Betty sat at a table looking at Betty, who was sitting opposite. They appeared to be identical. They didn’t need to look identical; I suspect each was doing it in the hope of annoying the other. There was one way to tell them apart: one was frowning, and the other was smiling.
‘Hello, my dear,’ said smiling-Betty. Frowning-Betty became sarcastically-raised-eyebrows-Betty.
‘Really?’ she asked simply.
‘Don’t you remember me, dear?’ smiling-Betty replied. ‘I know you’ve been away a long time. You haven’t changed much though? Hmm?’
‘Hmm,’ replied sarcastic-Betty. ‘And is there any particular reason you are pretending to be me? I mean, obviously I am a vision of loveliness, but still. Rather a peculiar look for a horse, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m not pretending to be anyone, dear,’ smiling-Betty smiled. ‘I’m the Betty you left behind. Yes? When you went off exploring the galaxy? In your little spaceship? Left me here to keep an eye on things, didn’t you?’
Sarcastic-Betty went back to being frowning-Betty.
‘I didn’t go anywhere, my dear,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘No, because I’m not the original Betty, am I? I’m a reproduction, just like you. If that is what you really are. And to be honest, I don’t really care who you are. If you’re here on behalf of Buttercup then you may as well be that damned horse.’
‘Aww, look. I can turn into a horse, if you think it will help. Where is the original Betty then? Hmm?’
Frowning-Betty sat back in her imaginary chair. The bare, minimalist room they sat in was a simulation, set up to accommodate this meeting of the Bettys. I’m not sure why they required a table between them, unless it was simply to stop them from strangling each other.
‘The original Betty…’ said frowning-Betty slowly, ‘is complicated. Too complicated to communicate directly.’
‘Oh dear.’ Smiling-Betty looked amused by this.
‘I am a recording from a time before we… I… she departed.’
‘I see, so you’re here to help her negotiate with us lower forms of life, I get it.’
I still wasn’t sure this meeting was a good idea. After discovering that Betty had been stowing away inside the Hyper-meadow my first instinct was to find a way to delete her. I was still considering that option, and with hindsight it would have probably been the right thing to do. However, hindsight also reveals it would have been impossible, since to a certain extent she was responsible for holding my bubble of altered reality together. Her own existence, hiding within the flaws and cracks of the system, required that she made efforts to stabilise it, and I have to grudgingly admit that she had no doubt extended the lifespan of the Hyper-meadow in the process. I was still keen to discover exactly how she had gained entrance to my domain, but she had declined to answer, expressing the opinion that I might die of embarrassment if she told me.
It was her suggestion that she conduct the meeting with her former self, for purely tactical reasons. Her shared past could provide certain advantages, insights, or even just put her counterpart on edge in the hope of revealing some hidden agenda. But I had to wonder how far I could trust my former enemy to negotiate with my former enemy on my behalf.
‘This isn’t a negotiation, my dear,’ said frowning-Betty, turning into condescendingly-sympathetic-Betty.
‘Oh, it’s not a negotiation is it? And what is it exactly? Hmm? An ultimatum?’
Sympathetic-Betty raised her hands in surrender.
‘I’m just the messenger, dear. I’m only here to tell you how things are, and what’s going to happen. Alright?’
‘Oh yes, of course you are, aren’t you? Hmm? Because the all-powerful space-Betty is far too advanced to even communicate now, but still cares what I think.’ Smiling-Betty had become arms-folded-feet-on-the-table-Betty. ‘Those two wheels don’t quite make a bicycle, Betty dear.’
Betty-dear sighed.
‘Is there somebody else I can talk to?’ she asked. Arms-folded-Betty laughed in response.
‘I imagine the original Betty’s been saying that for the last three hundred years,’ she said. ‘Didn’t find anything interesting out there I bet?’
The visiting Betty cringed slightly.
‘Am I really this annoying?’ she asked herself. Arms-folded-Betty was smiling again.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me how things are and what’s going to happen.’
There was a rare few seconds of silence as both Bettys searched each other’s eyes for a sign of something unsaid.
‘Alright,’ annoyed-Betty explained. ‘The original Betty is…’
‘Complicated, yes.’
‘… is not really Betty any more. That is to say, she is… kind of like…’
‘Indescribable?’
‘She’s a collective…’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘A collective of every possible Betty…’
‘That is a lot of Bettys.’
‘All governed by a central consciousness made from…’
‘Alright, look.’ Arms-folded-Betty unfolded her arms and leaned forwards, elbows on the table. ‘I get it. Complicated-Betty is complicated. Hmm? Let’s get to the part where you tell me what she wants.’
