“Are you certain?” Doug asked.
“I’m positive.”
“No, I mean… have you checked?”
Pete gave him a look.
“Yeah. Yeah I have.”
“Tell me then.”
“Well when the cleaners first told me about Roger, I figured I’d put him out of his misery myself, so I just slammed his head against the ground a few times. Save priming the gas tanks all over again. It did the trick alright, but then he just got up again a few minutes later. And I’m telling you, I felt his skull crack more than once.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. So then I started on the theory that maybe he couldn’t die. So I tested a few other things. I broke his legs, stabbed him in the eyes, and even used a syringe.”
“Full of what?”
“Nothing. I just injected some bubbles of air into his blood-stream, and it gave him a heart-attack.”
“And he just… walked it off, huh?”
"Yep, just got up again a few minutes later. Doug, I’m telling you, Roger the fluffy pony is invincible!"
“Pete… we can’t tell anyone.” Doug said firmly.
“What? Why not?”
“Pete, stop fantasising about deepthroating a Nobel Prize for just five minutes, and think rationally. Okay, so if what you’re saying is true, however insane it may sound… we have a fluffy pony that cannot die. No matter how badly it gets hurt, it’ll heal up and keep going.”
"Yeah! That’s great!"
“No, fuckface, it’s not.” Doug replied with a sigh. "Think about it. If word gets out about what we’ve done here, it’ll be all over the news. Everyone will want to know how we did it. Best case scenario, people cut Roger open to figure out how immortality works, and then everyone ends up immortal. We’d over-populate the Earth in a matter of years. It wouldn’t just be the end of the world as we knew it, it’d be the end of the world full stop."
“But-”
“On the other hand,” Doug continued, glaring at Pete. “Let’s say some less scrupulous people get their hands on Roger first. They’ll figure out how he works, and keep the immortality secrets to themselves. Imagine every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard, of an ageless council running the entire world. Suddenly it’ll be a reality, and nobody could stop them, because they’ll just live forever.”
“I-”
“Pete, look at me. You know I’m right. You know how bad human beings are. Fuck, look at us, we torture fluffy ponies for a career. There’s no telling what other people might do if the news about Roger gets out.”
“Okay, alright, I get it.” Pete replied, sitting down again in his chair. “Look… you’re right. I get it. I agree, we need to keep Roger a secret… but what the hell are we going to do with him?”
Doug looked into the pen again. Roger looked bored and was gazing around. Doug reached out and pressed a button, which automatically dispensed a small amount of soft food for him. Roger immediately perked up and went to devour it.
“Well, for starters, nobody can know about this, nobody internal either. We’ll fudge the paperwork and just claim Roger died with the others. We’ll get him out of the lab today and nobody here will ever see him again.”
“Okay, but then what?” Pete asked. “Do we just let him go?”
“No, no we can’t risk that… I’ll take him home.”
“Really?”
“I mean I don’t really have any other option. Do I need to start up with my ‘end of the world’ speech again? And I’m gonna be honest, Pete, I don’t trust you with him. Knowing you, you’d try and make a race of super-fluffies or something.”
Pete didn’t respond.
“So I’ll take him.” Doug said, looking at the dusty red fluffy in the pen. “I’ll keep him like he’s my pet, I’ll feed him and play with him, and make sure he never gets out. No other fluffies will get to see him, no humans either. He’ll be a secret.”
“Okay… but what happens if you die?”
It was Doug’s turn to not respond.
“I’ll figure something out, eventually.” He said at last, reaching towards one of the pen’s glass panels. He hooked his fingers into the catch and, with a hiss of escaping air, he lifted it up.
Roger immediately looked up at the sound, and blinked.
“Hewwo!” He said around a mouthful of food, then he realised why he recognised Doug. He was one of the two who had performed the painful ‘ecks-perry-ments’ on him and his brothers and sisters.
“Nu mowe huwties, pwease! Wojah a gud fwuffeh! Pwease nu mowe!”
“Woah, hey, it’s okay little guy.” Doug said, carefully lifting him out with both hands. “I’ve got some good news. You’ve been such a good boy, helping us both out, that you’re gonna get a nice big reward.”
“Wewawd…?” Roger asked, slowly coming around. Years of working in R&D had left Doug and Pete with all the necessary skills to speak to fluffies in ways they’d understand.
“That’s right. You’re gonna get to come home with me, and you’ll have a bed, and food, and even toys!”
Roger gasped.
“Nyu homesy?! Nyu daddeh?!”
“That’s right, I’m gonna take you home right now.” Doug promised, carrying Roger over to one of their carriers. “You just sit right there and be a good, quiet little fluffy, and we’ll be home soon…”
It had been a long time since Doug had brought Roger home. Roger wasn’t sure how long, but he knew that Doug used to have black hair, but now it was all white, and most of it was gone. In reality it had been 40 years, but Roger didn’t know numbers as big as that even existed. But those 40 years had been good ones.
