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In the blighted world of the Flim Flam timeline, Big Mac and Zephyr Breeze hold on to the remains of what they've lost.
written in one day for the May Pairings Contest 2023 and the 2023 Cyberpunk Equestria Story Contest.
this ended up being a lot of weird ideas about the Flim Flam timeline inspired by Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Calorie Man". the noun "calorie-mare" in this story is, of course, very directly inspired.
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yeah. This timeline rely comfuses me.
I really enjoyed this for the ZephyrMac (a new one, but it makes the naught part of my mind twitch with the bear/twink potential) and the post-apocalyptic gloom. I immediately bought the short story collection that has The Calorie Man in it as well.
I really enjoyed this! Very creative timeline and setting.
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the show timeline? i agree, hence the weird ideas in this story. if you mean the story timeline i don't blame ya since i ended up writing it in a rush and didn't have time to get around to making the setting clearer to a reader not already familiar with biopunk tropes, sorry about that!
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bear/twink "potential" huh? does that mean i didn't succeed in making my authorial intentions clear? :p
and yeah there are some great and out-there ideas in that collection! definitely an inspiration for myself
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thank you!
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Oh no, I picked up what you were laying down with those two! The steam heart made me squee.
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aww im glad! i originally meant for that to contrast with the carbon spewed by the new machines that can't be manipulated by pegasus magic in the same way water vapor can, but ran out of time to include that bit
I'm lost...is there mpreg or not??
This was good, and a nice look at an unusual pairing. The setting is interesting, and seeing more of it could be neat.
Wowzers, you took a few frames and made a very grim timeline out of them, arguably the grimmest compared to its compatriots. The tenseness inherent in this world scrabbling for survival, where cold logic brutally clashes with the warmth of our protagonists love, it hits hard.
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in retrospect it is pretty subtle, but yes! that is how the plot resolves in the final section
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thank you! rereading it now after half a year and having forgotten all of the things about the setting i had been planning to put into but wasn't able to, i love this setting as well. that said, i don't see myself returning to it sadly, as the story i wanted to tell with this setting was this one. but one never knows!
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thank you so much for these kind words! :) you have gotten exactly what i was going for, and i am so very glad my story had the impact that i had hoped for
A+ wordbuilding!
(I mean that literally.
)
But their heirloom apples are helping with the taste and texture of the HayMax, probably keeping it from being completely bland and worse. Unless she literally means it just goes into theirs, and only theirs, which would be inefficient and silly, so I would assume not.
Very good worldbuilding! I do want to know more, but this is really good. I was confused for some parts, but most of that is because I'm unfamiliar with biopunk stuff, and although it would have been nice to have some of it explained more clearly, that's not something that could have been done in a singular day.
Loved it.
I came out of reading this in a pleasant emotional daze — its immersiveness was delicious. The tone of this piece is so akin to the sort of formative, rawly engaging dystopian short stories I read in my middle school years (which comes as no surprise, given its main source of inspiration! Which I admit I did not read prior to this so as not to spoil the experience of it on its own terms).
It’s truly impressive how much worldbuilding you were able to incorporate into this story within its short word count and equally short writing period. I love all the unique terminology and societal structures you were able to express naturally through the present context the characters inhabit in this dire, hypercapitilistic biopunk version of Equestria. All of it was contrasted brilliantly with the former, gentler world they didn't quite get to live in up to the point we come to know them in the show. A great example of this is how the identity of the calorie-mare was revealed. It's evident she still grew up alongside Zephyr, he probably still developed his silly infatuation with her, and the collision of his detested nickname with who she currently is in this version of reality was a swift kick to the gut.
The dynamic of Zephyr and Big Mac’s relationship was a great frame through which to explore the contrasting values of idealism and pragmatism that the setting of dystopian fiction often brings to the fore. Zephyr’s vagabond, creatively oriented nature is well-suited to acting as a buoy against the despair that comes from living for survival. Whereas, Big Mac feels he must adhere deeply to the demands of hard work and self-sacrifice — which comes literally, and heart-wrenchingly, at the cost of his own body. They make for a lovely romantic pairing and it's so evident how they each contribute something meaningful to the other in this world rife with loss.
