Note: This story happens in an alternative timeline where fertile fluffies never got out into the wild and hasbio still exists and has complete control over fluffy production and sales. This is partially inspired by a post from the fluffy board from a user that said fluffies being released to the wild by ecoterrorists trying to help them actually took them away from a better life as pets. But the reality is that fluffies were always meant to be a product first and a lifeform later, their lack of rights is a byproduct of hasbio lobbying governments much like oil or pharma companies already do, and because of that hasbio wouldâve kept exploiting fluffies to extract more profits.
Your name is Hank. Youâre an assembly technician at Installation-72, one of the many production facilities for Hasbioâs fluffy ponies, also known as fluffies. They were launched over 10 years ago to insane sales numbers despite the first versions being glitchy as hell and costing as much as a new car.
It took a while for the price to go down but now you can get your own basic Earthie fluffy model for just $100!. Practically anyone who is not dirt poor has one now, but since fluffies are still fragile new ones are sold constantly. Sure the new versions (latest is 7.0.3 aka: Majestic) no longer have that disgusting smelly liquid shit or any trace of the smarty syndrome but they are still so fragile they are broken by all.
Officially PR says Hasbio canât make fluffies more resilient without also making them more dangerous but you heard from a guy over in engineering that they are never going to fix that since fluffies breaking (we are not allowed to say âdyingâ since officially speaking fluffies arenât alive) is one of the biggest drivers of new fluffy sales.
A sort of planned obsolescence for biotoys: they break easily so youâll buy a new one.
So what exactly you do here? well you work at production, more precisely the assembly area. This is where the foals are wellâŚborn. You were told to use âassembledâ instead since the fluffy is a biotoy and a biotoy isnât born because it isnât alive nor a real animal and your refusal to accept this would get you fired.
It used to be that Hasbio had a whole bunch of non-sterilized fluffies at installations like this one just to make more fluffy foals. At first (and Iâm talking back before launch) they made stallions inseminate the mares on their own kinda like a real animal would, well almost since they still got selected and paired by techs like me. After launch and with demand going sky high they got rid of that and started artificially inseminating the mares. You were told it was much easier this way since with the old method sometimes fluffies didnât felt like having âspecial huggiesâ (as the things call the process, a kid-friendly term devised by the marketing team at hasbio) so they wasted time forcing the things to do it sometimes with catastrophic results like the fluffies breaking, and fertile fluffies ainât cheap. With artificial insemination that was no longer a problem: the stallions got their seed taken by force and then the mares were forced to receive it. Three weeks later the assembly was over and the mare would release the finished product.
Fresh fluffy foals, usually 4 to 6 by mare.
But thatâs in the past, they moved away from that. Hasbio R&D found a new way to make fluffy foals faster to meet demand, lower prices and thus create even more demand making fluffies accessible to entire new markets that couldnât afford them before. This new method isnât public which is why you only learned about it your first day at the job.
Officially fluffies are still made by other fluffies, something Hasbio PR shows in highly doctored images and videos it releases on its website.
The reality is very different: that first day you entered the assembly building you were face to face with it. It was a huge mass of skin and fat the size of a coke vending machine, serial numbers laser-etched on its side. No legs or head at all. It had no fur, no âfluffâ. On the top it had a blow-hole and what you were told was an exposed esophagus. Both had tubes going into them, one blowing almost pure oxygen into the thingâs lungs and the other a highly enriched nutri-paste. On the bottom there was a hole that was actually carved into it, a sort of colostomy with a tube plugged into it to remove waste. There is one actual oblong hole with lots of skin, this is called the âextrusion portâ. Thatâs where the foals come out from in packs of 20âŚ
âŚevery HOUR.
Art by @Deliverance
It used to take nearly a month for a fluffy mare to be done assembling foals, but this artificial lifeform was able to pop them out by the hour. The moment it popped new ones us techs had two things to do: take care of the foals which came out in one big placenta bag all together, no easy task since most of the amniotic fluid was still inside so the product could drown in it if done incorrectly. The second task was to take the bio-tool and inject a new cartridge with foal embryos deep into the extrusion port so an hour later new foals will come out.
