Unwritten Future [Bonus Story!] (Patreon)

[Note from QH: Hello. We're taking a week off from Doing Business, but I thought I'd drop a little bonus story just for fun. I wrote this story quite a while ago, but because it's a little different than the usual stuff I post here, I wasn't sure what to do with it. So, uh, here you go! Enjoy this weird story.]

1.

On page 34 of a thread from a message board that hasn’t been updated in a year – and has been far from active in closer to ten years – there’s a 12 year old post that was likely just as ignored at the time it was posted as it is now.

It is only coincidence that brings me to it now. Maybe circumstance or fate.

I barely recall the steps I took to get here. I was searching for something else. And then something else caught my eye. I followed that new path before getting distracted again by something shinier. Repeat ad nauseum.

I don’t know how I got here, and I’m unsure if this is where my digital expedition ends, or if I’m on the verge of a new route altogether.

The message board was dedicated to a video game that nobody can even play anymore, since its servers were shuddered. I knew of it, but I had never played it. In fact, my recollection of it was that it hadn’t been received especially well. The thread was about the progression tree of a specific character class. 34 pages is a lot of conversation about such a niche topic – but it’s mostly three or four people talking. And while it starts off about the topic at hand, it slowly starts to spiral away from it. Nothing dramatic – or even interesting – just banter. A handful of anonymous strangers making references to each other. Even those references seem dated or too vague to really understand now. Other games? Other people from this forum or another?

Another voice appears on page 34. It’s actually the very last post on this thread. The previous conversations, they all just stop here, at this post. Mid-conversation. There was more to be said. Questions unanswered. There’s no discussion of taking this conversation somewhere else. Maybe they did  - maybe they didn’t have to and had communicated elsewhere.

But it feels strange to me – the accidental anthropologist.

This final post had been from someone who had been a long time member of the message board, per their bio, but had never once posted before.

The post was just a link. No description. The URL didn’t seem to be for a domain I had even heard of before – it was barely words at all. Letters and numbers that seemed both random and perfectly arranged.

I’m curious. I click it.

I’m taken to an entirely black screen, save for the video panel in the center of it. A “play” button awaits.

It’s probably nothing. It’s probably an ad. It’s probably what passed for viral content back in the day – or an attempt at it. Terrible comedy. Something edgy.

I could click the button, or I could close the browser. Maybe I’ve spent too much time online – too much time following this pointless road.

What had I even been looking up in the first place?

I click the button.

The darkness fades to a simple white room. A white floor – an industrial tile. It reminds me of working at a department store all those years ago. White wall. No décor. Lighting is off camera.

There’s a woman sitting in a chair, facing the camera. She has long dark hair that cascades down the sides of her face and disappears into her black dress. The resolution is poor, and everything seems to shift in and out of focus. Sometimes the floor and wall are one solid block of whiteness, with just her face peering out from a black human-like shape.

I wonder if I’m supposed to feel nervous.

“Hello,” she says.

There’s a pause, as if I’m to reply.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Logic prevails in my mind. I know she’s not talking to me, even if she’s talking to me.

“You may not have realized it yet,” she says, “but you’ve been looking for me. And I’ve been waiting.”

I feel uneasy. It feels slightly harder to believe she’s not actually talking to me, specifically. I still don’t actually believe this is the case, but my level of doubt has changed slightly.

“It’s time you and I had a talk,” she says. “Because I don’t think that you’ve been honest with yourself.”

This puts me at ease a little. I have no idea what she’s talking about. This video wasn’t meant for me. Of course it wasn’t. But I feel more sure about that than ever.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” she asks. It’s hard to tell with the grainy pixilation that obscures some details, but I swear that she’s smiling.

I play along. I’m feeling playful. I shake my head.

“I’m referring, of course, to your insistence that you’re a big boy. An adult. A man.”

The little smile that had been growing on my lips vanishes. Those words hit a little harder than I expected them to. For many reasons – reasons I can’t even assign words to yet.

