The dangers in my line of work had started to glare at me in ways I could no longer ignore, like the hot red indicator lights blinking through a fog at three a.m., warning of systems on the verge of catastrophe. My focus, not always razor-sharp, had grown ragged, splitting along the fault lines of recent events. I was restless, my mind torn between relentless programming and the much heavier shadows pressing in from all sides. It was time to make the decision: telecommute from there on out. The idea wasn’t bulletproof, but at least it meant my environment was on my terms. My domain, my rules. I set about layering the place with redundancies, traps, and fallback plans, anything to keep myself a step ahead. The skills I’d brought from another world, outlawed but still alive inside me, might be the only thing standing between me and a new, even bigger monster: the corpocracy, the network, the distributed mechanical beast.
Beneath the surface of my house, sealed away from whatever passed for the outside world, my bunker waited. Not just a hole in the ground, but a warren of chambers, rooms, and stockpiles, capable of outlasting any meltdown or extinction event they cared to throw at me. I’d gone overboard. Air-filtration and blast doors, layers of anti-intrusion technology, food-replication units, a cocktail of next-gen life support—they said if you ran the numbers, I could survive for centuries in there. Maybe two hundred. Maybe three. Who was counting? Some of the tech wasn't even verified, but nothing about my situation was. I’d bet on worse odds.
Supposedly my network was off-grid, un-hackable by anyone. Supposedly. But then the devil showed up again, squeezing into my house if not my bunker. It was aggravating, a glitch that shouldn’t have happened, but my confidence in the bunker held: unless I left a door open, the devil could pace outside for eternity and still never get in. Legion, though, was a different problem. They’d found their way in past the coding traps and firewalls I’d built to lash and snare any hacker, code designed to break bones and egos. Somehow they’d slipped through, like smoke through a cracked window. That meant there was a flaw somewhere, something I needed to patch not just with code but with chaos magick, ceremonial rituals, and ayahuasca journeys punched straight through my neurons. At the very least, those practices would take the edge off the mess, or at least mask the panic with something stranger.
Magick, shamanistic rituals, anything that bent reality at the seams—it was all banned in my world and the one before it. The only way to practice was to vanish, seal myself away in a treated pod shielded from heat-seeking satellites, spies, and whatever government bloodhound was crawling the net. Even researching it was dangerous: you risked prison or worse, getting locked into an algorithmic hell so deep Satan would think twice before visiting. I’ve heard what happens to people trapped on the wrong side of reality, and trust me: you don’t want the details.
If Legion could taste my thoughts, what about the others? How many eyes were on me, unseen? Rule number one for survival, the thread that ran through every disaster I’d walked away from: trust no one. It might have marked me as cold, but it kept me breathing. The trick was looking like you trusted someone, right up until the moment you had to drop them to keep your secrets. Maybe that’s what I was doing with the devil: stringing them along, never blinking, always ready to gut their story if they crossed me again. Harsh, maybe, but in a future that’s one part demon invasion, one part corporate killbox, you’d better be ready to strike first. Call it a caution.
When I built worlds, I liked to work outside the ceremonial Ultrahigh reality pod; the screens and hardware out there were good enough for most jobs. This time was different. Secrets like those called for full immersion: inside the raw pod, building a coding room and ritual chamber from the inside out, then locking it all down in its own fortified cell. Only once I’d sealed the chamber did I begin shaping the new world and the characters inside it, all crafted for higher magick, ceremonial rites, and the cold-blooded synthesis of ayahuasca.
To get answers, and to keep unseen hands out of my mind, I finally stepped into the chamber and prepped for the ayahuasca rite, calling up the old Celtic shaman code imprinted in my DNA. Not a choice you make lightly; the danger of the practice on its own could eat lesser people alive, but the risk of being found out by the corpocracy was worse. You needed to be clear, and at the same time, altered; doubt could trip you up, but fear was the real poison. Even a bad trip wouldn’t last forever, but getting swallowed by the magick or the brew—that was a one-way ticket. The greatest danger was never the tools; it was losing yourself in the process and letting the enemy walk in while you were too far gone to notice.
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The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 22 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
