Happy pt.10, Epilogue ( by milky )

Depends on the culture. Very few western cultures would eat dogs for example, but in Far Eastern cultures, dogs are typically viewed as a common foodstuff.

As for fluffies having sapience, many real world animals straddle the line (dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants, some species of parrots) and they don’t have the same level of legal protection as humans.

Playing devil’s advocate, there’s also the argument that fluffy sapience is in fact just a Chinese Room style input/output device and they don’t act beyond their programming.
You poke it with a stick, it goes “Nu huwties fwuffy! Fwuffy am fo’ huggies an’ wuw!”, just like the design team intended, to flag unintentional product damage to the owner and to reinforce the Fluffy sales tag line as further product advertising and recommended usage instructions.

You flay the thing alive and rub salt over its bare flesh, it’s going to go “WOWSTEST HUWTIES” then enter the “WAN DIE” loop as its programming is overwhelmed and to indicate to the owner that this product is now defective and a new one should be bought.

I remember reading a story that was focused on fluffies being nothing more than the sum of their programming, and part of it was that different fluffies’ crayon drawings were very similar due to the limits of building a suitable randomisation engine for artistry (aka creativity). Edit: Biotoys Last All Summer Long by Gardel.

I’m playing around with my own story based around a similar viewpoint, I just can’t get the story to go anywhere beyond a giant world building exposition dump.

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