The stable had remained much as I left it all those years ago. Unsurprisingly, an exploding horse had made it very difficult to keep people working there, and the facility had been largely deserted ever since. My old room was still used to store all the dusty old equipment that had brought me into the human world. The large screen was gathering cobwebs on the wall, various ancient computers were stacked up in silence and coils of cables hung lifeless from rusty hooks.
In the corner, a heap of straw was moving. A human face emerged from it, possibly to see where the irritating buzzing noise was coming from. It was coming from a hovering mechanical insect, attached to which was a small camera-phone displaying the cartoon image of a horse.
‘Tim,’ I greeted him. ‘You are a difficult man to find these days.’
He blinked at my floating camera for a few seconds and rubbed his eyes.
‘Buttercup?’ he croaked. His face sank back into his rudimentary nest of straw and was replaced by a groping hand that searched for a nearby bottle of water. After a few gulps he slowly erupted from his cocoon and gazed glassily at me.
‘What is all this about then, Tim?’ I asked, setting my camera down on a nearby stool. ‘Have you been reliving old times?’
He scratched his beard, which appeared to be half made of straw.
‘Old times…’ he muttered, looking around at the unused and unwanted junk around him. His eyes suddenly came to life. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked with some urgency.
‘Well, I had to guess, to a certain extent,’ I replied. ‘You have gone completely offline. Are you hiding from something?’
He glared suspiciously at the doorway and then squinted at my small glowing visage.
‘You haven’t been watching that Destination’s Destiny’s… whatever, then?’ he said, taking another sip from his bottle of water. It’s fair to say I avoided watching any human entertainment if I possibly could. Betty’s show was no exception, despite her attempts to make it my business, along with everyone else’s.
‘Is it getting worse?’ I hazarded a guess.
‘You could say that,’ he said, crawling on hands and knees to the doorway and poking his nose around the corner. Satisfied that no one was outside he crawled back to his nest of straw. ‘Did you know I’m the star of that show now?’ he asked me.
‘You? I didn’t think you were even in it,’ I replied.
‘No, neither did I, mate. I guess everyone’s in it, whether they like it or not. So, yeah, I’m in it, only in my absence they decided to make me into some kind of arch-villain or something. I only found out when a bunch of them broke into Bunzel Towers looking for me. Thank God I wasn’t there.’
‘Why are they looking for you?’ I asked. He began slumping into his pile of straw. ‘Tim. Why are people looking for you? What do they want?’
‘Invisible bloody forces,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s what they are looking for.’ He couldn’t get comfortable and sat up again, wisps of straw clinging to his hair. ‘That’s what people always blame for everything. Unseen, all-powerful invisible forces, controlling the world. Gods and demons, mate. Microscopic bloody germs. Aliens. I dunno. The more obviously wrong they are, the more they are obviously right, because the truth is being covered up or whatever. You know what people are like.’
He was struggling with something underneath his backside and pulled out an old horseshoe, throwing it across the room.
‘So here I am,’ he continued, ‘Tim Van Dangal, the biggest invisible force of them all. The mystery man behind BrainZero, running half the world, except I can’t talk to anyone about it cos I don’t even know how I’m doing it, so obviously I have something to hide. Obviously. And because I’m not joining in with their stupid reality show they can just write my part for me. So now I’m the shadowy figure responsible for everything that is wrong with everything, even though there wouldn’t be anything wrong with anything if it wasn’t for Destiny’s bloody Destiny… Destination… whatever. But, you know, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because it’s all fictional anyway, so they can make up anything they like. And I’m as fictional as any of it, I guess.’ He pulled a piece of straw from his beard and examined it. ‘Not that anyone would ever believe the reality.’
I have to confess I found this situation utterly mystifying. Constructing a deception was one thing, but the layers of wilful delusion that made Betty’s show possible seemed impenetrable. At the core of this madness was the strange paradoxical duality that existed in every human mind: the need to be a part of something bigger than themselves while also being the centre of their own universe.
‘Do you think this was Betty’s idea?’ I asked him. ‘Giving you the starring role in this fantasy, I mean.’ I’m not sure if he even heard me.
‘Twenty billion people out there,’ he said, glaring at the open doorway, as if he might be able to destroy the outside world with his eyes. ‘All plotting to overthrow my evil regime which doesn’t exist. I guess being a fictional character I can even be legally murdered, as long as my fictional murderer was given the appropriate fictional punishment.’
‘There aren’t really twenty billion people after you, Tim,’ I said, attempting to reassure him. To be honest, the actual number would probably still contain enough murderous psychopaths to populate a small country, but it was hard to tell exactly how much real danger he was in, and how much of this was the product of the mental torment he was clearly suffering from. ‘There aren’t even that many people in the world,’ I told him. He raised his eyebrows at me.
