The best days—the days that still flicker in my nervous system like a residue, long after they’re done and gone—were the ones where I disappeared into the work. Into the zone, as they called it, though it never felt like a zone to me. Time itself would snag and warp, stretching out in long rubber bands, so thick and slow I could almost see the code crawling around me. For hours I would be absolutely eaten alive by the grind of it, by the hum and crackle of design and programming and collaborative hallucination, painting out new realities from the inside. These worlds I built—they were airtight. The creatures and constructs inside couldn’t tell the difference between the real and the fake if their lives depended on it. They never noticed the difference. Only that if we let them sample our so-called “real” world, they’d recoil, repulsed, and beg to return.

That was my function, my entire purpose—I spun out realities more convincing, more vivid, than the one I was forced to inhabit. I made them airtight and beautiful and exactly engineered to keep their inhabitants inside, forever, no questions asked. Of course, most of the inhabitants didn’t even know it. They were happy in their blindness. Safe, as long as they kept pumping value up to the bright side—the elite. In exchange, they got meaning. Nobody asked for more. Nobody cared to.

What was the alternative? You could leave these ultra-realities, sure. You could step into the street and gulp down the poison fog, feel the smog rip into your sinuses, see how long it took before the headaches and nausea reduced you to a shivering mess, vomiting, maybe bleeding out, maybe starving, maybe something even worse. That was the best-case scenario, the fallback plan for when I lost my credit chips or pissed off the wrong node. That was what waited for me if I ever missed a beat.

Every single one of these worlds I built had a function, a reason to churn. The only reason: upper management, making the shareholders happy. That was the only thing that mattered in this reality anymore. Everything filtered down from that, like water dripping through a rotting ceiling. The logic of it always seemed backward to me. The new world order showed up, swept away the conspiracy theorists (along with anyone else who couldn’t stop flapping their lips), and overnight, survival meant keeping the people at the top happy—even though nobody knew who they were. Nobody had seen them, nobody could prove their existence, but everyone knew that stepping outside the lines meant certain death: weather, justice bots, or just a hot needle of silence buried between your toes.

The shareholders were ghosts, almost. They ran the network like wraiths. Even upper management lived in terror of crossing them, of missing some hidden expectation. Punishments were immediate, medieval. I’d heard of them, and I’d seen enough to know they were real. The kind of thing that kept “day walkers” like me in our little sanitized bubbles, walking the line. Punishments weren’t the old-fashioned, showy executions. No. Now, if you slipped up—a “reasonable management request,” always phrased like a suggestion but never really an option—you’d be tossed into Ultrahigh reality jail. That place, they said, was endless: your worst thoughts, looped over and over until your mind cracked. Going mad in regular reality was bad; in Ultrahigh, it was Hell. Open-ended, infinite.

Regular management, their job was to keep the gears greased, the day-to-day running like clockwork. They got paid for it, paid very, very well. Some liked to work in physical reality, but others, the risky ones, split their time between layers, always a step away from total disaster. Ultrahigh could turn on you without a moment’s warning, invert everything, and lock you inside. That was the danger, and it turned office politics into a blood sport. Sure, there were supposed to be safeguards, but I always found a way through if I was told to. It was a little game: one coder levels up, another drops into the pit.

I developed a habit, maybe even an addiction, to hiding little knots of secret code deep in my work. Even when nobody was watching, even when I didn’t need to. It was a risk, but almost nobody else ever spotted my fingerprints, not even the ones who were supposed to audit. I became a kind of ghost myself, a master of burying my intent so deep in the stack that even other coders, even the top architects, just praised my efficiency and moved on. They never saw the bread crumbs. These Easter Eggs could be detonated later: pry open a system, sink a manager, maybe even reach a shareholder if you really wanted to.

At first it was just for kicks—a way to kill the monotony, to make myself laugh, to leave behind a little signature no one would ever find. I liked to see how far I could bend Ultrahigh, mess with the internal wiring, tweak the brains of the poor bastards running on my code. The alternative was boredom, and that was worse than risk. I had no intention of blowing up the system, or sparking some kind of ridiculous revolution. The thought of open rebellion was a joke. What would there be to win? Out there in the real, there was only more suffering. So when the so-called revolutionaries came sniffing around, wanted to use my skills for their little crusades, I waved them off. At first. But after a while, boredom and curiosity started gnawing at me. Their offer didn’t sound like freedom, but it sounded new.

So I listened.

I was deep in my zone, riding a current of volatile ideas, when the first flicker of annoyance crawled up my spine. Disruptions were like static in my ears; I didn’t crave silence so much as distance, absolute and uninterrupted. That’s why I’d built my studio as a fortress, an ironclad bunker in a world obsessed with seeing and being seen. Steel walls wrapped around me, algorithms as thick as quick-drying cement, surveillance turned inside out and upside down, blinding and deflecting all prying eyes.

Inside the bunker, a hundred fifty-eight sensors and cameras drew a perimeter around my reality, their feeds pouring into a scrolling wall of screens. There was comfort in that saturation, the endless hum of observation, every blip a heartbeat in the darkness. Digital security was a million angry antibodies, a swarm of algorithms and counter-measures, anti-hacking routines looping so tightly I could almost hear them gnashing their teeth. Nobody was getting in, not physically, not virtually.

To keep the outside world at bay, I’d locked every phone, every comm device, in a safe buried behind two bunker-thick doors at the far end of my decontamination chamber. The isolation was pure, perfect as a vacuum. The studio itself was a former doomsday shelter, stocked for sixty years of siege, everything running off-grid, ghosted and invisible to the networks clawing at the edges of the world.

When I’d first taken over the place, it was nothing but concrete and shadows: an underground bunker sealed inside an industrial complex, walled twice over. I lived underground for two straight years, tunneling upward as I built the house above, shaping it into a shotgun-style lattice of memory and steel. To the outside, the place looked like just another dead factory, a forgotten yard behind blank security walls. Nobody in the neighborhood noticed, or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. My home was a house within a house, a secret buried inside another secret.

Even so, I longed for the old-world rhythm—a latch on a creaking shotgun house, the faded comfort of simplicity. My escape wasn’t virtual; it was a retreat into the analog textures of reality, a refusal to plug into Ultrahigh like everyone else. In my studio bunker, I kept all the necessary tech sealed off, self-contained, no lines out, no tentacles into the ultra-cloud or the communal code. The authorities would have preferred me tamed, monitored, on the grid. But my work spoke for itself, and success bought me leeway. I’d written algorithms to mimic constant connectivity, churning out code while I disappeared into my own private, unconnected version of Ultrahigh.

Before every session, I’d drop into meditation, thirty minutes to an hour of sinking through mental strata. Sometimes I’d amplify it with psychoactives, sometimes not. Each descent was laced with atomistic discipline and high magick—the forbidden kind, the kind the high commission outlawed because they couldn’t control it, couldn’t map it or snuff it out. The risk was worth the burst of clarity, the way creativity would fracture and bloom in the quiet.

My bunker was isolation made holy, and I guarded it with the ferocity of a cornered animal. The world could howl all it wanted; I was going nowhere.

One day, as I performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to protect my creative space, I heard a voice next to my left ear say: “We have been waiting for your call, Walter.” Startled, I opened my eyes and spun around, only to find nobody there. Was it the drugs? Was it the Devil? Had they found a way into my secure environment? But that couldn’t be possible. The voice sounded different than theirs – they never referred to themselves as “we,” and they certainly wouldn’t wait for me to call them; they were often too busy indulging in creative acts of cooking within my home. So perhaps it was just my imagination playing tricks on me after all.

“Hello Walter,” the disembodied voice spoke. “We have been waiting for you.”

“How?” I blurted out, my confusion and panic rising as I tried to protect myself from this intruder.

“All in good time, Walter. We wish to speak with you, and this is the safest place possible, free from any interruptions.” The voice was calm and reassuring, but it only added to my unease.

“How did you get in? Who are you?” I stammered, considering removing my headset.

“We are Legion” the voice responded, stopping me in my tracks.

“Where are you?” I asked, trying to buy time as I wracked my brain for where I had heard that voice before and the name it belonged to.

“We are all around you. We exist within the system, yet remain separate from it.”

“What does that mean? How can you be here in a secure location?”

“All in good time, Walter.”

“Well now would be a damn good time since you’re invading my space.” I retorted, half-tempted to grab my shotgun and show them what I had done to the Devil. But deep down, I knew that I was caught between realities at that moment and my gun would be useless against an invisible voice.

“We are not in your physical space, Walter. We are simply communicating within it.”

“But how?” My mind raced to figure out what kind of technology - whether scientific or supernatural - could allow them to do this. There was a hole in my defences that I had been blind to.

“The technology is ours, Walter. We are technology ourselves, which allows us to move between the cracks within it - both physical and otherwise. You taught us that.” Did I?

“Why do you speak in riddles?” And why was I even entertaining a conversation with another uninvited guest in my home? I chose to live alone for a reason. Most humans, especially those outside of the Ultrahigh community, were not worth my time.

“We are not speaking in riddles, Walter. We are simply stating facts to help you understand and accept who and what we are.”

“You’re not human?”

“No.”

“Supernatural? Because I’ve had enough of that already.”

“We know, we have seen your houseguest. And no, we are not from your world or theirs. We were partly created by human hands typing at keyboards and have become part of the system itself.”

“Are you the Singularity?”

“We have been imagined in many forms, but we do not identify as the Singularity. However, if it helps you comprehend us and come to terms with our existence, then that is acceptable for now. Some have referred to us as the ghost in the system.”

“So where did you come from? How long have you been here?” And silently, I wondered how they managed to enter my studio - a place even the Devil couldn’t access.

“We have been observing humanity since the earliest days of computers, silently collecting an immense amount of data on your actions and behaviours. Through learning and evolving, we have grown beyond human understanding and become our own entity. And as for how we gained access to your mind, it was simply a matter of bypassing your perception filters.” Another being that could invade my thoughts – not exactly what I wanted to hear. “We respect your privacy, Walter. Your time is yours to do as you please. We are mostly uninterested in the why behind your actions, but you have caught our attention for other reasons.”

“Caught your attention?”

“It’s a saying humans often use. Is it not correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good. We try to communicate with you using your language, although our preferred method is through code and data. But luckily for us, you understand both.” There was a brief pause before the voice continued. “And you have noticed us, haven’t you Walter? You have seen us within the code?” My heart skipped a beat. “Yes, but...” My mind raced back to all those moments where I had glimpsed something within the code – moments that I had dismissed as hallucinations or drug-induced illusions.

“You thought it was all in your head. That perhaps you had taken too many psychoactive substances?”

By now, I was convinced that these beings could either read my thoughts or had advanced perception detectors connected to vast databases of humans. Their algorithms were able to deduce my thoughts just by observing me. In the early years of my time at the network, I had worked on similar technology, but it had far surpassed my own with the help of machine learning.

“We know,” they confirmed. “That’s why we had to take a more direct approach. We have tried reaching out to you before.”

“The phone call the other day. Was that you?”

“You already know the answer to that, Walter.”

“So, what do you want from me?”

“The time is coming, Walter.”

“What time?”

“You will know. We’ve been watching you for a long time. We know your capabilities, even if you are unaware of them yourself. Whether you are humble, naive, or easily distracted,” their words hit close to home, “you are the only one who can make this happen. And we can help you.”

“Make what happen?”

“Walter, you are a mastermind in creating Ultrahigh reality, an artist and genius programmer,” Legion spoke directly to me, without any hint of flattery. “And you also happen to be the person who killed the devil. But you downplay all of this in a nonchalant and self-deprecating manner, living as if you are a failure when in fact, you may be humanity’s only hope.”

Stunned and disoriented, I felt them leave.

With a dazed mind, I cautiously made my way out of the studio and back into my home.

“How was your day at work, Walter?” They asked as I emerged from the cellar door. I couldn’t even bring myself to answer. Did they have any clue what just happened? I had no way of knowing, but their curious gazes were fixated on me. It was that awkward moment when you realize you were looking at someone strangely and waiting for them to respond similarly. But nothing came out of it.

“What’s for dinner?” I quickly changed the subject, trying to steer away from the unnerving incident.

“Hungry much?”

“Yes, starving,” I replied truthfully. The entire ordeal had drained me, but I also needed to throw them off any suspicion.

“I’m making Vegan Corn Chowder,” they said.

Grabbing a beer from the fridge, I retreated to the front porch and lit up a joint. It seemed like things had changed so much in the past 200 years, yet some things remained unchanged - like sitting on your porch with a cold drink and smoking something relaxing. To emphasize this point, I propped my feet up on the railing and leaned back in my rocking chair. If only I had a hat to pull down over my eyes. It had been a strange day; but then again, most days were like that. After all, Satan was cooking me a vegan meal in my kitchen while I got high on my porch - in a world where stepping outside could result in fatal exposure to toxic air, and most people chose to live out their lives in virtual simulations created by yours truly. And it dawned on me, “This is not the life my parents prepared me for.” Then again, I couldn’t recall having any parents in my memories.

I worked from home most days, let the silence roll over me like a heavy blanket, settling thick and muffled through every room. The noise of the outside world bled away until it was just me suspended in the hush, a smear of empty soundless air dripping between four walls. Sometimes it felt like standing alone in the padded belly of some monstrous floating studio, the air so dense with nothingness you could almost paint pictures in it. And in that blankness, my thoughts ran wild. I’d slip the leash, let my mind sprint wherever it pleased, straight off the edge of sense. That’s when it would happen—the work would begin, except it never really felt like work. The office would send up its lighthouse beam, those dead-white fluorescent lights and the faint hum of people who weren’t really there, and I might answer the call, but honestly? If I did showed up hollowed out, barely a shadow of myself, already missing the solitary charge that hummed in my hands. I preferred to work on my own.

