“Doug. Doug!”
“What is it, Pete? I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”
“Follow me, you’re gonna want to see this.”
“What? Can I at least get my cof-”
“No, you can get it later! This cannot wait!”
The two labcoat-wearing men stepped out of the Hasbio canteen and scurried down a corridor, Pete leading the way as Doug hurried to keep up, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“What the hell could be so important tha-”
“Doug, I’m telling you, this is revolutionary. Not just in terms of fluffy ponies, but to biological science as a whole!”
“The only ‘hole’ I’m seeing right now is you, Pete…”
“Just trust me, this is… it’s incredible!”
Pete finally stopped, breathing loudly, at their laboratory door. He dialled in the combination he and Doug had memorised and the door hissed open quietly. The two stepped in, Pete made sure the door was closed, and then led Doug further into the lab.
The two were part of Hasbio’s R&D team, their days were spent coming up with new concepts for fluffy ponies and then attempting to implement them. They had more failures than successes, but thankfully that hardly mattered, that was the name of the game in R&D. As long as one idea out of every ten was a success, they’d get funding for another year.
Their lab was brightly lit, with lines of cages covering one wall, and metal tables scattered around the area, covered in various medical implements and tools. In the centre of the lab was ‘the pen’: a dome constructed out of metal and specialised glass which from the outside was clear glass, but from the inside looked to be completely opaque.
Inside the pen was their latest fluffy experiment, designation R0-G3R, or ‘Roger’ as they had nicknamed him. Roger was a dusty red colour with a sandy yellow mane and tail, an earth pony by default. All of their experiments were earthies unless required otherwise, it ensured the least amount of variables.
“Wait, what’s Roger doing here?” Doug said. “You scheduled him for termination, right?”
“Yeah, about that…” Pete said, glancing around. Their lab was private, to prevent any industrial espionage, but even then he didn’t feel quite safe discussing it. “I think it’s best if we start from the beginning. This is… this is big.”
Doug grabbed a chair from one of the tables and hauled it over to the pen, as Pete did the same. Doug found himself wishing he’d told Pete to go fuck himself, at least until he’d had time to get his coffee, but kept that to himself as Pete began talking.
“Okay, so, what’s our latest project?”
“Uh, biology density of fluffy ponies. We were trying to find ways of making them less fragile, so they didn’t die from a sneeze.”
“Right. And what did we find?”
“Pete, you know all this, you were there for all of it.”
“I know, just… just humour me. I need to get this right in my head before I tell you what’s happened. Just go with it, okay?”
“Fuck’s sake… fine. We both knew going in that fluffy ponies were deliberately designed to be as fragile as possible to prevent them from hurting anyone, child or adult, by accident or on purpose. Their bones snap like twigs and their skin tears like tissue paper, they’re fundamentally feeble creatures, and that’s the entire point. If a fluffy pony stamps on a baby’s head, at best the fluffy will just get a sore hoof.”
“Right.” Pete interjected. “But the problem is, they die too easy.”
“Exactly. Like I said, a fluffy pony can sneeze too hard and break it’s neck, or it can stumble and snap it’s legs. Hell I saw one once run too hard into a wall and crack it’s skull into five different parts from the impact.”
“Right,” Pete said again. “They’re too fragile. They die all the time, and families have to replace them constantly. Good for business on a financial side, bad on a marketing side. Makes us look heartless and evil because we’re not doing anything to fix it.”
“Yeah. So Hasbio said they wanted us to find a way of making them sturdier, hardier, able to take a few knocks and get back up again. Still the same personality, but just make their bodies stronger.”
“But that was our first snag.” Pete said, remembering how it all began weeks ago. “We made some that were stronger, upped a few percentages and dosed a few pregnant mares in the breeding pens, but the result was fluffies that were too strong. They started beating and killing the other fluffies, sometimes not even intentionally. Most of them were killed by being hugged too hard, because the new ones had more muscles and were crushing the others.”
