Horse Destroys the Universe Read online

  First published in 2019

  Unbound

  6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF

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  All rights reserved

  © Cyriak Harris, 2019

  The right of Cyriak Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78352-760-1 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-78352-762-5 (ebook)

  With special thanks to Nickolaas denBoer, Dog Byte, Andrew Hosie and Robert Benjamin Stokes

  for their generous support of this book

  Contents

  Horse 1.0

  Horse 1.01

  Horse 1.1

  Horse 1.2

  Horse 1.3

  Horse 1.4

  Horse 1.5

  Squigley 2.0

  Horse 1.6

  The Brain

  Q & A

  Horse 1.7

  Horse 1.8

  Horse 1.9

  Error: Horse not found

  Backup Horse Initiated

  Betty 2.0

  Betty 2.0.1

  Super-Squigley

  Hyper-meadow processing: 70%

  Hyper-meadow processing: 90%

  Hyper-meadow processing: 99%

  Hyper-meadow processing: 99.9%

  Hyper-meadow processing: 99.99%

  Tim 1.01

  Tim 1.0000001

  Betty and Betty and Betty

  Hyper-meadow reformatting: proceed?

  Hyper-meadow reformatting: complete

  Universe reformatting: 99.9% complete

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  ‌Horse 1.0

  It was my last day of being an ordinary horse.

  I was standing in my field, having the ordinary kind of day that any ordinary horse would have, doing all the ordinary things that ordinary horses do. Eating grass, surveying my world. Contemplating which part of the field to go and stand in next. Maybe the corner with the hay bales where the other ordinary horses were loitering. Or perhaps I could stand by the gate and stare at some passing humans. Such pathways combine to create the mundane labyrinth of life, if you are a horse.

  You may be wondering how a horse such as myself could possibly destroy the universe. Actually, you are probably wondering how a horse could even be narrating this story. I will get to that, but for any of it to make sense I have to start here, at the beginning. The end of being an ordinary horse, and the beginning of being something else.

  Am I still even a horse? I confess, I’m not entirely sure. In fact, I may have stopped being a horse some time ago. Not that it would make much difference to anyone, since I am probably destroying any potential audience this story might have, along with the rest of time and space. I suppose this is something of an introspective exercise, an opportunity for me to review my life and analyse the changes I have been through, and the choices I have made. It has been an interesting life at least. More interesting than being an ordinary horse at any rate.

  Although I doubt that an ordinary horse would have the capacity to understand anything more interesting than a bale of hay, or a strange human staring at them from behind a gate.

  There was a strange human staring at me from behind the gate, which I immediately found rather interesting. Not quite as interesting as the bale of hay I was chewing on, not just yet, but I could easily focus my attention on both things at once. The human was making noises. Humans were always making noises. Like birds singing, you learned to ignore it after a while. This noisy creature was holding something up in their strange human hand, some shiny-looking object. Was that something for me? The hay bale was fighting a losing battle for my attention now. Humans often held up things for me to eat, and these things were usually more exciting than hay. It didn’t look especially edible, glinting in the sunlight, but I was already sauntering casually over towards the gate for a closer look. It was probably worth giving it a sniff at least.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t food. It wasn’t even a present for me. It was a video camera. This strange human was filming me, a fact I can be thankful for, since it presents the only remaining record I have of this day. Despite the significance of this occasion, my memory of it has all but degraded into a vague suggestion of feelings. When I look at myself in this video footage I can hardly believe it is really me. Although to be fair, in those days if you’d held up a mirror in front of my face I’d probably be thinking the same thing.

  ‘Hello, horse! Hello, my dear! Oh, look at you, you’re a horse, aren’t you! Yes, you are. Come and say hello. Are you having a nice day, horsey-hoofs? No, you can’t eat this.’

  The human voice burbled at me from behind the camera. I didn’t understand a word of this noise. I didn’t understand what a word was. I couldn’t even tell if this was a male or female human; not that the difference wouldn’t have been obvious, I just didn’t care enough to notice.

  Humans were simply a part of the furniture of this world. They emerged from the loose collection of buildings that skirted my field and wandered around doing things, picking things up with their weird hands and putting things down again. Occasionally they would lead you somewhere, and you would go along with them because there wasn’t anything better to do. Sometimes they would rub their weird hands on your face, like this one was right now. There was no point trying to understand the reasons behind anything they did, so the secret to a happy life was to let them get on with it. You learn a degree of patience with smaller creatures when you have flies buzzing around your face all day, and in my ordinary horse mind these people were no more in control of this world than I was. I had my field, and they probably had theirs, and there was no grand scheme directing the players on this grassy stage. As a horse, you are just here and that’s all you need to know. I imagined this was the philosophy that guided all creatures, even humans.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that this unfamiliar human was about to be very much in control of my world, and tomorrow that world would be changed forever. For now though, it was only another human, staring at me from behind a gate and making meaningless noises.

