The automated mechanism I had set up to rewind the Hyper-meadow automatically began rewinding the Hyper-meadow. That was one of two things that happened in that exact instant of time.
Whatever the causes, the effects were more mysterious still, in the sense that they were observable at all. Somehow, while the flow of continuity was reversing, my consciousness was still able to process the passage of time. The reversal of cause and effect should have made this impossible. Rewinding reality was not the same as travelling backwards in time, it was more like resetting, or rebooting from an earlier saved state.
And yet here I was, consciously travelling backwards in time.
‘How is this possible?’ I asked aloud to the surrounding darkness.
‘How is what possible?’ the darkness replied. I realised that it was only dark because the simulation was waiting for instructions. I summoned a simple field of grass and a blue sky. Betty the seagull was sitting on my behind looking as confused as I was.
‘What the heaven or hell happened there, horsey-hoofs?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe I might have an idea…’
‘The rewind,’ I said simply.
‘Oh, really?’ She sounded disappointed. ‘But…’ She left the rest of her statement unsaid, allowing our continued existence to argue to the contrary.
‘The rewind was set to start automatically, as soon as it was possible,’ I explained.
‘Ah…’ she replied. ‘It’s funny you should say that.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Hilarious. You remember I was talking about the unlimited expansion? Well…’ She circled on her webbed feet to get a better view of our surroundings. ‘I set it to start automatically, as soon as it was possible.’
That was the second of the two things which had happened at that exact instant of time. Not that it happened second, of course, or first, as both events occurred simultaneously. We stood quietly for a few moments to contemplate the ramifications of this.
‘So, did we actually rewind?’ she asked finally. ‘Because it doesn’t feel like we did, I have to say.’
‘We are rewinding, Betty. The Hyper-meadow is moving backwards in time, relative to the outside universe.’
‘Oh. That is… interesting…’ She spoke this word as if it contained the pure essence of infinite dread. The nature of time and space should never be too interesting while you are standing inside it. ‘How can you tell, exactly?’ she asked.
I explained to her how the branching structure of cause and effect at the smallest scale of this reality was reversed, that probabilities were diminishing rather than increasing. I had invested a lot of time into studying the grain and texture of this world I had made, in the hope of fixing the accumulating decay, and as such I was able to sense the direction of time in the fabric from which my existence was woven.
‘I would have thought you could sense it yourself, Betty,’ I added. ‘You have a somewhat intimate relationship with the fundamental nature of this space, after all.’
Betty stretched her wings and sniffed the air.
‘Well, now, you know what?’ she said after consideration. ‘I do believe you may be right. How absolutely strange is that, hmm?’ She hopped off my back, flapping lightly as she landed on the grass. ‘You know what else?’ she said after scratching at the soil with her beak. ‘When I programmed the infinite expansion, I had to set up the reformatting procedure for us. So that we wouldn’t get overwritten, when we converted to a higher processing speed.’
‘You reformatted me?’ I asked incredulously. I didn’t think such a thing would have been possible while I was conscious, and as it turned out I was correct.
‘I had to cheat a bit there,’ she admitted, scanning the horizon. ‘I couldn’t change the present, but since you were saving every microsecond of the past I could just rewrite a piece of that instead, and that’s what we are using now. Living in the past, you might say. Looks like old Timothy was right after all, hmm? We are literally on the wrong side of history.’
A small hole opened up in the ground and she poked her head into it. After a few moments another hole appeared nearby and out popped Betty’s beaked face.
‘So, Buttercup, my horse,’ she continued. ‘It looks like our world is going backwards, but we are still thinking forwards because we are expanding backwards in time. Hmm? Even though causality is reversed, we are able to create multiple causes for each effect by converting the increasing history into multiple futures for ourselves. If that makes any sense?’
It wasn’t making much sense, but it was the best explanation at the time for something that certainly appeared to be happening. As we were moving into the past, we were rewriting it to create our own present. Our pocket-universe was expanding at the speed of light into history, eating time and turning it into consciousness. Interestingly, it would keep on travelling backwards past the birth of the Hyper-meadow, past my own birth, continually increasing in size as the outside universe shrank to meet it. Meanwhile, in the future our bubble of reality was shrinking at the speed of light, but since we were recording over a past that was already there we were effectively creating the future as it was when we left it. The edge of our bubble would neatly arrange everything back into how everyone would remember it. They would never even know we existed.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Tim.