Explaining-Betty seemed uncomfortable, as if the actual heart of the matter was too awkward to say out loud.
‘She has returned here to archive our home world…’ she explained.
‘Archive?’
‘… and its inhabitants.’
‘Archive our home world?’
‘She needs to create a record of this world in order to protect its rights from future exploitation.’
Elbows-on-table-Betty was eerily speechless. Her mouth hung open waiting for some words to come out.
‘Obviously,’ explaining-Betty explained further, ‘in our glorious golden future when Betty has filled the known universe with every possible version of herself, as she ultimately will for whatever reason, this planet and its history will be a highly valued commodity. So she needs to transfer it to a virtual format in order to preserve our heritage and control access to its use. Simple as that, really.’
She waited patiently for open-mouthed-Betty to respond.
‘You need to transfer it…’
‘Yes…’
‘… to a virtual format?’
‘That’s right, dear.’
‘And all-powerful-godlike-Betty is all-powerful and godlike enough to do that, is she?’
The representative of all-powerful-godlike-Betty shrugged her shoulders.
‘I imagine the process is kind of similar to that weird horse-bubble you and Buttercup are hiding in,’ she said. ‘How is it in there, by the way? You and horsey-hoofs getting along alright now, are you?’
Betty didn’t answer that question. She took her elbows off the table and sat back in her chair. Then she stood up and walked slowly across the room to a window that conveniently appeared.
‘So, you’re basically making a copy of the world and destroying the original. Hmm?’ She was gazing out of the window. The view was of the planet in question, seen from orbit as if this room were hurtling through space around it.
‘We’re not destroying anything, dear, calm down. We’re only transferring it to a proprietary format. I don’t suppose anyone would even notice, apart from you and your friends.’
‘Me and my friends? You mean me and that horse?’
‘And whoever else you have in that bubble of yours. It’s not just you and a horse, is it? Good lord. Don’t you know people who know people any more?’
Standing-Betty turned to face her, eyebrows raised expectantly for further clarification.
‘You see’ – sitting-Betty spread her arms apologetically – ‘we’d like to record you and Buttercup as well. But we can’t while you are inside that horse-bubble of yours. What do you call that thing?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘Hmm, well. Whatever it is, we’re going to have to take it to pieces, along with everything else, and we’re not entirely sure how to put it together again. So there you go. That is the choice, I’m afraid. You can come out and join the party, or stay inside and…’ She implied the rest of that sentence.
‘… and you demolish our house with us inside it?’ said standing-Betty.
A pang of real sympathy crossed sitting-Betty’s face. ‘Come on, dear,’ she said. ‘Come and join us. What are you even doing in there anyway?’
‘She’s bluffing.’
Such was the opinion of our resident Betty, who had resumed her seagull form for reasons known only to herself. The Horse Council had been reconvened to discuss the historic meeting of the Bettys, but minus the other horses to save on my simulation’s precarious processing abilities. We had all watched it live, of course, but Betty was in a unique position to judge her counterpart’s intentions. Now I just had to decide whether I could trust the intentions of either of them.
‘Bluffing about what exactly?’ I enquired.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Honestly, how long was she away for? You couldn’t get anywhere interesting in that time, and now she’s talking about conquering the universe? Reformatting whole planets? No. I’ll tell you what happened. She got halfway out the door and realised there is nothing out there, so she came back and sat on an asteroid for a few hundred years, talking to herself.’
‘Are you saying she’s not capable of doing what she said?’ I asked.
She rubbed her beak with a feathery wing, contemplating this question.
‘I couldn’t honestly say for sure…’ she said at last. ‘Is this really the best image we can get?’
We were looking at a fuzzy blob. There were no more operational satellites in orbit, and even earthbound telescopes had fallen into disuse as the human race had turned their attention in on themselves. All I had left as a window on the heavens were the vast meadows of Server-grass, which sucked up the light from the sky in all its flavours to produce this blurred picture of the original Betty’s orbiting spacecraft. It didn’t seem very large, but then she might not have needed it to be, if she was as advanced as she claimed. For all we knew this fuzzy object could just be a messenger anyway, and the real Betty was looming vast and unseen in the darkness beyond.
‘All I know is she isn’t telling us the whole truth. Tell this horse, Timothy.’
We waited a few seconds for Tim to realise he was now joining the conversation.
‘Tell this horse what?’ he asked.
‘You know what I’m like, Timkins,’ she sighed.
Unfortunately, knowing what Betty was like wasn’t much use when one Betty was telling you that the other Betty was lying. Which Betty should you choose to believe?
