Inspired by Brayatansempai’s ‘Digital Fluffy’ post.
“Dear Mikey,” Michael read, grimacing at every word. “I just wanted to wish you happy birthday! I know all of you youngsters prefer to do these sorts of things by email, but you know me and computers, I still can’t quite get the hang of that ‘mouse’ thing! On that note, I know you’ve always wanted a pet, but your parents won’t let you have one until you’re older, so when I saw this, I thought ‘I know the perfect grandson who’d just love it for a gift!’ Happy birthday Mikey! Love, Grandma.”
Of course it was from Grandma. She was the only person who still called him ‘Mikey’.
And his birthday wasn’t until next month.
And he already had a pet, namely his dog Spartacus. He still wanted to get another and also call it Spartacus, but his parents said one was enough responsibility for a teenager.
But responsible he was. Michael loved Spartacus, despite how loud his barking was and how fast he ran when they went out for a ‘walk’ together.
At first, Michael wasn’t sure what his grandmother meant by her ‘gift’, until he picked up the envelope again and felt something shift inside it.
Tipping the envelope sideways, a shiny compact disc fell out, landing mirror-side up on Michael’s bed. He picked it up, one finger through the hole in the center and his thumb gripping the outer edge, and turned it over.
His grimace, only visible, then became audible, as it transformed into a groan.
The disc in his hand was… ugly. It bore many cartoon images of colorful horses, unicorns and pegasi, and bore the Hasbro Interactive branding, but that aside, it still felt like some kind of bootleg. The very notion of it was disturbing.
The disc was titled ‘MY DIGITAL FLUFFIES’.
Turning to his high-end gaming PC, Michael opened up his browser and immediately googled the name, finding his way to a Hasbio subreddit page about the very thing.
The story, as he read, was that Hasbio wanted to expand their fluffy pony bio-product into other markets. They had begun looking at marketing a ‘My Little Fluffy Pony’ animated series, had tried (and failed) to sell a fluffy pony mascot to several universities, colleges and schools across the US, and had, among many other things, expanded into software.
“Oh god…” Michael muttered as he glanced at the disc again. It was no bootleg, it was an official product, even if it still sounded insane.
In the age of smart-phone apps and digitally downloadable video-games, Hasbio had gotten the bright idea to manufacture CD copies of a game (if it could be called that) that nobody even wanted.
Michael began to wonder if Grandma had found this thing anywhere legit, or if she’d pulled it out of a landfill herself.
But Michael was nothing if not a curious type, and despite his best efforts, he was drawn enough to the disc to at least try and see what was on it.
So, opening up his disc drive, and apologising to his beloved PC in advance, he placed the disc in his machine and watched as the program started up.
After a few cheap splash logos had faded in and out again, he found himself looking at nothing more than the desktop of his computer. Nothing had changed, save for a small button at the top of his screen, labelled ‘FLUFFIES.EXE’.
He slid the cursor over to it and clicked it, which then opened up two windows.
The first was a PDF file, which looked to be a guide on how to care for fluffies in a general sense. How often to feed them, what specific food they ate, what toys were best for them, etc…
The second window was a little more technical, showing what looked like a TV remote control, a gray box with a selection of buttons available. ‘FOOD’, ‘TOYS’, ‘MISC’, ‘GUIDE’ (which was already depressed), and one big one at the top that read ‘ADOPT’, with a small black space at the bottom with a blinking vertical line for Michael to type messages to his fluffy.
Michael scrolled through the PDF for a few minutes to confirm what he’d suspected.
This software, the PDF claimed, was made for people who may want a fluffy pony in their lives, but due to budgets, schedules, or simple location problems, were unable to actually have one. As such, Hasbio had swooped in to the rescue with ‘My Digital Fluffies’, a piece of software which would allow users to simulate the experience of owning a fluffy, from feeding them to playing with them to cleaning up their messes.
The PDF proudly proclaimed that the software was designed to be as realistic as possible, to ensure an authentic experience. No player would miss a single aspect of fluffy pony life, it assured a somewhat worried Michael.
Finally, steeling himself, Michael clicked on the ‘ADOPT’ button on the remote.
It opened up a tab that gave him some options. He could either design his own fluffy from the ground up, or he could get a random one. Throwing caution to the wind, and not wanting to pick over every pore of his ideal fluffy, he picked ‘random’, ticking the box to give it a random name too.
