My head was throbbing, vision glued behind a crust of something dried and mean, like the world had welded my eyelids shut. There was a pulse of danger rising, acid in the back of my throat. I tried to shift, just enough to uncork my panic, but I wasn’t in my bed, not even close. I was upright, jammed into a chair, shoulders pinched and arms wrenched behind me. I strained; the effort made my skull throb harder, a drumbeat in sync with how fast my heart was punching at my ribs. Every attempt to wrench my eyelids apart was met with the gluelike grip of fatigue and whatever else they’d used on me. Awareness crept in, a nasty dawning—the room felt like home, but I was lashed tight, absolutely no chance of wiggling free. I’d never been claustrophobic, but in that moment, panic chewed through the dust and razorblades in my mouth. This was bad, unforgivably bad. Somewhere in the sticky fog I tried to piece together: payback, maybe? A cheap revenge for the fallout from last night’s argument? Maybe I had been an asshole, maybe my temper was a little too nuclear. Maybe that was why now I was the one left strung up and defenceless.
All of that self-loathing, the bile I was letting churn at Satan for everything, was interrupted by a small, sick noise off to my right. Like a dog, low and caged. I jerked my head, or at least tried, and fought to peel my eyes open. Two blurry lines, and then I saw it: the devil, gagged and strapped up just as I was. I let the surprise wash over me, confusion cold and deep. We weren’t enemies this time—we were both caught in whatever horror show this was. The devil tried to shout or bark something, but the gag rendered it useless, a muffled animal growl that only made my headache worse. I tried to think, but my thoughts were sludge and gristle. The questions came: Who orchestrated this? How had they slipped past my security? Where were they now? No sound, just the distant, briny taste of unfiltered air gusting in from open doors—the doors I never left open, not in that house. The rest was dead quiet. It was like something was waiting for whatever came next. All my mind wanted was a hit to steady my nerves, but that wasn’t happening. Survival came first now, the only thing left in my control.
I believed no one could get past my security, not by any means. I had engineered the system myself, layered over every kind of threat, real or imagined. It was my masterpiece. Unhackable, I’d told myself, even against metaphysical threats, which everyone else considered a joke. Now there I was, trussed up next to the only entity who’d ever breached my defences from the inside out. Not my smartest move, bringing the devils skull in, but it had seemed like a trophy at the time. At that moment it just looked like hubris. Maybe I was the author of my own defeat, maybe it was an inside job and someone close had betrayed me and was playing the victim. I couldn’t rule it out. That’s the thing about trust: it’s always a trap. But the devil looked even worse than I imagined I did, so maybe it was just coincidence, a side effect of someone else’s agenda. The only thing I knew for certain: when I got out, every inch of my security system would get an upgrade and a rewrite. I’d missed something.
Except—I hadn’t told anyone about the last upgrade. The one only I knew, the true backdoor, built from parts no one else could understand: flesh, code, and something much stranger. Nobody, not even the devil, could have anticipated it. It was mine, mine alone.
So I started humming, just low and deliberate, waiting for it to catch. The air in the room went still, even the devil stopped thrashing. The wind shut off. Silence took the whole house, pressed down on it. It would not be the reaction they wanted, whoever they were, not the human-AI-metaphysical mashup they would have been expecting. Doors slammed, the windows sealed themselves, a hum of energy shimmered through every wall, and the electrostatic trap I’d threaded through the place snapped on. No one moved except me. I watched as the devil’s restraints jolted with invisible voltage, body yanking in agony, and for a moment I let it ride. I wasn’t letting up until I knew they weren’t in on the break-in. Once I was satisfied, I flicked the pulse, and the metal bindings around my wrists and ankles evaporated. I stood, wobbly but upright, head pounding, senses reeling, and all I wanted was revenge and whiskey in equal measure. But before I did anything reckless, I needed to get my hands to stop shaking. I left the devil writhing in the chair and walked out, ignoring their protests. They could sweat it out while I lined up a drink and a hit. Priorities.
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The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 26 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
