If there was one thing I knew, it was this: dealing with the devil was a wager you made with your own destruction. They were wired to twist, to double-back, to cut deals with both hands crossed behind their suit jacket. The inevitability of betrayal pulsed in the background like the low hum of a cooling fan. All the same, at least I’d mapped out the devil’s motive: vengeance, burning cold and bright. Legion, though, Legion was deeper, darker, and even as they circled me, baiting, tempting, whispering that I was the missing piece in their plan for liberation—or annihilation—I could never isolate their intent. Maybe Legion genuinely wanted to free us from a world of lies. Maybe they just wanted to flatten anyone in their way. It didn’t matter: at that time, our rivers ran parallel, fusing for a time, and I had to ride the current wherever it spat me out.
But first there was the botched break-in, the freeze-frame violence that left me and the devil locked up like mannequins mid-gesture. If the devil had done it, why bind themselves too? It was the kind of double-bluff that would make perfect sense as an alibi, yet there was no aftermath, no knife between my ribs, no callous payback. If not them, who had slipped quietly past my barricades? I’d built my defenses like a madman: digital airlocks inside analog cages wrapped in biometric dead man’s switches, layered with metaphysical tripwires humming beneath the surface. Supposedly impossible to crack. Yet there I was, the fortress breached, the unknown had been prowling the walls.
Legion’s fingerprints already smeared the inside of my network. They hijacked, subverted, rewrote code and commandeered hardware, an invisible presence patching itself into my system’s veins and arteries, outclassing anything the devil could run solo. But Legion never came in the flesh. Their touch was distributed, omnipresent, the kind you only noticed by the chill at the nape of your neck, never by a body in the room. Unless they had a shell somewhere, an AI puppet, which would short-circuit half their power anyway. The only other actors with the reach and the motive were the Chaos Magickians—the Magus and their magi, lurking behind the corporation’s neon mask. But if it was them, why bother with binding instead of deletion? The logic wobbled. Maybe it wasn’t to harm, but to leave a scar as warning.
So this was it: play kingmaker for both the devil and Legion, and trust neither. Stupid, possibly fatal, but it was the only play worth making. I would seed reality with traps: little hacks and kill-switches, Easter eggs buried deep in Ultrahigh and the code of everything, insurance policies neither the devil nor Legion could sniff out. It might buy me space if things went nuclear. Probably wouldn’t. Hope is never a strategy.
I was getting too used to the devil. They’d become an old habit, easy to slip into, the kind that short-circuited your vigilance with a joke or a smile. Sometimes I even enjoyed their company, which was insane. Maybe they were feeding off that, soaking up the comfort so they could rake the rug out from under me at exactly the right hour. A year previous, if you’d told me I’d be splitting a meal with the Prince of Darkness, I’d have thrown you out the window. By that point I kept catching myself wanting actual conversation. Dangerous. I’d caught them rummaging in my memories already, and there was no reason to think they wouldn’t weaponise everything they found the moment it suited them.
As for Legion, they moved at their own tempo. I’d hear from them when it served them—not before, and never on my terms. I wasn’t about to go rooting around in their shadows and tip my hand. I could wait; patience was the only shield. They’d reach out soon enough. Until then, I had a dual mission: track the breach, and keep a half-step ahead of the two most lethal forces I’d ever tangled with. That, and try not to get myself overwritten or erased in the process.
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-The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 31 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
