The Alenix Proposal
By: Turboencabulator
Sam sat on the porch of his house, a mug filled with ten ounces of espresso and a splash of
milk sitting, steaming, on the low table. The second mug was always the slow one. Lightning was
bouncing around on the porch, making little whinnying sounds as he played keepy-uppy with a
balloon that had drifted in from somewhere on the wind.
A text message buzzed, and he lazily reached over, and flicked through to the app.
“Corporate types just showed up looking for you.”
Will’s text was neat and fully typed. More sober than usual, Sam guessed.
He watched as a trio of big, heavy looking SUVs crept along the road, looking for the turnoff
to get into Sam’s yard. He glanced down at Lightning, and made a little gesture with his
head. Lightning promptly turned and trotted in the half-open front door, and through to a
closet. There were a row of buttons at head height for a fluffy there, and one was marked with
a picture of a camera. He pushed it firmly, monitors turning on, recording security footage of
the front porch area.
After a few hundred feet, they found the gravel drive, and rumbled in, pulling around in a neat
row for a quick exit. Big, meaty looking men in not quite fitted suits got out, looking around
and undoing the top buttons on their jackets, ready to reach inside if need be. After a moment,
the middle car’s back door was opened, and out stepped a man that Sam immediately hated.
He was blonde, hair slicked back and rowed from a comb, stuck like a helmet with so much
product Sam could see it off-gassing in the morning sunlight. A giant Omega wristwatch and
several gaudy rings were visible, all matched to the tie pin and dress shirt.
The image of a weasel wearing an Armani suit came to Sam’s mind before he got up and strode
over to the railing, sipping his coffee. He casually leaned against on the warm wood and put on
a fierce grin.
“Bryce Carter, what brings you out to workin’ stiffs country?”
For a moment the permanent shit-eating grin faltered, before Bryce turned it back up to a
perfect fluorescing ten out of ten. “Sam, I didn’t think you’d remember me.”
“Oh, never. Congratulations on your promotion by the way. Assistant project manager is such a
mouthful. Just like I understand your promotion was.”
A few of the bodyguards had a twitch of a grin, quickly suppressed. Bryce blinked, missing the
suggestion, and plowed on. “Well it’s good to see you, but I have a business proposal to make
for you.”
“No.”
A brief splutter, and Bryce leaned in, grin turning sour. “Oh, come now, Sam. You haven’t even
heard me out.”
“Don’t need to.” Sam said, sipping his coffee. “Someone who matters in the company got handed a
contract that’s either too hot or too shit for them to take responsibility for, so it got
kicked down and down and down and down until you piped up in some godforsaken meeting room that you knew me, and now you’re here trying to earn brownie points to aid in your corporate ladder-climb.”
The smile died. “You always were too clever for your own good. Sam.”
Sam put on a magnanimous smile, and leaned down. “And you were too much of a fuckhead to know when you were outclassed, Bryce. Remember the time when we were trading stock and I earned in one week more than double what you managed in a full quarter?”
Bryce was silent, eyes glittering, angry, his upper lip twitching as he held on to his
composure.
“Look.” Sam said, draining his mug. “I’ll tell you what. If you get the fuck off my property
and have someone who matters show up, I’ll give you a good word that you convinced me to listen
to a solid business proposal. You get the credit for bringing me in, and we don’t need to cross
paths again.”
“Sam I swear to god I am going to bury you and your twee little fucking farm.”
“Five thousand, two hundred, fifty one.”
Bryce blinked. “What?”
“It’s the elevation my favorite whiskey is distilled at. Now, be a good little corporate cog
and spin your way back to Alenix. Buh-bye.”
With a brief hesitation of fury, Bryce got back in the SUV, and the group sped out.
Sam spat off the porch and grabbed a basket, wandering over to the meat pens.
It was nearly one in the afternoon before another, single SUV rolled in to the property and
stopped. Sam stood up from the porch and stretched, walking over to the steps.
A middle aged woman got out, with a weathered face and eyes like icepicks. She walked past her
security and up the steps. “You’re Sam.” She said, raspy from decades of cigarettes.
“You’re right. It’s Wainwright, isn’t it. Petunia Wainwright.”
“Call me Pete.” She said. They shook hands.
“Well, Pete. Lunch?”
She stared at Sam, tongue in cheek, thinking, then motioned for him to lead on. Inside he took
her to a casually set lunch table, and offered her a seat. She reached into her handbag and set
down a bottle of whiskey, then sat.
