[Author’s Note: Time for a radical departure from my previous works here. This is more of a teaser for a series I was considering writing, so depending on if anyone is interested in a continuation I might expand this into a whole series.]
Hasbio engineers get a lot of negative press, and quite rightly so. However, it’s worth taking into consideration that, as with many products, many of the issues with fluffies stemmed not from engineering faults, but from constant corporate meddling, budgetary concerns, and most importantly, an unfinished product being released early (although that last point isn’t generally something that the Hasbio engineers are blamed for). This results in many Hasbio engineers having to deal with massive backlash for a problem that, realistically speaking, they shouldn’t have been held accountable for in the first place.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that you are the head Hasbio engineer in charge of the fluffy project. Not the official head engineer, of course, since you’re a bit of a social recluse and wouldn’t make for a good interviewee had the project gone according to plan and resulted in countless financial magazines wanting to interview the genius behind the hit new pet. No, you’re the actual head engineer, the one who does most of the work while the rest of the team sits around and looks good for the promotional videos.
Ever since you were a child, you dreamed of the possibilities of bio-engineering. Yeah, you were generally seen as a weird kid, head so high in the clouds that your didn’t touch the ground. But inside that strange head of yours there was a mind that was so vast that modern psychologists couldn’t hope to measure it. And that mind dreamed of a future you could make reality.
The wonders in your mind, wonders that you somehow knew that you could bring to life, would change the world for the better. Bio-reactors that could turn municipal waste into clean and safe energy, plankton that would break down the plastic waste in the ocean, and living nanites that would make the entire medical field look like barber-surgeons with hacksaws. But in your deepest dreams you dreamed bigger, of improving humanity itself, allowing us to reach for the stars instead of being shackled to the ground. All you needed was tools, and time.
So, you went to college to study bio-engineering and quit halfway through your Bachelor’s degree. Not because it was hard, but because you couldn’t bear to see superstition, ignorance, and blatant falsehood preached as truth. Because you had the icy understanding that those who were supposed to teach you knew absolutely nothing about what they were teaching. While they guessed at what a gene did, you knew with absolute certainty, and you could prove it, too.
But without a degree you were treated as a joke by the bio-engineering industry, and by the scientific community at large. They’d made snide comments about wasting your potential, then spend six years failing to isolate a single gene. But for all that, there was one company that was willing to see the truth, willing to use your expertise. Hasbio.
You were taken aback when the project they put you on was a sort of synthetic pet, a talking one at that, but it seemed easy enough. They offered you a lab of your own, and a handsome salary, and so you agreed. Which shows that a brilliant mind can still make horrible mistakes.
At first, the project was going well. Then came the budget cuts, one after another, until you barely had enough of a budget to keep the lights on in the lab. After the seventh batch of bargain-bin feed had killed yet more of your prototypes, you began to feed your failed prototypes to the new ones in desperation. And there were a lot of failed prototypes.
Your first synthetic horse was a beautiful, graceful creature, although it resembled a miniature deer more than a horse. It was perfect; durable, passive, and even had a rudimentary grasp of English. Everything you’d been asked for and more.
But soon it became clear that the person making the decisions in the project wasn’t you. Change after change, week after week, they bastardized you creation. Given time and funding, you could have had the creatures speaking six languages by the time they came out of the synthesis pod, but your employers insisted on baby talk. Your durable creation had to be weakened, they said, or it could hurt someone, despite its passive nature. Make them shorter, remove the knees, make them fluffier, shorten their tail, add wings and horns, the list of changes went on and on.
And so, with every passing day, the tortured genome of your creations became weaker and weaker. You beautiful brainchild morphed more and more into a shitrat.
Eventually you came up with something that corporate was happy with. Well, either that or they’d finally run out of budget to spend on cocaine and decided they were done with their four-year binge. But what was left of your creation filled you only with shame and revulsion. Still, they’d promised you a lab if you finished their pet, their bio-toy, so you swallowed your sense of integrity and continued to work out the issues.
Eventually, you found a balance of functional life form and the ungodly thing corporate demanded. Unfortunately, this wasn’t what was released when the wannabe-ecoterrorists wrecked the facility. No, what was released was an old prototype that corporate insisted you keep to show investors how progress was going. And so the ecological disaster that was the fluffy species began.
Of course, corporate didn’t take the blame, that’s what you were there for. So your name was dragged through the mud, you were treated as some sort of mad scientist who’d willingly made these mockeries of life, and you lost any hope of ever working in the bio-engineering field ever again. So you dropped off the grid.
All you’d ever had was goodwill. All you wanted to do, you wanted to do for those around you. But goodwill betrayed can easily become spite. And so ends our little thought experiment.
In a small cottage, far from civilization, there was a small, homemade lab. Handmade and amateurish equipment that, nevertheless, even the top experts in the field wouldn’t begin to be able to fathom, sat scattered about, ignored now that its purpose had been served. And behind glass, on a face that even a mother couldn’t love, three pairs of eyes opened.
[You can’t convince me that someone who somehow programmed both language and brand preference into a creature’s DNA is anything less than a genius whose mind would be far beyond the comprehension of anyone else on Earth.]