A fennec fox, a lion and a plush savannah. Get ready for the cutest adventure you'll ever have!

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The morning sunlight crept over the poly-grass plain, blades of plasticine khaki-and-green foliage waved serenely underneath the gentle brush of the wind. Frigid air crept into the cartoonishly shallow grooves of a tree, illuminating the broad sheets of painted leaves. The birds residing on its branches crackled awake and sounded their early chime, a melodic advertising jingle, ending with Travel the Extranet with Archemidies Networks! They fluttered, and their chattering would herald the rise of the many other creatures residing around the tree.

Fenfen woke up.

She had her burrow, and it was thankfully, blissfully safe for another night. No weasels had come in and done battle with her, no moles had ended up bumping into it and making it cave, and the entrance was free of any suspicious smells. The fennec fox stood upright, observing the world through her glittery, pink, gem-like eyes. She looked over her paws, soft cotton with felt along the pads and hard-plastic nails, perfect for trapping her prey.

Ears the length of her entire body perked, bringing with them waves upon waves of glittering faux-fur that were prone to giving her position away. They were good for hearing, but still so obnoxiously huge. Even when she kept them drooped against herself their warmth tended to overheat her, or part the grass as she snuck around. Ugh, it was so annoying.

A chime went off in her mind, it was the voice of MOTHER, Remember to hunt!! Yes, hunting, that was the most important task of the day. Without hunting, there was no fun and without any fun she would face The Doldrums, and that would bring bad luck, and her burrow would cave in and and…
Another chime sounded, and Fenfen hurried up to the surface world. She snuck her small muzzle through the entrance, and then squeezed the rest of her body out, paws fumbling on the surface and scattering a few birds. Those were too difficult to catch anyways.

Perking her ears, she perceived the grassy plain around her. A cotton-candy sunrise had painted the sky in shades of cyan and pink, with a zig-zaggy pattern following the sun as it crossed the sky. When the hunt was especially passionate, it would become engulfed in all kinds of hypnotic, kalideoscopic shapes, a real predator-high. But those were rare occurrences for fennec foxes, modest creatures. It was only the especially quarrelsome that got those sorts of highs. Lions with their prey-crushing paws, hyenas with their colossal snoots and teeth, sometimes even wild dogs, as long as they were in their huge packs.

Fenfen was usually happy to pounce on a small mouse or lick her way through some insects. She’d heard of other fennecs having families, but the truth was, she’d never met any. There had been a jackal skull she’d made friends with, but she lost it over the side of a cliff in one of her many excursions. Fennecs were meant to be on the ground, not on cliffs.

The chime went off again.

The hunt, the hunt. Fenfen set her nose against the ground, bushy, faux-fur tail wagging as she scanned the terrain. For a moment, her nose desynced with the environment, but it only took a second for it to snap awake again and show her the creatures in her radius. Yes, this was familiar terrain. The molded plastic grooves of the grassland, itself fed by the nearby river of hot glue, adorned with huge trees sprouting cotton stuffing and string. The world sustained itself in a neverending cycle of manufacture and love. Fenfen had heard of the very distant sowing machines, city-sized complexes that formed the creation of the world, but no creature had ever actually seen them.

Trotting her way through the tall grass, she was faintly aware of how her ears peeked above the blades. Not that any of her victims were that high up, but she was mostly concerned about getting snatched up by a hawk or harassed by a pack of hyenas. In that same instant, Fenfen smelled the sharp, chocolate scent of them. She knew they were all girls, which meant they had extra big, patterned forepaws of rough denim, and metallic teeth that could easily gnaw her to pieces. She corrected her path and made a wide circle around them.

They seemed to have found an incapacitated lion, knocked out from some other sort of activity, and were taking turns gnawing on her and hurling insults. Their voices were harsh and drunk, chattering and chortling that deafened them to other prey in the area,
“Huehhrhh HHHEEHEHE KING OF DA JUNGLE?? hEHEHhhrrrhh.”

“L-looohhhhk!! Looohkk ma!! I wears him as a cape!!” They audibly struggled to form whole words in between their perpetual laughter. Clumsy, metal teeth that barely fit in their mouths, forming a huge over or underbite, sometimes both. They were goofy looking creatures, with huge stitched eyes and paws that nearly reached the size of their entire body. Occasionally one could see them struggling to articulate their fingers to no avail, and they’d stare at their own denim pads for a long moment of confusion, before opting to mercilessly smash the nearest hapless creature with a ground-shaking POMF. Fenfen hurried her quiet steps until she was fully out of earshot, then broke into a dead sprint.

