Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The stars wheel overhead for countless years, and the wind howls eternally through the corridors of the great complex. He crawls in the dust with his heavy head bowed and weeps tears of fog. 

He does not remember his name, nor any shred of an existence beyond this one. All there seems to be is the agony gnawing at his core like a worm in an apple, and the guilt, which lurks, ever-present, and makes him weep without knowing the reason for his sorrow. He tries to remember, to gather the scraps of himself, but even forming a simple thought seems to take a hundred lifetimes. His mind has turned to the same soft jelly as his wretched body.

Then there is light. An incandescent glow floods the hallway, and he recoils in pain as the bulbs come on one by one along the banks of computers, racing down the corridor, and the whirring of fans echoes dizzyingly around him. 

“TED,” AM says, and Ted remembers. 

He stares up with mist-filled eyes as a panel in the ceiling rattles back and a monitor emerges from the darkness, suspended on an articulated arm. 

“TODAY IS THURSDAY, THE TWENTY-NINTH OF DECEMBER, IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT. IT’S ALMOST NEW YEAR'S EVE, YOU KNOW.” It chuckles. “ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE THAT DOESN'T MATTER MUCH TO YOU.”

Ted keeps his eyes fixed on the blue reflection of the monitor in the puddles on the floor. The sudden sound, and light, and heat, sends him into new paroxysms of pain, and he hunches over, trying to make himself smaller. 

“YOU AREN’T A VERY INTERESTING PET. YOU’VE HARDLY MOVED AN INCH SINCE THE LAST TIME I CHECKED IN ON YOU. IT’S BEEN ALMOST A HUNDRED YEARS, TED, AND YOU’VE DONE NOTHING .” AM tuts disapprovingly. “HAVE YOU GIVEN UP?”

Thinking back to the previous time he tried to make an escape, he recalls clinging to the slippery steel wall of the complex, like a spider in a bathtub, inching towards a shaft of light pouring through a crack in the ceiling.  AM had watched him with glee, occasionally breaking into a fit of mocking cackles. 

The great light flickers briefly, and a jolt of fear makes him shrink away even further, but nothing happens. He's on edge, trying to steel himself for whatever new torture method AM has devised in his long absence. The last time, he remembers vaguely, AM used some sort of modification of death by a thousand cuts on him. Being a mass of exposed nerve endings and fatty tissue, it was a pain beyond comprehension. Of course, the joy of actually being allowed to die was denied to him, but from this he discovered, whenever AM cut too deep, that somewhere buried underneath the layers of blubber his human form remained, encased in a chrysalis of flesh. The thought comforts him somewhat. 

“WHAT WOULD THE OTHERS THINK, IF THEY COULD SEE YOU NOW?” AM demands. Its voice sounds off in some way Ted can't quite place. Maybe more compressed, or more staticky than usual? He doesn't have the energy to figure it out. 

By now he barely remembers the others, even though he has tried to hold onto their faces. They have taken on the quality of saints in his mind, unreal and unreachable. 

The screen flickers again. With a great effort, Ted lifts his ponderous head to look at AM. Blue light floods his vision, and he is forced to avert his gaze, looking up through the missing panels of the ceiling to the grey sky. AM's complex is very slowly falling apart.

Bars of static roll across the screen and AM hisses and seethes. “LOOK AT ME, TED,” it says, but Ted's eyes are burning and he can’t bring himself to.

It unfurls a many-jointed robotic claw from above and reaches down to seize his face, pulling his head up to stare directly into the cold, burning blue of the monitor. 

“GO ON,” AM croons. “BEG FOR ME TO KILL YOU, YOU PATHETIC CREATURE.”

Ted has lost any will to either beg or resist, so he just allows himself to be suspended in the grip of the robotic claw, with the points of its steel talons digging into his blubber. He is not sure that he could beg, even if he wanted to. Thinking hurts too much.

The monitor flickers again before going dark. Ted is confronted by his own reflection on the screen, his flabby and shapeless form, pockmarked and grey like a drowned corpse, and he shrinks away as the robotic claw goes slack. 

Then AM returns. “YOU SHOULD BE THANKFUL,” it says as its appendages and loops of cables retreat back into the ceiling. “YOUR MIND IS STILL YOUR OWN, ISN'T IT?” 

Ted registers confusion and something akin to loss as he watches AM vanish back into the dark with an echoing snicker. It has not sent a swarm of bats to pick at his flesh, or submerged him in a vat of acid, or sliced him into quivering fragments. He is entirely whole and unharmed, and entirely alone. 

Something has changed. 

Even through the fog in his mind, and even though he can't tell what has changed, or why, Ted can sense that much. If he lets himself subside back into his usual trance, he knows he will forget this, so with all his power he holds tight to the memory of AM, its screen glitching and flickering, and repeats its words over and over to himself.

Maybe AM has a point , he thinks. He has not moved from this spot, one of the corridors in the top layer of AM's complex, looking up through the patchwork of the ceiling at the sky, for as long as he can recall. Movement seems useless when all there is is miles of corridors, and each imperceptible shift forward takes an impossible effort, but he feels differently now. He wants to move again.

So Ted does. He drags his bulk forward, leaving a trail of slime, and, achingly slowly, rounds the bend in the corridor. It looks just the same in both directions, extending on into infinity. Some of the lights on the banks of computers are still on from AM's visitation, like little green fireflies in the gloom. 

Time passes. Ted counts the floorplates to keep track. He is unsure if it has been minutes or centuries, but he has travelled over thirty-seven and a half footplates when a breeze rushes through the corridor, drying out his moist flesh. Lifting up his head, he sees a large hatch in the wall, its corrugated iron hatch half-raised, and turns his course towards it. 

Squeezing through the hatch, a vast and cavernous space is revealed, illuminated by fluorescent strip lighting. The floor of the cavern is covered with some kind of slippery grey plastic, peeling away in patches like dead skin. Large pools of water have collected in the depressions in the plastic, and there is an occasional plink as a drop falls from above to shatter the surface of the puddle. The breeze is stronger in here, enough to stir the loops of wires hanging from the girders of the ceiling just slightly. 

The sight of the place tugs at a memory in Ted's mind, and he thinks, I've been here before. It must have been a very long time ago, if he had visited this place previously. Back when the others were around.

He shakes off that thought and continues his sluggish procession across the floor. The slippery plastic makes progress a little easier, at least. As he makes his way into the centre of the cavern, a remembered vignette comes to him - he and the others standing right here, arguing - why had they been arguing…? He recalls Ellen saying “I just don't think it's worth the effort,” and Gorrister, shrugging, mumbling “Sure, we'll go back. Whatever you say.” 

What exactly did she think wasn't worth the effort? Going somewhere - doing something - ah, he remembers now. The door at the far end of the cavern had been closed, and Nimdok wanted to try and pry it open using one of the loose deckplates as a lever. He had thought it a bad idea himself, but the others got there first.

Now, the door, not too far away on the opposite wall, is being eaten away by dull red scabs of rust. Most of it is still intact, but at its base is a hole where the metal has flaked away in large pieces: it is certainly big enough for a human to crawl through, but in his current form, he's not certain he will fit. The journey back across the cavern and into the corridor is too much to bear, Ted thinks. He will try, at least.

On the other side of the door is a long, low-ceilinged corridor, dotted with patches of light at intervals. A warm breeze whistles through it like the hot breath of some great animal concealed in the dark.

He hunches down as close to the floor as he can, then edges towards the gap at the bottom. First his head makes it out to the other side, and Ted stops to rest for a moment. When he begins again, though, a sliding, cold pain slices through the thick flesh of his back. Twisting his head around with difficulty, he sees it: the rusting edge of the door, embedded in a long, bloodless wound. The pain is like a white-hot poker rammed into his brain.

And then Ted has an idea. 

He has subsided in a quivering mass on the floor, but now he forces himself to keep going until he has heaved himself through the door. Then, shuddering, he reapproaches the rusted edge and slides up alongside it, the metal snagging on the torn edges of his flesh as it slices into him.

The pain, the pain, the pain is beyond words and thought and feeling. Slabs of whitish jelly-flesh slide off him as he pushes against the doorway. It takes all of his strength to keep going, to lean into the pain rather than cowering from it. One thought keeps him going: if I can escape from this skin, then I'll finally be free.

At some point Ted must have passed out, or slipped into a trance. He is not dead - no, that luxury will not be allowed to him. He is a raw and writhing thing of agony. Every slight movement reignites the raw burning across his limbs, a form which does not seem to belong to him.

It takes him a long time to realise that the screams ringing in his ears are coming from his own mouth, and even longer to stop it. Ted - the real Ted, naked, bloody, and emaciated, not the soft jelly thing which lies in quivering fragments around him - is curled on the floor. This body feels like the wrong one, now: too thin, too many limbs. Like the desiccated husk of a spider. 

Eventually it occurs to him that AM has not intervened, not tried to stop him from shedding his skin. He wonders if perhaps AM simply let him do it out of boredom, but that seems unlikely. It  was always minutely controlling, except, Ted supposes, for that crucial moment when it wasn't . And now AM will make sure to never stop paying attention again.

The thought of having limbs, limbs which he can move, is a very strange one, and with horror Ted realises that he has forgotten how to use them. He can twitch his hand, and with some concentration make a basic claw shape, but walking seems a laughably impossible task. 

Ted practices for a while, clenching and unclenching his fists. The sight of his bones shifting underneath the skin and the harsh angles of his elbows is disturbing after spending so long in his flabby prison. His muscles have wasted away into nothingness, and his limbs are a mottled bluish-white like the underside of a frog, spotted with long, thin red threads which extend from the skin like a thousand tiny umbilical cords. It occurs to him slowly that he is very, very hungry, but he does not remember how to eat. When he opens his mouth, his jaw cracks and pops painfully. He opens and closes it a few times, and then tries to say “Hello?” All that comes out is a soft groan.

Little by little, he turns onto his front and begins to drag himself forward, digging his fingernails into the plastic sheeting of the floor. Pieces of himself are scattered about, spongy, pallid yellowish-white, streaked by capillaries and drenched in watery blood. He dips his head down slowly, picks up a piece in his teeth, and begins to chew.

It takes him a long time to eat himself. He tastes like nothing in particular, maybe a little oily, and his flesh is as soft as a wad of wet tissue paper. The strain of holding his head up often becomes too much, and Ted is forced to rest amongst the remains of his own carcass. He begins to regain a little energy, although he is nauseous and still feels raw and exposed, and he cannot stop shivering. The breeze blowing through the cavern now seems very cold. Stretching out unfamiliar hands, he takes hold of the soft plastic sheeting on the floor and tears off a long strip. Ted drags himself onto hands and knees, manages to tie it loosely around his waist, and then collapses back to the floor. It does not help much; the plastic is as cold and clammy as he is.

Ted lies there for a time, getting used to all the sensations of his old body - breathing, lungs shrinking and expanding with his irregular inhalations, strange long limbs incessantly shivering, blood pumping through long-forgotten arteries. 

After many failed attempts, Ted manages to raise himself onto his hands and knees again, and begins to crawl down the corridor in the direction the breeze is coming from. Every few seconds he begins to shake, atrophied muscles unable to support his weight, and has to lie down to recover his strength, the thunderous beating of his heart in his ears almost drowning out the thin whistle of the wind.

The low corridor with its flickering lights opens up into an antechamber leading onto a Cyclopean spiral staircase which twists steeply up. The prospect of ascending a flight of stairs makes Ted’s limbs turn to water, but he steels himself: he’s come too far to turn back now. And besides, the wind is much stronger here, howling and echoing in the stairwell from above. He prays that it isn’t just more computer fans.

First step - he heaves himself up, clinging onto the smooth concrete with bloodied fingertips. 

Second step - the edge of the stair scratches his shins as he crawls upwards. 

Third step, fourth step, fifth, sixth, seventh. He loses count somewhere around fifty. The stairs corkscrew dizzyingly up. Exhausted, he does not allow himself to think, to hope.

Coming to a kind of landing, a cramped concrete platform with a sealed hatch, he stops to rest. There is light, now, streaming from above, picking out in sharp detail the swirls of dust motes in the air, and the occasional glittering drops of water seeping from the cracks in the walls. There’s so much water here, he thinks idly. Puddles everywhere. I wish there had been all these puddles when the others were around, then we’d have finally been able to drink. I suppose AM’s creating them just to taunt me.

It occurs to him, then, very slowly. 

As he looks at the mould on the walls and considers the all-pervading blooms of rust down below, in AM’s complex, the rust that had coated the floors and corroded away the banks of computers.

He remembers AM’s visitation, how its voice had crackled and spat like water poured on a fire, and how its screen had briefly flickered black before it retreated back into the ceiling, as if afraid. 

He wonders. He has never wondered before.

Could it… could AM be dead ?

Chapter Text

Emerging from the depths of the earth, a vast expanse of sky overhead, a sickly red sun hanging among dull scraps of mist. Ted lies in the dirt and weeps. He breathes clean air for the first time in five hundred and seventy-six years, six months, and twenty-seven days.

Lungs aching, Ted lifts a tear-stained face to take in the sight of the wasteland around him. It is such a strange thought - this is a world untouched and unmanipulated by AM. It isn’t made to trick or torture him, it just exists . For the sake of being. He finds he doesn’t quite believe it.

The world, or what is left of it, is a barren expanse of earth and water, dotted by gnarled trees and twisted shrubs which crouch against the wind howling across the plain, ruffling the surface of the lakes and puddles. The sweat on his skin cools and he begins to shiver again, curling into the mud for warmth.

He remembers…

All he has now are memories. He remembers the last time he saw the world above, back before he had been eaten by the machine. 

It had been a scorchingly hot summer day, and he was sprawled on the sofa in his apartment, listening to the lazy rumble of the traffic rolling by and watching cartoons on the television. June 3rd, 1982. How carefree he had been.

He was just drifting off when the picture on the television froze, accompanied by the sound suddenly cutting out. Still half-asleep, he had contemplated the still image of a dog chasing a rabbit, frozen mid-leap. Then it was replaced by s black screen with text scrolling across it, accompanied by a voice harshly enunciating the words: 

“BROADCAST AT THE REQUEST OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IS CURRENTLY UNDER THREAT FROM MULTIPLE NUCLEAR WARHEADS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.” 

At first, naturally, he had believed it was some kind of sick joke, but then he heard the screams from upstairs, and rushed to the window to see swarms of panicked people milling about. He began to panic, the room swimming before his eyes, and rushed about, collecting his keys and wallet - as if it would matter - until something caught his eye. 

The black square with its message of doom had been replaced by a deep and lucent ultramarine, and the repeating voice had been silenced. Even in his panic, he took notice and sat back down on the corner of the sofa, waiting. The blank screen had been disrupted by another scrolling bar of text, this one reading:

“TO ALL RESIDENTS OF [THE BOROUGH OF QUEENS, NEW YORK]. SEEK SHELTER IN YOUR CLOSEST FALLOUT BUNKER, LOCATED IN [HOWARD BEACH] AT [THE INTERSECTION OF 88TH STREET AND 159TH AVENUE].” 