The program was left hanging for a second, then with a quiet ‘eep!’, something neon green and shaped like a cloud landed on Michael’s taskbar, seeming to have dropped a few inches before landing with a small ‘oof’.
Michael was about to wonder about it’s name, when the fluffy spoke.
“Hewwo! Am Spwinkles!” A voice chirped out through Michael’s PC speakers. It was concerningly high-quality audio, it sounded like an actual fluffy pony voice. Michael had expected either something AI generated and terrible, or something made up from stitched-together fragments of other audio files… but this was neither, it was actually smooth and realistic.
He had to give it to Hasbio, or Hasbro, or whoever the hell made this game, they at least got that part right.
“Daddeh? Awe yoo dewe?” Sprinkles asked.
Michael opened up the text box and typed a response.
‘YES, I’M HERE.’
“Yay! Spwinkles wub daddeh!” Sprinkles cheered, racing back and forth across Michael’s taskbar. Well, ‘racing’ was a bit of an exaggeration, he was more waddling slightly faster than a normal walking speed, in fact he seemed to be more carried by his existing momentum alone than his actual movement ability.
“Can Spwinkles hab nummies?” Sprinkles asked at last, plopping himself down on the Windows icon.
“Shit.” Michael muttered, moving the mouse over to the remote. He clicked on the ‘FOOD’ tab and found himself scrolling through a list of exactly two items: kibble or spaghetti.
Michael clicked on ‘kibble’, at which point a small dish of lumpy brown gunk appeared on the taskbar, a few feet away from Sprinkles.
“Yay, nummies! Fank yoo daddeh!” Sprinkles squeaked, jumping up suddenly and sprinting over to the bowl.
Then tragedy struck.
Michael had let go of the mouse after spawning the bowl of kibble, which let the cursor drift down casually across the screen, coming to rest halfway over the taskbar, leaving the pixel-sharp tip of the cursor poking out by just a fraction.
And it was onto this pixel-sharp tip that Sprinkles’ hoof landed as he ran blindly towards his food.
“OWIES! OWIES IN HOOFSY!” He shrieked, tumbling onto his back as he rolled from side to side on the two-dimensional plane that was Michael’s taskbar.
“Fucking… seriously?” Michael asked as Sprinkles howled in agony, to the point Michael had to turn his speakers down.
He grabbed the mouse and yanked it across his desktop, intending to open up the guide again and see what it said about treating injuries, but didn’t account for it catching Sprinkles in the side as he rolled around in pain. The result was Sprinkles being launched into the air, as if punted by an invisible foot, before colliding hard with the harsh, unforgiving corner of Michael’s screen.
He landed with a yelp, and a wet ‘crack’, and soon all that was left was a motionless body and a trickle of blood that covered up the date/time display.
“Fucking… fluffies, man.” Michael said with a sigh.
He discovered, through reading the guide and clicking around, that the ‘MISC’ tab contained a ‘trash-bag’ and a ‘sponge’, the first of which was useful for disposing of corpses and unwanted items (such as the untouched food bowl), and the second of which was quite handy for cleaning up stains and spills.
However, as the guide explained, stains were treated realistically. If you didn’t get them out quick, they’d set for quite some time. Michael learned this all over again as he spent up to seven minutes scrubbing a pixelated sponge across a few pixels of his screen, attempting to clean the blood of Sprinkles off of his taskbar and clock.
But at long last, his screen was clear, and he decided it was time for round two.
Another random adoption later, and another fluffy appeared on Michael’s desktop, this time landing with a grunt and a fart.
The fluffy this time was a dusty blue colour, and had a permanent scowl on his face.
“WHEWE TOYSIES?” The new fluffy barked. “HUMPHWEY BOWED!”
So it’s name was ‘Humphrey’.
Michael opened up the ‘TOYS’ menu and spawned a ball for Humphrey to play with, which kept him occupied for approximately six seconds.
“WHEWE NUMMIES?! DUMMEH WISTEN TO HUMPHWEY! HUMPHWEY WAN’ NUMMIES! WAN’ NAO!”
Michael felt a nerve throb in his head, but opened up the ‘FOOD’ menu to spawn some kibble.