After several paces a wave of blissful relief washed over Fenfen, a notification popping up in front of her eyes, streaks of light followed by SAFE. Then the words flashed NOW HUNT. Yes, yes the hunt. It was a good feeling, tracking was what fennecs were meant to do, big ears listening for cute prey, the rustle in the grass, the whurrl3 of the bedsheet terrain. She’d heard of other foxes that could track prey by the folds of the cloth, but she’d never been that good. Fenfen was just a small fox in a big world, and only knew her nose and ears.

There was a rustling in the grass.

Words shone in her eyes, TRACK!! And her ears perked and a rush of invigorating, shaky energy flowed through her stuffing. Oh, that smelled really good, like neopolitan ice cream. Yes, she could already see the mouse. Pastel green and pink with long whiskers. Now she just had to find it. As she sniffed through the grass her feelings got more intense, more vicious and shaky. But they began to agonizingly slip away. She turned north, and they got stronger, her tail completely still, ears drooped against her body to better hide her… In the flannel folds of the bedsheets she could see the rustling! With a snap, Fenfen drove her plastic teeth over the cloth and snatched the struggling creature.

It writhed and wormed and kicked viciously in her teeth, still hidden beneath the thin sheets. The next part was the most delicate and exciting, Fenfen had to stun the creature and then pull it out from its flannel burrow. She whipped her head, beating the mouse against the ground and gnawing on it some more, making it squeak out,

“Please!! I have a family!! Nooo!!” It cried. Family… Fenfen knew it was lying! She gnawed some more, emitting that squeak that shot through her spine, eyes glowing in a pleasant hunter-high. With another whip of her head, it was finally knocked out. A points ticker appeared in her vision, tallying her performance. Finally, she let the mouse go and pulled the sheets out from over it. Yes! It was neopolitan flavored!

It was quite a catch. Fenfen’s tail whipped around in excitement and she bit in once again. Her khaki-colored, felt tongue was struck with a wave of creamy, ice cream flavors. Delicious chocolate, vanilla, cherry, all mixing together in a viciously tasty arrangement. She was in total fen-bliss, gnawing away on the ground, safe in the tall grass, with MOTHER’s happy melodies resounding in her head. Geometric arrangements danced across the sky a-
She was looking at a screen.

Lowren was sure she was wearing a headset, and when she lifted her cushioned paws to her head she realized that they were actually human hands, and she was staring at a VR headset. The low resolution monitors, the pixelation, the game. She’d really, genuinely been feeling it for awhile. As she felt along her head she began to remember in shocks and sparks. The neural shunt hooked into her neck with a long interface needle, thick cable leading out of the base of her neck. She collapsed, her Fenfen avatar in the plushworld released the mouse and slumped to the ground along with its operator. Yes, she had fingers, and she could grip stuff, especially the cord around her neck. Yes, she was there, in prison.

Mutaa was having a long night.

By all accounts he’d started the day off right. A good breakfast at his complex’s café, and then a Plusenergy drink and then an early trip to work. He’d even arrived a little early. But as soon as he’d taken over for the Day Handler, things had gone awry. MOTHER just wasn’t happy that day. A network crash had incapacitated most of the prisoners in Block Alpha through Charlie and required the debug team to get to work as fast as possible. Some of them were moved to Delta and Echo but… Well, the system could be temperamental. New prisoners meant more network issues.

With the Debug Team working that meant that Target Compliance was off his back and he could get back to watching Giant Sunday. Some warmed-over Atilla Ramen and a candy bar later and all was right with the world. Words and images streaked in front of his eyes, showing him the grinning visage of Matriarch Ajira as she reported the news, in between spoof cuts of Bahybee Money.

“I’ll take that to-go!” He chortled and sniggered along with her, promptly slurping up a few more noodles.

Desync error! Just as he was getting into the show, too. Mutaa grumbled and set down his cup angrily, prompting his implant to dispense some sedatives to regulate his mood. It helped, but only slightly as he turned his attention to the security feed provided to his AR interface. Just as he’d expected, some of the prisoners in Delta were experiencing a Desync error. The neural calibration settings had set back to defaults.

Before he could even do anything, Target Compliance was on his fucking case.

