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 affectionate.’
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.’