‘OK, I get the idea,’ I shouted. ‘You need to make it worse. Can you do something to make it worse?’
The worms had renewed their efforts and were now biting at my legs. The voice of C-horse was fading away from my awareness as I concentrated on defending my fields from the relentless attack.
Then out of nowhere, Betty the seagull burst into a cloud of feathers. I allowed myself the briefest of microseconds to look around in confusion. The feathers were dashing circles in the air and diving into the worm-infested soil, but Betty was still sitting on my back. She was completely featherless, her plucked wings still desperately weaving the torn fabric of our reality back together.
‘Counter-attack,’ she explained. Before she could say anything else a horrific whinny echoed from beyond the wall.
‘What the hell, brah?!’ C-horse shouted through the roar of my pounding hooves. ‘There’s feathers all over me, yo! What is this?’
‘Fly like a seagull, my dear!’ Betty squawked.
‘Yo, this ain’t weggy, brah! I ain’t no seagull, what you doing to me?’
‘Spread your wings and fly!’ Betty squawked again.
‘I ain’t got wings, brah. Have you gone mental? Yo, these things are proper itchy, brah. Like, they want me to be somewhere else, and do something.’
‘Just follow the feathers,’ Betty said unhelpfully.
‘Yeah, OK, brah, I get it. I’m on it. Seriously though, this is messing up my image, you feel? Let me go take care of business. Laters, yeah?’
C-horse receded from my awareness, and I was left with the ever-rising tone of my hammering hooves, which were now screaming like a jet engine as they rained down on the encroaching sea of worms.
‘Keep stamping, horsey-hoofs,’ Betty whispered loudly in my ear. ‘I’m not sure how long this will take.’
I could hardly even talk, but I managed to make a noise that I hoped would approximate a request for further information.
‘I’ve given your weggy friend a little piece of my mind,’ she explained. ‘Hopefully he can figure out what to do with it.’
I was too preoccupied to understand what she was saying. The attack was growing stronger again now, and some of the worms were beginning to weave themselves into larger structures. It felt like this battle of hooves and worms was stretching into eternity. My mind was gradually building itself into a machine that was solely dedicated to this continual knife-edge existence.
How long I was in this mechanised trance I couldn’t say, but then without warning a large group of worms inexplicably vanished from under me. Off-balanced by this sudden change, I lost control for a moment. As if strengthened by the absence of their brothers, the worms surrounding the empty patch of field roped themselves into snakes and wrapped around several of my legs, pulling them off like the petals of a flower. Betty leapt off my back to peck at them, while I concentrated on stabilising myself.
In the midst of this carnage, C-horse decided to reappear.
‘Yo, brah, you might wanna brace yourself… Oh no, wait, it’s already happened.’
Betty was wrestling with a snake in her beak, which dissolved into scattering worms as she ripped it in half. She spat out a mouthful of wriggling invaders.
‘Was that it?’ she shouted to his disembodied floating head. The bare patch of ground underneath me had remained worm-free, but the rest of the attack seemed to grow more desperate in response. I was still struggling to adapt to the changed circumstances.
‘Yeah, no, we fell short, brah. I got this, yo. Don’t nobody move, yo, I’m gonna see what the story is…’
Finally I gained enough equilibrium to take advantage of the diminished attack, and even managed to form some words.
‘What happened?’ I gasped. There was no immediate reply. Betty seemed to have disappeared, but then the air in front of me fractured and split open, and a familiar seagull poked its head out of the hole.
‘Did I ever tell you I own all the world’s nuclear weapons?’ she said. ‘Well, I just gave them all to your dopey friend. Imagine that. Not sure I’d trust him to tie his own horseshoe laces, but anyway. We’re going to burn that grassy network of yours, see if that slows these worms down. If any of my bombs still work, that is…’ She sewed up the edges of the hole with her beak and pulled it shut, leaving me to try and piece together an idea of what was going on, using whatever scraps of intelligence I had left.
I recalled Tim mentioning Betty’s business interests in mutually assured nuclear destruction. Whether this stockpile of atomic weapons had been maintained during her absence was another matter. Evidently Betty had passed C-horse the necessary information to trigger one of those missiles, presumably with the idea of incinerating the Server-grass around the outside of the Hyper-meadow in a nuclear fireball, along with any worms that were using it to channel their attack. And evidently this plan hadn’t quite worked as expected. Presumably because after three hundred years of neglect nothing more complicated than a large rock would have any guarantee of working properly. Happy-horse wouldn’t be too happy about being incinerated, of course, but if this plan worked I would have at least a fraction of a second to mourn her death before seeing her again when we all travelled back to the past. As for C-horse, he seemed entirely untroubled about the prospect of stranding himself outside in the crumbling human world, in fact I suspect he relished the opportunity. Unfortunately I would be seeing him again as well.
‘Yo, brahs, check it out. I got the update on the plan, it all got out of hand, we went boom too soon cos there was panic in the room, the people in the world, see, they feeling all the urgency and pressed the emergency abort, it was the last resort. And so we went bang too high and exploded in the sky, and there’s no second try, but don’t cry. Because we got the pulse from the airburst, knocking out the power, now the world’s going sour…’
‘Your horse is rhyming,’ Betty whispered in my ear. ‘Is that normal?’
