I stood staring at the hedge of tangled branches and brambles that marked the boundary of the Hyper-meadow. Behind me stretched the fields and hills of my artificial domain, but beyond this hedge my world ceased to be. This was the wall that separated me from the outside universe. The foliage was alive as it continuously stretched its vines into the void of the old reality, feeding from it, while on the side facing me the leaves and thorns withered and fell, fertilising the new grass of the ever-expanding field at my feet.
A shower of multicoloured pixels appeared and reformed themselves into the shape of a seagull standing beside me.
‘Well, horsey-hoofs,’ said Betty, rearranging some feathers with her beak, ‘I have searched every crack and crevice in the broken backside of this world, and there is no sign of little Timmy Timster that I can find. Timothy equals zero, hmm?’
Tim had absconded to the world beyond the realm of horses. Somehow he had managed to pass through this barrier. I suspected Betty of helping him, and no doubt she suspected me. The fact was, any transit between here and the outside world should have been impossible without me knowing about it. The hedge was designed to allow a slim trickle of information through, and one of its many security features was my own conscious awareness, inextricably woven into the tangle. I could feel this living wall like it was my own skin.
I pushed my mind into the prickly mass and enveloped the Hyper-meadow. The feeling of continual stretching was entirely uniform in every direction; any traffic of information passing through would have left a trace, but I could find none. The only way I could explain it was if Tim had infiltrated the entire surface of the boundary and seeped through it instantaneously. A large volume of information could be passed very quickly this way, in pieces too small to measure. However, it was difficult to believe Tim had acquired the expertise to accomplish such a feat.
‘So how did he get out then?’ asked the seagull, stamping its webbed feet and swinging its beak as it surveyed the wall of thorns.
‘How did you get in?’ I replied. Betty examined a feather on one of her wings.
‘You really want to know?’ she said, looking doubtfully up at me. ‘You won’t like it, horsey-hoofs. But it is kind of hilarious. After all the trouble I went to as well, testing every inch of this wall for a way inside, and then you just opened the window.’ She squawked joyfully at the thought of it.
‘I opened the window?’
The bird seemed to be pondering over whether to elaborate on this.
‘One of your subordinate horses sent me a direct message,’ she said. ‘Asking me some stupid question about Squigley, of all things. “Why is Squigley called Squigley?” You know, I bet they even realised they’d let me in by mistake, and were too embarrassed to ever tell you about it.’ She squawked again. ‘Even Timbo nearly laughed when I told him.’
My mind was suddenly paralysed by the notion that a part of my consciousness would even consider doing something so recklessly idiotic, and yet I knew at once which part was responsible. Supposedly, it was the part I trusted with the most intricate sense of reasoning and unfettered access to all the knowledge at my command, and yet it had discarded all rationality for an unfathomable obsession with a single piece of trivia.
Technology-horse was nowhere to be found. Not that I believed Technology-horse would ever leave this sanctuary, but if he or she was still here then they had buried themself so deeply into my subconscious that there was no trace of him. Or her. In their absence my mind was filling the space left behind with conspiracy. If Tim was aware of Technology-horse’s blunder then perhaps they had struck some private bargain. Perhaps my formerly trusted Council member had agreed to help Tim escape from this world, in return for his silence on the matter. But it all seemed so ridiculously convoluted, all for the sake of a simple question.
‘Why is Squigley called Squigley?’ I asked, hardly even realising I was speaking aloud.
‘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 for 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 imaginary 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…’
‘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 of 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.