“Ambition and Illusion”
“Part 5, Interaction”
Author:It_that_watches
CONTENT WARNING: Passing mention of “Enfie-Fluffies”.
Matthew sat up in bed, unable to shake the feeling that something was amiss. It was usually cold in his house, but this was too cold. Sheets were missing. Twilight was missing. The door to the hall was cracked eerily ajar.
He stood and walked straight to front stairs, knowing for sure what he would find. The front doors had been left wide open, and he could hear distant voices up his driveway and into the forest. Again.
He began to walk towards them.
The path up his shared community drive was paved, but that didn’t mean that he kept his section presentable. Heavy overgrowth combined with the canopy cover made night navigation impossible unaided.
The luminosity of the Maglite LED’s cast dancing shadows deep into the untamed mossy wilderness.
He was able to follow the path and voices until a split in the road, where the voices disappeared away, off into the forest. Uneasily he crept into the brush in the direction where he had heard sound of speaking. His path quickly grew rough and unhewn, with new branches appearing and disappearing around fern-hidden corners.
No visual aid assisted, but the forest grew thinner as he moved.
Though the heavens above were growing ever more exposed, the dim and dying flashlight remained his only guiding influence towards some unknown yet somehow certain destination. Slowly at first and increasing at regular intervals he began to hear disturbances coming from behind him. He stopped for a moment, and the noises stopped too.
Until they didn’t.
The noise did not grow further as he hastened his pace. It grew louder. The sound of his momentum crunching through the underbrush soon overwhelmed by the noise of uncountable pattering footsteps echoing from close behind. He never broke stride, focusing instead on the light of a fire before him.
Just as he felt whatever that thousand-footed aberration might have been following would soon overtake him, Matthew desperately stumbled out into the firelit clearing. The sudden quiet was just as overwhelming. Under the sky, the night was still dark, and his flashlight had died.
But there was something new. Before the bonfire, facing away from him, was Twilight.
When he drew close enough that he himself could feel the warmth of the fire, she began giggling and ran off into the terrible murk of the night. Where she had been sitting rested a crude unlit oil torch, like something you might see in an old exploration documentary.
He ignited it in the remains of the bonfire before the embers had a chance to die. Like cutouts against the night sky, he looked back up to see Twilight sitting next what appeared to be her sister as they both watched him approach from their perch on a nearby hill.
The steady flame was silent when contrasted to the racket that he made crushing what nature remained between him and his precious scions. Their perfect amethyst eyes danced with joyous life.
The chase over, he cast the torch aside and knelt to embrace his children.
“SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
The sound of the scream jolted his vision to where he had cast the torch, and the stars fell to the ground with the sound of shattering glass. He wheeled around in abject horror as the trees bent all aside and slithered away like disturbed snakes. In the chaos he lunged for the light, and when he regained his footing, he was horrified to see that he had taken it.
There was no torch, instead the coruscating wreath coiled around the palm of his quickly degloved right hand. All that was, was no more, and Matthew beheld a cloudless, moonless, lightless expanse. Again he was alone
Standing on seemingly nothing, his footsteps reverberated as if in a hospital hallway. He tried to cry out to his missing daughters yet could not force his voice to do so. He felt but a silent thrumming in his throat as his wordless voice tore through his vocal cords only to become nothing. Matthew’s frantic footsteps echoed in the dark, their eerie timbre fading too fast to be natural. He began to run after the sounds of hooves, but they soon became impossible to differentiate from the noise of newly heard screams around him.
Only a few of the vocalizations were audible over the sounds of suffering and the interminable chorus of “WAN DIE!” that filled the air. For each of these he managed to overhear, he heard his own voice speak twice. Once to instigate, and once to terminate the increasingly brutal conversations.
“Interesting, they shouldn’t respond to codephrases without triggers beforehand.”
“FWUFFY MEMOWY WESET TU FACTAWY DEFAWT. PWEASE PWESENT FWUFFY WIF NEW TEMPWATE.”
“Is it stuck in a loop? How many times has this one been reset?”
“001504 is by far the best behaved of this batch. You terminate the other prototypes as marked while I dismantle this one.”
“NUUUUUUUUUUU! NU WIKE! NU WAN! NU UNNASTAND!”
