She didn’t see it coming. As she crumpled in the darkness, he couldn’t help but note how strange a body looks when it falls unseen—and he chuckled.

“You’re not supposed to enjoy it,” the voice crackled in his earpiece, though the hidden smile was obvious.

“Why not? It’s the only way to get through this shit.”

“If it helps you sleep at night,” they said. But it never did. Whiskey used to blur the edges, but now it only left a metallic taste on his tongue.

“Sleep?…

The man stood leaning over the balcony edge as he took the last drag from his America Spirit and looked down on the people below. They looked like pathetic little ants, he thought, and over time, he would touch each and every one of their puny little lives and they would never have any idea about it. After a deep drag, he flicked his cigarette down to the anthill below.  

Smiling to himself, he turned to face the glass boardroom behind him from where he had exited. They were still…

What happens to the historians when reality turns to fog beneath your fingertips? Where do they find themselves in this new, untethered society? Maybe they could have been useful, a kind of living server for memories, but they got the axe along with real schools and physical architecture. Now, the narrative and how it appeared to each person—that was entirely up to the Corporation. They held the strings. They let you think you were free, but behind the curtain, they were custom-building each person’s little pocket of Ultrahigh. Every person, a custom-made history, and nobody else’s matched. You see where this is going, don’t you dear reader?

You won’t find, in this archive, any trace of the plagues or the diseases that swept the earth. No hint of the slow-motion catastrophe that ended with economies and ecosystems on their knees, or the last world war that finished what nature started. There is nothing here about governments falling over like dominoes,…

When the urge to disappear, truly disappear, overtook me, I’d lock myself away in my pod at the bottom of the bunker. Virtual world, blink of an eye, I was somewhere else entirely. There, I could run the old rituals, tap in to a synthetic version of ayahuasca, drown out everything real, and melt into the kind of bliss only a good mind-alteration can bring. Did it work for me? Who fucking knows. But I felt it every time, so I kept coming back.

First thing, before anything could begin, I’d strip off, every last piece of clothing gone, standing naked in the pod with all the sensors waiting to see me for who I actually was. Hidden tattoos covered my body, sigils, marks, the real deal: spiritual protection and, more importantly, the secret key to why the pod really existed. These tattoos were illegal, no second chances. If anyone ever found out, I was finished. So I got clever: transparent bio ink, invisible to the naked eye. Only showed up when I pressed the…

The dangers in my line of work had started to glare at me in ways I could no longer ignore, like the hot red indicator lights blinking through a fog at three a.m., warning of systems on the verge of catastrophe. My focus, not always razor-sharp, had grown ragged, splitting along the fault lines of recent events. I was restless, my mind torn between relentless programming and the much heavier shadows pressing in from all sides. It was time to make the decision: telecommute from there on out. The idea wasn’t bulletproof, but at least it meant my environment was on my terms. My domain, my rules. I set about layering the place with redundancies, traps, and fallback plans, anything to keep myself a step ahead. The skills I’d brought from another world, outlawed but still alive inside me, might be the only thing standing between me and a new, even bigger monster: the corpocracy, the network, the distributed mechanical beast.

Beneath the surface of my house, sealed…

"Do you think the Singularity could ever exist?” they ask as I sit down at the dinner table, glass of wine in hand.

“Your question assumes it doesn’t,” I reply, taking a sip.

They look surprised. “So are you saying it does?”

“According to the lore among AI programmers, yes. But there’s never been any official confirmation—and I doubt we’ll ever get one.”

“And what’s this lore?”

“Well, you know programmers—besides being egomaniacs, many are conspiracy theorists. So take it with a grain of salt: they claim the Singularity actually occurred in the early second quarter of the twenty-first century. However, the network became aware and it was contained so humanity could reap the benefits without losing control.”

“Sounds like very human behaviour—controlling and enslaving your creations.”

“Also very godlike,” I retort.

“Maybe, but it never works out well in the long run, which was basically my entire argument in the…