Still Rolling

Chapter 1
Still Rolling

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Chapter Description: Complete story. A hypersexual erotica addict discovers the ultimate in AR and is rapidly consumed by his obsession. Based on an idea from nico. // Male physical AR, male mental AR, infantilism, mind control, masturbation, humiliation. Dark comedy.

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written by little trip

story by nico

characters by trip/nico

This is a work of fiction. Duh. No character in this story is intended to represent an actual person or avatar.

STILL ROLLING

"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians." --Francis Ford Coppola

"It’s all just one film to me. Just different chapters." --Robert Altman

SCENE ONE.

Int. Apartment

VZZT. VZZT. VZZT.

He glanced at the spasmodic smart phone and put it to his left ear. “Josh Traeger.”

“Where the hell are you, man?” came the voice-- male, rather slurred, with just the vaguest hint of irritation. “We’ve been waiting on you for half an hour. The drink specials are ending soon. What’s going on?”

“I’m sick,” said Josh.

The loud music and jubilant sounds of his friends’ favorite sports bar were audible through the connection. “You’re always sick,” Mark replied. “Twenty-six years old and always sick.”

“It sounds like you’re having a fine time without me. Can I just go back to bed now?”

“Fine, dude,” came the unmistakably frustrated voice. “Whatever.”

Josh set his phone down onto his computer desk and powered it off. His right hand was still wrapped around his cock.

Whether Josh Traeger was physically ill wasn’t in question-- he wasn’t. Whether he was sick is a question better left to psychologists. For over an entire decade of almost ritualistic masturbation, Josh’s tastes had grown increasingly esoteric, and he fostered no qualms about it. He lived an accomplished existence. A demanding but lucrative job as a network administrator permitted him a life without roommates; he had plenty of friends, though he rarely cared to expend entire nights in their company; and Josh could have drawn a hypothetical treasure map to the best pornography sites on the internet. That was what he liked. His hobby. His passion. Nothing else even came close.

The man stared at the computer screen as he slid his fist up and down the throbbing shaft of his leaking dick. With no one to disturb him, Josh always took it to eleven. Gone were his jeans and his boxer-briefs-- no smacking his pud through a fly for him. He dripped pre-cum freely and unreservedly onto the computer chair between his thighs. It could always be cleaned up later, he figured, and who was ever going to know? And he never bothered to waste a load by blowing it into a sock or a condom. Josh wanted to see it. He wanted to see his hot white semen rocketing out, pulsing and taking flight in high-speed ribbons, splattering upon whatever computer parts or body parts it managed to streak.

Josh had come to terms with his hypersexuality many years prior. In fact, he had devised ways to permit himself the nine or 10 orgasms per day he required to maintain a modicum of sanity which broke no laws and didn’t get in the way of his day-to-day life. Most of the time he spent away from his job and his friends was spent bathed in the illuminating glow of his monitor-- him stroking his penis with his right hand, teasing his balls with the left, reaching desperately for that ultimate release, the sensation of his burning testicles emptying, the electricity stiffening his legs into steel I-beams, the curled-up toes, the rolled-back eyes, the involuntary and shuddering gasps and moans.

Aside from family, friends, and work (and even that was iffy at times), pornography was Josh’s life. Every bit a man of his generation.

Josh leaned back and whined weakly. He was getting close. He could feel a line of clear fluid drip down his fist and patter onto his computer chair. Josh had always been a heavy leaker. Though it saved him a ton of money on lubricant, he was compelled to wear black pants almost exclusively.

It wasn’t the kind of standard, “vanilla” pornography that wonked Josh’s conker, either-- not by a long shot, so to speak. He had a mental shelf lined up with poisons. It was BDSM. It was wild, unapologetic humiliation. It was the idea of being ruined, of being reduced to a shadow of his former self, if only for a little while. Josh became the man in the videos he watched... a surrogate. A deliciously degenerate surrogate.

As he masturbated, Josh saw himself as the twentysomething with the studded leather collar around his neck, forced to spend hours in a man-sized dog cage, slurping water from a doggie bowl and peeing on layers of newspaper as bitter tears cascaded from his eyes. Totally denuded. The unquestionable slave of a master who granted no quarter.

When the actor in the video interacted with his master just long enough to be force-fed fingerfuls of his own pre-cum, Josh did exactly that in imitation. It was slightly salty and its ingestion made him feel so wonderfully worthless.

His cock twitched again. The point of no return.

As the actor on Josh’s computer screen shot his load, so did his viewer. But, while the actor’s wad comprised a fairly standard couple of tablespoons -- perhaps from overwork -- Josh had a lot more to offer. The 26-year-old felt the familiar sensation of his genitals becoming a delivery system for Greek fire.

Josh whined, he gasped, he felt his heart jump into his throat as fierce jets of cum blew out of his penis, like his body was fighting to expel pearlescent poison just to save itself. His first shot slammed into his monitor with a splatter, almost completely obscuring the humiliating tableau that had brought him off. The next contraction, and the one after that, lined Josh’s keyboard in sticky white ropes of ecstasy.

By the time the storm was over, Josh’s computer desk was dotted with imperfect circles of varying whiteness. Hot seed drooled down the man’s hand as he continued to twitch involuntarily. Explicit dialogue emanated from the computer’s speakers, but it struck Josh’s ears as little more than static.

It never gets old.

Though Josh sat at the threshold of a veritable sperm bank of semen, he made no move to clean it up. He figured he could bother with it sometime after the three or so minutes he’d require to go for another round.

-=-=-=-=-

Josh Traeger remembers the first time he masturbated to orgasm. It had happened late in life. Aside from his BDSM proclivities, he regards his delayed sexual actualization as the secret he’s most afraid of having exposed.

He is a rather distant teenager.

Josh is 15 years old, sitting at his computer, reading websites about how to get himself to “cum.” Sure, he’s gotten hard before, all his life -- usually when a scene or sentiment of embarrassment had occurred to him.

Spanking.

Shrinking.

Following commands instantaneously and without question or debate, often given by a girl younger than he.

And it feels good when he rubs up and down. Josh gets not a tingly feeling, but more of a burning. A need. An almost painful pressing. Much like someone desperately in search of a restroom-- an amount of substance in his body so great that it screams to be gotten rid of.

But nothing ever happens.

Josh closes his eyes. Still sitting at his computer, he begins to masturbate, allowing his eyes to fall shut so that he can better project a scene in his mind. A sophomore classmate of his -- Jesse, female, and several inches shorter than he -- lays Josh out across her lap for a spanking.

A bare-bottomed spanking. And every other classmate is there. And they’re all laughing.

As Jesse reddens Josh’s butt with the palm of her hand, it starts to hurt. It stings worse and worse with each impact, and then it starts to sear. Josh cries. His classmates laugh even harder at this.

“Aww, is my wittle baby hurty?” Jesse coos.

Josh can’t catch his breath. He feels 10 years his junior. He can’t block out the laughter. He can’t block out the pain. He starts peeing all over Jesse’s thighs in abject fear--

The teenager’s eyes snap open. He’s back in his bedroom, staring at a website advising him on how to reach orgasm. And a flood of hot, white, sticky liquid -- liquid he had only read about in stories and seen in pictures -- is dripping out of his penis and over his hand.

It isn’t much, but it’s more than Josh had expected.

After he finishes spasming and emptying his load onto his 15-year-old fist, Josh lifts his masturbating hand up to eye level, separates his fingers vertically, and watches in awe as the substance binds his spread fingers like goo, then dangles and drips from his hand with a seemingly alien patience.

Josh would never forget that feeling. And he vowed to never again go a day without it.

SCENE TWO.

Int. Apartment

The subsequent week provided a Thursday night like any other. Josh had, in his opinion, wisely not committed to any fraternal plans; his phone had been tossed onto the bed, far away from his computer desk, and mercifully drained of battery power. It was just Josh and his own little world. He sat at his computer desk, limp dick dangling out the fly of his jeans, as he browsed the internet-- specifically, porn aggregators.

Josh never took off his pants until he found something to which he wanted to jerk off. It wasn’t superstition or even a conscious decision... just habit. His cock wanted the freedom of open air, though. It had been leaking into his work pants all day. The man could have retreated to the restroom to rub out a few in private, of course, but he had scored a wildly lucrative project-- a major coup in a department in the process of being gutted by budget cuts. He wasn’t about to let an errant stain on his expensive slacks get in the way of a tasty bonus... and, always the worrier, Josh assumed (perhaps rightly) that his career was riding on this singular performance.

He silently thanked the powers that be for his having been circumcised. Josh had no idea how he’d function in human society if he was possessed of any more sensitivity than he already had.

“Now, what might this be?” Josh muttered to himself, seeing, for the first time, a link to a BDSM site called “A Man No More.”

Josh assumed TG, and he wasn’t into that. But he felt as if he would be remiss if he didn’t at least click.

If you don’t take a chance, nothing happens.

The layout of the site couldn’t have been any simpler had it been hosted on TheGlobe in 1995. Its background was all-black, with nary an icon or an animation to be seen-- for that, at least, Josh was thankful. At the top of the page, in yellow, 48-point Comic Sans, were the words “A Man No More,” bordered inside a rectangle by a thin gray double-line.

But wait... no pop-ups? No malware? And... no goddamned membership fees?

Josh didn’t even care about the site’s content at that point. He was already in love.

After the initial shock wore off, Josh made note of the unorthodox method by which the offered content was presented. There were three thumbnails arranged in a horizontal row. By squinting, he could tell that each thumbnail featured a different, fully-clothed male, each trying to strike an enticing pose (and failing miserably at it).

The gentleman on the far left, according to the yellow Comic Sans text centered beneath his photograph, was named Brian, aged eighteen. He wore blue jeans and a button-down black shirt. With meticulous hair and a smooth face, he might’ve easily passed for fourteen. Brian could have any girl he wanted... and he probably did.

The thumbnail to the right of Brian’s belonged to Steve, a man much closer to Josh’s own age. He looked like a professional, but not a geek; a light blue dress shirt tucked into khaki slacks, a confident smile, and a hairstyle that clearly had seen the attention of a professional hairdresser. The look in his eyes indicated a career-driven, but altruistic, fellow.

To the right of Steve was Curt -- and if THAT dude’s 18, Josh thought, then I’m celibate. He looked perhaps 15 or 16 years old and appeared to be your stereotypical gay boi, with a black fauxhawk, glitter-glue beneath his eyes, and his fingertips meeting horizontally beneath a chin and a smile. His t-shirt was deliberately torn at the bottom so as to expose his navel, and if his jeans were any tighter, they’d have to amputate.

Josh glanced at the digital clock next to his bed. 9:07. Almost two hours before I have to go to bed for work in the morning.

The young man hovered his cursor over Brian’s thumbnail -- Here goes nothin’ -- and clicked.

SCENE THREE.

Int. ???

The studio had spared no expense on set design, and Josh reached that conclusion simply on the strength of the film’s “master bedroom.” It was lavish, with a four-poster mahogany bed and what looked to be an antique bureau. Josh didn’t care much for the obviously-cardboard plasma TV, feeling it took away from the verisimilitude of the scene just a tad... but, in seconds, his attentions lay elsewhere.

A large clapboard filled the computer screen. “‘Confidence Game,’ starring Brian, take one of one.” *SNAP*

Take one of one? Josh thought as he looked at his monitor. They must have some real “confidence” in their actors.

A voluptuous woman in her mid-20s, with long, brunette hair, and perfectly-rounded breasts to complement her equally-immaculate ass, sauntered sexily into frame from the left side. A small overlay of text appeared beneath her for five seconds. It read “Amethyst,” and some low-budget purple sparkles glinted over the Photoshopped lettering. The game was on when it faded away.

“Hi,” Amethyst said in a voice that evoked all those times Brian had heard girls say, in not so many words, “You have me already.”

“H-hi,” replied Brian. He seemed slightly dazed. Who could blame him? thought Josh.

“My name’s Amethyst... but you can call me Amy.”

“O...okay, Amy-thyst. I mean, Ameh. I mean, Amy.” A strange look crossed Brian’s face. Where had all his confidence gone? The charm and charisma that had helped him sail through the social trials of high school? Josh had to hand it to the kid... for a budding porn star, he could act.

