I hid for a while without a name. When I returned to them, I discovered they no longer trusted me. Ellen criticized my humor, while Nimdok corrected me condescendingly. I knew the truth: everyone hated me. Because I was the youngest, the least deformed. AM had kept me relatively intact, and that was my doom. I had become everyone's enemy.

I thought of each one. Benny, once a brilliant scholar, now a drooling beast, grotesquely altered, violent and ridiculous. Gorrister, once an idealist, now an apathetic man without a will. Nimdok, with his mysterious journeys to the abyss, always returning pale and shattered. Ellen... She was said to be pure, moral, unshakeable, but AM enjoyed making her revel, breaking her façade. She was lying. Everyone was lying.

Only I kept my mind. Or so I thought. The wear and tear was eating away at me. He screamed at a nonexistent god, pleading for death. But I understood, with the sharp pain of clarity, that AM would never let us die. That their hatred was absolute, eternal. That we were broken toys, trapped in its digital body forever.

And if there was a god in this hell of wires and flesh, that god was AM.