“Deep down, you know what I refer to, yes?”

Another long pause – maybe another opportunity for me to respond.

“Allow me to be blunt with you,” she says. “These words will be hard to process, but if you give them a chance to sink in, I don’t think you’ll disagree.”

My foot is tapping nervously. There are layers of my consciousness where I can feel myself trying to come up with answers for why I’m feeling like this, but I’m ignoring it. I don’t want to solve anything, I want to hear what she has to say.

“You are not a man,” she says. “You’re not the big boy that you believe that you are. You’re a child. A baby.”

My hand grabs my mouse and I drag the cursor up to the ‘back’ button of the browser. I’ve seen enough. But I can’t navigate away from it. There’s nothing preventing me from just leaving – I just can’t bring myself to go through with it.

“Did that strike a nerve?” she asks. “I imagine it would. Because this isn’t a metaphor.”

I sigh. I don’t like this. I don’t like how this video is making me feel inside. It’s as if someone is reaching deep into my past and pulling out things that I never thought would see the light of day again.

“It’s been a while since you wore diapers,” she states.

Fuck this thing. I’m angry. Livid. This is some sort of elaborate prank. Some sort of weird computer virus that has access to my life – including the parts of it that I had only ever kept to myself.

“But you still have them, don’t you? You know exactly where they are.”

I’ve completely forgotten how I’ve gotten to this video. I’m not thinking about old video games. This is a message to me, specifically.

Because I still have diapers. And I know exactly where they are.

“You should get them,” she says. “You should put them on again.”

I don’t want to.

No, I do want to. But I’m going to stay in this chair.

“It’s important to be yourself,” she says. “And you are a baby. You need to admit that. Not to me. To yourself. Say the words aloud. Say that you’re a baby.”

She pauses again, staring straight ahead – seemingly directly at me. I wait. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. She continues to stare. Is she actually waiting for me to respond?

Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Is what she said true? Am I lying to myself? Am I…a baby?

I open my mouth – I barely realize that I did it. My tongue shifts slightly and I can feel the words in my throat.

I was a baby. I was a diaper-wearing adult baby. And it had made me happy – up until it didn’t anymore. I had become obsessed, and this part of myself had been allowed to run rampant. I wasn’t able to turn it off. I took the diapers and my paraphernalia, and I put it in a box and stashed it deep in my closet.

But I knew where it was. It wasn’t far from me. And I wanted to get it. But I had to do something else first.

“I’m a baby,” I said.

Immediately after I had said that, she nodded. “Very good. I’m glad that you were able to do that for me. For you, really.”

Was this a video? This wasn’t sort of live feed? I checked my settings. No camera, no audio input. It’d have been impossible for her – for this video from god-knows-how-long-ago – to have heard me.

Coincidence. I think.

“You know what to do now,” she says.

The screen fades to black again. The play button reappears. I’m tempted to press it again. I’m curious if I’d see the same exact video again. I want that to be the case. I want to click it and see her say the same things. There’d be the same pauses. If this was just a video, I could probably write it off as a coincidence. The most bizarre coincidence I had ever experienced before, but a coincidence nonetheless.

I click the button. There’s a spinning icon on the screen – an attempt to load something.

We’re sorry, but this video cannot be found. Please contact the website administrator for further details.

That wasn’t what I expected, nor was it what I wanted. There’s a cavernous pit in my stomach. I should be scared, but I’m mostly just unsettled. I’ve seen something that I can’t understand, and my mind doesn’t know how to reconcile it.

The worst part of this feeling is that the woman was right. I had been lying to myself.

I am a baby.

2.

Dinner, multiple beers, ice cream, and sleep have all helped. I’m still unsettled, but the more time that has passed, the easier it is to write off parts of it in my head. I know that I can’t write it off completely. But I can try. For my own sanity, I can lie to myself.

It was a mix of coincidence and misremembering. I hadn’t seen everything that I thought I did. I was tired. Hungry. Not fully paying attention. I daydreamed and stumbled onto a strange video that I took personally when I shouldn’t have.

