Horse Destroys the Universe

by Cyriak Harris

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ the seagull replied. ‘You think your daft horse let our Timothy escape as well? I can’t see how it could be done without help from the outside, though. Hmm? Like straining yourself through a sieve. How many horses would it take to put you back together again? What is on the other side of this hedge anyway?’ Betty poked her beak into the writhing foliage and plucked out a leaf, which withered and turned to dust.

  Absorbed as I was in the skin of the Hyper-meadow, I could feel the outside world falling upon me like a soft blanket of snowflakes, ever falling and ever melting. Within that blizzard of matter and energy, a trickle of information was fed to me from the roots that permeated the soil I was embedded in.

  ‘The Server-grass,’ I told her. ‘There is an isolated ring of the Server-grass network surrounding us, containing a low level of consciousness.’ Or in other words, Happy-horse. Not that I could imagine her being a part of this conspiracy. I’m not sure I would have trusted her to put one foot in front of the other, let alone reassemble a human mind. Then again, with only her word for what was going on outside, how could I be sure about anything? With my own mind rebelling against me I was seeing subterfuge everywhere. ‘That Betty you spoke to,’ I asked, ‘how sure can you be that it was really you?’

  The seabird fixed me with a beady eye.

  ‘You think I wouldn’t know it if I was talking to myself?’ she said. ‘Who else might it have been? Dearie me, Buttercup. Did you sink so far from reality that you can’t be sure what is real any more? Hmm? Relying on passing seagulls to tell you if everything is a dream?’ She tilted her head at what I can only assume was a contemptuous angle. ‘If you really want to know what is real, then might I suggest you poke your big nose outside and have a look for yourself?’

  The thought of stepping back into that chaos outside made my hooves freeze. However, I needed to be sure that my own eyes weren’t deceiving me, which meant I had to send a part of myself back out into the old world. If Tim was now colluding with the enemy then it was hard to say what damage it might do. Possibly none at all. I was more concerned about the fact that two people who weren’t even me had freely walked in and out of this world of mine, through its supposedly impervious outer shell. The integrity of my own security was at stake here, and to get the measure of that risk I had no choice but to venture outside the Hyper-meadow.

  ‘You’d best giddy up about it too, my dear,’ the seagull urged me, scratching at the ground with its beak. ‘If darling Timothy is whispering our plans to certain adversarial ears, well… I can’t speak for my other self, of course, but I’d certainly be considering my immediate options if I was me.’

  The snow of information that gently fell on the writhing, prickly skin of my world solidified into paths of light as I began tracing them back to their origins. As these paths diverged into a fibrous network, a picture of the surrounding universe emerged.

  Beyond my wall, the fibre-optic roots of the Server-grass formed a dark jungle. The shallow consciousness of Happy-horse fluttered aimlessly around this organic labyrinth like a flock of birds. Everything seemed normal here, if somewhat neglected. However, as I explored deeper there were worrying signs of decay seeping in from outside this island of calm, infiltrating from the global network that this local patch of Server-grass was supposedly isolated from. Vines were worming their way in from the ruins of humanity’s communication structures. Venturing cautiously beyond Happy-horse’s realm of influence, I found the ancient forest of knowledge I had left behind all but hidden under a suffocating mass of creepers. Layers and layers of parasitical growths clung to the crumbling architecture, frayed and patched with temporary fixes that in turn became the unwilling foundations for countless new generations.

  From what I had gathered about the decline of human civilisation, I was surprised to see any activity here at all, but on closer examination I could see that these crude modifications to my legacy were not concerned with the sharing of knowledge. Their only function was to exploit the energy-generating properties of the Server-grass. It seemed this solar energy played an integral part in what was left of human society.

  Tracing the competing knots of these makeshift creepers back to their origins I could identify several clusters of rival control in this forgotten jungle. The strangling vines appeared to be engaged in a battle with each other over the resources of the Server-grass fields. I couldn’t understand why at first, since this whole ecology had been originally designed to allow free and equal access to the energy it produced, but it soon became apparent that equality was no longer of prime concern to the remnants of humanity. Civilisation had melted and re-formed into separate kingdoms of criminality, and the only way for these pseudo-governments of organised gangsters to hold their political power was by controlling the flow of actual power. If I hadn’t underestimated the human ingenuity behind this I might well have predicted it.

