Ultrahigh in the Metaverse: Series 1: The Behavioural Architect

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

I was mid-flow, mid-thought, and keyboard-crushing pound when I thought I heard someone whisper. I stopped typing. Fingers frozen like spiders mid-air.

Silence.

The air felt like ice.

Maybe it was just the voices in my head painting another fiction. I continued pounding away; my overstretched fingers seemed angry, but I didn’t know why. I heard the voice again. “It wasn’t all me, you know?”

That time I looked around me. I could see no one. I thought about stepping inside to grab my shotgun.

Then I heard the voice a third time, but that time I knew it wasn’t inside my head; it sounded like a person talking to me directly, rather than by talking through me. “You know most humans have only ever heard one side of the story.”

The devil’s skull had come loose and was lying on the floor. It had happened some time previous, but had only caught the periphery of my mind.

Could it be? The decision not to grab my shotgun seemed foolish. My only weapons were my laptop and my glass.

It was them, alright. Lucifer, as they hated to be called, were they really talking to me?

I was annoyed. I had been busy beating the shit out of my keyboard. I didn’t need supernatural interruptions in my quiet time. I had killed them once; they should stay dead if they knew what was good for them, especially considering my mood.

It had been two years prior, and it was by that point coding on my porch, something I had almost forgotten. Between then and the point of that evening’s interruption, I had reshaped their story and moved them from my conscious thought, a memory buried deep, becoming forgotten.

At that moment, hearing their unmistakable voice from a poorly decapitated skull didn’t surprise me; maybe it should have. I was more concerned with why they had chosen that moment when I was mid-creative flow, after weeks of dry patches to interrupt me.

I was in no state of mind for entertaining unwanted guests, especially those that were meant to be dead. And might have reason to kill me.

An unease fell over me.

I stopped what I was doing: annoyance rolling around my bloodstream, dropping neuropeptides in their corresponding receptors. My joint was still perched between my lips; it had gone out. I didn’t turn back, but I looked in the direction of the skull. My eyes could only just make out the outline of the jaw in the shadow. If Satan was trying to be dramatic, they were doing a damn good job of it. Still, I wasn’t impressed. The timing and intrusion were more annoying than anything else. The fear of revenge from a decapitated skull slipped away; I was just annoyed.

I relit my joint and inhaled thick smoke. I looked at them with the impatience of a father waiting for his banal five-year-old to get to the point. They had already broken my mojo; I wasn’t about to be forthcoming in making conversation. Small talk had always been foreign.

“You see, you humans have only heard her side of the story,” they continued.

“We have?” I responded with enthusiastic sarcasm. Staring into the bottom of my gin glass, dead-eyed, wondering when this hallucination might end.

“Yes, you have,” they sighed at the effort, “her side.”

“Whose for gods sake?” I asked, failing at displaying any interest whilst wondering why I was entertaining a conversation.

“Yes, gods, seriously, are you normally this much work?”

“Yes,” I said. I inhaled deeply, a tired sighing breath, took another drag from my joint and washed it down with a swig of now lukewarm gin. “But do you know what?”

“What?”

“The world got bored with this fucking conversation decades ago. There are no witnesses to your god anymore. We replaced her and killed you.”

“God has made her case over and over, and I never had a chance.” Geez, why were they still talking and carrying on this drivel? Had they not heard a word I said, or were they just choosing to ignore it?

“You mean in the Christian narrative. In the one where you ran the world?” Why was I allowing myself to be dragged kicking and screaming into a debate with my own hallucination?

“Bah, yeah, right. That’s what she had you believe.”

“I never believed.”

“You know what I mean. Maybe to start with, I had some influence, but after a while, you people became too much for even me to handle, too extreme, fierce, and without self-control. You redefined evil. Humans are fucked up.”

I couldn’t argue with that, not in my line of work, but still, I had now engaged in the argument and had to weigh in on the side of humanity, “but you’re the devil, according to your argument, based on a Christian god, in that narrative you torture souls for eternities, and you influenced the direction humans went in. Is it not your fault?”

“Come on. Really? Do you actually believe that?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Come on, man, I am trying to have a conversation with you.” They sighed and then continued. “What I am saying is that it was just god’s spin doctors spreading fear. The greatest PR campaign of all time, with god, pitched as man’s saviour. Why would I, someone who had seen worlds born and stars die, want to spend my time in a hot, fiery pit, sticking forks in people? You have an IQ of some description, would you waste your time with an eternity of that?” They were clearly the ones getting annoyed now and trying to get under my skin.

“Well, I suppose I never really thought about it from that angle, because frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck, but yeah, if the people were pricks, I could get some pleasure out of it.”

“Ok, some people deserve it. But no one has thought of it that way. I mean, what would be the point of me torturing all these souls for eternity?“

“Well. Like I said.” I trailed off, bored with my own logic. “I don’t give a fuck.” It really was a banal subject for anyone to come back and haunt me with, let alone the devil.

“On top of that,” they continued, “they would supposedly be the people that chose not to follow god, and therefore, people that followed me and I what, reward them with eternal damnation? Really? Come on, get real.”

“Erm.”

“And why? Why, because I dared to ask. Did I dare to question god? Because I thought her ego might be getting a little out of control with all the worship, servitude.”

“Well…”

“Exactly. You see, it just doesn’t make any sense, yet the entire world just decided to accept it. I mean, come on, people use your brains.”

“Well, not the entire world.”

“No?”

“No. Not everyone is a Christian.”

“No? Really?”

“What you don’t know?”

“Of course, I know. But I am asking you if you think you’re not Christian, for example?”