“Sleep now, I’ll be with you. You did good, five-oh-four.”
“Can you please hold this damn thing still? This is a huge gauge needle and I’ve missed the vein five times now.”
“FWUFFY WUV DOCTOW MAFFEW! WHY GIF HEWTIES!?”
“I- I didn’t mean to, but… You need to cooperate. I’m sorry.”
“Take the foals. This one always seems to have brightly colored offspring, and none of them have had defects.”
“PWEAS NU TAKE BABBEHS! BABBEHS NEE MUMMAH! DEY GUD BABBEHS!”
“They are good babies. They are the best babies, in fact, and we need them to go and teach the other babies how to be good too.”
“Lockdown is over. You can release the adolescents from testing back into the family pens.
“WHEWE MUMMAH!? WEWE FWUFFY FAMIWY GU?”
“A bunch of jackasses broke in and stole them. Gone now, and if they released them into the wild, dead too. Hopefully.”
“This one’s run has a defect. Decommission it, perform a dissection, and lay aside any deformed organs. Hopefully, we don’t need to scrap the whole line.”
“FWUFFY NU KNU WHA OWGANS, BUT MEANY DOCTAWS NU TAKE! FWUFFY HACHEW!”
“Use a paralytic. Vivisection. No anesthetic.”
“No, don’t return it, it might be contaminated. You know what to do.”
“DOCTAW MAFFEW HEWP FWUFFY! FWUFFY NU WAN GU TU FOWEBA BEWNIES WOOM!”
“Remember, the incinerator has new drop chutes at every airgap. You don’t need to leave the labs now.”
“You really shouldn’t have made her cry.”
“W-W-W-WAI DU DIS!? WAI GIB WOWSTEST BEWNIE HEWTIES AN TAKE FWUFF!? WHY TAKE WEGGIES!? WAI NU WUV FWUFFY NU MOAW!?”
“You really shouldn’t have made her cry.”
He began to hear crunching underfoot. He did not care.
He began to hear crying all around him. He did not care.
He stumbled and caught himself with his hands, the burning hand setting the coagulated spread on the planar surface below him to boil and hiss. The indistinct shapes that that inhabited the gory mire were indeed fluffies. It was obvious to him that the inch-deep liquid that he had been running through was blood, and the crunching was that of their brittle bones, but seeing the proof did validate him in his choice of using them as steppingstones to move faster.
He raised himself up and found himself in a cage of inchoate flesh, a rancid, teratomic trap of groaning fluffy mouths, glassed over weeping eyes, and disgusting matted fluff. This was the end, he thought.
Finally.
He closed his and eyes jabbed his blazing fingers into the wall of anguished meat. He held his breath as pungent smoke swirled and the wall of fluffies was reduced to bones and ash.
Before him stood a floor-length standing mirror, and as he exhaled, he beheld that it reflected nothing but a blood-drenched lab coat, a sourceless flame below the right sleeve, and two pairs of violet eyes in the void behind it.
The flame burned brighter and brighter, until the entirety of his vision was overwhelmed by it.
The world faded to white.
Matthew opened his eyes and blearily blinked awake, Twilight must have been only an inch from his face.
“Dad? Are you awake?”
“Twilight… What time is it?”
She looked up and squinted at the bedside clock. “Tennnn… forty.”
“Hmm…” He grumbled. “I suppose you’re bored and hungry then?”
“Kinda hungry, not really bored though!” she snickered, “They saw us last night, so they know we’re in here. I’ve been taunting them.”
Matthew ruffled her hair and smiled. “Atta girl. Just give me a few seconds to wake up.”
“Did you have a bad dream? You looked like Tia does when she’s having bad dreams, but it’s hard to tell. You did call my name- or, well, at least the first half of it. That’s why I came running.” She stepped her forehooves off his chest. “What were you dreaming about?”
“Oh, the usual. Work stuff. You were there though.” Matthew cupped Twilight’s head and kissed her on the nose. “I’d go through anything for you, sweetiebug.”
She kissed him back and jumped off the bed giggling. “Race you downstairs Dad!” She shouted before disappearing into the hallway.”
Matthew’s body and mind reeled as he pulled himself to his feet.
Soon he was downstairs. He was informed that he had lost the race.
