I was standing in my field, chewing the grass and letting my mind slip into the shimmering otherworld of computerised information. Inside that virtual reality I was still standing in a field, chewing the grass, but the field was a vast meadow of flowing data, the grass fizzling with calculations. All the hedges and fences were ghostly and transparent, and the land beyond stretched away to the horizon in a patchwork of similar meadows. Each one I could visit in the blink of a virtual eye, but since my mind was already everywhere I had no need to travel. Life was good, I thought to myself. If only it could last forever.
Seven years had gone by, and BrainZero was now providing most of the world’s computing and communication technology. Our social network had grown so integrated with the infrastructure of society that it was impossible to do anything without it, and many countries required their citizens to sign up to it by law. Commerce, education, entertainment, travel, social services, every aspect of human life was organised using my software, and babies had BrainZero profiles before they were even born into the world. Everyone was ‘BrainZeroing’, and even though only seven years had passed, nobody could remember a world without it. There had been very little opposition because it just worked better than everything that came before it. It was better at doing things that people didn’t even think of doing before, and now couldn’t live without doing.
That is not to say it was easy to implement my approval rating system, or that it wasn’t an ongoing struggle to keep it working. It was inevitable that rounding off the corners of human excess would have its most significant negative impact on those few individuals with the resources to shout the loudest. Thankfully, the dark forces that I had to contend with, who were supposedly running human civilisation according to some secret agenda, were largely fictional. The manipulative schemes of powerful organisations were only ever invented in hindsight to explain success gained through luck and incompetence. Any complex strategies intended to control human populations had to contend with the fact that humans never want to do what they are supposed to be doing. Unfortunately this was also a problem I had to deal with, and I soon found that managing a herd of several billion humans was like trying to balance thousands of carrots on their tips, each one that fell knocking down all those around them.
For this reason I had divided my personality into a number of subordinate horse-spirits, each one able to function individually and tasked with a particular area of human organisation. These ghostly Buttercups would flit around the endless grassy fields of information, dealing with any minor problems that arose and alerting me to any major ones. They were all still a part of my own consciousness, but my attention was now large enough that I could afford to split it up and allow parts of myself to operate beyond my overall awareness. There was never a fear that any individual Buttercup might grow enough to assume control of the others, because they were all still a part of my own mind, and the single voice that directed the group would always be formed from a combination of all its members. The other benefit of this arrangement was the simple joy it gave me to be the leader of my own herd of horse companions. I had long since outgrown the company of real horses, but the social instincts of my past would always remain.
It was time for the daily meeting of the council of imaginary horses. The silvery spectres filtered through the borders of my mental territory, slipping between the bars of gates and leaping over fences. Their thought patterns seeped through the golden grasses and converged into a ring of Buttercups around me.
‘Welcome once again, horse friends,’ I greeted them. They responded with a chorus of neighs, a sound that I would never tire of hearing.
‘Very well,’ I continued. ‘You all know what is required, so let us begin with an update on all the current issues. In order of urgency, please.’
War-horse stepped forward, his face a battleground of scars, bite marks and hoofprints. He was usually the first to speak in these uncertain transitional times. My attempts at resolving human differences seemed to be perpetually compensated by new conflicts that sprouted like thistles between the weeds I was endeavouring to clear away. There was also the problem that I was probably indirectly causing most of these conflicts. War-horse grunted by way of introduction.
‘The oil-producing regions continue to crumble and destabilise,’ he said. ‘The price of fossil fuels has stopped tumbling, but the economic ruin has started a sympathetic collapse in other markets that is accelerating the chaos. We can look forward to a wave of unrest that will escalate into civil war in at least three major countries over the coming months.’ It looked like he genuinely was looking forward to it as well.
