As far as silly pun names go, “Was-Bio” was pretty clever. The pay was astronomical, the hours reasonable, the onboarding and training process putting a lot of emphasis on the community good and how we were going to be making the world a better place while also helping the feral fluffy pony population. the only thing you really care about, is that they don’t drug test for weed.
Was-Bio; one of the largest biotoy hazardous waste cleanup franchises in the country. A fairly recession-proof gig in an unpredictable economy was a whole lot better than moving back home, or living out of your car.
You suited up for your first day of training in the field. It felt unnatural to leave your phone, keys, and wallet in a locker, but the changing room was fairly secure, and you’d been told repeatedly to have nothing on your person that can’t be steam sterilized or thrown away at the end of your shift.
You watch as the supply tech carefully reads and re-reads your badge before putting your initials in acrid smelling paint marker to a freshly laundered canvas jumpsuit. You have your navy blue suit, covering you head to toe like a baggy infant pajamas with your initials emblazoned on the left breast, the right back, and the left shoulder. (It’s really hard to identify each other in all this getup.) The Pakistani women from the chemicals team all wore a snug fitting gaiter of sorts instead of their everyday hijab, and they accidentally started a fashion trend, as the uniform supplier had all kinds of fun colors for the gaiter. You just take what you are handed, not sure what you’d prefer.
The team chatted idly while suiting up. You feel your face turn beet red as you accidentally catch an eyeful of your supervisor, LC, in nothing but her bra and panties. Your fellow trainee MP gently punches your shoulder and remarks it’s going to be a hot and disgusting humid day, and might rain later. Best to just be in your drawers under your ‘blue.’ MP is kind enough to help you tape your shoes, as you’d made the rookie mistake of taping your gloves before your shoes.
Your team for your first day is two rookies hired a little before you, LC your team lead, and your driver. Driver looked like a pretty sweet gig. He was a big ole black guy with a bald head and a bristle of mustache. He wore ordinary uniforms, like the office desk jockeys, tasked with coordinating via radio and maintaining the “clean zone" which was the cab of his truck with the waters and first aid gear. Once you stepped outside the truck you were ‘contam’ and not allowed back in. If you needed water you’d go get a disposable bottle from Driver and he would open it for you. If you were in a nasty enough state he’d slowly pour the bottle for you to nurse from, like a chirpy from a burly, hairy knuckled, broad chested mummah. The air conditioner is blasting you in the face with enough force to make your eyes water. You pull your goggles down. LC says to savor it because it’s the only relief you’re going to get until suits are off at the end of the shift.
First assignment was an abandoned mill. Brutal, even for a seasoned tech. LC is stern and meticulous in grilling her neophytes about the PPE. Unregistered mills and illegal drug labs were the number one source of secondary glimmer infection. since a piss test can’t tell if you got the glimmer from being careless at work, or from banging infected hookers, or shooting it up yourself, pissing sparkly meant the end of your career.
You had four hours, your entire shift, to clear the site and spray everything down with the neutralizing chemicals, a nasty carcinogenic cocktail of anti-viral enzymes and copper compounds that interfered with the glimmer nanotechnology. It was going to be hot. It was going to be absolutely disgusting, as most the biomaterial was already dead when the cops broke in. Over a week cooking in an unventilated warehouse.
You get taught to use objective language like “biomaterial" and never ‘shitrat’ or ‘fluffy pony’ because clinical detachment from the work is necessary for your mental health. Most techs do not last 3 months, despite the hefty paycheck and generous health benefits. Youre beginning to suspect the use of the suit initials instead of actual names is another objective strategy; with a stressful, insanely high turnover job like this, you probably dont want to be too close with your co-workers, given that you’ll probably only see them once or twice before they buzzer out.
