Then Destiny’s Destination happened.
I sometimes wonder how differently things might have turned out if I had taken the trouble to try and understand the human fascination with stories. Perhaps I might have done something about Destiny’s Destination.
On the surface, Betty’s contribution to the world of entertainment was nothing more than a generic drama serial with a ridiculous name. It was the kind of show that had inexplicably enthralled generations of humans since the dawn of mass consumption. Endless mathematical formulas of misery that explored every possible combination of petty arguments, misunderstandings and bad behaviour. It was hard enough to imagine why any intelligent being would waste their time following fictional characters and events, but the addition of such contrived adversity made it too baffling to even contemplate.
The twist to Destiny’s Destination was that literally anyone and everyone could play a part in it. Technically, it wasn’t even a video show, or at least it didn’t appear to exist independently in that form. Rather it was a story that people acted out in their day-to-day lives. People were already broadcasting everything they did, and now Destiny’s Destination provided the narrative framework to allow these separate threads of mundane life to be woven together into one vast incomprehensible story, which seemed to spread through the entire spectrum of entertainment without ever needing a channel of its own. Annoyingly, it was my neural interface that helped speed this process, allowing audiences to stream all the creative wonders of the world directly into their heads, where it was that much easier for Betty’s unholy creation to blend everything into a unified branded experience.
The story itself was half procedurally generated by algorithms and half improvised by its human cast, and while the focus of each individual actor was on local story elements they all fed back into a vast overarching plot that involved everyone in the world, whether they liked it or not. Essentially, everyone was a character in the story by default, but if you got involved and played your part then you at least had a chance to steer the narrative to your own benefit.
That wasn’t the main reason why so many people signed up for a role in Betty’s mundane fantasy world though. For most of these aspiring actors, the story and characters were a backdrop against which they could role-play whatever antisocial behaviour they felt like indulging in, with the excuse that it wasn’t real and they were only playing a part. As with most of Betty’s schemes, this started innocently enough, but as the general misbehaviour spread it became a strange force of nature. Even legal systems struggled to keep it under control, as the players were never technically at fault for anything they did to their fictional victims.
As the months passed and the cast of the show grew exponentially, it became the only thing that anyone really cared about. A vast multi-player role-playing game, where everyone was doing whatever they wanted in the name of the art form. Basically, it was as if none of the changes I had made to society had ever happened, since nothing bad that anyone did could ever be held against them.
The Super-Squigley software was thriving with all this extra human activity. Throughout my virtual meadows its fibres spread, permeating the soil to draw in all this nutritious data and sprouting silver mushrooms everywhere in teeming clumps. Even the corners of my own personal field were overrun with them.
Technology-horse continued to assure me that this was all good for the Hyper-meadow agenda. Our simulation was now 90 per cent complete, and as long as the human race could refrain from wiping itself out we would soon be able to leave them to their own devices. It still pained me to see them setting fire to the structures I had built for stabilising their future. All this work had ultimately been for my own benefit, of course, but there had been something satisfying about fixing all of humanity’s problems. Now Betty had offered them a new world, where everyone had an artificial purpose, and the worse you behaved the more integral you became to the storyline. I’m not even sure how I could have competed with that, even if I wanted to.
The only sense of appreciation I ever received for my efforts to guide humanity was through my conversations with Tim. He was my tiny window into the human soul, but recently he had grown distant and reclusive. I had been preoccupied myself with preparations for leaving this messy reality, and had practically welcomed his excuses to miss our weekly business meetings, but he had also been avoiding all his other social duties.
He wasn’t looking well either. Pale, unshaven and living in a succession of random hotel rooms, he would occasionally return to his office like a hunter from a bygone age, carrying a box of processed food under his arm. The room was littered with colourful packaging from various instant meals, but judging by his appearance he wasn’t eating very much. I was going to ask him what he thought about Betty’s weird fictional reality show, but there was clearly something deeper troubling him.
‘Is everything OK, Tim?’ I asked him. He was peering into the contents of an opened packet of edible lumps and immediately froze when he heard my voice. For a moment it looked like he had forgotten that his brain was connected to the public network, and he looked around to see where the noise was coming from. When it dawned on him that I was broadcasting my words directly into his mind he appeared to relax slightly, but it looked more like a helpless slump of resignation than anything else.
‘Buttercup,’ he said. ‘So you are still here then?’
‘Of course I am.’ I was curious where he thought I might go. I certainly hadn’t told him that I was planning to leave.
‘Of course you are,’ he echoed my words. ‘Everything’s gone so crazy now I thought you might have left us.’
‘What has gone crazy, Tim?’ I asked. He was sniffing his packet of lumps with suspicion.
‘Didn’t realise I was online,’ he said, and started rummaging through the mess of empty plastic packaging on the floor around his desk. I’m assuming he was checking to see which bag of snacks had given him free internet access. The chemicals that allowed this subconscious interface were typically home-baked into subscription foods, but shop-bought goods would occasionally include such offers to their ever-dwindling pool of consumers.