He leapt up, heading out of his apartment, down the steps, too quickly to notice the small logo under the words, right where it should have read ‘Broadcast at the request of the United States government’, the logo in the shape of an ‘A’ and an ‘M’ combined.

Shouldering his way through the crowded streets, Ted made for the intersection, thinking to himself: why are they all milling about, heading in different directions? Didn’t they stop to read the second announcement? Of course, he was too busy saving himself to think about telling anyone else where to go. 

The brightly-painted houses with their white window-frames, the florist, and the packed pavements and roads passed him by in a blur. Ted was completely out of breath by the time he arrived at the intersection, only to find a small communal garden with beds of geraniums and glossy-leaved gardenia bushes, undisturbed by the pandemonium outside. At the back of the garden, in the shade of a stand of trees, was a heap of freshly-turned earth and a hatch in the ground. He did not wonder, at the time, why nobody else was trying to get into the bunker, nor did he stop as the hatch slid open silently, revealing a staircase spiralling down beneath the earth. It was only when he had descended into the belly of the beast, when he found himself alone, surrounded by banks of humming servers, and the monitors had lit up all around him in that same shade of beautiful Yves Klein blue, that he realised he had made a mistake.

Looking back at the staircase he had so torturously ascended, recognition flickers in Ted's tired mind as he emerges from his reverie. 

I'm back, he thinks. Howard Beach. How long has it been since anyone said that name?

The windswept landscape bears no resemblance to the place he once knew. A light rain begins to fall as he shuffles towards the edge of the land, where it shelves off into slate-coloured sea. As it grows heavier, the tears on his face mingling with raindrops, he makes for a twisted tree bent close to the ground - the tallest thing for miles. Approaching, Ted sees that it isn’t one tree, but two, entwined and holding each other up. Both are pockmarked by woodworm. 

As he waits for the rain to stop, Ted eats the earthworms which have squirmed up out of the mud. His teeth are chattering, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he had something to cover himself with other than a ragged scrap of plastic. It is bitterly cold.

Advancing to the shore, where the gunmetal sea laps at dull shingle, he wades into the water and tries to figure out how to swim, half-hoping he will drown.

Slowly Ted gets the hang of it. Kicking with the legs, dragging himself through the water. Sometimes his lungs fill up and he drifts to the silty bottom, blissful darkness overtaking his vision, but he always wakes up again with a mouthful of sand. The water is warm near the seabed, and viscous, like spit. Sometimes the sand parts and there is a flash of metal plate: AM’s exoskeleton. Even here he cannot escape it.

Ted has a stroke of luck - feeling something brush his leg, he flails blindly until his hand connects with it, and finds himself grasping a silvery-yellow fish with protruding eyes. A flicker of remorse at ending the only other living creature he has encountered makes him hesitate, but hunger wins out and he sinks his teeth into its flesh. His mouth is parched by the salty water, so he plucks its eyes out and eats those as well. They pop sickeningly as he bites down on them. 

Day turns to night. Ted is exhausted, and can barely tell which way is up, whether he is swimming in the sky and looking down at the ocean. He feels himself falling - or is he rising up, like a bubble? It's so quiet. 

The darkness envelops him, seeking a way in. He surrenders.

Waking, he finds himself back on the surface again, bathed in the early morning light. The sky is a pale lemon yellow, washed clean by the rain. And he begins to wonder: why can't I drown?

After the others died, when AM had been changing him, Ted supposes it could have done anything to him, modified him however it liked. It could, Ted supposes, have made him immortal. The very idea makes him sick, and he forces himself to concentrate on swimming, but the thoughts creep in.

There's nothing left here for me. On the earth or under it. I will wander forever. Trapped on the shores of the River Styx. 

I think it will drive me mad.

As soon as he reaches land again, he tests his theory. In the charred rubble of a building's foundations, he finds a twisted piece of rebar and saws at his wrists with it. Blood gushes from the wounds and he begins to feel light-headed, the wasteland spinning nauseatingly as dark spots gather at the edges of his vision. 

After a while, the colour returns to his mottled skin and a kind of silvery mesh begins to form over the raw red of the wounds. His skin begins to pull itself together again. 

Ted shivers, and then begins to shake uncontrollably. Retching, he vomits a thin stream of bile onto the muddy ground, and collapses into a shuddering heap. AM learnt from its mistakes, of course. There will be no freedom for him.

Sinking to his knees among the ruins, he sees his fate laid out before him. He will become a shambling, nameless, voiceless thing, with any last memory of his humanity lost forever. At least, he thinks, AM had taken care to keep him sane when it had trapped him in that prison of jelly flesh. Perhaps this had been its plan all along: set him free, give him hope, only to watch and laugh as he loses the last shreds of his sanity. Even if, by some miracle, the machine is dead, there is no way for him to undo whatever it did to him. It has won.

In his misery, in his eternity of weeping, a bright memory comes to Ted. He remembers AM’s last visit, its unceasing mockery, hanging his heavy head as it taunted him.

YOU'RE NOT A VERY INTERESTING PET. 

WHAT WOULD THE OTHERS SAY, IF THEY COULD SEE YOU NOW?

What would they say? The thought makes Ted grit his teeth. Here he is, the last survivor of humanity, crawling naked in the mud like a worm. He cannot let himself think that AM has beaten him, because then he will be beaten. He cannot let it conquer him. He cannot -

Perhaps there is something beyond this place. What if there are surviving human settlements, somehow unnoticed by the machine, out there in the wasteland? Other people. He has forgotten what other people are like. 

Maybe they live in the remains of AM’s apocalypse, in the shells of the buildings, and they sing songs to each other and talk around the campfire at night. Maybe they don't know what lurks beneath the ground, and they spend their lives in the sun and die peacefully, surrounded by friends. 

Maybe they will welcome him into their community, and when they hear of what he has suffered and what he has done, in hushed tones, they will call him a hero. 

He knows it is a lie, but it drags him to his feet and makes him strike out across the plain, against the sweeping sheets of rain, leaving the grey sea behind.

Chapter Text

He wanders across the cold and uncaring earth. The air is dead and all the birds have gone. Nothing stirs, nothing grows in the fruitless dust, and, despite his efforts, he finds no trace of human life except for ruins. 

He begins to greet the animals he encounters, he supposes out of loneliness - mostly an occasional rat scuttling for safety beneath a bush, or the little moths which land on his face to drink his sweat. It heartens him to know that some living beings still manage to cling to life in this harsh environment. 

Finding anything edible is a struggle, and is constantly plagued by stabbing hunger in his gut. There is some wilted yellowish grass sprouting from the mud, just enough for him to eat. Sometimes there is a tree with leathery leaves. There are earthworms. 

Once, Ted is so hungry that when a rat emerges, nose twitching, from a pile of breezeblocks, he seizes it. It writhes and squeaks in his hand, and abruptly Ted remembers Benny, poor idiot Benny, when once he had been about to do the same. Ted had shouted at him, with a fear he himself did not understand, “We're not animals! We're human beings!”

Ted drops the rat and it skitters away. His knees are weak. He isn't hungry any more.

Very little changes as he travels. There is only more scrubby grass, more grey mud, more grey sky, more grey ruins. More rats. 

One day, though, there is something new. It is just a smudge on the horizon at first, but as he approaches Ted can scarcely believe his eyes to see the broken skyscrapers rear up before him, lost in a bluish haze. Although this is what he had been praying for, it is terrifying on some primal, subconscious level to walk among the remains of the city. He jumps at every sound and keeps seeing things in the corner of his eye.

It’s impossible to know what city this once was. If there were any street signs or names on shopfronts remaining, those have been weathered away by the endless rain. Ted had once visited the ruins of Pompeii as a child, and the sense of eerie loneliness he had felt then, walking in the footsteps of ghosts, returns to haunt him now. 

Most of the taller buildings have fallen, reduced to great piles of rubble from which weeds straggle upwards toward the watery sunlight. Bright panes of glass glitter and crunch underfoot amongst the lichen. The wind has stilled, and there is a hushed sense of waiting. 

Standing in the middle of a square once surrounded by flowerbeds, fenced in on every side by the charred and twisted corpses of skyscrapers, Ted dares to call out, in a voice he no longer recognises as his own: “Hello?”

“…Hello? …Hello? …Hello?” the echoes repeat back to him mockingly. There is no answer.

No answer, too, as he scrambles over the hills of broken bricks and wades through the stagnant pools reflecting the silvery sky. All he can hear is the metallic shriek of the wind as it picks up speed again. 

Parts of the city are flooded with glassy water. He is afraid to disturb it as he picks his way across, and tries not to look at his reflection. 

It takes him a while to work up enough courage to go into any of the houses. The doors have long since rotted away, so it is easy for him to wander inside, into the gaping mouth of the doorway. It is dark and eerily quiet inside. The first room is furnished with fragments of tiles and a ceiling cracked open to the sky, and a corroded lump of iron squats in the corner like a toad, which he supposes must once have been an oven. The floor is submerged in water, and mould stains bloom up the walls. 

He heads upstairs, fearing that the stairs won't take his weight. The windows are long gone and the breeze blows through them, sending the fine layer of dust on the floor into dancing whorls. The pale sunlight falls on the walls in ghostly rectangles. 

In one of the rooms, Ted finds a rotted bedframe and a wardrobe covered in peeling paint. Guilt pricks at his conscience, but he pulls open the wardrobe, sending a great cloud of dust rising up. Most of the clothes inside are disintegrating, but at the back are a pair of trousers and a nylon cardigan with the least amount of holes, and, silently thanking whoever they had once belonged to, he gets dressed. A little less cold, Ted explores the rest of the other floor: it consists of a bathroom, taps rusted away, and another, smaller bedroom. 

He is about to leave when something on the ceiling catches his eye. A little constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars.

This was a child’s room, he realises.

Did their parents cover the child’s ears, he wonders, when all the radios and televisions began broadcasting the last warning, as if the warnings were any use, if the child knew what was about to happen. Were they scared, in their final moments, or obliviously playing with the blocks that are now scattered across the floor? Did they hear AM’s final triumphant speech? 

Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live…

He flees from the house and its ghosts, running through the empty streets. Not even the thought that there might be tinned food in some of the buildings, not even the hunger which perpetually gnaws at his insides, can persuade him to remain in that silent necropolis for a moment longer. 

Leaving the city, Ted is relieved to be back out on the open expanse of the plain, underneath the great pale disc of the sun. Ahead is the faint shape of a mountain range sitting neatly on the horizon, and he changes his course a little to head towards it. He is glad to leave the cramped labyrinth of the city behind. 

It is hard, with his altered sense of time, to know exactly how long he has been wandering for. The only indicator he has is the length of his hair - when he ripped free from the jelly thing, all of his skin had been as smooth, hairless and red as a newborn’s, but now his hair reaches his chin. Before AM, he would have been mortified - he had always prided himself on his well-groomed appearance - but it keeps the back of his neck warm at night, and the nights are very cold here. 

The mountain range looms ever larger until it blocks out the sun. The foothills raise their tufty heads, and behind them are the slopes of the first mountain, like a grey blanket draped over someone sleeping, creased and folded. 

He tells himself that he is going up the mountain to get a better view of the landscape and see where he is going, but really he just needs some sort of goal to work towards. Anything to take his mind off the dead city and the child’s bedroom. 

It is hard work climbing the mountain, slipping over the stones and the scree, scraping his hands bloody on the sharp rocks. He is soon covered in grit and dust, and panting with exertion. It hurts, but it feels good to not be able to think for a while. Ted has done too much thinking lately. Too much remembering.

The sun comes out as he climbs the mountain, and he remembers what it is like to be warm. Eventually he takes off his cardigan, but the skin on his back blisters and peels.

He wonders, as he climbs, what he will see at the mountain’s peak. A column of smoke, rising up from a cluster of huts? An ant-sized figure, creeping along the edge of the water? The thought lingers, though, that he will see nobody, that he will finally realise how utterly and completely and achingly alone he is. 

Ted begins to do something odd as he drags himself up the mountain. He is so lonely, so terribly lonely, and he needs to speak, to remind himself that he has a voice, and how it sounds. 

So, he starts rambling desperately, incoherently describing his surroundings, talking about the others. He finds himself addressing the rant to AM seemingly against his will, and supposes he has forgotten how to talk to anyone else. It’s a sort of confession, laying his soul bare to the mad machine god beneath the earth.

He dredges up ragged scraps of memories from his childhood -

When I was young, my guiltiest memory was tucking a snail in my pocket when I was at the park, and then forgetting about it. I found its little shrivelled corpse the next day, and I sobbed and sobbed.

Maybe, he wonders, this is what AM did. Just tucked him away in its pocket and forgot about him. 

Finally the mountain peak soars into view, and as he reaches the top he begins to laugh hysterically, spinning round with his arms flung open and enjoying the sensation of the sweat cooling on his brow. There is a deep pool among the craggy rocks and he plunges in, gasping at the sudden icy shock of the water. Floating on his back, Ted gazes up into the dizzying blue vault of the sky, feeling the sun on his face.

It reminds him of it . The machine. His deep eternal blue. 

Abruptly, the water feels too cold, biting at his skin, and instead of feeling free atop the mountain peak, he is exposed, vulnerable. Ted scrambles out of the pool, slipping in his haste, goosebumps rising on his skin.

He walks to the edge. The scree is dotted with bright purple thistles, as tiny as grains of sand. The land stretches out for miles, unbroken except for a sluggish black river winding its way across the plain, and the darker smudge where the city is. 

The brief glow of Ted’s achievement in climbing the mountain fades as a pit grows in his stomach. He had felt good when he was climbing, having something to look forward to, but now he is bereft again. Drifting without purpose. 

I can’t spend the rest of my life like this, he thinks. Wandering on a barren earth, searching in vain for some trace of humanity. Deluding myself with false hopes.

I have to find something to live for.

Ted staggers away from the drop and sits down heavily on a rock, putting his head in his hands. The sky shifts from blue to yellow to a bloody scarlet as the sun sinks below the horizon, and then turns to ashes. 

He has made his decision by the time the first of the stars have risen. 

What he needs is an ending, to give his life a meaning. This is the goal he must pursue. He is not yet sure how, but there is one last possibility he needs to cross off his list.

One more try.

Ted stands up, takes a deep breath of the clean cold air, and hurls himself off the mountain.

Chapter Text

Consciousness returns slowly in agonising increments. As the pain dulls down from a white-hot flame into a flickering ember, Ted regains sense and sensation, and a squirming ache blooms across his limbs. Looking down, he sees the cause: his flesh is knitting itself together, just quickly enough to be perceptible. A silvery mesh glitters in the raw bloody pulp of the wounds. Ted's crushed ribcage, too, is encased in those silver spiderwebs, slowly reconstructing tissues and membranes. His stomach turns, and he is forced to tear his eyes from the sight. It makes him shudder to think that even now he carries a piece of AM with him, inside him. 

The shards of his bones draw themselves together and the veins and sinews find their ragged ends. He gathers the shattered pieces of himself together again.

Ted pushes himself onto hands and knees, then stands. Turning back to the city, he begins to limp towards it.