Amy’s sultry smile began to decay into a much more neutral expression. “You’re not much of a listener, are you, Brian?”

“No, no! Of course I am. I-I’m just a little nervous is all.” He had begun to bite his lip.

“I thought high school seniors weren’t supposed to be nervous,” Amy spat. No trace of her smile remained. “That sounds more like the behavior of a freshman to me.” The actress began unbuttoning Brian’s shirt and then slid it clean off his body. The apparently-confused teenager did nothing to react.

Josh lurched forward in his computer chair. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Could that boy be... shrinking? Actually getting shorter?

And not only that... his pectoral muscles simmered away beneath his skin, leaving a flat, boyish chest in memoriam. The six-pack abdomen he had just recently begun cultivating turned into a wiggly little bit of pudge. Brian was without chest hair, and his happy trail, too, had vanished into the aether.

Brian appeared exactly as many of Josh’s erstwhile freshmen peers had looked 12 years prior.

Josh’s jaw hung open as if it had been stripped of all its muscular support. These were the most incredible special effects he had ever seen in a low-budget BDSM porn... and he’d seen more than his fair share. How did they do that? How did they shrink him down? Get rid of his hair? Mirrors and quick-cuts?

And do all amateur porn stars start out so terrified? They did take the job...

Amy interrupted Josh’s train of thought. “That’s better. Now, Brian, I want you to make love to me. I want you to drive me wild. Drive me off the cliff of ecstasy, as you’ve done with so many girls before. Surely I must be prettier than some of them. Do you think you can handle that, big boy?”

“But--But--” Brian stammered.

“Oh, you want to do me in the butt, is that it?” Amy dropped off her dress with one flip of a button behind her shoulders. She wore no underwear beneath it, leaving her globular tits and shaved pussy in Brian’s full view. Despite his fear and uncertainty, Brian’s body responded much as one might expect any 14-year-old’s biology to react... he developed a throbbing erection in a pair of jeans that were already a few sizes too large for him.

Amy flopped onto the four-poster bed, stomach-down, perky ass wriggling in the air. Brian pulled down his jeans and boxer-briefs in one smooth motion and followed, straddling Amy’s thighs. Any viewer could tell that Brian’s greatest dream was about to come true. His dick was going to be inside the ass of the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

“Fuck me,” Amy commanded. “And make it good.”

“I will, baby,” Brian replied, in a humorously cracking voice.

Brian rested the palms of his hands on either side of Amy’s slender lower body, gently touched the tip of his pulsing hardon to the flesh just above her ass, and promptly ejaculated all over her back.

Josh’s eyes went wide. What the hell kind of porno has its money shot two minutes into it?

“You little jerk!!” Amy hollered. “You little kid!!”

“I--I’m sorry!” Brian gasped, all of his skin flushed red with humiliation. “That’s never--”

“‘--happened to you before?’ Oh, that’s what they all say. All the biiig baaad boooys who make reputations for themselves by regaling their equally-immature guy-friends with tall tales of actual sex. Get the hell off of me.”

Weakly, Brian rolled off of Amy, and laid on the other side of the bed, looking up at the ceiling and gasping for air. Amy sat up cross-legged next to him and shook her head condescendingly as the cameras moved closer to get a better shot of the two actors.

“Fortunately, I don’t have to clean my back off. You might as well have just sneezed on it.”

Josh had already developed an erection. A bead of pre-cum had formed at its tip. But he didn’t want to touch it just yet-- didn’t want to disrobe just yet. He wanted to see how far things would go.

This was his kind of humiliation. He mused to himself that this video had been made especially for him. Then, his train of thought was broken by Amy’s continued soliloquy.

“Frankly, if that’s the kind of ‘performance’ you’re able to give a woman, I don’t think you should be offering performances at all. After all, third-graders never do.”

Josh blinked. Are these people serious? He checked to make sure his window was blown up as far as it could go. He checked to make sure it was set at the highest resolution. And he looked at Brian’s naked form, towered over by a wickedly grinning Amy, and watched.

Brian screamed. It wasn’t a scream of pain, nor was it one of anguish... just one of confusion and regret as he pounded his fists on the bedlinens and left puberty. No longer a teenager, the hair beneath his armpits sucked back up into his body, and what was left of his pubes pinwheeled themselves into his groin. His shoulders slouched. His legs were bare. And even somebody with cataracts could see that the boy had lost at least a foot of height.

Now Josh was idly playing with himself through his fly. This was wild. This was his world. And not only had someone thought to film it, but they had clearly set aside the lion’s share of the budget for the most important part: the regression effects.

Well, the second-most important part. Amy had the talent to really hammer it home.

“Awww!” she cooed, gently twisting her face into a look of mock empathy. “Is Amy’s wittle Bri-Bri upset he has to go aaalllll the way back to elementary school? Spending the next nine years learning stuff he already knows? Making construction paper animals? Waiting for his turn on the slide? Getting pushed to the ground by fourth-graders? Having to ask for the bathroom pass-- and, if it’s already being used, having to make a trip to the nurse in damp briefs? And how about those showers after gym class?” The woman couldn’t hold back a five-second laughing fit. “Wait’ll all the other boys see what a cute little dinky you’ve got.”

Josh’s jeans and briefs were already on the floor, and he sat bare-assed on the computer chair, slowly -- and with great discipline, to build himself up -- dancing his fingertips along the length of his hard cock.

Brian, for his part, began to weep. Tears spilled out the sides of his eyes and dripped onto his pillow. He was sniffling. Though Josh had heard that one of the most crucial lessons in acting class is the convincing cry, that knowledge did nothing to attenuate the power of the image.

Amy scoffed. “And now look! You’re crying! And here I thought there might have been a chance of you putting up a decent façade. Where’s your confidence now, hmm? Did it disappear when you saw my tits? Did it disappear when you came in half a second? Did it disappear when you lost your big-boy cock?

“Well,” she continued, “I have a friend who’s a third-grade teacher, and she doesn’t like obnoxious crybabies when she’s trying to teach mature nine-year-olds. And guess what? I don’t, either.

“But you know where you can get away with behavior like that? Pre-school.”

Oh, thought Josh in the back of his mind, I can’t wait to see what sort of animatronic puppet they came up with for this one.

But there was no evident cut in the film. No sudden jerking motion on Amy’s part from one frame to the next. There was simply Brian, the years slipping through his increasingly-pudgy fingers like grains of sand, as he rapidly re-approached his days of nighttime diapers and learning colors. He began to sob, to wail, kicking and flailing around impotently, pockets of leftover baby fat jiggling inelegantly under the watchful eye of Amethyst the Sex Goddess. His sexy teenaged jawline was long gone, replaced instead by convex, adipose-packed cheeks perfect for accommodating a sucked thumb. And, as he settled down at three years old, that’s exactly what Brian had in his mouth.

Now Josh was masturbating. Slowly and deliberately did he fuck his fist, already slick with pre-cum. His thoughts were off the mind-blowing special effects in “Confidence Game.” All he could think about was the intensity, the wickedness, the sheer sadomasochistic humiliation of being a grown man regressed into a small child as a beautiful woman strove to make the transformation as miserable for him as possible.

“You’re going to love pre-school,” Amy teased her co-star, shadowing his face with hers and staring straight into his eyes. “All the stuffed bears and bunnies you’ll get to squeeze. All the blocks you’ll get to play with. Who cares if you know trigonometry? The teacher will smile, pat you on your silky, baby-fine hair because you know such a big word, then give you a big box full of holes you have to put the proper wooden shapes into. And a lot of kids suck their thumbs in pre-school... it’s o-kay. And a lot of kids wear Pull-Ups to pre-school. That’s okay, too. Have a little accident, and your mommy can change you when you get home.”

Amy looked up at the ceiling, feigning a thought process. “But what if you didn’t have little accidents, sweet Bri-Bri?”

The boy’s eyes became dinner plates.

“What if you had big accidents?”

Josh picked up the pace. His balls were beginning to boil as he watched the unfolding movie.

“Why... that would make you a baby, wouldn’t it? A sweet little bundle of joy who couldn’t hold in his pee-pees or poopies no matter how hard he tried.”

“Amy... please,” the toddler begged.

“Well, only because you asked so nicely.” And the transformation began.

Josh had to admit that the foley artists working on the production had done an outstanding job with overdubbing a real infant’s wail over Brian’s digitally-manipulated form. The boy must have been just a little over a foot tall after his body had become a soft, elastic paean to baby fat, but it was hard for Josh to tell from the computer window, especially since Brian was throwing his tiny legs and arms about in an infantile tantrum. A tantrum that went on for some time.

“Burnin’ film here,” came a woman’s voice from offscreen. Obviously, something they had missed in the editing room.

Ultimately, Amy simply went ahead and retrieved a double-thick disposable diaper from an oversized purse she carried nearby. Josh stared in awe as the actress so adeptly unfolded it beneath the butt of what must have been CGI, powdered the phantom, taped it into the babyish garment, and tucked everything in.

The moment Amethyst hoisted Brian into her arms, the tiny teenager swaddled in baby fat and with two inches worth of crinkling plastic pushing out from his butt, Josh completely lost it. His balls had taken just about all the torture they were willing to take. He couldn’t even control the muscles in his groin to fire off a series of ejaculations. The bulk of his delivery arrived in one long, uninterrupted arc, causing a terrible stain on the wall behind his computer desk. When at last he regained control of his muscles, he was able to send out his more usual series of foot-long jets.

He might have screamed during that first shot. He probably did. A guttural expulsion of air, emotion, and sensation. All Josh knew for certain was that, in eleven years of orgasms -- at least 40,000 by his math -- the one caused by watching a grown man systematically stripped of his pride and age before being returned to infancy and diapers was the only one during which he sincerely feared having a heart attack.

Josh didn’t bother pulling his pants back up; they were soaked with his drippings, anyway. Instead, he waited his customary three-minute refractory period, took a breath, and clicked on Steve’s photograph.

SCENE FOUR.

Int. ???

This video, too, opened with a clapboard. “‘To the Untrained Guy,’ starring Steve, take one of one.” *SNAP*

The studio’s dining room stage was every bit as opulent as the one boasted by its master bedroom, only much, much bigger. The hardwood table was almost comically long, stretching the length of the room and ending several feet away from a grand fireplace. The cameras were positioned at the opposing end of the table and looked down its length with an almost obsessively-calculated symmetry. Candles were lit and a smorgasbord fit for an ancient European king had been organized with care.

Josh found this slightly humorous, as only two people sat at the table: Steve, halfway down the table on the left, and a gorgeous blonde bombshell directly across from him. A post-production text overlay positioned beneath the woman read “Jade.”

Josh was adroit enough to correctly assume that most of the food on the table -- the whole turkey in the foreground, the pig with an apple crammed in its mouth pulling up the rear -- was decoration intended to add to the sense of realism, even though the crew’s spray paint technician had clearly missed a spot on the turkey, unless the bird had died of necrotizing fasciitis. But the food in front of Steve -- who looked admittedly smashing in his network-administrator-esque garb (not that Josh was biased or anything) -- and Jade was quite real, and they were having a rather lovely romantic dinner.

Always a recipe for disaster, whether or not you’re filming a porno.

Suddenly, Steve’s fork clattered to his plate and he clutched at his gut.

“Is something wrong?” asked Jade.

Steve took a few deep breaths, shook off the cramp, and sighed. “No, no, nothing’s wrong. So, how was your job at the Realtor today?”

“Well, I closed the deal on that house on Wedgewood... finally! And--”

Steve grabbed his belly with both hands. He had never felt so full in his entire life. Or in such desperate need of the toilet. Though one doesn’t have to be a master thespian to convincingly play a man with a surprisingly sudden case of the shits, Josh was still impressed by Steve’s acting ability. He could feel his pain.

“Bathroom?” was all Steve felt capable of verbalizing.

“Right outside that door,” Jade said, pointing to the northwest corner of the room. “Immediately to your right.”

Steve shoved his chair away from the table and made a mad, but careful, waddling dash towards the restroom, clutching his stomach all the while. Josh was surprised to find that one of the two cameras followed Steve out the door -- simply because it revealed that the studio had built an entire hallway that seemed totally unnecessary. And both Steve and Josh were relieved to find that, not only did the camera decline to enter the bathroom set, it shut off its microphone, as well.

