Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 15
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.
