Written with permission from @Foxhoarder for use of the “hategoat” concept. I loved those stories, and they immediately gave me inspiration for this. It isn’t anything about arguments within the fluffy community over the essential character of fluffies, but is a satire on a certain mindset that has given me some incredibly shitty days all my life both at home and at work.
You graduated from college a couple of years ago, and all you could find was a shitty data entry job. Then COVID hit, and your company decided to make everyone work from home on their own PC. And when the lockdowns ended, they decided it was cheaper to carry on doing that rather than keep the offices.
Trouble is, sitting at your computer in your boxers all day gets boring and lonely. When you were a kid, you and your family always had dogs and cats, but the goddamned contract for the apartment bans pets.
You got a couple of fancy rats, and that was fun, you can see why some people call them “pocket dogs”. But then the super saw a kibble packet in your garbage, and you had to take them to the shelter. Hope they got a new home and didn’t just get gassed.
Then you see something on the news about Nate’s Goats.
Yeah, Nate’s Goats. It was one of the first big Youtube-to-pro-media success stories, some animation student did a series about a bunch of cute goats living on a farm somewhere. Now the girl’s the head of a production company with a contract with Nickelodeon.
According to the news story some mad-science biotech start-up got an agreement to create creatures in real life that looked like the cartoons. There are shots of cute fluffy horned things bouncing around a laboratory, and a link to a website where you can actually buy them.
But what attracts your attention is that the company’s in some kind of legal argument about whether creatures created from scratch with biotech and not bred from animals are legally animals or something brand new. Some ramble about “biotoys”. So you wonder, if these things aren’t legally animals, could you get them as pets?
At least you’d have a few months or years until the Supreme Court made a decision. And it would really piss off your asshole landlord.
You go to the website and there are actual photos of people playing with the “NateGoats”, colorful fluff-covered things about the size of a collie. They can even talk a kind of broken English baby-talk. Could get a bit annoying, but they are very cute. There’s images of NateGoats playing games with kids, pulling people’s shopping in little carts, pulling up weeds in gardens, all sorts of things. Sold. The website suggests starting off with two male NateGoats so that they can interact with each other without concerns about breeding, so that’s what you do. The company emails you a glossy leaflet with all sorts of instructions about what to feed your NateGoat (they’re particularly fond of lasagne, for some reason), what its most common sentences mean, and how to keep it safe and comfortable.
Next week there’s a ring at your doorbell and a delivery guy drops off a big plastic animal carrier, before leaving almost before you can thank him. You open the carrier and recoil.
The big blue NateGoat seems to be violently raping the smaller purple one up the ass. You look a bit closer and see that Purple’s probably dead, given the bloody hoof-shaped dents in his head. Blue makes a repulsive orgasm noise before turning his head and looking at you.
“WETAWD HUMAN GIB HATEGOAT WASANYA AN NUU FUKTOY! DIS FUKTOY BWOKEN!” the NateGoat screams at you in a grating squeal.
You’re absolutely lost for words. “Did you just call me a retard?”, you say.
The NateGoat jumps out of the carrier and actually squares up to you. “HATEGOAT AM GENYUS HOOMAN AM WETAWD! GIB WASANYA OWW GENYUS BWAKE AWW YUU SHIT!”
Then the fucking thing actually charges you. Fortunately its horns seem to be made of something rubbery, but its head is hard enough to hurt. As you shout “What the fuck?”, the NateGoat starts wildly skipping around the room, knocking everything off tables or shelves that it can reach. Finally it clambers up to the top of your bookcase, turns its head to the wall, and… Oh shit. It sprays out a ridiculous amount of unspeakably stinky brown diarrhea, all over your floor and furniture.
“HATEGOAT SHIT ON YUU SHIT!” the NateGoat shrieks, and starts dancing clumsily but triumphantly. It promptly falls off the top of the bookcase with a wail of terror, and lands on its head. You hear its neck snap, and it sprays out even more shit, goes into convulsions and dies.
In complete disbelief, you reflexively start cleaning up.
The following day, after you’ve calmed down a bit, you telephone the support line for the NateGoat company. You’re on hold for ages, but you can wait and do some work. Finally, somebody answers the call.
“Hello, Biotoys LLP support. Do you have an issue with your NateGoat?”
“Yes, I do have an issue. One of my NateGoats raped the other one to death, wrecked my flat, and then killed itself.”
There’s silence on the line for a while.
“Ah, let me escalate this to one of our managers.”