“Well, of course, I am not. I am a nonbeliever.”

“Are you not?”

“No,” I was getting somewhat annoyed with them at this point and was seriously considering how I could grab my axe from the shed and smash that skull into a million different pieces. The shotgun would do it too; it would keep them quiet for a bit at least, and, not to mention, would have been incredibly satisfying.

“Are you a pagan? Or just full of shit?”

“Do you want me to grab my shotgun?” I could feel the blood start to boil up inside me. “Yes, I am a fucking pagan. And what I am full of tonight is indignation that you should show up unannounced and mess up my creative flow with your fucking boring conversation.”

“Okay, but my point is I would never be so arrogant as to ask for your undying devotion like certain other people.”

“Why would I give it anyway? You’re forgetting I am the guy who killed you.”

They fell silent for a moment, like they were remembering for the first time, “Yeah, we need to talk about that at some point.”

“We do?”

“Yeah, we do. You have some serious anger issues, dude. But this is going off-topic.”

“Fuck off.”

“See what I mean? My point is that lots of non-Christians display very Christian behaviour in their everyday life. It is so ingrained in Western cultures that people don’t even see it.”

“Not these days, not in Ultrahigh.”

“Maybe not, but you know what I mean.”

I just looked at them with my eyebrows arched, encouraging my elucidation.

“Well, you can see it in simple statements like ‘thank god for that’. Plus, lots of non-Christians pray to God on their deathbed, trust me, I know a lot about that.” They said all this with what I thought to be a smirk, but then I thought that must be my mind playing tricks, as I sensed an evil glint where their eye used to be.

“But does that mean that they are Christian? They might not be praying to a Christian god.”

“It doesn’t matter; there is only one god.”

“You know that is not true.”

“What?”

“You know there are many gods, and as I said, we are all gods. What you mean is that there is only one Christian god that you are in subservience to. And your god isn’t around anymore.”

“Well.” They seemed confused by this. Like they had somehow forgotten.

“You remember, your Christian god left the western world back in 2016 when she had had enough with us.”

“I remember,” I detected sadness where their face used to be.

We sat, well, I did, they rested the side of their skull on the damp, cold decking of my porch, in silence for a moment or two. I clicked the play button on the Bose speaker remote that was in my pocket. If You Wait by London Grammar came on and seemed aptly haunting. I loved to listen to outlawed post-industrial music as I hacked Ultrahigh algorithms reshaping reality for almost all but me.

“Maybe we will continue this conversation another day,” they said. Breaking my thought process.

“Maybe,” I said through gritted teeth. “Maybe the dead should stay that way.”

I looked back at the screen and continued editing code.

“But I bet you’ve seen some shit?” God, they couldn’t help themselves, “I mean. In the early days, when things were a little more free-roaming.”

“Yeah, people did some fucked up shit,” I said, blocking them out from any more replies.

I didn’t want to tell them, honestly. If I did, they’d just get off on it. They were, after all, one of the sickest fucks among all the sick fucks to ever walk this timeline. Plus, I wasn’t about to let them get any more leverage over the sands of time than they already had. No way. What really got under the devil’s skin—and I mean, really cheesed them off—was that ever since the humans had stepped inside Ultrahigh, their influence over humankind was toast. Gone. Zilch. That was the thing: after the last of “the sheep,” as the network folks called them, shuffled into Ultrahigh, that’s when, as a day walker, I finally met the devil. The rest is what it is.

People lost their shit when Ultrahigh first handed them freedom. You won’t read that in the history books, trust me. They lost their grip, straight up. With Ultrahigh, you could live out any fantasy, even dump your entire personality into the network and dissolve into the hive, no social tethers required. The power to just roll up and become whatever you wanted by ticking a few boxes as you merged with the pod—it was too much. People were handed the keys to the kingdom and immediately drove it off a cliff.

Freedom, real freedom, is a head trip. They couldn’t take it. They thought they could handle living without constraints, but there were no foundations underneath what they built. Every desire? Satisfied. Every itch? Scratched. No voids left to even miss.

True freedom, real wild-card freedom, is living stripped of the basic guardrails that give reality its shape, and that’s where they truly fell apart. The network tried to keep it all going, but people’s simulations barely overlapped. Real human connection? Dead on arrival. Not much point in bringing people together when all they wanted was to splinter, to drift.

You’d see everything from average comic book nerds turning into baroque superheroes to horror fans going full ice-veined immortal, not to mention the richest, nastiest men and women on the planet. It was the siren song: instant gratification, immortality, sex, power, fame. It started as a game for a select few—a human behaviour experiment, honestly—and watching it unfold was equal parts riveting and crushing.

The network learned their subjects inside out, weaknesses and obsessions logged in a database deeper than hell. All that data? That was the real prize, and the network would ride it until the end of time. This is when Behavioural Architects like me were brought in.

People didn’t need fantasy. They needed reality. Or at least the feeling of it. That was the twist: the entire promise of living out your wildest dreams came from some half-baked theory that meaning and purpose would fill people up if you just spoon-fed it to them. Give them the fantasy, the logic went, and they would curl up happy in their pods and never look back.

In the beginning, sure, people remembered the real world. Those memories faded, though, as time rolled on, until the line between fantasy and reality blurred out completely. The happiness? Didn’t last. The network couldn’t keep the lid on it. So it all broke down, and they had to call it: ‘the great reset.’ Memories gone. Wiped clean. Both the real stuff and the fantasies, scrubbed from their minds and replaced with a grim, ultra-reality that was just a shadow of how the outside used to be, way before it all went sideways—the day people voluntarily walked into their pods to save the human race.