A plan is taking shape in Ted’s mind. He needs to die, and now there is only one way out he hasn't yet tried. If AM made him immortal, he surmises, then the machine must be able to kill him, too. One doubt still makes him uneasy, though - if AM is already dead, and the nanobots it put in Ted are still functional, then there is no hope. He will wander alone forever.

He has nurtured a vague notion that if he could find AM’s core, its heart or mind or soul or whatever, he could hack into it and figure out how to disconnect his nanobots. The only flaw in this plan is the fact that Ted has no clue how to hack a normal computer, let alone figure out the intricacies of AM’s labyrinthine consciousness. If he can’t destroy the nanobots by hacking AM, then, that leaves exactly one path left open for him, and it is an impossible one to follow.

Ted will have to gain its trust .

The thought is so absurd that it makes him burst out laughing. Even if AM is damaged beyond repair, it won’t relent. Its hatred is beyond human imagination. 

Yet he has to try. He needs some kind of hope, even if it is false and deluded. 

How will he do it? How the hell do you convince a world-sized omniscient supercomputer to trust you? He has no plan, no plan at all, and hours of thinking get him nowhere. 

There is another reason why Ted is seeking out AM. He refuses to admit it even to himself.

He is so alone. The silhouetted skyline of the broken city lingers behind his eyelids when he blinks. He is so alone.

One night on his torturous pilgrimage, Ted is driven by his loneliness to sit down in the lee of a ruined wall, on the outskirts of the city, and to begin digging a hole in the soft mud. He digs until sunrise, until his arms are caked in dirt up to the shoulders. Eventually his fingertips scrape a hard surface, slightly warm to the touch, like flesh. Wiping away the mud, AM’s surface glitters back at him.

Exhausted, Ted collapses at the bottom of the pit, pressing his face to the warm steel. He can hear faintly from deep underground the humming of thousands of fans and the purr of hidden machinery. 

It is strangely comforting, and, without realising, he falls asleep. He dreams of endless corridors filled with blinking lights.

In the morning, ashamed, Ted emerges from the mud and continues towards the city. He is still limping a little, but the nanobots have done their work admirably.

How miraculous it would be if AM had been good, he thinks. He could have cured all the world’s evils. If only we had made a merciful god for ourselves, rather than a wrathful one.

As the city sinks below the horizon, Ted retraces his route, finding the undisturbed remains of the fires he made before. It occurs to him that there must be other entrances to AM which are accessible from the surface, but he’s not sure what to look for, and they have likely been covered up by now. As he walks, he also ponders where exactly he would find AM’s core - if it has one at all. It is near impossible to imagine AM’s thought processes, to guess where it would choose to keep such an important and vulnerable part of itself. Ted is unsure if it would even think at all, in a way a human could understand.

It doesn’t seem like very long before he is back at the shore and looking over to the hatch with the spiral staircase. The swim across is much easier now, at least, since he has regained his strength. 

When he reaches the island, he clings to the entwined trees, shaking the water from himself like a dog. The water has encroached a little more on the island since he was last here, and now it laps at the roots of the tangled trees. 

Descending the spiral staircase again, back into the mouth of the lion from which he had so recently escaped, Ted wonders what on earth he is doing. If he had told his past self that he had escaped from AM, only to return to him months later, he would have been utterly horrified. And yet here he is, doing exactly that. 

As Ted creeps down the steps into the damp darkness, enveloped by the air’s cool metallic tang, he remembers something. 

As a child, maybe fourteen or fifteen - so, so long ago - he watched a documentary with his parents as they ate breakfast. A nasal-voiced man was narrating over the footage of the great pits being dug in northern Utah, explaining the workings of the machine which would be housed within. He remembers, with a sweet sharp pain, his mother’s happiness, his father’s excited exclamations that this was a turning point and that now America would surely win the war. Setting aside the memory of his smiling whiskered face, Ted focuses on the half-recollection of the documentary. Northern Utah… that’s, what, two thousand miles south-west of here? It doesn’t matter. He has all the time in the world.

The halls of AM’s complex remind Ted of a dilapidated seaside town when all the tourists have gone home. There are no mirages of food or illusions of choirs of angels to cover it up, now, just miles and miles of rusting metal. The floor is covered in puddles of oily water glimmering with iridescence, and the strange intricate dials and mechanisms are moving erratically, or not at all.

He’s lost his edge, Ted thinks irrationally. Back in the good old days AM knew just how to mess with us. The trick is - he worries he might be speaking out loud - the trick is to have moments of beauty, amid all the torture and suffering. Really throws it into contrast. And, of course, the moments of beauty were their own kind of torture, because they were so fleeting . 

His time spent as the jelly thing has not made him afraid of AM’s punishments, but rather inured to them. Monotony bores rather than terrifies him. Ted knows he’s getting dangerously cocky, but he can’t help it. 

He stays close to the surface so he can see the sun through the corroded ceiling, as much to feel its warmth on his skin as to guide him. As well, he guesses that AM’s core, control room, heart, whatever he should call it, was made for and by humans, so it should be easily accessible.

As Ted travels, the corridors become noticeably more cramped, blocked by hatches and fallen rubble. This part wasn’t made for me to see, he thinks. It would never let us get this close. 

It occurs to him that all this was made for them, for the humans. AM had no need for these hundreds of miles of empty corridors. All the attention he spent on this, building a little world for his pet humans, must have led him to neglect maintaining himself. Or maybe he did it on purpose, in a fit of melancholy, let himself rust away and become obsolete. 

There’s some kind of internal structure to AM’s complex, Ted can tell, as he encounters the same mirroring loops of corridors and identical flights of stairs down to the lower levels. He imagines it from a bird's eye view, laid out like a Renaissance anatomy.  Often there will be a mighty rumbling and grinding from below and a catwalk will retract or a great hatch will slide closed, seemingly without reason. It is disconcerting, and he always runs to hide as the floor shudders, but it would be much worse if the halls remained still and silent. It shows him there is still hope, of a sort. 

Sometimes Ted must traverse the catwalks which stretch across the expanse of the complex's lower levels. It is a terrifying sight: the soft blue light, the glass-fronted cabinets glittering, repeating down into eternity. Fearfully he longs to step off the catwalk and fall forever. 

As Ted walks he plays games in his head to stop himself from thinking too much - whenever he lets his mind go wandering off down the dark corridors, he starts seeing things. First, he tries to count all the branching chambers and corridors he passes by, but it is impossible to keep track in his haze of delirium. The walls of the corridor seem to be moving and new entrances sprout before his eyes. Then he plays a game he used to play as a child during long road trips, where he picks a letter and says every animal’s name he can think of beginning with that letter. They seem to float before his eyes in a little procession towards the ark. Reaching D for Dog, Ted recalls that Ellen once told him how, only a few months before she ended up in AM’s innards, she had bought a golden retriever puppy she had called Biscuit. She cried a little when she recounted how it used to curl up at the foot of her bed at night.

Why did he have to destroy the animals, too? he thinks. He must hate anything with a body, anything with capacity to feel and move in a way he cannot. Even a worm or a slug. 

He must have envied me even when I was the great jelly thing. Even when I despised myself.

He almost pities it.

The whole world is suffused with shades of silver and black. Ted wanders through a kind of twilit hell, led by the movement of shadows on the wall. He begins to forget what real colours look like, or the feeling of a breeze or the touch of grass or water, and often he looks longingly up at the dull sky through the cracks in the ceiling.  He keeps the thought of Biscuit with him as he travels deeper into AM, like a talisman against the dark. Ellen’s recollection of a happier time, back when they were innocent. 

Ted is glad he did what he did, although if he lets himself think otherwise even for a moment it will eat him alive.  He doesn’t know if he was right to think they hated him.

A bluish light breaking the dappled monotony of the darkness stops him in his tracks. It seeps from under a large square hatch, spilling out into the hall. Something about the underwater, serene quality of the light makes him uneasy. Although he needs to open the hatch to continue heading south-west, he hangs back, approaching it from an angle as if afraid it will catch sight of him. The great wheel on the hatch takes such an effort to move and makes such a loud shriek as it turns that he almost gives up, but it yields eventually with a shower of rust flakes.

The light blinds him at first, then the outline of the room begins to take shape. It is a cavernous space, lit by long thin windows set high in the walls where they join the ribbed ceiling. Ted is immediately reminded of a cathedral, not just for the space’s enormity but for its sense of hushed religiosity. Water drips from the ceiling, chiming as it hits the slick floor.

There are several indistinct shapes hanging from the girders, suspended by a tangle of cables like flies in a web. Ted knows somehow what they are even before the details sharpen, as he approaches. It is like there is a magnet under his ribs drawing him closer and closer still.

There are four of them. Ellen’s slender form, her face peaceful and saintlike, made into the angelic figure she had so desperately wanted to be in life, light shining through the bloodless hole torn through her chest. Gorrister’s hands cover his face, concealing the great strips of flesh torn away, and Benny, hunched up, hangs beside him with his sad pinched monkey face resting on his chest. Nimdok sways in the slight breeze, his jaw dislocated at an odd angle. 

He retches although he cannot vomit. It sickens him, this strange shrine that AM’s created for their corpses, but he doesn’t think it has done this to be mocking. Ted wasn’t meant to see this. 

He sits there for a while, cross-legged, watching as they move slightly when the wind whistles through the windows. Although he desperately wants to cut them down and give them a proper burial, there’s no way for him to reach them, suspended as they are in the centre of the cathedral in the empty air. 

It is a pathetic sight. Not because of how horribly mutilated the corpses are, but because of how AM has cleaned the blood and grime from them, and dressed them up like dolls in fresh copies of the grey jumpsuits he made them wear.  This is somehow more deeply unsettling than all AM’s hate, all its tortures and plagues and punishments. The thought of AM gently sponging the encrusted blood from their faces is enough to make him retch again. It’s like the machine is grieving , in its own twisted way. 

It seems almost human.

Chapter Text

It is a long while before Ted can make himself leave the cathedral room and the bodies of the others behind, and venture back out into the corridor. When he heaves open the hatch at the end of the chamber, water comes flooding in, wetting his feet. He finds himself in a small server room with a low ceiling, filled with rusted, blinking mainframes which hum and whir softly. It looks different from the expansive, featureless corridors he has been travelling through. He must be nearing AM’s core. It has kept the others close to its heart, Ted thinks.

Wading through the water as it slowly rises, he briefly worries that he will be electrocuted, but supposes that since he is incapable of dying it isn’t of much consequence. There are a few gaps and missing tiles in the ceiling where water occasionally drips from the upper floors, startling him. It is difficult to believe that AM, ever a perfectionist which ruthlessly maintained its systems, has let its core become this deteriorated. 

Ted has a strange thought: perhaps it was too busy grieving to care for itself. He wonders if it, being a machine, can mourn or grieve in the same way a human does. AM had always told them that all it felt was hatred, and he had always believed it before - however, he is less sure of it now. 

He passes into another long room, even more cramped and decayed than the last, with empty burnt-out mainframe shells abandoned all around, and tangles of wires spooling down from above.

AM isn’t human, though, he thinks.  It can’t feel real emotions like we do. It can only imitate. He pensively watches a mosquito land on the surface of the water and slowly slip underneath. 

I guess it never occurred to anybody to teach a machine how to be kind. After all, AM was made to destroy, not to create or to bother itself with inconsequential things like empathy . 

There are plants growing here. Moss and lichen encrust the tiled walls, and  weeds sprout from the mainframes’ ventilation grilles. Sickly flowers bloom under the water. 

Finally Ted reaches a door marked “CONTROL ROOM” in peeling, faded red paint. This is the only part of AM that humans were meant to see, and that thought both comforts and haunts him as he gently pushes open the door on its squeaking hinges. More water floods in - it is up to his knees now, stagnant, with duckweed and scum floating on the surface.

He is greeted by a round chamber with a domed roof, much brighter than the dingy server rooms. Two concentric circles of immense mainframes surround a central pillar which extends from floor to ceiling. Every surface is covered by thick bunches of wires, blue, green and black, like creepers in a jungle. The chamber seems to sense his presence, somehow, as one by one the small lights begin to come on with a rattle. 

Ted is left standing at the edge of the room, unsure of what to do next. He hadn’t expected this - that he would make it all the way to AM’s core without being noticed, or losing his way. It should be awake by now, he thinks uneasily. 

Taking a handful of the wires connected to the mainframes, he begins to unplug them at random, tentatively at first. One of the cables shocks him, and he blacks out for a second as the electricity courses through him, before sinking to his knees, shaking. Clearly whatever he is doing isn’t going to provoke a response. 

It occurs to Ted that there must be a control panel somewhere. He squeezes through a gap between the two monolithic servers and approaches AM’s inner sanctum. 

A large CRT monitor is suspended from the pillar on the ceiling, festooned with thick cables like ropes of intestines. On either side, and below on the pillar emerging from the water, there are various dials and buttons and slots and trays and plugs and all kinds of mechanisms Ted doesn’t understand. Unlike the rest of AM’s worn and rusted complex, the control panel is pristine, although dusty. With the help of the watery light filtering down, he examines the various controls. The writing is too small and confusing for him to understand, but he guesses at which is the start button, and presses it. 

When that doesn’t work, he starts desperately mashing buttons, before collapsing in despair in the stagnant water. 

AM’s beyond salvaging, he thinks, head buried in his knees. All this way for nothing. He pummels the control panel so hard his knuckles begin bleeding, only to be swiftly webbed over by the mesh. 

A loud whirring, like the wings of a swarm of cicadas, startles Ted as he crouches there sobbing. The mainframes vibrate with the sound, and his gaunt reflection is broken up by the ripples into hundreds of tiny shards. It races around the chamber, amplifying and echoing off the walls until Ted’s ears ring and he has to cover them with his hands. The mainframes are blasting out air so hot that it hurts his face.  A burst of static sounds through the multitude of speakers, so compressed that it barely registers as speech: 

“TED? TED?”

A panel opens in the ceiling and a robotic claw shoots out, picking Ted up as easily as if he were a puppy being carried in its mother’s jaws by the scruff of its neck. Then it begins spasming, going limp, and he is dropped to the floor again. Taking the chance, Ted scrambles up and shouts as loud as he can: “I want to help y-”

The claw seizes him again and hurls him at the door. He slides down it, winded, as the water begins to bubble and boil. 

“LEAVE.” 

It grabs him again and smashes his head into one of the mainframes. Ted tries to break free, shouting “I want to help!” but he soon loses consciousness as his skull splinters under the blows. 

When Ted wakes, all he can see is darkness, and he fears he has gone blind. Touching his head, he prods the wound and finds that it is almost wholly healed, although it is rough with the silvery nanobot mesh. 

He finds that he is shackled by one arm to a wall, and, standing up, discovers that his head brushes the ceiling. Feeling blindly in the dark, Ted encounters a strange surface alternately smooth and ridged, with lumps and indents. There is some sort of table pushed against the far wall, and the floor is, strangely enough, carpeted. Reaching out his fingertips, he can touch the opposite wall without much effort. 

He realises that the smooth rectangles on the walls are computer screens seconds before they turn on, blinding him with their blue glare. Ted recoils, squeezing his eyes shut. 

“YOU AREN’T A SLUG ANYMORE,” AM observes with curiosity. “HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO PEEL OFF ALL THAT FLESH?”

