I lit up a joint and slipped outside into the night, seeking a little relief from the tangled noise in my skull. The devil’s words—too convincing by half, always contaminated with their logic, always twisting until I couldn’t tell whose thoughts I was having. That was the real trick, the one-two punch: convincing you the strings they pulled were all just your own hands moving, and meanwhile, they kept you tangled. And what was I supposed to do about it?
There was the obvious answer—a route that might take a century to carve out of Ultrahigh’s code. I’d have to snap people awake while their minds were still rewired, the system’s walls tight as a trap. Even a stray suggestion could kick alarms into life, paint a target on your back. Getting caught meant death. Not that death bothered me; what made my bones cold was the thought of wasting all that effort for nothing. Which meant there had to be a slyer way, a tickle instead of a punch—a way to slip people actual control, or at least some facsimile, something that would train them for reality even if at first it was a stage set.
Or maybe a different route altogether—a knife behind the curtain, using the devil’s own appetite against them, maybe even yanking Legion off their throne. Both of them, too hungry and too proud to notice the fail-safes I’d buried deep in the code, set to detonate if they so much as tried to hijack the system. I’d mix in bits of ancient tech, obscure enough to light a fire in the devil’s stare but far gone past Legion’s reach, lacing it all with the hard skeleton of behavioural AI and the black art of Ultrahigh architecture. I would need the insiders—the artists deeply embedded inside Ultrahigh’s architecture, the architects of the illusion, ones who understood how to bend the warped codebase from within. A path attempted by a handful, believed by fewer, and never visible to the rest. I’d done it, myself, learned the angles and shims, the double-life of coding at the center and hiding my own tracks. If my coworkers ever found out that the very place they thought ordinary was the lab for my most ruthless operations—I could almost taste their shock. My blend of code and outlaw ritual, forbidden and radioactive; anyone caught would be marked out as a threat to the entire system.
Ultrahigh was a mirror to the meat world, every thread of code a twin to some rippling strand in reality. The connections ran everywhere, most people just never got their eyes open wide enough to see the mesh. In the outside world, the links were fainter—a ghost of a feeling, a buried static you had to tease into being. But those who learned the sense of it, could twist both worlds; half the time they didn’t even know it. If I could seduce those rare types, bait them into my network and teach them the trick of swapping worlds and reshaping them, I’d have a team. The game was to do it without being seen and to keep the new recruits from gunning for my own position. Somewhere in my brain there was already the shape of a blueprint, fire just waiting to be fed.
The devil? I hadn’t decided. I shouldn’t trust them, but that “shouldn’t” left a hairline crack. At least with the devil, I could see the angles; the rest of the players were all smoke, double-meaning, and knives in the dark. Devils were up-front about wanting to win, if you went by the stories.
Best play was to hook the devil in with clever debates, draw their focus off the real signal by letting them chase sparks and distractions. I had the code, the expertise, and the reputation for being the one who’d ended the most infamous demon in living memory. That counted for something. But these ancient operators had seen every trick played since the beginning; they’d forgotten more about chaos than I’d ever learn. Overconfidence was the loaded gun under the table, so I kept mine tucked away.
I ground out my joint, ducked back inside, poured a whiskey, and crashed into my favorite chair. Had to keep a hard mask, keep the storm locked down until it was ready. I dialed up Max Richter’s Sleep and let it fill the space, notes thick as clouds, drawing both of us into that weird borderland between dream and calculation.
“What’s this?” The devil’s voice cut through, half-accusation, half-almost wistful.
“It’s nice,” I fired back.
“It is,” they mumbled, letting silence settle.
I hit my e-cig, sipped whiskey, let the mix of music and smoke drag me into that sweet spot where my focus blurred but my subconscious lit up like a switchboard. The answer hit me: spark another spliff, put it in the devil’s claws, and see what happened when demonic chemistry met my own home-grown strain. They balked, at first, so I leaned in, using every ounce of dark charm and not-so-veiled threat to bring them around.
I watched, not moving, eyes fixed for every flicker of their face, hiding my anticipation under all the usual boredom. Whiskey offered, accepted. I stood, poured, killed the overheads, lit a few candles, got the fire flickering, and let the room settle into something smoky, golden, almost ritualistic. I could feel them unwinding, centuries of tension dripping away, their edges starting to blur to match my own.
“Ever notice how Ultrahigh’s twisted realm is just a reflection of the way everything’s connected on the outside?” I asked, and right there, in the cross-current of weed and lullaby music, I pitched us both into the thick of my best delirium.
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-The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 28 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