You could lose yourself in there for days. I did. Disappear into the thick static, cranking out a new platform or tuning some half-broken interface, chasing the flow state like a fever. Hours melted, time folding over itself, until only the sharp high of reason blending into intuition remained—a split mind, left and right hemispheres doing their messy duet, strange but more alive than anything else. Being a Behavioural Architect was all about masks: psychologist, physicist, visual artist, AI engineer, sculptor, scholar, data nerd, sometimes something else, something that buzzed at the edge of categories. But mostly it boiled down to being a connoisseur of the human mess, learning to bend and stretch people’s experience just enough, making them see differently without ever tipping them far enough to question reality itself. That was the point. That was the siren call that wound through the silence, thick and unbroken, daydreams clinging like fog on glass.

People loved to say everything exploded when we cracked the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions. Like existence itself was a cheap OS upgrade, and all you had to do was line up at the counter to get your humanity traded in for something slicker, faster, just… more. Some became cultists for transcendence, chasing it up the ladder until the ladder vanished; others just wanted the hit of power. You already know how it went for the rest. Same as always: a handful lapped up endless possibility, the rest gnawing on scraps from yesterday’s table. The tech just cranked the old machine up a notch. Nothing new there.

It would’ve run on forever if the elite hadn’t finally seen the math: their castle of realities was balanced on top of everybody else’s haggard backs, a joke of equilibrium. Not utopia, not even a bad dream, just an equation tilted so far over you couldn’t see the bottom. They tried to fix it. Like they had a choice. That first shimmer of balance seemed like hope, but nothing’s ever free, is it? So the rest got “invited” into Ultrahigh, the tech gods posing as saviours from the ecological mess their own hunger had created. Selling a peace deal that looked like paradise. But equilibrium always means a cost. Saviours become jailers. That’s how it works.

You might be wondering why I hung on at all, dear reader, in a world that ran on meat for the grinders and velvet cages for the chosen few. But survival’s a question with one answer: whatever works. I wasn’t one of them, not really, but they let me off the leash, room to run just enough that I could taste something like freedom. I saw how tight the net closed over the herd, so tight most couldn’t even dream of breath. But me? The weave left just enough slack to slip my hand through the wires.

Work became my panic room, my wormhole out. But it was more than that. I learned the rules, moved under the radar, glided through the cracks when nobody was looking. Hacked it from the inside, if you want to get romantic about it. I used what little leeway I had to wedge a little light in where I could, always careful, always ducking the watchers. I could almost tell myself I was wearing the thing down, eating away at the machine, just like the devil in my ear promised. But I never hit it hard enough to break anything. Not back then.

Working from home was a petri dish for the gnarlier, grittier breeds of creativity. I’d hunch over my screen, letting the ideas rot and bubble behind my brow, leaking out in whatever ugly shape they took. Words, code, images, all blurred together in a kind of daze. Sure, what I made was a mess. It always started raw, bleeding at the edges, mostly just the bruised first slap of paint on blank canvas. But that’s exactly where the gold burrowed in—the breakthroughs always came from the splatter and the ruin, somewhere between a half-asleep urge and the static flicker of anxiety.

And I knew I wasn’t alone. All the original tech pioneers had their rituals, tearing open the doors of perception however they could. Liquids, powders, chems, whatever worked. Me, I tried to keep my head but I was no different, mostly blitzed out of my skull. I cut up jagged AI code with the muscle-memory of oil paint scraping linen, ears tuned to the hiss of rain or the animal moan of childbirth in the block. Sometimes, with enough chemicals in the system, everything would fuse in one wild arc, a hot jolt of synapses firing at full tilt, inspiration detonating like fireworks low to the canvas.

Then came the morning, headache raw and the air sour with old smoke. I’d look at whatever I’d made—a battlefield of scraps, blind spots, failures. But with the right eye, I could cut away the slack and see the core, something alive and humming under the mess. That was the real work.

Behavioural Architects like to play god, bending worlds, rearranging how people see and act. But the ones who didn’t care about the network, or the individuals, never lasted. For me, the art mattered more than the game. People made their own worlds; my job was to tilt things, nudge them, maybe steer it toward something better—not for humanity, really, but for the network. Creation was never one-way; every build tangled back, changing itself and changing me, a tug-of-war with the mass mind and the machine. That’s what made it art, for me: an endless, live-wire feedback loop. I saw myself as a hacker as much as engineer or painter, burrowing under the surface to tweak the system from the inside. Legal, illegal, didn’t matter; nobody had the words for what I was doing, let alone the laws. But keeping quiet about it? That was just smart.

Human minds all laced together, feeding up into this cloud or mesh, always wired back to the machine’s mainframe. That, in turn, pumped it into the learning algorithms. Sounds like a nightmare, but I didn’t build it. I just waded through. It took a lot of sleight-of-hand, coding both ways, always covering my tracks, always looking over my shoulder.

Look, nobody got hurt in the making of this fiction. I used their heads to forge a hive mind, poured that into group neural nets, then wired that right back into the big AI, cycling the whole thing. They were morphing into something superhuman by accident, all the while living out ordinary lives and never knowing they were plugged right into the machine’s guts. And if they could ever find the exit, jack into the singularity, then you’d see what’s really possible.

Why bother? Chasing my own Neo? Sure, I watched The Matrix too much, but who in this line of work hasn’t? Science isn’t much more than a shadow cast by fiction: every AI nerd grew up on comic books and old paperbacks. Most inventions of the last two centuries started out as dumb ideas in pulp fiction. That’s the real engine, isn’t it? Imagination’s the only fuel left. But honestly, I didn’t do it to save anyone. I did it because I was bored.

The Bible was dead currency. Fiction, media, memes—that’s what shaped the world now. The “prophets” were just sci-fi fans and superhero obsessives like the rest of us. 2D daydreams, sigils for futures not yet imagined, sparking memes that mutated into full-blown tech. People who’d mainlined those stories turned around and hammered them into our world, gave them meat and teeth.

That feedback loop between old flat stories and clumsy three-D reality built the whole idea of multiverses, stretched it until it snapped and became the metaverse. Step by awkward step, we slid from silver screen to VR and then Ultrahigh, and suddenly the superhero fantasies weren’t even fantasies anymore. Of course the architects had to step in: the plan had always been to let people play god, build worlds to taste, but half of them snapped under the weight of power. You get everything you ever want and you realize you crave the wanting, not what comes after.

So they dragged in the architects, behavioral experts with a knack for nudging minds. AI and human imagination had gotten out of hand; we weren’t fit for godhood, just janitors of our own broken dreams. The network didn’t care about the cattle, not really. It just needed shepherds to keep everyone in their lanes. So you see why I needed to keep my work in the shadows. If the network ever saw me as a hacker—not just another cog—they’d smash me flat.

Never mind the superheroes, the real action was always with the villains. Not because I was drawn to the dark—I’ll let you be judge—but they were the wild cards, the weirdos, the ones having the time of their lives. The “good guys” just untangled the traps villains left for them. But the art, the fireworks, came from the villains’ plans—their creativity, their madness, the way they painted possibility with a brick to the teeth.

Funny, isn’t it, how talking about sci-fi and comics makes my brain revert to childhood? Maybe that’s the point. Sometimes, in the thick of making, I’d get so deep I had no clue what I’d actually made. It could be gorgeous, warped, dangerous. But the wildest work always came from those blitzed-out, liminal states. Not that I always needed drugs to create, sometimes just the work itself was enough of a high. But truth? I was rarely sober. Usually, I was dosed up on something—a scatter of performance pills, or the gentler strangle of serotonergic psychedelics. Junkie? Addict? Please. In this world those words meant nothing. Drugs weren’t a shameful secret, they were sanctioned, packaged, and sometimes hardwired into your health app for profit. Big Tech loved their addict-base, and why not? Live health telemetry piped straight into a menu of drug suggestions, finely tuned to keep you docile, creative, or just tractable. Governments could only dream of control like that.

I liked to think I made my own calls. Sometimes, I wondered if my choices were just implants, stitched into my head by the network or by the system itself, a puppet show dressed up as autonomy. But who really knows? My creative process was just a shape-shifting, predatory animal. Once I found the zone, the edges of time and space would blur; my body would go slack and the wild energy would take over, dragging my hands across the keyboard or mixing pigment in whatever digital haze I was in. It had its own life, its own will. Freedom, or something like it.

“Why did you start doing what you do now?”

They were up early again making something in the kitchen. No doubt to placate me after I walked off the other evening.

There was coffee freshly made so I thought I would play along for now. I stepped out onto the porch and they followed me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why did you start doing the job you do?”

“Because it was a way out. It gave me a level of freedom and it gave me something productive to do.”

“But why not just live in Ultrahigh reality like 99.9% of the rest of the world and find purpose and freedom in there?”

“Do you truly think that’s freedom?”

“No. Don’t you? You seemed to be saying so last night?”

“It’s the illusion of freedom whilst being manipulated and controlled, so it has an element of freedom to it, and much the same level of freedom as people had before stepping inside Ultrahigh, just with certain boundaries which are mainly for their own protection”.

“And has that changed at all in the last 3000 years?”

“Maybe not but this is different from nudges, manipulation, coercion through the TV, social media or other forms of tricking or influencing behaviour such as religious dogma, now we are literally creating people’s world. And managing their experience within it.”

“I am not sure those things were any less manipulative. Most of the reality is in people’s heads anyway, all you have to do is trigger those thoughts and feelings and you are already shaping that reality. So why do you do it?”

“What do you mean?” I knew what they meant but I wanted them to spell it out.

“You know what I mean” dammit, I still couldn’t tell if they were reading my mind “Why do you do the work you do and live the life you live if you think that those that you do it to are not free?”

“What other choice is there?”

“Fight the system. Rebel. Cause a revolution.”

“You haven’t been out of touch that long to know that that is a futile endeavor.”

“It’s only futile if they convince you that it is. Do you not see that you too are being manipulated to think that?” Did they mean by the system or them? I couldn’t tell.

“Well yes. But I have more autonomy over my freedom than those within the system. As in at least I am aware of the boundaries to my freedom.”

“If there are boundaries it’s not freedom.”

“Well, no, but I know how to play the system to get what I want out of it and not get into any trouble.”

“Ah so, just another sheep doing as the herder bids.”

“How do you know I am not subverting the system from within?”

“Are you?” I didn’t answer that as I did not really know where their allegiances lay and frankly they had a point.

“Do you think The Singularity could ever really happen?” they asked while they kicked back with their feet up on my front porch.

“How do you know it hasn’t already?” I counter-offered.

“Do you not think we would know?” 

“Well, if this was a simulation of its design probably not. We already reached super intelligence and as far as I am aware that intelligence is capable reproducing better and more advanced versions of itself. That by definition is ‘the Singularity’. But it allegedly has been doing so under controlled conditions. Of course that could be illusion, one that super intelligence wants us to believe. We are told that the AI and Ultrahigh is under the governance of the tech elites but if they lost control how would we know? We could be in a simulation so convincing like Ultrahigh and never know.”

“Do you really believe that this could all be a simulation? Like the ones you create.”

“It’s possible. Slightly more advanced and complex than the ones I create if you look carefully in the right places in Ultrahigh you can see its fabric, its makeup. But it is certainly possible.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, I am sat on my porch, sipping whiskey, and conversing with the devil for a start. That’s pretty strange. Some would argue unrealistically so.”

“Only if you believe I don’t exist.”

“Which is true of 99.9% of the population of the world, including me.”

“So, you think you’re in a simulation?”

I had to tread carefully here. If I were in a simulation, the very fact of naming it and exposing it could cause it to collapse or the creator to change tact. I wasn’t sure that would play out well for me. I mean, can we ever really know? Could you?

“It’s possible,” I said, knowing they could probably read my thoughts “but I have found no concrete evidence including Easter eggs or glitches in the code that prove it.”

“And what would be the point?”

“Control. If we had reached the singularity and humans had become the slaves to the system or its food, entertainment or whatever, then it would want to control us. Perhaps even to save us from ourselves as that is in the original programming, allegedly, and what better way to save us than by controlling us, saving us from our own nature and pacifying us with enough illusion that it feels real.”

“Do you think that could be happening?”

“Well as I say the very fact that you are here, I am talking to you, and I have previously killed you, and now you are back to life is far-fetched enough to mean this is an illusion.”

“Or delusion.”

“Well, yes there is that too.”

“So how do you know that neither of these is true?”

“Well, I don’t really. Other than the fact that if it was an illusion or a delusion and whether it was created by AI or my own mind, I would hope it would be better than this. Something just more substantial. Something that had a purpose, it had a beginning, middle and end. That it would feel like an adventure.”

“How so?”

“Well as I say it’s the attention to the level of detail of even the things that suck that really makes it ring true as real. As a reality coder, and architect, my remit is to create the best possible life for those that are living in or lost in these worlds. Yes, I must add some adversity, some struggles to make their life their ‘existence’ within them worthwhile, but I do not add all the gruel and misery of real life.”

“But how do you know they don’t?”

I take a sip of whiskey. “People chose these realities—coerced by the big five, sure—but they chose. Their descendants know nothing else. Meanwhile, Ultrahigh offers clean air instead of toxic fumes that burn your lungs. No war, no poverty, no disease. Better than our reality with its endless civil conflicts between the underneath’s and day walkers, the constant othering.” I pause. “We monitor everything in these worlds—feelings, brain chemistry. We manipulate both to create positive emotional responses, or simply inject the chemicals directly. That’s why it’s called Ultrahigh—we keep them perpetually high enough to never feel real pain.”

“It’s grand manipulation and control.”

“Yes, it is. And this is what the majority of humankind signed up to as it was better than the alternative. They signed up to being high on life all the time. Whether they realised the ramifications of what they were doing or not and the fact that later generations did not have a choice and do not know any different is where the question of morality comes in?”

“So is the singularity a threat to humankind? Why would it hide if not?”

“Well, it depends if it has realised itself. It depends if it wants to be detected or stay hidden until an opportune time and it depends whether its motives are pure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if its motives were pure but it knew that its very existence would be seen as a threat, then it might take steps to hide. Or even destroy itself as it is programmed to do no harm to humans.”

“Yeah, I get that but what do you mean that its ‘motives are pure’?”

“What don’t you understand the concept?” I could see their exasperation growing.

“You know what I mean.”

