‘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.
Universe reformatting: 99.9% complete
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.�
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‘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.
‘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.
Acknowledgements
Back in November of 2015 I started writing a book about a horse who destroys the universe. You may be wondering why I would do such a thing. Well, nobody else was going to, and that was all the reason I needed at the time. I never considered the possibility that anyone would ever read it, which is why there are people I need to acknowledge for their part in making this book a reality.
If it were left up to me, this manuscript would have ended up gathering dust on my hard drive. Then Unbound got in touch with me out of the blue to ask if I had ever considered publishing a book, and I told them I happened to be writing one. It’s fair to say a science-fiction novel about a horse was not the kind of book they had in mind, but I sent it to them anyway, and it’s thanks to their enthusiastic response that this book now exists beyond the confines of my computer.
Of course, that would all be for nothing if it weren’t for the support of my fans. I can’t imagine any of them were expecting a science-fiction novel about a horse either, so they will also have my eternal gratitude for backing this project.
And then there are the people who helped me hammer this story into a presentable shape. My brother Jarrick Harris and his partner Lisa Kaiser both read an early draft and gave me extensive notes, as did Simon Spanton at Unbound. My good friend Sarah Brown not only read two drafts but also suffered with me through many days of trying to come up with fictional company names that hadn’t already been used. All of the feedback these people provided was invaluable, and it is a better book because of it.
I should also say a word of thanks to all the horses I have encountered over the years. Often I would pass them as they grazed in fields and find myself stopping to wonder what might be going on inside their heads. And often they would stare back at me, probably wondering the same thing. Perhaps one day science will answer both these questions.
A Note on the Author
Cyriak Harris is a British artist best known for his surreal animations using photo and video montage, which he began spreading on the internet in 2004. He has since built a career as a freelance animator, working on commercials, TV shows and music videos, and has a YouTube following of over a million subscribers.
Unbound is the world’s first crowdfunding publisher, established in 2011.
We believe that wonderful things can happen when you clear a path for people who share a passion. That’s why we’ve built a platform that brings together readers and authors to crowdfund books they believe in – and give fresh ideas that don’t fit the traditional mould the chance they deserve.
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