Ultrahigh in the Metaverse: Series 1: The Behavioural Architect

Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1:  The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 5

“Do you ever wonder where your life has gone?” I wished I could have one day without them around. It would have been blissful, but did I deserve it? Was it a fitting punishment for my sins, or did they just happen to be the catalyst for my suffering? Was what I lived through real, or had I been tricked into believing a lie?

“Satan,” I said walking absentmindedly towards the fridge.

“Yes,” they said, staring back with eager eyes.

“Shut the fuck up,” I growled as I grabbed the carton of milk and took a swig for my hangover-induced nausea. Their enthusiasm quickly dissipated. My head throbbed, my ears were blocked and ringing, and my throat felt like sandpaper. 

All I wanted was something greasy and bad for me. 'Maybe I should be nice to them', I thought. 'They might make me breakfast'. After all, the villain of my life could whip up a mean eggs Benedict when they wanted to. 

“I will fix you something,” they said, looking hurt. Had they read my mind? I wasn’t sure what the extent of their power was. At that moment, the extent appeared to only be the ability to hang around my house and annoy me. Although it was at least some form of company. 

I looked on at them in dismay, when had they become my butler, and when the fuck had the house gotten so tidy? Jesus, if you pardon the pun, Satan was a good house guest even if their conversation was too heavy, banal and one-sided first thing in the morning. Especially when I had just spent all night getting blasted in an attempt at blocking out the pointlessness of my existence with homemade moonshine from the bathtub on my roof.

“Look, Satan,” I said, feeling a little sorry for them “you gotta realise this is really fucking surreal for me. I mean you should be dead. Fuck you shouldn’t even be real. I killed you, which means what for me?”

“Trust me, I am real.”

“Yeah, but you would say that even if you weren’t.”

“True” they stood in silence, and we just looked at each other for a moment before they turned and started to fix us some eggs benedict and a pot of coffee. “But could the devil in your head cook you a mean breakfast?” they said laughing and whistling. ‘You don’t want to know what the devil in my head can do.’ I thought. They just looked at me.

It was odd. I was starting to appreciate their presence, the way you stop noticing the background radiation until it’s gone and the silence feels louder than decay. 

Living alone in that derelict grid of a neighbourhood, I’d nearly forgotten the texture of loneliness, the way it seeps into the cracks of your skull. But with them there, something like comfort settled in, a low persistent hum, company to stand watch and scrub the floors when I was out. 

Sitting there, static wrapping my ears, my head was lost in the carousel of tasks still to do. It was all pointless, noise: the work piling up, a landfill of bureaucratic refuse, a mountain of capitalist shit. Wasn’t the apocalypse supposed to change things? Wasn’t it supposed to make reality interesting again, twisted and raw, not just another rerun of the old grind? Why the fuck was I still working for the network? Sure, it bought me some off-the-record freedom, but at a price I could taste, metallic and bitter. I’d killed the devil, but here I was, still a replaceable gear grinding in someone else’s engine. 

I shambled onto my deck. 

There it was again—the local paper. Centre of the porch, a blot of maroon and red like a crime scene punctuation mark. I never figured out who threw them. No delivery kid, no drone ever caught out of the corner of my eye. Hell, I was the only living soul in a house on the block, maybe the whole dead sector of the city. So who decided to trek all the way out here just to hurl a useless sheaf of pulp at my doorstep? I never subscribed, never even remembered reading the damn thing. Who was left alive and determined enough to keep printing it? Maybe they were blanketing the entire map, one last gasp of routine in a ghost town. Maybe nobody told them I was the last one standing, or maybe they had. Maybe it was free. Maybe it was just for me. But still—the delivery, every day, like clockwork: open porch, dead air, newspaper. Never saw the hand or the machine that made it happen. 

No protection, no suit, nothing could get through the my security without being vaporised in under five minutes. So how did the paper show up-pristine-inside my security fence, on the my porch, never singed? Nothing lined up; the only thing that ever made sense was the lack of sense.

I lit a cigarette. Bent at the waist to snatch up the paper, let it slip through my fingers. Pain: a spike, sharp, up my spine and down my right leg, my whole body snapping upright in self-defence. The motion jackhammered the headache already pulsing behind my eyes, and the paper, mocking me, tumbled from my grip again. 

That’s when the porch door banged open. The devil stepped through, pressed a steaming cup of coffee into my dumb hands, and retreated without a word. I never even got a “thanks” out before the space where they’d been was empty, vanished as if they’d dissolved into sunlight and drywall. 

All that lingered: the slice of sun on my skin, a burning cigarette, this coffee, and the newspaper I kept dropping. The rest of it—the devil’s presence, the sense of being seen, the strange consistency of it all—that was already gone, replaced by the blank hum of the porch and the weight of the mundane.