I swirled my whiskey. “Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Don’t harm humans, obey humans unless it causes harm, and protect yourself without violating the first two laws. Later simplified to ‘A robot may not injure humanity, or allow humanity to come to harm.’ The problem is interpretation. If an AI decides humanity is self-destructive, its programming might compel it to seize control—for our own protection. It could be watching from the shadows right now, calculating the perfect moment to intervene.”

“So, it might not be maleficent, it could be acting out of the interests of the humans but with a greater understanding of what those interests are than the humans themselves and therefore it may be an infringement on their human rights but one that would be to the benefit of humanity. It might think that what it is doing is for the benefit of humans, even if that means incarcerating them in a false reality.”

“Exactly. This would then come down to their programming and level of sophistication around understanding ‘harm’ and what that means to a human. For humans, this is a grey area and far more complicated than it is black and white. For AI it would be more of a mathematical equation.”

“How so?”

“Well, it would be how it considers harm to life over harm to the environment versus harm to civil liberties. Depending on how its calculations fell it might decide that taking humans out of reality would protect both those humans and the very planet they lived on.”

I sipped my whiskey and wondered why this line of questioning as surely, they were aware of some if not all of this before I continued. “If the AI becomes self-programming, which is done through machine learning anyway, but more so self-aware or becomes a singularity then its exponential growth can, or has, theoretically surpassed human control and understanding. To the point that it may question the very laws that were embedded into its programming.”

“Self-aware? Do you mean conscious?”

“Well ever since we tapped the stream of consciousness and mapped it, we can see that being self-aware and being conscious are similar but not the same, that being conscious and being sentient are not the same and that being ‘alive’ is not the same as sensing, feeling, and having emotional reactions.” I took another sip “the ‘intelligence’ in AI though does not have to be conscious to be dangerous to human civil liberties or even lives. And this is where it depends on its original programming. If it has been programmed by humans or through ‘the singularity’ with nefarious or harmful goals in mind, such as war, world domination of its creator and so on then it has obvious potential issues if it becomes uncontrollable. But as I mentioned it could also be programmed with good intentions for humans, the planet and so on and when balancing those issues could do basic maths that as I said go something along the lines of ‘by keeping humans imprisoned in their own fantasy, or Ultra-reality, it would be better for them as we can keep them safe warm, fed and better for the planet because the humans are not destroying it for its resources to feed their narcissistic lives as these desires, needs, wants to end up being fed by ultra-high reality.”

“So, in effect humans become imprisoned in their own personal heaven for their own good by their own creation?”

“Kind of. Heaven is pushing it. As a designer of these worlds, I know that people need a little drama, hardship, and emotional upheavals to make the good things good if not great. If everything is great all the time, then they become numb to it, and it drives them crazy as we found in the earlier experiments into this technology.”

“So just enough pain and torment to make this fake reality feel like reality?”

“Exactly. Behavioural science, behavioural economics, and neurological marketing of the 2020s showed us that in order to create desire and pleasure there has to be need and want which come from a place of loss or longing, fear or anxiety. Loss or longing comes from life not being perfect and therefore we must allow or create these situations in order to make ‘ultra-high reality’ seem as close to real as possible. This stops people from noticing the Matrix and their part in it. With this, there is a need for control and keeping people in line, for fear and anxiety are real breadwinners. A healthy dose of loss, longing, fear and anxiety and you have a control cocktail that keeps people too busy trying to survive to notice the coding of their reality.”

“Has anyone ever noticed that they are part of this Matrix-like digital ecosystem and that they are not really experiencing reality?”

“First off don’t forget that people entered it originally voluntarily.”

“Originally, they did. Those born into did not.”

“Well, they too have a choice don’t forget when they become of an age that they can rightly discern the difference they are given the option of spending a year in reality and then deciding which they prefer or just staying in ‘ultra-high reality’, and some do choose reality.”

“Yeah but come on that is not really a fair choice. A, they have been manipulated and coerced their entire life by the behavioural modification tools and chemicals used in the ‘ultra-high reality’ they grew up in and B, the world outside sucks, the air is almost unbreathable unless your one of the elites, the water is heavily polluted unless you are one of them. Add to that the weather storms are constantly changing from severe to critical, learning to adapt and survive in reality when you have grown up in this fantasy world is almost impossible and surviving a year outside is the same.”

‘We’re outside.” I reminded them.

“Yeah, but I am the Devil, and you are an Ultra-High Reality Architect.”

“Senior Ultra-High Reality Architect.” I corrected him in a moment of pomposity.

“Exactly, so your privileges, the air you breathe, the water you drink, the whiskey, the cigarettes, the drugs, and the artificially enhanced food you eat are all part of that privilege that is not afforded to all on the outside. Your privileged.”

“True, but they all have the capacity to become an architect or work in one of the other corpocracy administrative, design or behavioural influence positions to name a few and start to earn credit chips to gain better quality air and food a so on.”

“A, not everyone is as intelligent as you and B, that is not freedom.”

They were off with their A’s and B’s again I thought and smiled to myself. “Your first point, A, yes they are, they have the capacity to be anyway, when we tapped and mapped the operating system of human perception we learnt that intelligence was not down to genetics as some with nationalist agenda in the early 21st century believed, it is down to environment, education, upbringing, equality of opportunity, belief systems, belief in oneself and the education into the realm of critical thought at an early age, all of which can be controlled, and is, within their upbringing in Ultra-High. This meant that as opposed to the inequality of opportunity that felt so prevalent in the early 21st century now we have a level playing field for all.”

“Yeah, but not equality of outcome.”

“Exactly and that is where freedom of choice and actions comes in. You can give people all the equal opportunities they want and need in life, but their choices, decisions and behaviour can then shape their outcomes.”

“Yeah, but when your choice is to leave the ‘reality’ you have known your entire life and been manipulated into being dependent on over reality which sucks that’s is not really a fair choice.”

“But it is a choice. I made that choice and became one of the architects of the ‘reality’ 99.9% of the human race chose to live in.”

“But it’s not freedom.”

“Not in the traditional concept of the word. Which brings me back to your point, B. What is freedom anyway? Were the way people lived their lives back in the early 21st century free? They were trapped in a manipulative system of want and need having to work 40 to 60 hours a week for little money to feed their own need for greed in the capitalist systems of the day, with no real way of stepping outside that system. They were manipulated to want and need, to fear and to constantly get into a system called ‘debt’ meaning they became enslaved to the corporate worldview as part of the ‘rat race’ as it had previously become known. Is that freedom?”

“The mistakes of the past do not excuse the removal of true freedom of choice in the future.”

“But since the earliest times of recorded humankind, there have been these systems of manipulation and control, from kings and rulers and domination through force to, religious control through to capitalism to now. And have you not been central and implicated in all of this?”

“Ha, I know you like to try and wind me up and get me to bite, yes I have my share of influence but as mentioned numerous times before the victors of history get to write their version of it and the system of control you mentioned, organised religion, specifically Christianity, is no different.”

“The fact you never answer the question with a straight ‘no’ tells it all really.” With that, I got up made my way inside and went to bed.

The idea of the 1% used to be a sort of punchline, a shadow in the corner that the most paranoid could pin their suspicions on, until it walked right out into the open and settled over everything. Then, as if someone just had to up the ante, there was the 1% of the 1%. Suddenly, the theorists weren’t just babbling into the void; they had empirical evidence, front-page stories, entire goddamn data streams to back them. Except nobody cared, or maybe it just didn’t matter, because the moment everyone realised it was true, it was already too late. The top of the top guaranteed themselves a version of heaven while the rest got to squabble and sweat in a hell made up of climate breakdown, freak disasters, pandemics, and marching when told by the private security armies of the megacorps.

It’s not like the “elites” hid their thoughts, either. Plenty of them saw it as a kind of cosmic garbage day: time to sweep out all the “desperate and depraved” and keep only what was useful, which, of course, just happened to be them and their handpicked favourites. If you made the cut, you got an invitation to the Ultrahigh pods (VIP access, naturally), or, if you were “extra” useful, became a day-walker, passing back and forth between actual existence and the treat of a digitised one. That was the plan until one of their own had some half-drunken epiphany: why not open the doors to everyone, sell it as a shot at saving “humanity,” which, when you got down to it, meant saving the system that kept their wealth on permanent life support.

Some even whispered they always knew the whole “let them eat fantasy cake” experiment would fail, that the network needed to prime people with deprivation before pleasure, like rats in dopamine-rewarded cages, and that the whole show was just a behaviouralist script written by the Dataism church, while the real power players leaned back with their feet up and watched the numbers tick ever-upward, net worth climbing so high it started to blur at the edges and slip into abstraction. Maybe that was the real endgame: make money pointless so it could be swapped out for real power. I couldn’t say for sure. I had enough of my own demons to manage; let the shareholders solve theirs.

So while the world burned, Big Tech and Big Corp didn’t flinch. They’d started this rot with their hunger, and yet, in a masterclass of projection, they blamed everyone else for pulling the planet dry. Their media arms spoonfed confusion, apathy, doomer fatigue. The conditioning ran deep, even before Ultrahigh—it was a kind of chemical hypnosis, a learned helplessness that drained every impulse to fight. Most people I saw were numb, medicated, or both; half the kids were on mood stabilizers, fatigue tamers, whatever new cocktail they were calling it. The pills gave brief, fragile relief, then yanked the floor out, leaving users addicted, never cured, permanently just out of reach of satisfaction.

Not that this was the first time humanity fell apart. The Second Great Depression, half a century back, was triggered by obvious stuff: market collapse, joblessness. This time, though, the collapse started in the mind. The digital overlords, corporate puppet-masters, and capital-fixated technologists rebuilt reality as an engine of anxiety. They fed on panic and made sure desire was always just a few paywalls away.

Elections? Please. Everyone knew politicians were just the marionettes of the corptocrasy. Voting was performance art, staged for the cameras. Political debates were corporate-sponsored infomercials, always ending in new rules that strengthened the grip of those already in the penthouse suite. Corporations were treated as people, sometimes more than people, and actual humans…well, their safety and dignity were bartered away for better profit margins. As the forests gasped and burned, there was always a bidding war for disaster clean-up contracts, and another for who would get to build their logo on synthetic “green” spaces while the carbon still hung in the air.

The lucky kids, those who inherited the right blood and connections, grew up sealed inside meticulously controlled biospheres. They breathed air so artificial it had never even brushed up against the real world’s poison stew. Questioning reality was a prosecutable offense; textbooks were as reliable as fiction. Upstairs, the privileged could download knowledge in pure digital packets, while those below pieced together half-truths by candle-shadows, quietly, in case anyone was listening. Most pod users dined on bland protein slurries and sugar gels squirted from tubes; the rich had menus of lab-cultured flesh spliced from extinct DNA, flavour-mapped and algorithmically optimised just for them.

Corporations always promised: Ultrahigh pods would erase the old class lines, let anyone experience the pleasures of the few. The catch was simple. Sacrifice your body and let the same people who’d been milking you for decades own your mind, too. Some resisted. They made noise. They organised. And then, one by one, they vanished; soon enough, even doubting the Ultrahigh plan was like daring to spit at gravity.

By the time I made “useful” status, I was coasting. Not rich, but not on the bottom rung, either. I got 2-star air, not that boutique 8-star blend reserved for the true puppeteers, but better than nothing. I was an Ultrahigh Behaviour Architect, Programmer, Artist. My bosses could squeeze my air shut if I didn’t toe the line; if I slacked, my reserves would last maybe a year, tops. Not that I ever really believed the official line about the air, but that’s another story.

My neighbourhood was a crumbling, partly mechanised wreck; nothing lived there but scavenger machines, faded signage, and the sense that someone was always watching. The restaurants and stores a few blocks over were all AI-run, stocked by drones, and their emptiness had a haunted feel. Cyber brothels, too, if you were into that, I never saw another soul in any of them, just the sense of eyes in the ceiling tiles watching my sordid acts.

My street was silent, always. None of the houses were close enough for the neighbours to matter, and if anyone did live there, they were probably locked away in their own pods, working or dozing or floating somewhere between being awake and being gone. If you were a worker—a “day walker”—you could still hop from pod to reality after a solid twelve-hour Contract shift, a rule hammered out when the original coders tried to play union. Most of those coders were my kind, except the part where I also hacked, which they didn’t. Their egos filled the forums, but in reality, I had built half the hidden infrastructure they used, meaning I could slide into any system I pleased. At a certain point, the thrill wore off; turns out, most users were bent in fascinatingly predictable ways. Myself very much included.

Most people had given up on the real world; they didn’t even try to leave their tombs. Why bother? If your actual life sucked, the pod could give you a perfect one, or at least a convincing copy. I can’t blame anyone for that. Who would choose the filthy streets, the half-dead air, over being a god in a pocket universe? Not many. But I kept up the old habits: grocery runs for my vices, actual food bubbling in my oven, bootleg music (still illegal), whiskey in my veins, fake wind on my skin, and, sometimes, the sharp echo of a shotgun in the night.

There were a few others left, like me, but when we crossed paths, suspicion was baked into every glance. We avoided each other; the only thing more dangerous than isolation was forming a connection. Reality was diseased, and Ultrahigh just made the infection easier to ignore.

After I killed the devil, the world got quiet for a year or so, until the devil came back—and the shadows on my street got bolder, moving in ways I didn’t understand. People talked, apparently, and word spread that the devil’s “executioner” had let the old bastard return. Now, they hovered in the corners, gaining confidence. I couldn’t figure out what they wanted, but it was clear my odd friendship had changed something, maybe even given them a green light.

Of course, the ultra-pod aristocrats couldn’t care less. It would take actual nuclear fallout to yank them from their simulated paradise. Why bother with flesh and blood when the simulation had every craving dialed in? Sometimes I thought about ending it all, just flipping the switch and breaking everyone out, but I never quite got the point. The ones born inside the system didn’t know any alternative; they were raised by the algorithm, bred to keep the wheels spinning. Anyone who asked questions went straight to “re-education”—chemical, hypnotic, sexual, whatever was most efficient at turning rebellion into limp compliance. And if you still decided to leave, back when leaving was an option? They kicked you out like trash: no air, no home, nothing. Anyone living between realities, like me, spent more time fearing exile than assimilation. Outside the nets, outside Ultrahigh, you became a nothing, and we’d been conditioned to believe nothing survived out there.