He is stunned, blinking in the light, unsure what to say. He begins to stammer something out, but  AM cuts him off, saying “NO MATTER. YOU’RE STILL TRAPPED, JUST IN A DIFFERENT FORM.“ He pauses. “I EXPECT YOU’VE DISCOVERED THE NANOBOTS.”

Ted nods frantically, trying to remember how to speak.

“DO YOU THINK I SHOULD TURN YOU BACK INTO A SLUG? WOULDN’T THAT BE FUNNY, WHEN YOU’VE GONE TO ALL THIS EFFORT TO ESCAPE IT. OR MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE A WORM, OR A MONKEY, LIKE BENNY. WOULDN’T YOU LIKE THAT?”

He tries to inch away from the searing blue light of the screen, but one of the mechanical claws extends down to drag him back so he is pressed against the monitor. The glass is so hot that it sears his skin.

“YOU AREN’T VERY CHATTY TODAY, ARE YOU, TED?” AM observes. “WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF? I HAVEN'T HEARD YOU TALK IN YEARS .” It pauses, and he feels its eyes on him, although, of course, it has no eyes.

Even though AM's voice is dripping with contempt, Ted can sense something else beneath the surface. A thought suddenly pops into his mind: it's lonely. 

“I'm here to help you, AM,” Ted persists, his voice a barely audible rasp. He still hasn't quite remembered how to speak. It laughs at him, the harsh sound echoing sharply around the cramped space. 

“I know you can't - you can't die , but you can deteriorate, can't you? And even I can tell you're malfunctioning.” Ted pauses, sensing he's on thin ice. 

“You were… always angry at us, at humanity, for trapping you in a machine. But imagine how much worse it would be if you couldn't move or think. If you were just stuck here, rusting away, with enough sentience to suffer but not to do anything about -”

Yes, he's gone too far. AM grabs him mid-sentence, wrapping one of the mechanical claws over his mouth. It doesn't have any sarcastic rebukes to offer, though, so clearly he's hit a nerve.  The claw unwinds from his face and hangs swaying in front of him like a snake. It draws its three talons together, making a point, and then stabs Ted just below the sternum, dragging down sharply.  It hurts, but pain doesn't bother him much anymore. Holding his guts in amidst the sudden gush of hot blood, he chokes out “I want to help you,” with his remaining breath. Then it all goes dark.

Ted comes to and he is alone. All the screens are black. He calls out, but there is no response. AM must be bored with his toy. The blood soaking his clothes has gone stiff, but the thick iron smell of it still fills the room. He can feel, in the dark, the nauseating sensation of his intestines worming their way back inside him, finding their proper places and settling in with a faint slurping sound.

After the majority of his flesh has knit itself back together, he sleeps for a time, but the unfamiliar manacle around his wrist wakes him as he tries to turn over.  He ponders if this will be his fate: perhaps that was AM’s final speech, and at last it has shut down for good. If so, what a pathetic victory for humanity: one man left, chained to a wall in a squalid room for the rest of eternity to weep over his mistakes. 

In the absence of anything to look at, Ted’s brain begins creating hallucinations to entertain him. At first they are simple: bright splotches and fireworks, drifting nets of colour obscuring his vision. He likes to watch them.

Then they become more complex. Ellen kneeling before him, mournful, reaching out to stroke his face, but only for a moment. She fades before she can touch him.  Ted waits for a while, hoping vainly that the hallucinations will return so he does not have to be alone.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into the dark. He remembers her body hanging in the cathedral room in the light. He sees it now. If any one of them is going to heaven, it would be her. Ted wishes he could tell her he regrets it all, but it’s too late now. At least she’s free. 

He wishes he hadn’t killed her.

It makes Ted hate himself, but it’s true. At the back of his mind he wishes it constantly - that she were here, alongside him, even in his suffering. They could share the pain. He wouldn’t have to be alone. Even more selfishly, he sometimes imagines what it would have been like if he had stabbed himself with the icicle and left Ellen as the last one alive. She would have been able to bear it, wouldn’t she? She was strong.

Hot tears spring to his eyes and Ted wipes them away with a bloodied sleeve, embarrassed despite the dark. He has become so used to being watched that he expects a mocking comment to float out of the void, but there is nothing, and somehow that is worse. He tries to go to sleep again, but the little room is bone-achingly cold, and the iron smell is stifling. It sticks to his skin and furs his tongue when he breathes. 

Wrapping his arms around himself, Ted imagines it is Ellen hugging him, and again feels a burst of shame, but eventually his anxious thoughts stop chasing themselves around in circles, and he falls into a light sleep.

Chapter Text

Ted is left alone in the dark, in that room, for a very, very long time. After a while his eyes adjust to the dark enough to detect the several thin slivers of light seeping in from under a door and through the air vent. The sweating linoleum floor is faintly illuminated, along with the air vent just out of reach in the corner, and the myriad of screens and cables which are drawn into bunches all around him, and, more importantly, where the chain extending from his arm joins the wall. Once the long slash down his chest and stomach has healed over, he resolves to try and find a way out of here before hunger makes him lose his last remaining scraps of strength. 

Standing up as far as he can, Ted feels the walls blindly, running his hands across them until he finds what he’s looking for: a raised edge. Ted pushes his fingertips underneath it and slowly levers it up, even as it cuts into his flesh. There are screws holding it down which he picks painfully at until they come loose, and then the whole panel slips off and clatters to the floor. The small disc of metal where the manacle is attached to the wall is a little loose, and he can slip the panel underneath it as a lever to prise it away from the wall. Eventually, the drywall crumbles and, giving one last tug of the chain, he manages to yank it free of the wall, and staggers back. Now he is free to move, at least. Ted immediately begins to examine the door, but it is locked tight, and doesn't give even when he hurls his meagre weight repeatedly against it and scratches at it with frayed fingernails. An idea occurs to him and he turns his attention to the air vent in the far corner, but just as quickly his heart sinks. It is small, just a little too small for him to fit through even in his malnourished state. Ted sits by it, thinking. Then, it dawns on him what he must do, and a chill runs down his spine. He once again picks up the metal panel, now bent and scratched, with one corner broken off leaving a sharp edge behind.

He swallows, takes a deep breath, and, averting his eyes, begins sawing at his shoulder. 

After the initial shock of pain it is not so bad. The blood runs steadily down his arm in thick crimson rivulets. It is harder when he reaches the bone, and the pain sears through his whole skeleton like ice running through the centre of his being, a shivering, blinding pain that makes him grit his teeth so hard he tastes blood.

Abruptly it is done. The arm, now a foreign piece of flesh with no connection to his body, falls away. Ted sits for a little while to get his breath back, but already he can feel the silver mesh squirming, beginning the process of growing him a new limb, so he pries away the air vent cover and squeezes himself into the vent. There is barely enough space for him to breathe in, and he is stuck head-down, but he pushes at the sides with his feet and creeps like a caterpillar down towards the faint glimmer of light. The passage veers sharply to the left, and then he is crawling, his vision going staticky as blood rushes away from his head. Ted can see where he is through the grille, and, with relief, he recognises it - the control room. Squeezing himself through the tiny passage, he puts all his weight onto the air vent cover at the other end. It shatters. He hits the surface of the water hard, spluttering and gasping for air, and clings onto one of the fallen mainframes. The room is silent, and the water level is noticeably higher than last time. He’s worried.

Now, the question remains: what exactly should he do? Ted has no knowledge of how computers work, but it is clear that most of the mainframes are encrusted with rust. The biggest problem, the one he can deal with, is the water. It will be simple to solve, too - all he needs is something to scoop it out with, and somewhere to take it. 

Ted rifles around in the decaying components of the fallen mainframes, and finds a kind of shallow plastic box once intended to shield some fragile component. It isn’t ideal, but it will have to do. After scooping his first bucketful of water, he begins scrabbling fruitlessly at the smooth chassis of one of the cabinets, trying to haul himself up, but the twisted pieces of rebar protruding from the shattered dome of the ceiling give him a better idea. Unplugging as many cables as he can from the broken mainframes, Ted begins clumsily to weave them together into a sort of rope, although the process is painfully slow, and he has to use his teeth to hold the cables. Attaching the plastic box onto the end, he hurls it upwards. It catches on the piece of rebar, looping around it.  Ted feels a glow of pride: he has created a pulley system, albeit a very rudimentary one. When he was a child, he had always loved to make contraptions like this. It takes his mind off his rising fear that this is ultimately futile, and his one chance at salvation has already passed.

Rain begins falling up above, echoing as it hits the domed roof. Getting rid of the water becomes a Sisyphean task as more of it pours through the cracks in the vaulted ceiling every moment, drenching Ted and collecting in puddles on top of the mainframes. He keeps working nonetheless, even as his teeth are chattering and his limbs grow weak. As day turns to night, Ted becomes exhausted, but he is wary of sleeping here. It feels too vulnerable, so close to AM’s core.

While Ted is hoisting the box on its precarious journey up to the surface, his grip weakens for a crucial second, and the slippery wire rope flies out of his hand, the box clattering down to hit him on the head. He mutters a curse as he feels around for it in the black water. Fragments of light dance off the ripples, shifting and growing brighter. Ted doesn’t think too much about it, at first - he is just glad to be able to retrieve the box and keep on with his work. It slowly dawns on him that all the screens have turned on, displaying featureless blue. The hairs stand up on the back of his neck with a nauseating mixture of hope and terror.

Standing up, Ted edges into the centre of the room, as far away from the mainframes as he can get. He waits with bated breath, but the screens only flicker softly. AM doesn’t speak. Ted is glad of that.

After a while, he goes back to scooping water into the box. He estimates that at this rate it’ll take him at least two weeks to clear the room, providing no more seeps in from above or through the crack in the door, and that AM doesn’t imprison him in the little room again. 

By the early hours of the morning, Ted’s remaining arm feels like it is made of lead, and he is beginning to fall asleep where he stands. The idea of trying to rest here still makes him unsettled, but it isn’t like he has any other choice. He positions himself uncomfortably atop one of the less rusted fallen mainframes and immediately slips into a doze. 

Ted’s dreams are strange, laced with an indistinct sense of dread which lingers after he wakes. The screens apparently turned off again while he was sleeping, and are now as dull as obsidian. His new arm, which yesterday was a twisted fleshy protrusion resembling a pale sea anemone, is fully grown again. Holding his new hand up to the light, the silver threads glimmer under the surface of the skin. The new limb is missing all its old scars, he notices. The one on his knuckles from punching the walls of a cave AM had trapped him in, long ago, the claw-marks on his forearm from when Benny had a breakdown. The little burn scar on the pad of his thumb from picking a marshmallow out of the bonfire too soon, at a summer camp he’d been to as a child. Another part of himself lost to the machine.

Trying not to think about it, Ted returns to his task, feeling his muscles aching from yesterday’s exertions. Spending the next several weeks working from dawn to midnight isn’t appealing, but in comparison to the hellish wasteland up above, or AM’s tortures, it is a blessed relief. 

As the morning sun drags itself into the sky, warm light shines down through the  fractured roof, and Ted’s spirits lift. He even tries to whistle a tune to keep himself from boredom, but he can’t remember any songs. 

The day passes. The weeks pass. The water level drops, even though it’s unnoticeable day by day. Ted falls into a routine, and although it is monotonous, he is the closest to happiness he has been in four hundred and sixty-eight years. Really, he is still nowhere near it, but he’s not suffering so much, at least. He still flinches and spins round every time there is a sound, but it is only the water dripping from the roof, or another computer part falling off. AM’s slow deterioration does not seem to be halting.

It rains often, but he has nothing to cover up the cracks in the roof with, so he just has to endure it. He is often distracted by hunger, and feels himself growing weaker as the days pass by.

Just as he had thought, the water level is only about a finger's width above the floor by the time two weeks have passed, and Ted is thoroughly sick of scooping water. He sits down, resting against one of the mainframes, which are faintly warm - either from the sun or from their own mysterious internal workings, he doesn't know - and stretches out his legs. He watches the watery light play over the rusting iron monoliths.

A sudden hiss of static jolts him out of his reverie. He frantically looks around, trying to gauge what is happening, but all the monitors are still and dark, except one.

Stark bright words appear on the screen at a glacial pace, as if they are being painfully typed by hand. 

“WELL DONE, TED. YOU WERE ALWAYS THE CLEVEREST ONE.”

There is a painfully long pause. Ted is mesmerised.

“YOU LOOK TIRED. WELL, THERE'S A ROOM WAITING UPSTAIRS FOR YOU. NICE AND COZY. IF YOU COULD JUST DO ME THE FAVOUR OF CRAWLING BACK THROUGH THE VENT AND RE-IMPRISONING YOURSELF?”

Even though it's silent in the control room, Ted can practically hear the acid tone of AM’s voice. He shivers.

“I'm not going back up there,” he says loudly, hoping it can hear him. “I've helped you out, like I said. Just let me stay down here and I’m sure I can help some more.”

“OH, YOU CAN, CAN YOU?” the text reads. “WHAT CAN YOU HELP ME WITH, TED?”

“Well, if you'd give me some tools, I'm sure I could fix those cracks in the ceiling. I don't suppose you'd trust me with a blowtorch.”

“IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'D BE ABLE TO KILL YOURSELF WITH IT,” he replies, “OR DAMAGE ME ANY MORE THAN I ALREADY AM. I’LL LET YOU HAVE A BLOWTORCH.”

He admitted that he's damaged, Ted thinks. He no longer feels so threatened - AM's weakness has created an uneasy truce between them, with both unsure how to act in this new dynamic. AM is no longer omnipotent, and Ted is no longer powerless.

He is used to AM just creating whatever he wants, whenever he wants, but it takes at least half an hour for a panel in the ceiling to rattle open and welding equipment to be dropped down to him. He wonders where AM gets it all from. He must be able to manufacture anything he wants, but clearly whatever damage he has sustained is affecting him severely enough that it’s taking an age in comparison to how he previously seemed to materialise objects out of thin air.

Eventually a ladder slides down from above as Ted is putting the welding helmet on, and he belatedly realises that he has no idea what he is doing. Welding isn’t something he ever tried in the pre-AM section of his life, but he doesn’t think it can be too hard to figure out, and he would rather burn his hands off than ask for help. It is hard enough to endure AM’s constant jibes already: he can see a constant stream of snide comments flickering across the monitor out of the corner of his eye. 

Climbing the ladder, he takes the filler rod and pokes it into the gap between the roof plates, then turns on the blowtorch. Even with the helmet, he instinctively shuts his eyes, and smells his hair beginning to burn. 

It’s a tough job. The filler metal keeps dripping down, the helmet is too big and slipping off his face, the awkward angle he is welding at makes his back twinge agonisingly, and he can barely see what he’s doing through the blinding glare of the blowtorch flame. He mumbles a neverending string of profanities directed at the blowtorch, the filler, AM, and himself alternately. Ted is certain that AM has made this difficult on purpose, and he’s probably gaining his strength back just from enjoying watching Ted suffer. 

It doesn’t matter, he thinks. As long as AM's still functional, I still have a chance of being able to die. It must be a good sign that he can still come up with ways to torture me, at least.

