and the devil died screaming — Chapter Two
Ultra-High Book One: A cyberpunk / dystopian fantasy
My Monday morning was like every other. Fucked. I had spent too much time the night before not going to bed. Only to lie there staring at the ceiling when I eventually did, not sleeping. With 19 hours of darkness sitting in my bunker coding and only 5 hours of light, to say I didn’t get much sleep is an understatement. And in those rare hours of light, I fell asleep. That night however I spent all the time wondering whether I should have another drink or smoke. This feeling then transposed itself onto my next day and even more so on my morning. To ease me into my day I took a hit from the bong next to my bed as I got up. I am not a morning person, never have been, and never will be. Add to this not getting any sleep the night before and it makes for a very surreal non-productive morning.
As I ventured downstairs I became aware that music was playing somewhere, it always was, I think I had left Spotify Ultra running again. Coffee was in the pot, and the toast was in the sink. I was getting ready to think about starting to think about the possibility of starting my day. But it would take four coffees, and another hit from my bong before that thought would occur at the front of the neocortex where it might leap into some form of action. Maybe I should have meditated to clear my head of the sleep fog. Maybe I would have put some thought about that for a while, or just sat in contemplation. I would be lying if I said that this was an unusual morning for me back then. Even if the night before did have a twist to it that hadn’t been so predictable, the rest of it and the morning after were as much routine as they were due to boredom.
The base of my skull had a null hum to it, and it was slightly annoying. My left earhole was dry, hot, and sore, I thought that must mean something but had no idea what. There was a scratching at the door; I chose to ignore it, they could wait. My coffee grew cold as I sat there with thoughts of nothing racing through my mind staring blankly at the digital screen across the room telling me something I would choose to ignore.
When I came back round to something resembling normality, I sipped some more of my cold coffee and lit a cigarette, what time was it? Surely somewhere between the ridiculous time I get up and the moment I would, on that day, be walking through the doors of my once-monthly visit to the office of incarceration. Why couldn’t I just once, especially for the one time a month where it fucking mattered, couldn’t I just have a calm normal night before work the next day?
I looked at my wrist computer and didn’t take the time in at all. I heard the scratching at the door again and ignored it. I stood up, eventually, and looked around for something that would give me the sense of urgency I so dearly needed, it seemed somewhat out of grasp. I wasn’t designed for work. Especially going into an office, it was soul-destroying, to think we had to do this once a month. Work starting at 8 am in the morning, what psycho came up with that ungodly hour? Why had I agreed to go in there at all? I made my way back upstairs so as to not waste any more time with my own annoying internal moaning about the inevitable. I could normally just telecommute, work in my studio, or via an Ultra-High plugin, but sometimes, when the network compelled it or when I needed a grasp of reality I had to go into the office. Of course, as free as we creators were, as day walkers, the network still wanted us to know our place.
Looking in the mirror, I saw that face I didn’t recognise, and it unnerved me. I reached for my shaver and pressed the button as it whirled and died, I thought ‘this is a metaphor for my life.’ I put the shaver down and decided this would be somewhere between bad beard and stubble day, not that it mattered as no one would be looking at me. No one really made eye contact anymore, not outside Ultra-High. My eyelids though were baggy and heavy, red and tired. I splashed cold water on my face and looked at my blank expression in the mirror, was I really this dull-looking? It certainly could explain my singleness at 35 but then so would the fact that meeting real humans for real conversation outside of an Ultra-High-Definition environment was tantamount to impossible, you could meet some in the coder and enforcers bars, but they were normally empty. I looked at my disgraceful appearance one last time and headed toward the bedroom to dress, I heard some more scratching in the distance, but it was more of a mild irritation now somewhere in the back of my mind. I was too busy, clouded in the narrative of my morning activity and the stories previous and not yet told that I hardly took in the noise and sights of ‘the now’ unless they were added to reinforce the story of me. My self-glorification as the hero of my own self-obsessed story would be borderline narcissistic if it were not merely a reflection of the state of mind of any citizen of the corpocratic society in which we lived.
I tripped over the cat I didn’t have as I left via my front door and walked towards my vehicle, adjusting my disheveled self as I sundered on. As I shut the car door the cold from the seat shoots up from my buttocks up my spine and I become aware of the frozen tomb into which I have entered, so I turn on the heaters and sit there wishing I had a coffee whilst I demystified the situation. I became alone and cold with my thoughts and I pictured my boss looking at my appearance as I entered the building late yet again, I would make up several different excuses that I can use from the passing of a relative or friend, but neither of which I had, the car wouldn’t start, or the house had a leak. Any of these could neither verified nor really questioned. Why he cared when I only went in once a month I didn’t know, but there is always one like him. I knew what he would say, and I would counterplay that with a “well obviously I don’t need to come to the office and I more than make up any time I miss, but you know that”, ‘don’t you’. I would continue in my own head ‘you, you draconian imp stuck in a 20th-century capitalist mindset’, I would leave him unable to dispute or verify if I ever really did make up any time lost as it was not something tangible, he could put his hands on. He knew my work was exceptional, and I knew it too, and we both secretly understood where the seat of power really sat within our boss and employee relationship, and he hated it with a passion. He just never said it out loud because to acknowledge it was to bring it into reality and to deny its very existence at least gave him a purpose in life. Whilst deep in thought and freezing my tits off I had all but not noticed that the windows had become streams of water and the car had become warm and toasty, I realised I must have been sat there thinking and lost in thought for a lot longer than I needed to be, this would only serve to add to the story of my lateness.
