Trixie lay upon a padded floor inside a small, square room, a space about two body lengths long by two lengths wide. In front of her a conveyor belt moved, flowing continuously from one side of the room to the other.
Riding the belt, a pebble entered the room. "Teacup!" Trixie said, as a bolt of magic from her horn struck the pebble. When the flash of light faded, the pebble's size and mass had increased by a factor of at least twenty. Also, it was now a teacup.
One of the electrodes which years ago had been implanted in Trixie's brain energized, giving her a small jolt of pleasure. She smiled, watching the piece of crockery pass out of the room.
Pebble after pebble entered the room, and Trixie transformed each in the same way. "Teacup!... Teacup!... Teacup!..." She created thousands of teacups during a length of time she could not measure (for her room had no clock or calendar.) She found pleasure in each act of transformation...the pleasure her electrode gave her.
Finally, the room's light faded to half-brightness, and the conveyor belt paused. Warm air blew from grates in the walls and ceiling, and warm water sprayed from above. The runoff exited through evenly spaced drains in the floor.
After a minute, a tone sounded. Trixie rolled herself onto her side, as the water continued spraying.
Trixie didn't get up to move, because she didn't have legs. She'd had legs as a foal, but as part of her Ceremony of Maturity, they had been removed under anesthesia. She had also given up some other unneeded parts. She need not worry about the complications of being a mare or a stallion. As she'd walked her last steps ever, into the surgery facility, she had felt so proud! The second starter set of electrodes in her brain had ensured it.
Three minutes later, when Trixie had been well washed all over, the water stopped, but the warm air blowers continued.
With each tone, she rolled over another quarter turn. Twelve minutes later the lights returned to full brightness, and she refocused her attention upon the conveyor belt in front of her.
Thousands more pebbles or bits of waste awaited her teacup making skills.
***
Trixie didn't live a very complicated life. She didn't go out of her room, she didn't visit family or friends. Electrodes stimulated the parts of her brain that would find joy and satisfaction in such activities. It was like friendship without risks, without effort, on a perfectly timed and calibrated schedule.
She probably would not live as long as a pony might who exercised her body and mind in more varied ways. But on another hoof, she was kept safe from many kinds of mischance and harm. She never had to worry where her next meal was coming from, if a manticore might eat her, if some winter she might encounter difficulties finding warm shelter, if social unrest or war might find a target in her.
She was guaranteed lifelong happiness, delivered as a constant electric trickle with extra intermittent jolts of joy on top of that.
Maturity was exactly as she'd been taught when she was a foal, but it was more too.
She was always, always happy.
***
Sometimes, Trixie wondered about how the system was run, on a larger scale. Were there ponies who had to perform work much more complicated than creating perfect teacups from bits of rubbish? Were there ponies who had to switch between one task and another, to handle unsual events? Did a few ponies need to wander from place to place, improvising solutions to the unexpected? Or was the system so perfectly planned that nopony ever needed to learn or change or grow again, once Maturity was reached?
If there were ponies whose lives were not completely planned in advance, she felt sorry for them. As a foal in history class, she'd learned about the random and terrible things that used to happen long ago. Her class had even done a Hunger unit, having to subsist on quarter rations or no rations at all from mealtime to mealtime.
They hadn't even known until each mealtime itself whether they would eat!
Those had been the three most miserable days of her life. She was so happy it was over and done with! And to be fair, a few days of suffering wasn't such a large price to pay, for understanding and appreciating how good her usual foalhood days and nights were, and how perfect her Maturity.
***
The only little wrinkle in Trixie's existence was, at night she had to sleep, and while sleeping...sometimes she dreamt.
If she dreamt of something terrifying or painful, her electrode array would detect the problem. It would either push her sleep into a non-dreaming stage, or it would wake her up.
Sometimes, though, Trixie had dreams that were neither terrible nor agonizing...but strange. Disquieting.
Maybe once or twice every ten sleep cycles, she would dream she was in an emormous palace, a maze of marble halls and pillars. Some rooms were larger than others; a very few halls or high-ceilinged chambers were so long or so vast that she could barely see one end of the space from the other.
In that palace, most rooms and hallways were swept and dusted and washed by servitors, ponies who had legs. In these dreams, Trixie had legs too. Even though in her Maturity she wasn't supposed to have unneeded parts, her limbs didn't disturb her. While she traveled through the Palace, they weren't superfluous at all.
A few times in her life, during such dreams, Trixie had wandered out of the well lit, carefully cleaned regions of the Palace, into other sections. Places that were dusty and dim. Places where she could see by the accumulation of cobwebs and dirt that nopony except herself had visited to leave hoofprints, not in a very long time.
During one of those dreams, Trixie had walked into one of the high-vaulted rooms, to discover a pony twice as large as any normal Mature. The oversize pony lay sprawled upon a golden couch, which stood atop a high dais, a pyramid of many steps.
The strange pony's coat might have gleamed white had it been clean, but it was as fouled with dust and dirt as everything else in the room.
Trixie slowly climbed the dais' steps, until she could rear up to place her forelegs upon the golden chair, and study the larger pony up close. Trixie shivered. The large, unconscious creature had not only a full set of fore and rear legs, but also yet another pair of limbs, which instead of velvety fur bore feathers.
What was this horrible monstrosity? How could such a thing exist, in a world where everypony had her place and was perfectly fitted to it? What could possibly be the function of such a strange creature?
Trixie's heart filled with fear. A second later, she awoke. She was safe and warm in her room. Her dream had been only a dream, nothing more.
She was safe, and the world was as it should be.
Author's Note
Um...the majority of my stories are not like this one.
Other Stories That Are At Least a LITTLE Like This One?
Here's the part where, by talking about the relationships between different pieces of literature and variations on related ideas, I risk convincing audiences and judges that a story wasn't really 'all THAT creative.'
This story may be viewed as a companion piece to either "Trixie Sexes a Chicken" or "The Fluttermop of Omelas."
A much happier story about a rather opposite kind of Trixie is "Magic Is Boring (But Trixie Is Amazing)."
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If you just want to read more science fiction stories by me, you can always try this link.
Literary History Minute
The related trope 'in the future, it's usual for a person to live alone in a small cubicle or room while their inclination or ability to travel atrophies' might first have been used in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," a story first published in 1909.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
Some other stories by Forster: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34089