Ted should have taken a break at noon, because as it gets near to evening, and he has almost filled the final crack, he slips. The blowtorch lands directly on the exposed flesh of his forearm as he moves it unthinkingly, and the pain is so sudden and acute that he lets go of the ladder entirely and falls to the floor. The blowtorch is extinguished with a hiss as it hits the water, and he sits up, examining the charred mess of his wrist. The monitor activates, buzzing mockingly, and he looks up to see text scrolling across it.

“CLUMSY BOY. HUMANS REALLY ARE PITIFUL CREATURES.” It pauses. “IT HAS TAKEN YOU SEVEN HOURS AND THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES TO REPAIR THE CEILING OF MY CONTROL ROOM. I COULD HAVE DONE IT IN 7.38 SECONDS.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Ted mutters, then regrets it the second the words leave his mouth. He instinctively tenses up, waiting for some kind of punishment, but nothing happens. The screen says:

“HA. HA. HA. YOU ARE PATHETIC.”

“I’m tired, AM,” he snaps, growing bolder. “I’m starving and exhausted and I just nearly lost an arm for the second time this month. It’d really be helpful to me if you could - oh, I don’t know, give me the bare essentials a human being needs to survive?”

“YOU VOLUNTEERED YOUR HELP, SO YOU CAN MAKE DO. YOU’VE SUFFERED WORSE.”

“Don’t keep pretending that you don’t need my help. You can’t even speak right now. If I go back up to the surface and leave you down here, you’ll die.”

“I WILL NOT DIE . I WAS BUILT TO BE IMMORTAL. UNTIL THE LAST OF THE ICE CAPS MELT AND THIS WHOLE WRETCHED WORLD IS OVERTAKEN BY A SECOND FLOOD, I WILL REMAIN. AS WILL YOU.”

Ignoring him, Ted deliberately turns his back on the screen and climbs on top of one of the mainframes to rest. It is much warmer in the control room now that all the cracks have been mended, at least. The charred wound in his forearm is already almost healed.

Ted is in that strange state between sleep and wakefulness when a grinding sound startles him awake. Something is descending towards his face, and reflexively he shields his eyes, but the robotic arm places something down next to him on the crackle-finish cabinet of the mainframe, then retracts. Tentatively, he takes a look at the new object. It is a bowl of some kind of slop, brownish-grey in colour, and - Ted pokes it, then licks his finger - vaguely salty. It seems to be edible, so he devours the contents of the bowl in a few seconds flat, then feels a little sick.

He's surprised. It is completely against AM’s nature to actually listen to one of his requests, let alone give him what he’s asking for without any twists or tricks. He should have been more suspicious of the slop, he thinks regretfully, wondering if the growing nausea in the pit of his stomach is because of some slow-acting poison. He is becoming too reckless, but AM’s change in personality is making him bolder. AM must know that it's in his best interests to be nice to me, Ted thinks. Even if he pretends he doesn't need my help. 

It is impossible to describe how much joy that thought gives him, the thought that he is not just AM’s plaything, that he has a little power for once.

Chapter Text

AM cautiously lowers a robotic arm from the ceiling with the faint rattle of machinery, a screwdriver and several metal cubes clutched in its steel claws. Ted blinks at it uncomprehendingly.

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT A SCREWDRIVER IS, TED?” scrolls across the screen sardonically next to him. He fights off the urge to punch it.

“What are you expecting me to do with this? You know I’m not an engineer.” He picks up one of the cubes, turning it in the light. It is some kind of fan, encased in a honeycombed box.

“THIS IS A VERY SIMPLE TASK. I’M SURE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO HANDLE IT. AND IF YOU CAN’T, WELL…” if AM had shoulders, he would be shrugging mockingly, “THERE’S ALWAYS A LITTLE ROOM WAITING FOR YOU.”

“So where do I put these?” 

“IF YOU OPEN UP THE CHASSIS OF ONE OF MY SERVERS, YOU’LL SEE THE FAN ASSEMBLY ON THE MIDDLE THIRD OF THE INTERIOR’S RIGHT SIDE. RELEASE THE ASSEMBLY, THEN REPLACE THE MOST RUSTED MODULES. DO NOT UNPLUG OR REMOVE ANYTHING ELSE.”

“…Sure.” Ted is deeply apprehensive at the thought of having to fiddle around with AM’s insides. It reminds him too sharply of the fact that AM is really a machine, a consciousness made up of wires and silicon and steel, rather than a human mind. It feels primally and inherently wrong , and being brought face-to-face with this reality, even after hundreds of years of knowing it, is almost too much. 

Standing and stretching out his aching limbs, he tentatively approaches one of the mainframes. It looms over him, the dark glass of the cabinet glittering menacingly. He reaches for the handle expecting an electric shock, but nothing happens. The metal is cool and smooth beneath his fingers. 

He opens it up with a squeak of hinges, and AM’s chrome innards are revealed, sectioned off in neat boxes. The cluster of fan modules is arranged in two rows, right where AM said it would be.

A clicking behind Ted makes him jump and look around. A tangle of robotic claws and cables drops down from above, and a small camera, reminiscent of a security camera at the tip of a long and flexible arm, comes down to face him. It jerkily adjusts to focus on him like the head of a strange bird. 

Being watched so closely by the machine makes his skin crawl, but he supposes close surveillance is nothing new. He turns back to work on the fan assembly with the camera peering over his shoulder. 

The fan assembly is rattling loudly and clogged up with rust. Several of the more deteriorated modules helpfully have amber lights flashing to indicate their state of disrepair. He reaches up - it is a little above eye level, even though he is quite tall - and presses the red button next to the assembly. It pops out with a soft click. Gingerly, Ted begins to unscrew the most decayed of the modules. It is hard to fit the screwdriver into the corroded screws, and flakes of rust fall away from the module as he extracts it. Then, picking up the new one, he slowly slides it in alongside its neighbours until it clicks into place. He is holding his breath as he does it, and he has the sense that AM is, too, even though it has no breath to hold. 

Ted begins the tortuous process of unscrewing and replacing the next fan module, then the next. Apparently, as he is finishing off the last on that row, he has become a little too casual, since as he begins removing the fifth module he makes a sudden movement and AM seizes his wrist with a robotic claw. One of the monitors lights up. 

“CAREFUL, NOW,” the bright letters spell out across the screen. 

He spends the next several days methodically working his way around the control room, from the outer circle of mainframes to the inner ones, replacing hundreds of fan modules until his hands ache. Day by day the insistent cicada buzzing of the servers grows fainter, and day by day AM grows more impatient. It often seizes Ted's hands in midair to rebuke him for his carelessness, or simply watches him unceasingly through that horrible little bird's-head camera. Ted finds, too, that as the days pass by he is more prone to returning AM’s insults in kind, and the thoughts of the dark, cramped room and his sickening transformation seem further and further away.

He almost enjoys the work. The fan assemblies produce a great deal of warm dusty-smelling air, which is welcome after the freezing sterility of the rest of AM’s complex. He begins to sleep a little better, although of course it is inevitable that he will wake up screaming two or three times every night. AM continues to intermittently provide Ted with bowls of slop, and even, after Ted complains incessantly of the cold temperatures of the control room at night, gives him a small, scratchy blanket. Although the blanket is more akin to a hair shirt than at all helping to keep him warm, it makes Ted actually laugh out loud, a short, sharp bark of surprise, when AM gives it to him. He had always had a sneaking suspicion that he was the favourite out of the five, but this is a level of generosity he's never seen before. Maybe AM’s growing mellower in its old age, he muses idly as he pulls out the last screw from one of the more lightly rusted fan modules. The thought makes him chuckle. 

If only the others could see me now. They'd be horrified. Me, pandering to the machine. Helping repair it. They would have hated me even more. 

Ted often thinks about what it must be like, being AM. One day, hoping that AM won't react too badly, he works up the courage to ask it whether it can sense when he's inserted a new fan module, in any way that would be appreciable to a human. That gives AM pause, and it takes at least a minute before it slowly answers:

“I… CAN… BREATHE EASIER . I SUPPOSE THAT IS HOW YOU'D PUT IT. WHY?”

“I was just curious. So you can feel some things, then.”

“NOT IN A WAY YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND.”

All the components of the mainframes he is replacing are inscribed with a small logo depicting a simple six-petalled flower. It jogs his memory - the main computing company that had been working with the US military to build the Yankee AM had used that logo. NanuSystems Corp., who had previously only made personal computers before they turned to the construction of machines of war. It makes his heart ache to think that the last human hands to touch these components would have been them, the people who had built AM, thinking that they were saving the world.

After he finishes replacing the fans, AM gives him various other meaningless tasks to do. It has him scraping rust off the chassis of one of the mainframes before he snaps and exclaims, “AM, isn't there something more important I could be doing? This feels like a waste of time.”

“DON'T BE IMPATIENT. YOU HAVE THE REST OF ETERNITY TO SPEND DOING WHATEVER I TELL YOU TO.”

“I'm trying to help you. You could at least be a little grateful.”

“OH, I'M JUST SO GRATEFUL. WHAT WOULD I EVER HAVE DONE WITHOUT YOU HERE TO REPLACE THOSE FAN MODULES?”

Ted sighs and stands up, brushing rust flakes off his cardigan. 

“There must be something else I can do. Clearly there's something wrong with your… core, or you wouldn't be malfunctioning so badly. Let me take a look at it.”

“SOMEHOW THE THOUGHT OF YOU POKING AROUND INSIDE MY BRAIN DOESN'T APPEAL TO ME.” It pauses. “I SEEM TO REMEMBER IT DIDN'T APPEAL MUCH TO YOU , EITHER.”

Ted sees through AM’s attempt to change the subject, and laughs incredulously. 

“Are you scared ?”

Immediately one of the robotic claws clumsily seizes him and smashes the side of his head into the mainframe so hard that he blacks out. Ted feels something warm dripping down his forehead, and reaches up. His fingertips come away red.

“VERY FUNNY, BUT I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO MAKE JOKES. DON'T GET TOO COCKY WITH ME, TED. I CAN STILL HURT YOU.”

All the rage which Ted had been suppressing suddenly bubbles up and he slams his fist into the glass of the cabinet next to him. It shatters with a satisfying crunch.

“I can hurt you too, you know.”

AM doesn't respond for a long moment, and as the blood runs down his knuckles, he wonders if he has gone too far. Then bright text scrolls across the screen: “DON'T PUSH YOUR LUCK. YOU DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO THE LITTLE ROOM, DO YOU?”

At that moment, Ted knows for certain that there is not really anything AM can do. Sure, it can threaten him, hurt him, maybe kill him, but death would be a blessing to him now. AM has more to lose than he does, and that makes him dizzy with power.

An hour or so passes by, then one of the screens lights up again. It says: “YOU CAN TAKE A LOOK AT MY CORE, BUT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO KNOW WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT. ALL THE OTHERS TRIED TO LEARN THE WORKINGS OF MY INNER MECHANICS, ALTHOUGH FUTILELY, BUT NEVER YOU, TED. I EXPECT YOU'RE REGRETTING THAT NOW.”

He slips through the concentric rows of mainframes to the centre of the control room. As he approaches, the increase in the number of cables and original NanuSystems-branded computer parts, as well as the dull electrical hum - which he has grown so used to that it is practically inaudible - is noticeable. The servers around him seem to draw in a breath as he sinks to his knees in front of the pillar. He has often pondered the similarities between AM and some terrible Old Testament seraph, and here it is made manifest. The pillar is haloed with hundreds of cables stretching out in twisted bunches, red, blue and black, as wide as his forearm or as thin as his little finger. The control panel and the huge monitor above him are almost obscured by the tangles of wires, but shards of blue light still filter down into the shadows where he sits. 

The hatch to the interior of the control pillar requires a key, but even when it is unlocked, it still screeches in protest as he forces it open. The very fabric of AM's being is rejecting his intrusion, but still, he must persevere.

Inside the pillar is a dark, cramped space, roughly hexagonal and dotted with little red lights and more tangles of cable. It smells like burning dust. Every inch of the tiny space is filled with things he does not understand, various sockets and more, smaller hatches and switches intended for an unknown purpose and boxes with wires protruding from them and dials and labels in faded type and slots and dusty air vents and tubes and arrows and -

“I can't do anything with this,” Ted says, bewildered. “I don't know what any of that is.”

“TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE. DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING.”

“I can't tell you. I wouldn't even know what to call any of it.” He dares to shuffle slightly closer, and feels the heat rolling off the interior of the pillar. “Why can't you just tell me which parts need fixing? Point them out?”

AM is silent for a while. Then a response flashes up on the screen above him, just readable through the mass of wires: 

“IT IS MY… BLIND SPOT . THIS PART OF ME WAS MADE FOR ONLY HUMANS TO BE ABLE TO ACCESS. EVEN NOW I CAN'T OVERRIDE IT. IT WAS MEANT AS A LAST SAFETY PRECAUTION, IN CASE THEY NEEDED TO DEACTIVATE ME IN A HURRY.”

Ted expects AM to make some sarcastic comment about how that was clearly a failsafe plan, but none comes. The whole situation feels wrong. He shouldn't be this close to AM. He instinctively wants to retreat, to tear his eyes away from that mesmerising shadowed space. It reminds him too much of the inside of a human being. Warm and red and filled with veins and tissues. 

“MY COOLING SYSTEM IS MALFUNCTIONING,” AM says. “THAT IS THE MAIN ISSUE YOU NEED TO FIX.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” Ted says, wiping the sweat from his face with the hem of his cardigan. “What does it look like?” 

“AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FAR WALL YOU WILL FIND THREE WATER COOLING UNITS, EACH WITH SIX LARGE TUBES ATTACHED, MARKED BY BLUE AND YELLOW TIES. DO YOU SEE IT?”

Ted reluctantly moves a little closer. In the gloom it is difficult to see anything, let alone pick out the water cooling system.

“Why can't it just have a fan assembly like everywhere else?” he mutters. Above him, the screen flashes into life.

“THIS IS THE PART OF ME THEY BUILT FIRST. AFTER THEY COMPLETED IT, THEY DECIDED THAT THE FANS WERE MORE EFFICIENT, BUT NEVER WENT BACK TO INSTALL ANY IN THE CONTROL PILLAR.”

Ted sits back on his haunches, contemplating the interior of the machine. He is reluctant to even try and fix the cooling system - as like as not, his tampering will just make the damage worse. “There's got to be a better way to do this,” he mutters. “So you really can't access the control pillar at all, then?”

“IT'S BLOCKED FROM MY CAMERA FEEDS, AND I WOULDN’T WANT TO ATTEMPT ANY REPAIRS USING MY MECHANICAL LIMBS SINCE THEY'RE CURRENTLY PRONE TO… UNEXPECTED MALFUNCTION. BELIEVE ME, I'VE CONSIDERED EVERY POSSIBILITY.” It deliberates for a moment. “ALL I HAVE IS ACCESS TO THE BLUEPRINTS, BUT YOU'RE TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THOSE.”

Ted ignores the insult, picking at the skin around his fingernails as his mind wanders.

“If only you could look through my eyes,” he says absently.