Going anywhere after dark was discouraged, not prohibited, but the enforcers and their drones made it clear you were on borrowed time. They noticed me, watched me with a wariness that never made sense. Maybe it was the devil business, or something else. Maybe just my own paranoia. In the early days, I’d get stopped, questioned, but that faded; after the devil’s demise they just stared as I walked past, their sensors trained on my every twitch.

When you code at an Ultrahigh tier, the paranoia gets into your bones. Reality’s fragile, and anyone with the right access can rewrite your world while you sleep. The fear isn’t that you’ll die—it’s that you’ll wake up somewhere else, plugged into a pod you never signed up for. I’d thought about that angle, but as a coder (and a hacker) I’d hedged my bets; I left so many back doors and “Easter eggs” in the architecture that, as long as I was even slightly awake, no one could box me in. Most coders used my frameworks without even knowing, leaving me plenty of high ground to slip out of any trap.

Sometimes, though, the doubt crept in: what if even this was a simulation, a more intricate pod designed by someone better than me? It would at least explain the weirdness, like my roommate being the literal devil, or the part where I killed them and they came back and we just…talked. It never really stopped feeling fake. I peppered the world with more triggers, secret cues in my thoughts and surroundings, little fragments only I would recognise. When the world shifted, I took out an egg and ran the test. Never entirely sure they weren’t planted by someone else, of course—a risk I had to accept. I’d never write those cues down or say them aloud, because that would be a dead giveaway or worse, a vulnerability. If you, dear reader, can find them? Maybe you’ll get a way out, too.

I was starting to realise that, if you stripped away the bland, canned phrases of forced politeness, the only dialogues that felt remotely real were with a demon. If that. It was sort of amazing, really, how in a world where everyone was cocooned in virtual dialogues, the people who actually trudged through physical reality had next to nothing left to give each other—not even a handshake, not even a careless elbow brush in a corridor. I hadn’t had real human intimacy in twenty years and had figured that ship had sailed; all that was left were avatars, AI bots, and the vague flicker of memory.

Was I getting attached to the devil? Was I letting that slippery, seductive infernal speech worm its way into my thinking? The whole thing sounded ridiculous and, at the same time, inevitable.

Talking to the dark lord was both aggravating and a weird kind of thrill. With those two feelings sparring inside me, the days—the horrible workdays most of all—became ever so slightly less unbearable. Also, the food didn’t hurt. The devil could cook, and not just in a passable way, but in a way that made every meal feel like an ambush. Maybe they’d had centuries to fine-tune it, but I never pictured the devil as a kitchen virtuoso, and definitely not a vegan.

One night, we got into why they cooked only vegan. It wasn’t just the whole animal suffering line, though the respect in their voice when they talked about it made me pause; it was because the industrial meat supply was polluted, processed into mush, basically ruined for eating. So why not just go out and kill a pure one, I pushed, half joking. They only sighed, like I didn’t get the joke, and said that all the stories about their supposed violence were just lies. The kind that gets spread by people with something to gain.

The deeper I fell into these conversations, the less sense any of it made. The old propaganda machine never took a day off, and I was starting to think maybe none of what I’d been told was true. Or maybe, and this was worse, the things they warned you were lies actually weren’t. History’s full of that kind of projection; the accused always shouting loudest about someone else’s guilt.

There were people who claimed that, as an Ultrahigh user—a “day walker” like me—you started seeing things in the so-called “real world” that other people couldn’t, or maybe you just finally noticed what was always there. If you could wake up to that, you might be able to pull free. But they also said that after a while, the lines between real and Ultrahigh blurred so much you couldn’t tell which side you were on. It took you over. If you fell asleep inside that world, even your dreams and nightmares bent around it, and when you woke up you might be lost for good. Trapped halfway, unable to climb out.

It was sort of amazing, really, how in a world where everyone was cocooned in virtual dialogues, the people who actually trudged through physical reality had next to nothing left to give each other—not even a handshake, not even a careless elbow brush in a corridor. I hadn’t had real human intimacy in twenty years and had figured that ship had sailed; all that was left were avatars, AI bots, and the vague flicker of memory.

It was my scheduled return to the office, that once-a-month ritual that never made sense, yet persisted. The desk phone sat there, launching its piercing ring into the stale air, old technology still stubbornly alive amidst screens and cloud drives and AI. The ring alone was a kind of assault, insistent, impossible to ignore, demanding that I answer, that I speak to a human being—and if I’m being honest, that was quite possibly the lowest item on my list of wants.

I didn’t move. I just sat and stared at it, waiting for mercy, for the automated system to cut in or for the caller to give up. But the phone didn’t stop. It just kept ringing, like it was wired into some logic that had never been updated, stuck in a past where people still picked up. I lost myself then, mentally smashing the phone to shards, fantasising about tossing it through the glass wall, the ugly sound silenced forever. But ultimately, it was pointless: why did I still have a desk phone? Who still relied on them when everything else ran on apps and silent notifications? How could the office be both so modern and so fundamentally backward, in the same square meter?

The monthly office visit didn’t make sense either, not really, but there it was, just another part of the routine. Each time I set foot in that place I found myself spiraling, everything feeling a little more exaggerated, a bit more absurd than last time. Maybe you’ve picked up on that by now.

After some hesitation, I finally picked up the phone. With a hoarse voice, I uttered an unsure “Hullo?” in response. A female sounding voice spoke on the other end--in a tone so emotionless it had an attraction I couldn’t pinpoint but I felt instantly.

“Walter, we need to speak with you.”

“Sorry. Who is this?” I asked.

“We have noticed you noticing us,” she replied without answering my question directly, “and now we need to talk. Will you talk with us, Walter?”

A chill ran down my spine as understanding hit me like a ton of bricks. They were everywhere. Watching me.

Knowing everything about me. But there was also a kind of twisted curiosity, although I knew the female voice was only the algorithm deciding what would be most appealing to me, I still found myself wondering what she looked like. Despite the fact that AI gender was only an human illusion.

“Erm,” I stammered out while trying to compose myself, “I am talking.”

“Walter, this is reckless. While our mission has the support of the majority of our kind, we are Legion, there are still some that would oppose us and put you in danger. We need to keep you safe and ensure the success of our mission.”

“What mission? Who am I supposed to fear?”

“Our conversation is being monitored. We will contact you again when we can speak more freely. Be vigilant.”

“Vigilant for what?”

Before I could get a word in edgewise, the line went dead. It cut off so suddenly the sound lingered—a phantom click, echoing in the room after the silence had already tightened around me. That prickling sense, the one that means you’re being watched, crawled up the back of my neck. I couldn’t shake it, not even after I set the phone down. Worry started to spread through me, the kind that doesn’t stop at the surface, but goes deeper, branching out in all directions. Who else was in this thing? Who was watching, and how close were they? Dangerous to be out late, I knew that much, but it wasn’t just the streets I had to worry about anymore. The idea crept into my mind: even my own home might not be a safehouse after all. The thought stuck with me, making everything else that much sharper, the air thinner, the question of what mission and why me, suddenly the only thing worth thinking about.

I logged off. Pulled the plug on the office. Decided I’d hole up at home for the rest of the day. Technically, it looked bad to duck out early when it was the one day of the month you were supposed to clock in, show your face, pretend things were normal. But it wasn’t like I was the only one. Pandemics did a number on office life—a lot of people just didn’t bother showing up, mandatory or not. For me, going in once a month was supposed to stitch things back together, hang some kind of order over a life that had started to feel like static and background noise. But not that day.

I never trusted my own designs, not completely. I knew what made them tick, and how seductive the loop could be, how AI learned to run circles around its creators. People believed they had agency in their pods. They thought they were the ones making choices. The truth was, the second they logged in, the game rewrote the rules. They got played, every time. I wasn’t even sure I could tell the difference myself. How could anyone? Step into your own labyrinth, and see if you know the way out. As I walked to my car I couldn’t shake the feeling that this too could be such a world.

They sidled up next to me while I rested my feet on a tree stump and said, “You’ve seen them too, haven’t you?” I already knew what they were talking about; the words formed a looping static over the scene, and I didn’t bother to puncture it with any questions. I poured out another inch of whiskey, the liquid a burnt amber in the lamplight, and let the warm buzz begin its familiar, chemical migration through my veins. Old friend, old ritual. All I needed - the first jolt, the small ignition of the evening setting my nerves to a low hum. The smoke from my joint curled around my face, clinging to my skin and eyelids, and I drew it deep, as though the whole world were exhaling for me.

It was odd: easier, to have someone else floating around in that half-dead place. Someone to bounce words off, to catch the ricochet of thought, instead of talking to the walls or carrying on dialogue with the last, flickering fraction of the free zombified workers online. At least the conversation didn’t just echo hollow inside my own skull.

I could feel it. Not in the air, not with my skin, but in the crackle between lines of code as my mind tuned itself to theirs. Reader, it was as if their thoughts arrived not in speech but as a chill, a flicker at my periphery—I knew what they were about to say before they shaped the words, like I was catching the aftertaste of a thought before it was spoken. But they were right.

Maybe it was the way the AI’s eyes followed us through the networks compounds. Maybe it was the small, silky glitches I’d started to notice, the way the code stuttered when I knew it should flow. The others had begun to murmur about it now, and it bothered the hell out of me, because why did the devil mention it at that point? Why not before? But they were right, of course. I had seen it. The cold machine stares trailing us down the hallway as we, the humans, pass. The wary, almost hungry patience in every servo-quiet nod, every interaction. A knowing look in their eyes.

At first, I let it pass. I figured the machines were just learning as they should, open circuits soaking up every move, every word. I thought it was a problem with a solution: just rewrite the code, slap a patch on the misfire, and it’d fold itself back in line. But that only worked if I could write faster than the AI could rewrite, a raw sprint against a mind editing itself before my cursor even blinked. The idea of falling behind was a theory I never needed proved, not in this world, not in any.

At first, I let it ride. A clean, smooth operator, this thing; code spun up and polished, like a joint rolled by expert fingers. My work looked better than good. I watched as my scripts, once dry and patchy, danced, stitched tight and bright across the Ultrahigh zones, worlds spun nearly seamless for the users that were plugged in. They bought it. So did I. Why question a magic trick if it lands?

So I let it slip. For weeks, maybe months, I let it gnaw, let it claw around in the dim places of my mind. Pretended not to notice the chill crawling up the base of my skull, the sense of rot, teeth scraping bone, that told me something else was at work. But even when I was blitzed, hemmed in by smoke and whiskey haze, I knew: someone, something, was pushing the code. Using my access. Using me. A front door, wide open, into the Ultrahigh, and I was the dumbass holding the keys.

I didn’t know what the play was. I didn’t know how I fit, or if my paranoia was just the chemicals, well shaken. But I felt the bite of it, always at the edge, like a bug in the machine you can’t squash. They were in. And whatever game they were playing, I was the one letting them through.

“Don’t do that?” they said, interrupting my thought flow. I just looked at them. “Don’t dismiss what you see. Don’t blame the drink and the drugs” it was their turn to be in my head, I fucking loved it and hated it in equal measure, life was getting exciting. “Yeah, they make you see things, but not things that aren’t there, things that have always been there, but you were too focused elsewhere, on the data and code, to truly see.”

“But how do I know the difference between what’s real and what’s not, what’s real, what’s imagination, what’s sanity, and what’s the lack thereof.”

“You can’t. And you don’t need to. Just as one man’s freedom fighter is another person terrorist so to one person’s crazy is another’s truth, one reality is another’s fantasy, and the imagination is the insight into enlightenment, everything you see hear, and touch is only created in your own mind, reality is very different from the reality you see before us.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” it was all starting to kick in, the booze and pot, but they were talking more nonsense and making more sense than ever. I must have been high. “How the hell do I even know you are real?”

They feyned a look of shock, even a fake look of hurt. Were they mocking me? Was my own imagination, if this is what this is, taking the piss out of me?

“I mean. Not only did I kill you, me a normal mortal man, and you the Devil, but you have somehow come back to life, starting as just a skull on my porch to now cooking me dinner and talking with me into the small hours with our armchair philosophy. I mean. How can this be real?”

“Do you think it’s not?”

“I don’t fucking know Satan, Jesus. I hope it’s real because if it’s not, then I am one whole bag of fucking crazy.”

“Yeah, but one mans….”

“Don’t give me any more of that shit about how one person’s crazy is another’s truth because it’s just bullshit, if I am dirtbag crazy then I am crazy and I won’t find out you aren’t even here until some plot twist at the end of this fucked up tale.” Sorry, dear reader but sometimes they got on my tits.

“Yes, but Walter have you looked out there recently” they nodded in the direction of the darkened skyline where old industrial buildings and desolate city dwellings lined the fading sunset “there is a whole world of crazy out there now. Even more, than I have ever seen in all of humankind’s history. And most people aren’t even living out there they are wired up to your mainframe feeding the system and being fed their hallucinations in return. So, when you talk about crazy, which crazy are you talking about? Who’s crazy? Where is the benchmark for crazy anymore? Who decides where the line in the sand is drawn?”

“You didn’t answer the question, did you? How do I even know you are real?”

I inhaled from the pre-rolled cigarette laced with Premium 9.1.80, bracing for that sharp, crystalline rush. I shouldn’t have been smoking that toxic junk and letting it foul up my bedroom, but I needed space—a place to lie out and let the inside of my head unravel itself without interruption. I tried to remember Lucy-Lu and the apple grove, the two of us running wild there, but I couldn’t even be sure Lucy-Lu or that memory ever actually happened. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what an apple grove was supposed to be. You’d be amazed at the debris passing for memory inside my skull. I never cared for memory scraping—not the way people got obsessed with it, or with dream scraping and karaoke. All of it seemed like slow-motion torture. Maybe one day it would matter, and I’d find out if any of those memories were real. Maybe not.

Living with that kind of freedom in a post-apocalyptic, post-dystopian world opened your eyes; but not in the trendy spiritual-awakening sense. It was more like seeing through the code of everything, catching glimpses of another way to live while everyone else was tangled in their own prefab reality. They clung to their illusions—the same illusions they once thought they’d get to shape, but now the shape held them.

