Copilot
The last few days had been oddly in keeping with the trucker’s routine despite him being a fugitive. And he was convinced that he was a fugitive. One of the great incentives to not act outside the norm was the casual understanding that everything on the street was recorded, from multiple angles, simultaneously. The only ones that were allowed to live with the cameras blind to them were the people who pulled in more cash than Roddenbury ever would in his entire lifetime, and those who did the dirty work for that aforementioned elite subsect. So, office-suits sitting at some terminal on one damp evening a few days back definitely knew that he took the fluffy now known as Straya.
Roddenbury had time enough on his delivery runs to reason that a possiblity as to why he hadn’t been carted off to prison for his actions was because he was that much of a small fish in an abyssal ocean of steel, concrete, glass and neon.
For all of the automation that ruled the world, humanity left its mark in the same way it often had, from the distant Stone Age past to this computer-chrome future. That mark was not the labor that machines had yet to master, but violence. Now, wars of the not-so-distant years had proved that machines were adept at destruction as well, but there was a distinct difference between a targeting computer selecting a predetermined mark and eliminating it in accordance to sophisticated victory calculations, and someone who just wanted authority to stick it down in the sewer-catacombs where the sun never shined.
It was this type of individual that Roddenbury figured he owed his continued allotment of freedom to. These individuals tended to band together for their like-minded madness down in those catacombs – hopefully not the sewer sections – and battle skirmishes with Ubermetro Enforcers through use of firearms and blades. Compared to the criminally tribal nature of these criminals, a softhearted semi driver wouldn’t even be a blip on the law’s radar.
Then again, all it took was a sum and a routing number to make a small infraction into an ultra-felony. Like tax evasion.
Whatever the reason for the insofar lack of consequence for his deed, Roddenbury knew that the smartest thing that he could do was come up with his own contingencies in the interim while expecting the worst to find him sooner, rather than later.
Straya was in danger of being confiscated from the apartment when he was away, so the trucker took the fluffy with him whenever he went out inside a company duffle bag. Straya did not like the duffle bag, but she hated being left alone for hours at a time even more, so she endured it and did not make a sound as long as she was inside that bag.
A contingency to deal with being confronted in person that did not involve misuse of a company vehicle was still pending. In the meantime, Roddenbury earned his pay driving his routes with Straya in the cab. In this way, he learned a few things about Straya’s kind, in addition to contemplating how the life he had known was doomed to crash and burn in diesel-fueled flames eventually.
Roddenbury now knew that Fluffy-synths did not excrete waste! The truck driver had suspected as much when his apartment wasn’t used as an ill-equipped litter box in the first days after taking Straya in. While he did not know which corporate entity was behind the creation of fluffies, any reasonable person could ascertain that they were meant to appeal to children of affluent families. Whether as pets, toys, or some strange dual purpose, it made sense that these artificial beings were designed not to have such inconvenient biological functions to get in between the youths and their fun. That made doing hauling runs with the fluffy a lot more feasible than the man ever thought possible.
Even if it did mean he had to take Straya, via the duffle bag, to the restroom whenever his own needs demanded to be answered.
That was a thing he had to do.
The inability to excrete waste also meant that fluffies did not need to eat, either! Not in the usual sense. Roddenbury had a hunch that there was some biomechanical process at work inside Straya’s organic-fabricated melded body that produced energy for the fluffy in lieu of an actual metabolism, but whatever she needed to consume in order to maintain it was definitely not readily available to a commoner.
Which was more than likely a good thing.
Materials that tended to release energy over time were, by definition, radioactive. Roddenbury decided he was not going to go over every last implication of having a radioactive companion riding shotgun in his truck for his own peace of mind.
‘They were made for kids, right? They’re probably no more radioactive than a handheld,’ the trucker rationalized, and then left that train of thought in the station.
The three-legged fluffy was reclining in the passenger seat at present, half swaddled in the duffel bag. It looked a little like a sleeping bag with her lying inside of it as she was. She was so small that she could hardly look over the truck’s dashboard. Straya did not want to though, preferring to look at the flashing instrument panel and its many complex displays. The fascinating intricacies kept her eyes wide with wonder.
Roddenbury went on to ask her, “If you don’t eat, and you don’t have to… find the little fluffy’s room… how do you… uh… reproduce?”
He did not expect a compelling answer from something that spoke in the manner that fluffies did, but Roddenbury felt the question was worth asking nonetheless. There might have been another insight into how fluffies defied the definition of a lifeform in Straya’s response.
The azure creature looked at the man quizzically. “Wha’ am ‘wepwoducies’?”
Roddenbury was quiet for a moment. Then he asked himself if he was really going to be reduced to such a level. Finally, he resigned himself to asking the anomalous thing, “Where do babies come from?”
“Oh! Babbehs am come fwom Hasbio Intewactivies Labowatowies, Incowpowated, twademawk… uhhh…”
Straya trailed off and stuck her tongue out to blow a raspberry. Fluffies were so early along in their development when the incident occurred, that the engineers running the program were still attempting to burn in the company “watermark” as a default saying into their latest iterations. As Straya was evidence of, they could not get the last batch of fluffy-synths to recite the year, as it was too large a number for their limited minds to comprehend. The desired empty repetition of a phrase were a few never-happening development cycles away, yet.
