I have no mouth and I must scream

part 5

AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with
interest at all the pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years. He
looked at the cross­routed and reconnected synapses and all the tissue damage his
gift of immortality had included. He smiled softly at the pit that dropped into the
center of my brain and the faint, moth­soft murmurings of the things far down there
that gibbered without meaning, without pause. AM said, very politely, in a pillar of
stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering:

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM
said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me
from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue­hot
rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had
ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.
All to bring me to full realization of why it had done this to the five of us; why it
had saved us for himself.
We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless.
But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to
think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the
machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM
could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be.
And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft
creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had
decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would
never serve to diminish his hatred ... that would merely keep him reminded, amused,
proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise
for us from the limitless miracles at his command.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with
his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern­filling bulk of the
creature machine, with the all­mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth,
and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never
digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two
of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.
Don't ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we
might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I sawthat when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of
returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed
deep into the soft gray brain matter.
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you.
And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you.
(529 words)