I needed a dose of reality, whatever that meant in those days. I scrubbed away the static and made my way up, climbed each step with a body that remembered more than my mind did. The home felt unfamiliar under my feet, even though it was mine. I’d been gone longer than a couple of days—the air said so, stale and watchful—but how long exactly? The numbers fuzzed away, lost in the cracks of time. No doubt the devil would have a snide remark tucked up their sleeve about it. They were still occupying my space, never asked, never left, unpacking their opinions like so many suitcases, critiquing every corner of my life in a voice that echoed through the walls. The devil had made themselves at home, and from the sound of it, my absence was just more fuel for their commentary.
“Nice trip?” they asked as I strolled into the kitchen.
“You have no idea,” I replied, making a beeline for the fridge in search of a cold beer.
“I’m sure I don’t,” they said, a flicker of dupers-delight in their smile. I must have been overtired, or maybe I was just getting paranoid. Why were they cooking? They couldn’t have been expecting me—they hadn’t heard from me in god-knows-how-long. Had they slaved over a hot stove and eaten alone every night, staring into the bottom of a wine glass?
“I can sense when you’re coming home,” they said, reading my thoughts for a moment. “It’s not mind-reading, Walter—just your feelings, your body language, my mirror neurons, and a millennium of practice. Turns out I’m pretty good at intuitive people-reading. Besides, while I’m cooking your dinner, I really am the devil, so there’s some Magick in this old beast yet.” They gave me that evil glint in the eye.
“Stop messing with me,” I groaned. “It’s been a very confusing day.”
“You sure don’t seem like yourself.”
“And who do I seem like, then?”
“That’s better. Now you’re back to your usual questioning, stubborn, prickly self. Isn’t that what meditation was supposed to fix? Calm your mind, find serenity?”
“It is—except it’s a bit hard to feel serene with the devil in my kitchen whipping up some cordon bleu.”
“Oh, thank you—for the compliment on the cooking, I mean, not for the insult.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Jesus, you’re grouchy.”
“Did you just blaspheme?”
“Well, I guess I did.” We both laughed. The devil was always careful with their words; I’d never heard them take gods’s name in vain. “Anyway, it’s not really blasphemy. Jesus wasn’t god—he was god’s first son.”
“I thought he was a god in the Trinity.”
“That’s a myth cooked up by the Church centuries before the Vatican fell. It was a clever way to confuse and control people—give them something to believe that they could never fully understand.”
I stared at them. “Do you know what? I’m going to lie on the sofa and watch TV. I can’t process all this right now after the day I’ve had.”
“Days.”
“What?”
“Days—plural. You said day, but you’ve been down there for three days.”
My mouth opened, but I was too tired to argue. I trudged to the couch and zoned out.
Waking up felt like breaking the surface after a long plunge. The air was thick with the scent of food on the stove, a solid, greasy warmth that tangled in my hair and clung to my tongue even before I opened my mouth. My body registered hunger first—a dull, gnawing insistence that sent me upright and searching. Even when the food was questionable, there was something about the care in its making, the way the aroma worked its way through my ribs. Comfort, or something that passed for it, from the devil’s own hands.
Truth was, my eating habits had been a disaster before the devil marched in and claimed permanent residency, labeling themself my private short order cook. I’d never suspected they had poison in mind. Not even after what I’d done. The devil kept bringing it up: the messy way I’d “killed” them. Therapy, they said, would probably help me untangle what had taken over—the more jagged, desperate evil that had supposedly eclipsed even their own. I didn’t buy the psychobabble, but I did watch their hands in my kitchen, weaponless except for a battered spatula and a saucepan big enough to double as a shield.
Maybe I should have been scared. Maybe I was, but only of my own head. The devil watched me while they cooked, picking me apart, psychoanalyzing the way I braced for every meal, trying to nail down my logic. If this was revenge, why wasn’t I dead? If this was retribution, why did I keep waking to the scent of food, the devil’s only threat a perfectly flipped omelette? I decided not to think too hard about it, not yet. Instead, I let the warmth of the kitchen hollow out my fear and fill it with something edible, and waited for answers that never came on an empty stomach.
“What are we having tonight?” I asked cheerily as I entered the kitchen. The devil turned and smiled.
“Pork belly.”
“Real pork?” I asked, astonished.
“No, Walter—no real pigs exist in this realm. “
“So they a pigs from other realms?”
“Nothing like that. It’s synthetic—an ultra-high-purity cultured pork. I thought we’d give it a try.”
“It sounds…unappetizing,” I admitted, “but it smells amazing.” I was in a strangely good mood. The devil raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t explain why, even to myself, but I felt changed.
Here’s the thing. That whole wacked-out shamanic journey I took in Ultrahigh—the trip into that dream-world, which at the time was straight-up confusing and terrifying—it suddenly wasn’t so random. It made sense. Being actually present, like for real, had plugged me into something different. Something bigger than the neural nets of Big Corp. And I started thinking, what if I could wake that up in other people? Show them how to see through all the bullshit? Maybe people could unplug from the Matrix and actually get their lives back.
And yeah, I knew living in Ultrahigh on purpose wasn’t the point, not really. The real problem was the secret control loops—the behavioural nudges, the AI manipulation, the drugging. The puppet strings nobody saw. That was the stuff that needed to be dragged out into the light.
So, yeah, I needed to see her again. Not just for the sex, in case you were thinking that. I needed to figure out how she hacked it all from the inside. If I could get my head around her model of reality, maybe I could pass it on. Break the spell for good.