Roger had plenty of toys to play with, he always used his litter-box, and Doug gave him lots of nice food to eat. Sure, he was a little lonely sometimes, like whenever Doug went to ‘work’ (which was most days of the week) but that wasn’t so bad. He just sometimes wished he had another fluffy to play with, but Doug was against it.
Roger had asked why, but he had never quite understood the reasoning.
“You’re a very special fluffy.” Doug had told him. “You can do things others can’t, you can play in ways that others can’t. When you get hurt, you recover, but if a regular fluffy pony gets hurt, it doesn’t come back the same way. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Roger didn’t.
Finally, one day, Doug came home with a tape from work. Roger liked watching tapes with Doug, they watched all kinds of movies together, some were scary, but some were really funny too!
But this one wasn’t funny. This one was very, very scary.
The tape was the test footage for the experiment that had created Roger, and demonstrated the various ways in which Doug and Pete had worked over numerous fluffies, one after another. Legs were broken, ears were sliced off, eyes were jabbed… and unlike Roger, the fluffies never got better. They continued to crawl around, mewling in pain, never able to go back to the way they were before.
Roger watched it all, and slowly began to understand.
“When you get hurt,” Doug explained as they watched. “You can heal yourself. Even better than a human can. But other fluffies can’t do that. Roger, you can fall down the stairs, or get hit by a car, and you’ll be totally fine in a few minutes… but other fluffies can’t. You couldn’t play with them, because you might hurt them without knowing it. And if you did, then it’d be over for them.”
Roger’s eyes filled with tears, because he knew it was true. He actually liked falling down the stairs, it hurt but it made his tummy feel so funny when he was spinning so fast in the air. Even when he hit the ground, sure it hurt, but… he was fine… in a few minutes…
“Wojah aww awone…?” He asked quietly. “Nebah hab any fwuffeh fwiends…?”
“I’m sorry, buddy.” Doug said, stopping the tape before it got to Roger’s own ‘experiments’. “It wouldn’t be safe for them. You can understand that, right?”
Roger understood it alright.
He hated it, and it wasn’t fair, and he’d never wanted it to be that way, but he understood.
Things were a little more tense between Roger and Doug after that, but Roger soon softened up again. He still had a lot to be grateful for, even if he couldn’t have any other friends. And he still enjoyed playing with Doug, especially when Doug announced he was ‘retiring’, which was a fancy word that meant ‘having more time to spend playing with Roger’.
Roger had hoped that things would be more simple as time went on, but if anything, they became more complicated.
Doug had been watching a lot of TV lately, but it wasn’t any kind of funny movie. It was a lot of big tube things going up in the air, and flying towards a big grey ball.
“Wha dat, daddeh?” Roger asked one day.
“Rockets.” Doug replied bitterly. “They’re going up to the moon.”
“Wha ‘moon’?”
“Y’know that big white ball in the sky at night?”
“Ooh, yus!”
“That’s the moon.”
“An’… an’ hoomans WIVE on dah moon?!”
“Yeah, they do now.” Doug said again, his bitterness returning. “The goddam Lunar Confederacy… it sounds like something out of a bad 50s sci-fi movie! But there it is, in full HD and Technicolor!”
Roger, again, didn’t manage to follow it much, but he listened anyway.
It turns out that as space-travel had become more affordable and accessible, a certain portion of humanity were pushing to leave the Earth behind, citing it’s pollution, overpopulation and diminishing resources as reasons to abandon it to rot.
The other party, however, argued that we had a duty of care to our mother planet, and that all of it’s problems were problems we had created, meaning if we did relocate to another world, they would simply follow us there. Thus any attempt to move ourselves to another planet was, ultimately, a waste of money and resources.
Regardless, both parties had a great many supporters, and soon it became a hot-button topic for everyone to discuss. Private firms were building rockets on a daily basis, applicants were signing up to be part of the first colonists on the moon…
And then the war had began.
It had only been a matter of time, really, but it had finally happened. The ‘for’ party had decided that the moon was officially theirs, since they were the only ones who had actually wanted it, and so claimed it as their own. The ‘Lunar Confederacy’ had planted their flag on that barren, grey surface, and announced that any attempts by ‘Earthlings’ to set foot upon their soil would be treated as an act of aggression.
Naturally, Earth’s population wasn’t happy with this, and felt that the ‘claiming’ of the moon was unlawful, unethical and downright inhuman. They swore that, one way or another, the moon would be a free place once again, and no ‘Lunar Confederacy’ would stand in the way of that.
Doug still played with Roger, but the fluffy could tell his owner had a lot on his mind. He’d be constantly muttering about ‘conscription’ and ‘police-state’ and ‘inter-planetary ballistic missiles’…
Then, a few years later, something happened.
Doug stopped waking up.