Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 17
The best days—the days that still flicker in my nervous system like a residue, long after they’re done and gone—were the ones where I disappeared into the work. Into the zone, as they called it, though it never felt like a zone to me. Time itself would snag and warp, stretching out in long rubber bands, so thick and slow I could almost see the code crawling around me. For hours I would be absolutely eaten alive by the grind of it, by the hum and crackle of design and programming and collaborative hallucination, painting out new realities from the inside. These worlds I built—they were airtight. The creatures and constructs inside couldn’t tell the difference between the real and the fake if their lives depended on it. They never noticed the difference. Only that if we let them sample our so-called “real” world, they’d recoil, repulsed, and beg to return.
That was my function, my entire purpose—I spun out realities more convincing, more vivid, than the one I was forced to inhabit. I made them airtight and beautiful and exactly engineered to keep their inhabitants inside, forever, no questions asked. Of course, most of the inhabitants didn’t even know it. They were happy in their blindness. Safe, as long as they kept pumping value up to the bright side—the elite. In exchange, they got meaning. Nobody asked for more. Nobody cared to.
What was the alternative? You could leave these ultra-realities, sure. You could step into the street and gulp down the poison fog, feel the smog rip into your sinuses, see how long it took before the headaches and nausea reduced you to a shivering mess, vomiting, maybe bleeding out, maybe starving, maybe something even worse. That was the best-case scenario, the fallback plan for when I lost my credit chips or pissed off the wrong node. That was what waited for me if I ever missed a beat.
Every single one of these worlds I built had a function, a reason to churn. The only reason: upper management, making the shareholders happy. That was the only thing that mattered in this reality anymore. Everything filtered down from that, like water dripping through a rotting ceiling. The logic of it always seemed backward to me. The new world order showed up, swept away the conspiracy theorists (along with anyone else who couldn’t stop flapping their lips), and overnight, survival meant keeping the people at the top happy—even though nobody knew who they were. Nobody had seen them, nobody could prove their existence, but everyone knew that stepping outside the lines meant certain death: weather, justice bots, or just a hot needle of silence buried between your toes.
The shareholders were ghosts, almost. They ran the network like wraiths. Even upper management lived in terror of crossing them, of missing some hidden expectation. Punishments were immediate, medieval. I’d heard of them, and I’d seen enough to know they were real. The kind of thing that kept “day walkers” like me in our little sanitized bubbles, walking the line. Punishments weren’t the old-fashioned, showy executions. No. Now, if you slipped up—a “reasonable management request,” always phrased like a suggestion but never really an option—you’d be tossed into Ultrahigh reality jail. That place, they said, was endless: your worst thoughts, looped over and over until your mind cracked. Going mad in regular reality was bad; in Ultrahigh, it was Hell. Open-ended, infinite.
Regular management, their job was to keep the gears greased, the day-to-day running like clockwork. They got paid for it, paid very, very well. Some liked to work in physical reality, but others, the risky ones, split their time between layers, always a step away from total disaster. Ultrahigh could turn on you without a moment’s warning, invert everything, and lock you inside. That was the danger, and it turned office politics into a blood sport. Sure, there were supposed to be safeguards, but I always found a way through if I was told to. It was a little game: one coder levels up, another drops into the pit.
I developed a habit, maybe even an addiction, to hiding little knots of secret code deep in my work. Even when nobody was watching, even when I didn’t need to. It was a risk, but almost nobody else ever spotted my fingerprints, not even the ones who were supposed to audit. I became a kind of ghost myself, a master of burying my intent so deep in the stack that even other coders, even the top architects, just praised my efficiency and moved on. They never saw the bread crumbs. These Easter Eggs could be detonated later: pry open a system, sink a manager, maybe even reach a shareholder if you really wanted to.
At first it was just for kicks—a way to kill the monotony, to make myself laugh, to leave behind a little signature no one would ever find. I liked to see how far I could bend Ultrahigh, mess with the internal wiring, tweak the brains of the poor bastards running on my code. The alternative was boredom, and that was worse than risk. I had no intention of blowing up the system, or sparking some kind of ridiculous revolution. The thought of open rebellion was a joke. What would there be to win? Out there in the real, there was only more suffering. So when the so-called revolutionaries came sniffing around, wanted to use my skills for their little crusades, I waved them off. At first. But after a while, boredom and curiosity started gnawing at me. Their offer didn’t sound like freedom, but it sounded new.
So I listened.