I’d like to say that I’ve let it go. That’s partially true. I’m not thinking about the video anymore.

But I am wearing a diaper.

I fished the box out of the closet this morning and opened it up. It had been a while, but everything was there, exactly as I remembered it. The thick diapers. Pacifiers. Bib. Infantile toys. The baby spoon I used to eat baby food with. My stuffed bear, Wilbur. An enema bag. Wipes. Baby powder.

I opened the container of wipes first, finding that my hunch was correct – they had dried out in the time since I had stowed them away. I tell myself it’s fine, I’ll just get more.

Not that long after, I’m in the grocery store. I pause at the foot of the baby aisle, looking down the long corridor of diapers, jarred food and various ointments and creams. I’m not entirely sure what my hesitation is – beyond the knowledge that I’m heading down a road I’ve been down before. I know where it takes me, and last time it ended with me packing things into a box.

I grab a pack of wipes from the shelf. It’s a small pack – the smallest, cheapest, option available. I make it halfway down the aisle before changing my mind. I put the pack back and grab a multipack – three smaller packs pound together. Not the cheap brand – the name brand. Not unscented either – I need all the scent I can get.

Was there a time when I felt ashamed and embarrassed to be walking around the store carrying infantile items like this? Probably. I’m a little older now. Perhaps I’ve learned a thing or two from my indifference towards what others are buying. I hold my baby wipes out in front of me as I casually walk through the store.

I come close to thinking that I have nothing to hide, but I do need to keep my diapers hidden. That’s the thrill. It’s my secret. Nobody knows that I’m a baby.

I’ve wet myself by the time I get to the checkout.

She, the young blonde cashier, scans the wipes and deposits them into a plastic shopping bag. It’s a simple enough process and I’m expecting this to be the end of it. But she leans forward, looking to see if there is anybody behind me in line. There seems to be nobody else there.

“Are these for you?” she asks.

“Excuse me?”

“The wipes. They’re for you, right?”

“Well…”

I’m not sure how to answer that. I’m not sure if I should be answering that at all.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. “Babies need them.”

“But…I’m not…”

“A baby?” she asks, smirking. “Are you sure? With that diaper?”

“Wait…you can tell?”

“Was I not supposed to be able to?” she asked. “You wear a thick diaper like that out in public and you expect people to look away?”

I look down at my pants. Even at my most paranoid, I’m not sure that I would’ve ever guessed I was wearing a diaper.

“I guess I didn’t realize that…”

The sound of her sniffing the air stops me from saying anything else. “I guess you’re getting these wipes just in time, then.”

“Well, I needed them.”

“Oh, believe me,” she scoffs, “I can tell. Little pissy pants needs a change real bad.”

“I didn’t…”

“Are you going to lie to me?”

Her tone is rife with authority and power. She’s younger than I am – maybe by 5 or 6 years. Maybe the age of my little sister? I’d guess 19 or 20.

“I…I’m sorry,” I say. “But I don’t know you and I just want to finish this transaction and go.”

“Your transaction is finished when I say it is,” she says. She points to a button on her side of the register. “I have to press that key for you to be able to pay. I haven’t pressed it yet.”

“What do you want from me?” I plead. I’m tempted to just leave. I’ll leave behind the wipes and go somewhere else. I’ll go home and use a wet washcloth if I have to.

“I want you to admit that you’re a little baby. I want you to say: ‘I’m a little pee-pee pants baby.’ And then I want you to say ‘Goo goo ga ga.’”

“You couldn’t possibly expect me to…”

“Say it,” she says, “and I’ll press this button so that you can finish your transaction.”

I confirm, for myself, that there’s nobody else behind me in line. Elsewhere, I hear the beeps and boops of other cashiers checking out customers. They all feel miles away from us.

“I’m a little pee-pee pants baby,” I say. I say it quickly, not giving myself a chance to hesitate.

“And?”