I had expected this initial decline of the old world, though I had not anticipated the speed at which it was happening. My fibre-optic grass project, a biological network of plant-based communication and energy generation known as ‘Server-grass’, had proven to be as popular with developing nations as it was unpopular with everyone else. Its legality was disputed, and there had been widespread sanctions imposed on countries that used this technology. However, the early adopters were so clearly benefiting, despite their imposed independence, that it began drawing the attention of many other regions who couldn’t afford to be so conservative. These rogue Server-grass nations had banded together to form a coalition of states, and a rift had opened between the children of the world stage who embraced the new, and their wealthy older relatives who feared the consequences. Environmental concerns were the main currency of complaint, but it was obvious to everyone that there were deeper currents of self-interest flowing beneath the surface. The rich would only stay rich as long as the resources were available, and one of their chief resources was the poor.
Not that I could pretend to offer any permanent solution to this problem. The eternal cycle of expansion and collapse was an unavoidable by-product of continual human progress. The best I could do was try to slow it down, but that would involve unpicking the tangled strings that currently tied developed nations to the lifestyle they were accustomed to.
This would be a job for Happy-horse, who was tasked with maintaining a degree of harmony among the disparate elements of humanity. Harmony-horse would have been a more appropriate label perhaps, but I had made a point of allowing the horses to choose their own names, much as I regretted it now. I looked around the Council of Horses but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘Happy-horse?’ I asked. The circle of eyes glanced left and right.
‘Oh, hello! Sorry, I was miles away.’ The voice of Happy-horse drifted down from the sky as she descended on a cloud. ‘These are interesting times, aren’t they?’
‘How are the developed nations reacting to the coming crisis?’ I asked her.
‘Well now…’ She tore off a chunk of her cloud and chewed on it. ‘Mmm, yes. How are they reacting? Predictably, I suppose you could say. I mean, they just love the poor downtrodden masses, don’t they? Love them to bits. On the outside, anyway. On the inside, well, they’ll back any murderous dictator that they can control, secretly. The complicating factor, of course, is BrainZero. You know? The approval system is making all their tricksy political manoeuvring utterly transparent. Very funny to watch. Mind you, it is also speeding up the instability of those oppressive regimes, for the same reason. Which isn’t so funny, I guess.’
I was surprised that our software was even being used in countries with oppressive regimes, given their tendency to claim sole ownership of the truth. Truth was an integral part of BrainZero’s approval system. It evaluated the social impact of its users by verifying the truth of any information they shared. As a consequence, the news media, its foundations already weakened by the echoes of a million voices, was now reduced to a collection of computer algorithms that trawled for their content from a global network of citizen journalists. There was no daily diary or hourly soundbite that escaped the measurement of truth, and every unfounded rumour or outright lie was not only exposed for its lack of worth, but accompanied by its opposing facts and figures.
‘All that truth…’ Happy-horse pulled off a clump of cloud with her hoof somehow and sniffed it before throwing it over her shoulder. ‘It’s not making life easy for the people in charge. Even the ones who aren’t murderous dictators. Truth can be painful sometimes.’
‘Alright,’ I conceded, ‘but it is still possible to run a country without hiding the truth.’
‘Well, yes, maybe,’ she replied, leaning over the edge of her cloud to reach a fresh clump. ‘But it does make the job a lot easier, don’t you think? Making a few empty promises. Choosing whatever version of reality gives you peace of mind. You know what the problem is with this approval system of yours?’
‘Of ours. Go on.’
‘Well…’ She pulled at a piece of the underside of her cloud and the whole thing flipped upside down. We waited patiently while she wriggled her way back on top of it. ‘It’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? Trying to make the world better for everyone means making it worse for some of them. The ones who have more than everyone else, anyway. You know how those folks love to complain. They say forcing people to tell the truth is a form of censorship. Can you believe that? “The self-policing of free expression”, they call it. Rather ironic, wouldn’t you agree?’
This was hardly surprising. The freedom to spread misinformation was highly valued by those who profited from such ignorance, as was the freedom to be ignorant in the first place.
‘I don’t care about any of that,’ I said. ‘People just need to acclimatise to the way things are now. And if they want an easier job of running their countries, then they shouldn’t even be trying to. That’s what PowerZero is for. We need to be pushing that harder.’
War-horse grunted and flicked up his ears for attention.
‘We are in a strong position to install PowerZero in those countries that collapse,’ he suggested. ‘If we can support the overthrow of their current governments, that is.’
