What happens to the historians when reality turns to fog beneath your fingertips? Where do they find themselves in this new, untethered society? Maybe they could have been useful, a kind of living server for memories, but they got the axe along with real schools and physical architecture. Now, the narrative and how it appeared to each person—that was entirely up to the Corporation. They held the strings. They let you think you were free, but behind the curtain, they were custom-building each person’s little pocket of Ultrahigh. Every person, a custom-made history, and nobody else’s matched. You see where this is going, don’t you dear reader?
You won’t find, in this archive, any trace of the plagues or the diseases that swept the earth. No hint of the slow-motion catastrophe that ended with economies and ecosystems on their knees, or the last world war that finished what nature started. There is nothing here about governments falling over like dominoes, crushed by the corptocrasy, or how famine, flood, and environmental collapse pushed humanity to give up whatever scraps of freedom were left. No one mentions the trade-off: real life surrendered for a slot in an artificial reality pod.
When the corporations rolled it out, they dressed it up like a miracle. Get rid of government overreach. Forget about borders. Live in a global network from inside your pod. Clean air, programmed exercise, real nutrition, and a highlight reel for a life. For some, it meant a total reset: new reality, new body, new family, new everything.
People loved it. This thing, which used to be a luxury for the 1%, suddenly belonged to everyone. The doors were wide open, and the rest of humanity flocked inside, chasing a better dream than what was left outside.
Of course, the skeptics put up a fight. “Don’t give in to the lies,” they said, but that just made them a joke. People forgot about the rebels fast—the moment they got what they wanted. When the last holdouts had no audience left, the Corporation finished the job. They got dragged in, sometimes with violence. Some managed to vanish; rumors spread about a resistance, maybe a revolution brewing somewhere out there. But really, who were they going to save? The ones living happily in their made-to-order paradise? What would be the point? To release them into a world where breathing can poison you, where food is toxic, the sunlight cooks your skin, and every day is a survival cage match? That alone is what kept me locked in my own inertia.
The pods built their own boundaries, high and absolute. So for anyone left outside, there was nothing but the wasteland and the prying eyes of the sun. The rest of us? We had to figure out how to make it work or die.
Yet, some did more than just survive. I heard stories, trade secrets among fellow behavioural hackers in the dark web backwaters, about people who learned the new rules. They found little islands, environmental dead zones where the air didn’t kill and you could still grow food if you worked at it. If you believed the rumours (and some did), as the bulk of humanity slept inside their self-directed virtual heavens, the planet started mending itself.
The result was parallel universes: one where you fought every day for a few more hours, and one where everything was curated easiness, a sense of struggle provided like a flavour.
Kids born into Ultrahigh didn’t know there was any other side of the wall. Why would they? Even if at birth—the mother didn’t get to hold the newborn, didn’t breastfeed it, had no idea it was taken away to start its new ‘life’ in Ultrahigh. Because that was the point: the Corporation’s experiment was to shape people into perfect citizens, loyal and unquestioning, right from their first digital breath.
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The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 24 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