As the car bounced over the uneven curvatures of the long-forgotten road, it shook my skeletal structure loose from its moorings for a second or two. Radio 6 Ultra bellowed out some Grizzly Bear, and I hummed along without really knowing the words, squinting at the morning greyness. I pulled up into the staff car park only to see my boss’s space unoccupied, I figured he was working from home again the lazy bastard and the story of my unexpected bereavement, car troubles, and the leaky house could be saved for another day of inevitable lateness.
— — —
“How was your weekend?” she said, as I walked in. There was a dry dark sarcasm in her voice that I couldn’t place. Did this human Ai hybrid really care what kind of weekend I had? I doubted it. She had probably partied until the last humans dropped, she would have the endurance to keep going, I thought, even past when the rest of us are dead.
“Fine,” I said lying, too bored by my own life narrative to add more context to it or to look up at the pretty fake girl. She looked at the top of my cranium counting the stubble that was on my head until I was all signed in with the usual retinal, tox, and fingerprint scans to get me in the building. I had been able to trick the security system since I hacked it on my first day and then, without a word, I was gone from her visual perception. She no doubt then became lost in her own narrative of the day’s events so far on whatever social ultra-high network she was plugged into, and she would be lost in days gone past where she had been wronged in some way by a dislike or shaming only knowable to her sense of self. My lack of interest in engaging with her that morning like countless other drones that had signed in would only help to cement her self-story and increase the darkness left in her hybrid heart.
Sitting at my desk, my ultra-high caffeinated drink that we used to call coffee had already gone tepid. After a brief exchange between me and my cigarettes out the back of the building, I had tried to distract myself from the fact I was no longer the free man that set his own pace over the weekend. I had rolled and half-smoked two cigarettes whilst watching the morning exchanges between the waking half-burnt trees and dancing discarded plastic bags that reminded me of some film I had seen and ‘the plastic was forever laying siege to this town’ I thought before heading back to face the inevitable program re-write and a bug fix in the mainframe system of “Enlightenment” the current Hypno-pod ultra-reality I had been working on. And fuck the spreadsheets.
By 10 am I had all but caught up on the mundane avenues of my work life and left my AI bot to finish the paperwork as my mind started to wander. I absentmindedly looked out of the window, nothing of any significance for me to ponder just stark grey reality, I enjoyed the stillness for a brief second, I let my mind wander as to whether I too should give up this present despair and dive headfirst into a hyper-reality that I could program from the inside, I snapped back into the moment before I decided to busy myself with the act of trying to appear busy, which is actually a lot harder than the work itself.
The base of my skull still had a chill by the time the idea of lunch raised its weary head. I thought about getting some soup to warm me up, the idea sounded lovely, so of course, I wouldn’t do that. I stepped treacherously inside the pathetic excuse we had for a canteen and moved my way towards the coffee machine. There was a queue of other semi-biotic life forms ahead of me taking their time about extracting their hot malted sewage. It didn’t bother me. The longer I was in here, the longer I was away from the intensely bright pixelation of my office computer screen. Staring into the back of this emasculated primate that stood in front of me, I found no place to hide and bury my thoughts even those of little worth. In the darkest scruples of my mind, I wanted to bury a fork into that bit of flesh that joined his spinal cord to his head. I wanted to rip it out and hold it aloft like Sub-Zero. That would sort out the constant gnawing at the base of my skull, of this I was certain. Unfortunately, it was not yet permissible or acceptable to spend one’s time in coffee queues planning and then acting out finishing moves, or co-worker fatality strikes.
As I returned to my desk semiprecious coffee lava in hand it was now my lunchtime, my 45 minutes of the one day a month in the office where my masters did not decide what I did or did not do, I was free to do whatever I wanted. So, I sat down and stared at the screen blankly. Its brightness soon made me look away. I thought about looking on FacebookUltra, but that was a big no-no at work even in your own time and if I did the Zuckerberg bots would only inform upper management and erode some of my credit chips giving me the hassle of having to hack into the mainframe again and correct everything. Freedom came at a cost, and that cost was a different kind of lack where freedoms were concerned. No one could see my screen from where they worked, but even so, the bots could get in, it was risky to even consider it. This was the other reason I hardly ever risked the smog to go into the office, other than on mandatory days. But I was creative, so I got away with a lot.
I thought about checking my crypto wallet to see which robbing bastards had harvested yet again my precious little funds but that only seem doomed to cause depression. Pitched as our saviour from capitalism the currency of freedom ensnared us in its web before the wet paint of liberation was even sat upon. There was little point being there if whilst I was, I saw the pennies dripping out of the other end. I could waste time on the internet and educate myself further on the inner workings of the human mind or the most lavish recipes for Lasagne that I could cook and leave to go cold before throwing out. I could get up and go for a walk, and get some filtered air in my lungs, this last idea seemed to be one which I would be a winner but then I decided to exchange the freshly filtered fake air for cigarette smoke. My walk would be limited to the 500 yards or so that it was from my desk to find myself out back in the ultra-air vented courtyard.
