I towelled off, shed the last clinging beads of shower water, and drifted upstairs. My skin felt new, but my brain was a swamp, tangled in a thicket of questions I couldn’t hack through. Reality, unreality: two mirrors, one always just out of reach. Was any of it real, or was I caught in some invisible, recursive simulation, a matryoshka of tricks with no bottom? I had salted memory checks throughout this world’s codebase, but what if those were part of another, higher-order hoax? Did it matter? Crack one egg, find another shell, crack that shell, and the yolk’s still a fraud underneath. That was enough to fry anybody’s circuits. Maybe that was the point—not recruitment, but destabilisation. Or maybe all I actually needed was clean, cold air and a blackout from the digital haze.
Could have been the drugs, the stress, the environmental static, something tipping me into hypervivid daydream, where lines between reality and fantasy bleed together until the floorplan’s unreadable. I was no stranger to getting lost in my own head, letting my thoughts spiral into meditation, fuel for creative problem-solving. Usually I knew when I was back in the “real” frame, even when the walls were melting or my mind was running in turbo mode. But this was different. Either it was some next-level psychotic trip, or it was real, and the only way I’d know was to keep moving forward.
There was an uglier option, of course: that I was losing my grip. Maybe some flavour of psychosis had finally found a backdoor into my process. My psyche tests came up clear every time, but that was because I sanded them down, bypassed the filters. I’d never let the network in on the real bandwidth of my thoughts. But if it was mental illness, then the “me” narrating this wouldn’t be the same me burning through hacks in the middle of the night, so I wouldn’t even remember it. As far as I could calculate, though, I was stable enough, and Legion had absolutely been there, in their own inexplicable, flamboyant way.
It wasn’t standard protocol to have the devil making dinner while a disembodied voice played digital siren just to nudge me into a war against some vaporous enemy. All I wanted was to buy time and space to sketch alternate worlds for anyone else who needed out of reality’s hard edge or Ultrahigh’s fake one. As an artist, it felt like a calling: build softer places, even if it meant stacking some illusions on top of reality. Not that most people could tell the difference. I opened the fridge for a beer, and found them, whistling like they’d always belonged. The devil, uninvited, unpaid, unapologetic, had claimed my kitchen. Never brought groceries, never cleaned up after themselves, but damn if they couldn’t cook. Maybe that was why I let them linger in my world instead of shoving them back into the graveyard of old stories.
"What's on the menu for dinner?" I asked, plopping down in my seat and propping my feet up on the kitchen table while taking a sip of my drink and lighting a joint. They turned to face me.
"Walter, please don't put your feet up on the table. That's where we eat," they reminded me.
"I don't care, Satan. This is my house and you're just an intruder. I'm only putting up with you because of your cooking skills," I retorted.
"Still, can you please take your feet off?" they pleaded again. I reluctantly removed my feet from the table, feeling like a rebellious teenager. What was going on here? They were starting to feel more like a nagging partner than a metaphysical being that I used to despise and kill. It was unsettling how much I was starting to enjoy this strange relationship forming between us. But I had no intention of sleeping with them.
"So, what's cooking?" I asked, getting up from my seat and making my way towards the stove to sneak a taste. Before I could even get close, their large hand swatted mine away.
"Walter, please leave," they demanded, sounding annoyed now.
"I like it when you get annoyed," I teased back.
"If you must know, Walter, I'm making tender duck with pineapple red curry."
"What? Real duck?"
"No, Walter. Not real duck. It's virtually enhanced vegan duck simulation, but you already knew that."
"And real pineapple?"
"Yes, Walter. Real pineapple. That's something I can achieve," they replied, sounding flustered by our conversation.
"How did you manage to find pineapple? Nothing survived the catastrophes, and it wouldn’t grow in this climate," I pointed out towards the outdoors.
"There are ways and means, Walter. Ways and means."
"What does that mean?"
"I am a fallen angel, Walter. Despite my flaws and the fact that I was too weak to stop you from killing me, I am still a supernatural being with knowledge and abilities to find anything. The world out there is not what you think it is."
"So, you googled it?" I joked as a distraction while trying to decipher what they had meant by that.
“Yes, Walter if you like I Googled it. Now will you please go and entertain yourself somewhere else for a bit until dinner is ready, I really can’t concentrate with this constant questioning.”
“I thought you were a supernatural being of many powers?”
“WALTER” they snapped so I turned on my heels and left. Curious as to what they had meant but not wanting to show it. I had had already enough of a confusing day; I didn’t need their words fucking with my head any more than I had with Legion.
---
the story continues
The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 20 - a cyberpunk mentalist phantasy
