You are Scarface, a hulking, scarred, surprisingly smart former street toughy, and right now, you’re feeling a little annoyed.
You’re trying to watch a moo-vee, but you can’t hear what’s going on because your daddeh, though you don’t really call him that, because he’s really more like a bwuddah to you, is laughing too hard.
You can hear the Doc-tow’s voice coming from the cum-pyoo-tuh your daddeh uses to talk to him.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you about the herd.”
Victor is literally rolling on the floor, laughing his ass off. If he doesn’t stop soon, he’s likely to piss his pants.
“Victor! Please kindly pull yourself together! We have business to discuss!”
After Victor finally collects himself, he apologizes.
“Sorry, Pierre. But it’s just so funny. A fluffy drug gang? That’s–” and there he goes again.
Scarface pushes the pause button on a TV remote, designed to be easy to use by fluffies. One of Pierre’s inventions. $19.99 at Flufftopia, batteries included. He glares at Victor, with one beady yellow eye.
“Victow! Nok it awf! Scawface am twyin tu watch Da Gawdfawfa!” Scawface has a passion for old movies, especially those about the world of organized crime.
Pierre, on the screen, turns toward Scarface.
“Thank you, Scarface. Glad to see one of you has some self-restraint.”
A silver and cyan fluffy pops up on the screen.
“Am dat Scawface? Hewwo, Scawface!”
“Hewwo, Nikowa.”
“Hewwo, Scawface!” another fluffy, gold and black pipes up, Pierre gently stroking her golden fluff.
“Hewwo, Awdwey.”
Scarface is an unusual fluffy in many ways, and this is one of them.
Most fluffies are practically hardwired to crave friendship with other fluffies, with as many fluffies as possible. It’s one of the reasons that feral herds can get so big.
Scarface, perhaps because of his negative experiences with his “friends” in his former herd, can take friends or leave them.
Nikola and Audrey, Pierre’s alicorn siblings, are two of the few fluffies Scarface genuinely likes.
He actually looks forward to their playdates, but because he’s got a rep to maintain, he doesn’t let it show.
Scarface is deeply embarrassed by the fluffies who blindly follow their unfinished programming to seek out “huggies an sketties an wub”, and have less depth than the average puddle, for the same reason that, say, a black man would look down on another black man who embodies all the negative stereotypes about black people.
Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of the Faucheuse brothers, this is slowly changing. They’ve made it their mission to help fluffies unleash their true potential, no matter how long it takes. They both have plenty of time and money to invest in this endeavour. And they know it’ll benefit humanity in the long run, too. The time when humans were the only sapient beings in the universe is long gone, they both know. The Rubicon has been crossed.
The basic desires for affection and Italian cuisine can’t be completely eliminated from the fluffy psyche, they were deliberately hardcoded in by Hasbio for reasons that are unknown, because all of their original documents on the project were mysteriously destroyed in a fire not long after the PLASMA incident, and the backups were all mysteriously erased. Even Scarface, to his eternal shame, starts drooling whenever Victor and him pass an Italian restaurant.
But it is possible, as the brothers have proven, to expand their minds, to an extent, allowing them to develop more complex personalities, if not entirely as complex as a human personality. They’ll still like sketties and huggies, but there’ll be a bit more to them than that.
The Faucheuse method of breeding and raising fluffies has been empirically proven to achieve this. Fluffies may be artificial creations, but they were created using DNA from many naturally occuring species, including human DNA, and thus, possess the same capacity for evolution as their genetic donors do. Even if Hasbio managed to limit that capacity.
Pierre attempted to speed this up by directly engineering smarter fluffies. He even succeeded in vat-growing a fluffy with human level intelligence, genius level even. He accomplished this by splicing his own DNA into the fluffy’s malleable genetic code.
Unfortunately, when the genius fluffy emerged from its vat, it immediately began screaming, fully aware of the horror of its existence, couldn’t be stopped, and had to be put down.
So, as Aesop’s tale of the Tortoise and the Hare could have told Pierre, slow and steady will win the race. Pierre and Deston take it one step at a time, one generation of fluffies at a time.
