Petmesh 260

The Petmesh 260 is a retail product sold by the Xenomart Corporation. It's intended purpose is to render Nibblers, a creature discovered on the planet Greenbelt safe enough for the average family to take them in as pets. Ever since their discovery, people have considered them to be cute, adorable - as long as they stay in their NIbbler state.

How It Works

The design principle for the Petmesh 260 is fairly straightforward. The product consists of a webbing of flexible fiber-optic material that is placed around the Nibbler. A small light generator attached to the webbing continuously pulses 260nm wavelength light through the webbing. This bathes the Nibbler with this near-ultraviolet radiation, which emulates the portion of the light of Greenbelt's star that prevents the Nibbler's permanent transformation into the horror known as the Shredder. A micro-powercell is guaranteed by the company to keep the device running for up to 25 years - about 10 years longer than the life expectancy of a Nibbler.

Marketing and Sales

Since the product's release two standard years ago, demand for these - and for Nibblers - has been astronomical. In fact, orders have surpassed the ability to obtain and/or breed the Nibblers to be outfitted with the devices. According to company press releases, 500,000 were manufactured and sold in the first year, with second-year sales exceeding 2 million. And since a subsidiary of the corporation called Xenocritters controls most of the market for wild Nibbler gathering and captivity breeding, Xenomart has found its Nibbler product line to be quite profitable.

The corporation also recently announced the development of a breakthrough that will permit them to breed Nibblers at an accelerated rate in order to fill what they claim is a demand for hundreds of millions of pet Nibblers throughout the systems of Borderspace and beyond. In light of recent events, however, investors are skeptical of these estimates.

Controversy

Release and sale of the Petmesh 260 has not been without incident or controversy, however. There have been several cases - fewer than 50, according to company officials - involving Nibblers that have slipped out of their devices, only to transform during the night and attack their owners. The company attributes these to situations to the Petmesh 260 not having been properly fitted or applied according to instructions. In the lawsuits that developed from these cases, the company has thus far argued successfully that improper use of the product transferred all liability to the consumer.

The incident that is now being called the "Slaughter in Paradise" will most likely be far more damaging to the product's - and the company's - reputation. This event, which occurred on the agrarian Borderspace planet called Paradise, apparently involved the deaths and/or maimings of members of over 500 families, all in the space of about three days. The inherent "information lag" resulting from the realities of jumpspace travel means that all the details are not yet known, and reports from other systems near Paradise are still trickling in that involve similar reports, though smaller in scale.

According to Xenomart's official response to these reports, a large number of Petmesh 260s apparently contained defective micro-powercells, causing them to fail after about six months of operation. Xenomart has officially blamed the supplier of the powercells, a much smaller corporation called Batteries-R-Us which has been known for numerous instances of marketing inferior goods. Company records show the bulk of the products with defective parts did indeed ship to Paradise and surrounding planets.

Lawsuits are still being filed all across the Borderspace, but the response from officials of Paradise has condemned Xenomart Corporation, assigning it the blame regardless of what any third-party supplier may have sold them. Laws have been passed on Paradise mandating that all Nibblers on the planet be either relocated off-world or humanely destroyed. Possession of a Nibbler is now a crime. Xenomart Corporation has been banned from doing any business on the planet whatsoever, and a government bounty has been placed on the heads of the corporation's CEO and Engineering Vice Preseident. It is likely that other planetary systems where similar incidents occurred will also be filing criminal charges or imposing corporate sanctions, or both, on Xenomart and its executives.

This story will continue to unfold.