They called this thing a âbio-ovenâ. It was created at Hasbio labs to make fluffy production completely independent of actual fluffies. These days fertile fluffies are just used to get harvested for their eggs in the case of the mares and sperm with males. The fertile mares get all their eggs removed two weeks after assembly, then are destroyed by being thrown into a grinder while still âactiveâ (again canât say âaliveâ since it was never alive legally-speaking) to prevent any from falling into the wrong hands. Stallions are kept and get their sperm farmed for life, then share the same fate of the mares when they become sterile or if the quality of the sperm is too low.
One of the advantages of the bio-ovens is that they allowed the creation of custom fluffies. Want a blue one with a yellow mane? no problem. A mono-black one? its done. A unicorn with a rainbow mane? that costs extra but thereâs no delay. We can even do custom alicorns on-demand but those are more expensive due to company policy not actual scarcity like back in the day. All it takes is a little manipulation and mixing the right egg with the right sperm and taking it to the nearest bio-oven. One hour later your fluffy is ready.
Now, most people donât know this but the production cost of a foal is actually really low, like reaaaaally low. Iâm talking about pennies here, or fractions of pennies with the new bio-ovens. Sure R&D wasnât cheap which is why the first fluffies were so goddamn expensive even with all the defects they had. But after sales went up that investment paid itself many times over. Hasbio had to spend more money on fluffy revisions and new features but that was a fraction of the original development cost. The use of bio-ovens got production costs as low as they can possibly be, we even have overproduction some times which is why we have to destroy entire batches of foals with a grinder rather than risk flooding the market with discount fluffies which would crash the current MSRP.
Anyway, after assembly and cleanup is done we take the foals from the bio-ovens at assembly to the bio-incubators. Another success story from the labs these are infertile fluffy mares with 10 âcrotch-boobsâ that are always lactating. They are engineered to be docile and care about the foals but never ever refuse to let the product be taken away when its ready. They had that problem back in the day when foals were left to feed with the mares that assembled them until they could consume solid food like kibble instead of fluffy Nutri-Milk⢠which the mares produced. Those mares would sometimes refuse to let the foals be taken, sometimes destroying the product in the process by stomping or even eating it. You were told by an old guy how he had to pry a foal from a mareâs mouth while another foal was down in the pen cut in half trying to move away as its guts were being spilled into the floor. The bio-incubators will never do this, partly because they are engineered to be unable to do it and partly because they have no teeth to bite the foals so these things eat the same highly enriched nutri-paste that the bio-ovens do, but from a dish like a regular fluffy would.
I been told there were interim solutions including rubber nipples with formula attached to a wall with the picture of a mare in the foal pens, but apparently foals became depressed and many units âself-destroyedâ by shutting themselves down (once again canât say they died from depression, they were never alive and something thatâs not alive canât be depressed right? not allowed). R&D tried using animatronic mares with formula being pumped to fake crotch-boobs but it didnât work either, the foals despite being dumb as any fluffy still realized it was fake. The moment they opened the eyes and saw the things they got scared and would rather starve to deaâŚI mean until they âshut-downâ than to take the fake milk from the fake mare.
So instead of that now we use these weird-ass big fluffy mares that have almost half their bodies covered in udders to feed the foal units with Nutri-Milk⢠until they can be moved to solid kibble and be ready for shipping. Starting with version 3 of fluffies weaning time has been shortened from the original 2 weeks to only 3 to 4 days. R&D didnât make foals grow faster since marketing said that would destroy the âcute factorâ that customers wanted. Instead they simply got their teeth earlier together with a digestive system that can handle kibble so they can be shipped to customers earlier.
Version 3 also came with a terminator gene that automatically âshuts downâ the fluffy permanently if it consumes any kibble that isnât official Hasbio-branded. This happened because Hasbio lost a case over the rights of the fluffy kibble trademark, and then another case saying owners could feed a biotoy whatever compatible food they wanted even if the EULA said otherwise. Hasbio was losing millions in kibble sales to pet food brands so to drive the point home the marketing guys told R&D to make version 3 fluffies dieâŚdamn, I mean shut-down horribly in front of their owners, basically puking and shitting blood whenever they get bootleg kibble.
