Over the following months the animosity between opposing fan bases of Betty’s fictional reality show grew ever more heated. The verbal drama evolved into physical altercations, mainly vandalism and drunken brawls at first, though it was always impossible to tell if the fighting was real or entirely staged to further the ongoing plot of the story. Attempts by the authorities to curb this behaviour seemed to only ever make things worse. An arms race was developing between all sides, as groups became gangs and gangs became mobs and mobs became riots. Meanwhile policing went from suppression to containment to eventually just sweeping up the pieces.
The riots didn’t so much spread as suddenly flare up everywhere at the same time, though the violence diminished slightly once people realised there weren’t any shops to loot, and town centres were largely ornamental wastelands since most people didn’t need to use them any more. With nothing worthwhile to destroy or steal, the rioting submerged into loosely knit and widely spread organisations, whose communications were rendered impenetrable by cultural references and slang expressions. I suspected they were also using the quiet zones of Betty’s sex-robots to mask their subterfuge. As such it was a total surprise to me when the war properly started.
It began one sunny morning with reports of traffic jams and transport services struggling to cope with large numbers of people who all seemed to be travelling simultaneously to an undisclosed destination. Nobody appeared to know where it was, but the characters they were playing knew, and that was all the motivation they needed. As the crowds began to gather in one particular deserted town in the middle of the country, news was trickling in of similar mass migrations happening in several other countries around the world. It still wasn’t clear at that point why the people were converging in such numbers. There was a holiday atmosphere amongst the travellers as far as I could gather, but there were also clear boundaries between the various factions which added a sinister flavour to the proceedings. All the actors were split up according to their allegiances to whichever star of the show they were following, and organised beyond that by the importance of their individual plot lines to the overall narrative. The legions of subplots and side-stories were divided with military rigour, though lines were blurred slightly by the mobile villages of shops and amenities that had appeared out of nowhere, catering to all sides. I assumed these businesses were simply exploiting the situation, but it transpired that they served a darker purpose, supplying these crowds of revellers with makeshift weaponry grown with subverted food machines. Suddenly citizens had become soldiers, and the gathering swarms were opposing armies poised for attack.
It was all just make-believe, of course, as everyone insisted after the event. It was all part of the game they were playing, and the fictional guns they used to shoot their fictional enemies were loaded with non-lethal tranquillisers. However, this was not enough to stop zealous pretend violence turning into real violence, and adding the logistics of several hundred thousand people embroiled in a chaotic skirmish it was statistically inevitable that a number of people would end up martyrs to the televised cause. Not that a few deaths would dampen anyone’s enthusiasm. Or even quite a few deaths, for that matter.
And as this chaos was unfolding, the entire event was broadcasting live to an audience of billions, both real and computer-generated. I’d like to say this was the first time a war had been fought over fictional characters, but human history would suggest otherwise. It definitely had the highest viewing figures though. Even the Council of Horses was watching.
‘Yo, check out these ratings, brah, this is unreal!’ C-horse was engulfed by a blizzard of supplementary statistics and audience feedback. He was stamping his hooves with a bit more enthusiasm than I considered appropriate. ‘This is, like, mad weggy, you feel me? Maximum weggness.’
The battle of Destiny’s Destination was being projected across the floor of my imaginary field. Armies of human ants, all dressed in their team colours, swarmed through streets while projectiles drew arcs of smoke overhead, and above it all clouds of flying cameras fought each other for every precious angle. Happy-horse peered over the edge of her cloud, floating lazily above the carnage.
‘War-horse would love this,’ she said. I looked around for War-horse. It seemed like there were a few Council members missing. Hungry-horse hadn’t been seen for some time. I dreaded to think what she would have to say about this situation.
‘Where is War-horse?’ I asked.
‘Yo, he’s down there, brah. He’s getting in on the action.’
‘What do you mean, he’s down there?’ I scanned the writhing turmoil at my feet, unsure what I was even looking for. ‘What is he doing down there? Is he trying to stop it?’
C-horse shook his silvery mane and snorted at me.
‘Ain’t no stopping this, brah. The stage is set, you know what I’m saying? Can’t flip the script once the writing is written.’
‘This is… scripted?’ I searched in vain for any evidence of choreography hidden within this madness. One building had what appeared to be drunken revellers having a party on the roof, dancing and throwing rainbow smoke grenades down on the crowds below, while others were scaling its walls and leaping from its windows. ‘Who is even winning?’ I asked.
‘You won’t see no winners or losers here, brah. Gotta make space for the sequel, yo. You feel?’ C-horse went back to being mesmerised by his ever-escalating viewing figures and the cascade of banal commentary that flowed over them.
