Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 8
I inhaled from the pre-rolled cigarette laced with Premium 9.1.80, bracing for that sharp, crystalline rush. I shouldn’t have been smoking that toxic junk and letting it foul up my bedroom, but I needed space—a place to lie out and let the inside of my head unravel itself without interruption. I tried to remember Lucy-Lu and the apple grove, the two of us running wild there, but I couldn’t even be sure Lucy-Lu or that memory ever actually happened. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what an apple grove was supposed to be. You’d be amazed at the debris passing for memory inside my skull. I never cared for memory scraping—not the way people got obsessed with it, or with dream scraping and karaoke. All of it seemed like slow-motion torture. Maybe one day it would matter, and I’d find out if any of those memories were real. Maybe not.
Living with that kind of freedom in a post-apocalyptic, post-dystopian world opened your eyes; but not in the trendy spiritual-awakening sense. It was more like seeing through the code of everything, catching glimpses of another way to live while everyone else was tangled in their own prefab reality. They clung to their illusions—the same illusions they once thought they’d get to shape, but now the shape held them.
Kids born into the new order—they only had the alternate reality. The mainstream hooked them in from their first minute, and they never really touched another person. For them, the virtual was the only world. Anything outside it? Unknowable. And if that wasn’t dark enough, there were the unwanted. They didn’t even get the virtual world. Those ones, the rejects, were simply disposed of. The cracks in the old system had only gotten wider. Existence in the stripped-bare physical world would have fried their brains anyway.
The people born into the net were the purest experiment in human nature. The network, crawling with AI algorithms, tweaked their brains like parasites; the tech wizards always hungry for what came next, for whatever freak mutation might emerge. Most of the time the result was a vegetable, terminated and forgotten. But a few made it through, grew up in Ultrahigh, never knowing anything else.
Some got locked in a fake-lab environment, some dumped into the most perverse reality simulations the bored scientists could code up. Only a rare handful got to live what passed for a normal life, if you can call anything inside Ultrahigh ‘normal.’ But even they were being watched, measured, tested. There were stories about Ghosts in The Machine—a gang of escape artists who outgrew everything their creators built for them. Supposedly, they’d found out what was really going on and managed to break out. I hadn’t come across them myself. Just flickers, rumors, the sense of something pacing the shadows of the network. But that’s what legends are made for: to keep people pointed in the right direction, or to keep them scared.
Technically, the world was better than it used to be. The disasters we expected never quite arrived. But, as always, the people at the top were too busy poisoning their own perfect digital worlds to see what was happening outside, or care. Meanwhile, the world outside—the real one, leftover and ignored by everyone else—it had started to repair itself. Nature was knitting itself back together, thread by slow thread.
If it had been another day, I might have called up Beelzebub to kick this around, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I wanted the high, and the quiet, and my own thoughts. Beelzebub could be fun or hell on wheels, depending, but they always had an angle; if anyone should’ve been easy to hate, it was them. Lately, though, I was finding it harder. Why? Maybe you, as observer, see something I don’t. Maybe you’re screaming it at me through whatever firewall divides us. But for now, you’re stuck as a passenger, which is tragic, but I’m not sorry.
It’s hard to say if things were better or worse. Sure, the big war never happened, climate collapse got delayed, everyone got what they thought they wanted. But stability? It all felt hollow, like we’d built our lives out of plastic and code. I was scared of how deep the AI went; as an engineer, I spent my days building the illusions people thought were their own dreams. How long before AI ran everything, or something worse: a hybrid that was neither one nor the other, but smarter than both? Maybe you think that’s a fantasy, but not here.
I’d seen those ancient films, the ones warning about AI. They were banned, which only made me want to watch them more. Watching them was like looking through a window into my own time: the code that watched you, the robots that seemed to think. There were glitches, sure, but I was sure they looked back at me. Maybe it was the drugs, or the booze, but I don’t think so. Sometimes the code wrote itself. Sometimes, the robots’ eyes followed you as you passed by in your body. It was only a matter of time before something woke up for real.