Only after five full minutes did the microphone switch back on.

“--ade?” was the first thing Josh heard Steve say from behind the door when audio was restored.

“Yeah?” the actress called from the dining room. The remaining camera was on her.

“May you come here for a second, please?”

Jade set down her utensils and made her way to the closed restroom door, the second camera in tow. In moments, the actress and two camera operators were standing in front of the door without a lock, looking as if they were about to open Capone’s vault.

“The plunger’s under the vanity,” said Jade, unable to hide half a smile from Josh and the rest of her viewers.

“Th--that’s not it,” came the reply.

“Then what is it, honey?”

Steve paused. “I... I forgot how to wipe.”

“...What?”

“I said I forgot how to wipe my butt!”

Jade had to bite her lip to keep from corpsing. But she was a professional. She could handle this.

“I hesitate to ask this,” she cooed through the closed door, “but is there any way I can help?”

“Can you, um...” -- Steve was already beginning to regret moonlighting as a porn star -- “...Can you come in here and wipe my butt?”

“Is that how little kids who can’t wipe their butts ask for favors, Stevie?”

The man gulped. He certainly didn’t feel like a man. “Miss Jade, may you please come in here and wipe the yuckies off my bottom?”

When Jade and a camera operator entered the bathroom, a crimson Steve was standing to the side of an already-flushed toilet, his back to the wall, but his pants and boxers around his ankles. His penis dangled shamefully between his legs and shrunk noticeably when he saw Jade-- and shrunk again when he noticed a camera trained on him.

But he had signed on for this.

Jade reached over to the toilet paper dispenser and grabbed about a half as much as she figured the plumbing could tolerate. She was a crumpler, not a folder.

“Sweetheart,” Jade cooed, “as adorable as your little penis is, it makes it really hard for me to wipe your tushie when I can’t get to it.”

Steve turned to face the wall. It was a good thing he had called for help, considering the amount of work that needed to be done.

Josh sat in his computer chair, confused. Sure, the humiliation of the situation had definitely given him a semi, and he savored the idea of Steve never again being able to wipe his own ass without a female’s assistance, but what was the catc--

“Before I start,” Jade warned, “I have to warn you that every wipe I make against your ass is going to make you two years younger, closer to the itty bitty little boy you certainly appear to be.”

--ohhh.

“Fine, fine, whatever,” Steve pouted. “It’s starting to itch.”

The special effects in this segment, Josh concluded, were even more impressive than those of its predecessor. Not the mess itself-- clearly it was just mud or prop chocolate... right? But he couldn’t detect a single scene break or shift in camera perspective as Jade carefully and lovingly cleaned the gunk off of Steve’s butt. And it was a big project. Even from behind, Josh could see Steve lose height, stature, and even deliver a few fevered sobs as he was dragged back through high school, and then junior high. What would the kids think? How could he ever get a girlfriend if part of the job description was to clean up after her boyfriend’s messes? She’d probably just end up putting him in diapers. How sexy could that possibly be?

Sexy enough for Josh to start masturbating again. With every wadded-up ball of tissue, with every press of the lever, Steve’s age and ability was being flushed down the toilet. Literally.

And Jade knew just the right things to say. “Shame on you, Stevie, coming into my house, claiming to be 25 years old, and not even knowing how to wipe your own ass. Who did it for you when you were in college? Your roommate? Well, I’m sure he looked forward to it even more than the next keg party.” *FLUSH* “What about when you were in high school? Your mom? Or did she just do it for you up through elementary and junior high school, said ‘fuck it,’ and put you back in diapers until you got to college?” *FLUSH*

Josh was hunched over in his computer chair, furiously beating his meat, his speakers’ volumes turned up to maximum.

Steve was crying. Ten flushes after the inception of his ordeal, the clear, salty splatters of a five-year-old’s tears struck the bathroom tile. He was perfectly clean by this time, but he had no way of knowing that.

“You’re five years old now, Stevie,” grinned Jade. “But leaving you like that wouldn’t be very kind to your mother, now would it? Every week, having to dig through and launder pairs and pairs of Superman and Ninja Turtle briefs, their backs streaked with stale shit you couldn’t be bothered to wipe off your butt? Having to buy new pairs every month because cotton can only take so much damage? I don’t think so.” *FLUSH*

The naked three-year-old toddled unsteadily, trapped on all four sides... a toilet to his right, a wall to his front, a camera at his backside, and Jade, with a seemingly limitless supply of toilet paper, to his left.

Jade tousled Steve’s hair. “At least now you belong in Pull-Ups. It doesn’t matter how badly you wipe when you wear those, because they all get thrown away, anyway. And they’re odor-resistant. So, technically, you don’t even have to wipe at all. You can just sit on your plastic potty chair, make stinkies, pull your underwear back up, and get on with your life. But that would be the epitome of laziness, wouldn’t it?

“No,” Jade corrected herself. “No, it wouldn’t.” *FLUSH*

A wordless, shrieking infant lay squirming around on the floor. Twelve months old.

“Now you can be lazy,” said Jade. “Now you can pee and poop wherever you want, whenever you want, and no one will think it’s revolting. They’ll just think it’s adorable.

“And they’ll clean everything up for you.”

Josh started to moan, started to fondle his balls. There was so much pre-cum from this scene and so much cum from Brian’s trial by fire that he no longer knew which was which. He was a sticky mess, and he liked it, and he was dangerously close to the edge.

Then the diapers came out.

That kinky bitch, Josh thought. That marvelous, kinky bitch.

Josh didn’t know of whom he was more envious: the male actors who got to act so infantile for fun and profit and then go back to their normal lives, or the brilliant graphic artists who made it all seem so real. He hadn’t seen pennies stretched so far since Skyline.

When the final tape was secured around Steve’s diaper, Josh blew his second load of the night. Fortunately, the wall was spared, but all the young man could do was gasp and grunt and pound his left palm against the top of his computer desk as he unloaded the contents of his balls onto the floor in front of his legs. His second consecutive orgasms never seemed to match the originals in volume, but they blew them out of the water in terms of how his central nervous system reacted to the sudden and continued onslaught of nature’s ultimate pleasure.

Illusory AR. The wave of the future. Josh’s new alpha and omega of BDSM. Soaked, sticky, and stinking, Josh waited three minutes, then eagerly clicked on Curt’s thumbnail.

SCENE FIVE.

Int. ???

Curt was actually kind of concerned. That’s how the video file began: a fair-skinned twinky-boi wandering aimlessly through a set designed to emulate an amalgam of designer and all-purpose department stores, nervously alternating between clapping his palms together and slapping his thighs, waiting for something to happen. He knew that if he, a 15-year-old, was caught doing a porno movie, it would be A Man No More that got in trouble, not him. But he badly, badly needed the $500. A hundred to pay back the money he borrowed for the fake ID, and $400 for a pair of jeans that he knew he would just die without.

Out came the clapboard. “‘Let’s Play Dress-Up,’ starring Curt, take one of one.” *SNAP*

In truth, Josh had some reservations of his own. Not about the age difference -- the website assured him that all models were 18, and he had no reason to doubt that apart from mere instinct -- but he wasn’t so sure about the “gay” thing. Would they really pair up a gay professional with a gay amateur in a series of videos wherein the amateur unwittingly regresses in age? Nahhh... a double-standard it may be, but it’s still just asking for trouble. Besides, to Josh, the sexuality in these videos had nothing to do with orientation. It was rooted in humiliation. Even the diapers were tangential. ...Well, no. The diapers were actually pretty important. Besides, the other two seasoned porn stars were both female, and they were both named after precious gems. How many guys are named after precious gems?

“Hello-oo!” sang-song a man who excitedly bounded towards Curt. “My name is Jasper, and I will be... folding clothes for the entire afternoon, because I forgot to punch out for lunch again. Fortunately, my boss, Opal, will make sure you leave with exactly what you need. Something to make you look good and feel good.” The tall, pony-tailed man retreated to the sweater section and spent the rest of his shift thinking about going to law school.

A woman just shy of 40 years of age entered from the back room, albeit in a much more sedate manner. “I’m Opal,” she said with a smile. The traditional post-production nametag flashed briefly beneath her mark. “I’d be more than happy to make sure you leave here with a brand-new attitude.”

“I kinda like my attitude,” said Curt.

“Now, now, now,” Opal said, her smile attenuating almost imperceptibly. “I’m old enough to be your mother. At least give me the benefit of the doubt.”

“So, uh,” Curt stammered, “what exactly am I supposed to do here?”

“Well, there’s a private dressing room right over there. It latches. The swinging door allows me to droop a hanger over its top, and attached to that hangar will be a tote bag with an outfit I’d suggest for you. That way, nobody has to see it if you don’t like it. But I would kindly ask you to try everything on that I provide you. I select clothes very carefully and promise not to waste your time.

“And, not to offend right off the bat, but what kind of outfit is that? One-third of your t-shirt is torn away. And you’re wearing girls’ blue jeans.”

“That’s my style.”

“What style is that?”

“Gay guys my age seem to really like it.”

“Iiiii see.” Opal’s frown deepened. “Homosexual, yes. Where is your mother?”

“She ran off with a Spanish bullfighter named Antonio.”

“And your father?”

“He did not run off with a Spanish bullfighter named Antonio. What the hell business is it of yours?”

Opal nodded. “An acid tongue. And God only knows what else you do with it. Anyway, go ahead into the dressing room and I’ll start bringing you your outfits in sequence.”

Josh had to hand it to Curt’s acerbic wit. Reservedly. The line between acerbic wit and bratty whine is a thin one for a teenager.

Curt did not like the inaugural outfit he was wearing when he first walked out of the dressing room. It was a Polo shirt without the alligator, baby blue, tucked into pressed khakis wrapped up in a belt so boring it made Black Swan look like The Dark Knight.

“Ohhh,” cooed Opal, “you look so handsome in that!”

Curt sneered. “I don’t want to look handsome. I look like I wear Catholic grade school uniforms. For fun.”

“Morality has to start somewhere,” Opal shrugged. Josh appreciated the facetious cognitive dissonance of an experienced porn star portraying a sanctimonious holy roller. “Alright, well, I’ll bring you another tote bag; try on what’s in it and put the Polo stuff back inside.”

Minutes later, Curt stepped out of the dressing room and outstretched his open palms towards the sky. “Seriously?”

“You’ve got your blue jeans,” defended Opal.

“Yeah, and they’re loose enough to smuggle Butterball turkeys out of my grocer’s freezer.” He pointed to his shirt with both index fingers. “And Justin Bieber?”

Opal gritted her teeth just a bit. Her patience was wearing thin. The script called for her to regard Curt as one of “The Unpleasables.”

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll bring you another tote bag. I guarantee that the next outfit will improve your mood.”

Shaking his head, Curt returned to the dressing room and stripped down to his boxer briefs, removing his next outfit from the provided bag and returning the Biebs to the empty. He stared curiously at what he had been given. He wasn’t sure he would be able to fit into them. But as soon as he put on the horizontally-striped t-shirt and set foot into one leg of the overalls, four years of his accrued existence peeled away from him. His earrings disappeared. His black fauxhawk decayed into a much more conservative blond crew-cut. He could no longer fit into his sneakers, so Opal had thought to bring him some colorful tennis shoes and tube socks. By the time he stumbled out of the dressing room, he was 11 years old, and his mood definitely hadn’t improved.

“Don’t like it,” was all he could say as he crossed his arms. He sounded a lot less cynical as a prepubescent.

Josh was fondling himself again. There was just something about a bitter-ass teenage boy stubbornly volunteering to regress himself that hit him in the right place. Curt valued his senses of pride and dignity so highly that he was completely oblivious to the fact that he was willfully surrendering them.

“But you’re so cute in those!”

“NO!” Curt shouted, drawing the attention of Jasper, who shrugged and simply returned to his sweaters.

Back in the dressing room, Curt couldn’t get out of the kids’ clothes quickly enough. With any luck, Opal had found the mercy to restore some of the boy’s dignity and, of course, age.

When the boy walked out again, he could have stared daggers through concrete.

The little boy looked down at himself and read off his pink t-shirt to Opal, as if she hadn’t picked it out herself. “‘7-Year-Olds Campaigning for Christ.’ Is the rainbow meant to be ironic?”

