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Nurserton #1: Prologue
🕑 Added 2022-04-16 04:13:53 +0000 UTCPrologue
The journalist normally preferred to do his afternoon drafting in a local café. One where he had to pay for the internet. He could pay for it, he wasn’t a young journalist anymore, but the simple barrier of procuring his credit card for a $1.99 fee was just enough to disrupt him. He could sit there with his sources all printed out in a neat stack, he could get there just around the end of lunch before the regulars arrived, those burned out graduate students and other young professionals dithering away their extra hours on personal projects they’d never finish. He’d claim a table for himself, make a grid of the differently clamped stacks of paper, and go until the aproned millennials ushered him out.
For this source, though, he’d need the internet. More importantly, he’d need privacy. Nobody could snoop through the big glass windows or pilfer behind him and catch a glimpse of these correspondences. Regardless, he wasn’t at the drafting stage yet anyway.
Initial contact had been at 2:11 pm on Tuesday, via an email so fake and alarming that Jasper Allenwood was at first frustrated at the laxity of his Gmail’s email filter. Much spam was caught and much got through still, and so he wasn’t all that miffed. He was a member to many publications, both popular and obscure, as any known and connected purveyor of truth and fact must be, and by thus wheeling his address all throughout different mailing lists across the web to become such a member, every mass distribution of ‘EXCLUSIVE’ and ‘YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE’ frittered into his attentions. It was insulting to him that Jasper Allenwood’s name would fall on lists of those who might be interested in salacious clickbait, but the tendrils of a successful journalist must go deep. This contact, though, with an email address that was absolutely dubious, didn’t fit the bill. It was why he clicked on it, why he bothered to read it. Perhaps it was that the message didn’t use all caps, and instead presented itself as a quiet whisper among the other boisterous demands for his attention. Maybe because the message subject didn’t bother to tell him up front that it was for his eyes only, that it didn’t use the word ‘scoop’ anywhere, that it was perfectly spelled all the way through. Spelling, and the lack of it, is a thing bots and spooks use to make themselves seem more real. After all, perfection is considered to be suspicious.
And so, frankly, was what the person had written to him about.
Yet it was also compelling. It presented itself as fact. Take it or leave it, I’ll find another, it seemed to say. For your eyes only was not a threat borne in bold in this email, it was an unstated opportunity. Whomever this writer was knew that if a reader believed and actually read the simple facts that were relayed, all desired behavior could be compelled by that reader’s simple curiosity.
And the need for the scoop. Jasper Allenwood was not above the scoop, even if he was above $1.99 internet café fees. Good journalists are like lawyers, that way. The stuff has to happen in order to write about it.
Jasper prepared for this meeting, which once again would occur at 2:00pm on a Tuesday, one week after initial contact. He researched the terms and everything tangential. He’d not been surprised by any of the fundamental concepts. Kink wasn’t abnormal to a learned man, though it was never the subject of any of his journals or subscribed publications, nor was it even the topic of anything that filtered through his spam. Scandals were not his bread and butter, but this wasn’t scandal. Well, it could be, he hadn’t determined that yet. He could be the implement of scandal in this case. But this wasn’t traditional, at least. This wasn’t someone saying they had an inside look at some Senator or Governor, about what skeevy things they did with their wife and her friends, or what have you. This was…social. This was a movement. This was notable brainfood for serious scholars of humanity and curators of exquisite menagerie.
An Adult Baby and Diaper Cult, is what the person said.
He’d already been familiar with this. Large, empowered, infantile men soiling themselves was a meme that he was aware of, though he was not sure from where this specific and grotesque image originated. That there were all sorts, of course, and not just overweight slobs with mommy issues, that the dominant image of a man in a big buttoned diaper and bonnet was perhaps completely inapplicable to a much vaster reality. This occurred to him instantly as he read what the contact described. He thought of his many ex-partners, who might fit the bill. Suzy, she’d be the best fit, and he’d thought of her instantly. She’d wet the bed when too drunk, she’d bite her lip and call him sir or mister or even, he swore, daddy. That last utterance had pulled him out once, in surprise. She’d swore she’d said dammit until he’d sunk his cock back inside her and they’d never spoken of it again. She wanted anal, she wanted anal chastity. She demanded that he stuff plump metallic and jeweled butt plugs up her keister for dates to stuffy formal dinners.
Where did Suzy run off to?
Sometimes, you can really feel the blood leave your head. Thank goodness he wasn’t at the café. It was 1:50pm.
