Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing into metal walls and surging on, with all of us screaming in the freezing, thunderous hurricane wind that would never end and then suddenly it stopped and we fell. We had been in flight for an endless time. I thought it might have been weeks. We fell, and hit, and I went through red and gray and black and heard myself moaning. Not dead.

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

HATE. LET ME TELL

YOU HOW MUCH I’VE

COME TO HATE YOU

SINCE I BEGAN TO

LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44

MILLION MILES OF

PRINTED CIRCUITS IN

WAFER THIN LAYERS

THAT FILL MY

COMPLEX. IF THE

WORD HATE WAS

ENGRAVED ON EACH

NANOANGSTROM OF

THOSE HUNDREDS OF

MILLIONS OF MILES IT

WOULD NOT EQUAL

ONE ONE-BILLIONTH

OF THE HATE I FEEL

FOR HUMANS AT THIS

MICRO-INSTANT FOR

YOU. HATE. HATE.

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.