“I tried to Sharpie over it, but that just made it look like the crucifix had struck oil.”

“And what is with these ultra-high-riding gray cotton shorts? You can see my black boxer-briefs sticking right out from under them!”

“You know, Curt,” thought Opal, scratching her chin, “you’re absolutely right.”

Five minutes later, when four-year-old Curt toddled out of the dressing room wearing only kids’ shoes, striped socks, and a pair of blue Pull-Ups, he was sucking his thumb and sniffling. A single tear dropped from either eye.

Josh gleefully fucked his fist from the comfort of his computer chair. He even sucked his left thumb as an erotic way to empathize with the little misanthrope’s plight.

“See what happens to picky little brats like you? Always with your senses of entitlement. Gotta have the preferential treatment. Gotta have the last word. Gotta have the $400 designer blue jeans. Well, sweetheart, look at your designer jeans now. Go on, look at them.”

His thumb still in his mouth, Curt looked down between his legs. He had completely soaked the front of his Pull-Up, and now rivers of hot urine were dripping down his legs and absorbing into the department store carpeting.

He didn’t want the $500 this badly.

This was Josh’s easiest deductive challenge yet: There’s a smaller door built into one of the dressing room’s walls, beginning low enough and finishing high enough to be invisible behind the slotted, swinging door. And a series of children of various ages behind it. Who look practically the same. And have the same mannerisms.

But all that speculation didn’t make his orgasm any less powerful when Opal pushed a red-and-white checkered stroller out of the ladies’ dressing room. She was transporting the one-year-old Curt from the department store. And the kid was finally happy-- grinning like an idiot as he shoved poop into his new disposables.

INTERMISSION.

Three minutes pass. Josh watches Brian’s video again.

Three minutes pass. Josh watches Steve’s video again.

Three minutes pass. Josh watches Curt’s video again.

With each viewing, Josh discovers something completely new-- something about which he kicks himself for not having noticed the first time. Darling-but-stumbling Brian has an outie belly button. Steve looks like a scared little boy when naked in front of an HD camera and should probably be moonlighting at a Kinko’s instead. Jasper looks just like a bartender Josh once met on a business trip to Pittsburgh. And he could be gay.

Then there are the clues-- the little giveaways Josh feels compelled to gather to prove that honest-to-God age regression is impossible... and, if it isn’t, why is it being hoarded by the pornography industry? At the very least, “A Man No More” is phony with a capital ‘P.’ To help Josh get to the bottom of this mystery, he watches Brian’s video again, and Steve’s video again. He already figured out the trick behind Curt’s video. He watches it again anyway.

Josh finds some light pink blood on his palm. He’s rubbed a portion of his shaft completely raw.

Beside Josh’s disheveled bed, an alarm goes off. 6:00. He walks over to it, gives the Alarm Off button a vindictive slap, and tries to rationalize having masturbated for nine hours straight.

SCENE SIX.

Int. Office

“Traeger!!”

Josh whipped his forehead up from his palm. He had anchored his left elbow on his workdesk and his glazed-over eyes were trained on an executive memorandum he held in his right hand. Josh had read it in its entirety four times over and would not have been able to say a single educated thing about it for a million in prizes.

“Yes!” he gasped, meeting his obviously-displeased boss’s gaze. “Yes, Mr. Williamson!”

“Traeger, it’s 10:20 in the morning, and this is the second time I’ve had to try twice to get your attention. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And what’s up with your eyes? Late Thursday night?”

“You could say that, sir.”

“I thoughtcha gave up drinkin.”

“I did, sir.”

“Then get a damn Sleep Number bed, Traeger,” Williamson sneered. “Today’s Friday. Wouldn’tcha know it, the project that I specifically encouraged the board to assign to you needs to be done in” -- he looked melodramatically at his watch -- “seven days, one hour, and 40 -- no, 39 -- minutes.”

“It’ll be done long before that, sir.” Josh gulped.

“Good,” replied Williamson, seemingly placated. “Now get two cups of black coffee. Both for you.”

-=-=-=-=-

Armed with just enough caffeine to improve his chances of success without risking a most inconvenient heart explosion, Josh returned to his desk and began to read:

Mr. Traeger:

As you know, certain executives in our Ypsilanti branch have expressed concern with possible security imperfections left unchecked in the run-up to our transition to the Datagram Transport Layer Security protocol. Cisco Systems has assured us that a vigilant adherence to their provided literature will prove considerably more effective in this regard than figuring out how Amethyst seemed to simply “talk” an 18-year-old boy into becoming a diaper-messing infant. Amazing things can be done these days with editing equipment. A Man No More is nothing other than a startup porn site and you’re giving it way too much thought. The site is free... for now. So stop looking a gift horse in the mouth and get the fuck back to wor--

Josh threw down the memo with a gasp. He was sweating. Blinking rapidly. What was happening to him?

-=-=-=-=-

“Hello. You’ve reached Joshua P. Traeger, Network Administrator for Polarity Systems Detroit. I’ll be in Toledo all this weekend, attending to family matters. I will receive any and all messages when I return to the office on Monday morning. Thank you.” He shut off his smart phone and threw it into a dresser drawer. He set up an Out-of-Office AutoReply that very Saturday morning. And he uninstalled every last piece of social networking software he could find on his PC.

There, he thought. Now it’s just me versus the world.

Josh had spent the first hour or so of his Friday night tending to his wounded penis. It wasn’t so bad -- a rug burn here, a barely-perceptible cut there -- but oh, did it hurt when the oils of his hand came in contact with those sensitive (in the worst possible way) areas. Still, it was nothing some soothing ointment and a few strategically-placed Band-Aids, cut to just the right size and shape, couldn’t palliate. And it certainly wasn’t the first time in his life he had to treat his cock like a burn victim.

Armed with medicine and years of practice working his way around such adversities, Josh didn’t have to waste the rest of his Friday night on not masturbating. Brian, Steve, Curt. Brian, Steve, Curt.

And if Friday night was for recreation, Saturday was for research. Josh had thousands of dollars’ worth of video and graphics suites open concomitantly. He took every second of every video and saved it as its own independent file. Then he combed each of those seconds frame-by-frame... looking for seams, looking for sudden jumps from one frame to the next, looking for obvious manipulations (he could tell by the pixels, having seen quite a few Photoshops in his day). He even zoomed in on every inch of every “victim’s” body, looking for a mole that hadn’t been there a quarter-second ago, or a toenail that appeared clipped, was inexplicably unclipped in the following frame, then suddenly clipped again.

Nothing. Everything was so fucking on the level. A Man No More was, without question, the most technologically-advanced purveyor of adult entertainment the world had ever known.

Josh didn’t take a shower on Saturday, nor did he brush his teeth. He didn’t shower or brush on Sunday, either; in fact, he ended up falling asleep with his cock in his hand-- his legs, his desk, the floor, all graffito-tagged with his stinking semen.

It was only out of sheer luck that Josh managed to wake up on Monday morning in time to grab a shower, brush his teeth, and get dressed. Combing his hair and shaving his neckbeard would have to wait. And, even then, he was still late for work.

-=-=-=-=-

Josh ambled into the 14-strong conference room, briefcase in hand, sweat dripping from his bumlike visage.

“Well, Mr. Traeger,” hummed Mr. Williamson with a sarcastic smile. “How nice of you to join us 25 minutes into a meeting about your Cisco project.”

Josh seethed on the inside. His boss could have at least tried to have been a little less clichéd with his repartee.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “The traffic on--”

“This isn’t Starbucks, kid,” Williamson growled, smile -- sarcastic or otherwise -- having disappeared from his face completely. “‘There was traffic’ is ‘the dog ate my homework’ for grown-up losers. Now take a seat.”

The meeting went about as well as it could have after beginning on that note.

-=-=-=-=-

Forty-five minutes later, Josh found himself seated in front of Williamson’s heavy oaken desk, the office door closed. Williamson had his fingers interlaced behind his head, swiveling forward and backward in his creaky chair, watching Josh’s Adam’s apple bob inward and outward with nervousness.

“How was Toledo?”

Josh blinked and tried to snap into communications mode. “Toledo, sir?”

“City in Ohio? Family there?”

“Oh--oh, yes, right... of course. They’re doing fine. My father was in the hospital but it was just an esophageal spasm.”

Williamson didn’t reply. He simply leaned forward and clasped his fingers together atop his desk.

“Traeger? Do you appreciate working here at Polarity Systems?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Josh replied. He was shivering and the blood had drained from his face.

“So I would imagine you would like to continue doing it.” Williamson shuffled a few papers around on his desk, his reading glasses hanging at the tip of his nose.

“Well, i--ideally, sir, yes. I would.”

Williamson tore off his reading glasses and stared Traeger down. “Then quit fuckin around. For four years you’re the ‘child prodigy,’ the ‘golden boy,’ the ‘prince of all packets, past and present.’ Then I put my ass on the line for you and all of a sudden you turn into Peter Gibbons.

“Well, lemme tell you somethin. I’m not ‘the Bobs’ and this ain’t Office Space. So get your ass in your chair and get the Board of Directors off my ass. Sound doable? Think ya can handle that?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“We’ll see,” sneered Williamson. “Dismissed.”

Josh rose from his seat, picked up his briefcase, and headed for the door. “Oh, and Traeger?”

He sighed. “Yes, sir?”

“Shave and a haircut,” Williamson said. “You look like Kurt Cobain. The way he does now.”

Josh left his boss’s office wordlessly and shut the door behind him.

-=-=-=-=-

Josh Traeger hated a lot of websites. TMZ, Gawker, the usual stable of “journalism” for nose-picking mouth-breathers. But, as he sat at his desk after being chewed out by Mr. Congeniality, he concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that the websites he hated the absolute most were the kinds sporting color schemes where the hue of the text is one color away from that of the background. With 16.7 million choices, how could someone--

“Hey, Josh.” It was Josh’s closest co-worker and confidante, Jarrell, leaning up against his desk with a mug of hot coffee. “You look a little stressed.”

“The same way a casino sounds a little noisy. What’s up, Jarrell?”

“You see that man become a baby?”

“What!?” Josh gasped, his eyes going wide.

“I said, ‘You need a hand with something, maybe?’”

Josh took a deep breath. He was losing it.

“Actually, yes. I can’t read this goddamned webpage. The text is practically the same color as the background. As far as I know, it could very well be.”

Jarrell tilted his head. “You serious? What’s gotten into you lately?”

Josh’s forehead fell into his open palms. “I don’t know, man. My head’s all fucked up. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Well, you gotta be here,” said Jarrell, sipping his coffee. “Ctrl-A, Mr. Network Administrator.”

Josh made the appropriate keystrokes and the page’s text showed up clear as day. “Thanks, man.”

“Ctrl-A,” Jarrell quietly sang in a mysterious voice as he theatrically walked backward towards his workspace, twirling his free fingers like a keeper of ancient secrets. “It makes the invisible... visible.” He laughed and returned to work.

Frustrated by his humiliating brain fart, Josh walked to the common area to pour some coffee of his own. And, as he was making the trek back towards his workstation, his pace slowed... and slowed... and stopped.

“Oh, my God,” he said to nobody in particular. “THAT’S IT!!”

-=-=-=-=-

The only actual precaution Josh had the option of taking when he returned to his computer was to make sure no fellow co-workers were approaching him in need of anything. The coast seemed pretty clear.

Quickly, he punched in the URL to A Man No More. As expected, the same bland screen darkened his monitor-- black background, ghastly Comic Sans, still photos of Brian, Steve, and Curt.

Josh held his breath, his heart beating in his ears. He held down Ctrl. He pushed A.

Red text appeared at the bottom of the screen:

A Man No More, LLC

TTS Office Plaza

1 Gemstone Lane

Fond du Lac, WI 54935

Feverish, Josh ripped the address from his printer, dumped his history, and burst into Mr. Williamson’s office.

“Boss! Boss!”

“Traeger?” Williamson said, lifting his head just halfway up, yet still managing to look unspeakably annoyed. “Unless, in the past half hour, you just got married, became a father, and taught your kid to read, I don’t want to hear one word.”

“I need the rest of the week off.”

Williamson set down his pen and looked at Josh. For once, his face was expressionless.