You’re on hold for another fifty minutes.
“Hiya, hear you had some trouble with your NateGoats. Did you say they’re both dead?”
“Yes, one of them raped the other one to death in the carrier on its way to my place. Then it called me a retard, wrecked my flat, climbed up the furniture, fell off and broke its neck.”
“Hmmm. Did you give it an attitude adjustment when you opened the carrier?”
“Attitude adjustment? What’s that? The documentation you sent me didn’t say anything about attitude adjustment.”
“Oh, well that documentation’s just to get you started. You really need to log onto our web forum, we’ve got a thriving community with all sorts of helpful hints from other owners. But because we’re customer focussed, we’ll send you another Goat for free.”
“So what’s this attitude adjustment?”
“OK, you need to get a pool cue or something similar, and if the NateGoat starts giving you any attitude, you beat it with the pool cue until it starts crying. That should get it tractable for a few days so you can start training it.”
“And after that it’ll be OK?”
“Well, most owners find that you need to give an attitude adjustment every two or three days.”
It’s your turn to be silent for a while.
“So you need to beat these little psychos into submission every couple of days? And these are meant to be for kids?”
“Look, this is a new technology. If you’re an early adopter, you need to get to know it. Really, you’re working in partnership with us at this stage, to help improve it.”
“So what, this is a beta version?”
“Well, actually, we had a bit of trouble. Some tree-huggers, animal-rights types attacked our plant, did quite a bit of damage. So 'cos we’re still burning cash we had to start getting a Minimum Viable Product out of the door.”
“You call that viable?”
“Listen. You are on the ground floor of a fantastic breakthrough in technology. The first entirely engineered living organic product in the world. It sounds like you don’t see the potential of what we’ve got here.”
You try to get through to this wanker some other way.
“You’re selling these things as friends for kids or as service animals! Has anybody managed to turn one of these into a pet?”
“Well, one of my colleagues has a NateGoat that he used to clear, rotavate and fertilise his garden this spring. He said it was really useful.”
You think for a while. “You mean it ripped all the plants up and shat on everything, don’t you?”
There’s silence at the end of the phone.
“Anyway, the really weird thing, it called itself a Hategoat. Any idea what that was about?”
The guy actually laughs. “Oh, sorry, sorry. It’s just, that’s kind of an Easter Egg. The guy who did the programming for the language, he’s a fucking genius, and he’s originally from Kyrgyzstan. They use the Cyrillic script there, like Russian? And in Cyrillic what looks like an N is actually an H? So just as a joke, very occasionally, they will do that. But they’re not supposed to do it all the time.”
“Riiiight, very funny. Can I have my money back now, please?”
There’s silence at the end of the phone again. “Look, I said, we’ll send you a replacement NateGoat. And I’ll make sure to tell the delivery department to give it an attitude adjustment right before they send it to you.”
“I don’t want another goddamned hategoat. I want my fucking money back or I’m going to sue you.”
The guy starts talking in a much more dangerous sounding voice. “OK, I see what this is. You’re one of those fucking losers who buy technology, something fucking fantastic, something revolutionary, and you think it should be something you can just hand over to your Great-Aunt Tilly. You don’t want to have fun, you don’t want to get under the hood, you want everything on a fucking plate. It’s people like you who get in the way of people like me when we want to FUCKING MAKE THE WORLD BETTER, with your fucking red tape and your fucking welfare. Go whine to your fucking lawyer, loser.”
The phone goes dead.
Just out of interest, you go and have a look at the official web forum. It’s mostly people complaining about their hategoats being fucking psychos, and not getting much response. Apart from a few long threads of people enthusiastically discussing “fun” ways of doing “attitude adjustment” on their hategoats, some of which show a level of sadistic imagination and gloating that makes you seriously worry about what else they do in their spare time.
The next day, you’re getting ready to call your lawyer, when there’s a ring at your doorbell. You open the door and there’s a pet carrier sitting there. You cautiously nudge it with your foot and it starts shaking.
“GIB HATEGOAT SANYA AND FUKTOYS OR HATEGOAT FUKKIN WAPE YOU AN BWAKE YUU SHIT AN CHOKEFUCK YUU BABBEH!”
You sigh, walk into the bathroom and run a cold bath, then go back out and grab the carrier.
“GENYUS HATEGOAT GON BUM YUU TU FUKKIN DEFF!”
You dump the quivering carrier into the bath. Some bubbles and liquid shit come out of the airholes for a while, then everything goes quiet.
Fucking hategoats.