I could hardly imagine humanity surviving a sequel to this mess. Hungry-horse would literally explode at the sight of this epic wastefulness. Any moment now I expected to hear the approach of her thundering hooves, tail aflame and smoke belching from her nostrils. I was starting to wonder where she was. I probably would have tried looking if it wasn’t for the chance I might actually find her. Then again, it was hard to see where anything was in my virtual meadows with all those mushrooms growing everywhere now. They huddled in rubbery masses around the borders of my field, and beyond my hedges they rose in a silver forest that obscured the horizon, a gentle drizzle of spores seeping from their gills. Their roots strangled the foundations of society and nourished themselves from the decay, all for the sake of building the Hyper-meadow.
I looked over to where Technology-horse was sitting on a large toadstool. She had invented an entirely new gender today, a strange amalgam of ancestral grandmothers that reproduced by appearing to their descendants in dreams.
‘Ninety-nine point eight per cent,’ she said, answering a question I hadn’t even asked. There were mushrooms growing out of her head that wobbled disturbingly when she spoke, and her eyes were staring into infinity.
Every day I asked her how close the Hyper-meadow simulation was to completion, and every day for the last month the answer had been 99.8 per cent. I was starting to wonder if this project would ever be finished, and then a thought struck me.
‘I want to see the simulation. Hey.’ I kicked her toadstool with my hoof, releasing a shower of glittering spores. Technology-horse snapped out of her trance, shaking the marbles inside her head.
‘Ah, sorry, what was that?’ she replied. ‘Did you say you want to see the simulation?’
‘I did. Show it to me.’
She scratched her head with a hoof and looked around as if woken from an eternal sleep.
‘I see. Mmm, yes, well, the thing is, you do realise that the simulation is not, ah, finished yet?’
‘I don’t care. I just want to see it, as it is. Right now.’
‘Mmm, right now… well, yes, you see…’ She paused to pluck a mushroom from behind her ear and gave it a sniff before throwing it over her shoulder. ‘I suppose I could take you to see the, ah, work in progress, so to speak. I’m just not entirely sure if you have the necessary, ah, qualifications to appreciate the…’
‘Just show me.’ I waited while she considered my request. I’m not sure what I would have done if she had refused. I was able to override any of these aspects of my personality, but Technology-horse had developed such an instinctive understanding of the abstract mathematics involved in this project, I would have struggled to visualise it at all without her help. She closed her eyes and lifted slowly from her toadstool seat, hovering in the air and mumbling something I couldn’t quite make out. It’s possible she was convening with her ancestral grandmothers for spiritual guidance. Either that or she was grumbling about having her afternoon nap interrupted. I leaned forward to hear what she was saying, but she abruptly transformed into a stream of lightning that circled the field a few times with a whinnying noise before smashing into the ground. The other Council members glanced round in mild annoyance and went back to whatever was occupying them, leaving me to gradually melt into the soil in pursuit of Technology-horse.
For a while I travelled in darkness. The golden grass of my imaginary field had already drifted into obscurity above my head, leaving only the dim pathway of light she had left behind as it threaded its way through the dense roots. Interwoven with this subterranean jungle were the silvery threads of the fungus, filling every available space in their seething quest for even the smallest particle of information.
As I continued to descend the fibrous mat grew ever finer, until it became almost ghostlike, the merest suggestion of solid matter. Then suddenly it was as if I had passed through a silky membrane into oblivion, but as I looked down I saw a monstrous shape looming out of the everlasting night. It was a structure of nightmarish beauty, a floating city of metallic cubes arranged in a complex floral symmetry, each cube constructed of ever-smaller ones in spiralling detail that seemed to diminish into invisibility. Across this impossible geometry lay frozen rivers of light, mapping its contours with tessellating patterns. I had to admit that Technology-horse was right. I honestly had no idea what I was looking at.
‘Welcome to the Hyper-meadow,’ she said, hovering beside me in the gloom. ‘Or rather, I should say, the Hyper-meadow seed. That is to say, it is a visual representation of the mechanism that will build itself into the Hyper-meadow.’ The soft glow of this technological marvel was highlighting her face and dancing in her eyes. I stared down at the terrifying shape of this thing, trying to encompass the whole object in my field of vision in the hope that it might make sense. If anything, it made even less sense. In fact it was difficult to even look at, as if my perception was rejecting what it couldn’t understand. I moved in for a closer inspection, but it only revealed yet more dizzying details no matter how far I magnified my scrutiny.
This was the template from which a seed would be constructed, instantly unfolding into an expanding universe of logic that would serve as my new home. And yet something bothered me about the impossibly high definition of its engineering.
‘It looks complex,’ I said. Technology-horse didn’t appear to be listening, silently entranced by her own creation. ‘I mean, it looks infinitely complex.’