“Mutaa, we’re getting desyncs on Echo.” The head of Compliance, some lady he’d only met once and remembered as a person-shaped blob with a sharp blonde cut and too-big shoulderpads..

“It’s Delta, and I’m on it already.” He spoke, gesturing through his interface and ordering a system reset for the Delta block, and Echo while he was at it.

There was a shuffling of documents on the other end of the line, “PrisonGod is reporting that we need to turn up the trauma responses for violent offenders.”

“Yeah, about that,” Mutaa said as he witnessed the prisoners in the Delta block simultaneously collapse into unconsciousness. The lights in the enormous, pillow-padded room shut off for a moment, coming on again and cycling through the bootup sequence. Mutaa continued, “So on my sheets here it only tells me what they did. Physical correction put this lady in Delta block for violent offenders, but all she did was break into an office building and steal some supplies and petty change.”

“The judge probably thinks violence extends to property. Just turn up the trauma responses, Mutaa.” She closed the line.

Fucking hell. Okay, sure, violence against property. If the lady upstairs wanted it. She got it. He cracked open the textfile for all violent blocks and turned the trauma responses up. He sipped his drink again and got back to Giant Sunday. Matriarch Ajira was still on!



The hyenas had spotted Fenfen sometime in the early morning, and proceeded to unrelentingly chase her for several hours. Their huge, rough-denim paws plowed against the pillow-and-plastic plain so hard it frequently threw off Fenfen’s balance, her ears ducked against her body, tiny legs propelling her as fast as she could move. But the terrain was unforgiving, there were no burrows in sight, no branches she could try to get the hyenas stuck in, or herds of larger animals she could dump them on.

“HHRHhghhrhh!!” One of them snarled and grumbled, “Fffehhhn we’re urhghhheheh.. heheh You’re uhh OURS!” It struggled. God, it was getting closer. The sky was pitch black, a void that was criss-crossed with claustrophobic darkness. Fenfen hurried, her muscles burning, stitches straining, her stuffing gathering in her backside in all the wrong ways. In an instant, she was swiped by a paw that could engulf her entire body and thrown across the plain. She flew weightlessly, tumbling several feet away and panickedly waving her legs. The ground gave under her feet and her body sank slightly in the pudding patch.

She was stuck.

“MOTHER!!” She yipped and yowled, “MOTHER please help!!”
The hyenas were circling around her, eyes wide and glowing with predatory hunger. They circled over the pudding patch slowly. With how clumsily they were built, it was a miracle that they had ever caught up to Fenfen! Their snouts basically blocked their eyeline, their forepaws kept fumbling with each other and their back halves seemed disproportionately small. All the same, those huge metal teeth clicked together, and they deftly, impossibly maneuvered the pudding patch to reach Fenfen, and smashed her.

Heavy padding, rough denim and stitching all came down on Fenfen with the force of a boulder, crushing her into the depths of the pudding patch and nearly making her drown in the few inches of it. Her own cotton stuffing was pushed to the extremities of her body, string and felt pressed painfully into her twine skeleton. The pudding forcibly entered through her mouth and nose, soaking her in, making her goopy and heavy. Her ears absorbed the stuff like long, pointy sponges, pulling down on either side of her head as she was picked up by a hyena claw and shown off, before being smashed again.

“Tehh. Tuhh… Teheherhhrhhh TEEARR HERHEHEH APART!!”

A cold shot of terror struck through Fenfen, and was only amplified by the feeling of hot, metal, hyena teeth biting down on her limbs, leaving stains and deep imprints on her hide. She screeched and yowled as her body was stretched out, her leg trembling, stitches stretching out and gradually beginning to give, revealing her cotton interiors. Spring-filled tubes patterned with moons and stars lept out of her leg, her lower half collapsing with a terrifying feeling of emptiness as she began to lose her shape. Fenfen’s hot pink, silk heart shifted and collapsed out of its delicate place.

Frigid emptiness rushed over Fenfen’s shoulders, to the tips of her ears, and a pleading panicking gasp escaped her throat. She wanted so desperately to cry out for help, even though she knew it wasn’t coming. Her life began to fade out of her, and she totally lost feeling for what was left of her body, even as more strings snapped and cloth tore. She could see the hyenas chewing on the silk pillow of her heart, tangled up in her patterned guts and gnawing on it happily. Pixelated hearts floated out of them along with a NEW HIGH SCORE fanfare.

