Story #154: In Too Deep:

Story #154: In Too Deep: (Content Tags: Protagonist is a bad person, humiliation, fake pictures, messy diapers, internet bullying) In the new century, with the advent of the internet, there arose countless ways for mankind to connect across all barriers and do things in a way never before seen. It was a bastion of knowledge not seen since the library of Alexandria caught flame, and a greater communication tool than the telephone or television had proved to be. But just like all good things, it was ruined by the poorest impulses of those who flocked to it. Keyboard warriors fighting in flame wars, insincere internet trolls lurked around every corner for the 'lolz', brain-rotted reactionaries who rode the tides of an endless culture war, and a rainbow of grifters, hucksters, and conmen. The internet could be summed up with one word: information. Conveying it or receiving it, whether intentionally or not, whether legitimate or in bad faith. Information was power, and the web was drawn in such a way that the fascists of yore would've drooled at the thought. While corporate interests, aggressive governments, and shady billionaires were the big dogs in this fight for the virtual playground, it was the little dogs that were far more relevant to people's lives. Macro-scale propaganda and astroturfing was far more problematic in the long run, but the many microcosms of a million different niches, that was what people were immediately impacted by. Maximus Mudd was a problem on that smaller scale. Better known online for his outrage-content channel 'Maximum Mud', Maximus had achieved great internet notoriety in a very short time by throwing any sense of ethics to the wind. He fearmongered, he grossly misrepresented the facts, he outright lied, and he did it all without worrying about the consequences. It would be an understatement to say that his content was trash, and it was often on the borderline of being libelous or outright hateful. He pandered to the kind of crowd that he could easily rile up with accusations of 'woke' and other such reductionist drivel. His content was surprisingly not monetized though, which made him an outlier from his peers. A good chunk of his content danced on the line of the terms of service, but then why not some service site? The reason was because he couldn't get payouts. One needed a bank account to do that, and Maximus would have needed the approval of his parents, who were wholly unaware their son even had a major online presence. Maximus Mudd, owner of the 'Maximum Mud' channel, wasn't even sporting chest hair yet. Hell, Maximus Mud wasn't even past wetting his bed or being home alone without a babysitter. Maximus Mud was ten. A direct consequence of sticking a tablet in a toddler's hands to placate him, while never considering the dangers of what later might happen with having unfettered access to a cesspool. Max had parents that were far too busy with their own lives to think about what their fifth grader got up to in his freetime. Maximus wasn't the most impressive specimen: he was short, he was a little chubby, he was awkward, and he wasn't all that gifted in anything. He wasn't a complete outcast, but he was pretty low on the food chain and he got bullied from time to time. Perhaps that was a big reason why he'd turned to this persona. He was tired of feeling weak or small or weird; he wanted to be the bully, instead of just being an easy target for a bigger kid on the playground or for the cool kid to belittle in class. He didn't necessarily believe all the gross things he was saying, but he loved the attention and adoration it afforded him, and he took great pleasure in seeing how upset it made others. He felt powerful, for better or worse. Max didn't just do it on his channel though. For people in his life that he had specific grievances with, he would turn to total anonymity to cyberbully and harass. That felt even better to him, to be able to see the impact of his cruelty in the real-world consequences around him. He would lie and lie and lie, all with a gleeful grin, as his victims fell to tatters before him. All the people around him were simply pawns on his chessboard and he decided who deserved to be destroyed. They were little dolls on strings and he was the puppeteer! It was all fun and games to him, until the fateful day that he opened up a notification on his Discord. 'Bro u seen this yet??? Wtf?' One of his few real-life friends, though they primarily just played Fortnite together, had sent him a picture. It was a picture of Max, and in that picture, Max was pretty clearly wearing what appeared to be a diaper. It looked very real, and the context of the picture, with the boy's shorts around his ankles and his anguished face, made it hard to simply dismiss as a photoshopped piece. 'U were daipers blud? Lol' This was where it had started, at least from the perspective of the one in that picture. It was the first time that Max had been on the receiving end of this digital devastation; he'd shared humiliating images of others, both real and fake, but he'd never felt that sting for himself. Max would spend the evening reassuring his friend that such a thing was simply untrue, and digging into where the horrible picture had come from in the first place. The chain of custody wasn't easy to pinpoint, but the gist that Max got was that it'd originated on some Instagram account that no longer existed. His sleuthing skills weren't anything special, which was unsurprising, since his online content had the bare minimum amount of investigation or critical thought. The case was cold as soon as it'd come to his attention; whatever account initially posted it had been deleted, and the only clue he had was that it was almost certainly someone from his class. Who else would have a picture of him to use? Or would even know him for that matter? He could tell it wasn't photoshopped, since no such similar picture of him existed, so it must be a very sophisticated AI generated image. The concerning part was how real it looked, and how the background in the picture actually looked like it matched with his bedroom. Nevertheless, it had to be artificially constructed! That was his defense at least. It'd happened on a Friday and spread like wildfire over the weekend, so it was impossible to ignore come Monday morning at school. The first thing he heard was one of the bullies calling him 'diaper boy' when he sat at his desk. It boggled the mind that something so clearly fake could propagate so fast and have people convinced so easily. If Max had been a little more self-aware, then he might have realized that he was upset about something that he himself did on a regular basis. His whole channel was about pushing fake news and convincing morons that it was true, so why would real life have any different of an outcome? The diaper comment continued on throughout the day, no matter how adamant that Max was about the picture being totally fake. He even offered to drop his pants and prove that he wore underwear like a normal kid, but people were less interested in proof than he would