Contraptionism (Turboencabulator)

Contraptionism

By: Turboencabulator


“You want to what.”

The four words hung in the air of the small office, cramped on all sides by towering
bookshelves stuffed with texts, papers crammed in the open gaps, and scribbled notes laying on
every flat surface. The overhead fan turned lazily, the gentle breeze not helping the headache
Dr. Stackhouse felt coming on.

One of his doctoral students sat across from him, twitching a little in excitement. Chuck was
in a side program as well, the university had basically given the department a pile of money
and said ‘Here, produce something we can show off.’

So the call went out for ideas. Chuck showed up. The headache started to pinch behind
Stackhouse’s eye as Chuck began rummaging through notes.

“Doc, I gotta tell you, full disclosure, 'cuz this does sound nuts, but I bet we can use
fluffies for computing.”

Stackhouse leaned over and opened a low desk drawer, pulling out a bottle of aspirin and
dry-swallowing a few. “You mean using their brains as biocomputers, right?”

“Stanford is already doing that. I mean using them as literal computing elements in their
natural state.” Chuck said, planting a folded map on the desk and opening it excitedly. “I
figure we can basically create an environment that functions like a logic cell in an FPGA. You
have a bunch of fluffies, in a bunch of cells, and you can express an arbitrary Boolean
equation with it. I proved this during my master’s degree but never got to build one. But what
if we can do something similar but rather than using fluffies mechanically, we use them
genetically as carriers for encoded vectors?”

“What the shit are you talking about?”

“Hold on.” Chuck sat down, fished out a bottle of pills, and took a few. “Ritalin.”

“Oh thank god.”

“Right. So.” Chuck said, pointing on the diagram. “We start with fluffies, engineered to have
certain proteins expressed that basically do nothing on their own.”

“Uh… ok?” Stackhouse leaned forward, trying to follow along.

“They do things when the fluffies breed. If the result is bad, the child is
stillborn. Essentially a program termination. Then, the proteins express different tweaks in
the fluffy’s basic behavior. This is then in an environment that functions like a filter and
control system, so the basic behavior modifications are stochastically guided into specific
breeding pools.”

With much squinting and noises, Stackhouse followed along. “This is the weirdest shit I’ve ever
heard but ok?”

“Well you can encode a problem in the excess genes in a fluffy, then put them in this system,
it’ll self-correct and automatically use their genes as a computing surface to solve other
problems.” Chuck said, sitting down again. “I calculated that it can be faster for specific
classes of problems given enough of a population. It can solve NP-complete problems faster than
most supercomputers, for instance.”

Stackhouse leaned back, thinking, sighing. “How much of a population are we talking about
here.”

“We could beat IBM with four million fluffies?”

Silence. Staring.


Vast and imposing, the new Fluffy Computation Center sprawled out over what used to be a
parking lot, the simple, concrete and steel construction at odds with the ornate stonework of
the historic campus adjacent.

At least, in Chuck’s mind. The board’s endowment made him scale back his experiment to a proof
of concept, but as he stared out into the slightly leaky expanse of Basketball Court 4B, the
world of possibilities opened.

Sitting at a desk he began to work, methodically planning out his budget and construction
requirements. Two thousand fluffies, inoculated and capable of breeding, a thousand of each
gender. Hundreds of square feet of tunnels, microcontrollers in quantities reserved for
industrial escapades, motors and latches and pens and feeders and hoppers and waste-drains and
feed.

He popped another pill from his bottle. The top label of Ritalin, taken from an old
prescription bottle, was beginning to peel off. He taped it down and continued, ignoring the
drip-drip-drip of the leaking roof as a modular framework began to play out on a CAD program.

Eventually the plans were finalized, calculations jotted down neatly on pages torn from a steno
pad all arranged in a grid, taped up on the walls behind him, ready to be set down in a
document for submission. It took Chuck hours to convert everything, describe everything, and
finally a single massive PDF was chugged out from his editor, and emailed to the Board.

He could almost smell the fluffies already.