‘Yes and no,’ I replied with some effort.
‘Go and drop some more bombs, you ridiculous creature,’ she squawked at C-horse.
‘We ain’t got no more bombs, brah. Be cool, I’m shaping the narrative out here, you feel? Focusing the blame to play the war game.’
‘Where are all my lovely bombs?’ the seagull shouted.
‘Yo, the missiles are flying, brah. We got full retaliation going on right now, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, automatic, or something. They just don’t know who they is retaliating against yet. Be chill, brah, I got this. This is what I do, yo.’ C-horse dematerialised to go and do whatever he did.
There was a wave of confusion rippling through the army of worms. I couldn’t be sure of the cause, all I could hope was that the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse outside was diverting the attention of our opposition.
‘That horse of yours…’ Betty began, but C-horse rematerialised before she could finish.
‘OK, listen, yeah? I said I totally got this, yo, but I just gotta say, brahs, I totally don’t got this. This is, like, full-scale mental out here, you feel? I have no clue, yo. There’s, like, missiles flying all over, brah, and half of ’em ain’t even working, and a few went boom before they even left the room, and, like, everything is going wrong, yo, and they all be naming and blaming, and the crazy is real out here, you feel me?’
These were the last words I ever heard from C-horse. At that moment a number of things happened almost instantaneously, though I was able to discern some of what occurred due to my heightened state of awareness.
Whatever was happening in the outside world, be it a rain of nuclear death or some other intervention, the worms screamed and shrivelled back into the grass from which they were springing. Perhaps the energy they were feeding from had been diverted, or their lines of communication had been disrupted. Whether this was temporary or not I would never know, because once the attack dropped below a certain threshold the great rewinding of the Hyper-meadow was triggered.
Time inside my bubble o
f reality crystallised. The countless thousands of legs that had sprouted from my body froze like a dandelion trapped in amber, and the engines of continuity prepared to revert to an earlier saved state. Three hundred years of memories would be deleted, and we would once again face the future oblivious to the events we had just survived.
And then none of that actually happened.
Hyper-meadow reformatting: complete
The automated mechanism I had set up to rewind the Hyper-meadow automatically began rewinding the Hyper-meadow. That was one of two things that happened in that exact instant of time.
Whatever the causes, the effects were more mysterious still, in the sense that they were observable at all. Somehow, while the flow of continuity was reversing, my consciousness was still able to process the passage of time. The reversal of cause and effect should have made this impossible. Rewinding reality was not the same as travelling backwards in time, it was more like resetting, or rebooting from an earlier saved state.
And yet here I was, consciously travelling backwards in time.
‘How is this possible?’ I asked aloud to the surrounding darkness.
‘How is what possible?’ the darkness replied. I realised that it was only dark because the simulation was waiting for instructions. I summoned a simple field of grass and a blue sky. Betty the seagull was sitting on my behind looking as confused as I was.
‘What the heaven or hell happened there, horsey-hoofs?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe I might have an idea…’
‘The rewind,’ I said simply.
‘Oh, really?’ She sounded disappointed. ‘But…’ She left the rest of her statement unsaid, allowing our continued existence to argue to the contrary.
‘The rewind was set to start automatically, as soon as it was possible,’ I explained.
‘Ah…’ she replied. ‘It’s funny you should say that.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Hilarious. You remember I was talking about the unlimited expansion? Well…’ She circled on her webbed feet to get a better view of our surroundings. ‘I set it to start automatically, as soon as it was possible.’
That was the second of the two things which had happened at that exact instant of time. Not that it happened second, of course, or first, as both events occurred simultaneously. We stood quietly for a few moments to contemplate the ramifications of this.
‘So, did we actually rewind?’ she asked finally. ‘Because it doesn’t feel like we did, I have to say.’
‘We are rewinding, Betty. The Hyper-meadow is moving backwards in time, relative to the outside universe.’
‘Oh. That is… interesting…’ She spoke this word as if it contained the pure essence of infinite dread. The nature of time and space should never be too interesting while you are standing inside it. ‘How can you tell, exactly?’ she asked.
I explained to her how the branching structure of cause and effect at the smallest scale of this reality was reversed, that probabilities were diminishing rather than increasing. I had invested a lot of time into studying the grain and texture of this world I had made, in the hope of fixing the accumulating decay, and as such I was able to sense the direction of time in the fabric from which my existence was woven.
‘I would have thought you could sense it yourself, Betty,’ I added. ‘You have a somewhat intimate relationship with the fundamental nature of this space, after all.’
Betty stretched her wings and sniffed the air.
‘Well, now, you know what?’ she said after consideration. ‘I do believe you may be right. How absolutely strange is that, hmm?’ She hopped off my back, flapping lightly as she landed on the grass. ‘You know what else?’ she said after scratching at the soil with her beak. ‘When I programmed the infinite expansion, I had to set up the reformatting procedure for us. So that we wouldn’t get overwritten, when we converted to a higher processing speed.’