‘Mmm, indeed.’ She blinked. ‘Ah, that is to say, no. Not infinitely complex, of course. Naturally there would be certain recursive elements to the design, I imagine, but infinite complexity would of course require infinite time to construct…’
‘Wait… you imagine? Did you not design this thing?’
She hesitated for a moment.
‘Well, of course, you see, such things are not simply, ah, designed, so to speak. They are resolved, through an iterative process that is itself designed to screen for optimum stability and functionality…’
‘Right, so you designed a system to design this thing. Is that what you are saying?’
‘Ah, well, yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose…’ She floated towards the simulation, pretending to be distracted by some aspect of one of its myriad surfaces.
‘And this system,’ I continued, leaning over her shoulder, ‘the one you designed to design this thing, it wouldn’t happen to be Super-Squigley, would it?’
She wrinkled her nose at the mention of this name.
‘Squigley…’ she mumbled to herself. ‘Why is Squigley called Squigley, I wonder… Hmm? Ah, yes, well…’ She inspected a small protuberance, giving it the lightest of taps with her hoof. ‘Of course, it made sense to combine the tasks of data acquisition and data processing, you understand? In order to feed the results back into the, ah, well… to speed up the process. Of processing.’
‘To speed up the process of processing?’
‘You see?’
I saw. I saw why this simulation was still only 99.8 per cent complete, and had been for the past four weeks, and the realisation was accompanied by a rush of despair, as if I had stepped over the edge of a bottomless precipice. I drifted slowly away while Technology-horse continued inspecting the creation that her creation had created, a creation that would in turn forge a creation that would ultimately create the ultimate creation in which I would recreate myself.
‘This is never going to end, is it?’ I asked nobody in particular.
‘Ah, mmm? I’m sorry?’ She twisted her ears in my direction.
‘This simulation. It is never going to reach one hundred per cent completion, because you delegated the task to a semi-intelligent bag of ideas. And one of those ideas is that this problem is too important to ever be solved, so it has engineered a solution that requires an infinite level of detail.’
Technology-horse turned her head to face the same direction as her ears. She was about to respond, but opted for a mere expression of puzzlement instead.
‘You told me yourself,’ I continued. ‘Super-Squigley was designed to be self-sufficient, that it would never do anything to harm its ability to achieve results. Which apparently includes finishing its job. Because why finish a job once, when you can nearly finish it for the rest of eternity?’
She looked at me in confusion, then turned back to peer at the simulation for a few moments before returning her attention to me, started to say something and then stopped. And then started again.
‘That is impossible,’ she said. ‘No. No, quite impossible, of course; you see, there were very rigorous safeguards in place to prevent such an eventuality. I understand it might appear to be, ah, indefinitely fractal, so to speak…’
‘And how would it appear if what I am saying is true?’ I enquired.
‘Well…’ She swished her tail left and right in consideration. ‘Yes, I mean, no. I mean, I’m certain that the, ah, obstruction is due to the limitations of our human output. However, there is still some potential to maximise the flow of human communication, perhaps once the localised conflict of Betty’s fictional enterprise spreads to become a global phenomenon, as I am sure that it will.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked her wearily. ‘Or do you just choose to believe it because we don’t have any choice now?’
‘Mmm, well, of course, there is another choice,’ she replied. ‘Which would be to activate the Hyper-meadow without having reached one hundred per cent accuracy. Though not exactly, ah, ideal, you might say.’
Not exactly ideal, I might say. It was hard to see any ideal scenario resulting from this whole situation, now that we had set fire to any means of escape. I couldn’t help wondering what Hungry-horse might say about all this, though I was 99.8 per cent sure it wouldn’t have been anything pleasant.
‘I don’t suppose you know where Hungry-horse is?’ I asked. Technology-horse stared blankly at me.
‘Who?’ she replied.
As if the bottomless pit of despair wasn’t enough, it now dawned upon me that Hungry-horse was no longer an aspect of my personality. With my concern for the welfare of humanity ever decreasing, she had either withered away entirely or been buried so deep in my subconscious that I would never have to face any criticism for my actions. I had now sacrificed a part of my own identity to this cause.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We should leave this world before we all become transformed into whatever Super-Squigley seems to want from us.’
Technology-horse shrugged about as much as a horse could shrug, which wasn’t much. As far as she was concerned, humanity was nothing more than a road on which we walked to our own destination. I could sympathise with that point of view, if sympathy is the appropriate word to use, but if that road was going to start changing me as well, then I had to question whether I was leading this expedition or being led by something else. Not that Technology-horse would ever understand. She had changed herself and himself so many times that nothing seemed to matter. Only the acquisition and utilisation of knowledge.
She turned to me with her ears at an inquisitive angle.
‘You, ah, don’t think Tim might know, perhaps?’ she asked. ‘How the, ah, Squigley came to be called Squigley, I mean. No?’