"What the hell is this?"
I stood at the foot of my bed with my arms folded tightly across my chest, staring down at the thing like it might blink back at me.
A matte-black carbon case sat right in the middle of my bedsheets — smooth, untouched, spotless. No logo. No return address. No brand name. No shipping label. Nothing.
Just… a black box.
A delivery, apparently meant for me.
"Is this supposed to be a birthday gift?"
I turned twenty last week. A week. If it was a gift, it was pretty late to the party.
And honestly? Who would even send me one in the first place?
My dad?
Yeah. Right.
He was technically my only family, but "father" felt like a stretch. He didn't actually care about me — he just pretended to. Covered the basics. Wired money every month for my apartment in Redwood City — which, to be fair, was a pretty nice place. Sent me a couple hundred bucks to live on. Not much, barely enough, but still… it could've been worse.
I wasn't ungrateful. I just wasn't stupid.
This was the same man who hadn't gotten me a thing for my last birthday — not even a text — while buying brand-new cars for his stepdaughters. Brand. New. Cars.
So the idea that he suddenly grew a conscience for my eighteenth birthday? Yeah, no.
And before you ask — no, it wasn't from friends. Or a girlfriend.
I didn't have either.
No friends. No girlfriend. Just a high school diploma and the quiet satisfaction of surviving long enough to graduate. Honestly, that was probably the best gift I'd gotten in years.
I reached out and placed my hand on the case.
It felt… expensive.
Heavy. Solid. Cold under my fingertips.
"Well," I murmured, more to myself than anything else, "let's see what kind of horror movie setup this is."
I grabbed a small cutter from my desk and carefully sliced through the thick tape sealing the case shut. For a second I hesitated — that dumb little gut feeling telling me to stop — but curiosity won. It always does.
The lid opened with a low creak.
The first thing I saw was a camera.
Not cheap. Not plastic-looking. A sleek black body with deep crimson accents along the edges. I lifted it slowly, turning it in my hands.
It felt… serious.
I didn't know a single thing about cameras, but even I could tell this wasn't some toy or budget model. This was professional. Clean. Heavy in a way that felt deliberate.
I set it carefully on the bed.
Next: a watch.
Black band. Red detailing. Tactile buttons instead of a smooth touchscreen.
It looked expensive. Like something you don't casually throw into a box and ship to some nobody kid living alone in an apartment.
Then I saw the laptop.
A full-size, matte-black laptop sitting snug in its foam cutout.
I actually laughed out loud.
"No way…"
This was insane.
A camera. A watch. A laptop. All brand new.
For me?
Was this… really from him?
Maybe he didn't write anything because he felt awkward. Too embarrassed. Too proud.
That would be on brand for him, honestly. Pathetic in a very familiar way.
Still, something felt off.
I looked deeper into the case, pushing the foam aside. A few cables, neatly coiled. Charging cords. Adapters.
And at the very bottom…
A black sheet of paper.
Not cardboard — real paper. Thick. Smooth.
White lettering printed cleanly across it.
---
Welcome, Adam.
The lens is hungry.
And Heaven is already watching.
---
My stomach twisted.
"What in the actual hell is that?"
That wasn't my dad.
He might be emotionally distant, embarrassing, and dumb in his own way — but even he wouldn't send some dramatic, creepy crap like this.
And he definitely wouldn't send this many gifts.
So yeah.
It wasn't him.
"Hm?"
The sound slipped out of me before I even knew I'd made it. My fingers were still holding the torn envelope paper when I felt it: something stiff, matte, caught behind the lining like a secret that didn't want to be found.
I flipped the sheet over.
A black card slid into my palm, heavier than it had any right to be. No logo, no text, nothing except a single gold 7 stamped dead center. The numeral caught the dim lamp-light and threw it back like it was smirking at me.
I turned the card over and over, half expecting some hidden hologram or QR code to pop up like in the movies. Nothing. Just that arrogant little 7, gleaming like it knew something I didn't.
"Okay… weird flex, universe," I muttered, and set it aside.
The watch came next. Sleek gunmetal band, face darker than the card, almost liquid. I wrapped it around my left wrist—cold at first, then warming fast, like it was drinking my pulse. Felt expensive. Way too expensive for whatever joke this was supposed to be.
