The young man sitting in the middle of the 24-hour diner nursed his black coffee and was keeping his head down. He had made eye contact with the waitress as she brought it to him, and this had been a mistake. He couldn’t stand to look anyone in the eyes anymore, and he knew this, but some part of him that was still human automatically looked up at her and smiled as she brought it. That's what he had told himself, but the sick, self-loathing part of him which had emerged in recent weeks spat out no, you filth, you wanted to get a good look at her, so you'd have a description. But you'll get a better look when you get home later, won't you.
This was the first time he had been in public after not leaving his apartment for about a month. Two days after the CD had arrived, he decided not to go to work, and then did not leave the apartment until the night he decided he had to force himself into public (and why had you? "Self-care?" Is what you've become really a thing worth taking care of?), and found himself at this shitty diner well past midnight. He thought it'd be a place his deadened stare would fit right in, or at least not be too out of place. If there was anything he did not want want from this little excursion, it was human attention.
But thankfully, nobody was paying attention to him, it seemed. He certainly had stopped paying attention to anyone else in the diner. He had no idea where the waitress had gone, he was trying to pretend the four or five other customers were not really there, and he was not paying enough attention to notice the man in the grey hoodie enter the diner and go to the restroom. He had underestimated how hard it was to see other people after all that time spent… doing what he was doing (you can't even fucking acknowledge what you are). No one else was like him. No one else had seen what he had seen, what he had chosen to show himself. Hell, no one else could even imagine anything like that existing. How could he look anyone in the eye again?
He finally sipped his coffee, expecting it to be at least room temperature and not ice cold as it was. He also noticed s smell of cigarette smoke that had been present in the air for a few minutes now, although he had not seen anyone smoking. He'd been here a long time, with only his thoughts. It was the first time he had really tried to put the events leading to this point in perspective. While it was happening, it just kind of… progressed.
He could barely even remember that first message, it felt like so much longer than one month ago. He had received an email from 'moc.yrotc|feht#moc.yrotc|feht,' a message which only caught his attention due to how strange the account sending the spam seemed, as well as how eye-catching the subject line was. "Get REAL access to all porn, ever." Curiosity got the better of him and upon opening the message he was greeted with what he assumed was a Photoshopped nude picture of some popstar he recognized but did not know the name of. As the picture did not catch his eye (although he did notice that it seemed much more real than other celebrity nudes he had come across before) he quickly moved past it in the email to see the rest of the message. It simply read "reply to this email with JUST your address and receive access to all porn ever created (and not!), for FREE." Nothing else at all. Subject line, picture, sentence.
As he sat in the diner, he worked over the decision that followed him after he had opened that message. Why had he done it? Why had he not only trusted the message to not be a scam, but taken up the offer? He knew part of it was based on how little it was asking of him. Most scams, he thought, asked for more information. And if someone was really trying to rip him off, was his address really the one extra piece of information they'd need? What can anyone do with just, specifically, someone's email and their address, that would be worth doing? What would there be to gain? The whole thing was too bizarre to be a scam, he thought. They weren't even asking for anything or even implying that he would have to give anything else.
But that leaves the question of why he followed through with sending his address. He would never know for sure, he thought. To see what would happen? Sure, that was as good a reason as any. It wasn't because he somehow knew what he would eventually be looking at. That couldn't be the reason. The part of him that still felt like a person needed that not to be the reason.
Of course he had felt a wave of regret and fear upon sending the email, and spent the next three days going in and out of a nervous fit as he wanted for anything to come of it, hoping that nothing would. Any desire for what was promised by the ad had been replaced by paranoia that he had given his address to some terrorist. He checked his mail each day as if it might explode when he opened it. His trepidation did not stop him from leaping backwards when he saw it.
A brown square. Well, it was clear what it was. A disc in a blank, brown wrapper. No address, neither his nor a return. He opened it, hands shaking, and was greeted with a generic CD with two words scribbled across it in black marker.
The following hours were some of the most exciting of his entire life. Even as he hated the wretched hedonist he had become, he could admit that it was truly exhilarating in the beginning.