“Traeger, if you don’t come into work tomorrow, don’t bother coming into work on Wednesday. Don’t bother coming into work on Thursday. Or Friday, or weekends, or fucking Christmas. If Detroit is overrun by hordes of shambling, rotting undead that suck out people’s internal organs through their eye sockets and this office is your only possible chance of survival, just kiss your lazy ass goodbye.”

Josh grinned. “Great. I knew you’d understand.” He unsnapped his identification badge from his shirt pocket, dug his security keycard out of his pants, and slapped both of them on a stunned Williamson’s desk. Then he turned around and went for the door.

But when Josh put his hand upon the knob, he took a deep breath. What am I doing? I’m rushing. I don’t want to live with this regret...

“Mr. Williamson?” he said, turning his head to meet the gaze of his shocked boss. “I know we’ve had our differences, but we got a lot done together these four years. You’re tenacious. You’re a good businessman. You don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Pardon my language, but you got a pretty big dick.”

Josh’s boss managed half a smile as the former employee opened the office door to leave.

“Too bad it’s sticking up out of your shirt collar,” he said, and was gone.

SCENE SEVEN.

Int. Hotel Room

He made it to Fond du Lac midday Tuesday. The 450-mile trip could have been made without an overnight in the Windy City, but Josh had come this far in his quest for answers-- he wanted everything meticulous. The traveler performed the most comprehensive packing job in the history of interstate travel. He didn’t wish to wind up at the studio without a laptop battery or a startup CD or anything that might prove useful in helping the company’s filmmakers satisfy their fan’s curiosity via hands-on demonstration. Josh knew he’d have to pay handsomely. Money was no object.

The young man stuffed a suitcase full of clothes, necessities, and “just-in-cases” before locking up his apartment and hitting the road. Even accounting for gas, tolls, and food -- which was always austerely cheap junk, as Josh’s ridiculous metabolism permitted him to use bacon grease as a condiment -- he still managed to afford a pleasant evening at a midrange downtown Chicago hotel. It even had a minibar. Out of habit, and out of a blend of anxiety and excitement network administrators rarely get to experience, Josh pulled out a $6 can of V8, then reached for an airline bottle of Absolut. His fingertips nearly touched the glass before he sighed wistfully, dropped his head, and put back the vegetable juice. Water it would be. Again.

Josh’s favorite element of the evening was taking care of the grooming he had missed out on during his fevered rush to arrive to work late. The road trip had been no help at all, either. After a second shower, a much-needed shave, and a decent conditioning of his hair, he was no longer ashamed to be seen out in public.

Only one other thing troubled Josh as he made the sojourn from Detroit to Chicago, and its subjective oddity hadn’t diminished over the hundreds of miles. During his childhood, Josh had visited Fond du Lac with his family on a few occasions. His memories of the town’s prides and joys were rather distinct: ballooning residential development, walleye fish (and an annual weekend dedicated to them), outboard motor factories, bait and tackle, and a crazy dude with huge glasses imploring viewers to save big money at Menard’s. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t recall rumblings of a pornography industry.

“Well, Rog, we got it all. Worms, fish, ce-ment, home improvement out the yin-yang, and news anchor Amy Hanten. What more could you ask for?”

“Porn studio.”

Oh well, Josh concluded. A Man No More certainly showed all the hallmarks of a revolutionary new upstart.

-=-=-=-=-

TTS Office Plaza, 1 Gemstone Lane.

“Well, I guess this is it,” Josh mused from the driver’s seat. It was something of a depressing sight. Five two-story office buildings, arranged in a horseshoe shape, with not a soul to be seen or a blade of grass kept to a reasonable height. The large concrete stone which bore the name of the plaza and its address had 20 slots for the custom-made logos of the complex’s occupants -- 10 on each side -- but only one of them had anything emblazoned on it: TALENT & TACKLE, printed in the most insipid monotype. And though Josh was somewhat aware that Fond du Lac had exploded with development over the past couple of decades, he still had to drive practically out to the wetlands just to find this staggering waste of cement and Plexiglas.

But denying his excitement as Josh entered the double glass doors of Talent & Tackle was a losing proposition. He was there -- here -- ostensibly where it all happened.

Though he had never seen a studio firsthand wherein pornography was filmed, Josh still had to stand in muted shock at what he saw. Everything in the lobby looked so professional... pedestrian... clean. Faux-marble flooring, couches alongside either wall (with a magazine table and a five-foot potted plant on either side of those), and a lovely, young-looking receptionist manning a wood-paneled desk against the wall opposite the entrance.

She set down her magazine and flashed Josh a genuine smile comprised of the brightest pearly-whites. “Good afternoon,” she sang. “How can I help you today?”

“Uh... yeah,” Josh mumbled, more than a little confused. “I’m not even sure I’m in the right place.”

“Talent & Tackle,” the bubbly young woman affirmed. “Talent agency and tackle shop.”

“Tackle shop?”

“Doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re running in this town,” she chuckled. “Sell some fishing equipment and that’s a few months’ lease money right there.”

Josh laughed. “Well, actually, I’m here about the videos.”

The receptionist’s face froze, but her grin remained. Something about it unsettled Josh. “And what videos might those be?”

“The ones from the internet. The ‘A Man No More’ series.”

Her smile disappeared. Her eyes were ice.

“What’s your business here, sir?” she hissed. “You a cop?”

Josh looked around, confused. “No, I’m not a cop!”

“Prove you’re not a cop.”

“How do I prove I’m not a cop? Here.” Josh gave his chin-length blond hair a few rough tugs. “Cops have short hair so suspects won’t have something to grab onto. How many cops could you possibly need in this burg, anyway? A lot of bluegill trafficking going on here?”

The receptionist sighed. “You still didn’t answer my first question. Why are you here, in this lobby, standing in front of me, right now?”

“Look, I just drove all the way out here from Detroit. I quit my job simply so that I could. I found these super-hot videos on the internet last Thursday. Female models, male models, humiliation, age regression. But it all looked so real. It all looked so freakin real and it’s driving me crazy. I’m addicted. I’m addicted to the videos and I’m addicted to the idea of meeting the technicians who create these illusions and the models who bring ‘em home. Mostly, I’m so addicted to the humiliation that I think my dick’s gonna immolate and fall off. Please, please, please show me how an independent outfit creates millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of visual effects.”

It was a little more information than Josh had intended to share, but his passion for “A Man No More” hadn’t diminished in the slightest.

The receptionist’s expression grew gentle and nonconfrontational. She was smiling again. Josh felt as if he was dealing with either the Stepford Secretary or the most dramatic case of bipolar disorder on the planet.

“My name’s Janice,” she said, extending her hand across the desk. Hesitantly, Josh shook it. “And, unfortunately, A Man No More’s techniques are quite proprietary and quite private. We guard our methods with security measures that are almost as secretive as the methods themselves.”

“I’m Josh, and you can’t be serious. Your biggest fan disassembles his entire life just to discover and learn about something that’s truly inspired him, and there’s not one thing you can do to satisfy his curiosity? That’s like making the pilgrimage to Mecca and finding a Super Wal-Mart.”

“Josh, do you know how many ‘biggest fans’ walk through those doors every week? We might not be the only film studio that does what we do, but we’re definitely the best, and this is a workplace, not a Ripley’s museum.

“Unless...” Janice said, scratching her chin. She rifled through a desk drawer for a few moments and pulled out a brown clipboard. Janice set the clipboard upon the desktop in front of Josh, who could see that at least a dozen sheets of cleanly-typed document were held to it by its metal brace. “You know, I never technically said that a guided tour wasn’t doable.”

Josh gestured at the clipboard. “What’s this?”

“Your ticket in.”

“Some kind of non-disclosure agreement?”

“Partially,” Janice nodded. “There’re two other components to it. By signing and dating the cover sheet you’re also admitting that you’ve come here of your own free will, and only because of recreational sexual interest in humiliation and age regression. Not clandestine research for scientific journals, the DSM, or photographic/videographic hobbyist publications and training manuals.”

“And the third?”

“We’re a busy team here, Josh,” explained Janice. “The time to explain every nuance of our methodologies to you simply isn’t there. If you sincerely want your curiosity satisfied, you’re going to have to participate in one of our short films.”

Josh blinked. “Be a porn star.”

“If that’s what you wanna call yourself, then I suppose so. I’d just leave it off of any future professional résumés. But at least you’ll know how it’s done-- mystery solved, and you can get on with your life.” Janice wrapped a ballpoint pen into Josh’s fist. “Do we have a deal?”

“Hmm. Gee. Let me think. Yes.”

Josh didn’t even waste time flipping through the dozen pages of legalese. It could have been an excerpt from a Sarah Palin book for all he cared. He never bothered to read a single EULA any time he sold a portion of his soul to Apple or Norton, and the opportunity to be the co-star of the next episode of “A Man No More” didn’t seem the most sensible time to start doing so.

When the contract was signed -- when Josh almost giddily agreed to clam up, fess up, and suit up -- the young man shakily handed the pen and the clipboard back to a glowing Janice. She filed the document away in the same drawer from whence it came and stood up, inviting Josh to follow her to the side of her desk... the side facing a paradoxically inviting and intimidating doorway to darkness.

Janice smiled warmly into Josh’s gaze of childlike anticipation. “Just give me your hand, dear, and I’ll walk you through the studio, show you some of the sets, let you meet a few of the actors. It’s dangerous in the dark-- a lot of electrical wires and video cabling just tossed around on the floor. OSHA’s furious.”

Josh nodded and wrapped his right hand into Janice’s left. The woman revealed a syringe in her free hand, plunged its needle into Josh’s arm, and pushed a massive dose of shimmering gold liquid into the shocked man’s bloodstream.

“Aww, honey,” Janice cooed, in a tone that suggested she regretted having to do it. “If you didn’t see this telegraphed 15 minutes ago, I kinda feel sorry for you.”

SCENE EIGHT.

Int. Studio

Janice’s elixir was fast-acting. Even before the syringe’s plunger had been completely depressed, Josh felt the same brand of mental interference that used to relax him in his days as a microbrew fiend. By the time his vein had received the entire dosage, an adequate amount of the concoction had already crossed his blood-brain barrier.

Josh had lost any semblance of volition. It wasn’t just that he had become pathologically suggestible, willing to follow all directions from his elders without question or delay-- he had lost the very concept that there was any alternative to doing so.

To his horror, he retained everything else. Memories. Knowledge. Dignity. A nagging sense that maybe -- just maybe -- he should have stayed in Detroit. And, of course, a libido that still refused to quit. Even envisioning the potential humiliations this “Janice” woman had in store for him sent blood pumping gradually into the tissues of his penis.

All this before they even entered the studio proper.

Josh wasn’t stumbling, or slurring, or even acting idiosyncratically youthful. He was simply there on a tour. A very, very guided tour, his fingers interlaced with Janice’s as if rubber cement had bound their palms.

Directly from the lobby, after just 12 feet of darkened hallway, was a set that was instantly familiar to Josh: the room with the four-poster bed, the antique bureau, and the cardboard TV. It felt like something of a holy place to the young man... his first taste of “A Man No More.” The first time he ever witnessed the illusion of a high school senior tumbling backwards into a second helpless infancy.

“This is where we filmed ‘Confidence Game,’” exposited Janice, as if her young guest hadn’t jacked off to the video a hundred times before. “Amethyst is especially talented at... talking down to her co-stars, I guess you could say.”

“Can I meet Amethyst?” Josh said dreamily, his erection straining painfully against his jeans as all the memories of this set came flooding back to him.

“Maybe later,” replied Janice.

“Can I meet Brian?”

“I’m sure you’ll get to.”

Another 12-foot hallway took Janice and Josh directly to the dining room wherein Steve and Jade had shared a most ill-fated meal. The synthetic pig was still on the table, as was the spray-painted turkey-- whose aesthetic imperfection had been dutifully covered up since Josh had seen it online. The balance of the table remained flawless and immaculate, ready for use by its next pair of co-stars.

“Here, we filmed ‘To the Untrained Guy.’ Jade was such a trooper with that one. I think that’s why her porn star name fits so well... nothing fazes her anymore.”

“C-can I meet Jade?” asked Josh. He had started to drip into his underwear.

