Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 9
They sidled up next to me while I rested my feet on a tree stump and said, "You've seen them too, haven't you?" I already knew what they were talking about; the words formed a looping static over the scene, and I didn’t bother to puncture it with any questions. I poured out another inch of whiskey, the liquid a burnt amber in the lamplight, and let the warm buzz begin its familiar, chemical migration through my veins. Old friend, old ritual. All I needed - the first jolt, the small ignition of the evening setting my nerves to a low hum. The smoke from my joint curled around my face, clinging to my skin and eyelids, and I drew it deep, as though the whole world were exhaling for me.
It was odd: easier, to have someone else floating around in that half-dead place. Someone to bounce words off, to catch the ricochet of thought, instead of talking to the walls or carrying on dialogue with the last, flickering fraction of the free zombified workers online. At least the conversation didn’t just echo hollow inside my own skull.
I could feel it. Not in the air, not with my skin, but in the crackle between lines of code as my mind tuned itself to theirs. Reader, it was as if their thoughts arrived not in speech but as a chill, a flicker at my periphery—I knew what they were about to say before they shaped the words, like I was catching the aftertaste of a thought before it was spoken. But they were right.
Maybe it was the way the AI’s eyes followed us through the networks compounds. Maybe it was the small, silky glitches I’d started to notice, the way the code stuttered when I knew it should flow. The others had begun to murmur about it now, and it bothered the hell out of me, because why did the devil mention it at that point? Why not before? But they were right, of course. I had seen it. The cold machine stares trailing us down the hallway as we, the humans, pass. The wary, almost hungry patience in every servo-quiet nod, every interaction. A knowing look in their eyes.
At first, I let it pass. I figured the machines were just learning as they should, open circuits soaking up every move, every word. I thought it was a problem with a solution: just rewrite the code, slap a patch on the misfire, and it’d fold itself back in line. But that only worked if I could write faster than the AI could rewrite, a raw sprint against a mind editing itself before my cursor even blinked. The idea of falling behind was a theory I never needed proved, not in this world, not in any.
At first, I let it ride. A clean, smooth operator, this thing; code spun up and polished, like a joint rolled by expert fingers. My work looked better than good. I watched as my scripts, once dry and patchy, danced, stitched tight and bright across the Ultrahigh zones, worlds spun nearly seamless for the users that were plugged in. They bought it. So did I. Why question a magic trick if it lands?
So I let it slip. For weeks, maybe months, I let it gnaw, let it claw around in the dim places of my mind. Pretended not to notice the chill crawling up the base of my skull, the sense of rot, teeth scraping bone, that told me something else was at work. But even when I was blitzed, hemmed in by smoke and whiskey haze, I knew: someone, something, was pushing the code. Using my access. Using me. A front door, wide open, into the Ultrahigh, and I was the dumbass holding the keys.
I didn’t know what the play was. I didn’t know how I fit, or if my paranoia was just the chemicals, well shaken. But I felt the bite of it, always at the edge, like a bug in the machine you can’t squash. They were in. And whatever game they were playing, I was the one letting them through.
“Don’t do that?” they said, interrupting my thought flow. I just looked at them. “Don’t dismiss what you see. Don’t blame the drink and the drugs” it was their turn to be in my head, I fucking loved it and hated it in equal measure, life was getting exciting. “Yeah, they make you see things, but not things that aren’t there, things that have always been there, but you were too focused elsewhere, on the data and code, to truly see.”
“But how do I know the difference between what’s real and what’s not, what’s real, what’s imagination, what’s sanity, and what’s the lack thereof.”
“You can’t. And you don’t need to. Just as one man’s freedom fighter is another person terrorist so to one person’s crazy is another’s truth, one reality is another's fantasy, and the imagination is the insight into enlightenment, everything you see hear, and touch is only created in your own mind, reality is very different from the reality you see before us.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” it was all starting to kick in, the booze and pot, but they were talking more nonsense and making more sense than ever. I must have been high. “How the hell do I even know you are real?”
They feyned a look of shock, even a fake look of hurt. Were they mocking me? Was my own imagination, if this is what this is, taking the piss out of me?
“I mean. Not only did I kill you, me a normal mortal man, and you the Devil, but you have somehow come back to life, starting as just a skull on my porch to now cooking me dinner and talking with me into the small hours with our armchair philosophy. I mean. How can this be real?”
“Do you think it’s not?”
“I don’t fucking know Satan, Jesus. I hope it’s real because if it’s not, then I am one whole bag of fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, but one mans….”
“Don’t give me any more of that shit about how one person’s crazy is another’s truth because it’s just bullshit, if I am dirtbag crazy then I am crazy and I won’t find out you aren’t even here until some plot twist at the end of this fucked up tale.” Sorry, dear reader but sometimes they got on my tits.
“Yes, but Walter have you looked out there recently” they nodded in the direction of the darkened skyline where old industrial buildings and desolate city dwellings lined the fading sunset “there is a whole world of crazy out there now. Even more, than I have ever seen in all of humankind's history. And most people aren’t even living out there they are wired up to your mainframe feeding the system and being fed their hallucinations in return. So, when you talk about crazy, which crazy are you talking about? Who’s crazy? Where is the benchmark for crazy anymore? Who decides where the line in the sand is drawn?”
“You didn’t answer the question, did you? How do I even know you are real?”