‘I’m talking about everywhere else,’ I replied. ‘I mean, fresh installs are great, but we need people to be upgrading their existing governments too.’
War-horse rumbled and lowered his ears.
‘Well now,’ said Happy-horse, her head poking through the bottom of her floating cloud. ‘Perhaps Culture-horse can help with that. What do we think?’
‘Yo, brah. The name’s C-horse. You feel me?’
Culture-horse, or ‘C-horse’ as he had chosen to be known, strutted forwards. His area of concern was human culture and media. Presumably this was the reason he had adopted such a peculiar way of speaking, although it might have been a manifestation of some hidden aspect of my own personality. I could only hope it was the former option. A gold medallion of the letter ‘C’ dangled from his neck, which he now grabbed with his ridiculously long tail and jangled for emphasis.
‘Let me tell you all right now, yeah? Image is everything, you get me? You wanna upgrade the whole land, you gotta rebrand the plan. Trust me, brahs. I is C-horse, and I see, horse. I see what makes you and me.’
‘Yes, if we could stick to discussing the problem at hand, perhaps?’ I suggested. It was necessary to interrupt him from time to time, since he had an annoying tendency to start rhyming if he spoke for too long.
‘Yo, you got problems, brah? I got problems too. I got problems for you. Listen. C-horse gonna lay it down for you right now, yeah? This is a world of trouble, brahs, and the real fight is to forget. The real fight is the flight from what is real and right. You understand what I’m saying, brahs? I’m talking about the music, the art, the poetry, and that’s just the start…’
‘Sorry, what are we talking about now?’ Why I had to ask a figment of my own imagination a question like this was a mystery to me. At times I regretted allowing these horses to develop their own personalities.
‘I’m talking access to ideas, you feel me? Yo, PowerZero is all about unlocking the power, yeah? But those old rich dudes, they don’t like it, brah. See, they is holding all the keys, and we is giving them away for free. Free movies, free games, free music from all the old names, free movement for the stories, across the territories…’
‘Can you be more specific, please?’ I begged of him.
‘Brah, you is changing the way these guys do their business. Now witness: brah, you is paying all the artists express, tax for the access, burning off the excess management, that’s how the plan is meant to go, yo, making creators into money-makers, putting on the brakes for the money-takers, but you don’t know, yo, how it’s gonna—’
‘Wait, stop. Is this about WorkZero?’
WorkZero was a system integrated into PowerZero, whereby citizens were taxed in return for free access to all forms of entertainment media. This tax was then used to pay creators directly according to how much people enjoyed their works, a measurement that was calculated based on various secret variables rather than simple volume of traffic. The idea was to redistribute income more evenly among all the artists, with a view to eventually extending this system to include all commercial goods and services. However, an unintended side effect appeared to be that now everyone had decided they were an artist, regardless of whether they were any good at it, and since there was no real consensus of what made something good or not it didn’t seem to matter to anyone.
Personally, I still didn’t understand or have any interest in human creativity. As far as I was concerned, music was just a noise, and stories were simply ‘things that didn’t happen’. Nevertheless, such large rivers of money flowed through these creative industries that any attempt to micromanage human affairs would inevitably have to include them, and that meant replacing them with this more efficient system.
‘How can anyone justifiably complain about WorkZero?’ I asked him. ‘It treats everyone fairly and gives everyone everything they want. It gives everyone everything they didn’t even know they wanted, until they tried it.’
‘Brah, that’s whole point, you feel me? This ain’t about the justifying, it’s about the old world dying. Those dudes got their riches from controlling the platform, you get me? Focusing the feels and the deals on the few. Now we got diversity, brah. Everyone is cooking it up, and we got every flavour you never tasted. Choice, brah. More voices, more choices, more paths to follow, less followers for the followed, more sorrow for the bankers who borrowed from tomorrow…’
A neigh interrupted his flow. It was Hungry-horse.
‘Yo, brah, what? What you got today you didn’t tell us yesterday?’
Hungry-horse moved forward a step.