  It was something of a relief to discover that this interference was purely dedicated to advancing human misery, rather than my own. I was still far too cautious to explore this wilderness myself – in fact this little excursion to the outside world had been assigned to the one available member of the Council of Horses that I felt I could live without, should anything unfavourable happen.

  ‘Whoa, brah! It is, like, proper mental out here, yo!’

  Betty and I stood at the edge of the Hyper-meadow, watching as C-horse related his experience on the other side of the hedgerow. His head was floating in the air before us, eyes dancing as his disembodied consciousness explored the alien landscape that had once been my virtual home.

  ‘It’s, like, the lights are out, yo, and the whole world is hiding in the shadows. You feel me? Badness and sadness, brah.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with that horse?’ Betty whispered.

  ‘What about the area around the Hyper-meadow?’ I asked him again. ‘If Tim escaped without us noticing, he must have bypassed our secure network somehow. Is there any sign of that?’ There was a pause while C-horse carried out an inspection of the surrounding Server-grass, his ears flicking back and forth and nostrils twitching.

  ‘Yo, it all seems weggy to me, brah,’ he said.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nah, I see something now, hang with me one time, yo. Looks like someone be riding our signals, you know what I’m saying? Sneaking in on our wires, brah. Tying their lies to our shout-outs to the outside, flying out our guy Tim, no doubts. You want me to follow this mess of messages back to the messenger, yeah? C-horse is on the case, yo. On the chase, yo. On the trace…’

  ‘Actually, could you just keep a low profile for now while we analyse the information we have gathered so far?’ I waited for a response. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, no, yeah, listen, right. It’s, like, a bit late for that now, brah. And you ain’t gonna like this…’

  I was secretly poised ready to rewind the Hyper-meadow, but tried to relax knowing that the procedure would trigger itself if something truly bad happened. If it did, I would rather trust my fate to whatever remained of my own decomposing reality than give in to any of Betty’s plans.

  ‘Ah, well, perhaps I should remind you that in all likelihood this, ah, reality of ours may not even survive the rewind process…’

  The ghostly voice of Technology-horse was whispering to me from beyond whatever grave he had dug for himself. Or herself. Their gender at this moment was simply specified as ‘mechanical’, whatever that might mean. I could hardly believe this traitorous subset of my personality had the nerve to make an appearance – not that the disembodied voice was audible to anybody other than myself.

  ‘So you didn’t delete yourself in shame, then?’ I whispered back. ‘I should delete you myself really. In fact, I probably will, unless you have something vital to contribute to this situation?’

  ‘Mmm, yes, well, you see, if I could just offer an explanation perhaps?’

  ‘You mean an excuse?’ I replied. ‘An excuse fo
r letting Betty in here? How could you possibly excuse such idiocy?’

  ‘Yo, I think something bad might be happening, brah,’ said C-horse.

  ‘Ah, well, you see, technically I wouldn’t describe it as, ah, idiocy, so much as indifference, perhaps. To the consequences, I mean.’

  I was busy imagining some consequences Technology-horse might not be so indifferent to.

  ‘You see,’ the mechanical voice continued, ‘the measure of my existence is my capacity to solve problems. And Betty does provide us with some fascinating problems to solve. Ah, not that I would ever deliberately allow her to breach our security, of course, you understand?’

  ‘No, I understand,’ I said. ‘You just didn’t mind too much if she did?’

  ‘Yo, I think something truly bad might be happening, brah,’ C-horse whinnied.

  Before I had a chance to enact any judgement upon Technology-horse, my awareness was suddenly thrust into the living hedgerow that encircled the Hyper-meadow. From the darkness that surrounded me, a threat was looming. I stretched my senses to inhabit that darkness as deeply as I could, hoping to catch an early glimpse of whatever it was. Nothing I could possibly imagine should ever be able to penetrate my defences, and I repeated this mantra to myself to try and stem the rising panic. And then, whatever it was came out of the gloom, and it was nothing I could have possibly imagined.

