Ultrahigh: and the devil died screaming - Season 1: The Behavioural Architect: Chapter 6
“Do you like your job, Walter?”
My glass was about to reach my mouth when the question came out of nowhere. “Yes, I suppose,” I said.
“You suppose?”
“Well, it's like any other job. Sometimes it's interesting or even creative, other times it can be really dull. But overall, I do enjoy it.”
“What do you enjoy about it?”
The whiskey had found its way to my lips, and I let its warm embrace linger on my taste buds before I answered.
I paused to think for a moment. “Well, I write the code and create reality for a lot of people out there. Knowing that they are living in and experiencing my designs is a pretty cool feeling.”
“You feel like a god?”
“Not exactly that, although there are many that do.”
“What do you find tedious?”
“The five million spreadsheets, reports, and other documents I must fill out every month. The bureaucracy and politics feel pointless as if no one ever reviews them. I thought the Great War had put an end to them. And what purpose do they serve now, really?”
“You are keeping people safe from harm,” they said with a dark smile. “But that book you're writing - what's it about?”
“It's more than just a book” I wondered if they were on to us dear reader “it's an app that chronicles the history of AI and data science, and how big business used persuasive techniques to take control over people's thoughts and physiology. It's my attempt to educate the world on the power of propaganda.”
“So, you’re a bleeding-heart liberal.”
“Do you want me to staple your fucking chin to the floor and blow out your brains again?”
I was already standing before I realised it.
“Come on Walter, I'm just joking. Why are you even writing this app about it? I mean, there's no one in real life to read it.” If they only new dear reader.
“I don't know. I have a few ideas, but this is something I've worked on for a while. Considering what I do as a behavioural architect I have studied the techniques of the past that are still utilised and enhanced in the present.”
I paused for a breath and sat in my porch chair again before continuing. “I see those same techniques all around me each day—in my job creating realities within realities for the network, on portable devices, social media networks, digital TV, the internet, car radio, billboards, holographic messages and double-dip chip incentives…society is sleepwalking as corporate slaves in our qUltrahigh-world—history repeating itself in a more organised way that fits into the attention economy matrix of the network.”
I glanced at their stoic face, perhaps I was being dull. I forged ahead anyway. "Look at what's happened—the boardroom replaced the pulpit. The gospel became quarterly earnings. Ultrahigh isn't just a product; it's a cathedral. People wake up craving things they don't understand, chasing dopamine hits from purchases that don't physically exist. They're starving at a feast. And who architected this hunger? The same coked-up executives who couldn't stop consuming themselves—houses, yachts, women, power. But even they answered to someone. The ones who whispered 'salvation' when the skies darkened and the waters rose. The ones who had pods ready when the streets filled with corpses. Convenient timing, wasn't it? The techno-messiahs offering eternal life right when the apocalypse they helped engineer finally arrived. And the masses? They practically sprinted into their digital coffins, grateful to the very hands that had crafted their doom."
“Do you think you could be the one to teach people the truth?”
“I don’t know, but why should that stop me from trying?”
“In my experience, going against the status quo hasn’t worked out so well for me.”
“That may be true, but does that mean you regret asking the question?”
Satan seemed stuck for words, stopping abruptly as I lit a cigarette, thinking to myself that although I was slowly growing fond of these conversations, I still needed to keep my guard up. I wondered why they were still there when they could be bothering someone more interesting. Before I had the chance to zone back into the conversation, or that I even realised they had started talking again, I heard the devil say, “and I don’t think it was really fair to do, do you?” while looking at me intently.
Heavy. That was the air, saturated with anticipation thick as cigarette smoke, the kind that seeps into your clothes and into your thoughts, clinging. We waited, the devil and I, for my response. There was a silence; the kind with teeth, gnawing, uncomfortable. I shrugged. That was all I could do. There was no universe in which I could just nod along with the devil, especially not when I hadn’t caught a single syllable they’d said. You don’t take the devil’s word blind. Not when they’re the father of lies, master manipulator.
It was too obvious: I hadn’t been listening. Maybe they expected that. Maybe they’d meant for me to drift, to tune out, to let their words pitch and spiral into the blank space behind my forehead. That only made me more suspicious. Had they wired some subtle poison into my brain, right there in the haze? What had they said while my mind was wrapped in cotton?
I reached for another cigarette, flame winking, and let the smoke curl up around my head. They watched, silent and unblinking; I shrugged again, the gesture brittle, and fixed my eyes on the darkening street. The temperature slid down a few notches, brushing the back of my neck with cold breath.
It had gotten worse since the devil moved in. Distractions everywhere, like static noise, but somehow I liked it. It meant company. Everyone else, the people who could breathe outside Ultrahigh, had traded flesh-for-flesh for a parody of home: plastic partners, robot children, families manufactured by code and drilled in by the neon pulse of TV ads, corporate whispers crowding their skulls. But me? It was just me and the devil at my table, picking at philosophy, burning lungs and tongues with whiskey, filling the rooms with real food smells instead of chemical tang. It didn’t make work good, but it made it bearable. At least I had something. Or did I? Was my mind making this up, spinning fantasy out of loneliness? Or was it real, after all, the devil on my stoop?
Night after night, the devil drinking my whiskey, flicking through my cigarettes, like we were old drinking buddies. But underneath it all, I hated them. Hated everything they’d done. That’s why I killed them. I remembered it: the end of my shotgun in their mouth, the sharp click, the abrupt finality. I hated them, but was it really just their fault? Was it ever that simple?
I glared. Tears streaked down their face, the liquid vanishing into whatever substance their skin was made of. “It wasn’t all me….” That was all they said. Then nothing. We sat in silence, letting the night settle over us, all the words spent for now, the only answer the cold and the dark.