“Right. So we went back to the drawing board. Making fluffies stronger wasn’t the answer, that was a big mistake. We incinerated all of those, right?”
“Yeah, as soon as we realised the problem.”
“Okay, just checking. So yeah, we couldn’t make them stronger, but that’s exactly what Hasbio wanted from us. They wanted fluffies that could bounce back from a hit and recover with practically no scars, except maybe mental ones.”
“Right, so what did we think up next?”
Doug paused, thinking it over.
“We started looking at the biology a little closer, we wanted to see if there was a way we could make a fluffy pony heal faster. These things are like real horses, if they break a leg then they never fully recover. They get scars constantly, if they lose something they can’t grow it back. We wanted to see if we could make them heal better, so if a fluffy pony fell down the stairs and broke all of it’s legs, it’d be up and playing again in a few months or so.”
“Right.”
“So again, we played around with some enzymes and glands, we injected a few mares, and they gave birth to the R0-G3 litters. 22 foals total, named after the letters A to V. We tested them at various points, the first lot when they were still only just newborns. We broke their limbs, cut them a bit, and then left them to heal. But… well, they didn’t, they were just regular foals, and most of them died from their injuries.”
“Then the next litter.”
“Right. After that set, we went for the next one, which we let grow to the ‘talkie baby’ stage. We did the same, broke some legs, cut them a bit, punched them around a little… but they had the same issue, they didn’t recover so well, and most died eventually.”
“So we kept going.”
“Yeah, moving from litter to litter like Jason fucking Voorhees, each one at a different stage of development. R0-G3R was the first one born in the very last litter, By the time we got to them they were just entering their ‘adult’ phase.”
“Okay. And?”
“And the same thing happened. Broke limbs, cut them, punched them, kicked them… no luck. They didn’t heal, they just sat around whining and crying about ‘weggies nu wowk nu mowe’ and shit. So we wrote off the entire thing as a complete failure, not one of them showed any kind of improvements.”
“Right. So we marked them all for termination, like every other litter, correct?”
“That’s right. Their cages would be taken away and gassed, and the fluffies in them would be dead within a minute. Last thing done every night is the terminations.”
Doug blinked, remembering why he was there.
“So why the fuck is Roger still here?” He asked, looking into the pen. The dusty red fluffy was playfully nudging a ball around, having a relatively fun time despite being the only one there.
“Doug,” Pete said. “Think back over everything we’ve just talked about. You tell me. Why is Roger still here?”
“What? I don’t… what are you talking about? We had a bunch of failures, we terminated them, end of story.”
“Right.”
“…Pete, are you drinking the rubbing alcohol again? I don’t fucking get it. Why is Roger still here? Why wasn’t he gassed?”
Pete took off his glasses, looking at him grimly.
“Doug, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. He was gassed.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he was marked for termination, he was taken with the others, they were gassed. They all ‘went to sleep’, just like normal, Roger included. Then, when the cleaners were grabbing the corpses for the incinerator, Roger woke up.”
“That’s… that’s not possible. The gas must’ve been-”
“Doug, I checked that already, and besides if there was something wrong with the gas then none of the others would have been killed either, but they were. Every other fluffy in that litter was dead, except Roger. He was totally fine. He even asked if the cleaner would play with him.”
“I don’t… what the fuck? What the fuck happened?”
Pete looked him dead in the eye.
“We did it, Doug. We succeeded. That’s what the fuck happened. We pulled it off.”
“Pulled what off?!”
“The eternal endeavour, the great work, the ultimate victory of humanity.”
Pete looked into the pen, where Roger was happily waddling around on all four perfectly functional legs, without a single scar, bruise or blemish visible on his skin. He didn’t even seem ill from the gas.
"We made a fluffy pony that can heal. Not only that, but one that heals so rapidly that death itself cannot touch it. We have created a being that cannot die."
Pete looked at Doug, a manic smile on his face.
"Doug… we cured death!!!"