LC’s supervisor was BM (and dont you dare giggle around him about that) and every time he got called down to payroll to sign a final check, his personal elevator would make an obnoxious buzzing sound that echoed through the whole lower level where the trainees were clicking through multiple choice tests and watching about twenty hours of safety videos. Every time you heard that angry buzz, you knew that BM was on the move, and someone was quitting or being fired. But not you. You are determined to stick this out and indulge in every silly financial mischief you can get into with that big fat check you’ll see deposited to your bank account every Monday afternoon.
The smell hits before you can even see the building. The rookie with the initials “KF” and wide blue eyes is already looking unsure of himself. Or herself. It’s hard to tell in these monkey suits. You grew up poor, you know the smell of rotten bodega fruit, homeless camp improvised latrine, the lonely death of the mean old man in the tenement flat above yours, the fresh death of roadkill and the old death of electrified squirrel chewing wires on the roof … and that one time your sister missed the bin by the toilet and one of her sanitary pads stewed in the behind the bog humidity for about a week before you found it sweeping.
The smell was worse than all of those combined, and this miasma was perfumed with the sickeningly sweet chemical smell you’d come to associate with biotoys breaking down into their biological components, and the breath of glimmer addicts.
KF was already gagging. In your head you placed an imaginary wager that KF would buzz out at the end of the week. The other rookie, MS, looked to be successfully dissociating, unfocused eyes watching Driver’s hula dancer dash ornament wobble with her little ukulele.
I
The policemen quickly removed the heavy chain and fucked off in their squad car, leaving nothing but the screech of tires and puddles of vomit. LC flung the doors open wide. A black cloud seemed to engulf her, like slow, lazy doves cascading from the tower of a cartoon princess. It was flies.
You and your two companions line up, armed with nothing but neon pink biohazard bags, and start opening cages and picking up bodies. The fluffy pony corpses are small, hardly large cat to small dog size when they were alive, (well, you dont say “alive” you say functional. They are toys. They are not alive.) and the heft of the biotoys is minimal given the decay.
The viscous state of the bodies though, makes grabbing them difficult. You yank wrong on a leg and the bone would slide out like a thanksgiving turkey. Untangling the breeders from the tubing was pointless, and MS just started throwing the tubing in his bags as well.
LC was several yards ahead, scouting for safety concerns and assessing what supplies would be needed, using her radio to tell driver what was needed. The leader cursed loudly. At one end of the endless row of cages, the shelving structures had toppled. The broken mess of metal wire meant that there might be loose biotoys still around.
Normally this wasn’t a big deal, but you knew there were only enough supplies in the truck for cleanup, and not exterminating.
“Everyone, heads up, we may have active elements, improvise a weapon or disable manually. Our orders are to decontaminate so this building can be safely demolished, no transport for product.”
Driver’s voice crackled from the four radios at your team’s belts, “LC, dispatch confirms, no transport.”
You knew that meant kill everything and bag it up. But you dont say “kill” you say “disable,” because they aren’t alive. KF timidly wields a piece of 2x4 from the shelves, and MS goes outside and comes back with a rod made of rebar from the cinderblocks outside. You like MS’s style. Solid weapon choice. You think you’ll try with your bare hands, like LC does, and maybe impress her with your neck snapping technique or something.
You realize in afterthought how absolutely insane that sounds.
LC is the first to discover a living fluffy pony. A brown pillow with a shock of magenta mane and a sawed off golden horn, surrounded by dead chirpies, two little corpses still dangling from her teats. LC scoffs, more an exhale and a shrug of shoulders. “Hey rookies step back and watch me do fuckin magic, i found bait.”
LC grabs an empty tote emblazoned with the Spaghetti Dave’s Fluffy Pasta Product Logo and sits on an empty wire cage. LC gently unhooks the milk bag fluffy mare from the tubing and removes the feeder mask. The mask had dug deep, weeping cuts into her flabby pony cheeks. LC takes the pillow fluffy up in her lap, and starts to sing the mummah song.
“Cmon you know the mummah song. Sing with me.”