I tapped the glass once, curious.
A woman's voice—smooth, amused, way too alive—curled into the room.
"Welcome, Master Adam."
I jerked so hard the wheelchair creaked. "Huh—!"
Before I could finish choking on my own spit, a perfect 3D hologram blossomed in the air above the watch. Not some cheap phone projection either—this thing was crisp enough to cut yourself on. Letters floated like they were carved out of light.
I just stared, mouth half open, feeling like a caveman who'd stumbled onto a spaceship.
"Wow," I breathed. "Tech's moving way too fast for my broke ass."
Then the actual text loaded and my brain blue-screened.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
EROS LENS │ HOST #7 │ ADAM WHITE
CURRENT RANK: ★ 1-Star Channel
ORGASMS HARVESTED: 0
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
ACTIVE QUEST (1)
Task: Film yourself reaching climax.
—Solo masturbation accepted.
Time Limit: 71:59:47 remaining
Reward on upload: $500 + 100 Orgasm Points
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The silence that followed was so complete I could hear my pulse thumping in my ears like a drunk guy trying to kick down a door.
"What the actual fuck," I whispered.
I blinked. Blinked again. Rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand until I saw stars. The text didn't even flicker. It just hung there, serene and obscene.
Active quest.
Orgasm points.
Five hundred dollars for… beating off on camera.
My gaze drifted to the little black camcorder sitting innocently on the desk. The red lens stared back like it already knew what I was going to do.
Upload to my channel, it said.
What channel?
"Oh." The word left me like a sigh. My eyes slid to the laptop, closed and smug on the bedspread.
I rolled over, snatched it up, flipped it open. The screen woke instantly.
Fingerprint.
One word, glowing soft white.
I snorted. "Yeah, right."
Still… my hand moved on its own. Found the little square sensor below the keyboard, pressed my index finger to it. A thin green line swept across the pad. Then the webcam flashed crimson—once, twice—scanning my face like it was taking my measurements for a coffin.
The screen unlocked with a gentle chime.
I sat there, frozen, feeling like the room had tilted five degrees off axis.
The homepage that opened wasn't Windows. Wasn't anything I recognized. Just deep glossy black with blood-red accents, and the words LENSRAW pulsing slow in the center like a heartbeat.
My channel was already there.
Eros Lens – Host #7
0 Videos
0 Subscribers
Balance: $0.00
There was even a big friendly button that said UPLOAD YOUR FIRST CLIP ♡ with a little animated droplet bouncing beside it.
I laughed—short, sharp, a little insane. The sound echoed off the bare walls of my shitty studio apartment and came back sounding like someone else.
"This can't be real," I said to the empty room. "This is way too polished for a prank. Like, evil genius money went into this."
My eyes flicked back to the hologram timer.
71:58:12 remaining.
I swallowed. My throat clicked.
I'd been broke for so long that five hundred bucks felt like a winning lottery ticket someone had taped to my forehead while I was sleeping. Rent was late. Fridge was empty except for half a jar of off-brand mayo and something that used to be bread.
I had literally nothing to lose except my dignity, and let's be honest, that ship sailed around the time I started selling old gaming accounts to eat.
"All right," I said; "Let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes."
I grabbed the camcorder. It was heavier than it looked, cool matte plastic that warmed instantly in my grip. Flipped the screen out. Hit record.
The red tally light blinked on, tiny and accusatory.
I rolled back to the desk, parked the chair, angled the lens down just enough. My heart was going triple-time now, ridiculous, like I was sixteen and about to lose my virginity instead of twenty and about to become an amateur porn star for mysterious cosmic perverts.
I propped the camera on a stack of unopened mail and an empty Monster can so it had a clean shot of the chair, my lap, everything that mattered.
My hands hovered over my waistband.
The hologram floated patiently beside me, counting seconds off my life.
I smirked—shaky, but real.
"Fuck it. If this is a scam, at least I'll get to come before they steal my kidney."
Thumb hooked under elastic.
Pants down.
Here we go.
