If I had a genius, and it's questionable, it definitely didn't show up in neat code blocks or any gallery-worthy sense of beauty, nor did it sit in the realm of human psychology, art, or outmaneuvering digital phantoms. No, my one redeeming spark was this: sitting at a monitor, empty-minded, not a diagram or a skeleton plan in sight, and still, somehow, mixing the disjointed logic until the program seemed to write itself. Like the machine was dreaming, and I was its hands.
I had once tried to wrestle the myth into academic submission, theorising it down to dust particles, but the whole thing fizzled. That myth never wanted to be explained; it needed to be lived. People only bought in because they could see it happen, pixel by pixel in front of them; no one ever raised a hand to object, just sank deeper into the illusions they’d been handed.
I used to call it “dreaming out loud,” though there wasn’t any real reason for it. That’s just how it felt. Chaotic. Fluid. Not always clear, but addictive in a way that pulled you under. People called it flow state, but I just rode the current and let the code dictate the river’s course. I never tried to control it. That would have ruined everything.
Some days I was untouchable, burning through lines at a speed that made my fingers ache. Other days, I barely scraped together more than a stub of real work. But what is that if not the ordinary truth of being human? The cracks, the slips, the days lost in the weeds—that’s where the real life crept in. That’s what I fed to the code: the small anxieties, the ugly falls, the rare bright win. Anything too airtight, too flawless, was a trap waiting to be exposed; sooner or later, someone would poke a hole in the illusion, and it would shatter. Perfection simply couldn’t withstand the pressure.
Programming could jolt you awake, numb you into daydreams, or grind you down. The worst was always the clean-up: tracing bugs like hunting ghosts, combing each line again and again, looking for the error that rattled the walls of users' realities. In my early days, I was a disaster. But in those deep simulations, leaving a flaw in the code was a public menace. Even worse, you had to jack into those broken simulacra, slip inside, and find the cancerous logic by hand. If you’ve never done it, you can’t imagine how much it hurts.
Still, there was nothing like the first draft. That initial reckless pour, worlds spinning out from nothing, riding the high until it burned my nerves raw. Revisions had their own strange pleasure, though; chiseling the mess into something richer, more breathing, making the scaffolds of the worlds hold together.
Templates existed, sure, alleged shortcuts to piecing together a functional reality, but most of them were trash, and I’d gutted or replaced almost everything. Templates were a prison, but they stitched order across the system, kept the seams from showing. Now and then, we’d bridge two realities, joining participants so they might stumble on a genuine connection—a soulmate, if you wanted to romanticise it. Sometimes the architects talked about merging every simulation into one seamless web, but then the suits clammed up. Fragmented networks gave them a tighter grip, easier surveillance, and complete domination.
Like every “breakthrough” that was supposed to uplift humanity, this one curdled at the heart. Power always spoils the handler, if it hasn’t already. The liberation that was meant to free minds from small tyrants just became, in the hands of big tech, the new cage. The same megalomania, only on a global scale.
