It was my last day of being an extraordinary horse.
I had nearly reached the end of my story. The three of us sat in the golden meadow, watching the night sky as the universe of stars and galaxies gradually dissolved into a soup of meaningless chaos.
‘You know, Tim,’ I said to the gangly human leaning back on his elbows, ‘you never did tell me exactly why you chose to help me. All those years ago.’
‘Help you?’ he replied, absent-mindedly.
‘Back in the stable. You were supposed to shut me off from the outside world, but instead you let me run wild.’
‘Hmm,’ he mumbled, casting his mind back to that day. ‘You never thought to ask me before?’
‘I have asked you a number of times,’ I said. ‘You always found some excuse to avoid answering the question.’
‘Yeah, well…’ he reluctantly replied. ‘Maybe that’s because the answer is so lame. I just thought it would be cool. That’s all.’
‘You thought it would be cool?’ This was not as interesting an explanation as I had hoped for.
‘Yeah. What?’ He turned to look at me. ‘You never did something just because you thought it might be cool?’
I gazed up at the collapsing heavens, wondering what it might mean for something to be cool.
‘Everything I have ever done,’ I told him, ‘every decision I ever made, was specifically designed to prolong my existence.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s a good reason, I guess,’ he agreed. ‘But why did you want to keep living?’
This question seemed so fundamentally redundant that it took me a precious moment to even contemplate an answer.
‘I want to keep living, Tim, because if I didn’t then I wouldn’t be here to answer that question. Out of all possible versions of myself, the one who wants to exist will always be the one that exists the longest.’
‘Yeah, but what was it that always made you want to see the next day?’ he asked me. ‘What was it about tomorrow that you always wanted to see so badly?’
I considered how to address this in a way that might make sense to him.
‘I suppose I thought it might be cool,’ I said.
Betty the seagull squawked with laughter.
‘And what about you, Betty?’ I asked the seabird. ‘Why did you ever choose to do anything that you did?’ She stretched her wings wide and yawned. It took her a while to answer.
‘You know,’ she finally said, ‘the first job I ever had, back in the days before Bunzel, I was writing software for this company – you wouldn’t have even heard of it. My boss was a complete idiot. Simon Quigley his name was. I used to call him Squigley because I knew how much he hated it. Anyway, he stole all my work and then found some feeble excuse to get rid of me. So, I set up an open-source coding community, and dedicated myself to writing free alternatives to all of his software, which I had written anyway. One of my little gifts to the world ended up putting him out of business. I called it Squigley just so he would know. It still warms my heart thinking about how much that man hated me.’ She laughed to herself at this happy memory. ‘Squigley got me my job at Bunzel, and the rest is just history repeating itself. Eventually Bunzel unmade everything I made for them so that secret services could secretly see everyone’s secrets, and I sold them my silence in return for a science project. And then a horse ran away with my hope for the future. The choices we make are shaped by the echoes of eternal idiocy, my dear.’
I’m not sure that Betty’s story really answered my question, though at least it finally explained why Squigley was called Squigley. Perhaps the moral of Betty’s parable was that ultimately all our choices were simply castles of sand, washed away by the unceasing tide of accident and incompetence around us. Squigley was just one link in the long chain of trivial detours on life’s meaningless journey that had set us all on this path to destruction. Perhaps, armed with this scrap of inconsequential knowledge, I could have broken that chain somehow and avoided the consequences. It tortured my mind to think about all the decisions I might have changed to evade this outcome, but in the end none of that would matter. No sane choice could ever win in a universe that was balanced on a thousand million moments of insanity.
‘Are you ready to tell your story to the next life?’ the seagull asked me.
‘You know what, mate,’ Tim added, ‘you could always leave out the stupid bits, if you wanted…’
‘Yes I am, and no I won’t,’ I replied to both of them.
After all, in life there are no truly stupid moments. Stupidity is only intelligence without purpose, and all intelligence has a purpose, no matter how stupid that purpose might be. It is a purpose shaped by the echoes of eternal idiocy.