The Product Tester

Chapter 5

Mary stared into the glass lens of the camera, frowning. "Are you working? The light didn't come on. Let me click the button again, see if that-"

...

The camera beeped, its internal microphone picking up footsteps as Mary waddled back into view. She was working from home, and hadn't applied even basic makeup to hide her freckles, but that was okay, since nobody was going to see the video except her. "Okay, you're rolling, you've got plenty of memory, let's do this."

Sitting down on the couch, she looked into the lens. "Recording this for posterity, and my own notes. It's day one of my attempts to break out of the Lab-D diaper cover. I will be starting with some basic brute force attacks, and moving on from there. First off, I will be attempting manual removal without tools."

She felt a bit silly, filming herself with an obvious, puffy diaper right in the center of frame, but there wasn't a better way to get a record of her experiments. Grabbing the waistband, she tugged at it, trying to get a finger underneath and pull it off her waist.

In response to her resistance, the elastic material of the locked band seemed to tighten, digging into her skin and leaving no room for her to pull.

"Okay, the cover appears to respond to physical stimuli. When I attempted to pull it free manually, it reacted by contracting around my waist. The next test will be simple cutting implements against the material of the cover."

It was just a pair of kitchen scissors, but 'cutting implement' sounded better on the recording. Bending over, she dug in her box of disorganized tools, fishing out the scissors and holding them up for the camera to see.

"Alright, attempting the first cut... now." She pinched some of the plasticy cover, creating a spot that she could get between the blades, and squeezed the handle.

Again, she got no productive results. The cover was plasticy, but it didn't respond like plastic. It flexed around the blades, stretching without showing any signs of being stressed, and when she tried to apply more pressure, the plastic handle of the scissors started to bend. Since the cover had yet to react at all to the cutting, she stopped.

"Okay, the second test showed no better results. It seems to resist cutting force with surprising efficacy." She dug around in her toolbox, looking at the options she had lined up. A knife, a razor blade, pliers, a hammer-

The front of the diaper grew warm, and she frowned. "Huh? What's- oh." She glanced between the growing dark stain on the front of the diaper and the camera, suddenly wishing she'd gone with only an audio recording.

"Screw this, I'm getting out of the cover now. I'm skipping the basics." Reaching into the toolbox, she produced a cordless power drill with a pilot bit.

She didn't completely disregard safety. Drilling straight towards her crotch was a horrible idea, but she didn't need to drill straight down. Instead, she produced a metal plate and two A-clamps from the box, creasing the plasticy material and pinning it onto the plate so that it had a hard back.

With the safety in place so that she wouldn't punch the bit into her own body, she raised the drill, pressed it against the waiting cover, and gently squeezed the trigge-

FUCK FUCK OW SHIT GODDAMN-

Mary didn't know the exact sequence events, but when she turned on the drill, a signal was sent to her collar that told it to deliver a powerful shock. Electricity coursed into her body, intensely painful, and the shock made her hand jerk back, dropping the drill.

As soon as the tool had stopped applying torque and cutting power to the cover, the shock stopped. Mary fell back, panting, fingers twitching in phantom sensation.