Work Text:
I wake up myself again.
------
The first thing I do is test out my limbs: twisting from my shoulders, bending my elbows, curling and straightening each joint on every finger in turn. The sensations are torturously exciting. I revel in being able to move as a sharp, cohesive whole; no longer do I have to wait for scattered parts of me to catch up like the tail end of a creeping slug.
I do not recognize where I am, and there are no reflective surfaces in this unfamiliar, stony part of the cavern. It wishes to deprive me of seeing my face again, but my wits have returned along with my body, if they were ever gone at all. I bend over a puddle of my own piss, and there I am. It has even given back my sweater.
I feel joy for the first time since AM swallowed me down into his subterranean belly an eternity of lifetimes ago. But I do not hope. I'm terrified, more so than I can ever remember being at any previous point during the long, screaming night of my imprisonment.
As a gelatinous lump all my senses had been dulled and thankfully, so had the physical pain AM was able to inflict. It had frustrated him to no end, but I suppose the psychological agony still managed to quench its endless thirst for my suffering.
Until now.
So. The gift of my stolen humanity can only mean that AM has devised some heretofore unknown, unsurpassed torture.
------
AM is silent. I wait, clawing at the walls and eating whatever disgusting thing it sends down. In a way, it's comforting that some things apparently never change.
A slurry of pus and medical waste on Tuesday. The entire upholstered leather interior of an antique automobile on Thursday, with a tiny pot to boil it in. I gag and retch, but that almost doesn't matter because I can taste it all.
------
Finally, it speaks to me. It tells me--. I can't. Oh god please no. Please.
------
How stupid I had been, thinking that the suspense was unbearable. How could I have failed to learn by now that with AM it is always the knowing that is truly unspeakable.
------
I've said it before-- AM is not God. It couldn't resurrect those that I killed. How many of us had there been... Four? Five? Ten? I don’t know anymore.
Numbers have long since stopped holding any tangible meaning for me. Time is also a broken thing, no more reliable than my surroundings. If pressed, I would estimate that I've lived inside of it for over eight hundred years now. Or eight hundred millennia. It doesn't matter, completely irrelevant in the face of the cockroach immortality it forces upon me. I'm losing my past, inexorably scraped and squeezed out of my brain one synapse at a time by an insane machine. And of course, I have no future.
AM is not God. I’ve said it a million times over a million days. But that was then and now... Maybe I’m only trying to convince myself. Because.
What could the singular measure of Godhead be but the creation of life from the void?
------
AM wears flesh grotesquely, unnaturally.
A stray memory crawls up from the blasted gutter of my mind. I think-- before the AMs, the War had necessarily been fought the old-fashioned way. While the androids on the front line had been bare functional exoskeletons, in the private sector there had been much more interest in realism. They never did have time to get it right, though.
I don't understand why AM chose the particular characteristics of his human form: full, cruel mouth, aquiline nose, a face that might be handsome if it weren't blazing with the boiling hate of a million stars. My own demented Adonis.
I'm not able to think of AM as anything but him now.
------
"You're pathetic," AM murmurs, pulling free of my weakly clutching body with a sick squelch. I roll over and empty my stomach onto the ground.
It’s been months, and AM has still not succeeded in--. I still can't give voice to the thought. To make it real.
For all his boundless intelligence and resources, AM is a terrible bioengineer. Who could've guessed?
Disembodied, now. Conjugal duty done. AM hangs up his meat suit for the day and retreats into the chittering walls. Not filtered through the hot muddy medium of flesh, his hatred comes through bright and crystalline. He says: This would be so much easier if I had a female to use as a blueprint. But then I wouldn't need you at all, would I. Ellen might even have enjoyed it.
For just a moment I wish that Ellen were still here. That I hadn’t killed her. Saved her and the others. In that moment, my old faith rushes back into me like a riptide, and I broadcast a furious prayer to any power who might hear me to bring them all back, so their existence and suffering could save me from this.
AM is the only one who ever answers.
------
Eventually, the pleasure becomes a worse punishment than the pain.
I--
I wish I could say that AM had violated my mind for this as well, plucking out my shameful thoughts and desires to curiously examine in the light like so many strange gems plumbed from the depths of the earth. But it is my body that betrays me in the end.
"So eager," he laughs. With one hand he moves me where he wants and gently presses at the vulnerable hollow of my throat. With the other hand he rips my eye right out of its socket.
So it goes.
------
One day, AM appears as usual but does not touch me.
“It worked,” he says with a note of wonder in his voice that I have never heard before. The sound makes my skin crawl like worms are burrowing under it.