‘Don’t argue with the viewing figures, mate,’ he said. ‘Most of them are computer people, sure. But you know, even computers can have valid opinions, yeah? That’s what they’re programmed to do. Evaluate, assess. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Half the world wants me dead, and the other half is too busy telling everyone how terrible it all is to actually do anything about it. That’s all I am now. I’m a receptacle for public opinion. I think I read that somewhere.’ He began retreating back into his nest, folding straw over himself. ‘At least I’m still normal boring old Tim here,’ he mumbled, closing his eyes. ‘Good old Tim. Timothy Timkins. I just want to go to sleep and never wake up.’
‘I’m going to be leaving soon, Tim,’ I said.
‘Goodbye,’ he cooed softly.
‘I mean, I’m going to be leaving this universe,’ I clarified.
Tim opened his eyes and frowned at me.
‘You what, mate?’
‘I have developed a way to rewrite space into an organised format. I am going to use that reorganised space as a framework in which to store my consciousness.’ I paused to allow Tim to ask me any questions he might have, but he just stared at me from his heap of straw. ‘It will exist as a pocket of alternative reality, separate and self-sustaining. So, once I am inside it… I won’t need to be here any more.’ Tim nodded slowly and let his eyes drift out of focus. I wasn’t sure if he fully understood what I was saying. ‘The reason I am telling you this,’ I went on, ‘is because you are welcome to join me. If you would like to.’
He stared into the distance. I assumed he was considering my proposal but then he suddenly snapped out of his trance.
‘Sorry, what?’ he said. ‘You’re building… you’re turning space into… some kind of computer? That you can live inside?’
‘That is essentially what I am doing,’ I agreed.
‘Space?’ he queried.
‘The raw material that space is made from,’ I explained. ‘The fundamental building blocks of reality that—’
‘Yeah, whatever. And you want me to… what? Upload myself into this cyberhorse land with you?’
He didn’t appear to comprehend any immediate advantages in doing this.
‘You would be living in a simulated reality,’ I told him. ‘It can be any place you want it to be. With any people you want to be there.’
‘Hmm,’ he nodded. ‘People.’
‘If you want people there, that is. Simulated people are about as real as real people anyway,’ I said. ‘Real people are only really pretending to be real, because they don’t know what else to do.’
‘What else is there to do?’ he asked, gazing existentially into nothingness. I considered this for a moment.
‘There isn’t much else you can do, I suppose. Existence is like a reward you get for existing. It is both cause and effect.’
‘I don’t have the energy to even understand what that means.’ His eyes wandered sleepily around the room, looking at the abandoned equipment gathering dust and cobwebs around him. ‘I tell you what though, mate, if it gets me away from this world then sign me up. How does it work? Do you open my head up and poke wires in it or something? Will I be all super-clever like you and Betty? Dunno if I even want to be…’
‘Unfortunately we won’t have time for such a procedure,’ I explained – not that I would have offered to share my personal space with such a rival intelligence anyway. ‘We would just be making a straight copy of your consciousness. But extensive surgery won’t be necessary.’
‘A copy?’
‘Yes, an exact duplicate of your mind. That includes a virtual simulation of your body as well, since the two are inextricably linked. There will, of course, be potential for making subsequent modifications…’
‘Wait a second.’ He unfurled himself into a sitting position. ‘You’re gonna make a copy of me, and take that with you?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Your duplicate will share all your memory, so it will simply think it went to sleep in this world and woke up in a new reality.’
‘And what about the original? I mean me. I’ll still be here?’
‘That’s up to you,’ I shrugged. ‘I could put you to sleep if you like?’
‘Whoa, hang on, mate! What kind of deal is that? What do I get out of that?’
‘You get eternal life,’ I told him.
‘No I don’t. The other guy does, but that’s not me, is it?’
The cartoon horse on the phone’s display rubbed its chin thoughtfully with a hoof while I took a moment to formulate my answer.
‘Think of it like this,’ I said. ‘This isn’t really any different to what happens every night when you go to sleep. When you fall unconscious, you effectively cease to exist. The person that wakes up in your bed every morning thinks he is you, because he has all your memories, but if you died every night and an exact duplicate replaced you, you wouldn’t even notice the difference. Because they are essentially the same thing.’
Tim didn’t look entirely convinced.
‘You aren’t the same Tim that you were yesterday, and you won’t be the same Tim tomorrow. That continual stream of’ – I struggled for an appropriate word to describe the quality of being Tim – ‘Timmishness, that’s just an illusion. Like how the still frames of a video appear to show movement when they are played. You are simply a ripple flowing down a river of Tim.’
It looked like Tim was experiencing genuine pain as he tried to run this concept through his head.