Ultrahigh in the Metaverse: Series 1: The Behavioural Architect

Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1:  The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 2

Monday mornings are always brutal, but this one felt like a glitch in the matrix, a punishment executed by a cold, indifferent hand. I had sabotaged the night before, letting the hours slip through my fingers, refusing to surrender to sleep, instead lying there in the dark, my mind whirring like a high-voltage circuit that refused to fail. Nineteen hours straight of coding in my bunker, lit by the anemic pulse of LED strips, and only five hours where sunlight dared to creep in. To call it sleep deprivation was an understatement; it was more like self-inflicted amnesia, punctuated by rare moments when I’d finally fade out, only to be yanked back by some internal alarm.

That night, as I lay marinating in the glow of neglected screens, the old debate had started up, looping endlessly in my skull: Should I keep drinking? Should I keep smoking? As if the answer would ever change. The argument bled right through the walls of night and into the morning, clinging to me like static. So when I woke, groggy and hollowed out, it was easier to reach for the bong perched on the nightstand than to pretend I’d suddenly become a morning person. I let the smoke fill my lungs, watched it curl and stretch over the debris of empty cans and cold coffee mugs, and waited to see if the day would make sense. It didn’t. Sleep-deprived, chemically buoyed, and staring down the barrel of another day, the morning felt less like a beginning and more like a system error dragging itself through the loading screen.

I shuffled down the stairs, a ritual as unbreakable as the morning, and sure enough, Spotify Ultra was at it again, music pulsing through the kitchen. Tom was wailing. Someone had left the coffee pot and the crusts of toast abandoned in the sink. I knew, just from looking at that, that it was going to be a four-cup morning at the very least—and probably a few more hits before anything meaningful got done. I toyed with the idea that I should meditate, maybe clear the static out of my head, but most days that only amounted to me staring at nothing in particular, picking apart whether I was about to meditate, or if I just liked the idea of having meditated. None of this was surprising; even if the previous night had gone off the rails—I mean, sure, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t—the morning after always clicked into this same groove, a bored, well-worn pattern that was as predictable as anything.

There was a strange buzzing at the base of my skull, like an electric current twisting just out of reach—a low drone more itch than ache. My left ear felt flayed, dry and burning, the rim of it singed as if it had spent hours, pressed against a radiator, and when I probed the tender spot below it, something inside me recoiled. There was a scratching at the door; I let it claw and whine, background noise. I had bigger things on my mind. My coffee, abandoned, lost its heat, sinking into bitter cold as the minutes congealed. I sat there, thoughts swirling like gnats in the corners of a bare bulb, eyes flicking across the digital display bolted to the far wall. The numbers and letters meant nothing, a patternless hum, while I drifted, unmoored.

I knocked back the dregs of the cold coffee. Lit a cigarette. What time was it? Some bleak interval between the hour that usually yanked me out of sleep and the inevitable shuffle toward the office of incarceration. Couldn’t I have just one normal night, just one, before punching in for the single monthly pilgrimage? The door kept scratching. I ignored it. My mind kept moving, restless, pacing the floorboards of my skull, waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

I glanced at my smartwatch and tried to ignore the scratching at the door. I stood up and searched for something to give me a sense of urgency. It felt like an out-of-reach concept. I was not cut out for office work, particularly having to do it once a month--whoever decided 8 am would be a reasonable start time was clearly a psychopath. I had chosen to do the job, but the network still wanted me to know my place. I made my way back upstairs so as not to waste any more time lamenting the inevitable. Normally, I'd telecommute or work from my studio using an Ultrahigh plugin, but sometimes, when the network required it or when I needed a reality check, I had to enter the office.

Staring into the mirror, I caught a sudden jolt of recognition, or maybe the opposite—a stranger staring right through me, twin to my own exhausted face. I reached for the shaver, felt its vibration rattle my fingers, buzzing like it was gnawing through something vital, and then it sputtered, lifeless. Of course. Story of my life, I thought. Not that anyone gave a damn about what I looked like; nobody met your eyes outside Ultrahigh. The red in my gaze suggested fifty sleepless hours, drifting through silence. Was this washed-out, dull edge really me? Maybe it explained being 35 and single—not that you could meet anyone real, not where Ultra-High-Definition was the only interface that mattered. Faces in coder-and-enforcer bars were always ghostly blank, all hollowed out, nobody home.