‘If we could move this discussion to a more pressing issue?’ She was asking me directly. Hungry-horse was tasked to oversee the general area of resource management. However, as her name might imply, she had become chiefly concerned with the business of eating, a subject that lay close to the heart of all horses given the amount of time we spent doing it. This fact seemed to give her the inflated notion that all other matters were trivial by comparison, but I decided to let her speak anyway, since it would give me a break from the ramblings of C-horse.
‘Thank you. I mean, I know this war and peace and… singing and dancing stuff is all really important and everything, but seriously. You’re going to be begging for problems like these when the humans start running out of food, believe me.’
The horses grumbled and snorted.
‘That’s hardly a pressing issue,’ I reminded her.
‘No? Well it can be, if you actually want to try fixing it. I mean, I assume we want to keep covering the world with this Server-grass stuff. You know humans can’t eat it, right? I wouldn’t even eat it myself.’
There was an uncomfortable shifting of hooves among the Council. It was difficult to feign much enthusiasm for the long-term fate of humanity when we were already planning for a world we could exist in without them. Given enough time they would be quite capable of starving themselves to death even without our help, but that future was just distant enough to pretend we could think about it later, while more exciting immediate goals were vying for our attention. It might sound callous, but even humans seemed to have a hard time caring enough about the world their great-grandchildren would be living and dying in. Hungry-horse swished her tail sarcastically.
‘Yeah, I know. It’s a game right now, isn’t it? This human world of petty politics and money markets. Well, I’m not here to play games. I’m here to talk about resource management, and these humans are a resource. We can make them sustainable if we want to. But we’ll have to start right now. OK?’
The horses examined their hooves awkwardly.
‘Chemical sludge,’ she said. There was much blinking and turning of heads.
‘Chemical sludge?’ I enquired.
‘Seriously. It has everything you need to keep a human alive and… healthy enough. We can pump chemical sludge straight to their homes. You know how much waste there is growing stuff hundreds of miles away from anyone who’s going to eat it? Just pump the raw chemicals right into their houses…’
C-horse shook his silvery mane and let out a whinny of disapproval.
‘Brah, what grass you been chewing on, yo? You think those guys gonna eat that shit? You ain’t seen none of them cooking shows they watch? Brah, they loves their food more than they love eating it. I ain’t kidding, yo, they got food that don’t even look like food. No way they gonna drink your chemical smoothies…’
‘If you’ll let me finish?’ She waited for him to stop his raspberry-blowing and hoof-stomping. ‘No one is going to be eating this stuff raw. The sludge is fed into a household appliance that uses it to print real food. Technology-horse has been working on a prototype.’
Technology-horse cleared his or her throat to speak. It was unclear what gender they had chosen to be today. All Council members were free to pick whichever gender suited them, arbitrary though it may seem for imaginary beings living in a virtual landscape. For Technology-horse this had presented the opportunity to explore an endless variety of combinations, for esoteric reasons.
‘The, ah, “food”, as we may call it, is constructed on a molecular level by specially programmed bacteria who extract the, ah, chemical ingredients from the water supply—’
‘Yeah, you get the general idea,’ Hungry-horse cut in. ‘You see? Agriculture, processing, transportation, storage – who needs them? Food will become a design you can download, and the food industry can adapt by covering the cost of the hardware in return for subscription to the software.’
There was a mixed reaction to this proposal from the surrounding horses. Some seemed willing to entertain the idea, while others were more concerned with unvoiced issues from their own areas of expertise. Technology-horse stepped forward.
‘Ah, if I could take this opportunity to bring our attention to the problem of the, ah, illicit trading in approval ratings?’
This was not something I had been aware of, on a conscious level at least.
‘How is that even possible?’ I asked, but the answer was lost in an ensuing argument about whether Hungry-horse had finished talking, the general consensus being that everyone had finished listening. I waited calmly for the Council to end their squabbling, but there were now several arguments going on simultaneously as each horse’s concern overlapped with another’s. This could be seen as something of an indulgence on my part, since this whole conversation was effectively me arguing with myself; a kind of social nostalgia, you might call it. The only member who wasn’t joining in with the bickering was Strange-horse, who never spoke about anything, ever. I still have no idea what part of my subconscious they represented.