“Sam I’m going to be honest, you’ve got a pair of balls on you.”
Sam smiled, serving a light lunch of asparagus, white wine, and feta-and-olive stuffed roast
chirpies. “Had to make up for the ones Bryce left in Chicago.”
Pete laughed, a coarse, harsh bark. “He’s one of the fastest rising managers we have.”
With a flourish of sauce, Sam served her. Lightning jumped up at his own place, a small plate
already waiting. Pete stared at the little fluff as he delicately nibbled on the chirpies.
“He didn’t, however, mention that you had a fluffy. And an extremely rare variant, at that.”
Sam sat, with his own plate. “Lightning is a rescue. Far more intelligent than the normal
stock. However, on the side of Bryce, I would point out that, despite how fast he rose, he’s a
conniving, backstabbing prick.”
“Well yes.” Pete said, popping in one of the chirpies. She froze, chewing carefully, staring
out in the middle distance.
“It’s the touch of fenugreek rubbed into the skin that makes the dish.” Sam said, savoring his
own.
One meal later, and Sam had poured coffee. “So, what’s this big proposal that Bryce wanted
credit for?”
Pete had a cigarette lit, watching Lightning play Reader Rabbit on an old laptop. “The rest of
the board had been pushing for more civil contracts to try and get us good favors in the state
capitol. You heard about the possible legislation regarding fluffy testing?”
Sam nodded. “A bit, something about a tax stamp?”
“It’s graft is what it is.” She said, blowing out a cloud. “They’re threatening to set it up so
a fluffy for scientific testing is considered a controlled item, so each one has a tax stamp to
be used. Something absurd like twenty dollars per fluffy.”
“It’ll never pass.” Sam said, rolling his own smoke carefully. “All you have to do is point out
that any fluffy can be used for scientific testing, even the ones that are mill grown. All of a
sudden, every fluffy has a twenty dollar tax stamp on them, and nobody will pay. Mass dumping.”
“Yes,” Pete said, chaining off another cigarette. “But the B-side is they’re going to use this
to sneak in a weaker version so that lab-use fluffies need registered, and inspections, and
blah blah blah. They’re trying to pressure us to give more ‘intangible’ help. Like more civil
contracts.”
Sam chuckled, rolling a second joint. “No wonder Bryce was so hot to smarm his way into my good
graces when he showed up. He’s stepping up to spearhead some big contract and look like a hero
isn’t he.”
“The biggest.” Pete said, taking the offered joint and lighting it, taking a long, direct
hit. “If we can demonstrate a way to reduce Indianapolis’s feces problem, we get contracts for
major metropolitan centers statewide, and then eventually citywide.”
She exhaled, blinking. “Jesus fuck this is good shit. I haven’t had grass like this since I
dated that Swiss botanist.”
“I’m guessing he’s already started his own project, hm?”
She nodded, rubbing her eyes. “Oh god I’ve already got the munchies.”
“Yeah those are a killer with this strain. What’s the project timeline?”
“A year.” She said, taking another drag. “We’ve already got an R&D budget allocated to Bryce’s
department in the five million range with extensions up to twenty if need be.”
Sam nodded, thoughtful. “How’s next week?”
“For what?”
“To present my solution.”
A week later, an auditorium in the Alenix headquarters was packed with engineers, management,
and city officials. Word had spread immediately about the one-week turnaround this supposed
‘genius consultant’ had. Rumors spread further when a backfiring, slightly rusty pickup truck
pulled in to the guest parking lot and began unloading covered objects from the bed.
Bryce was seated near the front, arms folded, a grim look on his face. Pete was in with the rest
of the board of directors, chewing nicotine gum and furiously taking notes on a steno pad.
Sam and Will wheeled out a number of covered objects, before Sam took a microphone from an
assistant. After tapping on it to check its volume, he began.
“Everyone, thank you for coming, hopefully today’s demonstration will show that this uh, rather
unhygienic problem has a straightforward and economical solution. My name is Sam, this is my
associate Will.”
There was general muttering. Bryce leaned forward, watching.
Sam walked to the middle of the stage. “In essence this is a number of related problems in
one. First, existing waste, second, the continual production of new waste from the urban fluffy
population, and third, the population itself. Now, there is no way to completely eliminate any
of these issues. As long as fluffies are in an area, there will be waste, and if you remove the
feral population, it’s only a matter of time before they’re back.”
