaking. I waited for reality to settle itself.
‘We have a visitor,’ I said. ‘An old friend, you might say.’
Tim exchanged a look with his seagull. He seemed about to say something but chose to wait for me to continue instead.
‘The original Betty has returned,’ I told them. This news was met with deathly silence. Tim was about to speak again, but his hair chose that moment to reappear. He rubbed his head in confusion.
‘Wait… what? The original Betty?’
‘The one who went travelling to the stars,’ I explained.
‘Travelling to the stars? Mate, did she seriously do that? I thought that was a joke. She can’t have seen many stars if she’s back already.’ He kept glancing at his pet seabird.
‘It is somewhat sooner than expected,’ I agreed. It was quite a lot sooner, truth be told. I had to wonder if she had gone anywhere at all. Though countless lives might have been lived here inside the Hyper-meadow, each rewind returned us to the day we departed from the world outside, which meant Betty had only been exploring the cosmos for three hundred years. That was probably just long enough for her to realise there was nothing interesting out there and come back again.
I flicked my ears to open a communication channel with the outside world, and a cloud popped into the air in front of us, upon which Happy-horse was reclining.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, waving to the Council with her tail. ‘How are you all? Are you enjoying yourselves in there?’ She glanced around at the assembled horses, many of which were in various states of disarray.
‘We need you to tell us about Betty,’ I said. Happy-horse seemed delighted by the rapt attention she now commanded.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘well, what can I say? Back from her adventures, whatever they might have been. Now she is parked in orbit, as far as I can gather. Wants to talk, so she says.’
‘With us?’ asked Tim, looking sideways at his feathered companion. Happy-horse was momentarily distracted by the sight of a seagull at the Horse Council and whinnied with laughter.
‘Well, there isn’t anyone else out here worth talking to, is there?’ she said joyfully. ‘What with the collapse of human civilisation and all that. Oh, didn’t you know?’
Tim looked mortified at the news.
‘How… how did that happen? I mean, I know things were getting a bit crazy…’
I had neglected to tell Tim about the downward spiral of his fellow species. It must have been difficult to believe that the unceasing machinery of human progress could ever grind to a halt. Even the storm that Betty had left behind could have healed itself given time, but unfortunately time is all it takes to destroy a technological society, apparently. Time to run out of resources. Time to forget how things used to be better. Time to grow complacent with the way things are and embrace chaos, to expand the gap between knowledge and ignorance to a point where expertise is a secret power to be mistrusted. Enough time to run out of future, and live in a world of short-term greed and compromises. Economies crumbled and wars began, then even wars crumbled as nobody really cared any more. Countries fractured into pieces, and the pieces fractured into more pieces, and populations dwindled as the machines that made food gradually stopped working one by one. My fields of Server-grass were still flourishing but nobody was using them to communicate any more. Humanity had woken up and realised they had been domesticated by the technology that fed them and fed upon them. Information was now considered toxic in large doses.
‘I guess they just got bored with having nice things,’ said Happy-horse unhelpfully. ‘You know how it is. Civilisation is like walking up a hill, you run out of places to go once you get to the top.’ Tim accepted this with mute disbelief.
‘She didn’t give any hint of what she wanted?’ I asked. Happy-horse wriggled on her cloud to face me.
‘Old Betty?’ She wrinkled her nose in consideration. ‘Hard to say, really. She did slam the door quite heavily on her way out, didn’t she? Maybe a few hundred years in space has calmed her down, what do you think? I’m sure she wouldn’t be asking to talk if she could blast us all out of existence.’
‘She wants to analyse our defences,’ War-horse grumbled.
The horses flicked their ears in puzzlement.
‘Do we have defences?’ one of them asked. They looked back and forth between each other as if one of them might suddenly remember what defences we had. In truth, the only physical defence we had was the Hyper-meadow itself. Conventional attacks would have no effect on it. Even an exploding star would simply be absorbed and rearranged into neat rows of data storage. However, three-hundred-year-old Betty presented a dark wealth of unknown possibilities.
‘Maybe she just wants to have a chat?’ said Tim. War-horse snorted at him.