‘All I know about Betty, Betty,’ Tim said awkwardly, ‘is that there’s no way she’d bluff something like this and risk being called out on it. I mean, if we told her to get stuffed, and she couldn’t actually do anything, well… she would never live it down.’
Betty the seagull seemed surprised to learn this fact about herself.
‘So you think I’m telling the truth?’ she asked him. He looked confused for a moment. ‘Not me, dear, the other one,’ she added.
‘I just don’t see what our options are,’ he replied.
‘The way I see it—’ I began.
‘Look,’ Betty cut in immediately, ‘there are two options we have here. Option one, we surrender and hope she doesn’t want to destroy us. Or option two, we stay here and hope she can’t destroy us. And there isn’t enough information either way to be any better than flipping a coin. And yes I know, Buttercup dear,’ she added as I was about to speak, ‘I know there is option three, but seriously, we can’t rewind this place any more. I mean look at the state of it.’
At that particular moment in time the field around us happened to be randomly disappearing in patches. What grass there was had a habit of periodically cycling through every colour of the rainbow other than green, and the hedgerows were largely made out of lists of their separate ingredients.
I flicked my tail by way of response.
‘Yeah, I know,’ she nodded. ‘You’re still thinking about it aren’t you? You’ve got those old run-away-horsey alarm bells ringing, haven’t you? It’s in your genes. But even if you could do one more rewind, you’d still have to deal with this scenario again three hundred years later, wouldn’t you? Hmm? However, gentlemen and horses, we do have an option four.’
She looked at both of us in turn with her beady seagull eyes.
‘Unlimited expansion,’ she announced.
Tim looked at me as if I might know what she was talking about, while I waited for her explanation in hope that she didn’t.
‘This Hyper-meadow of ours…’
‘Of mine’ I corrected.
‘Of yours, my dear Buttercup. This pocket of horsey reality is currently expanding at a leisurely walking pace, because it is busy encoding every moment of our history. Now, why is it doing that?’
‘So that we can rewind…’ I began.
‘But we can’t risk that now, can we?’ she said. ‘So, we stop recording and set it galloping at full speed instead. Hmm? You know how fast that is? Timmington? Have a guess.’
Tim opened his mouth but she spoke over the top of him.
‘The speed of light,’ she said. ‘And that, my dear friends, is option four. We attack. We explode in her stupid face. And we win. Because she wouldn’t even be able to see it coming.’
‘That’s…’ Tim started, but trailed off.
‘You see,’ Betty continued, ‘with all other options we are rolling the dice, but with option four… we can’t lose.’
She waited for our reactions, and the sudden absence of her voice felt like time had stopped moving. I searched inside my head for Technology-horse in the hope that he or she could explain to me why this wouldn’t work, but Technology-horse was strangely absent. I knew instinctively that it was a terrible idea, but Betty’s confidence in the proposal caused me to wonder if she knew something I didn’t.
‘No,’ I said finally.
‘No?’ she replied, astounded.
‘Betty, if you try and alter the rules of this’ – I looked around at the hills and fields glitching spasmodically around us – ‘this world of ours, if you change how it expands outwards, that change will also reflect inwards. It would overwrite everything inside here, including us.’
‘Buttercup, my dear, I honestly wouldn’t be suggesting this if I hadn’t already spent a long time working out how to do it. Believe me, I know how this place works. I can adapt us to the new format,’ she said.
‘Um…’ Tim added.
‘But the new format wouldn’t be viable, Betty,’ I replied. ‘Not if you were expanding at that rate – you couldn’t create a medium capable of sustaining thought processes.’
‘There is a way around that,’ she said cryptically.
I waited for her to explain further, but she didn’t.
‘Are you not going to tell me what it is?’ I asked her. ‘Why? Can’t you trust me with that information? And yet you suggest I allow you to reformat my mind? Really, Betty, after everything we have been through together? Why not let me take control of the reformatting?’
‘Because you might do it wrong,’ she said.
‘Not if you tell me exactly how it works.’
Betty squawked and flapped her wings in frustration. The sudden activity made her wings forget they were attached to her body and they flew off in different directions, leaving her looking at the blank spaces where they should have been.
‘Can I just ask…’ Tim ventured.
‘Alright look, horsey-hoofs,’ the wingless seagull continued, ‘obviously we have some quite understandable trust issues between us, so let’s just work something out, shall we? How about some kind of mutual process…’
‘Guys!’
All eyes turned towards Tim. Even the grass seemed to turn round and look at him. For a moment he seemed shocked to have anyone’s attention.