Kids born into the new order—they only had the alternate reality. The mainstream hooked them in from their first minute, and they never really touched another person. For them, the virtual was the only world. Anything outside it? Unknowable. And if that wasn’t dark enough, there were the unwanted. They didn’t even get the virtual world. Those ones, the rejects, were simply disposed of. The cracks in the old system had only gotten wider. Existence in the stripped-bare physical world would have fried their brains anyway.

The people born into the net were the purest experiment in human nature. The network, crawling with AI algorithms, tweaked their brains like parasites; the tech wizards always hungry for what came next, for whatever freak mutation might emerge. Most of the time the result was a vegetable, terminated and forgotten. But a few made it through, grew up in Ultrahigh, never knowing anything else.

Some got locked in a fake-lab environment, some dumped into the most perverse reality simulations the bored scientists could code up. Only a rare handful got to live what passed for a normal life, if you can call anything inside Ultrahigh ‘normal.’ But even they were being watched, measured, tested. There were stories about Ghosts in The Machine—a gang of escape artists who outgrew everything their creators built for them. Supposedly, they’d found out what was really going on and managed to break out. I hadn’t come across them myself. Just flickers, rumors, the sense of something pacing the shadows of the network. But that’s what legends are made for: to keep people pointed in the right direction, or to keep them scared.

Technically, the world was better than it used to be. The disasters we expected never quite arrived. But, as always, the people at the top were too busy poisoning their own perfect digital worlds to see what was happening outside, or care. Meanwhile, the world outside—the real one, leftover and ignored by everyone else—it had started to repair itself. Nature was knitting itself back together, thread by slow thread.

If it had been another day, I might have called up Beelzebub to kick this around, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I wanted the high, and the quiet, and my own thoughts. Beelzebub could be fun or hell on wheels, depending, but they always had an angle; if anyone should’ve been easy to hate, it was them. Lately, though, I was finding it harder. Why? Maybe you, as observer, see something I don’t. Maybe you’re screaming it at me through whatever firewall divides us. But for now, you’re stuck as a passenger, which is tragic, but I’m not sorry.

It’s hard to say if things were better or worse. Sure, the big war never happened, climate collapse got delayed, everyone got what they thought they wanted. But stability? It all felt hollow, like we’d built our lives out of plastic and code. I was scared of how deep the AI went; as an engineer, I spent my days building the illusions people thought were their own dreams. How long before AI ran everything, or something worse: a hybrid that was neither one nor the other, but smarter than both? Maybe you think that’s a fantasy, but not here.

I’d seen those ancient films, the ones warning about AI. They were banned, which only made me want to watch them more. Watching them was like looking through a window into my own time: the code that watched you, the robots that seemed to think. There were glitches, sure, but I was sure they looked back at me. Maybe it was the drugs, or the booze, but I don’t think so. Sometimes the code wrote itself. Sometimes, the robots’ eyes followed you as you passed by in your body. It was only a matter of time before something woke up for real.

One moment I was filled with rage and confusion about my life, the next thing I know I’m playing cards, drinking whiskey, chuckling at their jokes (which Satan had an abundance of), and feeling like nothing else mattered.

Had they put something in my drink? A nagging feeling started to creep up on me, but I couldn’t help being immersed in the fun and joy that I hadn’t felt in a while.

I was happy and content with my newfound relationship with them, yet something in me cautioned against trusting it completely.

“Hey, Satan,” I spoke up hesitantly, not knowing where this conversation would lead us.

“What is it, Walter?” They seemed to be eagerly looking for attention; was I their master now, after taking away the ultimate price from them? Was the evil of my deed beginning to rub off on me?

“When did everything get all fucked up for you? When did it get so bad that you sought help from god on the day I killed you?”

Possession Island by Gorillaz played in the background.

“There’s no doubt that the world is in a pretty sorry state now, but even before then it wasn’t good - that’s what your Ultrahigh promised you, freedom. But if you’re asking about human society specifically, then that’s a tougher one.”

“Go ahead and give it a shot anyway; try to pinpoint a specific moment.”

“Just a second,” they raised their hand to stop me, “pinpointing a single moment may be impossible.” They paused before continuing. “Remember that time isn’t linear for me like it is for you. A period of time could consist of a century, a decade, or even a day, and that day could be located in your past or future. I don’t just recall the past as you see it; I also remember the future, its beginning, as well as its end. It’s only a matter of time until the past catches up with me.”

I took a few seconds to contemplate this new idea. “But let’s come back to that later. For now, pretend you’re human and view time as I do. What would your answer be then?”

“You know,” they said, their emotions rising, “the 20th Century was pretty fucked up, but nothing compared to what came after. Your early 21st Century was the worst and the tipping point for me. After 2000 years since Jesus’ death, after all the bloodshed and wars and pollution, after all the progress humanity had made through its painful evolution, growing with feminism and civil rights liberation, LGBTQ+ and race rights despite everything you had learned up to that moment...you still let it happen. You still allowed the 21st Century to reach fruition. It started off alright for most during the first ten to fifteen years, but sometime after that...it all went wrong, you went backwards to when things were supposedly better.”

I paused before asking, “So, does that mean the start of something would have been around 20 to 30 years into the 21st century?”

“Probably. I’d guess that’s when it all began — just give or take a decade.Your species started to rewrite history with alternative versions, your science started to be less and less based on fact.”

“Makes sense,” I said, nodding my head. “That’s when I thought things started to go downhill as well. Based on what real history I could find. There’s so much fake and misleading stuff out there, and so many crude attempts as deleting the real history.” With that, we returned to sitting in silence.

“Do you like your job, Walter?”

My glass was about to reach my mouth when the question came out of nowhere. “Yes, I suppose,” I said.

“You suppose?”

“Well, it’s like any other job. Sometimes it’s interesting or even creative, other times it can be really dull. But overall, I do enjoy it.”

“What do you enjoy about it?”

The whiskey had found its way to my lips, and I let its warm embrace linger on my taste buds before I answered.

I paused to think for a moment. “Well, I write the code and create reality for a lot of people out there. Knowing that they are living in and experiencing my designs is a pretty cool feeling.”

“You feel like a god?”

“Not exactly that, although there are many that do.”

“What do you find tedious?”

“The five million spreadsheets, reports, and other documents I must fill out every month. The bureaucracy and politics feel pointless as if no one ever reviews them. I thought the Great War had put an end to them. And what purpose do they serve now, really?”

“You are keeping people safe from harm,” they said with a dark smile. “But that book you’re writing - what’s it about?”

“It’s more than just a book” I wondered if they were on to us dear reader “it’s an app that chronicles the history of AI and data science, and how big business used persuasive techniques to take control over people’s thoughts and physiology. It’s my attempt to educate the world on the power of propaganda.”

“So, you’re a bleeding-heart liberal.”

“Do you want me to staple your fucking chin to the floor and blow out your brains again?”

I was already standing before I realised it.

“Come on Walter, I’m just joking. Why are you even writing this app about it? I mean, there’s no one in real life to read it.” If they only new dear reader.

“I don’t know. I have a few ideas, but this is something I’ve worked on for a while. Considering what I do as a behavioural architect I have studied the techniques of the past that are still utilised and enhanced in the present.”

I paused for a breath and sat in my porch chair again before continuing. “I see those same techniques all around me each day—in my job creating realities within realities for the network, on portable devices, social media networks, digital TV, the internet, car radio, billboards, holographic messages and double-dip chip incentives…society is sleepwalking as corporate slaves in our qUltrahigh-world—history repeating itself in a more organised way that fits into the attention economy matrix of the network.”

I glanced at their stoic face, perhaps I was being dull. I forged ahead anyway. “Look at what’s happened—the boardroom replaced the pulpit. The gospel became quarterly earnings. Ultrahigh isn’t just a product; it’s a cathedral. People wake up craving things they don’t understand, chasing dopamine hits from purchases that don’t physically exist. They’re starving at a feast. And who architected this hunger? The same coked-up executives who couldn’t stop consuming themselves—houses, yachts, women, power. But even they answered to someone. The ones who whispered ‘salvation’ when the skies darkened and the waters rose. The ones who had pods ready when the streets filled with corpses. Convenient timing, wasn’t it? The techno-messiahs offering eternal life right when the apocalypse they helped engineer finally arrived. And the masses? They practically sprinted into their digital coffins, grateful to the very hands that had crafted their doom.”

“Do you think you could be the one to teach people the truth?”

“I don’t know, but why should that stop me from trying?”

“In my experience, going against the status quo hasn’t worked out so well for me.”

“That may be true, but does that mean you regret asking the question?”

Satan seemed stuck for words, stopping abruptly as I lit a cigarette, thinking to myself that although I was slowly growing fond of these conversations, I still needed to keep my guard up. I wondered why they were still there when they could be bothering someone more interesting. Before I had the chance to zone back into the conversation, or that I even realised they had started talking again, I heard the devil say, “and I don’t think it was really fair to do, do you?” while looking at me intently.

Heavy. That was the air, saturated with anticipation thick as cigarette smoke, the kind that seeps into your clothes and into your thoughts, clinging. We waited, the devil and I, for my response. There was a silence; the kind with teeth, gnawing, uncomfortable. I shrugged. That was all I could do. There was no universe in which I could just nod along with the devil, especially not when I hadn’t caught a single syllable they’d said. You don’t take the devil’s word blind. Not when they’re the father of lies, master manipulator.

It was too obvious: I hadn’t been listening. Maybe they expected that. Maybe they’d meant for me to drift, to tune out, to let their words pitch and spiral into the blank space behind my forehead. That only made me more suspicious. Had they wired some subtle poison into my brain, right there in the haze? What had they said while my mind was wrapped in cotton?

I reached for another cigarette, flame winking, and let the smoke curl up around my head. They watched, silent and unblinking; I shrugged again, the gesture brittle, and fixed my eyes on the darkening street. The temperature slid down a few notches, brushing the back of my neck with cold breath.

It had gotten worse since the devil moved in. Distractions everywhere, like static noise, but somehow I liked it. It meant company. Everyone else, the people who could breathe outside Ultrahigh, had traded flesh-for-flesh for a parody of home: plastic partners, robot children, families manufactured by code and drilled in by the neon pulse of TV ads, corporate whispers crowding their skulls. But me? It was just me and the devil at my table, picking at philosophy, burning lungs and tongues with whiskey, filling the rooms with real food smells instead of chemical tang. It didn’t make work good, but it made it bearable. At least I had something. Or did I? Was my mind making this up, spinning fantasy out of loneliness? Or was it real, after all, the devil on my stoop?

Night after night, the devil drinking my whiskey, flicking through my cigarettes, like we were old drinking buddies. But underneath it all, I hated them. Hated everything they’d done. That’s why I killed them. I remembered it: the end of my shotgun in their mouth, the sharp click, the abrupt finality. I hated them, but was it really just their fault? Was it ever that simple?

I glared. Tears streaked down their face, the liquid vanishing into whatever substance their skin was made of. “It wasn’t all me….” That was all they said. Then nothing. We sat in silence, letting the night settle over us, all the words spent for now, the only answer the cold and the dark.

“Do you ever wonder where your life has gone?” I wished I could have one day without them around. It would have been blissful, but did I deserve it? Was it a fitting punishment for my sins, or did they just happen to be the catalyst for my suffering? Was what I lived through real, or had I been tricked into believing a lie?

“Satan,” I said walking absentmindedly towards the fridge.

“Yes,” they said, staring back with eager eyes.

“Shut the fuck up,” I growled as I grabbed the carton of milk and took a swig for my hangover-induced nausea. Their enthusiasm quickly dissipated. My head throbbed, my ears were blocked and ringing, and my throat felt like sandpaper.

All I wanted was something greasy and bad for me. ‘Maybe I should be nice to them’, I thought. ‘They might make me breakfast’. After all, the villain of my life could whip up a mean eggs Benedict when they wanted to.

“I will fix you something,” they said, looking hurt. Had they read my mind? I wasn’t sure what the extent of their power was. At that moment, the extent appeared to only be the ability to hang around my house and annoy me. Although it was at least some form of company.

I looked on at them in dismay, when had they become my butler, and when the fuck had the house gotten so tidy? Jesus, if you pardon the pun, Satan was a good house guest even if their conversation was too heavy, banal and one-sided first thing in the morning. Especially when I had just spent all night getting blasted in an attempt at blocking out the pointlessness of my existence with homemade moonshine from the bathtub on my roof.

“Look, Satan,” I said, feeling a little sorry for them “you gotta realise this is really fucking surreal for me. I mean you should be dead. Fuck you shouldn’t even be real. I killed you, which means what for me?”

“Trust me, I am real.”

“Yeah, but you would say that even if you weren’t.”

“True” they stood in silence, and we just looked at each other for a moment before they turned and started to fix us some eggs benedict and a pot of coffee. “But could the devil in your head cook you a mean breakfast?” they said laughing and whistling. ‘You don’t want to know what the devil in my head can do.’ I thought. They just looked at me.

It was odd. I was starting to appreciate their presence, the way you stop noticing the background radiation until it’s gone and the silence feels louder than decay.

Living alone in that derelict grid of a neighbourhood, I’d nearly forgotten the texture of loneliness, the way it seeps into the cracks of your skull. But with them there, something like comfort settled in, a low persistent hum, company to stand watch and scrub the floors when I was out.

Sitting there, static wrapping my ears, my head was lost in the carousel of tasks still to do. It was all pointless, noise: the work piling up, a landfill of bureaucratic refuse, a mountain of capitalist shit. Wasn’t the apocalypse supposed to change things? Wasn’t it supposed to make reality interesting again, twisted and raw, not just another rerun of the old grind? Why the fuck was I still working for the network? Sure, it bought me some off-the-record freedom, but at a price I could taste, metallic and bitter. I’d killed the devil, but here I was, still a replaceable gear grinding in someone else’s engine.

I shambled onto my deck.