While Hasbio couldnât trademark kibble they did trademark and patent Nutri-Sauce⢠which is actually the component that keeps the terminator gene from activating and destroying the version 3 fluffy when it eats Hasbio-branded kibble. Generic kibble and any other foodstuff that lacks said component will start the self-destruct sequence the moment the fluffy units starts metabolizing the unofficial food. Now that only a few v2.x fluffies still remain and most units out there are v3.0 and up Hasbio kibble sales are through the roof.
Hasbio always makes these modifications, version 2 for example was unable to make âsorry-poopiesâ anymore which was one of the major complaints customers had with v1.0 fluffies. You were told that getting rid of behavioral problems like the smarty syndrome was far more complicated since it required tons of neuroprogramming work while the other problem could be fixed with a minor reworking of the fluffyâs rectum. A lot of the design of fluffies were the result of legal and marketing issues. Being targeted mainly to kids meant it couldnât be aggressive, in fact one of the earliest problems was what if the fluffy attacked a human or a real animal? would it be the fluffyâs fault or hasbioâs? This is basically why fluffies are weak by design, the fragility was more of a consequence of having to give it pitiful muscles coupled with brittle bones and incredibly dull teeth so it couldnât kick nor bite. Of course that fragility ended up being a blessing in disguise since it worked as a sort of planned obsolescence which is why its still there, because marketing wanted it and they had the sales number to prove it was not a bug but a feature.
The entire speech pattern of fluffies boils down to two problems designers have: make it incredibly child-friendly while working around the limitations of the hardware created by GMO tech at the time. First one is why fluffies canât say any offensive words and why they use such child-like terms like special-huggies for sex. The second is why their speech is so garbled and full of lisps, and why its so limited to the point any chat-bot on the internet can out-compete a fluffy in terms of conversation skills.
Enough about history, as your shift begins you get the order for this batch on your screen
âLets see: 3 custom jobs, 2 alicorns, 4 earthies, the rest pegasus and no unicorns. Guess people still think those can turn smarty on themâŚwhere I left my bio-tool?â
You look around for it, its more like one of those hot glue guns but for some reason they call it a tool rather than a gun. Guess someone in PR is one of those gun control freaks or somethingâŚyou open a drawer and find it below some papers. You take the embryo cartridge preloaded with the foals from the pneumatic tube and load it to your tool. While the eggs and sperm is usually frozen the embryos are made just-in-time by medical robots within the facility so thereâs no reason to waste liquid nitrogen freezing those too.
You tap the side of your data-glasses.
âAlright, need a free slotâŚoven 6-G just popped so its availableâ
You walk down the G aisle where all the bio-ovens are mounted on small platforms next to the walls where the oxygen and nutri-feed pipes are connected. The smell is pretty bad so you put on your mask to avoid the fumes. You see that oven 2-Gâs waste pipe is leaking so thatâs probably why it reeks more than usual. If its not fixed quick is going to get infected as well.
As you arrive to the bio-oven 6-G you see a cleanup guy putting the placenta inside a biowaste bag for disposal. Then you see something on the ramp next to the extrusion port.
âWhatâs that foal doing here?â you tell the guy soaking the amniotic fluid from the last batch that fell on the floor âDid the last guy forget to take it to the incubators?â
âNah, its defectiveâ says the guy. You check the foal, a bright red unicorn filly with a teal mane. You donât see whatâs wrong with it besides being newboâŚerâŚfreshly assembled.
âYou sure its defective? looks good to meâ you reply
âCheck under the hoofsâ says the guy as he dunks the mop in a bucket
As you do it you see the problem: on one the the legs the heart-shaped logo is faded and the lettering is all messed-up, you canât even read the âFluffies⢠by Hasbio â˘â inside the logo at all.
âOh right, my badâ you say as you toss the foal into the biowaste bag. It cheeps and peeps in distress.
SCREEEEEEEE!
âSHUT UP!â yells the cleanup guy as he punches the bag
Huuuhuhuuuuu! is the only thing you hear from the defective filly as he walks away with it inside a tiny plastic bag. Most biowaste is incinerated but defective fluffies get destroyed by grinder as always to make sure they donât leave the facility at all.
One small defect is all it matters, as far as management cares its that fillyâs fault for trying to damage Hasbioâs brand by being born like that.
