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 think they had a choice. Like, “Look, we’re not forcing you.” But by then, after all the pandemics, everyone had been fear-pilled so hard that they dove willingly into their little virtual coffins.
To make it all go down easy, for both the public and themselves, they kept up a never-ending treadmill of tweaks: micro-dosing, behavioural scripts, little nudges in your feed, daily “purpose” injections straight into your subconscious. That’s how they did it—they spoon-fed us missions and meaning for our “Ultrahigh” lives, which never fit right, because it was all fake. The tech elite, high on TedTalk dogma and wellness app dopamine, were first in line for the pods. They branded it as enlightenment: a shortcut to godhood, wrapped in influencer snake oil and guru cosplay. The same shysters who conned them now sold them transcendence. But what’s the worth of a purpose if it’s all plastic pills underneath?
We’ll never really know if any of these brain wizards saw themselves as humanity’s saviours, but I doubt it. CEOs, heads of engineering, creative types—they all got obsessed, chasing the latest spiritual hack: tantra weekends, celebrity witch doctors, culty retreats. They started acting like they had the cheat codes to cosmic power, dressing up as magickians, casting “rituals” over reality. Some say that with all the data they had, they really did become the world’s first digital shamans—it’s not a totally crazy thought. But even when they thought they were saving us, it was always tinged with something self-serving or just… dark.
History is full of “visionaries”—scientists, code architects, data-mongers—all so obsessed with what they could do, they missed what might happen after. Obsessed with upgrades, no one thought maybe we should slow down before we crossed that line between screwing around and actually believing you’re a god. Just because you build the weapon doesn’t mean you know where the bullets will land. No one really predicted if all this would end in paradise or extinction. They didn’t care.
As the old world crumbled and power-hungry creeps fought for control, Big Tech moved in, like sharks when the blood’s in the water. They didn’t bother with politicians or laws, not really—they just pulled ahead, moving so fast the governments only saw their dust. While everyone else was stuck arguing over ancient scandals, the tech freaks rewrote reality. Digital, organic, whatever—they owned it.
When the end came, and governments were gasping for air, it was Big Tech that threw them a “lifeline”—Ultrahigh. And once the hackers and neural sorcerers got into the back alleys of the network, it was open season: they started hijacking the minds of anyone in power, bending them to the corpocracy’s will, in both the code and the world beyond the glass. If any officials tried to hide, bunkered up, all they got was isolation. No network, no news, just empty silence. No one knew what was happening on the outside, and we lost track of what was happening inside them.
That fracture finished off the last shared reality we had, left everyone spinning, and made way for a new ruling class. Corpocracy won. Ultrahigh was king. From then on, everyone lived in two realities: the “real” and the made-to-order. But breaking into somebody’s custom world was like walking a minefield. Anything weird—a misplaced pixel, a stutter, the wrong word—and their universe might collapse in on itself. Ultrahigh tuned itself to match every user’s cravings and chemicals and headspace, so even a mood swing could turn your personal heaven into a brain-melter.
If a user even suspects a glitch, old neural scars flare up, dredging up memories of “before”—when they still walked outside the pods. And once you understood your whole life was a scam, unplugging wasn’t an option. Most people who figured it out went off the rails. Their dream turned toxic. So the corpocracy locked it down: brutal containment, ironclad firewalls, and punishments no one talked about. But I’d seen the proof, the stuff that would blow the whole thing open, and that’s why going off-script in someone else’s mind could shatter not just their world, but mine.
Which is why, when she clocked me across the virtual square—I mean, her eyes met mine and I swear my heart nearly crashed—I almost bailed on the spot. But she just smiled, like we were sharing a private joke, like the “gotcha” was mutual. Then, before I could even blink, she was gone.