After he booted up Thefactory.exe for the first time, and saw the prompt "What would you like to see?" for the first time, his mind raced as he thought of a way to test how real this was. He thought of a specific porn video he could remember the title from, and entered it into the command prompt. Sure enough, the first video result was that video he had been thinking of, as evidenced by the thumbnail. He was about to chuckle at how spot-on the CD had been when he noticed that there were more videos. Many more. At least twenty or thirty. Each video, again apparent through the thumbnails, was a separate scene from the first one, still starring the titular woman whose name he had to search to help find it, but filmed in different locations, with different male actors (as the title of the video searched specified a male), and at different times, as the actress appears to be visibly older and younger in several videos. He was confused. As far as he was aware, this woman had appeared in a handful of amateur videos before quitting very early in her career. There should not have been this many, and even if there were he probably would have been familiar with a couple already.
And so he had discovered magic. That was still the only explanation. He could make anything appear in a video. Of course every video he generated had to be pornographic, but he began testing the limits of what this CD could generate. He actually began thinking of it like a science experiment, running tests to see what knowledge could be gained from the CD. One of his early experiments, shortly after he had fully accepted that the disc was "magic," involved putting himself in videos. By searching "I [blank] in the foreground while two people fuck in the background" he was able to "direct" himself to do whatever he wanted on video, performing tasks as simple as holding up a certain number of fingers and as complicated as reciting digits of pi (which he certainly did not know in real life). He discovered how easy it was to do this with anyone, and further experimentation revealed that he could make anyone appear in these videos, whether it be famous people, historical figures, or completely regular people. Searching for names of people he knew would always result in the people he was thinking of, and vague descriptors of people he did not know the names of still resulted in the people he was thinking of appearing.
The experiments got more complicated and the results more fantastical. He generated videos with "the person who actually killed JFK" (who anticlimactically turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald, clearly enjoying himself very much judging by his performance). He watched Stonehenge being built as two ancient people made love in the background. He watched world-famous masterpieces being painted, all the while trying to ignore the undulating flesh in the periphery of the video.
All this experiment, this pretending that he would not use Factory Porn for its intended purpose, was only to fool himself, he now realized. He was always going to be the thing sitting in the diner.
He had been using it for pornography a good amount, but his experiments took up the lion's share of his time with the program for the first week or so. It really changed when he was searching for Jack the Ripper. He was trying to see if the program would reveal the identities of famous unknown people, when one of the thumbnails caught his eye. The video purported itself to be "*REAL*" footage of Jack the Ripper with his last victim, the one whose body he spent hours mutilating. For some reason that was the one he clicked.
And watched the whole thing.
And within a few hours, a video like that was not enough for him anymore.
The man no one saw had been keeping an eye on the man in the diner for about a week now. The week of watching a man not leaving his apartment had left the man in gray more than a little irritated, at both himself and the man-shaped lump of self-loathing who now had his head lowered as he stared into a pool of black liquid.
Of all the leads on the Factory, he certainly had not expected that fucking CD to be the one that panned out. He let a "hmph" escape his lips in a sort of half-chuckle at the phrase "fucking CD" being so appropriate in this instance. The man who was not there had learned very quickly to laugh at his own jokes, as very few other people would hear them.
He refocused. The Factory. That's why he was here, parked in front of a diner, watching a pervert with his head down, staring at a small, still pool of black coffee in his cup. Because The Factory was planning something. Something bigger than the "something" that they and every other so called "Group of Interest" is usually planning. God, he was thinking in Foundation-speak now. He needed a vacation.
Focus, again. This really wasn't like him. What about this was stressing him out so much? He was more than equipped to get this guy to give him the disc, whether through discussion or violence. And on the off-chance that this was not a real Factory Porn appearance and it's some kind of trap, he'd survive. He'd learned as much as he could about the man in the diner to minimize that possibility, but it was still there. No matter how much he thought he was two steps ahead of anyone else, you never knew in this game.
He stepped out of the appropriately-gray car he was parked in, and lit a cigarette as he started walking towards the diner. His hood was pulled up and his hands were in his pocket, but he knew he would not be noticed no matter how he walked or what he looked like. He continued smoking as he entered the diner and quickly made his way to the restroom, glancing at everyone in the diner in one quick motion. No one appeared to have noticed him, there was not even an unconscious reaction to someone entering a room. That was good, as it meant most likely none of them were looking for him, since he had found that the people who were looking for him always had the easiest time seeing him, unfortunately.
He quickly scanned both bathrooms for possible hiding spots, escape routes. He hated having to be this paranoid, but it was necessary. All this for some porn addict, he couldn't help but think.