Clicking a controller, the lights dimmed, and Will began running a projector.
“That’s not just a turn of phrase.” Sam said, using a laser pointer to gesture on a video of a
simulation. “Working with a statistician friend of mine from the University of Washington at
St. Louis, we modeled the fluffy population in an urban center and found that there’s a fairly
simple way to describe urban feral population growth. Starting from near zero, the population
will grow as more fluffies are released or migrate in from the surrounding area, to a stable
equilibrium population. The time to reach this point is basically constant for all size urban
areas, at around fourteen months.”
"So, " Sam said, going to the first object under a cover. “The plan is simple. Make the
fluffies clean up after themselves.”
With a flourish, he revealed a machine made of lexan and aluminum, roughly the size of a fifty
five gallon barrel.
“This is a transparent version made for demonstration purposes, the real deal is to be painted
suitably gaudy colors.”
“The idea is this is basically four parts, on top we have a section for the lure, which is an
artificial spaghetti smell and a fan.” He indicated a top section, then moved down. “This is a
controller, which spots fluffies by simple image processing as well as audio recognition. I
found that a neural network can be trained on about two hundred hours of fluffy recordings.”
He turned the drum around, revealing two complex segments of piping, forms, and large
tanks. “Here we have basically the main show. This is a giant tank of fluffy poop, modified as
I will detail later, and wheat powder in this hopper. The system presses an edible wafer plate,
serves the fluffy poop on it, and dispenses it out the front.”
Turning back to the audience, he put up his hands, smiling. “Now I know it sounds like all I’ve
done is made the world’s worst soft-serve machine.”
General chuckles, Bryce twitched a frown, then back to neutrality.
“But the key really is the treatment. Alenix has a large stock of breeding fluffies, so
high-quality feces are no cost. Not that there’d be much of a cost anyways but you know what I
mean.”
The project turns to the next slide, showing a chemical analysis. “This is a bit nerdy but
essentially, fluffies are terrible at processing food. Their feces are actually more nutritious
than some bargain kibbles. So, I thought that this would be an excellent thing to exploit.”
“The poop is doctored with five main things.” Sam said, indicating as they showed up on the
projection. “The first is nicotine. This causes a psychological as well as physical addiction
to eating the feces our machines dispense. Second, we have a small amount of a digestible salt
of the hormone ghrelin. This induces the feeling of hunger. Only a small amount, basically
enough to make it feel like the fluffy had far less than they actually ate. This encourages
them to seek out more, since the machine is smart enough to not dispense twice to the same
fluffy in a day.”
“Third,” Sam said, indicating a complex looking molecule. “Is a rather interesting compound I
discovered while experimenting independently. It essentially shuts down the transmission of
nutrients into milk, starving any nursing young. However, nicotine is expressed in the milk, so
even though the young starve, they’re addicted to the nutrientless milk, even to the point
where they will refuse formula.”
“Fourth,” Sam said, holding up a can with a large, prominent food supply corporation’s logo on
the front. “Is MSG. More addiction, and so they’ll like the taste.”
“Finally.” Sam said, pulling out a party popper and setting it off with a loud noise.
“Glitter.”
General muttering went through the audience, confused.
Sam nodded to Will, who began playback of a video.
The dispensing drum is shown in a waist high artificial alleyway. The lure fan is gently
whirring, and a shit-assed mare is waddling up to it.
“Magic nummies!” The machine says, and the mare waddles faster, curious.
After a minute, it begins playing a jingle, and the mare sits up, laughing and clapping along
to the tune. A whirring sound is barely audible, and after the tune finishes, a healthy serving
of shit is pushed out a hatch on a cracker platter.
It sparkles, and the mare stares at it, confused. “Dat not nummies, dat poopies.”
The machine clicks and a merry little tinkle of sound is produced, followed by, “Magic nummies
awwys hab spawkles!”
After some uncomfortable shifting, the mare takes a taste. She visibly shivers, then plows into
the feces, licking the plate clean, before picking up the platter and trotting off with it.
The view switches, subtitled “Six Hours Later”.
The mare is back, begging the machine to give more poopies, before she’s given a stern shock
and made to move along.
Another switch, and the mare is shown eating old feces, and being laughed at by another mare
with young. The mother kicks her poopie over to the single mare, who picks up the poopie baby
and wanders off.