Pierre handles the biological aspects of the mission: determining the best ways to breed fluffies. He also invented the line of ÜberFluff products Flufftopia sells: highly nutritious foods that stimulate the body and brain’s growth. A fluffy raised on ÜberFluff milk, and subsequently ÜberFluff kibble (and the occasional can of ÜberFluff sketties) has been proven to be smarter, hardier, and longer-lived than a fluffy raised on the generic milk (harvested from highly-stressed milkbags, negatively affecting the quality), kibble (often made of fluffies) and canned sketties (actually just cheap noodles and tomato ketchup) sold by competing stores. The high fiber content makes their excrement more solid, though not so hard that passing it hurts the fluffy, putting an end to sorry poopies from nine out of every ten fluffies. Dams that eat ÜberFluff Bestest Babbehs kibble throughout the pregnancy give birth to healthier, smarter foals, and fewer runts, and produce milk with effects more-or-less identical to ÜberFluff milk. The trade-off is that the litters are smaller, usually three or four tops, but this is deliberate on Pierre’s part. Quality over quantity.
Deston handles the psychological aspects of the mission: determining the best ways to raise fluffies. His uncanny insight into the workings of the fluffy psyche has been invaluable to Pierre, and to The Fluff Network. Fluffies raised on TFN have been proven to actually learn more and are better behaved than fluffies raised on the much-maligned FluffTV. Deston has won many awards for his books on fluffies, and across the globe, more and more fluffies are being raised the Faucheuse way. That it is making the Faucheuse brothers mountains of money is merely a bonus.
But all their efforts may be for naught, because, while fluffies may be getting smarter, at least somewhat, humans remain as stupid as they’ve always been.
Pierre has a vast network of contacts and sources. He has eyes and ears everywhere, many of them being his. He knows about the attempts by several parties to weaponize Pheromone 53, and he’s got a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen if they succeed. Spoiler alert: everyone dies.
Victor thinks that, if he didn’t know that Pierre was on the side of the angels, he would be very worried indeed.
“Okay, okay, I’m done. Hee hee hee. Sorry. Continue, Pierre.”
“Right. I’ve just gotten word from my man in the Vercettis that their boss has acquired a fluffy with Syndrome-P53. He’s got his drug lab working on harvesting P53 from the poor thing as we speak. You know what to do.”
Victor nods. “Another slash and burn. Got it. Send me the deets, I can be there in half an hour. The Vercettis are sure I don’t know where the lab is. Joke’s on them.”
“Aaaaaand sent. Good luck, my friend. Oh, and Victor?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to get the fluffy out alive this time. He’s not an accessory to the crime, he’s a victim.”
“I swear, last time it was an accident. I was aiming for the asshole trying to escape with the poor little bugger. This time, I’m not giving them that chance.”
“Godspeed, Victor. Remember: we must survive.”
“We must survive.” Victor repeats, hanging up.
“Scarface! I’m heading out.”
Scarface grunts and nods.
“Moo-vee am awmos oba. Scawface miss bestest pawt, nu fanks tu yu.”
“There’s a rewind button on that remote. The two little arrows pointing left. And the button under it lets you jump to any part you want. Use the little arrow buttons around the red one in the middle to pick the part you want, then hit the red button. Got it?”
A minute goes by, the only sounds being a few soft clicks, and snippets of audio from various scenes of The Godfather.
“…Fank yu, Victow.”
“No problem, Soul Brother. Oh, and maybe you should skip the third movie.”
“Scawface neba see fiwd moo-vee.”
“Well don’t. I personally think it’s god-awful. But I won’t stop you. I’ll be back. Oh, and I suggest you watch The Terminator. I know you prefer crime movies, but Arnold Schwarzenegger kicks ass.”
Victor changes into his “work uniform”, including a hood and a mask, with a built-in voice modulator, and so many other wonderful little toys, like thermal vision. There’s no hiding from Victor. He’s Death incarnate when on the job.
Just before he leaves, Scarface turns to him.
“Victow!”
Victor turns back.
“Yeah?”
“Gud wuck, Souw Bwuddah.”