It hurts.
It hurts so much.
Your headsie feels like its gonna explode, you feel your heartbeat in your brain.
You’re also hot all the time, like a fever, but only in your head.
You listen to the screams all day and night as the pain means you barely get any sleep.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
HUWT! HUWTIES! PWASE STOB HUWTIES!
MUUUUMAH! HEEEEWP! HEEEEWP BABEEEEEEEEH!
You’ve already screamed yourself hoarse long ago, you can’t even say ‘wan die’ anymore.
Even thought you’re blind you can’t sleep, nor see all the lights and screens above you.
Your body its hold down by braces, the fluff behind your head has been removed with laser so as to not interfere with the rat nest of cables that were shoved at the base of your skull. You don’t even feel those anymore, your nerves there are dead and besides the pain from your head numbs any other discomfort you might have.
Art by Chikahiro
You don’t know why you ended up here, you thought you were going to a good housie together with all the other fluffies. You were breed at a mass production facility but one with above-average industry standards. You were allowed to live with your mummah, bruddas and sissies, a rarity for mass produced fluffies. The staff were nice to you, said you were such a good fluffy with “big bwains”. So smart, but not a smarty, far smarter than those, smart as an alicorn if not more.
And yet one day you were placed on a rack, your teeth removed, hoses stuck to your poopie pwace and mouth, most of your pwetty mane removed with stinging light. Then the wires were shot into your head, you felt an incredible pain as the lights went out forever. You screamed and screamed as all the other fluffies there but nothing happened. You wanted to die but couldn’t.
But today a miracle happened: a brain hemorrhage.
You heard the alarms going off as you still had your hearing.
“Shit shit” -said a technician
“Unit R-354 its having a stroke! give me a hand here!”
You felt the braces being removed, hoomin hands lifting you with care.
It was nice, brought you memories of better times…
“Yank the wires!”
You felt a tug at the back of your head and suddenly your vision came back.
“Eyes moving, guess the visual cortex its now free”
You saw the place where you used to be, racks of fluffies with wires coming out of their heads, small OLED screens above them showing live feeds from their brains.
It didn’t last though.
“Fuck, I think we’re gonna lose this one”
Your vision its getting blurry, you smelt buwnies but there’s no fire nor huwties.
“No more hashing for this one”
“$1400 down the drain, how is it gonna impact the pool?”
“Gonna slow mining a bit until we get another unit from the factory”
“Man these things are weak!”
“I know, ASICs were better, but the energy bills were insane…”
“Yeah I remember, still taking care of shitrats its a pain in the ass, always hated these things”
“Sure, but the money its great”
“No arguing that haha!”
As you heard those words they tossed you into a red biowaste bag labelled for the incinerator, but fortunately for you your stroke was going to end you well before the fire did.
You were simply another miner unit, your pain was the result of calculations as proof-of-work so your pool of other suffering fluffies could find a block and thus make money for your owners. Of course you were never told that, not that you would understand. Despite the higher neuron density of your brain you weren’t smart enough to understand crypto mining, a concept that even escapes most humans. Your brain was simply being used to crunch numbers like a processor would, and while new ASICs and quantum computers could run circles around your tiny overclocked brain those consumed insane amounts of power and needed advanced cooling, even cryo-cooling to control quantum decoherence. Even your souped-up genetics to increase yields that made you some of the most expensive fluffies in the world, didn’t compare to the cost of those.
Indeed the moment brain computers were proved somehow feasible it didn’t take long for cryptominers to see the potential. Of course using animals with bigger brains like chimps would be better, but animals have rights.
Fluffies don’t.
It took mere months for a miner in China to build a crude mining pool using live fluffies. Those didn’t last long, their suffering probably unthinkable, but it paved the road for a new wave of custom industrial fluffies that much like LAL fluffies the old defunct Hasbio had never thought would exist.
After all fluffies were “for huggies and love”.
grimdark even!~ really nice illustration too