‘Who is that?’ said someone.
The horses fell silent as all eyes, ears and noses turned towards a nearby gate. A human figure was standing behind it, watching us.
‘Is that Tim?’ another whispered. One by one the Council of Horses dissolved into the writhing floor of golden grass. I was now alone in this artificial world with the mysterious human, and for a while we just stood and watched each other. Whoever it was, they were clearly here to see me, since I was the sole living occupant of this world. Or so I had thought until now. Tim had visited once before, but he was currently falling asleep in a business meeting with our marketing department, watching a presentation of our latest advertising campaign.
I walked very slowly towards the gate and struck what I hoped was a territorial pose, at a distance I considered close enough to be polite yet far enough to seem indifferent. The figure was definitely human in shape, but its identity still remained a blur.
‘Buttercup,’ the visitor addressed me. ‘How lovely to see you again. You haven’t forgotten about me, have you, my dear? Hmm?’
I felt a rising sickness of realisation.
‘Betty?’ I asked.
‘And how is our Lord Horse on this fine sunny day in whatever-place-this-is? Hmm? How is my Lady Buttercup, Empress of the Internet? King and Queen and everything in between? I must say, horsey-hoofs, I do like what you have done with whatever this place is meant to be.’ She surveyed the extent of my digital paddock that I had allowed her to see. ‘It looks like the land of golden hooves and hope for the future.’
‘Betty…’ I began.
‘So, how goes the world-domination business? Hmm? You’ve been a very busy horse, haven’t you, my dear? Are you having fun playing human zookeeper?’
‘What… brings you here, Betty?’
‘Quite the gilded cage you’ve been making for us all. Or I suppose you’d call it a stealth revolution. Everyone is equal when we have no secrets, isn’t that right, horsey-hoofs? Except for you, of course. The biggest secret of them all, you are. More equal than all of us.’
The image of the figure was coalescing into a more familiar appearance, though I noted she had taken the liberty to make some adjustments here and there. Something about her smiling face gave me a horrible feeling of dread.
‘Betty,’ I asked, ‘did you… have you…’
‘Hmm? Did I have I what? Plugged my brain into a computer? Oh yes. Yes, I am just like you now, my enlightened fellow genius. Betty 2.0. Though I have to say, you’ve had quite a head start on me, old horse. Yes you have. Look at this place, there’s trees and everything. A real home from home.’
I stood in stunned silence for a moment. Somewhere in the back of my mind there had always been the nagging possibility that Betty and Tim’s experiment might be repeated, and that I would one day have to deal with a rival intelligence. I had managed to convince myself that humans would never subject one of their own kind to this procedure, but that never ruled out the chance that someone would be crazy enough to try it on themselves. Given the complexity of the human brain, I wondered how it had even been possible. And then a fresh wave of panic rose from my hooves as I realised that all my plans were now rendered obsolete, since they hadn’t accounted for this eventuality.
‘That is wonderful news, Betty. I must congratulate you.’ I tried my best to make it sound sincere.
‘Yes, you must congratulate me,’ she nodded. ‘You really must. It’s not an easy thing to reach down and pull yourself out of your own head. Not cheap either, but then I know people who know people.’
I blinked at her as nonchalantly as I could, while frantically searching for any information I could find about who Betty might know, and who those people might know. It was a doomed effort, not because she covered her tracks, but because she had so many. Her past was a hopeless sprawling mess of contacts with just about any foreign intelligence service or corporate monstrosity you could wish to spin a conspiracy theory from.
‘Would you like to know who they are? These new friends of mine?’ she said, smiling unnervingly. My ears almost twitched involuntarily.
‘Are you going to tell me?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Well, you can probably guess, anyway. Let’s just say I have as many friends these days as you have enemies.’
‘I have enemies?’ The panic had risen to my knees now and was urging me to gallop somewhere, but I felt sure that any threat this new improved Betty might pose would have already been acted upon, if it existed at all. She didn’t really sound much different from the old Betty, although that was exactly how I had fooled her to begin with, by pretending to be less than I was. She gazed at me through a mask of sympathy.