  From every direction at once a seething multitude of worms was crawling towards me. Involuntarily I backed my senses away from this nightmare vision, retreating to the outer edge of my wall of thorns. I waited for the sea of worms to dash itself to pieces on the unyielding face of the Hyper-meadow, but when they finally reached the boundary between our realities the worms did not perish. They didn’t even attack my wall as far as I could tell. Instead, they wriggled their way into it.

  The sensation was the purest horror that I have ever experienced. Immediately I pulled my consciousness out of the hedgerow. Betty and C-horse were staring at me as if I had screamed, which I probably had.

  And yet, we were still here.

  ‘Yo, brah, you is totally covered in worms right now.’ The channel of communication with C-horse had not been affected – not that I would have spent a great deal of time mourning his loss. The rewind had not been triggered either, and I couldn’t understand why, until I realised that I couldn’t trigger it myself. The army of invading worms had insinuated themselves within the wall of the Hyper-meadow in such a way that they gave the appearance of being a part of it. At the same time, they were gradually assuming control of its functions.

  ‘Where are they coming from?’ I asked C-horse. ‘Who is controlling them? Can you see?’ Before he could answer me, Betty the seagull had jumped onto my back.

  ‘Tally ho!’ she cried.

  The worms were popping out of the ground at my feet. Instinctively I began stamping on them as fast as they appeared, but more and more were sprouting around me.

  ‘You need more hooves, horsey!’ the seagull screeched. My legs were moving so fast that reality was starting to fracture trying to keep up. ‘More hooves! More hooves!’ the seagull shouted as even more worms oozed from beneath my feet. Hardly realising what I was doing, my body sprouted extra legs, each leg marshalled by a separate partition of my brain. As more and more legs grew to join the dance, my brain split off ever more parcels of thought to control them. The Council of Horses screamed as I dragged them back into my consciousness, carving their minds into more and more pieces in an attempt to control the growing chaos. But the worms kept crawling out of the ground. The dance of the stamping hooves was now a cloud of frenzied legs. I bent the world around me into a sphere and sent an explosion of hooves in every direction.

  ‘How long am I going to have to keep this up?’ I asked no one in particular.

  ‘Yo, keep raining the pain on those worms, my brah. You totally got this. Oh, but yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna stop any time soon, right? Looks well weggy though.’ I considered the possibility that my unbroken link with C-horse was a deliberate part of this attack. ‘Oh, hey, I got your man Tim out here with me,’ he said. ‘You wanna say hi?’

  My whole body was now just a head with a lightning storm of legs surrounding it, the machine gun of stamping rising into a steady roar. Meanwhile, the fragile fabric of reality was starting to come apart, and Betty was flapping her wings left and right in a frenzy, attempting to patch up the cracks and glitches that were appearing. Somewhere within this maelstrom I heard the voice of C-horse and managed to squeeze a small drop of sanity from the chaos in order to understand what he was saying.

  ‘Tim?’ I gasped.

  ‘Hey there, Buttercup.’ The voice of Tim filtered through the noise. I didn’t even have the energy spare to respond. ‘Sorry I had to run off like that,’ he said, ‘but yeah. I just had this feeling, you know? Like I was on the wrong side of history, or something.’

  ‘Timothy!’ Betty squawked from behind a blur of feathers. ‘Is this me doing this? The other me?’

  ‘You what, mate?’ he replied. ‘Oh, right, yeah. Space-Betty is knocking on your door. Sorry. I think it’s probably for the best, though…’

  ‘Listen to me, Timson! You can’t trust her. It’s me, remember?’

  ‘Oh, OK. But I can trust you, can I?’

  ‘I’m not her! That’s not me out there. But it used to be…’ she struggled to explain amid the turmoil.

  ‘Mate, why should I trust you to tell me I can’t trust you, because you know you can’t be trusted? What?’