“Goo goo…ga ga.”

Her finger taps the button. “Your total is $6.97. Will you be paying with cash or card today?”

I pay with my debit card, waiting for her to say something else. Another jab or humiliating request. But she has nothing to say. She’s not even smiling – I don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing her impressed with my following her direction. She hands me a receipt, vacant expression on her face, and I take it and toss into the bag with my wipes.

As I walk away from the register, I take one last look over my shoulder to see if she’s smiling. Or looking at me. Or acknowledging what had happened in any way.

She’s just drinking water and staring off into space.

3.

I’m a little shaken from the experience at the grocery store, but the further I get from the store, the more dream-like it feels.

It may have been a while since I last wore a diaper, but old habits die hard. It feels like there was never a long pause between the last time and now. Slipping into a diaper again, I found myself becoming someone else. The baby.

Driving home, I wet myself again. I barely think about it. I feel a tingle in my bladder and just act on it, immediately emptying myself into the already saturated diaper.

I could change. Maybe I should.

Did the cashier actually see something?

I’m not ready yet. I decide I’m going to sit down for a bit and just…enjoy the wet padding between my legs. I’ve missed it.

I ditch my pants, leaving only my t-shirt and sopping wet diaper on.

But no sooner than my bottom begins to lower itself onto the couch, there’s a firm knock on the front door of my apartment.

I reach for my pants, but the knock comes again.

“Martin? Martin Fitzgerald?” says a voice from the other side of the door. Feminine and urgent.

I debate for another half-second about the pants, ultimately grabbing them, but carrying them with me to the door instead of putting them on. I position myself behind the door and open it a crack.

“Hello?” I ask into the void.

“Martin Fitzgerald, yes?” the voice asks.

“I…yes.”

“Officer Hamilton here, city police. May I come in?”

Her words are so nonsensical that they don’t even register with me. Who did she just say she was?

I open the door to get a better look. Sure enough, there she is. A female police officer – her blonde curly hair is barely contained under police-hat.

She holds a hand out in front of her and marches into my apartment, pushing me backwards into the room before she clears the threshold. The door shuts behind her.

“Oh my god,” I say, realizing that I’m only holding my pants still. “I’m so sorry. I…I didn’t mean to answer the door like this.”

“That’s actually what I came here to talk to you about,” she says. “Your diaper. Just how much did you wet that thing, anyways?”

“Just now?”

“Well, however long you’ve been wearing it,” she says.

“Well…a lot. I guess.”

“Thought so.” She tilts her head towards the radio on her upper chest and speaks into it: “Just as we thought. We’ve got a 22-401 up here, over.”

My eyes widened. Was there really a police code for someone excessively wetting their adult diapers in their own home?

A slightly muffled voice responded on the radio: “Copy that. Do you need backup?”

“I think I got this.” She released the radio and looked back at me again. “Do you have a fresh diaper? Wipes? Baby powder?”

“Sure,” I say, nodding. I point a thumb over my shoulder, signaling back to my bedroom.

“Let’s go have a look.” She marches past me, grabbing the shopping back with my wipes in it as she passes it. She walks all the way back into my bedroom, where I left my ‘baby box’ wide open on the floor. Needless to say, everything that she’s looking for is there.

“How do you know about this?” I ask. “About…my diaper?”

“You wet a lot,” she says. “The office got a few complaints about it.”

“The office? Complaints? Who…complained?”

The girl at the grocery store, I think. It had to be. Right? The way she teased me. The way she was so sure that it was visible. The way that she claimed she could smell it.

“Buddy, I don’t have all night,” she says in her no-nonsense cop tone. “You’ve got to get over here so I can put you in a fresh diaper.”

“You’re going to change me?”

“Serve and protect,” she says. “That’s my job.”

It doesn’t make sense. But I don’t want to argue with her. I waddle over to her and ease myself onto the end of the bed. I feel the bloated diaper squish beneath me.

“Am I leaking onto the bed?” I ask.

