In the mountain town of Brockburg, Oregon there lives a fluffy older than any fluffy anyone can remember. He is a shortlegged and stocky stallion with a greenish brown coat and a brownish green mane. His back is unusually broad and convex, and he’s fatter than an average fluffy. His belly fluff drags along the ground as he slowly waddles around at the Brockburg Public Library where he’d lived for the last twenty years. Sometimes it’d catch momentarily on something and slow him up.
“Siwwy fwuff…is otay, wiww wait fow fwuff be weddy tu wawkies…”
His name is Boris. He was already old and portly when Amanda the librarian found him. She was only an assistant then, but she met this very slow and mellow fluffy with flecks of grey in his pelt in the woods one day and just knew he’d be great with kids.
He had been. Upon the opening of his enclosure in the middle of the library, he was an immediate hit with families for miles around. Brockburg was the largest town within an hour of itself, and it only had about 30,000 people total. Their local library had, back in the Lean Twenties, been just about the only public education institution able to function despite budget cuts, the sudden Balkanization of North America, and the sectarian violence that followed. There are numerous reasons why they were able to endure as a beacon to folks throughout central Oregon when larger cities found themselves embroiled in violent struggles, but ask anyone there and they’ll say it was all because of Boris.
He’d just been ‘fluffy’ for his first few weeks. Then a child asked him his name and he said “Boaw-iss, wike Kawwoff.” When asked where his name came from, he shrugged. When asked who Boris Karloff was, he shrugged. “Juss sumfin peepuw tawkies sumtiem.” Ever mysterious, soon the name was just settled fact. It seemed as concrete and immovable as the hills themselves. Like it had always been there. Like he had always been there.
His enclosure had been a rallying point for the community. Something about this gentle old fluffy who never raised his voice and loved listening to little kids and adults with the same sense of childlike glee (albeit a child on a shitload of Codeine) made people feel hopeful as the Federal Government was busy tearing its own dick off to fuck itself to death. By the time the Red Summer of '29 finally put an end to the Brushfire Wars and settled the border of the People’s Republic of Cascadia, he had become a symbol for all the downtrodden and exhausted masses from Grants Pass to Skookumchuck.
He didn’t understand or care. People would come to see him, he’d smile his broad sleepy smile and slowly trudge over to them. He never grumbled or complained or gave any indication that movement bothered him. Over the years, his enclosure was enlarged to incorporate more space as it became clear that Boris could mingle with people. By the Thirties, there was no enclosure to be seen. The Library was his enclosure.
This was the way things were for some time. Since rules had been relaxed, Amanda had caught four separate children riding on top of Boris. They were young, maybe first or second graders, but he’s a fluffy! She shooed them away, much to the dismay of the gentle giant. He made a pouty face at her.
“Mummah Manduh? Wai make wittwe hoomins gu way?” She sat down next to him leaning against the bookshelf. “Because Boris, I don’t want you to get hurt. You’re very old, and kids can be so rough sometimes. You’re very special to me, Boris. To all of us.” He pondered that, and as he pondered he slowly lowered his head to rest on her leg.
“Bowis wub yu tuu, Mummah Manduh. Wub aww Bowis fwens in howe wai-bewwy.” He closed his eyes and breathed, deeply as he fell asleep on her leg. She stroked his mane, careful not to wake him. He’s a lumbering oaf, but a surprisingly light sleeper. She sacrificed many evenings of her twenties staying with him when the bombings were too close and he could hear them. She reckons she’s one of maybe ten people who’ve ever seen Boris afraid. Hell, ever seen Boris in any mood other than “Buddhalike contentment.”
She was watching his lips flutter as he breathed in and out, making the same adorable “pshew” noise he’d made on every exhale of every nap she’d ever let him take on her leg. Something about the angle of his head. He likes it, but if he stays too long he says his neck gets “wittwe bit owwies.”
“Ma’am? I’m…I’m so sorry to disturb you…” Snapped out of her daze, Amanda turned to the voice. An old man was standing in the aisle. She’d not even noticed him approaching. “Is…is this Boris?” She smiled. She got this question more than anything from people she didn’t recognize. Usually they were here to see the famous Dependable Boris.
“Yes sir, in the flesh. He’s just a little tuckered out right now, taking a quick nap. Maybe another twenty minutes or so I’ll stir him so his neck don’t get stiff.” The man nodded. “I can imagine it would. Tortoise Fluffs always did like putting pressure on their necks.” The woman had a double take. “Tortoise fluffs? I’m…what?”