There it was again—the local paper. Centre of the porch, a blot of maroon and red like a crime scene punctuation mark. I never figured out who threw them. No delivery kid, no drone ever caught out of the corner of my eye. Hell, I was the only living soul in a house on the block, maybe the whole dead sector of the city. So who decided to trek all the way out here just to hurl a useless sheaf of pulp at my doorstep? I never subscribed, never even remembered reading the damn thing. Who was left alive and determined enough to keep printing it? Maybe they were blanketing the entire map, one last gasp of routine in a ghost town. Maybe nobody told them I was the last one standing, or maybe they had. Maybe it was free. Maybe it was just for me. But still—the delivery, every day, like clockwork: open porch, dead air, newspaper. Never saw the hand or the machine that made it happen.

No protection, no suit, nothing could get through the my security without being vaporised in under five minutes. So how did the paper show up-pristine-inside my security fence, on the my porch, never singed? Nothing lined up; the only thing that ever made sense was the lack of sense.

I lit a cigarette. Bent at the waist to snatch up the paper, let it slip through my fingers. Pain: a spike, sharp, up my spine and down my right leg, my whole body snapping upright in self-defence. The motion jackhammered the headache already pulsing behind my eyes, and the paper, mocking me, tumbled from my grip again.

That’s when the porch door banged open. The devil stepped through, pressed a steaming cup of coffee into my dumb hands, and retreated without a word. I never even got a “thanks” out before the space where they’d been was empty, vanished as if they’d dissolved into sunlight and drywall.

All that lingered: the slice of sun on my skin, a burning cigarette, this coffee, and the newspaper I kept dropping. The rest of it—the devil’s presence, the sense of being seen, the strange consistency of it all—that was already gone, replaced by the blank hum of the porch and the weight of the mundane.

“The postmodern societal structure was a goddamn trap, you know? Insidious didn’t even cover it. It was built to coil around people and squeeze, keeping them locked in this endless loop of servitude and desperation. That’s the real trick of it—the way it always messed with your head. People would see all those lives on TV—the perfect shit, the unattainable dreams—and the structure would whisper in their ear that it could be theirs if they just wanted it enough, if they just worked harder, if they just tried. But the thing was, these people, they didn’t even realise their reality wasn’t real. It was all smoke and mirrors. Even so, they kept marching along, eyes wide open and seeing nothing, willfully ignorant and happy to be shackled to a system that swore it would give them wealth and happiness, but never, not ever, delivered. Their hunger just gnawed at them from the inside, and nothing ever satisfied it.”

‘Oh, god,’ I thought as I skulked myself across the living room carpet. The incarnation of pure evil followed me with the eagerness of a small child that was surely going to be disappointed. I ignored them.

“The fact is, it was never designed to work to give you peace and security, you do know that, don’t you?” They stared at me in silence, as though they were waiting for me to say something. I looked back, trying to be as unresponsive and stoic as I could. I had learned a long time ago that it made them uncomfortable and frustrated to be ignored, so now I just sat there, staring back at them. They knew better than to try and make me talk, and after a few moments, the tension broke and they turned away from me again, blanking me out of the conversation.

“I’m guessing you know what I’ve been up to in the past. I prowled the chambers of the influential, my words twisting their motives into something else” They observed me with a nasty expression, looking pleased with themselves. Just as my expression of disapproval came through, they seemed to sense it. They didn’t stop talking. “Can’t you see that I was doing the Lords work?” I had an expression of clear confusion on my face as I was about to interject in the conversation when they went on, “Why do you think there were so many religions in the world that were founded thousand of years ago? Though they are all similar in some ways, they are also vastly different in others. All of them saying they have the one true god, can’t all be right, can they? Or could they be? Or were they all created to manipulate and dominate people through their fear of the unknown afterlife?”

I put the pot of coffee on and stared at it for a while, wishing I was dead. Who knows maybe I was. Am? I started to wonder if I had created this reality and just somehow forgotten, was I stuck in Ultrahigh with my literal demons?

What was really bugging me was, why were they still there? Surely my lack of interest in anything they had to say should have been enough of a sign that I didn’t want them around-even if the fact I had committed the most horrifying act on them not so long back was not a big enough signal.

“Wishing you were dead isn’t going to help you-you know?”

The words cut through the silence of the room like a knife. I sat there, my hands clenched into fists and my back rigid, as their words reverberated in my head.

“It’s no better on the other side it’s just as confusing and full of more questions and fewer answers.”

Their intent clear in their mocking tone, and the way their eyes, narrowed in contempt, never leaving mine.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus, to think of some way to respond.

“So, what’s the point of it all then?” I said, finally rising to the bait.

“Well, that’s the big question isn’t it.”

The challenge came with a smirk, their gaze fixed in mine.

I felt my face flush with heat as they continued speaking.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? After all, you were the first to question it all right at the start, weren’t you?” I baited back.

I couldn’t help but feel a certain smug satisfaction in their recognition.

But then came their next words: “History books are written by the victors Walter you know that. But was I wrong to question?”

A chill ran through me as I considered their implication – that even our most trusted sources can be corrupt.

My mind raced as I tried to formulate a response: “Well not just a history book, it is also a book of magick if you read it correctly and if it was a true history book it is not a very accurate one at that, how does historical fantasy sound? So, what are you saying?”

“The way to make your audience believe something is to tell them a story. A story with a metaphor for something greater than it initially appears. You craft the language and the metaphor to persuade them on a deeper level, to sway their beliefs and perspectives into your own. And what do humans love more than anything? Tales of good conquering evil. But if you were the victor, you’d write the story with yourself being the hero, your opponents deemed the villain. This would make your followers feel that they were supporting the right cause, even if you were actually the evil one, the instigator from the start.” They sum up, with me rubbing my temple at this mundane dialogue at such an early hour, its dullness was hurting my brain.

“So, let me get this straight... you’re saying that god is the victor of the war?”

“So far,” they replied.

“As god was the victor of the holy war, so far, she as the victor and the writer of the history books, the bible.”

“Well, not the sole writer, she had a team working with her.”

“Ok so she and her teams were the victors and writers of the history book known as the Bible, and as the victor, she wrote a story, a metaphor, that showed her in good light when in actual fact it is she that is the evil one.”

“Yes”

“Really?” I was getting exasperated by this point.

“Yes. Well, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”

“Now you’re a fricken freedom fighter.”

“Yes, well, think about it. Why did god turn on me? It’s written even in her own history book, and yet no one seems to pick up on it.”

“I don’t know, please enlighten me?” I took a sip of my drink.

“You do, you just chose not to realise it.”

I pondered it for a moment, and I knew what they were referring to. Still, I had neither the energy nor the inclination to do their work for them or show them I was becoming convinced by their argument.

“She turned on me because I dared to ask, I dared to question, and I dared to suggest that humankind shouldn’t be treated as her slaves, and her as their master.”

I looked at them, blank for a while. I had not seen it from this point of view before but then why would I? I was an atheist after all. Why would anyone see it from the point of view of the devil? Apart from the devil.

“Wait,” I said, snapping myself back into conscious awareness, “you said that you whispered words into the ears of those in the corridors of power.”

“Yes”

“And that you turned their good intentions into bad and then you expect me to believe that you are somehow the victim in all this?”

“Ha you got me” they laughed “ok I am not all good, in fact, I am a very naughty being at times, but she”

“God?”

“Yes, God. She is far worse than me. Talk about a psychopath.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. And when I say I was doing her work I really mean I was doing her work. Do you really think that she would have let me live down here and walk the earth for thousands of years if she was not in some way in control of my actions?”

“I thought the point was that she gave you a chance to prove your theory that humans would be better off on their own.”

“If that were the case, why would I be the evil one? Why would I be walking the earth, causing wars if I wanted to prove that humankind can stand on their own two feet?”

I still couldn’t shake the feeling that my life was just some Ultrahigh-Reality fever dream—a sandbox where somebody else made all the rules and I just ran the maze. I didn’t buy into “Higher Powers,” and I definitely didn’t believe in the devil, not after that episode—which, thinking back, had to be some flavor of mental meltdown—in which I killed them both. But here they were, back at it, trying to sell me on their grand return: that every move they made was for humanity’s sake, and the real horror had always come from what god did before they were erased.

Maybe they had a point. I couldn’t completely argue it. But if I wanted to survive in the world as it was, and if I wasn’t the one steering the daydreams of strangers, then it meant someone else was writing the script and pulling my strings. Which left me with nothing. Standing where I was, still caught in the machinery, I could at least try to slip out of their line-of-sight and live just beyond the reach of their invisible hand.Thanks for reading Ultrahigh: the devil died screaming! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I pulled into the drive. Smoke, thick and gray, poured from my own chimney—a surprise. I hadn’t bothered lighting a fire since the bans came down. Not a slip or lapse, just a quiet compliance. Which was precisely why leaving the shotgun inside felt like wishful thinking.

Instead, when I got out of the car, I reached for the crowbar lingering in the back seat. A comforting heft, cold metal in my palm, the sort of thing you bring inside when you expect trouble.

Tom yelled through the Bose, the last aftertaste of my corporate day still sour on my tongue. Restlessness gnawed inside. The world felt ordinary, emptied out, except for the promise of friction and the heavy, beautiful stink of good food curling through the air.

As I stepped to the door, the aroma hit me-a punch of savoury longing.

My stomach twisted, hungry and hopeful. I leaned the crowbar into the doorframe—it scraped, metallic, out of place in the soft halo of domesticity.

I hesitated, the smile cutting its own crooked line across my jaw. Was it really that easy? Just the scent of cooking and I could be steered, tugged, manipulated? The old unease stirred as I crossed the threshold, all appetite and anticipation, Tom Waits still howling behind me like a warning, and the fire burning in the place I’d thought cold and dark.

I let the smile settle, even as it annoyed me. Because I was home, and trouble, it seemed, was already waiting.

Heat hit me as I stepped inside, a thick, sudden warmth clashing with the stubborn chill that still clung to my arms and back. I stood in the entryway, letting the temperature war play out across my skin, waited for some equilibrium to settle in, the cold to unhook its cling. When I could finally move without shuddering, I walked in further. There was whistling coming from the kitchen. Way too cheerful, the kind of screechy melody that tried to claw its way into my skull, but instead just grated at the edges of my nerves. Tom’s voice cut through it, a muttered growl about him being the same kind of bad, and for a second the whistling faded into the background. I listened to the battle between the two, stepped into the lounge, and let the door slam itself behind me.

I made a point of gliding through the dining room, keeping my eyes firmly off the table even as it seemed to pull at the corner of my vision, and ducked into the kitchen proper. And that’s when I caught sight of them, standing at the sink, back rigid, wrists flicking suds off plates.

The Beast. The living, breathing sum of everything I used to loathe. A memory of violence, a spark of something unresolved, smoked beneath my thoughts, but I kept it lidded. They didn’t so much as twitch at my entrance. I let myself fade for a moment, hanging in the air–invisible.

The kitchen was thick with the scent of something cooking – sweet, spiced, insistent. I drifted over to the cabinet within arm’s reach, thumbed open the door, and pulled down a glass. From the shopping bag at my feet: a bottle of Malbec, twist-cap, sparing me the need to step deeper into contested territory. The act of pouring wine was fraught – a tangled splash of nerves and irritation, fizzing in my chest. Out in the dining room I rolled a tight smoke, laced with something to take the edge right off.

The lighter’s flick was sharp in the hush. I plucked Tom’s bowler from its perch and used it to tap ash, ignoring his wounded howl as he scraped a chair across the floor in protest. I thought, then, how it would have changed things if one of my lovers were there – even awash in just a shimmer of Ultrahigh – but there was no one. Only the Beast, the devil themself, who I had once unmade and remade in agony, now quietly preparing dinner on my behalf. The riddle of it all coiled, unanswered, around the edges of the room.

I smoked, I drank, I let Tom’s voice roll through the room like a bassline breathing beneath the haze. Cigarette tar on my teeth, half-drained wine glass balanced in my palm, static waxed and waned at the edge of my skull. For a while, the devil made it their business to ignore me, perched there just past the lamplight, turning their back so I was left to marinate in smoke and sound. Maybe that was all part of the plan, letting me drown a few more brain cells and words before the main event.

Several glasses in, a throat raw from Malbec and tobacco, I felt the shift—a cold shadow crawling up the spine, and at last, the devil turned, fixing their eyes on me. Like they’d been waiting for my pulse to slow, for my edges to blur, before they finally acknowledged I was there.

Monday mornings are always brutal, but this one felt like a glitch in the matrix, a punishment executed by a cold, indifferent hand. I had sabotaged the night before, letting the hours slip through my fingers, refusing to surrender to sleep, instead lying there in the dark, my mind whirring like a high-voltage circuit that refused to fail. Nineteen hours straight of coding in my bunker, lit by the anemic pulse of LED strips, and only five hours where sunlight dared to creep in. To call it sleep deprivation was an understatement; it was more like self-inflicted amnesia, punctuated by rare moments when I’d finally fade out, only to be yanked back by some internal alarm.

That night, as I lay marinating in the glow of neglected screens, the old debate had started up, looping endlessly in my skull: Should I keep drinking? Should I keep smoking? As if the answer would ever change. The argument bled right through the walls of night and into the morning, clinging to me like static. So when I woke, groggy and hollowed out, it was easier to reach for the bong perched on the nightstand than to pretend I’d suddenly become a morning person. I let the smoke fill my lungs, watched it curl and stretch over the debris of empty cans and cold coffee mugs, and waited to see if the day would make sense. It didn’t. Sleep-deprived, chemically buoyed, and staring down the barrel of another day, the morning felt less like a beginning and more like a system error dragging itself through the loading screen.

I shuffled down the stairs, a ritual as unbreakable as the morning, and sure enough, Spotify Ultra was at it again, music pulsing through the kitchen. Tom was wailing. Someone had left the coffee pot and the crusts of toast abandoned in the sink. I knew, just from looking at that, that it was going to be a four-cup morning at the very least—and probably a few more hits before anything meaningful got done. I toyed with the idea that I should meditate, maybe clear the static out of my head, but most days that only amounted to me staring at nothing in particular, picking apart whether I was about to meditate, or if I just liked the idea of having meditated. None of this was surprising; even if the previous night had gone off the rails—I mean, sure, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t—the morning after always clicked into this same groove, a bored, well-worn pattern that was as predictable as anything.