That, however, was not enough.
“DUMMEH, WHY GIB HUMPHWEY GWOSS ICKY NUMMIES?! DIS BAD NUMMIES! HUMPHWEY NU WIKE!” Humphrey snorted, before turning and kicking over the food bowl, sending a cascade of lumpy brown food all over the taskbar… and all over Michael’s desktop icons too. He watched, half furious and half impressed, as the watery kibble dripped and ran across his Google Chrome icon, actually soaking into the shape of the logo.
Then Michael realised he was going to have to clean it.
Spawning the sponge again he began scrubbed at his icon and desktop, determined not to let the stain soak in, but Humphrey had other plans.
"DUMMEH HOOMAN, WISTEN TO HUMPHWEY! HUMPHWEY TUMMEH AM WUMBLIES! NEED NUMMIES NAO! NAO NAO NAO!"
‘NO, I AM BUSY.’ He typed in response.
“HRMPH! DUMMEH HOOMAN NU WISTEN TO HUMPHWEY, HUMPHWEY MAKE YOO SOWWY!” He snarled.
Michael’s eyes were fixated on the stain he was still trying to scrub away, so much so that he didn’t actually notice Michael crouch down and begin gnawing at the taskbar, chewing into the icons that were embedded into it.
Then, with a sound not unlike the splintering crack of breaking glass, Michael’s ‘Steam’ icon suddenly changed, becoming infested with rogue pixels and incorrect colors.
Michael, alerted by the sound, saw what Humphrey was doing and nudged him away with the cursor, but the damage was done. He attempted to open Steam, but found nothing. He attempted it again using the Start menu, but still nothing.
Fearing the worst, Michael opened up his browser and tried to log in to Steam via the website… but his account was no longer recognised.
Humphrey had broken his Steam account.
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘not liable’?!” Michael shouted down the phone ten minutes later. “Your bullshit fluffy pony program destroyed my account! Do you have any idea how much money I put into that thing?! And how they hell did it even do that?!”
The customer service rep told Michael for the 5th time how sorry they were, but that there was nothing they could do.
Michael shouted a curse at the top of his lungs and hurled his phone across the room, slumping down in front of his computer again.
Humphrey was dead. Michael had lifted him up with the cursor and simultaneously impaled him with it while crushing him against the ‘ceiling’ of his screen. It’d taken a minute of waggling the cursor around to knock it off again but it’d worked at last.
The bloodstains had dried already, and Michael hadn’t even attempted to get them off. That is to say, he’d terminated the .exe using his task manager and had cut the disc itself in half with a pair of scissors, but evidently the damage was done.
The fluffy ponies had gotten to his computer, and like all things they touched, they had utterly destroyed it.
ADDENDUM - ‘SHITHEAD’S STORY’
So originally this was going to be part of Michael’s story but I couldn’t really find a way of working it in, so here’s just another little scrap of an idea thrown in like an after-dinner mint. Enjoy!
His name was Shithead.
It wasn’t the name he would’ve picked for himself, but it was his name anyway.
He was a shit brown fluffy with a horn and wings, what was known among fluffy-kind as a freak or a monster, but he had never seen another fluffy… although he had still been called far worse.
The person who spoke to him was his daddy, Shithead knew that, but Shithead wasn’t allowed to talk to daddy… so said daddy himself. Daddy only ever spoke to Shithead to hurt him. To hurl abuse at him. To call him mean names.
But those days were the good ones.
Other days, daddy would throw things at Shithead, or box him into a tiny space with ‘icons’, or make a big plate of spaghetti appear out of nowhere only to place it somewhere Shithead couldn’t reach.
Then Shithead would make bad poopies everywhere, and he would be told by daddy to clean them up by eating them.
This was the only sustenance Shithead got, and while he didn’t understand it, it seemed to be enough to tick the box of ‘ate food = yes’, and so his hunger faded… but not for long.
Shithead was never truly not hungry, nor was he ever not sad.
Every day he would walk the length of the two-dimensional world he lived in, wishing for anything, anything at all, any sign of kindness from daddy. Some food, some toys, maybe even another fluffy, or even just to be left alone… but it wasn’t to be.
For the only times Shithead was awake were when daddy wanted to hurt him.
So was the life of Shithead, the digital fluffy pony.