have thought. Some were reasonable, but many just wanted to believe something salacious in lieu of what was actually reality. The lie was more interesting than the truth. The matter was embarrassing, but Max knew it would eventually become old news. He knew better than his peers how the news cycle worked, even when just on a small local level like this. Better yet, he didn't have to wait for this to blow over, not really; he could manufacture his own tabloid-level junk to capture the attention of his peers. What to put out there was where he was struggling. There were plenty of people in his class that he could pick to make stories about, but there had to be some finesse to it. The lie had to be absurd enough to catch attention, yet grounded enough to be plausible without proof. He decided on a few easy ones: Garrett the jerkish jock was secretly gay. Tanya the popular girl was seen kissing a nerd. Nathan's parents are secretly getting a divorce due to infidelity. Janice the class brainiac got caught cheating. All bangers in their subtlety. They had a hook, but they all still seemed possible. Worse than that, they all targeted preconceived biases that other kids had against these tall poppies. They already harbored a seed of resentment in their psyche, and that seed was just looking for permission to bloom. Max offered that permission. These lies, which he was disseminating throughout many online channels, would have no proof with them. They didn't need it though; with this shotgun spread of deceit, at least one pellet would find its mark and grow to obfuscate his own shame. When he'd just about finished, he noticed his name on one of the channels that he'd been using. It was another discussion about the photo that'd been shared around, but this one had comments of people sharing their stories about him. No names used of course, except for him. His full name, in fact. The users claimed to know him in some vague way, and that they could confirm that he wore diapers. Riskitbizkit: "I was in class with him one time and I literally heard him poop in his pants. It was super wet and gross and it smelled really bad." BozosBizzareAdventure: "My dad works at the school and he said that Max's parents had to beg the principal to not put him in the retard class. He even has his own diaper bucket in the nurse's office, because he craps his pants so much." 7/11isaninsidejob: "He lives on my street, on Little Lane, and I see his mom taking huge boxes of diapers out of the car for him. I've seen him having to throw away all his dirty diapers before on trash day. Lol, I'll try to get a picture next time." PopcapSniper420: "Max went to the same summer camp as me in second grade. They didn't have a special ed cabin, so they stuck him in the bedwetter cabin. I still got a pic from it." Max had been reeling from the fake stories being made up about him, and then he'd been caught off-guard by yet another picture of 'him' as he scrolled down the page. It indeed looked like a younger 'him', and it was him standing inside a cabin with a pajama top and a thick diaper on. It looked especially grainy too, as if taken on a camera of low quality. It *had* to be someone from his class that was doing this to him. That was the only way that these fakes could be so well made; they would have needed a picture of him from second grade, which they could have gotten from a yearbook. But why? He hadn't publicly stepped on any toes... Perhaps it was a victim of one of his rumors? Someone who had somehow peeked through the veil of his anonymity to see it was him. That was the only solid theory he had, and it made for a long list of suspects; Max had been stirring up shit behind the scenes with his peers for as long as he'd been in school. The profiles that posted the stories were all throwaway accounts. Their slander was the sole post in each of their histories, and Max obviously suspected that all three belonged to one set of hands on the keyboard. Not long after he'd discovered it, he got another message from his 'friend', the same who had clued him in on the first picture. It quickly became another defensive conversation about how the second picture was also a fake, and so were those lame stories that'd preceded it. The next few days of school were a little rough. The teasing continued and kids got more comfortable with asking demeaning questions about his supposed diaper dependency. By the third day, he had been half-tempted to pull his pants down in front of the class and prove definitively that he wasn't wearing a diaper. Worse, his little rumor seeds had proven to be duds. The story of the 'weird diaper kid' was far more scandalous than anything that Max had put out there. It helped that the diaper rumor was ongoing, with more 'testimonials' being posted online about Max's big secret. Last week, Max had been a nobody. Not liked or hated, but ignored. That's the way he had liked it, since it allowed him to have his twisted fun with maligning people's lives. Now, he was the kid that everyone in his class was talking and joking about. Kids talked about waiting for the next 'drop' online, speculating what other bombshells would drop. Vultures who cared not for the truth, who covered their eyes to avoid it. He was meeting the very audience that he otherwise loved, but now he was the one in the hot seat. The next picture didn't come until Friday afternoon. School was almost out and he'd started to hear the snickering of his surrounding classmates. Everyone was looking at their phone, and then they were glancing over at him with a discerning eye. Max scrambled for his own phone and checked the place where the drops had been happening: MaxMuddbutt: "My mom is friends with his mom and she made me hang out with him a few months ago. Dude is seriously stupid, I don't know how he passed Kindergarten. At one point, he pulled his pants down and that's when I saw he had a diaper on. He squatted down, and his face got really red and sweaty. Dude was farting and talking about how he had to 'make pushies'. I took a picture, because it was so funny, and I'm glad I didn't delete it." Below the false chronicle was another picture. The other two had been bad, but this was humiliating on another level: he was squatting and the diaper around his waist was clearly loaded with his own filth. It sagged, it was lumpy and misshapen, and it had brown stains. It made Max sick to look at. "Look at his face getting all red. Maybe diaper boy is going in his pants right now." "I can't believe they let him in the normal class." "I always thought he smelled funny." "Did you guys see that screen name on the post? 'Max Muddbutt'? Pretty fitting." They were whispering to eachother while the teacher was grading quizzes, and Max felt helpless to defend his honor. This wasn't slowing down, it was accelerating, and he still didn't even know who the mastermind behind it was! He looked between the snickering faces, as if trying to discern who the culprit could be. Someone in here was ruining his life with fake news and deep fakes. Someone in here was determined to make sure his name really was 'Mudd'.