Roddenbury was stiff behind the wheel of the big rig after hearing this from Straya. If he did not know for a fact that his cabin wasn’t subjected to audio and visual surveillance, he would have pulled over to the side of the highway then and there, and lied down on the pavement for retrieval.
What were the metrics to gauge the effectiveness of a marketing scheme?
The notoriety of brands in a society in which most average people would never partake in the culture of tag supremacy was for certain one of them. All those neon-lined screens and monitors constantly flashing snippets of some advertising campaign. Some tinny jingle echoing down the packed streets.
Hasbro. Hasbaron. A gluttonous behemoth, one of the worst of the shapeless beasts that feasted upon the spoils of the corporate machine. It was not enough that the conglomerate had attained the rights to, and retained the rights to, almost every piece of nostalgia from the last century. The legal team was ravenous in cordoning off what was deemed company interests. The illegal team, much like the bygone era of the mafia, was an open secret. Something that did not exist, but everyone knew best to stay far away from. Beware the black vans.
The real-life boogeyman. And every corporation had one on their leash, levying their monsters of espionage and subterfuge against one-another. Roddenbury suspected that he was dealing with things far out of his league, but this was as close to unfathomable as he ever had the misfortune to venture.
It was petrifying. This small fake equine with a mentally stunted understanding of the world and manner of speech was a terrifying piece of contraband on par with the most illicit substance circulating in the cartel trades. That was how seriously Hasbro protected their assets.
“Wod? Wod am otay? Wod nu ma’e gud speaksies; ma’e Stwaya wowwied, huu…”
“You make me worried,” Roddenbury muttered under his breath, a bit of reflexive wit.
“Wha’?”
“Nothing,” the man spoke up sternly. Inwardly, he steeled himself. “Absolutely nothing,” Roddenbury reiterated. He felt as if he was beginning to piece together the edges of the puzzle, the frame in which all other details would fall into place:
Hasbio started their fluffy program, however long ago that was, for reasons dreamed up by some fatheaded CEO. Sure enough, a competitor – any one of them – got wind of it somehow. Without anyone being any wiser to the game being played, the synthetic creatures wound up spreading all throughout Zen Angeandres. Public reception of their appearance turned sour as they were viewed as annoying vermin; all to serve the end goal: forcing Hasbro to shut down the Hasbio program at a steep loss and liquidate the fluffy concept before they could reach market. If everyone was against the idea before it had the chance to launch, the whole endeavor would be a bust. If the whole endeavor would be a bust, then erasing the breach was the only way for Hasbro to limp away and save face.
This was the duel of the economic gods; their powers derived from employees, investors, banknotes, and devotion. And fluffies were the gambit in which one of these deities was going to bled to death before the gazing eyes of the stock market moguls and the clueless man.
Roddenbury felt something stir within him at the idea that faceless corporations were as gods. One of them had already gone and created its own version of life, after what image? And for what cause? For what possible justification could a businessman, or man of science, validate the creation of synthetic beings destined to be pawned off as toys, if things had gone to plan?
They already had all the reason they needed to commit to killing them all, now that everything had been derailed. Roddenbury only had to look at Straya’s burnt stump of a leg to know that.
“Straya, what happened to you, before I found you. How did you lose your leg?” the trucker asked pointedly so that he could confirm his suspicions. His eyes were locked on the lines speeding by the truck’s bonnet. Body acting on muscle memory. Mind set off on a journey.
Straya’s voice cracked in her throat as a deep frown formed on her expression. Roddenbury was glum in his own right. Glum and gruff. He needed to hear the fluffy’s story, and then redecipher it so that it made sense in plain English.
Straya cried as she recounted her horror. Roddenbury’s indignation reached a low simmer. His knuckles were white, so tight was his hold on the steering wheel.
“An’ dats when Stwaya wan’ die! Wan… wan die… wan…”
Roddenbury snarled, “None of that!” and the azure mare yelped. Then she started to tremble with fear. The sight in the trucker’s periphery only deepened his seething rage at the omniscient goliaths that toyed with lives, human or otherwise. They deliberately imitated joyful innocence, only to corrupt it with suffering and terror. A sin as loathsome as conceiving of a child, only to abandon it from birth.
“None of that, Straya,” Roddenbury repeated with a more collected tone of voice. “You’re alive for a reason. I’m alive for a reason.” And Straya was alive. It did not matter what the chemistry of her blood was, or whether or not she had decaying isotopes supplying the electrical impulses to move her muscles and think her thoughts.
“We’re going to set this right. I don’t know how. But we are,” Roddenbury pledged to the quivering mare.
“Stwaya miss famiwy, Wod…” she confided in the trucker.
“We’re going to do right by them, too. We’re going to do right by every fluffy we could possibly save.”
Roddenbury did not know where these words were coming from.
It was probably the fact that he was already a fugitive.
And that his life was already sold for a profit he would never see.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad moving to those catacombs.
Just so long as he didn’t have to live in a goddamned sewer.
-Author’s Note-
@Lothmar see it finally happened.