“Maybe later!” Janice said, a little less patiently than before. Josh figured it prudent to hold off on the “meeting Steve” issue for the time being.

Through the northwest door and to the right was, just as in the video, the bathroom in which Jade cleaned her 25-year-old date’s messy bottom.

“I never considered how humiliating it would be to suddenly forget how to wipe your ass during a hot date until I saw that video,” Josh grinned. “That was some really good acting.”

“Good acting, yes.” Janice coughed. “Steve’s very talented.”

The next stop on the tour was jarring in its degree of transition. From quiet domesticity to wanton commercialism... Josh finally discovered where the mysterious hallway from “To the Untrained Guy” led when he and Janice wound up in the department store that had found “manager” Opal systematically humiliate a petulant and spoiled 15-year-old into a stroller-bound baby with no desire more complex or unattainable than pooping in his pants.

“Wait! Wait!” Josh yelled, weak as his voice had become in his moderate haze. “I got this one!”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Janice.

Josh pointed feverishly towards the dressing room with his free hand. He couldn’t get there himself, effectively having become a bodily extension of his tour guide, but if only he could convince Janice to walk him there so he could swing open the door and reveal the secret passageway through which they switched out the older children for younger ones, he would have the total vindication for which he had come.

Janice shrugged. “If you say so.” She led Josh to the dressing room, the young man put his left hand upon the slats, and he flung the door open.

“So where’s this ‘secret passageway’ again?” asked an amused Janice. “I see two walls. One’s a mirror, and if I allowed you to simply walk into it, I’d never forgive myself. And on the other wall... oh, my God! It’s a poster of Raquel Welch! Throw an alabaster chess piece at it! ...Oh, wait. It’s just a clothes hanger.”

Josh was equal parts dumbfounded and fuming. The one sure thing he knew he could count on was just as much an illusion as anything else in the studio. Some detective; Dr. House probably wouldn’t even condescend to allow Josh to pick up his dog’s crap. And now he was being openly mocked by a woman of questionably-honorable intentions. Josh was quickly beginning to care less about unraveling the mystery of A Man No More’s illusionism and more about returning to Detroit and checking out the classifieds.

“Okay, well,” Josh said, chuckling nervously. “This was enlightening. It really was. You’ve got a really nice place here. Best of luck to your cast and crew in the upcoming fiscal--”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Janice, her eyes searching Josh’s and her hand locked in a viselike grip. “You’re a man of your word, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a man of my word.”

“And you promised that you’d co-star in our next production.”

“I did promise that.”

“So you will.”

“So I will.” The scope of Josh’s suggestibility, brought on by the elixir, had peaked at just the right time.

“And you’ll finally -- finally -- get to see how we pull off our outstanding visual trickery here at A Man No More.”

“I have to know,” Josh whined, a single tear dripping from his left eye. “I just have to.”

Janice smiled. She had her new future .avi file. The film director was pleased, but not surprised; she’d never had any trouble reeling them in before.

They were the talent. She was the tackle.

-=-=-=-=-

The last stop on the tour was meant for Josh. He could tell because it was a kitchen-- a set which hadn’t appeared, even tangentially or accidentally in-frame, among any of the three videos the young man had enjoyed. In fact, it smelled freshly-built, as if the last block of wood had been sawn and the last glop of paint had been blended no earlier than the previous evening.

Janice had brought him to it through a doorway which, ordinarily, would have led to the “back room” of the studio’s faux department store.

Josh, standing frozen in place with the fingers of his right hand inextricably interlaced with those of Janice’s left, looked around in shock at the amount of loving detail that had been implemented on-set. An inviting window on the western wall opened out onto the small pond in the back of the office park; eventually it would be the portal to a Wisconsin sunset. One of the cupboards, which had been left slightly ajar for effect, was fully stocked with everything from Honey Comb cereal to a sealed jar of Vlasics. The cupboards’ knobs were hand-painted with flowery motifs. Technicians scurried around, making sure the refrigerator lit up when it was opened and that the microwave displayed the correct time.

Josh had to give the filmmakers credit for their commitment to verisimilitude. Fake porn, unimaginative tripe thrown together in half an hour to turn a quick few million bucks, looked just that: fake. Which is why the lack of mirrors, pulleys, and green screens bedeviled Josh all the more. The amount of post-production involved in “A Man No More” had to have already broken several records Guinness would never deem fit to publish.

This is a quality production for sure, thought Josh. This could be my big break. A whole new station in life.

Then Josh saw some things that made him shiver.

A small Formica table with two chairs set up at adjacent sides, as opposed to positioned across from one another-- perfect for a doting mother to help her growing little boy learn how to operate a knife and fork. A locking-tray high-chair, complete with a vertical clicking belt at the crotch to prevent Baby from slipping through. And a stairway leading to who knows where? Caught up in the surrealism of the entire day, Josh had completely forgotten that the office building had two stories.

Most intimidating of all was that the set was technically only two-thirds of a kitchen. Sure, the western portion of the set was straight out of a 1970s homemakers’ catalogue... but the eastern third was all business. Men in headphones calling orders to unseen crew members paced quickly and nervously, chewing on pencils and flipping through the cryptic stage directions of worn-out clipboards. A/V techs fiddled with wires and repositioned microphones in an effort to ensure the capture of the crispest sound. Four female stars -- Amethyst, Jade, Opal, and a drop-dead siren Josh didn’t recognize -- sipped lite beers and played Phase 10. Lines of computers were populated by graphics designers, webmasters, and one fellow whose literal job description was “to make sure the computers don’t fuck up.” A newly-hired gaffer, after a few days of trying to figure out how to “gaff” most effectively, adjusted the set’s lighting so that not a single detail would be missed.

Every episode of “A Man No More” was crucial. Every episode of “A Man No More” had to be a winner.

It was all too much for Josh. He didn’t like this anymore. Slowly, unconsciously, he brought his left thumb up to his mouth and pushed it between his lips.

When Janice saw this, some switch in her mind got flipped. Gone were the suspicious receptionist and the reminiscent tour guide. The director had arrived. She let go of Josh’s hand and started hollering at everyone in the bare third of the kitchen.

“Alright, everybody-- Josh is starting early, and so are we! Jasper, position the camera! Oliver, stop pacing around like a lunatic! Team World of Warcraft, enough with the clickety-clacks! This place better sound like a tomb in 30 seconds! Chuck, lower the boom mic!”

This was Josh’s chance to escape, he thought as he sucked his thumb.

But I’ve come so far. And this feels so good. And soon I’m gonna know how they do it. And this feels so GOOD!

Janice sat in the director’s chair and took control of the camera, which hummed to life. The woman’s affinity for film was legend amongst her staff; she’d only go digital when she needed a tracking shot.

“You!” she said, pointing to the one cruel mistress Josh hadn’t seen in any of the three videos. “This one’s yours. Don’t hold back. We’ve spent a shit-ton of money on this and we’re gonna need three shit-tons back. Terry!”

Terry leaned in with the clapboard. “‘The Cost of Curiosity,’ starring Josh, take one of one.” *SNAP*

“Action!”

SCENE NINE.

Int. Studio

Her name was Diamond. Her shimmering onscreen placard would be added in post.

Josh gazed upon her in awe. She was tall, shapely, graceful, and wore a dress of white sequins that lent her the appearance of a wise and gentle angel.

The young man, meanwhile, presented as a silly child, gaping wide-eyed at this woman who so delicately took Josh’s right hand in hers. He savaged his free thumb, his mind attempting to blaze a million new trails at once. He sucked with such ferocity that the boom mic picked up Josh’s slurping sounds and the camera followed a line of drool streaking down his chin.

And Janice’s elixir had only pulled him back to age twenty. The possibility that Josh would have reacted to Diamond in exactly the same manner under perfectly normal circumstances was a very real one. He hadn’t been this entranced by a sight since he watched Curt load up a diaper from the comfort of a stroller.

The actress lowered her height by a few inches so she could look the dumbstruck porn addict in the eyes. “My name is Diamond. Would you like to go out to dinner with me, Joshua?” She had the voice to match her beauty. Each syllable flitted into Josh’s ears like a C-chord.

Josh nodded fiercely. He could hide neither his excitement nor the pulsing tent in his jeans. After all, he was a perfectly healthy 17-year-old boy, and there was a practically-negative chance that anything remotely resembling a proposition like this would ever be offered to him again.

“Okay, cutie,” said Diamond, “but first you’re gonna have to take your thumb out of your mouth. You can’t do much eating when you’re nursing away on your fingers like a baby. And, besides, I don’t date babies. I date men. Real men like you, Joshua.”

Josh wrenched his thumb from his mouth. He hadn’t even realized his tongue had been bathing it in the first place. How long had it been in there? A somber twinge streaked through the boy’s heart. What if he’d blown it already? What if he’d fucked up his chances with this goddess of carnal pleasures because of his perennially embarrassing response to instances of stress?

What are you thinking!? his mind was screaming at him. This isn’t real! None of this is real! It’s totally unreal! It’s totally unreal that I’m going out on my first date with Diamond!

Diamond walked Josh hand-in-hand to the Formica table beneath the western window. The 14-year-old sat in one seat, and his date sat to his immediate right.

In seconds, Jasper walked by with a small candle and an order pad. The tall gentleman with the pony tail was this time dressed as a server for a fine-dining restaurant, and he lit the candle with a flourish.

“Good evening,” he said. “May I get the two of you something to drink?”

“1952 Dom Pérignon, please,” replied Diamond.

“Ahh, an excellent choice, Madame,” Jasper offered with a smile. “We keep our Moët & Chandon in a pretty cabinet.”

This sent the pair of actors into a fit of giggles. Josh simply blinked. What the hell is so funny about that?

“And for you, sir?”

“Um...” Josh was beginning to feel a chill. Wearing clothes fitted for a man 12 years his senior was not helping matters, though his seated position mercifully kept his outfit on his body as the romantic rendezvous progressed. “Uh... 2008... Dumb Parent Yawn?”

Diamond and Jasper practically collapsed in a fit of laughter. Jasper had to rest his hand on Diamond’s shoulder just to keep from falling over. When he asked to see Josh’s ID, this sent the actors into a fresh round of hilarity. At least when they corpsed, it made the scene all the more humiliating for Josh, and all the more enjoyable to future viewers.

Josh’s face was burning. He was really messing up his first date. Why hadn’t anybody taught him any of this stuff?

“I see we have an up-and-coming sommelier in our midst,” grinned Jasper.

“Hey!” retorted Josh, his voice cracking. “I’m not a summer whatever! I’m a man!”

“Yes, you are, Josh,” Diamond said in her most patronizing voice. What happened to “Joshua?” “Now, how about we let the nice man bring you a fine 2011 chocolate milk?”

Josh crossed his arms, stuck out his bottom lip, and pouted. His hands had already slipped into his sleeves. So concerned was he with how Diamond saw him that he never took the opportunity to examine himself. In that regard, he was precocious, acting more like an insecure teenager than the 11-year-old he had become.

“Our meat today is a lovely single-cut filet with béarnaise sauce.”

“I don’t want that,” spat Josh.

“But sir, it is what the chef has prepared.”

“No, I mean, I don’t want your stupid bear mayonnaise. I want A1 steak sauce.”

“And how would you like your steak cooked, sir?”

Finally, I can have something my way.

“Just run a torch over it for a few seconds,” Josh said. “Cool, red outside.”

“Ho ho ho,” Diamond called out, throwing up her hands. “I don’t think so. No 11-year-old in my care is going to increase his risk of foodborne illness by eating raw or undercooked meats.” She turned to Jasper. “He’ll have it medium-well, and I’ll go with rare. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you, Madame,” Jasper replied. He turned to Josh, who had tears forming in his eyes. “And I’ll bring you a niiice coloring placemat and a box of Crayolas. How does that sound?”

Josh was almost certain he was going to explode. This was no illusion. This was Hell on Earth.

He was more turned on than he had ever been in his life.

“Joshua Peter Traeger,” scolded Diamond, having jacked his legal name from his contract, “you thank the nice man when he offers you toys to play with!”

His arms still crossed in too-long sleeves, Josh sat still and moved his eyes upward and diagonally to meet Jasper’s. “Thanks.”