I looked once more at the mirror, almost daring it to show me something different, then peeled myself away and slogged to the bedroom to get dressed. There was a scraping, scratching echo in the background, but it only registered as static behind my thoughts. I was already narrating myself, building some threadbare story about who I was, so fully immersed in that fiction that reality hardly registered unless it fit the myth. Maybe, in another world, this obsessive self-construction would hint at narcissism, but in a society run by tech oligarchs, it was just survival.

I stumbled out the front door, practically tripping over something at my feet, and drifted toward the car. My reflection caught me mid-shamble: shirt untucked, beard in open rebellion, face puffy with the ghosts of too-late nights. I slumped into the driver’s seat; the icy leather bit into my thighs, crawling up my spine, worming into my bones. I jabbed the heater on full blast, fingers numb, brain flickering dimly through the fog. Coffee. All I wanted was hot coffee, the burn at the back of my throat, the jolt of it like a shot to the system.

Instead, I was creeping through grey city streets, mentally drafting my defence for another late punch-in. My boss’s voice, nasal and insistent, started up in my mind, rehearsing the litany of why-can’t-you-get-it-rights, the pointless recitations of punctuality. The excuses assembled themselves, neat rows of plausible fictions: relative dead, car dead, house drowning in imaginary leaks. Lies, all of them, resurrected from the fossil record of the office era. I almost laughed. He couldn't touch the truth, not really. He only cared because he needed to—the illusion of authority, the dinosaur twitch in his lizard brain. I’d hacked that man years before; I could crush his system with a keystroke if I ever cared enough. He suspected as much. Maybe that’s why our clashes tasted so electric.

I knew the lines by heart: “Obviously, I don’t need to be in the office, and I make up the time I miss, right?” I could see my own smirk reflected dimly in the fogging glass. Capitalist dinosaur. 🦖 We both understood the real nature of our equation, but neither of us ever said it aloud. Naming things made them dangerous; best to leave the truth humming under the surface.

By that point, the car was a cocoon of warmth. Windows steamed, breath hanging dense in the air. I blinked. I’d been lost in the swirl of my own head, time sliding by unnoticed, minutes sliding straight into the evidence pile for my lateness. Typical.

The car rattled like loose bones along the broken road, every pothole jarring up through the steering wheel, vibrating the ache right into my elbows and teeth. Father John Misty blasted from the sound system, his voice ricocheting off the dashboard. I hummed along, never hitting the right notes, letting the noise fill the cavities between thoughts. The morning sky pressed low and ash-grey, smothering the horizon as I swung into the staff parking lot. My boss’s usual spot was empty—a glaring rectangle of absence. He was probably working from home again, his favourite excuse for being late and unseen. Relief slumped over me. No questions, no explanations, just the pulse in my ears and the engine ticking as I cut it. I would not have to explain my own tardiness.

------ 

“How was your weekend?” she asked, the syllables skating across the lobby as I entered, edged with an insincerity I felt but couldn’t quite localise. The question was a script she performed, meant for the nameless parade, not me. I imagined her nights lit up with after-hours static, parties pulsing far beyond the last human straggler, fueled by her neuralink surges. Maybe she hadn’t slept since Friday. Maybe she didn’t need to.

I faked my way through her prompt, letting answers shuffle themselves into a dull, automatic sequence, too indifferent about my own downtime to summon enthusiasm or even meet her gaze. Still, I felt her eyes scraping over me, mapping the stubble on my scalp with quiet calculation. She was probably measuring data points: hybrid, high-grade analytics and combat threads woven together, perfect for masking a security protocol behind the play of a bored front desk worker.

I moved on to the gauntlet: retinal scan, tox, fingerprint. The rituals. My hack, laid in on day one, worked smoothly—the system always gave the green light, regardless of what I’d poisoned myself with the night before. But I could tell she watched, always a shade suspicious. Always waiting for the glitch.

I slipped past, no pleasantries, no backward glance. The drone routine resumed. She’d already begun to spool up her own internal narrative, uploading complaints and micro-aggressions to whatever virtual forum her type preferred, the grievances looping through her neural membranes. My refusal to sync with her script that morning, unlike the other office ghosts, would be another knot in her chain, fresh evidence for the algorithm of her dissatisfaction, compounding the heavy inertia of her augmented heart.