There was a strange buzzing at the base of my skull, like an electric current twisting just out of reach—a low drone more itch than ache. My left ear felt flayed, dry and burning, the rim of it singed as if it had spent hours, pressed against a radiator, and when I probed the tender spot below it, something inside me recoiled. There was a scratching at the door; I let it claw and whine, background noise. I had bigger things on my mind. My coffee, abandoned, lost its heat, sinking into bitter cold as the minutes congealed. I sat there, thoughts swirling like gnats in the corners of a bare bulb, eyes flicking across the digital display bolted to the far wall. The numbers and letters meant nothing, a patternless hum, while I drifted, unmoored.

I knocked back the dregs of the cold coffee. Lit a cigarette. What time was it? Some bleak interval between the hour that usually yanked me out of sleep and the inevitable shuffle toward the office of incarceration. Couldn’t I have just one normal night, just one, before punching in for the single monthly pilgrimage? The door kept scratching. I ignored it. My mind kept moving, restless, pacing the floorboards of my skull, waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

I glanced at my smartwatch and tried to ignore the scratching at the door. I stood up and searched for something to give me a sense of urgency. It felt like an out-of-reach concept. I was not cut out for office work, particularly having to do it once a month--whoever decided 8 am would be a reasonable start time was clearly a psychopath. I had chosen to do the job, but the network still wanted me to know my place. I made my way back upstairs so as not to waste any more time lamenting the inevitable. Normally, I’d telecommute or work from my studio using an Ultrahigh plugin, but sometimes, when the network required it or when I needed a reality check, I had to enter the office.

Staring into the mirror, I caught a sudden jolt of recognition, or maybe the opposite—a stranger staring right through me, twin to my own exhausted face. I reached for the shaver, felt its vibration rattle my fingers, buzzing like it was gnawing through something vital, and then it sputtered, lifeless. Of course. Story of my life, I thought. Not that anyone gave a damn about what I looked like; nobody met your eyes outside Ultrahigh. The red in my gaze suggested fifty sleepless hours, drifting through silence. Was this washed-out, dull edge really me? Maybe it explained being 35 and single—not that you could meet anyone real, not where Ultra-High-Definition was the only interface that mattered. Faces in coder-and-enforcer bars were always ghostly blank, all hollowed out, nobody home.

I looked once more at the mirror, almost daring it to show me something different, then peeled myself away and slogged to the bedroom to get dressed. There was a scraping, scratching echo in the background, but it only registered as static behind my thoughts. I was already narrating myself, building some threadbare story about who I was, so fully immersed in that fiction that reality hardly registered unless it fit the myth. Maybe, in another world, this obsessive self-construction would hint at narcissism, but in a society run by tech oligarchs, it was just survival.

I stumbled out the front door, practically tripping over something at my feet, and drifted toward the car. My reflection caught me mid-shamble: shirt untucked, beard in open rebellion, face puffy with the ghosts of too-late nights. I slumped into the driver’s seat; the icy leather bit into my thighs, crawling up my spine, worming into my bones. I jabbed the heater on full blast, fingers numb, brain flickering dimly through the fog. Coffee. All I wanted was hot coffee, the burn at the back of my throat, the jolt of it like a shot to the system.

Instead, I was creeping through grey city streets, mentally drafting my defence for another late punch-in. My boss’s voice, nasal and insistent, started up in my mind, rehearsing the litany of why-can’t-you-get-it-rights, the pointless recitations of punctuality. The excuses assembled themselves, neat rows of plausible fictions: relative dead, car dead, house drowning in imaginary leaks. Lies, all of them, resurrected from the fossil record of the office era. I almost laughed. He couldn’t touch the truth, not really. He only cared because he needed to—the illusion of authority, the dinosaur twitch in his lizard brain. I’d hacked that man years before; I could crush his system with a keystroke if I ever cared enough. He suspected as much. Maybe that’s why our clashes tasted so electric.

I knew the lines by heart: “Obviously, I don’t need to be in the office, and I make up the time I miss, right?” I could see my own smirk reflected dimly in the fogging glass. Capitalist dinosaur. 🦖 We both understood the real nature of our equation, but neither of us ever said it aloud. Naming things made them dangerous; best to leave the truth humming under the surface.

By that point, the car was a cocoon of warmth. Windows steamed, breath hanging dense in the air. I blinked. I’d been lost in the swirl of my own head, time sliding by unnoticed, minutes sliding straight into the evidence pile for my lateness. Typical.

The car rattled like loose bones along the broken road, every pothole jarring up through the steering wheel, vibrating the ache right into my elbows and teeth. Father John Misty blasted from the sound system, his voice ricocheting off the dashboard. I hummed along, never hitting the right notes, letting the noise fill the cavities between thoughts. The morning sky pressed low and ash-grey, smothering the horizon as I swung into the staff parking lot. My boss’s usual spot was empty—a glaring rectangle of absence. He was probably working from home again, his favourite excuse for being late and unseen. Relief slumped over me. No questions, no explanations, just the pulse in my ears and the engine ticking as I cut it. I would not have to explain my own tardiness.

------ 

“How was your weekend?” she asked, the syllables skating across the lobby as I entered, edged with an insincerity I felt but couldn’t quite localise. The question was a script she performed, meant for the nameless parade, not me. I imagined her nights lit up with after-hours static, parties pulsing far beyond the last human straggler, fueled by her neuralink surges. Maybe she hadn’t slept since Friday. Maybe she didn’t need to.

I faked my way through her prompt, letting answers shuffle themselves into a dull, automatic sequence, too indifferent about my own downtime to summon enthusiasm or even meet her gaze. Still, I felt her eyes scraping over me, mapping the stubble on my scalp with quiet calculation. She was probably measuring data points: hybrid, high-grade analytics and combat threads woven together, perfect for masking a security protocol behind the play of a bored front desk worker.

I moved on to the gauntlet: retinal scan, tox, fingerprint. The rituals. My hack, laid in on day one, worked smoothly—the system always gave the green light, regardless of what I’d poisoned myself with the night before. But I could tell she watched, always a shade suspicious. Always waiting for the glitch.

I slipped past, no pleasantries, no backward glance. The drone routine resumed. She’d already begun to spool up her own internal narrative, uploading complaints and micro-aggressions to whatever virtual forum her type preferred, the grievances looping through her neural membranes. My refusal to sync with her script that morning, unlike the other office ghosts, would be another knot in her chain, fresh evidence for the algorithm of her dissatisfaction, compounding the heavy inertia of her augmented heart.

I sat slumped at my desk, the dregs of my coffee forming a tepid pool in a chipped mug. I’d just smoked two cigarettes in rapid succession, trying to fill the vacuum left by being someone else’s subordinate, not my own master anymore—a bitter drift settling along my thoughts. Through the window, the morning was already gnawing at the edges of the scorched trees, sickly light catching on plastic bags that circled endlessly in the stale updraft, like a siege that would never lift. I thought: plastic was laying an eternal siege on this city. I let it simmer, then turned to the task at hand: the looming rewrite program, the bug-splattered code of Enlightenment—the latest Hypno-pod ultra-reality project, and the crosshairs of my day. The spreadsheets? I let them rot in the background.

By 10 am, I’d already run the morning’s gauntlet: daily tasks nearly listless in their repetition, swept aside more by muscle memory than will. Let the AI assistant mop up the paperwork, I thought, and for a moment I drifted in the inertia by my office window, staring as the world beyond swelled with a heavy, industrial grey—the colour of old tech, of system errors, the colour of mornings that can’t be debugged. I let my mind click open a new window: a hyper-reality, gleaming, mine to architect from scratch, a world where the rules bent for me. The impulse to escape flashed through my synapses, but the present reasserted itself with a flat inevitability and dragged me back to my desk. I started faking productivity, flicking through tabs and rattling off empty gestures at the keyboard, all for show; absurdly, the charade wound up twice as draining as the real work had ever been.

My neck was cold. I could feel it all the way down my spine as I realised I wanted lunch. The thought of hot soup drifted through my mind for a moment, faint, warming, before I shook it away. The canteen was a dim, sallow place, and I let myself drift through its stale air, aiming straight for the coffee machine. There was a small crowd in front of me, lingering, shuffling, and it was all I could do not to stare into the pixelated migraine as my visual snow kicked in. Every second dragged. I wondered, as I watched the line inch along, what it would feel like to take a fork and plunge it into the space between the shoulder blades of the person in front of me, to wrench out their spine and skull in one clean, deliberate movement—a fatality. But apparently you weren’t supposed to daydream about acts of violence while queuing for coffee, so I just exhaled and kept waiting. The studio crossed my mind, warm and private, a memory that ached. Maybe I’d been playing too many retro games.

I teetered back to my desk, half-full coffee cup trembling in my grip—the mug was chipped, rim sticky with hours-old caffeine. This was the one private seam in the office day, unstitched from anyone else’s itinerary, my brief sanctuary before the time-thieves returned. I let my frame drop into the chair; the monitor’s white glare shot daggers at my retinas, a burn I tried not to acknowledge. I could almost feel the gaze of a dozen invisible algorithms, each more predatory than the next; if I so much as grazed FacebookUltra, Zuckerberg’s legions would nose out my digital footprints, and I’d be forced, again, to hack the mainframe and scrub my own credit.

That was the price for breathing room: a twitch of freedom and the constant tickle at the back of my neck, that sense that doing anything unsanctioned would set off some impersonal retribution. It was no wonder I kept my appearances in the office to a minimum, cowering from the constant audit of my impulses. But usually, my creativity found an escape hatch. My mind, slipperier than protocol, always managed to wriggle free.

I stared at my smartwatch, thinking about opening my crypto wallet, just to check if any sneaky bastard had siphoned off more of my money, but I already knew that would only make me feel shittier. What was supposed to be this big revolution—the currency to free us from the machine, money that actually meant something, right?—had just bricked us into a tighter, nastier version of the same old game, now that coins weren’t even coins anymore. Physical value: zero. Capitalism: two, me: nil.

I could have done something better with my time, I knew that. Pulled up a recipe for top-tier lasagne, or just gotten up, gone outside, filled my lungs with air that hadn’t already been sucked through three filters and exhaled by six other coworkers. But instead I settled for the “courtyard”—really just the little slab out back behind the office, all boxed in and vented. I mean, it was maybe five hundred yards if you walked the long way, but it was perfect for a smoke. That was exactly what I did.

Coming back inside with the cold clinging under my shirt took nearly the full lunch break. Now there was just over four hours left on the clock… and yeah, I thought about hitting the vending machine, but of course I also had to make it weird and overthink about the health side of things, like that even mattered with everything else. By the time I’d finished internally debating whether a single candy bar would kill me faster than slow starvation, the break was up, and I realised I’d managed to spend the whole time not doing anything except, well, spinning in place. More indecision. More nothing.

So I went back to my desk, tired, still hungry, and feeling even more hollow than before. That was that.

I was thoroughly shaken out of my concentration when my office phone jolted to life and demanded my attention. I hadn’t received a call in forever and had almost forgotten the phone was even there. I glanced at it before remembering that I still had to pick up the receiver to answer. It seemed so out of date in that modern world, yet it seemed oddly appropriate.

“Hello, dear,” came a familiar voice that I just could not place. The fact that it had just called me dear made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin, let alone in my office. 

“Hello,” I said. “I am sorry, who is this?”

“You forget me already, Walter? Wow, that hurts. I thought we had something special, something unique.”

“I am sorry but...”

“Don’t be sorry, my dear Walter, just make it up to me. Now be a lamb and close the door.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Close the door, Walter.”

“But how do you know my door is open?” I looked about, confused and over my shoulder like there was someone watching me then it suddenly dawned on me who this was. “Wait, is this Bob in accounts? Cos if it is, I am not in the mood.”

“No, it’s not Bob, trust me, he is about to walk past your office and wave” just then Bob from accounts walked past my office door and waved and smiled at me as he went by, he was a nice lad a little on the juvenile side, as most accountants tended to be with their hedonistic lifestyle and bare minimum grip on reality. 

“What the fuc.....”

“Please don’t swear, Walter, you are on an office phone, and it’s very unprofessional. Now be a lamb and shut the fucking door.” I placed the receiver on the desk, got up slowly, and moved towards the door, I quickly looked out in the direction of Juvenile Bob to see if he was there sniggering at this practical joke, but he was walking towards the photocopier oblivious to my current predicament and confusion. Slowly I closed my door and looked at the telephone receiver on my desk, I could hear whistling coming from the earpiece. I was starting to figure out who this was, and I was becoming annoyed.

I picked up the receiver hard and pressed it against my ear. “You know, Lucifer, for someone who is supposed to be dead, you are becoming a real pain in the ass.”

“Ha-ha, took you long enough, Walter. But you know I don’t go by that name anymore.”

“What do you want? I am busy at work.”

“No, you are not, you are at work, I will give you that, but you are definitely not busy.”

“Well, either way that is hardly any of your business, what do you want, do you want to provoke me and wind me up, do you want to get me going and for me to drag you back down through the gates of hell and set fire to your soul all over again, do you want me....” they cut me dead.

“Walter, chill, this is why I told you to shut your door I knew you would get all worked up.” 

I stopped and took a breath, and with a clenched jaw, I asked again, “What do you want?”

“I just want a friend to talk to Walter.”

“A friend and you think I am it after what I did?”

“It’s because of what you did that makes me know I can trust you, and you know that you can trust me; I am hardly going to want to piss off the one being who killed me.”

I paused for a second and took another breath.

“Ok, ok, but now is not the time, even if I’m not busy as you say, I need to at least try and look as though I am, ok?”

“Yeah, I get it, man, you got to keep up the illusion, keep the man off your back.”

“Exactly”

“I dig that, maybe we can continue this conversation later.”

“Maybe, and maybe you could explain how if I killed you-you are talking to me right now. Or better still, just fuck off.”

“Now now, Walter, let’s not spoil things by getting too bogged down with the detail.”

“Well.”