The fluffies outside reacted strangely to Twilight’s brief appearances. Some of them, almost always the older ones, reacted with fear or hostility towards her. Others however, seemed to be in awe of her. Some even attempted to address her. Their parents usually shut down conversations with the “munstah”.
She was, however, always able to draw them back to the glass door. All it took was a bowl of fruit taken from the kitchen island. She simply left it in plain sight, and the brightly colored “nummies” brought them like moths to a flame.
After some time had passed, Matthew decided that he had to know what she was doing.
“Is there a reason you keep trying to talk with them, Twilight?” Matthew said as he wiped down a cast iron pan, “They don’t often have much to say, and what they do have to say usually isn’t worth hearing.”
“I’m trying to find out how their herd works.” She responded, “From what they tell me, the sky-colored unicorn named “Smarty” is their leader.”
Twilight frowned. “He won’t come over here though. No matter how many times I send his minions to ask him.”
Matthew set a bowl of scrambled eggs and rice on the coffee table and motioned to Twilight that food was ready. “You aren’t far off.” He said through a mouthful, “Smarty is what feral herd leaders call themselves, or what their followers start calling them. Either way, every herd eventually has a smarty.”
“So, can I talk to him? Maybe learn more about them?” Her ears perked up as she remembered her notes, “WAIT DAD! Did you wash my coat?”
“Yes?”
“Did you check the pockets first?”
“Of course, sweetie, I’m never gonna forget the time you filled your pockets with tissue paper and the residue obliterated my washing machine.” Your stuff is on top of the dryer. I’ll get it as soon-”
Twilight left in a frenzy towards the laundry room. Soon after came the sound of things being knocked off of shelves. “She better not break my sewing kit.”
Now alone, Matthew closed his eyes and tried to tune into what the smarty outside had been screaming.
“NU! NU GU IN HOUSIE! DAT NU AM NICE MISTAW!”
“Wha? Smeww bestest gud nummies in housie!”
“Big fwuffy in housie twy gib nummies! Meanie nu-see waww nu wet fwuffies in!”
“Wai nu wike nice mista? Dis mista nu teww hewd tu gu ‘way!
The smarty uncharacteristically for being a smarty, lowered its voice.
“Smawty… Smawty see dis hooman befowe.”
He raised his eyebrow as Twilight skittered back into the room, notepad in her mouth. She excitedly dropped the pad on the couch next to him “Look dad! I made notes just like you do at work! I’m a science person like you!”
Matthew had moved to hear the discourse better.
“Twilight I need…” He began to say, before turning to face her, “You did what?”
“I made notes on the fluffies when I was watching them yesterday!”
Matthew picked up her notepad and smiled at the drawing of Twilight and himself wearing lab coats and safety goggles that she had drawn, alongside the words “Science Book”. It was crude, but she wasn’t exactly equipped to use writing implements. She curled up against him as he reviewed her notes.
“Sweetie, you spelled science right! That’s amazing! Aww… I’m so proud of you.” Matthew lifted her high into the air, spinning her around as she cried out in happiness.
The fluffy ponies outside all received a perfectly clear demonstration of the human love and affection that they were being denied. Matthew and Twilight both noticed this and with a synchronicity that seemed almost telepathic, decided to completely commit to the bit. He spun in place holding her outstretched, her long hair twirling around them like a ribbon made of dusk.
The fluffies worriedly looked at one another. “Wook! Nice mistah am nice mistah! Gib fwuffy good upsies!”
He completed the twirl and as Twilight laughed and he balanced her on his hip and grabbed her bowl of breakfast. Twilight gasped as if she had never seen food before and slammed her face into the bowl, chomping and chewing.
The fluffies were getting antsy now. “Wook! Nice mistah gib hooman nummiest tu fwuffy! Fwuffy wan hooman nummies!”
In a final flourish, Matthew cradled her in his arms, being sure to face the window. He kissed her on the top of her head and wrapped her in the most exaggerated, over the top hug he could. He closed his eyes just to soak it all in, both the affection from his beloved Twilight, and the sounds of muffled sobbing.
“Wai nu hooman wuv fwuffies? Wai nu gif hugs an’ wuv?”