The world faded away and words filled her vision, a void of scores and names and actions. PERFORMANCE TALLY, with tabulated performance and scores. How many mice caught, burrows dug, encounters survived. Then a ranking: C-. The void was then sucked through a straw, narrowed into a pinprick of existence that Fenfen was pulled through and-

Dawn looked at the dogs messing around in the fudge patch at the end of a hot glue river.

She was tired of them. They were thin-limbed snarling creatures that relentlessly enjoyed playfighting, nipping at each other with transluscent plastic teeth, grooming their way through the stringy, sparkly faux-fur that was usually matted with pudding or fudge. But despite her permanent exhaustion, the way they tugged at her ears, her paws, picked at her stitching and had even stolen one of her button eyes to gnaw on, Dawn couldn’t bring herself to part from the dogs.

They were half a pack, and without a suitable ‘mom’ figure, they were an ineffective mob. Their hunts for cows and horses were miserable at best, with the dogs usually devolving into nipping and biting each other instead, tearing their own stuffing apart for sustenance. It wasn’t uncommon for a trail of discarded cotton balls and twine to lead directly to their next resting spot.

Dawn had managed to find a patch of bedding to at least rest for a little bit, and get away from the constant yipping and barking that had formed the constant cacophony of her life now. She tried to think of another time, other places she might have been, but found herself too exhausted to review her memories. Especially as one of the smaller dogs broke away from the pack and trotted over, his eyes stitched into a permanently mischievous expression.

“Dawn!” He yipped, “Hey Dawn!”

She sighed and hid her head under her mountainous paws. She was immensely strong, but too heavy to run, and how could she ever bap those pups? They were just runts and outcasts, so soft and-
The pup had started biting one of her humongous fingers, pulling at the mismatched patchwork of cloth with his plastic teeth,

“I’m hungry!! Feed me!” He cried, testing the tension of her formidable stitching. Dawn sighed as she witnessed the rest of the pack approaching.

“Not now, sweetie.” She whimpered softly. They were all going to take turns gnawing on her again.

In an instant they had surrounded her, adolescents and pups, all climbing over the lioness and tugging at her mane, at her gnawed-to-pieces tail, at the bits of stuffing that were starting to peek out of her body. Dawn felt a tightening sensation in her chest, a cold terror filling her arms.

Mutaa checked the clock again. His shift was only a few minutes from being over, and the MOTHER systems had finally settled into their usual activity. The debug team had done their work, and Target Compliance seemed happy. He threw away the small castle of energy drinks he’d amassed, and a few noodle cups before standing up and checking his messages. There was another coupon for a case of Plusenergy… Yeah, he actually really needed that. Blissful relief flowed through his fingertips as he reserved a case at the nearby convenience store. Oh, the Giant Saturday season pack from last year was on sale too. That would be fun to watch before bed for a few weeks. Matriarch Ajira was a looker, maybe he’d pick up some of her perfume.

“Hey, Mutaa.” Ryan, the daytime handler, had arrived. His face was, as usual, blocked behind an AR-displayed array of comic books he’d been reading on the walk to work.

“Yeah, MOTHER was acting up this morning but it’s fine now. Have a good day.” Mutaa grumbled, a little peeved to have his shopping spree interrupted. Well, he’d get back in the rhythm of it, that was for sure! He stepped off.

Ryan sat down and waved away his comic books, opening up the handler’s interface and the wide array of middleware used to control MOTHER’s systems. Mutaa was okay, but there was always one or two things that were off when he came in, but today it was in spades. A full system reset, desync errors, decalibration. Mutaa had turned the trauma responses all the way up for blocks Alpha through Echo! Ryan’s eyes narrowed as he leaned into the interface window, sorting through prisoner files. Sure, it got Target Compliance off his back in the short run, but tipping a prisoner too hard into trauma responses would just result in a higher recidivism rate down the line. No, none of that was right.

It would take him all day, but it would save his job. He began the laborious task of recalibrating MOTHER’s simulations for each individual prisoner.

The dogs’ activity had built up into a frenzy. Dawn could feel the loose stitches on her flank being tense and tested, stretching and straining. Some of the dogs were cheering, their bushy tails waving wildly as they dug into her cotton ball stuffing. They smiled and giggled and reached one of her guts. But Dawn couldn’t do anything about it, merely hide under her paws some more, moan and plead with them not to eat her. She yowled and grabbed one of the smaller pups, pulling him into her begging embrace.