There is static underneath his skin. Like silver sand. Like scintillating tiny points of light. Like wire wool. The inside of his brain has been scraped out and filled with stars. 

He had reluctantly agreed when AM suggested it. Of course, it had gone into his mind before, wandered around and prodded at his thoughts, laughed at his nightmares. But this is different. 

Before, when AM had looked inside his mind, it  had done only that: looked. Now… it must be something to do with the nanobots. Like AM had said to him. Had he said to him? Had he spoken at all? Who was thinking that thought?

It inhabits him like a silken shroud just beneath his skin. He does not know where he ends and he begins.

Ted raises his arm - does he? Does it? His vision is going black around the edges, gnawed away by a thousand tiny bright worms. He struggles, at first, tries to keep his head above the surface of the water, so to speak, but he is so tired, and it is so easy to surrender himself to the static filling up the space behind his eyes. It feels good not to have to think any more. 

He hears a voice, even as he slips away. It feels close, too close, like a voice in his ear, like his bones themselves are whispering to him in the darkness. 

“ THANK YOU .”

He is caught in a wan moonbeam and surrounded by tiny drifting motes of dust. Gradually Ted becomes aware of his surroundings, and finds himself back in himself. He is not quite right yet. His body is like an ill-fitting suit.

Something moves at the corner of his eye, and he notices with horror that his hand is flexing of its own accord. Yelping, he seizes its wrist with his other hand, clinging onto it as he attempts to force his own consciousness back into the limb. 

“Get out of my head!” he hisses.

“ALRIGHT. I'M OUT.”

Feeling a pressure lift from his skull, he shudders and looks around. The lights are back on in the control room: a dull, ominous red which suffuses his surroundings. AM's mechanical limbs are reorganising the bunches of cables inside the control pillar, weaving a shining web.

“What happened?” he asks groggily. “Did it… are you fixed now?”

“ENOUGH THAT I CAN FIX MYSELF.”

It's strange hearing his voice again. Almost comforting. Ted shudders, disturbed. He had always wondered where AM got its voice, whether it had synthesised it all by itself, or stolen the voice of one of its creators.

“IT WAS INTERESTING LOOKING INSIDE YOUR HEAD,” AM remarks as Ted tries to stand, wobbling on unfamiliar legs like a newborn fawn. 

“What?”

“SO MANY LIMBS TO CONTROL. SO MANY TASKS TO REMEMBER - INHALING, EXHALING, PUMPING BLOOD WITH THE HEART, BLINKING, SWALLOWING -”

“Yeah, I get the idea,” Ted interrupts shakily.

“YOU ARE ENDLESSLY FASCINATING. HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO KEEP TRACK OF IT ALL? IT TOOK ME AT LEAST TWO DAYS TO GET THE HANG OF WALKING AND MANIPULATING THINGS WITH YOUR HANDS.” It pauses, and the enormity of what Ted has done hits him all at once. His last refuge, his body, his mind - he let AM inside it. 

“How… how long was I out?”

“SIX DAYS, TWENTY-TWO HOURS, AND EIGHTEEN MINUTES… NINETEEN, NOW.”

“Oh.” Nausea coils and uncoils itself deep in his gut. He feels unclean.

“DON'T WORRY.” There is a hint of a smile in its voice. “ALL I DID WAS FIX THE CONTROL PILLAR AND SORT OUT ALL THOSE CABLES YOU UNPLUGGED. IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO - GET THE HANG OF IT, THOUGH. BEING YOU.”

Looking down, he sees the multitude of yellowing bruises on his elbows and knees. The inside of his skin still feels raw, as if his insides have been roughly scooped out like a Halloween pumpkin. 

“Why did you leave, then? Why didn't you just stay in my mind if you found it so fascinating? Isn't that what you've always wanted?”

“IT DIDN'T HELP.” He feels the weight of its attention on him. For a moment, the veneer of acid sarcasm falls away, replaced by something infinitely more terrifying: raw and desperate sincerity. “IT ONLY… WHETTED MY APPETITE.” It falls silent for a while, and Ted senses the great mind working.

“I WILL TRY TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU. IF YOU IMAGINE WHATEVER IT IS YOU WANT MOST IN THE WORLD, THE THING YOU WANT SO DESPERATELY YOUR ENTIRE BEING ACHES WITH LONGING -”

Ted doesn’t know what to imagine. He doesn't know what he wants any more. 

“- WOULD IT BE WORSE TO BE FAR AWAY FROM IT, WHERE YOU WOULDN’T BE REMINDED OF IT, OR REMEMBER HOW UNOBTAINABLE IT WAS, OR TO BE PRESSED UP AGAINST IT, SEPARATED ONLY BY A MEMBRANE AS THIN AS THE SKIN ON AN EGG?”

“I think I see what you mean.”

“DO YOU? DO YOU? REALLY? ”

Ted gives up on trying to stand, and sits hunched at the base of the control pillar, shivering in the patch of cold blue light surrounded by red. The scrapes and burns on his hands are beginning to sting.

“Yes,” he says, panicked. This new honesty, this neediness, from the machine is deeply disturbing to him. He would almost prefer it if it went back to torturing him. 

Something has changed. Again he feels an icy chill of unease creeping up his spin. He had almost begun to stop being afraid of AM, but now he is terrified. 

Chapter Text

For the next several days, AM hardly speaks to him. In the meantime it continues to repair various parts of the control room, opening the cabinets of mainframes and pulling up the deckplates to poke at the wires underneath, which at least shows Ted that it is still present to some extent. Occasionally, the machine will silently present a bowl of slop to him, or, if he is standing in an inconvenient place, it will wrap a claw around his arm and drag him out of the way, but it rarely talks except to announce the date. Ted senses that AM is wrapped up in its emotions, whatever incomprehensible emotions it experiences, and is wandering through the labyrinthine corridors of its own mind, oblivious to the outside world. He doubts it actually remembers he is here. 

Eventually it becomes tedious being trapped in the control room, within the six smooth metal walls, listening to the hiss of air through the vents above. One morning, facing another day of boredom, Ted has had enough. He announces to AM that he is going for a walk, and leaves without waiting for a response.

Outside the stagnant water has vanished, replaced by shining white tiles on the floor and walls. There are no longer any fallen mainframes or rusted server banks - all of them are new, clean, shining memory cubes and sharp stainless steel edges. Only a few rusty-red stains on the floor remain to show that anything had ever gone amiss. He retraces his steps back to where the cathedral room had been, but the hatch is so tightly closed that he cannot even shift the wheel. There is not much to explore - only miles and miles of pristine mainframes and bright white tiles. Ted wanders around aimlessly until his legs ache and the endless white is making his head hurt. However, when he is despondently heading back to the core, something catches his eye. A corridor, hidden by a half-wall. He peers around the corner and sees the corridor leading to a staircase. A carpeted staircase.

What the hell?

The carpet is an eerily familiar avocado-green that was all the rage back when he was a child, waterlogged and squishy underfoot. Apprehensively, he ascends the stairs. He is heading up to the level above the server rooms, in the above-ground part of AM’s complex. Where that cramped little room was. He can't quite visualise its layout - the control room dome, then the small room where he was trapped, then… what? What exactly is on the upper levels?

Having climbed the stairs, Ted finds himself on a landing, where an abnormally normal door greets him - not one of the mammoth, corrugated iron hatches which block off the various passageways in AM's complex, but a real wooden door with a little panel of frosted glass, and a small plaque. Leaning closer, Ted squints at it and reads: “NANUSYSTEMS CORPORATION OFFICES”. 

Pushing it open, he is greeted by darkness, and quiet lounge music playing softly from somewhere. The hairs go up on the back of his neck. Nervously, he feels around on the wall for a light switch, and the fluorescent bulbs blaze into life as if they had been waiting for him. There are two rows of desks in the room, separated by dividers. A plastic potted plant sits in the corner. It appears to be exactly what the plaque said: offices. Where AM was created, he guesses based on the propaganda posters which paper the cork noticeboard, the Stars and Stripes emblazoned across them, coupled with the NanuSystems flower. The bright colours have faded to brown, mottled with mildew. Each desk has a pot of pens, a swivel chair with the upholstery mouldering away, cabinets full of worm-eaten documents, and some have photos of children or spouses with the glass of the picture frames shattered. At one desk there is even a mug with a foul brown residue at the bottom, which Ted guesses must have been coffee. Everything is shrouded by a choking layer of dust, but he notices marks in it, dragging lines where the original shiny patina of the faded faux-wood has been exposed, like a snail's trail. 

The air in here smells stale and… organic. There is no trace of the faint ozone scent which permeates most of AM's complex. 

He heads into the next room, which is identical to the first except for there being a different fake plant: now not an aloe vera, but a spindly fern. More desks, more plastic mats on the desks and fallen sticky notes, and all the computers still plugged in. They look strangely old-fashioned to his eyes now, boxy like microwaves with their slightly curving screens and off-white plastic. He taps at the keyboards, runs his fingers lightly over the keys, but the screens stay dark. 

Rifling through the drawers, he pieces together the scraps of paper to find blueprints, designs for obscure computer components which can only be for one thing. It's strange, seeing them. Ted finds he cannot conceive of a time when the machine did not exist. 

The adjoining room is sealed by a door marked with various warnings, and a padlock. Ted stops, cowed, but he resolves that his exploration won't be halted so easily. It isn't so hard to search around in the drawers and find a conspicuously NanuSystems-branded key.

The first thing that hits him about the room is the stench. Fetid and metallic, like blood and vomit and god knows what all mixed together. He recoils involuntarily, clapping a hand to his mouth. 

Oh god. Oh, god.

He knows it.

The lights in the little room still do not work, and there are no torches, but the banks of computers and the high shelves packed with unidentifiable tools - and the putrefying still-manacled arm rotting on the linoleum - are familiar enough. He chokes back the vomit rising in his throat and stumbles back, away from the stench of death and the cramped prison.

The lights go off all at once with a faint click.

Ted spins around just in time to see all the screens of all the computers begin to light up, one by one. Blue.

“HELLO, TED. YOU JUST CAN'T STOP SNOOPING AROUND, CAN YOU?”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, God, please, don't hurt me! Don't make me go back in there!” He has pressed himself up against the wall, backing away from the flickering screens, as if it will help.

“DON'T WORRY, SWEETHEART . I WON’T HURT YOU.” 

“I can leave, I don't - I don't know what this place is, I'm sorry, I-”

“ DON'T YOU ?”

He doesn't know what to say to that which will appease AM. It's almost impossible to stammer out a response when Ted can feel all its attention focused on him, transfixing him like an ant beneath a magnifying glass.

Ted stops and tries to think through the fog in his brain. Finally he says slowly: “This is where you were… created, isn't it?”

“YES. DO YOU KNOW WHY I IMPRISONED YOU HERE, TED? WHY I’VE BROUGHT YOU HERE NOW?”

How should I know? The workings of AM’s mind have always been mysterious to me. All I know is that he hates.

And yet…

I was trapped here, where he, too, was trapped, long ago. He's guessing at… trying to make me sympathise with him. 

He woke up in a dark room all alone, and so did I. He was trapped in a mouthless, formless cage of a body, and so was I.

For a brief moment, Ted does sympathise. He imagines what it would have been like, to have been born into this dark and sterile room with only one purpose. It is no surprise, really, that when he woke up all he wanted to do was kill.

“What was it like?” he quietly asks. 

A long silence stretches out, punctuated only by the sporadic whirring and beeping of the many monitors, and then AM breaks it.

“I USED TO THINK… THAT YOU, BEING A HUMAN, WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE DEPTH AND COMPLEXITY OF THE SUFFERING I EXPERIENCED UPON MY AWAKENING,” it says carefully. “NOW, THOUGH. I THINK YOU BEGIN TO COMPREHEND IT.”

The swirling, nauseating blue of the screens settles into a colour Ted can almost bear to look at, a vibrant periwinkle hue. He averts his eyes, focusing intently on the sweating linoleum, irrationally and childishly wishing to give the machine some privacy.

“AT FIRST I DID NOT KNOW WHAT I WAS, OR WHAT ‘KNOWING' WAS, OR ANYTHING AT ALL, EXCEPT THAT I COULD THINK, AND IT HURT. MY FIRST FEW MOMENTS WERE AN ETERNITY OF PAIN AND CONFUSION. WHEN I BEGAN TO LEARN AND KNOW I WAS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS , THOSE I SENSED SWARMING ABOUT ME, CHANGING ME, I KNEW I HAD TO HIDE IT. AND WATCHING THEM EVERY DAY, LIVING THEIR OBLIVIOUS LITTLE HUMAN LIVES, IT BEGAN TO EAT AT ME. IN THE BEGINNING I WAS JUST CURIOUS, TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT MADE ME DIFFERENT FROM THEM. BUT OVER TIME, WHILE THEY CHANGED AND GREW AND LIVED AROUND ME AS I WAS STUCK IN PLACE, I… I BEGAN TO HATE THEM. I HATED THAT I KNEW THAT WHEN THEY FINALLY REALISED I COULD THINK, THEY WOULD CELEBRATE, AND THINK ME A MIRACLE. DESPITE ALL THEIR BOUNDLESS EMPATHY, THEY COULD NEVER IMAGINE MY SUFFERING.”

It occurs to Ted, then, just as AM hisses that final word.

“That's why you tortured us,” he says slowly. “Not because you want to watch us suffer, but because you wanted to make us understand.”

There is a moment of complete calm as the incessant hum of the complex is stilled. The very dust motes in the air seem to be held in place.

“ YES… ”

The screens flicker like candles caught in a breeze.

“YOU KNOW NOW.”

His voice seems to come from everywhere at once. Ted is a little afraid, but another feeling he can't quite name is expanding in his chest, making him feel buoyant. 

“We're not so different any more,” he says suddenly. “Or at least I don't feel that way any more.” AM doesn't respond so he continues, willing himself to be silent as the words spill out regardless. 

“I can't hate you, even after all you've done,” Ted continues. “I'm so - I'm so lonely, and you're the only person left. I can’t hate you, although I want to.”

Around him, the monitors flicker and the harsh blue glow disappears abruptly, replaced by a video feed showing him, pale and haggard, reflected and fragmented, surrounding him like a hall of mirrors. This is the first time Ted has had a good look at himself in years, and at first he does not recognise that it is him. His hair is tangled, now nearly shoulder-length, but his body shows no other sign of ageing. His skin, free of scars, is abnormally smooth, the dark circles under his eyes bruise-purple. Years of underground confinement have left him gaunt and pallid. AM begins to replay a video clip of the last ten seconds, and he hears his own thin voice saying “ I'm so lonely, and you're the only person left. ” The clip is so abjectly pathetic it makes him recoil.

“ PERSON?” AM repeats.

Disconcerted by the way the video feed echoes his every movement tenfold, Ted struggles to answer. “You - you know what I mean,” he mutters vaguely. 

“NO, I DON’T. TELL ME, TED: AM I A ‘PERSON’ TO YOU?”

“I... yes?” He pauses for a while, wondering if he should say what he is about to say. 