“Terribly sorry, I should introduce myself. My name is Robert Clark, I was a Bionengineer for Hasbio back before the Revolution.” Her face tensed up and his hands went up in surrender. "Not in Applied Sciences. Just in the Biotoy division." His hands were shakier as they came back down. “None of us knew what they’d…” He trailed off, staring at Boris.
“I designed them. Their traits are the result of controlled breeding and the manipulation of genetic material in both high tech and low tech ways, but I was in charge of deciding what the standard would be. We wanted a large, slow moving fluffy with a broad and strong back supported by thick legs.” He knelt down next to Boris and placed his hand on top of his back.
“Obviously it was a mixed success. Boris is a lot of things, but he’s not a tortoise. We basically succeeded in taking a Fluffalo and giving it some Tortoise traits.” Amanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Why have I never heard of this? Why has nobody ever reached out! We’ve had Boris for decades now, you’re telling me he’s not just some one off? There are more like him?”
The man’s face turned sad. “Afraid not. Getting a creature like Boris was hard. There were biological tradeoffs. Firstly, he’s sterile. We only managed to birth three viable Tortoise Fluffs. The three male ones. The Females just…we never figured it out. They just didn’t work.” He pulled away and stood, backing up from Amanda.
“There were…even as a child Boris was large. His two brothers were too, but neither of them have his strong back, and only one of them had his strong legs.” The guilt that had been building on his face was now visible to the naked eye. “In…in 2020, when the People’s Militia first hit our Aberdeen lab, I panicked. Like I said, I didn’t know what the rest of the company was doing. If I had…” He pauses. Amanda feels like he needs her to interject, but how can she? Applied Sciences had been the modern equivalent to nightmare organizations like the SS, Unit 731, and the CIA.
After the war, the People’s Revolutionary Militia helped form a sort of loose transitional government to make sure essential services and infrastructure could be restored quickly and efficiently. Once Cascadia had dusted off the ashes of the old world, attention turned to the vanquished enemy. The hordes of Capitalists and their collaborators who had spent the Brushfire Wars trying desperately to undermine the various Socialist movements taking hold around the former United States. Most of them were guilty of nothing more than standard capitalist exploitation. Despite the rhetoric people used in the lead up and during the war, in peacetime there was just no practical purpose for “punishing” such banal evils, so long as those who committed them were no longer able to.
Nobody wanted to hang their bosses, and it turned out most bosses didn’t want to be hanged so they didn’t force matters. In Cascadia especially, the violence had been brief in all but the most hotly contested urban centers. Which is what had made it so odd that the PMC hired by Hasbio to protect their “Applied Sciences” skunkworks operation was so hell bent on killing anyone who approached.
Of course after the siege finally broke through and the data was seized, it was clear why. Wildly unethical experiments bordering on Mad Science. Grafting crude copies of human consciousness onto fluffies to test psychological warfare. Applying the same unrestricted gene modification used on fluffies to normal animals. To humans. While North America was trying desperately to break the chains of oppression that bound them all to a sinking ship, these fucking monsters were in a lab in the mountains trying to breed human beings who stood nine feet tall, were immune to all disease, could live 200 years easily, and had brains custom made for whatever purpose they’d be used for.
“Combat Units don’t need things like ‘doubt’ and ‘conscience’ any more than Labor Units need things like ‘fear’ and ‘compassion.’ Just juice them up with whatever they need for the end task and atrophy anything nonessential. Not like any of them are gonna become the next Mozart.”
A video of a meeting between top Hasbio executives, the heads of the Applied Sciences team, a Brigadier General, and the Vice President yielded this and dozens more damning quotes from all involved. A nascent movement in New England to nullify the Northeastern Confederacy and reinstall the federal government basically died overnight because there was now video of the former Vice President making a joke about what qualities a “Skinjob Voter” would and wouldn’t need. “Mouths are necessary, but vocal cords aren’t that critical.” He had to flee the country. In a decade things had deteriorated to the point that a former VP was forced to flee to the UK to avoid his former constituents.
All this rattled through Amanda’s head. It was history now, but she’d lived it. She remembered it. Standing in the break room with Amy and Michael when the breaking news report announced the fall of Aberdeen, feeling nauseous as she watched dozens of former Hasbio scientists and engineers giving testimony on the horrors they’d been made to commit.