All in all, by the time I came in from the cold and plonked myself back on my seat I had managed to waste 30 minutes of my all too precious lunch break. I wondered whether I should get a chocolate bar from the vending machine to ensure I had enough sustenance to last the remaining 4 hours and 15 minutes of my servitude. I considered this for far longer than it was worth pondering all the aspects of whether this would become a new dietary supplement in my ever less healthy lifestyle and whether it would contribute to the ever-pressing onset of obesity and weight-related illnesses that would ultimately put way too much pressure on my heart and vascular system to ensure a premature end to this all but sorry existence. By the time I had decided to give the chocolate a miss my lunch break was over, and I suddenly felt deflated and hungry. I had missed life’s opportunities again due to procrastination.
As I looked at my screen and checked my emails, my office phone startled me into action and shook the very life from my being. Composing myself I looked at it strangely as I never really got calls on it and I had long since given it to be an item of furniture in the corner of my eye that was only ever really on my peripheral and never a focus of my attention. I looked at it and then realised myself and remembered you must pick the damn thing up to answer it. Antiquated technology of the old world, it seemed out of place but somehow fitting.
“Hello dear” came a familiar voice that I just could not place, the fact that it had just called me dear made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin, let alone my office.
“Hello,” I said, “I am sorry, who is this?”
“You forget me already, Walter? Wow, that hurts I thought we had something special something, unique.”
“I am sorry but…”
“Don’t be sorry my dear Walter, just make it up to me now be a lamb and close the door.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Close the door, Walter.”
“But how do you know my door is open” I looked about confused and over my shoulder like there was someone watching me then it suddenly dawned on me who this was “wait is this Tom in accounts? Cos if it is, I am not in the mood.”
“No, it’s not Tom, trust me, he is about to walk past your office and wave” just then Tom from accounts walked past my office door and waved and smiled at me as he went by, he was a nice lad a little on the juvenile side as most accountants tend to be with their hedonistic lifestyle and bare minimum grip on reality.
“What the fuc…..”
“Please don’t swear Walter you are on an office phone and it’s very unprofessional, now be a lamb and shut the fucking door.” I placed the receiver on the desk got up slowly and moved towards the door, I quickly looked out in the direction of Juvenile Tom to see if he was there sniggering at this practical joke, but he was walking towards the photocopier oblivious to my current predicament and confusion. Slowly I closed my door and looked at the telephone receiver on my desk, I could hear whistling coming from the earpiece. I was starting to figure out who this was, and I was becoming annoyed.
I picked up the receiver hard and pressed it against my ear “you know Lucifer for someone who is supposed to be dead; you are becoming a real pain in the ass.”
“Ha-ha took you long enough Walter. But you know I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“What do you want? I am busy at work?”
“No, you are not, you are at work I will give you that, but you are definitely not busy.”
“Well either way that is hardly any of your business, what do you want, do you want to provoke me and wind me up, do you want to get me going and for me to drag you back down through the gates of hell and set fire to your soul all over again, do you want me….” they cut me dead.
“Walter chill, this is why I told you to shut your door I knew you would get all worked up.”
I stopped and took a breath, with a clenched jaw I asked again “What do you want?”
“I just want a friend to talk to Walter.”
“A friend and you think I am it? After what I did to you?”
“It’s because of what you did that makes me know I can trust you and you know that you can trust me, I am hardly going to want to piss off the one man who killed me and have to go through all that again.”
I paused for a second and took another breath.
“Ok, ok but now is not the time, even if I’m not busy as you say, I need to at least try and look as though I am, ok?”
“Yeah, I get it, man, you got to keep up the illusion, keep the man off your back.”
“Exactly”
“I dig that, maybe we can continue this conversation later.”
“Maybe and maybe, you could explain how if I killed you-you are talking to me right now. Or better still just fuck off.”
“Now now Walter let’s not spoil things by getting too bogged down with the detail.”
“Well.”
“Hey, Walter.”
“What?”
“Can you pick up some wine and cheese and crackers on your way home, I kind of have a hankering for it?”
“Yeah, of course, but you don’t even have a stomach.”
“Things change Walter, things change, and thank you you’re a sweetie.”
“What the fuck? Since when is my home your home and when the fuck did Satan start calling people sweetie?” I realised I was now talking to myself as they had hung up the phone. The last time I saw them they were just a skull, now they seemed to be able to pick up and dial the phone as well as enjoy the finer moments of wine and cheese. I didn’t even know I had a phone at my house or if the UltarMart even sold wine and cheese, and if it did would my credit reach that far?
— -
This is a live cyberpunk / dystopian fantasy book writing project. Copyright is protected. It is a first rough draft so I would love to hear any feedback from readers. When the book is launched all that are signed up for this to my mailing list on the website below you will be sent a free Kindle copy of the book as a thank you for subscribing.
This project is part of the writing projects from my site sleeplessdystopian.com