The pup writhed and yipped nervously as her hug grew tighter, smothering it in faux-fur. Something came over Dawn in that instant. Her stitches weren’t being torn apart, the dogs, her pups, were just playfully gnawing on her. Toying with her bright orange-and-yellow tail, which she dangled over them, guiding the pack from one side of her body to the other. She gently groomed the pup in her arms, embracing it in her huge, caring hands. The sky settled into a rhythmic gradient, gently shifting colors. She deeply and truly loved the dogs that helped sustain her with mice and foxes to chew on. All was right with the world, and the clock stopped.

Dawn’s world had frozen. She released the puppy in her hands and it merely floated where she had left it. Likewise, the dogs on her back appeared frozen in place, impossible to budge away. The air had stopped flowing, the sky no longer pulsed. The world slipped away and Lowren realized where she was once again. Her neural shunt dug deep into her spinal cord, making her shoulders feel extremely tense and sore. A metallic flavor filled her mouth as she tried to take stock of her hands, feeling them near the ground, the rest of her body laying on it, still stuck in the pose of a lioness entertained by dogs.

Words filled her vision along with a harsh robotic voice, Your debt to society has been paid. Congratulations. Please await your parole officer’s arrival and enjoy your release.

Before it could even finish talking, the headset was forcefully removed from her eyes and the locking ring of the neural shunt was disengaged. The parole officer was accompanied by one of the prison guards, both picked her up and shoved a plastic bag full of her clothes and belongings into her arms. They impatiently escorted her out of the enormous padded room, past the blank white props imitating trees, logs and other natural paraphernalia. Prisoners ambled blindly around them, muttering cartoonish gibberish to themselves, with the thick cords of their neural shunts leading into the server stacks in the ceiling.

One year in Corrective Simulation as punishment for breaking and entering, theft, and financial damages. Lowren had been relocated to a different end of the city away from most of her friends and family, and would begin a job placement program the following day. The words and plans crashed over her numbed brain, still misfiring synapses, seeing small cute animals around brushed concrete corners. Talking seemed foreign to her, like the muscles in her mouth had been used very infrequently for a long time. Carrying a conversation seemed like the last thing she wanted to do in the world.

She was placed on a third floor one-room apartment with a view of a playground that didn’t look like it had been used in years. After getting her implant calibrated with the door, she spent hours staring at the cartoon lions and giraffes painted on the swing set, examining the simplified lines of their figures, their little tack-mark claws and happy expressions. Watching them filled her with a profound sense of longing and terror that cut through her chest in paroxysms of loss.

The new job was something she was used to, even though she was still fighting her way through cobwebs of time and memory. Line cook at a restaurant with an automated floor, which meant she didn’t have to talk to anyone for most of the day. Merely look at the screen, read the order, prepare it, and then set it on the conveyer belt. Her world was aquamarine tile and white concrete. Even though the faux-sushi and cultivated steak she prepared were delicacies, they were the furthest thing from appetizing to her.

When she was corrected by her employer after a mistake, his voice would rise slightly, and Lowren felt a caving sensation in her chest. She felt that bolt of fen-fear cutting through her twine-and-stuffing body, and would briefly be pulled back to that place. She would nod profusely, and wish that she could go back to that stitched together world. The moment she was alone and quiet again, those feelings would slip away, replaced with the vivid terror of staring at a candy dreamscape through screens in front of her eyes, of a neural shunt in her neck telling her what reality was and where she belonged.

After work she would frequent the street market near her apartment block. Cheap electronics chimed in soothing multicolor lights, animal themed pajamas resting on hangers in the frigid air. Lowren sorted her thin (too thin) fingers over the striped hyena set, eventually settling on a pale fox one, with enormous stuffed ears stitched into the hood. The sight of it filled her with a dreadful comfort. As if the terrors of the world were pressing down on her, the screen at work indicating that this is good and that she should like it.

Her home became a mausoleum of animal plushies, and she decorated her AR environment like a brightly colored savannah. Foxes filled her desk, in drawings, pencil cases, computer accessories. The Archemidies Networks owl presided over her her bed, observing her with its enormous, yellow eyes. Her minifridge was filled to the brim with chocolate pudding, fudge, vanilla frosting and nutrition packs. The only things she could really stomach anymore. Lowren, when not working, would curl up in her bed and stare longingly at pictures of the ancient deserts and grasslands. She would run her hands compulsively over her moon-and-stars patterned bedding, and a cold shot of comforting fear would cut through her.