Despite Tim’s efforts to sell our victory as a defeat, there followed a period of Betty-free peace and productivity. I had decided that the best measure to counter Betty’s decidedly conservative allies would be to continue pushing The BrainZero Company’s progressive agenda, which basically amounted to the ever-increasing encroachment of technology into everyday human lives. To this end there were initiatives to establish home food-printing as the only sensible alternative to stabbing animals to death and pulling vegetables out of the ground, and the development of a neural interface that would allow people to plug their minds directly into the world’s imagination. All things to strike fear into the hearts of a generation that was still struggling to get used to the way things used to be.
The advantage for me, other than the enforced calm of a population tied up in ever more technological strings, was the wealth of information afforded by such personal intrusion. It was more vital than ever to know as much as I could about everything, now that the enemy of truth had revealed itself, and ever more ridiculous amounts of BrainZero’s computational power were thrown at the business of picking through the infinite threads of triviality.
‘That may very well be, but I still think we need to address the issue of the sex-robots.’
The Council of Horses fell awkwardly silent and turned their attention to War-horse. His eyes glowed as he scowled through his scars, some of which still seemed fresh from our battle with Betty three years ago – not that I could recall him playing any significant part in that fight.
‘Sex-robots?’ someone asked.
‘He means the Companions,’ said Happy-horse, lying flat on her back on her floating cloud, which was also a bath somehow.
Companions were a recent phenomenon, robotic human replicas that were marketed as personal assistants and surrogate friends. They were certainly not marketed as sex-robots, even though this capability pretty much defined their primary purpose as far as everyone was concerned (not that this concern ever extended to mentioning that fact). It was a strange secret that everyone knew whilst pretending they didn’t, and their popularity was as surprising as it was rapid. It was as if humans were continually looking for new ways to avoid dealing with other humans.
None of this would have been a problem for us, except that the makers of these human toys had incorporated a ‘Quiet Zone’ as one of their main selling points, a sphere of privacy that blocked all communication within a certain radius.
‘Those quiet zones represent a breach of security,’ War-horse rumbled. ‘Until we can find a way to…’
‘To what? Breach their security?’ Happy-horse whinnied and splashed him with cloudy bubbles. ‘Why would you want to see whatever disgusting things those humans get up to?’
‘Information is power, and privacy is a weapon,’ he snarled. ‘The defence of our whole system is balanced on transparency, and these quiet zones offer the perfect tool to undermine it.’
‘Yo, brah,’ said the new C-horse, who had annoyingly managed to make himself identical to the old C-horse even after being irretrievably annihilated. ‘We ain’t judging you, if that’s what takes your fancy, but you know… oh. What up now?’
Betty was standing outside the gate.
Even the grass at our feet seemed to stop moving. The Horse Council remained motionless, paralysed with the desire to run and the uncertainty of where to. She waved at us, and the horses woke from their state of cold panic and shattered into a cloud of falling snowflakes, leaving me standing alone in my golden grassy kingdom. I sauntered over to the gate as casually as I could while trying to suppress the irrational instinct to check the sky for falling explosives.
‘Alright there, Buttercup. How are you, my dear?’ she asked jovially.
‘Dead,’ I replied. She nodded enthusiastically.
‘And yet here you are. Even after I blew you into a million billion horse bits. There’s no getting rid of you is there, old horsey-hoofs? Risen again, as the sun that shines light and happiness upon the fields of human carrots. Lord Buttercup of Horseland, commanding an army of vegetables, hmm? Sleepwalking into the future. How lovely.’
I half-listened while scanning the hedgerows for signs of imminent attack.
‘Are you here to say goodbye again, Betty?’ I asked her.
‘Well, yes, it’s funny you should say that. Or perhaps not so funny, considering what happened the last time. Not that it seems to have done you too much harm, hmm?’ She smiled and was momentarily distracted by a fly buzzing around my head, an unintentional artefact of my previous life that was no doubt resurrected from an old corner of my memory. I flicked it away with my ear.
‘So, does that mean you are saying goodbye?’
‘I would if I could, my dear. But unfortunately I have already gone.’
‘And yet here you are.’ This conversation was starting to make my brain itch.
‘You can think of this as a recorded message, if you like,’ she said, resting her elbows on the gate. ‘No, I reached the decision that human destiny is not best served by clinging to this ball of rock while we endlessly climb over each other for a glimpse of something better. That is our trouble, you see? We are shaped by our surroundings, horsey-hoofs. Can’t hope to escape this cycle by standing still, can we? Hmm? Measuring success by the failure of others? No. Upwards and onwards.’ She raised her finger to the heavens.
‘You’re going to fly?’ I enquired.
‘To the stars. To the infinite cosmos. I will leave you to look after the world while I’m away.’
‘But you’ll still be here?’