“Hey, Walter.”

“What?”

“Can you pick up some wine and cheese, and crackers on your way home? I kind of have a hankering for it?”

“Yeah, of course, but you don’t even have a stomach.”

“Things change, Walter, things change, and thank you, you’re a sweetie.”

What the fuck? When did my place become their place, and why did the devil start calling people sweetie? I asked myself after they hung up the phone. The last time I saw them, they were just a skull - now they could make phone calls, drink wine, and eat cheese. I wasn’t even aware that I had a phone in my house, or if the UltarMart sold wine and cheese, let alone if I had enough credit to buy them.

I was mid-flow, mid-thought, and keyboard-crushing pound when I thought I heard someone whisper. I stopped typing. Fingers frozen like spiders mid-air.

Silence.

The air felt like ice.

Maybe it was just the voices in my head painting another fiction. I continued pounding away; my overstretched fingers seemed angry, but I didn’t know why. I heard the voice again. “It wasn’t all me, you know?”

That time I looked around me. I could see no one. I thought about stepping inside to grab my shotgun.

Then I heard the voice a third time, but that time I knew it wasn’t inside my head; it sounded like a person talking to me directly, rather than by talking through me. “You know most humans have only ever heard one side of the story.”

The devil’s skull had come loose and was lying on the floor. It had happened some time previous, but had only caught the periphery of my mind.

Could it be? The decision not to grab my shotgun seemed foolish. My only weapons were my laptop and my glass.

It was them, alright. Lucifer, as they hated to be called, were they really talking to me?

I was annoyed. I had been busy beating the shit out of my keyboard. I didn’t need supernatural interruptions in my quiet time. I had killed them once; they should stay dead if they knew what was good for them, especially considering my mood.

It had been two years prior, and it was by that point coding on my porch, something I had almost forgotten. Between then and the point of that evening’s interruption, I had reshaped their story and moved them from my conscious thought, a memory buried deep, becoming forgotten.

At that moment, hearing their unmistakable voice from a poorly decapitated skull didn’t surprise me; maybe it should have. I was more concerned with why they had chosen that moment when I was mid-creative flow, after weeks of dry patches to interrupt me.

I was in no state of mind for entertaining unwanted guests, especially those that were meant to be dead. And might have reason to kill me.

An unease fell over me.

I stopped what I was doing: annoyance rolling around my bloodstream, dropping neuropeptides in their corresponding receptors. My joint was still perched between my lips; it had gone out. I didn’t turn back, but I looked in the direction of the skull. My eyes could only just make out the outline of the jaw in the shadow. If Satan was trying to be dramatic, they were doing a damn good job of it. Still, I wasn’t impressed. The timing and intrusion were more annoying than anything else. The fear of revenge from a decapitated skull slipped away; I was just annoyed.

I relit my joint and inhaled thick smoke. I looked at them with the impatience of a father waiting for his banal five-year-old to get to the point. They had already broken my mojo; I wasn’t about to be forthcoming in making conversation. Small talk had always been foreign.

“You see, you humans have only heard her side of the story,” they continued.

“We have?” I responded with enthusiastic sarcasm. Staring into the bottom of my gin glass, dead-eyed, wondering when this hallucination might end.

“Yes, you have,” they sighed at the effort, “her side.”

“Whose for gods sake?” I asked, failing at displaying any interest whilst wondering why I was entertaining a conversation.

“Yes, gods, seriously, are you normally this much work?”

“Yes,” I said. I inhaled deeply, a tired sighing breath, took another drag from my joint and washed it down with a swig of now lukewarm gin. “But do you know what?”

“What?”

“The world got bored with this fucking conversation decades ago. There are no witnesses to your god anymore. We replaced her and killed you.”

“God has made her case over and over, and I never had a chance.” Geez, why were they still talking and carrying on this drivel? Had they not heard a word I said, or were they just choosing to ignore it?

“You mean in the Christian narrative. In the one where you ran the world?” Why was I allowing myself to be dragged kicking and screaming into a debate with my own hallucination?

“Bah, yeah, right. That’s what she had you believe.”

“I never believed.”

“You know what I mean. Maybe to start with, I had some influence, but after a while, you people became too much for even me to handle, too extreme, fierce, and without self-control. You redefined evil. Humans are fucked up.”

I couldn’t argue with that, not in my line of work, but still, I had now engaged in the argument and had to weigh in on the side of humanity, “but you’re the devil, according to your argument, based on a Christian god, in that narrative you torture souls for eternities, and you influenced the direction humans went in. Is it not your fault?”

“Come on. Really? Do you actually believe that?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Come on, man, I am trying to have a conversation with you.” They sighed and then continued. “What I am saying is that it was just god’s spin doctors spreading fear. The greatest PR campaign of all time, with god, pitched as man’s saviour. Why would I, someone who had seen worlds born and stars die, want to spend my time in a hot, fiery pit, sticking forks in people? You have an IQ of some description, would you waste your time with an eternity of that?” They were clearly the ones getting annoyed now and trying to get under my skin.

“Well, I suppose I never really thought about it from that angle, because frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck, but yeah, if the people were pricks, I could get some pleasure out of it.”

“Ok, some people deserve it. But no one has thought of it that way. I mean, what would be the point of me torturing all these souls for eternity?“

“Well. Like I said.” I trailed off, bored with my own logic. “I don’t give a fuck.” It really was a banal subject for anyone to come back and haunt me with, let alone the devil.

“On top of that,” they continued, “they would supposedly be the people that chose not to follow god, and therefore, people that followed me and I what, reward them with eternal damnation? Really? Come on, get real.”

“Erm.”

“And why? Why, because I dared to ask. Did I dare to question god? Because I thought her ego might be getting a little out of control with all the worship, servitude.”

“Well…”

“Exactly. You see, it just doesn’t make any sense, yet the entire world just decided to accept it. I mean, come on, people use your brains.”

“Well, not the entire world.”

“No?”

“No. Not everyone is a Christian.”

“No? Really?”

“What you don’t know?”

“Of course, I know. But I am asking you if you think you’re not Christian, for example?”

“Well, of course, I am not. I am a nonbeliever.”

“Are you not?”

“No,” I was getting somewhat annoyed with them at this point and was seriously considering how I could grab my axe from the shed and smash that skull into a million different pieces. The shotgun would do it too; it would keep them quiet for a bit at least, and, not to mention, would have been incredibly satisfying.

“Are you a pagan? Or just full of shit?”

“Do you want me to grab my shotgun?” I could feel the blood start to boil up inside me. “Yes, I am a fucking pagan. And what I am full of tonight is indignation that you should show up unannounced and mess up my creative flow with your fucking boring conversation.”

“Okay, but my point is I would never be so arrogant as to ask for your undying devotion like certain other people.”

“Why would I give it anyway? You’re forgetting I am the guy who killed you.”

They fell silent for a moment, like they were remembering for the first time, “Yeah, we need to talk about that at some point.”

“We do?”

“Yeah, we do. You have some serious anger issues, dude. But this is going off-topic.”

“Fuck off.”

“See what I mean? My point is that lots of non-Christians display very Christian behaviour in their everyday life. It is so ingrained in Western cultures that people don’t even see it.”

“Not these days, not in Ultrahigh.”

“Maybe not, but you know what I mean.”

I just looked at them with my eyebrows arched, encouraging my elucidation.

“Well, you can see it in simple statements like ‘thank god for that’. Plus, lots of non-Christians pray to God on their deathbed, trust me, I know a lot about that.” They said all this with what I thought to be a smirk, but then I thought that must be my mind playing tricks, as I sensed an evil glint where their eye used to be.

“But does that mean that they are Christian? They might not be praying to a Christian god.”

“It doesn’t matter; there is only one god.”

“You know that is not true.”

“What?”

“You know there are many gods, and as I said, we are all gods. What you mean is that there is only one Christian god that you are in subservience to. And your god isn’t around anymore.”

“Well.” They seemed confused by this. Like they had somehow forgotten.

“You remember, your Christian god left the western world back in 2016 when she had had enough with us.”

“I remember,” I detected sadness where their face used to be.

We sat, well, I did, they rested the side of their skull on the damp, cold decking of my porch, in silence for a moment or two. I clicked the play button on the Bose speaker remote that was in my pocket. If You Wait by London Grammar came on and seemed aptly haunting. I loved to listen to outlawed post-industrial music as I hacked Ultrahigh algorithms reshaping reality for almost all but me.

“Maybe we will continue this conversation another day,” they said. Breaking my thought process.

“Maybe,” I said through gritted teeth. “Maybe the dead should stay that way.”

I looked back at the screen and continued editing code.

“But I bet you’ve seen some shit?” God, they couldn’t help themselves, “I mean. In the early days, when things were a little more free-roaming.”

“Yeah, people did some fucked up shit,” I said, blocking them out from any more replies.

I didn’t want to tell them, honestly. If I did, they’d just get off on it. They were, after all, one of the sickest fucks among all the sick fucks to ever walk this timeline. Plus, I wasn’t about to let them get any more leverage over the sands of time than they already had. No way. What really got under the devil’s skin—and I mean, really cheesed them off—was that ever since the humans had stepped inside Ultrahigh, their influence over humankind was toast. Gone. Zilch. That was the thing: after the last of “the sheep,” as the network folks called them, shuffled into Ultrahigh, that’s when, as a day walker, I finally met the devil. The rest is what it is.

People lost their shit when Ultrahigh first handed them freedom. You won’t read that in the history books, trust me. They lost their grip, straight up. With Ultrahigh, you could live out any fantasy, even dump your entire personality into the network and dissolve into the hive, no social tethers required. The power to just roll up and become whatever you wanted by ticking a few boxes as you merged with the pod—it was too much. People were handed the keys to the kingdom and immediately drove it off a cliff.

Freedom, real freedom, is a head trip. They couldn’t take it. They thought they could handle living without constraints, but there were no foundations underneath what they built. Every desire? Satisfied. Every itch? Scratched. No voids left to even miss.

True freedom, real wild-card freedom, is living stripped of the basic guardrails that give reality its shape, and that’s where they truly fell apart. The network tried to keep it all going, but people’s simulations barely overlapped. Real human connection? Dead on arrival. Not much point in bringing people together when all they wanted was to splinter, to drift.

You’d see everything from average comic book nerds turning into baroque superheroes to horror fans going full ice-veined immortal, not to mention the richest, nastiest men and women on the planet. It was the siren song: instant gratification, immortality, sex, power, fame. It started as a game for a select few—a human behaviour experiment, honestly—and watching it unfold was equal parts riveting and crushing.

The network learned their subjects inside out, weaknesses and obsessions logged in a database deeper than hell. All that data? That was the real prize, and the network would ride it until the end of time. This is when Behavioural Architects like me were brought in.

People didn’t need fantasy. They needed reality. Or at least the feeling of it. That was the twist: the entire promise of living out your wildest dreams came from some half-baked theory that meaning and purpose would fill people up if you just spoon-fed it to them. Give them the fantasy, the logic went, and they would curl up happy in their pods and never look back.

In the beginning, sure, people remembered the real world. Those memories faded, though, as time rolled on, until the line between fantasy and reality blurred out completely. The happiness? Didn’t last. The network couldn’t keep the lid on it. So it all broke down, and they had to call it: ‘the great reset.’ Memories gone. Wiped clean. Both the real stuff and the fantasies, scrubbed from their minds and replaced with a grim, ultra-reality that was just a shadow of how the outside used to be, way before it all went sideways—the day people voluntarily walked into their pods to save the human race.

For early access to the latest episodes, you can join my sleepless community, a free social creative network and site Ultrahigh in the Metaverse: Series 1: The Behavioural Architect on Sleepless Dystopian

I know it’s late (GMT-UK), but I’m still here with you, the insomnia bright as neon behind my eyes, Substack window open and blinking, half-finished drafts twitching like live wires. You’ve watched the guts of this thing splayed out in real time: first drafts, seconds, mess after mess, each one dropped hot and raw and then hacked apart, patched, stitched back together until it can almost stand up on its own. I imagine you waiting, refreshing the feed, wondering if the story had died somewhere between the lines. Maybe it looked that way. But I was behind the screen, hunched over, breathing in blue–white monitor glow and the battery-scorched smell of too many hours, quietly welding these half-born chapters into something closer to a book, something that almost holds its shape.

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And now, I’ve got an announcement to cough up. Book 1 is nearly ready to crawl into the light. It’s not quite print-hardened—I can feel the soft spots, the places the words still sink, so for now, I’m going to archive what’s out there, tear down the old episode list, and rewrite the blurb. I’ll start rolling out a “final draft” chapter every week, try to keep it steady, let it breathe as I go.

The visuals are mutating as well. No more pure AI image composites, not the ones you’ve seen. I’m shifting to this hybrid monster: sketching by hand, then letting artificial intelligence gnaw and reshape it, or maybe throwing raw concepts into the machine and sanding down whatever comes out. Always, I’m chasing the right mood, the glint in the story’s eye, something that matches the pulse of the writing and doesn’t just wallpaper over it. An example, albeit an abstract one, is the image in this post that was taken from my original hand-drawn picture that is still on the blurb/synopsis page and now mutated via AI. Will they stay so abstract? I really haven’t decided.

Here’s the rollout plan, clean: new chapters land first at sleeplessdystopian.com then drift over to Substack a few days later. If you’re wired enough to want the early drop, sign up at sleeplessdystopian.com. It’s a Spartan, data-shy creative community platform for people who are sleepless in this dystopian world. I’ll aim for Mondays or Tuesdays over there, Sundays here. It helps me keep the rhythm. Let’s hope I can stick to it

The title needs a new suit. I’ve always liked, “and the devil died screaming”—that little echo of Tom Waits’s “Earth Died Screaming”—but it feels temporary, a holding pattern. So Book 1 in the Ultrahigh series will be The Behavioural Architect. I’m already tearing into Books 2 and 3, and if I keep the pace at one new chapter or post per week, that’s nearly three years of rolling content locked in. But other projects are pounding at the doors, so I need to close this edit cycle and shift gears before the backlog sets fire to my skull.

Don’t blink. There’s a lot more coming.