The man who had received the CD did not see or hear Nobody approach his table from the restroom, and in fact it took a surprising amount of time after Nobody had sat down for the man to notice his presence. He wore a hoodie that the man would describe as the grayest he had ever seen, although he was not sure what that even meant. The hood was over his face and slightly obscured it, and he found it indescribable. That was the only thing he could think of. It was like he could see the features on the face of the hooded figure in front of him, but could not say what they were.
The man was frozen in panic until Nobody spoke. "Gregory," he said. "You're not in trouble. I'm here to help."
His eyes widened as the moment of fear intensified, in direct opposition to Nobody's intention. "I promise. I'm only here because I'm looking for something called The Factory, and I think you can help me find them. Do you know anything about that?"
Gregory's eyes began to fill with tears. Here it goes, Nobody thought. The hysterics, before I get any information out of him, of course.
But, to Nobody's surprise, Gregory let his eyes remain filled with tears as he began to speak. He told the man in gray everything, from the beginning. It was as if a dam had burst. In hushed tones so only Nobody could hear, he left out no relevant details, describing how he came into possession of the CD, what he discovered it capable of. He only began to falter once he began describing what he ended up using the CD for, after his initial period of experimentation.
"I… I won't go further, I guess," he whispered, meekly. "I used it for what it is supposed to be used for."
There was a heavy silence. Gregory noticed Nobody had been making some notes in a notebook while he had been talking. It was the thought of other people reading whatever was being written about him that broke him.
"I'm so sorry." He quietly sobbed. "I don't know how I can live anymore. I am the most disgusting…"
"Now, come on," Nobody said. "You know you only became this because of the disc. If you want to be done with it, and you want those responsible to eventually get what's coming to them," he continued, leaning forward like a salesman coming in for the kill, "give it to me. I can use it to find them. I bet you keep it on you, don't you?"
A little tidbit he had learned from a Foundation document at some point. Subjects given access to a copy of the CD end up asking to take it with them everywhere so as to not lose it. He was hoping he'd save himself a trip to this guy's apartment. He didn't want to think about the smell.
Gregory winced at the question. Of course he had it on them. He was at the depths of an addiction to the most putrid filth imaginable. No, worse than imaginable. The tears flowed slowly and silently as he produced a brown square from his own hoodie pocket and passed it over to Nobody. The man who was not grabbed it almost too quickly, as if he was gluttonous for the lead this CD represented for him.
"See?" he said, putting the CD away, "It's all over now. You can be normal. Now, I know this is a quick goodbye, but that's kind of my style, you know, and I really must be going." He stood up from the table and began to leave
Even as Nobody faced away from the table, he saw Gregory's face. Nobody had never seen anyone so pathetic. It was like a begging animal, he thought, but worse still, because at least animals don't have the capacity for self-loathing. Nobody saw clearly what would happen next. Gregory would go home, no longer using Factory Porn, but still dying. Hating himself to death, whatever that ends up looking like. A casualty in a war waged by all of these anomalous entities against one another, with Nobody trapped in the middle. But fuck, Nobody wasn't really the trapped one, was he?
Goddamn, why was he turning around and heading back to the table? Why was he reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small pill bottle, unscrewing the cap and placing a small red capsule in his hand?
Nobody spoke quickly. "Listen. You're the smartest guy I know to find this thing," he holds up the wrapper holding the CD, "but it happens to everyone. Everyone loses themselves to it. You're not worse than anyone else. I mean, hell, you probably held out way longer than anyone." There was another painful silence. He slapped the red capsule on the diner table and said "Take this." He then quickly turned around and left.
Why had he done that? There were way more five-hundreds than the Foundation thought, but not so many that giving one to a guy to cure them of their sexual deviance didn't make Nobody wince.
As he got into his car, he glanced in the backseat at the folded gray suit. His "Foundation clothes." He liked keeping up appearances around those folks. He thought of Gregory, and the way his natural inclination when given Factory porn had been to run tests on it. Thoughtful tests, too.
He wasn't supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be separate from the rest of them. Why was he feeling so empathetic towards this random guy? Was he getting soft?
He pushed those thoughts away and tried to think logically. Of course, no matter what the reason for it, it'd be good to get The Foundation a new employee. He'd be able to use them for inside information, that's the reason. Why else would Nobody go so far out of his way to help them?