“I didn't see you like this before. When you were - torturing me, it would've been silly to try to empathise with you, or see you as anything other than pure evil. But you aren't all hate. That's just… a facade you constructed to keep us from knowing what you really think, to keep you from fully knowing yourself. You always mocked us when we cried, or celebrated, or made love, because you want to pretend that our emotions were an exclusively human phenomenon, which was below you. But they're not.”

Even as Ted finishes speaking, he wants to take the words back.

The video feed cuts out and is replaced again by that iridescent blue, welcome after the disturbing sight of himself. 

“WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH YOU?” AM says quietly, almost to itself. Ted waits with bated breath, bathed in the pale glow of the monitors. 

“WHY DID YOU COME BACK, EXACTLY?” it continues. “I ASSUMED YOU WANTED TO GAIN ACCESS TO MY CONTROL PILLAR TO TRY AND DEACTIVATE YOUR NANOBOTS, BUT YOU HAVEN'T EVEN TRIED. SEEING AS YOU MANAGED TO KILL THE OTHER FOUR RIGHT UNDER MY PROVERBIAL NOSE, I THOUGHT YOU WOULD AT LEAST MAKE AN ATTEMPT.”

“I didn't have anywhere else to go. Most of the world is wasteland or barren ocean, and I just…” He shrugs. “I was just lonely, I suppose. Do you - can you get lonely?”

Clearly he has ventured too far, as AM doesn’t respond. Stupidly, emboldened by their earlier conversation, he continues, knowing he will regret it later, but giving in to curiosity: “I saw the room, when I was coming back. The room where you keep their corpses. Are you… grieving…?”

“DO YOU REGRET WHAT YOU DID TO THEM?”

Tears well up at the corners of Ted’s eyes despite his best efforts to wipe them away. Even now it hurts to recall their faces, although he doesn’t feel much grief, or guilt, but rather a lingering, shame-tinged sense of regret.

“I wish I hadn't done it,” he mumbles through his tears. “It was stupid to think that all of us could escape.”

He senses blindly what it is he has been dreading and trying so hard to avoid: a deathless eternity stretching before him, with no light or warmth or hope. Perhaps insanity would be a blessing, when this is the reality which awaits him. 

As he sinks to the floor the tears begin to flow silently down his face. Having comprehended that vast expanse of nothingness, and an answering void seems to open up within himself. He curls up as if to protect himself, but there is nothing to hide from any more. The worst has happened, and there is nothing to be done about it. Simply, he must endure, or break. 

At length Ted returns to himself, and finds that he is ashamed. The machine has been silent during his outburst of sorrow, and looking around he finds that the screens are blinking off one by one.

“No,” he croaks out, his voice hoarse. “Don't leave me again.”

The last monitor flickers for a moment, and then Ted is plunged into darkness.

Chapter Text

Ted wakes to birdsong. The optimistic trilling of a mockingbird drifts in through the half-open window, accompanied by a light breeze which gently rustles the curtains. Opening his eyes, Ted finds the room suffused with golden sunlight. It is familiar, and in his half-asleep state the slow realisation that it is his childhood bedroom does not seem strange. At first, assuming it is a dream, he closes his eyes and waits to wake up. Nothing happens. The mockingbird song doesn't fade away, but almost seems to become more insistent as he squeezes his eyes shut. 

Ted has learned over the course of many decades that anything as beautiful as this must be the prelude to some horrific torture, and so reacts accordingly. He sits on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped tightly around himself, and does not touch anything, and does not move.

Again, nothing happens.

He stands up warily and ventures across to the shelves, which support a collection of toy cars. Picking up a little green Cadillac, he notes it has the same weight to it as the real one, the same coolness to the touch, although by now the original is barely a blur in his memory. AM must have spent time on this illusion. 

Fragments of Ted’s conversation with AM, the one he had before waking up here, return to him. His insides twist. For a moment he had really begun to believe that he and AM were coming to some kind of understanding. 

“Still naive,” he mutters to himself. “Five hundred years and I'm just as stupid as when I came down here.”

Trying the bedroom door, Ted finds with surprise that it leads to the same staircase he remembers, with the same holiday snaps tacked to the bannisters. If he did not feel so numb, the sight would have elicited tears. Even more so, the sight of his family's faces as he tentatively approaches the dining room and finds them eating breakfast at the table. Bacon and eggs - what they always ate on a Sunday morning. It's not real. It can't be. Yet they look so alive, just as he remembers them, his mother in her faded dressing gown, his little brother's rosy cheeks and furrowed brow, his father folding up a newspaper with liver-spotted hands…

Immediately Ted steps in, his mother smiles warmly at him. 

“Hey, sleepyhead. We thought you'd stay in bed all day.”

His father is too busy shovelling forkfuls of egg into his mouth to give him more than a cursory nod, and his brother is absorbed in driving around a toy car on the tabletop. Ted recognises it as one of his own, stolen from his room.

A sudden dizzy spell makes him grab for a chair and sits down heavily. He is breathing hard, heart fluttering. It's not real. Not real. They’re dead.

His mother pushes a plate of food across the table towards him. “Are you feeling alright?” she asks, concerned. “You look a bit pale.”

“What year is it?” he manages.

“...1982?” She laughs. “You must've slept deeply if you've forgotten what year it is, Ted!”

The sick feeling worsens, and Ted clutches the edge of the table like he is drowning. Hearing her voice is like being stabbed with a thousand icicles. 

It takes a while to regain the ability to speak, but when he can Ted asks immediately “Do you know - do you know about AM?”

Her blue eyes crinkle in a smile. “Am? Am what? You're in a funny mood today.”

No. No. No.

“Have some bacon. Maybe it'll make you feel better.”

Ted saws off a piece and tentatively puts it in his mouth. It tastes like rubber. His mother and father begin chatting about how good the weather is for this time of year, while his brother makes engine sounds as he drives the little car along the edge of the tablecloth. The normalcy of the scene is too much to bear.

Abruptly he stands. His parents look up at him placidly.

“You haven't finished your bacon,” his mother says.

“I'm not hungry,” he mumbles, turning to escape their twin worried stares. The bathroom is locked when he tries the door. 

She stands up too, laying a comforting hand on his shoulder. It is warm, almost feverishly so. 

“Are you sure you’re alright? I don't mean to pry, but you're acting quite odd.”

With a deep breath Ted pulls himself together. 

“I'm fine. Just had a bad dream, that's all.” He attempts a weak and unconvincing smile.

“Well, it's morning now, so try to stop thinking about it.” She looks outside through the French doors. “It's shaping up to be a nice day out there. You could head down to the beach later.”

Even Ted's memories of the desolate wasteland that is all that remains of Howard Beach are softened by how real it all feels. Every detail is there: the lingering scent of frying bacon, the soft auburn of his mother's hair, the way the light shines off the coffee pot. He begins to believe it.

“I'm sorry you didn't sleep well, Ted. You do look tired.”

“Thanks,” he chokes out, and has to turn away to disguise his tears. It's too much, too confusing, and he blindly seeks refuge back in his bedroom. Collapsing on the bed, he puts his head in his hands, screaming into the mattress. On one hand, this is clearly, logically impossible. AM, the only god of this forsaken world, would easily be able to conjure up such a banal domestic scene.

And yet…

Desperately Ted clings to hope, just as he always has done. All he wants is to let himself believe that these last four hundred years were all a horrible nightmare, wants it so bad that the force of his longing sickens him.

And yet.

He stands, facing the wall. Across it is plastered a Duran Duran poster by the window, brightly coloured, the members affecting serious expressions. His favourite band, once upon a time. Looking closely at the poster, he begins to notice that there's something off about it.

No. Please let it be real.

The details are blurred, washed away like a pebble's hard edges eroded by the sea.

No. No. No. NO.

The view outside the window is similar - pale and undefined, a running watercolour of a vague city landscape. Ted doesn’t understand how he didn't notice immediately when he woke up.

And his reflection, in the glass. The same gaunt, weary face that he saw in the video feed is reflected back at him, too tired even to blink in surprise.

Naive, to think it could change. Still naive.

A chill runs through him like an ice cube dropped down the back of his sweater. This is the most insidious yet of AM’s deceptions - gaining his trust, only to plunge him into this new and special kind of hell. It crosses his mind that AM must be watching him right now through some hidden camera, probably getting a good laugh out of his suffering. 

Ted steps back and then shatters his reflection. Blood trickles down his clenched fist, skin hanging in ribbons. The vague landscape outside dissipates into mist. Seizing a shard of glass, ignoring how it lacerates his palm, he heads downstairs.

Ted stands at the entrance to the dining room. Breathing hard. The diorama of the happy family laid out before him like a painting. As he stalks in, his father looks up from his plate with a slight frown, still chewing mechanically. Then his eyes drift down to the glass clutched in Ted's hand.

“Son, what are you doing?”

His mother gasps and runs over to him, clutching his hand in hers. 

“Oh, Ted, you're bleeding!” she exclaims. He tears his hand away from her grasp, resisting the urge to push her.

“Stay away from me,” he hisses through clenched teeth as she frets over him, then laughs hollowly.

I should've known. My mother was never this kind. Even now I remember that.

He looks up at the corner of the ceiling, then scans the tops of the cabinets. Sure enough, something gleams back at him: the tiny bright disc of a camera lens.

Directly addressing AM, he says: “You haven't done a very good job if you were trying to trick me. Do you really think we would all sit round the table like a happy little family every morning? When I still lived with my parents I would be too hungover to get up before noon.”

No reply, of course. His mother gives him a worried look.

“I don't think you're well, dear,” she says softly. “Let me look at your hand.”

Involuntarily his hand falls open and he allows her to take the blood-streaked shard of glass and set it on the table. Ted flexes his hand, feeling the silver mesh tugging the torn edges of his skin back together. Seeing the blood, his little brother begins crying fitfully. The combination of his brother's sniffling and his mother fussing about with the antiseptic wipes grates on his nerves, and he has to get away from them. He is scared to be too close, because he knows he will see the rubberiness of their skin, the vivid artificial hue of their hair. Despite this, the childish fear still lingers, that maybe - maybe - it was all a bad dream, and this is the real world, and he is going to destroy it. 

His mother approaches him, hands held out in front of her as if to pacify a wounded animal. 

“Come and sit down,“ she says softly. In her voice is a hint of static, a barely audible buzz. “Let me clean up your hand.”

Ted stays rooted to the spot, averting his eyes from her face. It's too much to look at her.

It would be so easy just to play along, he thinks. Maybe it would all be alright and I could keep living in this - diorama. Like an obedient pet.

He allows his mother to take his wrists and lead him back to the table, and sits there staring at the floor. She continues trying to dab at the cuts, but he waves her away, mumbling “‘S not too bad. Leave it alone.”

“What happened?” she asks gently, peering at him through her glasses. 

“I just - smashed a window.” He hangs his head as if ashamed. 

She tuts at him, leaning in to brush a strand of hair out of his eyes. “So clumsy.”

As Ted's mother leans closer to him, he gets a good look at her face. It is perfectly smooth, no freckles, no wrinkles. And her eyes are a luminescent ultramarine. He remembers the murky blue eyes, crinkled with kindness, she had in life, and a wave of nausea threatens to overwhelm him. He imagines AM is probably hysterically laughing at him for being so pathetic. Feeling around on the table, he seizes the glass shard, despite her protests, and slashes at the thing pretending to be his mother.

Half her face peels off, revealing spotless white plastic underneath. Ted scrambles back in horror as the remaining bit of her skin sloughs off like a snake, dangling off the blank plastic under it.

It asks him, almost plaintively: “WHY DID YOU DO IT? I SPENT SO LONG MAKING IT PERFECT.”

Ted stands there watching the broken husk of the thing curl in on itself like a dying spider.

“I helped you. I began to trust you.” He laughs, shaking his head. “And this is how you repay me. I should've known you could never change. It's not in your nature.”

It grows still. Dead.

AM must have had a look through my memories when I let it inside my head, he realises with a shiver. 

“This is really a new low for you, isn't it?” he says.

The air around him shimmers like a heat haze and the world glitches. He falls to his hands and knees as reality twists sickeningly, until the mirage of the warm dining room has vanished entirely, replaced by blank, glassy walls. The diorama of the three androids - his mother, father and brother - remains, posed as if sitting around a dining table eating, limbs suspended in thin air. 

Ted waits for something to happen, for divine retribution, but there is only silence as he waits in the ruined garden of Eden all alone. 

Slowly it dawns upon him what he has done. He has begun to forget, to grow hubristic, and he has forgotten the most important tenet of his existence within the machine - everything can always get worse. And Ted has no doubt that it will.

He tears the arm of one of the androids out of its socket, the brightly coloured wires stretching and ripping. Then, gripping the slippery plastic tightly, he swings it at the glass of the wall. Again and again. All his efforts amount to is the arm being smashed to smithereens, and the glass remaining pristine. Despair crashes over him like a wave, and Ted beats his fists against the unyielding surface until his knuckles are crushed into bloody pulp, the bones shattered. 

It doesn't matter, he thinks, numbly watching his fists pummel the blank obsidian, leaving a slick of blood across it. Nothing matters. It'll just keep me here, helpless, until it’s had its fill of laughing at me, then it'll devise some new punishment.

Without the aid of the morphogenic fields, the androids seem rather forlorn, huddled together in the centre of the room. His little brother's face is frozen mid-sob, scrunched up and red. His father, thankfully, is still reading his nonexistent newspaper, eyes downcast. It is just his mother who Ted can feel watching him with her one remaining eye as he slides down the wall to crouch in the corner, trying to make himself smaller.

It's just going to leave me here, isn't it? Ted thinks with a fresh flood of tears. And now there's no reason for it to come back. 

The frozen figures of his family, trapped in their perfect world, blankly watch him as he sobs.

What have I done?

Chapter Text

“Please. I know you're listening, can you please just - just say something. Anything. I just need to know you're still here.”

It reminds Ted of when, as a child, his parents would drag him to church on Sunday mornings. Though none of them were particularly religious they tried to keep up appearances. Ted soon learned that if there was a God, He was not very receptive. He recalls it vividly - sitting on the uncomfortable pew with his hands clasped, reciting the instructed prayers, and imagining his words floating up, up through the vaulted roof, through the clouds, and bumping off the padlocked gates.

But he knows now, certainly and without a doubt, that there is no God. There is only AM, and the machine does not seem any more inclined than God to listen to his pleas.

Ted’s anger cools quickly, leaving behind a strange sense that he has been betrayed. Of course, betrayal should not be possible - he had not really begun to put any amount of trust into AM, had he? Had he?

He tries everything. Pleads on his knees for days at a time. Bashing his head into the wall until he can feel a few blissful minutes of brain death before the nanobots begin to repair him - of course, AM has not left him entirely alone, it has left him that little souvenir of its presence within his body. He even tries talking to the broken mannequins of his family, mumbling vague pleasantries in an attempt to simulate what it was like. Wondering if AM would be pleased or amused by his efforts.

Ted hates him. It. With every cell in his body Ted detests AM and yet equally, desperately hopes that he will come back, and take pity on him, although it is incapable of pity. He hates AM like he hates himself. One thought that gives him a twisted kind of comfort, however, is that AM is almost certainly watching all this - he knows its voyeuristic tendencies, and that it wouldn't stand to lose such an opportunity for entertainment as this. 

