Fluffies are often called a blight, blamed for the horrendous state of the world. But in truth they’re mankind’s greatest distraction after the Faceverse. Whatever your predilection the interactivity, ease of care, and replicability of the beasts served all of humanity’s pressing need to close its eyes and piss away time until death. But man creates in his own image, and anything that has happened to a Fluffy on any given day will have happened at least once to a human that same year somewhere in the world, if not sometimes every day in every city.
For example, look at Little Rock, Arkansas.
Jeffery Myoga would have been better off making a new front door out of the plywood that had been sitting in the back yard for three years, picking the hole-filled apples off the tree in the backyard to mash and store in the fridge for a week for some extra nutrition his microwave soup and diet soda diet didn’t afford, and gotten a good night sleep so he could make it through the busiest day of the week. Instead he masturbated, screamed at his neighbor’s son for the noise of mowing the lawn, then went out for a Fluffy to torment. By preference, pregnant Mares, which he thought of as “rat sows”, since he got a thrill out of the small movements a Foal still connected to the umbilical cord made after cutting through the uterus in a Cesarian immediately after she entered labor, and how they spent their dying hours hugging their still-connected offspring or attempting to run from the situation and slipping on their young until flattened corpses trailed like cans from a marital rental car.
Old Candi Cypress should have cleared out her bedroom, bleached the black mold that gave her a persistent cough and brain fog that grew in every corner of the room and behind her bed, then slept in her car while the fumes dissipated since it was the only place she could go with a lock. Instead she went out looking for Fluffies to rescue, preferably the mouthy ones since lord knows nobody else wanted them and the old barn had enough space for at least twelve more to be separated into their own little 5 foot square pens by chicken wire where they could scream at each other and spray shit until they were all brown, living moderately happy-adjacent lives of hate and spite.
Abner Mae-Cooter should have walked the three blocks home from his job at the tattoo parlor front desk, then gotten on the computer and changed his name so he would have a chance at employment at the hospital he could commute to using that nursing degree he’d worked so hard for. Instead he took the long way home, past rows of houses full of screaming families and starved dogs which ensured no Fluffies would bother him and trigger his anxiety over social confrontations.
Myoga met his end after coming across an aggressive man he’d never met before walking down the sidewalk of the next street. Neither moved out of the way and shoulders met, with Myoga whirling around to call the man a ‘clumsy cocksucker’. Had his eyes not been scanning the bushes and gutters for victims he may have noticed the dilated eyes, sweat, shallow breathing, and taut muscles on the skeletal frame that revealed the other man to be quite high on several strong somethings. A gun came out, Myoga was informed he was a ‘retarded fuckcunt’ who was ‘in Commander Bitchkiller’s kingdom now’ before being ordered to drop his wallet. Instead Myoga dropped a load in his two day unwashed underwearless pants while trying to run. Without thinking the man shot him in the back twice, then proceeded to rant at the corpse for a full minute before proceeding on his way to resume looking for packages to steal from porches.
Cypress’s position was given away by the struggling Hellgremlin Smarty who was promising revenge against her for pulling him away from his herd and making him waste his fecal spray on a trash can lid shield. She didn’t sense her assailant coming and didn’t feel the brick to the back of her head. She was able to look up while she struggled against the shoelace around her neck, tongue out and eyes bulging while tears ran down her tomato red face. The Smarty was right ahead of her, flailing on is back as it complained about the broken leg and rib it suffered in the fall. Once she stopped moving the Smarty was dispatched with a shoeless foot to the skull four times. She was bound, stripped of her pants and underwear while her shirt was hiked up, then her body was roughly handled in a grotesque exploration by hands unfamiliar with care for another for fifteen minutes until a distant sound of a skidding car startled her attacker. A pair of shears was produced and all of her fingers aside from the middle fingers and thumbs were removed, both pinkies kept as trophies by the figure that slipped out and back into a running car before vanishing into the city again. She may have survived the experience were it not for her incorrect dose of Interferon preventing clotting.
