As with every new boutique technology, crazy early-adopters took the risk between a potentially innovative and life-changing technology, and everyone else stood back a good distance of fifteen feet and waited to see what happened to all the financially irresponsible nutcases who had invested before sensible people had a chance to point out all the flaws in the utopian vision being marketed as a result of a simple product purchase.

After two months, it was clear: Clone-a-Pone™ was here to stay.

The service proposal was simple: For $599.99USD, Clone-a-Pone™ will produce a 100% faithful, real-life, organic copy of your entire consciousness and being.

And it will be a pony. A pony of the opposite sex.

The reason for the permutation was never made publicly available. Early-adoption, as a result, was undertaken primarily only by bronies and cat-girl afficionados. After Elon Musk retweeted, though, sales began to rise drastically. Humans who had never watched or even heard of My Little Pony were suddenly ordering carbon copies of their entire dna algorithm, restructured into adorable marshmallow equines. Ponies could be appropriate from show material wholesale, thanks to some creative intellectual property loopholes, and before you could say "Alicorn Twilight ruined the show", Clone-a-Pone™ had become the most popular technological startup since Microsoft. Or maybe Google. Definitely AskJeeves, at least.

I got mine a week ago.

The first surprising thing, to me, is that you don't get to pick your pony. You supply the questionaire, the DNA swab sample, the copy of your family lineage (available from Ancestry.com for a small accompanying fee), and at least three relevant Buzzfeed quizzes with your answers recorded. Then you wait a week. Then the company emails you back to let you know if they can meet your request. Then they request payment. Then you pay. Then you wait for another week, until they send you an email saying your 'product' is'ready'. And then you wait four-to-six weeks for delivery. And it shows up in a cardboard box on your front step. If you don't want your roommates knowing you ordered a living, breathing Clone-a-Pone™, you can request a disguised delivery, and the company will write "Rob's Cakes: Delivered by Door Dashie" on the box and leave it in a nonconspicious area with enough bottled water and bags of Cool-Ranch Doritos™ to keep your pony sustained for up to three days. After that there's a recovery fee.

My pony was tiny, and green. She only came up to about my waist, poking her head and horn out of the box. Was she supposed to look like me? Am I supposed to look like her?

Her name is Lyra, she says. That's convenient.

"Hi," is my greeting. "Come on in." It's surprisingly casual, consdering I'm not even sure she existed a month ago. Or what she eats. Or if she's even going to be able to understand me.

"Okies." Lyra jumped out of the box like a spry cat, and shook her mane after landing, tossing the loose strands out over her foreheard and beside her ears. "This is your place?"

She means the apartment. How to explain modern-day capitalist rent-infrastructure to an other-worldly miniature horse?

"Uh... no, not really. Like, I pay rent on it, but—"

"I didn't mean you own it. I'm not trying to be confusing. I was just kind of, like, leading up... "Oh, this is your place? It sure is nice!"" Lyra shrugged and ran a hoof thru her mane casually. Casually.

"Oh... so like, you were doing a, kind, social niceties sort of thing, trying to be polite?"

"Pretty much. I don't imagine you'd be happy to see me if first thing out of the box I pooped on your shoes or started running around eating the furniture or something."

"I think at this point I'd be happy for any amount of unpredicted stimulus being sourced from another living being."

"How do you know I'm alive?" Lyra raised an eyebrow, still standing on the door-mat to the third floor apartment I'd managed to nab for my self, like a mediocre, children's-coloring-book version of a primitive cave, carved out of the face of some giant, suburban edifice...

"You like words a lot," Lyra said, stepping inside past me. Her head brushed against my jeans as she walked past. It was surprising not to find myself instantly hard.

"I guess." I shut the door and locked it, then remembered I'd left the box on the front step, unlocked the door, opened it, grabbed the box, through it haphazardly into a corner of the room where another pile of miscellaneous items had begun to accrue, closed the door, locked it, and let out a long, pained-sounding sigh.

"We've known each other for two minutes and you're already existentially drained? That's not a good sign." Lyra yawned and took a look around the room. For some reason, probably ancient custom alone, there was a couch, still. A television, that you could theoretically watch things on, if there was anything to watch. Piles of dirty clothes. A mostly empty sink, holding only a single bowl, spoon, plastic My Little Pony drinking cup, and a few spilled noodles left-over from the afternoon's attempt at making dollar-store ramen taste both paletable and not so hot it melted your tongue down to its component molecules.

"I'm perpetually existentially drained. Just the idea of spending money on something took me like two months to work up to. No one gave me any approvable. I didn't have anyone to ask. And they probably would have said not to bother anyway."

"Just becuase of the idea that something that costs money to make you happy is ultimately insufficient?" Lyra took a seat on the couch, laying down and yawning as she fluffed a pillow next to her head.

"Maybe... but everyone buys stuff to make themselves happy. You wouldn't be very happy without food, or heat, or that stuff."

"Yeah, but we don't really look for those things. When was the last time you decided to stay at home and hold your feet over the heater to keep warm and content versus spending your money to go out to eat or on vacation or buy a new video game that transports you to an essentially entirely different universe?"

