Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 12
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.