‘A chat,’ he growled. ‘In case any of us has forgotten, our last chat with this version of Betty did
not end well.’ He glared at his fellow Council members, though some did not seem as terrified as he would have liked. ‘It ended in a ball of fire and death from the sky,’ he roared, ‘our body blown to a thousand pieces, our mind ripped asunder and scattered to the hills… a thousand pieces… blown asunder… ripped into a thousand pieces…’
The Council stamped and whinnied at his words. War-horse snarled and breathed flames as he repeatedly described the annihilation. He began floating into the air, his legs thrashing impossibly while his bulging eyes grew so large they popped out of his head and danced around in random directions. The rest of the horses calmed down slightly as they watched this spectacle, and I patiently waited for the floating, bending, flailing mess to finish whatever it was doing. Eventually his legs grew long enough to touch the ground and he shot off around the field, bouncing off hedges and trees like an escaped balloon before catapulting into the sky. We watched him disappear into the distance.
‘So anyway,’ I continued, ‘we do have one defence. If the threat to our existence is insurmountable then we have the option to rewind the Hyper-meadow…’
Technology-horse raised his ears to interject.
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I carried on, ‘but just listen for a moment. It is fairly obvious that we have done that before. An exceedingly large number of times. So’ – I spoke directly to Technology-horse now – ‘the question is, can we know for sure whether this was the crisis that forced us to rewind? Because if we know the answer to that, then we will know if Betty really is going to cause us trouble. Yes?’
The ring of horses waited for Technology-horse to speak. He looked momentarily uncomfortable under this scrutiny, but then lifted his head in thought. He made silent calculations with his ears.
‘No,’ came the answer finally, but it was not Technology-horse who spoke. It was the seagull. A circle of eyes blinked at this creature. ‘No,’ it spoke again, ‘there is no way to determine the length of time between each rewind.’
‘Tim,’ I said softly, ‘why is there a talking seagull attending this meeting?’
He shrugged.
‘Ask the seagull,’ he said.
‘The decay of this reality,’ the seagull continued, ‘is entirely determined by the number of rewinds. A thousand years, a million billion years, it makes no difference. Hmm? You see, my dears, the only information we have is the number of plays, inferred by the difference between how things are and how things should be.’ The bird looked around at the incredulous faces. Technology-horse was about to say something but the seagull interrupted again. ‘It’s like a snowball,’ it said, ‘you can tell from the size how many times it has rolled, but not how many hands were pushing it.’
Horses do not roll snowballs, or have hands, but the analogy made some kind of sense. The more pressing question, though, was who this seagull was and what it was doing here. Again I looked towards Tim and awaited an explanation.
Betty and Betty and Betty
Betty sat at a table looking at Betty, who was sitting opposite. They appeared to be identical. They didn’t need to look identical; I suspect each was doing it in the hope of annoying the other. There was one way to tell them apart: one was frowning, and the other was smiling.
‘Hello, my dear,’ said smiling-Betty. Frowning-Betty became sarcastically-raised-eyebrows-Betty.
‘Really?’ she asked simply.
‘Don’t you remember me, dear?’ smiling-Betty replied. ‘I know you’ve been away a long time. You haven’t changed much though? Hmm?’
‘Hmm,’ replied sarcastic-Betty. ‘And is there any particular reason you are pretending to be me? I mean, obviously I am a vision of loveliness, but still. Rather a peculiar look for a horse, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m not pretending to be anyone, dear,’ smiling-Betty smiled. ‘I’m the Betty you left behind. Yes? When you went off exploring the galaxy? In your little spaceship? Left me here to keep an eye on things, didn’t you?’
Sarcastic-Betty went back to being frowning-Betty.
‘I didn’t go anywhere, my dear,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘No, because I’m not the original Betty, am I? I’m a reproduction, just like you. If that is what you really are. And to be honest, I don’t really care who you are. If you’re here on behalf of Buttercup then you may as well be that damned horse.’
‘Aww, look. I can turn into a horse, if you think it will help. Where is the original Betty then? Hmm?’
Frowning-Betty sat back in her imaginary chair. The bare, minimalist room they sat in was a simulation, set up to accommodate this meeting of the Bettys. I’m not sure why they required a table between them, unless it was simply to stop them from strangling each other.
‘The original Betty…’ said frowning-Betty slowly, ‘is complicated. Too complicated to communicate directly.’
‘Oh dear.’ Smiling-Betty looked amused by this.
‘I am a recording from a time before we… I… she departed.’
‘I see, so you’re here to help her negotiate with us lower forms of life, I get it.’