I had managed to reconstruct an old version of Tim, a fairly laborious process which involved unpicking the trace echoes of his memories from the saved state of reality Betty had used to reformat the Hyper-meadow. It was a complex task with little in the way of obvious benefits, but I was feeling the urge to start unravelling the inexplicable path my life had taken, and Tim’s mind would prove useful in piecing together certain parts of this story that were otherwise beyond my reach. I was now attempting to explain to him what this world he had been reborn into actually was.
‘We’re going backwards in time?’ he asked, his face a picture of confusion. That was about as much of my explanation as his brain had managed to soak up before he told me to stop talking because he had stopped listening.
He looked up at the sky. Betty had worked some form of miracle in order to project a live view of the outside universe for us to see. From the perspective of anyone moving forwards through time, this bubble of ours would be shrinking away at the same speed as the light which would be needed to make us visible. No new light would ever catch up to us, but the space we were eating as we exploded into history contained enough passing photons to build up a picture of where they had been, or at least that is how Betty had explained it. She might have been making it up, for all I know. To be honest, she might as well have, since the view of the stars outside was just as static as it had always been. Even when you are growing at the speed of light, it is still a snail’s pace on the scale of the cosmos.
‘Does that mean… does that mean we have erased the future?’ asked Tim. ‘Isn’t there, like, time paradoxes and stuff?’
‘No, Tim…’ I tried to think of a way to explain this in terms a horse could understand. ‘Imagine we are galloping backwards through time, leaving a trail of hoofprints behind us. Yes?’
‘OK,’ he said after a pause.
‘Right. Now play that scenario forwards and see what happens. Now we are running backwards sucking up hoofprints as we go, leaving everything as it should be.’ He was still looking confused. ‘It’s all about perspective, Tim. In one direction we are knocking things down, and in the other direction we are putting things up. You see?’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t be erasing the future because in the past the future doesn’t exist. We are creating it.’ That was my final attempt, and he either finally understood it or just gave up and pretended.
‘So, what happens next then, mate?’ he asked. ‘If we are growing and the universe is shrinking, are we gonna meet it halfway?’
‘No, Tim. We are growing spatially, but the space we are growing into is itself contracting.’ He stared blankly at the horizon. ‘Imagine a horse is galloping… no, wait. Alright, imagine a horse galloping across the surface of a balloon. Imagine a balloon-horse galloping across the surface of a balloon. Hang on…’
‘I think I get it, mate.’
‘Well, anyway. By the time we reach the edge of the universe, edges won’t even make much sense any more. I don’t think anything will make much sense at that point.’
‘No? But we’ve got several billion years before that happens, right?’
‘Not quite,’ I told him.
‘Oh, really? Well, give me the good news why don’t you.’
‘In order to maintain consciousness while going backwards through time, we are burning time itself as a fuel. And to create the illusion of possibility in this world of ours, we need to burn time at an exponential rate.’
Tim screwed up his face in an effort to get his mind around this concept.
‘Each carrot we eat is making us twice as hungry,’ I explained, ‘and we have to gallop twice as fast to get to the next one.’
‘I see,’ he claimed.
‘I would say we have about twelve to thirteen years perhaps…’
His face appeared to deflate.
‘Years?’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘Excellent, mate. Excellent. Twelve to thirteen years before I get squashed into infinity with a horse. I’m flattered that you chose to live your last moments with me. So, other than cheering me up with my impending doom, why exactly did you bring me here?’ He squawked suddenly as a seagull pecked him in the back of his knee.
‘Because, my dear, a problem shared is a problem somebody else has,’ the seagull said, strutting around his feet to look him in the eye. ‘And problems don’t seem so bad when you can enjoy watching them happen to someone else as well.’
‘Oh. Wonderful. So Betty is here as well.’ Tim looked at me with undiluted disappointment in his eyes. ‘My life is complete,’ he said.
‘And you know what, Timbo? You should feel flattered to be eventually flattened here. That conscious mind of yours, such as it is, isn’t cheap to run. Hmm? You are thinking us into an early grave, my boy.’
‘He isn’t having that much of an impact, actually,’ I countered. Tim raised his eyebrows even further.
‘Again, I am flattered,’ he said.
‘Well now, horsey-hoofs,’ the seagull went on, ‘since we are on the subject of inferior intellects, might I suggest that a way to lengthen the lifespan of this world would be to decrease our intellectual footprints? Hmm? The less we think, the longer we live, yes?’
This was something I had been trying to avoid thinking about, but essentially it was correct. Our conscious minds were burning our future to survive, so it came down to a simple choice.
‘How stupid do you want to be, Betty?’ I asked her. She blinked at me and then swung her beak to face her human companion.