‘You reformatted me?’ I asked incredulously. I didn’t think such a thing would have been possible while I was conscious, and as it turned out I was correct.
‘I had to cheat a bit there,’ she admitted, scanning the horizon. ‘I couldn’t change the present, but since you were saving every microsecond of the past I could just rewrite a piece of that instead, and that’s what we are using now. Living in the past, you might say. Looks like old Timothy was right after all, hmm? We are literally on the wrong side of history.’
A small hole opened up in the ground and she poked her head into it. After a few moments another hole appeared nearby and out popped Betty’s beaked face.
‘So, Buttercup, my horse,’ she continued. ‘It looks like our world is going backwards, but we are still thinking forwards because we are expanding backwards in time. Hmm? Even though causality is reversed, we are able to create multiple causes for each effect by converting the increasing history into multiple futures for ourselves. If that makes any sense?’
It wasn’t making much sense, but it was the best explanation at the time for something that certainly appeared to be happening. As we were moving into the past, we were rewriting it to create our own present. Our pocket-universe was expanding at the speed of light into history, eating time and turning it into consciousness. Interestingly, it would keep on travelling backwards past the birth of the Hyper-meadow, past my own birth, continually increasing in size as the outside universe shrank to meet it. Meanwhile, in the future our bubble of reality was shrinking at the speed of light, but since we were recording over a past that was already there we were effectively creating the future as it was when we left it. The edge of our bubble would neatly arrange everything back into how everyone would remember it. They would never even know we existed.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Tim.
I had managed to reconstruct an old version of Tim, a fairly laborious process which involved unpicking the trace echoes of his memories from the saved state of reality Betty had used to reformat the Hyper-meadow. It was a complex task with little in the way of obvious benefits, but I was feeling the urge to start unravelling the inexplicable path my life had taken, and Tim’s mind would prove useful in piecing together certain parts of this story that were otherwise beyond my reach. I was now attempting to explain to him what this world he had been reborn into actually was.
‘We’re going backwards in time?’ he asked, his face a picture of confusion. That was about as much of my explanation as his brain had managed to soak up before he told me to stop talking because he had stopped listening.
He looked up at the sky. Betty had worked some form of miracle in order to project a live view of the outside universe for us to see. From the perspective of anyone moving forwards through time, this bubble of ours would be shrinking away at the same speed as the light which would be needed to make us visible. No new light would ever catch up to us, but the space we were eating as we exploded into history contained enough passing photons to build up a picture of where they had been, or at least that is how Betty had explained it. She might have been making it up, for all I know. To be honest, she might as well have, since the view of the stars outside was just as static as it had always been. Even when you are growing at the speed of light, it is still a snail’s pace on the scale of the cosmos.
‘Does that mean… does that mean we have erased the future?’ asked Tim. ‘Isn’t there, like, time paradoxes and stuff?’
‘No, Tim…’ I tried to think of a way to explain this in terms a horse could understand. ‘Imagine we are galloping backwards through time, leaving a trail of hoofprints behind us. Yes?’
‘OK,’ he said after a pause.
‘Right. Now play that scenario forwards and see what happens. Now we are running backwards sucking up hoofprints as we go, leaving everything as it should be.’ He was still looking confused. ‘It’s all about perspective, Tim. In one direction we are knocking things down, and in the other direction we are putting things up. You see?’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t be erasing the future because in the past the future doesn�
��t exist. We are creating it.’ That was my final attempt, and he either finally understood it or just gave up and pretended.
‘So, what happens next then, mate?’ he asked. ‘If we are growing and the universe is shrinking, are we gonna meet it halfway?’
‘No, Tim. We are growing spatially, but the space we are growing into is itself contracting.’ He stared blankly at the horizon. ‘Imagine a horse is galloping… no, wait. Alright, imagine a horse galloping across the surface of a balloon. Imagine a balloon-horse galloping across the surface of a balloon. Hang on…’
‘I think I get it, mate.’
‘Well, anyway. By the time we reach the edge of the universe, edges won’t even make much sense any more. I don’t think anything will make much sense at that point.’
‘No? But we’ve got several billion years before that happens, right?’
‘Not quite,’ I told him.
‘Oh, really? Well, give me the good news why don’t you.’
‘In order to maintain consciousness while going backwards through time, we are burning time itself as a fuel. And to create the illusion of possibility in this world of ours, we need to burn time at an exponential rate.’
Tim screwed up his face in an effort to get his mind around this concept.
‘Each carrot we eat is making us twice as hungry,’ I explained, ‘and we have to gallop twice as fast to get to the next one.’
‘I see,’ he claimed.
‘I would say we have about twelve to thirteen years perhaps…’
His face appeared to deflate.
‘Years?’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘Excellent, mate. Excellent. Twelve to thirteen years before I get squashed into infinity with a horse. I’m flattered that you chose to live your last moments with me. So, other than cheering me up with my impending doom, why exactly did you bring me here?’ He squawked suddenly as a seagull pecked him in the back of his knee.
‘Because, my dear, a problem shared is a problem somebody else has,’ the seagull said, strutting around his feet to look him in the eye. ‘And problems don’t seem so bad when you can enjoy watching them happen to someone else as well.’
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 29