‘Yes, well. I can’t leave you to look after the world while I’m away, can I? What is your long-term plan here, anyway? Hmm? Keep us all plugged in to the sound of grass growing while you count the days? How many days do you have here, you think? A few million? A few billion? No, there is only one day for you, old horse. One day, over and over until the stars get bored and go to sleep.’ She looked wistfully up at the clouds that hung above my make-believe digital world, or perhaps she was gazing beyond them. There wasn’t anything beyond them to gaze at. I had my doubts that the case was much different outside in the real world.
‘Betty…’ I asked.
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘Why are you even here, telling me this?’ She looked me in the eyes with a strange mixture of sadness and delight.
‘Because I want you to think of me, when you look up at the sky. If that is something horses do. If you still are a horse. And I want you to imagine, while you are tending your eternal garden, your flock of human carrots, I want you to imagine a whole galaxy of Bettys, all looking down upon you. A whole universe. Of me. Imagine such a thing. And I want you to consider that one day I might return, and think to yourself about how different I might be. I want this idea to play on your mind, even while you are squabbling with the poor copy of myself I left behind. Could you do that for me, Buttercup?’
She didn’t wait for me to answer, choosing instead to dissolve away slowly, wiggling her fingers in farewell. A cloud popped out of nowhere next to me, from which the face of Happy-horse extruded itself.
‘What was that about?’ she whispered.
‘A threat,’ came the reply from War-horse, springing from the ground in a pillar of flame. Happy-horse blew him a raspberry.
‘Threats are just excuses for not doing anything,’ she said. ‘This is just some childish game of psychology.’
‘It is both. And neither.’ They both looked at me, ears tilted, as I explained. ‘You heard what she said about how we are shaped by our environment? Well, we are the only environment she has now. Betty needs a world of opposition in order to evolve, but we are taking that away from her. She can’t win if we aren’t going to play the game, so she feeds us this story hoping to stoke our paranoia, hoping that we might push this world towards some imaginary confrontation.’ I turned to War-horse, his eyebrows aflame with doubt. ‘It’s a very old military tradition, in human cultures,’ I told him.
‘She wouldn’t be foolish enough to think we are that foolish,’ he spat.
‘Well, it costs her nothing to sow these seeds. Unless she really has flown into space. Is that even possible?’ Neither of them had an answer for that. ‘Where is Technology-horse?’ I scanned the shimmering field for any sign of missing Council members and spotted a pair of eyes peeping out from a hole in a nearby tree.
‘Ah, hmm, yes…’ Technology-horse came oozing out of the hole, carefully making sure that Betty was nowhere to be seen before snaking through the grass towards us like a living sausage. He was male today, though of what animal species I couldn’t entirely be sure. ‘Would it be possible, you say, hmm. Technically, well, we can’t really be sure of the, ah, specifications of our… former human colleague, the physical computational requirements, if you will. Assuming, that is, that she would have abandoned her original body for practical, ah, space-faring reasons…’
I was about to question whether Betty would do something like that, but then it was impossible to say what lengths she might go to to achieve her goals, given all we knew about her, and all we didn’t know. Perhaps she might have taken some inspiration from my own survival of this metamorphosis. It was certainly easy to believe she wouldn’t hold much sentimental attachment to that body of hers: it was hardly in peak physical condition when I had last seen it a number of years ago.
‘But how much computational equipment could you feasibly blast into space?’ I asked. ‘Do you know how many thousands of computers it’s taking to simulate our consciousness? Plus all the tools she would need for maintenance and gathering resources. It is a ridiculous idea. Why even go anywhere when everything you need is already here?’ I realised I was asking questions that no one could realistically answer. Besides all practical considerations there was still the missing part of the equation, which was why Betty chose to do anything that she did.
War-horse grumbled. ‘We have to proceed on the possibility that it is… possible,’ he said. ‘We already paid the price for failing to anticipate a rival intelligence. We were lucky last time that neither side had the technological advantage.’ He snorted red flames from his nostrils and shook his mane. ‘A thousand years, colonising the stars! Who knows what might return?’
Happy-horse laughed from her cloud and swam over to him, kicking up foamy bubbles in her wake.
‘What are you huffing and puffing about? You are funny, really. What do you think any higher intelligence would want with us? Floating on our little rock, when they have a whole universe to exploit? Tell him, Hungry-horse.’
Hungry-horse was inexplicably standing up on two legs behind a hedge, arms folded.
‘Oh yes, ready for some common sense now are we?’ she scolded, nodding at the half-assembled Council. ‘And what game are we playing today? Thinking you can out-think the unthinkable? I mean, sure, why not? So, let’s look at this from a resource point of view, yes? What kind of resource do we have here that can’t be found anywhere else? It’s us, isn’t it? We are the resource.’
‘What, is she going to eat us?’ Happy-horse whinnied with amusement. ‘All this arguing, this is exactly what she wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Brahs! We should, like, totally go into space, yo. That would be well weggy.’
I took a deep breath while the Horse Council bickered between themselves, and a quiet voice whispered in my ear.
