Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun
for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now.
Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some
hundreds of years. He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no
way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared
and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him. He was furious. I
had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate
he now slavered from every printed circuit. He made certain I would suffer eternally
and could not do myself in.
He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. I remember all
four of them. I wish—
Well, it doesn't make any sense. I know I saved them, I know I saved them from
what has happened to me, but still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen's face. It isn't
easy. Sometimes I want to, it doesn't matter.
AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn't want me to
run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I
faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down
here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing
white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were
once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I
leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my
surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known
as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more
obscene for the vague resemblance.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM,
whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known
unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.
AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet ... AM
has won, simply ... he has taken his revenge ...
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
(445 words)