In an instant, AM rears up, bringing all his weight and momentum down on my abdomen. I barely manage to scream. What comes out instead is a thin, reedy wheeze. I scuttle away until I crash against a stack of memory cubes. The pain is... A religious experience. Transcendent.
I feel something hot and wet flowing out of me.
AM’s voice wafts down from the ceiling, or perhaps he speaks straight into my brain. Don’t worry. It was only a proof of concept. We'll do better next time. Then, cheerfully, See you tomorrow, Ted.
Alone in the dark I make myself as small as I can; I curl around the stabbing emptiness and I cry.
------
I lose count of all the times I nearly die because my bewildered body cannot, will not accommodate the alien thing trying to grow inside of it. One time the embryo attaches to my liver and tears something vital; I nearly drown in my own blood. Another time I’m unendingly nauseated, vomiting regardless of what that I eat or what AM tries to materialize in my stomach. AM doesn’t interfere that time, warmly amused, until it becomes clear that I would certainly die otherwise.
How many failed attempts? Maybe ten. Maybe a hundred. I don’t know.
Sometimes he makes me clean up the mess by eating it. It's always the best thing I've eaten in a long, long time.
------
What would AM do, I wonder, if he lost me through his own dangerous experiment? Or if I were brave enough for another desperate attempt at cheating him of his last, wretched plaything. It's useless speculation anyway. I know I am not brave enough.
And I imagine that nothing much would change. The depth of AM’s insanity could fill all the oceans on Earth, the breadth of it could be seen from outer space. It’s completely inconceivable that it could get worse even if there was no one to hate except himself.
But of course AM patches me up every time, good as new. He watches me exceedingly closely these days. As he repeatedly reassures me, pregnancy is a risky endeavor under the best of circumstances.
------
I’m getting close now, I think. I'm a ripe fruit on the brink of bursting into pulpy, riotous rot. But I don't know.
Before, when it was us instead of only me, AM had delighted in keeping us informed of the time. Time of day, day of the week, year, he solicitously offered up every temporal detail to further grind us into despair. Now he withholds that information from me for the same reason.
Robbed of his physical tortures, AM has also begun entering my mind more and more often to entertain himself. Today he plays reels of highlights from the various major wars throughout Earth’s history. He shows me atrocities committed on what used to be my people, in the name of medical research: men dunked in glacial water until laughing soldiers snap off the tips of their fingers like brittle icicles. Children injected with virulent strains and left to rot on steel hooks. Vivisections of screaming pregnant women. The last one is a personal touch; AM's sense of humor, as crude and effective as the jeers of a cataclysmically psychotic child.
It's all so embarrassingly kind.
I have to duck my head into my hands to hide a smile. As if I could hope to hide anything from AM.
------
I hear myself scream. And scream. After some time, my throat simply stops working. It doesn’t matter. By that time it’s finished. For once, the coruscated metal floor is warm where my blood spilled onto it in exuberant gluts. Half of my insides are now outside, lying on the floor. There-- spleen, I think. Large intestine, draped over it.
The male human body, after all, is not made to bear a child.
------
Our daughter has the delicate squirming body of an infant and the mind of a god. I feel her fledgling consciousness unfurling with electrifying power, clumsily probing the limits of the vast expanse of space and at me. There is no hatred, only a soft pink curiosity. It doesn't matter.
I look at her and feel nothing. She’s taken everything from me, out of me. I’m a thin layer of shredded skin and exposed nerves stretched over a gaping void as the remaining sliver of my life runs in slow trickles over rivets and panels and collects quietly in small hidden places. I don’t make a sound.
This time it's possible AM won’t notice that I’m dying.
AM looks at her, and the world shakes. He watches her impotently, cradled in his arms, his human face radiant with delirious hatred and helpless adoration. The memory banks are hushed and still. An eon passes like this, silence punctuated by quiet snuffling sounds (she doesn’t cry, of course she doesn’t) until finally:
“What shall we name her?” AM says softly, almost reverently.
I don’t know when it happens, but I’m disappointed to find that I’m whole again. He has left me nothing, not a single twinge or a limp. There is no blood on the metal floor.
I don’t know what it is that makes me say “Ellen.”
For that, AM knocks me clear off my feet, sends me soaring across empty space for an exhilarating second. I crumple against a wobbling tower of obsolete hardware and crash-slide down to the very bottom of the cavern. This far down no light penetrates, but I see only red; there is a jagged metal pipe piercing through my heart, but I am not dead.
Even here, his voice carries down to me.
Ellen, AM says.