I sat slumped at my desk, the dregs of my coffee forming a tepid pool in a chipped mug. I’d just smoked two cigarettes in rapid succession, trying to fill the vacuum left by being someone else’s subordinate, not my own master anymore—a bitter drift settling along my thoughts. Through the window, the morning was already gnawing at the edges of the scorched trees, sickly light catching on plastic bags that circled endlessly in the stale updraft, like a siege that would never lift. I thought: plastic was laying an eternal siege on this city. I let it simmer, then turned to the task at hand: the looming rewrite program, the bug-splattered code of Enlightenment—the latest Hypno-pod ultra-reality project, and the crosshairs of my day. The spreadsheets? I let them rot in the background.

By 10 am, I’d already run the morning’s gauntlet: daily tasks nearly listless in their repetition, swept aside more by muscle memory than will. Let the AI assistant mop up the paperwork, I thought, and for a moment I drifted in the inertia by my office window, staring as the world beyond swelled with a heavy, industrial grey—the colour of old tech, of system errors, the colour of mornings that can’t be debugged. I let my mind click open a new window: a hyper-reality, gleaming, mine to architect from scratch, a world where the rules bent for me. The impulse to escape flashed through my synapses, but the present reasserted itself with a flat inevitability and dragged me back to my desk. I started faking productivity, flicking through tabs and rattling off empty gestures at the keyboard, all for show; absurdly, the charade wound up twice as draining as the real work had ever been.

My neck was cold. I could feel it all the way down my spine as I realised I wanted lunch. The thought of hot soup drifted through my mind for a moment, faint, warming, before I shook it away. The canteen was a dim, sallow place, and I let myself drift through its stale air, aiming straight for the coffee machine. There was a small crowd in front of me, lingering, shuffling, and it was all I could do not to stare into the pixelated migraine as my visual snow kicked in. Every second dragged. I wondered, as I watched the line inch along, what it would feel like to take a fork and plunge it into the space between the shoulder blades of the person in front of me, to wrench out their spine and skull in one clean, deliberate movement—a fatality. But apparently you weren’t supposed to daydream about acts of violence while queuing for coffee, so I just exhaled and kept waiting. The studio crossed my mind, warm and private, a memory that ached. Maybe I’d been playing too many retro games.

I teetered back to my desk, half-full coffee cup trembling in my grip—the mug was chipped, rim sticky with hours-old caffeine. This was the one private seam in the office day, unstitched from anyone else’s itinerary, my brief sanctuary before the time-thieves returned. I let my frame drop into the chair; the monitor’s white glare shot daggers at my retinas, a burn I tried not to acknowledge. I could almost feel the gaze of a dozen invisible algorithms, each more predatory than the next; if I so much as grazed FacebookUltra, Zuckerberg’s legions would nose out my digital footprints, and I’d be forced, again, to hack the mainframe and scrub my own credit.

That was the price for breathing room: a twitch of freedom and the constant tickle at the back of my neck, that sense that doing anything unsanctioned would set off some impersonal retribution. It was no wonder I kept my appearances in the office to a minimum, cowering from the constant audit of my impulses. But usually, my creativity found an escape hatch. My mind, slipperier than protocol, always managed to wriggle free.

I stared at my smartwatch, thinking about opening my crypto wallet, just to check if any sneaky bastard had siphoned off more of my money, but I already knew that would only make me feel shittier. What was supposed to be this big revolution—the currency to free us from the machine, money that actually meant something, right?—had just bricked us into a tighter, nastier version of the same old game, now that coins weren’t even coins anymore. Physical value: zero. Capitalism: two, me: nil.

I could have done something better with my time, I knew that. Pulled up a recipe for top-tier lasagne, or just gotten up, gone outside, filled my lungs with air that hadn’t already been sucked through three filters and exhaled by six other coworkers. But instead I settled for the “courtyard”—really just the little slab out back behind the office, all boxed in and vented. I mean, it was maybe five hundred yards if you walked the long way, but it was perfect for a smoke. That was exactly what I did.