“Yes, but you can’t just assume that parasocial relationships are a detriment to the possible
motivation of the proletariat. If you can establish that stan armies can be motivated to
perform actions for the removal of the bourgesoisie, then isn’t it beneficial in the long run?”

A young man watched as the words came from the mouth of an equally young woman, sitting on
opposite sides of a picnic table in the quad.

He sighed and leaned forward. “It might be beneficial in the long run but only
circumstantially, since understanding of the ideas behind the relationship isn’t necessarily
something that stans have. If they … what the hell is that.”

The two first-year political science students watch as truck after truck, all marked with the
Alenix logo, roll past silently, the clean solar panels on the roof casting reflections on the
high buildings around the quad. The smell of fluffy excrement became overwhelming for a minute,
but the trucks passed eventually, leaving only a bright, sunny day in their wake.

The duo threw up from the smell.


Two months later

What used to be Basketball Court 4B stank.

It was not the usual stink of sweat and off-brand floor wax, but the smell of a hospital, the
cleaning agents and antiseptics used by the gallon to keep clean what was supposed to be a
place of health and healing.

Fluffies, across generations and families, milled through a massive labyrinthine construction,
taking up the majority of what used to be the court itself. Wires and data cables were
haphazardly zip-tied in place to steel struts supporting walkways and branching gates. The
quiet babbling of happy, if confused fluffies blended with the soft hum of the environmental
systems, the food processors, and the chugging slosh of the waste system.

Life persisted, and fluffies filled the space, breeding, moving, and being shuttled around by
automated, simple systems, in the pursuit of computation.

Doctor Stackhouse sat and watched, deep in thought. Stallions and mares copulated in random
corners, other fluffies had gone mad lost in a maze that changed itself by unknown rules. A
massive database tracked the genetic composition of every element in the brobdingnagian
structure. A chirpie was crushed under the lip of a moving elevator, split in two. The back
half kicked as latent nerve impulses fired off.

This did not stop a young stallion from mounting the chirpy, the half-body more than enough to
sate the needs that the genetic lottery had laden the fluffy with.

He felt a headache coming on again, and leaned over, rummaging through the desk nearby. Chuck
was busy at the terminal to the database, reviewing the computation’s progress.

Doctor Stackhouse found the bottle of meds, the label peeling off. Ritalin was printed on the
outer label, but he saw the curl of old adhesive letting go, and pulled it aside.

The word underneath was “Risperdal”.

He looked at Chuck.

Chuck looked back, a manic, grinning rictus in place of his normal twitchy expression.

“Doc. I think it’s coming together.” He said.

An hour later, he was being gently loaded into an ambulance, destined for St. Dymphna’s
Institution.

24 Likes

Extra points for the use of “Brobdingnagian”.

9 Likes

Huh. An actual beneficial use for fluffies. Will wonders never cease.

5 Likes

It IS beneficial in the long run. We truly have no choice but to Stan.

6 Likes

52v21c

Also, why didn’t he just put his schizophrenia medication in the original ritalin bottle?

8 Likes

Because that would be logical. And sane.

7 Likes

Am I right in assuming that the fluffies aren’t actually computing anything? :laughing:

And by the way just what is a stan army?

5 Likes

Yeah no this is a complete waste of time and resources due to a nutbar being off his meds.

Stans are an online phenomenon named after, of all things, a character from an Eminem song of the same name. They’re particularly obsessive and energetic fans of a celebrity, currently most commonly applied to internet personalities or bands. The little discussion between students was a partial re-creation of something I overheard once where a pair of AnComs were trying to figure out a way to quickly motivate people to revolution and they thought manipulating online fanbases might be a way to do it.

9 Likes

I wish I had half your writing chops, that story was so smooth and easy to read

4 Likes

Ooooh now it all makes sense. Marxist revolution through brainwashed fan worshipping proxies. Interesting idea.

5 Likes

Worked for the nat-socs.

1 Like

Lol Nazis aren’t Socialists ya goof. It’s just a name, nothing more.