This story is dedicated to my cats, who somehow find the perfect fucking times to demand affection when I’m at my busiest
Sudo was a black-and-green unicorn, and he was the only one in his litter to be a “funneh babbeh” and a glowy friend. It wasn’t all that uncommon of an occurence— most fluffies had enough genetic tampering in their ancestry for the occasional bizarre trait to resurface.
In Sudo’s case it manifested in his mane, hooves, iris, and horn continuously produced a dim green light. His mommy found it endearing enough to outbid a handful of halfhearted breeders in an auction— he looked just like the black-and-green glowy screens she played with for her “jahwb” in her bedroom!
In many ways, Sudo was a very lucky fluffy. His mommy stayed home for her work, meaning she was never far away, and his saferoom was the largest in the apartment, though he spent just as much time sleeping in mommy’s lap as she worked.
Sudo didn’t feel that way. She hardly ever played with him for very long, and when she let him stay on her lap, he had to be very quiet or he’d be kicked out. He didn’t understand why she loved her computer screens more than him— it was all boring words and numbers and it never gave her huggies or love. He did his best to play with his toys, but they just weren’t the same when his mommy was right there in the room across.
“Nu wan’ pway wit baww,” Sudo sulked, eyeing the bright red sphere resting in the middle of his playroom.
He was perched atop the highest turret of the fluffy-safe play castle in his playroom, and he was bored.
“Nu wan pway with bwockies, an nu wan pway with stuffie, an nu wan plway with cwayons, an nu wan’ nappie, an nu half tu use wittabawks.”
Save for the thin foam padding on the floor, that was it. There were no other features in Sudo’s saferoom— no TV screens, interactive boards, electronics, or enrichment toys.
Twisting around like a cat, Sudo maneuvered himself into his back and stretched his forelegs up at the pastel peach ceiling, kicking them in the air.
“Sudo am bowed,” he declared to nobody in particular.
And Sudo remained bored, wriggling around in the foam turret of his castle for what felt like many forevers, until he could bear it no longer.
“MUMMAHH!” Sudo yelled.
He waited, but no mommy came. He waited some more, but no mommy came! Wriggling back onto his feet, he hopped down from his play castle, paced around the room, checked under all his toys, and yet he still couldn’t find mommy. Sudo started to get worried. Where was she?
“MUUMMAHH!” Sudo yelled, again, “MUMMMMMAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!” and it was only when he really began to panic that mommy finally appeared in the doorway to his saferoom.
Sudo’s mommy wore nothing but panties and a loose t-shirt, her mane was tangled and snaggly, and after looking around the room to see he wasn’t on fire or bleeding, she glared at him with bags under her eyes.
“What? What is it, Sudo?”
Sudo cringed, knowing he’d probably done a bad thing by calling his mommy over when she was busy, but it was too late now. Besides, he was sure she would be perfectly sympathetic to his woes once he sufficiently elocuted his plight:
“Sudo am bowed!”
Andromeda was having a shit morning.
She’d spent the last few hours wrangling SSH keys that weren’t supposed to have expired for two years from now, one of her computers’ kernels had fucking imploded for no reason, the company servers were getting DDOSed, AWS East was having on-and-off outages, and she’d been called in to fix shit on her day off. Again.
And if juggling all that wasn’t enough, her fluffy had started screaming to call her over when she was supposed to be monitoring time-sensitive network trace statements, because he was bored.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re bored, Sudo? And what do you want me to do about it?”
“Aehh… Sudo nu kno… buh…” The pony’s expression melted into a distraught frown. “Sudo sowwy fow make mummah nu happy… wan huggies?”
He raised his forelegs up in the universal ‘uppies’ gesture, and despite half wanting to beat his ass then and there, Andromeda’s heart melted as she reached down to pick him up. She knew she gave him an unhealthily sparse attention, just like she knew it wasn’t his fault that her morning had gone to shit, though it still didn’t make her magically able to play with him right now.
Sudo cooed and giggled as she held him like an infant, tummy-up, and rocked him gently. “You know I’m busy, don’t you, Sudo?”
He cringed. “Sudo knu…”
“And I’m very busy today, so I need you to be a good fluffy and only call me over if there’s an emergency, okay?”
“Otay… buh…” Sudo wriggled in her arms.“Sudo bowed.”
Andromeda sighed. Yes, he was probably chronically understimulated, and no, she didn’t have time to play with him, since the packet tracer really fucking needed her attention, and yes, she knew he was make work impossible now regardless of whether she made good on playing with him later.
Still keeping him in her arms, Andromeda pursed her lips as she walked back into her office and looked around for anything to pacify him this very second.
Shortwave radio— would be funny, but a bad idea. Soldering iron? Nope. Anime figurines? Absolutely not. She paused as her gaze fell on an old tablet lying half-buried by papers on a table, and she paused.
It had been a gift from her grandfather, since she ‘liked electronics’, even though Andromeda hated the idea of using any operating system owned by a corporation. Still… she’d heard of annoying babies being shut up by sensory videos, and Sudo was as annoying a toddler as any. It was just for one day, wasn’t it— what was the worst that could happen?
Downloading ClickClock, Andromeda set Sudo up with a charger and a pillow in a corner of his saferoom. She turned it on, registered a dummy account, and Sudo’s expression went from curious to awestruck as she dialed in to the first livestream she found after searching ‘Fluffy’.
Glad that he was finally quiet, Andromeda tucked him in, locked the baby gate behind her, and got back to work.
Sudo was AMAZED by the shiny screen with the fluffies inside it. No wonder mommy spent all day playing with them!
He didn’t know what AI-generated content was, just that the fluffies moved funny and sometimes vanished, and that wasn’t an issue for his mushy fluffy attention span. Certainly not while he was being bombarded with bright colors, constant motion, quick camera cuts, and repetitive music.
Sudo lost all track of time, totally mesmerized, until the broadcast suddenly stopped, freezing, as a loading icon took up the center of the screen.
It took Sudo several seconds to process what had happened and several more for his emotional state to become distraught.
“Whai fwuffy scween nu wan pway wit Sudo?”
The tablet said nothing because it was an inanimate object incapable of speech. Still, the ClickClock app was intelligently designed software— after ten seconds of buffering, a tutorial overlay popped up: “Tired of waiting for the stream to buffer? Swipe down to explore alternative broadcasts. Try it now!”
While Sudo couldn’t read, he could see the graphic of a finger pressing down in the screen and pulling up, and after studying the animation for three loops, he reached one of his hooves and mimicked the gesture.
It took two tries, but finally, Sudo changed to the next broadcast. It showed a fluffy and their mommy playing with blocks. So many blocks!! The fluffy had to have super duper talented to build with wooden blockies like that!
He watched the stream for a few minutes, but it was boring!!! He wanted the fun music and bright colors back!
And so, off Sudo went, scrolling deeper and deeper through broadcasts and later shorts as the algorithm quickly honed in on what could capture his short attention span.
But algorithms were fickle things, as Sudo’s administrator mommy knew all too well. Not only were they prone to randomness, but they were easily abused or hijacked by those with the patience to tame them.
And it would not be long before the very same capricious algorithm would attempt to insert the first of many videos from a new topic into Sudo’s feed:
- A shitpost telling fluffies that they HAVE to run around and shit everywhere RIGHT NOW or sketties will NEVER exist again
- 60 seconds of brainrot at absolute seizure-inducing potency
- An innocuous, child-focused outdoor vlog of a man hiking intended to go kids outside
- Well-disguised fluffTV-style cartoons designed to instill incorrect morals and paranoia
- Other: funniest or Agamo’s choice from the comments