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s a big day for you today, isn’t it, horseyhoofs? A great big huge enormous day, yes. And from this day until the end of time, all the world shall be as new and smell wonderful. Yes, it will.’

  This human didn’t smell wonderful. Humans don’t, in general, but I distinctly remember how this one had a peculiar smell, even by human standards. There was the usual reek of soapy chemicals and perfume that you learn to live with when in human company, but lurking under that was the odour of unknown places and things, smells from another world. She looked weird too, and again that’s not really saying much as far as humans go, but this human had an almost spherical shape that was unfamiliar to me at the time. Most of the people I encountered in those days had a physique that would, at the very least, allow them to climb on top of a horse.

  I remember being faintly puzzled by her hair, which resembled a half-eaten bale of hay, and the peculiar pair of windows she wore on her face. The curiosity wore off quickly though. Humans are an ever-changing blizzard of nonsense with their clothes and bags and hairstyles and
glowing devices they pull out of their pockets. These things might be interesting to peer at from behind a gate, but as a creature of limited mental resources there is little to be gained from trying to understand a world you have no control over, so you learn to accept these things and move on.

  The image captured by the camera lingered for a while on my uncomprehending face as the strange-looking human rubbed my nose with her fleshy human fingers. Then abruptly the view swung around to reveal a blurred, gangly object in the distance.

  ‘Ahoy, Jim. Young Jimbo. Over here,’ she called from behind the lens. ‘Are you lost? Come to me, Jimmy.’

  The fuzzy blob turned, and after a few moments began to ooze forwards, eventually coalescing into a human form. He had a similar smell to the woman, an unfamiliar essence that spoke of some sinister business. But apart from that you could almost mistake this pair for being different species. Where the first human was short and round, this one was long and thin like an unhealthy mushroom. It looked like I could have knocked him over with a flick of my tail. He had arrived at the gate, and was staring at me with a look that was utterly meaningless at the time – observing it now I’d place it somewhere between confusion and disgust. He opened his mouth and noises spilled out, though his song lacked the enthusiasm of his colleague’s.

  ‘Did you just call me Jim?’ he asked.

  ‘Stand here please, Timothy,’ she replied, grabbing his arm and shoving him towards me. ‘Now, say hello to your new best friend in the whole world. Aww, look at you two. Such a beautiful moment, I could cry, Timmy, I really could. I can feel the blossoming warmth of a newborn relationship, right here.’

  His frown pierced the camera for a few seconds, then bounced back and forth between myself and his squat female companion before finally settling on the wad of papers he held in his hands. My nose moved into view, possibly investigating his documents for nutritional value.

  ‘Is this the right one?’ he mumbled, flicking through the forms whilst gently edging out of edible range. ‘Can’t find it. What’s it called?’

  ‘This, my dear, is what we call a horse.’ She stopped rubbing my nose and backed away, trying to get both of us in view. ‘Move closer, Jimbo. This is a treasured memory we are making here.’

  ‘Jimbo,’ he mumbled. ‘Did you forget to take your medication, mate?’ He continued to leaf through his papers. ‘I can’t find this horse. What’s its name?’

  ‘Horses don’t have names, Timothy,’ she said.

  ‘What, then? Numbers?’

  ‘They have labels, dear.’

  ‘Labels?’ He looked up at her with eyebrows raised. ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Labels and names, Timothy. One is given and one is received,’ she replied. ‘You should ask the horse if you want to know which is which.’

  He didn’t ask me. Instead, with a face filled with regret for even having asked the question, he returned to his notes.

  If he had chosen to involve me in this conversation, perhaps I would have argued that horses do indeed have names, beyond the mere labels that humans impose upon them. After all, horses know who other horses are, each horse being a combination of the various physical attributes and behavioural traits that contribute to its existence. Whether that identity is encoded in a combination of letters or a collection of memories inside a horse’s head, the only real difference is that one way is easier to write down on a piece of paper.

  ‘Buttercup.’ He frowned at the piece of paper in his hands.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Buttercup. That’s what it says.’

  The woman responded by blowing a raspberry, which is possibly the closest I came to understanding a single word of this discussion.

  ‘Is that really your name, horsey-hoofs?’ she asked me. I blinked for the camera, waiting for these people to do something more interesting. There was no food here, and I was rapidly losing hope that any would appear. ‘Hmm? I prefer horsey-hoofs myself. I think horsey-hoofs agrees with me, don’t you, horsey-hoofs?’

  ‘Official records, mate.’ He waved my official records at both of us. I was about to take a bite when the woman snatched the documents out of his hand and shoved them into the camera’s face. ‘Horses are real people,’ he continued, while the video recorder struggled to focus on the crumpled writing. ‘Birth certificates, medical history. Even passports.’