Coming back inside with the cold clinging under my shirt took nearly the full lunch break. Now there was just over four hours left on the clock… and yeah, I thought about hitting the vending machine, but of course I also had to make it weird and overthink about the health side of things, like that even mattered with everything else. By the time I’d finished internally debating whether a single candy bar would kill me faster than slow starvation, the break was up, and I realised I’d managed to spend the whole time not doing anything except, well, spinning in place. More indecision. More nothing.

So I went back to my desk, tired, still hungry, and feeling even more hollow than before. That was that.

I was thoroughly shaken out of my concentration when my office phone jolted to life and demanded my attention. I hadn't received a call in forever and had almost forgotten the phone was even there. I glanced at it before remembering that I still had to pick up the receiver to answer. It seemed so out of date in that modern world, yet it seemed oddly appropriate.

"Hello, dear," came a familiar voice that I just could not place. The fact that it had just called me dear made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin, let alone in my office. 

"Hello," I said, "I am sorry, who is this?"

"You forget me already, Walter? Wow, that hurts. I thought we had something special, something unique."

"I am sorry but..."

"Don't be sorry, my dear Walter, just make it up to me. Now be a lamb and close the door."

"I beg your pardon."

"Close the door, Walter."

"But how do you know my door is open?" I looked about, confused and over my shoulder like there was someone watching me then it suddenly dawned on me who this was. "Wait, is this Bob in accounts? Cos if it is, I am not in the mood."

"No, it's not Bob, trust me, he is about to walk past your office and wave" just then Bob from accounts walked past my office door and waved and smiled at me as he went by, he was a nice lad a little on the juvenile side as most accountants tended to be with their hedonistic lifestyle and bare minimum grip on reality. 

"What the fuc....."

"Please don't swear, Walter, you are on an office phone, and it's very unprofessional. Now be a lamb and shut the fucking door." I placed the receiver on the desk got up slowly and moved towards the door, I quickly looked out in the direction of Juvenile Bob to see if he was there sniggering at this practical joke, but he was walking towards the photocopier oblivious to my current predicament and confusion. Slowly I closed my door and looked at the telephone receiver on my desk, I could hear whistling coming from the earpiece. I was starting to figure out who this was, and I was becoming annoyed.

I picked up the receiver hard and pressed it against my ear. "You know, Lucifer, for someone who is supposed to be dead, you are becoming a real pain in the ass."

"Ha-ha, took you long enough, Walter. But you know I don't go by that name anymore."

"What do you want? I am busy at work."

"No, you are not, you are at work, I will give you that, but you are definitely not busy."

"Well, either way that is hardly any of your business, what do you want, do you want to provoke me and wind me up, do you want to get me going and for me to drag you back down through the gates of hell and set fire to your soul all over again, do you want me...." they cut me dead.

"Walter, chill, this is why I told you to shut your door I knew you would get all worked up." 

I stopped and took a breath, and with a clenched jaw, I asked again, "What do you want?"

"I just want a friend to talk to Walter."

"A friend and you think I am it after what I did?"

"It's because of what you did that makes me know I can trust you, and you know that you can trust me; I am hardly going to want to piss off the one being who killed me."

I paused for a second and took another breath.

"Ok, ok, but now is not the time, even if I'm not busy as you say, I need to at least try and look as though I am, ok?"

"Yeah, I get it, man, you got to keep up the illusion, keep the man off your back."

"Exactly"

"I dig that, maybe we can continue this conversation later."

"Maybe, and maybe you could explain how if I killed you-you are talking to me right now. Or better still, just fuck off."

"Now now, Walter, let's not spoil things by getting too bogged down with the detail."

"Well."

"Hey, Walter."

"What?"

"Can you pick up some wine and cheese, and crackers on your way home? I kind of have a hankering for it?"

"Yeah, of course, but you don't even have a stomach."

"Things change, Walter, things change, and thank you, you're a sweetie."

What the fuck? When did my place become their place, and why did the devil start calling people sweetie? I asked myself after they hung up the phone. The last time I saw them, they were just a skull - now they could make phone calls, drink wine, and eat cheese. I wasn't even aware that I had a phone in my house, or if the UltarMart sold wine and cheese, let alone if I had enough credit to buy them.