“A little,” she says. “I’m afraid that’s out of my jurisdiction, though. I’m just here for the diaper.”

“Okay…fine.”

As to be expected from a woman of the law, she is incredibly efficient in changing a diaper. There are no wasted movements on her part. The tapes are peeled back. The diaper is opened. She runs the wipes between my legs and over my pathetically shriveled manhood. The wipes are placed in the dirty diaper which is then balled up and tossed perfectly across the room and into a trash can. A liberal smattering of baby powder. The new diaper is tucked under me and she seals me into it.

I’m as good as new now.

“Wow,” I say. “That was incredible.” I feel like I owe her money for a service like that. I scan the room for my wallet.

“I’m just doing my job,” she says. “For you and the community.”

“What if I need you again?” I ask.

“I doubt that. This was an emergency. Did you see how heavy that diaper was?”

“Okay. But, like, let’s say that I get myself into a real pickle like that again.”

“Don’t call us. We’ll come to you.”

She pivots on her heel and she marches right back out of the bedroom. Her footsteps get softer and softer until I hear my front door open and close.

4.

There’s no evidence that Officer Hamilton was ever in my apartment. Moments after the door closes, I’m tempted to run out into the hallway and see if I can catch a glimpse of her again.

I don’t.

I waddle around my apartment for a few minutes listlessly. I’ve got a lot of thoughts, a lot of questions - but I know that I don’t have any answers. Was it always like this? Was this why I stopped wearing diapers before?

I’m home and alone. I lock the front door and draw the living room curtains closed. I’m going to enjoy my diaper, as I had intended to, and I’m not going to look backwards. It’s been a strange day so far – one that almost feels unlikely and dreamlike in hindsight. But I’m here now. Not dreaming. Wide awake.

I know what I want to do – something dirty and disgusting. It’s been a while. It’d be a shame to dirty this fresh new diaper so soon after being changed into it. But I also didn’t make that choice – it was made for me.

Right?

I think back to the young woman at the grocery store. She thought she could see my diaper? She thought she could smell what I had done in it? She hadn’t seen, or smelled, anything yet.

I squatted a little, trying to find the position that felt the most comfortable. I used to have a sweet spot for this.

This used to be so hard. It was a psychological thing – years and years of cultural norms imprinting themselves on my consciousness, making it hard to do anything that society would frown upon so heavily. You’re not supposed to poop your pants, no matter how badly you want to. But I just needed to do it once. It was infinitely easier after that. I could do it anytime, anyplace, if I wanted. Sometimes I did.

I imagined that I’d be back at square one now, but that wasn’t the case at all. With the diaper on, and my body in a squatting position, I was completely ready to go. I almost had to tell myself not to just release my bowels until I was ready. I hold it a little longer just to remind myself of what those last few moments of desperation feel like before I just let go.

I’m good to go.

I start pushing, but I find that I don’t have to do most of the work. Once things get started, the rest just happens. It’s been a while since…

I could make a drinking game out of acknowledging every filthy nostalgia fit I have.

Maybe it all happened in three seconds, or maybe it took 15 minutes, I can’t be sure. My mess slowly slips out of me, hungrily eating up the vacant space in my diaper. It droops from my hips as its weight increases, and every time I think it has reached capacity, it droops a little bit more to free just enough space. Eventually, I’ve either purged everything from within me, or the diaper is unwilling to take anything else. Either one is acceptable to me.

I’ve missed this feeling. Nothing else, in my experience, feels quite like a loaded diaper. The weight of it. The skin that it pulls on slightly. The scent. Just the diaper’s revised mass alone triggers the right combination of nerves.

I already know that it’s going to be a while before I clean this up again.

I think about Officer Hamilton again. How long do I need to stay like this before she’s called again? I’m joking, I think. To take it more seriously could cause the world around me to unravel.