The camera switches back, and the mare shows the poopie colt to the machine, which dispenses
two servings. Both fluffies eat heartily, the mother shown in the far distance, watching.
Another cut, this time the subtitle is “Twenty four hours later.”
The mother is desperately, weakly licking at a shitstain on the ground, a trio of dead babies,
and one still weakly suckling the non-nutritious, addictive milk from her teats. She grunts and
squeezes out a pale, runny pile of feces, still laden with sparkles, and immediately turns
over, flopping on her stomach and crushing her last remaining infant before digging in to the
mound of feces. She snorts, inhaling some of the mess, and begins to writhe, fighting for
breath.
After a minute, she expires, and the single mare runs up to eat the pile of droppings, patchy
and shivering from addiction, collapsing on her side. The poopie baby runs up and begins
fervently suckling from her leaking anus.
The image cuts.
Sam turns back to the silent, open-mouthed audience. “This was one of a number of tests we
did. Integrating the fluffy’s belief in magic with the addictive nature of the dosing made for
a very powerful method of cleanup. Some eighty percent of fluffies began eating non-treated
feces as well, in the hopes that they just had ‘dummy no-sparkle magic’.”
Sam pulls off another sheet, revealing a logo on a canvas, an orange dot, with purple and green
trapezoids surrounding it. “This was designed as the image to put on the drums. Fluffies
remember this easily, and the sparkles were chosen to be orange, green, and purple as
well. However, while we have a good portion of the solution laid out, there is still the
question of cleaning up the fluffies themselves once they’re addicted.”
He goes to the last sheet, the largest, and pulls it off, revealing a large, boxy construction,
one end terminated in doors from the back of a cargo van. One wall is clear for demonstration
purposes… “This insert is designed to be put in most large vans, and contains enough room for
forty fluffies, on two levels.”
He opens the back doors, revealing the same gaudy design, and a padded ramp that lowers to the
ground. “Entry is one-way and the whole thing is soundproofed. Up top is an additional scent
production system and audio playback inviting fluffies inside, plus there’s LED lighting and
music to make it seem safe. It is brighter on the second level, so fluffies will naturally want
to clear the entry level if possible.”
“Simply park a van near one of the dispensing devices, lower the back, and wait for a full
load.” Sam closes up the back and goes to a flat control panel on the other side. “When you’re
on your way to a suitable disposal site, the fluffies may be euthanized en route by flooding
the containment chamber with nitrogen gas if desired. This is painless and the fluffies simply
fall asleep until their respiration stops.”
The slide changes to a price estimate. “Assuming secondhand vans, and bulk purchasing of
relevant chemicals, this system can be implemented strategically for only a few million dollars
a year. The most effective way to run this system, however, would be cyclically. Run it a week
in early spring, and a week in late fall, when fluffies are at their most food-focused, plus a
few dedicated places that are particularly troublesome like the warehouses. After initial setup
costs the system will pay for itself in the reduction of public health worker’s pay and related
expenditure.”
The crowd began to applaud. Bryce began to fume, one eye going bloodshot.
Two days later Sam woke up to find Will shaking him awake.
“Dude, something’s wrong, all the fluffies are sick.”
Sam got up and hurried out with Will, heading to the barns. Inside, all the fluffies were
quivering wrecks, vomiting up blood, or expired.
Lightning stalked between the rows with Hickory, both smelling and investigating.
Lightning looked up at the pair. “Foodies smeww wrong.” He said, indicating a scattering of
kibble, knocked out of the pen by a seizing kick.
Hickory looked at Will and made a motion. Will went over and crouched down, looking at a shoe
print, outlined in a patch of straw-dust.
“Smooth sole. Stitched, too.”
Sam nodded, and went back to the house, bringing up surveillance footage.
He watched as Bryce and a pair of stooges broke in and went along the rows, poisoning the
fluffies.
Lightning watched from the doorway as something in Sam gave way. “Daddeh? Wut is it?”
“He fucked with my work.”
Lightning nodded, jumping up on Sam’s lap and sitting down, leaning against his chest.
Sam fumed, petting Lightning, and began typing after a minute, stopping only to take the last of the stimulant he had been using for the previous week of work.
Three days later Bryce was let go after videos surfaced of him performing oral sex on a bound
fluffy mare, at the direction of an unknown woman. He was later arrested for destruction of
private property and possession of controlled substances after being found with cocaine.