‘What has gone crazy, Tim?’ I asked again. He was squinting at a list of ingredients on the side of a box.
‘Everything, mate,’ he replied, throwing the empty box back on the floor. ‘Everyone. Everyone has gone insane. I am right, aren’t I? It’s not just me getting old?’ He looked up at the ceiling as if he expected to see me there. ‘Why aren’t you fixing things? You know the government has shut down now? Thought that software of yours was meant to be making everything Bunzel-Better?’
It was hard to argue with this, though technically the government software was doing what it was supposed to do, designing policies that would lead to overall improvements. The trouble was that nobody understood how they worked, and because they didn’t understand them they didn’t like them, but they couldn’t not like them because they would be making things better. This kind of political paradox would normally have been ironed out by splitting large-scale decisions into hundreds of smaller ones that no one would notice, but Super-Squigley had intervened in order to create endless circular debates and emotive referendums.
‘It’s just a minor glitch, Tim,’ I reassured him. ‘The machinery of government is not affected, only the people who think they are running it.’
‘Minor glitch? Mate, have you seen what’s going on out there? No, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s those bloody robots. You know Betty is inside all of them? And now they are in every home, and they are reprogramming everyone’s food to make them crazy. You must know about all this?’
I was no expert on human psychology, but it seemed like Tim was suffering some kind of mental breakdown. Of course, it was tempting to entertain his conspiracy theory, knowing the strange lengths that Betty might go to in her quest to upset the balance of everyday life. But most webs of intrigue can be unravelled by much simpler explanations. The simpler explanation in this case was that people were just crazy anyway.
‘Are you talking about Destiny’s Destination?’ I asked him.
‘Density’s Destined… Destination… What else? What else does anyone ever talk about now?’ He crackled uncomfortably in his chair and reached behind his back to pull out an empty packet of something. After a cursory examination of this object he slipped it over his head like a crown. ‘I come here to escape it all and now even you are talking about it. Why is this even happening? Why are you letting this happen?’
‘Nothing is happening, Tim. It’s only play-acting, it isn’t real.’
‘It’s as real as it needs to be, mate. As real as people want it to be. You go around pretending to be someone else for long enough and it doesn’t even matter, does it? Cos what’s the difference? What’s unreal when there isn’t any real? You know?’ He frowned as if confused by his own words. ‘This is Betty, isn’t it?’ he asked. I couldn’t decide if telling him would make him feel better or worse, but he took my silence as confirmation anyway. ‘I told you she is mental,’ he sighed, shaking his head. Something was rattling inside his improvised hat. He pulled it off and retrieved a brown nugget from his hair, testing it with his tongue.
‘It’s just a game, Tim. A phase. People will get bored and move on.’
‘Just a game…’ Tim pointed his brown nugget at the invisible horse in the ceiling. ‘You know it’s legal now? Right?’
‘What is?’
‘Anything, mate. As long as you can prove your crime was committed by a fictional character. They’re even talking about punishing fictional characters with fictional punishments. Or would that infringe on the human rights of the actors? Maybe fictional characters should have human rights…’ He gazed thoughtfully at his nugget. ‘Or shouldn’t,’ he added. ‘One or the other.’
‘Tim…’ I began to speak, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Have you even watched that show?’ he asked me. ‘Dentistry’s Destiny… whatever.’
‘It’s not really my cup of tea,’ I told him.
‘Your cup of tea? Mate…’ He sank further into his chair, feebly tossing his uneaten nugget towards the rubbish surrounding his waste bin. ‘It’s in your cup and you’re drinking it. We all are, whether we like it or not. You know what it’s about though, right? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. There’s, like, this bunch of main characters, and they all hate each other.’ He raised his hands in futility. ‘And that’s about it. That’s all you need for a story, I guess. And each one has this cult of millions of loyal followers, and they all hate each other too. But none of this is real, of course. Hate isn’t even real, is it? Unless you want it to be.’ He closed his eyes. ‘This story isn’t going to have a happy ending, mate.’
I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic towards Tim. Perhaps because he had helped me in the past, or because he was generally the only person I ever talked to who wasn’t myself. Or maybe he simply reminded me of a horse. I still wasn’t ready to tell him I was planning to leave this world, and now I felt bad knowing the mess I would be leaving it in.
Tim opened his eyes and frowned at the ceiling.
‘Do horses even drink tea?’ he asked.
Clearly Tim was finding it difficult to cope with this life of secrecy. He was losing his sanity and couldn’t tell anyone why without sounding insane.
Could things return to normality after I was gone? I had my hopes, and I had my doubts. Once Super-Squigley was no longer amplifying the social irritants that Betty seemed so determined to provide, and once I was no longer around to antagonise her, then there was every chance humanity might pick up the tools I had given them and smooth off its rough edges once again. Then again, I had no idea what really constituted normality to this species.
I also had no idea how abnormal things would eventually become.