"So those are bigger pieces than just buying a car or pack of gum or something," I said, sighing and absent-mindedly straightening objects around the room into arbitrarily organized piles. Some things that would get used later, chapstick, a headphone jack, those had mostly collected in this pile... there was some used Kleenex in that pile. A ball of dust that came out from under the couch. There were some more piles too. I don't know, really.

"Yeah, but you should get the right to make that decision yourself. Isn't someone else telling you what to spend your money on barely a way to live your life?"

I shrugged. "Feels safer. You don't have to blame other people for your mistakes, but at least when things fuck up your brain will say "See? It wasn't our fault! We listened to exactly what they said to do, we're completely infallible, and innocent, and knew this wasn't going to work in the first place wahhhh..."... something like that, anyway."

"Well," Lyra said, surveying the room again and finding it mostly full of scattered books and miscellaneous debris. "It seems like you're safe now. Nopony in here trying to be mean to you. No reason to do anything besides sit down and talk for a bit." Lyra patted the couch cushion next to her.

"I don't really wanna talk though. What is there to talk about?"

"Wanna talk about sex?" Lyra asked, flicking her tail suggestively and moving her body to give just the tiniest peek of her plush pony-butt.

"Yes, but also no?" I sat down on the couch as directed, feeling a vague sensation in my dick trying to prompt me in the more sexually suggestive direction of this particular piece of metacognitive fiction. "I feel like we would save the sex until the end."

"Pretty much everyone wants the sex at the beginning. It's like hentai. If you make them sit through fifteen minutes of exposition and set-up, they're gonna be limp and angry by the time they finally get to the part where you want them to cum."

On the couch, I raised an eyebrow slightly.

"Why is it that every time you say a word related to sex it makes my cock twitch?"

Lyra felt a small shiver, then shrugged. "Dunno. Probably the same reason my pussy got a little wet when you said "makes my cock twitch.""

"We can talk about it later or we can talk about it now."

"I don't really wanna talk. I'd rather fuck."

"Can you say 'fuck' again?"

"Fuck. Fuck. Are we gonna fuck or what? You wanna fuck my pony pussy?"

"Whatever you're doing should be made illegal. It's literally a form of mind control. I'm not even looking at you but my brain is picturing you on the couch. I literally can't get this picture of your butt out of my head now."

"The one you used for that story cover?" Lyra asked, leaning more onto her back and showing off more tantalizing hints of her pussy and ass, just visible for a moment before she shifted back to a covered position. It's hard to describe what someone physically looks like as they are doing this. Picture someone naked, lying on their stomach, head-propped up, looking over their back with one of those "I'm the girl getting fucked doggy-style and it's my job to smile at the camera" looks, except instead of having to do it to make money, this is a girl pretending she has to do it to make money, and she's actually totally fine and safe and just likes pretending that she's a porn star looking back at the camera... and if I don't want the girl to look back at the camera, why do I want Lyra to stare at me?

"I'm more real," Lyra says, waggling her tail and shaking her butt suggestively.

"If you literally say 'butt' one more time we're gonna fuck before the story changes chapters."

"Aw, come on. You can't say that. You put me in a catch-22." Lyra stuck out her lower lip and pouted, her eyes wide and puppy-like. "Now if I say it, I lose the sense of control I had, because you told me what the outcome was gonna be. But now I really wanna say it, because now you've got me thinking about it, and contrary to popular opinion, some girls, or girl ponies, or fillies, or whatever, really like when you give their butt a healthy amount of attention..."

"Is it that? It's like... a special secret you're not supposed to know or do, because it makes you 'dirty', even though... like, you're admitting it doesn't? It's like... a legal, consent thing?"

"Hmm... maybe." Lyra began to wave her tail in my direction, wafting the faint smell of the dampness between her legs towards my face. "It feels like it's definitely something 'illicit', anyway."

"Just because it's in the butt?" I was staring now. Lyra's plump, well-formed ass was staring back at me, wiggling and waving and dancing back and forth and reminding me of the way she might look with a cock inside her, grinding onto it and bouncing and throwing her head back with her mane tossed. Like, picturing, picturing it. Dangerous material.

"Can we take a break?" I asked, wiping a healthy amount of sweat off my forehead. "I'm like... fifty percent the horniest I've ever been, fifty percent so scared I'm gonna do it so wrong we'll never get to be intimate again."

"Has that ever actually happened?" Lyra asked, running a hoof leisurely along her own back, tracing it to her tail and hindquarters, where she ran it luxuriously along her backside once or twice before smacking herself on the right butt-cheek with a playful smack.

"Ahhh. Stop. And... no. It hasn't. Once a girl came over like three times and then stopped because the apartment smelled like cat piss, but I didn't really feel that bad about it as a matter of fact..."

"We're gonna get into that, right?"

"Only if you stop trying to seduce me."

"Let's try again in the next chapter."

"Okay."

The unstoppable, unrelenting song is called I Love Beijing Tiananmen, also known as I Love Peking Tiananmen. Peking Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing. And Scrooge McDuck had his 50th Anniversary in '97!