I loved, as well, the themes of past and future that emerged through their relationship. Big Mac knew a world before the Everfallow and he clings to the preservation of that history. Zephyr’s past, however, is indistinct and bathed in nostalgia. He lacks the settled, dynastic history of the Apple family and is able to more freely envision ideas about what comes next for his and Mac’s lives. I feel it’s so very poignant that Zephyr is the one who inspires the idea of continuing a family with Big Mac, even at the cost of the Apple’s land — and that Zephyr himself is the one to carry their foal. No longer merely symbolically, he becomes a vessel for their future.
Relatedly, the passages of what both Big Mac and Zephyr gave of themselves physically make for a really lovely parallel. I love the eeriness of:
contrasted with the hope of:
The final passage in particular was beautifully written, too. I really just loved your choices of description in how you closed this story. Zephyr ends it in this lovely, bittersweet transitional state, reflecting on something irreversible that has happened while looking ahead to what comes next.
Thank you for this very conceptually interesting and emotionally gripping story!
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i could not dream of a better comment to receive for this, especially from a writer whose work induces these feelings in myself
oh hey, i also read such stories in my middle school years!
funnily enough i actually also never read The Windup Girl, so what i really mean by it being inspired by that is it being inspired by the short stories by that author in that setting, haha
yes! this is one of the things i was proud of for how it contrasted with the main timeline's Rainbow Dash and Zephyr Breeze. the collision with the cold steel of the power dynamics here, augh i love it
this puts together the themes in their relationship here even better than i could or perhaps even intended? thank you so much for that! thus is the power of writing, and of reading and then writing about reading.
augh, that bittersweet transitional state is exactly what i wanted to capture. i yearn to capture the beauty of the endings and reading this affirms me oh so much. thank you so, so much for reading!
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thank you! and aww, that is a nice interpretation! my own (unwritten) one is that the apples were too diluted in the HayMax to actually affect the flavor.
and yeah, as much as i really love the condensed quality of it that came from the short time i had, if i had had more time maybe i could've found a way to make the worldbuilding elements clearer without making it too exposition-y.
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thank you! i do love my bits of Ponish vocabulary that are not in the overlap of it and English
The feelings of a bleak Ray Bradbury piece really came through here! I really like how you chose the rarely-addressed Flim and Flam dystopian future as your subject. Futuristic calorie rationing makes sense in the neo-malthusian world of Flim and Flam--everything has to be measured and charged and efficient. (The nod to Huxley is appreciated). There's also clearly symbolism between the title and the inversion of the end of the forest/trees and the repopulation/potion point that other commentators touched on below.
A rather grim ending for RD!
It makes sense for the story, of course, though one does wonder how they are going to cover up? The details are a bit more implicit than I prefer; however, I suppose it brings to mind the fate of a number of tax collectors throughout history.
I am a little unclear about: (a) whether they gave up their entire apple crop--it seems they did. And (b) how Big Mac can live with that. I get that Big Mac has a family to live for but I'm a bit skeptical for his state of mind if *every* apple is gone.
On the whole, the story has some great inferential storytelling. It could benefit from a little more build-out; however, it is an entertaining read!
Similar to how Altruist Artist mentions below, it has an ethereal quality that suits it well.
These comments provided due to a request on the Comment Exchange thread!
First off, I love the concept. An impoverished future giving the rich license to manage workers' food intake to such an extreme degree that a lifespan can be measured in calories as easily as it can be measured in years. Additionally, the idea that you shouldn't burn calories to make calories is something. Big Mac being able to buy charge crystals for robotic legs instead of just using his real ones suggests either that these charge crystals can be created with an even cheaper source of "calories" (labour), or that they are pre-existing, mined from somewhere, and perhaps running out. Layers of exploitation! Love it.
The story itself falters in the fourth section where Zephyr's idle thoughts are little more than an exposition dump. I would have liked to know less about the fate of the School for Gifted Unicorns and the failed solutions that got us to this blighted world, and more about what exactly is going on with Zephyr at the end, or how their relationship got started.
But overall it satisfies the curiosity. Much is left unsaid, but fairly, as the core ideas come together in context and contrast, and the final beats strike true. Good stuff.