It would be a lie to say the world didn't see it coming. A complete fallacy. The warnings blared for decades, each generation stacking another layer of panic and prophecy onto the last. The 2020s, the 2010s, the 1990s and 1980s—decade after decade, the same dire messages, the same parade of expert testimony and artistic doomsaying, all swept under the rug by those who could afford to ignore it. We were warned, and warned, and warned, until the warnings themselves became…

If you're reading this, then it's already too late for me. I'm either dead or holed up in some off-grid cage where no one can hear me scream. Don’t bother with the sympathy, dear reader. I almost certainly had this coming; I earned every minute of what I got, and whatever is happening now is no worse than what I’ve dished out to others in the service of my country—and ultimately, ‘the cause.’ Hack the justifications together however you like, I did. I could explain it all…

“What is the point of working here if we can’t do anything?”

“James, listen.” She paused; the eye above needed misdirection. Her hand found his knee, fingers tracing small circles. He froze. Was a banked fantasy in play? If Tom from accounts walked in, he’d die.

“You know we can’t talk like that in the office.” Her gaze locked in his, pupils narrowing to pinpoints drilling through his skull. “But do you know what I would like?” She leaned in, teeth grazing her lower lip,…

The moment our eyes connected that second time, something physical jolted through me—a dual sensation that registered both in my avatar and back in my dormant meat-self. Her smile carried secrets. Did she actually recognise me? Or was this just an Ultrahigh welcome wagon? Every instinct screamed at me to bolt. The medieval festival swirled around us—jugglers tossing flaming batons, lute players strumming ancient melodies, costumed NPCs hawking digital mead—yet her gaze remained locked on mine, unwavering. Something about her rendered the simulation more vivid, awakening sensations I'd forgotten existed, which terrified me even more.

I needed an escape route. Back to baseline reality—the only authentic one, I reminded myself. Yes, the platform was designed for some connections—I'd coded those algorithms myself—but this felt different. Genuine attraction? Or sophisticated programming? The questions alone accelerated my heart rate. Still, I couldn't look…

I needed to infiltrate Ultrahigh with a message—a subtle wake-up call that wouldn't trigger the surveillance algorithms. The sleepers' reality needed unraveling from the inside out, their minds preserved while I remained a ghost to the system. Only when ready would I reveal myself, by which time the corpocracy would find itself outmanoeuvred.

The battlefield existed across realities. Those trapped in pods, even offline, remained vulnerable to physical threats from the corpocracy's enforcers. Liberation alone wouldn't save them—they needed combat readiness. My solution: covert training within Ultrahigh itself. Every virtual sprint, every simulated fight would condition their actual muscles, preparing bodies they'd forgotten they still possessed. The challenge was making this happen under the watchful eyes of the system.

Protection of the physical pods was equally crucial. This meant reluctant alliance with my oldest enemies—the demons. Since I'd…

There is something about slipping into somebody else’s simulation that just fucks with me—I mean, goosebumps, skin prickling, the lot. The real nightmare is if you’re caught in there: suddenly you’re a parasite, ripping apart the delicate mess that keeps their sanity strung together. Human minds are fragile. And we acted like gods, like we were the great engineers of the psyche, but we couldn’t patch what was already splintered; all those heavy-handed “fixes,” the drugs, the warped programs, just made the damage worse.

It was exactly why the corpocracy kept repeating their line about refusing to link up everyone’s brains, even though they totally had the tools ready. The official warning: once you go into your pod, that’s it—you’re sealed in, and if the network gets even a single bad byte, it could spread like a mind-pox: global psychosis, crash the system, game over. All horseshit, obviously. The real reason was way simpler. They wanted people to…

If I had a genius, and it's questionable, it definitely didn't show up in neat code blocks or any gallery-worthy sense of beauty, nor did it sit in the realm of human psychology, art, or outmaneuvering digital phantoms. No, my one redeeming spark was this: sitting at a monitor, empty-minded, not a diagram or a skeleton plan in sight, and still, somehow, mixing the disjointed logic until the program seemed to write itself. Like the machine was dreaming, and I was its hands.

I had once tried to wrestle the myth into academic submission, theorising it down to dust particles, but the whole thing fizzled. That myth never wanted to be explained; it needed to be lived. People only bought in because they could see it happen, pixel by pixel in front of them; no one ever raised a hand to object, just sank deeper into the illusions they’d been handed.

I used to call it “dreaming out loud,” though there wasn’t any real reason for it. That’s just how it felt. Chaotic.…

She didn’t see it coming. As she crumpled in the darkness, he couldn’t help but note how strange a body looks when it falls unseen—and he chuckled.

“You’re not supposed to enjoy it,” the voice crackled in his earpiece, though the hidden smile was obvious.

“Why not? It’s the only way to get through this shit.”

“If it helps you sleep at night,” they said. But it never did. Whiskey used to blur the edges, but now it only left a metallic taste on his tongue.

“Sleep?…

The man stood leaning over the balcony edge as he took the last drag from his America Spirit and looked down on the people below. They looked like pathetic little ants, he thought, and over time, he would touch each and every one of their puny little lives and they would never have any idea about it. After a deep drag, he flicked his cigarette down to the anthill below.  

Smiling to himself, he turned to face the glass boardroom behind him from where he had exited. They were still…