On the other side of town, crammed into an eighties Florida ranch that his mother kept too warm due to her total reliance on social security, Denny cruised the internet chat rooms. Normally, the ferocious appetite and penchant for sharing among his fellow chat room enthusiasts guaranteed an around-the-clock visual buffet of the young and beautiful from any computer in the world, but that night, all the usual players were silent.
He didn’t feel ashamed about his practices anymore. After all, men were visual creatures, and who was he to try to fight centuries of conditioning? It wasn’t as if he went trolling for kindergarteners. He had a standard. Sixteen was old enough, and it turned out twenty-two states in America agreed with him.
The first time he crossed the line was the hardest, but each time after became easier and easier, as if the highway to hell was greased into a frictionless pathway to depravity. Knowing he was breaking the law added an element of addictive danger to his practice that hit like a high, and he was forever craving the next one.
To quell his frustration, he lit a cigarette and took a drag, then stubbed it out into the tray before blowing the smoke out of a cracked window. In the bedroom below him, he heard her muffled movement, and then the attic door creaked open and her voice filtered up.
“Are you smoking up there again, Dennis?” She coughed a wet, raspy hack that instantly incensed him. “You know I can’t handle cigarette smoke with my asthma.”
“No, Ma,” he shouted in response. “It’s all in your head. Remember, the doctor said it’s a case of lingering Phantosmia from when you had Covid last winter.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” He was grateful her stroke last year ended her ability to climb stairs easily. It kept her from his attic lair on the second floor. It was the one place he was free from her hyper-vigilant surveillance. During her hospitalization, he helped himself to her financial records and discovered his childhood home and the remainder of his father’s pension would be his after her demise. Attempting to speed up the process, he’d tried to convince her to give him power of attorney, but the old bat refused. It was obvious she would be stubborn until her last dying breath—a breath he hoped she’d take sooner rather than later.
“Don’t stay up too late.” Her condescending, smothering tone instantly added to the pit of bitterness that resided permanently in his stomach.
He’d moved in after the stroke to help get his mother to her doctor’s appointments. With him living there, she could stay in her home instead of going to assisted living. At least that was the cover story he told his last blind date that had been a total bust. After ponying up the dough to buy a steak dinner for a woman who wouldn’t even register above a four on the hotness scale, he’d been enraged by her instant decline to his offer for a nightcap at his place.
She’d wrinkled up the nose on her pudgy face and actually recoiled from him. Her! A fat pig with an admin job at an auto parts store! Curvy girl, my ass! She was a delusional liar, fully ensconced in the obese category.
“When your belly extends out further than your tits, honey, you’re fat!” he shouted as he ran alongside her Uber that sped away, but not before groaning as it sank under her weight.
Denny’s rage simmered as he walked the mile back to his mother’s house, following sidewalks and crossing busy intersections, hands balled at his sides. There was a chip on his shoulder that grew heavier with each unsuccessful interaction with a female, and he yearned to make someone pay.
As his social failures piled up, bitterness swelled in the pit of his stomach. A seed of hatred was planted deep in his soul, nurtured with every dis and rebuff that happened. Now it was a mighty oak swaying in the breeze, and his emotional trunk was warped and permanently scarred by their disgust and pity.
In his early sixties, his once thick wavy hair had receded and thinned. In denial, he refused to cut it and instead religiously wore it in a limp gray ponytail held together with a hair tie at the base of his neck. A particularly bad break to his nose had healed at an unfortunate angle, making it hard to breathe, and his bright blue eyes became dull and wary.
In another life, Denny had been an accomplished photographer until the MWACs (moms with a camera) descended like locusts and destroyed his precious industry. He was reduced to hawking his fine art floral photography at pop-up shows that catered to the moneyed retirees in Florida.
It was a feast or famine existence he supplemented by working part-time for Precious Momento, shooting family portraits on the beach—the most cliché of all family portrait locations. A few nights a week, he lowered the bar of his beloved craft, pasted on a smile, and mingled with happy families while he snapped their photos, hating himself a little more with each click of the shutter. With every session, a little of his greatness drifted away like a puff of smoke. Wasted.
Denny dared to take another drag on the cigarette and then covered it with a blast of lemon-scented air freshener when a whoosh sound from his cell phone notified him of a new message. It was from his favorite anonymous chat app, WhisperHub. Hearing the sound, a thrilling tingle surged through him, and like Pavlov’s dog, he began to salivate.
Someone had made a new post in the encrypted chat room. Though end-to-end encrypted chat was originally created to help keep login credentials, health records, and credit card information secure, it didn’t take long for the dirty underbelly of the internet to find its own alternative use for the technology. It was a veil of anonymity that allowed you to remain hidden, often in plain sight, and to carry out your fantasies without fear or repercussions.
His handle was twistedsnaps69. Denny logged in and tapped to open his inbox where one of his favorite members, 1_bad_influence, posted a short video clip and a message.
“How to Make Six Figures in Thirty Days.”
Instantly intrigued, Denny tapped on the video to watch it, and while he definitely enjoyed the content due to its graphic and salacious nature, evidenced by the painful erection in his pants, he was more motivated by the promise of riches.
Twistedsnaps69: Enjoyed the skin-ema. Teach me your ways, oh wise one!
1_bad_influence: 5 Easy Steps to Financial Freedom
- Create a profile and befriend your target on social media.
- Slide into their DMs, pouring on the compliments and expressing romantic interest.
- Exchange selfies. Make it a game. Dare them to record themselves doing dirty things to send to you. Entice your target to push their boundaries and send as many explicit videos and photos as they can.
- After you’ve collected the collateral, it’s time for your pay day. Contact your target via email with instructions on how to keep these photos and videos private with your bitcoin address.
- Stalk their accounts, find their family members online, and threaten to send the material to them unless payment is made. Any girl will pay dearly to keep her dad’s eyes away.
Twistedsnaps69: Does this really work?
1_bad_influence: You’d be surprised how well.
Twistedsnaps69: Diabolical! I love it.
1_bad_influence: You’ll love the money more. I promise.
Twistedsnaps69: What if I already have a collection? I might have access to a private inventory I’ve personally curated over the years.
1_bad_influence: Then you can skip straight to step 5! You are sitting on a goldmine, my man! Track them down and rake in the cash. Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of your beauties will be in the public eye, or better yet, be married to a pastor! All you have to do is send a sneak peek, apply the pressure, and wait.
Twistedsnaps69: You’re a legend.
1_bad_influence: How about you show your appreciation and share the most depraved photos in your collection? Daddy needs a taste.
Twistedsnaps69: Coming right up.
He spent the next hour crawling through his collection of solid-state hard drives containing his most debased digitized content. They were meticulously organized and carefully concealed in the back of his closet in a large lockbox. The collection in its entirety was always a tantalizing sight, but now he was pining for the financial windfall. The ones and zeros stored there represented an untold fortune, and thanks to 1_bad_influence, all the wrongs in his life would now be made right. Denny was finally going to level back up into the kind of lifestyle he deserved. The tide was turning and his ship was coming in.