Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 11
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.