Mae-Cooter had rounded the corner when he spied a Fluffy herd milling about in the front yard of an abandoned house. He froze, then deliberated running past them or turning to go another way. The worst thing he expected to happen occurred as they spotted him, fourteen starving talking rodents of a larger than usual size bounding over to him and making a cacophony of pleas and demands. He was trapped on all sides, rotating and looking for an exit as muddy hoofpads grasped up towards his knees and he struggled to convince individuals to leave him alone as his own rambling begging for solitude fell on deaf ears and sunk into the discordant chorus. The delay gave a man driving by enough time to stop, listen, and become annoyed. Gunshots rang out, striking Mae-Cooter four times. A young and healthy Stallion, one who’s dominant genes for eggshell white and royal blue colors plus his deeper voice would have a breeder or rescuer at least four figures, was pinned by Mae-Cooter’s fallen corpse and was abandoned by his Herd as they returned to their territory for comfort. His shrieks for help were ignored as a monster mimicking their dead Herdmate and humans who saw the man’s body ignored the situation. The Stallion perished in agony from heat, baking under the human’s bloating frame like a toddler in a sealed car, the two becoming stuck together forever.
Normally an investigation is carried out when a body is discovered. Normally it is removed from the scene. Normally a city has enough funding that there is at least one person in the chain of command to be held accountable. Little Rock hadn’t known much justice since Internet 4.0 had knocked out the power grid and bankrupted the only remaining power company willing to carve out a niche in the region which was legally shackled to obsolete and difficult to obtain fuels almost a century ago.
Law enforcement was the sole entirely funded thing left in public services. They kept their good standing by ensuring the local digital news was full of reports of violence and robberies but not deaths. With a circular system of protections, missing or anonymous paperwork filings, and extremely potent political power as well as state level disinterest in oversight of almost anything the fifteen or more deaths each day were mostly marked as accidents or disappearances. People who demanded answers or actions were soon made aware they should simply move if they didn’t like their service in town.
US law on unidentified dead has always been reliant entirely on the honor system. Corpses incinerated before an investigation is finished and data is collected was shrugged off, unidentified remains were kept usually between a week and fifteen years depending on factors from individual morgue policy to funding, and any body with a name not requested in 24 hours by family was considered “unclaimed” and thus could be sent for destruction at any time with predictably no punishment for failure to reach out to the family. Morgue regulation was similarly low, and reliant on saw enforcement to pursue.
Myoga, Cypress, and Mae-Cooter were dumped alongside twenty six other casualties from the night in a pile in the abandoned church in the part of town where the soil was so contaminated it could cause mild chemical burns to bare skin. There bodies could be considered disposed of, but could still be reclaimed if needed for an actual investigation. As per usual one out of every thirty deaths was actually investigated, the least newsworthy. Reclusive old man Hickory Klem merely watched as his neighbor’s six year old daughter Susan Abarillo was mauled by a neighbor’s pitbull. During the arrest officers shot all five of the dogs as well as non-fatally wounding Abarillo’s inconsolable mother using a beanbag gun at point blank range after she responded to orders to give testimony by remaining on her knees, begging Jesus to take her instead.
The remains of all thirty nine “unclaimed” bodies were feasted on by a Herd of Fluffies, the source of the smaller group which had accosted Mae-Cooter. They helped break down the bodies and provided regular target practice for off-duty officers looking to appease smatterings of suppressed shame by pinning their guilt secondhand onto the unnatural animals that sinned against even the standards of engineered nature by consuming human flesh.
Fifty dead people on average a day, the highest in record one hundred and eighty seven. Grieving families, traumatized witnesses, and damaged perpetrators alike split attention afterwards between their virtual reality playtime and their biologically engineered diversions, though this being Arkansas that mostly meant Fluffies rather than something pricey which didn’t breed in abundance and occupy as much space outdoors as possible. The Fluffies didn’t poison the people, eliminate services and budget, or put their fates into the hands of random people and an unelected militia which had benefitted from the legal affirmation that “To serve and protect” was only a motto and not a promise or rule. Fluffies just gave everyone the same chance to do what would one day be done to them on their way to the pit in the old church on blighted land, flesh feeding the toys so someone else could play too.