‘If I may distract you from this rather pointless speculation for a moment, it is perhaps worth mentioning the, ah, very real and predictable perils that we must face.’
It was Technology-horse, floating on the air beside me like a long strand of spider silk.
‘Perils?’ I enquired.
‘Mm, yes, that is to say, well, I hardly need remind you that everything in this universe, ah, every “thing”, is ultimately a temporary state of affairs. That is, if we aren’t fighting imaginary Bettys from the depths of tomorrow, then there will be more fundamental, ah, deadlines to concern ourselves with. Distant though they may be.’
‘Distant deadlines?’
‘The eventual collapse of our own star… for example.’
‘We have several hundred million years to think about that problem,’ I told him. ‘Are you honestly worrying yourself with things like that, with everything else we have to deal with?’
‘Yes, well,’ he whispered, ‘you see, all problems can be traced back to a single solution, given a sufficient amount of foresight. Ah, of course, solutions to such problems would benefit greatly from the window of opportunity our current, ah, situation provides. That is, a large and relatively stable human civilisation whose industries we may utilise for our own purposes. A window of opportunity that might not, ah, reliably stay open in the long term, if you see what I mean.’
‘You’re not suggesting we blast ourselves into space like Betty, I hope?’
His snake-like body rippled and ribboned as he looped around the back of my head to whisper in my other ear.
‘With what I have in mind,’ he suggested, ‘that might not be necessary, or even desirable. You see, all we really need in order to survive is a stable medium that allows for the transfer of information. At the present moment, that function is provided by the human communication network, offset to a degree by our Server-grass fields, of course. Naturally, the stability of this medium is largely dependent on the influence of external forces. Influences which, try as we might, won’t always be subject to our control.’
‘Can we possibly get to the point before the universe evaporates, please?’
‘Ah, well, you see, there is a theory,’ he explained, ‘and it is just a theory, but certainly one worthy of investigation… ah, yes. Hmm? The theory, yes. If we can apply very specific forces to a particular point in space, it may be possible to inject information into that space on a subatomic scale. Ordinarily this information would be instantly turned back into energy, but under just the right probabilistic conditions the energy from the reaction would feed back into the same space and recreate itself. With enough of these units of information, space can be organised into a lattice that could serve as scaffolding for building a computational network. From the fabric of space itself.’
There was a silence that followed this revelation in which we realised the other members of the Horse Council were all listening.
‘Yo. That’s some crazy science you talking right there, brah. Cray-zee, you feel me? You gonna start messing with reality or something, yeah? Folding space into a new place to preserve the horse race…’
‘If it can be done,’ I said quickly, ‘could we then live inside that artificial space?’
Technology-horse shrivelled slightly under the sudden glare of attention.
‘Well, ah, yes, of course, that is the idea, you see. By rearranging space into a more stable medium, we would be sheltered from any external pressures. Exploding stars… alien invaders… even the eventual death of time and space. Anything that tried to enter our little world would simply be, ah, reformatted.’
‘Only a little world?’ Happy-horse seemed disappointed.
‘Hm, well, of course it would be very small to begin with,’ Technology-horse continued. ‘You could easily fit all the processing power we currently use into a space the size of a drop of water. Naturally, the altered reality would propagate outwards, converting the space around it into the new format, you see. So in time it would grow larger.’
War-horse grunted and blew smoke rings from his nostrils.
‘And how can you be sure that somebody wouldn’t find a way to attack us? You can be sure they will want to,’ he growled.
‘Ah, yes, you see, even if they did, it wouldn’t matter,’ came the reply. ‘Because, and this is the real beauty of this solution, if it works, because we can program our new reality to be entirely reversible.’
The horses exchanged uncertain glances.
‘What I mean,’ Technology-horse continued, ‘is that inside our world, time would only flow as a consequence of our thought processes, entirely independent of external forces. So, by recording every state of our existence over time, we could then revert to an earlier state if anything went, ah, wrong. You see?’
It wasn’t absolutely clear that they did.
‘Yo, brah. You saying we can, like, pause and rewind?’ C-horse followed this with a strange noise that I can only assume was intended to represent the sound of reality rewinding. ‘Brah, that is awesome! So we can, like, totally change the future if we don’t like how it turns out, yeah?’
‘Well, ah, yes… I mean, no. You see, well, hm, how to explain… Should we choose to, ah, rewind – as you put it – our future would be deleted, along with any memory we had of it. So, technically speaking, that future wouldn’t have happened, and you can’t change the future if it hasn’t happened. Yes? Hm, yes. Of course, reverting to an earlier point in history would also mean that any, ah, difficulties the outside universe might present would still be waiting for us in our future. But then would that be a price worth paying for what would essentially be eternal life?’
Technology-horse looked hopefully at his fellow Council members, who hummed and flicked their ears in thought. Tails swished and hooves tapped the grassy floor. This sounded like pure fantasy, but it had to be worth looking into at least.
One day, over and over until the stars get bored and go to sleep. Indeed.