The milk bag’s jaw was deformed from a life of being fed by force, but the garbled noises of a creature’s first taste of affection were … touching in a demented way. But goddamn if LC wasn’t clever. the pied piper. The siren.
Soon the abandoned building full of empty crates was alight with a tiny chorus of fluffies eager to tap into that deep programming.
“I’m going to give you the biggest best huggies and put you in my sleepytime box, ok? Who else wants a hug?”
Fuck she was brilliant. that syrupy sweet voice made you want a hug, too.
OH shit never mind.
LC starts snapping their necks, singing the mummah song, hugging the fluffies to her chest to conceal the unnatural bent of their heads, lining them up tidy as steaks at the butchers in the discarded sketti tin crate.
She must have had about a dozen corpses before the mound of bodies overtook the edges. LC gestured for you and the other rookies to come forward. She gives the “go!” hand signal, and KF and MS start smashing. You’re faster than they are and you dart after the ponies quick enough to escape the rain of blows and try to twist their necks as effortlessly as LC made it look. It isn’t. Their stupid little heads are very wide and the necks very short.
Soon enough you have the entire mill cleared of tiny corpses. Countless chirpies. About a hundred desiccated corpses, and another two dozen that had to be caught and killed. The work is hot and sweaty and smelly. You are nauseous from the heat and the stench and not having enough water when you had the chance. the idea of getting out of the suit just to wee sounded worse than being dehydrated.
The idea of heat sickness was more appealing than getting fluffy guts on the meat and potatoes if you know what you mean.
Driver calls the time. 3 hours fifteen minutes. Contam truck en route. Get ready for load out. LC grabs the respirators and backpacks full of chemicals for everyone. You all suit up. LC and you have the really dangerous stuff, so you go first, quickly dousing everything in a potent enzyme that would react with the second chemicals to destroy the nanotechnology.
KF and MS follow behind, dousing everything in a fine mist that sizzles ominously as it makes contact with the fluffy pony blood and shit. The contam truck arrives. You pile yourself and your team into the back of the open bed truck, along with your tiny massacre’s leavings. LC’s blue uniform is spotless. You slipped on some fluffy brains and have a huge red smear of viscera over most of your left hip and left elbow. KF’s sleeves got the worst of the spray of using a wide tool like a piece of wood. MS looked like a crime scene. Dude has problems with the amount of joy he took in that work. You made a mental note to give him wiiiiiiide berth when you got back to HQ.
But you never saw either of them again. they both buzzed out within the first month.
Yet here you are. 6 months in. Staring at your own toes in the lukewarm locker room shower pondering your choices. Glad you bought those shower shoes, and glad that athletes foot was cleared up finally. You wonder what about your pretty, no nonsense boss … whatever happened on that first day … what she did. Singing to the ponies. Was that against the rules?
Why did it feel like someone broke in you that day? The first day on the job. Like you gave up a piece of your soul watching her joylessly and methodically end little lives like that.
You’ve long since given up that cold, clinical language. The attitude those training videos wanted to foster was never going to stick to you. You arrived here already damaged by the world. There wasn’t anything innocent for the training to protect.
You slick deodorant down your pits and dress quickly. You missed a button. You wave to the receptionist and smile at her fluffy bouffant of hair, all you can see of her over the tall desk.
You go out to your car. It’s Autumn. Beautiful. Breezy. You love this kind of weather.
Lili Cabrillo (as she was properly called,) lights up a cigarette leaning against your brand new car. the one you always dreamed of. “Fuckin starved,” she mumbles, “I hope i remembered to thaw chicken, else I’ll need to pop down to the market. Fuckin hate the market on a Friday afternoon.”
You fish your vape out of the center console and smile at your companion.
The pay was astronomical, the hours reasonable, really working towards the community good and how we were going to be making the world a better place while also helping the feral fluffy pony population. the only thing you really care about, is that they don’t drug test for weed.