Matthew sat back down with Twilight and carried on like nothing had happened. “Now Angel, really, great job on your spelling.”
“Thanks!” Twilight exclaimed, “I cheated!”
Matthew appraised her work.
“I went into your office and looked for those big boring words-only books. The one I chose sounded right and looked pretty sciency.”
“That’s not cheating.” Matthew retorted, “That’s called using all of your resources.”
“Now let’s see what you have!”
Matthew turned to the first page of recordings. Here was a close up of a yellow fluffy with small colored circles on its back. This first drawing was accompanied by the caption “Baby birds.”
“Birds?” Matthew inquired.
“No, but the little ones sound like birds. Do the ones with wings sound like birds when they are babies?”
Matthew smiled and squeezed her.
“They all make peeping noises when they’re small, usually they start talking after two or three weeks. I think that’s when they are at their best. He looked outside at a mother attempting to spin one of her colts like he had spun Twilight. “You know, when they can’t talk.”
He flipped to the next page.
The second page was a drawing depicting a green lawn with a brown line intersecting it, as well as a horde of randomly colored spheres crossing the boundary. On the far side were a dark green and a dark brown sphere, circled in red and marked with a question mark. At the bottom of the page were the words “Scouts?” “Grabbers?” and “Bad?”.
“I wasn’t sure what the nature-ey looking ones were for. From what I overheard, they aren’t used for anything.”
Matthew pursed his lips in discomfort. Further down the page was a depiction of larger fluffies with angry expressions hitting the earthen ones, and below that arrows leading into the lawn. One ended at a fern frond, and two others entered the lawn and terminated with question marks. At the gate where the angry fluffies were, was a red “X”.
“What do the question marks mean?”
Twilight sheepishly answered, trying to look away. “I lost track of them. That’s about where they were when I realized I couldn’t see them anymore.”
“And the ‘X’ here?”
“Oh! Right! I wanted to ask you about that! The big fluffies grabbed one of the little brown ones and dragged it into the forest. I never saw it again. It cried about being called an ‘enfie-fluffy’. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds worse than ‘dummy-fluffy’.” Twilight indicated the list of fluffy “castes” with her hoof.
Matthew closed his eyes. “I’ll look into it. Please, keep going.”
“Okay!”
She smiled, and Matthew managed to recompose himself and smile back.
“I heard them calling themselves and each other names. Not names like, mean names, but names like you call people at work. Like ‘doctor’, or ‘tech’, or ‘suit’.”
Twilight flipped the page to reveal a wall of words in many colors. “I ordered them from top to bottom, based on their… uh… popularity?” Before Matthew could respond she had already launched into her explanation.”
Smarty
Smarty-Special-Friends
Toughie-Friend
Toughie-Special-Friend
Soon-Mummah
Mummah
Fluffy with special friend
Fluffy
Dummy-Fluffy
Enfie-Fluffy
Poopie-Fluffy
Bad-Dummy-Poopy-Fluffy
Matthew knew most of what she was explaining to him but was still proud that she had taken the time to write it down for him. Anything else that he learned pertained to the specific herd outside his house, not fluffykind in general. Still, his stomach turned when he got to “enfie-fluffy”.
“I think there was only that one fluffy that was given ‘enfie’ status, it was one of the smaller ones.” Her ears perked up and jumped up to look at where it had been dragged off to. “You think that was Twiggie? The missing foal from the fluffies downstairs?”
Matthew agreed. That probably was, if it was part of a group moving together that was.
Twilight slowly lowered herself after scanning the onlooking fluffies. “I don’t see the fluffy from last night, you know the one I bit?”
“Twilight…” Matthew struggled to process what she had just said, “With the amount of blood on you, and the bite on your ankle not breaking the skin… I mean… There is no way that he survived.”
Twilight looked crestfallen for a moment. “I killed him?”
“Yeah, sweetheart…” Matthew spoke softly, pulling her into a hug. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
There was more than a moment of silence as Twilight stared in the direction the body must lay.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Have… Have you ever… Have you ever killed a fluffy? Dad?”
Memories of his dream earlier, and the actions that impelled it flashed across his mind. Vividly visible behind his closed eyes.
Matthew walked through the aisles of a Hasbio Department C incubation bloc flanked by another, much less composed employee.