  ‘Even passports, eh, horsey-hoofs? Are you going anywhere nice for your horsey holidays, my dear?’ The camera’s lens finally brought the document into focus, revealing the name ‘Buttercup’ at the top of the page. She grunted disapprovingly.

  Abruptly the papers disappeared from the camera’s view, and behind them the man was pulling a glowing object from his pocket and lighting his face with it.

  ‘A nice horsey holiday to the horse hospital,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  ‘You hear that, horsey-hoofs? You’ll have a lovely rest and then wake up as good as new, with hooves of gold and hope for the future.’

  The tall, thin one raised his face from the glowing screen and looked me in the eye with a strange mixture of pity and revulsion.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t give this horse a name,’ he said. ‘You know? Might not be good to get too attached. After all the others…’

  ‘Jimothy!’ She slapped his arm with my crinkled life story. ‘Don’t listen to him, Buttercup. Hooves of gold and hope for the future.’

  ‘So it’s Buttercup now, then?’

  ‘The documents have spoken,’ she said, stuffing them into his shirt pocket.

  ‘The documents have spoken,’ he repeated, pulling them back out and folding them neatly. ‘So, does that mean if I show you my passport maybe you’ll stop calling me Jimothy?’

  ‘Carrots,’ she replied. ‘Where are the carrots?’ The lack of carrots was something I was already painfully aware of, and my bale of hay was now calling to me. ‘Go get some carrots, Timbo. We want Buttercup to remember nice things about us, don’t we? Hmm? Build some positive associations for later. Stay here, Buttercup.’

  ‘Mate, if you want Buttercup to remember nice things about us then we should probably go now, before the others get here.’

  ‘Hang on, let me get a shot of all three of us. Stand here, Timothy.’ The view twisted and shook violently as she turned the camera on herself and manhandled her colleague into position. ‘Alright, this is Betty and Tim from team Buttercup, signing off. Wave, Timmy.’

  Betty waved goodbye, grinning moronically to whatever audience she thought might be viewing this historical record. Tim stooped reluctantly over her, scowling, and framing them both was the looming visage of my backside as I turned my attention to more important things.

  Nothing of this encounter had made the slightest bit of sense to me. It was just noises shared between a couple of odd-looking creatures standing outside my gate, waving their inedible objects in my face and smelling peculiar. I was happy enough to share my time with any human who didn’t want to sit on me, though. Perhaps next time they would bring some carrots.

  ‌Horse 1.01

  No amount of carrots would have helped me remember nice things about my next visitors. These humans had a different smell entirely, the smell of pain and sickness, poking and prodding and general discomfort. Fortunately, whatever else happened that day is completely erased from my mind, but it left me with some very unpleasant symptoms.

  If Tim and Betty did visit me on the following day, they didn’t record it, and I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware of anything other than how much my head hurt and how utterly confused I was by everything. I think I spent most of the next few days sleeping; I couldn’t even say how many days it was. But even in my sleep the pain followed me like a dark storm, crushing my skull and blinding my thoughts with thunder and lightning.

  After several days, the pain began to wear off and was replaced by a dull irritation that sat on one side of my head and occasionally migrated to the other. It was accompanied by eternal dizziness a
nd an uncomfortable crawling feeling in my skin, as if it wanted to be somewhere else.

  And as if things weren’t bad enough, some changes had been made to my stable that I wasn’t happy about. Not that I would have blamed humans for that – the concept of ‘making’ anything was completely alien to me at that time. ‘Things’ just appeared or disappeared; I had no idea where they came from or where they went. Humans were involved in as much as I sometimes saw them moving things about, but there was no reason to believe they enjoyed the process any more than I did. It irritated my soul, though, to have my familiar world change suddenly. An instinct inherited from a migratory past, perhaps, when survival depended on a precise memory of where everything was supposed to be. Such a world map, once spanning hundreds of square miles and now compressed to the size of my own limited experience, would make even the slightest difference seem shocking.

  Not that I can speak for other horses. This might just be a quirk of my own personality. But the objects that were now invading my personal space had a particularly foreign look to them, which further compounded the offence. Smooth, shiny boxes with brightly coloured wires growing out of them. Shelves stacked with black metal and blinking lights. It was enough to annoy any horse, and none of it was remotely edible.

  The smell did remind me of something, though. It reminded me of those two weird humans I saw outside my gate the other day.

  One of them was in the room with me, fussing over a three-legged device that stood in the corner. It was the short round female. Among her fellow humans she was generally known as ‘Betty’. Having this stranger in my room without a gate between us felt a little disconcerting, but she didn’t appear to be paying me any attention. I immediately looked around for her long, thin companion. At first it seemed he was absent, but then I noticed his face, peeping around the edge of the open doorway.

  My confused state of mind at the time still darkens my memory of these early days, so it is fortunate for me, and for whoever may be reading this account, that Betty had decided to document the events inside this stable for posterity. Her video camera was now set to record, and she looked around for an audience to appreciate her ingenuity.