I angled the camcorder down, the little flip-out screen showing exactly what it was about to witness: my completely soft, totally unimpressed dick just kind of lying there like a sleepy caterpillar. The red tally light stared at me like a tiny demon eye.
This was next-level weird. I've jerked off in pretty much every pathetic corner of this apartment, but never with a film crew. Never with an audience that might be, what, interdimensional perverts? Aliens? A secret wing of the NSA that gets off on broke dudes?
Whatever. Rent's due in six days and my bank account is doing an impression of a desert.
I grabbed the lotion (some off-brand aloe crap that smells like a hospital) and the scratchy one-ply tissues I buy in bulk. Reached down, then stopped.
"Nah, man. I'm not doing this dry and sad."
Wheeled over to the desk, dick still out like an idiot, and woke my personal laptop again. Typed the name that's lived rent-free in my head since I was fourteen: Elena Harris.
Boom. Hundreds of pictures. Red carpets, paparazzi shots, that one magazine cover where she's she's in black lace underwear and looking like she could ruin your life with a smile. I picked the lace one. Classic. Reliable. Has gotten me through many a dry spell.
Rolled back into frame, propped the camera steady, and finally wrapped my hand around myself.
Jesus, this felt like I was performing surgery on national television. My face burned. My palm was sweaty. For a solid ten seconds nothing happened; the little guy was stage-fright central.
Then I looked at Elena's smirk on the screen and remembered that one scene in that spy movie where she walked out of the pool in slow-mo. Blood redirected south. We were in business.
I kept the camera pointed down, catching every slow stroke, the way the lotion glistened, the way my breathing started to hitch. It was clumsy and awkward and honestly kind of hot in a train-wreck way. My wheelchair creaked every time I shifted. The room smelled like cheap soap and desperation.
It didn't take long; been a couple days, and the sheer absurdity of the situation had me half-hard before I even started. When I came it was sudden and violent, a rope that shot straight through the pitiful tissue shield and splattered across the monitor. A perfect bullseye right on Elena's million-dollar cheekbone.
I barked out a laugh that sounded half-crazed. "Sorry, queen. Never gonna happen in real life, but damn if that didn't feel poetic."
Chest heaving, I sagged back in the chair, the cheap faux-leather sticking to my bare ass. Hit stop on the camcorder.
The second the red light died, the watch buzzed against my wrist like an excited puppy. Same time, the laptop chimed.
[New clip detected. File transferred and ready for upload.]
"Holy shit, they're all synced," I muttered, shaking my head. "That's… terrifyingly convenient."
I cleaned my hands on my T-shirt because of course I did, then rolled back to the desk. The clip was already sitting there in the upload window, thumbnail frozen on my flushed face mid-orgasm. Lovely.
There was a basic editor (trim, blur face, whatever) which I did just in case.
I hovered over the UPLOAD button for a solid minute, heart jackhammering against my ribs like it wanted to escape before I did something stupid.
Clicked.
The progress bar crawled. 10 %… 37 %… 88 %…
Then: ding.
Two notifications exploded across the hologram and the laptop screen at the same time.
[$500 USD credited to your account. Withdraw anytime with your Eros Black Card.]
[1,000 Orgasm Points awarded! Visit the Seraph Wish Shop to spend.]
I stared at the glowing numbers until they blurred. My mouth was dry. My palms were wet. I felt like I'd just sold a tiny piece of my soul and the buyer paid in cash, upfront, no questions.
I didn't even bother pulling my pants. Just yanked yesterday's hoodie off the floor, shrugged it on, grabbed the black card, and bolted, well, rolled like hell, out the door.
The hallway smelled like old curry and weed. The elevator groaned like it resented being woken up. Outside, the night air bit my bare legs; I hadn't even noticed I was still commando under the hoodie. Didn't care.
There's an ATM half a block down, under a flickering streetlight that makes everyone look jaundiced. I got there in record time, wheels rattling over cracked sidewalk.
Fingers shaking, I slid the black card in.
The machine didn't even ask for a PIN. Just blinked once and displayed:
WELCOME, MASTER ADAM
BALANCE: $500.00 USD
I stood there, wind whipping the hoodie around my thighs, staring at those three zeros like they were written in actual gold.
"Are you fucking kidding me?"