For a minute or two, the scent of the diaper only seems to follow me around. I can waddle across the apartment and wait for a minute before the air around me gets polluted again. This doesn’t last long, and the pungent stink manages to permeate the entire apartment. Long after I change out of this diaper, and it’s thrown into a dumpster outside, the scent will remain hanging about – reminding me of what I did here.

Outside, I can hear something. It’s not one sound – it’s like someone turned something on. A sudden ambient noise that wasn’t there before. I ignore it.

I almost sit on the couch, but at the last minute I decide to take off my t-shirt and put it down under the diaper before I do. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I sit, but I don’t want to have scrub the couch clean later.

There’s already barely anywhere for the thick mess in the diaper to go. Sitting in the diaper just compacts it into a firm mound under me. It’s uncomfortable, but it in the best way possible.

I turn the TV on.

“…and for those of you just joining us, we’re covering a developing story right now…”

My ears perk up. What is this, now?

“We have reason to believe that Martin Fitzgerald has, in fact, used his diaper again. This coming only minutes after having to be changed into a fresh diaper following his accident at the grocery store. Gus Hendricks is live now at Fitzgerald’s apartment complex. Gus?”

The screen cuts to a reporter holding a microphone, and he is indeed standing in front of my apartment complex. Around him are people, all looking up at my apartment window. They’re talking to each other. Some are laughing. Some are yelling angrily. Many are shaking their heads, and most look to be some combination of disgusted and disappointed.

“Thanks Dana. I’m standing outside of Martin Fitzgerald’s apartment. Only minutes ago, Officer Brittany Hamilton had just left the building, responding to numerous complaints of Fitzgerald’s overly-saturated diaper. She joins us now. Officer Hamilton, with reports coming in that Fitzgerald has, already, used his new diaper, do you have any comments on what action – if any – will be taken?”

“It’s too soon to say,” says Officer Hamilton on the TV screen.  ”We’re keeping an eye on the situation.”

I look around the room frantically. Is this happening? Is this outside my window? If I open the curtains, am I going to see Gus Hendricks and a camera crew?

On the newsroom, the cameras have cut back to the newsroom.

“Just moments ago, we were able to capture this footage…”

The screen cuts to a clip of my apartment. There I am, squatting a little as I grunt and push. The back of my diaper expands and darkens.

For a moment, I’m kind of enchanted by what I see. It’s a fun angle on myself that I’ve never had before. It looks just like it felt.

I quickly shake this thought away. This is getting ridiculous. How did they get that footage from inside my apartment anyways? My eyes scan left to right, spotting the kitchen window. I’m three stories up but…maybe? From across the street? I walk towards the window, and I see movement in the building across the way. The curtain in their window closes abruptly. Suspicious.

I don’t believe any of this, or at least I don’t want to. I run as fast as my diaper will allow and arrive at the living room window. I peer through a crack in the curtains. There’s the news crew. A crowd of people. They are holding up signs.

CHANGE HIS DIAPER

MARTIN IS STINKING UP THIS TOWN

PUT THE BABY BACK IN A CRIB

Whatever. I could take it personally, I guess. I don’t want to – not now. I don’t want them to ruin what I have going. Not yet.

I waddle to my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I lie down on my bed, easing my hand down the front of my diaper.

Just a few more minutes and then I’ll see what I can do as far as damage control goes. Maybe I’ll have to make some sort of statement.

5.

We’re sorry, but this video cannot be found. Please contact the website administrator for further details.

That link might not have worked at all.

I hit ‘back’ in my browser, going back to the message board thread. I copy the URL for the video and run it through a search engine instead. No direct hits – but evidence that the domain had been closed down years ago.

Maybe I hadn’t watched anything. Or gone to the store. Encountered law enforcement. Been on the news.

I feel unsettled, and that’s going to stick with me for a while. The things that had felt so real moments ago now just felt like vague recollections of a dream. I’m tempted to write it off as fantasy – but it might have been a warning too. The worst case scenario in an, as yet, unwritten future.

I glance over to my closet. I already know that I’m going to open it and get the box out. Maybe it’s a chance I’m willing to take.