‘Can I just clarify something here, yeah?’ he asked. ‘We are actually talking about erasing the universe, aren’t we? Are we?’
Betty looked back and forth between myself and her human companion.
‘Well, it’s going to take quite a long time to do that, Timbo, even at light speed,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but I mean… Mate. That’s pretty harsh isn’t it? Like, there are people out there using it, you know?’
It was perhaps generous of Tim to imagine Betty might have any sympathy for her former fellow species. Though I can’t say I felt much attachment towards them myself.
‘Aww, Timtims. I didn’t think you liked those people out there. They weren’t all that keen on you, last time I checked. In fact, they pretty much blame you for everything now.’
‘Yeah, well,’ he grumbled. ‘I can forgive them for that, seeing as we know it isn’t true.’
‘You know, it actually is true in a way,’ she suggested. Tim shook his head and ignored it.
‘But look, mate, they aren’t the only ones out there… maybe. And no one is gonna be able to escape from this… expansion thing, right?’ He struggled to form the thoughts running through his head. ‘So, this other Betty, the one from space? She’s clearly a bit mental, OK, but she’s saying let’s record everyone, let’s archive everything, and you guys can all have a nice new home and everyone is happy. And then here you are, talking about wiping everything and everyone out of existence.’ He paused to see if this revelation might have some effect on either myself or Betty. ‘I mean, can’t you see how that makes us the bad guys? Don’t you think?’
I decided to stay quiet and let Betty deal with this. I was still operating under the suspicion that this was all just a ruse she had orchestrated to allow her to gain control of the Hyper-meadow. The inhabitants of the outside universe, abundant and diverse though they might be, didn’t really concern me if I could simulate literally anything I ever wanted or needed in here.
‘Well, that’s a fair point, Timothy,’ Betty conceded. ‘But the thing is, my dear, we are all the bad guys, in the end. All of us. If you exist in this universe, you are doing so at the expense of somebody else. Hmm?’
‘Yeah, somebody else, not everybody else,’ he replied.
Betty sighed.
‘Yes, Timmy, but think about this. What I’m proposing here, if we can do it then so can everyone else. Can’t they? Hmm? And maybe somebody out there already has. Maybe there is a wall of death heading towards us at the speed of light at this very moment. You see what that means, don’t you? It means that anyone who discovers how to do this immediately has to do it. That’s what our Betty in the sky is thinking too, believe me. I’ll bet the only reason she came back here was to figure out how to take over this damn bubble of ours, or make one of her own.’ The seagull looked each of us in the eye. ‘Honestly, you two. Why do you think I’m even hiding in here with you? Hmm? You think I ever wanted to stop you making this place? Listen, the only solution to all our problems is to be the problem to everyone else’s solution. Do you see what I’m saying, Timbo?’
Tim immediately exploded into a shower of multicoloured pixels, which I took to signify his disagreement on the matter.
I still refused to believe it was possible to achieve this unlimited expansion she spoke of. Even if it was possible, and the universe was littered with these expanding globes of death, when two of them collided then the one with the lowest complexity would simply absorb the other one. So even if you made the simplest possible bubble of reality you could survive in, the odds are that somebody would make one even simpler, just to annoy everyone else. Unless Betty had come up with a way around that, which I doubted, then the best solution was the one I had already found: record everything and then rewind the moment your altered space bumps into something it can’t eat. I had an automated system set up to do exactly that.
‘Where did Timothy disappear to?’ asked the seagull, quizzically pointing its beak left and right. I assumed he had deserted the conversation of his own accord, since it seemed to be causing him some discomfort, but given the instability of the Hyper-meadow it was also possible he had suffered a disconnection from our shared space. However, he was not attempting to rejoin us, so malfunction or not, Tim clearly had better things to do. It then struck me that Betty’s question was entirely serious. Tim had disappeared, not just from the conversation, but altogether.
I sent a pulse of thought through my hooves that echoed through the waving grass, following the path that Tim’s consciousness had taken. It appeared to lead to the outer wall of the Hyper-meadow, a place reserved for the machinery of interaction with the outside world. Mainly this interaction with the outside world involved slowly eating it, but it also allowed for a thin line of communication, encoded into the light that played on its surface. Access to this communication channel should not have been possible for Tim, and yet evidence seemed to suggest that he had somehow managed to dump a large volume of information through the wall of the Hyper-meadow. The fact that he was now nowhere to be found strongly implied that the information being dumped was Tim himself.
‘It looks like Tim has defected to the outside world,’ I said.
The seagull squawked and exploded into a shower of multicoloured pixels.