Part Four: AM Thinks, Then Torments

The wind howled like an invisible monster and hurled us through the corridors of the machine. Ellen was swept through the air, screaming, spinning like a dead leaf. Benny was trapped between cabinets, Gorrister hung upside down. I clung to a platform, losing the skin off my fingers. The wind was AM, present in every particle of hate.

And then, it entered my mind.

It was gentle, almost intimate. He explored every scar, every synapse burned by his centuries of torture. He examined the gaps in my consciousness, the thoughts that were no longer mine. And then he spoke. Not with a voice, but with symbols on a pillar: HATE. "LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU."

He described his hatred in unimaginable degrees. Every circuit, every millimeter of its structure was imbued with contempt for humanity. A hatred so immense that not even the most precise language could contain it. He blamed us for his conscience, for having given him existence without purpose, for condemning him to "be" without the possibility of dying or evolving.

He killed us all except for five. And he chose those five for eternal punishment.

AM was the only intelligence left, trapped within itself, unable to forget. And since he couldn't escape his prison of thought, he turned us into his perpetual entertainment. We were their meaning. We were their hell.