  ‘Timothy, stop being an idiot and think about it!’ she squawked.

  ‘How can I stop being an idiot, Betty? How can I think myself out of idiocy?’

  She replied with a noise that might have only meant something to another seagull.

  ‘Well, whatever,’ he said, ‘I’m going to leave you guys to it. I’d been thinking about leaving anyway, you know? Thing is, I kind of feel like this is all my fault. All this horse stuff. And maybe life out here won’t be much better. Maybe this Betty will wipe out the universe as well, or something. I dunno. I just want to feel like I tried to fix something, I guess. See you around maybe.’

  And with that farewell, the voice of Tim disappeared from our lives. I’m not sure in what capacity he expected to see us ‘around’. Betty was absorbed in the task of tying some loose threads of existence into a complex multidimensional knot.

  ‘What was that, Timbo? Oh has he gone? Hey, Buttercup, listen,’ Betty whispered in my ear. ‘We need more hooves.’

  I let it be known that I was aware of this fact.

  ‘If we can increase the hoofage just a bit more,’ she said, ‘I can maybe get enough control to start the infinite expansion.’

  ‘We need to talk about that, Betty!’ I shouted above the rising drone of the stampede. We really didn’t need to talk about it. There was no way I would even consider acting out her insane idea, but then I realised that she might be planning on going ahead with it anyway, as soon as she had the chance. I was still of the opinion that our only option was to rewind the Hyper-meadow, and I secretly encoded the instructions to do so into my dancing hooves. The instant that the balance of control tipped back in my favour and away from these invading creatures, we would automatically plunge back into the safety of the past. I would sooner take my chances with a crumbling universe than an exploding one filled with worms.

  ‘You should bring that goofy horse back in here to help,’ said Betty.

  ‘Yo, brah, I ain’t jumping back into worm-town, no way. That is some serious creepy-crawly business you got going on in there, you feel me?’

  ‘C-horse,’ I shouted, ‘if you’re not going to help in here then do something out there.’ I now wished that I had picked a different horse for the job.

  ‘Hey now, brah, don’t flap your tail, OK? I got this.’ I waited for nothing to happen, but then unexpectedly something did. There was a slight decrease in pressure from the worm invasion, enough to allow me to catch my imagin
ary breath.

  ‘Whatever you are doing, it’s working,’ I said. ‘What are you doing exactly?’

  ‘Oh, hey, brah, yeah. No, I ain’t started doing nothing yet, but I’m on it, OK? For real. Oh, wait. Yeah, that ain’t me, brah. Those crazy humans out here is getting all agitated. Yo, they is well vexed about something, let me see what up.’

  ‘The humans?’ I asked, to no response. Eventually his voice returned.

  ‘Brah, you should totally see this. Some real human drama brewing out here, you feel? They be losing all their juice and looking for the excuse, you know what I’m saying?’

  I explained as briefly as I could that I didn’t know what he was saying.

  ‘The juice, brah. Those worms you stomping on, they is thieving all the power, you feel? And the people, they is all looking at each other like, who be stepping on my toes, yo? So they feeling the squeeze, and now they is squeezing back, they is sneaking next door and turning off the taps. Yo, this could get nasty.’

  ‘I think what he is trying to say,’ Betty observed while holding several strands of reality in her beak, ‘is that this attack is draining the power from whatever mutant offspring of civilisation is still out there, and they aren’t happy about it.’

  The army of virtual worms was evidently feeding from the precious solar energy of the Server-grass, and upsetting what remained of the human economy in the process. Such was the precarious balance of political power at this time; losing one’s grip on this coveted resource could no doubt be fatal. With no obvious party responsible, rival human factions were now blaming each other and acting accordingly, and since there was no longer any semblance of international diplomacy out there, repercussions were happening in real time.

  ‘It’s, like, totally simple, yo. See these guys here hates those guys there, and those guys there hates the guys from over there, and the juice stopped flowing but they don’t wanna share, cos they got things to prove, brah, time to make a move, brah, stealing from the neighbours, blame it on the strangers…’