“Cooper, there’s no use trying to reverse this. The whole line is compromised. I don’t know how you people managed to do this overnight, but this… This is bad… Reset bad.”
“Doctor Winston, you can’t possibly be suggesting that we-”
“I’m not suggesting anything, I’m giving you an order.”
“It’s a minor defect! Does it really matter if the ugly little things have a few extra nerves?”
The two arrived at the multi-man console connected to the incubators for an entire generation of fluffies slated to be “born” soon. They were scheduled to be released from the incubators and begin the next iteration of the Hasbio fluffy in only a week.
“If the extra nerves cluster in random places, then yes, jackass. Do you know what it’s like to feel digestion? We already have more than twenty with short circuited spines stuck in eternal seizures. They would be in unending pain.”
After briefly clicking around on the interface Matthew pulled his ID badge from his coat and slammed it into a slot that had opened on the console.
“End it now.” Matthew pointed at another slot that had opened. “Turn the key.”
“No, Doctor Winston, I won’t have this setback pinned on me. It’s a minor defect. Live with it.”
The man walked past Matthew and left the control room, leaving Matthew to survey all of the fluffies suspended in their incubation units. They were nearly mature, and the ones that were unaffected by the disorder tapped at the other fluffies they could see through the glass, smiling at one another and wordlessly babbling.
Matthew removed his ID from the console and placed it back on his chest. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out two more ID cards. Both were white and featureless, one labelled in sharpie “Dr. Cooper”.
He slotted both cards in and the console UI changed from blue to yellow.
Matthew retraced the movements he had made earlier on the touchscreen. The UI turned from yellow to red as he reviewed the information displayed, and a dialogue box flashed onscreen.
DEPARTMENT C, GENERATION 6 BATCH 4
16000 UNITS ONLINE / 19 UNITS REPORT ERRORS
15288 UNITS ACTIVE / 712 UNITS REPORT SUBJECT DEATH
16 OF 16 SERVICE UMBILICAL ARMATURES FUNTIONAL
TEMPERATURE OF UNITS/SYS/ARM: 21C/18C/16C
EMERGENCY SYSTEM SHUTDOWN - AUTHENTICATION
ACTION WILL BE LOGGED AND REPORTED FOR REVIEW
DR. ANDREW COOPER - L5 ACCESS - DEPARTMENT C
L5 ACCESS CONFIRMED
DR. XXXXXX XXXXXX – L5 ACCESS - DEPARTMENT C
L5 ACCESS CONFIRMED
PROCEED? Y/N
Matthew struck the “Y” key and pulled the cloned keycards. He then proceeded to draw his phone and calmly start back down to the factory floor, the soft plink of the aluminum stairs mingling with the sounds of hooves on glass. The emergency system shutdown’s failsafes had triggered, cutting power to the synthetic umbilicals and enacting a terrible fate upon those that relied on them. The fluffies realized quickly that something was very wrong. The lights went red as the complex switched to emergency power, and the fluffies realized that they were beginning to drown. Matthew looked into their panicked, pleading eyes as he listened to the dial tone.
“You have Hasbio corporate, how might I direct your call?”
Matthew placed his hand on the cold glass of a pod, the fluffy contained within bloodying its head as it struggled to break the thick glass. The machines oxygenating their blood needed time to spool down, so they weren’t going to actually drown for a few more minutes. The pumps had stopped though, and Matthew didn’t want to imagine the painful strain that this was going to place on their hearts.
“Connect me to corporate security. They are gonna want to know what Dr. Cooper just did.”
“Dad? Are you still there?”
Matthew shook his head to clear the fog. “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”
Twilight pushed. “Well?”
“I try to be honest with you all the time sweetie. But well…”
“Dad, I can deal with it, I’m six, not two.” She gave him a look of condescension, like somehow that was a good argument toward her point.
“Twilight, I killed more fluffies in one day than you will probably meet in your entire life. And I’d make the same decision again if I had to.”
“Wow!” She responded, “I don’t know what to say to that. I wanna know if I should I feel bad about… Well, killing fluffies.”
“Did it give you a reason to?”
“Yeah.” Twilight said, a smile returning to her face, “And you always get rid of the violent ones, right?”
“That we do.”