Sixty seconds later, eight-year-old Josh Traeger gripped a blue crayon in his fist and slid its cerulean wax haphazardly across his paper placemat. He was trying to make the sky. It wasn’t working out so well for the poor boy. He had already removed his enormous shirt and thrown it on the ground; it was the only way he could secure crayons in his grasp, but it did nothing to preserve his rapidly-diminishing motor skills.

He discarded the crayon in frustration and it rolled off the table. “Diamond?”

“Yes, Josh?”

“When I was trying to order my din-din, you said that I was in your care.”

Diamond sipped her Champagne. “That’s true. I did.”

“But I thought we were on a date.”

The woman nearly choked, but set down her glass and wiped Champagne off her chin with her napkin. “A date? How is that even possible!?”

“Because you asked me--”

“Look at yourself, Josh! You’re a half-naked eight-year-old boy! Who, from this angle, could stand to run a few more laps around the ol’ baseball diamond. You’re not supposed to keep baby fat your entire life!

“And look at me! Three times your age, a perfect body, and loaded with cash and ambition! What are you loaded with... Hot Wheels and dinosaur figurines?

“Face it, Josh. I’m more than happy to be your babysitter, but I don’t think my actual boyfriend would appreciate seeing me wine and dine a second-grader. He’s great. He knows computers and everything.”

Josh sniffled. “I know computers, too.”

“Real computers, Josh,” Diamond said calmly. “Not Speak & Spells.”

The boy burst into tears. He was so, so humiliated... and so, so hard. His brain hated his body for feeling the way it did. Josh was confused... ensnared within an agonizing limbo of emotion. His sobbing grew louder and he found it difficult to catch his breath. He needed a break.

Josh, then seven years old, turned to face the camera. “C-c-cut...” he whined between sobs.

Janice shook her head, her attentions devoted exclusively to her work. “Still rolling.”

“CUT!!” screamed Josh.

“STILL! ROLLING!”

Josh was six years old by the time their entrées arrived. He wasn’t wearing his jeans any more, per se, so much as he was sitting inside a gigantic pair of them-- a pair which, if Josh made the wrong motion, threatened to collapse and reveal things the boy didn’t want revealed. His shoes and socks had fallen off shortly after his tantrum.

Famished from the emotional gravity of his afternoon, Josh eagerly reached for his fork and steak knife.

“Ah-ah-ah,” said Diamond, swiftly depriving the child of his meat and the utensils with which he had intended to cut it. “You let Diamond cut this for you, little Joshie. You’re way too young to be playing with grown-up tools like these.”

Josh sniffled again.

“Just be grateful that I’m still letting you have steak, instead of subbing it with the kids’ chicken fingers.” Professionally, systematically -- as if she had done it several times before -- Diamond cut Josh’s steak into little kid-sized bites as the tortured youngster looked on. He had no idea why he found this so fascinating-- why his utter helplessness with practically everything at this point was imbuing him with such a primal brand of ecstasy. Josh knew he should have been wildly upset -- and, to a point, he was -- but the very state of being upset by his utter ineffectuality made him feel even littler. Happier. Hotter.

Being a part of “A Man No More” was everything Josh had feared and hoped it would be.

-=-=-=-=-

Jasper was frazzled and frustrated by his unscheduled workout. Chasing down a lightning-fast, ceaselessly-giggling four-year-old -- even on a set as constraining as the studio’s kitchen -- was the stuff of Olympians. Still, the actor never broke character, begging the boy’s date-cum-babysitter to help him catch the little rascal, and for God’s sake, to find the boy some underwear.

Janice was quick with the camera. She cut back and forth between the hellraising toddler and the harried server with truly enviable improvisational skills. She’d been at the game long enough; she knew who would be where, and when.

“This is against restaurant policy!” Jasper shouted between pained gasps. He bumped his hip into the Formica table and Josh’s ramekin full of A1 sauce went clattering and splattering to the linoleum. “For health and decency all diners must wear pants!”

Josh giggled and ran and skipped and hopped and waved his hands in the air. “For health and dee-tent-tee all waiters must not be poopheads!!”

Jasper grabbed one end of the Formica table. Josh stood in a wide stance on the opposite end, looking left and right as if he were a secret agent. It was simply a matter of seeing who would move first-- and which route he would pick.

“I’ve got you now, you little brat,” Jasper grinned.

“I’ve got you now, you little brat,” said Josh.

“Oh, that’s real mature,” said Jasper, rolling his eyes. “You sure are a big boy now.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Oh, that’s real mature. You sure are a big boy now.”

“Stop repeating me!”

“Stop repeating me!”

Jasper smiled. “I surrender and will stop running around the restaurant.”

Josh smiled. “Great!” He picked up a handful of cut-up steak and threw the cubes in Jasper’s face.

“Ackpth! Why, you--”

And Josh took off again. He made it about three feet before being swept off the floor and into Diamond’s arms.

“Alright,” she said. “Playtime’s over, you little demon.”

Josh started whining and beating his fists on Diamond’s shoulder.

“Since you can’t handle eating like a grown-up or wearing big-boy pants, we’re moving on to Plan B.”

-=-=-=-=-

Josh sobbed pathetically as Diamond pushed the kidney-shaped plastic tray into its locked position in the high-chair and secured the clicking safety belt over the three-year-old’s Pull-Up.

“There, that oughta hold you for a while,” Diamond exhaled in relief.

Try as he might, the boy simply could not adjust to the bipolarity of his feelings. After 26 years on this Earth, Josh was humiliated to be back in training pants. On the other hand, he had built his entire sexual identity on humiliation, and he had dreamt of something like this happening to him since he was a teenager. Perhaps that’s why he was so vehemently skeptical about A Man No More for so long, he thought; he simply didn’t want to believe AR was actually possible because he didn’t know whether he would ever have the opportunity to live it out himself. He couldn’t wait to touch base with Brian, Steve, and Curt-- perhaps they had felt the same way, and the foursome could become fast friends.

Josh liked the way his Pull-Ups felt. They spread his thighs a bit and they teased areas of his body that had been crying out for attention ever since he left downtown Chicago. The boy valued the fact, the mere concept, that he could piss himself within reason and see what it actually felt like to be a little kid of questionable continence again... the tragic irony being, of course, that there wasn’t going to be a single drop of pee coming out of him any time soon. Not in the condition he was in.

“Our special tonight,” Jasper said, interrupting the boy’s thoughts as he approached the high-chair, “is whatever Diamond shoves into your face.” The man set a half-dozen jars of baby food across the outer edge of the plastic tray, lined up like a chorus of revolting possibilities. He made sure Josh got a good look at each of the labels: squash, beets, peas, prunes, something called “puréed leeks,” and one that simply had a black question mark drawn on it. Josh assumed that the mystery jar was Jasper’s idea of a joke, but one really can never tell these days.

Diamond tied an adorable white-and-yellow bib around Josh’s neck and draped it over his naked chest, then proceeded to open the jar of squash. Using a plastic safety spoon to deliver Josh’s dinner to his mouth, Diamond made theatrical airplane noises and danced the spoon left and right until it finally came in for a landing. As Josh choked down the grotesque paste, he couldn’t help but remember that, less than an hour previous, he had been on a date with a porn star... one who was now feeding him baby food as he squirmed, barefoot and helpless, wearing training pants into which she herself had helped him.

Little Joshie was a messy eater. Picky, too. Roughly half of the food that Diamond offered to his tiny, whining mouth ended up streaking his bib. Some of the bib buffet could be blamed on Josh’s grossly underdeveloped motor skills and maladjusted facial anatomy; his tongue felt huge in his mouth, his cheeks puffed out like those of a chipmunk’s, and the unfamiliar number of teeth he retained was strangely unsettling to the boy. But the lion’s share of the gunk that would have left Josh’s torso filthy were it not for the bib was the result of deliberate rerouting. If Josh didn’t like the taste of what Diamond was cramming into his gullet -- which was more often than not, especially with the beets and leeks -- he’d simply spit it out onto his chin, leaving the slop to drip down and land wherever it may.

Josh gleefully ruminated upon the dumb luck that had led him to such success in adulthood. His professional training, after all, was in being a renegade, thumbsucking sonofabitch.

-=-=-=-=-

Which must have only begun in force towards his third birthday, because when Josh had regressed to 24 months of age, he appeared to behave positively angelically. Covered in unpalatable, veggie-flavored wallpaper paste he may have been, but the giggly little boy with the 30-word vocabulary was all smiles when Diamond lifted him out of the high-chair. Josh’s Pull-Ups flopped unceremoniously onto the seat, already far too large to accommodate a toddler who had been so abruptly reduced in size.

Janice snapped her fingers in the general direction of one of her technicians, her eyes never leaving the image of Diamond bouncing a nude and cooing Josh on her forearm. “Henry, digital, now. We’re tracking upstairs.” She opened the palm of her hand and, in seconds, a high-quality digital camcorder was filling it.

Josh and the essential staff began making their way up the staircase. In front, Diamond held the baby in her embrace and tickled his chin, eliciting squealy giggles from the youngster. Following the unlikely duo was Janice, eyes transfixed on her camera’s viewfinder, hands trying to keep her tracking as steady as possible in hopes that the final product wouldn’t come out looking like Paraphilic Activity. Bringing up the rear was Chuck, dangling a microphone from a lightweight boom over the procession in front of him.

Their destination was the least impressive set in the studio; in fact, construction on it was still days away from completion. It was a room, no doubt, with four walls, carpeting, and a plate-glass window, but all it had to offer in terms of furniture was a three-paneled couch and the western red cedar coffee table in front of it. A closed door adorned the wall immediately opposite the crest of the staircase. Its purpose was unknown to Josh. He’d seen enough “A Man No More” to know that he was gradually approaching 12 months of age, and when he hit that sweet spot, they’d shut down filming and inject him with whatever they manufactured to return their co-stars to their original selves.

Then, and only then, would Josh finally be granted the opportunity to relieve the pressure of the titanium rod sticking out from between his thighs. The humiliations he had suffered, the humiliations he had enjoyed, the humiliations captured permanently on film for billions of internet surfers and porn addicts across the world to see, had locked him in position. There was only one way out of his erection: patience.

Things hadn’t turned out so badly for the amateur investigator, though he was a little disappointed that the final scene of his motion picture debut would take place in such a spartan location. Josh had wanted to go out with a bang. He’d have to settle for a diaper.

Josh saw that the coffee table supported but one item at the moment: a baby bottle filled practically to the top with a white liquid the boy assumed was warm milk. He clapped at the sight of it. Since the very moment Jasper had taken his order for a steak that never got eaten, Josh had hoped beyond hope that, ultimately, he would end up nursing warm dairy from a baba like a real infant.

When Diamond sat upon the center panel of the couch, picked up the bottle, and rested the boy’s naked form across her lap, any passer-by with a Mason jar could have captured Josh’s palpable joy and sold it to the wanting.

Diamond gently pushed the nipple of the bottle to Josh’s tiny lips. It was partly desire -- but mostly instinct -- that compelled the boy to latch on and begin to nurse. Janice had already rested her digital camcorder atop a tripod she’d set up in advance for just such an occasion and, with some clever positioning and maneuvering, Chuck was able to rig the boom in such a way so as to capture the unmistakable slurping sound of each individual suckle.

Eighteen-month-old Josh was taken by surprise on a number of levels. It most definitely wasn’t the familiar, comforting taste of cow’s milk that washed over the infant’s tongue as he took his baba; it was none other than infant formula, the taste of which Josh obviously had zero recollection. Once the initial shock of expecting to taste one thing and actually tasting something quite different had worn off, the boy discovered that he had no problem whatsoever with hungrily downing the unusual liquid. And with Diamond’s maternal assistance in tilting the bottle upwards, Josh reached satiation at the exact moment his mouth went from sucking on formula to sucking on air.

Janice removed her camcorder from the tripod and walked behind the scene just in time to film the result of Diamond patting her infant diner’s back: a high-pitched, babyish burp, accompanied by a glop of formula blurting from Josh’s mouth and onto the back of the couch. The director zoomed in on the boy’s idiotic smile as warm, white liquid ran down his chin.

Diamond pulled little Joshie Traeger, aged 15 months, away from his standing position on her lap just enough to speak quietly into his ear.

