I needed space to think. Even with most people burrowed away in Ultrahigh, the world was still a cage. I went for a walk in nature, though where and when I lived, nothing about that was simple. Past my house, past my car, through the city’s fortified zones—the day-walkers’ towers and the office-industrial blocks where I worked—the story was always the same: air so toxic a breath would kill you, rain sharp enough to burn, heat thick enough to suffocate. My protective suit rattled, chafed at the neck and wrists, but I knew, coming home, I’d drop myself in the detox bath in the shed and burn off the scum, five days of quarantine after. Not a nuisance. Isolation had become as automatic as breathing, just another post-plague routine. I preferred it.
If I lingered too long by the smog wall, the corporation’s moles would ping my feed for status reports—a leash. They only tolerated me because I was insured property. Fear was their business. They broadcast warnings about the wall, that beyond it the toxins were so virulent you’d be dead in minutes, no matter the suit. Lies, all of it. My rig was custom, stealth as anything. I ran a fake bio-stream to make it look like I never left the house. Cameras, iris scanners, all deceived by a scarf that scrambled my face and pulse. Sometimes the metaphysical types noticed: spirits and things older than the network. The gentle ones made space. The dangerous ones remembered what I’d done to the devil and kept their distance, unless some idiot was looking for a story worth dying for.
My destination was the woods and hills beyond the smog. They were posted as off-limits, but the real story: the network hardly bothered to monitor them. A few scattered sensors, nothing serious. They figured no one would tempt fate at the toxic line. They had to hide the truth: the air was clearing. Nature had been crawling back for years. If anyone leaked that, control would shatter.
Years back, when the first batch of pioneers cracked Ultrahigh’s code, they opened up new senses. Once activated, those senses bled back into the real world. The casualties were everywhere: coders driven to suicide, others locked in the virtual forever. Science and Magick fused. The corporate elite, already addicted to chaos rituals and New Thought, were first through the breach. They honed occult skills. Then turned around and engineered the food, the air, even the hardware to flatten the rest of us, keep the gifts suppressed. Only a few scientists smuggled the knowledge to their kids, keeping the flame alive under the floorboards.
My own awakening was a back-alley thing. Pot smoke, lines of code, me in a VR pod tripping out of my mind. I came up gasping, reality’s wires exposed. Thoughts, objects, time itself unfurling in raw, visible patterns. Nearly broke me. Instead, I learned to bend them over my knee. I got precognition, strikes that shut down attackers’ minds in a heartbeat, a calm colder than the space between signals. Most attacks were psychic: energy leeches or intrusions, parasite thoughts. After every one I felt more centered. Solid.
Now, walking under the blood-red sky, I was a slipping ghost; drones, moles, and spirits all stepped aside. My thoughts realigned with each step, and by the time I came home ideas poured out of me, pure and sharp. Wildlife was rare. Once, I saw a starving squirrel sizing me up, measuring if I could be brought down. Another time, a solitary blackbird on a branch, silent, weighing the state of the world until we made eye contact. The trees out there felt ancient, like heavy old minds cleaning the air one slow second at a time.
That day I walked ten miles and found a clearing tangled with thorns. In the center, a small, shriveled fallow deer. I froze, not wanting to spook her. Waited. She looked at me, approached easy, unafraid. Her huge eye locked onto me and wouldn’t let go. I dug in my pocket for candy, offered her a piece; she snapped it up and nuzzled my hand for more. I tipped out water from my bottle, watched her drink down every drop. The peace that hit me was total, cutting deeper than anything I’d ever known.
That’s when it hit: we’d met before, this deer and me, in my shamanic ayahuasca drumming. She’d always been my spirit guide, only this time she wasn’t a vision. She was standing there alive, looking at me with that old recognition. I saw her at the edge of my vision and in the roots of my being. She’d come back for a reason.
---
-The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 32 - A Mentalist Cyberpunk Novel
