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…

Inspiration didn’t always arrive on cue. I could meditate, run, even sample every stimulant known—and sometimes the well stayed dry. I’d sit before a blank screen, willing code into being, and nothing would come. Then on other days it poured out of me as if it wrote itself. Lately, ever since my dialogues with the devil and with Legion, I’d been stuck. I could squash bugs in legacy modules, fill out routine functions, file my reports—but the breakthrough ideas that were my trademark simply refused to materialize. I knew the reason, of course, but hadn’t decided what to do about it. In the meantime, I’d have to coast.

From a production standpoint, it wasn’t a catastrophe. I’d prepared stacks of backup code—enough to keep systems running smoothly, if uninspired. What I lacked was that special spark. Then I hit on a plan: I needed to plunge myself into the worlds inhabited by the humans I’d crafted in Ultrahigh —not as a passive observer, but as an active…

They asked softly, brushing a lock of hair behind their ear. “What does freedom even mean? Is it the power to choose? To wander unbound? To live without fear or danger? Or is it just a mirage? Even before the collapse, freedom was conditional—a trick you played on yourselves. No one ever truly went wherever they pleased, yet they convinced themselves they did. And if they did move, believing each step sprung from pure free will—another illusion.”

I exhaled and poured a hefty measure of whiskey. “What makes you bring this up now?”

They watched as I handed over the bottle. “Mind if I take a swig?”

After a measured sip, they said, “Like you pointed out the other day, you don’t choose which thoughts arrive—only whether to act on them. And if you could teleport anywhere, you’re confined by what you can imagine. You can’t map every corner of the world in one life. In the end, you never discover truly new territory.”

“In other words, freedom is…

I needed space to think. Even with most people burrowed away in Ultrahigh, the world was still a cage. I went for a walk in nature, though where and when I lived, nothing about that was simple. Past my house, past my car, through the city’s fortified zones—the day-walkers’ towers and the office-industrial blocks where I worked—the story was always the same: air so toxic a breath would kill you, rain sharp enough to burn, heat thick enough to suffocate. My protective suit rattled, chafed at the neck and wrists, but I knew, coming home, I’d drop myself in the detox bath in the shed and burn off the scum, five days of quarantine after. Not a nuisance. Isolation had become as automatic as breathing, just another post-plague routine. I preferred it.

If I lingered too long by the smog wall, the corporation’s moles would ping my feed for status reports—a leash. They only tolerated me because I was insured property. Fear was their business. They broadcast warnings…

If there was one thing I knew, it was this: dealing with the devil was a wager you made with your own destruction. They were wired to twist, to double-back, to cut deals with both hands crossed behind their suit jacket. The inevitability of betrayal pulsed in the background like the low hum of a cooling fan. All the same, at least I’d mapped out the devil’s motive: vengeance, burning cold and bright. Legion, though, Legion was deeper, darker, and even as they circled me, baiting, tempting, whispering that I was the missing piece in their plan for liberation—or annihilation—I could never isolate their intent. Maybe Legion genuinely wanted to free us from a world of lies. Maybe they just wanted to flatten anyone in their way. It didn’t matter: at that time, our rivers ran parallel, fusing for a time, and I had to ride the current wherever it spat me out.

But first there was the botched break-in, the freeze-frame violence that left me and the devil locked up…