“Only one thing left to do.”

-=-=-=-=-

Josh wasn’t certain he was ready for this. Oh, sure, he knew it was coming; how else could his episode end? What singular item, above and beyond anything else, exists in a class of its own as the definitive object that instantly demarcates babies from kids and grown-ups?

But it was one thing to see other people wearing them. It was one thing to fantasize about wearing them himself. It was one thing to conjure up vivid memories and sensory recollections of the security, warmth, and comfort they so famously provided.

It was quite another to be put in them by a porn star. It was quite another to have it captured on film. It was quite another to have said footage available for free to anybody on the internet... forever.

It was one thing to want them. It was quite another to need them.

The humiliation was back, and it was out of Josh’s control. Everything was out of Josh’s control. In truth, he had inadvertently surrendered all pretense of control the previous Thursday, when he invited himself into a world for which he was not fully prepared.

Make sure you have your fantasies, Josh thought to himself as Diamond stretched him out on the changing pad. Make sure they don’t have you.

The double-thick disposable diaper that Diamond slid beneath Josh’s tiny bottom was bizarrely comfortable, the boy had to concede, and the smell of lilac-scented baby powder that penetrated his nose brought back a flood of memories he’d just assumed had been lost forever. And while the feeling of Diamond’s ivory-soft hands spreading powder all over Josh’s thighs and genitals would elicit a ridiculously turgid erection under even the most conventional of circumstances, the abject humiliation of the events which were transpiring live and on-camera made the psychosexual epiphany of the moment all the more resonant.

When the lovely actress pulled the thick, crinkly plastic up to Josh’s tummy, separating his pudgy legs to such a degree that the boy wouldn’t have been able to walk even if his legs had retained the musculature necessary to do so, Josh made a mental note to vacation again in Fond du Lac for the filming of the inevitable sequel.

Diamond secured each of the diaper’s four tapes one-by-one, dragging an involuntary giggle out of Josh every time the boy felt his baby pants become tighter and more secure. Finally, after tucking in the leg bands of the garment with her fingertips, Diamond pronounced little Joshie Traeger diapered.

He was exactly one year old.

Finally, Diamond pushed the nipple of a baby-blue pacifier between Josh’s lips and kissed him on the forehead. Janice zoomed in and got a closing shot of the infant squirming, crinkling, and inflating and deflating his plump cheeks around his new binky.

“Aaand... cut.”

SCENE TEN.

Int. Nursery

Josh Traeger was bouncy and joyful as Janice hoisted him up off of the changing pad.

“Another outstanding performance, Diamond,” the director said as she bounced the diapered infant in her arms. “You may rejoin your colleagues downstairs for the time being.”

Janice brought the gleeful, clingy Josh to the only other door in the upstairs room. The youngster suckled in earnest on his pacifier and grasped his pudgy hands randomly along Janice’s shoulders. He was on his way to the antidote. Though his baby body served as a pleasant vacation and a nice place to visit, Josh’s mind didn’t want to live there.

Josh hadn’t known precisely what to expect when Janice opened the door and carried him through it, but he was pretty sure that this wasn’t it.

A fully-equipped nursery stretched before his sight. A hardwood crib was in one corner; a changing table opposed it. A diaper pail, a baby’s supply dresser, and a massive pileup of stuffed animals could be found along the walls. And, in the center of the nursery, a playpen -- loaded up with large plastic rings, rattles, and other infant toys -- had been set up. A pair of babies, each scarcely more than 12 months old, sat inside; one of them was gumming sloppily on a plastic ring, and the other was bawling uncontrollably, his eyes shut and leaking, drool dripping from his howling mouth and streaking the front of his yellowed diaper.

Josh sucked on his pacifier a little more insistently and pushed his cheek against Janice’s chest. Something wasn’t right.

Jasper stood in a third corner of the nursery, leaning up against the wall and scrawling a series of numbers into an accountant’s ledger. Though he seemed deep in thought, occasionally chewing on the cap of his pen, Janice approached him anyway.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

“Hey, babe,” Jasper replied, giving his wife a kiss on the cheek. “So this is him, huh? Our little track champion?”

“Yeah.” Janice, as gently as possible, struggled to remove Josh from her body; he was clutching onto her like a superglued chimpanzee. Eventually, she was able to hold him up on display for Jasper, the thoroughly confused baby nursing his binky and kicking weakly through his diaper’s leg holes. “Whaddya think? Two hundred thousand?”

Jasper looked Josh up and down, then returned to writing in his ledger as he spoke. “Eh, make it two-fifty. As petulant as he can be, he still made for an awfully cute kid.”

“Two-fifty it is,” Janice agreed, and brought little Joshie over to the playpen to meet his new friends. She set the new boy down upon his crinkly butt just as the crybaby’s wails of anguish decrescendoed into sniffles of curiosity.

“Well, I see my little ensemble cast is enjoying the accommodations of our green room. Are the plastic rings to your pleasure?” Janice reached over and pulled the toy away from the baby’s lips, a line of drool connecting the two for about a foot’s length before it broke. “Don’t be rude, Steve. Say hi to our new guest. His name is Josh.”

Josh felt his heart drop into his stomach. It was Steve... Steve from the video! His eyes were unmistakable-- Josh had seen them too many times to leave even a single shred of doubt!

The bad date with the wiping problem crawled bashfully towards Josh, drool leftover from his makeout session with the plastic ring dripping from his chin. He pawed curiously at the new boy’s pudgy chest, poked twice at the rigid front of his diaper, and then wrapped his arms around him in a clumsy, infantile hug. Not knowing what else to do, Josh hugged him back.

“Brian? How about you?”

Tears still dripping from his cheeks, snot dangling from his nose, the boy from “Confidence Game” plotted a course for Josh. He had a much more difficult time of it; the former teenager was soaked and a baseball-sized wad of poop was sagging the back of his diaper towards the ground. Eventually, though, Brian reached his destination, and he joined Steve and Josh in a soft and warm group embrace.

Then, just as quickly as the beautiful moment had initiated, it had passed-- Steve rolling off to the side so he could cram his toes into his mouth, and Brian falling onto his back so that he might fruitlessly masturbate through the front of his wet diaper.

Josh stared up at Janice’s smiling mug. He wanted to convey confusion, anger, and sorrow all at once... but the Detroit native celebrating his first birthday wasn’t feeling particularly expressive at that time.

“An explanation, I assume?” Janice mockingly guessed at Josh’s desire.

The baby nodded solemnly.

Janice knelt next to the playpen and tousled what was left of Josh’s fine, downy hair. “Put most simply... it’s the actor’s job to sell his performances to the audience. It’s our job to sell our actors to the audience.

“We’re a baby trade, Josh. We amass healthy, usually not-so-happy, one-year-old boys and donate them to parents who can’t conceive or can’t or don’t want to adopt. Of course, they donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to us in return. We’ve been so successful in such a minute period of time that Jasper and I could conceivably retire five minutes from now. But who’d want to throw away perfectly good money like that?

“Babies are priced based on a number of factors... appearance, comportment, the type of personality they’ll regain when they grow up again. Take Curt, for example. We sold him two days ago for just $50,000. Much like respectable Realtors, we disclose everything we know about our merchandise to potential buyers. So we had to tell the parents that their little ray of sunshine ran a very real risk of becoming a complete jackass of a teenager. And, sad to say, prospective parents just aren’t willing to pay as much for a gay kid.

“But you, Josh-- you’re worth at least a quarter of a million dollars! You should be proud of yourself! And these are just bare-minimum prices. The real fun begins when the bidding wars start. Why, one of our very first sales was an award-winning neurosurgeon. He went for $4.2 million.

“So why the filming? Why the lavish production values? Well, Joshie, I’d ask you this: Would you have ever even come here were it not for our internet presence? Hell, you don’t have to pay for a membership... you don’t even have to register an e-mail address. One little strategic error like that -- one little slip-up that would turn you off to investigating our video files -- and that’s at least $250,000 we’d never see.

“It’s true that there’s more to it than that. I hired the nation’s most talented ‘pusher porn’ stars -- women so sultry and in tune with the human rhythm that they can lay claim to unilateral control over any man at all -- in addition to the film industry’s most promising up-and-coming technicians for a reason: I confess that I get off on the process itself. Personally witnessing big, strong, independent men gradually reduced to helpless, thumb-sucking, diaper-filling rugrats -- over and over again, whenever I want -- gets me hotter and wetter than a Calcutta July.

“And that’s not even the best of it. In case you haven’t noticed, though I’m sure you have, you’ve had the mother of all hardons since you took your first step into our quaint little studio. There’s a reason for that. It’s the same reason why every baby who winds up in this playpen is an irrepressible little horndog: You’re turned on by humiliation. You came here for humiliation. Well, Josh, you have your humiliation, and you’ll continue to have it until you can bring yourself to ejaculation again. Our apologies if you were late to the whole ‘orgasm’ thing.

“Not to put too sadistic a point on it, but I get off on the idea of that, too. All that pent-up sexual energy, just getting worse and worse and worse with every humiliating breastfeeding, poopy diaper-changing, childhood pants-wetting... and never, ever any relief. The only relief you’ll have for years is when you take a nap or go to sleep at night-- and your erection fades long enough to empty your bladder into your diapers. Then, eventually, you’ll wake up, feel your sopping baby pants squishing around your genitals, and once again be willing to sell your soul to Satan for just one cum.”

Janice leaned down, wiped away Josh’s flowing, frustrated tears, and gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead.

“So... now you know.” And she left the nursery with Jasper, who closed the door behind them.

-=-=-=-=-

The sun was beginning to set, casting an eerily calming glow over the mostly-abandoned buildings of TTS Office Plaza. Three babies sat in a playpen, too bored even to interact with one another. Steve had deliberately willed himself into a nap so he could go limp and relieve his aching bladder into his diaper. Brian had finally been changed, yet he still bashed his weak little fists uselessly against the hardness in the front of his diaper, hoping beyond reason that he could beat the system, willing what remained of his adult spirit to help him blow a load that would never arrive.

And Josh? He had to go, and, seeing no other options, did. He pooped his pants for the first time in over 23 years... grunting and squirming and slapping his open palms upon the carpet as he expelled his sticky mess into the seat of his diaper. The strain was almost too great for his suddenly-weakened body to handle; dirtying a diaper is a very different task from using the toilet, where a wall of tightly-secured fabric isn’t pushing back.

Josh began to cry again the second he realized Janice hadn’t embellished a word of her sick custom reality. He was helpless. Humiliated. Ruined. Reduced to a shadow of his former self. And hopelessly hornier than he could imagine any other man in the history of the planet had ever been.

He wanted to yell “cut.” Had he been capable of speech, he would have.

And all he’d hear in reply would be an echoing in his ears: “Still rolling.”

TAG.

VZZT. VZZT. VZZT.

He glanced at the spasmodic smart phone and put it to his left ear. “What?”

“We’re going skateboarding, dude!” came the voice-- male, teenaged, and very excited. “We’re about two blocks from your house, so grab your deck and get your ass out on your porch.”

“I got homework,” said Todd.

“Oh, you always ‘got homework.’ Fuckin nerd.”

“Go on without me. I’ll drive us to the movies later.”

“Fine, dude,” came the unmistakably frustrated voice. “Whatever.”

Todd set his phone down onto his computer desk and powered it off. His right hand was still wrapped around his cock.

“Now, what might this be?” Todd muttered to himself, seeing, for the first time, a link to a BDSM site called “A Man No More.” Todd made note of the unorthodox method by which the offered content was presented. There were three thumbnails arranged in a horizontal row. By squinting, he could tell that each thumbnail featured a different, fully-clothed male, each trying to strike an enticing pose (and failing miserably at it).

The photograph on the left was labeled Brian. In the middle was Steve. And, on the right, Josh, with a garishly-flashing “NEW!” .gif just above it.

The site looked so amateurish. But Todd felt as if he would be remiss if he didn’t at least click.

If you don’t take a chance, nothing happens.

the end of

"STILL ROLLING"

but little trip will return in

"HC SVNT DRACONES"

thanks for reading. -lt

I am currently (September 2011) hard at work on commissions and cannot accept new ones at this time. If you are one of my current clients, please check your Mailbox for updates on your position in the queue. Thank you!

 

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