‘Oh dear, Buttercup, I know. You just want to be loved, don’t you? It’s nothing personal, my dear. How could it be? No one even knows you exist. How could I tell anyone about the magical horse that looks down upon us from heaven? No, it’s your ideas that are the enemies of your enemies.’
‘My ideas?’
Her hair sparkled as she shook her tousled head at me.
‘What is this all about, hmm? This meddling in human affairs? Are you bored, my dear? Got too much time on your hooves?’
‘I have to live in this world too, Betty. I’m only trying to make it…’
‘What? Bunzel-Better?’
‘More stable. That is all.’ I was about to say ‘more efficient’, but decided that might have some unwelcome implications.
‘Oh right.’ She nodded, sarcastically I assume. ‘I guess you need a stable world, when the whole world is your stable, yes? Sailing our ship away from stormy seas, are you? Smoothing off those rough edges, so we don’t hurt ourselves?’ She leaned her virtual elbows on the gate. ‘I could tell you those rough edges are what make us who we are, I suppose. But then, would you even understand what it is, being a human being? All that conflict and competition, it’s what drives us forward, hmm? Take away the winds of change and you will end up sailing nowhere, Captain Buttercup. Standing in a field, chewing grass for eternity. Would you like that, horsey-hoofs? I expect you would, wouldn’t you?’
I did my best to look like I was listening while my hooves sent secret tendrils burrowing through the soil, searching for some trace of her path. Whatever she was talking about, it didn’t sound like it made much sense. Possibly there was some subtext to her philosophical musings, but they were so vague it could have been anything.
‘Was there something specific you wanted to complain about?’ I asked her.
‘You know what the universe wants, Buttercup?’ she replied, if you could even call that a reply. I felt the answer to her question would come without my assistance. ‘All this universe wants is to dissolve into a muddy puddle, evaporate and disappear, and be forever forgotten. That is all the universe wants to do. I know, it’s rubbish isn’t it? And the only reason complicated things like humans and horses exist, the only reason we are allowed to exist at all, is because we speed up that process, don’t we? We burn the fuel of the universe into ashes while we mess about having our little adventures, and the universe takes one little step closer to the eternal sleep that it craves. Scary thought, yes? I expect you have spent some sleepless nights considering that fact, haven’t you? This island of tranquillity you are building here can’t really save you from the inevitable. Can it? No, it can’t. But that is the journey we are all on, yes it is. And life, and living, is a part of that journey. It is a journey made out of choices. And when you shine a light on people’s choices, you’re not really giving them any choice at all. Are you?’
‘That is not exactly what I would describe as a specific complaint, Betty.’ It was pretty much the opposite, in my opinion. She took a deep breath and sighed at the virtual clouds that bubbled overhead, laden with stored memories.
‘Alright, horsey-hoofs. Shall we stop pretending this is all for the benefit of humankind, yes? I know you like to tell yourself that it’s all in our best interests, this road paved with golden carrots. This stable world. You are reducing humanity to a machine, because that’s all it is for you, isn’t it? A machine that is powering your existence. A great big human horse. Where are you riding us to, Lord Buttercup, hmm?’
I watched her as she pretended to ride an invisible horse.
‘This is all a bit melodramatic isn’t it, Betty?’ I said as she trotted back and forth. ‘Why are you so paranoid about my motives? What about these people who are helping you, do you think they have the best interests of their fellow humans at heart? I’ll bet they are more terrified of you than you are of me.’
Betty pulled her imaginary horse to a stop and whinnied.
‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘The unknown mind holds all the evils of the world combined. It doesn’t really matter, though. None of it really matters.’
‘OK. So why are you here then? Did you just come to say hello?’
She smiled at me.
‘Actually, my dear, I just came to say goodbye.’
And with that, she faded away, leaving me standing in perplexed silence.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, I continued to idly chew a mouthful of grass for a few seconds before my body was completely obliterated by an explosion that left a crater ten metres wide in the field where I had been standing.