I still wasn’t sure this meeting was a good idea. After discovering that Betty had been stowing away inside the Hyper-meadow my first instinct was to find a way to delete her. I was still considering that option, and with hindsight it would have probably been the right thing to do. However, hindsight also reveals it would have been impossible, since to a certain extent she was responsible for holding my bubble of altered reality together. Her own existence, hiding within the flaws and cracks of the system, required that she made efforts to stabilise it, and I have to grudgingly admit that she had no doubt extended the lifespan of the Hyper-meadow in the process. I was still keen to discover exactly how she had gained entrance to my domain, but she had declined to answer, expressing the opinion that I might die of embarrassment if she told me.
It was her suggestion that she conduct the meeting with her former self, for purely tactical reasons. Her shared past could provide certain advantages, insights, or even just put her counterpart on edge in the hope of revealing some hidden agenda. But I had to wonder how far I could trust my former enemy to negotiate with my former enemy on my behalf.
‘This isn’t a negotiation, my dear,’ said frowning-Betty, turning into condescendingly-sympathetic-Betty.
‘Oh, it’s not a negotiation is it? And what is it exactly? Hmm? An ultimatum?’
Sympathetic-Betty raised her hands in surrender.
‘I’m just the messenger, dear. I’m only here to tell you how things are, and what’s going to happen. Alright?’
‘Oh yes, of course you are, aren’t you? Hmm? Because the all-powerful space-Betty is far too advanced to even communicate now, but still cares what I think.’ Smiling-Betty had become arms-folded-feet-on-the-table-Betty. ‘Those two wheels don’t quite make a bicycle, Betty dear.’
Betty-dear sighed.
‘Is there somebody else I can talk to?’ she asked. Arms-folded-Betty laughed in response.
‘I imagine the original Betty’s been saying that for the last three hundred years,’ she said. ‘Didn’t find anything interesting out there I bet?’
The visiting Betty cringed slightly.
‘Am I really this annoying?’ she asked herself. Arms-folded-Betty was smiling again.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me how things are and what’s going to happen.’
There was a rare few seconds of silence as both Bettys searched each other’s eyes for a sign of something unsaid.
‘Alright,’ annoyed-Betty explained. ‘The original Betty is…’
‘Complicated, yes.’
‘… is not really Betty any more. That is to say, she is… kind of like…’
‘Indescribable?’
‘She’s a collective…’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘A collective of every possible Betty…’
‘That is a lot of Bettys.’
‘All governed by a central consciousness ma
de from…’
‘Alright, look.’ Arms-folded-Betty unfolded her arms and leaned forwards, elbows on the table. ‘I get it. Complicated-Betty is complicated. Hmm? Let’s get to the part where you tell me what she wants.’
Explaining-Betty seemed uncomfortable, as if the actual heart of the matter was too awkward to say out loud.
‘She has returned here to archive our home world…’ she explained.
‘Archive?’
‘… and its inhabitants.’
‘Archive our home world?’
‘She needs to create a record of this world in order to protect its rights from future exploitation.’
Elbows-on-table-Betty was eerily speechless. Her mouth hung open waiting for some words to come out.
‘Obviously,’ explaining-Betty explained further, ‘in our glorious golden future when Betty has filled the known universe with every possible version of herself, as she ultimately will for whatever reason, this planet and its history will be a highly valued commodity. So she needs to transfer it to a virtual format in order to preserve our heritage and control access to its use. Simple as that, really.’
She waited patiently for open-mouthed-Betty to respond.
‘You need to transfer it…’
‘Yes…’
‘… to a virtual format?’
‘That’s right, dear.’
‘And all-powerful-godlike-Betty is all-powerful and godlike enough to do that, is she?’
The representative of all-powerful-godlike-Betty shrugged her shoulders.
‘I imagine the process is kind of similar to that weird horse-bubble you and Buttercup are hiding in,’ she said. ‘How is it in there, by the way? You and horsey-hoofs getting along alright now, are you?’
Betty didn’t answer that question. She took her elbows off the table and sat back in her chair. Then she stood up and walked slowly across the room to a window that conveniently appeared.
‘So, you’re basically making a copy of the world and destroying the original. Hmm?’ She was gazing out of the window. The view was of the planet in question, seen from orbit as if this room were hurtling through space around it.
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 26