Short story attempt for @Royal_Rabbit’s Dialogue Prompt.
Feedback and comments welcome!
“Thank you doctor for speaking to me and letting me record this interview for my high school paper.”
“That’s no problem, Elizabeth. I’m happy to help out. I’m not a doctor though, not yet. Just call me Mike.”
“Soooo Mike, can you tell me what you’re working on? I’m guessing it’s something fluffy related from those fluffies in the other rooms.”
“Yeah, I’m looking into feral fluffy control to keep them out of critical infrastructure. I’m working on something that uses their pattern recognition alongside their programming flaws to cause a specific targetted response that triggers a neural cascade failure.”
“I’m sorry, could you explain that in easier English?”
“Fluffy see bad thing, fluffy die. Anything else see bad thing, they don’t die.”
“Oh, I get it! So that ‘bad thing’ you were talking about, is this… weird looking pattern here?”
“Yeah, I’ve been working on it for months now.”
“And you’ve been testing it on these fluffies?”
“I’ve got cages of ferals in that room, which are the main test subjects.”
“What’s with the fluffies in the other room? It looks like a saferoom to me.”
“That’s the control group. I’m gonna test it on these feral fluffies, then I need to check it still works on domestic fluffies.”
“Why are you testing it on regular fluffies if you’re trying to stop ferals?”
“A large number of the feral population are abandoned or runaway fluffies, so I need to check whether this works on them as well. There’s no point on it just working on ferals if those ex-domestics live.”
“Is there a difference between ferals and regular fluffies?”
“That’s part of what we’re trying to work out.”
“I see… so how are you stopping owned fluffies from seeing this thing and dying then? Won’t there be problems with the owners?”
“They’re going up in restricted access areas where you’re not going to get domestics, like power stations and logistics depots. Even if some dum-sorry I mean naive, fluffy owner did bring their fluffy in, then there’s big signs up saying 'Fluffy Exclusion Zone - no fluffies allowed” before they get anywhere close to these off-kers."
“What an off-ker? That thing there?”
“Yes, it’s short for Optical-vector Fluffy Kill Agent. I thought Berryman Logical Image Technique would be too on the nose and probably copyrighted as well.”
“I don’t know what that reference means.”
“It’s an old scifi story, you can probably look it up later.”
“So how good are these… off-kers?”
"Unfortunately, it only gives them a mild headache at best… here, I’ll show you.
“If you put on a pair of ear defenders from that dispenser over there, I’ll go get a feral.”
“DUMMEH HUUMIN! WET SMAWTY OUT!”
“Shut up and look at this.”
"NU! SMAWTY NU WIKE WOOKING AT DUMMEH DWAWING! GIB DINKY-PWACE HUWTIES!
“WET SMAWTY GU! WET GU! WET-”
“Holy shit, that’s a noisy shitrat! Oh fu- crap, I gotta edit that out later.”
“*Laugh * Yeah, most of these ferals are just annoying loud shitrats.”
“So could I ask some more questions? This off-ker is targetting how they think, right? Something with how they’re programmed?”
“Yeah.”
"My sister had a fluffy and he was an annoying little shi-idiot. She did the whole good owner thing of looking after him, like using a hamster style water bottle to make he didn’t drown as ‘wawa bad fo’ fwuffy’.
“He eventually drowned when we took him to a water park, but he didn’t go near the water, just the picture of the water slides and stuff were enough to set him off.”
“What.”
“Have you tried a picture of something watery, like a picture of a lake or something?”
“No… it can’t be that simple…”
“WAI DUMMEH HUUMIN GET SMAWTY ‘GAIN?! NU WAN SEE DUMMEH PIK-WAWA BAD FO’ SMARTY! NU WAN WAWA! NU WAWA-GLK-Kkk-gkgkgkgkkkkkrkrrr…”
“Holy fuck, it drowned!”
“NO! YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS! Wait, the control group!”
“Hewwo nize mistuh! Wha’ kan Pumkin du fo’ nize mist-WAWA BAD FO’ FWUFFY!!! NU WAN WAWA! NU WAWA-GLK-Kkk-gkgkgkgkkkkkrkrrr…”
“Motherfucker.”
“Errr, I guess this interview is over now?”
really can imagine that