It was all over her face, and the man saw it. He knew that look. He was used to it. Guess it’s just part and parcel to having spent your best years helping a corporation fund war crimes by selling eugenics as a fun toy. “He was all I could save. He lived with me for a year, but when men from my team started getting drug in I knew it was only a matter of time. So I took him to the woods outside town, down in-”
“Down in the valley. That’s where I found him.” The man smiled, and Boris began to stir. He opened his eyes and looked up at the man. “Hubba-wha? Oh, hewwo owd daddeh. Bowis nu see in wong tiem. Hao douin?” Amanda was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe he remembers you. It’s been twenty years. He’s practically ancient.” The man laughed. Not a nervous one like he’d been doing, an actual honest laugh from the diaphragm. “Hahaha oh Lord, hahahahah…” She looked at him puzzled. “He’s…uh…” The man searched for the words. “He’s older than any fluffy aside from himself, but Boris is not ancient. Not for his biology.” Amanda found herself taken even further aback. “Seriously? How…how long will…I mean…”
She had spent so many years assuming this would be Boris’ last season. Could this be true? Is any of it true? The man shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to say. I know the genes for longevity are activated because we used the genes for color and bone density as flags. He’s got both of those, so he’s gonna live…a while.” Amanda got up, looking back down at Boris. He hadn’t changed. He was the same and she was twenty years older. It seemed so obvious now, but she’d never thought about it.
“One question.” She looked back to the man. “Why name him Boris? He seems to know Boris Karloff’s name, but not who he is?” The man chuckled. “It started as a joke about his appearance. When he was born his skin was sort of grayish green and his peach fuzz made him look like Frankenstein’s Monster, what with the odd bone structure and tubes and machines we had him on. But he never had an actual name name until I fled with him. We weren’t allowed to name them in the lab. By then, I’d taught him this:” He looked down at Boris and spoke plainly. “Hey Boris, if you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to, why don’t you go where fashion sits?” Boris reared up on his hind legs and bellowed, which Amanda had never heard before.
“PUTTIN AWN DA WIIIIIIIIIIITZ!”
Amanda was overcome with delight. Seeing this stoic gentle beast shout like that, it was like the last twenty years fell away. She was just a starry eyed young woman standing in awe of this…thing that shouldn’t exist.
“He’ll bury us both. We’re lucky to know him.”
“You think? I don’t know, he is a fluffy.”
…
Boris is sleeping in his favorite place: A big flat rock in the middle of the Central Willamette Valley Communal Library. He’d lived here for a very long time, longer than anyone can remember. He’d seen countless librarians come and go, he remembered them all. He loved them all.
Some time ago, he’s not sure how long, a nice man gave him a very pretty hat to wear that made him very proud of his appearance. The man said the hat was a magic hat that he could think into so the magic hat would know what he knew. He never knew what to think about, but the man was always nice and friendly on his visits.
The man is old now, and Boris can tell his time is short. Soon he will leave, just like all the others. It makes Boris a little sad, but not too bad. This is just what hoomins do. But today is not like other days. The man isn’t alone. He’s brought a small pet carrier.
He sets it down in front of Boris, who slowly approaches. The man opens it, and a fluffy steps out.
She is big for a foal. Just weaned and she’s larger than an average standard grown fluffy. Wide too. With thick stubby legs and a broad convex back. Her fluff is brownish green, and her mane a sort of mossy brown. She waddled slowly towards Boris who was, for the first time in his life, truly speechless.
His nose wouldn’t lie, this is his babbeh. She smells like him. She looks like him. But he can’t have babbehs. It makes no sense! The man senses his confusion and helps him understand.
“A lot of humans worked very hard to make another of you. She is your daughter, and her mother is every technician and researcher to work on this project since it began ninety years ago.” The friendly fuzzy lump of a foal waddled to Boris. “Daddeh? Daddeh! Babbeh wub!” He nuzzled her, held her close, and cried. He’d never dreamed of this, and the scientists had been wise to hide it from him. It had been a long shot at best, and nobody wanted to sour his mood by giving him false hopes.
He looked back to the man, eyes glistening with sheer joy. “Am…am babbeh gunna wib wong tiem wike daddeh? Wike Bowis du?” The man smiled. “We think so. I can’t say for sure that she can make it to 800 years, but she will outlive you.” This was a curveball. He’d never met someone who would definitely outlive him, not since Fiwstest Mummah Manda told him he was a special forever fluffy so so long ago.
He held his daughter tight. “Wub babbeh. Wub Manda.” She looked up, beaming. “Namesie? Wub namesie! Babbeh am Manda nao! Hooway babbeh!” They embraced, both overcome with emotion at this meeting of father and daughter. Amidst the soft happy-huhuhus, Boris could be heard occasionally repeating a phrase to himself.
“Su happies, nebba wonewy ebba gain.”
He was right.