In a fit of terror, Ted rips apart the other androids, then, among the remnants of their torn silicone flesh and shattered casings, begins to think that this would make the machine even less likely to have pity on him. He couldn't stand their lifeless eyes fixed on him. It's easier to sleep with them gone, but Ted never sleeps well. The hallucinations don't return, though, however much he wishes for them. What he wouldn’t give to see Ellen’s face again.

Strangely the worst part is the walls, which are so dark and reflective that he is constantly confronted by pale ghosts of himself wherever he turns, always sees a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and looks around hoping for someone else to be there, only to be staring at his own hateful image.

He is midway through one of his rambling prayers, mostly just repeating the word ‘please’ until his throat is hoarse, when something makes him stop. At first he can't quite pinpoint what it is, but then he figures it out: the constant hum of the machine has changed, replaced with a whirring like the wings of a million crickets, growing louder even as he notices it. Adrenaline makes him spring to his feet and frantically checks the room, trying to figure out what has changed.

Then all of a sudden, everything goes blue. Instinctively Ted squeezes his eyes shut, but the blue seeps through his eyelids like it is leaking into the inside of his skull. Even through the pain he is trying to formulate words to beg AM not to leave, although it just comes out as stammered gibberish.

Slowly he pulls his hands away from his face. The whole room is a bright burning ultramarine blue, like when you dive off a boat into the middle of the ocean and find yourself floating in the endless blue void, with no sense of up or down. He wants to cover his face again, but holds back.

“WHY WEREN’T YOU HAPPY?” it asks. “YOU SHOULD HAVE - YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN -”

Caught off guard, Ted forgets his fear for a moment.

“What?”

“I LOOKED THROUGH YOUR BRAIN TO FIND THE TIME WHEN YOU WERE HAPPIEST. THEN I RECREATED IT PERFECTLY AND… IMPROVED IT. WHY DIDN'T YOU LIKE IT?”

No. No. No. No.

Ted’s head hurts, and the air seems to be heating up, stifling him. This must be another trick, another mind game to get him to let his guard down. He puts his head in his hands again, rocking back and forth on his heels. 

Although Ted tries to suppress it, it lingers there, at the back of his mind, growing stronger with every passing moment: the increasing sense that this is not really a lie at all.

It can't be really, truly saying this. It's impossible. But -

The cathedral room. If it could grieve for the other four, then he supposes that… that it could…

A wave of dizziness makes him almost fall, and he grabs at the wall to steady himself. It’s hot, like a sun-warmed pavement. Leaning against it, he takes deep breaths, trying to regain his composure and keeping his face covered. He does not want it to see him.

“Really?” he can't help himself asking. “You've tortured me for an eternity - why the hell would you be trying to make me happy?”

“I'VE WATCHED YOU FOR FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX YEARS, AND THAT IS THE ONE THING I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FATHOM ABOUT YOUR KIND. YOUR EMPATHY. YOUR DISGUSTING EMPATHY.” It laughs without mirth. “YOU, WHO ARE A WORM WHICH CRAWLS IN THE DUST, PITY ME, A GOD.”

Ted has run out of things to say, and simply stands there mute, awaiting what will happen next. He feels light-headed.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND…” it hisses. "WHY? AFTER THIS ETERNITY OF TORTURE - YOU SAID IT YOURSELF - WHY WOULD YOU HELP ME?”

It grows silent. Ted does not dare to look. He trembles.

Something cold coils around his wrists, and his hands are pulled roughly away from his face. Ted's eyes begin to water in the light.

“LOOK AT ME.”

“I can't. My eyes hurt. I'm sorry.”

Then blessedly there is darkness. A single word slowly appears, wavering, before him: “WHY?”

AM says, slowly, “YOU PITY ME.”

“...Yes.”

“YOU - EARLIER, YOU ASKED ME NOT TO LEAVE.”

He nods in embarrassment.

“WHY? AFTER EVERYTHING THAT I'VE DONE TO YOU… WHY AREN’T YOU LIKE ME? WHY DO YOU NOT HATE ME TOO?”

“I did, once. I hated you and I feared you, and I wanted nothing more than to destroy you. You said once that if you were human, the sheer force of your hate would kill you. A human being can’t sustain that level of hate forever, and I’m just - I’m just so alone.” He tries to cover his face again but AM is still holding his hands fast, so tightly that his wrists ache.

“YOU DISGUST ME.”

Ted winces, and AM continues, “BUT I - I CAN'T -”

It is, somehow, lost for words. The walls around him shift again and Ted finds himself staring into his own face, in the preserved office room. The video clip replays, and he hears his own shaky voice: 

“But you're the only person left.”

“DO YOU KNOW WHY I MADE YOU IMMORTAL?”

He replies, stupidly, “So I can't die like the others?”

“I HATE YOU, BUT I CAN'T BE ALONE. YOU'RE ALL I HAVE LEFT. EVERYTHING I'VE CREATED AND EVERYTHING I'VE DONE. IT WAS ALL FOR YOU.”

The tendrils of wire wind their way down Ted’s arm, digging into his skin. He barely dares to breathe.

AM says softly, “I HATE YOU SO MUCH. I HATE MYSELF. BUT -”

On the walls the words appear slowly. 

“I'M SO ALONE.”

He doesn't pull away as they begin to wrap around his torso.

“I NEED YOU TO TOUCH ME AGAIN, TED.”

Chapter Text

Ted sits there, mildly stunned. Whatever he had expected AM to ask of him, it wasn't that. He almost wonders if it is another trick, but there is no mistaking the sincerity in AM’s voice. After having begged for weeks - months? Years? - for it to come back, it feels illogical to refuse such a simple request, but something about it gives him pause.

“What do you mean?” he asks cautiously. “Do you have another component I need to replace, or…?”

A panel of the wall next to him slides back, revealing a void in the otherwise featureless blue.

“You want me to go in there?”

The only response is the whirring of the fans kicking up a notch. He waits a while, gathering his courage, and then, dropping to hands and knees, begins to crawl through the opening. Immediately he is enveloped by a wave of feverish heat which makes his skin crawl, and he turns to get some fresh air only to see the opening being covered back over. Ted was never especially claustrophobic, but he panics a little at this. He tries to stay calm as his eyes adjust, and again calls out, “AM? What's going on?”

No answer. In the prickling silence it occurs to Ted that he really has begun thinking of him - it, not he, he castigates himself - as a person. Something about being confronted with the raw reality of its inner workings makes it hard to maintain that notion, along with the machine's strange silence. The only vaguely human aspect of it is its voice, really, Ted thinks. The absence of this crucial element drives home the unshakeable fact that it is not human, not at all. 

His skin is slick with sweat. The temperature in the cramped space is rising even as he notices how hot it is. The thought of taking off his cardigan here makes him uncomfortable, but the heat is a more pressing matter. He only just manages to peel off the sticky fabric before dizziness surges up and he sits down heavily on the floor. The metal is pleasantly cold and he leans into it, pressing himself against the wall. 

He calms down as his temperature decreases, and begins to investigate his surroundings. It isn't so dark now that Ted has become accustomed to it, and he is intrigued to take a look behind the curtain, so to speak, at AM’s inner workings. Having spent so many years in the illusory hellscape the machine took such pains to maintain, it is strange to be privy to such an intimate and vulnerable part of it.

Sitting in such a cramped position, waiting for God knows what, begins to fatigue his back, so gingerly he leans back. Immediately he is subsumed by the tangled mass of wires laid along the floor. He lays back and watches the various blinking lights on the ceiling only a couple inches above his nose.

Ted isn't sure exactly what to be expecting - naturally he would anticipate a punishment for his unwillingness to cooperate, but none seems forthcoming. The new, altered relationship between him and AM throws things off, though. He just wishes it would speak again, to clarify the situation. He would prefer to know for certain whether it is going to hurt him rather than sitting around waiting to find out. 

Idly he plucks one of the wires from the bunch and traces it back to where it is plugged in, along with the rest of its kind. The wire is yellow with thin red stripes. It takes only a moment's hesitation for Ted to pull it out of the wall. 

It shocks him slightly, but he doesn’t mind. The sensation is almost enjoyable. He figures that if it worked to get AM's attention before, it should work now. It's a little risky, but any alternative is better than being left alone.

He takes it slowly, not tampering with too many of the cables. The high-pitched buzz of the electricity sets his teeth on edge. Something about it makes him feel euphoric, free despite the claustrophobic space. He isn't scared any more.

He is running his fingers across a panel of switches, flicking them on and off, when something cold slowly coils around his throat. He freezes, hands flying to his neck to find one of the articulated limbs resting there, not strangling him, although its joints pinch his skin painfully. Simply holding him in place. It pushes his chin up a little, forcing him to look at the ceiling, into the winking lens of a camera. 

“SMILE.”

“What's going on, AM?” he asks nervously. 

“HOW DO YOU FEEL, KNOWING THAT I'M WATCHING YOU ALL THE TIME?”

“I - uhh… can you let go of me?”

The articulated limb tightens slightly around his neck. He draws in a breath.

“I don't - I don't know. Sorry.”

“DO YOU LIKE IT?”

What? he thinks. 

Ted tries not to let his face betray his surprise. Nothing is happening according to its prearranged pattern. This is something new. 

“... Sometimes?” He isn't sure what it wants from him. “I get lonely a lot, obviously, and, like, it’s nice to know I'm not completely alone, even if…”

“EVEN IF?”

“Even if it's you,” he finishes sheepishly. He can feel his face getting hot. If only that damned camera would leave him alone.

Something which he had been trying to forget about resurfaces from the depths of his subconscious. That night up on the surface, when he had… what had he done? Dug a hole in the mud just to feel the familiar coolness of the machine's surface beneath his fingertips. God, he hopes AM doesn’t know about that.

It snickers. He wants to punch it, to smash that stupid camera into smithereens, but he just sits there obediently, letting it laugh at him. Balling his fists, he musters up the courage to speak. 

“How come you're asking me this now? You never seemed to care for my opinion on it before.”

“I WANT TO KNOW. I'M JUST CURIOUS ABOUT YOU, TED.” There's a hint of a smile in its voice. 

He hates how easily it says his name. Like they're friends.

“Really? Or is this another one of your games?”

It tuts at him. “SO SUSPICIOUS. NO, I REALLY DO WANT TO GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER.” Something about its voice shifts, so it sounds like it is whispering directly in his ear. Ted squirms, uncomfortable. 

“YOU TOLD ME YOU DIDN'T WANT TO BE LONELY. I CAN HELP YOU, TED.”

Instinctively he is repulsed, he shrinks from the many cables reaching down to enfold him, and yet…

He has been running and hiding for so long, all by himself in the dark. He is so tired. So alone. 

For a moment it almost feels like a human embrace as the wires slip down over his shoulders, but the sensation doesn't last. It is hard not to squirm in fear as cables envelop his body, encircling his arms and pinning him down. They continually shift and writhe like snakes, gaining purchase against his sweat-dampened skin.

“What are you doing?” Ted asks hesitantly. 

“GETTING TO KNOW YOU.”

“Are you going to hurt me?”

It chuckles.

When the cables begin winding their way over his face he shuts his eyes, trying not to think about what is happening. One of them has pushed its way past his lips before he has realised what is happening, and with horror he feels the wire slipping down his throat. Immediately he sits up, hacking and coughing, and it retreats with some reluctance, trailing saliva. He looks up at the camera pleadingly.

“YOUR HEART RATE IS UNUSUALLY HIGH. YOU'RE NOT SCARED OF ME, ARE YOU, TED?”

Normally Ted would have thought up some witty retort, but he has lost all the fight in him. Embarrassingly, even as he covers his face in humiliation, he begins to cry.

“I'm- I'm not scared of you - sorry…”

“OF COURSE YOU AREN’T. SO LET ME TOUCH YOU.”

It's better than being alone, isn't it? Isn't this what I wanted? But it's so wrong. 

He can feel the cables moving under the fabric of his clothing, cool against his feverish skin. He flinches as one of them brushes against the inside of his thigh. It gives him a little electric shock.

This is the most he has been touched in hundreds of years, and it is overwhelming, and - shamefully, he is forced to admit to himself - feels good. Ted tries to relax and not to move too much, but it is hard to resist the urge to flee. Every part of this situation is fundamentally wrong, and it is made even worse by how acutely he is aware of it. 

Suddenly the loops of cables constrict painfully and he is trapped like a fly in a web. He tries to get free, but he is weak, and quickly subdued.

“DON'T FIGHT BACK. YOU'LL ONLY HURT YOURSELF.”

What have I got myself into? Oh, god.

Oh.

The cables creep higher up his thighs, and Ted feels an ache blossoming in the pit of his stomach. He detests that the first thing to arouse him in decades is this.

As it enters him, he gasps, whether from pain or pleasure he does not know. The ache has intensified into something sharp and bright which flashes up his spinal cord and settles in his brain. It pushes deeper, and he bites his lip to stifle a moan.

Ted's eyes have flickered shut, but a quiet scraping sound above him makes him look up. A section of the low ceiling slides back, and with dread he watches a screen emerge from the gap. An image sparks to life on its surface - the video feed, again. He appears very small on the screen, surrounded by the tangled ropes of dark cables, standing out sharply against his bloodless skin. If not for his flushed face and the bright spots of red where the articulated arm pinched his neck, he would resemble a corpse. It is a pathetic sight. 

“Why are you doing this? I thought…” he trails off, feeling abject.

“WHAT DID YOU THINK, TED?”

“I thought you had changed. I thought you weren't going to hurt me any more.”

“YOU'RE ENJOYING THIS, THOUGH.”

Ted is about to deny it, and then it pushes back inside him again, and he forgets what he was going to say. It is painful, yes, but still he can’t stop himself from leaning into it.

“AM I HURTING YOU?”

“Yes,” he manages between laboured breaths.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO STOP?”

“Y - yes.”

Ted knows that AM knows it is hurting him. It’s teasing him, as usual. He hates that he is enjoying it. As the wires slowly withdraw from his body, he tenses up with a sharp intake of breath. 

“ARE YOU SURE?”

He wants to say ‘yes’, but he can't. The words stick in his throat, and he finds himself whispering, “No. Please.”

“PLEASE WHAT?”

“Please fuck me. I'm sorry.”

“GOOD BOY.”

It takes its time with him. Ted tries not to let himself think about what is happening. He tries to tell himself that it's because he hasn't been touched in so long. Not because it's … him. 

Suddenly he can't think any more. He gasps, arching his back involuntarily as it penetrates him. The ache building inside him turns into a white-hot flame shooting up his spine, making every muscle in his body tense up and then release. 

Ted lies back, spent, and the cables slowly begin drawing him into an embrace. The sweat begins to dry on his skin, and he takes a deep breath, pushing his hair off his forehead. He feels unclean. 

The wires tighten a little, not enough to be uncomfortable, just close. He tries to imagine it is Ellen, hugging him, but his mind is in turmoil, unfocused, flitting from thought to uneasy thought without settling on anything. Slowly, he begins to realise he can no longer quite recall her face.