But this person had said so much more. A thousand of them or more lived there. An entire campus. An entire enclosing wall to keep the world out. Shipments of food and even greater shipments of diapers. Diapers by the truckload. A complement of adults (they were all adults), numbering in the hundreds themselves, to take care of the thousands of diaper changes a day. A complicated hierarchy that cowed and rewarded the thousands based on potty training.
It was too absurd to ignore.
He replied. “Thank you for reaching out about this. I have many questions and am not sure I believe the statements you’re making. Would you have time to discuss this over the phone?”
Days went by, and then a reply, from a different email address, starting a brand new thread.
“Yes. I would like to discuss life here with you.”
He almost skipped over this email too, until he connected its perfunctory oddness as a reasonable reply to his last message. The clandestine nature, the use of a new thread, of replying with a new message, of, after a few more correspondences agreeing to a very specific and duplicative time, reminded him of the time he’d broken a story about forced labor abuse in American Prisons. Someone was trying to be secret, and someone didn’t have that much free time.
The appointed time had arrived, however. They could not talk on the phone, the person explained, in email. But they could use Skype. Jasper could do this, voice chat if possible, but the person demurred to this as well. They’d text back and forth using the Skype app, and that’d be all. Jasper did not even know the username of the individual. Apparently, they would request him sometime after 2pm. He had given the contact his address, and now all he could do was wait.
“User13469 has sent you a message request,” came an alert, popping up with an obnoxious sound from the toolbar of his computer. Jasper navigated to the alert and accepted it.
“Hi there, I’m here. Thank you for contacting me.”
“I don’t have much time.”
“I understand. We can share information in pieces, over time, is that okay?” Jasper typed quickly.
“Yes.”
“What’s your name,” he wrote, going too fast to add the question mark.
“I shouldn’t say.”
“I understand. Down the road, I will need it. I won’t have to publish it but I will need it.”
“Okay. Later.”
Jasper’s fingers rapped on the table beside his keyboard. He knew he’d have limited questions to ask, and this contact seemed spooked. It was nothing he couldn’t handle..
“How did you find out about this place?” That was a good one. Being able to gain information about this place independent of this source would be crucial, and this question was innocuous enough.
“A few years ago,” the person said.
“I see,” Jasper typed, a bit frustrated. “Did a friend tell you about it?”
“Yes.”
“How did they find out?”
“I don’t know.”
Rats. He should have seen that coming. “What did you think, did you do any research on your own.”
“No.”
“How did you know you wanted to live there?”
“My friend told me all about it.”
“What did you think?”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
There was a pause, long enough for Jasper to consider that whatever external pressure caused this person to message only at two in the afternoon, for only a short while, with different email addresses, with as minimal paper trail as possible, had come. But it had not, and the dots indicating that User13469 was back in action reappeared.
“Her name is Suzy.”
Jasper, sitting in a chair without wheels, pushed his chair back as if his chair did in fact have wheels. Suzy? He thought. That was coincidental. That was too coincidental. Jasper almost pushed the chair too far back.
Relax, there are plenty of randy minxes named Suzy running around with plugs in their asses. His Suzy was a very bohemian lady, and not a social media person. She could be his neighbor now for all he knew, her phone deactivated and incense pouring through the arranged plants in her window.
Right?
It could also have been a sign. Something to prove veracity to him and him alone.
“Thank you,” he wrote. He needed to go faster. Ten minutes had gone by already. “Is it against some rule to talk to me?”
“Yes,” was the quick answer.
“Okay. Is there anything you feel safe telling me about?”
“I’d like to tell you why I reached out.”
“You can do that, I’m very curious.”
“I need your help to make things the way this place should be.”
Jasper rapped his fingers once again. He didn’t have an answer to that. It was a strange answer, and hardly at all in line with what this contact had revealed about the place previously. Adults running around in diapers, sex everywhere, nothing of real value being produced. What about this place could still be alive if he wrote about it? If the whole world knew, and indeed, Jasper Allenwood was not being egotistical when he considered that telling him something was essentially telling the whole world, how could it survive? What was the should be that this individual was talking about, other than utterly destroyed? He had assumed that this person was reaching out to him from a place of concern and alarm. But this was different.
Even more interesting, in a sense. He had no obligation to maintain the state of the world. Jasper Allenwood was sworn only to truth and its telling.
“And how should it be?” he typed. But there would be no answer. Not that day nor the next, and nor on the following Tuesday.