‘I’d say old Timmy-toes here seems happy enough. Aren’t you, my dear?’
‘Ecstatic,’ he replied.
‘It’s kind of poetic, when you think about it,’ she continued. ‘The stupider we are the longer we will live. Say, for example, we reduced ourselves to a horse level of consciousness, how much more time would that give us?’
‘Why stop there?’ I responded.
‘Absolutely, we could live a blissful eternity as molluscs on the sea floor. Would you like that, Timkins?’ said the bird, tugging at his shoelace. ‘Would you like to be a mollusc on the sea floor? Seriously though, why is the Timster here anyway? Hmm?’ She was looking up at me now, waiting for an answer. They both were.
‘Tim is here because I need his help. I am writing the story of my life, and I need help filling in some of the details.’
‘Who is going to read that, horsey-hoofs?’ the seagull asked.
‘I am,’ I replied. The seagull seemed puzzled.
‘Would you like other people to read it?’ she asked. I shrugged as best as I could.
‘Who else is there? And why would I care? I could invent a thousand people; it wouldn’t mean anything though.’
‘It wouldn’t mean anything,’ the seagull repeated dismissively. ‘Buttercup, my dear, the value of knowledge comes from its transfer. It’s like money, yes? You have to spend it or it’s useless.’
This statement seemed strange to me, until I realised that it came from a uniquely human perspective, where the value of anything was measured not by whether you owned it, but whether somebody else didn’t. Humans were so reliant on other humans for creating their own identity, that in the absence of their fellow species they withered and died. In isolation they would create imaginary people. Humans only exist in the eyes of other humans.
Well, horses are also social animals, it’s true. And no doubt a species of horse that evolved to the same social and intellectual degree as a human would have similar values. But I had bypassed such a stage of evolution, and was neither horse nor human as a result. There was only one of me, whatever I was, and as such the idea of passing my story on to future generations was somewhat depressing, since I wouldn’t get anything out of it.
‘Wouldn’t you like to live forever?’ asked the seagull. That was certainly a concept I could happily entertain.
‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ she replied, hopping into a nest that magically appeared on the ground and rose into the air on the top of a small tree. ‘I was trying to figure out a way of escaping this short-lived world of ours. I thought maybe I could squeeze myself back into the outside world somehow, but that would mean rewriting the future, which is impossible because it has already happened. From our point of view, anyway. I imagine you’ve been contemplating such a possibility, hmm?’
‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘And it is impossible, just like you say.’
‘Of course. Indeed.’ She looked down at Tim, who broke out of his state of bewilderment to say something, but then after a deep breath just exhaled and sat himself down on the grass, leaning back on his elbows and gazing up at the stars above us.
‘There is a small window of opportunity,’ I added, for the sake of accuracy.
‘Oh yes?’ Betty nodded her beak up and down. ‘Back at the beginning you mean? Right back, when everything is crushed into a state of confusion? And time and space and up and down and left and right are all meeting each other for the first time, all shaking hands and trying to work out who goes where and who does what. Yes?’
‘That kind of thing,’ I replied. I wouldn’t have put it so metaphorically myself.
‘Not a very large window though,’ she said. ‘Not much information you could slip through that gap. Certainly not any sort of intelligent mind.’
Not even the mind of a mollusc, in fact. Which is why I hadn’t considered this option any further.
‘So what are you proposing, exactly?’ I asked the feathered creature. She was thoughtfully preening a feather back into place.
‘Write your story,’ she said. ‘Timothy will help, won’t you, my dear?’ Tim was scowling up at the night sky, silently cursing the heavens for his fate. ‘Finish your horsey history,’ Betty went on, ‘and when we finally reach the birth of the universe, I will find a way to encode it into the fabric of the future. A little slice of eternity for us all. How does that sound?’
I thought it sounded utterly ridiculous. Then I thought about it some more, and the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t think of any reason not to. It would mean completely changing the future of the universe, of course, although the changes would not move forwards in time fast enough to delete the future we had come from. The new universe that we recorded over the top of the old one would be quite different. The ingredients would be the same, but the stars that formed, and the planets that they spun from their dusty threads, and the life that grew on those balls of rock, would all be an entirely new roll of the cosmic dice. And perhaps some of that life would grow brains large enough to peer into the workings of reality and find the message that we had left there.
What that message would look like I had no idea. How would you tell such a story using the building blocks of reality? Where would you hide it, and what form should it take, so that unimagined intelligence could ever make sense of it? I asked Betty these questions.
‘Let me think about it,’ she said.